AS 1854 GAVE WAY TO 1855, Abraham Lincoln’s long-dormant dream of high political office was reawakened, now infused with a new sense of purpose by the passage of the Nebraska Act. He won a seat in the Illinois State Assembly, then promptly declared himself a candidate for the U.S. Senate. In the Illinois state elections the previous fall, the loose coalition of antislavery Whigs and independent Democrats had gained a narrow majority over the Douglas Democrats in the legislature. The victory was “mainly attributed” to Lincoln’s leadership, observed state legislator Joseph Gillespie. With the new legislature set to convene in late January to choose the next U.S. senator from Illinois, Lincoln was “the first choice” of the overwhelming majority of anti-Nebraska members. His lifelong dream of achieving high political office seemed about to be realized at last.
On January 20, 1855, however, the worst blizzard in more than two decades isolated Springfield from the rest of the state, preventing a quorum from assembling in the state legislature. Immense snowdrifts cut off trains coming in from the North, and mail was halted for more than a week. While Springfield’s children relished “the merry sleigh bells” jingling through the snow, the “pulsation of business” was “nearly extinct.” Finally, the weather improved sufficiently for the legislature to convene.
On Thursday morning, February 8, long before the balloting opened at three o’clock, the Capitol was “a beehive of activity.” Representatives caucused and whispered in every corner. The anti-Nebraska caucus, composed mainly of Whigs, voted, as expected, to support Lincoln, but a small group of five anti-Nebraska Democrats was ominously absent. The Douglas Democrats, meanwhile, had decided to support the incumbent senator, James Shields, on the early ballots. If Shields’s campaign faltered, due to his outspoken endorsement of the Nebraska bill, they had devised a plan to switch their support to the popular Democratic governor, Joel Matteson, who had not taken an open position on the bill. In this way, the Democrats believed, they might win over some members of the anti-Nebraska caucus.
By noon, the “lobby and the galleries of the Hall of the House of Representatives began to fill with senators, representatives and their guests.” Notable among the ladies in the gallery were Mary Todd Lincoln and her friend Julia Jayne Trumbull, wife of Democrat Lyman Trumbull, who had recently been elected to Congress on an anti-Nebraska platform. The wife and daughter of Governor Matteson were also in attendance. Some weeks earlier, Lincoln had bought a stack of small notebooks to record, with Mary’s help, all hundred members of the two houses, identifying the party affiliation of each, as well as his stance on the Nebraska bill. Their calculations gave reason to hope, but the situation was complicated. To reach a majority of 51 votes, Lincoln would have to hold together the fragile coalition comprised of former rivals in the Whig and Democratic camps who had only recently joined hands against the Nebraska bill.
Led by the governor, the senators marched into the House chamber at the appointed hour. When all were sworn in, the balloting began. On the first ballot, Lincoln received 45 votes, against 41 for the Douglas Democrat, James Shields, and 5 for Congressman Lyman Trumbull. The five anti-Nebraska Democrats who voted for Trumbull were led by Norman Judd of Chicago. They had no personal animosity toward Lincoln, but “having been elected as Democrats…they could not sustain themselves at home,” they claimed, if they voted for a Whig for senator.
In the ballots that followed, as daylight gave way to gaslights in the great hall, Lincoln reached a high point of 47 votes, only 4 shy of victory. Nonetheless, the little Trumbull coalition refused to budge, denying Lincoln the necessary majority. Finally, after nine ballots, Lincoln concluded that unless his supporters shifted to Trumbull, the Douglas Democrats, who had, as expected, switched their allegiance to Matteson, would choose the next senator.
Unwilling to sacrifice all the hard work of the antislavery coalition, Lincoln advised his floor manager, Stephen Logan, to drop him for Trumbull. Logan refused at first, protesting the injustice of the candidate with the much larger vote giving in to the candidate with the smaller vote. Lincoln was adamant, insisting that if his name remained on the ballot, “you will lose both Trumbull and myself and I think the cause in this case is to be preferred to men.”
When Logan rose to speak, the tension in the chamber was so great that the “spectators scarcely breathed.” In a sad voice, he announced that it was “the purpose of the remaining Whigs to decide the contest.” Obeying his directions, Lincoln’s supporters switched their votes to Trumbull, giving him the 51 votes needed for victory. Lincoln’s friends were inconsolable, believing that this was “perhaps his last chance for that high position.” Logan put his hands over his face and began to cry, while Davis stormily announced that had he been in Lincoln’s situation, “he never would have consented to the 47 men being controlled by the 5.”
In public, Lincoln expressed no hard feelings toward either Trumbull or Judd. He deliberately showed up at Trumbull’s victory party, with a smile on his face and a warm handshake for the victor. Consoled that the Nebraska men were “worse whipped” than he, Lincoln insisted that Matteson’s defeat “gives me more pleasure than my own gives me pain…. On the whole, it is perhaps as well for our general cause that Trumbull is elected.”
Lincoln’s magnanimity served him well. While Seward and Chase would lose friends in victory—Seward by neglecting at the height of his success his old friend Horace Greeley, and Chase by not understanding the lingering resentments that followed in the wake of his 1849 Senate victory—Lincoln, in defeat, gained friends. Neither Trumbull nor Judd would ever forget Lincoln’s generous behavior. Indeed, both men would assist him in his bid for the U.S. Senate in 1858, and Judd would play a critical role in his run for the presidency in 1860.
Mary Lincoln was unable to be so gracious. Convinced that Trumbull had acted with “cold, selfish, treachery,” she never spoke another word to Trumbull’s wife, Julia, who had been a bridesmaid at her wedding and one of her closest friends. Though intermediaries tried in succeeding years to bring the two women together, the ruptured friendship never healed. Neither could Mary forgive Norman Judd for his role in supporting Trumbull. Though Judd, along with Davis, would do more than anyone else to assure Lincoln’s nomination at the Chicago convention, Mary did everything she could to blackball him from a cabinet post after her husband’s election.
Despite the dignity of Lincoln’s public demeanor, he privately suffered a brutal disappointment, describing the ordeal as an “agony.” Though he had engineered Trumbull’s victory for the sake of the anti-Nebraska cause, it was difficult to accept the manner of his loss. “He could bear defeat inflicted by his enemies with a pretty good grace,” he told his friend Gillespie, “but it was hard to be wounded in the house of his friends.” After all the hard work, the interminable nights and weekends on the hustings, the conversations with fellow politicians, the hours spent writing letters to garner support, after so many years of patient waiting and hopefulness, he seemed as far from realizing his ambition as ever. Fate seemed to take a curious delight in finding new ways to shatter his dreams.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1855, disappointment piled upon disappointment. Six months after his loss to Trumbull, Lincoln’s involvement in a celebrated law case forced him to recognize that his legal reputation, secure as it might have been in frontier Illinois, carried little weight among the preeminent lawyers in the country.
The story began that June with the arrival in Springfield of Peter Watson, a young associate in the distinguished Philadelphia firm headed by George Harding, a nationally renowned patent specialist. Harding had been hired by the John Manny Company of Rockford, Illinois, to defend its mechanical reaping machine against a patent infringement charge brought by Cyrus McCormick, the original inventor of the reaper. McCormick v. Manny, better known as the “Reaper” suit, was considered an important test case, pitting two outstanding patent lawyers, Edward Dickerson of New York and former Attorney General Reverdy Johnson for McCormick, against Harding for Manny. Since the case was to be tried before a judge in Chicago, Harding decided to engage a local lawyer who “understood the judge and had his confidence,” though, from his Eastern perspective, he condescendingly expressed doubt he could find a lawyer in Illinois “who would be of real assistance” in arguing the case.
Watson was sent to Springfield to see if Abraham Lincoln, whose name had been recommended, was the right man for the position. His initial impression was not positive. Neither the small frame house on Eighth Street nor Lincoln’s appearance at the door with “neither coat nor vest” indicated a lawyer of sufficient standing for a case of this magnitude. After talking with Lincoln, however, Watson decided he might be “rather effective” after all. He paid Lincoln a retainer and arranged a substantial fee when the work was completed. Lincoln was thrilled with both the fee and the opportunity to test himself with the renowned Reverdy Johnson. He began working on the legal arguments for the case, understanding that Harding would present the scientific arguments.
Not long after Watson’s Springfield visit, Harding received word that the case had been transferred from Chicago to Cincinnati. The change of venue to Ohio “removed the one object” for employing Lincoln, allowing Harding to team up with the man he had wanted in the first place—the brilliant Edwin Stanton. Unaware of the changed situation, Lincoln continued to develop his case. “At our interview here in June,” he wrote Watson in late July, “I understood you to say you would send me copies of the Bill and Answer…and also of depositions…I have had nothing from you since. However, I attended the U.S. Court at Chicago, and while there, got copies…I write this particularly to urge you to forward on to me the additional evidence as fast as you can. During August, and the remainder of this month, I can devote some time to the case, and, of course, I want all the material that can be had. During my day at Chicago, I went out to Rockford, and spent half a day, examining and studying Manny’s Machine.”
Though Lincoln never heard from Watson, he pieced together what he needed and in late September set out for Cincinnati with a lengthy brief in his hands. Arriving at the Burnet House where all the lawyers were lodged, he encountered Harding and Stanton as they left for the court. Years later, Harding could still recall the shock of his first sight of the “tall, rawly boned, ungainly back woodsman, with coarse, ill-fitting clothing, his trousers hardly reaching his ankles, holding in his hands a blue cotton umbrella with a ball on the end of the handle.” Lincoln introduced himself and proposed, “Let’s go up in a gang.” At this point, Stanton drew Harding aside and whispered, “Why did you bring that d——d long armed Ape here…he does not know any thing and can do you no good.” With that, Stanton and Harding turned from Lincoln and continued to court on their own.
In the days that followed, Stanton “managed to make it plain to Lincoln” that he was expected to remove himself from the case. Lincoln did withdraw, though he remained in Cincinnati to hear the arguments. Harding never opened Lincoln’s manuscript, “so sure that it would be only trash.” Throughout that week, though Lincoln ate at the same hotel, Harding and Stanton never asked him to join them for a meal, or accompany them to or from court. When Judge John McLean hosted a dinner for the lawyers on both sides, Lincoln was not invited.
The hearing continued for a week. The sophisticated arguments were “a revelation” to Lincoln, recalled Ralph Emerson, one of Manny’s partners. So intrigued was he by Stanton’s speech, in particular, that he stood in “rapt attention…drinking in his words.” Never before, Emerson realized, had Lincoln “seen anything so finished and elaborated, and so thoroughly prepared.” When the hearing was over, Lincoln told Emerson that he was going home “to study law.” Emerson did not understand at first what Lincoln meant by this, but Lincoln explained. “For any rough-and-tumble case (and a pretty good one, too), I am enough for any man we have out in that country; but these college-trained men are coming West. They have had all the advantages of a life-long training in the law, plenty of time to study and everything, perhaps, to fit them. Soon they will be in Illinois…and when they appear I will be ready.”
As Lincoln prepared to leave Cincinnati, he went to say goodbye to William Dickson, one of the few people who had shown him kindness that week. “You have made my stay here most agreeable, and I am a thousand times obliged to you,” Lincoln told Dickson’s wife, “but in reply to your request for me to come again I must say to you I never expect to be in Cincinnati again. I have nothing against the city, but things have so happened here as to make it undesirable for me ever to return here.”
After returning to Springfield, Lincoln received a check in the mail for the balance of his fee. He returned it, saying he had not earned it, never having made any argument. When Watson sent the check a second time, Lincoln cashed it.
Unimaginable as it might seem, after Stanton’s bearish behavior, at their next encounter six years later, Lincoln would offer Stanton “the most powerful civilian post within his gift”—the post of secretary of war. Lincoln’s choice of Stanton would reveal, as would his subsequent dealings with Trumbull and Judd, a singular ability to transcend personal vendetta, humiliation, or bitterness. As for Stanton, despite his initial contempt for the “long armed Ape,” he would not only accept the offer but come to respect and love Lincoln more than any person outside of his immediate family.
Stanton’s surly condescension toward Lincoln must be considered in the context of his anxiety over the Reaper trial, which had assumed crucial importance for him. Ever since the death of his father when he was only thirteen, Stanton had been obsessed with financial security. Until his father, a successful physician, died from apoplexy at the age of forty, young Edwin had led a pampered existence in Steubenville, Ohio, surrounded by a loving family in a stately, two-story brick house with a large yard and fruitful garden. Taught to read when he was only three years old, the precocious child had ready access to his father’s large collection of books and received an excellent education at the Old Academy in Steubenville. But when his father died, leaving no estate, Edwin was forced to leave school to help support his widowed mother and three younger siblings. First came the forced sale of the house, then the sale of his father’s library, and finally, the necessity to move to much smaller quarters. Apprenticed to a bookseller, Stanton read books in every spare moment he could find and spent his evenings preparing for entrance to nearby Kenyon College, headed by Chase’s uncle Philander. An excellent student, he enjoyed two happy years at Kenyon before his family’s scarce resources required that he return to work, this time in a Columbus bookstore.
The following year, Stanton returned to Steubenville and secured an apprenticeship in a law office, where he simultaneously studied law and helped his mother with the younger children. In later years, his adoring sister Pamphila recalled Stanton’s critical role in anchoring the entire family, tenderly nursing his ailing mother, sending his brother Darwin to Harvard Medical School, and encouraging his younger sisters to memorize dozens of poems by Byron and Whittier, all the while reading Plutarch’s Lives and other works of history. Success in the law came quickly, the result of an intuitive mind, a prodigious capacity for work, and a forceful courtroom manner.
When he fell in love with Mary Lamson, he enjoyed what he much later called the “happiest hours of his life.” A marvelously intellectual young woman, Mary shared his passion for reading and study, coupled with a feminist determination that women could “regenerate the world” if only they were rightly educated. When their marriage produced a daughter, Lucy, and a son, Edwin Junior, Stanton had every reason to believe that fortune was smiling on him. His sister Pamphila later recalled that her brother seemed perpetually “bright and cheery.” As his practice grew, he had the means not only to take care of his own family but to provide for his mother and younger siblings as well.
Stanton looked upon Mary as his life companion. They both loved history, literature, and poetry. Together, they read Gibbon, Carlisle, Macaulay, Madame de Staël, Samuel Johnson, Bancroft, and Byron. “We years ago were lovers,” he wrote her after the children were born. “We are now parents; a new relation has taken place. The love of our offspring has opened up fresh fountains of love for each other. We look forward now to life, not for ourselves only, but for our children. I loved you for your beauty, and grace and loveliness of your person. I love you now for the richness and surpassing excellence of your mind. One love has not taken the place of the other, but both stand side by side. I love you now with a fervor and truth of affection which speech cannot express.”
His happiness was short-lived: his daughter Lucy died after an attack of scarlet fever; three years later, in March, 1844, his beloved Mary developed a fatal bilious fever and died at the age of twenty-nine. Stanton was so brokenhearted, his grief “verged on insanity.” Before he would allow her burial, he had a seamstress fashion a wedding dress for her. “She is my bride and shall be dressed and buried like a bride.” After the funeral, he could not bring himself to work for months. Since he was involved in almost every case that came before the court in Jefferson County, Ohio, no court was held that spring. For months, he laid out Mary’s nightcap and gown on her pillow. His sister, Pamphila, who had come to stay with him, would never forget the horror of the long nights when, “with lamp in hand,” he searched for Mary through every room of the house, “with sobs and tears streaming from his eyes,” screaming over and over, “Where is Mary?”
Stanton’s responsibilities to his family eventually brought him back to his law practice, but he could not let go of his sorrow. Fearful that his son, then only two years old, would have no memories of the mother he had lost, he spent his nights writing a letter of over a hundred pages to the boy. He described his romance with Mary from its earliest days and included extracts from all the letters they had exchanged over the years. His words were penned with an unsteady hand, he confessed, with “tears obscuring his vision” and an “anguish of heart” driving him periodically from his chair. He would have preferred to wait until the boy was older and better able to understand; “but time, care, sickness, and the vicissitudes of life, wear out and efface the impression of the mind. Besides life is uncertain. I may be called from you…. You might live and die without knowing of the affection your father and mother bore for you, and for each other.”
Stanton’s miseries multiplied when his younger brother, Darwin, who completed his studies at Harvard Medical School, developed a high fever that impaired his brain. Unhinged by his acute illness, the young doctor, who was married with three small children, took a sharp lance-head and punctured his throat. “He bled to death in a few moments,” a family friend recalled. His mother watched helplessly as “the blood spouted up to the ceiling.” Neighbors were sent to fetch Edwin, who lived nearby. When he witnessed the aftermath of the gruesome spectacle, he reportedly “lost self-control and wandered off into the woods without his hat or coat.” Fearful that he, too, might commit suicide, neighbors pursued, restrained, and escorted him home, where they took turns watching over him.
This horrific train of events transformed Stanton’s spirit. His natural ebullience faded. “Where formerly he met everybody with hearty and cheerful greeting,” said a friend, “he now moved about in silence and gloom, with head bowed and hands clasped behind.” Though he remained a tender father to his son and a loving brother to his younger sisters, he became increasingly aggressive in court, intimidating witnesses unnecessarily, antagonizing fellow lawyers, exhibiting rude and irascible behavior.
He derived his only satisfaction from his growing reputation and his increasing wealth, which allowed him to care for his son, his widowed mother, his sisters, and his dead brother’s wife and children. The Reaper case was the biggest case of his career, “the most important Patent cause that has ever been tried,” he told a friend, “and more time, labor, money and brains have been expended in getting it ready for argument, than any other Patent case ever has had bestowed upon it.” If all went well, it would open doors for Stanton at the highest level of his profession.
When he arrived at the Burnet House, he discovered that Harding “had been unwell for several days” and might not be in a position to go to court. Terrified that in addition to the legal argument he had fully prepared, he might now have to present the “scientific part of the case to which [he] had given no attention,” Stanton stayed up all night in preparation. He was greatly relieved when Harding recovered, but anxiety and lack of sleep compounded the irascibility that had marked his demeanor since the multiple deaths in his family.
Beyond the breaking pressures of the case, Stanton had become involved in a turbulent courtship. The young woman, Ellen Hutchison, the daughter of a wealthy Pittsburgh businessman, was the first woman who had attracted his interest since the death of his wife more than a decade earlier. Tall, blond, and blue-eyed, Ellen was, by Stanton’s description, “radiant with beauty and intellect.” While Stanton was smitten with Ellen immediately, she was slow to respond to his affections. She still suffered from a romantic disappointment that had left her heart in “agony” and convinced her that she could not love again.
Stanton understood, he told her, that “the trouble of early love fell like a killing frost upon the tree of your life,” but he was confident that “enough life still remains to put forth fresh blossoms.” Despite his encouragement, Ellen was vexed by some of the qualities others noted in Stanton: his obsessive concentration on work, his impatience and lack of humor, and, most worrisome, “his careless[ness] and indifferen[ce] to the feelings of all.” Addressing these concerns, Stanton admitted that “there is so much of the hard and repulsive in my—(I will not say nature, for that I think is soft and tender) but in the temper and habit of life generated by adverse circumstances, that great love only can bear with and overlook.” If the last decade of his life had been different, he assured her, if he had been “blessed with the companionship of a woman whose love would have pointed out and kindly corrected my errors, I would have escaped the fault you condemn.”
After the successful conclusion of the Reaper trial, Ellen was finally persuaded to marry Edwin on June 25, 1856. Happier years followed for Stanton. The Manny patent was sustained not only by the Cincinnati court but by the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal. With this huge victory behind him, Stanton moved his practice to Washington, D.C., where he argued important cases before the Supreme Court, achieved substantial financial security, and built a brick mansion for his new wife.
AS LINCOLN’S OWN HOPES were repeatedly frustrated, he wistfully watched the progress of others, in particular, Stephen Douglas, his great rival with whom he had often debated around the fire of Speed’s general store. “Twenty-two years ago Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted,” he confided in a private fragment later discovered in his papers. “We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much so as he. With me the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown, even, in foreign lands. I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has reached. So reached, that the oppressed of my species, might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s brow.”
At this juncture, some have suggested, Lincoln was sustained by his wife’s unflagging belief that a glorious destiny awaited him. “She had the fire, will and ambition,” his law partner John Stuart observed. When Mary was young and still being courted by many beaux, she had told a friend who had taken an old, wealthy husband, “I would rather marry a good man—a man of mind—with a hope and bright prospects ahead for position—fame and power than to marry all the houses—gold and bones in the world.” Stephen Douglas, who had been among her suitors, she considered “a very little, little giant, by the side of my tall Kentuckian, and intellectually my husband towers above Douglas just as he does physically.” Quite simply, in Mary’s mind, her husband had “no equal in the United States.”
In an era when, as Mary herself admitted, it was “unladylike” to be so interested in politics, she avidly supported her husband’s political ambitions at every stage. Although she undoubtedly fortified his will at difficult moments, however, Lincoln’s quest for public recognition and influence was so consuming, it is unlikely he would have abandoned his dreams, whatever the circumstances.
ONCE AGAIN, at a moment when Lincoln’s career appeared to have come to a halt, Seward and Chase were moving forward. Chase’s leadership during the political uprising in the North that followed the passage of the Nebraska Act had proved, in the words of Carl Schurz, to be “the first bugle call for the formation of a new party.” Under the pressure of mounting sectional division, both national parties—the Whigs and the Democrats—had begun to fray. The Whig Party—the party of Clay and Webster, Lincoln, Seward, and Bates—had been the first to decline as “conscience Whigs,” opposed to slavery, split from “cotton Whigs,” who desired an accommodation with slavery. In the 1852 election, the divided Whig Party had been buried in a Democratic landslide. But the passage of the Nebraska Act brought serious defections in the Democratic Party as well, as Northerners unwilling to sanction the extension of slavery looked for a new home, leaving the party in control of the Southern Democrats.
The political upheaval was enormously complicated by the emergence of the Know Nothing Party, which had formed in reaction to an unprecedented flood of immigration in the 1840s and 1850s. In 1845, about 20 million people inhabited the United States. During the next decade, nearly 3 million immigrants arrived, mainly from Ireland and Germany. This largely Catholic influx descended on a country that was mostly native-born Protestant, anti-Catholic in sympathy. The Know Nothings fought to delay citizenship for the new immigrants and bar them from voting. In the early 1850s, they won elections in several cities, swept to statewide victory in Massachusetts, and gained surprising ground in New York. Newspapers and preachers assaulted “popery”; there were bloody anti-Catholic riots in several Northern cities.
Lincoln had nothing but disdain for the discriminatory beliefs of the Know Nothings. “How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?” he queried his friend Joshua Speed. “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance.”
But this party, too, was soon to founder on the issue of slavery. Many Northern Know Nothings were also antislavery, and finally the anti-Nebraska cause proved more compelling, of more import, than resistance to foreign immigration. The split between the party’s Northern and Southern factions would diminish its strength, though the nativist feelings that had fueled its birth would continue to influence the political climate even after the party itself collapsed and died.
With the Whigs disappearing and the Democrats under Southern domination, all those opposed to the extension of slavery found their new home in what eventually became the Republican Party, comprised of “conscience Whigs,” “independent Democrats,” and antislavery Know Nothings. In state after state, new coalitions with different names came into being—the Fusion Party, the People’s Party, the Anti-Nebraska Party. In Ripon, Wisconsin, an 1854 gathering of antislavery men proposed the name “Republican Party,” and other state conventions soon followed suit.
In Illinois, Lincoln held back, still hoping that the Whig Party could become the antislavery party. In New York, Seward hesitated as well, finding it difficult to sever friendships and relationships built over three decades. Salmon Chase, however, was unhindered by past loyalties. He was ready to commit himself wholeheartedly to the task of forging a new party under the Republican banner. He had always been willing to move on when new political arrangements offered richer prospects for himself and the cause. Beginning as a Whig, he had joined the Liberty Party. He had abandoned that party for the Free-Soilers and then had gone to the Senate as an independent Democrat. Now, with his Senate term coming to an end, and with little chance of being nominated by the Democrats for a second term, he was happy to become a Republican.
In Ohio, as in New York and Illinois, the new movement was complicated by the strength of nativist sentiment. A delicate balance would be required to court the old Know Nothings without forfeiting support in the immigrant German-American community, which was passionate in its hatred of slavery. Chase accomplished this feat by running for governor on a Republican platform endorsing no specific Know Nothing proposals, but including eight Know Nothing candidates for all the important offices on the statewide ticket.
It was a hard-fought canvass, and the indefatigable Chase left nothing to chance. Traveling by railroad, horseback, hand car, canoe, and open wagon, he spoke at fifty-seven different places in forty-nine counties. Campaigning in the sparsely settled sections of Ohio proved to be an adventure. To reach the town of Delphos, he wrote Kate, he was driven along the railroad tracks “on a hand car” operated by two men who “placed themselves at the cranks.” Though the stars provided light, “it was rather dangerous for who could tell but we might meet a train or perhaps another hand car.”
Chase’s strenuous work paid off, making him the first Republican governor of a major state. “The anxiety of the last few days is over,” Sumner wrote from Boston. “At last I breathe freely!” Reading the news under the telegraphic band at breakfast, the Massachusetts senator could barely contain his excitement, predicting that his friend’s victory would do more than anything else for the antislavery cause.
In New York, Seward faced a more difficult challenge than Chase in trying to placate the Know Nothings, who had never forgiven his proposal to extend state funds to Catholic schools. Indeed, they were determined to defeat Seward for reelection to the Senate in 1855. Facing the enmity of both the Know Nothings and the proslavery “cotton Whigs,” he concluded that he could not risk moving to a new, untested party.
Seward’s only hope for reelection lay in Weed’s ability to cobble together an antislavery majority from among the various discordant elements in the state legislature. In the weeks before the legislature was set to convene, Weed entertained the members in alphabetical groups, angling for every possible vote, including a few Know Nothings who might put their antislavery principles above their anti-Catholic sentiments. At one of these lavish dinners, the story is told, three or four Know Nothings on a special tour of Weed’s house confronted a portrait of Weed’s good friend New York’s bishop John Hughes. The stratagem would be doomed if the identity of the man in the portrait was known, so they were told that it was George Washington in his Continental robes, presented to Weed’s father by Washington himself!
Working without rest, Weed somehow stitched together enough votes to reelect Seward to a second term in the Senate. “I snatch a minute from the pressure of solicitations of lobby men, and congratulations of newly-made friends, to express, not so much my deep, and deepened gratitude to you,” Seward wrote Weed, “as my amazement at the magnitude and complexity of the dangers through which you have conducted our shattered bark.” In Auburn, a great celebration followed the news of Seward’s reelection. “I have never known such a season of rejoicing,” Frances happily reported to her son Augustus. “They are firing 700 cannons here—a salute of 300 was given in Albany as soon as the vote was made known.”
Once Seward was securely positioned for six additional years in the Senate, he and Weed were liberated to join the Republican Party. Two state conventions, one Whig, one Republican, were convened in Syracuse in late September 1855. When Seward was asked by a friend which to attend, he replied that it didn’t matter. Delegates would enter through two doors, but exit through one. The Whig delegates assembled first and adopted a strong antislavery platform. Then, led by Weed, they marched into the adjoining hall, where the Republicans greeted them with thunderous applause. From the remnants of dissolving parties, a new Republican Party had been born in the state of New York.
“I am so happy that you and I are at last on the same platform and in the same political pew,” Sumner told Seward. That October, Seward announced his allegiance to the Republican Party in a rousing speech that traced the history of the growth of the slave power, illustrating the constant march to acquire new slave states and thereby ensure for slaveholders the balance of power in the Congress. “What, then, is wanted?” he asked. “Nothing but organization.” The task before the new Republican Party was to consolidate its strength until it gained control of the Congress and secured the power to forbid the extension of slavery in the territories.
IN EARLY 1856, Lincoln decided that Illinois should follow New York and Ohio in organizing the various anti-Nebraska elements into the new Republican Party. Through his efforts, the call went out for an anti-Nebraska state convention to be held on May 29, 1856. Lincoln proceeded carefully in the weeks leading to the convention, recognizing the complexities of reconciling the disparate opponents of the Nebraska bill into a unified party. Despite the success of Weed and Chase in their respective states, Lincoln worried that the convention call would attract only the more radical elements of the coalition, providing too narrow a base for a viable new party.
Dramatic events in Kansas helped rally support for Lincoln’s cause. A guerrilla war had broken out between Northern emigrants desiring to make Kansas a free state under the “popular sovereignty” provision of the Nebraska Act, and so-called “border ruffians,” who crossed the river from Missouri and cast illicit votes to make Kansas a slave state. During the debate over the Nebraska Act, Seward had told the slave states that the North would “engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right.” In the South, the Charleston Mercury responded: “When the North presents a sectional issue, and tenders battle upon it, she must meet it, or abide all the consequences of a victory easily won, by a remorseless and eager foe.” As the violence spiraled, “Bleeding Kansas” became a new rallying cry for the antislavery forces. Kansas was not merely a contest between settlers but a war between North and South.
Moderate antislavery sentiment was further aroused when shocking news from Washington reached Illinois the week before the convention. On the Senate floor, South Carolina’s Preston Brooks had savagely bludgeoned Charles Sumner in return for Sumner’s incendiary antislavery speech. Sumner had begun unremarkably enough, presenting familiar arguments, laced with literary and historical references, against admitting Kansas as a slave state. The mood of the Senate chamber instantly shifted, however, when Sumner launched into a vituperative attack directed particularly against two of his fellow senators, Stephen Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina. He likened Butler to the aging, feeble Don Quixote, who imagined himself “a chivalrous knight,” sentimentally devoted to his beloved “harlot, Slavery…who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him.” Riding forth by Butler’s side, Douglas was “the squire of Slavery, its very Sancho Panza, ready to do all its humiliating offices.”
In the days before delivering the speech, Sumner had read a draft to Frances Seward. She strongly advised him to remove the personal attacks, including a reference to Butler’s slight paralysis that slurred his speech. In this instance Sumner did not heed her advice; when he finished speaking, Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan characterized the speech as “the most un-American and unpatriotic that ever grated on the ears of the members of this high body—as I hope never to hear again here or elsewhere.”
Two days later, Butler’s young cousin Congressman Preston Brooks entered the Senate chamber armed with a heavy cane. Walking up to Sumner, who was writing at his desk, Brooks reportedly said, “You have libelled South Carolina and my relative, and I have come to punish you.” Before Sumner could speak, Brooks brought the cane down upon his head, cudgeling him repeatedly as Sumner futilely tried to rise from his desk. Covered with blood, Sumner fell unconscious and was carried from the floor.
News of the brutal assault, which left Sumner with severe injuries to his brain and spinal cord and kept him out of the Senate for three years, galvanized antislavery sentiment in the North. “Knots of men” on street corners pronounced it “a gross outrage on an American Senator and on freedom of speech,” reported the Boston Daily Evening Transcript. Even the moderate supporters of the Nebraska bill “expressed themselves as never so much aroused before by the slave power.” Mass public meetings, so crowded that thousands were unable to gain entrance, convened in cities and towns to protest the caning. Truly to “see the slave aggression,” one of Sumner’s supporters wrote, the North had first to see “one of its best men Butchered in Congress.” Other antislavery men had been assaulted, the New York Tribune observed, “but the knocking-down and beating to bloody blindness and unconsciousness of an American Senator while writing at his desk in the Senate Chamber is a novel illustration of the ferocious Southern spirit.” The beating reached into the people’s hearts and minds, which political events rarely touch, the historian William Gienapp has argued. It “proved a powerful stimulus in driving moderates and conservatives into the Republican party.”
If Sumner became a hero in the North, Brooks was equally lionized in the South, where the press almost universally applauded the assault. The Richmond Enquirer spoke for many when it pronounced the act “good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequence.” Celebratory gatherings were held everywhere, and in Columbia, South Carolina, the governor presented Brooks with a silver goblet and walking stick in honor of his good work.
More ominous still was the reaction of the distinguished Richmond Whig, a professed opponent of extremism on sectional issues. “We are rejoiced at this,” the Whig proclaimed. “The only regret we feel is, that Mr. Brooks did not employ a horsewhip or a cowhide upon his slanderous back, instead of a cane. We trust the ball may be kept in motion. Seward and others should catch it next.” The Petersburg [Virginia] Intelligencer sounded a similar theme. “If thrashing is the only remedy by which the foul conduct of the Abolitionists can be controlled…it will be very well to give Seward a double dose at least every other day until it operates freely on his political bowels…his adroit demagoguism and damnable doctrines are infinitely more dangerous to the country than the coarse blackguardism of the perjured wretch, Sumner.” The antipodal reactions of North and South, David Donald notes, made it “apparent that something dangerous was happening to the American Union when the two sections no longer spoke the same language, but employed rival sets of clichés to describe the Brooks-Sumner affair.”
With emotions running high in Illinois, “all shades of antislavery opinion” flocked to the Bloomington convention—“old-line Whigs, bolting Democrats, Free-Soilers, Know Nothings, and abolitionists.” Lincoln’s fears were put to rest. Every faction seemed willing to concede something to create a party that all could stand behind.
The adopted platform united disparate factions on the issue of slavery extension without giving in to the bigoted views of the Know Nothings. Lincoln then delivered a powerful speech, full of “fire and energy and force,” that further fortified the jarring factions into a united front. “That is the greatest speech ever made in Illinois,” state auditor Jesse Dubois said, “and puts Lincoln on the track for the presidency.” So enthralled were those in the audience that reporters cast aside their pens so as to concentrate on what Lincoln said, and the unrecorded speech has become known to history as the famous “Lost Speech.” Lincoln was now the acknowledged leader of the new Republican Party in Illinois.
BY THE LATE SPRING of 1856, branches of the Republican Party had already been organized in at least twenty-two states and the District of Columbia, a remarkable beginning for a new party, giving hope to the leaders that this time, with the Whig Party all but dissolved and the Democratic Party split in two, they stood a solid chance in the presidential election. On June 17, when energized Republicans assembled in Philadelphia for their first national convention, both Seward and Chase had their hearts set on the nomination.
In Republican circles, Chase’s gubernatorial election had earned him such tremendous prestige that he was convinced he was destined for the presidency. Writing to a friend just ten days after his Ohio victory, Chase suggested that his success in uniting liberal nativists with antislavery German-Americans demonstrated the key to Republican victory in the future. Where Republicans challenged the Know Nothing Party, as they did in Massachusetts, they found defeat. Chase seemed to feel that he was now entitled to the Republican presidential nomination in 1856.
Chase had journeyed to Francis Blair’s country home in Maryland the previous December for the legendary Christmas conclave called to organize the Republican Party on a national basis. Francis Blair, the patriarch of the Blair family, wielded great power in party politics because of his old ties to the Democratic Party and his newfound antislavery views. Chase arrived to find Sumner in attendance, along with his old friend Gamaliel Bailey, the abolitionist editor of The National Era; New York congressman Preston King; and Massachusetts politician Nathaniel Banks. Seward had been invited, but, uncertain of how he would proceed on a national scale, he had sent Blair a note “approving of his activity, but declining his invitation.” After an elegant dinner, served, ironically, by Blair’s household slaves, the group sat down to discuss the future of the Republican Party.
At Chase’s suggestion, the gathering agreed to hold an organizational meeting the following month in Pittsburgh. Inevitably, the conversation turned to potential candidates for the upcoming presidential election. Blair’s suggestion of John Charles Frémont, the celebrated explorer who had played a central role in the conquest of California during the Mexican War, met with general approval. The discussion undoubtedly disappointed Chase, who believed up to the moment of Frémont’s nomination at the Philadelphia convention on June 19 that “if the unvarnished wishes of the people” prevailed, he would be chosen.
Chase’s certainty was insufficient to mobilize the wrangling elements at the convention in support of his candidacy. Not only had he neglected to appoint a manager, but he failed to unite his own state behind him on the first ballot. The questionable deals he had made to secure his Senate seat eight years earlier had created permanent enemies within his home state. “I know that if Ohio had united on you instead of dividing her votes between [ John] McLean & Fremont & you,” Chase’s friend Hiram Barney wrote, “your nomination would have been a matter of necessity; or if a tithe of the pains which were taken to urge Fremont had been employed for your nomination, it would have been accomplished.”
Before the convention met, Seward had greater reason for hope than Chase, for clearly, he was the first choice of Republican voters and politicians. Weed kept him from running, however, insisting that the party was not yet sufficiently organized to win a national election. Better to wait four years than to be tarred with failure.
While the Republican Convention was in progress, Lincoln was staying at the American House in Urbana, Illinois, attending court. He was in high spirits, recalled Henry Whitney, having engaged in one of the practical jokes of which he was so fond. He had hidden the loud and annoying gong that summoned his fellow boarders to dinner. When the loss was discovered, Whitney entered the dining room and saw Lincoln sitting “awkwardly in a chair tilted up after his fashion, looking amused, silly and guilty.” When Judge Davis told him he must put it back, Lincoln took the gong from its hiding place and returned it, “after which he bounded up the stairs, two steps at a time.”
Within a day or two, the merry prankster received word that in the balloting for vice president, he had received 110 votes, second only to the eventual nominee, William Dayton of New Jersey. “Davis and I were greatly excited,” Whitney recalled. Lincoln did not take it seriously at first, remarking only that “there’s another great man in Massachusetts named Lincoln, and I reckon it’s him.” His casual response aside, it is probable that this unexpected event stimulated Lincoln’s aspiration for higher office.
Unlike Seward, Chase, and Lincoln in 1856, Edward Bates refused to desert the divided and much-diminished Whig Party. While he joined with Republicans in vigorous opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the repeal of the sacred Missouri Compromise, he feared that the Republican focus on slavery would lead to an irreparable divide between North and South. After some indecision, he agreed to preside over the shrunken Whig National Convention of July 1856. The Whigs gathered in Baltimore and ultimately decided to support Millard Fillmore for president. Fillmore ran as a member of the American Party (a more palatable title for the old Know Nothing Party) on a platform that denounced both Republicans and Democrats for agitating the slavery issue at the risk of the nation’s peace.
Though not a fanatical nativist, Bates considered the American Party, with its emphasis on issues other than slavery and a support base drawn from all sections of the country, the best hope for preserving the Union. “I am neither North nor South,” he said in a final plea before the convention, “I repudiate political geography…. I am a man believing in making laws and then whether the law is exactly to my liking or not, enforcing it—whether it be to catch a runaway slave and bring him back to his master or to quell a riot in a disordered territory.”
The general election resulted in a three-way race between the Republican Frémont, the Southern-leaning Democrat James Buchanan, and American Party candidate Millard Fillmore. When the votes were counted, Weed’s advice to Seward proved correct. Though the Republican Party showed considerable strength throughout the North in its first national effort, winning eleven states, the South threw its strength behind Democrat James Buchanan, who emerged the victor. In addition to his overwhelming strength in the South, Buchanan captured four Northern states—Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey—the states destined to be the battleground in the 1860 election. Fillmore and the American Party captured only tiny Maryland.
AS THE DAY of Buchanan’s inauguration approached, the Supreme Court was drafting a decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, which had originated in Missouri eleven years earlier. Scott, a slave, was suing for his freedom on the grounds that his master, an army doctor, had removed him for several years to military bases in both the free state of Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory before returning to the slave state of Missouri. The case wound its way through state and federal courts until it finally reached the Supreme Court for argument in 1856, with Francis Blair’s son, Montgomery, representing Dred Scott and the celebrated Reverdy Johnson from the slave state of Maryland representing Scott’s owners. The court was headed by Chief Justice Roger Taney of Maryland, “an uncompromising supporter of the South and slavery and an implacable foe of racial equality, the Republican Party, and the antislavery movement.”
Seward was among the thousands of spectators gathered at the Capitol on March 4, 1857, to witness James Buchanan’s inauguration. “Bright skies and a deliciously bland atmosphere” relieved the blustery weather of the previous two days. In his inaugural address, Buchanan conceded that a “difference of opinion” had arisen over the question of extending slavery into the territories. However, this vital question, which had figured in the formation of the Republican Party, was not a political issue, he claimed, but “a judicial question, which legitimately belongs to the Supreme Court of the United States.” A decision in the Dred Scott case bearing on this very issue was pending before that august body. To that decision, Buchanan pledged: “I shall cheerfully submit, whatever this may be.” All evidence suggests that Buchanan was already aware of the substance of the decision.
Two days later, on March 6, the historic decision was read by the seventy-nine-year-old Taney in the old Supreme Court chamber, one flight below the Senate. The 7–2 decision was breathtaking in its scope and consequences. The Court ruled that blacks “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.” Therefore, Scott had no standing in federal court. This should have decided the case, but Taney went further. Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution had been intended to apply to blacks, he said. Blacks were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” But the Chief Justice did not stop even there; he went on to say that Congress had exceeded its authority when it forbade slavery in the territories by such legislation as the Missouri Compromise, for slaves were private property protected by the Constitution. In other words, the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. The act itself, of course, had already been repealed by the Nebraska Act, meaning that the Court was pronouncing on an issue that was not before it.
One of the justices later asserted that Taney had “become convinced that it was practicable for the Court to quiet all agitation on the question of slavery in the territories by affirming that Congress had no constitutional power to prohibit its introduction.” But the fierce sectional conflict of the age, the question that had given birth to the Republican Party, could not be quieted by a divided judicial fiat. The Dred Scott case, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter later said, was “one of the Court’s great self-inflicted wounds.”
Initially, the decision appeared to be a stunning victory for the South. For more than a decade, the Richmond Enquirer proclaimed, antislavery forces had claimed for the federal government the right of prescribing the boundaries of slavery in the territories. Now the territorial prize for which the two sides had “often wrestled in the halls of Congress, has been awarded at last, by the proper umpire, to those who have justly won it.” The decision of the Supreme Court, “the accredited interpreter of the Constitution and arbiter of disagreements between the several States,” the Enquirer continued, has destroyed “the foundation of the theory upon which their warfare has been waged against the institutions of the South.” Antislavery men were staggered, the Enquirer claimed, left “nonplused and bewildered, confounded and confused.”
“Sheer blasphemy,” Republicans responded. The ruling was “entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.” The New York Tribune argued that the Supreme Court had forfeited its stature as “an impartial judicial body,” and predicted that its attempt to derail the Republican Party, which had come so close to victory in the previous presidential election, would fail. “Judge Taney can do many things,” Frederick Douglass observed, “but he cannot…change the essential nature of things—making evil good, and good, evil.” Frances Seward hoped that the blatantly unethical decision would galvanize the national will of the North. It “has aroused many to the encroachments of the slave power,” she happily reported to Sumner.
The furor broke yet another bond of union by involving the Supreme Court, the common guarantor of both North and South, in sectional conflict. Dred Scott was sold to a Mr. Taylor Blow, who promptly freed him. He would die within a year, a free man whose name would leave a deeper mark on American history than those of the justices who had consigned him to slavery.
Speaking in Springfield, Lincoln attacked the decision in characteristic fashion, not by castigating the Court but by meticulously exposing flaws of logic. The Chief Justice, Lincoln said, “insists at great length that negroes were no part of the people who made, or for whom was made, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution.” Yet in at least five states, black voters acted on the ratification of the Constitution and were among the “We the People” by whom the Constitution was ordained and established. The founders, he acknowledged, did not “declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity.” But they did declare all men “equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’…They meant simply to declare theright, so the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.”
SEWARD, TOO, would condemn the Dred Scott decision in a sensational oration on the Senate floor, accusing the administration of having engaged in a corrupt conspiracy with the Supreme Court. “The day of inauguration came,” Seward said. The innocent crowd gathered for the ceremony were “unaware of the import of the whisperings carried on between the President and the Chief Justice.” While the Chief Justice looked on and the members of the Senate watched in silence, Seward continued, President Buchanan proclaimed his complete support for the forthcoming, and supposedly yet unknown, Supreme Court ruling on the status of blacks under the Constitution. When “the pageant ended,” Seward cried scornfully, “the judges, without even exchanging their silken robes for courtiers’ gowns, paid their salutations to the President, in the Executive palace. Doubtlessly the President received them as graciously as Charles I did the judges who had, at his instance, subverted the statues of English liberty.”
While Seward’s charges were echoed and acclaimed throughout the North, they provoked a violent reaction in the South and within the administration. President Buchanan was so enraged by the conspiracy charge that he forbade Seward access to the White House. Chief Justice Taney was even more infuriated, declaring later that if Seward had become president in 1861, he would “have refused to administer to him the official oath, and thereby proclaim to the nation that he would not administer that oath to such a man.”
Six months later, Seward delivered another provocative speech that, like the “higher law” speech, would be indelibly linked to his name. Catering to the emotions of an ardent Republican gathering overflowing in Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, Seward argued that the United States was divided by two “incompatible” political and economic systems, which had developed divergent cultures, values, and assumptions. The free labor system had uneasily coexisted with slave labor, he observed, until recent advances in transportation, communication, and commerce increasingly brought the two “into closer contact.” A catastrophic “collision” was inevitable. “Shall I tell you what this collision means?” he asked his audience. “They who think that it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.”
Frances Seward was thrilled with her husband’s speech, believing its radical tone completely warranted by the increasingly aggressive stance of the South. Indeed, for all those fighting against slavery, the words “irrepressible conflict” provided a mighty battle cry. Seward had defined the sectional conflict as driven by fundamental differences rather than the machinations of extremists who exaggerated discord for their own political ends. He had taken his stand on an issue, Kenneth Stampp suggests, “that troubled the politicians of his generation as it has since troubled American historians: Was the conflict that ultimately culminated in the Civil War repressible or irrepressible?”
The speech produced an uproar in opposition papers. The Albany Atlas and Argus claimed that Seward was no longer content with restricting slavery to its present domain, but threatening to end slavery in South Carolina and Georgia. With this speech, the New York Heraldclaimed, Seward had thrown off his mask to reveal a “more repulsive abolitionist, because a more dangerous one, than Beecher, Garrison or [Massachusetts minister Theodore] Rev. Dr. Parker.”
Seward, in fact, was not an abolitionist. He had long maintained that slavery in the states where it already existed was beyond the reach of national power. When he told of a nation without slavery, he referred to long-run historical forces and the inevitable triumph of an urbanizing, industrializing society. To Southerners, however, Seward seemed to be threatening the forced extinction of slavery and the permanent subjugation of the South. Seward, the historian William Gienapp suggests, “never comprehended fully the power of his words.” He failed to anticipate the impact that such radical phrases as “higher law” and “irrepressible conflict” would have on the moderate image he wished to project. Long after the incendiary words had been spoken, Seward conceded that “if heaven would forgive him for stringing together two high sounding words, he would never do it again.”
Ironically, while Seward was applauded in the antislavery North for his radical rhetoric, he was by temperament fundamentally conciliatory, eager to use his charisma and good-natured manner to unify the nation and find a peaceful solution to the sectional crisis. From his earliest days in politics, Seward had trusted the warmth and power of his personality to bridge any divide, so long as he could deal one-on-one with his adversaries. When his first election to the Senate was greeted with “alarm and apprehension” throughout the South, he remained placid. Although his positions on immigration, public education, the protective tariff, internal improvements, and above all, slavery made him a symbol of everything the South abhorred about the North, Seward’s confidence was unshaken. “This general impression only amuses me,” he wrote, “for I think that I shall prove as gentle a lion as he who played that part before the Duke, in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’”
He remained true to his resolve. “Those who assailed him with a view to personal controversy were disturbed by continual failures to provoke his anger,” a contemporary recalled. The story was told and retold of a Southern senator who delivered an abusive speech against Seward, labeling him “an infidel and a traitor.” When the senator resumed his seat, “heated and shaken with the fierce frenzy” of his own ire, Seward walked over to his chair and “sympathetically offered him a pinch of snuff.”
Within the Washington community, Seward’s extravagant dinner parties were legendary, attended by Northerners and Southerners alike. No one showed greater acumen in reconciling the most contentious politicians in a relaxing evening atmosphere. Throughout the 1850s, the New Yorker used such dinners to maintain cordial relations with everyone, from Jefferson Davis of Mississippi and John Crittenden of Kentucky to Charles Sumner and Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts. Seward was a superb master of ceremonies, putting all at ease with his amiable disposition. Though an inveterate storyteller himself, he would draw the company into lively conversations ranging from literature and science to theater and history.
A woman who was present at one of these feasts recalled that seventeen courses were served, beginning with turtle soup. The plates were changed with each serving of fish, meat, asparagus, sweetbreads, quail, duck, terrapin, ice cream, and “beautiful pyramids of iced fruits, oranges, french kisses.” By each place setting there stood wineglasses, “five in number, of different size, form and color, indicating the different wines to be served.” After dinner, coffee was served to the women in the parlor while the men gathered in the study to enjoy after-dinner liqueurs, and cigars ordered specially from Cuba. Through these Bacchanalian feasts, “by the juice of the grape, and even certain distillations from peaches and corn,” Seward endeavored, one reporter suggested, “to give his guests good cheer, and whether they are from the North or South, keep them in the bonds of good fellowship. Strange rumors have often crept out from Washington and startled the people, to the effect, that fire-eaters have been known to visit the house of the great New Yorker, and come away mellow with the oil of gladness, purple with the essence of the fruit of the wine.”
Seward’s social engagements did not lessen when Congress was out of session. The summer after the Dred Scott decision was handed down, he invited Francis Blair, Sr., and his wife, Eliza, to accompany him on a trip through Canada. Joining the party were Seward’s son Fred and Fred’s young wife, Anna. Though he understood that the Blairs were far more conservative than he, Seward trusted that his charm would win their support for the nomination in 1860.
The “voyage of discovery,” as Blair later described the trip, took the travelers through Niagara Falls, Toronto, and the Thousand Islands to the coast of Labrador. The sprightly Blairs, who seemed far younger than their years, enjoyed the adventure thoroughly. In an exuberant letter of thanks, Blair told Seward he was the “very best traveling companion,” who not only made every stop “doubly interesting” by his gifts as a storyteller, but had taken pains to remove all the hardships of the voyage, providing secure sleeping arrangements, a comfortable fishing boat that traversed rough waters without inducing seasickness, and elegant meals. It was a trip they would never forget. But when the time came for hard decisions, the Blair family would back the man more closely aligned with their political views—Edward Bates.
WHILE SEWARD WAS A NATURAL in social situations, Governor Chase struggled through the dinners and receptions he organized to further his political ambitions, possessing none of Seward’s social grace. Chase’s greatest resource was his seventeen-year-old daughter, Kate, who flourished in her role as her father’s hostess. “At an age when most girls are shy and lanky,” the Cincinnati Enquirer noted, “she stepped forth into the world an accomplished young woman, able to cross swords with the brightest intellects of the nation.”
A child less strong-willed and high-spirited than Kate might have been crushed by the vicissitudes of her father’s demanding love, which he bestowed or denied depending on her performance. In her case, however, the unremitting stress on good habits, fine manners, and hard work paid off. By the time she returned to Columbus, she had acquired an excellent education, a proficiency in several languages, an ability to converse with anyone, and, her biographer observes, “a scientific knowledge of politics that no woman, and few men, have ever surpassed.”
Tall and willowy, Kate was celebrated far and wide as one of the most captivating women of her age. “Her complexion was marvellously delicate,” a contemporary recalled, “her hair a wonderful color like the ripe corn-tassel in full sunlight. Her teeth were perfect. Poets sang then, and still sing, to the turn of her beautiful neck and the regal carriage of her head.” Friends and acquaintances were struck by the extraordinary similarity in looks between the handsome Chase and his stunning daughter. Indeed, when they made an entrance, a hush invariably fell over the room, as if a king and his queen stood in the doorway.
Kate’s return to Columbus prompted her father to settle in a house of his own. Devastated by the loss of three young wives, Chase had never summoned the energy to buy and furnish a home, shuttling instead between rented homes, boardinghouses, and hotel suites. Now, with both Kate and Nettie at home, he bought the stately Gothic mansion on Sixth Street, leaving most of the decorating decisions to Kate. He sent her to Cincinnati to select the wallpaper, carpets, draperies, and sideboards. “I feel I am trusting a good deal to the judgment of a girl of 17,” Chase told her, “but I am confident I may safely trust yours”…“you have capacity and will do very well.”
Assuming the role of Ohio’s first lady, Kate wrote out the invitations and oversaw arrangements for scores of receptions, soirées, and dinners. “I knew all of the great men of my time,” she later recalled. “I was thrown upon my own resources at a very early age.” William Dean Howells, working then as a cub reporter in Columbus, never forgot his invitation to an elegant Thanksgiving party at the governor’s house. It was his first dinner “in society,” the first time he had seen individual plates placed before guests “by a shining black butler, instead of being passed from hand to hand among them.” After dinner, the company was invited to a game of charades, which promised mortification for the shy young Howells. Kate immediately allayed his fears, he gratefully recalled, by “the raillery glancing through the deep lashes of her brown eyes which were very beautiful.” Kate’s dynamic grace and intellect made her the most interesting woman in any gathering, as well as a critical force behind her father’s drive for the presidency.
While Kate projected a mature poise, she was yet a spirited young girl with a rebellious streak. Her craving for excitement and glamour led to a tryst with a wealthy young man who had recently married the daughter of a well-known Ohio journalist. The dashing figure reportedly “began his attentions by little civilities, then mild flirtations,” building familiarity to take Kate for carriage rides and call on her in the Governor’s Mansion. When Chase learned of these encounters, he banished Kate’s admirer from the house. Nonetheless, the young couple continued meeting, signaling each other with handkerchiefs from the window. One day Chase apparently arrived home unexpectedly, to find the “enamored Benedict” in his drawing room. Chase used his horsewhip to put an end to the relationship.
Kate once again settled into her role as her father’s helpmate, working with him side by side as he set his sights on a presidential run in 1860. Like Seward and Lincoln, Chase regarded the Dred Scott decision as part of a conspiracy aimed at free institutions, which only a Republican victory could stop. He had offered his services to Scott’s defenders, but in the end had not taken part in the case. His true service to the nation, he believed, could best be served in the White House. “I find that many are beginning to talk about the election of 1860,” he wrote his friend Charles Cleveland in November 1857, “and not a few are again urging my name…. Some imagine that I can combine more strength than any other man.”
WHILE SEWARD AND CHASE eyed the presidency, Lincoln prepared for another bid for the U.S. Senate. As chief architect of the Republican Party in his state, Lincoln had first claim to run against Stephen Douglas in 1858. Recognizing the sacrifice he had made three years earlier to ensure Trumbull’s election, hundreds of party workers stood ready to do everything they could to ensure that this time Lincoln had every chance to realize his dream. In addition to David Davis, Leonard Swett, and Billy Herndon, stalwart friends in 1855, he could count on Norman Judd, whose refusal to abandon Trumbull had contributed mightily to his earlier defeat.
Once again fate threatened to disrupt his plans as events in Kansas took an ominous turn. Although an overwhelming majority of the settlers were opposed to slavery and wanted to join the Union as a free state, a rump group of proslavery forces met in Lecompton, drafted a proslavery constitution, and applied for statehood. The Buchanan administration, hoping to appease Southern mainstays of the Democratic Party, endorsed the Lecompton Constitution, calling on Congress to admit Kansas as a slave state. A new wave of outrage swept the North.
At this juncture, Stephen Douglas stunned the political world by breaking with his fellow Democrats. In an acrimonious session with President Buchanan, he told him he would not support the Lecompton Constitution. The man who had led the Democratic fight for the Nebraska Act was now siding with the Republicans in open opposition to his own administration. “My objection to the Lecompton constitution did not consist in the fact that it made Kansas a slave State,” he later explained. He cared not whether slavery was voted up or down; but the decision “was not the act and deed of the people of Kansas, and did not embody their will.” To Douglas, the clash with the Buchanan administration must have seemed unavoidable. Support for Lecompton would have betrayed his own doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” on which he had staked his political future, and seriously diminished his chances for reelection to the Senate from Illinois.
With Douglas on their side, Republicans were thrilled, believing they now had a chance to keep Kansas from entering the Union as a slave state. “What can equal the caprices of politics?” Seward queried his wife the day after Douglas made his dramatic announcement. Throughout the entire decade, Seward explained, “the triumph of slavery…could not have occurred but for the accession to it of Stephen A. Douglas, the representative of the West.” His defection, Seward exulted, was “a great day for freedom and justice.” Old party enmities were forgotten as Eastern Republicans rushed to embrace Douglas as an ally in the fight against slavery. In the Tribune, Horace Greeley called on Illinois Republicans to cross party lines and endorse Douglas for senator in the upcoming race.
Lincoln at once understood the catastrophic implications for his own political prospects. Furthermore, knowing Douglas as he did, Lincoln believed that his “break” with the administration was but a temporary squabble over the facts of the situation in Kansas, rather than a change of heart on principle. Once the Kansas matter was settled, Lincoln suspected, Douglas would resume his long-standing alliance with the proslavery Democrats. In the meantime, duped Republican voters would have reelected Douglas, destroyed the Republican Party in Illinois, and ceded their voice in the Senate to a fundamentally proslavery politician.
Everywhere he went, lamented Lincoln, he was “accosted by friends” asking if he had read Douglas’s speech. “In every instance the question is accompanied with an anxious inquiring stare, which asks, quite as plainly as words could, ‘Can’t you go for Douglas now?’ Like boys who have set a bird-trap, they are watching to see if the birds are picking at the bait and likely to go under.”
“What does the New-York Tribune mean by it’s constant eulogising, and admiring, and magnifying [of] Douglas?” Lincoln demanded of Trumbull. “Have they concluded that the republican cause, generally, can be best promoted by sacraficing us here in Illinois?” Even in his bleakest moods, Lincoln characteristically refused to attribute petty motives to Greeley, whom he considered “incapable of corruption.” While he recognized that Greeley would rather “see Douglas reelected over me or any other republican,” it was not because Greeley conspired with Douglas, but because “he thinks Douglas’ superior position, reputation, experience, and ability, if you please, would more than compensate for his lack of a pure republican position.” Lincoln felt much the same about Seward’s enthusiasm for Douglas’s reversal, despite the hazard it posed to his own chances.
To Lincoln’s immense relief, the interference of the Eastern Republicans only served to strengthen the determination of his friends and supporters. At hastily called conventions all over the state, resolutions were passed declaring that “Abraham Lincoln is the first and only choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the United States Senate.” In an unprecedented move, since the ultimate decision would be made by the state legislature elected that fall, a statewide Republican convention in Springfield was called in June to officially nominate Lincoln for senator. “Lincoln’s rise from relative obscurity to a presidential nomination,” Don Fehrenbacher has convincingly argued, “includes no more decisive date than June 16, 1858,” when the convention met in Springfield and enthusiastically endorsed Lincoln as its “first and only choice…for the United States Senate, as the successor of Stephen A. Douglas.”
“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln said, echoing the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, as he began his now famous acceptance speech at Springfield. Straightaway, he set forth an instantly accessible image of the Union as a house in danger of collapse under the relentless pressure of the slavery issue. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free,” he continued. “I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
Supporters and opponents alike believed that with his image of a house that could not “endure, permanently half slave and half free,” Lincoln had abandoned the moderate approach of his Peoria speech four years earlier in favor of more militant action. His argument, however, remained essentially unchanged: slavery had seemed on the road to gradual extinction until the fateful passage of the Nebraska bill gave it new momentum. His call for action was no more radical than before—to “arrest the further spread” of slavery and “place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief” that it was back where the framers intended it, “in course of ultimate extinction.” The true change since the Peoria speech was not in Lincoln’s stance but in the designs of proslavery Democrats, who, he charged, had cunningly erected a new proslavery edifice to destroy the framers’ house of democracy.
Lincoln deftly illustrated what he, like Seward, considered a plot to overthrow the Constitution. Whereas Seward cited the days of the English king, Charles I, with an oblique reference to the Roman emperor Nero, to present a tableau of a tyrant’s coronation, Lincoln delineated the conspiracy with an everyday metaphor. “When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance,” Lincoln explained, “and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house…all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places…we find it impossible to not believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.” With these timbers in place, Lincoln warned, only one other “nice little niche” needed to be “filled with another Supreme Court decision,” declaring that the constitutional protection of private property prevented states as well as territories from excluding slavery from their limits. Then, in one fell swoop, all laws outlawing slavery in the Northern states would be invalidated.
If “the point of this rather elaborate [house] metaphor seems obscure today,” the historian James McPherson observes, “Lincoln’s audience knew exactly what he was talking about.” The four conniving Democratic carpenters were Stephen Douglas, architect of the lamentable Nebraska law and vocal defender of the Dred Scott decision; Franklin Pierce, the outgoing president who had used his last annual message to underscore the “weight and authority” of Supreme Court decisions even before the Court had completed its deliberations in the Dred Scott case; Roger Taney, the Chief Justice who had authored the revolutionary decision; and James Buchanan, the incoming president who had strongly urged compliance with the Supreme Court decision a full two days before the opinion was made public. Working together, these four men had put slavery on a path to “become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.”
Reminding his audience that Douglas had always been among the foremost carpenters in the Democratic plan to nationalize slavery, Lincoln made it clear that the Republican cause must be “intrusted to, and conducted by its own undoubted friends—those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the work” of shoring up the frame first raised by the founding fathers. While Douglas might be “a very great man,” and the “largest of us are very small ones,” he had consistently used his influence to distort the framers’ intentions regarding slavery, exhibiting a moral indifference to slavery itself. “Clearly, he is not now with us,” Lincoln stated, “he does not pretend to be—he does not promise to ever be.”
The image of America as an unfinished house in danger of collapse worked brilliantly because it provided a ringing challenge to the Republican audience, a call for action to throw out the conspiring carpenters, unseat the Democratic Party, and recapture control of the nation’s building blocks—the laws that had wisely prevented the spread of slavery. Only then, Lincoln claimed, with the public mind secure in the belief that slavery was once more on a course to eventual extinction, would the people in all sections of the country live together peaceably in the great house their forefathers had built.
In the campaign that followed, Douglas would strenuously deny that he had ever conspired with Taney and Buchanan before the Dred Scott decision. “What if Judge Douglas never did talk with Chief Justice Taney and the President,” replied Lincoln. “It can only show that he was used by conspirators, and was not a leader of them.” This charge reflected his agreement with Seward and Chase that—whether there was an explicit conspiracy—there was a mutual intent by the slave power to extend slavery. Edward Bates also feared that Southern radicals “planned to seize control of the federal government and nationalize slavery.”
SO THE STAGE WAS SET for a titanic battle, arguably the most famous Senate fight in American history, a clash that would make Lincoln a national figure and propel him to the presidency while it would, at the same time, undermine Douglas’s support in the South and further fracture the Democratic Party.
In keeping with political strategy followed to this day, Lincoln, the challenger, asked Douglas to campaign with him so they could debate the issues. The incumbent, Douglas, who boasted a national reputation and deep pockets, had little to gain from debating Lincoln and initially refused the challenge, but eventually felt compelled to participate in the seven face-to-face debates known to history as the Lincoln-Douglas Debates.
In the course of the campaign, both men covered over 4,000 miles within Illinois, delivering hundreds of speeches. The northern part of the state was Republican territory. In the southern counties, populated largely by migrants from the South, the proslavery sentiment dominated. The election would be decided in the central section of Illinois, where the debates became the centerpiece of the struggle. With marching bands, parades, fireworks, banners, flags, and picnics, the debates brought tens of thousands of people together with “all the devoted attention,” one historian has noted, “that many later Americans would reserve for athletic contests.”
Attending the debate in Quincy, the young Republican leader Carl Schurz recounted how “the country people began to stream into town for the great meeting, some singly, on foot or on horseback, or small parties of men and women, and even children, in buggies or farm wagons; while others were marshaled in solemn procession from outlying towns or districts…. It was indeed the whole American people that listened to those debates,” continued Schurz, later remarking that “the spectacle reminded one of those lays of ancient times telling us of two armies in battle array, standing still to see their two principal champions fight out the contested cause between the lines in single combat.” The debates, said Lincoln in Quincy, “were the successive acts of a drama…to be enacted not merely in the face of audiences like this, but in the face of the nation.”
“On the whole,” Schurz observed, “the Democratic displays were much more elaborate and gorgeous than those of the Republicans, and it was said that Douglas had plenty of money to spend for such things. He himself also traveled in what was called in those days ‘great style,’ with a secretary and servants and a numerous escort of somewhat loud companions, moving from place to place by special train with cars specially decorated for the occasion, all of which contrasted strongly with Lincoln’s extreme modest simplicity.”
Each debate followed the same rules. The first contestant spoke for an hour, followed by a one-and-a-half-hour response, after which the man who had gone first would deliver a half-hour rebuttal. The huge crowds were riveted for the full three hours, often interjecting comments, cheering for their champion, bemoaning the jabs of his opponent. Newspaper stenographers worked diligently to take down every word, and their transcripts were swiftly dispatched throughout the country.
“No more striking contrast could have been imagined than that between those two men as they appeared upon the platform,” one observer wrote. “By the side of Lincoln’s tall, lank, and ungainly form, Douglas stood almost like a dwarf, very short of stature, but square-shouldered and broad-chested, a massive head upon a strong neck, the very embodiment of force, combativeness, and staying power.”
The highly partisan papers concocted contradictory pictures of crowd response and outcome. At the end of the first debate, the Republican Chicago Press and Tribune reported that “when Mr. Lincoln walked down from the platform, he was seized by the multitude and borne off on their shoulders, in the center of a crowd of five thousand shouting Republicans, with a band of music in front.” Observing the same occasion, the Democratic Chicago Times claimed that when it was over, Douglas’s “excoriation of Lincoln” had been so successful and “so severe, that the republicans hung their heads in shame.”
The people of Illinois had followed the careers of Douglas and, to a lesser extent, Lincoln for nearly a quarter of a century as they represented opposing parties in the State House, in Congress, and on the campaign trail. Indeed, in the opening debate at Ottawa, Douglas spoke of his first acquaintance with Lincoln when they were “both comparatively boys, and both struggling with poverty in a strange land,” when Lincoln was “just as good at telling an anecdote as now. He could beat any of the boys wrestling, or running a foot race, in pitching quoits or tossing a copper, could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town together, and the dignity and impartiality with which he presided at a horse race or fist fight, excited the admiration and won the praise of everybody,” as well as the lifelong epithet “Honest Abe.”
The amiable tone was laced with innuendo as Douglas described Lincoln’s climb from “flourishing grocery-keeper” (meaning that Lincoln sold liquor, a curious charge from the notoriously hard-drinking Douglas) to the state legislature, where they had served together in 1836, till Lincoln was “submerged…for some years,” turning up again in Congress, where he “in the Senate…was glad to welcome my old friend,” for he had neither friends nor companions. “He distinguished himself by his opposition to the Mexican war, taking the side of the common enemy against his own country; and when he returned home he found that the indignation of the people followed him everywhere, and he was again submerged or obliged to retire into private life, forgotten by his former friends. He came up again in 1854, just in time to make this Abolition or Black Republican platform, in company with Giddings, Lovejoy, Chase, and Fred Douglass for the Republican party to stand upon.” With this, the crowd broke into laughter, shouting: “Hit him again.”
Lincoln readily conceded that Douglas was far better known than he. As he outlined the advantages of Douglas’s stature, however, his audience laughed with glee. “All the anxious politicians of his party,” Lincoln told a crowd at Springfield, “have been looking upon him as certainly, at no distant day, to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly, fruitful face, postoffices, landoffices, marshalships, and cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands.” When the cheers and laughter drawn forth by this comical image subsided, Lincoln went on, “Nobody has ever expected me to be President. In my poor, lean, lank face, nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting out. These are disadvantages all, taken together, that the Republicans labor under. We have to fight this battle upon principle and upon principle, alone.”
Douglas asserted that Lincoln dare not repeat his antislavery principles in the southern counties of Illinois. “The very notice that I was going to take him down to Egypt made him tremble in the knees so that he had to be carried from the platform. He laid up seven days, and in the meantime held a consultation with his political physicians.” Lincoln promptly responded, “Well, I know that sickness altogether furnishes a subject for philosophical contemplation, and I have been treating it in that way, and I have really come to the conclusion (for I can reconcile it no other way), that the Judge is crazy.” There was “not a word of truth” to the claim that he had ever had to be carried prostrate from a platform, although he had been hoisted aloft by enthusiastic supporters. “I don’t know how to meet that sort of thing. I don’t want to call him a liar, yet, if I come square up to the truth, I do not know what else it is.” Amid cheers and laughter, Lincoln closed: “I suppose my time is nearly out, and if it is not, I will give up and let the Judge set my knees to trembling—if he can.”
Throughout the debates, Lincoln carried a small notebook that contained clippings relevant to the questions of the day sent to him by his law partner, William Herndon, along with the opening lines of his own “House Divided” speech and the paragraph of the Declaration of Independence proclaiming that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It was on the meaning of the Declaration that battle lines were drawn.
As Lincoln repeatedly said in many forums, slavery was a violation of the Declaration’s “majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe,” allowed by the founders because it was already among us, but placed by them in the course of ultimate extinction. Although unfulfilled in the present, the Declaration’s promise of equality was “a beacon to guide” not only “the whole race of man then living” but “their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages.”
For Douglas, the crux of the controversy was the right of self-government, the principle that the people in each territory and each state should decide for themselves whether to introduce or exclude slavery. “I care more for the great principle of self-government, the right of the people to rule, than I do for all the negroes in Christendom.”
Lincoln agreed that “the doctrine of self government is right—absolutely and eternally right,” but argued that “it has no just application” to slavery. “When the white man governs himself,” he asserted, “that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governsanother man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal’; and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.”
While it did not matter to Douglas what the people of Kansas decided, so long as they had the right to decide, for Lincoln, the substance of the decision was crucial. “The difference between the Republican and the Democratic parties on the leading issue of this contest,” declared Lincoln, “is, that the former consider slavery a moral, social and political wrong, while the latter do not consider it either a moral, social or political wrong; and the action of each…is squared to meet these views.”
DOUGLAS UNDERSTOOD from the outset that his primary goal, more important than debating or defining his own position, was to cast Lincoln as a radical, bent on abolishing all distinctions between the races. The question of black equality—in the modern sense—was not controversial in Illinois, or in the nation as a whole. Almost every white man was against it, even most abolitionists. Douglas was certain that no candidate who professed a belief in the social or political equality of blacks and whites could possibly carry Illinois, where a long-standing set of Black Laws prevented blacks from voting, holding political office, giving testimony against whites, and sitting on juries.
At every forum, therefore, Douglas missed no opportunity to portray Lincoln as a Negro-loving agitator bent on debasing white society. “If you desire negro citizenship,” Douglas baited his audience, “if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party.” The crowd responded as Douglas hoped: “Never, never.” Cheers nearly drowned out his voice as he shouted his opinion that “the signers of the Declaration of Independence had no reference to negroes at all when they declared all men to be created equal. They did not mean negro, nor the savage Indians, nor the Fejee Islanders, nor any other barbarous race. They were speaking of white men…. I hold that this government was established…for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should be administered by white men, and none others.” Cries of “that’s the truth” erupted from the agitated throng amid raucous applause.
In response, Lincoln avowed that he had “no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races.” He had never been in favor “of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry.” He acknowledged “a physical difference between the two” that would “probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality.” But “notwithstanding all this,” he said, taking direct aim at the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case, “there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence…. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral and intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”
It is instructive, political philosopher Harry Jaffa perceptively notes, that the only unequivocal statement of white supremacy Lincoln ever made was as to “color”—the assertion of an obvious difference. Had he advocated political and social equality for blacks, he unquestionably would have lost the election in a state where the legislature not only supported the discriminatory Black Laws but had gone even further by passing a special law making it a criminal offense to bring into the boundaries of Illinois “a person having in him one-fourth negro blood, whether free or slave.” And this same law essentially barred blacks and mulattos from entering the state to take up residence.
Nonetheless, Lincoln’s implied support for the Black Laws stands in contrast to the bolder positions adopted by both Seward and Chase. Chase had long since adopted a liberal stance on race far in advance of the general public, and had been instrumental in removing some but not all of Ohio’s discriminatory Black Laws. Seward, too, had spoken out vehemently against the Black Laws, and in favor of black suffrage, coming from the more progressive state of New York.
However, neither Seward nor Chase advocated full social and political equality for blacks. “Seward did not believe,” his biographer concludes, “that the black man in America was the equal of the white, or that he was capable of assimilation as were the Irish and German immigrants. But he did believe that the Negro was a man, and as such deserved and should have all the privileges of the whites.” Nor did Salmon Chase think that “the two races could live together.” He told Frederick Douglass that he thought “separation was in everyone’s best interests.” He believed that blacks would find “happier homes in other lands.” So long as they were here, however, he championed measures to fight discrimination.
These statements of Seward and Chase, coming from the leaders of the antislavery cause, reveal that racism, the belief in white supremacy, was deeply embedded in the entire country. It is only in this context that the statements of Lincoln and his contemporaries can be judged.
Less than two decades earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville, who was deeply opposed to slavery and believed emancipation to be inevitable, had written: “The most dreadful of all the evils that threaten the future of the United States arises from the presence of blacks on its soil.” Even in the states where slavery had been eradicated and where suffrage had been granted, he observed, countless obstacles had been placed in the way of the black man. “If he presents himself to vote, he runs a risk to his life. Oppressed, he can complain, but he finds only whites among his judges…. His son is excluded from the school where the descendants of Europeans come to be instructed. In theaters he cannot buy for the price of gold the right to be placed at the side of one who was his master; in hospitals he lies apart. The black is permitted to beseech the same God as whites, but not to pray to him at the same altar. He has his own priests and churches. One does not close the doors of Heaven to him; yet inequality hardly stops at the boundary of the other world. When the Negro is no longer, his bones are cast to one side, and the difference of conditions is still found even in the equality of death.” Even when abolition should come, Tocqueville predicted, Americans would “have still to destroy three prejudices much more intangible and more tenacious than it: the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of race, and finally the prejudice of the white.”
The dilemma faced by advocates of emancipation was the place of free blacks in American society. The opposition to assimilation was almost universal. Blacks were already barred from entering the borders of many free states. Confronting such barriers, what “in the name of humanity,” Henry Clay asked, “is to become of them—where are they to go?”
“My first impulse,” Lincoln had said before, “would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,—to their own native land.” Lincoln had long supported the same implausible plan endorsed by Edward Bates and Henry Clay, the notion of compensating slaveowners and returning freed slaves to their homeland. Without such a program, “colonizers” argued, Southern whites would never accept the idea of emancipation. Still, Lincoln took note of the staggering administrative and economic difficulties. More than 3 million blacks lived in the South, representing 35 percent of the entire Southern population. The overwhelming majority had no desire to go to Africa, and only a few spokesmen, not including Lincoln, advocated forced deportation. They were here to stay.
“What then?” Lincoln asked. “Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition?” But once freed, could they be made “politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question…. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded.”
Lincoln understood that the greatest challenge for a leader in a democratic society is to educate public opinion. “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed,” he said. “Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.” This statement goes to the heart of his disagreement with Douglas; when such an influential leader as Mary’s “Little Giant” insisted that blacks were not included in the Declaration, he was molding public opinion and bending history in the wrong direction. “He is blowing out the moral lights around us,” Lincoln warned, borrowing a phrase from his hero Henry Clay, “eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in this American people.”
Lincoln’s goal was to rekindle those very beacons, constantly affirming the revolutionary promises made in the Declaration. When the authors of the Declaration spoke of equality, Lincoln insisted, “they did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality…. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”
He hoped to “penetrate the human soul” until, as he said, “all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior” could be discarded, until all Americans could “unite as one people throughout this land,” providing true meaning to the phrase “all men are created equal.” His comments on race here and throughout the debates reveal a brooding quality, as if he was thinking aloud, balancing a realistic appraisal of the present with a cautious eye toward progress in the future.
History demonstrates that Lincoln and his contemporaries were not overestimating the depth of racial bigotry in America. A century would pass before legal apartheid was outlawed in the South, before separate schools were deemed unconstitutional, before blacks were finally guaranteed the right to vote. Moreover, each of these steps toward what Frederick Douglass called the “practical recognition of our Equality” met with fierce white resistance and were made possible only by the struggles of blacks themselves, forcing the issue upon largely hostile or indifferent whites.
There is no way to penetrate Lincoln’s personal feelings about race. There is, however, the fact that armies of scholars, meticulously investigating every aspect of his life, have failed to find a single act of racial bigotry on his part. Even more telling is the observation of Frederick Douglass, who would become a frequent public critic of Lincoln’s during his presidency, that of all the men he had met, Lincoln was “the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.” This remark takes on additional meaning when one realizes that Douglass had met dozens of celebrated abolitionists, including Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and Salmon Chase. Apparently, Douglass never felt with any of them, as he did with Lincoln, an “entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race.”
THE SEVENTH AND LAST debate took place at Alton, a town on the Mississippi River in southwest Illinois, before an audience Lincoln described as “having strong sympathies southward by relationship, place of birth, and so on.” By the middle of the day, the “whole town” was “alive and stirring with large masses of human beings.” Gustave Koerner, a leader of the German-Americans, was among the throng that came to witness the show. “More than a thousand Douglas men,” Koerner wrote, “had chartered a boat to attend the Alton meeting,” while Lincoln “had come quietly down from Springfield with his wife that morning, unobserved…. He was soon surrounded by a crowd of Republicans; but there was no parade or fuss, while Douglas, about noon, made his pompous entry, and soon afterwards the boat from St. Louis landed at the wharf, heralded by the firing of guns and the strains of martial music.” When Koerner reached Lincoln’s hotel, he found him seated in the lobby. No sooner had they said hello than Lincoln suggested that they go together to “see Mary.” Apparently, Mary was “rather dispirited” about his chances for victory, and Lincoln hoped that Koerner would lift her mood. Koerner told Mary that he was “certain” the Republicans would carry the state in the popular vote, “and tolerably certain of our carrying the Legislature.”
Although there was little new in the Alton debate, Koerner believed that Lincoln’s speech included “some of the finest passages of all the speeches he ever made.” The “real issue,” Lincoln argued, the issue that would continue long after the “tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent,” was “the eternal struggle between…right and wrong”; the “common right of humanity” set against “the divine right of kings….
“It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.” With this, Lincoln took his seat, Douglas made his concluding remarks, and the great debates came to an end.
In this race, as in all others, Lincoln was his own political manager. He drew up for his supporters a detailed battle plan, examining every district in the state and listing those he regarded as lost, those “we take to ourselves,” and those “to be struggled for.” Between his speeches, he drafted letters of instruction to key supporters, telling Koerner, for example, “We are in great danger in Madison. It is said half the Americans are going for Douglas…. Nothing must be left undone. Elsewhere things look reasonably well. Please write me.”
Though Eastern Republicans stayed out of the race, Chase came to Illinois to stump for the Republican ticket. He believed that Lincoln was a man who could be trusted on the antislavery issue, while at the same time he recognized that the prairie lawyer could be helpful to him in the upcoming presidential convention. More clearly than Seward or Greeley, Chase saw from the start that Douglas would never truly stand with the antislavery forces. For eight days, traveling to Chicago, Galena, Warren, Rockford, and Mendota, Chase spoke to thousands on behalf of Lincoln and the Republican ticket in Illinois—a gesture Lincoln would not forget.
It was a dreary day, November 2, 1858, when the voters of Illinois went to the polls. The names of Lincoln and Douglas did not appear on the ballots, since the state legislature would choose the next senator. That evening, Lincoln anxiously awaited the returns with his friends in the telegraph office. Once again, he would be sorely disappointed. Though the Republicans had won the popular vote, the Democrats had retained control of the state legislature, thereby ensuring Douglas’s reelection. Lincoln’s supporters were disconsolate and angry, blaming an unfair apportionment scheme. Koerner charged that “by the gerrymandering the State seven hundred Democratic votes were equal to one thousand Republican votes.” Republicans in Illinois bewailed the lack of support from Eastern Republicans and bitterly resented a last-minute intervention by the respected Whig leader and Kentucky senator John Crittenden, who had penned a series of highly publicized letters to Illinois, urging old Whigs and American supporters to vote for Douglas to repay his Lecompton stance. “Thousands of Whigs dropped us just on the eve of the election, through the influence of Crittenden,” Herndon complained.
Two days later, still feeling the sting of his defeat, Lincoln wrote Crittenden. He suppressed his justifiable resentment, exhibiting as he had with Greeley, and earlier with Trumbull and Judd, a magnanimity rare in the world of politics. “The emotions of defeat, at the close of a struggle in which I felt more than a merely selfish interest, and to which defeat the use of your name contributed largely, are fresh upon me,” he told Crittenden, “but, even in this mood, I can not for a moment suspect you of anything dishonorable.”
Yet this defeat left Lincoln far less disheartened than his loss four years earlier. He had won the vote of the people. The ambition he had outlined in his very first public address at the age of twenty-three—to render himself worthy of his fellow citizens’ esteem—had been realized.
“I am glad I made the late race,” he wrote his Springfield friend Dr. Anson Henry on November 19. “It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way…. I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.” That cause, he vowed to Henry Ashbury, “must not be surrendered at the end of one, or even, one hundred defeats.” There was no reason for despondency, he told another friend, Dr. Charles Ray, who continued to brood over Lincoln’s defeat. “You will soon feel better. Another ‘blow-up’ is coming; and we shall have fun again.”