Lincoln Raw

by DL Fowler

  But, sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust,

  Approach thy grave like one

  Who wraps the drapery of his couch about him,

  And lies down to pleasant dreams.

  He introduces me with words nearly as eloquent. “It is a grateful office that I perform introducing to you an eminent citizen of the West, hitherto known to you only by reputation. He is a gallant soldier of the political campaign of 1858, and a great champion of the Republican cause in Illinois.

  “These children of the West, my friends, form a living bulwark against the advance of slavery, and from them is recruited the vanguard of the armies of Liberty. I have only to pronounce the name, Abraham Lincoln ….”

  Applause greets me as I walk slowly to the rostrum. I swallow, offer my greeting, and forthrightly state my purpose.

  The facts which I shall deal with this evening are mainly old and familiar; nor is there anything new in the general use I shall make of them. If there shall be any novelty, it will be in the mode of presenting the facts and the inferences and observations following that presentation.

  Beads of moisture form along my lips, though my mouth is dry as I unfold my speech and proceed to do exactly as I promise. Holding true to the facts, I demonstrate that the intent of our Founders was to prohibit the extension of slavery and to see it die a slow and natural death. At the conclusion of my lecture I admonish the audience.

  Let us be diverted by none of those contrivances … such as groping for some common ground between right and wrong … such as appeals calling on not the sinners, but on the righteous to repentance … such as imploring men to unsay what Washington said and to undo what Washington did.

  Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government, nor of dungeons.

  Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.

  My heart bonds with the rhythm of the crowd’s ovation as the people rise in one great wave and cheer, their hats and handkerchiefs waving high above their heads. When their enthusiasm seems spent, voices cry out for more speakers to be heard.

  The first to step forward is Horace Greeley. He calls me “a specimen of what free labor and free expression of ideas could produce,” and I bite down on my lip to stay a flood of tears.

  Following him, James Briggs speaks for the organizers of the event. Although he is publically for Governor Chase from Ohio, he announces that “one of three gentlemen shall be our standard bearer in this year’s canvass for President of the United States—the eloquent Senator William Seward from New York, the able Salmon Chase, or the unknown knight who in 1858 on the prairies of Illinois met the Bois Gilbert of the Democracy, Stephen A. Douglas, and unhorsed him, Abraham Lincoln.” The rapid hammering of my pulse thunders in my ears. I never imagined myself standing before such an audience in New York, hearing my name uttered as an equal to such touted men.

  The next morning Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune trumpets, “The Speech of Abraham Lincoln at the Cooper Institute last evening was one of the happiest and most convincing arguments ever made in this City.”

  In the afternoon, William Cullen Bryant’s New York Evening Post declares, “The Framers of the Constitution in Favor of Slavery Prohibition—The Republican Party Vindicated—Great Speech of Hon. Abraham Lincoln.”

  Euphoria buoys me until the realities of fickle politics slap me across the face. Less than forty-eight hours after my lecture in New York, Senator Seward delivers a major speech in Washington City. The following afternoon on my arrival in Exeter, New Hampshire, for a speech in the city where our son Bob is attending preparatory school, I’m handed a copy of the New York Tribune. Horace Greeley’s praise of Seward’s speech deflates me. He calls it “more striking than any witnessed this winter.” I search out a copy of Bryant’s New York Evening Post to find him crowing Seward’s speech was “distinguished for its certain noble impassiveness which shows the author is as superior to his opponents in moral nature as he is in intellect.”

  Over the next several days I make six more speeches in the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Mostly, I repeat the same two-hour lecture I gave at the Cooper Institute. Although many have read reprints of my New York speech, large crowds endure bitter weather to hear it first-hand and cheer me when I am done. They lift me from gloom to a plane shy of my Cooper Institute ecstasy.

  In the town of New Haven, I offer a new homily to explain my view of keeping slavery out of the territories.

  If we find a snake in our children’s bed, we likely will not take up a stick and begin striking it. If we do so, we risk harming our little ones with our blows and getting them bit in the process. Furthermore, if we make them a new bed to sleep in, we do not gather up a batch of snakes and nest them in the bed before putting the children down.

  A large audience hears me proclaim, “I want every man to have a chance—and I believe the Black man is entitled to it—to improve his condition.

  On my return trip to Springfield, I stop in New York City to collect my two-hundred dollar honorarium for the Cooper Institute speech. While there, I take the ferry to Brooklyn and attend another service at Rev. Beecher’s church, arriving late and finding the pews are filled. After being directed upstairs to a gallery next to the organ loft, a kindly usher gives up his seat for me. Once the usual rituals are dispensed with, Rev. Beecher makes his points and illustrates them with unsurpassed clarity. When he concludes, I consider that humanity may have never before hosted such a productive mind.

  After the service, I return to New York and pay a visit to the infamous Five Points slums. There, I tour the renowned House of Industry, a six-story charity mission which offers refuge to abandoned and abused children in exchange for honest toil. My host is Hiram Barney, a member of the committee which hosted my speech at the Cooper Institute. With iron-gray hair swept back from his broad forehead and a square, pugnacious jaw, he radiates strength and unwavering purpose.

  Mr. Barney leads me to a little Sunday School class being held there, and the teacher invites me to say a few words to the children. After sharing stories of my own deprivation on the prairie as a child, I tell them of the hope they can look to by applying themselves in earnest. My eyes mist over as their faces light up. On receiving the teacher’s appreciation I say, “These little ones give me courage.”

  Before leaving the city I’m accompanied on a stroll by James Briggs, the young Republican who sent me the invitation to speak at Rev. Beecher’s church. As we come to the main post office, he stops and turns to the old building saying, “I wish you would take notice of what a dark and dismal place we have here. I think your chance of being the next president is equal to that of any man in the country. When you are president, will you recommend an appropriation of a million dollars for a suitable location for a post office in this city?”

  My knees quiver as if under a heavy weight. I tell him, “When I was east, several gentlemen made about the same remark to me that you did today about the presidency; they thought my chances were about equal to the best. I am humbled you think of me in that light.”

  Chapter Thirty Three

  On returning to Springfield, my patience is tested. Seward’s supporters have noticed the broad circulation of my speech at Cooper Institute. They now impugn me for accepting the two-hundred dollar honorarium from its organizers. I’m vilified as “disgraceful” and “greedy.”

  As controversy over my fee continues to brew, charges are laid in the press that I am a “two shilling candidate who charges his own friends two shillin’ apiece to hear him talk about politics.” We had planned to make my candidacy public at a more appropriate time through newspaper endorsements. Now the word is out in an unflattering way. Since candidates for the land’s highest office customarily refrain from giving speeches after their intentions are known, everything I wish to say from this point forw
ard must be done through surrogates.

  After making a clear and accurate account of the arrangements for my speech, I tell my friends, “I wish no explanation made to our enemies. What our opponents want is a squabble and a fuss, and they can have it if we explain, but they cannot have it if we don’t. Give no denial and no explanations.”

  A few weeks later I’m bedding down at the Junction House in Decatur, Illinois, with John Moses and Nathan Knapp, two old friends and supporters from Scott County. We’re here for the State Republican Convention. Moses and Knapp, both lawyers, are delegates while I’m merely a spectator.

  As I stand at the washing bowl splashing water on my face, Knapp says, “Well, Lincoln, tomorrow’s going to be a mighty big day for you.”

  I dab my forehead with a towel. “Reckon it won’t be too different from most days.”

  Moses takes the towel from me and steps in front of the bowl. “There’s talk of you leaving here as Illinois’ only choice for nomination as president.”

  I scratch my ear. “Everyone knows that Seward will be the nominee.”

  Knapp sits down on the bed. “When Seward speaks it’s like a professor lecturing you on things he’s only read about. On the other hand, the things you say sound like they’re freshly mined—something you’ve actually lived. Don't be surprised if you come out of the Chicago convention on top.”

  “I’m not sure I consider myself fit for the presidency.” I pick up my carpetbag and rummage through it, searching for nothing in particular.

  Moses shakes his head. “You don’t know your own power. Always worried about pushing yourself into positions you’re not equal to. Just look at how far you’ve come, though. You’ve done it all with no great effort.”

  I smirk, “You have me confused with Douglas.”

  Knapp chuckles. “Douglas? The same Douglas you say doesn’t even know himself? How did you put it? ‘Like a skillful gambler, he plays for all the chances. He never lets the logic of principle displace the logic of success.’”

  I lay my hand on his shoulder, smiling. “See there, you prove my point. Douglas is the man of success.”

  Moses hands Knapp the towel and says, “You wouldn’t leave the job of beating him to a rabid abolitionist like Seward, would you?”

  Knapp pauses at the washing bowl. “With the Democrats so badly split that they couldn’t nominate a candidate in Charleston, it seems the risk isn’t in losing to Douglas, it’s in electing the wrong Republican.”

  I ask, “What’s the right Republican?”

  Knapp wipes his face. “One who articulates our founding principles as clearly as you, who understands the Democrats will drive us headlong into despotism. We must repel them, or they will subjugate us.”

  Moses lies on the bed. “We need a man who can match Douglas’ oratory and who can expose his deceit. Douglas is like dealing with a man you can see and touch, but when you examine his tracks you think he isn’t there.”

  Knapp adds, “As when he insists that Congress prohibited slavery in the territories, though they understood they ought not do so.”

  I grin. “You’re using my own speeches against me.”

  Knapp continues, “Didn’t you say last summer that the Democrats would delight a convocation of crowned princes plotting against their own citizens?”

  “Yes. The Democrats of today hold the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing when it comes in conflict with another’s right of property. Republicans, on the other hand, are for both the man and his property; but when the two principles are at odds, the man before the dollar.”

  Knapp plops down on the bed next to Moses. “The Democrats seem to have switched sides. When they were the party of Jefferson, they believed as we do now.”

  “Damned Jackson corrupted them,” says Moses.

  I nudge Knapp to slide over and make room for me on the bed. “I remember once being much amused at seeing two intoxicated men engage in a fight. After a while, they removed their coats and continued their rather harmless contest. When the long affair was over, each man got into the other’s coat. If the two leading political parties of today are identical to the ones from the days of Jefferson and Adams, they have performed about the same feat as the two drunken men. Unfortunately in this day, saving the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow is no game.”

  Moses turns on his side and faces away from Knapp and me. “If I were you, Lincoln, I would not go about it as you did the other night in Springfield.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said in your speech that it strains logic for the Democrats to say on the one hand that the federal government cannot intervene to declare slavery illegal, yet they clamor for the government to outlaw polygamy.”

  “Why, that is the truth,”

  Knapp sits up. “I applaud them for standing up against moral decay, and I hope a great many folks agree with me.”

  I roll to my side with my back to them. “Why are all the beds so short?”

  The next morning Knapp and Moses go over to the Convention, while I eat breakfast with Richard Oglesby, one of the young Decatur men who has organized the meeting.

  Oglesby takes a sip of coffee and repeats much of what the two Scott county delegates told me the previous night. He pleads with me to be in the convention hall after the noon recess. I assure him I will be there.

  Just before two o’clock in the afternoon, I walk down South State Street to the make-shift convention hall, a wigwam made out of lumber and a borrowed circus tent. It measures one-hundred-and-twenty by fifty feet, taking up the width of the street and portions of the vacant lots on either side. I enter and crouch in the back, surveying the crowd of several thousand. The wigwam is so tightly packed I can barely see the array of prominent men seated on the hastily cobbled platform.

  Without fanfare, a straw ballot is taken to indicate the delegates’ preferences for who should be chairman of the convention. The poll indicates my old friend Joe Gillespie—who once joined me in jumping out the window to escape a quorum—will win the official voting. Judge Palmer, the temporary chairman, invites him to the stage as preparations are made to take the formal ballot. Joe’s ascent to the platform is met with a standing ovation.

  After waving to the delegates and spectators, Joe takes his seat, and everyone in the hall sits as well, except for Richard Oglesby.

  Oglesby calls out, “Mr. Chairman.”

  I hold my breath. Our earlier conversation begins to take on meaning.

  Judge Palmer replies, “What business do you have before the convention?”

  “Mr. Chairman, I am informed that a distinguished citizen of Illinois, and one whom we ever delight at honoring, is present. I wish to move that he be invited to a seat on the platform. That man is Abraham Lincoln.”

  My heart races as some three-thousand folks, seven-hundred of whom are delegates, rise to their feet giving a thunderous ovation. The roar of applause shakes every board and joist of the wigwam.

  When order is restored, the motion is seconded and approved. Those standing near me make a great effort to jam me through the crowd, which is once again standing and cheering. Tears of joy want to spill out of me, but I swallow hard, fighting to hold them back. A handful of friends circle around me, hoping to usher me forward. Well-wishers press in around me such that my friends can no longer move me ahead. At my side, Hill Lamon wraps his arms around my waist and jerks me off my feet. Others come to his aid, and together, they hoist me into the air. I am passed forward from one swell of hands to the next. I’m floating over the sea of delegates, like a flatboat riding the current of the great Mississippi.

  On stage, I turn and wave to the audience, soaking in their cheers. While their hoopla continues, unabated, I take a seat in a small chair, the only one not occupied. I wrap my feet around the chair’s legs and make an earnest effort to become inconspicuous.

  A short time later, order is restored, and preparations are being made to
take a ballot to nominate a candidate for governor. I slip off stage and walk over to Jim Peake’s jewelry store to take a nap.

  Soon after falling asleep, Hill shakes me and tells me I must return to the convention.

  I rub my eyes. “What’s up?”

  “Come and see,” he says. “Oglesby has it firm in his mind that the entire Illinois delegation will be voting for you at the Chicago Convention.”

  I get up and follow him back to the hall. Even a block away the noise from the place is deafening. My pulse quickens. I am now coming to comprehend the meaning of Hill’s words, of what Oglesby intends. He is now attempting what Moses talked about last night.

  As we step through the entrance, hats, books, and canes are flying in the air, and two men are making their way through the throng to the platform carrying a banner fastened between two poles. My heart begins to pound in my chest. When the two men reach the platform and turn to face the feverish crowd, I recognize one of them as John Hanks and make out the words on the sign.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  THE RAIL CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT IN 1860

  TWO RAILS FROM A LOT OF 3,000 MADE IN 1830

  BY THOS. HANKS AND ABE LINCOLN …

  I point to the sign and laugh. “His name is John, not Thomas, Hanks.”

  Again, I’m lifted by a sea of hands and passed toward the stage. This time, the crowd’s delirium is so intense that part of the awning over the platform falls onto the heads of those standing beneath it. Undaunted, the delegates continue to propel me forward.

  After much jostling, I make it onto the stage and wave at the crowd, unsure of what they expect.

  In response to my gesture, they begin shouting with one voice, “Identify your work!”

  I shake my head, grinning, and go to the chair where I’d been seated before.

  The demands grow louder, “Identify your work!”

  My grin fades as I sit down and tell the men nearest me, “I cannot say that I split these rails.”

  I wave again to the audience, but they refuse to give up their demand. Turning to John Hanks who’s still holding up the sign, I say, “Where did you get these rails?”