Mary also watched her friends depart for Mexico. One childhood pal from Kentucky, Cassius Marcellus Clay, took command of a company of cavalry and set off for the Rio Grande. Clay—whom Lincoln would one day appoint minister to Russia—cut a dashing figure. With his strong features and thick black hair, Clay displayed, as one admirer put it, “the glory of a perfect physical manhood.” Still, detractors saw only a vainglorious buffoon. The Boston Liberator predicted that he would be “the first to perish on the Mexican soil, an ignoble death.” Lincoln’s allies, however, defended the Kentuckian. “Foreign nations,” declared the Sangamo Journal, to which Lincoln was closely tied, “will find Americans acting as one man, with one soul.”48
In the early days of the war, that statement was accurate enough. Both Lincoln and his opponent, a Methodist revival preacher named Peter Cartwright, appear to have supported the conflict, largely neutralizing it as a campaign issue. Throughout the summer of 1846, Lincoln spoke at least occasionally on the Mexico and Oregon questions. Yet Lincoln avoided making major news on the topic. The strategy seems to have worked. Lincoln trounced Cartwright in the August 3 election, winning the poll by a wide margin.49
The year that followed must have been maddening for Lincoln. Because the Thirtieth Congress was not due to convene for another sixteen months, the newly elected legislator could do little more than sit on the sidelines as the Mexican War unfolded. “Being elected to Congress,” he wrote to a friend in October 1846, “though I am very grateful to our friends, for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected.”50
An inveterate news junkie, Lincoln carefully followed developments as American forces pushed deeper into Mexico. (Newspapers, Herndon once reported, were Lincoln’s “food.”)51 In February 1847, the Mexican general Santa Anna launched a major offensive targeting the forces of U.S. General Zachary Taylor at Buena Vista in northern Mexico. Rain poured down on the clashing armies as Taylor’s men met the advance. The death tolls, for the time, were huge. More than 270 Americans fell on the battlefield, along with twice as many Mexicans. But Taylor and his men ultimately held their ground, and the Battle of Buena Vista entered the annals of great American military victories. Taylor’s laconic request during the fighting—“A little more grape, please, Captain Bragg”—was turned into a slogan. Americans thrilled at the news. Shows about the victory at Buena Vista played to sold-out crowds on the Bowery in New York.52
For Springfield, the victory turned out to be bittersweet. Among the dead: John Hardin, Lincoln’s old friend and recent competitor. Hardin had fought heroically, leading a force of Illinois troops into the fray and snatching a Mexican battle flag before he was killed.53 The news of Hardin’s death reached the Illinois capital in March. Even the politician’s Democratic rivals lauded the local martyr. “Beloved by all who knew him, and without a personal enemy on earth, his fate will cast a gloom, not only over this whole state but throughout the nation,” wrote the Illinois State Register. At a memorial a few days later, Lincoln graciously offered a resolution celebrating the victory and praising Hardin.54
Hardin’s funeral later that summer reignited Illinois’s martial flame. A friend of Lincoln’s remembered the ceremony as a “gala day.” Still, it also somehow lacked dignity. Jacksonville, the Illinois town where the funeral was held, was a dry town, but revelers managed to smuggle in plenty of liquor. Noisy, drunken teenagers caroused, and soldiers paraded through the town to Hardin’s house. The central square, observed Lincoln’s friend, “is overrun with mounted marshals, dressed with enormous white sashes, who are curvetting and galloping about in every direction, apparently with no other object in view than to show themselves off.” At the burial, buglers from Hardin’s regiment played taps, and local legislators wore black crepe armbands in his memory.55
The war euphoria began to take on a circus atmosphere in Springfield. At the Battle of Cerro Gordo, troops from the Fourth Illinois captured Santa Anna’s wooden leg, and hauled the prosthesis back to the state capitol. The American forces sometimes seemed intoxicated by their victories. Volunteers returned home from the battles amid “a veritable frenzy of robberies, murders, and rapes.” At least one mother of a Mexican girl begged for help recovering her missing daughter, who had run off with an American soldier. In Springfield, a local Presbyterian preacher complained that returning veterans had become “a moral pest to society.” Still, the clergyman’s views were by no means universal. During one appearance he was threatened and shouted down by local politicians.56
American troops finally punched through to Mexico City in September 1847. Earlier that year, General Winfield Scott had landed a force of American troops in the Gulf Coast city of Vera Cruz. Scott steadily pushed west toward the capital while Taylor’s men surged south. Now, under the scorching September sun, columns of Scott’s men poured into Mexico City’s central square through clouds of still-dissipating gunpowder fumes. Mexicans, perhaps impressed by the gold-braided figure of General Scott on horseback, found themselves bursting into applause. At Chapultepec, the hilltop Mexican palace, ecstatic soldiers plunged an American flag into the ramparts, and then swarmed around their victorious commander. The Duke of Wellington ultimately praised Scott as the “greatest living soldier.”57
The United States was still vibrating with enthusiasm in the fall of 1847, as Abraham and Mary Lincoln prepared to leave Springfield for Washington. Lincoln, by his thirty-eighth birthday, had achieved an admirable degree of success in his home state. A reporter who traveled with Lincoln throughout the district found himself amazed at how the gangly lawyer seemed to know everyone he met. He had clearly charmed his local Whig newspaper. “Mr. Lincoln, the member of Congress-elect from this district, has just set out on his way to the city of Washington,” reported the Illinois Weekly Journal in late October. “His family is with him; they intend to visit their friends and relatives in Kentucky before they take up the line of march for the seat of government. Success to our talented member of Congress. He will find many men in Congress who possess twice the good looks, and not half the good sense, of our own representative.”58
A Spirit of Wild Adventure
The Lincolns stopped at Mary’s family home in Kentucky on their way to Washington, arriving in Lexington on a bitterly cold November day. The entire Todd family crowded into their chilly front hallway as the visitors stepped inside. Mary, then a twenty-nine-year-old beauty, entered first. “To my mind,” recalled her half-sister, Emilie, “she was lovely,” with “clear, sparkling blue eyes … smooth white skin with a fresh, faint wild-rose color in her cheeks; and glossy light brown hair, which fell in soft, short curls behind each ear.” Lincoln, clutching his son Robert, followed behind his wife. As the congressman-elect placed the boy on the floor, Emilie, then just a small girl, could not help but think of the story of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” She feared, she later recalled, that Lincoln “might be the hungry giant of the story.” Lincoln wore a black cloak draped over his shoulders and a fur cap with ear straps that covered most of his face. “Expecting to hear the, ‘Fee, fi, fo, fum!,’ ” Emilie remembered, “I shrank closer to my mother and tried to hide behind her voluminous skirts.”59
Lexington was nearly deserted. Many of the city’s young men were still away fighting in Mexico. The national euphoria was tempered by a deep sense of sorrow for some of the city’s most prominent citizens who had been killed in the war. Henry Clay Jr., the son of the Todds’ illustrious neighbor, was one casualty. Like Hardin, the young man had been killed at the Battle of Buena Vista, speared multiple times by enemy lances. By the time Lincoln arrived in Lexington, the Sage of Ashland was complaining that he had been “tortured” by the stories of his son’s death and “the possible outrages committed upon his body.” Clay, Lincoln was soon to find out, had turned bitterly against the Mexican War by the fall of 1847.60
In the stately Todd home, Lincoln spent most of his time upstairs in a back parlor and a narrow passageway filled with bookshelves. The Todd library included co
pies of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and lives of Cromwell and Napoleon. Still, for Lincoln, the highlight of the Lexington stop must have been the opportunity to see his idol Henry Clay in person. Lincoln once remarked that he “almost worshipped” the Whig elder. Clay, Lincoln said, was his “beau ideal of a statesman.” At one point the Railsplitter even began dressing like his hero, sporting a denim suit instead of English broadcloth, to support local manufactures. In early November, the local newspaper reported that the famed orator would deliver an address on the Mexican War at the Lexington courthouse. Lincoln would not have missed the performance.61
Clay, like Lincoln, had at first mildly rallied behind the Mexican War effort. “I felt half inclined to ask for some little nook or corner in the army in which I might serve in avenging the wrongs to my country,” Clay told a banquet audience in New Orleans in late 1846, perhaps attempting to make a joke. “I have thought that I might yet be able to capture or to slay a Mexican.” Yet when his own son decided to join the U.S. troops, Clay balked. Though he ultimately gave his son a couple of pistols to take with him to Mexico, the father complained that he wished the war were “more reconcilable with the dictates of conscience.” If he had any remaining sympathies for the war effort, they evaporated after his boy was killed at Buena Vista. By April 1847 the Sage of Ashland was deriding the war as “calamitous, as well as unjust and unnecessary.”62
By Lincoln’s visit, Clay was past his prime. At seventy-one, he had failed in several bids for the presidency. The Great Compromiser acknowledged that he was “in the autumn of life” and felt “the frost of age.” Yet when he spoke, the old man could still draw a crowd. His voice, one contemporary recalled, could sound “soft as a lute or full as a trumpet.” On the Friday night before his remarks, supporters flooded into Lexington, filling the local taverns. The audience grew so large that the event’s organizers, which included Lincoln’s father-in-law, moved it from the courthouse to a large brick building that could accommodate the throng. Clay took his place at the head of a makeshift platform organizers had thrown up at the front of the room. Rain had been pouring down on the city when the statesman began to speak.63
As Clay began his remarks, he noted that the weather was “dark and gloomy, unsettled and uncertain, like the condition of our country, in regard to the unnatural war with Mexico.” He insisted that the war should be brought to “a satisfactory close.” The conflict, he told the crowd, “is no war of defense, but one unnecessary and of offensive aggression. It is Mexico that is defending her fire-sides, her castles and her altars, not we.”
The war threatened to shatter the union’s delicate sectional balance, and was slowly eroding the American character. “War unhinges society, disturbs its peaceful and regular industry, and scatters poisonous seeds of disease and immorality, which continue to germinate and diffuse their baneful influence long after it has ceased,” he said. “Dazzling by its glitter, pomp and pageantry, it begets a spirit of wild adventure and romantic enterprise, and often disqualifies those who embark in it, after their return from the bloody fields of battle, from engaging in the industrious and peaceful vocations of life.”
Clay subtly criticized his own party. Whigs, he said, had “lent too ready a facility” to the prosecution of the conflict, “without careful examination into the objects of the war.” Congress had an obligation to exert its constitutional authority and force President Polk to more clearly define the war’s aims. “Such a vast and tremendous power ought not to be confided to the perilous exercise of one single man,” he said. If Polk had the power to start a war alone, he asked, “where is the difference between our free government and that of any other nation which may be governed by an absolute czar, emperor, or king?” Clay insisted that he was particularly “shocked and alarmed” by the increasingly loud talk of annexing the entire country of Mexico. “Of all the dangers and misfortunes which could befall this nation,” he said, “I should regard that of its becoming a warlike and conquering power the most direful and fatal.”64
Clay spoke for two and a half hours, reviewing the history of the Mexican War and offering his prescriptions for ending it. Soon after he concluded his remarks, news of the speech flashed throughout the country. James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, paid $500 to charter a train to take the text of Clay’s speech from Lexington to Cincinnati. From there telegraph operators beamed it to the newspaper’s offices in Manhattan. Britain’s foreign minister, Lord Palmerston, praised the speech for rejecting Polk’s “aggressive policy.” At least some Illinois Whigs, however, worried that Clay’s bold anti-war stance could hurt the party in the next year’s presidential election. “That speech of Mr. Clay,” an Illinois friend wrote Lincoln, “will beat us as a party for years to come, unless we can unite upon ‘Old Zac’ [Zachary Taylor].”65
Lincoln may have had the opportunity to continue the dialogue over a dinner with Clay that November. An acquaintance of Lincoln’s later insisted that the two men had shared a meal at Ashland during this visit. Historians find this difficult to believe, since Lincoln never mentioned the encounter and there is no corroborating evidence to support the claim. In any case, Lincoln later told friends that he was slightly disappointed with his first impression of the statesman. Clay had read from a prepared text rather than speaking extemporaneously. His delivery, one of Lincoln’s acquaintances later recalled, “did not come up to Mr. Lincoln’s expectations.” Still, the remarks clearly made a deep impression on the congressman-elect. In just two months, he would heed Clay’s call and bring the fight to President Polk on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.66
The So-Called City of Washington
The nation’s capital in the fall of 1847 was still “an ill-contrived, ill-arranged, rambling, scrambling village.” Farm animals, including pigs and geese, wandered through the city’s muddy streets. Only Pennsylvania Avenue, with its rows of shops selling “French wines, Parisian millinery, and fine English woolens” held much charm for worldly visitors. One French diplomat complained that the whole place amounted to “neither city nor village” and said it displayed “a miserable, desolate look.” The diplomat derided the capital as “the so-called city of Washington.”67
The Lincolns arrived at the central station late on the night of December 2, 1847. At the depot, the usual throng of bums and pushy hackney-cab drivers likely provided an unpleasant welcome. The congressman-elect and his family made their way to Brown’s “Indian Queen” Hotel, a local flophouse with an image of Pocahontas on the sign out front. In the reservation book, someone scrawled a terse record of their visit: “A. Lincoln & Lady 2 children, Illinois.” The family soon moved to Mrs. Sprigg’s, a pleasant boardinghouse on the current location of the Library of Congress, with windows overlooking the “shade trees and shrubbery” of Capitol Park.68
From Mrs. Sprigg’s, it was only a short walk for Lincoln to the House chamber in the Capitol building. The hall resembled a Greek amphitheater, with rows of mahogany desks arranged in a semicircle around a “richly draped” speaker’s platform. Lincoln drew seat number 191—a dismal spot in the last row. In front of Lincoln sat Alexander Stephens, a slight, wiry figure who would one day become the vice president of the Confederacy. Stephens thought his new colleague was “careless as to his manners and awkward in his speech,” but Lincoln also possessed a peculiar brand of magnetism. “Socially,” recalled Stephens, “he always kept his company in a roar of laughter.”69
Lincoln’s fellow Whig congressmen included former president John Quincy Adams, who had eschewed retirement in exchange for a chance to settle some old Washington grudges. Adams could be eccentric and ornery, especially in later life. He liked to skinny-dip in the Potomac and described himself as “an unsocial savage.” Yet even in the late 1840s, he remained one of the nation’s most thoughtful and accomplished foreign-policy thinkers. As a young man, Adams had served as a U.S. envoy in Russia. With Henry Clay, he had helped to negotiate an end to the War of 1812 wi
th British diplomats in Belgium. Adams could be a vigorous, self-righteous expansionist. He believed that God had anointed Americans to spread across the entire continent. Still, his moralistic worldview also came with a powerful sense of justice. “Your conscience,” his father, John Adams, had once written to his son at his post in St. Petersburg, “is the minister plenipotentiary of God Almighty in your breast. See to it that this minister never negotiates in vain. Attend to him in opposition to all the courts in the world.”70
Adams’s conscience (and perhaps his political instincts) told him that the Mexican War was all wrong. The United States, the former president once declared in another context, “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” Adams now counted himself among fourteen “irreconcilables” in the House who had voted against the declaration of war. The curmudgeonly former president had little patience for the rowdy new brand of expansionism embodied in “Mr. Polk’s War.” In the House chamber one day, legislators cheerfully debated among themselves about the correct pronunciation of the word “Illinois.” Overhearing the conversation, Adams snapped that judging “from the character of the representatives in this congress from that state, I should decide unhesitatingly that the proper pronunciation was ‘All noise.’ ”71
The House swore in Lincoln and the other freshman representatives on December 6. The following day the war over the war began. On December 7, President Polk sent his annual message—a forerunner of the modern State of the Union—to Congress. A clerk read it before the assembled chamber. The president shrewdly sought to capitalize on the national elation over the capture of Mexico City. He lauded the “rapid and brilliant success of our arms and the vast extent of the enemy’s territory, which [has] been overrun and conquered.” Polk faulted Mexican troops for “striking the first blow, and shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil.” The United States, the president claimed, was “the aggrieved nation” and was “compelled in self-defense to repel the invader and to vindicate the national honor and interests by prosecuting [the war] with vigor until we could obtain a just and honorable peace.”
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