by Joshua Zeitz
Decades later, people still remembered those electrifying weeks as though they had been yesterday. Carl Schurz, the German American political leader, reminisced of his train journey to Quincy the evening before the penultimate debate. Riding in a packed railroad car, “all at once . . . I observed a great commotion among my fellow-passengers, many of whom jumped from their seats and pressed eagerly around a tall man who had just entered the car. They addressed him in the most familiar style. ‘Hello, Abe!’ they shouted, as they pressed his hand. ‘How are you?’ and so on. And he responded in the same manner: Good-evening, Ben! How are you, Joe? Glad to see you, Dick!” Schurz described his first encounter with “that swarthy face”—sunburned from the grueling early autumn campaign—“with its strong features, its deep furrows, and its benignant, melancholy eyes, now familiar to every American by numberless pictures.” Clad in a black dress coat with sleeves too short for his arms, black trousers that barely reached his boots, white shirt, and thin black necktie, Lincoln doffed his “battered ‘stove-top’ hat” and worked the crowd. Schurz remembered that “on his left arm he carried a gray woolen shawl . . . a cotton umbrella of the bulging kind, and also a black satchel that bore the marks of long and hard usage. His right he had kept free for hand-shaking, of which there was no end until everybody in the car seemed to be satisfied.” What struck Schurz so many years later was Lincoln’s skill as a candidate. “When, in a tone of perfect ingenuousness, he asked me—a young beginner in politics—what I thought about this and that,” he put Schurz at such ease that “I soon felt as if I had known him all my life and we had long been close friends.”
Lincoln’s political acumen, the product of a quarter century of experience, was on full display during his great campaign against Douglas, but the result proved a bitter disappointment to the Republicans. Taken in sum, Republican legislative candidates polled 125,430 votes; pro-Douglas Democrats, 121,609; and anti-Douglas/pro-Buchanan Democrats, 5,071—a slim Republican plurality (or a narrow loss, if the votes of the two Democratic factions were combined), but a meaningless one. Because seats in the state legislature were still apportioned according to the 1850 census, which had not yet taken into account the enormous tide of population growth in the northern, Republican-leaning counties, Douglas carried the Senate election by a vote of 54 to 46. “After a hundred consecutive days of excitement, of intense mental strain, and of unremitting bodily exertion,” Hay wrote many years later, “after speech-making and parades, music and bonfires, it must be something of a trial to face at once the mortification of defeat, the weariness of intellectual and physical reaction, and the dull commonplace of daily routine.” But that he did. Writing to a friend just two weeks after his defeat, Lincoln admitted that he “wished, but . . . did not much expect, a better result . . . I am glad that I made the late race. It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way; and though I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.”
In fact, the Senate campaign proved the launching point of Lincoln’s presidential candidacy. He had squared off against the Little Giant and earned a national reputation for it. Enjoying political celebrity from coverage of his unsuccessful race, Lincoln agreed to deliver a string of political speeches in the fall of 1859 in Columbus, Dayton, Hamilton, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis, where his piercing censure of the slave power met with wide acclaim among Republican audiences. Responding to Douglas’s recent declaration that “he was for the negro against the crocodile, but for the white man against the negro,” Lincoln lamented that Douglas had encouraged supporters to suppose “that the negro is no longer a man but a brute . . . Public opinion in this country is everything,” and Douglas was manipulating it in a vicious and highly immoral way.
It was around this time that John Hay first came to know the future president. “He came into the law office where I was reading, which adjoined his own, with a copy of Harper’s Magazine in hand, containing Senator Douglas’s famous article on Popular Sovereignty,” Hay remembered. “Lincoln seemed greatly roused by what he had read. Entering the office without a salutation, he said: ‘This will never do. He puts the moral element out of this question. It won’t stay out.’”
The following February, with rumors swirling of his possible presidential candidacy, Lincoln visited New York City at the invitation of leading Republican boosters, where he defied the expectations of his eastern audience, many of whom expected “something weird, rough, and uncultivated,” by delivering a powerful antislavery broadside. “Let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively,” he implored listeners in his dramatic conclusion. “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it.” On the heels of his success, Lincoln worked a speaking circuit through New England—ostensibly to visit his oldest son, Robert, who was attending prep school at Phillips Exeter Academy. He was again received by enthusiastic crowds who were intrigued by the rough-hewn Illinois politician who spoke so mightily yet in a strange Kentucky-Indiana tongue.
To win the presidency, the Republican Party would need to carry all of the states where Frémont prevailed in 1856 and any combination of two states among Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Indiana. Though its candidate lacked the stature and experience of top-tier aspirants like William H. Seward and Salmon P. Chase, Illinois Republicans could credibly argue that the party needed to nominate a midwestern moderate to pull off a regional hat trick. Lincoln seemed to fit that bill better than any other man. Certainly some of his Illinois friends thought so. Early in 1860, they dispatched John Nicolay to Ohio to oversee logistical arrangements for the publication of Political Debates Between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, in the Celebrated Campaign of 1858, in Illinois. The 268-page transcript became an instant bestseller. That spring, as the two parties began preparing for their nominating conventions, mention of his name became more frequent alongside those of more long-standing repute.
As early as 1858, Nicolay had the audacity to suggest in his private journal that “when we get him to the Senate—& the White House,” Lincoln would prove a steady and fearless leader. It was a bold prediction at a time when few people yet knew his name. Now circumstances had changed. “I will be entirely frank,” Lincoln wrote to Lyman Trumbull in early 1860. “The taste is in my mouth a little.”
CHAPTER 5
Wide Awake
In May 1859, shortly after arriving in “the dreary wastes of Springfield—a city combining the meanness of the North with the barbarism of the South”—John Hay fired off a letter to his college friend William Leete Stone reporting on the “life of listless apathy which I [have] been leading ever since we parted” and apologizing for his long delay in writing. “Let the cry of your mourning go up continually for your brother of old time,” he pleaded, only half in jest, “for he hath fallen on evil days. There is no land so sad as this. The sky is forever leaden with gloomy clouds, or glowing with torrid fervors . . . Yet such as it is, Springfield is my home. I am settled here—a student of the law an’t please you—& here shall I abide for many days to come.”
Though Springfield was not where he wanted to be, Hay indeed settled in quickly enough. His days given over to obedient study of the law, he spent evenings and weekends running the full circuit of church fairs, “sociables,” lyceum lectures, and political rallies. He also became a fixture in the home of Nicholas Ridgely, a wealthy banker whose teenage daughters, Anna and Mary, staged elaborate “soirees” where attendees spoke to one another only in French. Caroline Owsley Brown, who knew Hay well in these years, remembered his “bright, dark eyes that wrought havoc in the hearts of susceptible maidens, and a tongue that could have talked the traditional bird off the bush—fortunately he was of an age when a few soft words, and a few softer looks, did not count. So he flitted from flower to flower, with a sonne
t to this one’s sweet eyes, and to that damsel’s rosy lips, with no worse result than a fleeting pang which was speedily soothed by the flash of brass buttons.” At first meeting, Anna Ridgely privately sized him up as “a very pleasant young fellow & very intelligent,” “a bright, handsome fellow of medium height and slight build, with good features, especially the eyes, which were dark, lustrous brown [sic]; red cheeks and clear dark complexion.” Springfield was a small town and, for a young man of Hay’s intellect and good looks, an easy one to conquer. In this pursuit, he had a partner.
It was in these late days of 1859 that Hay rekindled his friendship with George Nicolay. A lively dancer and talented musician, Nicolay was an accomplished autodidact who held his own at the Ridgely girls’ French-language soirees. Holding a position that in modern terms might be analogous to executive director of the state Republican Party, he was a close confidant to the capital city’s leading elected officials and boosters and a rising talent in his own right. Photographs from that era show a man of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, his youthful features masked ever so slightly by a carefully trimmed, and not especially full, mustache and beard. With thick black hair that he brushed straight back and clipped just a few inches above his shoulders, and piercing, dark eyes, he looked the part of a no-nonsense political operator. Nicolay was by then either engaged to Therena Bates or in a serious, though long-distance, relationship with her. Now twenty-three years of age, Therena had grown into a pretty woman with jet-black hair, strong features, and a warm smile. Like most of his closest friends, she called him George, after his middle name; he called her Maggie, after hers.
From their letters, it is clear that Nicolay and Therena made frequent trips to see each other, taking turns in traveling the seventy miles that separated Pittsfield and Springfield, by rail and coach. In each city they shared common friends and built a common life. “I scarcely know what I shall do with myself tonight,” he wrote to her, in a plea for a visit. “Miss Ella Irwin is in New York, Miss Ridgely and Miss Latham are visiting in Quincy, and down at Mr. Chatterton’s, where Miss Stack is staying, they have a very cold parlor, and which can scarcely be kept comfortable. So you need not think it strange that I should be especially wishing that I could spend the evening with you, where I could have a voice in regulating the temperature of the room. Don’t you pity me?”
Friends and colleagues who knew him for his stiff, businesslike demeanor would have been surprised by how freely and frequently Nicolay expressed his affection for Therena. “It’s been raining all day,” he wrote on an overcast winter afternoon, “and as night approaches it is becoming particularly gloomy and disagreeable outdoors. I sit here and, shutting my eyes to the murkiness of the clouds, and my ears to the patter of the rain, vainly imagine how pleasant it would be to sit beside you for the evening. I would be willing to give you a dozen warm kisses to have the vision made real.” As his workload inevitably increased during the 1860 campaign, visits between the couple grew less frequent—intervals of two or three months, rather than weeks—and “the sixty or seventy miles of intervening space” between Springfield and Pittsfield began to feel like the span of a continent. Without reservation, George regarded Therena as the love of his life, though expressions of personal affection did not come easily to him. “I have rarely ever either delighted or disgusted you (which would it be?), with sentimentalism of any sort,” he admitted, “—because I happen to think that words are empty things.” However clumsy his love letters sometimes were, he genuinely missed her when they were apart. “I repeat my wish that I could be with you,” he told her. “I think the mood would last me long enough to sit by you and talk you weary of it.”
For Nicolay, the year 1860 proved a turning point. He witnessed “something genuine, elemental, uncontrollable in the moods and manifestations” of the Republican National Convention in Chicago, where between thirty thousand and forty thousand party loyalists, many of them traveling from northern Illinois by specially chartered trains, converged on the city to select the party’s presidential and vice presidential candidates. Decades later, he could still recall the view from inside the “wigwam,” the temporary structure built to house the gathering. “Seats and standing-room were always packed in advance, and, as the delegates entered by their own separate doors, the crowd easily distinguished the chief actors.” Lincoln’s strategy going in was to make a respectable showing on the first ballot against the top-tier contenders, William Seward and Salmon Chase. “I am not the first choice of a very great many,” he conceded. “Our policy, then, is to give no offense to others—leave them in a mood to come to us, if they shall be compelled to give up their first love.”
Nicolay would never forget the exhilarating moments before the first roll call—the “united voice of a great crowd.” As the chairman began to call the roll, “the tumult gradually died away,” leaving hushed delegates and spectators in eager suspense as the states called out their votes, one by one. On the first ballot, Seward won 173½ votes to Lincoln’s 102, with Chase and other candidates trailing far behind. No candidate came close to the magic number—233. Nicolay remembered the “groundswell of suppressed excitement which pervaded the hall” as Lincoln supporters, sensing that momentum was on their side, cried out, “Call the roll!” On the next ballot, Seward saw his lead evaporate, as he won 184½ votes to Lincoln’s 181. “When the vote of Lincoln was announced,” reported Nicolay, “there was a tremendous burst of applause, which the chairman prudently but with difficulty controlled and silenced. The third ballot was begun amid a breathless suspense; hundreds of pencils kept pace with the roll-call, and nervously marked the changes on their tally sheets.” When the chairman announced the totals, Lincoln was ahead with 231½ votes—just one and a half shy of the nomination—with Seward trailing far behind at 180.
A profound silence suddenly fell upon the wigwam; the men ceased to talk and the ladies to flutter their fans; one could distinctly hear the scratching of pencils and the ticking of telegraph instruments on the reporters’ tables . . . While every one was leaning forward in intense expectancy, David K. Cartter sprang upon his chair and reported a change of four Ohio votes from Chase to Lincoln. There was a moment’s pause,—a teller waved his tally-sheet towards the skylight and shouted a name,—and then the boom of a cannon on the roof of the wigwam announced the nomination to the crowds in the streets, where shouts and salutes took up and spread the news. In the convention the Lincoln river now became an inundation. Amid the wildest hurrahs, delegation after delegation changed its vote to the victor.
Lincoln never saw any of it and would have to rely on Nicolay and others for their firsthand accounts. Adhering to tradition, he remained in Springfield, nervously awaiting results. The candidate tried to distract himself by playing a game of fives—a variant on handball—in a vacant lot adjacent to the offices of the Illinois State Journal before making his way to the paper’s telegraph room. “I knew this would come when I saw the second ballot,” he said, upon learning of his nomination. After accepting the congratulations of friends and colleagues who joined him in the cramped room, he took his leave. “Well Gentlemen,” he said, “there is a little woman at our house who is probably more interested in this dispatch than I am.”
John Hay was also in Springfield that day, and though he still maintained a deliberate skepticism toward all things political, he could not help but note with pride that his hometown had become “the central city of the north.” Prior to the convention, Hay had agreed to write a series of dispatches for the Providence Journal, now edited by his former college professor James Angell—brother of his college sweetheart, Hannah. With the town in a state of pitched excitement, he freely joined in the moment. “When the lightning came down from Chicago, on Friday,” he wrote, “to tell us that the nation had honored the honest man whom we have so long delighted to honor, the deep and earnest enthusiasm of the hearty western populace burst forth in the wildest manifestations of joy.” Hay described enormous
bursts of cannon fire from the lawn of the state capitol, “Lincoln banners, decked in every style of rude splendor, fluttered in the high west wind, and the very church bells signaled the triumph of stainless honor.” That evening, hundreds of loyal Republicans gathered by candlelight in the rotunda of the statehouse and then marched to the Lincoln residence, with thousands more joining the procession along the way. Hay was on the scene when “the tall, gaunt form of the future anchor of the republic appeared in his doorway, and in a few good-humored and dignified words he thanked them for their kind manifestations of regard.” The next morning, when the official delegation arrived from Chicago to inform Lincoln of his nomination, it was met with “round after round of rousing, electrifying western cheers.” The city brimmed over with popular enthusiasm. “Until nearly midnight the rejoicings continued. The principal streets were ablaze with illuminations. Bonfires flamed and roared in public places, and bursting rockets paled the splendor of the calm May star-light.”