As this anecdote suggests, Lincoln was notoriously indulgent to his sons. William Herndon observed that Lincoln was “so blinded to his children’s faults” that if “they s[hi]t in Lincoln’s hat and rubbed it on his boots, he would have laughed and thought it smart.… He worshipped his children and what they worshipped; … disliked what the[y] hated, which was everything that did not bend to their … whims.” Herndon complained that when the boys came to the office with their father, they “would take down the books—empty ash buckets—coal ashes—inkstands—papers—gold pens—letters etc., etc. in a pile and then dance on the pile.”238 Many Springfield residents shared Herndon’s view that Lincoln “was too kind, too tender & too gentle to his children: he had no domestic government—administration or order.” Herndon added that Lincoln “was liberal—generous—affectionate to his children, loving them with his whole heart, … as loving & tender as a nursing mother.”239 Mary Lincoln recalled her husband’s statement about childrearing: “It [is my] pleasure that my children are free—happy & unrestrained by parental tyranny. Love is the chain whereby to Lock a child to its parents.”240 A Springfield neighbor remembered having a meal at the Lincoln house: “Mr. Lincoln was carving the chicken, and the first thing he did was to cut off the drumstick and gave it to Tad …, and then he said, smiling at the rest of the company, ‘Children have first place here, you know.’ ”241
The visit with Mary’s family went smoothly in part because Robert Smith Todd was fond of his son-in-law, whom he had met at Springfield in 1843. That visit pleased Mary because her father and husband came to like each other. She and Lincoln pledged to take the first convenient opportunity to visit Lexington. To help the newlyweds out, Todd gave them 80 acres of land near Springfield, provided annual gifts for the remaining six years of his life (totaling over $1,100), and assigned to them notes of various Illinois merchants who owed him money. Lincoln, who in 1843 told Joshua Speed that he could not come to Kentucky because of “poverty,” doubtless appreciated these funds.242
In 1844, Robert Smith Todd offered to assist Lincoln politically. He explained to Ninian W. Edwards: “Mr. Lincoln I discover is using his influence & talents for the Whig Cause.… I can use influence here if Mr Clay is elected (of which there can be no doubt) to procure some appointment for him, which will keep him out of Congress until his Situation in a monied point of view, will enable him to take a stand in Congress, creditable both to himself and Country. Such as District Attorney or Judge.”243 Todd confided to Edwards that “I feel more than grateful that my daughters all have married gentlemen whom I respect and esteem, and I should be pleased if it could ever be in my power to give them a more substantial evidence of my feelings than in mere words or professions.… I will be satisfied if they discharge all their duties and make as good wives as I think they have good husbands.”244
Arriving at the Todd house shortly after the irate Joseph Humphreys, the Lincolns were warmly received. During this vacation, Lincoln spent much time reading periodicals like Niles Register and a poetry anthology, including William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” which he committed to memory. In that volume, titled Elegant Extracts, or Useful and Entertaining Passages from the Best English Authors and Translations, Lincoln marked with a pencil some verses, including Pope’s couplet: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The Proper study of Mankind is man.”
He scribbled marginalia next to these lines from “The Grave,” by John Blair:
The last end
Of the good man is peace. How calm his exit.
Night dews fall not more gently to the ground,
Nor weary, worn-out winds expire so soft
Lincoln might have been thinking of his wife when he marked this passage from “Love of Fame”:
A dearth of words, a woman need not fear;
But ’tis a task indeed to learn to hear.
Doubly like Echo sound is her delight,
And the last word is her eternal right.
Is’t not enough plagues, wars and famines rise
To lash our crimes, but must our wives be wise? 245
Lincoln was so impressed with Cowper’s poem “Charity,” dealing with slavery and the slave trade, that “he bracketed and even turned down the page upon which it appeared.” He marked the following verses:
Oh that the voice of clamor & debate
That pleads for peace ’til it disturbs the State
Were hushed in favor of thy generous plea,
The poor thy clients, and heaven’s smile thy fee.246
From the same poem he also made notations beside these lines:
But Ah! What wish can prosper, or what prayer
For merchants rich in cargoes of despair,
Who drive a loathsome traffic, gauge and span,
And buy the muscles and the bones of man?
The tender ties of father, husband, friend,
All bonds of nature in that moment end;
And each endures, while yet he draws breath,
A stroke as fatal as the scythe of death.247
During this visit Lincoln had ample opportunity to observe the cruelties of slavery. In Lexington newspapers, he may well have read advertisements like this one placed by a slave dealer: “Those who have slaves rendered unfit for labor by Yaws, Scrofula, Chronic Diarrhea, Negro Consumption, Rheumatism &c, and who wish to dispose of them on reasonable terms will address J. King, No. 29 Camp St., New Orleans.”248 His in-laws may have explained to Lincoln that in Louisiana, some plantations of absentee owners were run by overseers who deliberately worked to death such diseased slaves, whom they bought cheap. The future president may also have heard tales about the notoriously ill-tempered Caroline A. Turner, who savagely mistreated her slaves, killing half a dozen before one strangled her to death.
In Lexington, Lincoln could observe slavery as well as read and hear about it. He doubtless saw the public square, with its slave auction block and whipping post, where some blacks were openly flogged. Lincoln may have seen coffles file by the Todd house, for Lexington was the state’s principal slave market. The noisome holding pens of a slave dealer practically abutted the home of Mary Lincoln’s grandmother, the redoubtable Elizabeth R. Parker. Lincoln perhaps witnessed auctions there or at the public square, where one was held in mid-November, when a man sold five of his slaves to satisfy a judgment obtained against him by Robert Smith Todd.
From his wife’s older relatives, Lincoln probably heard stories about his own kin, including his great-uncle, Thomas Lincoln, who had settled a few miles outside Lexington and prospered until his marriage to a physically abusive wife ended in divorce. (Lincoln may have derived some comfort from the knowledge that he was not the only man in the family with a violent spouse.)
On November 13, Lincoln heard Henry Clay launch his fourth attempt to win the presidency with a speech about James K. Polk’s actions precipitating the war with Mexico, a conflict still officially underway at the time. “This is no war of defence,” Clay charged, “but one unnecessary and of offensive aggression. It is Mexico that is defending her fire-sides, her castles and her altars, not we.” Plaintively he asked: “Must we blindly continue the conflict, without any visible object, or any prospect of a definite termination?” He declared that all nations “look upon us, in the prosecution of the present war, as being actuated by a spirit of rapacity, and an inordinate desire for territorial aggrandizement.” He emphatically opposed the extension of slavery into any territory acquired from Mexico: “I have ever regarded slavery as a great evil, a wrong, for the present, I fear, an irremediable wrong to its unfortunate victims. I should rejoice if not a single slave breathed the air or was within the limits of our country.”249
With these words ringing in his ears, Lincoln soon left Kentucky to take his seat in Congress, where he would denounce President Polk’s Mexican War policy and try to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. Accompanying him was a wife who aspired “to loom largely” in the nation’s capital.250
8
“A Strong but Judicious Enemy to Slavery”
Congressman Lincoln
(1847–1849)
Lincoln’s entire public service on the national level before his election as president was a single term in the U.S. House. Although he had little chance to distinguish himself there, his experience proved a useful education in dealing with Congress and patronage.
Washington, D.C.
Arriving in Washington on December 2, 1847, the Lincolns found themselves in a small, dark, dingy train depot, widely considered a disgrace to both the city and the railroad company. As they emerged from this unfortunate structure, they beheld an “an ill-contrived, ill-arranged, rambling, scrambling village” of approximately 40,000 souls.1
Europeans expressed scorn for the capital, which reminded an Englishwoman “of a vast plantation with houses purposely kept far apart to give them room to grow and spread.”2 Eminent British novelists were especially critical. Charles Dickens described it as “the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva,” a “City of Magnificent Intentions,” with “spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, miles-long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete.”3 Anthony Trollope wrote in 1862: “Of all places that I know it is the most ungainly,” the “most unsatisfactory,” and “the most presumptuous in its pretensions. There is a map of Washington accurately laid down; and taking that map with him in his journeyings a man may lose himself in the streets … as one does … in the deserts of the Holy Land, between Emmaus and Arimathea.” Trollope lamented that “no one knows where the places are, or is sure of their existence, and then between their presumed localities the country is wild, trackless, unbridged, uninhabited and desolate.” Trollope described a walk along one of the city’s main thoroughfares, Massachusetts Avenue: “Tucking your trousers up to your knees, you will wade through the bogs, you will lose yourself among rude hillocks, you will be out of the reach of humanity.”4
Yet another Briton, Alexander MacKay, thought that “at best, Washington is but a small town, a fourth-rate community.”5 The Chevalier de Bacourt disparaged the “miserable, desolate look” of “the so-called city of Washington,” which in his view was “neither city nor village” but rather “a collection of houses put anywhere and everywhere with no regularity.”6
Some Americans were also taken aback by their capital. A Bostonian protested that Washington “covers too much ground to generate a cheerful spirit, for vastness is repellant to the social pleuare of unceremonious visiting.” Moreover, it lacked “the native aristocracy of wealth or talent to be found in the commercial cities.”7 In 1854, Mark Twain praised the city’s public buildings but not their setting. To him, they looked like “so many palaces in a Hottentot village.”8 Carl Schurz described Washington as “a strange-looking city. Imagine a broad street lined on both sides with hotels and shops, then wide stretches of open country and again streets interrupted by vacant lots; groups of houses scattered about in apparent disorder, with here and there a marble palace which contains one of the Government Departments. This strange jumble leaves the spectator in doubt whether all this grandeur is in a state of development or is already approaching decay.”9 He thought that the capital “had throughout a slouchy, unenterprising, unprogressive appearance.” The “departments of State, of War, and of the Navy were quartered in small, very insignificant-looking houses which might have been the dwellings of some well-to-do shop keepers who did not care for show. There was not one solidly built-up street in the whole city—scarcely a block without gaps of dreary emptiness.” Few residences “had the appearance of refined, elegant, and comfortable homes. The streets, ill-paved, if paved at all, were constantly covered with mud or dust.” Along those streets “geese, chickens, pigs, and cows had still a scarcely disputed right of way.”10 (One day in 1858, while strolling about the city, a senator was sent sprawling to the pavement by “a great, dirty pig.”)11
Despite its roaming livestock, noisome sewer system, and unpaved, unlit, garbage-strewn streets, Washington appeared splendid to some small-town Midwesterners. In 1849, an Illinoisan praised the capital as “a great city.” The “public buildings are superb,” he gushed, adding that “there is many now under the course of erection that will throw those built a few years ago entirely in the shade as regards architecture.” He called the view from the west portico of the Capitol “one of the finest that I have ever beheld,” for as “far as the eye can reach is but one mass of buildings while away to the right is the beautiful residences of oppulent citizens with their parks and yards beautifully embellished, whilst to the left rolls the majestic potomac its waters covered with vessels conveying merchandise.”12 Even the bumpy main thoroughfare, Pennsylvania Avenue, with its uneven, carriage-rattling cobblestones, impressed Lincoln’s Illinois friend Jesse W. Fell, who described it in 1841: “Casting my eyes into the spacious avenue that fronts the room in which I am writing and what a buisey scene is ther[e] presented.—Thousands of persons of every age and sex—of every character and complexion—and from almost every part of the world—constitute the living, moving mass. Some brought here on business—some sent here by the sovereign people—some in search of office—some for pleasure—some for mischief—and all of them busily intent on the prosecution of their respective objects, make up this great, bustling bab[b]le.”13
Another Midwesterner, however—Ohio Senator Benjamin F. Wade—found the city objectionable because of its large black population. An antislavery Radical who was to denounce Lincoln during the Civil War for his tardiness in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Wade observed upon arriving at the capital in 1851: “On the whole, this is a mean God forsaken Nigger rid[d]en place. The Niggers are certainly the most intelligent part of the population but the Nigger smell I cannot bear, yet it is in on and about every thing you see.” Wade lamented that the food was “cooked by Niggers, until I can smell & taste the Nigger.”14
For the political elite, life in Washington combined “magnificence and squalor.” In 1851, Mary Elizabeth Wilson Sherwood reported that dinner parties there were “handsome and very social, the talk delightful,” but she deplored the conduct of congressmen from the Southwest who “got fearfully drunk at dinners.”15 Decades later, Mrs. Sherwood exclaimed: “How primitive Washington was in those days!” The “small, straggling city, with very muddy streets,” she wrote, was “cold and dreary in winter then; the houses were insufficiently heated, the hotels abominable.” But in a capital noted for “the proud prominence of intellect over material prosperity,” she found that “high thinking” helped offset “plain living.”16
Washington was a town full of men, for the wives of most members of Congress did not accompany their spouses. Those footloose lawmakers were, as a journalist noted, “exposed to many strong temptations” and hence were “too often corrupted by evil example and impure association.”17 A British visitor grew disenchanted with the “coarse, unattractive surface” of Washington society, where “the social sway of women” was limited.18
Like the capital of Illinois, Washington was exciting only when the legislature was in session. Upon the adjournment of Congress, the city reverted to its customary, dull monotony.
For a few days, the newly arrived Lincolns resided at The Indian Queen, a shabby hotel, unimpressive even by the low standards of Pennsylvania Avenue. Soon thereafter, like most members of the Thirtieth Congress, they settled at one of the city’s numerous boardinghouses. They chose Mrs. Ann Sprigg’s, located on a site where the Library of Congress was later built. It formed part of Carroll Row, across from the Capitol. That structure was surmounted by a wooden dome and lacked the wings it would eventually acquire.
Theodore Dwight Weld, a prominent abolitionist who roomed at Mrs. Sprigg’s in 1842, depicted it thus: “The iron railing around the Capitol Park comes within fifty feet of our door. Our dining room overlooks the whole Capitol Park which is one mile around and fi
lled with shade trees and shrubbery. I have a pleasant room on the second floor with a good bed, plenty of covering, a bureau, table, chairs, closets and clothes press, a good fire place, and plenty of dry wood to burn in it. We have about twenty boarders, mostly members of Congress.” Weld explained that his Virginia-bred landlady was “not a slaveholder, but hires slaves. She has eight servants all colored, 3 men, one boy and 4 women. All are free but 3 which she hires and these are buying themselves.”19
The Lincolns admired Mrs. Sprigg. During the Civil War, Lincoln called her “a most worthy and deserving lady,” and even the sharp-tongued Mary said she “found her a most estimable lady.”20
Eight of Lincoln’s fellow congressmen lived at Mrs. Sprigg’s, known informally as “the Abolition house.”21 Among them was Joshua R. Giddings of Ohio, the most radical antislavery Representative, whose sobriquets included “the [General] Blucher of abolitionism” and “the Lion of Ashtabula, [Ohio].” Giddings was 6 feet 2 inches tall, courageous, self-assured, impossible to intimidate, and ever prepared to battle for righteousness; he declared that in Congress “I allways make the fir fly.”22 In 1846, he taunted a Georgia Representative who threatened him with a pistol and a sword-cane: “Come on! The people of Ohio don’t send cowards here!”23 Upon Congressman John Quincy Adams’s death in February 1848, Giddings assumed leadership of the antislavery forces in the House. Another of Lincoln’s messmates opposed to slavery was John Dickey of Pennsylvania, who struck a fellow boarder as “a very offensive man in manner and conversation” and “seemed to take special pleasure in ventilating his opinions and provoking unpleasant discussions.”24
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 46
