A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  John Todd Stuart, Lincoln’s former law partner and a member of First Presbyterian, remembered that Lincoln began to attend church on a more regular basis in the late 1850s. Both Abraham and Mary appreciated Smith, “an intellectual, powerful man,” who, in the words of Mary’s close cousin Lizzie Grimsley, “could thunder out the terrors of the law as well as proclaim the love of the Gospel.” Lincoln, who had pushed away his father’s emotional expressions of faith when he moved to New Salem in the 1830s, began to take another look at religion.

  LESS THAN A YEAR after Eddie’s death, Mary’s grief was relieved in part when she gave birth to William Wallace Lincoln on December 21, 1850. He was named after Mary’s brother-in-law Dr. William Wallace. The Lincolns’ third son would grow to become the boy most like his father.

  A fourth son, Thomas Lincoln, was born on April 4, 1853, named after Abraham’s father. He quickly acquired the nickname “Tad,” short for “Tadpole,” the way he looked at birth. Tad grew to be a prankster in a family of boys who were mischief makers—with their father’s consent and often encouragement.

  Tad Lincoln was baptized at First Presbyterian Church on April 4, 1855. Thomas was the only son born after Mary joined First Presbyte rian Church and seems to have been the only one of the Lincoln boys who was baptized. All the boys regularly attended Sunday school at the church. The Lincolns were becoming fond of Pastor James Smith and frequently invited him to their home. Lincoln discovered in Smith someone who had also doubted as a young man, had also read Volney and Paine, but had come to affirm both reason and faith.

  LINCOLN, THOUGH NOT SEEKING PUBLIC OFFICE himself, continued to lobby for public offices for his friends. He wrote to President Taylor in January 1850, to recommend Stephen T. Logan for U.S. judge of the District Court of Illinois. In the spring of 1850, Lincoln’s name was put forward by a Whig newspaper for another term in Congress, but he quickly quashed the idea.

  In July 1850, while in Chicago to participate in a case before the U.S. District Court, Lincoln learned that President Taylor, after participating in patriotic ceremonies on a hot July 4, had contracted a stomach ailment and died five days later. In Chicago, two committees immediately planned an event to memorialize the dead president. Receiving word that Lincoln was in town, they invited him on July 22 to give a eulogy. Honored by the request but concerned that he had less than two days to prepare, Lincoln replied, “The want of time for preparation will make the task, for me, a very difficult one to perform, in any degree satisfactory to others or to myself.”

  Nevertheless, on July 24, 1850, Lincoln offered a eulogy at city hall. The address had all the marks of words prepared in a hurry. Lincoln took much of his eulogy from Taylor’s 1848 campaign biographies, some of which contained inaccurate information.

  Lincoln did, however, use the occasion to offer his perspective on contemporary politics. “I fear the one great question of the day, is not now so likely to be partially acquiesced in by the different sections of the Union, as it would have been, could Gen. Taylor have been spared to us.” Lincoln, never as enamored of Taylor as he was of Henry Clay, nonetheless had hoped that the president, a slave owner, would be a mediating figure in the growing crisis over slavery.

  In Lincoln’s unusual conclusion, he reminded his audience “that we, too, must die.” He concluded with six entire stanzas from the poem “Mortality” by Scottish poet William Knox, which he had discovered in a newspaper in 1846 and committed to memory.

  The eulogy said as much about Lincoln as it did about Taylor. Lincoln, through the poem, evoked his own struggles with the meaning of life and death.

  Yea! Hope and despondency, pleasure and pain,

  Are mingled together in sun-shine and rain;

  And the smile and the tear, and the song and the dirge,

  Still follow each other, like surge upon surge.

  Lincoln had known melancholy and despondency.

  ’tis the wink of an eye, ’tis the draught of a breath,

  From the blossoms of health, to the paleness of death.

  From the gilded saloon, to the bier and the shroud.

  Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud!

  The poem, with its summoning of eternal and unchanging rhythms of life, appealed to Lincoln in his quest for meaning and fulfillment.

  SOON AFTER THE BIRTH of Willie, Lincoln received a letter from his stepbrother, John D. Johnston, telling him that his father was quite ill and might not recover. Thomas Lincoln and his second wife, Sara Bush Lincoln, had lived on a farm on Goosenest Prairie in Coles County in southeastern Illinois since 1840. Johnston reminded Lincoln that he had written two previous letters and wondered why he had received no reply. Lincoln, acknowledging the receipt of both letters, wrote, “it is no[t because] I have forgotten them, or been uninterested about them—but because it appeared to me I could write nothing which could do any good.” Lincoln added, “You already know I desire that neither Father or Mother shall be in want of any comfort either in health or sickness while they live,” and added that his stepbrother should use his name “to procure a doctor, or anything else for Father in his present sickness.” Lincoln then asked his stepbrother to convey to his father a consolation of faith: “Tell him to remember to call upon, and confide in, our great and good, and merciful Maker, who will not turn away from him in any extremity. He notes the fall of a sparrow, and numbers the hairs of our heads; and He will not forget the dying man, who puts his trust in Him.”

  It has been suggested by some that Lincoln’s religious words were an unconvincing appeal to the language of the primitive Baptist faith adhered to by Lincoln’s parents. But it is more plausible that Lincoln offered heartfelt language that he himself had heard from the Reverend Smith eleven months earlier at the funeral of his son Eddie and now conveyed as a consolation to his own father.

  In his conclusion, Lincoln wrote of the distance that had grown between son and father. “Say to him that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.”

  Thomas Lincoln died five days later on January 17, 1851. Lincoln did not attend the funeral. The distance could not be bridged.

  AS SOLE HEIR, Lincoln inherited the eighty-acre farm on the Goosenest Prairie. He had no wish to benefit from the farm and sold it to his stepbrother for one dollar on August 12, 1851.

  When, near the end of that year, he learned that Johnston was considering selling the land and moving to Missouri, Lincoln could not restrain his outrage. “I have been thinking of this ever since; and can not but think such a notion is utterly foolish.” He peppered Johnston with questions. “What can you do in Missouri, better than here? Is the land richer? Can you there, any more than here, raise corn, & wheat & oats, without work? Will any body there, any more than here, do your work for you?” Lincoln did not mince words. “I feel it is my duty to have no hand in such a piece of foolery.” He was particularly upset on “Mother’s account,” that the lack of Johnston’s labor and income would leave his stepmother destitute.

  Lincoln, in reading over this strong letter, began his final paragraph, “Now do not misunderstand this letter, I do not write it in any unkind-ness.” He told his stepbrother he wrote “to get you to face the truth … your thousand pretences for not getting along better are all non-sense—they deceive no body but yourself.” Lincoln’s final sentence articulated not simply his hopes for his brother, but his own creed. “Go to work is the only cure for your case.”

  SENATOR HENRY CLAY died in Washington, D.C., on June 29, 1852. On July 6, Springfield suspended all city business in recognition of a day of national mourning. The citizens of Springfield held two memorial meetings, one at the Episcopal church led by the Reverend Charles Dresser, who read the “Service for the Dead” from the Book of Common Prayer, and the second at the state capitol with a eulogy delivered by Lincoln. What Jefferson had meant to Madison, Clay had meant to Lincoln.

  Lincoln began his speech by relating the birth of the nation to the birth o
f Clay. “The infant nation, and the infant child began the race of life together.” Lincoln built his eulogy around the lessons that Clay’s life could still offer the country. Commenting on Clay’s “comparatively limited” education, Lincoln said that it “teaches at least one profitable lesson,” that “one can scarcely be so poor, but that, if he will, he can acquire sufficient education to get through the world respectably.” Lincoln may have exaggerated Clay’s lack of education, but in introducing this theme he offered his identification with the politician he idealized.

  Unlike hundreds of other eulogies to Clay, Lincoln’s highlighted the Kentuckian’s vigorous engagement with slavery throughout his political life. He emphasized that Clay, from the beginning of his public career, “ever was, on principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery.” Acknowledging the paradox that Clay was a slave owner, Lincoln declared that he had nonetheless been “in favor of gradual emancipation of the slaves in Kentucky.” Lincoln admired Clay for opposing “both extremes” on slavery: those who would “shiver into fragments the Union” and those who would “tear to tatters the Constitution” in their desire to overthrow slavery immediately. Lincoln was intent to “array his name, opinions, and influence,” against “an increasing number of men” who, Lincoln feared, were beginning to assail “the declaration that ‘all men are created free and equal.’ ”

  Lincoln offered this tribute to Clay three years after he had last held public office. He had no future political office in sight. His eulogy memorialized his ideal politician, but it also enunciated the ideals that would bring Lincoln once again into public life, much sooner than he anticipated.

  This photograph from October 17, 1854, by Polycarp Von Schneidau in Chicago, captures an intellectual if not crafty, Lincoln in the year he reentered politics.

  CHAPTER 11

  Let No One Be Deceived 1852–56

  OUR REPUBLICAN ROBE IS SOILED, AND TRAILED IN THE DUST LET US REPURIFY IT LET US TURN AND WASH IT WHITE, IN THE SPIRIT, IF NOT THE BLOOD, OF THE REVOLUTION.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Speech at Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854

  E WERE THUNDERSTRUCK AND STUNNED; AND WE REELED AND FELL IN utter confusion.” Abraham Lincoln spoke these words in one of his first responses to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. He found himself quickly caught up in the midst of a tempest, and his words revealed his keen awareness that he was not prepared for the political task before him. Yet, he would discover in the months ahead how to speak with new definition and clarity about the meaning of the promise of America in the national debate about slavery. The ways in which Lincoln responded to this storm would mark a significant turning point in his life.

  ON JANUARY 4, 1854, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, chairman of the powerful Committee on Territories, brought to the Senate a bill to set up a government in the vast Nebraska Territory. The urgency grew from mounting pressure to organize this territory in the center of the old Louisiana Purchase. President Jefferson’s acquisition from France in 1803 of more than one million square miles had expanded the area of the United States all the way from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the United States consisted of seventeen states—nine free and eight slave—of almost equal population.

  Political infighting over the organization of the sizable Nebraska Territory had broken out in earlier Congresses, and four previous bills had foundered over disagreements about the extension of slavery. Doug las now offered what he called a “compromise” measure, arguing that local control, what he called a long-held American “sacred” value, would finally mitigate the issue of slavery. In its final form the act provided for not one but two new territories, Nebraska and Kansas. The bill stated that “all questions pertaining to slavery in the territories were to be left to the decision of the people residing therein.” The intent of Douglas’s bill was to transfer the power to decide whether or not slavery would be permitted from Congress to the people in the territory.

  The storm began the moment the Kansas-Nebraska Act was introduced. Salmon P. Chase, elected to the Senate from Ohio in 1849 by a coalition of Free Soilers and Democrats, was chosen point man for the counterattack. Chase would be ably assisted by Charles Sumner, the new senator from Massachusetts, also elected by Free Soilers and Democrats. The tall, handsome Chase questioned Douglas’s interpretation of American history and declared that the leaders of the revolutionary generation had abhorred slavery, had tolerated it as the price of gaining approval for the Constitution, and, by restricting its future growth, had expected it to die out by the second or third generation of the new nation. In the course of his remarks, Chase charged that the Illinois senator had “out Southernized the South.”

  Douglas was surprised and angered by the intensity of the criticisms. A dramatic moment occurred when Senator Edward Everett of Massachusetts brought to the Senate a 250-foot-long memorial against the bill signed by 3,050 New England ministers of various denominations. Douglas was furious at what he described as religious leaders inappropriately meddling in politics.

  On March 2, 1854, the Senate began a final debate on the bill. Everyone wanted to speak, bickering ensued, and insults were exchanged. On March 3, exhaustion set in and liquor broke out. At dusk, the candles in the great chamber were lit so that the debate could continue. Douglas finally began his summation at eleven-thirty in the evening with the galleries still packed. He rested his case in his belief that popular sovereignty would in the long run “destroy all sectional parties and sectional agitations.” After a nonstop session of more than seventeen hours, at five o’clock in the morning on March 4, the Senate passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act by a vote of 37 to 14. The size of the majority belied the tensions within both the Democratic and Whig parties.

  The bill faced greater opposition in the House. With the bill bottled up in committee, Lincoln’s friend from the Thirtieth Congress, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, played an experienced parliamentary hand to bring it to the floor for a vote. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was approved by the House on May 22, 1854, in a much tighter vote, 113 to 110. President Franklin Pierce, who lined up with Douglas’s intentions, signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law on May 30. The fight in Congress had been won, but the real battle was about to begin.

  The debate over and passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act dramatically changed the political landscape of the country. The carefully constructed political compromises of 1820 and 1850 had been overturned; the fury of the antislavery advocates was intensified; but the legislative action fell short of mollifying many in the South. The Whig Party, which had elected a president only six years earlier, was now demoralized and in disarray; it struggled to respond. The Democratic Party, which Douglas hoped to bring together, suffered dissension between Northern and Southern members. American religious leaders, not united in their response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, came together in pulpits and press to exhort their constituencies to raise their voices in protest. An “anti-Nebraska” movement grew quickly, enlisting disparate groups that cut across party lines.

  With Clay, Calhoun, and Webster no longer present, new, younger leaders entered the political stage. The forty-year-old Douglas, serving in his second term in the Senate and ambitious to move to center stage, positioned himself as a leading actor in an unfolding national drama. Far offstage, Abraham Lincoln, at age forty-four, five years removed from his single term in Congress and traveling the dusty back roads of the Eighth Judicial Circuit, emerged from political exile to speak with new power in response to passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In the months of 1854 and beyond, Lincoln and Douglas would find themselves on a collision course.

  AS THE BILL MOVED forward through Congress in the winter and spring of 1854, Lincoln read reports of the debate in the Congressional Globe. Herndon had long made it his business to show Lincoln important speeches, newspaper reports, and editorials about national issues. Three weeks after Douglas introduced
his bill, Lincoln read in the National Era “An Appeal of Independent Democrats” over the names of six congressional leaders, including Senators Chase and Sumner, plus his friend from the Thirtieth Congress Joshua Giddings of Ohio. The “Appeal” was filled with inflammatory language. “We arraign this bill as a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.”

  The fact that Lincoln failed to speak out was not surprising. He did not hold political office, nor was he a candidate for office. He was, however, extremely busy with his general law practice. In January and February, he began work on an appeal before the Illinois Supreme Court of his first large case for the Illinois Central Railroad, Illinois Central v. McLean County. He was continuously involved in court cases until the Sangamon Circuit Court adjourned in Springfield on June 15, 1854. And he continued to practice his regular intellectual discipline. His notes from the 1850s include reflections on law, government, slavery, sectionalism, Stephen A. Douglas, and the formation of the Republican Party.

  In the early months of 1854, the anti-Nebraska movement accelerated the disintegration of the Whigs, but Lincoln was, if anything, loyal. He remained faithful to the party of Clay and was not ready to abandon the Whig heritage or its future.

  The artist places the blame on the Democrats for the violence against Free Staters in Kansas in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.