Chapter One
Four Men Waiting
On May 18, 1860, the day when the Republican Party would nominate its
candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln was up early. As he climbed the
stairs to his plainly furnished law office on the west side of the public
square in Springfield, Illinois, breakfast was being served at the
130-room Chenery House on Fourth Street. Fresh butter, flour, lard, and
eggs were being put out for sale at the City Grocery Store on North Sixth
Street. And in the morning newspaper, the proprietors at Smith, Wickersham
& Company had announced the arrival of a large spring stock of silks,
calicos, ginghams, and linens, along with a new supply of the latest
styles of hosiery and gloves.
The Republicans had chosen to meet in Chicago. A new convention hall
called the “Wigwam” had been constructed for the occasion. The first
ballot was not due to be called until 10 a.m. and Lincoln, although
patient by nature, was visibly “nervous, fidgety, and intensely excited.”
With an outside chance to secure the Republican nomination for the highest
office of the land, he was unable to focus on his work. Even under
ordinary circumstances many would have found concentration difficult in
the untidy office Lincoln shared with his younger partner, William
Herndon. Two worktables, piled high with papers and correspondence, formed
a T in the center of the room. Additional documents and letters spilled
out from the drawers and pigeonholes of an outmoded secretary in the
corner. When he needed a particular piece of correspondence, Lincoln had
to rifle through disorderly stacks of paper, rummaging, as a last resort,
in the lining of his old plug hat, where he often put stray letters or
notes.
Restlessly descending to the street, he passed the state capitol building,
set back from the road, and the open lot where he played handball with his
friends, and climbed a short set of stairs to the office of the Illinois
State Journal, the local Republican newspaper. The editorial room on the
second floor, with a central large wood-burning stove, was a gathering
place for the exchange of news and gossip.
He wandered over to the telegraph office on the north side of the square
to see if any new dispatches had come in. There were few outward signs
that this was a day of special moment and expectation in the history of
Springfield, scant record of any celebration or festivity planned should
Lincoln, long their fellow townsman, actually secure the nomination. That
he had garnered the support of the Illinois delegation at the state
convention at Decatur earlier that month was widely understood to be a
“complimentary” gesture. Yet if there were no firm plans to celebrate his
dark horse bid, Lincoln knew well the ardor of his staunch circle of
friends already at work on his behalf on the floor of the Wigwam.
The hands of the town clock on the steeple of the Baptist church on Adams
Street must have seemed not to move. When Lincoln learned that his
longtime friend James Conkling had returned unexpectedly from the
convention the previous evening, he walked over to Conkling’s office above
Chatterton’s jewelry store. Told that his friend was expected within the
hour, he returned to his own quarters, intending to come back as soon as
Conkling arrived.
Lincoln’s shock of black hair, brown furrowed face, and deep-set eyes made
him look older than his fifty-one years. He was a familiar figure to
almost everyone in Springfield, as was his singular way of walking, which
gave the impression that his long, gaunt frame needed oiling. He plodded
forward in an awkward manner, hands hanging at his sides or folded behind
his back. His step had no spring, his partner William Herndon recalled. He
lifted his whole foot at once rather than lifting from the toes and then
thrust the whole foot down on the ground rather than landing on his heel.
“His legs,” another observer noted, “seemed to drag from the knees down,
like those of a laborer going home after a hard day’s work.”
His features, even supporters conceded, were not such “as belong to a
handsome man.” In repose, his face was “so overspread with sadness,” the
reporter Horace White noted, that it seemed as if “Shakespeare’s
melancholy Jacques had been translated from the forest of Arden to the
capital of Illinois.” Yet, when Lincoln began to speak, White observed,
“this expression of sorrow dropped from him instantly. His face lighted up
with a winning smile, and where I had a moment before seen only leaden
sorrow I now beheld keen intelligence, genuine kindness of heart, and the
promise of true friendship.” If his appearance seemed somewhat odd, what
captivated admirers, another contemporary observed, was “his winning
manner, his ready good humor, and his unaffected kindness and gentleness.”
Five minutes in his presence, and “you cease to think that he is either
homely or awkward.”
Springfield had been Lincoln’s home for nearly a quarter of a century. He
had arrived in the young city to practice law at twenty-eight years old,
riding into town, his great friend Joshua Speed recalled, “on a borrowed
horse, with no earthly property save a pair of saddle-bags containing a
few clothes.” The city had grown rapidly, particularly after 1839, when it
became the capital of Illinois. By 1860, Springfield boasted nearly ten
thousand residents, though its business district, designed to accommodate
the expanding population that arrived in town when the legislature was in
session, housed thousands more. Ten hotels radiated from the public square
where the capitol building stood. In addition, there were multiple saloons
and restaurants, seven newspapers, three billiard halls, dozens of retail
stores, three military armories, and two railroad depots.
Here in Springfield, in the Edwards mansion on the hill, Lincoln had
courted and married “the belle of the town,” young Mary Todd, who had come
to live with her married sister, Elizabeth, wife of Ninian Edwards, the
well-to-do son of the former governor of Illinois. Raised in a prominent
Lexington, Kentucky, family, Mary had received an education far superior
to most girls her age. For four years she had studied languages and
literature in an exclusive boarding school and then spent two additional
years in what was considered graduate study. The story is told of
Lincoln’s first meeting with Mary at a festive party. Captivated by her
lively manner, intelligent face, clear blue eyes, and dimpled smile,
Lincoln reportedly said, “I want to dance with you in the worst way.” And,
Mary laughingly told her cousin later that night, “he certainly did.” In
Springfield, all their children were born, and one was buried. In that
spring of 1860, Mary was forty-two, Robert sixteen, William nine, and
Thomas seven. Edward, the second son, had died at the age of three.
Their home, described at the time as a modest “two-story frame house,
having a wide hall running through the centre, with parlors on both
sides,” stood close to the street and boasted few trees and no garden.
“The adornments were few, but chastely appropriate,” one contemporary
observer noted. In the center hall stood “the customary little table with
a white marble top,” on which were arranged flowers, a silver-plated
ice-water pitcher, and family photographs. Along the walls were positioned
some chairs and a sofa. “Everything,” a journalist observed, “tended to
represent the home of a man who has battled hard with the fortunes of
life, and whose hard experience had taught him to enjoy whatever of
success belongs to him, rather in solid substance than in showy display.”
During his years in Springfield, Lincoln had forged an unusually loyal
circle of friends. They had worked with him in the state legislature,
helped him in his campaigns for Congress and the Senate, and now, at this
very moment, were guiding his efforts at the Chicago convention, “moving
heaven & Earth,” they assured him, in an attempt to secure him the
nomination. These steadfast companions included David Davis, the Circuit
Court judge for the Eighth District, whose three-hundred-pound body was
matched by “a big brain and a big heart”; Norman Judd, an attorney for the
railroads and chairman of the Illinois Republican state central committee;
Leonard Swett, a lawyer from Bloomington who believed he knew Lincoln “as
intimately as I have ever known any man in my life”; and Stephen Logan,
Lincoln’s law partner for three years in the early forties.
Many of these friendships had been forged during the shared experience of
the “circuit,” the eight weeks each spring and fall when Lincoln and his
fellow lawyers journeyed together throughout the state. They shared rooms
and sometimes beds in dusty village inns and taverns, spending long
evenings gathered together around a blazing fire. The economics of the
legal profession in sparsely populated Illinois were such that lawyers had
to move about the state in the company of the circuit judge, trying
thousands of small cases in order to make a living. The arrival of the
traveling bar brought life and vitality to the county seats, fellow rider
Henry Whitney recalled. Villagers congregated on the courthouse steps.
When the court sessions were complete, everyone would gather in the local
tavern from dusk to dawn, sharing drinks, stories, and good cheer.
In these convivial settings, Lincoln was invariably the center of
attention. No one could equal his never-ending stream of stories nor his
ability to reproduce them with such contagious mirth. As his winding tales
became more famous, crowds of villagers awaited his arrival at every stop
for the chance to hear a master storyteller. Everywhere he went, he won
devoted followers, friendships that later emboldened his quest for office.
Political life in these years, the historian Robert Wiebe has observed,
“broke down into clusters of men who were bound together by mutual trust.”
And no political circle was more loyally bound than the band of
compatriots working for Lincoln in Chicago.
The prospects for his candidacy had taken wing in 1858 after his brilliant
campaign against the formidable Democratic leader, Stephen Douglas, in a
dramatic senate race in Illinois that had attracted national attention.
Though Douglas had won a narrow victory, Lincoln managed to unite the
disparate elements of his state’s fledgling Republican Party – that
curious amalgamation of former Whigs, antislavery Democrats, nativists,
foreigners, radicals, and conservatives. In the mid-1850s, the Republican
Party had come together in state after state in the North with the common
goal of preventing the spread of slavery to the territories. “Of strange,
discordant, and even, hostile elements,” Lincoln proudly claimed, “we
gathered from the four winds, and formed and fought the battle through.”
The story of Lincoln’s rise to power was inextricably linked to the
increasing intensity of the antislavery cause. Public feeling on the
slavery issue had become so flammable that Lincoln’s seven debates with
Douglas were carried in newspapers across the land, proving the prairie
lawyer from Springfield more than a match for the most likely Democratic
nominee for the presidency.
Furthermore, in an age when speech-making prowess was central to political
success, when the spoken word filled the air “from sun-up til sun-down,”
Lincoln’s stirring oratory had earned the admiration of a far-flung
audience who had either heard him speak or read his speeches in the paper.
As his reputation grew, the invitations to speak multiplied. In the year
before the convention, he had appeared before tens of thousands of people
in Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin, Kentucky, New York, and New England.
The pinnacle of his success was reached at Cooper Union in New York,
where, on the evening of February 27, 1860, before a zealous crowd of more
than fifteen hundred people, Lincoln delivered what the New York Tribune
called “one of the happiest and most convincing political arguments ever
made in this City” in defense of Republican principles and the need to
confine slavery to the places where it already existed. “The vast
assemblage frequently rang with cheers and shouts of applause, which were
prolonged and intensified at the close. No man ever before made such an
impression on his first appeal to a New-York audience.”
Lincoln’s success in the East bolstered his supporters at home. On May 10,
the fired-up Republican state convention at Decatur nominated him for
president, labeling him “the Rail Candidate for President” after two fence
rails he had supposedly split in his youth were ceremoniously carried into
the hall. The following week, the powerful Chicago Press and Tribune
formally endorsed Lincoln, arguing that his moderate politics represented
the thinking of most people, that he would come into the contest “with no
clogs, no embarrassment,” an “honest man” who represented all the
“fundamentals of Republicanism,” with “due respect for the rights of the
South.”
Still, Lincoln clearly understood that he was “new in the field,” that
outside of Illinois he was not “the first choice of a very great many.”
His only political experience on the national level consisted of two
failed Senate races and a single term in Congress that had come to an end
nearly a dozen years earlier. By contrast, the three other contenders for
the nomination were household names in Republican circles. William Henry
Seward had been a celebrated senator from New York for more than a decade
and governor of his state for two terms before he went to Washington.
Ohio’s Salmon P. Chase, too, had been both senator and governor, and had
played a central role in the formation of the national Republican Party.
Edward Bates was a widely respected elder statesman, a delegate to the
convention that had framed the Missouri Constitution, and a former
congressman whose opinions on national matters were still widely sought.
Recognizing that Seward held a commanding lead at the start, followed by
Chase and Bates, Lincoln’s strategy was to give offense to no one. He
wanted to leave the delegates “in a mood to come to us, if they shall be
compelled to give up their first love.” This was clearly understood by
Lincoln’s team in Chicago and by all the delegates whom Judge Davis had
commandeered to join the fight. “We are laboring to make you the second
choice of all the Delegations we can, where we can’t make you first
choice,” Scott County delegate Nathan Knapp told Lincoln when he first
arrived in Chicago. “Keep a good nerve,” Knapp advised, “be not surprised
at any result – but I tell you that your chances are not the
worst … brace your nerves for any result.” Knapp’s message was followed by
one from Davis himself on the second day of the convention. “Am very
hopeful,” he warned Lincoln, but “dont be Excited.”
The warnings were unnecessary – Lincoln was, above all, a realist who
fully understood that he faced an uphill climb against his better-known
rivals. Anxious to get a clearer picture of the situation, he headed back
to Conkling’s office, hoping that his old friend had returned. This time
he was not disappointed. As Conkling later told the story, Lincoln
stretched himself upon an old settee that stood by the front window, “his
head on a cushion and his feet over the end,” while Conkling related all
he had seen and heard in the previous two days before leaving the Wigwam.
Conkling told Lincoln that Seward was in trouble, that he had enemies not
only in other states but at home in New York. If Seward was not nominated
on the first ballot, Conkling predicted, Lincoln would be the nominee.
Lincoln replied that “he hardly thought this could be possible and that in
case Mr. Seward was not nominated on the first ballot, it was his judgment
that Mr. Chase of Ohio or Mr. Bates of Missouri would be the nominee.”
Conkling disagreed, citing reasons why each of those two candidates would
have difficulty securing the nomination. Assessing the situation with his
characteristic clearheadedness, Lincoln could not fail to perceive some
truth in what his friend was saying; yet having tasted so many
disappointments, he saw no benefit in letting his hopes run wild. “Well,
Conkling,” he said slowly, pulling his long frame up from the settee, “I
believe I will go back to my office and practice law.”
(Continues…)
Simon & Schuster
Copyright © 2005
Blithedale Productions, Inc.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-684-82490-6
Excerpted from Team of Rivals
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Copyright © 2005 by Blithedale Productions, Inc..
Excerpted by permission.
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