All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  “I have observed that those candidates who are most cautious of making pledges, stating opinions or entering into arrangements of any sort for the future save themselves and their friends a great deal of trouble and have the best chance of success,” William Cullen Bryant wrote Lincoln on June 16. The editor of the New York Post, host to Lincoln at Cooper Union, who had been at the Chicago convention, and was now a Lincoln presidential elector from New York, advised him that reserve was his wisest strategy. “The people have nominated you without any pledges or engagements of any sort; they are satisfied with you as you are, and they want you to do nothing at present but allow yourself to be elected. I am sure that I but express the wish of the vast majority of your friends when I say that they want you to make no speeches, write no letters as a candidate, enter into no pledges, make no promises, nor even give any of those kind words which men are apt to interpret into promises.”

  Abraham Lincoln’s membership certificate in the Chicago Wide-Awake Club

  Lincoln’s eyes were open and his mouth shut. “I hesitate to say it, but it really appears now, as if the success of the Republican ticket is inevitable,” Lincoln confided in a letter on August 4 to Simeon Francis, the founder of the Illinois State Journal, who had moved a year earlier to Oregon to edit the Oregon Farmer. Lincoln’s admission of the obvious was restricted to private correspondence. He conducted his campaign by reticence. He delivered no speeches, wrote no public letters, and gave no substantive interviews. His silence was more than a matter of following the tradition of maintaining the dignity befitting a statesman and cultivating the sense that the office found the man. Speaking was the sign of the desperate, as Douglas demonstrated daily. Spelling out policy positions in letters was dangerous, as Henry Clay proved in 1844 in letters that alienated his supporters and encouraged his detractors. Lincoln was quiet, but alert and wary.

  The crisis had begun. The crack-up of the Democratic Party that made Lincoln’s election inevitable was the most obvious sign. In the North the overnight mobilization of the Wide-Awakes was a kind of prerevolutionary upsurge. Lincoln’s motionlessness did not mean that he was inert. Nor was he dormant. But the politician believed that politics as usual would ultimately prevail. On August 15, he wrote a friend, acknowledging the letter of John Minor Botts, the Old Whig from Virginia supporting Bell, who advised that “in no probable event will there be any very formidable effort to break up the Union. The people of the South have too much of good sense, and good temper, to attempt the ruin of the government.” Lincoln seemed to agree with that assessment. Lincoln saw Douglas’s shipwreck, but he was the beneficiary, not its victim. Douglas inhabited the experience that Lincoln could view only from the outside. Douglas was also, unlike Lincoln, a national figure, who knew firsthand all the men of his party and their motives. Lincoln was at a half distance, even personally unfamiliar with many of the leading personalities of his own party. He did not have any relationships with the Southern leaders, except a long-ago tie to Alexander Stephens from the days when he was a young Whig in the Congress working for the election of Zachary Taylor. Lincoln’s experience of the South came largely from Kentucky, a border state with a border state of mind. Extrapolating from Kentucky, which was about to vote for Bell and give Breckinridge only about one third of its votes, was a misleading Southern indicator. Certainly, Kentucky in the fall of 1860 did not want “to attempt the ruin of the government,” but the same could not be said for South Carolina. Yet in his immobility Lincoln steadfastly refused to move in the slightest from his position against the extension of slavery and in defense of the integrity of the federal government. The pressure on him to back down, fatally compromise, and withdraw from his principles was about to begin, and would build until the firing on Fort Sumter. His silence during the campaign, even if he misjudged the intensity and dynamic of secession, was not indifference, but a principled virtue.

  Lincoln did his best to position himself as unthreatening to the South. He used a reporter from the New York Herald to attempt to communicate the message. Simon P. Hanscom, the Herald correspondent, came to Springfield, which the paper dubbed “The Republican Mecca,” in late October. The Herald was an unlikely outlet for Lincoln to use. The paper called him “a vulgar village politician,” one of its nicer epithets. It regularly peppered its columns with “nigger.” Lincoln had made the mistake of speaking too freely in replying to another of its reporters, who asked him if he’d like to visit his home state of Kentucky, that he might be lynched. The paper had a heyday turning the gaffe into a controversy. Hanscom was something of a ringer, a clerk for the Republicans on the House committee on the Kansas troubles, who also wrote for the New York Tribune. “In conversation with Lincoln I found him eminently conservative,” he wrote, and “the most violent Southern fire-eater will find it difficult to question his patriotism or impartiality.” Hanscom also confidently but unreliably reported “with some degree of confidence” that “Mr. Seward will not hold a place in the next administration.” He also pointed to Lincoln’s comments on his visit to Kansas, undoubtedly directed by Lincoln, in which he spoke about secessionists suffering the same fate as John Brown if they chose to break up the Union.

  Lincoln quietly dispatched Medill of the Chicago Press and Tribune to negotiate a détente with the Herald’s editor, James Gordon Bennett, “His Satanic Majesty.” “He can do us much harm if hostile. If neutralized a point is gained,” Medill wrote Lincoln. Bennett told Medill on July 5 that Lincoln would be “broken down” by the “radical element,” “the first time he said, you caught a runaway nigger, and sent him back to slavery you would raise the d—l in your party, and thereupon the old Satanic laughed loud and boisterously. It was on that rock (the Fugitive law) that Fillmore ship—cracked, and you would dash to pieces on the same rock, he was confident.” Bennett was certain Lincoln would be elected, which would cause “the Republicans be split to pieces by being put into power.” “When I arose to leave him, he said ‘we could beat your man Lincoln, if we would unite, but I think it would be better for the country to let him be elected. I’ll not be hard on him.”

  The unscrupulous Bennett instantly broke his promise and was soon comparing Lincoln’s “public declarations” to “the bloody acts of John Brown,” and warning that Lincoln would impose black equality. What “decent white man,” he editorialized, would “vote himself down to the level of the negro race?” (It was a rare use of the proper word “negro” in the Herald.) On October 24, the paper reported on the large fusion rally in New York. Bennett himself had been instrumental behind the scenes pushing for the fusion of the Douglas, Bell, and Breckinridge forces in the state. The headlines ran: “Tremendous Uprising of the People. Turn Out of the Conservatives Last Evening. The Wide Awakes Completely Squelched. Bell-Ringers, Little Giants and Breckinridgers Side by Side.” The Herald prominently printed in featured boxes the mottos of banners held at the rally: “We want none but white men at the helm”; “No niggers allowed in this club”; “I see the nigger peeping through the fence”; “To the memory of Old Abe Lincoln, who died November 6, 1860.”

  The Herald also hyped the “the inconsistency and insincerity of ‘honest Abe,’ ” by featuring the attacks of Wendell Phillips, the radical abolitionist. “Who is this huckster in politics?” asked Phillips in a speech on May 30 in Boston. Lincoln was simply “a country court lawyer, whose only recommendation was that out of the emptiness of his past, lying newspapers could make him any character they pleased.” Phillips followed with an article in Garrison’s The Liberator on June 22 headlined: “Abraham Lincoln, the Slave-hound of Illinois.”

  Phillips’s speech was delivered at the Massachusetts state convention of the Radical Abolition Party, which nominated Gerrit Smith for president, who had recently been released from the insane asylum where he committed himself after being exposed as one of the Secret Six behind John Brown. The tiny party would not receive a measurable vote in 1860. But Phillips’s attack was the beginning of rising abolitionist c
riticism of Lincoln as slow, vacillating, and compromising. Phillips’s censure also disclosed the factional and schismatic nature of abolitionist politics. William Lloyd Garrison, who insisted on publishing Phillips’s article only under his byline in order to separate it from The Liberator’s editorial position, considered Gerrit Smith’s nomination “extremely farcical.” Frederick Douglass endorsed Lincoln a week after the Republican convention as “one of the most frank, honest men in political life,” but under the stress of Phillips’s and a few others’ hostile remarks switched to support Gerrit Smith. Smith himself privately wrote Joshua Giddings about Lincoln, “I feel confident that he is in his heart an abolitionist,” and that his election would “be regarded as an Abolition victory.” Giddings wrote Lincoln a congratulatory letter and publicly praised him as “honest and faithful,” and campaigned strenuously for him as if it was “a sort of jubilee.” Two men close to John Brown endorsed Lincoln. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, one of the Secret Six, declined to back the Radical Abolitionists in favor of “the excellence of the Republican nominations.” Richard J. Hinton, a journalist who accompanied Brown in Kansas, wrote the first campaign biography of Lincoln, noting that he was not a “radical” though “decidedly opposed to slavery,” and not “old” despite being called “Honest old Abe.” Sumner endorsed Lincoln, as did Henry Wilson, and others down the list of Republican senators and members of Congress. In the end, almost all the prominent abolitionists supported Lincoln’s candidacy, and a few criticized Phillips.

  Lincoln was known in New York through his Cooper Union appearance. He was known in New England mainly through his scant biographies, his reputation from the 1858 Senate campaign, and the testimonials of his friends. None of the New England abolitionists had actually met him. Herndon had a worshipful and epistolary relationship with Theodore Parker, but Parker died in Florence the week before Lincoln was nominated. Herndon visited Garrison in 1858 on his Eastern tour to turn Greeley-influenced Republicans and abolitionists away from supporting Douglas over Lincoln in the Senate race. Herndon explained to Garrison that Lincoln was “all right on slavery.” He understood that Garrison was hostile to politics in general and in particular to strategic antislavery politics instead of immediate abolition. “We are as we are,” Herndon told Garrison. “You hate Republicanism, but never mind that: it is a midlink,” which would, he suggested, help “climb to heaven.” His effort to persuade Garrison of the value of both politics and Lincoln to his cause fell, at least in 1860, on deaf ears. The distorted image that Phillips projected for sectarian purposes combined with the antipolitical current that was always present in the abolitionist movement formed a lasting impression of suspicion about Lincoln among them. Three days after Lincoln’s election, Garrison wrote in The Liberator that “we are warranted in entertaining no confident hopes,” and that Lincoln’s administration “must be a continual support of slavery.”

  The Illinois abolitionists, however, knew Lincoln, sought him out to create the Illinois Republican Party, and had come to see him as their political leader, not one of them, but in large part because of that, indispensable. From the moment of his nomination forward, the Illinois abolitionists and preeminently Owen Lovejoy were stalwart regardless of the intensity of criticism from Eastern abolitionists. “I have seen enough of political life to know that it is not altogether a bed of roses,” Lovejoy wrote Lincoln in a congratulatory letter after his nomination. He also sent a book to Mary to ingratiate himself with the person closest to Lincoln who was very skeptical of him because he was an abolitionist. Two days earlier, Lincoln had written an anonymous letter in the Chicago Press and Tribune in a clear signal to Republicans: “Judge Davis expects Lovejoy to be nominated and intends to vote for him.” Davis, in fact, remained dyspeptic on the subject of Lovejoy. “What on earth induced Govr Seward to indorse Lovejoy as he did in his speech,” he complained to Lincoln. Lovejoy, freed from internal strife within the party through Lincoln’s quiet efforts, was released to campaign far and wide for him. One of Lovejoy’s close associates, Ichabod Codding, a member of the small band of original radical founders of the Illinois Republican Party, a minister trained as a speaker against slavery by Theodore Weld in the first organized group of abolitionist circuit riders, worked his heart out for Lincoln, speaking from town to town, and editing A Republican Manual for the Campaign: Facts for the People, The Whole Argument in One Book, which began with Lincoln’s biography, “With His Opinions on Human Rights and the Slavery Question.” Zebina Eastman, who came to Illinois after Elijah P. Lovejoy’s murder to crusade as an abolitionist editor, was initially skeptical of Lincoln, but had learned to trust him, and would receive President Lincoln’s appointment as consul to Bristol, England. “He is a politician,” Eastman later said of Lincoln, “as every man must be who holds an important office, and such men, and only such, can kill slavery, because . . . the life of slavery is its political power.”

  Lincoln’s nomination was taken up as a fervent cause by another group of abolitionists, the German Americans. They raised the Republican banner for Lincoln in the spirit of the Revolution of 1848, whose suppression had sent them to America. Their political leaders’ meeting at the Deutsches Haus in Chicago at the convention was instrumental in squelching Bates’s candidacy and opening the path for Lincoln. Across the country the German language newspapers were a Republican chorus. Lincoln wrote Carl Schurz on June 18, “I beg you to be assured that your having supported Gov. Seward, in preference to myself in the convention, is not even remembered by me for any practical purpose, or the slightest u[n]pleasant feeling. I go not back of the convention, to make distinctions among its’ members; and, to the extent of our limited acquaintance, no man stands nearer my heart than yourself.” At Lincoln’s invitation, Schurz visited him at Springfield on July 24. After checking into his hotel, Schurz was surprised by a knock at his door. The presidential candidate told Schurz to rest in bed from his trip while for two hours they talked politics. “Men like you,” Lincoln told him, “who have real merit and do the work, are always too proud to ask for anything; those who do nothing are always the most clamorous for office, and very often get it, because it is the only way to get rid of them. But if I am elected, they will find a tough customer to deal with, and you may depend upon it that I shall know how to distinguish deserving men from the drones.” Lincoln brought him home to dinner with Mary and the boys, and then the Wide-Awakes appeared. “I have never seen so large a torch-light procession. Lincoln insisted on accompanying us, although he had not appeared in public since his nomination. He declared that he must once hear ‘that tremendous speaker.’ And so the Wideawakes surrounded ‘Old Abe’ and me; thus arm in arm we marched to the capitol.” Schurz spoke first in German, then in English. “Lincoln sat directly in front of me all evening, watched every movement and applauded with tremendous enthusiasm. When I had finished, he came to me and shook hands and said: ‘You are an awful fellow! I understand your power now!’ ” Lincoln gave him a copy of the book of his debates with Douglas and Mary told him to bring his wife next time. Schurz left in a euphoric state ready to spread the word for Lincoln.

  Germans in every city organized for Lincoln through their bunds, or associations. In New York City, after the anti-Lincoln fusion ticket was forged, the garment factories dependent on the Southern cotton trade systematically started to fire workers, most of them Germans, as a consequence of German American support for Lincoln. “German fellow-citizens!” read the leaflet entitled “An Address to the Republican Germans in Williamsburg.” “Stand by Lincoln and freedom and do not be intimidated into voting for the Fusion ticket. The lackeys of the slave power tell you that there is so little work now because the firms that work in the clothing industry for the South are fearful of the election of Lincoln. They lie!” The author of the manifesto, who also spoke at a pro-Lincoln workers’ rally on October 30, Joseph Weydemeyer, had been a Prussian military officer turned revolutionary, an intimate of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, member of th
e Communist League turned Free Soiler, and was still in touch with Marx and Engels about his American activities, which they encouraged. Weydemeyer, who contributed articles to the Illinois Staats-Zeitung, was a delegate at the Deutsches Haus conference. (In the war he would serve as a lieutenant colonel.) He was not the only comrade of Marx laboring for Lincoln. There was also August Willich, another Prussian officer and revolutionary, who became a German language newspaper editor in Cincinnati, and would befriend Lincoln. It is a matter of more than historical curiosity and not ironic, but an aspect of Lincoln’s relationship with Germans, that a few good comrades in the New World played roles in his election. The Republican Party is in fact the only American political party that was cofounded by some men personally close to that distant admirer of Lincoln, Karl Marx.