The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History

By Edward Achorn

Atlantic Monthly Press 512 pp.

By Jim Swearingen

Presidential timber manifests itself long before an inauguration. The procedural skirmishes that attend a party convention prepare a candidate for the slings and arrows that will come in office. While Abraham Lincoln’s wily political acumen is well-documented, less well-known are the events that made his improbable nomination for President happen.

Lincoln scholar Edward Achorn’s new book, The Lincoln Miracle, recounts the artful maneuvering that enabled a coarse, little-known, Illinois circuit court lawyer to best several nationally prominent politicians for the job that would soon witness the rupture of the Republic. For fans of political wheeling and dealing, who find brokered conventions, Electoral College forecasts, and the down-ticket impacts of state voting trends engrossing, this is a grand book documenting a milestone in the formation of the Grand Old Party. Achorn’s brisk, 400-page account is replete with all the bribery, patronage, rumors, back-stabbing, whiskey, cigars, and political calculus that went into the most consequential Presidential nomination in our history.

The 1860 convention took place in Chicago, a neutral site that leading candidate William Seward, former Governor and two-term Senator from New York, hoped would facilitate his nomination. The City of the Big Shoulders becomes a metaphor for the young party and the burgeoning North, tough and robust, enterprising and industrious. Achorn captures the teeming vitality of the city in all its “stormy, husky, brawling” power. The Lincoln campaign apparatus used their home court advantage to full effect when staging convention demonstrations, voice votes, and delegation seating arrangements to manipulate the eventual results.

Seward, who would later become Lincoln’s Secretary of State, alienated moderate Republicans with his abolitionist rhetoric. Indeed, the South thought Seward the far more radical of the two, with his blunt assessment of the “irrepressible conflict” facing a nation half-slave and half-free. Seward was also too closely tied to the corrupt New York political machine to suit the Republicans’ reformist wing, which eagerly sought to cleanse Washington of Democratic Party graft.

Early on Achorn shows Lincoln to be a canny and disciplined politician, willing to suspend grandiose moral gestures while remaining singularly focused on the one issue able to keep the fledgling Republican Party united—blocking the expansion of slavery into the western territories. In 1860, advocating the complete abolition of slavery, though unimpeachable in its intent, would have shattered the coalition that survived to accomplish that righteous goal just three years later.

Yet, whichever of these men ultimately prevailed, the “radical” Seward or the “moderate” Lincoln, the South was already itching to bolt from the Union. The scales of representation in Washington had always been skewed in the South’s favor thanks to the 3/5th’s rule embedded in the Constitution, which artificially inflated its numbers in Congress. With the looming admission of more free states, her days of disproportionate power were numbered.

With the Democratic Party badly fractured over whether to force the expansion of slavery into newly admitted Western states by fiat or to gamble its ratification through individual referendums, whoever won the Republican nomination of 1860 faced the likelihood of winning the Presidency while triggering Southern secession and civil war. Only a strongly pro-slavery President could have stopped it. Achorn’s account makes clear that the slavery problem was very much on the minds of Republican candidates and delegates, as well as their Democratic counterparts.

The book belies—as so many well-researched books of the period do—the notion that slavery was only a peripheral cause of the Civil War. Slavery remained an existential concern—its proliferation, its extension, its containment, its eradication, its immorality, its hypocrisy—one that could no longer be deferred as the country fractured and exploded like a long-smoldering volcano. Confederate apologists may continue to obfuscate the slave-power’s motivations for war, to dress plantationism in Constitutionalist finery, but Edward Achorn reminds us that in 1860, to slave or not to slave was the essential question.

With the 21st century nation again facing a fork in the Constitutional road, the old anti-democratic adversaries of proportional representation, universal legal equality, intellectual and corporal freedom, and national infrastructure are echoing their ante-bellum forebears. In 1860, the political stars aligned to elect Abraham Lincoln as President and the ultimate savior of the Republic. Let us hope Providence looks after us again in the days ahead.

Jim Swearingen is a Minneapolis-based writer.