Lincoln's Mentors

by Michael J. Gerhardt

  Also, in May 1856, Herndon, who was a member of the Anti-Nebraska state committee at the editors’ gathering, had published a call for a meeting of Sangamon County residents opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act so they could select delegates for the Bloomington convention. With Lincoln’s knowledge, Herndon signed both Lincoln’s name and his own as potential delegates. Reputedly, when the signatures became public, an irate John Todd Stuart stormed into Lincoln’s law offices to ask whether Lincoln had actually signed the form. Lincoln was not around, but his partner Herndon, who was, said he had done it without consulting Lincoln, to which Stuart replied, “Then you have ruined him.”15 Stuart did not believe that a Republican, especially a radical one (and he thought all Republicans were radicals), could win a statewide election in Illinois.

  Herndon and Lincoln thought otherwise, but the former had anticipated that Lincoln might have wanted to try to have it both ways—to be able to take advantage of aligning with the party growing in popularity but at the same time appear not to be taking a leading role or sanctioning its major activities. When he telegraphed Lincoln to alert him that he had signed him up as a delegate to the Republican convention, and that conservative Whigs like Stuart were not happy with his new radicalism (in 1856, Stuart campaigned for Fillmore in the hopes of thwarting “Black Republicans,” those within the party who supported giving the vote to African Americans, which, he said, would “array the North against the South”), Lincoln responded briefly, “All right; go ahead. Will meet you—radicals and all.”16

  On May 29, 1856, Lincoln was one of around 270 delegates to attend the Bloomington convention, which formally recognized the formation of the Republican Party in Illinois. Whigs of all stripes were there, as were Anti-Nebraska Democrats and abolitionists. Lincoln’s friend John Palmer, a former Democrat, was the presiding officer. Orville Browning was there, too, representing conservative Whigs. Browning’s plan was to move the old Whig Party in the state, as he told Lyman Trumbull, “under the control of moderate men, and conservative influences, and if we do so the future destiny of the State is in our own hands—victory will inevitably crown our exertions. On the contrary if rash and ultra counsels prevail all is lost.”17 Recognizing upon his arrival that there had been few advance plans, Browning took the initiative to undertake one of the most important functions there: drafting a platform for the new party. This was a delicate task, the kind that required tact and coordination and finding consensus and common ground. It was easy to think Browning might not be well suited for the task, since his self-assurance and tendency to take himself too seriously might have rubbed more than a few people the wrong way. But this was a job for a good lawyer and astute politician, and Browning was both in spite of whatever other limitations he had. He understood this was his moment, and he shined. He called fifteen to twenty delegates to his room to get their input and find out what they could each accept and not accept. Then he prepared two platform resolutions that everyone, including Lincoln, could endorse: that the Constitution and the nation’s institutions guaranteed that “we will proscribe no one, by legislation or otherwise, on account of religious opinions, or in consequence of place of birth,”18 and that Congress

  possesses the full power to prohibit slavery in the territories; and that while we maintain all constitutional rights of the south, we also hold that justice, humanity, the principles of freedom as expressed in our Declaration of Independence, and our national constitution, and the purity and perpetuity of our government, require that the power should be exerted to prevent the extension of slavery into territories heretofore free.19

  On the afternoon of May 29, Browning made two speeches to the convention, each emphasizing the values of compromise and moderation. He was there to speak to the “old Clay-Whigs” and he did. He told the delegates that they could choose no better role model than Henry Clay. As Browning’s biographer Maurice Baxter describes the speech,

  He read extracts from the speeches of Henry Clay from his first entrance upon public life to the close of his career, all of which proved him to have been steadfastly and uniformly opposed to the spread of slavery into free territory, and that he had still been upon the national stage when his great measures of pacification—the Missouri Compromise—was ruthlessly violated, his voice and vote would have been the same in 1854, that they were in 1820.

  Baxter surmised that “Browning’s emphasis of old-line Whig traditions [was] cogently and eloquently expressed and made a strong impression on his colleagues.”20

  It was no accident that Browning looked to Clay as the model for the new party. He knew—nearly everybody did—that Clay was Lincoln’s idol and the idol, in all likelihood, of most of the people in attendance. Browning had met Clay in 1844, and as he noted in his diary, “I was never more charmed with a man. So plain, so unaffectedly kind, so dignified, so unaustatious [sic], so simple in his manners and conversation, that he is irresistibly fascinating.”21 This meeting apparently arose shortly before the 1844 presidential election, at which time Clay might well have been at his most charming—and in need of support among old-line Whigs like Browning, John Todd Stuart, and Lincoln. Ostensibly, as Browning recalled, no introduction was required—Clay knew who he was and where he was from. As Baxter describes the meeting, “This evidence of personal interest reinforced Browning’s belief that Clay had all the personal qualities with which he had been credited. He appeared younger than Browning had expected, as he was in good health, and above all he was not the least bit egotistical. Undoubtedly he ought to be President of the United States.” Browning’s perception of Clay is more consistent with what we know about Clay than Linder’s description of Lincoln’s meeting, when Clay was described as obnoxious and pretentious. Browning’s view is also consistent with what we know about him; much more than Lincoln, he would have been receptive to such flattery and attention.

  Browning was determined to revive the spirit of Clay for the convention. If “compromise” and “moderation” were the hallmarks of a Republican, as Browning told the delegates, Lincoln fit that bill. Indeed, Browning often assumed Lincoln was a conservative like himself, prone to upholding internal improvements funded by tariffs and restrictions on slavery but not to undertake more radical notions, such as complete abolition. Lincoln did nothing to dissuade Browning of that impression.

  Though Lincoln had little role in organizing the convention, the delegates called him as the last major speaker. Everyone knew Lincoln had his eye on the Senate. He gave a short preview of the positions he expected to take in the upcoming election. As Judge John Scott, who witnessed the speech, recalled, Lincoln had “an expression on his face of intense emotion seldom if ever seen upon any before. It was the emotion of a great soul. Even in statu[re] he appeared great. A sudden stillness settled over the body of thoughtful men as Lincoln commenced to speak. Everyone wanted to hear what he had to say.” Scott concluded that this was “the speech of his life in the estimation of many who heard it. [It] was a triumph that comes to few speakers. It was an effect that could be produced by the truest eloquence.”22 Such effusive praise was possible not only because of Lincoln’s passionate delivery (while he was sometimes reserved in personal conversation, once onstage he came alive, particularly in front of a friendly audience) but also the content—content that Lincoln, unlike that of his other speeches, did not want to reach a wide audience. This became the “lost speech,” which Lincoln purposely had not written down but suppressed, because he and party leaders thought it too radical for publication and nationwide distribution. Lincoln had learned from Clay’s mistakes of often speaking too much and inconsistently to appease a broad constituency, and he and his supporters were careful not to allow anything but moderation to define Lincoln.

  What made the speech so touchy was that Lincoln identified slavery as the principal cause for the nation’s problems, defended the idea of a union that opposed the extension of slavery, and closed by reiterating the declaration that Daniel Webster famously had given in 1830 i
n response to the South Carolina nullification movement, which maintained states had the authority to nullify or refuse to follow federal laws they did not like: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”23 This was the Webster whom Lincoln preferred to remember. In beginning his life as a Republican, Lincoln reminded those listening, and those later reading reports about his remarks in friendly newspapers, that while he might have been newly repackaged as a Republican, he remained, contrary to what Douglas said in 1854, faithful to the commitment of Clay and Webster to the Union.

  II

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  While Lincoln was maneuvering for the Illinois Republican nomination for the Senate, Pierce’s plans were falling apart. Kansas was in turmoil. Even before the Kansas-Nebraska Act had gone into effect, proslavery residents of Missouri had flooded into Kansas. They congregated mostly in the southern part of the territory, where, on March 30, 1855, they voted to select a proslavery legislature. That legislature quickly passed a statute outlawing antislavery activities. Meanwhile, antislavery residents had congregated in the northern portion of Kansas, where they formed a government of their own, which they called the Topeka Constitution. With the state divided into two halves and both sides beginning to engage in physical confrontations and violence, Pierce publicly sided with the proslavery faction and announced he would send federal forces into the territory if necessary to enforce their claims. He blamed Kansas’s problems on the “inflammatory agitation” of outsiders, code for abolitionists.24 He also declared that the Constitution protected the rights of slaveholders and agreed to station federal troops at Forts Leavenworth and Riley to serve as needed by the territorial governor.

  Several violent outbreaks further grabbed national attention, one in the U.S. Senate and others in Kansas. On May 19–20, 1856, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner delivered what he believed was the most important speech of his career. He was right, but for the wrong reason. He not only spoke of a widespread conspiracy involving the Pierce administration to force slavery on the prospective new state of Kansas, but he directed insults—including vulgar sexual imagery—against Douglas and particularly South Carolina senator Andrew Pickens Butler. Two days later, Congressman Preston Brooks, a cousin of Senator Brooks, marched into the Senate and confronted Sumner at his desk. Without warning, he repeatedly beat Sumner with his walking stick. Sumner was stunned and blinded by the first few blows, after which he wrenched his desk from its mooring and fell onto the Senate floor. Several senators watched him bleeding profusely and unconscious on the floor but did nothing, having been told to back off by Brooks’s gun-waving accomplices, two other Southern representatives. By the time some senators stopped the beating, Sumner was nearly dead. Although reelected in 1857, the damage from the beating kept him out of the Senate until 1859. As for Brooks, an investigating committee recommended his expulsion from the House, but instead he was merely censured. Brooks resigned from the House but was reelected.

  Back in Kansas, on May 21, 1856, proslavery forces ransacked the city of Lawrence, which had been settled largely by antislavery forces from Massachusetts. In response, a rabid abolitionist named John Brown led a closely knit band of followers who killed five proslavery settlers north of the Pottawatomie Creek during the night of May 24 and early morning of May 25. From there, Brown led his antislavery forces at two other battles in Kansas. They wreaked havoc wherever they could, culminating in an attack on a federal armory in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Within thirty-six hours, a Marine force led by Robert E. Lee captured Brown. Brown was tried and convicted of treason and hanged on the spot. Democrats used Brown as the symbol of the radical abolitionism they said was destroying the country.

  III

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  Bleeding Kansas was the central issue in the 1856 presidential election. On the Democratic side, Stephen Douglas made his first serious effort to grab the presidential nomination, as did three other prominent contenders, including Pierce, Lewis Cass of Michigan, and Polk’s secretary of state, James Buchanan. At the Democratic nominating convention held in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1856, Pierce struggled to keep his candidacy alive for as long as he could, but he withdrew his name from contention as his support fell precipitously in the late rounds of balloting. In being denied renomination, Pierce became the first elected president not to be renominated for a second term in office. Douglas’s candidacy lasted until the seventeenth ballot, but he ultimately withdrew to avoid a contest with Buchanan that would have amplified internal tensions within the party and hurt its chances to keep the White House in the fall. Douglas’s decision was made easier because, at forty-three, he expected to be a viable candidate in the next election. Buchanan, who had been out of the country during Pierce’s administration, serving as the ambassador to Great Britain, had the advantage of not having been involved with any of the administration’s decision making on the Kansas-Nebraska Act or the civil war in Kansas.

  The Republicans held their first presidential nominating convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Republicans, in the judgment of Lincoln and Orville Browning, were looking for a candidate who was not conservative or at least not perceived as one, and both men supported John McLean, who had served Monroe and John Quincy Adams as the nation’s first postmaster general and whom Andrew Jackson had appointed to the Supreme Court in 1829. (The American Party, which was merely the nativist Know Nothing Party under a different name, nominated Millard Fillmore, who still had great appeal to conservatives in both of the major parties.) Lincoln told Trumbull that McLean’s nomination “would save every whig, except such as have already gone over hook and line” to the Democrats. He explained, “I am in, and shall go for any one nominated unless he be ‘platformed’ expressly, or impliedly, on some ground which I may think wrong.”25 Lincoln had never failed to back his party’s presidential nominee, but for the first time, he kept the door open to withholding support from the nominee. The most important thing was to do nothing that could hurt his chances for the upcoming Senate election.

  The nomination did not go to McLean, who was actively campaigning in spite of the fact that he was still sitting as a justice on the Supreme Court. Nor did the nomination go to either Seward or the newly elected governor of Ohio, Salmon Chase; as strident abolitionists, neither man held any appeal with the conservative wing of the Whig or Republican Parties. Instead, the nomination went to John Frémont, a former soldier and explorer. In 1848, he had been court-martialed for mutiny and insubordination in a dispute over who was the rightful governor of California, but Polk, in his last full year as president, commuted his sentence and reinstated him to his rank as major in the army so he could resign without disgrace. Frémont had led five expeditions into California, earning him the nickname the Pathfinder. He had also been U.S. senator from California and governor of the Arizona Territory. His appeal derived in part from his having been a Democrat until he resigned from the party in protest over the Kansas-Nebraska Act. A dashing figure himself, he had by his side his wife, Jessie, renowned as the beautiful, fiery daughter of Jacksonian Democrat Thomas Hart Benton. Drawing on the appeal of Frémont’s views and persona, the party adopted as its slogan for the presidential campaign, “Free speech, free press, free soil, free men, Fremont and victory!”

  Having chosen Frémont to lead the ticket, the delegates looked for a solid Whig as vice president. The early frontrunner was former New Jersey senator William Dayton, but when Illinois delegates complained that the party was overlooking the middle of the country, they arranged for John Allison of Pennsylvania to put Lincoln’s name into consideration for vice president because he was “the prince of fellows, and an Old-Line Whig.”26 Illinois delegate William Archer seconded the nomination, saying that he had known Lincoln for thirty years and had always found him “as pure a patriot as ever lived.”27 Lincoln’s friend John Palmer added his endorsement, saying, “We [in Illinois] can lick Buchanan any way, but I think we can do it a little easier if we have Lincoln on the ticket with John C. Fremont.”28


  By the time Lincoln was nominated for vice president, more than half the delegates were already committed to other candidates. In fact, Lincoln was not even present; he was riding the circuit. Dayton eventually won the contest with 253 votes, but the 110 votes cast for Lincoln placed him second in a crowded field of fifteen candidates. When David Davis told him the news that he had been nominated for vice president, Lincoln joked, “I reckon that ain’t me; there’s another great man in Massachusetts named Lincoln, and I reckon it’s him.”29 Yet Lincoln felt the sting once again of beginning a campaign too late as he had done in prior congressional races, especially since this time, without any effort, he had finished second within his party for its nomination for the second-highest office in the land. With effort, he could improve vastly on that.

  As the 1856 general election approached, Pierce tried to manage Bleeding Kansas in a way that would not hurt his party’s nominee, Buchanan. This meant he continued to put all the force of the national government behind the proslavery forces and enforced their selection of a proslavery constitution for Kansas. In response, Republicans focused on only a single issue: that the Democrats and their attachment to slavery were fanning the flames of war. Democrats argued that Pierce was enforcing the principle of popular sovereignty only when it favored slavery and Buchanan would simply continue to maintain the same policy. When the dust settled, the arguments of both parties did not matter: The election split almost entirely between free states and slave states. Buchanan won seventeen states, including all but one of the slave states, while Frémont won only nine states and received no electoral votes in ten of the fourteen slave states. Buchanan won the electoral vote, 174–114.