American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The task of party invigoration, of creative political response to the hurricane of events and the social dynamics of the 1850s, would fall on a cadre of activists who, amidst all the murk, had a clear vision of what they believed in, where they wanted to go, and how they proposed to get there. No state demonstrated their problems and their progress more vividly than Illinois.

  Illinois seemed the distillation of America. Though it opened on the Great Lakes to the north and flanked hundreds of miles of the Mississippi on its west, already it was the quintessential heartland. Both its industry and its agriculture were booming in the 1850s, the two meeting in Chicago’s grain elevators and McCormick’s reaper factory. Illinois embraced sections and cultures: Chicago teemed with Irish and Germans; northern Illinois was dotted with towns more Yankee than Dedham; southern Illinois, touching Kentucky and reaching farther south than Richmond, was a land of people who still talked and thought as Virginians and Kentuckians. No one—no European traveler, no nationally ambitious politician, no immigrant heading west along the northern routes, no businessman looking for profit—could ignore Illinois.

  If Chicago was the economic capital of Illinois in the 1850s, Springfield was the legal and political. Like Bloomington and Peoria and a dozen other places in central Illinois, it was a boom town, with its brand-new railroad connection to Chicago and New York, its population that was doubling while land valuation tripled. This town smack in the middle of the state was also the capital, with a proud new statehouse built of buff-colored stone that had been dragged by teams of twelve oxen from a nearby quarry. Springfield was still in part an unfinished frontier town: on a wet day people could sink to their knees in the prairie mud of the unpaved sidewalks; hogs ran wild in the streets, and in the business district imposing three-story shops stood next to ramshackle houses. The public square was crowded with buggies and sometimes by “movers” headed west in their covered wagons. Yet Springfield also had its aristocracy, dominated by wealthy old Whig families like the Stuarts, Edwardses, and Todds.

  One of the Todds, Mary, a small and refined woman of quick temper, had married below her station in accepting a local lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, a man of tall frame, easygoing manner, hollowed cheeks, huge arms and hands, coarse black hair, and dowdy garb. Even after Lincoln was making good money as a lawyer, he could be seen currying his horse and milking his cow.

  If you wanted to find Abe Lincoln in Springfield, you would look for a battered sign, LINCOLN & HERNDON, swinging on rusty hinges outside an office building downtown. You would climb a narrow flight of stairs, cross a dark hallway, and enter an office filled with a long, creaking sofa, a few old cane-bottomed chairs, and desks piled high with papers that overflowed the pigeonholes. If Lincoln wasn’t there, his partner, William Herndon, might be. Billy seemed almost the opposite of Abe: youthful, nervous, verbose, something of a dandy, but admiring, of “Mr. Lincoln.” Lincoln might be down at the courthouse or the capitol, or visiting another law office, or some place where you might find him telling jokes that had a crowd in stitches—“he could make a cat laugh,” someone said—or he might be sitting by himself in a state of such utter melancholy that no one would dare approach him.

  If Lincoln was not in town, he was probably out riding circuit. Gone were the days when he might ride horseback through rain and snow for thirty miles or so. Now he could take trains, with his free pass, or drive a horse and buggy. In earlier times he had been lucky to find a farmhouse where he could put up overnight in the extra room; now he could often stay at a newly built hotel. He often traveled with other lawyers, and with David Davis, circuit judge of the judicial district, a huge man of three hundred pounds, cherubic face, and sharp, penetrating mind. At night Lincoln might have to share a bed with another attorney, but the judge had his own bed, as tribute to the principle of separating bench and bar.

  Life on the circuit was hard but educational. Lincoln, arguing every kind of case under every kind of law, constitutional, patent, admiralty, and common, came to know virtually every economic interest and human problem in the heart of Illinois.

  He became a respected lawyer, trusted with important responsibilities, arguing many cases involving human problems, including divorce, rape, murder, and both sides in fugitive-slave cases. But most of his cases dealt with property: disputed wills, railroad rights-of-way, foreclosures, debt collection, patent infringements, trespass violations, mortgages, property damages. While early in his career he represented rivermen against bridge and railroad enterprises, later he took so many cases for railroads—he represented the Illinois Central in eleven appeals to the Illinois Supreme Court—that by the mid-1850s he was known as a railroad lawyer. Yet he also sued the Illinois Central when they offered him a fraction of the fee he billed them, and won. A Whig, a man of property, he prospered in the economic boom of capitalist Illinois. He believed in individual liberty, initiative, and enterprise. It was best, he said, “to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can.” Some would get rich, but a law to prevent that would do more harm than good.

  But Lincoln was much more than an attorney for capitalism. A onetime state legislator, a Whig congressman in 1845-47, an unsuccessful candidate for the United States Senate, he had repeatedly subordinated his law practice to his desire to run for office. Herndon marveled at this man who could be so relaxed and casual at times but who seemed “totally swallowed up” in his greed for office. His ambition, Herndon said, “was a little engine that knew no rest.”

  Politically ambitious—and yet the soul of political caution. When news of the Nebraska bill reached Springfield, and Herndon and other militant young Whigs wanted to use aggressive, even desperate means to defend the cause of freedom, Lincoln urged them to do nothing rebellious or illegal. People all around him were breaking away from Whiggism to the Know-Nothing or Republican or some other party, but Lincoln would have none of it. Above all he feared being linked with abolitionists or other extremists, but he dared not offend the radicals, for they voted too. When Republicans and other antislavery leaders invited him to a Springfield meeting to form a state organization, he contrived to be out of town; and when they elected him to their state central committee, he declined the poisoned chalice.

  He was not sure where he stood. “I think I am a whig,” he wrote his friend Joshua Speed, “but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist.” As a congressman he had voted for the Wilmot Proviso forty times, he went on, and he had never heard of anyone trying to “unwhig” him for that. He simply opposed the extension of slavery, he insisted to Speed.

  “I am not a Know-nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?” Americans seemed to be degenerating. “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners and Catholics.’ ” At that point, Lincoln added, he would prefer to emigrate to some country like Russia, “where they make no pretense of loving liberty.”

  If he was politically immobilized, at least he could speak for himself, and when Stephen Douglas returned to Illinois late in 1854, Lincoln’s competitive spirit was aroused by the man who had succeeded so brilliantly in politics as he had not. The Little Giant, after journeying to Chicago “by the light of my own effigy,” Douglas related almost pridefully, tried to defend his Nebraska role to a mass meeting, only to be howled down. Farther south he found his audiences more friendly. When he defined his position to a wildly cheering audience at the state fair in Springfield early in October, Lincoln was there, sitting directly in front of him and listening intently to every word; at the end he rose and announced that he would respond to Douglas the next day, at the same time and place. He did, before a crowd as enthusiastic as Douglas’, and the two men squared off again in Peoria—exchanges that would lead to a m
uch more extended confrontation four years later.

  Still, Lincoln continued to take a moderate position on slavery, far short of abolition, and to act as a conciliator among anti-Nebraska Whigs, fusionists, and others, not to take leadership and certainly not to join the controversial Republicans. Few other moderate antislavery leaders of statewide standing were willing to embrace Republicanism or radicalism. Yet within a year a strong Republican party was growing in Illinois. What had happened?

  The persons who built the Republican party in Illinois were not national leaders—the Republicans still had none—nor were they noted state anti-slavery men—most of them were still standing by their old parties—but a “third cadre” of militant grass-roots activists. These were the people who organized meetings, put up posters, carried on antislavery correspondence, carried around petitions, got people to vote. One antislavery orator alone, a man named Ichabod Crane, subsidized by an anti-Nebraska fusion group in Chicago, spoke to more than a hundred rallies and probably many more than 100,000 persons during 1854, and to almost another hundred meetings during the next two years. The militants had a superb political vehicle—the city or county convention. No one could stop them from “issuing the call,” organizing and holding the convention, adopting rules of order, electing a chairman, conducting vigorous debate, passing resolutions, all before press and public.

  Perhaps the most remarkable of the activists’ meetings was held in the winter of 1856 in Decatur by a group of anti-Nebraska newspaper editors, mainly old-line Whigs. Only one politician was present—Abraham Lincoln, who had just declined to serve as an Illinois delegate to a Republican national organizing convention in Pittsburgh. To Lincoln’s satisfaction, the Illinois editors took a moderate position, calling for restoration of the Missouri Compromise but acceding to slavery in the South and the fugitive-slave law. Acting boldly as men who were political leaders as well as editors, they called for a statewide convention, to take place in Bloomington in late May. While Lincoln was out of town, Herndon added his partner’s name to the call. Told by old-line Whigs that he had ruined Lincoln, Herndon anxiously wrote his partner: Did he approve?

  “All right, go ahead,” Lincoln replied. “Will meet you, radicals and all.”

  The Bloomington convention met in the wake of lurid accounts of the sack of Lawrence and the caning of Sumner. The grass-roots activists were still taking the lead; Lincoln came to Bloomington but was immensely relieved when old-line Whigs and bolting Democrats showed up along with radicals and abolitionists. At least he could play the role of conciliator. He and Judge Davis and old-line Whig Orville Browning worked strenuously behind the scenes to prevent splits among the polyglot delegations of Whigs, anti-Nebraska Democrats, Know-Nothings, German immigrants, and temperance reformers. The convention censured both the Nebraska bill and nativism. Soon the call rang out for “Lincoln, Lincoln” to give the concluding address. The normally analytical attorney seemed to catch fire as he spoke. Men sat enthralled, reporters listened with their pencils transfixed while Lincoln gave perhaps his most galvanizing speech—a speech lost to history because of those frozen pencils.

  By this time the national parties were wheeling into line, in preparation for the presidential election battle of 1856. After the Know-Nothings split into their northern and southern wings earlier in the year, the “South Americans” prepared to do battle behind Fillmore, and the “North Americans” looked toward other parties, especially the Republicans. As nativists, they could hardly look to the Democratic party, with its hospitality to immigrants and Catholics. The Democratic national convention met in Cincinnati early in June.

  Pierce hoped to be renominated, but his weakness as President and flabbiness as a leader had disappointed even his southern friends in the party. The Southerners would rather reward the Northerner who had taken leadership on the Nebraska bill, fought for it, and put it through—the Little Giant. Southern support now was Douglas’ undoing, however, for at this point the Democracy wanted to win a national election, not merely a congressional enactment, and a moderate safe-and-sane candidate was available in James Buchanan. The Pennsylvanian had worked closely with southern leaders, but less flamboyantly than Douglas. He had served in both House and Senate; he was experienced in foreign affairs as a former Secretary of State—and he had the great advantage of having been in London during the battle over Kansas. Keeping in close touch with the contest from Washington, Douglas learned over the telegraph of the successive ballots as Pierce fell behind and Buchanan forged ahead; then the Illinoisan, always a believer in party unity and discipline, asked that his name be withdrawn.

  Two weeks later, in a fervency of moral indignation and high enthusiasm, two thousand Republican delegates and friends gathered in Philadelphia’s Musical Fund Hall. This crusading new party was already proclaiming itself as a national movement but one look at the state standards revealed that it was embarrassingly sectional—not a single southern delegation was present. Unswayed by Democratic charges that they were a single-issue party, the Republicans adopted a platform of nine planks, most of which took a strong stand against slavery extension, but they did not neglect to call for government-aided construction of a Pacific railroad “by the most central and practical route.” The convention quickly chose for President a man who seemed an ideal candidate—John C. Fremont, soldier, western explorer, famous as the “Pathfinder,” and a moderate on slavery. True, he was politically inexperienced but he was young and bold and determined, just the right candidate, in Nevins’ words, for a party that would be young, bold, and determined. The fact that he was married to the spirited Jessie Benton, daughter of the maverick Democratic senator from Missouri, seemed a fine little extra—until the senator announced that he was sticking by his party’s choice of Buchanan and, to boot, that he loved his son-in-law “like a son” but flatly opposed him for President. The presidency had now become such a glittering prize in American politics that parties were compelled to broaden their ranks and win over third parties. Already there were three parties in the 1856 field, but where were the Whigs and the North Americans? The latter threatened to hold their own convention and nominate their own candidate—a move that would divide the antislavery forces even further—until Thurlow Weed and other Republican managers contrived an adroit piece of political chess play. In a move that once again indicated the close affinity between Republicans and northern Know-Nothings, the leaders of the latter party had chosen Speaker Banks for President as a holding operation until the Republicans selected their own candidate. The maneuver worked; once Fremont was nominated by the Republicans, the North Americans soon dropped Banks and endorsed the Pathfinder.

  The Whigs, broken as a major party, had their last hurrah in a September gathering of their leaders in Baltimore. There they fell back on their political and intellectual taproot—preservation of the Union. Denouncing both the Democratic and Republican parties as merely sectional and divisive, they endorsed Fillmore as a friend of the Union and of the Constitution, “without adopting or referring to the peculiar principles of the party which has already selected” him. So disappeared the northern leadership of the great Whig party in the bowels of the Know-Nothing party, for whose nativist prejudices it had little but contempt. It was the politics of nostalgia; these Whig “gentlemen,” a Republican journalist observed, “are evidently incapable of the idea that the process now going on in the politics of the United States is a Revolution. ”

  By now the parties’ orators and foot soldiers—Fremont’s Republican-North Americans, Buchanan’s Democrats, and Fillmore’s Know-Nothing-Whigs—were locked in furious combat throughout the North. The Democrats were so strong in the South, the Fillmore forces so weak, and the Republicans so absent, that Buchanan won there by default, and the Democracy was able to deploy its finest southern orators in the battle of the North. That battle on the part of all three parties consisted, rhetorically, of systematic exaggeration and distortion of the positions of both foes. Although the Republicans in part
icular tried to moderate their position on slavery in order to capture the centrist vote, southern Democrats frightened the electorate with warnings of disunion and secession should Fremont win.

  It was also a battle of cadres. Here the Democrats had the advantage, with their thousands of well-disciplined jobholders and their tens of thousands, of stalwarts who could not forget the glory days of Jackson and Van Buren. But the Republicans had the advantage of enthusiasm, as their militants used press, pulpit, parades, and personal proselytizing to transmit their new gospel. They could call on some of the most eminent literati. In Concord, a group of Republican neighbors had gone to Emerson’s house to ask him to join the Massachusetts delegation to the Republican national convention. They had done so in fear and trembling, for Emerson was known to be averse to “meddling with politics” in any partisan way. Though Emerson was not at home, Mrs. Emerson electrified her visitors by stating that of course Mr. Emerson would put aside his private affairs in this “momentous crisis.”

  But this election would not be decided in Massachusetts—all New England, and New York too, were expected to go Republican—rather in the great swing states in the center. Foremost of these was Pennsylvania, with its twenty-seven electoral votes, and its bellwether state elections three weeks before the presidential. The Democrats poured in vast sums of money, some of it scourged out of New York merchants in the southern trade; the Republicans brought in less money but battalions of orators. The Democrats’ victory in the state election presaged Buchanan’s win in November. Still the Republicans fought on. Women and clergymen were so militant in the cause that Democrats sneeringly dismissed them as “Pulpit and Petticoats.” The militants took on a radical posture, appropriating the air of the “Marseillaise” and bringing audiences to their feet with the battle song: