Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

by Richard Brookhiser

  He described Clay’s eloquence with a quotation from an obituary—two pages of what was, in effect, oratory about an orator. Useful for pressing flowers, maybe. Then Lincoln decided, as Herndon might have put it, to dig up the root. “Mr. Clay’s predominant sentiment, from first to last, was a deep devotion to the cause of human liberty. . . . He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country.” Clay was known as the Great Compromiser, and Lincoln was about to survey his achievements in that line. But he asserted that Clay’s compromises all had a goal, which was freedom.

  Lincoln discussed the Missouri Compromise, the Nullification Crisis, and the Compromise of 1850. Then he returned to liberty—and turned to present-day politics. Clay “ever was, on principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery.” What then had he done about it? Nothing much, or so at first it seemed in Lincoln’s presentation. Clay’s “feeling and his judgment,” said Lincoln, “ever led him to oppose both extremes of opinion on the subject.” This looks like one of the weariest rhetorical dodges in the world: Clay’s opponents were all extremists; the truth lay between them.

  Yet Lincoln was quite precise as to what the extremists had been saying. Clay’s opponents attacked America’s two founding documents. Abolitionists wanted to “tear to tatters” the Constitution because of the protections it offered slavery. (In 1842 William Lloyd Garrison had arraigned the Constitution as “a covenant with death, and with Hell.”) But partisans of slavery, Lincoln added, were “beginning to assail and to ridicule . . . the declaration that ‘all men are created free and equal.’”

  Here, at the climax of his eulogy, Lincoln quoted Clay himself, reaching back to a speech Clay had delivered to the American Colonization Society in 1827. Colonization was a plan to send free Negroes back to Africa—the same that James Madison had discussed with Harriet Martineau. A protectorate had been set up on Africa’s Atlantic coast, which would take the name Liberia. Henry Clay was a supporter of the scheme. So was Lincoln, and he would continue to be so until the middle of the Civil War. But the passage of Clay’s long-ago speech that he quoted in 1852 was not about Liberia, but about America.

  The American Colonization Society had critics: abolitionists (including Martineau) thought it was a futile project whose only effect would be to rid America of free blacks. But some slave owners thought it put dangerous dreams of freedom in black minds. It was the latter that Clay had addressed:

  What would they, who reproach us [for stirring up blacks], have done? If they would repress all tendencies towards liberty . . . they must do more than put down the benevolent efforts of this society. They must go back to the era of our liberty and independence, and muzzle the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return. . . . They must blow out the moral lights around us, and extinguish that greatest torch of all which America presents to a benighted world—pointing the way to their rights, their liberties, and their happiness. And when they have achieved all those purposes their work will be yet incomplete. They must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate the light of reason, and the love of liberty. Then, and not till then . . . can you perpetuate slavery.

  All his life Clay talked for effect, but here he was as clear and sequential as Euclid. This paragraph moved, in three steps, from the news to history to the soul. Slavery was the problem before Clay and his audience. But slavery was opposed to the spirit of the founders (the thundering cannon celebrated the Fourth of July). And the founders, whom Americans celebrated, had expressed a truth about human nature—that all men yearn for liberty, and as men, deserve it. There is poetry here, and reason, and orderly arrangement. No wonder Lincoln loved this passage, and would come back to it repeatedly (he would quote it at least three times when he ran for Senate in 1858, and again as he prepared to run for president).

  Lincoln had been driven to think about Clay’s passage by events—by Clay’s death, obviously, but also by a sense that Clay’s great compromises, his life’s work, were a patchwork, liable at any moment, as John Stuart said on the hill outside Peoria, to be torn apart. If that happened, what should be done next? If that happened, what would the founders do?

  Henry Clay was not the only American to bring the founders to bear on the question of slavery. Abolitionists and Free Soil men made the Declaration of Independence a holy document. The Western Citizen, an abolitionist newspaper published in Chicago, printed the Preamble of the Declaration on the front page of every issue. Lincoln was familiar with writing of this kind; his partner Herndon, an abolitionist, subscribed to their publications and kept copies in the office. Lincoln, however, found a more congenial expression of the antagonism between the founders and slavery in a man more congenial to him—in a compromiser, in a lover of the Constitution, in a Whig—in Henry Clay.

  But Lincoln was delivering a eulogy—a speech after a death. His ending was short and not sweet. “But Henry Clay is dead.” A few sentences followed, then Lincoln added, “but he is gone.” Gone as the coffin fragments and fustian of a decade of orators; gone as a rained-on grave.

  Lincoln would come back to the dead again.

  PART TWO

  Seven

  1854: THE REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE

  HENRY CLAY’S DEATH IN 1852 WAS FOLLOWED, IN 1854, BY the repeal of his first great achievement, the Missouri Compromise. The repeal, as Lincoln wrote, would “arouse . . . him as never before” and set the trajectory of his life for the next six years.

  The repeal involved Lincoln in a long battle with his fellow Illinoisan Stephen Douglas—over their political futures, over the future of the United States, and over the intentions of the founding fathers. Both men believed that the opinions of the founders carried special weight, and each believed he understood them best.

  But before that, Lincoln witnessed a parade of deaths.

  In February 1850 Lincoln’s second son, Edward, died after a two-month illness, not quite four years old. Lincoln wrote of it, with some asperity, to his stepbrother John Johnston, who had approached him asking for various favors. “As you make no mention of it,” Lincoln replied, “I suppose you had not learned that we lost our little boy. . . . We miss him very much.” Johnston’s selfishness, at that particular moment, no doubt grated even more than usual.

  The funeral was conducted by the Reverend James Smith, a Scotsman who had recently become pastor of a Presbyterian church in Springfield. Smith believed that Lincoln turned to Christianity in the 1850s and that Smith had showed him the way. “[I had] the high honor,” he wrote Herndon, “to place before Mr. Lincoln arguments designed to prove the divine authority of the Scriptures accompanied by the arguments of infidel objectors in their own language. To the arguments on both sides Mr. Lincoln gave a most patient, impartial and searching investigation. . . . The result was the announcement by himself that the argument in favor of the divine authority and inspiration of the Scripture was unanswerable.”

  Herndon hated Smith, and wrote on the letter: “Foolish. . . . Knows nothing of Lincoln.” Smith had as much regard for Smith as he did for Lincoln or for Scripture, and his account reeks of wish-fulfillment. But that does not mean that Lincoln did not return to the greatest questions in the wake of his son’s death. There is no evidence that he came to any new conclusions in the 1850s, but he would have more occasions to do so later on.

  In the summer of 1850 Zachary Taylor, the second Whig president, became the second president to die in office. He had lasted longer than William Henry Harrison, but after two years in the White House he succumbed, age sixty-five, to acute gastroenteritis after eating contaminated food on the Fourth of July. Lincoln delivered a eulogy in Chicago. It was not as interesting as his eulogy of Clay would be two years later, though it included a shrewd estimate of Taylor’s character: “He could not be flurried, and he could not be scared.” Taylor, a patriotic old soldier, had wanted California and New Mexico admitted as free states, even though he was a Louisiana plantation owner, and he threatened to hang any of his fellow
southerners who objected. His successor in office, Millard Fillmore, a New York Whig, was as sleek as Taylor was rough, but without any of his force of character.

  The Whig Party was dying along with its presidents. Its nomination in 1852 went not to Fillmore but to the other hero of the Mexican War, Winfield Scott. Scott was a better general than Taylor or Harrison—probably the greatest American general between George Washington and Ulysses Grant—but he was also pompous, acerbic, and enamored of the figure he cut in his splendid uniforms. This would be no Log Cabin Campaign. That summer Lincoln gave a speech for Scott in Springfield, answering a Democratic campaign speech that Stephen Douglas had given in Richmond. Lincoln’s effort was long and rambling, strewn with jokes and partisan quibbles. Maybe he sensed which way the race was going. In the fall the Democrat Franklin Pierce crushed Scott with 254 electoral votes to 42. Yet again, the Democrats carried Illinois.

  How does a major party die? The greatest Whig never won the White House, neither of the Whig Party’s winners completed a term there, Whig Party faithful had enjoyed scant federal patronage, the economic program of the Whigs was never enacted. As an Illinois Whig, Lincoln was accustomed to failure, but his party nationwide was sinking from sight.

  Lincoln had arrived at midlife, but he was already calling himself an old man. As early as his years in Congress, when he was still in his thirties, his letters home were full of references to his age: “my old, withered, dry eyes”; “I am now one of the old men”; “I was young once.” This was a new way for Lincoln to poor-mouth himself; the rube/boob could now be the old rube/boob. But a sense of premature age can also arise from a fear (or a conviction) of futility. Lincoln was still ambitious; he was always ambitious. “His ambition,” as Herndon wrote, “was a little engine that knew no rest.” Yet what did he have to show for it?

  His speech for Winfield Scott had been marred by his envy of the man he was rebutting, Stephen Douglas. “When I first saw his speech,” Lincoln began, “I was reminded of old times—of the times when . . . Douglas was not so much [a] greater man than all the rest of us, as he now is.” The contrast between the two Illinoisans was stark. In 1852 Lincoln was a former congressman; Douglas was a lord of the Senate. Lincoln had given a eulogy for Henry Clay, a man whom he had never met, in Springfield; Douglas had been at Clay’s right hand in Washington, helping the great man save the nation.

  By the time Lincoln reached his early forties he had not done one important thing. He had led an interesting life, yet he would have had to be a great memoirist, or be imagined by a great novelist, for anyone to recognize it. He was a self-made man of no consequence.

  In 1854 Stephen Douglas changed Lincoln’s prospects and American politics.

  Douglas, four years younger than Lincoln, had moved to Illinois from Vermont when he was twenty. He was first elected to the state legislature in 1836, two years after Lincoln, but his rise was faster. He went to the US House of Representatives in 1843; four years later, the Democratic legislature chose him to be a senator on the eve of his thirty-fourth birthday.

  Douglas was short, deep-chested, smart, quick, aggressive. He was one of those small men who dominate a room by their energy and their presence. Photographs show an unflattering line across the bridge of his nose, as if he had butted heads with a locomotive, but no one thought less of him for it. Herndon testified that he had “that unique trait, magnetism.” Lincoln joked about the Man of Audacity; Douglas was that man.

  Piecing together the Compromise of 1850, while still in his thirties, was a considerable achievement. But Douglas had his sights on others.

  Now that the country had a Pacific coast, it needed a quicker means of getting there than horse-drawn wagons or ships sailing around Cape Horn. The means of the future was obviously the railroad. A transcontinental line anchored in Illinois would be a boon to the state—an iron Erie Canal—and to the man who made it happen.

  Douglas wanted to be president. His name had been placed in nomination at the Democratic convention of 1852, and he had actually led the field for two ballots. Franklin Pierce, the eventual winner, was a dark horse who had triumphed on the forty-ninth ballot. Douglas had been only thirty-nine at the time. If he were to win the nomination and the election in 1856, he would still be the youngest man to have reached the White House.

  Douglas’s chances of winning both the railroad and the presidency seemed to be enhanced by his position as chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Territories. The Compromise of 1850 had divided the American Southwest into states and territories, but one great swath of land in the middle of the continent remained without formal government. Two more states had been fashioned out of the old Louisiana Territory after the admission of Missouri—Arkansas and Iowa—and the northeastern corner of it had been organized as the Minnesota Territory. But between the Missouri River and the Rockies there was nothing but plains, mountains, bison, and Indians, with a few forts. Most of this wilderness lay north of the Missouri line. A transcontinental railroad linked to Chicago would have to pass somewhere west of Missouri or Iowa. The region needed territorial government, followed by statehood.

  Wrangling over new territories and states had almost torn the country apart in 1850, but Douglas had surmounted that crisis. He was sure he could handle any problems that might now arise.

  He went to work in January 1854 and produced a bold bill. Douglas proposed two new territories—Kansas (the present state, plus a slice of Colorado) and Nebraska (everything else all the way to Canada). Whether these territories would admit slavery would be left to the decision of the inhabitants. Douglas said he was following the principles of the Compromise of 1850, under which the territories of New Mexico and Utah had been allowed to choose slavery or not as they wished. That option was simply being extended to Kansas and Nebraska.

  By leaving slavery up to the people of the new territories, Douglas claimed to be taking it off the table of national politics. His bill was a recipe for peace and quiet; it would, as he put it, “avoid the perils of . . . agitation by withdrawing the question of slavery from the halls of Congress and the political arena, and committing it to the arbitrament [judgment] of those who were immediately interested in it.” The name for Douglas’s new principle was “popular sovereignty,” a phrase that had been first used a few years earlier by presidential candidate Lewis Cass. Now Douglas made it his own.

  By embracing popular sovereignty, Douglas claimed to be beyond politics, but he had nevertheless offered a political deal along the way. Allowing slavery north of the Missouri line (if the residents wished it) meant repealing the Missouri Compromise. Many southerners had resented the compromise as a rebuke to slavery and to themselves as slave owners. (Why limit the spread of slavery unless it was a bad thing?) Douglas hoped his bill would win him southern support at the next Democratic convention.

  For the rest of the winter and all through the spring, Douglas labored to pass his bill. He approached President Pierce in January, calling at the White House on a Sunday, which Pierce considered Sabbath-breaking. But Pierce’s secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, got the two men to sit down and talk; as a result, Pierce supported the bill. Douglas out-argued and arm-twisted his fellow senators, winning their approval by a comfortable margin. The House, with its northern majority, was harder, but he lobbied on the House floor (which senators are not supposed to do) for a narrow victory. The bill became law at the end of May 1854. “I passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act myself,” Douglas told his father-in-law, by “the marshalling and directing of men. . . . I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the whole controversy.”

  Dictating to congressmen was one thing; persuading their constituents, another. The Kansas-Nebraska Act (often called the Nebraska bill or act, for short) was greeted in the North with rage. Every sectional dispute for the past thirty-plus years had been resolved with some sort of deal: Missouri became a state, but so did Maine; South Carolina dropped nullification, but tariffs had been lowered; Texas had been annexed, but
so had the Pacific Northwest; the Compromise of 1850 was a cat’s cradle of trade-offs. Now Douglas had given slavery and the South an opening for nothing in return, and he had obliterated one of the key provisions of an earlier deal—the Missouri line—to do it. Northern politicians, both Whigs and Democrats, denounced him.

  Lincoln waited until later in the year to say anything in public about Douglas’s latest deed, but then he would not relent for the rest of the decade. The Lincoln-Douglas debates, which all the world now knows about, happened in 1858, but the six years from 1854 to 1860 were one long Lincoln-Douglas debate. Lincoln made it his business to shadow Douglas, speaking where he spoke and replying to what he said, as he tried, in succession, to join him in the Senate, to replace him in the Senate, and finally, to beat him to the White House. Their contest was a local matter, but it had national implications, for slavery was a national issue, Douglas was a national figure, and Illinois was becoming a more significant state (in the 1850s its population would double, boosting it from the ninth most populous state to the fourth). The contest began on unequal terms, as Lincoln was well aware, for Douglas in 1854 was a success and Lincoln was, if not quite a failure, certainly no success. But Lincoln hung on Douglas’s shoulder like a jockey trailing another down the backstretch and around the clubhouse turn, waiting for the chance to pull ahead.

  All the elements of Lincoln’s mind and personality, which had lain about like engine parts in a workshop, finally came together into something coherent and ultimately powerful. He made use of humor, logic, and eloquence, each trait now purged of grossness, rigidity, or bombast.