Lincoln offered characteristically modest estimates of his own stature as an attorney. In 1860, while discussing the political antecedents of a Pennsylvania leader, he remarked: “I suppose we could say of General Cameron, without offence, that he is ‘not Democrat enough to hurt him.’ I remember that people used to say, without disturbing my self-respect, that I was not lawyer enough to hurt me.”231 Likening himself to swine scavenging acorns in a forest, he said: “I’m only a mast-fed lawyer.”232 According to a resident of one of the towns in which Lincoln practiced on the circuit, he was “aware of his inferiority as a lawyer” and always ready to acknowledge it “with a smile or a good natured remark,” which endeared him to his colleagues.233
It is hard to assess the importance of Lincoln’s legal career in shaping his political life. Certainly, his widespread practice on the Eighth Circuit helped acquaint him with many voters, and that experience enhanced his uncanny ability to read public opinion. The friends he made on the circuit (among them David Davis, Leonard Swett, and John Todd Stuart) lent invaluable assistance in promoting his political fortunes. Lincoln’s work as a legal draftsman doubtless contributed to his ability to write terse, precise prose and to think through such difficult legal subjects as emancipation and habeas corpus. His knowledge of human nature was deepened by widespread contact with all sorts of people in court and out, and his powers of persuasion were strengthened. He honed his God-given talent as a logician during his twenty-four years at the bar. In his practice, he settled innumerable disputes, a task he performed regularly in the White House. In all these ways, Lincoln’s legal career helped prepare him for greatness as president.
But that greatness rested largely on his moral vision, which was little fostered by an adversarial legal system in which he acted as a hired gun. Such a system can easily produce a kind of ethical agnosticism. Fortunately for the nation, it did not do so in Lincoln’s case.
Political Dabbling
From 1849 to 1854, Lincoln retained some interest in politics, though nothing like what he had shown in the previous seventeen years or the subsequent eleven. In June 1850, he refused to sign a call for a rally in support of the fateful compromise measures pending in Congress. In 1852, however, he did inject some political content into his eulogy on Henry Clay. After quoting the Great Compromiser’s eloquent defense of the American Colonization Society, Lincoln offered his own biting commentary on slavery: “Pharaoh’s country was cursed with plagues, and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea for striving to retain a captive people who had already served them more than four hundred years.”234 (This concern about divine punishment for the sin of slavery was to reappear in one of his greatest state papers, the second inaugural address.)
During the presidential campaign of 1852, Lincoln spoke occasionally on behalf of the Whig standard-bearer, Winfield Scott, for whom he served as an elector. As Lincoln observed in his 1860 autobiographical sketch, however, “he did something in the way of canvassing, but owing to the hopelessness of the cause in Illinois, he did less than in previous presidential canvasses.”235 The speech that he did give still reflected the immaturity of the pre-1854 Lincoln. In it he resorted to the ridicule and sarcasm that had long been his stock-in-trade. His remarks were prompted by Stephen A. Douglas, who had attacked Scott while praising the Democratic presidential nominee, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire. Responding to the Little Giant, Lincoln engaged in a lawyerlike quibble over the meaning of the word “with,” denounced “the utter absurdity” of Douglas’s arguments, and compared Pierce to a Springfield militia leader who rode at the head of his men “with a pine wood sword, about nine feet long, and a paste-board cocked hat, from front to rear about the length of an ox yoke, and very much the shape of one turned bottom upwards; and with spurs having rowls as large as the bottom of a teacup, and shanks a foot and a half long.” Lincoln pictured the Democratic nominee complying with the rules of the Springfield militia, which stipulated that “no man is to wear more than five pounds of cod-fish for epaulets, or more than thirty yards of bologna sausages for a sash.” Scott should fear, said Lincoln, that some day he would be attacked by Pierce “holding a huge roll of candy in one hand for a spy-glass; with B U T labelled on some appropriate part of his person; and with Abrams’ long pine sword cutting in the air at imaginary cannon balls, and calling out, ‘boys there’s a game of ball for you,’ and over all streaming the flag, with the motto, ‘We’ll fight till we faint, and I’ll treat when it’s over.’ ” He also criticized Pierce for expressing hostility to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and likened him to a mulatto.236
Midlife Crisis
This minor address was notable as the last such crude partisan speech that Lincoln would ever deliver. Between 1849 and 1854, while sitting on the political sidelines and devoting himself outwardly to the practice of law, Lincoln inwardly was undergoing a profound transformation, successfully wrestling with the challenges of midlife. Little documentation of his inner life survives; he kept no diary, seldom wrote revealing personal letters, and confided few of his innermost thoughts to anyone. Yet he was clearly trying to come to grips with the questions that many men address, consciously or unconsciously, as they pass from the first half of life to the second half during their early forties: What do I really want from life? Is the structure of my life so far truly satisfactory? What kind of legacy do I wish to leave? Have I paid too much attention to the demands of the outer world and conformed too much to its pressures? What do I hope to accomplish with the rest of my days? What do I really care about most? What are my basic beliefs? How have I failed to live up to the dream I formed many years ago? How can I realistically modify that dream? Have I suppressed parts of my personality that now need to be developed? How shall I deal with the uglier aspects of my personality? How have I behaved in a destructive fashion, and how have I in turn been affected by the destructiveness of others? Have I chosen the right career and the right spouse?
Introspection of this sort is often triggered by a sense of failure, which Lincoln painfully experienced. In 1857, a Democratic newspaper contemptuously observed that “Lincoln is undoubtedly the most unfortunate politician that has ever attempted to rise in Illinois. In everything he undertakes, politically, he seems doomed to failure. He has been prostrated often enough in his political schemes to have crushed the life out of any ordinary man.”237 As a political ally noted, Lincoln had plenty of setbacks to brood over: “He went into the Black Hawk war as a captain, and … came out a private. He rode to the hostile frontier on horseback, and trudged home on foot. His store ‘winked out.’ His surveyor’s compass and chain, with which he was earning a scanty living, were sold for debt. He was defeated in his first campaign for the legislature—defeated in his first attempt as a candidate for Congress. Four times he was defeated as a candidate for Presidential Elector, because the Whigs of Illinois were yet in a hopeless minority. He was defeated in his application to be appointed Commissioner of the General Land Office.”238 It was painful for Lincoln to reflect on these setbacks, for he was “keenly sensitive to his failures,” and any allusion to them made him “miserable,” according to Herndon.239 In his mid-forties he lamented, “With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure.”240 In reflecting on his legal career, he said: “I am not an accomplished lawyer. I find quite as much material for a lecture, in those points wherein I have failed, as in those wherein I have been moderately successful.”241 In 1855, he remarked “with much feeling” that “men are greedy to publish the success of [their] efforts, but meanly shy as to publishing the failures of men. Men are ruined by this one sided practice of concealment of blunders and failures.”242
Lincoln worried about his legacy. In 1851, he told Herndon: “How hard—oh how more than hard, it is to die and leave one’s Country no better for the life of him that lived and died her child.”243 Joshua Speed recalled Lincoln uttering a similar lament: “He said to me he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived—and t
hat to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day & generation and so impress himself upon them, as to link his name to something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man was what he desired to live for.”244
Lincoln’s obsession with death, which dated back to his youth, became even more marked in his early forties. A heightened awareness of mortality is common among men at that stage of life. In Lincoln’s case it became especially acute in 1850 when his second son, three-year-old Eddie, died after an illness of fifty-two days. Lincoln told a friend that if he “had twenty children he could never cease to sorrow for that one.”245 A poem, perhaps by Lincoln, appeared in the Illinois State Journal a week after the boy’s death. Titled “Little Eddie,” it read:
Those midnight stars are sadly dimmed,
That late so brilliantly shone,
And the crimson tinge from cheek and lip,
With the heart’s warm life has flown -
The angel of Death was hovering nigh,
And the lovely boy was called to die.
The silken waves of his glossy hair
Lie still over his marble brow,
And the pallid lip and pearly cheek
The presence of Death avow.
Pure little bud in kindness given,
In mercy taken to bloom in heaven.
Happier far is the angel child
With the harp and the crown of gold,
Who warbles now at the Savior’s feet
The glories to us untold.
Eddie, meet blossom of heavenly love,
Dwells in the spirit-world above.
Angel Boy—fare thee well, farewell
Sweet Eddie, We bid thee adieu!
Affection’s wail cannot reach thee now
Deep though it be, and true.
Bright is the home to him now given
For “of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
The lad’s funeral was conducted by the Rev. Dr. James Smith, who frequently visited the grieving parents and provided what Lincoln gratefully called “loving and sympathetic ministrations.”246 Smith gave them a copy of his 676-page book, The Christian’s Defense, which (according to Smith) Lincoln found convincing. Mary Lincoln said her husband’s “heart, was directed towards religion” following Eddie’s death.247 Soon after the funeral, the Lincolns rented a pew in the First Presbyterian Church, where Smith served as pastor.
The following year, Lincoln’s father passed away. As Thomas lay dying near Charleston, a day’s journey from Springfield, Lincoln rejected his deathbed appeal for a visit. Coldly, Lincoln wrote his stepbrother, John D. Johnston, to tell their father “that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.”248 Lincoln neither attended Thomas’s funeral nor arranged for a tombstone to mark his grave.
In some men, the painful questioning that often occurs at midlife can lead to despair; in others, it produces stagnation. But it can also be a creative, if turbulent, period during which inner psychological growth takes place and leads to profound maturity. Out of the crucible of midlife introspection can emerge an awareness of one’s own identity and uniqueness that breeds self-confidence and inspires confidence in others. A hallmark of such psychological progress is an ability to overcome egotism, to avoid taking things personally, to accept one’s shortcomings and those of others with equanimity, to let go of things appropriate for youth and accept gladly the advantages and disadvantages of age. People able to meet these challenges successfully radiate a kind of psychological wholeness and rootedness that commands respect.
Lincoln was such a person after his period of retreat from politics. As he came to be more fully himself, Lincoln resembled the archetypal Kentuckian described by Ralph Waldo Emerson in a lecture that the future president heard and remembered. The Sage of Concord said that men from the Bluegrass State proclaim by their manners: “Here I am; if you don’t like me, the worse for you.”249 During the final eleven years of his life, Lincoln impressed people with what Herndon called “that peculiar nature … which distinguishes one person from another, as much to say ‘I am myself and not you.’ ”250 Joshua Speed, his closest friend, said: “If I was asked what it was that threw such charm around him, I would say it was his perfect naturalness. He could act no part but his own. He copied no one either in manner or style.”251 Lincoln “had no affectation in any thing,” Speed reported. “True to nature[,] true to himself, he was true to every body and every thing about and around him—When he was ignorant on any subject no matter how simple it might make him appear he was always willing to acknowledge it—His whole aim in life was to be true to himself & being true to himself he could be false to no one.”252 In 1859, a perceptive friend noted that what Lincoln “does and says is all his own. What Seward and others do you feel that you have read in books or speeches, or that it is a sort of deduction from what the world is full of. But what Lincoln does you feel to be something newly mined out—something above the ordinary.”253 John W. Forney, an influential newspaper editor who saw Lincoln often during his presidency, recalled that he “was a man of the most intense individuality, so that his capacity to stand alone, and, in a measure, outside of others, was one of the hidden forces of his character.”254 Admiral David Dixon Porter, who knew Lincoln in the Civil War, thought he “had an originality about him which was peculiarly his own.”255 John Littlefield recalled that Lincoln “was a very modest man in his demeanor, and yet gave you an impression of strong individuality. In his freedom of intercourse with people he would seem to put himself of a par with everybody; and yet there was within him a sort of reserved power, a quiet dignity which prevented people from presuming on him, notwithstanding he had thrown down the social bars. A person of less individuality would have been trifled with.”256
Lincoln’s highly evolved sense of his own identity lent him what some called “psychic radiance.” His good friend and political ally Joseph Gillespie observed him in 1858 as residents of Highland, Illinois, flocked around him: “there was some magnetic influence at work, that was perfectly inexplicable, which brought him and the masses into a mysterious correspondence with each other.” As time passed, Gillespie recalled, that “relation increased and was intensified to such an extent that afterwards at Springfield I witnessed a manifestation of regard for Mr. Lincoln, such as I did not suppose was possible.”257 Like others, Henry C. Whitney was hard put to identify Lincoln’s special quality. Though Lincoln was “awkward and ungainly,” Whitney said, “there nevertheless was in his tout ensemble an indefinable something that commanded respect.”258
Some thought Lincoln’s magnetism stemmed from his distinctive voice. An Illinois congressman remembered that Lincoln “personally won men to him, and those who came in contact with him felt the spell and submitted to its thralldom, led by the invisible chords of his marvelous power.… As well might the hasheesh-eater attempt to analyze its seductive influence as for those who felt the spell of Lincoln’s voice and presence, to say where and what it was.”259 In 1859 a Wisconsinite marveled at Lincoln’s voice, which “had something peculiarly winning about it, some quality which I can’t describe, but which seemed to thrill every fiber of one’s body.”260
In 1863, Jane Grey Swisshelm, a Radical critic of Lincoln’s administration, called on him in Washington “with a feeling of scorn for the man who had tried to save the Union and slavery.” But quickly she was “startled to find a chill of awe pass over me as my eyes rested upon him. It was as if I had suddenly passed a turn in a road and come into full view of the Matterhorn.… I have always been sensitive to the atmosphere of those I met, but have never found that of any one impress me as did that of Mr. Lincoln, and I know no word save ‘grandeur’ which expresses the quality of that atmosphere.”261 That same sense of grandeur impressed an Illinois railroad conductor, who often observed leading politicians on his train. He considered Lincoln “the most folksy of them. He put on no airs. He did not hold himself distant from any man.” Yet “there was s
omething about him which we plain people couldn’t explain that made us stand a little in awe of him.… You could get near him in a sort of neighborly way, as though you had always known him, but there was something tremendous between you and him all the time.”262
The modesty that accompanied Lincoln’s grandeur was genuine. Like most people who have truly come to grips with their own dark side—and Lincoln had a cruel streak that had marred his conduct toward political opponents in earlier years—he cherished no exalted self-image. “I am very sure,” he told a friend one day in the White House, “that if I do not go away from here a wiser man, I shall go away a better man, for having learned here what a very poor sort of a man I am.”263 To a delegation of clergy who called at the Executive Mansion, he declared, “I may not be a great man—(straightening up to his full height) I know I am not a great man.”264 This lack of egotism, a hallmark of psychological maturity, impressed many observers. It is an especially noteworthy quality in a politician, for seekers of political preferment often have exceptionally needy egos.
Thus in 1854, when Lincoln reentered the political world wholeheartedly, he was a changed man. No more would he ridicule and belittle his opponents. No more would he travel the political low road of narrow partisanship. Summoned by a grave national crisis, the partisan politico was about to emerge from his semiretirement as a true statesman.
10
“Aroused as He Had Never Been Before”
Reentering Politics
(1854–1855)
For Lincoln, 1854 was an annus mirabilis. As he later said of himself, by that year the practice of law “had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind, when the repeal of the Missouri compromise aroused him as he had never been before.”1 He and hordes of other Northerners were outraged by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which threw open to slavery millions of acres in the West that had long been set aside for freedom. That legislation, introduced in January 1854 by Stephen A. Douglas, allowed settlers in the central plains territories to decide for themselves if slavery should exist there. The statute, which its author said rested on the principle of “popular sovereignty,” raised “a hell of a storm” as Douglas predicted it would because it repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise forbidding slavery in the northern portion of the Louisiana Purchase (encompassing what would become the states of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana.)2
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 64
