The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876

by Nester, William

  The Whig Party had last won a presidential election in 1840 by nominating a victorious general as president. Alas, William Henry Harrison lasted little more than a month in the White House before he died of pneumonia. He was succeeded by Vice President John Tyler, who was such a fervent slavocrat that the Whigs eventually expelled him from their party. Now the Whigs hoped to duplicate their win of a presidential election with the same strategy. At their June convention in Philadelphia, the Mexican War’s two best commanders dueled for the nomination along with several other candidates. Although Winfield Scott was a far more skilled general than Zachary Taylor, he lost. Their nicknames help explain why “Rough and Ready” Taylor beat “Old Fuss and Feathers” Scott. Taylor led on the first ballot with 111 votes to Henry Clay’s 97, Scott’s 43, Daniel Webster’s 22, and 6 split among two others. He won a majority on the fourth ballot. Clay declined Taylor’s request to serve as his running mate. Millard Fillmore, a New York senator, was picked instead.

  After the convention, Abraham Lincoln enthusiastically backed Taylor’s campaign. Although as a loyal Whig he would have done so anyway, he was jubilant when Taylor endorsed a platform that embraced Henry Clay’s American System of a protective tariff, internal improvements, and a national bank. Although Taylor owned a Louisiana plantation worked by over a hundred slaves, he upheld the Wilmot Proviso that forbade slavery from a territory taken from Mexico.

  Another party emerged that year to compete with the Whigs for many of the same voters and states. The Free Soil Party was an amalgam of dissatisfied Whig, Democrat, and Liberty Party adherents who rallied around the slogan “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men.”23 The National Free Soil Convention met at Buffalo, New York, and on August 9 nominated Martin Van Buren for president and Charles Francis Adams as his running mate. In this gathering were men who either were or would be national progressive leaders, including senators William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Benjamin Wade and newspaper editors Horace Greely, Walt Whitman, and Frederick Douglass, respectively of the New York Tribune, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Rochester North Star. A small group of fellow black abolitionists accompanied Douglass, who was already a celebrity for his autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, which was published in 1845.24

  This year’s election was the first wherein states chose their electors on November’s first Tuesday, and all but South Carolina did so by a popular vote. Taylor won a solid plurality with 1,361,393 votes, or 47.3 percent, compared to Cass with 1,223,400, or 42.5 percent, and Van Buren with 291,616, or 10.1 percent. In the Electoral College, Taylor garnered 163 to Cass’s 127 and none for Van Buren. With about 10 percent of the popular vote, the Free Soilers made a respectable showing for a third and new party but also provoked the wrath of the second-place candidate and his supporters for being a spoiler that robbed the Democratic Party of victory. The Liberty Party, dedicated to slavery’s abolition, got only 2,245 votes.

  As Taylor prepared to move to Washington and assemble a cabinet, Abraham Lincoln struggled with mixed feelings over returning to his family, friends, and law career at Springfield, Illinois. He tried to reconcile himself to the reality that his brief sojourn on the crowded national political stage was over, most likely forever.

  2

  Young Lincoln

  “The short and simple annals of the poor.” That’s my life, and that’s all you or any one else can make of it.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  I range the fields with pensive tread, And pace the hollow rooms, And feel (companion of the dead) I’m living in the tombs.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. . . . I can say . . . that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  I don’t think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  When a journalist offered to write his biography for his 1860 presidential campaign, Abraham Lincoln dismissed the notion as “a great piece of folly.” He characterized his early decades as “‘the short and simple annals of the poor.’ That’s my life, and that’s all you or any one else can make of it.”1

  Lincoln, of course, cannot be understood without exploring the time from his birth to his twenty-second year, when he literally and figuratively turned his back on his family and set forth in search of a better life. He was indeed born into poverty on February 12, 1809, on the hardscrabble farm of his parents, Thomas and Nancy, and elder sister, Sarah, near Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Thomas was a stern, penny-pinching taskmaster who had witnessed Indians murder his own father when he was six. Nancy was reserved but bright and kind. Both parents were barely literate. The Lincolns migrated to Indiana in 1816. After Nancy died when Lincoln was nine, his father left his two children to fend for themselves while he returned to Elizabethtown in search of a new wife. He eventually reappeared with Sarah Bush Johnston, a widow with three small children aged nine to five.

  Starved for affection, Lincoln soon loved his sweet and nurturing stepmother, who taught him to read and write. During his teens he voraciously devoured every book he could get his hands on. He later cited the family Bible, William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution, Parson Weems’s Life of George Washington, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, William Shakespeare’s tragedies, William Grimshaw’s History of the United States, and Aesop’s Fables as the most influential books of these years.

  Thomas resented the time Lincoln spent reading, partly because it distracted him from his work but perhaps more because he could not understand let alone control his son’s ever-expanding mind. So he redoubled his efforts to fill his son’s life with unrelenting, exhausting physical labor. When Lincoln was done with the myriad of tasks on their own farm, Thomas hired him out to neighbors and pocketed what little coin his son earned. He increasingly favored his obedient stepson John over his natural son Abraham. The father and son became so deeply estranged that decades later Lincoln declined to visit him on his deathbed, reasoning that “if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.”2

  In his thirty-seventh year, he looked back and wrote a revealing poem about his youth.

  My childhood’s home I see again,

  And sadden with the view;

  And still as mem’ries crowd my brain,

  There’s pleasure in it too . . .

  Where things decayed and loved ones lost

  In dreamy shadows rise,

  And freed from all that’s earthly vile . . .

  Near twenty years have passed away

  Since here I bid farewell

  To woods and fields and scenes of play

  And playmates loved so well . . .

  How changed, as time has sped!

  Young childhood grown, strong manhood grey

  And half of all are dead . . .

  I range the fields with pensive tread,

  And pace the hollow rooms,

  And feel (companion of the dead)

  I’m living in the tombs.3

  The single most important event of Lincoln’s young life occurred in 1828, when he and his cousin John Hanks poled a flatboat piled with goods all the way to New Orleans, sold them off, then took a steamboat home. Lincoln’s hatred of slavery dates from that journey. He was morally repelled by the sight of blacks chained, whipped, prodded, and disdained. His most haunting experience was witnessing a young mulatto woman on an auction block surrounded by leering bidders. He later wrote that “I am naturally antislavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not think so.”4

  Lincoln emerged from his first two decades with an enduring legacy. From an early age, he deplored the bullying of the weak by the strong and cruelty to animals. Although outwardly gregarious, he encased his deepest feelings, turtle-like, within a hard, impenetrable shell. He hated physical labor and constantly
sought to expand his mind through reading and discussion. He extolled reason and developed the ability to express himself through finely crafted arguments. Lincoln’s childhood was not all ceaseless toil. He enjoyed telling stories, pulling pranks, and performing feats of strength. He reached his height of six foot, four inches by his late teens.

  At age twenty-two, Lincoln was determined to cut loose from his family and begin life as an independent man.5 He decided where to settle during a second journey to New Orleans, when his flatboat got stuck on the milldam across the Sangamon River at New Salem, Illinois, in April 1831. For some complex of reasons this hamlet appealed to him. In July he returned to New Salem, where he became a store clerk. A year later he was jobless when the store went bankrupt. He resorted to hiring himself out as a day laborer.

  Abraham Lincoln won his first election in 1832, when most men in his militia company voted for him as their captain. Illinois’s governor had mustered the militia for Black Hawk’s War, caused when that chief led his Sauk and Fox people from west of the Mississippi River into the state in a desperate search for food. Lincoln’s company never fired a shot in the campaign that eventually crushed Black Hawk and his followers. Indeed, during his three-month stint as a soldier, his only decisive action was to save rather than take a life. One evening an old Indian man appeared in their camp with an official safe-conduct pass. Some of the militia called for murdering him. At that “Lincoln jumped between our men & the Indian and said we must not shed his blood.” In a typical expression of how twisted frontier values could get, “some thought Lincoln was a coward because” he saved the Indian’s life. To this Lincoln replied, “If any one doubts my Courage let him try it.”6

  This fleeting leadership experience whetted his appetite for more. Later that year he ran for the state legislature. Although he came in eighth in a thirteen-man race, he saw his loss not as a failure but an opportunity for its insights in how to do better the next time. His first public speech revealed a remarkable maturity of thought and emotions for someone so young. He embraced the Whig Party platform of a government that nurtured the nation’s development by building roads, canals, railroads, and ports; a protective tariff that encouraged investments in industry and raised federal revenues; and universal education for children.7

  He sought a comfortable middle-class life by scrapping together his savings and investing in a store with William Berry. Unfortunately Berry was an alcoholic who drank himself to death and drained the store’s profits; he left Lincoln with a $1,100 debt that took him fifteen years to pay off. Once again, Lincoln reverted to earning money by splitting rails, cutting firewood, and performing other hard manual work.

  An important opportunity arose for Lincoln in May 1833, when he was appointed New Salem’s postmaster. No available local job was then better suited for him. Post offices were community centers in early America. People gathered there to chat, swap tales, make friends, cut deals, and peruse newspapers. It was the perfect place for an ambitious young man at once to develop his mind and a political following. It was also the perfect place to read when customers were scarce. His most influential books during those years were Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason and Constantin de Volney’s Ruins of Civilization, each critical of organized religion. He honed his speaking and thinking skills by attending the debate club. Most importantly, he studied law informally by reading texts, most notably William Blackstone’s Commentaries and the Revised Laws of Illinois. He passed the bar in September 1836.8

  Most ambitious men get their law licenses before they venture into politics. Not Lincoln, who launched his political career four years earlier in 1832, when he was just twenty-three years old, then won his first campaign to be an Illinois assemblyman in 1834 and reelection campaigns in 1836, 1838, and 1840.9 His most critical act during those eight years came on March 3, 1837, when he joined five other dissidents to vote against an overwhelming seventy-six-member majority who resolved that “we highly disapprove of the formation of abolition societies,” upheld as “sacred” the “right of property in slaves,” and asserted that Congress “cannot abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, against the consent of its citizens.”10

  As a politician, Abraham Lincoln modeled himself after Whig Party leader Henry Clay. He described Clay as “my beau ideal of a statesman” and added, “during my whole political life I have loved and revered him as a teacher and leader.”11 In his 1852 eulogy, he lauded Clay as “that truly national man” who “loved his country because it was a free country” and “saw in such the advancement, prosperity, and glory of human liberty, human rights, and human nature.” Lincoln may have also found in Clay a father figure who was everything that his own ignorant and at times brutal father was not.12 In Clay, Lincoln saw reflected a highly intelligent, largely self-taught, self-made man who eloquently advocated progressive, pragmatic policies to strengthen the nation economically, politically, and morally.13

  Lincoln championed Clay’s American System, whose three key policies were designed to develop America’s economy—a protective tariff, internal improvements, and a U.S. bank to regulate the monetary system. That Whig agenda was the latest incarnation of the political philosophy articulated by Alexander Hamilton and his Federalist Party in the 1790s. Lincoln was a Whig as much for the image it conveyed as the policies it espoused. Whigs represented self-made, worldly, sophisticated American men. There was also a very practical reason: “The man who is of neither party is not—cannot be of any consequence.”14

  Lincoln rose steadily in the state’s Whig Party ranks. From its birth in 1832 until its demise in 1854, the Whig Party battled the Democratic Party across much of the nation, although its strength lay mostly in the North. Illinois mirrored the national distribution of party power. Like Indiana and Ohio, Illinois was split politically north and south. Northerners from back east had settled the state’s northern half and southerners the southern half. Not surprisingly, Whigs and later Republicans tended to dominate northern Illinois and Democrats, southern Illinois.

  Lincoln moved to Springfield on April 15, 1837, and the same day found lodging with Joshua Speed above his store.15 Speed became Lincoln’s most intimate friend, with whom he shared his innermost thoughts and a bed for four years. Most of this time two other young men, William Herndon and Charles Hurst, crowded into the same room. His first law partner was John Stuart, but in 1844 he established a partnership with Herndon that continued seventeen years, until he entered the White House. Herndon had recently passed the bar and was nine years younger than him. They remained friends until Lincoln’s death. Herndon would later write a book that provided deep insights into Lincoln’s character and early life.16

  Lincoln’s legal and political skills were interchangeable. He spoke with simple words and told engaging stories spiced with wit and wisdom that any voter or juror could understand. His advice to would-be lawyers reveals his core values: “Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser—in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peace-maker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man.”17

  He expressed key elements of his political philosophy in a speech before the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield on January 27, 1838.18 A vicious crime inspired his oration. Just two months earlier, a mob had murdered the outspoken abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy and destroyed his printing press in Alton, Illinois. Lincoln titled his speech “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.” He began by asking his audience to appreciate how fortunate they were to live in such a rich and free country due to the ability of the nation’s founders “to display before an admiring world . . . the capability of a people to govern themselves.” America’s prosperity and democracy, however, faced a dire and worsening threat. This danger “cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die of suicide.” Violent mobs would be the weapon wher
eby the nation self-destructed. Fortunately there was an antidote to this deadly poison: “Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution never to violate in the least particular the laws of the country, and never to tolerate their violation by others. . . . Let reverence for the laws . . . become the political religion of the nation.”19

  Lincoln committed an act in September 1842 that was completely out of character. Had he gone through with it, he would have violated the very laws and institutions that he swore to uphold. Had he lost, the course of American and world history might have decisively shifted. What Lincoln did was to accept a challenge to a duel. The challenge arose after he anonymously ridiculed James Shields, a local Democratic Party leader, in the Sangamon Journal. He had no desire to duel but was egged on by several prominent Whig leaders. Fortunately the duel was averted when the seconds struck a deal whereby both men repudiated the fighting words that provoked them to “the field of honor.” Lincoln typically drew life-changing lessons from this experience. He resolved that henceforth reason would command his emotions and he would never anonymously criticize anyone.20

  What of Lincoln’s love life? He was awkward among women and was said to be “deficient in those little links which make up the chain of woman’s happiness.”21 He may have scared off many a potential mate with his gangly height and crude behavior. Shortly after moving to Springfield, he confessed that “I am quite as lonesome here as I ever was anywhere in my life. I have been spoken to by but one woman since I have been here and should not have been by her if she could have avoided it. I’ve never been to church yet and probably shall not be soon. I stay away because I am conscious I should not know how to behave.”22 Herndon recalled that “Lincoln had terribly strong passions for women—could scarcely keep his hands off them,” but “his honor and a strong will . . . enabled him to put out the fires of his terrible passion.”23 Although he could be bumbling in words and demeanor around the fair sex, he was a man far ahead of his time when it came to women’s rights. During his 1836 run for the Illinois assembly, he courageously aired the then-outlandish belief that women who paid taxes should be allowed to vote.24