Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  Fifteen years after the Lincoln-Stone protest, Lincoln criticized abolitionists who, like Garrison, marched beneath the banner inscribed “No Union with Slaveholders.” In a eulogy on Henry Clay, Lincoln criticized Garrisonians: “Those who would shiver into fragments the Union of these States; tear to tatters its now venerated constitution; and even burn the last copy of the Bible, rather than slavery should continue a single hour, … have received, and are receiving their just execration.” He praised more moderate opponents of slavery, like Clay, and condemned those proslavery apologists who “are beginning to assail and to ridicule” the Declaration of Independence.252

  The Lincoln-Stone protest further declared that “the Congress of the United States has the power, under the constitution, to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia; but that power ought not to be exercised unless at the request of the people of said District.” Lincoln had unsuccessfully tried to amend the original resolution to permit abolition in the District “if the people of said District petition for same.” (Twelve years later, as a member of Congress, he would frame legislation to rid the District of slavery with such consent.) Unlike the committee report to which Lincoln and Stone responded, their protest clearly asserted that the Constitution empowered Congress to abolish slavery in the District, a question that was hotly debated at the time and became a litmus test distinguishing the friends of slavery from its foes.

  The boldness of the Lincoln-Stone protest is notable but uncharacteristic of Lincoln in his twenties and thirties. When in March 1837 he moved to Springfield from the dying hamlet of New Salem, he was essentially a clever partisan whose promise of future statesmanship would long remain unfulfilled.

  5

  “We Must Fight the Devil with Fire”

  Slasher-Gaff Politico in Springfield

  (1837–1841)

  Lincoln began his new life as lawyer and legislator in the “straggling” and “irregular village” of Springfield (population 1,300), which visitors described as “a commonplace, sprawling sort of town, covering about ten times as much ground as it ought” and “a very unattractive, sickly, unenterprising town.”1 Its dirty, dusty, unpaved streets and sidewalks were flanked by log cabins and shabbily constructed frame houses. In 1832, William Cullen Bryant deemed nearby Jacksonville “a horribly ugly village, composed of little shops and dwellings, stuck close together around a dirty square, in the middle of which stands the ugliest of possible brick court-houses,” but he thought it outshone Springfield, where “the houses are not so good, a considerable proportion of them being log-cabins, and the whole town having an appearance of dirt and discomfort.”2 A friend of Lincoln recalled that “for many years, it was far from being an inviting city.”3

  The town’s mud was notorious. When wet, the black loam of central Illinois became knee-deep “prairie gumbo.” A woman from the East declared that nobody “can know the definition of ‘Mud’ until they come to Springfield. I think scrapers and mats must be fast selling articles here.”4 The family of Elizabeth Capps, who called Springfield “a low, muddy place where it was a common thing for carriages and horses to mire in the mud around the public square,” left the city for high and dry Mt. Pulaski.5 Mud rendered the sidewalks, such as they were, impassable. The streets were even worse; in foul weather they “approached the condition of a quagmire with dangerous sink-holes where the boatmen’s phrase ‘no bottom’ furnished the only description.” Not until 1870 was the town square paved, finally making its thoroughfares passable for wagon teams in winter. Garbage and refuse made the muddy streets even more repellant. The streets became “the dumping ground for the community rubbish so that the gutters were filled with manure, discarded clothing and all kinds of trash, threatening the public health with their noxious effluvium.” Roaming livestock compounded matters. Throughout the antebellum period, hogs and cattle roamed freely throughout the town.6 The hogs rubbed against fences and house corners, leaving them filthy.

  When the summer sun beat down on privies, sinkholes, stables, abattoirs, and the like, the stench became overwhelming. The numerous ponds around town, which “furnished frog and mosquitoe music for the inhabitants,” were always “loathsome to the eye;” in hot weather they became “sickening to the smell.”7 Equally noisome was the market house, which swarmed with green-back flies.

  Springfield’s business structures were arranged haphazardly and slapped together in the cheapest possible manner. Both its hotels and livery stables were few in number, small, badly managed, and expensive. Its stores were meagerly stocked, and the concert hall was so dirty and shabby that the celebrated soprano Adelina Patti refused to sing there once she had taken the stage and beheld its appearance. The capitol was considered an eyesore, with an interior that impressed one visitor as “the most shabby, forlorn, dirty, dilapidated specimen of a public edifice which we have ever seen.”8

  Other visitors called the city “dull,” “inactive,” “wanting in public spirit and enterprise,” and found “little in and about Springfield to interest or amuse a stranger.”9 Sessions of the legislature provided some diversion, but when the lawmakers departed, the town reverted to its customary dullness. An Ohioan wrote that while he had been to “many a distressing place,” Springfield was “the most distressing of all.”10

  Springfield’s citizens as well as its streets and buildings failed to please visitors. Hezekiah Morse Wead, a delegate to the 1847 constitutional convention meeting in the city, lamented that during the convention’s three-month duration, “no kindness or hospitality or friendship has been extended to these delegates by any of the citizens” save Ninian W. Edwards. “Even the ordinary kindness & civilities of life” were lacking, he confided to his diary.11 John Hay called Springfield “a city combining the meanness of the North with the barbarism of the South.” Shakespeare’s Dogberry, Hay quipped, “ought to have been an Illinoisan.”12 A Briton deplored the local manners: “The nasty habit of chewing tobacco, and spitting, not only gives them a dirty look, but makes them disagreeable companions. They eat so fast, and are so silent, and run off so soon when they have finished their meals, that really eating in this country is more like the feeding of a parcel of brutes than men.”13 Brawling and drunkenness were common, especially at election time. In 1839, at least fifteen fights broke out while the polls were open.

  Lincoln enjoyed telling a story about Springfield that he had heard from his friend Jesse K. Dubois, the Illinois state auditor. In that capacity, Dubois was once asked by an “itinerant quack preacher” for permission to use the Hall of Representatives for a religious lecture.

  When Dubois inquired, “What’s it about?” the minister replied, “The Second Coming of Christ.”

  “Nonsense,” retorted the state auditor. “If Christ had been to Springfield once, and got away, he’d be damned clear of coming again.”14

  Settling Down in Springfield

  A few weeks after moving from New Salem to the new capital-designate, a gloomy Lincoln confided to a lady friend that “living in Springfield is rather a dull business after all, at least it is so to me. I am quite as lonesome here as [I] ever was anywhere in my life.” Beyond the drawbacks of the town itself, he felt embarrassed by his poverty. Calling Springfield a “busy wilderness,” he noted that there was “a great deal of flourishing about in carriages here,” a form of transportation that he could not afford because of his debts.15

  Lincoln may have been lonesome for female companionship, but kind male friends helped him settle in. One of them, William Butler, recalled that as he, Lincoln, and two others rode to Springfield from Vandalia after the close of the legislative session in March 1837, they “stopped over night down here at Henderson’s Point, and all slept on the floor. We were tired, and the rest slept pretty well.” Butler observed, however, “that Lincoln was uneasy, turning over and thinking, and studying, so much so that he kept me awake.”

  Finally Butler asked: “Lincoln what is the matter with you?”

  “Well,” came the r
eply, “I will tell you. All the rest of you have something to look forward to, and all are glad to get home, and will have something to do when you get there. But it isn’t so with me. I am going home, Butler, without a thing in the world. I have drawn all my pay I got at Vandalia, and have spent it all. I am in debt—… and I have nothing to pay the debt with, and no way to make any money. I don[’]t know what to do.”

  As Butler told an interviewer, he came to Lincoln’s assistance: “[W]hen we got to Springfield I went and sold his horse without saying anything to him.” Butler paid off his debts and took Lincoln’s saddlebags to his home, where Butler’s wife washed the clothes they contained. When Lincoln learned that Butler had disposed of his horse, he “was greatly astonished. ‘What in the world did you do that for?’ he asked.”

  Lincoln, Butler added, “then went back to get his saddlebags, and they told him they had been taken down to my house. So he came down and asked where they were. I said to him ‘I have had them brought down here, and have had your clothes taken out and washed. Now I want you to come down here, and board here and make my house your home.’ ”

  According to Butler, Lincoln “was always careless about his clothes. In all the time he stayed at my house, he never bought a hat or a pair of socks, or a coat. Whenever he needed them, my wife went out and bought them for him, and put them in the drawer where he would find them. When I told him that he couldn’t have his clothes, that they were in the wash, he seemed very much mortified. He said he had to go down home to New Salem. I told him that he might take my horse and ride him down there. I also told him that there were his saddlebags, and that there was a clean shirt in them. He took the saddlebags and went and got the horse, and rode down to New Salem, and stayed there about a week. Then he came back and put up the horse.”16

  For the next five years Lincoln took his meals, without charge, at Butler’s home, one of the largest in Springfield. Ninian W. Edwards may have prompted Butler to extend this hospitality, for Edwards considered the impoverished newcomer a promising young man who, with a little help, would flourish. In addition, Butler was probably grateful to Lincoln for his recent successful effort to have Springfield named the state’s capital.

  The Kentucky-born merchant Joshua F. Speed, who became Lincoln’s closest friend, proffered equally generous assistance. Speed remembered that Lincoln rode “into town on a borrowed horse, with no earthly goods but a pair of saddle-bags, two or three law books, and some clothing which he had in his saddle-bags. He took an office, and engaged from the only cabinet-maker then in the village, a single bedstead.” Lincoln then asked Speed, a silent partner in the general merchandise store, James Bell & Company, how much it would cost to furnish the bed. When the young businessman, nearly five years Lincoln’s junior, calculated that mattress, blankets, pillow, sheets, and coverlid would cost $17, Lincoln replied: “It is probably cheap enough: but I want to say that, cheap as it is, I have not the money to pay. But if you will credit me until Christmas, and my experiment here as a lawyer is a success, I will pay you then. If I fail in that I will probably never be able to pay you back at all.” (Novice lawyers did not always prosper on the Illinois frontier. One Jacksonville attorney reported in 1835: “Out of the long list of Lawyers that come to this country and settle, there is not one out of an hundred who does one half business enough to pay his expenses the first year nor enough to pay his expenses for three of the first years.”)17

  Speed recalled that the “tone of his voice was so melancholy that I felt for him. I looked up at him, and I thought … that I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face.”

  “The contraction of so small a debt seems to affect you so deeply,” Speed remarked, “I think I can suggest a plan by which you will be able to attain your end, without incurring any debt. I have a very large room, and a very large double-bed in it; which you are perfectly welcome to share with me if you choose.” He explained that “my partner and I have been sleeping in the same bed for some time. He is gone now, and if you wish, you can take his place.”

  After inspecting the room above the store, Lincoln, “with a face beaming with pleasure,” said: “Well, Speed, I’m moved.”18 Between 1837 and 1841, Lincoln bunked with Speed in the room above the store, where Speed’s clerks, William H. Herndon and Charles R. Hurst, also slept. There was no partition and hence no privacy. Such sleeping arrangements were common in frontier Illinois.

  Neophyte Lawyer

  John Todd Stuart, Lincoln’s law partner, matched the generosity that Speed and Butler extended to Lincoln. On September 9, 1836, the justices of the Illinois Supreme Court licensed Lincoln to practice law throughout the state. Seven months later he moved to Springfield, where in April the firm of Stuart and Lincoln was formally established in a small, second-floor office on Hoffman’s Row, a block of buildings facing the town square. Its meager furniture consisted of a small bed, a buffalo robe, a chair, and a bench. (Stuart’s partner during the previous four years, Henry E. Dummer, had moved to another town.)

  Most of Stuart and Lincoln’s business involved debts in one form or another, though the two men also dealt with various matters in the criminal, common law, and chancery branches of the law. Many of the cases were of small importance, for example, challenging Lincoln to determine who owned a litter of pigs or who was responsible for the death of sheep due to foot rot. Lincoln and Stuart could not make ends meet if they confined their practice to Springfield, so, like most of their colleagues, they rode the First Judicial Circuit, encompassing ten counties. In 1839, when Sangamon County was included in the newly created Eighth Judicial Circuit, Lincoln traveled its nine counties but did the bulk of the firm’s work in Sangamon, Tazewell, Logan, and McLean counties.

  Tyro though he was, Lincoln handled much of the business of the firm, for politics monopolized Stuart’s attention. Defeated in 1836 for Congress, Stuart renewed his quest for that seat the very day after he lost. Lincoln got off to a bad start when Stuart sent him to represent John W. Baddeley, a blunt, English-born merchant of McLean County. When the haughty, aristocratic Baddeley beheld the unprepossessing young attorney, he promptly dismissed him and hired James A. McDougall in his stead.

  Lincoln’s first law case, Hawthorn vs. Wooldridge, which began in 1836, involved a farmer charged with trespass and breach of contract. David Woolridge, Lincoln’s client, allegedly “assaulted, struck, beat, bruised and knocked down” James Hawthorn, “plucked, pulled and tore divers quantities of hair” from his head, “with a stick and with his fists gave … a great many violent blows and strokes on and about his head, face, back, shoulders, legs, and divers other parts of his body and … with great force and violence, struck, shook, pulled, and knocked him … down upon the ground, and … violently kicked” Hawthorn, “struck him … a great many other blows and strokes,” “violently thrust his … thumbs” into his eyes, “and gouged him … to his great pain, distress and injury.”19 The case, involving three separate actions, was argued before a jury, which awarded Hawthorn damages of $36 and costs. The other two actions were settled out of court, with Hawthorn paying the costs of one and Woolridge the other.

  No record indicates how the settlement was reached, but Lincoln may well have urged the parties to compromise. Years later he advised lawyers to “[d]iscourage litigation” and to “[p]ersuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser—in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peace-maker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man.”20 Most Whig lawyers, including Stuart, shared this view. In his first case Lincoln might have served as such a peacemaker, a role he had often played in his youth. Dennis Hanks recalled, “I’ve seen him walk into a crowd of jawin’ rowdies, and tell some droll yarn, and bust them all up. It was the same when he was a lawyer; all eyes, whenever he riz were on him; there was a suthin’ peculiarsome about him.”21

  Lincoln and Stuart usually charged $5 to $10 for their services, dividing those modest fees equall
y. The only large sum they received was $500 for a sensational murder trial in 1838. The case arose when Henry Truett, quondam register of the Galena land office, cold-bloodedly shot and killed a political opponent, Jacob Early, a doctor and Methodist minister who had criticized Truett’s appointment to the land office post. Truett hired Lincoln, Stuart, Stephen T. Logan, Edward D. Baker, and Cyrus Edwards to defend him; the prosecution team included Stephen A. Douglas. Faced with overwhelming evidence of their client’s guilt, Lincoln and his colleagues lamely argued that when Truett pulled a gun on Early, the latter had picked up a chair and was therefore armed when he was shot by Truett, who in fact was merely acting in self-defense. (Witnesses testified that the victim was obviously using the chair as a shield, not a weapon.) Though only in practice for a year, Lincoln was chosen to deliver the closing speech to the jury. No record exists of his words; Logan praised his “short but strong and sensible speech,” and Milton Hay recalled that despite “his rawness, awkwardness and uncultivated manner,” Lincoln “was expected to make a strong speech in the case, and that expectation was not disappointed.”22 It must have been quite persuasive, for the jury, amazingly, delivered a verdict of not guilty, which doubtless bolstered Lincoln’s self-confidence.