Lincoln Looks West: From the Mississippi to the Pacific

6. The Tribe of Abraham: Lincoln and the Washington Territory

➢ 153 6 ➢ The Tribe of Abraham: Lincoln and the Washington Territory Robert W. Johannsen On November 6, 1860, the day American voters cast their ballots for a new president, a politically active farmer living on Puget Sound asked, “Who is Elected? or is any one Chosen? If the People have made a choice, which is probable, that Choice has undoubtedly fallen on Lincoln.” The prospect did not seem reassuring. “I have faint hope that Lincoln may be defeated,” the farmer wrote. “Yet I scarcely allow myself to believe Such can be the fact.”1 Although Washington Territory had no voice in national elections, its people felt a keen interest in the outcome in 1860. Party feelings ran deep, in spite of the territory’s geographic isolation and the slow, haphazard means of communication that tied it to the rest of the nation. Party divisions, conforming roughly to the national pattern, appeared early on this frontier, and the fact that two of the region’s political leaders had achieved national prominence gave partisan organization in the territory a relevance it might not otherwise have had. Joseph Lane and Isaac I. Stevens (or “Ancient Joseph ” and “Two-Eyed” Stevens, as they were often called) had both been territorial officeholders, Lane in Oregon and Stevens in Washington, and both represented their respective territories in Congress. Both were also principal figures in the 1860 election, unusual for men from a far-distant and sparsely settled frontier. Lane was the vice presidential candidate on the southern-backed Breckinridge Democratic ticket, and Stevens headed that party’s national campaign committee. Because of their aggressive leadership From David H. Stratton, ed., Washington Comes of Age: The State in the National Experience (Pullman: Washington State University, 1992), 73–93.  Robert W. Johannsen 154 and close ties with national party leaders, and because the party of Andrew Jackson seemed more responsive to frontier interests and concerns, Democrats had dominated Pacific Northwest politics.2 Twelve days after the Puget Sound farmer had expressed his anxiety lest Lincoln be elected, the picture cleared. Fragmentary news reports filtering into the territory pointed to a Lincoln victory. “This is bad news for Democrats ,” the farmer shrugged, “but I suppose will have to be borne.”3 The territory’s leading Democratic newspaper searched desperately, if unsuccessfully , for some good that might come from the election of aRepublican president. Republicans, on the other hand, made up for their lack of numbers with loud rejoicing. A one-hundred-gun salute was fired in the village of Tumwater to celebrate Lincoln’s triumph, following which the townspeople marched to the nearby territorial capital of Olympia, ringing bells, blowing horns, and cheering all the way. Olympia’s new Republican newspaper, the Washington Standard, boasted unconvincingly that Washington Territory had always been “Republican at heart.” And from the territory’s remote eastern mining region came an enthusiastic word: “Old Abe must certainly be elected President, for . . . we have not had a cloudy day for the past week.”4 The Republican Party had won its first national victory, and there was no doubt among its partisans in Washington Territory that the country now stood on the threshold of a new and wonderful age. “A day of brightness is about to dawn on our Territory,” crowed the Standard. “The dark shadows of locofocoism,” which had long “blighted and withered” the Northwest, were about to be dispelled. The Port Townsend North-West proved unable to control its excitement: the Republican triumph marked “the inauguration of a new era, in which a prosperity unparalleled shall commence with our people.” But, asked many puzzled Pacific Northwesterners, who is Abraham Lincoln?5 Lincoln was virtually unknown in the Pacific Northwest. Indeed, it had only been since his race for Stephen A. Douglas’s Senate seat two years before that his name was recognized at all beyond the borders of his home state of Illinois. On the northwest frontier, Lincoln evoked only a dim response. Even then, most people knew him simply as the man whom Douglas defeated . His name had rarely been included among those who sought the Republican nomination for the presidency. When Oregon’s Republicans met in April 1859 to select delegates to the national convention, they turned first to the well-known senator from New York, William H. Seward—a choice both premature and ill-advised. Seward not only was not identified with the ➢ The Tribe of Abraham 155 West...