n 1860 political cartoon, The Republican Party Going to the Right House, shows the party’s presidential candidate, Lincoln, being carried on a rail by the party’s most famous newspaper editor, Horace Greeley, into a lunatic asylum. Mop haired and awkward, his shirt sleeves rolled up, Lincoln looks back at a miscellaneous crowd of followers and says, “Now my friends I’m almost in, and the millennium is going to begin, so ask what you will and it shall be granted.” His acolytes call for social change: a free-love couple argues for “passional attraction” and the banishment of marriage; a Mormon promotes polygamy; a bearded socialist advocates the distribution of property; a spinsterly suffragist predicts woman’s ascendancy over man; a tramp asks for a free hotel room; a street tough demands the firing of all policemen so that “the bohoys [sic] can run with the machine” and engage in “a muss”; and a dandified African American declares, “De white man hab no rights dat cullud pussons am bound to spect. I want dat understood.”1
The cartoon is misleading but telling. Actually, Republicans had little tolerance for radicalism or social disruption. They denounced free love, dismissed Mormonism along with slavery as “relics of barbarism,” preferred free enterprise to socialism, and did not call for women and African Americans to strip white males of power.
But the cartoon accurately reflects virulent anti-Republican hostility on the part of Democrats and Southerners, who criticized Lincoln’s party for its alleged association with subversive “isms” that, in their view, threatened to ruin the nation.
The cartoon also points out a very real problem that Lincoln and others faced in the mid-1850s: political and social fragmentation. The collapse of the Whig Party let loose an array of factions. In June 1858, looking back at the formation of the Republican Party four years earlier, Lincoln declared, “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.”2 The Republicans stood to the left of Democrats on many issues, and if you squinted at them from an unfriendly viewpoint, as the Democrats did, their components blended into many other unconventional isms that bubbled up in the cauldron of antebellum culture.
Seeing that his party had burst into fragments that were often mistaken for radical isms, Lincoln took an active role in shaping a new fusion party that was appealingly moderate and yet firmly devoted to antislavery principles.
Lincoln correctly described the shattering of the old party system and the “hot fire” of insults that were hurled at Republicans. The epithet “Black Republicanism”—the worst ism of all, in the Democrats’ view—raised the specter of racial reversal that the Republicans would supposedly bring about. A Democratic journalist wrote that the Republican Party, ranging from members “who can go a little nigger” to ones “who can go the whole nigger,” championed “the various isms and fanaticisms that have infected our country . . . ; forsooth, witchism, foolism, mesmerism, abolitionism, knownothingism, spiritualism, &c., &c.”3
Such denunciation by Democrats prompted New York’s Robert Emmet, the lead-off speaker at the first national Republican convention in Philadelphia in June 1856, to confront the isms charge. “They may call us Black Republicans and Negro-Worshippers,” he said. “They may say that we mean to concentrate and gather under our wings all the odds and ends of parties, all the isms of the day. Be it so. Let them come at us with all their isms. We will merge them all in that great ism: patriotism. [Rapturous and prolonged cheering.]”4
Some Republicans, especially the mercurial Horace Greeley, did champion passing isms. Lincoln had a different approach to the isms. He observed them and channeled their energies in ways that combatted two specific ones: sectionalism, which he tried to challenge at every turn, and what he called “Douglasism”—that is, the Democratic Party’s effort, under Stephen A. Douglas, to open the way for the spread of slavery.5 His refusal to get caught up in other isms in spite of constant charges of being their defender is not adequately appreciated. His reaction against such charges helps explain the doggedness of his pursuit of what in 1854 he called America’s “central idea . . . the equality of men.”
WOOLLY HORSE, WOOLLY PARTY
Stephen Douglas pounced quickly and hard. In 1854, the year that saw the passage of his Kansas-Nebraska Act, he declared the Whig Party dead. (In a wry comeback, Lincoln announced himself at a political rally as a ghost.) Soon Douglas was insisting that the fusion party being rebuilt on its ruins was an amalgam of wild isms. In the 1856 presidential campaign, which pitted the Democrat James Buchanan against the Republican John Frémont, Douglas repeatedly delivered a stump speech that, he hoped, would kill off the fledgling Republican Party. To raucous audiences, he declared:
The black republican army is an allied army, composed of Know Nothings, Abolitionists, Free Soilers, Maine Liquor Law men, (laughter,) woman’s right men, (increased laughter,) Anti-renters, Anti-Masons, and all the isms that have been sloughed off from all the honest parties in the country, and have made a combination against the Democracy. We have got to fight this allied army. . . . Our business is to bury all the isms and all their allies in one common grave in November next.6
The anti-ism argument was repeated by many other Democrats who wanted to present Frémont and the Republicans as troublesome radicals. One journalist, insisting that only the Democrat Buchanan could save the nation, lambasted Frémont as “a strictly sectional candidate for the Presidency, nominated by the North, sustained by an abolition conglomerate of all the isms at war with the rights of the States and the perpetuity of our blessed Union.”7 Governor Henry Wise of Virginia told a cheering crowd at Richmond that if Frémont was elected, isms would rule the land, and civil war would surely follow. Wise announced, “It [the Republican Party] is all the isms, I say, combined in the superlative ism, which I denounce as demonism.” He asserted that the choice of “slavery or abolition, Frémont or Buchanan, democracy or demonism . . . are fearful issues; they are issues of peace or war—of civil war, of blood, disunion and death. [Tremendous cheers.]”8
Civil war, blood, death. Surely, this was an overreaction to Frémont, the reserved western explorer and former California senator who had been chosen by the Republicans because, while opposed to slavery, he came without the controversial reputation of more outspoken candidates such as Salmon Chase and William Henry Seward. But for Democrats, Frémont was like any other Black Republican—vilely antislavery and overly sympathetic to blacks.
To highlight his supposedly Negrophile tendencies, Democrats seized on an unusual symbol associated with him: the Woolly Horse. In 1847, the showman Phineas T. Barnum, always on the lookout for curiosities, purchased a brown, curly-haired horse, without a mane or a tail, and waited for the right moment to put it on exhibit. The moment came in 1850, after Frémont, who had been lost for weeks while exploring the snow-bound Rockies, emerged from his trek unharmed. Barnum seized the public excitement over the adventure by claiming that Frémont in his travels had captured an “extremely complex” beast, “made up of the Elephant, Deer, Horse, Buffalo, Camel, and Sheep,” that “easily bounds twelve or fifteen feet high.”9 A legend arose about Frémont and his men in the wilds having chased this creature as it flew along, leaping many yards at a time. Frémont’s father-in-law, Thomas Hart Benton, sued Barnum for his chicanery, but the lawsuit only increased interest in the Woolly Horse and its alleged connection to Frémont.
In the 1856 race, Frémont, said his political enemies, was the Woolly Horse—woolly in the sense of being an abolitionist who defended black people. A Democratic reporter branded Frémont as the “merest tool” of “Northern fanatics” like Seward and Giddings. “The ‘Woolly Heads’ at Philadelphia,” the reporter wrote, “have mounted the Woolly Horse and are now going strong for wool. It is their pretended love for wool which induced them to nominate Fremont. . . . Oh, their love [is] for any thing that wears wool, from a black sheep down to a nigger.”10An Ohio paper averred that “The genuine Woolly Head Republicans think the day is not far distant when they can say, ‘nigger ahead, white man behind.’ . . . Freemen of Ohio! Choose to-day—Fremont and Nigger Supremacy or Buchanan and a government for white men!”11
A political cartoon pictured Buchanan as an antlered buck whose rear legs kick the woolly horse, Frémont, over a cliff. Frémont cries, “O I shall never get to the White House. Why did Barnum sell me to Greeley & Seward?”—which elicits Buchanan’s command: “Carry this Woolly Horse back to Barnum, if he’s not too much injured . . . The Union forever!”12
By 1856, Lincoln was a known antislavery politician. The previous year, he had almost won a seat in the US Senate from Illinois. The state legislature gave him forty-five votes on the first ballot—just five shy of the number needed for victory. In later ballots, maneuvering by the opposition chipped away at his lead. Alarmed at the growing support for the proslavery Democrat Joel Matteson, he told his backers to shift to the antislavery Democrat Lyman Trumbull, who won the seat. Lincoln’s rising visibility resulted in the Republican Party nearly choosing him as Frémont’s running mate at its first national convention, held in Philadelphia in June 1856. The spot went instead to the New Jersey politician William L. Dayton. In the fall, Lincoln campaigned widely in Illinois for the Frémont/Dayton ticket.
During the campaign he gained valuable practice in representing a “woolly” party. In one speech, replying to the charge that “Mr. Lincoln and the woolly party are working to endanger if not dissolve the Union,” Lincoln said that that he “would go for Fremont . . . —would go for the woolly horse
itself, if necessary to secure congressional prohibition of slavery in the territories.”13 In another speech, responding to a Democrat in the audience who shouted that Frémont was “a woolly head,” Lincoln insisted that the Republican Party was actually right in step with Washington, Jefferson, and Clay and thus walked in “old paths.” Clueless as to how to refute Lincoln’s historical argument, the heckler said that Frémont “found the woolly horse and ate dogs.” Lincoln retorted, “That aint true—but if it was, how does it prove that Fremont is a woolly head—how?” No answer came from the heckler. Lincoln: “You’re treed, my friend. [Loud laughter.]”
But opponents of the Republicans made sure that “woolly” stuck to the party. Lincoln himself was accused of woolliness. In the 1860 presidential race, Stephen Douglas’s running mate, Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia, said of the Republican Party that you might “simmer it down, and then dissolve it in a fluid, and all you could find would be ‘WOOLLY-HEAD, WOOLLY-HEAD,’” and that America should be “ready for disunion in the case of Lincoln’s election.”14 The New York Herald printed a poem that associated Lincoln with a sick, lame Woolly Horse, meant to symbolize his party’s advocacy of futile ideas about racial equality:
Oh, the Woolly Horse has got the ails,
And up Salt River [that is, toward oblivion] started,
Where Old Abe is splitting rails
All sad and broken hearted.15
For the Democrats, the Woolly Horse was the unsightly mascot of Black Republicanism.
NAVIGATING THE ISMS
Among the other isms commonly used to denounce Lincoln’s party were Maine Lawism, Know-Nothingism, and women’s rights. It’s understandable that Republicans were accused of an association with these isms. Many Republicans supported the 1851 Maine Law, which prohibited the sale of alcohol, in their conviction that slavery to the bottle was akin to chattel slavery. Know-Nothingism—the secret anti-Catholic movement so called because its members pledged to say nothing about it to outsiders—held appeal for conservative Protestants and nativists in the party who feared the influx of foreigners in America. Women’s rights, while not a popular movement, joined hands with the Republican Party in the 1856 race, when, for the first time, women turned out in great numbers to support the wife of a presidential candidate, Jessie Benton Frémont.
Lincoln learned how to turn these issues to his advantage by avoiding narrow association with any of them while directing their supporters to his main project of stopping slavery’s spread.
That he did so is remarkable because he was surrounded by partisans of these issues. Prohibition was a key cause for several people close to him, including his law partner William Herndon, his former partner John T. Stuart, and the newspaper editor Simeon Francis. Lincoln joined these men in signing a letter requesting the publication of a temperance lecture given in January 1853 by the Reverend James Smith before a convention of the Sangamon County Maine Law Alliance.16 We can surmise that Lincoln gave his signature, which was last on the list, reluctantly—to go along with his Republican friends, perhaps—since Smith’s speech used the kind of uncharitable language he frowned upon. Smith described the drunkard as “a miserable being with bloated face and shabby appearance, frequenting the lowest haunts of vice . . . forever under the influence of strong drink, stretched senseless in the gutter; or rolling in the mud on the highway; or staggering into the midst of his unhappy family, besmeared with blood and dirt.”17
Maine Law fever struck William Herndon especially hard. Though he was a tippler whom Lincoln once had to bail out of jail after he and some hooligans drunkenly trashed a building, Herndon joined several temperance groups, including the Washingtonians and the Temple of Honor, and served as president of the Maine Law Alliance. After being elected as Springfield’s mayor in April 1854, Herndon went door to door to liquor sellers, urging them to close down. He pushed for a prohibition law and was thrilled when the Illinois legislature passed one in February 1855, subject to a referendum. Did Lincoln write this law? In the early twentieth century, promoters of the Eighteenth Amendment (the Prohibition Amendment) spread the story that Lincoln was the bill’s author. A bald effort to put his imprimatur on prohibition, the story was either an intentional fabrication or a case of old-age misremembering on the part of the ailing temperance advocate James B. Merwin, who claimed to have been “an intimate friend” of Lincoln’s (a highly dubious claim: Lincoln’s son Robert reported that he had no recollection at all of Merwin).18
At any rate, when the Illinois prohibition bill was brought to a popular vote in June 1855, it was defeated. Herndon glumly wrote Theodore Parker, “We got badly beaten in our temperance move. . . . It is very hard to overcome interest, appetite, habit and the low demagogue who rules the synod in the grocery [that is, the saloon].”19 Herndon may well have drowned his disappointment in liquor, as he did at many other difficult moments in his life. As one historian writes of Herndon: “A leader in the temperance movement, his greatest failing was his addiction to alcohol.”20
Lincoln shared neither Herndon’s zeal for prohibition nor his addiction; on this point, he was also distant from other intemperate temperance men he knew, such as Usher Linder and Richard Yates. Although Lincoln joined the Sons of Temperance, he must have done so in the spirit of his 1842 temperance address, in which he urged nondrinkers to team up with drinkers in fighting addiction. Of course he had no such problem himself. In answer to Stephen Douglas, who asked about his attitude toward the temperance movement, he replied, “I am temperate in this, that I don’t drink anything.”21 As a lawyer, he was flexible on temperance—in the courtroom, he sometimes defended prohibition advocates and at other times liquor sellers.22 As a politician, he aligned himself with temperance mainly because he knew it would attract Republican support. For instance, when running for the Senate in 1854 he received assurance that a certain legislator would back him “if he finds you safe, as I assure him he will, on Anti-Nebraska, Maine Law, Good Whig &c &c—.”23 However, Lincoln did not want to push the temperance cause too zealously, which might have alienated would-be Democratic fence jumpers or the increasing number of German and Irish émigrés in Illinois, groups that were repelled by the temperance movement. On temperance, Lincoln sought a middle point between extremes, positioning himself carefully in the center.
He performed a similar maneuver with regard to Know-Nothingism. The Know-Nothings became a significant force in the mid-1850s, just when Lincoln was rising to political prominence. Stirred to xenophobia over the surge of European immigrants in America, many of them Irish or Germans escaping poverty or persecution in their native countries, the Know-Nothings (soon renamed the American Party) sent candidates to office throughout the nation, aiming to introduce nativist legislation. By 1854, they numbered one million nationally and elected eight governors and hundreds of congressmen, as well as the mayors of Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia.24 They were especially successful in the Northeast, as in Massachusetts, where in 1854 they won the governorship and all but three of the state legislature’s four hundred seats. They clashed with Democrats and
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