Raymond and the Times, when the Republican national convention met in Chicago on May 16, 1860, were ardently for Seward—indeed, Thurlow Weed and Raymond were Seward’s chief lieutenants there. Greeley, had he been able to make the nomination himself, would have chosen Bates of Missouri first, and anybody to beat Seward second. Bryant, up to the time of the Cooper Union speech, had supported Chase for the nomination, but he knew that his chances were slight and he now leaned toward Lincoln—for he also was anxious to see Seward beaten. The Evening Post’s dislike of Seward dated from 1853, when it had declared (Nov. 2) that his friends in the Whig Party and a Democratic faction had formed a corrupt combination to plunder the State treasury through contracts. Its bitterness against him had steadily increased during the years of his close association with the political boss, Thurlow Weed. No one believed that Seward was dishonest, but thousands thought that Weed’s methods were detestable, and that Seward’s intimacy with men who schemed for public grants was altogether too close. References to the connection between “Seward’s chances” and “New York street railroads” had become common in 1859. Bryant wrote his associate Bigelow on Dec. 14 that, much as Seward had been hurt by the misconstruction of his phrase “the irrepressible conflict,” he had been damaged more in New York by something else. “I mean the project of Thurlow Weed to give charters for a set of city railways, for which those who receive them are to furnish a fund of from four to six hundred thousand dollars, to be expended for the Republican cause in the next Presidential election.” He added on Feb. 20:
Mr. Seward is not without his chance of a nomination, though some of your friends here affirm that he has none. He is himself, I hear, very confident of getting it. While the John Brown excitement continued, his prospects improved, for he was the best-abused man of his party—now that he is let alone, his stock declines again and people talk of other men. For my part I do not see that he is more of a representative man than a score of others in our party. The great difficulty which I have in regard to him is this, that by the election of a Republican President the slavery question is settled, and that with Seward for President, it will be the greatest good luck, a special and undeserved favor of Providence, if every honest Democrat of the Republican party be not driven into the opposition within a twelvemonths after he enters the White House. There are bitter execrations of Weed and his friends passing from mouth to mouth among the old radical Democrats of the Republican party here.
Bigelow, writing home from London (March 20), saw in Lincoln the only hope of the party. He had no use for Seward; he had even less for Bates—“an old Clay Whig from Missouri ... who has been for two years or more the candidate of Erastus Brooks and Gov. Hunt, who is not only not a Republican but who is put forward because he is not a Republican, and whom the Tribune recommends because he can get some votes that a straight-out Republican cannot get.” Moreover, Bigelow saw “no possibility of nominating Fessenden, or Chase, or Banks, or any such man”; and he knew that unless the right kind of Republican was elected the fight was lost.
Lincoln’s nomination was therefore hailed with more real gratification by the Post than by any other great Eastern newspaper. It saw in him one who would call forth the enthusiasm of his party, and the attachment of independent voters. The popular approval had already been surprising in its volume and gusto. “The Convention could have made no choice, we think, which, along with so many demonstrations of ardent approval, would have been met with so few expressions of dissent.” It paused to point out the two reasons for Seward’s defeat. The first was the convention’s opinion, with which it was inclined to agree, that he could not be elected, because he could not have carried Pennsylvania, Douglas would have beaten him in Illinois, and he was weak in Ohio, Indiana, and Vermont; the second lay in the distrust of his warmest political friends excited by the corruption of the two last New York legislatures. At this time there was much talk about “representative men,” and the Post, after naming a few, remarked that Lincoln surpassed them all as a personification of the distinctive genius of our country and its institutions. “Whatever is peculiar in the history and development of America, whatever is foremost in its civilization, whatever is good in its social and political structure, finds its best expression in the career of such men as Abraham Lincoln.”
A vignette of Lincoln by one of Bryant’s friends then traveling in the West, George Opdyke, was immediately printed to disprove the current story that he dwelt in “the lowest hoosier style”:
I found Mr. Lincoln living in a handsome, but not pretentious, double two-story frame house, having a wide hall running through the center, with parlors on both sides, neatly but not ostentatiously furnished. It was just such a dwelling as a majority of the well-to-do residents of these fine western towns occupy. Everything about it had a look of comfort and independence. The library I remarked in passing, particularly, and I was pleased to see long rows of books, which told of the scholarly tastes and culture of the family.
Lincoln received us with great, and to me surprising, urbanity. I had seen him before in New York, and brought with me an impression of his awkward and ungainly manner; but in his own house, where he doubtless feels himself freer than in the strange New York circles, Lincoln had thrown this off, and appeared easy, if not graceful. He is, as you know, a tall lank man, with a long neck, and his ordinary movements are unusually angular, even out west. As soon, however, as he gets interested in conversation, his face lights up, and his attitudes and gestures assume a certain dignity and impressiveness. His conversation is fluent, agreeable, and polite. You see at once from it that he is a man of decided and original character. His views are all his own; such as he has worked out from a patient and varied scrutiny of life, and not such as he has obtained from others. Yet he cannot be called opinionated. He listens to others like one eager to learn. And his replies evince at the same time both modesty and self-reliance. I should say that sound common sense was the principal quality of his mind, although at times a striking phrase or word reveals a peculiar vein of thought.
At first, it is interesting to note, the Evening Post was not only all confidence in Lincoln’s election, but all contempt for the Southern threats of secession if he won. Until that fall it held to a short-sighted view that the secession talk was a mere repetition of the old Southern attempt, made so often since nullification days, to bully the North as a spoiled child bullies its nurse. This confidence, which the Times and Tribune fully shared, was not assumed for campaign reasons. The stock market sustained it, and Bryant pointed to the midsummer advance in security prices as showing that business was not alarmed. A correspondent wrote from Newport on Aug. 23 that visitors from all parts of the South were there, but no fire-eating disunionists among them; “they deplore the election of Lincoln, while they regard it as almost a certainty, but scout the idea of secession or rebellion as a necessary consequence of it.” For years the North had listened to bullying, blustering, and threats from the South, and it had grown too much used to menaces.
But in the final fortnight of the campaign the newspaper began to perceive that there was a sullen reality behind these fulminations. On Oct. 20 we find the first editorial to treat secession earnestly, one declaring that no government could parley with men in arms against its authority, and that like Napoleon dealing with the insurrectionaries of Paris, the United States “must fire cannon balls and not blank cartridges.” On Oct. 29 it charged the existence of a definite secession conspiracy. Its authors were Howell Cobb and other officers high in the Administration; moreover, it declared, “the eggs of the conspiracy now hatching were laid four years ago, in the Cincinnati Convention.” Bigelow at that time, a close observer at Cincinnati of the scenes amid which Buchanan was nominated, had declared (June 13, 1856) that the nomination was purchased from the South by a promise from one of Buchanan’s lieutenants, Col. Samuel Black, that if a radical Republican should be elected his successor in 1860, then Buchanan would do nothing to interfere with the secession of the Southern States.
John Bigelow