Lincoln, the unknown by Tom Clancy
"Ambition has been ascribed to me," he said. "God knows how sincerely I prayed from the first that this field of ambition might not be opened. I claim no insensibility to political honors; but to-day, could the Missouri Compromise be restored, and the whole slavery question replaced on the old ground of 'toleration' by necessity where it exists, with unyielding hostility to the spread of it, on principle, I would, in consideration, gladly agree that Judge Douglas should never be out, and I never in, an office, so long as we both or either, live.
"It makes little difference, very little difference, whether Judge Douglas or myself is elected to the United States Senate; but the great issue which we have submitted to you to-day is far above and beyond any personal interests or the political fortunes of any man. And that issue will live, and breathe, and burn, when the poor, feeble, stammering tongues of Judge Douglas and myself are silent in the grave."
During these debates Douglas maintained that any State, anywhere, at any time, had a right to have slavery if the majority of its citizens voted for it. And he didn't care whether they voted it up or down. His celebrated slogan was this: "Let each State mind its own business and let its neighbors alone."
Lincoln took directly the opposite stand.
"Judge Douglas's thinking slavery is right," he explained, "and my thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy.
"He contends that whatever community wants slaves has a right to have them. So they have, if it is not a wrong. But if it is a wrong, he cannot say people have a right to do wrong.
"He cares as little whether a State shall be slave or free as whether his neighbor shall plant his farm with tobacco or stock it with horned cattle. But the great mass of mankind differ with Judge Douglas: they consider slavery a great moral wrong."
Douglas went up and down the State, crying out time after time that Lincoln favored giving Negroes social equality.
"No," retorted Lincoln, "all I ask for the Negro is that, if you do not like him, you let him alone. If God gave him but little, let him enjoy that little. He is not my equal in many respects, but in his right to enjoy 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,' in his right to put into his mouth the bread that his hands have earned, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas and the equal of every living man."
In debate after debate Douglas accused Lincoln of wanting the whites to "hug and marry the blacks."
And time after time, Lincoln was forced to deny it: "I object to the alternative which says that because I do not want a Negro woman for a slave, I must want her for a wife. I have lived until my fiftieth year, and have never had a Negro woman either for a slave or a wife. There are enough white men to marry all the white women; and enough Negro men to marry all the Negro women; and, for God's sake, let them be so married."
Douglas tried to dodge and befog the issues. His arguments, Lincoln said, had got down to the point where they were as thin as "soup made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death." He was using "specious and fantastic arrangements of words, by which a man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse."
"I can't help feeling foolish," continued Lincoln, "in answering arguments that are no arguments at all."
Douglas said things that weren't true. He knew that they were falsehoods, and so did Lincoln.
"If a man," responded Lincoln, "will stand up and assert, and repeat and reassert, that two and two do not make four, I know nothing that will stop him. I cannot work an argument into the consistency of a mental gag and actually close his mouth with it. I don't like to call Judge Douglas a liar, but when I come square up to him, I don't know what else to call him."
And so the fight raged on, week after week. Day after day Lincoln continued his attacks. Others leaped into the fray. Lyman Trumbull called Douglas a liar, and declared that he had been guilty of "the most damnable effrontery that ever man put on." Frederick Douglas, the famous Negro orator, came to Illinois and joined in the assault. The Buchanan Democrats waxed vicious and ferocious in their denunciation of Douglas. Carl Schurz, the fiery German-American reformer, indicted him before the foreign voters. The Republican press in screaming head-lines branded him as "a forger." With his own party divided, and himself hounded and harassed on every side, Douglas was fighting against tremendous odds. In desperation, he wired his friend Usher F. Linden "The hell-hounds are on my track. For God's sake, Linder, come and help me fight them."
The operator sold a copy of the telegram to the Republicans, and it was head-lined in a score of papers.
Douglas's enemies screamed with delight, and from that day
on as long as he lived, the recipient of the telegram was called "For God's Sake Linder."
On election night, Lincoln remained in the telegraph office, reading the returns. When he saw that he had lost, he started home. It was dark and rainy and gloomy. The path leading to his house had been worn pig-backed and was slippery. Suddenly, one foot shot from under and hit the other. Quickly he recovered his balance. "It's a slip," he said, "and not a fall."
Shortly after that he read an editorial about himself in an Illinois paper. It said:
Hon. Abe Lincoln is undoubtedly the most unfortunate politician that has ever attempted to rise in Illinois. In everything he undertakes, politically, he seems doomed to failure. He has been prostrated often enough in his political schemes to have crushed the life out of any ordinary man.
The vast crowds that had rushed to hear him debate with Douglas encouraged Lincoln to believe that he might make a little money now by giving lectures; so he prepared to talk on "Discoveries and Inventions," rented a hall in Bloomington, stationed a young lady at the door to sell tickets—and not one solitary person came to hear him. Not one!
So once more he returned to his dingy office with the ink-stain on the wall and the garden seeds sprouting on top of the bookcase.
It was high time he was getting back, for he had been away from his law practice for six months, earning nothing. Now he was out of funds entirely; he didn't have enough cash on hand even to pay his butcher's and grocer's bills.
So again he hitched up Old Buck to his ramshackle buggy, and again he started driving over the prairie circuit.
It was November, and a cold snap was coming. Across the gray sky above him wild geese flew southward, honking loudly; a rabbit darted across the road; off in the woods somewhere a wolf howled. But the somber man in the buggy neither saw nor heard what was going on about him. Hour after hour, he rode on, his chin on his breast, lost in speculation, submerged in despair.
W.
hen the newly formed Republican party met in Chicago in the spring of 1860 to nominate a Presidential candidate, few people dreamed that Abraham Lincoln had a chance. A short time before that, he himself had written to a newspaper editor: "I must in all candor say I do not think myself fit for the presidency."
It was generally accepted in 1860 that the nomination honors were going to the handsome William H. Seward of New York. There could hardly be any question about that, for straw ballots were taken on the trains carrying the delegates to Chicago, and they gave Seward twice as many votes as all the other candidates combined. On many of the trains there was not a single ballot cast for Abraham Lincoln. It is possible that some of the delegates did not even know that such a man existed.
The convention met on Seward's fifty-ninth birthday. How fitting! He was positive that he would receive the nomination as a birthday present. He was so confident of it that he said good-by to his colleagues in the United States Senate and invited his intimate friends to attend a great feast of celebration at his home in Auburn, New York; and a cannon was rented, hauled into his front yard, loaded, and cocked up in the air, ready to boom the joyous news to the town.
If the convention had started balloting on Thursday night, that cannon would have been fired, and the story of a nation would have been changed; but the voting could not begin until
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the printer de
Mosquitoes were bad in the hall, the place was hot and stuffy, and the delegates hungry and thirsty; so some one stood up and moved that the convention adjourn until ten o'clock the next morning. A motion to adjourn is always in order; it takes precedence over all other motions and it is nearly always popular. This one carried with a rush of enthusiasm.
Seventeen hours elapsed before the convention assembled again. That is not a long time, but it was long enough for Seward's career to be wrecked, and Lincoln's made.
The person largely responsible for the wrecking was Horace Greeley, a grotesque-looking man with a head as round as a cantaloupe; with thin, silky hair as light as an albino's; and with a string necktie that usually worked itself out of place until the bow was approximately under his left ear.
Greeley was not even advocating the nomination of Lincoln, but he was determined with all the bitterness of his soul to even up an old score with William H. Seward and Seward's manager, Thurlow Weed.
The trouble was this: For fourteen years, Greeley had fought side by side with these men; he had helped make Seward Governor of New York and then United States Senator; and he had aided Weed tremendously in his battle to become and remain political boss of the State.
And what had Greeley gotten out of all this struggle and combat? Very little but neglect. He had wanted to be made State printer, and Weed had taken that place for himself. He had longed to be appointed postmaster of New York City, and Weed did not offer to recommend him. He had aspired to be governor, or even lieutenant-governor, and Weed not only said "no," but said it in a way that hurt and rankled.
Finally, when he could stand no more, Greeley sat down and wrote a long, stinging letter to Seward. It would fill seven pages of this book, and every paragraph of it was seared with bitterness.
That fiery message had been written on Saturday night, November 11, 1854. . . . And this was 1860. Greeley had waited six long years for an opportunity to get his revenge, but at last
it had arrived, and he made the most of it. He didn't go to bed at all, that fateful Thursday night while the Republican nominating convention was having a recess in Chicago; but from sundown until long after dawn, he hurried from delegation to delegation, reasoning, arguing, pleading. His paper, the "New York Tribune," was read all over the North; and it influenced public opinion as no other paper had ever done. He was a famous man, voices were hushed whenever he appeared, and the delegates listened to him with respect.
He hurled all kinds of arguments against Seward. He pointed out that Seward had repeatedly denounced the Masonic order; that in 1830 he had been elected to the State Senate on the anti-Mason ticket, and, as a consequence had aroused bitter, widespread, and undying resentment.
Later, when he was Governor of New York, Seward had favored the destruction of the common-school fund and the establishment of separate schools for foreigners and Catholics, and thus had stirred up another hornet's nest of fiery hatred.
Greeley pointed out that the men who had made up the once powerful Know Nothing party were violently opposed to Seward and would vote for a hound dog in preference to him.
And that wasn't all. Greeley pointed out that this "arch agitator" had been too radical, that his "bloody program" and talk of a higher law than the Constitution had frightened the border States, and that they would turn against him.
"I will bring you the men who are candidates for governor in these States," Greeley promised, "and they will confirm what I say."
He did, and the excitement was intense.
With clenched fists and blazing eyes, the gubernatorial candidates in Pennsylvania and Indiana declared that Seward's nomination meant inevitable defeat in their States, inevitable disaster.
And the Republicans felt that, to win, they must carry those States.
So, suddenly, the flood-tide that had been running toward Seward began to recede. And Lincoln's friends rushed about from delegation to delegation, trying to persuade those who were opposed to Seward to concentrate on Lincoln. Douglas was sure to be nominated by the Democrats, they said, and no man in the country was better equipped to fight Douglas than Lincoln. To him, it was an old job; he was used to it. Besides, Lincoln
was born a Kentuckian, and he could win votes in the doubtful border States. Furthermore, he was the kind of candidate the Northwest wanted—a man who had fought his way up from splitting rails and breaking sod, a man who understood the common people.
When arguments like these didn't succeed, they used others. They won Indiana's delegates by promising Caleb B. Smith a place in the Cabinet, and they won Pennsylvania's fifty-six votes with the assurance that Simeon Cameron would sit at Lincoln's right hand.
On Friday morning the balloting began. Forty thousand people had poured into Chicago, eager for excitement. Ten thousand wedged into the convention hall, and thirty thousand packed the streets outside. The seething mob reached for blocks.
Seward led on the first ballot. On the second, Pennsylvania cast her fifty-two votes for Lincoln, and the break began. On the third, it was all but a stampede.
Inside the hall, ten thousand people, half crazed with excitement, leaped upon the seats, shouting, yelling, smashing their hats on one another's heads. A cannon boomed on the roof— and thirty thousand people in the streets raised a shout.
Men hugged one another and danced about wildly, weeping and laughing and shrieking.
One hundred guns at the Tremont House belched and barked their volleys of fire; a thousand bells joined in the clamor; while whistles on railway engines, on steamboats, on factories, were opened and tied open for the day.
For twenty-hour hours the excitement raged.
"No such uproar," declared the "Chicago Tribune," "has been heard on earth since the walls of Jericho fell down."
In the midst of all this rejoicing, Horace Greeley saw Thur-low Weed, the erstwhile "maker of Presidents," shedding bitter tears. At last, Greeley had his sweet revenge.
In the meantime what was happening down in Springfield? Lincoln had gone to his law office as usual that morning and tried to work on a case. Too restless to concentrate, he soon tossed the legal papers aside and went out and pitched ball for a while back of a store, then played a game or two of billiards, and finally went to the "Springfield Journal" to hear the news. The telegraph office occupied the room above. He was sitting in a big arm-chair, discussing the second ballot, when suddenly
the operator burst down the stairway, crying: "Mr. Lincoln, you are nominated! You are nominated!"
Lincoln's lower lip trembled slightly, his face flushed. For a few seconds he stopped breathing.
It was the most dramatic moment of his life.
After nineteen years of desolating defeats, he had been suddenly whirled to the dizzy heights of victory.
Men rushed up and down the streets shouting the news. The mayor ordered the firing of a hundred guns.
Scores of old friends flocked about Lincoln, half laughing, half crying, shaking his hands, tossing their hats into the air, yelling in mad excitement.
"Excuse me, boys," he pleaded; "there is a little woman down on Eighth Street who will want to hear this."
And away he dashed, his coat-tails sailing behind him.
The streets of Springfield were rosy all that night with the light of bonfires fed by tar-barrels and rail fences, and the saloons never closed their doors.
It wasn't long before half of the nation was singing:
"Old Abe Lincoln came out of the wilderness, Out of the wilderness, out of the wilderness; Old Abe Lincoln came out of the wilderness, Down in Illinois."
Stephen A. Douglas did more than any one else to elevate Lincoln to the White House, for Douglas split the Democratic party and put three candidates in the field a
With the opposition hopelessly divided, Lincoln realized, early in the contest, that he would be victorious; but, nevertheless, he feared that he would not be able to carry his own precinct or his home town. A committee made a house-to-house canvass in advance, to find out how the people in Springfield were going to ballot. When Lincoln saw the result of this canvass, he was astonished: all except three of the twenty-three ministers and theological students in town were against him, and so were many of their stanchest followers. Lincoln commented bitterly: "They pretend to believe in the Bible and be God-fearing Christians; yet by their ballots they are demonstrating that they don't care whether slavery is voted up or down. But I know God cares and humanity cares, and if they don't, surely they have not read their Bibles aright."
It is surprising to discover that all of Lincoln's relatives on his father's side, and all except one on his mother's side, voted against him. Why? Because they were Democrats.
Lincoln was elected by a minority of the votes of the nation. His opponents had approximately three votes to his two. It was a sectional triumph, for of his two million votes only twenty-four thousand came from the South. A change of only one vote
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in twenty would have given the Northwest to Douglas and thrown the election into the House of Representatives, where the South would have won.
In nine Southern States no one cast a Republican ballot. Think of it. In all Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas not one man voted for Abraham Lincoln. This was ominous.
To appreciate what happened immediately after Lincoln's election, we must review the story of a movement that had raged over the North like a hurricane. For thirty years a fanatical group, obsessed by a holy zeal for the destruction of slavery, had been preparing the country for war. During all that time an unbroken stream of vitriolic pamphlets and bitter books had flowed from their presses; and paid lecturers had visited every city, town, and hamlet in the North, exhibiting the tattered, filthy garments worn by slaves, displaying their chains and manacles, holding up bloodstained whips and spiked collars and other instruments of torture. Escaped slaves themselves were pressed into service and toured the country, giving inflammatory accounts of brutalities they had seen and atrocities they had endured.