The Zealot and the Emancipator

by H. W. Brands

  But it wasn’t easy, for as his star continued to rise, he became a bigger name. Illinois Republicans gathered in Decatur to make their choice of the party’s hopefuls. “It was a very large and spirited body, comprising an immense number of delegates, among whom were the most brilliant, as well as the shrewdest men in the party,” recalled Ward Lamon, a Lincoln friend. “It was evident that something of more than usual importance was expected to transpire.” Lincoln sat in the back of the Wigwam, as the temporary meeting hall was called, trying to be inconspicuous. He failed. The convention’s chairman rose, commanded the attention of the crowd, and said, “I am informed that a distinguished citizen of Illinois, and one whom Illinois will ever delight to honor, is present; and I wish to move that this body invite him to a seat on the stand.” He pointed toward the back and pronounced the name: “Abraham Lincoln!”

  “Not a shout, but a roar of applause, long and deep, shook every board and joist of the Wigwam,” Lamon continued. “The motion was seconded and passed. A rush was made for the hero that sat on his heels. He was seized, and jerked to his feet. An effort was made to jam him through the crowd to his place of honor on the stage; but the crowd was too dense, and it failed. Then he was boosted—lifted up bodily—and lay for a few seconds sprawling and kicking upon the heads and shoulders of the great throng. In this manner he was gradually pushed toward the stand, and finally reached it, doubtless to his great relief, in the arms of some half-dozen gentlemen, who set him down in full view of his clamorous admirers.” The commotion grew louder. “The cheering was like the roar of the sea. Hats were thrown up by the Chicago delegation, as if hats were no longer useful.”

  The chairman silenced the delegates in order to speak. “There is an old Democrat outside who has something he wishes to present to this convention,” he said. Delegates were puzzled. What could a Democrat bring to a Republican convention? Some feared a trick.

  “The door of the Wigwam opened,” Lamon recalled, “and a fine, robust old fellow, with an open countenance and bronzed cheeks, marched into the midst of the assemblage, bearing on his shoulder two small triangular heart rails, surmounted by a banner with this inscription: ‘TWO RAILS, FROM A LOT MADE BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND JOHN HANKS, IN THE SANGAMON BOTTOM, IN THE YEAR 1830.’ The sturdy bearer was old John Hanks himself”—a Lincoln cousin—“enjoying the great field-day of his life. He was met with wild and tumultuous cheers, prolonged through several minutes.”

  The delegates demanded a speech from Lincoln. Blushing but shaking with laughter, he acceded. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I suppose you want to know something about those things.” He pointed to the rails. “Well, the truth is, John Hanks and I did make rails in the Sangamon Bottom. I don’t know whether we made those rails or not.” He examined them more closely. “Fact is, I don’t think they are a credit to the makers.” He laughed the more. “But I do know this: I made rails then, and I think I could make better ones than these now.”

  The delegates couldn’t contain their enthusiasm. Unanimously they declared, “Abraham Lincoln is the first choice of the Republican party of Illinois for the presidency.” They instructed the Illinois delegates to the national convention to vote as a unit for Lincoln and employ all honorable means to win his nomination.

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  THE DECATUR GROUNDSWELL for Lincoln rolled north to Chicago as the national party gathered there. The convention marked a coming-out for the booming city on the lake; Republican leaders sought to capture the votes of the region of which Chicago served as the commercial hub. Railroads linked Chicago to every part of the country, but the distance to New York hindered the ability of the backers of William Seward to arrange the ostensibly spontaneous outbursts of support expected of candidates. Lincoln’s Illinois friends, by contrast, manipulated the seating charts in the meeting hall—another purpose-built structure, also called the Wigwam—in a manner to magnify their own influence and minimize collusion among delegations that might try to block his advance.

  Lincoln directed his supporters to be discreet. “Be careful to give no offence, and keep cool under all circumstances,” he urged a Kansas ally. The convention would deal with issues besides slavery; of these the tariff was one with roots in the party’s Whig prehistory. Lincoln adopted the most uncontroversial stance possible for a Republican. “In the days of Henry Clay I was a Henry Clay-tariff-man, and my views have undergone no material change upon that subject,” he wrote to a supportive delegate. Yet even here he counseled discretion. “Save me from the appearance of obtrusion.” In a scribbled note to Edward Baker, an old friend now serving as a lieutenant at the convention, Lincoln stressed, “Make no contracts that will bind me.”

  The strategy worked admirably. William Seward was the favorite as the convention opened, and he led on the first ballot, with Lincoln far behind. But Seward fell short of a majority, and his failure to win outright was seen as evidence of underlying weakness. Lincoln’s men inside the Wigwam bargained with Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, suggesting that Cameron would receive a cabinet post in a Lincoln administration if Pennsylvania put him over the top. Cameron duly delivered Pennsylvania, whose votes created a bandwagon effect that propelled Lincoln past Seward on the second ballot. A third ballot completed the shift, giving Lincoln the nomination. The party balanced the ticket geographically by tapping Hannibal Hamlin of Maine for vice president.

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  THE LOSERS WERE disconsolate. “Dear Seward,” wrote Thurlow Weed, an Albany editor who served as the New York senator’s floor leader, “I do not know that you care to learn by what means our expectations have been disappointed.” Weed had labored on Seward’s behalf for years, and he could hardly bear the result. “I have slight inclination to think, or speak or write, still less to go where I shall be seen or questioned.” Yet Seward deserved an explanation for his defeat. “We were beaten by a combination of all the disappointed, whose diligent assertions (sustained by the delegates from these states) were that you would lose New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Connecticut.” The Pennsylvania delegation, in particular, “were violent and denunciatory, all saying that you could not carry the state.” Seward’s reputation for arrogance had cost him. Weed observed that many of those who worked with him in Washington had sabotaged his chances. “Much of this mischief has been doing for months by members of Congress.”

  But the villain of the piece was Horace Greeley, the New York Tribune editor. “Greeley was malignant,” Weed wrote. “He misled many fair minded men. He was not scrupulous. He said to some that you could not carry New York and that 20 of our delegates were against you.” Weed disputed Greeley’s head count but not his entire message. “The traitors from New York were few in number but most violent and unscrupulous.”

  Weed mourned the loss. “We have all been to church this morning”—a Sunday—“but the sadness deepens.” Even so, he encouraged Seward to accept the result graciously. “A prompt and cheerful acquiescence in the nomination,” he said, “is not only wise but a duty.” As for Weed himself: “Lincoln’s confidential friends ask me to go to Springfield.”

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  HIS DISAPPOINTED RIVALS ASIDE, the Republicans as a party were thrilled at Lincoln’s nomination. “The enthusiasm with which the result was received was immense,” wrote Greeley’s Chicago correspondent. “The Wigwam, packed with some 12,000 people, resounded with shouts and calls of satisfaction for five or ten minutes. There was no repressing the irrepressible enthusiasm, and it only subsided when everybody was tired. There was never such another scene in America.” The reaction was even stronger outside the Wigwam. “Chicago is in a blaze of glory tonight. Bonfires, processions, torchlights, fireworks, illuminations and salutes have filled the air with noise and the eye with beauty. ‘Honest Abe’ is the cry in every mouth, and the ‘irrepressible conflict’ against slavery and corruptions opens with great promise and immense
enthusiasm. It is impossible to exaggerate the good feeling and joy that prevail here. The Illinois delegation resolved that the millennium has come.” Some of the Illinoisans wept tears of joy. “They say it is a triumph of the people over politicians.”

  Republicans across the country—which was to say, outside the South—joined the celebration. “A grand torchlight procession is now marching the streets,” declared a dispatch from Philadelphia. Detroit weighed in: “A salute of 100 guns was fired here this afternoon, and bonfires and illuminations were the order of the evening.” From Newark: “A large, spontaneous and enthusiastic meeting of Republicans was held here this evening, ratifying and congratulating themselves on the Chicago nomination.” Bangor, Maine: “One hundred guns were fired, and the Republicans are jubilant for the Chicago nomination.” Boston, being Boston, was slightly more restrained: “Mr. Lincoln’s nomination for president caused some surprise, but was well received generally by the Republicans, who hailed the announcement with a salute of 100 guns.” Buffalo, mindful of its upstate New York neighbor Seward, was polite: “A salute was fired here this afternoon upon the receipt of the news of the nomination of Lincoln and Hamlin. No other evidences of mad enthusiasm, however, were witnessed.”

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  PARTIES ALWAYS CHEER their newly anointed champions, but the Republicans had special reason to celebrate, for by the time they chose Lincoln, they could imagine they were not simply selecting a nominee but naming a president. Slavery had split the Whigs; now it cleaved the Democrats. Stephen Douglas’s party had gathered ahead of the Republicans, in Charleston, with Douglas the front-runner. But Douglas’s popular-sovereignty approach to slavery in the territories, and especially his Freeport Doctrine of territorial nullification of the Dred Scott decision, alienated uncompromising Southerners. Decades earlier, in the interest of party unity, the Democrats had adopted a rule requiring a two-thirds supermajority for nomination. This year it had the opposite effect. Douglas garnered a simple majority on the first ballot, but not two-thirds. He improved his total only marginally in more than fifty additional ballots. At length, exhausted, the convention voted to recess for six weeks and reconvene in Baltimore, where, Douglas partisans hoped, the influence of the Southern diehards would be diminished.

  The Republican convention took place during the Democratic recess. Republicans indulged the not unreasonable hope that the Democrats would never agree on a candidate, clearing the Republican path to the White House; this hope was what inspired the giddiness that greeted the selection of Lincoln.

  Stephen Douglas received the news of Lincoln’s nomination via telegram at the Capitol at Washington. Several Republicans happened to be around him when he read the news. He reflected for a moment, nodded his head as though he had expected it, and said, “Gentlemen, you have nominated a very able and a very honest man.”

  And one even more likely to become the next president after the Democrats failed to mend their breach. The Baltimore reprise of the Charleston convention collapsed almost at once, with several Southern delegations walking out. While the remainers nominated Douglas, the bolters chose John Breckinridge of Kentucky.

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  LINCOLN COULD READ the evolving political landscape, and he understood what it required of him. The presidency was his to lose. He should speak as little as possible; when speech could not be avoided, he should strive to say nothing. And even then he should cover his tracks. At the end of a letter vaguely describing an utterly noncommittal conversation with Thurlow Weed, William Seward’s man, Lincoln instructed the recipient, “Burn this; not that there is anything wrong in it, but because it is best not to be known that I write at all.”

  He refused to promise jobs in a Lincoln administration. Aspiring officeholders made their availability known; he ignored them. “Remembering that Peter denied his Lord with an oath, after most solemnly protesting that he never would, I will not swear I will make no committals; but I do think I will not,” Lincoln told Lyman Trumbull.

  He declined to affirm even things he believed in. Temperance societies heard he wasn’t a drinker and tried to get him to take the pledge publicly. He begged off. “I think it would be improper for me to write, or say anything to, or for, the public, upon the subject of which you inquire,” he wrote to the representative of one anti-liquor committee. Newspapers had reported that Lincoln hosted a dry reception for a visiting group of dignitaries; Lincoln acknowledged the truth of the report. “Having kept house sixteen years, and having never held the ‘cup’ to the lips of my friends then, my judgment was that I should not, in my new position, change my habit in this respect.” But he wouldn’t translate his personal preference into a political statement, and he hoped others wouldn’t either. “I therefore wish the letter I do write”—the present letter—“to be held as strictly confidential.”

  He avoided those who wanted to make him famous. Reporters and instant authors produced biographies of the little-known nominee. Some sought Lincoln’s cooperation and even approval. He refused. While urging Republican allies to examine the manuscripts for errors that might reflect ill on the party, he said he would have nothing to do with any life story. “I authorize nothing—will be responsible for nothing.”

  Silence and opaqueness didn’t come easily to one who loved to talk and tell revealing stories. Occasionally he slipped. A newsman trolling for an article tried to get Lincoln to visit his Kentucky birthplace. Lincoln demurred. “You suggest that a visit to the place of my nativity might be pleasant to me,” he said. “Indeed it would. But would it be safe? Would not the people lynch me?” He meant this to be funny, yet it didn’t seem so when he read himself quoted in the New York Herald. He tried to wriggle out. “This is decidedly wrong,” Lincoln declared of the article. As to the statement ascribed to him: “I did not say it.” But then he essentially admitted he had said it. “I have, playfully, (and never otherwise) related this incident”—of writing the letter—“several times; and I suppose I did so to the Herald correspondent, though I do not remember it. If I did, it is all that I did say from which the correspondent could have inferred his statement.” He didn’t want to be held responsible for a misinterpretation of his joke. “I dislike exceedingly for Kentuckians to understand that I am charging them with a purpose to inveigle me, and do violence to me,” he wrote to a friend. Yet he wouldn’t take the responsibility of addressing the matter himself. “I cannot go into the newspapers,” he told the friend, who, he hoped, would go to the papers. He sent the friend a proposed correction. “Would not the editor of the Herald, upon being shown this letter, insert the short correction, which you find upon the enclosed scrap? Please try him, unless you perceive some sufficient reason to the contrary. In no event, let my name be publicly used.”

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  HIS INSCRUTABILITY APPEARED to pay off. “We know not what a day may bring forth,” he wrote to a Republican ally on July 4. “But today it looks as if the Chicago ticket will be elected. I think the chances were more than equal that we could have beaten the Democracy united. Divided, as it is, its chance appears indeed very slim.” Lincoln knew things could change. “Great is the Democracy in resources; and it may yet give its fortunes a turn. It is under great temptation to do something.” But he didn’t think Stephen Douglas’s party had many options left. “What can it do which was not thought of, and found impracticable, at Charleston and Baltimore? The signs now are that Douglas and Breckinridge will each have a ticket in every state. They are driven to this to keep up their bombastic claims of nationality, and to avoid the charge of sectionalism which they have so much lavished upon us.” Lincoln appreciated the irony in this situation. “It is an amusing fact, after all Douglas has said about nationality, and sectionalism, that I had more votes from the Southern section at Chicago, than he had at Baltimore! In fact, there was more of the Southern section represented at Chicago, than in the Douglas rump concern at Baltimore!!”
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  As the Democrats’ chances dwindled, they tried to flush Lincoln out by increasingly personal attacks. He was said to be a Know-Nothing in disguise, an allegation intended to weaken Lincoln among immigrants. One article in a Democratic paper placed Lincoln at a gathering at a Know-Nothing lodge in Quincy, Illinois.

  He felt obliged to answer, but off the record. “I suppose as good, or even better, men than I may have been in American, or Know-Nothing lodges, but in point of fact, I never was in one, at Quincy, or elsewhere,” he wrote to a friend who had been with him at the time in question. “It was in 1854, when I spoke in some hall there, and after the speaking, you, with others, took me to an oyster saloon, passed an hour there, and you walked with me to, and parted with me at, the Quincy House, quite late at night. I left by stage for Naples before daylight in the morning, having come in by the same route, after dark, the evening previous to the speaking, when I found you waiting at the Quincy House to meet me.” Lincoln urged his friend to back him up. “That I never was in a Know-Nothing lodge in Quincy, I should expect, could be easily proved, by respectable men who were always in the lodges and never saw me there. An affidavit of one or two such would put the matter at rest.” But again he had to stay out of it himself. “Our adversaries think they can gain a point, if they could force me to openly deny this charge, by which some degree of offence would be given to the Americans. For this reason, it must not publicly appear that I am paying any attention to the charge.”

  A potentially more explosive slander connected Lincoln to John Brown. Democratic papers asserted that Lincoln had been part of Brown’s secret network, giving fifty dollars to the author of the Harpers Ferry insurrection. Lincoln denied the charge most vigorously. “I never gave fifty dollars, nor one dollar, nor one cent, for the object you mention, or any such object,” he replied to a correspondent who had asked about the story. He had subscribed twenty-five dollars toward a Kansas defense fund, on the condition that the overseer of the fund, a distinguished judge, confirm that the money was needed to keep the Missouri ruffians at bay. But this was late in the fight for Kansas, and the judge had decided the money wasn’t needed. “I never paid a dollar on the subscription,” Lincoln said. He certainly had never sent money to John Brown.