northerners, Welles attributed its passage to an increasingly aggressive “slave power.”
The act proved to be disastrous for the Democratic Party: in the ensuing Congressional elections the party lost 67 of the 92 northern House seats it had held in the Congress that enacted the measure. Many of these losses came at the hands of insurgent “anti-Nebraska” candidates backed by an ad hoc coalition of outraged Whigs, dissident Democrats, and Free-Soilers, a coalition that prefigured the Republican Party.14 The nativist American Party (discussed below) also contributed to the Democratic debacle in Connecticut and some other states.
By mid 1855, Welles had concluded that the Democratic Party was beyond redemption – a conclusion he arrived at in part because under relentless pressure from conservative Democrats Alfred E. Burr, editor of the Hartford Times, had closed the paper’s pages to him. For a time he was uncertain whether and where he would find a new political home. In early February 1856, however, with a presidential election on the horizon, he was among about a dozen ex-Whigs, Free-Soilers, and independent Democrats who met in Hartford to found the state’s Republican Party. Again he immersed himself in building a new party from the ground up. His first step was to establish the Hartford Evening Press, which would do for the fledgling Republican Party what the Hartford Times had done for the fledgling Democratic Party three decades earlier. He declined the editorship, but wrote many of the paper’s editorials during its start-up phase.
Welles represented Connecticut on the Republican national committee and attended the party’s first presidential nominating convention at Philadelphia in June 1856. Named to the 22-member platform committee, he, together with his Jackson-era friend Francis Preston Blair, Sr., drafted much of the party’s first national platform.
John C. Fremont, the Republican presidential nominee, carried Connecticut in the November election. For the Republican Party to become a lasting force in the state’s politics, however, it would have to meet two challenges. First, the former Whigs, who constituted the party’s largest component, and its much smaller contingent of ex-Democrats, would have to put aside their old partisan animosities in the interest of party unity. This they managed to do despite lingering tensions.
A greater challenge was posed by another new political organization, the American (or Know-Nothing) Party. Running on an anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic platform, it did remarkably well in the 1854 legislative elections and continued to prosper for several years, taking the governorship and three of Connecticut’s four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1855 and winning the gubernatorial contest again in 1856. Many Connecticut Know-Nothings were not only nativists but also opposed to slavery’s extension; and many anti-slavery Republicans also harbored nativist sentiments. Thus some leaders of the two parties favored bringing them together in a formal alliance, or even merging them into a single entity. Detesting ethnic and religious bigotry, Welles opposed any merger. He was enough of a practical politician, however, to support cooperation between Republicans and Know-Nothings, provided that his party avoided taking a nativist stance.
The two parties did cooperate during the 1856 presidential race, when many of the state’s anti-slavery Know-Nothings, like their counterparts elsewhere in the North, were so outraged by the American Party’s tacit endorsement of the Kansas-Nebraska Act that they backed the breakaway North American Party, which endorsed Fremont. The result in Connecticut was a hybrid Electoral College ticket composed of three Republicans and three North Americans. The following year the two parties held a joint convention at which Alexander Holley, whose support came largely from the Know-Nothing delegates, won the gubernatorial nomination by a wafer-thin margin over the candidate preferred by most Republican delegates, William A Buckingham, who was free of any Know-Nothing taint.
Ultimately, the Republican Party won over a large share of Connecticut’s Know-Nothing voters and absorbed many of the American Party’s leaders. To Welles’s satisfaction, it did so largely on its own terms as nativist passions subsided while hostility to slavery’s extension and the “slave power” continued to intensify. The turning point came in 1858, when the party spurned Governor Holley’s bid for a second term, nominated Buckingham instead, and went on to win the gubernatorial race without making significant concessions to the Know-Nothings.15
By 1860, the Know-Nothing movement was defunct; the Democratic Party’s perceived subservience to the “slave power” had seriously weakened it in Connecticut (as it had in much of the North); and relative harmony prevailed between the ex-Whig and ex-Democratic components of the Republican Party, as was exemplified by Welles’s selection to head the state’s delegation to the Republican national convention at Chicago in May.
Welles was optimistic about the party’s chances of taking the White House in 1860. But he strongly opposed the frontrunner for the nomination, William H. Seward, a U.S. senator since 1849 and previously a two-term governor of New York. He not only distrusted Seward as a longtime leader of the Whig Party but also believed he was an unprincipled opportunist who wanted to centralize power in Washington at the expense of the states and was tainted by the corruption characteristic of Empire State politics. In the months preceding the Chicago convention, Welles wrote several forceful anti-Seward articles for influential newspapers in New York City and Washington, helped convince the Connecticut delegation not to cast any of its 12 votes for him, and worked to deny him support in other New England states, which Seward was counting on to back him heavily.16
Welles favored Salmon P. Chase, formerly a U.S. senator and governor of Ohio, for the nomination. But he had also been impressed by Lincoln when the two men talked during the Illinoisan’s visit to Hartford in early March as part of a speaking tour in New England following his heralded Cooper Union address in New York City.17
At the Chicago convention, Seward led on the first ballot, but to Welles’s satisfaction he drew far fewer votes from New England delegates than expected. Thereafter, his candidacy stalled, and on the third ballot Lincoln was nominated, mainly because a majority of the delegates concluded that he had a much better chance than Seward of carrying the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, and Illinois, all of which the party had lost in 1856.18
Although Welles voted for Chase on all three ballots, he deemed Lincoln a worthy candidate and would give him unqualified support in the general election. He was part of the delegation of Republican leaders that traveled to Springfield after the convention to formally notify Lincoln of his nomination. The nominee greeted him warmly and made reference to their conversation in Hartford the previous March.
Lincoln learned early in the morning of November 7th that he had won the election and within hours began the politically delicate task of forming a cabinet. Determined to maintain sectional and political balance, he intended to give one seat to a prominent New Englander, preferably a former Democrat. Welles was on the short list from the start. But cabinet-making took time and involved the juggling of numerous competing claims. Thus Welles didn’t receive definitive word that Lincoln had chosen him until February 28th, just four days before the inauguration. Even then it was uncertain whether he would become postmaster general or secretary of the navy. That question was answered on March 5th when the president submitted his name to the Senate for confirmation as the latter.
Welles brought to the cabinet a number of political convictions and personal characteristics he had exhibited in the pre-war decades. Like his father, he revered Thomas Jefferson and believed the key to Jefferson’s greatness was his faith in the capacity of ordinary people for self-government. Lincoln and Welles both understood that the fate of democracy was at stake in the Civil War. As Lincoln declared in his July 4, 1861, message to a special session of Congress:
[Secession] presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy – a government of the people, by the same people – can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its domestic foes …. It forces us to ask: “Is there, in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness?” “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”19