Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

by Richard Brookhiser

  The Log Cabin Campaign was literally false, since Harrison was no hick but the son of a Virginia grandee who had signed the Declaration of Independence. But the Whigs told a political truth: they had spent a decade in the wilderness, while Harrison’s opponent, Van Buren, was the insider’s insider presiding over a haggard administration. For all their hokum the Whigs had a point—in a two-party system, the challengers deserve a chance when the incumbents have been in office too long.

  It was not the point Lincoln wished to make, however. He was an active Harrison supporter. He was a Whig presidential elector, in case Harrison carried Illinois; he ran a campaign newspaper called The Old Soldier; and he stumped the center of the state, debating Democrats. In one encounter with Stephen Douglas, another rising politician, Lincoln played the race card, reading from an old campaign biography of Van Buren to show that he had supported black suffrage in New York State (free blacks could not vote in Illinois). Lincoln did this to embarrass Douglas and he succeeded: “Damn such a book,” Douglas cried, snatching it from his hands and flinging it into the crowd. Lincoln opposed lynching and called slavery unjust, but he was not above slyly trafficking in prejudice.

  For the most part, however, he stuck to the issue that was then preoccupying him, and that would soon cause him to jump out the window of the state legislature: the Democratic Party’s war on banks. Lincoln “drew a vivid picture of our prosperous and happy condition” under the Second Bank of the United States, according to one newspaper account of his stump speech. Lincoln, as the economic historian Gabor Boritt put it, was by nature a single-issue candidate. His issue after the collapse of the System was banking, and he focused on it, rather than log cabins.

  Yet he would have had to be insensible not to notice the populist hoopla of the Whig onslaught, and careless not to file it for future reference. A serious single-issue candidate might not engage in such antics himself, but he could let his supporters do it for him.

  Harrison won, with 234 electoral votes to Van Buren’s 60, and 53 percent of the popular vote to Van Buren’s 47 percent. He did not win Democratic Illinois, however, which Van Buren carried narrowly. Lincoln would not be casting an electoral vote. He also experienced a personal setback, for although he was elected to a fourth term in the state legislature, he won by the smallest margin of any of his races so far. The collapse of the System had crimped his popularity.

  Nationally, the Whig triumph was cut short when the sixty-eight-year-old Harrison caught pneumonia and died in April 1841, a month after his inauguration. For the first time in American history, a vice president was obliged to fill a vacancy in the White House. But Harrison’s vice president, John Tyler, was not a Whig at all, but a renegade Democrat who had been put on the ticket to increase its appeal. Once he became president he fought the Whigs who had unintentionally elevated him, vetoing a bill to restore the Second Bank of the United States. “By the course of Mr. Tyler,” wrote Lincoln sourly, “the policy of our opponents has continued in operation.”

  The election of 1840 was not a total loss for Lincoln, however, for it introduced him to his future wife—though their courtship would be harder and longer than a presidential campaign.

  Mary Todd, almost ten years younger than Lincoln, grew up in a wealthy family in Lexington, Kentucky, bluegrass country—a different world from the one the Lincolns had left. She was a cousin of John Stuart, Lincoln’s law partner, and two of her sisters had married into the Springfield elite. Mary came to pay her relatives an extended visit late in 1839.

  Mary Todd was short, plump, and attractive; smart, lively, and pert. There is a story that Lincoln told her, at a ball that December, that he wanted to dance with her “in the worst way,” and that she said later that “he certainly did.” Some scholars doubt the truth of the tale, but its interest lies in what it says about Mary: a woman who was dull or placid would not have been assigned such a punchline.

  Politics drew them together. Mary and her family, as well as her Illinois connections, were all Whigs. She was passionate about politics, especially in the banner year of 1840. Whig women threw themselves into the Harrison campaign, one Democrat even complaining that they wore ribbons across their chests “with two names printed on them” (Harrison and Tyler—one for each breast). For Lincoln and Mary the thrill of their newfound acquaintance was enhanced by the thrill of presidential politics.

  Then, suddenly, it was over; the campaign romance did not survive the campaign. It is hard to figure out why exactly. Lincoln had more in common with his political lover than he had with Mary Owens. Perhaps the prospect of success alarmed him. Both Mary Todd and Lincoln began flirting with other people. In December 1840 Lincoln told his friend and roommate Joshua Speed that he had decided he would see Mary no more and that he would write her a letter saying so. Speed told him that he must tell her face to face. Mary cried, Lincoln kissed her. The campaign romance ended with a break-up kiss.

  Lincoln was plunged into gloom. “I am now the most miserable man living,” he wrote Stuart. “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.” Speed hid their knives and razors. Other acquaintances in the little world of Illinois politics gossiped about his distress. Lincoln reportedly had had “two cat fits and a duck fit,” one woman wrote her brother, a Whig legislator. “Is it true? Do let us hear soon.”

  Lincoln stayed sad, if not suicidal, for much of 1841. Speed sold his share of his Springfield store and moved back to his family’s estate outside Louisville, where Lincoln visited him in the late summer. Speed’s mother gave Lincoln a Bible, perhaps to steady him. On the steamboat going home, he saw a sight that impressed and chastened him, and he described it in a letter to one of Speed’s sisters: “A gentleman had purchased twelve Negroes . . . and was taking them to a farm in the South. They were chained six and six together. A small iron clevis [a U-shaped shackle] was around the left wrist of each, and this fastened to the main chain . . . at a convenient distance from the others, so that the Negroes were strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line.” What struck Lincoln most was their good spirits. “In this condition they were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood,” and from their families and friends. “Yet amid all these distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board.” One played a fiddle; “others danced, sung, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards.”

  There was a racist way to view the scene: Negroes are simple creatures, they will get over anything. Lincoln viewed it through the eyes of melancholy: even slaves can feel happy, unlike me. He spelled it out to Speed’s sister: “[God] renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while He permits the best to be nothing better than tolerable.” Depression can seem absurdly self-aggrandizing to those who do not experience it themselves; that does not make it any less painful to those who do.

  Lincoln began to emerge from his funk by helping Speed out of a funk of his own. In the summer of 1841 Speed fell in love with a young woman, Fanny Henning, and then fell into gloomy fears. He worried that he did not love her; he imagined that she would die young. Lincoln wrote him hortatory letters in January and February 1842 as his wedding day approached. Speed’s problem, Lincoln decided, was “nervous debility.” Speaking as a fellow-sufferer, he assured Speed that “our forebodings . . . are all the worst sort of nonsense.” It was in these letters that Lincoln recalled his father’s saying: “If you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter.” A medical diagnosis that explained nothing, an airy dismissal, and an opaque proverb were not very lucid encouragements, but they may have helped get Speed over his reluctance; in February 1842 the wedding to Fanny came off as planned.

  Once his friend was married, Lincoln turned his thoughts back to Mary Todd, though still with an odd passivity. Lincoln wrote Speed on the Fourth of July to say that, even as “God made me one of the instruments” of your happiness, He would somehow p
rovide for Lincoln, too. “Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord,” he added, quoting a command God gives Israel in the Bible, promising to fight her battles Himself.

  Lincoln’s almost-fight with James Shields in September 1842 seems to have concentrated his mind. Politics helped his courtship in the home stretch, as it had at the start: Whig friends arranged for him and Mary Todd to meet again. Mary was more persevering, and more forgiving, than Mary Owens. Lincoln wrote Speed a last nervous letter, asking if he was truly glad to be married. Speed must have said yes; Lincoln and Mary Todd were married in November.

  The happy ending did not make for a happy marriage. Neither of the Lincolns was easy to live with. One friend of the couple described Mary as “always either in the garret or the cellar”—exalted or downcast. Abraham was generally the latter. Mary’s mood swings were accompanied by a temper. In moments of distress she would beseech her husband, berate him, even throw things at him. In response he would read the newspaper, play with his children, or otherwise detach himself.

  Mary Lincoln’s eccentricities would cause Abraham political headaches during his presidency. Against this must be set her political interests, which kept her engaged in his career, and her political instincts, which could be sharp. (She accused him of being too trusting, which he was, though that probably benefited him in the long run.)

  Lincoln’s marriage would be of no interest to history, except for what it lacked. Public achievements are not always compensations for personal deprivation; there have been great men whose private lives were filled with blessings—wonderful parents, happy marriages, splendid children. Lincoln, however, was a wanderer in his own life, looking for something he never quite had. He chose issues in public life for sufficient political and moral reasons, but he came to them with passion to spare.

  In the depths of his depression in 1841 he told Speed that “he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.” He did not expect family life to generate saving memories of him, and he had not yet earned them from politics.

  Lincoln’s law partner John Stuart had been elected to Congress in 1838 and reelected in 1840. In 1841 the two men recognized that the time Stuart spent in Washington made the partnership impracticable, so they dissolved it, and Lincoln joined forces with another Whig lawyer-politician, Stephen Logan. They worked together until 1844, when Lincoln took on his third, last, and longest-serving partner, Speed’s former clerk William Herndon.

  Much of Lincoln’s legal work was done in Springfield, where the state supreme court and federal courts sat; but twice a year—in the spring and the fall—he traveled the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Illinois, arguing cases in county courthouses. The Eighth Circuit was as big as Connecticut, and each road trip took ten weeks. Accommodation could be almost as primitive as the family cabin back in Indiana, the cases were routine, and the fees were tiny. But Lincoln liked the camaraderie of his fellow lawyers, and his travels made him known throughout central Illinois (his judicial circuit overlapped most of his congressional district).

  Lincoln the lawyer cut a homely figure. In his Springfield office he stuffed letters, bills, and notes to himself in an old silk hat, or in a bundle of papers on his desk with a reminder slipped under the string: “When you can’t find it anywhere else, look in this.” On the road he wore a coat that was loose and pants that were short, and carried an umbrella that had no knob and a carpetbag packed with documents and underwear. He was genuinely indifferent to what he wore and ate and where he slept, but his slovenliness was also an extension of his rube/boob persona, which served several functions. It put ordinary clients and jurors at ease, and it took opposing counsel off their guard. “Any man who took Lincoln for a simple minded man,” said one fellow lawyer, “would very soon wake up with his back in a ditch.”

  Lincoln’s strength as a lawyer was his ability to focus on the case at hand. Logan, his second law partner, rated his general knowledge of the law as “never very formidable”—the legacy of his do-it-yourself education—but he bore down on anything he handled, mastering both the details of the case itself and the principles involved. “He not only went to the root of the question,” wrote Herndon, “but dug up the root.”

  When Lincoln took on Herndon as a law partner, he also acquired a biographer. Herndon put off writing until he was an old man who needed the help of an amanuensis, but preparing and planning the biography was the project of his life. Herndon realized early on that Lincoln was unusual; he observed him, and endeavored to draw him out. Much of what we know about Lincoln’s prepresidential appearance and habits comes from Herndon or from the many interviews with family and friends that Herndon conducted after Lincoln’s death. Herndon was alert to Lincoln’s melancholy, which “dripped from him as he walked.” He understood how Lincoln used humor to keep himself afloat—“to whistle off sadness,” as one of Herndon’s informants put it.

  Herndon described a strain of fatalism that ran through Lincoln’s mind. Lincoln used a little catchphrase to express it that both Herndon and Mary Lincoln recalled: “What is to be will be, and no prayers of ours can reverse the decree.” His fatalism may have begun as a legacy of his parents’ religion; the particular sect of Baptists to which they belonged believed in predestination. Lincoln left the church, but kept the belief. Fatalism became a way of explaining his gloom to himself: The reason I feel so bad is because it could not have been any other way. I am damned because I was doomed. “There are no accidents in my philosophy,” Lincoln told Herndon one day. Every action was a link in an “endless chain” of cause and effect. “The motive was born before the man.” The motive, and the moods.

  In the early 1850s, Lincoln pursued a new intellectual interest on the circuit, working his way through the first six books of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry. He was proud enough of this accomplishment to mention it in a campaign autobiography when he ran for president. Euclid pleases minds enamored of logic. Thomas Hobbes admired him; so did Thomas Paine, who declared in The Age of Reason that Euclid, unlike the authors of the Bible, proved everything he said (Paine called the Elements a book of “self-evident demonstration”). The chains of proof, each building on the one that went before, unwind like cause and effect in Lincoln’s view of the world. But Euclid offered something that fatalism did not: clarity and definition. He tells us what things are. Fatalism locks us in place; Euclid is a means, austere but certain, of understanding.

  Lincoln the lawyer was no mere reasoning machine. He could summon the passions when he had to. Herndon recorded the case of Rebecca Thomas, the widow of a Revolutionary War veteran, who had been bilked by an agent she had hired to collect her husband’s pension. She “came hobbling into the office” one day in 1846, Herndon wrote, “and told her story. It stirred Lincoln up.” The day before the trial he asked Herndon to get him a history of the Revolution, for refreshing his memory; the next day, in court, he went to work. He only called one witness—Mrs. Thomas herself—then summed up for the jury. He “drew a vivid picture of the hardships of Valley Forge, describing with minuteness the men, barefooted and with bleeding feet, creeping over the ice.” Shades of Weems and the crossing of the Delaware. Lincoln concluded: “Time rolls by, the heroes of ’76 have passed away and are encamped on the other shore. The soldier has gone to rest, and now, crippled, blind and broken, his widow comes to you and to me, gentlemen of the jury, to right her wrongs. She was not always thus. She was once a beautiful young woman. Her step was elastic, her face fair. . . . But now she is poor and defenseless. . . . She appeals to us, who enjoy the privileges achieved for us by the patriots of the Revolution, for our sympathetic and manly protection. All I ask is, shall we befriend her?” The jury was in tears; Lincoln won the case, and charged no fee.

  This speech was not for a general audience and was not printed until Herndon published this reconstruction of it decades later. But it corrects what Lincoln said about the founders in the Lyceum Address. The heroes of ’76 are dead, but they can be summoned; we, th
eir beneficiaries, have an obligation to summon them, especially when there are wrongs to be righted. Even in death they help us (we enjoy the privileges they achieved); so we must help others (with sympathetic and manly protection); the heroic dead can inspire us to do it. Reason is powerful, but so is memory. Lincoln would make this appeal again, to a larger audience, for a greater cause.

  While Lincoln practiced law, he simultaneously pursued his political career. Stuart decided not to run for Congress again in 1842, which opened up the one safe Whig seat in Illinois. Three Whig lawyers, all in their early thirties, wanted it: Lincoln, John Hardin, and Edward Baker.

  One way Lincoln positioned himself to be a candidate was by campaigning for temperance. Temperance was a religiously tinged movement of moral reform, one of several that flourished in the 1830s and 1840s (Sabbath observance was another). Whigs tended to be more hospitable to such impulses than Democrats; Lyman Beecher, a Connecticut minister, wrote that the Democratic Party in his state had been founded by “rum-selling tippling folk, infidels and ruff-scuff generally.” Lincoln did not drink, which suited him to this new role; on the other hand, temperance crusaders often employed a hectoring tone that he did not like.

  On Washington’s Birthday in 1842 Lincoln gave a speech in Springfield’s Presbyterian Church to a meeting of a temperance society named for the first president. Lincoln urged the temperance advocates to drop the fire and brimstone: “It is an old and true maxim that a ‘drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.’” Unfortunately the speech as a whole was the most fustian performance he would ever give; it ended with a paean to Washington as the Father of Temperance: “Washington is the mightiest name of earth—long since mightiest in the cause of civil liberty; still mightiest in moral reformation.” This was the legacy of Weems’s stories about the apple orchard and the cherry tree, erecting Washington into an icon of virtue—only now Lincoln, and those who had named the temperance society for Washington, were addressing adults. It seems that Lincoln overdid it: Herndon, who stood at the church door listening to the crowd as it left, claimed they thought Lincoln was making fun of them. Thanks to carelessness, or unhappiness with his task, Lincoln had not made good use of Washington.