The pro-Taylor assault of Lincoln and the other Young Indians ultimately paid off. The general defeated both Cass and Van Buren for the presidency, although Taylor’s margin in the popular vote amounted to only three percentage points. At the general’s inauguration, on a “cold, gusty day, filled with flurries of rain and snow,” Lincoln shared in the revelry with mixed feelings. Although thrilled at the Whig victory, Lincoln appeared a little sad at the prospect of leaving Washington as the end of his term approached. He had campaigned for his office on the principle that “turn about is fair play.” Now, honoring his promise, he was obliged to eschew a second term in order to give his former law partner Stephen Logan his own opportunity. With his return to Springfield looming, Lincoln tried to enjoy himself, remaining at Taylor’s inaugural ball until after four a.m. When he finally left, the staff had already gone home, leaving the hats and coats in a heap on the floor. Drunken revelers began throwing punches as they scrambled to recover their possessions. Lincoln ultimately left the ball without finding his hat. He walked home to his boardinghouse in the cold.95
Lincoln’s opposition to Polk’s conduct of the Mexican War is often viewed as an early political failure. Herndon (and many of Lincoln’s other early biographers) certainly saw it that way. There is some evidence that Lincoln himself regretted his uncompromising stance. John Hay later reported Lincoln as president quoting his fellow Illinois Whig Justin Butterfield about the wisdom of enthusiastically supporting one’s country in wartime. “I opposed one war,” Lincoln recalled Butterfield saying. “That was enough for me. I am now perpetually in favor of war, pestilence and famine.”96
Modern historians, however, have questioned whether Lincoln’s opposition was really such a political disaster. His stance, after all, was not so different from his other Midwestern Whig colleagues in Congress.97 A larger but related question is whether Lincoln’s position was a principled stance against American foreign-policy excess or a cynical attempt to get ahead in party politics. The answer is neither and both. Lincoln—and this was a large part of his brilliance and originality as a statesman—was somehow able to remain both a principled idealist and a pragmatic realist throughout his career. That combination would serve the sixteenth president well in his relations with the great powers of Europe, whose leaders were often masters of that same mysterious art.98
In any event, there is no denying that by the end of his term in Congress, Lincoln had evolved considerably as a foreign-policy thinker. As a young man he had viewed foreign affairs simply as a source of adventure and a means of escape from Midwestern drudgery. Until the debate over Texas annexation and the subsequent Mexican War, he had given the topic little serious thought. Yet over the course of Lincoln’s time in Congress, he had begun to develop what would later become a sound and nuanced approach to foreign affairs. He understood that some territorial expansion was inevitable in a young and growing country. Yet he worked ceaselessly to keep it from upsetting the sectional balance and violating the principles of international justice that many Americans held dear.99
In the winter of 1848, however, Lincoln still remained a long way from the paragon of executive power that he would later become. His opposition to Polk’s conduct had been based on the principle that “no one man” could launch a war—a stark challenge to the office of the presidency. He was determined, as he told Herndon, to keep presidents from occupying the space “where kings have always stood.” Lincoln’s moral sense and political instincts during the Mexican War had proved sound. Yet it would take the brutal necessities of the Civil War to convince him that the exigencies of foreign affairs would often demand the strong hand of a determined executive—sometimes, as Polk had demonstrated, even in defiance of Congress.
Lincoln returned to Springfield in early 1849. His friends noticed that he brought a considerable new trove of off-color stories home with him from Washington. (The young politician, a friend once remarked, had a lifelong “insane love in telling dirty and smutty stories.”) Yet Lincoln had also acquired a renewed “soberness of thought.” Lincoln had witnessed his young country in the throes of its first major growing pains. He had also seen the White House up close—a tantalizing prize. As Lincoln returned to his law practice, friends noticed a peculiar vacant stare that would sometimes flash across their former congressman’s face. It resembled, one of them later recalled to Billy Herndon, a “stargazing thinking look.”100
Ghosts of the Mexican War
To residents of Ottawa, Illinois, the columns of pilgrims streaming into town—cantering on horseback, drifting on boats, bouncing along in carriages—looked like a vast army preparing for battle. Rows of campfires blinked along the approaches into the village, warming travelers who could find no room in local hotels. The following morning, August 21, 1858, so many visitors stomped through Ottawa’s dirt roads that the whole place “resembled a vast smokehouse.” The unforgiving late summer sun and oppressive heat offered no quarter to the standing-room-only crowd that had assembled to watch Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debate.101
A decade had elapsed since Lincoln’s term in Congress. Now he wanted to return to Washington. He had spent the interval building up his law practice, traveling the frontier circuit, and dabbling in the increasingly acrimonious debate over slavery—a battle that the Mexican War had helped to touch off. Now Lincoln was seeking a seat in the U.S. Senate as a candidate from the newly formed Republican Party. As Lincoln took his place on the platform in Ottawa, the ghosts of the Mexican War almost immediately came back to haunt him.
Stephen Douglas was a short, fat man whose body was topped by a “disproportionately huge head.” Cheeks punched with dimples flanked his “pug nose.” But when he spoke, he put his entire body into the effort, often to great effect. Today, as he hammered Lincoln on his Mexican War stance, the Little Giant “threw himself into contortions, shook his head, shook his fists.” Douglas’s entire body quivered “as with a palsy; his eyes protruded from their sockets; he raved like a mad bull.” The voice of Lincoln’s opponent sounded to one local reporter like “a demonized howl.”102
In his opening remarks, Douglas sketched out his vision for America—an increasingly powerful young nation beginning to assert itself on the world stage. The United States had grown “from a feeble nation,” he boomed, to “the most powerful on the face of the earth.” If the country followed Douglas’s policy proposals, it was destined to “go forward increasing in territory, in power, in strength and in glory until the republic of America shall be the North Star that shall guide the friends of freedom throughout the civilized world.” Douglas tore into Lincoln over his old Mexican War speeches. “Whilst in Congress,” the Little Giant began, Lincoln “distinguished himself by his opposition to the Mexican War, taking the side of the common enemy against his own country. And when he returned home, he found that the indignation of the people followed him everywhere, and he was again submerged or obliged to retire into private life, forgotten by his former friends.” The overheated audience whooped and groaned at Douglas’s opening volley.103
Lincoln, when it came time for his rejoinder, defended himself from Douglas’s assault. He reminded that while he opposed the way Polk had begun the conflict, he had always voted supplies to the troops. Yet Lincoln and Douglas were not simply bickering over an old war. The classic debates, which stretched out over two months during the fall of 1858, really amounted to a profound conversation over the nature of American power itself.104
By the fall of 1858, Douglas had amassed a lengthy record of encouraging U.S. expansion. He had long lobbied for a transcontinental railroad, and he had supported the annexation of Texas and Oregon. In a subsequent debate, Douglas compared antiexpansionists to fathers who wanted to place their twelve-year-old sons in hoops to keep them from growing up. “Either the hoop must burst and be rent asunder,” Douglas insisted, “or the child must die. So it would be with this great nation.”105
Lincoln, for his part, argued that he was “not generall
y opposed to honest acquisition of territory.” The real test, he said, would be whether expansion “would or would not aggravate the slavery question.” Yet Douglas was relentless. By late October the Democrat was still hounding Lincoln about his Mexican War votes. Douglas maintained that Lincoln’s statements on the war “were all sent to Mexico and printed in the Mexican language, and read at the head of the Mexican army.” Lincoln’s opposition, Douglas claimed, “induced the Mexicans to hold out the longer, and the guerrillas to keep up their warfare on the roadside, and to poison our men, and to take the lives of our soldiers wherever and whenever they could.”106
Billy Herndon did his best to defend his law partner. He threw himself into the campaign, stumping through the state visiting out-of-the-way schoolhouses and small-town churches. For the debates with Douglas, Herndon helped Lincoln compile scrapbooks stuffed with newspaper clippings to bolster the candidate’s arguments. Lincoln and Herndon must have known that American power and expansion would factor heavily into the debates. The pocket-size, leather-bound notebooks, currently archived at the Library of Congress, overflow with statistics about America’s rising material strength and tables comparing the United States to European and other foreign countries. The United States boasted “the longest railroad on the globe,” produced $15 million worth of nonagricultural products each year, and possessed 33,000 miles of overland telegraph wires—nearly as many as all of Europe—according to the clips. America’s gold, copper, lead, and iron mines, according to another clipping, were “among the richest in the world.”107
Herndon had always displayed an ambivalent attitude toward power. On the one hand, he sometimes seemed to embrace a muscular foreign policy—as his Mexican War stance and his at least occasional advocacy for Cuban annexation demonstrate. Although he always remained firmly in Lincoln’s corner, Herndon admired Douglas’s nerve and once acknowledged that he had “a kind of undeveloped feeling” for the Little Giant. And yet, even as he sometimes supported expansion, Herndon’s crusading temperament never allowed him to feel comfortable with the unprincipled pursuit of the national interest. For Herndon, power was a dirty word—something to cleanse or expel. “I hate power,” he once told an Illinois acquaintance.108
Lincoln, on the other hand, had long since made his peace with the gritty realities of power. He had put in his time on Aristocracy Hill, married one of their own. When it was politically necessary, he embraced convenient hypocrisies. He accepted power and sin as facts of life, things that could be managed but never completely eliminated. Understanding Lincoln’s attitude toward power is critical to making sense of Lincoln’s Mexican War policy—and later his approach to foreign affairs during the Civil War.
“The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject anything, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good,” Lincoln once told an audience as a young congressman. “There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost everything, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.”109
Lincoln applied his mixed assessment of human nature to personal relationships as well as foreign affairs.110 When Lincoln finally lost his 1858 Senate race to Douglas, he assumed he would be abandoned by the leaders of his party. After so many years in politics, he had little faith in the unconditional goodwill of powerful men. Lincoln appeared resentful and heartbroken when an acquaintance visited him at his Springfield law office on the day Douglas was reelected. “I expect everyone to desert me,” Lincoln said, “except Billy.”111
CHAPTER TWO
Lincoln vs. Seward
LINCOLN’S WORST FEARS ABOUT HIS POLITICAL FATE WERE OVERBLOWN. ONLY TWO YEARS AFTER LOSING HIS SENATE RACE, HE FOUND HIMSELF IN A SMALL, CROWDED OFFICE ON the second floor of the state house in Springfield, surrounded by supplicants of “as many nationalities as could easily be brought together [in] the West.” Visitors filed past the “heaps and hills” of newspapers that were piled on the tables. A relaxed Lincoln, growing the beginnings of a wispy beard, pumped hands and warmly slapped backs. Outside, an icy wind howled over the prairie. The crush of uncouth visitors repulsed some witnesses. One newspaperman marveled at the “disagreeably intense” odor that filled the room. Lincoln was not complaining. After nearly thirty years climbing Illinois’s political ladder, he was finally president-elect.1
The American political landscape had evolved dramatically since Lincoln’s time in Congress more than a decade earlier. He had spent the first phase of his career as a loyal Whig, focusing primarily on economic issues like improving roads and canals.2 Yet in the wake of the Mexican War, and particularly the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854—which reopened the possibility that slavery might be established in newly acquired territories under the doctrine of “popular sovereignty”—the old Whig Party had splintered. New battle lines emerged around the issue of human bondage. “Conscience Whigs” embraced the reinvigorated movement to abolish slavery, while more conservative “Cotton Whigs” feared a dramatic shift in the sectional balance. Lincoln attempted to bridge the divide by helping to found the new Republican Party in the mid-1850s. The Railsplitter’s old antagonist Stephen Douglas, for his part, sought to take up the Democratic standard as the 1860 election approached.3
Lincoln’s opponents, too, were badly divided along regional and ideological lines in 1860. Southern fire-eaters had nominated their own candidate, John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, and another new group made up partly of disaffected southern Whigs—dubbed the Constitutional Union Party—siphoned off additional votes. Lincoln ultimately defeated Douglas and his other rivals by a huge margin in 1860. New Jersey was the only northern state he failed to win in the Electoral College.
Still, just weeks after the polls closed, the president-elect was forced to watch his prize dissolve. Angered by Lincoln’s election and the rise of the Republicans to power, South Carolina voted to secede in December, followed by an avalanche of other states—first Mississippi, then Florida, Alabama, Georgia. Advisers urged the president-elect to hurry to Washington and take charge of the government as soon as possible. Lincoln, already looking worn and pale, was in no rush. “I expect they will drive me insane after I get there,” he told reporters, “and I want to keep tolerably sane, at least until after the inauguration.”4
Lincoln managed to keep his head almost until Inauguration Day, which in the midnineteenth century did not take place until well into the New Year. Yet by early March, as expected, the president-elect was losing it. His young secretary, John Hay, thought his boss was beginning to show the symptoms of a man under “a good deal of hydraulic pressure.” On top of the secession crisis, rumors poured in from abroad about the malign intentions of the European powers. John McClintock, a Methodist pastor in Paris, wrote to caution the president that the chaos across the Atlantic looked like weakness to Europeans. “The public mind both of France and England is befogged on the American question,” McClintock warned Lincoln. It was “of the utmost importance,” the clergyman insisted, that the president should quickly fill the consular slots in Paris and London with “competent men.”5
Lincoln began by choosing William Henry Seward as his chief diplomat. Short and pompous, with a husky voice and small, darting blue eyes, Seward had been the president’s main competition for the Republican nomination.6 The former New York governor could be irascible. His dinner-table conversation reminded one guest of “a man soliloquizing aloud.” Yet he was also well connected and well traveled. “Governor Seward, there is one part of my work that I shall have to leave largely to you,” the president told his nominee for secretary of state shortly after he arrived in the capital. “I shall have to depend upon you for taking care of these matters of foreign affairs, of which I know so little, and with which I reckon you are familiar.” Lincoln ordered Seward to make sure the American legations in England, France, Spain, and Mexico were “guarded as strongly and quickly as possib
le.”7
Seward was never a man to underestimate his own importance. When Lincoln offered him the post, the New Yorker dashed off a terse letter to his wife: “I have advised Mr. L. that I will not decline. It is inevitable. I will try to save freedom and my country.” As the secession crisis worsened, Seward reported home that he had “assumed a sort of dictatorship for defense,” in the capital. A couple of weeks later he told his wife that the whole government “would fall into consternation and despair” if he left Washington for even a few days. “I am the only hopeful, calm, conciliatory person here,” he boasted.8
Lincoln may have been elected president, but Seward intended to carve out his own power center. There “exists no great difference between an elected president of the United States and a hereditary monarch,” Seward explained to one European diplomat in Washington. “The latter is called to the throne through the accident of birth, the former through the chances which make his election possible. The actual direction of public affairs belongs to the leader of the ruling party here just as in a hereditary principality.” Lincoln’s allies wrote to warn him that Seward considered the president-elect his subordinate, “just as the queen or king of England is subject to the policy of the ministry.”9
Indeed, at least at first, Lincoln did not seem up to the task. When he finally reached Washington, the stress physically overwhelmed him. On bad days the president threatened to storm out onto the south lawn of the Executive Mansion and hang himself from a tree. Lincoln had trouble sleeping, and he rarely found time to eat. Some afternoons he simply went to bed after lunch. “If to be the head of Hell is as hard as what I have to undergo here,” the president complained, “I could find it in my heart to pity Satan himself.” Lincoln had always been sensitive to changes in the climate. Harsh weather aggravated his “defective nerves,” he once told a friend. The unsteady Washington elements—alternating between a crisp, cool spring, and a clammy Indian summer—may have made matters worse. By late March, high winds had enveloped the entire city in a suffocating cloud of yellow dust. Mary Lincoln told friends that the president had “keeled over” with a migraine.10
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