Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  Lincoln was also likely the author of a July letter by a “Democrat” explaining why one of their candidates, William Carpenter, had dropped out: “at the last session of the Illinois Legislature the squire voted to allow free negroes the right of suffrage.” This “Democrat” then asked: “Now if this is an objection against the squire, will it not apply with double force to Mr. Van Buren, our candidate for the Presidency? Did not Mr. Van Buren first bring forward this odious measure in the New York Convention? I say most positively that he did; and for proof of the statement I refer you to the journals of the Convention of 1821, Sept. 19, page 106.”147 Democratic legislative candidates vigorously denied that they favored black suffrage.

  This line of attack was unfair, for Van Buren disliked slavery but believed it should be dealt with on the state and local level, not by the federal government. He also supported the abolition of property qualifications for white New Yorkers in 1821 and the retention of such qualifications for blacks. Furthermore, he opposed the abolition of slavery in Washington, D.C. During the 1836 campaign, he publicly declared: “I must go into the presidential chair the inflexible and uncompromising opponent of any attempt on the part of congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, against the wishes of the slave holding states; and also with the determination equally decided to resist the slightest interference with the subject in the states where it exists.”148 In private, Van Buren urged important New York friends to attack abolitionists. Nonetheless, the assault on Van Buren’s support for limited black suffrage would be repeated vigorously in 1840 and was still being cited in the presidential campaign two decades later.

  When not engaged in race-baiting, Lincoln excoriated the Democrats’ newly established convention system, which Ebenezer Peck and Stephen A. Douglas had introduced in December 1835. Previously, any Democrat who wished to run for office simply announced his intention and entered the race; now candidates were required to win endorsement at a nominating convention. Lincoln called adherents of this innovation “slaves of the magician [Martin Van Buren],” “eastern trading politicians,” and “Hartford Convention federalists from New England,” whereas Democrats opposing Peck’s innovation were men “born and raised west of the mountains” and “south of the Potomac.”149

  The author of some satirical letters to the Journal—all probably by Lincoln—had a Democrat bemoan his party’s failure to hold a county caucus to nominate officers: “The people are not yet sufficiently drilled for this purpose.”150 Writing under the name “Spoon River,” a correspondent denounced the convention system for assuming “that six men can regulate the affairs of Fulton County better than six hundred; that our old backwoodsmen, squatters, and pioneers have no right to think, and act, for themselves, when with the aid of this machine six men can do it for them, with perfect ease.”151 In a letter ostensibly by the Democratic state printer, William Walters, the author ridiculed Stephen A. Douglas for imposing the convention system on his district.

  When U.S. Senator Elias Kent Kane died in 1835, Lincoln poked fun at Democrats like George Forquer who scrambled to replace him: “This news had the magic effect, to produce much of both feigned sorrow and heart-felt rejoicing.” Kane’s “greatest political friends are glad of it, not that they loved him less, but that they loved his office more.”152 (Forquer denounced the author of this piece as “a monster, devoid of the ordinary susceptibilities of humanity.”)153

  When not ridiculing his political foes, Lincoln praised his friends, including John Todd Stuart. Referring to the passage of the canal bill, he declared that northern Illinois “is under the strongest obligations to the untiring zeal of Mr. Stuart …, who has spared no pains in a high minded and honorable way to secure the accomplishment of this great work.”154 Lincoln heralded Archibald Williams as “much the closest reasoner in the Senate” and asserted that it would “be a gratification to any man to hear him tear in tatters the new democracy.”155

  Lincoln assailed members of the “Monster party” for delaying construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal until they could vest the legislature with the power to appoint canal commissioners.156 He caustically observed that “there are men hanging on here who are bankrupt in principle, business habits, and every thing else who have the promises of these offices as soon as they shall be made elective.”157 He referred to Democratic supporters of Martin Van Buren as “ruffle-shirted Vannies,” whereas supporters of his own favorite candidate for the Whig presidential nomination (Tennessee Senator Hugh Lawson White) he called “the people.”158 (Although White was a Jacksonian, many people in the South and West viewed his candidacy as a protest against the dictation of northern Democrats who had selected Van Buren.)

  Lincoln and other Whigs called Democrats “locofocos,” a derogatory term originally applied to the most radical faction of the party, which was accused of abandoning Jeffersonian and Jacksonian principles. When opponents denounced that smear tactic, Lincoln responded with a story about a farmer who captured a skunk in his hen house. Reacting to the varmint’s protest that he was no polecat, the farmer remarked: “You look like a polecat, … act like one, smell like one and you are one, by God, and I’ll kill you, innocent & friendly to me as you say you are.” The locofocos, Lincoln continued, “ ‘claim to be true democrats, but they are only locofocos—they look like locofocos, … act like locofocos,’ and turning up his nose and backing away a little … as if the smell was about to smother him, ‘are locofocos by God.’” Members of the audience “nearly bursted their sides laughing.”159

  In the 1836 campaign, Lincoln emerged as a prominent and effective Whig spokesman. One of his fellow Whig candidates for the legislature, Robert L. Wilson of Athens, recalled that “Lincoln took a leading part,” and praised him for “manifesting Skill and tact in offensive and defensive debates, presenting his arguments with great force and ability, and boldly attacking the questions and positions taken by opposing Candidates.” Wilson ascribed Lincoln’s success to his original style, avoiding “the beaten track of other Speakers, and Thinkers.” According to Wilson, Lincoln “appeared to comprehend the whole situation of the Subject, and take hold of its first principles.” His “remarkable faculty for concentration” enabled him “to present his subject in such a manner as nothing but conclusions were presented.” His “mode of reasoning was purely analytical; his reasons and conclusions were always drawn from analogy.” Wilson also praised Lincoln’s keen understanding of people and their motives, as well as his prodigious memory for facts and anecdotes, which he applied tellingly to the exact situation at hand. Wilson concluded, “no one ever forgets, after hearing Mr. Lincoln tell a Story, either the argument of the Story, the Story itself, or the author.”160

  One of Lincoln’s stiffest political opponents, John Hill (son of the New Salem merchant Samuel Hill), also praised Lincoln for his remarkable eloquence. “The convincing power of Mr. Lincoln’s plain conversational method of address,” recalled Hill, was “marvelous and almost iresistable, Plain, candid and honest, without the slightest effort at display or oratory.” Lincoln carried his auditors “along to unconscious conviction. The benign expression of his face and his earnest interest in the subject, asserted with such simplicity, secured sympathetic absorbtion. All listened in close attention to the end, and when he had finished there pervaded a momentary solemn silence before his audience realised that it was the end.” Hill described Lincoln as “the planest man I ever heard.” He “was not a speaker but a talker.” Such were his “honesty, candor, and fairness” that it “was scarcely possible for an auditor not to believe every word [he] uttered.” The same was true of conversation. “He left behind him on all occasions, a feeling one can not express of respect and that accompanied by affection for a good man.”161 Lincoln’s fellow attorney and Whig politician Albert Taylor Bledsoe detected in Lincoln’s speeches “a homely strength, and a rustic beauty of expression, which are more effective than the oratorical periods of an [Edward] Everett or a [George] Bancroft. Hi
s simple, terse, plain, direct English, goes right home to the point.”162

  On August 1, 1836, Lincoln handily won reelection, finishing first in a field of seventeen. In New Salem he ran well ahead of the victorious Whig ticket. (Three months later, Van Buren captured the presidency with the help of Illinois’s electoral votes.) Just as he had been in the vanguard during the campaign, so too that winter Lincoln would be a leader of the Whigs in the General Assembly, filling the place vacated by John Todd Stuart, who had run for Congress and lost.

  Lincoln was among the few veterans in the enlarged and reapportioned legislature; of the ninety-one members (thirty-six more than its immediate predecessor) less than one-fourth were incumbents. During the 1836–1837 session, Lincoln became prominent as the leader of Whigs in the House. He regularly squelched Democrats with clever stories. In 1839, a Democratic legislator identified ten colleagues, among them Lincoln, who “take up more time than all the members.”163 An Assembly colleague, Robert L. Wilson, thought him “a natural debater” who “was always ready and always got right down to the merits of his case, without any nonsense or circumlocution.” As comfortable in the House of Representatives as he was in the houses of New Salem, “he had a quaint and peculiar way, all of his own, of treating a subject, and he frequently startled us by his modes—but he was always right.” To Wilson he “seemed to be a born politician.” The Whigs “followed his lead, but he followed nobody’s lead; he hewed the way for us to follow, and we gladly did so.” He combined mastery of the facts with clear thinking and formidable oratorical skill, yet he “excited no envy or jealousy” because of his unpretentious manner and winning wit. His colleagues readily acknowledged that he was “so much greater than the rest of us that we were glad to abridge our intellectual labors by letting him do the general thinking for the crowd.” Whig Representatives, Wilson said, “would ride while he would walk, but we recognized him as a master in logic; he was poverty itself when I knew him, but still perfectly independent. He would borrow nothing and never ask favors.” (Lincoln seldom asked favors because he believed that “those who receive favors owe a debt of gratitude to the giver and to that extent are obedient and abject slaves.”)164 To Wilson, Lincoln “seemed to glide along in life without any friction or effort.”165

  In fact, Lincoln was not exactly gliding along. Shortly after the General Assembly convened, he wrote from Vandalia to a friend: “my spirits [are] so low, that I feel that I would rather be any place in the world than here. I really can not endure the thought of staying here ten weeks.”166 Aside from his customary melancholy, he may have been downcast because he had nothing to do. The day before Lincoln penned his dispirited letter, a Vandalia newspaper reported that “little business has been done in either the Senate or the House of Representatives thus far” because of “the unfinished situation of the State House. The plastering is new and damp, and it became necessary to the comfort and health of the members to have additional stoves put up.”167

  Downcast or not, Lincoln gathered himself in time to help shape important legislation. He championed the state bank with special vehemence. On January 11, 1837, he defended that institution against an attack by Democrat Usher F. Linder. Sarcastically acknowledging that Linder was his superior in “the faculty of entangling a subject, so that neither himself, nor any other man, can find head or tail to it,” Lincoln dismissed his opponent’s arguments as “silly” and harshly declared that if Linder were unaware of Illinois’s usury statute, “he is too ignorant to be placed at the head of the committee which his resolution proposes.” If, on the other hand, he were aware of that usury law (which he did not mention in his flings against the bank), Linder was “too uncandid to merit the respect or confidence of any one.” Lincoln went on to denounce “capitalists” who “generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people,” and politicians, “a set of men who … are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men.” (Lincoln immediately added that “I say this with the greater freedom because, being a politician myself, none can regard it as personal.”) He further denounced “that lawless and mobocratic spirit, whether in relation to the bank or any thing else, which is already abroad in the land; and is spreading with rapid and fearful impetuosity, to the ultimate overthrow of every institution, or even moral principle, in which persons and property have hitherto found security.”168

  In this partisan speech, Lincoln did not forthrightly address all the criticisms of the bank. When the legislature incorporated the Bank of Illinois, it anticipated that its stock would be bought primarily by in-state investors. Instead, most shares were purchased by financiers in the East who deviously used the names of Illinois farmers as “owners” of the stock. Linder justly accused the bank commissioners of violating the law. This Lincoln dismissed as a quarrel among selfish capitalists, which was of no concern to the people. In fact, the law had been undermined. Lincoln was also disingenuous in alleging that the bank had met its legal requirement to redeem its notes in specie. This provision of the law was virtually nullified through clever arrangements by which the nine branches of the Bank of Illinois printed notes redeemable only at the issuing branch. To ensure that few such requests for redemption were made, the branches brought their notes into circulation at remote sites.

  Though somewhat demagogic, Lincoln’s speech rested on the sound notion that economic growth required banks and an elastic money supply. His political opponents, with their agrarian fondness for a metallic currency, failed to understand this fundamental point. Banks, he knew, had a vital role to play in financing the canals and railroads essential for ending rural isolation and backwardness, a goal he cared about passionately. (In fact, the state bank had been revived in the 1830s to finance internal improvements without raising taxes.) In addition, Lincoln wanted to protect the assets earned by ordinary people in the sweat of their brows; he predicted that the destruction of the bank would “annihilate the currency of the State” and thus “render valueless in the hands of our people that reward of their former labors.”169 Banks also allowed the “honest, industrious and virtuous” poor to get ahead through loans. Without internal improvements and banks, argued the Sangamo Journal, the poor would forever remain “hewers of wood and drawers of water” for the rich. By making credit difficult to obtain, the Democrats forced the “industrious poor” to accumulate capital on their own before starting a business, a process that might take decades. The Whigs, by making the surplus capital of the rich available through banks, aimed to expand economic opportunity for the poor.170

  Lincoln’s chief goal in the winter of 1836–1837 was to have Springfield chosen as the new state capital. By law, Vandalia’s claim to that honor expired in 1839; thereafter, some other town might replace it. A change made sense. In 1819, when Vandalia had been selected, most Illinoisans lived in the southern part of the state, where Vandalia was located. During the 1820s and 1830s, however, more and more settlers flowed into the middle and northern counties, availing themselves of the cheap transportation provided by the Erie Canal, completed in 1825, and by Great Lakes steamboat connections to Chicago, opened in 1832. At the same time, the state’s rejection in 1824 of attempts to introduce slavery discouraged some potential immigrants from the South. By 1833, Vandalia seemed inadequate, as one critic put it, because of its “remoteness … from the centre, from the most populous districts of the State, and from practicable navigation; its known and striking destitution of any commanding commercial facilities; the unsightly, monotonous appearance, comparative barrenness and flatness of the country immediately surrounding it, rendering it as unhealthy as incommodious, unpleasant, and insusceptible of dense settlement and successful cultivation.”171

  Vandalia did indeed have major shortcomings as the state capital. For two weeks in December 1836, communication with Springfield was entirely cut off because of the condition of the roads. That situation had not improved over the preceding decade. Then a traveler had complained that the “road for three miles
east of Vandalia is … impassable with wagons, and nearly so on horseback. It is a perfect marsh or swamp, of soft clay, extremely tenacious into which a horse will sink at every step to his knees, and for the whole distance covered with water to the depth of six or eight inches.” That same observer, noting that the countryside surrounding Vandalia was “hard and sterile, covered with stunted oaks and apparently unproductive,” prophetically remarked, “I think that it can never be a place of much importance.”172

  Yet another drawback of Vandalia was its unhealthy summer climate. A visitor warned that “[b]ilious fever prevailed here, and there were several patients in the hotel where we stayed.”173 In the mid-1820s, that same disease had killed many Vandalians. Five legislators died in the town between 1830 and 1836. A local booster protested that the “trouble was busthead whiskey,” which was made too freely available to the lawmakers at Ebenezer Capps’s store, a favorite gathering place for members of the General Assembly.174

  Moreover, critics protested, Vandalia offered inferior lodgings and food. In 1836, Justice Samuel D. Lockwood of the state supreme court complained that “all the accommodations are indifferent.”175 Many years later, John Todd Stuart told an interviewer: “I remember that one of the objections that were urged against keeping the seat of government at Vandalia was that they did not feed us on anything but prairie chickens and venison. A piece of fat pork was a luxury in those days—we had such a longing for something civilized.”176 (One day legislators organizing a deer hunt asked Lincoln to join them. He declined, remarking: “You go get the deer, [the hotel proprietor] Mattox can cook it and I’ll eat all you can get.”)177