SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS

Party Malice

NOVEMBER 20

IN SPRINGFIELD, THE ATMOSPHERE OF EXUBERANT CELEBRATION THAT had prevailed on Election Day rapidly gave way to an unexpected calm. “The contest has been so long and so exhaustive, that this town almost immediately settled down into its usual quietness,” John Nicolay wrote to his fiancée on Sunday, November 11, as the city prepared somewhat listlessly for the obligatory formal celebration of Lincoln’s victory—a “Jollification”—set to take place nine days later. He had, after all, won the town with only a twenty-two-vote margin. “Seeing the city, and noticing the people on Friday and Saturday, one would not imagine there had been a Presidential election for a year,” Nicolay wrote. “People look and act as if they were almost too tired to feel at all interested in getting up a grand hurrah over the victory and I believe they would not do it at all were it not that it is a formality which in this case cannot well be omitted.”

Some in Springfield harbored a sense of dread. One young woman, Anna Ridgely, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a prominent city banker—a Democrat sympathetic to the South who nonetheless often played cards with Lincoln—wrote in her diary of her disappointment at his election, “for we had hoped that such a man as he without the least knowledge of state affairs, without any polish of manner would not be chosen to represent this great nation, but so it is.” Lincoln’s apparent lack of political acumen and poise worried her. “I tremble for our country,” she wrote. “I hope foreigners will not judge us by our head. I hope he will keep the peace but I am afraid that our union has commenced to break and will soon fall to pieces but God knows what is best and we can leave all in his hands.”

Henry Villard, an ambitious young émigré from Germany assigned by the New York Herald to cover Lincoln in Springfield, knew him about as well as anyone, and, like Anna Ridgely, also had his doubts. “The present aspect of the country, I think, augurs one of the most difficult terms which any President has yet been called to weather,” Villard wrote, “and I doubt Mr. Lincoln’s capacity for the task of bringing light and peace out of the chaos that will surround him. A man of good heart and good intention, he is not firm. The times demand a Jackson”—this a reference to Andrew Jackson, who thirty years earlier had forcefully quashed South Carolina’s nullification revolt.

Villard recalled an encounter with Lincoln during his 1858 senatorial campaign in which Lincoln himself expressed skepticism about his own political prowess. Villard was waiting for a train to take him back to Springfield after covering a rally in Petersburg, Illinois, twenty miles northwest of the city. The Petersburg station was primitive, basically a parcel of ground where trains stopped, with no waiting room or other physical structures. The night was hot and sticky. At about nine o’clock a buggy pulled up and dropped off Lincoln, his frame unmistakable: “lean, lank, indescribably gawky,” as Villard put it. The train was supposed to arrive about then but did not. They waited half an hour, then a thunderstorm tore open the skies. With no shelter in sight, the two fled to an empty freight car on a siding. “We squatted down on the floor of the car and fell to talking on all sorts of subjects,” Villard wrote.

At one point, Lincoln told him that when he was a clerk in a country store, his greatest ambition had been to become a state legislator. “I did not consider myself qualified for the United States Senate,” he told Villard, “and it took me a long time to persuade myself that I was. Now, to be sure, I am convinced that I am good enough for it; but in spite of it all, I am saying to myself every day: ‘It is too big a thing for you; you will never get it.’” But his wife, he said, insisted that he would become not only a senator, but president as well. At this, according to Villard, Lincoln laughed his oddly high-pitched laugh, “with his arms around his knees, and shaking all over with mirth at his wife’s ambition.”

Lincoln then exclaimed, “Just think of such a sucker as me as President!”

EVEN AS THE CRISIS INTENSIFIED, Lincoln, sequestered in Springfield, seemed to have scant appreciation for the depth of Southern discontentment. He still believed that the majority of Southerners favored the Union, that only extremists and fire-eaters wanted to destroy it, and that with time the South would come to its senses. He also found it hard to grasp how anyone could see him as a radical Black Republican hell-bent on abolishing slavery. He considered his stance to be a moderate one, protecting slavery where it existed but opposing its extension elsewhere. He supported the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, much hated in the North, which allowed planters to retrieve runaway slaves even from free states, on grounds that it was a duly enacted law that only Congress could eliminate. He understood, however, that in the weeks before his inauguration anything he said could prove incendiary; he chose, therefore, to say nothing. Or almost nothing.

While he avoided public comment and steered inquisitive souls to his published speeches and previously reported remarks, he also deftly seeded the firmament by recruiting sympathetic news editors and political allies to convey his views to the public and to Washington without attribution to him. One example of this occurred in Springfield on Tuesday, November 20, the night Republicans had designated for Lincoln’s “Jollification.”

It was a festive night, although it got a lukewarm review from young Miss Ridgely. “I liked some of the things very much,” she wrote. “Almost all the houses in town were lighted with colored lanterns hung out of the windows. The state house was lighted with little candles in all the window panes. Some of the fireworks were beautiful, but most of them were rockets and Roman candles that we have seen all summer long, while the torch light procession was the smallest I ever saw.”

The big event that night was to be a speech by U.S. senator Lyman Trumbull, whose reelection by the Illinois Assembly was all but assured and thus worthy of celebration as well. Five years earlier Trumbull had bested Lincoln for the Senate seat but had since become an ally whose firsthand knowledge of political currents in Washington was proving invaluable. (Mary Lincoln still nursed resentment toward Trumbull for his prior victory, and also toward Trumbull’s wife.) Reporters speculated that Trumbull’s speech might reflect Lincoln’s own thinking. Certainly they hoped for something other than the persistent silence from Springfield that thus far had prevailed. They could not know it, but Lincoln had secretly drafted a lengthy passage for Trumbull to include in his speech, most of which the senator did include, although with a few modifications.

Lincoln’s main goal was to reassure the South. In his draft for Trumbull he vowed that under Republican leadership every state would be left in complete control of its own affairs. Referring to himself in the third person, he wrote, “Those who have voted for Mr. Lincoln, have expected, and still expect this; they would not have voted for him had they expected otherwise.”

Lincoln had one more paragraph, startlingly naïve, that he’d wanted Trumbull to include. Two sentences long, and reflecting his persistent belief that pro-Union sentiment would triumph in the South, it proposed that the many Southern militias forming in the slave states were a good thing because they could eventually be put to use in taming rebellion. “I am rather glad of this military preparation in the South,” Lincoln wanted Trumbull to say. “It will enable the people the more easily to suppress any uprisings there, which their misrepresentations of purposes may have encouraged.”

Even the ever-loyal Trumbull balked at this one.

THANKS TO THE PRACTICE of newspapers’ routinely republishing one another’s news stories, Trumbull’s speech was widely disseminated, but it did little to ease the nation’s malaise. It affirmed Lincoln’s conviction that he should not yet speak directly to the public, a point he reasserted on November 28 in a “Private and Confidential” note to Henry J. Raymond, the staunchly Republican editor of the then-hyphenated New-York Times. This was Lincoln’s reply to an earlier letter from Raymond that challenged his reasons for keeping silent. Citing Trumbull’s speech, Lincoln wrote, “I now think we have a demonstration in favor of my view … Has a single newspaper, heretofore against us, urged that speech upon its readers with a purpose to quiet public anxiety? Not one, so far as I know.” Instead, he wrote, the Boston Courier and other Republican papers condemned it for sacrificing party principles, while the Washington Constitution and sister papers claimed the speech constituted a declaration of war against the South.

“This is just as I expected, and just what would happen with any declaration I could make,” Lincoln wrote. “These political fiends are not half sick enough yet. ‘Party malice’ and not ‘public good’ possesses them entirely.” Lincoln found further support for his own silence in the gospel of St. Matthew. “‘They seek a sign,’” he told Raymond, “‘and no sign shall be given them.’ At least such is my present feeling and purpose.”

Raymond later snipped Lincoln’s signature from the letter and gave it to a friend who wanted his autograph.

NOW CAME THE LONG wait until the electoral certification on February 13, 1861, and Lincoln’s subsequent inauguration, which if all went well would take place nineteen days afterward at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. In certain circles, dark talk held that Lincoln would never make it to Inauguration Day. For the slaveholding states, his election conjured the real possibility of abolition and its inevitable—and intolerable—consequence, the utter loss of control over the Black race. On November 22, 1860, James Clement Furman, a prominent Baptist minister and first president of Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, published an open letter that encapsulated the South’s great abiding fear of what would happen if slavery were abolished. “Then every negro in South Carolina and every other Southern State will be his own master; nay, more than that, will be the equal of every one of you.”

Another Southern orator, quoted in the New York Herald, issued an even more vivid warning. “What will you do with these people? Will you allow them to sit at your own table, marry your daughters, govern your States, sit in your halls of Congress and perhaps be president of the United States?”