Abraham Lincoln

by Thomas Keneally

  Back from circuit in August 1843, Lincoln celebrated the birth of his first child, Robert Todd Lincoln. It was now Lincoln’s turn to have a son who, as well as resembling the Todds closely, would in temperament be something of a stranger to him. The Lincolns moved out of the Globe to rent a cottage on Fort Street, and would soon buy a house at H and Jackson, a respectable one-and-a-half-story frame structure that cost Lincoln twelve hundred dollars and where they would live until he achieved the presidency.

  Abraham would prove, by the standards of his time, an overindulgent father to all his children, and even to Robert, whom Herndon would later dismiss as “a Todd and not a Lincoln.” But it has to be said that Abraham had relief from domesticity when he went on circuit, and Mary had none. Mary too was indulgent, but in another sense: in a fraught manner interspersed with outbursts of anger. The house sometimes overwhelmed her. She had but one servant, and the nature of domestic life as wife of a young lawyer with no independent means and, of course, no slaves shocked her and made her anxious. Her fear of poverty would become a monomania, plaguing her for the rest of her life, but it often manifested itself in fits of alternating extravagance (especially when it came to clothes and furnishings) and frenzied cheeseparing. She had an unpredictable temper—a trait not unknown in the Todd family—and neighbors overheard some of the fights, in which Mary’s stridency would be interspersed with Lincoln’s desperately appeasing, “Now there, Mother.” At tenderer moments he called her, “My child wife, my Molly,” and yet he often found that the easiest way to deal with her was to take to the streets or to his office. A friend of Lincoln’s described her as a “she-devil.” Her tantrums “vexed & harrowed the soul out of that good man.”

  But his distant and abstracted nature frustrated her, and Mary must often have chided him about the limitations of his success, for she told a friend, “If Mr. Lincoln should happen to die, his spirit will never find me living outside the boundaries of a slave state.” And since he still rode the circuit six months out of the year, Mary was often on her own, and oppressed by fears about her children, which some called morbid.

  Now that she had her own house, and despite her bemoaning the lack of slaves, Mary sturdily insisted on doing much of her own work, when by contrast her sister, Elizabeth Edwards, had two Irish-born servants and a laborer, as well as two slaves from the Todd house in Kentucky (and thus of uncertain status as to whether they were bond or free). Sometimes Mary’s tantrums drove away even the help she had. One servant would later complain, “I was never so unhappy in my life as while living with her.” Servants could find Mary unexpectedly generous, though, suddenly as energetic in generosity as she had been, just a minute or two before, in shrillness.

  The servant who lasted longest was an Irishwoman, Katherine Gordon, although Mary wrote to her half sister Emilie: “If some of you Kentuckians had to deal with ‘the wild Irish,’ as we householders are sometimes called to do, the South would certainly elect Mr. Fillmore next time.” Millard Fillmore was one of the leaders of the Know-Nothings, passionately anti-Irish and anti-Catholic. It can be said for Lincoln that although it was quite fashionable for Whigs to slam the Irish, given that they were electoral fodder for the Democrats, he never stooped to do so.

  Late in 1844 Logan sought to dissolve the partnership, since he wanted to form another with his son. Lincoln intended to carry on on his own, but looked around for an assistant and chose Billy Herndon, who had clerked for him and who was genial company. Herndon, one day to write a controversial biography of his friend, was a loquacious, well-dressed young man in his mid-twenties. He was a freethinker, which appealed to Abe, and a bohemian boozer, which Abe wasn’t. He also possessed considerable power among young Whigs. A voracious reader, he took a great number of liberal magazines from Britain and the East, subscribing as well to Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. Lincoln would sometimes ask him to give digests of the ideas he had encountered in recent books, something Herndon was willing to do. In an age of advancing Victorian prudery, he would later be attacked for indelicately recording that Lincoln told him, “My Mother was a bastard—was the daughter of a nobleman, So called of Virginia. . . . All that I am and hope ever to be I get from my Mother—good bless her—Did you ever notice that bastards are generally smarter—shrewder & more intellectual than others? Is it because it is stolen?”

  Billy Herndon always sided with Lincoln in his home problems, and called the Lincoln household “domestic hell on earth.” It was, said Herndon again, “an ice cave.”

  But then, perhaps understandably, Lincoln did frequently absent himself from that cave. In 1844 he stumped the state and rode into Indiana to address rallies for his political paragon, Henry Clay, Whig champion and candidate for the presidency. But a protégé of Andrew Jackson, James Knox Polk, took the White House. The previous year, at a party convention in Pekin, Illinois, Lincoln had put himself forward as congressional candidate, but a cousin of Mary’s, John J. Hardin, received the nomination. Lincoln did, however, manage to broker a deal by which the Seventh Congressional District would rotate between Hardin, Lincoln’s close friend Edward Baker, and Lincoln himself. (Edward Baker, after whom the Lincolns would name their second son, was a state senator who often appeared on political rostrums with a pet eagle.) Lincoln could look forward with some certainty to being a candidate in 1846 and taking his seat in Congress the following year.

  Even before Polk was inaugurated, the United States acquired Texas as a slaveholding state. Under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, slavery could not exist north of thirty six degrees thirty minutes latitude. The Southern Democrats, therefore, pursued a policy of encouraging annexation of territory south of the compromise line. They dreamed not only of Texas but of Central America and Cuba, whose incorporation as future slave states would perpetuate the balance between slave and free jurisdictions and ensure that the peculiar institution spread and flourished. It was for fear that border and land disputes in Texas would cause the U.S. Army to be unjustly employed to conquer more territory for slavery’s domain that Lincoln campaigned so much for Henry Clay, who—though himself a Kentucky slaveholder—saw the spread of the slave empire as pernicious, and a gradual end to the institution of slavery as inevitable.

  As, to the horror of such Whigs as Lincoln, the American army marched into Mexico, Lincoln and Billy Herndon moved into new premises across the public square from the courthouse. It was an office that quickly took on an increasing look of disarray, Lincoln even having a parcel of documents tied with string and classified with the words: “When you can’t find it anywhere else, look into this.” Apple seeds and orange rinds from Abraham’s profuse fruit eating littered the floor. Herndon was a newshound, so that the floor was also strewn with pages of broadsheets. To add to the eccentricity of the office, Lincoln filed papers in his stovepipe hat, a habit he had picked up during his time as a postmaster-surveyor in New Salem. He made frequent use of the sofa, which was too small for his long body, so that his upper body would lie on it and the lower would be extended over a number of chairs. Thus he would lie under heaps of newspapers.

  The partners got along, but Mary could not tolerate Herndon and never had him in the house. She learned that he had described her as a serpent, and though he claimed he had intended it as a reference to her gracefulness, she never forgave him. He would ultimately, in his famous biography, give her other and more concrete reasons for dislike.

  Though Mary’s distant cousin John Hardin tried again to get the nomination for the Seventh Congressional District in 1846, Lincoln lobbied hard as he moved around the state on circuit, and managed to outmaneuver the man. It was the year his second son, Edward, was born, and having been elected, Lincoln suddenly confessed that the honor did not please him as much as he had expected. He was perhaps daunted by balancing the interests of his sons, his law practice, and his party. But Mary was delighted. She intended to go with him to Washington for the next congressional session in 1847.

  When the family set out for
the national capital in the fall of 1847, they intended to travel by way of Kentucky to visit Mary’s beloved father and not-so-cherished stepmother, Betsey Todd. Betsey had never met Mary’s husband or children. It was a testing journey for the couple, the thirty-eight-year-old congressman, his twenty-six-year-old wife, their four-year-old son, Robert, and infant Eddie already beginning to suffer from the onset of tuberculosis. They took the stagecoach to Alton on the Mississippi, then one steamer down to Cairo, another up the Ohio to Carrollton, a third down the Kentucky River to Frankfort, and then went on by train into Lexington. This part of the journey occupied ten fretful days. When the visit home was over, they went on by stage, steamer, and rail into the Shenandoah Valley and so to Washington.

  Washington was an imperfect capital, its great civic buildings only partially completed, its roads dusty in summer and mired in winter, its environment malarial, its water supply dangerous to health, and its accommodations overpriced. Dickens had recently satirized the capital as “a small piece of country which has taken to drinking, and has quite lost itself.” He complained of its “spacious avenues that begin in nothing and lead nowhere. . . .”

  Many legislators lived in “messes,” corps of like-minded congressmen and senators, in such hotels as Brown’s or in boardinghouses. Some of the wealthier were able to rent houses. The humble Lincolns took a room in Mrs. Sprigg’s boardinghouse, across from the Capitol, on the site of what is now the Library of Congress. Mrs. Sprigg’s place was a favorite haunt of Whig congressmen of antislavery stripe. Only a minority of wives accompanied their husbands to Washington for the congressional sessions, and they were often the wives of powerful plantation owners. Mary was the only wife among the ten legislators Mrs. Sprigg accommodated in her house at that time. A number of the guests thought that both Mary and Abe indulged Robert too much, and they were disturbed by Eddie’s crying. And although Mary Todd would enjoy shopping in Washington, in the boutiques and bookshops of Pennsylvania Avenue, and visiting the sights, such as the unfinished Washington Memorial and the Museum of the Patent Office, the bitter Washington winter kept her increasingly indoors and restive. The children caught illnesses. The present day Ellipse, behind the Capitol, was then a putrid and infectious swamp.

  After Lincoln’s session Mary went back to stay at her father’s house in Lexington. She was not above jovially threatening that if Abraham did not come to see her there soon, she might take up again with Mr. Webb, her old suitor. In an age of foreshortened lives, she did contemplate the possibility of future husbands, and told her half sister Emilie that next time she wanted one rich enough to take her to Europe. She returned to Washington for the second session of Abraham’s term and then, as Lincoln exerted his merely moderate degree of influence in Washington, went back to Springfield and stayed at the Globe with her two sons, because their house was still rented out.

  Abraham himself liked the boardinghouse and Washington. He played bowls in the lane behind Mrs. Sprigg’s and in the bowling alley south of the Capitol. He took his wife to the Olympian Theatre and Caruso’s Saloon, with its so-called Ethiopian serenaders, who performed comedy and minstrel songs in blackface. The Lincolns also attended events at the White House (the President’s House, as it was then more commonly called). They were of course present for President Polk’s New Year’s reception for 1848. By then Lincoln and other Whigs were in polite but passionate opposition to Polk over what they saw as the American intrusion into Mexican territory, and the cancellation of internal improvement projects.

  In these matters, as in all his political beliefs, Lincoln followed a coherent political philosophy, much of it influenced by the very Calvinism he had already rejected. He believed, as he said, in the “Doctrine of Necessity”—that is, “that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.” In political terms this meant that he believed “all human actions were caused by motives, and at the bottom of motives were self.” This fatalism explained to his satisfaction why Southern advocates of slavery were no better or worse than Northerners—slavery was upheld by the motives of self inherent in the Southern system, and thus Southern interests tried to expand its reign to new territories. The North’s desire for tariffs was similarly driven. The difference was of course one of morality—tariffs would be a morally laudable outcome of the doctrine of necessity; slavery was not.

  His own escape from subsistence farming was based on this doctrine of necessity, and as he had wished to be free, so too must the slaves. “I used to be a slave,” he had said in an early speech, and recognizing a friend from Offut’s flatboat in the crowd, continued, “There is my old friend John Rowan. He used to be a slave, but he has made himself free, and I used to be a slave, and now I am so free that they let me practice law.”

  Democrats such as Douglas saw wage labor as a form of slavery that created a noxious dependency between the worker and the employer. Increasingly, throughout the next decade and a half, Democrats would point to the conditions of Northern industrial, railroad, and navigation canal workers as far more severe than those under the more beneficent institutions of slavery. In slavery the plantation owner had an investment in the individual slave and thus had a motive to treat him or her well. Capital could use up and kill the laborer without any compunction.

  Lincoln, however, saw wage labor as a mere way station on the ascent to the status and decent affluence that characterized his own life. There was no need for anyone to remain a wage-laborer indefinitely. Necessity would drive a man through enlightened self-interest to become an employer himself. Like many a man who had remade himself, he falsely considered that any laborer had the same gift thus to transform himself, to become a merchant or a lawyer or at least an employer of other labor. He was sometimes impatient when relatives were too feckless to shake themselves free of their rustic helplessness. For example, his stepbrother John D. Johnston wrote to him for a loan of eighty dollars to cover various cash debts he’d incurred. Lincoln accused Johnston of being “lazy . . . what I propose is, that you shall go to work, ‘tooth and nails’ for somebody who will give you money for it.” A man who worked for wages this year could afford in the next to “work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him!” As an incentive, however, Lincoln did offer to match Johnston dollar for dollar.

  There was one answer to the poverty of the cities, but it was one the Southern and Northern Democrats would not vote for—a homestead act that would open up allotments in the new territories to free occupation by the slum dwellers and ill-paid artisans of the cities, and to the poor farmers of the East. These new territories would be run, according to the Whig ideal, not on the basis of the dark drudgery of Lincoln’s boyhood but on that of the newest agricultural knowledge, disseminated by agricultural colleges in their midst. Yet every time such measures would be proposed, Southern interests voted them down, for fear that the new territories would become hotbeds of abolition, and that free land would undermine land values.

  Yet despite his moral contempt for slavery and its advocates, Lincoln’s impatience with abolitionists still prevailed. He considered them to have cost Henry Clay the presidency in 1844 by frightening people with all their of talk of imminent crisis and black-white equality. In fact Lincoln had sometimes acted as counsel for slave owners, such as the Kentuckian Robert Matson, in pursuit of their property rights. In 1843 Matson had purchased a farm in Illinois and brought a group of slaves over the Ohio River for planting and harvest. They included the slave wife and children of Matson’s black overseer, Bryant, who was a freedman. When Matson’s common-law wife had an argument with the slave wife, Jane, Matson threatened to send her and her children down South for resale to a cotton plantation. The Bryants sought the help of two abolitionists to fund a challenge, but Matson hired Lincoln, who argued that Matson had clearly stated his intention to limit the service of Jane and her children in Illinois to seasonal labor only, under the Illinois transit laws. The Illinois Supreme
Court found that Jane Bryant had been in Illinois for a continuous two years and declared her free.

  Since the Constitution gave slavery legal sanction, only a constitutional amendment could alter it, and this could be achieved only with the consent of the South, which obviously would not be forthcoming. The fortunate reality, thought Lincoln, was that the institution was doomed—it would, like the subsistence farming of his childhood, be rendered obsolete. Like Henry Clay, Lincoln and many of the Whigs with whom he played bowls in the back alley believed that the future and just liberation of the slaves would be a prelude to colonizing them back to Liberia or to Central America.

  But through the war against Mexico, the South and its friends were attempting to ward off the withering of their institution by expanding it into new territories. As a congressman Lincoln rose in the House to offer some “spot resolutions” attacking President Polk, but before he was allowed to go to the rostrum, Mexico City had been captured by the United States. Lincoln’s resolutions attacking the war were depicted as disloyalty to the victorious army, and at Democratic rallies Abe was lambasted as “spotty” Lincoln. By late 1848 Lincoln was caught in a quandary by his opposition to the war. The Whigs wanted their candidate to be a war hero—Zachary Taylor, with whom Lincoln had once campaigned in the Black Hawk War. No one was particularly delighted with Taylor, but his party could see that he was eminently electable, despite the problem for the New England vote that he was a slaveholder.

  Horace Greeley of the New-York Tribune noticed Lincoln’s term in Congress to the extent of saying that he was a strong but practical enemy of slavery. Toward the end of the Thirtieth Congress, in January 1849, Lincoln announced that he had a proposal for abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. It involved compensation of the district’s slave owners for the “full value” of their property. It went nowhere.