THE NEWS THAT Lincoln had defeated Seward came as a shock to much of the country, especially to the Eastern Republican establishment. On Capitol Hill, word of Lincoln’s nomination “was received with general incredulity,” conceded Charles Francis Adams, “until by repeated announcements from different quarters it appeared that he had carried the day by a union of all the anti-Seward elements…. The House was in such a state of confusion that it was clear no business would be done, so we adjourned.”
Since people were unaware of the skill with which he had crafted his victory, Lincoln was viewed as merely the accidental candidate of the consolidated anti-Seward forces. Still an obscure figure, he was referred to by half the journals representing his own party as “Abram” rather than “Abraham.” Pointing out that when Lincoln had visited the Historical Library at Hartford the previous March, he signed the visitors’ book as “Abraham Lincoln,” the Democratic New York Herald caustically noted that “it is but fair to presume that a man knows his own name.” Lincoln wrote to George Ashmun, the Republican chairman of the acceptance committee: “It seems as if the question whether my first name is ‘Abraham’ or ‘Abram’ will never be settled. It is ‘Abraham.’”
Exulting in Lincoln’s lack of national experience, Democratic newspapers had a field day ridiculing his biography. He is “a third rate Western lawyer,” the Herald gloated. “The conduct of the republican party in this nomination is a remarkable indication of a small intellect, growing smaller.” Rejecting Seward and Chase, “who are statesmen and able men,” the Herald continued, “they take up a fourth rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar,” and whose speeches are “illiterate compositions…interlarded with coarse and clumsy jokes.” Not content to deride his intellect, hostile publications focused on his appearance. “Lincoln is the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs, arms and hatchet-face ever strung upon a single frame. He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege which all politicians have of being ugly.”
More violent attacks appeared in the Charleston Mercury, which scornfully asked: “After him what decent white man would be President?” Seward, the paper insisted, had been “thrust aside” because he “lacked the necessary nerve to carry through measures of Southern subjugation.” Lincoln, on the other hand, was “the beau ideal of a relentless, dogged, freesoil border-ruffian.” He was “an illiterate partizan,” claimed the influential Richmond Enquirer, “possessed only of his inveterate hatred of slavery and his openly avowed predilections for negro equality.”
The venom of such attacks reflected the growing discord and apprehension among Southern Democrats. As Lincoln prepared for the election campaign, his prospects of victory had been enhanced considerably by the splintering of the Democratic Party, which was now the only party with supporters in both the North and South. Meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, before Lincoln’s nomination, the Democratic National Convention had ended in chaos. A majority of delegates, comprised of Stephen Douglas’s supporters, had presented a platform designed to paper over the slavery issue. Unfortunately for Douglas, the time when the slavery issue could be veiled had passed. Recent events, including the Dred Scott decision and the raid on Harpers Ferry by John Brown had hardened the position of many Southern leaders. The moderate positions acceptable in the past were rejected by radical Southern politicians who now condemned all compromise, demanding complete freedom to bring slaves into all the territories and explicit congressional protection for those slaves. They dismissed the doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” once widely acceptable, as an abandonment of Southern principle.
When the convention approved the moderate Douglas platform, the representatives from Alabama walked out, followed first by Mississippi and then the other Southern states. As the Mississippi delegation rose to walk out, one incensed delegate climbed on a chair for a rousing farewell speech, predicting that “in less than sixty days there would be a United South.” With this, observer Murat Halstead recorded, “the South Carolinians cheered loud and long,” the applause mounting as each state bolted. That night, “there was a Fourth of July feeling in Charleston…. There was no mistaking the public sentiment of the city. It was overwhelmingly and enthusiastically in favor of the seceders.”
Unable to secure a two-thirds vote for any nominee, the deadlocked Charleston convention was forced to reconvene in Baltimore after Lincoln had been nominated by the Republicans. There Douglas would finally receive the nomination he had long pursued. It was too late, however, to reassemble the pieces of the last national party. The positions of the Northern and Southern Democrats were now irreconcilable, shattered by the same forces that had destroyed the Whigs and the Know Nothings.
With Douglas the Democratic nominee, Southern seceders reconvened to nominate John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, a staunch believer that slavery could not constitutionally be excluded from the territories. North Carolina–born senator Joseph Lane was chosen as the vice presidential nominee. To complicate matters further, the new Constitutional Union Party, composed of old-line Whigs and remnant Know Nothings, held its own convention, nominating John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett of Massachusetts on a platform rooted in the illusory hope that the dissolution of the Union could be avoided by ignoring the slavery question altogether.
“The great democratic organization has finally burst into pieces,” Charles Francis Adams rejoiced in a diary entry of June 23, “and the two sections have respectively nominated candidates of their own.” Two weeks later, Lincoln informed a friend that he figured “the chances were more than equal, that we could have beaten the Democracy united. Divided, as it is, it’s chance appears very slim.” Nonetheless, he cautioned, “great is Democracy in resources; and it may yet give it’s fortunes a turn.”
While the Democrats were splintering, a committee came to Springfield to notify Lincoln formally of his nomination. “Mr. Lincoln received us in the parlor of his modest frame house,” wrote Carl Schurz, Seward’s avid supporter and a leading spokesman for the German-Americans. In the “rather bare-looking room,” Lincoln “stood, tall and ungainly in his black suit of apparently new but ill-fitting clothes, his long tawny neck emerging gauntly from his turn-down collar, his melancholy eyes sunken deep in his haggard face.” Ashmun spoke for the committee, and Lincoln “responded with a few appropriate, earnest, and well-shaped sentences.” Afterward, everyone relaxed into a more general conversation, “partly of a jovial kind, in which the hearty simplicity of Lincoln’s nature shone out.” As the committee members left, Mr. Kelley of Pennsylvania remarked to Schurz: “Well, we might have done a more brilliant thing, but we could hardly have done a better thing.” Still, Schurz acknowledged, other members of the committee “could not quite conceal their misgivings as to how this single-minded man, this child of nature, would bear himself in the contact with the great world.”
Another visitor, Thurlow Weed, detected an unexpected sophistication and political acumen in Lincoln. Still nursing wounds from Seward’s defeat, Weed traveled to Springfield at the invitation of Swett and Davis shortly after the convention. The two master politicians analyzed “the prospects of success, assuming that all or nearly all the slave States would be against [them],” determining which states “were safe without effort…which required attention,” and which “were sure to be vigorously contested.” Lincoln exhibited, Weed later wrote, “so much good sense, such intuitive knowledge of human nature, and such familiarity with the virtues and infirmities of politicians, that I became impressed very favorably with his fitness for the duties which he was not unlikely to be called upon to discharge.” Weed departed, ready to “go to work with a will.”
As Weed and Lincoln plotted election strategy, it must have been apparent to both men that there would, in actuality, be two elections. In the free states, the contest would pit Lincoln against Douglas, while the Southern Democrat, Breckinridge, would battle border-state Bell for the slave states. Douglas, once the defender of Southern principles, the author of the infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act, was, by 1860, reviled throughout the South as a traitor or closet abolitionist. “Now what difference is it to the people whether Lincoln or Douglas shall be elected?” one Southern newspaper asked. “The same ends are sought by each, and we do not see any reason to choose between them.”
A Lincoln victory would require at least 152 electoral votes. Anything short of a majority would throw the election into the turbulent chamber of the House of Representatives, which might well prove unable to elect anyone. The choice of vice president would be left to the Southern-dominated Senate, which might well elect Joseph Lane, Breckinridge’s running mate, to occupy the vacant presidential chair. Lincoln, therefore, would have to capture virtually the entire North, including those states that had voted for the Democrat Buchanan in the last election.
In three of these “must win” states—Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Ohio—Douglas had considerable strength, especially in their southern counties, populated largely by settlers from the South. Although slavery was an issue everywhere, it was not always the dominant concern. Pennsylvanians were more interested in tariff protection, while voters in Indiana, Ohio, and elsewhere in the Northwest wanted free land for settlers and internal improvements to expand commerce there. In addition, remnants of the anti-immigrant American Party lingered everywhere. The antislavery vote would undoubtedly go Republican, but that alone could not build a majority among such diverse constituencies.
LINCOLN’S FIRST TASK was to secure his hold on the Republican Party by conciliating and enlisting those who had fought him for the nomination—Chase, Seward, and Bates.
Chase was first approached to speak on behalf of Lincoln in the form of “a mere printed circular.” He felt, he later admitted, “not a little hurt & [his] first impulse was not to reply at all.” Then a personal letter from Lincoln arrived. Ignoring newspaper reports that Chase was “much chagrined and much dissatisfied with the nomination of so obscure a man as Mr. Abe Lincoln,” Lincoln graciously chose to construe Chase’s formal congratulatory letter as a symbol of his willingness to help. “Holding myself the humblest of all whose names were before the convention,” Lincoln wrote Chase, “I feel in especial need of the assistance of all; and I am glad—very glad—of the indication that you stand ready.” His ego soothed, Chase spoke at numerous Republican gatherings in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan during the weeks that followed. Though he harbored a lasting bitterness toward the Ohio delegation, he affirmed his hopes for the nation, arguing “first, that the Republican party is an inevitable party; secondly, that it grows out of the circumstances of the country; thirdly, that it proposes no measure which can be injurious to the true interests of the people.”
The formation of the Constitutional Union Party had made the support of Edward Bates vital to Lincoln. The party had enlisted many of the Missouri statesman’s old Whig supporters, and included many old Know Nothings. To engage the elder statesman’s support, Lincoln’s old friend Orville Browning called on Bates at his St. Louis home. Browning was in the best position to persuade Bates to help the Republican cause, since he had supported Bates’s presidential bid until the Illinois delegation, of which he was a member, had pledged itself to Lincoln. During their conversation, Bates “declined to take the stump” but promised to pen a public letter supporting Lincoln, even though he was aware, he said later, that in doing so, he would “probably give offense to some members of the Constitutional Union party.”
True to his word, Bates produced a letter for Browning to publish in which he praised Lincoln lavishly, positioned him as a conservative, and affirmed his own determination to support the Republican ticket. “I give my opinion freely in favor of Mr. Lincoln,” Bates wrote. “I consider Mr. Lincoln a sound, safe, national man. He could not be sectional if he tried. His birth, his education, the habits of his life, and his geographical position, compel him to be national.” What was more, Bates continued, Lincoln had “earned a high reputation for truth, courage, candor, morals and ability so that, as a man, he is most trustworthy. And in this particular, he is more entitled to our esteem [than] some other men, his equals, who had far better opportunities and aids in early life.” Later in the campaign Bates wrote of Lincoln: “His character is marked by a happy mixture of amiability and courage; and while I expect him to be as mild as Fillmore, I equally expect him to be as firm as Jackson.”
While Lincoln worked to enlist the cooperation of all his rivals, he knew that the active support of William Henry Seward would be pivotal to his campaign. Seward’s following among Republicans had brought him to the edge of nomination. His reverberant phrase making—“irrepressible conflict,” “higher law than the Constitution”—though too flammable for some, had emblazoned the banners and helped define the Republican cause. The 35 electoral votes in his home state of New York might well prove the key to victory. And for Lincoln it did not bode well that Seward had returned to New York in the wake of the convention to find many of his supporters disillusioned and dispirited by the prospect of any other candidate.
“The campaign started heavily,” Kansas delegate Addison Procter recalled. “Enthusiasm was lacking and conditions were getting more and more desperate.” Hoping to organize a Lincoln Club in Kansas, Procter approached one of the state’s most respected Republicans and asked him to preside. The man vehemently refused: “You fellows knew at Chicago what this country is facing…. You knew that it will take the very best ability we can produce to pull us through. You knew that above everything else, these times demanded a statesman and you have gone and given us a rail splitter. No, I will not preside or attend.”
“My personal feelings have been so much disturbed by the result at Chicago,” Charles Sumner wrote, “that I cannot yet appreciate it as a public act.” There is but “one & only one thing consoles me,” Michigan Republican George Pomeroy told Seward—“our chance of being defeated this time and your sure chance of a nomination in ’64.” Treasury agent William Mellen of Ohio expressed his disbelief to Frances Seward that Abraham Lincoln was presented as “the suitable man for the Presidency. The rail-candidate forsooth! I confess to a disposition to rail at him, & much more at the Convention for its self-stultification…. What is to be feared is the utter disintegration of the Republican party as a consequence of this abandonment of principle for mere expediency.”
Though Seward had pledged his support to the Republican ticket in a public letter, he was so dejected in the aftermath of his defeat that he considered resigning immediately from the Senate. Without the onerous demands of the congressional session, he could remain in Auburn, surrounded by his loving family and consoling friends. “When I went out to market this morning,” he told one friend, “I had the rare experience of a man walking about town, after he is dead, and hearing what people would say of him. I confess I was unprepared for so much real grief, as I heard expressed at every corner.”
But he understood that a decision to resign would look petulant and would, as his friend Israel Washburn warned, “give the malignants” an opportunity to damage him further. In the end, he determined to return to Washington in late May to complete his Senate term. The journey back to Capitol Hill “in the character of a leader deposed by [his] own party” was agonizing for him, however, as he admitted in a long letter to Frances. “I arrived here on Tuesday night. Preston King, with a carriage, met me at the depot, and conveyed me to my home. It seemed sad and mournful.” Even the pictures hanging on the wall, “Dr. Nott’s benevolent face, Lord Napier’s complacent one, Jefferson’s benignant one, and Lady Napier’s loving one, seemed all like pictures of the dead.” When he reached the Senate, “good men came through the day to see me…. Their eyes fill with tears…. They console themselves with the vain hope of a day of ‘vindication;’ and my letters all talk of the same thing. But they awaken no response in my heart.” His only solace, he told her, was the realization that “responsibility has passed away from me, and that the shadow of it grows shorter every day.”
Frances was delighted at the thought of her husband’s permanent return to their Auburn home when his Senate term ended the following March. “You have earned the right to a peaceful old age,” she assured him; “35 years of the best part of a mans life is all that his country can reasonably claim.” This was not the time, however, for Seward to fade contentedly from public life. Weed’s report of his visit with Lincoln perhaps roused Seward’s own resolve. To withdraw from this fight would be an abdication of his fierce political ambition and his belief in the Republican cause.
In the weeks that followed the convention, Seward was overwhelmed with speaking requests from dozens of Republican committees throughout the North. “Your services are more necessary to the cause than they ever were,” Charles Francis Adams wrote. “And your own reputation will gain more of permanency from the becoming manner with which you meet this disappointment, than it would from all the brilliancy of the highest success.”
“I am content to quit with the political world, when it proposes to quit with me,” Seward told Weed in late June. “But I am not insensible to the claims of a million of friends, nor indifferent to the opinion of mankind. All that seems to me clear, just now, is that it would not be wise to rush in at the beginning of the canvass, and so seem, most falsely, to fear that I shall be forgotten. Later in the canvass, it may be seen that I am wanted for the public interest.” So he delayed, while entreaties to join streamed in, finally committing himself to an electioneering tour in nine states in late August and early September. The announcement that Seward “was about to take the platform and open the campaign for Lincoln,” Addison Procter recalled, “was our first gleam of sunshine from out of the depths of discouragement.”
WHILE SEWARD PREPARED for his grand tour, Lincoln remained in Springfield. In deference to political tradition and to his own judgment that further public statements could only damage his prospects, he decided against a personal speaking tour. Recognizing that his cluttered law office could not accommodate the flood of visitors eager to see him, he moved his headquarters to the governor’s reception room at the State House.
Initially, Lincoln’s sole assistant was John Nicolay, a twenty-eight-year-old German-American immigrant who had worked for three years as a clerk in the secretary of state’s office. Lincoln had often visited the serious-minded Nicolay when searching out the latest election figures maintained in the office. After the convention, Lincoln had asked Nicolay to be his private secretary, “a call to service,” Nicolay’s daughter, Helen, later noted, “that lasted until his hair grew white and the powers of life ran down.”
With Nicolay’s help, Lincoln answered letters, received hundreds, perhaps thousands, of visitors from all parts of the North, talked with politicians, and contributed to a short campaign biography that sold more than a million copies. From his impromptu headquarters at the State House, Lincoln would engineer many aspects of his campaign. The telegraph wires allowed for fairly swift communication to political battlegrounds. Confidential messages were sent by mail, carried by personal emissaries, and given to political visitors. Most of these meetings are lost to history, but those that were recorded reveal Lincoln as a skillful politician, formulating and guiding his own campaign strategy.
“He sat down beside me on the sofa,” wrote a correspondent from Utica, New York, “and commenced talking about political affairs in my own State with a knowledge of details which surprised me. I found that he was more conversant with some of our party performances in Oneida County than I could have desired.” He “can not only discuss ably the great democratic principle of our Government,” wrote a newspaperman from Missouri, “but at the same time tell how to navigate a vessel, maul a rail, or even to dress a deer-skin.” Each correspondent’s impression was quickly forwarded to the newspapers, the principal conduits between candidates and the public.
To counter the savage caricatures of Lincoln in Democratic papers as semiliterate, ignorant, an uncultured buffoon, homely, and awkward, Republican journalists were dispatched to Springfield to write positive stories about Lincoln, his educated wife, Mary, and their dignified home. Newspapers that had supported Seward swiftly transferred their allegiance to the new leader of the Republican Party, and utilized every occasion to extol their candidate and attack the opposition.
Lincoln and his team doubtless controlled the “line” out of Springfield that reverberated in Republican papers across the nation. After spending an evening at the Lincoln home, the correspondent from the Utica Morning Herald reported that “an air of quiet refinement pervaded the place. You would have known instantly that she who presided over that modest household was a true type of the American lady.” As for Lincoln, “he has all the marks of a mind that scans closely, canvasses thoroughly, concludes deliberately, and holds to such conclusions unflinchingly.”
“Ten thousand inquiries will be made as to the looks, the habits, tastes and other characteristics of Honest Old Abe,” the Chicago Press and Tribune wrote. “We anticipate a few of them…. Always clean, he is never fashionable; he is careless but not slovenly…. In his personal habits, Mr. Lincoln is as simple as a child…his food is plain and nutritious. He never drinks intoxicating liquors of any sort…. He is not addicted to tobacco…. If Mr. Lincoln is elected President, he will carry but little that is ornamental to the White House. The country must accept his sincerity, his ability and his honesty, in the mould in which they are cast. He will not be able to make as polite a bow as Frank Pierce, but he will not commence anew the agitation of the Slavery question by recommending to Congress any Kansas-Nebraska bills. He may not preside at the Presidential dinners with the ease and grace which distinguish the ‘venerable public functionary,’ Mr. Buchanan; but he will not create the necessity” for a congressional committee to investigate corruption in his administration.
The visiting correspondents from Republican papers had nothing but praise for Mary. “Whatever of awkwardness may be ascribed to her husband, there is none of it in her,” a journalist from the New York Evening Post wrote. “She converses with freedom and grace, and is thoroughly au fait in all the little amenities of society.” Frequent mention was made of her distinguished Kentucky relatives, her sophisticated education, her ladylike courtesy, her ability to speak French fluently, her son’s enrollment in Harvard College, and her membership in the Presbyterian Church. Mrs. Lincoln is “a very handsome woman, with a vivacious and graceful manner,” another reporter observed; “an interesting and often sparkling talker.”
Reporters were fascinated by the contrast between a cultured woman from a refined background and the self-made rough-hewn Lincoln. Party leaders began to cultivate the legend of Lincoln that would permeate the entire campaign and, indeed, evolve into the present day. He was depicted as “a Man of the People,” an appealing political title after the rustic Andrew Jackson first supplanted the Eastern elites who had occupied the presidency for the forty years from Washington through John Quincy Adams.
The log cabin was emblematic of the dignity of honest, common, impoverished origins ever since William Henry Harrison had been triumphantly dubbed the “log-cabin, hard-cider” candidate twenty years earlier. Harrison had merely been posed in front of a log cabin. Lincoln had actually been born in one. One Republican worker wrote: “It has also afforded me sincere pleasure to think of Mr. Lincoln taking possession of the White House; he, who was once the inmate of the log cabin—were he the pampered, effeminated child of fortune, no such pleasing emotions would be inspired.” Answering the charge that Lincoln would be a “nullity,” the New York Tribune suggested that a “man who by his own genius and force of character has raised himself from being a penniless and uneducated flat boatman on the Wabash River to the position Mr. Lincoln now occupies is not likely to be a nullity anywhere.”
This aura of the Western man, the man of the prairie, had been reinforced during the Chicago convention, when Republicans paraded through the streets carrying the rails Lincoln had supposedly split. Although Lincoln—Honest Abe—was careful not to verify that any particular rail had been his handiwork, in one interview he held a rail aloft and said: “here is a stick I received a day or two since from Josiah Crawford…. He writes me that it is a part of one of the rails that I cut for him in 1825.”
Lincoln was aware that being “a Man of the People” was an advantage, especially in the raw and growing Western states critical to the election of a Republican candidate. Prior to the campaign, he had reinforced this politically potent image with descriptions of his poor schooling, years of poverty, and manual labor. Although his grim beginnings held no fascination for him, Lincoln was astute enough to capitalize upon this invaluable political asset.
From the outset, he decided that “it would be both imprudent, and contrary to the reasonable expectation of friends for me to write, or speak anything upon doctrinal points now. Besides this, my published speeches contain nearly all I could willingly say.” When his friend Leonard Swett asked his approval of a letter expressing the candidate’s sentiments, Lincoln replied, “Your letter, written to go to N.Y. is…substantially right.” However, he advised, “Burn this, not that there is any thing wrong in it; but because it is best not to be known that I write at all.” He recognized that anything he said would be scanned scrupulously for partisan purposes. The slightest departure from the printed record would be distorted by friends as well as enemies. Even his simple reiteration of a previous position might, in the midst of a campaign, give it new emphasis. He preferred to point simply to the party platform that he had endorsed. His few lapses justified his fears. A facetious comment to a Democratic reporter that “he would like to go into Kentucky to discuss issues but was afraid of being lynched” was made into a campaign issue.
Underlying this policy of self-restraint was another important but unvoiced political reality: Lincoln had to maintain the cohesion of the new Republican Party, a coalition of old Democrats, former Whigs, and members of the nativist American Party. Informing a Jewish friend that he had never entered a Know Nothing lodge, as accused by Democrats, he cautioned that “our adversaries think they can gain a point, if they could force me to openly deny this charge, by which some degree of offence would be given to the Americans. For this reason, it must not publicly appear that I am paying any attention to the charge.” Although Lincoln himself had disavowed any sympathy with the nativists, and had actually invested in a German paper, many Republicans remained hostile to immigrants, and their support was essential.
Lincoln knew this election would not be determined by a single issue. While opposition to slavery extension had led to the creation of the Republican Party and dominated the national debate, in many places other issues took precedence. In Pennsylvania, the leading iron producer in the nation, and in New Jersey, the desire for a protective tariff was stronger than hostility to slavery. In the West, especially among immigrant groups, multitudes hoped for homestead legislation providing free or cheap land to new settlers, many of whom had been hard hit by the Panic of 1857. “Land for the Landless” was the battle cry. And when, in the midst of the campaign, President Buchanan vetoed a mild Homestead Act, many in Indiana and throughout the West turned to Lincoln. All of these issues had been carefully addressed in the Republican Party platform. Had the election been fought on the single issue of slavery, it is likely that Lincoln would have lost.
WHILE LINCOLN KEPT a strategic silence in Springfield, Seward stepped forward to speak on public issues and provide the drama and excitement of the campaign. Traveling by train, steamboat, and carriage with an entourage (which included Fanny and her friend Ellen Perry; Charles Francis Adams and his son, Charles Junior; along with a contingent of politicians), Seward opened his tour in Michigan. From there, he proceeded west to Wisconsin and Minnesota, south to Iowa and Kansas, and east to Illinois and Ohio.
At every stop, Seward was met with “cannons, brass bands, and processions of torch-bearing ‘Wide Awakes’”—young Republicans dressed in striking oilcloth capes and caps—who generated enthusiasm for the party. They created a circus atmosphere at Republican rallies, surrounding the perimeter of crowds and marching in meandering, illuminated processions. One such march took several hours to pass the Lincoln house in Springfield. “Viewed from an elevated position, it wound its sinuous track over a length of two miles, seeming, in its blazing lights and glittering uniforms, like a beautiful serpent of fire,” wrote John Hay. “The companies…ignited vast quantities of Roman candles, and as the drilled battalions moved steadily on, canopied and crowded with a hissing and bursting blaze of fiery splendor…the enthusiasm of the people broke out in wild cheerings.” Other candidates mustered marching clubs, but with less success. One group of Douglas partisans designated themselves the “Choloroformers,” ready and able to “put the Wide Awakes to sleep.”
Fifty thousand people gathered to hear Seward speak in Detroit, and the fervor only increased as his tour moved west. Thousands waited past midnight for the arrival of his train in Kalamazoo, and when he disembarked, crowds followed him along the streets to the place where he would sleep that night. The next day, thousands more assembled on the village green to enjoy a brilliant “procession of young men and women on horseback, all well mounted, children with banners, men with carts and wagons,” that preceded the formal speeches. Still craving more, the crowd followed the entourage back to the train station, where Seward appeared at the window to speak again. To the discomfort of the elder Charles Francis Adams, Seward suggested that he, too, stick his head out of the window for some final words. “All of this reminded me of a menagerie,” Adams confessed in his diary, “where each of the beasts, beginning with the lion, is passed in review before a gaping crowd.”
In St. Paul, Minnesota, a correspondent reported, Seward’s arrival was “a day ever memorable in the political history of our State.” Early in the morning, the streets were “alive with people—the pioneer, the backwoodsman, the trapper, the hunter, the trader from the Red River,” all of them standing in wonder as a “magnificent Lincoln and Hamlin pole” was raised. A procession of bands and carriages heralded the arrival of Seward, who spoke for nearly two hours on the front steps of the Capitol.
Reporters marveled at Seward’s ability to make every speech seem spontaneous and vital, “without repetition of former utterances,” surpassing “the ordinary stump speech in fervency…literary quality, elevation of thought, and great enthusiasm on the part of the auditors.” It often appeared “the whole population of the surrounding country had turned out to greet him,” one correspondent noted. “Gov. Seward, you are doing more for Lincoln’s election than any hundred men in the United States,” a judge on board the Mississippi boat told him. “Well, I ought to,” Seward replied.
Charles Francis Adams, Jr., who was twenty-five at the time, could not figure “where, when, or how” Seward was able to prepare “the really remarkable speeches he delivered in rapid succession,” for “the consumption of liquors and cigars” during the journey was excessive. “When it came to drinking, Seward was, for a man of sixty, a free liver; and at times his brandy-and-water would excite him, and set his tongue going with dangerous volubility; but I never saw him more affected than that—never approaching drunkenness. He simply liked the stimulus.” Amazingly, Adams remarked, despite Seward’s drinking, his capacity for work was unimpaired.
Young Adams was mesmerized by Seward, whom he considered the most “delightful traveling companion” imaginable. “The early morning sun shone on Seward, wrapped in a strange and indescribable Syrian cashmere cloak, and my humble self, puffing our morning cigars,” Adams recorded in his diary after an overnight journey by rail to Quincy, Illinois. The two smokers had adjourned to the baggage car, “having rendered ourselves,” in Seward’s words, “‘independent on this tobacco question.’”
Seward’s grand tour received extensive coverage, complete with excerpts from his speeches, in newspapers across the land. From Maine, Israel Washburn wrote that he was astonished at the “integrity & versatility” of the speeches. He considered the speech in Detroit “the most perfect & philosophical—the St. Paul the broadest, the Dubuque the warmest, the Chicago the most practical & effective…but, of all the speeches…I like the short one at Madison—it seems to me to be the most comprehensive & complete, the grandest & highest.”
At home in Auburn, Frances Seward received dozens of letters praising her husband’s performance. “I am sure you must be most happy,” Seward’s old friend Richard Blatchford wrote. “He has shown throughout a depth of power, eloquence & resonance of thought and mind, which we here who know him so well, are not a little taken a-back by.” Sumner told Frances that as he read each speech, he “marveled more & more. I know nothing like such a succession of speeches by any American.” Frances took pride in her husband’s accomplishments but simultaneously recognized that his great success had eclipsed the possibility he would soon retire to private life in Auburn. “Yes Henry is very popular now,” she wrote Sumner. “He is monopolized by the public and I am at last—resigned—Is that the word.”
On October 1, en route to Chicago, Seward’s train made a brief stop in Springfield. “There was a rush into and about the windows of the car in which Mr. Seward was seated,” observed a correspondent. Lincoln and Trumbull had waited with the crowd and came aboard to pay their respects. Lincoln “was a revelation,” young Adams recorded in his diary. “There he was, tall, shambling, plain and good-natured. He seemed shy to a degree, and very awkward in manner; as if he felt out of place, and had a realizing sense that properly the positions should be reversed. Seward too appeared constrained.” Adams undoubtedly ascribed his own feelings to Lincoln, who most likely did not feel “out of place” at all.
This was the first time Lincoln and Seward had met since the evening they spent together in Massachusetts in 1848. “Twelve years ago you told me that this cause would be successful,” Lincoln told him, referring to the antislavery crusade, “and ever since I have believed that it would be.”
During their conversation, Lincoln asked Seward if he would be willing in his upcoming Chicago speech to address a certain problematic subject: John Wentworth, now the mayor of Chicago, was continually making references to an argument the party was trying to avoid—that a Republican win would bring an eventual end to slavery altogether. Knowing Wentworth was set to introduce Seward, Lincoln asked the New Yorker to reassure the audience that Republicans “would not interfere with slavery where it already existed.” Seward readily agreed and made it clear in his speech that Republicans were not attacking slavery in the South, that securing freedom for the territories need not interrupt ordinary intercourse with the South. In distancing themselves from Northern abolitionists, the Lincoln team was far more concerned with reassuring Northern conservatives than with conciliating the South.
Seward’s tour came to a triumphant close on October 6. His train pulled into Auburn, where a “noisy throng” gave him a warm welcome home. “Seward, in fact, never appeared so well as at home,” young Adams observed. “He walked the streets exchanging greetings with everyone.” His responses were “all genuine, the relations were kindly, unaffected, neighborly.” Seward’s return created “an impression of individuality approaching greatness.” It was a journey Adams would never forget.
Although Lincoln himself made no public statements or speeches, he labored constantly on his campaign and fully justified Weed’s appraisal of his political acumen. He strove to hold his coalition together, while disrupting efforts of his opponents to unite on fusion tickets. He sent emissaries to his supporters with instructions to solve campaign problems and heal divisions. Indirectly, he sought to clarify his position on important issues without breaking his vow of silence. He rigorously abstained from making patronage commitments. Responding to Senator Trumbull’s suggestion that he make some pledges in New York, Lincoln replied, “Remembering that Peter denied his Lord with an oath, after most solemnly protesting that he never would, I will not swear I will make no committals; but I do think I will not.”
Despite the unremitting, consuming labor of organizing his campaign, Lincoln somehow found time to write a humorous fictional dialogue between Breckinridge and Douglas. He also answered many of the endless letters he received, writing personal, unpretentious replies to supporters and well-wishers of every kind. An author wishing to dedicate his new legal work to Lincoln was answered: “I give the leave, begging only that the inscription may be in modest terms, not representing me as a man of great learning, or a very extraordinary one in any respect.” In mid-October, he replied to eleven-year-old Grace Bedell, who had recommended that he grow a beard, “for your face is so thin” and “all the ladies like whiskers.” After lamenting the fact that he had no daughter of his own, he wondered: “As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affection if I were to begin it now?” Nonetheless, he proceeded to grow a beard. By January 1861, John Hay would pen a witty couplet: “Election news Abe’s hirsute fancy warrant—Apparent hair becomes heir apparent.”
Recognizing that much of the positive news he received from friends was biased, Lincoln implored his supporters to give straightforward accounts of his prospects in each state. He worried about reports from Maine, New York, and Chicago, and brooded over the lack of solid information from Pennsylvania. His political objectives in the Keystone State were to establish his soundness on the tariff issue and heal the ominous divisions between the followers of Cameron and Curtin, the gubernatorial candidate. Lincoln always understood the importance of what he described as “the dry, and irksome labor” of building organizations to get out the vote, while most politicians preferred “parades, and shows, and monster meetings.”
He enthusiastically supported Carl Schurz’s “excellent plan” for mobilizing the German-American vote, and assured Schurz that “your having supported Gov. Seward, in preference to myself in the convention, is not even remembered by me for any practical purpose…to the extent of our limited acquaintance, no man stands nearer my heart than yourself.” A large part of the German-American vote would go to Lincoln, aiding his victories in the Northwest.
Although concerned with progress in all the Northern states, he focused his attention primarily on the critical West. He urged Caleb Smith to do his utmost in Indiana, believing that nothing would affect the November results in Illinois more strongly than the momentum provided by an Indiana victory in the October state elections. In July, he sent Nicolay to an Indiana supporter who wished to prevent a Bell ticket from being placed on the ballot. “Ascertain what he wants,” Lincoln instructed Nicolay. “On what subjects he would converse with me. And the particulars if he will give them. Is an interview indispensable? Tell him my motto is ‘Fairness to all,’ but commit me to nothing.”
Having pledged to make no new statement on public issues, Lincoln had surrogates present excerpts from his previous speeches to reinforce his positions. He had Judge Davis show Cameron selections of pro-tariff speeches he had made in the 1840s, and then cautioned Cameron: “Before this reaches you, my very good friend, Judge Davis, will have called upon you, and, perhaps, shown you the ‘scraps.’…Nothing about these, must get into the news-papers.” This tone reveals Lincoln’s keen awareness that notes from unpublished thirteen-year-old speeches stretched his vow of silence, but he hoped the assurances they provided would corral Cameron’s powerful influence in Pennsylvania. Cameron replied that he was pleased by the content of Lincoln’s earlier writings.
To a correspondent who sought his intervention in the discord between Cameron and Curtin, Lincoln replied: “I am slow to listen to criminations among friends, and never expouse their quarrels on either side…allow by-gones to be by-gones, and look to the present & future only.” Yet at the same time, he informed Leonard Swett, who was preparing a trip to Pennsylvania, that he was very concerned about former congressman Joseph Casey’s disclosures that the Cameron faction lacked confidence in the Pennsylvania Central Committee, controlled by Curtin. “Write Mr. Casey,” Lincoln urged, “suggest to him that great caution and delicacy of action, is necessary in that matter.” Meanwhile, Republican money flowed into Pennsylvania. “After all,” wrote Republican National Committeeman John Goodrich of Massachusetts, “Pennsylvania is the Sebastopol we must take.”
Lincoln turned his political attention to every state where his campaign experienced difficulty. Hearing that two Republican seats might be lost in Maine’s September elections, he told his vice presidential mate, Hannibal Hamlin, that “such a result…would, I fear, put us on the down-hill track, lose us the State elections in Pennsylvania and Indiana, and probably ruin us on the main turn in November. You must not allow it.” In August, troubled by a letter received from Rhode Island “intimating that Douglas is in-listing some rich men there, who know how to use money, and that it is endangering the State,” Lincoln asked Rhode Island’s senator James Simmons, “How is this? Please write me.” In the end, the September elections in New England favored the Republicans, preparing the way for the great October contests in the West.
Lincoln was not alone in his assessment that the October state elections in Indiana and Pennsylvania would prove critical to the fortunes of the Republican Party. On the eve of the state elections, Judge Davis told his son that “tomorrow is the most important day in the history of the Country.” Lincoln’s camp was elated by the positive results as large Republican majorities piled up in both states. When Judge Davis first heard the exciting news, Ward Lamon reported back to Lincoln, “he was trying an important criminal case, which terminated in his Kicking over the Clerk’s desk, turned a double somersault and adjourned court until after the presidential Election.” If the three-hundred-pound Davis actually performed such a stunt, it was a miracle second only to Lincoln’s nomination. But there was no question that Davis was thrilled. “We are all in the highest glee on acct of the elections,” he wrote his wife, Sarah. “Mr. Lincoln will evidently be the next Pres’t.” That Saturday night, Davis traveled to Springfield to celebrate with the Lincolns, Trumbull, and Governor Corwin. “I never was better entertained,” he rejoiced, though he confessed that Mary was still “not to my liking.” She appears to be “in high feather,” he continued. “I am in hopes that she will not give her husband any trouble.”
Mary reveled in her newfound celebrity. She delighted in the crowds of visitors coming to her house, the artists pleading to paint her husband’s portrait, the prominent politicians waiting for the chance to converse with the presidential nominee. With pride, and perhaps a shade of spite toward the man who had so often bested her husband, she noted that a reception for Stephen Douglas in Springfield had attracted only thirty people when hundreds were expected. “This rather looks as if his greatness had passed away,” she commented to a friend.
Still, Mary remained terribly anxious that ultimate success might once again prove elusive. “You used to be worried, that I took politics so cooly,” she confessed to her friend Hannah Shearer; “you would not do so, were you to see me now. Whenever I have time, to think, my mind is sufficiently exercised for my comfort…I scarcely know, how I would bear up, under defeat. I trust that we will not have the trial.”
For weeks, Stephen Douglas had been barnstorming the country, having decided immediately after his nomination to defy custom. Disregarding criticism that his unbecoming behavior diminished the “high office of the presidency…to the level of a county clerkship,” he stumped the country, from the New England states to the Northwest, from the border states to the South, becoming “the first presidential candidate in American history to make a nationwide tour in person.”
Douglas was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, when he heard the news of the Republican victories in Indiana and Pennsylvania, which destroyed any hope he might have had for victory. “Mr. Lincoln is the next President,” he declared. “We must try to save the Union. I will go South.” It was a courageous move, his “finest hour,” according to Allan Nevins. Exhausted from his nonstop weeks of campaigning, Douglas faced one hostile audience after another as he moved into the Deep South. No longer hoping to gain support for his candidacy, he campaigned for the survival of the Union. “I believe there is a conspiracy on foot to break up this Union,” he warned an audience in Montgomery, Alabama. “It is the duty of every good citizen to frustrate the scheme…if Lincoln is elected, he must be inaugurated.”
Douglas understood what the Republicans failed to see—that Southerners were serious in their threats to secede from the Union if Lincoln won the election. “The cardinal error of the Republicans,” Nevins writes, was their failure to deal candidly with “the now imminent danger of secession.” Their dismissal of the looming possibility of secession was in part, but only in part, a deliberate tactic to ignore the threat so that voters would not be scared away from the Republican ticket. Beyond that, they simply did not believe that the threat was serious. After all, the South had made similar threats intermittently for the past forty years. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., later admitted, “we all dwelt in a fool’s Paradise.” Though Northern Republicans had undoubtedly seen the threatening editorials in Southern newspapers, they continued to believe, as Lincoln told a journalist friend, that the movement was simply “a sort of political game of bluff, gotten up by politicians, and meant solely to frighten the North.”
In mid-August, Lincoln assured one of his supporters, John Fry, that “people of the South have too much of good sense, and good temper, to attempt the ruin of the government.” Many in the South were equally skeptical. A Tennessee editor later admitted that “the cry of disunion had been raised so often that few had taken it seriously during the campaign. Evidently the ‘Northern sectionalists’ had believed it to be ‘all talk’…while most intelligent Southerners had assumed that it was ‘an idle menace, made to sway Northern sentiment.’”
Bates likewise shrugged off Southern threats as the desperation of belligerent politicians, while Seward openly scorned the taunts of secession: “they cry out that they will tear the Union to pieces…‘Who’s afraid?’ Nobody’s afraid.” His audience echoed: “Nobody!” Among Lincoln’s colleagues, only Frank Blair, Jr., recognized that the distortions of Lincoln’s speeches in the Southern papers and the “misrepresentations” of extremists who intimated the Republicans intended an attack on the South had created “a large and influential class who are even now ready to apply the torch which will light the fires of civil discord.” Still, Blair believed, these extremists would not succeed and “this glorious Union” would not “be sundered in consequence of the triumph of our party.” Even John Breckinridge, the South’s standard-bearer, sought to distance himself from Southern extremists. His sole campaign speech refuted charges that he favored splitting up the Union.
The realization that the “irrepressible conflict” might prove more than rhetoric came too late. The divided house would indeed fall. These phrases, intended by Seward and Lincoln as historical prophecies, were perceived by many in the South as threats—imminent and meant to be answered.
With the October elections, the campaign had gained decisive momentum, but it was not yet over. With four candidates dividing the vote, Lincoln would have to capture New York’s pivotal 35 electoral votes to win an electoral majority and avoid throwing the election into the House. He relied on Thurlow Weed to manage the campaign in New York, but continued to seek other perspectives and intelligence. “I have a good deal of news from New-York,” Lincoln told former congressman John Pettit, “but, of course, it is from friends, and is one-sided…. It would seem that assurances to this point could not be better than I have. And yet it may be delusive.”
The Empire State posed unique problems for Republicans. New York was home to large numbers of traditionally Democratic Irish immigrants who were unfriendly to the antislavery cause. In addition, New York City contained an influential class of merchants and manufacturers who viewed Republicanism as a threat to their commercial relations with the South. If these groups united against Lincoln, and if, as the Douglas people believed, Seward’s partisans remained unreconciled to Lincoln’s nomination, New York could easily be lost.
Lincoln recognized these complications from the outset, warning Weed in August that “there will be the most extraordinary effort ever made, to carry New-York for Douglas.” He feared that Douglas was “managing the Bell-element with great adroitness,” and might well obtain a fusion of the two forces, thereby keeping the state from the Republicans. Less worried than Lincoln, Weed nonetheless left nothing to chance. He wrote to Seward in late October from the Astor House in New York City: “Can you afford to make a soothing speech in this city?…A speech in the spirit that you delivered last in the Senate, showing that it is the business of Republicans and the mission of the Republican Party to preserve the Union…that there is not an aggressive Plank in the Republican Platform…. I think it would finish the work.” Seward agreed to come to New York at once. His speech, even in this Democratic stronghold, was punctuated by wild applause, and when he finished, “the whole audience broke forth into the most tumultuous cheering.”
ON ELECTION DAY, November 6, 1860, the citizens of Springfield were awakened at sunrise by cannonade and rousing band music “to stir whatever sluggish spirits there might be among the populace.” Lincoln spent the morning in his quarters at the State House, receiving and entertaining visitors. Samuel Weed of the New York Times long remembered the atmosphere in the room that morning. Lincoln “was chatting with three or four friends as calmly and as amiably as if he had started on a picnic.” Tipping his armchair backward to prop his long legs atop the woodstove, he made such detailed inquiry into all the local races that “one would have concluded that the District Attorneyship of a county of Illinois was of far more importance than the Presidency.”
Lincoln had originally declined to vote himself, believing that “the candidate for a Presidential office ought not to vote for his own electors,” but Herndon insisted that if he cut off the presidential electors at the top, he could still vote for all the state and local offices. Warming to the idea, Lincoln headed over at about three o’clock to the polling place at the courthouse. His appearance drew a large crowd, “who welcomed him with immense cheering, and followed him in dense numbers along the hall and up stairs into the Court room,” where he was hailed with another wild “burst of enthusiasm.”
At five, he headed home to have supper with Mary and the boys, returning to the State House at seven, accompanied by Judge Davis and a few friends. An immense crowd followed him into the Capitol, leading one supporter to suggest that he ask everyone but his closest friends to withdraw. “He said he had never done such a thing in his life, and wouldn’t commence now.” When the polls had closed, the first dispatches began to filter into the telegraph office. A correspondent from the Missouri Democrat noted that throughout the evening, “Lincoln was calm and collected as ever in his life, but there was a nervous twitch on his countenance when the messenger from the telegraphic offices entered that revealed an anxiety within that no coolness from without could repress.” The first dispatch, indicating a strong Republican win in Decatur, Illinois, was “borne into the Assembly hall as a trophy of victory, to be read to the crowd,” who responded with great shouts of joy. Though the early returns were incomplete, it was observed that Lincoln “seemed to understand their bearing on the general result in the State and commented upon every return by way of comparison with previous elections.”
By nine o’clock, as tallies were relayed from distant states, Lincoln, Davis, and a few friends gathered at the telegraph office for immediate access to the returns. While Lincoln reclined on a sofa, the telegraph tapped out good news all around. New England, the Northwest, Indiana, and Pennsylvania had all come into the Republican camp. When ten o’clock arrived, however, with no word from New York, Lincoln grew fretful. “The news would come quick enough if it was good,” he told his cohorts that “and if bad, he was not in any hurry to hear it.”
Finally, at 11:30, a message came from New York. “We have made steady gains everywhere throughout the State, but the city returns are not sufficiently forward to make us sure of the result, although we are quite sanguine a great victory has been won.” The dispatch produced tremendous cheers. Minutes later, Lyman Trumbull came running into the room: “Uncle Abe, you’re the next President, and I know it.” Lincoln was still uncertain, for if the Democrats piled up huge majorities in New York City, the Republican votes in the rest of the state could be offset. “Not too fast, my friends,” he said. “Not too fast, it may not be over yet.”
At midnight, Lincoln attended a “victory” supper prepared by the Republican ladies. While everyone else was in high spirits, assured of victory, Lincoln remained anxious about New York. Too often in the past his dreams had collapsed at the last moment. Without New York’s 35 electoral votes, his total of 145 electoral votes would be 7 short of a majority.
Lincoln’s concerns proved groundless, for Thurlow Weed’s unparalleled organization had been at work since dawn, rounding up Republican voters in every precinct. “Don’t wait until the last hour,” Weed had instructed his workers. “Consider every man a ‘delinquent’ who doesn’t vote before 10 o’clock.” He left his organization plenty of time to prod, push, and, if necessary, carry voters to the polls.
Soon after midnight, the returns from New York and Brooklyn came in, revealing that Democratic control of New York City was not enough to counter the Republican vote throughout the state. Celebrations could begin in earnest, for Lincoln’s victory was accomplished.
Church bells began to ring. Cheers for “Old Abe” resounded through the streets. Lincoln was jubilant, admitting that he was “a very happy man…who could help being so under such circumstances?” Pocketing the final dispatch, he headed home to tell Mary, who had been waiting anxiously all day. “Mary, Mary,” he cried out, “we are elected!”