Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Eventually, that “little engine” succeeded. In 1842 Lincoln married Mary Todd, the daughter of a prominent Lexington, Kentucky, family, who brought him a lifelong schooling in social graces. Even more important, Lincoln labored with ferocious intensity at becoming a successful lawyer and Whig politician. Herndon noticed that Lincoln seemed to think “that there were no limitations to the force and endurance of his mental and vital powers,” and he watched Lincoln wear himself to the point of breakdown in “a continuous, severe, persistent, and exhaustive thought” on a problem. Herndon described Lincoln as “persistent, fearless, and tireless in thinking.”15

  His thoroughness, his feel for the practical in legal issues, and his remarkably retentive memory made Lincoln an outstanding courtroom performer. He was not “a learned lawyer,” recalled Herndon, but he was a first-rate case lawyer with an uncanny ability to bend juries to his point of view. “He was wise as a serpent in the trial of a cause,” one legal associate, Leonard Swett, recalled, “but I have got too many scars from his blows to certify that he was harmless as a dove.” He was not a schemer. “Discourage litigation,” was Lincoln’s own advice to aspiring lawyers. “Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser—in fees, expenses, and waste of time.” If anything, he was renowned for his scrupulous honesty. Among his fellow lawyers, “Mr. Lincoln’s character for professional honor stood very high.” The entire “frame-work of his mental and moral being was honesty,” Herndon remembered, “open, candid and square in his profession, never practicing on the sharp or low.” Herndon watched him warn clients with shaky cases, “You are in the wrong of the case and I would advise you to compromise, or if you cannot do that, do not bring a suit on the facts of your case because you are in the wrong and surely [be] defeated and have to pay a big bill of costs.”16

  Yet, as unbending as Lincoln could be about ends, he was surprisingly flexible about means. “Mr. Lincoln was a very patient man generally,” said Herndon, “but if you wished to be cut off at the knee, just go at Lincoln with abstractions.” This was a pattern that, in later years, would also characterize his political solutions. “Secret, silent, and a very reticent-minded man,” Lincoln was “a riddle and a puzzle to his friends and neighbors,” and in political combat he could be deceptively hard, evasive and dangerous to underestimate. “Any man,” warned Leonard Swett, “who took Lincoln for a simple minded man would very soon wake [up] with his back in a ditch.”17

  The plainest example of this evasiveness was his awkward embarrassment over his crude backcountry origins. “Lincoln’s ambition,” remarked Herndon, was “to be distinctly understood by the common people.” Yet no man wanted less to be one of them. Once Lincoln moved to Springfield, he rarely cast a backward glance at his humble origins: neither Thomas nor Sarah Lincoln was invited to their son’s wedding, and Lincoln was too embarrassed and alienated by his father’s crudeness even to attend the old man’s funeral in 1851. His stepbrother’s pleas that Lincoln come down to the Coles County farmhouse where Thomas Lincoln lay dying were met with a frosty refusal: “Say to him that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.”18

  When the same stepbrother tried to talk Lincoln into a loan to pay off his debts, Lincoln bluntly refused: “You are now in need of some ready money; and what I propose is, that you shall go to work, ‘tooth and nails’ for some body who will give you money [for] it. Let father and your boys take charge of things at home—prepare for a crop, and make the crop; and you go to work for the best money wages, or in discharge of any debt you owe, that you can get”—in other words, join the cash economy. Lincoln had no love for Thomas Jefferson’s republic of yeoman farmers, nor would he have much use for utopian dreams of cooperative commonwealths in which all results were leveled. What he wanted for the Union was what he wanted for himself: an upwardly mobile society of successful small-scale producers and professionals, with equal liberty to pursue their own interests. “I hold the value of life is to improve one’s condition,” Lincoln said in 1861, and the star he navigated by was the “promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”19

  The practice of law gave Lincoln his first “equal chance.” Although much of his reputation as a trial lawyer was made on the state circuit courts, riding from one plank-and-shingle courthouse to another over the Illinois prairies, by the 1850s he was appearing regularly before the Illinois Supreme Court, where he handled appeals in 402 cases, and in the federal circuit court for northern Illinois, where he handled over 300 cases for bankruptcy and debt. In addition to a demanding legal practice that may have amounted to more than 5,100 cases and upward of 100,000 separate legal documents, Lincoln even managed to sit as a judge in more than a hundred cases on the state circuit courts when a regular judge was sick or unavailable. He was involved in six cases before the United States Supreme Court (one of which involved oral argument before no less than Roger B. Taney) and developed a long-term association as counsel for the Illinois Central Railroad (sublimely confident in the benefits of pushing the boundaries of markets deeper and deeper into the west, Lincoln managed to persuade the state court to have the Illinois Central declared tax-exempt as a “public work”).20

  Lincoln was not a sentimentalist about the law. “There was nothing of the milksop about him,” remarked Henry Clay Whitney, who practiced alongside Lincoln on the Eighth Circuit. Although his two most famous trials—his defenses of Duff Armstrong and Peachy Quinn Harrison on murder indictments—were criminal cases, criminal law accounted for only about 6 percent of his case load over twenty-four years; the bulk of his practice was civil and commercial, and the single largest category included bankruptcies and debt collections; Whitney “never found him unwilling to appear in behalf of a great ‘soulless corporation.’” Lincoln had no animus against capital: “Men who are industrious, and sober, and honest in the pursuit of their own interests should after a while accumulate capital, and after that should be allowed to enjoy it in peace, and also if they should choose when they have accumulated it to use it to save themselves from actual labor and hire other people to labor for them is right. In doing so they do not wrong the man they employ.” Nor did Lincoln propose any “war upon capital.” He took it for granted that “it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can.” He merely wished Americans “to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else.” Lincoln certainly labored to practice what he preached: by the 1850s, Lincoln was commanding an annual income of more than $5,000 per annum—approximately twenty times that figure if we reckon in today’s currency—owned a large frame house in Springfield, had his eldest son in a private school in Springfield, and had investments in real estate, mortgages, notes, bank accounts, and insurance policies amounting to over $20,000.21

  Despite his successes, Abraham Lincoln arrived at his mid-forties dissatisfied and restless. Rigidly self-controlled, Lincoln refused even the relaxation of liquor, and Robert Lincoln, his eldest son, afterward recollected that he had “seen him take a sip of a glass of ale and also of a glass of champagne… on two or three occasions in my life, not more.” When self-control or his control of his circumstances escaped him, Lincoln had always been possessed by a strain of moody introspection, and he easily lapsed into periods of sustained and almost suicidal depression. “You flaxen men with broad faces are born with cheer and don’t know a cloud from a star,” he told one optimistic Iowa politician. “I am of another temperament.” Whatever religion he may have been taught by his parents he had exchanged for an emotionless rationalistic deism, and he proclaimed his faith not in a personal God but in “reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason,” as “all the materials for our future support and defence.” Yet all his life he retained a streak of the superstitious, in the form of belief in dreams and omens, and he transmuted the Calvinist prede
stination of his parents into “the Doctrine of Necessity—that is, that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.”22

  One remedy for the depression lay in his peculiarly clownish sense of humor and the almost bottomless fund of jokes and funny stories he had collected from the folk humor of the Illinois frontier. His reputation as a storyteller was nearly as legendary as his eloquence as a lawyer; his jokes reeked of the cornfield, and occasionally of the barnyard. Some measure of Lincoln’s humor was consciously cultivated to appeal to popular audiences, and Lincoln used laughter to deadly effectiveness as a stump speaker (Douglas would later claim that he never feared Lincoln’s arguments, but “every one of his stories seems like a whack upon my back”). In a larger sense, Lincoln craved the escape from melancholy offered him by the jokes he could tell to a crowd of friends and admirers, making them howl with laughter. “Some of my friends are much shocked at what I suppose they consider my low tastes in indulging in stories some of which, I suppose, are not just as nice as they might be,” Lincoln admitted, “but I tell you the truth when I say that a real smutty story, if it has the element of genuine wit in its composition, as most of such stories have, has the same effect on me that I think a good square drink of whiskey has to an old toper. It puts new life into me. The fact is, I have always believed that a good laugh was good for both the mental and physical digestion.”23 It also reflected the division of Lincoln’s character, one side all seriousness and ambition and Republican honesty, the other bawdy, cunning, homespun, and secretive.

  Part of Lincoln’s brooding was rooted in his complex and sometimes unhappy marriage to Mary Todd. Painfully aware of his own social awkwardness, Lincoln’s relationships with women were tentative and uncertain. His early passion for Ann Rutledge, the daughter of a New Salem tavern keeper, has often been dismissed as a fairy tale shaped by William Herndon to discomfit Mary Lincoln, but the evidence Herndon accumulated for the Rutledge story has more substance to it than the dismissals imply. Rutledge’s premature death, if we can rely on Herndon’s interviews with New Salemites years afterward, devastated Lincoln. A subsequent engagement to Mary Owens in 1836 fell through due to Lincoln’s hasty and not entirely becoming retreat from matrimony. For the most part, he avoided the society of women—not for lack of interest, but for fear of rejection and a strict observance of male-female proprieties. “Lincoln was a Man of strong passion for woman,” said David Davis, the presiding circuit judge before whom Lincoln practiced for many years, but “his Conscience Kept him from seduction—this saved many—many a woman.” In the end, only the determined intervention of friends and the equally determined strategy of Mary herself managed to tie the knot for Lincoln.24

  As it was, Mary Todd was both a burden and a blessing to Lincoln. Criticized by her wealthy, slaveholding family for having married beneath herself, Mary constantly fed Lincoln’s “little engine” and provided him with the kind of reassurance and devotion that he needed to keep himself going. She was, said Herndon, “like a toothache, keeping her husband awake to politics day and night.” On the other hand, she could goad her husband into rage as easily as into politics. Mary was high-strung and irritable, and Herndon (whose dislike she returned, with interest), thought her a “terror… imperious, proud, aristocratic, insolent, witty, and bitter”; he (and almost everyone else who knew the Lincolns personally) characterized the Lincolns’ marriage as a “domestic hell.” It was this that explained to his contemporaries why Lincoln began to spend increasing amounts of time away from Springfield on the circuit or on railroad cases. “Mrs Lincoln had notions not very agreeable to him and which so affected his domestic peace as to force him off in the circuit,” wrote one Springfield neighbor. David Davis agreed: “Mr Lincoln was happy—as happy as he could be, when on this Circuit and happy no other place. This was his place of Enjoyment. As a general rule when all the lawyers of a Saturday Evening would go home and see their families & friends at home Lincoln would refuse to go home. It seemed to me that L was not domestically happy.” By the 1850s, Lincoln was away for almost twenty weeks of the year.25

  Further aggravating Lincoln’s melancholy was his persistent failure at politics. In 1840 he had campaigned as a loyal Whig for William Henry Harrison, and in 1843 the Whig state committee recruited him to write a state party platform. He campaigned for Whig nominees in 1844, including Henry Clay, and in 1846 the Illinois Whigs successfully ran him for Congress as the representative for the Seventh Congressional District. But Lincoln’s performance in Washington fell far short of impressive. Although Lincoln struggled hard to make a name for himself as a Whig, little in his solitary term as a congressman was noticed, not even his opposition to President Polk and the Mexican War. In 1848 he stepped aside in accordance with party wishes to allow another Whig, Stephen Logan, to win the Seventh District seat, and Lincoln was sent out on the stump to promote the election of Zachary Taylor, the Whig candidate for president. Despite falling on his spear so loyally, Lincoln was offered as a political reward only the governorship of the Oregon Territory, a lusterless post so far removed from real political life that Lincoln turned it down.

  Thus Abraham Lincoln in the mid-1850s was a man who had accomplished much, but not nearly as much as he craved. At this point his vision shifted from the unsatisfied and ambiguous conflicts of his private world to the equally unsatisfied and ambiguous conflicts of national politics.

  Lincoln had long harbored anti-slavery instincts. “I have always hated slavery,” he said years later, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel.” As early as 1837, during his days as an Illinois state legislator, he had put himself on record as opposing slavery as “both injustice and bad policy.” Lincoln’s dislike of slavery was generated less by a concern over racial injustice and more by the arbitrary and unnatural restraint it placed on the natural rights and abilities of an individual “to make himself.” Any artificial burden placed on the acquisition of property and the free exercise of one’s natural rights, whether it be aristocracy or slavery, was an offense to Lincoln. As was the case with most Northerners through the 1830s and 1840s, his rankling at slavery never actually took the route of abolitionism, nor did he need it to: “I rested in the hope and belief that it was in course of ultimate extinction.” The debate over Kansas-Nebraska and then Dred Scott, however, changed that: “I became convinced that either I had been resting in a delusion, or the institution was being placed on a new basis… for making it perpetual, national and universal.” Kansas-Nebraska “took us by surprise—astounded us,” and “raised such an excitement… throughout the country as never before was heard of in this Union,” Lincoln said.26

  Kansas-Nebraska had managed to trample on not just one but several of Lincoln’s sensibilities. In the first place, it represented a reneging by the slave states on a contract they had agreed to in good faith in 1820. After “the South had got all they claimed, and all the territory south of the compromise line had been appropriated to slavery,” the South turned its eyes on the lands reserved for freedom and attempted to “snatch that away,” too. Instead of extinction, slavery had won access to the old Missouri Compromise territories, and with that, a new lease on life.27 That, in turn, meant the spread of a planter aristocracy who meant to use the slave system to fasten a permanent system of economic dependence onto the American republic, with no more opportunity for a “poor man’s son” to acquire a homestead of his own and begin the same ascent to bourgeois respectability which Lincoln had achieved.

  What made this even more destructive was the way it soiled the reputation of liberal democracy before the world. “I hate [slavery] because of the monstrous injustice of slavery,” Lincoln said, but even more, “I hate it because it… enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.” How could Americans embrace the Declaration of Independence and Kansas-Nebraska with the same arms? The Declaration declared
that all men are created equal; Kansas-Nebraska repudiated that and declared that some men might now be kept as unequals anywhere a majority decided to approve it. Lincoln could not have produced “one man that ever uttered the belief that the Declaration did not apply to negroes, before the repeal of the Missouri Compromise!” If slavery was good enough to be sanctioned, then blacks could not be good enough to be men; hence, Kansas-Nebraska has “deliberately taken negroes from the class of men and put them in the class of brutes.”28

  So he threw himself into the anti-Nebraska fight, hoping to rebuild the shattered unity of the Whig Party on a platform that offered Northern Whigs a resurrection of the Missouri Compromise and Southern Whigs new reassurances for the safety of slavery in the Southern states. “We rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.”29 That platform came near to winning him one of Illinois’s U.S. Senate seats in 1855, when Lincoln outpolled a pro-Nebraska Democratic candidate, James Shields. The Whigs in Illinois no longer had the strength to push Lincoln over the finish line, however, and Lincoln was forced to throw his support to a free-soil Democrat, Lyman Trumbull, in order to keep another Douglasite out of the Senate.