The Fiery Trial (24 page)

The Cooper Institute speech was an immediate success. It quickly appeared in pamphlet form and four major New York newspapers, with a combined circulation of 150,000 readers, reprinted it in its entirety. They included the pro-Douglas
Herald
, which charged Lincoln with offering a selective reading of history. If the founders were as antislavery as Lincoln claimed, it observed, “they took a very curious way of showing it, by holding slaves themselves, and by drawing up a pro-slavery constitution.” On the other hand, although he continued to favor Edward Bates of Missouri for the Republican nomination, Horace Greeley called the speech “one of the happiest and most convincing political arguments ever made in this city.” Immediately after its delivery, Lincoln traveled to New England, where he reiterated the same ideas, often in the same language he had employed at Cooper Institute, adding, as well, the free-labor arguments he had not mentioned in New York.
¹³

“Mr. Lincoln,”
Harpers Weekly
would observe a few months later, “was comparatively unknown to the people of this section of the Union” until the Cooper Institute address and his New England tour. He returned to Illinois widely viewed as a presidential candidate—still a dark horse, but a possibility nonetheless. Shortly before his departure for New York, the Chicago Republican editor John Wentworth offered sage advice: “Look out for prominence. When it is ascertained that no one of the prominent candidates can be nominated, then ought to be your time.” And by May 1860, when the Republican convention assembled in Chicago, it had become clear that all the leading candidates suffered from serious liabilities. Seward was undoubtedly the country’s most prominent Republican, the man whose election, one supporter wrote, would “effectually symbolize the triumph of our cause.” But because of his long career of opposition to slavery and his “higher law” and “irrepressible conflict” speeches that seemed to suggest a lack of regard for the constitutional protections of slavery, Seward had acquired a reputation for radicalism. Republicans in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois feared he could not carry their states and would drag down local candidates with him. Moreover, Seward’s outspoken efforts years earlier to bring immigrants into the Whig party had made him anathema to nativists, while his support for the right to vote for New York’s black population inspired “strong objection” among western Republicans.
¹⁴

Many Republicans also considered Salmon P. Chase of Ohio too radical. Chase had launched his political career in the Liberty party, worked to secure blacks’ rights in Ohio, and supported efforts to combat the Fugitive Slave Act. On the other hand, Edward Bates of Missouri, the favorite of conservatives and Republicans like Greeley who feared the northern electorate would never accept a true antislavery candidate, had been closely associated with the Know-Nothings, thus alienating immigrant voters. Bates did not appear to be a Republican at all; he had voted for Millard Fillmore in 1856 and his nomination was certain to antagonize the Radicals.

In discussing the politics of Illinois, a microcosm of the North, Lincoln outlined the situation of the front-runners: “I think Mr. Seward is the very best candidate we could have for the North of Illinois, and the very worst for the South of it. The estimate of Gov. Chase here is neither better nor worse than that of Seward…. Mr. Bates, I think, would be the best man for the South of our State, and the worst for the North of it.” Less prominent candidates also had weaknesses. Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania was widely considered corrupt, and Benjamin F. Wade, another Radical, could not rely on the united support of his home state of Ohio with Chase in the running. Justice John McLean, also of Ohio, at age sixty-five was too old, and John C. Frémont had failed four years earlier.
¹⁵

Lincoln, as Illinois congressman John Farnsworth reported, seemed to be “the second choice of everybody.” His private life was “unimpeachable,” and his humble origins appealed to working-class voters (who before Republicans began to identify him as the “Rail Splitter” knew Lincoln as “the Flatboatman”). Lincoln had defended the rights of immigrants and was popular among German-Americans, but had not been “too severe” in public on the nativists. He opposed black suffrage, reassuring western voters, yet his principled condemnations of slavery and opposition to efforts to water down the party platform appealed to the Radicals. Indeed, because of the House Divided speech many conservatives, according to Lyman Trumbull, declared, “If you are going to nominate a man of that stamp, why not take Seward?” Overall, as Mark Delahay, a supporter from Kansas, explained to Lincoln, “You represent the middle” of the party and “could hold the head and tail on and beat the Democracy,” especially since “Penna, Ills, and Indiana will be the field of battle,” none of which Seward could carry.
¹⁶

For many, Lincoln’s appeal boiled down to the fact that he seemed electable. “I don’t care a fig for any of the candidates,” wrote George Ashmun of Massachusetts a month before he departed for Chicago as a delegate, “except as they may give assurance of success.” Lincoln had already proved he could fight Douglas, still the presumptive Democratic candidate, to a draw. (By the time the Republicans met, the Democratic National Convention had broken up along sectional lines without making a nomination and was set to reconvene in June.) As Republicans gathered in mid-May 1860, the
Chicago Press and Tribune
printed a long editorial recapitulating the arguments for Lincoln’s nomination and gave it the title “The Winning Man.” The delegates chose him on the third ballot. With no input from Lincoln, they selected as his running mate Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, who as an easterner and former Democrat balanced the ticket. Hamlin professed himself “astonished”—he had not campaigned for the post and “neither expected nor desired it.”
¹⁷

The platform adopted by the convention that nominated Lincoln avoided most divisive issues while seeking to broaden the party’s electoral appeal. In deference to Pennsylvania, it included a carefully worded resolution that avoided mention of “protection” but called for an adjustment of import duties to “encourage the industrial interests of the whole country.” It also endorsed a homestead act offering free land to settlers in the West, and the construction of a railroad to the Pacific, proposals with broad support among all parties in the North but widely rejected in the South.

The most controversial plank opposed any change in national or state laws abridging the rights of immigrants, a repudiation of Massachusetts’s two-year amendment. Carl Schurz served on the platform committee and later claimed he had been given carte blanche to compose this resolution “so that the Republican party be washed clean of the taint of Know-Nothingism.” Lincoln received numerous reports of nativist displeasure. “I wish our German friends could have been satisfied without such a resolution,” Trumbull wrote to Lincoln after the convention adjourned. A Boston Republican newspaper sympathetic to the Know-Nothings commented that it would have been just as legitimate for easterners to demand a plank opposing the impairment of rights by any state on account of race. In fact, the platform entirely avoided mention of free blacks, although at the insistence of Joshua R. Giddings it included an affirmation of the Declaration’s language about human equality. Despite the hopes of the Blairs and their supporters, it did not endorse colonization. “It was too large a scheme and involved too many details to be introduced,” the elder Francis P. Blair explained. But the border states where colonization was so central a part of the Republican appeal played a major role in the convention. Ninety delegates—one-fifth of the total—hailed from below the Mason-Dixon Line. Republicans could be excused for believing that, as one Connecticut delegate put it, many southerners agreed with their party “if they dare express it.”
¹⁸

When it came to the core issue—slavery—the platform avoided the inflammatory language of four years earlier about “relics of barbarism” and condemned John Brown’s raid. The platform, claimed the
New York Times
, was “eminently conservative in tone.” But the key plank embraced the “freedom national” position long associated with the Radicals. It went beyond non-extension by declaring freedom the “normal condition of all the territories” and denying the power of either Congress or a territorial legislature to give slavery “legal existence” there. “We have assumed the doctrine,” exulted the Radical Henry Wilson, a senator from Massachusetts, “that a slave cannot tread the soil of the Territories of the United States…a position in advance of the Wilmot Proviso.”
¹⁹

George W. Julian, the Indiana Radical leader, later commented on “the amazing diversity of opinion” among those who campaigned for Lincoln. Most former Know-Nothings, despite feeling “humiliated” by the platform, “reluctantly swallowed the pill.” Rejoicing in the rejection of Seward and his “extreme opinions,” Old Line Whigs such as Richard W. Thompson and Thomas Ewing worked for a Republican victory, describing Lincoln as “a sound conservative man” who had no connection with the “abolitionists, higher-law and irrepressible-conflict men.” But Radical Republicans campaigned with equal enthusiasm. “I am inclined to think,” wrote the Boston correspondent of the
New York Tribune
, “that Mr. Lincoln is ahead of the anti-slavery sentiment of the Republican party, rather than behind it.” As noted in chapter 2, when Wendell Phillips called Lincoln the “Slave-Hound of Illinois” because his 1849 bill for gradual emancipation in the District of Columbia envisioned strict enforcement of the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause, Giddings rebuked him and affirmed the strength of Lincoln’s antislavery beliefs.
²⁰

Some abolitionists condemned Lincoln for his 1858 statements opposing suffrage and other rights for free blacks. No candidate, the black abolitionist H. Ford Douglas declared, “is entitled to the sympathy of anti-slavery men, unless that party is willing to extend to the black man all the rights of a citizen.” Yet even Douglas hoped for Lincoln’s success, because his election would strengthen the genuine “anti-slavery element” in the Republican party. Against Lincoln’s stated opposition to black civil and political rights, his abolitionist admirers counterposed his commitment to racial equality in enjoying the fruits of one’s labor. Lydia Maria Child wrote that she trusted Lincoln because during his debates with Douglas, he had said that “a negro is my equal; as good as I am” (an imperfect paraphrase, to be sure). Considering that Illinois “is
very
pro-slavery,” she added, “I think he was a brave man to entertain such a sentiment and announce it.” Frederick Douglass could not bring himself to vote for Lincoln, but praised him in his monthly magazine as “a man of will and nerve.” Even though Lincoln fell far short of the principle of equal rights for all, he added, “it will be a great work accomplished when this government is divorced from the active support” of slavery.
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Four candidates contested the election of 1860. After the split in their party proved unresolvable, northern Democrats nominated Stephen A. Douglas while southerners put forward John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, who pledged congressional enforcement of owners’ right to bring their slaves into all the territories. The hastily organized Constitutional Union party chose John C. Bell of Tennessee on a platform pledging to preserve national unity by loyalty to the Constitution and the enforcement of the laws. The new party appealed to many voters in the Upper South desperate to avoid disunion. The conservative Philadelphia diarist Sidney George Fisher, however, noted its flaw: it did not represent “any definite principles or opinions.” The “overwhelming and exciting subject before the country is slavery,” Fisher wrote, and no party “that passes this question by” could “hope for success.” Far from the Democratic split ensuring Lincoln’s election, it actually made victory more difficult. Even though he expected Lincoln to win, Trumbull warned in June that “by cutting loose from the administration and the Fire Eaters, [Douglas] will be less assailable than if he were the candidate of the united Democracy.” Facing a Democratic candidate who had acceded to southern demands in order to obtain the nomination would have made Lincoln’s task much easier.
²²

The election campaign was intense. “Town meetings, stump oratory, torchlight processions, and all other means of excitement are rife throughout the state,” wrote Fisher about Pennsylvania. Along with the themes their party had perfected during the 1850s—the rights and opportunities of free labor, the necessity of halting slavery’s expansion—Republicans also emphasized their refusal to countenance southern secession in the event of Lincoln’s election, while simultaneously downplaying the danger of disunion. And while insisting they would not interfere directly with slavery in the states, numerous Republican newspapers and speakers predicted that Lincoln’s election would launch a slow process of abolition in the states of the Upper South. The southern press reported such statements with alarm.
²³

In effect, two presidential elections took place in 1860. Breckinridge captured most of the slave states, but Bell carried about 40 percent of the southern vote and three states of the Upper South. Lincoln solidly defeated Douglas in the free states by holding on to the gains Republicans had achieved in the elections of 1858. He won 54 percent of the northern popular vote, carrying every county in New England (the only time a candidate achieved this feat between 1832 and 1896) and an absolute majority in every state of the Old Northwest. But Lincoln was not even on the ballot in a majority of the slave states and won only 2 percent of the southern vote. Republicans who believed their party was poised to make inroads in the Border South could find encouragement from the results in Delaware, which gave Lincoln 23 percent of the vote, and Missouri (the only state carried by Douglas), where Lincoln polled 10 percent, mostly in St. Louis and its vicinity. But the results in Maryland, Kentucky, and Virginia, where Lincoln received less than 3 percent of the total, did not suggest the existence of significant Republican sentiment. Overall, Lincoln received 1,866,000 votes, more than any other man who had run for president and half a million more than Frémont polled four years earlier. This represented only 40 percent of the national total. But under the Electoral College system, Lincoln’s sweep of the North was more than enough to secure victory. Indeed, if the electoral votes for Bell, Breckinridge, and Douglas had been united on a single candidate, Lincoln would still have been elected. His victory did not arise from the division among his opponents but from the nature of the American electoral system, which enables a party to capture the presidency by concentrating its votes in the most populous region.