Free Mrs. Lincoln's Rival by Jennifer Chiaverini

thoughts of what might have been, he nevertheless mustered up the good grace to send his best regards to the victor. “I congratulate you most heartily on your nomination,” he wrote to Mr. Lincoln in Springfield, “and shall support you, in 1860, as cordially and earnestly as I did in 1858.” He praised the platform adopted at the convention and the selection of Hannibal Hamlin, “that true & able man,” as the nominee for vice-president. “They will prove, I am confident, as auspicious to the country as they are honorable to the nominees.”
    Soon thereafter, Mr. Lincoln responded with a gracious letter of his own. “Holding myself the humblest of all whose names were before the convention,” he wrote, “I feel in especial need of the assistance of all; and I am glad—very glad—of the indication that you stand ready.”
    Mr. Lincoln’s sincere humility mollified Kate’s anger somewhat. “At least he realizes that he needs your help,” she said, returning the letter to her father. “Will you, as he puts it, ‘do service in the common cause’?”
    “Of course,” Father responded solemnly. “No amount of personal disappointment could compel me to forsake my duty to my country.”
    Kate had never been more proud of him.
    Mr. Lincoln was right to admit that he needed help if he were to win the national election, and some help came to him unwittingly from an unlikely quarter—the Democratic Party. After their convention in Charleston had ended in shambles, the Southern delegates who had walked out were replaced by other men from their states when the Democrats officially reconvened in Baltimore on June 18. There, to no one’s surprise, Mr. Douglas was chosen as the party’s nominee. Five days later, elsewhere in the city, the excluded Southern delegates defiantly held their own convention, where they nominated former congressman and current vice-president John C. Breckinridge, a Kentuckian who adamantly insisted that the Constitution permitted slavery throughout the states and new territories. Further crowding the slate of presidential candidates was Mr. John Bell of Tennessee, the nominee of the Constitutional Union Party, an alliance of conservative Know-Nothings and Whigs whose simple platform suggested that their approach to the slavery question was to ignore it altogether. With the Democrats splintered, the outlook for a Republican victory in November seemed promising, although Kate and her father agreed that the battle for electoral votes would likely break along geographic lines, with Mr. Lincoln battling Mr. Douglas for the Northern states and Mr. Breckinridge and Mr. Bell for the Southern. But as Kate had noted on the last day of the convention, Mr. Douglas had trounced Mr. Lincoln before. The Republicans could take nothing for granted.
    His loyalty to the party stronger than its loyalty to him, Father kept his promise and campaigned on behalf of his former rival in midsummer and into the fall, just as he had when Mr. Lincoln ran for the Senate in 1858.
    In September, Father decided to take time away from his electioneering for a trip to Cleveland to attend the dedication of a monument to Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, the “Hero of Lake Erie,” who had commanded the American naval forces in tremendous, unprecedented victories against the Royal Navy in the War of 1812. Father’s good friend Richard Parsons, a Cleveland attorney and the Speaker of the state House of Representatives, had invited the Chases to be his honored guests during their visit.
    “A trip to Washington would be more fruitful,” Kate urged. “In half a year you will be in the Senate again. There is no time like the present to begin building a coalition.”
    “It will not look well if I don’t go to Cleveland,” Father said, surprised by her reluctance. “The people will think I sulk at home, or that I begrudge a hero his accolades. No, Katie, I must go, and I would have you come with me.”
    “Take Nettie