Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  To combat their opponents’ demagoguery, Republicans and other opponents of slavery expansion had to insist that they truly championed the interests of whites. The New York Times defended Republicans, arguing that they had insisted “always and everywhere, that they aimed at the good of the white men of the country, and had nothing to do with negroes.” In 1858, that paper spoke for many when it disavowed any “abstract love of the negro.” Republicans, said the Times, had “uniformly and most emphatically repudiated the idea that they had anything whatever to do with negroes or negro rights.”50 The New York Tribune protested against “the silly lie that ours is a ‘negro party’—that ‘it has no idea but “nigger! nigger!” ’—that it cares nothing or thinks nothing of the interests and welfare of White Men.”51 The Tribune’s editor maintained that the Republican Party “contemplates primarily the interest of Free White Labor, for which it struggles to secure the unoccupied territory of the Union.”52 Iowa Senator James Harlan declared that the “policy of the Republican party invites the Anglo-Saxon … and others of Caucasian blood, by its proposed preemption and homestead laws, to enter and occupy [the territories], and by the exclusion of slavery it will practically exclude the negro and kindred races.”53 A leader of Virginia’s antislavery movement chastised Democrats for their monomaniacal preoccupation with race: “It is niggers, niggers, niggers, first and always.… Tariff and everything else must be made to suit their niggers. Our interest … is the White man[’]s interest. I am proud to say that I belong to the white man[’]s party [i.e., the Republicans].”54

  The first known photograph of Lincoln, ca. 1846. When this image first appeared in published form in 1895, the noted geologist and author John Wesley Powell expressed his delight. Lincoln’s pictures, he said, “have never quite pleased me, and I now know why. I remember Lincoln as I saw him when I was a boy; after he became a public man I saw him but few times. This portrait is Lincoln as I knew him best: his sad, dreamy eye, his pensive smile, his sad and delicate face, his pyramidal shoulders, are the characteristics which I best remember; amid I can never think of him as wrinkled with care, so plainly shown in his later portraits. This is the Lincoln of Springfield, Decatur, Jacksonville, and Bloomington.” Robert Todd Lincoln later stated that this “daguerreotype was on the walls of a room in my father’s house from my earliest recollection,” along with one of his mother. Daguerreotype probably by Nicholas H. Shepherd, Springfield. Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Illinois.

  Mary Todd Lincoln, probably also taken by Nicholas H. Shepherd in about 1846 and likely the companion mentioned by Robert Todd Lincoln. Library of Congress.

  Alexander Hesler took this photograph in Chicago in February 1857. Lincoln called the likeness “a very true one; though my wife, and many others, do not. My impression is that their objection arises from the disordered condition of the hair.” (The photographer had mussed Lincoln’s hair to make him look more natural.) After Lincoln won the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, his supporters rushed a lithograph of the photo into print. Lincoln then enjoyed telling friends that newsboys hawking it on city streets cried out: “Ere’s yer last picter of Old Abe! He’ll look better when he gets his hair combed!” Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Illinois.

  Lincoln as he appeared on the eve of the debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858. The photographer, T. Painter Pearson, offered his subject a mirror so that he could tidy up. Lincoln allegedly replied: “It would not be much of a likeness if I fixed it up any.” Library of Congress.

  Ambrotype dated May 7, 1858, the day Lincoln won the Duff Armstrong case. After the acquittal, 22-year-old Abraham M. Byers stopped Lincoln on the street and asked him to pose in his studio. At first Lincoln protested, insisting that his white linen suit was too dirty, but eventually he yielded, leading to one of the few images showing him looking directly into the camera. Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Illinois.

  Mathew Brady took this photo in New York on February 23, 1860, the day Lincoln delivered his Cooper Union speech. The artist-photographer George H. Story scheduled and attended the session. Afterward, Lincoln allegedly said that Brady and the Cooper Union speech made him president. The sculptor Truman H. Bartlett observed that “Lincoln’s tall & well made body, vivified by his kind & undemonstrative nature” enabled him “to stand with perfect ease, unconscious & dignified force, making this portrait one of unique distinction.” Bartlett thought this image of Lincoln “the only portrait of him in existence which while including the larger part of Lincoln’s body produces on the observer the extraordinary effect so often described by the one word, ‘presence.’” Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Illinois.

  Alexander Hesler took this photograph in Chicago on June 3, 1860, less than three weeks after the Chicago Convention. “That looks better and expresses me better than any I have ever seen,” Lincoln allegedly said; “if it pleases the people I am satisfied.” That year a journalist wrote that Lincoln was 51 years of age, “but he certainly has no appearance of being so old. His hair is black, hardly touched with gray, and his eye is brighter than that of many of his juniors.” Illinois State Historical Society, Springfield, Illinois.

  The house in Springfield, where the Lincolns lived from 1844 to 1861 and the only one they ever owned. Charles Dresser, the Episcopalian minister who presided at the Lincolns’ wedding in 1842, sold it to them. The photograph, taken by John Adams Whipple [in 1860], shows Lincoln and his son Willie behind the front fence. Mary’s sister Frances said that neither of the Lincolns “loved the beautiful—I have planted flowers in their front yard myself to hide nakedness—ugliness &c. &c. have done it often—and often—Mrs L never planted trees—Roses—never made a garden, at least not more than once or twice.” Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Illinois.

  In Illinois, Macon County Republicans proclaimed that “the industry, virtue and patriotism of the free white laboring classes is the great bulwark of our political freedom” and “our cause is that of the white man, and our object the encouragement and prosperity of free white labor, and the spread of free society.”55 A Republican leader in Galena insisted that his “party is really and truly the white man’s party.”56 The Springfield Illinois State Journal agreed, asserting that the Republican Party was “preeminently the white man’s party. It defends the cause of free labor and honorable industry against the encroachments of slave labor. It repels the modern Democratic dogma, that slavery should not only be nationalized but should be made dependent, not upon color, but condition.”57 A constituent wrote to an Illinois Republican congressman: “No matter whether we are opposed to the extension of slavery from our humanity and love of right and justice, or from hatred of niggers (of the latter class are many Illinois Republicans) we are terribly in earnest in our opposition to the extension of that institution.”58 According to the Chicago Tribune, the “doctrine of the Abolition party is, to let the African race alone, neither marry nor cohabit with them; to give them their freedom; treat them as human beings; pay them for their work; separate the whites from adulterous communication with them, and preserve the purity of the Caucasian blood from African admixture.”59

  Some Republicans responded to the Democrats’ race-baiting in kind. When the Democratic Rushville Times advised Republicans to “be consistent! Just agree to sleep with Fred Douglass and marry your daughters to specimens of the thick-lip-gentry and be done with it,” The Free Press of Pittsfield reminded the Times “that its co-laborers of the South live among niggers, work among niggers, eat among niggers, drink among niggers and sleep with niggers. That they never get out of sight of a nigger, and their constant intercourse with niggers corrupts even their manners and language, and leads them to acquire nigger antics, nigger pronunciation, and nigger language. … The Anti-Nebraska men are laboring to keep Kansas and her white people free from the foul contamination with niggers; their purpose is to ke
ep niggers out of Kansas.”60

  Attacking the Kansas-Nebraska Act

  Lincoln eschewed such racial arguments in his attacks on the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He applauded Senator William Henry Seward’s high-minded speech against that legislation in mid-February. The following month the Illinois State Journal ran an editorial, probably by Lincoln, that expressed themes he would stress in formal speeches later that year. It condemned the Democratic Illinois State Register for supporting Douglas’s bill. “If he [George Walker, co-publisher of the Register] can find any ‘principle’ in the constitution that allows George Walker, white man, to enslave George Walker, black man, then he has some ground for ‘conscience sake’ to stand upon.” But there was no such constitutional justification for allowing slavery to expand into the northern portion of the Louisiana Purchase. “If the principle of free government means anything, the black man must stand on the same footing of ‘governing himself’ as the white.… The Register with one blow would annul the grandest principle of free government and give to ten thousand slaveholders from the south, the privilege of setting up slave pens in Nebraska, thus widening the foulest curse, and fostering the most ‘insidious enemy’ that holds in the bosom of our Republic.”61

  Throughout 1854, the Journal continued publishing editorials, in all likelihood by Lincoln, assailing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. One of them ‘that virtually all authorities agree was Lincoln’s handiwork’ ridiculed the fourteenth section of that law, which stated that it was “the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery into any territory or State, not to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way.” Sarcastically, Lincoln proposed an analogy to expose the illogic of that assertion: “Abraham Lincoln has a fine meadow, containing beautiful springs of water, and well fenced, which John Calhoun had agreed with Abraham (originally owning the land in common) should be his, and the agreement had been consummated in the most solemn manner, regarded by both as sacred.” In time Calhoun had “become owner of an extensive herd of cattle,” which, because of a drought, was starving. Thereupon Calhoun, “with a longing eye on Lincoln’s meadow,” dismantles his neighbor’s fence.

  “ ‘You rascal,’ says Lincoln, ‘what have you done? What do you do this for?’

  “ ‘Oh,’ replies Calhoun, ‘everything is right. I have taken down your fence; but nothing more. It is my true intent and meaning not to drive my cattle into your meadow, nor to exclude them therefrom, but to leave them perfectly free to form their own notions of the feed, and to direct their movements in their own way!’

  “Now would not the man who committed this outrage be deemed both a knave and a fool,—a knave in removing the restrictive fence, which he had solemnly pledged himself to sustain;—and a fool in supposing that there could be one man found in the country to believe that he had not pulled down the fence for the purpose of opening the meadow for his cattle?”62

  While this barb was aimed at his former surveying boss, Democrat John Calhoun, Lincoln understandably focused attention most closely on Stephen A. Douglas. From 1854 to 1860, Lincoln and Douglas engaged in an ongoing political and moral contest, of which their celebrated debates in 1858 formed only a part.

  Douglas proved a formidable, immensely popular opponent, as Lincoln acknowledged. From 1852, when both Henry Clay and Daniel Webster died, until 1860, Douglas loomed larger than any other American politician, presidents included. Pugnacious, arrogant, vituperative, and ferociously ambitious, he was, as a Southerner who served with him in the U.S. House recalled, “distinctly a man of large faculties.”63 He had a knack for genially convincing everyone he met that he was their good and true friend, interested in what they were interested in, and caring about what they cared about. They in turn felt drawn to him and disposed to support him. A journalist who accompanied Douglas on a campaign swing reported that he “can talk religion with the priests as well as politics with the statesman.” At train stations where they stopped, “more regularly than the conductor, Mr. Douglas is on the platform with a good-bye to the leaving, and a welcome to the departing traveler—a shake of the hand with one man that stands at the depot and the touch of the hat to another. He knows everybody; can tell the question that affects each locality; calls the name of every farm-owner on the way.”64 Douglas’s overflowing energy and uncommon industriousness led people to call him “a steam engine in britches.”65 With his “hail-fellow-well-met” manner he could be exceptionally persuasive, and he radiated a magnetism that won him countless followers. Though short (5 feet 4 inches), his broad shoulders, muscular frame, huge head, bright eyes, and firm mouth gave him a most imposing presence.

  Lincoln referred to him as Judge Douglas, for he had served briefly on the Illinois Supreme Court, where he scandalized older members of the bar with his lack of dignity. At lunch he would occasionally sit in a fellow attorney’s lap and ramble on about politics and the past. He constantly gave the impression that he was electioneering. Douglas’s suave and hearty manner made him popular with colleagues in Congress. “Many a time have I watched him,” said John W. Forney, editor of the Philadelphia Press, “leading in the keen encounters of the bright intellects around the festive board. To see him threading the glittering crowd with a pleasant smile or a kind word for every body, one would have taken him for a trained courtier.” But, Forney observed, “he was more at home in the close and exciting thicket of men.” There he was truly in his element. “To call each one by name, sometimes by his Christian name; to stand in the centre of a listening throng, while he told some Western story or defended some public measure; to exchange jokes with a political adversary; or, ascending the rostrum, to hold thousands spell-bound for hours, as he poured forth torrents of characteristic eloquence—these were traits that raised up for him hosts who were ready to fight for him.” Under his banner “[e]minent men did not hesitate to take their stand,” and “[ri]per scholars than himself, older if not better statesmen, frankly acknowledged his leadership and faithfully followed his fortunes.”66 Forney’s colleague John Russell Young praised Douglas as “a man of great nature,” the “most buoyant of Americans, full of life and aggressiveness and animal vigor, a man of the multitude,” the “most gifted, the most popular, the most strenuous of Democratic statesmen, the most accomplished debater in America, quick, apt, ready, irrepressible.”67

  Carl Schurz, who observed Douglas debating in the senate in 1854, recalled that his sentences “went straight to the mark like bullets, and sometimes like cannon-balls, tearing and crashing.” It was hard, Schurz thought, “to surpass his clearness and force of statement when his position was right; or his skill at twisting logic or in darkening the subject with extraneous, unessential matter, when he was wrong; or his defiant tenacity when he was driven to defend himself, or his keen and crafty alertness to turn his defense into attack, so that, even when overwhelmed with adverse argument, he would issue from the fray with the air of the conqueror.”68

  With equal justice, Douglas’s detractors called him egotistical, belligerent, scornful, quarrelsome, demagogic, unscrupulous, shifty, brash, haughty, impudent, vituperative, intensely partisan, vindictive, humorless, coarse, vulgar, profane, and morally obtuse. Young deplored Douglas’s “insane yearning for immediate success” and his willingness to truckle to Southern slaveholders. “He believed in the rowdy virtue of American politics, and had much of the rowdy in his nature.”69 Horace White thought him “patriotic beyond a doubt,” but “color blind to moral principles in politics, and if not stone blind to the evils of slavery was deaf and dumb to any expression concerning them.”70 Even the Little Giant’s friends lacked “confidence in his moral principle.”71

  In debate, Douglas could be abusive. According to Schurz, the senator was “utterly unsparing” of “the feelings of his opponents. He “would nag and nettle them with disdainful words of challenge, and insult them with such names as ‘dastards’ and ‘traitors.’ Nothing co
uld equal the contemptuous scorn, the insolent curl of his lip with which, in the debates to which I listened, he denounced the anti-slavery men in Congress as ‘the Abolition confederates,’ and at a subsequent time, after the formation of the Republican party, as ‘Black Republicans.’ ” Worse still, “he would, with utter unscrupulousness, malign his opponents’ motives, distort their sayings, and attribute to them all sorts of iniquitous deeds or purposes of which he must have known them to be quite guiltless.” His “style of attack was sometimes so exasperatingly offensive, that it required, on the part of the anti-slavery men in the Senate, a very high degree of self-control to abstain from retaliating.” Schurz never saw “a more formidable parliamentary pugilist” in whom “there was something … which very strongly smacked of the bar-room. He was the idol of the rough element of his party, and his convivial association with that element left its unmistakable imprint upon his habits and his deportment.” Douglas “would sometimes offend the dignity of the Senate by his astonishing conduct. Once, at a night session of the Senate I saw him, after a boisterous speech, throw himself upon the lap of a brother senator and loll there, talking and laughing, for ten or fifteen minutes, with his arm around the neck of his friend, who seemed to be painfully embarrassed, but could or would not shake him off.”72

  A journalist observed Douglas attack senatorial rivals in an 1854 speech that had no trace of dignity. He abused colleagues so mercilessly that a fight seemed likely to break out. His language and tone were “wholly alien to that body, and disgraceful alike to it and to him that it was indulged in.”73 In 1856 the Little Giant rebuked Charles Sumner, asking: “Is his object to provoke some of us to kick him as we would a dog in the street, that he may get sympathy upon the just chastisement?”74 (Two days later South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, wielding a heavy cane, cudgeled Sumner into insensibility on the senate floor.) Such conduct earned Douglas the reputation of “a bully who only insults peaceable men.”75 Douglas taunted New York Senator William Henry Seward, saying: “Ah, you can’t crawl behind that free nigger ‘dodge.’ ” According to a reporter covering the senate, Douglas “always uses the word ‘nigger’ and not ‘negro’ as it appears in his printed speeches.” (Seward told the Little Giant, “no man who spells Negro with two gs will ever be elected President of the United States.”) That journalist informed his readers that only “those who know Douglas, or who heard him, can be aware of his low ‘Short Boy’ style of speaking. His sneering tone and vulgar grimaces must be heard and seen rather than described.”76 In 1858, another journalist, E. L. Godkin, termed Douglas “a model demagogue,” who “is vulgar in his habits and vulgar in his appearance, ‘takes his drink,’ chews his quid, and discharges his saliva with as much constancy and energy as the least pretentious of his constituents.”77 Commenting on the premature death of President Zachary Taylor, Douglas tastelessly remarked: “It was the hand of Providence that saved us from our first and only military administration. Taylor was gathered to his fathers.”78