Cheering and applause erupted. Hats, canes, and books tossed in the air nearly brought down the canvas ceiling. Lincoln, who had been hauled by the crowd to the stage, looked at the rails and said that maybe they were his, “but whether they were or not, he had mauled many and many better ones since he had grown to manhood.”39 More cheering, mixed with laughter. The enthusiastic attendees adopted a resolution naming Lincoln as Illinois Republicans’ first choice for the presidency, to be promoted by the state’s delegates to the national convention.
The Illinois Rail-splitter was born. Abe was about to emerge on the national scene.
But for the Abe image to have an impact, Lincoln first had to secure the Republican nomination. Reaching that goal was sped by a group of Lincoln supporters, led by his campaign manager David Davis, who attended the Republican National Convention from May 16 to May 18. Because no building in Chicago was big enough to house the convention, a 100-by-180-foot wooden structure was built at the southeast corner of Lake and Market Streets. Dubbed the Chicago Wigwam, the building could hold more than ten thousand people. Four hundred and sixty-six delegates represented twenty-four states, including the slave states of Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, Kentucky, Texas, and Missouri, whose presence at the convention signaled the Republican Party’s effort to prove itself nonsectional.40
The air buzzed with excitement when a mass of politicians and spectators gathered in the Wigwam on May 16. Before long, the floor was slippery with saliva and tobacco juice, and the air reeked of whiskey guzzled by the raucous crowd.
The Republican platform passed by the convention supported the nonextension of slavery and denounced the recently revived slave trade. To reach out to the South, the platform promised to protect slavery where it already existed. One plank lambasted armed invasion of a state, such as John Brown’s raid, as “the gravest of crimes.”41 Other planks endorsed federally funded river and harbor improvements, the transcontinental railroad, and a homestead act. If Lincoln at this time was pulling back from the overt radicalism of the Peoria and “House Divided” speeches, so the Republican platform struck a moderate tone at a divided moment, when a radically worded provision could provoke disunion or civil war.
The temperately phrased but firmly antislavery party platform favored Lincoln. So did his team of operatives, who played the politicians and the onlookers at the Chicago Wigwam masterfully. An expert organizer, David Davis delegated team members to approach representatives of the various states in order to sway votes by promising certain political rewards if the states went for Lincoln. Even though Lincoln had written, “Make no contracts that will bind me,” Davis doled out promises of patronage, regardless of whether or not they could be fulfilled.42 When the Chicago lawyer Wirt Dexter later remarked that Davis must have prevaricated at the convention, Davis declared, “Prevaricated. Prevaricated, brother Dexter? We lied, lied like hell.”43
Among the most active Lincoln boosters at the convention was Ward Hill Lamon. The burly, hard-drinking Lamon had no scruples about using any means of advancing Lincoln’s cause. Lamon went to a Chicago printer and had hundreds of counterfeit convention tickets issued. Early on May 18, he handed out the tickets to Chicagoans who supported Lincoln. His strategy was to fill the Wigwam with as many Lincoln backers as possible before a large contingent of Seward supporters could enter the building. He instructed the Lincolnites to outshout Seward’s backers.
Davis and his team had expected Lincoln to win on the third ballot, and they were right. On the first ballot, Seward had 173.5 votes, Lincoln 102, with Cameron, Bates and McLean far behind. The second ballot saw Seward at 184.5, Lincoln at 181, and Salmon Chase in the mix with 42.5 votes. A shouting match between the various candidates’ supporters developed in which the artificially inflated Lincoln contingent became especially uproarious. After the Sewardites let loose with wild yelling, Lincoln’s name was announced. His supporters exploded with a sound compared by one observer to “all the hogs ever slaughtered in Cincinnati giving their death squeals together” and by another to “a thousand steam whistles, ten acres of hotel gongs, a tribe of Comanches, headed by a choice vanguard from pandemonium.”44
A combination of the noise, Davis’s strategizing, and insufficient support for Seward led to the selection of Lincoln on the third ballot.
Lincoln, meanwhile, was back in Springfield, doing law work and checking the convention results as they came over the telegraph wires. He relaxed for a time by playing handball against a wall with some boys. When the news of his nomination arrived at the law office, he accepted the exuberant congratulations of those around him and then excused himself by saying, “I must go home; there is a little short woman there that is more interested in this matter than I am.”45
The next day, a Republican committee led by the Massachusetts congressman George Ashmun appeared at the Lincolns’ Jackson Street home to deliver the official results of the convention. Friends of Lincoln had sent bottles of brandy and champagne to be served with cakes and sandwiches to the committee. Hours before the committee arrived, Gustave Koerner and Judge Ebenezer Peck visited the Lincolns and saw brandy decanters set out on a table, with a basket of champagne bottles on the floor below. The sight disturbed Peck and Koerner, who warned the Lincolns that there could well be some temperance men among the visitors, and the liquor should be removed. Mary, recalling the mint-julep political receptions in her childhood home, remonstrated vigorously, but Lincoln said, “Perhaps, Mary, these gentlemen are right. After all is over we may see about it, and some may stay and have a good time.”46
When the committee arrived at the home that evening, the liquor was out of sight. Ashmun delivered a brief notification speech in the front parlor as Lincoln, looking solemn as though carrying a new weight, listened. Expressing his “profoundest thanks,” for this “high honor,” Lincoln said he was “deeply, and even painfully sensible of the great responsibility” that went with it.47 After the interchange, the committee was served ice water from a silver pitcher. When the committee left, a number of them joined the carousals that were going on in the saloons and the streets of Springfield, which exploded with wild celebration of Lincoln’s nomination.
Two weeks later, in response to a reporter’s inquiry about the cold-water reception, Lincoln wrote in a letter, “Having kept house sixteen years, and having never held the ‘cup’ to the lips of my friends then, my judgment was that I should not, in my new position, change my habit in this respect.”48
Self-reliant action, carefully regulated rhetoric, and the machinations of political friends had brought Lincoln to the cusp of the presidency.
Now popular culture took over, sweeping Abe into the presidency.
BARNUM, SPECTACLE, AND THE 1860 CAMPAIGN
In February 1863, a low point in the Civil War for the Union, the Lincolns held a reception in the White House for Charles S. Stratton and his new wife, Lavinia Warren. Known to the world as General Tom Thumb, Stratton stood two feet eleven inches and weighed twenty-one pounds; his wife, eight pounds heavier than he, was two feet six. At the reception, attended by many Washington luminaires, the six-foot-four Lincoln warmly greeted the couple. “It was pleasant,” one of the guests that evening wrote, “to see their tall host bend, and bend, to take their little hands in his great palm, holding Madame’s with especial chariness, as though it were a robin’s egg, and he were fearful of breaking it.”49 The widely reported event became a subject of public interest and genial commentary.
The Tom Thumb reception was just one of many points of convergence between Lincoln and the culture of spectacle promoted with incomparable verve by the age’s master showman, Phineas T. Barnum. Four months before the Tom Thumb event, Lincoln had held a reception for Barnum and another famous little person, George Washington (aka Commodore) Nutt. Tom Thumb and Commodore Nutt were among the curiosities exhibited at Barnum’s five-story American Museum on New York’s Broadway. Visited by millions each year between its opening in 1842 and its destruction by fire in 1865, the museum featured human, scientific, theatrical, and historical exhibits. Under the guise of offering rare information and instructive entertainment, Barnum catered to the sensation-hungry American public, exploited to the hilt by what I call the -est factor: America’s fascination with the tallest, the shortest, thinnest, fattest, strangest, and so on.50 The exhibits at his museum included Joice Heth, allegedly the 161-year-old black nanny of George Washington; the seven-foot-eleven-inch Anna Swan, billed as the Nova Scotia Giantess; the Siamese twins Chang and Eng; and the Feejee Mermaid
The American public feasted on the bizarre or grotesque. It gobbled up crime pamphlets, sensation-filled penny newspapers, and lurid urban novels like George Lippard’s The Quaker City and George Thompson’s City Crimes, whose villainous protagonists—Devil-Bug and the Dead Man, respectively—are among the most physically repulsive figures in American literature. Davy Crockett of the humorous Crockett almanacs boasts that he is so ugly that he sometimes doesn’t get up in the morning for fear of scaring the sun away.51
To many, Lincoln fit in with such crowd-pleasing curiosities. His cragged face, with its cavernous eyes, large mouth and nose, and swarthy complexion; his wide ears and unruly black hair; his huge hands and feet and overly long arms and legs—these features, along with his ill-fitting clothes and awkward gait, made him seem almost as unusual as a Barnum exhibit. “To say that he is ugly,” a journalist wrote, “is nothing; to add that his figure is grotesque, is to convey no adequate impression.”52
The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who visited Lincoln in the White House in 1862, pointed out that Lincoln’s ordinary appearance was part of his Uncle Abe persona, exaggerated in a calculating way, with the intent of winning over the American audience. Here was Hawthorne’s description of the president:
[I]n lounged a tall, loose-jointed figure, of an exaggerated Yankee port and demeanor, whom, (as being about the homeliest man I ever saw, yet by no means repulsive or disagreeable,) it was impossible not to recognize as Uncle Abe. . . . There is no describing his lengthy awkwardness, nor the uncouthness of his movement; and yet it seemed as if I had been in the habit of seeing him daily, and had shaken hands with him a thousand times in some village street; so true was he to the aspect of the pattern American, though with a certain extravagance which, possibly, I exaggerated still further by the delighted eagerness with which I took it in.53
Hawthorne captures the performative Lincoln, whose aim was to appear as the plainest American: what Hawthorne calls “the pattern American.” Just as Benjamin Franklin had won great popularity by posing publicly as the bumpkin Poor Richard, so Lincoln performed as the lowly Uncle Abe. He was the humble American as political spectacle. His homely averageness was, in Hawthorne’s words, “exaggerated” and “extravagant.”
Lincoln joked about his appearance because he knew it was salable. He had his own version of the -est factor: he enjoyed playing the ugliest man. He often told a story, adapted from frontier humor and jest books, about meeting a horrible-looking stranger with a gun who had been instructed to shoot someone uglier than himself. Lincoln’s eyes sparkled when he delivered the punchline: he opened his shirt and told the man, “If I am uglier than you, then blaze away.”54 During the Civil War, when he heard that a cabinet member, Edwin Stanton, in an angry moment cried, “We’ve got to get rid of that baboon at the White House,” Lincoln was asked how he could endure such an insult. “Insult? insult?” the president said; “that is no insult; it is an expression of opinion; and what troubles me most about it is that Stanton said it, and Stanton is usually right.”55
Baboon, ape, gorilla: such epithets were used to describe him by adversaries and even by some allies. The Union general George McClellan, for instance, called him “the original gorilla.”56
Small wonder that he was sometimes compared to a Barnum exhibit. When riding on the law circuit, with his tall hat, long umbrella, and spindly legs that nearly reached the ground, he was, in Herndon’s words, “a sight—beat anything that Barnum ever had or could by any possibility.”57 The only thing more bizarre was Lincoln’s all-elbows-and-knees, clomping attempts at dancing, about which Herndon wrote, “Barnum could make more money on Lincoln’s dancing than he could on Jumbo.”
When Lincoln wanted to communicate a message, he knew how to use his physical differences to draw people in. Many contemporary observers noted that at first he came across as plain or awkward, even bizarre, but in the course of speaking, his manner and arguments won over his listeners, and his appearance even seemed to change, creating an aura of humanity and genuineness. A lawyer who was in the audience at the Cooper Union Address initially felt “pity for so ungainly a man” as the “angular and awkward” Lincoln, who at the start of his speech thanked “Meester Cheerman,” fiddled with his suspenders, and spoke in “a low, monotonous tone” that tended “to dwindle into a shrill and unpleasant sound.” But as the speech progressed, his “face lighted as with an inward fire; the whole man was transfigured.” He “held the vast meeting spell-bound” as “his trenchant and convincing arguments confirmed the soundness of his political conclusions.”58 His striking looks and manner proved to be effective lures to many who subsequently heeded his words. The New York lawyer George Templeton Strong remarked that Lincoln initially seemed like “a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla,” but proved himself “most sensible, straightforward, honest, . . . clear-headed and sound-hearted,” a man of “evident integrity and simplicity of purpose.”59
Lincoln’s supporters made political capital of his physical oddness, which attracted attention to his superior qualities. A Boston journalist, reporting that there was “so much curiosity to learn the personal appearance and bearing of Mr. Lincoln,” described him as “a tall, lank man, awkward,” but with “a grandeur in his thoughts, comprehensiveness in his arguments, and a binding force in his conclusions, which were perfectly irresistible.”60 The Illinois Republican Lyman Trumbull described him as “a giant in stature, six feet three inches high, every inch a man, and a giant in intellect as well as in stature.”61 Backers at the Chicago convention explained, “Honest Old Abe is the homely but expressive phrase,” the “rude designation . . . invented by unerring popular instinct, [that] expresses the entire and confident affection which the heart of the masses feels for Mr. Lincoln wherever he is known.”
The very first Lincoln campaign biography of the 1860 presidential race stated: “His features are not handsome, but extremely mobile; his mouth particularly so. He has a faculty of contorting that feature in a style excessively ludicrous, and which never fails to provoke uproarious merriment.” But his typical speech is “an expression of great impressiveness, all the more remarkable from the contrast with the extremely humorous air it sometimes assumes”; it reveals such “profound earnestness” and “sure evidence of thought” that it sways the audience. With its combined ludicrousness and good sense, his oratory is “eminently addressed to the popular mind.”62
Lincoln’s true character also came out in his speeches, in which he exploited the showman-like energies that Barnum represented but channeled them in a serious direction: toward communicating the bedrock principles that mattered to him. Barnum was above all interested in effect, Lincoln in message. Among Barnum’s exhibits were General Santa Anna’s wooden leg, pilfered during the Mexican War, and a knife-headed pike taken from John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. For Barnum, these items were valuable only for their impact on curiosity seekers. For Lincoln, in contrast, Santa Anna and John Brown related to issues he cared about deeply: the Mexican War and the fight against slavery.
Many of Barnum’s marvels were frauds. Joice Heth, advertised as more than a century and a half old, was, as her autopsy revealed, in her seventies when she died in 1856. The Feejee Mermaid, who appeared lovely in Barnum’s posters, was nothing more than a monkey’s torso sewn to the bottom half of a fish. Barnum had no qualms about fooling the public as long as he kept it entertained. Known as “the prince of humbug,” he wrote the popular book Humbugs of the World, in which he argued that “humbug is an astonishingly wide-spread phenomenon—in fact almost universal”; he showed that it permeated virtually all aspects of culture and society.63
When Lincoln used the word humbug, in contrast, he had in mind the bogus reasoning behind proslavery laws and arguments. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was, in his words, “a naked humbug, a foul wrong, perpetrated under false pretences, sustained by weak inventions and afterthought.”64 “All this talk about the dissolution of the Union,” he declared, “is humbug—nothing but folly.” Douglas’s popular sovereignty idea was “the most errant humbug that has ever been attempted on an intelligent community.” Lincoln repeated the idea so often that he elicited the word in call-and-response fashion. In his debates with Douglas, he said, “Let us talk about Popular Sovereignty! [Laughter.] What is Popular Sovereignty? [Cries of ‘A humbug,’ ‘a humbug.’]”
THE 1860 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN AND THE REIGN OF IMAGE
Such Barnumesque interchanges with audiences had served Lincoln well during the 1850s, but when the 1860 campaign came, he was faced with a new reality. Public silence replaced speeches. In that era, it was considered unseemly for a presidential candidate to campaign for himself. One of Lincoln’s opponents in the four-way 1860 race, Stephen Douglas, was ridiculed for going from state to state on his own behalf. Under the pretense of visiting his mother in Vermont, he traveled throughout the northeast and then elsewhere, promoting himself. Journalists and cartoonists mocked him as a wandering child looking for his mother. A typical cartoon, Honest Old Abe and the Little Boy in Search of His Mother—A Sensation Story, showed Lincoln leaning on an axe and towering over the diminutive Douglas, who looks confused and fatuous in his frilly child’s garment, as the White House looms in the distance.
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