Lincoln's Mentors

by Michael J. Gerhardt

  Andrew Jackson’s reputation has waxed and waned in the years since his death in 1845. As the last president to serve for two terms before Lincoln’s reelection in 1864, Jackson has received considerable attention from historians, political scientists, and presidential scholars. Among presidents, only George Washington, Lincoln, and Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt are the subjects of more biographical studies than Jackson. Jackson’s record on forced removal of Native Americans is a permanent stain on his legacy. During his eight years in office, Jackson signed only one statute into law: the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which authorized the government to negotiate with southern Native American tribes for relocation west. The vigorous enforcement of the law under both Jackson and Van Buren resulted in the forced expulsion of thousands of Native Americans from their homelands. The removals required forcibly moving about sixty thousand Native Americans westward from the southeast. The march became known as the Trail of Tears to signify the fact that thousands of Native Americans died during the march westward, including a fourth of the Cherokee population. Yet, Jackson still gets credit, as Lincoln gave him, for his strong stance against secession. Jackson’s staunch partisanship—and the many years Lincoln had spent defending Jackson’s nemesis Clay and combating Jacksonian Democrats—continue to distract people from considering how Jackson served as a mentor for Lincoln.

  Historians largely treat Zachary Taylor as a footnote in American history. For them, his only importance was his death, which opened the way for Millard Fillmore to sign the Compromise of 1850 into law. Yet Lincoln did not overlook Taylor. Taylor was one of the two political leaders Lincoln eulogized, one of the three presidents Lincoln met while they were in office (the other two were Polk and Buchanan), one of the two most famous Kentuckians before his election as president, and a model to Lincoln and others for his toughness and ingenuity as a general and strong stand against threats of nullification and secession. Taylor was a cautionary tale, too, for Lincoln. In speaking about the presidency in Taylor’s eulogy, Lincoln said, “No human being can fill that station and avoid censure.” He was determined, too, not to repeat Polk’s and Taylor’s mistakes in failing to cultivate good, constructive relationships with members of Congress and his Cabinet, though he had difficulties in doing so with a number of Radical Republicans in Congress and Salmon Chase in the Cabinet.

  John Todd Stuart and Orville Browning led productive lives for more than two decades after Lincoln’s death. On the morning after the assassination, Browning was at the White House early consoling Lincoln’s family and meeting with Andrew Johnson and shaken Cabinet members to discuss the delicate transition from Lincoln to Johnson as president. In subsequent and increasing visits with Johnson, the two men quickly realized they had important views on reconstruction in common. Browning had long favored policies that were sympathetic to the South, even though an enraged Southerner had killed Lincoln, who had supported harsh measures against the South for much of the war.

  Unlike Lincoln, as his presidency went on, Johnson routinely sought Browning’s advice, including on such matters as patronage and on whether he had the authority to dismiss Stanton as his secretary of war without Senate approval. The Cabinet split on whether Johnson had the authority on his own to dismiss Stanton or whether he needed Senate approval as required by the Tenure in Office Act. Browning suggested a middle course. Given that he believed the Tenure in Office Act did not clearly apply to Cabinet officers appointed before Johnson became president (because it was not modified to preclude him from doing so until after he became president), Browning thought Johnson should suspend Stanton and avoid a direct conflict with the statute or Congress. Johnson agreed, though the middle course was not enough to prevent Johnson from being impeached for his hostility to congressional Reconstruction policy.

  When, in 1866, Johnson reshuffled Lincoln’s Cabinet to rid himself of Radical Republicans (whom he believed were trying to impede his authority and force him to defer to congressional control over Reconstruction), he named Browning as his secretary of the interior. Later, when Henry Stanbery resigned as attorney general in order to represent Johnson in his impeachment trial (along with other eminent counsel, including former Supreme Court justice Benjamin Curtis), Browning became Johnson’s acting attorney general. Johnson survived his trial, albeit barely, and the next president, Ulysses Grant, replaced Browning and the rest of Johnson’s Cabinet. Having been alienated from the policies of the Radical Republicans, Browning, like Stuart before him, became a Democrat in his remaining years and returned to his law practice, serving as counsel to several railroads. Before his death in 1881, Browning communicated at length with Herndon as he was writing a life of Lincoln, but his pivotal role as a mentor to the aspiring Lincoln was mostly forgotten.

  After losing his reelection bid in 1864, John Todd Stuart returned to Springfield, never again to return to Washington or to politics. He resumed his practice and prominence as one of Illinois’s most successful trial lawyers. When he died in 1885, David Davis delivered his eulogy, speaking to the Illinois State Bar Association on November 23, 1885, of the man whom he knew “after half a century of unbroken friendship,” said Davis. “The part which Stuart took in shaping Lincoln’s destiny is not generally known outside of the circle of their immediate friends.” He then recounted the two men’s years together, living in the same boarding house, their engagement in Whig politics. David said,

  Each estimated aright the abilities of the other. Both were honest men with deep convictions, and appreciated by their fellow members. The one was liberally educated and a lawyer; the other uneducated, and engaged in the humble occupation of a land surveyor. Stuart saw at once that there must be a change of occupation to give Lincoln a fair start in life, and that the study and practice of the law were necessary to stimulate his ambition and develop his faculties. [Every] lawyer, and indeed every thoughtful and intelligent person can readily see the influence which the choice of legal profession had on Lincoln’s life.

  Davis added,

  Stuart was as devoted to its fortunes equally with Lincoln. Their political friendship seemed to be as close and enduring as their personal friendship. [And] there was no sincerer mourner at his grave than Stuart. The beautiful monument erected in yonder cemetery to the memory of Lincoln, is a silent witness to the unceasing labors of Stuart, who cooperated with other distinguished citizens of Illinois in its construction. The men loved one another, and their political separation was a source of sorrow and grief to both.8

  Davis took liberties with the truth, as such tributes often do, but the connection between Stuart and his greatest student could not be denied.

  Indeed, Lincoln was that rare student who surpassed his teachers. He studied them closely not just to emulate them but to improve on what they did. He did not idolize his mentors but instead understood they were as human as he and thus prone to mistakes in judgment and action. Herndon recalled, “He read specifically for a special object and thought things useless unless they could be of utility, use, practice, etc.”9 He gradually abandoned the dense, systematic logic of Clay and the powerful imagery and declarations of Webster for plainer language, both easier to speak and easier to remember. He did not speak over the heads of the public, as so many presidents had done, or merely to the political elite, as so many members of Congress had done. Nor was he as conniving or duplicitous as some presidents had been in saying one thing and doing another. Jefferson had coined the great promise of the Declaration of Independence, but as president he declared in his first inaugural “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” just before his administration retaliated with fervor against the Federalists, who had attacked the Democratic-Republicans in the previous administration under President Adams. Jackson spoke with anger, harshness, and partisanship. Clay spoke powerfully (and memorably for those present) but often with partisan zeal, complicated analogies, and logical ferocity. Lincoln substituted for their excesses and mistakes simple, plain, poetic language, pitching what he had to
say “low down, and the common people will understand you” as he once counseled Herndon. As Herndon told Jesse Weik, with whom he wrote Lincoln’s biography, “Lincoln’s ambition [was that] he wanted to be distinctly understood by the Common People.”10

  Lincoln had seen other presidents squander their public support, speak with the same kind of partisanship they had spoken with as candidates, and do little inspiring in either deeds or words. There were presidents who benefited from slogans that captured the essence of their visions—combatting the “corrupt bargain” for Jackson, achieving “manifest destiny” for Polk, Jefferson’s timeless declaration that “all men are created equal,” and Clay’s “American System.” But Lincoln went beyond slogans to craft a story of America that celebrated a renewed commitment guaranteeing equality and liberty to every American. That this story mirrored his own self-made journey reinforced his faith in its fundamental authenticity.

  Actions could produce enduring results, as the Founders’ generation did in winning the Revolutionary War. Actions were taken in response to the rebellion against the Union. Lincoln was cautious in taking the lead on issues he knew were dividing the nation—preserving the Union, whether to end slavery, and if so how to do it. But Lincoln saw a value to words that no other president, with the possible exceptions of Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and Jackson in his proclamation against secession, had yet made use of. Words inspired action. Words inspired people to become their better selves. Words defined the war’s purpose. Words defined the purpose of the Union. Words could entertain. Words could console. Words could wound. Words could divide. Words could unify. They could be used to free an enslaved people.

  Memory was all-important to Lincoln. To him, what people remembered, even more than what happened, is what counted most. Lincoln lived a life—like the books, poems, and plays he loved—to be remembered. His actions and statements in public, from the hospitals and battlefields he visited, to the carefully constructed speeches he gave and Annual Messages he wrote to Congress, the many letters he wrote, and the steady stream of stories and jokes he told, were all done for a reason—to make people remember him, to write his story.

  Lincoln saw a connection between Jackson and Clay that few others perceived. Jackson, as the champion of the “common man,” and Clay, the champion of the “self-made man,” were both championing something similar. Lincoln saw the connection between the two. He saw that the common man, with sufficient ambition and determination, could become a self-made man and that a self-made man was an ordinary man who realized his potential.

  Some of Lincoln’s closest associates saw the connection, including former Democrats, such as the Blair family, Gideon Welles, and Edwin Stanton. Poets and writers saw the connection, too. When Lincoln died, Herman Melville wrote the poem “The Martyr.” Though he had been strongly committed to the Union in the 1850s, Melville met Lincoln briefly in 1861 and was unimpressed with his first few months in office. (Jackson had made an appearance as “The Hero” in Melville’s Moby-Dick, published in 1851, and Melville wrote seventy-two poems during the Civil War.) But four years later, in 1865, Melville felt different:

  He lieth in his blood—

  The father in his face;

  They have killed him, the Forgiver—

  The Avenger takes his place,

  The Avenger wisely stern,

  Who in righteousness shall do

  What the heavens call him to,

  And the parricides remand;

  For they killed him in his kindness,

  In their madness and their blindness.

  And his blood is on their hand.

  There is sobbing of the strong,

  And a pall upon the land;

  But the People in their weeping

  Bare the iron hand:

  Beware the People weeping

  When they bare the iron hand.

  For Melville, there was no conflict in celebrating Jackson’s manliness and the “kingly commons,” then also lauding another man, one who embodied different attributes and even proclaimed Jackson’s nemesis as his teacher. Behind the Clay-like moderate tone and the jocularity was a man as firmly committed to the Union as Jackson. He gave his own “last full measure of devotion” to preserve it.

  For much of his career, Walt Whitman had celebrated Jackson. In one famous poem, he paid homage to Jacksonian democracy and heroic manhood:

  O the joy of a manly self-hood!

  To be servile to none, to defer to none, not to any tyrant known or unknown,

  To walk with erect carriage, a step springy and elastic,

  To look with calm gaze or with a flashing eye,

  To speak with a full and sonorous voice out of a broad chest,

  To confront with your personality all the other personalities of the earth.

  Jacksonianism aside, after Lincoln’s death, Whitman wrote two poems to honor Lincoln, one perhaps the most famous poem to do so. It opened with the memorable line, “O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done. . . .” Near the end, Whitman laments, “My Captain he does not answer . . . / But I with mournful tread, / Walk the deck my Captain lies, / Fallen cold and dead.”

  Melville and Whitman each saw a direct line connecting Jackson and Lincoln. Lincoln would have relished the irony that the line went straight through Henry Clay.

  The poetry, like the sermons and eulogies, fed the narrative of Lincoln’s story. They all celebrated the American ideals he exemplified and championed. They took what he gave them, the words, actions, attestations of humility and self-deprecation, homilies, the defense of the Union, and celebration of the common man to produce an enduring image of Lincoln as an American hero. Frederick Douglass had a nuanced view of Lincoln; in the same year, 1876, in which he stressed that Lincoln was a white man bent on serving other white people, Douglass reconsidered Lincoln’s legacy, concluding, “Because of his commitment to liberty and equality, he is doubly dear to us, and his memory will be precious forever.”

  When Nathaniel Hawthorne met Lincoln in 1862, Lincoln struck him as a “country schoolmaster.”11 Hawthorne observed further,

  the president is teachable by events, and has now spent a year in a very arduous course of education; he has a flexible mind, much capable of expansion, and convertible towards far loftier studies and activities than those of his early life; and if he came to Washington a backwoods humorist, he has already transformed himself into [a] statesman. . . .

  The educable country schoolmaster who became a statesman became in turn the teacher of presidents, a model and inspiration more than any other. No president is quoted more by other presidents than Abraham Lincoln. Every president after Lincoln in the nineteenth century had served the Union in some capacity under Lincoln (except for Grover Cleveland, who had arranged for a substitute to take his place in the Union Army). As a little boy, Theodore Roosevelt reputedly watched Lincoln’s funeral procession pass by his grandparents’ home, and later acknowledged Lincoln as “my great hero.” And at his 1905 inauguration, he wore a ring containing a lock of Lincoln’s hair, which had been given to him by Lincoln’s secretary John Hay, who served as Roosevelt’s secretary of state. Before Roosevelt placed Lincoln’s image on the penny in 1909 to honor his fellow Republican, no American coin had featured an image of a president.

  During his 1912 campaign for president, Woodrow Wilson traveled to Springfield to emphasize Lincoln’s presidency as his inspiration. In 1929, Franklin Roosevelt told a journalist that “it was time for us Democrats to claim Lincoln as one of our own.” As president, he spoke of Lincoln more than any other president, quoted him in support of his New Deal, and on July 3, 1938, delivered his own brief address upon the seventy-fifth anniversary of Gettysburg, on which occasion he met the oldest living veteran of the Civil War. Harry Truman studied Lincoln’s firing of General George McClellan when he was considering whether to relieve General Douglas McArthur from his command of U.S. forces in Korea because of insubordination. Dwight Eisenhower kept a
set of Lincoln’s collected works in the Oval Office and even painted a portrait of Lincoln that he hung in the Cabinet Room of the White House.

  In daring to broaden protections for African Americans’ civil and voting rights in 1964 and 1965, Lyndon Johnson understood that he was extending Lincoln’s hard-fought vision of equality and opportunity for all Americans. Richard Nixon had a picture of Lincoln hung over his bed when he was a boy and later visited the Lincoln Memorial for inspiration as he wrestled with how to end the Vietnam conflict. In speaking to a junior high school class visiting the Federal Executive Office Building (next to the White House) in 1987, Ronald Reagan spoke of how as a young boy he knew “Americans who could remember Abraham Lincoln” and of Lincoln’s rise to the presidency as the quintessential American success story.

  Bill Clinton mused to one historian that he hoped to write a biography of Lincoln, while George W. Bush read fourteen biographies of Lincoln in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks against the United States on 9/11 and met with a group of Lincoln scholars to better understand Lincoln “as a war-time president.” Bush’s Justice Department used Lincoln’s refusal to have war declared against the seceding states as a model for not requesting a declaration of war against the terrorists who attacked the United States, since in both cases the United States was combatting rebels and terrorists, not formally recognized foreign states.

  When Barack Obama was president, he placed a portrait of Lincoln so that when he looked up from his desk in the Oval Office, Lincoln’s eyes met his, and he acknowledged Lincoln, above all others, as his inspiration, model, and teacher. Perhaps with Lincoln’s team of rivals in mind, Obama appointed Hillary Clinton, his chief opponent for the Democratic nomination, as secretary of state, the position Clay held under John Quincy Adams.