Lincoln Part 23

He also tried to keep Republicans in other states from shattering the party harmony. When Republicans in Ma.s.sachusetts, where nativism was strong, endorsed a const.i.tutional provision requiring naturalized citizens to wait two years before they could vote, Lincoln expressed forthright opposition. "I have some little notoriety for commiserating the oppressed condition of the negro," he explained; "and I should be strangely inconsistent if I could favor any project for curtailing the existing rights of white men, even though born in different lands, and speaking different languages from myself." Similarly, when Ohio Republicans adopted a platform calling for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave law, he bluntly warned Governor Salmon P. Chase that "the cause of Republicanism is hopeless in Illinois, if it be in any way made responsible for that plank." "In every locality," he urged, "we should look beyond our noses; and at least say nothing on points where it is probable we shall disagree."

He continued to worry about the fatal attraction that Stephen A. Douglas had for many Republicans. Though reelected to the Senate, Douglas had lost much Southern support because of his Freeport Doctrine. The almost unprecedented action of the Democratic Senate caucus in removing him from his cherished chairmanship of the Committee on Territories in December 1858 indicated just how few his Southern followers were. Shrewd and realistic, Douglas began making moves to attract backing from Republicans, just as he had done in the Lecompton controversy. He reminded them that he had consistently opposed enacting a slave code that would protect slavery in all the national territories and had fought the reopening of the African slave trade-both measures dear to Southern extremists.

Always suspicious of his great rival, Lincoln thought that Douglas was playing a double game. Douglas was presenting himself as a strong candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1860 but at the same time was so positioning himself that if the Democrats rejected him he would "bolt at once, turn upon us, as in the case of Lecompton, and claim that all Northern men shall make common cause in electing him President as the best means of breaking down the Slave power." Lincoln knew that some Republicans, like Horace Greeley, had never recovered from their earlier infatuation with Douglas, and he was even more troubled when Kansas Republicans, after rejecting the Lecompton Const.i.tution and thus ensuring that their state would be free, began speaking of their victory as a triumph of popular sovereignty. In Lincoln's first political appearance after the 1858 campaign, he warned Chicago Republicans of the dangers of "Douglasism": "Let the Republican party of Illinois dally with Judge Douglas; let them fall in behind him and make him their candidate, and they do not absorb him; he absorbs them."

Lincoln's anxiety became greater when he read the long article "The Dividing Line Between Federal and Local Authority: Popular Sovereignty in the Territories," which Douglas published in the September 1859 issue of Harper's Magazine. Taking as his texts Lincoln's house-divided speech and Seward's even more radical "irrepressible conflict" address, Douglas developed at great length his argument that popular sovereignty had consistently been the American policy from the days of the Revolution; that "great principle" meant "that the people of every separate political community (dependent Colonies, Provinces, and Territories as well as sovereign States) have an inalienable right to govern themselves in respect to their internal polity." By fairly tortuous reasoning he discovered that even the Dred Scott decision had recognized that right. He claimed that popular sovereignty, correctly construed, would block both the Republican efforts to exclude slavery from the territories by congressional act and Southern attempts to enact a national slave code.

Widely discussed, if not widely read, Douglas's article was a bold attempt to create a new party of the center-one that would unite moderate Democrats and conservative former Whigs and reject both Southern and Northern radicals. To bring this message to a larger audience, Douglas welcomed the opportunity to partic.i.p.ate in the 1859 Ohio campaign, where he supported the local Democratic candidates but urged "all conservative men-all lovers of peace and of the law-all friends of the Union"-to rally in support of the great principle of popular sovereignty.

Lincoln found Douglas's activities decidedly threatening. Considering the Little Giant "the most dangerous enemy of liberty, because the most insidious one," he readily accepted an invitation from the Ohio Republican state central committee to partic.i.p.ate in the campaign and thus "to head off the little gentleman."

He did not appear on the same platform with Douglas in Ohio, but his speeches at Columbus, Dayton, Hamilton, and Cincinnati (September 1617), as well as one he delivered in Indianapolis two days later, were, in effect, continuations of the 1858 senatorial debates. For the most part, Lincoln presented arguments that he had advanced during those debates, but he was now freer in his criticisms of Douglas, apparently taking to heart Joseph Medill's advice: "As you are not a candidate you can talk out as boldly as you please Do not fail to get off some of your 'anecdotes and bits'... hit below the belt as well as above, and kick like thunder." He took obvious delight in mocking what he called Douglas's "gur-reat pur-rinciple" of popular sovereignty. As explained in "nineteen mortal pages of Harper," it amounted to saying "that, if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man nor anybody else has a right to object."

Lincoln now developed some elements of his argument more fully than he had done in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The real danger posed by Douglas, he explained, came from his "gradual and steady debauching of public opinion." Douglas's attempts to prove that the Declaration of Independence did not include African-Americans had already changed the way most whites viewed blacks. His recent remark "that he was for the negro against the crocodile, but for the white man against the negro" helped spread the opinion "that the negro is no longer a man but a brute;... that he ranks with the crocodile and the reptile." "Public opinion in this country is everything," Lincoln observed, and Douglas and his friends were serving as "the miners and sappers" to undermine resistance to the spread of slavery, so that state laws excluding slavery would soon be overruled, a national slave code enacted, and the African slave trade revived.

In these 1859 addresses Lincoln also elaborated on a subject that he had slighted during debates with Douglas: how "the ma.s.s of white men are really injured by the effect of slave labor in the vicinity of the fields of their own labor." The argument required him to lay out his view of American economic development. Like Francis Wayland and the other political economists whose books he had read years earlier, he firmly adhered to the labor theory of value: "labor is the source from which human wants are mainly supplied." Labor was thus "prior to, and independent of, capital"; indeed "capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed." But capital, though derivative, performed a valuable service in a free society, because those who had it could offer employment to "the prudent, penniless beginner in the world" who owned "nothing save two strong hands that G.o.d has given him, [and] a heart willing to labor." If this novice worked industriously and behaved soberly, he could in a year or two save enough to buy land for himself, to settle, marry, and beget sons and daughters, and presently he, too, would begin employing other laborers. Reminding his Ohio audiences that "at an early age, I was myself a hired laborer, at twelve dollars per month," he insisted that in a free society there was "no such thing as a man who is a hired laborer, of a necessity, always remaining in his early condition."

Lincoln's version of the American dream was in some ways a curiously limited one. Confident that advancement was open to all who worked hard, he was untroubled by the growing disparity of wealth between the poor and the rich. Viewing himself as a man of the people, he did not find it incongruous that some of his most loyal supporters were large-scale farmers like Isaac Funk, of McLean County, who owned 25,000 acres of prairie land, and William Scully, of Logan County, who owned 30,000 acres. Nor did he find it remarkable that his strongest political backer was David Davis, who was becoming one of the wealthiest landlords and land speculators in the state. Though Lincoln regularly represented railroads, the largest corporations in the country, he thought of economic opportunity primarily in terms of individual enterprise. In his a.n.a.lysis he gave scant attention to the growing number of factory workers, who had little prospect of upward social mobility.

To the free economy that Lincoln idealized, he juxtaposed the slave society of the South. There it was a.s.sumed that labor must always remain subordinate; there, as James Henry Hammond, of South Carolina, proclaimed, labor was the mudsill on which the social edifice was erected. In a slave society, Lincoln observed, "a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect ill.u.s.tration of what a laborer should be-all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understanding."

The free economy and the slave society had coexisted, more or less peacefully, since the founding of the republic, but now they were increasingly in compet.i.tion and conflict. Like most Republicans, Lincoln believed that slavery had to expand or die; the exhaustion of the soil and the natural increase of the slave population meant that slaveholders were forced to move into new lands. But free society had also the imperative to expand. The basic impulse to improve one's condition, an "inherent right given to mankind directly by the Maker," required room. The national territories were "G.o.d-given for that purpose," and he had long believed that their best use was "for the homes of free white people." But if Douglas and the Southern Democrats had their way, free laborers who moved to the territories would be in compet.i.tion with the unpaid slaves. Consequently, Lincoln exhorted his audiences, "it is due to yourselves as voters, as owners of the new territories, that you shall keep those territories free, in the best condition for all such of your gallant sons as may choose to go there."

II

The warm reception that Lincoln's speeches received in Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Kansas during the last half of 1859 gave plausibility to suggestions that he ought to be nominated for high office. The idea had emerged right after the 1858 election, when some of his followers, bitter over his defeat and convinced "he is one of the best men G.o.d ever made," began to ask: "Cant we make him President or vice."

Perhaps the obscure Lacon Illinois Gazette was the first newspaper seriously to propose Lincoln's name for the presidency, but a November 6 story in the Sandusky (Ohio) Commercial Register calling on Republicans to nominate Lincoln received more attention. Presently the Olney (Illinois) Times began running "Abram [sic] Lincoln for President for 1860" below its masthead, and favorable mention of his possible candidacy appeared in papers as diverse as the New York Herald, the Rockford (Illinois) Republican, and the Reading (Pennsylvania) Journal.

Neither Lincoln nor anybody else took these suggestions very seriously. He did not think himself presidential timber. During the 1858 campaign against Douglas he confided to the journalist Henry Villard that he doubted his ability to be a senator, though his wife was confident that he would one day become President. "Just think," he exclaimed, wrapping his long arms around his knees and giving a roar of laughter, "of such a sucker as me as President." Most of the newspaper stories were intended only to suggest that Lincoln was a prominent Republican, who deserved recognition as a favorite son of Illinois on the first ballot. Some of them were designed to promote his candidacy for the second place on the Republican ticket; the Hennepin (Illinois) Tribune endorsed him while frankly acknowledging that it favored William H. Seward for President, with Lincoln for Vice President. Wentworth's organ, the Chicago Democrat, seemed to be endorsing Lincoln, "the Great Man of Illinois," when it urged Republicans to nominate him for either President or Vice President; but it gave the editor's game away by also recommending Lincoln for governor, rather than Wentworth's archrival, Judd.

To all such suggestions Lincoln gave essentially the same answer. "I must, in candor, say I do not think myself fit for the Presidency," he wrote the admiring editor of the Rock Island Register, who wanted to promote the simultaneous announcement of Lincoln's candidacy in Republican newspapers across the state. He gave an identical answer to Samuel Galloway, who was trying to organize a Lincoln-for-President movement in Ohio.

In issuing these disclaimers Lincoln was not being coy, but realistic. To all outward appearances he was less prepared to be President of the United States than any other man who had run for that high office. Without family tradition or wealth, he had received only the briefest of formal schooling. Now fifty years old, he had no administrative experience of any sort; he had never been governor of his state or even mayor of Springfield. A profound student of the Const.i.tution and of the writings of the Founding Fathers, he had limited acquaintance with the government they had established. He had served only a single, less than successful term in the House of Representatives and for the past ten years had held no public office. Though he was one of the founders of the Republican party, he had no close friends and only a few acquaintances in the populous Eastern states, whose vote would be crucial in the election. To be sure, his debates with Douglas had brought him national attention, but he had lost the senatorial election both in 1855 and in 1859. Dismissing his chances for the presidency, one of Hatch's Boston correspondents remarked scornfully: "As for Lincoln I am afraid he will kick the beam again as he is in the habit of doing."

Despite these handicaps, of which no one was more conscious than Lincoln himself, he did think about the presidency. Indeed, any public man with intelligence and ambition, looking over the sorry run of recent chief executives, was forced to consider whether he could not occupy the White House as satisfactorily as, say, Franklin Pierce or James Buchanan.

When Lincoln allowed himself to consider the possibility of running for President, his chances for securing the Republican nomination seemed better than average. The party had several strong candidates, but all had flaws. The leading name was William H. Seward, the senator and former governor of New York, an unquestionably able, experienced, and adroit politician of Whig antecedents, who was handicapped by an undeserved reputation for extremism because of his speeches proclaiming a higher law than the Const.i.tution and predicting an irrepressible conflict between slavery and freedom; in addition, his emphatic opposition to nativism would alienate former Know Nothing voters. Pennsylvania Republicans, irate because the low tariff of 1857 had removed protection from their iron industry, mostly favored Simon Cameron, but he had few followers outside that state and was widely suspected of financial improprieties or even gross corruption. Salmon P. Chase, the Republican governor of Ohio, earnestly sought the nomination, and many of the more dedicated antislavery members of the party backed him; but he lacked personal magnetism as well as political adroitness. Another possibility was Edward Bates of Missouri, a conservative, free-soil Whig now sixty-six years old, who was not even a member of the Republican party; he was the improbable favorite of the erratic Horace Greeley, who was willing to back anybody who could defeat his former friend and now bitter rival, Seward. In addition to these front-runners, there were secondary candidates who might become winners if the convention was deadlocked: John C. Fremont, the defeated Republican candidate in 1856; William L. Dayton of New Jersey, who had been Fremont's running mate; Ca.s.sius M. Clay, the fiery, unstable Kentucky abolitionist; and Benjamin F. Wade, the blunt antislavery senator and Chase's princ.i.p.al rival in Ohio.

Shrewdly Lincoln recognized that his own chances against these better-known rivals could best be advanced not by an open announcement of his candidacy but by small, private moves to consolidate his strength and expand his influence. To ensure wider circulation of his ideas, he took an active role in compiling and preserving his 1858 debates with Douglas. With the a.s.sistance of Henry C. Whitney he collected the reports of his speeches that appeared in the Chicago Press and Tribune and those of Douglas in the Chicago Times. These he carefully pasted in a large sc.r.a.pbook, which he hoped to have published. After plans for having a book printed in Springfield failed, he turned over the project to Follett, Foster & Company of Columbus, Ohio, which shortly before the national nominating conventions of 1860 issued a 268-page book t.i.tled Political Debates Between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, in the Celebrated Campaign of 1858, in Illinois. It immediately became a best-seller.

In December 1859, Lincoln made another quiet move to gain broader recognition by preparing an autobiography for campaign purposes. Jesse W. Fell, a Bloomington politician, forwarded a request from Joseph J. Lewis, of the Chester County (Pennsylvania) Times, for biographical information he could use in preparing an article on Lincoln. Lincoln complied with a terse sketch that reviewed his homespun beginnings, summarized his public career, and ended: "If any personal description of me is thought desirable, it may be said, I am, in height, six feet, four inches, nearly; lean in flesh, weighing, on an average, one hundred and eighty pounds; dark complexion, with coa.r.s.e black hair, and grey eyes-no other marks or brands recollected." This he sent to Fell, noting, "There is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me." Lewis evidently found the sketch meager, for he embroidered it with remarks on Lincoln's oratorical gifts and on his long record of support for a protective tariff, so dear to Pennsylvanians. His article, widely copied in other Republican newspapers, was the first published biography of Lincoln.

An even stronger indication of Lincoln's growing interest in a presidential race was the alacrity with which he accepted an invitation from New York to lecture at Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church in Brooklyn in February 1860. Knowing that he would appear before a sophisticated Eastern audience, he promptly began more careful research and preparation than for any other speech of his life. He also ordered a brand-new black suit for the occasion, for which he paid the local tailors, Woods & Henckle, $100.

By the time he arrived in the East, sponsorship of the address had been taken over by the Young Men's Central Republican Union, a body that included sixty-five-year-old William Cullen Bryant, forty-nine-year-old Horace Greeley, and other such youths, who were organizing a stop-Seward movement. Lincoln's was the third in a series of lectures-following addresses by Frank Blair, the Missouri antislavery leader, and Ca.s.sius M. Clay, the Kentucky abolitionist-designed, according to the sponsors, "to call out our better, but busier citizens, who never attend political meetings." Without informing Lincoln, the Young Republicans also shifted the lecture from Brooklyn to the Cooper Union in Manhattan. Learning of the change after he arrived and registered at the Astor House, Lincoln spent his first day in New York revising his address, so as to make it more suitable for a general political audience than for a religious congregation.

On Monday, February 27, escorted by several of the Young Republicans, he caught a glimpse of Broadway and had his photograph, which he called his "shaddow," taken at Mathew B. Brady's studio, where he exchanged pleasantries with George Bancroft. "I am on my way to Ma.s.sachusetts," Lincoln told the historian, "where I have a son at school, who, if report be true, already knows much more than his father." The portrait Brady produced after this sitting was a work of art; he retouched the negative in order to correct Lincoln's left eye that seemed to be roving upward and eliminated harsh lines from his face to show an almost handsome, statesmanlike image.

That night, after a warm introduction by Bryant, Lincoln appeared before a capacity audience at the Cooper Union. Many of his listeners expected "something weird, rough, and uncultivated," George Haven Putnam remembered, and Lincoln's appearance did nothing to undeceive them. "The long, ungainly figure, upon which hung clothes that, while new for the trip, were evidently the work of an unskilled tailor; the large feet; the clumsy hands, of which... the orator seemed to be unduly conscious; the long, gaunt head capped by a shock of hair that seemed not to have been thoroughly brushed out," Putnam continued, "made a picture which did not fit in with New York's conception of a finished statesman." Equally disconcerting was Lincoln's voice, for it was high and piercing in tone at the outset.

But the speech that he delivered, reading carefully and soberly from sheets of blue foolscap, quickly erased the impression of a crude frontiersman. It was a masterful exploration of the political paths open to the nation. In the first third of the address Lincoln closely examined Douglas's contention that popular sovereignty was simply a continuation of a policy initiated by the Founding Fathers. After digging through the records of the Const.i.tutional Convention and the debates in the earliest Congresses, he was able to show that of the thirty-nine signers of the Const.i.tution, at least twenty-one demonstrated by their votes that the federal government had the power to control slavery in the national territories; other noted antislavery men, like Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Gouverneur Morris, should probably be added to that list, though they were not called to vote on this specific question. This minutely detailed record confirmed a position that Lincoln had been arguing for years: that prior to Douglas's introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act it was impossible "to show that any living man in the whole world ever did ... declare that... the Const.i.tution forbade the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the federal territories."

Next Lincoln examined the Southern position, though he had little hope that his arguments would be heard, much less heeded, in that section. Nevertheless, he seized the opportunity to argue that the Republicans were the true conservatives on questions relating to slavery; they adhered "to the old and tried, against the new and untried," while Southern fire-eaters "with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy." This gave him a welcome opening to explain the Republican att.i.tude toward the raid that John Brown and a handful of zealous followers had staged in October 1859 on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. At that time Lincoln denounced Brown's attempt to stir up an insurrection among the slaves as "wrong for two reasons. It was a violation of law and it was, as all such attacks must be, futile as far as any effect it might have on the extinction of a great evil." Though he had paid tribute to Brown's "great courage, rare unselfishness" and sympathized with his hatred of slavery, he concluded that the old abolitionist was "insane." Now he took the offensive, pointing out that Brown's raid was not a slave insurrection but "an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to partic.i.p.ate"; further, he pointed out, Southerners after an elaborate congressional investigation had failed to implicate a single Republican in it. Southern efforts to capitalize on John Brown's raid were simply additional evidence of their determination to "rule or ruin in all events." More recently Southerners had gone so far as to announce that if a Republican was elected President in 1860 the Union would be dissolved and the fault would be the North's. "That is cool," Lincoln exclaimed. "A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, 'Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!'"

What should Northerners do? Avoiding both the moral indifference with which Douglas approached the slavery issue and the proslavery zeal of the Southern radicals, Republicans should fearlessly and effectively persist in excluding slavery from the national territories, confining it to the states where it already existed. "Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves," Lincoln announced in his spine-tingling peroration. "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

As a speech, it was a superb performance. The audience frequently applauded during the delivery of the address, and when Lincoln closed, the crowd cheered and stood, waving handkerchiefs and hats. Noah Brooks, then working for the New York Tribune, exclaimed: "He's the greatest man since St. Paul," and a student at the Harvard Law School, trained to master his emotions, told his father, "It was the best speech I ever heard." The next day four New York papers printed the address in full. Bryant in the New York Evening Post called it forcible and "most logically and convincingly stated." Greeley, less restrained, announced: "Mr. Lincoln is one of Nature's orators, using his rare powers solely and effectively to elucidate and to convince, though their inevitable effect is to delight and electrify as well." Immediately published in pamphlet form, the Cooper Union address was issued and reissued as a Republican tract by the New York Tribune, the Chicago Press and Tribune, the Detroit Tribune, and the Albany Evening Journal

It was also a superb political move for an unannounced presidential aspirant. Appearing in Seward's home state, sponsored by a group largely loyal to Chase, Lincoln shrewdly made no reference to either of these Republican rivals for the nomination. Recognizing that if the Republicans were going to win in 1860 they needed the support of men who had voted for Fillmore in the previous election, Lincoln in his Cooper Union address stressed his conservatism. He did not mention his house-divided thesis or Seward's irrepressible-conflict prediction; Republicans were presented as a party of moderates who were simply trying to preserve the legacy of the Founding Fathers against the radical a.s.saults of the proslavery element. Even Lincoln's language contributed to the effect he sought; the careful structure of the speech, the absence of incendiary rhetoric, even the laborious recital of the voting records of the Founding Fathers, all suggested reasonableness and stability, not wide-eyed fanaticism. In short, it was, as one of the sponsors wrote, an enormous success. Sending Lincoln the agreed-upon fee of $200, he added, "I would that it were $200,000 for you are worthy of it."

The next day Lincoln moved on to New England, ostensibly to visit Robert, who had enrolled in the Phillips Exeter Academy the previous September. Of course, he was glad to see his son and to chat with his schoolmates. When one of them produced a banjo and gave an informal concert for the visitor, Lincoln was genuinely pleased and said to his stiff, unmusical son, "Robert, you ought to have one." But it quickly became clear that the real object of his visit was to cement connections with influential Republicans who would be attending the forthcoming national convention. After the success of the Cooper Union address, Lincoln was something of a lion, much in demand at Republican rallies, and during his four days with Robert he made campaign addresses at Concord, Manchester, Dover, and Exeter. On the last of these occasions many of the boys from the academy turned out, and he had an audience of about five hundred people. The students, who knew Bob as "a gentleman in every sense of the word; quiet in manner, with a certain dignity of his own," were astonished when Lincoln came into the hall, "tall, lank, awkward; dressed in a loose, ill-fitting black frock coat, with black trousers, ill-fitting and somewhat baggy at the knees." They observed his rumpled hair, his necktie turned awry, and his long legs that seemed to fit neither under or around his chair. "Isn't it too bad Bob's father is so homely?" they whispered to each other. "Don't you feel sorry for him?" But after Lincoln disentangled his legs, rose slowly from his chair, and began speaking, they forgot his appearance; they no longer pitied Bob but felt proud to know his father.

During his two weeks in New England, Lincoln spoke nearly every day, avoiding Ma.s.sachusetts, which was a Seward stronghold, but attempting to help the Republican candidates in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. He found it hard work. So many in his audiences had read the Cooper Union address that he could not simply repeat that speech, and he had to try to think of new ways of presenting his ideas. Perhaps his most telling innovation was his explanation of why Republicans firmly opposed to the extension of slavery were not pledged to eradicate it in the Southern states. If "out in the street, or in the field, or on the prairie I find a rattlesnake," Lincoln explained, "I take a stake and kill him. Everybody would applaud the act and say I did right." "But suppose the snake was in a bed where children were sleeping. Would I do right to strike him there? I might hurt the children; or I might not kill, but only arouse and exasperate the snake, and he might bite the children." The best way to end slavery, he insisted, was firmly to oppose its spread into the national territories. On this issue there could be no compromise. "Let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively," he urged over and over again, often ending with the peroration of his Cooper Union address: "Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it."

The success of Lincoln's Eastern trip edged him a step closer to becoming an avowed candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. As recently as January he had been hesitant about making a race. Conferring with Judd, Hatch, Jackson Grimshaw, and a few other prominent Illinois Republicans who pressed him to run, he expressed doubt whether he could get the nomination if he wished it. Only after a night of reflection-and doubtless of conferences with Mary Lincoln, who was even more ambitious than he was-did he authorize the little group to work quietly for his nomination. Even then he did not consider himself a serious candidate but hoped that endors.e.m.e.nt as a favorite son would help unite the Illinois Republicans and confirm his party leadership. He explained that he was "not in a position where it would hurt much for me to not be nominated on the national ticket" but that "it would hurt some for me to not get the Illinois delegates" at the Republican convention. But after his return from New York and New England he made no attempt to conceal his desire for the nomination. By April he wrote to Trumbull, who inquired about his intentions: "I will be entirely frank. The taste is in my mouth a little."

III

Lincoln could not openly campaign for the nomination because tradition dictated that the office should seek the man, and he necessarily worked through aides and intermediaries, many of them veterans from his 1858 senatorial race. In Springfield he continued to rely on Hatch, the Illinois secretary of state, and Dubois, the state auditor, whose offices made them privy to detailed, confidential political information about every part of the state. In the Chicago area Wentworth offered to be Lincoln's Warwick, but he turned instead to Judd. He did not entirely trust Judd but recognized his power as chairman of the Illinois Republican state central committee and as the Illinois member of the Republican National Committee. Both Leonard Swett and Richard Yates, who were competing with Judd for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, served as Lincoln's agents in central Illinois. Gustave Koerner, the Belleville lawyer, was his princ.i.p.al connection to the German-American const.i.tuency, which he also tried to reach through Dr. Theodore Canisius, whose newspaper, the Springfield Illinois Staats-Anzeiger, he secretly owned. His most trusted adviser, however, was Judge David Davis, who emerged as his informal campaign manager. "I keep no secrets from him," Lincoln declared.

These Lincoln managers were not an organized or unified group. Throughout Lincoln's career, his advisers felt connected only to him, not to each other or to some larger cause. Indeed, their loyalty to Lincoln was matched, in many cases, by the distrust they exhibited toward each other. Davis never forgave Judd's role in defeating Lincoln's election to the Senate in 1855; Judd hated Wentworth; Wentworth attacked not merely Judd but Hatch and Dubois; Swett and Yates were rivals united only by their dislike of Judd. Of course, Lincoln was aware of this dissonance, but he tolerated it; perhaps he believed that advisers in compet.i.tion with each other would work all the harder.

One result of this decentralized command structure was that each member of the group came to think that he, and he alone, truly understood Lincoln and gave him useful advice. Curiously enough, many of Lincoln's advisers viewed him as a man who needed to be encouraged and protected. Even those who played only minor roles in the Republican party often shared this att.i.tude. For instance, Nathan M. Knapp, chairman of the Scott County, Illinois, Republican party, believed that Lincoln was a greater man than he himself realized: "He has not known his own power-uneducated in Youth, he has always been doubtful whether he was not pushing himself into positions to which he was unequal." David Davis put it another way: "Lincoln has few of the qualities of a politician and... cannot do much personally to advance his interests," because he was such "a guileless man." Had Lincoln known of this p.r.o.nouncement, he might have been amused.

While his managers were hard at work, Lincoln had to appear above the fray. To requests for his views on the political scene, he replied that he was not the fittest person to answer such questions because "when not a very great man begins to be mentioned for a very great position, his head is very likely to be a little turned." Nevertheless, he managed to offer opinions that, without being barbed or invidious, cast doubts on the availability of the other prominently mentioned candidates. Seward, he declared, "is the very best candidate we could have for the North of Illinois, and the very worst for the South of it." The same held for Chase, "except that he is a newer man." Bates "would be the best man for the South of our State, and the worst for the North of it." The strongest candidate, he a.s.serted with apparent lack of guile, was Justice John McLean, aged seventy-five-if only he were fifteen, or even ten, years younger.

Even with avowed supporters Lincoln was cagey. When James F. Babc.o.c.k, editor of the New Haven Palladium, who had been much impressed by the speeches Lincoln made in the recent Connecticut campaign, offered to promote his candidacy, he replied, in unusually opaque language: "As to the Presidential nomination, claiming no greater exemption from selfishness than is common, I still feel that my whole aspiration should be, and therefore must be, to be placed anywhere, or nowhere, as may appear most likely to advance our cause." Nevertheless, he pa.s.sed along to Babc.o.c.k a list of eleven "confidential friends" who were working for his nomination.

When one enterprising Illinois Republican suggested that he ought to have a campaign chest of $10,000, Lincoln replied that the proposal was an impossibility: "I could not raise ten thousand dollars if it would save me from the fate of John Brown. Nor have my friends, so far as I know, yet reached the point of staking any money on my chances of success." To a request for money from Mark W. Delahay, an old and somewhat disreputable Illinois friend who hoped to be a delegate to the Republican National Convention in order to promote his chance of being elected senator from Kansas, Lincoln responded, "I can not enter the ring on the money basis-first, because, in the main, it is wrong; and secondly, I have not, and can not get, the money." Yet, admitting that "in a political contest, the use of some [money], is both right, and indispensable," he offered to furnish Delahay $100 for his expenses in attending the convention. (As it turned out, Delahay was not chosen as a Kansas delegate but went to Chicago anyhow to root for Lincoln, who paid him the money he had promised.)

Central to Lincoln's planning was Douglas's expected role in the coming campaign. If the Democratic National Convention, scheduled to meet in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 23, nominated the Little Giant, the Republicans would be obliged to choose a candidate from the West, where Douglas was enormously popular. On the other hand, if the Democrats nominated a Southern-rights champion, like Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, or if the party split, Republicans would feel free to nominate Seward, Chase, or any other antislavery leader. Thus, as had so often been the case, Lincoln's prospects varied directly with Douglas's.

Given this political reality, Lincoln adopted a very simple campaign strategy. He hoped to go into the Republican National Convention with the unanimous support of the Illinois delegation and perhaps with the backing of a few individuals in other delegations. If Seward failed to secure the nomination on the first ballot-a decision that would be determined in no small part by what happened to Douglas-Lincoln and other candidates would have their chance on a second ballot. Recognizing that most members of the convention would favor someone else, Lincoln thought that his great strength lay in the fact that no one made "any positive objection" to him. "My name is new in the field; and I suppose I am not the first choice of a very great many," he explained to Samuel Galloway. "Our policy, then, is to give no offence to others-leave them in a mood to come to us, if they shall be compelled to give up their first love."