Three Ballots in the Wigwam and How Lincoln Beat the Favorite in 1860

Everybody in the room knew who was going to win. The newspapers said so. The bands said so. The delegates from New York, who marched through Chicago in the spring of 1860 with a brass band and a banner, said so loudest of all. William Henry Seward, the senator from New York, the famous one, the party's leading voice for years, was coming to Chicago to be nominated for President, and the rest was paperwork.

Three days later, a lawyer from Springfield, Illinois, who had never held a statewide office and had lost his last race for the Senate, was the Republican nominee. Let me tell you how that happened, because the story is the best lesson in political arithmetic I know. It says that in a coalition party, being the loudest favorite is not the same as being the safest choice. Sometimes the second choice of nearly everybody beats the first choice of a few.

The stakes: a young party that had lost once

Remember where the party stood. It was six years old. In 1856 it had run John C. Frémont for President and lost to James Buchanan, though it had carried eleven free states. If you want the origin story, it is in The Little Schoolhouse in Ripon and the Oak Grove in Jackson, 1854. By 1860, the question was not whether Republicans could carry the states they already held. The question was whether they could get a few more.

Here is the arithmetic, and I want you to see how tight it was. Frémont's eleven states added up to 114 electoral votes. The 1860 Electoral College had 303 electors, so a candidate needed 152, which is half of 303 rounded up. The gap: 152 minus 114 equals 38 votes still to find. Four large states had gone to Buchanan in 1856 and were within reach: Pennsylvania with 27 electors, Indiana with 13, Illinois with 11, and New Jersey with 7. Pennsylvania plus Illinois alone would get a candidate to 152 (114 plus 27 plus 11), and Indiana would give some breathing room (that makes 165).

So the real question at the Chicago convention was never "who is the most popular Republican?" It was "who can win Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois?" Those were the states that would decide it, and none of them was the home of the front-runner.

The favorite: William Seward

Seward was a giant. He had been governor of New York, he had sat in the Senate since 1849, and he had a record of standing against the spread of slavery that few could match. He had given two speeches that every delegate knew. In 1850 he had spoken of a "higher law" than the Constitution when it came to slavery in the new territories, and in 1858 he had said the country faced an "irrepressible conflict." His campaign manager was Thurlow Weed, the New York political boss, and Weed was good at his job.

And that was the problem. Seward had been in the public eye for so long that he had collected enemies the way a ship collects barnacles. The "higher law" phrase sounded to many cautious Northerners like a politician who put his own view above the law of the land. The "irrepressible conflict" speech sounded to Southerners like a threat, and to border-state voters like a prediction of war. Some delegates, especially from states with large numbers of former Know-Nothing voters, remembered that Seward as governor had backed state aid for Catholic schools and had been friendly to immigrants. Horace Greeley, the New York editor who had once been Weed's partner, had become Seward's enemy and was working against him in Chicago.

None of that made Seward a bad man or a weak candidate. It made him a candidate with a ceiling. The delegates who were nervous were from precisely the swing states.

The cast of rivals, and the bargain no one made

Seward was not alone. Salmon Chase of Ohio, the anti-slavery lawyer who had helped write the Appeal of the Independent Democrats, wanted it. Edward Bates of Missouri, an older border-state Whig, wanted it. Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, with a strong grip on that state's party, wanted it, or at least wanted to be bought. And there was Lincoln.

Lincoln was not in Chicago. He stayed home in Springfield. Two years earlier, in 1858, he had lost the Senate race to Stephen Douglas, but the seven debates against Douglas had made his name known and his arguments clear. Early in 1860 he gave a speech at Cooper Union in New York that impressed an audience of skeptical Easterners. So he was a known quantity and a respected one. But as the convention began, he trailed far behind Seward in the count of delegates pledged.

What he had was a team. His managers included Judge David Davis of Bloomington, Illinois, Leonard Swett, Norman Judd and Jesse Dubois. Judd, who chaired the Illinois Republican committee, had helped bring the convention to Chicago in the first place, so the home team had the hall. The Illinois men worked the delegations of the doubtful states one at a time, with a simple pitch: we are not asking you to give up your first choice. We are asking you to remember us when your first choice cannot win.

A famous story says Lincoln sent word to his managers not to make deals that would bind him. A second story says the managers made some anyway, including a promise of a place in the cabinet for Cameron. Historians still argue about how much was promised and how much Lincoln knew. Cameron did become Secretary of War in 1861, and he left the post in early 1862. I'll let you draw your own conclusion, and I'll keep the claim to what the record shows: the managers worked hard, they made friends, and some of the friends later got jobs.

The Wigwam itself

The convention met in a large wooden hall called the Wigwam, built for the occasion at the corner of Lake and Market streets. It was made to hold thousands of people, and the crowd mattered. Convention floors in that era were noisy and public, and cheering was a weapon. Lincoln's local supporters, so the stories go, made sure the galleries were full of men who knew when to roar. How much of that is true and how much is legend, I can't say for sure. What is certain is that the cheering for Lincoln was loud and the home crowd was not for Seward.

On the second day, May 17, the delegates adopted the platform first and voted on the nominee after. That order matters. The platform was the program: no extension of slavery into the territories, a homestead law, a Pacific railroad, river and harbor improvements and a tariff to help American industry. The planks that mattered most to the swing states were the ones about homesteads and the tariff, and you can read how they stacked up against the Democrats in What the 1860 Republican Platform Promised Compared With What Democrats Offered. Pennsylvania wanted its iron protected. Indiana and Illinois wanted free western land.

The other party was coming apart

One more piece of context, because it explains the mood in the hall. The Democrats had met in Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1860 and could not agree on a nominee. Delegates from several Southern states walked out when the party would not adopt a platform demanding federal protection for slavery in the territories. The Democrats tried again in Baltimore in June, and the party split for good: Northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas, Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, and a third group, the Constitutional Union Party, put up John Bell of Tennessee.

The Republicans in Chicago did not know all of that yet, since the Baltimore meeting came a month after theirs. But they knew the Charleston convention had failed, and they could see the Democrats were in trouble. That raised the stakes of getting the choice right. When the other side is fighting itself, the worst thing you can do is hand it a gift by nominating someone who frightens the middle of the country. Delegates who were weighing Seward's brilliance against Lincoln's safety were weighing it with that in mind. A divided opposition does not guarantee a win. It does reward a party that refuses to beat itself.

The three ballots

Balloting began on May 18, and it took three rounds. A candidate needed 233 votes out of 465 delegate votes, which is half plus one, rounded up.

1. First ballot. Seward led, as expected, with about 173 and a half votes. Lincoln was second with 102. The rest went to Cameron, Chase, Bates and others. Nobody was close to 233. Seward had come in with a lead but not with a majority, and that was already a sign of trouble.
2. Second ballot. The shifts began. Pennsylvania delegates who had stood by Cameron moved to Lincoln, and so did others. Seward gained a little, to about 184 and a half. Lincoln jumped to 181. In one ballot, the favorite's lead had shrunk to three and a half votes.
3. Third ballot. Lincoln came in with about 231 and a half, only a vote and a half short of the 233 he needed. Before the tally was announced, delegates from Ohio switched four votes to him, and that pushed him over. The rest of the floor followed. By the time the roll was done, the nomination was his.

The convention then nominated Hannibal Hamlin of Maine for Vice President. Hamlin had been a Democrat and had joined the Republicans in 1856, so the ticket joined an Illinois Whig with a New England former Democrat: it balanced the East and the West, and it balanced the party's two main roots.

Back in Springfield, Lincoln learned the result at a newspaper office where the telegraph reports were being posted. He had not gone to the convention, and he had not been in the hall for any of it.

Why Seward lost and Lincoln won

Now let me do what a debater does, and set out the argument in numbered points, because the result was not an accident.

1. The party needed to win new states, not impress old ones. The states Seward carried, New York and the others, were already in the Republican column. The prize was Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois, and the party's own governors-to-be in those states said Seward would struggle there.
2. Pennsylvania and Indiana had October elections for state offices. Candidates for governor in those two states, Andrew Curtin in Pennsylvania and Henry Lane in Indiana, told the delegates they could not win their own races on a ticket headed by Seward. A loss in October would be a signal to the country, and it could sink the November effort. The delegates listened.
3. Lincoln had few enemies. He had taken a firm position against the spread of slavery, but he had done it in language that sounded reasoned, not threatening, and he had not spent twenty years in the national limelight.
4. Lincoln had made a lot of second-choice friends. Many delegates who arrived pledged to another man did not hate Lincoln. They simply had another favorite. When the first choice could not win, the second choice was already warm.

The general election bore the arithmetic out. Lincoln carried all the free states except New Jersey, which he split, and he reached 180 electoral votes. Look at the map: 114 from the old Frémont states, plus Pennsylvania's 27, Indiana's 13 and Illinois's 11, plus a few more from the West and a split in New Jersey. The Democrats, divided in two that year, could not stop it.

The strongest objection: it was a backroom deal

The best case against my account goes like this. Chicago in 1860 was a smoke-filled room with a bigger roof. Delegates were courted with promises of jobs. The galleries were packed. The nominee was chosen by managers and bosses, not by the voters, and a modern conservative who believes in open primaries ought to be suspicious of the whole thing.

That is a fair point, and it is worth taking seriously. The convention system had real weaknesses, and the party later moved toward primaries, a long story told in How Republicans Pick Nominees from Party Bosses to Primaries and Caucuses and From Smoke-Filled Rooms to Prime Time Republican Conventions in Dated Steps. But I'd offer two answers. First, the delegates in 1860 were chosen by state conventions made up of local party members, so the pull of the grass roots was not absent. Second, the choice they made was a good one: they picked the candidate who could win, who could hold the coalition and who then held the Union together through the worst test the country ever faced. A process that produces Lincoln has something going for it.

I'd add one more lesson that conservatives should like. The party showed discipline. Seward, the loser, and Weed, his manager, came home and campaigned for the winner. Seward would serve as Lincoln's Secretary of State, and his later purchase of Alaska is told in William Seward bought Alaska for about two cents an acre and got mocked. Compare that to the convention fight of 1912, when the losers walked out and split the party, a story in Taft, Roosevelt and the Convention Fight That Split the Party in 1912.

The bottom line

• The 1860 Republican nomination went to Lincoln, not the favorite Seward, because the party needed to win Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois, and Lincoln had the fewest enemies in those states.
• The arithmetic: 114 electoral votes from the old Frémont states, 152 needed, and the three big swing states supplied the rest. Winning coalitions are built on arithmetic, not applause.
• Being the second choice of many beats being the first choice of a few. If you want to move a party, make friends outside your own faction.
• The losing side of a nominating fight should do what Seward did: get behind the nominee. A party that cannot do that gives away elections.
• When you hear someone say that conventions and primaries do not matter, point to a Wigwam in Chicago and three ballots in May.