1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [31]
In his office in Springfield, the Republican candidate himself was thronged all morning by journalists and well-wishers, all of whom knew that Electoral College calculus made his victory almost a foregone conclusion. It was a brisk, glorious autumn day in Central Illinois, and most citizens were thrilled at the prospect of their neighbor becoming president, even if they hadn’t voted for him. When someone asked Lincoln whether he was concerned about all the fear and anger that his campaign had seemed to evoke, the candidate replied optimistically, and with typical rough humor, that “elections in this country are like ‘big boils’—they cause a great deal of pain before they come to a head, but after the trouble is over the body is in better health than before.” In the afternoon, he put on his tall hat and walked over to the courthouse to cast his vote. Facing his fellow citizens, he held up the printed Republican ticket and snipped his own name and the names of his electors from the top: a gesture of modesty to show that he would not vote for himself.55
On a rainy Boston morning, meanwhile, “vote distributors,” the men who handed out the ballots with each party’s slate of candidates printed on them, patrolled outside the polling places in each ward. So did the Wide Awakes, dressed in their civilian clothes and without torches. (They had held their last big rallies throughout New England a few nights earlier; the young Henry Adams, freshly arrived from an encounter with Garibaldi in Europe, got home just in time to see the Quincy march.) Vote casting was more or less public business in those days—the rival parties’ vote distributors, who usually happened to be on the burly side, hovered close to see whose ballot you dropped into the box—so it certainly made sense to have a few Republican reinforcements, just in case. Pickpockets were out in force, too, upholding another tradition of American election days as gold watches and rolls of banknotes vanished from the pockets of well-padded vests. In neighborhoods with many black voters, white politicians stood outside the polls shaking hands and addressing everyone as “Sir”—the only time until next election day, the Post hinted, that colored men would enjoy this extraordinary honor. (Massachusetts was one of five states, all of them in New England, that allowed free blacks to vote.56) A few African-Americans, however, chose to vote with brickbats instead of ballots, letting fly a hail of projectiles at a procession of John Bell’s supporters passing them on Centre Street.
That night, anxious Bostonians of every party crowded telegraph stations and newspaper offices as results came in from across the country. Only a few years earlier, they would have had to wait days or weeks to know who would be the new president. Now there was round-the-clock coverage, with the Transcript publishing extra editions every half hour long past midnight, and as for the newsboys, the next morning’s paper reported, “the little imps had no sleep last night.” First Indiana went for Lincoln, followed by Wisconsin, Iowa, and Connecticut. Massachusetts itself, to no one’s surprise, fell into the Republicans’ column. When word came that even the conservative states of New York and Pennsylvania had chosen Lincoln, cheers rocked Faneuil Hall, the old Revolutionary shrine, where the city’s Wide Awakes had gathered to celebrate their impending victory.57
The next morning, the only thing