Beyond Illinois, Lincoln boosted his stature, while the harder Douglas kept harping on his close alliance with Clay, the more it weakened his support among Democrats. Democrats had never been a particularly harmonious party, but those who had not yet fled to the Republican Party or others were largely strong advocates for the maintenance and extension of slavery. John Todd Stuart, for example, had become a Democrat by the time Lincoln was in Congress. In 1856, he had supported Buchanan for president. Nevertheless, as the 1860 presidential election neared, he was growing increasingly frustrated with the party’s pandering to the slave-owners. Lincoln was not going to get his vote (which went to third-party candidate John Crittenden), but neither would Douglas. It was clear to both Douglas and Lincoln that as 1858 turned to 1859 and 1860, Democrats like Stuart were wasting their votes or flocking to the Republican Party. Either way, the Republican nominee would be the beneficiary of the exodus.
VII
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After the debates, Lincoln told a friend that they “gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way; and though I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of the civil liberty long after I am gone.”93 He told another friend, “The fight must go on. The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one, or even, one hundred defeats.”94 If the great question of the day was the future of slavery, and if Douglas was the likely Democratic nominee for president, Lincoln knew—and anyone reading newspapers reporting the debates around the country knew—that everyone could see there was only one Republican in the country who had stood on the same stage as Douglas for seven straight debates and given as good as he got. It was unimportant that Lincoln was not in the Senate to debate Douglas. He had already more than held his own with Douglas in public, while the other contenders for the 1860 presidential election had not done as well when they had the chance in Congress.
Notwithstanding the themes he had sounded in his debates with Douglas, the Lincoln of 1858 and 1859 was not a starry-eyed follower of Clay, nor was he unmindful of the genuine challenges facing his party and the country. He had learned from not only Clay’s successes but his failures. As far back as 1852, Lincoln suggested that the “signal failure of Henry Clay, and other good and great men, in 1849, to effect anything in favor of gradual emancipation in Kentucky, together with a thousand other signs, extinguishes that hope utterly.” He added, “Not a single state” had abolished slavery since the founding era. “That spirit,” he said, “which desired the peaceful extinction of slavery has itself become extinct. [The] Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.” As for the ultimate fate of slavery, Lincoln said, “The problem is too mighty for me.” He said “peaceful, gradual emancipation” was no longer a viable option in the United States.95
Lincoln the pragmatist would not say this out loud in his debates with Douglas or in public. If he had, it would have ended all hope of his appealing to anyone who did not want to embrace slavery as the most outspoken Southerners did. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, Bleeding Kansas, and the splintering of the Democratic Party presented the newly established Republican Party with an opening it could exploit—and Lincoln planned to do so.
Rather than back away from pushing for the extension of slavery for the sake of another last-minute compromise to save the Union, Jefferson Davis did the opposite. On July 6, 1859, he proclaimed, “There is not probably an intelligent mind among our own citizens who doubts either the moral or legal right of the institution of African slavery.”96
A little more than two months later, Lincoln removed doubt about where he stood on the great issue of the day, fully casting aside whatever despair he had in 1852. In a speech on September 16, 1859, to a largely pro-Chase audience in Columbus, Ohio, Lincoln again relied on Clay as his guide, reusing one of his favorite quotes of Clay telling “an audience that if they would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, they must go back to the era of our independence and muzzle the cannon which thundered its annual joyous return on the Fourth of July; they must blow out the moral lights around us.” This imagery plainly appealed to Lincoln, who now adapted it to the task at hand of calling
attention to the fact that in a preeminent degree these popular sovereigns are at this work; blowing out the moral lights around us; teaching that the negro is no longer a man, but a brute; that the Declaration has nothing to do with him; that he ranks with the crocodile and the reptile; that man, with only body and soul, is a matter of dollars and cents. I suggest to this portion of Ohio Republicans, or Democrats [that] there is now going on among you a steady process of debauching public opinion on this subject.97
Here Lincoln might well have been intentionally doing something far more pragmatic—he may have been saying different things to different people, tailoring his message to appeal to his audience (as Douglas had charged in the debates). Lincoln could have been testing the waters, feeling out who else might share this bleak opinion. He sounded conservative to Browning and Stuart but not to Giddings and Wilmot. He was creating a big enough tent of supporters to include not just the old-line Whigs but the growing masses who opposed slavery. Lincoln was not without principle. He drew a line at secession; Clay always had opposed it, just as Jackson did in 1832. He found the bridge that connected the two.
With Jackson and Clay as his inspirations, Lincoln set his sights squarely on the presidency. More nationally prominent, better-known national figures than Lincoln, such as Seward, Chase, and former Missouri attorney general Edward Bates, were maneuvering to secure the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1860. With the date of the mid-May convention fast approaching, the leading contenders gave barely if any thought to the rangy Westerner who had never impressed them in person. Among party leaders, he was widely regarded as a second-tier candidate at best.
However, losing the Senate race to Stephen Douglas made Abraham Lincoln a national figure. Lincoln knew how Jackson, Taylor, and Clay had each made of their failures and built their presidential campaigns by rallying the support not just of the public but also party leaders and the press. He began following—if not perfecting—that path immediately after his debates with Douglas, mailing copies of his speeches and debate transcripts and highlights around the country to friendly newspapers, old friends, and political contacts he was keen to nurture.
The object of Lincoln’s efforts was to insert himself into the presidential race, already well underway, beginning with his speech at the Cooper Union Institute in New York on February 27, 1860. Lincoln had stumped for Republican candidates throughout the North, and he was hopeful, after Republican successes in state and local races in key midterm elections, that his candidacy for the presidency held greater promise. The Cooper Union appearance (part of a series of lectures that winter) gave Lincoln the opportunity to move from a second-level candidate to the front ranks. The speech held the prospect of enabling him to secure the support of the Republican elite in New York City, as well as to audiences all over the Northeast and New England through the favorable newspaper coverage that Lincoln was carefully cultivating at the same time.
In the biggest race of his life, Lincoln projected his moderate self. He understood that he was in William Seward’s home state but that the sponsors of the debate came from the anti-Seward wing of the party and therefore favored Salmon Chase. Lincoln could expect few sympathetic supporters in the audience, but having lived for more than two decades in a state and county dominated by Democrats, Lincoln was used to being around people who didn’t support him. He stayed out of the fight between Seward and Chase. Instead, he would let them knock each other off in their quest for the nomination. Meanwhile, he would seek to reach the broad middle of the Republican Party as well as Anti-Nebraska Democrats.
A further challenge was not to be overshadowed
by the two men who were scheduled to appear before him in the series of lectures scheduled at the Cooper Union Institute that winter. The first was Frank Blair of Missouri, Jackson’s longtime friend and a Democratic Party founder who left the party over its embrace of slavery. The former editor of the Democratic Party’s favored newspaper, Blair focused his remarks on attacking slavery. The second speaker was Cassius Clay of Kentucky, a cousin of Henry Clay’s and an ardent foe of slavery. He attacked slavery just as relentlessly as Blair. Lincoln was on the card because the organizers felt that all three of the speakers—Blair, Clay, and Lincoln—would help Chase by weakening enthusiasm for Seward.
Lincoln had no problem denouncing slavery—he had done that before. But in the Cooper Union address, he felt the need to do something he had not yet done with the diligence it required: deep research on the founding. Following Logan’s example as well as his own advice and experiences, he hit the books. Because the material he found was so copious, he made sure he had the written research before him when he spoke. It was only the second time he used a manuscript when giving a major speech.
Lincoln pushed his appearance back to two weeks after his birthday, February 27. He made it later than the organizers had wanted so there would be less time between the event and the Republican national convention scheduled for early that summer. He spent hours in the Illinois State House’s library, just across the street from his law office, and, between court appearances, he pored over the history of the Constitution, the Northwest Ordinance, and Jonathan Elliot’s multivolume set of the debates on the Constitution in the various state ratifying conventions.
The speech was unique in two ways: its tone and its substance.
Its first section reflected Lincoln’s long hours in the law library. Responding to Douglas’s claim that the nation’s Founders had endorsed popular sovereignty, Lincoln conceded that “our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.”98 He then demonstrated something he had not done in debates with Douglas but which was enormously effective in this rarified setting: He examined the actions of the signers of the Constitution to establish that “our fathers,” about whom Douglas spoke so reverentially, actually supported the power of Congress to regulate slavery in the territories. Systematically going through votes on such measures as the Northwest Ordinance (signed no less than by George Washington, he emphasized), Clay’s Missouri Compromise, and the acts that Congress took to organize the Mississippi and Louisiana territories, Lincoln showed that of the thirty-nine men who signed the Constitution, twenty-three had had opportunities to vote on federal authority over slavery in the territories; of them, twenty-one voted to ban slavery from the territories. Turning to the remaining sixteen Founders of the Constitution who never had the chance to participate in the later votes, Lincoln argued that fifteen of them had opposed slavery and left “significant hints” that they would have voted to restrict it from the territories if given the chance to do so.99 He figured the framers lined up thirty-six to three in favor of the power of Congress to regulate slavery in the territories. He mentioned Douglas by name only five times but pronounced the names of the signers of the Constitution thirty-nine times, George Washington’s name eight times, and Thomas Jefferson’s name twice.
In the next part of his speech, Lincoln appealed to the South, not unlike the way his mentor Henry Clay had tried to many times on the floor of the Senate. Lincoln hoped to convey to Southerners that he was no threat to them. It was Southerners who insisted on straying from the legacy of the framers. Placating the South with half measures like popular sovereignty would abandon the intentions of the framers, Lincoln argued, and it would fail, he predicted, because nothing short of federal activism on behalf of slavery would satisfy Southern demands. If there was a breach coming, it would be the South’s fault, not the North’s.
Concluding, Lincoln proclaimed the immorality of slavery. He could not entirely ignore the crowd in front of him. So, he felt comfortable saying, “If slavery is right,” then “all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right.”100 But slavery was not right. Only a platform like the Republican one, based on the idea that slavery was wrong, was morally and politically right. Lincoln concluded by imploring his fellow Republicans not to delude themselves into “groping for some middle ground between the right and wrong,” which did not exist, but instead to “have faith that right makes might, and in that faith . . . dare to do our duty as we understand it.”101
This conclusion sounded less like Clay and more like Lincoln’s fiery House Divided Speech, but Lincoln deftly broadened his appeal. He did not emphasize compromise, though his tone was respectful when discussing Southerners, several of whom were long-standing friends of his. Nor did he openly stress Clay’s name as he’d done in his debates with Douglas. Douglas was barely in the speech; he didn’t need to be. This, after all, was not Illinois, or Clay country. These Republicans were more radical than the Democrats he lived with. These were Seward and Chase folks, not Lincoln men. Convincing this crowd of his reverence for Clay was unnecessary and unproductive. Clay was there, to be sure, albeit in spirit and Lincoln’s arguments, as well as the presence of Clay’s cousin. (Abe even chose to stay at the Astor, the same place where Webster and Clay had each spoken.) It was enough that Lincoln knew he was following in the footsteps of his mentors. Lincoln cast the speech in such a way that scholars, to this day, do not agree on whether it was conservative or moderate. The difficulty of pinning it down as one or the other proves that it achieved Lincoln’s aim of appealing to both. Yet, in the end, the substance and style were much closer to Clay than to Seward, Chase, or Owen Lovejoy, son of Elijah Lovejoy and a popular abolitionist preacher.
As Harold Holzer explains in his study of the Cooper Union speech and its consequences, Lincoln’s delivery was more refined and sophisticated than ever before. Lincoln did not use the same tropes that he had used to reach the voters in Illinois, instead aligning himself and his arguments unmistakably with the framers. As Holzer notes, “Having identified thirty-nine framers whose slavery votes cry out for analysis, [Lincoln] w[ould] repeat the number thirty-nine for emphasis twenty separate times in a parallel burst of repetition for effect.”102 As Holzer notes further, on federal authority to regulate slavery, Lincoln repeated fifteen times the sentence, “Our fathers, when they framed the government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better than we do now.”103 Lincoln used the phrase our fathers at least five times in the speech and the word fathers nine times.104 Further driving home this message was the technique, used by Clay and Webster, of “alternatively parallel and contradictory double phrasing—the device of antiphony—to neatly set up his audience for his arguments.”105 Antiphony is an old form of singing in which voices alternate, like the recitations in church when the leader of the congregation reads a line followed by the congregation reading another, back and forth, until the end. And so, Lincoln used the phrase you say repeatedly to introduce some of the arguments of the Southerners threatening secession but then following each time with his blunt denials, which were sure to resonate with the crowd and those later reading the speech.
When Lincoln finished, the audience erupted in thunderous applause. New York Times editor Henry Raymond declared Lincoln a national leader of “preeminent ability” and New York’s second choice for the Republican nomination after Seward.106 Mason Brayman, a Democrat from Springfield, who knew Lincoln from his early days as a lawyer for the Illinois Central Railroad, had called on Lincoln before the speech and agreed to stand in the back of the hall and signal if he could not hear Lincoln’s voice. No signal came. Brayman reported that Lincoln’s voice, like his rhetoric, filled the room.
The next evening, Lincoln visited the offices of the New York Tribune to correct proofs of the speech that would app
ear in the newspaper the next day. In the weeks that followed, several other newspapers throughout the Northeast and back home reprinted his address. The New York press was the most productive and powerful in the nation, and it churned out favorable news about his Cooper Union address that was read widely throughout the region. Lincoln and his friends distributed copies of the speech as far and wide as they could, while Lincoln began a speaking tour in the Midwest and Northeast. The local Illinois Journal produced pamphlets of the speech that it sold in bulk to Republican clubs throughout the country.
VIII
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Nothing in Lincoln’s life led him to doubt that he had the credentials to become president. Many presidents had been less qualified. In his lifetime, he had seen Zachary Taylor, a man with no political experience whatsoever, win his party’s nomination and the presidency. Winfield Scott had been the Whig candidate in 1852. He had seen men with considerable political experience—Henry Clay and Lewis Cass—fail repeatedly to win the presidency and losing each time to a candidate with a less impressive record of service to the country. He had seen a man with no meaningful political experience—Franklin Pierce—win the presidency and then stumble so badly in office that he couldn’t even win his party’s nomination for reelection. He had seen a man with perhaps the most extensive résumé of any politician yet running for the presidency, James Buchanan, fail so miserably as president that he became the second to have no chance even to secure his party’s nomination. He remembered his friend and colleague John Quincy Adams, with a résumé as good as Buchanan’s, finish his one term without a single legislative accomplishment. Neither of the leaders often considered greatest, Washington and Jackson, had had any executive experience in political office before becoming president. Lincoln did not have their military records, but neither did his likely Democratic opponent. Like Clay, Lincoln had no executive experience, but Douglas could barely claim more, a lackluster stint of less than three months as Illinois’s secretary of state.
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