by Joshua Zeitz
A few weeks later, on June 7, Nicolay mustered up the courage to ask Lincoln’s key campaign managers for the one and only perquisite he had ever sought in his years of loyal service to the antislavery cause. He was “filled with an ambitious desire to write a campaign biography of the Republican candidate for President, and was greatly disappointed and chagrined to learn that that honor had already been promised to a young Ohioan, then little known . . . [William] D. Howells.” Nearly choked up with tears, Nicolay spoke privately with his boss, Ozias Hatch, who placed a hand on his shoulder and said, “Never mind. You are to be private secretary.” Later that afternoon, at five o’clock, following another day of rallies, parades, and marching music, George informed Therena of his good fortune. “I can now definitively answer your question as to what I am going to do, for a while at any rate. Mr. Lincoln has engaged me to act as his private secretary during the campaign, and pays me at the rate of $75 per month for the service . . . He has a room here in the State House, and so I go right along without any change of quarters or arrangements of any kind other than indicated.” From that day forward, until the day that Lincoln died, Nicolay would remain in his service.
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From the moment that it began, the presidential race of 1860 emerged as one of the most dramatic moments then or since in American political life. In the weeks after his unexpected nomination, Lincoln benefited from what soon proved an irrevocable split in the Democratic Party. With his longtime foe Stephen Douglas closing in on the nomination, Southern Democrats conditioned their fealty on his support of new constitutional protections for slavery. In response, Northern Democrats insisted that “never, never, never, so help us God,” would they abandon their popular sovereignty platform. For the first and only time in American history, a major political party rent itself in two, with Northern Democrats nominating Douglas and Southern Democrats running John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, the young, dashing vice president and a stalwart defender of slavery. Adding to the year’s confusion, a coalition of conservative ex-Whigs and Know-Nothings ran its own slate of electors in favor of John Bell, a former Tennessee senator and advocate of sectional compromise. To win the election, Republicans needed to pick off any combination of two states among Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Indiana, a task made easier by the divided opposition.
As summer gave way to fall, the canvass reached a fever pitch. Ironically, Abraham Lincoln, the consummate political animal, was bound by tradition to sit out the most electrifying campaign of his life. Prevailing convention, stretching back to the earliest days of the Republic, held that public men should make themselves available for office but that it was unseemly for them to work for it. The logic behind this display of disinterestedness flowed from classical republican fears of tyrannical leaders who aggressively sought and protected power. During the Jacksonian era, this form of reserve largely fell by the wayside in congressional, state, and local races, as Americans came to embrace a more vibrant and earthy form of popular democracy. But many people still expected their presidents to demonstrate republican virtue. Under pressure to smooth over his rough image and to prove his fitness for high office, Lincoln was in no position to test tradition. Douglas, however, felt that he was. The senator broke with custom and barnstormed the country, as would later become the norm among presidential contenders, while Lincoln remained in careful seclusion, leaving it to others to deliver speeches, pen broadsides, and work the enormous crowds that gathered at Republican campaign rallies. With Nicolay as his sole aide, he managed the enormous influx of correspondence, much of it political in nature and requiring delicate attention, and tried to satisfy the numerous party operators who traveled to Springfield to confer with the candidate. He made no public appearances and said nothing that might clarify his position on the central issues, beyond his allegiance to the Chicago platform. Upon visiting Lincoln at his temporary office in the statehouse, Herndon found him “bored—bored badly. I would not have his place and be bored as he is.”
The electorate was anything but bored. Across the country, Republicans held enormous political rallies that tapped into the imagination and fervor of an electorate that was larger and younger than ever before. In almost every small town and large city throughout the North, young men joined Wide-Awake Clubs, donned oilcloth capes, and staged dramatic torchlight parades meant to stir the passions of the faithful. None of these practices were new, though the intensity of the canvass was in many ways unprecedented. Politics in the antebellum era was a deeply polarized affair. The object of a campaign was not so much to persuade the small sliver of undecided voters as to drive turnout among the party faithful. “Party lines were as strictly drawn as were the lines of religious sects,” the Philadelphia Inquirer observed several years later. “A man belonged to either the Democratic or the Whig party, to the Republican or the Democratic. He did not merely entertain opinions, he had convictions.” The steady expansion of the franchise in the first decades of the nineteenth century had inspired new mechanisms to stir popular passions, including party clubs, rallies, campaign songs, pole raisings (a throwback to England’s Maypole rituals), and torchlight processions meant to inspire awe and fervor among ordinary voters. Democrats were first to adopt these practices, but the Whig campaign of 1840, in which young men flocked to the banner of the war hero and everyman William Henry Harrison, set a new standard for democratic electioneering. By 1860, most Northerners likely knew where their political sympathies lay. It was incumbent upon the parties to use public spectacles in order to socialize their nominees (some of whom, like Lincoln, might be unknown outside their regions) among the party base and run up the numbers in the fall. The fireworks displays and martial parades were, in some respects, an early form of popular entertainment, in an age before professional sports and cinema. But “people did not go to the stands for amusement,” one journalist claimed. “Everybody was intensely excited” by the issues at stake. Whereas only 48 percent of eligible voters cast ballots as late as 1836, by the Civil War turnout in presidential elections averaged 69 percent, a testament to the success of democratic campaign practices.
Though the fires burned bright throughout the North, naturally they were the most intense in Springfield. Writing in the twilight hours of a massive rally in Springfield, which he judged “the greatest political demonstration that our State has ever seen,” Hay marveled that “veteran stumpers, who have mingled in every fight since Jackson’s time, fail of comparisons to describe it. Editors and reporters who have haunted for years the mass meetings of the nation, say they have seen nothing to compare it to. Grey-haired Whigs, who shouted and drank hard cider on the Tippecanoe battle field, at the monster meeting of twenty years ago, and have lived ever since in the confident belief that no other meeting ever would be held like it, shake their heads since yesterday, and mourn over a broken idol, an ideal eclipsed.” In a dispatch for the Providence Journal, Hay described the bright illuminations of the nighttime sky that met the tens of thousands of party loyalists who had flocked to the capital city to support its native son. “If you are a man of lively imagination,” he advised, “take a dose of Hasheesh and turn your mind to some such brilliant subjects as the Feast of Lanterns, the Vale of Cashmere, Bengal lights, and Choate’s oratory, and you will drift into a kaleidoscope of fantastic design and gorgeous colors, which may realize to your perceptions the show that yesterday’s parade gave us.” Everywhere one turned, there were replicas of log cabins, “monster flatboats, and big Indians, and allegorical representations of all the trades, and beautiful young women clothed in innocence and tarlatan, personating the Union-loving States, and every conceivable variety of mottoes, inscriptions, and devices on banners, globes and transparencies that swayed and floated and revolved along a seemingly interminable line of eight miles of procession.” The state’s leading Republicans were on hand to deliver the expected oratory, and as the afternoon sky began to tinge with the reddish yellow of sunset, “Mr. Lincoln appeared upon the g
rounds, to see for a moment, and be seen by the eager thousands who had come so many miles with that one purpose and hope.” The candidate said nothing, but his mere presence satisfied the throngs of Republican loyalists, many of them first-time voters who had only just come of age.
“Night came at last,” Hay continued, “and the enthusiasm rekindled under the stars. The torch-light parade of the Wide-Awakes . . . was the most magnificent thing that could have been devised to close worthily a demonstration like this. Viewed from an elevated position, it wound its sinuous track over the length of two miles, seeming, in its blazing lights and glittering uniforms, like a beautiful serpent of fire.” As the procession turned at Fifth and Adams streets, in the center of town, its young members set off hundreds of Roman candles that covered the statehouse in a “hissing and bursting blaze of fiery splendor, that cast a lurid glare on the upturned faces of the excited thousands, [and] the enthusiasm of the people broke out in wild cheerings, that came back in redoubled echoes from the four sides of the square.” For Hay, it caused the first stirrings of political awakening.
The first harbinger of good news came in October, when Republicans won state elections in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. If the same pattern carried in November, Lincoln would command enough electoral votes to win the presidency. Nicolay reported that the “effect of the glorious news . . . was signally illustrated in the splendid demonstrations of the Republicans of this city last night, in honor of these victories.” By now, the city had grown so accustomed to massive party demonstrations that local partisans erected a temporary meeting hall, to impose order where chaos otherwise prevailed. “Darkness had scarcely set in,” Nicolay noted, “when the Republican Wigwam was lighted up, and soon filled with an eager crowd of Republicans. Soon the ‘Wide Awake’ torches dashed out, and the organized and uniformed Lincolnites ranged themselves shoulder to shoulder for a march . . . From different points in the city rockets and other fireworks were filling the air with light, the windows of the Head Quarters of the Lincoln Club, and numerous business houses were beautifully illuminated. Passing once around the square they took their way toward the residence of Mr. Lincoln.” Standing near the candidate, Nicolay heard the crowd give “three cheers for Lincoln—three cheers for Trumbull—three cheers for Pennsylvania—three for Indiana, and three for Ohio.”
For Nicolay, these were heady times. Almost always at Lincoln’s side, he worked out of the governor’s office in the statehouse, reading and answering mail, managing the multitude of visitors who jockeyed for the candidate’s attention, conducting the flow of information between Springfield and key battleground states, and, on occasion, performing delicate political tasks. Mary Ridgely later noted that “if ever there was a man who worked, John Nicolay was that man.” In July, Nicolay traveled to Indiana to meet with a prominent Know-Nothing leader who commanded a key block of nativist voters. “Ascertain what he wants,” Lincoln instructed. “On what subjects he would converse with me. And the particulars if he will give them. Is an interview indispensable? Tell him my motto is ‘Fairness to all.’ But commit me to nothing.”
Throughout the fall, Republicans enjoyed what political commentators one hundred years later might call “the big momentum,” while Democrats suffered an enormous enthusiasm gap, particularly in the North. Writing just two weeks before the election, Nicolay dismissed a Douglas rally in Springfield as a “miserable . . . mortifying failure.” There were “some feeble fireworks,” but “public faith was shaken when the trains came in and brought only some little squads of fifties and hundreds—not making in the aggregate a thousand, all told . . . To the crown dismay of the Douglasites, fully one-half of the crowd on the sidewalks wore Lincoln badges, and every shout for Douglas was met by an answering shout from the enthusiastic Lincolnites.” Compared with the Wide-Awake revelry of several weeks before, the Douglas rally did not “‘shine’ any better at night. The torch bearers again patched up a ragged single file procession . . . shot off some straggling Roman candles, and the whole affair ‘blowed out’ at about nine o’clock, leaving the city in darkness, and almost as total quiet as if there were no squatters in the land.” Even in the southernmost counties, known colloquially as Egypt, or Africa, and usually a reliable source of Democratic support, Hay found that the “watchfires of liberty are lighting.”
Election Day fell on a crisp autumn day. At 3:30 in the afternoon, Lincoln—accompanied by fellow attorney Ward Hill Lamon, the law student Elmer Ellsworth, Ozias Hatch, William Herndon, and John Nicolay—made his way to the courthouse to vote. John Hay was there, too, and bore witness as “the dense crowd immediately began to shout with the wild abandon that characterizes the impulsive heart of the west.” To emphasize his availability for, but nonpursuit of, office, Lincoln made a show of clipping his name—and that of his designated electors—off the preprinted Republican ballot. That night, as returns began to roll in from around the country, he and Nicolay set up camp in the headquarters of the Illinois & Mississippi Telegraph Company, on the north end of the town square, to keep tally. “Here in this little room,” Nicolay remembered years later, “in the company of two or three silent operators moving about their mysteriously clicking instruments, and recording with imperturbable gravity the swift-throbbing messages from near and far, Mr. Lincoln read the reports as they came, first in fragmentary dribblets, and later in the rising and swelling stream of cheering news.” Outside, Hay recorded, “the crowd had speeches and songs. They grew uproarious over some telegraphic dispatches that Mr. Nicolay read to them . . . It seems absurd to write about the good time here, when the whole continent is aglow with the same good feeling. But the peculiar warmth that lives on the rejoicing here seems to me worthy of especial note. It is not so much the return of purity and the triumph of freedom that the people here hail, as it is the recognition by the world of the great soul that they have honored and loved for many years.”
Lincoln won the presidential election with over 1.8 million votes—a plurality that came just an inch shy of 40 percent of all votes cast, but a commanding majority of 180 votes in the Electoral College. Even when combined, the popular votes of his three opponents would not have been sufficient to defeat him in the Electoral College, a testimony to the yawning gap in population between the North, where Lincoln carried every state but New Jersey, and the South, where his name appeared on the ballot in just a handful of states.
Nicolay stayed up until four o’clock, taking in the “shouting, yelling, singing, dancing” and celebratory firing of guns and Roman candles. “I can scarcely realize that, after having fought this slavery question for six years past, and suffered so many defeats, I am at last rejoicing in a triumph which only two years ago we hardly dared dream about,” he crowed to Therena. “Though I was fighting then as something more than a private, I should have thought it a wild dream to imagine that six years after I should find victory so near the Commander-in-Chief.”
In the coming weeks, the pace of work accelerated, as would-be office seekers, party leaders, and veterans of past presidential administrations flocked to Springfield in search of patronage appointments or to make general introductions to the president-elect. From the governor’s office in the statehouse, measuring just fifteen feet by twenty-five feet, Nicolay controlled access to Lincoln and labored alone at reading and answering anywhere between fifty and a hundred letters each day. When Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper ran a sketch of their working space, Nicolay smiled at “the marvelous truthfulness of the representation of Mr. Lincoln, and his elegant and accomplished private secretary who sits writing at the desk.” He jokingly advised Therena not to spend more than “say $75” on the frame.
When the influx of mail and visitors grew unmanageable for just one staff member, John Hay began showing up at the statehouse and assisting his friend on an informal basis. It was still not clear that either man would accompany the president-elect to Washington. As late as December 9, Nicolay told Therena that Lincoln
had not yet offered him the position of secretary to the president, though he was “gratified to tell you that I have . . . evidence that Mr. Lincoln reposes entire confidence in me, which I deem sufficient gauranty [sic] that my present confidential relation to him will be continued.” Presidential staffs were then very small, and the job of secretary traditionally carried more authority and importance than its title would suggest. By custom, presidential secretaries lived in the White House and served as the primary interface between members of Congress, the press, and the public, on the one hand, and the commander in chief, on the other. Without prior political experience in Washington, or even outside the Midwest, and still unknown to the men who ran the Republican Party in large states like New York and Pennsylvania, Nicolay struck some critics as loyal but dramatically underqualified to be appointed to head the president’s office. But Lincoln valued loyalty. By the end of December, it was understood that Nicolay would be awarded the coveted position, at a princely salary of $2,500 per year—almost three times what he presently earned as Lincoln’s campaign secretary. Not long after, Nicolay suggested that Hay be appointed assistant secretary. “We can’t take all Illinois down with us to Washington,” Lincoln replied. When Milton offered to pay his nephew’s salary for six months, the president-elect relented. “Well, let Hay come,” he agreed. He would be appointed a clerk in the Interior Department, at an annual salary of $1,500, and detailed to the White House.
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Throughout the long interregnum between Lincoln’s election in November and his inauguration the following March (it was not until 1937 that the Twentieth Amendment, which was ratified in 1933, moved the start of presidential terms to January), Nicolay enjoyed greater exposure and insight into the president-elect’s thinking than anyone, except perhaps Mary Todd Lincoln. His role was not consultative, but in managing Lincoln’s relationships with national Republican officeholders and in communicating his instructions to members of the House and Senate, many of whom were in a state of panic at the prospect of disunion, George spent many hours in private discussion with the president-elect and came to know his point of view. In early December he told Therena that the Deep South states were likely to pass secession ordinances, but he believed that Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, Delaware, and Maryland would show “a decided disposition to remain in the Union.” Quite likely echoing Lincoln’s own thinking, he saw “no single reason why they should secede now, more than there was four years ago when Buchanan was chosen. True the Republican party have succeeded in electing their president. But neither Lincoln nor the party have ever avowed any purpose to interfere with, or deprive them of any recognized right, and as both Houses of Congress have a Democratic majority they could not do so if they wanted . . . The truth is that the State of South Carolina is a nest of traitors—disunionists per se who make Lincoln’s election the mere pretext not the cause of dissolution.” Nicolay also doubted very seriously that the seceding states could effectuate a break with the United States, as it was “easy enough for a State or States to resolve themselves out of the Union. But a State or nation cannot do without a government.” How would they re-create from scratch the elaborate web of institutions and services that the federal government had established gradually over the course of almost seventy-five years? “To maintain an independent government requires a lot of Executive officers, which must be paid,” he observed, “an army, which must be paid—a navy, which must be paid—ambassadors at foreign courts, which must be paid—a postal service, which must be paid—and a thousand other things which cost money. Where is the money to come from?” By and large, he did not regard secession fever as a particularly serious threat, and in holding this position, he very likely imitated the views of his employer.