Even on the most divisive issues relating to slavery, Lincoln believed Taylor’s position should be the same. Though Taylor was a Southerner and the owner of more than two hundred slaves, he should declare that if Congress passed the Wilmot Proviso prohibiting the extension of slavery into the territories acquired from Mexico, he would not veto it. (Lincoln did not explain that this contingency was highly unlikely, since no version of the Wilmot Proviso could pass the Senate, which was dominated by Southerners.) This position, Lincoln maintained, was “the best sort of principle” for a party, “the principle of allowing the people to do as they please with their own business.”
III
Lincoln’s efforts to promote Taylor’s election and to reformulate Whig ideology led him to advocate policies that would later come back to haunt him. His demand that President Polk prove that the United States owned the spot on which the first blood of the Mexican War was shed gave him the enduring sobriquet “Spotty Lincoln.” Stephen A. Douglas repeatedly taunted him with it in their 1858 debates, and even during his presidency it was used to question his patriotism.
Equally embarrassing was Lincoln’s argument that Polk acted unconstitutionally in ordering American troops into territory disputed with Mexico. He claimed that the Constitution gave the war-making power to Congress, not to the Chief Executive. The Founding Fathers, he told Herndon, had recognized that war was “the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions” and they “resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.” This was the very argument that Lincoln’s enemies used during the Civil War to combat what they called his executive tyranny.
They also invoked Lincoln’s statement about the right of revolution, which he included as a curious digression in his speech attacking Polk. Forgetting his own advice that “it is good policy to never plead what you need not, lest you oblige yourself to prove what you can not,” Lincoln argued that the title to the disputed land between the Nueces and the Rio Grande depended on whether the inhabitants of that area had engaged in a revolution against Mexico. “Any people anywhere... have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better,” he announced. “Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of the territory as they inhabit.” “This,” he declared, “is a most valuable,—a most sacred right—a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.” These were words he would have to eat in 1860–1861.
In another speech Lincoln went out of his way to challenge Polk’s argument that federal funding of internal improvements required an amendment to the Constitution. Lincoln opposed any change in that document. “We would do much better to let it alone,” he argued. “Better... habituate ourselves to think of it, as unalterable. It can scarcely be made better than it is.” It was a peculiar position for a future President whose name would always be connected with the Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery.
The argument that Lincoln advanced during the 1848 campaign that would have the most pernicious effect on his own administration was for a weak Chief Executive who would not veto measures passed by the Congress or dictate policies to his cabinet members. These were not new ideas for Whigs. The party had been founded to oppose that “detestable, ignorant, reckless, vain and malignant tyrant,” Andrew Jackson, who made the entire government subject to “one responsibility, one discretion, one will.” But up to this time Whigs had opposed a strong President largely because they objected to the policies he advocated. Now, with the nomination of General Taylor, they favored a weak Chief Executive to conceal the fact that their candidate stood for nothing. But Lincoln was convinced by his own arguments, and his preference for a do-nothing President persisted into the Civil War years. Claiming that it was “better that congress should originate, as well as perfect its measures, without external bias,” Lincoln as President exercised little influence over the legislative branch and used the veto power sparingly. On most issues he followed Whig doctrine by giving his cabinet members such a free hand that at times it seemed that his administration had no policy at all.
IV
After working out in his own mind a defense of Taylor and a reformulation of Whig principles, Lincoln was ready to go on the offensive against the Democrats. In July, after Taylor, Cass, and Van Buren were all in the field, the House of Representatives virtually abandoned all pretense of doing business and listened to what were essentially stump speeches for the three candidates. When Lincoln gained the floor on July 27, he was the eighth congressman to speak on the presidential question, but, fortunately for his hearers, he was able to leaven his arguments with humor. After paying a perfunctory tribute to Taylor, he turned to ridiculing the Democrats for always campaigning in the name of Andrew Jackson. “Like a horde of hungry ticks you have stuck to the tail of the Hermitage lion to the end of his life,” he jeered; “and you are still sticking to it, and drawing a loathsome sustenance from it, after he is dead.” He poked fun at Cass’s military record, comparing the general’s exploits in the War of 1812 with his own unheroic adventures in the Black Hawk War. Cass’s changing positions on the Wilmot Proviso came in for a share of ridicule, and Lincoln gleefully described how the general, as territorial governor and Indian agent, had received pay in seven different capacities simultaneously. During one eight-month period, he asserted, Cass drew ten rations a day in Michigan, ten more in Washington, and five dollars’ worth more on the road between the two places. The Democratic candidate, he joked, would never suffer the fate of Balaam’s ass, starving to death because it was unable to choose between two stacks of hay. “The like of that would never happen to Gen: Cass; place the stacks a thousand miles apart, he would stand stock still midway between them, and eat them both at once; and the green grass along the line would be apt’to suffer some too at the same time.” “By all means, make him President, gentlemen,” he urged the Democrats. “He will feed you bounteously,—if—if there is any left after he shall have helped himself.”
It was a capital speech, the Baltimore American reported. Lincoln’s manner “was so good natured, and his style so peculiar, that he kept the House in a continuous roar of merriment for the last half hour He would commence a point in his speech far up one of the aisles, and keep on talking, gesticulating, and walking until he would find himself, at the end of a paragraph, down in the center of the area in front of the clerk’s desk. He would then go back and take another head, and work down again.”
After Congress adjourned on August 14, Lincoln remained in Washington to work for Taylor’s candidacy and the triumph of Whig principles. Helping with the Whig campaign newspaper, the Battery, he oversaw the distribution of thousands of campaign documents. He was not officially a member of the Whig Executive Committee of Congress, but he sent out circular letters in its name. Taking advantage of the acquaintances he had made while attending the Whig convention in Philadelphia, he kept close track of political developments in key states, for instance asking William Schouler, the editor of the Boston Atlas, for his “undisguised opinion as to what New England generally, and Massachusetts particularly will do” in the election. Similarly, he requested newly elected Representative Thaddeus Stevens, as an “experienced and sagacious Pennsylvania politician,” to report “as to how the vote of that state, for governor, and president, is likely to go.”
Very busy during the hot Washington summer, Lincoln was also very lonely. When Mary and the children were in Washington, he had found them in his way, but after they left, he began to miss them. “I hate to stay in this old room by myself,” he complained to his wife, finding that “having nothing but business—no variety—... has grown exceedingly tasteless to me.” Eagerly he read Mary’s letters for news about the children, and when she asked him to find some stockings that would fit “Eddy’s dear little feet,” he searched the capital in vain, finding “not a single pair of the description you give, and only one plaid pair of any sort.”
He worried about the children, especially after he had what he called “that foolish dream about dear Bobby,” and he wrote them little letters. “Dont let the blessed fellows forget father,” he enjoined his wife.
But he missed Mary most of all. His letters to her, during this longest period of separation during their marriage, combined fatherly advice with mild sexual flirtatiousness. “Are you entirely free from head-ache?” he asked. “That is good—good—considering it is the first spring you have been free from it since we were acquainted.” Then he went on to add: “I am afraid you will get so well, and fat, and young, as to be wanting to marry again.” She responded in kind, with news of the boys and her family. “How much, I wish instead of writing, we were together this evening,” she wrote. “I feel very sad away from you.” Presently she began to think of returning to Washington. “Will you be a good girl in all things, if I consent?” Lincoln asked. “Then come along, and that as soon as possible. Having got the idea in my head, I shall be impatient till I see you.”
By the time she was ready to travel, Lincoln was leaving on a campaign tour of New England, and Mary and the children joined him. Fond as she was of sightseeing, she probably got little pleasure out of the trip, because Eddie was sick. Certainly her husband was too busy to take much interest in historic landmarks. Appearing without much advance notice at Worcester, in central Massachusetts, on the day before the state Whig convention was to assemble, Lincoln accepted an invitation to speak at a city hall rally on September 12, and he gave an address that he repeated, with minor variations, in Boston, New Bedford, Lowell, Dedham, Taunton, and other places where he had appointments.
It was essentially the same speech he had given in Congress in July, defending Taylor and ridiculing Cass, but he now spent more time attacking Van Buren and the Free-Soilers, who threatened to cost the Whigs their normal majority in the state. Taking for granted the strong antislavery convictions of his listeners, he established his own credentials by reminding them “that the people of Illinois agreed entirely with the people of Massachusetts on this subject, except perhaps that they did not keep so constantly thinking about it.” Both Whigs and Free-Soilers, he said, “agreed that slavery was an evil, but that we were not responsible for it and cannot affect it in the States of this Union where we do not live.” Both were opposed to the extension of slavery to the new territories. The only question, then, was which party could most effectively curb the expansion of slavery. Since the Free-Soilers, by taking votes from Taylor, would contribute to the election of Cass, he concluded “that they were behind the Whigs in their advocacy of the freedom of the soil.”
As was to be expected, Whig papers like the Boston Daily Advertiser praised Lincoln’s speech as “showing a searching mind, and a cool judgement.” “It was one of the best speeches ever heard in Worcester,” reported the Boston Atlas, and the Boston Herald called Lincoln “a tremendous voice for Taylor and Fillmore.” Democratic papers generally ignored Lincoln’s appearances, and Free-Soil editors, when they troubled to notice them at all, sneered that his remarks were “rather witty, though truth and reason and argument were treated as out of the question, as unnecessary and not to be expected.” The Norfolk Democrat found Lincoln’s remarks “absolutely nauseous,” and the Roxbury Gazette called his performance “a melancholy display.”
Lincoln’s manner attracted as much attention as the substance of his remarks. His enormous height startled his listeners, and they were puzzled that he began, “leaning himself up against the wall,... and talking in the plainest manner, and in the most indifferent tone, yet gradually fixing his footing, and getting command of his limbs, loosening his tongue, and firing up his thoughts, until he had got entire possession of himself and of his audience.” Some were charmed by the rapid flow of “argument and anecdote, wit and wisdom, hymns and prophecies, platforms and syllogisms,” while others deplored “his awkward gesticulations, the ludicrous management of his voice, and the comical expression of his countenance.” With Yankee terseness one New Bedford man summed up his opinion: “It was a pretty sound, but not a tasteful speech.”
Lincoln made no lasting impression on Massachusetts voters, but he left New England with indelible memories. Years later in the White House he could recall every detail of his visit, including “a grand dinner—a superb dinner”—that former Governor Levi Lincoln gave to Whig leaders in Worcester. It made such an impression that he could name every guest at the table and the order in which they were seated. “I went with hay seed in my hair,” the President told a Massachusetts visitor, “to learn deportment in the most cultivated State in the Union.”
He departed feeling that he had done his part to elect Taylor. The family went home by way of Albany, where Lincoln conferred with Thurlow Weed, the New York boss, who introduced him to Millard Fillmore, the Whig vice presidential candidate. Then they briefly visited Niagara Falls, which inspired Lincoln to momentary rhapsody: “Niagara is strong, and fresh to-day as ten thousand years ago. The Mammoth and Mastadon—now so long dead, that fragments of their monstrous bones, alone testify, that they ever lived, have gazed on Niagara. In that long—long time, never still for a single moment. Never dried, never froze, never slept, never rested”—and here his pen stopped as he recognized that he was not good at this sort of thing. Later, when Herndon asked him what reflections he had when he saw the falls, he remarked solemnly that he wondered where all that water came from.
V
In the excitement of helping to manage a national campaign, Lincoln became convinced that the Whigs would have “a most overwhelming, glorious, triumph” in the fall. He was chagrined to discover that Illinois Whigs did not share his enthusiasm. Many of them remained loyal to Henry Clay and resented Taylor’s nomination. Others were troubled that the party was simultaneously opposing the Mexican War and backing a nominee who had helped win it. In the northern counties, recently settled by immigrants from New England, antislavery Whigs objected to the nomination of a slaveholder like Taylor; some of them had defected to the Liberty party in 1840 and 1844 and now a mass exodus was threatened. In the Galena district Whigs were bitterly divided when Baker, back from the war and recovered from his wounds, pushed aside local party leaders like Elihu B. Washburne and ran for Congress. Throughout the state Whigs were so divided that David Davis reported they were “in a more disorganized state than I have ever known them to be.”
Nowhere was the disorganization more apparent than in Lincoln’s own Seventh District, where Herndon reported Whig disaffections that Lincoln termed “heart-sickening.” The Whig convention nominated Stephen T. Logan to succeed Lincoln in Congress, but voters thought him mean-spirited and avaricious. Thomas L. Harris, the Democratic candidate, questioned Logan’s patriotism because he endorsed Lincoln’s “Spot” resolutions, and the charge had greater force because it came from a veteran who had been wounded in the battle of Cerro Gordo. To help his former partner, Lincoln urged Herndon to “gather up all the shrewd wild boys about town”—and he named several—into Taylor clubs, where everyone should “play the part he can play best—some speak, some sing, and all hollow.” “Dont fail to do this,” he insisted. But Herndon responded with a long, melancholy letter, reflecting “severely on the stubbornness and bad judgment of the old fossils in the party, who were constantly holding the young men back.” In the August congressional election, Illinois voters decisively defeated Logan; the district Lincoln had carried two years earlier by 1,511 votes gave a majority of 106 votes to the Democratic candidate.
On his return to Illinois in October, Lincoln tried to reverse this trend before the presidential election. In Chicago he made his usual speech, arguing that a vote for either of Taylor’s opponents would be interpreted as a vote “against any restriction or restraint to the extension and perpetuation of slavery in newly acquired territory.” As he neared Springfield, his effectiveness was repeatedly undercut by reminders of his unpopular stand against the Mexican War, which the Illinois State Register declared had cau
sed the defeat of Logan in the recent congressional election. Lincoln made no campaign appearances in Springfield, but as assistant elector, appointed to stir up enthusiasm for the Whig ticket, he made nine addresses in the Seventh Congressional District. Most of the time he spoke in the northern counties of the district, where antislavery sentiment was strongest, reminding abolitionists that their defection to the Liberty party in 1844 had produced Polk’s victory and warning that support of the Free-Soil ticket in 1848 would help elect Cass.
His warning was well taken, for Cass won Illinois with a vote less than that of the Whigs and Free-Soilers combined. In the Seventh Congressional District, Taylor’s vote nearly equaled the record number Lincoln had received in 1846. Lincoln could take satisfaction in the fact that in all but one of the counties where he spoke, more voters supported Taylor than had turned out for Logan in the congressional contest. He had done his part to bring about the election of a Whig President.
VI
Next, he hoped, he could bring the party to adopt new principles. As soon as he returned to Washington in December—alone this time, for Mary and the children remained in Springfield—he saw that the central issues facing the new session of Congress were those relating to slavery and its expansion. These were not issues to which he had hitherto given much thought. He had little firsthand knowledge of slavery before he went to Washington. Except for whatever he had learned on his riverboat trips to New Orleans, he was acquainted with the South’s “peculiar institution” only through his brief visits to Kentucky, where the patriarchal households of the Speeds and the Todds showed the institution in its least oppressive form. Yet he was, he said many times, “naturally anti-slavery,” as his father had been. He expressed his views as early as 1837, in the protest he and Daniel Stone had presented to the Illinois state legislature, declaring “that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy.” But he did not support any active measures to end slavery because, as the protest stated, “the Congress of the United States has no power, under the constitution, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the different States.”
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