Lincoln reached Atchison on the evening of Brown’s hanging. Lincoln turned the law and its inexorable logic used to convict Brown to convict the Southern fire-eaters. “Old John Brown,” he said, “has just been executed for treason against a state. We cannot object, even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right. So, if constitutionally we elect a President, and therefore you undertake to destroy the Union, it will be our duty to deal with you as old John Brown has been dealt with. We shall try to do our duty.”
Lincoln refused to act defensively about Brown. In Leavenworth, on December 5, he called the Democrats’ effort to blame the Republican Party for Harpers Ferry nothing but a ploy. “The attempt to identify the Republican party with the John Brown business was an electioneering dodge,” he said. “In Brown’s hatred of slavery the speaker sympathized with him,” reported the Leavenworth Register (Delahay’s paper back in operation). “But Brown’s insurrectionary attempt he emphatically denounced. He believed the old man insane, and had yet to find the first Republican who endorsed the proposed insurrection. If there was one he would advise him to step out of the ranks and correct his politics.” But Lincoln put the ultimate blame on slavery itself; nor would he blame the slaves for rising against it. “But slavery was responsible for their uprisings. They were fostered by the institution. In 1830–31, the slaves themselves arose and killed fifty-eight whites in a single night. These servile upheavings must be continually occurring where slavery exists.”
The next day he observed the election of state officials conducted under the free state constitution—in defiance of the Lecompton Constitution recognized by the Buchanan administration. After a week in Kansas, Lincoln returned to Springfield “delighted with his visit and the cordial reception he met with from the people of that incipient state,” reported the Illinois State Journal, which noted about the election there, “The returns thus far indicate that the Republicans did their whole duty, having made great gains.” Indeed, the Republicans swept the boards, winning 86 of 100 seats in the legislature. (Delahay soon wrote Lincoln he would manage his presidential campaign if Lincoln would provide the funds. Lincoln replied he “can not get, the money,” but offered to send Delahay $100 to pay for his expenses if he were elected a convention delegate. Delahay was not chosen, but Lincoln sent him the money anyway. Lincoln would not win a single Kansas delegate at the Republican convention.)
Once he was back home, Jesse Fell again bothered him to submit an autobiography. Hardly anyone outside of Illinois knew Lincoln’s story. Even in Illinois Lincoln had been reticent about revealing his background. Throughout his debates with Douglas and his speeches in Ohio and Kansas, he had not sought to advance himself by portraying his rise from a log cabin. About his lowly origins, he was silent. But on December 20 he acceded to Fell’s badgering. He decided to provide a “little sketch,” a page and a half of the bare facts of his early poverty, political offices, and physical self-description. “There is not much of it,” he wrote of his life, “for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me.” The subject he discussed more than any other in this brief document was education, or lack of it. His father “grew up literally without education.” Lincoln wrote of himself that he attended “some schools, so called.” “If a straggler supposed to understand Latin, happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education. Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the Rule of Three; but that was all. I have not been to school since. The little advance I now have upon this store of education, I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.” He was “sort of a clerk in a store,” served in the Black Hawk War, elected to the legislature, “studied law,” elected to the Congress, and: “Always a Whig in politics, and generally on the Whig electoral tickers . . . I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.”
Jesse Fell, who conceived the idea that Lincoln should challenge Douglas to debates, had a strategic mind. Before he had come to Illinois as a young man he had grown up in Pennsylvania and maintained a myriad of political contacts there. He knew that Republicans feared a Seward candidacy. He had been at war with the nativists of New York for decades and probably cost Henry Clay the presidency in 1844 as a result, and was unpopular in Pennsylvania, where the Know Nothings had been a controlling force within the legislature and Philadelphia as recently as 1855. Simon Cameron had been elected to the Senate as a Republican in an alliance with the Know Nothing remnant. But Fell understood that Cameron, running as a favorite son candidate for president, could never be nominated with his reputation for corruption. Fell believed that Pennsylvania would be the Keystone State for Lincoln at the convention, swinging for him. His prescience, which would be precisely realized, prompted him to give Lincoln’s “sketch” to his old friend, Joseph J. Lewis, a prominent lawyer, a Quaker like Fell, and who had represented the abolitionists in the notorious Christiana Riot case involving the murder of a slaveholder attempting to reclaim his runaway slaves. Lewis burnished Lincoln’s short account of his life into an article of several thousand words, published it in the Chester County Times in January 1860, and saw that it was widely reprinted in newspapers throughout the state. (Lincoln would appoint him the second commissioner of internal revenue.)
Even as the far-sighted Fell prepared to project Lincoln’s reputation to the East, Lincoln was dragged again into the pit of internecine warfare plaguing the Illinois Republican Party. This time he did not have to untangle the hostility of Old Whigs toward abolitionists, but vindictive hatreds going back decades of former Democrats turned Republicans against each other. The ferocity of petty animosities and the poisons of suspicion had the potential of shredding the party and spoiling his candidacy before it was launched. The depth of resentment threatened to draw in virtually the whole Republican Party.
The conflict was a struggle for primacy between two great political beasts from Chicago, “Long John” Wentworth, the mayor, with an ego as large and swaggering as his six feet seven inches height, and Norman B. Judd, the state senator, whom Trumbull described to Lincoln as “the shrewdest politician . . . in the state.” According to the journalist Horace White (who became the secretary of the Illinois Republican Central Committee in 1860), Judd was “fertile in expedients . . . a ‘trimmer,’ sly cat-like, and mysterious, and thus he came to be considered more farseeing than he really was; but he was jovial, companionable, and popular with the boys who looked after the primaries and the nominating conventions.” But the rivalry had spun out of control. Judd had declared to run for the Republican nomination for governor and Wentworth was determined to destroy him.
On December 16, Lincoln received a desperate letter from one of his stalwart supporters, urging him to stop “the War of the Roses at Chicago.” Nathaniel Niles, a lawyer, judge, and former editor of the Belleville Advocate, one of the editors who had summoned Lincoln to the organizing meeting in 1856 of the Illinois Republican Party, wrote, “You can command in this matter—as the acknowledged, indisputable leader of the party you can enforce the peace. It is of some interest to all of us that an unseemly personal warfare should not go on; and it may be of some interest also to the belligerents, to stop it—Please consider this matter and go up to Chicago.”
Wentworth and Judd had been enemies since 1844, when Judd encouraged a friend to challenge Wentworth for Congress, and another Judd friend, Ebenezer Peck, a state legislator, chased Wentworth down the street with a cane for allegedly libeling him.
Lincoln was already enmeshed in the conflict. Wentworth and Judd fired accusations at each other through competing newspapers, the Chicago Democrat, which Wentworth owned, and the Tribune, which was aligned with Judd. As early as 1857, Lincoln had signaled his dis
quiet. “I do not entirely appreciate what the republican papers of Chicago are so constantly saying against Long John,” Lincoln wrote Henry C. Whitney. “We cannot afford to lose the services of ‘Long John’ and I do believe the unrelenting warfare made upon him, is injuring our cause.”
Norman B. Judd
Judd, close to Trumbull, had been among the Democratic state senators who had held out for him over Lincoln in the struggle for the Senate seat in 1855. Lincoln’s friends, especially David Davis, and above all Mary Lincoln, never forgave Judd. But Judd the Democrat became the chairman of the Republican State Central Committee and was in charge of Lincoln’s 1858 Senate campaign. Judd told Lincoln that Wentworth was trying to undermine him because he wanted to grab the Senate seat. After the defeat, his maladroit first gesture to Lincoln was to dun him to cover the party’s debt from the race. Wentworth wrote David Davis that Judd was responsible for the loss. “I agree with him religiously,” said Davis, believing that the former Democrat had ignored the Old Whig counties. He stirred up opposition to Judd’s candidacy for governor. When the Clinton Central Transcript published an editorial discussing the upcoming Republican nomination of a candidate for governor, it blamed Lincoln’s defeat on “Northerners” in the state—code for Judd—who slated “ultra men”—code for Owen Lovejoy—Lincoln wrote a letter to the editor on July 3, 1859, to protest, “I think this is unjust and impolitic.”
In November 1859 the Chicago Democrat accused Judd not only of financial corruption and sinking Lincoln’s chance for the Senate against Trumbull in 1855, but also secretly plotting to “cheat Lincoln for the third time” by working to nominate Trumbull for president. On December 1, Judd filed a libel suit against Wentworth. The same day he fired off a letter to Lincoln. “I begin to doubt whether there is such a thing as truth in this world. . . . From the representations that are afloat amongst your friends and believed in by some of them I am induced to doubt myself—and think is it true that Lincoln has been cheated by me.” The slander was being spread “without any public defense by you or any of your friends.” Judd made clear to Lincoln he understood the high stakes. “You have ambitions, high hopes and brilliant prospects, and no man has or will aid you more faithfully than myself—There is no risk in doing right.” He suggested a remedy. “There is only one mode of replacing the harmony of the party—and that is John Wentworth is to be driven out or silenced,” and his friends and “their lying associates kicked into the kennel with the rest of the curs.”
That same day Judd wrote Trumbull a histrionic letter, “I have slaved for L as you know and that I should today be suffering amongst his friends by the charge of having cheated him, and he silent is an outrage that I am not disposed to submit to.” The truth was that Judd was bad-mouthing Lincoln. Thomas J. Pickett, editor of the Rock Island Register, another member of the small group that issued the original call for the organizing meeting of the Republican Party, and a Lincoln loyalist, recalled Judd dropping by his paper’s office. When Pickett volunteered he was for Lincoln for the presidential nomination, he recalled, “Mr. Judd, in a sneering tone said, ‘I am not joking; tell me your honest choice.’ I repeated, ‘Abraham Lincoln.’ He quickly responded, ‘I am astonished that any one should think of his nomination when we have first class statesmen in our party like Lyman Trumbull, Salmon P. Chase and John M. Palmer.’ ”
After he returned from his Kansas trip, Lincoln wrote Judd a letter on December 9. “It has a tone of blame towards myself which I think is not quite just,” he wrote, but gave Judd what he wanted, stating that the charges against Judd were “false and outrageous.” On December 14, Lincoln released a public letter to prevent “a wrong being done to him by the use of my name in connection with alleged wrongs to me.” He declared that during the Senate campaign, “I had no more sincere and faithful friend than Mr. Judd—certainly none whom I trusted more.” He added carefully, “I have been and still am very anxious to take no part between the many friends, all good and true, who are mentioned as candidate for a Republican gubernatorial nomination.” After all, two of Lincoln’s friends and former Whigs, Leonard Swett and Richard Yates, were also seeking the nomination.
Wentworth slyly asked Lincoln to represent him in the Judd libel suit. Lincoln instead suggested that he publish an apology and in return Judd would withdraw his suit. He drew up detailed terms for agreement from both parties and used David Davis as a go-between to Wentworth. Davis wrote Lincoln that if they would make the settlement “you will have, politically, accomplished a great result.” Judd wrote Lincoln still complaining about Wentworth’s libels. “These things unretracted can or ought I to ‘eat dirt.’ . . . What shall I do[,] write me.” But the libel suit disappeared. Without fanfare, Lincoln’s settlement had gone into effect.
“I know,” wrote Herndon, “the idea prevails that Lincoln sat still in his chair in Springfield, and that one of those unlooked-for tides in human affairs came along and cast the nomination into his lap; but any man who has had experience in such things knows that great political prizes are not obtained in that way. The truth is, Lincoln was as vigilant as he was ambitious, and there is no denying the fact that he understood the situation perfectly from the start. In the management of his own interests he was obliged to rely almost entirely on his own resources. He had no money with which to maintain a political bureau, and he lacked any kind of personal organization whatever.”
Only Jesse Fell envisioned the path for Lincoln. Lincoln had created the Illinois Republican Party, but it was not unified behind the idea of his presidential candidacy, which hardly anyone yet thought was plausible. The Old Whigs still hated the abolitionists and were wary of the Democrats, while the Democrats hated the Democrats. But the party was more than a house divided whose rancor he had to calm. Herndon was always willing to do Lincoln’s bidding if he was properly directed, but he had detoured into sniping against Judd along with the Davis crowd, which included Mary. For all the publicity attached to Lincoln’s campaign against Douglas, he had lost. He had not held office for a decade. No one who had only been a backbench congressman, one-term at that, had ever been nominated much less elected president. There were rumblings for Trumbull as a favorite son. Lincoln needed Illinois, but Illinois had to perceive him as more than Illinois for him to win Illinois.
The Chicago Press and Tribune reported on January 10 that the book of the Lincoln-Douglas debates was being published, “a first-rate document for the campaign,” and “no trifling compliment to Old Abe.” Two days later, the Springfield Young Men’s Republican Club announced “the name of this association be and is hereby changed, and be hereafter called the “LINCOLN CLUB.” And two days after that the Illinois State Journal, the newspaper under Lincoln’s influence, issued a ringing endorsement of Lincoln for president, “the favorite son of Illinois.” A week later, the paper published the pragmatic case that Illinois and Pennsylvania were the key strategic states. It was the case that Jesse Fell made. “Looking over the whole field, we regard it that the success of the Republicans depends upon those two states, and the Republican nominating Convention should select its candidates with direct reference to the exigency which exists. . . . It is with this view and with the further consideration that the Great West deserves the Presidency, that the Republicans of Illinois present the name of ABRAHAM LINCOLN as their first choice for the nomination.”
On the last week of January, when a number of key people from around the state came to Springfield for the sessions of the state Supreme Court and the federal court, a secret group was convened in the office of Lincoln’s friend, the Illinois secretary of state, Ozias M. Hatch, to discuss his presidential candidacy. The meeting was called by Jackson Grimshaw, a member of the Republican Central Committee, a lawyer from Quincy, who had run for Congress unsuccessfully in 1858. Judd was there, along with Leonard Swett, Jesse K. Dubois, Ward Lamon, Ebenezer Peck, Nehemiah Bushnell (Orville Browning’s law partner and president of the Northern Cross Railroad), and John Whitfield Bunn, the Sp
ringfield merchant along with his brother Jacob who financed Lincoln’s campaigns. Those present had varied recollections. Grimshaw had initially been promoting the notion of a Cameron-Lincoln ticket. Judd recalled he “strongly opposed this action, saying the proper and only thing to do was to claim the Presidency for him and nothing less.” Grimshaw later told Herndon, “We all expressed our personal preference for Mr. Lincoln as the candidate for the presidency and asked him if his name might be used at once in connection with the coming nomination and election. Mr. Lincoln with his characteristic modesty doubted whether he could get the nomination even if he wished it and asked until the next morning to answer us whether his name might be announced as one who was to be a candidate for the office of President before the Republican Convention. The next day he authorized us to consider him and work for him if we pleased as a candidate for the presidency.” Grimshaw wondered if he would accept the vice presidency if he could not get the presidential nomination. “No!” Lincoln replied.
Almost all of those in this caucus were Lincoln’s longtime Whig friends. Judd, now on board with Lincoln, and his friend Peck were the former Democrats. The obvious missing person was Orville Browning. He was working for Edward Bates as the conservative alternative. The oldest of the candidates at sixty-five, Bates had fought in the War of 1812, served in the Congress for a single term from 1827 to 1829, was a prominent attorney in St. Louis, had freed his slaves, but “always disclaims Republicanism,” briefly belonged to the Know Nothings, and was backed by Francis P. Blair on the basis that he could carry border states and Old Whigs. Bates stood as an improved version of Fillmore. (Fillmore had offered him the post of secretary of war, which he declined.) The rationale for Bates’s candidacy was that because he was not really a Republican he would attract those who were not Republicans. He presented the hope of a repressible conflict. The temporizing Bates was also supported by the radical Greeley, who wanted to use him to stop Seward out of revenge. Seward’s supporters saw Bates as an anachronism who would “settle nothing,” as John Bigelow wrote William Cullen Bryant, the editor of the New York Post. Bates would find his “associations” with “men and doctrine” in the Republican Party “uncongenial,” and “the end would be that the old Whig party, of which in his person you would have effected the resurrection, would sink back into its grave after a second time betraying the cause of freedom.” The coming conflict between Seward and Bates, with Chase in the middle, without another miraculous option, seemed irrepressible.
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