These days, gentlemen and ladies are apt to rush into battle over the Constitution, which became law thirteen years after Independence was declared. One of our three branches of government is largely absorbed by the task of discerning whether acts of government are within the Constitution or outside it. Then, once the Justices have their say, ladies and gentlemen rush to dispute the result, campaigning for either a change of heart or a change of Justices.
So, yes, the Constitution is important.
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Yet in our darkest hour, our president, one of the great legal minds of his or any age, resorted not to the Constitution but to the Declaration of Independence, the more ancient document.
Abraham Lincoln reasoned that the Declaration preceded the Constitution. The Declaration in a sense fathered the Constitution and was superior to it—or at least more basic, more fundamental. The Constitution, he said, could not become a suicide pact for the nation; its strictest construction would not suffice for dissolving the Union.
The Constitution of 1789 codified the structure of government in a state that existed for larger purposes, announced in 1776. Before there was a Constitution, the Declaration of Independence already said “all men are created equal.” The Constitution—in which the framers parsed fractional numbers to satisfy fragmented constituencies—could not abrogate that original guarantee.
The Declaration’s 56 signers explosively asserted that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” and that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . . .”
This doctrine was the necessary foundation of revolutionary acts. Inconveniently, it happened that some who signed this guarantee of freedom owned slaves, whom they had no intention of letting go.
Slaveholders and non-slaveholders endorse freedom in Philadelphia, 1776. Painting by John Trumbull (1756–1843). Public Domain.
Thus the stage was set for the Civil War 85 years later. In the midst of that orgy of blood, the Chief Executive chose to force the republic back upon its first principles.
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In the days when children were thought capable of learning things “by heart,” we memorized Jefferson’s stirring preamble to the Declaration easily. It came ringingly off the tongue, while the stilted phrases of the Constitution’s preamble got lost in a chorus of mumbling. To promote the general welfare is fine and dandy—but Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness are the heart of our national mission.
Therefore, starting in 1777, we have always celebrated July Fourth as Independence Day.
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Seventy years ago, the young men of our family—my uncles—in the small town of Knoxville, Illinois, used to go to Gil Hebard’s gun store and buy fireworks. Not only pinwheels, fountains, and sparklers, but also skyrockets and miniature buzz bombs were legal then in the Flatlands.
Enveloped in the sultry evening, my uncles Dick and Garrett LaFollette, Earl Chaney, and Richard Henderson fired their sky-sizzlers with great gusto, arching them above a huge elm tree that overspread Grandma’s yard. After the main event, we kids lit snakes and sparklers and shot up rolls of paper caps in our cowboy pistols.
The Public Square across the street was littered with scraps of pastry left earlier in the day by piggish contenders who plunged their whole faces into the pie-eating contest under a hot sun. There had also been sack races, three-legged races, and giant slices of watermelon for everyone.
A reasonable person might wonder, what had these hijinks to do with the deep principles of liberty that Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence? It’s hard to say, Dear Reader, but—something, surely.
The hoopla was connected with our liberty. Otherwise, why did we get up to these robust exertions on July 4, but never in the more moderate weather of Constitution Day, September 17?
Now, seven decades after the spectacles that enlivened my youth, we still make a big deal out of Independence Day. We still have picnics, speeches, fireworks, and tomfoolery. We poise our politicians over galvanized tanks and give everybody with a pitching arm the opportunity to dunk them in cold water.
There is something republican, and also democratic, about that.
There would not be much need to celebrate, had 56 brave souls not inked their signatures to a parchment 247 years ago and pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the twin dreams of freedom and equality.
Happy Fourth, and be careful with those sparklers. If you don’t watch out you’ll put somebody’s eye out.
A literary agent asked what book I had most recently read. It was a kind of litmus test.
Between you and me, Dear Reader, my short-term memory is on its last groove. Had I not just polished off a book that very morning, I might have been struck speechless.
But it happens I had. So I spoke right up—“The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History, by Edward Achorn.”
Do you suppose I passed the agent’s litmus test?
At least I knew the name of a book. There’s that to be said in my favor.
But I digress.
My purpose today, Fair Reader, is actually to acquaint you with that particular book.
The Crisis
In the mid-nineteenth century every American knew trouble lay ahead. The words “civil war” increasingly rolled off people’s tongues.
Southern politicians wanted to expand the geographic limits of the institution of slavery, while many in the Northern states wanted to limit slavery to the places where it already existed. These two agendas were incompatible—and people on both sides cared deeply about the question.
Abraham Lincoln summarized the situation in a famous speech, saying:
Abraham Lincoln February 27, 1860. Matthew Brady photo. Public Domain.
“A house divided against itself, cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing or all the other.
Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.
But Lincoln was only a provincial politician, a self-educated man whose highest public office had been a single term as United States Representative from Illinois’ 7th District. Even after he skewered the great Stephen A. Douglas in Senatorial candidate debates in 1858, that did not make him a national figure. He won the debates but lost the election. So much for the upstart prairie lawyer.
William H. Seward, 1859 or before. Public Domain.
William H. Seward was a two-term U.S. Senator from New York, a former governor of the state. He was the dear friend and the special project of a top kingmaker, Thurlow Weed of Albany. A long-time Whig, Seward was the most prominent figure to join the new Republican party when it formed. He could have been nominated for president in 1856, but his political manager Weed forced Seward to withdraw his name, throwing the nomination to grandiose political novice John C. Frémont. “We do not want him nominated for fun,” Weed explained to a friend. He was convinced the new party was too weak to win in 1856; better to sacrifice Frémont than Seward.
The Nomination
Four years later, in 1860, Seward’s time had come. He and Weed were ready. Seward, a top architect of the Republican party, believed he was owed the presidential nomination.
Seward, like Lincoln, had spoken of the North-South divide in stark terms.
“It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.”
Seward’s Irrepressible Conflict Speech “set off a firestorm,” according to author Achorn, whereas Lincoln’s House Divided Speech “had been all but ignored outside of Illinois.” Seward was a big-name politician; Lincoln was not.
Thurlow Weed, ca. 1860. Matthew Brady photo. Public Domain.
The Republican Party chose Chicago as the site for its 1860 nominating convention. Seward and Weed approved the decision, perhaps considering Illinois a neutral ground, the home of no major rival candidate. When Thurlow Weed and a united New York delegation steamed into Chicago on a special train Saturday, May 12, it was to ensure Seward’s coronation.
Achorn’s book, The Lincoln Miracle—which I highly recommend—is a detailed examination of how a small team of Lincoln’s Illinois supporters, working feverishly around the clock over the course of the next week, spoiled Seward’s party.
The Convention
The stakes were enormous. Not only was the entire nation gripped in the fear of civil war; the Democratic Party had split in a major debacle at its convention in Charleston, South Carolina. It looked like there would be not one, but two or even three Democratic candidates. Thus, it seemed the Republican nominee would win the White House.
Neither Lincoln nor Seward, nor any other potential candidate—Bates, Cameron, Chase, or any other—was present in Chicago. It would have been unseemly. Candidates were expected to stay home, serenely attending to personal or professional matters. They communicated with their floor teams daily by telegraph.
Judge David Davis, ca. 1860. Public Domain.
Lincoln’s campaign was run by his old friend, Judge David Davis. Just as Lincoln seemed a minor figure compared to Seward, so Davis—a purely local commodity—was eclipsed by the fame of Thurlow Weed, the great newspaperman and political boss.
But Davis was a long-time politician and knew just what to do.
Lincoln started with a home field advantage the New Yorkers were slow to grasp. The convention was held in a fresh-built wooden auditorium called The Wigwam. It was large enough to hold ten thousand people. And Lincoln supporter Norman B. Judd had charge of the seating arrangements. The Illinois delegation was seated close to those of wavering or undecided states, the better to lobby their delegates during the balloting, whereas the New York delegation sat isolated, separated by a broad aisle from those same delegates.
A drawing of the Wigwam’s interior during the convention. Public Domain.
All week long the Lincoln men had been buttonholing delegates from other states. Their orders from Lincoln were never to speak ill of other candidates. They only sought to make Lincoln, so far as possible, every delegate’s second choice.
Seward was a great American, they granted, and a leading foe of slavery. Only—just in case his support was not quite as strong as everybody imagined—then Lincoln, not Bates or Chase or anybody else, was the logical second choice.
After all, his House Divided Speech said the same thing Seward’s Irrepressible Conflict Speech did. It was just maybe a bit more carefully worded, with its language looking to slavery being placed “in the course of ultimate extinction.” The pro-slavery firebrands already agitating for secession would not be happy with either Seward or Lincoln, but conservative Union men in the Border States might be able to stomach the more cautious and politic Abe.
When the balloting started on Friday, it came as a great surprise to Weed and his cohorts that Lincoln, not Bates or Cameron or Chase or McLean, stood in second place with a strong showing of 102 votes to Seward’s 173½.
Since 233 votes were needed for a majority, a second ballot was taken and showed Seward at 184½ and Lincoln at 181. A hushed crowd suddenly realized that Seward did not have it sewed up.
Enough delegates swtiched to Lincoln to give him the nomination on the third ballot.
The Illinois delegation, other Lincoln supporters, and local residents of Chicago generally went wild. Fireworks erupted. There was pandemonium. There were joy and tears in distant cities as telegrams went out to announce the stunning news.
A committee of party poo-bahs took a train to Springfield the next day to formally tender the nomination to Lincoln in person. Most of them had never met the Railsplitter and wondered whether the party had made a great mistake by nominating the ignorant country bumpkin of hostile press accounts.
Imagine their delight when the candidate and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, received the little group of big men in their modest and tasteful home with grace, dignity, and irresistible warmth.
They decided Lincoln would do.
The Book
Reader, intending to tell you about Achorn’s book. Instead I have told you some little bit of what the book says.
Why do I like the book? Because, in addition to explaining in perfect detail the political machinations behind Lincoln’s nomination at The Wigwam in May 1860, it gives memorable and insightful portraits of the main characters.
William Seward is no villain. He is a man of towering stature, better qualified than Lincoln in many ways. He is kind-hearted, generous of spirit, unwilling to overstep the bounds of propriety. He is also a man of no small ego, and he genuinely believes he has a date with destiny as president of the United States. But the smart and hard-working campaign engineered by David Davis deprived him of it. It was a bitter pill to swallow. He did find a way to swallow it, accepted the post of Secretary of State, and became a key Lincoln ally throughout the war and the far-sighted purchaser of Alaska afterwards.
Thurlow Weed comes in for sympathetic treatment. Too often dismissed as a crude machine politician, he emerges in Achorn’s telling as a man of great intelligence, sensitivity, and magnetism, a man of high Christian principles. He, too, was bitterly disappointed by the 1860 result. He, too, made the best of it and forged a strong working relationship with the new president.
Horace Greeley, ca. 1860. Public domain.
The Hon. Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the New York Tribune, is the joker in the deck at the 1860 Republican convention. Formerly a great friend of Seward and Weed, he turned on both of them in the years just before the convention, apparently because they would not help him achieve public office. Neither Seward nor Weed seemed to realize the depth of Greeley’s animus, but the old curmudgeon spent a lot of time and effort lobbying delegates with the notion that Seward could not be elected. Though he was ostensibly working for Edward Bates of Missouri, the seeds of doubt Greeley sowed about the front-runner worked in Lincoln’s favor. With his demanding, querulous nature, he went from bedeviling Seward at the convention to bedeviling Lincoln once the new president was in office.
Finally, there is Lincoln himself. Honesty was a big part of his brand at Chicago in 1860. Whether or not people felt he was the right candidate, they knew they could trust him not to be corrupt. That is because he genuinely was honest and not corrupt.
He was a shrewd politician, for sure. But one reason he stood head and shoulders above other politicians in his mastery of the whole political scene was his ability to see the long picture. Throughout his political career, whenever anyone did him ill, he bore no grudge. He turned the other cheek. He suffered a lot of insufferable people. So when the time came to make his move, there were not a lot of people holding specific grudges against him.
He gave Davis and his team a clear written instruction: “Make no contracts that will bind me.” Yet Lincoln was in Springfield; his flying squad was in Chicago on the convention floor. It appears that, when push came to shove and they needed to shift a few more votes to accomplish the miracle, they promised cabinet posts to Pennsylvania strongman Simon Cameron and Indiana politico Caleb Smith.
Lincoln may not have felt “bound” by these undertakings but he did appoint Cameron Secretary of War and Smith Secretary of the Interior. Neither man was well-qualified, and Cameron was soon replaced by the zealous and effective Edwin M. Stanton.
By the standards of the time, only two cabinet posts was a remarkably light obligation for a successful candidate to have incurred. That his campaigners did not obligate him for more than this is probably because they knew the candidate would object. Mister Lincoln’s command not to “bind” him had its effect. But as a practical politician, he did what he had to do to cover his operatives afterward.
All in all, The Lincoln Miracle sheds welcome light on the 1860 convention and is a very enjoyable and entertaining read. It uncovers new meaning in our common past.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
Hans Christian Heg, an immigrant from Norway, believed that black lives matter.
For this reason he became a leader of Wisconsin’s Wide Awakes, an anti-slave catcher militia. He sheltered Sherman Booth, who was made a federal fugitive after inciting a mob to rescue an escaped slave. He joined the Free Soil Party, which opposed the expansion of slavery into the western states.
When the Free Soil Party merged into the new Republican Party, which also opposed the expansion of slavery, Heg became a Republican. When the Republican candidate became president and the slave-holding states of the South seceded, he went to work raising an army unit from his fellow Norwegians. His “thousand Norsemen” were mustered into service as the 15th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the only all-Scandinavian regiment in the Union Army, with Heg at their head as colonel.
Colonel Hans Christian Heg, in bronze, by Paul Fjelde. Public Domain.
He led the 15th in battle at Perrysville, Kentucky, and Stones River, Tennessee. In September 1863, at Chickamauga, Georgia, he “was shot through the bowels and died the next day.” Heg’s body was returned to Wisconsin and buried in the Norwegian Lutheran cemetery near Wind Lake.
In 1925, in conjunction with the centennial of Norwegian immigration to America, a bronze statue of Heg was installed at the state capitol in Madison. The bronze colonel has stood in silent witness to Norwegian-Americans’ contributions to freedom ever since.
Statue Toppled
But a few nights ago—June 23, 2020—a mob of citizens toppled Heg’s statue, dismembered it, and threw the pieces in Lake Monona. They had begun by protesting the disorderly-conduct arrest of a black man named Devonere Johnson and ended by destroying the statue of Colonel Hans Christian Heg.
Many have pointed out the apparent incongruity of Black Lives Matter protesters destroying the statue of a leading abolitionist and Civil War hero. “These people must not know history,” they have said.
But surely the point here is that in the current uproar, historical judgments are irrelevant. History itself is the enemy. The bond between past and present sometimes becomes more visceral than philosophical. At suchtimes, the strident present ransacks the mute past, seeking out victims. Ask any Bosnian.
There can be no distinction between a Hans Christian Heg and a Nathan Bedford Forrest when a noisy claque regards the whole past as merely a bogus excuse for a deplorable status quo.
It is bad enough they killed him at Chickamauga. Killing him all over again, by effigy, assasinates his memory. It cannot injure Hans Christian Heg beyond the grave. But it is dispiriting to those of us who would like to suppose that Americans express themselves in rational ways. Obviously, that is not always so.
The people destroying things now for racial harmony, like those destroying things fifty years ago for peace, may think they are igniting The Revolution. Their Marxist utopia did not come into being in those days. But our nation’s troubling racial divide is a more fertile ground for deep-seated conflict.
It’s unlikely there will be a revolution, but it’s easy to believe we are in for a long, hard time. It would be nice if some good came out of it all, but I don’t have that kind of faith.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author
Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
When vast public ills descend on us, usually we can pinpoint the moment, or the day, when they became manifest.
In the case of sudden events—the eruption of Vesuvius, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, etc.—the time of their occurrence, even to the second, is obvious to all.
John Martin’s 1821 painting Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Public Domain.
Other disasters roll out more slowly, and the precise moment we later remember is really an instant of realization, a time when the nature and dimensions of the threat suddenly crystallized. Thus it was at the Battle of Shiloh—April 6-7, 1862—when the emergence of forty thousand yipping rebels from the woods near a Tennessee River landing destroyed the wishful Northern hope that the Secession had almost run its course. Likewise, in the spring of 1965, the Students for a Democratic Society’s march on Washington served notice that the Vietnam War would not be, like previous wars, supported by most of the American public.
The Slow Roll
So it is with the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been raging, in China, since 1 December 2019. On 7 January 2020 the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a travel notice for travelers to Wuhan, relating to “the cluster of cases of pneumonia of an unknown etiology.” On 9 January the World Health Organization confirmed the existence of a “novel coronavirus,” and the first death occurred in China.
On 19 January, cases began appearing in areas of China outside Wuhan.
On 21 January, the United States reported its first laboratory-confirmed case, in the state of Washington.
Li Wenliang. Fair use.
On 28 January, China’s Supreme People’s Court ruled that whistleblower, Li Wenliang, had not committed the crime of spreading “rumors” when on 30 December 2019 he posted to a WeChat forum for medical school alumni that seven patients under his care appeared to have contracted SARS. In their ruling, the Supreme People’s Court stated, “If society had at the time believed those ‘rumors’. . . perhaps it would’ve meant we could better control the coronavirus today. Rumors end when there is openness.”
On 6 February, Dr. Li died of the coronavirus illness.
By that time, there were thousands of cases in China and many cases in other countries of the world and certain cruise ships at sea or quarantined in ports.
Since then, we have had daily reports of new illness and deaths in many places around the world, and in the United States. America’s and the world’s financial markets have crashed as airlines, cruise lines, and many other business have seen their customer streams and supply chains badly affected.
Moment of Truth
Yesterday—Wednesday, 11 March 2020—is when this illness became real to most of us:
Tom Hanks caught it. And his wife, Rita Wilson. They have been diagnosed in Australia, where they are making a film.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association announced that their annual basketball tournament would be played with practically nobody in the stands. (Today, they canceled the event entirely.)
The World Health Organization officially declared a global pandemic (as if we didn’t know already).
Donald J. Trump made a speech from the Oval Office. Whether you liked it or not probably depends on what you think of Trump generally.
Norway closed, for crying out loud!
Now that Tom Hanks, our national Everyman, has caught the corona bug, and now that one of our great national festivals, the NCAA Tournament, has been canceled—COVID-19, overnight, has become dire in a way it was not before.
The Upshot
Classes, events, gatherings everywhere are being canceled or rescheduled. My own life has been affected: The University of Wisconsin Writers’ Institute, an event many of us look forward to all year long, is suddenly off the books. We await, with bated breath, the new dates.
It’s most frustrating. But it really is necessary. A full-court press, in the realm of what we now call “social distancing,” is probably the greatest weapon we have to “flatten the curve” of the coronavirus. It will save lives—mine for sure, maybe yours, too.
I have no advice for you, Dear Reader, any better than what you can get elsewhere. As Abraham Lincoln said in a much different context, “With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.”
Please do your best to stay healthy. I need all the devoted readers I can get.
Blessings and best wishes for a long, long life,
Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer.
Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
