A few days after that epoch-making speech a prominent Democratic acquaintance, who had often expressed to me in language of bitterness his hatred of all people who opposed the South, assured me that Mr. Lincoln’s speech had made him a Free-Soiler, although he had not believed it possible that such a change in his views could ever occur.
In subsequent speeches throughout New England Mr. Lincoln went to greater lengths in his denunciation of slavery. At Hartford, on the 5th of March, he denounced slavery as the enemy of the free working-man; a day later, at New Haven, he characterized slavery as “the snake in the Union bed”; at Norwich, on the ninth of that month, he described Douglas’s popular sovereignty as “the sugar-coated slavery pill.”
These later speeches greatly strengthened the anti-slavery agitation throughout the North, and went far to settle the opinions of the voters, who were wavering between Douglas’s popular sovereignty and the ultra radicalism of Garrison and Phillips.
III
HOW LINCOLN WAS FIRST NOMINATED
The Republican National Convention that convened in Chicago, May 16, 1860, proved a complete refutation of the frequently expressed belief that the new party had died with Fremont’s defeat in 1856. Some of the ablest and most distinguished men in the country appeared as delegates and as candidates for nomination. During the four years following Fremont’s defeat by James Buchanan, of Pennsylvania, former minister to England, the Republican party had been strengthened by the affiliation of many Northern Democrats who were inclined to oppose the extension of slavery. The struggles to exclude the curse of slavery from Kansas and Nebraska had agitated the entire country during these years, and had brought many new voters into the ranks of the Republican party.
William H. Seward was admittedly the great Republican leader and the ablest champion of his party. His speech in the United States Senate on the “Irrepressible Conflict” had made him famous all over the country, and he was constantly talked of by both friends and foes. At least two-thirds of the delegates at the Chicago convention favored his nomination, and even the majority of the delegates from Illinois, Lincoln’s own State, while instructed to vote for “Honest Old Abe” as the favorite son, passively favored Seward.
In the New York delegation was Tom Hyer, the noted champion prize-fighter of his generation. He bore the banner of the New York City Republican Club, and was an ardent supporter of Seward. Being a man six feet two and a half inches in height, he presented an imposing figure.
The defeat of Seward’s ambition was generally ascribed to an unhealed break between Horace Greeley, Thurlow Weed, and himself. These three men, all eminent in their spheres, constituted what was known then as the “Republican Triumvirate,” or what would now be called the “Big Three.” This breach occurred in November, 1854, over five years previously. Greeley resented the injustice that he believed had been meted out to him, being sincerely of the opinion that Senator Seward had deceived him, and this unfriendly feeling had fermented into a fully developed hatred.
His letter to Seward announcing “a dissolution of the political firm of Seward, Weed, and Greeley, by the withdrawal of the junior partner,” is a part of political history. It is a long epistle, covering more than five pages in Greeley’s Recollections of a Busy Life, in which is recounted the writer’s career in New York, from his start as “a poor young printer” to his affiliations with the political powers of the Empire State. While it contains kindly words for Thurlow Weed, it proclaims the severance of all relations with Seward. In conclusion, it acknowledges acts of kindness by his former partner in politics, and, reiterating that “such acts will be gratefully remembered, the writer takes an eternal farewell.”
In the stormy days preceding the Chicago convention the New York Tribune’s opposition to Seward’s nomination had been continuous. But I have always had an idea, based upon a study of the actual occurrences in the convention where I was a looker-on, and from my intimacy with Mr. Greeley, that the factor which had the most to do with Seward’s defeat was the fear of Henry S. Lane, Republican candidate for Governor of Indiana, and of Andrew G. Curtin, Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania, that Seward could not carry these two States. This weakness would not only insure defeat of the Presidential ticket, but would carry down with it the aspirations of these two Gubernatorial candidates.