Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
W
HILE
L
INCOLN KEPT
a strategic silence in Springfield, Seward stepped forward to speak on public issues and provide the drama and excitement of the campaign. Traveling by train, steamboat, and carriage with an entourage (which included Fanny and her friend Ellen Perry; Charles Francis Adams and his son, Charles Junior; along with a contingent of politicians), Seward opened his tour in Michigan. From there, he proceeded west to Wisconsin and Minnesota, south to Iowa and Kansas, and east to Illinois and Ohio.
At every stop, Seward was met with “cannons, brass bands, and processions of torch-bearing ‘Wide Awakes’”—young Republicans dressed in striking oilcloth capes and caps—who generated enthusiasm for the party. They created a circus atmosphere at Republican rallies, surrounding the perimeter of crowds and marching in meandering, illuminated processions. One such march took several hours to pass the Lincoln house in Springfield. “Viewed from an elevated position, it wound its sinuous track over a length of two miles, seeming, in its blazing lights and glittering uniforms, like a beautiful serpent of fire,” wrote John Hay. “The companies…ignited vast quantities of Roman candles, and as the drilled battalions moved steadily on, canopied and crowded with a hissing and bursting blaze of fiery splendor…the enthusiasm of the people broke out in wild cheerings.” Other candidates mustered marching clubs, but with less success. One group of Douglas partisans designated themselves the “Choloroformers,” ready and able to “put the Wide Awakes to sleep.”
Fifty thousand people gathered to hear Seward speak in Detroit, and the fervor only increased as his tour moved west. Thousands waited past midnight for the arrival of his train in Kalamazoo, and when he disembarked, crowds followed him along the streets to the place where he would sleep that night. The next day, thousands more assembled on the village green to enjoy a brilliant “procession of young men and women on horseback, all well mounted, children with banners, men with carts and wagons,” that preceded the formal speeches. Still craving more, the crowd followed the entourage back to the train station, where Seward appeared at the window to speak again. To the discomfort of the elder Charles Francis Adams, Seward suggested that he, too, stick his head out of the window for some final words. “All of this reminded me of a menagerie,” Adams confessed in his diary, “where each of the beasts, beginning with the lion, is passed in review before a gaping crowd.”
In St. Paul, Minnesota, a correspondent reported, Seward’s arrival was “a day ever memorable in the political history of our State.” Early in the morning, the streets were “alive with people—the pioneer, the backwoodsman, the trapper, the hunter, the trader from the Red River,” all of them standing in wonder as a “magnificent Lincoln and Hamlin pole” was raised. A procession of bands and carriages heralded the arrival of Seward, who spoke for nearly two hours on the front steps of the Capitol.
Reporters marveled at Seward’s ability to make every speech seem spontaneous and vital, “without repetition of former utterances,” surpassing “the ordinary stump speech in fervency…literary quality, elevation of thought, and great enthusiasm on the part of the auditors.” It often appeared “the whole population of the surrounding country had turned out to greet him,” one correspondent noted. “Gov. Seward, you are doing more for Lincoln’s election than any hundred men in the United States,” a judge on board the Mississippi boat told him. “Well, I ought to,” Seward replied.
Charles Francis Adams, Jr., who was twenty-five at the time, could not figure “where, when, or how” Seward was able to prepare “the really remarkable speeches he delivered in rapid succession,” for “the consumption of liquors and cigars” during the journey was excessive. “When it came to drinking, Seward was, for a man of sixty, a free liver; and at times his brandy-and-water would excite him, and set his tongue going with dangerous volubility; but I never saw him more affected than that—never approaching drunkenness. He simply liked the stimulus.” Amazingly, Adams remarked, despite Seward’s drinking, his capacity for work was unimpaired.
Young Adams was mesmerized by Seward, whom he considered the most “delightful traveling companion” imaginable. “The early morning sun shone on Seward, wrapped in a strange and indescribable Syrian cashmere cloak, and my humble self, puffing our morning cigars,” Adams recorded in his diary after an overnight journey by rail to Quincy, Illinois. The two smokers had adjourned to the baggage car, “having rendered ourselves,” in Seward’s words, “‘independent on this tobacco question.’”
Seward’s grand tour received extensive coverage, complete with excerpts from his speeches, in newspapers across the land. From Maine, Israel Washburn wrote that he was astonished at the “integrity & versatility” of the speeches. He considered the speech in Detroit “the most perfect & philosophical—the St. Paul the broadest, the Dubuque the warmest, the Chicago the most practical & effective…but, of all the speeches…I like the short one at Madison—it seems to me to be the most comprehensive & complete, the grandest & highest.”
At home in Auburn, Frances Seward received dozens of letters praising her husband’s performance. “I am sure you must be most happy,” Seward’s old friend Richard Blatchford wrote. “He has shown throughout a depth of power, eloquence & resonance of thought and mind, which we here who know him so well, are not a little taken a-back by.” Sumner told Frances that as he read each speech, he “marveled more & more. I know nothing like such a succession of speeches by any American.” Frances took pride in her husband’s accomplishments but simultaneously recognized that his great success had eclipsed the possibility he would soon retire to private life in Auburn. “Yes Henry is very popular now,” she wrote Sumner. “He is monopolized by the public and I am at last—resigned—Is that the word.”
On October 1, en route to Chicago, Seward’s train made a brief stop in Springfield. “There was a rush into and about the windows of the car in which Mr. Seward was seated,” observed a correspondent. Lincoln and Trumbull had waited with the crowd and came aboard to pay their respects. Lincoln “was a revelation,” young Adams recorded in his diary. “There he was, tall, shambling, plain and good-natured. He seemed shy to a degree, and very awkward in manner; as if he felt out of place, and had a realizing sense that properly the positions should be reversed. Seward too appeared constrained.” Adams undoubtedly ascribed his own feelings to Lincoln, who most likely did not feel “out of place” at all.
This was the first time Lincoln and Seward had met since the evening they spent together in Massachusetts in 1848. “Twelve years ago you told me that this cause would be successful,” Lincoln told him, referring to the antislavery crusade, “and ever since I have believed that it would be.”
During their conversation, Lincoln asked Seward if he would be willing in his upcoming Chicago speech to address a certain problematic subject: John Wentworth, now the mayor of Chicago, was continually making references to an argument the party was trying to avoid—that a Republican win would bring an eventual end to slavery altogether. Knowing Wentworth was set to introduce Seward, Lincoln asked the New Yorker to reassure the audience that Republicans “would not interfere with slavery where it already existed.” Seward readily agreed and made it clear in his speech that Republicans were not attacking slavery in the South, that securing freedom for the territories need not interrupt ordinary intercourse with the South. In distancing themselves from Northern abolitionists, the Lincoln team was far more concerned with reassuring Northern conservatives than with conciliating the South.
Seward’s tour came to a triumphant close on October 6. His train pulled into Auburn, where a “noisy throng” gave him a warm welcome home. “Seward, in fact, never appeared so well as at home,” young Adams observed. “He walked the streets exchanging greetings with everyone.” His responses were “all genuine, the relations were kindly, unaffected, neighborly.” Seward’s return created “an impression of individuality approaching greatness.” It was a journey Adams would never forget.
Although Lincoln himself made no public statements or speeches, he labored constantly on his campaign and fully justified Weed’s appraisal of his political acumen. He strove to hold his coalition together, while disrupting efforts of his opponents to unite on fusion tickets. He sent emissaries to his supporters with instructions to solve campaign problems and heal divisions. Indirectly, he sought to clarify his position on important issues without breaking his vow of silence. He rigorously abstained from making patronage commitments. Responding to Senator Trumbull’s suggestion that he make some pledges in New York, Lincoln replied, “Remembering that Peter denied his Lord with an oath, after most solemnly protesting that he never would, I will not swear I will make no committals; but I do think I will not.”
Despite the unremitting, consuming labor of organizing his campaign, Lincoln somehow found time to write a humorous fictional dialogue between Breckinridge and Douglas. He also answered many of the endless letters he received, writing personal, unpretentious replies to supporters and well-wishers of every kind. An author wishing to dedicate his new legal work to Lincoln was answered: “I give the leave, begging only that the inscription may be in modest terms, not representing me as a man of great learning, or a very extraordinary one in any respect.” In mid-October, he replied to eleven-year-old Grace Bedell, who had recommended that he grow a beard, “for your face is so thin” and “all the ladies like whiskers.” After lamenting the fact that he had no daughter of his own, he wondered: “As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affection if I were to begin it now?” Nonetheless, he proceeded to grow a beard. By January 1861, John Hay would pen a witty couplet: “Election news Abe’s hirsute fancy warrant—Apparent hair becomes heir apparent.”
Recognizing that much of the positive news he received from friends was biased, Lincoln implored his supporters to give straightforward accounts of his prospects in each state. He worried about reports from Maine, New York, and Chicago, and brooded over the lack of solid information from Pennsylvania. His political objectives in the Keystone State were to establish his soundness on the tariff issue and heal the ominous divisions between the followers of Cameron and Curtin, the gubernatorial candidate. Lincoln always understood the importance of what he described as “the dry, and irksome labor” of building organizations to get out the vote, while most politicians preferred “parades, and shows, and monster meetings.”
He enthusiastically supported Carl Schurz’s “excellent plan” for mobilizing the German-American vote, and assured Schurz that “your having supported Gov. Seward, in preference to myself in the convention, is not even remembered by me for any practical purpose…to the extent of our limited acquaintance, no man stands nearer my heart than yourself.” A large part of the German-American vote would go to Lincoln, aiding his victories in the Northwest.
Although concerned with progress in all the Northern states, he focused his attention primarily on the critical West. He urged Caleb Smith to do his utmost in Indiana, believing that nothing would affect the November results in Illinois more strongly than the momentum provided by an Indiana victory in the October state elections. In July, he sent Nicolay to an Indiana supporter who wished to prevent a Bell ticket from being placed on the ballot. “Ascertain what he wants,” Lincoln instructed Nicolay. “On what subjects he would converse with me. And the particulars if he will give them. Is an interview indispensable? Tell him my motto is ‘Fairness to all,’ but commit me to nothing.”
Having pledged to make no new statement on public issues, Lincoln had surrogates present excerpts from his previous speeches to reinforce his positions. He had Judge Davis show Cameron selections of pro-tariff speeches he had made in the 1840s, and then cautioned Cameron: “Before this reaches you, my very good friend, Judge Davis, will have called upon you, and, perhaps, shown you the ‘scraps.’…Nothing about these, must get into the news-papers.” This tone reveals Lincoln’s keen awareness that notes from unpublished thirteen-year-old speeches stretched his vow of silence, but he hoped the assurances they provided would corral Cameron’s powerful influence in Pennsylvania. Cameron replied that he was pleased by the content of Lincoln’s earlier writings.
To a correspondent who sought his intervention in the discord between Cameron and Curtin, Lincoln replied: “I am slow to listen to criminations among friends, and never expouse their quarrels on either side…allow by-gones to be by-gones, and look to the present & future only.” Yet at the same time, he informed Leonard Swett, who was preparing a trip to Pennsylvania, that he was very concerned about former congressman Joseph Casey’s disclosures that the Cameron faction lacked confidence in the Pennsylvania Central Committee, controlled by Curtin. “Write Mr. Casey,” Lincoln urged, “suggest to him that great caution and delicacy of action, is necessary in that matter.” Meanwhile, Republican money flowed into Pennsylvania. “After all,” wrote Republican National Committeeman John Goodrich of Massachusetts, “Pennsylvania is the Sebastopol we must take.”
Lincoln turned his political attention to every state where his campaign experienced difficulty. Hearing that two Republican seats might be lost in Maine’s September elections, he told his vice presidential mate, Hannibal Hamlin, that “such a result…would, I fear, put us on the down-hill track, lose us the State elections in Pennsylvania and Indiana, and probably ruin us on the main turn in November. You must not allow it.” In August, troubled by a letter received from Rhode Island “intimating that Douglas is in-listing some rich men there, who know how to use money, and that it is endangering the State,” Lincoln asked Rhode Island’s senator James Simmons, “How is this? Please write me.” In the end, the September elections in New England favored the Republicans, preparing the way for the great October contests in the West.