by Rich Lowry
It managed to unite the wildly divergent strands of the anti-Jacksonian forces under the banner “Whig,” a hallowed name borrowed from the American Revolution and first promoted by a newspaper editor. At its core was opposition to executive usurpation, exemplified by Jackson with his willful temperament and authoritarian style. “The Whigs of the present day,” Clay said in 1834, were heirs of the Whigs who rose up against George III. He vowed to extend “the campaign of 1777.” But the revival of the spirit of the revolution got off to a bumpy start. In 1836, the Whigs didn’t manage to hold a national convention, nominate a unified candidate for president, or beat Jackson’s chosen successor, Martin Van Buren, who lacked all the animal political power of Old Hickory.
This is the motley, politically pressed crew to whom Lincoln hitched his political fortunes. “Always a whig in politics,” Lincoln attested to Jesse Fell in 1859, although this might not have been quite right (and, as a technical matter, the Whigs didn’t formally organize in Illinois until 1838). Dennis Hanks told Herndon, “I opposed Abe in Politics when he became whig—was till 20 years of age a Jackson Democrat—turned whig—or whiggish about 1828–9.” Nathaniel Grigsby, a neighbor and schoolmate of Lincoln’s, remembered: “Lincoln in Early years—say from 1820 to 25 was tending towards Democracy—He afterwards Changed.” This was right around the time Jackson was crushing John Adams nationally, and of course in Indiana (by double digits) and in Illinois (by a 2–1 margin). In the next presidential election, in 1832, Henry Clay got all of 31 percent of the vote in Illinois. Lincoln proudly noted years later that even though he lost his first legislative race, he won his own precinct 227–7. “And this too,” he wrote of himself, “while he was an avowed Clay man, and the precinct the autumn afterwards, giving a majority of 115 to Genl. Jackson over Mr. Clay.”
What attracted Lincoln to the Whigs? Why did he gravitate to the party that would never quite live down the idea that it was the heir to the defunct, aristocratic-friendly Federalists, that it was the party—in the abusive terms of the Democrats—of the “British-bought, bank-Federal-Whig gentry who wear ruffle shirts, silk stockings and Kid gloves”? Why did he associate himself, even before he had left home, even before he was out of Indiana, even before he made any money or had a profession, with the party of the snobs and the elitists, the moralists and the do-gooders? Because he wanted to be one of them. And because he wanted others to be like them, too.
Lincoln’s Whiggery was a statement of distinctiveness from his surroundings, and the assumptions and behaviors that came with them. It qualifies as one of what historian William Miller calls his “refusals, rejections, and disengagements.”
Lincoln grew up among Democrats. They were his neighbors and his family. They loved Andrew Jackson, the Mars of the backwoods, the vindicator of the West and the South and of the common farmer. “We were all Jackson boys & men at this time in Indiana,” recalled Nathaniel Grigsby. Having suffered enough of agricultural life, Lincoln didn’t look kindly on the agrarian romanticism of the Jacksonians. In a typical sentiment, the Jacksonian journalist William Leggett contrasted “ploughmen” with “merchants.” He preferred “hardy rustics” to “lank and sallow accountants, worn out with the sordid anxieties of traffic and the calculations of gain.”
Lincoln didn’t mind the accountants. It is telling that an early Whig influence on Lincoln was William Jones—a storekeeper. Lincoln worked for him in Indiana and, in the words of one contemporary, “young Abe was warmly attached to Jones.” The merchant was such a party stalwart that when Whig standard-bearer Henry Clay lost the presidential election in 1844, he supposedly took it so hard he couldn’t work for days. The store would have been a locus for political discussion and newspaper reading. Dennis Hanks said, “[I] think Col Jones made him [Lincoln] a whig.” Nathaniel Grigsby thought Jones was Lincoln’s “guide & teacher in Politics.” Another contemporary recalled, “Col Jones told me that Lincoln read all his books,” and “often said that Lincoln would make a great man one of these days.”
If the party’s typical adherents in Lincoln’s early life were represented by his farmer father, probably a Democrat in Indiana (although there is contention over it), and a merchant like Jones, Lincoln would take the storekeeper every time. Those two men fit within the broad demographic schema of the two parties.
Lincoln’s father matched the profile of a non-immigrant, non-Catholic Democrat. “Throughout the nation,” Michael Holt explains, “Democratic voting strength was concentrated among subsistence farmers in the most remote and economically underdeveloped regions of states—among voters, that is, who feared becoming ensnared in precisely the kind of commercial-monetary network Whigs wanted to foster. In addition, Democrats drew votes heavily from immigrants, Catholics, and others who resented the self-righteous moral imperialism of the dominant Protestant groups they associated with the Whigs.”
Jones, on the other hand, was a standard-issue Whig: “Repelled by strident Democratic rhetoric about class conflict, appalled by the consequences of the negative state, and attracted by what they perceived as the economic benefits of the Whig program, the vast majority of wealthy businessmen, professionals, and planters supported the Whig party. So did most people in those areas most deeply involved in the commercial economy—farmers who grew cash crops, miners, manufacturers and their workers, artisans, merchants, and tradesmen.”
These were Lincoln’s types. Andrew Jackson himself must have had limited appeal to him, even if their backgrounds were similar. Jackson, too, was born in a log cabin. They both fought in Indian wars, although Jackson obviously with much more consequence than Lincoln, who bragged of his mock exploits in the Black Hawk War (“I had a good many bloody struggles with the musquetoes; and, although I never fainted from loss of blood, I can truly say I was often very hungry”). Jackson also made himself a lawyer, a politician, and an up-from-the-bootstraps success story. Yet these were superficialities on top of yawning differences of character and worldview.
Surely Lincoln recoiled from Jackson the duelist, the slave owner and gambler, the high-living plantation owner, the unreflective man of action, the emotional volcano. Jackson exemplified what the Whigs scorned as the “passions.” He nearly got entangled in an affair of honor with John Quincy Adams’s secretary of the navy during the 1828 presidential campaign. He was reputed to have staked his slaves in bets on horse races. He once offered a fifty-dollar reward for a runaway, stipulating “ten dollars extra for every hundred lashes a person will give to the amount of three hundred.” All this would have been anathema to a Lincoln who worshipped lawfulness, the careful cultivation of talent, and self-control.
As a young man, Clay wasn’t so different from Jackson. He, too, was an impulsive gambler and duelist. But he sought to overcome it. The British writer Harriet Martineau, who chronicled her travels in the United States, thought him “a man of an irritable and impetuous nature, over which he has obtained a truly noble mastery.” Most of the time. When Senator John Randolph of Virginia called him a “blackleg,” or a gambler who cheats, Clay challenged him to a duel despite his personal vow two years earlier not to participate in such so-called affairs of honor. The stand-off ended harmlessly enough because Clay—then serving as secretary of state—couldn’t aim and Randolph didn’t want to kill him. Clay articulated the standard that he tried to uphold as a general matter thusly: “All legislation, all government, all society, is formed upon the principle of mutual concession, politeness, comity, courtesy.”
The Whig program of economic development and cultural uplift suited Lincoln the practitioner and apostle of self-improvement. Lincoln fashioned himself into an almost perfectly archetypal Whig. It wasn’t just that he was ambitious. Plenty of people were ambitious. It was how he was ambitious and for what. His ambition was refracted through a quest for order. Historian Robert Kelley writes that Lincoln joined the party “because he p
referred what Whigs believed to be a more civilized way of life.” The words “more civilized” are apt. Life on the frontier could be nasty, brutish, and extraordinarily drunken. Lincoln made himself into a sort of countercultural figure. He stood aloof from all that was degrading or prone to check his advancement.
Liquor lubricated everyday life for men and women alike. People considered it an aid to labor, a great tool of medicine, and a guarantee of health. Lincoln himself stated its pervasiveness in an 1842 address to the Springfield Washington Temperance Society: “When all such of us, as have now reached the years of maturity, first opened our eyes upon the stage of existence, we found intoxicating liquor, recognized by every body, used by every body and repudiated by nobody. It commonly entered into the first draught of the infant, and the last draught of the dying man. From the sideboard of the parson, down to the ragged pocket of the houseless loafer, it was constantly found. Physicians prescribed it in this, that, and the other disease. Government provided it for its soldiers and sailors; and to have a rolling or raising, a husking or hoe-down, any where without it, was positively insufferable.”
Lincoln didn’t drink. Alcohol made him feel “flabby and undone.” His stepmother said, “He never drank whiskey or other strong drink—was temperate in all things—too much so I thought sometimes.” In a tobacco-soaked environment worthy of a smoking lounge at a European airport or a major-league dugout, Lincoln didn’t smoke or chew tobacco, either. He loved to tell the story of sharing a trip on the railroad with a friendly gentleman from Kentucky who offered him sequentially a plug of tobacco, a cigar, and a glass of brandy. After Lincoln refused each offer, the Kentuckian commented, “See here, my jolly companion, I have gone through the world a great deal and have had much experience with men and women of all classes, and in all climes, and I have noticed one thing.” What was it? “Those who have no vices have d—d few virtues.”
Lincoln didn’t gamble, at horse races or cards, and despite his off-color stories, he didn’t swear. Reportedly, he once tossed a man out of his store for swearing in front of ladies. As president, he used the phrase “by jings” in the telegraph office and apologized: “By jings is swearing, for my good old mother taught me that anything that had a by before it is swearing.”
On the frontier, coarse language or a plug of tobacco was the least of it. Fighting constituted a rite of passage, and a matter of honor. Lincoln would eventually get a reputation as a peacemaker, although his record wasn’t spotless. Back in Indiana, one family thought that he, “like all his Indiana cronies, was pretty much of a rowdy, and certainly, was not of a saintly nature.” When he was nineteen years old, his stepbrother John Johnston fought an adversary named William Grigsby. The son of one of the farmers Lincoln worked for told Herndon: “Wm Grigsby was too much for Lincoln’s man—Johnson [sic]. After they had fought a long time—and it having been agreed not break the ring, Abe burst through, caught Grigsby—threw him off some feet—stood up and swore he was the big buck at the lick. . . . After Abe did this—it being a general invitation for a general fight they all pitched in and had quite a general fight.”
A friend of Lincoln’s in New Salem recalled another brawl. Two neighbors, Henry Clark and Ben Wilcox, were embroiled in a lawsuit. Clark lost the suit but averred that nonetheless “he could whip his opponent.” Lincoln was Clark’s second, and a man named John Brewer the second for Wilcox. The friend recounts, “The parties met, stripped themselves all but their breeches, went in and Mr Lincoln’s principal was beautifully whipped. These combats were conducted with as much ceremony and punctiliousness as ever graced the duelling ground. After the conflict the seconds conducted their respective principals to the river washed off the blood, and assisted them to dress.”
Then came another provocation: “During this performance, the second of the party opposed to Mr Lincoln remarked—‘Well Abe, my man has whipped yours, and I can whip you.’ Now this challenge came from a man who was very small in size. Mr Lincoln agreed to fight provided he would ‘chalk out his size on Mr Lincoln’s person, and every blow struck outside of that mark should be counted foul.’ After this sally there was the best possible humor and all parties were as orderly as if they had been engaged in the most harmless amusement.”
By the standards of the time and place, Lincoln was practically Gandhi. In Indiana, he had supposedly acted as the mediator in a fierce dispute over ownership of a goose. An acquaintance in Illinois recalled, “When a fight was on hand Abe used to Say to me ‘Lets go and Stop it—tell a joke—a Story—Say Something humorous and End the fight in a good laugh.’ ” He kept his men during the Black Hawk War from killing an old Indian who had wandered into their camp. William Greene, who served with Lincoln, recalled: “Some of the men said to Mr Lincoln—‘This is cowardly on your part Lincoln.’ Lincoln remarked if any man thinks I am a coward let him test it.”
Lincoln’s consideration extended to animals, in a frontier environment that would have appalled the ASPCA. After shooting a turkey from the family’s cabin as a kid, Lincoln noted in the autobiographical account for Scripps, “He has never since pulled a trigger on any larger game.” As a boy he led a little personal crusade against the mistreatment of animals. Nathaniel Grigsby told Herndon: Lincoln “would write short sentences against cruelty to animals. We were in the habit of catching Turrapins—a Kind of turtle and put fire on their back and Lincoln would Chide us—tell us it was wrong—would write against it.” He said that Lincoln’s injunctions reached all the way down to “crawling insects.” His stepsister remembered him giving a mini-sermon, “Contending that an ants life was to it, as sweet as ours to us.” Stories of his sometimes inconvenient, sometimes even embarrassing, kindness to animals abound.
There was the story of the hog. One day as Lincoln was crossing the prairie he saw a hog mired in the mud. Mary Owens, whom Lincoln courted, remembered him telling her that “he resolved that he would pass on without looking towards the shoat, after he had gone by, he said, the feeling was eresistable and he had to look back, and the poor thing seemed to say so wistfully—There now! my last hope is gone; that he deliberately got down and relieved it from its difficulty.” “In many things,” she said, “he was sensitive almost to a fault.”
And the baby birds. Joshua Speed told Herndon of Lincoln traveling on a country road by horseback, returning to Springfield from a court about thirty miles away. When the party of lawyers stopped to water its horses, Lincoln was nowhere to be seen. John Hardin had been riding back with Lincoln. Asked where he was, Hardin replied, “Oh, when I saw him last he had caught two little birds in his hand, which the wind had blown from their nest, and he was hunting for the nest.” Speed said that Lincoln “finally found the nest, and placed the birds, to use his own words, ‘in the home provided for them by their mother.’ When he came up with the party they laughed at him. Said he, earnestly, ‘I could not have slept tonight if I had not given those two little birds to their mother.’ ”
And the cat. Nathaniel Grigsby remembered staying over with Lincoln in the house of William Jones after a Lincoln speech in the vicinity in 1844: “When we had gone to bed and way in the night a Cat Commenced mewing and scratching—making a fuss generally—Lincoln got up in the dark and Said—Kitty—Kitty—Pussy—Pussy. The cat Knew the voice & manner Kind—went to Lincoln—L rubbed it down—Saw the Sparkling—L took up the Cat—Carried it to the door & gently rubbed it again and again Saying Kitty—Kitty &c—then gently put it down closed the doors.”
Lincoln, an acquaintance recalled, “Was fond of cats—would take one & turn it on its back & talk to it for half an hour at a time.” At dinner once in the White House, using official flatware, Lincoln fed one of the family’s cats, which was sitting on a chair next to him. Mrs. Lincoln asked a guest, “Don’t you think it is shameful for Mr. Lincoln to feed tabby with a gold fork?” The president replied, “If the gold fork was
good enough for Buchanan I think it is good enough for Tabby.”
If these were Lincoln’s rejections, his affirmations were the law, reason, and personal and collective reform. In January 1838, he gave a speech at the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield called “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.” In occasionally grandiloquent terms, Lincoln expounded on lawfulness as the foundation of our institutions and of liberty. Citing the fearful work of lynch mobs, he warned of “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgement of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.” In cataloging recent atrocities, he mentioned those who “throw printing presses into rivers” and “shoot editors,” an unmistakable reference to the martyred abolitionist publisher Elijah Lovejoy. Mobs in Alton, Illinois, destroyed Lovejoy’s presses and dumped them into the Mississippi, and then he was killed trying to defend another press from a rabble.
The answer to this threat to the “fair fabric” of our republic is enshrining the law in an exalted place in our consciousness. “Let reverence for the laws,” Lincoln counseled, “be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap—let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges;—let it be written in Primmers, spelling books, and in Almanacs;—let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation.”