But then conventioneers began to wonder whether a tall, skinny former congressman named Abraham Lincoln might be a good compromise. Lincoln, who was remembered for his debates against Douglas in an 1858 senatorial race, was the more moderate candidate that many of the delegates were seeking.
As the nomination battle heated up, dirty tricks abounded. Thurlow Weed promised $100,000 to the Indiana and Illinois delegations (which supported Lincoln) if they threw their votes to Seward. No deal. In return, Lincoln backers waited until Seward’s delegates were outside marching in demonstration around the convention hall, then distributed counterfeit tickets to other Lincoln backers waiting outside. When Seward’s men returned, they found they could not get back into the Wigwam to vote.
The Wigwam was set for a rocking, rolling, reeling ride such as would not be seen again in Chicago until 1968. When the voting began, ten thousand people were inside the hall, and another twenty thousand screaming and chanting on the streets. One observer described the noise inside the place: “Imagine all the hogs ever slaughtered in Cincinnati giving their death squeals together, plus a score of steam whistles going.” After four rounds of balloting, the vote went to Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln, waiting anxiously in Springfield, was informed by telegram of his victory but advised not to come to Chicago—Seward backers, many of them weeping profusely, were in such a state that it was not advisable for the new presidential nominee to meet with them. The party’s judicious choice for Lincoln’s vice president would be Hannibal Hamlin, senator from Maine and a friend of the defeated Seward.
The stage was now set for the most important presidential campaign in the country’s history.
THE CANDIDATES
REPUBLICAN: ABRAHAM LINCOLN The six-foot-four Lincoln capitalized on his humble upbringing—unlike William Henry Harrison, he actually had been born in a log cabin. Living the hardscrabble life in Kentucky, Indiana, and finally Illinois, he received minimal formal schooling but worked his way up to become a circuit lawyer, Illinois legislator, and congressman. His folksy exterior concealed a brilliant political mind that would prove to be his most valuable campaign asset.
DEMOCRAT: STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS Officially five-feet-four, although some estimates put him at no taller than five feet, Stephen Douglas was as short as Lincoln was tall. In fact, the senator from Illinois was known as the Little Giant. He earned the nickname as much for his bulky, boxlike torso and head as for his declamatory abilities and outsized political stances. “Let the people rule!” was his famous cry, and this meant allowing each state to decide whether slavery should be allowed within its territory. But for much of his political career, he had to keep hidden the fact that he had married a North Carolina woman who owned a large, slavery-driven cotton plantation.
THE CAMPAIGN
The Republicans held massive rallies and marches several miles long, with hordes of Wide Awakes—Republican faithful who would save the Union—marching with torches and likenesses of “Honest Abe.” The Wide Awakes wore oilcloth capes and strange black enamel caps to protect themselves from dripping torch oil. In surviving lithographs, they bear a weird resemblance to certain members of the Village People. Boston Republicans organized a rail-splitter’s battalion—in homage to Lincoln, every member stood exactly six-feet-four-inches tall. And throughout the campaign, Republican newspapers published countless jokes at Douglas’s expense, such as: “Lincoln is like a rail; Douglas is the reverse—rail spelled backwards—liar.”
The Democrats, at a disadvantage to begin with, tried to answer back. Lincoln, they said, had participated in duels. As a congressman during the Mexican War (which Lincoln opposed), he had failed to vote for provisions for the troops. There was a claim that he had slandered Thomas Jefferson by saying that Jefferson had sold his own children (by Sally Hemings) into slavery.
Lincoln denied these lies privately but was too smart to be lured into public debate. He remained in Springfield, while Douglas stumped mightily, riding a railcar all over the country. Douglas told audiences that a Republican win would mean secession. If only Andrew Jackson were alive, he bellowed, “he might hang Northern and Southern traitors on the same gallows.”
THE WINNER: ABRAHAM LINCOLN
After November 7, when the votes were counted, Lincoln was the president-elect, with 1,865,908 votes to Douglas’s 1,380,202. It was a strong victory for Lincoln, but with a powerful quotient of caution—he had not received a single vote from a Southern state.
THEY’RE GRRRREAT! Lincoln did not debate Douglas during the 1860 campaign; if their 1858 debates were any indication, Lincoln would have come out on top. Honest Abe could be quite droll; he had the habit of mocking Douglas’s rolling stentorian tones, sounding like Tony the Tiger as he satirized the Little Giant’s “gr-r-r-r-r-r-r-reat pur-r-rinciple” of popular sovereignty. What popular sovereignty really meant, Lincoln pointed out, was that “if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man nor anybody else has a right to object.”
THE LOST BOY Douglas took a lot of heat for his whistle-stop tour during the election. In the next century, of course, such journeys would become a standard for any presidential candidates—but back in 1860, they still felt unseemly. Douglas didn’t help matters by claiming that he wasn’t so much electioneering as making a few stops on the way to visit his dear mother in New York. It took him about a month to finally see her, and Republicans wouldn’t let him forget it. One pamphlet purported to be a “Lost Boy” handbill. “Left Washington, D.C., some time in July, to go home to his mother … who is very anxious about him. Seen in Philadelphia, New York City, Hartford, Conn., [and] at a clambake in Rhode Island. Answers to the name of Little Giant. Talks a great deal, very loud, always about himself.”
MUTT AND JEFF SQUARE OFF Lincoln took some hard hits because of his appearance—he was gaunt and far taller than most people of his day. Photographs made him look dreadfully serious, almost spectral. It’s little wonder that Democratic papers caricatured him with a vengeance. “[He is] a horrid-looking wretch,” wrote the Charleston Mercury, “sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse-swapper, and the nightman.”
The Houston Telegraph added: “Lincoln is leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a single frame.”
Not to be outdone, Republicans described Douglas as “about five feet nothing in height and about the same in diameter the other way. He has a red face, short legs, and a large belly.”
THE RACE CARD While Douglas waffled on the slavery issue, making such strange pronouncements as, “I am for the negro against the crocodile, but for the white man against the negro,” Lincoln was plainly antislavery, which left him open to attack from racist elements of the Democratic Party. In one Democratic poster, he was pictured being carried into the lunatic asylum by numerous “supporters.” One was a black man dressed in fancy clothes who was saying: “Da white man hab no rights at collud pussuns am bound to spect.” And just to make the whole poster a little more offensive, the artist also included a feminist screeching: “I want women’s rights enforced and man reduced in subjugation to her authority!”
The Mutt and Jeff of 1860: The Little Giant and the Railsplitter.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
VS.
GEORGE MCCLELLAN
“It is not best to swap horses while crossing the river.”
—Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln took office under stresses felt by no other president, before or since. A month after his inauguration, Confederate batteries opened up on Fort Sumter, in South Carolina, and the Civil War began.
America had had only one wartime president—James Madison—and the War of 1812 was nothing compared to this bloody struggle that threatened to destroy the American republic. Lincoln was forced to learn on the job; early results were mixed. As the war heated up, partisan politics in the North reached a temporary cease-fire. Lincoln’s opponent in the 1860 election, Stephen Doug
las, supported him wholeheartedly. But as the war continued and casualties increased, opposition to Lincoln was inevitable.
His chief critic among the Democrats was General George G. McClellan, commander-in-chief of the Army of the Potomac and the youngest of the Union generals. Lincoln had appointed “Little Mac” early in the war to replace General Winfield Scott, the aging Mexican War hero, who had a habit of napping during major battles. But McClellan turned out to be a disaster. He consistently overestimated enemy strength and moved at such a glacial pace that Lincoln once sent him a note that read: “If you don’t want to use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while.”
In 1862, after the bloody battle of Antietam, Lincoln fired McClellan, and the Democrats immediately starting talking up the embittered Little Mac as their candidate.
Lincoln now had problems within his own party as well. Many so-called Radical Republicans disagreed with his conduct of the war. They called him a dictator—and not a very good one. (“How vain to have the power of a god and not use it godlike,” Senator Charles Sumner wrote.) They pointed out that in the previous thirty years, since Andrew Jackson, no president had served more than one term—so why should Lincoln be any different?
Even Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in 1863 didn’t satisfy the Radical Republicans. They eventually splintered away to form a party they called Radical Democracy. Meeting in Cleveland in May of 1864, they chose the 1856 Republican candidate John C. Frémont as their nominee. Their platform demanded one-term limits on the presidency and congressional participation in wartime and reconstruction decision-making.
The Republican Convention was held in June, in Baltimore, and Lincoln was renominated. Still, no one was at all sure that he could win the presidency again. Despite Union victories in the summer of 1863, the war seemed to be turning in the Confederacy’s favor. Countless party luminaries asked Lincoln to step aside, including Horace Greeley (“Mr. Lincoln is already beaten”) and Boss Thurlow Weed (“I told Mr. Lincoln that his election was an impossibility”). Lincoln, understandably nervous, chose his running mate carefully—he picked Andrew Johnson, former Democrat and senator from Tennessee, as a ticket-balancer who might win votes in the border states.
The Democrats met in Chicago in August; the convention was controlled by antiwar Democrats known as the Copperheads. George McClellan was nominated as their presidential candidate, although he wisely refused to endorse the “peace at any cost” plank that Copperheads had inserted into their platform. His vice-presidential nominee was George Pendleton, a congressman from Ohio.
THE CANDIDATES
REPUBLICAN: ABRAHAM LINCOLN The fifty-five-year-old Lincoln looked much older than his age. He was worn down not only by the war but also by the death of his young son Willie, in 1862. Yet he fervently pursued his goals, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 as he sought to find the right generals to conduct the war.
DEMOCRAT: GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN When George McClellan was first appointed commander-in-chief of the Army of the Potomac, at the remarkably young age of thirty-four, the handsome and dashing general wrote to his wife: “I find myself in a new and strange position here—Presdt., Cabinet … & all deferring to me—by some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land.… I almost think that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator.” No wonder McClellan earned the nickname “Little Napoleon.”
But the reality of McClellan was at odds with his image. He was a plodding general, insubordinate to Lincoln (whom he openly despised), and a divisive presence in the army.
THE CAMPAIGN
McClellan started things off with a bang: “The President is nothing more than a well-meaning baboon,” he roared. “He is the original gorilla. What a specimen to be at the head of our affairs now!”
It was hard to match this level of rhetoric, but other Democrats tried their best. “Honest Abe has few honest men to defend his honesty,” wrote the New York World, accusing Lincoln of corruption. They published a truly perfidious campaign biography, The Only Authentic Life of Abraham Lincoln, Alias Old Abe, that accused Lincoln of being interested only in the money: “Abraham thought [being president] was a good chance to make twenty-five thousand a year.” The same circular went on to describe him personally: “Mr. Lincoln stands six-feet-twelve in his socks, which he changes once every ten days. His anatomy is composed mostly of bones, and when walking he resembles the offspring of a happy marriage between a derrick and a windmill.”
A pamphlet war ensued between the two parties. In “The Lincoln Catechism, Wherein the Eccentricities & Beauties of Despotism Are Fully Set Forth,” Democrats asked a series of mock questions:
Q. What is the constitution?
A. A compact with hell, now obsolete.
Q. By whom hath the constitution been made obsolete?
A. By Abraham Africanus the First.
Republicans fired back with “The Copperhead Catechism”:
Q. What is chief Aim of a Copperhead in life?
A. To abuse the President, vilify the administration, and glorify himself.
In July, Confederate forces under Jubal Early came within five miles of the White House. Lincoln himself stood on a parapet to watch their battle with Union forces and was told repeatedly to seek shelter as bullets flew and the men around him were wounded. Despite his show of bravery, Early’s raid was bad political news for the president, and he began to despair of winning the election. Late in August, he even made each member of his cabinet sign a note he had written indicating that they would cooperate with the new president-elect, whoever that person might be.
THE WINNER: ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Fortunately for Lincoln—or not so fortunately, considering that he would be assassinated in six months—the gods of battle finally smiled on the Union. In early September, Admiral Farragut captured Mobile Bay (“Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”) and Sherman marched into Atlanta.
When the tide of war turned, so did the election. In November, Lincoln easily beat McClellan 2,218,388 votes to 1,812,807. The soldiers of the Army of the Potomac, whom McClellan bragged would vote for him to a man, went for Lincoln by a margin of almost four to one.
LINCOLN’S DIRTY TRICKS Most history textbooks portray Lincoln as a martyred American icon, but Honest Abe was not above a little double-dealing.
In 1864, Lincoln feared that John C. Frémont’s third-party candidacy would drain votes away from the Republican ticket. With Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan acting as broker, a deal was struck—Frémont would withdraw his presidential bid if Lincoln would fire his controversial Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, who hated Frémont and the Radical Republicans. There is some doubt whether Lincoln knew about Chandler’s actions ahead of time, but he certainly acquiesced once the deal was brought to him. On September 22, Frémont quit the election. On September 23, Lincoln fired Blair, using the excuse that the volatile Blair, on numerous occasions, had offered to resign. “You have generously said to me more than once that whenever your resignation could be a relief to me, it was at my disposal.” Thus was Blair disposed of.
Lincoln still, however, needed to please powerful Tammany boss Thurlow Weed and his New York City conservative Republicans, who in general were not fans of the president. To help his cause, therefore, Lincoln ousted several appointees in New York’s Port and Custom Houses and replaced them with Weed’s handpicked men. The New York Herald dryly pointed out: “It is remarkable to note the change which has taken place in the political sentiments of some of these gentlemen in the last forty-eight hours—in fact, an anti-Lincoln man could not be found in any of the departments yesterday.”
Lincoln was also a man who believed in getting out the vote, in whatever way he could. On Election Day, he sent a federal steamer down the Mississippi to collect the ballots of gunboat sailors and furloughed federal employees in Washington, D.C.
IS NOTHING SACRED? After Lincoln delivered his famous Gettysburg Address, the Harr
isburg Patriot and Union wrote: “We pass over the silly remarks of the President; for the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them.”
MIXED MARRIAGES Only Lincoln could have the charm to joke about interracial marriage during the Civil War and get away with it. Responding to continuous Democratic smear charges that Republicans favored intermarriage of blacks and whites, Lincoln joked: “It’s a democratic mode of producing good Union men, and I don’t propose to infringe on the patent.”
LITTLE MAC TO THE REAR Republicans noted how far Little Mac kept to the rear of his army during any combat. Lincoln called the Army of the Potomac McClellan’s bodyguard, and another Republican said that, during a retreat, “McClellan for the first time in his life was found in the front.”
This was mainly a canard—McClellan had performed bravely during the Mexican War—but it was true that, compared to some Civil War generals, he did spend a good deal of time back with the camp wagons.
According to one Democratic newspaper, Abraham Lincoln changed his socks only once every ten days!
ULYSSES S. GRANT
VS.
HORATIO SEYMOUR
“Grant has been drunk in the street since the first of January.”
—Democrat attack on Ulysses S. Grant
Some vice presidents—like Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson—take a tragedy like the death of a sitting president and make the most of it. Others—like Andrew Johnson—well, they get impeached.
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