Lincoln for President: An Unlikely Candidate, An Audacious Strategy, and the Victory No One Saw Coming

418 Pages·2009·3.91 MB·English

by  Bruce Chadwick

“Bruce Chadwick has delved deeply into the behind-the-scenes record…

a compelling account of Lincoln the man and politician.”
—Fred I. Greenstein, Professor of Politics Emeritus, Princeton University

Copyright © 2009 by Bruce Chadwick
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chadwick, Bruce.
Lincoln for president : an unlikely candidate, an audacious strategy, and the
victory no one saw coming / Bruce Chadwick.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865--Political career before 1861. 2. Lincoln,
Abraham, 1809-1865--Political and social views. 3. Presidential candidates-
-United States--Biography. 4. Presidents--United States--Election--1860. 5.
Political campaigns--United States--History--19th century. 6. Republican
Party (U.S. : 1854- ) 7. United States--Politics and government--1857-1861.
I. Title.
E457.C437 2009
973.7092--dc22
2009023197
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
SB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Marjorie and Rory

Contents
Acknowledgments.........................................vii
Prologue ................................................ ix
INvADING THE WIGWAm
Chapter 1: Lincoln Enters the Ring .........................1
Chapter 2: A Politician of Unwavering Ambition...............7
Chapter 3: The Relentless Little Giant ......................23
Chapter 4: The Democrats Split in Two.....................37
Chapter 5: A Great Speaker Is Born ........................45
Chapter 6: The Underdog Rail-Splitter versus
the Firebrand Senator ..........................59
Chapter 7: One Last Night to Steal the Nomination............81
Chapter 8: The Birth of the Seceders .......................97
Chapter 9: Will the House of Representatives Elect the
President? ..................................105
THE PRESIDENTIAL CAmPAIGN OF 1860
Chapter 10: A Great Speaker Is Quiet......................117
Chapter 11: Lincoln, the Letter Writer.....................129
Chapter 12: The Wide Awakes ..........................145
Chapter 13: Disdain for the Secessionists ...................159
Chapter 14: The Keys to victory .........................179
Chapter 15: Breck and Bell and Give ’Em Hell...............207
Chapter 16: The Douglas Campaign ......................223
Chapter 17: The Polls Never Lied.........................255
Chapter 18: Down to the Wire...........................275
Chapter 19: All Roads Lead to New York...................279
Chapter 20: The Eleventh Hour .........................289
Chapter 21: “mary, mary, We Have Been Elected President”....299
Chapter 22: The Inauguration of President Lincoln ...........311
Bibliography ............................................317
Endnotes...............................................333
Index..................................................381
Acknowledgments
I have written several books that involved Abraham Lincoln and never
quite understood the magic about him. Lincoln for President was a long
and comprehensive study of his first election campaign and, after all of that
work and all of that time, I still do not understand all of his magic. Perhaps
we never will.
I now grasp part of it, though, discovered in writing this book. I found out
exactly how he was elected president and why he was one of the best pure
politicians in the nation’s history. To do that, I had to wade through rolls
and rolls of microfilm, read over one hundred books and sift through boxes
full of notes. I had to find and read the letters and journals of hundreds of
people who knew the sixteenth president or worked with him. I read more
nineteenth-century newspapers than I knew were published.
To accomplish that task, and to finish the work, I had much help. I want
to thank the staff at the Guarini Library, at New Jersey City University,
especially Fred Smith. Additional thanks go to the staff of the Firestone
Library at Princeton University and the research staffs at the libraries of
Harvard University, Rutgers University, the morris County Free Library
viii  LincoLn for President
and Randolph libraries (N.J.), and the Abraham Lincoln Library in
Springfield, Illinois.
I want to thank Dr. matthew Pinsker, at Dickinson College, for reading
the manuscript and making suggestions to improve it. He was most helpful.
I want to thank all the professors at Rutgers and Princeton who read parts
of it and also offered suggestions.
Thanks to Joanne Bruno, vice President for Academic Affairs at New
Jersey City University, and her committee, for granting me a sabbatical to
research and write the book.
Thanks to Hillel Black, my editor at Sourcebooks, who helped turn this
from a good idea into a solid historical work. Thanks, too, to the editorial
staff at Sourcebooks, including Peter Lynch, Todd Stocke, Anne Hartman,
and Kelly Bale.
I want to thank my agents at mcIntosh and Otis, Elizabeth Winick and
Rebecca Strauss, who helped to put this project together. Finally, thanks
to my wife marjorie, who assisted in the research and read through the
manuscript several times in order to help me.
Prologue
The 1860 presidential election, one of the most critical in United States
history, has often been presented as a rather staid four-man race in which
Abraham Lincoln, through little effort of his own, was able to slip in the
back door of the White House, even though he won only 39 percent of
the popular vote. In many books, movies, plays, and stories he is wrongly
depicted as a man far above politics whom the nation naturally turned to
in its hour of need. His Republican Party won the 1860 election, of which
the key issue was presented exclusively as slavery, most agreed, because the
country had split into two camps—North and South. The slavery forces
won in the Southern states, and the antislavery forces, the Republicans, took
the Northern states and their huge electoral votes and won the election.
Lincoln won, historians seemed to suggest, because the Democratic Party
was torn apart and its three different candidates—Stephen Douglas, John
Breckinridge, and John Bell—split the opposition vote, giving Lincoln
victory. Subsequently, the conventions and election were thought to have
provided little drama. The major biographers of Lincoln paid little attention
to them. One of his earliest biographers, Carl Sandburg, in his Abraham