The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876

by Nester, William

  Ann Rutledge became his life’s first and perhaps only romantic love in 1835. He later recalled that “I did honestly—& truly love the girl & think often . . . of her now.”25 They planned to marry after Lincoln was admitted to the bar. Tragically, she contracted “brain fever,” perhaps encephalitis, and died on August 25. Lincoln was crushed and for months was mired in deep depression.

  The next year he began courting Mary Owens, who came from Kentucky to live with her sister, Lincoln’s friend, in New Salem. His heart was not in it. He broke off the relationship by arguing that she would not be happy in Springfield and being with him would only compound her misery.26 His reluctance is understandable given that her girth made her “a fair match for Falstaff” and with her he could not “avoid thinking of my mother . . . not from withered features—for her skin was too full of fat to permit of its contracting into wrinkles—but from her want of teeth.” He got involved with her in the first place because of his rash promise to her sister that he would marry Owens sight unseen. The experience was so unsettling that he concluded “never again to think of marrying, and for this reason I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be blockhead enough to have me.”27

  Mary Todd became the wife if not the love of Lincoln’s life.28 She had grown up in wealth, with house slaves and finishing schools as the pampered daughter of a leading merchant of Lexington, Kentucky. In 1837 she came to Springfield to escape a mean stepmother and stay with her older sister. She later enjoyed recalling her first encounter with Lincoln at a ball. He mustered his courage, strode up to her, and admitted that he wanted to dance with her “in the worst way.” And so, she would add with a laugh, he did.29

  What attracted Lincoln to Mary? She was bright, educated, vivacious, and voluptuous. Perhaps as important, her father was a rich Whig and friend of Henry Clay. Mary appeared to be the ideal trophy wife for an ambitious politician. But as he courted her he saw the flaws behind her appearance. Vain, spoiled, and nervous, she craved to be constantly the center of attention and the belle of the ball. Whenever stymied she could erupt with tantrums or burrow in bed with splitting headaches.

  Understandably Lincoln got cold feet not long after he initially proposed and she accepted. The break came in December 1841, when he told Mary that he did not love her. She burst into tears. His resolve melted: “I found the tears trickling down my own cheeks. I caught her in my arms and kissed her.”30 That reconciliation was fleeting. He ended their relationship on New Year’s Day 1841. Yet, rather than feel relief, he fell into a deep depression. To his law partner John Stuart he revealed that “I am now the most miserable man living. . . . To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better.” He finally roused himself and visited his friend Joshua Speed, who had returned to his family’s home in Kentucky and was himself torn over whether to wed his fiancée. Eventually both men reluctantly decided that wedlock was the lesser evil over a lifetime of bachelorhood.31

  At age thirty-three, Lincoln married Mary on November 4, 1842. A week later he wrote a friend, “Nothing new here except my marrying, which to me is matter of profound wonder.”32 Their first child, Robert Todd, was born on August 1, 1843. With time they would have three more sons, Edward Baker on March 10, 1846, William Wallace on December 21, 1850, and Thomas, nicknamed Tad, on April 4, 1853.

  Lincoln ran for his district’s seat in the House of Representatives in 1846.33 His opponent was Peter Cartwright, a Methodist circuit rider. Among the charges that he and his supporters leveled against Lincoln was that he scorned religion. To this, Lincoln offered an honest and heartfelt reply: “That I am not a member of any Christian Church is true, but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disregard of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.” He asserted that he could not “support a man for office whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer of, religion” and that no “man has the right thus to insult the feelings, and injure the morals of the community in which he may live.”34

  After he won on August 3, 1846, Lincoln and his family had plenty of time to prepare for their move to Washington and his new duties. The next Congress was not scheduled to open for another year and a half, in December 1847. The Lincolns reached Washington City on December 2, 1847, just days before Congress reconvened. After settling his family into a boardinghouse, Lincoln got to work. His most notable acts were the eight resolutions that he introduced on December 22, 1847, calling on the Polk administration to submit all documents to prove their assertion that Mexico initiated the war, and when those were not forthcoming, his blistering condemnation of the president and his war on January 12, 1848. Although he opposed the war, he supported the troops by voting for every military appropriation bill.

  What was it like to attend a Lincoln speech? He was a first-rate orator. Like Jesus, he liked to illustrate his points with parables and folksy images that penetrated his listeners’ hearts and minds. At times he conveyed the loftiest of thoughts or most daunting of challenges through haunting, poetic phrases that will enrich humanity to the end of time. Yet, while nearly all enjoyed the substance and style of his words, some were confounded by his delivery of them:

  His voice was not musical, rather high keyed . . . [yet] had an exceedingly penetrating, far reaching quality. The looks of the audience convince me that every word he spoke was understood at the remotest edges of the vast assemblage. His gesture was awkward. He swung his long arms sometimes in a very ungraceful manner. Now and then he would bend his body with a sudden downward jerk, and then shoot up again with a vehemence that raised him to his tiptoes and made him look much taller than he really was. There was, however, a tone of earnest truthfulness, of elevated noble sentiment, of kindly sympathy, which added greatly to the strength of his arguments. . . . Even when attacking his opponent . . . there was still a certain something in his utterances making his hearers feel that those thrusts came from a reluctant heart, and that he would much rather have treated his foe as a friend.35

  Then there was his appearance. Lincoln’s face and tall, lean body are instantly recognizable to those familiar with the iconic photographs. Yet these images fail to convey how he moved and how his contemporaries saw him. Herndon leaves this brilliant description: “He was thin, wiry, sinewy, raw-boned; thin through the breast through the back, and narrow across the shoulder; standing he leaned forward. . . . The whole man, body and mind, worked slowly, as if it needed oiling. . . . When he walked he moved cautiously but firmly; his long arms and giant hands swung down by his side.”36

  Lincoln was incessantly reminded of his gangly, homely appearance by opponents and well-wishers alike. He typically tried to disarm with self-deprecating humor one excuse not to vote for him. He liked to tell the story of the woman who stops an ugly man and calls him “the homeliest man I ever saw.” The man agrees but explains that “I can’t help it.” To that the woman retorts, “No, I suppose not, but you might stay at home!”37 One can imagine the mirth with which Lincoln told that story but also the twinge of inner hurt. After being elected to the White House, he famously followed a young girl’s advice that a beard might make him look more appealing.

  What of the statesman behind his unforgettable voice and appearance?38 Two powerful forces, pragmatism and principles, or what was doable and what was ideal, guided Lincoln. Principles provided the parameters within which he practiced politics as the art of the possible. He deconstructed any problem, examined how all the parts fit together, then proposed ways to right what was wrong: “If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.”39 If one proposal failed to inspire enough support to win approval, he devised another. The best example of this was his approach to slavery. From a young age he hated slavery and believed that ideally it should be abolished. Yet as a politician he adjusted his positions to what was feasible, with four distinct phases: tolerating its legality under the Constitution; preventing its expa
nsion to new territories; asserting a limited emancipation justified by military necessity; and finally, supporting a constitutional amendment that completely abolished slavery. When a congressman complained, “Mr. President, you have changed your mind entirely within a short time,” he replied, “I don’t think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.”40

  Hard reason rather than lofty sentiment was Lincoln’s political and intellectual rudder. Young Lincoln honed his thinking to the highest levels by studying the six books of Euclid’s geometry. Bolstering his command of reason was an emotional maturity rarely attained by most so-called adults. He had the power to check his sorrows and convert his anger into humor and wisdom. His self-deprecating wit helped endear him to many people. He was a teetotaler, an attribute that was a political encumbrance in that hard-drinking age. Yet his abstinence reflected his character. The power of reason obviously diminishes with each tip of the jug. His obsession with self-control had many sources, of which watching a teenage friend go insane was certainly the most haunting, followed by his first business partner drinking himself to death.

  Work pressures strained his marriage. In April 1848 Mary and the boys returned to Springfield. In perhaps his most intimate surviving letter to Mary, he confessed, “In this troublesome world, we are never quite satisfied. When you were here, I thought you hindered me some in attending to business; but now, having nothing but business . . . it has grown exceedingly tasteless to me. . . . I hate to stay in this old room by myself.” It took a couple of months before Mary expressed a wish to return. Lincoln’s reply reveals whose behavior prompted their separation: “Will you be a good girl in all things if I consent? Then come along . . . as soon as possible.”41

  Melancholy, or enduring feelings of profound wonder and sadness for life’s mingled beauties, tragedies, and intransigence, shadowed Lincoln throughout his life. These feelings were natural to him but were exacerbated by the early deaths of his beloved mother, sister, and Ann Rutledge and his father’s unrelenting attempts to harness and exploit him. Lincoln described his melancholy as “a misfortune not a fault.”42 He tried to sublimate his “misfortune” with learning, writing, and speaking about the world’s most pressing issues, along with sharing the wit and wisdom for which he became renowned. He was perhaps most happy when he was playing with his sons or riding the court circuit with his fellow lawyers. Yet at times these diversions failed and his melancholy morphed into outright depression that deprived him of sleep through chronic insomnia and bad dreams and several times in his twenties pushed him to the brink of self-destruction.

  Lincoln’s religious beliefs heightened his melancholy.43 Like such notable earlier Americans as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson, he was a Deist who believed that God and nature’s universal laws were one. There was no personal God, miracles, or afterlife, only the infinite universe and the laws that governed it. When asked if he believed in life after death, he replied, “I’m afraid there isn’t. It isn’t a pleasant thing to think that when we die that is the last of us.”44

  This outlook changed after he assumed the presidency and the crushing burdens of fighting a civil war. He increasingly appealed to a personal God for help in his endeavors. He came to believe that “without the assistance of the Divine Being I cannot succeed.”45 Early in the war, he explained that

  I am not a man of a very hopeful temperament. . . . But believing . . . that our cause is just, and relying on God for help, I firmly believe we shall conquer. . . . I am sometimes astonished at the part I am playing in this terrible drama. I can hardly believe I am the same person I was a few months ago when I was living my humble way . . . in Springfield. . . . I would gladly take my neck from under this yoke, and go home . . . to Springfield. . . . But . . . it has pleased Almighty God to put me in my present position, and looking to him for divine guidance, I must work out my destiny as best I can.46

  Lincoln tended to believe that free will was an illusion in a world where everything was predetermined. This fatalism was imbedded from his earliest years by his parents and backwoods preachers who were Separate Baptists committed to a strict Calvinist predeterminism. He explained that “early in life I was inclined to believe in . . . the ‘Doctrine of Necessity’ that . . . the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.”47 Shortly before entering the White House, Lincoln anticipated himself as president as merely “an accidental instrument, temporary, and to serve but for a limited time.”48 Looking back through his presidency, he concluded that he had not “controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now at the end of three years struggle the nation’s condition is not what either party or any man devised or expected. God alone can claim it.”49

  Lincoln’s fatalism appears to refute his extraordinary life whereby he rose from poverty to the presidency and during four years in the White House provided decisive, hands-on leadership that won a war, reunited the nation, and ended slavery. He was a self-made man who insisted that the “way for a young man to rise is to improve himself every way he can” and that he “must not wait to be brought forward by the older men.”50

  How did he reconcile this contradiction between fatalism and drive? His answer was that for reasons far beyond human understanding some powerful universal force popularly called Providence or God directed each step of his life or anyone else’s. Today, of course, analysts find answers not in the stars but deep in one’s psyche. However, in the pre-Freudian age in which Lincoln lived, a Deist explanation of life was about as sophisticated as any available.

  Lincoln supplemented his Deism with a bleak view of human nature. He believed that “all human actions were caused by motives, and at the bottom of these motives was self.”51 Each self was inherently selfish even if individual motives differed. Providence then combined with circumstances to work through one’s motivation to determine what one did in life. Providence was at once fickle, inexplicable, and all powerful. This left “the human mind . . . impelled to action or held in rest by some power over which the mind itself has no control.”52 Human nature stirred empathy rather than cynicism in him. He was a deeply compassionate, forgiving, and nurturing man who sought to channel the self-interest of others into beliefs and acts that benefited humanity.

  In Lincoln’s first political speech in 1832, he revealed the motivation that drove him: “Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. . . . I can say . . . that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.”53 From this motivation came astonishing achievements that changed the world.

  3

  Uncle Tom’s Cabin

  So this is the little lady who made this big war.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Liberty for the few—Slavery, in every form, for the mass!

  GEORGE FITZHUGH

  Enslave but a single human being and the liberty of the world is put in peril. . . . The war [against slavery] is a war of extermination and I will perish before an inch shall be surrendered, seeing that the liberties of mankind and harmony of the universe, and the authority and majesty of Almighty God, are involved in the issue.

  WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

  The state of Georgia will . . . resist . . . any action of Congress upon the subject of slavery . . . incompatible with the safety and domestic tranquility, the rights and honor of the slave- holding states, or any refusal to admit as a state any territory . . . because of the existence of slavery.

  GEORGIA CONVENTION

  If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die of suicide.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Freedom is not possible without slavery.

  RICHMOND (VA) ENQUIRER

  Abraham Lincoln made perhaps the most awkward greeting of his life when he hosted Harriet Beecher Stowe at the White House in 1862.
To the author of the antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly, he exclaimed, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.” Stowe’s reaction was not recorded, but acute embarrassment and irritation would have been understandable.1

  Stowe was inspired to write her novel after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act forced free state and local governments and their citizens to aid masters in recovering their escaped slaves or else suffer fines and prison. She then lived in Cincinnati, just across the Ohio River from slavery’s northern boundary. Cincinnati had a swelling black population, of whom many were escaped slaves. Her novel undoubtedly changed more minds about slavery’s evils than all the editorials and speeches by abolitionists over the decades. The story first reached a mass audience as a weekly serial in the newspaper the National Era from mid-1851 to spring 1852, during which time speculation over what would happen next in the story animated countless conversations across the North and beyond. When Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared as a book in 1852, it swiftly broke the existing best-seller record, with three hundred thousand copies snatched up the first year alone and two million by the time eleven slave states rebelled against the United States nine years later.2

  The political impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin far exceeded its literary qualities. Even then critics noted its melodrama, sentimentality, and clichés of character and plot. Yet this novel forced ever more northerners to contemplate slavery’s moral and economic costs, and southerners to conjure up ever more tortured “logic” to defend their “peculiar institution.”