Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [122]
In Republican circles, Chase’s gubernatorial election had earned him such tremendous prestige that he was convinced he was destined for the presidency. Writing to a friend just ten days after his Ohio victory, Chase suggested that his success in uniting liberal nativists with antislavery German-Americans demonstrated the key to Republican victory in the future. Where Republicans challenged the Know Nothing Party, as they did in Massachusetts, they found defeat. Chase seemed to feel that he was now entitled to the Republican presidential nomination in 1856.
Chase had journeyed to Francis Blair’s country home in Maryland the previous December for the legendary Christmas conclave called to organize the Republican Party on a national basis. Francis Blair, the patriarch of the Blair family, wielded great power in party politics because of his old ties to the Democratic Party and his newfound antislavery views. Chase arrived to find Sumner in attendance, along with his old friend Gamaliel Bailey, the abolitionist editor of The National Era; New York congressman Preston King; and Massachusetts politician Nathaniel Banks. Seward had been invited, but, uncertain of how he would proceed on a national scale, he had sent Blair a note “approving of his activity, but declining his invitation.” After an elegant dinner, served, ironically, by Blair’s household slaves, the group sat down to discuss the future of the Republican Party.
At Chase’s suggestion, the gathering agreed to hold an organizational meeting the following month in Pittsburgh. Inevitably, the conversation turned to potential candidates for the upcoming presidential election. Blair’s suggestion of John Charles Frémont, the celebrated explorer who had played a central role in the conquest of California during the Mexican War, met with general approval. The discussion undoubtedly disappointed Chase, who believed up to the moment of Frémont’s nomination at the Philadelphia convention on June 19 that “if the unvarnished wishes of the people” prevailed, he would be chosen.
Chase’s certainty was insufficient to mobilize the wrangling elements at the convention in support of his candidacy. Not only had he neglected to appoint a manager, but he failed to unite his own state behind him on the first ballot. The questionable deals he had made to secure his Senate seat eight years earlier had created permanent enemies within his home state. “I know that if Ohio had united on you instead of dividing her votes between [ John] McLean & Fremont & you,” Chase’s friend Hiram Barney wrote, “your nomination would have been a matter of necessity; or if a tithe of the pains which were taken to urge Fremont had been employed for your nomination, it would have been accomplished.”
Before the convention met, Seward had greater reason for hope than Chase, for clearly, he was the first choice of Republican voters and politicians. Weed kept him from running, however, insisting that the party was not yet sufficiently organized to win a national election. Better to wait four years than to be tarred with failure.
While the Republican Convention was in progress, Lincoln was staying at the American House in Urbana, Illinois, attending court. He was in high spirits, recalled Henry Whitney, having engaged in one of the practical jokes of which he was so fond. He had hidden the loud and annoying gong that summoned his fellow boarders to dinner. When the loss was discovered, Whitney entered the dining room and saw Lincoln sitting “awkwardly in a chair tilted up after his fashion, looking amused, silly and guilty.” When Judge Davis told him he must put it back, Lincoln took the gong from its hiding place and returned it, “after which he bounded up the stairs, two steps at a time.”
Within a day or two, the merry prankster received word that in the balloting for vice president, he had received 110 votes, second only to the eventual nominee, William