Lincoln believed that early state elections could have a domino effect, influencing voters in other states. When he heard that expected September victories in two congressional districts in Maine might not materialize, and that Governor Israel Washburn’s margin of victory in his race for reelection might be much smaller than originally predicted, he wrote an urgent letter to Senator Hamlin, his vice presidential running mate, who was from Maine. “Such a result … would, I fear, put us on the down-hill track, lose us the State elections in Pennsylvania and Indiana, and probably ruin us on the main turn in November.”
Even with direction from Lincoln and a national committee, much of the campaign was under the control of state Republican organizations. This meant that in Massachusetts voters heard a strong antislavery message, whereas in Pennsylvania that message was muted in favor of one about protective tariffs. In the West, Republicans emphasized commitments to homestead opportunities and the building of the transcontinental railroad. Nonetheless, Republicans everywhere extolled the virtues of Lincoln and of sustaining the Union.
Douglas, whom Lincoln knew to be his chief rival, threw aside the nineteenth-century tradition of campaign abstention, and launched a strenuous crusade, believing he still could carry the populous free states with their large electoral votes. He put far more weight on the threats from the South than did Lincoln, and therefore tried to circulate the message that only his election could bring about peace between North and South.
The Little Giant and his supporters held nothing back in their attacks on Lincoln. Douglas partisans accused Lincoln of being a Deist—someone who believed only in natural religion—and circulated stories of Lincoln’s near duel with James Shields. They charged that Lincoln had once joined a secret Know-Nothing lodge in Quincy and dredged up the story of Lincoln’s supposed lack of support for the troops in the Mexican War. Both Douglas and John Bell, presidential candidate of the Constitutional Union Party, sought to portray Lincoln and the Republicans as the party of disunion.
In response to these attacks, Lincoln said nothing about secession. His policy was not to credit such fears, even in the fall of 1860. He believed talk of secession in the South was mostly bluster. He remained confident that, as a son of the South, he understood the mind of the Southern people. He continually referred people to his written speeches, because he believed Southerners would find in them his repeated promise not to touch slavery where it already existed in the South. In response to a letter in early August, Lincoln replied, “The people of the South have too much good sense, and good temper, to attempt the ruin of the government.”
In Springfield, Lincoln was isolated from the secessionist talk, but throughout the summer and fall of 1860, there was much foreboding across the South. Around the cracker barrels at country stores and on porches of sprawling mansions, people turned Lincoln into a caricature. Southerners depicted him as a Black Republican who was secretly aligned with abolitionists ready to unleash slave rebellions throughout the South. Southerners did not read Lincoln’s speeches, but they heard that Douglas had accused him in 1858 of favoring Negro equality. The spirit of 1776 was being rekindled in the South; this time the enemy was not the despotic British, but the tyrannical North about to elect an unknown man from the West.
Lincoln rejoiced, and also expressed a sense of relief, when victories in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana were announced at the beginning of the second week of October. On October 12, 1860, Lincoln wrote to Seward, “It now looks as if the Government is about to fall into our hands.”
All through October, Lincoln maintained his policy of silence. Although some supporters suggested that he write a public letter in the last days of the campaign setting forth his key ideas and allaying fears in the South, he continued with his strategy and said nothing.
ON A SUNNY ELECTION DAY MORNING, Tuesday, November 6, 1860, Lincoln received visitors at his office in the statehouse. He had never voted for himself in an election and was not planning to do so today. William Herndon persuaded him that he could clip off the presidential electors at the top of the ballot and still cast his vote for the state offices.
In the afternoon, Lincoln walked over to the courthouse to vote. Everywhere Lincoln went on this Election Day, people cheered and followed him. He went home for an early supper with Mary and the boys. He returned to the statehouse by seven, where he intermittently received scattered and inconclusive reports of election results from across the country.
At nine, Lincoln and David Davis and a few others went to the telegraph office. With increasing rapidity, the tapping of the telegraph keys began to spell out Republican victories across the North. Lincoln had one remaining fear. If he did not win New York, with its thirty-five electoral votes, he might not win a majority, and the election would be decided in the House of Representatives. Shortly after midnight, the results from New York signaled that Lincoln would be the sixteenth president of the United States.
With victory assured, Lincoln walked over to Watson’s Confectionery, where Mary and other Republican women had prepared a victory supper. As he entered, the women greeted him, “How do you do, Mr. President!” After eating, he went back to the telegraph office and stayed until nearly two o’clock to monitor the results.
By everyone’s remembrance, Lincoln remained remarkably calm through the long evening. He did exclaim that he was “a very happy man … who could help being so under such circumstances?” As church bells rang, and cheering exploded, Lincoln finally headed for home. “Mary, Mary, we are elected.”
This Lincoln photograph by Samuel G. Alschuler in Chicago on November 25, 1860, shows the president-elect’s new whiskers.
CHAPTER 16
An Humble Instrument in the Hands of the Almighty November 1860–February 1861
I NOW LEAVE, NOT KNOWING WHEN, OR WHETHER EVER, I MAY RETURN, WITH A TASK BEFORE ME GREATER THAN THAT WHICH RESTED UPON WASHINGTON.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Farewell address at Springfield, Illinois, February 11, 1861
N THE FIRST DAYS AFTER HIS ELECTION, ABRAHAM LINCOLN TOOK THE initial steps to build his administration and determine his policies. He faced a problem never encountered by any of his predecessors—how to preserve the nation. For all his gifts and abilities, Lincoln still did not fully understand the very real possibilities for secession and war while he remained isolated in Springfield. Thinking of himself as a son of the South, he failed to appreciate that Kentucky, as a border state, was not representative of Southern opinion. With his upbeat mind-set, removed from the information and intrigue of Washington, as well as Southern state capitals, he remained optimistic that all would yet be well.
Lincoln and his Republican colleagues had become used to persistent enmity between North and South, which, for nearly thirty years, had always stopped short of war. Lincoln, as the first president ever elected by a minority, sectional electorate, faced twin challenges: how to defend the Union but not resort to war, and how to save the Union but not give in to compromise. These challenges would grow, not diminish, in the long months ahead.
“WELL, BOYS, YOUR TROUBLES are over now,” Lincoln greeted some newspapermen on the morning after the election; “mine have just begun.” Lincoln had gone home at 2 a.m., but not to sleep. Both exhilarated and exhausted, “I then felt, as I never had before, the responsibility that was upon me. I began at once to feel that I needed support, others to share with me the burden.”
Lincoln stayed up pondering whom he should name to his cabinet. He had been thinking about this question for some time, but on this night he wrote down eight names on a slip of paper:
Lincoln
Judd
Seward
Chase
Bates
M. Blair
Dayton
Welles
Lincoln listed himself at the top, but within the list. The other seven names all had some kind of leadership experience, in business or politics, whereas Lincoln was keenly aware that he had no executive experience. All
were on record as against the extension of slavery into the territories. Lincoln included his three major Republican rivals, William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates. The four other men listed had come into the Republican ranks from previous Free Soil and Democratic affiliations. Lincoln seemed to be aiming for geographical balance. Gideon Welles came from New England (Connecticut); William Seward and William Dayton from Northeastern states (New York and New Jersey); Norman Judd and Salmon Chase from the Northwest (Illinois and Ohio); and Edward Bates and Montgomery Blair from border states (Missouri and Maryland). Lincoln would hold this list close to his chest.
IT TOOK SEVERAL DAYS for the returns to reveal the final shape of the election. Lincoln won with 180 electoral votes, followed by 72 for John Breckinridge, 39 for John Bell, and 12 for Stephen Douglas. Lincoln won the popular contest with 1,866,452 votes to 1,376,957 for Douglas, 849,781 for Breckinridge, and 588,879 for Bell. This highly spirited election drew 82.2 percent of the eligible voters to the polls, making it the second highest turnout in the nation’s history. Lincoln won all of the free, Northern states, dividing the electoral votes of New Jersey with Douglas. Despite finishing second in the popular vote, Douglas won only Missouri. Bell won three states in the upper South: Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Breckinridge won the rest of the South.
In the midst of celebration, there was some sobering news. Lincoln was the first Republican elected as president, but he won with only 39.9 percent of the popular vote, and with almost a million votes less than the combined total of his three opponents. The Republicans had failed to win either chamber of Congress. The most portentous warning for a party that had steadfastly denied it was a sectional party was that Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin won not one vote in ten Southern states.
Immediately after the election, Lincoln committed one of his greatest errors of political judgment by failing to grasp the growing agitation over secession spreading across the South. Senator Truman Smith of Connecticut tried to alert him when he wrote Lincoln a long letter on November 7, 1860. Smith had become aware of a group, “among the most respectable citizens of New York,” who were speaking out against Lincoln’s election and plans for the nation. The senator told Lincoln,
Public exigencies may be such as to make it incumbent on a successful candidate to speak out, not to repel slander, for that is of little consequence, but to disarm mischief makers, to allay causeless anxiety, to compose the public mind, and to induce all good citizens to … “judge the tree by its fruit.”
Lincoln replied on November 10, 1860, “It is with the most profound appreciation of your motive, and highest respect for your judgment too, that I feel constrained, for the present, at least, to make no declaration for the public.” Lincoln’s decision to be silent muted his greatest strength—speaking persuasively to any audience.
President-elect Lincoln now sought to organize for a long transition. It would be four months before he would be inaugurated in Washington on March 4, 1861. This extended time would remain the pattern in American politics until the second term of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937, when the date for the presidential inauguration was shifted from March 4 to January 20.
Lincoln continued to use the governor’s room on the second floor of the statehouse, a room about fifteen by twenty-five feet in size, with long windows looking out on the south and east sides of the square. He arrived each morning looking much the same, except for a fringe of beard he had begun to grow. Eleven-year-old Grace Bedell of Westfield, New York, had written him on October 15, 1860, urging him to grow a beard. She told Lincoln, “You would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President.”
John G. Nicolay, Lincoln’s one-man campaign staff, now became his one-man transition team. Lincoln worked at a corner table with his secretary. “Heaps and hills” of newspapers were piled everywhere. Letters cascaded in from Republican leaders recommending themselves or others for offices. Lincoln dictated responses or wrote them in his own hand. Hate mail from the South also arrived regularly, constantly comparing Lincoln to the devil. The writers threatened him with death by hanging, gibbet, and stiletto. Most were not signed with real names, but rather by the “Southern Brotherhood” or other such organizations.
Lincoln greeted friends, politicians, reporters, and visitors in his corner office from ten until twelve. At noon, he walked home for lunch with Mary and the boys. He returned to work with Nicolay in the early afternoon and held another open house from three until five-thirty. The young newspaperman Henry Villard, posted to Springfield to cover Lincoln for the New York Herald, recorded the scene in the first days after Lincoln’s election. “He sits or stands among his guests, throwing out hearty Western welcomes, asking and answering questions, joking, endeavoring to make matters every way comfortable to all present.”
People even followed Lincoln home at night and “he was once more crowded upon in his parlor, and had to undergo another agony of presentations … by the constant influx of an ill-mannered populace.” Mary enjoyed the visibility and attention, but she had “to endure,” night after night, the complete first floor of her home filled with visitors, as many “callers ask each other, ‘Is that the old woman?’ ” Villard, who had covered Lincoln in the debates in 1858, was impressed that Lincoln’s personality had not changed with his election. “He is precisely the same man as before—open and generous in his personal communications with all who approach him.”
UNDER RELENTLESS PRESSURE to speak about his policies as the future president, Lincoln partially broke his silence on November 20, 1860. Senator Trumbull was slated to speak at a Republican victory celebration in Springfield, and Lincoln gave him two paragraphs to insert into his speech. Lincoln sat beside Trumbull as he announced that under the new Republican administration “each and all of the States will be left in as complete control of their own affairs respectively, and at as perfect liberty to choose, and employ, their own means of protecting property, and preserving peace and order within their respective limits, as they have ever been under any administration.”
These words were meant to reassure the South, but the speech continued with words that took away that assurance. “Disunionists per se, are now in hot haste to get out of the Union, precisely because they perceive they can not, much longer, maintain apprehension among the Southern people that their homes, and firesides, and lives, are to be endangered by the action of the Federal Government.” Lincoln’s insertion revealed that he wrongly believed the secessionists represented only a tiny minority of Southern sentiment. His concluding words were the most surprising of all. “I am rather glad of this military preparation in the South. It will enable the people the more easily to suppress any uprisings there, which their misrepresentations of purposes may have encouraged.” Fortunately, Trumbull decided not to include these two sentences, and the public never heard them.
Trumbull’s address satisfied no one. The Democratic-leaning New York Herald charged that the president-elect seemed to be either cut off from “all knowledge of the Southern revolutionary movements of the day; or that he is so completely under the control of his party advisors that he dare not speak; or that he feels himself unequal to the crisis, and is afraid to speak.”
Though following the nineteenth-century tradition of refusing to speak publicly before inauguration, in private Lincoln worked tirelessly to influence events in the coming months, by both affirmation and rejection of ideas brewing in Congress. On November 21, 1860, Lincoln left Springfield, for the first time in more than six months, for a three-day meeting with Vice President–elect Hamlin and several others in Chicago.
Calling himself a private citizen, Lincoln purchased tickets on the Chicago, Alton, and St. Louis Railroad. He and Mary traveled with Lyman and Julia Trumbull—Mary was now speaking to Julia—in a regular crowded train car. Lincoln also invited Joshua Speed and his wife, Fanny, to come from Kentucky, as he wished to surround
himself with friends, even as he sought to build a government mostly with men he had never met. Lincoln spoke with Speed, a Southerner who disagreed with Lincoln about slavery, about a cabinet position, but his longtime friend was not interested.
In Chicago, Lincoln explained to Hamlin and Trumbull that he wanted to reach out to his rivals, especially Seward, Bates, and Chase; he wanted to tap the best talent available for the difficult road ahead. He was most concerned about getting Seward on board as secretary of state. He wondered if Seward, rejected by the convention, might in turn reject Lincoln’s invitation. He entrusted Senator Hamlin, wise to the ways of Washington politics, to handle the negotiations with Seward. As Trum-bull listened to Lincoln’s rationale to secure the most able leaders for the cabinet, he began to assume that Lincoln “would lean heavily on members of his Cabinet and leave many crucial decisions to them.”
Lincoln looked forward to meeting with Vice President–elect Hannibal Hamlin at a conference in Chicago in November 1860.
ON DECEMBER 3, 1860, Lincoln waited anxiously for news from Washington: On this day the Thirty-sixth Congress would assemble and receive President Buchanan’s fourth and final annual message. Buchanan was popularly known as a “doughface,” a derogatory term for the Northerners who, pliable like dough, adapted their views to appease Southern leaders on slavery. In his farewell, the seventy-year-old president placed responsibility for the national crisis on the North. “The long continued and intemperate interference of the northern people with the question of slavery in the southern States has at length produced its natural effects.” How could the present crisis be settled? “All that is necessary” is for the South “to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way.”
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