Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  In 1838, Lincoln campaigned not only for his own reelection but also for his law partner, John Todd Stuart, who tried once again to win the congressional seat he had sought two years earlier. The hard times, widely blamed on the Democratic administration in Washington, improved Whig chances and aroused the public to pay more attention than usual to politics. David Davis of Bloomington recalled that no “canvass, in my time, awakened such interest at the start, and retained it to the last. It seemed in my neighborhood, at least, as if every man, woman and twelve-year-old child were enlisted for the fight. Nothing but politics were subjects of conversation and everybody attended political meetings.”41

  Lincoln attacked Stuart’s opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, in letters by “A Conservative,” which the Sangamo Journal ran in January and February 1838. (Democrats opposed to President Van Buren’s economic policies referred to themselves as “Conservatives.”) In the first missive, Lincoln called Douglas a radical, arguing that ever since the Little Giant had assumed responsibility for the editorials in the Illinois Republican, that newspaper had championed “the Utopian scheme of an exclusive specie currency, involving the destruction of all banks—and the dangerous doctrine that all incorporated institutions, and all contracts between the State and its citizens, can be changed or annulled at the pleasure of the Legislature.” He also accused Douglas of striking a corrupt bargain to win his nomination. Douglas furiously denied the charges and condemned the “vindictive, fiendish spirit” of “Conservative.” With some justice, he protested that “my private and moral, as well as public and political character [has] been assailed in a manner calculated to destroy my standing as a man and a citizen.”42

  Two weeks later, “Conservative” branded Douglas a “man of expedients” and once again questioned the legitimacy of his nomination. The Democratic convention in Peoria that chose him to run for Congress was, “Conservative” alleged, “gotten up and conducted in such a manner, as to render it both injurious and disgraceful to the party if they attempt to sustain it.” Douglas had been register of the Springfield land office, a post coveted by “a certain gentleman [John Calhoun] who resides in Sangamon county, and who has followed a variety of occupations both here and elsewhere, for a living and failed in all.” Calhoun, eager to replace Douglas, flattered him with the suggestion that he run for Congress, “telling him that he regretted to see him confined to the dry and laborious occupation of writing answers to the endless and silly enquiries of every applicant about N. W. of S. E. of 23, T. 24 R. 3 W., etc. etc.; that for one whom nature designed for nothing else but to be

  ‘Fixed to one certain spot,

  To draw nutrition, propegate, and rot,’

  such a plodding occupation was well enough; but that for one of his towering genius, it was absolutely intolerable. ‘You,’ continued he, ‘may be President of the United states just as well as not. A seat in Congress is not worthy to be your abiding place, though you might with propriety serve one term in the capacity of Representative—not that it would at all become you; but merely in imitation of some king, who being called to the throne from obscurity, lodges for one night in a hovel as he journies to the palace. History gives no account of a man of your age [Douglas was 24] occupying such high ground as you do now. At twenty-four Bonaparte was unheard of; and in fact so it has been with all great men in former times.… There is no doubt of a seat in Congress being within your reach. The only question is whether you will condescend to occupy it.” Thus “flattered out of his senses,” “Conservative” alleged, Douglas arranged matters so that he could win the nomination at Peoria. Operating craftily behind the scenes, he stacked the convention with his supporters and won.43 (The two lines of poetry quoted in this missive were from Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man,” a favorite of Lincoln’s.)

  The day that this article appeared, Lincoln gave a significant speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield. Entitled “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” it focused primarily on a recent nationwide outbreak of mob violence. In 1835, the country had experienced such a startling increase in mob violence (71 people died in 147 recorded riots that year) that a South Carolina newspaper declared: “Mobs, strikes, riots, abolition movements, insurrections, Lynch clubs seem to be the engrossing topics of the day.”44 In 1837, Lincoln himself attacked “that lawless and mobocratic spirit … abroad in the land.”45 In his Lyceum address Lincoln added his voice to the Illinois Whig chorus denouncing the upsurge in riots and lynching.

  In the midst of his ostensibly nonpartisan address, Lincoln struck a blow against Douglas. He alluded to the danger of a coming Caesar, a man “of ambition and talents” who would ruthlessly pursue fame and power, overthrowing democratic institutions to achieve his ends. “Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.” Lincoln asked rhetorically if such a person would be content to follow traditional paths to distinction, and then he answered, “What! think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path.”46 Clearly, the “towering genius” was Douglas, the man whom the flatterer in “Conservative No. 2” called “a towering genius.” (This was probably a slighting reference to Douglas’s diminutive stature—5 feet 4 inches—which Lincoln in December 1837 had alluded to: “We have adopted it as part of our policy here, to never speak of Douglass at all. Is’nt that the best mode of treating so small a matter.”)47 Here Lincoln echoed the charges of “Conservative” from the Sangamo Journal. “Conservative” likened Douglas to Bonaparte; Lincoln at the Lyceum warned against men like Napoleon. “Conservative” suggested that Douglas would not be content with a mere seat in Congress; Lincoln denounced any man whose ambition would not be satisfied with such a post. Since the rules of the Lyceum forbade political speeches, Lincoln could not directly attack Douglas, but because his audience was politically aware, he could assume that they had read “Conservative No. 2” earlier in the day and thus understood that Douglas was the target of his remarks about the coming Caesar. It was a clever maneuver to circumvent the ban on partisanship at the Lyceum. (Two decades later Lincoln would again satirize Douglas in an ostensibly nonpolitical address on “Discoveries and Inventions.”)

  The Lyceum speech could be construed as an attack not only on Douglas but also on the Democratic Party, which Whigs denounced for championing “mobocracy.” (A headline in an Illinois Whig paper read: “Mobocracy and Loco-Focoism—One and the Same Thing.”)48

  With some justice, friends criticized this florid address as “highly sophomoric in character” and a prime example of “ ‘spread eagle’ and vapid oratory.”49 It illustrated Albert T. Bledsoe’s contention that Lincoln, as a young man, was “most wofully given to sesquipedalian words, or, in Western phrase, highfalutin bombast.”50

  Lincoln may have been imitating the flamboyant oratorical style of Daniel Webster, whom he had heard speak a few months earlier in Springfield. He greatly admired Webster’s speeches, which he predicted “will be read for ever.”51 In the Massachusetts statesman’s 1825 Bunker Hill address, he reflected on the inability of his generation to achieve the fame of their Revolutionary forefathers: “We can win no laurels in a war for independence. Earlier and worthier hands have gathered them all.”52 Similarly, Lincoln observed that during the Revolutionary era “all that sought celebrity and fame, and distinction, expected to find them in the success of that experiment.… This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated.”

  The moral that Lincoln drew from his survey of recent mob violence in Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois was that “every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity” should “swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their viola
tion by others.” He portrayed reverence for the law as the “political religion” of the nation.53 Lincoln echoed an earlier speaker before the Lyceum, his friend Anson G. Henry, who in 1835 had appealed to the young men of Springfield to put down “every symptom of mobocracy and lawless violence by enforcing the laws. The blood of our fathers, let it not have been shed in vain.”54

  Despite its evident banality, Lincoln’s address offered beneath the surface a bold commentary on slavery and race, couched so as to give little offense but nevertheless designed to prick the conscience of his audience. In part, the speech was inspired by the recent murder of abolitionist Elijah P. Lovejoy, whom Missouri slaveholders had driven from their state. When Lovejoy transferred operations across the Mississippi River to Alton, Illinois, he encountered an even more unfriendly reception. At a public meeting in 1837, several Alton residents condemned him; soon thereafter mobs twice destroyed his printing presses, dumping them into the river. On November 7, 1837, as he brandished firearms in an attempt to protect yet another press from mob violence, he was killed. His death aroused indignation throughout the North, where he was regarded as a martyr to freedom of expression.

  In the Lyceum speech, Lincoln, who several months earlier had denounced slavery as an institution based on “injustice and bad policy,” clearly alluded to the murder of Lovejoy in a passage condemning mobs that “throw printing presses into rivers” and “shoot editors.” Lincoln’s central theme was the danger that mob violence poses to democracy. Although the speech did not mention Lovejoy by name, its application to his murder was obvious. Lincoln’s audience might also have been reminded of the Springfield mob that forced the cancellation of an abolitionist sermon the previous October.

  If it took courage in the Springfield of 1838 to express sympathy for an abolitionist like Lovejoy, it required even more nerve to speak compassionately of a black man who in April 1836 had stabbed two white men. Lincoln nonetheless did so, referring to a “highly tragic” and “horror-striking scene at St. Louis,” where a “mulatto man, by the name of McIntosh, was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman, attending to his own business, and at peace with the world.” (Because the case of McIntosh had been widely publicized by Lovejoy’s newspaper, it seems probable that Lincoln was indirectly expressing further sympathy with Lovejoy by calling attention to that atrocity.) Moreover, Lincoln condemned Mississippi mobs for lynching “negroes, suspected of conspiring to raise an insurrection,” and “white men, supposed to be leagued with the negroes,” and “strangers, from neighboring States, going thither on business.”55

  Thus, within the bombast of the Lyceum address, Lincoln subtly embedded criticism not only of Stephen A. Douglas but also of anti-abolitionists and racial bigotry.

  Lincoln continued to attack Douglas. A third installment of the “Conservative” letters submitted to the Sangamo Journal, ostensibly written by unhappy Democrats but probably composed by Lincoln, repeated the charge that the Peoria convention which had nominated Douglas was “a mere farce,” and denounced the “jugglery” and “secret management” that procured him the nomination.56

  Lincoln also confronted Douglas in person, both on the stump and in the courtroom. Lincoln and Stuart debated their opponents throughout the campaign. In one encounter, Stuart grew incensed at Douglas’s allegations, grabbed his smaller opponent by the neck, and walked about with him; in response Douglas bit Stuart’s thumb, scarring it for life. Earlier in the campaign, Douglas, offended by a piece in the Sangamo Journal, tried to cane its editor, Simeon Francis, who (as Lincoln described it) caught his would-be assailant “by the hair and jammed him back against a market-cart, where the matter ended by Francis being pulled away from him.”57 In May, when Stuart became ill, Lincoln substituted for him at a debate in Bloomington.

  Realizing that the race between his partner and Douglas would be close, Lincoln worked hard and urged other Whigs to follow his example. “If we do our duty we shall succeed in the congressional election,” he told a friend, “but if we relax an iota, we shall be beaten.”58 His concern proved justified on election day in August, when Stuart narrowly prevailed, receiving 18,254 votes to Douglas’s 18,218. Lincoln easily won a third legislative term, running ahead of all the fifteen other candidates, even though some of his old friends in New Salem, Sandridge, and Petersburg voted against him because his party opposed the division of Sangamon County.

  When the Eleventh General Assembly convened in December 1838, Lincoln again found himself pitted against William L. D. Ewing, who had run for the legislature that year promising to “be a thorn in the side of the ‘long nine,’ should we again see them” and to “fearlessly expose to the new Legislature the foul corruption by which the seat of Government, contrary to justice and the constitution, was removed to Springfield.”59 As the most prominent Whig, Lincoln was his party’s obvious choice for Speaker of the House. Ewing managed to win after several ballots by the vote of 43 to 38, making Lincoln in effect minority leader of the lower chamber. Lincoln might have won if all Whigs had been present and voted for him; as it was, three were absent and two defected to Ewing. Disappointed at his loss, Lincoln declared that Ewing “is not worth a damn.”60 Thus began what one Representative called “a stormy session & a very unpleasant one.”61

  Once organized, the House somewhat desultorily addressed banking questions yet again. Two weeks into the session the Committee on Finance submitted a report written, in all likelihood, by Lincoln. Reflecting the standard Whig position, it condemned President Van Buren’s proposal for an independent subtreasury, arguing that a divorce between government and banking was unnecessary and citing the history of “the extraordinary and unprecedented degree of prosperity which accompanied us in our onward march during the period of this union [of banks and government].” The generally dispassionate document criticized the inconsistency of congressional Democrats who between 1831 and 1835 had voted against proposals to separate banking from the government but who now supported Van Buren’s plan to do so. The committee expressed concern that the separation of bank and state could lead to the marriage of public funds and executive patronage, an alliance that might corrupt elections. Since the system already in place had worked so well, it should not be abandoned: “Your committee do not wish to be understood as resisting, without inquiry or examination, all changes in the fiscal affairs of the Government,” the report said. But, it asked, “what are the grounds, what are the reasons and considerations which render this [proposed] change necessary and proper?”62

  Proponents of divorce argued that federal funds were insecure in deposit banks, though a recent report by the secretary of the treasury showed that this was not a serious problem. Moreover, Van Buren in his December 1838 annual message praised the conduct of banks. In January, the General Assembly expressed agreement with Lincoln’s arguments by instructing Illinois’s congressional delegation to vote against the subtreasury plan.

  In addition to debating the bank issue on the national level, the legislators addressed state banking concerns, including a resolution condemning the practice of depositing in a Missouri bank the federal taxes collected from Illinois residents. Lincoln at first agreed with the resolution but then moved to table it indefinitely.

  Instead of responding to the financial panic and recession by sensibly reducing expenditures for canals and railroads, the General Assembly, with Lincoln’s approval, unaccountably appropriated more funds for such purposes. In December, acknowledging that “his own course was identified with the system,” Lincoln said that Illinois “had gone too far to recede, even if we were disposed to do so.”63 The following month he reiterated this sentiment in a Finance Committee report: “[W]e are now so far advanced in a general system of internal improvements that, if we would, we cannot retreat from it, without disgrace and great loss.”64 He had pledged to support the system and announced in the General Ass
embly “that his limbs should be torn asunder before he would violate that pledge.”65

  A year later “A Citizen” (probably Lincoln) defended internal improvements spending in a letter to the Sangamo Journal. Illinois legislators had done “that which they thought would be for the future glory and honor of the State.” They sought to help farmers create “a ready market for the fruits of their labor” by borrowing money to build roads “whereon the farmer could transport his products to some port of embarkation.” An improved transportation network would provide a home market as well as “a cheap and easy conveyance of commodities to foreign markets.” The parts of the system in place had “already dispelled the gloom from the face of many a farmer and mechanic.” The author warned that to abandon the system would be ill-advised. Should the state manage to get “through it honorably she will get glory.” Illinois’s “own industry and good management” would pay the debt. The author wished his “fellow citizens to keep constantly in mind that no murmuring or complaining of their’s will mend matters.” They should not, “like the foolish Israelites, by their murmurings, distract the councils of their State, and put back the work of public improvement, which is fast converting their whole country into a fruitful field.” Instead, let them with “contented minds, and cheerful industry,” go about making “pork and beef enough in the next thirty years to pay for works fifteen times as costly as those now in progress, if they can find a reasonable market for it.”66

  To meet the costs of the internal improvements system, Lincoln proposed that Illinois buy 20 million acres of public land within the state from the federal government for 25¢ per acre, then sell it for $1.25 per acre. If implemented, the plan would generate enough revenue to pay off the debt. Resolutions endorsing Lincoln’s scheme passed the legislature, but Congress ignored them. In 1840, Lincoln urged John Todd Stuart to show them to the influential South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, who had proposed a similar plan.