The general election was set, with four exceptionally well-qualified presidential candidates confronting the electorate. On its face, the multicandidate election was not unusual. Five times in recent years there had been third-party candidates. But there was something decidedly different this time around. The election was not among four candidates seeking the national vote, but two separate elections, breaking down sectionally. Four men were running for president in 1860, but only two of them really counted—Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. Neither John C. Breckinridge nor John Bell could hope to carry any states in the North. By the same token, neither Lincoln nor Douglas could expect to carry any of the southern states—Lincoln, in fact, was not even on the ballot there. The contest would be decided in the northern states, between Lincoln and Douglas, and opening odds favored Lincoln.
Douglas, swept away by the first flush of enthusiasm after his nomination, predicted optimistically that he would carry Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, and Texas, and hoped “to get enough more in the free States to be elected by the people.” That was highly unlikely, given the Republicans’ strength across the swath of northern states from New England to Minnesota, to say nothing of his ongoing anathematization in the South. Still, Douglas was nothing if not a fighter, and he immediately took to the campaign trail, setting out for New York City in late June to meet with prospective financial backers. En route, he stopped over in Philadelphia, where he declined (for once) to make a speech, saying only, “If my political opinions are not known to the people of the United States, it is not worthwhile for me to explain them now.”1
Accompanied by Adele, Douglas set up camp in New York at the luxurious Fifth Avenue Hotel. The couple was escorted up Broadway by a boisterous claque of supporters, but once again the candidate declined to make a campaign speech. “It is the first time in my life,” he said, “that I have been placed in a position where I had to look on and see a fight without taking a hand in it.” That would not last long. “Mr. Douglas has no faith in standing still,” observed the New York Times. After his New York stopover, he intended to head to the flinty shores of New England, his ancestral home, to see his brother-in-law, James Madison Cutts, Jr., graduate from Harvard and to visit his aged mother in upstate New York. The visit was announced long in advance, and when Douglas failed to appear in Clifton Springs for several weeks, the opposition press had a field day with his continuing absence. “A Boy Lost!” screamed one Republican handbill. “Left Washington, D.C., some time in July, to go home to his mother. He has not yet reached his mother, who is very anxious about him. He has been seen in Philadelphia, New York City, Hartford, Conn., at a clambake in Rhode Island. He has been heard from in Boston, Portland, Augusta, and Bangor, Me. He is about five feet nothing in height and about the same in diameter the other way. He has a red face, short legs, and a large belly. Answers to the name Little Giant, talks a great deal, very loud, always about himself. He has an idea that he is a candidate for President. Had on, when he left, drab pants, a white vest, and blue coat with brass buttons; the tail is very near the ground.” Plaintive messages signed “S.D.’s Mother” were published daily in Republican newspapers, appealing for information about her “wandering son.”2
In fact, Douglas had been caught up in a delusive, if not self-deluding, burst of enthusiasm for his candidacy in the Northeast. At Harvard, he appeared on the same stage with Constitutional Unionist vice presidential candidate Edward Everett and Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, who was still recovering from his savage beating on the floor of the Senate four years earlier. Neither Douglas nor Sumner alluded to the incident, although Douglas did cross swords with Boston editor Benjamin F. Hallett, author of the ambiguous Cincinnati platform of 1856. The Democrats, said Hallett, would soon unite behind a single candidate. “Never!” shouted Douglas, noting that he could never work with anyone who had “voted against me at Charleston on principle,” and “if you voted against me out of personal hatred, I know very well how to act toward you.” In keeping with his renewed bellicosity, Douglas toured the Revolutionary War battlefields at Lexington and Bunker Hill, where he compared his fight for popular sovereignty to the patriots’ struggle against the British. This was too much for one Massachusetts journalist, who complained that Douglas “has staked so much on the Squatter Sovereignty doctrine that he seems to be falling into a monomania about it, and drags it about the country with him with as much assiduity as if it were a change of linen or a toothbrush.”3
For nearly two months, Douglas toured New York and New England, describing an erratic loop that followed no discernible pattern. To get to western New York, joked one New Hampshire newspaper, Douglas “naturally came to New Haven, Guilford and Hartford on his way, and at the latter place he was ‘betrayed’ into a speech. Still bent on his maternal pilgrimage, he goes toward Boston. At Worcester, some Judas ‘betrayed’ him into a speech. At Boston, ‘betrayed’ again.” Even the folks back home took note of his wanderings. The Weekly Illinois Journal printed “A Plaintive Poem” that wondered: “Why did I down to Hartford go?/’Twas not my squatter self to show;/I went to hunt, I told you so,/My mother.” Still seeking, however transparently, to make his trip appear nonpolitical, Douglas would feign surprise when the crowd at a railroad station summoned him to speak. At Concord, New Hampshire, he consented to speak “a little, just for exercise.” He may have spoken more truly than he meant. Lost in the initial outpouring of support was the fact that the Republicans had carried the entire region, including New York, with the much-weaker, woefully inexperienced John C. Frémont in 1856. Since then, the abolitionist movement there had gotten even stronger, and Abraham Lincoln had made a well-received swing through New England the previous winter following his landmark appearance at the Cooper Union. Douglas could scarcely hope to carry any of the New England states, and he wasted valuable time and energy preaching, in essence, to the choir.4
At length, Douglas pulled into Clifton Springs, near Canandaigua, for a brief visit with his mother, who complained in true maternal fashion that “he never writes when we may expect him.” Mrs. Granger expressed the odd opinion that her son’s presidential campaign would have a good effect on his health by keeping him from making so many speeches. There was not much chance of that. Douglas preceded his visit to his mother with a well-publicized pilgrimage to his father’s gravesite in Brandon, Vermont, where virtually the entire town turned out to meet his train. A twenty-one-gun salute heralded his arrival, followed by a prematurely optimistic rendition of “Hail to the Chief.” Stopping at the modest two-story house where he was born, Douglas affirmed: “I am proud of being a native of Vermont. Here I first learned to love liberty.” Someone in the crowd—probably a Republican—challenged him on his earlier statement that Vermont “was a great state to be born in—provided you left it early in life.” Douglas replied smoothly that he had meant that it was impossible to rise above all the “great men with great minds” who lived there, and so he had been forced to make his way west to seek his fortune.5
The Douglas express rumbled through Burlington, Montpelier, Concord, Manchester, Nashua, and Providence before rolling to a stop at the upscale resort of Newport, Rhode Island, where the candidate spent the next twelve days relaxing, swimming in the ocean, and attending formal dinners where he and Adele invariably were the guests of honor. It was a good time to rest. “It is not a seemly or a welcome sight to see any man whom a large portion of his countrymen have thought fit for the Presidency, traversing the country and soliciting his own election,” sniffed the New York Times. The Jonesboro, Illinois, Gazette was more dismissive. “Douglas is going about peddling his opinions as a tin man peddles his wares,” it reported. “The only excuse for him is that since he is a small man, he has a right to be engaged in small business, and small business it is for a candidate for the Presidency to be strolling around the country begging for votes like a town constable.” The North Iowan went even further, comparing Douglas to a performing monkey and recommending, “He should be attended by some Italian, with his hand organ to grind out an accompaniment.”6
Douglas cared little what the opposition newspapers were saying about him, but he was greatly troubled by the dire financial report he received at Newport from his campaign treasurer, August Belmont. The New York City financier, American representative to the fabulous Rothschild fortune, was having no luck raising funds for the Little Giant. He had started the bidding, so to speak, by throwing in $1,000 of his own money, but other New Yorkers were loath to contribute funds to what had the unmistakable look of a losing campaign, particularly since many of them had long-standing ties to southern business interests. “If we could only demonstrate to all those lukewarm & selfish moneybags that we have a strong probability to carry the State of New York,” said Belmont, “we might get from them the necessary sinews of war.” As it was, he could not even manage to get a quorum for a called meeting of the Democratic National Executive Committee in early August. Only two members bothered to show up. Belmont appealed to each congressional district to contribute $100 to Douglas’s campaign—scarcely a heavy tithe—but by mid-September “not a single cent” had been raised.7
Another unpropitious omen for the campaign was the loss of the Chicago Times, Douglas’s longtime mouthpiece in Illinois, which was purchased by Cyrus McCormick. There was talk of the Times throwing its support to Breckinridge. The only prominent northern newspaper supporting Douglas was James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, and that was a decidedly mixed blessing, given Bennett’s parlous reputation, both personally and professionally. Even then, Bennett was halfhearted in his backing. Fellow editor Joseph Medill, a Lincoln loyalist, found Bennett willing to bargain. “He is too rich to want money,” Medill informed Lincoln. “Social position we suspect is what he wants. He wants to be in a position to be invited with his wife and son to dinner or tea at the White House occasionally. I think we can afford to agree to that much.” Lincoln, as always, was noncommittal.8
Lincoln, naturally, was much on Douglas’s mind. His old debating opponent, said Douglas, “is a very clever fellow—a kind-hearted, good-natured, amiable man. I have not the heart to say anything against Abe Lincoln; I have fought him so long that I have a respect for him.” It was obvious, he told one audience, that “you will have to go to Illinois for your next President.” While in Boston, he said much the same thing to Massachusetts Republican Anson Burlingame. “Won’t it be a splendid sight, Burlingame?” he gushed. “Douglas and Old Abe, all at Washington together—for the next President is to come from Illinois.” Burlingame understood him to mean it to be the latter, in which case Douglas had already read the writing on the wall. So, too, had his southern running mate. In a letter to Alexander Stephens in July, Herschel Johnson warned: “I have not much hope for the future. The sky is dark. The fires of sectionalism in the South are waxing hot and Black Republicanism in the North already exhibits the insolence of conscious strength. The South is in peril—the Union is in peril—all is in peril that is dear to freemen.” Johnson expected Lincoln to be elected, hoping only that the Democratic Party could be reconstructed “at a future day.” It was not much on which to hang a campaign.9
Lincoln, keeping himself safely under wraps in Springfield, made one early misstep in the campaign. He would like to go into Kentucky to discuss the issues, he told a correspondent, presumably tongue-in-cheek, but “would not the people lynch me?” Somehow the letter got out, making Lincoln look both foolish and timid. Much embarrassed by the ensuing brouhaha, the candidate publicly retracted the statement and took pains to ensure that he would not make the same mistake again. Careful, if not necessarily content, to remain in the background, he dutifully entertained a steady stream of friendly reporters who trooped through his parlor in search of homey details for their readers. “Honest Old Abe,” recounted the Chicago Press and Tribune, was “always clean…never fashionable…careless but not slovenly. In his personal habits, Mr. Lincoln is as simple as a child. His food is plain and nutritious. He never drinks intoxicating liquors of any sort. He is not addicted to tobacco.”10
Lincoln, in their recounting, was as rustic and pure as Natty Bumppo. Not only could he discuss “the great democratic principle of our Government,” enthused one Missouri journalist, “but at the same time tell how to navigate a vessel, maul a rail, or even to dress a deer-skin.” (Why such frontier-like topics would have arisen in Lincoln’s genteel sitting room, the visitor did not say.) Meanwhile, Mary Lincoln graciously welcomed as many as 100 visitors a day into their home. She was a new sort of candidate’s wife, more than willing to share her political opinions—she even bet a neighbor a new pair of shoes that her husband would be elected president—but smart enough to do so with a smile. “Whatever of awkwardness may be ascribed to her husband,” reported a New York Evening Post journalist, “there is none of it in her. She converses with freedom and grace, and is thoroughly au fait in all the little amenities of society.” Gushed another reporter: “I shall be proud as an American citizen when the day brings Mary Lincoln to grace the White House.”11
Lincoln’s biggest problem was boredom. Herndon found his law partner “bored—bored badly. I would not have his place.” Confined to the city limits of Springfield, Lincoln spent most of his time at the capitol, where he and Nicolay labored to answer the mountain of letters that tumbled against the door like a gentle but insistent landslide. Most were either letters of congratulation or requests for autographs. Lincoln answered the latter with a standard, if brief, reply: “You request an autograph, and here it is. Yours truly A. Lincoln.” The candidate gave his assistant a detailed checklist of instructions for handling the mail: “Ascertain what he wants. On what subject he would converse, and the particulars if he will give them. Is an interview indispensable? And if so, how soon must it be had? Tell him my motto is ‘Fairness to all’ but commit me to nothing.” To avoid the prying eyes of Democratic postmasters, Lincoln employed a “flying squadron” of friends to hand-deliver especially sensitive letters. Photographers and painters also descended on Springfield, including one painter with the unfortunate name of John Brown, who was given the task of painting a miniature of the candidate that would be “good-looking whether the original would justify it or not.”12
Besides the normal curiosity raised by a relatively obscure presidential nominee, there was another reason that the public wanted to see what Lincoln looked like. Southern Democrats were spreading rumors that the “sooty” Republican candidate was a mulatto, a “horrible-looking wretch…a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper, and the night man,” who was planning to unleash the horrors of racial amalgamation on white womanhood. “I shudder to contemplate it,” one Alabama politician warned. “What social monstrosities, what desolated fields, what civil broils, what robberies, rapes, and murders of the poorer whites by the emancipated blacks would then disfigure the whole fair face of this prosperous, smiling, and happy Southern land.” In New York City, Democrats paraded behind a banner showing Lincoln piloting a steamship upon which an insolent-looking black man embraced a white woman. “Free love and free niggers will certainly elect Old Abe if he pilots us safe,” read the caption.13
Fortunately for Lincoln, given such an ugly climate, he did not have to hit the campaign trail. The well-financed Republican National Committee arranged for a bevy of spokesmen, including several of Lincoln’s former presidential rivals, to carry the message for him. William Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Simon Cameron, and Edward Bates all campaigned in their states for Lincoln, along with the usual complement of local gadflies and mountebanks. The Republicans also organized Wide Awake Clubs for eager young men to march, holler, and sing the praises of Lincoln and his running mate, former Maine governor Hannibal Hamlin. The clubs’ name arose from an incident in which an alert young Republican punched an attacking Democrat, proving forcefully that he was “wide awake” to any danger. (A competing Democratic organization in Brooklyn dubbed itself, with typical Flatbush cheek, the Chloroformers, vowing “to put the Wide Awakes to sleep.”) Within a few months’ time, membership in the Wide Awakes numbered more than 400,000, with chapters in every northern state. “Ain’t I glad I joined the Republicans,” the men sang over and over, trooping along in their faintly military black oilcloth capes behind banners that hailed “Honest Old Abe, Our Western Star.” One such parade in Springfield took several hours to wind past the candidate’s house. “A Political Earthquake! The Prairies on Fire for Lincoln!” streamed the Illinois State Journal.14
Lincoln, for his part, found such displays more tiresome than gratifying. Such “parades and shows and monster meetings,” he groused, were just part of the “dry and irksome labor” of getting the people to the polls. At the only campaign rally he attended, in Springfield, a huge crowd surrounded his carriage and nearly smothered him in all the excitement before a quick-thinking friend pulled Lincoln out of the carriage and slipped him onto the back of a horse to escape.15
Leaving nothing to chance, Lincoln met with Seward’s former campaign manager, Thurlow Weed, to make peace and plot strategy. Despite Weed’s well-earned reputation as a political fixer, Lincoln found in him “no signs whatever of the intriguer.” Reiterating his instructions to Davis on the eve of the convention—instructions that Davis had obeyed mainly in the breach—Lincoln assured the New Yorker that he had made no deals with anyone, and that the Empire State could expect “fair dealings” from a Lincoln administration. Weed went away happy. The candidate also consented to be interviewed for various campaign biographies, although, as he told would-be chronicler John Locke Scripps, his early years were yawningly unexciting. “Why, Scripps, it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life,” Lincoln said. “It can be condensed into a single sentence you will find in Gray’s Elegy: ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’”16
That did not stop Scripps, or a young journalist from Ohio, William Dean Howells, whose own campaign biography was his first national publication in what would become one of the great careers in American literature. In due time, Howells’s book would get him out of the Civil War, when a grateful Lincoln appointed the twenty-three-year-old diplomatic neophyte the American consul in Venice. Scripps, in particular, was rather creative with the facts, describing the notably unreligious Lincoln as “a regular attendant upon religious worship, and…a pew-holder and liberal supporter of the Presbyterian church in Springfield.” Despite the questionable accuracy of its claims, the thirty-two-page pamphlet sold over a million copies before Election Day.17
Predictably, the Democrats dragged up old charges, including Lincoln’s near-duel with James Shields and earlier accusations that he was a practicing pagan. Once again, Lincoln was tarred with the dirty brush of Know-Nothingism. “Our adversaries think they can gain a point, if they could force me to openly deny this charge,” he cautioned one Jewish supporter. “For this reason, it must not publicly appear that I am paying any attention to the charge.” At one point, even Mary entered the fray, writing to a concerned Ohio minister, “Mr. Lincoln has never been a Mason or belonged to any secret order.” More serious—and true—were the charges that Lincoln had opposed the Mexican War. Democratic speakers railed against Lincoln’s “traitorous” stance and recalled his infamous demand on the floor of the House for President Polk to tell the nation on what spot the first drop of American blood had been spilled. Opponents chanted: “Mr. Speaker! Where’s the spot?/Is it in Spain or is it not?/Mr. Speaker! Spot! Spot! Spot!” There was not much the Republicans could do to combat the charge, but when one Democrat scoffed that Lincoln would be “a nullity” in his own administration, Horace Greeley fired back dryly: “A man who by his own genius and force of character has raised himself from being a penniless and uneducated float boatman on the Wabash River to the position Mr. Lincoln now occupies is not likely to be a nullity anywhere.”18
While Douglas restlessly roamed the countryside and Lincoln stayed more or less serenely in the background, the other two candidates for president attempted to combine approaches. Breckinridge, in the hands of administration handlers, issued a formal letter of acceptance that was noticeably more moderate than the stance taken by his ultra supporters in Baltimore. There was no need for a special slave code, Breckinridge said, and Congress did not have the constitutional power to legislate over personal or property rights. “The Constitution and the equality of the states,” he concluded. “These are the symbols of everlasting union. Let these be the rallying cries of the people.” It was not exactly a stirring call to arms, and it simultaneously threw a wet blanket over his most ardent supporters, while failing to reassure those on the other side. “Mr. Breckinridge claims that he isn’t a disunionist,” fumed the San Antonio Alamo Express. “An animal not willing to pass for a pig shouldn’t stay in the sty.”19
After three weeks of organizing his campaign in Washington, Breckinridge headed home to Kentucky. He made a few impromptu speeches en route, confining his remarks to his acceptance letter, much to the dissatisfaction of the ultras. “If he has a fault as a statesman,” Mississippi senator Albert Gallatin Brown observed, “it is in being too cautious. Prudence is a virtue, but too much is a fault.” The widow of his longtime political opponent, Linn Boyd, scathingly pronounced Breckinridge “all ruffles and no shirt.” Moving into the Phoenix Hotel in Lexington, the vice president maintained an uneasy silence that reflected the untenable position in which he found himself. “To those who take advantage of the position of a silent man, to heap upon him execrations, I say, pour on, I can endure,” he said manfully. Unfortunately, Americans expected their presidential candidates to say something, occasionally, about the issues. After his personal choice for clerk of the Kentucky Court of Appeals was defeated in a landslide by a candidate supported by the combined forces of Douglas and Bell, Breckinridge was prevailed upon to make a public appearance. Henry Clay’s son, James, helpfully offered the use of his grounds at Ashland for a giant campaign picnic. Thousands of Kentuckians turned out for the event—or nonevent, as it transpired. Breckinridge managed to speak for three hours, the longest speech of his life, without saying anything more riveting than “The truth will prevail.” The general tenor of the speech, said one Virginia ultra, was “union-lauding.” He did not mean it as a compliment.20
The fourth candidate in the field, Constitutional Unionist John Bell, was sixty-three years old and looked even older. The balding, grim-visaged Bell had entered public life as a Jacksonian Democrat, but broke ranks with his fellow Tennessean over the national bank and joined the Whigs. Bell served in the House of Representatives from 1827 to 1841, including a stint as Speaker. He was secretary of war in the Harrison and Tyler administrations and served two terms in the Senate before retiring in 1859. Bell owned slaves at his estate near Nashville, but opposed extending the practice into the territories, voting against both the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Lecompton Constitution. Like Douglas, he became persona non grata at the White House, while winning few converts among the abolitionists. Horace Greeley “venture[d] to say that Bell’s record is the most tangled and embarrassing to the party which shall run him for president of any man’s in America.” Despite Bell’s long service in Congress, his running mate, Massachusetts-born Edward Everett, was actually the better known of the two, having won a national reputation as an orator of fulsome and ornate gifts. Three years later, the former Harvard president would find himself on the same speaker’s platform as Abraham Lincoln, at a little southern Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg.21
The Constitutional Union ticket did not excite anyone. It was, said the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican, “worthy to be printed on gilt-edged satin paper, laid away in a box of musk, and kept there. It is the party of no idea and no purpose.” The cardboard-strength platform, calling merely for support of the Constitution and the enforcement of existing laws, had “no North, no South, no East, no West, no Anything,” sniffed a New York newspaper. One Boston observer watched Bell-Everett supporters marching behind a horse-drawn wagon carrying an enormous bell. “It was too bad to laugh at,” he said. “A more orderly and respectful funeral procession I have never seen, though the mourners were few.” A generation after “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too,” old-line Whigs had forgotten how to hurrah a candidate.22
The indefatigable Douglas would do his own hurrahing. Following his notorious swing through New England, he headed south. His ostensible motive was to settle his former mother-in-law’s estate in North Carolina, but he had also been invited to speak at the Democratic state convention in Raleigh. Given the demonstrable weakness of the Breckinridge and Bell candidacies, Douglas sensed an opportunity in the Upper South. Stopping first at Norfolk, Virginia, he told a large crowd gathered at the courthouse: “I did not come here to purchase your votes. I came here to compare notes, and to see if there is not some common principle, some line of policy around which all Union-loving men, North and South, may rally to preserve the glorious Union against northern and southern agitators. I desire no man to vote for me unless he hopes and desires to see the Union maintained.” If anyone attempted to break up the Union, Douglas said, the new president should treat the revolters as Andrew Jackson had treated South Carolina’s nullifiers in 1832. “There is no evil, and can be none, for which disunion is a legitimate remedy,” he warned. “You cannot sever this Union unless you cut the heartstrings that bind father to son, daughter to mother and brother to sister in all our new states and territories.”23
From Norfolk, Douglas headed deeper into the South, which more than ever was enemy territory. Arriving in North Carolina to oversee the division of his former mother-in-law’s property—she had left instructions to sell her slaves and give the proceeds to Douglas’s sons—the candidate told a crowd in Raleigh that he loved his children and did not want them to live in a divided country. “The only mistake we Democrats made was in tolerating disunionist sentiments in our bosoms so long,” he said, warning darkly that there was “a mature plan throughout the southern states to break up the Union” following the election. As Douglas explained privately to Massachusetts congressman Charles Francis Adams, a plot was in the works by southerners to overthrow Buchanan and replace him with Breckinridge. A new cotton kingdom would then be created among the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico, along with Cuba, Mexico, and certain Central American countries. The fact that Adams saw Douglas drinking heavily during the campaign might explain, in part, some of the senator’s more lurid imaginings.24
Douglas’s threats did not sit well with touchy southerners. As the torrid summer wore on—it was the hottest and driest in a generation—tempers rose accordingly. Jefferson Davis, who scoffed at Douglas as “an itinerant advocate of his own claims,” reportedly told his fellow Mississippians to prepare a twin gallows for Douglas and Lincoln, taking into account the difference in their heights. In Montgomery, Alabama, the Weekly Advertiser said with glinting menace: “Douglas did well to turn his course northward—there are some portions of the South where the utterance of such sentiments might have led to the hoisting of that coat tail of his that hangs so near the ground to the limb of a tree, preceded by a short neck with grapevine attachment.” That such warnings were not completely hollow was demonstrated in New Orleans, where future writer George Washington Cable, then a teenager, saw a crowd chase a man down Royal Street, crying, “Hang him! Hang him!” After the man was rescued, it transpired that he was a vendor of campaign buttons who somehow had failed to notice a Lincoln-Hamlin medal among his wares. Rumors sped through southern towns of slave uprisings, John Brown–type revolts, rapes, arsons, murders—even well poisonings. It was all enough, said South Carolina congressman Lawrence Keitt, “to risk disunion on.”25
Except for Douglas, who had years of painful experience on which to base his views, few northerners took such talk seriously. The South, said the New York Herald, was at “the old game of scaring and bullying the North into submission to southern demands and southern tyranny.” Massachusetts poet James Russell Lowell (who in a few years would lose a beloved nephew in the Civil War) called it the “old Mumbo-Jumbo.” And William Seward, having for years fulminated about an “irrepressible conflict,” now seemed to dare southerners to act. “They cry out that they will tear the Union to pieces,” he sneered at one campaign stop for Lincoln. “Who’s afraid? Nobody’s afraid.”26
Lincoln, safe in his protective cocoon in Springfield, affected a placid nonchalance. “The people of the South have too much good sense, and good temper, to attempt the ruin of the government,” he told one supporter. Ohio journalist Donn Piatt, a close observer of his southern neighbors across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, tried unsuccessfully to warn the candidate. “He considered the movement South as a sort of political game of bluff, gotten up by politicians, and meant to solely frighten the North,” wrote Piatt. “He believed that when the leaders saw their efforts in that direction unavailing, the tumult would subside. ‘They won’t give up the offices,’ I remember he said, and added, ‘Were it believed that vacant places could be had at the North Pole, the road there would be lined with dead Virginians.’”27
Douglas knew better, and his speeches took on a more desperate aspect as the long summer gave way to fall. He followed his southern tour with a swing through the crucial states of the Lower North—Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania—where the election likely would be decided. With a total of 303 electoral votes at stake, the winning candidate would have to receive a majority of 152 votes. Lincoln and the Republicans could safely count on 114 electoral votes from the eleven free states that Frémont had carried in 1856. They could also add Minnesota, which had entered the Union since the last election. If they won Pennsylvania, with its 27 votes, they would only need to add one more state from among Illinois, Indiana, and New Jersey.28
It was eminently doable, particularly since Buchanan, with his typical combination of malice and ineptitude, had presented the Republicans with another ready-made issue when he vetoed the Homestead bill, which would have given 160 acres of public land to anyone living on the land for five years. Southerners opposed the act, fearing that it would populate the territories with hardworking, antislavery white farmers. “Better for us that these territories should remain a waste, a howling wilderness, trod only by red hunters than to be so settled,” said one Mississippi lawmaker. Despite Douglas’s long-standing support for such legislation, the issue became a powerful tool for Republican opinion makers during the campaign. “Does anybody suppose that Abraham Lincoln would ever veto such a bill?” Horace Greeley wondered.29
Douglas did what he could, speaking to large crowds in Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo before dropping down to campaign in Ohio and Indiana. In mid-September, he summoned his running mate, Herschel Johnson, to New York City for a quick strategy session. Republican candidates had already carried state elections in Maine and Vermont—Douglas’s home state—by landslide margins, but the Little Giant surprised Johnson by still appearing upbeat about their chances. Johnson hastened to disagree. “I told him, he underestimated the power of Mr. Buchanan’s army of office holders, in the northern states,” recalled Johnson, “that although they could not carry a single one for Breckinridge, they would bring him enough votes to give them all to Lincoln, that he would not carry a single southern state & that I regarded Lincoln’s election as certain.” “If you be correct in your views,” said a shaken Douglas, “then God help our poor country.”30
For once in his political life, Lincoln felt no need to campaign. Trusty stand-ins, including Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson, the old-time “Natick Cobbler,” Tom Corwin, “the Wagon Boy,” and Thomas Ewing, who grandly billed himself “the last of the Whigs,” made Lincoln’s case for him. While industrious townspeople turned the streets of Springfield into what one observer called “a Hindoo Bazaar,” selling wooden souvenirs supposedly made from rails split by Lincoln like medieval pardoners hawking pieces of the True Cross, the candidate kept determinedly to his game plan. He would say or do nothing that might give offense to his enemies or frighten his friends. Sometimes it was hard to keep silent. After one worried supporter wrote to him about mounting southern belligerence, an exasperated Lincoln fired back: “What is it I could say which would quiet alarm? Is it that no interference by the government, with the slaves and slavery within the states, is intended? I have said this so often already, that a repetition of it is but mockery, bearing an appearance of weakness, and cowardice, which perhaps should be avoided. Why do not uneasy men read what I have already said and what our platform says?”31
As a way, perhaps, of escaping such letters, Lincoln gave serious thought to appearing at a Massachusetts horse show, a trip that would allow him to look in on Robert at Harvard. With some difficulty, he was dissuaded. Lincoln was glad of the diversion when William Seward’s campaign train pulled into Springfield for a brief stopover en route to Chicago. Again, he was tempted to join the fun, but settled instead for an impromptu strategy session with Seward in which he urged him to stop Long John Wentworth from promising publicly that the Republicans, if successful, would end slavery altogether. It was the first face-to-face meeting of Lincoln and Seward in a dozen years. Lincoln reminded Seward of his words then. “Twelve years ago you told me that this cause would be successful,” he said, “and ever since I have believed that it would be.” Gratified by the attention, Seward returned to the campaign trail to vigorously make the case for Lincoln. In Toledo, Ohio, he shared an awkward moment with Stephen Douglas, after Seward’s train arrived at the station while a Democratic rally was taking place. Douglas, carrying a whiskey bottle and “plainly drunk,” in the view of Seward aide Charles Francis Adams, Jr., burst into the New Yorker’s sleeping car, woke him up, and invited him to join the rally. Seward, startled, hastily declined.32
To sympathetic observers, Douglas had taken on the look of “a way-worn backwoods traveler,” and his constant campaigning again aggravated his chronically enflamed throat. His booming baritone reduced to a “spasmodic bark,” he frequently interrupted his speeches to squeeze lemon juice down his aching throat. In Cincinnati, he was so hoarse that he could not speak a word to the thousands who had gathered to hear him. Not even the presidency was worth such trouble, one follower observed. Watching from afar, Alexander Stephens lamented the cost to Douglas, both personally and politically. “I am pained and grieved at the folly which thus demanded the sacrifice of such a noble and gallant spirit as I believe Douglas to be,” he wrote. Still, Douglas carried on. In Chicago, on October 5, he spoke to a massive crowd at the lakefront. Seward had preceded him into the city, and Douglas took the occasion to lambaste both him and Lincoln, warning that loose talk about irrepressible conflicts and houses divided “means revolution—undisguised revolution.” “I am no alarmist,” Douglas said, “but I believe that this country is in more danger now than at any other moment since I have known anything of public life.” The only way to save the Union was to ensure that “northern abolitionism and southern disunion are buried in a common grave.” That same day, South Carolina governor William H. Gist sent a round-robin letter to his fellow southern governors, advising them that his state was prepared to secede if Lincoln were elected.33
The October elections in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana made that event appear likely. In Pennsylvania, home of the sitting president, a nasty intraparty feud between Republican senator Simon Cameron and gubernatorial candidate Andrew Curtin gave momentary hope to the Democrats. But when the Buchanan forces rallied behind Breckinridge, Douglas supporter John W. Forney fired back: “No true friend of Douglas, in Pennsylvania or elsewhere, can touch an electoral ticket which contains upon it the single name of a Breckinridge Disunionist.” “The Douglas and Breckinridge men,” said Republican activist Carl Schurz happily, “would give [Pennsylvania] to us to spite each other.” That was precisely what happened, with Curtin defeating Democratic nominee Henry D. Foster by 30,000 votes.34
The results were just as dire for the Democrats in Ohio and Indiana. The Buckeye State, under the leadership of Governor Salmon P. Chase, elected thirteen Republican congressmen, to eight for the opposition party, and added a state supreme court justice. Indiana went Republican as well, helped by a monster rally of 50,000 Wide Awakes and “Rail Maulers” in Indianapolis and a large infusion of money from the Republican National Committee. (“Men work better with money in hand,” the ever-pragmatic David Davis observed.) Lincoln, keeping a gimlet eye on the results, exulted to Seward: “It now really looks as if the government is about to fall into our hands. Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana have surpassed all expectation.”35
Douglas was campaigning in Iowa when he heard the news from Indiana. “Mr. Lincoln is the next president,” he told his secretary, James B. Sheridan. “We must try to save the Union. I will go South.” Accompanied by Sheridan, Adele, and brother-in-law James Madison Cutts, Jr., Douglas set out for St. Louis a few days later to begin his final descent into the simmering cauldron of southern politics. The emotional atmosphere in the South had grown even worse in the past two months. Continuing rumors of slave uprisings had led to the arrest of thirty-six black men in Dalton, Georgia, and the lynching of a white man in Talladega, Alabama. In Texas, the Methodist Church had split into northern and southern branches over the question of slavery. The northern branch was said to have organized a secret society, the Mystic Red, to “produce disaffection among our Negroes” and “to force their fair daughters into the embrace of buck Negroes for wives.” On the floor of Congress, Texas representative John H. Reagan repeated the ridiculous claim that nearly a dozen towns in his state had been burned to the ground by black agitators, who allegedly had murdered an untold number of white citizens in the process. It was all “part of the legitimate fruits of Republicanism,” Reagan charged.36
Against such a backdrop, Douglas’s second southern tour took on a certain desperate grandeur. Having privately conceded the presidency to Lincoln, he was now concerned with preventing the breakup of the Union (and also preserving his viability as a presidential candidate four years hence). He began his tour in St. Louis, where he addressed a nighttime crowd from atop the levee beside the Mississippi River. “I am not here tonight to ask for your votes for the presidency,” Douglas said. “I am here to make an appeal to you on behalf of the Union and the peace of the country.” It was more a concession speech than a call to arms.37
Boarding a steamer, the Little Giant and his party headed downriver to Memphis, where two years earlier he had given a well-received, racist speech comparing blacks to crocodiles. Times had changed. The Memphis Appeal marked Douglas’s arrival on southern soil with an editorial denouncing his visit as “the most impudent, the most disgraceful, the most indefensible of his acts during the campaign.” Another Memphis newspaper mocked his “bloated visage” and called him “an itinerant peddler of Yankee notions.” Undeterred, Douglas spoke for three hours to an enormous crowd, insisting that Lincoln’s election, in itself, would not constitute a mortal threat to southern interests, since the Democrats still controlled Congress and the Supreme Court. “I traveled yesterday through West Tennessee and looked out upon one of the loveliest countries the eye of man ever beheld,” he said lyrically, “a country bearing the evidence of a kind providence that hath smiled upon and cherished its people, and I reflected what manner of man he must be who would precipitate this Union into revolution.”38
One such man was the relentless William Yancey, whose path Douglas inadvertently crossed at Nashville, Chattanooga, and Kingston, Georgia. There were no run-ins with the violent Alabaman, although a few weeks earlier in Knoxville, Yancey had threatened to grab a bayonet “and plunge [it] to the hilt through and through [the] heart” of local abolitionist newspaperman William Brownlow. In Chattanooga, a little frontier town that within a few years would feel the full brunt of military occupation, siege, and starvation, residents greeted Douglas’s arrival at the train depot with “an outburst of deafening salutations,” augmented by a combination of what Tennessee journalist K. N. Pepper, Jr., termed “the spirit of politics and the rectified spirit of alcohol.”39
From Chattanooga, Douglas crossed the border into Georgia, where he met up with Alexander Stephens. Little Aleck, loyal to the last, continued praising Douglas as the only man capable of preventing a civil war, “a lordly buffalo” being hounded to death by a lupine crowd of “malicious and envious pettifoggers.” Moving west to Montgomery, Alabama, the seething heart of secessionist sentiment, Douglas and Adele were greeted by a large crowd and a torchlight procession to their hotel. En route, someone threw rotten eggs and spoiled tomatoes at the senator, knocking off his hat and spattering Adele. “I fear that we are in the midst of a revolution,” Mobile Register editor John Forsyth told the seething Douglas. “The storm rages to such a madness that it is beyond the control of those who raised it. Our own people are becoming frantic.”40
The next day, standing on the steps of the Alabama state capitol, Douglas gave his reply. Assuring his listeners that “your title to your slave property is expressly recognized by the Federal Constitution…where no power on earth but yourselves can interfere with it,” he attempted to put the issue in climatological terms. “This question of slavery is one of political economy depending upon the class of climate, production and self-interest,” he explained. “You cannot compel slavery to exist in a cold, northern latitude any more than by an act of Congress you can make cotton grow upon the tops of the Rocky Mountains. Whenever you make up your minds to maintain slavery in those cold northern regions, where the people do not want it and will not have it, you must first get an act of Congress compelling cotton, rice, sugar and tobacco to grow there, and then you can have Negroes.”41
It was vintage Douglas, offering practical solutions to political problems, or political solutions to practical problems, but it failed to recognize that many northerners and southerners had moved beyond mere politics into a realm of theoretical certitude as exacting and precise as a hard-shell Baptist’s understanding of sin. Lincoln realized this; so did those in the crowd. Slavery was not (or not strictly) what Douglas maintained that day in Montgomery, a mere accounting term—“horses, Negroes, merchandize, every kind of property”—but rather a tangible, physical act of control. If southerners could not feel secure in physically transporting their slaves, one man, woman, or child at a time, wherever they wished to take them, the entire multimillion-dollar system of slavery would soon be as dead as any sclerotic old master strangled in his bed by his houseboy.42
Douglas and Adele suffered another painful mishap while they were preparing to leave Montgomery for Selma. As the senator was making his farewell remarks on the top deck of their riverboat, the railing abruptly gave way under the weight of the surging crowd. The couple fell through the splintered wood to the deck below. Douglas wrenched his leg so badly that he needed a crutch to get around, and Adele was too shaken and bruised to continue the trip. (Five months later, literally adding insult to injury, Douglas received a bill for the crutch.) Hobbling like a pirate, Douglas made it to Mobile, where he gave the last speech of his presidential campaign the night before the election. It was, said the Mobile Daily Advertiser, with perhaps backhanded praise, “a triumphant vindication of his consistency since 1850.” In a last flourish of defiance, Douglas vowed not to participate if the election were thrown into the House of Representatives. “I scorn to accept the presidency as a minority candidate,” the Little Giant declared. Deep down, he knew it would not come to that.43
Election Day, November 6, finally arrived. There was no reported violence, although the mood in the South was sepulchral. Not so in Springfield, where the Republican candidate spent the day relaxing in his office at the capitol. Lincoln, in fact, was so relaxed that Herndon had to urge him to leave the office to vote. Lincoln demurred, not wanting to be seen voting for himself. Only after Herndon convinced him that his vote was needed for the other Republican candidates did Lincoln go to the polling place. Greeted by shouts and cheers from his neighbors, he carefully cut off the top of the ballot sheet (which included the names of his own electors) before casting his vote. In the evening, Lincoln ate supper at home with his family, then headed back over to the capitol to await returns. The crowd grew so large that someone suggested he ask all but his closest friends to leave. Lincoln wouldn’t hear of it—everyone who came was welcome to stay.44
Outwardly, Lincoln was calm and collected, but a Missouri Democrat reporter noted a slight nervous twitch whenever a messenger arrived from the telegraph office. All the news was good. Illinois fell to the Republicans, occasioning a great shout of joy from the listeners. Indiana fell. New England fell. The Old Northwest fell. Lincoln, increasingly excited, headed over to the telegraph office to eliminate the wait between returns. Sprawling across an old sofa in the superintendent’s room, he received a dispatch from Simon Cameron in Pennsylvania: “Pennsylvania 70,000 for you. New York safe. Glory enough.” Lincoln was not so sure. “The news would come quick enough if it was good,” he fretted, “and if bad, I am not in any hurry to hear it.”45
Around ten o’clock, Lincoln and his party headed over to Watson’s Saloon, where a bevy of Republican women had taken over the premises and prepared a late-night snack for the candidate, Mrs. Lincoln, and their friends. When Lincoln entered the room, the women chorused: “How do you do, Mr. President!” He had scarcely taken his seat beside Mary at the long table when another telegram arrived. It was from New York politico Simeon Draper, an intimate of William Seward. “We have made steady gains everywhere throughout the state,” Draper said, and although New York City had not yet reported, “we are quite sanguine a great victory has been won.” The hall echoed with cheers; a spontaneous outburst of the campaign song “Ain’t I Glad I Joined the Republicans” shook the rafters. “Not too fast, my friends,” Lincoln cautioned. “Not too fast, it may not be over yet.”46
But it was over, or soon would be. A belated effort by New York Democrats to fuse the backers of Douglas, Breckinridge, and Bell had come too late. (The brilliant New York City politician Samuel Tilden, who sixteen years later would lose—or have stolen from him—the closest presidential election in American history, estimated that a switch of 24,000 votes in selected districts would have kept New York out of the Republican column and thrown the election into the House of Representatives, where Lincoln would almost certainly have lost.) While Mary went home to check on the boys, Lincoln returned to the telegraph office, where word came in around midnight that he had indeed won New York, giving him a sure 180 electoral votes and putting him in line to become the sixteenth president of the United States. Crowds surged into the streets, climbed onto rooftops. The entire town of Springfield, reported Mary Lincoln’s friend Mercy Conkling, was “perfectly wild: the republicans were singing, yelling, shouting! Old men, young, middle-aged, clergymen and all!” Church bells began clanging and cannons booming. Lincoln, putting the historical telegram in his pocket for safekeeping, hurried home to tell his most loyal, long-standing, and fiercest supporter the news. “Mary, Mary!” he called, bursting through the front door of their home. “We are elected!”47
A thousand miles away, in a newspaper office in Mobile, Stephen Douglas was getting the same results. Resigned to defeat, he had spent the day quietly, reading his mail and accepting congratulations for a race which, if lost, had been gallantly run. To his companion, John Forsyth, the Little Giant seemed “less excited by the election than perhaps any other man in the city.” The returns showed why. Douglas had carried only one state outright—Missouri—and split New Jersey (where fusion efforts finally had taken hold) with Lincoln, for a pitiful total of twelve electoral votes. Breckinridge, as expected, won all the Deep South states, along with Delaware and Maryland, giving him seventy-two electoral votes. Bell’s Constitutional Union Party, somewhat surprisingly, carried the border states of Virginia and Kentucky, along with his home state of Tennessee, for thirty-nine electoral votes. All the rest went to Lincoln. The Old Rail-splitter carried every northern and midwestern state—sixteen in all—and added California and Oregon on the West Coast. The extreme sectionalism of the results disguised the fact that Lincoln had won a decisive, if not overwhelming, victory. Except for Kentucky, New Jersey, and the two far western states, he had received a popular majority of the votes in every state where he was on the ballot. Only in California, Oregon, and Illinois was his margin of victory less than 7 percent, and he still beat Douglas by 12,000 votes in their own backyard. The only solace Douglas could take was in besting Breckinridge by more than 500,000 votes. He remained the clear leader of the Democratic Party, the only one of the four presidential candidates who had won electoral votes in both free and slave states. Already, there was talk of another run for the White House in 1864.48
Eighteen sixty-four would take care of itself. For the time being, Douglas was “more hopeless than I had ever before seen him,” in the words of aide James Sheridan. The day after the election, he was rejoined by Adele, and the couple traveled to New Orleans, where a driving rain allowed him to indulge in another of his favorite meteorological metaphors. “This is no time to despair or despond,” he told the crowd from the steps of the St. Charles Hotel. “The bright sun will soon chase away these clouds and the patriots of the country will rally as one man and throttle the enemies of our country.” In an open letter to residents of the city, Douglas lamented Lincoln’s victory, but pointed out again that the Democrats still held both houses of Congress, along with a voting majority on the Supreme Court. “Four years will soon pass away,” he said, “when the ballot-box will furnish a peaceful, legal and constitutional remedy for all the evils and grievances with which the country may be affected.”49
Perhaps. But with the states of the Deep South already planning to hold constitutional conventions on the issue of secession, it was questionable, at best, whether the nation would have the luxury of waiting that long. “I think the Union is gone,” Herschel Johnson wrote to Douglas a few days after the election. Forsyth said much the same thing, lamenting, “With your defeat, the cause of the Union was lost.” The editor of the provocatively named Atlanta Confederacy framed the issue more vividly, if less succinctly: “Let the consequences be what they may—whether the Potomac is crimsoned in human gore, and Pennsylvania Avenue is paved ten fathoms in depth with mangled bodies, or whether the last vestige of liberty is swept from the face of the American continent, the South will never submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.” Having lost, and lost badly, the third presidential bid of his career, Douglas headed back to Washington to attend the traditional swearing-in ceremony formalizing that defeat, however humiliating and degrading it might be.50