Team Of Rivals Part 2

In contrast to Seward, whose restless energy found insufficient outlet in the bosom of his family, and to Chase, plagued all his days by unattained ambition, Bates experienced a pa.s.sionate joy in the present, content to call himself "a very domestic, home, man." He had come briefly to national attention in 1847, when he delivered a spellbinding speech at the great River and Harbor Convention in Chicago, organized to protest President Polk's veto of a Whig-sponsored bill to provide federal appropriations for the internal improvement of rivers and harbors, especially needed in the fast-growing West. For a short time after the convention, newspapers across the country heralded Bates as a leading prospect for high political office, but he refused to take the bait. Thus, as the 1860 election neared, he a.s.sumed that, like his youth and early manhood, his old ambitions for political office had long since pa.s.sed him by.

In this a.s.sumption, he was mistaken. Thirteen months before the Chicago convention, at a dinner hosted by Missouri congressman Frank Blair, Bates was approached to run for president by a formidable political group spearheaded by Frank's father, Francis Preston Blair, Sr. At sixty-six, the elder Blair had been a powerful player in Washington for decades. A Democrat most of his life, he had arrived in Washington from Kentucky during Andrew Jackson's first presidential term to publish the Democratic organ, the Globe newspaper. Blair soon became one of Jackson's most trusted advisers, a member of the famous "kitchen cabinet." Meetings were often held in the "Blair House," the stately brick mansion opposite the White House where Blair lived with his wife and four children. (Still known as the Blair House, the elegant dwelling is now owned by the government, serving as the president's official guesthouse.) To the lonely Jackson, whose wife had recently died, the Blairs became a surrogate family. The three Blair boys-James, Montgomery, and Frank Junior-had the run of the White House, while Elizabeth, the only girl, actually lived in the family quarters for months at a time and Jackson doted on her as if she were his own child. Indeed, decades later, when Jackson neared death, he called Elizabeth to his home in Tennessee and gave her his wife's wedding ring, which he had worn on his watch chain from the day of her death.

Blair Senior had broken with the Democrats after the Mexican War over the extension of slavery into the territories. Although born and bred in the South, and still a slaveowner himself, he had become convinced that slavery must not be extended beyond where it already existed. He was one of the first important political figures to call for the founding of the Republican Party. At a Christmas dinner on his country estate in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1855, he instigated plans for the first Republican Convention in Philadelphia that following summer.

Over the years, Blair's Silver Spring estate, just across the District of Columbia boundary, had become a natural gathering place for politicians and journalists. The house was situated amid hundreds of rolling acres surrounded by orchards, brooks, even a series of grottoes. From the "Big Gate" at the entrance, the carriage roadway pa.s.sed through a forest of pine and poplar, opening to reveal a long driveway winding between two rows of chestnut trees and over a rustic bridge to the main house. In the years ahead, the Blairs' Silver Spring estate would become one of Lincoln's favorite places to relax.

The group that Blair convened included his two accomplished sons, Montgomery and Frank; an Indiana congressman, Schuyler Colfax, who would later become vice president under Ulysses Grant; and Charles Gibson, one of Bates's oldest friends in Missouri. Montgomery Blair, tall, thin, and scholarly, had graduated from West Point before studying law and moving to Missouri. In the 1850s he had returned to Washington to be closer to his parents. He took up residence in his family's city mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue. In the nation's capital, Monty Blair developed a successful legal practice and achieved national fame when he represented the slave Dred Scott in his bid for freedom.

Monty's charismatic younger brother Frank, recently elected to Congress, was a natural politician. Strikingly good-looking, with reddish-brown hair, a long red mustache, high cheekbones, and bright gray eyes, Frank was the one on whom the Blair family's burning ambitions rested. Both his father and older brother harbored dreams that Frank would one day become president. But in 1860, Frank was only in his thirties, and in the meantime, the Blair family turned its powerful gaze on Edward Bates.

The Blairs had settled on the widely respected judge, a longtime Whig and former slaveholder who had emanc.i.p.ated his slaves and become a Free-Soiler, as the ideal candidate for a conservative national ticket opposed to both the radical abolitionists in the North and the proslavery fanatics in the South. Though he had never officially joined the Republican Party, Bates held fast to the cardinal principle of Republicanism: that slavery must be restricted to the states where it already existed, and that it must be prevented from expanding into the territories.

As a man of the West and a peacemaker by nature, Bates was just the person, Blair Senior believed, to unite old-line Whigs, antislavery Democrats, and liberal nativists in a victorious fight against the Southern Democratic slaveocracy. The fact that Bates had receded from the political scene for decades was an advantage, leaving him untainted by the contentious battles of the fifties. He alone, his supporters believed, could quell the threats of secession and civil war and return the nation to peace, progress, and prosperity.

Unsurprisingly, Bates was initially reluctant to allow his name to be put forward as a candidate for president. "I feel, tho' in perfect bodily health, an indolence and indecision not common with me," he conceded in July 1859. "The cause, I fear, is the mixing up of my name in Politics.... A large section of the Republican party, who think that Mr. Seward's nomination would ensure defeat, are anxious to take me up, thinking that I could carry the Whigs and Americans generally.... I must try to resist the temptation, and not allow my thoughts to be drawn off from the common channels of business and domestic cares. Ambition is a pa.s.sion, at once strong and insidious, and is very apt to cheet a man out of his happiness and his true respectability of character."

Gradually, however, as letters and newspaper editorials advocating his candidacy crowded in upon him, a desire for the highest office in the land took command of his nature. The office to which he heard the call was not, as he had once disdained, "a mere seat in Congress as a subaltern member," but the presidency of the United States. Six months after the would-be kingmakers had approached him, Frank Blair, Jr., noted approvingly that "the mania has bitten old Bates very seriously," and predicted he would "play out more boldly for it than he has heretofore done."

By the dawn of the new year, 1860, thoughts of the White House monopolized the entries Bates penned in his diary, crowding out his previous observations on the phases of the moon and the state of his garden. "My nomination for the Presidency, which at first struck me with mere wonder, has become familiar, and now I begin to think my prospects very fair," he recorded on January 9, 1860. "Circ.u.mstances seem to be remarkably concurrent in my favor, and there is now great probability that the Opposition of all cla.s.ses will unite upon me: And that will be equivalent to election.... Can it be reserved for me to defeat and put down that corrupt and dangerous party [the Democratic Party]? Truly, if I can do my country that much good, I will rejoice in the belief that I have not lived in vain."

In the weeks that followed, his days were increasingly taken up with politics. Though he did not enjoy formal dinner parties, preferring intimate suppers with his family and a few close friends, Bates now spent more time than ever before entertaining political friends, educators, and newspaper editors. Although still tending to his garden, he immersed himself in periodicals on politics, economics, and public affairs. He felt he should prepare himself intellectually for the task of presidential leadership by reading historical accounts of Europe's most powerful monarchs, as well as theoretical works on government. He sought guidance for his role as chief executive in Carlyle's Frederick the Great and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Evenings once devoted to family were now committed to public speeches and correspondence with supporters. Politics had fastened a powerful hold upon him, disrupting his previous existence.

The chance for his nomination depended, as was true for Chase and Lincoln as well, on Seward's failure to achieve a first ballot victory at the convention. "I have many strong a.s.surances that I stand second," Bates confided in his diary, "first in the Northwest and in some states in New England, second in New York, Pa." To be sure, there were pockets of opposition, particularly among the more pa.s.sionate Republicans, who argued that the party must nominate one of its own, and among the German-Americans, who recalled that Bates had endorsed Millard Fillmore when he ran for president on the anti-immigrant American Party four years earlier. As the convention approached, however, his supporters were increasingly optimistic.

"There is no question," the New York Tribune predicted, "as there has been none for these three months past, that [Bates] will have more votes in the Convention than any other candidate presented by those who think it wiser to nominate a man of moderate and conservative antecedents." As the delegates gathered in Chicago, Francis Blair, Sr., prophesied that Bates would triumph in Chicago.

Though Bates acknowledged he had never officially joined the Republican Party, he understood that many Republicans, including "some of the most moderate and patriotic" men, believed that his nomination "would tend to soften the tone of the Republican party, without any abandonment of its principles," thus winning "the friendship and support of many, especially in the border States." His chances of success looked good. How strangely it had all turned out, for surely he understood that he had followed an unusual public path, a path that had curved swiftly upward when he was young, then leveled off, even sloped downward for many years. But now, as he positioned himself to reenter politics, he sighted what appeared to be a relatively clear trail all the way to the very top.

ON THAT MORNING OF MAY 18, 1860, Bates's chief objective was simply to stop Seward on the first ballot. Chase, too, had his eye on the front-runner, while Seward worried about Chase. Bates had become convinced that the convention would turn to him as the only real moderate. Neither Seward nor Chase nor Bates seriously considered Lincoln an obstacle to their great ambition.

Lincoln was not a complete unknown to his rivals. By 1860, his path had crossed with each of them in different ways. Seward had met Lincoln twelve years before at a political meeting. The two shared lodging that night, and Seward encouraged Lincoln to clarify and intensify his moderate position on slavery. Lincoln had met Bates briefly, and had sat in the audience in 1847 when Bates delivered his mesmerizing speech at the River and Harbor Convention. Chase had campaigned for Lincoln and the Republicans in Illinois in 1858, though the two men had never met.

There was little to lead one to suppose that Abraham Lincoln, nervously rambling the streets of Springfield that May morning, who scarcely had a national reputation, certainly nothing to equal any of the other three, who had served but a single term in Congress, twice lost bids for the Senate, and had no administrative experience whatsoever, would become the greatest historical figure of the nineteenth century.

CHAPTER 2

THE "LONGING TO RISE"

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, William Henry Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates were members of a restless generation of Americans, destined to leave behind the eighteenth-century world of their fathers. Bates, the oldest, was born when George Washington was still president; Seward and Chase during Jefferson's administration; Lincoln shortly before James Madison took over. Thousands of miles separate their birthplaces in Virginia, New York, New Hampshire, and Kentucky. Nonetheless, social and economic forces shaped their paths with marked similarities. Despite striking differences in station, talent, and temperament, all four aspirants for the Republican nomination left home, journeyed west, studied law, dedicated themselves to public service, joined the Whig Party, developed a reputation for oratorical eloquence, and became staunch opponents of the spread of slavery.

It was a country for young men. "We find ourselves," the twenty-eight-year-old Lincoln told the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, "in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate." The founding fathers had crafted a government more favorable to liberty "than any of which the history of former times tells us." Now it was up to their children to preserve and expand the great experiment.

The years following the Revolution fostered the belief that the only barriers to success were discipline and the extent of one's talents. "When both the privileges and the disqualifications of cla.s.s have been abolished and men have shattered the bonds which once held them immobile," marveled the French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville, "the idea of progress comes naturally into each man's mind; the desire to rise swells in every heart at once, and all men want to quit their former social position. Ambition becomes a universal feeling."

The same observation that horrified Mrs. Frances Trollope on a visit to America, that "any man's son may become the equal of any other man's son," propelled thousands of young men to break away from the small towns and limited opportunities their fathers had known. These ambitious youngsters ventured forth to test their luck in new careers as merchants, manufacturers, teachers, and lawyers. In the process, hundreds of new towns and cities were born, and with the rapid expansion of roads, bridges, and ca.n.a.ls, a modern market economy emerged. Vast new lands and possibilities were opened when the Louisiana Purchase doubled the extent of America's territorial holdings overnight.

The newly liberated Americans crossed the Appalachian Mountains, which had separated the original colonies from the unsettled West. "Americans are always moving on," wrote Stephen Vincent Benet. "The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried/The metal sleeping in the mountainside." In the South, pioneers moved through the Gulf States toward the Mississippi River, extending cotton cultivation and slavery as they went. In the North, the movement west from New England and the mid-Atlantic brought settlers who created a patchwork of family farms and planted the seeds of thriving cities.

Bates traveled farthest, eight hundred miles from his home state of Virginia across Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana to the young city of St. Louis in the newly established territory of Missouri. Chase made the arduous journey from New Hampshire to Cincinnati, Ohio, a burgeoning city recently carved from a forest rich with wild game. Seward left his family in eastern New York for the growing city of Auburn in the western part of the state. Lincoln traveled from Kentucky to Indiana, and then on to Illinois, where he would become a flatboatman, merchant, surveyor, and postmaster before studying law.

"Every American is eaten up with longing to rise," Tocqueville wrote. These four men, and thousands more, were not searching for a mythical pot of gold at the edge of the western rainbow, but for a place where their dreams and efforts would carve them a place in a fast-changing society.

OF THE CONTENDERS, William Henry Seward enjoyed the most privileged childhood. Blessed with a sanguine temperament that seemingly left him free from inner turmoil, he launched himself into every endeavor with unbounded vitality-whether competing for honors in school, playing cards with his cla.s.smates, imbibing good food and wine, or absorbing the pleasures of travel.

Henry Seward, as he would be called, was born on May 16, 1801. The fourth of six children, he grew up in the hill country of Orange County, New York, in the village of Florida, about twenty-five miles from West Point. His father, Samuel Seward, had acc.u.mulated "a considerable fortune" through his various employments as physician, magistrate, judge, merchant, land speculator, and member of the New York state legislature. His mother, Mary Jennings Seward, was renowned in the community for her warmth, good sense, and kindly manner.

Affectionate and outgoing, with red hair and intelligent blue eyes, Henry was singled out among his brothers for a college education, "then regarded, by every family," he later wrote, "as a privilege so high and so costly that not more than one son could expect it." His "destined preferment," as he called it, led him at the age of nine to a preparatory academy in the village of Goshen, and then back to his own town when a new academy opened its doors. His day of study began, he recalled, "at five in the morning, and closed at nine at night." The regime imposed by the schoolmaster was rigorous. When young Henry faltered in his translations of Caesar or failed to decipher lines of Virgil's poetry, he was relegated to a seat on the floor "with the cla.s.sic in one hand and the dictionary in the other." Although sometimes the pressure was "more than [he] could bear," he persisted, knowing that his father would never accept failure.

After the isolated hours consumed by books, Henry delighted in the sociability of winter evenings, when, he recalled, "the visit of a neighbor brought out the apples, nuts, and cider, and I was indulged with a respite from study, and listened to conversation, which generally turned upon politics or religion!" His pleasure in these social gatherings left Seward with a lifelong memory and appet.i.te. Years later, when he established his own home, he filled evenings with a continuous flow of guests, always providing abundant food, drink, and conversation.

The Sewards, like other well-to-do families in the area, owned slaves. As a small child, Henry spent much of his time in the slave quarters, comprised of the kitchen and the garret above it. Basking in the warmth of the fireplace and the aroma of the turkeys and chickens roasting on the spit, he savored the "loquacious" and "affectionate" company of the garret's residents. They provided a welcome respite from the "severe decorum" of his parents' parlor on the other side of the house. As he grew older, however, he found it difficult to accept the diminished status of these slave friends, whose lives were so different from his own.

Although his father, an exception in the village, permitted his slaves to join his own children in the local schoolhouse, Henry puzzled over why "no other black children went there." More disturbing still, he discovered that one of his companions, a slave child his own age who belonged to a neighboring family, was regularly whipped. After one severe beating, the boy ran away. "He was pursued and brought back," Seward recalled, and was forced to wear "an iron yoke around his neck, which exposed him to contempt and ridicule," until he finally "found means to break the collar, and fled forever." Seward later would credit this early unease and personal awareness of the slaves' plight for his resolve to fight against slavery.

The youthful Seward was not alone in his budding dislike for slavery. In the years after the Revolutionary War, the state legislatures in eleven Northern states pa.s.sed abolition laws. Some states banned slavery outright within their boundaries; others provided for a system of gradual emanc.i.p.ation, decreeing that all slaves born after a certain date would be granted freedom when they attained adulthood. The slaves Seward knew as a child belonged to this transitional generation. By 1827, slavery would be fully eradicated in New York. While Northern legislatures were eliminating the inst.i.tution, however, slavery had become increasingly important to the economic life of the cotton-growing South.

At fifteen, Seward enrolled in upstate New York's prestigious Union College. His first sight of the steamboat that carried him up the Hudson was one he would never forget. Invented only a decade earlier, the steamboat seemed to him "a magnificent palace...a prodigy of power." His first glimpse of Albany, then a rural village with a population of twelve thousand, thrilled him-"so vast, so splendid, so imposing." Throughout his life, Seward retained an awe of the new technologies and inventions that fostered the industrial development of his rapidly expanding country.

At Union, Seward's open, affable nature made him dozens of friends. Upon his arrival, he later confessed, "I cherished in my secret thoughts aspirations to become...the valedictorian of my cla.s.s." When he realized that his compet.i.tors for the honor seemed isolated from the social life of the school, he wondered if the prize was worth the cost. His ambitions were revitalized, however, when the president of Union announced that the Phi Beta Kappa Society "had determined to establish a fourth branch at Union College," with membership conferred on the top scholars at the end of junior year. There were then only three active branches of Phi Beta Kappa-at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth. To gain admission, Seward realized, would place him in the company of "all the eminent philosophers, scholars, and statesmen of the country."

He made a pact with his roommate whereby the two "rose at three o'clock in the morning, cooked and spread our own meals, washed our own dishes, and spent the whole time which we could save from prayers and recitations, and the table, in severe study, in which we unreservedly and constantly aided each other." Years later, his jovial self-confidence intact, Seward wrote: "Need I say that we entered the great society without encountering the deadly blackball?"

Seward began his senior year in good spirits. Without sacrificing his popularity with cla.s.smates, he was poised to graduate as valedictorian. But his prideful character temporarily derailed him. Strapped by the stingy allowance his father provided, he had fallen into debt with various creditors in Schenectady. The bills, mostly to tailors, were not large, but his father's refusal to pay spurred a rash decision to leave college for good, so that he might work to support himself. "I could not submit to the shame of credit impaired," he later wrote. Without notifying his parents, he accompanied a cla.s.smate to Georgia, where he found a good job teaching school. When his father discovered Henry's whereabouts, he "implored [him] to return," mingling promises of additional funds with threats that he would pursue the trustees of the school "with the utmost rigor of the law...if they should continue to harbor the delinquent."

If his father's threats increased his determination to stay, a letter from his mother, revealing "a broken heart," prompted Seward's return to New York. The following fall, after working off his debt that summer, he resumed his studies at Union. "Matters prosper in my favor," he wrote to a friend in January 1820, "and I have so far been inferior to none in my own opinion." He was back on track to become valedictorian, and his election as graduation speaker seemed likely. If denied the honor, he told his friend, "his soul would disdain to sit in the hearing of some, and listen to some whom he considers beneath even his notice." His goals were realized. He graduated first in his cla.s.s and was unanimously elected by cla.s.smates and faculty to be Union College's commencement orator in June 1820.

From his honored place at Union College, Seward glided smoothly into the profession of law. In an era when "reading the law" under the guidance of an established attorney was the princ.i.p.al means of becoming a lawyer, he walked directly from his graduation ceremony to the law office of a distinguished Goshen lawyer, and then "was received as a student" in the New York City office of John Anthon, author of a widely known book on the legal practice. Not only did Seward have two eminent mentors, he also gained access to the "New York Forum," a society of ambitious law students who held mock trials and prosecutions to hone their professional skills before public audiences.

Accustomed to winning the highest honors, Seward was initially chagrined to discover that his legal arguments failed to bring the loudest applause. His confidence as a writer faltered until a fellow law student, whose orations "always carried away the audience," insisted that the problem was not Henry's compositions, which were, in fact, far superior to his own, but his husky voice, which a congenital inflammation in the throat rendered "incapable of free intonation." To prove this point, Seward's friend offered to exchange compositions, letting Seward read one of his while he read one of Seward's. Seward recalled that he read his friend's address "as well as I could, but it did not take at all. He followed me with my speech, and I think Broadway overheard the clamorous applause which arose on that occasion in Washington Hall."

During his stay in New York, Seward formed an intimate friendship with a bookish young man, David Berdan, who had graduated from Union the year after him. Seward believed that Berdan possessed "a genius of the highest order." He had read more extensively than anyone Seward knew and excelled as a scholar in the cla.s.sics. "The domains of History, Eloquence, Poetry, Fiction & Song," Seward marveled, "were all subservient to his command." Berdan had entered into the study of law at the same office as Seward, but soon discovered that his vocation lay in writing, not law.

Together, the two young men attended the theater, read poetry, discussed books, and chased after women. Convinced that Berdan would become a celebrated writer, Seward stood in awe of his friend's talent and dedication. All such grand expectations and prospects were crushed when Berdan, still in his twenties, was "seized with a bleeding at the lungs" while sojourning in Europe. He continued traveling, but when his tuberculosis worsened, he booked his pa.s.sage home, in "the hope that he might die in his native land." The illness took his life before the ship reached New York. His body was buried at sea. Seward was devastated, later telling his wife that he had loved Berdan as "never again" could he "love in this world."

Such intimate male attachments, as Seward's with Berdan, or, as we shall see, Lincoln's with Joshua Speed and Chase's with Edwin Stanton, were "a common feature of the social landscape" in nineteenth-century America, the historian E. Anthony Rotundo points out. The family-focused and community-centered life led by most men in the colonial era was transformed at the dawn of the new century into an individual and career-oriented existence. As the young men of Seward and Lincoln's generation left the familiarity of their small communities and traveled to seek employment in fast-growing, anonymous cities or in distant territories, they often felt unbearably lonely. In the absence of parents and siblings, they turned to one another for support, sharing thoughts and emotions so completely that their intimate friendships developed the qualities of pa.s.sionate romances.

After pa.s.sing the bar examination, Seward explored the western part of the state, seeking the perfect law office from which to launch an ill.u.s.trious career. He found what he wanted in Auburn when Judge Elijah Miller offered him a junior partnership in his thriving firm. Seward quickly a.s.sumed responsibility for most of the legal work pa.s.sing through the office, earning the senior partner's trust and respect. The fifty-two-year-old judge was a widower who shared with his daughters-Lazette and Frances-the grandest residence in Auburn. It seemed to follow naturally that, less than two years later, Seward should woo and win Miller's twenty-year-old daughter, the beautiful, sensitive Frances. The judge insisted, as a condition of consent to the marriage, that the young couple join his household, which included his mother and unmarried sister.

Thus, at twenty-three, Seward found himself the tenant of the elegant country mansion where he and Frances would live for the rest of their lives. With a brilliant marriage and excellent prospects in his chosen profession, he could look ahead with confidence. To the end of his long life, he gazed optimistically to the future, believing that he and his countrymen were steadily advancing along a road toward increased knowledge, achievement, prosperity, and moral development.