Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [150]
WHEN HE RETURNED from his canvassing, Lincoln focused on the approaching meeting of the Republican National Committee, to be held on December 21, 1859, at the Astor House in New York. Committee members from nearly all the free states were gathered to decide where the Republican Convention would be held. Supporters of Seward, Chase, and Bates argued in turn that the convention should be placed in New York, Ohio, or Missouri. Though Lincoln had not yet committed himself publicly to run for the nomination, he wrote to Norman Judd, a member of the selection committee, to press the claims of Illinois, to satisfy friends who “attach more consequence” to the location than either he or Judd had originally done.
Judd waited patiently as the claims of Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Harrisburg were put forth. When no agreement could be reached, he shrewdly suggested Chicago as “good neutral ground where everyone would have an even chance.” Although Lincoln was known to most of the committee members at this point, none considered him a serious candidate for the presidency. Judd “carefully kept ‘Old Abe’ out of sight,” observed Henry Whitney, “and the delegates failed to see any personal bearing the place of meeting was to have on the nomination.” The choice finally narrowed down to St. Louis and Chicago. Judd “promised that the members of the Convention and all outsiders of the Republican faith should have a hospitable reception,” that sufficient accommodations would be provided “for feeding and lodging the large crowd,” and that “a hall for deliberation should be furnished free.” Ultimately, Chicago beat St. Louis by a single vote.
Once Chicago was selected, Judd, a railway lawyer, persuaded the railroad companies to provide “a cheap excursion rate from all parts of the State,” so that lack of funds would not keep Lincoln supporters from attending the convention. Concealed from his rivals, Lincoln had taken an important step toward the nomination.
So confident were Seward’s friends about his chances that they had no problem with the Chicago selection. “I like the place & the tenor of the call,” New York editor John Bigelow wrote Seward at the time. “I do not see how either could be bettered, nor how it is possible to take exception to it.” But Charles Gibson, Bates’s friend and supporter, was not so sanguine; he recognized that it was a blow to the Bates candidacy. “Had the convention been held in St. Louis,” Gibson later wrote, “Lincoln would not have been the nominee.”
As Lincoln’s candidacy became a real prospect, he attended to the request made by Jesse Fell a year earlier for a short history of his life to be published and distributed. After warning Fell that “there is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me,” Lincoln detailed, without a hint of self-pity, the facts of his early life, growing up in “a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods.”
“If any thing be made out of it, I wish it to be modest,” Lincoln told Fell. “Of course it must not appear to have been written by myself.” This simple sketch written in his own hand would be used later in Republican efforts to romanticize Lincoln’s humble beginnings.
LINCOLN’S HOPES for making himself better known outside the West received an immense boost when he received the invitation from Chase supporter James Briggs to speak as part of a lecture series in Brooklyn. The lecture was eventually scheduled for February 27, 1860. Chase, as we saw,