Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  Election to the State Legislature

  While surveying land in Sangamon County, Lincoln also surveyed his political prospects, which seemed encouraging. As a veteran of the Black Hawk War, merchant, humorist, surveyor, handyman, teller of colorful stories, and an honest, helpful friend, he had made himself not only known, but liked and well regarded. He was a Whig with a host of Democratic friends and admirers. The Democrats approached him first in 1834. Because they had supported him for postmaster and surveyor, they had reason to hope Lincoln would join them. During the early and mid-1830s, it was common for ambitious Illinois politicos to affiliate with the Democrats. New Salem Democrats told their party comrades throughout Sangamon County to assist Lincoln or else they would not support their candidates.

  It was a Democrat, Justice of the Peace Bowling Green, who persuaded Lincoln to make a second run for the legislature. In March 1834, Green and Lincoln presided over a meeting called to endorse a gubernatorial candidate. Afterward, Green and other Democrats approached Lincoln and offered to remove two of their own nominees in favor of his candidacy. Lincoln immediately recognized that this might hurt the chances of his friend, John Todd Stuart, and informed Stuart of the scheme. Stuart appreciated that Lincoln had “acted fairly and honorably.” Confident of his own strength, though, Stuart instructed Lincoln “to go and tell them he would take their votes—that I would risk it.”154

  An important issue in 1834 was a proposal to lop off the New Salem area from Sangamon County (which at that time was over twice the size of Rhode Island) and form a new county. Travel to the county seat, Springfield, imposed hardships on jurors, witnesses, litigants, land filers, and anyone else who had to do public business there. Between New Salem and Springfield lay 20 miles of rough country. In 1832 a resident described how in the spring “our rivers are over-flowed, the channels of all streams are full and traveling in any direction is impeded, and sometimes wholly stopped.” A rider would find himself “wading through ponds and quagmires, enjoying the delights of log bridges and causeways, and vainly invoking the name of McAdam, as he plunges deeper and deeper into mire and misfortune.”155 In addition to avoiding the perils of travel to Springfield, voters in New Salem hoped their town would become the seat of the new county.

  New Salemites and their neighbors began petitioning for their own separate county in 1830. In the winter of 1832–1833, Hugh Armstrong and Ned Potter obtained 195 signatures on a petition to the legislature calling for a new county; several of Lincoln’s friends signed it. Lincoln pledged that he would attempt to get New Salem detached and incorporated into a new county. That pledge won Lincoln nearly unanimous support in the New Salem area, while he secured at least the Whig vote elsewhere in the county.

  Lincoln also gained popularity by favoring construction of a canal from Beard-stown to the Sangamon River. New Salem had closer ties to Beardstown than Springfield. The canal, Lincoln told the electorate, would prevent spring flooding and allow farmers to transport their produce more cheaply to the Illinois River, 40 miles away. The Illinois was their preferred highway to the world; the Sangamon was mostly un-navigable except in the spring.

  Lincoln issued no principled manifestos in 1834 and instead focused heavily on the county separation issue in what he called “more of a hand-shaking campaign than anything else.” He stumped extensively, staying with friends like Abner Y. Ellis in Springfield. At Island Grove, when Lincoln approached some thirty men harvesting crops, they declared they would support no man unless he could lend them a hand. Lincoln replied, “well, boys if that is all I am sure of your votes.” He grabbed a cradle and easily pitched in; later, every one of the men voted for him. An onlooker, Dr. Richard F. Barrett, observing Lincoln harvesting away, scornfully asked J. Rowan Herndon if the Whig Party could not find a better nominee than that. In response, Herndon urged the doctor to attend a political rally the next day where all the candidates would speak. Barrett did so, later acknowledging to Herndon that Lincoln “knows more than all of them Put together.”156

  Lincoln’s personal qualities appealed to the voters, especially his geniality and humor, both of which were highly prized by frontiersmen, and he was gifted in the art of calling on people in their homes. Charles Maltby remembered that Lincoln “made himself pleasant and agreeable with all persons, with the rich or poor, in the stately mansion or log cabin.” Dealing with the prosperous, “he was respectful, deferential and sociable,” and with the lowly, “affable, agreeable and simple.” He talked to the families about their hopes and prospects, about schools, farms, crops, and livestock. People felt “they had met a friend—one near as a brother.” He paid attention to the children, gave them candy and nuts, and it was clear that all this “came from the natural impulses of his heart.” While other home-visiting candidates tended to talk immediately about politics, Lincoln would propose a tour of the farm while supper was cooking. After the meal he would eventually involve the women and children and regale the family with tales of his own childhood. He was folksy and congenial, and he made people feel he was one of them—clearly, a smarter version of them, but one of them nonetheless.157

  Lincoln’s family-friendly campaign style worked because it was without affectation. Especially appealing to the families was his genuine fondness for children. When he boarded with John Camron, he delighted in playing merry tricks and pranks on his host’s many daughters. He would pluck their ears and give them nicknames. In the Camron family, Vienna became “Quinine,” Tom he renamed “Tam O’Shanter,” Betsy was “Queen Isabella,” and Eliza, unaccountably, was dubbed “John.”158 They and the other children of New Salem enjoyed his joking and playfulness as much as he did and loved him for it.

  Lincoln also won admirers and votes in the neighboring town of Athens, primarily by saving one of their neighbors from the roughnecks of New Salem. A fierce rivalry had grown up between Athens and New Salem, fueled by raids that residents of one community made on the other; in turn, retaliatory counter-raids were executed. When one of the combatants from Athens incautiously visited New Salem alone, several villagers stuffed him into a sugar hogshead, nailed it shut, and prepared to roll him down the steep 200-foot bluff into the river. Lincoln intervened and talked them out of this potentially fatal plan. Thereafter, the Athens boys voted for him enthusiastically in all his campaigns for the legislature.

  A potential threat to Lincoln’s electoral chances was his reputation as a religious skeptic. Isaac Snodgrass urged fellow townsmen to vote against him because of his alleged deism. The father of James H. Matheny, Lincoln’s close friend, loved Lincoln wholeheartedly but was a strong Methodist and therefore hesitated to vote for him. Lincoln’s religious views were in fact unconventional. After discussing with his New Salem friends such iconoclastic works as Constantine de Volney’s The Ruins; or, A Survey of the Revolutions of Empires, and Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason and Common Sense, Lincoln wrote an essay in a similar vein. When he told his political backer, Samuel Hill, that he intended to publish it, Hill snatched the manuscript from his hands and flung it into the fire. According to Jesse Fell, Lincoln “held opinions utterly at variance with what are usually taught in the Churches,” and his views, “would place him entirely outside the Christian pale.”159

  Lincoln lived in a community that took religion seriously. He often discussed religious topics with his friends, many of whom were skeptics. In New Salem, and later in Springfield, his views bordering on atheism shocked many. He pointed out contradictions or logical lapses in the Bible; according to Herndon, Lincoln told him “a thousand times that he did not believe that the Bible, etc., were revelations of God, as the Christian world contends.”160 In many conversations with Edward D. Baker, Lincoln challenged the authenticity of scriptures, unconvinced that they were divinely inspired.

  At times, Lincoln appeared saddened by his lack of faith. Albert Taylor Bledsoe, who debated religious issues with Lincoln in Springfield, thought that he “always seemed to deplore his want of faith as a very great inf
elicity, from which he would be glad to be delivered.” The way Lincoln talked about religion, “with an air of such apparent modesty” as well as “gloom and despair,” made Bledsoe feel “deep compassion” for his friend.161 When Samuel Hill’s devout wife asked Lincoln, “Do you really believe there isn’t any future state?” he replied: “Mrs. Hill, I’m afraid that there isn’t. It isn’t a pleasant thing to think when we die that is the last of us.”162

  Lincoln found religion as practiced on the frontier unappealing. Detailed doctrinal hairsplitting repelled him, as did the cranky sectarianism that bred enmity and divided communities. In Indiana, Sophie Hanks heard young Lincoln declare “that if he could take the best parts from all the churches, he could make a new church better than any of them.”163 He told a New Salem friend, “I’d like to go to church if I could hear a good sermon. About all one hears is one preacher get up and denounce another or run down the denomination he preaches for.”164 An exception to this rule was Campbellite minister Josephus Hewitt, whose preaching Lincoln admired. Even as late as the Civil War, Lincoln continued to be put off by doctrinal bickering. As he told a congressman, “When any church will inscribe over its altar, as its sole qualification for membership, the Savior’s condensed statement of the substance of both law and Gospel, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself,’ that church will I join with all my heart and all my soul.”165 On good and evil, Lincoln identified with a man who asserted that “when he did good he felt good, when he did bad he felt bad.” That, Lincoln said, “is my religion.”166

  Innately tolerant and forbearing, Lincoln was doubtless offended by harsh frontier Calvinism. Because he often spent weekends at George Spears’s home, he on occasion probably attended Clary’s Grove Baptist Church, which had been founded in Spears’s house and was known for punitive discipline of its congregants. John M. Berry, the father of Lincoln’s store partner, William F. Berry, was a strapping man with a strong voice and a reputation for rigidity; he denounced his son as a drunk and disowned his daughter for marrying at the age of 14. Not only did he never again speak to her, but when her first-born died, he did not attend the funeral; he limited his formal grieving to a momentary pause in his gardening as his grandchild’s funeral procession passed by his farm. Lincoln was probably alienated by such unforgiving, hard-hearted inhumanity in a man purportedly espousing the gospel of a savior who counseled: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”

  One of the poems Lincoln memorized, Robert Burns’s “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” satirized the doctrine of predestination:

  O Thou that in the heavens does dwell!

  Who, as it pleases best Thysel’,

  Send ane to heaven and ten to hell,

  A’ for Thy glory,

  And no for ony gude or ill

  They’ve done before Thee

  That poem, according to James H. Matheny, “was Lincoln’s religion.”167 Lincoln poked fun at the doctrine of damnation by telling a story about a Methodist parson who criticized a Universalist minister: “Why, the impertinent fellow declared that all shall be saved, but, my dear Brethren, let us hope for better things.”168

  Despite his unorthodox religious views, in 1834 Lincoln won election to the Illinois Legislature. Democratic crossover votes helped him finish among the top four in a twelve-man contest, even though he was unyielding in his devotion to Whig principles. In the two years since his first try at office, he had become much better known and appreciated. A growing network of loyal friendships, many of them dating from the Black Hawk War, strengthened him. In Lake Fork, for example, when the official Democratic tickets instructing the party faithful whom to vote for disappeared, Lincoln’s resourceful friend Hawkins Taylor made up tickets of his own that included Lincoln’s name. Although few voters there had heard of Lincoln, Taylor talked him up. “I let each man name whom he pleased for Governor and the other state officers,” Taylor remembered, “but not one of them could name four members for the Legislature, and then I would get in Mr. Lincoln’s name.” According to Taylor, 108 of the 111 men who voted at Lake Fork marked their ballots for Lincoln.169 Lincoln was overjoyed. Not only was election an honor, but members of the legislature were paid $4 per day, and he told a friend that that was “more than I had ever earned in my life.”170 During his four terms as a legislator, Lincoln received a total salary of $1,762.

  By the end of 1834, the piece of human driftwood who had three and a half years earlier washed up on the banks of the Sangamon River at New Salem had been transformed. Though still known as “a mighty Rough man,” he had acquired a sense of direction.171 Having chosen his career as a politician, he would pursue it single-mindedly, distancing himself ever further from the backward, provincial, isolated, ignorant world of Thomas Lincoln.

  4

  “A Napoleon of Astuteness and

  Political Finesse”

  Frontier Legislator

  (1834–1837)

  After leaving his paternal home and settling in New Salem, Lincoln found a surrogate father in Bowling Green, a rotund, easygoing, humorous, jovial “reading man” from North Carolina known as a gifted spinner of yarns. Twenty-two years Lincoln’s senior, Green served at various times as justice of the peace, canal commissioner, doorkeeper of the Illinois House of Representatives, judge of elections, county commissioner, sheriff, and candidate for the state senate. In Lincoln’s early days in New Salem, he boarded at Green’s house, which attracted many visitors, for Green was famously hospitable.

  Finding a Surrogate Father

  Abner Y. Ellis reported that Lincoln “Loved Mr Green” as “his allmost Second Farther.” Green, in turn, “looked on him with pride and pleasur[e]” and “Used to Say that Lincoln Was a Man after his own heart.” Green told Ellis “that there Was good Material in Abe and he only Wanted Education.” Undertaking to provide that education, Green nurtured his protégé, lending him books, encouraging him to study, and fostering his political career. Though a prominent Democrat, Green urged Lincoln, who opposed the Democrats, to run for the state legislature. Lincoln confided to Ellis “that he owed more to Mr Green for his advancement than any other Man.”1

  Green stimulated Lincoln’s interest in the law by inviting him to attend sessions of his court, where Green’s directness and informality could lead to humorous moments. When John Ferguson sued Green’s poetry-loving friend Jack Kelso for stealing a hog, Green ruled in Kelso’s favor, even though he had no proof and witnesses testified that the hog was Ferguson’s. Green announced that “the two witnesses we have heard have sworn to a—lie. I know this shoat, and I know it belongs to Jack Kelso. I therefore decide this case in his favor.”2 When Lincoln queried him about the verdict, Green explained that “the first duty of a court is to decide cases justly and in accordance with the truth.”3 Green displayed a similarly casual approach to the niceties of the law when he asked attorney Edward D. Baker if a justice of the peace could preside over slander suits. After Baker replied that only courts of general jurisdiction could hear a slander case, Green expostulated: “Well, think again; you have not read law very well, or very long; try it again; now, have I not jurisdiction; can I not do it?” Once again Baker responded in the negative. After another round of such questioning, Green finally said: “I know I can; for, by Heaven, I have done it.”4

  Lincoln had learned some law from the books Green lent him, which he read in 1832 and 1833. Because few lawyers lived in the New Salem area, the young would-be attorney was often requested to try suits in Green’s court. He accepted the challenge but turned down any remuneration. Initially the judge, who enjoyed Lincoln’s humor, allowed him to practice for amusement’s sake. Green’s fat sides would shake as he laughed at the young man’s laconic presentation of cases. Soon realizing that Lincoln was more than just a comedian, Green came to respect his intellect.

  Green and Lincoln performed a kind of comic duet in one trial. When quizzed by an attorney about th
e veracity of a bibulous shoemaker named Peter Lukins, Lincoln testified: “he is called lying Pete Lukins.” The lawyer then asked Lincoln if he would believe Lukins under oath. Lincoln turned about and said, “ask Esquire Green. He has taken his testimony under oath many times.” Green replied: “I never believe anything he says unless somebody else swears the same thing.”5

  Lincoln grew close to Green and his wife, the former Nancy Potter, an unusually maternal, hospitable woman. In 1835, while suffering from depression, Lincoln repaired to the Greens’ cabin, where for three weeks they nursed him back to psychological health. When a stroke killed Green in 1842, his widow asked Lincoln to speak at the memorial service. He agreed to do so, but when “he arose he only uttered a few words and commenced choking and sobbing” and acknowledged that “he was unmanned and could not” go on; he therefore “got down and went to Mrs. Green’s old family carriage.”6

  Law Student

  Even before he began attending Green’s court, Lincoln had shown interest in the law. In Indiana he was sued for violating the rights of a Kentucky ferry operator and sat in on trials held before a neighboring judge. He may have actually done some pettifogging before this court, acting as a very junior attorney in minor matters. To Judge John Pitcher of Rockport, Indiana, young Lincoln expressed a desire to study law. During his brief sojourn in Macon County in 1830, Lincoln read law books at the home of Sheriff William Warnick.

  Like many other Hoosiers, Lincoln had often attended court sessions in Boon-ville, where conditions were doubtless primitive. Legal proceedings in a similar community (Fall Creek) were conducted in a double log cabin. While shoeless jurors sat in the woods on a log, their foreman signed indictments on his knee. One Indiana judge quelled a disturbance with his fists, saying: “I don’t know what power the law gives me to keep order in this court, but I know very well the power God Almighty gave me.”7