Leadership

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Most troubling to Lincoln was the realization that his reputation had been compromised. He had promised the people during his first run for office that if elected, he would support any law providing dependable roads and navigable rivers so the poorest and most thinly populated communities could thrive. That pledge, which he considered binding upon his honor, reputation, and character, had not been fulfilled. The burdens he had sought to lift from the people had instead been multiplied.

  The blow to Lincoln’s conception of his public integrity coincided with a blow to his private sense of honor, occasioned by his anguished decision to break off his engagement to Mary Todd, the well-educated, intelligent daughter of a wealthy Whig Party member who had served in both the Kentucky House and Senate. The couple had been drawn together by their shared love of poetry and politics. Lincoln’s idol, Whig Party leader Henry Clay, had been a frequent guest at the Todd family home; Mary considered herself a passionate Whig; she took pride in her “unladylike” zeal for politics. Her faith in Lincoln’s destiny spurred his aspirations and drew them together.

  As the courtship moved toward marriage, however, Lincoln began to question the strength of his love for the mercurial young woman who could be affectionate and generous one day and depressed and irritable the next. His best friend Joshua Speed recalled that “in the winter of 40 & 41, he was very unhappy about his engagement to Mary—Not being entirely satisfied that his heart was going with his hand—How much he suffered on that account none Know so well as myself.”

  Beyond Lincoln’s vacillation concerning Mary, he was also anxious, a relative suggested, about “his ability and Capacity to please and support a wife.” His work in the legislature and on the stump had taken a toll on his fledgling legal practice. “I am so poor, and make so little headway in the world,” Lincoln acknowledged, “that I drop back in a month of idleness, as much as I gain in a year’s rowing.” How could he expect to support a wife and children? Would the responsibilities of family life prevent his continuing pursuit of education and his political ambitions? He possessed no template of a successful family life, no foundation on which to construct his own family. He had seen glimpses of family life—people sitting together at meals, fathers serving as providers—but had never shared in it. Riddled by agitation, Lincoln ended the engagement.

  The “breach of honor” soon became common knowledge in the small town of Springfield, magnifying Mary’s humiliation. Feeling Mary’s sorrows as intensely as his own, Lincoln could not bear the idea that he was responsible for her unhappiness. It “kills my soul,” he said. Most damaging of all, he confessed to Speed, he had lost confidence in his ability to keep his “resolves when they are made. In that ability you know, I once prided myself as the only or at least, the chief gem of my character; that gem I lost,” and until it is recovered, “I cannot trust myself in any matter of much importance.”

  That very winter, Joshua Speed was preparing to leave Springfield to return to his family’s plantation in Kentucky. His father had died and he felt a responsibility to care for his widowed mother. For seven years, Speed’s general store had been the hub of Springfield’s political and social life. He and Lincoln had lived together in a large upstairs room. The two men had traveled together to political events, dances, and parties. The anticipated departure of Speed represented the loss not simply of a friend but of the sole human being with whom Lincoln had shared his private self at a time when he needed companionship the most. Lincoln loved Speed “more than any one dead or living,” William Herndon believed. “I shall be verry [sic] lonesome without you,” Lincoln told Speed. “How miserably things seem to be arranged in this world. If we have no friends, we have no pleasure; and if we have them, we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained by the loss.”

  These central events of his personal life combined with the public collapse of the improvement projects he had so wholeheartedly espoused plunged Lincoln into what soon became an incapacitating depression. Lincoln had suffered from bouts of melancholy before. Six years earlier, when his first love, Ann Rutledge, died, he had seemed “indifferent” to life, taking his gun and ominously wandering into the woods. His friends feared that unless he quickly gained equilibrium, “reason would desert her throne.” By openly sharing his sorrows with his neighbors in the closely knit New Salem community, however, he had soon been able to return to his law studies and his legislative duties.

  This breakdown, when he was thirty-two, was the most serious of his lifetime, with more lasting ramifications. “I am now the most miserable man living,” Lincoln wrote his then law partner. “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.” The letter ended abruptly with the simple statement “I can write no more.”

  Day after day, he remained bedridden, unable to eat or sleep, unfit to carry out his duties in the legislature. “Lincoln went Crazy,” Speed said, “it was terrible.” Fellow Illinois lawyer Orville Browning recalled that Lincoln was “delirious to the extent of not knowing what he was doing” and that he “was so much affected as to talk incoherently.” He no longer looked “like the same person,” one friend remarked. “He is reduced and emaciated in appearance,” another friend observed, “and seems scarcely to possess strength enough to speak above a whisper. His case at present is truly deplorable.”

  The doctors in Springfield believed that Lincoln was “within an inch of being a perfect lunatic for life.” Joshua Speed remained with Lincoln throughout this harrowing time. The conversation that passed between them branded both men for the rest of their lives. When Speed warned Lincoln that he must somehow revive his spirits or he would assuredly die, Lincoln replied that he was more than willing to die, but that he had “done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.” The greatest passion he harbored, he confessed to Speed, was “to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man.”

  The same powerful thirst—the elemental desire to engrave his name in history—that a dozen years before had empowered “a friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flatboat” to present himself to the settlers of New Salem and ask for their support that he might represent them in the state legislature would rescue him now from the worst personal disintegration of his life.

  First, Lincoln had to repair what was lost, to reconstruct both his private and his public life. Step by step, this was to become the task of better than a decade. After leaving the legislature, Lincoln formed a new partnership with Stephen Logan, the leading lawyer in the county, and “one of the finest examples of the purely legal mind” in the West. Logan knew that Lincoln had little methodical understanding of the principles and precedents of law, but he had seen Lincoln’s clarity, humor, and speaking skills in dealing with juries, and believed the younger man “would work hard.” The partnership turned out well for both men. Lincoln found in Logan a mentor who guided his general reading in the law and became, Lincoln said, “almost a father to me.” Logan taught Lincoln “how to prepare his cases” and, most importantly, bolstered the confidence of the self-made lawyer when he occasionally despaired of ever catching up to his college-educated colleagues. “It does not depend on the start a man gets,” Logan told him, “it depends on how he keeps up his labors and efforts until middle life.” Working together, the two men built up a reliable practice, and finally, Lincoln began to make a decent living.

  As doubts about his ability to support a wife began to fade, Lincoln resumed his courtship with Mary. He realized that he had been held back not only by financial insecurity but, as he told Speed, by untenable imaginings of love, by “dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that anything earthly can realize.” By committing himself once again to the engagement he had broken, he began to restore his sense of honor; he had proved to himself that he could, indeed, k
eep his “resolves”—“the chief gem” of his character. While his marriage to Mary proved troublesome at times, Lincoln made great efforts to be a good husband and a kindly, playful father, forging a relationship with his children he had never experienced with his own father. “It is my pleasure that my children are free—happy and unrestrained by paternal tyranny,” he noted. “Love is the chain whereby to lock a child to its parent.” The life he was leading may have seemed commonplace, but to him it was no small thing to have built, for the first time, a firm foundation of domestic and financial security, without which little else would have been possible.

  * * *

  That chance plays a master role in the fortunes of leaders is vividly illustrated by Lincoln’s experience. As the Illinois economy began to revive, so, too, did Lincoln’s inert political ambitions. “Now if you should hear any one say that Lincoln don’t want to go to Congress,” he instructed a Whig friend shortly after his marriage, “I wish you as a personal friend of mine, would tell him you have reason to believe he is mistaken. The truth is, I would like to go very much.”

  In the years since Lincoln’s first election to the state legislature, when aspirants simply stepped forth and nominated themselves, both Whigs and Democrats had developed a convention system to nominate candidates for public office. That the Whigs enjoyed a strong majority in the 7th Congressional District, which included Sangamon County, boded well for Lincoln. If he gained the nomination, victory was certain. To buffer potential dissension among potential rivals, however, the Whigs in the 7th District had recently adopted the principle of rotation: each nominee agreed to serve a single term and then give way to the next. Thus John Hardin, the son of a U.S. senator, would be nominated in 1842; Edward Baker, a member of the State Senate, in 1844; then, lastly, Abraham Lincoln in 1846. The rotating system promised each candidate united support when his turn came, but such brief congressional tenure hardly offered time for even the most striking among them to make a lasting impression. Given this single-term system, the Congress of the 1840s seemed an unlikely place to further the fierce aspirations of a man like Abraham Lincoln, thought by one friend to be “as ambitious of earthly honors as any man of his time” and by another as “the most ambitious man in the world.”

  Hardly two weeks after Lincoln’s arrival in Washington, the freshman congressman introduced an eye-catching resolution on the House floor that called into question the legitimacy of the recently completed Mexican-American War. He charged that President James K. Polk had deliberately provoked Mexico into war, “trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory.” He proceeded to contrast the president’s war message to “the half insane mumbling of a fever dream,” revealing a guilty mind “running hither and thither, like some tortured creature on a burning surface.” This was a far cry from the careful, step-by-step analysis that would later characterize Lincoln’s public reasoning. His impatient need for widespread recognition had managed only to inflame Democrats, vex Whigs, and lose support in Illinois, where patriotic zeal over the victorious war ran high.

  The 1848 presidential race provided Lincoln with an opportunity to distinguish himself among his colleagues in a more effective manner, one based upon his unique charisma and storytelling gifts. Speaking on the House floor on behalf of the Whigs’ candidate, war hero General Zachary Taylor, Lincoln won high praise from fellow Whigs and reporters alike for a thoughtful, yet humorous speech. He impressed them, one reporter noted, as “a very able, acute, uncouth, honest, upright young man.” The Baltimore American rated the highly original performance “the crack speech of the day,” observing that “Lincoln’s manner was so good-natured and his style so peculiar that he kept the House in a continuous roar of merriment.” As he spoke, he roamed up and down the aisle, continually “talking, gesticulating,” in a fashion so electrifying and entertaining that Hannibal Hamlin (who would later serve as Lincoln’s vice president) inquired as to the identity of the young man. “Abe Lincoln,” the colleague marveled, “the best story teller in the House.” Whig Party chieftains were so taken by his speech that they invited Lincoln to stump for Taylor that fall in New England.

  Years later Lincoln vividly recalled that first visit to Massachusetts. “I had been chosen to Congress then from the Wild West and with hayseed in my hair, I went to Massachusetts, the most cultured state in the union, to take a few lessons in deportment.” Self-mockery aside, he required no instruction to connect with eastern audiences, who found his droll storytelling style novel, diverting, and unique. His speeches in a dozen different cities, reporters noted, were “replete with good sense, sound reasoning, and irresistible argument, and spoken with the perfect command of manner and matter which so eminently distinguishes the western orators.”

  Far more important than the popularity he excited from the partisan Whig audience was the greater consciousness, sensitivity, and emotional understanding Lincoln gained concerning the issue of slavery. The vast new territories acquired from Mexico had reignited the slavery issue. While slavery was protected by the Constitution in the states where it already existed, that protection did not apply to the newly acquired territories. Before the war ended, Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot had affixed an amendment to a war appropriations bill, which stipulated that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory.” While this Wilmot Proviso passed the House over and over again, it was repeatedly blocked in the southern-dominated Senate. Though Lincoln later claimed he had voted for the Wilmot Proviso “at least forty times,” he had not spoken a single word about slavery on the House floor.

  During his swing through Massachusetts, unlike in Illinois, the oxygen was sucked from every room he entered by passionate discussions about slavery. This experience would quicken Lincoln’s evolving views on the issue that would rend the country in the decade ahead. At Tremont Temple in Boston, he heard a passionate keynote speech by William Henry Seward, the former governor and future senator from New York. Seward argued that “the time had come for sharp definition of opinion and boldness of utterance.” Lincoln and Seward shared a bedroom the following night and stayed up long past midnight engrossed in a discussion about slavery. “I reckon you are right,” Lincoln told Seward in the early morning hours. “We have got to deal with this slavery question, and got to give much more attention to it hereafter than we have been doing.”

  After Taylor won the election in November 1848, Lincoln returned to Congress for the final three-month rump session, resolved to make his voice heard on the slavery issue. Working for weeks, he crafted what he considered an equitable, almost mathematically balanced proposal. He began by conceding that the Constitution protected slavery in the states where it already existed, but proceeded to argue that Congress had the right, under its authority to control affairs in the nation’s capital, to address slavery within the District of Columbia. Accordingly, on the one hand he called for the gradual emancipation of slaves within the District; on the other, he insisted that the government compensate slaveholders for the full value of their slaves. Furthermore, he argued that local authorities be equipped to arrest and deliver up fugitive slaves from the South who were attempting to find sanctuary in the District and that the people of the District should have a chance to vote on his proposal. However logically balanced his formulaic proposal, it failed to fathom the irreconcilability of sentiments in the North and the South. The abolitionist Wendell Phillips chastised Lincoln as “that slave hound from Illinois,” while proslavery forces refused to contemplate any form of emancipation that opened the door to abolishing slavery in the country at large. Without sufficient endorsement from either side, Lincoln withdrew his carefully measured compromise.

  Historians generally consider Lincoln’s single term in Congress a failure, an assessment with which Lincoln himself would likely concur. He had served the Whig cause with strident fidelity, but the scope of his ambition was higher than party and wider than
geographic section.

  Upon returning to Illinois, he had expected that his vigorous advocacy on Taylor’s behalf would gain him an important presidential appointment. He had focused his fondest hopes upon securing the position of commissioner of the Land Office, a powerful sub-cabinet post that would oversee all federal lands in the western states, allowing him the opportunity to redress the pledge he had made when he first ran for office—to do all that he could to promote economic development in the poorest communities by providing government aid for roads, railways, and navigable rivers. He reckoned his failure to deliver on that promise not merely a political failure but a moral one. The commissionership would provide a rare opportunity for reparation; but in the end, the post was given to another Whig politician who had prudently kept silent on the probity of the war’s origin, when Lincoln had scathingly impugned the president for a popular war already waged and won.

  Upon learning that he had been bypassed for the position he coveted, Lincoln “despaired of ever rising in the world,” Herndon recollected. Lincoln voiced a sentiment that would become a refrain in his troubled passage to middle age: “How hard—Oh how hard it is to die and leave one’s country no better than if one had never lived.” Years later, after he had become president, the emotions of this moment remained so intense, Lincoln remembered, that “I hardly ever felt so bad about any failure in my life.”