All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  Davis created a political machine overnight, marshaling the Illinois delegates and alternates; the entourage of the Eighth Judicial Circuit, including Jesse Fell, Leonard Swett, William Herndon, Stephen Trigg Logan, and Ward Hill Lamon; Illinois state officials Ozias M. Hatch, secretary of state; Jesse Dubois, state auditor; and William Butler, state treasurer; editors of the Chicago Press and Tribune and other Illinois journalists; and Mark Delahay, Lincoln’s distant cousin from Kansas, whose expenses Lincoln personally paid. A close friend of Davis, John Z. Goodrich, a former congressman and newspaper editor from western Massachusetts, and member of the Republican National Committee, moved into the Tremont House to help. Taylor Hawkins, an influential Iowa delegate, the mayor of Keokuk, and an old friend of Lincoln from his childhood in Kentucky, joined the group.

  Judd and Davis put aside their antagonism to labor together in common cause. “Long John” Wentworth was the outrider, angry that Lincoln had named Judd and not him as a delegate, and out of resentment and mischief sent the police on raids of the extensive whorehouses to arrest delegates. He loudly talked up Seward in hotel lobbies. Davis, who had been pressing Wentworth on Lincoln, assigned a man to shadow him everywhere to rebut him.

  “No one ever thought of questioning Davis’ right to send men hither and thither, nor to question his judgment,” said Swett. The Illinoisans “worked like Turks for Lincoln’s nomination,” William A. Jayne, Lincoln’s old friend, personal physician, and a state senator, reported to Trumbull. “Judge Davis is furious,” Dubois wrote Lincoln. “Never saw him work so hard and so quiet in all my life.”

  David Davis

  “He seated himself behind a big table in the rooms of the headquarters and organized committees of visitation to the various delegations, and did the other work of the convention,” recalled Swett. “For instance, he had Samuel C. Parks, of Logan, who was born in Vermont, organize a delegation of about four, also from Vermont, to visit the delegates from that State; and he had me, from the State of Maine, organize a delegation, and visit my old friends from the Pine Tree State, and every man was to come back and report to him. And so he labored with all, issued his orders to all, and knew the situation of every delegation.” Native Kentuckians Logan and Richard Yates, the Illinois Republican candidate for governor, were sent to the Kentucky delegation; Lamon, the native Virginian, to the Virginians. “No men ever worked as our boys did. I did not, the whole week I was there, sleep two hours a night,” wrote Swett.

  “The gods help those who help themselves,” editorialized the Press and Tribune. “Illinois is bound by all considerations of self defense to labor for the man who can bring her to the land of promise, and so she will be found laboring in the Chicago Convention.” For the benefit of delegates, the paper published the results of the race for the Senate: Lincoln, 125,275 votes; Douglas, 121,190.

  “Availability” was the word most frequently bandied about the candidates. It meant electability. The case for Lincoln as the most available man was seemingly paradoxical. He was as principled as Seward on slavery, their positions indistinguishable, and Lincoln’s “house divided” statement preceded Seward’s controversial “irrepressible conflict” one, but Lincoln was perceived as the moderate and Seward the radical. Lincoln was also not a nativist, unlike Bates, and yet acceptable to nativists, unlike Seward. The Press and Tribune spelled out the Lincoln strategy for the convention in two editorials. Under the headline, “The Winning Man—Abraham Lincoln,” the paper stated on May 15, “Without a stain of Know-Nothingism on his skirts, he is acceptable to the mass of the American party.” In a prescient article the next day on “The Doubtful States,” it published the vote totals of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, and Illinois from the 1856 presidential election to show that if the Fillmore votes were combined with those for Frémont they would constitute majorities in those states. “A nomination which will drive the Fillmore vote over to John Bell must necessarily prove fatal to the Republican ticket. Who has the hardiness to affirm that Mr. Seward is popular with the Fillmore men? Or that he is the best candidate to secure their support.”

  Lincoln’s team ruthlessly exploited his rivals’ vulnerabilities to demonstrate their unavailability. The discrediting of Bates created a vacuum that lifted Lincoln and forced a choice between Lincoln and Seward. In the two-man contest, the availability question became acute and the momentum rushed to the least tainted.

  Bates was a dignified and passive candidate taken up by Francis P. Blair and his sons in order to block Seward. Blair, the old Jacksonian Democrat, had viewed Seward, the preeminent Whig, as the partisan enemy for decades. But mostly he thought that in an election that the Republicans ought to win, Seward was the Republican most likely to lose. Blair hoped to make Bates the candidate as he had made John C. Frémont the candidate in 1856. But Frémont had a romantic heroic image, was a member of the Blair extended family through his marriage to Jesse Benton, and had no real opposition for the nomination once Seward decided he would wait for his chance in 1860. Bates had endorsed the opponent of Francis P. Blair, Jr., when he ran for the Congress as a Republican in 1858, but the Blairs were not about to let that slight get in the way of having an available candidate of their own.

  “Dined with F.P. Blair Jr.,” read Bates’s diary for April 27, 1859—“a confidential conference” of “influential leaders” to “adopt me.” They “say,” Bates recorded, “that Mr. Seward cannot get the nomination of his party, perhaps not because he is not the acknowledged head of the party and entitled to the lead, but because the party is not quite strong enough to triumph alone; and his nomination therefore would ensure defeat.”

  But Bates’s supposed strength was also his weakness. He was raised up as a candidate on his negative capability, being not a Republican, which was touted as his pulling power to unreconstructed Old Whigs, Know Nothings, and the softest of Republicans. Bates’s personal politics were those of the Constitutional Unionists, and he even had hoped for their nomination. The flaw in his strategy was that his appeal to nativist prejudice did not cut only one way.

  The German Americans were a decisive voting bloc in the swing states; their leadership was highly organized and they drew a red line against Bates. Failing to account for the Germans as potent political actors revealed incomprehensible blindness on the part of the Bates team. His candidacy was headed straight for the rocks. During the two days before the convention, on May 14 and 15, the Conference of the Germans at the Deutsches Haus in Chicago raised an ultimatum that the Republican candidate could not be nativist in any way, shape, or form, and proscribed Bates.

  The movement against Bates that lead to the ultimatum at the conference began with the Iowa Republican clubs, which passed resolutions on March 7 reading: “Whereas, therefore, Edward Bates has shown himself to be an approver and supporter of the plans and measures of the Pro-Slavery Know-Nothings, and a disapprover and opponent of the Republican principles. . . . Resolved, that the nomination of Edward Bates as the Republican candidate for the Presidency would imply a desertion from Republican principles and that we, therefore, under no circumstances will vote for the Hon. Edward Bates.” The German Republicans of Ohio, meeting in Cincinnati, called for the pre-convention conference.

  The Illinois Republican convention at Decatur that endorsed Lincoln had adopted a two-point platform at his direction, one of which was in favor of a Homestead Act and the other against the nativist restrictions against immigrants, specifically the Massachusetts law that denied voting rights to naturalized citizens for two years after they had become Americans. “That we are in favor of giving full and efficient protection to all the rights of all citizens, at home and abroad, without regard to the place of their birth. That our naturalization laws, having been enacted by the Fathers of the Revolution and the Constitution, and being just in principle, we are opposed to any change being made in them intended to enlarge the time now required to secure the rights of citizenship under them, and that the State Legislatures should pass no law
discriminating between native born and naturalized citizens in the exercise of the right of suffrage.”

  The Illinois platform was the high standard for German Republicans. It was well-known among them that it was Lincoln’s platform. It was equally well-known to them that the Philadelphia Platform of the 1856 convention was exactly the formula that Lincoln had approved in the founding document of the Illinois Republican Party. The German Republican Club of New York had already called on German Republicans across the country to endorse a common platform based on the principles expressed in Philadelphia. That platform was proposed there by George Schneider of the Illinois Staats-Zeitung newspaper. Schneider himself was at the conference at Deutsches Haus; so were other forceful Illinois Germans aligned with Lincoln, including Friedrich Hecker, whose burned house was rebuilt on funds Lincoln had raised, and Gustave Koerner, Lincoln’s chosen delegate-at-large. But these pro-Lincoln German connections were invisible to those nativists worried about Seward’s long anti-nativist record and who saw Lincoln as more acceptable. Meanwhile, introducing the German factor into the nomination battle would prove devastating to Bates’s claim to be the most “available” and sharpened the contest between Lincoln and Seward.

  Bates’s most visible promoter on the scene was the mercurial Horace Greeley, mounting his own stop-Seward movement. The editor of the most influential national Republican newspaper was a malcontent, an idealist, and given to enthusiasms that he fooled himself into thinking showed his superior pragmatism. In a rage over not being slated years ago as lieutenant governor by Weed and Seward, passed over for none other than Henry J. Raymond of the Times, Greeley was set on revenge and thought of himself as adopting the methods of Weed against Seward. Before the convention he dispatched reporters north and west to spread the word that Seward could not win. Yet he perversely stopped at Weed’s house in Albany on his way to Chicago and left the impression he would support Seward. Greeley managed to get himself credentialed as a Bates delegate from Oregon. He was ubiquitous in the hotels and on the streets, arguing as he told the Kansas delegation, “So, to name Seward, is to invite defeat.” “He was not idle a moment, and, wherever he happened to be, was surrounded by a gaping crowd,” recalled Isaac Hill Bromley, an editor of the New York Tribune, who was present in Chicago. Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times and a Seward stalwart, wrote, “Mr. Greeley labored harder, and did tenfold more, than the whole family of Blairs . . . and he devoted every hour of the interval to the most steady and relentless prosecution of the main business which took him thither,—the defeat of Governor Seward. He labored personally with the delegates as they arrived,—commending himself always to their confidence by professions of regard and the most zealous friendship for Governor Seward, but presenting defeat, even in New York, as the inevitable result of his nomination.” Greeley was effective against Seward, but ineffectual for Bates. “We let Greeley run his Bates machine,” said Swett, “but got most of them for a second choice.” Bromley observed that as the stooped and bright-eyed Greeley buttonholed delegates, “Some mischievous fellow pinned a Seward badge on his coattail; it amused the crowd for a moment without giving him the slightest disturbance.”

  Another editor from the New York Tribune, Abram J. Dittenhoefer, who traipsed with Greeley among the delegates, concluded

  from my intimacy with Mr. Greeley, that the factor which had the most to do with Seward’s defeat was the fear of Henry S. Lane, Republican candidate for Governor of Indiana, and of Andrew G. Curtin, Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania, that Seward could not carry these two States. This weakness would not only insure defeat of the Presidential ticket, but would carry down with it the aspirations of these two Gubernatorial candidates. I talked with both of these able politicians on the subject, and the reasons they gave for their opposition to Seward were that he had antagonized the Protestant element of the country and the remnants of the old “Know Nothing party” by his advocacy, in a message to the New York Legislature, of a division of the school funds between Catholic parochial schools and the common or public schools of the States in proportion to the number of Catholics and non-Catholics. How much ground there was for the anxiety of Lane and Curtin I have never been able to settle in my mind. Whether they were unduly alarmed or not, the dissemination of these views among the delegates created a noticeable weakening on the part of Seward’s friends.

  Neither Indiana nor Pennsylvania was a Republican state. In Pennsylvania, the label of Republican was still too controversial and the party was called the People’s Party. Both elections were to be held in October. The combined vote of the Republicans and the Know Nothings in both states exceeded that of the Democrats. Both Lane and Curtin “were looking solely to their own success in October, and their success meant the success of the Republican party in the nation,” wrote Alexander K. McClure, a Pennsylvania politician close to Curtin. “I was with Curtin and interested as he was only in his individual success, as he had summoned me to take charge of his October battle in Pennsylvania. The one thing that Curtin, Lane, and their respective lieutenants agreed upon was that the nomination of Seward meant hopeless defeat.” Both Lane and Curtin were unbothered that Lincoln might appear radical, even more radical than Seward. The insuperable problem with Seward was that he had proposed state funding of Catholic schools, “on that single question when Governor of New York that made him an impossible candidate for President in 1860.”

  Indiana was the first target of the Lincoln men, who had a network of contacts in the neighboring state. Lincoln had already begun the process in response to a letter from Cyrus M. Allen, a lawyer from Vincennes and convention delegate, who wrote Lincoln in April with the intelligence that the delegation would be unpledged, arrive early, and open to hearing from him. Lincoln replied that Jesse Dubois and David Davis would meet him in Chicago. As soon as Davis came to the city he launched into private meetings with the Indiana delegation, intensive talks that continued day after day.

  “Things are working admirably well now,” Delahay wrote Lincoln on Monday, May 14. “The Stock is gradually ‘rising.’ Indiana is all right. . . . Penna says we can’t give our vote for Seward. N York in return says N York will not go Cameron, and they whisper, that a man with Democratic antecedents can’t be nominated for Pres—this all to my mind looks as well as we could wish.” William Butler wrote Lincoln that day, “Your chances are brightening, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa Maine and New Hampshire will present a solid front for you as they stand this morning. Ohio and Pennsylvania divided. Ohio inclining for you.” Within hours Butler sent another dispatch. “The Pennsylvania and New York delegates are quarreling,” he wrote. “The Pennsylvania delegation will not go for Mr. Seward under no circumstances. They tell us to stand fast never go to Mr. Seward they are much excited—The New York men tell us to stand firm, don’t go to Mr. Cameron. The respective delegations from New York and Pennsylvania have both proposed to run you for Vice President. We have persistently refused to suffer your name used for Vice President on any ticket. Things yet looks favorable, though I can’t tell what things turn it may take. Prospects looks bright for you.”

  Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Press and Tribune, told Lincoln biographer Ida M. Tarbell that “half the Indiana delegation had been won for Lincoln on the ground of availability before the convention met.” Swett, however, stated Indiana “came to us unitedly” and “acted efficiently with us” by then. Charles H. Ray, publisher of the Press and Tribune, claimed that to secure Indiana’s support he had traded a cabinet post for Caleb B. Smith and Indian commissioner for William P. Dole. “We are going to have Indiana for Old Abe, sure,” he says he told Davis. “How did you get it?” “By the Lord,” he explained, “we promised them everything they asked.” Jesse Fell, however, said that “a disposition of favors was a good deal spoken of at Chicago, in a quiet way, though of course no improper pledges . . . were asked . . . and [they] could not be given.” Caleb Smith, an Old Whig who had served with Lincoln in the Congress,
confirmed Fell’s account of a suggestive method. “The Republicans of [Indiana] generally supposed that Mr. L. would select some man from this state for a place in his cabinet.”

  Overly enthusiastic and impatient, Ray wrote Lincoln on the 14th, in a communiqué he marked “Profoundly Private,” “Your friends are at work for you hard, and with great success. Your show on the first ballot will not be confined to Illinois, and after that it will be strongly developed. But you need a few trusty friends here to say words for you that may be necessary to be said. Dast you put yourself in the hands of Judd, David Davis, and, if there is no better man, Ray? A pledge or two may be necessary when the pinch comes.”

  The impulse to cut deals may have been inspired as an attempt to equal the wiles of Thurlow Weed, who held forth in his packed parlor at the Richmond House pouring a bottomless supply of champagne and handing out an endless supply of cigars, surrounded by “a crowd of men, some of whom did not strike me as desirable companions,” as Carl Schurz recalled. He came to Weed’s suite as a leader of the Wisconsin delegation pledged to Seward and to get direction. “But we did not find there any of the distinguished members of that delegation whom we most wished to see—William M. Evarts, George William Curtis, Henry J. Raymond, Governor Morgan, and others.” Instead he discovered a gaggle of New York politicians, “apparently of the lower sort, whom Thurlow Weed had brought with him to aid him in doing his work. What that work consisted in I could guess from the conversations I was permitted to hear, for they talked very freely about the great services they had rendered or were going to render. . . . Among these men Thurlow Weed moved as the great captain, with ceaseless activity and noiseless step, receiving their reports and giving new instructions in his peculiar whisper, now and then taking one into a corner of the room for secret talk, or disappearing with another through a side door for transactions still more secret.”