AS 1859 OPENED, Lincoln remained guardedly optimistic about the future, knowing he had run a solid campaign for the Senate and made a good name for himself. Well aware that he had only an outside chance at the presidential nomination in 1860, he nevertheless worked to build his reputation nationally. He was always careful to conceal his ambitions. Whenever he was asked about the upcoming election, he would speak with well-modulated enthusiasm of other candidates. Yet all his actions were consistent with a cautious and politically skillful pursuit of the nomination. Indeed, no other period in his pre-presidential life better illustrates his consummate abilities as a politician.
Unlike Seward, he had no experienced political manager to guide his efforts. He would have to rely on himself, as he had from his early days on the frontier and throughout his career as shopkeeper, lawyer, and politician. A month earlier, Jesse Fell, secretary of the Illinois Republican state central committee, had expressed his “decided impression” in a letter to Lincoln that Lincoln’s tremendous fight against Douglas had given him a national platform. If the details of his early life and his “efforts on the slavery question” could be “sufficiently brought before the people,” he could be made “a formidable, if not a successful candidate for the presidency.” Skeptical, Lincoln noted that Seward and Chase and others were “so much better known.” With an equivocal modesty, he asked: “Is it not, as a matter of justice, due to such men, who have carried this movement forward to its present status, in spite of fearful opposition, personal abuse, and hard names? I really think so.” As for a campaign biography, he curtly answered, “there is nothing in my early history that would interest you or anybody else.”
Although refusing to confuse flattery with fact, he recognized nonetheless that Fell’s argument had force. Lincoln’s gradually evolving political strategy began with an awareness that while each of his three rivals had first claim on a substantial number of delegates, if he could position himself as the second choice of those who supported each of the others, he might pick up votes if one or another of the top candidates faltered.
As a dark horse, he knew it was important not to reveal his intentions too early, so as to minimize the possibility of opponents mobilizing against him. On April 16, 1859, when the Republican editor of the Rock Island Register proposed to call on other editors to make “a simultaneous announcement of your name for the Presidency,” Lincoln replied: “I certainly am flattered, and gratified, that some partial friends think of me in that connection; but I really think it best for our cause that no concerted effort, such as you suggest, should be made.” He added that he “must, in candor, say I do not think myself fit for the Presidency.” By “fit,” the self-confident Lincoln meant only to suggest that he did not necessarily have the credentials or experience appropriate to the office, not that he lacked the ability. It was important that any efforts on his behalf be squelched until the timing was right. And Lincoln, as would be evidenced throughout his presidency, was a master of timing.
WHILE LINCOLN MOVED CAREFULLY, step by step, Seward, Chase, and even Bates had grown so eager for the presidential nomination that they made a number of costly errors as they headed down the final stretch.
In the crucial months before the nomination, Seward, at Weed’s rare misguided suggestion, took an extended tour of Europe. Certain that Seward had the nomination locked up so long as he refrained from the radical statements that frightened more moderate elements of the party, Weed recommended that his protégé remove himself from the increasingly contentious debate at home by traveling overseas for eight months. “All our discreet friends unite in sending me out of the country to spend the recess of Congress,” Seward joked.
Fourteen-year-old Fanny Seward, at home with her mother, was desolate at the prospect of an eight-month separation from her father. In the days before his ship was set to sail from New York, she could think of nothing else, she confided in her diary, but his approaching departure. An intelligent, plain girl, Fanny had been encouraged from an early age to read broadly and to write. Beyond her daily journal, she tried her hand at poetry and plays, determined, she once vowed, never to marry, so that she could live at home and devote herself to a literary career. While extremely close to her mother, a relationship she described as “‘my affinity’ with whom I think instead of speak,” she idolized her father. The night before he left for Europe, she could barely contain her tears.
In Europe, Seward was entertained by politicians and royalty alike, who assumed that he would be the next president. He met with Queen Victoria, Lord Palmerston, William Gladstone, King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, King Leopold I of Belgium, and Pope Pius IX. Moving from one dazzling social occasion to the next, Seward was ebullient. His letters home revealed the great pleasure he took in his sojourn, which carried him to Egypt and the Holy Land. Yet in the countdown to the presidential nomination, eight months was a critical absence.
Upon his return to Washington for the new congressional session that began after the New Year in 1860, Seward took Weed’s advice and prepared a major address. Designed to reassure Northern conservatives and moderate Southerners that he was a man who could be trusted to hold the Union together, the speech was to be delivered on the Senate floor on February 29, 1860. The reporter Henry Stanton later recalled that Seward showed it to him beforehand and asked him to write it up for the New York Tribune, with an accompanying description of the scene in the Senate chamber as he was speaking. “The description was elaborate,” Stanton claimed, “the Senator himself suggesting some of the nicer touches, and every line of it was written and on its way to New York before Mr. Seward had uttered a word in the Senate Chamber.” Seward was in “buoyant spirits,” assuring Stanton that with this speech they would “go down to posterity together.”
Frances Seward was less enthusiastic, perhaps fearing that her husband would bend too far to placate the moderates. “I wish it were over,” she told her son Will on the morning of the speech. Fanny, however, seated in the gallery directly opposite her father, was thrilled to witness the great event. “The whole house of Reps were there,” she gushed, “the galleries soon filled, alike with those of North and South, ladies and gentlemen, even the doorways were filled.” When the three-hour speech started, Fanny recorded, “no Republican member left his seat…the house was very still.” Everyone understood that this speech could influence the Republican nomination.
Seward took as his theme the enduring quality of the national compact. Though he maintained his principled opposition to slavery, he softened his tone, referring to the slave states as “capital States,” while the free states became the “labor States.” His language remained tranquil throughout, with no trace of the inflammatory phrases that had characterized his great speeches in the past. It seemed, one historian observed, that “‘the irrepressible conflict’ between slavery and freedom had graciously given way to the somewhat repressible conflict of the political aspirants.”
Departing from the bold assertions of his Rochester speech, Seward now claimed that “differences of opinion, even on the subject of slavery, with us are political, not social or personal differences. There is not one disunionist or disloyalist among us all…. We have never been more patient, and never loved the representatives of other sections more, than now…. The people of the North are not enemies but friends and brethren of the South, faithful and true as in the days when death has dealt his arrows promiscuously among them on the common battle-fields of freedom.”
The Republican Party in the North, he pledged, did not “seek to force, or even to intrude, our system” upon the South. “You are sovereign on the subject of slavery within your own borders.” The debate revolved only around the expansion of slavery in new and future states. Retreating from the larger vision of the nation’s future manifest destiny in some of his earlier speeches, he promised that Republicans did not harbor any ulterior motive “to introduce negro equality” in the nation at large.
Seward’s powerful conclusion—an altered form of which would appear in Lincoln’s inaugural address—was an impassioned testimony to the Union. The nation could never be sundered, for its bonds were not simply “the written compact,” or even the radiating network of roads, train tracks, trade routes, and telegraph lines that facilitated “commerce and social intercourse.” Rather, Seward urged his audience to conceive of the strongest bonds holding the Union together as “the millions of fibers of millions of contented, happy human hearts,” linked by affection and hope to their democratic government, “the first, the last, and the only such one that has ever existed, which takes equal heed always of their wants.”
The speech produced deafening applause in the galleries and widespread praise in the press. Reprinted in pamphlet form, more than half a million copies were circulated throughout the country. Some, of course, considered Seward’s tone too conciliatory, lacking the principle and fire of his previous addresses. That speech “killed Seward with me forever,” the abolitionist Cassius Clay reportedly said. Charles Sumner wrote to a friend that “as an intellectual effort,” Seward’s oration was “most eminent,” but that there was “one passage”—perhaps the one disclaiming any intention to support black equality—which he “regretted, & [Seward’s] wife agrees with me.”
Nevertheless, Seward’s goal had not been to rally the faithful but to disarm the opposition and placate uneasy moderates. “From the stand-point of Radical Abolitionism, it would be very easy to criticize,” Frederick Douglass observed in his monthly paper, but “it is a masterly and triumphant effort. It will reassure the timid wing of his party, which has been rendered a little nervous by recent clamors against him, by its coolness of temper and conservatism of manner…. We think that Mr. Seward’s prospects for the Chicago nomination will be essentially brightened by the wide circulation of this speech.” Seward, he concluded, was “the ablest man of his party,” and “as a matter of party justice,” he deserved the nomination.
“I hear of ultra old Whigs in Boston who say they are ready to take up Mr. Seward upon his recent speech,” a Massachusetts delegate told Weed. “All the New England delegates, save Connecticut’s, will be equally satisfactory.” And in Ohio, Salmon Chase admitted that there “seems to be at present a considerable set toward Seward.” Seward himself believed that the speech had been a great success, the final step in his long journey to the presidency.
In the heady weeks that followed, Weed assured him that everything was in readiness for a victory at the convention. By trading legislative charters to build city railroads for campaign contributions, Weed had assembled what one observer called “oceans of money,” a campaign chest worth several hundred thousand dollars.
As the convention approached, overconfidence reigned in the Seward camp and poor judgment set in. Despite Weed’s generally keen political intuition, he failed to anticipate the damage Seward would suffer as a consequence of a rift with Horace Greeley. Over the years, Greeley had voiced a longing for political office, for both the monetary compensation it would provide and the prestige it promised. On several occasions, Greeley later claimed, he had made this desire clear to Seward and Weed. They never took his political aspirations seriously, believing that his strength and usefulness lay in writing, not in practical politics and public office. Greeley had written a plaintive letter to Seward in the autumn of 1854, in which he catalogued a long list of grievances and announced the dissolution of the political firm of Seward, Weed, & Greeley. He recalled the work he had done to secure Seward’s first victory as governor, only to discover that jobs had been dispensed “worth $3000 to $20,000 per year to your friends and compatriots, and I returned to my garret and my crust, and my desperate battle with pecuniary obligations.” With the exception of a single term in Congress, Greeley charged, Weed had never given him a chance to be nominated for any office. Despite hundreds of suggestions that he run for governor in the most recent election, Weed had refused to support the possibility, claiming that his candidacy would hurt Seward’s chances for the Senate. But the most humiliating moment had come, Greeley revealed, when Weed handed the nomination for lieutenant governor that year to Henry Raymond, editor of the New York Times, the Tribune’s archrival.
Seward was distressed to read Greeley’s letter, which he characterized as “full of sharp, pricking thorns,” but he mistakenly assumed that Greeley’s pique was temporary, akin to the anger, he said, that one of his sons might display if denied the chance to go to the circus or a dancing party. After showing it to his wife, Seward cast the letter aside. Frances read it more accurately. Recognizing the “mortal offense” Greeley had taken, she saved the letter, preserving a record of the tangled web of emotions that led Greeley in 1860 to abandon one of his oldest friends in favor of Edward Bates, a man he barely knew.
Week after week, through his columns in the Tribune, Greeley laid the groundwork for the nomination of Bates. Seward’s supporters were incensed when he subtly began to sabotage the New Yorker’s campaign. Henry Raymond remarked that Greeley “insinuated, rather than openly uttered, exaggerations of local prejudice and animosity against him; hints that parties and men hostile to him and to the Republican organization must be conciliated and their support secured; and a new-born zeal for nationalizing the party by consulting the slave-holding states in regard to the nomination.” The influence of the Tribune was substantial, and with each passing day, enthusiasm for Bates’s candidacy grew.
At some point that spring, Weed had a long talk with Greeley and came away with the mistaken conviction that Greeley was “all right,” that despite his editorial support for Bates, he would not play a major role at the convention. The conversation mistakenly satisfied Weed that ties of old friendship would keep Greeley from taking an active role against Seward once the convention began.
Overconfidence also played a role in Weed’s failure to meet with Pennsylvania’s powerful political boss, Simon Cameron, before the convention opened. In mid-March, Cameron told Seward that he wanted to see Weed in either Washington or Philadelphia “at any time” convenient to Weed. Seward relayed the message to his mentor, but Weed, certain that Cameron would deliver Pennsylvania to Seward by the second ballot, as he thought he had promised, never managed to make the trip.
Weed’s faith in Cameron was due partly to Seward’s report of a special visit he had made to Cameron’s estate, Lochiel, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Shortly before leaving for Europe the previous spring, Seward had spent a day with Cameron and had returned certain that Cameron was pledged to his candidacy. “He took me to his home, told me all was right,” Seward told Weed. “He was for me, and Pa. would be. It might want to cast a first ballot for him or might not…. He brought the whole legislature of both parties to see me—feasted them gloriously and they were in the main so free, so generous as to embarrass me.” Reports of this lavish reception persuaded reporters and politicians alike that a deal had been brokered.
In the months that followed, even as gossip spread that Cameron did not have control of his entire delegation, Weed continued to believe that the Pennsylvania boss, so like himself in many ways, would do whatever was necessary to fulfill his pledge and deliver his state. After all, to Cameron was attributed the oft-quoted definition: “an honest politician is one who, when he is bought, stays bought.”
Cameron had been quicker than Weed to exploit the lucrative potential of politics. Through contracts with canal companies, railroads, and banks, he amassed “so much money,” he later boasted, that he might have become “the richest man in Pennsylvania” had he not pursued elective office. Unlike Weed, who remained behind the scenes, Cameron secured for himself two terms in the U.S. Senate; in 1844 and again in 1855. He began his political life as a Democrat but became frustrated by Democratic positions on slavery and, more important, on the tariff, which was his “legislative child.” In 1855, he was instrumental in establishing Pennsylvania’s Republican Party, initially called the People’s Party.
At the People’s Party state convention in February 1860, Cameron received the expected favorite-son nod for the presidency, but Andrew Curtin, a magnetic young politician who was challenging Cameron for control in the state, was nominated for governor. Though Cameron received a majority vote at the convention, a substantial number of district delegates remained to be chosen, eventually producing a split between the rival forces of Cameron and Curtin. Curtin was uncommitted to any candidate when the Republican Convention opened, yet it was known that he questioned Seward’s electability. Seward’s name on the ticket might hamstring his own election, for the anti-Catholic Know Nothings, who still exerted considerable power in Pennsylvania, had never forgiven Seward for his liberalism toward immigrants and his controversial support for parochial education. Boss Cameron might have been able to resolve these obstacles with Boss Weed in private conversation before the convention. Since that meeting never took place, Weed was left to navigate the countervailing forces of the Pennsylvania state delegation without Cameron’s guidance.
SEWARD’S LEISURELY SOJOURN abroad afforded Chase the opportunity to actively secure pledges and workers for his nomination. Never the most astute of politicians, Chase made curiously little use of the precious months of 1859 to better his chances. Sure of the power and depth of his support, he once again, as in 1856, assumed he would somehow gain the nomination without much personal intervention. News to the contrary Chase dismissed out of hand, even when the intelligence came from his close friend Gamaliel Bailey.
Bailey and Chase had become acquainted in Cincinnati when Bailey was editing The Philanthropist. Later on, when Bailey became publisher of The National Era and moved his family to Washington, they warmly welcomed the lonely Chase into their home. When the Senate was in session, Chase lived for months at a time at their house, forming friendships with Bailey’s wife, Margaret, and the entire Bailey clan. On Saturday evenings, the Baileys’ home became “a salon in European tradition,” replete with dinner and the word games at which Chase excelled.
Throughout their long friendship, Bailey had always been frank with Chase, castigating him in 1856 for his temporizing attitude toward the “detestable” Know Nothings. Nonetheless, Bailey remained loyal and supportive of his old friend, assuring him on numerous occasions that he would rather see him “in the presidential chair than any other man.” Yet, as Bailey assessed the temper of the country in early 1859, conversing with many people, “observing the signs of the times and the phases of public opinion,” he concluded in a long, candid letter to Chase that he thought it best to support Seward in 1860. The time for Chase would come again four years later.
“He and you are the two most prominent representative men of the party,” Bailey wrote on January 16, 1859, “but he is older than you.” His friends believe it is “now or never” with him, “to postpone him now is to postpone him forever…you are in the prime of life and have the promise of continuing so—you have not attained your full stature or status—he has—every year adds to your strength, and in 1864, you will be stronger than in 1860…. To be urgent now against the settled feeling of Seward’s numerous friends, would provoke unpleasant and damaging discords, and tend hereafter to weaken your position.” Bailey suspected that Chase might disagree with his recommendation, but “I know you will not question my integrity or my friendship.”
“I do not doubt your friendship,” Chase testily replied, “but I do think that if our situations were reversed I should take a different method of showing mine for you…. The suggestion ‘now or never’ [with regard to Seward] is babyish…how ridiculous…but to sum up all in brief…let me say it cannot change my position. I have no right to do so…. A very large body of the people—embracing not a few who would hardly vote for any man other than myself as a Republican nominee—seem to desire that I shall be a candidate in 1860. No effort of mine, and as far as I know none of my immediate personal friends has produced this feeling. It seems to be of spontaneous growth.”
Bailey responded that he presumed Chase’s characterization of the “now or never” position of Seward’s supporters as “babyish” was “a slip of your pen…. It may be erroneous, groundless, but…it is entitled to consideration. It has reference not only to age, & health, but other matters…. Governor Seward will be fifty-nine in May, 1860…. Should another be nominated, and elected, the chances would be in favor of a renomination—which would postpone the Governor eight years—until he should be sixty-seven, in the shadow of seventy…. You are still growing [Chase had just turned fifty-one]—you are still increasing in reputation—four years hence…your chances of nomination & election to the Presidency would be greater than they are now.” Bailey assured Chase that he would never work against him. “All I desired was to apprise you, as a friend.”
Deluded by flattery, Chase preferred the unrealistic projections of New York’s Hiram Barney, who thought his strength in New York State was growing so rapidly that it was possible he might receive New York’s vote on the first ballot. So heroic was his self-conception, Chase believed that doubtful supporters would flock to his side once they understood the central role he had played as the guardian of the antislavery tradition and father of the Republican Party.
Failing once again to appoint a campaign manager, Chase had no one to bargain and maneuver for him, no one to promise government posts in return for votes. He rejected an appeal from a New Hampshire supporter who proposed to build a state organization. He never capitalized on the initial support of powerful Chicago Press and Tribune editor Joseph Medill. He turned down an invitation to speak at Cooper Union in a lecture series organized by his supporters as a forum for candidates other than Seward. Refusing even to consider that his own state might deny him a united vote on the first ballot, he failed to confirm that every delegate appointed to the convention was pledged to vote for him. Indeed, his sole contribution to his own campaign was a series of letters to various supporters and journalists around the country, reminding them that he was the best man for the job.
Frustrated supporters tried to shake him into more concerted action. “I now begin to fear that Seward will get a majority of the delegates from Maryland,” Chase’s loyal backer James Ashley warned. “He and his friends work—work. They not only work—but he works.” The willful Chase was blind to troubling signs, convinced that if the delegates voted their conscience, he would ultimately prevail.
“I shall have nobody to push or act for me at Chicago,” Chase boasted to Benjamin Eggleston, a delegate from Cincinnati, “except the Ohio delegation who will, I doubt not, faithfully represent the Republicans of the State.” While a large majority of the Ohio state delegation indeed supported Chase, Senator Ben Wade had his own devoted followers. “The Ohio delegation does not seem to be anywhere as yet,” delegate Erastus Hopkins warned. Heedless, Chase remained positive that the entire Ohio delegation would come around, given everything he had done and sacrificed for his state. To support any other candidate would put one “in a position no man of honor or sensibility would care to occupy.”
A month before the convention, Kate convinced her father that a journey to Washington would shore up his support among various congressmen and senators. Lodging at the Willard Hotel, they made the rounds of receptions and dinners. Seward was very kind to them, Chase admitted to his friend James Briggs. The genial New Yorker hosted a dinner party in their honor at which “all sides were pretty fairly represented” and “there was a good deal of joking.” The next evening, former Ohio congressman John Gurley organized a party to honor both Chase and Ohio’s new governor, William Dennison. Seward was invited to join the Ohio gathering, which included former Whig leader Tom Corwin and Senator Ben Wade.
Writing home after the dinner, Seward joshingly noted that he “found much comfort” in the discovery that Ohio was home to at least three candidates for the presidency, “all eminent and excellent men, but each preferring anybody out of Ohio, to his two rivals within.” While Seward immediately intuited signals that Ben Wade, in particular, coveted the nomination, Chase remained oblivious, refusing to believe that Ohio would not back its most deserving son. On the Chases’ last evening in Washington, the Blairs threw them a lavish party at their country estate in Silver Spring.
As usual, Kate left a deep impression on everyone. Seward afterward told Frances that she was quite “a young lady, pleasant and well-cultivated.” Chase wrote Nettie how pleased he was that many showed “attention to Katie,” and many were “kind to me.” He returned home convinced that his trip had accomplished a great deal. “Everybody seems to like me and to feel a very gratifying degree of confidence in me,” he reported to a Cincinnati friend. Confusing hospitality with hard allegiance, he told one of his supporters that “a great change seemed to come over men’s minds while I was in Washington.”
THE BEGINNING of the pre-presidential year found the backers of Edward Bates more active in the pursuit of his nomination than the candidate himself. While Bates would gradually warm to the idea, he found himself, as always, conflicted about plunging into politics. Without the encouragement of the powerful Blairs, it is unlikely that he would have put his name forward. Once he agreed to stand, he was confronted with a political dilemma. His strength lay among old Whigs and nativists concentrated in the border states, and conservatives in the North and Northwest. To have a genuine chance for the nomination, he would have to prove himself acceptable to moderate Republicans as well.
Had he used the months prior to the nomination to travel to the very different states of Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Connecticut, or Maryland, he might have acquainted himself with the wide range of views that comprised the new party. But he never left his home state, preferring to rely on intelligence received from colleagues and supporters who came to visit him. Not only did he keep to Missouri, he rarely left his beloved home, noting in his diary when he was forced to stay overnight in St. Louis that it was “the first that I have slept in town for about two years.” Four decades of marriage had not diminished his bond with Julia.
Secluding himself at home, Bates never developed a clear understanding of the varied constituencies that had to be aligned, a deficit that resulted in a number of missteps. While his distance from the fierce arguments of the fifties was considered beneficial to his candidacy, his long absence from politics made him less familiar with the savage polarization created by the slavery issue. In late February 1859, he answered the request of the Whig Committee of New York for his “views and opinions on the politics of the country.” The New York Whigs had passed a resolution calling for an end to agitation of “the Negro question” so that the country might focus on “topics of general importance,” such as economic development and internal improvements, that would unite rather than fracture the nation. In his letter, which was published nationwide, Bates declared that he had always considered “the Negro question” to be “a pestilent question, the agitation of which has never done good to any party, section or class, and never can do good, unless it be accounted good to stir up the angry passions of men, and exasperate the unreasoning jealousy of sections.” He believed that those who continued to press the issue, “after the sorrowful experience of the last few years,” must be motivated by “personal ambition or sectional prejudice.”
Lauded by Whigs and nativists, the letter provoked widespread criticism in Republican circles. Schuyler Colfax, who backed Bates for president, warned him that his comments “denouncing the agitation of the negro question” sounded like “a denunciation of the Rep[ublica]n party, and would turn many against [him].” Bates disagreed. “If my letter had been universally acceptable to the Republicans, that fact alone might have destroyed my prospects in two frontier slave states, Md. and Mo., and so I would have no streng[t]h at all but the Republican party,” where Seward and Chase, he knew, were far better positioned. Maryland congressman Henry Winter Davis, the leading member of the American Party in the House, confirmed Bates’s views, advising him that he was poised to secure majority approval and should not attempt to further define his views—“write no more public letters—let well enough alone.”
As the new year opened, Bates believed his chances were growing “brighter every day.” Supporters in the key battleground states of Indiana and Pennsylvania assured him that large percentages of the delegates appointed to the Chicago convention were “made up of ‘Bates men.’” A visitor from Illinois told him that much “good feeling” existed in the southern part of the state, “but first (on a point of State pride,) they must support Lincoln.” This was the first time in his daily entries that Bates so much as mentioned Lincoln’s name as a presidential aspirant. In Illinois, Lincoln was keenly aware of Bates, answering an inquiring letter about how Illinois regarded the various candidates by saying that Bates “would be the best man for the South of our State, and the worst for the North of it,” while Seward was “the very best candidate we could have for the North of Illinois, and the very worst for the South of it.” With amusing self-serving logic, Lincoln suggested that neither Bates nor Seward could command a majority vote in Illinois.
On the last day of February 1860, the very day of Seward’s conciliatory speech in the Senate, a great Opposition Convention comprised of Whigs and Americans met in Jefferson City, Missouri, and “enthusiastically” endorsed Bates for president. Two weeks later, Bates received a second endorsement from the Republican state convention in St. Louis. The Missouri Republicans, however, were in a carping mood, particularly the German-American contingent, which threatened to block the endorsement, still troubled by Bates’s open support for the nativist party in 1856. To satisfy both the more ardent Republicans and the German-American community, Frank Blair suggested that Bates agree to outline his positions in answer to a questionnaire drawn up by the German-American press.
The questionnaire posed a difficult problem for Bates. He had to assuage the doubts of Republicans who felt, like editor Joseph Medill of Chicago, that it was better to be “beaten with a representative man” who placed himself squarely on the Republican platform than to “triumph with a ‘Union-saver’” and “sink into the quicksands.” However, if he moved too far to the left to satisfy the passionate Republicans, he would risk his natural base among the old Whigs and Americans. Though once noted for his deft touch in harmonizing opposing forces, Bates plunged into his answers without calculating the consequences.
Asked to render his opinions on the extension of slavery into the territories, he announced that Congress had the power to decide the issue, a position that directly contradicted the Dred Scott decision. He felt, moreover, that “the spirit and the policy of the Government ought to be against its extension.” He advocated equal constitutional rights for all citizens, native-born or naturalized, claiming to endorse “no distinctions among Americans citizens,” and adding that the “Government is bound to protect all the citizens in the enjoyment of all their rights every where.” Beyond this, he favored colonizing former slaves in Africa and Central America, a Homestead Act, a Pacific Railroad, and the admission of Kansas as a free state.
His statement met with approval in traditional Republican enclaves in the Northeast and Northwest, but in the border states, where his advantage was supposed to reside, it proved disastrous. The Lexington [Missouri] Express wrote that the published letter came “as a clap of thunder from a clear sky,” placing Bates so blatantly in the Black Republican camp that he should no longer expect support from the more conservative border states. By subscribing to every article of the Republican creed, the Louisville Journal complained, Bates became “just as good or bad a Republican as Seward, Chase or Lincoln is…. He has by a single blow severed every tie of confidence or sympathy which connected him with the Southern Conservatives.” Only four years earlier, the Memphis Bulletin observed, Bates had denounced Black Republicans as “agitators,” labeling them “dangerous enemies to the peace of our Union.” Now he had become one of them. Bates himself recognized the backlash his letter had created, lamenting “the simultaneous abandonment of me by a good many papers” in the border states.
The attempt to pacify the anxious German-Americans had diminished his hold on what should have been his natural base, without bringing a commensurate number of Republicans to his side. Though the Bates camp maintained faith that their man was bound to win the nomination, Bates confided in his diary that “knowing the fickleness of popular favor, and on what small things great events depend, I shall take care not so to set my heart upon the glittering bauble, as to be mortified or made at all unhappy by a failure.”
NOT HINDERED by the hubris, delusions, and inconsistencies that plagued his three chief rivals, Abraham Lincoln gained steady ground through a combination of hard work, skill, and luck. While Seward and Bates felt compelled in the final months to reposition themselves toward the center of the party, Lincoln never changed his basic stance. He could remain where he had always been, “neither on the left wing nor the right, but very close to dead center,” as Don Fehrenbacher writes. From the time he had first spoken out against the extension of slavery into the territories in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln had insisted that while the spread of slavery must be “fairly headed off,” he had no wish “to interfere with slavery” where it already existed. So long as the institution was contained, which Lincoln considered a sacred pledge, it was “in course of ultimate extinction.” This position represented perfectly the views of the moderate majority in the Republican Party.
Though a successful bid for the nomination remained unlikely, a viable candidacy was no longer an impossible dream. Slowly and methodically, Lincoln set out to improve his long odds. He arranged to publish his debates with Douglas in a book that was read widely by Republicans. As more and more people became familiar with him through the newspaper stories of the debates, invitations to speak at Republican gatherings began to pour in. Not yet an avowed candidate, Lincoln delivered nearly two dozen speeches in Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kansas in the four months between August and December 1859.
While Seward was still touring Europe and the Middle East, Lincoln was introducing himself to tens of thousands of Westerners. “I think it is a mistake,” a leading New Yorker wrote Lincoln, “that Senator Seward is not on his own battlefield, instead of being in Egypt surveying the route of an old Underground Rail Road, over which Moses took, one day, a whole nation, from bondage into Liberty.” Lincoln capitalized on Seward’s absence. The crowds that greeted him grew with every stop along the way. Most of his audiences had never laid eyes on him, and he invariably forged an indelible impression. Once he began speaking, the Janesville Gazette reported, “the high order of [his] intellect” left a permanent impact upon his listeners, who would remember his “tall, gaunt form” and “his points and his hits” for “many a day.”
Speaking not as a candidate but as an advocate for the Republican cause, Lincoln sharpened his attacks on the Democrats and, in particular, on the party’s front-runner, Stephen Douglas, who preceded him at many of the same locations. “Douglasism,” he wrote Chase, “is all which now stands in the way of an early and complete success of Republicanism.” In this way, ironically, Douglas’s national reputation continually increased the attention paid to Lincoln.
Perhaps Lincoln’s most rewarding stop was Cincinnati, which he had vowed never again to visit after the humiliating Reaper trial. This time, he was “greeted with the thunder of cannon, the strains of martial music, and the joyous plaudits of thousands of citizens thronging the streets.” He arrived at the Burnet House and was put up “in princely style,” delighted to find that the most prominent of Cincinnati’s residents were vying to meet the “rising star.”
Lincoln addressed the Southern threats that the election of a Republican president would divide the Union, directing his remarks particularly to the many Kentuckians who had crossed the Ohio River to listen to him. “Will you make war upon us and kill us all? Why, gentlemen, I think you are as gallant and as brave men as live; that you can fight as bravely in a good cause, man for man, as any other people living…but, man for man, you are not better than we are, and there are not so many of you as there are of us. You will never make much of a hand at whipping us. If we were fewer in numbers than you, I think that you could whip us; if we were equal it would likely be a drawn battle; but being inferior in numbers, you will make nothing by attempting to master us.” The next day, his speech was described in the Cincinnati Gazette “as an effort remarkable for its clear statement, powerful argument and massive common sense,” and possessed of “such dignity and power as to have impressed some of our ablest lawyers with the conclusion that it was superior to any political effort they had ever heard.”
Lincoln’s crowded schedule allowed him no time to accept Joshua Speed’s invitation to visit him in Kentucky for the opening of the national racecourse, “when,” his old friend promised, “we expect to have some of the best horses in America to compete for the purses. In addition we think we can show the prettiest women,” adding, “if you are not too old to enjoy either the speed of the horses or the beauty of the women come.” If his speaking tour caused Lincoln to forgo speedy horses and beautiful women, it greatly increased his stature among western Republicans. “Your visit to Ohio has excited an extensive interest in your favor,” former congressman Samuel Galloway told him. “We must take some man not hitherto corrupted with the discussion upon Candidates. Your name has been again and again mentioned…. I am candid to say you are my choice.”
Rapidly becoming a national spokesman for the fledgling Republican Party, Lincoln sought to preserve the unity of the still-fragile coalition. He wished, he wrote Schuyler Colfax, “to hedge against divisions in the Republican ranks.” An anti-immigrant movement in Massachusetts “failed to see that tilting against foreigners would ruin us in the whole North-West,” while attempts in both Ohio and New Hampshire to thwart enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law might “utterly overwhelm us in Illinois with the charge of enmity to the constitution itself…. In a word, in every locality we should look beyond our noses; and at least say nothing on points where it is probable we shall disagree.”
Colfax appreciated Lincoln’s “kind & timely note,” which underscored the need to enlist in the Republican cause “men of all shades & gradations of opinion from the Conservative…to the bold radical.” To be victorious in 1860, he wrote, “we must either win this Conservative sentiment, with its kindred sympathizers, represented under the title of North Americans, Old Line Whigs &c, to our banners” without alienating the radicals, “or by repelling them must go into the contest looking for defeat.” In this cause of unity, Colfax assured Lincoln, “your counsel carries great weight…there is no political letter that falls from your pen, which is not copied throughout the Union.” Lincoln’s ability to bridge these divisions would prove of vital importance to his campaign.
On October 16, 1859, as Lincoln prepared for a trip to Kansas, the remaining bonds of union were strained almost to the point of rupture when the white abolitionist John Brown came to Virginia, in the words of Stephen Vincent Benét, “with foolish pikes/And a pack of desperate boys to shadow the sun.” Brown and his band of thirteen white men and five blacks seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry with a bold but ill-conceived plan of provoking a slave insurrection. The arsenal was swiftly recaptured and Brown taken prisoner by a federal force under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee, accompanied by Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart.
Brown was tried and sentenced to death. “I am waiting the hour of my public murder with great composure of mind, & cheerfulness,” Brown wrote his family, “feeling the strongest assurance that in no other possible way could I be used to so much advance the cause of God; & of humanity.” In the month between the sentence and his hanging, the dignity and courage of his conduct and the eloquence of his statements and letters made John Brown a martyr/hero to many in the antislavery North. His death, when it came, was mourned by public assemblies throughout the Northern states. “Church bells tolled,” the historian David Potter writes, “black bunting was hung out, minute guns were fired, prayer meetings assembled, and memorial resolutions were adopted.”
Brown’s motivations, psychological profile, and strategy would be probed by historians, poets, and novelists for generations. The immediate impact of the intrepid raid, which “sent a shiver of fear to the inmost fiber of every white man, woman, and child” in the South, was unmistakable. While antislavery fervor in the North was intensified, Southern solidarity and rhetoric reached a new level of zealotry. “Harper’s Ferry,” wrote the Richmond Enquirer, “coupled with the expression of Northern sentiment in support…have shaken and disrupted all regard for the Union; and there are but few men who do not look to a certain and not distant day when dissolution must ensue.” The raid at Harpers Ferry, one historian notes, was “like a great meteor disclosing in its lurid flash the width and depth of that abyss,” which cut the nation in two. Herman Melville, in his poem “The Portent,” would use the same metaphor, calling “Weird John Brown/ The meteor of the war”—the tail of his long beard trailing out from under the executioner’s cap.
Throughout the South, heightened fear of slave insurrection led to severe restrictions on the expression of antislavery sentiments. “I do not exaggerate in designating the present state of affairs in the Southern country as a reign of terror,” the British consul in Charleston wrote. “Persons are torn away from their residences and pursuits…letters are opened at the Post Offices; discussion upon slavery is entirely prohibited under penalty of expulsion…. The Northern merchants and Travellers are leaving in great numbers.” In Norfolk, Virginia, the St. Louis Newsreported, a grand jury indicted a merchant “for seditious language, because he declared that John Brown was a good man, fighting in a good cause.”
Leading Southern politicians were quick to indict the Republican Party and, by extension, the entire North. The Tennessee legislature resolved that the raiders at Harpers Ferry were “the natural fruits of this treasonable ‘irrepressible conflict’ doctrine, put forth by the great head of the Black Republican party, and echoed by his subordinates.” A man representing “one hundred gentlemen” published a circular that offered a $50,000 reward “for the head of William H. Seward,” along with the considerably smaller sum of $25 for the heads of a long list of “traitors,” including Sumner, Greeley, Giddings, and Colfax. Lincoln was not included in the list of enemies.
Democratic papers in the North joined in, targeting Seward for special condemnation. “The first overt act in the great drama of national disruption which has been plotted by that demagogue, Wm. H. Seward, has just closed at Harper’s Ferry,” the New York Herald charged. “No reasoning mind can fail to trace cause and effect between the bloody and brutal manifesto of William H. Seward [the “irrepressible conflict” speech a year earlier]…and the terrible scenes of violence, rapine and death, that have been enacted at the confluence of the Potomac and the Shenandoah.”
Republicans, naturally, countered Democratic attempts to implicate their party. Seward himself stated that although Brown was a sympathetic figure, his execution was “necessary and just.” Weed’s Albany Evening Journal also took a decided stance against the futile raid, deeming Brown’s men guilty of treason for “seeking to plunge a peaceful community into the horrors of a servile insurrection.” They “justly deserve, universal condemnation.”
In Missouri, Bates concluded that “the wild extravagance and utter futility of his plan” proved that Brown was “a madman.” He discussed the incident at length with his young friend Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, who had come to stay at Grape Hill for several days with his wife, Flora, his child, and two free black servants. “He tells me a good deal about ‘Old Brown,’” Bates wrote in his diary. “He was at his capture—and has his [dagger].”
For Chase, the situation presented particular problems. Though he publicly denounced Brown’s violation of law and order, his younger daughter, Nettie, later conceded that “for a household accustomed to revere as friends of the family such men as Sumner, Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Whittier, and Longfellow,” it was impossible not to sympathize with “the truly good old man who was about to die for others.” She and her friends built a small fort in the conservatory and “raised a flag on which was painted…defiantly ‘Freedom forever; slavery never.’” When friends warned Chase that such open support of Brown could not be countenanced, he had to explain to his daughter that “a great wrong” could not be righted “in the way poor old John Brown had attempted to do.” The little fort was dismantled.
At the time of Brown’s execution on December 2, 1859, Lincoln was back on the campaign trail, telling an audience in Leavenworth, Kansas, that “the attempt to identify the Republican party with the John Brown business was an electioneering dodge.” He wisely sought the middle ground between the statements of radical Republicans, like Emerson, who believed that Brown’s execution would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross,” and conservative Republicans, who denounced Brown for his demented, traitorous scheme. He acknowledged that Brown had displayed “great courage” and “rare unselfishness.” Nonetheless, he concluded, “that cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right.”
WHEN HE RETURNED from his canvassing, Lincoln focused on the approaching meeting of the Republican National Committee, to be held on December 21, 1859, at the Astor House in New York. Committee members from nearly all the free states were gathered to decide where the Republican Convention would be held. Supporters of Seward, Chase, and Bates argued in turn that the convention should be placed in New York, Ohio, or Missouri. Though Lincoln had not yet committed himself publicly to run for the nomination, he wrote to Norman Judd, a member of the selection committee, to press the claims of Illinois, to satisfy friends who “attach more consequence” to the location than either he or Judd had originally done.
Judd waited patiently as the claims of Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Harrisburg were put forth. When no agreement could be reached, he shrewdly suggested Chicago as “good neutral ground where everyone would have an even chance.” Although Lincoln was known to most of the committee members at this point, none considered him a serious candidate for the presidency. Judd “carefully kept ‘Old Abe’ out of sight,” observed Henry Whitney, “and the delegates failed to see any personal bearing the place of meeting was to have on the nomination.” The choice finally narrowed down to St. Louis and Chicago. Judd “promised that the members of the Convention and all outsiders of the Republican faith should have a hospitable reception,” that sufficient accommodations would be provided “for feeding and lodging the large crowd,” and that “a hall for deliberation should be furnished free.” Ultimately, Chicago beat St. Louis by a single vote.
Once Chicago was selected, Judd, a railway lawyer, persuaded the railroad companies to provide “a cheap excursion rate from all parts of the State,” so that lack of funds would not keep Lincoln supporters from attending the convention. Concealed from his rivals, Lincoln had taken an important step toward the nomination.
So confident were Seward’s friends about his chances that they had no problem with the Chicago selection. “I like the place & the tenor of the call,” New York editor John Bigelow wrote Seward at the time. “I do not see how either could be bettered, nor how it is possible to take exception to it.” But Charles Gibson, Bates’s friend and supporter, was not so sanguine; he recognized that it was a blow to the Bates candidacy. “Had the convention been held in St. Louis,” Gibson later wrote, “Lincoln would not have been the nominee.”
As Lincoln’s candidacy became a real prospect, he attended to the request made by Jesse Fell a year earlier for a short history of his life to be published and distributed. After warning Fell that “there is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me,” Lincoln detailed, without a hint of self-pity, the facts of his early life, growing up in “a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods.”
“If any thing be made out of it, I wish it to be modest,” Lincoln told Fell. “Of course it must not appear to have been written by myself.” This simple sketch written in his own hand would be used later in Republican efforts to romanticize Lincoln’s humble beginnings.
LINCOLN’S HOPES for making himself better known outside the West received an immense boost when he received the invitation from Chase supporter James Briggs to speak as part of a lecture series in Brooklyn. The lecture was eventually scheduled for February 27, 1860. Chase, as we saw, had declined the opportunity to speak in the same series, despite word that its organizers were men seeking an alternative to Seward. Upon his arrival in New York, Lincoln sought out Henry Bowen, editor of the antislavery New York Independent, who had helped arrange the event. “His clothes were travel-stained and he looked tired and woe-begone,” Bowen recalled. “In this first view of him, there came to me the disheartening and appalling thought of the great throng which I had been so instrumental in inducing to come.” But Bowen’s initial impression of Lincoln softened after Lincoln admitted that the long journey had worn him out, and said, “if you have no objection I will lie down on your lounge here and you can tell me about the arrangements for Monday night.”
At the Astor House, Lincoln met Mayson Brayman, a fellow lawyer who had lived in Springfield for some years before returning to his native New York. “Well, B. how have you fared since you left Illinois?” Lincoln asked. “I have made one hundred thousand dollars and lost all,” Brayman ruefully replied; “how is it with you, Mr. Lincoln?”
“Oh, very well,” Lincoln said. “I have the cottage at Springfield and about $8,000 in money. If they make me Vice-President with Seward, as some say they will, I hope I shall be able to increase it to $20,000, and that is as much as a man ought to want.” Lincoln’s sights, however, were not trained on the vice presidency, and politics, not riches, were his object.
That February afternoon, Lincoln paid a visit to the studio of the photographer Mathew Brady on Broadway. When Brady was posing him, he urged Lincoln to hike up his shirt collar. Lincoln quipped that Brady wanted “to shorten [his] neck.” The resulting three-quarter-length portrait shows the fifty-one-year-old Lincoln standing before a pillar, the fingers of his left hand spread over a book. Prominent cheekbones cast marked shadows across his clean-shaven face. The delicate long bow of his upper lip contrasts with the full lower lip, and the deep-set gaze is steady and melancholy. This photograph, circulated widely in engravings and lithographs in the Northeast, was the first arresting image many would see of Abraham Lincoln.
Nearly fifteen hundred people came to hear “this western man” speak in the great hall at Cooper Union. He had bought a new black suit for the occasion, but it was badly wrinkled from the trip. An observer noticed that “one of the legs of his trousers was up about two inches above his shoe; his hair was disheveled and stuck out like rooster’s feathers; his coat was altogether too large for him in the back, his arms much longer than his sleeves.” Yet once he began to speak, people were captivated by his earnest and powerful delivery.
Lincoln had labored to craft his address for many weeks, extensively researching the attitudes of the founding fathers toward slavery. He took as the text for his discourse a speech in which Senator Douglas had said of slavery: “Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.” Fully endorsing this statement, Lincoln examined the beliefs and actions of the founders, concluding that they had marked slavery “as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity.”
In the preceding months, tensions between North and South had continued to escalate, with each section joining in a “hue and cry” against the other. The troubling scenario that Lincoln had observed nearly two decades earlier, during the battle over temperance, had come to pass. Denunciation was being met by denunciation, “crimination with crimination, and anathema with anathema.” To have expected either side to respond differently once the rhetoric had heated up, Lincoln warned during that earlier battle, “was to expect a reversal of human nature, which is God’s decree, and never can be reversed.”
At Cooper Union, as he had done in his celebrated Peoria speech six years earlier, Lincoln attempted to cut through the rancor of the embattled factions by speaking directly to the Southern people. While his faith in Southern responsiveness had seriously dimmed by this time, he hoped the fear and animosity of slaveholders might be assuaged if they understood that the Republicans desired only a return to the “old policy of the fathers,” so “the peace of the old times” could once more be established. Denying charges of sectionalism, he said Republicans were the true conservatives, adhering “to the old and tried, against the new and untried.”
Turning to his fellow Republicans, he entreated, “let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can.”Though the approach was moderate, Lincoln spoke with such passion and certainty about the unifying principle of the Republican Party—never to allow slavery “to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States”—that even the most radical Republicans in the audience were captivated. When he came to the dramatic ending pledge—“LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT”—the audience erupted in thunderous applause.
After Lincoln spoke, several of the event organizers took the platform. Chase supporter James Briggs predicted that “one of three gentlemen will be our standard bearer”—William Henry Seward, Salmon Chase, or “the gallant son of Kentucky, who was reared in Illinois, and whom you have heard tonight.” Lincoln’s still-unannounced candidacy had taken an enormous step forward.
“When I came out of the hall,” one member of the audience said, “my face glowing with an excitement and my frame all aquiver, a friend, with his eyes aglow, asked me what I thought of Abe Lincoln, the rail-splitter. I said, ‘He’s the greatest man since St. Paul.’”
Once the speech was reported in the papers, Lincoln was in demand across New England. He answered as many requests as possible, undertaking an exhausting tour of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, repeating and modifying the arguments of his Cooper Union address. He was forced to decline invitations from outside New England but hoped “to visit New-Jersey & Pa. before the fall elections.”
Writing to Mary from Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where their son Robert was completing a preparatory year before entering Harvard College, Lincoln admitted that the Cooper Union speech, “being within my calculation before I started, went off passably well and gave me no trouble whatever. The difficulty was to make nine others, before reading audiences who had already seen all my ideas in print.”
In Hartford, Connecticut, on March 5, Lincoln first met Gideon Welles, an editorial writer for the Hartford Evening Press who would become his secretary of the navy. Arriving by train in the afternoon, Lincoln had several hours to spare before his speech that evening. He walked up Asylum Street to the bookstore of Brown & Gross, where he encountered the fifty-eight-year-old Welles, a peculiar-looking man with a curly wig perched on his outsize head, and a flowing white beard. Welles had attended Norwich University and studied the law but then devoted himself to writing, leaving the legal profession at twenty-four to take charge of the Democratic Hartford Times. A strong supporter of Andrew Jackson, Welles had represented his town of Glastonbury in the state legislature for eight years. He remained a loyal Democrat until the mid-fifties, when he became troubled by his affiliation to “the party of the Southern slaveocracy.” Like many antislavery Democrats, he joined the Republican Party, though he still held fast to the frugal fiscal policies of the Democrats.
With the convention only two months away, Welles had settled on Chase, whom he had met four years earlier while visiting Cincinnati. While Welles held less radical views on slavery, he was comforted by Chase’s similar sentiments regarding government spending and states’ rights. Seward, by contrast, frightened Welles. For years, the former Whig and the former Democrat had been at loggerheads over government spending; Welles was convinced that Seward belonged “to the New York school of very expensive rulers.” Moreover, Welles was appalled by Seward’s talk of a “higher law” than the Constitution and his predictions of an “irrepressible conflict.” He was ready to support any candidate but Seward, despite the fact that Seward was the most popular among the Republicans.
That afternoon, Lincoln and Welles spent several hours conversing on a bench in the front of the store. Welles had read accounts of Lincoln’s debates with Douglas and had noted the extravagant reviews of his Cooper Union speech. There is no record of their conversation that day, but the prairie lawyer left a strong imprint on Welles, who watched that evening as he delivered a two-hour speech before an overflowing crowd at City Hall.
Though he retained much of his Cooper Union speech, Lincoln developed a new metaphor in Hartford to perfectly illustrate his distinction between accepting slavery where it already existed while doing everything possible to curtail its spread. Testing his image in Hartford, he would refine it further in subsequent speeches. “If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road,” Lincoln began, “any man would say I might seize the nearest stick and kill it; but if I found that snake in bed with my children, that would be another question. I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them…. But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide!…The new Territories are the newly made bed to which our children are to go, and it lies with the nation to say whether they shall have snakes mixed up with them or not.”
The snake metaphor acknowledged the constitutional protection of slavery where it legally existed, while harnessing the protective instincts of parents to safeguard future generations from the venomous expansion of slavery. This homely vision of the territories as beds for American children exemplified what James Russell Lowell described as Lincoln’s ability to speak “as if the people were listening to their own thinking out loud.” When Seward reached for a metaphor to dramatize the same danger, he warned that if slavery were allowed into Kansas, his countrymen would have “introduced the Trojan horse” into the new territory. Even if most of his classically trained fellow senators immediately grasped his intent, the Trojan horse image carried neither the instant accessibility of Lincoln’s snake-in-the-bed story nor its memorable originality.
The morning after his City Hall speech, Lincoln met with Welles again in the office of the Hartford Evening Press. When they parted after an hour of discussion, Welles was favorably impressed. “This orator and lawyer has been caricatured. He is not Apollo, but he is not Caliban,” he wrote in the next edition of his paper. “He is [in] every way large, brain included, but his countenance shows intellect, generosity, great good nature, and keen discrimination…. He is an effective speaker, because he is earnest, strong, honest, simple in style, and clear as crystal in his logic.”
Preparing to return to Springfield, Lincoln had accomplished more than he ever could have anticipated. No longer the distant frontiersman, he had made a name in the East. His possible candidacy was now widely discussed. “I have been sufficiently astonished at my success in the West,” Lincoln told a Yale professor who had praised his speech highly. “But I had no thought of any marked success at the East, and least of all that I should draw out such commendations from literary and learned men.” When James Briggs told him, “I think your chance for being the next President is equal to that of any man in the country,” Lincoln responded, “When I was East several gentlemen made about the same remarks to me that you did to-day about the Presidency; they thought my chances were about equal to the best.”
Now there was work to be done at home. A successful bid would require the complete support of the Illinois delegation. To accomplish this, Lincoln would need to bridge the often rancorous divisions within the Republican ranks, a task that would demand all his ample and subtle political skills.
At the end of January 1859, Lyman Trumbull, concerned that the increasingly popular Lincoln might contest his reelection to the Senate, had apprised him of an article “said to have been prepared by Col. John Wentworth,” the Republican mayor of Chicago, “the object of which evidently is, to stir up bad feeling between Republicans who were formerly Whigs, & those who were Democrats.” The piece suggested bad faith on the Democrats’ part, singling out Norman Judd and Trumbull himself, in 1855, and again in 1858, when Lincoln ran a second time against Douglas. “Any effort to put enmity between you and me,” Lincoln reassured Trumbull, “is as idle as the wind…the republicans generally, coming from the old democratic ranks, were as sincerely anxious for my success in the late contest, as I myself…. And I beg to assure you, beyond all possible cavil, that you can scarcely be more anxious to be sustained two years hence than I am that you shall be so sustained. I can not conceive it possible for me to be a rival of yours.
“A word now for your own special benefit,” Lincoln warned in a follow-up note. “You better write no letters which can possibly be distorted into opposition, or quasi opposition to me. There are men on the constant watch for such things out of which to prejudice my peculiar friends against you. While I have no more suspicion of you than I have of my best friend living, I am kept in a constant struggle against suggestions of this sort.”
It would require more effort to defuse the increasingly bitter feud between Norman Judd and John Wentworth. In public forums, Wentworth would drag out past wrongs, continuing to accuse Judd and his former Democratic allies of conspiring to defeat Lincoln in 1855, of “bungling” Lincoln’s campaign in 1858, and of working now “to advance Trumbull as a presidential candidate, at Lincoln’s expense.”
Lincoln hastened to reassure Judd, who hoped to run for governor, that the “vague charge that you played me false last year, I believe to be false and outrageous.” In 1855, “you did vote for Trumbull against me; and, although I think, and have said a thousand times, that was no injustice to me, I cannot change the fact, nor compel people to cease speaking of it. Ever since that matter occurred, I have constantly labored, as I believe you know, to have all recollection of it dropped.” Finally, “as to the charge of your intriguing for Trumbull against me, I believe as little of that as any other charge.” If such charges were made, Lincoln promised, they would not “go uncontradicted.”
The controversy erupted into public view when Judd brought a libel suit against Wentworth, who tried to retain Lincoln as his counsel, claiming that the “very reason that you may assign for declining my offer is the very one that urges me to write you. You are friendly to us both. I prefer to put myself in the hands of mutual friends rather than…in the hands of those who have a deep interest in keeping up a quarrel.” Of course, Lincoln had no intention of entangling himself in such explosive litigation, but he did help to mediate the altercation. The dispute was resolved without a court fight. Consequently, both Wentworth and Judd remained close to Lincoln and would support his efforts to control the Illinois delegation.
“I am not in a position where it would hurt much for me to not be nominated on the national ticket; but I am where it would hurt some for me to not get the Illinois delegation,” Lincoln wrote Judd, knowing that the former Democrat had influence with the Chicago Press and Tribune, which covered the northern part of the state. “Can you not help me a little in this matter, in your end of the vineyard?” A week later, the Tribune published a resounding editorial on behalf of Lincoln’s candidacy. “You saw what the Tribune said about you,” Judd said to Lincoln. “Was it satisfactory?”
On May 10, 1860, the Illinois state Republicans assembled in Decatur. Buoyed by the noisy enthusiasm his candidacy elicited at the state convention, Lincoln nonetheless recognized that some of the delegates chosen to go to the national convention, though liking him, probably favored Seward or Bates. To head off possible desertions, Lincoln’s friends introduced a resolution on the second day of the meeting: “That Abraham Lincoln is the choice of the Republican party of Illinois for the Presidency, and the delegates from this State are instructed to use all honorable means to secure his nomination by the Chicago Convention, and to vote as a unit for him.”
With the Republican National Convention set to begin the following week, Lincoln could rest easy in the knowledge that he had used his time well. Though he often claimed to be a fatalist, declaring that “what is to be will be, and no prayers of ours can reverse the decree,” his diligence and shrewd strategy in the months prior to the convention belied his claim. More than all his opponents combined, the country lawyer and local politician had toiled skillfully to increase his chances to become the Republican nominee for president.