Closely related to the Republicans’ use of anti-Romanist sentiment was their stress on corruption in the national administration and their relish for a language of purification that Whigs had so adroitly used before them—most notably in 1840, when they turned Harrison into a crusader against Jacksonian filth. Twenty years on, after forming three of the last four national administrations, Democrats once more faced the charge of steering the nation toward moral crisis. Republicans’ promise to encourage “a revival of moral honesty and integrity, in all departments of life” took on even greater urgency after June 1860, when the report of the congressional Covode Committee exposed the Buchanan administration’s dishonesty in Kansas affairs and government contracts. An abridged edition became a mainstay of the Republican campaign.76 The Democrats, claimed Republican editors, in language blending genuine outrage and political calculation, formed “the rendezvous of thieves, the home of parasites and bloodsuckers, the enemy of God and man, the stereotyped fraud, the sham, the hypocrite, the merciless marauder, and the outlawed renegade and malefactor.” The administration had “sunk the nation into a gulf of corruption and misrule,” putting at stake “the very existence of the Republic.” The times demanded “moral independence in politics” and a new Luther.77
An unfriendly caricature of a two-faced Lincoln on the stump. The left-facing Lincoln—at a Republican state convention in 1858—denies any presidential ambition or capacity to reward supporters with jobs (“cabbages”); the other, after his nomination for the presidency two years later, tells his puzzled and uninspired hearers, “I come to see, and be seen.”
Lincoln met that need. What Democrats treated with scorn—his lack of executive experience—became a source of campaigning strength, a promise of simple government. Across the North, Republican speakers and writers seized on his reputation for Calvinist integrity. Joshua Giddings told a ratification meeting at Oberlin that “every beat of ‘honest Abe’s’ heart was a throb of sincerity and truth.” The Chicago Press and Tribune insisted that he was “above all, religiously honest.” His legal career, explained the Ohio State Journal, showed “no crooked turns, no evasion, no duplicity in his past life, official or private. All is plain, manly, straightforward and consistent.” A Connecticut paper maintained that he “always conducts his argument on high moral ground. Is this right or wrong, is the first, last, and only question he asks.” Pertinently, the Rail Splitter’s masthead comprised a likeness of Lincoln’s “homely but honest face” above the legend “An Honest Man’s the Noblest Work of God.” Democrats’ efforts to counter these Republican thrusts invoked the testimony of Charles Hanks that his cousin was an ambitious, unprincipled party-switcher who, having been a Democrat when he first arrived in Illinois, had jumped ship because he lived in a Whig district, and subsequently joined the Republicans through the lure of office. Douglas’s paper in Springfield lamented the “vulgarity” and “impurity” of Lincoln’s jokes (“His qualifications for side-splitting are quite as good as for rail-splitting . . . but neither vocation is supposed to be carried out extensively in the white house”) and dryly added that, politically, it could be assumed that “Mr. Lincoln’s honesty is about on a par with the scheming office-hunters generally of his class and party.” But his opponents found it hard seriously to shift the widespread perception of Lincoln as “the very soul of integrity.”78
By these means Republicans became the godly party crusading for righteousness. As in 1856, they flavored their conventions with prayer and encouraged clergy to take a salient role in the political campaign. Although some of the most radical antislavery evangelicals demanded still higher ground, many influential religious editors and prominent ministers, such as Henry Ward Beecher and Josiah Bushnell Grinnell, became active supporters. In contrast to 1856, however, when Frémont’s alleged Catholicism proved a damaging diversion, the party now had a presidential candidate well fitted for each of the critical issues: slavery, Catholicism, and corruption. In consequence, Republicans fought the campaign with supreme ideological confidence. “We stand upon a rock, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” Caleb Smith told the Chicago delegates. Editors believed their platform embodied “the moral instincts and feelings of the nineteenth century.” “Democratic Jacobins” were in a battle against “civilization and Christianity,” the “moral sentiment of the nation,” “the pulpit, the church, the academy.” Schurz could recall no other campaign “in which the best impulses of human nature were so forceful and effective and aroused the masses to so high a pitch of almost religious fervor.” When Republicans gathered for the great Springfield meeting in August, it seemed to one observer that their hearts were filled with the prayer: “May God speed the right.”79
A few Democrats responded in kind by pointing to ministerial celebrities who had endorsed their own party: Jedediah Burchard, the Presbyterian revivalist; the Methodist Henry Clay Dean, who was on the Democrats’ slate of presidential electors in Iowa; and Peter Cartwright.80 But in general, Democrats and Constitutional Unionists jeered at the Republicans for claiming to be “the decency, moral and Christian party.” Thus, when Springfield’s joyful Lincoln men pealed church bells on news of his nomination in May, the town’s Douglasite paper protested: “Black republicanism has ever recognized pulpits and church bells as party adjuncts, but yesterday’s performance run the thing a little beyond the line of decency.” In nearby Pana, Douglasites told of Republicans marking the Chicago convention by singing “Old Hundred” and “Pisgah,” and calling for prayer—in the shade of “the sainted [John] Brown.” Democrats derided Republicans as “a religious Sect” with a “holy zeal for its one idea,” the natural allies of “blue light puritans” and “fanatical Sabbatarians,” who were working to unite church and state, and universalize New England morality: if the party “had not slavery for a hobby, it would be vexing us about some other questions of morals or of social arrangement.” This was the party of “ultra and fanatical” ministers who aimed to turn Lincoln into one of God’s “instrumentalities” in the great battle against slavery; of Owen Lovejoy, “the old nigger stealer,” “great negroite,” and abolitionist, whose “sacred drippings” (stump speeches) aimed to secure the election of his like-minded friend. Responding with ridicule to what it considered Republican sanctimony, the Campaign Plain Dealer of Cleveland, Ohio, proffered “A Political Sermon. By the Rev. Hardshell Pike,” a satirical riposte to the jeremiads of Lincolnite ministers. Taking as his “tex” the reading “He split some rails in Illinoy and bossed a roarin’ flat-boat,” the Douglasite preacher developed his theme:
The pizin crew who oppose us tell us to come to ABRAHAM’s buzzum, when the fact is he hain’t got no more buzzum than a chest of jiner’s tools has. . . . Maybe he’s a good man. I’m not here to maline him, my Brethering. No doubt he kin split a fair rail. Probly he’s a kind man in his family & pays his grocer’s bill promptly, but my Brethering, he can’t keep a hotel. He’s too small a man—too weak a sister—to be President.81
An anti-Republican cartoon in which Lincoln, carried on a fence rail by Horace Greeley, encourages a troupe of radical reformers and eccentrics as they advance on a lunatic asylum. Advocates of women’s rights, free love, and socialism bring in their tow a cluster of feckless, thieving hooligans. A Mormon says, “I want religion abolished and the book of Mormon made the standard of morality.” A black dandy declares, “De white man hab no rights dat cullud pussons am bound to spect. I want dat understood.” Lincoln tells them: “Now my friends I’m almost in, and the millennium is going to begin, so ask what you will and it shall be granted.”
The October state elections triumphantly vindicated the Republicans’ campaign strategy of targeting the swing voters in the pivotal states. Ohio gave the party ticket a majority of 12,000. More encouraging still, Lane in Indiana and Curtin in Pennsylvania swept to their governor’s mansions by stunning margins of 10,000 and 32,000 respectively. The two men who had done most to block Seward at Chicago now appeared to re
move the final obstacles to a Lincoln presidency, by drawing into the coalition enough nativists, old-line Whigs, and immigrants to ensure that in November the Constitutional Union ticket would enjoy little credibility amongst conservative anti-Democrats. Lincoln told Seward that the results exceeded his highest hopes: “It now really looks as if the Government is about to fall into our hands.”82 Douglas grimly concurred and abandoned the stump in the western states. “Mr. Lincoln is the next President. We must try to save the Union. I will go South.”83
In this Republican print, the election takes on the character of a baseball game. A victorious Lincoln, his foot on “home base,” wears a “Wide Awake Club” belt and explains to his opponents the merits of a “good bat,” namely a wooden rail inscribed “Equal Rights and Free Territory.” His defeated (“skunk’d”) rivals—Bell, Douglas, and Breckinridge—carry bats which say, respectively, “Fusion,” “Non Intervention,” and “Slavery Extension.”
Not even attempts at cooperation amongst his opponents would deny him the election. The leaders of the Douglas, Breckinridge, and Bell forces in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, fearing that a Republican victory would provoke the secession of southern states and so strike a commercial body blow at New York, Philadelphia, and their hinterlands, tried to agree on “fusion” tickets, but with only limited success. Continuing recriminations between the “treacherous” Douglasites and “secessionist” Breckinridge men did little to restore a pragmatic unity to the fragmented Democratic party. At the same time, the Irish and other foreign-born Democrats could not easily forget the nativist antecedents of the Constitutional Union party (and, in case they were inclined to do so, Republican editors were only too ready to issue helpful reminders). Fusion of a limited kind was engineered in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; in New York, despite more effective cooperation, Lincoln still ran comfortably ahead.
As this suggests, Lincoln’s victory on November 6 was not in any simple way the consequence of a divided opposition, though that is what the tally of presidential ballots might seem to indicate, for Lincoln won with less than 40 percent of the popular vote nationally: 1,866,452 to Douglas’s 1,376,957, Breckinridge’s 849,781, and Bell’s 588,879. This, however, offers a misleading measure of Lincoln’s relative strength. More telling was his comfortable victory in the electoral college, by 180 votes to Breckinridge’s 72, Bell’s 39, and Douglas’s 12. This he achieved by securing a clear majority of the vote in almost every free state in which he ran. In New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts, and other populous states with the largest number of presidential electors, support for Lincoln exceeded the combined popular vote for his opponents. Only in California, Oregon, and New Jersey did his ticket win electoral votes with fewer than 50 percent of ballots cast, and these electors (14 in all) were not crucial to the outcome. Thus, even if we combine all the opposition ballots behind a single candidate, state by state, Lincoln still retains his ascendancy in the electoral college, by 169 to 134.
Hypothesizing a united opposition vote, however, is entirely unhistorical. For Republicans to have faced a united Democratic opposition, as they had done in 1856, either the Douglas or the Buchanan forces would have had to concede their position. This was implausible in the circumstances of 1860, given the split over Lecompton, Douglas’s political realism, and the tightening grip of pro-slavery extremism in the southern party. Had—against all likelihood—a Democratic compromise been patched together, the party would have lost the support of free-soil elements in the North, or southern rights men in the South, or both. Douglas undoubtedly retained the votes of some northern antislavery Democrats precisely because he was seen to be untainted by connection with the “doughface” administration. In other words, the divided opposition—given how things had come to stand by 1860—may have maximized the anti-Lincoln vote, rather than making the Republicans’ victory more likely. (The divisions may have helped Lincoln, however, in the October state elections, especially in Indiana, where personal antipathies ran so deep that many Breckinridge men actually sustained the Republicans against the forces of the hated Douglas.)
More significant than the Democrats’ schism in paving the way for Lincoln’s victory was his party’s success in squeezing the conservative American vote of 1856. Compared with Fillmore, Bell performed miserably in the free states. In the crucial southern regions of Indiana he held onto just one vote in five, in southern Illinois just one in eight. Here Lincoln doubled—at least—Frémont’s share of the vote. As early as June a hopeful Herndon had sensed that in the western states “the ‘old line Whigs’ are fast coming out for us—are going almost unanimously and wildly for Lincoln.”84 In the end a combination of a relatively moderate platform and the candidate’s lawyerly Whig constitutionalism and southern roots helped to assuage conservatives’ fears of Republican radicalism. Symbolically, the party won in Springfield itself, reversing the Democrats’ victory of 1858, and in Sangamon County, Douglas’s majority was now reduced to just a few votes.85
The Republican heartlands remained, as they had been for Frémont, not the conservative lower North, but the countryside and the small towns in regions most saturated with New England influences. With only a few exceptions—Chicago was one—Lincoln ran poorly in the largest cities: leading businessmen, including those with southern trading connections, were commonly hostile, as were unskilled and poorer foreign-born workers. It was amongst skilled workingmen and market-oriented farmers that Republicans did best. The Massachusetts Springfield Republican located the party’s strength in “the great middling-interest class,” men “who work with their own hands, who live and act independently, who hold the stakes of home and family, of farm and workshop, of education and freedom.” The party of “free soil, free labor and free men” struck a powerful chord with certain economic interests in the free states.86 Yet the Republican appeal related less to voters’ immediate material interests than to their attachment to ideas of self-improvement, achievement through self-discipline, and economic independence.
These ideas commonly derived their moral aspect from religious authority. It is clear that Republican voting patterns related quite strongly to religious and church affiliations and to the ethnic identities with which they were interwoven. Veteran reformers as well as youthful idealists rallied to the party and to Lincoln as incorruptible representatives of a particular variety of ramrod-backed, reforming Protestantism. There is little doubt they enjoyed the support of the smaller, earnestly antislavery denominations, including Quakers, Freewill Baptists, Wesleyan Methodists, and Free Presbyterians. But how successful were Republicans in living up to their self-image as the “Christian party” by securing the votes of the bulk of the free states’ evangelical churchgoers?
Lincoln’s own analysis provides a proper caution against the notion of Protestant political uniformity. During the campaign, in a conversation with Newton Bateman—the superintendent of public instruction for Illinois, whose room in the state capitol adjoined Lincoln’s own campaign headquarters—he produced the results of a recent canvass of Springfield voters. These included the names of the city’s clergymen. Bateman recalled Lincoln’s frustration that self-proclaimed God-fearing men could so have misread their Bibles as not to care whether slavery was voted up or down: “Here are twenty-three ministers of different denominations, and all of them are against me but three; and here are a great many prominent members of the churches, a very large majority of whom are against me.”87 As we have seen, Lincoln had a strong grasp of the religious features of his state’s electoral geography and political cultures, and of Springfield’s standing at the crossroads between Yankee reformism and southern-oriented conservatism. Against the predominant Democrat and Constitutional Union clergy stood a minority of New Englanders, including two Connecticut-born pastors: Albert Hale, of the antislavery Second Presbyterian Church, and Noyes W. Miner, Lincoln’s Baptist neighbor, who would spend election day in 1860 at the polls, doing “the hardest day’s work he ever did challenging vot
es and trying to keep things straight.”88
Lincoln’s words did not mean that he considered Republicanism uniformly weak within Illinois evangelical Protestant churches. The party was particularly well supported by New School (though not Old School) Presbyterianism as well as by most of the state’s two hundred Congregational churches.89 Equally significant was the considerable loyalty to Lincoln, especially in the northern counties, amongst the state’s largest denomination, the Methodists. The editor of the Northwest’s most influential Methodist newspaper, Thomas M. Eddy, was a staunch Republican. When, during the course of the campaign, Anthony Bewley, a northern Methodist preacher, was lynched by a Texas mob, Eddy took up the case as the most recent instance of the slave power’s flagrant violation of Americans’ constitutional rights. In an open letter to President Buchanan, he pointedly noted that this southern “reign of terror” drove Methodists to ask: “Can an administration be found which will protect the rights of conscience and the freedom of worship?” Though previously divided in their voting habits, Methodists would cast their “united suffrage” for the man able to uphold their rights. Eddy’s threat caused no small stir. His thinly veiled endorsement of Lincoln was reprinted in the columns of the Chicago Press and Tribune (where the Methodist Scripps proved a bridge to his denomination) and other Republican papers throughout the free states.90
Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power Page 19