HOW LINCOLN BECAME A NATIONAL FIGURE
BY IDA M. TARBELL
From "The Life of Abraham Lincoln."[4]
"The greatest speech ever made in Illinois, and it puts Lincoln on the track for the Presidency," was the comment made by enthusiastic Republicans on Lincoln's speech before the Bloomington Convention. Conscious that it was he who had put the breath of life into their organization, the party instinctively turned to him as its leader. The effect of this local recognition was at once perceptible in the national organization. Less than three weeks after the delivery of the Bloomington speech, the national convention of the Republican party met in Philadelphia, June 17, to nominate candidates for the Presidency and Vice-presidency. Lincoln's name was the second proposed for the latter office, and on the first ballot he received one hundred and ten votes. The news reached him at Urbana, Ill., where he was attending court, one of his companions reading from a daily paper just received from Chicago, the result of the ballot. The simple name Lincoln was given, without the name of the man's State. Lincoln said indifferently that he did not suppose it could be himself; and added that there was "another great man" of the name, a man from Massachusetts. The next day, however, he knew that it was himself to whom the convention had given so strong an endorsement. He knew also that the ticket chosen was Frémont and Dayton.
The campaign of the following summer and fall was one of intense activity for Lincoln. In Illinois and the neighboring States he made over fifty speeches, only fragments of which have been preserved. One of the first important ones was delivered on July 4, 1856, at a great mass meeting at Princeton, the home of the Lovejoys and the Bryants. The people were still irritated by the outrages in Kansas and by the attack on Sumner in the Senate, and the temptation to deliver a stirring and indignant oration must have been strong. Lincoln's speech was, however, a fine example of political wisdom, an historical argument admirably calculated to convince his auditors that they were right in their opposition to slavery extension, but so controlled and sane that it would stir no impulsive radical to violence. There probably was not uttered in the United States on that critical 4th of July, 1856, when the very foundation of the government was in dispute and the day itself seemed a mockery, a cooler, more logical speech than this by the man who, a month before, had driven a convention so nearly mad that the very reporters had forgotten to make notes. And the temper of this Princeton speech Lincoln kept throughout the campaign.
In spite of the valiant struggle of the Republicans, Buchanan was elected; but Lincoln was in no way discouraged. The Republicans had polled 1,341,264 votes in the country. In Illinois, they had given Frémont nearly 100,000 votes, and they had elected their candidate for governor, General Bissell. Lincoln turned from arguments to encouragement and good counsel.
"All of us," he said at a Republican banquet in Chicago, a few weeks after the election, "who did not vote for Mr. Buchanan, taken together, are a majority of four hundred thousand. But in the late contest we were divided between Frémont and Fillmore. Can we not come together for the future? Let every one who really believes and is resolved that free society is not and shall not be a failure, and who can conscientiously declare that in the last contest he had done what he thought best—let every such one have charity to believe that every other one can say as much. Thus let bygones be bygones; let past differences as nothing be; and with steady eye on the real issue let us reinaugurate the good old 'central idea' of the republic. We can do it. The human heart is with us; God is with us. We shall again be able, not to declare that 'all States as States are equal,' nor yet that 'all citizens as citizens are equal,' but to renew the broader, better declaration, including both these and much more, that 'all men are created equal.'"
The spring of 1857 gave Lincoln a new line of argument. Buchanan was scarcely in the Presidential chair before the Supreme Court, in the decision of the Dred Scott case, declared that a negro could not sue in the United States courts and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the Territories. This decision was such an evident advance of the slave power that there was a violent uproar in the North. Douglas went at once to Illinois to calm his constituents. "What," he cried, "oppose the Supreme Court! is it not sacred? To resist it is anarchy."
Lincoln met him fairly on the issue in a speech at Springfield in June, 1857.
"We believe as much as Judge Douglas (perhaps more) in obedience to and respect for the judicial department of government. … But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it has often overruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it overrule this. We offer no resistance to it. … If this important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with legal public expectation and with the steady practice of the departments throughout our history, and had been in no part based on assumed historical facts which are not really true; or if, wanting in some of these, it had been before the court more than once, and had there been affirmed and reaffirmed through a course of years, it then might be, perhaps would be, factious, nay, even revolutionary, not to acquiesce in it as a precedent. But when, as is true, we find it wanting in all these claims to the public confidence, it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat it as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country."
Let Douglas cry "awful," "anarchy," "revolution," as much as he would, Lincoln's arguments against the Dred Scott decision appealed to common sense and won him commendation all over the country. Even the radical leaders of the party in the East—Seward, Sumner, Theodore Parker—began to notice him, to read his speeches, to consider his arguments.
With every month of 1857 Lincoln grew stronger, and his election in Illinois as United States senatorial candidate in 1858 against Douglas would have been insured if Douglas had not suddenly broken with Buchanan and his party in a way which won him the hearty sympathy and respect of a large part of the Republicans of the North. By a flagrantly unfair vote the pro-slavery leaders of Kansas had secured the adoption of the Lecompton Constitution allowing slavery in the State. President Buchanan urged Congress to admit Kansas with her bogus Constitution. Douglas, who would not sanction so base an injustice, opposed the measure, voting with the Republicans steadily against the admission. The Buchananists, outraged at what they called "Douglas's apostasy," broke with him. Then it was that a part of the Republican party, notably Horace Greeley at the head of the New York "Tribune," struck by the boldness and nobility of Douglas's opposition, began to hope to win him over from the Democrats to the Republicans. Their first step was to counsel the leaders of their party in Illinois to put up no candidate against Douglas for the United States senatorship in 1858.
Lincoln saw this change on the part of the Republican leaders with dismay. "Greeley is not doing me right," he said. " … I am a true Republican, and have been tried already in the hottest part of the anti-slavery fight; and yet I find him taking up Douglas, a veritable dodger—once a tool of the South, now its enemy—and pushing him to the front." He grew so restless over the returning popularity of Douglas among the Republicans that Herndon, his law-partner, determined to go East to find out the real feeling of the Eastern leaders towards Lincoln. Herndon had, for a long time, been in correspondence with the leading abolitionists and had no difficulty in getting interviews. The returns he brought back from his canvass were not altogether reassuring. Seward, Sumner, Phillips, Garrison, Beecher, Theodore Parker, all spoke favorably of Lincoln and Seward sent him word that the Republicans would never take up so slippery a quantity as Douglas had proved himself. But Greeley—the all-important Greeley—was lukewarm. "The Republican standard is too high," he told Herndon. "We want something practical. … Douglas is a brave man. Forget the past and sustain the righteous." "Good God, righteous, eh!" groaned Herndon in his letter to Lincoln.
But though the encouragement which came to Lincoln from the East in the spring of 1858 was meagre, that which came from Illinois was abundant. There the Republicans supported him in whole-hearted devotion. In June, the State convention, meeting in Springfield to nominate its candidate for Senator, declared that Abraham Lincoln was its first and only choice as the successor of Stephen A. Douglas. The press was jubilant.