by DL Fowler
When a bill is put before us to allow the Bank to suspend redeeming bank notes until the end of the next session, I glance into the gallery and my eyes meet those of an old foe. Usher Linder, the decidedly superior whom I skinned in my big speech last session, is our new State Attorney General and no longer a member of the legislature. Nonetheless, he’s in the hall for the debate. Douglas is seated next to him, his arms folded across his chest in the imperial fashion.
On the House floor, Ewing rises on behalf of the Democrats to argue that the Bank is at the heart of our state’s economic crisis. After an aristocratic pause, he adds that the meager confidence the Bank commissioners may have once enjoyed has been squandered by their corruption and inability to redeem its notes with gold and silver.
When he finishes, I take the floor. “Mr. Chairman, in our previous session, one decidedly superior gentleman from Coles County made similar arguments.” I gesture toward the gallery where Linder is seated. “These arguments were rebutted at that time and facts have not changed in the intervening months.”
I glance back at Linder and Douglas who are engaged in agitated, though hushed, conversation. Then I turn back to face the members and continue, “I will repeat what I have said before, that there has been no corruption shown on the part of the Bank’s commissioners. Were they guilty of such, the offended parties would have come forward to make their claims—but no one has done so, except the politicians who only desire to stir the pot for their own selfish gain.”
The other Whigs applaud and shout their agreement, encouraging me to continue. “On the matter of our economy’s sad state, let it be understood that the fault lies squarely with those who support Jackson and Van Buren.”
The Democrats hiss. Their disapproval spurs me on. “Jackson killed the United States Bank, stripping the economy of paper currency which is essential to the rapid growth and maintenance of frontier commerce. Mr. Van Buren has maintained the venerated general’s disastrous course.”
Ewing jumps to his feet and accuses the Sangamon County legislators of chicanery, selling our votes on internal improvements to gain support for Springfield’s selection as the state’s permanent capital. Pointing to me he says, “Lincoln, here, is chief among the miscreants. He is a statesman of no account.”
I gesture toward Ewing and grin. “It’s an honor to be promoted from small game to statesman by the successor to decided superiority, himself.” Before he can respond, I turn to the chairman and ask for a vote on the question before the House. He grants my motion, and the members pass a resolution to allow the Bank to suspend redeeming paper money with gold and silver until the end of the next session.
Several weeks later, I sit with Speed on our bed and hand him Mary Owens’ letter. On reading it, he slaps my knee, “So she’s declined your marriage overture.”
I cross my arms over my chest. “It seems so.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have pressed the matter.”
“I had to. I told her sister that I would take her for better or for worse. It was a point of honor and conscience, and I’m fairly convinced that no other man on earth would have her.”
He grins. “She should have been deeply indebted to you for asking.”
“She and her sister … well, at least her sister was bent on holding me to my end of the bargain. So I thought, I have said it, therefore I will not fail to do it, unless of course, she backs out.”
He folds the letter and hands it back. “Fine, you did the right thing in pressing the matter.”
“She had already replied ‘no’ the first time I wrote.”
He furrows his brow. “Wait. She turned you down more than once?”
“I’m ashamed to say, yes. At first, I thought she declined out of modesty, but when she rejected me again, with more resolve, I was mortified and too stupid to discern her intentions. I tried again and again, but with the same want of success.”
He laughs. “Isn’t that what you wanted—to have her turn you down?”
I hang my head. “Yes, but after convincing myself nobody else would have her, and then having her throw me over, I realized I was a little bit in love with her.”
He lies down and rolls to his side with his back to me. “Lincoln,” he mutters. “You are the most hopeless case I’ve ever known.”
One evening in late October, several of us have gathered around the stove in Speed’s store to gab. Just as Stephen Douglas coaxes the last drop of whiskey from the cask behind the counter, Ned Baker shows up. A moment later, Speed comes out of the back room carrying a tub of corn and sets it on a shelf.
Speed studies Baker. “Sounds like there was quite a fracas at First Presbyterian this afternoon. Heard you were in the middle of it, Ned.”
Baker grabs a couple sticks of wood to stoke the fire. “It all started on the square just past noon. Word had spread that one of the preachers at the Synod meeting was to give a speech denouncing slavery.”
I lean back in my chair. “Heard about it, but I’m not one for church meetings.”
“Well,” Baker continues, “someone rang a bell, and a mob gathered in the square, intent on putting a stop to the meeting. Suppose if it had been the local pastor, the crowd wouldn’t have been so agitated.”
Speed asks, “Who was the speaker?”
Baker says, “Jeremiah Porter from up in Peoria. Was from Chicago before that. The boys weren’t pleased about an outsider coming to town to stir up trouble. So, some of them went over to the church to work him over.”
Douglas takes a sip of whiskey. “Why does religion come up every time anyone mentions the word slavery?”
My back twitches. I grit my teeth. “Because it’s evil.”
Douglas dismisses me with a wave of his hand. “Slavery’s neither good nor bad. It just is.”
I fold my arms across my chest. “When did you ever pretend to know the difference between good and evil?”
Douglas shrugs. “Anyway, thought about joining them, but I was otherwise occupied.”
I snicker. “What? Your lips won’t let go of the bottle?”
We all laugh, except Douglas. He knocks back a gulp of whiskey and says, “What’s next for you, Lincoln. You going to be joining the Temperance movement?”
I shake my head. “I don’t go for vilifying men over their whiskey any more than I favor the bondage it puts them in.”
Douglas laughs. “You jealous my lips have more to keep themselves occupied than a bunch of words?”
“Ooh,” Speed teases.
“Settle down,” Baker warns. “We’ve had enough excitement for one day. Don’t want another brawl.”
I bite my tongue while Douglas taps a fresh cask and draws another mug full.
Speed gestures to Baker. “Go on.”
“Well, I stepped into the middle of the fellows and told them they should go hear what the preacher had to say before they assailed him.”
“Did they?” I ask.
“They did.”
“Mighty bold for a fancy fellow like you,” I say. “Though, it would have been a better show if little Douglas over here had taken on a mob like that. Except, he’d have been one of them wanting to ride the abolitionist out of town on a rail. Maybe I should have been there.”
Douglas wags his finger at me.
Baker shakes his head. “Would have paid admission to see that.”
Speed gestures to Baker. “And?”
Baker continues. “The mob sent a delegation to the church to hear Porter out. When one of the delegates read the animosity on their faces, he stood and tried to temper Porter’s denunciation. Another minister interrupted him and attacked slavery with fire equal to Porter’s. He pointed to the fellows seated in the back and said, ‘These men have dared come into the House of God to intimidate a Christian minister speaking the truth.’”
I ask, “What happened next?”
“The men slinked out,” says Baker with a grin.
Two
weeks later in early November, Baker bursts into my office. “Elijah Lovejoy was attacked by an anti-abolitionist mob in Alton.”
I look up, unable to form any of the words that are swirling in my head. Lovejoy was an abolitionist editor who recently started up a newspaper in Alton. Before that he’d run an anti-slavery paper in St. Louis and was chased out of town by mobs that ransacked his offices three times.
He goes on. “After the mob destroyed his printing presses, there was an exchange of gunfire, and Lovejoy was killed.”
Finally my words spill out. “Why would they do such a thing?”
When no one answers, I say, “Radicalism only invites trouble. Just the same, these lawless mobs must be stopped.”
Baker pounds his hand on my desk. “Are you saying Lovejoy deserved what he got?”
“No one deserves that,” I say, “but he’s partly responsible for what happened.”
“Do you hear what you’re saying?”
“I’m saying that each side is pushing the other to become more radical with every passing day. Slavery will die out in time if we don’t let it spread any farther and we just leave it alone where it’s protected under the Constitution.”
Baker’s face reddens, and his veins bulge under his collar. “Wait. You’ve said yourself that slavery is a great evil. Evil ought to be stamped out.”
I lean back. “It may be evil, but it’s still the law.”
For weeks, a war wages in my head between anger at the mob for its lawlessness and despair over the treachery radicalism invites on itself. Not until late January of the following year do I find the words to express what’s in my heart. I make a speech entitled The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions at the Young Men’s Lyceum meeting held in Springfield’s Baptist Church.
There is even now, something of an ill-omen amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country. The growing disposition to substitute wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts, and worse supplanting the executive ministers of justice with the rule of savage mobs…
The question recurs, ‘how shall we fortify against it?’ The answer is simple. Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity swear by the blood of the Revolution never to violate in the least particular the laws of the country, and never tolerate their violation by others…
Let every American mother breathe reverence for the laws to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap….
A few weeks later, as several of us are huddled around the fire at Speed’s general store, Douglas chides me about my speech. He says the law should always bend with the times.
Billy Herndon, who’s recently begun clerking for Speed, casts him a sideways glance from behind the counter. Billy, a young college man, with his mouth perpetually drawn in a puckering frown, is staunchly anti-slavery, though his father is the opposite. When Illinois College was swept up in the abolitionist sentiment after Elijah Lovejoy’s murder, Billy’s father forced him to return home.
Billy scolds Douglas. “The only way to rid the country of slavery is through bloody revolution.”
I lean back in my chair. “Well, Billy, we’ve seen where that gets us. Nothing will destroy this country faster than disregard for the law. It’s the law that keeps the world in order. Tear it down, and everything falls apart.”
Douglas guzzles a dram of whiskey and heaves a sigh. “The law is not a fixed thing. The system of Common Law, just like the people it ruled and protected, was simple and crude in its infancy. Then it grew, improved, and became polished as the nation advanced in civilization, virtue, and intelligence.”
Billy scowls. “Intelligence?”
Douglas shrugs. “It adapted to the condition and circumstances of the people. But as for Billy’s abolitionism, that is not a refinement. It proposes to destroy the law and extinguish the principle of self-government for which our forefathers fought, and upon which our whole system of free government is founded.”
Billy’s eyes grow wider. “Slavery is an abomination. It goes against everything our forefathers fought for, and Lovejoy’s murder makes me all the more determined to see its evil wiped off the face of the earth.”
“Fellows,” I say, grabbing a log for the fire, “Let’s move on. These claims that our Founders were in one accord either for or against slavery only serve to whip folks into frenzy. They’re contrivances manufactured by self-serving politicians.”
Billy turns his back to us and begins rearranging merchandise on the shelf.
Douglas smirks, the same expression Father wore each time he abused me over my excess of ‘eddication.’
Speed comes out of the storage room in back of the store carrying a sack of cornmeal.
I ask, “So, Speed, are you getting any these days?”
He laughs. “I’m getting enough these days that I’m willing to share my leftovers. Why just the other night, Douglas was pawing a pretty little brunette I’d recently thrown over.”
Douglas leaps off his stool and shakes his fists at Speed, as if challenging him to fight.
“Settle down, boys,” I say, picking up a book of Byron’s verse to read aloud.
Conqueror and captive of the earth art thou!
She trembles at thee still, and thy wild name
Was ne'er more bruited in men's minds than now
That thou art nothing, save the jest of Fame,
Who wooed thee once, thy vassal, and became
The flatterer of thy fierceness, till thou wert
A god unto thyself; nor less the same
To the astounded kingdoms all inert,
Who deem'd thee for a time whate'er thou didst assert.
Chapter Nineteen
In March of the following year, Ned Baker rushes into my office with news that Henry Truett, a small, passive man, shot Dr. Jacob Early the previous night at the Spottswood’s Hotel. Truett went there to confront Dr. Early, a fellow Democrat much larger and more temperamental than himself, over a political matter. Truett had lost his post as Register of the Land Office at Galena, and friends told him Dr. Early was the cause.
Baker’s partner Judge Stephen Logan, the stern-faced dean of Sangamon County’s Bar, will lead the defense while Stephen Douglas takes charge of the prosecution. Logan wants me to assist in the defense.
When the case comes to trial in October 1838, Douglas’ mood is as foul as I’ve ever seen. He’s still fuming over losing to my law partner John Stuart in the August Congressional election. The two of them debated six days a week for three months—except for the month of May when Stuart was too ill to campaign, and I stood in for him. Douglas and I haven’t exchanged cordial words since.
On the witness stand, Truett testifies that he lingered by the fireplace in the hotel bar while Dr. Early sat nearby in a chair, reading quietly. After everyone else went home he verbally accosted Early, demanding to know whether the doctor was the cause of his misfortune. He claims Early replied, he was. Then Early demanded the name of his informant.”
Truett refused to identify his source, after which Early called him a “damned liar.” The ensuing argument grew heated, and Truett says he drew a pistol; though, he did so in response to Early picking up a chair and wielding it in a threatening manner.
Under cross-examination, Douglas presses Truett to admit he’d drawn his weapon before Early raised the chair. Truett remains resolute, just as we counseled him. He insists he retreated—fearful that Early might crush his skull with the chair—then he fired a single shot without aiming in hopes of disarming his attacker.
Douglas’ three witnesses claim, with varying degrees of certainty, that Truett drew his weapon before Dr. Early lifted the chair as a shield. Logan and Baker question one witness each before I cross-examine the third, a handsome, bearded young man who was cock-sure of his answers.
“What was your name, again?”
He answers in a strong voice. “James Reed.�
�
I smile. “Well Jimmy, I have a dear friend up near Petersburg named Jimmy.”
He grins.
“It’s a very good name, and a good name is something you want to protect. Take Mr. Alexander Trent over there in the jury, for example.” I glance over at Trent; he squirms in his seat and looks away. “When I was a young man, I sold a general store to Mr. Trent and his brother Billy.”
I turn back to the witness. “You see, the two of them skipped town after a month, making off with all the inventory, and they never did pay me. Reckon there are still some folks out New Salem way who don’t think highly of the Trent name.”
Folks in the courtroom murmur.
I point to my client. “Jimmy, you don’t mind if I call you Jimmy, do you?” I don’t pause for his answer. “Do you know my client here, Mr. Truett?”
He looks at my client. “I know of him, but don’t have a personal acquaintance.”
I stroke my chin. “Very well. Did you know the deceased, Dr. Early?”
He raises his chin. “We were acquainted.”
“Did you know him to be a good man?”
Jimmy leans forward, studying the jury. “What I knew of him was good.”
“Reckon that would be so.” I pull back my shoulders. “I knew him quite well for many years. Served under his command in the Black Hawk War and have, of late, been connected with him in politics. Even though he was a bit hot-tempered as well as a Democrat, and me a Whig, I liked the man. Now, with his untimely demise, I watch after the welfare of his children. I’m what’s called their guardian ad litem.”
Jimmy slumps back in the witness chair and says in a quiet voice, “Suppose he’ll be missed.”
“Yes….” I turn and survey the jurymen then look back at the witness. “So, tell me Jimmy, you have pretty good eyesight?”
