Oglesby calmed the crowd. He declared that “an old Democrat desired to make a contribution to the convention.” “Receive it! Receive it!” shouted the crowd. “What is it?” cried others. “All was expectancy and excitement,” recalled Oglesby. In walked John Hanks and a local carpenter, each holding an old wooden rail between which was hung a banner: “Abraham Lincoln, the rail candidate for the Presidency in 1860. Two rails from a lot of three thousand, made in 1830, by John Hanks and Abe Lincoln, whose father was the first pioneer of Macon County.”
Again, the crowd went wild. “Lincoln! Lincoln!” delegates cheered. “The roof was literally cheered off the building,” recalled another delegate, “hats and canes and books and papers were tossed aloft, as men jumped and screamed and howled, until part of the awning over the platform fell on their heads. When the enthusiasm finally subsided the Wigwam was almost a wreck.”
“How are you Abe?” John Hanks said to his cousin when he reached the stage. “How are you, John?” Lincoln replied.
“The whole scene was for a time simply tempestuous and bewildering,” wrote Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln’s friend and eyewitness. “But it ended at last; and now the whole body, those in the secret and those out of it, clamored like men beside themselves for a speech from Mr. Lincoln.” Lincoln, recalled a delegate, “blushed, but seemed to shake with inward laughter.” “Gentlemen,” said Lincoln, laughing as he spoke, “I suppose you want to know something about those things. I don’t know whether we made those rails or not; fact is, I don’t think they are a credit to the makers. But I do know this: I made rails then, and I think I could make better ones than these now.”
The convention moved directly to balloting on the gubernatorial nomination. Judd ran strongly in front, but was short of a majority. On the fourth ballot, Leonard Swett, who was losing ground, urged his supporters to vote for Richard Yates, who won. Yates, who was a Lincoln protégé in the Whig Party, accepted with an endorsement of Lincoln, which set off another demonstration. Wentworth was ecstatic at Judd’s demise, but Judd’s composure in defeat and prompt endorsement of Yates was received with acclaim and Wentworth was cast as the spoiler. The Chicago Press and Tribune, undoubtedly reflecting Lincoln’s point of view, wrote that “many delegates now regret that they did not vote for him [Judd]. His slanderers and back-biters now receive the indignant execrations of those delegates whom their falsehoods deceived. The friends of Mr. Swett attribute his failure to get the nomination for Governor to Wentworth, whom they heartily denounce for his impertinent interference with the Convention, thereby creating a prejudice against the person he advocated.”
The next day, the Decatur convention passed a resolution instructing the delegation to vote as a unit for Lincoln: “Resolved: Abraham Lincoln is the first choice of the Republican party of Illinois for the Presidency, and instructing the delegates to the Chicago Convention to use all honorable means to secure his nomination, and to cast the vote of the State as a unit for him.” The leader of the Seward delegates, Thomas J. Turner, a former speaker of the Illinois House, from Freeport, rose to object to any instruction. But John M. Palmer, a stalwart Lincoln man, replied, “Is he so blind and so deaf that he cannot see and hear that this Convention is literally sitting on a volcano of its own enthusiasm for Abraham Lincoln, and just aching to give three cheers and a tiger for Old Abe?” Turner was overridden, and the unit rule imposed. Still, Swett later observed, “Our delegation was instructed for him, but of the twenty-two votes in it, by incautiously selecting the men, there were eight who would gladly have gone for Seward.” The unit rule turned out to be essential discipline on the delegation. “Every Body for Lincoln,” read the headline in the Press and Tribune.
After the first day of the convention, Lincoln gathered Judd, Swett, Davis, state senator Burton C. Cook, and other members of the delegate selection committee, and conferred in a nearby park. They carefully went over the list for the national convention. Lincoln as the preferred candidate could name four at-large delegates. He named Judd, the reward for his steadfastness and skill; Davis, who, despite his recent mischievous bungling, was a formidable politico; and Gustave Koerner, a strategic choice to win over the German Americans. He also named Orville H. Browning over the objection of Oglesby. “I know that old Browning is not for me,” explained Lincoln, but he “will do more harm on the outside than he could on the inside.” Once Bates faded, Browning would prove useful. “When Orville sees this he’ll undoubtedly come over to me, and do us some good with the Bates men.” Notably left out was “Long John” Wentworth. “His desire to be a delegate to the Chicago Convention or a member of the State Committee,” said the Press and Tribune, “was treated with utter scorn, and the man whom he sought to blacken stands higher in public estimation than ever before.”
As for John Hanks, he kept the original two rails, sold both, one for five dollars, and promptly drove out to collect a wagonload of more, which he stored in Oglesby’s barn, doing a booming business at a dollar apiece. “Then,” recalled Oglesby, “other people went into the business, and the supply seemed inexhaustible.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THE WIGWAM
Thurlow Weed, confident of his ability to pull the strings for the nomination of Seward, dismissed Lincoln to delegates as “a backwoods lawyer” who was preposterously being pushed forward as a “presidential possibility.” Seward was the preeminent man of his party, the former governor of New York, its senator, anointed as a young man by John Quincy Adams, tribune of the antislavery cause, maker of Whig presidential candidates for as long as there was such a party, adviser to Whig presidents, just returned from Europe, where he was treated as the next president.
Abraham Lincoln, May 20, 1860
The center spread of Harper’s Weekly of “Prominent Candidates for the Republican Nomination” featured a large portrait of Seward surrounded by the lesser lights, with Lincoln relegated to the bottom line, between John C. Frémont, the candidate of the last convention, and John Bell, who was the candidate of the Constitutional Union Party. Cassius Clay, a very dark horse, was in a far corner. Lincoln was shunted below Salmon P. Chase, whose Ohio delegation was hopelessly split, wrecking his chances from the start; Speaker of the House William Pennington, who was not a candidate, and whose picture was there apparently to fill in a space; ancient Justice John McLean, who had some old admirers and a small contingent from Ohio lying in wait to undermine Chase; and Senator Simon Cameron, favorite son of Pennsylvania and no place else. Near Seward, on the top line, were a gray-bearded Edward Bates, being handled by the Blairs for their own purposes, the former Know Nothing who advertised himself as not quite a Republican; and Congressman Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts, another darkest of horses, too closely linked to the Know Nothings. Below Seward was a vista of Washington with the White House in the middle ground. But the convention was in Chicago.
“Prominent Candidates For The Republican Presidential Nomination At Chicago,” Harper’s Weekly
Chicago was Lincoln’s city. The explosive growth of the city revolutionized the balance of political power in the state from the south and middle to the north. Chicago made possible the Illinois Republican Party. Lincoln and his men knew it, lived it, and felt it, and the others did not. His wrinkled suit and shrill Kentucky accent that had created initial apprehension at Cooper Union misled the New York audience into thinking of him as a rustic savant, something like the mermaid at P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, but come to life before their eyes, moving them to wonder. But Lincoln was not just from Springfield, or a wanderer on the Eighth Judicial Circuit of central Illinois. Even before he came to Chicago in 1847 to attend the River and Harbor Convention to protest President Polk’s veto of internal improvements for its development, he was one of the makers of the city. As the Whig floor leader of the legislature he had engineered passage of the Illinois and Michigan Canal that connected Chicago to the Mississippi River. Lincoln was a “backwoods lawyer” whose driven aspiration was a flight from coun
try life, and who was quite consciously an agent of urbanization, modernity, and industrialism.
The former fur trading post on the lake was a town of ten thousand when Lincoln first saw it. Barely more than a decade later more railroads converged on Chicago than any other city in the world. Overnight it had displaced St. Louis as the gateway between the East and the West. Cyrus McCormick’s manufacturing works produced more than four thousand reapers a year, the harbinger of the assembly line and mass production. Chicago’s markets dominated the richest agricultural land on earth. Twelve huge grain silos, the city’s early skyscrapers, loomed above the endless urban sprawl. The Chicago Board of Trade created the futures market to set the price of wheat and hogs, the first commodity exchange. Chicago’s harbor was the world’s largest lumberyard, hundreds of boats arriving by the hour. The great meatpacking operations that occupied miles would soon employ one fifth of the city’s workers. Chicago was being feverishly built on free labor, floated on risk, propelled by rail and water, rewarding the inventive and the brash with little time to defer to tradition or authority.
In the counting rooms of Wall Street and Boston’s State Street, long established relations with Southern interests still prevailed. In the metropolis on the prairie, cotton was not king. Antislavery sentiment was nearly universal. The Free Soil Party carried the city in 1848. In 1850, the Chicago Common Council voted a resolution: “That the fugitive slave law lately passed by Congress is a cruel and unjust law, and ought not to be respected by an intelligent community, and that this Council will not require the city Police to render any assistance for the arrest of fugitive slaves.”
All sorts of Lincoln’s friends had close ties to the city, both political and business. Lincoln himself invested in Iowa real estate with Norman B. Judd. John Whitfield Bunn, the Springfield merchant who financed Lincoln’s campaigns and was the initial contributor and treasurer of his 1860 effort, along with his brother Jacob Bunn were major investors in a wide array of Chicago-based firms. “Lincoln’s political career can be viewed as the first instance in the history of the United States of large-scale corporate interests successfully supporting a Republican candidate for the presidency,” wrote the family’s historian. But as John Bunn pointed out, he always acted at Lincoln’s direction.
The rise of Chicago was entwined with the rise of Lincoln. Lincoln was offered a partnership in a Chicago law firm in 1849, which he turned it down, but tried many cases in its courts. He knew the leading members of the bar, the editors of the newspapers, and the politicians. From the moment he thrust himself back into public life after 1854, he became embroiled in Chicago’s fractious politics that threatened his ability to hold together the newly formed Republican Party. He operated behind the scenes in local elections using his agents so his hand would not be detected, especially to upset Douglas on the one hand and the Know Nothings on the other. He addressed crowds at Chicago, raised money, and even brought his young son Willie with him on one trip to stay at the Tremont House hotel. “I had made his acquaintance as early as 1856,” recalled John M. Palmer, later a general, Illinois governor, and U.S. senator, “and had, as a young and ardent Republican, frequently occasion to consult with him in regard to political matters while acting as secretary of one of our young Republican clubs.” Once, waiting in a Chicago courthouse with Palmer and Judd to appear on behalf of a client, Lincoln sat in on a trial out of curiosity in which a lawyer named Blackwell held forth on the habits of storks in Holland. “That beats me!” said Lincoln. “Blackwell can concentrate more words into the fewest ideas of any man I ever knew. The storks of Holland! Why, they would eat him up before he began to get half through telling that story about them.”
In late March of 1860, Lincoln came to Chicago to argue as the lead attorney in the case of Johnston v. Jones and Marsh before the U.S. Circuit Court. The so-called “Sandbar” case involved ownership of some of the most valuable lakefront property in the city. The Army Corps of Engineers had dredged a sandbar to create a deep channel where the Chicago River met Lake Michigan for easier access to the harbor. North of the channel the tides washed in the sand and sediment to make a sizable parcel of new land. Today this area is among the most expensive real estate in the city, the northeast land running along Michigan Avenue. William S. Johnston owned a lot adjoining that of William Jones and Sylvester Marsh. Johnston sued Jones and Marsh to eject them from the new land. After four trials, Jones appealed a verdict in Johnston’s favor to the federal court, hiring Lincoln as his lawyer. The lead attorney for Johnston was Lincoln’s friend, Isaac N. Arnold, already preparing to help advance his nomination at the convention. After an eleven-day trial, Lincoln won the “Sandbar” case. Among the witnesses he called was John H. Kinzie, one of earliest settlers, who had arrived in 1803, when there were one hundred people in Chicago. “I believe,” Lincoln told the jury, “he is common law here, as one who dates back to the time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.”
The day after the trial ended, April 5, Lincoln was met at the Chicago train station by Harvey B. Hurd, a Chicago lawyer, professor at the newly founded Northwestern University, and an ardent abolitionist, who was secretary of the local branch of the Kansas Aid Society and had helped shelter John Brown when he passed through on his way east. Hurd was a close friend and later the law partner of Grant Goodrich, the Chicago lawyer who had offered Lincoln a partnership, also active in the antislavery movement and a leader in creating Northwestern. Hurd was one of the founders and real estate developers of the town of Evanston, just north of Chicago, and he escorted Lincoln there. Lincoln had accepted an invitation to visit from Julius White, the harbormaster of Chicago, who was involved in the “Sandbar” case. Many of the townspeople, including the faculty at Northwestern, uniformly Republicans, gathered to hear Lincoln give a little speech from the porch of White’s house. (Lincoln would appoint White collector of the Port of Chicago.)
Afterward, Lincoln went back to Chicago for the sole purpose of sitting for a life mask and bust to be cast by the sculptor Leonard Volk. Volk, twenty-three years old, would later become the founder of the Chicago Academy of Design, now the School of the Art Institute. He was related by marriage to Stephen A. Douglas, his wife’s cousin. Douglas was Volk’s patron, subsidizing his study in Rome and Florence, and Volk named his son in his honor, Stephen A. Douglas Volk. Earlier in the year, Volk had made a mask and statue of Douglas. Volk came by the courthouse during the “Sandbar” case to ask Lincoln if he would do a sitting. He had the idea that Lincoln might be the Republican candidate. Just as Lincoln posed for his photograph taken by Mathew Brady, he decided to be a subject for Leonard Volk. He was interested in exploring depictions of his image. “Mr. Volk,” he said, “I have never sat before to sculptor or painter—only for daguerreotypes and photographs. What shall I do?” Lincoln sat quietly for an hour while the plaster cast on his face set. He returned the next few days while Volk worked on the bust. On Sunday, Lincoln told him that a friend had invited him to church, “but I thought I’d rather come and sit for the bust. The fact is, I don’t like to hear cut and dried sermons. No, when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.” “And,” Volk recalled, “he extended his long arms, at the same time suiting the action to the words.”
In January 1861, Volk visited President-elect Lincoln, no longer cleanshaven but with the stubble of a beard, sitting in his parlor at his home in Springfield surrounded by friends and politicians. Lincoln had posed for a bust from another sculptor, but couldn’t make out the likeness. “But,” he said, “in two or three days after Mr. Volk commenced my bust, there was the animal himself!”
After sitting for Volk, Lincoln returned to Springfield to await the news that would be forthcoming from the convention at Chicago. Chicago was even more of a factor for the Republican convention than Charleston was for the Democratic one. The campaign of the “backwoods lawyer” had the place wired. Chicago was the convention site, after all, because Judd had convinced
the Republican National Committee that Illinois would have no favorite son candidate. Now Judd finagled the Illinois Central and Prairie State Railroads to provide half-rate fares to Chicago, flooding the city with Lincoln supporters on a lark to “make history.” Tens of thousands of Lincoln men roamed the streets in a holiday mood. The size of the crowds in Chicago dwarfed those of Charleston and made “the little excitement” there seem “insignificant,” according to Murat Halstead.
Delegation by delegation entering the city at the Great Union Depot were greeted by salutes and rockets fired by the Chicago Light Artillery. The Wide Awakes, companies of young Republicans in military-like drill wearing caps and capes and carrying oil-lit torches, accompanied by the Light Guard Band, escorted the delegates to their hotels with march music and fanfare.
David Davis arrived in Chicago on Saturday, May 12, “the first on the ground,” four days before the convention’s start, startled to discover that Judd, who had done so much to arrange matters, had in his preoccupation with his own failed campaign for the gubernatorial nomination neglected to set up a headquarters. Immediately, Davis spoke with a friend, the owner of Tremont House, John B. Drake, the city’s leading hotelier, a Republican, and partner in various enterprises in Chicago with Lincoln’s backer Jacob Bunn, including the Chicago Secure Depository Company and the Chicago and Alton Railroad. (Drake’s sons would establish the Drake and Blackstone hotels, still operating. The Drake, on the “Magnificent Mile,” is located on land that was at issue in the “Sandbar” case.) Drake’s Tremont hotel was booked, but Davis paid guests in adjoining rooms to leave. A sign was affixed to the door: “Illinois Headquarters.” From the window Davis could see a banner hung on the building of the Chicago Journal across the street: “SEWARD.” “Here without anybody electing him to the position, he at once became the leader of all the Illinois men,” recalled Leonard Swett of Davis. “He told me when I arrived there Monday to join his staff and go to work, and if everybody would also work, the nomination could be made.”
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