Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [179]
Lincoln was not alone in his assessment that the October state elections in Indiana and Pennsylvania would prove critical to the fortunes of the Republican Party. On the eve of the state elections, Judge Davis told his son that “tomorrow is the most important day in the history of the Country.” Lincoln’s camp was elated by the positive results as large Republican majorities piled up in both states. When Judge Davis first heard the exciting news, Ward Lamon reported back to Lincoln, “he was trying an important criminal case, which terminated in his Kicking over the Clerk’s desk, turned a double somersault and adjourned court until after the presidential Election.” If the three-hundred-pound Davis actually performed such a stunt, it was a miracle second only to Lincoln’s nomination. But there was no question that Davis was thrilled. “We are all in the highest glee on acct of the elections,” he wrote his wife, Sarah. “Mr. Lincoln will evidently be the next Pres’t.” That Saturday night, Davis traveled to Springfield to celebrate with the Lincolns, Trumbull, and Governor Corwin. “I never was better entertained,” he rejoiced, though he confessed that Mary was still “not to my liking.” She appears to be “in high feather,” he continued. “I am in hopes that she will not give her husband any trouble.”
Mary reveled in her newfound celebrity. She delighted in the crowds of visitors coming to her house, the artists pleading to paint her husband’s portrait, the prominent politicians waiting for the chance to converse with the presidential nominee. With pride, and perhaps a shade of spite toward the man who had so often bested her husband, she noted that a reception for Stephen Douglas in Springfield had attracted only thirty people when hundreds were expected. “This rather looks as if his greatness had passed away,” she commented to a friend.
Still, Mary remained terribly anxious that ultimate success might once again prove elusive. “You used to be worried, that I took politics so cooly,” she confessed to her friend Hannah Shearer; “you would not do so, were you to see me now. Whenever I have time, to think, my mind is sufficiently exercised for my comfort…I scarcely know, how I would bear up, under defeat. I trust that we will not have the trial.”
For weeks, Stephen Douglas had been barnstorming the country, having decided immediately after his nomination to defy custom. Disregarding criticism that his unbecoming behavior diminished the “high office of the presidency…to the level of a county clerkship,” he stumped the country, from the New England states to the Northwest, from the border states to the South, becoming “the first presidential candidate in American history to make a nationwide tour in person.”
Douglas was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, when he heard the news of the Republican victories in Indiana and Pennsylvania, which destroyed any hope he might have had for victory. “Mr. Lincoln is the next President,” he declared. “We must try to save the Union. I will go South.” It was a courageous move, his “finest hour,” according to Allan Nevins. Exhausted from his nonstop weeks of campaigning, Douglas faced one hostile audience after another as he moved into the Deep South. No longer hoping to gain support for his candidacy, he campaigned for the survival of the Union. “I believe there is a conspiracy on foot to break up this Union,” he warned an audience