All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  About two weeks after the secret caucus meeting, Browning came to Springfield. That day the Republican Central Committee fixed a convention in May at Decatur that would nominate state candidates—and give a presidential nod. Lincoln visited Browning that evening at his hotel room. Browning was likely aware of the caucus meeting for Lincoln and that he was excluded because he was for Bates. “We had a free talk about the presidency,” Browning wrote in his diary, noting Lincoln’s reaction. “He says it is not improbable that by the time the national convention meets in Chicago he may be of opinion that the very best thing that can be done will be to nominate Mr. Bates.” The most interesting thing about this entry was not Lincoln’s effort to mollify Browning, but his apparent foreknowledge that the convention would be at Chicago, which had not yet been decided. It’s possible, though, that Browning wrote after the event based on memory.

  Lincoln was alarmed by his meeting with Browning. The next day he wrote Judd for help to advance his candidacy as the return of his favor to him. “I am not in a position where it would hurt much for me to not be nominated on the national ticket; but I am where it would hurt some for me to not get the Illinois delegates,” he wrote. “What I expected when I wrote the letter [on your behalf] . . . is now happening. Your discomfited assailants are most bitter against me; and they will, for revenge upon me, lay to the Bates egg in the South, and to the Seward egg in the North, and go far towards squeezing me out in the middle with nothing. Can you not help me a little in this matter, in your end of the vineyard?” This was not the first time he had discussed the convention with Judd. Lincoln had already written him about locating it in Chicago, which would be a coup. “I find some of our friends here, attach more consequence to getting the National convention into our State than I did, or do. Some of them made me promise to say so to you,” Lincoln wrote him on December 14, the same day he released his letter exonerating Judd of wrongdoing. “As to the time, it must certainly be after the Charleston fandango; and I think, within bounds of reason, the later the better.”

  A week later, on February 16, the Chicago Press and Tribune published a blazing editorial: “The Presidency—Abraham Lincoln,” which touted him as the candidate to win the swing states and catalogued his virtues from “unimpeachable purity of private life” to “great acuteness of intellect” to “Right on the record.” “Should the Convention give him this position, then the honor which he has not sought, but which his admirers have hoped he might attain, will, like ripe fruit, fall into his hands. Abraham Lincoln will never be President by virtue of intrigue and bargain.” “You saw what the Tribune said about you—was it satisfactory?” Judd wrote Lincoln.

  On February 22, George Washington’s birthday, the Republican National Committee met in New York City at the Astor House, Thurlow Weed’s lair. Norman B. Judd was the representative of Illinois. Seward’s supporters wanted the convention to be in New York; Chase’s in an Ohio city; and Bates’s advocates in St. Louis. Judd proposed a neutral city, in a state the party needed to carry, and did not have a serious national candidate of its own. And without mention of Lincoln the Republican National Committee decided on Chicago.

  Lincoln left for New York City the next day to speak on “a political subject” at the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. Since he received the invitation on the eve of John Brown’s raid the world had tilted. Lincoln’s round of speeches in Ohio in 1859 before Harpers Ferry were versions of what he had said in his debates. John Brown had exposed Douglas’s and Seward’s vulnerabilities within unstable parties, but they both continued to act on the unspoken assumption that they would be their party’s nominees and adjusted to the increasingly charged atmosphere with the general election in mind. Lincoln had spent his entire political career to this point crafting most of his important speeches to counter Douglas. Now he had to think about his speech in the light of Douglas and Seward. Taking on Douglas was familiar territory, but approaching Seward was uncharted. He could rebut Douglas, but not Seward. Lincoln had to present himself to let others draw the contrasts, not only with Seward but also implicitly with Chase and Bates. Lincoln’s positioning had to be subtle yet apparent. And there was another unseen presence he could not escape. Like the ghost in a Shakespeare play John Brown was a haunting figure the actor had to address. The phantom of Harpers Ferry loomed over the characters on the stage.

  Between law cases and settling feuds Lincoln sequestered himself in the law library of the State Capitol, following his practice with his important speeches since the one he delivered against the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. He took Douglas’s article from Harper’s Magazine in which he argued that the framers of the Constitution were self-consciously indifferent to slavery as an opposing brief. Lincoln had been rebutting Douglas on the “revolutionary fathers” since his 1854 speech. He had pointed out then Jefferson’s antislavery sentiments and inspiration for the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banishing slavery from the territories, which Lincoln considered as integral to the Constitution and proving the intent of the founders. He had repeated these arguments in his debates with Douglas in 1858. Lincoln always believed that Douglas twisted logic and distorted history. Now, determined to make one more overwhelming argument against him, Lincoln’s research was prodigious, the greatest scholarly effort in his life. He owned the two volumes of Jonathan Elliot’s The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution as Recommended by the General Constitution at Philadelphia in 1787, in which he found the evidence that a large majority of the signers of the Constitution believed the federal government had the authority to regulate slavery. Lincoln consulted James Kent’s Commentaries on the Constitution, Charles Lanman’s Dictionary of the United States Congress, the Annals of Congress, the Congressional Globe, The Letters of George Washington, The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of James Madison, and biographies. “He probably consulted, too, a life of the Marquis de Lafayette, and likely examined the works of Alexander Hamilton,” wrote the historian Harold Holzer. “He reread Benjamin Franklin’s petition against slavery. He looked through accounts of the great slave uprisings, including Nat Turner’s insurrection in 1831.” He scoured old yellowing newspapers and he read The Impending Crisis of the South.

  “The finished speech grew very slowly,” recalled Henry B. Rankin, an occasional clerk in the Lincoln-Herndon law office. “Herndon’s patience was tried sorely at times to see him loitering and cutting, as he thought, too laboriously.” “He was painstaking and thorough in the study of his subject,” Herndon wrote, “but when at last he left for New York we had many misgivings—and he not a few himself—of his success in the great metropolis. What effect the unpretentious Western lawyer would have on the wealthy and fashionable society of the great city could only be conjectured.”

  Lincoln’s sponsor, the Young Men’s Central Republican Union, had come into existence to provide a forum for potential alternatives to Seward. Few of its members were actually young men, but rather an assemblage of influential personages, including William Cullen Bryant of the New York Post, the distinguished lawyer David Dudley Field, and the ubiquitous marplot Greeley. Many had been Barnburners of the Democratic Party faction that had split in 1848 to form the Free Soil Party and were perennial opponents of Weed’s political machine. Far from being the “unpretentious Western lawyer,” Lincoln was keenly aware of the political backgrounds of the men he was about to encounter. He had campaigned for the Whigs against the Free Soil Party through New England, appearing on the same Boston platform with Seward, their first meeting. Lincoln had developed strong feelings about Greeley, who had been for Douglas until he wasn’t in the Senate race. When Greeley came through Springfield in the aftermath and sent Lincoln a message he would like to meet him, Lincoln spurned him. He knew Greeley was now for Bates. Lincoln also loved Bryant’s poetry, especially “Thanatopsis,” tolling “the silent halls of death.” But Lincoln did not know that Bryant had initiated the invitation for him to come to New York because he
was Bryant’s choice for the nomination if Seward faltered, but wanted to be able to judge him in person.

  Bryant had closely followed the famous debates with Douglas, which were covered in his newspaper, but he also knew about Lincoln firsthand from his four brothers, early settlers of Princeton, Illinois, all abolitionists and Republicans, eminent in science and horticulture. Lincoln stayed at the home of John Howard Bryant, a poet, journalist, and former state legislator, when he came to Bryant’s Woods to deliver a Fourth of July address in 1856 denouncing Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, followed to the stage by Owen Lovejoy. The prosperous Bryant brothers were Lovejoy’s principal backers and would almost certainly have been aware of the internal politics surrounding Lincoln’s endorsement of Lovejoy over the objections of David Davis. The Bryants were also close to Jesse Fell, Lincoln’s indispensable friend. (John Bryant would be an Illinois delegate pledged to Lincoln at the Republican convention in Chicago. President Lincoln appointed him collector of internal revenue.)

  According to George H. Putnam, of the publishing family, William Cullen Bryant felt that “if Seward could not be nominated it would be necessary to accept some candidate from the West, and he suggested that this young lawyer in Illinois, who had in his debates with Douglas shown an exceptional grasp of the grave issues pending and a power to influence public opinion, might very possibly prove to be the best man for the purpose if Seward could not be secured. Bryant reminded his friends that he had printed in the Evening Post a full report of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, and he said that these debates had given him a very high opinion of the clear-sightedness, patriotism, and effective force of the young lawyer. He suggested that they had better send an invitation to Lincoln to give an address in New York in order that they might secure a personal impression of the man and of his methods.”

  Salmon P. Chase turned down an invitation to speak, feeling his preeminence was already established and that he did not need to condescend to seeking it. The first speaker in the series was the Blair scion, former congressman Francis Preston Blair, Jr. The second was Cassius M. Clay, who devoted much of his speech to praising Helper’s book as a call for poor Southern whites to overthrow “the slaveholding interest.” Clay and Lincoln encountered each other in New Haven after Lincoln’s New York speech. Clay, Henry Clay’s flaming abolitionist cousin, who had lived as a university student in Mary Todd’s house in Lexington, gave Lincoln “a long talk” on “my arguments in favor of liberation.” “Clay,” Lincoln replied, “I always thought that the man who made the corn should eat the corn.” Clay was for Chase for president and for Seward, “my next choice.” But after he read Seward’s Senate speech “in favor of Union, with or without slavery . . . I took up Lincoln as a more reliable man.”

  Lincoln arrived in the city two days early, only to learn from reading a notice in the New York Tribune that he would not speak at the Plymouth Church but at the Cooper Union. The next day, on Sunday, the abolitionist editor Henry C. Bowen of the New York Independent brought him to the Plymouth Church, where he greeted parishioners, heard Henry Ward Beecher’s sermon, and greeted him. “Let Virginia make him a martyr,” Beecher had said of John Brown shortly after his raid. “Now, he has only blundered. His soul was noble; his work miserable. But a cord and gibbet would redeem all that, and round up Brown’s failure with a heroic success.” Sometime after Brown’s execution, Beecher delivered a sermon at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York City, where he brandished the chains that had bound John Brown in jail, threw them to the floor, and stomped on them as the symbolic crushing of slavery. After shaking Beecher’s hand, Lincoln took a ferry back to the city and returned to his hotel to polish his speech.

  On the morning of February 27, several representatives of the host committee met Lincoln at his room at the Astor House. They had put him up at the best hotel in town. “We found him in a suit of black, much wrinkled from its careless packing in a small valise,” recalled Richard C. McCormick, an editor at the New York Post. “He received us cordially, apologizing for the awkward and uncomfortable appearance he made in his new suit, and expressing himself surprised at being in New York. His form and manner were indeed odd, and we thought him the most unprepossessing public man we had ever met.” McCormick, a newspaperman, suggested Lincoln give copies of his speech to the press so it could be printed the next day. “The address was written upon blue foolscap, all in his own hand, and with few interlineations. I was bold enough to read portions of it, and had no doubt that its delivery would create a marked sensation throughout the country.”

  Lincoln’s handler apparently had a little program for him. “During the day,” wrote McCormick, “it was suggested that the orator should be taken up Broadway and shown the city, of which he knew but little, stating, I think, that he had been here but once before.” The Astor was located on Broadway, across from P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, which a month before had added to its exhibits of albinos, mermaids, and stuffed creatures a life-size wax figure of “Osawatomie Brown Himself!” with two pikes.

  Lincoln was escorted on a stroll past the store windows for two miles until he reached Bleecker Street. He was taken up a flight of stairs, through glazed glass doors into the studio of Mathew Brady, the photographic portraitist of the great, the celebrated, and the monied who could afford the services of his art. In the reception room, Lincoln encountered one of the illustrious men who had come to sit for a Brady picture. It was ironic that George Bancroft, the diplomat, founder of the Naval Academy at Annapolis as secretary of the navy, and historian, was there by happenstance. He was the intellectual guiding hand behind Douglas’s Harper’s article that Lincoln was prepared to disprove. McCormick recalled, “The contrast in the appearance of the men was most striking—the one courtly and precise in his every word and gesture, with the air of a trans-Atlantic statesman; the other bluff and awkward, his every utterance an apology for his ignorance of metropolitan manners and customs.”

  Once Lincoln entered into what Brady called “the operating room,” the photographer felt challenged at the sight of his subject. “I had great trouble in making a natural picture,” he said. Lincoln’s neck was too thin and elongated, his suit wrinkled, and one sleeve was shorter than the other. Brady posed him standing next to a false column that suggested statesmanship. He had Lincoln spread his hand on top of two books that symbolized his learning and also hid the longer sleeve. After he made the exposure, Brady and his team worked their magic in the darkroom to iron out some of the wrinkles and lengthen the shirt collar. Lincoln left before he could see the striking image of a self-possessed but determined figure nearing the height of his powers. Only after he was nominated did the photo emerge. Within days, woodcut engravings appeared on the front page of Harper’s Weekly and tens of thousands of lithographic copies were reproduced to depict the man of destiny. “Brady and the Cooper Institute made me president,” Lincoln later remarked.

  At eight in the evening, fifteen hundred notables who had paid an admission price of 25 cents gathered under twenty-seven crystal chandeliers in the Great Hall of the Cooper Union, which had just opened the previous year, anticipating the words of the man whose debates with Douglas they had read but whom few of them had ever seen. Bryant’s Post advertised Lincoln in the morning paper—“birth in a slaver state, personal observation of the effects of slavery, and equal knowledge of the advantages of a state of society in which the laboring population is free.”

  The audience applauded the entrance onto the stage of the old crusading editor and poet Bryant with his flowing white beard and hair, followed by the serious and plodding figure of David Dudley Field, and finally the speaker, carrying the pages of his speech in his hand, who took a seat “with his legs twisted around the rungs of the chair—he was the picture of embarrassment,” recalled a member of the audience, Russell H. Conwell, who was later the founder of Temple University. Bryant stood to introduce “an eminent citizen of the West, hitherto known to you only by reputation . . . a gallant soldier
in the campaign of 1856 . . . [a] great champion . . . [i]n the battle we are fighting in behalf of freedom against slavery and in behalf of civilization against barbarism. . . . I have only, my friends, to pronounce the name of”—and after a dramatic pause—“Abraham Lincoln of Illinois!”

  Lincoln’s hair, neatly combed for Brady, was tousled, and when he opened his mouth the audience was stunned that his voice was high-pitched, “thin” and “squeaky,” an eyewitness recalled. “Mr. President and Fellow-Citizens of New-York,” he began in a Kentucky twang. Numerous members of the audience described him as “ungainly” and “awkward.” His speaking style was unusual, standing stationary, almost motionless in one spot, gesticulating not with his hands but suddenly jerking his head and mop of hair. He began “in a low, monotonous tone,” recalled McCormick, and after reading through a few paragraphs he lost his place, “began to tremble and stammer,” and turn over his handwritten blue foolscap pages. “He spoke in a high-pitched voice, in which there was not a trace of the smooth-tongued orator,” recalled Henry Martyn Field, D.D. Field’s brother and a renowned clergyman. “But there was a singular clearness in his style, with a merciless logic which no listener could escape, as he unfolded link after link in the iron chain of his argument.” Noah Brooks, the correspondent for the New York Tribune, observed that “his face lighted up as with an inward fire; the whole man was transfigured. I forgot his clothes, his personal appearance, and his individual peculiarities. Presently, forgetting myself, I was on my feet like the rest, yelling like a wild Indian, cheering this wonderful man.”