A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  In the handbill, Lincoln acknowledged that Cartwright had charged him to be “an open scoffer at Christianity.” In response he declared, “That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.” He admitted that “in early life,” he had believed in the “Doctrine of Necessity,” which he defined as “the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which he has no control.” He quickly added, “The habit of arguing thus however, I have, entirely left off for more than five years.” Finally, Lincoln declared, “I do not think I could myself, be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion.” Though distributed as a handbill, the statement was not published in newspapers until after the election.

  Cartwright might have been a popular preacher and revivalist, but he was a poor campaigner. Some voters, including Democrats, did not believe a preacher should be involved in politics. By the time the voting took place, the result was a foregone conclusion. In the election, held on August 3, 1846, Lincoln received 6,340 votes to Cartwright’s 4,829. Lincoln won the most decisive victory so far in the Seventh District, running ahead of the winning margins of both his predecessors, Baker and Hardin.

  “BEING ELECTED TO CONGRESS, though I am very grateful to our friends, for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected,” wrote Lincoln to Speed, two months after his election. Perhaps the lack of elation was in part due to the fact that in the political calendar of those years, it would be sixteen months before Lincoln would take up his seat in Washington in December 1847.

  During this long interval, Lincoln decided to attend the great Rivers and Harbors Convention in the summer of 1847. He traveled by stagecoach for four days on his first visit to Chicago, joining more than ten thousand people in the mud-flat town on July 4, 1847. The first national convention ever held in this rising city of sixteen thousand drew businessmen and farmers, politicians and the press, eager to encourage navigation and business on rivers and lakes.

  President Polk’s veto of the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Bill in August 1846 was the impetus for the convention. Polk called the effort at internal improvements unconstitutional, arguing that many of its appropriations were not federal in scope but limited to a single state. The Whigs, who had long championed internal improvements, seized a strategic opportunity to present their case. The decision to hold the convention “at the terminus of lake navigation,” recognized not simply the large number of rivers and lakes affected, but the huge migration of people to the West.

  On the morning of July 6, 1847, David Dudley Field, a prominent New York lawyer, spoke in defense of the position of the Polk administration. He rejected the obligation of the federal government to help develop the navigation of the Illinois River, which traversed a solitary state.

  Lincoln stood to offer a reply, speaking for the first time before a national audience. His full remarks were not recorded, but Field’s remarks brought out the best of Lincoln’s satire. Lincoln, who as usual had done his homework, learned that Field favored a federal appropriation for the Hudson River in New York. Lincoln asked “how many States the lordly Hudson ran through.”

  Lincoln’s remarks made an indelible impression on a leading New York newspaper editor. Horace Greeley, a reformer and politician at heart, and founding editor of the New York Tribune, always had a nose for the up-and-coming. He thought he spied it in the tall congressman-elect. The next day, Greeley wrote in appreciation, “Hon. Abraham Lincoln, a tall specimen of an Illinoian, just elected to Congress from the only Whig District in the state, spoke briefly and happily in reply to Mr. Field.”

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  CONGRESSMAN-ELECT ABRAHAM LINCOLN posed for his first photograph, a daguerreotype, sometime in the last half of 1846, perhaps shortly after his election to Congress. The daguerreotype was a process that created an extremely detailed image on a sheet of copper plate without the use of a negative.

  Lincoln was the perfect candidate for early daguerreotypists, who sought out political figures to photograph so they could place their finished products in the front of their studios to attract other customers. By 1850, there were more than seventy daguerreotype studios in New York City. Even in the small city of Springfield there were as many as four photographers by the late 1840s.

  Nicholas H. Shepherd opened his Daguerreotype Miniature Gallery above the drugstore of J. Brookie at the northwest corner of the square in Springfield. He first advertised his photographic services in the Sangamo Journal on October 30, 1845, and probably approached Lincoln as a rising political figure to pose for a photograph. He offered to take a separate daguerreotype of Mary. Robert Lincoln remembered that these photographs of his parents hung on the wall in a prominent place in their Springfield home.

  Photography in 1846 was subject to the limitations of a craft and technology still in its infancy. Abraham and Mary had to sit still for up to fifteen minutes, which meant that their facial expressions appear direct and unsmiling. In his first photograph, Abraham Lincoln, at thirty-seven, wears the clothes of a successful lawyer and politician. His slicked-down hair is not the tousled mop familiar to Lincoln’s friends; it was surely arranged by the photographer or his assistant in an effort to reflect Lincoln’s station. His large, muscular hands are a striking feature that could not be rearranged. His eyes reflect a man determined to make his mark in Congress.

  Lincoln admired three legislators for their oratory. Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts became known as “the Great Triumvirate.”

  CHAPTER 9

  My Best Impression of the Truth 1847–49

  AS YOU ARE ALL SO ANXIOUS FOR ME TO DISTINGUISH MYSELF, I HAVE CONCLUDED TO DO SO, BEFORE LONG.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN to WILLIAM H. HERNDON,

  December 13, 1847

  BRAHAM AND MARY LINCOLN PREPARED TO LEAVE SPRINGFIELD for Washington on October 25, 1847, cheered on by Springfield’s Illinois State Journal. “Success to our talented member of Congress! He will find many men in Congress who possess twice the good looks, and not half the good sense, of our own representative.”

  Two days before departing, Lincoln leased their family home at Eighth and Jackson to Cornelius Ludlum, a brick contractor from Jacksonville, for ninety dollars a year. As the Lincolns embarked on their six-week journey, they looked forward to visiting Mary’s family in Lexington. It was her first visit home since 1839. Her father, Robert S. Todd, had visited Springfield, but her stepmother, Elizabeth, and stepbrothers and -sisters, had never met her husband.

  The Lincolns traveled from Springfield by stage to Alton, where they boarded a packet steamboat to take them down the muddy waters of the Mississippi past St. Louis. At Cairo, the southernmost tip of Illinois, they transferred to a river steamer to journey up the clearer waters of the Ohio River. As the steamboat plowed north, with autumn colors in view on both the Indiana and Kentucky shores, Lincoln may have remembered his first trip on the Ohio thirty-one years before. He passed Thompson’s Landing where, as a nine-year-old boy, he and his family disembarked in 1816 and began the trek to their new home at Pigeon Creek. The four Lincolns continued by boat on the Kentucky River to Frankfort, Kentucky, where they boarded the Lexington and Ohio train, which consisted of a small steam locomotive and a solitary coach car, for the bumpy thirty-mile ride to Lexington. On November 2, 1847, a raw, windy day, the whole Todd family stood near the front of the brick mansion on West Main Street to greet them. Mary walked in first with little Eddie in her arms, followed by Abraham carrying four-year-old Bob.

  The three-week sojourn in Lexington gave Lincoln plenty of opportunity to observe slavery once again. Every day he encountered it in the Todd household. Slave auctions were held at Cheapside in the center of Lexington most weeks. Lincoln also confronted the issue every time he picked up a Le
xington newspaper. On November 3, 1847, the Lexington Observer and Reporter printed a notice:

  NEGROES FOR SALE.

  35 negroes in lots to suit purchasers or the whole, consisting of field hands, house servants, a good carriage-driver, hostlers, a blacksmith, and women & children of all descriptions.

  James H. Farish

  Lincoln would also have seen plenty of advertisements about runaway slaves. A reward of five hundred dollars was offered for the arrest of a forty-year-old slave named Joshua, “who is slow of speech, with a slight choking when agitated and who professes to be a preacher.”

  While in Lexington, Lincoln was afforded the singular opportunity to attend a political meeting organized by Mary’s father featuring an address by Henry Clay. Lincoln had long admired Clay, but they had never met. His political vision had long been indebted to Clay’s “American System” of economic advancement through internal improvements and fiscal accountability. How fortuitous to hear Clay, his political hero, discuss the vexing subjects of the war with Mexico and American slavery just weeks before Lincoln would take his seat in the Thirtieth Congress.

  At age seventy, Clay evoked strongly mixed emotions among his political friends and foes. Some labeled him the “Star of the West,” a courageous, brilliant, eloquent politician who had devoted his life to the noble cause of the Union. Others found Clay ambitious, ruthless, and a demagogue, whose silver voice was not to be believed, and who was taking power away from the states and giving it to the federal government. Despite his age and the counsel of friends, Clay was testing the waters for a fourth run for the presidency.

  Lincoln, stopping in Lexington, Kentucky, on his way to Washington, heard Clay deliver a fiery speech declaring his opposition to war with Mexico.

  Clay began his speech by telling his Lexington audience that the day was “dark and gloomy, unsettled and uncertain,” because of the “unnatural” war with Mexico. Clay’s son, Henry, Jr., had been killed at the battle of Buena Vista the previous February. By the summer of 1847, the Mexican War had become a partisan issue, with most Whigs opposing it, and Democrats, appealing to a sense of Manifest Destiny and seeing it as an opportunity to extend slavery, supporting it. In vivid detail, Clay recounted the blunders and lies that had led to the “perils and dangers” the United States now faced.

  He contrasted the war with Mexico with what he called “the British War” of 1812, arguing that the earlier war was defensive and “just,” while the present engagement with Mexico was “no war of defense, but one unnecessary and of offensive aggression.” Clay laid the blame at the feet of President Polk. The Kentucky senator rose to the height of his oratory in declaring that although Congress may have initially acquiesced in supporting the president’s request to raise fifty thousand troops, “no earthly consideration would have ever tempted or provoked me to vote for a bill, with a palpable falsehood stamped on its face.” He invoked the Constitution in urging the Congress to stand up and now resolve the proper purposes of the war.

  In concluding, Clay asked his audience to join with him “to disavow, in the most positive manner, any desire, on our part, to acquire any foreign territory whatever, for the purpose of introducing slavery into it.” He reiterated his “well known” beliefs about slavery. “I have ever regarded slavery as a great evil,” but the slaves were here, and their future should be finally resolved “with a due consideration of all the circumstances affecting the security, safety, and happiness of both races.”

  THE LINCOLNS PREPARED TO LEAVE Lexington on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1847. In the morning they attended services in the new sanctuary of the Second Presbyterian Church. The guest preacher was Robert J. Breckenridge, a well-known Presbyterian minister and politician, “noted for his hostility to slavery.” Breckenridge’s opinions were printed regularly in the Lexington Observer and Reporter, but the words of the sermon that Lincoln heard on his final day in Lexington were not preserved.

  In the afternoon, the Lincolns began their trip by stage, boat, and finally by train to Washington. They arrived in the nation’s capital six days later on the evening of December 2, 1847. They went directly to Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel, a marble-fronted moderately priced hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. Lincoln registered his family as “A. Lincoln & Lady 2 children, Illinois.”

  They did not stay long at Brown’s, soon moving into rooms at a boardinghouse operated by Ann Sprigg, a widow from Virginia. The boardinghouse was the fourth in a row of houses known as Carroll Row on East First Street between A and East Capitol streets, located where the Library of Congress stands today.

  LINCOLN ARRIVED EAGER TO EXPLORE Washington, which had a population of more than thirty-five thousand, including nearly eight thousand slaves and two thousand free Negroes. It was only the thirteenth largest city in the nation. Many members of Congress lived in one of the new hotels in the downtown area, such as the United States and the National. In 1847, shortly before the Lincolns arrived, the City Hotel, at the northwest corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street, had been remodeled by the brothers Edwin D. and Henry A. Willard. The new Willard Hotel quickly achieved the reputation as the finest hotel in Washington.

  The national capital, not quite five decades old, remained an almost-city. Carriages rattled over the rough cobblestones of Pennsylvania Avenue, the main thoroughfare. Charles Dickens, visiting the United States five years earlier, had described Washington as “the 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 be complete.” Pennsylvania Avenue was the lone street lit by oil lamps, and only when Congress was in session.

  “Washington may be called the headquarters of tobacco tinctured saliva,” wrote Dickens, appalled by the manners, especially the pervasiveness of chewing tobacco, of his American cousins. He described a scene where “several gentlemen called upon me who, in the course of the conversation, frequently missed the spittoon at five paces.” More seriously, Dickens expressed his disgust at the slave pens and slave auctions in the nation’s capital.

  THE THIRTIETH CONGRESS of the United States convened on December 6, 1847, the customary first Monday of December. The Capitol was located directly across the street from Ann Sprigg’s boardinghouse. Each day, Lincoln passed the colossal statue of George Washington by American sculptor Horatio Greenough in the eastern Capitol gardens. The controversial neoclassical statue, commissioned for the Capitol in 1832, had proved to be too heavy for its floor.

  The House of Representatives met in a space south of the Rotunda that would become today’s National Statuary Hall. The original chamber, burned by the British in 1814, had been rebuilt and reopened in 1819. A statue of Clio, the muse of history, stood above the entrance. The Hall appeared like an ancient Greek theater, with a richly draped Speaker’s chair at the front. For all of its architectural beauty, the Hall, like the older chamber, was an acoustical nightmare. Not only was it hard to hear, but the lofty arched ceiling redirected speeches and conversations.

  The Thirtieth Congress comprised 232 members, or only a little more than half of the 435 members of today’s House of Representatives. The national legislature represented a cross-section of a rapidly changing nation. Over half the members were, like Lincoln, serving their first term. Only two members in the whole House were over sixty-two.

  Abraham Lincoln arrived in Washington in December 1847, to be greeted by this view of the Capitol located directly across from Ann Spriggs boardinghouse, where he and Mary lived.

  On their second day in session, the representatives drew their seat locations by lot. The seats were arranged in six semicircular rows. Lincoln drew seat 191, placing him in the back row on the left, or Whig, side. Lincoln received appointments to two committees: Post Offices and Post Roads and the Expenditures of the War Department.

  The House membership of the Thirtieth Congress included a few men who would play significant rol
es in the country’s future political struggles. Joshua R. Giddings, a strapping six-foot-two-inch Whig from the Western Reserve of Ohio, led the radical antislavery forces in the House and would become a prominent abolitionist in the years before the Civil War. Democrat Andrew Johnson, six weeks older than Lincoln and his future vice president, represented Tennessee. Johnson voted against almost every government appropriation, including the painting of portraits of presidents, paving Washington’s streets, and establishing the Smithsonian Institution, as well as all antislavery activity.

  From the day he arrived, Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, began trying to reform the House, especially its penchant for waste and greed. The mileage paid to members for their travel to and from Congress was supposed to be computed according to the most direct route. Determined to take on the “mileage-elongators,” Greeley published in the Tribune the monies received by each member. For just one session of Congress, Greeley calculated an excess of $47,223.80. Greeley’s list revealed that Lincoln was one of the chief culprits. Congressman-elect Lincoln understood that he would be reimbursed for this trip to Washington at the amount of forty cents per mile. The shortest route from Springfield to Washington was 840 miles. Lincoln sent in a bill for 1,626 miles, almost twice the shortest route, and thereby collected $1,300.80 in reimbursement. Greeley published, for all to see, $676.80 as the excess amount received by Lincoln.