Chapter Two
Finding the Path to Congress
(1834–1844)
Within seven months of his arrival in New Salem, Abraham Lincoln announced his first campaign for office. Over the next seven years, he would become the most powerful Whig in the Illinois State House of Representatives.
Lincoln and many other young Whigs supported both the Missouri Compromise and the American System, which he backed until the day he died. Perhaps more than anything else, however, Lincoln was driven by another of Clay’s ideas. Andrew Jackson championed the “common man,” whom he believed he exemplified—the poor, illiterate, disenfranchised, hardworking men, who were born with nothing but worked with their hands and were the backbone of America, men born in poverty but could rise to the nation’s highest elected office. In contrast, Henry Clay had coined the concept of “the self-made man,” in 1832, as the centerpiece of his economic vision.1 Clay’s idea was that any man in America, no matter how modest his beginnings, could become economically productive, particularly if the government supported the development of business and internal improvements, such as roads, bridges, and tunnels, that linked the disparate parts of America into one land. It was an ideal that inspired young Whigs like Lincoln to seek to improve themselves through hard work, self-discipline, and social respectability.
In the 1840s, Lincoln declared himself a “self-made man,” though he had been expressing the same idea in emphasizing self-reliance in campaign speeches and public pronouncements beginning in the 1830s. He had examples of self-made men all around him, men such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Clay, and even Jackson. Although Lincoln did not win a seat in Washington as quickly as Clay or Jackson, he was not yet forty when he established his own law firm, became a leader in the Illinois Whig Party, and mounted a successful campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives. His chance to make his mark loomed closer.
I
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In 1832, both Bowling Green and John Todd Stuart encouraged Lincoln to run for an open seat in the Illinois legislature. Following their advice and his own burning ambition, Lincoln declared his candidacy for the Illinois House of Representatives on March 9, 1832.2 Clay had begun his political career in the Kentucky General Assembly, and Lincoln looked to start his own in a similar way. Lincoln, however, was three years younger than Clay had been when he first ran for office.
Lincoln’s announcement of his first political campaign might not surprise anyone looking back at his life, but it likely surprised more than a few of the townsfolk. He had just turned twenty-three, but to the many who engaged with him, he talked about politics incessantly. Orville Browning recalled that “even in his early days [Lincoln] had a strong conviction that he was born for better things than then seemed likely or even possible.” Browning added, “Lincoln’s ambition was to fit himself properly for what he considered some important predestined labor or work.”34
Lincoln’s speech to announce his candidacy for the Illinois House was not his best, but it showed he was learning from Clay. According to Clay’s 1831 campaign biography, his first campaign speech was brief and to the point: “He told his fellow-freemen that he was, indeed, young and inexperienced, and had neither announced himself as a candidate, nor solicited their votes; but that, as his friends had thought proper to bring forward his name, he was anxious not to be defeated.”5 Clay “gave an explanation of his political views, and closed with an ingenuous appeal to the feelings of the people.”6 From reading that speech, as well as Clay’s other speeches or reports on them, Lincoln learned their characteristic flow. Usually, Clay began with some kind of self-deprecation, such as reminding his listeners of his “humble” origins or lack of the superior intellect that others had. He often marked the occasion or context of the speech, where it was happening and why, and praised his adversaries before launching into systematic evisceration—often filled with ridicule and satire—of his opponents’ arguments. (Clay did not care about what happened to his speeches once he was done with them. He rarely drafted a speech beforehand; instead, he would write down a few ideas on fragments of paper, which he usually tossed away afterward.)
Clay could build a case as well as any lawyer, but it was his keen sense of humor and colorful images and delivery that helped to set his rhetoric apart. His humor was designed to endear himself and his message to his audience, but he often used humor to mock and belittle his opponents (his followers, for example, called Jackson “jackass” and “King Andrew”), even while professing the greatest respect for them. Lincoln’s first speech emulated Clay’s early no-nonsense approach and his focus on substance, but it was short on humor. In time, Lincoln would learn to meld the two in winning fashion. In this first speech, Lincoln launched quickly into his purpose, just as Clay would have done. In the short opening paragraph, he declared, “It becomes my duty to make known to you—the people whom I propose to represent—my sentiments with regard to local affairs.”7 His efforts to connect with the crowd were weak because they were too formulaic, and Lincoln would further study Clay’s almost invariably successful methods for bonding with his audiences. Yet Lincoln’s conclusion was pure Clay in its self-deprecation and expression of humility:
Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed. I am young and unknown to many of you. I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or popular relations to recommend me. My case is thrown exclusively upon the independent voters of this county, and if elected they will have conferred a favor on me, for which I shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate. But if the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the back ground, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.8
In time, he would learn to begin, as Clay (and classical orators) nearly always did, with what became his trademark expression of humility.
Lincoln voiced support for “the public utility of internal improvements,” the core of Henry Clay’s American System.9 Elaborating, he spoke of the need for “roads and canals,” a need for “more easy means of communication than we now possess” in Sangamon County, the need to investigate “the expediency of constructing a railroad from some eligible point on the Illinois river,” meant to improve the means for navigating the Sangamon River, and a need to outlaw “exorbitant rates of interests” on loans.10 All of these proposals came from Clay.
So, too, did Lincoln’s statement that education is “the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in.”11 Funding education was to Clay a crucial element of the American System. In declaring that he could “see the time when education, and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise, and industry, shall become much more general than at present,” Lincoln was delivering a sharp rebuke to his father.12 Indeed, he was not only demonstrating his support for a program a still-loyal Democrat like Thomas opposed but, in seeking public office, he was publicly seeking a life his father never had, a life like Clay’s.
Lincoln enjoyed the rough-and-tumble of the political campaign. At a stop at a sale in the tiny town of Pappsville, Lincoln was about to take the stage when he noticed a friend of his was being heckled. As Lincoln spoke, a fight broke out. Lincoln quickly stepped off the stage, stepped into the middle of the fray, grabbed the main culprit by the neck and trousers, and threw him to the ground. The fighting suddenly stopped. Lincoln calmly walked back up to the stage and recommenced his speech—“Fellow citizens, I am humble Abraham Lincoln.”13
Whether Lincoln’s volunteering for the state militia in the midst of his campaign was simply a means of relatively stable employment after a stretch of professional insecurity or a tactical move to burnish his credentials as a candidate, not long after announcing he headed off to battle. When he returned from the Black H
awk War, the election was only a couple of weeks away. On August 2, 1832, he and the other candidates for the New Salem seat in the Illinois House assembled to give their final speeches before the election on August 6. Drawing on a Sangamo Journal story about President Jackson’s veto of the national bank’s rechartering, along with advice from John Todd Stuart, Lincoln spoke for thirty minutes in defense of the national bank (and how it fit into Clay’s broader vision), denouncing Jackson’s veto of its rechartering.
It was for naught. Though Lincoln had promoted his candidacy throughout the county, he lost the election, finishing eighth out of thirteen candidates. He took solace in the fact that, although he lost the county, he had won 277 votes out of the 300 cast in New Salem, which was predominately Democratic. Stuart won his election for the Illinois House. Shortly thereafter, Stuart was elected as the floor leader for the Whigs in the House, so while Lincoln had failed in his first campaign for office, he now had a close friend and political compatriot in a position to help him in future campaigns.
Besides doing well as a Whig in a sea of Jackson men, Lincoln had, without realizing it, impressed some important Whigs. Stephen Logan, already one of the state’s best trial lawyers, had been in the audience more than once. Logan recalled his first sighting of the candidate, at a political rally at the courthouse in Springfield:
I saw Lincoln before he went up into the stand to make his speech. He was a very tall and gawky and rough looking fellow then . . . But after he began speaking I became very much interested in him. He made a very sensible speech. [Up] to that time I think he had been doing odd jobs of surveying, and one thing and another. But one thing we very soon learned was that he was immensely popular.14
The year was far from over. Lincoln returned to the hustings, an activity he had loved ever since he was a little boy delivering funny speeches and stories to his friends. This time, he was on a bigger stage: with the presidential election only a few months away, he visited nearby counties to campaign for Henry Clay, but here too the outcome he had hoped for did not come to pass: Illinois went for Jackson, as did the nation. Calhoun left the vice presidency for the Senate. To replace him, Jackson brought Martin Van Buren back from Great Britain to serve as his new vice president and political heir.
Jackson’s triumph over Clay was not the victory for which states’ rights enthusiasts had hoped. After the election, the South Carolina legislature passed a law that declared unconstitutional the 1828 and 1832 tariffs that Clay had helped pass to protect American manufacturers from their European competitors. South Carolina declared its entitlement, by virtue of being one of the states that had founded the Union, to disregard, or nullify, any federal enactment it deemed illegitimate. Jackson disagreed. On December 8, 1832, he issued a proclamation declaring that South Carolina did not have the power to nullify a federal law and that such power was “incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which It was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.”15 Jackson had taken a page from Clay (and Clay’s rival Daniel Webster) in acknowledging that the Union took precedence over the states and that therefore the states could not undermine it. In agreement, the Illinois governor, a Democrat, issued a proclamation declaring nullification “treasonable.”16
While Jackson and much of the nation were focused on his rebuttal to South Carolina’s “Ordinance of Nullification,” Lincoln and Stuart were discussing ways for Lincoln to follow Stuart into the state legislature. Looking back at Lincoln’s growing reputation at that time, Stuart said, “Everyone who became acquainted with him in the campaign of 1832 learned to rely on him with the most implicit confidence.”17 In his earnest efforts to help his neighbors by doing all sorts of odd jobs and favors for them and to entertain locals with his stories, Lincoln endeared himself to the voters in his district. He had not abandoned his political aspirations after his defeat, and in this he looked again to Clay for inspiration. Clay, after all, had lost the presidential election in 1824, sat out the 1828 election because he was secretary of state, returned to the Senate in late 1831 to raise his stature and create a perch from which he could try to block Jackson’s initiatives, and became the first sitting senator to secure a major party’s nomination for the presidency, although Jackson won the 1832 presidential election by a large margin, winning 218 of the 286 electoral votes cast. Those losses had been hard on Clay—how could they not be? After all, elections are measured in a precise and quantifiable manner, and when he’d craved the broadest support, Clay had consistently been liked less than his opponents. Even when he had been in high office, his policy dreams had been muffled, if not sometimes suffocated. And yet such rejection did not deter him. Such resilience was another reason Lincoln revered him.
Inspiration was also more immediately at hand. Stuart believed Lincoln’s political career, much like his own, was just beginning, and he encouraged Lincoln to try again.18 Lincoln had learned from the loss and realized that he had to start earlier and campaign harder.
Lincoln’s awed recognition of Clay’s fortitude would help him again and again and again. Looking back at the path that he had taken to Congress and later the presidency, he recalled that the 1832 election was the only time “he had ever been beaten by the people.”19 In truth, he would lose eight different elections, but to be fair, six were lost before the general election, and his election to the presidency was not, strictly speaking, a winning popular election but one where the key votes came from electors, not directly from the public. Had he at any time surrendered to the trend, we would likely not know his name today.
II
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In 1833, Lincoln had no job and no source of income. John Todd Stuart, Bowling Green, and Orville Browning each stepped up their encouragement for him to study law. Stuart was impressed that Lincoln, then twenty-four, had already acquired a reputation for “candor and honesty,” as well as for his ability “in speech-making.”20 Lincoln might not yet be comfortable onstage speaking to large audiences as a candidate, but in smaller settings, where he was speaking to friends or townspeople, he had an ease about him that made people like and trust him. Stuart, as well as Lincoln, thought this boded well not just for a legal career, but also a future in politics. Lawyers needed to write well, study and learn the language of law, and just as important, be able to avoid or settle litigation, protect clients’ assets, get along with everyone as much as possible, and be persuasive and compelling in making arguments before judges or juries. The more he refined these skills, the better Lincoln would become as both a lawyer and a politician.
Stuart’s law partner in those days, Henry Drummer, recalled that
Lincoln used to come to our office—Stuart’s and mine—in Springfield from New Salem and borrow law-books. Sometimes he walked but generally rode. He was the most uncouth looking man I ever saw. He seemed to have little to say; seemed to feel timid, with a tinge of sadness visible in the countenance, but when he did talk all this disappeared for the time and he demonstrated that he was both strong and acute. He surprised us more and more at every visit.21
Even without the encouragement, Lincoln must have been considering it as an option, since so many successful politicians had begun as lawyers. Of the ten men who had been elected to the presidency as of 1836, seven had studied law—Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John and John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren. Clay was not a president but he, too, was a lawyer. For all these men, the law itself was not the end. It was a stepping-stone to public office. It was a source of income and well-placed contacts who were instrumental for political advancement. Besides his military service and the controversies that he sparked wherever he went, Jackson had also been a legislator and a state judge before becoming president. Clay’s national prominence had begun with his law practice, but more important, that work led to his election to Congress, informed and sharpened his
arguments and oratory, and facilitated his leadership in the House and Senate. Even Clay’s stint as John Quincy Adams’s secretary of state was made possible because of the notoriety he had attained through his oratory and other endeavors. As a “self-made” man eager to make his mark on the world, Lincoln knew his path had to be his own, and with each career advancement, he was pushing the negative example of his father further behind him and was coming closer to becoming what his father had never been nor could tolerate—a man like Henry Clay, an accomplished professional and public figure.
Moreover, the law would be meaningful work, likely the best he could expect to find, given the constraints of community and his own education, and it was not the manual labor he detested. Such a station would situate him nicely within the community, and he could make enough money to support a family and his ambition of succeeding in politics. As Stuart well knew, such income could also help Abe pay off the debts he had been trying to settle for years.
The problem was that studying law required both time and money. Lincoln doubted he had enough of either. The time it would likely require to become qualified to practice was at least a couple of years, if not more, especially because, as the junior lawyer, he would have to do all the scut work Stuart didn’t want to do himself. Though Lincoln yearned to better himself, he worried that he still did not have the money needed to secure a legal education. Aware that the son of another villager had earned a law degree from a college in Louisville, Lincoln lamented that he did not have “a better education” that might have allowed him to avoid such tuition.22 Later, he wrote, seemingly with regret, that he “was never in a college or Academy as a student; and never inside of a college or academic building till since he had a law license.”23
Lincoln's Mentors Page 6