En route home, Lincoln stopped in Indianapolis to deliver a speech denying Douglas’s claim that Indiana and other states in the Northwest were free not because of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance but because the soil and climate of that region were unsuited for plantation agriculture. Lincoln noted that parts of Indiana and Ohio lay south of the northern boundary of Kentucky, where slavery flourished, and that Illinois abutted Missouri, a Slave State whose soil and climate resembled those in the Prairie State. He also attacked Douglas’s oft-repeated observation “that in all contests between the negro and the white man, he was for the white man, but that in all contests between the negro and the crocodile, he was for the negro.” The Little Giant evidently meant to imply “that you are wronging the white man in some way or other, and that whoever is opposed to the negro being enslaved is in some way opposed to the white man.” Lincoln said that “was not true. If there were any conflict between the white man and negro, he would be for the white man as much as Douglas. There was no such conflict. The mass of white men were injured by the effect of slave labor in the neighborhood of their own labor.” Another implication of the Little Giant’s remark was, Lincoln asserted, “that there is a conflict between the negro and the crocodile.” Lincoln “did not think there was any such struggle. He supposed that if a crocodile … came across a white man, he would kill him if he could! And so he would a negro. The proposition amounted to something like this—as the negro is to the white man, so is the crocodile to the negro, and as the negro may treat the crocodile as a beast or reptile, so the white man may treat the negro as a beast or reptile.”63 A Democratic paper said of the speech that “for deep thought, historical research and biting criticism, it has not been equaled by any Republican orator in the West, or the East either.”64 A Republican auditor described Lincoln as “a plain commonsense man without much polish[.] Evidently a backwoods man.”65
Back in Springfield, Lincoln penned a note to Salmon P. Chase expressing regret that they had been unable to meet during his brief foray into Ohio. Having warned Chase earlier to avoid radicalism, he now counseled Buckeyes to give no “encouragement to Douglasism. That ism is all which now stands in the way of an early and complete success of Republicanism; and nothing would help it or hurt us so much as for Ohio to go over or falter just now. You must, one and all, put your souls into the effort.”66
On October 13, Lincoln rejoiced at the news that Republicans had won control of the Ohio Legislature, paving the way for the election of David Tod to replace Democrat George Pugh in the U.S. senate. The Republican gubernatorial candidate, William Dennison, bested his opponent by 13,000 votes. “Is not the election news glorious?” Lincoln asked rhetorically.67 On October 15 in a speech at Springfield, he “referred to the recent glorious victories achieved by the Republicans in Ohio and other States as clearly indicative that the good old doctrines of the fathers of the Republic would yet again prevail.”68
The Ohio result damaged Douglas. As a correspondent for the New York Times had observed shortly before the election, “[i]f the Democrats do not gain largely; nay, if they do not positively succeed, it will be proof positive in the minds of candid men that the Douglas dogma has brought no strength to the party, even in the Northwest.”69 The Chicago Press and Tribune was premature, however, in concluding that the “necessity of warring upon Douglas seems to be at an end. The October elections in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana and Minnesota, resulting in the overthrow of the Democracy, have, by destroying whatever remaining chances he may have had for the Charleston nomination, sealed his fate.”70 Lincoln’s prospects, on the other hand, were enhanced. “We all think that your visit aided us,” Samuel Galloway wrote him from Columbus, “and we are grateful for your services—You have secured a host of friends among Republicans—and the respect of the better portion of the Democracy.” Galloway urged him to run for president: “Your visit to Ohio has excited an extensive interest in your favor.” Though admiring Salmon P. Chase’s “eminent abilities,” Galloway believed that “his nomination as our Candidate for the Presidency would sink us,” for he had aroused too much “embittered feeling.”71
Lincoln clubs sprang up in the Buckeye State. On October 31, Charles H. Ray asked Lincoln: “Do you know that you are strongly talked of for the Presidency—for the Vice Presidency at least.”72 Less than a month later, the Paris, Illinois, Beacon noted that “there are a great many influential journals, not only in the west but also in the middle and eastern states, who have expressed themselves in favor” of Lincoln for president, a sentiment the Beacon endorsed.73 William O. Stoddard of the Central Illinois Gazette in West Urbana, Illinois, followed suit. (Stoddard would later serve in the White House as an assistant to Lincoln’s two personal secretaries.) In Baltimore, the German Turnzeitung declared that if “on the score of expediency we pass Mr. Seward by, then will Mr. Lincoln be the man.”74
In November, Mark W. Delahay of Kansas advised Lincoln to “discard a little modesty and not distrust your own Powers, and strike boldly and for the next 6 months cease to be a modist man.” He could win the presidential nomination, said Delahay, because William Henry Seward had been discredited by the setback New York Republicans just suffered at the polls; American Party supporters would like Lincoln’s Whig antecedents; and his championship of the tariff over the years would please Pennsylvanians. “You have always distrusted your own ability too much,” Delahay scolded. The “only advantage Douglas ever possessed over you was that of impudence.”75 Prophetically Delahay added: “this is the most important period of your political life.”76 Similarly, the perceptive Nathan M. Knapp wrote that Lincoln “has not known his own power—uneducated in youth, he has always been doubtful whether he was not pushing himself into situations to which he was unequal, and has often been startled at looking down from his own elevation, which by the way he acquired by what seemed to him no great effort, but a sort of natural, perhaps clumsy, step.”77
The victorious Ohio Republicans wanted to publish the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates, which Lincoln had unsuccessfully attempted to bring out a year earlier in Illinois. They regarded those debates and his Ohio speeches as “luminous and triumphant expositions of the doctrine of the Republican Party … of great practical service to the Republican party in the approaching Presidential contest.”78 On his September visit Lincoln had brought along a carefully assembled scrapbook containing the Chicago Times’s account of Douglas’s speeches and the Chicago Press and Tribune’s version of his own remarks, as well as addresses each had delivered in Chicago, Bloomington, and Springfield. Lincoln evidently showed it to the Ohio Republican leaders with a view to having them publish it. He explained that he had made a “very few … small verbal corrections” in the text of his speeches and none in Douglas’s. “It would be an unwarrantable liberty for us to change a word or a letter in his,” he explained.79 (Douglas later complained that his own stenographers had inaccurately reported his words.) Lincoln entrusted the scrapbook to young John G. Nicolay to deliver to Columbus, where the firm of Follett, Foster and Company, which had been lobbied by Samuel Galloway, agreed to publish the volume. Chase’s friends, motivated by fear and envy, contrived to delay publication.80 A week before the Republican national convention at Chicago, Lincoln received his first copies. The New York Tribune reported selling hundreds before mid-May. This 268-page volume would be circulated widely in the presidential campaign, during which Lincoln himself delivered no speeches, in keeping with the custom for presidential candidates. In August 1860, when asked his views on the issues of the day, he replied: “my published speeches contain nearly all I could willingly say.”81 During the canvass, Republicans taunted Democrats about the debate volume. “We took the speeches of both of them [Lincoln and Douglas] and sent them over the country as an electioneering document,” said Cassius M. Clay of Kentucky. “And what do you Democrats do? You go away into some cellar and read them and then burn the book, lest any one else should see them.”82
After a week back in
Springfield, Lincoln departed for Wisconsin to fill three speaking engagements. In Milwaukee he delivered an ostensibly nonpolitical speech before the Wisconsin Agricultural Society attacking the proslavery argument and vindicating free labor. Candidly Lincoln told his audience that he presumed he was not expected to engage “in the mere flattery of farmers, as a class. My opinion of them is that, in proportion to numbers, they are neither better nor worse than other people. In the nature of things they are more numerous than any other class; and I believe there really are more attempts at flattering them than any other; the reason of which I cannot perceive, unless it be that they can cast more votes than any other.” (Among other things, Lincoln’s unwillingness to pander to farmers reflected his alienation from the world of his father.) After recommending steps to improve agricultural productivity, deploring “mammoth farms,” and speculating on the possible introduction of “steam plows,” Lincoln reiterated his analysis of the advantages of free labor and refuted what he called “the ‘mud-sill’ theory” propounded by Southerners like George Fitzhugh and James H. Hammond. Labor, he argued, “is prior to, and independent of, capital,” for “capital is the fruit of labor” and therefore “labor is the superior—greatly the superior—of capital.” The free labor system, in which the “prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help,” is “the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.” He also extolled “cultivated thought” (i.e., education) that would help promote efficient agriculture.83 The turnout at the fair was disappointingly small, both at this event and in the evening, when he was scheduled to speak from the balcony of a hotel. Seeing so few people assembled in the street, Lincoln sadly asked the local officials in charge of his visit, “we can’t call that a crowd, can we?” He cheered up, however, when the organizers arranged for an impromptu address in the hotel lobby.84 The next day at Beloit and Janesville, Lincoln resumed his overtly political campaigning with speeches repeating earlier arguments.
Having bolstered his reputation in the Midwest, Lincoln looked east, especially to Pennsylvania, one of the swing states that the Republicans needed to win in 1860. (In 1856, Frémont had lost Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.) Two Pennsylvanians were being mentioned for the presidency: Simon Cameron, the state’s leading Republican politico, and Judge John M. Read of the state Supreme Court. Cameron’s supporters insisted that only their man could carry the Keystone State, which was essential if the Republicans were to win the presidency. Cameron and Read, together with Massachusetts Governor Nathaniel P. Banks, who had become a household name in 1855–1856 when he won a protracted battle for the speakership of the U.S. House, approached Lincoln about possibly being their running mate. In late October, Joseph Medill reported this news to his preferred candidate, Salmon P. Chase. Medill added that those feelers “set Lincoln’s friends to talking of him for the first place on the ticket, on the grounds that he is a stronger and more available man than either Cameron or Reed—even in Pa. We have had several visits from Pittsburg Harrisburg, Lancaster & Phila. to negotiate for C[ameron] or R[ead] with L[incoln]. A Pittsburger is here now.”85
To one of Cameron’s emissaries, Lincoln replied with uncharacteristic circumlocution: “It certainly is important to secure Pennsylvania for the Republicans, in the next presidential contest; and not unimportant to, also, secure Illinois. As to the ticket you name [Cameron and Lincoln], I shall be heartily for it, after it shall have been fairly nominated by a Republican national convention; and I cannot be committed to it before. For my single self, I have enlisted for the permanent success of the Republican cause; and, for this object, I shall labor faithfully in the ranks, unless, as I think not probable, the judgment of the party shall assign me a different position. If the Republicans of the great State of Pennsylvania, shall present Mr. Cameron as their candidate for the Presidency, such an indorsement of his fitness for the place, could scarcely be deemed insufficient. Still, as I would not like the public to know, so I would not like myself to know I had entered a combination with any man, to the prejudice of all others whose friends respectively may consider them preferable.”86
When a Pennsylvanian asked him whether he supported protective tariffs (the “all absorbing question” in that state), Lincoln cautiously but candidly replied that he was “an old Henry Clay tariff whig. In old times I made more speeches on that subject, than on any other. I have not since changed my views. I believe yet, if we could have a moderate, carefully adjusted, protective tariff, so far acquiesced in, as to not be a perpetual subject of political strife, squabbles, charges, and uncertainties, it would be better for us. Still, it is my opinion that, just now, the revival of that question, will not advance the cause itself, or the man who revives it. I have not thought much upon the subject recently; but my general impression is, that the necessity for a protective tariff will, ere long, force it’s old opponents to take it up; and then it’s old friends can join in, and establish it on a more firm and durable basis. We, the old whigs, have been entirely beaten out on the tariff question; and we shall not be able to re-establish the policy, until the absence of it, shall have demonstrated the necessity for it, in the minds of men heretofore opposed to it.”87
In December, Jesse W. Fell urged Lincoln to supply a Pennsylvania journalist with an autobiographical sketch. Lincoln complied, saying: “There is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me. If anything be made out of it, I wish it to be modest, and not to go beyond the material. If it were thought necessary to incorporate anything from any of my speeches, I suppose there would be no objection. Of course it must not appear to have been written by myself.”88 This brief document was forwarded to Joseph J. Lewis, who used it to write a long article about Lincoln that appeared in the Chester County Times of West Chester on February 11, 1860, and was widely copied in the Republican press. It described its subject as “a consistent and earnest tariff man from the first hour of his entering public life,” a statement endearing Lincoln to Pennsylvanians.89 Lincoln noted in his autobiographical piece that his formal schooling had been brief in boyhood and adolescence. He added modestly, “The little advance I now have upon this store of education, I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.”90 A year earlier, in conversation with a young clergyman, Lincoln had “remarked how much he felt the need of reading, and what a loss it was to a man not to have grown up among books.”
“Men of force can get on pretty well without books,” the cleric replied. “They do their own thinking, instead of adopting what other men think.”
Lincoln agreed, but added that “books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new, after all.”91
In October, Joseph Medill wrote to a Virginia editor, making a strong case for Lincoln as a candidate able to win the doubtful states, for he was a native of Kentucky, a long-time resident of Indiana, a Henry Clay supporter, and a protectionist. Rhetorically Medill asked, “Is there any man who could suit P[ennsylvani]a better? … On the hypothesis that the four [Northern] States lost by Frémont should name the candidate, has not ‘Old Abe’ more available points than any man yet named?”92 In the columns of the Chicago Press and Tribune Medill kept Lincoln’s name before the public throughout the fall and winter of 1859 and the spring of 1860.
Meanwhile, other papers mentioned Lincoln as a candidate for president or vice-president. One of the first to do so was the Aurora Beacon, which on November 10, 1859, said he “has every element of popularity and success.” Lincoln proudly showed the editorial to his friends, who recalled that he was “very much pleased.”93 Young Whitelaw Reid, who was to become one of the nation’s premier journalists, suggested that Lincoln combined better than any other aspirant “the requisites of ea
rnest Republicanism, fitness and availability.”94 In January, the Illinois State Journal endorsed its fellow townsman enthusiastically as “a man for the times,” a “conservative National Republican,” and “a tower of strength to the party whose leader he is now regarded.”95
The October electoral victories were sweet, but the Republicans’ euphoria was short-lived. On October 16, abolitionist firebrand John Brown led an abortive raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, sending shock waves throughout the South. His goal was to seize arms and provide them to slaves for an uprising. Republicans feared that Brown’s act might injure them at the polls. Newspapers throughout the South and Border States fumed that Brown’s act was a logical consequence of Republican agitation over slavery. “We are damnably exercised here about the effect of Old Brown’s wretched fiasco in Virginia, upon the Moral health of the Republican party!” exclaimed Charles H. Ray in Chicago. “The old idiot—The quicker they hang and get him out of the way, the better.”96 In Sangamon County, Lincoln worried that John M. Palmer, “a good and true man” and the Republican candidate running for the seat vacated by the death of Congressman Thomas L. Harris, was in trouble. Sure enough, on election day Palmer lost to Democrat John A. McClernand.97 “I reckon the Harpers Ferry affair damaged Palmer somewhat,” Lyman Trumbull speculated plausibly.98
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