Lincoln also voted to impose a modest tax on land and to change the formula used to compute property taxes. To a dissenting Democrat, Lincoln protested that the old system, which relied almost exclusively upon taxes levied on the property of out-of-state landowners, failed to produce enough revenue. Moreover, it valued all land at either $3 or $4 per acre, allowing owners of valuable property to pay less than their fair share of taxes. Lincoln claimed that the new system “does not increase the tax upon the ‘many poor’ but upon the ‘wealthy few’ by taxing the land that is worth $50 or $100 per acre, in proportion to its value, instead of, as heretofore, no more than that which was worth but $5 per acre.” If the wealthy did not like it, there was little reason to worry, for “they are not sufficiently numerous to carry the elections.”67
The Eleventh General Assembly addressed the touchy subject of county divisions. One legislator observed that of all the questions pending, “the most difficult to settle are such as grow out of dispute[s] in relation to county towns and lines of counties that affect such local interest.”68 In 1839, David Davis explained to a Massachusetts relative that there was “a great mania in our State for the creation of new Counties. Speculators who own towns want Counties made for prospective county seats. And then again, the office holding spirit, which is diffused very generally in Illinois, induces the people generally within the limits of the proposed new County, to desire its formation.”69
Lincoln fought a rear-guard action to prevent the balkanization of Sangamon County. In September 1838, the Sangamo Journal had run a letter, probably by Lincoln, accusing division proponents of “selfishness—A desire to make money, or to obtain the little offices in the new counties.” The author was particularly harsh in criticizing John Taylor: “Old Sangamon must be cut to pieces to accommodate Col. Taylor. He once endeavored to destroy her through the instrumentality of Illiopolis. He now aims to produce the same result by making use of Petersburg.” The letter maintained that Aaron Vandever of Lick Creek wanted a division so that he could win election to the General Assembly, something he could not do in Sangamon County. “In any of the proposed divisions of Sangamon the mass of the people would not be accommodated so far as county business is concerned, as well as they are now.”70
Despite Lincoln’s opposition, it was clear that some kind of division was inevitable. He pragmatically sought to ensure that Sangamon would be carved up into three instead of four new counties, and that Springfield would not be disadvantaged. (If the county were split into four equal sections, Springfield would be isolated in the corner of one.) As a member of the Committee on Counties, Lincoln drafted a bill creating three new counties. When it was reported on January 16, 1839, the House referred it to a special committee (on which Lincoln sat) that amended the bill (all of the amendments being in Lincoln’s hand). On February 2, the House debated the measure, with Lincoln arguing against four equal counties. The bill as amended passed, establishing the small new counties of Logan, Dane, and Menard. Sangamon remained large, with five representatives; Lincoln preserved for Sangamon six townships that would have been lost if the county had been divided into four counties of equal size. Thus, as the Sangamo Journal noted, “Old Sangamon, though considerably shorn of territory, will still remain among the most extensive and populous counties in the State.”71 In protecting the interests of the county, Lincoln employed the same skills he had used in Springfield’s campaign to become the state capital.
At least one of Lincoln’s friends criticized him sharply for his stand. In January 1839, William Butler, known as “a quiet, dignified man,” accused him of truckling to land speculators.72 In deference to their friendship, Lincoln judiciously replied: “You were in an ill-humor when you wrote that letter, and, no doubt, intended that I should be thrown into one also; which, however, I respectfully decline being done.” Employing the imagery of suicide, as he did surprisingly often, Lincoln declared, “I am willing to pledge myself in black and white to cut my own throat from ear to ear, if, when I meet you, you shall seriously say, that you believe me capable of betraying my friends for any price.” In closing, Lincoln called himself “[y]our friend in spite of your ill-nature.”73
Butler had also rebuked the less forbearing Edward D. Baker, who responded heatedly, calling Butler “a fool.”74 Acting as peacemaker, Lincoln explained to Butler that Baker had been “writhing under a severe tooth-ache,” hence “at that time was incapable of exercising that patience and reflection which the case required.” He counseled that it “is always magnanamous to recant whatever we may have said in passion; and when you and Baker shall have done this, I am sure there will no difficulty be left between you.”75 Lincoln practiced what he preached, exercising over the years an almost superhuman magnanimity.
The General Assembly also addressed the issue of slavery. On January 5, 1839, the Judiciary Committee moved two resolutions, the first condemning the governor of Maine for his refusal to extradite Georgia men who had helped runaway slaves, and the second declaring that citizens of the Free States “ought not to interfere with the property of slaveholding States; which property has been guarantied unto them by the Constitution of the United States, and without which guaranty, the Union, perhaps, would never have been formed.”76 Lincoln initially concurred, but on second thought said he wanted more time for deliberation; finally, he concluded that it was “better to postpone the subject indefinitely.”77
The subject, however, would not go away; on February 1, it came up again when John Calhoun, in reply to abolitionist petitions, introduced resolutions urging Congress to ignore pleas for the abolition of slavery in both Washington, D.C., and the western territories, and for the prohibition of slave trading among the states. He added that attempts to grant Illinois blacks fundamental rights were “not only unconstitutional, but improper, inexpedient, and unwise.”78 The House defeated Calhoun’s motion 44–36, with Lincoln joining the majority.
In March 1839, the General Assembly adjourned. Lincoln had as usual been conscientious, answering 157 of the 181 roll calls and serving on eleven select committees.
The legislature reconvened the following December at the urging of Governor Thomas Carlin. Meeting for the first time in Springfield, the General Assembly had to deliberate in churches, for the statehouse, whose cornerstone had been laid two years earlier, stood unfinished on the public square, surrounded by stagnant pools in which many of the city’s free-roaming hogs wallowed. (A wag suggested that wild rice be cultivated there: “It will grow in water from six inches to a foot deep—reproduces well and is a very nutritious article of food. A sufficient quantity could be raised in the State House yard to secure rations for all the State offices.”)79
Governor Carlin wanted the legislature to modify the internal improvements system, for the state could not pay the interest on the debt needed to support it. As the House of Representatives discussed the governor’s proposal in its temporary quarters at the Second Presbyterian Church, Lincoln once again tried to salvage what the Democrats referred to as “Infernal Improvements.” He argued “that at least some portion of our Internal Improvements should be carried on … at least one work calculated to yield something towards defraying its expense, should be finished and put in operation.”80 When he voted for an unsuccessful proposal to have joint-stock companies take over the system, with the state owning some shares, the Springfield Register sneeringly declared that Lincoln “has blown his pledges to the winds, and has left the system to shift for itself. What an example of good faith!”81 The jibe was unfair, for Lincoln voted repeatedly to sustain the system, including the Illinois and Michigan Canal. When it was proposed that work on the canal be suspended, he said “we should lose much by stopping the work on the Canal—that a mutual injury would result to the State by suspending all operations there.… The embankments upon the Canal would be washing away, and the excavations filling up.”82 Although the legislature did not kill the internal improvements system de jure, it did so de facto.
Governo
r Carlin also recommended an investigation of the state bank. The legislators complied by establishing a special committee, with Lincoln as one of its members. In late December, he reported to John Todd Stuart that the “legislature is in session, and has suffered the Bank to forfeit it’s charter, without Benefit of Clergy. There seems to be but verry little disposition to resuscitate it.”83 A month later, Lincoln had better news for his law partner: “The Bank will be resuscitated with some trifling modifications.”84 He was right; the following day the investigating committee defended the bank in a report that Lincoln signed. The General Assembly permitted that institution to suspend specie payments until the close of the next legislative session.
The removal of the state capital came up yet again, because the citizens of Springfield, suffering from the economic hard times, had difficulty raising the $50,000 to help pay for the new statehouse. Some legislators were ready to introduce a bill relieving the townspeople of that burden, but Lincoln “objected, and, though fully appreciating the kindly feelings that prompted the proposal, insisted that the money should and would be paid.”85
The legislature adjourned on February 1, 1840, after reviving the State Bank, continuing support for the Illinois and Michigan Canal (but otherwise cutting back on internal improvements), and incorporating the town of Springfield while leaving unchanged its new status as state capital. Characteristically, Lincoln had answered 145 of 169 roll calls.
Well before adjournment, Lincoln and other Whigs girded for the presidential election. Thanks to the hard times caused by the Panic of 1837, they had a good chance to win. Illinois Whigs had at first opposed the convention system adopted by the Democrats, believing it to be “a Yankee contrivance, intended to abridge the liberties of the people, by depriving individuals, on their own mere motion, of the privilege of becoming candidates, and depriving each man of the right to vote for a candidate of his own selection and choice.”86 Eventually, however, defeat at the polls forced them to reconsider. David Davis told a fellow Whig in 1839: “The longer I live the more I am convinced that unless the Whigs of this State organize through Conventions they will be beaten at the next General election. Candidates show themselves as plenty as blackberries.”87 The following year Lincoln and four party colleagues declared that a “disbanded yeomanry cannot successfully meet an organized soldiery.”88 In September 1839, the Whigs of Sangamon County urged their counterparts throughout Illinois to send representatives to a state convention the following month. That conclave chose delegates to the Whig national convention, passed resolutions, adopted a plan for organizing the state, and drafted an address to the people. Lincoln was named one of the five Whig presidential electors and placed on the Whig State Central Committee, which the Democrats derisively called the “Junto.” The delegates endorsed the presidential candidacies of both Henry Clay and William Henry Harrison.
Although Lincoln deeply admired Clay, he supported Harrison for expediency’s sake. An 1838 editorial in the Sangamo Journal, probably by Lincoln, declared (in words which had personal resonance for him) that Harrison’s nomination would “proclaim to the world, that poverty shall never arrest virtue and intelligence on their march to distinction.” Furthermore, Harrison had earned his country’s gratitude for “arduous and valuable services to the community.”89 A May 1839, letter in the Sangamo Journal, also probably by Lincoln, argued that Harrison was more electable than Clay. Acknowledging his admiration for Clay, the author nonetheless noted “that the people—the bone and sinew of the country—the main pillar of the republic—I mean the farming and laboring classes” favored Harrison. The author, who signed himself “A Voice from Southern Illinois,” added that “the people are for Gen. Harrison, and be it whim or not—they must be humored or the Vannites [Democrats] will take advantage of the deep toned feeling of the public mind in his favor, and a victory which is properly our’s will be their’s.”90
In December 1839, delegates to the first Whig national convention agreed with Lincoln, passing over Clay and the other conspicuous leader of the party, Daniel Webster, to nominate the popular, colorless Harrison and send him forth unencumbered by a platform. When a Democratic newspaper sneered at Harrison’s simple ways (“Give him a barrel of hard cider and settle a pension of two thousand a year upon him, and our word for it, he will sit the remainder of his days content in a log cabin”), the Whigs made a virtue of them.91 Instead of principles, he would run on his military record, his humble log-cabin origins, and his fondness for egalitarian hard cider rather than elitist champagne. Some Whig organizers eagerly seized the political low ground, believing that “passion and prejudice, properly aroused and directed, would do about as well as principle in a party contest,” and that to “correct the abuses of the [Van Buren] Administration is sufficient motive to vigorous and efficient effort, and in politics, as well as in Philosophy—it is unwise to give more reasons than are necessary.”92 They ridiculed Van Buren as an aristocrat who ate with gold cutlery, wore silk hose and ruffled shirts, scented himself with perfume, and primped before immense mirrors. In a circular signed by the Illinois Whig central committee, including Lincoln, the president was termed effeminate and luxury-loving.93 Whigs championed Harrison, by contrast, as a true man of the people, content with homespun clothes and log-cabin rusticity.
The campaign insulted the intelligence of many thoughtful people. An Illinois Whig leader, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, declared that observers of the 1840 contest “would have supposed that the whole world had run mad, and rushed into the wild contest on the sublime issues, that log-cabins are the best of all buildings, hard-cider the most delicious of all drinks, and coon-skins the finest of all furs. In no age or country, perhaps, since the dawn of civilization, has humbuggery been exhibited in more gigantic and grotesque forms than in the Harrison campaign of 1840.” When Bledsoe expressed “intense mortification that the Whig Party, which had claimed a monopoly of all the intelligence and decency of the country, should descend to the use of such means,” Lincoln replied: “It is all right; we must fight the devil with fire; we must beat the Democrats, or the country will be ruined.” In response to Bledsoe’s protest that ends do not justify means, Lincoln “looked very grave” but “said nothing.”94
Lincoln was not alone in his evident embarrassment. A British visitor reported that many Whigs “seemed to be a little ashamed of the arts to which their own party had had recourse, in order to enlist the labouring classes in their ranks.” Noting that the Democrats had used hickory poles to win support for Andrew Jackson (“Old Hickory”) in earlier campaigns, some Whigs rationalized that “one piece of vulgarity and bad taste was justified by another.” Thus “neither party had dignity or independence enough to rise superior to such absurdities.”95 A case in point was the New York Whig who reasoned that since his party had been “broken down by the popularity and non-committal character of old Jackson,” it was “but fair to turn upon, and prostrate our opponents, with the weapons … with which they beat us.”96
Lincoln took charge of the Harrison campaign in traditionally Democratic Illinois, where “the idea prevailed … that all things were fair in politics, love, and war.”97 He predicted the state would turn Whig in 1840. In January, he reported to John Todd Stuart that the “nomination of Harrison takes first rate. You know I am never sanguine; but I believe we will carry the state. The chance for doing so, appears to me 25 per cent better than it did for you to beat Douglass.”98 In the fall and winter of 1839–1840, he helped organize two series of debates with Democrats, the first of which took place in November. They were preceded by informal political discussions in Joshua Speed’s store, where one evening Douglas accused the Whigs of committing every imaginable political crime and challenged his opponents to a public debate. The Whig spokesmen were Lincoln, Cyrus Walker, and Edward D. Baker; the Democrats were represented by Douglas, John Calhoun, Josiah Lamborn, and Edmund R. Wiley.
The first debate took place on November 19, with Cyrus Walker making the Whig case and Doug
las the Democratic response; Lincoln had the final word. In the course of his remarks, Lincoln called the Democratic editors of the Springfield Register “liars” for alleging that he supported John Bennett instead of his old friend Bowling Green for a legislative seat. The Register chided Lincoln for the “assumed clownishness in his manner which does not become him.” According to that paper, he “will sometimes make his language correspond with this clownish manner, and he can thus frequently raise a loud laugh among his Whig hearers; but this entire game of buffoonery convinces the mind of no man, and is utterly lost on the majority of his audience.”99
The next night Douglas and Lincoln debated the Bank of the United States. Lincoln evidently did badly. The Register ridiculed his efforts and said that even Lincoln’s friends thought he had been whipped. One of those friends, Joseph Gillespie, had to agree that against Douglas “Lincoln did not come up to the requirements of the occasion.” Gillespie, who said he “never saw any man so much distressed,” thought that Lincoln “was conscious of his failure.”100 (Years later, Lincoln told a friend: “I’m one of the thinnest skinned men to any marks of impatience in my audience.”)101
Later that week, the fiery, hot-tempered, impulsive Edward D. Baker spoke for the Whigs. (One election day, the British-born Baker assaulted a prominent Democrat who had questioned his right to vote. Lincoln said that the bloody-faced Democrat was “the worst whipped man that he had ever seen.” In the Illinois General Assembly, Baker threatened to beat a judge who challenged his word.)102 Baker uttered some harsh words about George R. Weber, co-editor of the Illinois State Register, prompting Weber’s brother John to yell: “Pull him down!”103 Relaxing in his office on the second floor of the building where the debate took place, Lincoln heard the commotion below and promptly raced downstairs and beheld Baker confronted by a menacing crowd. Lincoln grabbed a stone pitcher and threatened to smash it on the head of anyone who attacked Baker.
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 27
