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But unlike Seward, he had not made enemies or aroused envy along the way. It is hard to imagine Lincoln letting Greeley’s resentment smolder for years as Seward did. On the contrary, he took pains to reestablish rapport with Judd and Trumbull after they had defeated him in his first run for the Senate. His ability to rise above defeat and create friendships with previous opponents was never shared by Chase, who was unable to forgive those who crossed him. And though Bates had a warm circle of friends in St. Louis, most of them were not politicians. His campaign at the convention was managed by a group of men who barely knew him. Without burning personal loyalty, they had simply picked him as a potential winner, dropping him with equal ease when the path to his nomination proved bumpy.

Finally, Lincoln’s profound and elevated sense of ambition—“an ambition,” Fehrenbacher observes, “notably free of pettiness, malice, and overindulgence,” shared little common ground with Chase’s blatant obsession with office, Seward’s tendency toward opportunism, or the ambivalent ambition that led Bates to withdraw from public office. Though Lincoln desired success as fiercely as any of his rivals, he did not allow his quest for office to consume the kindness and openheartedness with which he treated supporters and rivals alike, nor alter his steady commitment to the antislavery cause.

In the end, though the men who nominated Abraham Lincoln in Chicago may not have recognized all these qualities, they chose the best man for the supreme challenge looming over the nation.

CHAPTER 9

“A MAN KNOWS HIS OWN NAME”

THE NEWS THAT Lincoln had defeated Seward came as a shock to much of the country, especially to the Eastern Republican establishment. On Capitol Hill, word of Lincoln’s nomination “was received with general incredulity,” conceded Charles Francis Adams, “until by repeated announcements from different quarters it appeared that he had carried the day by a union of all the anti-Seward elements…. The House was in such a state of confusion that it was clear no business would be done, so we adjourned.”

Since people were unaware of the skill with which he had crafted his victory, Lincoln was viewed as merely the accidental candidate of the consolidated anti-Seward forces. Still an obscure figure, he was referred to by half the journals representing his own party as “Abram” rather than “Abraham.” Pointing out that when Lincoln had visited the Historical Library at Hartford the previous March, he signed the visitors’ book as “Abraham Lincoln,” the Democratic New York Herald caustically noted that “it is but fair to presume that a man knows his own name.” Lincoln wrote to George Ashmun, the Republican chairman of the acceptance committee: “It seems as if the question whether my first name is ‘Abraham’ or ‘Abram’ will never be settled. It is ‘Abraham.’”

Exulting in Lincoln’s lack of national experience, Democratic newspapers had a field day ridiculing his biography. He is “a third rate Western lawyer,” the Herald gloated. “The conduct of the republican party in this nomination is a remarkable indication of a small intellect, growing smaller.” Rejecting Seward and Chase, “who are statesmen and able men,” the Herald continued, “they take up a fourth rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar,” and whose speeches are “illiterate compositions…interlarded with coarse and clumsy jokes.” Not content to deride his intellect, hostile publications focused on his appearance. “Lincoln is the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs, arms and hatchet-face ever strung upon a single frame. He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege which all politicians have of being ugly.”

More violent attacks appeared in the Charleston Mercury, which scornfully asked: “After him what decent white man would be President?” Seward, the paper insisted, had been “thrust aside” because he “lacked the necessary nerve to carry through measures of Southern subjugation.” Lincoln, on the other hand, was “the beau ideal of a relentless, dogged, freesoil border-ruffian.