Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [156]
“Our city has been chosen, here to throw to the winds the broad banner of Republicanism,” the Press and Tribune proclaimed, “and here to name the leader who shall lead all our hosts to victory.” Lavish preparations were made to give the arriving trains a reception to remember. Chicagoans who lived on Michigan Avenue were asked to illuminate their houses. “A most magically beautiful effect was the result,” one reporter noted, “the lights flashing back from and multiplied countlessly in the waters of the Lake shore basin.” Thousands of spectators lined the shore of the lake, and as the trains moved along the pier, “half minute guns were fired by the Chicago Light Artillery, and rockets shot off from the foot of Jackson Street.” No one present, the reporter observed, would forget the effect of “artillery pealing, the flight of the rockets, the gleaming windows from the entire residence front of our city, the vast depot edifice filled with the eager crowd.”
Hotels and boardinghouse proprietors had spent weeks sprucing up their establishments; private citizens were asked to open their homes; and restaurants promised hearty meals at low prices. The most popular luncheon in town included a glass of four-year-old ale and a ham sandwich for ten cents. As packed trains continued to steam into the thronged city, the number of eager Republican visitors on Chicago’s streets climbed to forty thousand.
“I thought the city was crowded yesterday,” one amazed reporter exclaimed on the day before the convention was set to open, “but it was as loose and comfortable as a last year’s shoe beside the wedging and packing of today. The streets are full, and appear very like conduits leading off the overflowings of the hotels, where huge crowds are constantly pouring out as if they were spouted up from below in some popular eruption.”
Even billiard rooms were enlisted to accommodate the staggering crowds. At a certain hour each evening, the games were brought to an abrupt halt as mattresses were laid across the tables to create beds for the sleepy visitors. Looking in on one such establishment at midnight, a reporter saw 130 people stretched out on billiard tables “with a zest, from the fatigues of the day, that would have excited the sympathy of the most unfeeling bosom.”
“The city is thronged with Republicans,” wrote the Chicago Evening Journal. “Republicans from the woods of Maine and the green valleys of all New England; Republicans from the Golden Gate and the old plantation, Republicans from everywhere. What seems a brilliant festival is but the rallying for a battle. It is an army with banners!” Amid “this murmur of the multitude, thought reverts to a time long past,” the Journal reminded readers, “when a single car and one small chamber could have conveyed them all,” when the antislavery principle that “now blossoms white over the land was deemed the vision of enthusiasts, ridiculed, shunned and condemned.”
By 1860, the Republican Party had clearly become the dominant force in Northern politics. Its growth and momentum had absorbed two parties, the Whigs and the Know Nothings, and ruptured a third—the Democratic Party. If this new party could carry three of the four conservative Northern states it had lost in 1856—Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey—it could win the presidency. These battleground states lay along the southern tier of the North; they all bordered on slave states; they would play a decisive role in choosing a nominee.
IN THE EARLY HOURS of Wednesday, May 16, the streets surrounding the newly built convention hall swarmed with excited citizens “who crowded