In considerable measure Mary Lincoln’s outbursts were reactions to her husband’s behavior; he was a very difficult man to live with. For three months out of every year he was off riding the circuit, and she was left alone in her tiny house with two squalling children and, at best, an incompetent maid. She understood, and did not protest, the financial needs that sent Lincoln traveling, but she sadly told a neighbor “if her husband had staid at home as he ought to that she could love him better.”
Even when he was at home, he did not provide the comfort, the warmth, the affection that she craved. After a busy day at work, seeing clients and attending to cases in court, he wanted to sit quietly before the fire, reading, and he failed to realize that his wife, cooped up in the house all day with no one to talk to but infants, longed for adult conversation. Sometimes his inattention made her fly off the handle. On one occasion as he sat reading in his rocking chair in the living room while she cooked dinner, she warned him that the fire was about to go out. Absorbed in his reading, he did not respond, and she called out again, and then a third time. Furious at being ignored, she found a way of getting his attention: she struck him on the nose with a piece of firewood.
Such episodes were infrequent. The subject of much gossip in Springfield, they incorrectly represented the Lincolns’ marriage. For all their quarrels, they were devoted to each other. In the long years of their marriage Abraham Lincoln was never suspected of being unfaithful to his wife. She, in turn, was immensely proud of him and was his most loyal supporter and admirer. When someone compared her husband unfavorably to Douglas, she responded stoutly: “Mr. Lincoln may not be as handsome a figure ... but the people are perhaps not aware that his heart is as large as his arms are long.”
Their children further cemented their marriage. Both the Lincolns had to learn that parenting is a difficult art, and inevitably they made mistakes, especially with their first son, a short, chubby fellow, who from birth seemed to resemble the Todds more than the Lincolns. High-strung and overprotective, Mary constantly worried over Bob, and when the little boy disappeared from her sight for a few minutes, she was likely to alert the whole neighborhood that he was lost. Lincoln, for his part, gave too little attention to his oldest son. He did not ignore the child deliberately, but nothing in his upbringing suggested that a father should be comforting and nurturing. Occasionally he took the boy for walks, and when he was chopping firewood in the backyard he let his son help by splitting kindling. There is a touching account of Bob as a four-year-old trying to walk in his father’s gigantic boots. But Robert’s principal memory of his father during these years was of his loading his saddlebags in preparation for going out on the circuit.
Both parents made some attempt to discipline their firstborn, who seems to have been a perfectly normal little boy, no more given to mischief than other children his age. But the whippings Mary administered were ineffectual—the more so because her husband made fun of her efforts—and when he tried to correct the child, she gave him a tongue-lashing. After the birth of Eddie, both parents pretty well gave up disciplining their offspring. Years later Mary reported that her husband said: “It is my pleasure that my children are free, happy and unrestrained by parental tyranny. Love is the chain whereby to bind a child to its parents.”
Pride in their children helped the Lincolns through even the worst of their domestic discord. When Robert was only three years old, Lincoln described him to Speed in a characteristic understatement that could not conceal his satisfaction with his firstborn: “He is quite smart enough. I some times fear he is one of the little rare-ripe sort, that are smarter at about five than ever after.” A few years later Mary did her own boasting when she wrote a friend: “I have a boy studying latin and greek and will be ten years old in a few days.”
VI
Politics was another bond that held the Lincoln marriage together. Mary Lincoln, like her husband, was an ardent Whig. In a sense, they inherited their politics, for Mary’s father was an influential Whig spokesman in Kentucky and Thomas Lincoln hoped for the election of a Whig President who would make “Locofoco [i.e., Democratic] principals crmble to dust.” Both the Lincolns admired Henry Clay, the founder of the Whig party—Mary, because he was a friend of the Todd family in Lexington, her husband because Clay was his “beau ideal of a statesman.”
From the beginning of Lincoln’s political career he supported the Whig party. As late as 1859 he characterized himself as “always a whig in politics.” He was a strong defender of Whig economic policies against the proposals offered by the rival Democrats, and he usually stressed one principal issue in each campaign. In 1840, for instance, he repeatedly argued for a national bank, favored by most Whigs, and opposed the Independent Treasury system, endorsed by the Democrats. During the presidential election of 1844, Lincoln, like most other Northern Whigs, made the protective tariff his weapon to combat the Democrats, who favored low customs duties or free trade.
On all these issues Lincoln closely followed the national Whig party line, which he sometimes seemed to echo rather than to understand. In the 1840 campaign his frequently repeated address attacking the Democrats’ subtreasury plan and advocating a new national bank was a respectable, though certainly not an original, piece of work. His speeches in 1843–1844 on the tariff were confused and demagogic. A protective tariff, he claimed, would have no effect at all on the common man; it would be collected only from “those whose pride, whose abundance of means, prompt them to spurn the manufactures of our own country, and to strut in British cloaks, and coats, and pantaloons.” On the stump he tried to argue that a high tariff made everything the farmers bought cheaper, but, according to a hostile reporter, “said also he could not tell the reason, but that it was so.”
Lincoln was apparently sufficiently dissatisfied with his own argument that he continued to examine the tariff question after the election, and he studied Herndon’s copies of both Henry C. Carey’s Essay on the Rate of Wages (1835) and Francis Wayland’s Elements of Political Economy (1837). He learned much from Wayland’s lucidly written text but rejected its free-trade doctrines; Carey’s pro-tariff tract made a deeper impression. Over several months he jotted down on eleven foolscap half sheets his thoughts and conclusions about protection that showed that he was still wrestling to master the subject. On reflection, he now concluded that tariff duties would not bear only on the rich; they would be shared equally among the producer, the merchant, and the consumer of taxed goods. To end protective tariffs would actually increase costs, because so much would be wasted on the “useless labour” of carrying goods back and forth to foreign markets. Such useless labor helped to perpetuate a system where “some have laboured, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.” “This is wrong, and should not continue,” Lincoln concluded. “To [secure] to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.” But that reflection took him far beyond Whig orthodoxy, and far beyond any possible campaign speech. He quietly filed his notes away.
Membership in the Whig party meant something more than issues to Lincoln. He thought the party was grounded on principles in which he passionately believed. To him it embodied the promise of American life. Economically it stood for growth, for development, for progress. Clay’s American System sought to link the manufacturing of the Northeast with the grain production of the West and the cotton and tobacco crops of the South, so that the nation’s economy would become one vast interdependent web. When economic interests worked together, so would political interests, and sectional rivalries would be forgotten in a powerful American nationalism. Class antagonisms would also be erased, because this “just and generous, and prosperous system... opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.” This was a vision that attracted many of the wealthiest and best-educated members of society to the Whig party, but it was also one that appealed to young men who aspired t
o get ahead. Henry Clay, Lincoln’s political idol, coined the term “self-made man” to describe Kentucky businessmen—but he might more accurately have applied it to Lincoln himself.
VII
In return for his loyalty to the Whig party, Lincoln expected recognition, but the possibilities were decidedly limited. After the expiration of his fourth term in the Illinois state legislature in 1841, he did not seek reelection; that assemblage offered no new worlds to conquer. Statewide office was out of the question, because the Democrats had a hefty majority in Illinois; the state never voted for a Whig candidate for President, and it never elected a Whig governor or United States senator. Only in the newly created Seventh Congressional District, which included Sangamon County (Springfield) and Morgan County (Jacksonville), along with several of the other counties in the judicial circuit that Lincoln traveled so regularly, did the Whigs consistently have a majority. This included the counties (then within the old Third Congressional District) that John Todd Stuart represented from 1839 to 1843.
When Stuart made it clear that, after two terms, he was going to retire to his law practice, an intense rivalry arose among central Illinois Whigs in the Seventh District to become his successor. In the western part of the district John J. Hardin, of Jacksonville, a handsome, experienced Kentuckian, educated at Transylvania University, was the principal contender. In Sangamon County, Whigs were divided between Lincoln, the party workhorse, and Baker, the flamboyant orator.
During 1843, Lincoln sought to build support for his nomination by taking an active role in Whig meetings and in drawing up an elaborate “Address to the People of Illinois,” a campaign circular from the Whig state committee. At the same time, he began quietly wooing delegates to the district convention that would choose the congressional candidate. “If.. .there are any whigs in Tazewell [County] who would as soon I should represent them as any other person,” he wrote a former colleague in the state legislature, “I would be glad they would not cast me aside until they see and hear further what turn things take.” “Now if you should hear any one say that Lincoln don’t want to go to Congress,” he wrote another friend, “I wish you... would tell him ... he is mistaken. The truth is, I would like to go very much.”
He found his efforts frustrated by a whispering campaign. Citing Lincoln’s marriage into the wealthy, exclusive Edwards-Stuart elite, Baker’s supporters began characterizing him “as the candidate of pride, wealth, and arristocratic family distinction.” Lincoln was baffled. Surely everybody remembered that he was a self-made man with humble origins. He sought to refute the slur by assuring Baker’s law partner, James H. Matheny: “Jim—I am now and always shall be the same Abe Lincoln that I always was,” but the charge stuck. At the same time, Baker gained support because voters knew that he and his wife were devout Campbellites, while Lincoln, it was said, “belonged to no church, was suspected of being a deist, and had talked about fighting a duel.”
Generously Lincoln did not blame Baker for these charges. The two men were close friends, who shared adjacent offices in the Tinsley Building; the Lincolns thought so much of Baker that they named their second son for him. But the combined effect of these accusations undermined Lincoln’s strength at the Sangamon County convention, which endorsed Baker. Then it elected Lincoln, against his will, to serve as one of the delegates to the district convention, to assist in getting the nomination for Baker. Wryly Lincoln wrote Speed that he was “‘fixed’ a good deal like a fellow who is made groomsman to the man what has cut him out, and is marrying his own dear ‘gal.’”
As it turned out, Baker as well as Lincoln lost the nomination at the Whig district convention that met in Pekin in May 1843, for Hardin was the choice of the delegates. Though disappointed, Lincoln could point to two considerable gains. At his urging, the convention adopted a resolution endorsing Baker “as a suitable person to be voted for by the Whigs of this district” in the 1844 congressional election. Thus the delegates in effect stipulated that Hardin should serve only a single term and committed themselves to the principle of rotation in office. If maintained, this rule, which was widely followed in many states, would almost guarantee that Lincoln would succeed Baker.
Equally important, the Whig delegates at Pekin endorsed the practice of holding conventions to nominate candidates. This ran counter to a strong streak of antipartyism among Whigs, a feeling that open political organization and management were not gentlemanly and had better be left to the wire-pulling Democrats. Many, like Hardin, preferred a less formal way of choosing the party’s nominees: let aspiring candidates, or their friends, present their names directly to the public; if they did not secure a majority of the votes in a primary, they were entirely free to run as independents, but still Whigs, in the election. Lincoln had for some years been arguing for more system and organization in the party; “union is strength” was his maxim. A proliferation of candidates resulted only in Whig defeats at the polls. Employing a phrase that he would later put to better use, he reminded the party that “he whose wisdom surpasses that of all philosophers, has declared that ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand.’” Unless the Whigs stood together, they would once again see “the spoils chucklingly borne off by the common enemy,” the Democrats. Reluctantly the Seventh District Whigs accepted his argument.
The next year, as he had arranged, the Whigs of central Illinois met again in convention, and this time by prearrangement they nominated Baker to succeed Hardin in Congress. Lincoln vigorously campaigned for his friend, and for Clay, the Whig presidential candidate, making frequent speeches to expose “the absurdities of loco focoism” and confirm the soundness of the Whig candidates’ position on protection, demonstrating, at least to the satisfaction of those already converted, that “the English are now flooding this country with tracts and money to break down the present Whig tariff.” Throughout the district he addressed Clay Clubs, where the party faithful met to sing songs praising “Gallant Harry” and hear their hero’s merits extolled. He was so effective that David Davis called him “the best stump speaker in the state,” adding, “He shows the want of early education but he has great powers as a speaker.” Loyally, Herndon agreed: “If Baker or Lincoln is missing at our meetings, it seems that something is lost.”
All this activity was in behalf of both the Whig cause and Lincoln’s own career. There was little chance that Clay could carry Illinois, but Baker won in the Seventh District—and Lincoln was in line to succeed him. In the fall of 1845, a full year before the next congressional election, Lincoln began actively working to secure the nomination, Getting a pledge from Baker not to run for a second term, Lincoln went over to Jacksonville to talk to Hardin, who, he learned, had enjoyed his two years in the House of Representatives and gave the impression that he would like to serve another term.
For the next six months Lincoln and Hardin tried to outmaneuver each other. Hardin’s friends suggested nominating Lincoln for governor—knowing that would get him off the track of a congressional nomination and knowing, too, that there was no chance that he, or any other Whig, could be elected to statewide office. In turn, Lincoln’s supporters proposed Hardin for governor. To avoid the appearance of “attempting to juggle Hardin out of a nomination for congress by juggleing him into one for Governor,” Lincoln discouraged his closest editorial friend, Simeon Francis of the Sangamo Journal, from endorsing the scheme, but let it be known that he would have no objection if editors outside of Springfield urged it.
Counting on the support of Sangamon and Menard counties, Lincoln expected that Morgan County, along with Scott County, the small, adjacent county, would go for Hardin. It was necessary, then, for him to win in the northern part of the district, and he paid especial attention to Tazewell County, where he had a strong supporter in Benjamin F. James, the editor of the Tazewell Whig, to whom he wrote frequently and frankly about his political prospects. To Dr. Robert Boal, the state senator from this area, he appealed tactfully: “My reliance for a fair shake (and I want no
thing more) in your county is chiefly on you, because of your position and standing, and because I am acquainted with so few others.” To all he insisted that nothing must be said against Hardin, whom he described as “talented, energetic, usually generous and magnanimous.” He based his claim to the nomination not on any difference between his record and Hardin’s but simply on the grounds that “Turn about is fair play.”
Lincoln’s tactics were strikingly effective. In traveling the judicial circuit, he had sought and secured the endorsement of leading men throughout the district before anyone had an idea that Hardin wanted to go back to Congress. By January friends reported to Hardin that Lincoln had the nomination locked up. According to one of Hardin’s correspondents, the general opinion was: “Hardin is a good fellow and did us and himself great credit... in Congress, Lincoln is also a good fellow and has worked hard and faithfully for the Party, if he desires to go to Congress let him go this time, turn about is fair play.” A friend in Tremont agreed, warning Hardin, “Our people think that it is Abraham’s turn now.”
Realizing that he stood no chance of being endorsed at a regular party convention, Hardin wrote to Lincoln proposing new rules for selecting the congressional candidate. He sought to undo all Lincoln’s careful early preparation by reverting to the former system of independent candidates. In addition, he wanted Lincoln to agree that each candidate should campaign only in his own county—a proposal that would work to his advantage because, as a former congressman, he was more widely known throughout the district than Lincoln.
Lincoln rejected Hardin’s proposals, declaring that he was “entirely satisfied with the old system under which you and Baker were successively nominated and elected to congress.” It was hard for him to keep his temper, because Hardin repeatedly charged him with distorting the history of the previous Whig nominations and of unfairly managing the convention system to procure his own selection in 1846, but he held his tongue. So far as possible he kept his differences with Hardin out of the newspapers, warning editor James “that it will be just all we can do, to keep out of a quarrel—and I am resolved to do my part to keep peace.” It was less important to make a crushing retort to an opponent who was behaving ungenerously than it was to avoid alienating Hardin’s numerous supporters.
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