Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [147]
Though a successful bid for the nomination remained unlikely, a viable candidacy was no longer an impossible dream. Slowly and methodically, Lincoln set out to improve his long odds. He arranged to publish his debates with Douglas in a book that was read widely by Republicans. As more and more people became familiar with him through the newspaper stories of the debates, invitations to speak at Republican gatherings began to pour in. Not yet an avowed candidate, Lincoln delivered nearly two dozen speeches in Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kansas in the four months between August and December 1859.
While Seward was still touring Europe and the Middle East, Lincoln was introducing himself to tens of thousands of Westerners. “I think it is a mistake,” a leading New Yorker wrote Lincoln, “that Senator Seward is not on his own battlefield, instead of being in Egypt surveying the route of an old Underground Rail Road, over which Moses took, one day, a whole nation, from bondage into Liberty.” Lincoln capitalized on Seward’s absence. The crowds that greeted him grew with every stop along the way. Most of his audiences had never laid eyes on him, and he invariably forged an indelible impression. Once he began speaking, the Janesville Gazette reported, “the high order of [his] intellect” left a permanent impact upon his listeners, who would remember his “tall, gaunt form” and “his points and his hits” for “many a day.”
Speaking not as a candidate but as an advocate for the Republican cause, Lincoln sharpened his attacks on the Democrats and, in particular, on the party’s front-runner, Stephen Douglas, who preceded him at many of the same locations. “Douglasism,” he wrote Chase, “is all which now stands in the way of an early and complete success of Republicanism.” In this way, ironically, Douglas’s national reputation continually increased the attention paid to Lincoln.
Perhaps Lincoln’s most rewarding stop was Cincinnati, which he had vowed never again to visit after the humiliating Reaper trial. This time, he was “greeted with the thunder of cannon, the strains of martial music, and the joyous plaudits of thousands of citizens thronging the streets.” He arrived at the Burnet House and was put up “in princely style,” delighted to find that the most prominent of Cincinnati’s residents were vying to meet the “rising star.”
Lincoln addressed the Southern threats that the election of a Republican president would divide the Union, directing his remarks particularly to the many Kentuckians who had crossed the Ohio River to listen to him. “Will you make war upon us and kill us all? Why, gentlemen, I think you are as gallant and as brave men as live; that you can fight as bravely in a good cause, man for man, as any other people living…but, man for man, you are not better than we are, and there are not so many of you as there are of us. You will never make much of a hand at whipping us. If we were fewer in numbers than you, I think that you could whip us; if we were equal it would likely be a drawn battle; but being inferior in numbers, you will make nothing by attempting to master us.” The next day, his speech was described in the Cincinnati Gazette “as an effort remarkable for its clear statement, powerful argument and massive common sense,” and possessed of “such dignity and power as to have impressed some of our ablest lawyers with the conclusion that it was superior to any political effort they had ever heard.”
Lincoln’s crowded schedule allowed him no time to accept Joshua Speed’s invitation to visit him in Kentucky for the opening of the national racecourse, “when,” his old friend promised, “we expect to have some of the best horses in America to compete for the purses. In addition we think we can show the prettiest women,” adding, “if you are not too old to enjoy either the speed of the horses or the