Abraham Lincoln

by Thomas Keneally

  Indeed, he had not been a particularly impressive congressman, and was not satisfied with his own performance. But then, it was hard work for a one-term congressman. Members had no offices and worked at their cramped desks like so many school-children. Lincoln’s desk was, of course, at the back of the chamber. He sought solace from his insignificant presence in the chamber by spending much time in the Congressional Library, which was then located within the Capitol itself. He was able to take books home to Mrs. Sprigg’s, even books from the founding collection of the library—Jefferson’s personal library.

  At the end of his term, Lincoln did not return home at once but went on the campaign trail, campaigning for Zachary Taylor. He even confessed—blasphemy in his eyes—that Henry Clay would have had no hope as the Whig candidate. He went to the Whig National Convention in Philadelphia, though he was not a delegate, and he worked at Whig national headquarters. It was obvious to some that he hoped for an appointment out of all this—he had sniffed glory, had not possessed it, but did not yet wish to leave the field. He hoped to have an Illinois ally, a relative of Mary’s, appointed commissioner of the General Land Office, but when he was told that his friend had proved unappointable, he tried for the post himself. This fact did not much improve his relationship with the Edwardses back in Springfield. Yet, Zachary Taylor having been elected president, he was generally disappointed that “not one recommended by me has yet been appointed to anything, little or big, except a few who had no opposition.” In the late spring of 1849, Mary herself took up Lincoln’s cause by writing to President Taylor, signing her letters in his name. But Lincoln lost the contest, and was offered instead the secretaryship and ultimately the governorship of Oregon Territory. As one friend said, “Mary would not consent to go out there.” Lincoln was not enthusiastic either. Should the Lincolns make the trip by sea, the most feasible way, Eddie’s health might well be further imperiled by the journey: Two children of the incumbent governor had died on the journey around Cape Horn.

  The Whig nominee to succeed Lincoln in the seat in Congress, Stephen Logan, Mary’s cousin, would be defeated by the Democrats. Some blamed the defeat not on Logan’s personal unpopularity but on Lincoln’s passionate opposition to the successfully concluded war against Mexico.

  Returning to Springfield, Lincoln told Billy Herndon that he was “politically dead.” Without politics he had time for family and reading. “I am reading books again, The Iliad and Odyssey. You ought to read it. He has a grip and knows how to tell a story.”

  6

  IT WAS JUST AS WELL that Lincoln had time for the domestic sphere, because on February 1, 1850, after fifty-two days of a pitiable respiratory struggle, Eddie died. Child deaths were common enough for books of etiquette to advise Christian mothers how to behave when they lost their children. The Mother’s Assistant described a bad mother as saying, “I cannot lose my child, I cannot. She is so bright and promising,” whereas a good mother “leaned on the Almighty and meekly bowed her head to earthly things.”

  The latter advice was untenable for Mary Todd. She was demented by grief, even though the new pastor of the First Presbyterian Church gave her such comfort that she changed her allegiance to its brand of Presbyterianism. In comforting each other, the Lincolns begot another child, who was born the following December. The boy, named William, proved to be an engaging and precocious child.

  Lincoln knew that his father, Tom, had been ill in 1849—“attacken with a lesion of the Heart” according to Lincoln’s stepbrother, John D. Johnston. When Thomas became fatally ill in the winter of 1850-51, Johnston again notified Abraham, who decided not to leave his wife, still ill from the birth of William, to visit his dying father. “If we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant,” Lincoln told Johnston. “At all events tell him to remember to call upon, and confide in, our great, and good, and merciful Maker.” Thomas Lincoln died in January 1851, and Abraham did not attend the funeral or ever raise a monument over his father’s grave.

  In the vacuum left by Lincoln’s failed political hopes, the law practice of Lincoln and Herndon flourished in the first half of the 1850s, and so, in its way, did the Lincoln family. Another boy, Thomas, was born in 1853, a fetching and affectionate child with a speech impediment, for whom Lincoln had a special weakness, nicknaming him “Tad” (tadpole). Tad was a prankster, and his tendency to mischief was enhanced by his father’s leniency toward him and Willie. Lincoln could often be seen in the streets, towing Willie and Tad along in a little cart. Many Springfielders would consider them brats. Their father often took them to his law office, and while he spoke to clients, the two small boys “clamored over his legs, patted his cheeks, pulled his nose, and poked their fingers in his eyes, without causing reprimand or even notice.” Herndon complained that the boys “would tear up the office, scatter the books, smash up pens, spill the ink and piss all over the floor. I have felt many, many a time that I wanted to wring their little necks.” Herndon believed that “had they shit in Lincoln’s hat and rubbed it on his boots, he would have laughed and thought it smart.”

  Mary was as ever more volatile with her boys, and she swung between indulgence and severity, sometimes spanking them fiercely and then becoming overwhelmed with guilt. Her moods might have accounted for their frequent presence in Lincoln’s office when he was not on circuit.

  Those days Lincoln found that he could reach most of the county seats in the Eighth Circuit by rail. And he was amused but delighted to find himself a mentor to younger lawyers, such as the Maine aristocrat Leonard Swett, who would become a Lincoln devotee and work for his election as president. Since his early days as a lawyer, Lincoln had grown to be more interested in reconciliation than in litigation. He had become, too, an expert on railroad matters, and represented the Illinois Central in such disputes as whether county authorities could tax a railroad. He similarly served the Tonica and Petersburg Railroad, the Alton & Sangamon, and the Ohio and Mississippi.

  One particularly significant case of Lincoln’s involved the Rock Island Railroad, which had built a rail bridge across the Mississippi into the new state of Iowa. In May 1856 a steamboat named the Effie Afton, struggling against eddies around the bridge pylons, crashed against one and caught fire. The owners sued the Rock Island Railroad. Lincoln saw this case as a struggle between East-West railroad transportation and the primacy of the North-South Mississippi, the preferred route of the Southern supremacists. Despite its early favors to him, the Mississippi was Slavery Way, whereas the East-West railways were Liberation Boulevard. Lincoln’s defense of the railroad company in the Illinois Supreme Court was a triumph. He had done extensive groundwork—measuring distances around the bridge, discovering that one of the Effie Afton’s engines had been malfunctioning, and that the captain knew it had been before he tried to take it under the bridge. The jury was hung, and there would be appeals for many years, reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. But the bridge had survived, and Lincoln’s reputation, in Illinois at least, was enhanced.

  He also built up an expertise in patent cases, particularly those having to do with the flood of steam-powered agricultural machinery designs appearing on the market. (These too held out a promise of ending the human drudgery that had characterized his childhood.) In a case over the renowned McCormack Virginia Reaper, Lincoln was recruited to defend another inventor, John H. Manny, an Illinois man, against McCormack’s accusation of patent infringement. The defense Lincoln and his colleague would raise was that McCormack was using an infringement suit to scare off the inventiveness and industry of others. The case moved on to Cincinnati, however, and a new lawyer, the stocky, pugnacious Edwin M. Stanton, joined the team. Stanton was already such a legal star that he wondered why they had bothered to bring in a “long-armed Ape” from Illinois. (He had, of course, no idea that he would one day serve very happily in the supposed simian’s cabinet.) Lincoln had the gift of humility—it was one of the reasons he was beloved—and as best he could he sat and l
earned from Stanton, but was hurt by his daily contempt and hubris.

  In the winter of 1854, there occurred in the Senate an event that would in the end propel Lincoln to national prominence. In the meantime it brought most luster to Stephen Douglas, by now the Little King of Illinois. Unlike Lincoln, Douglas had been no one-term Congressman. He had by now served three terms as a U.S. representative and had been a U.S. senator from Illinois since 1847. As one of the Democratic Party’s most notable ideologues, he was sick of all the time the question of slavery was taking up in Congress, and the passions it unleashed. He proposed a new Nebraska Bill, designed to divide the vastness of Nebraska into two new territories, Nebraska and Kansas. Within them the question of whether they would be slave or free would be decided by popular vote—a process Douglas called “popular sovereignty.” The Missouri Compromise, which had until then banned slavery beyond the latitude of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes, was thus voided.

  Lincoln was simply one politician among many who were appalled when this bill became the Kansas-Nebraska Act a few months later. Douglas’s initiative brought Lincoln back to passionate participation in politics, since it violated a number of his profoundly held principles. He wanted the West to be a home for free white people. It would not be so if it became slave states. “Slave states are places for poor white people to remove from; not to remove to.”

  He achieved prominence in the opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska “popular sovereignty” act with a speech delivered by torchlight in Peoria in the fall of 1854. “Near eighty years ago,” he said, “we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a ‘sacred right of self-government.’ ” On a pragmatic level he pointed out that the self-interest of Northern laborers and settlers was opposed to the flooding of the market by Southerners, who could bring their slave labor north for indefinite periods and take employment away from whites.

  The Peoria speech helped Lincoln again achieve the Whig nomination for a seat in the state legislature, but when elected he resigned the seat so that he could contest the nomination for the U.S. Senate, where he hoped to take a national part in the great fight against the extension of slavery inherent in the Kansas-Nebraska issue. Illinois senators were at that stage elected indirectly by the members of the state house. Young, elegant Swett; the hefty Judge Davis, whom Lincoln knew from his life on the circuit; Ward Hill Lamon, who would one day guard Lincoln’s life with his own; Stephen T. Logan, his former law partner—all converged on Springfield to drum up support for Lincoln among the legislators.

  While Lincoln waited in his law office on February 8, 1855, Mary watched the balloting for the Senate seat from the gallery of the state legislature. Lincoln won the first ballot but was six votes short of victory. However, in negotiations, anti-Nebraska Democrats who had joined with anti-Nebraska Whigs to oppose Douglas, declared that they would never vote for Lincoln. Their support looked as if it would go to a Democrat, so Lincoln sent word from his office that he would withdraw and give his support to his fellow Whig Lyman Trumbull, an electable, urbane Yankee. The Lincoln team was devastated, and Mary would never forgive Trumbull or his wife, her former friend. Lincoln’s loss brought on a sharp case of his “hypo.” He did measure his own modest status against that of Douglas, triumphant in Washington, dominant in national affairs. And though Trumbull sought a great deal of help and advice from Lincoln, it was not enough to console Lincoln or to make Mary Lincoln forgive him.

  The slavery issue had split the Whigs asunder, many Southern Whigs being pro-Nebraska—that is, pro-popular sovereignty. The question was whether Whigs should now join the free-soil, antislavery coalition called the Republican Party. But the Republican Party did not seem as strong as the American Party—the party of the Know-Nothings—anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, and anti-immigrant in general, and Lincoln could not contemplate joining forces with Know-Nothing abolitionists.

  I do not perceive how any one professing to be sensitive to the wrongs of the negroes, can join in a league to degrade a class of white men. Our progress into degeneracy appears to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “All men are created equal.” We now practically read it “All men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, “All men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

  Meanwhile, proslavery invaders from Missouri rampaged into Kansas, attacking Free-Soilers. Ultimately they would attack and set fire to the free-soil capital of Lawrence, Kansas. But the Free-Soilers had their avatars of vengeance too. John Brown, the abolitionist zealot, went to Kansas with wagonloads of armaments to bring down God’s vengeance on slavery.

  Even as the Whigs split apart over the Kansas-Nebraska issue, so too did the Know-Nothings. Lincoln still remained a loyal Illinois Whig, and as such attended a convention at Bloomington, Illinois, in the spring of 1856, whose purpose was to make a coalition of all the anti-Nebraska forces in Illinois. This coalition found itself in accord with other such groupings throughout the North who called themselves Republicans. It seemed apparent to Lincoln that to participate in the broad fight of anti-Nebraska, of free-soil, one must be a member of the new organization. Lincoln thus became a Republican, and brought many other Illinois Whigs, including Billy Herndon and Stephen Logan, with him.

  He gave the last speech at that Bloomington convention, and everyone said it was electrifying. Only some of its sentiments survive: “He was here ready to fuse with anyone who would unite with him to oppose the slave power.”

  The Republicans would indeed launch a national ticket in 1856. The Illinois Republican convention in Bloomington proposed Lincoln as a vice presidential candidate. The presidential nominee was John Charles Frémont, soldier, explorer, and former Democrat. Lincoln stayed home from the national convention in Philadelphia in June, but discovered that he received as many as 110 votes as vice presidential candidate (not nearly enough for the nomination, which went to William Dayton of New Jersey). Lincoln was secretly delighted at garnering so many delegates at the national level, though he joked, “There is a great man named Lincoln in Massachusetts, and he must be the one for whom the votes were cast.”

  Mary, a political woman and thus an oddity for her age, had no doubts that her husband was at last coming into his political inheritance. She nagged him about it, said Herndon, “like a toothache.” “Nobody knows me,” Lincoln would habitually assure her. But fierce Mary always responded, “They soon will.”

  Lincoln stumped around the state in support of Frémont, even traveling into Michigan for the purpose. He was a man for whom oratory was somewhere between an art form, a sport, and a drug. But the anti-Democrat vote was split between the Know-Nothing candidate, Millard Fillmore, whom Mary supported, and Frémont.

  About the elderly Democratic candidate, James Buchanan, there hung an air of fatherly calm, and people trusted him to cool down the passions of the era. Their hopes would prove illusory, but Buchanan won the presidency, his very lack of fiery rhetoric and his apparently appeasing air being his chief political assets. Thinking about the reason for the Republicans’ defeat, Lincoln believed it was that people thought Republicans were in favor of amalgamating the black and white races. He fiercely defended himself and fellow Republicans from any such charge.

  It was that winter of political unease, after the high promise of his 110 vice presidential votes in the autumn, which caused him, in the spirit of the “hypo,” again to compare himself unfavorably with Stephen A. Douglas. He remembered when they had first met in Vandalia twenty-two years before. They had both been ambitious, but, “with me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the n
ation; and is not unknown, even in foreign lands.”

  He hungered to have influence on a national level. His best hope to redress this imbalance between himself and the Little Giant would come in opposing Douglas for the U.S. Senate in 1858. He had won Mary from Douglas long ago. Now he wanted to take the Senate podium away from him.

  7

  TWO DAYS AFTER Buchanan was inaugurated in 1857, another blow against freedom was struck by the Supreme Court. Dred Scott was a middle-aged slave whose owner had taken him into the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase. After eight years in the Illinois and Wisconsin Territories, and the death of his master, he brought a lawsuit on the basis that his long residence on free soil made him a free man. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Roger Taney, was determined to have none of that. Seven of the nine justices rejected Scott’s suit, on the grounds that blacks could never be considered citizens under the Constitution, and that the federal government had no power to affect the status or the movement of black property. The Declaration of Independence did not cover blacks, who were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

  Taney and Buchanan both believed that this would put an end to the slavery debate, but even Democrats like Stephen Douglas were appalled by the decision, since it went so much further than the idea of popular sovereignty as to make the latter—the idea that people of a state could vote to accept or refuse slavery—irrelevant. No territorial legislature could decide to exclude slavery! Douglas was horrified when Buchanan decided to introduce Kansas into the Union as a slave state, and Lincoln was delighted to see the Democrats split between supporters of Douglas and supporters of Buchanan.