Shields challenged him to a duel. As the man challenged, Lincoln had the choice of weapons. He chose broadswords. He figured Shields was more adept at pistols than he was with swords and that his long reach would give him an advantage over his much shorter challenger. Lincoln even hoped Shields might withdraw from the fight once he realized the disadvantage. But Lincoln didn’t know that Shields had trained as a fencer and was quite comfortable—indeed, confident—in a swordfight.
Hundreds of people reportedly gathered to watch the two men square off on the field of battle. There is more than one story about what happened next. The most popular is that, moments before the duel commenced, Hardin and other “would-be pacificators” rode up on their horses and pleaded with both men to put their dispute before a disinterested panel.101 In another account, Hardin reached both men before weapons were drawn and persuaded them to drop the fight, and both quickly agreed. Whatever the truth, Lincoln subsequently looked back upon the affair only with embarrassment, as a cautionary tale about how far to go in taunting an opponent anonymously in the press. Whenever anyone, even Mary Todd, later referred to the matter, Lincoln refused to discuss it and quickly changed the subject.
Much to Lincoln’s chagrin, Hardin won the general election for the congressional seat in 1842. Afterward, Lincoln persuaded other Whig Party leaders in the state to adopt “rotation in office,” which Andrew Jackson and the Democrats had introduced at the federal level in 1828. In every election or appointment cycle, a political party would rotate new men as candidates for each office. Jackson defended the practice as implementing the will of the electorate, and Lincoln adapted it to ensure broader participation and inclusion of party loyalists in elections.
When Hardin secured his party’s nomination for the House seat he occupied, he had appeased his fellow Whigs by agreeing to take the seat on the condition that he would rotate out of it in 1844 to allow another Whig to compete for the nomination that year. Unfortunately for Lincoln, Edward Baker, a friend but an equally ambitious Whig, took the nomination for the House seat next, won the general election in 1844, and served in the congressional seat until he resigned in 1846 to enlist as an officer in the Mexican War. The resignation became necessary to avoid a conflict with the Constitution’s incompatibility clause, which bars an “officer of the United States” from serving in Congress.102 Baker was a colonel in the local militia and therefore was technically an army officer, an “officer of the United States.” When Baker resigned his seat, it became open for Lincoln to compete to fill.
VIII
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Lincoln’s politicking in the late 1830s and early 1840s did not interfere with his courting eligible women in Springfield. He was popular in Springfield social circles, as a young “self-made man” on the rise, and on November 4, 1842, he married Mary Todd. She was ten years younger than Lincoln and was soon expecting their first child, Robert Todd Lincoln, who was born on August 1, 1843.
Neither Stuart nor Browning expressed love, or much if any like, for Mary Todd. Both opposed the match, and neither ever changed his mind. We cannot know what, if anything else, either man said to Lincoln when they must have spoken in person about Mary Todd. We do not even know how often they did. From correspondence and observations of Stuart, Browning, and Joshua Speed, whom Lincoln had befriended when they both lived in Springfield, we can gather that all three men knew that Lincoln’s relationship with her was often tempestuous and unstable, even before they married. After once breaking off his engagement with her, Lincoln wrote to Stuart, “I am now the most miserable man living,” adding, “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forbode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.”103 Though Lincoln was sad other times, Speed felt obliged “to remove razors from his room [and] take away all the knives and other such dangerous things.”104
Speed warned Lincoln that he would die unless he pulled himself together. Lincoln responded that he was unafraid to die but for his regret “that he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived” and that he had not yet done anything to make the world a better place.105 More than a year later, Lincoln still could not decide whether he should marry Mary Todd. “Before I resolve to do the one thing or the other,” Lincoln confided to Speed, “I must regain my confidence in my own ability to keep my resolves when they are made.”106 Lincoln took his own advice to heart; he was characteristically slow and deliberate in making decisions, but once he made them, he stuck by them. As Mary Todd years later remembered, he was “a terribly firm man when he set his foot down—none of us—no man no woman Could rule him after he had made up his mind.”107 It was a rigidity bound to make things worse at home, since unlike Abraham, Mary had an aristocratic background and usually got her way. But his stubbornness would ultimately provide crucial ballast on a much greater stage.
Though Lincoln went on to do what he thought best, eventually marrying Mary Todd, Stuart and Browning each continued to talk of her as untrustworthy, histrionic, and difficult, and they both described Lincoln as unhappy on the day of his marriage. (Lincoln reputedly said, in response to a question about what he was about to do, that he was headed “to hell.”108) Stuart and Browning believed that Lincoln’s difficult, turbulent relationship with his wife might have explained why he spent so much time away from home riding the circuit and working on campaigns. Stuart and Browning also believed Mary Todd was more ambitious for Lincoln than even Lincoln was, though it seems reasonable to assume that Lincoln welcomed a wife who shared his ambitions or had even grander ones for him than he might have imagined for himself. In their opinion, however, she was the aggressor in the relationship, and possibly had seduced Lincoln on the eve of their marriage as a way to make it impossible for him to escape. (Robert Todd Lincoln, their first child, was born slightly less than nine months after the date of their wedding.)109
For Lincoln, there was another likely incentive: Henry Clay was a friend of the Todd family, a fact that undoubtedly would have pleased Lincoln. Mary Todd’s father, Robert Todd, had been a law student of Henry Clay’s at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, and later a business partner and political ally of Clay’s. Mary Todd had supposedly met and socialized with Clay when she was younger and was so loyal to Clay that she became known as “a violent little Whig.” For all of her faults, Mary Todd was fiercely in Lincoln’s corner, calling their marriage “our Lincoln party.” If Lincoln’s confidence lagged, and it did, she was there to refuel their joint ambitions.
On January 16, 1844, Charles Dresser, the minister who had performed their wedding ceremony, sold Lincoln and Mary Todd a one-and-a-half-story, five-room cottage at Eighth and Jackson Streets. Jackson was one of five Springfield streets named for former presidents. Every day Lincoln took his short walk from his home to his office at Sixth and Adams, the State Capitol building at Fifth and Adams, or both, he almost certainly would have thought of the nation’s early presidents and their ongoing presence in his and the nation’s life.
While Lincoln was settling into married life in 1844, he ended his two-year law partnership with Stephen Logan and began a new one with a younger partner, William Herndon. Lincoln’s impending family responsibilities and his interest in running for Congress explain why he chose to partner with a younger lawyer—he needed someone else to run the office while he campaigned for the House. As Lincoln learned from working with both Stuart and Logan, a younger partner could be given more of the firm’s work, freeing the senior partner to drum up more business or plan a political run. According to Henry Clay Whitney, who rode the circuit with Lincoln, Lincoln had explained to Herndon that he had taken him “in partnership on the supposition that he was not much of an advocate, but that he would prove to be a systematic office lawyer; but it transpired, contrary to his supposition, that Herndon was an excellent lawyer in the courts and
as poor as himself in the office.”110
IX
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On June 8, 1845, Andrew Jackson died. On his deathbed, he forgave his political enemies, including Clay. His final words were to his family, “Be good children, all of you, and strive to be ready when the change comes.”111 (Legend has it that Jackson had a parrot, which erupted in profanity the moment Jackson died.) At the time of his death, Democrats hailed his legacy as one of America’s strongest presidents, an American hero who opposed corruption and an overreaching federal government and was the relentless champion of democracy and the common man.
The Whigs were not inclined to forgive Jackson for anything. Daniel Webster, who had aligned with Jackson in opposing secession, was the only prominent Whig leader to eulogize Jackson. In a speech at the New-York Historical Society, he called Jackson a man “of dauntless courage, vigor, and perseverance” who sometimes had shown “wisdom and energy.”112 Clay said nothing. Yet again following Clay’s lead, Lincoln was silent.
Like Clay, Lincoln considered Jackson a tyrant, whose twelve vetoes were more than those of any other president up until that time. His dismissals of his Cabinet and of Whigs throughout the government to serve his own political whims and his appointments of friends and allies to replace Whigs whom he had dismissed had seriously damaged the American Constitution. Clay and Lincoln believed that Jackson should have been held accountable, even in death, for his bad acts, including deliberately using inflammatory rhetoric to stoke vicious and frenzied actions by his supporters. They likely would have agreed with the assessment of Jackson made by the visiting French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville, who in his monumental two-volume book Democracy in America declared, “General Jackson is the majority’s slave; he yields to its intentions, desires, and half-revealed instincts, or rather he anticipates and forestalls them.”113 On his travels throughout the United States, Tocqueville had closely observed Jacksonian democracy in action, famously deriding it as nothing but the tyranny of the majority.114 Lincoln and his fellow Whigs agreed.
Another likely reason that Clay and Lincoln said nothing positive in reacting to the news of Jackson’s death is that, although the former president was gone, the worst parts of his legacy were still alive, including the man now in the White House. Jackson’s protégé James K. Polk, newly into his first term, gave every indication that he was prepared to be the same kind of president in terms of policies, vicious partisanship, and constitutional outlook. “Young Hickory,” as those who supported Polk called him, fully commanded the Whigs’ attention. Besides being something for which they each might have once wished, Jackson’s death was almost an afterthought when Polk took the oath of office in 1845, such was Polk’s ideological fidelity.
Clay and Lincoln remained, however, shocked that it was not Clay in the Oval Office. In 1844, Clay had run against Polk as the Whig candidate for president; it was his third run as a major-party candidate for the nation’s highest office. Lincoln had been selected as an elector for Clay in the Electoral College, and the entire Whig Party believed that Clay’s chances had never looked better.
True, in 1840, the innocuous and bland William Henry Harrison beat out Clay to become the first Whig president, but he died a month into office, elevating to the presidency his vice president, John Tyler, who had left the Democratic Party to be Harrison’s running mate. Whigs didn’t trust him, and Democrats hated him for helping the Whig Party win the presidency.
The Whigs’ distrust of Tyler turned out to be for good reason. Even though as a senator he had harshly criticized Jackson for his tyrannical behavior, as president he acted a lot like his former target—vetoing infrastructure investments and tariffs, and defending states’ rights at every turn. Clay led the movement to oust Tyler from the Whig Party.
Tyler saved his most outrageous act for the end. As a lame duck (both parties hated him), he was seriously considering taking the initiative on perhaps the biggest issue confronting the country. Mexico continued to be perceived as a threat to the Union, since it claimed Texas on the basis of the original Spanish explorations by Alonso Álvarez de Piñeda, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, and Luis de Moscoso de Alvarado, the area rightly passing to Mexico upon independence in 1821. The Mexican government maintained it would go to war if the United States tried to take it. Americans who had become leaders in Texas asked for its incorporation into the Union, and Democrats like Jackson and Tyler looked favorably upon the request because its admission would add an additional slave state. From the sidelines, Jackson, still the most powerful voice in the Democratic Party, encouraged Democrats to take it. “Texas must be ours,” he proclaimed. “Our safety requires it.”115
Clay did not yet know who the Democrats might nominate to oppose him in the early months of 1844, but he was aware that Martin Van Buren, who had lost the presidency to Harrison in 1840, was hoping to become the Democratic nominee again. Clay wanted to take a stand on the Texas issue before Van Buren could, and on April 17, 1844, with the election nearly six months away, he made the fateful decision, as his biographer Robert Remini wrote, to write “the letter on Texas that ultimately destroyed his presidential bid.”116 Clay began the letter by reviewing the history of the region. Originally, the territory of Texas was part of the land that was included in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. But according to Clay, that area had been given back to Mexico in the Adams-Onis Treaty, negotiated in 1819, several years before he became John Quincy Adams’s secretary of state. Hence, in Clay’s judgment, it was absurd, “if not dishonorable,” he wrote, to attempt to resume title to Texas as if it had never ceased being a part of the United States.117 Claiming title to it would be an act of war, he predicted: “Of that consequence there cannot be a doubt. Annexation and war with Mexico are identical.”118
Clay understood that Jacksonians were not averse to going to war, but “I regard all wars as great calamities,” he wrote, “to be avoided, if possible, and honorable peace as the wisest and truest policy of this country.”119 While some Democrats believed that defeating Mexico in a war would not be difficult, Clay cautioned that Great Britain or France might come to its aid because each was “jealous of our increasing greatness, and disposed to check our growth” and eager to find a way to “cripple us.”120 Even if for some reason Mexico agreed to allow the United States to annex Texas, Clay argued that its annexation would be opposed by a “considerable and respectable portion of the Confederacy.”121 (Confederacy was a word that the framers’ generation had used to mean the union, or compact, of states comprising the United States.) Hence, the annexation of Texas would produce discord and turmoil within the nation and possibly endanger the Union. He expected the likely Democratic nominee, Martin Van Buren, to also oppose annexation, and added, “We shall therefore occupy common ground.”122
Clay’s letter appeared in the National Intelligencer on April 27, 1844, the same day that the Washington Globe, the Democratic newspaper begun with Andrew Jackson’s blessing and led by Francis Blair, published a letter from Van Buren to Congressman William Hammett of Missouri expressing opposition to the annexation.123 No one knew how Clay could have anticipated Van Buren’s position, but the simultaneous publications and nearly identical content of the two letters quickly became problematic for Van Buren. The similarities produced widespread concern that Clay had once again struck a “corrupt bargain,” this time to attain the presidency. Jackson was one of the first to predict that the letter and an editorial Clay wrote in its defense would destroy Clay’s bid, noting that they made Clay “a dead political Duck.”124 But he also said that, upon reading Van Buren’s letter that “it was impossible to elect him.”125 Consequently, Jackson gave his support for the Democratic nomination to his protégé James Polk, who had been the governor of Tennessee after having served four years in Clay’s previous position as the speaker of the House of Representatives. Clay had easily secured the Whig Party’s nomination in April 1844 before his letter appeared, while Polk became the surp
rise winner on the ninth ballot for the Democratic nomination.
In an attempt to mollify the increasing number of voters in favor of annexation, Clay tried to help himself by writing a series of letters to clarify his position. The more he wrote, the worse it got, and as he kept trying to stand on both sides of the Texas question the more his prevarications played into the hands of Democrats who used it to show that Clay’s ambition was out of control. As the campaign neared its conclusion, Clay wrote to the publisher of the Washington National Intelligencer on October 1, 1844. His letter reaffirmed his opposition to the annexation of Texas and complained that he was being misunderstood around the country and said that he would no long speak publicly on national issues until after the election.
That left a month in which Clay fell (largely) mute while the Democrats relentlessly hammered him for his persistent shifts, supposed hypocrisies, and overabundant ambition for the presidency. Whigs tried to counter by using many of the tactics they had used effectively in 1840 to get Harrison elected, including putting on numerous events to entertain prospective voters and plastering Clay’s name on nearly anything that could be given away. They thought it clever to keep asking “Who is James K. Polk?” as a constant refrain to underscore his mediocrity and anonymity.126 But their candidate was effectively nowhere to be seen.
In the end, it was a close election: Neither Polk nor Clay received a majority of the popular vote, though Polk had a slightly higher plurality, but only 105 electoral votes went to Clay as opposed to 170 for Polk. Clay won eleven states, but Polk won fifteen, including Indiana and Illinois, the two states where Lincoln had campaigned for Clay. Yet the election was even closer than it appeared. Clay lost New York by only 5,100 votes, and a win there would have made the difference between Clay as president and Clay as a three-time loser.
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