Team of Rivals (29 page)

Douglas had argued that Northern politicians were simply manufacturing a crisis, that Kansas and Nebraska were destined, in any event, to become free states because the soil and climate in both regions were inhospitable to the cultivation of staple crops. Labeling this argument “a
lullaby,”
Lincoln exhibited a map demonstrating that five of the present slave states had similar climates to Kansas and Nebraska, and that the census returns for 1850 showed these states held one fourth of all the slaves in the nation.

Finally, as the greatest bulwark against the Nebraska Act and the concept of “popular sovereignty,” Lincoln invoked the Declaration of Independence. He considered the Nebraska Act simply a legal term for the perpetuation and expansion of slavery and, as such, nothing less than the possible death knell of the Union and the meaning of America. “The doctrine of self government is right—absolutely and eternally right,” he argued, but to use it, as Douglas proposed, to extend slavery perverted its very meaning. “No man is good enough to govern another man,
without that other’s consent.
I say this is the leading principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism.” If the Negro was a man, which Lincoln claimed he most assuredly was, then it was “a total destruction of self-government” to propose that he be governed by a master without his consent. Allowing slavery to spread forced the American people into an open war with the Declaration of Independence, depriving “our republican example of its just influence in the world.”

By appealing to the moral and philosophical foundation work of the nation, Lincoln hoped to provide common ground on which good men in both the North and the South could stand. “I am not now combating the argument of
necessity,
arising from the fact that the blacks are already amongst us; but I am combating what is set up as
moral
argument for allowing them to be taken where they have never yet been.” Unlike the majority of antislavery orators, who denounced the South and castigated slaveowners as corrupt and un-Christian, Lincoln pointedly denied fundamental differences between Northerners and Southerners. He argued that “they are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up…. When it is said that the institution exists; and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself.” And, finally, “when they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them…and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives.”

Rather than upbraid slaveowners, Lincoln sought to comprehend their position through empathy. More than a decade earlier, he had employed a similar approach when he advised temperance advocates to refrain from denouncing drinkers in “thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,” for denunciation would inevitably be met with denunciation, “crimination with crimination, and anathema with anathema.” In a passage directed at abolitionists as well as temperance reformers, he had observed that it was the nature of man, when told that he should be “shunned and despised,” and condemned as the author “of all the vice and misery and crime in the land,” to “retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart.”

Though the cause be “naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel,” the sanctimonious reformer could no more pierce the heart of the drinker or the slaveowner than “penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man, and so
must
he be understood by those who would lead him.” In order to “win a man to your cause,” Lincoln explained, you must first reach his heart, “the great high road to his reason.” This, he concluded, was the only road to victory—to that glorious day “when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth.”

Building on his rhetorical advice, Lincoln tried to place himself in the shoes of the slaveowner to reason his way through the sectional impasse, by asking Southerners to let their own hearts and history reveal that they, too, recognized the basic humanity of the black man. Never appealing like Seward to a “higher law,” or resorting to Chase’s “natural right” derived from “the code of heaven,” Lincoln staked his argument in reality. He confronted Southerners with the contradictions surrounding the legal status of blacks that existed in their own laws and social practices.

In 1820, he reminded them, they had “joined the north, almost unanimously, in declaring the African slave trade piracy, and in annexing to it the punishment of death.” In so doing, they must have understood that selling slaves was wrong, for they never thought of hanging men for selling horses, buffaloes, or bears. Likewise, though forced to do business with the domestic slave dealer, they did not “recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man…. Now why is this?” he asked. “You do not so treat the man who deals in corn, cattle or tobacco.” Finally, he observed, over four hundred thousand free blacks in the United States had been liberated at “vast pecuniary sacrifices” by white owners who understood something about the human rights of Negroes. “In all these cases it is your sense of justice, and human sympathy, continually telling you” that the slave is a man who cannot be considered “mere merchandise.”

As he wound to a close, Lincoln implored his audience to re-adopt the Declaration of Independence and “return [slavery] to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace.” This accomplishment, he pledged, would save the Union, and “succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.” When he finished, the enthusiastic audience broke out in “deafening applause.” Even the editors of the Democratic paper felt “compelled” to say that they had “never read or heard a stronger anti-Nebraska speech.”

From that moment on, propelled by a renewed sense of purpose, Lincoln dedicated the major part of his energies to the antislavery movement. Conservative and contemplative by temperament, he embraced new positions warily. Once he committed himself, however, as he did in the mid-fifties to the antislavery cause, he demonstrated singular tenacity and authenticity of feeling. Ambition and conviction united, “as my two eyes make one in sight,” as Robert Frost wrote, to give Lincoln both a political future and a cause worthy of his era.

A
S
1854
GAVE WAY TO
1855, Abraham Lincoln’s long-dormant dream of high political office was reawakened, now infused with a new sense of purpose by the passage of the Nebraska Act. He won a seat in the Illinois State Assembly, then promptly declared himself a candidate for the U.S. Senate. In the Illinois state elections the previous fall, the loose coalition of antislavery Whigs and independent Democrats had gained a narrow majority over the Douglas Democrats in the legislature. The victory was “mainly attributed” to Lincoln’s leadership, observed state legislator Joseph Gillespie. With the new legislature set to convene in late January to choose the next U.S. senator from Illinois, Lincoln was “the first choice” of the overwhelming majority of anti-Nebraska members. His lifelong dream of achieving high political office seemed about to be realized at last.

On January 20, 1855, however, the worst blizzard in more than two decades isolated Springfield from the rest of the state, preventing a quorum from assembling in the state legislature. Immense snowdrifts cut off trains coming in from the North, and mail was halted for more than a week. While Springfield’s children relished “the merry sleigh bells” jingling through the snow, the “pulsation of business” was “nearly extinct.” Finally, the weather improved sufficiently for the legislature to convene.

On Thursday morning, February 8, long before the balloting opened at three o’clock, the Capitol was “a beehive of activity.” Representatives caucused and whispered in every corner. The anti-Nebraska caucus, composed mainly of Whigs, voted, as expected, to support Lincoln, but a small group of five anti-Nebraska Democrats was ominously absent. The Douglas Democrats, meanwhile, had decided to support the incumbent senator, James Shields, on the early ballots. If Shields’s campaign faltered, due to his outspoken endorsement of the Nebraska bill, they had devised a plan to switch their support to the popular Democratic governor, Joel Matteson, who had not taken an open position on the bill. In this way, the Democrats believed, they might win over some members of the anti-Nebraska caucus.

By noon, the “lobby and the galleries of the Hall of the House of Representatives began to fill with senators, representatives and their guests.” Notable among the ladies in the gallery were Mary Todd Lincoln and her friend Julia Jayne Trumbull, wife of Democrat Lyman Trumbull, who had recently been elected to Congress on an anti-Nebraska platform. The wife and daughter of Governor Matteson were also in attendance. Some weeks earlier, Lincoln had bought a stack of small notebooks to record, with Mary’s help, all hundred members of the two houses, identifying the party affiliation of each, as well as his stance on the Nebraska bill. Their calculations gave reason to hope, but the situation was complicated. To reach a majority of 51 votes, Lincoln would have to hold together the fragile coalition comprised of former rivals in the Whig and Democratic camps who had only recently joined hands against the Nebraska bill.

Led by the governor, the senators marched into the House chamber at the appointed hour. When all were sworn in, the balloting began. On the first ballot, Lincoln received 45 votes, against 41 for the Douglas Democrat, James Shields, and 5 for Congressman Lyman Trumbull. The five anti-Nebraska Democrats who voted for Trumbull were led by Norman Judd of Chicago. They had no personal animosity toward Lincoln, but “having been elected as Democrats…they could not sustain themselves at home,” they claimed, if they voted for a Whig for senator.

In the ballots that followed, as daylight gave way to gaslights in the great hall, Lincoln reached a high point of 47 votes, only 4 shy of victory. Nonetheless, the little Trumbull coalition refused to budge, denying Lincoln the necessary majority. Finally, after nine ballots, Lincoln concluded that unless his supporters shifted to Trumbull, the Douglas Democrats, who had, as expected, switched their allegiance to Matteson, would choose the next senator.

Unwilling to sacrifice all the hard work of the antislavery coalition, Lincoln advised his floor manager, Stephen Logan, to drop him for Trumbull. Logan refused at first, protesting the injustice of the candidate with the much larger vote giving in to the candidate with the smaller vote. Lincoln was adamant, insisting that if his name remained on the ballot, “you will lose both Trumbull and myself and I think the cause in this case is to be preferred to men.”

When Logan rose to speak, the tension in the chamber was so great that the “spectators scarcely breathed.” In a sad voice, he announced that it was “the purpose of the remaining Whigs to decide the contest.” Obeying his directions, Lincoln’s supporters switched their votes to Trumbull, giving him the 51 votes needed for victory. Lincoln’s friends were inconsolable, believing that this was “perhaps his last chance for that high position.” Logan put his hands over his face and began to cry, while Davis stormily announced that had he been in Lincoln’s situation, “he never would have consented to the 47 men being controlled by the 5.”

In public, Lincoln expressed no hard feelings toward either Trumbull or Judd. He deliberately showed up at Trumbull’s victory party, with a smile on his face and a warm handshake for the victor. Consoled that the Nebraska men were “worse whipped” than he, Lincoln insisted that Matteson’s defeat “gives me more pleasure than my own gives me pain…. On the whole, it is perhaps as well for our general cause that Trumbull is elected.”

Lincoln’s magnanimity served him well. While Seward and Chase would lose friends in victory—Seward by neglecting at the height of his success his old friend Horace Greeley, and Chase by not understanding the lingering resentments that followed in the wake of his 1849 Senate victory—Lincoln, in defeat, gained friends. Neither Trumbull nor Judd would ever forget Lincoln’s generous behavior. Indeed, both men would assist him in his bid for the U.S. Senate in 1858, and Judd would play a critical role in his run for the presidency in 1860.

Mary Lincoln was unable to be so gracious. Convinced that Trumbull had acted with “cold, selfish, treachery,” she never spoke another word to Trumbull’s wife, Julia, who had been a bridesmaid at her wedding and one of her closest friends. Though intermediaries tried in succeeding years to bring the two women together, the ruptured friendship never healed. Neither could Mary forgive Norman Judd for his role in supporting Trumbull. Though Judd, along with Davis, would do more than anyone else to assure Lincoln’s nomination at the Chicago convention, Mary did everything she could to blackball him from a cabinet post after her husband’s election.

Despite the dignity of Lincoln’s public demeanor, he privately suffered a brutal disappointment, describing the ordeal as an “agony.” Though he had engineered Trumbull’s victory for the sake of the anti-Nebraska cause, it was difficult to accept the manner of his loss. “He could bear defeat inflicted by his enemies with a pretty good grace,” he told his friend Gillespie, “but it was hard to be wounded in the house of his friends.” After all the hard work, the interminable nights and weekends on the hustings, the conversations with fellow politicians, the hours spent writing letters to garner support, after so many years of patient waiting and hopefulness, he seemed as far from realizing his ambition as ever. Fate seemed to take a curious delight in finding new ways to shatter his dreams.

I
N THE SUMMER OF
1855, disappointment piled upon disappointment. Six months after his loss to Trumbull, Lincoln’s involvement in a celebrated law case forced him to recognize that his legal reputation, secure as it might have been in frontier Illinois, carried little weight among the preeminent lawyers in the country.

The story began that June with the arrival in Springfield of Peter Watson, a young associate in the distinguished Philadelphia firm headed by George Harding, a nationally renowned patent specialist. Harding had been hired by the John Manny Company of Rockford, Illinois, to defend its mechanical reaping machine against a patent infringement charge brought by Cyrus McCormick, the original inventor of the reaper.
McCormick v. Manny,
better known as the “Reaper” suit, was considered an important test case, pitting two outstanding patent lawyers, Edward Dickerson of New York and former Attorney General Reverdy Johnson for McCormick, against Harding for Manny. Since the case was to be tried before a judge in Chicago, Harding decided to engage a local lawyer who “understood the judge and had his confidence,” though, from his Eastern perspective, he condescendingly expressed doubt he could find a lawyer in Illinois “who would be of real assistance” in arguing the case.

Watson was sent to Springfield to see if Abraham Lincoln, whose name had been recommended, was the right man for the position. His initial impression was not positive. Neither the small frame house on Eighth Street nor Lincoln’s appearance at the door with “neither coat nor vest” indicated a lawyer of sufficient standing for a case of this magnitude. After talking with Lincoln, however, Watson decided he might be “rather effective” after all. He paid Lincoln a retainer and arranged a substantial fee when the work was completed. Lincoln was thrilled with both the fee and the opportunity to test himself with the renowned Reverdy Johnson. He began working on the legal arguments for the case, understanding that Harding would present the scientific arguments.

Not long after Watson’s Springfield visit, Harding received word that the case had been transferred from Chicago to Cincinnati. The change of venue to Ohio “removed the one object” for employing Lincoln, allowing Harding to team up with the man he had wanted in the first place—the brilliant Edwin Stanton. Unaware of the changed situation, Lincoln continued to develop his case. “At our interview here in June,” he wrote Watson in late July, “I understood you to say you would send me copies of the Bill and Answer…and also of depositions…I have had nothing from you since. However, I attended the U.S. Court at Chicago, and while there, got copies…I write this particularly to urge you to forward on to me the additional evidence as fast as you can. During August, and the remainder of this month, I can devote some time to the case, and, of course, I want all the material that can be had. During my day at Chicago, I went out to Rockford, and spent half a day, examining and studying Manny’s Machine.”

Though Lincoln never heard from Watson, he pieced together what he needed and in late September set out for Cincinnati with a lengthy brief in his hands. Arriving at the Burnet House where all the lawyers were lodged, he encountered Harding and Stanton as they left for the court. Years later, Harding could still recall the shock of his first sight of the “tall, rawly boned, ungainly back woodsman, with coarse, 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.” Lincoln introduced himself and proposed, “Let’s go up in a gang.” At this point, Stanton drew Harding aside and whispered, “Why did you bring that d——d long armed Ape here…he does not know any thing and can do you no good.” With that, Stanton and Harding turned from Lincoln and continued to court on their own.

In the days that followed, Stanton “managed to make it plain to Lincoln” that he was expected to remove himself from the case. Lincoln did withdraw, though he remained in Cincinnati to hear the arguments. Harding never opened Lincoln’s manuscript, “so sure that it would be only trash.” Throughout that week, though Lincoln ate at the same hotel, Harding and Stanton never asked him to join them for a meal, or accompany them to or from court. When Judge John McLean hosted a dinner for the lawyers on both sides, Lincoln was not invited.

The hearing continued for a week. The sophisticated arguments were “a revelation” to Lincoln, recalled Ralph Emerson, one of Manny’s partners. So intrigued was he by Stanton’s speech, in particular, that he stood in “rapt attention…drinking in his words.” Never before, Emerson realized, had Lincoln “seen anything so finished and elaborated, and so thoroughly prepared.” When the hearing was over, Lincoln told Emerson that he was going home “to study law.” Emerson did not understand at first what Lincoln meant by this, but Lincoln explained. “For any rough-and-tumble case (and a pretty good one, too), I am enough for any man we have out in that country; but these college-trained men are coming West. They have had all the advantages of a life-long training in the law, plenty of time to study and everything, perhaps, to fit them. Soon they will be in Illinois…and when they appear I will be ready.”

As Lincoln prepared to leave Cincinnati, he went to say goodbye to William Dickson, one of the few people who had shown him kindness that week. “You have made my stay here most agreeable, and I am a thousand times obliged to you,” Lincoln told Dickson’s wife, “but in reply to your request for me to come again I must say to you I never expect to be in Cincinnati again. I have nothing against the city, but things have so happened here as to make it undesirable for me ever to return here.”

After returning to Springfield, Lincoln received a check in the mail for the balance of his fee. He returned it, saying he had not earned it, never having made any argument. When Watson sent the check a second time, Lincoln cashed it.