Part 15 (1/2)

Stanton's responsibilities to his family eventually brought him back to his law practice, but he could not let go of his sorrow. Fearful that his son, then only two years old, would have no memories of the mother he had lost, he spent his nights writing a letter of over a hundred pages to the boy. He described his romance with Mary from its earliest days and included extracts from all the letters they had exchanged over the years. His words were penned with an unsteady hand, he confessed, with ”tears obscuring his vision” and an ”anguish of heart” driving him periodically from his chair. He would have preferred to wait until the boy was older and better able to understand; ”but time, care, sickness, and the vicissitudes of life, wear out and efface the impression of the mind. Besides life is uncertain. I may be called from you.... You might live and die without knowing of the affection your father and mother bore for you, and for each other.”

Stanton's miseries multiplied when his younger brother, Darwin, who completed his studies at Harvard Medical School, developed a high fever that impaired his brain. Unhinged by his acute illness, the young doctor, who was married with three small children, took a sharp lance-head and punctured his throat. ”He bled to death in a few moments,” a family friend recalled. His mother watched helplessly as ”the blood spouted up to the ceiling.” Neighbors were sent to fetch Edwin, who lived nearby. When he witnessed the aftermath of the gruesome spectacle, he reportedly ”lost self-control and wandered off into the woods without his hat or coat.” Fearful that he, too, might commit suicide, neighbors pursued, restrained, and escorted him home, where they took turns watching over him.

This horrific train of events transformed Stanton's spirit. His natural ebullience faded. ”Where formerly he met everybody with hearty and cheerful greeting,” said a friend, ”he now moved about in silence and gloom, with head bowed and hands clasped behind.” Though he remained a tender father to his son and a loving brother to his younger sisters, he became increasingly aggressive in court, intimidating witnesses unnecessarily, antagonizing fellow lawyers, exhibiting rude and irascible behavior.

He derived his only satisfaction from his growing reputation and his increasing wealth, which allowed him to care for his son, his widowed mother, his sisters, and his dead brother's wife and children. The Reaper case was the biggest case of his career, ”the most important Patent cause that has ever been tried,” he told a friend, ”and more time, labor, money and brains have been expended in getting it ready for argument, than any other Patent case ever has had bestowed upon it.” If all went well, it would open doors for Stanton at the highest level of his profession.

When he arrived at the Burnet House, he discovered that Harding ”had been unwell for several days” and might not be in a position to go to court. Terrified that in addition to the legal argument he had fully prepared, he might now have to present the ”scientific part of the case to which [he] had given no attention,” Stanton stayed up all night in preparation. He was greatly relieved when Harding recovered, but anxiety and lack of sleep compounded the irascibility that had marked his demeanor since the multiple deaths in his family.

Beyond the breaking pressures of the case, Stanton had become involved in a turbulent courts.h.i.+p. The young woman, Ellen Hutchison, the daughter of a wealthy Pittsburgh businessman, was the first woman who had attracted his interest since the death of his wife more than a decade earlier. Tall, blond, and blue-eyed, Ellen was, by Stanton's description, ”radiant with beauty and intellect.” While Stanton was smitten with Ellen immediately, she was slow to respond to his affections. She still suffered from a romantic disappointment that had left her heart in ”agony” and convinced her that she could not love again.

Stanton understood, he told her, that ”the trouble of early love fell like a killing frost upon the tree of your life,” but he was confident that ”enough life still remains to put forth fresh blossoms.” Despite his encouragement, Ellen was vexed by some of the qualities others noted in Stanton: his obsessive concentration on work, his impatience and lack of humor, and, most worrisome, ”his careless[ness] and indifferen[ce] to the feelings of all.” Addressing these concerns, Stanton admitted that ”there is so much of the hard and repulsive in my-(I will not say nature, for that I think is soft and tender) but in the temper and habit of life generated by adverse circ.u.mstances, that great love only can bear with and overlook.” If the last decade of his life had been different, he a.s.sured her, if he had been ”blessed with the companions.h.i.+p of a woman whose love would have pointed out and kindly corrected my errors, I would have escaped the fault you condemn.”

After the successful conclusion of the Reaper trial, Ellen was finally persuaded to marry Edwin on June 25, 1856. Happier years followed for Stanton. The Manny patent was sustained not only by the Cincinnati court but by the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal. With this huge victory behind him, Stanton moved his practice to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., where he argued important cases before the Supreme Court, achieved substantial financial security, and built a brick mansion for his new wife.

AS LINCOLN'S OWN HOPES were repeatedly frustrated, he wistfully watched the progress of others, in particular, Stephen Douglas, his great rival with whom he had often debated around the fire of Speed's general store. ”Twenty-two years ago Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted,” he confided in a private fragment later discovered in his papers. ”We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much so as he. With me the race of ambition has been a failure-a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown, even, in foreign lands. I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has reached. So reached, that the oppressed of my species, might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch's brow.”

At this juncture, some have suggested, Lincoln was sustained by his wife's unflagging belief that a glorious destiny awaited him. ”She had the fire, will and ambition,” his law partner John Stuart observed. When Mary was young and still being courted by many beaux, she had told a friend who had taken an old, wealthy husband, ”I would rather marry a good man-a man of mind-with a hope and bright prospects ahead for position-fame and power than to marry all the houses-gold and bones in the world.” Stephen Douglas, who had been among her suitors, she considered ”a very little, little giant, by the side of my tall Kentuckian, and intellectually my husband towers above Douglas just as he does physically.” Quite simply, in Mary's mind, her husband had ”no equal in the United States.”

In an era when, as Mary herself admitted, it was ”unladylike” to be so interested in politics, she avidly supported her husband's political ambitions at every stage. Although she undoubtedly fortified his will at difficult moments, however, Lincoln's quest for public recognition and influence was so consuming, it is unlikely he would have abandoned his dreams, whatever the circ.u.mstances.

ONCE AGAIN, at a moment when Lincoln's career appeared to have come to a halt, Seward and Chase were moving forward. Chase's leaders.h.i.+p during the political uprising in the North that followed the pa.s.sage of the Nebraska Act had proved, in the words of Carl Schurz, to be ”the first bugle call for the formation of a new party.” Under the pressure of mounting sectional division, both national parties-the Whigs and the Democrats-had begun to fray. The Whig Party-the party of Clay and Webster, Lincoln, Seward, and Bates-had been the first to decline as ”conscience Whigs,” opposed to slavery, split from ”cotton Whigs,” who desired an accommodation with slavery. In the 1852 election, the divided Whig Party had been buried in a Democratic landslide. But the pa.s.sage of the Nebraska Act brought serious defections in the Democratic Party as well, as Northerners unwilling to sanction the extension of slavery looked for a new home, leaving the party in control of the Southern Democrats.

The political upheaval was enormously complicated by the emergence of the Know Nothing Party, which had formed in reaction to an unprecedented flood of immigration in the 1840s and 1850s. In 1845, about 20 million people inhabited the United States. During the next decade, nearly 3 million immigrants arrived, mainly from Ireland and Germany. This largely Catholic influx descended on a country that was mostly native-born Protestant, anti-Catholic in sympathy. The Know Nothings fought to delay citizens.h.i.+p for the new immigrants and bar them from voting. In the early 1850s, they won elections in several cities, swept to statewide victory in Ma.s.sachusetts, and gained surprising ground in New York. Newspapers and preachers a.s.saulted ”popery”; there were b.l.o.o.d.y anti-Catholic riots in several Northern cities.

Lincoln had nothing but disdain for the discriminatory beliefs of the Know Nothings. ”How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading cla.s.ses of white people?” he queried his friend Joshua Speed. ”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.”

But this party, too, was soon to founder on the issue of slavery. Many Northern Know Nothings were also antislavery, and finally the anti-Nebraska cause proved more compelling, of more import, than resistance to foreign immigration. The split between the party's Northern and Southern factions would diminish its strength, though the nativist feelings that had fueled its birth would continue to influence the political climate even after the party itself collapsed and died.

With the Whigs disappearing and the Democrats under Southern domination, all those opposed to the extension of slavery found their new home in what eventually became the Republican Party, comprised of ”conscience Whigs,” ”independent Democrats,” and antislavery Know Nothings. In state after state, new coalitions with different names came into being-the Fusion Party, the People's Party, the Anti-Nebraska Party. In Ripon, Wisconsin, an 1854 gathering of antislavery men proposed the name ”Republican Party,” and other state conventions soon followed suit.

In Illinois, Lincoln held back, still hoping that the Whig Party could become the antislavery party. In New York, Seward hesitated as well, finding it difficult to sever friends.h.i.+ps and relations.h.i.+ps built over three decades. Salmon Chase, however, was unhindered by past loyalties. He was ready to commit himself wholeheartedly to the task of forging a new party under the Republican banner. He had always been willing to move on when new political arrangements offered richer prospects for himself and the cause. Beginning as a Whig, he had joined the Liberty Party. He had abandoned that party for the Free-Soilers and then had gone to the Senate as an independent Democrat. Now, with his Senate term coming to an end, and with little chance of being nominated by the Democrats for a second term, he was happy to become a Republican.

In Ohio, as in New York and Illinois, the new movement was complicated by the strength of nativist sentiment. A delicate balance would be required to court the old Know Nothings without forfeiting support in the immigrant German-American community, which was pa.s.sionate in its hatred of slavery. Chase accomplished this feat by running for governor on a Republican platform endorsing no specific Know Nothing proposals, but including eight Know Nothing candidates for all the important offices on the statewide ticket.

It was a hard-fought canva.s.s, and the indefatigable Chase left nothing to chance. Traveling by railroad, horseback, hand car, canoe, and open wagon, he spoke at fifty-seven different places in forty-nine counties. Campaigning in the spa.r.s.ely settled sections of Ohio proved to be an adventure. To reach the town of Delphos, he wrote Kate, he was driven along the railroad tracks ”on a hand car” operated by two men who ”placed themselves at the cranks.” Though the stars provided light, ”it was rather dangerous for who could tell but we might meet a train or perhaps another hand car.”

Chase's strenuous work paid off, making him the first Republican governor of a major state. ”The anxiety of the last few days is over,” Sumner wrote from Boston. ”At last I breathe freely!” Reading the news under the telegraphic band at breakfast, the Ma.s.sachusetts senator could barely contain his excitement, predicting that his friend's victory would do more than anything else for the antislavery cause.

In New York, Seward faced a more difficult challenge than Chase in trying to placate the Know Nothings, who had never forgiven his proposal to extend state funds to Catholic schools. Indeed, they were determined to defeat Seward for reelection to the Senate in 1855. Facing the enmity of both the Know Nothings and the proslavery ”cotton Whigs,” he concluded that he could not risk moving to a new, untested party.

Seward's only hope for reelection lay in Weed's ability to cobble together an antislavery majority from among the various discordant elements in the state legislature. In the weeks before the legislature was set to convene, Weed entertained the members in alphabetical groups, angling for every possible vote, including a few Know Nothings who might put their antislavery principles above their anti-Catholic sentiments. At one of these lavish dinners, the story is told, three or four Know Nothings on a special tour of Weed's house confronted a portrait of Weed's good friend New York's bishop John Hughes. The stratagem would be doomed if the ident.i.ty of the man in the portrait was known, so they were told that it was George Was.h.i.+ngton in his Continental robes, presented to Weed's father by Was.h.i.+ngton himself!

Working without rest, Weed somehow st.i.tched together enough votes to reelect Seward to a second term in the Senate. ”I s.n.a.t.c.h a minute from the pressure of solicitations of lobby men, and congratulations of newly-made friends, to express, not so much my deep, and deepened grat.i.tude to you,” Seward wrote Weed, ”as my amazement at the magnitude and complexity of the dangers through which you have conducted our shattered bark.” In Auburn, a great celebration followed the news of Seward's reelection. ”I have never known such a season of rejoicing,” Frances happily reported to her son Augustus. ”They are firing 700 cannons here-a salute of 300 was given in Albany as soon as the vote was made known.”

Once Seward was securely positioned for six additional years in the Senate, he and Weed were liberated to join the Republican Party. Two state conventions, one Whig, one Republican, were convened in Syracuse in late September 1855. When Seward was asked by a friend which to attend, he replied that it didn't matter. Delegates would enter through two doors, but exit through one. The Whig delegates a.s.sembled first and adopted a strong antislavery platform. Then, led by Weed, they marched into the adjoining hall, where the Republicans greeted them with thunderous applause. From the remnants of dissolving parties, a new Republican Party had been born in the state of New York.

”I am so happy that you and I are at last on the same platform and in the same political pew,” Sumner told Seward. That October, Seward announced his allegiance to the Republican Party in a rousing speech that traced the history of the growth of the slave power, ill.u.s.trating the constant march to acquire new slave states and thereby ensure for slaveholders the balance of power in the Congress. ”What, then, is wanted?” he asked. ”Nothing but organization.” The task before the new Republican Party was to consolidate its strength until it gained control of the Congress and secured the power to forbid the extension of slavery in the territories.

IN EARLY 1856, Lincoln decided that Illinois should follow New York and Ohio in organizing the various anti-Nebraska elements into the new Republican Party. Through his efforts, the call went out for an anti-Nebraska state convention to be held on May 29, 1856. Lincoln proceeded carefully in the weeks leading to the convention, recognizing the complexities of reconciling the disparate opponents of the Nebraska bill into a unified party. Despite the success of Weed and Chase in their respective states, Lincoln worried that the convention call would attract only the more radical elements of the coalition, providing too narrow a base for a viable new party.