Delegates gather in Baltimore for the 1912 Democratic Convention.  They would nominate Woodrow Wilson for President on the 46th ballot.

In case you forgot, the five longest National Political Conventions in American history all were on the Democratic side.  Democrats used to requires a two-thirds majority to pick a presidential nominee, a device designed in pre-Civil War days to assure slave-holding southern states a veto.  Scrapped in 1936, this two-thirds rule actually changed the outcome in 1860 and 1912, and made the others way longer than needed.

The longest Republican convention by far was the 1880 epic (36 ballots) that produced winning candidate James A. Garfield (R-Oh).  No other Republican convention went beyond ten ballots.

So here they are, the five longest, in order:

• 1924: New York, took 103 ballots to nominate New York lawyer John W. Davis, who lost in a landslide to incumbent Calvin Coolidge;

•  1860: Charleston, took 57 ballots to reach a deadlock.  Illinois U.S. Senator Douglas had a majority of the delegates on several ballots but he could not reach two-thirds and stubborn Southerners refused to back down.  The delegates decided to call it quits.  Then, a few weeks later, the Party split, with Northerners meeting in Baltimore to nominate Illinois U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas as their candidate for president and Southerners choosing sitting Vice President John Breckinridge, a Kentucky slaveholder. Both lost to Republican Abraham Lincoln;

• 1852: Baltimore, took 49 ballots to nominate New Hampshire’s Franklin Pierce — elected;

•  1912: Baltimore, took 46 ballots to nominate New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson — elected.  Wilson’s chief rival, House Speaker Champ Clark (D.-Mo.), actually won a majority of the delegate votes during the early ballots but failed to reach two-thirds;

•  1920: San Francisco, took 44 ballots to nominate Ohio Governor James M. Cox, who lost to Ohio Republican U.S. Senator Warren G. Harding

Delegates at the 1924 New York 104-ballot epic demonstrating for losing candidate Alfred E. Smith.  Smith would win the nomination the next time, in 1928, but lose the White House that year to Republican Herbert Hoover.

Thanks to our friends at the Huffington Post for first running this piece on August 27, 2012:

Washington, DC — When Republicans and Democrats meet at their national conventions to anoint Mitt Romney and Barack Obama as their Party nominees for President of the United States, few Americans will bother to interrupt their summer vacations long enough to watch more than a speech or two from either side. It’s not just that voters are tired after almost a full year of non-stop campaigning. The fact is, conventions themselves, staged meticulously by strategists and media consultants, have become increasingly stale for outsiders, looking more like extended televised pep rallies for party activists, lobbyists, politics junkies and media celebrities.

Is it time to scrap them? Or stop covering them? Not by a long shot….

It is easy to forget that, not long ago, these conventions used to be among the most anticipated, exciting, and consequential events in American politics. From the 1830s through the 1950s, conventions refused simply to coronate candidates. They picked them, while also tackling key public issues from Civil War to prohibition to civil rights to the Viet Nam War to tax policy.

Waves of reform since the early 1900s have stripped these gatherings of any real decision-making power. No national party convention has gone beyond a single ballot since Democrats took three to nominate Adlai Stevenson in 1952. None has voted on a platform plank or credentials fight since 1992. Gone are the days when freewheeling multi-ballot conventions gave us some of our best presidents: Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 (four ballots), Woodrow Wilson in 1912 (46 ballots), and Abraham Lincoln in 1860 (three ballots).

Party conventions represented a great reform when they first appeared in 1832. Credit for the first goes to the National Republicans, meeting in Baltimore that year to nominate Kentucky Senator Henry Clay; Clay would lose to the incumbent, Democrat Andrew Jackson, also nominated by convention that year. Originally, presidential candidates was chosen by a few party elders meeting behind closed door. Conventions threw the doors open to delegates from across the country and invited the public to watch. In their golden age, they could be dazzling spectacles rivaling a modern Super Bowl or World Series — the speeches, the deal-making, the surprises. The delegates, proud political professionals, made real choices, and usually good ones. Critics called them “bosses,” but they saw their job as winning elections and usually preferred capable, mainstream leaders.

Lincoln’s convention in 1860 showed the old system at its best, a three day, three ballot carnival of music, fireworks, and politics in frontier-era Chicago. Lincoln, a long-shot, used the setting to out-hustle better-known rivals led by New York’s U.S. Senator William Seward, who led on the first two ballots. Lincoln’s team used every trick in the book – packing the galleries, manipulating floor seats, cutting deals for votes — but mostly they just talked. They buttonholed delegates and explained personally to each why their man deserved support. It was the kind of inside politics that made reformers cringe, but it gave us one of the best presidents in American history.

Voters finally rebelled. Florida held the first binding presidential primary in 1904, and a dozen states soon followed. Party leaders fought the tide. In 1912, for instance, former President Theodore Roosevelt won eight out of 11 primaries for that year’s Republican nomination, but backers of incumbent President William Howard Taft used their control of the Party’s national committee and credentials process and deny seats to some 235 Roosevelt delegates from contested states – enough to block any challenge. In 1968, Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey, the sitting Vice President to the incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson saddled with the widely unpopular war in Vietnam, despite the fact that Humphrey had not run in a single primary (though had he endorsed “favorite son” stand-ins in several states who won on his behalf). This contributed to violence in Chicago and prompted major party reforms.

Today, Democratic and Republicans both require each state to choose delegates in an open process, primary or caucus. The long state-by-state slog, starting more than a year before Election Day, has replaced the conventions for settling party fights. By the time the conventions come in late summer, the arguments are done. The candidates are picked, they have announced their Vice Presidential running mates, and the platforms are prepackaged

So what’s left for the conventions themselves? Aside from the lavish parties, social regalia, and good times for those lucky enough to attend, I see three things that make them still compelling for voters across the country:

1. The big speeches: After months of over-exposure, negative attacks, and sore feelings from the nomination fights, the candidates deserve the chance to reintroduce themselves before the final push, and the public deserves to see it. The convention gives each party one last clean opportunity to make its case, feature his best speakers, tout its top issues, and show its enthusiasm. Prime time convention speeches usually give the candidates a full hour to address voters directly without interruption. These speeches are often been the best and most memorable of the campaigns. The cacophony, spin, and nit-picking will start soon enough.
2. A window on the next administration: But there’s more. Politics is a team sport. A vote for Romney or Obama elects not just the one man but also his friends and Party. As president, Romney would choose thousands of appointees to staff the federal government, just as Obama has: judges, agency heads, commissioners, generals, Cabinet members, and all the assistants and deputies. Those delegates in the room represent the prime talent pool for the incoming administration. They are on the ballot just as much as the candidates, and this is our chance to take a good look at them.
3. A limiting factor on the fall campaigns. Finally, simple logistics demand that the final, full throttle campaign cannot start until the conventions are over. Candidates must be named, platforms adopted, and party organizations set. By pushing the starting gun until Labor Day, the conventions give us one last chance to enjoy the summer and not worry too much they about politics.

National conventions have a different role today than historically, but it’s still am important one. So let’s enjoy it, and then buckle up for an exciting race.

A view inside the New York Gold Room from Harper’s Weekly, October 1869.

 Thanks to our friends at Bloomberg Echoes for  first running this post last week on August 2, 2012.

When President Abraham Lincoln acted in December 1861 to suspend the national gold standard — the legal right to convert paper money into gold coin or “specie” — he wasn’t trying to start a fight with financial speculators in New York.

Lincoln had a bigger headache at that moment: trying to finance his rapidly growing Union Army in its fight against the South.

Within three years, though, Lincoln’s decision would bring a defining moment that would shape the federal government’s relationship with Wall Street. It came in June 1864 when Congress passed the Gold Act — the single time in U.S. history that Congress used its power to directly close a major financial market in the middle of active trading. It was such a failure that Congress never tried again.

The Gold Act was Washington’s response to a case of extreme profiteering during one of the bloodiest periods of the Civil War. After Lincoln had suspended the gold standard in 1861, he immediately asked Congress to float about $450 million in paper currency for the government to pay its bills. These steps created a temporary dual-currency system: paper “greenbacks” as legal tender for domestic debts, and gold coin as the currency of the world, needed for foreign trade, tariffs and custom duties.

Confederate Victories

Without government backing, the value of paper floated freely against gold. Within a few weeks, there was a brisk market on Wall Street for trading between gold and dollars. Each Confederate military victory sent gold prices soaring.

Speculators, stock traders, rebel and Union sympathizers, and government officials soon dominated the market, far outnumbering the bankers, exporters, importers and other commercial gold users. Daily price fluctuations affected the national war effort because rising gold prices directly eroded the value of the federal Treasury.

A Philadelphia banker, Jay Cooke, called the New York gold traders “General Lee’s left flank.” The New York Stock Exchange agreed; it considered gold trading disloyal and refused to allow it under its roof. This forced gold speculators to form a separate Gold Exchange on nearby William Street.

Gold prices spiked in June 1864 to $200 in paper — a 50 percent devaluation of the nation’s paper currency. That spring marked the culmination of General Ulysses Grant’s “Wilderness campaign,” a particularly bloody set of encounters as the Army of the Potomac pursued Confederate General Robert E. Lee across Virginia toward the Confederate capital of Richmond. Casualties on both sides were enormous, about 40,000 killed and wounded for the Union and another 70,000 for the Confederacy.

Gold prices peaked just as Grant’s army reached Petersburg, Virginia, to begin a desperate seven-month siege. The spectacle of New York financiers profiting from this carnage particularly outraged the public, and Congress decided it had to act.

The result was the Gold Act, passed with little debate on June 17, 1864. It was designed to close the Gold Exchange immediately and thereby end the speculative bubble in prices. To the surprise of senators and Treasury officials, however, it did nothing of the kind.

In fact, closing the Gold Exchange only made matters worse, by encouraging hoarders and fueling a panic. Kinahan Cornwallis, a British-born writer working in New York during the war as a reporter for the New York Herald, described how “the real holders of gold were thus isolated,… and purchasers had to run from office to office, inquiring the price at which holders were willing to sell … The whole country was alarmed by the rocket- like ascent of the [gold] premium, including Congress, amazed and rebuked by the advance.” Finally, he wrote, “Leading merchants and bankers, who had urged upon Congress this prohibitory legislation, now wrote and telegraphed to Washington, imploring the repeal of the Gold bill.”

Price Spikes

Gold prices would touch almost $300 before Congress would finally reverse course, repeal the Gold Act, and reopen the Exchange on July 2 — barely two weeks after the law was passed. Even after the Gold Room reopened, chaos continued with further corners and price spikes. Only the capture of Atlanta by General William T. Sherman in August 1864 finally broke the bull market in gold. By the time Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, the gold price was $144, less than half its wartime high.

In the 148 years since the Gold Act, Congress has developed extensive systems to regulate Wall Street –including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve, and the latest additions under the Dodd-Frank law, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Financial Stability Oversight Council — but never again has it shut an actively trading market. Closing a market can turn excitement into fear and transform a bubble into a panic.

The Gold Act episode taught a simple lesson. In a crisis, politicians and financial regulators should follow the same rule as physicians: First, do no harm.

For Kinehan Cornwallis’s full story of the of the 1864 Gold Act episode, see the new reissue of his classic account — The NEW YORK GOLD ROOM: Wall Street’s Big Gamble on the Civil War.

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, the 2012 Republican ticket.    Photo from CNN.

Mitt Romney may get a nice bounce in public opinion polls from announcing 42 year-old Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running mate.  And why not?  Ryan, though very conservative, has many appeals.  He is young, energetic, articulate, and, as chairman of the House Budget Committee and author of its recent controversial ten-year plan, has made himself an intellectual leader of Congressional Republicans on the financial issues.  He will give Joe Biden a tough VP debate come October, bring knowledge on fiscal matters, and unify the Republican Tea Party faction behind Romney’s campaign.

Already, the optics seem to work: Romney the father figure, Ryan the smart protege (about the same age as Romney’s own eldest son Tagg).  What could go wrong?  

Watching the announcement this morning, three comparisons came quickly to my mind, all with the same idea, but very different ends:

Dwight Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon, 1952.

Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952: 
Probably the best use of father-son optics in recent decades was engineered by General Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 when he picked a smart, young, 39-year-old California U.S. Senator named Richard M. Nixon as his running mate.  Eisenhower not only was relatively old — 62 years old — but a political newcomer, a career soldier.  Nixon, like Paul Ryan, was a rising intellectual leader of the Republican right who had starred in House and Senate anti-Communist investigations.  He offered Eisenhower a bridge to the Party’s Congressional wing and beautiful optics as a young family man with two cute daughters.

Nixon weather an early storm over a financial scandal resulting in his famous “Checkers Speech,” (click here to see it).  But after that, the strategy worked.  Eisenhower and Nixon won two terms, and it wasn’t until later, when Nixon sought the Presidency on his own, the Nixon’s full set of eccentricities came into full flower, culminating in Nixon’s 1974 resignation in disgrace from the hite House   in the Watergate scandal.

Kerry and Edwards, 2004:

John Kerry in 2004 also decided to pick a younger man, though the age difference between him and campaign rival John Edwards was much smaller than Eisenhower and Nixon.  Kerry was 61 years old in 2004, while Edwards was 51.  Still, Edwrad, a North Carolina U.S. Senator and acomplished courtroom lawyer, had made a good impression during the primaries that year and brought energy to the ticket.

The criticisms of Edwards came later.  Many backers were disappointed by Edwards’s lackluster debate in October 2004 against Republican Dick Cheney.  And since then, Edwards has shown himself to be a remarkably duplicitous character, chearing on his wife Elizabeth during his 2008 presidential campaign as she was dying with cancer and covering it up with campaign contributions, resulting in the recent criminal trial.

Reagan and David Stockman, 1980:

Ronald Reagan and  David Stockman.

But to my mind, Ronald Reagan, as usual, made the best decision in this type of situation.  Reagan’s list of potential running mates in 1980 included a particularly smart young Michigan Congressman named David Stockman, 34 years old but already an intellectual leader of House Republicans on budget issues.  Reagan decided not to make Stockman his running mate — Stockman wasn’t old enough in any event.  He chose for the job a more experienced hand, future president George H.W. Bush.

Instead, Reagan gave Stockman a more appropriate role in his White House: Director of his Office of Management and Budget.  This allowed Stockman to take full direct control of Reagan’s early effort to cut taxes and cut spending, a major accomplishment of Reagan’s presidency.

Stockman mostly did a fine job, but he was too much a purist.  When Congress passed Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981 but failed to adopt enough spending cuts — producing unprecedented budget deficits throughout the 1980s — Stockman went rogue. In gave an interview to Atlantic Monthty  in which he openly criticized the outcome and acknowledged “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers.”   Reagan took Stockman “to the woodshed” — yes, that’s how they described it.  Stockman ultimately had to resign, and afterward, he wrote a book called The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed. 

By making Stockman his OMB Director rather than VP, Reagan had made the best managerial choice.  He allowed Stockman to focus on his signature budget issues, but where Reagan could jettison him the minute he malfunctioned.  

Bright young man can be great things, but pose risks as well.  Will Paul Ryan be a purist like David Stockman, pushing candidate (or president) Romney farther right then he really wants?   Will Ryan be a secret cad like John Edwards, with lingering skeletons in the closet?  Will he serve faithfully like Richard Nixon, then let his own ambition take control when he gets the chance to run for himself?  

Most likely, it’s none of the above.  History never really repeats itself; each situation is new and different.   For now, let’s hope that Paul Ryan is just what he seems, a smart, idealistic, articulate advocate of conservative fiscal views who, agree with him or not, is ready to defend them in good faith and good spirit.  Let the games begin.

Some of you have noticed that I’ve written very little — almost nothing — in this Blog lately about what usually is my favorite topic: politics.  Yes, one reason is that I’m lazy, it’s summer, and I’ve been busy  with other things — more on that later.  But here’s the basic truth:  I am finding this year’s 2012 presidential contest a pathetic disappointment.  The candidates are shallow: Romney and Obama both.  The debate over “issues” is pointless chatter.  The news coverage is insipid.    The time spent on it — sixteen months to pick a president — is ridiculous. (In France or Britain, the whole campaign lasts two months.)   The free-reign influence of big money is cheapening the whole affair.  And the actual task of governing the country and dealing with the real economic crisis is treated as a boring afterthought.  (In fact, the actual decisions that Congress will make in this year’s “lame duck” session after Election Day — not talked about by either candidate — may prove far more important to the future of the country that the presidential choice itself.)

Yes, the Republicans have been particularly terrible this year with their incoherent economics and right wing social views.  (Why couldn’t we have George Romney as the candidate instead of Mitt?) But the process itself is out of control and off-putting.

So why have I been silent about this?  Frankly, I don’t like having to sound like a crabby, cynical, nasty, grouchy old man on the Internet.  But when it comes to this 2012 presidential election, I don’t know how to avoid it.   

So, in the spirit of straight talk,  I have decided to break my silence and start laying out my case.  It may take a few weeks and many posts — using my usual historical comparisons —  but I’ll give it my best.  And maybe in the process we’ll discover some silver lining to this awful-looking mess.

So stay tuned to this spot.  More is coming.  All the best. –KA

Photo from Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Thanks again to our friends at the Bloomberg “Echoes” financial history blog for running this item first on June 14, 2012.  Check them out for a great daily history fix.

Do big corporations really control U.S. politicians through money and contributions? Is the system more corrupt today than ever before?



It often seems that way. U.S. corporations spent about $3.32 billion in 2011 to lobby officials in Washington, according to OpenSecrets.org. This, plus billions more in newly liberated campaign contributions and other practices have combined to create a system many describe as “legalized bribery.”


Still, lobbying is protected by the First Amendment and, if anything, decades of reforms designed to increase transparency have made today’s abuses mild by comparison.


How bad was it?


Probably the low point for corporate-influence peddling in the U.S. came in 1868, when the New York state legislature decided a contest over control of the Erie Railroad, then one of America’s premier corporations.


The battle pitted the venerable Cornelius Vanderbilt, the owner of the New York Central Railroad, against Daniel Drew of Erie and his two young proteges, Jay Gould and James Fisk Jr.


Vanderbilt’s goal was simple: With Erie in his pocket, he could control all rail links from New York City to the Great Lakes, an immensely profitable monopoly. But Drew, who had grown rich manipulating Erie stock prices as company treasurer (before insider-trading bans), had no intention to let go.


The so-called Erie War took place during one of the most corrupt periods in American history. Historians call it the “Era of Good Stealings,” the years just after the Civil War when William “Boss” Tweed ruled New York City, Ulysses S. Grant sat in the White House, and scandals — from the Whiskey Ring to Credit Mobilier to postal frauds to Reconstruction to Indian agent frauds — all bubbled just beneath the surface. The New York Stock Exchange was an unregulated frontier of booms, busts and manipulations.


The complex contest between Vanderbilt and Drew — involving bribed judges, stock fraud, dueling injunctions and corporate piracy — reached its climax in March 1868. Decades before the existence of rules governing tender offers, stock registration, disclosures or other such niceties, all Vanderbilt had to do was buy Erie stock as fast as he could until he owned enough to control the company — what was known as a “raid.”


But Drew cheated. Tipped off to Vanderbilt’s plan, he secretly authorized and printed thousands of new Erie shares, turning the market into a quicksand pit.


Furious, Vanderbilt responded by finding a friendly New York judge to declare Drew, Gould, and the other Erie directors in contempt, forcing them all to flee across the Hudson River to New Jersey to avoid arrest.


Drew, in turn, responded by sending Gould to Albany to persuade the state Legislature to approve a bill legitimizing the large block of new stock issued to thwart Vanderbilt’s raid. Tweed, as a state senator (among other titles), personally represented Vanderbilt in the fight.


It’s difficult today to conceive the scale of the ensuing contest between Gould and Tweed for the hearts and minds of the state Legislature. Gould brought along a suitcase full of cash and set up shop in Parlor 57 of Albany’s Delavan House hotel, tending bar and doling out largess — in thousand-dollar bills. Tweed was equally generous. Nobody knows the true totals, but the two men reportedly distributed close to $1 million apiece (worth about $50 million or more today) to Albany lawmakers as they debated the Erie legislation.


It wasn’t just a senator or two they were trying to buy, but the entire statehouse.


The lawmakers, in turn, played both sides for suckers. For years, a group of about 20 assemblymen calling themselves the Black Horse Cavalry had specialized in blackmailing businesses with what they called “strike bills” — proposed laws designed to cripple businesses that refused to pay bribes. For them, the Erie War would be the richest payday ever. Instead of directly taking sides, most simply bid the two against each other.


One state senator, A.C. Matoon, reportedly took Erie’s side after receiving $15,000 from Gould, switched to Vanderbilt’s after taking $20,000 from Tweed, then supported Erie on the final vote.


“The wealth of Vanderbilt seemed pitted against the Erie treasury,” wrote Charles Francis Adams Jr. in his classic expose, “Chapters of Erie.” At one point, when a Vanderbilt agent arrived from New York with fresh cash, Gould reportedly paid him $70,000 to disappear.


Vanderbilt steamed at the spectacle. “It never pays to kick a skunk,” he said. He then ordered Tweed to cut off the bribes.


The legislators realized their fountain of easy money had run dry. Senators and assemblymen who had demanded a thousand dollars for their vote days earlier now offered their support for a mere hundred. To Adams, the mood among lawmakers was reminiscent “of the dark days of the war when tiding came of some great defeat.”


The legislators passed the Erie bill — which made the secretly issued Erie stock legitimate and thus secured Drew’s hold on the company — by a vote of 101 to 6. They had rejected it 83 to 32 when Vanderbilt money was being offered.


Vanderbilt and Drew ultimately settled their battle with a backroom deal that made them both much richer at the expense of Erie stockholders, in effect paying them both “golden parachutes” long before that term became common. At the same time, it left Gould and Fisk in charge of the company — Gould’s first big step in building one of the great American fortunes.


How does this compare with today’s big corporations attempting to influence Congress on issues close to their pocketbooks? There’s still plenty of money in politics, and plenty of favoritism by politicians toward big donors and high- powered lobbyists. But today the system is far more public and regulated — even with its flaws and gaps. And sunlight, as Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously told us, is the best disinfectant.


(Kenneth D. Ackerman is the author of four books, including “Boss Tweed: The Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York.” The opinions expressed are his own.)



Scene in the Chicago convention hall at it prepared to nominate Abe Lincoln for president, from Harper’s Weekly, May 1860.

Every president is shaped by his nominating convention. Lincoln’s in 1860 not only was one of the most important, but also the most exciting in America up to that point. In a three day, three-ballot carnival of music, fireworks, and politics drawing some 40,000 people, Lincoln and his friends outwitted the leading celebrities of their party, capturing the prize with nerve, ambition, and brass tacks. They played the kind of hardball politics that usually made reformers cringe. Still, it gave us one of the best presidents in American History.

Joe Howard Jr. of the New-York Times, who wrote the article below, was one of the most flomboyant newsmen of the era.  His dogged Civil War reporting sometimes crossed ethical lines even by Nineteenth Century standards.  Still, it was first rate, earning him a national following and a rare by-line.

From Abraham Lincoln’s Convention: Chicago 1860:

1. Headline: They nominated who?

The New-York Times, Saturday, May 19, 1860.
By Joe Howard, Jr.


FROM CHICAGO.

——-

THE REPUBLICAN TICKET FOR 1860.

——-

Abram Lincoln, of Illinois, Nominated

For President.

_____

The Late Senatorial Contest in Illinois to be Re-

Fought on a Wider Field.

——-

Disappointment of the Friends of

Mr. Seward

——-

INTENSE EXCITEMENT AND ENTHUSIASM

——-

Special Dispatch to the New-York Times
Chicago, Friday, May 18




The work of the Convention is ended. The youngster who, with raged trousers, used barefoot to drive his father’s oxen and spend his days in splitting rails, has risen to high eminence, and ABRAM LINCOLN, of Illinois, is declared its candidate for President by the National Republican Party.


The result was effected by the change of votes in the Pennsylvania, New-Jersey, Vermont, and Massachusetts delegations.

Mr. SEWARD’s friends assert indignantly, and with a great deal of feeling, that they were grossly deceived and betrayed. The recusanis endeavored to mollify New-York by offering her the Vice-Presidency, and agreeing to support any man she might name, but they declined the position, though they remain firm in the ranks, having moved to make Lincoln’s nomination unanimous. Mr. Seward’s friends feel greatly chagrined and disappointed. [Recunasi is an old word referring to English Roman Catholics in the 1600s who refused allegiance to the Church of England, a crime back then.]

Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

Western pride is gratified by the nomination, which plainly indicated the departure of political supremacy from the Atlantic States. …


Immense enthusiasm exists, and everything here would seem to indicate a spirited and successful canvass. The city is alive with processions, meetings, music, and noisy demonstrations. One hundred guns were fired this evening.


The Convention was the most enthusiastic ever known in the country, and if one were to judge from appearances here, the ticket will sweep the country


Great inquiry has been made this afternoon into the history of Mr. Lincoln. The only evidence that he has a history as yet discovered, is that he had a stump canvass with Mr. Douglas, in which he was beaten. [U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas from Illinois was the likely Democratic nominee and Lincoln’s likely chief opponent for President. Lincoln actually had won the popular vote in his 1858 Senate contest against Douglas, but the Democratic Illinois legislature nevertheless awarded the seat to Douglas.] He is not very strong at the west, but is unassailable in his private character.


Many of the delegates went home this evening by the 9 o’clock train. Others leave in the morning…..


Massachusetts delegates, with their brass band, are parading the streets, calling at the various headquarters of the other delegations, serenading and bidding them farewell. “Hurrah for Lincoln and Hamlin – Illinois and Maine!!” is the universal shout, and the sympathy for the bottom dog is the all-pervading sentiment.


The “Wide-Awakes,” numbering about two thousand men, accompanied by thousands of citizens, have a grand torch-light procession. The German Republican Club has another. The office of the Press and Tribune [today’s Chicago Tribune] is brilliantly illuminated, and has a large transparency over the door saying “For President, Honest Old Abe.” A bonfire thirty feet in circumference burns in front of the Tremont House, where thirty-three guns were fired from the top, and illumines the city for miles around. The city is one blaze of illumination. Hotels, stores and private residences, shining with hundreds of patriotic dips. Enough.


–Howard

We hoped you enjoyed this excerpt from Abraham Lincoln’s Convention: Chicago 1860.  If you enjoyed it, please consider downloading the full book through Amazon, Nook, or Apple iTunes.

In Abraham Lincoln’s Convention: Chicago 1860, we tell the story of Lincoln’s convention primarily through the eyes of newspaper writers, giving it the immediacy of the moment, with annotations, background, and updated formatting.

Publish Now:  From Manuscript to Book and eBook in the New World of Publishing


At this comprehensive day-long seminar, keynote speaker Justin Branch of Greenleaf Book Group, a nationally known publishing, marketing and distribution company, will share his expertise on the whole publishing landscape and “controlling your publishing experience” for e-books and digital publishing. Other presenters include authors, agents, book marketers and attorneys who will offer guidance on finishing your manuscript, preparing for publication, getting help, marketing your book, understanding copyright and more.

Publish Now! Take Your Writing from Manuscript to Book & ebook in the New World of Digital Publishing


At The Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Saturday, June 23,  9 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Cost includes networking lunch and closing reception

Topics:

Publishing

“The New World of Publishing” will be led by Justin Branch, a publisher with Greenleaf Book Group, a publishing, marketing and distribution company based in Austin, Texas, whose clients range from well-known brands such as John Gray and Kanye West to debut authors.

Ken Ackerman & Neal Gillen will present “The Non-Traditional Publishing Experience.” Ackerman has authored four published books and founded his own publishing company. Gillen is the author of eight self-published novels.

Writing

“The Story – The Manuscript is Finished – Or is It – What’s Next?”, led by C.M. Mayo, author of The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, a Library Journal Best Book 2009; Miraculous Air and Sky Over El Nido, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, among many other works. Her presentation will answer the question, How do I know when my manuscript is ready to be published, and whose help do I need to get it there; for example, a private editor, writing coach, or trusted reader?

Marketing

“Developing Your Marketing Plan,” led by Ally Peltier, chief editor, writer and editor of Ambitious Enterprises and Angela Render, owner of Thunderpaw Business Intelligence & Network Systems Management and author of “Marketing for Writers,” will break down what a successful manuscript is and how to design your own program for marketing it. Please call 301-654-8664 to receive student pricing.

Legal/Business

Attorneys Laura Strachan and Cynthia Blake Sanders will demystify copyright, fair use and commercial speech laws, which are changing rapidly in the new world of publishing and help you understand who owns your manuscript.

Click here to find out more.