Everyone understood that the immediate subject of their contest was the economy (though slavery was intertwined with that as it was with virtually everything else). Just a year before, the nation had entered into its first great depression. A likely cause could be traced to one of Andrew Jackson’s last acts as president, the Specie Circular, which required that all payments for public land be made in the form of specie, or hard currency (coins, in this case, of gold and silver). The problem was that specie was hard to get, and on May 10, 1837, New York banks, unable to meet continuing demands for it, refused to convert paper money into hard currency in the form of gold or silver. Soon thereafter, the convergence of many factors (including restrictive lending policies in Great Britain and a sharp decline in cotton prices and mortgage payments), produced panic nationwide. More than a third of the nation’s banks failed, credit became practically impossible to obtain to start new businesses, cotton prices fell dramatically, and the trade balance with England deteriorated. At the same time, a drought hit Illinois and caused many crops to fail.
Naturally, Democrats blamed Whigs for the economic collapse, and Whigs blamed Democrats. Van Buren, Jackson’s self-selected successor, believed that overreach by the federal government was the principal cause of the depression, but another was the Whigs’ contempt for republican values, particularly a lack of commitment to civic virtue and to the self-discipline required for saving money and avoiding debt. Arguing that the American people were too self-indulgent, Van Buren proposed to replace the national bank with a system of independent treasuries that would create an institutional choke point between the federal treasury on one side and the states and the private sector on the other.
In the Senate, Clay denounced Van Buren as out of touch with most American workers and his financial plan as ineffective, since it failed to invest in programs and projects that could help the people economically succeed to the point where they would be able to contribute to the solvency of the system as viable economic actors. Following Clay’s lead, Stuart and Lincoln themselves argued that the solution to the nation’s economic problems was the national bank, which they believed was instrumental to stabilizing the nation’s credit and improving the handling of the federal government’s financial affairs. Clay and his fellow Whigs in Congress, as well as Stuart and Lincoln on the campaign trail, also derided Jackson’s—and now Van Buren’s—consolidation of presidential power as usurping the legislative authority vested in Congress by the Constitution.
As is often the case in politics, crisis became an opportunity for finger pointing. Just as Van Buren had blamed Whig ideology, the Whigs capitalized on the economic collapse and Van Buren’s inability to sustain Jackson’s appeal as the champion of the common man. Lincoln published a series of anti-Douglas letters in Springfield’s Sangamo Journal as Douglas and Stuart traveled around the district debating each other.
Lincoln later recalled the give and take of the debates, describing from the vantage point of 1854 the thrust and the parry as “a neatly varnished sophism . . . readily penetrated” by Stuart,50 but recognizing in Douglas’s response that “a great, rough non-sequitur was sometimes twice as dangerous as a well-polished fallacy.”51 When the congressional election ended in August 1838, almost everyone expected a Douglas victory, but it did not materialize. Instead, the final tally gave Stuart a narrow victory by thirty-six votes. Douglas complained that Stuart had won because of vote fraud, but he did not press the claim, because the fraud was not likely confined to just one side of the ledger. Stuart and Lincoln also won their murder trial. It was not a good summer for Douglas.
In the first two of his four successive terms in the state legislature, Lincoln voted consistently in line with Clay’s positions on infrastructure expansion. Many of the improvements were to be state funded, while Lincoln, as a state legislator, was in the position of voting to instruct the state’s senators on the issues that came before them. The votes, particularly those mandating state funding, came back to haunt Lincoln when the 1837 depression hit. With the tightening of credit and extensive foreclosures, the state faced insolvency, and Lincoln had to choose between finding a way to keep the state budget from hemorrhaging and sticking with Clay. He stuck with Clay.
V
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Two of Lincoln’s speeches from this period show the significant influence of Clay as his mentor. The first was “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” given in 1837 to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, an organization Stuart had been instrumental in bringing to the town. The timing of the speech coincided with several significant developments—the economic fallout; Stuart’s upcoming 1838 campaign for the House; Lincoln’s repeated attempts in the state legislature to curb slavery, including filing an official protest declaring “that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy” and a failed attempt to amend a pro-Southern resolution cautioning Congress against abolishing slavery in the nation’s capital (his amendment would have affirmed the voters’ right to abolish slavery);52 Lincoln’s concurrent campaign for reelection to the state legislature; the lynch-mob murder of Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist minister and newspaper publisher in Alton, Illinois; and the horrific burning of an African American in St. Louis. While it is customary to consider the speech as a verbose attack on Stephen Douglas, it responded to a theme that was common to all these developments: threats to the rule of law from unruly mobs stoked by populists or, as Lincoln suggested, a tyrant like Stephen Douglas or especially Andrew Jackson.53 At the same time, the speech was an attempt at something grander than the kinds of newspaper letters and political attacks Lincoln had unleashed against his political opponents.
Early in the speech, Lincoln referred to an “ill-omen” developing within the nation by which, he said, “I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.”54 (In his Lyceum Address, Lincoln used the terms mob or mobs eight times.)55 “This disposition,” he argued, “is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country, from New England to Louisiana.”56 Though “tedious” to recount the “horrors” of what these mobs did, he did recount that in Mississippi “white men, supposed to be leagued with the negroes” and with “strangers” “were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side.”57 Lincoln did not expressly mention Lovejoy’s murder; he said without saying. Jackson’s base and those who attended his rallies were poor and rowdy, and to his detractors Jackson was King Mob because of the undisciplined and unruly mobs he controlled, yet here too his nickname went unsaid, the allusions clear. No one, at the time or later, mistook that Lincoln was saying Jackson’s supporters were responsible for the violence against Lovejoy and other abolitionists.
Lincoln mentioned the rise of tyrants nearly as often as the mobs. The “new reapers” who fomented this violence were “men of ambition and talents” who would “spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so before them.”58 Overly ambitious men would not be satisfied with merely “a seat in Congress” or “a gubernatorial or a presidential chair.”59 “What! Think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. –It sees no distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, erected to the memory of others.”60 In all likelihood, Lincoln’s reference to “towering genius” was a swipe at Stephen Douglas, who was often ridiculed for his short stature but lofty aspirations. Lincoln went further to suggest that the tyrannical disposition, which he obviously thought both Jacks
on and Douglas had, “denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.”61
If “some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us,” Lincoln warned, “it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.”62
Of course, Lincoln himself was intensely ambitious and well understood the lure of power. The difference was that he understood it through Clay’s prism, that its exercise was valid only if used in line with the republican principles of the Founding Fathers. He was also expressing the hope that the people who were inclined to support aspiring despots had the intelligence and the courage to bring them down. They should prefer someone who came from nothing but made his own way by his own labor, someone like himself, a self-made man, just like Clay.
The nation’s salvation depended on the public’s appreciating that “passion has helped us,” for it brought about the American Revolution, but it “can do so no more.”63 Instead, he said “Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.64 Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws,” which could lead the American people to a point at which they could look back and know that “we improved to the last; that we remained free to the last; that we revered his name to the last; that, during his long sleep, we permitted no hostile foot to pass over or desecrate his resting place; shall be that which to learn that the last trump shall awaken our WASHINGTON.”65 This distinction between passion and reason was important not just to Lincoln but to Madison and the Founders—and likely Lincoln, too—who took it from classical authors Cicero and Seneca. Aristotle was a major influence on the latter two, but while he counseled plainness and directness in writing Lincoln was, at that time, seemingly in the thrall of the ornamentation common to the classical orators Aristotle criticized. Perhaps Lincoln read no Aristotle. More likely, he had not yet settled on the realization that the more plainly he spoke the more the public understood, or took to heart, his message.
Lincoln’s Lyceum speech was one of hope for a better future. He was denouncing overly ambitious men but expecting the nation’s salvation to depend on finding a new Washington, fearing tyrants but remaining faithful to a single leader who could lead the nation out of its current mess. Lincoln, as Clay had done, was characterizing the project of overcoming slavery, demagoguery, and lawlessness as a return to the values that were the foundation of America and its Constitution. It was a distinctly idealistic objective, which Whigs clearly shared. (The Sangamo Journal reprinted the speech so it could be read more widely.) Jackson and his acolytes, Van Buren and Douglas, were promising to decentralize power, give more of it back to the states, and expect less from the nation’s capital, but the Whig solution for maintaining the Union was respect for the rule of law and the values enshrined in the grand language of the Constitution.
In retrospect, it is clear that Lincoln was struggling in his Lyceum Address, as he had struggled in his maiden campaign speech, to find his voice. Occasionally he repeated a short phrase and a word—a popular rhetorical device at the time, as reflected in the speeches of Clay and Webster. (It is a rhetorical technique that also appears throughout the Shakespeare corpus, which Lincoln had studied and enjoyed reciting to himself and others.) But that technique was overwhelmed by a greater ambition, his urgent need to make a mark on the world. His remarks were cluttered with the kind of ornamentation common to classical orations and references to Napoléon (twice), the Bible, and the Founders as “a fortress of strength” and “a forest of giant oaks” swept away by “the all-restless hurricane,” which “left only, here and there, a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage; unshading and unshaded, to murmur in a few gentle breezes, and to combat with its mutilated limbs, a few more ruder storms, then to sink, and be no more.”66 This was the insecurity of a twenty-nine-year-old trying to embellish his message (in this specific case, before a crowd assembled under “academic” pretenses), and the ornaments dangled poorly. He was not unaware that the forced grandiosity and formality poorly suited him. He was searching for language that could straightforwardly, memorably, and movingly capture the Whig project and his own role in advancing it.
Prentice’s biography of Clay mentioned his eloquence on nearly every page, and Clay’s friends and foes alike often remarked upon that quality. Clay was not stirring, fluent, and memorable in the same ways as his contemporary and rival, Daniel Webster of New England, was in the turning of a phrase or striking declaration. Instead, Clay’s reputation was rooted in his humor and skill as a performer—the way he held his body, the way he used his voice and hands, the pauses in his speech, and the timing of his insertion of a jab here or a cutting remark there. It is likely, given the way in which Lincoln viewed Clay, that if the young man had been able to witness his “mentor” (again, Lincoln’s term), he might have shed the ponderous attempts to show off in favor of something more honest and open. By the time he finally saw Clay in action, he was already transforming his earlier extrapolations of Clay’s style into something all his own.
Lincoln’s other signature speech delivered in these years was his December 26, 1839, address on behalf of the Whig candidate for president, William Henry Harrison, who was challenging the incumbent, Martin Van Buren. While Clay was not the candidate, the expectation among Whigs was that Harrison would follow the party line and therefore allow Congress, where Clay reigned, to take the lead in domestic affairs. The arguments for Harrison were, in other words, the same as they would have been if Clay had been the candidate, including discouraging the use of the presidential veto and deferring to the Cabinet and Congress. Perhaps Harrison’s most important innovation was in the campaign he ran, including using women to spread his message and the first campaign slogan in a presidential race, “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too,” a reference to his prowess as a fighter against Native Americans and to his running mate, a stalwart Democrat, who brought balance to the ticket. Clay’s “American System” was no match as a rallying cry.
Michael Burlingame suggests that Lincoln’s speech “became the Illinois Whig Party’s textbook for 1840.”67 Unlike his Lyceum Address in front of a more detached crowd, the intent here was to mobilize his fellow Whig partisans. Lincoln was more comfortable in these settings than academic ones, perhaps because he was self-conscious about his lack of formal education, or perhaps he could be less self-conscious and more relaxed and candid with his fellow partisans. In any event, this speech demonstrated that Lincoln was evolving toward the rhetorical patterns that had made Clay a legend. First, he did not save his humility for the end as he had done in his first campaign speech but instead began the speech with self-deprecation (a Clay trademark) by noting that the crowd was smaller than it had been for previous speakers. “The few who have attended,” Lincoln said, “have done so, more to spare me of mortification, than in the hope of being interested in anything I may be able to say. This circumstance casts a damp upon my spirits, which I am sure I shall be unable to overcome during the evening.”68
Lincoln then launched into a searing attack on President Van Buren’s subtreasury plan (creating independent subtreasuries for the collection and distribution of federal money), which, he said, would cause “distress, ruin, bankruptcy and beggary” by removing money from circulation.69 After suggesting that the poor would be hit the hardest by Van Buren’s economic policies, he defended Clay’s favorite project, the national bank, which Lincoln claimed handled money more responsibly than run-of-the mill government officials did. He proceeded to lambaste Jackson, Van Buren, and Douglas as spendthrifts,
deftly turning the criticism leveled against proponents of internal improvements—that they were fiscally reckless—against them. His attacks were unsubtle: he declared Douglas “stupid” and “deserving of the world’s contempt” and his arguments “supremely ridiculous,” while Van Buren was captive to the “evil spirit that reigns” in Washington.70 The biblical allusions of the Lyceum speech were now decidedly on the underside and the prophetic. He described the nation’s capital as hell, with “demons” running amuck and “fiendishly taunting all those who dare resist [their] destroying course”71 before casting himself as heroic and his cause blessed by the Almighty:
If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly and alone, and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors. Here, without contemplating consequences, before high heaven and in the face of the world, I swear eternal fidelity to the just cause, as I deem it, of the land of my life, my liberty, and my love.72
Lincoln’s speech for Harrison was a paean not only to the candidate but his new profession. It sounded the theme that faith in law could bring order to the chaos that was the alternative, a theme that Lincoln reiterated throughout his career, and one that Stuart, Clay, and Webster all repeated as well. At the same time, Lincoln’s rhetoric was evolving stylistically, his phrasing was plainer, more succinct, and therefore more memorable. His fellow Whigs praised the eloquence, passion, and reasoning of this speech.
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