Leading Southern politicians were quick to indict the Republican Party and, by extension, the entire North. The Tennessee legislature resolved that the raiders at Harpers Ferry were “the natural fruits of this treasonable ‘irrepressible conflict’ doctrine, put forth by the great head of the Black Republican party, and echoed by his subordinates.” A man representing “one hundred gentlemen” published a circular that offered a $50,000 reward “for the head of William H. Seward,” along with the considerably smaller sum of $25 for the heads of a long list of “traitors,” including Sumner, Greeley, Giddings, and Colfax. Lincoln was not included in the list of enemies.
Democratic papers in the North joined in, targeting Seward for special condemnation. “The first overt act in the great drama of national disruption which has been plotted by that demagogue, Wm. H. Seward, has just closed at Harper’s Ferry,” the New York Herald charged. “No reasoning mind can fail to trace cause and effect between the bloody and brutal manifesto of William H. Seward [the “irrepressible conflict” speech a year earlier]…and the terrible scenes of violence, rapine and death, that have been enacted at the confluence of the Potomac and the Shenandoah.”
Republicans, naturally, countered Democratic attempts to implicate their party. Seward himself stated that although Brown was a sympathetic figure, his execution was “necessary and just.” Weed’s Albany Evening Journal also took a decided stance against the futile raid, deeming Brown’s men guilty of treason for “seeking to plunge a peaceful community into the horrors of a servile insurrection.” They “justly deserve, universal condemnation.”
In Missouri, Bates concluded that “the wild extravagance and utter futility of his plan” proved that Brown was “a madman.” He discussed the incident at length with his young friend Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, who had come to stay at Grape Hill for several days with his wife, Flora, his child, and two free black servants. “He tells me a good deal about ‘Old Brown,’” Bates wrote in his diary. “He was at his capture—and has his [dagger].”
For Chase, the situation presented particular problems. Though he publicly denounced Brown’s violation of law and order, his younger daughter, Nettie, later conceded that “for a household accustomed to revere as friends of the family such men as Sumner, Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Whittier, and Longfellow,” it was impossible not to sympathize with “the truly good old man who was about to die for others.” She and her friends built a small fort in the conservatory and “raised a flag on which was painted…defiantly ‘Freedom forever; slavery never.’” When friends warned Chase that such open support of Brown could not be countenanced, he had to explain to his daughter that “a great wrong” could not be righted “in the way poor old John Brown had attempted to do.” The little fort was dismantled.
At the time of Brown’s execution on December 2, 1859, Lincoln was back on the campaign trail, telling an audience in Leavenworth, Kansas, that “the attempt to identify the Republican party with the John Brown business was an electioneering dodge.” He wisely sought the middle ground between the statements of radical Republicans, like Emerson, who believed that Brown’s execution would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross,” and conservative Republicans, who denounced Brown for his demented, traitorous scheme. He acknowledged that Brown had displayed “great courage” and “rare unselfishness.” Nonetheless, he concluded, “that cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right.”
WHEN HE RETURNED from his canvassing, Lincoln focused on the approaching meeting of the Republican National Committee, to be held on December 21, 1859, at the Astor House in New York. Committee members from nearly all the free states were gathered to decide where the Republican Convention would be held. Supporters of Seward, Chase, and Bates argued in turn that the convention should be placed in New York, Ohio, or Missouri. Though Lincoln had not yet committed himself publicly to run for the nomination, he wrote to Norman Judd, a member of the selection committee, to press the claims of Illinois, to satisfy friends who “attach more consequence” to the location than either he or Judd had originally done.
Judd waited patiently as the claims of Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Harrisburg were put forth. When no agreement could be reached, he shrewdly suggested Chicago as “good neutral ground where everyone would have an even chance.” Although Lincoln was known to most of the committee members at this point, none considered him a serious candidate for the presidency. Judd “carefully kept ‘Old Abe’ out of sight,” observed Henry Whitney, “and the delegates failed to see any personal bearing the place of meeting was to have on the nomination.” The choice finally narrowed down to St. Louis and Chicago. Judd “promised that the members of the Convention and all outsiders of the Republican faith should have a hospitable reception,” that sufficient accommodations would be provided “for feeding and lodging the large crowd,” and that “a hall for deliberation should be furnished free.” Ultimately, Chicago beat St. Louis by a single vote.
Once Chicago was selected, Judd, a railway lawyer, persuaded the railroad companies to provide “a cheap excursion rate from all parts of the State,” so that lack of funds would not keep Lincoln supporters from attending the convention. Concealed from his rivals, Lincoln had taken an important step toward the nomination.
So confident were Seward’s friends about his chances that they had no problem with the Chicago selection. “I like the place & the tenor of the call,” New York editor John Bigelow wrote Seward at the time. “I do not see how either could be bettered, nor how it is possible to take exception to it.” But Charles Gibson, Bates’s friend and supporter, was not so sanguine; he recognized that it was a blow to the Bates candidacy. “Had the convention been held in St. Louis,” Gibson later wrote, “Lincoln would not have been the nominee.”
As Lincoln’s candidacy became a real prospect, he attended to the request made by Jesse Fell a year earlier for a short history of his life to be published and distributed. After warning Fell that “there is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me,” Lincoln detailed, without a hint of self-pity, the facts of his early life, growing up in “a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods.”
“If any thing be made out of it, I wish it to be modest,” Lincoln told Fell. “Of course it must not appear to have been written by myself.” This simple sketch written in his own hand would be used later in Republican efforts to romanticize Lincoln’s humble beginnings.
LINCOLN’S HOPES for making himself better known outside the West received an immense boost when he received the invitation from Chase supporter James Briggs to speak as part of a lecture series in Brooklyn. The lecture was eventually scheduled for February 27, 1860. Chase, as we saw, had declined the opportunity to speak in the same series, despite word that its organizers were men seeking an alternative to Seward. Upon his arrival in New York, Lincoln sought out Henry Bowen, editor of the antislavery New York Independent, who had helped arrange the event. “His clothes were travel-stained and he looked tired and woe-begone,” Bowen recalled. “In this first view of him, there came to me the disheartening and appalling thought of the great throng which I had been so instrumental in inducing to come.” But Bowen’s initial impression of Lincoln softened after Lincoln admitted that the long journey had worn him out, and said, “if you have no objection I will lie down on your lounge here and you can tell me about the arrangements for Monday night.”
At the Astor House, Lincoln met Mayson Brayman, a fellow lawyer who had lived in Springfield for some years before returning to his native New York. “Well, B. how have you fared since you left Illinois?” Lincoln asked. “I have made one hundred thousand dollars and lost all,” Brayman ruefully replied; “how is it with you, Mr. Lincoln?”
“Oh, very well,” Lincoln said. “I have the cottage at Springfield and about $8,000 in money. If they make me Vice-President with Seward, as some say they will, I hope
I shall be able to increase it to $20,000, and that is as much as a man ought to want.” Lincoln’s sights, however, were not trained on the vice presidency, and politics, not riches, were his object.
That February afternoon, Lincoln paid a visit to the studio of the photographer Mathew Brady on Broadway. When Brady was posing him, he urged Lincoln to hike up his shirt collar. Lincoln quipped that Brady wanted “to shorten [his] neck.” The resulting three-quarter-length portrait shows the fifty-one-year-old Lincoln standing before a pillar, the fingers of his left hand spread over a book. Prominent cheekbones cast marked shadows across his clean-shaven face. The delicate long bow of his upper lip contrasts with the full lower lip, and the deep-set gaze is steady and melancholy. This photograph, circulated widely in engravings and lithographs in the Northeast, was the first arresting image many would see of Abraham Lincoln.
Nearly fifteen hundred people came to hear “this western man” speak in the great hall at Cooper Union. He had bought a new black suit for the occasion, but it was badly wrinkled from the trip. An observer noticed that “one of the legs of his trousers was up about two inches above his shoe; his hair was disheveled and stuck out like rooster’s feathers; his coat was altogether too large for him in the back, his arms much longer than his sleeves.” Yet once he began to speak, people were captivated by his earnest and powerful delivery.
Lincoln had labored to craft his address for many weeks, extensively researching the attitudes of the founding fathers toward slavery. He took as the text for his discourse a speech in which Senator Douglas had said of slavery: “Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.” Fully endorsing this statement, Lincoln examined the beliefs and actions of the founders, concluding that they had marked slavery “as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity.”
In the preceding months, tensions between North and South had continued to escalate, with each section joining in a “hue and cry” against the other. The troubling scenario that Lincoln had observed nearly two decades earlier, during the battle over temperance, had come to pass. Denunciation was being met by denunciation, “crimination with crimination, and anathema with anathema.” To have expected either side to respond differently once the rhetoric had heated up, Lincoln warned during that earlier battle, “was to expect a reversal of human nature, which is God’s decree, and never can be reversed.”
At Cooper Union, as he had done in his celebrated Peoria speech six years earlier, Lincoln attempted to cut through the rancor of the embattled factions by speaking directly to the Southern people. While his faith in Southern responsiveness had seriously dimmed by this time, he hoped the fear and animosity of slaveholders might be assuaged if they understood that the Republicans desired only a return to the “old policy of the fathers,” so “the peace of the old times” could once more be established. Denying charges of sectionalism, he said Republicans were the true conservatives, adhering “to the old and tried, against the new and untried.”
Turning to his fellow Republicans, he entreated, “let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can.” Though the approach was moderate, Lincoln spoke with such passion and certainty about the unifying principle of the Republican Party—never to allow slavery “to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States”—that even the most radical Republicans in the audience were captivated. When he came to the dramatic ending pledge—“LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT”—the audience erupted in thunderous applause.
After Lincoln spoke, several of the event organizers took the platform. Chase supporter James Briggs predicted that “one of three gentlemen will be our standard bearer”—William Henry Seward, Salmon Chase, or “the gallant son of Kentucky, who was reared in Illinois, and whom you have heard tonight.” Lincoln’s still-unannounced candidacy had taken an enormous step forward.
“When I came out of the hall,” one member of the audience said, “my face glowing with an excitement and my frame all aquiver, a friend, with his eyes aglow, asked me what I thought of Abe Lincoln, the rail-splitter. I said, ‘He’s the greatest man since St. Paul.’”
Once the speech was reported in the papers, Lincoln was in demand across New England. He answered as many requests as possible, undertaking an exhausting tour of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, repeating and modifying the arguments of his Cooper Union address. He was forced to decline invitations from outside New England but hoped “to visit New-Jersey & Pa. before the fall elections.”
Writing to Mary from Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where their son Robert was completing a preparatory year before entering Harvard College, Lincoln admitted that the Cooper Union speech, “being within my calculation before I started, went off passably well and gave me no trouble whatever. The difficulty was to make nine others, before reading audiences who had already seen all my ideas in print.”
In Hartford, Connecticut, on March 5, Lincoln first met Gideon Welles, an editorial writer for the Hartford Evening Press who would become his secretary of the navy. Arriving by train in the afternoon, Lincoln had several hours to spare before his speech that evening. He walked up Asylum Street to the bookstore of Brown & Gross, where he encountered the fifty-eight-year-old Welles, a peculiar-looking man with a curly wig perched on his outsize head, and a flowing white beard. Welles had attended Norwich University and studied the law but then devoted himself to writing, leaving the legal profession at twenty-four to take charge of the Democratic Hartford Times. A strong supporter of Andrew Jackson, Welles had represented his town of Glastonbury in the state legislature for eight years. He remained a loyal Democrat until the mid-fifties, when he became troubled by his affiliation to “the party of the Southern slaveocracy.” Like many antislavery Democrats, he joined the Republican Party, though he still held fast to the frugal fiscal policies of the Democrats.
With the convention only two months away, Welles had settled on Chase, whom he had met four years earlier while visiting Cincinnati. While Welles held less radical views on slavery, he was comforted by Chase’s similar sentiments regarding government spending and states’ rights. Seward, by contrast, frightened Welles. For years, the former Whig and the former Democrat had been at loggerheads over government spending; Welles was convinced that Seward belonged “to the New York school of very expensive rulers.” Moreover, Welles was appalled by Seward’s talk of a “higher law” than the Constitution and his predictions of an “irrepressible conflict.” He was ready to support any candidate but Seward, despite the fact that Seward was the most popular among the Republicans.
That afternoon, Lincoln and Welles spent several hours conversing on a bench in the front of the store. Welles had read accounts of Lincoln’s debates with Douglas and had noted the extravagant reviews of his Cooper Union speech. There is no record of their conversation that day, but the prairie lawyer left a strong imprint on Welles, who watched that evening as he delivered a two-hour speech before an overflowing crowd at City Hall.
Though he retained much of his Cooper Union speech, Lincoln developed a new metaphor in Hartford to perfectly illustrate his distinction between accepting slavery where it already existed while doing everything possible to curtail its spread. Testing his image in Hartford, he would refine it further in subsequent speeches. “If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road,” Lincoln began, “any man would say I might seize the nearest stick and kill it; but if I found that snake in bed with my children, that would be another question. I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them…. But if there was a bed newly made up, to which th
e children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide!…The new Territories are the newly made bed to which our children are to go, and it lies with the nation to say whether they shall have snakes mixed up with them or not.”
The snake metaphor acknowledged the constitutional protection of slavery where it legally existed, while harnessing the protective instincts of parents to safeguard future generations from the venomous expansion of slavery. This homely vision of the territories as beds for American children exemplified what James Russell Lowell described as Lincoln’s ability to speak “as if the people were listening to their own thinking out loud.” When Seward reached for a metaphor to dramatize the same danger, he warned that if slavery were allowed into Kansas, his countrymen would have “introduced the Trojan horse” into the new territory. Even if most of his classically trained fellow senators immediately grasped his intent, the Trojan horse image carried neither the instant accessibility of Lincoln’s snake-in-the-bed story nor its memorable originality.
The morning after his City Hall speech, Lincoln met with Welles again in the office of the Hartford Evening Press. When they parted after an hour of discussion, Welles was favorably impressed. “This orator and lawyer has been caricatured. He is not Apollo, but he is not Caliban,” he wrote in the next edition of his paper. “He is [in] every way large, brain included, but his countenance shows intellect, generosity, great good nature, and keen discrimination…. He is an effective speaker, because he is earnest, strong, honest, simple in style, and clear as crystal in his logic.”