This was Lincoln’s first personal experience with the bloodlust of combat. Unlike many other veterans of Indian wars who justified the wanton destruction of enemy property and life as a reasonable response to the uncivilized action of a savage enemy, Lincoln emerged from the Black Hawk War seemingly committed both to the rules of war and to the sanctity of civilian life. In the face of a murderous enemy, an enemy seemingly inferior in both race and culture, Lincoln was highly unusual in upholding such a scrupulous moral standard. He was unlikely to forget what he saw during the Black Hawk War, or the conclusions he drew about the rights of civilians during wartime.
Immediately after returning to New Salem in 1832, at the age of only twenty-three, he ran for the State House of Representatives. At six foot four, in mismatched clothes too short in both the legs and the sleeves, his outfit topped off with an old straw hat that did nothing to flatter his sunburned face, Lincoln had neither pretension nor, as he put it, “wealthy or popular relatives or friends to recommend me.” But thanks to his militia service he “was acquainted with everybody,” had a good name in the county, and had friends to spare. He came in eighth in that race, but his simple speaking style and support for the Whig principles of a national bank, internal improvements, and a high protective tariff won him admirers. He told audiences that “if elected I shall be thankful; if not it will be all the same,” and he clearly meant it. Failure did nothing to dampen his ardor for office. When he ran again for the statehouse in 1834, on a platform that reflected Henry Clay’s principles, he won, and in 1836 he was not only reelected but chosen minority-party leader. Lincoln moved to the new capital of the state, Springfield, where he trained as a lawyer.12
Springfield was good to Abraham Lincoln. He made an advantageous marriage in 1842 to Mary Todd, a staunch Whig partisan who was the daughter of a prominent Kentucky Whig. She was described by her sister as “the most ambitious woman I ever knew.”13 The union brought Lincoln social stature and much-needed funds: Mary’s father, Robert Todd, visited the couple not long after their marriage and was so taken by his new son-in-law that he promised them a generous yearly stipend. Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, along with a new baby named after their benefactor, applied some of the funds to the purchase of a modest one-story, five-room wooden-frame structure on the corner of Eighth and Jackson in downtown Springfield. The fifteen-hundred-dollar purchase price also bought them several outbuildings and an eighth of an acre of land. The house wasn’t in the best neighborhood, but it was only four blocks from the courthouse. It was their first real home.
Both Abraham and his wife recognized that he had married up. Mary was a woman who “loved to put on Style,” and while she had absolute faith in her husband’s political future, she was less convinced that he knew what he was doing in some other aspects of life. She recognized, well before her backwoods husband did, that success in Springfield required a certain level of polish and decorum. Springfield wasn’t New York, of course, nor was it Mary’s own hometown of Lexington, but the professional class of Springfield had pretensions to refinement, and although Lincoln was oblivious to those standards, Mary was not. She set to work upgrading Lincoln’s wardrobe in an attempt to make him “look like somebody”—lengthening his pants, coordinating his outfits, and insisting that he purchase a new suit of “superior black cloth,” the most expensive purchase of the Lincolns’ first year of marriage.14
She started tutoring him in etiquette, demonstrating how to receive guests at dinner and how to interact with servants, begging him please not to come to dinner in his shirtsleeves. Some members of her family thought she had gone too far. One told her, “If I had a husband with a mind such as yours has, I would not care what he did.” But Mary persisted, if only with limited success. As long as Mary dressed him, he looked fine, but if left to his own devices, Lincoln was sure to mismatch his clothes or use the wrong fork at dinner. “I do not think he knew pink from blue when I married him,” she told her sister.15
Lincoln took on a new law partner, William “Billy” Herndon, and the two opened an office in the Tinsley Building, where the U.S. District Court of Illinois met, not far from the capitol. With modest fees of ten to twenty-five dollars per client and a reputation for honesty and hard work, the law firm flourished. Although Lincoln had almost more work than he could handle, his success as a lawyer allowed him to indulge in his passion for politics. Throwing himself into the coming presidential election, he organized a public meeting in Springfield to refute the charge that Whigs were hostile to foreigners or Catholics.16 He also spoke in support of the Whig platform at the state convention in June 1844.
The young Whig volunteered to campaign for Clay across Illinois and into neighboring Indiana, and not incidentally build his own political base in the process. Lincoln was a brilliant storyteller, a natural in debates. He loved public speaking, and audiences loved him, something else he had in common with his hero. In 1844 he was already gaining a reputation as “the best stump speaker in the state.” Clay’s positions were entirely Lincoln’s own: credit, tariffs, internal improvements. Like Clay, he generally avoided the subject of Texas, but at one appearance in Springfield he declared annexation of Texas “inexpedient” and supported Clay’s position opposing it.17
As he rode from town to town young Abraham Lincoln undoubtedly felt baffled by the appeal of Polk’s message among so many of his neighbors. He himself was indifferent about the possibility of annexing Texas. “I never was much interested in the Texas question,” he admitted the following year. “I could never very clearly see how the annexation would augment the evil of slavery. Slaves would be taken there in about equal numbers, with or without annexation.”18 A pragmatist who believed that what a man needed to do in order to get ahead was settle down, work hard where he was, and develop the resources at his disposal, Lincoln couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm for expansionism. He had learned from watching his unlucky father and shiftless stepbrother, who were constantly moving from place to place in search of better land, that success did not lie just beyond the frontier.
To Lincoln’s mind, Manifest Destiny was a smoke screen designed to obscure the superiority of the Whig platform, and Polk’s campaign themes were merely fodder to solidify the Democratic base. The United States would naturally expand its boundaries over time, no doubt, due to the superiority of its social and economic systems. But Lincoln understood the American dream as economic: technological development, access to credit, the growth of markets. Those, he determined, would be the elements of his message when he finally got to campaign for himself. And they would be his issues as a U.S. congressman.
The Whigs were a decided minority in Illinois in the early 1840s, but there were enough of them around the capital that redistricting in 1843 created a safe congressional seat for the party. Lincoln openly coveted it, and wrote to a friend, “Now if you should hear any one say that Lincoln don’t want to go to Congress, I wish you, as a personal friend of mind, would tell him you have reason to believe he is mistaken. The truth is I would like to go very much.”19 To run, though, he would have to maneuver around a distinct obstacle.
The formidable John J. Hardin was a year younger and had a far loftier pedigree. Lincoln was, by his own description, “a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy” when he arrived in Illinois. Untutored, self-made, and a backwoods campaigner, Lincoln was the original hick, never having traveled east of Kentucky, never even having had the leisure to take a vacation. Hardin was a southern gentleman. He was the stepnephew of Henry Clay, and son and heir of Martin Hardin, U.S. senator from Kentucky, member of the Kentucky Supreme Court, and decorated veteran of the War of 1812.20
He was also, notably, the namesake of his grandfather John Hardin, a Revolutionary War patriot who became famous for his military exploits against Native Americans and the British. The original John Hardin was a man of “great firmness of character, and a ready self-devotion to dangerous enterprises when … country called.” He was also an expert marksman,
“famous for the rapidity and accuracy of his shots.” When he first heard the call for troops to “resist” Great Britain, he began recruiting. He joined Daniel Morgan’s Rifle Corps with the rank of lieutenant and became a colonel in General Horatio Gates’s campaign against General John Burgoyne’s British troops. Gates offered him a public thanks for his “distinguished services” at the Battle of Saratoga.21
But the original John Hardin’s prowess as a Revolutionary War soldier was far outstripped by his career as an Indian killer. As a lieutenant colonel in the Kentucky militia and a colonel in the Northwest Indian War in the Ohio Territory, Hardin was involved in almost every action against Indians in the region from 1786 to 1791. He was shot in the groin by an Indian at age twenty, and carried both the bullet and thoughts of vengeance with him for the rest of his life. He led a mistaken attack against a friendly tribe, the Piankeshaws, destroying a village near Vincennes, Indiana, in 1786. He brought home twelve scalps from an attack on a Shawnee village in 1789. In a campaign against the Miami in the fall of 1790, Hardin led 180 men into a Miami trap that resulted in 22 American deaths. In response, Hardin’s men burned all the Miami villages near the forks of Indiana’s Maumee River: 300 houses and 20,000 bushels of corn in total. The campaign was a failure, but this persuaded neither Hardin nor the U.S. Army to change tactics. The following year Hardin burned a Kickapoo village along with its cornfield and gardens at the mouth of Big Pine Creek in southern Illinois. It was widely said that “he commanded both the fear and the hatred of the Indians.”22
So perhaps it is not entirely surprising that in April 1792, while he was traveling under President George Washington’s orders to negotiate a peace treaty with the Shawnee, tribal members murdered him and his slave while they slept. He was only thirty-eight when he died. Before the news made it back to Washington, Kentucky entered the Union as the fifteenth state and the first state west of the Appalachians. John Hardin was posthumously named general of the First Brigade of the Kentucky Militia, and Kentucky, Ohio, and Illinois all named counties in the hero’s honor.23
Abraham Lincoln knew the Hardin name well. Not only was Mary Todd third cousin to young John J. Hardin, but he himself had been born in one of the counties named after the famed Indian killer: Hardin County, Kentucky. Coincidentally, Lincoln was also named after an immigrant from Virginia to frontier Kentucky who was killed by Indians, “not in battle, but by stealth,” as Lincoln later put it.24
Like his grandfather, John J. Hardin turned heads. Tall, handsome, and elegantly dressed, he walked with a military swagger and cut an “attractive, manly figure.” He had a “winning and amiable character” and, although “somewhat impulsive,” was widely popular among men and women. And he made the most of his advantages. He was a successful lawyer and army officer who upheld the family tradition by burning an Indian village to the ground in the Black Hawk War. He was elected brigadier general of the state militia in 1840. Although he lost an eye in a hunting accident not long afterward, he continued to impress and intimidate. College educated, rich, and well married, as patrician as you could get in the backwater state of Illinois, General Hardin was a natural at politics.25
Lincoln and Hardin had arrived in Illinois at the same time, both eager for advancement. The two got to know each other well while serving in the Illinois House of Representatives. The older man admired the younger and cultivated his friendship, and Hardin seemed happy to include Lincoln in his more elevated social circle. Before courting Mary Todd, Lincoln “never got on well with women” and was “curiously shy, ill at ease, and even perplexed in their presence.” But the debonair Hardin provided a model of how to flirt and win women’s favor. The two men jointly signed a letter in 1839 to one woman promising “as a gallant knight to give you the privilege of hanging up on a peg in my closet whenever it may seem convenient.” Hardin and Lincoln may have been competitors for her favor as well as for political advancement, but the competition was a friendly one. Lincoln declared that Hardin was “more than his father” to him. Hardin repaid him in 1842 by stopping Lincoln’s one and only duel before anyone was injured.26
Hardin, Lincoln, and a third state senator named Edward Baker, a large and easygoing British-born lawyer and good friend of Lincoln’s who also served in the Black Hawk War, were the leading young Whigs in the heavily Democratic state. Once the young men found a route to Congress open to them, all three began to jockey for position. Hardin, the best known of the three thanks to his name and military exploits, won election to a short term in Congress (1843–44) after redistricting took place. Baker received the nomination the following year. As for Lincoln, he won the “honor” of serving as delegate to the nominating convention, which left him, as he wryly wrote a friend, “fixed a good deal like a fellow who is made a groomsman to a man that has cut him out and is marrying his own dear ‘gal.’ ”27
Brigadier General John J. Hardin, as he appeared around 1840. J. G. Nicolay and John Hay, “Lincoln in Congress and at the Bar,” The Century: A Popular Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Feb. 1887): 517. (photo credit 3.1)
To ensure that he would not again be jilted at the altar of Congress, he turned to Baker and Hardin, asking that they agree to a rotating arrangement in which each would get a turn. Baker was game, and Lincoln believed Hardin understood the agreement as well. In 1844 Lincoln couldn’t be sure what the future would bring, but he watched the surge of support for Polk with dismay. He knew that his fate and the fate of Henry Clay were linked. As one Illinois Whig wrote that fall, nothing less than “the nation’s glory or shame—the destiny of an empire” was at stake. “Henry Clay shall be the Joshua of our Army … and lead his chosen people to the chosen land” of peace and prosperity. It was imperative that Henry Clay win the election.28 Polk’s supporters weren’t leaving anything to chance in their effort to prevent that from happening. The Democratic Party had a domestic agenda of its own, focusing on low taxes, a small federal government, and states that protected the interests of their residents. But it wasn’t much, and Polk acknowledged its limitations when he allowed supporters in the key manufacturing states of New York and Pennsylvania to undercut the Whigs with the promise that if elected, President Polk would support a protective tariff to help industry.
But all that was secondary to foreign policy. Democrats made territorial expansion their signature issue, proclaiming the dawn of a “Young America” that would surpass the old and enervated nations of Europe in strength and vitality, spread across the continent, and become the great empire of the future. They contrasted the Whigs, who, “advocating centralization, must wish & have ever wished to narrow our territory,” with their own party, which, thanks to a wise faith in “State’s Rights, know no limit to the possible extent of the Federal Union.”29 They would bring Texas into the Union, but wagered that they could hold the North with a promise to take the entire Oregon Country, including British Columbia, even at the risk of war with Britain.
It was a smart bet. After the Senate’s rejection of the annexation treaty in June, the national clamor for Texas became almost deafening. “Poke & Texas, that’s the thing,” concluded one demoralized Mississippi Whig, “it goes like wild-fire with the folks as kant rede, nor don’t git no papers.” Polk recognized what Clay and Lincoln did not: that Manifest Destiny was everything in 1844. One Illinois Democrat, who admitted that he “dreaded the annexation of Texas” because it “would increase the slave territory” of the country, explained his support for Polk, saying that “a glance at the map was enough to convince one that sooner or later the United States must extend to the Rio Grande.” Manifest Destiny made annexation appear inevitable—“only a question of time”—and the Democratic platform look like simple common sense. Territorial expansion had become the “great and new element which has entered in to this momentous contest, and which by its superior importance, is enough of itself, to determine the vote of every freeman.”30
This election, Polk argued, was really about whether the country would grow or stand sti
ll, reach for its future or protect its past. How did America see itself, and what was it willing to risk? Was the nation with God and Manifest Destiny, or would this chosen people simply tend to their garden? Did not Americans owe it to less enlightened nations to guide them to enlightenment? Polk was ambitious for his country, and he was not averse to a call to arms. So it was natural that his eye wandered from Texas to Mexico.
The United States of Mexico in 1847. J. Disturnell, New York. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. (photo credit 3.2)
Mexico was certainly vulnerable. The nation won its independence from Spain just a generation after the United States threw off its own European oppressor, but the subsequent development of the neighboring republics differed strikingly. In 1800 the two nations boasted similar populations of around five million people. But the United States, politically stable and economically vibrant, expanded in both population and size, while Mexico’s population stagnated. Mexico emerged from its brutal war for independence a shell of its colonial self. Six hundred thousand people died between 1800 and the end of the revolution in 1820, most from starvation and disease. Agriculture and industry were decimated, and mining output decreased by more than half. In 1845 Mexico’s per capita income was less than half of what it had been in 1800, and its population of seven million was only a third of that of the United States.31
A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico Page 8