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By Root 1693 0

C. Frémont, whose claim to fame lay in having explored the Far West and playing a role in the conquest of California during the Mexican War. (Lincoln preferred Supreme Court Justice John McLean of Ohio, whose reputation as a moderate Whig, he felt, would appeal to voters in Illinois and throughout the Lower North.) Since Frémont’s brief career in politics, a stint in the Senate from California in 1850–51, had been as a Democrat, the convention needed to choose a former Whig for vice president. The Illinois delegation asked John Allison of Pennsylvania to nominate Lincoln. Few at the convention had heard of him. All Allison could say about Lincoln’s qualifications was that “he knew him to be the prince of good fellows, and an Old-line Whig.” William B. Archer of Illinois seconded the nomination. He described Lincoln as fifty-five years old (in fact, he was forty-seven), “as pure a patriot as ever lived,” and a man whose presence on the ticket would enable the party to carry Illinois. John M. Palmer of Illinois added, “I know he is a good man and a hard worker in the field, although I never heard him.” Despite these less-than-ringing endorsements, Lincoln received 110 votes on the first ballot, far behind the eventual nominee, William Dayton of New Jersey, but well ahead of political luminaries such as Nathaniel P. Banks, David Wilmot, and Charles Sumner. Lincoln’s support from his own delegation reflected the standing he had achieved as a party leader in Illinois; his strong showing elsewhere underscored how crucial his state would be in the upcoming campaign.33

The three-way election of 1856 that pitted Frémont against Democrat James Buchanan and ex-president Millard Fillmore, running as the candidate of the American party, as the Know-Nothings were officially known, proved to be the most boisterous since the log-cabin campaign of 1840. Like the nation itself, Illinois emerged as a house divided, with Republicans certain to carry the northern counties and Democrats the southern. The “central counties…are to be the battle ground,” Richard Yates reported to Lincoln in August. And there Fillmore offered a refuge for conservative Whigs alarmed by the sectional nature of the Republican party but unwilling to vote for a Democrat. “I regret to say,” Yates wrote, “that the Fillmore division is large in this section of the State—splitting the Anti Nebraska vote right in the middle.”34

Lincoln threw himself into the campaign, all but abandoning his law practice in the fall to deliver over 100 speeches for Frémont. (“I lost nearly all the working part of last year,” he wrote in 1857, “giving my time to the canvass.”) He concentrated on his political base of central Illinois, but also gave a major address in Chicago. He even ventured into the southern part of the state, to places where, one newspaper remarked, “such a thing as a Fremont speech…[had] never been heard.” In general, Lincoln repeated the themes he had advanced in 1854, although the language now seemed more strident. Slavery, he claimed, was seeking not simply to expand into the West but to become the “ruling element” in the government. To counteract the Democrats’ description of the Republicans as a “sectional party” that endangered the Union, which he called “the most difficult objection we have to meet,” Lincoln drew attention to his own Kentucky birth and Whig background and to his party’s disavowal of any intention to interfere with slavery where it already existed. He begged Fillmore supporters to “unite” with the Republicans, even proposing the formation of a joint electoral ticket that would pledge to throw its support to whichever of the two candidates received more popular votes in the state.35

In the end, Frémont carried eleven northern states—all of New England, New York, Ohio, and the upper Northwest. But this was not enough, as Buchanan won every slave state except Maryland (Fillmore’s only victory), as well as California, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey—the moderate and conservative bastions of the Lower North. Within Illinois, the results