Those five defeats mattered. Though Republicans won the popular vote, Democrats enjoyed a combined majority of fifty-four to forty-six in the two houses of the Illinois legislature, which they used to return Douglas to the Senate at joint session in January. An out-of-date apportionment of legislative seats accounted for a modest mismatch between the popular party vote and party representation; this was compounded by a Democrat majority amongst the thirteen state senators not up for reelection. Strictly speaking, then, electoral technicalities caused Lincoln’s defeat. But he and other leading Republicans recognized there were profounder lessons. To achieve dominance, the party needed to recruit at least some of those whom Lincoln called “the nice exclusive sort” of Whigs. As one metaphor-mixing activist explained, unless the party managed to “secure that conservative part of the old Whig party which the Democrats have been fishing after for the last three years we may as well ‘hang up de fiddle and de bow.’ ”72
Lincoln, though disappointed, refused to be downcast by his defeat at the hands of his old rival. On the “dark, rainy & gloomy” evening of election day, aware from the telegraphed returns that the Democrats would control the legislature, he set out for home on a slippery, “hog-backed” path. He almost lost his footing but, he recalled, “I recovered myself & lit square: and I said to myself, ‘It’s a slip and not a fall.’ ” It was a theme he pursued in the cascade of consolatory letters he despatched to his supporters. “The fight must go on. We are right and can not finally fail.” “The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one, or even, one hundred defeats.” Even the ingenious Douglas could not indefinitely repeat the conjurer’s trick of winning support “both as the best means to break down, and to uphold the slave power”; eventually there would be “another ‘blow up’ in the democracy.” He himself, though, would “now sink out of view, and . . . be forgotten.” In the next elections, he told Norman Judd, he would “fight in the ranks.”73
Lincoln’s doubts were understandable, though we may reasonably wonder if he really believed his political future would be so anonymous or the public so amnesiac. What he could not have doubted, when reviewing the previous four or five years, was that he had been a chief beneficiary of the swirling public opinion which had destabilized the old parties in Illinois and opened the door to political realignment. Through several seasons of public speaking—in the campaigns of 1854, 1856, and 1858—his steady advocacy of an antislavery argument had done much to color public sentiment, and to effect the displacement of the Whigs by a broader-based Republican party that, far more realistically than its predecessor, could aspire to national power. Seeking to fashion a new institutional order, and alert in particular to the power of evangelical opinion, Lincoln deliberately fused appeals to Protestant millennialism and Enlightenment rationalism. By the time the debates of 1858 reached their climax, Lincoln was earnestly seeking to harness antislavery religious sensibilities not just in Chicago and the Yankee settlements but as widely as possible across the state. His defeat by no means discredited this strategy of moral engagement: just two years later, the power of a crusading party would unlock the gate of the presidency.
CHAPTER 3
The Power of Party: Winning the Presidency, 1858–60
Late in the evening of general election day in 1860, Lincoln and a few friends walked to the Springfield telegraph office to await the returns from the East. Already aware of the Republicans’ success in Illinois and other western states, Lincoln was quietly confident of victory. Less than twelve months earlier he had been little more than a leading provincial politician with a mixed record in pursuing national office. Few of those who then thought about such things had given him a serious chance of running for the presidency, let alone entering the White House. Yet hindsight shows a remorseless logic at work in the process by which Lincoln rose from defeat at the hands of Douglas in 1858 to achieve the highest elective office in the land. If his rise was unexpected to most observers, it was certainly not accidental.
In the interplay of the three elements that shaped Lincoln’s antebellum career—namely his own political energies, the shifts of public opinion, and the mechanisms of party—it was the third, the operations of party, that did most to bring about his remarkable success in 1860. Winning the presidential nomination demanded the confidence of the Republican organization whose national leadership had several other names from which realistically to choose. Once selected, a presidential nominee was almost completely dependent in reaching office on his party’s exertions as a campaigning organization—one disciplined and unified by a sense of shared values and the promise of jobs. Lincoln needed no lessons here: no man, he knew, could get anywhere without party.1
Yet parties at a national level were a far cry from the well-oiled machines of the modern era. They lacked permanence, adequate money, and the means of running an integrated, coordinated campaign. The party that Lincoln depended on was in its national form little more than a loose confederation of state organizations, over which national candidates and their advisers exerted only modest leverage. And while some of those constituent state parties were towers of strength, others were snake pits where personal and ideological venom impaired local activity. Still, whatever their organizational shortcomings in 1860, the Republicans suffered none of the self-destructive trauma of their Democratic opponents, stretched on the rack of slavery. Even more important, Republicans enjoyed in popular, local-level enthusiasm what they lacked in institutional polish. The party’s philosophical cohesion and crusading fervor, colored by the millennialism of the evangelical Protestants who sustained it, gave their presidential canvass an energy denied to more routine campaigns. As their candidate, Lincoln was the beneficiary of activists inspired by a self-image as “the Christian party in politics.”
PRESIDENTIAL AMBITION: LINCOLN, HIS PARTY, AND THE ROAD TO THE DECATUR CONVENTION
The moment when Lincoln decided to seek the presidency has to remain a matter of speculation. As a congressman in 1848 he had written about what he would do “were I president,” but these were notes for a campaign speech in support of Zachary Taylor—he, not Lincoln, being the “I” in question.2 Lincoln would certainly have been gratified by the broad-based support he got when put up for Frémont’s running mate in 1856.3 It was, however, the debates with Douglas two years later that marked the real watershed in his national recognition. At the outset of that campaign he ruefully contrasted his standing with that of his gilded opponent: “nobody has ever expected me to be President.” Still, the Chicago Tribune’s Charles H. Ray was right to compare Lincoln to Byron, “who woke up one morning and found himself famous,” and within a few months, as David Davis told Lincoln, his “noble canvass” had won friends everywhere and earned him “a national reputation.” A scattering of newspapers both inside and outside Illinois judged him worthy of an office higher than senator, and Lincoln’s conversations at the time hinted at future possibilities. During the campaign he told a young journalist, Henry Villard, “Mary insists . . . that I am going to be Senator and President of the United States too.” At this, Villard recalled, “He burst out laughing, shook all over, and exclaimed, ‘Just think of such a sucker as me as President!’ ” When Jesse Fell returned in December 1858 from a tour of the eastern states, including his native Pennsylvania, he told Lincoln that the Illinoisan’s growing reputation made him a formidable candidate for the presidency. According to Fell, Lincoln replied that realism and common justice favored William Henry Seward, Salmon Portland Chase, or some other well-established servant of the national party; but he added, “I admit the force of much that you say, and admit that I am ambitious, and would like to be President . . . but there is no such good luck in store for me as the presidency.”4
Lincoln persisted with this etiquette of modesty during 1859. “I must say I do not think myself fit for the Presidency,” he told one admirer. Several Illinois newspapers wanted to float his name as election year approached, but when the editor of the Rock
Island Register offered to engineer a concerted drive for Lincoln in all the state’s Republican papers, he declined. His supporters could not be certain if this marked a genuine lack of ambition or the shrewd calculation of an interested candidate who feared a counterthrust against a premature boom. Whatever the truth, Lincoln found such presidential gossip helpful, for it confirmed his position as the preeminent Republican in the state and did no harm to his chances of a further tilt at a Senate seat. While he reassured Lyman Trumbull that he would be no rival to Trumbull’s bid to seek a second term in 1860, he certainly hoped to run himself in 1864.5
As the presidential election year approached, Lincoln focused his political energy in ways that would do no harm to his chances of the nomination. First, he developed his connections. His debates with Douglas had brought fame, a stream of correspondence, and calls to speak from all over the North. For much of 1859 financial exigency kept him hard at work in his law practice, forcing him to decline many of these invitations: “I shall go to the wall for bread and meat, if I neglect my business this year as well as last,” he explained to a disappointed Iowan.6 Still, during the later months of the year, with his finances restored, he traveled four thousand miles to deliver twenty-three speeches. Having made just three out-of-state addresses in the previous five years, he now gave nearly twenty such within just a few months, many of them in Iowa, Kansas, and Wisconsin. Most notable, though, was his visit to Ohio in September, to speak at the statehouse in Columbus and before a mass audience at Cincinnati. Called in by the Republican leaders to counter Douglas’s influence in the gubernatorial race, Lincoln prepared two careful speeches that engaged with the Little Giant’s most recent reformulation of popular sovereignty. He won new admirers and broadened his base.
Lincoln’s second, though not secondary, objective was to sustain the philosophical integrity of his party while at the same time making it a broad enough church to win a national election. This was a live issue in the Republican press throughout the later 1850s. Some conservative spokesmen, including the New York Times, advocated replacing the policy of nonextension with popular sovereignty, to draw southern Know-Nothings into a national “Opposition” capable of ousting the Buchanan administration in 1860; others suggested an even weaker stance on slavery, simply opposing southern schemes for reopening the Atlantic slave trade. Lincoln, fearing a retreat to lower ground, spent much of his time urging conservatives to resist “the temptation to lower the Republican Standard in order to gather recruits.” What gave the party its authority was its guaranteed hostility to slavery’s spread. Weaken that, to attract southern opponents of “the rotten democracy,” and you “gain nothing in the South, and lose every thing in the North.”7
Lincoln’s chief targets in this case remained Douglas and his “insidious” doctrines. Increasingly estranged from the southern Democrats, Douglas reached out to Republicans, emphasizing his own unyielding hostility to the pet proposals of radical slaveholders, particularly their demand for a federal slave code to protect slavery throughout the territories before their admission to statehood. His representation—in Harper’s Magazine—of popular sovereignty as the truly national doctrine made a huge impact in September 1859, and was seen as an attempt to fashion a broad coalition of the center, between the extremes of nonextension and a slave code. Lincoln was alarmed but not surprised. Barely had Douglas won the senatorial election in 1858 when Lincoln warned Trumbull that future turmoil amongst Democrats might well spur Douglas to summon all northerners to “make common cause in electing him President as the best means of breaking down the Slave power.” Lincoln recognized that this would test Republicans’ mettle nationally, just as the Illinois party had had to fight for its integrity in 1858. The struggle would be to see “whether the Republican party can maintain its identity, or be broken up to form the tail of Douglas’ new kite.”8
Consequently, Lincoln insisted that Douglas had perverted genuine popular sovereignty into nothing “other than that, if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man nor anybody else has a right to object.” No barrier to slavery’s spread, the doctrine had caused a “gradual and steady debauching of public opinion,” excluding blacks from the terms of the Declaration of Independence, ranking them with brutes and crocodiles, and acting as “the miner and sapper” for measures that would bring slavery “into the very heart of the free North.” If Republicans fell in behind the Little Giant, “they do not absorb him; he absorbs them.” Douglas sought ideological clones ready to agree “that the question of negro slavery is simply a question of dollars and cents; that the Almighty has drawn a line across the continent, on one side of which labor . . . must always be performed by slaves.” But Republicans’ duty was “to keep to the faith, to remain steadfast to the right. . . . Stand by your principles, stand by your guns; and victory complete and permanent is sure at the last.”9
Lincoln asked his party to show the backbone they had discovered in 1858. Had they then followed Greeley’s mistaken advice, “there would today be no Republican party in this Union.” Antislavery principles were indestructible, of course, and a party that perished through the folly of its confused leaders could eventually be rebuilt around the same truths. “But in the meantime all the labor that has been done to build up the present Republican party would be entirely lost, and perhaps twenty years of time, before we would again have formed around that principle as solid, extensive, and formidable an organization as we have, standing shoulder to shoulder to-night in harmony and strength around the Republican banner.”10 There is no clearer statement in all Lincoln’s writings on the unique and essential power of party to effect social change, and of its vulnerability to diversion, co-option, and the betrayal of principle.
At the same time Lincoln also condemned radical initiatives that endangered party unity. How to deal with the hated Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 proved an especially divisive issue. In most of the free states during the 1850s the radicals sought to repeal or effectively to nullify the measure. Several urged outright disobedience and even armed resistance. In Wisconsin, over the protests of conservative Republicans, radicals adopted an assertive states’ rights position, passing a personal liberty law that made the Fugitive Slave Law inoperable. In Ohio some inhabitants of the Western Reserve were imprisoned in 1859 for trying to rescue a fugitive. Emotions ran high. Giddings, Wade, and other radicals successfully blocked the renomination of the state supreme court judge who had upheld the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law. The subsequent state election turned on the question of its repeal. A party split was only narrowly avoided by deft footwork over its platform.
Lincoln viewed developments in Ohio with alarm. His own view was clear enough: slaveholders had a constitutional right to the return of their fugitive slaves and, though the federal Constitution did not specify the agency of their delivery, Congress was empowered to make all laws necessary and proper for carrying out the responsibilities of government. But what more especially concerned him was the damage done by initiatives of this kind in stirring up bad feeling within the party generally. Their “tilting” at the law, he told Indiana’s Republican congressman Schuyler Colfax, threatened “utterly [to] overwhelm us in Illinois with the charge of enmity to the constitution itself.” Exchanging letters with Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln insisted that introducing a repeal plank at the Republicans’ national gathering in 1860 would “explode the convention and the party.”11
The party’s difficulties with the fugitive slave question were, Lincoln thought, symptomatic of a general danger which he raised in his letter to Colfax: “the temptation in different localities to ‘platform’ for something which will be popular just there, but which, nevertheless, will be a firebrand elsewhere, and especially in a National convention.” Thus, the two-year naturalization law in Massachusetts might serve the interests of the local party, but had Republicans there “looked beyond their noses” they would have seen that it invited ruin for the party throughout the Northwest.
Kansans had embraced popular sovereignty as a means to freedom locally, without seeing its wider dangers. Lincoln urged Colfax, who endorsed the need to harmonize the party’s discordant elements, to use his influence in Congress and with state leaders to get them to think nationally and “at least say nothing on points where it is probable we shall disagree.” At the same time Lincoln did what he could in his home patch to reduce the discord between conservative Republicans in central and southern Illinois and the more radical men in the north. He reproved one central state editor for unfairly describing the northerners, essential to the party’s electoral success, as “ultras” and “nigger-stealers.” “Why manufacture slang to be used against us by our enemies?” Republicans should “help . . . instead of trying to hurt one another.”12
On one issue Republicans were broadly agreed: they stood to suffer serious electoral damage following the abolitionist John Brown’s astonishing but ineffectual incitement of slave rebellion in October 1859. In the hysteria that followed Brown’s botched attack on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, conservatives damned the party as sponsors of the abolitionist’s revolutionary schemes. Lincoln called the charge “an electioneering dodge,” but it was not without foundation.13 Some Republicans had certainly been involved in financing and planning Old Brown’s ventures. Moreover, Republicans’ assertion of their constitutional conservatism could not mask some admiration for Brown’s brave bearing as captive and martyr. Lincoln’s own comments hinted at that ambivalence. Speaking in Kansas, he declared the attack wrong on two counts: “It was a violation of law and it was, as all such attacks must be, futile as far as any effect it might have on the extinction of a great evil.” The ballot box, not “violence, bloodshed and treason,” was the constitutionally prescribed means of effecting change. But, he also noted, Brown—who “agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong”—had shown “great courage, rare unselfishness.”14 At bottom, Lincoln and other moderate Republicans joined with radicals in approving the underlying sentiments that drove Brown on, even as they recognized the justice of his execution. Still, the party leadership’s protestations of conservatism, allied with shrewd Democrat-bashing, proved convincing enough to prevent a hemorrhage of support in the free states. The raid, though, ended any hope of engineering an alliance with anti-Buchanan oppositionists in the alarmed border South.
Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power Page 14