This horrific train of events transformed Stanton’s spirit. His natural ebullience faded. “Where formerly he met everybody with hearty and cheerful greeting,” said a friend, “he now moved about in silence and gloom, with head bowed and hands clasped behind.” Though he remained a tender father to his son and a loving brother to his younger sisters, he became increasingly aggressive in court, intimidating witnesses unnecessarily, antagonizing fellow lawyers, exhibiting rude and irascible behavior.
He derived his only satisfaction from his growing reputation and his increasing wealth, which allowed him to care for his son, his widowed mother, his sisters, and his dead brother’s wife and children. The Reaper case was the biggest case of his career, “the most important Patent cause that has ever been tried,” he told a friend, “and more time, labor, money and brains have been expended in getting it ready for argument, than any other Patent case ever has had bestowed upon it.” If all went well, it would open doors for Stanton at the highest level of his profession.
When he arrived at the Burnet House, he discovered that Harding “had been unwell for several days” and might not be in a position to go to court. Terrified that in addition to the legal argument he had fully prepared, he might now have to present the “scientific part of the case to which [he] had given no attention,” Stanton stayed up all night in preparation. He was greatly relieved when Harding recovered, but anxiety and lack of sleep compounded the irascibility that had marked his demeanor since the multiple deaths in his family.
Beyond the breaking pressures of the case, Stanton had become involved in a turbulent courtship. The young woman, Ellen Hutchison, the daughter of a wealthy Pittsburgh businessman, was the first woman who had attracted his interest since the death of his wife more than a decade earlier. Tall, blond, and blue-eyed, Ellen was, by Stanton’s description, “radiant with beauty and intellect.” While Stanton was smitten with Ellen immediately, she was slow to respond to his affections. She still suffered from a romantic disappointment that had left her heart in “agony” and convinced her that she could not love again.
Stanton understood, he told her, that “the trouble of early love fell like a killing frost upon the tree of your life,” but he was confident that “enough life still remains to put forth fresh blossoms.” Despite his encouragement, Ellen was vexed by some of the qualities others noted in Stanton: his obsessive concentration on work, his impatience and lack of humor, and, most worrisome, “his careless[ness] and indifferen[ce] to the feelings of all.” Addressing these concerns, Stanton admitted that “there is so much of the hard and repulsive in my—(I will not say nature, for that I think is soft and tender) but in the temper and habit of life generated by adverse circumstances, that great love only can bear with and overlook.” If the last decade of his life had been different, he assured her, if he had been “blessed with the companionship of a woman whose love would have pointed out and kindly corrected my errors, I would have escaped the fault you condemn.”
After the successful conclusion of the Reaper trial, Ellen was finally persuaded to marry Edwin on June 25, 1856. Happier years followed for Stanton. The Manny patent was sustained not only by the Cincinnati court but by the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal. With this huge victory behind him, Stanton moved his practice to Washington, D.C., where he argued important cases before the Supreme Court, achieved substantial financial security, and built a brick mansion for his new wife.
AS LINCOLN’S OWN HOPES were repeatedly frustrated, he wistfully watched the progress of others, in particular, Stephen Douglas, his great rival with whom he had often debated around the fire of Speed’s general store. “Twenty-two years ago Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted,” he confided in a private fragment later discovered in his papers. “We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much so as he. With me the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown, even, in foreign lands. I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has reached. So reached, that the oppressed of my species, might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s brow.”
At this juncture, some have suggested, Lincoln was sustained by his wife’s unflagging belief that a glorious destiny awaited him. “She had the fire, will and ambition,” his law partner John Stuart observed. When Mary was young and still being courted by many beaux, she had told a friend who had taken an old, wealthy husband, “I would rather marry a good man—a man of mind—with a hope and bright prospects ahead for position—fame and power than to marry all the houses—gold and bones in the world.” Stephen Douglas, who had been among her suitors, she considered “a very little, little giant, by the side of my tall Kentuckian, and intellectually my husband towers above Douglas just as he does physically.” Quite simply, in Mary’s mind, her husband had “no equal in the United States.”
In an era when, as Mary herself admitted, it was “unladylike” to be so interested in politics, she avidly supported her husband’s political ambitions at every stage. Although she undoubtedly fortified his will at difficult moments, however, Lincoln’s quest for public recognition and influence was so consuming, it is unlikely he would have abandoned his dreams, whatever the circumstances.
ONCE AGAIN, at a moment when Lincoln’s career appeared to have come to a halt, Seward and Chase were moving forward. Chase’s leadership during the political uprising in the North that followed the passage of the Nebraska Act had proved, in the words of Carl Schurz, to be “the first bugle call for the formation of a new party.” Under the pressure of mounting sectional division, both national parties—the Whigs and the Democrats—had begun to fray. The Whig Party—the party of Clay and Webster, Lincoln, Seward, and Bates—had been the first to decline as “conscience Whigs,” opposed to slavery, split from “cotton Whigs,” who desired an accommodation with slavery. In the 1852 election, the divided Whig Party had been buried in a Democratic landslide. But the passage of the Nebraska Act brought serious defections in the Democratic Party as well, as Northerners unwilling to sanction the extension of slavery looked for a new home, leaving the party in control of the Southern Democrats.
The political upheaval was enormously complicated by the emergence of the Know Nothing Party, which had formed in reaction to an unprecedented flood of immigration in the 1840s and 1850s. In 1845, about 20 million people inhabited the United States. During the next decade, nearly 3 million immigrants arrived, mainly from Ireland and Germany. This largely Catholic influx descended on a country that was mostly native-born Protestant, anti-Catholic in sympathy. The Know Nothings fought to delay citizenship for the new immigrants and bar them from voting. In the early 1850s, they won elections in several cities, swept to statewide victory in Massachusetts, and gained surprising ground in New York. Newspapers and preachers assaulted “popery”; there were bloody anti-Catholic riots in several Northern cities.
Lincoln had nothing but disdain for the discriminatory beliefs of the Know Nothings. “How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?” he queried his friend Joshua Speed. “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance.”
But this party, too, was soon to founder on the issue of slavery. Many Northern Know Nothings were also antislavery, and finally the anti-Nebraska cause proved more compelling, of more import, than resistance to foreign immigration. The split between the party’s Northern and Southern factions would diminish its strength
, though the nativist feelings that had fueled its birth would continue to influence the political climate even after the party itself collapsed and died.
With the Whigs disappearing and the Democrats under Southern domination, all those opposed to the extension of slavery found their new home in what eventually became the Republican Party, comprised of “conscience Whigs,” “independent Democrats,” and antislavery Know Nothings. In state after state, new coalitions with different names came into being—the Fusion Party, the People’s Party, the Anti-Nebraska Party. In Ripon, Wisconsin, an 1854 gathering of antislavery men proposed the name “Republican Party,” and other state conventions soon followed suit.
In Illinois, Lincoln held back, still hoping that the Whig Party could become the antislavery party. In New York, Seward hesitated as well, finding it difficult to sever friendships and relationships built over three decades. Salmon Chase, however, was unhindered by past loyalties. He was ready to commit himself wholeheartedly to the task of forging a new party under the Republican banner. He had always been willing to move on when new political arrangements offered richer prospects for himself and the cause. Beginning as a Whig, he had joined the Liberty Party. He had abandoned that party for the Free-Soilers and then had gone to the Senate as an independent Democrat. Now, with his Senate term coming to an end, and with little chance of being nominated by the Democrats for a second term, he was happy to become a Republican.
In Ohio, as in New York and Illinois, the new movement was complicated by the strength of nativist sentiment. A delicate balance would be required to court the old Know Nothings without forfeiting support in the immigrant German-American community, which was passionate in its hatred of slavery. Chase accomplished this feat by running for governor on a Republican platform endorsing no specific Know Nothing proposals, but including eight Know Nothing candidates for all the important offices on the statewide ticket.
It was a hard-fought canvass, and the indefatigable Chase left nothing to chance. Traveling by railroad, horseback, hand car, canoe, and open wagon, he spoke at fifty-seven different places in forty-nine counties. Campaigning in the sparsely settled sections of Ohio proved to be an adventure. To reach the town of Delphos, he wrote Kate, he was driven along the railroad tracks “on a hand car” operated by two men who “placed themselves at the cranks.” Though the stars provided light, “it was rather dangerous for who could tell but we might meet a train or perhaps another hand car.”
Chase’s strenuous work paid off, making him the first Republican governor of a major state. “The anxiety of the last few days is over,” Sumner wrote from Boston. “At last I breathe freely!” Reading the news under the telegraphic band at breakfast, the Massachusetts senator could barely contain his excitement, predicting that his friend’s victory would do more than anything else for the antislavery cause.
In New York, Seward faced a more difficult challenge than Chase in trying to placate the Know Nothings, who had never forgiven his proposal to extend state funds to Catholic schools. Indeed, they were determined to defeat Seward for reelection to the Senate in 1855. Facing the enmity of both the Know Nothings and the proslavery “cotton Whigs,” he concluded that he could not risk moving to a new, untested party.
Seward’s only hope for reelection lay in Weed’s ability to cobble together an antislavery majority from among the various discordant elements in the state legislature. In the weeks before the legislature was set to convene, Weed entertained the members in alphabetical groups, angling for every possible vote, including a few Know Nothings who might put their antislavery principles above their anti-Catholic sentiments. At one of these lavish dinners, the story is told, three or four Know Nothings on a special tour of Weed’s house confronted a portrait of Weed’s good friend New York’s bishop John Hughes. The stratagem would be doomed if the identity of the man in the portrait was known, so they were told that it was George Washington in his Continental robes, presented to Weed’s father by Washington himself!
Working without rest, Weed somehow stitched together enough votes to reelect Seward to a second term in the Senate. “I snatch a minute from the pressure of solicitations of lobby men, and congratulations of newly-made friends, to express, not so much my deep, and deepened gratitude to you,” Seward wrote Weed, “as my amazement at the magnitude and complexity of the dangers through which you have conducted our shattered bark.” In Auburn, a great celebration followed the news of Seward’s reelection. “I have never known such a season of rejoicing,” Frances happily reported to her son Augustus. “They are firing 700 cannons here—a salute of 300 was given in Albany as soon as the vote was made known.”
Once Seward was securely positioned for six additional years in the Senate, he and Weed were liberated to join the Republican Party. Two state conventions, one Whig, one Republican, were convened in Syracuse in late September 1855. When Seward was asked by a friend which to attend, he replied that it didn’t matter. Delegates would enter through two doors, but exit through one. The Whig delegates assembled first and adopted a strong antislavery platform. Then, led by Weed, they marched into the adjoining hall, where the Republicans greeted them with thunderous applause. From the remnants of dissolving parties, a new Republican Party had been born in the state of New York.
“I am so happy that you and I are at last on the same platform and in the same political pew,” Sumner told Seward. That October, Seward announced his allegiance to the Republican Party in a rousing speech that traced the history of the growth of the slave power, illustrating the constant march to acquire new slave states and thereby ensure for slaveholders the balance of power in the Congress. “What, then, is wanted?” he asked. “Nothing but organization.” The task before the new Republican Party was to consolidate its strength until it gained control of the Congress and secured the power to forbid the extension of slavery in the territories.
IN EARLY 1856, Lincoln decided that Illinois should follow New York and Ohio in organizing the various anti-Nebraska elements into the new Republican Party. Through his efforts, the call went out for an anti-Nebraska state convention to be held on May 29, 1856. Lincoln proceeded carefully in the weeks leading to the convention, recognizing the complexities of reconciling the disparate opponents of the Nebraska bill into a unified party. Despite the success of Weed and Chase in their respective states, Lincoln worried that the convention call would attract only the more radical elements of the coalition, providing too narrow a base for a viable new party.
Dramatic events in Kansas helped rally support for Lincoln’s cause. A guerrilla war had broken out between Northern emigrants desiring to make Kansas a free state under the “popular sovereignty” provision of the Nebraska Act, and so-called “border ruffians,” who crossed the river from Missouri and cast illicit votes to make Kansas a slave state. During the debate over the Nebraska Act, Seward had told the slave states that the North would “engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right.” In the South, the Charleston Mercury responded: “When the North presents a sectional issue, and tenders battle upon it, she must meet it, or abide all the consequences of a victory easily won, by a remorseless and eager foe.” As the violence spiraled, “Bleeding Kansas” became a new rallying cry for the antislavery forces. Kansas was not merely a contest between settlers but a war between North and South.
Moderate antislavery sentiment was further aroused when shocking news from Washington reached Illinois the week before the convention. On the Senate floor, South Carolina’s Preston Brooks had savagely bludgeoned Charles Sumner in return for Sumner’s incendiary antislavery speech. Sumner had begun unremarkably enough, presenting familiar arguments, laced with literary and historical references, against admitting Kansas as a slave state. The mood of the Senate chamber instantly shifted, however, when Sumner launched into a vituperative attack directed particularly against two of his fellow senators, Stephen Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of
South Carolina. He likened Butler to the aging, feeble Don Quixote, who imagined himself “a chivalrous knight,” sentimentally devoted to his beloved “harlot, Slavery…who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him.” Riding forth by Butler’s side, Douglas was “the squire of Slavery, its very Sancho Panza, ready to do all its humiliating offices.”
In the days before delivering the speech, Sumner had read a draft to Frances Seward. She strongly advised him to remove the personal attacks, including a reference to Butler’s slight paralysis that slurred his speech. In this instance Sumner did not heed her advice; when he finished speaking, Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan characterized the speech as “the most un-American and unpatriotic that ever grated on the ears of the members of this high body—as I hope never to hear again here or elsewhere.”
Two days later, Butler’s young cousin Congressman Preston Brooks entered the Senate chamber armed with a heavy cane. Walking up to Sumner, who was writing at his desk, Brooks reportedly said, “You have libelled South Carolina and my relative, and I have come to punish you.” Before Sumner could speak, Brooks brought the cane down upon his head, cudgeling him repeatedly as Sumner futilely tried to rise from his desk. Covered with blood, Sumner fell unconscious and was carried from the floor.
News of the brutal assault, which left Sumner with severe injuries to his brain and spinal cord and kept him out of the Senate for three years, galvanized antislavery sentiment in the North. “Knots of men” on street corners pronounced it “a gross outrage on an American Senator and on freedom of speech,” reported the Boston Daily Evening Transcript. Even the moderate supporters of the Nebraska bill “expressed themselves as never so much aroused before by the slave power.” Mass public meetings, so crowded that thousands were unable to gain entrance, convened in cities and towns to protest the caning. Truly to “see the slave aggression,” one of Sumner’s supporters wrote, the North had first to see “one of its best men Butchered in Congress.” Other antislavery men had been assaulted, the New York Tribune observed, “but the knocking-down and beating to bloody blindness and unconsciousness of an American Senator while writing at his desk in the Senate Chamber is a novel illustration of the ferocious Southern spirit.” The beating reached into the people’s hearts and minds, which political events rarely touch, the historian William Gienapp has argued. It “proved a powerful stimulus in driving moderates and conservatives into the Republican party.”