Lincoln, the unknown

by Tom Clancy

  At the first sight of him, Mary Lincoln flushed with anger and embarrassment. She could have wept in her disappointment and despair.

  No one dreamed of it at the time, but we know now that this homely man, whose wife was ashamed of him, was starting out that hot October afternoon on a career that was to give him a place among the immortals.

  That afternoon, he made the first great speech of his life. If all the addresses that he had made previously were collected and placed in one book, and those that he made from that afternoon on were placed in another volume, you could hardly believe that the same man was the author of them all. It was a new Lincoln speaking that day—a Lincoln stirred to the depths by a mighty wrong, a Lincoln pleading for an oppressed race, a Lincoln touched and moved and lifted up by moral grandeur.

  He reviewed the history of slavery, and gave five fiery reasons for hating it.

  But with lofty tolerance, he declared: "I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist among them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we should not instantly give it up.

  "When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all

  earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do with the existing institution."

  For more than three hours, with the perspiration rolling down his face, he continued to answer Douglas, revealing the senator's sophistry, showing the utter falseness of his position.

  It was a profound speech, and it made a profound impression. Douglas winced and writhed under it. Time after time he rose to his feet and interrupted Lincoln.

  The election wasn't far off. Progressive young Democrats were already bolting the ticket and attacking Douglas, and when the voters of Illinois cast their ballots, the Douglas Democrats were overwhelmed.

  Senators were chosen in those days by the State legislatures; and the Illinois Legislature met in Springfield on February 8, 1855, for that purpose. Mrs. Lincoln had bought a new dress and hat for the occasion and her brother-in-law, Ninian W. Edwards, had with sanguine anticipation arranged for a reception to be given that night in Senator Lincoln's honor.

  On the first ballot, Lincoln led all the other candidates, and came within six votes of victory. But he steadily lost after that; and on the tenth ballot he was definitely defeated, and Lyman W. Trumbull was elected.

  Lyman Trumbull had married Julia Jayne, a young woman who had been bridesmaid at Mary Lincoln's wedding and probably had been the most intimate friend that Mrs. Lincoln ever had. Mary and Julia sat side by side in the balcony of the Hall of Representatives that afternoon, watching the senatorial election; and when the victory of Julia's husband was announced, Mrs. Lincoln turned in a temper and walked out of the building. Her anger was so fierce, and her jealousy was so galling, that from that day on, to the end of her life, she never again spoke to Julia Trumbull.

  Saddened and depressed, Lincoln returned to his dingy law office with the ink-stain on the wall and the garden seeds sprouting in the dust on top of the bookcase.

  A week later he hitched up Old Buck and once more started driving over the unsettled prairies, from one country courthouse to another. But his heart was no longer in the law. He talked now of little else but politics and slavery. He said that the thought of millions of people held in bondage continually made him miserable. His periods of melancholy returned now more

  frequently than ever; and they were more prolonged and more profound.

  One night he was sharing a bed with another lawyer in a country tavern. His companion awoke at dawn and found Lincoln sitting in his nightshirt on the edge of the bed, brooding, dejected, mumbling to himself, lost in unseeing abstraction. When at last he spoke, the first words were:

  "I tell you this nation cannot endure permanently half slave and half free."

  Shortly after this a colored woman in Springfield came to Lincoln with a pitiful story. Her son had gone to St. Louis and taken a job on a Mississippi steamboat. When he arrived in New Orleans he was thrown into jail. He had been born free, but he had no papers to prove it. So he was kept in prison until his boat left. Now he was going to be sold as a slave to pay the prison expenses.

  Lincoln took the case to the Governor of Illinois. The governor replied that he had no right or power to interfere. In response to a letter, the Governor of Louisiana replied that he couldn't do anything, either. So Lincoln went back to see the Governor of Illinois a second time, urging him to act, but the governor shook his head.

  Lincoln rose from his chair, exclaiming with unusual emphasis: "By God, Governor, you may not have the legal power to secure the release of this poor boy, but I intend to make the ground in this country too hot for the foot of a slave-owner."

  The next year Lincoln was forty-six, and he confided to his friend Whitney that he "kinder needed" glasses; so he stopped at a jewelry store and bought his first pair—for thirty-seven and a half cents.

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  e have now come to the summer of 1858, and we are about to watch Abraham Lincoln making the first great fight of his life. We shall see him emerge from his provincial obscurity and engage in one of the most famous political battles in United States history.

  He is forty-nine now—and where has he arrived after all his years of struggle?

  In business, he has been a failure.

  In marriage, he has found stark, bleak unhappiness.

  In law, he is fairly successful, with an income of three thousand a year; but in politics and the cherished desires of his heart, he has met with frustration and defeat.

  "With me," he confessed, "the race of ambition has been a failure, a flat failure."

  But from now on events move with a strange and dizzying swiftness. In seven more years he will be dead. But in those seven years he will have achieved a fame and luster that will endure to the remotest generations.

  His antagonist in the contest we are to watch is Stephen A. Douglas. Douglas is now a national idol. In fact, he is world-renowned.

  In the four years that had elapsed since the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, Douglas had made one of the most amazing recoveries in history. He had redeemed himself by a dramatic and spectacular political battle. It came about in this way:

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  Kansas knocked at the door of the Union, asking to be admitted as a slave State. But should she be so admitted? Douglas said "no," because the legislature that had framed her constitution was not a real legislature. Its members had been elected by chicanery and shot-guns. Half the settlers in Kansas—men who had a right to vote—were never registered, and so couldn't vote. But five thousand pro-slavery Democrats who lived in western Missouri and had not the shadow of a legal right to cast ballots in Kansas went to a United States arsenal, armed themselves, and, on election day, marched over into Kansas with flags flying and bands playing—and voted for slavery. The whole thing was a farce, a travesty on justice.

  And what did the free-State men do? They prepared for action. They cleaned up their shot-guns, oiled their rifles, and began banging away at signs on trees and knot-holes in barn doors, to improve their marksmanship. They were soon marching and drilling and drinking. They dug trenches, threw up breastworks, and turned hotels into forts. If they couldn't win justice with ballots, they would win it with bullets!

  In almost every town and village throughout the North, professional orators harangued the citizenry, passed hats, and collected money to buy arms for Kansas. Henry Ward Beecher, pounding his pulpit in Brooklyn, cried that guns would do more for the salvation of Kansas than Bibles. From that time on, Sharp's rifles were known as "Beecher's Bibles." They were shipped from the East in boxes and barrels labeled as "Bible
s," as "Crockery," as "Revised Statutes."

  After five free-State settlers had been murdered, an old sheep-raiser, a religious fanatic who cultivated grapes and made wine on the side, rose up on the plains of Kansas and said: "I have no choice. It has been decreed by Almighty God that I should make an example of these pro-slavery men."

  His name was John Brown, and he lived at Osawatomie.

  One night in May he opened the Bible, read the Psalms of David to his family, and they knelt in prayer. Then after the singing of a few hymns, he and his four sons and a son-in-law mounted their horses and rode across the prairie to a pro-slavery man's cabin, dragged the man and his two boys out of bed, chopped off their arms, and split their heads open with an ax. It rained before morning, and the water washed some of the brains out of the dead men's skulls.

  From that time on, both sides slew and stabbed and shot.

  The term "Bleeding Kansas" was written on the pages of history.

  Now, Stephen A. Douglas knew that a constitution framed by a bogus legislature in the midst of all that fraud and treachery was not worth the blotting-paper that it took to dry it.

  So Douglas demanded that the people of Kansas be permitted to vote at an honest and peaceful election on the question of whether Kansas should be admitted as a slave or a free State.

  His demand was altogether right and proper. But the President of the United States, James Buchanan, and the haughty pro-slavery politicians in Washington wouldn't tolerate such an arrangement.

  So Buchanan and Douglas quarreled.

  The President threatened to send Douglas to the political shambles, and Douglas retaliated: "By God, sir, I made James Buchanan; and by God, sir, I'll unmake him."

  As Douglas said that, he not only made a threat, but he made history. In that instant, slavery had reached the apex of its political power and arrogance. From that moment on, its power declined with a swift and dramatic abruptness.

  The battle that followed was the beginning of the end, for in that fight Douglas split his own party wide open and prepared the way for Democratic disaster in 1860, and so made the election of Lincoln not only possible but inevitable.

  Douglas had staked his own political future on what he believed, and on what almost every one in the North believed, was an unselfish fight for a magnificent principle. And Illinois loved him for it. He had now come back to his home State, the most admired and idolized man in the nation.

  The same Chicago that had hooted and lowered the flags to half-mast and tolled the church bells as he entered the city in 1854—that same Chicago now despatched a special train with brass bands and reception committees to escort him home. As he entered the city, one hundred and fifty cannon in Dearborn Park roared a welcome, hundreds of men fought to shake his hand, and thousands of women tossed flowers at his feet. People named their first-born in his honor; and it is probably no exaggeration to say that some of his frenzied followers would actually have died for him on the scaffold. Forty years after his death men still boasted that they were "Douglas Democrats."

  A few months after Douglas made his triumphal entry into

  Chicago the people of Illinois were scheduled to elect a United States Senator. Naturally the Democrats nominated Douglas. And whom did the Republicans put up to run against him? An obscure man named Lincoln.

  During the campaign that followed, Lincoln and Douglas met in a series of fiery debates, and these debates made Lincoln famous. They fought over a question charged with emotional dynamite, public excitement rose to fever heat. Throngs such as had never been known before in the history of the United States rushed to hear them. No halls were large enough to accommodate them; so the meetings were held in the afternoon in groves or out on the prairies. Reporters followed them, newspapers played up the sensational contests, and the speakers soon had a nation for their audience.

  Two years later, Lincoln was in the White House.

  These debates had advertised him, they had paved the way.

  For months before the contest began Lincoln had been preparing; as thoughts and ideas and phrases formed in his mind, he wrote them down on stray scraps of paper—on the backs of envelopes, on the margins of newspapers, on pieces of paper sacks. These he stored in his tall silk hat and carried about wherever he went. Finally he copied them on sheets of paper, speaking each sentence aloud as he wrote it, constantly revising, recasting, improving.

  After completing the final draft of his first speech, he invited a few intimate friends to meet him one night in the library of the State House. There, behind locked doors, he read his speech, pausing at the end of each paragraph, asking for comments, inviting criticisms. This address contained the prophetic words that have since become famous:

  "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

  "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.

  "I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

  "It will become all one thing or all the other."

  As he read that, his friends were astonished and alarmed. It was too radical, they said; it was "a damn fool utterance," it would drive voters away.

  Finally Lincoln rose slowly and told the group of the intense thought that he had given the subject, and ended the conference

  by declaring that the statement "A house divided against itself cannot stand" was the truth of all human experience.

  "It has been true," said Lincoln, "for six thousand years. And I want some universally known figure, expressed in a simple language, that will arouse men to the peril of the times. The time has come when this truth should be uttered, and I am determined neither to change nor modify my assertion. I am willing, if necessary, to perish with it. If it is decreed that I should go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked to the truth. Let me die in the advocacy of what is just and right."

  The first of the great debates was held on the twenty-first day of August in the little farming town of Ottawa, seventy-five miles out of Chicago. Crowds began arriving the night before. Soon the hotels, private houses, and livery-stables were filled to capacity; and for a mile up and down the valley camp-fires blazed on bluffs and bottom-lands as if the town were surrounded by an invading army.

  Before daybreak the tide set in again; and the sun rose that morning over the Illinois prairies to look down on country roads filled with buggies and wagons, with pedestrians, and with men and women on horseback. The day was hot, the weather had been dry for weeks. Huge clouds of dust arose and drifted over the corn-fields and meadows.

  At noon a special train of seventeen cars arrived from Chicago; seats were packed, aisles jammed, and eager passengers rode on the roofs.

  Every town within forty miles had brought its band. Drums rolled, horns tooted, there was the tramp, tramp of parading militia. Quack doctors gave free snake-shows and sold their painkillers. Jugglers and contortionists performed in front of saloons. Beggars and scarlet women plied their trades. Firecrackers exploded, cannon boomed, horses shied and ran away.

  In some towns, the renowned Douglas was driven through the streets in a fine carriage drawn by six white horses. A mighty hurrah arose. The cheering was continuous.

  Lincoln's supporters, to show their contempt for this display and elegance, drove their candidate through the street on a decrepit old hay-rack drawn by a team of white mules. Behind him came another hay-rack filled with thirty-two girls. Each girl bore the name of a State, and above them rose a huge motto:

  Westward the star of empire takes its way.

  The girls link on to Lincoln as their mothers linked to Clay.

  The speakers, committees, and reporters wedged and squeezed their way through the dense crowd for half an hour before they could reach the platform.

  It was protected from the broiling sun by a lumber awning. A score of men climbed on the awning; it gave way under their weight; boards tumbled down on the Douglas committee.


  In almost every way the two speakers differed sharply.

  Douglas was five feet four. Lincoln was six feet four.

  The big man had a thin tenor voice. The little man had a rich baritone.

  Douglas was graceful and suave. Lincoln was ungainly and awkward.

  Douglas had the personal charm of a popular idol. Lincoln's sallow wrinkled face was filled with melancholy, and he was entirely lacking in physical magnetism.

  Douglas was dressed like a rich Southern planter, in ruffled shirt, dark-blue coat, white trousers, and a white broad-brimmed hat. Lincoln's appearance was uncouth, grotesque: the sleeves of his rusty black coat were too short, his baggy trousers were too short, his high stovepipe hat was weather-beaten and dingy.

  Douglas had no flair for humor whatever, but Lincoln was one of the greatest story-tellers that ever lived.

  Douglas repeated himself wherever he went. But Lincoln pondered over his subject ceaselessly, until he said he found it easier to make a new speech each day than to repeat an old one.

  Douglas was vain, and craved pomp and fanfare. He traveled on a special train draped in flags. On the rear of the train was a brass cannon mounted on a box-car. As he approached a town, his cannon fired time after time, to proclaim to the natives that a mighty man was at their gates.

  But Lincoln, detesting what he called "fizzlegigs and fireworks," traveled in day-coaches and freight-trains and carried a battered old carpet-bag, and a green cotton umbrella with the handle gone and a string tied around the middle to keep it from flapping open.

  Douglas was an opportunist. He had no "fixed political morals," as Lincoln said. To win—that was his goal. But Lincoln was fighting for a great principle, and it mattered to him very little who won now, if only justice and mercy triumphed in the end.