Lincoln did, however, criticize Taylor’s passivity. By the summer of 1849, the president was thought to be ruled by his cabinet. In a letter that foreshadowed his own presidential style of active leadership and echoed the complaints of other prominent Whigs, Lincoln told Secretary of State Clayton that Taylor appeared to defer excessively to his cabinet in the distribution of patronage. Such conduct, Lincoln warned, “is fixing for the President the unjust and ruinous character of being a mere man of straw.” Recalling that Taylor during the Mexican War had overruled a council of war’s unanimous recommendation against fighting a battle, Lincoln declared that this story, whether true or not, “gives him more popularity than ten thousand submissions.” The public, Lincoln advised, “must be brought to understand, that they are the President’s appointments. He must occasionally say, or seem to say, ‘by the Eternal,’ ‘I take the responsibility.’ Those phrases were the ‘Samson’s locks’ of Gen. Jackson, and we dare not disregard the lessons of experience.”293
In 1850, after Taylor’s untimely death, Lincoln praised his “sober and steady judgment,” his “dogged incapacity to understand that defeat was possible,” his lack of tyrannical instincts as well as of “excitement” and “fear, “ his aversion to “sudden and startling quarrels,” his magnanimity, his solicitude for his troops, and “his unostentatious, self-sacrificing, long enduring devotion to his duty.” These very qualities were to distinguish Lincoln himself as president.294 Some thought Lincoln’s dogged pursuit of a patronage job resulted from the pressure of economic necessity. A Massachusetts congressman said that at “the close of Mr. Lincoln’s term in Congress, the Administration of Gen. Taylor was just coming into power. He had lost some of his … business because of his being in Congress, and he felt like abandoning the practice of the law. For this reason he wanted Gen. Taylor to appoint him Comer. of the Genl. Land Office.”295 His good friend, Representative Richard W. Thompson, with whom he discussed these matters, saw the same motive at work. As the remarks he made to David Davis in February 1849 indicate, Lincoln feared that his law practice had suffered during his sojourn in Washington. While stumping Maryland in September 1848, Lincoln’s fellow campaigner, William Pickney Whyte, played a trick on him at their hotel. As Whyte later recalled, in the morning “I arose first and assuming a woe begone tone I said, Abe, you should see your horse.” Lincoln sprang from bed exclaiming in alarm, “My Lord, he isn’t dead is he?” In fact, his mount was perfectly healthy; Lincoln had panicked, Whyte explained, because he “was very poor.”296
More importantly, perhaps, Lincoln may have had little desire to return to provincial Springfield after consorting with leading lawyers and politicians in sophisticated Washington. Parties and soirees for 300 to 900 guests were a regular occurrence at the capital. A congressional chaplain of the mid-1840s observed that almost “every man in Congress has made himself noteworthy at home by some gift or accomplishment; he can play the fiddle well, tell a good story, manage a caucus, make an effective speech, indite striking paragraphs, laugh loud and long, listen complaisantly while others talk, talk fluently and copiously himself, or has a pretty and clever wife. These gifts and graces are, of course, brought to the Federal Capital, and invested in the joint-stock company of social life.”297 Lincoln’s own strong ambition had been fortified by his two years in Washington, where conversation was brilliant and he could hobnob with eminent men of impeccable manners and great wit.
Lincoln’s congressional colleagues included the redoubtable John Quincy Adams, who in February 1848 suffered a stroke on the floor of the House and died shortly thereafter. Lincoln, who may have witnessed the former president’s collapse, was named to a committee charged with arranging the funeral. One of the giants of the senate, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, now and then invited Lincoln to his Saturday breakfasts, where the Illinoisan’s humor and geniality charmed the senator’s other guests. (On March 4, 1849, Lincoln told John Cook, son of the deceased U.S. Senator Daniel Cook: “I want you to go with me to the Senate Chamber. I want to introduce you to one of the greatest men of the Nation and a warm personal friend of your father,” Daniel Webster.)298
Lincoln’s reaction to Webster’s hospitality may well have resembled his reaction to a dinner given by Governor Levi Lincoln which he attended at Worcester in September 1848. Thirteen years later, he said: “I had been chosen to Congress then from the wild West, and with hayseed in my hair I went to Massachusetts, the most cultured State in the Union, to take a few lessons in deportment.” Lincoln added “that the dinner at Governor Lincoln’s by reason of its elaborate hospitality and social brilliancy was different in kind from any function he had ever attended before. He remarked upon the beauty of the china, the fineness of the silverware and the richness of all the table appointments, and spoke of the company of distinguished and thoroughly educated men whom he met there in the animated, free and intimate conversation inspired by such an accomplished host as Governor Lincoln.”299 Lincoln probably observed something like this at Washington. In any event, he clearly wished to be reelected. Mary Lincoln shared her husband’s desire to remain in the glamorous capital.
Others were as disappointed at Lincoln’s defeat as he was. The treatment he received at the hands of Secretary Ewing and the Taylor administration angered many active Illinois Whigs. David Davis called it “outrageous” and expressed wonderment “that the voice of Members of Congress from a State is not taken about appointments.”300 That summer, the chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, William Wilson, reported “great indignation on the part of the Whigs of this State at the course pursued in the appointment of Butterfield over Lincoln & that it would take but little to call forth a public expression against Mr Ewing.”301 In the fall, Usher F. Linder, speaking in the Illinois House of Representatives, called Ewing “universally odious,” a man who “stinks in the nostrils of the nation,” a “lump of ice, an unfeeling, unsympathizing aristocrat, a rough, imperious, uncouth, and unamiable” fellow, “unsuited to wield the immense patronage placed in his hands, from the fact that he … could disregard the almost unanimous wish of the people—the whig people of Illinois, and overlook the claims of such men as Lincoln, Edwards and Morrison, and appoint a man [Butterfield] … who could not, as against any one of his competitors, have obtained one twentieth of the votes of Illinois.”302 In attacking the secretary publicly, Linder voiced the private feelings of many, including Elihu B. Washburn, who fumed, “Ewing must go out.”303
Some Whigs regretted Linder’s indiscretion; among them was Lincoln, who asserted publicly that if he had known that such a speech was to be given, he would have tried to stop it. He magnanimously praised Butterfield and Ewing, saying of Butterfield that when he became commissioner, “I expected him to be a faithful and able officer, and nothing has since come to my knowledge disappointing that expectation.” Of Ewing he added: “I believe him, too, to be an able and faithful officer.”304
(As it turned out, criticism dogged Butterfield until a paralytic stroke forced him to resign in 1852. Despite his claims of robust health, during his tenure he frequently left Washington because of illness. He also engaged in wholesale nepotism. An anonymous, undated memorandum in the Interior Department files excoriated him for hiring at least nine close relatives while dismissing such people as Lincoln’s friends Josiah M. Lucas and William H. Henderson.)
To restore peace and forestall other attacks on Butterfield’s appointment, the administration tried to appease Lincoln by offering him the secretaryship of the Oregon Territory, which he promptly declined, urging that it be given instead to his friend Simeon Francis. Soon thereafter, as Lincoln attended court in Bloomington with John Todd Stuart, a special messenger arrived with an offer to appoint him governor of Oregon at a salary of $3,000 a year. Truly tempted, Lincoln asked Stuart if he should accept. His former law partner said he “thought it was a good thing: that he could go out there and in all likelihood come back from there as a Senator when the State was admitted.” Lincoln,
according to Stuart, “finally made up his mind that he would accept the place if Mary would consent to go.” But she had no wish to live in a remote frontier and would not consent. Joshua Speed later told Stuart “that Lincoln wrote to him that if he [Speed] would go along, he would give him any appointment out there which he might be able to control. Lincoln evidently thought that if Speed and Speed’s wife were to go along, it would be an inducement for Mary to change her mind.… But Speed thought he could not go, and so the matter didn’t come to anything.”305 During her husband’s presidency, Mary Lincoln liked to remind him that she had kept him from “throwing himself away” by accepting the governorship of Oregon.306
And so Lincoln returned to Springfield. Not long after his defeat by Butterfield, he told a friend: “I have a little property and owe no debts; it is perhaps well that I did not get this appointment. I will go home and resume my practice, at which I can make a living—and perhaps some day the people may have use for me.”307
This setback may have been a blessing in disguise. Richard W. Thompson believed that Lincoln’s failure to win the commissionership of the General Land Office was “most fortunate both for him and the country.” If he had been successful, Thompson speculated, he would have stayed on in Washington, “separated from the people of Illinois,” sinking “down into the grooves of a routine office, so that he would never have reached the eminence he afterwards achieved as a lawyer, or have become President of the United States.”308
Five years would pass before he again sought public office. During that political hiatus he underwent a painful introspective ordeal from which he emerged a different man. At the age of 40, he was an accomplished partisan politician of limited scope; by 45, he had somehow transformed himself into the statesman that the world would come to revere. Signs of that statesmanship had appeared in his congressional term (when he denounced the president’s conduct in provoking the Mexican War and when he framed an emancipation bill for the District of Columbia) and during his tenure as an Illinois legislator (when he declared that slavery was based on “injustice and bad policy.”) But only after he had passed through a fiery psychological trial at midlife was he to fulfill the promise foreshadowed in those gestures.
9
“I Was Losing Interest in Politics
and Went to the Practice of the Law with
Greater Earnestness Than Ever Before”
Midlife Crisis
(1849–1854)
A colleague at the bar maintained that Lincoln’s life between 1849 and 1854, although outwardly “uneventful and even unimportant,” was really a time “in which by thought and much study he prepared himself for his great life work.”1 Indeed, Lincoln did mature remarkably during those years, passing through a highly successsful midlife crisis. Semiretired from public life (he campaigned sporadically and desultorily for others but ran for no office himself), the slasher-gaff politico who reveled in sarcasm and excelled at ridicule somehow developed into a statesman, a principled champion of the antislavery cause who rose far above the narrow partisanship of his earlier years. To be sure, the 1837 Lincoln-Stone protest and his 1849 proposed statute abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia showed Lincoln’s interest in the slavery issue but only as a minor matter in his political consciousness. Believing “that God will settle it, and settle it right, and that he will, in some inscrutable way, restrict the spread of so great an evil,” he had concluded that “it is our duty to wait.”2
From 1849 until 1854, Lincoln focused assiduously on his legal career. He later wrote that at that time, “I was losing interest in politics” and “went to the practice of the law with greater earnestness than ever before.” By 1854 the legal profession, he said, “had almost superseded the thought of politics” in his mind.3
Looking back on his legal career, Lincoln considered that it had two distinct stages, separated by his term in Congress. Before serving in the House of Representatives, he handled petty cases of debt collection, property damage, land titles, negligence, trespassing livestock, divorce, and slander, from which he earned little money, even though he and his partners had an extensive practice. To make ends meet, Lincoln and other lawyers in Springfield traveled the circuit during the spring and fall, when rural counties held court. In the winter and summer, the attorneys would remain in Springfield, appearing before the Illinois State Supreme Court, the Sangamon County Court, and the Federal District Court, as well as justices of the peace.
When Lincoln returned from Washington, Illinois was changing rapidly. In 1848, the adoption of a new state constitution, the completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, the launching of a rail line connecting Chicago with Galena, and the arrival of a presidential message via the telegraph for the first time all heralded the end of the frontier era. During the 1850s, the state’s rail network expanded rapidly (from 111 miles to 2,790) and its population doubled (from 851,470 to 1,711,951). Urban areas in particular grew swiftly. In 1850, Chicago had a population of 29,963; by the end of the decade, that figure had soared to 109,260. Springfield’s population increased twofold in that same period (from 4,533 to 9,320). Railroads slashed the travel time between those cities from 3 days to 12 hours. The 705-mile Illinois Central Railroad system, begun in 1851, was the world’s longest when completed five years later.
Illinois’s transformation changed the lives of the state’s lawyers. Because they now found more and more business in their own towns, they no longer had to spend weeks and months traveling from one county seat to another in quest of clients; by the end of the decade, only Lincoln continued attending courts throughout the circuit. Simultaneously, night sessions became more common, reducing the opportunities for convivial gatherings after dark. Rather than petty cases tried under the common law, more and more commercial causes filled the dockets, especially those involving railroads. Attorneys increasingly found themselves working for out-of-state corporations. The law became less a means of resolving local disputes and promoting community harmony than an impersonal mechanism for dealing with the booming industrial and commercial revolutions. Lincoln found the new climate more profitable but less congenial than the old one.
Law Practice
Lincoln must surely have experienced a letdown when he exchanged the glamorous world of Washington for his unprepossessing law practice in provincial Springfield. Henry C. Whitney thought that “no lawyer’s office could have been more unkempt, untidy and uninviting.”4 It contained only a plain, small desk and table, a couch, a rusty antique stove, a bookcase, and a few wooden chairs. The floors were so seldom cleaned that plants took root in the accumulated dirt. (As a congressman, Lincoln had distributed seeds to his farmer constituents; the contents of some of the packets he had brought home from Washington leaked out and sprouted in the office.) Little light penetrated the filthy windows, and the upper and center panels of the office door leading to the hallway were missing. In the crude bookcase were copies of Blackstone, Kent’s Commentaries, Chitty’s Pleadings, and a small number of other volumes. (There were few books because Lincoln and Herndon regularly used the well-stocked law library at the nearby capitol.) Outside hung a cheap, weather-beaten sign by the staircase leading to the office.
In these crude surroundings Lincoln spent many monotonous hours dealing with what he called “the drudgery of the law.”5 As an Ohio attorney noted in 1849, the “business of a lawyer’s office, generally has as little interest as a merchant’s counting room. Declarations, pleas or demurrers, bills or answers in chancery, petitions in dower or partition, conveyances, depositions, the collection of notes, engross the time of an attorney.”6 Much of Lincoln’s fabled yarn-spinning was done outside his office. As Gibson W. Harris, who studied there from 1845 to 1847, put it, an “attorney’s ‘den’ is about the last place for genial humor; for, except to a peculiarly constituted mind, the law is a dry and uninteresting study.”7
Some of the office drudgery fell to Harris, but most of it was performed by Herndon, who in 1857 described Lin
coln as a “hoss” and added that “I am the runt of the firm and no ‘hoss.’ ”8 As the runt, he said he “ ‘toted books,’ and ‘hunted up authorities’ for Lincoln,” who “detested the mechanical work of the office.”9 Herndon claimed that he “made out his best briefs in the largest law cases and … Lincoln would argue his case from those briefs and get the credit for them” while the junior partner “was the power behind them.”10 Herndon drafted pleadings and other papers for cases in the district courts, while Lincoln wrote them for supreme court cases. In addition to composing wills, mortgages, contracts, deeds, and other documents requiring no litigation, Herndon managed the office. Lincoln did most of the interviewing and litigation, as well as zealously drumming up business for the firm.
The Lincoln-Herndon partnership, formed in 1844 and lasting until Lincoln departed Springfield as president-elect in 1861, was harmonious. The two men, according to Herndon, “never had a cross word—a quarrel nor any misunderstandings—however small.” He asserted that when Lincoln “did attach himself to man or woman he was warmly wrapt in the man or woman—nothing but demonstrations of dishonesty or vice could shake him.”11 When other lawyers tried to supplant Herndon, Lincoln rebuffed their overtures. Herndon’s fondness for liquor often landed him in trouble and embarrassed his partner, but Lincoln characteristically overlooked this foible. Herndon acknowledged that “in his treatment of me Mr. Lincoln was the most generous, forbearing, and charitable man I ever knew. Often though I yielded to temptation he invariably refrained from joining in the popular denunciation which, though not unmerited, was so frequently heaped upon me. He never chided, never censured, never criticized my conduct.”12
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 55