by Rich Lowry
Lincoln picked up other standard volumes of law and read them whenever he could, even as he kept surveying “to pay board and clothing bills.” People remembered seeing him studying barefoot under a tree. Russell Godbey, an acquaintance, told Herndon “the first time I Ever Saw him with a law book in his hands he was Sitting astraddle of Jake Bails wood pile in New Salem—Said to him—‘Abe—what are you studying’ ‘Studying law’—replied Abe. ‘Great God Almighty—’ Said Godbey.” One New Salemite thought, “he read so much—was so studious—took so little physical exercise—was so laborious in his studies that he became Emaciated & his best friends were afraid that he would craze himself.”
By 1837, Lincoln was officially enrolled as a lawyer. That year, he borrowed a horse, packed his few belongings in his saddlebags, and left a dying New Salem. He headed to Springfield. There he became law partners with the already-established John Stuart, a boon to the neophyte barrister. The first case we know that he handled involved a disagreement over payment to James P. Hawthorn for breaking the sod on thirty-eight acres of David Wooldridge’s land.
It was the kind of suit you could imagine entangling his father, who once had to sue for payment for hewing timbers. In the speech recalled by John Roll noting his own putative slavery, Lincoln supposedly called out, “There is my old friend John Roll. He used to be a slave, but he has made himself free, and I used to be a slave, and now I am so free they let me practice law.” For him, the law office felt like a liberation, from out of the bondage of toil for others into the fresh free air of making the most of his talents.
Lincoln had risen above drudgery. He would be paid for his knowledge and analytical prowess. He would read, write, and argue for a living. He wasn’t a man of the axe, but of the book—and of those silver half-dollars. He was a lawyer and a politician, though of a particular type. By habit, outlook, and partisan commitment, Lincoln emerged from the backwoods, not a Jacksonian Democrat like so many of his neighbors, but a devoted Whig.
Chapter 2
“The Sober, Industrious, Thriving People”: A Devoted Whig
He loved the struggling masses—all uprising towards a higher Civilization had his assent & his prayer.
—DAVID DAVIS, INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM HERNDON, 1866
When Lincoln was offered his deputy surveyorship in 1833 he wasn’t in a position to be picky. He needed to eat. Yet delighted as he was by the opportunity, he made a stipulation before taking it. A man named John Moore Fisk related the story to Herndon: A friend of Lincoln’s named Pollard Simmons knew Lincoln “was very poor at that time” and so wanted to do Lincoln a favor. He asked the surveyor of Sangamon County, John Calhoun, to give Lincoln the deputy job. Calhoun agreed. So far, so good. But Calhoun was a Democrat and it was a political appointment, although a minor one.
Fisk tells the rest: “Simmons got on his horse and went on the hunt of Lincoln whom he found in the woods mauling rails. Simmons Said ‘Lincoln I’ve got you a job’ and to which Lincoln replied—‘Pollard, I thank you for your trouble, but now let me ask you a question—Do I have to give up any of my principles for this job? If I have to surrender any thought or principle to get it I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole.’ ‘No, you do not Lincoln,’ said Pollard Simmons, and to which Lincoln replied—‘Ill accept the office and now I thank you and my superior for it.’ ”
At this point in his life, Lincoln wasn’t established in anything—except, apparently, his Whig principles. The surveying job fell into his lap like manna from heaven. It made it possible for him to earn a living. But that didn’t trump his political commitments. Years later, in 1844, Lincoln ended up engaging Calhoun in a series of debates over tariff policy. According to one witness, “they were the best debaters—most Logical & finest debates on the Tariff question in the State.”
In Illinois in the 1830s, there wasn’t much reason to be a Whig other than principle and personal predilection. It was a heavily Jacksonian state, far from the party’s political and cultural stronghold in New England. The Whigs never elected a governor or senator in Illinois. They always lost the state in presidential elections. “From 1830 up to 1837 the tendency in Illinois was for every man of ambition to turn Democrite,” Lincoln’s early law partner John Todd Stuart told Herndon. “There was a fear,” he explained, “that the Yankees about 1832 to 1837 imigrating to Ills would be whig—but when they got here were no more than democrats.”
Lincoln especially disdained the opportunists who switched from Whig to Democrat to better make their way in the state. Joshua Speed wrote a letter to Herndon recounting an incident from Lincoln’s campaign for the legislature in 1836. Lincoln gave a speech in Springfield that thrilled the Whigs in attendance and dispirited the Democrats. George Forquer, a Democrat of some prominence, decided to rebut Lincoln and teach him a lesson. Speed writes, “Forquer had been a whig—one of the Champions of the party—But had then recently joined the Democratic party and Almost simultaneous with his change—had been appointed Register of the land office—which office he then held.”
Forquer had apparently made the most of it: “Just about that time Mr F had Completed a neat frame house—the best house then in the village of Springfield and upon it had erected a lightning rod—the only one in the place and the first one Mr Lincoln had evr observed.”
When Forquer rose at the event to counter Lincoln he “commenced by saying that this young man would have to be taken down and was sorry that the task devolved upon him.” According to Speed, during his answer “his whole manner asserted & claimed superiority.” When Forquer finished, Lincoln replied in turn. He homed in on Forquer’s party switch: “The gentleman has alluded to my being a young man—I am older in years than I am in the tricks and trades of politicians—I desire to live—and I disire place and distinction as a politician—but I would rather die now than like the gentleman live to see the day that I would have to erect a lightning rod to protect a guilty Conscience from an offended God.”
A few years later, Lincoln lampooned another party-switcher named Josiah Lamborn with a story of the misadventure of a slave in Kentucky. The slave was supposed to deliver two puppies to a neighbor, but when he stopped for a drink on his way, pranksters substituted piglets for the puppies, unbeknownst to him. Surprised by the advent of the piglets when he arrived to make his delivery, he turned around to go back home with them. When he stopped for another drink, the jokesters switched the puppies back. The slave exclaimed to his master when he arrived home, “I isn’t drunk, but dem dar puppies can be pigs or puppies just when dey please!” Lamborn, too, Lincoln charged, could change parties “just when he pleased.”
Lincoln’s Whiggery wasn’t subject to change. It derived from a place deep within his character. Lincoln felt drawn to the kind of people who tended to be Whigs, the “better sort,” people who were firmly embedded within the commercial economy and welcomed its ethos. As the great historian of the Whigs Daniel Walker Howe points out, Lincoln’s partisan commitment to the Whigs was the political expression of his individual drive, and the means by which he hoped to help his countrymen elevate themselves. He was a Whig out of aspiration—both for himself and the nation.*
This same spirit would eventually be transferred to his Republicanism, but his Whig politics matter on their own terms. He was a Whig during the entire existence of the party, for about twenty years in total. He was a proto-Whig before he ran for office and a Whig during the party’s breakup in the sectional tensions of the 1850s. He was a Whig for all of his legislative career, in the Illinois House and during his one term in Congress (his central Illinois was more favorable territory for the party). He worked to build the Whig Party in Illinois, to defend and refine its doctrines, and to elect its presidential candidates. If above all else Lincoln was a politician, he was first and foremost a Whig.
And that meant, a Henry Clay man. J. Rowan Herndon, a c
ousin of William Herndon who lived in New Salem, called Lincoln, “one of the most Devoted Clay whigs in all the State. Henry Clay was his favorite of all the great men of the Nation[—]he allbut worshiped his name.” Lincoln would cite Clay in his famous debates with Douglas dozens of times. In the first debate, he called Clay “my beau ideal of a statesman, the man for whom I fought all my humble life.” In a letter from the White House in 1861, he referred to Clay as “him whom, during my whole political life, I have loved and revered as a teacher and leader.”
A gentleman farmer from Kentucky, the charismatic Clay inspired intense devotion. He occupied the commanding heights of American politics for decades, as Speaker of the House, as a senator, and as a frequent contender for the presidency. Clay is often said to have originated the phrase “self-made man,” which eventually became synonymous with Lincoln. Confronted with the argument that one of his policies—the tariff—would only support the well-heeled, Clay replied: “In Kentucky, almost every manufactory known to me, is in the hands of enterprising and self-made men, who have acquired whatever wealth they possess by patient and diligent labor.” Clay depicted his own ascent as a rise up by the bootstraps. If he didn’t come from poverty, he was self-educated. In his youth, he had taken the grain to the mill in an area referred to as the “slashes.” Hence, he was the “Millboy of the Slashes,” who had ascended to the status of great statesman.
Elected to Congress in 1810, Clay started his career as a Jeffersonian hater of banks and Great Britain. A “War Hawk,” he agitated for hostilities with Britain—and got them good and hard in the War of 1812. The United States suffered serial humiliations stemming from its military and financial weakness. The White House burned and the government nearly went bankrupt, while New England threatened to secede. A dismayed Clay turned around after the war and championed his famous “American System”—banks, tariffs, and infrastructure—to strengthen the economy and the union. It became the signature program of the Whigs.
The Whigs can’t be pinned down cleanly in terms of contemporary political taxonomy. Daniel Walker Howe points to a possible very rough shorthand. One might say that the Whigs supported the “positive liberal state” (affirmatively working to increase opportunity and promote the public welfare), while the Democrats believed in the “negative liberal state” (leaving people to their own devices). Howe objects to this schema, though, because it makes Whigs sound too much like contemporary liberals, when the Whigs were much more concerned with upholding moral standards and imposing discipline.
While the Whigs opposed executive power, they supported government action in furtherance of economic development. They believed in commerce and industrialization, saw a harmony of interests in all classes of society, and thought a rising tide lifts all boats. Denounced as the party of the rich, the Whigs countered via one of their newspapers: “Who are the rich men of our country? They are the enterprising mechanic, who raises himself by his ingenious labors from the dust and turmoil of his workshop, to an abode of ease and elegance; the industrious tradesman, whose patient frugality enables him at last to accumulate enough to forego the duties of the counter and indulge a well-earned leisure.”
Henry Clay’s program, Howe writes, embodied the Whig values of “order, harmony, purposefulness, and improvement.” The Whigs championed an evangelical-inflected bourgeois morality. Their vision of economic progress meshed with a commitment to moral progress. A mass gathering of Whigs at Bunker Hill in 1840 professed, “We believe especially, in the benign influence of religious feeling and moral instruction on the social, as well as on the individual, happiness of man.” The Whigs encouraged both individual efforts at improvement, through self-discipline and work, and collective efforts, exemplified by reform movements like temperance. They considered themselves the champions of the “sober, industrious, thriving people.”
As the historian of the Whigs Michael Holt relates, a fissure within the dominant Jeffersonian Republicans of the early nineteenth century ultimately created the Whigs. On the one hand, there were the moderate nationalists like Clay who supported a Hamiltonian economic program and stronger central government. On the other, there were the Old Republicans or Radicals who opposed any government centralization as a betrayal of the American Revolution.
The fiery spokesman for the latter tendency loved the simplicity of the yeoman farmer and hated the alleged greed and superficiality fostered by the economic development of the nationalists. They distrusted banks, financiers, and paper money, and therefore opposed the Clay agenda. They were egalitarians—at least when it came to the privileges of corporations or the wealth of businessmen (the riches of Southern planters were something else entirely).
The nationalists, Holt notes, had the advantage until the panic of 1819 stoked a populist reaction against the banks and the political establishment. In 1824, five different candidates ran for president. Andrew Jackson, the hero of the War of 1812, won a convincing plurality. But the election was thrown into the House, where John Quincy Adams, who had finished second in the presidential race, prevailed. An also-ran in the campaign, Henry Clay lent crucial backing to Adams in the House. President Adams subsequently made him secretary of state.
The Jackson forces screamed, “Corrupt bargain!” The charge had powerful overtones from Anglo-American history, since the king in England and colonial governors in America had sought to influence—or “corrupt”—the Parliament and colonial legislatures through alluring appointments. The slogan dogged Adams throughout his presidency and Clay for the rest of his career.
The rival Adams-Clay and Jackson alignments—destined to become the National Republicans and the Democratic Republicans (in other words, Democrats) respectively—now faced off. Jackson was the anti-establishment, anti-eastern champion, the scourge of corruption and vindicator of republican virtue. He characterized the fight as a “struggle between the virtue of the people and executive privilege.” Jackson considered himself an opponent of “all banks,” and had counseled a return to “our former habits of industry and simplicity” as the best prescription for the Panic of 1819. He was a friend of slave owners and hell on the Indians, whose appointed role in the Jacksonian vision was to get swept across the continent before a tide of white settlers. Unsurprisingly, Jackson found his political base in the South and the West,* although his support was by no means limited to those places. His supporters became pioneers in how to appeal to and mobilize ordinary voters in an incipient mass democracy, at a time when their rivals still practiced a dated, top-down politics.
In Adams, the Jackson forces had a perfect foil. The bookish Yankee had a résumé that would scream “elitist” in any era. Besides being a son of a president, he was a Harvard professor, a Massachusetts senator, a diplomat—a French speaker and incipient supporter of the metric system. He lacked the common touch, or really any touch at all. The Jacksonians mustered opposition to his support for high tariffs, internal improvements, and the general expansion of central power, although initiatives like a bankruptcy law (authorized by the Constitution) and a national university and astronomical observatory hardly heralded the arrival of unchecked Leviathan.
In 1828, Jackson brought down the electoral hammer on Adams in a contest, as a cheeky ditty had it, “Between J. Q. Adams, who can write / And Andy Jackson, who can fight.” Jackson won the largest percentage of the popular vote of any president up to the twentieth century and both houses of Congress. Despite his theoretical hatred of executive privilege, he imposed an unprecedented mass firing of federal officials for patronage reasons. Jackson established his personal dominance of American politics for the next decade. He became the sun, Henry Clay the moon. There’s a reason no one speaks of the “Age of Clay.”
As the National Republican presidential nominee in 1832, Clay hoped that a fight over rechartering the Bank of the United States would open up a powerful new avenue of attack for him. The Second Ba
nk of the United States—the first had been the baby of Alexander Hamilton—acted as an incipient central bank. Its notes were the country’s best paper currency and it provided some regulatory check on regional and local banks. A mixed public-private corporation, it also held potential for abuse by the well connected—imagine the Federal Reserve run by people seeking to make a profit. The headstrong president of the bank, Nicholas Biddle, pushed for a recharter four years early to force the issue. If in his zeal to kill the bank Jackson vetoed the measure after it passed Congress, Clay and his allies thought it would backfire on him. They calculated that it would turn off all the people in the South and the West who were dependent on access to cheap credit and reliable currency, and that Jackson’s high-handedness would alienate congressional leaders.
Instead, Jackson famously executed one of the most punishing acts of political jujitsu in American history. He hated the bank—as a bank, as an issuer of invidious paper currency, as a fount of privilege, and as a competing center of power. He issued a rousing veto message inveighing against it as an unconstitutional excrescence on the body politic tending toward its corruption: “Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress.” Biddle sniffed that the message had “all the fury of a chained panther biting the bars of his cage.” But it worked. Clay got crushed. He won fewer electoral votes than Adams in 1828 and got no votes at all in Georgia, Alabama, or Mississippi. “The election of 1832,” Holt writes, “clearly stamped the National Republican party as a loser and as the tool of the northeastern elite.”
From the ashes of the National Republicans, the Whigs gradually arose. States’ righters alienated by Jackson’s robust nationalism in the nullification crisis of 1832–33 (South Carolina defied the federal government over the tariff) provided the seedbed of Whig parties in the South. Jackson’s insistence on withdrawing deposits from the Bank of the United States (still in business until 1837, although not rechartered) in defiance of the law gave his opponents another hook to portray him as dangerous King Andrew the First and galvanized his adversaries in the Congress. Jackson ran through two Treasury secretaries before settling on the redoubtable Roger Taney—long before his star turn in Dred Scott—to work his will as interim secretary. The Senate censured Jackson, who fumed that he wanted to duel Clay over it, and Clay’s allies took over key Senate committees in a victory for the inchoate party.