Coming Fury, Volume 1 (10 page)

The trouble with being the man to beat is that everybody else tries to beat you. This was especially true at Chicago, where all men knew that with reasonable luck this convention would name the next President; the awareness of approaching victory pressed men here just as forebodings of defeat had pressed men at Charleston. The man who attached himself to the winner could expect to be rewarded. The party faithful wanted to listen to The Word, but as necessitous human beings they were also intensely concerned with the eventual division of the loaves and fishes. There was an especial point to this because the party itself was so new; it had never distributed national patronage before, and it was developing an immense appetite for it. Furthermore, this appetite was concentrated in the Northern section of the country, which meant that the chosen candidate’s capacity to win votes could have an equally narrow focus. Only five of the fifteen slave states—Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri—were represented here. The Democrats had painstakingly examined each candidate’s record to see whether his orthodoxy could meet every test; the Republicans were examining records to find the man who could most surely carry the North and thus win a majority in the electoral college. Nobody was going to take anything for granted.

Senator Seward’s position was weaker than either he or Weed realized, and there were in Chicago men who had diagnosed its weaknesses and were working, literally without sleep, to exploit them. The most effective of these were buzzing in and out of a set of rooms at the Tremont Hotel, where a fat down-state lawyer, Judge David Davis, had set up headquarters for Abraham Lincoln.

Davis had known Lincoln ever since the old circuit-riding days, and when Long John Wentworth, the Republican mayor of Chicago, advised Lincoln that “you ought to have a feller to run you like Seward has Weed,” Lincoln had chosen Davis. Never noted as a trial lawyer, and almost wholly lacking in the ability to make a good stump speech, Davis was a thorough man, a hard worker, careful about details, a good organizer and behind-the-scenes executive, and he was about to demonstrate that his political instincts were alert and sensitive. He had gathered together an able group of
co-workers. Among them were such men as Leonard Swett, of Bloomington, State Auditor Jesse Dubois, Judge Stephen Logan, who used to be Lincoln’s law partner, Norman Judd, the railroad lawyer and political leader who had arranged the Lincoln-Douglas debates, hard-fisted Ward Lamon, of Springfield, and the two canny editors of the Chicago
Tribune
, Charles Ray and Joseph Medill. Their first job now was to survey the field and see what this race was really like.
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Aside from Seward the principal candidates were Governor Salmon P. Chase, of Ohio, Judge Edward Bates, of St. Louis, Simon Cameron, of Pennsylvania, and of course Lincoln himself. Chase was a famous anti-slavery leader: a little too much so, perhaps, for a new party that was going to have to draw some support from the Northern Democrats. Chase had lofty hopes, and yet he was not quite making a campaign of it; he was merely standing off stage, full of dignity and rectitude, willing to receive whatever might be given to him, but not equipped with the guides and beaters needed by a man who hoped to penetrate a jungle like this one at the Wigwam. Bates had the important backing of the famous Blair family and he came from a border state, which was in his favor. If the convention should try to placate the South (which was somewhat unlikely), Bates would be a very likely choice. He had, however, presided over the national convention of the Know-Nothings in 1856 and he would be a loser in any state where the German or other foreign-born vote was essential. Cameron was a typical political boss who could hardly hope to carry anything except his own state of Pennsylvania.

Then there was Lincoln, and Davis and his aides were hard at work reminding people of him. Mayor Wentworth had warned Lincoln to “look out for
prominence
.” The convention would eventually realize, Wentworth said, that a really prominent candidate could not be chosen; then the man who had avoided prominence would have his chance.
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Now the Lincoln managers were trying as hard as they could to keep their man out of the limelight and at the same time set men thinking about him; he was a dark horse and for the moment he must stay dark, but he must never become so dark as to be lost to view. The job called for expert handling.

Expert handling it was getting. The immediate problem was
to line up as many second-choice votes as possible, to cultivate friendships everywhere, and to get accurate, hour-by-hour knowledge of the shifting political currents among the delegates. Nothing could be done, of course, with a delegation like that of New York, where Weed had everything under control, but if there was the slightest doubt as to where a state’s votes would finally land, Davis had one or more aides attached, full time, to that state’s delegation.

This involved some intensely practical considerations. If an important politician led his delegation to a candidate and so made that candidate a winner, he would expect to be rewarded for it, in the essential currency of politics—jobs, patronage, a say in the inner councils. Before this convention week began, Dr. Charles Ray, senior editor of the Chicago
Tribune
, had written a “profoundly private” letter to Lincoln pointing out that “you need a few trusty friends here to say words for you that may be necessary to be said,” and urging that the principal managers at Chicago be properly empowered. “A pledge or two,” Ray reminded him, “may be necessary when the pinch comes.” Lincoln, who had been around politics long enough to know what can happen to a candidate who puts himself unrestrictedly in the hands of his managers, refused to take this bait, writing in return: “Make no contracts that will bind me.” Davis and his co-workers would have to do the best they could with promises of their own. They felt their prospects were good, and on May 15 Davis telegraphed Lincoln that “nothing will beat us but old fogy politicians the heart of the delegates are with us.”
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Down-to-earth problems were not overlooked. The men of the 1860s lived in what are now assumed to be innocent years, but they knew as much as anyone needs to know about the creation and manipulation of mass enthusiasm, and with the primitive means at their disposal they got excellent results. It became evident, for instance, that in the immense pro-Seward entourage that had come on from New York there were hundreds of men who had been brought to Chicago simply because they could yell very loudly. Properly spotted about the Wigwam under orders to stand up and cheer whenever Seward’s name was mentioned, these might make uncertain delegates believe that enthusiasm for Seward was sweeping the convention, and the Seward band wagon might thus begin
to roll irresistibly. Lincoln needed his own shouters, and the headquarters group at the Tremont Hotel saw to it that he got them.

As Congressman Isaac Arnold remembered afterward: “There was then living in Chicago a man whose voice could drown the roar of Lake Michigan in its wildest fury; nay, it was said that his shout could be heard, on a calm day, across that lake.” And there was another man, who lived down on the Illinois River, whose remarkable voice had equal range and carrying qualities; he unfortunately was a Democrat, but he seems to have been malleable and he was asked to take the first train to Chicago. These two, then, the man from Chicago and the down-state Democrat, were told to bring together a group of huskies and take station on opposite sides of the Wigwam. When a key member of the Illinois delegation should take out his handkerchief, each man was to yell as hard as he could, his huskies yelling with him, and the yelling was to continue until the handkerchief vanished. As a matter of pride, Illinois would not let its favorite son be out-shouted.
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The convention would generate its own intensity. Vast as the Wigwam was, it could hold but a fraction of the crowd that wanted to get in. Long before the main gates were thrown open, at noon on Wednesday, May 16, the galleries were filled to capacity—3000 persons. The rule here was that only gentlemen accompanied by ladies could be admitted, and ladies were greatly in demand; schoolgirls, it was said, were paid twenty-five cents apiece to help male spectators get by the gatemen, and Halstead reported that certain women of the town plied a brisk if honest business along the same line. One hopeful man found an Indian woman who, at a sidewalk stand, was selling moccasins or some such artifacts to the visitors, and tried to escort her in—failing, when an official lacking in gallantry ruled that she was no lady.… When the three 20-foot doors giving access to the convention floor were opened, a dense crush of men came powering into the hall—delegates, alternates, and newspapermen mixed with spectators.
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In the various delegations were men whose names were now or soon would be nationally famous. Thaddeus Stevens went limping to his place with the Pennsylvanians, and Gideon Welles, his wig a poor match for his voluminous whiskers, led the delegation from Connecticut. John A. Andrew, who would be war governor of his
state, led the Massachusetts delegation, and the Wisconsin group was headed by the tense, black-bearded German, Carl Schurz; the immense Davis lounged at ease under the Illinois standard, and William Evarts, a lawyer and orator of national reputation, took his seat as chairman of the New York contingent, expecting to see the nomination go to Seward without delay once the balloting began.

There would be no balloting, however, for two days, and this opening session was an anti-climax. The convention got itself organized, named committees, listened to an anti-slavery speech by the David Wilmot whose famous proviso had touched off so much trouble in Congress after the Mexican War, installed George Ashmun, of Massachusetts, as its president, listened to more oratory, and then adjourned early, one reason for adjournment being the fact that the Chicago Board of Trade, with four steamboats at the water front, was offering all hands a short excursion on Lake Michigan. Some delegates and visitors accepted this invitation. Others returned to the Wigwam to watch an exhibition drill by a corps of Zouaves; and the rest strolled about, visited bars, gathered in hotel rooms for argument, for song, for cards, or for private drinking, and in general disposed of the evening in the way traditional at political conventions.
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The air of pent-up excitement increased, and on Thursday—the day when the convention would hear the report of its platform committee—it began to break loose.

The Seward contingent met that morning in front of Richmond House and paraded straight to the Wigwam, all of the men wearing huge badges, a uniformed band in front blaring away at a popular air—“Oh Isn’t He a Darling?” Inside the hall, the immense crowd greeted the report of the platform committee with wild shouts, interrupting at almost every paragraph to cheer the statement of the party’s creed.

The platform had been drawn up so as to please all Republicans, and it met this desire precisely. It began by asserting that conditions in America made the Republican party a necessity, and it went on to endorse the Declaration of Independence, with especial reference to the part about all men being created equal. It demanded preservation of the Constitution, the rights of the several states and the Federal Union, drawing attention to the fact that all of the
recent talk about disunion had been uttered by Democrats, whose incendiary language was briskly denounced as “an avowal of contemplated treason.” The Buchanan administration and the Lecompton constitution were condemned, and “the new dogma” that the Constitution automatically carried slavery into the territories was held unsound, “revolutionary in its tendency and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country.” The normal condition of people in the territories was held to be one of freedom, the authority of Congress to make slavery legal in a territory was denied, and the admission of Kansas as a free state was demanded.

Then, after assailing extravagance in government, the platform advocated a protective tariff, called for a homestead act, denounced the Know-Nothing demand for restriction on the citizenship rights of naturalized immigrants, called for Federal aid for internal improvements, and commended the projected railroad to the Pacific Coast. It concluded by inviting the co-operation of all citizens who agreed with the importance of these “distinctive principles and views.”

There was something here for everyone except Southerners—for anti-slavery people, for the foreign-born, for the Eastern manufacturers, for the developing Northwest—and the platform was adopted with a great burst of cheers. Delegates and spectators sprang to their feet, waved their hats, and yelled, the ladies in the gallery fluttered their handkerchiefs and clapped their hands, and Halstead reported that “such a spectacle as was presented for some minutes has never before been witnessed at a convention.” He felt, too, that all of this jubilation carried a powerful element of enthusiasm for Seward, and as the crowds poured out into the streets, he wrote that “there is something almost irresistible here in the prestige of his fame.”
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Seward that Thursday evening was within reaching distance of the nomination, and if balloting could have begun then, he would probably have attained his goal. When the uproar that followed adoption of the platform died down slightly, some Seward delegate arose to move that the convention proceed to the nomination of a candidate, and if this had been done, Seward almost certainly would have got what he wanted. Unfortunately, the convention secretary was compelled to announce that the tally sheets were not quite
ready. They would arrive in a few minutes; would the delegates wait?

At that moment the delegates were prepared to do anything but wait. The mood to shout, to parade about, to slap backs, and to rejoice in the prospect of victory was too strong, and the convention adjourned for the evening. The nomination would be made Friday, and the Seward managers were unworried. There would be a great deal of caucusing and pleading during the evening, but the New Yorkers’ lines looked firm. At Richmond House headquarters an immense quantity of champagne was opened and consumed, brass bands tramped all over town with Seward banners in the breeze, serenading state delegations that might still be uncommitted … and at the Tremont Hotel the determined men from Illinois settled down for a night of very hard work.
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