Of all the "Americans" or "Oppositionists" of the pre-war South, Henry Winter Davis of Baltimore was the one who was closest to the Republicans. His lifelong hatred of the Democrats made him open to fusion with anyone who had a chance of defeating them. In 1858, Davis had been one of two southerners in the House (the other had been Republican Frank Blair of Missouri) who
consistently voted against the Lecompton Constitution. During the 1860 Speakership contest, Davis, while voting for North Carolina American John A. Gilmer in the early ballots, privately indicated that he would have voted for the Republican candidate John Sherman if Davis's one vote would have been decisive. As it turned out, Sherman was never able to come closer than three votes away from victory, so Davis felt no obligation to vote for him. Sherman then withdrew from the race, and the Republicans took up the candidacy of William Pennington, who was thought to be potentially more acceptable to Americans than Sherman because unlike Sherman he had never endorsed Hinton Rowan Helper's violently antislavery tract The Impending Crisis--and because he was a longtime Whig who had only recently become a Republican. Pennington ultimately won by two votes: he was supported by Davis and by New York American George Briggs, who had assured the Republicans that he would vote for Pennington if Davis did--and kept his word.
After Pennington's victory, Davis became a hero to Republicans and was talked about as a possible vice-presidential candidate. Davis's biographer, Gerald S. Henig (
Henry Winter Davis: Antebellum and Civil War Congressman from Maryland), summarizes the situation at that year's Republican national convention as follows (pp. 132-3):
"On the second day of the convention, a subcommittee composed of three delegates from each of the 'doubtful states'--Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey--met to consider Lincoln's candidacy. David Davis of Illinois, Winter Davis's cousin, showed the committee sufficient evidence to convince them that Lincoln could command more delegate votes than either New Jersey's 'favorite son' William L. Dayton or Pennsylvania's Simon Cameron. By the following day, the New Jersey and Pennsylvania delegations agreed to support Lincoln. With all four of these crucial states now behind him, he was virtually assured the nomination.
"Before the subcommittee adjourned, it turned to the problem of selecting a vice-presidential candidate. The delegates agreed upon Winter Davis and requested David Davis to telegraph him to determine whether he would accept. The Maryland congressman declined by wire the next morning. If not for this refusal, New Jersey delegate Thomas H. Dudley maintained, 'Henry Winter Davis would have been placed upon the ticket.'"
Would he have?
It's doubtful. True, he was popular at the convention due to his vote for Pennington, and the very mention of his name drew great cheers from the assembled multitude. But probably his well-known nativist affiliations would have been fatal to him. The German-Americans in particular were vehemently opposed to him. Republicans had already shown in 1858 that their party could win over the majority of 1856 Fillmore voters in the North; as long as they had Lincoln, with his Whig background, on the top of the ticket, they did not need someone as controversial as Davis as their vice-presidential nominee.
Two other problems: (1) Davis was not quite a Republican yet; he was only an ally of the party. Indeed, while he wanted Lincoln to win nationwide, he did not want there to be a Lincoln ticket in Maryland; he thought that this would merely enable Breckinridge to defeat Bell there; and as
http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/u/usa/pres/1860.txt indicates, he was correct.
(2) Davis's methods of winning re-election in 1859 were, let's say, questionable. The Know Nothings in Baltimore were opposed by the Democratic-led "Reform Coalition." On October 27 Davis addressed a Know Nothing mass meeting where, in Henig's words (p. 116):
"Transparent banners displayed all sorts of barbarous sentiments. One had a picture of an uplifted arm with a clenched fist, under which was written 'With this we'll do the work.' On another was a picture of a bleeding head marked 'the head of a Reformer.' And on still another was written:
Reform movement--reform man
If you can vote, I'll be damned."
In front of the speakers' platform stood a blazing furnace mounted on wheels, where men were forging awls to be used as weapons on election day...Anyway, the November 2, 1859 election was the most violent in Baltimore's history, which is saying a great deal. Reform voters were beaten, pricked with awls, stabbed, shot and several killed. The nativist ruffians even resorted to kidnaping; a day or two before the election, hundreds of foreigners and naturalized citizens were seized and confined in "coops" and on election day were led by their captors to vote for the Know Nothing ticket, in some cases as many as sixteen times. Nor was it only the voters who were victims of violence; William Prescott, the reform congressional candidate for the third congressional district, was attacked by several hoodlums and severely beaten with brass knuckles. By noon the reformers withdrew almost entirely from the contest and the Know Nothings had sole control of the ballot boxes except in two wards. As one might expect, the Know Nothings (who lost ground in most of Maryland to the Democrats, thanks in part to John Brown) easily carried Baltimore; Davis was "re-elected" by several thousand votes, as was his colleague J. Morrison Harris in the third congressional district.
This wasn't the first time a Davis election had been marred by fraud, either. In 1857, though there was much less open violence, there was plenty of intimidation. Using a device they had learned from the Democrats, the Know Nothings made sure that their ballot had a plainly visible red or pink stripe drawn upon it. Persons approaching the polls without such tickets were threatened, bullied, and in some cases driven away. In fairness to the nativists, they were not the only people using such tactics; in the Eighth Ward, which the Democrats dominated, hundreds of nativist sympathizers were prevented from voting. But in most parts of the city the Know Nothings were in control.
Davis may not have been directly implicated in the 1857 or 1859 violence but he certainly could not have been unaware that he was benefitting from it. He always maintained, though, that he had been elected honestly both times, that the Democrats had started the violence, etc. I'm not sure how much this association would have harmed him as a vice-presidential candidate, though, especially since campaign violence was fairly common in those days, and hardly confined to Baltimore. In any event, the fact that some Republican newspapers could (after Davis's pro-Pennington vote)
affectionately call him the "Plug Ugly Republican" shows that there was a fairly widespread belief that politics was a rough game and that this wasn't necessarily such a bad thing.
Anyway, suppose that in spite of all his defects he is selected (maybe the Republicans are a bit too worried about Bell's appeal to former Whigs and Know Nothings in the North) and accepts. Would his selection doom Lincoln? I doubt it; it would hurt him a bit with German voters in Illinois and Indiana, but given Lincoln's nine point OTL margin in Indiana, I doubt there was much risk of his losing the state. (One reason for this is that Breckinridge got a larger percentage of the vote in Indiana than in any other state of the Old Northwest, thanks to Jesse Bright's hatred of Douglas.) Davis might actually help Lincoln in New Jersey, where there was a large Fillmore vote in 1856 and where Davis seems to have been popular. And I don't think Davis would cost Lincoln California or Oregon, either. So I think Lincoln-Davis could be elected. The question then is whether Vice President Davis will get along better with Lincoln than Congressman Davis did in OTL, when he became one of Lincoln's most bitter opponents within the Republican Party. (Unlike, say, a Charles Sumner who got along well with Lincoln
personally, Davis, like Ben Wade, seems to have been one of those Radicals who disliked Lincoln personally as well as politically.) Even if considerable tension does develop between the president and vice-president, it is just possible that to keep Radical support, Lincoln will retain Davis on the ticket in 1864, with the result that Davis could become president in 1865, and presumably take a quite different stance on Reconstruction than Andrew Johnson. (BTW, Davis like many other Radicals at first welcomed Johnson's accession to the presidency; though insisting that he sincerely mourned Lincoln, he added that it was ironic that he had "fallen a victim to the scoundrels he was trying to protect & conciliate!") In OTL Davis by July 1865 was a strong advocate of African American suffrage, arguing in a July 4 oration in Chicago:
"No State government has ever been recognized which ostracized a majority or any great mass of the people. When slavery existed, slaves were merged in the master. But the right of the State to ostracize a great mass of free negroes has never been recognized. They were a handful every where but in Maryland—-and there they voted with the whites on the adoption of the Constitution of the United States. If this precedent be set now, it is for the first time to be set. When negroes become free, they become a part of the people of the nation, and to ostracize them is to sanction a principle fatal to American free government.
"In South Carolina there are twice as many negroes as whites; in Mississippi there are more negroes than whites; in Alabama, in Louisiana, and in Georgia they are nearly equal. They are now in sufficient numbers at the South to control the result of any election. "They will vote with their masters," insidious gentlemen tell us; then at least let their masters be under the necessity of touching their hats to them to get their votes. "They are not intelligent enough to vote," another says. They know, fellow-citizens, a gray uniform from a blue one. They know a Yankee from their masters. They have fought well under Yankee leadership; maybe they can vote as intelligently under Yankee leadership. They are not spread in equal masses over the Southern country, but they are congregated in particular districts that border the Atlantic, the Gulf, and the Mississippi, and are in immense majorities in fully one third of the congressional districts of the South. They can break the terrible unity of the Southern vote that plunged us into the rebellion. Men who are not capable of understanding considerations like these had better go and whine about negro votes. I have seen about as much of negroes as any of you, have lived as near them, and suppose I have as much prejudice toward them as any of you; but to talk of this after we have had to call them to our aid in putting down the rebellion, is either driveling folly or infinite meanness. If you did not wish to have the negro hereafter enjoy the rights of a man, why did you bring him on the battle-field? You, white men of Illinois, why did you not have the quota of your State increased, so that the negro should not be needed? We of Maryland carried emancipation by going to the poor white men in the southern portion of the State, and showing them that the negro could relieve them from military service. They did not stop to discuss his right to political privileges then. If he is their and your equal on the battle-field, in the service of the country, he is, and should be, at the ballot-box; and if he is not your equal on the battle-field, then you have cheated the United States, to the injury of the national cause, to save yourselves from service."
https://books.google.com/books?id=Qx5cAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA581One may of course say that Davis's increasing radicalism was the result of his alienation from Lincoln (which may date back from Lincoln's decision to appoint Montgomery Blair to the cabinet instead of Davis) but one could just as well argue the opposite; and I think that Davis's lifetime partisanship, his hatred of the southern-and-doughface-dominated Democratic party would drive him to radicalism in any event.
In OTL, Davis died suddenly and unexpectedly in December 1865 when he caught a cold and developed pneumonia; I am assuming that this TL butterflies it away...
