Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
The convention finally settled down and the balloting began. Two hundred thirty-three votes would decide the Republican presidential nomination. The roll call opened with the New England states, which had been considered solidly for Seward. In fact, a surprising number of votes went for Lincoln, as well as a scattering for Chase. Lincoln’s journey through New England after the Cooper Union speech had apparently won over a number of delegates. As expected, New York gave its full 70 votes to Seward, allowing him to leap far ahead. The Seward men relaxed until Virginia, which had also been considered solid for Seward, split its 22 votes between Seward and Lincoln. Chase had assumed that Ohio, which came next, would give him its full 46 votes, but the delegation was divided in its vote, giving 34 to Chase and the remaining 12 to Lincoln and McLean. Perhaps the greatest surprise was Indiana, which Bates had assumed was his territory; instead, Lincoln gathered all 26 votes. “This solid vote was a startler,” reported Halstead, “and the keen little eyes of Henry S. Lane glittered as it was given.”
At the end of the first ballot, the tally stood: Seward 173½ Lincoln 102; Chase 49; Bates 48. The Bates managers were downhearted to realize, as the historian Marvin Cain writes, that “no pivotal state had gone for Bates, and the sought-after votes of the Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota and Ohio delegations had not been delivered.” Disappointment was equally evident in the faces of the Chase men, for they were keenly aware that the division within the Ohio delegation was probably fatal. Lincoln’s camp was exhilarated, for with his total of 102 votes, Lincoln had emerged as the clear-cut alternative to Seward. Although taken aback by the unexpected defections, Weed still hoped that Seward would win on the second ballot. The 48 votes Cameron had supposedly promised from Pennsylvania would put Seward within striking distance of the victory number of 233.
The second ballot revealed a crucial shift in Lincoln’s favor. In New England he picked up 17 more votes, while Delaware switched its 6 votes from Bates to Lincoln. Then came the biggest surprise of all, “startling the vast auditorium like a clap of thunder”: Pennsylvania announced 44 votes for Lincoln, boosting his total to 181, only 3½ votes behind Seward’s new total of 184½. Chase and Bates both lost ground on the second ballot, essentially removing them from contention. The race had narrowed to Seward and Lincoln.
Tension in the Wigwam mounted. The spectators sat on the edge of their seats as the third ballot began. Lincoln gained 4 additional votes from Massachusetts and 4 from Pennsylvania, also adding 15 votes from Ohio. His total reached 231½, only 1½ votes shy of victory. “There was a pause,” Halstead recorded. “In about ten ticks of a watch,” David K. Cartter of Ohio stood and announced the switch of 4 votes from Chase to Lincoln. “A profound stillness fell upon the Wigwam,” one eyewitness wrote. Then the Lincoln supporters “rose to their feet applauding rapturously, the ladies waving their handkerchiefs, the men waving and throwing up their hats by thousands, cheering again and again.”
For the Sewardites, the defeat was devastating. “Great men wept like boys,” one New Yorker observed, “faces drawn, white and aged as if ten years had passed in that one night of struggle.” Everyone looked to Thurlow Weed, but there was no solace he could give. The work of his lifetime had ended in defeat, and he, too, could not restrain his tears. His failure to serve his country by making his good friend president, Weed later acknowledged, was “the great disappointment of his life.”
All across the chamber, representatives rose, clamoring to change their votes so that Lincoln could achieve a unanimous victory. Their emotional tone revealed that the defeated Seward still had a great hold on their hearts. When Michigan shifted its votes to Lincoln, Austin Blair confessed that his state was laying down “her first, best loved candidate…with some bleeding of the heart, with some quivering in the veins; but she does not fear that the fame of Seward will suffer,” for his story will be “written, and read, and beloved long after the temporary excitement of this day has passed away, and when Presidents are themselves forgotten.” In similar fashion, Carl Schurz of Wisconsin predicted that Seward’s ambition would be fulfilled “with the success of the cause which was the dream of his youth,” and that his name would “remain in history, an instance of the highest merit uncrowned with the highest honor.”
The most poignant moment came when New York’s chairman, William Evarts, stood up. “Mounting a table, with grief manifest in his countenance, his hands clenched nervously,” he delivered a powerful tribute to Seward: “Gentlemen, it was from Governor Seward that most of us learned to love Republican principles and the Republican party.” He finally requested that New York shift its votes to Lincoln. So moving was his speech, one reporter noted, that “the spectator could not fail to be impressed with the idea that a man who could have such a friend must be a noble man indeed.”
Once the vote was made unanimous, the celebration began in earnest. A man stationed on the roof of the Wigwam shouted the news of Lincoln’s nomination, along with that of Hannibal Hamlin of Maine for vice president, to the thousands waiting on the street. Cannons were fired and “between 20,000 and 30,000 outside were yelling and shouting at once.” The festivities continued through the night. “The Press and Tribune building,” one of the paper’s reporters wrote, “was illuminated from ‘turret to foundation,’ by the brilliant glare of a thousand lights which blazed from windows and doors.” Shouldering the symbolic fence rails that Lincoln had supposedly split, Republicans paraded through the streets to the music of a dozen bands.
S
EWARD RECEIVED THE NEWS
of his loss while sitting with friends in his country garden at Auburn. A rider on a swift horse had waited at the telegraph office to dash through the crowded streets the moment a telegram arrived. When the totals of the first ballot came in, the messenger had galloped to Seward’s house and handed the telegram to him. When the news of Seward’s large lead was repeated to guests at his house and to the crowds on the street, great cheers went up. When the totals of the second ballot came in, Seward retained his optimism. “I shall be nominated on the next ballot,” he predicted to the boisterous audience on the lawn, and a great cheer resounded from the streets. Long, anxious moments followed. When no further news arrived, Seward “rightly [judged] that…there was no news that friends would love to bring.” Finally, the unwelcome telegram announcing Lincoln’s nomination on the third ballot arrived. Seward turned “as pale as ashes.” He understood at once, as did his supporters, his son Fred would remember, “that it was no ordinary political defeat, to be retrieved in some subsequent campaign. It was…final and irrevocable.”
“The sad tidings crept through the vast concourse,” one reporter noted. “The flags were furled, the cannon was rolled away, and Cayuga county went home with a clouded brow.” Later that night, writing in his diary in Washington, Charles Francis Adams could not stop thinking of his defeated friend, “of his sanguine expectations, of his long services, of his large and comprehensive philosophy, and of his great ambition—all now merged for a time in a deep abyss of disappointment. He has too much of alloy in his composition to rise above it. Few men can.”
Yet “he took the blow as a champion should,” his biographer notes, putting on “a brave front before his family and the world.” In her diary, sixteen-year-old Fanny Seward noted simply that “Father told Mother and I in three words, Abraham Lincoln nominated. His friends feel much distress—he alone has a smile—he takes it with philosophical and unselfish coolness.” Informed that the editor of the local evening paper could find no one in the disconsolate town willing to write and comment on the news announcing Lincoln and Hamlin’s nominations, Seward took up his own pen. “No truer or firmer defenders of the Republican faith could have been found in the Union,” he graciously stated, “than the distinguished and esteemed citizens on whom the honors of the nomination have fallen.”
Before he retired that night, Seward wrote to Weed: “You have my unbounded gratitude for this last, as for the whole life of efforts in my behalf. I wish that I was sure that your sense of the disappointment is as light as my own.” A week later, in a public letter, Seward pledged his support to the Republican ticket and said he hoped his friends who had “labored so long” by his side would not allow their “sense of disappointment…to hinder or delay…the progress of that cause.”
Beneath his graceful facade, Seward was angry, hurt, and humiliated. “It was only some months later,” the biographer Glyndon Van Deusen writes, “when the shock had worn off and hope of a sort had revived, that he could say half ruefully, half whimsically, how fortunate it was that he did not keep a diary, for if he had there would be a record of all his cursing and swearing” when the news arrived.
If Seward managed to project a willed equanimity, Chase could not hide his bitterness at his defeat, nor his fury at the Ohio delegation that had failed to support him unanimously. “When I remember what New York did for Seward, what Illinois did for Lincoln and what Missouri did for Bates,” Chase told a friend, “and remember also that neither of these gentlemen ever spent a fourth part—if indeed a tithe of the time labor and means for the Republican Party in their respective states that I have spent for our party in Ohio; & then reflect on the action of the Ohio delegation in Chicago towards me; I confess I have little heart to write or think about it…. I must say that had [Senator Ben Wade] received the same expression from Ohio which was given to me, and had I been in his place, I would have suffered my arm to be wrenched from my body, before I would have allowed my name to be brought into competition with his.”
For years, Chase was racked by the thought that had Ohio remained loyal, he would have won the nomination. Even in a congratulatory letter to Lincoln, he could not refrain from citing his own situation. Supposing that the “adhesion of the Illinois delegation” yielded Lincoln “a higher gratification” even than “the nomination itself,” Chase confessed that the perfidy of his own delegation was unbearable. “In this…I am quite sure you must participate,” he sounded Lincoln, “for I err greatly in my estimate of your magnanimity, if you do not condemn as I do the conduct of delegates, from whatever state, who disregard…the clearly expressed preference of their own State Convention.” Lincoln responded graciously without taking the bait.
Carl Schurz contemplated Chase’s torment in the dark hours following the nomination. “While the victory of Mr. Lincoln was being announced to the outside world,” he wrote, “my thoughts involuntarily turned to Chase, who, I imagined, sat in a quiet office room at Columbus with a telegraph near by clicking the news from Chicago…. Not even his own State had given him its full strength. No doubt he had hoped, and hoped, and hoped against hope…and now came this disastrous, crushing, humiliating defeat. I saw that magnificent man before me, writing with the agony of his disappointment, and I sympathized with him most profoundly.”
As the news of Chase’s defeat filtered into the streets of Columbus, the dray readied to haul the cannon to the corner of Third and State streets, to announce his victory with a roar of thunder, was used instead to honor Lincoln’s nomination. After the short “melancholy ceremony” was concluded, the dray hauled the cannon back to its shed, and the city went to sleep.
Bates accepted defeat with the composure that had marked his character from the outset. “As for me, I was surprised, I own, but not at all mortified, at the result at Chicago,” he wrote Greeley. “I had no claim—literally none—upon the Republicans as a party, and no right to expect their party honors; and I shall cherish, with enduring gratitude, the recollection of the generous confidence with which many of their very best men have honored me. So far from feeling beaten and depressed, I have cause rather for joy and exultation; for, by the good opinion of certain eminent Republicans, I have gained much in standing and reputation before the country—more, I think, than any mere private man I have ever known.”
In his private journal, however, Bates admitted to a sense of irritation. “Some of my friends who attended the Convention assure me that the nomination of Mr. Lincoln took every body by surprise: That it was brought about by accident or trick, by which my pledged friends had to vote against me…. The thing was well planned and boldly executed. A few Germans—Schurz of Wisconsin and Koerner of Illinois, with their truculent boldness, scared the timid men of Indiana into submission. Koerner went before the Indiana Delegation and assured them that if Bates were nominated, the
Germans
would bolt!”
The platform, he continued, “is exclusive and defiant, not attracting but repelling assistance from without…. It lugs in the lofty generalities of the Declaration of Independence, for no practical object that I can see, but needlessly exposing the party to the specious charge of favoring negro equality…. I think they will soon be convinced, if they are not already, that they have committed a fatal blunder—They have denationalized their Party; weakened it in the free states, and destroyed its hopeful beginnings in the border slave states.”
While the melancholy spirit of defeated expectations settled upon the streets of Auburn, Columbus, and St. Louis, Springfield was euphoric. The legendary moment when Lincoln learned of his nomination has spawned many versions over the years. Some claim Lincoln was standing in a shop, purchasing some items that Mary had requested, when cheers were heard from the telegraph office, followed by the shouts of a boy rushing through the crowd: “Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Lincoln, you are nominated.” Others maintain that he was talking with friends in the office of the
Illinois State Journal
when he received the news. Handed the scrap of paper that reported his victory, he “looked at it long and silently, not heeding the noisy exultation of all around.” Shaking hands with everyone in the room, he remarked quietly, “I knew this would come when I saw the second ballot.” Leaving the
Journal
office, Lincoln plunged into a crowd of well-wishers on the street. “My friends,” he said, “I am glad to receive your congratulations, and as there is a little woman down on Eighth street who will be glad to hear the news, you must excuse me until I inform her.” When he reached his home, Ida Tarbell reports, he found that Mary “already knew that the honor which for twenty years and more she had believed and stoutly declared her husband deserved…at last had come.”