Chicagoan Charles Ray was of course on the scene here in his hometown to cover the event for the Tribune, performing double duty as both a correspondent and a political operative on the team of Lincoln floor managers operating out of the Tremont House hotel. Ray arranged things so each and every delegate was welcomed to town by a long and enthusiastic convention- eve Tribune editorial headlined “Abraham Lincoln, the Winning Man.” The piece ended with this ringing endorsement: “We present our candidate, then, not as the rival of this man or that, not because the West has claims which she must urge; not because of a distinctive policy which she would see enforced; not because he is the first choice of a majority; but because he is that honest man, that representative Republican, that people’s candidate, whose life, position, record, are so many guarantys of success—because he is that patriot in whose hands the interests of the government may be safely confided.”74
For the next two days, Medill and Ray busied themselves with both journalism and politicking, issuing a convention extra newspaper while concurrently counting heads on behalf of their candidate and, as some later whispered, promiscuously offering future cabinet posts to state delegations whose votes might be available to Lincoln after the first ballot. In the heat of the battle to persuade wavering delegates, Ray allegedly confirmed to Medill that he promised to buy Pennsylvania’s support by offering the Treasury Department to the state’s favorite son Simon Cameron. An exasperated Medill responded, “What will be left?” To which Ray supposedly shot back: “Oh, what is the difference? We are after a bigger thing than that; we want the Presidency and the Treasury is not a great stake to pay for it.” Or so Medill recalled years later. It was Medill, in turn, sitting with his old friends in the Ohio delegation, who reportedly whispered that the Treasury Department might instead go to the Buckeye State’s first choice, Salmon P. Chase, if their votes, too, shifted in Lincoln’s direction on subsequent ballots.75
Deeply concerned when he heard the rumors of such unauthorized deals, Lincoln urgently sent his most trusted press ally, Edward Baker of the Illinois State Journal, rushing from Springfield to Chicago to clarify the candidate’s positions—both political and philosophical—for the benefit of floor managers and curious delegates alike. First, Lincoln offered his views about front-runner Seward’s most controversial positions: for the record, he agreed with the New York senator’s “Irrepressible Conflict” warnings. (How could he not? He had said much the same thing in his own “House Divided” address.) But, as Lincoln added, “I do not endorse his ‘Higher Law’ doctrine”—citing and implicitly criticizing Seward’s onetime declaration that the Constitution could be superseded by moral opposition to slavery. As his backers shared the contents with wavering delegates, Lincoln’s message had the bombshell impact of a convention speech.
Lincoln accompanied his statement with a private postscript meant to inhibit his brazen operatives as they trolled the various delegations offering to trade cabinet jobs for convention support: “Make no contracts that will bind me.” Perhaps because he preferred that no official record of the communication survive, Lincoln did not commit these crucial, last-minute instructions to a formal letter. Rather, he communicated them in much the same way ordinary Americans had shared their most important thoughts a generation earlier when, unable to afford general postage, they had scrawled personal messages on recycled newspapers. Lincoln scribbled his final pre-convention instructions onto a copy of the pro-Republican newspaper anachronistically called the Missouri Democrat.76
• • •
From their separate Chicago hotels, the major New York Republican editors tirelessly cajoled, negotiated, filed dispatches and commentary, and generally created as much commotion as the candidates themselves might have stirred had tradition of the day encouraged them to attend the convention personally. In their absence—Seward remained in Auburn, New York, Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois, waiting anxiously for news by telegraph—delegates pursued the celebrated Greeley, Weed, and Raymond for comments, advice, and clues about the pending vote.
Weed—who promptly acquired the new nicknames “Lord Thurlow” and “the general” in tribute to his formidable arm-twisting at the convention—labored strenuously behind the scenes to keep pledged Seward delegates in line. In marked contrast, wearing his trademark ankle-length white duster, Greeley automatically attracted admiring crowds wherever he turned up—and, as several delegates noted, he seemed to turn up everywhere. If Raymond had been the darling of the first Republican convention in 1856, Greeley emerged as the principal eminence of the second convention in 1860. “The way Greeley is stared at as he shuffles about, looking as innocent as ever,” Murat Halstead reported, “is itself a sight. Whenever he appears there is a crowd gaping at him, and if he stops to talk a minute with someone who wishes to consult him as the oracle, the crowd becomes dense as possible, and there is the most eager desire to hear the words of wisdom that are supposed to fall on such occasions.”77
Albany editor and state political boss Thurlow Weed (left) and his preferred candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, U.S. senator William H. Seward (right) of New York.
“On one memorable occasion,” Connecticut editor Isaac Hill Bromley recalled with relish, “some mischievous fellow pinned a Seward badge on his coattail; it amused the crowd for a moment without giving him the slightest disturbance.”78 Taking note of the very same incident, the Times reported that “for several hours” Greeley “unconsciously carried the irrepressible badge with him,” arousing laughter from everyone familiar with the editor’s hatred for his home-state U.S. senator. Greeley and his New York rival Henry Raymond occupied opposite political camps that week but, to his credit, the Times editor generously acknowledged that it was Greeley who “made a great sensation” in Chicago, noting: “He is surrounded by a crowd wherever he goes, who besiege him for a speech, and failing in that seduce him into conversation, which inevitably becomes a speech.” Greeley made his mark on the convention floor as well, introducing a resolution holding “liberty to be the natural birthright of every human being,” and declaring “that slavery can only exist where it has been previously established.” The Cincinnati Commercial’s Halstead admitted that when the chairman called the roll on the motion, Greeley’s name elicited “the greatest ovation” of all the delegates, adding a bit snidely that “those who know him well know that nobody is more fond of the breath of popular favor than the philosophic Horace.”79
Greeley’s dogged opposition to Seward, however, infuriated his fellow New Yorkers. When the Empire State delegation—all of whom remained firmly committed to the senator—hosted a dinner the night before the scheduled balloting for president, speaker after speaker rose not only to praise the senator, but to denounce Greeley, who did not attend. But in his own remarks, Raymond “defended Mr. G. from the imputation of selfishness, and vindicated his right to act as the best interests of the Republican Party seem to require.”80 For his part, Greeley wired his paper from Chicago on the eve of the balloting: “My conclusion, from all that I can gather tonight, is that the opposition to Gov. Seward can not concentrate on any candidate, and that he will be nominated.”81 Once again, Horace Greeley had not only chosen the wrong horse, but taken the wrong measure of his colleagues.
Charles Ray came far closer than Greeley to assessing the mood of the convention when he wired Lincoln: “Your friends are at work for you hard, and with great success. Your show on the first ballot will not be confined to Illinois, and after that it will be strongly developed. . . . A pledge or two may be necessary when the pinch comes. Don’t be too sanguine. Matters now look well and as things stand to-day I had rather have your chances than those of any other man. But don’t get excited.”82
Dr. Charles H. Ray of the Chicago Tribune, who doubled as a floor manager for Lincoln’s surprise victory at the 1860 Republican National Convention.
The Republican National Convention gaveled to order on May 16 inside a massive temporary wooden str
ucture near the lakefront dubbed the Wigwam. Three thousand spectators, many gaining entry with counterfeit tickets supposedly issued by the Lincoln campaign, filled its galleries to overflowing. After passing an antislavery-expansion platform as expected, delegates began casting their votes for president on May 18, but not before the Chicago Tribune issued what Murat Halstead called “a last appeal to the Convention not to nominate Seward.”83 Even so, going into the first ballot, Halstead, for one, agreed with Greeley that the New Yorker’s nomination was a foregone conclusion. Their certainty notwithstanding, Seward came up short on the first ballot, but to the astonishment of many, it was not Chase of Ohio, Cameron of Pennsylvania, or Bates of Missouri who came in second, but Lincoln of Illinois. From that point on, the Seward nomination was doomed.
After two more rounds of noisy balloting in which Lincoln’s strength steadily increased as Seward’s first stalled, then ebbed, Lincoln won the nomination. The galleries, thick with partisan Illinoisans, erupted in an ear-shattering roar that Halstead likened to “the rush of a great wind in the van of a storm.” As the city went “wild with delight,” Medill and Ray ordered the offices of the Chicago Tribune illuminated with bright lights and decorated with Lincoln memorabilia. “On each side of the counting room door,” the paper proudly reported, “stood a rail—out of the three thousand split by ‘honest Old Abe’ thirty years ago on the Sangamon River bottoms.”84 Heading home to Cincinnati hours later, Halstead could still hear from his train window “the thundering jar of cannon, the clamor of drums . . . and the wild whooping of the boys, who were delighted with the idea of a candidate for the Presidency who thirty years ago had split rails . . . and whose neighbors name him ‘honest.’ ”85
Lincoln received word of his triumph in the secure, convivial setting to which he had retreated so often during the past decade to strategize, submit editorial copy, or simply exchange gossip with his closest friends and advisors in politics and the press: the rustically furnished editorial rooms of Bailhache and Baker’s Illinois State Journal. There, a breathless runner arrived from the town’s nearby telegraph office clutching the decisive wire, screaming at the top of his voice as he rushed up the stairs, “Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Lincoln, you are nominated!” Hearing the shouts, the “cool” but evidently well-pleased politician rose from his favorite seat at the Journal office, a painted bentwood hickory armchair, seized the dispatch in his hands, read it slowly, and only then confided: “I felt sure this would come when I saw the second ballot.” After congratulations all around, Lincoln announced: “I must go home. There is a little short woman there that is more interested in this matter than I am.” Then he pressed through a rapidly thickening swarm of well-wishers already filling the street outside the Journal office to offer him congratulations, joking as he headed in the direction of his house a few blocks away: “Boys you had better come and shake hands with me now that you have an opportunity—for you do not know what influence this nomination may have on me. I am human, you know.”86
The Tribune editor slays Seward in Vanity Fair’s June 1860 Julius Caesar parody, “Et Tu, Greeley?” Mounting the pedestal is the new—and noticeably dark-skinned—presidential nominee Lincoln. Below him a bearded Henry Raymond, as Mark Antony, looks on in despair.
Looking on approvingly at this frenzied scene were the two Springfield Republican editors who for years had promoted Lincoln so loyally: Edward Baker and William Bailhache. Now their small and otherwise unremarkable country newspaper office had witnessed history.
Lincoln’s newspaper friendships—and obligations—were about to expand. A taste of things to come arrived within days. One of the first to send congratulations to the newly minted nominee was William Schouler, onetime editor of the Boston Atlas, who still contributed occasional articles to Republican papers in and about town. “I am neither an office seeker or the son of one,” he took pains to point out in his letter. That was because he already occupied a political office, and meant to hold on to it. He was serving as adjutant general of Massachusetts at a salary of $1,800 a year, he explained. And as he made clear, he anticipated that a change in administrations would bring no commensurate change in what he boasted was “not a mere ornamental position.”87
The Republican press had done its work in behalf of Lincoln; now, months before Election Day, it was apparently time for Lincoln to go to work in behalf of the Republican press.
In return, Lincoln would demand from Republican journalists unconditional loyalty in print—along with hard work on direct grassroots politics—“organizing every election district,” as he put it to a prominent Pennsylvania editor, even if it meant “counting noses one by one.”88
Horace Greeley had already done his work—and more, at least according to one eyewitness at Chicago, who claimed the editor had done nothing less than balance the ticket at the convention. Following Lincoln’s nomination, fellow delegates surrounded Greeley and asked, “Who is it best to bring forward for Vice-President?” Greeley replied: “The friends of Mr. Seward are very sore, and they must have their own way as to Vice-President.” Pressed to name a candidate who could placate the Seward faction, “Mr. Greeley put his hand to the side of his mouth and in an undertone said, ‘Hamlin of Maine.’ ”89
Hannibal Hamlin was chosen as Lincoln’s running mate that afternoon.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I Can Not Go into the Newspapers
Republican editors throughout the North—even the politically myopic Horace Greeley, who suddenly faced significant danger of being marginalized by the party—quickly rallied behind Abraham Lincoln, although not before some of their Eastern brethren engaged in a furious debate over who deserved blame for William Seward’s humiliation at Chicago. Three weeks after the convention, Kansas editor Mark Delahay tried assuring the newly anointed candidate that “the Raymond and Greeley quarrel should not hurt us much”—at least “not in NY.”1 But as the internecine newspaper war raged, Democratic editors pounced. Citing abundant evidence of morning-after remorse among Republicans, the opposition press did its best both to plant seeds of doubt about Lincoln’s competence and to incite fears about his party’s antislavery agenda.
Leading that effort, as usual, was James Gordon Bennett. Denouncing Lincoln’s nomination as “absurd, improbable and incredible,” the Herald wickedly claimed that astonished Democrats first greeted the news as some kind of “hoax, played off by some wag on the Little Giant.” In the Herald’s brutal estimation, Lincoln was “rough timber . . . slovenly . . . an uneducated man—a vulgar village politician, without any experience worth mentioning in the practical duties of statesmanship, and only noted for some very unpopular votes which he gave while a member of Congress.”2
Bennett could not resist reminding readers as well that Lincoln had visited New York but once—and then, for a fee to orate at Cooper Union. For good measure, Bennett lumped Lincoln together with Horace Greeley:
The conduct of the Republican Party in the nomination is a remarkable indication of small intellect, growing smaller. They pass over Seward, Chase and Bates, who are statesmen and able men, and they take up a fourth-rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar, and who, to raise the wind, delivers his hackneyed, illiterate compositions at $200 apiece. Our readers will recollect that this peripatetic politician visited New York two or three months ago on his financial tour, when, in return for the most unmitigated trash, interlarded with coarse and clumsy jokes, he filled his empty pockets with dollars coined out of Republican fanaticism. If, after he becomes President of the United States, the public finances should fall, he can set out on a lecturing mission through the country, taking Horace Greeley along with him.3
Henry Raymond, trying his utmost to conceal his disappointment over the convention’s choice, left Chicago not to return home, but dutifully to journey to Springfield together with Thurlow Weed, as members of the delegation assigned to notify Lincoln officially of his nomination. The visit proved disheartening. The laconic candidate did little to convince R
aymond that he was ready for the presidency. “No one doubts that he has all the intellectual ability, the honesty of purpose, and the fixedness of political principle essential to the high position for which he is in nomination,” the Times soon opined. “The only apprehension which any of his friends entertain is that he may lack the iron firmness of will and the practical experience of men of factions, which the passing crisis will render indispensable in a Republican president.”4
Back home, Greeley squirmed as Democrats and embittered Seward Republicans alike circulated the charge that the Tribune editor bore primary responsibility for the convention defeat of the New York favorite son they still believed to be best qualified to be president. Bennett had the most sport of all, tormenting Republicans by asserting that Seward (whom he still detested) was “a far better man in every way than Abe Lincoln.” The Herald reported that Greeley had not only “killed” the front-runner in Chicago, but that his grateful admirers had repaid him by launching a subscription “to buy Greeley a new suit of clothes to replace his present seedy raiment.” (Bennett pledged his own contribution of five cents.) Bennett also invented the rumor that Greeley had supported Edward Bates in Chicago in the expectation that he would himself become the Missourian’s running mate “as soon as Bates was out of the woods.”5 An infuriated Thurlow Weed reported to his own Albany readers that Greeley was actually overheard before he left Chicago exulting, “Now I am even with Governor Seward.” On May 22, Greeley tried responding to the cascading charges with a lengthy editorial defending his actions in Chicago, vowing support for the Republican ticket, and indignantly maintaining that he truly believed the conservative Bates had been the best available man.6
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 32