Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  Shortly before the convention, Caleb B. Smith, head of the Indiana delegation, asked some of his colleagues about Bates’s chances. Citing Bates’s unpopularity among the Germans of Cincinnati, R. M. Moore replied that Bates stood no chance of winning but that Lincoln did. Other Hoosier leaders, like John D. Defrees, ostensibly supported Bates but thought of “bringing forward a man who has more ‘running pints’.”47 In March, an Indiana congressman suggested that Lincoln could “by some exertion be nominated.”48

  Two other key delegates from western Indiana—James C. Veatch, chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the State House of Representatives, and Cyrus M. Allen, the speaker of that body—helped persuade the rest of the delegation to back Lincoln. In April, when Allen asked Lincoln who would be representing his interests at Chicago, he replied: “Our friend Dubois, and Judge David Davis, of Bloomington, one or both, will meet you at Chicago on the 12th. If you let [John Palmer] Usher & [William D.] Griswold of Terre-Haute know, I think they will co-operate with you.”49 Dubois was from the Illinois county across the river from Vincennes, where Allen lived. A week before the convention, Allen predicted that Lincoln would carry his congressional district by 2,000 votes but that Seward would probably lose it.

  Instructed to vote for Bates if the Missourian seemed to have a chance, Veatch and Allen journeyed to St. Louis to confer with Bates’s main supporters; en route they canvassed the situation thoroughly and concluded that Bates could not win the nomination. Veatch told Allen that he would vote for Lincoln, whom he had heard speak very effectively in 1844. Allen had also heard Lincoln sixteen years earlier and was impressed not only by his eloquence but also by the fact that he had spent his boyhood and adolescence in their region of Indiana. At St. Louis, they inferred that Bates’s champions did not really expect their man to win and only put him forward in the hopes of securing a cabinet post. When Veatch and Allen reached Chicago, they worked hard to persuade their colleagues to support Lincoln.

  Helping to win over the Hoosiers was the eloquence of Gustave Koerner. When he heard that Frank Blair and other Bates spokesmen were addressing the Indianans, he and Orville Browning hurried over to their conclave to speak on behalf of Lincoln. Blair had been arguing that Bates could carry Missouri and Maryland, thus cleansing the party of the taint of sectionalism. Koerner denied that Bates could win his home state against Douglas, and insisted Bates did not deserve the support of Germans because in 1856 he had presided at the Whig national convention, which had endorsed the Know-Nothing candidacy of Millard Fillmore. Moreover, Bates had backed Know-Nothings in St. Louis municipal elections. If Bates were the nominee, Koerner predicted, the Germans would place an independent ticket in the field. (On May 14 and 15, German leaders did meet at the Deutsches Haus in Chicago and threatened to bolt the party should Bates be nominated.) When Koerner mentioned Lincoln’s name, the crowd applauded vigorously. Browning, who had once favored Bates, assured the Hoosiers that Lincoln was a good Whig who opposed nativism. He concluded his remarks with an electrifying paean to Lincoln. (In Illinois, Browning’s oratorical gifts were regarded as second only to Edward D. Baker’s.)

  Bates’s champions, Caleb B. Smith and John D. Defrees, reluctantly concluded that their man could not win. Henry S. Lane, who had at first backed McLean, then Bates, energetically lobbied for Lincoln once he understood that the Rail-splitter was the only one who could stop Seward. Other Hoosiers shared Lane’s alarm at the prospect of an early Seward victory. To meet that threat, they agreed to vote unanimously for Lincoln or Cameron or McLean as long as any of one of them appeared capable of winning. (McLean was in fact out of the running.) There seemed to be a fair chance that the Indianans would support Cameron, until dissension within the Pennsylvania ranks, especially from delegates representing the western part of the state, cooled their enthusiasm.

  With other alternatives to Seward rapidly fading, Veatch and Allen, with the able assistance of Dr. Eric Locke, managed to convince all but two of their colleagues to support Lincoln; one of the holdouts agreed to abstain, and the other they eventually won over. Bates’s supporters came to the reluctant conclusion that defeating Seward required them to vote as a bloc for Lincoln. On the night of May 15, the Indianans decided to back Lincoln. From that point on they worked efficiently and actively, night and day, cooperating with the Illinoisans to promote Lincoln’s candidacy. This was a key turning point, for it elevated the Rail-splitter above the status of a mere favorite son. Easterners were impressed by the united front presented by these two Midwestern swing states.

  The offer of a cabinet post for their state may have persuaded some Indiana delegates to back Lincoln. David Davis allegedly promised that Lincoln would appoint Caleb B. Smith to head a department. The evidence supporting this hypothesis is contradictory, however. On the one hand, Davis flatly denied it. In September, he told Thomas H. Dudley: “Mr Lincoln is committed to no one on earth in relation to offices. He promised nothing to gain his nomination, and has promised nothing since. No one is authorized to speak for him.”50 Leonard Swett also insisted that “[n]o pledges have been made, no mortgages executed.”51 On May 21, Lincoln wrote Joshua Giddings: “It is indeed, most grateful to my feelings, that the responsible position assigned me, comes without conditions, save only such honorable ones as are fairly implied.”52 Ten days later he assured callers, “I … have made no pledges to any man and intend to make none.”53

  On the other hand, several people testified that Indiana was promised a cabinet seat. (In fact, Caleb B. Smith became Lincoln’s first secretary of the interior.) One convention delegate, William T. Otto, a leading Indiana Republican who was to serve as Lincoln’s assistant secretary of the interior, averred that Smith “made Judge Davis believe that the Indiana delegation would go to Seward unless Smith was promised a place in the cabinet; when the truth was that none of us cared for Smith, and after we got to Chicago and looked over the ground all were for Lincoln.”54 William P. Fishback, a law partner of Indiana’s Republican state chairman, reported in January 1861: “There was a determination and a promise on the part of Mr Lincoln to give Mr. C. B. Smith a place in his Cabinet.”55 Medill recalled Charles Henry Ray saying, “We are going to have Indiana for Old Abe, sure,” because “we promised them everything they asked. We promised to see Smith put in the cabinet.”56

  Such bargaining was standard procedure. Davis promised rewards to Know-Nothings as well as Hoosiers for their support. Returning to Springfield by train after the convention, Davis encountered A. M. Whitney, father of Lincoln’s friend Henry C. Whitney and a leading Illinois Know-Nothing. In 1863, Whitney reminded Davis of that encounter: “I said to you that regardless of my own party I should support Mr L with whatever influence I had—that I had supported Fremont in ’56 notwithstanding I received over 37,000 votes for Am[erican Party] Elector myself in the 3rd Con[gressional] Dist[rict]. You remarked that if Mr Lincoln was elected that I should be remembered and well taken care of and you said that in saying so that you spoke by authority.”57

  Lincoln was advised that deals must be cut if he were to win the nomination. On May 14, Charles Henry Ray told him that he should authorize friends like Judd, Davis, or himself to speak on his behalf, because a “pledge or two may be necessary when the pinch comes.”58 Similar advice reached Lincoln from Mark W. Delahay, who on May 17 wrote: “If we could tonight say to Ohio, Penna, Mass & Iowa—concentrate on you [Lincoln] … and your … representative men … may dispense whatever Patronage they respectively are … entitled to.… you would beyond doubt be nominated.”59 In January 1861, Jesse W. Fell recommended that Lincoln appoint men from Indiana and Pennsylvania to cabinet posts because “such a disposition of favors was a good deal spoken of at Chicago.”60 Herndon claimed that Davis had pledged a cabinet post to Smith. A delegate who helped lead the Bates forces recalled that “Judge Davis, Lamon, and Swett, traded off a cabinet position to Caleb Smith for our [nineteen] Indiana votes and another place in the cabinet to Simon Cameron for our [fifteen] P
ennsylvania votes.”61

  Many years later, Davis reportedly acknowledged that he had made some dubious promises at the convention. He told Wirt Dexter, a leading Chicago attorney, that he and his allies won over delegates by “making promises to bring them into line. Sometimes the promises overlapped a little.”

  Dexter asked, “you must have prevaricated somewhat?”

  “‘PREVARICATED?’ replied Davis in his high voice, raising his right hand … and gesturing towards Mr. Dexter, ‘Prevaricated, Brother Dexter? We lied, lied like hell.’ ”62

  In late November 1860, John D. Defrees, a prominent Hoosier Republican, warned Davis that the president-elect should not ignore Indiana when cabinet members were chosen, “considering some matters occurring at Chicago within your knowledge,” which if revealed “would be unfortunate and might give great dissatisfaction.”63

  In all probability, Davis did not specify that a cabinet post would go to Smith but rather pledged that an Indianan would be named to some cabinet position and that he would personally urge Smith’s appointment. Swett told his law partner, Peter S. Grosscup, that he and Davis had promised the Indiana delegation that a Hoosier would receive a cabinet post if they backed Lincoln for the nomination. After the November election, Davis did lobby vigorously on behalf of Smith, telling Lincoln: “No one rendered more efficient service from Indiana, at the Chicago Convention” than Smith. Absent “his active aid & co-operation, the Indiana delegation could not have been got as a Unit to go for you. And until we had got the Indiana delegation, entirely united, we could not properly appeal to the other delegations for votes.”64 In 1862, after Smith had proved a poor choice for secretary of the interior, Davis ruefully confessed to Swett: “We made a great mistake in urging [Smith] … for a cabinet appointment.”65

  It was also agreed that the rich merchant William P. Dole, a shrewd politician and delegate who had lived in Indiana and was then residing in Illinois, would become commissioner of Indian affairs. In 1861, Dole was appointed to that post.

  When Lincoln’s cabinet was finally selected, Francis Preston Blair, Sr., whose son Montgomery was picked as postmaster general, said the president “has suffered himself to be seduced by a grateful & unsuspicious heart into early commitments which he has had too much pride upon the point of honor involved in promises—although made by others—to revoke.”66

  The Platform

  As the convention opened on Wednesday, May 16, the city was so overrun with visitors that some wound up sleeping atop tables in billiard parlors. Wielding the gavel as temporary chairman, David Wilmot of Pennsylvania impressed Orville Browning as “a dull, chuckel headed, booby looking man” who “makes a very poor presiding officer.”67 The convention hall, specially built of rough timber for the occasion, was called the Wigwam because it resembled an Indian longhouse. A large, clumsy, solid, barn-like structure, measuring 100 × 180 feet, with a capacity of 12,000 people, it was “decorated so completely with flags, banners, bunting, etc., that when filled it seemed a gorgeous pavilion aflame with color and all aflutter with pennants and streamers.” The interior resembled a huge theater whose stage was reserved for delegates and journalists. The acoustics were such that an ordinary voice could easily be heard throughout the building.68 An “overflowing heartiness and deep feeling pervaded the whole house,” John G. Nicolay remembered. “The galleries were as watchful and earnest as the platform. There was something genuine, elemental, uncontrollable in the moods and manifestations of the vast audience.”69

  The first two days were devoted to routine business and to consideration of a platform that criticized attempts to limit the rights of immigrants; condemned disunionism, the popular sovereignty doctrine, and threats to reopen the African slave trade; upheld the right of states to regulate their own institutions; denounced the Buchanan administration’s corruption, abuse of power, and support of the Lecompton Constitution; maintained that the normal condition of the territories was freedom; called for the immediate admission of Kansas as a Free State; and endorsed protective tariffs, internal improvements (including a Pacific railroad), and homestead legislation. The plank on corruption was emphatic: “That the people justly view with alarm the reckless extravagance which pervades every department of the Federal Government; that a return to rigid economy and accountability is indispensable to arrest the system of plunder of the public treasury by favored partisans; while the recent startling developments of fraud and corruption of the Federal metropolis, show that an entire change of administration is imperatively demanded.”70 The platform committee omitted any reference to the Declaration of Independence. When the doughty old abolitionist lion Joshua R. Giddings moved that a plank endorsing its principles be added, he was overruled. Angered, he stormed out of the Wigwam, whereupon young George William Curtis of New York made a stirring speech which reversed that action. Giddings came back radiant.

  This platform, largely the handiwork of Horace Greeley, did not please everyone. Proponents of strong language on slavery extension were especially disgruntled at Greeley’s determined effort to omit what he deemed “all needlessly offensive or irritating features—such as that concerning the ‘twin relics of barbarism,’ and the requirement that Congress shall positively prohibit Slavery in every Territory whether there be or be not a possibility of its going thither.”71 Eli Thayer claimed that Greeley had originally proposed to endorse the Wilmot Proviso. “I said,” Thayer recalled, “it was nonsense now, and worse, to insert this in our Platform, since we had shown in the Kansas contest how free States could be made without it. As matters were, there could never be another slave State, and that it would be much wiser and safer to encourage the freedom-loving people of the North to trust in themselves and their own acts for the restriction of slavery, rather than in any act of Congress, which had always disappointed us.” Greeley acquiesced, and the plank was adopted over the objections of some committee members, including George F. Talbot of Maine, George Boutwell of Massachusetts, and Carl Schurz of Wisconsin.72 Abolitionists complained that “by omission at least,” the platform “surrenders its old non-extension of slavery policy, and thus virtually endorses the ‘popular sovereignty’ doctrine.”73

  Pennsylvanians would probably have raised objections to the tepid, obscure tariff plank if the noise and confusion in the Wigwam had not made it inexpedient. That weak endorsement of protectionism, which Democrats scorned as “two-faced—Tariff & Free Trade,” tried to placate Keystone State protectionists while offending no free-traders.

  The fourteenth plank, which dealt with immigrants’ rights and was intended as an antidote to the Massachusetts two-years amendment, angered the Bay State delegation, which railed against it vehemently. The Massachusetts men argued that “the insult offered the State by the 14th clause can only be wiped out by the nomination of Banks or Wade,” while former members of the American Party protested “loudly against the submission of the Convention to the demands of the German leaders,” saying “it will cost them Connecticut and Rhode Island.”74 This so-called Dutch plank was regarded in some circles as the result of “undue pandering to German fanaticism” partly because it had been written by two Germans—Carl Schurz and Gustave Koerner—over the objections of Eastern leaders like New Jersey’s Thomas H. Dudley.75 Radical Germans, on the other hand, dismissed it is a mere “plaster for this Massachusetts wound.”76

  But most delegates received the platform with enthusiasm, and those who objected went along in the interest of party harmony. When the announcement came that it had been unanimously adopted, multitudes in the Wigwam leapt to their feet, cheering, waving hats and handkerchiefs, and screaming at the top of their lungs for more than ten minutes. Murat Halstead thought that a “herd of buffaloes, or lions, could not have made a more tremendous roaring.”77

  A Republican newspaper called the plank condemning government corruption “the strongest practical point in the platform” and predicted that it would do more to unite the party than anything else. The paper rightly note
d that there was “a feeling that corruptions have grown frightfully rank at Washington, and that it is high time that the honest masses should interfere. The great document of this canvass will not be the Kansas Committee report, but the Covode Committee report [on government corruption]; and the great watchword will be not antagonism to slavery, but ‘honest Abe Lincoln.’ ”78 Though exaggerated, there was much truth in this forecast. Slavery would dominate the campaign, but the corruption issue would induce many Know-Nothings and others who had shied away from the Republicans four years earlier to join them in 1860.

  Winning Pennsylvania and New England

  Meanwhile, behind the scenes, David Davis and his allies, having secured Indiana, turned their attention to Pennsylvania, whose favorite son candidate, Simon Cameron, would receive almost all the state’s votes on the first ballot but stood no chance of winning the nomination. Illinois gained the Pennsylvanians’ support with the material aid of John A. Andrew of Massachusetts. On the eve of the convention, a New England delegation led by Andrew made a proposition to their Keystone State counterparts. Though ideologically sympathetic to Seward, the New Englanders wanted above all to win in November and feared that the New Yorker could not do so; along with the rest of the convention delegates, they regarded Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, and Illinois as keys to victory. New Jersey, like Pennsylvania, was backing a favorite son, William L. Dayton, who was clearly unable to secure the nomination. Illinois and Indiana supported Lincoln. So Andrew proposed that the four swing states hold a joint caucus and try to unite on a candidate.