All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  Next came the demolition of Douglas’s bulwark of New York. Two delegations, one of the Softs and one the Hards, presented themselves. Barlow wrote that “it was evident that if the New York delegation, represented by Mr. Dean Richmond and his associates, who were known as the ‘Softs,’ secured seats, that the nomination of Mr. Douglas was inevitable.” The Buchaneers packed the galleries by gaining control of the visitor’s passes and got one of their own, Senator Bayard, appointed as chairman of the credentials committee. The majority report recommended that the Softs be given most of the delegate seats; the minority report suggested an even division. Bayard moved for the minority report, which narrowly carried. New York was neutralized. The Buchaneers had destroyed Douglas before the first ballot. “Every move that was made emanated from some one of the gentlemen there present,” recalled Barlow, “and but for their presence and active cooperation, there is little doubt that Mr. Douglas would have been nominated upon the first ballot after organization.”

  From the first ballot Buchanan had the lead with 1311/2 votes, to 118 for Pierce, 33 for Douglas, and 4 for Cass. After the fourteenth ballot when Douglas reached 63 and Pierce 75, the Pierce forces threw their votes to Douglas. But there was a crucial defection of Tennessee. Douglas’s main support, apart from Illinois and the Softs of New York, came from Southern delegations. Buchanan swept those from Northern, Northwest, and border states. After the sixteenth ballot Richardson rose to withdraw Douglas. “Don’t withdraw Doug! Stop!” shouted his supporters. “But I feel I have imposed upon me a duty to—” “Damn the duty, sit down there.” Richardson waved a telegram from Douglas. “I shall withdraw Douglas from this contest,” he said, and he read the message pleading “harmony.”

  In the battle for the vice presidency, Douglas’s man, Congressman Thomas L. Harris of Illinois, nominated John A. Quitman, the former governor of Mississippi, who Douglas might have taken as his own running mate. But the Louisiana delegation controlled by Slidell nominated Congressman John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, who won in a stampede. “Then again the convention resolved itself into a carnival,” reported Halstead. Breckinridge took the podium to acclaim Buchanan: “Reserved to a green old age he has lived down detraction, and time has destroyed calumny.”

  Douglas’s withdrawal left a bitter taste in the mouths of a number of Democrats who believed that he had staged an elaborate charade, according to Benjamin F. Butler, a pro-Southern Pierce delegate from Massachusetts, who would later change his political spots to Republican. In Butler’s telling, Douglas’s men duplicitously promised Pierce’s that when Pierce was withdrawn in favor of Douglas he would continue “until a compromise candidate could be brought forward acceptable to all as in the case of Mr. Polk and Mr. Pierce himself.” But as Butler surmised, Douglas intended to pull out all along in order to better position himself with Buchanan and for the nomination in 1860. “Was not the whole matter a ruse to bring in the friends of Mr. Pierce to the support of Douglas, so that he might have the merit of withdrawing as the only competing candidate?”

  Never leaving the bucolic surroundings of his beloved Wheatland, Buchanan sent letters written at the direction of his handlers to announce the theme of his campaign as a crusade to save the Union. “The Union is in danger and the people everywhere begin to know it,” he wrote in June. “The Black Republicans must be, as they can be with justice, boldly assailed as disunionists, and this charge must be reiterated again and again.”

  Buchanan did not bother to send any letters to Pierce or Douglas. They were now beneath him. But Douglas delivered speeches in city after city on Buchanan’s behalf. He sold some of his Chicago real estate property, spending $42,000 on the campaign. He hoped for patronage and other advantages in the future. Buchanan carefully kept his distance and silence.

  Outwardly, Douglas sustained his enthusiasm. But the Illinois State Journal, Lincoln’s newspaper, accidentally caught up with him in an unguarded moment and glimpsed an augury of what was to come. “On the train of cars which conveyed Senator Douglas to Galena, a vote, as usual now-a-days, was taken. The canvassers did not know Douglas, and when they came to him, while going through the cars, the following conversation took place: Canvasser. Who do you vote for, sir—Buchanan or Fremont? Douglas (angrily looking up from the perusal of the Chicago Times)—Vote for the Devil! The result of the canvass was as follows: Fremont 117. Buchanan 15. Fillmore 17. The Devil 1.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE FORBIDDEN WORD

  Five days after the Bloomington convention the scene was set for a triumphant homecoming for its hero. “We got out large posters,” recalled Herndon, “had bands of music employed to drum up a crowd &c. The court house was the place of the meeting. As the hour drew near I lit up the Court with many blazes and many lights—blowed horns and rang bells, &c. What do you think the number of the People was—? How many? Three persons—namely John Pain”—the courthouse janitor—“W H Herndon and A Lincoln.”

  Millard Fillmore

  Herndon’s description of the forlorn event may well have been apocryphal or misremembered. There is no other record of such a meeting, but it’s also possible that Herndon failed to notify anyone that Lincoln was speaking. Whether or not this was a phantom rally, another one took place at the courthouse on June 10 that was packed. The Register querulously claimed that one third of the crowd consisted of curious Democrats who had come to observe Lincoln’s “gyrations.” It reported that before the mostly Old Whig assemblage “he would soften his remarks to a supposed palatable texture. . . . His timidity before the peculiar audience he addressed prevented earnest advocacy with the power and ability he is known to possess.” In another dispatch, the Register claimed, “Mr. Lincoln’s remarks were received with coldness. . . . He was evidently laboring under much restraint, conscious that he was doling out new doctrine to the old whigs about him . . . however . . . his niggerism has as dark a hue as that of Garrison or Fred Douglass.”

  The Journal countered by praising Lincoln for “the most logical and finished argument against the evils to be apprehended from the continued aggressions of the slave power, that it has ever been our good fortune to listen to,” but reported almost apologetically that Lincoln preferred “rather to appeal to the reason than to excite the feelings of his hearers.”

  Lincoln had successfully stage-managed the convention, but the party statewide remained to be organized. The coming campaign would be its crucible. Lincoln carefully avoided using the fraught word “Republican” to refer to what was the Republican Party, but called it the “People’s Party.” The “Republican” label frightened many of Lincoln’s former Whig friends. The prominence of abolitionists in the Republican coalition filled many Old Whigs with disgust. Those drawn to the Know Nothings spurned the German immigrants, a new and large voting group that altered the balance of Illinois politics. To win over the Old Whigs Lincoln had to get them to submerge their nativism in the greater antislavery struggle. He had to make their Know Nothingism a way station to the destination of Republicanism. These were, after all, men he had known well and worked closely with for decades. His focus was rooted in friendships, loyalties, and identity, now shaken and divided.

  The Know Nothings were more than skeletons rattling in the Old Whig closet. They had their secret lodges, oaths, and handshakes, but the Know Nothings were not a secret. They were self-proclaimed “the Americans,” claiming to speak exclusively for native-born Protestant Americans, a political party mustering in the field with the last Whig president Millard Fillmore as its candidate.

  “I don’t sympathize with that black Republican movement, in any way, shape, manner, or form,” declared Edwin Bathurst “Bat” Webb. “Its permanent success would surely end in the dissolution of this Union.” Webb had served in the state legislature with Lincoln as a stalwart Whig, had even courted Mary Todd, and was the Whig nominee for governor in 1852 in a campaign that smashed the Whig Party but in which he respectably carried Sangamon County, the Whig stronghold. Webb,
who was Virginia born, lived in a southern Illinois county that might as well have been located in Kentucky for its hostility to the new party.

  Joseph Gillespie, who had also served in the legislature with Lincoln and was among his closest political friends, had signed the call for the Bloomington convention, but had second thoughts. Lincoln’s loss of the Senate seat the year before had embittered Gillespie against the Whigs’ perennial rival. He was too mistrustful of the antislavery Democrats to join with them. Instead, he clung to the old banner and turned to the last Whig president, Millard Fillmore, and the Know Nothings as his last hope. “I have my fears that the so-called Democrats at the Bloomington Convention are going for Buchanan and that it will turn out to be a clean sell of the Whigs and true conservative men of the State,” he wrote Lincoln on June 6. “If this is the game, I am for a thorough organization for Fillmore and [Andrew] Donelson [his running mate] whether we sink or swim. They are honest and conservative men and it would be more creditable to fail fighting under that banner than to triumph in such company as I fear some of the wire workers at Bloomington are. I am tired of being dragooned by some half dozen men who are determined to either rule or ruin. I am out of all temper with, and have no faith in the honesty of, men who insist that ten Whigs shall go with one Democrat because they cannot in conscience vote for a Whig. Though I am well satisfied with Trumbull, yet his five particular friends who would rather see the country go to the Devil than to vote for a Whig are not at all to my taste. I have made up my mind that henceforth I can be as reckless as they are, and, so help me God, they shall find out that I am one as well as either of them.”

  James H. Matheny had been the best man at Lincoln’s wedding and had known him since they worked together in the New Salem post office. Douglas referred to him as “Mr. Lincoln’s especial confidential friend for the last twenty years.” Matheny developed a conspiracy theory that justified his support for the Know Nothings—a theory that Douglas would throw at Lincoln in their 1858 debates and which Lincoln would insist was untrue. The way Matheny saw it, the Whigs, dissident Democrats, and abolitionists made a secret deal in which Trumbull would be supported for the Congress, the abolitionists would get State House patronage jobs, and Lincoln would be backed for the Senate. “But, in the most perfidious manner, they refused to elect Mr. Lincoln,” said Matheny, “and the mean, low-lived, sneaking Trumbull succeeded, by pledging all that was required by any party, in thrusting Lincoln aside and foisting himself, an excrescence from the rotten bowels of the Democracy, into the United States Senate: and thus it has ever been, that an honest man makes a bad bargain when he conspires or contracts with rogues.”

  Matheny swore that “he was a whig and nothing else” and that Whigs should not be “sold out” to the Republicans. Disgruntled Old Whigs began holding county conventions and nominated a statewide ticket, which merged with the American Party or Know Nothing slates. Matheny became the Whig/American candidate for Congress in Springfield and Gillespie a presidential elector for Fillmore. At a rally for Fillmore in Springfield, John Todd Stuart, Lincoln’s first law partner, one of his earliest mentors, assailed “black republicanism” and charged “the result, if not the design of their movement, was to array the north against the south.”

  John M. Palmer, a Democrat turned Republican who presided over the Bloomington convention, wrote that “the dog howl of Abolitionism-Black Republicans” made Old Whigs in southern Illinois “feel that they are called specially to the patriotic duty of ‘saving the Union’ which can be done by throwing their votes away on Fillmore.” Benjamin S. Edwards, an Old Whig and Springfield lawyer related to Lincoln through his brother, Ninian Edwards, Jr., Lincoln’s brother-in-law, moved uneasily into the Republican Party, wary of the abolitionists. He wrote Trumbull: “You need . . . vindication against the charges of abolition, and opposition to the Union which however unfounded they may be are yet made, and must be met.”

  Certain prominent Democrats who attended the Bloomington convention were hard to shepherd. “John Wentworth roars like a bull whenever the Republican Party is mentioned and swears that he’s a Democrat,” observed a friend. It was not until after the campaign of 1856 was waged that most members of the party were willing to abandon their long attachments and hazard wearing the scorned label of Republican—“Black Republicans,” as Douglas always called them.

  The most intimate defector, however, was located within Lincoln’s household. No one was more devoted to his ambition than his wife, Mary. When he was elected to the state legislature in 1854, she forced him to quit in order to run for the Senate. Returning to his old haunts was not good enough for her husband by her lights. She understood his inner insecurities and would not tolerate him settling for anything but the highest office he could attempt to reach. She was embittered when he lost the Senate race and shunned her old friend Julia Trumbull, wife of Lyman Trumbull to whom Lincoln threw his votes to stop Douglas’s ally from gaining the seat through bribery. After Lincoln at last shed the dead skin of the Whig Party his wife wrapped herself in it like a protective covering to shield herself from his new association with the discreditable Republicans.

  She had been raised as a Whig through and through. Her father, Robert S. Todd, had been Henry Clay’s business partner and political ally, and as a girl Mary gained a reputation as “a violent little Whig.” She was unusual among the ladies for her willingness to voice her strong political opinions in mixed company. She referred to her marriage as “our Lincoln party.” It began with the two of them. In the 1856 campaign she was no less opinionated, but they were not opinions that helped her husband. She disliked the people Lincoln was trying to bring together. She disdained abolitionists, demeaned immigrants, and wanted nothing to do with those Democrats around Trumbull who she felt had robbed her husband of his rightful place. “Fusionism” was not for her. She remained wedded to the Whig Party.

  Mary wrote her younger half sister Emilie Todd Helm, living in Kentucky, a fanciful letter about the election. “Altho’ Mr L- is, or was a Fremont man, you must not include him with so many of those who belong to that party, an Abolitionist.” The idea that Lincoln was a reluctant Republican, of course, was simply untrue. Mary disclosed her own political desire. It was the figure of Millard Fillmore. “My weak woman’s heart was too Southern in feeling, to sympathize with any but Fillmore,” she wrote. Mary, who treated her Irish maids poorly, felt an affinity for the anti-immigrant movement. “I have always been a great admirer of his, he made so good a President and is so just a man and feels the necessity of keeping foreigners, within bounds. If some of you Kentuckians, had to deal with the ‘wild Irish,’ as we housekeepers are sometimes called upon to do, the south would certainly elect Mr. Fillmore next time.” Mary’s idolatry of Fillmore and bias against immigrants was completely at odds with Lincoln, who ignored her pride and prejudice and soldiered on.

  By the time Millard Fillmore sailed with flags flying into New York Harbor on June 22 from a Grand Tour of Europe, his strategy for a return to power was in tatters. His plan had been to present himself as the reassuring figure from the past who could preserve the Union, saving it from division as he had done by forging the Compromise of 1850. Only yesterday’s man could bring back yesterday. He was the man of the past for those longing for the past. His promoters let it be known that he had taken the secret oath of the Know Nothings: “America only for Americans.” Nativism provided the motif for purification, restoration, and nostalgia. Hatred of immigrants distracted from the conflict over slavery, whose controversy was solely blamed on agitators. Standing firmly against the winds of change, Fillmore promised he could sweep it all away. But in order for his plan to work, the existing parties, including the new Republican one, would have to collapse to clear room for the Americans. His strategy was passive at heart, dependent on lucky events. According to the plan, when a candidate from the Pierce-Douglas wing of the Democrats would be nominated, the Hards of New York would be alienated while Old Whigs, repelled by abo
litionists, would flee from the Republican Party. But Buchanan foiled the scheme. He was another version of yesterday’s man personifying complacency yet seemingly fresher, thereby canceling out Fillmore’s foremost credential. Still, Lincoln worried about Fillmore’s appeal to Old Whigs.

  Fillmore was more than the sum of his minuses, neither this nor that. His campaign was a suggested center that played on the margins. His supporters rejected not only Northern abolitionists and Southern fire-eaters, but also Republicans and Democrats. They wanted everything back in its proper place as it was in 1850. They wished immigrants to go back to where they came from. They could not explain why their golden age of stability had yielded instability. But the Fillmore campaign was based on more than wishful thinking. It had a geographic base—the border slave states that wanted to banish slavery as an issue from national debate. It also had a political base—Southern Whigs unmoored from their old party and unwilling yet to join the Democrats. And now it had a nationally recognized candidate.

  Millard Fillmore offered no ideas, vision, or memorable words. There was nothing about the bland, tired, and gray figure that captured anyone’s imagination. There had never been a glimmer of excitement or inventiveness about him. He had been a factotum of the New York State Whig Party, achieved the office of state comptroller, and was named as vice president in 1848 as a sop to the embittered Henry Clay, who had been frustrated from attaining the presidential nomination again and intended Fillmore’s selection of running mate to thwart the ambition of Fillmore’s former patron Seward to be appointed secretary of state. (By tradition only one representative from a state was chosen for the cabinet and the vice presidency. Fillmore and Seward were both New Yorkers. Putting Fillmore on the ticket negated Seward.) But Vice President Fillmore was shunted aside until the sudden death from cholera of President Zachary Taylor. Fillmore ascended as His Accidency II. (His Accidency I was John Tyler, the first vice president to assume the presidency on the death of his predecessor.) He inspired no movement, ideology, or affection. After passage of the Compromise of 1850, handled by Douglas, the unloved incumbent was denied his party’s nomination in 1852. His latter-day Know Nothingism was thin and bloodless. “I am an American,” he said, “and with the Americans.” He followed its bandwagon in the hope that it would follow him. He had no instinct for arousing passions of any kind. Nobody marched for Fillmore. Fillmoreism was an oxymoron. He was against all “isms.”