Lincoln for President by Bruce Chadwick Chadwick

Author:Bruce Chadwick Chadwick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2009-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

Indiana

Indiana, too, was a big question mark. Lincoln faced different problems in Indiana, his neighboring state. There, Frémont had been beaten by Buchanan in 1856, 50 percent to 40 percent, but the remaining 10 percent of the votes, which went to Fillmore, were up for grabs in 1860.552

Unlike the New England states, Indiana was relatively conservative on the slavery question, so the Republicans hammered away at the Homestead Act with the slogan free land for free labor.

Lincoln and his advisers put together a team of nationally famous speakers to stump through Indiana in mid-July. One was Cassius Clay, an abolitionist and powerful political figure from Kentucky whose support, as a Southerner, was important. Lincoln wrote Clay, “I sincerely thank you for this.”553

Clay told Lincoln that “I must trust you to the fullest extent,” and then he added, “I can’t help myself!”554

Clay, a good campaigner, went on a stump tour in Indiana that lasted from August 28 to September 9 and was then sent into Pennsylvania for speeches in the southern counties. He reported earlier that the Democratic Party was in disarray. “The whole Fillmore vote is dissolved,” he said, and added, “You are surely a winner in Indiana.”555

Judge Davis decided more German speakers were needed to hold the German vote for Lincoln. Several German orators, including the influential Carl Schurz, who charged his dear friend Lincoln $600 for his campaign services, then stumped through the state for the Republicans. They targeted heavy German areas with German speakers to prevent the old Know-Nothings, kept in the Republican ranks by the thinnest of threads, from bolting because of the Republican efforts to secure the German vote. They were walking a political tightrope.

The hardest-working speaker in Indiana was Schuyler Colfax, a longtime political figure in the state, who delivered more than 120 speeches for Lincoln, an average of one per day. Perhaps the most influential was Pennsylvania Congressman John Covode, the chair of the committee that investigated the corruption in the Buchanan administration. He was electric, telling crowds that “offices were bought and sold in the ante room of the Senate and the executive mansion was open as a butcher shop.”556

Davis organized large outdoor rallies for Lincoln in the major cities, including a wild affair at Indianapolis on August 29. Local Republican organizers attracted a crowd of over fifty thousand to watch one of the biggest demonstrations of the campaign, a festive rally that featured speeches by a dozen state and national leaders, including Edwin Stanton (Lincoln would later name him secretary of war). Thousands of Wide Awakes paraded through the streets of Indianapolis. They were joined by two new Lincoln groups, “Abe’s Boys” and the “Rail Maulers,” who, like the Wide Awakes, were comprised of new, young voting men (the Wide Awake uniforms were mass produced and only cost each man $1.15).557

“Our friends have gone home inspired with new zeal,” said Lincoln supporter Caleb Smith after the rally.558

Still, things were not going well. “To injure our prospects in November, I am afraid a majority of Bell men will vote against us in our state in November.

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