Lincoln: A Photobiography

by Russell Freedman

  Lincoln's career flourished. After working as a junior partner with John Todd Stuart and later with Stephen T. Logan, he opened

  Marriage license of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd, dated November 4, 1842. They were married that evening.

  Above: Purchased for fifteen hundred dollars, this house at Eighth and fackson streets in Springfield was the only home that Lincoln ever owned. In this 1860 photograph, Lincoln and his son Willie are standing on the terrace, just inside the picket fence. Below: The sitting room in Lincoln's home, as sketched for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in 1860.

  his own law office. He invited talkative young William Herndon to join him as junior partner. Soon he was able to pay off the last of his New Salem debts. Meanwhile, he had his eye on a seat in Congress. In 1846, Lincoln won his party's nomination, and after a spirited campaign, he was elected by a large majority to the U.S. House of Representatives.

  The following year he was off to Washington with Mary, four-year-old Robert, and the baby Eddie. They moved into a boardinghouse on Capitol Hill that catered to Whig politicians. But Mary found that she was bored and unhappy in Washington. After three months, she packed up and left with the boys to spend the rest of Lincoln's term with her family in Kentucky. "I hate to stay in this old room by myself," Lincoln wrote to her. "What did [Robert] and Eddie think of the little letters Father sent them? Don't let the blessed fellows forget father."

  The major issues during Lincoln's term in Congress were the spread of slavery beyond the South, and the war between the United States and Mexico, which had broken out in 1846. By the time Lincoln took his seat in Congress, American troops had occupied Mexico City The Mexican government was about to sign a peace treaty giving up more than two-fifths of its territory—including the present states of California, Nevada, and Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado.

  Many Whigs had opposed the Mexican War. They accused President fames Polk's Democratic administration of starting the conflict on purpose, in order to seize Mexican territory. Some Whigs charged that the war was a plot by Southern Democrats to grab vast new areas for the expansion of slavery.

  Lincoln had criticized the war from the beginning. Soon after taking his seat in Congress, he introduced a series of resolutions attacking the Democrats' war policy, calling the war "immoral and unnecessary." Back home in Illinois, his antiwar stand did not go down well. Democratic newspapers ridiculed his "silly and imbecile" position, accusing him of a "treasonable assault" on the president. Illinois had wholeheartedly supported the war, and Lincoln's outspoken opposition almost wrecked his political career.

  On the issue of slavery, his record was mixed. He supported a bill to prohibit slavery in any of the lands taken from Mexico. And he proposed a bill of his own to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, but when the measure drew fire from both Whigs and Democrats, he dropped it. Aside from that, Lincoln took no active part in the growing antislavery movement in Congress.

  His two-year term was a disappointment. When he returned home to Springfield, he was disappointed again. Lincoln had worked hard for the Whig party and its candidate Zachary Taylor, who was elected president in 1848. Afterward, he hoped to be rewarded with a government post as commissioner of the General Land Office. But the job went to someone else. With his political fortunes at a low ebb, Lincoln returned to full-time practice of the law.

  Then he faced a personal tragedy. His boy Eddie, not yet four, fell gravely ill. After lingering for two months, the child died on February 1, 1850. Mary collapsed in shock. Robert, who was then six, would remember his mother's uncontrolled sobbing, the dark circles under his father's eyes, the house draped in black. Mary shut herself in her room and stayed there for weeks. Lincoln buried himself in his work.

  Lincoln was now in his forties. He would usually walk the few blocks from his house to his law office in downtown Springfield, stopping along the way to greet friends and chat in his distinctive high-pitched voice. He walked with a slight stoop, head bent forward, stepping along firmly like a man following a plow.

  The office of Lincoln & Herndon occupied two cluttered and unswept rooms on the second floor of a brick building across from the state capitol. Neither man was much for neatness, and people said that orange seeds sprouted in dusty office corners. Lincoln's favorite filing place for letters and papers was the lining of his high silk hat. When he was finished with documents, he stashed them away in mysterious places. After his death, Herndon found a bundle of papers marked: "When you can't find it anywhere else, look here."

  When visitors called, Lincoln usually greeted them with one of his jokes or anecdotes. One morning a friend heard him tell the same story to three different callers, "and every time he laughed as heartily and enjoyed it as much as if it were a new story."

  From their disorderly office, littered with letters, documents, journals, and books, Lincoln and Herndon handled more than a hundred cases a year. Lincoln became one of the most sought-after attorneys in the state. He took on all sorts of cases, ranging from disputes over runaway pigs to murder. And he represented all kinds of clients, from powerful corporations to penniless widows.

  When he agreed to take on a client, he mastered every detail of the case before going to court. Once, during a lawsuit over patent rights, Lincoln wanted to show a jury the differences among various makes of mechanical reapers. Models of several reapers were brought into the courtroom. As he explained how each machine worked, he knelt down in order to point out the moving parts. Fascinated by his technical knowledge, the jurors left their seats, came over, and got down on their knees beside him.

  Lincoln was at his best when addressing a jury. His speeches were seasoned with wit and humor, and he could boil down the most complex issue to its simplest terms. Lincoln was shrewd, but he also had his superstitions. When selecting a jury, he would favor fat men (because they were jolly and easily swayed, he believed) and reject men with high foreheads (because they had already made up their minds).

  William H. Herndon, Lincoln's law partner from 1844 to 1865.

  In his most famous murder trial, Lincoln defended Duff Armstrong, the son of his old New Salem chum, Jack Armstrong. Duff and another man had been charged with attacking James Metzger during a drunken brawl. Metzger died three days later. The prosecution's star witness, Charles Allen, testified that he had seen Duff strike Metzger on the head with a slingshot. He had seen everything clearly, Allen testified, because a full moon was shining directly overhead.

  When Lincoln rose to cross-examine the witness, he hooked his thumbs under his suspender straps and asked Allen to repeat his story. Now, was Allen sure about the moon being overhead? Allen was sure. Lincoln nodded and stroked his chin. Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out a copy of the 1857 almanac, flipped through the pages, and read aloud to the jury. At the time of the brawl, the moon wasn't directly overhead. It was low in the sky, about an hour away from setting. The jury quickly found Duff Armstrong not guilty.

  Lincoln spent much of his time traveling through the Eighth Judicial Circuit, which sprawled across fourteen Illinois counties. Every spring, and again in the fall, the presiding judge left his Springfield headquarters to make a swing around the circuit, holding court for a few days in each county seat. Lincoln and other Springfield lawyers went along to try cases in remote prairie courthouses.

  For six months a year, Lincoln rode from town to town along empty trails in an old horse-drawn rig, his legal papers and a change of clothing in his carpetbag. Lodging was primitive. Lawyers slept two to a bed, with three or four beds to a room in crude country inns. Criminals and judges often ate at the same table. Sometimes, Lincoln had just a few minutes to confer with a client before going to trial.

  But he didn't mind the hardships. Life on the circuit offered a chance to meet all sorts of people, to sit by a roaring tavern fire in the evening, swapping stories and rehashing the day in court. And the long days of travel across the silent prairie gave him time
to be alone with his thoughts, away from family interruptions. Out on the circuit he seemed "as happy as he could be," said a friend, "and happy no other place."

  He was earning a substantial income now, but his rural habits stayed with him. Neighbors would remember Lincoln milking the family cow in the carriage shed before breakfast, grooming his horse in the backyard, chopping firewood by moonlight. On quiet family evenings he loved to sprawl on the parlor floor, reading his newspapers or roughhousing with Willie and Tad and their yellow dog, Fido.

  Lincoln at the age of forty-eight. "The picture ... is, I think, a very true one; though my wife, and many others, do not," Lincoln wrote. "My impression is that their objection arises from the disordered condition of the hair."

  Mary had a strong sense of propriety, and her husband's homespun manners riled her. She was annoyed when he answered the front door in his shirtsleeves, greeted guests in shabby carpet slippers, or littered the parlor with papers and books. When Mary lost her temper, the neighbors would hear her furious explosions of anger. Lincoln would simply walk out of the house, giving her time to calm down.

  She wasn't easy to live with, but neither was Lincoln. His untidiness followed him home from the office. He cared little for the social niceties that were so important to his wife. He was absent-minded, perpetually late for meals. He was away from home for weeks at a time, leaving Mary alone with a big house to run and children to care for. And he was moody, lapsing into long brooding silences. Like other couples, the Lincolns fought. But they always made up, and the love between them endured. If Mary scolded her husband for his failings, it was because she was so fiercely proud of his abilities.

  They adored their boys, denied them nothing, and seldom disciplined them. Lincoln liked to take Willie and Tad to the office when he worked on Sundays. Their wild behavior infuriated his partner. "The boys were absolutely unrestrained in their amusement," Herndon complained. "If they pulled down all the books from the shelves, bent the points of all the pens, overturned the spittoon, it never disturbed the serenity of their father's good nature. I have felt many and many a time that I wanted to wring the necks of those little brats and pitch them out of the windows."

  Mary Lincoln with her sons Willie (left) and Tad (right) in 1860.

  But as far as Lincoln was concerned, his boys could do no wrong. "Mr. Lincoln ... was very exceedingly indulgent to his children," Mary remarked. "He always said: 'It is my pleasure that my children are free, happy, and unrestrained by parental tyranny. Love is the chain whereby to bind a child to its parents.'"

  Wanted poster for a runaway slave.

  FOUR

  Half Slave and Half Free

  "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel."

  When Lincoln took his seat in Congress in 1847, Washington was a sprawling town of 34,000 people, including several thousand slaves. From the windows of the Capitol, Lincoln could see crowded slave pens where manacled blacks waited to be shipped south.

  Southern planters had built a cotton kingdom on the shoulders of enslaved blacks, and they meant to preserve their way of life. White Southerners claimed a "sacred" right to own Negroes as slaves. Slavery was a blessing for blacks and whites alike, they said, "a good—a positive good," according to Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.

  Slave uprisings and rebellions had resulted in tough measures to control blacks and silence white critics of slavery. Throughout the South, antislavery writings and societies were suppressed or banned.

  Slavery had never prospered in the North and had been outlawed there. Some Northerners wanted to abolish slavery everywhere in the land, but abolitionists were still a small and embattled minority. Most people in the North were willing to leave slavery alone, as long as it was confined to the South.

  While the North was free soil, it was hardly a paradise for blacks. Racial prejudice was a fact of everyday life. Most Yankee states had enacted strict "black laws." In Illinois, Lincoln's home state, blacks paid taxes but could not vote, hold political office, serve on juries, testify in court, or attend schools. They had a hard time finding jobs. Often they sold themselves as "indentures" for a period of twenty years—a form of voluntary slavery—just to eat and have a place to live.

  Even in northern Illinois, where antislavery feelings ran strong, whites feared that emancipation of the slaves would send thousands of jobless blacks swarming into the North. Abolitionists were considered dangerous fanatics in Illinois. Lincoln knew that to be branded an abolitionist in his home state would be political suicide.

  Early in his career, Lincoln made few public statements about slavery. But he did take a stand. As a twenty-eight-year-old state legislator, he recorded his belief that slavery was "founded on both injustice and bad policy." Ten years later, as a congressman, he voted with his party to stop the spread of slavery, and he introduced his bill to outlaw slavery in the nation's capital. But he did not become an antislavery crusader. For the most part, he sat silently in the background as Congress rang with angry debates over slavery's future.

  Lincoln always said that he hated slavery. He claimed he hated it as much as any abolitionist, but he feared that efforts to force abolition on the South would only lead to violence. He felt that Congress had no power to interfere with slavery in states where it already existed.

  Slave market in Atlanta. The slaves were held in pens until they were auctioned off.

  He wanted to see slavery done away with altogether, but that would take time, he believed. He hoped it could be legislated out of existence, with some sort of compensation given to the slaveholders in exchange for their property As long as Congress kept slavery from spreading, Lincoln felt certain that it would gradually die a "natural death."

  When his congressional term ended in 1849, Lincoln decided to withdraw from public life. For the next five years he concentrated on his law practice and stayed out of politics. As he traveled the Illinois circuit, arguing cases in country courthouses, slavery was becoming an explosive issue that threatened to tear the nation apart.

  Vast new territories were opening up in the West, bringing the North and South into conflict. Each section wanted to control the western territories. The South needed new lands for the large-scale cultivation of cotton and other crops with slave labor. The North demanded that the western territories be reserved for the free labor of independent farmers and workers. Meanwhile, as the territories reached statehood and gained votes in Congress, they would hold the balance of political power in Washington. The admission of each new state raised a crucial question: Would it enter the Union as a free state or a slave state?

  So far, Congress had managed to hold the country together through a series of uneasy compromises, such as the Missouri Compromise of 1820. These agreements permitted slavery in some western territories and barred it in others. But attitudes were hardening. Growing numbers of Northerners had come to regard slavery as a moral evil, an issue that could no longer be avoided. Southerners, meanwhile, were more determined than ever to protect their way of life.

  Five generations of a slave family on a South Carolina plantation.

  The issue came to a head in 1854, when Congress passed the bitterly debated Kansas-Nebraska Act. Under the Missouri Compromise, the region that included the territories of Kansas and Nebraska had been declared off-limits to slavery Under the new Act, however, the future of slavery in those territories would be determined by the people who settled there. They would decide for themselves whether to enter the Union as free states or slave states.

  The Kansas-Nebraska Act had been introduced by Lincoln's old political rival, Stephen Douglas, now a U.S. Senator from Illinois. Douglas's policy of "popular sovereignty" caused a storm of protest in the North. By opening new territories to slavery, his measure overturned the Missouri Compromise, which had held slavery in check. With the passage of Douglas's Act, Lincoln ended his long political silence. "I was losing interest in politics," he said, "when the re
peal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again."

  He was "thunderstruck and stunned," aroused as he had "never been before." Douglas and his followers had opened the gates for slavery to expand and grow and establish itself permanently. Now it would never die the "natural death" Lincoln had expected. He felt compelled to speak out. For the first time in five years he neglected his law practice. He traveled across Illinois, campaigning for antislavery Whig candidates and speaking in reply to Senator Douglas, who had returned home to defend his policies.

  Lincoln told his audiences that slavery was a "monstrous injustice." It was a "cancer" threatening to grow out of control "in a nation originally dedicated to the inalienable rights of man." And it was not only wrong, it threatened the rights of everyone. If slavery was permitted to spread, free white workers would be forced to compete for a living with enslaved blacks. In the end, slavery would undermine the very foundations of democracy. "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master," Lincoln declared. "This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is not democracy."

  Published as a book in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin became an international best seller that for hundreds of thousands of readers dramatized the horrors of slavery.