Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  The other boarders were drawn to Lincoln. The journalist Nathan Sargent, who served (appropriately enough) as sergeant-at-arms of the U.S. House, recalled that the Illinois Whig was “genial and liked,” “fond of fun and humor,” and “ever ready to match another’s story by one of his own.”25 Representative James Pollock of Pennsylvania found Lincoln “full of good humor, ready wit and with an unlimited fund of anecdote, which he would relate with a zest and manner that never failed to bring down the ‘Mess’, and restore harmony & smiles, when the peace of our little community was threatened by a too earnest or heated controversy on some of the exciting questions of the hour.”26

  Pollock, a puritanical “old fogy” Whig who in 1854 was elected governor of Pennsylvania as the candidate of the nativist Know–Nothing Party, angrily participated in one of those heated controversies. In January 1849, Pollock criticized a bill concerning the admission to the Union of California and New Mexico, causing an exceptionally heated row. When he denounced Giddings as an irresponsible agitator, the Ohioan replied that he would not tolerate such criticism of his motives “by a miserable Doughface who had not mind enough to form an opinion nor courage enough to avow it.” Enraged by this insult, Pollock leaped up from the table and confronted Giddings, who also rose. Pollock quickly calmed down.27

  When such intemperate debates on slavery occurred at mealtime, Lincoln defused the tension with amusing anecdotes. Although he had strong feelings about slavery, he was careful to express them in such as way as to offend no one, even pro-slavery colleagues. When he was preparing to share an anecdote, he would set down his utensils, put his elbows on the table, cup his face in his hands, and preface his remarks with “That reminds me.” His fellow diners keenly relished the prospect of a hilarious recitation. They liked him not only for his humor but also for his amiability, kindness, and unpretentious manners.28

  Lincoln often relaxed with messmates or other congressmen at a nearby bowling alley. Although he was quite awkward at the sport, he enjoyed it and played with gusto. Whenever it was known he was at the alley, people would make a point to drop by to listen to his stories, many of which were off-color. He modestly tried to make it appear that he had gotten his material from others, although his auditors suspected he was misleading them on that score.

  Popularity

  Lincoln’s humor won him friends all over Capitol Hill. Around Christmas of 1847, he began to frequent the small post office of the House of Representatives, where members often gathered to swap yarns. After diffidently remaining silent for a while, he eventually started to tell stories and quickly outstripped all competitors. His repertoire was so vast that he never repeated a story but, as a reporter put it, delivered one after another “like the successive charges in a magazine gun, and always pertinently adapted to some passing event.” His tales of the Black Hawk War were especially popular with newspaper correspondents, who were bored by congressional pomposity.29

  In Washington he picked up several new stories, some of them quite obscene. Representative William M. Cocke of Tennessee remembered that whenever he “saw a knot of Congressmen together laughing I knew that they were surrounding Lincoln and listening to his filthy stories.”30 Moses Hampton of Pennsylvania recalled two such off-color tales, one involving an “old Virginian stropping his razor on a certain member of a young negro’s body” and the other about “the old woman[’]s fish” which “get[s] larger, the more it is handled.”31

  Colleagues in the House admired not only Lincoln’s humor but also his character and personality. In May 1848, a Washington correspondent reported that “no member of whom I have any knowledge, possesses in a higher degree the respect and confidence of the House” than Lincoln—heady praise for a newcomer.32 A few months later, another journalist called Lincoln a “universal favorite here—an entirely self-made man, and of singular and striking personal appearance.”33 His colleagues praised his warmth, generosity, magnanimity, and practical common sense.

  Lincoln was especially grateful for the treatment he received from the renowned educational reformer and antislavery militant, Horace Mann. In 1865, Lincoln told Mann’s sister-in-law that he “was very kind to me” and “it was something to me at that time to have him so—for he was a distinguished man in his way—and I was nobody.”34 Among those members whom Lincoln especially liked was Daniel M. Barringer of North Carolina, with whom he shared a desk and many meals.

  In addition to his character and humor, Lincoln’s oratorical prowess won him respect. Charles H. Brainard, a Washington-based publisher who saw Lincoln often during his congressional term, reported that whenever the Illinois Whig “addressed the House, he commanded the individual attention of all present.” If occasionally his speeches “lacked rhetorical grace and finish, they had directness and precision, and never failed to carry conviction to every candid mind, while his sallies of wit and humor, and his quick repartee whenever he was interrupted by questions from his political opponents, would be followed by peals of laughter from all parts of the hall.”35

  This was no small accomplishment in a chamber whose notoriously poor acoustics made it difficult to hear speakers. The 60-foot-high domed ceiling, modeled on the Pantheon at Rome, created a distracting echo. Almost every member had difficulty hearing and making himself heard. To be audible, a speaker had to strain to the utmost. Frequently, reporters for the Congressional Globe, unable to make out what was said on the floor, noted that the remarks of an honorable gentleman were inaudible. In 1844, John J. Hardin complained that of “all the places to speak or to try & do any business, the Hall of the House is the worst I ever saw. I would prefer speaking in a pig pen with 500 hogs squealing … or talk to a mob when a fight is going on, or endeavor to speak to a set of men at a muster when the studs are exhibiting—than to try to fix the attention of the House. Not one man in fifty can make himself heard on acc[oun]t of the construction of the Hall, & no one but J Q Adams is even listened to by the House, unless there is a quarrel going on or the prospect of a row is brewing. Last week the scenes in the House would have disgraced the meanest western grocery. Bullying & Billingsgate are the only order of the day.”36

  Although the House’s acoustics were poor, the 95-foot-long chamber was, as Charles Dickens observed a “beautiful and spacious hall, of semicircular shape, supported by handsome pillars.” Dickens also reported that the chamber was “handsomely carpeted” but deplored the “state to which these carpets are reduced by the universal disregard of the spittoon with which every honourable [i.e., Representative] is accommodated.” The “extraordinary improvements on the pattern which are squirted and dabbled upon it in every direction, do not admit of being described,” Dickens added.37 Statues of Liberty and History, as well as full-length portraits of Washington and Lafayette, decorated the hall. Crimson drapery festooned the spaces between the twenty-six massive marble columns. Light was provided by an unreliable gas system, which one member in 1849 described disapprovingly: “our gas has just gone out for the second time, giving us a very bright stink but the darkest possible light.”38 That Representative also found the Capitol bewildering, “a series of blind, gloomy and crooked labyrinths, through which a stranger threads his devious way with difficulty.”39

  Unlike her husband, Mary Lincoln enjoyed little popularity, and by April 1848, she had returned to her father’s home in Lexington. She may have been lonely, for there were few congressional wives with whom to socialize. (In 1845, only 72 of the 221 members of the House were accompanied by family members.) At the boardinghouse, Mary Lincoln seldom appeared save at mealtime. Some boarders at Mrs. Sprigg’s, like those in the Globe Tavern five years earlier, found her disagreeable. On April 16, 1848, Lincoln wrote her saying that all the guests “or rather, all with whom you were on decided good terms—send their love to you. The others say nothing.” Lincoln had mixed feelings about his wife’s absence. “In this troublesome world,” he told her, “we are never quite satisfied. When you were here, I thought you hindered me some i
n attending to business; but now, having nothing but business—no variety—it has grown exceedingly tasteless to me. I hate to sit down and direct documents, and I hate to stay in this old room by myself.”40

  Such loneliness afflicted other congressmen, including Joshua Giddings, who complained to his spouse in June 1848: “last Sunday I was home with wife children & friends[;] now here [I am] solitary and alone in the midst of so many thousands surrounded with heated walls and almost burning pavements. I am homesick.”41 In 1854, Richard Yates, representing Lincoln’s district, lamented to Mrs. Yates: “You speak of being lonely but I do assure you that you cannot feel near as lonely as I do. Sometimes a feeling of loneliness comes over me which is nearly insupportable. The days are weeks and the weeks months.”42

  Life of a Freshman Representative

  Like many of his colleagues, Lincoln found routine congressional work unrewarding. In 1844, John J. Hardin told a law partner: “Having a seat in Congress is not the thing it is cracked up to be.” Almost nothing “about life in Washington [is] desirable. There is a vast deal of … drudgery to do, in reading & writing letters on business which no lawyer would attend to, & which would not pay him if he did. Still they must be answered. The Hours of eating here destroy all business habits, & the Hours of the House destroy a man’s health.”43

  Representatives usually spent their mornings answering correspondence, visiting government offices on behalf of constituents, attending committee meetings, and conning newspapers. House sessions customarily ran from noon till early evening, at which time caucuses were often held. Committee work could be tedious, as Isaac Holmes of South Carolina noted when he remarked that the Commerce Committee spent two-thirds of its time “with the consideration of such subjects as bounties on codfish, while the vastly more important subjects were greatly neglected.”44

  As a lowly freshman, Lincoln occupied an undesirable seat at the back of the House chamber in what was known as the “Cherokee Strip” on the Whig side of the aisle. He also was assigned to unimportant committees (those on Expenditures in the War Department and on Post Offices and Post Roads). The chairman of the latter said that “no man on that Committee worked more industriously than he [Lincoln] did.”45

  The House teemed with activity. The Representatives’ desks made the lower chamber a convenient place for them to take care of their correspondence and other business, much to the annoyance of colleagues who were addressing them. Even more annoying was the cacophony created by members clapping their hands to summon ubiquitous page boys for various chores, like delivering messages, or fetching water, newspapers, and envelopes. A Representative’s wife likened the “confusion and noise of the House of Representatives” to “a hundred swarms of bees.”46 In 1849, a Kentuckian reported that the House “is but a continued scene of dissension, distraction, disorder, and uproar. No speech is listened to while the floor is occupied—the honorable members are skipping to and fro, laughing, talking, whispering, cursing one another, slapping their hands together, rapping on the desk for the messenger boys, &c.,—altogether making a bedlam that outlives the pit of a theatre or tap room. It is impossible to hear a speech in the galleries.”47 From those galleries, Horace Greeley noted, a visitor could “look down on the noisy Bedlam,” which would “give him large opportunities for headache, meagre ones for edification.”48

  To many Representatives, their colleagues’ inattention made little difference, for speeches were designed for home consumption, while the real business of the House was transacted in committees and private consultations. In the first several months of 1848, the desultory debates in the House lacked interest and relevance. Whenever a dull speaker took the floor, “a forest of newspapers” appeared, as members caught up on their reading.49 In early February 1848, a Massachusetts Representative reported that he and his colleagues “have not done much business” and complained that “there does not appear to be a disposition to do so.”50 Small wonder that Lincoln’s immediate predecessors disparaged the House: “The most stupid place generally I was ever in,” said John J. Hardin, while Edward Baker lamented that the “House is dull and so are many of its members.”51

  Much time was wasted on private bills, which formed “rather a tedious and stupid subject of debate.”52 Most of the claims that Congress investigated were not acted upon, for a legislative body was ill-suited to function as a court of claims.

  The House Whig leadership in Lincoln’s term lacked distinction, though the octogenarian John Quincy Adams was still serving. But “Old Man Eloquent” was well beyond his prime. The majority leaders, Samuel Vinton of Ohio (chairman of the Ways and Means Committee) and Truman Smith of Connecticut (de facto national party chairman since 1842), enjoyed a reputation for above-average sagacity, but the shrewd, savvy, well-informed Smith lacked oratorical skills and, like the conservative Vinton, was no match for Adams in his heyday. Nor was House speaker Robert C. Winthrop, a mild-mannered, touchy, hyper-dignified Boston Brahmin who reportedly was “so timid that when he had bid a friend good-night he would call him aside and ask him not to say anything about it.”53

  Speeches

  Much as Lincoln enjoyed the popularity that his humor and personality won him, he aspired to do more than merely ingratiate himself with his colleagues, a slight majority of whom were Whigs. (Lincoln was also in the occupational majority: three-quarters of the Representatives were lawyers.) On December 13, 1847, Lincoln told his law partner: “As you are all so anxious for me to distinguish myself, I have concluded to do so, before long.”54

  Lincoln hoped to accomplish this goal with a memorable speech. Speechmaking was vitally important to new members, whose maiden efforts always attracted close critical attention. As one journalist noted, a “young Representative is anxious to show to the world in general, and to his constituents in particular, that he is somebody.… To make one set speech, at least, is therefore the great idea of his Congressional life.” He longed “to make a spectacle of himself for one brief hour,” preferably early in the session, to “show his constituents that he is ever on hand, prompt in attention to their great interests.”55 Lincoln decided to make his mark with a speech on the Mexican War, which many Whig members condemned.

  Lincoln’s brief initial speech, given on January 5, did not prove to be his magnum opus. It dealt with a government mail contract and was not a conspicuous success. He presented his argument in the form of a legal pleading. Congressman Joseph Root of Ohio said of it: “This whole matter was treated by the gentleman from Illinois precisely as if the House were sitting as a court of equity, having before them the railroad company, the Post Office Department, and such of the good people of the United State[s] as were interested in the expedition of this mail; and he seemed to consider that the only question was, what is right between the parties?”56 As a Democratic journalist put it, Lincoln labored under a common misapprehension among freshman members of the House, who falsely assumed “that if they were only in that body they would say this, or do that, and then it would be settled.”57 He was interrupted at the beginning of his remarks and admonished that he must not reveal in debate what had taken place in committee deliberations.

  Lincoln’s party, which had been critical of the Mexican War since it began in May 1846, intended to make President James K. Polk’s conduct of hostilities a centerpiece of the presidential campaign. Those plans were scotched in February 1848 when a peace treaty arrived in Washington and won senate ratification the following month. Attention then shifted to the president’s justification for going to war in the first place.

  On December 22, 1847, Lincoln introduced a series of resolutions asking Polk to supply information about the commencement of the war. In his annual message earlier that month, the president had insisted that the conflict began as a result of Mexican soldiers “invading the territory of the State of Texas, striking the first blow, and shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil.”58 In eight legalistic interrogatories, which became known as “spot resolutions,�
� Lincoln clearly intimated that the soil where blood was initially spilled was not American and that in the spring of 1846 Polk had dispatched troops to Mexico in order to provoke an attack. Lincoln was particularly graphic in inquiring if “the People of that settlement [where hostilities began], did, or did not, flee from the approach of the United States Army, leaving unprotected their homes and their growing crops, before the blood was shed.”59 Polk ignored these interrogatories.

  Lincoln ran a risk in questioning the legitimacy of the war, for as his colleague James Dixon of Connecticut said in making a similar point: “I know full well, that if a man says he does not believe the region on this side of the Rio Grande is American soil, he will instantly be denounced as a traitor.”60 This bold gesture by Illinois’s lone Whig Representative prompted a Baltimore journalist to remark that Lincoln’s questions “stick to the spot in Mexico, where the first blood of the war was shed, with all the tightness that characterized the fabled shirt of the fabled Nessus! Evidently there is music in that very tall Mr. Lincoln.”61 Back in Illinois, Whig journals also applauded Lincoln’s resolutions as “direct to the point” and “based on facts which cannot be successfully controverted.”62

  Democratic newspapers sneered at Lincoln’s “pathetic lamentation over the fate of those Mexicans,” a statement that strongly contrasted with “his cold indifference in regard to our own slaughtered citizens.”63 The Illinois Globe of Charleston claimed that Lincoln’s spot resolutions “show conclusively, that the littleness of the pettifoging lawyer has not been merged into the greatness of the statesman.”64 Lincoln’s indirect attack on Polk reminded the editor of the Ottawa Free Trader of a “hen-roost robbing coon.”65 Charles Lanphier, editor of the Illinois State Register, told a Democratic congressman: “Our long legged friend from the 7th dist. has very properly damned himself ‘by resolution.’ … He may well exclaim ‘out damned spot,’ for Cain’s mark is on him. Give him hell.”66 Lanphier’s newspaper did just that, declaring that Lincoln’s resolutions encouraged “moral traitors” to hope that they could “make a respectable fight against the defenders of the country’s honor.”67 The Chicago Times claimed that Lincoln “made himself ridiculous and odious … in giving aid and comfort to the Mexican enemy.”68