In presenting
ABRAHAM LINCOLN to the National Republican Convention, as a candidate for the
Presidency, were are actuated not by our great love and esteem for the man, by
any open or secret hostility to any other of the eminent gentlemen named for
that high office, nor by a feeling of State pride or Western sectionalism, but
by a profound and well matured conviction that his unexceptionable record, his
position between the extremes of opinion in the party, his spotless character
as a citizen and his acknowledge ability as a statesman, will, in the
approaching canvass, give him an advantage before the people which no other
candidate can claim. We are not disposed to deny that Mr. SEWARD, is the
question of availability being set aside, the first choice of perhaps a
majority of the rank and file of the party; that Gen. CAMERON has claims upon
Pennsylvania which his friends will not willingly have overlooked; that the
statesman like qualities, inflexible honesty and marked executive ability of
SALMON P. CHASE entitle him to a high place in Republican esteem; that Mr.
BATES’ pure life and noble aims justly command the confidence of troops of
friends; that the chivalric WADE has extorted the admiration of the North and
West; that FESSENDEN, for his gallant service but be gratefully remembers; and
that JOHN McLEAN, whose life is without a stain and whose love of country has
never been challenged, must be remembered as a strong and unexceptional man.
But Illinois claims that Mr. LINCOLN, though without the ripe experience of
SEWARD, the age and maturity of BATES and McLEAN, or the fire of FESSENDEN and
WADE, has the rare and happy combination of qualities which, as a candidate, enables him to outrank
either.
I. By his own
motion, he is not a candidate. He has never sought, directly or indirectly, for
the first or second place on the ticket. The movement in his favor is
spontaneous. It has sprung up suddenly and with great strength, its roots being
in the conviction that he is the man to reconcile all difference in our ranks,
to conciliate all the now jarring elements, and to lead forward to certain
victory. Having never entered into the field, he has put forth no personal
effort for success, and he has never made, even by implication, a pledge of any
sort by which his action, if he is President, will be influenced for any man,
any measure, any policy. He will enter upon the contest with no clogs, no
embarrassment; and this fact is a guaranty of a glorious triumph.
II. In all the
fundamentals of Republicanism, he is radical up to the limit to which the
party, with due respect for the rights of the South, proposes to go. But nature
has given him that wise conservatism which has made his action and his
expressed opinions so conform to the most mature sentiment of the country on
the question of slavery, that no living man can put his finger on one of his
speeches or any one of his public acts as a State legislator or as a member of
Congress, to which valid objection can be raised. His avoidance of extremes has
not been the result of ambition which measures words or regulates acts but the natural
consequence of an equable nature and in mental constitution that is never off
its balance. While no one doubts the strength of his attachments to the
Republican cause, or doubts that he is a representative man, all who know him
see that he occupies the happy mean between that alleged radicalism which binds
the older Anti-Slavery men to Mr. Seward, and that conservatism which dictates
the support of Judge Bates. Seward men, Bates men, Cameron men and Chase men
can all accept him as their second choice, and be sure that in him they have
the nearest approach to what they most admire in their respective favorites,
which any possible compromise will enable them to obtain.
III. Mr. LINCOLN has
no new record to make. Originally a Whig, though early a recruit of the great Republican
party, he has nothing to explain for the satisfaction of New Jersey,
Pennsylvania or the West. His opinions and votes on the Tariff will be
acceptable to all sections except the extreme South, where Republicanism
expects no support. Committed within proper limitations set up by economy and
constitutional obligation to the improvement of rivers and harbors, to that
most beneficent measure, the Homestead bill, and to the speedy construction of
the Pacific Railroad, he need write no letters to soften down old asperities,
growing out of these questions which must inevitably play their part in the
canvas before us. He is all that Pennsylvania and the West have a right to
demand.
IV. He is a Southern
man by birth and education, who has never departed from the principles which he
learned from the statesmen of the period in which he first saw the light. A
Kentuckian, animated by the hopes that bring the Kentucky delegation here, a
Western man, to whom sectionalism is unknown, he is that candidate around whom
all opponents of the extension of Human Slavery, North and South, can rally.
V. Mr. LINCOLN is a
man of the people. For his position, he is not indebted to family influence,
the partiality of friends or the arts of the politician. All his early life a
laborer in the field, in the saw-mill, as a boatman on the Wabash, Ohio, and
Mississippi, as a farmer in Illinois, he has that sympathy with the men who
toil and vote that will make him
strong. Later a valiant soldier in the Black Hawk war, a student in a law
office, bonding his great powers to overcome the defects of early training;
then a legislator, and at last a brilliant advocate, in the highest courts, and
a popular leader in the great movement of the age, there is enough of romance
and poetry in life to fill all the land with shouting and song. Honest Old Abe!
Himself an outgrowth of free institutions, he would die in the effort to
preserve to others, unimpaired, the inestimable blessings by which he has been
made a man.
VI. Without a stain
of Know-Nothingism on his skirts, he is acceptable to the mass of the American
party who, this year, will be compelled to choose between the candidate of
Chicago and the nominee of Baltimore. The experience of two years has proved
their error and his wisdom. They want the chance to retrieve the blunders of
the past. Endeared by his manly defence of the principles of the Declaration
of Independence to the citizen of foreign birth, he could command the warm
support of every one of them from whom, in any contingency, a Republican vote
can be expected.
VII. Mr. LINCOLN is
an honest man. We know that the adage “Praise overmuch is censure in disguise”
is true; and we know, too, that it is the disgrace of the age that in the
popular mind, politics and chicane, office and faithlessness go hand in hand.
We run great risk then in saying of Mr. Lincoln what truth inexorably demands,—that
in his life of 51 years, there is no act of a public or private character, of
which his most malignant enemy can say “this is dishonest,” “this is mean.”
With his record, partizanship [sic] has
done its worst and the result we have stated. His escutcheon is without a blemish.
VIII. After saying
so much, we need not add that Mr. LINCOLN can be elected, if placed before the people with the approbation of the
Convention to meet tomorrow. In New England, where Republicanism pure and
simple is demanded, and where he has lately electrified the people by his eloquence,
his name would be a tower of strength. New York who clings with an ardent
embrace to that great statesman, her first choice, would not refuse to adopt
Mr. LINCOLN as a standard bearer worthy of the holy cause. Pennsylvania,
satisfied with his views in regard to the present necessity of fostering domestic
interests, and the constitutional moderation of his opinions upon slavery,
would come heartily into his support.
The West is the
child of the East, and aside from her local pride in one of the noblest of her
sons, she would not fail by her plaudits to exalt and intensify the enthusiasm
which the nomination of Honest Old Abe would be sure to excite. The West has no
rivalry with the East except in the patriotic endeavor to do the most for the
Republican cause. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin desire
no triumph in which the East does not share—no victory over which the East may
not honestly exult. In a contest for Lincoln, they will fight with zeal and
hope that has never before animated the Republican hosts.
We present our
candidate, then, not as the rival of this man or that, not because the West has
claims which she must urge; not because of a distinctive policy which she would
see enforced; not because he is the first choice of a majority; but because he
is that honest man, that representative Republican, that people’s candidate,
whose life, position, record, are so many guarantys [sic] of success—because he is that patriot in whose hands the
interests of the government may be safely confided. Nominated, he would, we
believe, be triumphantly elected; but if another, in the wisdom of the
Convention, is preferred we can pledge him to labor, as an honest and effective
as any that he ever done for himself, for the man of the Convention’s choice.
SOURCE: “President
Making,” The Press and Tribune, Chicago, Illinois, Tuesday, May 15,
1860, p. 2, col. 1-2
