Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

by Richard Brookhiser

  Ann was the third young woman in Lincoln’s life to die—mother, sister, now fiancée. Anyone in his situation would be grief-stricken. But he now showed the special grief of the depressed. Those who have never been depressed can scarcely comprehend it. Depression is not a mood that comes and goes, but a climate, a permanent backdrop, your most faithful friend. Consider Lincoln’s sensitivity to the rain. Rain falls on everyone, just and unjust, living and dead, depressed and not depressed. But the depressed feel that it is addressed specially to them.

  Lincoln’s depression would flow on throughout his life, noted by friends of long standing and by acquaintances alike. The most famous description would come from his last law partner, William Herndon: “His melancholy dripped from him as he walked.” Work, once he settled into his adult careers, could block it from view; so could his endless flow of stories and jokes, which continued as before. Humor was his distraction, his safety valve, his protective screen (it hid his sorrow from others and from himself). But melancholy never forsook him.

  About this time—the mid-1830s—he told one friend that he never carried a pocket knife. Every man carried a pocket knife in those days, to cut things, to trim things, to whittle and waste the time. But Lincoln said he “never dare” do it. Lest he find some other use for it.

  After tragedy, farce. One of the ladies of New Salem had an unmarried sister in Kentucky, Mary Owens, who came to Illinois for a long visit in 1836. She was attractive, educated, and feisty. Lincoln began a courtship that sputtered on for a year. Perhaps he felt it was too much too soon, perhaps he felt pressured into it by matchmaking friends. The letters he wrote Mary, when they were apart, were arias of hesitation. In one he threw the burden of deciding their future on her: “What I do wish is that our further acquaintance shall depend upon yourself.” Not surprisingly, she decided to have no further acquaintance. “I thought him lacking in smaller attentions,” was how she put it (to say nothing of larger ones).

  After it was all over, Lincoln summed up his second experiment in courtship in a letter to a married woman friend. He made a series of crude jibes about Mary’s weight, her skin, and her bad teeth, as if her looks had given him cold feet. It is a cringe-making performance; the funny man was trying to be funny, but his timing and delivery were all off. By the end of the letter, Lincoln finally put the blame for the failed relationship where it belonged. “Others have been made fools of by the girls, but this can never be with truth said of me. I most emphatically in this instance made a fool of myself.”

  Maybe he had done them both a favor; if he did not love Mary Owens, she would not die.

  By the time Lincoln had lost Ann and driven off Mary, he had taken the first steps in the careers that he would pursue for the rest of his life—he had become a state legislator and the junior partner in a two-man law firm.

  Lincoln made his first run for office in 1832, for the Illinois House of Representatives, the lower house of the General Assembly, or state legislature. The Black Hawk War kept him away from the hustings for most of the campaign; when he was able to appear before audiences, he was cheered by Jack Armstrong’s posse. Because he had no reputation in the county as a whole, he lost his bid, though he managed to win 277 out of 300 votes in greater New Salem. In 1834, when his service as a postmaster and a surveyor had made him more widely known, he won handily. He came into the legislature as a protégé of John Stuart, his Black Hawk War comrade and lender of law books.

  In his very first races Lincoln employed a technique he would use ever after: poor-mouthing himself. “If the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background,” he said in declaring his first candidacy, “I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.” This sounds like beginning a campaign with a concession speech: poor Abe! The modesty, however, was tactical; Lincoln was creating a role, a persona, the rube/boob, which served the same function in his political rhetoric as his odd appearance did in his joke-telling. I am an unprepossessing man of humble origins. Both the humorist and the politician warm up the audience by softening it up. But I will hold your attention anyway, was the implicit offer of the humorist. I will persuade, or lead, or inspire you, was that of the politician. Lincoln admitted his infirmities to make way for his strengths. The technique would not have worked, of course, if he had no strengths.

  The fact that the rube/boob persona worked at all was a tribute to the democratization of American life. The founding fathers were austere republicans who rejected monarchy and aristocratic orders. But they thought of themselves as “natural” aristocrats—the expression was Jefferson’s—proud of their talents. Almost all of them were wealthy men, or at least well off. George Washington, the first president, never learned Latin, but he was a Virginia planter; so were the third, fourth, and fifth presidents, Jefferson, Madison, and James Monroe. The other founding president, John Adams, was a Harvard-educated lawyer. Settlers in new states like Illinois were not unimpressed by such credentials, but they also liked leaders who were more like themselves.

  Why had Lincoln chosen politics in the first place? Other paths were closed to him—he hated farming, and the failure of the store in 1833 showed he had no head for business. Politics was more inviting: in a newish, growing state, it was fluid, with fewer barriers to entry than in settled communities. And Lincoln might be suited to it: he was smart, and he liked thinking and talking on his feet. Finally, he was ambitious. “Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition,” he admitted in his first campaign statement. His ambition was to be “truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.” That was a trifle stiff, a bit faux-marbled, but it showed the bent of his hopes. His own nature, perhaps with an assist from reading Parson Weems, had raised his sights.

  Politics was a rowdy game in 1830s Illinois. At one meeting Lincoln picked up a heckler and tossed him aside. Candidates and their supporters rumbled in taverns and the open air. John Stuart fought another politician, Stephen Douglas, in a grocery—a store that sold liquor by the drink—when both men were running for Congress. When they stopped, exhausted, Stuart ordered a barrel of whiskey for all the spectators. Sometimes pistols were pulled, though they were seldom fired.

  There were real issues in the commotion, along with mere animal spirits. The first American two-party system had pitted the Federalists of Washington, Adams, and Alexander Hamilton against the Republicans of Jefferson and Madison. Federalists wanted a strong federal government run by a self-confident leadership class. Republicans stood for small government and the common man, however uncommon Jefferson and Madison were. This system had vanished when Lincoln was a child—the Federalist Party disappeared after opposing the War of 1812. In the election of 1824 four Republicans fought among themselves to succeed Monroe, the last founder president: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, William Crawford, and Henry Clay. Jackson narrowly lost that contest to Adams, but he came back to win in 1828 and 1832, and to become the catalyst and polarizer of a new party system.

  The Jacksonians called themselves Democrats. They, too, embraced small government and the common man, like their Republican forebears, but they were also identified with Jackson’s contentious personality. Jackson—victor of the Battle of New Orleans—was the second former general to become president, after George Washington, but their temperaments could not have been more different. Washington had been an icon of self-control. Parson Weems got this right: “In him,” Weems wrote, the “noble quality” of courage was always the “ready servant” of his reason. Jackson, by contrast, was a fighter, willful and tempestuous. He had killed a man in a duel, and he had brawled with one of his colonels in a frontier hotel with pistols and swords.

  Harriet Martineau, the English traveler who visited Madison on her tour of the United States, met President Jackson in Washington, DC, at a characteristic moment. Early in 1835 a madman fired two pistols at him on the steps of the Capitol (both misfired and Jackson was unhurt). In Martineau’s opinion, “the pre
sident’s misconduct” over the weeks that followed “was the most virulent and protracted.” Jackson told everyone who would listen that a hostile senator had plotted to kill him. Jackson’s conspiracy theory was fantastic: the shooter was a crazy loner who blamed Jackson for keeping him from the British throne. Martineau was embarrassed for the president’s paranoid credulity, and worried for the country. Jackson’s tendency to personalize everything, she said, would sow a “poisonous crop of folly.” Decades later Lincoln would come to view Jackson more favorably, but Old Hickory in his heyday seemed to be a dangerous man.

  By the mid-1830s Jackson’s enemies were calling themselves Whigs, borrowing the name from eighteenth-century English politics, when Whigs were the opponents of royal power. Similarly, American Whigs opposed King Andrew and his overbearing ways.

  Lincoln became a Whig—a decision with long consequences, for Illinois was a solidly Democratic state. In twenty years it would never vote for a Whig presidential candidate, never elect a Whig senator, and almost never send more than one Whig representative at a time to the House. (Illinois would elect a Whig governor—once.) Central Illinois, where Lincoln lived, was the state’s lone Whig stronghold. Locally, Lincoln had done the prudent thing; statewide, he had tied himself to perennial losers. Whig minority status would test his mettle, but whatever it gave by way of instruction, it would not give much by way of victory.

  Democrats and Whigs became national omnibus parties contesting a variety of issues, especially after Jackson retired in 1837. The first issue to absorb Lincoln was internal improvements, particularly canals.

  Rivers were nature’s infrastructure, but suppose man could improve them, or dig his own waterways? The model for all American canal builders was the Erie Canal, which when completed in 1825 ran across New York State, linking the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, and so to the Atlantic Ocean. The produce of the old Northwest could flow through New York, without making long detours down the St. Lawrence or the Mississippi. Upstate New York flourished, and New York City was confirmed as the nation’s greatest port.

  The Erie Canal made a hero of DeWitt Clinton, the New York Republican who had planned and completed it—and not just in his home state: Clinton County in Illinois was named for him in 1824, and DeWitt County would be added in 1839.

  Lincoln knew about river transportation firsthand, and he knew the problems with Illinois’ rivers. The Sangamon was a tangle of meanders and switchbacks. Canal-building would be a way to earn the esteem of his fellow men. He told a friend he intended to be the “DeWitt Clinton of Illinois.”

  All American politicians supported canals. They differed only about whether the federal government should pay for them. Democrats, true to their Republican antecedents, tended to think not; Whigs thought so. But both parties agreed that states could do as they liked. New York State had raised the money for the Erie Canal itself, and reaped the benefits. Surely Illinois could follow its lead.

  But what canals should it dig? The most obvious project would be to link the Illinois River (which flowed into the Mississippi) with Lake Michigan at the old trading post of Chicago; the great north-south pathway of the Mississippi would then intersect with the new east-west artery of the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal. But Illinois was a large, broad state, half as wide as it was long; great expanses of it were dozens, even a hundred miles distant from Lake Michigan or the Mississippi. Any program of state-subsidized transportation would have to be a system of trade-offs, giving something to everyone.

  The system that Lincoln ended up supporting—it was known locally simply as “the System”—would have covered the state with canals and the very latest form of infrastructure, railroads. The first American railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, had been chartered in 1827; Charles Carroll laid the cornerstone the following year. In 1837 Illinois proposed to borrow $8.5 million to dig the Illinois and Michigan canal; $400,000 to improve navigation in five rivers; $10 million to build two major railroads and six spurs; and $200,000 for miscellaneous projects in places that had not benefited from any of the above.

  One side effect of adopting the System was to move the state capital—and, incidentally, Lincoln himself. Since 1819 the capital had been in Vandalia, a town in southern Illinois. But if the whole state was about to be developed, then a more central location was desirable. Lincoln and eight fellow legislators from Sangamon County lobbied for Springfield (the nine politicians were known as the Long Nine—their combined height was 54 feet). They succeeded, and the capital moved there in 1837.

  Lincoln moved along with it and moved up in the world. Springfield was no village, but a town of 1,500, and growing. Lincoln became John Stuart’s law partner; he would no longer be a pettifogger arguing before a country justice of the peace, but a bona fide lawyer.

  In Springfield he also met two of the most important men in his life. Joshua Speed was Lincoln’s first Springfield landlord, renting him a room on the second floor of a general store he managed. Space was so tight, Lincoln and Speed shared a bed for four years. For a time Speed became Lincoln’s best friend, maybe the only true friend he ever had. They were soul-mates—intelligent, sensitive, and depressed.

  William Herndon, younger than Lincoln by nine years, was a clerk in Speed’s store; for two years he would sleep in the same room as Lincoln and Speed, in a separate bed. He was not Lincoln’s soul-mate—he was far less temperamental—but he became his disciple. Herndon fell in love with Lincoln—the love of admiration and devotion. He would become his law partner and his almost-Boswell, the author of the best book on Lincoln that was never quite written.

  The System, however, ended in catastrophe. Becoming the next DeWitt Clinton was harder than Lincoln had thought. New York had started from a stronger financial base than Illinois—it was already a prosperous state when it began digging the Erie Canal—and it pursued a more coherent goal: its canal was one project, not a dozen.

  The System was also battered by a national economic storm. In 1829 Andrew Jackson declared war on the Second Bank of the United States, the national bank that regulated the money supply. Jackson hated it because he believed it was a tool of the rich and the Whigs, and by 1836 he had succeeded in destroying it. But when the bank went down, credit dried up nationwide, especially for grandiose projects like the System. In January 1840 the law authorizing the System was repealed, with only 105 miles of canal dug and 26 miles of track laid. The System, Lincoln wrote Stuart glumly, was “put down in a lump.”

  The collapse of the System hobbled Illinois for a time. But the state was growing so rapidly that it soon recovered; the canal to Lake Michigan and the most important railroads all got built eventually. Young, healthy communities can afford to roll the dice.

  The demise of the System would hobble Lincoln’s career, too—he stayed loyal to it to the bitter end, vainly urging the legislature “to save something . . . from the general wreck”—but he eventually found other issues. Good politicians know how to move on, sooner or later.

  In passing, Lincoln touched on what was then a marginal issue for him—slavery. The 1830s saw the emergence of an American movement to abolish it. Older critics of slavery, such as the Quakers, were joined by a more aggressive breed of polemicists. William Lloyd Garrison’s new Boston weekly, The Liberator, set the tone: “Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.”

  For all their fervor, abolitionists remained a tiny minority. Democrats and Whigs were both national parties with slaveholders in their ranks; abolition threatened to upend the economy and society of half the country and annul the Constitution’s protections of slavery. (Each slave was counted as three-fifths of a freeman in apportioning seats in the House of Representatives—Article I, Section 2—and slaves escaping to free states had to be returned to owners who sought them�
�Article IV, Section 2.) Although Illinois was a free state, most Illinoisans had little love for Negroes, free or enslaved. In January 1837 the legislature voted overwhelmingly in support of a motion condemning “abolition societies.”

  At the tail end of the session in March, Lincoln and Dan Stone, another lawmaker from Sangamon County, entered a brief Protest on Slavery into the record. Although the two men agreed with their colleagues in disapproving of abolitionists, they declared “that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy.” And while they acknowledged that Congress could not “interfere” with slavery in the states where it existed, they pointed out that it could abolish it in the District of Columbia, which it governed directly. Even so, they went on, Congress should not act “unless at the request of the people of the District.”

  Why go to this trouble on an issue of minor importance—Lincoln was then far more concerned with the System—and for no practical effect? (No one else in the legislature joined Lincoln and Stone in their Protest.) The arguments of the Protest showed some characteristic features of Lincoln’s mind. He respected both legal punctilio—hence the parsing of Congress’s powers—and public opinion—Congress should be guided by the District’s voters. He also had a stubborn concern for first principles—hence the abstract statement about slavery’s injustice. The Protest resembled the course of his own education—it was careful, incremental, and self-directed. He worked up his own thoughts, and he would not forget anything once he had thought it.