“As to the other matter you kindly mention, I must in candor say I do not think myself fit for the presidency.  I certainly am flattered and gratified that some partial friends think of me in that connection; but I really think it best for our cause that no concerted effort, such as you suggest, should be made.”

He had given an equally positive answer to an eager Ohio friend in the preceding July; but about Christmas 1859, an influential caucus of his strongest Illinois adherents made a personal request that he would permit them to use his name, and he gave his consent, not so much in any hope of becoming the nominee for President, as in possibly reaching the second place on the ticket; or at least of making such a showing of strength before the convention as would aid him in his future senatorial ambition at home, or perhaps carry him into the cabinet of the Republican President, should one succeed.  He had not been eager to enter the lists, but once having agreed to do so, it was but natural that he should manifest a becoming interest, subject, however, now as always, to his inflexible rule of fair dealing and honorable faith to all his party friends.

“I do not understand Trumbull and myself to be rivals,” he wrote December 9, 1859.  “You know I am pledged not to enter a struggle with him for the seat in the Senate now occupied by him; and yet I would rather have a full term in the Senate than in the presidency.”

And on February 9 he wrote to the same Illinois friend: 

“I am not in a position where it would hurt much for me not to be nominated on the national ticket; but I am where it would hurt some for me not to get the Illinois delegates.  What I expected when I wrote the the letter to Messrs. Dole and others is now happening.  Your discomfited assailants are most bitter against me; and they will, for revenge upon me, lay to the Bates egg in the South, and to the Seward egg in the North, and go far toward squeezing me out in the middle with nothing.  Can you not help me a little in this matter in your end of the vineyard?”

It turned out that the delegates whom the Illinois State convention sent to the national convention at Chicago were men not only of exceptional standing and ability, but filled with the warmest zeal for Mr. Lincoln’s success; and they were able at once to impress upon delegates from other States his sterling personal worth and fitness, and his superior availability.  It needed but little political arithmetic to work out the sum of existing political chances.  It was almost self-evident that in the coming November election victory or defeat would hang upon the result in the four pivotal States of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois.  It was quite certain that no Republican candidate could carry a single one of the fifteen slave States; and equally sure that Breckinridge, on his extreme pro-slavery platform, could not carry a single one of the eighteen free States.  But there was a chance that one or more of these four pivotal free States might cast its vote for Douglas and popular sovereignty.