Abraham Lincoln
Today is Halloween. Theologically a day devoted to warding off evil spirits, kids (along with adults) dress up in often-spooky costumes and solicit goodies in an annual ritual that mainly benefits candy-makers and dentists.
In Las Vegas and Nevada, though, October 31 holds a special significance. It was on this day 161 years ago, in 1864, that the Territory of Nevada became the State of Nevada. Officially, October 31 is Nevada Day, a state holiday observed on the last Friday of the month to create a three-day weekend. For the first time since 2014, the final Friday–today–actually is October 31, and thus the real Nevada Day.
And despite the lack of any historical connection with Halloween, which became popular in the U.S. only later in the 19th century amid immigration waves of Scots and Irish, there is a holiday element to the origins of Nevada Day. The biggest participant hereabouts was none other than the incumbent president, Abraham Lincoln. His treat was the creation of a new Republican-leaning state solely to help rig his re-election in 1864. The trick was the somewhat shady stuff pulled off to make it happen.
Since becoming New to Las Vegas, I have written about this subject several times. But, of course, I can’t plagiarize myself.
Let’s roll way back to 1864. The United States was mired in the fourth year of the terrible Civil War. Lincoln was seeking a second term. With 11 Southern states in rebellious secession, there was growing unhappiness against the war in the North. Strong pockets of anti-Lincoln sentiments existed in places like New York, then-tiny Los Angeles and my native New Jersey, the only Northern state with legal slaves (13, to be exact).
You think Donald J. Trump has had problems with his generals, complaining they weren’t loyal to him like, say, Hitler’s generals (who only tried to kill Der Führer three times)? The Democratic candidate against Lincoln was one of his own leaders, General George B. McClellan, who actually ran while still in the military.
The political scene was fractured. The Republicans were badly split. One faction, headed by the war criminal John C. Frémont (the GOP’s first presidential candidate in 1856 and the personality for whom once-glitzy Fremont Street in Las Vegas would be named) wanted an immediate end to slavery and was unhappy with Lincoln’s slower approach. The Democrats were even more split, with War Democrats, Peace Democrats, Moderate Peace Democrats, Peace with Slavery Democrats, and so on.
Lincoln already had helped engineer one new state. Some 41 western counties of Virginia split to form the pro-union (and pro-Lincoln) state of West Virginia in 1863. That would give him five more electoral votes. Lincoln might need every one he could get. Since the U.S. Constitution grants every state at least three electoral votes, where else could he look for more?
At the outset of the Civil War, Congress, controlled for the first time by Republicans, split off thinly populated Nevada from Utah to become its own territory. Its top officials were all appointed by Lincoln. Most notable was James W. Nye, a fast-talking lawyer of dubious propriety who had been head of the New York City Metropolitan Board of Police. He was chosen by Lincoln to be the territorial governor.
With the backing of Lincoln, Nye and his fellow Republicans immediately began agitating for statehood. But there was this itty-bitty problem. An old federal law, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, said new states first had to have a population of at least 60,000. Nevada’s population at the 1860 census was 6,857, some 53,143 short of that mandate. Almost all the population was centered around the capital of Carson City. Las Vegas, which was still part of Arizona, didn’t even exist, except on a government map fashioned, as it happened, by Frémont showing a place for gold-crazed settlers to get some water in the Mojave Desert on the way to California.
But a mere federal law could be amended by another mere federal law. Especially when the Presidency was at stake.
Putting aside the population issue, any would-be state needed a constitution. So Nye convened a territorial constitutional convention. A constitution was drafted. But there were profound differences over how mining–with gambling decades off, the state’s only real revenue source–would be taxed. On January 19, 1864, Nevada voters nixed the draft constitution by a lopsided male-only vote of 8,851 to 2,157 (the population has grown but was still well short of 60,000). No constitution, no state, and thus no three electoral votes for Lincoln.
The federal election was just eight-and-a-half months off.
Undaunted, Nye and his crew tried again. They got some big help from Honest Abe. In Washington, D.C., the Republican-controlled Congress quickly passed, and Lincoln signed, a bill that would allow statehood for Nevada if the territory adopted a constitution and condemned slavery, no matter what the population. Also crucially, the legislation also allowed Lincoln alone, rather than the deliberative Congress, as was the practice, to declare Nevada a state.
Now, that fast-track provision and last-minute moving of goalposts (although football had not yet been invented) definitely could be called a rigging.
Back in Nevada, Nye called a second constitutional convention. A compromise was reached on mining taxation, and a new constitution was drafted. Put to the voters, it passed easily, 10,375 to 1,284.
The date was September 14, 1864. Certification came on September 27. Election Day was just 42 days off. The drama was building.
But Nye then made a big mistake. He immediately sent a copy of the constitution to Lincoln–by U.S. mail. The package never showed up, perhaps because it had to be routed to California, sailed to Panama, ported by mule across the isthmus and then boated up the Atlantic outside the reach of Confederate gunboats. By the time its non-arrival was noticed in D.C., it was too late to re-mail (the transcontinental railroad going through northern Nevada was still five years away from completion).
U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward (who a few years later would buy Alaska for the U.S.) asked Lincoln to proclaim statehood without the document in hand on the basis of a telegram from Nye. But that was just too much for Lincoln, a careful lawyer who also might have been aware of Nye’s shady reputation. So on October 26, Nye, in what has been described as the second-longest telegram ever sent, wired the entire 16,543-word document to the U.S. Department of State. Since there was no transcontinental telegraph yet, either, the transmission had to be re-keyed three times along the way. The cost to Nevada was $4,303.27–about $168,000 in today’s dollars.
The telegraphed constitution reached Lincoln in the White House on the evening of October 28–11 days before the election. Lincoln declared Nevada statehood. A telegram so stating was sent to Nye on October 30. He received it just after midnight and immediately issued his own proclamation announcing the nation’s 36th state, forever sealing October 31 as a day of note in Nevada history.
The federal election was just eight days off.
On November 8, 1864, the part of the U.S. not in rebellion voted for president–including, for the first time, Nevada. By then, things had started moving in Lincoln’s way, and as it turned out, he didn’t need the newest state. Lincoln received 55% of the national popular vote and overwhelmingly won the electoral vote, 212 to 27. McClellan captured only Kentucky (where Lincoln had been born), Delaware and McClellan’s home state of New Jersey with those 13 slaves.
Lincoln handily won the popular vote in Nevada, 9,826 to 6,594. The total of 16,420 votes was the least cast in any state. (The southern tip of Nevada where Las Vegas is did not become part of the state until 1867 when Congress transferred that region from the territory of Arizona.)
But despite all that effort, Lincoln still failed to get all of Nevada’s three electoral votes. Due to a snowstorm (Nevada, after all, is the Spanish word for “snow-covered”), one of the electors pledged to Lincoln could not make it to the state capital of Carson City a month later for the formal meeting and voting of Nevada electors. So for all this work Lincoln ended up getting two electoral votes from Nevada, but not three.
For his efforts, Nye became one of Nevada’s first two senators—where he hired Mark Twain as a staffer–serving for eight years. He also got his name on Nye County, the wild, woolly, and still solidly Republican county just north and west of Las Vegas that is the country’s third largest by area. Following his Senate service, Nye moved back to New York State. He quickly was declared insane and committed to an asylum, where he was so delusional he thought he had died and was waiting for his coffin. When the casket finally arrived–after Nye expired on Christmas Day 1876 in the New York City suburb of White Plains at age 61–he was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. One obituary said Nye had been a fine speaker with a great sense of humor but was “not over-honest.”
In Las Vegas there probably won’t be a lot of kids today dressed up as Lincoln. Too bad, because for him it was trick AND treat in Nevada.