* * *
The half-decade that followed Lincoln’s brief and unhappy tenure in Congress is often depicted as a period of withdrawal from public life. He himself claimed that he “was losing interest in politics.” Although one might suspect his claim, it is undeniable that he “practiced law more assiduously than ever before.” Furthermore, this waiting period was anything but a passive time; it was, on the contrary, an intense period of personal, intellectual, moral, and professional growth, for during these years he learned to position himself as a lawyer and a leader able to cope with the tremors that were beginning to rack the country.
What fired in Lincoln this furious and fertile time of self-improvement? The answer lay in his readiness to gaze in the mirror and soberly scrutinize himself. Taking stock, he found himself wanting. From the beginning, young Lincoln aspired to nothing less than to inscribe his name into the book of communal memory. To fulfill what he believed to be his destiny, a different kind of sustained effort and discipline was required, a willingness to confront weakness and imperfection, reflect upon failure, and examine the kind of leader he wanted to be.
The diligence and studiousness he exhibited during this period of introspection would have been remarkable in a young student; in a man of forty, it was astounding. Lincoln’s avid self-improvement commenced with a fresh reexamination of and rededication to his chosen profession. Upon resuming his legal practice after returning to Illinois, he noted with matter-of-fact candor: “I am not an accomplished lawyer.” Lincoln had already practiced law for twelve years and was earning sufficient money to support his family. But after a long hiatus politicking, he felt that his legal prowess had atrophied while the profession had grown more complex and sophisticated in his absence, requiring greater powers of reasoning and “a broad knowledge of the principles” beneath the statutory law. No sooner had Lincoln returned to his law practice than William Herndon observed a decided change in his partner’s demeanor. Acknowledging “a certain lack of discipline—a want of mental training and method”—Lincoln began to apply himself mightily and, in Herndon’s experience, “no man had greater power of application. Once fixing his mind on any subject, nothing could interfere with or disturb him.”
In Lincoln’s day, the judges, lawyers, witnesses, and bailiffs traveled together on “the circuit” eight weeks every spring and fall. Covering some 150 miles, the traveling bar, like a theater troupe, moved from one county seat to another, holding court and trying cases in dozens of sparsely settled villages and towns. Villagers came from miles around to witness the courtroom drama as hundreds of cases were tried, ranging from murder, assault, and robbery, to disputed wills, collection of debts, and patent challenges. With the arrival of the circuit, the county seats bustled with excitement and anticipation, much like a fair coming to town. The itinerant troupe would settle in the overcrowded local tavern for the night, always forced to share rooms and often beds.
Lincoln relished this convivial setting; but more importantly, it was on the circuit that he managed to create the time and space needed to conduct his intensive course of study—a curriculum that extended well beyond the practical parameters of the law. He studied philosophy, astronomy, science, political economy, history, literature, poetry, and drama. He struggled to work out mathematical theorems and proofs. From his earliest years, when unable to understand what someone had said, he would turn the phrases over in his mind, battering his brow against them until he could capture their meaning. So now, with mathematics, he persisted “almost to the point of exhaustion,” until he could proudly claim that he had “nearly mastered the Six Books of Euclid.”
Lincoln “would read and study for hours,” Herndon recalled, long after everyone else had gone to sleep, “placing a candle on a chair at the head of his bed,” often remaining in this position until 2 a.m. “How he could maintain his mental equilibrium or concentrate his thoughts on an abstract mathematical proposition” while the snores of his roommates rumbled the air was a puzzle, marveled Herndon, “none of us could ever solve.” Not only did Lincoln stay up later than colleagues, but “he was in the habit of rising earlier.” One circuit rider recalled how Lincoln would “sit by the fire, having uncovered the coals, and muse and ponder, and soliloquize.” A stranger entering the room and hearing Lincoln “muttering to himself,” might have imagined “he had suddenly gone insane.” But these fellow circuit riders knew Lincoln, so they only “listened and laughed.” What might have seemed to an outsider a picture of leaden dejection was rather Lincoln’s peculiar manner of figuring things out—a form of mental wrestling. Then, once the breakfast bell rang, Lincoln hurriedly dressed, joined his cohorts at breakfast, and readied himself for the cases he would try over the course of the day. So successful did Lincoln become in defending his clients and speaking before juries, that he soon developed “the largest trial practice of all his peers in central Illinois.”
The key to Lincoln’s success was his uncanny ability to break down the most complex case or issue “into its simplest elements.” He never lost a jury by fumbling with or reading from a prepared argument, relying instead “on his well-trained memory.” He aimed for intimate conversations with the jurors, as if conversing with friends. Though his arguments were “logical and profound,” they were “easy to follow,” fellow lawyer Henry Clay Whitney observed. “His language was composed of plain Anglo-Saxon words and almost always absolutely without adornment.” An Illinois judge captured the essence of Lincoln’s appeal: “He had the happy and unusual faculty of making the jury believe they—and not he—were trying the case.”
When the courtroom closed, the lawyers, who had fought one another during the day, would come together as friends in the tavern at night, eating supper at the same long table with Judge David Davis presiding. Once the meal was done, everyone would gather before a blazing fire to drink, smoke tobacco, and engage in conversation. Neither a smoker nor a drinker, Lincoln nevertheless commanded respect and attention with his never-ending stream of stories, whether the crowd was ten, fifty, or several hundred. “His power of mimicry,” Herndon noted, “and his manner of recital, were in many respects unique, if not remarkable. His countenance and all his features seemed to take part in the performance. As he neared the pith or point of the joke or story every vestige of seriousness disappeared from his face. His little gray eyes sparkled,” and when he reached the point, “no one’s laugh was heartier than his.” There are myriad accounts of Lincoln’s stories and tales, but the common denominator is that long after the laughter ended, they provoked thought and discussion. Small wonder that Lincoln drew crowds from the countryside eager to be regaled and entertained by a master storyteller.
Despite his blossoming reputation, incessant striving, and self-imposed scholastic regime, Lincoln treated everyone, high or low, without a trace of affectation, with the same tenderhearted patience, the same generous and helpful kindliness and empathy that had drawn the protective affection of the settlers of New Salem to him when the twenty-three-year-old first appeared on the banks of the Sangamon River. “No lawyer on the circuit was more unassuming than was Mr. Lincoln,” a fellow lawyer recalled. “He arrogated to himself no superiority over anyone—not even the most obscure member of the bar.” The seating arrangements at the tavern table reflected the hierarchy of the court. Judge Davis would preside, surrounded by the lawyers at the head of the table. On one occasion when Lincoln had settled himself at the foot among the common clientele the landlord told him: “You’re in the wrong place, Mr. Lincoln, come up here.” Lincoln queried: “Have you anything better to eat up there, Joe? If not, I’ll stay here.”
As Lincoln became a leader in his profession, he assumed responsibility for mentoring the next generation. “He was remarkably gentle with young lawyers,” his colleagues noted. Henry Whitney was deeply affected by how “kindly and cordially” Lincoln treated him when he first arrived at the bar. If a new clerk appeared in court, “Lincoln was the first—sometimes the only one—to shake
hands with him and congratulate him on his election.”
The art of communication, Lincoln advised newcomers to the bar, “is the lawyer’s avenue to the public.” Yet, Lincoln warned, the lawyer must not rely on rhetorical glibness or persuasiveness alone. What is well-spoken must be yoked to what is well-thought. And such thought is the product of great labor, “the drudgery of the law.” Without that labor, without that drudgery, the most eloquent words lack gravity and power. Even “extemporaneous speaking should be practiced and cultivated.” Indeed, “the leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence. Leave nothing for tomorrow that can be done to-day.” The key to success, he insisted, is “work, work, work.”
* * *
Lincoln’s mind was his “workshop,” a fellow lawyer recalled. “He needed no office, no pen, ink and paper; he could perform his chief labor by self-introspection.” During this waiting period, he was not simply enlarging his grasp of law and his growing practice, nor was he generally educating himself to fulfill the constitutional need and intellectual curiosity of his nature. For although he eschewed politics and professed no great interest in returning to the national fray, his pursuit of knowledge was anything but random. It was directed toward understanding the role and the purpose of leadership.
Two eulogies delivered during this time of introspection, the first for Zachary Taylor, the second for Henry Clay, cast light into that workshop, revealing Lincoln’s evolving thoughts on leadership. The first eulogy argued that while Zachary Taylor’s military leadership was not distinguished by “brilliant military manoeuvers,” he succeeded “by the exercise of a sober and steady judgment, coupled with a dogged incapacity to understand that defeat was possible. His rarest military trait was a combination of negatives—absence of excitement and absence of fear. He could not be flurried, and he could not be scared.”
The 1852 eulogy for Clay struck a far more personal note, for the Kentucky statesman had been a major figure and mentor in Lincoln’s life. Early on, the young Lincoln had identified with the image of the self-risen, self-educated lawyer and politician who had been elected speaker of the house in his early thirties, served multiple terms in the Senate, and been nominated for president three times by the Whigs. For Lincoln, that Henry Clay had dined on numerous occasions with Mary’s family in Lexington lent a luminous quality to the Todd household.
In his lengthy address, Lincoln identified three leadership attributes in Clay that accounted for the “enduring spell” he had cast on the American people. To start, Clay possessed an unsurpassed eloquence, which proceeded not from an “elegant arrangement of words and sentences” but “from great sincerity” and “thorough conviction.” Eloquence without judgment, however, counts for nothing, and without the will to sustain both, leadership would fail. What made Clay, in Lincoln’s mind, “the man for a crisis,” was the fusing of these leadership qualities with crucible moments in the country at large. “In all the great questions which have agitated the country,” Lincoln pointed out, most particularly those surrounding the issue of slavery, Clay had been able, decade after decade, to quell rancor and bring opposing parties together in compromise. Time and again, he resisted “extremes of opinion” in both North and South. “Whatever he did, he did for the whole country.”
While the slavery issue had been a source of division between North and South from the beginning of the nation, every expansion of territory reignited the smoldering embers. When Missouri, part of the vast territory acquired by the Louisiana Purchase, “knocked at the door” for admission as a slave state, an angry struggle ensued between North and South. Constructed under Clay’s leadership, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 brought an end to the escalating tensions. It granted Missouri’s request for statehood, admitted Maine as a free state, and drew an imaginary line: territories north of that line would enter the Union as free states; those below would be slave states. For the following three decades, the Missouri Compromise kept that peace until Congress was called upon to decide the fate of the territories acquired by the Mexican War. Speaking for many southerners, Robert Toombs of Georgia warned: “If by your legislation you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico, purchased by the common blood and treasure of the whole people, I am for disunion.”
Once again, Lincoln said, the nation turned to Henry Clay and once again, the seventy-three-year-old senator forged a compromise that promised to keep the Union intact. The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state but brought Utah and New Mexico into the Union with no restrictions on slavery; it called for an end to the slave trade in the District of Columbia, but asked Congress to strengthen the old Fugitive Slave Law, empowering federal officials to draft citizens to hunt down escapees in free states. For his role in these two critical compromises, Lincoln regarded Clay, as did a grateful nation, as “The Great Pacificator.”
While the 1850 Compromise seemed to end the crisis, the new, more strenuous provisions in the Fugitive Slave Law sparked the fury of antislavery activists in the North. Violent disturbances broke out when slaveholders tried to recapture runaway slaves who had settled in Boston and New York. While Lincoln, too, was dismayed about the provision bolstering the Fugitive Slave Law, his unhappiness was superseded by the fact a solution had been reached. “Devotion to the Union,” he maintained, “rightfully inclined men to yield somewhat, in points where nothing could have so inclined them.” William Herndon, who now considered himself an abolitionist, was frustrated by Lincoln’s “apparent conservatism when the needs of the hour were so great.” The issue of slavery began to dominate discussion on the circuit, as the lawyers argued over the various journals they were reading—the antislavery papers in the North and the proslavery papers in the South. The center was being drained while both extremes were hunkering down with rampant animosity. “The time is coming,” a fellow lawyer told Lincoln, “when we shall have to be all either Abolitionists or Democrats.” The 1850 Compromise lasted only four years.
* * *
Lincoln was on the circuit when he heard the news that Congress, after prolonged debate, had passed the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act. Designed by Stephen Douglas of Illinois, the popular leader of the Democratic Party (presently in his second term in the Senate and a presumptive contender for president), the bill would allow settlers in the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska, both of which stood above the dividing line created by the 1820 Missouri Compromise, to decide for themselves whether they wanted to enter the Union as slave or free states.
“Popular sovereignty”—the simplistic evasion at the heart of the bill—would release slavery from its southern cage and allow it to aggressively spread. In one stroke, the three-decades-old Missouri Compromise had been obliterated. No longer was slavery on the path to ultimate extinction, as Lincoln had hoped and believed. Lincoln grasped at once the meaning, ramification, and gravity of the new law. The situation of the slave was now “fixed, and hopeless of change for the better.” Before speaking out, Lincoln withdrew to the State Library, where he investigated the slavery issue and the debates at the time the Constitution was framed, searching and researching logically and methodically until, as Herndon once remarked, he knew his subject “inside and outside, upside and downside.” As a boy, when Lincoln was on “such a hunt for an idea,” he could not sleep until he had “caught it.” He was on a hunt now, and would not sleep until he caught what he was after—a way of hammering the issue of slavery into the story of our country and the impasse of the present moment.
Fragmented notes penned during this period reveal Lincoln’s attempt to boil down the slavery argument into its elemental components. “If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B,” Lincoln began, “why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A? You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, w
ith a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly? You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.” To Lincoln, this fragment was more than an exercise in logic. By extension, A. and B. were dramatic personifications of antagonistic points of view. Each exercise of logic was a small drama of contention and persuasion, a kernel of full-blown argument and debate as yet enacted only in Lincoln’s mind.
It would not be long before Lincoln’s scattered thoughts would dramatically unfold as full-blown arguments and debate with his old rival, Stephen Douglas. Lincoln and Douglas had met nearly two decades earlier during nightly sessions around the fire in Joshua Speed’s general store. “We were both young then,” Lincoln later wrote. “Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much so as he. With me the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation.”
In the fall of 1854, Douglas returned to Illinois to defend the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which had fomented mass protest meetings throughout the North. Appalled by the hostility he encountered, even in his own Illinois, Douglas chose a series of public forums where he might champion the inviolable principle of self-government. After a preliminary skirmish with Lincoln at the Springfield State Fair, the two men engaged in a highly publicized joust in Peoria. While Douglas rode into the second largest city in Illinois “at the head of a triumphal procession, seated in a carriage drawn by four beautiful white palfreys and preceded by a band of music,” Lincoln arrived without fanfare sometime after midnight. By early afternoon, an enormous crowd, seated in chairs, standing, or sprawled on the grass, had spilled over the public square; hundreds of farmers had traveled long distances to hear the two men speak. Speaking from the courthouse balcony, the “Little Giant,” as the short, stocky Douglas was called, stripped off his jacket and, like a spirited pugilist, inflamed the crowd with a speech that ran three hours long.
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