Chapter 6: The Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln

The time had now come for the formation of a new political party, and in this Carleton had a hand, being at the first meeting and making the acquaintance of the leading men, Henry Wilson, Anson Burlingame, George S. Boutwell, N. P. Banks, Charles Sumner, and others. His connection with the press brought him into personal contact with men of all parties. He found Edward Everett more sensitive to criticism than any other public man.

In 1856 Carleton was offered a position on the Atlas, which had been the leading Whig paper in Massachusetts. He attended the first great Republican gathering ever held in Maine, at Portland, at which Hannibal Hamlin, Benjamin Wade, and N. P. Banks were speakers. On the night of the Maine election, which was held in August, as the returns, which gave the first great victory of the Republican party in the Fremont campaign, thrilled the young editor, he wrote a head-line which was copied all over the country, —”Behold How Brightly Breaks the Morning.”

In Malden, where he was then residing, a Fremont Club was formed. Carleton wrote a song, to the melody “Suoni La Tromba,” from one of the operas then much admired, which was sung by the glee men in the club. Political enthusiasm rose to fever heat. In the columns of the Atlas are many editorials which came seething hot from Carleton’s brain, during the campaign which elevated Mr. James Buchanan to the presidency.

When the storm of politics had subsided, Carleton wrote a series of articles for an educational periodical, The Student and Schoolmate. Inspired by his attendance on the meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he penned a series of astronomical articles for The Congregationalist. He also attended the opening of the Grand Trunk railroad from Montreal to Toronto, celebrated by a grand jubilee at Montreal. During the winter, when Elihu Burritt, the learned blacksmith, failed to appear on the lecture platform, Carleton was called upon at short notice to give his lecture entitled “The Savage and the Citizen.”

He was welcomed with applause, which he half suspected was in derision. At the end, he received ten dollars and a vote of thanks. The lecture system was then just beginning, and its bright stars, Phillips, Holmes, Whipple, Beecher, Gough, and Curtis were then mounting the zenith.

Carleton made another trip West in 1857, seeing the Mississippi, when the railway was completed from Cincinnati to St. Louis. When the crowd was near degenerating into a drunken mob, —the native wine of Missouri being served free to everybody, —the committee in charge cut off the supply of drink, and thus saved a riot. From St. Louis he went to Liverpool, on the Illinois River, to see about his land affairs. He enjoyed hugely the strange frontier scenes, meals in log cabins, and the trial of a case in court, which was in a schoolroom lighted by two tallow candles.

The Boston Atlas, unable to hold up the world, had summoned the Bee to its aid, yet did not even then stand on a paying basis. Finally it became absorbed in the Boston Traveller. Carleton again entered the service of the Boston Journal as reporter. Yet life was a hard struggle. Through the years 1857, 1858, 1859, Carleton was floating around among the newspapers getting a precarious living, —hardly a living. He wrote a few stories for Putnam’s Magazine, for one of which he was paid ten dollars. One of the bright spots in this period of uncertainty was his attendance, at Springfield and Newport, upon the meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also became more or less acquainted with men who were afterwards governors of Massachusetts, or United States senators, with John Brown and Stephen A. Douglas.