Mary wrote in May telling Abraham that she wanted to return to Washington to be with him. He replied, playfully, “Will you be a good girl in all things, if I consent?” This was undoubtedly another reference to her behavior with other guests at the boardinghouse. “Then come along, and that as soon as possible. Having got the idea in my head, I shall be impatient till I see you.”
The correspondence between Abraham and Mary, in the sixth year of their marriage, brings to light both the depth of their love and the difficulties in their relationship. Lincoln, as was often his way, gently teased Mary about her strained relations with some of the boarders, but his comments also hint at tensions between them. Mary, pretty and perky, could also be difficult and demanding.
WITH MARY AND the two boys gone, Lincoln had more time to continue his self-education. He attended sessions of the U.S. Supreme Court, hearing Daniel Webster argue a case before the highest court in the land. He certainly got a glimpse of Roger B. Taney of Maryland, who in 1836 had been appointed by President Andrew Jackson to replace the legendary John Marshall as chief justice of the United States.
Lincoln frequently walked across the street from the boardinghouse to the Library of Congress. The Library began in 1800 when the capital moved from Philadelphia to Washington. During the War of 1812, when the British burned the Capitol, they used books from the Library of Congress to kindle the inferno. The Library began to rebuild itself when former president Thomas Jefferson offered his private library to Congress. After partisan wrangling, Jefferson’s offer was accepted and Congress purchased his library of 6,487 volumes for $23,950. The books were transported by wagons from Monticello to Washington. The fledgling Library continued in its temporary quarters until August 1824, the last year of James Monroe’s presidency, when it moved into its new home in the center of the west front of the Capitol.
Twenty-three years later, Abraham Lincoln became one of the Library of Congress’s most active borrowers. Where the new congressman spent his free time became “a puzzle, and a subject of amusement” to his fellow representatives. They observed, “He did not drink, or use tobacco, or bet, or swear.” What Lincoln was doing was “mousing among the books” at the Library. Lincoln often selected books to take to his room at the boardinghouse, wrapping them in a bandana, placing a stick in the knot, and transporting them over his shoulder. To his fellow congressmen, whatever else they thought of Lincoln, many were convinced: “He is a bookworm!”
THERE WAS A presidential election in 1848, and in June Lincoln attended the Whig convention in the Chinese Museum Hall in Philadelphia. The contest pitted Henry Clay against General Zachary Taylor. Intellectually, Lincoln leaned toward Clay and his ideas, but he supported Taylor for a strictly pragmatic reason: The Whigs needed to win. The Whigs took a page from the Democrats, who had nominated General Andrew Jackson in 1828 and 1832, and nominated their own military hero, General Zachary Taylor, as their presidential candidate in 1848.
Taylor, a down-home fellow known as “Old Rough and Ready,” had served in the military for forty years. He was best known for leading his troops to an unlikely victory at the desperate battle of Buena Vista in the Mexican War. He did not write or speak well and was woefully ignorant of foreign affairs. The Whigs hoped that Taylor, a strong nationalist, could appeal to their Northern constituents because of his experience in the military. At the same time, they hoped he would also draw in Southerners because he was from Louisiana and owned a plantation with one hundred slaves in Mississippi.
Lincoln made the pragmatic decision to back General Zachary Taylor, a hero of the Mexican War, over Henry Clay in the 1848 presidential election.
Taylor’s nomination allowed Lincoln and other young Whigs in the House to continue to attack the Democrats for beginning an unjust war, but at the same time extol one of the generals responsible for winning it. Taylor’s political record was nonexistent, but he offered the hope of electability. “I am in favor of Gen: Taylor as the whig candidate for the Presidency because I am satisfied we can elect him, that he would give us a whig administration, and that we can not elect any other whig.” The other Whig, unnamed, was Henry Clay. Lincoln said as much in a letter to a friend in Illinois: “Our only chance is with Taylor. I go for him, not because I think he would make a better president than Clay, but because I think he would make a better one than Polk, or Cass, or Buchanan.” In 1848, Lincoln’s political pragmatism triumphed over his idealism.
The Democrats nominated Lewis Cass of Michigan. Cass had fought in the War of 1812, had been secretary of war in the Jackson administration, and was serving as U.S. senator from Michigan. On the slavery issue, Cass favored what he called “popular sovereignty,” letting the residents of each of the new territories decide whether they wanted slavery or not.
A third antislavery party, the Free Soil Party, emerged in 1847–48 as a protest to both Cass, who they feared would allow “squatter sovereignty” in the territories, and to Taylor, a slave owner. The Free Soil Party nominated former president Martin Van Buren as their candidate in 1848. This loose coalition of former Liberty Party men, plus antislavery Whigs and Democrats, campaigned on the slogan “Free soil, free speech, free labor, free men.”
As the long, hot summer term of Congress wound down, presidential politicking warmed up. Presidential campaigning in the early nineteenth century was largely the work of surrogates. Most Americans thought it unseemly for candidates to speak on their own behalf. Before the Thirtieth Congress adjourned, the candidates’ supporters took to the floor to give their best political orations. On July 27, 1848, Lincoln found himself speaking eighth behind three Democrats and four Whigs in the House before a packed gallery. After hours and hours of speeches, how could Lincoln stand out?
He decided to turn the Cass criticism of Taylor against their man. The Democratic speakers that day had complained that they did not know either the principles or policies of General Taylor. Lincoln answered by giving an exposition of Whig principles—tariff, currency, and internal improvements. But Democrats contended that the Whigs had deserted all of their principles and taken refuge under General Taylor’s military armor. Lincoln could smell an opening.
What about the military coattail of General Jackson? “Like a horde of hungry ticks you have stuck to the tail of the Hermitage lion to the end of his life.” Part of Cass’s reputation was his military exploits in the War of 1812. As Lincoln zeroed in on Cass, he exclaimed, “You democrats are now engaged in dovetailing onto the great Michigander … tying him to a military tail.”
Lincoln now raised suspicions about Cass’s war record by presenting a self-deprecating recital of his own military record. “By the way, Mr. Speaker, did you know that I am a military hero?” Lincoln captivated his listeners by declaring, “Yes, sir; in the days of the Black Hawk war, I fought, bled, and came away.” By now it was clear that he was mocking Cass’s military career. “Speaking of Gen: Cass’ career, reminds me of my own.” Lincoln spoke satirically with a set of derisive comparisons about battles, weapons, and enemies, all meant to say that Cass saw no more action than Lincoln did. Finally, in sardonic humor, Lincoln told his colleagues, now convulsed in laughter, “If he saw any live, fighting Indians, it was more than I did; but I had a good many bloody struggles with musquetoes.”
Reporting on Lincoln’s speech, the Baltimore American described his power to mesmerize an audience. Lincoln “was so good natured, and his style so peculiar, that he kept the House in a continuous roar of merriment.” Lincoln’s mannerisms caught the eye of the reporter as it did that of his fellow congressmen. “He would commence a point in his speech far up one of the aisles, and keep on talking, gesticulating, and walking until he would find himself, at the end of a paragraph, down in the center of the area in front of the speaker’s desk. He would then go back and take another bead, and work down again.” Lincoln, perhaps feeling more at home, offered an old-fashioned Illinois stump speech in the well of the House of Representatives.
MARY, BOB, AND ED
DIE returned to Washington at the end of July, finding husband and father busily engaged in the last two weeks of the first session of Congress. After an all-night meeting on August 13, 1848, Congress adjourned for the summer. Lincoln decided to spend the recess working for Taylor’s election.
In early September, with a basic stump speech in hand, Lincoln left Washington with his family for a campaign tour in Massachusetts. The Bay State had been a Whig stronghold, led by such giants as Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate, but lately Whig unity and dominance was fracturing. Many members, outraged about the lack of progress on the issue of slavery, were joining the emerging Free Soil Party just as the 1848 presidential campaign got into full swing. By the middle of the 1840s, two groups of New England Whigs had fallen into dispute. “Conscience Whigs” saw the battle over slavery as a moral struggle; “Cotton Whigs,” while admitting the evils of slavery, nevertheless did not want to completely alienate the South, whose cotton was needed in New England’s textile mills. As Lincoln prepared to speak in Massachusetts, he knew many Massachusetts Whigs were deeply upset that the Whig presidential candidate, General Taylor, owned slaves in Louisiana.
Lincoln arrived in Worcester on Tuesday, September 12, 1848, the eve of the Whig state convention. Andrew Bullock, a local Whig politician, was planning a public rally for the evening but all of the speakers had declined his invitation to speak. Hearing that the Illinois congressman was in Worcester, he found Lincoln at the Worcester House and asked him to address the rally. That evening at 7 p.m., Lincoln, dressed in a long linen duster, arrived at the city hall to find more than one thousand people crammed inside. The chairman of the meeting introduced Lincoln as a “Free Soil Whig,” which he did not deny.
Dusting off the speech he gave in the Congress in July, Lincoln spoke for two hours. He had two main goals in mind. First, he wanted to assure the audience that Taylor did embody Whig values. Second, Lincoln drove home the point that Van Buren, the Free Soil candidate, could not win the election; a vote for Van Buren would end up being a vote for the Democratic candidate Cass. Lincoln had vowed never to forget the lesson of the presidential campaign of 1844, that moral purity can be self-defeating if it opens the door to political defeat. The Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican reported that the audience “frequently interrupted” Lincoln “by loud cheering.” The Boston Daily Advertiser was impressed with his initial speech. “Mr. Lincoln has a very tall and thin figure, with an intellectual face, showing a searching mind, and a cool judgment.” The Whig newspaper called Lincoln’s oration a “truly masterly and convincing speech.”
Three days later, Lincoln arrived by train in Boston. The different districts in this city of 130,000 were connected not by horsecars but by a number of stagecoach lines. Used to rude hostelries in central Illinois, Lincoln and his family enjoyed their stay at the stylish Tremont House.
In succeeding days, Lincoln traveled by train to speak in Lowell, Dorchester, Chelsea, Dedham, Cambridge, and Taunton. On Thursday evening, September 21, 1848, Lincoln addressed the Union Hall in Taunton, a city humming with industrialization. A Taunton Whig newspaper, the Old Colony Republican, captured the dynamism of Lincoln as a public speaker and described the way Lincoln “advanced upon his hearers.”
It was an altogether new show for us—a western stump speaker. … Leaning himself up against the wall, as he commenced, and talking in the plainest manner, and in the most indifferent tone, yet gradually fixing his footing, and getting command of his limbs, loosening his tongue, and firing up his thoughts, until he had got possession of himself and of his audience.
The content of Lincoln’s speech struck the reporter as even more distinctive. “Argument and anecdote, wit and wisdom, hymns and prophecies, platforms and syllogisms, came flying before the audience like wild game before the fierce hunter of the prairie.” The reporter concluded, “There has been no gathering of any party in a region where the responses of the audience were so frequent and so vigorous.”
The climax of his speaking tour was a giant Whig open-air rally in the evening in Boston. The main speaker for the evening was not Lincoln, but William H. Seward. A former governor of New York, the slender Seward had been elected to the Senate in 1848 and spoke in Boston as an established leader in the antislavery movement. Seward gave a formal address, arguing that a third Free Soil Party, however well intentioned in their ideas, could only draw away votes from the Whigs and help elect Democrats who would do nothing to stop the spread of slavery.
Seward gave such a lengthy speech that by the time Lincoln was introduced, it was already 9:30. But Lincoln was not about to cut short his remarks. He spoke for a full hour, the Boston Courier reporting that Lincoln spoke “in a most forcible and convincing speech, which drew down thunders of applause.” The next evening Lincoln and Seward, who would go on to become Lincoln’s secretary of state, shared a room in Worcester. Seward recalled, “We spent the greater part of the night talking about anti-slavery positions and principles.” Lincoln told Seward, “I have been thinking about what you said in your speech. 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.”
WITH HIS SPEAKING obligations in New England completed, Lincoln and his family finally started for home. He stopped in Albany, New York, to meet Millard Fillmore, the Whig vice presidential candidate, and Thurlow Weed, founder of the Albany Evening Journal and a close friend of Seward’s. In Buffalo, the Lincolns took a boat trip to see Niagara Falls. Lincoln was “overwhelmed in the contemplation of the vast power the sun is constantly exerting in quiet, noiseless operation of lifting water up to be rained down again.” He wrote some notes about this experience, thinking of turning it into an essay. “It calls up the indefinite past. When Columbus first sought this continent—when Christ suffered on the cross—when Moses led Israel through the Red Sea—nay, even when Adam first came from the hand of his Maker—then as now, Niagara was roaring here.”
The Lincolns traveled on the steamer Globe from Buffalo to Chicago, covering the 1,047 miles in the astounding time of sixty hours. During the voyage, the ship became stranded on a sandbar. The captain called for the hands to collect loose planks and empty casks and barrels and try to force them under the boat to help lift it off the sandbar. Lincoln observed this operation closely, perhaps remembering similar problems in navigating the Sangamon and the Mississippi.
On October 10, 1848, the Lincolns finally arrived home in Springfield. Lincoln quickly learned that many of his constituents held him in disfavor. While campaigning for Taylor in the Seventh District, Lincoln found himself criticized for opposing President Polk on the war with Mexico. The Illinois State Register wrote, “Lincoln has made nothing by coming to this part of the country to make speeches. He had better have stayed away.” Nevertheless, on Election Day, November 7, Lincoln joined the cheering in his hometown when Taylor won the presidency, carrying the Seventh District by nearly fifteen hundred votes.
IN LATE NOVEMBER Lincoln left Springfield to return to Washington for the final, short, session of the Thirtieth Congress, reporting “present” on Saturday, December 7, 1848.
The rump session would be dominated by rancorous debates on slavery, both about the territories and in the nation’s capital. Lincoln had been largely silent during the debates over slavery in the first session, but he returned to Washington determined to offer a compromise measure. Twelve years earlier, in the Illinois legislature, Lincoln had advocated the abolition of slavery in the nation’s capital, but only with the approval of Washington’s citizens. He now wrote a proposal in the same spirit. Lincoln showed it to Joshua Giddings on January 8, 1849, who encouraged him to go forward even though the abolitionist Ohio congressman disapproved of the feature of compensation for the owners of slaves.
Lincoln stood on January 10 to announce his intention to present a bill in his final session in the House. Lincoln aimed for conciliation in a bitterly divided Congress. On the one hand his bil
l would allow officers of slaveholding states to bring their slaves to the nation’s capital while on government business. Lincoln’s bill also allowed for the arrest of fugitive slaves who might escape into the District. But Lincoln was clear in his first and main point: “No person within the District shall ever be held in slavery within it.”
The next evening, at Mrs. Spriggs’s boarding house, the Whig boarders remained after dinner to discuss Lincoln’s bill. Giddings wrote in his diary of Lincoln’s proposal: “I believed it as good a bill as we could get at this time.”
In March 1849, Lincoln applied for a patent in Washington for his invention to help lift boats over sandbars or shoals.
On January 12, Lincoln intended to introduce his bill but ultimately did not. In a matter of days he discovered that support for his compromise measure had dried up and his bill never made it into the hopper, the wooden box near the Speaker’s desk in which all new bills were deposited before being printed for consideration by committees. In speaking of what Lincoln hoped would be the results of compensated emancipation, he crafted language (“such slaves shall be forever free”) that he would revisit at a future time.
ON FEBRUARY 12, 1849, Congressman Abraham Lincoln turned forty. Three weeks later, the Thirtieth Congress worked all night to conclude its business, finally adjourning at 7 a.m. on Sunday, March 4. On Monday, March 5, a gray cloudy day, Lincoln attended the inauguration of President Zachary Taylor.
Two days later, Lincoln argued his first and only case before the U.S. Supreme Court. While in Congress he had watched cases argued, but now he had the delight of standing before the nine black-robed justices. On March 7, 1849, Lincoln argued Lewis for use of Longworth v. Lewis, referred to the high court from the U.S. Circuit Court in Illinois, which involved a disputed meaning of a statute of limitations. On March 13, 1849, Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled against Lincoln’s plea.
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