A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  At the end of this unprecedented cycle of conventions, all signs favored Lincoln and the Republicans. Douglas would be his main contestant in the North. Breckinridge and Douglas would do battle in the South, with Bell hoping to do well in the border states. Lincoln assessed his chances in a letter to Anson G. Henry in Oregon, “We know not what a day may bring forth; but, today, it looks as if the Chicago ticket will be elected.” He added, “I think the chances were more than equal that we could have beaten the Democracy united. Divided, as it is, its chance appears indeed very slim.”

  CAMPAIGN BIOGRAPHIES CONSTITUTED a major feature of nineteenth-century political campaigning. William Dean Howells, a twenty-three-year-old editorial writer for the Ohio State Journal in Columbus, was engaged by Follett, Foster and Company, the same firm that had recently published Lincoln’s scrapbook of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, to write a biography of Lincoln. The publisher suggested that Howells go to Springfield to interview Lincoln himself. Howells, at the beginning of a brilliant literary career during which he would write more than one hundred books from 1860 to 1920, declined, saying later, “I missed the greatest chance of my life.” Instead, he commissioned a young law student, James Quay Howard, to interview Lincoln. When Lincoln received his copy in the early summer, he sat down with his Farber pencil to insert corrections and additions, most of them small, in the Howells text.

  John Bell, a former Whig senator from Tennessee, led the Constitutional Union Party ticket.

  The most popular biography came from the pen of John Locke Scripps, senior editor of the Chicago Press & Tribune. Scripps interviewed Lincoln in Springfield in June. When his thirty-two-page pamphlet biography, published by the New York Tribune, appeared in mid-July, the Republican organization inundated the public with what they called “Campaign Document No. 1.” They based their claim in part on the extensive interview Scripps did with Lincoln, thereby lending a semiofficial authority to it.

  Stephen Douglas, Lincolns longtime opponent, led the Northern Democratic ticket.

  On July 17, 1860, Lincoln received a letter from Scripps that may have given him a chuckle. Scripps wrote, “I believe the biography contains nothing that I was not fully authorized to put into it.” But then he quickly added, “In speaking of the books you read in early life, I took the liberty of adding Plutarch’s Lives. I take it for granted that you had read that book. If you have not, then you must read it at once to make my statement good.” Lincoln made no reply to Scripps, but the Chicago Tribune author learned that Lincoln, never missing a beat, made “frequent humorous allusions to it.”

  John C. Breckinridge, Kentucky senator, led the Southern Democratic ticket.

  THE LINCOLN-HAMLIN CAMPAIGN started quickly. With so many people coming to see him, and quickly realizing he could not work out of his law office, he accepted the offer of Governor John Wood to use the governor’s room on the second floor of the statehouse. John G. Nicolay, the serious, hardworking assistant to Secretary of State Hatch, who had been on loan to Lincoln, now became his one-man staff. Nicolay, born in Essingen, Germany, immigrated to the United States with his family when he was six. First living and attending school in Cincinnati, a city of German immigrants, he kept moving west with his family, finally arriving in Illinois. Young Nicolay went to work for the Pike County Free Press in Pittsfield, a New England town set down on the prairies, and by twenty-three was its editor. Now twenty-eight, Nicolay was five feet ten inches tall, and a rail-thin 125 pounds. He had blue eyes and brown hair, his “slow smile” partially hidden behind a mustache and small beard. Nicolay was a young man who loved words, whether it was the Bible, especially the Old Testament, printed in German letters, the plays of Shakespeare, or his editorials in a Whig newspaper. All of these qualities helped build a relationship of mutual trust and appreciation with Lincoln.

  John G. Nicolay, quiet and efficient, became Lincoln’s one-man staff in his campaign for the presidency.

  Nicolay had been the custodian of Illinois state election records in Hatch’s office, and Lincoln, an assiduous student of these records, was regularly in conversation with him. Now the two shared Lincoln’s campaign office, which, while large, had no anteroom, no security, so visitors came and went all day long.

  To his chagrin, Lincoln discovered that he had become a celebrity. Every day an army of politicians, reporters, photographers, portrait painters, and others arrived in Springfield. Yet, for all of the crush of people to see him, his new elevated status brought little change to his personal habits and his relationships with people, be they old friends or new acquaintances. Three weeks after his nomination, his old friend Orville Browning, after visiting Springfield’s campaign office, wrote in his diary, “Lincoln bears his honors meekly.”

  Photographer Alexander Hesler of Chicago traveled to Springfield to take four photographs of Lincoln on June 3, 1860. Lincoln particularly liked one photograph that captured his facial expression at the crowning moment of his maturity. Lincoln commented, “That looks better and expresses me better than any I have ever seen.” Mary and some others, however, did not like it. Lincoln believed “their objection arises from the disordered condition of the hair.” Lincoln concluded, “My judgment is worth nothing in these matters.”

  Through the weeks of the hot Illinois summer, Lincoln said nothing about his policies. He did not discuss what he would do about the disgruntled South. His standard reply to questions was that his ideas could be found in his published speeches. When pressed, he added that he did not want to say anything that could be misinterpreted. Lincoln’s posture did not mean he was passive or inactive. He kept abreast of events in the states and flagged his concerns to friends and allies.

  He also continued to act as a peacemaker, using the skills he had learned in the small towns of the Eighth Judicial Circuit and in the rough-and-tumble state politics of Illinois. He had successfully steered the Republican boat through troubled waters in Illinois in 1859 and now he sought to do the same on a national stage in 1860. Because he did not campaign publicly, it is easy to miss how much he did behind the scenes.

  Looking east to the state of New York, Lincoln became aware of the long-running Republican division between the William Seward– Thurlow Weed constituency and the Free Soil Democratic wing of the party led by William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Post, with support from Horace Greeley. Lincoln kept hearing that Douglas would mount a tremendous campaign in New York and feared that unhappy Seward supporters might sit out the presidential election. In August, Lincoln wrote to Weed, “I think there will be the most extraordinary effort ever made, to carry New-York for Douglas.” Even though the New York Republicans were confident of victory, Lincoln admonished, “Still it will require close watching, and great effort” to keep Douglas contained. Continuing to hear of divisions within the New York Republican Party, Lincoln sent word that he “neither is nor will be … committed to any man, clique, or faction.” Lincoln’s policy, in New York and elsewhere, was “to deal fairly with all.”

  Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin led the Republican ticket in 1860.

  In Pennsylvania, a feud between Senator Simon Cameron and Andrew Curtin, Republican candidate for governor, threatened Republican solidarity in the second largest state in the Union. David Davis and Leonard Swett visited Pennsylvania in August on a fact-finding mission and reported back to Lincoln. Lincoln then wrote to members of the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee. “I am slow to listen to criminations among friends, and never expose their quarrels on either side. My sincere wish is that both sides will allow by-gones to be bygones, and look to the present and future only.”

  MARY LINCOLN WAS EAGER to join her husband’s campaign in ways that most previous candidates’ wives were not. In past presidential campaigns, the wives of candidates were seldom seen and never heard. But Mary had inherited from her father a passion for politics, and for years she had put that enthusiasm to work encouraging her husband and, in an “unwomanly” way for her time, offering her c
ounsel on all manner of politics and people. From early in their marriage, when Lincoln was running for state office, again while he served in Congress, and even when he was seemingly exiled to the Eighth Judicial Circuit, Mary had her eyes on faraway horizons. Even if Mr. Lincoln was not always an ideal husband, traveling away from her too often and not present to her when he was at home, she recognized long before others his abilities, which she believed would carry him one day all the way to the presidency.

  If Lincoln did not go to the people, the people came to him. He met supporters in his home as much as at his temporary election office. As daily visitors to Springfield came to take the measure of Lincoln’s leadership abilities, many were also eager to take the measure of Mary’s abilities as hostess and conversationalist. As the candidate welcomed visitors to his office in the statehouse, she welcomed many of these same people to their home at Eighth and Jackson. Newspapers of the day seldom talked about the wives of politicians, but the New York Tribune departed from this tradition to offer a first assessment of Mary Lincoln on May 25, 1860. Greeley’s newspaper wrote that Mary Lincoln was “amiable and accomplished … vivacious and graceful,” and reported that she was “a sparkling talker.”

  Through her love of letter writing to correspondents, known and unknown, across the country, Mary campaigned for her husband from Springfield. Most of her letters have vanished, but a sample of her writing is found in a reply to the Reverend Dyer Burgess, a Presbyterian minister in Constitution, Ohio, who was both antislavery and anti-Mason (some people feared that the Masons were a secret movement attempting to rule the nation). Burgess wrote that, as a Republican, he wanted to support Lincoln but needed assurances that he had never been a member of a secret society. Mary replied, “Mr. Lincoln has never been a Mason or belonged to any secret order.”

  Mary received a note shortly after Lincoln’s nomination from Annie Parker Dickson, a cousin living in Cincinnati. She and her husband, William Martin Dickson, an attorney and active Republican, had entertained Lincoln when he was in Cincinnati for the “Reaper Case” in 1855. The note read, “You are an ambitious little woman and for many reasons I am delighted with your success.” Dickson was only voicing what others, especially women, had observed for a long time.

  One of Mary’s regular correspondents was Hannah Shearer, sister of Noyes W. Miner, a Baptist minister and the Lincolns’ neighbor. After the death of her first husband, Edward Rathbun, Hannah had married John Henry Shearer, a physician, and moved to Brooklyn, New York. Shortly before the election, Mary wrote, “You used to be worried, that I took politics so coolly you would not do so, were you to see me now. Whenever I have time, to think, my mind is sufficiently exercised for my comfort.”

  With her husband home, Mary acted as a consultant—not about issues, but about people. Mary had long believed her husband was too trusting of others. She had strong opinions about his political colleagues. She did not like or trust Norman Judd. She relied on David Davis. Unlike her husband, she held grudges. She still harbored resentment toward Lyman Trumbull, who had defeated Lincoln for the Senate in 1855, and had not repaired her relationship with his wife, Julia Jayne Trumbull. From May through November 1860, Mary was with Abraham nearly every day, expressing her opinions and counting herself as his chief adviser. It was one of their longest periods together.

  AN INSIGHT INTO Mary and Abraham Lincoln’s home life was provided by young Frank Fuller, a friend of Robert’s from Phillips Exeter who visited in the summer of 1860. After Frank called on Lincoln at the statehouse, Lincoln invited him home to dinner. Lincoln did not invite anyone to dinner without Mary’s prior consent, but Fuller found himself “warmly welcomed by Mrs. Lincoln.” He brought Mary a gift of a slim book of poems by Albert Laighton, a young poet from Ports mouth, New Hampshire. She told him of her delight in poetry and quizzed young Fuller about the poet and the poems.

  As the family seated itself in the dining room, Lincoln asked Fuller if he offered grace at meals. He replied that it was his practice to read a couple of lines of poetry. As Lincoln bowed his head, Fuller asked the blessing of “the Supreme Power”

  That made our frames, sustains our lives,

  And through all earthly change survives.

  In the conversation at dinner the young Phillips Exeter student discovered that Lincoln had committed to memory a good deal of the Bible, especially, he told him, the Sermon on the Mount and the Twenty-third Psalm.

  AFRICAN-AMERICAN LEADER Frederick Douglass, returning to Rochester in 1860 from a speaking tour in England and Scotland, tried to take stock of the multiplying political candidates poised to run for the presidency. He had been a supporter of Seward, who was a subscriber to Douglass’s antislavery newspaper, the North Star, and whose career he had followed as a fellow New Yorker.

  In June, Douglass offered a perceptive analysis of Lincoln in the Douglass’ Monthly. He praised Lincoln as “a man of unblemished private character; a lawyer, standing near the front rank of the bar of his own State, has a cool, well balanced head; great firmness of will; is perseveringly industrious; and one of the most frank, honest men in political life.” Noting that nineteenth-century political parties had habitually turned away from their best statesmen for president—Daniel Webster and Henry Clay—and nominated men of lesser stature—William Henry Harrison, James Polk, Zachary Taylor, and Franklin Pierce—Douglass observed, “Mr. Lincoln possesses great capacities, and is yet to be proved to be a great statesman, it is lucky for him that a political exigency moved his party to take him on trust and before his greatness was ripe, or he would have lost his chance.” And what of Douglass’s hopes for Lincoln as president?

  When once elected it will be no longer dangerous for him to develop great qualities, and we hope than in taking him on a “profession of faith,” rather than on the recommendations of his political life, his party will witness his continual “growth in grace,” and his administration will redound to the glory of his country, and his own fame.

  Douglass, utilizing two metaphors for the Christian journey of faith, offered one of the most prescient predictions of Lincoln’s journey of political leadership.

  “ON MONDAY NIGHT some miserable, infamous, low-flung, narrow-minded, ungodly, dirt-eating, cutthroat, hemp-deserving, deeply dyed, double-distilled, concentrated miscreant of miscreants, sinned against all honor and decency, by cutting down and sawing down two or three Republican poles in this city.” This editorial in Springfield’s Illinois State Journal was referring to huge poles, some as high as one hundred feet, to which were fastened the banners of parties and candidates. What the editorial really highlighted was the enthusiasm, intensity, and contentiousness of political campaigning in Illinois at midcentury.

  Political campaigns were the chief source of entertainment of the day. Events ran the gamut from rallies, parades, and pole raisings, to picnics, fireworks, excursions, and illuminations, and sometimes riots. The enthusiasm for political campaigns rivaled earlier nineteenth-century religious revivals and could be compared to the twentieth-century embrace of spectator sports. People all over the nation were paying attention as four candidates sprinted toward the finish line.

  On a thousand platforms across the North, Republican leaders stumped for Lincoln. Seward and Chase barnstormed across the Midwest. In their speeches they depicted Lincoln, emphasizing his humble origins, as a man of the people. They extolled him as a lawyer and a decisive debater. Women, who could not vote, were nevertheless quite present at political rallies, carrying banners that declared,

  Westward the star of Empire takes it way,

  We link-on to Lincoln, as our mothers did to Clay.

  A highlight of the summer campaign took place on August 8, 1860, when Springfield hosted an “immense” rally at the fairgrounds to honor its townsman candidate. The Illinois State Journal’s headline blared: “The Prairies on Fire for Lincoln.” The Journal used a full three columns to describe the rally, beginning the first column with an image of an elephant bearing its tr
unk, the first known use of the elephant as a symbol for the Republican Party. The words “We Are Coming” stood beneath the elephant, followed by “Clear the Track.”

  A parade, led by Wide-Awakes, came to Lincoln’s home to convey him to the fairgrounds. When he arrived, the crowd, aroused at the sight of their candidate, stampeded his carriage, lifted him bodily above the mob, and carried him to one of the five speakers’ stands.

  Lincoln, overcome with emotion, nevertheless kept his cool. Adjusting his stovepipe hat, he told the huge crowd, “It has been my purpose, since I have been placed in my present position, to make no speeches.” He did admit, “I confess with gratitude … that I did not suppose my appearance among you would create the tumult which I now witness.”

  Lincoln’s problem became how to extricate himself from that tumult. When the crowd surrounded and stopped his carriage, George Brinkerhoff, a clerk in the state auditor’s office, joined with several other men in pulling Lincoln out of the carriage and “slipped him over the horses tail on to the saddle [and] led the horse to town.”

  In August, Lincoln was particularly delighted to receive a letter of congratulations from his old friend Edward Baker. Writing from San Francisco, Baker, having known Lincoln for a quarter century, pinpointed the two characteristics that best described the president-elect. Baker wrote, “The reward that fidelity and courage, find in your person will infuse hope in many sinking bosoms, and new energy in many bold hearts.” Lincoln would need both fidelity and courage for the challenges ahead.

  WITH HIS OPPONENTS DIVIDED, Lincoln was confident he would win, but he was taking nothing for granted. In the nineteenth century, state elections took place throughout the calendar year; the victories of Republicans in Maine and Vermont in August seemed to many a harbinger of good things to come. Lincoln looked forward eagerly to the results of elections in early October in the crucial states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.