Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

by Richard Brookhiser

There were other public figures making the arguments Lincoln did not make. In May 1856, just as the Illinois Republican Party was about to hold its first convention, Charles Sumner, a senator from Massachusetts, gave a two-day speech in Congress attacking slavery root and branch. His occasion was the nascent violence in Kansas, where proslavery gangs from Missouri had shot antislavery settlers and trashed Lawrence, an antislavery town. Sumner defended freedom in Kansas in fiery terms; he also excoriated proslavery southern politicians by name, comparing one of his colleagues, Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, to Don Quixote (a madman) and slavery to his harlot. Days later, the senator’s nephew, Preston Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina, accosted Sumner in the Senate and beat him over the head with a gold-tipped cane until Sumner lost consciousness; a friend of Brooks’s, also a congressman, held off onlookers trying to intervene at pistol point. The two congressmen rumbling on the House floor in 1798 had nothing on this.

  Sumner was intelligent and eloquent. He was also arrogant, inhumane, and so in love with his own ideas and voice that he could become unbalanced. Brooks was a thug who showed himself to be a coward: he backed out of a duel with a northern congressman, an ally of Sumner’s, who was a crack shot.

  Two days after the caning of Sumner, John Brown and his sons took five proslavery settlers in Kansas from their homes in the middle of the night and killed them with broadswords.

  John Brown, born in Connecticut in 1800, was a tanner and wool-dealer by profession, an abolitionist by destiny. The lynching of the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy in 1837 radicalized him; in the 1840s, he became active in the Underground Railroad. Brown came to live in the heart of the movement that Lincoln had always deplored.

  Brown was one of many combatants drawn to Kansas. After his quintuple murder, he fought in several pitched battles with marauders from Missouri, acquitting himself well. In 1856, he returned east to raise money for a new plan. He had a network of respectable backers, including the Transcendentalist minister Theodore Parker; he knew the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and he visited freed slaves in Canada. Who knew what about Brown’s new plan and what they said to Brown about it is still not certain; Brown was intending to liberate slaves in the South.

  In October 1859 Brown and eighteen followers seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). They rounded up some hostages, including a distant relative of George Washington’s who lived in the area, and planned to distribute the armory’s weapons to local slaves. But Brown and his men were surrounded, first by militia, then by a party of Marines, and after two days of fighting, he was taken. Brown was tried for murder, conspiracy, and treason against the State of Virginia and hanged early in December.

  Brown iconography typically highlights his Old Testament beard. In John Steuart Curry’s mural of him in the Kansas State Capitol, his beard mimics the swirls of a tornado filling the sky behind and above him. But his last statement to the court was not stormy, but calm: “[If I] had interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great . . . it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.” Brown then indicated the court’s Bible. “[That] teaches me . . . to ‘remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them’ [Hebrews 13:3]. I endeavored to act up to that instruction.”

  Brown became a political lightning rod. Abolitionists considered him a hero and a martyr. In Concord, Massachusetts, the smell of other people’s blood filled Henry David Thoreau with rapture: “For once we are lifted out of the trivialness and dust of politics into the region of truth and manhood.” Back in the trivialness and dust of politics, Democrats tried to pin Brown on the Republican Party, which tried to have nothing to do with him.

  Lincoln’s late 1859 swing through the Midwest took him to Kansas, where the subject of Brown was unavoidable. He gave Brown credit for courage, but condemned him as violent, criminal, and insane. He elaborated at Cooper Union. In his passage of reassurance addressed to the South, he denied that the Republican Party had any responsibility for slave revolts, even indirectly. It intended no “interference whatever with your slaves, or with you about your slaves. Surely this does not encourage them to revolt.” He added a mild joke: the only way slaves ever even heard of the Republican Party was when they overheard their masters denounce it. Slave revolts, Lincoln went on more sternly, were an inescapable feature of life in slave societies. He mentioned Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831—Had the Republican Party caused that?

  Lincoln ended by comparing Brown’s effort to failed assassinations: Guy Fawkes’s plot to blow up James I, or a recent attempt on the life of Napoleon III: “An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution.” So Lincoln dismissed Brown as a zealot and a failure. So he also managed to equate slaveholders with royalty, a favorite maneuver of his.

  Brown was more than an ordinary abolitionist. He was willing to free slaves by force, if necessary, and to do it not just in Kansas, but in the most venerable state in the South. Brown claimed he was not for a general uprising or a race war, but it is hard to imagine a program of armed raids leading to anything else.

  Was Brown the towering genius, the Napoleonic destroyer that Lincoln had feared twenty years earlier? If drama belongs to rhetoric, Brown was a rhetorical genius. After six years of speeches, Lincoln had only just come to national attention. With a few bold strokes, Brown had riveted the world.

  Brown was outside the channels of ordinary politics. He was not interested in Lincoln or Seward or Douglas, the Senate or the White House; he wanted to free slaves, and he set about it in the most direct way. But the towering genius is not apolitical. He wants a new politics that he controls. Brown hoped to lead a considerable organization, and before Harpers Ferry he even drew up a constitution for it, with an elaborate structure of congress, courts, and cabinet. (His lawyer would introduce it at his trial in an attempt to establish an insanity defense: only a lunatic could have drawn up such a plan.) But Brown’s rules were for an underground movement engaged in a guerrilla struggle, not laws for a new America.

  Brown was too religious for politics—“commissioned by Heaven,” as Lincoln put it. A Puritan, as Thoreau said, more precisely: “He died lately in the time of Cromwell, but he reappeared here.” Brown answered his call, and passed into legend.

  Temperamentally and philosophically, Lincoln and Brown were strangers: Lincoln was humorous, Brown intent; Lincoln skeptical, Brown pious; Lincoln a lawyer-politician, Brown a lawbreaker and a killer. Lincoln preferred, as he had throughout his long debate with Douglas, to engage with Jefferson and the other founders, not such as Brown. But other candidates for the role of the towering genius would appear during the 1860s.

  Eleven

  THE ELECTION OF 1860. THE TOWERING GENIUS (II)

  THE COOPER UNION ADDRESS KICKED OFF LINCOLN’S RUN for the White House; the next fourteen months were consumed with presidential politics and presidential responsibilities. But even in this rush the founders appeared in his thoughts, speeches, and jokes, and in the speeches of his rivals; they were by now woven into his life.

  Presidential contests in Lincoln’s lifetime were much shorter than they are today. The nomination struggles that now take place over a months-long parade of caucuses and primaries were then compressed into a day, at worst two, of balloting at political conventions. The campaigns that followed were also, in one respect, quieter. Would-be candidates might set themselves up with significant speeches before the contest formally began; Lincoln could point to a string of them going back six years. But once nominations were made, candidates were expected to maintain a dignified silence, while their supporters maintained a raucous hoopla in their behalf.

  Despite his new prominence, Lincoln was not among the front-runners for the Republican nomination in 1860. The leader among the le
aders was William Seward. Besides a long career and a base in the nation’s largest state, Seward was blessed with a winning personality, genial and charming. He was one of those men on whom fortune smiled, and who smiled back. But even the blessed acquire enemies in politics. Horace Greeley, who had long yearned to run for office himself in New York without a hint of encouragement from Seward, had become one such (one reason he had puffed the Cooper Union speech was simply to spite Seward).

  Seward was also weighed down by one of his convictions. The Republican Party was a coalition of disparate elements, united by the issue of slavery expansion. As Lincoln had put it in the “House Divided” speech, “we gathered from the four winds.” Among the disparate elements were antislavery veterans of the American or Know-Nothing Party, which had flourished and died in the mid-1850s. But Seward was boldly pro-immigrant, going so far in his days as governor of New York to call for state support of Catholic schools. No nativist could ever be comfortable with him.

  The opposite drawback affected Edward Bates, an elderly lawyer and politician from Missouri. Bates might give the Republicans clout in the border states, and Greeley (whatever nice things he said about the Cooper Union speech) backed Bates for the nomination for that reason. But Bates had backed the American Party in 1856, and German Americans, who were a mainstay of the Republican Party in the Midwest, would not forgive him for it.

  Salmon Portland Chase had been the first Republican governor of Ohio, and Ohio was the third-largest state in the country. Chase was intelligent, energetic, and idealistic—his opposition to slavery had taken him into the Liberty and Free Soil parties in the 1840s, before he became a Free Soil Democrat, then a Republican. But he was both humorless and sharp-elbowed. His rise to office in Ohio had left a trail of bruised competitors. His own state would not be united behind him.

  Simon Cameron was a senator from Pennsylvania, the nation’s second-largest state. He was a wheeler-dealer, turning alternately—and profitably—from politics to business and back. One deal from the 1830s had given him an unfortunate nickname: he was thought to have cheated Indians whose claims on the federal government he had been appointed to settle, and was known thereafter as the Great Winnebago Chieftain. Pennsylvanians were used to him, and someone like Thurlow Weed could understand him, but ordinary voters outside his home state might look askance.

  Years later, Leonard Swett, a veteran of Illinois politics, would attribute Lincoln’s success to shrewd positioning: “His tactics were, to get himself in the right place and remain there . . . until events would find him in that place.” Certainly Lincoln occupied a surprisingly strong position as 1860 unfolded.

  His stature as a politician was noticeable, but not so noticeable as to appear threatening to Seward and the other front-runners. His 1858 Senate race and the Cooper Union speech had put him on the national stage—just. He had the support of those who knew him well—Illinois Republicans were solid for him—and competitors who did not yet know him well did not pay enough attention to him.

  He had devoted his energies to slavery expansion, the issue that defined his party—the “question about which all true men do care,” he had called it at Cooper Union—without blotting his record with inconvenient positions on other issues. Illinoisans knew he was opposed to Know-Nothingism—in one of his speeches during his 1858 Senate race, he said that all “liberty-loving men,” German, Irish, and Scandinavian as well as old-stock Americans, shared the principles of the Declaration of Independence. But he did not have a record of pro-immigrant policies to match Seward’s.

  Being from Illinois was one of his strongest attributes. The 1860 census would show that Illinois had become the fourth-largest state in the nation, and Chicago the ninth-largest city (up from twenty-fourth a decade earlier). The Democrats had carried Illinois in the 1856 presidential election, as they had in every contest since statehood. But the Republican and American parties together had outpolled them. If the Republicans could carry the state in 1860, they would have a fighting chance in the Electoral College.

  Yet, despite what Swett said, a lot of work went into Lincoln’s presidential campaign. Norman Judd, a Lincoln man who served on the Republican National Committee, had lobbied to put the party’s convention in Chicago. A home-state advantage was a great leg-up for a candidate. Your operatives knew the setting, your supporters were on the spot to hold rallies and make noise. The other city in the running for the convention had been St. Louis, which would have been a boon to Bates, but the less obvious contender took the prize.

  Early in May, before the national convention, Illinois Republicans held a state party convention in Decatur, where Lincoln acquired an image that would serve him through Chicago and beyond: his cousin John Hanks marched into the hall carrying a rail that Lincoln had supposedly split decades ago. Lincoln, who was on the podium at the time, admitted he could not recognize that particular rail, but said he had split “many better ones” in his day. So Lincoln the Railsplitter was born. The drudgery he had fled as a young man now came back to benefit him. His rube/boob persona became heroic; paintings and cartoons showed him with his maul, swinging away. Twenty years after William Henry Harrison’s Log Cabin Campaign, Lincoln supporters would run their own version.

  The Republican convention ran from May 16 to 18. Candidates in those days might attend state conventions, but they could not, with propriety, appear at national conventions, so Lincoln stayed in Springfield while his associates took care of business in Chicago. They did a superb job. Judd, who was in charge of seating arrangements for the convention, placed the New York and Pennsylvania delegations far apart, so that the Seward and Cameron camps could not easily communicate. Lincoln supporters flooded the city thanks to cut rates offered by Illinois railroads (now friendlier than they had been two years earlier); fake convention tickets were printed for them to ensure that all Lincoln supporters had seats in the spectator galleries.

  Lincoln, like all statesmen, solemnly told his minions to make no deals that would bind him later, and his minions, like all minions, did what they had to do. A wonderful story describes Lincoln’s floor manager, David Davis, having been reminded in mid-deal of their candidate’s prohibition, howling “Lincoln ain’t here!” and dealing anyway. Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald doubts that it is true. But he does concede that Davis promised the Pennsylvania delegation that there would be a spot in the cabinet for Cameron if its votes swung to Lincoln after the first ballot.

  The convention made its choice on May 18, its last day. With 233 votes needed to win the nomination, Seward led on the first ballot, with 173½ (states with more delegates than votes cast fractional votes). Lincoln was second with 102. Cameron, Chase, and Bates had about 50 votes each, and there were scattered votes for half a dozen others. On the second ballot Seward rose to 184½, but Lincoln, buoyed by an infusion of Pennsylvanians plus defectors from other candidates, was right behind him with 181. Seward had the lead, but Lincoln had the momentum. On the third ballot Lincoln rose to 231½; a switch of four votes in Ohio put him over the top and triggered a stampede of last-minute conversions.

  Lincoln spent the day in Springfield following events by telegram, chatting with cronies, and playing handball in a vacant lot. Christopher Brown, a young lawyer who was one of his handball partners, recalled that Lincoln told one of his off-color jokes to pass the time. This one was about George Washington, the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen, and a “back house” (outhouse):

  It appears that shortly after we had peace with England, Mr. Allen had occasion to visit England, and while [he was] there the English took great pleasure in teasing him and trying to make fun of the Americans, and General Washington in particular, and one day they got a picture of General Washington, and hung it up [in] the back house where Mr. Allen could see it. And they finally asked Mr. Allen if he saw that picture of his friend in the back house.

  Mr. Allen said no, but said he thought that it was a very appropriate [place] for an Englishman to keep it.
/>   “Why?” they asked.

  “For,” said Mr. Allen, “there is nothing that will make an Englishman shit so quick as the sight of General Washington.”

  Ethan Allen had been a British prisoner of war for a year and a half during the Revolution, and for part of that time he was held in England. But the rest of the story belonged to art rather than history.

  It is obvious why Lincoln was telling jokes at such a time. He was “nervous, fidgety,” the young lawyer recalled. When Fate comes to the front door, some men whistle, some men whittle; Lincoln told jokes. It is equally obvious why he told this particular joke. If he were nominated, he might sit where Washington sat. And with the country in the state it was in, that was enough to send any man to the back house.

  The Democrats had already held their convention in Charleston, South Carolina, at the end of April, and it was a debacle. The party’s rules required its nominee to win not a majority but two-thirds of the convention’s votes—202 out of 303. Since James Buchanan, the incumbent, had long ago announced that he would serve only one term, Stephen Douglas was the front-runner. But his fight against the Lecompton Constitution and his failed dalliance with the Republicans had made him odious to southern Democrats, and there were enough of these at the convention to make a two-thirds vote for him virtually impossible. Southern hardliners, meanwhile, demanded that the party platform call on the federal government to protect property in slaves in the territories. Such a law would give substance to Chief Justice Taney’s opinion that the Fifth Amendment sheltered slavery there; it would be Dred Scott with teeth, and the end of popular sovereignty. Douglas could not possibly accept such a plank without forfeiting all self-respect.

  Douglas led for two days of balloting, hovering between 145 and 152½ votes. A handful of other candidates trailed behind him. Fifty disgruntled southern delegates simply left the convention, awaiting events in another hall in Charleston. After fifty-seven ballots, the exhausted Democrats voted to reassemble in Baltimore in June. There, after two more ballots and more walkouts by southerners, the delegates who remained declared Douglas their candidate. The southerners, meeting in another venue in Baltimore, then tapped the current vice president, John Breckinridge, a thirty-nine-year-old Kentuckian, as theirs. Douglas would stand for popular sovereignty, Breckinridge for expanding slavery into the territories under the aegis of the federal government.