On December 5, members of the Electoral College gathered in each of the 33 states to cast the electoral votes for president. The electoral count would presumably be based on the results of last month’s popular election. In Illinois, the 11 electors defied a “heavy fall of snow” and gathered at Lincoln’s home town of Springfield. They met in the Senate chamber of the State Capitol, just across the hall from the offices that had been set up for Lincoln to conduct his business.
The electors certified their ballots at 2 p.m.: “Abraham Lincoln of Illinois received 11 votes being the whole number of votes cast for President at said balloting.” Hannibal Hamlin was elected vice president, also unanimously. Lincoln’s political ally Leonard Swett was assigned to deliver the results to Washington. Lincoln’s secretary John Nicolay wrote, “These Electors met today in every State of the Union (or at least it was their duty to do so) and voted for the future Executive. The vote so cast, is sealed up and forwarded by special messenger to Washington City, where it will be opened and counted by the Senate and House of Representatives next February.”
A 44-gun salute was fired in Lincoln’s honor at the State House; 33 for the states in the Union, and 11 for each of the Illinois electors. That evening, Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln attended a “very pleasant” dinner at the home of elector John Conkling on Monroe Street.
Aside from this, the usual business of meeting the hundreds of daily visitors and answering the flood of letters continued for the president-elect. One of the letters was from local resident Edward Pease, who asked Lincoln to send him a copy of the “House Divided” speech he had delivered in the State Capitol just before starting his famous debates with Senator Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln wrote Pease, “The foregoing, in pencil, in my own hand, is a copy of an extract of a speech of mine delivered June 16, 1858, which I now state at the request of Mr. E.B. Pease.” By this time, the extract had become eerily prophetic:
“We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has continually augmented. I believe it will not cease till a crisis shall have been reached and passed. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it will become alike lawful in all the States old as well as new–North as well as South.”
Two days after Lincoln sent the extract, Nicolay noted, “The secessionists are still rampant, and everybody in the extreme southern states is settled in the belief that the Union is to be dissolved.” Lincoln offered no specifics on what he planned to do once he became president in March, but he explained to his secretary that the very existence of government “implies the legal power, right, and duty… of a President to execute the laws and maintain the existing government.”
The president-elect also began seriously considering who should serve in his cabinet. He decided that the most prestigious cabinet post, secretary of state, should go to William H. Seward. Seward, former New York governor and current U.S. senator, was a leading Republican whom many had expected to win the party’s presidential nomination last May. Lincoln sent two letters to Hannibal Hamlin, the vice president-elect who was currently serving in the Senate with Seward, and instructed him that if there was “no reason to the contrary, deliver the letter to Governor Seward at once.”
The first letter was, as Seward expected, a formal announcement: “With your permission, I shall, at the proper time, nominate you to the Senate, for confirmation as Secretary of State, for the United States.” The second letter was less formal, and marked “Private & Confidential.” There had been rumors that Lincoln was only making this appointment because Seward was so influential within the Republican Party, and that he expected Seward to decline the offer. Thurlow Weed, Seward’s political benefactor, had been one of these rumor-spreaders, and Hamlin had told Lincoln that Seward “will not desire a place in your Cabinet.” Lincoln wanted to make clear that he was selecting Seward, not because he expected Seward to turn it down, but because he wanted Seward to accept:
“Rumors have got into the newspapers to the effect that the Department… would be tendered you, as a compliment, and with the expectation that you would decline it. I beg you to be assured that I have said nothing to justify these rumors. On the contrary, it has been my purpose, from the day of the nomination at Chicago, to assign you, by your leave, this place in the administration. I have delayed so long to communicate that purpose, in deference to what appeared to me to be a proper caution in the case…”
As Seward spent the next two weeks mulling it over, Lincoln turned to filling the rest of the cabinet posts.
Bibliography
- Donald, David Herbert, Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster, (Kindle Edition), 2011.
- Holzer, Harold, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter of 1860-1861. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, Reprint Edition, 2008.
- Long, E.B. with Long, Barbara, The Civil War Day by Day. New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1971.
- McPherson, James M., Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford History of the United States Book 6, Oxford University Press (Kindle Edition), 1988.