Lincoln Part 18

Nevertheless, he took the train to Cincinnati, where he called on Harding at the Burnet House. The Philadelphia lawyer was not impressed; he described Lincoln as "a tall rawly boned, ungainly back woodsman, with coa.r.s.e, ill-fitting clothing, his trousers hardly reaching his ankles, holding in his hands a blue cotton umbrella with a ball on the end of the handle." This fellow clearly would not do, especially now that Edwin McMasters Stanton, the brilliant Pittsburgh lawyer, had joined the defense team. "Why did you bring that d--d long armed Ape here," Stanton asked Harding; "he does not know any thing and can do you no good." They made it clear to Lincoln that he could not partic.i.p.ate in the trial. Lincoln remained in Cincinnati for the week of the hearing, closely observing the proceedings, but the other lawyers ignored him. "We were all at the same hotel," Harding recalled; but neither he nor Stanton "ever conferred with him, ever had him at our table or sat with him, or asked him to our room, or walked to or from the court with him, or, in fact, had any intercourse with him."

At the end of the week Lincoln left for home, feeling insulted and indignant. When he received a check for the remainder of his fee, he sent it back, saying that he had made no argument and therefore was not ent.i.tled to anything beyond the original retainer. But when Watson returned the check to him, with a note explaining that he had earned it, he cashed it. Lincoln said little to his Springfield a.s.sociates about the trial, though he did tell Herndon that he had been "roughly handled by that man Stanton." But the snub was a painful one, and it added to his dejection over the loss of the Senate election.

IX

Even though Lincoln's law practice occupied most of his time during 1855, he kept up a silent but active interest in public affairs. Following events closely, he anxiously observed the consolidation of Southern opinion in favor of slavery. Where earlier Southern statesmen like Thomas Jefferson had hoped for the gradual extinction of the peculiar inst.i.tution, a new breed of fire-eaters favored its perpetuation and, indeed, its extension. Lincoln & Herndon subscribed to the Charleston Mercury and the Richmond Enquirer, both rabidly proslavery, and sadly noted that an inst.i.tution once lamented as a necessary evil was now promoted as a positive good. Herndon bought a copy of Sociology for the South, by George Fitzhugh, the able and extreme Virginia polemicist, who argued that slave labor was preferable to free labor, because under slavery workers had security and greater real freedom.

The specious logic of Fitzhugh's ideas troubled Lincoln, and in memoranda to himself he pointed out the flaws in the Virginian's arguments. "Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing," he noted, "we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself." The contention that slavery offered labor the greatest real freedom ran into the inescapable fact "that the most dumb and stupid slave that ever toiled for a master, does constantly know that he is wronged." Defenses of slavery were, in fact, reversible arguments: "If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B.-why may not B. s.n.a.t.c.h the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?" If slavery was justified on the ground that masters were white while slaves were black, Lincoln warned, "By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own." If it was defended on the ground that masters were intellectually the superiors of blacks, the same logic applied: "By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own."

The more Lincoln thought about these questions, the more pessimistic he became. In the summer of 1855 he wrote a Kentucky friend that decades of experience had demonstrated "that there is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us." "The condition of the negro slave in America ... is now as fixed, and hopeless of change for the better, as that of the lost souls of the finally impenitent," he lamented, predicting, "The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves." With voluntary emanc.i.p.ation nowhere in sight, the United States had to face up to reality: "Can we, as a nation, continue together permanently-forever half slave, and half free?" To this question he would return in the future, but now he evaded an answer: "The problem is too mighty for me. May G.o.d, in his mercy, superintend the solution."

Events in Kansas made the future of slavery an immediately pressing issue. As Lincoln had predicted, there could not have been "a more apt invention to bring about collision and violence, on the slavery question" than the Kansas-Nebraska Act. "It was," he said, "conceived in violence, pa.s.sed in violence, is maintained in violence, and is being executed in violence." While the settlement of Nebraska went on in a peaceful fas.h.i.+on, Kansas was in turmoil. Settlers who rushed in to claim the best land and the most advantageously situated town sites discovered that there were no government land offices. The area was still technically an Indian reserve, and no effort had yet been made to settle the Indian claims. Land claims could only be defended by the six-shooter and the bowie knife. Inevitably there was friction among the settlers. By opening the territory to slavery, the Kansas-Nebraska Act served as a challenge to the antislavery forces, and organizations like Eli Thayer's New England Emigrant Aid Company began funneling in free-state immigrants, equipped with rifles and ammunition. Proslavery forces in Missouri countered by pouring over the border, ready to fight in order to keep Kansas a slave state. As Missourians swamped the polls, the election of a territorial legislature proved a farce, and the delegates chosen made it a felony to question the right to hold slaves in Kansas and a capital offense to give aid to a fugitive slave. Lincoln learned of these developments not merely from the national newspapers, like the New York Tribune, which gave incessant coverage to proslavery "outrages" in Kansas, but from the frequent letters he received from Mark W. Delahay, an old friend and distant relative, who was editing a free-state paper at Leavenworth.

Reports of proslavery aggression made Herndon and other antislavery men in Springfield almost frantic, and they urged "the employment of any means, however desperate, to promote and defend the cause of freedom" in the territory. Lincoln, as usual, intervened to calm his excitable partner, reminding the little group of radicals that "physical rebellions and b.l.o.o.d.y resistances" were wrong and unconst.i.tutional. Nevertheless, he made a contribution to the Kansas cause, with the restriction that his money should be sent only when Judge Logan decided it was necessary for the defense of the people of that territory. But he ended by urging the abolitionist group to think of "other more effective channels" of action-namely, politics.

The problem was to know how political action could be effective. Reluctantly Lincoln was obliged to recognize that the Whig party, with which he had acted all his adult life, was dying. For some years Whig economic policies calling for federal promotion of economic growth had been sounding less and less realistic, and the prosperity that followed the discovery of gold in California in 1848 made the party's program obsolete. Nor did the Whigs have more to offer in the way of political policies after they joined with the Democrats in endorsing the Compromise of 1850 as a finality. With the differences between the major parties blurred, party loyalties waned. Opponents of slavery, discouraged by the repeated waffling of the Whigs, began to look to a third party. So did the large number of Whigs who were hostile to foreigners, suspicious of the Catholic Church, and opposed to the sale of alcoholic beverages. After 1852, when Winfield Scott's managers made an inept and unsuccessful effort to attract foreign-born and Catholic voters, who had always supported the Democratic party, large numbers of native-born Whigs flocked to the Know Nothing banner.

Lincoln had trouble defining his own position. A practical man, he knew-as he had remarked in his eulogy of Henry Clay-that in America "the man who is of neither party, is not-cannot be, of any consequence." But it was not clear what party he should choose. When his old friend Joshua F. Speed, with whom he now differed politically, inquired where he now stood, he replied: "That is a disputed point. I think I am a whig; but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist." But, he went on to explain, he resented efforts to "unwhig" him, since he was doing no more than oppose "the extension of slavery," which had long been the position of most Northern Whigs. Certainly, he explained to Speed, he was not a Know Nothing. "How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading cla.s.ses of white people?" The United States began with the declaration that all men are created equal; it now was practically read as "all men are created equal, except negroes," and if the Know Nothings gained control it would read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics." When things came to this pa.s.s, he told Speed, "I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy."

By the end of 1855 he found it easier to choose his political course. The Whig party was no longer a viable political organization. The abolitionist Republican party of Codding and Lovejoy was too extreme to attract a wide following. The nativist movement had crested, as the defeat of a statewide prohibition referendum, sponsored by the Know Nothings and the temperance organizations, demonstrated. What was now needed in Illinois was what had already taken place in many other Northern states-a fusion of all the opponents to the extension of slavery in a new political party.

Lincoln was ready to take the lead. In January 1856, when Paul Selby of the Jacksonville Morgan Journal proposed a conference of anti-Nebraska editors to plan for the next presidential election, Lincoln endorsed his idea, and when the editors met at Decatur on February 22, he was the sole nonjournalist in attendance. With his guidance the group drafted a conservative declaration that called for restoration of the Missouri Compromise, upheld the const.i.tutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act, and pledged noninterference with slavery in the states where it already existed. To appease the more radical antislavery element, the resolutions also affirmed the basic free-soil doctrine, which Salmon P. Chase and Charles Sumner had most forcibly enunciated, that the United States was founded on the principle that freedom was national, and slavery exceptional. To win foreign-born voters, the platform advocated religious toleration and opposed any changes in the naturalization laws, and to attract the Know Nothings it denounced "attacks" on the common school system-meaning Catholic efforts to secure aid for parochial schools. Still avoiding the name "Republican," the conference called for a state fusion convention to be held at Bloomington on May 29.

On the night the conference adjourned, the editors attended a banquet, where Lincoln played a conspicuous role. When one speaker suggested that he ought to be the candidate of the new party for governor, he emphatically refused, stating that an anti-Nebraska Democrat would be more available for that post. But in response to a toast praising him "as the warm and consistent friend of Illinois, and our next candidate for the U.S. Senate," he rose, after prolonged applause, and said "the latter part of that sentiment I am in favor of." Pointing out that he felt a little out of place at this gathering, where he was the only noneditor, he capitalized on his odd appearance by saying that he felt like the ugly man riding through a wood who met a woman, also on horseback, who stopped and said: "Well, for land sake, you are the homeliest man I ever saw."

"Yes, madam, but I can't help it," he replied.

"No, I suppose not," she remarked, "but you might stay at home."

Having thus disarmed criticism, he went on to announce "his hearty concurrence in the resolutions adopted by the Convention" and "his willingness to buckle on his armor" for the coming fight with the Democrats.

Despite Lincoln's very active role at the Decatur gathering, some of his more conservative friends were unaware he was so fully committed to the new political movement. On May 10, Herndon, who had been named a member of the anti-Nebraska state committee at the editors' meeting, published a call for a meeting of Sangamon County citizens opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act to select delegates to the Bloomington convention. Though Lincoln was out of the office, attending court in Pekin, Herndon signed both his name and Lincoln's. Dismayed at this evidence of radicalism, John Todd Stuart rushed into the Lincoln & Herndon office to ask whether Lincoln had actually signed the call. Herndon admitted his responsibility. "Then you have ruined him," muttered Stuart. But Herndon knew he was doing just what his partner wanted-just what the Decatur convention had expected him to do. To placate Stuart, he wired Lincoln that the announcement was causing a stir among conservative Whigs, and his partner promptly responded: "All right; go ahead. Will meet you-radicals and all."

Elected a delegate to the Bloomington convention, Lincoln was committed to the new anti-Nebraska party but was nevertheless nervous about the outlook. In view of the failure of several previous attempts to organize a statewide antislavery party, he had reason to worry that leading politicians might not attend and that southern Illinois, where Douglas was so strong, might send no representatives. Arriving in Bloomington early, he had time on his hands and, restless, left David Davis's mansion, where he was staying, to prowl the streets of the little city. To help pa.s.s the minutes, he stopped in a small jewelry store, where he bought his first pair of spectacles for 37 cents. He "kinder" needed them, he told Henry C. Whitney, who accompanied him, because he was now forty-seven years old. Not until he met the late train from Chicago and found it filled with delegates to the convention was he satisfied that the political decision he had made was a wise one.

On May 29 about 270 delegates a.s.sembled in Major's Hall to organize the Illinois Republican party. All shades of opinion were represented: conservative Whigs like Lincoln, anti-Nebraska Democrats like Norman Judd, Know Nothings like newly elected Representative Jesse O. Norton, Germans like Adolph Mayer, and abolitionists like Lovejoy. After conferring with about twenty influential politicians representing all shades of opinion, Orville Browning, the conservative Quincy lawyer, constructed a platform on which all could stand. To placate an estimated 20,000 German voters, it included a pledge to proscribe no one "on account of religious opinions, or in consequence of place of birth"-a promise so vague that it did not alienate the Know Nothings. On slavery questions the platform ignored abolitionist demands and offered a mild declaration that Congress had the power and the duty to exclude slavery from the national territories. The slate of officers nominated was carefully balanced: William H. Bissell, an anti-Nebraska Democrat who was also a hero of the Mexican War, was the candidate for governor; the German leader Francis A. Hoffmann was nominated for lieutenant governor; and three other offices went to Know Nothings who were former Whigs.

The delegates recognized Lincoln's role in creating the new party by calling him to the platform to make the last major speech before adjournment. Obviously delighted that the proceedings had gone so smoothly, and undoubtedly relieved that at last his break with the Whig party was public and irrevocable, he gave what was universally acclaimed as the best speech of his life. Because he spoke extemporaneously, there was no reliable record of what he said. Even Herndon, who usually took notes when his partner spoke, gave up after about fifteen minutes and, as he said, "threw pen and paper away and lived only in the inspiration of the hour."

Only the Alton Weekly Courier, in a brief report, gave the highlights of this major address. After enumerating "the pressing reasons of the present movement," Lincoln identified slavery as the cause of the nation's problems. Mistaking the idiosyncratic George Fitzhugh as a representative thinker, he claimed that Southerners were more and more arguing not merely that slavery was a positive good for blacks but that it should be extended to white laborers as well. Quite erroneously he claimed that because of Southern pressure, Northern Democrats like Douglas, who had once advocated "the individual rights of man," were beginning to accept this argument. "Such was the progress of the National Democracy." To oppose this heresy, Lincoln urged a union of all who opposed the expansion of slavery, and again he pledged that he was "ready to fuse with anyone who would unite with him to oppose slave power." If the united opposition of the North caused Southerners to raise "the bugbear [of] disunion," they should be told bluntly, "the Union must be preserved in the purity of its principles as well as in the integrity of its territorial parts." Firmly he made Daniel Webster's thundering reply to the South Carolina nullifiers the motto of the Republican party: "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable."

"His speech was full of fire and energy and force," Herndon recalled; "it was logic; it was pathos; it was enthusiasm; it was justice, equity, truth, and right set ablaze by the divine fires of a soul maddened by the wrong; it was hard, heavy, knotty, gnarly, backed with wrath." To his partner Lincoln seemed seven feet tall that day.

X

Lincoln recognized that the Republican party faced formidable problems in the 1856 presidential contest. Not only was it a new and imperfectly articulated organization, but it had powerful compet.i.tion. Shrewdly the Democrats pa.s.sed over the controversial Douglas and nominated James Buchanan, the former Secretary of State, who had a distinguished career of public service-and the inestimable blessing of having been out of the country, as minister to Great Britain, during the controversy over the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The nativists, now calling themselves the American party, nominated ex-President Millard Fillmore, whose highly respectable Whig antecedents made him attractive to conservatives of all persuasions. Even Mary Lincoln, usually wholly committed to her husband's political views, confessed that her "weak woman's heart" compelled her to favor Fillmore, who understood "the necessity of keeping foreigners, within bounds."

To counter the appeal of these two conservative candidates, Lincoln thought it important for the Republican party, holding its first national convention in Philadelphia on June 1719, to recognize that nine-tenths of the anti-Nebraska voters had formerly been Whigs. He wrote Trumbull, who attended the convention at his urging, that the nomination of Supreme Court Justice John McLean of Ohio "would save every whig, except such as have already gone over hook and line" to the Democrats, but he carefully explained that he was not inflexible in his choice. "I am in,' he pledged, "and shall go for any one nominated unless he be 'platformed expressly, or impliedly, on some ground which I may think wrong."

The Philadelphia convention did not follow his advice, nor did it nominate either of the most conspicuous leaders in the Republican movement, William H. Seward of New York, or Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. Instead, it chose the flamboyant, highly popular John C. Fremont, widely known as the "Pathmarker of the West" because of his explorations of the Rocky Mountains.

But when it came to selecting a vice presidential nominee, the delegates did look to former Whigs. The most popular candidate was William L. Dayton, a former senator from New Jersey. Unhappy that the new party was failing to recognize the importance of the Northwest, Illinois delegates caucused, and Nathaniel G. Wilc.o.x proposed that they present Lincoln's name to the convention. Trumbull, who was not a delegate but attended the caucus, agreed that Lincoln was a 'very good man," and all the other members backed Lincoln's candidacy. All through the evening they worked to secure support in other delegations, convincing the Indiana members that the nomination of Dayton would do great injustice to the Western states.

On June 19 the Illinois delegation arranged to have John Allison of Pennsylvania put Lincoln's name in nomination as "the prince of good fellows, and an Old-Line Whig." Then Illinois delegate William B. Archer seconded the nomination, saying that he had known Lincoln for thirty years and had always found him "as pure a patriot as ever lived." Anti-Nebraska Democrat John M. Palmer, who had been instrumental in preventing Lincoln's election to the senate in 1855, added his endors.e.m.e.nt, announcing, "We [in Illinois] can lick Buchanan any way, but I think we can do it a little easier if we have Lincoln on the ticket with John C. Fremont."

But the Illinois movement got under way too late, after most of the delegates were already committed to other candidates. In an informal ballot for vice presidential nominee, Dayton received 253 votes to Lincoln's 110. Lincoln was, of course, flattered by the support he received, which was evidence that he was becoming nationally known as a leader of the new party, but he pretended indifference. On the circuit in Urbana when Davis and Whitney brought him the news, he said with charming false modesty, "I reckon that ain't me; there's another great man in Ma.s.sachusetts named Lincoln, and I reckon it's him."

The nomination of Fremont did not discourage Lincoln. As he wrote Trumbull, in a carefully chosen double negative, he was "not without high hopes for the state," though Illinois Republicans would have had an easier time had McLean been nominated. From the start of the campaign he made it his mission to win over Fillmore's supporters to the Republican cause. Most of these were, as a man in Clinton wrote him, "still tender, old time whigs,... partly with and partly not with us," and they looked to Lincoln for leaders.h.i.+p. "In you they do place more confidence than in any other man," his correspondent continued. "Others may make fine speeches, but it would not be 'Lincoln said so in his speech.

Responding to the need, Lincoln entered the campaign wholeheartedly and, as he remembered, made more than fifty speeches in behalf of the Republican ticket. Most of them were delivered in the central and southern parts of the state, where Fillmore was strong, and there Republican editors, attempting to appeal to the Southern-born voters, stressed that Lincoln was a Kentuckian, "a Southerner, with eloquence that would bear a comparison with Henry Clay's."

Few of Lincoln's 1856 campaign speeches were preserved-or were worth preserving. In them he only occasionally praised Fremont, as "our young, gallant and world-renowned commander," or attacked "Buchanan, and his gang." He made few attempts to excite his audiences with tales of recent atrocities against free-state men in Kansas; he did not mention the quasi-war raging between the proslavery Lecompton regime and the free-state Topeka government in the territory and said nothing about the sack of Lawrence by pro-Southern ruffians on May 21. Nor did he refer to the attack that South Carolina Representative Preston S. Brooks made the following day upon Charles Sumner in the Senate chamber because of his antislavery speeches. Instead, Lincoln offered low-key, reasonable arguments to persuade American voters opposed to the expansion of slavery not to waste their votes on Fillmore, who had no chance of winning.

In private letters to old Whig friends, Lincoln made the same argument, stressing that a vote for Fillmore was really a vote for Buchanan. "This," he told them, "is as plain as the adding up of the weights of three small hogs." Because he had no secretarial a.s.sistance and wanted to reach a larger number of his former political a.s.sociates, Lincoln had lithographed a form letter, marked "Confidential," expressing these views. Filling in the date and salutation by hand, he sent out several dozen of these until one fell into the hands of a Democratic editor, who exposed them as form letters.

What effect Lincoln had on the outcome of the 1856 election in Illinois was hard for him or anybody else to determine. In Republican newspapers his speeches were invariably praised as "unanswerable," showing "great eloquence and power." Democratic papers described his speeches as "prosy and dull in the extreme." He himself was under no illusions about the impact of his campaigning, though he was pleased when local Republican leaders said they were "tolerably well satisfied" with his work.

In the end, the canva.s.s verified the prediction Lincoln had made at the start: "With the Fremont and Fillmore men united, here in Illinois, we have Mr. Buchanan in the hollow of our hand; but with us divided,... he has us." The antislavery vote was split, and in November, Buchanan carried Illinois and won the election.

When Lincoln looked back on the events of the past two years, he had to recognize that he had received some severe rebuffs. He had been defeated in his quest for a Senate seat, he had been snubbed by Eastern lawyers in the McCormick reaper case, and he had been pa.s.sed over for the first Republican vice presidential nomination. On the other side of the ledger he could enter the solid distinction he had earned in the campaign against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the respect that was due him as the princ.i.p.al architect of the Republican party in Illinois, and the admiration he received as a powerful orator for the free-soil cause. After 1856 he found no further occasion to lament to Herndon about his future or to grieve that he had done nothing to make his country better.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A House Divided

After the 1856 elections Lincoln tried to maintain a low political profile. He declined most invitations to speak with the explanation, "Having devoted the most of last year to politics, it is a necessity with me to devote this, to my private affairs." He turned to his law practice with great a.s.siduity, and 1857 became the busiest and most profitable year of his professional life. But he had no-idea of giving up politics, and he worked, mostly behind the scenes, to maintain and perfect the Republican organization so that it could mount an effective challenge to the reelection of Stephen A. Douglas in 1858.

I