Lincoln in the World (14 page)

Weed tried to create an aura of inevitability around his man. But Seward had serious flaws as a candidate. As the debate over slavery had intensified, Seward predicted that the regional differences would erupt into an “irrepressible conflict”—a statement that unnerved some dovish voters. Lincoln’s campaign staff shrewdly used his opponent’s words against him. The Lincoln men whispered that Seward’s hard-line stance had rendered him unelectable. Lincoln’s team knew that Seward and Weed would be formidable opponents. They cleverly asked delegates to make Lincoln their “second choice.”

Seward, meanwhile, ensconced himself at his vast estate in Auburn, New York—a twenty-room mansion set amid five acres of spectacular gardens and fruit trees. Huge crowds gathered on the lawn and spilled out into the street. “All right,” Seward’s men at the convention site had telegraphed their boss the day of the balloting, “everything indicates your nomination today sure.” Now, as voting began, a rider stationed at the local telegraph office galloped to the Seward estate and announced his enormous lead to the crowd. Seward, now fifty-nine, with a shaggy mop of gray hair, beamed confidently at his supporters. “I shall be nominated on the next ballot,” he declared, to a chorus of huzzahs.
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As the voting began, Seward easily won the first ballot, with 173½ votes to Lincoln’s 102. Wild cheering broke out in Auburn when the horseman arrived with the tally. Seward, according to one witness, processed the news “without the movement of a muscle of his countenance.” Yet as the polling continued, ballots shifted away from marginal candidates with no chance of victory and into Lincoln’s column. Delegates seemed to be buying the line that Seward’s radical rhetoric would fatally hinder him in the border states during a general election. The pleas to convention-goers to make Lincoln their “second choice” was proving to be sound strategy.

At the Wigwam, trying to maintain the momentum, Lincoln’s advance men whipped the crowd into a fury. “Imagine all the hogs ever slaughtered in Cincinnati giving their death squeals together,” wrote one newspaperman. “I thought the Seward yell could not be surpassed; but the Lincoln boys … made every plank and pillar in the building quiver.” Moments later, Seward’s team was forced to dictate a curt telegram and dispatch it to Auburn: “Lincoln nominated third ballot.” The color drained from Seward’s face. On the Wigwam floor, a reporter saw Thurlow Weed “press his fingers
hard
upon his eyelids to keep back the tears.” Seward himself later mused that it was lucky he had not kept a diary at the time of the vote, or his entries would have been full of “cursing and swearing.”
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In Chicago, jubilant Lincoln supporters streamed out of the Wigwam, burning tar barrels, pounding drums, and firing cannon. Lincoln got the news at the local newspaper office in Springfield, where he had gone to wait for the results. “Well, gentlemen,” he said when his nomination was confirmed, “there is a little woman at our house who is probably more interested in this dispatch than I am.” At the state capitol building in Springfield, cheering Lincoln supporters packed into a raucous rally in the rotunda. Church bells clanged, and a Mexican War–era cannon thundered. The Lincoln men eventually marched to the nominee’s house amid blaring music and fluttering banners. Late into the night, revelers burned bonfires and filled the sky with fireworks.
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Seward was devastated. Months after the balloting, the New Yorker was still smarting from the defeat. “Disappointment!” he cried. “You speak to me of disappointment. To me, who was justly entitled to the Republican nomination for the presidency, and who had to stand aside and see it given to a little Illinois lawyer!” Seward, when he cooled down, eventually agreed to campaign for Lincoln, speaking at whistle stops around the country. The New Yorker cut his usual melodramatic figure, dressing in “a strange and indescribable Syrian cashmere cloak,” according to Charles Francis Adams Jr., son of Lincoln’s future man in London. As the train rumbled
across the country, Seward fortified himself with brandy and chain-smoked cigars. At one stop, in Toledo, Ohio, an inebriated Stephen Douglas stumbled into Seward’s car in the dead of night. Waving a whisky bottle, he demanded that Seward come out and make a speech. Seward refused and went back to bed.
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Toward the end of the campaign, in October 1860, Seward’s train made a quick stop in Springfield. Lincoln briefly boarded Seward’s car, but the former opponents treated each other coolly. One newspaperman reported that the two men acted “as if each was afraid of his own virtue in the presence of the other.” Another observer wrote that Lincoln’s demeanor “was marked rather by deference and respect than cordiality.” Lincoln, recalled a third witness to the meeting, appeared shy and stiff, “as if he felt out of place.” Seward seemed no more comfortable. The entire whistle stop took all of fifteen minutes. Then the wounded New Yorker was gone again.
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Lincoln’s opponents, meanwhile, did their best to remind voters of his stance on the Mexican War. “Mr. Speaker!” went one Democratic chant. “Where’s the spot? Is it in Spain or is it not? Mr. Speaker! Spot! Spot! Spot!” The heckling seemed to have some effect. “Will you be kind enough,” a New York iron importer wrote Lincoln in October 1860, “to say if you
did
or
did not
while you were in Congress vote against supplies to the American army while on the battlefields of Mexico?” Lincoln swiftly wrote back to refute the accusation, adding that it would be “a matter of record in the Journals and Congressional Globe” if he had. “No man making that, or any such charge, should be listened to,” Lincoln scolded his correspondent.
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The 1860 campaign also featured a fierce battle for the loyalty of foreign-born voters. For years, refugees from Europe—a handful of whom had fled the tumult of the liberal revolutions and conservative counterrevolts of 1848—had been streaming into the American Northwest, where voting laws made it relatively easy for newcomers to gain the franchise. German immigrants, in particular, tended to be intensely politically active. They flocked to crowded rallies to hear native speakers like Carl Schurz, a Lincoln supporter from
Wisconsin who loudly advocated for voting rights and western land grants. Schurz boasted that his acolytes consisted of a “solid column of German and Scandinavian anti-slavery men, who know how to handle a gun and who will fight, too.” Actually, German voters were far less homogeneous than Schurz claimed; many Catholic Germans, for example, remained wary of the xenophobic nativism of some Republicans. Nevertheless, Schurz founded a “foreign department” of the Republican national committee and sent speakers fanning out across the heartland.
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Lincoln, a long-standing supporter of immigrant rights, did his best to court the increasingly powerful constituency. He forcefully rejected the nativism of many of his fellow former Whigs. (Billy Herndon, for example, had been known to exclaim, “God damn the Irish!” Even Mary Lincoln had once written of “the
necessity
of keeping foreigners within bounds,” complaining of the “wild Irish.”)

Lincoln worried that if anti-immigrant sentiment got much worse, Americans would soon have to change the Declaration of Independence to read, “all men are created equal, except negroes,
and foreigners, and catholics
.” In that event, Lincoln lamented, “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.” As the 1860 campaign approached, he wrote a letter to a German-American supporter observing that “I have some little notoriety for commiserating [with] the oppressed condition of the negro; 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.”
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Democrats traditionally had better luck wooing foreign-born voters. Yet with the Democratic field hopelessly divided in 1860, the Republican ticket was virtually assured of victory in November. As the fall unfolded, the reality of Lincoln’s impending election began to set in. “It now really looks as if the Government is about to fall into our hands,” Lincoln wrote Seward in mid-October. On election night,
Lincoln ended up winning more than twice as many electoral votes as his closest Democratic challenger. “I guess there’s a little lady at home who would like to hear this news,” he told supporters at the telegraph office after the returns were finalized. When he reached his house, Lincoln exclaimed, “Mary, Mary, we are elected.”
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High Road to a Slave Empire

Meditating on his election, Lincoln once mused that it was “very strange that I, a boy brought up in the woods, and seeing, as it were, but little of the world, should be drifted into the very apex of this great event.” The men who would become Lincoln’s future diplomats shared the president-elect’s sense of wonder. John Bigelow, whom Lincoln would eventually appoint as his consul in Paris, wrote to a correspondent in England that the Illinoisan was “not precisely the sort of man who would be regarded as one entirely
a la mode
at your splendid European courts.… He is essentially a self made man and of a type to which Europe is as much a stranger as it is to the Mastodon.”
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And yet a perilous world almost immediately confronted the president-elect. Charles Sumner thought the 1860 election would “cause a reverberation that will be heard throughout the globe.”
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As the winter deepened, Northerners and Southerners staked out increasingly firm positions on American expansion—the same issue that Lincoln had been debating since the Mexican War. By November 1860, the president-elect had developed exceptionally nuanced arguments on the subject. Like many in his party, Lincoln supported westward expansion and commercial development. That social mobility, he believed, was the very thing that differentiated the United States from Old Europe.
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Yet he opposed most compromises that would avert the secession crisis at the cost of extending slavery.

In his makeshift office in the capitol building in Springfield, Lincoln tried to make sense of the crisis. The city had become “one
grand mud hole,” observed a journalist. “It has been raining, snowing, sleeting, blowing, and freezing for eight days.” Lincoln surrounded himself with a surprisingly cosmopolitan crowd. Advice poured in from Europeans—many of them hawkish German émigrés who had experienced the revolutions of 1848 firsthand. Gustave Koerner, a German immigrant and one of Lincoln’s Illinois allies, presented Lincoln with the recent example of Switzerland, whose government called up 100,000 troops and managed to intimidate a few breakaway cantons into abandoning their rebellion.
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The coaching may have had some effect. The president-elect dispatched a barrage of letters to political allies in Washington and elsewhere making his position on expansion southward abundantly clear. “Let there be no compromise on the question of
extending
slavery,” Lincoln wrote to Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull. “Stand firm. The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.” Lincoln cautioned another friend to prevent “compromise of any sort” on the extension of slavery. Any deal, the president-elect believed, would provide a signal for Southern filibusters to pour into the new territory and begin claiming the land for future slave states. “On that point hold firm,” Lincoln wrote, “as with a chain of steel.” To Pennsylvania congressman James Hale, Lincoln insisted that if his administration struck a deal, one “year will not pass” before the United States will “have to take Cuba” in order to satisfy the slave states. Only “one compromise,” Lincoln concluded, “would really settle the slavery question, and that would be a prohibition against acquiring any more territory.”
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At the same time, Lincoln began attempting to woo Seward. On December 8, he sent his one-time opponent a letter asking him to join the cabinet as secretary of state. Lincoln then penned a second, longer letter—marked “
Private & Confidential
”—that he dispatched along with the first. The second missive assured Seward that he genuinely wanted him to take the job. The president-elect made reference to rumors in the newspapers that he would offer Seward the post simply “as a compliment, and with the expectation that you
would decline it.” Lincoln insisted that he had intended Seward for the position since the day of his nomination. He concluded by praising his former opponent’s “integrity, ability, learning, and great experience.” Seward responded a few days later, asking for “a little time to consider whether I possess the qualifications and temper of a minister and whether it is in such a capacity that my friends would prefer that I should act if I am to continue in the public service.”
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Still, the two men were once again drifting apart—this time over a matter of policy. Seward and Thurlow Weed began pushing for a deal to avert the secession crisis. Both men favored a plan that would extend the line of the Missouri Compromise all the way to the Pacific Ocean. In such a package, slavery would be protected south of the line, and prohibited north of it. Many Northeastern businessmen—including a significant number of Seward’s constituents—favored such a deal if it would prevent a disruptive war. In late December, Kentucky senator John J. Crittenden introduced a series of constitutional amendments based on a similar plan. Seward, at first, joined the chorus of politicians lobbying to approve the Crittenden Compromise. But Lincoln feared that any deal that allowed the extension of slavery southward would lead to war in the long run.
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Seward’s secession-winter maneuvering, the scholar Eric Foner has noted, “has proved to be something of a puzzle for historians.” Seward had long been considered a firm antislavery man. His radical reputation contributed to his defeat for the Republican nomination in 1860. Yet there was a great deal of subtlety in his position. The New Yorker had opposed the peculiar institution because he believed it hindered America’s rise to world power. A free-labor economic system would achieve that goal far more efficiently, he believed. And yet if Northern statesmen refused to compromise with slaveholders, the Union would be torn apart—almost certainly halting its imperial drive.
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