Quickly he began to take the measure of his fellow representatives. Unlike the Senate, where his old rival Stephen A. Douglas now joined such august solons as Webster, John C. Calhoun, and Thomas Hart Benton, the House, for the most part, was composed of men of mediocre ability and only local reputation. The one great exception was John Quincy Adams, distinguished alike for his rocklike integrity and his implacable hatred of slavery, but the former President died early in the session, before Lincoln really got to know him. Apart from Giddings, whose presence Lincoln felt more as a moral than a political force, he was most taken by Georgia Whig Alexander H. Stephens, whom he described as “a little slim, pale-faced, consumptive man”; the young Southerner, like Lincoln, was looking for a way to rejuvenate and reunite the Whig party. Looking about the hall, Lincoln could readily identify a number of other industrious and competent representatives—men like David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, author of the celebrated proviso that would bar slavery from all territories gained in the Mexican War; Caleb B. Smith, the astute Indiana political manager, who would become Lincoln’s first Secretary of the Interior; and Robert C. Schenck, of Ohio, whom Lincoln would one day appoint major general in the army. Not a modest man, Lincoln saw no reason to feel that these flickering lights outshined him.
He found his party in disarray. Though the Whigs had done very well in the off-year elections of 1846, party leaders were troubled by the outlook for the 1848 presidential election. The Democratic administration of James K. Polk had been extraordinarily successful: the President settled the festering boundary dispute with Great Britain over the Oregon Territory; by signing the Walker Tariff, which imposed very low duties, he set policy for the next decade; by firmly vetoing an internal improvements bill, he killed that question as a political issue; and he presided over a highly successful war that was about to add California and New Mexico to the Union. Whigs recognized that it would be very difficult to defeat the Democrat most often mentioned as Polk’s probable successor, Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan, whose contradictory positions on the Wilmot Proviso allowed all factions to favor him.
The only issue on which the Democrats appeared to be vulnerable was the President’s role in originating the Mexican War. This was not a subject to which Lincoln hitherto had given much attention. Like every other American, he knew about the Texas revolt from Mexico in 1836, and because he thought of the Mexicans as “greasers,” he no doubt was pleased when Texas gained its independence. But in 1844 when President John Tyler urged the annexation of Texas to the United States, Lincoln, like Henry Clay, former President Van Buren, and Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, branded the move as “altogether inexpedient.” He did not share Tyler’s enthusiasm for territorial expansion because, as he later declared, he “did not believe in enlarging our field, but in keeping our fences where they are and cultivating our present possession, making it a garden, improving the morals and education of the people.”
He had nothing to say when Texas was annexed or when President Polk sought aggressively to protect the new territory and also to settle longstanding claims and complaints against Mexico. In April 1846 fighting broke out between the Mexican army and American troops commanded by Zachary Taylor in territory between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, a region claimed by both the United States and Mexico. The United States declared war. Unpopular in New England, the conflict stirred patriotic enthusiasm in other parts of the country, and in Illinois there was a rush to enlist in the volunteer army. Both Hardin and Baker, Lincoln’s predecessors, became officers. But the Mexican War never surfaced as an issue in the congressional campaign that Lincoln and Peter Cartwright were waging. Lincoln’s only utterance on the subject was a “warm, thrilling and effective” speech that he gave on May 30 at a public meeting to encourage volunteering. Even after he was elected to Congress, he made no comment on the war, believing, as he said later, “that all those who, because of knowing too little, or because of knowing too much, could not conscientiously approve the conduct of the President, in the beginning of it, should... as good citizens and patriots, remain silent..., at least till the war should be ended.”
By the time Lincoln arrived in Washington, he felt free to speak out, because the fighting was substantially over. In hard-fought battles at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, Monterrey, and Buena Vista, General Taylor repeatedly routed the Mexican forces in the North, while General Winfield Scott led an expedition that captured Veracruz and, eventually, Mexico City itself. In his annual message of December 1847, President Polk asked Congress for additional funds to bring the war to a close, claiming the vast territories of New Mexico and California as partial indemnity. With a note of triumph he announced that he was about to conclude a war that Mexico had initiated by “invading the territory of the State of Texas, striking the first blow, and shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil.”
The message was the pretext for a sustained Whig attack upon the President, his administration, and, in general, the Democratic party. Lincoln led the assault on Polk. On December 22 he introduced a series of resolutions requiring the President to provide the House with “all the facts which go to establish whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed, was, or was not, our own soil” In the manner of a prosecuting attorney, he demanded that the President inform the Congress whether that spot had ever been part of Texas and whether its inhabitants had ever “submitted themselves to the government or laws of Texas,... by consent, or by compulsion, either by accepting office, or voting at elections, or paying taxes, or serving on juries, or ... in any other way.” Lincoln clearly intended to show that the American army had begun the war by making an unprovoked attack on a Mexican settlement, despite the fact that “Genl. Taylor had, more than once, intimated to the War Department that... no such movement was necessary to the defence or protection of Texas.”
The attack became more general on January 3, when Representative George Ashmun of Massachusetts introduced a resolution declaring that the war had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.” It was adopted by the votes of eighty-five Whig representatives, including Lincoln’s. A few days later Lincoln continued the campaign against Polk in a long speech, on which he had worked very hard. Subjecting Polk’s version of the origins of the war to a close, lawyerly scrutiny, he chided the President for the gaps in his evidence and his logic. The mistakes could not be unintentional, because “Mr. Polk is too good a lawyer not to know that is wrong.” After sifting “the whole of the President’s evidence,” he demanded that Polk respond to the interrogatories he had posed: “Let him answer, fully, fairly, and candidly. Let him answer with facts, and not with arguments.” Piously he professed that if the President could do so, “then I am with him for his justification.” But if he failed to respond, that would show “that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong—that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.” The President, Lincoln speculated with a freedom that he would never have permitted himself in a courtroom, must have begun the war motivated by a desire for “military glory—that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy.” When that aim failed, his mind, “tasked beyond it’s power,” began “running hither and thither, like an ant on a hot stove,” and this “bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man” could now only speak in “the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream.”
Proud of his effort, Lincoln hoped it would establish his place in the House of Representatives. Now feeling very much at home, he began to think of Washington as a very pleasant place, and he regretted his pledge that he—like Hardin and Baker before him—would serve only one term. When Herndon reported that some people thought he should be reelected, he replied that his word and honor forbade him to enter the race, but he added coyly, “If it should so happen that nobody else wishes to be elected, I could not refuse the people the right of sendi
ng me again.”
II
His expectations were quickly dashed. In Washington nobody paid much attention to his resolutions, which the House neither debated nor adopted, or to his speech. The President made no response to Lincoln’s interrogatories; he never mentioned Lincoln’s name, even in his voluminous diaries. Congressmen were for the most part equally indifferent, regarding Lincoln’s attack as part of the general Whig assault upon a Democratic administration. One obscure Indiana Democrat did chide Lincoln for having failed to tell his constituents during his election campaign that he was opposed to the war, and Representative John Jameson of Missouri professed to be astonished that the successor of John J. Hardin, killed at Buena Vista, and of E. D. Baker, a hero of the battle of Cerro Gordo, should make such an unpatriotic speech. There was little newspaper comment. The Baltimore Patriot carried a squib commending his “Spot” resolutions and commenting: “Evidently there is music in that very tall Mr. Lincoln,” and the St. Louis Missouri Republican called his speech “one of great power,... replete with the strongest and most conclusive arguments.” But none of the newspapers with national circulation paid attention to either Lincoln’s resolutions or his address.
Very different were the responses from Illinois. As was to be expected, Democratic newspapers were uniformly critical. In Springfield, the Illinois State Register contrasted Lincoln’s opposition to the war with the “gallantry and heroism” of Hardin, who had rushed to enlist in the army. Later the Register called Lincoln’s speech “politically motivated,” predicted that his ideas would be “repudiated by the great mass of people who voted for him,” and warned that Lincoln would “have a fearful account to settle” with the veterans when they returned from Mexico. Other Democratic newspapers joined the attack. According to the Charleston Illinois Globe, Lincoln’s resolutions showed “conclusively that the littleness of the pettifogging lawyer has not merged into the greatness of the statesman,” and the Peoria Press denounced this “miserable man of ‘spots’” for his “traitorous course in Congress.” Throughout the Seventh District, public meetings—largely Democratic, though some were labeled nonpartisan—condemned Lincoln’s course. The rally in Morgan County, where Hardin had lived, expressed “deep mortification” at Lincoln’s “base, dastardly, and treasonable assault upon President Polk,” and prophesied that “henceforth will this Benedict Arnold of our district be known here only as the Ranchero Spotty of one term.”
Condemnation from Democrats was to be expected, and discounted, but Lincoln was troubled by the faintness of praise he received from fellow Whigs. Simeon Francis’s Illinois State Journal (formerly the Sangamo Journal) loyally supported him, as did B. F. James’s Tazewell Whig. Some Whig newspapers reported that his “crack speech” had placed him in the “front rank of the best speakers in the House.” But most of the other editors imitated the Quincy Whig, which published Lincoln’s resolutions with the mild comment that they were “based upon facts which cannot be successfully controverted.”
More disturbing were the private messages he received from his political friends in Illinois. Dr. Henry strongly dissented from the prevailing Whig view of the war. If Illinois Whigs followed Henry Clay and opposed all territorial annexations as a result of the war, he warned, they would continue to be “the minority party for a long time.” Soberly he wrote Lincoln, “It would be painful in the extreme to part company with you after having fought with you side by side so long.” The Reverend John Mason Peck, a prominent Baptist of St. Clair County, sent a similar message, concluding “that the Government of the United States committed no aggression on Mexico.”
Herndon, too, reported that “murmurs of dissatisfaction began to run through the Whig ranks.” He deplored Lincoln’s vote for the Ashmun resolution, took it for granted that Lincoln’s opposition to the war meant that he would not vote to supply the armies in the field, and warned that his partner’s course would not be well received by “the whig men who have participated in the war.” Herndon argued that instead of condemning President Polk for invading Mexico and starting a war on Mexican soil, Lincoln ought to follow the law of nations and argue “that if it shall become necessary, to repel invasion, the President may, without violation of the Constitution, cross the line, and invade the territory of another country.”
Because Herndon claimed to speak for a considerable Whig constituency in Illinois, Lincoln went to some pains to refute his arguments. As for the Ashmun resolution, he replied, he had no choice; if he had opposed it, he would have voted a lie. Though he censured the President’s conduct in beginning the war, he had every intention of voting for supplies to the armies. As for the attitude of returning Whig soldiers, he pointed out that veterans in Washington, with hardly an exception, did “not hesitate to denounce, as unjust, the Presidents conduct in the beginning of the war.” Lincoln dismissed Herndon’s constitutional arguments: “Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion,... and you allow him to make war at pleasure.” Thus Herndon would place “our President where kings have always stood.”
The acerbity that crept into Lincoln’s replies to Herndon reflected his discomfort that his partner, and whatever other Whigs he represented, had failed to understand the real intent of his attack on Polk. Now that the fighting was over and the peace treaty was expected in Washington momentarily, the only purpose that Lincoln and other Whigs had for assailing the President’s course in beginning the war was political. Their object was to hurt the Democrats in the next presidential election.
They were aware that this course entailed a considerable risk; attacking the President’s actions in beginning the war might easily be misunderstood as opposing the war itself. Whigs with a long memory knew how dangerous that position could be. When someone asked Justin Butterfield, a leading Chicago Whig, whether he would condemn the Mexican War as he had once denounced the War of 1812, he responded: “No, indeed! I opposed one war, and it ruined me. From now on I am for war, pestilence, and famine.” But Lincoln, working closely with Alexander H. Stephens and the small group of other Whigs in the House who called themselves the Young Indians, thought he could resolve the difficulty. Whigs could assail the Democrats for having wrongly begun the war—and then demonstrate how loyally they supported their country’s cause by nominating a general who was winning that war.
That general had to be Zachary Taylor, despite his total ignorance of public affairs and his lack of any political experience. Nobody knew where he stood on anything. That made him an available candidate, and Lincoln, eager to see new leadership in the Whig party, jumped on the Taylor bandwagon. “I am in favor of Gen: Taylor as the whig candidate for the Presidency,” he announced, “because I am satisfied we can elect him, that he would give us a whig administration, and that we can not elect any other whig.” “Our only chance is with Taylor,” he explained. “I go for him, not because I think he would make a better president than Clay, but because I think he would make a better one than Polk, or Cass, or Buchanan, or any such creatures, one of whom is sure to be elected, if he is not.”
Throughout the spring Lincoln worked earnestly to secure Taylor’s nomination, and in early June he attended the Whig National Convention at Philadelphia, where he attracted a good deal of attention as the only Whig representative from Illinois. After the convention nominated Taylor on the fourth ballot, Lincoln, along with three other members of the House, addressed a ratification meeting in Wilmington, Delaware. Introduced as the “Lone Star of Illinois,” he was received with three hearty cheers as he predicted a Whig victory in the fall. Taylor’s nomination, he wrote Herndon, took the Democrats “on the blind side,” by turning “the war thunder against them.” Grimly jubilant, he told his partner, “The war is now to them, the gallows of Haman, which they built for us, and on which they are doomed to be hanged themselves.”
Along with the other Young Indians, Lincoln hoped not just to elect a presidential candidate but to formulate a new set of b
eliefs for the Whig party in place of old doctrines that no longer aroused public interest. Without some vital, controlling principles, there was a danger that Whigs might follow local, sectional interests. In the South some Whigs were tempted to make a defense of slavery their central issue, so that they could demonstrate that they, rather than the Democrats, more truly represented their region’s interests. In the Northeast many Whigs, troubled by the huge influx of immigrants, who tended to vote Democratic, flirted with the Native American party. Other party leaders thought that a strong antislavery platform could win back the Conscience Whigs, mostly in New England, who were so opposed to any extension of slavery that they were ready to join antislavery Democrats in nominating ex-President Martin Van Buren on the new Free-Soil ticket. All these approaches were tempting—and all would disastrously split the party. Even if Taylor was elected, he would find that he could not govern.
To avoid these dangers, Lincoln urged Taylor to put himself above all local and regional issues. The proper Whig policy ought to be one of “making Presidential elections, and the legislation of the country, distinct matters; so that the people can elect whom they please, and afterwards, legislate just as they please, without any hindrance [from the Chief Executive], save only so much as may guard against infractions of the constitution, undue haste, and want of consideration.” He wanted Taylor to announce: “Were I president, I should desire the legislation of the country to rest with Congress, uninfluenced by the executive in it’s origin or progress, and undisturbed by the veto unless in very special and clear cases.” When Taylor made this pledge, Lincoln was jubilant, and he took the floor of the House of Representatives to explain what it meant: “In substance, it is this: The people say to Gen: Taylor ‘If you are elected, shall we have a national bank?’ He answers Your will, gentlemen, not mine.’ ‘What about the Tariff?’ ‘Say yourselves.’ ‘Shall our rivers and harbours be improved?’ ‘Just as you please.’”
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