A. Lincoln A Biography

Chapter 15
Justice and Fairness to All May 1860–November 1860

LINCOLN BEARS HIS HONORS MEEKLY

ORVILLE BROWNING
Diary entry, June 12, 1860

ON THE EVENING OF MAY 18, 1860, A LARGE RALLY ASSEMBLED AT THE statehouse in Springfield. Picking up the symbol of the Rail Splitter, several hundred men arrived with rails, which they stacked at the statehouse doors like muskets. Afterward, a large parade wound its way to the Lincoln home. After a serenade, Lincoln told the cheering crowd he “did not suppose the honor of such a visit was intended particularly for himself, as a private citizen, but rather the representative of a great party.” That evening, across the Midwest and the East, Republicans gathered in small and large communities for “ratification rallies.” In the stacks of telegrams Lincoln received on May 18, David Davis, his campaign manager, counseled, “Write no letters & make no promises till You see me write me at Bloomington when to see you I must see you soon.”
Lincoln had learned in the early evening the convention had nominated Hannibal Hamlin of Maine for vice president. Hamlin, born the same year as Lincoln, 1809, taught school and published a Democratic newspaper before being admitted to the bar in 1833. A strong-willed Mainer, he sought to abolish the death penalty and was hostile to the extension of slavery. He was elected to Congress in 1843 and entered the Senate in 1848. His nomination balanced Lincoln, a former Whig from the West, with a former Democrat from the East. In the practice of mid-nineteenth-century politics it was not unusual that Lincoln would not be consulted about the choice of a vice presidential running mate.
The next day, George Ashmun of Massachusetts, president of the convention, and various chairmen of state delegations—almost all of whom had originally supported other candidates—traveled to Springfield to bring the official notification of Lincoln’s nomination. Carl Schurz, German-American leader from Wisconsin who was a strong supporter of Seward, recalled that Lincoln received the delegation in the north parlor of “his modest frame house.” Most had never even seen Lincoln and looked at him “with surprised curiosity.” Lincoln stood “tall and ungainly in his black suit of apparently new but ill-fitting clothes.” Abraham and Mary had disagreed over whether to serve liquor or not. Lincoln, with great respect for the temperance movement, prevailed, and ice water was served. He also broke the demeanor of the stuffy notification ceremony when he asked a surprised Governor Edwin D. Morgan of New York what his height was. Walking out of the house, Judge William D. Kelley told Schurz, “Well, we might have done a more brilliant thing, but we could hardly have done a better thing.”
AN IRONY OF THE 1860 campaign was that Lincoln stayed home in Springfield more than he ever had before, as was the custom of nineteenth-century politics. Lincoln believed his record to be in plain sight in his speeches, many of which were now being bundled together in campaign pamphlets. He told everyone he would be home for the summer.
Lincoln did pledge that, if elected president, he would govern by the motto “Justice and fairness to all.” By “all,” he meant a widening set of concentric circles of his constituencies. He would not distinguish among Republicans who did or did not support him. He had always worked with Democrats and intended to do so again. Most important, he would make no distinction between North and South.
In this spirit, Lincoln’s first initiative in his campaign was to reach out to his Republican opponents. On Monday, May 21, 1860, David Davis expressed his concern about New York and how the disaffection of Seward supporters could play into the hands of Douglas. On May 24, Thurlow Weed, Seward’s shrewd campaign manager, arrived in Springfield for what Lincoln and Davis hoped would be the beginning of a rapprochement with his chief rival. Weed wrote later of that initial visit that he sensed from the first that Lincoln revealed “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.” On the same day, Orville Browning, dispatched by Lincoln and Davis to St. Louis, met with Edward Bates, his second rival, to try to bring him on board. Bates told Browning that he would write a public letter endorsing Lincoln.
Lincoln himself wrote to Salmon P. Chase, his third rival. “Holding myself the humblest of all whose names were before the convention, I feel in especial need of the assistance of all.” To Schuyler Colfax, who had supported Bates, Lincoln wrote, “You distinguish between yourself and my original friends—a distinction which, by your leave, I propose to forget.”
WHILE THE REPUBLICANS were uniting, Lincoln watched from Springfield as the Democrats and others were dividing. From late April through June, five nominating conventions produced three more presidential candidates. A week before the Republican convention, former Whigs and Know-Nothings who could back neither the Republicans nor the Democrats, and were hoping to avoid disunion, met in Baltimore to found the Constitutional Union Party with the promise to save “the Union as it is.” They nominated John Bell, a former Whig who had opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and Edward Everett, former president of Harvard and secretary of state under President Fillmore.
The Democrats, after the disaster at Charleston, reconvened on June 18, 1860, in Baltimore. One hundred and ten “fire-eaters” walked out when once again the convention would not agree to a resolution recognizing slavery in the territories. Following marathon balloting, the convention nominated Stephen Douglas for president and Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia for vice president.
The Southern Democrats, convening in another location in Baltimore after their walkout, reconvened in Richmond on June 28, 1860, and nominated Buchanan’s incumbent vice president, John C. Breckin-ridge of Kentucky, for president, and Joseph Lane of Oregon for vice president, on a pro-slavery platform.
At the end of this unprecedented cycle of conventions, all signs favored Lincoln and the Republicans. Douglas would be his main contestant in the North. Breckinridge and Douglas would do battle in the South, with Bell hoping to do well in the border states. Lincoln assessed his chances in a letter to Anson G. Henry in Oregon, “We know not what a day may bring forth; but, today, it looks as if the Chicago ticket will be elected.” He added, “I think the chances were more than equal that we could have beaten the Democracy united. Divided, as it is, its chance appears indeed very slim.”
CAMPAIGN BIOGRAPHIES CONSTITUTED a major feature of nineteenth-century political campaigning. William Dean Howells, a twenty-three-year-old editorial writer for the Ohio State Journal in Columbus, was engaged by Follett, Foster and Company, the same firm that had recently published Lincoln’s scrapbook of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, to write a biography of Lincoln. The publisher suggested that Howells go to Springfield to interview Lincoln himself. Howells, at the beginning of a brilliant literary career during which he would write more than one hundred books from 1860 to 1920, declined, saying later, “I missed the greatest chance of my life.” Instead, he commissioned a young law student, James Quay Howard, to interview Lincoln. When Lincoln received his copy in the early summer, he sat down with his Farber pencil to insert corrections and additions, most of them small, in the Howells text.


John Bell, a former Whig senator from Tennessee, led the Constitutional Union Party ticket.

The most popular biography came from the pen of John Locke Scripps, senior editor of the Chicago Press & Tribune. Scripps interviewed Lincoln in Springfield in June. When his thirty-two-page pamphlet biography, published by the New York Tribune, appeared in mid-July, the Republican organization inundated the public with what they called “Campaign Document No. 1.” They based their claim in part on the extensive interview Scripps did with Lincoln, thereby lending a semiofficial authority to it.


Stephen Douglas, Lincolns longtime opponent, led the Northern Democratic ticket.

On July 17, 1860, Lincoln received a letter from Scripps that may have given him a chuckle. Scripps wrote, “I believe the biography contains nothing that I was not fully authorized to put into it.” But then he quickly added, “In speaking of the books you read in early life, I took the liberty of adding Plutarch’s Lives. I take it for granted that you had read that book. If you have not, then you must read it at once to make my statement good.” Lincoln made no reply to Scripps, but the Chicago Tribune author learned that Lincoln, never missing a beat, made “frequent humorous allusions to it.”


John C. Breckinridge, Kentucky senator, led the Southern Democratic ticket.

THE LINCOLN-HAMLIN CAMPAIGN started quickly. With so many people coming to see him, and quickly realizing he could not work out of his law office, he accepted the offer of Governor John Wood to use the governor’s room on the second floor of the statehouse. John G. Nicolay, the serious, hardworking assistant to Secretary of State Hatch, who had been on loan to Lincoln, now became his one-man staff. Nicolay, born in Essingen, Germany, immigrated to the United States with his family when he was six. First living and attending school in Cincinnati, a city of German immigrants, he kept moving west with his family, finally arriving in Illinois. Young Nicolay went to work for the Pike County Free Press in Pittsfield, a New England town set down on the prairies, and by twenty-three was its editor. Now twenty-eight, Nicolay was five feet ten inches tall, and a rail-thin 125 pounds. He had blue eyes and brown hair, his “slow smile” partially hidden behind a mustache and small beard. Nicolay was a young man who loved words, whether it was the Bible, especially the Old Testament, printed in German letters, the plays of Shakespeare, or his editorials in a Whig newspaper. All of these qualities helped build a relationship of mutual trust and appreciation with Lincoln.


John G. Nicolay, quiet and efficient, became Lincoln’s one-man staff in his campaign for the presidency.

Nicolay had been the custodian of Illinois state election records in Hatch’s office, and Lincoln, an assiduous student of these records, was regularly in conversation with him. Now the two shared Lincoln’s campaign office, which, while large, had no anteroom, no security, so visitors came and went all day long.
To his chagrin, Lincoln discovered that he had become a celebrity. Every day an army of politicians, reporters, photographers, portrait painters, and others arrived in Springfield. Yet, for all of the crush of people to see him, his new elevated status brought little change to his personal habits and his relationships with people, be they old friends or new acquaintances. Three weeks after his nomination, his old friend Orville Browning, after visiting Springfield’s campaign office, wrote in his diary, “Lincoln bears his honors meekly.”
Photographer Alexander Hesler of Chicago traveled to Springfield to take four photographs of Lincoln on June 3, 1860. Lincoln particularly liked one photograph that captured his facial expression at the crowning moment of his maturity. Lincoln commented, “That looks better and expresses me better than any I have ever seen.” Mary and some others, however, did not like it. Lincoln believed “their objection arises from the disordered condition of the hair.” Lincoln concluded, “My judgment is worth nothing in these matters.”
Through the weeks of the hot Illinois summer, Lincoln said nothing about his policies. He did not discuss what he would do about the disgruntled South. His standard reply to questions was that his ideas could be found in his published speeches. When pressed, he added that he did not want to say anything that could be misinterpreted. Lincoln’s posture did not mean he was passive or inactive. He kept abreast of events in the states and flagged his concerns to friends and allies.
He also continued to act as a peacemaker, using the skills he had learned in the small towns of the Eighth Judicial Circuit and in the rough-and-tumble state politics of Illinois. He had successfully steered the Republican boat through troubled waters in Illinois in 1859 and now he sought to do the same on a national stage in 1860. Because he did not campaign publicly, it is easy to miss how much he did behind the scenes.
Looking east to the state of New York, Lincoln became aware of the long-running Republican division between the William Seward– Thurlow Weed constituency and the Free Soil Democratic wing of the party led by William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Post, with support from Horace Greeley. Lincoln kept hearing that Douglas would mount a tremendous campaign in New York and feared that unhappy Seward supporters might sit out the presidential election. In August, Lincoln wrote to Weed, “I think there will be the most extraordinary effort ever made, to carry New-York for Douglas.” Even though the New York Republicans were confident of victory, Lincoln admonished, “Still it will require close watching, and great effort” to keep Douglas contained. Continuing to hear of divisions within the New York Republican Party, Lincoln sent word that he “neither is nor will be … committed to any man, clique, or faction.” Lincoln’s policy, in New York and elsewhere, was “to deal fairly with all.”


Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin led the Republican ticket in 1860.

In Pennsylvania, a feud between Senator Simon Cameron and Andrew Curtin, Republican candidate for governor, threatened Republican solidarity in the second largest state in the Union. David Davis and Leonard Swett visited Pennsylvania in August on a fact-finding mission and reported back to Lincoln. Lincoln then wrote to members of the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee. “I am slow to listen to criminations among friends, and never expose their quarrels on either side. My sincere wish is that both sides will allow by-gones to be bygones, and look to the present and future only.”
MARY LINCOLN WAS EAGER to join her husband’s campaign in ways that most previous candidates’ wives were not. In past presidential campaigns, the wives of candidates were seldom seen and never heard. But Mary had inherited from her father a passion for politics, and for years she had put that enthusiasm to work encouraging her husband and, in an “unwomanly” way for her time, offering her counsel on all manner of politics and people. From early in their marriage, when Lincoln was running for state office, again while he served in Congress, and even when he was seemingly exiled to the Eighth Judicial Circuit, Mary had her eyes on faraway horizons. Even if Mr. Lincoln was not always an ideal husband, traveling away from her too often and not present to her when he was at home, she recognized long before others his abilities, which she believed would carry him one day all the way to the presidency.
If Lincoln did not go to the people, the people came to him. He met supporters in his home as much as at his temporary election office. As daily visitors to Springfield came to take the measure of Lincoln’s leadership abilities, many were also eager to take the measure of Mary’s abilities as hostess and conversationalist. As the candidate welcomed visitors to his office in the statehouse, she welcomed many of these same people to their home at Eighth and Jackson. Newspapers of the day seldom talked about the wives of politicians, but the New York Tribune departed from this tradition to offer a first assessment of Mary Lincoln on May 25, 1860. Greeley’s newspaper wrote that Mary Lincoln was “amiable and accomplished … vivacious and graceful,” and reported that she was “a sparkling talker.”
Through her love of letter writing to correspondents, known and unknown, across the country, Mary campaigned for her husband from Springfield. Most of her letters have vanished, but a sample of her writing is found in a reply to the Reverend Dyer Burgess, a Presbyterian minister in Constitution, Ohio, who was both antislavery and anti-Mason (some people feared that the Masons were a secret movement attempting to rule the nation). Burgess wrote that, as a Republican, he wanted to support Lincoln but needed assurances that he had never been a member of a secret society. Mary replied, “Mr. Lincoln has never been a Mason or belonged to any secret order.”
Mary received a note shortly after Lincoln’s nomination from Annie Parker Dickson, a cousin living in Cincinnati. She and her husband, William Martin Dickson, an attorney and active Republican, had entertained Lincoln when he was in Cincinnati for the “Reaper Case” in 1855. The note read, “You are an ambitious little woman and for many reasons I am delighted with your success.” Dickson was only voicing what others, especially women, had observed for a long time.
One of Mary’s regular correspondents was Hannah Shearer, sister of Noyes W. Miner, a Baptist minister and the Lincolns’ neighbor. After the death of her first husband, Edward Rathbun, Hannah had married John Henry Shearer, a physician, and moved to Brooklyn, New York. Shortly before the election, Mary wrote, “You used to be worried, that I took politics so coolly 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.”
With her husband home, Mary acted as a consultant—not about issues, but about people. Mary had long believed her husband was too trusting of others. She had strong opinions about his political colleagues. She did not like or trust Norman Judd. She relied on David Davis. Unlike her husband, she held grudges. She still harbored resentment toward Lyman Trumbull, who had defeated Lincoln for the Senate in 1855, and had not repaired her relationship with his wife, Julia Jayne Trumbull. From May through November 1860, Mary was with Abraham nearly every day, expressing her opinions and counting herself as his chief adviser. It was one of their longest periods together.
AN INSIGHT INTO Mary and Abraham Lincoln’s home life was provided by young Frank Fuller, a friend of Robert’s from Phillips Exeter who visited in the summer of 1860. After Frank called on Lincoln at the statehouse, Lincoln invited him home to dinner. Lincoln did not invite anyone to dinner without Mary’s prior consent, but Fuller found himself “warmly welcomed by Mrs. Lincoln.” He brought Mary a gift of a slim book of poems by Albert Laighton, a young poet from Ports mouth, New Hampshire. She told him of her delight in poetry and quizzed young Fuller about the poet and the poems.
As the family seated itself in the dining room, Lincoln asked Fuller if he offered grace at meals. He replied that it was his practice to read a couple of lines of poetry. As Lincoln bowed his head, Fuller asked the blessing of “the Supreme Power”
That made our frames, sustains our lives,
And through all earthly change survives.
In the conversation at dinner the young Phillips Exeter student discovered that Lincoln had committed to memory a good deal of the Bible, especially, he told him, the Sermon on the Mount and the Twenty-third Psalm.
AFRICAN-AMERICAN LEADER Frederick Douglass, returning to Rochester in 1860 from a speaking tour in England and Scotland, tried to take stock of the multiplying political candidates poised to run for the presidency. He had been a supporter of Seward, who was a subscriber to Douglass’s antislavery newspaper, the North Star, and whose career he had followed as a fellow New Yorker.
In June, Douglass offered a perceptive analysis of Lincoln in the Douglass’ Monthly. He praised Lincoln as “a man of unblemished private character; a lawyer, standing near the front rank of the bar of his own State, has a cool, well balanced head; great firmness of will; is perseveringly industrious; and one of the most frank, honest men in political life.” Noting that nineteenth-century political parties had habitually turned away from their best statesmen for president—Daniel Webster and Henry Clay—and nominated men of lesser stature—William Henry Harrison, James Polk, Zachary Taylor, and Franklin Pierce—Douglass observed, “Mr. Lincoln possesses great capacities, and is yet to be proved to be a great statesman, it is lucky for him that a political exigency moved his party to take him on trust and before his greatness was ripe, or he would have lost his chance.” And what of Douglass’s hopes for Lincoln as president?
When once elected it will be no longer dangerous for him to develop great qualities, and we hope than in taking him on a “profession of faith,” rather than on the recommendations of his political life, his party will witness his continual “growth in grace,” and his administration will redound to the glory of his country, and his own fame.
Douglass, utilizing two metaphors for the Christian journey of faith, offered one of the most prescient predictions of Lincoln’s journey of political leadership.
“ON MONDAY NIGHT some miserable, infamous, low-flung, narrow-minded, ungodly, dirt-eating, cutthroat, hemp-deserving, deeply dyed, double-distilled, concentrated miscreant of miscreants, sinned against all honor and decency, by cutting down and sawing down two or three Republican poles in this city.” This editorial in Springfield’s Illinois State Journal was referring to huge poles, some as high as one hundred feet, to which were fastened the banners of parties and candidates. What the editorial really highlighted was the enthusiasm, intensity, and contentiousness of political campaigning in Illinois at midcentury.
Political campaigns were the chief source of entertainment of the day. Events ran the gamut from rallies, parades, and pole raisings, to picnics, fireworks, excursions, and illuminations, and sometimes riots. The enthusiasm for political campaigns rivaled earlier nineteenth-century religious revivals and could be compared to the twentieth-century embrace of spectator sports. People all over the nation were paying attention as four candidates sprinted toward the finish line.
On a thousand platforms across the North, Republican leaders stumped for Lincoln. Seward and Chase barnstormed across the Midwest. In their speeches they depicted Lincoln, emphasizing his humble origins, as a man of the people. They extolled him as a lawyer and a decisive debater. Women, who could not vote, were nevertheless quite present at political rallies, carrying banners that declared,
Westward the star of Empire takes it way,
We link-on to Lincoln, as our mothers did to Clay.
A highlight of the summer campaign took place on August 8, 1860, when Springfield hosted an “immense” rally at the fairgrounds to honor its townsman candidate. The Illinois State Journal’s headline blared: “The Prairies on Fire for Lincoln.” The Journal used a full three columns to describe the rally, beginning the first column with an image of an elephant bearing its trunk, the first known use of the elephant as a symbol for the Republican Party. The words “We Are Coming” stood beneath the elephant, followed by “Clear the Track.”
A parade, led by Wide-Awakes, came to Lincoln’s home to convey him to the fairgrounds. When he arrived, the crowd, aroused at the sight of their candidate, stampeded his carriage, lifted him bodily above the mob, and carried him to one of the five speakers’ stands.
Lincoln, overcome with emotion, nevertheless kept his cool. Adjusting his stovepipe hat, he told the huge crowd, “It has been my purpose, since I have been placed in my present position, to make no speeches.” He did admit, “I confess with gratitude … that I did not suppose my appearance among you would create the tumult which I now witness.”
Lincoln’s problem became how to extricate himself from that tumult. When the crowd surrounded and stopped his carriage, George Brinkerhoff, a clerk in the state auditor’s office, joined with several other men in pulling Lincoln out of the carriage and “slipped him over the horses tail on to the saddle [and] led the horse to town.”
In August, Lincoln was particularly delighted to receive a letter of congratulations from his old friend Edward Baker. Writing from San Francisco, Baker, having known Lincoln for a quarter century, pinpointed the two characteristics that best described the president-elect. Baker wrote, “The reward that fidelity and courage, find in your person will infuse hope in many sinking bosoms, and new energy in many bold hearts.” Lincoln would need both fidelity and courage for the challenges ahead.
WITH HIS OPPONENTS DIVIDED, Lincoln was confident he would win, but he was taking nothing for granted. In the nineteenth century, state elections took place throughout the calendar year; the victories of Republicans in Maine and Vermont in August seemed to many a harbinger of good things to come. Lincoln looked forward eagerly to the results of elections in early October in the crucial states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.
Lincoln believed that early state elections could have a domino effect, influencing voters in other states. When he heard that expected September victories in two congressional districts in Maine might not materialize, and that Governor Israel Washburn’s margin of victory in his race for reelection might be much smaller than originally predicted, he wrote an urgent letter to Senator Hamlin, his vice presidential running mate, who was from Maine. “Such a result … would, I fear, put us on the down-hill track, lose us the State elections in Pennsylvania and Indiana, and probably ruin us on the main turn in November.”
Even with direction from Lincoln and a national committee, much of the campaign was under the control of state Republican organizations. This meant that in Massachusetts voters heard a strong antislavery message, whereas in Pennsylvania that message was muted in favor of one about protective tariffs. In the West, Republicans emphasized commitments to homestead opportunities and the building of the transcontinental railroad. Nonetheless, Republicans everywhere extolled the virtues of Lincoln and of sustaining the Union.
Douglas, whom Lincoln knew to be his chief rival, threw aside the nineteenth-century tradition of campaign abstention, and launched a strenuous crusade, believing he still could carry the populous free states with their large electoral votes. He put far more weight on the threats from the South than did Lincoln, and therefore tried to circulate the message that only his election could bring about peace between North and South.
The Little Giant and his supporters held nothing back in their attacks on Lincoln. Douglas partisans accused Lincoln of being a Deist—someone who believed only in natural religion—and circulated stories of Lincoln’s near duel with James Shields. They charged that Lincoln had once joined a secret Know-Nothing lodge in Quincy and dredged up the story of Lincoln’s supposed lack of support for the troops in the Mexican War. Both Douglas and John Bell, presidential candidate of the Constitutional Union Party, sought to portray Lincoln and the Republicans as the party of disunion.
In response to these attacks, Lincoln said nothing about secession. His policy was not to credit such fears, even in the fall of 1860. He believed talk of secession in the South was mostly bluster. He remained confident that, as a son of the South, he understood the mind of the Southern people. He continually referred people to his written speeches, because he believed Southerners would find in them his repeated promise not to touch slavery where it already existed in the South. In response to a letter in early August, Lincoln replied, “The people of the South have too much good sense, and good temper, to attempt the ruin of the government.”
In Springfield, Lincoln was isolated from the secessionist talk, but throughout the summer and fall of 1860, there was much foreboding across the South. Around the cracker barrels at country stores and on porches of sprawling mansions, people turned Lincoln into a caricature. Southerners depicted him as a Black Republican who was secretly aligned with abolitionists ready to unleash slave rebellions throughout the South. Southerners did not read Lincoln’s speeches, but they heard that Douglas had accused him in 1858 of favoring Negro equality. The spirit of 1776 was being rekindled in the South; this time the enemy was not the despotic British, but the tyrannical North about to elect an unknown man from the West.
Lincoln rejoiced, and also expressed a sense of relief, when victories in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana were announced at the beginning of the second week of October. On October 12, 1860, Lincoln wrote to Seward, “It now looks as if the Government is about to fall into our hands.”
All through October, Lincoln maintained his policy of silence. Although some supporters suggested that he write a public letter in the last days of the campaign setting forth his key ideas and allaying fears in the South, he continued with his strategy and said nothing.
ON A SUNNY ELECTION DAY MORNING, Tuesday, November 6, 1860, Lincoln received visitors at his office in the statehouse. He had never voted for himself in an election and was not planning to do so today. William Herndon persuaded him that he could clip off the presidential electors at the top of the ballot and still cast his vote for the state offices.
In the afternoon, Lincoln walked over to the courthouse to vote. Everywhere Lincoln went on this Election Day, people cheered and followed him. He went home for an early supper with Mary and the boys. He returned to the statehouse by seven, where he intermittently received scattered and inconclusive reports of election results from across the country.
At nine, Lincoln and David Davis and a few others went to the telegraph office. With increasing rapidity, the tapping of the telegraph keys began to spell out Republican victories across the North. Lincoln had one remaining fear. If he did not win New York, with its thirty-five electoral votes, he might not win a majority, and the election would be decided in the House of Representatives. Shortly after midnight, the results from New York signaled that Lincoln would be the sixteenth president of the United States.
With victory assured, Lincoln walked over to Watson’s Confectionery, where Mary and other Republican women had prepared a victory supper. As he entered, the women greeted him, “How do you do, Mr. President!” After eating, he went back to the telegraph office and stayed until nearly two o’clock to monitor the results.
By everyone’s remembrance, Lincoln remained remarkably calm through the long evening. He did exclaim that he was “a very happy man … who could help being so under such circumstances?” As church bells rang, and cheering exploded, Lincoln finally headed for home. “Mary, Mary, we are elected.”


This Lincoln photograph by Samuel G. Alschuler in Chicago on November 25, 1860, shows the president-elect’s new whiskers.