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his long tawny neck emerging gauntly from his turn-down collar, his melancholy eyes sunken deep in his haggard face.” Ashmun spoke for the committee, and Lincoln “responded with a few appropriate, earnest, and well-shaped sentences.” Afterward, everyone relaxed into a more general conversation, “partly of a jovial kind, in which the hearty simplicity of Lincoln’s nature shone out.” As the committee members left, Mr. Kelley of Pennsylvania remarked to Schurz: “Well, we might have done a more brilliant thing, but we could hardly have done a better thing.” Still, Schurz acknowledged, other members of the committee “could not quite conceal their misgivings as to how this single-minded man, this child of nature, would bear himself in the contact with the great world.”

Another visitor, Thurlow Weed, detected an unexpected sophistication and political acumen in Lincoln. Still nursing wounds from Seward’s defeat, Weed traveled to Springfield at the invitation of Swett and Davis shortly after the convention. The two master politicians analyzed “the prospects of success, assuming that all or nearly all the slave States would be against [them],” determining which states “were safe without effort…which required attention,” and which “were sure to be vigorously contested.” Lincoln exhibited, Weed later wrote, “so much good sense, such intuitive knowledge of human nature, and such familiarity with the virtues and infirmities of politicians, that I became impressed very favorably with his fitness for the duties which he was not unlikely to be called upon to discharge.” Weed departed, ready to “go to work with a will.”

As Weed and Lincoln plotted election strategy, it must have been apparent to both men that there would, in actuality, be two elections. In the free states, the contest would pit Lincoln against Douglas, while the Southern Democrat, Breckinridge, would battle border-state Bell for the slave states. Douglas, once the defender of Southern principles, the author of the infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act, was, by 1860, reviled throughout the South as a traitor or closet abolitionist. “Now what difference is it to the people whether Lincoln or Douglas shall be elected?” one Southern newspaper asked. “The same ends are sought by each, and we do not see any reason to choose between them.”

A Lincoln victory would require at least 152 electoral votes. Anything short of a majority would throw the election into the turbulent chamber of the House of Representatives, which might well prove unable to elect anyone. The choice of vice president would be left to the Southern-dominated Senate, which might well elect Joseph Lane, Breckinridge’s running mate, to occupy the vacant presidential chair. Lincoln, therefore, would have to capture virtually the entire North, including those states that had voted for the Democrat Buchanan in the last election.

In three of these “must win” states—Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Ohio—Douglas had considerable strength, especially in their southern counties, populated largely by settlers from the South. Although slavery was an issue everywhere, it was not always the dominant concern. Pennsylvanians were more interested in tariff protection, while voters in Indiana, Ohio, and elsewhere in the Northwest wanted free land for settlers and internal improvements to expand commerce there. In addition, remnants of the anti-immigrant American Party lingered everywhere. The antislavery vote would undoubtedly go Republican, but that alone could not build a majority among such diverse constituencies.

LINCOLN’S FIRST TASK was to secure his hold on the Republican Party by conciliating and enlisting those who had fought him for the nomination—Chase, Seward, and Bates.

Chase was first approached to speak on behalf of Lincoln in the form of “a mere printed circular.” He felt, he later admitted, “not a little hurt & [his] first impulse was not to reply at all.” Then a personal letter from Lincoln arrived. Ignoring newspaper reports that Chase was “much chagrined and much dissatisfied with the nomination of so obscure a man as