CHAPTER X
Birth of the Republican Party—Lincoln One of Its Fathers—Takes His Stand with the Abolitionists—The Bloomington Convention—Lincoln's Great Anti-Slavery Speech—A Ratification Meeting of Three—The First National Republican Convention—Lincoln's Name Presented for the Vice-Presidency—Nomination of Fremont and Dayton—Lincoln in the Campaign of 1856—His Appearance and Influence on the Stump—Regarded as a Dangerous Man—His Views on the Politics of the Future—First Visit to Cincinnati—Meeting with Edwin M. Stanton—Stanton's First Impressions of Lincoln—Regards Him as a "Giraffe"—A Visit to Cincinnati.
The year 1856 saw the dissolution of the old Whig party. It had become too narrow and restricted to answer the needs of the hour. A new platform was demanded, one that would admit the great principles and issues growing out of the slavery agitation. A convention of the Whig leaders throughout the country met at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on the 22d of February of that year, to consider the necessity of a new organization. A little later, Mr. Herndon, in the office of Lincoln, prepared a call for a convention at Bloomington, Illinois, "summoning together all those who wished to see the government conducted on the principles of Washington and Jefferson." This call was signed by the most prominent Abolitionists of Illinois, with the name of A. LINCOLN at the head. The morning after its publication, Major Stuart entered Mr. Herndon's office in a state of extreme excitement, and, as the latter relates, demanded: "'Sir, did Mr. Lincoln sign that Abolition call which is published this morning?' I answered, 'Mr. Lincoln did not sign that call.' 'Did Lincoln authorize you to sign it?' 'No, he never authorized me to sign it.' 'Then do you know that you have ruined Mr. Lincoln?' 'I did not know that I had ruined Mr. Lincoln; did not intend to do so; thought he was a made man by it; that the time had come when conservatism was a crime and a blunder.' 'You, then, take the responsibility of your acts, do you?' 'I do, most emphatically.' However, I instantly sat down and wrote to Mr. Lincoln, who was then in Pekin or Tremont—possibly at court. He received my letter, and instantly replied, either by letter or telegraph—most likely by letter—that he adopted in toto what I had done, and promised to meet the radicals—Lovejoy and such like men—among us." Mr. Herndon adds: "Never did a man change as Lincoln did from that hour. No sooner had he planted himself right on the slavery question than his whole soul seemed burning. He blossomed right out. Then, too, other spiritual things grew more real to him."
Mr. Herndon had been an Abolitionist from birth. It was an inheritance with him; but Lincoln's conversion was a gradual process, stimulated and confirmed by the influence of his companion. "From 1854 to 1860," says Mr. Herndon, "I kept putting into Lincoln's hands the speeches and sermons of Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, and Henry Ward Beecher. I took 'The Anti-Slavery Standard' for years before 1856, 'The Chicago Tribune,' and 'The New York Tribune'; kept them in my office, kept them purposely on my table, and would read to Lincoln the good, sharp, solid things, well put. Lincoln was a natural anti-slavery man, as I think, and yet he needed watching,—needed hope, faith, energy; and I think I warmed him."
It is stated that "when Herndon was very young—probably before Mr. Lincoln made his first protest in the Legislature of the State in behalf of liberty—Lincoln once said to him: 'I cannot see what makes your convictions so decided as regards the future of slavery. What tells you the thing must be rooted out?' 'I feel it in my bones,' was Herndon's emphatic answer. 'This continent is not broad enough to endure the contest between freedom and slavery!' It was almost in these very words that Lincoln afterwards opened the great contest with Douglas. From this time forward he submitted all public questions to what he called 'the test of Bill Herndon's bone philosophy'; and their arguments were close and protracted."
Lincoln's attitude on slavery aroused formidable opposition among his friends, and even in his own family. Mrs. Lincoln was decidedly pro-slavery in her views. Once while riding with a friend she said: "If my husband dies, his spirit will never find me residing outside the limits of a slave State." But opposition, whether from without or within, could never swerve him from a course to which conscience and reason clearly impelled him. Long before Mr. Herndon published the call for the Bloomington convention, he had said to a deputation of men from Chicago, in answer to the inquiry whether Lincoln could be trusted for freedom: "Can you trust yourselves? If you can, you can trust Lincoln forever."
The convention met at Bloomington, May 29, 1856. One of its chief incidents was a speech by Lincoln. This speech was one of the great efforts of his life, and had a powerful influence on the convention. "Never," says one of the delegates, "was an audience more completely electrified by human eloquence. Again and again his hearers sprang to their feet, and by long continued cheers expressed how deeply the speaker had aroused them." "It was there," says Mr. Herndon in one of his lectures, "that Lincoln was baptized and joined our church. He made a speech to us. I have heard or read all of Mr. Lincoln's great speeches; and I give it as my opinion that the Bloomington speech was the grand effort of his life. Heretofore, and up to this moment, he had simply argued the slavery question on grounds of policy,—on what are called the statesman's grounds,—never reaching the question of the radical and eternal right. Now he was newly baptized and freshly born; he had the fervor of a new convert; the smothered flame broke out; enthusiasm unusual to him blazed up; his eyes were aglow with inspiration; he felt a new and more vital justice; his heart was alive to the right; his sympathies burst forth; and he stood before the throne of the eternal Right, in presence of his God, and then and there unburdened his penitential and fired soul. This speech was fresh, new, genuine, odd, original; filled with fervor not unmixed with a divine enthusiasm; his head breathing out through his tender heart its truths, its sense of right, and its feeling of the good and for the good. This speech was full of fire and energy and force; it was logic; it was pathos; it was enthusiasm; it was justice, equity, truth, right, and good, set ablaze by the divine fires of a soul maddened by wrong; it was hard, heavy, knotty, gnarly, edged, and heated. I attempted for about fifteen minutes, as was usual with me then, to take notes; but at the end of that time I threw pen and paper to the dogs, and lived only in the inspiration of the hour. If Mr. Lincoln was six feet four inches high usually, at Bloomington he was seven feet, and inspired at that. From that day to the day of his death, he stood firm on the right. He felt his great cross, had his great idea, nursed it, kept it, taught it to others, and in his fidelity bore witness of it to his death, and finally sealed it with his precious blood."
The committee on resolutions at the convention found themselves, after hours of discussion, unable to agree; and at last they sent for Lincoln. He suggested that all could unite on the principles of the Declaration of Independence and hostility to the extension of slavery. "Let us," said he, "in building our new party make our cornerstone the Declaration of Independence; let us build on this rock, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against us." The problem was mastered, and the convention adopted the following:
Resolved, That we hold, in accordance with the opinions and practices of all the great statesmen of all parties for the first sixty years of the administration of the government, that under the Constitution Congress possesses full power to prohibit slavery in the territories; and that while we will maintain all constitutional rights of the South, we also hold that justice, humanity, the principles of freedom, as expressed in our Declaration of Independence and our National Constitution, and the purity and perpetuity of our government, require that that power should be exerted to prevent the extension of slavery into territories heretofore free.