His tactics worked. Anticipating defeat, Hardin withdrew from the race and saved face by joining the army for the fight against Mexico. The Whig district convention, which met on May 1 at Petersburg, fell entirely under Lincoln’s control. Herndon became the permanent secretary of the convention; Lincoln’s previous law partner Logan was chairman of the committee on resolutions, which celebrated Lincoln’s “firm support of Whig principles, [and] his abilities and integrity.”
Lincoln’s Democratic opponent was Peter Cartwright, the celebrated Methodist circuit rider, famed alike for his muscular Christianity and for his devotion to Jacksonian principles. Though Cartwright was personally popular, he was not an effective political campaigner, and his contest with Lincoln stirred little enthusiasm among voters. Indeed, there was so little interest in the campaign that newspapers only occasionally reported public appearances by either candidate and gave no extended accounts of their speeches.
Toward the end of the campaign, growing desperate, Cartwright, in the words of one Whig, “sneaked through this part of the district after Lincoln, and grossly misrepresented him” by asserting that he was an infidel. Troubled that this accusation, which was similar to charges that had been raised in previous elections, might succeed “in deceiving some honest men,” especially in the northern counties of the district where he was less well known, Lincoln published a little handbill answering Cartwright’s charges. Admitting that in the past he had argued for the “Doctrine of Necessity,” he noted this was a position “held by several of the Christian denominations.” It was true that he was “not a member of any Christian Church,” but he denied ever having spoken “with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular” and declared that he could never “support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion.”
Cartwright’s charge obviously had little effect. On August 3 the voters of the Seventh District elected Lincoln by an unprecedented majority.
VIII
After his election victory Lincoln could relax. Since the Thirtieth Congress, to which he had been chosen, did not assemble until December 1847, he had over a year to prepare for his move to Washington. His only notable public appearance during the intervening months was as a delegate to a gigantic River and Harbor Convention, which met in Chicago in July to protest President James K. Polk’s veto of a bill that would have provided federal funding for internal improvements. As the sole Whig congressman-elect from Illinois, Lincoln attracted some attention, and his name first appeared in a nationally circulated newspaper when Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune mentioned that this “tall specimen of an Illinoisian... spoke briefly and happily” to the convention.
But for the most part Lincoln spent his time contentedly attending to his family and cultivating his law practice. A daguerreotype made about this time—his first photographic likeness—showed a young congressman well satisfied with himself. In his best suit he sat stiffly for the photographer, obviously proud of his tailor-made clothing, his carefully buttoned satin waistcoat, his stiff, starched shirt with gold studs, his intricately knotted black tie. Because of photographic distortion his hands appeared even more enormous than they actually were, but it was not the daguerreotypist’s fault that his chest looked thin and his head too small for such a tall body.
“He was not a pretty man by any means—nor was he an ugly one,” wrote Herndon, who left the most vivid description of his partner’s appearance; “he was a homely looking man.” At this time Lincoln weighed about 160 pounds, and he was so thin that he appeared even taller than his six feet, four inches. His height, as Herndon pointed out, was due to the abnormal length of his legs. “In sitting down on common chairs,” Herndon observed, “he was no taller than ordinary men from the chair to the crown of his head. A marble placed on his knee thus sitting would roll hipward, down an inclined plane.... It was only when he stood up that he loomed above other men.”
“Mr. Lincoln’s head,” Herndon noted minutely, “was long and tall.... The size of his hat, measured at the hatters block was 7⅛, his head being from ear to ear 6½ inches—and from the front to the back of brain 8 inches. Thus measured it was not below the medium size.” “Mr. Lincoln’s forehead was narrow but high,” Herndon continued. “His hair was dark—almost black and lay floating where the fingers or the winds left it, piled up at random. His cheek bones were high—sharp and prominent. His eye brows heavy and jutting out. Mr. Lincolns jaws were long up curved and heavy. His nose was large—long and blunt, having the tip glowing in red, and a little awry toward the right eye. His chin was long—sharp and up curved. His eye brows cropped out like a huge rock on the brow of a hill. His face was long—sallow—cadaverous—shrunk—shrivelled—wrinkled and dry, having here and there a hair on the surface. His cheeks were leathery and flabby, falling in loose folds at places, looking sorrowful and sad. Mr. Lincoln’s ears were extremely large—and ran out almost at right angles from his head—caused by heavy hats and partly by nature.”
For all Herndon’s detail, he failed quite to capture the feeling conveyed by that 1846 daguerreotype. Because a sitter had to hold a pose for several seconds without moving, it showed Lincoln’s face as grave and unsmiling, but it managed to convey a sense of a man who had attained his goals. No longer was he attempting to impose the rule of reason upon impassioned emotions; no longer was he afflicted by swings of mood that went from Napoleonic ambition to deep melancholy. He was at peace with himself.
He now felt able to come to terms with the painful memories of his early years. During the 1844 presidential campaign he had accepted an invitation to speak to the Whigs of Rockport, in southern Indiana—an invitation that suggested his growing recognition as leader of his party in the West—and for the first time in fifteen years he returned to the area where he had spent his youth. He was making his usual speech advocating the protective tariff, a subject which, a partisan paper ungrammatically declared, he “handled... in a manner that done honor to himself and the whig cause,” when he spotted his old schoolmate, Nathaniel Grigsby, and, interrupting himself, called out, “There is Nat.” Walking out into the audience, he greeted his old chum most cordially and insisted that he must stay overnight. After he finished his address, the two men returned to the house where Lincoln was staying and, as Grigsby remembered, they spent most of the night “telling stories and talking over old times.” The next day they went on to Gentryville, where Lincoln saw friends he had grown up with and revisited “the neighborhood ... in which I was raised, where my mother and only sister were buried.”
That visit broke an emotional barrier that for years had kept him from mentioning the death of his mother or the loss of his sister. He could now complete the unfinished process of grieving over his mother—a process interrupted by the suddenness of her death, her hasty burial, the absence of religious service at her grave, and his father’s prompt remarriage. His emotions welled up, and, over the next several months, he sought to master them by expressing them in verse. “That part of the country is, within itself, as unpoetical as any spot of the earth,” he wrote a friend to whom he sent what he wrote; “but still, seeing it and its objects and inhabitants aroused feelings in me which were certainly poetry.”
Lincoln expressed those feelings in four-line, rhyming stanzas, which he planned to arrange into “four little divisions or cantos.” The first recaptured a bittersweet mixture of sorrow and joy produced by the visit. It began:
My childhood’s home I see again,
And sadden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
There’s pleasure in it too.
His verses mixed backwoods slang with archaic words from his favorite British poets, and he was quite correct in doubting “whether my expression of those feelings is poetry.” But he accurately conveyed a fuguelike sense of almost forgotten memories, “Where things decayed, and loved ones lost / In dreamy shadows rise.” No longer we
re the hardships and the sorrows of his youth important; now, “freed from all that’s earthly vile,” his early memories were “Like scenes in some enchanted isle, / All bathed in liquid light.”
With his childhood experiences unlocked, Lincoln could explore another of his deepest concerns: the overthrow of reason. In his lyceum address he had urged the reign of reason to protect society against both mob violence and dictatorial ambition, and no doubt his deep, debilitating bouts of depression caused him also to realize the importance of reason as an internal gyroscope. His own fear of madness was too painful to explore, but he was able to deal with the case of Matthew Gentry, a schoolmate, whom he encountered again at Gentryville. Three years older than Lincoln, Gentry had been “rather a bright lad, and the son of the rich man of our very poor neighbourhood.” “At the age of nineteen,” Lincoln recalled, “he unaccountably became furiously mad, from which condition he gradually settled down into harmless insanity.” After seeing his childhood friend in this sad plight, Lincoln felt impelled to describe in verse the condition of “A human form with reason fled,/While wretched life remains.” The meter was lame, but Lincoln’s lines managed to recapture the genuine terror he had felt at the acts of this “howling crazy man,” who maimed himself, fought with his father, and sought to kill his mother. He could not erase from his memory the madman’s maniac laughter and his mournful night screams; they seemed to him “the funeral dirge... / Of reason dead and gone.” “O death!” Lincoln’s poem concluded, in an apostrophe that linked the now harmless madman to the shadowy ghosts of Nancy and Sarah Lincoln, “Why dost thou tear more blest ones hence, / And leave him ling’ring here?”
With that Lincoln had exhausted his poetical inspiration. A third “canto” containing a spirited description of a frontier bear hunt was entirely different in tone, and at this point his muse deserted him, so that he never completed a proposed fourth section. He was proud enough of his effort to send a copy of his verses to a friend in Quincy, authorizing him to print them anonymously in the Quincy Whig. “Let names be suppressed by all means,” he explained. “I have not sufficient hope of the verses attracting any favorable notice to tempt me to risk being ridiculed for having written them.”
At home with himself, at peace with his past, Lincoln completed arrangements to depart for Washington. He leased his house in Springfield to Cornelius Ludlum, a brick contractor, for ninety dollars a year, carefully reserving one of the upstairs loft rooms for storing his furniture. With Herndon he agreed that the law firm of Lincoln & Herndon should continue while he was in Congress, with the expectation that the senior partner would resume his active practice after his term was over. On October 25 the Lincoln family left for Washington.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lone Star of Illinois
“Being elected to Congress, though I am very grateful to our friends, for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected,” Lincoln wrote Speed several weeks after his victory over Peter Cartwright. As the only Whig representative from Illinois, he knew that he could have very little influence on the Democratic administration of President Polk. He hoped, however, to offer constructive leadership in his own party, which, despite its narrow majority in the House of Representatives, was foundering. Its most prominent national leaders, like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, still yearned for another chance at the presidency, but they were clearly over the hill. Equally out of date were many of the traditional Whig issues, like a national bank, federal support of internal improvements, and a protective tariff. Lincoln saw his two years in Congress as an opportunity to help the Whig party to find fresh leadership and to adopt a program relevant to the times. He devoted himself to promoting the presidential prospects of General Zachary Taylor and to developing a new Whig ideology. In the first goal he was successful, but he failed in the second. At the end of his term he left Washington disappointed not so much with his own performance as with that of the political party to which he belonged.
I
The Lincolns arrived in Washington on December 2, 1847, just a few days before the Thirtieth Congress convened, and they went to Brown’s Hotel. Presently they removed to the boardinghouse of Mrs. Ann G. Sprigg, where both Stuart and Baker had resided when they were in Congress. It was just east of the Capitol, in a row of houses on land now occupied by the Library of Congress. Eight other congressmen, all Whigs, boarded with Mrs. Sprigg, the most notable of whom was Joshua R. Giddings of Ohio, the stalwart and uncompromising enemy of slavery.
Lincoln immediately made himself at home in the boardinghouse, charming the other guests with his jokes and anecdotes. One of his fellow boarders, Dr. Samuel Busey, recalled that when there was a controversy over political issues, or especially over the subject of slavery, Lincoln would “interrupt it by interposing some anecdote, thus diverting it into a hearty and general laugh, and so completely disarrange the tenor of the discussion.” For recreation Lincoln joined other members of the mess in bowling at the nearby alley owned by James Casparis. “He was a very awkward bowler,” Dr. Busey remembered, “but played the game with great zest and spirit, solely for exercise and amusement.” He punctuated his bowling by telling stories—“some of which were very broad”—and a crowd of listeners always gathered when he was playing.
Initially both the Lincolns found life in the national capital an exciting adventure. Washington, with its 40,000 inhabitants—including 2,000 slaves and 8,000 free blacks—was the largest and most cosmopolitan place either of them had ever known. The Capitol building, which they could see from Mrs. Sprigg’s windows, was an imposing, though still unfinished, structure, its temporary, wooden dome suggesting the fragility of the federal Union. At the opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue loomed the White House, certainly the grandest residence either of the Lincolns had seen. South of the Executive Mansion, preparations were under way for the laying of the cornerstone of the vast obelisk of the Washington Monument; as congressman, Lincoln took part in the dedication ceremonies. Most of the streets in the capital were still unpaved, but a cobblestoned stretch of Pennsylvania offered a tempting array of specialty shops with luxury goods.
As transients, the Lincolns, like other congressional families, were not admitted to the exclusive social life of long-term capital residents, but they could always find amusements. There were levees at the White House, though these were not heavily attended, since the Polks forbade dancing and offered guests neither food nor drink, and there were biweekly concerts by the Marine Band in the President’s grounds. In the evenings there were sometimes lectures and concerts. On one notable occasion the Lincolns attended a performance by the Ethiopian Serenaders, minstrels in blackface who had recently sung for Queen Victoria and the royal family.
But Mary soon became dissatisfied. Her husband, busy with the work of Congress, had little time to spend with her; indeed, he wrote later, he thought she “hindered me some in attending to business.” She lacked female companionship, because few of the congressmen were accompanied by their wives. The four Lincolns lived in a single large room, and she appeared downstairs only at meal times. Because the Lincoln children were noisy and undisciplined, there was inevitably friction with the other boarders. Robert, one of them remembered, was a bright boy, who “seemed to have his own way”; Eddie was sick much of the time. In the spring Mary Lincoln decided to take the children back to Lexington, Kentucky, where she stayed with her father. When Lincoln wrote her, he hinted at the sometimes tense relations at Mrs. Sprigg’s: “All the house—or rather, all with whom you were on decided good terms—send their love to you. The others say nothing.”
Lincoln was so absorbed in his congressional duties that at first he hardly missed her. Enthusiastically he threw himself into the work of the House, establishing a conspicuous record for faithful attendance. Of the 456 roll-call votes during his two years of service, he missed only 13. Appropriately, in view of his experience as a postmaster, he was assigned to the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, and he also served on th
e Committee on Expenditures in the War Department. In both committees he did his share of the work and effectively presented reports from the Post Office Committee to the House. He regularly and promptly submitted petitions from his constituents, most of which dealt with requests for land grants for constructing railroads. He did his best to help his friends who sought appointments from the federal government, even though he knew that there was little reason to think a Democratic administration would shower patronage on a freshman Whig congressman. Much of his time was spent in answering his correspondence, without, of course, the aid of a secretary or assistant. After he began making speeches in the House of Representatives, he took great pains to see that they reached his home audience, purchasing no fewer than 7,580 copies, which he painstakingly addressed and franked in his own hand—far more than most of the other members of the Congress.
The House of Representatives did not overawe him. If he was new to Washington, so were two hundred of the other representatives in this Thirtieth Congress, and his four terms in the Illinois state legislature had made him familiar with parliamentary procedures. Like any other freshman congressman, he had a little stage fright when he first gained the floor to make a few remarks, but he got over it quickly. “I find speaking here and elsewhere about the same thing,” he reported to Herndon. “I was about as badly scared, and no worse, as I am when I speak in court.”
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