by Rich Lowry
Lincoln mused how during the American Revolution the basest passions of the people were suppressed or turned against the British rather than inward. That could no longer be the case, as memories of the revolution faded and the people who fought it passed away. Americans would inevitably lose their emotional connection to the event. “Passion has helped us,” Lincoln concluded, “but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence. Let those [materials] be moulded into general intelligence, [sound] morality and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.”
In his 1842 temperance address, Lincoln was just as high-flying. In it, he warned the foes of drinking against a denunciatory self-righteousness liable to repel rather than persuade. As the great Lincoln scholar Harry Jaffa notes, it is a temperate temperance address. By the end, Lincoln swung around again to the American Revolution and praised it as “a solution of that long mooted problem, as to the capability of man to govern himself.” Lincoln favored self-government both as a political system and as a personal ideal. The temperance movement brings a freedom of its own: “In it, we shall find stronger bondage broken; a viler slavery, manumitted; a greater tyrant deposed.”
He called temperance “a noble ally” to the cause of political freedom. Then he launched into a prose poem on freedom’s hand-in-hand advance with temperance: “With such an aid, its march cannot fail to be on and on, till every son of earth shall drink in rich fruition, the sorrow quenching draughts of perfect liberty. Happy day, when, all appetites controled, all passions subdued, all matters subjected, mind, all conquering mind, shall live and move the monarch of the world. Glorious consummation! Hail fall of Fury! Reign of Reason, all hail!”
“His preoccupations with self-control, order, rationality, industriousness,” Daniel Walker Howe writes, made Lincoln the prototypical Whig character type. The last quality—industriousness—wasn’t merely a personal ethic with Lincoln; it was his touchstone and his gospel. Success for him was a matter of work and of will.
In 1855, Lincoln wrote back to Isham Reavis, who had inquired about studying law with him. Lincoln told him he was away from the office too often to take him on as a student, but he offered this advice: “If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already. It is but a small matter whether you read with any body or not. I did not read with any one. Get the books, and read and study them till, you understand them in their principal features; and that is the main thing. It is of no consequence to be in a large town while you are reading. I read at New-Salem, which never had three hundred people living in it. The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places.” Before signing off he urged: “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.” (Reavis went on to become a judge.)
A few years later, in September 1860, he answered a young man named John Brockman, who asked him “the best mode of obtaining a thorough knowledge of the law”: “The mode is very simple, though laborious, and tedious. It is only to get the books, and read, and study them carefully. Begin with Blackstone’s Commentaries, and after reading it carefully through, say twice, take up Chitty’s Pleading, Greenleaf’s Evidence, & Story’s Equity &c. in succession. Work, work, work, is the main thing.” The emphasis on reading, though obviously necessary for the study of law, also jibed with the Whig emphasis on concerted self-improvement.
His words of comfort in 1860 for a young man from Springfield rejected by Harvard amount to a hymn of praise to willpower: “It is a certain truth, that you can enter, and graduate in, Harvard University; and having made the attempt, you must succeed in it. ‘Must’ is the word. I know not how to aid you, save in the assurance of one of mature age, and much severe experience, that you can not fail, if you resolutely determine, that you will not. . . . In your temporary failure there is no evidence that you may not yet be a better scholar, and a more successful man in the great struggle of life, than many others, who have entered college more easily.”
Writing from Washington in 1848, where he was serving in Congress, Lincoln advised Herndon to get over his complaints that the elders in the party were treating the younger Whigs unfairly. Much better to concentrate on what was important: “The way for a young man to rise, is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that any body wishes to hinder him. Allow me to assure you, that suspicion and jealousy never did help any man in any situation. There may sometimes be ungenerous attempts to keep a young man down; and they will succeed too, if he allows his mind to be diverted from its true channel to brood over the attempted injury.” He added, “You can not fail in any laudable object, unless you allow your mind to be improperly directed.”
The point was the same, if the tone harsh and unsparing, in his letters to his stepbrother John Johnston, a pleasant sort, but not a go-getter. In 1848, Lincoln upbraided Johnston in reply to his request for eighty dollars: “At the various times when I have helped you a little, you have said to me ‘We can get along very well now’ but in a very short time I find you in the same difficulty again. Now this can only happen by some defect in your conduct. What that defect is I think I know. You are not lazy, and still you are an idler. I doubt whether since I saw you, you have done a good whole day’s work, in any one day. You do not very much dislike to work; and still you do not work much, merely because it does not seem to you that you could get much for it. This habit of uselessly wasting time, is the whole difficulty; and it is vastly important to you, and still more so to your children that you should break this habit.”
He came up with an offer to entice Johnston into the cash economy. He suggested that Johnston let Lincoln’s father—who lived with him—and his children tend to the farm, while “you go to work for the best money wages, or in discharge of any debt you owe, that you can get.” Lincoln said he would match whatever he made, dollar for dollar. “Now if you will do this,” he continued, “you will soon be out of debt, and what is better, you will have a habit that will keep you from getting in debt again.”
When Johnston said in 1851 that he wanted to sell his Illinois farm and move to Missouri, Lincoln rebuked him again: “What can you do in Missouri, better than here? Is the land any richer? Can you there, any more than here, raise corn, & wheat & oats, without work? Will any body there, any more than here, do your work for you? If you intend to go to work, there is no better place than right where you are; if you do not intend to go to work, you can get along any where. Squirming & crawling about from place to place can do no good.” He professed no unkindness, just a desire to get Johnston “to face the truth—which truth is, you are destitute because you have idled away all your time. Your thousand pretences for not getting along better, are all non-sense—they deceive no body but yourself. Go to work is the only cure for your case.” Johnston can’t have appreciated the hectoring stepbrotherly advice.
For all Lincoln’s tenderheartedness and his homespun charm, the Johnston letters hint at a chill in his character. He could be remote. Lost in thought, he would sometimes pass friends on the street without acknowledging them. Herndon described him, when he was studying law, as “often walking unconscious, his head on one side, thinking and talking, to himself.” Mary Todd’s sister Elizabeth Edwards called him “not Social—was abstracted—thoughtful.” She said she had “seen him Sit down at the table and never unless recalled to his Senses, would he think of food.”
He ultimately remained a closed book to his acquaintances. His friend and supporter David Davis said that “Lincoln had no spontaneity—nor Emotional Nature—no Strong Emotional feelings for any person—Mankind or thing.” He “was not a social man by any means: his Stories—jokes &c. which were done to whistle off sadness are no evidences of sociality.” Davis called him “the most retic
ent—Secretive man I Ever Saw—or Expect to See.” Herndon wrote of one of his interviews with John Stuart, “Stuart says he has been at L’s house a hundred times, never was asked to dinner.” The way Lincoln’s close political ally Joseph Gillespie put it is that “he loved the masses but was not strikingly partial to any particular individual.” His secretaries in the White House, John G. Nicolay and John Milton Hay, said that when it came to familiarity with Lincoln “there was a line beyond which no one ever thought of passing.”
Lincoln fortified himself behind a sense of his own dignity. Michael Burlingame points out that people began calling him “old” when he was still in his thirties. He never liked the nickname Abe. At his law office, according to David Herbert Donald, he called his younger partner William Herndon “Billy”; Herndon called him “Mr. Lincoln.” His wife, too, called him “Mr. Lincoln”; before they had children and he began calling her “Mother,” he addressed her as “Puss,” “little woman,” or “child wife.” Mary said that Lincoln “was not a demonstrative man, when he felt most deeply, he expressed the least.”
His marriage to her, despite its famous trials over the years, was another act of self-improvement. Lincoln arrived in Springfield not exactly a ladies’ man. Years later he said, “Women are the only things that cannot hurt me that I am afraid of.” He never looked like much. One girl in Illinois declared him as “thin as a beanpole and as ugly as a scarecrow!” Nor was he inclined to finery. William Butler, who boarded him in Springfield, recalled: “In all the time he stayed at my house, he never bought a hat or a pair of socks, or a coat. Whenever he needed them, my wife went and bought them for him, and put them in the drawer where he would find them.” The sartorial carelessness stayed with him in the White House and drove Mary Todd to distraction. She couldn’t stand, among other offenses, that his shirt cuffs were frayed and he never learned to remove his hat properly.
Lincoln hardly made up these deficiencies with an effortless social grace. Elizabeth Edwards said he “Could not hold a lengthy Conversation with a lady—was not sufficiently Educated & intelligent in the female line to do so.” His courtship with Mary Owen in the late 1830s ended badly. Her sister, a friend of Lincoln, proposed bringing her from Kentucky so the two could get engaged. Lincoln agreed, having met Mary years before and finding her quite pleasing. When he saw her again, he changed his mind. “I knew she was over-size,” Lincoln wrote in a letter to a friend afterward, “but now she appeared a fair match for Falstaff.” Out of a sense of obligation, he proposed anyway, and was shocked and “mortified” to be rejected. “Mr. Lincoln was deficient in those little links,” she explained later in a letter to Herndon, “which make up the great chain of womans happiness.”
In Mary Todd, he “married up,” as male politicians always like to say. The uneducated, penniless boy married a woman who had learned French at Madame Charlotte Mentelle’s academy in Lexington, Kentucky. From a prosperous Kentucky family, she once showed off her new pony at Henry Clay’s mansion. A highly desirable catch, Mary was “quick, lively, gay—frivalous it may be, Social and loved glitter Show & pomp & power,” in her sister Elizabeth’s description. For her, marrying Lincoln was a come-down in social status. She grew up in a household with personal servants and slaves, then went to living in a four-dollar-a-week room in the Globe Tavern in Springfield, where the couple stayed after their marriage. For him, the marriage was a step up. Lincoln joked of the family that once might have seemed impossibly august to him, “One ‘d’ was good enough for God, but not the Todds.”
Mary’s sister Elizabeth had married Ninian Edwards, a Whig politician and son of the former territorial governor of Illinois. The two lived in a Springfield mansion where they entertained the great and good of Illinois politics. Lincoln met Mary there. Through the marriage, he had allied himself to one of the most prominent Whig families in the state, and his wife took an active interest in politics. “She was an Extremely Ambitious woman,” Elizabeth Edwards said. Elizabeth initially supported the union, on grounds that Lincoln “was a rising man,” before doubting the couple’s personal compatibility. John Stuart called the marriage a “policy Match all around.” He told Herndon, “His wife made him Presdt. . . . She had the fire—will and ambition—Lincolns talent and his wifes Ambition did the deed.”
In her ambition for her husband, Mary was of course pushing on an open door. William Miller sets out the impressive catalogue of Lincoln’s office-seeking: in 1832, 1834, 1836, 1838, 1840, and 1854 (for the Illinois House); in 1843, 1845, and 1846 (for his party’s nomination to Congress and for the congressional seat itself ); in 1855 and 1858 (for the U.S. Senate). He took a leading role in the presidential campaigns in the state for Henry Clay in 1844 and Zachary Taylor in 1848, as well as laboring on the hustings for William Henry Harrison in 1840 and Winfield Scott in 1852. Herndon said politics was “his life and newspapers his food.”
The politics of the day was robustly participatory; in 1840 turnout was 80 percent. It made a great spectacle, with some gladiatorial combat occasionally mixed in. Lincoln’s triumph of reason, hoped for in the most soaring passages of his addresses, would have to wait—a good long time. Thomas Ford, a chronicler of Illinois and former governor, described the trajectory of the typical raucous political event: “The stump speeches being over, then commenced the drinking of liquor, and long before night a large portion of the voters would be drunk and staggering about town, cursing, swearing, hallooing, yelling, huzzaing for their favorite candidates, throwing their arms up and around, threatening to fight, and fighting.”
In 1840, the Whigs put up William Harrison as their counter to Andrew Jackson, a general and a man of the people. His hard-cider-and-log-cabin campaign ran on hoopla and revelry. Songs and parades, freely dispensed hard cider, and joyfully blatant symbols—coonskins, log-cabin raisings, whiskey in bottles shaped like log cabins—were the order of the day. A Whig rally in Springfield in June was like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and a July Fourth celebration wrapped into one, with a barbecue for fifteen thousand people and a “flood” of oratory. A Springfield merchant described the party when the Whigs won the election: “I do not believe there has ever been such a jollification since then. The center of the celebration was a big saloon, and there champagne flowed like water. It was a favorite trick to knock the neck off the bottle by striking it on the stove. Lincoln was present and made a great deal of sport with his speeches, witty sayings and stories. He even played leap-frog.” (But, the merchant added, “he did not drink a thing.”)
In this rollicking environment, Lincoln’s physicality served him well. One Springfieldite recalled an 1836 Lincoln speech in Mechanicsburg: “[John] Neal had a fight at the time—the roughs got on him and Lincoln jumped in and Saw fair play.” He also remembered Lincoln debating someone at the court house: “The whigs & democrats had a general quarrel then & there. N. W. Edwards [Lincoln’s brother-in-law] drew a pistol on Achilles Morris.” In a debate that turned into a tussle with the Whig candidate John Todd Stuart when Stephen Douglas was running against him for Congress, Douglas bit Stuart’s thumb. Douglas tried to cane Simeon Francis, the editor of the Sangamo Journal, a prominent Whig newspaper in Springfield, for an offending article. Douglas failed after the editor, in Lincoln’s words, caught him “by the hair and jammed him back against a market-cart.” Lincoln added, “The whole affair was so ludicrous that Francis and everybody else (Douglas excepted) have been laughing about it ever since.”
Lincoln wielded his verbal acuity and his wit as his weapons. His particularly merciless take-downs of opponents were called “skinnings,” like the famous “skinning of Thomas.” During the 1840 campaign, Lincoln got entangled in a controversy with Jesse B. Thomas Jr., a young lawyer from a prominent family who was a Whig but not a reliable one. At an event in Springfield, Thomas accused—correctly, it seems—Lincoln and his confederates of writing an anonymous p
olitical letter and falsely attributing it to him. Lincoln responded savagely. “He imitated Thomas in gesture and voice,” Herndon reported, “at times caricaturing his walk and the very motion of his body. Thomas, like everybody else, had some peculiarities of expression and gesture, and these Lincoln succeeded in rendering more prominent than ever. The crowd yelled and cheered as he continued. Encouraged by these demonstrations, the ludicrous features of the speaker’s performance gave way to intense and scathing ridicule.” Thomas left the platform in tears, and Lincoln eventually apologized.
Lincoln’s taste for ridiculing the opposition led to his own scrape with an affair of honor. He had to admit to writing a pseudonymous article viciously lampooning the state’s prickly state auditor, a Democrat, James Shields. The offended official issued a challenge. Even though dueling was illegal in Illinois, with his honor at stake, Lincoln accepted. The episode now reads like farce, yet no one treated it as one at the time.
As the challenged party, Lincoln had the choice of weapons and picked “Cavalry broad swords of the largest size, precisely equal in all respects.” He further stipulated that the clash would take place in a box set out on the ground and divided in two, with the penalty of death for overstepping the center line and surrender of the contest for overstepping the back line. Lincoln had fashioned a fight depending largely on who had the longer and strong arms. Shields was five-eight or nine, and Lincoln was about half a foot taller. As his colleague in the legislature Robert L. Wilson attested, Lincoln had arms “longer than any man I ever knew, when standing Straiht, and letting his arms fall down his Sides, the points of his fingers would touch a point lower on his legs by nearly three inches than was usual with other persons.”