Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
“My personal feelings have been so much disturbed by the result at Chicago,” Charles Sumner wrote, “that I cannot yet appreciate it as a public act.” There is but “one & only one thing consoles me,” Michigan Republican George Pomeroy told Seward—“our chance of being defeated this time and
your
sure chance of a nomination in ’64.” Treasury agent William Mellen of Ohio expressed his disbelief to Frances Seward that Abraham Lincoln was presented as “the suitable man for the Presidency. The rail-candidate forsooth! I confess to a disposition to
rail
at him, & much more at the Convention for its self-stultification…. What is to be feared is the utter disintegration of the Republican party as a consequence of this abandonment of principle for mere expediency.”
Though Seward had pledged his support to the Republican ticket in a public letter, he was so dejected in the aftermath of his defeat that he considered resigning immediately from the Senate. Without the onerous demands of the congressional session, he could remain in Auburn, surrounded by his loving family and consoling friends. “When I went out to market this morning,” he told one friend, “I had the rare experience of a man walking about town, after he is dead, and hearing what people would say of him. I confess I was unprepared for so much real grief, as I heard expressed at every corner.”
But he understood that a decision to resign would look petulant and would, as his friend Israel Washburn warned, “give the malignants” an opportunity to damage him further. In the end, he determined to return to Washington in late May to complete his Senate term. The journey back to Capitol Hill “in the character of a leader deposed by [his] own party” was agonizing for him, however, as he admitted in a long letter to Frances. “I arrived here on Tuesday night. Preston King, with a carriage, met me at the depot, and conveyed me to my home. It seemed sad and mournful.” Even the pictures hanging on the wall, “Dr. Nott’s benevolent face, Lord Napier’s complacent one, Jefferson’s benignant one, and Lady Napier’s loving one, seemed all like pictures of the dead.” When he reached the Senate, “good men came through the day to see me…. Their eyes fill with tears…. They console themselves with the vain hope of a day of ‘vindication;’ and my letters all talk of the same thing. But they awaken no response in my heart.” His only solace, he told her, was the realization that “responsibility has passed away from me, and that the shadow of it grows shorter every day.”
Frances was delighted at the thought of her husband’s permanent return to their Auburn home when his Senate term ended the following March. “You have earned the right to a peaceful old age,” she assured him; “35 years of the best part of a mans life is all that his country can reasonably claim.” This was not the time, however, for Seward to fade contentedly from public life. Weed’s report of his visit with Lincoln perhaps roused Seward’s own resolve. To withdraw from this fight would be an abdication of his fierce political ambition and his belief in the Republican cause.
In the weeks that followed the convention, Seward was overwhelmed with speaking requests from dozens of Republican committees throughout the North. “Your services are more necessary to the cause than they ever were,” Charles Francis Adams wrote. “And your own reputation will gain more of permanency from the becoming manner with which you meet this disappointment, than it would from all the brilliancy of the highest success.”
“I am content to quit with the political world, when it proposes to quit with me,” Seward told Weed in late June. “But I am not insensible to the claims of a million of friends, nor indifferent to the opinion of mankind. All that seems to me clear, just now, is that it would not be wise to rush in at the beginning of the canvass, and so seem, most falsely, to fear that I shall be forgotten. Later in the canvass, it may be seen that I am wanted for the public interest.” So he delayed, while entreaties to join streamed in, finally committing himself to an electioneering tour in nine states in late August and early September. The announcement that Seward “was about to take the platform and open the campaign for Lincoln,” Addison Procter recalled, “was our first gleam of sunshine from out of the depths of discouragement.”
W
HILE
S
EWARD PREPARED
for his grand tour, Lincoln remained in Springfield. In deference to political tradition and to his own judgment that further public statements could only damage his prospects, he decided against a personal speaking tour. Recognizing that his cluttered law office could not accommodate the flood of visitors eager to see him, he moved his headquarters to the governor’s reception room at the State House.
Initially, Lincoln’s sole assistant was John Nicolay, a twenty-eight-year-old German-American immigrant who had worked for three years as a clerk in the secretary of state’s office. Lincoln had often visited the serious-minded Nicolay when searching out the latest election figures maintained in the office. After the convention, Lincoln had asked Nicolay to be his private secretary, “a call to service,” Nicolay’s daughter, Helen, later noted, “that lasted until his hair grew white and the powers of life ran down.”
With Nicolay’s help, Lincoln answered letters, received hundreds, perhaps thousands, of visitors from all parts of the North, talked with politicians, and contributed to a short campaign biography that sold more than a million copies. From his impromptu headquarters at the State House, Lincoln would engineer many aspects of his campaign. The telegraph wires allowed for fairly swift communication to political battlegrounds. Confidential messages were sent by mail, carried by personal emissaries, and given to political visitors. Most of these meetings are lost to history, but those that were recorded reveal Lincoln as a skillful politician, formulating and guiding his own campaign strategy.
“He sat down beside me on the sofa,” wrote a correspondent from Utica, New York, “and commenced talking about political affairs in my own State with a knowledge of details which surprised me. I found that he was more conversant with some of our party performances in Oneida County than I could have desired.” He “can not only discuss ably the great democratic principle of our Government,” wrote a newspaperman from Missouri, “but at the same time tell how to navigate a vessel, maul a rail, or even to dress a deer-skin.” Each correspondent’s impression was quickly forwarded to the newspapers, the principal conduits between candidates and the public.
To counter the savage caricatures of Lincoln in Democratic papers as semiliterate, ignorant, an uncultured buffoon, homely, and awkward, Republican journalists were dispatched to Springfield to write positive stories about Lincoln, his educated wife, Mary, and their dignified home. Newspapers that had supported Seward swiftly transferred their allegiance to the new leader of the Republican Party, and utilized every occasion to extol their candidate and attack the opposition.
Lincoln and his team doubtless controlled the “line” out of Springfield that reverberated in Republican papers across the nation. After spending an evening at the Lincoln home, the correspondent from the
Utica Morning Herald
reported that “an air of quiet refinement pervaded the place. You would have known instantly that she who presided over that modest household was a true type of the American lady.” As for Lincoln, “he has all the marks of a mind that scans closely, canvasses thoroughly, concludes deliberately, and holds to such conclusions unflinchingly.”
“Ten thousand inquiries will be made as to the looks, the habits, tastes and other characteristics of Honest Old Abe,” the Chicago
Press and Tribune
wrote. “We anticipate a few of them…. Always clean, he is never fashionable; he is careless but not slovenly…. In his personal habits, Mr. Lincoln is as simple as a child…his food is plain and nutritious. He never drinks intoxicating liquors of any sort…. He is not addicted to tobacco…. If Mr. Lincoln is elected President, he will carry but little that is ornamental to the White House. The country must accept his sincerity, his ability and his honesty, in the mould in which they are cast. He will not be able to make as polite a bow as Frank Pierce, but he will not commence anew the agitation of the Slavery question by recommending to Congress any Kansas-Nebraska bills. He may not preside at the Presidential dinners with the ease and grace which distinguish the ‘venerable public functionary,’ Mr. Buchanan; but he will not create the necessity” for a congressional committee to investigate corruption in his administration.
The visiting correspondents from Republican papers had nothing but praise for Mary. “Whatever of awkwardness may be ascribed to her husband, there is none of it in her,” a journalist from the
New York Evening Post
wrote. “She converses with freedom and grace, and is thoroughly
au fait
in all the little amenities of society.” Frequent mention was made of her distinguished Kentucky relatives, her sophisticated education, her ladylike courtesy, her ability to speak French fluently, her son’s enrollment in Harvard College, and her membership in the Presbyterian Church. Mrs. Lincoln is “a very handsome woman, with a vivacious and graceful manner,” another reporter observed; “an interesting and often sparkling talker.”
Reporters were fascinated by the contrast between a cultured woman from a refined background and the self-made rough-hewn Lincoln. Party leaders began to cultivate the legend of Lincoln that would permeate the entire campaign and, indeed, evolve into the present day. He was depicted as “a Man of the People,” an appealing political title after the rustic Andrew Jackson first supplanted the Eastern elites who had occupied the presidency for the forty years from Washington through John Quincy Adams.
The log cabin was emblematic of the dignity of honest, common, impoverished origins ever since William Henry Harrison had been triumphantly dubbed the “log-cabin, hard-cider” candidate twenty years earlier. Harrison had merely been posed in front of a log cabin. Lincoln had actually been born in one. One Republican worker wrote: “It has also afforded me sincere pleasure to think of Mr. Lincoln taking possession of the White House; he, who was once the inmate of the log cabin—were he the pampered, effeminated child of fortune, no such pleasing emotions would be inspired.” Answering the charge that Lincoln would be a “nullity,” the
New York Tribune
suggested that a “man who by his own genius and force of character has raised himself from being a penniless and uneducated flat boatman on the Wabash River to the position Mr. Lincoln now occupies is not likely to be a nullity anywhere.”
This aura of the Western man, the man of the prairie, had been reinforced during the Chicago convention, when Republicans paraded through the streets carrying the rails Lincoln had supposedly split. Although Lincoln—Honest Abe—was careful not to verify that any particular rail had been his handiwork, in one interview he held a rail aloft and said: “here is a stick I received a day or two since from Josiah Crawford…. He writes me that it is a part of one of the rails that I cut for him in 1825.”
Lincoln was aware that being “a Man of the People” was an advantage, especially in the raw and growing Western states critical to the election of a Republican candidate. Prior to the campaign, he had reinforced this politically potent image with descriptions of his poor schooling, years of poverty, and manual labor. Although his grim beginnings held no fascination for him, Lincoln was astute enough to capitalize upon this invaluable political asset.
From the outset, he decided that “it would be both imprudent, and contrary to the reasonable expectation of friends for me to write, or speak anything upon doctrinal points now. Besides this, my published speeches contain nearly all I could willingly say.” When his friend Leonard Swett asked his approval of a letter expressing the candidate’s sentiments, Lincoln replied, “Your letter, written to go to N.Y. is…substantially right.” However, he advised, “Burn this, not that there is any thing wrong in it; but because it is best not to be known that I write at all.” He recognized that anything he said would be scanned scrupulously for partisan purposes. The slightest departure from the printed record would be distorted by friends as well as enemies. Even his simple reiteration of a previous position might, in the midst of a campaign, give it new emphasis. He preferred to point simply to the party platform that he had endorsed. His few lapses justified his fears. A facetious comment to a Democratic reporter that “he would like to go into Kentucky to discuss issues but was afraid of being lynched” was made into a campaign issue.
Underlying this policy of self-restraint was another important but unvoiced political reality: Lincoln had to maintain the cohesion of the new Republican Party, a coalition of old Democrats, former Whigs, and members of the nativist American Party. Informing a Jewish friend that he had never entered a Know Nothing lodge, as accused by Democrats, he cautioned that “our adversaries think they can gain a point, if they could force me to openly deny this charge, by which some degree of offence would be given to the Americans. For this reason, it must not publicly appear that I am paying any attention to the charge.” Although Lincoln himself had disavowed any sympathy with the nativists, and had actually invested in a German paper, many Republicans remained hostile to immigrants, and their support was essential.
Lincoln knew this election would not be determined by a single issue. While opposition to slavery extension had led to the creation of the Republican Party and dominated the national debate, in many places other issues took precedence. In Pennsylvania, the leading iron producer in the nation, and in New Jersey, the desire for a protective tariff was stronger than hostility to slavery. In the West, especially among immigrant groups, multitudes hoped for homestead legislation providing free or cheap land to new settlers, many of whom had been hard hit by the Panic of 1857. “Land for the Landless” was the battle cry. And when, in the midst of the campaign, President Buchanan vetoed a mild Homestead Act, many in Indiana and throughout the West turned to Lincoln. All of these issues had been carefully addressed in the Republican Party platform. Had the election been fought on the single issue of slavery, it is likely that Lincoln would have lost.