The platform was the first order of convention business. To universal acclaim, citing the Declaration of Independence, it denied any authority to establish slavery in the territories, called for Kansas to be admitted as a free state, and declared “the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy, and Slavery.” As a point against Buchanan for his passive collusion in in the botched scheme to seize Cuba from Spain, the Ostend Manifesto, a resolution stated, “That the highwayman’s plea, that ‘might makes right,’ embodied in the Ostend Circular, was in every respect unworthy of American diplomacy, and would bring shame and dishonor upon any Government or people that gave it their sanction.” “The reading of the resolution referring to the Ostend circular was interrupted by boisterous laughter, and when silence was restored there were loud cries of ‘Read it again,’ ” reported the New York Herald. The phrase “might makes right” would remain in Lincoln’s mind until he addressed it at the Cooper Union in 1860.
Then suddenly there was dissension. The issue that had threatened to tear apart the Illinois Republican Party at its organizing meeting was raised again by precisely the same person who had brought it up there. George Schneider, the editor of the German language Illinois Staats-Zeitung, proposed a resolution against nativism that duplicated every word of the one that had been agreed upon by the Illinois party under the guidance of Lincoln, who went unmentioned, was unknown to the Republican throng, and not consulted by Schneider. “There is no people more in favor of freedom than the German population of Illinois,” Schneider assured the delegates. His resolution immediately met stiff resistance from McLean’s supporters, especially from Pennsylvania, a state heavily influenced by the Know Nothings and which was solid for McLean. They preferred a policy of silence on nativism, seeking to attract the Know Nothings, not to condemn them.
Their leader was a former Know Nothing and Pennsylvania’s most fervent antislavery politician. Thaddeus Stevens had to retire from his seat in the Congress in 1852 because of his abolitionism. He did more than introduce petitions for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act. At the trial of two Quakers charged with no less than treason for refusing to assist U.S. marshals in the Christiana Riot that resulted in the killing of a slave owner trying to capture his runaways Stevens served as a defense counsel and won their acquittal. He had been born with a clubfoot to a poverty-stricken family in Vermont. His father deserted. The boy rose through a fierce determination to educate himself, graduating from Dartmouth. He suffered a rare disease that left him hairless and he wore an ill-fitting wig, another mark of disfigurement. He moved to Gettysburg, where he became a successful attorney, the chairman of the City Council, the largest landowner, president of the Gettysburg Railroad, and founder of the Caledonia Iron Works factory. In 1821, Stevens represented a slave owner seeking to repossess a fugitive slave, and was overcome with self-revulsion. His antislavery activity dated from that incident. But his physical disabilities undoubtedly gave him a profound empathy toward the oppressed. He joined the Anti-Masonic Party, promoting John McLean for its presidential nomination. Elected to the state legislature, Stevens sponsored the law establishing a free public education system. He was now a Whig. After the Panic of 1837, he moved to a house in Lancaster only two miles from that of James Buchanan. The two men were diametric opposites, open enemies since the presidential campaign of 1840, and in 1856 Stevens described Buchanan as “a bloated mass of political putridity.” While Stevens’s law practice was lucrative, he also represented fugitive slaves. He lived openly with his mulatto housekeeper, Lydia Hamilton Smith, for all intents and purposes his common-law wife whom he brought to social occasions. Their house was a stop on the Underground Railroad with a secret hiding place for runaways. Stevens’s burning hatred of slavery was matched by his ruthless pragmatism. He joined the intolerant Know Nothings, which included many former Anti-Masons, out of the belief they would be his allies against slavery. He was elected a delegate to the Republican convention at a joint Pennsylvania convention consisting of Old Whigs, Know Nothings, and abolitionists.
Stevens rose at the convention to offer the only objection to any resolution. He wished to strike out certain of Schneider’s words: “we oppose all proscreptive legislation,” which was interpreted as an implicit rebuke of the Know Nothings. Stevens, the New York Herald reported, “thought this would be read as a direct assault upon the largest party in Pennsylvania”—the Know Nothings. “It contained nothing, he admitted, but what was right; but it at the same time contained what would be misunderstood and tortured.” David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, chairman of the resolutions committee, suggested substituting the word “impairing” for “proscriptive,” and the controversy was avoided. Stevens could not have known that the words he had excised were originally Lincoln’s. Yet, even in its amended form, the first Republican Party platform included a version of the resolution Lincoln had engineered in Illinois.
Thaddeus Stevens
Stevens’s editing of the resolution was the only victory for the McLean forces. They spent the day trying to convince delegates that McLean should be nominated for president with Frémont as his running mate, which they promised “pretending to be from authoritative sources,” according to Halstead, and a gambit that would lead to Fillmore’s withdrawal. “The McLean men were hot last night—in fact, almost desperate, and threatened combustion and explosion if their demands were not complied with.” The next morning delegates were presented with a circular: “You are divided between McLean and Fremont. Why not unite their names on one ticket? It would be invincible.” But McLean’s doom was apparent. Before the voting was about to begin, his manager, Judge Rufus P. Spalding, a Free Soiler and founder of the Republican Party of Ohio, took the floor. He unfurled a letter from McLean withdrawing his name from consideration, “without a struggle in the Convention.” His supporters were stunned at the abruptness of the end. Stevens vainly objected. Then Chase’s name was withdrawn. An Ohio delegation divided could not stand for one favorite son. Only Frémont was left.
Before the final vote for the presidential nomination, after McLean’s letter of withdrawal was read, a McLean delegate from New York, Dewitt Clinton Littlejohn, declared that the Know Nothings “had this Republican movement at heart, and the convention should act liberally with them, and give them at least one of the candidates.” Littlejohn, the former Speaker of the New York State Assembly, was both a Know Nothing and an ally of Thurlow Weed, who himself was backing Frémont. But Owen Lovejoy, of Illinois, “opposed any action conciliating the North Americans. If they did so, the Prince of Iniquity—Stephen A. Douglas—would use it to seduce away the foreign vote.” If the motion had stood the slightest chance, the mention of Douglas’s name banished it to a netherworld.
The formal vote proceeded with just one live candidate. The chairman called: “All who are in favor of nominating John C. Fremont as the candidate of this convention for the presidency, will signify the same by giving three cheers!” “And,” reported Halstead, “three times three perfect Davy Crockett war-whoops, with a touch of the buffalo bull and the wild cat, were given with stunning effect.” But some McLean men were bewildered that the McLean-Frémont arrangement had been summarily rejected, “and thought it very strange and hard that such a compromise was not acceptable.”
“On being defeated as to Mr. McLean for whom I did my best, I felt badly and at dark after the nomination of Mr. Fremont, I resolved to name you for Vice-President regardless of whom they might name,” William B. Archer, an Illinois delegate, wrote Lincoln after the convention. Like Lincoln, Archer was Kentucky born, founded the town of Marshall, from which he was elected to the state legislature, where he served with Lincoln. An Old Whig, Archer joined the Know Nothings, who nominated him as their candidate for governor, which he declined because he believed it would only help elect the Democrat. At the convention Archer stayed up all night with a small group from Illinois trying to round up support for Lincoln’s nomination
. The favorite candidate of the Frémont forces for vice president was former U.S. senator William Dayton of New Jersey, an Old Whig who was already considered “a concession” to the “McLean men,” reported Halstead.
The next day, June 19, Archer took the floor. According to the account in the New York Tribune: “Said he was acquainted with Mr. Lincoln, and had known him over thirty years. He was a native of Kentucky, and had always been a Clay Whig and a firm friend of this Republic. He had no fear of the North of Illinois, but the South was inhabited by emigrants from Kentucky and Tennessee, but with Lincoln on the ticket Illinois would be safe for Fremont, [cheers], and he believed it would be safe without him, [loud cheers and laughter], but doubly safe with him.” Judge Spalding, Chase’s manager, called out, “Will Lincoln fight?” “Col. Archer (jumping at least eighteen inches from the floor, and gesturing emphatically with his arms), YES, SIR. He is a son of Kentucky [Loud and prolonged laughter and cheers].”
When the roll was called Dayton won 253 votes, Lincoln 110. It was an unusual showing for an unknown, described by Halstead as “Colonel Lincoln” in his report, apparently thinking that if he was from Kentucky he must be a colonel. The Lincoln tally was more a vote for the importance of Illinois and the lingering resentment of the hard-core McLean supporters than it was for the obscure Lincoln. “I think you will pardon me for the move. I had a strong hope and felt disposed to make the effort,” Archer wrote Lincoln.
Lincoln was in Urbana at a session of the Circuit Court of Champaign County. “The weather was dry and hot: our surroundings were not conducive to comfort, and I don’t recollect to have ever attended a more uninteresting term of court,” recalled Whitney. The traveling entourage of lawyers and Judge Davis stayed at the American House, a “primitive hostelry,” whose owner, John Dunaway, beat a gong to summon the guests to meals, “and thereby causing us great annoyance.” One evening Dunaway went to bang away but the gong was gone. “When I had reached the room I was in the presence of the culprit. Lincoln sat awkwardly in a chair tilted up after his fashion, looking amused, silly and guilty, as if he had done something ridiculous, funny and reprehensible. The Judge was equally amused; but said to him: ‘Now, Lincoln, that is a shame. Poor Dunaway is the most distressed being. You must put that back.’ ” Lincoln restored the gong and “bounded up the stairs, two steps at a time.”
The next day the coterie gathered shortly after noon as they did every day for the arrival of a copy of the Chicago Tribune. It reported the nomination of Frémont. And the next day they assembled to read the news about his running mate. “The convention then proceeded to an informal ballot for Vice-President . . .” To everyone’s surprise, the gong prankster had been nominated and finished second. “Davis and I were greatly excited,” wrote Whitney, “but Lincoln was phlegmatic, listless and indifferent: his only remark was: ‘I reckon that ain’t me; there’s another great man in Massachusetts named Lincoln, and I reckon it’s him.’ ”
But Lincoln brightened when he wrapped up his cases and collected his meager fees. “I do not remember to have seen him happier than when he had got his little earnings together, being less than $40, as I now recollect it, and had his carpet-bag packed, ready to start home.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE BIRTHER CAMPAIGN
IMMENSE ENTHUSIASM,” ran the front-page headline of the New York Times story reporting Frémont’s nomination. At the moment the convention made it unanimous, a large banner with “JOHN C. FREMONT, for President of the United States” was unfurled behind the platform while in front of it was hung an American flag with the candidate’s name inscribed. The slogan, “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, Fremont,” was immediately taken up. “ ‘The Path-Finder of the Rocky Mountains,’ the chivalric John C. Frémont, the type and embodiment of the spirit of Young America, was yesterday afternoon nominated. . . . Such a degree of unanimity and enthusiasm as this, has had no example in the political history of the country. . . . Though the nominee of the Republican Party has never been identified with any great political movement, and is the youngest man who has ever been nominated for the Presidency, he is so well known, and his romantic history is so familiar to the people of the whole country, that no one, on hearing his name now, will say, as they did of Pierce, ‘Who is he?’ ”
John C. Frémont
Frémont’s legend had been printed, but the statesmanship was yet to come. His “romantic history” romanticized the worrisome parts of his history to the vanishing point. He was made new by becoming a man scrubbed of much of his past. His bleached slightness lifted him momentarily above politics and party, his scandals receding from view until his balloon was abruptly pulled back to earth.
“There is no mistake about the effect of Fremont’s nomination on the politicians,” warned the Washington correspondent of the New York Herald. “The Democrats are taken all aback by it. All sorts of stories are trumped up against him. . . . It is reported here on the best authority that a great effort will shortly be made to crush Fremont and blast his prospects forever.”
The Republican campaign had the aura of a great awakening, a moral crusade, and a social movement. While Republicans were summoned to rescue democracy and “free soil” from the “Slave Power,” and to struggle for the “free labor” system that gave all men an equal chance, the Democrats and Know Nothings raised the cry to save the nation from the Republicans. One common point of the attack was that Frémont and the Republicans were fanatical sectionalists in the grip of abolitionists. “The Union is in danger and the people everywhere begin to know it,” Buchanan declared. “The Black Republicans must be, as they can be with justice, boldly assailed as disunionists, and this charge must be reiterated again and again.”
Fillmore, for his part, desperately followed a strategy for ruin and rule. His far-fetched scheme was to win over the Southern Whigs, break the Northern Republicans, and discredit Frémont to create a political stalemate in the Electoral College that would throw the election into the House of Representatives, where by some miracle he would be chosen president as the saving middle course. He asserted his centrality by wishfully claiming to hold the balance of power. Campaigning against conflict and partisanship, he created chaos as a spoiler. The bleaker his prospects, the harsher became his campaign.
Fillmore said not a word about Kansas. He said nothing about the extension of slavery. He said nothing about the Know Nothing platform. On June 26, a week after the Republican convention, he delivered a major speech in which he warned that if the Republicans were to win the South would have just cause for secession. “Alas! threatened at home with civil war,” he said. The clear and present danger was the existence of the Republican Party itself. “We see a political party presenting candidates for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency, selected for the first time from the free States alone, with the avowed purpose of electing those candidates by suffrages of one part of the Union only, to rule over the whole United States. Can it be possible that those who are engaged in such a measure can have seriously reflected upon the consequences which must inevitably follow, in case of success? Can they have the madness or the folly to believe that our Southern brethren would submit to be governed by such a chief magistrate?”
But the question of illegitimacy was raised about more than the “Black Republicans.” While Fillmore tarnished the Republican Party as provocateur of civil war, his operatives spread stories that Frémont, who was an Episcopalian, was actually a Catholic. The Catholic smear, that Frémont was not a true American but the covert agent of a Vatican plot to seize the country, resonated with the paranoid Know Nothing cosmology. Those susceptible to the lie were also susceptible to an extensive Catholic fear-mongering literature, including sexually graphic best-selling novels about rapacious priests preying on innocent Protestant girls. The New York Express, a newspaper edited by the Know Nothing candidate for governor, Erastus Brooks, a former Whig state senator, filled its pages with stories about Frémont’s secret papist identity. Lincoln
would have been familiar with the other chief propagandist, Nathan Sargent, a clever former Whig newspaper correspondent, who had been among Lincoln’s boardinghouse mates during his stint in the Congress. “Fremont’s Romanism Established,” a widely circulated pamphlet, apparently written by Sargent, alleged “the most foul combination” directed by Archbishop John Hughes, the Catholic prelate in New York, in league with “Abolitionists and the Foreigners,” and William H. Seward, who had supposedly conspired to deliver the Republican nomination to Frémont in the interest of the Vatican. Sargent wrote Fillmore that the Catholic question was “the battery which proves most effective in thinning his ranks.”
The nativist pamphleteers charged that proof of Frémont’s Catholicism was irrefutable: Frémont’s father was a French Catholic immigrant, Frémont was a bastard, and Frémont and his wife, who had hastily eloped, were married in a civil ceremony by a Catholic priest. Citing bogus sources that Frémont rejected a Protestant Bible from a friend and maintained a Catholic chapel in his home, the case was clinched: “He goes to a Roman Catholic Church in Washington, crosses himself with so-called holy water at the door, and makes the sign of the cross when he goes into his pew.”
Frémont’s illegitimacy extended to more than his suspect religion. He was assailed as literally illegitimate, the child of a mother who was not divorced from her first husband. “The question arises,” editorialized the Richmond Dispatch, “could there have been a legitimate marriage without a divorce?” About Frémont’s father, the paper wrote, “The life of the progenitor of the free-soil candidate of the Presidency, shows that he was at least a disciple of Free-love, if not of Free-soil.” For good measure, Frémont was also accused of murder; adultery; cannibalism; faking his explorations as “a fancy amateur tourist” and “over-grown schoolboy playing mountaineer” (New York Daily News); and according to a trapper quoted in the Missouri Republican “a very young beaver” and “a cold-hearted, selfish devil.” He was rumored to own seventy-five slaves and denounced as an abolitionist. The Richmond Enquirer mocked the Republican slogan: “Free niggers, free women, free land, and Fremont.” In San Francisco, Democrats marched in an anti-Frémont parade under the banner “Fremont: Free Niggers and Frijoles.”
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