Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [146]
The questionnaire posed a difficult problem for Bates. He had to assuage the doubts of Republicans who felt, like editor Joseph Medill of Chicago, that it was better to be “beaten with a representative man” who placed himself squarely on the Republican platform than to “triumph with a ‘Union-saver’” and “sink into the quicksands.” However, if he moved too far to the left to satisfy the passionate Republicans, he would risk his natural base among the old Whigs and Americans. Though once noted for his deft touch in harmonizing opposing forces, Bates plunged into his answers without calculating the consequences.
Asked to render his opinions on the extension of slavery into the territories, he announced that Congress had the power to decide the issue, a position that directly contradicted the Dred Scott decision. He felt, moreover, that “the spirit and the policy of the Government ought to be against its extension.” He advocated equal constitutional rights for all citizens, native-born or naturalized, claiming to endorse “no distinctions among Americans citizens,” and adding that the “Government is bound to protect all the citizens in the enjoyment of all their rights every where.” Beyond this, he favored colonizing former slaves in Africa and Central America, a Homestead Act, a Pacific Railroad, and the admission of Kansas as a free state.
His statement met with approval in traditional Republican enclaves in the Northeast and Northwest, but in the border states, where his advantage was supposed to reside, it proved disastrous. The Lexington [Missouri] Express wrote that the published letter came “as a clap of thunder from a clear sky,” placing Bates so blatantly in the Black Republican camp that he should no longer expect support from the more conservative border states. By subscribing to every article of the Republican creed, the Louisville Journal complained, Bates became “just as good or bad a Republican as Seward, Chase or Lincoln is…. He has by a single blow severed every tie of confidence or sympathy which connected him with the Southern Conservatives.” Only four years earlier, the Memphis Bulletin observed, Bates had denounced Black Republicans as “agitators,” labeling them “dangerous enemies to the peace of our Union.” Now he had become one of them. Bates himself recognized the backlash his letter had created, lamenting “the simultaneous abandonment of me by a good many papers” in the border states.
The attempt to pacify the anxious German-Americans had diminished his hold on what should have been his natural base, without bringing a commensurate number of Republicans to his side. Though the Bates camp maintained faith that their man was bound to win the nomination, Bates confided in his diary that “knowing the fickleness of popular favor, and on what small things great events depend, I shall take care not so to set my heart upon the glittering bauble, as to be mortified or made at all unhappy by a failure.”
NOT HINDERED by the hubris, delusions, and inconsistencies that plagued his three chief rivals, Abraham Lincoln gained steady ground through a combination of hard work, skill, and luck. While Seward and Bates felt compelled in the final months to reposition themselves toward the center of the party, Lincoln never changed his basic stance. He could remain where he had always been, “neither on the left wing nor the right, but very close to dead center,” as Don Fehrenbacher writes. From the time he had first spoken out against the extension of slavery into the territories in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln had insisted that while the spread of slavery must be “fairly headed off,” he had no wish “to interfere with slavery” where it already existed.