Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

In an 1855 letter—and not in a public speech—to his friend Joshua Speed, Lincoln addressed his views regarding immigrants and the nativist Know-Nothing Party, which was an offshoot of the Whig Party led by Millard Fillmore, the thirteenth president. Lincoln was quite conscious that, from time to time, he was falsely accused of being sympathetic to the Know-Nothings. Reflecting back on the Declaration of Independence, he wrote, “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes[.]’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [ sic ].”27

Although Seward went in as the expected winner and other prominent candidates presented themselves, including the governor of Ohio, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates, a congressman from Missouri, Lincoln prevailed. He secured the nomination on the third ballot. How did he do it? Well, it certainly helped that the convention was held in Chicago, Lincoln’s backyard, where he could exert the kind of double-dealing influence that would not have been easily available to him had the convention not been in Illinois. The convention venue, the Wigwam, required tickets for entry. Lincoln’s campaign team had counterfeit tickets printed and used them to pack the hall with his supporters. Since space was limited, he managed by this means to keep many of Seward’s supporters from entering the Wigwam and being present to cast their ballot in his favor. Those who made their way in found that Lincoln’s political managers engineered it so that Seward’s men were seated in a far corner of the hall where, in a time before microphones, they could not be heard. And then, as the Chicago Tribune reported on May 18, 1860: “During the third ballot, with Lincoln tantalizingly close to winning the nomination, [Chicago mayor Joseph] Medill sat close to the chairman of the Ohio delegation, which had backed its favorite son, Salmon P. Chase. Swing your votes to Lincoln, Medill whispered, and your boy can have anything he wants. The Ohio chairman shot out of his chair and changed the state’s votes. After a moment of stunned silence, the flimsy Wigwam began to shake with the stomping of feet and the shouting of the Lincoln backers who packed the hall and blocked the streets outside.” Thus, through clever maneuvering of the sort that today we might call dirty tricks, Lincoln rose in the Republican political ranks to become his party’s nominee. The promise to Salmon Chase was not forgotten. Chase became Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury.

It is the second aspect of Lincoln’s political ability that is more appealing and that shows him to be the brilliant man we prefer to remember. He manifested his brilliance politically just about whenever he could turn campaigning into an opportunity to argue a lawyer’s brief for his preferred point of view. Consider his famous “House Divided” speech in June 1858. We all know the famous, quotable lines, such as “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” but too few of us appreciate the stark and belligerent message he conveyed in that great lawyer’s brief that essentially called for a war on slavery. It is difficult to imagine how anyone today can read that speech—given when Lincoln accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for an Illinois Senate seat—without seeing it as a call for war. It is harder still to imagine that his contemporaries did not understand that he was demanding either war or a surrender of the proslavery parts of the country to a leader bent on getting rid of “so great an evil.”

Lincoln gave the “House Divided” speech against the backdrop of the recent Dred Scott decision. The speech and the subsequent Lincoln-Douglas debates were part of Lincoln’s political strategy to maneuver his Senate rival, the incumbent Stephen Douglas, into staking out a position on slavery that was sure to divide the national Democratic Party in 1860. By doing so, Lincoln cost himself the Senate seat but improved, as he understood he was doing, his chances of becoming the Republican nominee for president. And he increased the chances of war if he (or any Republican) was elected president in 1860. This, too, he also surely understood. Indeed, he delivered the controversial “House Divided” speech against the advice of his own friends and advisers who had these very fears. In it Lincoln stated (with his own emphasis included):

We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.

Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased , but has constantly augmented .

In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free .

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved —I do not expect the house to fall —but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

This passage reminds us of Lincoln’s conviction that the Dred Scott decision had undone the federal bargain that was necessary to unify the states under the Constitution. Now, with the Supreme Court’s ruling, it became clear to Lincoln that the country would survive only by being all slave or all free. The message he delivered in that speech was a strongly argued brief for a free nation, or, at least, that is how it was interpreted by Douglas, who referred repeatedly to the “black” Republican Party, and it was how it apparently was interpreted by the state legislators in Illinois who chose Douglas over Lincoln.

Did Lincoln hope , as he intimated, to avoid national dissolution over the question of slavery? Certainly. Did he expect that it could be avoided? That seems doubtful given that he knew the South was not about to give up slavery voluntarily and the North increasingly found it intolerable; hence his statement, “it will become all one thing or all the other.” In this regard it is worth recalling the less often quoted closing portion of that same “House Divided” speech:

Two years ago the Republicans of the nation mustered over thirteen hundred thousand strong. We did this under the single impulse of resistance to a common danger, with every external circumstance against us. Of strange, discordant , and even, hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds, and formed and fought the battle through, under the constant hot fire of a disciplined, proud, and pampered enemy. Did we brave all then to falter now?—now—when that same enemy is wavering , dissevered and belligerent?

The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail—if we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise councils may accelerate or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later the victory is sure to come.28

Most clearly, the “common danger” to which he referred was not just national dissolution, but the unfettered spread of slavery throughout the states and the territories, a spread promoted by the Dred Scott decision. All the great political developments of the previous few years had pointed to a nation that would be all slave and that was an outcome intolerable to Abraham Lincoln, as well as to much of the population in the northern states and, of course, to abolitionists everywhere. Lincoln’s declaration “We shall not fail” and all the rest of the heated rhetoric in this speech hardly seems the utterance of a man seeking to push the regional differences onto the backburner for the sake of preserving the Union. It sounds much more like the man who declared that the “Republicans of the nation” came together “under the single impulse of resistance to a common danger.” It was a radical statement and it was understood as such in its time, just as it was understood by Lincoln to be both an instrument for his eventual rise to the presidency and almost certainly as well a provocation likely to trigger a heightened threat of civil war.