Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen

by Rae Katherine Eighmey

  Makes 4 to 6 servings

  ADAPTED FROM “PIGS FEET AND EARS, SOUSED,” MISS ELIZA LESLIE, DIRECTIONS FOR COOKERY IN ITS VARIOUS BRANCHES, 1845.

  AT THE CROSSROADS OF PROGRESS

  IRISH STEW, GERMAN BEEF, AND OYSTERS

  During the decade of the 1850s, Springfield, Illinois, grew to become a complex crossroads of transportation, commerce, politics, and influence.

  Springfield benefited from the intersection of two newly constructed railway lines, completed by 1854. On these rail lines raw materials, farm produce, and finished goods traveled between surrounding country and cities to the east, south, and north. The Great Western of Illinois headed to Toledo and from there connected to the urban capitals of the East Coast. The Chicago, Alton, and St. Louis Railway allowed a vital commercial linkage between the Gulf of Mexico and Chicago. Goods traveled up the Mississippi River and were put on the train at St. Louis. From the north they came on rail from Chicago and the Great Lakes.

  The town crowded with newcomers as people moved in to take advantage of the trade-created opportunities. Economic conditions improved as Springfield grew from a town into a city. The latest national newspapers and magazines brought current fashions and happenings into Springfield living rooms. These midwesterners could enjoy foods from Europe and the Caribbean, and even spices from the Far East.

  Information arrived with the immediacy of clacking telegraph keys. Telegraph lines were strung in 1849, bringing Springfield nearly immediate access to events. Lincoln’s friend David Davis described the impact on the community: “The wonder workings of the Telegraph are past comprehension. The wires are in communication from this place direct with Phild [Philadelphia] & New York, and two or three hours after anything is done in those cities, it is known here.”

  The decade was critically important for Abraham Lincoln. He returned from his term in Congress in 1849 and began building his successful law practice. In just eleven years he would be heading back to Washington, D.C., to lead the nation through its most difficult challenges. Hundreds of authors have written thousands of pages explaining, defining, striving to capture the “real Lincoln.” I decided to see where his words would lead me and what clues I could find to discover how the Indiana and Illinois Lincoln, seemingly removed from the power base of the nation, became the Mount Rushmore Lincoln.

  I didn’t find the answer, but I did come to an insight—a perspective I’d never realized. The more I read, the more convinced I became that the five years from 1854 to 1859 were pivotal for Lincoln, for the Union, and for the people of Springfield. And part of the story could be told through the food folks in Springfield ate, revealing a crossroads of cuisine feeding a complex society rooted in traditions, open to innovation, and influenced by non-midwestern opportunities.

  In a nutshell, in 1854 the United States reached a political crossroads. Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas sponsored a bill essentially overturning the Ordinance of 1787 and 1820 Missouri Compromise, which had limited slavery to Southern states. Douglas’s bill established that new states entering the Union could, if their citizens wanted, become slaveholding states. The bill was passed by Congress as the Kansas-Nebraska Act and signed into law by President Franklin Pierce on May 30, 1854.

  Lincoln and Douglas, arguably the men who were to become the nation’s two most influential speakers on the topic, gave a series of speeches around Illinois that fall. Although the pretext was campaigning in the congressional election—Lincoln to reelect Congressman Richard Yates; Douglas to elect Thomas Harris—the real debate was the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

  Lincoln gave at least nine major addresses between August 26 and November 1, 1854. Three of them were, in effect, joint appearances with Stephen Douglas. The audiences were very large, sometimes in the thousands. On October 16 in Peoria, Douglas spoke first for two or three hours. Lincoln followed, speaking for the same amount of time, and then Douglas had another hour to answer Lincoln’s arguments. The topic was the role of slavery in the admission of new states to the Union. Douglas defended his position. Lincoln passionately argued against it. Newspaper reports noted the audience participation, cheering points they agreed with and shouting down those they did not.

  I was struck by Lincoln’s elaboration of his underlying principles. He explained his hatred for the spread of slavery. “I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself,” and also because it showed American leaders to be hypocrites: speaking of freedom while allowing slavery and, thus, “losing influence in the world.” He continued that it put “really good men” into a war with the Declaration of Independence as they insisted, “there is no right principle of action but self-interest.” The emphasis is Lincoln’s.

  One of Lincoln’s supporting arguments jumped out at me. He demonstrated the real and positive economic impact of freedom as he characterized the settlement of the slave-free Midwest: “No states in the world have ever advanced as rapidly in population, wealth, the arts, and appliances of life and now have such promise of prospective greatness as the states that were born under the Ordinance of ’87.” Lincoln wrote that Douglas’s Nebraska bill set the country “at once in a blaze” and into sectional conflict.

  Four years later the men once again faced each other over the issue of slave and free states in the famous 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates for Douglas’s senate seat. As he accepted the Republican nomination, Lincoln addressed the extreme risks of Douglas’s position. The most-remembered phrase from that speech is “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” but there was much more. Again, Lincoln put Douglas’s position into economic terms, suggesting it would set the stage for backward motion, a retreat from all of the progress the United States had made. Following Douglas’s logic, Lincoln said, it was even possible that Illinois could become “a slave state” and that slave trade with Africa could be revived.

  Lincoln lost the race but valued the successes of the campaign. He wrote to an associate: “It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could not have had in [any] other way; and though I now slink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.”

  Lincoln returned to his Springfield law practice, feeling the pressures of the loss of time and business. He wrote to his advisor and friend Norman Judd of the cost of the campaign that, “I have been on expenses so long without earning any thing that I am absolutely without money now for even household purchases.” But far from fading from view, he continued writing to political allies and public speaking.

  Lincoln returned to the discussion of the economic advantages of free states as he closed his February 1859 lecture on “Discoveries and Inventions,” saying that a “new country is most favorable—almost necessary—to the emancipation of thought, and the consequent advancement of civilization and the arts … we, here in America, think we discover, invent, and improve, faster than any of them.”

  The railroad was a primary and progressive improvement and one that Lincoln had studied for years. In 1832 when he was campaigning to represent his New Salem neighbors in the Illinois legislature, Lincoln predicted “no other improvement … can equal in utility the rail road. It is a never failing source of communication, between places of business remotely situated from each other.” Now, in the 1850s, Lincoln recognized that this promise had proven true. The railroad “is growing larger and larger, building up new countries with a rapidity never before seen in the history of the world … [promoting] young and rising communities” in the middle of the nation.

  Now food traveled readily between sections of the country giving people more and more choices. Even though the political differences between North and South were increasingly tense, on Springfield tables Carolina rice could share a dinner plate with New England stewed codfish.

  In Springfield the benefits of progress were now an obvious part of everyday life: Oysters! Pineapples!! Tomato sauce!! In cans!!!! As I read the foods h
eralded in the 1850s Springfield newspapers’ grocery advertisements—oysters from the East Coast, pineapples and citrus from the tropics, and just-invented canned tomato sauce—I realized there could be no better realization of Abraham Lincoln’s 1832 progressive vision than the food available to the people of Springfield. A huge variety of fresh and packaged food filled the stores, and the growing, diverse population had the money to buy it.

  In 1853, Springfield businessman and newspaper editor Simeon Francis highlighted the change over the previous ten years: “In those times [1843] few of our farmers, indeed of our citizens, could indulge in such luxuries as coffee, sugar, tea, or a broadcloth coat.” The price of farmland increased from between three dollars to eight dollars an acre and now sold for between fifteen to thirty dollars.

  Farming and food were the engines of this economic progress. Far from being a sleepy backwater, Springfield was an active national trading hub. During 1856, for example, the two railway lines exported nearly a million bushels of wheat and corn grown on Springfield-area farms. Another half million bushels of wheat were ground into one hundred thousand 156-pound barrels of flour and sent along the rails. Eastward shipments of live cattle and hogs brought $1,500,000 to the city. Armstrong’s woolen mill turned seventy-five thousand pounds of wool into blankets, flannels, and yarn. Another two hundred thousand pounds of raw wool, worth $100,000, were sent east for manufacturing.

  Springfield’s population grew from 2,600 in 1840 to 7,250 in 1855 as people from around the nation and across the ocean came to make their mark. Many early Illinois settlers had been from the upper South—Tennessee and Kentucky—others from Indiana and Ohio, and some from New England. Now European immigrants came directly to the center of Illinois, contributing their traditions into the cultural mix. These immigrants changed the nation and Springfield. Their foods were reflected in a variety of “American” cookbooks and magazines. Whether the Lincolns actually ate any “foreign foods” is another journey into speculation, but they had the opportunity, especially from three immigrant groups—Irish, Germans, and Portuguese.

  Mary Lincoln and many of her neighbors employed as live-in help Irish girls, who arrived as part of the great migration following the Irish potato famine. Irish stew recipes began appearing in nearly every cookbook.

  Springfield’s substantial German population filled two churches: one Lutheran, one Methodist. The community had political clubs and a marching band. City directories displayed ads from grocers “Reisch & Helmle” and “Klaholt & Claus,” along with three Bier Halles: “Leuterback & Sawer’s,” “Raps & Shoemaker’s,” and “Weideman & Schriefer’s Lager Bier Halle.” As to recipes for food to go with that beer, there was a German-American cookbook published in Philadelphia and printed in both languages, “a complete manual … with particular references to the climate and production of the United States.” The book has recipes for simple and sophisticated dishes including sauerkraut and beef with sour cream. For those who wanted Old Country flavors without the work and wait, Springfield residents only had to look to Lavely’s grocery store for their supply of “crout.” The store ran a large advertisement in January 1859.

  Lincoln recognized the importance of the German population as a key voting block. He even purchased Springfield’s German-language newspaper, the Illinois Staats Anzeiger. Control of the paper remained with the editor, Theodore Canisius, under the condition that the paper supported the Republican Party. Lincoln owned it from May 30, 1859, to December 6, 1860.

  Springfield’s First Presbyterian Church, the church the Lincolns attended, helped sponsor a large group of Portuguese who had fled religious persecution in their homeland. The families left Madeira and lived for a time in Trinidad before they were welcomed to Illinois. By 1855 some 350 Portuguese had settled in Springfield (about 4 percent of the population), working in a variety of trades. Mary Lincoln employed one Portuguese woman, Charlotte DeSouza, as a seamstress. Maybe DeSouza shared some of her favorite homeland foods with the Lincolns: chopped beef with eggs or a fancy egg custard encased in puff pastry. Regardless of my speculation about what the Lincolns may have enjoyed, Portuguese recipes were entering American life. Springfield homemakers may have happened on the recipe for the “Portuguese way to prepare mutton” as I did in Lucretia Irving’s 1852 book Irving’s 1000 Receipts, or, Modern and Domestic Cookery, a complex dish of chops stuffed with a forcemeat and dressed with the fancy “Sauce Robert.”

  Free people of color made Springfield their home, too. Mariah Vance worked for the Lincoln family on and off for several years in a variety of responsibilities, including cook. She was, evidently, a valued friend of the family. Years later Robert stopped to visit her when he passed through Danville, where she had moved. Another Springfield free person of color, a young man named William H. Johnson, born about 1835, accompanied Lincoln to the White House and functioned as his barber and valet.

  Though there were occasional economic downturns in Springfield, the track was steadily ahead through the 1850s. Signs of success were all around. The clothing needs of the community were met by workers at Wiley’s ready-made clothing factory. Craftsmen in the two hat stores made one-third of the hats they sold, and fifty shoemakers cobbled at the city’s seven shoe dealers. Furniture builders made fine and everyday home furnishings. Laborers, who had earned about ten dollars a month working at Armstrong’s woolen mill, Manning’s carriage shop, flour mills, the pork-packing plant, and brickyard, now earned twenty dollars, while the prices of manufactured and imported goods declined.

  Advertisements in Springfield’s newspapers chronicled and sometimes even celebrated the community’s economic advances in the kinds of foods—fresh, imported, and manufactured—people could purchase. In the early 1840s, grocers advertised mostly staples and a few fancy goods. In the fall of 1841, Barrett & Taylor offered 1,500 barrels of salt “sold low,” for those who needed this essential ingredient for home curing or smoking meats. J. Bunn had two barrels of rice in stock along with Underwood’s lemon syrup, pickles, ketchup, pepper sauce, and fresh lemons. John Buckhardt’s store offered rice along with “New Orleans molasses” and barrels of both loaf and crushed sugar. Iles & Pasfield listed raisins, rice, allspice, cloves, nutmegs, mace, cinnamon, black and red pepper, vinegar, coffee, and tea, along with fish—mackerel, shad, herring, and cod. A. Lindsay and Bro. gave a more complete description of these fish in their July 11, 1842, ad. “Just received a choice lot of fish—consisting of Mackerel, Shad, Salmon, Herrings, pickled and smoked.”

  By the mid-1850s not only were prices lower, but more and more exotic goods were available at the dry goods, or grocery, merchants in Springfield. Fruits from the Caribbean included pineapples and oranges. Newly perfected canned tomato sauce put the useful “esculent” vegetable on Springfield homemakers’ pantry shelves for year-round use. Cheese was popular. Favored kinds include some from the Western Reserve region of northeast Ohio and even a type of cheddar cheese shaped like a pineapple made in New York. Dried cod along with smoked and pickled fish were still advertised, perhaps reflecting the preferences of New Englanders and the Portuguese residents. But now, as the December 1856 newspapers exclaimed, the railroad could bring “the celebrated Baltimore oyster” to town. “Fresh Shell Oysters” were advertised by H. C. Meyers & Son and W. W. Watson & Son. W. Lavely offered “Fresh Cove Oysters.”

  We know the Lincolns had charge accounts at two of the twenty-three Springfield dry goods and grocery stores in business during 1859. Alas, we don’t know their shopping habits at any of the butchers, bakers, or meat markets in town, but we do know they must have made purchases there.

  However, we do have witnesses recording several times when Lincoln ate oysters. Lincoln scholar Wayne Temple suggests that if Lincoln had a favorite seafood, it “would have been oysters.”

  Oysters had been available in central Illinois earlier. Lincoln and the other Sangamon Long Nine, very tall legislators, served oysters and champagne at a party celebrating their success in pas
sing the legislation to move the capital from Vandalia to Springfield in 1837. But this 1856 advertising intensity suggests a good supply for just about every Springfielder who cared to eat them. In January 1859, Hull’s store even advertised “chafing dishes for cooking oysters.” An illustration in the American Home Cook Book shows such a dish, fueled by an alcohol lamp “to keep steaks hot or to cook oysters, venison, mutton, etc. on the table.” It looks like a modern, low chafing dish or one of those holders to disguise a utilitarian baking dish, with decoratively pierced “silver” sides surrounding some kind of cooking basin. Just the thing for a quick supper or an oyster party.

  So we come to another common Lincoln food speculation: Did Springfield families hold parties that featured only oysters? Did the Lincolns host them? Certainly, there were such events as oyster parties. In 1855 a short story in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine portrayed an oyster party held in New York: “Some ten or a dozen young men were seated round the long-table, some busily stewing oysters in silver chafing-dishes … while more were sipping their Sauterne, and watching the operations of their companions with a sort of hungry interest.… The table looked like work. On the snowy cloth three or four silver chafing dishes glittered and one might hear in the pauses of conversation the bubbling of the savory stews within.”

  Alas, the household inventories and purchase records don’t show that the Lincolns, or any of Mary’s sisters, owned an oyster chafing dish. And even though archaeological excavations around the Lincoln Home National Historic Site have found oyster shells and shards of bivalve shells—possibly oysters—those shells are the only existing evidence. It will remain speculation whether the couple ever did feed their guests exclusively on the popular bivalve.