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"Ain't You Glad You Joined The Republicans?" 1854-1865
At Chicago, the gavel pounded to open the Republican presidential nominating convention at exactly noon, Wednesday, May 16, 1860.
No one came to order. There were ten thousand Republicans inside this tall, vast, turreted meeting hall called the Wigwam; ten thousand more waited outside on a field located between Michigan Avenue and the lake; and everyone was as wild as children as they hollered and signaled that the time for the hard questions was finally here.
Who will be our candidate? Who can whip the Democrats? Who can end slavery? Who can stop disunion? Who's going to be the first Republican president in history?
After six angry years of a revolution at the ballot box that had invented a modern political party out of disgust for the South's slaveholding, the Republicans ached to know: who will lead us to total victory?
Rumors swept the arena like gusts off the lake. In this brand-new building the acoustics were so sharp that everyone could hear the speakers at the podium at the same time they suffered the hammering and sawing from the roof as crews rushed to finish the shell. The interior was arranged in a pecking order: At the center there were seats for one thousand delegates and alternates arranged by states on the wide, low platform. Behind the delegates were chairs for eighty VIP editors, and in the lower gallery directly in back were seats for several hundred more journalists. Squeezed in everywhere else along the upper galleries were thousands of male spectators, who were flanked by two ladies-only sections overhanging the stage wings.
Such dazzling excitement made folk "orationize" spontaneously and disagree passionately. Seward? Bates? Fremont? McLean? Lincoln? Surely it will be Seward!
And yet Lincoln, waiting by the telegraph office in the dusty spring air of his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, had instructed his supporters carefully that it would be all or nothing -- he didn't want the vice presidency.
The convention adjourned the first day past 10 p.m. The Republican mob, smelling of chewing tobacco and groaning out its hunger, poured out of the giant Wigwam and headed for the hotels off Michigan that were jammed with up to forty thousand visitors. The luxurious Tremont House was the official headquarters of the power brokers, and it was raucous with argument and song. Not a few of the boys slopped their beer and shouted out that chorus first popularized back in '56: "Ain't You Glad You Joined the Republicans?"
The newspapermen, dressed like beggars, eavesdropped quietly and then headed for the magnetic telegraphs.
Seward's friends headed for the private bar. How many votes have we got?
At midnight the reports were shaky for Seward. Indiana vacillating; Virginia perhaps not voting at all; Maine unsettled. The only certain delegations for Seward were New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Texas.
Seward's lieutenant and moneyman, Thurlow Weed, told the press, "Everything depends upon the obstinacy and union of Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, Indiana and Illinois."
Elsewhere in the Tremont House, the platform committee scribbled and argued. Slavery must be abolished! No, slavery must be contained! No, we must listen to Seward's own words -- that the debate over slavery is "an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces." No, Seward is too much like the radicals! He can't carry the doubtful Border states! --
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