How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. Up next, a story of how a lawyer from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, became the Savior of the Union despite all conventional political wisdom. When most people think of Lincoln, they likely think of his famous speeches, his unwavering commitment to the nation during the Civil War, or his tragic inn. They probably don’t think much about his political savvy, let alone the forces at work that even put him in a position to win the nomination of his party in the first place. Here’s Gary Eckelbarger, author of “The Great Comeback,” to share that story. We’d like to thank the U.S. National Archives for this audio. Let’s get into it.

The question is, how does a two-time Senate loser, two-time Senate loser, come back to win his party’s nomination within a year and a half of that second Senate defeat? It’s only happened once in our history, and the fact that it happened to Abraham Lincoln makes that story much more intriguing. The Republican Party in Illinois had just gone through the ringer. On January 5, 1859, Abraham Lincoln officially lost that second Senate race to Douglas in the Twenty-First General Assembly of Illinois by a vote of 54 to 46. Back then, they chose senators, not by a popular vote like they’ve done since 1913. I believe before then it was done indirectly. You chose your state legislators’ House and Senate representatives who would meet in a General Assembly and then have the official vote, usually in the winner after the November election. What a lot of people don’t realize is his bid for the presidency began the very next day. He got together with a group of prominent Republicans, a lot of his lawyer friends in Illinois, and they were meeting in the basement of the State Capitol. And in the basement was the state library. So they used the state library on a snowy Thursday. And they got down there, and they were talking about the state of the party, and they were really in a lot of trouble because he had just lost. They were in debt, and they were talking about people whom they could possibly support. In 1860, maybe there were a dozen people in this room, and as they were bringing up names of prominent Westerners, as they would call it—we would say Midwesterners—that they could consider for the presidency. Lincoln was silently stewing because in his mind, they weren’t bringing up the most important name and the most obvious name: his. And I think they were doing that out of deference to him. I mean, twenty-four hours earlier, he had just lost a Senate race. But in the midst of this, Lincoln stood up and said, “Why don’t you run me? I can be nominated, I can be elected, and I can run the government.” As one person in that room stated, “We all looked at him and thought he was kidding, and then saw that he was completely serious.” They made no specific overtures on that specific day, but in their minds, this was Lincoln’s start of his bid for the presidency in 1860. Now this was January of 1859, but he was still looked at as a guy that lost to the potential Democratic nominee, Stephen A. Douglas. Well, there would be a specific strategy devised three months later, and I’m going to call it “the under the radar strategy.” I know there was no radar in 1859, but just work with me on this one. The whole idea was to be a kind of an undetected candidate. So, of course, there were no primaries and there were no caucuses back then. No primaries, no caucuses. You didn’t officially throw your hat in the ring. You didn’t go out and say, “I am running for president,” because you didn’t want to look too ambitious for the office. So you went out, you made public speeches, you wrote letters that you hoped got published in the prominent media source at the time, which was newspapers, and you would hope that you would start to garner some recognition for your principles and hopefully build up some support for it. And what they decided to do was that he would be quietly supported by the State Republican Central Committee members. They were going to quell any attempts by newspapers who would try to boom Lincoln’s name out too early because they didn’t want him to be seen as a candidate, or else he was going to attract criticism from the other top-tier candidates in the country. The other thing that they already had to knock down was any talk about Lincoln being a vice-presidential match on any ticket. This would be a death knell. It was really attractive to put a Westerner, Midwesterner like Lincoln along a prominent candidate. So they were talking up Cameron-Lincoln tickets or Seward-Lincoln nomination tickets. So they wanted to make sure that Lincoln had no interest at all at being a vice-president linkage on anybody’s ticket. So they stopped that, and then it would be up to Lincoln to do the rest. Before I do that, I’ve got to tell you, well, this “under the radar strategy” worked. The head of the Republican Central Committee in Illinois was a man named Norman Judd, who was Lincoln’s campaign manager in a losing race in 1858. Well, as head of the Illinois committee, he was invited out to New York City with twenty other Republican committee heads from the other states who were going to meet at the Astor House in New York City to decide two things: when and where the Republican National Convention was going to be held. Now, they got the “when” pretty quickly. They decided on June of 1860, and then that would eventually be moved up to the middle of May. “Where” was going to be the problem because there were so many prominent Republicans being talked up that everybody was shooting down any state where these people hailed from as a bias or at least an advantage to them. So you couldn’t bring up any place in New York City because that was an advantage to William Henry Seward. You couldn’t bring up Pittsburgh because that was Simon Cameron’s advantage. You couldn’t bring up Columbus or Cincinnati because that would be an advantage for Chase. City that looked like it was going to win hands down because it had hotels, it had railroads, it was supposed to be Saint Louis, all right? But Saint Louis really had a candidate to consider as well, and that was Edward Bates, who was an Old Whig. He really wasn’t even declared as a Republican, but they knew he was going to be presented as a potential nominee. So that was one strike against him, and they were arguing about this. The other problem with Saint Louis was it was in a state where Republicans had no chance to win in a general election. No Southern state was going to vote for any Republican. So while all the parties were fighting about this, the different heads, Judd stood up and said, “Why don’t you hold it in Chicago?” “It’s a neutral place where all of you front-running candidates have an equal chance.” Little did they realize that he was up there in support of Abraham Lincoln, who was “under the radar,” and when the final votes came through, Chicago would win over Saint Louis by one vote.

Judd, you’ve been listening to Gary Eckelbarger, the author of “The Great Comeback,” and we just learned how people got elected, not just as a president back in the 1860s, but as a U.S. Senator as well. Direct elections did not happen until the 20th century. When we come back, more of the story of how Lincoln became the nominee of the Republican Party here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here. As we approach our nation’s 250th anniversary, I’d like to remind you that all the history stories you hear on this show are brought to you by the great folks at Hillsdale College, and Hillsdale isn’t just a great school for your kids or grandkids to attend, but for you as well. Go to Hillsdale.edu to find out about their terrific free online courses. Their series on communism is one of the finest I’ve ever seen. Again, go to Hillsdale.edu and sign up for their free and terrific online courses. And we return to Our American Stories and the story of how Abraham Lincoln, a two-time Senate loser and lonely lawyer from Illinois, beat the odds and became the nominee of the Republican Party in 1860. Let’s get back to the story. Here again is Gary Eckelbarger.