Shortly after the Whig Party nominated Taylor as its presidential candidate in 1848, Lincoln took to the House floor to support the nomination and destroy Cass. He defended Taylor’s promise to use the veto power sparingly, a pledge that had become part of Whig orthodoxy to distinguish their candidates from Jackson, who had used it to thwart the national bank. Lincoln praised Taylor’s willingness to defer to Congress, because it aligned with “the principle of allowing the people to do as they please with their own business.”79 He expressed the hope that Taylor would oppose “the extension of slavery” into the territories and sign any bill with the Wilmot Proviso.80
Throughout the speech, Lincoln exhibited a growing mastery of Clay’s tools of gesticulation and ridicule, yet he also demonstrated an improved alliance of barb and instruction. His humor and storytelling set him apart from the other, more somber members of Congress, and he relished the attention it brought him. Lincoln’s “sparkling and spontaneous and unpremeditated wit” entertained Daniel Webster, when they met occasionally for breakfast on Saturdays, as well as other “solid men of Boston” in Congress.81 When Maine’s senator Hannibal Hamlin came to the House chamber and asked the newspaper man Ben Perley Poore who the speaker was that was entertaining the House and the galleries, Poore said that it was Abe Lincoln, known as “the champion story-teller of the Capitol.”82
For much of the speech, Lincoln stuck again with what had brought him to the House. He ridiculed the Democrats and their candidate mercilessly. Responding to the claim made the day before by a Georgia congressman that the Whigs had “deserted all our principles, and taken shelter under General Taylor’s military coat-tail,” Lincoln accused the Democrats of having used “the ample military coat tail” of Andrew Jackson:
Like a horde of hungry ticks you have stuck to the tail of the Hermitage lion to the end of his life; and you are still sticking to it, and drawing a loathsome sustenance from it, after he is dead. A fellow once advertised that he had made a discovery by which he could make a new man out of an old one, and have enough of the stuff left to make a little yellow dog. Just such a discovery has General Jackson’s popularity been to you. You have not only twice made President of him out of it, but you have had enough stuff to make Presidents of several comparatively small men since; and it is your chief reliance now to make still another.83
Lincoln satirized nearly everything about Cass—his military record, which Lincoln suggested was comparable to his own experience in the Black Hawk War dodging mosquitoes; his waffling on the Wilmot Proviso; his financial records when he was governor of the Michigan Territory from 1813 to 1831; and especially his corpulence.84 Lincoln ridiculed the Democratic candidate’s “wonderful eating capacities,” which enabled him to consume “ten rations a day in Michigan, ten rations a day here in Washington, and near five dollars worth a day on the road between the two places!”85 He warned his colleagues never to stand between Cass and food.86
After Congress adjourned on August 14, 1848, Lincoln stayed in Washington to help the Whig Executive Committee of Congress organize the national campaign. It was Lincoln’s first chance to see inside the operations of a national campaign, overseen by Clay’s onetime friend Senator Crittenden of Kentucky.
Under the direction of Crittenden, Lincoln corresponded with party leaders and distributed copies of his speeches and those by other Whigs in defense of Taylor. He instructed young Whigs back home to take the initiative, to get involved and push for Taylor: “You must not wait to be brought forward by the older men,” he wrote during the campaign, “For instance, do you suppose that I should ever have got into notice if I had waited to be hunted up and pushed forward by the older men[?]”87 It was a telling instruction from Lincoln. He had learned from his own political experience not to be overly dependent on others but rather to depend primarily on himself to advance his own interests and those of his party. Here was his foundational self-made man proposition through a civic filter. At the same time, Lincoln persistently counseled the candidate and his surrogates to stay on message, avoiding Clay’s folly in opining on nearly everything (often in contradictory ways), instead emphasizing that Taylor leaned in the direction of the Whigs and their basic principles but was no zealot.88
Over the next two months, Lincoln followed his own advice to the young Whigs. He went out among the voters and stumped for Taylor. Besides writing letters and (usually anonymous) opinion pieces and helping to organize support from Washington, Lincoln rallied supporters in Maryland, New England, and Illinois. In Massachusetts, he shared the stage with one of New York’s senators, William Seward. As someone who had vied with Fillmore to control the Whig Party—and its spoils—back home, Seward could not have been happy to see his rival on the national ticket at his own expense. Nonetheless, he gave a rousing speech in opposition to slavery. But Seward was not impressed with Lincoln’s performance, criticizing to a correspondent Lincoln’s “rambling storytelling speech, putting the audience in good humor, but avoiding any extended discussion of the slavery question.”89 Lincoln was more complimentary in return. “I have been thinking about what you said in your speech,” Lincoln told Seward after their joint appearance. “I reckon you are right. We have got to deal with this slavery question, and got to give much more attention to it hereafter than we have been doing.”90
Throughout the campaign, Taylor’s doubtful allegiance to Whig principles troubled party leaders, especially when he accepted a nomination for president from a group of dissident South Carolina Democrats, which had formed their own mini-convention in protest over the party’s nomination of Cass. Thurlow Weed, the powerful Whig boss of New York and Seward’s mentor, threatened to call a mass meeting of New York Whigs to denounce their party’s candidate. Fillmore wrote Taylor directly in mid-August to point out the dangers of accepting support from the opposition party. On September 4, Taylor replied to Fillmore in a letter much like one that he had written previously to his brother-in-law Captain John S. Allison of Louisville, Kentucky, who had shared the letter with the public. The first missive, dated April 22, 1848, was prompted by the need for Taylor to push back an effort by Clay to claim the party’s nomination. In it, Taylor acknowledged that he was not sufficiently familiar with many public issues to pass judgment on them. He said, “I reiterate [that] I am a Whig but not an ultra Whig. If elected, I would not be the mere president of a party—I would endeavor to act independent of party domination, & should feel bound to administer the Government untrammeled by party schemes.”91 He then promised, in good Whig fashion, to limit his vetoes to “cases of clear violation of the Constitution,” since “the personal opinion of the individual who may happen to occupy the executive chair ought not to control the action of Congress upon questions of Domestic policy.”92 This statement meant he would follow Congress on questions of the tariff, currency, and internal improvements. The letter achieved its purpose of reassuring Whig voters of Taylor’s commitment to their party’s basic principles.
In the second letter that Allison shared with the public, Taylor complained that people had not properly understood what he had been trying to say in the first. He pointed out that all who had served with him in the Mexican War knew that he was a Whig in principle. Moreover, even while a commanding general in Mexico, he had been nominated for president by informal, popular assemblies of Whigs, Democrats, and Native Americans but had declined the endorsements in order to avoid appearing to be partisan. Taylor continued to insist that he was not a partisan candidate but would be the president of all the people, promising not to impose indiscriminate, politically motivated personnel changes nor to coerce Congress with vetoes of constitutional legislation. He wrote separately to reassure Crittenden that this would be the last letter he intended to write during the campaign. The correspondence held the party in line, at least through election day.93
The split within the Democratic Party nearly guaranteed Taylor a victory in the general election, but his final margin of victory was thin, with 1,360,000 popular vote
s to 1,220,000 for Cass and 291,000 for Van Buren. Taylor’s margin over Cass in the Electoral College was more decisive, 163–127. Van Buren did not carry a single state, but his 120,000 votes at home in New York provided Taylor his victory margin there. Taylor carried all of New England except Maine and New Hampshire, plus the three Middle Atlantic states and the four border ones. In the South, he carried four (Kentucky, Louisiana, Florida, and Georgia) of the seven. He won four states that Clay had lost—Georgia, Louisiana, New York, and Pennsylvania, but in the Midwest he lost Michigan, Indiana, Missouri, and Illinois. He carried no Western states, and the Democrats controlled a majority of seats in both the House and the Senate. For the fifth straight time in five presidential elections, Abraham Lincoln had yet to deliver Illinois to his preferred candidate.
VII
* * *
The end of Lincoln’s single term in the House coincided with Zachary Taylor’s inauguration. In the five months between election day in November 1848 and Taylor’s inauguration on March 5, 1849, Lincoln reaffirmed his strong attachment to Clay’s American System in his support for internal improvements and opposition to slavery. But whatever hope he had to retain his place in Congress was firmly dashed when Herndon wrote to inform him that Lincoln’s friend and former partner, Stephen Logan, wanted the seat.94 Lincoln stood down. Democrats tightly controlled Illinois’s Senate seats, so Lincoln looked elsewhere. He told several friends, perhaps in an effort to save face and appear still to be politically relevant, that he had declined an offer to serve as the head of the Land Office in the newly created Department of the Interior, even though the position paid the handsome salary of $3,000 annually.95
For one of the few times in his political career, Lincoln was indecisive, unsure of what to do. He wrote Mary Todd that “having nothing but business—no variety—[ Washington] has grown exceedingly tasteless to me.” Worrying about his sons, he asked her, “Don’t let the blessed fellows forget father.”96 He felt her beckoning him home—“How much, I wish instead of writing, we were together this evening”—but Lincoln stayed in Washington.97
With Taylor’s inauguration speedily approaching, Lincoln realized that there was still a vacancy in the position of leading the Land Office, which oversaw the administration of federally owned lands throughout the nation and the territories.98 Whoever ran the Land Office would have a significant say over the extent to which the United States allowed or barred slavery in federal territories.
Throughout the first several months of 1849, Lincoln, in his capacity as a member of Congress, forwarded names for the administration to consider for the job. On March 11, he and Edward Baker, with whom he had long competed for leadership of the Sangamon County Whigs, visited the office of Secretary of the Interior Thomas Ewing, an Ohio Whig who had once been close with Henry Clay. One object of the meeting was to secure the commissionership of the Land Office for an Illinois candidate, but neither Lincoln nor Baker made a recommendation for either of the two leading candidates—Cyrus Edwards, a lawyer who once ran for governor of Illinois, or J.L.D. Morrison, a Mexican War veteran and Democratic member of the Illinois house—to be chosen. Several of Lincoln’s friends urged him to break the deadlock by competing for the office himself, but he declined, telling them that he refused to compete for the appointment unless Taylor denied it to Edwards, a friend who was also the brother of Ninian Edwards, the husband of Mary Todd’s sister.99 The stalemate broke when another candidate, Justin Butterfield of Chicago, said he wanted the office. Lincoln knew Butterfield as an accomplished lawyer and fellow Whig but an active partisan for Clay, not Taylor. Butterfield’s lack of efforts on Taylor’s behalf prompted Lincoln to write Ewing that “[Butterfield] is my personal friend, and is qualified to do the duties of the office but of the quite one hundred Illinoisians equally well qualified, I do not know one with less claims to it.”100 Lincoln thought it absurd that Taylor would give the position to someone who had neither backed the Taylor campaign nor worked for it, as Lincoln had done, and he was offended when Ewing said Butterfield was his choice for Land Office commissioner.101
At this point, Lincoln decided to compete for the office himself; perhaps he had been planning to all along. He sent appeals to his friends in Illinois and surrounding states, asking them for support and urging them to contact Taylor personally.102 Taylor and Ewing made clear that they wanted the office to go to a Clay man, and Clay backed Butterfield. Lincoln was displeased, particularly with the administration’s seemingly perverse interest in rewarding not those who had served the campaign, but rather those who had served past party leaders. Ewing instead offered Lincoln the prestigious governorship of the Oregon Territory. Lincoln declined.
In fact, he wanted the position. John Todd Stuart had encouraged Lincoln to pursue the opportunity, since it likely meant that once Oregon became a state, Lincoln would be assured, as so many other territorial governors had been, of returning to Congress as one of the new state’s two senators. Cass, for example, had once briefly been the governor of the Michigan Territory before his congressional career.
The opposition to the move came from Mary Todd. The Oregon Territory was a dangerous place, which she didn’t want to visit, much less move to. Indeed, John Gaines, the man whom Taylor appointed to the spot Lincoln had turned down, lost two daughters to sickness as they were traveling to Oregon from Kentucky.
Lincoln, however, never expressed regret about moving back to Springfield. As the only Whig in Illinois’s national delegation, he had a special role to play back home. Indeed, he had explained in letters asking friends to back him for the Land Office job that such concern had held him back before deciding to apply late for the position.
But there may have been another reason for Lincoln’s turning down the assignment. Lincoln had watched how Jackson had used patronage to unify his party and administration and how Adams’s mismanagement of it had doomed his presidency. Now it seemed that Taylor was abandoning the Jackson strategy in a hopeless attempt to placate his opponents. Lincoln confessed to his friend Joshua M. Lucas, a clerk in the Land Office, however, that he was personally hurt because the Taylor administration flattened his wishes “in the dust merely to gratify” Clay and his followers.103 Lincoln had been a Clay man all his adult life, but he didn’t follow Clay mindlessly, as his support of Taylor made clear. Instead, he learned from Jackson’s success and Clay’s failures. Jackson and Van Buren had invented the spoils system as a way to reward their allies and supporters. Jackson had promised that system as a candidate and used it to win a second term in the White House. Lincoln had told friends that Butterfield’s appointment was “an egregious political blunder,” because of the negative repercussions he believed it would have on loyal Whigs who expected patronage in exchange for their support.104 As former Whig Committee chairman Dr. Anson G. Henry had asked rhetorically, “Who ever heard of Butterfield as a Whig, until the fight was over?”105
In public and in communications with the Taylor administration, Lincoln was careful to keep his complaints to himself (or close friends). He wanted to be a good party man, and so he put on a brave front and threw his support behind the appointment of Butterfield. He knew that was what his fellow Whigs expected, and what he often pleaded with them to do, and that the needs of the floundering Whig Party in Illinois were of greater urgency than infighting over how Taylor handed out appointments. Even when he learned that Secretary Ewing had likely removed two letters of recommendation from his file in an effort to weaken his candidacy, Lincoln stood by the appointment of Butterfield and the administration. As he told David Davis, then an Illinois state judge, “I hope my good friends everywhere will approve the appointment of Mr. B. in so far as they can, and be silent when they cannot.”106 A fractured party had kept Cass out of the White House in 1848, done the same to Clay and the Whig Party in 1844, while a unified party had kept Jackson in charge of it. If Taylor was not careful, Lincoln worried, the Whigs would lose the power that he and his fellow ardent supporters had won for them in
1848.
Of course, it was sadly ironic that Taylor wanted a Clay man to get the position of leading the Land Office, given that Lincoln had turned away from his mentor for the campaign. Lincoln had expected that his service to Taylor would have counted as the most important thing in his appointment, but in spite of his protestations that he was a genuine, long-standing Clay man, Lincoln was not considered enough of one to appease either the wounded Clay or the victorious Taylor.
Besides staying for Taylor’s inauguration, Lincoln attended one of the major inaugural balls on the evening of March 4, 1849. He spoke briefly with Taylor’s former son-in-law Jefferson Davis, now remarried. We know little about whom else he talked to, but among the other guests were Robert E. Lee, who had served on General Winfield Scott’s staff in Mexico, and an unhappy President Polk. After initially resisting meeting President-Elect Taylor, Polk welcomed him to the White House and held a dinner in his honor. The former president left town the day after the inauguration for his first vacation in years.
Unfortunately, it did not end well. The work of the presidency had taken a toll on him, and within three months of leaving office, Polk died, his body exhausted after four hard years in office and vulnerable to the cholera that killed him. Less than a decade before, sixty-eight-year-old William Henry Harrison, at the time the oldest person ever elected president, died barely a month into office. Over the span of a few weeks, he had been weakened by pneumonia and ultimately succumbed to typhoid fever. Polk, who had been the youngest person elected president, was now the youngest former president to have died. He was fifty-three. Clay greeted the news of Polk’s death in the same way he had greeted news of Jackson’s—he said nothing. Following suit, Lincoln remained silent.
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