In 1910, a Tribune editorial called the day of Abraham Lincoln’s nomination the most illustrious in the city’s history. It still is.
Tuesday is the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s nomination to be president and, we think, a perfect moment to publish this photo.
That was Lincoln with his favorite newspaper — this one — on his lap.
Yes, Lincoln was a loyal subscriber. And, not to brag, but this paper did have something to do with his convention victory in 1860.
But, ah, about that photo? It’s altered. Lincoln actually held a German anti-slavery newspaper, not the Tribune.
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We’re chalking that one up to a little overzealous marketing by then-Tribune managing editor and co-owner Joseph Medill, who shared an intense common cause with his famous subscriber — abolishing slavery.
Medill spared no newsprint or superlative in promoting Lincoln for president. A February 1860 Tribune editorial, for instance, extolled him as a “gentleman of unimpeachable purity of private life … a man of, at once, great breadth and great acuteness of intellect … never garrulous, never promising what he cannot perform, never doing anything for show or effect, laboriously attentive to detail, industrious and conscientious …”
But Lincoln wasn’t well known to many voters outside Illinois. And at times, even he had his doubts about his qualifications for the top job.
“See here,” he once told Medill, “you Tribune boys have got me up a peg too high. How about the vice-presidency — won’t that do?”
“We are not playing second in this dance to any musician,” Medill retorted. “…It is president or nothing. Else you may count the Tribune out. We are not fooling away our time and science on the vice-presidency.”
Way to go, Joe.
For nearly 163 years, this newspaper has fought for causes — and candidates — we believe in. And that’s why we’re taking a few moments to celebrate this anniversary of one of the Tribune’s first editorial campaigns and one of our proudest moments — Lincoln’s nomination on May 18, 1860.
That morning, on the corner of what is now Wacker Drive and Lake Street, thousands of delegates and visitors swarmed a hastily built pine-plank convention hall nicknamed the Wigwam.
Sen. William Seward of New York was the heavy favorite. But Lincoln had Chicago’s political muscle — and its finest mischief-makers — behind him. Including Medill, of course.
And they made no little plans.
Lincoln supporters poured into the city, courtesy of special cheap rail fares engineered by Lincoln’s men. No tickets to the convention? No problem. Counterfeit convention tickets were printed on local presses — history doesn’t record whose (but we can guess) — and handed out to Lincoln boosters.
Lincoln’s men also forged signatures for special Seward cheering-section tickets and recruited “idlers, who for a modest fee or just for fun, agreed to be at the Wigwam before the Seward men,” the Tribune reported in 1960. “When the latter appeared, they were refused admittance because their places had been taken by the holders of fake tickets.”
That morning, Medill pulled what he later called “the meanest trick” of his life.
He gerrymandered the Seward-voting New York delegates into a far corner of the convention floor, where they couldn’t easily be heard — remember, there were no microphones in 1860. One account admiringly reported that “Lincoln’s organizers had recruited 1,000 of the loudest shouters in the state” to drown out the competition.
The ploy paid ear-pummeling dividends. Cincinnati newspaperman Murat Halstead wrote that when Lincoln’s nomination was seconded, “the uproar was beyond description. Imagine all the hogs ever slaughtered in Cincinnati giving their death squeals together, a score of big steam whistles going … and you conceive something of the same nature.”
Seward led on the first ballot that day, but fell short of enough votes to clinch the nomination. On the second, Lincoln gained votes. On the third, Lincoln needed just 1 1/2 votes to win. That’s when Medill raced over to the Ohio delegation, which had been supporting favorite son Salmon P. Chase.
‘If you can throw the Ohio delegation to Lincoln, Chase can have anything he wants,” Medill promised delegation leader David Cartter, without authority to actually deliver anything. Cartter climbed onto his seat and declared the switch of four votes to Lincoln. (Footnote: Chase did eventually become Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury.)
A cannon boomed from the roof of the Wigwam — signaling the choice of Lincoln — and Chicago celebrated. “Stout men wept like children,” the Tribune reported.
Less than a year later, the first shots of the Civil War were fired.
Fifty years after the convention — in a country where the census still counted 1,611 Union and 650 Confederate veterans — the Tribune peered back and wondered, “what if?” Had the delegates known the “fiery ordeal” that awaited the 16th president as he struggled to save the Union, Lincoln might not have been chosen, the paper said.
“And yet as the event proved, he was of all men the one who should have been chosen.”
That was no fluke. The paper credited Lincoln’s nomination to his “shrewd and determined friends, masters of all political arts. They were a little unscrupulous in some of their methods, or at least they seemed so to the friends of Senator Seward …”
Yes, maybe a little unscrupulous.
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But the paper also noted that Lincoln’s “friends worked for him as indefatigably as if he had been spurring them on. It may be that as lookers-on at the game they had a clearer perception of his peculiar qualifications for the nomination…than he himself had.”
In 1910, a Tribune editorial called the day of Lincoln’s nomination “the most illustrious” in the city’s history. It still is.
The Tribune you hold in your hands or read online, like the one Medill edited, thrives on something the paper’s most famous subscriber said long ago: “Let the people know the facts, and the country will be safe.”
Sometimes, we’d add, facts aren’t enough. Sometimes, history needs a shove. We’re sure Medill would agree.