All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  Despite the apparent consensus among the convention planners, the name “Republican” was discarded as too controversial. “Up to that date,” wrote Cunningham, “the term ‘Republican,’ as the name of a political party had been made use of in other states and in a few localities in this State, as a party designation; but with the use made of it by Senator Douglas in connection with the prefix ‘Black,’ and the hated epithet ‘Abolitionist,’ it carried with it much that was obnoxious to the people of a considerable part of the State. So the convention planners made no use of this name, but on the contrary called for a ‘State Convention of the Anti-Nebraska Party of Illinois.’ ”

  While on the one hand Lincoln deployed Herndon on the other he also relied upon conservative Old Whig friends. Orville Hickman Browning led a parallel life to Lincoln’s: a native Kentuckian, veteran of the Black Hawk War, member of the state legislature, and lawyer on the circuit. He arrived in Bloomington on May 28, a day before Lincoln. He expressed his fears that the convention could go off the rails to Trumbull on May 19: “We wish if possible to keep the party in this state under the control of moderate men, and conservative influences, and if we do so the future destiny of the state is in our own hands and victory will inevitably crown our exertions. On the other hand if rash and ultra counsels prevail all is lost.” While Browning and Lincoln were colleagues and ostensible allies, Browning harbored a jealousy rooted in his sense that Lincoln was the inferior man, that “the handsome, stately, suave college man and finished orator regarded himself as superior to the homely, self-educated, rough and ready stump-speaker,” according to historian Theodore Calvin Pease, who edited Browning’s diaries.

  If the convention were to spin apart, dissolve into enmity and recrimination, and fail to give birth to a viable organization, the fiasco would belong to Lincoln. Lincoln’s own political career would be finished before it was revived. If the new party emerged in a weakened condition in Illinois, the potential for the national Republican Party would be severely damaged. Without a unified Illinois party, the Republicans might stand little chance of ever winning the presidency. Without Illinois, the Electoral College calculus would be forbidding and the cause of limiting the extension of slavery would be eternally frustrated.

  Lincoln was acutely aware of the stakes, not least concerning himself. Since he had run for the Senate, he was determined to run again, the next time in 1858 against his constant rival. Lincoln always envied Douglas’s seemingly unstoppable rise far beyond him and felt belittled, even helpless. In his first formal speech, his Springfield Lyceum Address in 1838, Lincoln had warned against Douglas’s overreaching ambition, which “thirsts and burns” for “celebrity,” “fame,” and power. “Distinction will be his paramount object; and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.”

  The Little Giant had grown into a colossus while Lincoln disappeared into the prairie. During the 1852 campaign, Lincoln observed, “Douglas has got to be a great man, and [be]strode the earth. Time was when I was in his way some; but he has outgrown me and [be]strides the world; and such small men as I am, can hardly be considered worthy of his notice; and I may have to dodge and get between his legs.” “Twenty-two years ago,” Lincoln recalled later in 1856, “Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted. We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much so he. With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown, even, in foreign lands. I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has reached. So reached, that the oppressed of my species, might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s brow.”

  Douglas had done the work for Lincoln he could not do for himself. Lincoln’s chance was Douglas’s unintended consequence. Douglas’s fierce need to smash everything and everybody in his way cleared a path for Lincoln. Douglas’s bedlam invited Lincoln’s entrance. The moment Douglas proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln responded as if it were a cue. “In 1854, his profession had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind, when the repeal of the Missouri compromise aroused him as he had never been before,” Lincoln wrote later in a brief autobiography for the 1860 campaign. But while politics was closed to him after his congressional term and he was immersed in his legal practice, he still prepared himself for some greater political destiny that he could not anticipate.

  Lincoln’s stark naturalness, his extremes of silliness and melancholy, masked his romantic and fatalistic sense of himself. “Closely allied and interwoven with these traits was an inherent belief in his destiny,” wrote Whitney. “I am not aware that a specific destiny was clearly outlined to him; if so, he did not reveal it; but on several occasions he avowed that he was doomed to a violent and bloody end.” Whitney recalled Lincoln coming into his law office in October 1854 and pulling Byron’s Childe Harold from the shelf to read aloud:

  There is a very life in our despair. . . .

  He who ascends to mountain-tops shall find

  The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow;

  He who surpasses or subdues mankind,

  Must look down on the hate of those below.

  Though high above the sun of glory glow,

  And far beneath the earth and ocean spread,

  Round him are icy rocks, and loudly blow,

  Contending tempests on his naked head,

  And thus reward the toils which to those summits led.

  Traveling around central Illinois riding Old Tom or Old Bob was a vocation but not a destiny. Lincoln’s ambition, that “little engine that knew no rest,” according to Herndon, was stalled but not dampened. Lincoln had not lost such interest in politics that he failed to follow them in the newspapers and study them in books. During the years when he was not running for office or thinking of running for office, he read eclectically the volumes Herndon collected in the best private library in Springfield. He read the New York Tribune, the Richmond Enquirer, British journals, proslavery and antislavery tracts, works on science, volumes of humor, poetry, Shakespeare, and the geometry of Euclid in order to master the underlying principles of logic. But the telltale book that revealed his inner sense as a man of political destiny was Francis Bacon’s Essays.

  Francis Bacon was the preeminent English Renaissance man of science and politics. His Novum Organum, published in 1620, established the principles of the scientific method of experimentation and evidence. After serving as a member of Parliament, attorney general, and Lord Chancellor, he wrote his Essays, a series of fifty-eight pieces providing insight into the character and conduct of statecraft. These epigrammatic essays ranged from “Of Truth” to “Of Faction” to “Of Vain Glory,” in which he observed, “Glorious men are the scorn of wise men; the admiration of fools; the idols of parasites; and the slaves of their own vaunts.” In “Of Honor and Reputation,” he categorized ignoble and noble rulers, the virtuous beginning with those who were founders of states, followed by the “second founders” who were the lawgivers, then liberators from the “long miseries of civil wars, or deliver their countries from servitude of strangers or tyrants,” and finally the honor that is “the greatest, which happens rarely; that is of such as sacrifice themselves to death or danger of the good of their country.”

  A politician intent on the discipline of power would seek instruction in Bacon. In “Of Great Place,” Bacon wrote, “Men in great place are thrice servants; servants of the sovereign or state; servants of fame; and servants of freedom; so as they have no freedom, neither in their persons, nor in their actions, nor in their times. . . . When he sits in place he is another man.” Lincoln, according to Whitney, was also acquainted with Bacon’s biography. “He once spoke to me in h
ighly eulogistic terms of Bacon, at which I expressed surprise, and ventured to object that he had been accused of receiving bribes. Lincoln admitted this to be true, but in extenuation said that it had never made any difference in his decisions; in short, he admired him for his strength in spite of his flagitiousness.” But Lincoln may also have understood that a man in power subject to envy (the subject of another Bacon essay) could be accused of wrongdoing for reasons of power.

  Lincoln applied the empirical and inductive Baconian scientific method by idiosyncratic means. “In his exterior affairs he had no method, system, or order,” wrote Whitney.

  He had no library of any sort, law or other, at any time. He had no clerk, stenographer, or typewriter; no letter-copying book, no scrap or commonplace book, no diary, no index rerum, no cash or account book, no daybook, journal, or ledger. When he received money for law practice, he gave his partner his share at the time, or wrapped it in a bit of paper, awaiting an opportunity to divide. Even when he was President, when he wanted to preserve an unofficial memorandum of any kind, he noted it on a card, and put it in a drawer or, mayhap, in his vest pocket. But in his mental processes and operations he had a most complete method, system, and order; while outside of his mind all was anarchy and confusion, inside all was symmetry and precision. His mind was his workshop; he had little need of an office or pen, ink, and paper; he could perform his chief labor by self-introspection and reflection.

  In drawing up his cases, Lincoln sought all the evidence from every source he could muster. He organized his facts in logic that point after point refuted his adversary’s. His plain language and fetching stories allowed his arguments to be easily grasped by the juries he knew well and who were indistinguishable from the voters. For his major political addresses, he sometimes spent weeks working on their construction, and they became the template for dozens of stump speeches. His efforts were always a silent internal struggle. When he arrived at his conclusions they were locked into his mind and he would not reverse them. His oratorical method was also his political method. “The great secret of his power as an orator, in my judgment, lay in the clearness and perspicuity of his statements,” recalled Leonard Swett, a younger lawyer from Bloomington who was part of his circle.

  When Lincoln had stated a case, it was always more than half argued and the point more than half won. The first impression he generally conveyed was, that he had stated the case of his adversary better and more forcibly, than his opponent could state it himself. He then answered that state of facts fairly and fully, never passing by, or skipping over a bad point. When this was done, he presented his own case. There was a feeling when he argued a case, in the mind of any man who listened to him, that nothing had been passed over; yet if he could not answer the objections he argued in his own mind and himself arrived at the conclusion to which he was leading others; he had very little power of argumentation. The force of his logic was in conveying to the minds of others the same clear and thorough analysis he had in his own, and if his own mind failed to be satisfied, he had no power to satisfy any body else. His mode and force of argument was in stating how he had reasoned upon the subject and how he had come to his conclusion. . . . From the commencement of his life to its close, I have sometimes doubted whether he ever asked anybody’s advice about anything. He would listen to everybody; he would hear everybody, but he never asked for opinions. I never knew him in trying a lawsuit to ask the advice of any lawyer he was associated with.

  Boarding an early morning train from Decatur to Bloomington on May 28, Lincoln anxiously walked through every car. “I really would like to know if any of those men are from down south, going to the convention. I don’t see any harm in asking them,” he announced to those traveling with him. He returned after twenty minutes, “his face radiant with happiness,” according to Whitney, having identified a grand total of two delegates, one of them a former legislative colleague, Jesse K. Dubois, a conservative Old Whig. Lincoln was glad to see two, but especially delighted to see Dubois.

  Jesse K. Dubois

  The town swarmed with delegates, virtually all from the northern and central counties, the Pike House hotel “full to overflowing and the streets alive with partisans of the ‘anti-Nebraska’ type,” recalled Cunningham. The night before they had excitedly gathered in the square to hear from the hotel’s veranda Andrew Reeder, the former governor of Kansas, his hair still tinted from the silver nitrate he had applied for his disguise as a tramp in order to escape. “Poor Reeder is the only public man who has been silly enough to believe that any thing like fairness was ever intended; and he has been bravely undeceived,” Lincoln had written Speed on August 24, 1855. Sara Robinson, the wife of the free state leader Charles Robinson, also on the run, mingled in the crowd, along with politicians of all stripes, abolitionists, and German editors (including twenty-three-year-old John G. Nicolay, who would become Lincoln’s private secretary in the White House).

  Upon his arrival Lincoln walked the short distance from the Illinois Central depot to the mansion of Judge Davis, where he usually stayed when he was in Bloomington. Two old friends joined him there, Judge T. Lyle Dickey and former legislator Archibald Williams, both Old Whigs and regulars on the circuit. Orville Hickman Browning appeared that afternoon and was dispatched to organize the order of business for the next day. “No resolutions had been prepared for the Convention tomorrow, and no program of Proceedings settled; and many discordant elements to be harmonized,” he wrote in his diary. He assembled a group of about twenty men “of all shades of opinion” to work on the resolutions, which were based on the template Lincoln had hammered out at the preliminary meeting in February. Once again, the sticking point was a conflict between Know Nothings and Germans that had nearly torn apart the organization, but resolved as Lincoln had resolved it before. “Mr. Lincoln, who was a delegate, counseled every step that was taken, in his quiet, persuasive way,” wrote Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune, who was also a delegate.

  As the alpha and omega of unity the resolutions went no further than opposing the extension of slavery. If the platform had embraced other issues, such as opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act, the convention would have spun apart before it had come together. Lincoln “advised the committee to endorse” the Declaration of Independence to underpin its resolution that Congress “possessed full constitutional power to prohibit slavery in all territories.” Another resolution that would receive universal acclaim denounced Douglas: “Resolved, That Stephen A. Douglas, having laid his ‘ruthless hand’ upon a sacred compact, which had ‘an origin akin to that of the constitution,’ and which had ‘become canonized in the hearts of the American people,’ has given the lie to his past history, proved himself recreant to the free principles of this government, violated the confidence of the people of Illinois, and now holds his seat in the Senate while he misrepresents them.” Just as Douglas was damned yet another resolution equally praised Trumbull as “able and consistent.” That evening Lincoln wandered back to the depot to spot people he might know coming to the convention on the Chicago train. On the way he stopped at a shop to buy a pair of reading glasses for 371/2 cents, explaining to Whitney he “kinder” needed them. When he saw Norman B. Judd, a Chicago attorney and Democratic state senator, he remarked, “That’s the best sign yet; Judd is there; and he’s a trimmer.” “One conspicuous matter is this,” wrote Whitney, “that while Lincoln did not, as a rule, betray enthusiasm under any stress of circumstances, he was in a state of enthusiasm and suppressed excitement throughout this convention; yet he kept his mental balance, and was not swerved a hair’s breadth from perfect equipoise in speech or action.”

  At Bloomington he went out of his way to introduce people from disparate political backgrounds to each other. When he brought “the polite and courtly Browning to the unpolished and irreverent Wentworth”—“Long John” Wentworth, the Democratic congressman and boss of Chicago—Browning courteously said, “I have never had the pleasure of meeting you, but I have heard
much of you,” to which Wentworth replied, “Damned much against me.” “It struck Lincoln as being very comical,” recalled Whitney. “I heard him repeat it a dozen times that day.”

  Lincoln had been quietly operating behind the scenes for months, trying to bring together the patchwork coalition of hostile factions and edgy personalities. He expended much of his energy convincing William H. Bissell, a Democratic congressman, to head the ticket as its candidate for governor. Without Bissell at the top of the slate, the party might easily fracture. From Lincoln’s point of view, he was the ideal man, the perfectly crafted Democrat for the purpose—the law partner of James Shields, the former Democratic U.S. senator; a Mexican War hero; and member of Congress elected in 1849 as a follower of Douglas.

  But, unlike Douglas, Bissell bristled at Southern arrogance. “The Southerners are insolent, overbearing and bullying beyond all belief,” he wrote. When Congressman James Seddon of Virginia delivered a speech in 1850 falsely depicting Northern troops routed and replaced by courageous ones from Mississippi at the Battle of Buena Vista, Bissell the war veteran was enraged. “Why, but for the purpose of furnishing materials for that ceaseless, never-ending eternal theme of ‘Southern chivalry’?” The former colonel of the Mississippi regiment in question, Jefferson Davis, challenged Bissell to a duel, which, to his surprise, Bissell promptly accepted. President Zachary Taylor directly intervened to halt it. (Davis, after all, was his former son-in-law.) “There certainly would have been a fight, and one or both of them killed had it not been for General Taylor,” said Douglas.