The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln

by Abraham Lincoln

  There was no doubt that he was popular in his own state and throughout the Middle West. Laboring men and farmers could be depended upon to support him. At the Illinois State Republican Convention held at Decatur on May 9, an incident had occurred which showed Lincoln’s potential strength with the masses. His cousin John Hanks, with whom he had gone to New Orleans by flatboat many years before, entered the convention carrying two fence rails which Lincoln had split on the Sangamon bottom in 1830. Lincoln became “the Rail-splitter Candidate” for President. This was something for vote-hungry political managers to think about long and seriously.

  Eager enough as Lincoln had been to attain the Presidency, he must have had cause to ponder hard over the matter during the weeks before the convention. Becoming a Republican President in 1860—even a “safe” Republican President—was very much like hammering on a stick of dynamite to see whether or not it was correctly labeled. The South had long threatened to secede the moment a Republican President took office. The only thing that lulled Northerners into believing that the dynamite might not explode was that it was old—the South had made so many threats for so many years that no one quite knew whether to believe this one or not.

  Lincoln’s managers, in order to obtain the nomination for their man, at the last moment had to make promises that their candidate had specifically warned them not to make. They agreed to swap offices in exchange for delegation votes. They promised the backers of Simon Cameron—who wanted to be President, but who was willing to take the next best thing—that Lincoln would make their man a Cabinet member. This was to cause Lincoln much mental anguish, and bring about internal wrangling in the Cabinet during the early and most critical period of the War.

  On the first ballot, Lincoln was in second place with Seward more than seventy votes ahead of him; he was only three and a half votes behind Seward on the second ballot after the Cameron deal had gone through. Then the landslide began—more votes from Pennsylvania, votes from New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, California, Texas, the District of Columbia, votes from the territories—“bleeding” Kansas, Nebraska and Oregon rapidly came in. The hall was in an uproar. Three hundred and sixty-four and a half votes! Someone moved that the nomination be made unanimous. The motion was carried. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was the Republican candidate for the Presidency! Artillery in the city was fired. Cannon fire was an appropriate salute to the man who was to be the first Republican President. These Chicago cannon were the first guns of the War; they were to be replied to at Sumter, and their echoes were to shake the nation for four long terrible years.

  The candidate had spent the day quietly in Springfield, where he passed some of the waiting hours playing handball. Dr. J. G. Holland describes Lincoln’s reception of the news of his nomination: “A messenger from the telegraph office entered with the decisive dispatch in his hand.… Mr. Lincoln read it in silence, then aloud. After exchanging greetings and receiving congratulations from those around him, he strove to get out of the crowd, and as he moved off, he remarked to those near him: ‘Well, there is a little woman who will be interested in this news, and I will go home and tell her.’ ” Mary Todd was about to achieve the goal of her social ambitions.

  There were torchlight processions and wild celebration in Springfield that night. Again the cannon roared, and to the fifty-one-year-old man who must have lain awake questioning in his own mind the reality of what had happened to him, their roar must have been filled with dark significance, for he certainly knew what was ahead of him.

  The campaign dragged on through the summer. It was picturesque and spirited, but Lincoln took no part in it, nor did he, in fact, even go outside the town of Springfield until after election day. On June 1, he wrote out a long autobiographical statement to be used for campaign purposes. He kept in touch with his political leaders throughout the country, but he declined to take the stump to speak in his own behalf, although Douglas was engaging in a whirlwind electioneering tour for himself.

  In October Lincoln received a letter from a young girl, Miss Grace Bedell, suggesting that he grow a beard so as to appear more dignified for the high position he evidently was about to fill. He seems to have been influenced by her suggestion, for he began to let his beard grow, and the smooth-shaven Illinois politician became transformed into the familiar short-bearded Civil War President.

  On November 6, the nation voted. Lincoln waited in the telegraph office until his election was assured. Then he went out into the streets that were filled with cheering townspeople. He stopped for a while to partake of a Republican ladies’ supper, and from there he went home with Mrs. Lincoln, to enter his house for the first time as the President-elect of the United States.

  When all the returns were in they showed that Lincoln received 1,866,000 popular votes—more than Buchanan had received in 1856. Douglas got 1,377,000 votes; Breckinridge, the Southern Democrats’ candidate, only 850,000. The North had spoken in terms of its vastly greater population; the slaveholders would never again be able to win a national election.13 They had long realized this, but they waited for election day, hoping against hope that something might go wrong in their political calculations. On October 5, more than a month before the election was held, the Governor of South Carolina sent a confidential letter to the Governors of the other cotton states, informing them that his state intended to call a convention to consider a course of action if Lincoln were elected.

  As soon as the news of the election of a Republican President was made known, the South boiled with activity. Secession meetings were called; bills were passed to raise and equip volunteers; large sums of money were voted for the purchase of munitions; Southern sympathizers in responsible governmental and army positions did their best to strip Northern armories by sending materials of war into the South; Northern men and women residing in Southern states were told to return home. Everything was prepared for the waging of a general war. Even possible foreign allies were approached. The South made good use of the long interval between the election and the inauguration of a new President. The North, still deluding herself that all this furor was only another gesture of defiance, waited. And the President-elect waited, too. He had to remain silent, withholding himself from public affairs while his predecessor was still in office.

  Buchanan as President had hitherto simply been a fool—now he became a public calamity. Revolt simmered under his feet and he did nothing. He was advised by General Scott, commander of the Army, to garrison the forts in the South as President Jackson had done during the nullification controversy with South Carolina in 1832,14 but he disregarded Scott’s advice. In his message to Congress on December 4, 1860, Buchanan denied the right of the South to secede, but he refrained from any action as though the matter were a purely theoretical one. He seems to have been motivated only by one desire—to postpone everything until the end of his administration so that all the problems engendered by the election of a Republican President would be dumped into the Republican President’s lap. However, he apparently doubted that Lincoln would be permitted to take office, for several times he said lugubriously: “I am the last President of the United States!”

  The North was by no means united on the question of what should be done. Greeley came out with an editorial in the New York Tribune, saying that the Southern states should be allowed to go in peace; he was supported in this attitude by the abolitionists who wanted to be free from all alliances with slavery. Others felt that some kind of compromise should be arrived at, and the last few months of 1860 were given over to a desperate effort to reach such a compromise. Several proposals were made, the best known of which is the Crittenden Compromise, so called because it was introduced into the Senate by Senator J. J. Crittenden of Kentucky. It provided for an amendment to the Constitution which would practically restore the Missouri Compromise; in exchange for this concession, laws regarding personal liberty issues and the taking of fugitive slaves were to be made still more stringent.
It was a complicated and tangled measure, but the essence of it was that the South was to be permitted to extend slavery anywhere south of 36° 30´; the slaveholders were to be guaranteed by Constitutional amendment the right of holding human beings in involuntary servitude, and the North was to acquiesce in their bondage. Crittenden was no fire-eating Southerner—he was an ardent pro-Union man who remained loyal to the Union during the War. These were the most reasonable terms he felt he could get the South to accept.

  While these attempts to effect a reconciliation were in progress, South Carolina held her convention. On December 17, 1860, the delegates met at Columbia, and three days later passed an ordinance of secession which announced that the state had withdrawn from the Union and that South Carolina was now a sovereign nation holding allegiance to herself alone—and to the principle of slavery which she was determined to preserve at any cost.

  On this same day, December 20, while the telegraph wires of the nation were hot with the news of South Carolina’s secession, the President-elect faced his first grave decision. Seward had been invited by Lincoln to become his Secretary of State. Thurlow Weed, Seward’s political manager, went to Springfield to consult with Lincoln about Seward and also to find out exactly how the President-elect stood on the whole matter of compromise with the South. Any concessions that might be made by Republican Senators and Representatives in Congress had to have the support of the incoming President if they were to possess any permanent validity.

  THE END OF COMPROMISE

  Lincoln had already made up his mind, as his letters written earlier in the month show. He resolutely opposed the kind of compromise proposed by the South, compromise that would permit slavery to be extended to the territories and perhaps to Central America and the West Indies. He had written to Weed on December 17, saying: “I will be inflexible on the territorial question … either the Missouri [Compromise] line extended, or Douglas’s … popular sovereignty would lose us everything we gain by the election—filibustering for all south of us and making slave states of it would follow.… My opinion is that no state can in any way lawfully get out of the Union without the consent of the others; and that it is the duty of the President and other government functionaries to run the machine as it is.”

  Developments during the past ten years had led Lincoln to make this decision, fateful as it was. He had seen compromise after compromise with the slaveholding interests fail as they greedily reached out for more territory and for more privileges. He had no intention of attempting to prohibit slavery in the states where it already existed, but he was determined to arrest its spread. And he was convinced that slavery itself was wrong, an evil thing that had no right to exist in a civilized world, although for expediency’s sake he was willing to let it stand as it was. Yet in the basic moral issue he was as inflexibly convinced as he was in the matter of confining slavery to its already established borders. This was the real issue—“the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world.”

  Compromise at this time might have again postponed the struggle; civil war might have been staved off for another year or two. But it was evident that the South would never be satisfied—or the North forever willing to remain politically hampered in the natural course of her development. The issue had been joined, and the issue that was tearing the nation apart was slavery.15 From this moment on, the nation was at war. South Carolina had seceded, and on the same day, the Republican President-elect had given the answer that he would entertain no compromise dictated by the South to extend her territorial control and to preserve her peculiar property interests by means of a law written into the Constitution of the United States.

  Weed went back to the East, taking with him a declaration of policy written out by Lincoln’s hand. This policy did much to shape the Northern attitude on coming events. Its actual wording, unfortunately, has been lost—perhaps destroyed. But the Republican leaders knew where their “safe” candidate stood now. Nor was this the last time they were to be surprised by the firmness of purpose and unshakable conviction of this rail-splitter President who had come up from the people to lead them in battle against a principle which, if allowed to persist, could end only in making all men slaves.

  The defiant attitude of South Carolina, “cradle of secession,” was rapidly adopted by other states in the far South. Mississippi seceded on January 9; then Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana. On February 1, Texas seceded, making a total of seven states that had withdrawn from the Union. Delegates from the first six states met on February 4, at Montgomery, Alabama, to set up a separate national government for the South. The cornerstone of the new nation was announced to be “the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.”

  Meanwhile, the man, against whose election this philosophical and moral government had been formed in protest, had to watch the months pass slowly by until the time came for his inauguration. The maundering Buchanan was still presiding in the White House; the nation impatiently waited to be rid of him.

  The Lincoln home in Springfield became a focal point for office-seeking politicians who hoped to get jobs in return for having supported the new party. The President-elect had not only to face the most difficult internal crisis in his country’s history, he had also to meet, talk with and not unduly antagonize all the aspiring postmasters, customs officers and petty job seekers who came to him from a hundred cities and a thousand towns. They pursued him to Washington; they made his life a hell in the White House; they ignored the impending crisis of the nation in their own eagerness to shove themselves toward the hog-trough of political patronage.

  The Lincolns prepared themselves for their journey to Washington. Mrs. Lincoln left Springfield early in January for a hurried shopping trip to New York in order to outfit herself with the fine clothes necessary for her position as mistress of the White House. This was to be the first of many such expeditions.

  At the end of the month, Lincoln went to pay a visit to his aged stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, who was living near Charleston, Illinois. The President-elect missed connections and arrived in Charleston in the caboose of a freight train from which he had to make his way down the track through the winter mud until he reached the station platform. He spent the night at the home of a friend in Charleston, telling stories to the neighbors who dropped in to see their old acquaintance who had now become great.

  In the morning Lincoln drove out to see his stepmother. Thanks to Herndon, who interviewed her in 1865 and recorded her words, we have Sarah Bush’s own account of this meeting. “He was here after he was elected President of the United States.” (Here the old lady stopped, turned around and cried, wiped her eyes, and proceeded.) “… I wish I had died when my husband did. I did not want Abe to run for President, did not want him elected, was afraid somehow or other, felt in my heart that something would happen to him, and when he came down to see me … I still felt that something told me that something would befall Abe, and that I should see him no more …”

  The superstitions of the forest folk rose up out of the past, out of the far-off days when Sarah Bush Lincoln had lived with her stepson in the great wilderness of Indiana where the phases of the moon, the call of an owl in the night and the spirits that dwelled in the darkness had been a real part of their lives. The old stepmother was not alone in her premonitions. Her foster child had received the dark warning; he, too, had had a presentiment of his destiny and his end. In Springfield, a few days after his election, he had risen from a couch one day to look at himself in a mirror. He had seen a double image in the glass, one clear and real, the other vague and shadowy, lurking behind the clear reflection. The incident made a great impressio
n on him. He told it to his wife who said that she felt it was a sign that he would serve two terms as President but that he would not live to finish his second term of office.

  There was good reason for his mind—and the minds of his stepmother and his wife—to turn toward thoughts of an untimely death for him. The bitterness of feeling raging in the country had concentrated itself upon the person of this one man who was about to take office as President. Threats of personal violence and of actual assassination had begun even before election; they were to continue all through his administration. The Lincoln family mail was never free from them. Mrs. Lincoln finally had to have someone open their letters to remove the abusive and sometimes obscene messages addressed to them both.

  Before the month of February was out, Lincoln was to have his first experience with threatened assassination. Long familiarity with its ever-present possibility finally made him oblivious of danger. “I long ago made up my mind that if anybody wants to kill me, he will do it,” he said. “If I wore a shirt of mail, and kept myself surrounded by a bodyguard, it would be all the same. There are a thousand ways of getting at a man if it is desired that he should be killed.”

  “HERE I HAVE LIVED A QUARTER OF A CENTURY …”

  The time was now fast approaching when it would be necessary to leave Springfield for Washington. On February 6, a farewell party was given by the Lincolns in the house that had been their home for sixteen years. As soon as the party was over the furniture was sold and dispersed forever. Trunks and bags were packed for the long stay in Washington. The family went to a hotel on February 8. There Lincoln made out the baggage labels with his own hand and addressed them: “A. Lincoln, Executive Mansion, Washington.” On the afternoon of his last day in Springfield (Sunday, February 10), he walked over to his law office to talk with Herndon.