Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [152]
Turning to his fellow Republicans, he entreated, “let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can.” Though the approach was moderate, Lincoln spoke with such passion and certainty about the unifying principle of the Republican Party—never to allow slavery “to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States”—that even the most radical Republicans in the audience were captivated. When he came to the dramatic ending pledge—“LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT”—the audience erupted in thunderous applause.
After Lincoln spoke, several of the event organizers took the platform. Chase supporter James Briggs predicted that “one of three gentlemen will be our standard bearer”—William Henry Seward, Salmon Chase, or “the gallant son of Kentucky, who was reared in Illinois, and whom you have heard tonight.” Lincoln’s still-unannounced candidacy had taken an enormous step forward.
“When I came out of the hall,” one member of the audience said, “my face glowing with an excitement and my frame all aquiver, a friend, with his eyes aglow, asked me what I thought of Abe Lincoln, the rail-splitter. I said, ‘He’s the greatest man since St. Paul.’”
Once the speech was reported in the papers, Lincoln was in demand across New England. He answered as many requests as possible, undertaking an exhausting tour of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, repeating and modifying the arguments of his Cooper Union address. He was forced to decline invitations from outside New England but hoped “to visit New-Jersey & Pa. before the fall elections.”
Writing to Mary from Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where their son Robert was completing a preparatory year before entering Harvard College, Lincoln admitted that the Cooper Union speech, “being within my calculation before I started, went off passably well and gave me no trouble whatever. The difficulty was to make nine others, before reading audiences who had already seen all my ideas in print.”
In Hartford, Connecticut, on March 5, Lincoln first met Gideon Welles, an editorial writer for the Hartford Evening Press who would become his secretary of the navy. Arriving by train in the afternoon, Lincoln had several hours to spare before his speech that evening. He walked up Asylum Street to the bookstore of Brown & Gross, where he encountered the fifty-eight-year-old Welles, a peculiar-looking man with a curly wig perched on his outsize head, and a flowing white beard. Welles had attended Norwich University and studied the law but then devoted himself to writing, leaving the legal profession at twenty-four to take charge of the Democratic Hartford Times. A strong supporter of Andrew Jackson, Welles had represented his town of Glastonbury in the state legislature for eight years. He remained a loyal Democrat until the mid-fifties, when he became troubled by his affiliation to “the party of the Southern slaveocracy.” Like many antislavery Democrats, he joined the Republican Party, though he still held fast to the frugal fiscal policies of the Democrats.
With the convention only two months away, Welles had settled on Chase, whom he had met four years earlier while visiting Cincinnati. While Welles held less radical views on slavery,