These statements of Seward and Chase, coming from the leaders of the antislavery cause, reveal that racism, the belief in white supremacy, was deeply embedded in the entire country. It is only in this context that the statements of Lincoln and his contemporaries can be judged.
Less than two decades earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville, who was deeply opposed to slavery and believed emancipation to be inevitable, had written: “The most dreadful of all the evils that threaten the future of the United States arises from the presence of blacks on its soil.” Even in the states where slavery had been eradicated and where suffrage had been granted, he observed, countless obstacles had been placed in the way of the black man. “If he presents himself to vote, he runs a risk to his life. Oppressed, he can complain, but he finds only whites among his judges…. His son is excluded from the school where the descendants of Europeans come to be instructed. In theaters he cannot buy for the price of gold the right to be placed at the side of one who was his master; in hospitals he lies apart. The black is permitted to beseech the same God as whites, but not to pray to him at the same altar. He has his own priests and churches. One does not close the doors of Heaven to him; yet inequality hardly stops at the boundary of the other world. When the Negro is no longer, his bones are cast to one side, and the difference of conditions is still found even in the equality of death.” Even when abolition should come, Tocqueville predicted, Americans would “have still to destroy three prejudices much more intangible and more tenacious than it: the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of race, and finally the prejudice of the white.”
The dilemma faced by advocates of emancipation was the place of free blacks in American society. The opposition to assimilation was almost universal. Blacks were already barred from entering the borders of many free states. Confronting such barriers, what “in the name of humanity,” Henry Clay asked, “is to become of them—where are they to go?”
“My first impulse,” Lincoln had said before, “would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,—to their own native land.” Lincoln had long supported the same implausible plan endorsed by Edward Bates and Henry Clay, the notion of compensating slaveowners and returning freed slaves to their homeland. Without such a program, “colonizers” argued, Southern whites would never accept the idea of emancipation. Still, Lincoln took note of the staggering administrative and economic difficulties. More than 3 million blacks lived in the South, representing 35 percent of the entire Southern population. The overwhelming majority had no desire to go to Africa, and only a few spokesmen, not including Lincoln, advocated forced deportation. They were here to stay.
“What then?” Lincoln asked. “Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition?” But once freed, could they be made “politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question…. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded.”
Lincoln understood that the greatest challenge for a leader in a democratic society is to educate public opinion. “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed,” he said. “Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.” This statement goes to the heart of his disagreement with Douglas; when such an influential leader as Mary’s “Little Giant” insisted that blacks were not included in the Declaration, he was molding public opinion and bending history in the wrong direction. “He is blowing out the moral lights around us,” Lincoln warned, borrowing a phrase from his hero Henry Clay, “eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in this American people.”
Lincoln’s goal was to rekindle those very beacons, constantly affirming the revolutionary promises made in the Declaration. When the authors of the Declaration spoke of equality, Lincoln insisted, “they did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality…. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”
He hoped to “penetrate the human soul” until, as he said, “all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior” could be discarded, until all Americans could “unite as one people throughout this land,” providing true meaning to the phrase “all men are created equal.” His comments on race here and throughout the debates reveal a brooding quality, as if he was thinking aloud, balancing a realistic appraisal of the present with a cautious eye toward progress in the future.
History demonstrates that Lincoln and his contemporaries were not overestimating the depth of racial bigotry in America. A century would pass before legal apartheid was outlawed in the South, before separate schools were deemed unconstitutional, before blacks were finally guaranteed the right to vote. Moreover, each of these steps toward what Frederick Douglass called the “practical recognition of our Equality” met with fierce white resistance and were made possible only by the struggles of blacks themselves, forcing the issue upon largely hostile or indifferent whites.
There is no way to penetrate Lincoln’s personal feelings about race. There is, however, the fact that armies of scholars, meticulously investigating every aspect of his life, have failed to find a single act of racial bigotry on his part. Even more telling is the observation of Frederick Douglass, who would become a frequent public critic of Lincoln’s during his presidency, that of all the men he had met, Lincoln was “the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.” This remark takes on additional meaning when one realizes that Douglass had met dozens of celebrated abolitionists, including Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and Salmon Chase. Apparently, Douglass never felt with any of them, as he did with Lincoln, an “entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race.”
THE SEVENTH AND LAST debate took place at Alton, a town on the Mississippi River in southwest Illinois, before an audience Lincoln described as “having strong sympathies southward by relationship, place of birth, and so on.” By the middle of the day, the “whole town” was “alive and stirring with large masses of human beings.” Gustave Koerner, a leader of the German-Americans, was among the throng that came to witness the show. “More than a thousand Douglas men,” Koerner wrote, “had chartered a boat to attend the Alton meeting,” while Lincoln “had come quietly down from Springfield with his wife that morning, unobserved…. He was soon surrounded by a crowd of Republicans; but there was no parade or fuss, while Douglas, about noon, made his pompous entry, and soon afterwards the boat from St. Louis landed at the wharf, heralded by the firing of guns and the strains of martial music.” When Koerner reached Lincoln’s hotel, he found him seated in the lobby. No sooner had they said hello than Lincoln suggested that they go together to “see Mary.” Apparently, Mary was “rather dispirited” about his chances for victory, and Lincoln hoped that Koerner would lift her mood. Koerner told Mary that he was “certain” the Republicans would carry the state in the popular vote, “and tolerably certain of our carrying the Legislature.”
Although there was little new in the Alton debate, Koerner believed that Lincoln’s speech included “some of the finest passages of all the speeches he ever made.” The “real issue,” Lincoln argued, the issue that would continue long after the “tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent,” was “the eternal struggle between…right and wrong”; the “common right of humanity” set against “the divine right of kings….
“It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.” With this, Lincoln took his seat, Douglas made his concluding remarks, and the great debates came to an end.
In this race, as in all others, Lincoln was his own political manager. He drew up for his supporters a detailed battle plan, examining every district in the state and listing those he regarded as lost, those “we take to ourselves,” and those “to be struggled for.” Between his speeches, he drafted letters of instruction to key supporters, telling Koerner, for example, “We are in great danger in Madison. It is said half the Americans are going for Douglas…. Nothing must be left undone. Elsewhere things look reasonably well. Please write me.”
Though Eastern Republicans stayed out of the race, Chase came to Illinois to stump for the Republican ticket. He believed that Lincoln was a man who could be trusted on the antislavery issue, while at the same time he recognized that the prairie lawyer could be helpful to him in the upcoming presidential convention. More clearly than Seward or Greeley, Chase saw from the start that Douglas would never truly stand with the antislavery forces. For eight days, traveling to Chicago, Galena, Warren, Rockford, and Mendota, Chase spoke to thousands on behalf of Lincoln and the Republican ticket in Illinois—a gesture Lincoln would not forget.
It was a dreary day, November 2, 1858, when the voters of Illinois went to the polls. The names of Lincoln and Douglas did not appear on the ballots, since the state legislature would choose the next senator. That evening, Lincoln anxiously awaited the returns with his friends in the telegraph office. Once again, he would be sorely disappointed. Though the Republicans had won the popular vote, the Democrats had retained control of the state legislature, thereby ensuring Douglas’s reelection. Lincoln’s supporters were disconsolate and angry, blaming an unfair apportionment scheme. Koerner charged that “by the gerrymandering the State seven hundred Democratic votes were equal to one thousand Republican votes.” Republicans in Illinois bewailed the lack of support from Eastern Republicans and bitterly resented a last-minute intervention by the respected Whig leader and Kentucky senator John Crittenden, who had penned a series of highly publicized letters to Illinois, urging old Whigs and American supporters to vote for Douglas to repay his Lecompton stance. “Thousands of Whigs dropped us just on the eve of the election, through the influence of Crittenden,” Herndon complained.
Two days later, still feeling the sting of his defeat, Lincoln wrote Crittenden. He suppressed his justifiable resentment, exhibiting as he had with Greeley, and earlier with Trumbull and Judd, a magnanimity rare in the world of politics. “The emotions of defeat, at the close of a struggle in which I felt more than a merely selfish interest, and to which defeat the use of your name contributed largely, are fresh upon me,” he told Crittenden, “but, even in this mood, I can not for a moment suspect you of anything dishonorable.”
Yet this defeat left Lincoln far less disheartened than his loss four years earlier. He had won the vote of the people. The ambition he had outlined in his very first public address at the age of twenty-three—to render himself worthy of his fellow citizens’ esteem—had been realized.
“I am glad I made the late race,” he wrote his Springfield friend Dr. Anson Henry on November 19. “It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way…. I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.” That cause, he vowed to Henry Ashbury, “must not be surrendered at the end of one, or even, one hundred defeats.” There was no reason for despondency, he told another friend, Dr. Charles Ray, who continued to brood over Lincoln’s defeat. “You will soon feel better. Another ‘blow-up’ is coming; and we shall have fun again.”
CHAPTER 7
COUNTDOWN TO THE NOMINATION
AS 1859 OPENED, Lincoln remained guardedly optimistic about the future, knowing he had run a solid campaign for the Senate and made a good name for himself. Well aware that he had only an outside chance at the presidential nomination in 1860, he nevertheless worked to build his reputation nationally. He was always careful to conceal his ambitions. Whenever he was asked about the upcoming election, he would speak with well-modulated enthusiasm of other candidates. Yet all his actions were consistent with a cautious and politically skillful pursuit of the nomination. Indeed, no other period in his pre-presidential life better illustrates his consummate abilities as a politician.
Unlike Seward, he had no experienced political manager to guide his efforts. He would have to rely on himself, as he had from his early days on the frontier and throughout his career as shopkeeper, lawyer, and politician. A month earlier, Jesse Fell, secretary of the Illinois Republican state central committee, had expressed his “decided impression” in a letter to Lincoln that Lincoln’s tremendous fight against Douglas had given him a national platform. If the details of his early life and his “efforts on the slavery question” could be “sufficiently brought before the people,” he could be made “a formidable, if not a successful candidate for the presidency.” Skeptical, Lincoln noted that Seward and Chase and others were “so much better known.” With an equivocal modesty, he asked: “Is it not, as a matter of justice, due to such men, who have carried this movement forward to its present status, in spite of fearful opposition, personal abuse, and hard names? I really think so.” As for a campaign biography, he curtly answered, “there is nothing in my early history that would interest you or anybody else.”
Although refusing to confuse flattery with fact, he recognized nonetheless that Fell’s argument had force. Lincoln’s gradually evolving political strategy began with an awareness that while each of his three rivals had first claim on a substantial number of delegates, if he could position himself as the second choice of those who supported each of the others, he might pick up votes if one or another of the top candidates faltered.
As a dark horse, he knew it was important not to reveal his intentions too early, so as to minimize the possibility of opponents mobilizing against him. On April 16, 1859, when the Republican editor of the Rock Island Register proposed to call on other editors to make “a simultaneous announcement of your name for the Presidency,” Lincoln replied: “I certainly am flattered, and gratified, that some partial friends think of me in that connection; but I really think it best for our cause that no concerted effort, such as you suggest, should be made.” He added that he “must, in candor, say I do not think myself fit for the Presidency.” By “fit,” the self-confident Lincoln meant only to suggest that he did not necessarily have the credentials or experience appropriate to the office, not that he lacked the ability. It was important that any efforts on his behalf be squelched until the timing was right. And Lincoln, as would be evidenced throughout his presidency, was a master of timing.
WHILE LINCOLN MOVED CAREFULLY, step by step, Seward, Chase, and even Bates had grown so eager for the presidential nomination that they made a number of costly errors as they headed down the final stretch.
In the crucial months before the nomination, Seward, at Weed’s rare misguided suggestion, took an extended tour of Europe. Certain that Seward had the nomination locked up so long as he refrained from the radical statements that frightened more moderate elements of the party, Weed recommended that his protégé remove himself from the increasingly contentious debate at home by traveling overseas for eight months. “All our discreet friends unite in sending me out of the country to spend the recess of Congress,” Seward joked.
Fourteen-year-old Fanny Seward, at home with her mother, was desolate at the prospect of an eight-month separation from her father. In the days before his ship was set to sail from New York, she could think of nothing else, she confided in her diary, but his appro
aching departure. An intelligent, plain girl, Fanny had been encouraged from an early age to read broadly and to write. Beyond her daily journal, she tried her hand at poetry and plays, determined, she once vowed, never to marry, so that she could live at home and devote herself to a literary career. While extremely close to her mother, a relationship she described as “‘my affinity’ with whom I think instead of speak,” she idolized her father. The night before he left for Europe, she could barely contain her tears.
In Europe, Seward was entertained by politicians and royalty alike, who assumed that he would be the next president. He met with Queen Victoria, Lord Palmerston, William Gladstone, King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, King Leopold I of Belgium, and Pope Pius IX. Moving from one dazzling social occasion to the next, Seward was ebullient. His letters home revealed the great pleasure he took in his sojourn, which carried him to Egypt and the Holy Land. Yet in the countdown to the presidential nomination, eight months was a critical absence.
Upon his return to Washington for the new congressional session that began after the New Year in 1860, Seward took Weed’s advice and prepared a major address. Designed to reassure Northern conservatives and moderate Southerners that he was a man who could be trusted to hold the Union together, the speech was to be delivered on the Senate floor on February 29, 1860. The reporter Henry Stanton later recalled that Seward showed it to him beforehand and asked him to write it up for the New York Tribune, with an accompanying description of the scene in the Senate chamber as he was speaking. “The description was elaborate,” Stanton claimed, “the Senator himself suggesting some of the nicer touches, and every line of it was written and on its way to New York before Mr. Seward had uttered a word in the Senate Chamber.” Seward was in “buoyant spirits,” assuring Stanton that with this speech they would “go down to posterity together.”