1858 (42 page)

In Ohio, the Republicans won fifteen of the state’s twenty-one congressional seats, an increase of three, captured both houses of the legislature and the governor’s mansion. Hamilton County, Ohio (Cincinnati), was an example of the Republican surge there and in the nation. The Republicans lost that county by 3,300 votes in 1857, but won it by 1,500 votes in 1858.

Overall, the Republicans won nearly two-thirds of the vote in the northwestern states; it was only in Illinois that their total was as low as 49 percent. The Republicans won two-thirds of the vote in the New England and northeast states, 61 percent in the east, west, and north-central states. They worked to get out a record 81.6 percent vote in Massachusetts and not only won the state’s senate and assembly, but took the governor’s mansion as well. As expected, they lost in all of the Southern slave states. The vote was spread out over all of the congressional districts in which the Republicans won, enabling them to win some seats by large pluralities, but most by small ones, meaning victories in far more districts. This pattern of triumphs without rolling up landslide numbers permitted the Republicans to maintain control of these districts for the next fourteen years.
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There was no mere good fortune involved in the Republican sweep, just solid strategy and hard work. The brand-new Republican Party had stunned the Democrats in the 1854 and 1856 congressional elections, capturing nearly half the seats in the House of Representatives. The leaders of the new party determined that in order to gain control of the Senate and the House and win the presidency in the 1860 elections they had to capture the electoral votes of Ohio, New York, and especially Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania was not only a Democratic state, but it shared a border with two slave states and was home to President Buchanan. Victory there was seen as the biggest challenge because nine of its southern counties—Adams, Cambria, Clarion, Cumberland, Fayette, Westmoreland, Wyoming, Northampton, and Northumberland—bordered Maryland and Virginia, both slave states, and thousands of Pennsylvanians in those counties did business in Maryland and Virginia and had relatives living there. Those counties had been solidly Democratic for years, and any Republican incursion there would be difficult. In fact, despite Buchanan’s narrow victory in the state in 1856, the Democrats did maintain their majority in the state legislature, winning fifty-three of one hundred seats, and held on to fifteen of the state’s twenty-five congressional seats. Wrote one Pennsylvanian later to Abraham Lincoln of the Democratic strength there, “I lived in Pennsylvania several years and without Pennsylvania’s vote you cannot be elected president.”
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The Republicans were not daunted and went to work on Pennsylvania immediately following the ’56 election. They convinced several key Democrats to leave their party and join the Republicans; some brought hundreds of followers with them and, even more important, dozens of veteran campaign organizers who could help the Republicans in the 1858 elections. Fortunately for the Republicans, the popularity of the antislavery American Party in Pennsylvania slipped precipitously as the overwhelming majority of its members became Republicans; William Hazelhurst, the American Party’s gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania in the previous year, 1857, polled only 28,000 votes, or one-third the number cast for the American Party’s presidential candidate in that state in 1856.
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Beginning in the 1856 elections, the Republicans cleverly played up to the American Party by joining their campaign for tougher immigration laws to keep foreign criminals from arriving in America, but did not agree with their anti-Catholic stand in order to attract the thousands of Catholics in states such as Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania.
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The Republicans’ major issue was slavery, but the party’s leaders knew that they could not succeed on a single campaign plank; they needed to become a full-service party that took a stand on dozens of issues besides slavery. They found a very appealing issue in 1856 that they pushed harder in the 1857 and 1858 elections—a protective tariff. American manufacturers and their millions of workers, the people who created the industrial revolution, could not maximize their profits because products imported from Europe, particularly England and specifically iron and coal, were selling for the same prices, sometimes less. Nowhere was this a bigger problem than in Pennsylvania, whose one million iron and coal workers supplied nearly half the nation’s iron. The Republicans argued long and hard for a sweeping tariff to protect Pennsylvania’s iron workers and it had helped.
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The Republicans were not alone as they worked hard to increase their popularity in Pennsylvania; the Democrats toiled at growing their numbers, too. They had held the state in the 1854 election and won the presidency for Buchanan by carrying it in 1856, although by less than five thousand votes. Those Democrats, though, had been led by state party chairman John Forney, who had defected following his acrimonious dispute with the president. The president had done little for the party in his home state, preferring to fill his time with foreign-policy adventures. The Democrats, without presidential assistance and without Forney—and in fact with Forney working against them—floundered.

The Republicans’ hard work paid off and they captured the Keystone State by 31,000 votes and, in a special non-binding question in several counties’ polling booths there, voters turned down the Lecompton Constitution, 51,208 to zero.
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An election eve analysis showed that Pennsylvania Republican congressmen running in the districts where Lecompton was on the ballot as a special question won by the widest pluralities.
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In a real surprise, the Republicans took eleven of the state’s fourteen congressional seats that were contested that year.

The biggest blow there, to the party and President Buchanan, was the stunning defeat of the powerful J. Glancy Jones, the Democratic House whip. His district was considered the safest in the country for the Democrats, earning the nickname “the Gibraltor of Democracy.” Jones lost because of a well-organized Republican campaign, Buchanan’s sinking popularity, and, most of all, because John Forney and his
Philadelphia Press
, and his political associates, targeted the powerful Jones as part of Forney’s retribution campaign against Buchanan. Buchanan had blithely cast his old friend aside when he became president, and now John Forney had blithely cast aside James Buchanan’s old friend J. Glancy Jones, crippling the Democratic congressional leadership. Buchanan knew it too, and after the elections, raged that “the conspirators against poor Jones have at length succeeded…”

And who were those wretched conspirators? “The Forney mob,” answered the president.

The defeat of Jones was just one of many Republican triumphs on election day. They also won control of the state senate and equaled the Democrats’ seats in the assembly. And, as the Republicans seemed to do in every state, they rolled up impressive margins in every congressional and state legislative district, except for Philadelphia and the nine southern counties, just as they did in 1856, laying the foundation for an even more impressive victory in 1860.
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The Democratic debacle in New York was almost as great. There, the Democrats, who had minimized Seward’s effect on the race with his “irrepressible conflict” speech, lost seven congressional seats, giving the Republicans twenty-nine of the state’s thirty-three seats. The Republican sweep was so complete that the new party even defeated the candidates of the seemingly invincible Tammany Hall political machine in New York City.

The Republicans swept Democratic congressmen out of office everywhere. In Vermont the Republicans captured all three congressional seats, and two of three in Wisconsin, six out of six in Maine, four of five in New Jersey, all twelve seats in Massachusetts, three of four in Michigan. The Democrats took six of the seven congressional districts in Missouri (a slave state) and five of the nine in Illinois, thanks to Douglas and not Buchanan.
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Altogether, the Democrats lost twenty-one seats in Congress and, with the loss of those districts, control of the House of Representatives. The Democrats clung to a slender majority of seats in the Senate and held their majority in states whose congressional seats were not up for election that fall, especially the Southern states, preventing a complete Republican takeover of the Congress.
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Perhaps the most significant Republican victory came in its greatest loss—the senatorial campaign in Illinois. There, the Democratic Party won or held fifty-four of the state’s ninety-five state legislative seats (eighteen were not up for election), guaranteeing the reelection of Stephen Douglas, but in a surprise Republican Abraham Lincoln actually won the popular vote, 125,430 to Douglas’s 121,609, with Buchanan’s Danite candidate drawing a mere 5,000.

Douglas was exhilarated. To him, all that counted was the state legislative vote, not the popular vote. He had defeated both Lincoln and the political assassins of President Buchanan and was certain he would be elected president as the Democratic nominee in two years. Ironically, many newspapers heralded his victory over Buchanan and downplayed Lincoln entirely. Less than a week after the election, the Buffalo Register and Times ran a huge headline: “For President in 1860: Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois” (the National Slavery Standard proclaimed both Douglas and Seward the 1860 nominees, as did the New York Herald). One week after that, thousands attended a raucous torchlight parade to honor Douglas in Chicago. In Philadelphia, organizers fired off a two-hundred-gun salute to celebrate Douglas’s victory.

No one was happier about the Douglas win than John Forney, Buchanan’s old friend and now avowed enemy. He bragged after the election results came in that Douglas had won despite “the entire administration of the federal government with its vast patronage of a hundred millions of dollars, with its army of mercenaries and expectants, organized and rallied against [Douglas].” Douglas wired the
Illinois State Register
on election night of his victory, “Let the voice of the people rule!”
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The Little Giant immediately went on a tour of several Southern states to reassure voters and political powerbrokers there that he was on their side on the territorial slavery question and rashly advocated that the United States annex Cuba, Mexico, and all of Central America, permitting slavery there, too. He even traveled to Havana, Cuba, in an effort to broker an annexation of Cuba with the United States. He was confident that he could regain his popularity in the South, but just a week after the elections, while he was traveling from state to state, the South’s leading politicians had already started to turn against him, angered by his repeated affirmations that he did not object to free territories in his debates with Lincoln.
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