The Man Who Saved the Union (15 page)

Lincoln found his way to the Republicans, who in
Illinois were a cautious bunch, at first refusing even to call themselves Republicans for fear of being branded abolitionists by the pro-Southern elements that ran strong in parts of Illinois. At their founding convention in Bloomington in 1856, the Illinois Republicans endorsed the minimal antislavery position of the national party: opposition to an extension of slavery in the western territories. Lincoln approached the Republicans with folksy humor that made some people smile and others groan. He acknowledged that most members of the party were better known than he, and he said he felt like an ugly man who met an outspoken woman on the road. “
You are the homeliest man I ever saw,” the woman asserted. The man replied, “I can’t help it.” “I suppose not,” the woman retorted. “But you might stay at home.”

Yet
Lincoln could be serious too. At the Bloomington convention he delivered a stirring speech on the necessity of preserving the values of American democracy against the iniquitous and unconstitutional demands of the slaveholders, some of whom threatened secession if they didn’t get their way. He concluded by quoting
Daniel Webster: “
Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”

He sufficiently impressed his fellow Republicans in Illinois that when the national party held its first presidential nominating convention that year at Philadelphia, the Illinois delegates arranged to have Lincoln offered for vice president. The effort failed, but it won him notice outside his state. He campaigned vigorously around Illinois for the Republican presidential nominee,
John Frémont, who had survived his Mexican War court-martial to become rich on California gold, famous for his audacity and envied for his beautiful and forceful wife,
Jessie Benton Frémont, the daughter of
Thomas Hart Benton. Though Frémont lost to Democrat
James Buchanan in the general election, Lincoln earned credit for his service on behalf of the Republicans.

He redeemed some of that credit in 1858 when the Illinois Republicans nominated him for the Senate against Stephen
Douglas. Lincoln understood that he needed to capture the attention of the public, and in accepting the Senate nomination he uttered a chilling prophecy. “
A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he said. “I believe that this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free.… 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 alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, North as well as South.”

Lincoln’s shocking prediction brought him the notice he sought, and it compelled Douglas to accept Lincoln’s challenge to a series of debates on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision and related aspects of the sectional struggle. During the late summer and early autumn
of 1858 Lincoln and Douglas toured Illinois, with Douglas defending his record of compromise over slavery and Lincoln assailing that record as capitulation to the slave tyranny. “
Henry Clay once said of a class of men who would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, that they must, if they would do this, go back to the era of our independence and muzzle the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return,” Lincoln told an audience in Ottawa, Illinois. “They must blow
out the moral lights around us. They must penetrate the human soul and eradicate there the love of liberty. And then, and not till then, could they perpetuate slavery in this country. To my thinking, Judge Douglas is, by his example and vast influence, doing that very thing.”

L
ouisa
Boggs felt sorry for Grant. “
It was a hard situation for him,” she remembered. “He was a northern man married to a southern, slave owning family. Colonel
Dent openly despised him. All the family said ‘poor Julia’ when they spoke of Mrs. Grant.… Everybody thought Captain Grant a poor match for Miss Dent.”

Louisa Boggs considered Grant a decent soul who was simply out of his element in civilian life. “We thought him a man of ability but in the wrong place. His mind was not on such things as selling real estate. He did clerical work and wrote a good clear hand, but wasn’t of much use. He hadn’t the push of a business man. His intentions were good, but he hadn’t the faculty of keeping affairs in order. Mr. Boggs went east on business, leaving the Captain in charge, and when he returned he found everything upside down. The books were in confusion, the wrong people had been let into houses and the owners were much concerned.”

Grant didn’t appear to resent the low esteem in which he was held. “He didn’t blame us to think poorly of him,” Louisa Boggs said. “He thought poorly of himself. I don’t think he had any ambition further than to educate and care for his family. His mind was always somewhere else. He said very little unless some war topic came up. If you mentioned Napoleon’s battles or the
Mexican war or the question of secession, he was glib enough.” Grant’s knowledge of his ineptitude at the business of life shaped his emotions, she believed. “
He seemed to me to be much depressed. Yes, he was a sad man. I never heard him laugh out loud. He would smile, and he was not a gloomy man, but he was a sad man.”

He grew sadder as he realized that the partnership with Boggs wouldn’t work. He couldn’t object when Boggs cut him loose; there was scarcely enough business for one partner, let alone two.

He applied for a job as county engineer. His army background, even if in infantry, gave his application a certain plausibility, but the decision rested with the county board of commissioners, who took other considerations into account. His brief residence in St. Louis told against him; he lacked the friendly connections that often facilitated public appointments.
And though he kept out of partisan politics, he had voted for
James Buchanan in
1856. “
It was evident to my mind that the election of a Republican President in 1856 meant the secession of all the Slave States, and rebellion,” he explained afterward. “Under these circumstances I preferred the success of a candidate whose election would prevent or postpone secession, to seeing the country plunged into a war the end of which no man could foretell.” His preference for Buchanan was known, voting being a public act in those days, and it pleased the two Democrats on the county board, but the three Republicans—or Free-Soilers, as they were still called in Missouri—were less happy.

“
Should your honorable body see proper to give me the appointment,” he wrote the board as part of his application, “I pledge myself to give the office my entire attention and shall hope to give general satisfaction.” He produced references, including
Joseph Reynolds, a West Point classmate who currently taught mechanics and engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. “
He always maintained a high standing, and graduated with great credit, especially in mathematics, mechanics, and engineering,” Reynolds exaggerated of Grant. “From my personal knowledge of his capacity and acquirements as well as of his strict integrity and unremitting industry I consider him in an eminent degree qualified for the office of County Engineer.”

Grant didn’t get the job. “
The question has at length been settled, and I am sorry to say, adversely to me,” he wrote his father in September. “The two Democratic Commissioners voted for me and the Freesoilers against me.… The Free Soil party felt themselves bound to provide for one of their own party.”

His failure left him at a loss regarding his future. “What I shall now go at I have not determined,” he told his father. He had swapped the Hardscrabble farmhouse for the house in St. Louis, a lot and a $3,000 note; these gave him some hope. “If I could get the $3,000 note cashed … I could put up with the proceeds two houses that would pay me, at least, $40 per month rent.” He and Julia had pared their expenses sufficiently that this would cover much of them. “A very modest salary will support me.”

But nothing turned up. “
I am still unemployed,” he wrote his younger brother Simpson four weeks later. Yet he did have one prospect, in the St. Louis customhouse. “My name has been forwarded for the appointment of Superintendent, which if I do not get will not probably be filled
at all. In that case there is a vacant desk which I may get that pays $1200 per annum.” He landed the desk job—a clerkship—but it lasted only a month, until his patron suddenly died.

His pitiful savings dwindled. Simpson, who lived in Galena, brought him a horse to sell; Grant let a potential buyer take the horse on a trial basis. “I have seen neither man nor horse,” he had to report to Simpson a week later. He and Julia moved into a cheaper house. “It is much more pleasant than where we lived when you were here,” he told Simpson unconvincingly.

Grant’s descent was painful to witness, not least because his family fell with him. “
They were very poor in money and in clothes and furniture,”
Louisa Boggs recalled. “They always had enough to eat, but Mrs. Grant had to dress very plainly. I remember once someone asked her to go downtown shopping and she said, ‘I can’t do it. I have no shoes fit to wear on the street.’ ”

  PART TWO  

THE RAGE OF ACHILLES

“Sing, goddess, the rage of Achilles …”

12

J
OHN
B
ROWN LEFT
K
ANSAS AFTER A NEW GOVERNOR
, J
OHN
G
EARY
, brokered a truce between the warring parties in the territory. Increasingly Brown believed that freedom for the slaves must come by the blood of their masters; a peaceful
Kansas might serve the purpose of its inhabitants but would do nothing for the larger struggle of which Kansas had been a part. When other abolitionists sent petitions to Congress and sponsored lectures and symposia, Brown couldn’t contain his scorn. “
Talk! talk! talk! That will never free the slaves. What is needed is action—action!”

Brown’s call for action shamed certain abolitionists who realized how helpless politics and the law had become to ameliorate the condition of the slaves. Several put their money at Brown’s disposal; these “secret six” included individuals eminently respectable but for a willingness to foment revolution, which was what Brown now proposed. He plotted an attack on the federal arsenal at
Harpers Ferry in western Virginia, with the goal of distributing the captured weapons to slaves who would use them against their masters.

Frederick Douglass tried to talk Brown out of the endeavor. Douglass, an escaped slave whose personal journey galvanized the abolitionist movement even as it steeled the slaveholders to foil potential imitators, thought the raid on Harpers Ferry would accomplish no good and much bad, beginning with the deaths of the raiders. “
You will never get out alive,” he warned Brown.

Brown dismissed the warning as cowardly and defeatist. “Remember the trumpets of Jericho!” he told Douglass. “Harpers Ferry will be mine. The news of its capture will be the trumpet blast that will rally slaves
to my standard from miles around. Join me, Frederick; together we will bring slavery down!”