Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  Some members of the General Assembly thought the capital “the dullest, dreariest place,” and the governor complained that “there is no young ladies in Vandalia.”44 The sleepy hamlet, which one of its founders called “a most dull and miserable village” when the General Assembly was not in session, came to life when the legislators arrived.45 On the opening day of the 1834 session, a Vandalian reported that “last night, all night nearly this town has been a scene of busy, buzzing bargaining, etc. It is said 150 persons, some from the most distant parts of the State [are vying] for the appointments of Sergeant at Arms of the Senate and Doorkeeper of the House of Representatives.”46

  Primitive as it was, Vandalia—with its bookshop, jewelry store, furniture emporium, and other businesses—must have seemed glamorous to the rough young legislator from New Salem. It certainly seemed so to Representative John J. Hardin’s wife, who in 1839 wrote from her home in Jacksonville, “I miss the intellectual feasts I enjoyed at Vandalia.”47 A friend of hers wondered: “how can she bear with the dull monotonous town of Jacksonville after leaving the gay scenes of the splendid city of Vandalia.”48 In 1830, a visitor to the capital marveled that “three meetings of an antiquarian and historical society have already taken place, and the whole of their published proceedings are as regular, and as well conducted, and as well printed … as if the seat of society had been at Oxford or Cambridge.”49 In the winter of 1838–1839, lectures were given at the statehouse by an officer in Napoleon’s army and a visitor from McKendree College, among others; the topics included temperance, phrenology, and Prussian education. James Hall, a journalist and litterateur, promoted intellectual life in Vandalia, helping to found schools and lyceums. Parties, dances, and receptions enlivened society during sessions of the legislature.

  Lincoln struck up a close friendship with Senator Orville H. Browning of Quincy and his wife, Eliza, a charming and witty woman. Years later Senator Browning told an interviewer: “Lincoln had seen but very little of what might be called society and was very awkward, and very much embarrassed in the presence of ladies. Mrs. Browning very soon discovered his great merits, and treated him with a certain frank cordiality which put Lincoln entirely at his ease. On this account he became very much attached to her. He used to come to our room, and spend his evenings with Mrs. Browning … most of his spare time was occupied in this way.”50 In 1839, Lincoln and three other legislators lightheartedly invited Mrs. Browning to come from her home in Quincy to the capital, “bringing in your train all ladies in general, who may be at your command; and all Mrs. Browning’s sisters in particular.”51

  In the 1830s, the legislature wielded more power than it would later. As Governor Thomas Ford described it, his office “was feeble, and clothed with but little authority,” while the legislators “came fresh from the people, and were clothed with almost the entire power of government.”52 Voters chose only the governor, lieutenant governor, senators, and representatives; all other state officers were selected by the General Assembly. People paid little attention to government, as long as it left them alone. Politicians “took advantage of this lethargic state of indifference of the people to advance their own projects, to get offices and special favors from the legislature, which were all they busied their heads about.” Governor Ford decried the “fraud” and “deceit” that legislators employed in passing special laws and creating offices and jobs, while ignoring the general welfare. He lamented that the “frequent legislative elections; the running to and fro of the various cliques and factions, before each election; the anxiety of members for their popularity at home; the settlement of plans to control future elections, to sustain the party in power, on the one side, and to overthrow it, on the part of the minority, absorb nearly the whole attention of the legislature, and leave but little disposition or time to be devoted to legitimate legislation.”53

  Others shared Ford’s view of the legislature. In 1835, Lincoln’s colleague in the General Assembly, fellow Whig William H. Fithian, complained from Vandalia of “[t]oo much blowing off steam, for expedition [of] business.” Four years later, he lamented: “We have been here now two weeks and as yet so far as I can judge, not one measure has been adopted for the benefit of the people of Illinois.”54 The Chicago Democrat condemned Illinois legislators for passing “most of their time at drinking, gambling and bawdy houses.”55 Legislatures throughout the West were held in low esteem. One Hoosier declared: “When I hear of the assembling of a Legislature in one of these Western States, it reminds me of a cry of fire in a populous city. No one knows when he is safe; no man can tell where the ruin will end.”56 Judge David Davis, appalled by a particularly dangerous criminal standing before his bench, absently sentenced the miscreant to seven years in the Illinois Legislature, where Davis had endured one term.

  During the ten-week legislative session in 1834–1835, Lincoln, under the tutelage of John Todd Stuart, remained inconspicuous, quietly observing his colleagues grant petitions for divorce, pass private bills to relieve individual citizens, appeal to Congress for money, declare creeks navigable, lay bills on the table, and listen to committee reports. On roll calls, Lincoln sided with Stuart 101 times but voted against him on 26 occasions. On votes for public officials, Lincoln agreed with Stuart every time save one. Stuart claimed that in 1834 and 1836 “he frequently traded Lincoln off.”57 As he laid plans for a congressional race in 1836, Stuart groomed Lincoln to take over his leadership role in the General Assembly.

  Lincoln’s first bill sought to limit the jurisdiction of justices of the peace; much amended, it won approval in the House but not the senate. Two weeks into the session he introduced a measure that did pass, authorizing the construction of a toll bridge over Salt Creek. Appreciating his literary skill, colleagues pressed him to draft legislation for them; he also wrote reports for the Committee on Public Accounts and Expenditures.

  In addition, Lincoln composed anonymous dispatches about legislative doings for the Sangamo Journal, an influential Whig newspaper in Springfield that over the years would publish many of his unsigned articles. Lincoln had easy access to the columns of that paper. As William Herndon recalled, “I frequently wrote the editorials in the Springfield Journal, the editor, Simeon Francis, giving to Lincoln and to me the utmost liberty in that direction.” Both partners submitted material to the Journal up to 1861.58 James Matheny, who was to be a groomsman at Lincoln’s wedding, recalled that when he served as deputy postmaster in Springfield in the mid-1830s, he came to recognize Lincoln’s handwriting and estimated that he delivered hundreds of editorials from him to Simeon Francis.

  Lincoln’s political opponents took note that he was contributing to the Journal. The Democratic Illinois State Register of Springfield charged that the “writers of the Journal have had a late acquisition (Lincoln)—a chap rather famous not only for throwing filth, but for swallowing it afterwards.”59 In 1840, the Register alleged that the author of a Journal article attacking Democrats “is no doubt one of the Junto, whose members deliberate in secret, write in secret, and work in darkness—men who dare not let the light of day in upon their acts.”60 This was doubtless an allusion to Lincoln, a leader of the Whig “Junto” and its most trusted writer.

  The partisan press was filled with anonymous attacks and misattributed remarks. In 1841 the Register charged that a member of the Junto had contributed pseudonymous articles, signed “Conservative,” to the Journal and had then tried to ascribe the authorship to Judge Jesse B. Thomas. The Register claimed that “the gang who control the Sangamo Journal wrote the articles which appear in that paper over the signature of ‘A Conservative,’ and privately impressed it upon the minds of the friends of the [Martin Van Buren] administration that the Judge [Jesse B. Thomas] was the author.… The Junto resorted to this foul stratagem to render the Judge obnoxious to the friends of Van Buren, hoping that thereby he would be driven to become a Federalist [i.e., a Whig].”61

  Although Lincoln’s journalism is not easy to identify with certainty, dozen
s of pieces from the 1830s seem clearly to be his handiwork, including dispatches from an unnamed Whig member of the legislature. At first, those dispatches simply offered terse accounts of legislative activity; in time, they grew longer and more partisan. One, dated January 23, 1835, sarcastically referred to Whig legislators as “Aristocrats” and reported dissension within the Democratic ranks. Written in Lincoln’s characteristic bantering, satirical style, it concluded thus: “The thing was funny, and we Aristocrats enjoyed it ‘hugely’.”62

  In the first session of his initial term as a legislator, Lincoln made no formal speeches and only two brief sets of remarks. In one of the latter he humorously commented on the nomination of a surveyor to fill a post that, it turned out, had not been vacated: “if … there was no danger of the new surveyor’s ousting the old one so long as he persisted not to die,” Lincoln said he “would suggest the propriety of letting matters remain as they were, so that if the old surveyor should hereafter conclude to die, there would be a new one ready made without troubling the legislature.”63

  Economic issues dominated the session. The most important bill dealt with the much-discussed proposal to dig a canal from Chicago to La Salle, connecting the Great Lakes with the Illinois River, which fed into the Mississippi. (When completed in 1848, it helped make Chicago a metropolis.) Lincoln, who wished to be known as “the De Witt Clinton of Illinois,” voted with the majority to finance that internal improvement with $500,000 in state bonds.64 (Clinton was the governor of New York when the Erie Canal was built.) The most controversial national issue debated by the legislature involved the Bank of the United States, on which President Andrew Jackson had declared his well-publicized war. Another was the distribution of funds generated by the sale of federal public lands. Lincoln introduced an unsuccessful resolution calling for the U.S. government to remit to the state at least one-fifth of such proceeds collected in Illinois. In fulfillment of his pledge to Hugh Armstrong and Ned Potter, he also submitted a petition of “sundry citizens of the counties of Sangamon, Morgan and Tazewell, praying the organization of a new county out of said counties.” The Committee on Petitions reported against it.65

  That winter of 1834–1835 the General Assembly passed 191 laws, dealing chiefly with roads, corporations, schools, and acts to relieve individuals. A state bank was chartered; the Illinois and Michigan Canal received vital funding; public roads were encouraged; the state was divided into judicial districts; and four colleges were incorporated. Lincoln voted on 131 of the 139 roll calls and was present for at least 59 of the 65 days when the legislature met.

  During that session, some observers felt that Lincoln had achieved little. Stuart recalled that Lincoln “was the author of no special or general act” and that he “had no organizing power.”66 John Moses reported that Lincoln “arose in his place and spoke briefly on two or three occasions, without giving any special promise, however, of ability as a debater or speaker. He seemed rather to be feeling his way, and taking the measure of the rising men around him.”67 Lincoln did virtually nothing to implement the three main proposals of his 1832 platform: expanding public education, improving navigation of the Sangamon, and curbing high interest rates. Usher F. Linder said that “if he won any fame at that season I have never heard of it.” In 1835, upon meeting Lincoln for the first time, Linder found him “very modest and retiring,” “good-natured, easy, unambitious, of plain good sense, and unobtrusive in his manners,” resembling “a quiet, unassuming farmer.”68

  Other contemporaries, however, recalled Lincoln’s legislative debut more positively. Jesse K. Dubois asserted that before the session ended, “Lincoln was already a prominent man.”69 John Locke Scripps wrote in an 1860 campaign biography (which Lincoln read and corrected) that Lincoln “acquired the confidence of his fellow-members as a man of sound judgment and patriotic purposes, and in this manner he wielded a greater influence in shaping and controlling legislation than many of the noisy declaimers and most frequent speakers of the body.”70

  If Lincoln achieved little renown, he learned a great deal: he had met legislators, lobbyists, judges, and attorneys from around the state and sized them up; had observed a more civilized culture than he had known along Little Pigeon Creek or in New Salem; had paid heed to the shrewd advice of John Todd Stuart; and had seen firsthand how legislation was framed and passed. In addition, he had made friends, in part through his legendary skill at storytelling. Those ten weeks in Vandalia sharpened Lincoln’s already keen desire to escape the backwoods world of his father. He wanted to belong to this new realm, peopled with ambitious and talented men, and so he returned to New Salem resolved not only to continue studying law but also to smooth some of his rough edges. Abner Y. Ellis thought that “Lincoln improved rapidly in Mind & Manners after his return from Vandalia his first Session in the Legislature.”71

  Romance

  In Illinois, as in Indiana, the bashful Lincoln paid little attention to young women. (In middle age, he admitted that “women are the only things that cannot hurt me that I am afraid of.”)72 When he boarded with John M. Camron, he took no romantic interest in his host’s attractive daughters, one of whom described him as “thin as a beanpole and as ugly as a scarecrow!”73 Between 1831 and 1834, when Daniel Burner and Lincoln both lived in New Salem, Burner never observed him with a girl. Because he could not sing “any more than a crow,” Lincoln avoided the singing school, where on weekends young men and women received elementary musical instruction and also courted. When he did attend social occasions where the sexes mingled, he “never danced or cut up.”74 Jason Duncan, who left New Salem in 1833, recalled that Lincoln “was verry reserved toward the opposite sex.” Duncan could “not recollect of his ever paying his addresses to any young lady.”75 James Short said that Lincoln “didn’t go to see the girls much,” for “he cared but little for them,” and when he craved companionship, he “would just as lieve the company were all men as to have it a mixture of the sexes.”76 Abner Y. Ellis, who employed Lincoln as a sometime clerk at his store, reported that he was “a verry shy Man of Ladies.” One day, Ellis recalled, “while we boarded at this Tavern there came a family Containing an old Lady her Son and Three stilish Daughters from the State of Virginia and stoped their for 2 or 3 weeks and during there stay I do not remember of Mr Lincoln Ever eating at the Same table when they did.”77 A New Salem maiden said that in his mid-twenties, the “homely, very awkward” Lincoln was “a very queer fellow” and “very bashful.”78 One historian speculated that it “was greatly to Lincoln’s advantage that he was not a favorite with society women. If he had been, most of his time and energies would have been wasted in agreeable frivolity.”79

  Women who claimed that Lincoln was drawn to them testified that he was socially backward and not a particularly eligible bachelor. Martinette Hardin said he was “so awkward that I was always sorry for him.” He “did not seem to know what to say in the company of women.”80 Polly Warnick, whom Lincoln allegedly tried to woo in Macon County, Illinois, had “little interest in a tall gangly youth with an Indiana accent.”81 A woman whose parents had lived in New Salem reported that “Lincoln was not much of a beau, and seemed to prefer the company of the elderly ladies to the young ones.”82

  Those more mature women (in effect surrogate mothers) included Mrs. Bennett Abell, who encouraged Lincoln’s ambition. William Butler deemed her “a cultivated woman—very superior to the common run of women about here.” While boarding at Bowling Green’s, Lincoln came to know the Abells, who lived close by. Mrs. Abell found Lincoln congenial. In time Lincoln boarded with the Abells, where he lived “in a sort of home intimacy.” Butler thought it was “from Mrs. Able he first got his ideas of a higher plane of life—that it was she who gave him the notion that he might improve himself by reading &c.”83

  Lincoln’s other surrogate mothers included Mary Spears, a woman of uncommon intelligence. He thought that if she had received an education she would have been the equal of any woman. She, in turn, remarked
that there was “a great promise—a great possibility in Lincoln.”84 Lincoln called his first landlady in New Salem, Mrs. John M. Camron, “Aunt Polly” and always remembered her affectionately. According to Charles Maltby, “her motherly kindness and counsels to Lincoln reminded him of the advice and instructions of a dear departed mother.”85 Hannah Armstrong, yet another surrogate mother, remembered that he “amused himself by playing with the children, or telling some funny story to the old folks.”86 Lincoln also liked to converse with Sarah Graham, the wife of Mentor Graham, often soliciting her advice about personal matters, including love.

  Romantic love finally entered Lincoln’s life in the person of Ann Rutledge, the daughter of one of his early New Salem landlords, James Rutledge. Four years younger than Lincoln, she was, by all accounts, attractive, intelligent, and lovable. She weighed approximately 120 pounds, stood 5 feet and 3 inches tall, and had large blue eyes “with a great deal in them.” She was smart, moderately educated, pleasant, a good conversationalist, hardworking, and domestically accomplished. Her mother “said she had been noted for three things, her skill with the needle, being a good spinner and a fine cook.”87 She also possessed a kind nature that one observer described as “angelic,” and a modesty that left her “without any of the airs of your city Belles.”88 Her cousin, James McGrady Rutledge, called her “a girl whose company people liked … seeming to enjoy life, and helping others enjoy it.”89 In the opinion of William G. Greene, her “Character was more than good: it was positively noted throughout the County. She was a woman worthy of Lincoln’s love & she was most worthy of his.”90