At a banquet that evening at the Cassell House, one of the editors proposed that Lincoln run for governor. Lincoln quickly replied that it would not do to have an old-line Whig head the ticket; it would be better to try to elect an anti-Nebraska Democrat. Richard J. Oglesby of Decatur, a hero of the Mexican War, was called upon to make a toast. He toasted Lincoln “as the warm and consistent friend of Illinois, and our next candidate for the U.S. Senate.”
Lincoln rose and said, “The latter part of that sentiment I am in favor of.” He then addressed the dinner guests. He told them that “not being an editor” reminded him of “the ugly man riding through a wood who met a woman, also on horseback. She stopped and exclaimed, ‘Well, for land sake, you are the homeliest man I ever saw.’
“ ‘Yes, madam, but I can’t help it,’ said he.
“ ‘No, I suppose not,’ she observed, ‘but you might stay at home.’ ”
Lincoln gave the editors his word that he would “buckle on his armor for the approaching contest.”
In the spring, Herndon took the lead in calling for a county convention to select delegates for the anti-Nebraska convention in Blooming-ton. Lincoln was out of town and Herndon, confident that he knew Lincoln’s sentiments, signed his name. The list of delegates was then published in the Illinois State Journal.
The list had barely been printed when John Todd Stuart stormed into Herndon and Lincoln’s law office asking, “Did Lincoln authorize you to sign the list?”
Herndon replied with an emphatic “No.”
Stuart quickly responded, “Then you have ruined him.” Stuart, who had been Lincoln’s first mentor in the study of law, was yet another person wishing to define him. By 1856, Stuart had become deeply concerned that Lincoln was being recruited by the Republicans, whom he equated with radical abolitionism.
Herndon thought he knew Lincoln’s mind, but immediately wrote him in Tazewell County where he was attending court. He told Lincoln how much of a stir this was causing among his conservative friends. Herndon needed a response right away.
Lincoln responded: “All right; go ahead. Will meet you—radicals and all.”
ON MAY 28, 1856, Lincoln traveled by train from Danville to Decatur on his way to Bloomington. Upon learning there was no train north until the following morning, he strolled about town with other delegates to the upcoming anti-Nebraska convention. While sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree, Lincoln reminisced about coming to Decatur twenty-five years earlier as a young man from Indiana. He pointed to the exact place on the public square where he had stopped the wagon and team of oxen he was driving. Lincoln confessed he was worried about what might transpire in Bloomington. He feared the radicals in the northern counties would be well represented in Bloomington, but voiced his concern that there might not be many representatives from the conservative southern Illinois counties.
Arriving in Bloomington the next day, Lincoln made his way to Judge Davis’s mansion where he was invited to stay. Later he stopped in a small jewelry store where he bought his first pair of spectacles for thirty-seven and a half cents. He told his walking companion, lawyer Henry C. Whitney, that “he had got to be forty-seven years old, and ‘kinder’ needed them.”
In the evening, a crowd gathered in front of the Pike House hotel and called for speeches. Lincoln stepped forward, claimed he wasn’t prepared to speak that evening, but then proceeded to do so. He talked about the “outrages” in Kansas and said, “A man couldn’t think, dream, or breathe of a free state there, but what he was kicked, cuffed, shot down and hung.”
On the morning of May 29, 1856, everyone was eager for the arrival of the Chicago dailies. Isaac N. Arnold, a former Democrat and now Free Soil politician from Chicago, stood on the main stairway and read from two stories that the delegates had been following. Eight days earlier a huge Kansas posse, including Missouri “border ruffians,” had swept into Lawrence, Kansas, with the intent of striking terror among the rising free-state population. Finding that the free-state leaders had fled, they proceeded to throw two printing presses into the streets and turned five cannon on the Free State Hotel, finally setting the building on fire. Although no one was killed, homes and businesses were pillaged, and the story of the “Sack of Lawrence” ignited antislavery men across the North.
Arnold then read aloud about events in Washington. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts had delivered an eloquent but bitterly antagonistic “Crime against Kansas” speech on May 19 and 20, 1856, including fierce personal criticisms of Senator James Mason of Virginia and Senator Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina. On May 22, as the Senate was adjourning, Sumner was attacked by young South Carolina representative Preston S. Brooks, a nephew of Butler, and beaten into bloody unconsciousness with a walking cane.
With everyone talking about Kansas and Sumner, the convention was called to order. About 270 delegates, mostly from northern and central Illinois, joined together in Major’s Hall, located on the third floor over Humphrey’s Cheap Store. The call that had gone out was for a “State Convention of the Anti-Nebraska Party of Illinois.” There were at least two stumbling blocks for using the name “Republican.” First, the name had become associated with the abolitionists, and many delegates detested the abolitionists as much as they did Douglas. Second, Douglas had been using the characterization “Black Republicans” as a way to play the race card.
The artist pictures the caning of Senator Charles Sumner on May 22, 1856. Above the scene were words from Henry Ward Beecher: “The symbol of the North is the pen; the symbol of the South is the bludgeon.”
Orville Browning, conservative lawyer from Quincy, led the effort to put together a platform. In its final form, it did not embrace the demands of the abolitionists, but rather reiterated the older logic that Congress had the right to keep slavery out of the territories. It condemned the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and called for the immediate admission of Kansas as a free state. With a nod to the Germans—a potential new force for the Republicans—it remained silent on temperance. As for the vexing issue of nativism, it included the statement that the new party would “proscribe no one, by legislation or otherwise, on account of religious opinions, or in consequence of place of birth.” Emerging out of Bloomington was an Illinois Republican Party, moderate in its beliefs and tone, ready to take its place within what had become a national Republican Party.
When the official business of the convention was completed, shouts rang out, “Lincoln! Lincoln! Lincoln!” Lincoln stepped forward, to “deafening applause,” to make the final speech of the convention. He spoke for nearly an hour and a half. The speech was so powerful that the newspaper reporters in the hall, spellbound, put down their pencils after the opening minutes and failed to record what Lincoln said. It was reportedly one of the most compelling speeches of his life. Some said that he spoke extemporaneously, but by now Lincoln never approached even the possibility of such a speech without careful preparation.
The Alton Weekly Courier was the only newspaper that carried a summary of the speech, and it was exceedingly brief. Lincoln spoke of the “pressing reasons” for the Republican Party to step forward at this time. As to the prospect of threats of disunion coming from the South, Lincoln replied, “The Union must be preserved in the purity of its principles as well as the integrity of its territorial parts.”
Because no stenographic reporter recorded the address, it has acquired the title of Lincoln’s “Lost Speech.” It’s surprising that Lincoln, even though he spoke without notes, did not later write the speech out, at least in summary form, for publication by local newspapers. Yet, his passion and eloquence were not lost on his audience. Herndon wrote ten years later, “I have heard or read all of Mr. Lincoln’s great speeches, and I give it as my opinion that the Bloomington speech was the grand effort of his life. … He had the fervor of a new convert; the smothered flame broke out; enthusiasm unusual to him blazed up, his eyes were aglow with an inspiration, he felt justice.”
IT WILL FOREVER BE D
EBATED whether Lincoln’s political career was essentially continuous or whether there was a new beginning in 1854. The friends who knew him best—even with their great respect for what he had already accomplished—would say there was something new in the anti-Nebraska Lincoln. In 1854, with the speech he delivered at Springfield and again at Peoria, he laid the foundation of ideas he would build upon in the next six years. Like anything new, Lincoln’s ideas went through a refining process. He began with opposition to the extension of slavery in the West in the political disguise of “popular sovereignty.” But he had long ago learned that simple opposition to expansion could never carry the day. Where he began to distinguish himself from his peers was his ability to offer affirmation—of the old Declaration of Independence and of a new vision for America.
Beneath the public figure dwelt a private man forging a deeper moral character as he clarified his personal and political identity. As Lincoln’s political star began to rise, his friends and colleagues often tried to define and sometimes even restrict who he was becoming. But the dynamism of the developing Lincoln could not be confined. Emphasizing his “ancient faith” in the Declaration of Independence, he was not to be bound even to the American Revolution and the founding generation. Though he grieved for the Whig Party, its passing opened up new prospects for political achievement and service that he had not known before. With the birth of the Republican Party, Lincoln left Bloomington with no political office but with something much more important—a political vision for the promise of America that would lead him into the future.
While Lincoln was in Chicago working on a lawsuit some attorney friends asked him for a photograph. He replied, “I don’t know why you boys want such a homely face.” Alexander Hesler tried to brush Lincoln’s hair away from his forehead. This “tousled hair” photograph made Lincoln smile and pleased his friends.
CHAPTER 12
A House Divided 1856–58
I BELIEVE THIS GOVERNMENT CANNOT ENDURE, PERMANENTLY HALF SLAVE AND HALF FREE.
I DO NOT EXPECT THE UNION TO BE DISSOLVED—I DO NOT EXPECT THE HOUSE TO FALL—BUT I DO EXPECT IT WILL CEASE TO BE DIVIDED.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Speech at the Republican convention, Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858
N JUNE 1856, ON THE EVE OF THE FIRST NATIONAL REPUBLICANconvention in Philadelphia, Abraham Lincoln was far away in Urbana, Illinois. He had arrived on Tuesday, June 17, to attend a special session of the Champaign County Court. He checked into a room at the American House hotel where he was joined by his close friends Judge David Davis and lawyer Henry C. Whitney.
The proprietor, John Dunaway, called his guests to meals by beating vigorously on a gong situated directly under the room where the three jurists slept. On Thursday morning, after their sleep was disturbed for a second morning, Davis and Whitney, by a majority vote, elected Lincoln to deal with the noisy annoyance. The next day, after the morning session of court, Lincoln went back to the hotel, took the gong down, and “secreted” it between two layers of a dining room table. When the proprietor attempted to call his boarders to the noon meal, he looked high and low but could not find the missing gong. When Whitney and Davis reached their room, there sat Lincoln, “looking amused, sheepish, and guilty, as if he had done something ridiculous as well as reprehensible.” The prank deserved a great laugh, and no one laughed harder than Lincoln.
The following day, June 20, 1856, the Chicago papers, arriving about the time of the noon court break, announced that Lincoln had received 110 votes for vice president at the Republican national convention, the second highest of any candidate. Davis and Whitney were “jubilant” at the news. Davis, recalling the prank of the day before, playfully admonished Lincoln: “Great business for a man who aspires to be Vice President of the United States.” To their surprise, the news “made slight impression on Lincoln.” Finally, he responded, “I reckon it’s not me. There’s another Lincoln down in Massachusetts. I’ve an idea he’s the one.”
The Republicans in Philadelphia offered a validation that Lincoln had become a national Republican leader. Yet, the forty-seven-year-old Lincoln, for a long time reluctant to join the Republican Party, had not held an elected office for seven years and was only one and a half years removed from his defeat for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. Given the whirlwind of events since he reemerged into politics two years before, who could dare predict what the next two years might bring for A. Lincoln, the man with the self-deprecating sense of humor.
THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION convened on June 17 at the Musical Fund Hall in Philadelphia. The party nominated John C. Frémont as its first presidential candidate. A forty-three-year-old military man and explorer, Frémont had become a hero after his expeditions through the American West. Born in the South, he had served briefly as one of the first two senators from California. He was strongly opposed to slavery. As a celebrity with great name recognition, Frémont won on the first ballot, with 530 votes to 37 for Judge John McLean of Pennsylvania, whom Lincoln had favored.
Delegates nominated fifteen names for vice president. Illinois delegate William B. Archer persuaded John Allison, a congressman from Pennsylvania, to nominate Lincoln. Archer, who had known Lincoln for thirty years, made a seconding speech on behalf of Illinois, calling Lincoln “as pure a patriot as ever lived.”
Lincoln garnered 110 votes on the first ballot, trailing only William L. Dayton, a former senator from New Jersey, who polled 221 votes. Most impressive was that Lincoln received votes from eleven states, stretching from Maine to California. Dayton was elected on the second ballot. Two days later, Archer wrote to Lincoln, “had we moved earlier,” he might have stood a stronger chance at the nomination.
Lincoln learned that a number of people outside of Illinois had stood up to commend his nomination. Lincoln wrote to one of them, John Van Dyke of New Brunswick, New Jersey, who had served with Lincoln in the Thirtieth Congress. He told Van Dyke, “When you meet Judge Dayton present my respects, and tell him I think him a far better man than I for the position he is in.”
LINCOLN THREW HIMSELF into the 1856 presidential campaign. Unlike 1852, when he had done little campaigning for the Whig presidential nominee, General Winfield Scott, Lincoln spoke everywhere on Frémont’s behalf. On June 23, 1856, in Urbana, he praised “the gallant Fremont,” and promised he would “devote considerable of his time to the work” of seeking his election.
Lincoln stumped for the first Republican presidential ticket, John C. Frémont and William Dayton, in 1856.
The Democratic Party, deeply split over the issue of slavery, “bleeding Kansas,” and the ongoing debate over the role of the states versus the federal government, nominated James Buchanan of Pennsylvania over Stephen Douglas as their presidential candidate. Buchanan’s political advantage was his absence. He had been out of the country the past four years serving as ambassador to England, and thus he was the only candidate not tarnished by the bruising battles over the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Douglas, who had worked hard to become his party’s star, was now seen by some as too controversial to be elected. Buchanan won the nomination on the seventeenth ballot. The party platform supported “popular sovereignty” as the means of settling the issue of slavery in the territories.
The presidential election of 1856 became a story of contrasts. Buchanan was born into a well-to-do family in Pennsylvania. He had never married. A tall, handsome man, he wore stiff, high stocks about his jowls that accentuated both his height and his formal personality. He had served five terms in the House of Representatives and ten years in the Senate. He also had served as minister to Russia under President Jackson and secretary of state under President Polk, and came to the campaign fresh from his service as minister to the Court of St. James’s in England under President Pierce. Never had a candidate brought more political experience to a presidential campaign.
Frémont was born in Georgia, an illegitimate child of a father who came to the United States as a penniless French-Canadian refugee. He mar
ried Jessie Benton, the beautiful daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Benton, a champion of Western expansion, helped Frémont get assignments in the 1840s to explore the entire American West. Frémont capitalized on five successful expeditions, traveling across the Rocky Mountains to California, to position himself as a young hero of a new party. Ironically, it was Buchanan, as secretary of state, who convinced the Senate to publish Frémont’s Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1842, which had enhanced Frémont’s fame. Seldom had a candidate brought less political experience to a campaign.
The Republicans set out to campaign on the theme “Free Soil, Free Speech, and Frémont.” Stories of “bleeding Kansas” were kept alive by on-the-scene reports in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Democrats countered that Frémont was a “black abolitionist,” the front man for a party of radicals.
In this frenzied environment, Lincoln spoke out on the campaign trail in support of Frémont, but the scope of his speeches was broader than support for the candidate, whom he did not know. Long sections of his speeches consisted of historical and philosophical analysis and made almost no reference to Frémont.
In the summer of 1856, Lincoln privately wrestled with a number of ideas. He wrote a long note to himself—undated, but probably from July—in which he sought to define the issues at stake in the campaign. He began, as he almost always did in his private notes, with a problem. “It is constantly objected to Fremont & Dayton, [Frémont’s vice-presidential candidate] that they are supported by a sectional party, who, by their sectionalism, endanger the National Union.” The Democrats continually charged that the Republicans, because of their strong anti-slavery beliefs, represented only the North and parts of the West, and thus could never be a national party. Lincoln believed that the issue of sectionalism, “more than all others,” was causing persons “really opposed to slavery extension, to hesitate.” This was the “reason, I now propose to examine it, a little more carefully than I have heretofore done, or seen it done by others.”
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