Lincoln's Mentors

by Michael J. Gerhardt

  There were three things a successful candidate needed, and Lincoln had them all. The first was a compelling vision of the Constitution and the future of the country. Vision had trumped experience in nearly every presidential election so far, and when experience seemed to matter (as with John Quincy Adams and Buchanan), it mattered less than the winning candidates’ politics, which were simply vision wrapped differently. Lincoln asserted his vision strongly in his debates with Douglas and even more clearly at Cooper Union.

  Next in importance was campaign organization. Lincoln’s was a patchwork of the networks he had used to disseminate his Cooper Union speech; his many contacts with Republican-friendly newspapers throughout the country; the candidates he’d helped in Illinois, the Midwest, and Northeast; and his close-knit band of supporters in Illinois. While Lincoln was speaking at Cooper Union, his people were already on the ground in Chicago preparing for the upcoming Republican convention. Powerful local newspapers were already singing his praises. The state’s largest newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, run by his friend Joseph Medill, continued to quote Lincoln’s speeches freely and praise his every move, as it had done during his Senate campaign.

  The final factor was party unity. Lincoln had been preaching its importance for decades. He had pushed for it in 1844 with Clay, 1848 with Taylor, 1852 with Scott, and 1856 with Frémont. Taylor was the only one of those who had won, but like Harrison, he had died at the beginning of his term. There was no Whig legacy to run on. Taylor’s short-lived victory of 1848 was the only high point before the Democratic decline of Pierce and Buchanan. In this election, the winner was likely to be whichever party could hold itself together in addressing the monumental issue of slavery. In his run against Douglas for the Senate, Lincoln had actually gotten more votes than Douglas because the Republican Party organization within the state had performed better than its Democratic counterpart. Districts could swing states, and Republicans held the advantage in organization in almost every region of the country except the South.

  The Democratic Party was splintering well before 1860. Douglas’s split with Buchanan in 1857 foreshadowed the difficulty that their party faced in the run-up to the 1860 election. If Douglas got the Democratic nomination as expected, it was hardly a sure thing that his party would follow him. It had been hemorrhaging since 1854. But if Lincoln secured the Republican nomination, it was likely that the party would follow.

  This brought Lincoln back to his ground game in Chicago. It was no accident the convention would be held in Lincoln’s backyard. When the Republican National Committee met in New York on February 22, 1860, Lincoln’s friend Norman Judd came as the representative of Illinois. When Seward’s and Chase’s representatives could not agree on a city, with Seward’s pushing for New York City and Chase’s pushing for an Ohio city, Judd astutely proposed a neutral city, which he reminded everyone was in a state—Illinois—that Republicans needed to win but had no serious candidate of its own in the mix for the nomination. The committee agreed on Chicago. Judd never mentioned Lincoln but had given him a boost with the convention being held on his turf and not that of any other serious contender.

  Earlier in February, newspapers in Springfield and Chicago had endorsed him for president. In New York, Richard McCormick, a member of the Young Men’s Republican Union, had generated admirable publicity for Lincoln. Lincoln had won his first election with the wily veteran John Todd Stuart calling the shots. This time, Stuart was not at Lincoln’s side; instead, Lincoln turned to the sharpest political veteran available, the Yale-educated judge and former legislator David Davis. With the help of Norman Judd, Joseph Medill, John Palmer, Ward Hill Lamon, William Herndon, and Leonard Swett, Davis had been maneuvering months before the Republican convention to produce a Lincoln victory. For Davis and his team, the Republican convention became just another local convention to orchestrate. Lincoln gave Davis broad instructions on what to do, while Davis handled the day-to-day logistics.

  Lincoln was the favorite of the Illinois delegation but of no others, which meant if matters were decided on the first ballot, he would lose. Lincoln and Davis figured the best strategy, just had been the case writ small with Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech, was to stay alive as a candidate for as long as possible in the hope that the front-runners—Seward, Chase, and perhaps Bates—knocked each other off. Seward and Chase were well known, but they were well known not as moderates or Clay men but as radical abolitionists. Bates was a weak moderate but had the support of Horace Greeley, the founder and editor of the influential New York Tribune. The strategy was for Lincoln’s surrogates to get each of the major candidates’ camps to consider Lincoln as their second choice. James Polk had entered the 1844 convention in a similar position and come out the winner, albeit after he was proposed a compromise candidate on the eighth ballot.

  Despite the odds, Bates mattered because Missouri was a swing state. He had served in the state house and for one term in the U.S. House of Representatives, and he had been a well-regarded Missouri attorney general and a well-known, popular figure in national Whig circles. Bates—and Jackson’s friends, the Blair family—had significant sway over whichever way the delegation leaned at the convention.

  To get the Missouri delegation to make him their second choice, Lincoln turned to Orville Browning. Browning had come to Illinois by way of Missouri, and he was a longtime friend of Bates, a founder of the Republican Party in Illinois and an old-line Whig who revered Clay. Before the Illinois Republican convention gathered, the two met, and Browning told Lincoln he was going to push for Bates but would back Lincoln as a second choice if Bates faltered. That sounded fine with Lincoln, who was already, unbeknownst to Browning, working through his surrogates to solidify support among Illinois Republican delegates before the convention began. Lincoln’s plan worked—Bates’s nomination was dead on arrival, and Browning backed Lincoln in Bloomington.

  Lincoln asked John Palmer to help Davis in Chicago. Palmer had become a leader in the state’s Republican Party after leaving the Democratic Party in disgust over its virulent proslavery orientation. Palmer instructed the Illinois state delegates to use all “honorable” means to secure Lincoln’s nomination for president. When the time came to select at-large delegates to the convention from Illinois, Lincoln urged Browning’s inclusion. He trusted Browning to support the state convention’s decision once Bates collapsed as a candidate. Lincoln had expected Bates to fold early.

  Davis, Medill, and Palmer began pushing the Illinois delegates to support Lincoln well before the convention started. With Davis in charge and everyone aware of Lincoln’s strategy, Lincoln went to Springfield to await developments. It was no secret that Seward was the front-runner. Harper’s Weekly published on its cover a large engraving of the eleven leading candidates for the Republican Party’s nomination, with Seward as the largest in the center and the others in smaller portraits around the edges. Seward and his mentor Thurlow Weed had been lobbying delegations at least as hard and as long as Lincoln’s team. Months before the convention, Seward went from one Republican stronghold to another trying to drum up support for his candidacy.

  However, his case did not match the story that Lincoln’s friends were spreading throughout the convention to persuade state delegations to accept Lincoln as a second choice to whomever was their first choice. It was the story of a self-made man, who was born in a log cabin, had no schooling, worked as a farmhand, split rails for a living, and taught himself law. An honest man and a man of the people he was. The nicknames “Old Abe” and “Honest Abe” made the rounds of the convention. Lincoln could not be sure that slogans would win him the presidency, but his aides left nothing to chance, coming up with the memorable image of Lincoln as “The Railsplitter.” He had bested Douglas in their debates. It didn’t matter that these assertions were not all literally true. Lincoln had learned that what people believed was more important than what actually happened. Myths and stories moved people, and if some exaggeration was part of the game—and it was
on all sides—at least it could be applied for noble purposes.

  Davis assigned Browning and Swett to lobby state delegations to make Lincoln their second choice, an effective strategy ensuring that once a front-runner stumbled, Lincoln would get his delegates—and Lincoln figured rightly that Seward and Chase each would stumble. On the day before the convention began, Browning wrote in his diary, “By request I went in company with Judge Davis [to] meet and confer with the Maine delegation; and at their solicitation made them a speech. Also called upon the delegation from New Hampshire. At night we received a message from the Massachusetts delegation, and called upon them at their rooms.”107 Davis and John Palmer, who later would be elected governor of Illinois, called on the New Jersey delegation. Each delegation agreed to Lincoln as a second choice. On that same day, Davis and Jesse Dubois wired Lincoln, “We are quiet but moving between heaven & earth. Nothing will beat us but old fogy politicians. The heart of the delegates are with us.”108 When Davis was not lobbying state delegations, he met with several old political friends, whom he enlisted to support Lincoln. He persuaded his friends in the Indiana delegation to go with Lincoln, though when they broke his way a rumor began that Davis had promised Caleb Smith, a prominent Indiana lawyer, a Cabinet post. Davis denied it. Lincoln denied it. In 1861, Lincoln selected Smith as his interior secretary.

  On the second day of the convention, Browning and Gustave Koerner, a fellow member of the Illinois bar and Lincoln’s connection with the growing German American population, were following Francis Blair of Missouri, who visited the Indiana, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania delegations to urge their support for his friend Bates. Browning and Koerner urged each of the delegations to support Lincoln as a second choice. The two met again with the three delegations later in the evening and secured their agreement to favor Lincoln as a second choice if the time came. Although Lincoln telegraphed Davis, “I authorize no bargains and will be bound by none,” and attempted, without success, to have a note delivered to Davis declaring, “Make no contracts that bind me,” Davis ignored the instructions. Instead, he engaged in negotiations with Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, one of the weaker contenders for the nomination, that left the impression, at least to Cameron and his supporters, of a deal to eventually deliver his delegation, if needed, to Lincoln in exchange for a Cabinet post.109

  On May 18, 1860, the balloting began. In keeping with the custom at the time, Judd put Lincoln’s name into nomination in a single sentence: “I desire, on behalf of the delegation from Illinois, to put in nomination, as a candidate for President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois.”110

  On the first ballot, Seward led with 173½ votes, while Lincoln followed with 102. Cameron had 50½, Chase had 49, and Bates had 48. It was a surprise to find Seward lacked a majority, but an even bigger surprise that Lincoln was in second place on the first ballot. Lincoln had not only won the unanimous support of the Illinois and Indiana delegations but also unexpected support 7–1 from New Hampshire, where he had spent much of March. Seward received the remaining vote in New Hampshire, while Connecticut gave two of its votes to Lincoln and none to Seward.

  On the second ballot, Lincoln showed considerably more momentum than anyone else. Seward gained 11 votes but was well short of the 233 required for the nomination. Lincoln gained 79 because of defections from Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Chase’s home state of Ohio, where Lincoln had campaigned hard in the months preceding the convention. After the second ballot, Lincoln was only 3½ votes behind Seward.

  The end was clearly in sight. Seward had nowhere to go but down, and the other state delegations were breaking for Lincoln. On the third ballot, more defections from Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Maryland went for Lincoln, and he was suddenly only 1½ votes shy of the majority needed for nomination. Ohio, which had elected Chase as both a senator and governor, struck the final blow—it moved four votes over to Lincoln. With that, it was over. Seward’s supporters could add as well as anyone else and asked for the nomination to become unanimous. Many Seward delegates cried in shock, while Lincoln’s supporters, at Davis’s direction, carried out a life-size portrait of the winner onto the stage. The convention chose Hannibal Hamlin, a senator from Maine and a founder of the Republican Party, as Lincoln’s running mate.

  Nathan Knapp, chairman of the Scott County, Illinois, Republican Party, had been assigned the job of keeping Lincoln informed back in Springfield. At the end of each of the first two ballots, he telegraphed the news to Lincoln. The future president was lounging in a chair at the Springfield telegraph office when Knapp’s next telegram came: “We did it. Glory be to God.” Lincoln accepted congratulations from all around the crowded room and from the wall of people outside. He was calm. “I knew this would come when I saw the second ballot,” he told well-wishers.111 On breaking free from the crowd, he said, “Well gentlemen there is a little woman at our house who is probably more interested in this dispatch than I am.”112 Koerner, Swett, and Judd were among those telegraphing Lincoln not to come to Chicago. Davis, too, instructed Lincoln, “Don’t come here for God’s sake. Write no letters and make no promises till you see me.”113 Lincoln did not come, and he made no promises.

  Two weeks before the Republican convention, the Democrats had deadlocked and adjourned without naming a nominee. They were more sharply divided than ever before. Eventually, they split into two camps, one favoring the party’s eventual nominee, Stephen Douglas, and the other calling itself the Southern Democratic Party, which backed Buchanan’s vice president John Breckinridge of Kentucky for president. (The incumbent president, Buchanan, urged Democrats to back his vice president.) Once again, when it came to Lincoln, Douglas was magnanimous. Although James Russell Lowell joined other Eastern newspaper and magazine editors bemoaning the fact that Seward had not won, Douglas told a group of Republicans in Washington that they had made no mistake: “Gentlemen, you have nominated a very able and a very honest man.”114 John Bell, a former House speaker and senator, ran as the candidate for the Constitutional Unionist Party, whose agenda was to appeal to disenchanted Whigs who wished to take no stance on slavery. The Republican Party and several publishers produced hastily assembled campaign biographies of Lincoln, some including the text of the Cooper Union Institute address.

  With several Southern states threatening to secede if Lincoln won and the Democratic Party severely split, Lincoln’s assignment was simple to understand but difficult to execute: If the Republican Party remained unified as Lincoln urged and he helped them by keeping his own counsel to Taylor to stay silent during the general election (as Lincoln wished Clay had in 1844), the election was his. It was one of the more difficult challenges he ever faced. Surrogates, like Browning, did the talking, as they fanned out to lobby or reassure old Whigs or former Democrats to go with Lincoln. The five months between Lincoln’s nomination in May and election day in early November 1860 were the longest stretch in his political life when he made no public appearances and gave no speeches. Lincoln’s surrogates, including Browning, who lobbied old Whigs, made his case around the country. But Lincoln stayed silent. In spite of his repeated protestations of being “bored-bored badly” (as Herndon related after Lincoln’s death), he followed the advice he had given to Taylor—and party leaders were giving to him—to keep his mouth shut. He did, and the reward was the presidency.

  Chapter Six

  “He Was Entirely Ignorant Not Only of the Duties, But of the Manner of Doing Business”

  (1860–1861)

  In the 1860 election, Abraham Lincoln’s lack of executive and congressional experience was both an asset and a liability. On the one hand, it helped him win the presidency. Nearly half a continent away from the disputes ripping Congress apart and several hundred miles from the violence in Kansas, he never had to directly confront, much less vote on, any of the policy proposals bandied back and forth in either place. His lack of a record made him a small target, overshadowed by first-tier candidates Seward and Chas
e, who took most of the hits. People knew Lincoln by his words, not his actions. In some parts of the country, they had read about him. In the Northeast, many people knew him from his campaigning. (He gave 175 speeches in the run-up to the presidential election.) Newspapers combed his statements for clues, but most journalists concluded he was weak and out of his depth. Indeed, the editors of many newspapers had grave doubts that Lincoln was good at anything else than telling stories and jokes.

  Lincoln might have been gratified to know that he didn’t have to do much to exceed most people’s expectations of him. Unlike Jackson, he came into office with no mandate. Though he had won the election with 180 electoral votes, he had won less than 40 percent of the popular votes, a lower proportion than Jackson had won in 1824. (Lincoln’s three opponents together won 123 electoral votes.) With the fragmentation of the Democratic Party, Douglas finished far worse than expected, and Lincoln’s closest competitor turned out to be Buchanan’s vice president John Crittenden, who had run as the nominee of the Southern Democrat party. Douglas won only one state (Missouri) and received the fewest number of electoral votes of the three candidates running against Lincoln.

  Lincoln was the first president to be elected from outside the South since William Henry Harrison’s victory two decades before, the first president to come from the West since Jackson (since Tennessee at that time was considered Western frontier), and one-half of the first successful national ticket that did not have a Southerner on it. He was, and still is, the only president who ever argued a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. He was the first man elected president without carrying a single Southern state.