Noah Brooks, the correspondent for the New York Tribune, said he left the Cooper Union with “my face glowing with excitement and my frame all aquiver.” When a friend asked him his opinion of Lincoln after the event, he spontaneously replied, “He’s the greatest man since St. Paul.”
After a celebratory dinner held by his hosts at the Athenaeum Club on Fifth Avenue, where he was asked just who might carry Illinois for the Republicans in the election, at about midnight Lincoln went to the Tribune Building to proofread galleys of the text as it would be published in the next day’s edition. He insisted on the capitalization of the last sentence. He wandered back to his hotel, leaving his manuscript at the newspaper office, where it was tossed into a wastepaper basket. Four New York newspapers printed his speech in full. Bryant’s Post filled the front page with headlines of Lincoln’s conquest: “The Framers of the Constitution in Favor of Slavery Prohibition. THE REPUBLICAN PARTY VINDICATED. THE DEMANDS OF THE SOUTH EXPLAINED. Great Speech of Hon. Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, at Cooper Institute.”
On his way to visit his son Robert at Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, Lincoln received a flood of invitations to speak throughout New England. Beginning with a reprise of the Cooper Union speech at Providence, he spoke eight more times, swinging back to New York for another nonspeaking appearance at the Plymouth Church. His speeches on tour were improvised from his formal text. His language became more colloquial, sarcastic, and humorous. At Hartford, on March 5, Lincoln said that the Democrats were “pretty generally getting into a system of bushwhackery” and that Douglas “goes into fits of hydrophobia” at Seward’s “irrepressible conflict doctrine.” “Another species of bushwhacking,” he went on, “is exhibited in their treatment of the John Brown and Harper’s Ferry affair. . . . The Democracy is still at work upon John Brown and Harper’s Ferry, charging the Republicans with the crime of instigating the proceedings there; and if they think they are able to slander a woman into loving them, or a man into voting with them, they will learn better presently.”
The Chicago Press and Tribune beat the drum for Lincoln in virtually every edition. “The Republicans are delighted with Lincoln’s New York speech,” wrote Joseph Medill, the paper’s Washington correspondent. “The speech has created a sensation through the eastern states such as few speeches have ever done. Bates’ stock culminated last week, and is now fast falling. By the time the Convention is held it will be out of the market. The signs now are, that if Seward is not nominated, Lincoln will be.” Reading the Tribune’s encomiums to Lincoln, an “irritated” Seward called on Medill, “and ‘blew me up’ tremendously for having disappointed him—‘gone back on him’—and preferring that ‘prairie statesman,’ as he called Lincoln. . . . He dismissed me from his presence, saying that thereafter he and I would no longer be friends.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
WALPURGISNACHT
James Sheahan, editor of the Chicago Times, rushed against his deadline to finish his campaign biography, The Life of Stephen A. Douglas, shortening accounts of recent events to get it to the printer before the Democratic convention. Douglas helpfully advised the author that he had “no recommendations of mercy to make in behalf of the administration.” Harper’s Weekly announced the biography would be “their prominent spring book.” Large quantities were shipped to Charleston for distribution to delegates. “At this day,” Sheahan concluded of Douglas, “he occupies the most extraordinary position of being the only man in his own party whose nomination for the Presidency is deemed equivalent to an election. Friends of other statesmen claim that other men, if nominated, may be elected—a claim that admits of strong and well supported controversy; but friend and foe—all Democrats, unite in the opinion that Douglas’ nomination will place success beyond all doubt.”
The South Carolina Institute Hall, site of the Democratic convention, 1860
“There will be no serious difficulty in the South,” Douglas wrote on February 19 to Peter Cagger, a wealthy New York lawyer who was in the inner circle of the group that informally controlled much of the state Democratic Party and known as the “Albany Regency.” “The last few weeks have worked a perfect revolution in that section. They all tell me and write that all will be right if our Northern friends will fearlessly represent the wishes and feelings of the Democracy in their own States.” Douglas envisioned that the convention would move toward him like clockwork. It would begin by adopting his platform, the same platform that the convention that nominated Buchanan had adopted in 1856, the Cincinnati Platform. By settling controversy at the start, his inevitability would be apparent and he would be nominated on the first ballot. If the voting went to a second ballot he would win on assurances given to his agents. The election itself would be an uncomplicated matter. According to his calculations of the Electoral College, the South would be solid for him, all the border states would follow, and along with California and Oregon he would take his own state and Indiana, needing only New York or Pennsylvania to put him over the top. New Jersey would be in his column, too.
The optimistic signs seemed obvious. Not a single challenger to Douglas for the nomination emerged from the North. From the South, not one could attract delegates beyond their own state. Howell Cobb desperately wanted to succeed Buchanan, but Buchanan would not anoint him. Cobb struggled to control his state’s delegation, which humiliated him when its convention refused to name him a favorite son. Toombs was inclined to accept Douglas, though he thought only a Southern Democrat could avert disaster, and Stephens signaled he would be open to becoming Douglas’s running mate. “He would like very much to be put on the ticket with you for Vice-President,” Douglas’s agent reported to him after speaking with Stephens. Senator Hunter and Governor Wise hotly divided Virginia with Hunter forcing an uninstructed delegation that tilted to him. Neither of them, however, was viable. Slidell was a favorite son of Louisiana, but was ferociously opposed by former Senator Pierre Soulé, who was for Douglas, using him to punish his enemy Slidell. James Guthrie, Pierce’s secretary of the treasury and president of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, beat out Vice President John C. Breckinridge in Kentucky, which worked to Douglas’s advantage because the youthful Breckinridge had more serious potential as a competitor. In Tennessee, Senator Andrew Johnson had the backing of the old Polk machine but the Douglas people got word that Johnson would go for Douglas on the second ballot. Jefferson Davis put himself forward in Mississippi, privately encouraged by Franklin Pierce, who wrote to praise his former secretary of war as “ ‘the Coming Man,’ one who is raised by all the elements of his character above the atmosphere ordinarily breathed by politicians.” Andrew Johnson thought Davis “burning up with ambition, is nearer consumed by the internal heat than any man I ever saw. . . . What Jeff will do if he is not nominated God only knows!” But even some Mississippi delegates seemed willing to support Douglas on a second ballot. In Alabama, an Ultra bastion, Douglas’s man there, John Forsyth, editor of the Mobile Register, wrote him, “Your foes are getting shaky in the knees.” And later he reported to Douglas that he was “stronger a thousand times with the Southern people” than anyone imagined. He believed that once the platform was passed, a border state delegation would come out for Douglas and “the Southern spell is broken.” Even in South Carolina, former congressman James Orr was allied with Douglas and prepared to swing the delegation for him. Observing the proliferation of Southern favorite sons, Senator Hammond of South Carolina thought they were all self-defeating, “all looking on Douglas as the great bug-a-boo—thereby elevating him at their own expense and equally ready to cut down any other person supposed to look that way.” The New York Herald estimated there were twenty-six candidates for the Democratic nomination. But there was only one with a national following and a majority within the party.
Before the convention Douglas maintained two busy campaign headquarters with free-flowing bars, one in New York and the other at the National Hotel in Washington. Many Northern delegates stopped in the capital to congregate befo
re setting off for Charleston. On April 16, delegates from twenty-four states staged a Douglas rally at the hotel to show he could claim 155 votes. The Northern states had sixty percent of delegates, and Douglas controlled eighty-four percent of those. Of the 303 total delegates, he could boast a majority even before the convention. But according to rules two thirds were required to nominate. The South had about forty percent of the delegates, so if they nearly held together they could block any nomination. Douglas, however, believed that would be highly unlikely. He had pledges in his back pocket for the second ballot, and precedent, he felt, should favor him when there was no other challenger. He had, after all, conceded graciously to Pierce and Buchanan. It was his turn to be the recipient of gestures of goodwill in the interest of party unity. This time there was no Northern man of Southern sympathy waiting in the wings who could win a Northern state. No Southern candidate could win any. Douglas had sufficient votes to block any challenger. It was clear there was really only one possible candidate. To deny Douglas would be to deny the will of the majority. To reject Douglas would be to reject the party itself.
But Douglas had been mistrusted from the moment he burst into Congress to pass the Compromise of 1850 and then immediately launched his a presidential campaign. He conceived of himself as a singular force, the spirit of the age, “Young America” and Manifest Destiny. But in his self-intoxication he had forgotten to check in with the powers-that-be. His will to power collided with the intent of the F Street Mess. He believed he was an independent actor while all along the Southerners thought of him as useful only as their cat’s paw. Even when he advanced their purposes, his need to satisfy Northern voters made him dangerous. The unresolvable problem of his conceit was that he could not ultimately realize his ambition except as a Northerner. They tolerated him when, in his Kansas-Nebraska Act, he helped repeal the Missouri Compromise. But then his abstraction of popular sovereignty intended to be all things to all sections was shattered by the realities of “Bleeding Kansas” and Dred Scott. Taney’s decision left no ground for Douglas’s doctrine. He pretended he was upheld, but popular sovereignty was swept aside. The Lecompton Constitution exposed his conundrum. Either he stood by his discarded idea or he would face defeat in his Senate race for reelection against Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln drove him to the wall of his political fatality on the Freeport Doctrine. Now, the Alabama delegation came to the convention pledged to bolt if the platform did not support a national slave code. And Jefferson Davis proposed it in the Senate as a nail in the coffin of Douglas’s candidacy.
In his biography of Douglas, anticipating his victory, Sheahan wrote that, “in defiance of all the bitterness of his enemies, throughout all coming time the name of DOUGLAS and the great principle of Popular Sovereignty will be so linked in the records of the past, and so closely identified with the memories of the present, that the fame of the former can only perish in the overthrow of the latter—an occurrence only possible in the total destruction of truth itself.”
But even as Sheahan’s hagiography was being printed, Douglas received worrying reports. Henry B. Payne, one of his chief men in Ohio, a former state senator and gubernatorial candidate, wrote him on March 17 that the Ultras intended “to bring the Southern sentiment to the point of demanding Davis’ resolution as a sine qua non, making Congressional protection a test of orthodoxy and proscribing all who dissent.” Payne predicted that if the delegates from Oregon and California, already hostile to Douglas, voted for the Alabama Platform then only Pennsylvania, controlled by the Buchanan forces, stood against catastrophe. Unless Douglas could control the platform committee it “would be destruction to us at home.” If the Alabama Platform passed, Payne wrote, “Our men will be prepared to retire from the Convention in the contingency above spoken of.”
Nothing Douglas could say to denounce either John Brown or Hinton Helper, Abraham Lincoln or William Seward would make his enemies loathe him less. Nothing he could do to conciliate his enemies, even bidding beyond the Ultras—not his bill to suppress antislavery conspiracies—would lead to his acceptance. Jefferson Davis expressed his unvarnished feelings about Douglas’s nomination in a letter to Franklin Pierce: “If our little grog drinking, electioneering Demagogue can destroy our hopes, it must be that we have been doomed to destruction.”
On January 12, 1860, on the floor of the Senate, Davis and others baited Douglas. They ridiculed his complaint against their removal of him as chairman of the Committee on Territories. They belittled his prospective nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate. They mocked the Little Giant as pathetic and marked him as an outcast. Their contempt was undisguised.
“The Senator magnifies himself when he supposes that there is any combination against him,” said Jefferson Davis. “He altogether exalts himself above his level when he supposes there is a combination here to oppress him. He was not in my mind. . . . He may find that he had enough to do when he finishes one man without invoking all the Democracy to stand up together in order that he may kill them at once.”
Douglas had ceaselessly attempted over the years to ingratiate himself with Davis. But Davis had followed Calhoun in adamant opposition to the Compromise of 1850 that had made Douglas’s career. Davis guided Pierce’s hand to sign Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act only after the F Street Mess pressured Douglas to repeal the Missouri Compromise, and then Davis still regarded it as a half measure and Douglas an obstacle to his vision of a slave empire encompassing the West. Douglas had attended a dinner with Davis hosted by the former Mississippi governor John Quitman in honor of Preston Brooks after he nearly murdered Sumner at which he was given an honorary cane. But Davis and his wife still thought of Douglas, even after his marriage to Adele Cutts, as vulgar white trash. (“Public sentiment proclaims that the most arrogant man in the United States Senate is Jefferson Davis,” editorialized the New York Tribune about the time of this encounter. “Nor does there seem to be much doubt that in debate he is the most insolent and insufferable. The offence consists not so much in the words used as in the air and mien which he assumes towards opponents.”)
Douglas’s public style was never to retreat or apologize, but to trample his opponents. His usual techniques of hollering, threatening, stamping his feet, twisting elbows, or bribery would not, however, work with Davis. Davis stood between Douglas and his prize. He wanted Davis to loosen his grip, to let Douglas take the nomination that was rightfully his, but he could not back down without losing the respect of the entire North and the worshipful galleries. He understood that the underlying difference was one of class. “In regard to the statement of the Senator from Mississippi that I overrate myself,” he replied, “I shall institute no comparison between him and me, or the modesty of my bearing and his in this body.”
Clement Clay of Alabama, who with his wife belonged to same social set as Jefferson Davis and his wife, entered into the fray. “I do not exactly agree with my friend from Mississippi in thinking it evinces a great deal of egotism,” he said about Douglas’s performance, “but I think, with due deference, that it may be construed as evincing something worse. It looks, sir, to me, as an invocation of public sympathy on behalf of a persecuted and abused man. It looks at least . . . very much like the conduct of Peisistratus when he ran into the market-house, exhibited the self-inflicted wounds which streamed with his blood, and asked a body-guard for his protection.”
Douglas took the back-and-forth insults as part of a concerted effort to deny him the nomination. “He has no right,” he said about Davis to Clement Clay, “to claim to the organization and say that he intends to bolt the nominees . . . if he does not extend to me the right hand of Democratic fellowship, I shall survive the stroke. . . . I should like to understand who it is that has the right to say who is in the party and who not.” Douglas pointed out that Buchanan in 1856 received two thirds of his popular vote from the North and one third from the South. “Then one third of the Democratic party is going to read out the remaining two thirds? . . . If these t
ests are to be made, one third will not subdue two thirds. . . . I do not admit the fact there is a better Democrat on earth than I am, or a sounder one of the question of State rights, or even on the slavery question. No, not one. When a man tells me he will vote for me if nominated—wonderful condescension indeed? Vote for me if nominated! As if such a man could for a moment compare records with me in labor the Democratic party.”
Davis returned to the issue of Douglas’s removal as chairman of the Committee on Territories as a suggested precedent for thwarting him now, tossing in a non sequitur about the Fugitive Slave Act, which Douglas after all had helped pass. “I should object to any man being a district attorney or district judge whose constitutional opinions or whose conscientious feelings would not allow him to execute the fugitive slave law,” Davis said.
“Of course,” replied Douglas.
“He would be unfit for the place,” said Davis. “If he was a gentleman, he would not accept it. . . . It amounts merely to this: that where there is a difference between Democrats in opinion upon a particular point, that marks a particular position to which he is not suited, if a majority of the party differ from him. . . . As for me, I am one of the rank and file.”
“So am I,” said Douglas.
“Well,” Clay concluded, “let it go.”
But no one was letting it go. There was, despite Jefferson Davis’s claim to the contrary, “a combination” to “oppress” Douglas. It was a coalition of the loathing. No one hated Douglas more than the president of the United States. “Old Buck is determined to rule or ruin us,” Toombs wrote on December 4, 1859. “I think he means to continue his own dynasty or destroy the party, and the times are at least favorable to his accomplishing the latter result and the country with it.”
Buchanan had issued a statement that he would not run for reelection; nor would he help Cobb to become his successor. Buchanan was a poisoned chalice in any case. Between “rule or ruin,” he was left with the decision to ruin. Slidell, his malign spirit, called Douglas’s views “an unequivocal declaration of war.” Just as Buchanan had used the federal patronage to create an Illinois faction called the National Democrats to harass the apostate Douglas, he deployed his power to pack various state delegations. Buchanan’s popularity was depleted, but he could achieve control of most of the delegates from Pennsylvania. Buchanan dangled plums before delegates from New Jersey, which turned anti-Douglas. Jobs were bartered against Douglas throughout the New England states. Delegates from Rhode Island were turned. The battle over Connecticut was bitter. Franklin Pierce prevailed upon the New Hampshire Democratic convention to adopt the Southern slave code platform. When the New Hampshire delegates passed through Washington on their way to Charleston, Jefferson Davis lectured their leader on “the evil effect of permitting N.H. to be mustered in under the banner of Douglas,” Davis reported to Pierce. In Massachusetts, Buchanan named a new collector of the Port of Boston, who used the patronage over delegates if they would oppose Douglas. Douglas’s agent in New England set off an alarm that the administration was “raising Heaven and earth” to break down support.
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