Abraham Lincoln

by Thomas Keneally

  The day of the Cooper Union speech was bitter, and the wind mounted and snow fell as night came on. Nonetheless fifteen hundred Republicans made their way through the blizzard to hear Lincoln speak. Some of them, it seemed, looked at the lecturer and wondered if they had made the right choice, for a witness said that there was “something weird, rough, and uncultivated” about Abraham Lincoln. Introduced by William Cullen Bryant, the Republican power broker, poet, and newspaper editor, Lincoln began hesitantly, and his high-pitched western twang raised further doubts in the minds of urbane New Yorkers. But his power as a speaker was his sense of mission—his fury to prove among other things that the Founding Fathers had frequently voted to let Congress regulate slavery and saw it as a practice to be limited, not licensed as a right. He quoted Thomas Jefferson: “It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation, and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degrees, as if the evil will wear off insensibly; and their places be, pari passu, filled up by free white laborers.”

  No one before Roger Taney and Stephen Douglas, Lincoln told the crowd, ever questioned the authority of the Federal government to control slavery in Federal territories. The South wants “us to stop calling slavery wrong and join them, in acts as well as words, in calling slavery right. Only when the whole atmosphere is ‘disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery’ will they quit blaming us for their troubles. . . . If slavery is right, then all laws and all state constitutions against it must be swept away.”

  In his report a young journalist from the Tribune, Noah Brooks, an extensive commentator on the age in which he lived, and a man devoted to Lincoln from that night, recorded the increasing enthusiasm and the gales of applause that interrupted Lincoln’s speech. Brooks quoted a member of the audience who said of Lincoln, “He’s the greatest man since St. Paul.” And, bent on its task of exalting Lincoln and disparaging Seward, the Tribune reported that “no man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New-York audience.” Quite apart from any political convenience sought by Horace Greeley and others, it had been a triumph.

  After his New York success, he spoke at Providence, Rhode Island, and in New Hampshire, where Phillips Exeter, the preparatory school at which Robert was being groomed for Harvard, was located. Such was the contrast between Lincoln’s print-deprived and rail-splitting adolescence and that of his favored sons! But Robert never seemed to evince much gratitude for the contrast (Herndon said that he was very much Mary Todd’s sullen child). One Sunday Lincoln consented to go to church with Robert, and then shared dinner with him before they went back to Robert’s rooms, where one of the boy’s house-mates entertained Abraham Lincoln with a banjo. In Hartford he met white-bearded Gideon Welles, a powerful Connecticut Republican and newspaperman, whose positive remarks in private conversation helped convince Lincoln that he might after all have a chance for the presidential nomination.

  When the Illinois Republican convention met in Decatur in May 1860, in a huge tent or wigwam structure specially erected for the occasion, Lincoln’s cousin John Hanks and a friend of Hanks’s marched down the aisle carrying a banner fixed between two fence rails: ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE RAIL CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT, read the banner. TWO RAILS FROM A LOT OF 3,000 MADE IN 1830 BY THOS. HANKS AND ABE LINCOLN—WHOSE FATHER WAS THE FIRST PIONEER OF MACON COUNTY.

  The convention went wild, and the only figure who was not delighted at such a vote-winning display was Abraham himself. There were the split rails, putatively cut by him in his era of slavery. Two from a lot of three thousand—the fruit of intense rustic labor, the symbol of numb endurance and of a past he would rather put aside. But the idea of “Abe” the rail splitter was released into the air and was hungrily taken up by the American public. Of course he was nominated by the Illinois delegates.

  A headquarters was eventually set up in the Fremont Hotel in Chicago, as the base for the promotion of Lincoln’s candidacy. The hotel was five blocks from where the Republican convention would ultimately take place, the Chicago Wig-Wam. From the Fremont and within its rooms, the Lincoln team began to lobby delegates. They noticed that there was a great deal of goodwill toward Lincoln, for he had not had such a visible career as to have collected enemies. Orville Browning and Herndon did not think he could possibly win, however, and their support for his candidacy would drop off.

  The national delegates assembled in Chicago in mid-May. Neither Lincoln nor Mary attended—it was not customary for candidates to do so. In Springfield, Mary awaited news at home, and Abraham lingered in his office.

  Early messages he received from Judd had declared “nothing will beat us but old fogy politicians,” and, “I tell you that your chances are not the worst . . . be not too expectant, but rely upon our discretion. Again I say brace your nerves for any result.” Lincoln himself had already sent off a message to Davis: “Make no contracts that will bind me.” On the first ballot Seward scored 173.5 delegates, Lincoln 102. When he received the telegram announcing these figures, a bigger vote than he had expected, he could not stay in his office any longer but went to the Sangamo Journal office. A further telegram arrived: The second ballot had seen Seward pick up only 11 delegates, but Lincoln 79. Some witnesses say that Lincoln had gone off to a local court for a game of handball when the final telegram arrived. It had an electrifying effect: TO LINCOLN YOU ARE NOMINATED.

  On the floor of the Chicago convention, when in the final count four Ohio votes moved from Chase to Lincoln to make his nomination possible, there was an uproar, said a witness, like “all the hogs ever slaughtered in Cincinnati giving their death squeals together.” The convention selected for him as running mate Hannibal Hamlin, former Democrat from Maine.

  On receipt of the news, Lincoln told the supporters gathered in the Journal office, “Well, gentlemen, there is a little woman at our house who is probably more interested in this dispatch than I am; if you will excuse me, I will take the dispatch up and let her see it.” As the town rocked with band music, with serenaders and congratulatory processions, Lincoln was besieged for some days in his home. Enthusiastic crowds surrounded the white frame residence, and when Lincoln told them that he would like to have them all indoors if only the place were big enough, a spectator shouted, “We will give you a larger house on the Fourth of next March” (the date of inauguration at that time). Lincoln was fiendishly busy with his correspondence, and with receiving leading Republicans, including possible claimants for cabinet positions, such as Seward and Salmon P. Chase. Mexican diplomats, encouraged by his opposition to the war of 1846, came to express their hope for a cooperative relationship between the two republics. So that he could deal with the crowds of place hunters, journalists, and others, he was offered the use of the governor’s room in the state house, where, free from interruption by playful Tad, he received visitors and worked on his enormous correspondence. He needed to forestall misstatements, particularly regarding the myths about his childhood, likely to appear in the fifteen campaign biographies that would be issued that summer. And even though these were written by Republicans, as they mythologized his childhood and took all the genuine bitterness out, they seemed to be subscribing to the Jeffersonian myth that nothing dishonest, cunning, or dishonorable could come out of a log cabin. This concept caused Lincoln dark and edgy amusement.

  Lincoln had also to assure one correspondent that he had never been a member of any Know-Nothing lodge. He needed to correct the proofs of his famous New York speech, and to console by letter a friend of Robert’s who had failed to gain entry to Harvard (Robert had been accepted). And to reply to eleven-year-old Grace Beddell, who wrote suggesting that he grow whiskers: “. . . you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin.” “Having never worn any,” Lincoln responded, “do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affection if I were to begin it now?” Many, including himself, were becoming concerned about matters of style and clothing. He was reconsidering his wardrobe, and a group of New York Republicans sent him a quite
serious memorial stating that their “candid determination” was that his appearance of gauntness would be less obvious if he cultivated whiskers and wore standing collars to hide his scrawny neck. Later in the year he would yield to Miss Beddell’s and his fellow Republicans’ advice and begin to grow a beard.

  To deal with the mass of work, he employed a secretary, a young German American named John Nicolay, who had previously worked as a secretary-cum-archivist in the state attorney general’s office. Nicolay would be Lincoln’s familiar from that point on. Occasionally the armies of people seeking Federal posts, large and small, brought him a sense of his inadequacy for the presidency, and an awareness of the contingent factors by which he had become the Republican candidate. He believed he had been “accidentally selected.”

  The Democratic convention in Charleston had split between those such as Jefferson Davis, favoring a prescriptive Federal slave code for the territories, and the supporters of Douglas and the earnestly held principle of popular sovereignty. Douglas could not get the two-thirds support he needed for nomination. The stalemated party, including many Southern “bolters,” came to a new convention in Baltimore, but the “bolters” walked out again and held their own convention, nominating their own candidate, John C. Breckinridge, President Buchanan’s vice president. On June 18 the main Baltimore convention nominated Douglas. The Democratic schism was now a matter of fact. Lincoln seemed destined to win because of the division of the Democratic vote between Douglas, the Southern Democrat candidate Breckinridge, and the residual Whig-Know-Nothing candidate, John Bell.

  In the meantime Southern Democrats and their Northern friends, in editorials and public meetings, declared that if Lincoln was elected, hundreds of thousands of fugitive slaves would “emigrate to their friends” in the North, “and be placed by them side by side in competition with white men.” This was the message of the Little Giant, Stephen A. Douglas, who began almost at once to conduct his own nationwide campaign. It was unprecedented then for a candidate to do his own campaigning, but he felt that the issue was so great that he must do so—to run as a true national, not sectional, candidate, and to promise to save the Union. The demands of the campaign would help hasten his death, which would occur as the bloody casualties began to mount in late 1861.

  A courageous Douglas, fearing that the split in Democratic ranks would leave Lincoln the presidency, went South to warn people about the dangers of rhetoric concerning secession. Southern Democrats, however, saw Douglas as almost as vicious as Lincoln.

  Lincoln himself aroused in the South a fever of revulsion and hysteria. According to the accepted rhetoric, he was a supporter of slave uprisings. The election of Lincoln, went the fervid message, would unleash mayhem, miscegenation, and the end of freedom, and would be adequate grounds for secession from the Union. Billy Herndon supplied Lincoln and Nicolay in their office at the state house with the latest editions of rabid Southern newspapers. Lincoln was depicted as a horrid-looking wretch, a bloodthirsty tyrant, a chimpanzee, a promoter of slave uprising indistinguishable in attitude from John Brown. Unionists in the South warned the Republican Party that hysteria and madness ruled the hour, and that Lincoln was being demonized as a grotesque gargoyle, a walking casus belli. “What is it that I could say that would quiet alarm?” asked a bewildered Lincoln of those who would have him make yet another appeasing statement to the South. “Is it that no interference by the government, with slaves or slavery within the states, is intended? I have said this so often already, that a repetition of it is but mockery, bearing the appearance of weakness.” Indeed, he was right. The South was far gone in its pathology.

  His unwillingness to make too many statements might have been due to such wise advice as that of William Cullen Bryant, the editor who had introduced his famous Cooper Union speech. Bryant advised him early “to make no speeches, write no letters as a candidate.” His record spoke for itself, and new notations on it might cast up nuances that could be twisted by the press, North and South, into great campaign issues.

  During Lincoln’s silence, journalists began to notice how political Mary Todd Lincoln was by comparison with other politicians’ wives. Talkative and well informed, she made good newspaper copy, especially since Lincoln had closed down and referred people to his previous statements. Like some presidents’ wives since, Mary would later discover the perils of being an outspoken first lady.

  Lincoln had the sagacity early in his campaign to avoid any alliances, either with the Seward-style easterners, with the more abolitionist Salmon P. Chase, with Charles Sumner, another abolitionist leader in the Senate, or with any other faction. At the lowest estimation this meant that he would distribute posts according to his own wisdom, and the result would be that he did not exalt any Republican group over another. At best it was the high wisdom that acknowledged that he needed all factions to elect him. It was a principle he would reiterate over and over again to party notables at his dinner table at Eighth and Jackson that summer.

  Precious, precocious, early-reading Willie Lincoln had in the meantime caught a form of scarlet fever, and it intensified his parents’ secretly harbored concerns about loss and defeat. Mary wrote, “I scarcely know, how I would bear up, under defeat. I trust we will not have the trial.” The family was caught between the rankest abuse from Southern commentators and condemnation by the fathers of abolition, Garrison and Wendell Phillips, who considered Lincoln’s brand of gradualism immoral and cowardly.

  In 1860 not all states’ elections occurred on the same day, and those that were held in Pennsylvania and Indiana in October served as indicators for Republicans’ hopes. Republican governors and legislatures were elected in both states, and Lincoln wrote to Seward, “It now really looks as if the Government is about to fall into our hands.” He spent election day, November 6, in his office in Springfield, emerging at about three o’clock to cross the square and vote. Then, with a number of supporters, he went off to the telegraph office to which the popular returns from around the country would be wired. Lincoln disposed himself crookedly on the telegraph office sofa as the news came in. Illinois had gone strongly his way, it became apparent. So had New England. Figures from the upper and lower North looked promising, and New York hung in the balance, but by midnight the returns from New York appeared to be conclusive.

  Huge crowds had gathered in the square in front of the statehouse, and Lincoln supporters ran from the telegraph office to acquaint them with the returns. Lincoln was taken over to the statehouse to a celebration dinner, through crowds of supporters singing, “Ain’t you glad you joined the Republicans, down in Illinois!” The dinner had been arranged by Mary and other Republican women, who crowded around jubilantly calling Lincoln “Mr. President.”

  By 1:30 A.M. the less complimentary returns from the South were coming in. Lincoln sent Mary home ahead, and went back to the telegraph office, walking home at last aware that although he would win the North, he did not have an absolute majority. He hoped he might garner, however, an absolute majority of the electoral college, and thus have strong legitimacy as president. In those streets, walking away from the riotous joy of Republican supporters, which would occupy the center of town all night, he felt the dead weight of the office he so dearly desired.

  He would never for another breathing moment escape it. “Well, boys,” he would tell journalists the next day, “your troubles are over now, mine have just begun.”

  The final tally of electoral votes for Lincoln would be 180. Breckenridge, who carried most of the South, received 72; there were 39 for Bell, who won Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee; and despite his 1.3 million votes, ultimately only 12 for Douglas, given that he had won only two states, Missouri and New Jersey. The previous imbalance between Lincoln’s star and Douglas’s had now been savagely adjusted. The tide had run out beneath the Little Giant.

  9

  EVEN BEFORE all the votes were in, the South Carolina governor had called the legislature into special session to authorize a state co
nvention on the dissolution of the Union and the formation of a Southern Confederacy. Henry Raymond, the editor of the New York Times, pleaded with Lincoln to issue a statement clarifying his intentions. Lincoln stood firm. He did not want any words he uttered to add to the conflagration. He feared that anything he said now, instead of calming the waters, would be held up by “the Washington Constitution [a pro-Southern Washington, D.C., daily] and its class . . . as an open declaration of war against them [the South].”

  A number of friends of his, in a state of stress about the forthcoming secession convention in South Carolina, urged him to allow popular sovereignty-based extension of slavery into territories south of the old Missouri Compromise line. Outraged, he answered, “I am sorry any Republican inclines to dally with Pop. Sov. of any sort. It acknowledges that slavery has equal rights with liberty, and surrenders all we have contended for.”

  The South Carolina secession convention came together and decided on December 20 to pass an ordinance of secession and to send commissioners to every slaveholding state to invite them to join “a great slaveholding Confederacy.” In the intervening period, while Buchanan still held power, Mississippi followed South Carolina, and then, on January 10, so did Florida. Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas joined the seceding states by February 1. On February 4 in Montgomery, Alabama, commissioners from all the seceding states met to bring the Confederacy into being. Through all this, when many in his ranks panicked, Lincoln remained silent except in some private letters, one of them to the great Georgian statesman and future Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, in which he defined his position. It was that the South would not be in any greater danger of losing its slaves under him than it had been in the days of Washington. “I suppose, however, this does not meet the case. You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That is, I suppose, the rub.”