The 鈥榬oaring mob鈥� that changed us
Edward Achorn’s “The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History,” published last year, dishes the dirt on maybe the most muddled and sketchiest political convention ever, but also the most important.
Achorn unspools the raucous gathering of Republican delegates in Chicago in May 1860 that chose the inexperienced, little-known Abraham Lincoln for president. The “Rail Splitter’s” electoral plurality in November and the South’s denial of democracy plunged the nation into a bloody civil war soon after Lincoln took office.
Northern victory in the war ended slavery and restored the union of states. Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 by a pro-Southern fanatic was a dagger-thrust: By removing Lincoln from the scene, the murderer John Wilkes Booth pretty much destroyed the opportunity for both national reconciliation and justice for the formerly enslaved in the war’s aftermath.
Those events are far-removed from Achorn’s briskly riveting narrative, however. The author’s focus is on the political maneuvering that made Lincoln the Republican nominee for president – only the second in the party’s brief existence. (The party was founded amidst the anti-slavery fervor of the 1850s.)
Fortunately for us, Pennsylvania played a key role in Lincoln’s nomination. It was one of several states that viewed the probable nomination of William Seward of New York with alarm. With Seward at the head of the ticket, Republican politicians in Pennsylvania feared the party would not only lose the presidential election but the race for governor as well.
The states – Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, and Lincoln’s own Illinois – agreed, after much haggling, that Lincoln was the candidate whom voters in their states and across the North would find more appealing than Sen. Seward. The leading Republican in the country, Seward bore the political burden of having proclaimed that the North and South were on a course toward an “irrepressible conflict” because of slavery.
Lincoln was not so encumbered, despite his 1858 prediction “that a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Lincoln’s nomination was a close call. One “Lincoln miracle” was the adjournment that was called on the very brink of Seward’s nomination – an adjournment prompted by hungry convention delegates at supper time on Thursday, May 17, 1860. Overnight, the four states fastened on Lincoln as the compromise candidate against Seward, a future Secretary of State.
“On such slender threads hangs the destiny of nations,” Achorn writes.
“Shortly after the convention broke,” the author explains, “a fateful meeting began in the rooms of Pennsylvanian David Wilmot at the Briggs House … a gathering of twelve leading men, three each from Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Their goal was to rally around a candidate who might stop the New Yorker [Seward] cold. For the next five hours they wrangled.”
Achorn doesn’t name the three Pennsylvanians who met through the night and into the following morning.
Neither does he mention how the three Pennsylvania delegates might have been chosen for this politically delicate assignment. We do know something, however, gleaned from Lincoln’s published correspondence. In January 1861, following the election, Fayette County state Rep. Smith Fuller wrote Lincoln a letter in an effort to head off the appointment of Pennsylvania’s Simon Cameron to the Cabinet.
To exert maximum pressure on Lincoln, Fuller assured the president-elect that he alone maneuvered state party leaders into selecting, for the Briggs House meeting, three members “reflecting the sentiments of the whole” caucus.
“The action of our [Pennsylvania] delegation nominated you,” Fuller asserted.
“The Lincoln Miracle” offers up inside dealing, the play of ego, and the role of the press in 19th century politics. Horace Greeley exemplified all three. Editor of the nation’s leading newspaper, the New York Tribune, Greeley, a delegate and the most famous and conspicuous man at the convention, had one goal: to derail Seward’s candidacy as payback for an earlier political snub.
There was no more astute political horse trader at Chicago’s Wigwam auditorium than Lincoln’s convention manager, the rotund Illinois jurist, David Davis. The extent of Davis’ backroom deals remains a mystery. But the proof that he deployed all the political arts is easy enough to recognize in Lincoln’s astounding leap from dark horse to nominee.
At home in Springfield, Lincoln wired his men in Chicago. The wire itself may have been an artful ruse: “Make no contracts that will bind me,” he told Davis, to which Davis responded, “Lincoln ain’t here.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.