Lincoln's Mentors

by Michael J. Gerhardt

  Lincoln was always closely watching people and learning from them. Sometimes, he learned the most by observing the failures of others. Clay’s strengths had molded him, but Lincoln’s genius in selecting his mentors was in his capacity to distinguish the deficiencies of the admirable and the admirable traits of the deficient. Lincoln could learn from all of them. He despised much of Jackson’s despotic conduct, but he still found several elements in Jackson’s strong leadership worth emulating. Clarity was one of them; consistency, another. It was not in Lincoln’s nature to follow someone mindlessly or blindly but rather to learn what he could later put to his own purposes.

  Less than a month after Clay’s Market Street Speech, Lincoln was sworn in to Congress. He soon would use many of the same arguments Clay had made in Lexington to denounce Polk and the Mexican War on the floor of the House. One of Clay’s tragic flaws, Lincoln knew, was he had trouble seeing how others saw him or how they could sometimes see through his artifice, a fault that was on display early in the Market Street Speech when he referred to the support that he naïvely thought he still had within the Whig Party. Lincoln knew Clay had no such support, because a rising star in the party already had it.

  V

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  When Lincoln arrived in Washington, in the winter of 1847, it was his first visit to the nation’s capital. Five years earlier, Charles Dickens had declared Washington a “City of Magnificent Intentions,” with “spacious avenues that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to complete.”37 Another British writer, Alexander MacKay, said that “at best, Washington is but a small town, a fourth-rate community.”38

  On entering the Capitol itself, Lincoln saw “an immense lantern, towering over the dome of the rotunda,” six feet in diameter inside an eight-foot mast.39 That impressive rotunda was lined with paintings telling the story of America—from John Vanderlyn’s The Landing of Columbus (just installed in January 1847) to John Trumbull’s magnificent depictions of the Second Continental Congress’s reception of the Declaration of Independence, Lord Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, and General Washington’s resigning his commission. When Lincoln and other House members walked into the Hall of Representatives, they passed through a door with a portrait above of the folk hero Daniel Boone fighting a tomahawk-wielding Native American. Elsewhere within the Capitol was the Supreme Court library and the nation’s largest collection of books, the Library of Congress, which would give Lincoln opportunities to advance his knowledge. Marble busts of American leaders—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, Andrew Jackson, and even Martin Van Buren, among others—stood on pedestals throughout the room. Lincoln could not have helped but notice the absence of any important Whig among them.

  Lincoln arrived three days late for the Thirtieth Congress, which had convened on December 6, 1847. It had taken seven days for Lincoln, Mary Todd, and their two sons to trek from Springfield to Lexington to Washington as a family, a break with the traditional practice that members of Congress left their families back home. Once in the capital, Lincoln was eager to get to work. Initially, the family stayed at the city’s most storied hotel, Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel, though it lacked whatever grandeur it had once had. It had been the site of the inaugurations of James Madison, James Monroe, and John Tyler. For nearly thirty-five years, it had been the place where the members of the Supreme Court boarded, including Chief Justice John Marshall, during each term of the Court.

  Finding Brown’s too expensive, Lincoln moved his family to a more affordable boarding house managed by Mrs. Ann Sprigg, the widow of a clerk of the House of Representatives, and near the home of Duff Green. In 1827, Jackson had asked Green to start a partisan newspaper in Washington, the United States Telegraph, defending his administration, and Green became a member of President Jackson’s band of unofficial advisers, which his opponents called the “kitchen Cabinet.” Green often ate at Mrs. Sprigg’s.

  Within a few weeks after taking his seat, Lincoln sent his family back to Springfield. He told them they “hindered me some in doing business.”40 Mary Todd was not unhappy, because she felt bored and alone in Washington. Later, Lincoln wrote to her that he missed her and wished she and the children were with him, but they never returned while he was in Congress.41

  Lincoln was the youngest of the members of Congress in his boarding house. He befriended them all, regardless of party. They debated the issues before the House, often finding common ground on many of them. Late into the evenings, Lincoln entertained them with his storytelling and countless humorous asides. He forged especially close relationships with three of the men, each of whom would have a major impact on his term in Congress and career afterward.

  One was Joshua Giddings, an Ohio Whig, who would push Lincoln to oppose slavery altogether. Orlando Ficklin, a Democrat from Ohio, recalled that “Lincoln was thrown in a [boarding house] with Joshua R. Giddings,” described as a “tall man, of stout proportions, with a stoop in his shoulders, the face marked, and the hair gray.” Ficklin suggested that it was in this company that Lincoln’s “views crystallized, and when he came out from such association he was fixed in his views on emancipation.”42 In his two-year term, Lincoln consistently sided with Giddings against the extension of slavery. Less than three weeks after Lincoln was sworn in to the House, he cast one of his first votes in support of Giddings’s motion to refer an antislavery petition to the Judiciary Committee. In July and August, Lincoln voted with Giddings on thirteen of fourteen roll call votes on the question of allowing slavery in the territories. In the one deviation, Lincoln supported the suspension of House rules to permit consideration of a joint resolution declaring it expedient to establish civil government in New Mexico, California, and Oregon. Giddings opposed the resolution because he worried that New Mexico might be forced to unite with Texas, which was strongly proslavery. The two men disagreed further on the need for extremist tactics in fighting against the slave power, Giddings disposed to support any measure in opposition no matter how radical but Lincoln inclined to compromise and to oppose any resistance to the rule of law, no matter how wrong the law.

  Another friend at the boarding house was Pennsylvania’s David Wilmot, who was as virulently antislavery as Giddings. Wilmot’s reputation as a fierce abolitionist grew each time he tried to attach his proviso as a rider to any appropriations pertaining to the territories acquired in the Mexican War.

  Lincoln proclaimed that he had voted for the Wilmot Proviso “at least” forty times in his single term in the House, but in fact he had voted for it or its equivalent only about five times.43 The exaggeration came in handy for Lincoln when he was battling for the Republican nomination for president against fiercer opponents of slavery, including Seward of New York and Salmon Chase of Ohio. In 1847, however, Lincoln’s moderate position on slavery—opposing its extension but not its continuation—was enough to lump him together with Giddings and Wilmot so that their boarding house became known as Abolition House.

  Another new friend who lived nearby and hung out with Lincoln and his housemates was “a little slim, pale-faced, consumptive man,” Alexander Stephens, a congressman from Georgia and a fellow Whig. Stephens and Lincoln formed a lasting bond, rooted in friendship, mutual antipathy for the Mexican War, hatred of Polk, and a shared interest in forging a compromise on slavery that would keep the country unified. Stephens was one of the few people Lincoln trusted as a confidant, even from the beginning. Stephens said that “he was as intimate with Lincoln as well as with any man except perhaps” Robert Toombs, one of Georgia’s two senators.44 Toombs and Stephens remained Whigs as long as they could before the national divisions over slavery pushed them both to side with secession. Lincoln respected Stephens, his favorite Southern Whig, and his respect was reciprocated. On February 2, 1848, Lincoln wrote Herndon that Stephens, with a voice that reminded him of Logan, “has just concluded the very best speech, of an hour’
s length I ever heard. My old, withered, dry eyes, are full of tears yet.”45 In it, Stephens shredded the basis for the Mexican War. He declared, “The principle of waging war against a neighboring people to compel them to sell their country, is not only dishonorable, but disgraceful and infamous.”46 Lincoln and Stephens joined in looking for a promising Whig to take back the White House in 1848, as well as for a way out of the bloody civil war they both wanted to avoid.

  In terms of his pre-Washington experience, Lincoln was not alone in the House. Two hundred other representatives were also new in town. Two-thirds of the House members had served in their state legislatures. Shortly after being sworn in, he wrote Herndon,

  As to speech-making, by way of getting the hang of the House, I made a little speech two or three days ago, on a post office question of no general interest. I find speaking here and elsewhere about the same thing. I was about as badly scared, and no worse, as I am when I speak in court. I expect to make [another speech] within a week or two, in which I hope to succeed well enough, to wish you to see it.47

  The focus of Lincoln’s first speech was on a matter he well understood as a former postmaster. It involved a dispute over a postal contract for the Great Southern Mail, which carried mail by rail through Virginia to Washington but charged outrageously high rates for its service. Once its contract expired, the U.S. Post Office opted for a less expensive carrier, but Congressman John Botts of Virginia, the chair of the House Committee on Post Offices and Roads (of which Lincoln, too, was a member), introduced a bill to force the postmaster general to renew the contract with the Great Southern Mail. Lincoln’s humor and grasp of the facts were immediately apparent. He demonstrated how under the contract the postmaster

  took the most expensive mail coach route in the nation. He took the prices allowed for coach transportation on different portions of that route and averaged them, and then built his construction of the law upon that average. It came to $190 per mile. He added 25% of that rate and offered the result to this railroad company. The gentleman from Virginia says this was wrong [for the Postmaster General to do]: I say it was right.

  It was not a huge sum, but it was the principle of gouging the public that animated Lincoln, who insisted the carrier was entitled to “just compensation” but not to a rate that exceeded the one for traveling across the state of New York on a steamboat or the one for traveling between Cincinnati and Louisville. His humor was aptly employed. When confronted with the fact that he was out of order to reference the committee proceedings on the issue, he laughed and said he never could stay in order for long. Even the Congressional Globe recorded the fact that there was a “laugh” when he referred to “the lawyers in this House (I suppose there are some).”48 In the evening he joked with his housemates about it. One guest later wrote, “I recall with vivid pleasure the scene of merriment at the dinner after his first speech in the House of Representatives, occasioned by the descriptions by himself and other of the Congressional mess, of the uproar in the House during its delivery.”49

  Lincoln supported every internal-improvement measure proposed, including not just the first bill he spoke about on the House floor but also the resolutions upholding all the measures that had been proposed at the Chicago River and Harbor Convention to improve navigation on the nation’s lakes and rivers.

  Lincoln noticed two significant differences from his prior legislative experience. In the Illinois state legislature, leadership mattered; people usually followed what their party leader told them to do. In the House, it mattered less. Lincoln was a loyal party man, which is what the House leadership cared about most, but he was, after all, expected to serve only a single term, and none of the leaders had any leverage over how he voted. Generally, he voted the party line, but not always. When Lincoln was not speaking or working behind the scenes on drafting legislation and crafting coalitions, he was studying his colleagues. (He was present for 97 percent of House votes, compared with the House average of 74 percent.)

  In the vote for speaker, Lincoln supported Robert Winthrop while Giddings stayed out of the selection process so he could avoid being held responsible for its result. Winthrop was not a Clay Whig. He was a protégé of Daniel Webster, one of Clay’s fiercest competitors for the heart and soul of the Whig Party. Winthrop had no patience or interest in Lincoln’s penchant for hanging around the House post office to entertain people with his stories. The new congressman lacked a college education like Winthrop, who had attended Harvard, or Webster, who had studied at Dartmouth. In Illinois, Lincoln had been one of the more literate people, but in Washington he was not.

  More significant, Winthrop had voted for the Mexican War, which placed him and Lincoln at sharp odds. Lincoln was faithful to the Whig conception of executive power, which included the president deferring to Congress and to the Cabinet. Though he opposed the war, Lincoln made clear his support for the troops in the field.

  As Lincoln knew, the Whig Party was divided into regional camps. Northern Whigs tended to favor more internal improvements, because they would benefit their states more. Southern Whigs were more concerned with stifling executive tyranny but often disagreed about opposing slavery. In Congress, these differences were readily apparent, and they weakened the Whigs, then destroyed the party less than a decade after Lincoln left the House.

  No one knows precisely why Lincoln became such a determined, persistent, and vocal critic of the Mexican War. Back home, Democrats relentlessly attacked him for his stand, which one might have thought would have endeared him to ardent Whigs, but it didn’t, because in his district so many had fought in the war or had family or friends who did, and to them it seemed a just cause. Lincoln may have been haunted by the deaths of Henry Clay Jr., John Hardin, Daniel Webster’s son Edward, or the more than thirty-five thousand other soldiers and civilians on both sides who died of combat, battlefield diseases, and collateral damage. At any rate, something led him to question the lawfulness of the war. He might have thought it was simply good Whig politics or perhaps a way to emulate, if not ingratiate himself with, Clay, as he would likely have seen in Polk’s push for war the same kind of abuse of power he and Clay had seen in Jackson, particularly in his slaughter of American natives and efforts to kill the national bank. As Lincoln fashioned a censure of Polk for his misleading the nation into war, his model was Clay’s 1834 censure of Jackson for illegally transferring federal deposits from the national bank in an effort to destroy it. The Senate’s later expungement of the resolution in January 1837 did not erase its passage from the memories of Clay and his supporters.

  Lincoln’s first order of business, upon his arrival in the House, was to follow through on Clay’s critique of the war. Barely a month after hearing his idol denounce the Mexican War for more than two hours, Lincoln did the same on the House floor. According to Polk, Mexican forces on American land had provoked the United States into war by firing and spilling American blood first. On December 22, 1847, with Mary Todd in the balcony, Lincoln introduced eight resolutions to demand from Polk the exact “spot” of “soil” where “the blood of our citizens was so shed.”50 Lincoln’s spot resolutions were legalistic in their fixation on the precise location Mexico started the war, as if Lincoln figured that all he had to do to defeat Polk was call attention to the weakest spot in his argument. Though the failure of these resolutions was often used to taunt Lincoln, on January 3, 1848, only six weeks after Clay’s speech in Lexington, the House approved a resolution not unlike Lincoln’s declaring that the Mexican War had been begun “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally.”51 Lincoln voted in favor of the resolution, which barely passed 85–81. When House Democrats tried to expunge the House’s censure resolution of Polk, as the Democrat-controlled Senate had expunged Clay’s censure of Jackson a decade before, the House rebuffed their efforts 105–95. Polk thus became the only American president to be, in effect, censured twice by the House.

  Before that second vote, however, on January 12, 1848, nearly two months to the day since Li
ncoln had listened to Clay in Lexington, Lincoln took to the floor of the House to deliver a major speech denouncing Polk’s war.52 His main purpose was to respond to Polk’s end-of-the-year message in December 1847 defending his order for American forces to take the initiative. In his Market Speech, Clay had described Polk’s “order for the removal of the army,” which placed it in harm’s way, as “improvident and unconstitutional.”53 Lincoln made the same point in simpler, more direct language.

  In Lexington, Clay had focused his attack on Polk’s displacing Congress from its “right and duty” (a phrase he repeated more than once for emphasis) to determine the objects of the war, a position that aligned perfectly with the Whig conception of separation of powers.54 But Clay framed the attack within broader discourses on both separation of powers and the history of war. Lincoln left out a disquisition on war and the nature of government and instead focused on the abuse of presidential authority, particularly Polk’s duplicity and incompetence. Sometimes, Lincoln spoke like the lawyer that he was, repeatedly crafting his arguments as if they were being made in a court of law, referring to the need for “evidence” to support Polk’s shifting justifications for the war.55 At other times, Lincoln sounded like the partisan he also was, even as he dismissed that he or others criticizing the war were engaged in “mere party wantonness.”56 Clay cultivated his oratory in the halls of Congress, where he cast his rhetoric to fit the occasion and the audience. Lincoln cultivated his oratory not just in the courtrooms of Illinois but also in diligently refining arguments down to their basics for an audience of farmers and laborers. Clay rarely distilled his argument down to a single memorable sentence. His message came through the overall flow of his speech, but the same could not be said of Lincoln. Lincoln made his points directly, unvarnished, and crystal clear: “I propose to try to show,” he declared on the floor of the House, that “the whole of this—issue and evidence—is, from beginning to end, the sheerest deception.”57 Indeed, in the paragraph in which this line appears, Lincoln three times refers to Polk’s “deception.”58 The rhetorical trick of repeating the word or idea that the speaker wishes his audience to take away did not originate with Clay, but he was among those whose mastery of the technique Lincoln followed.