On Sundays, while Mary was at church, Lincoln often brought the boys with him to the law office, where Herndon found them a nuisance. “These children,” Herndon remembered, “would take down the books—empty ash buckets—coal ashes—inkstands—papers—gold pens—letters, etc. etc in a pile and then dance on the pile. Lincoln would say nothing, so abstracted was he and so blinded to his children’s faults. Had they s-t in Lincoln’s hat and rubbed it on his boots, he would have laughed and thought it smart.” “I have felt many and many a time,” he recalled years later, “that I wanted to wring their little necks and yet out of respect for Lincoln I kept my mouth shut.”
Herndon’s animus toward the Lincoln children reflected his dislike, verging on hatred, of their mother. He had never got along with Mary Todd Lincoln. He met her first in 1837, when, as visiting belle from Kentucky, she attended a ball given by Colonel Robert Allen. Herndon asked her to dance and, intending to compliment her, observed that she “seemed to glide through the waltz with the ease of a serpent.” Miss Todd, never distinguished by a sense of humor, flashed back: “Mr. Herndon, comparison to a serpent is rather severe irony, especially to a newcomer”—and she left him on the dance floor. Neither ever forgot that episode. Herndon strongly opposed Lincoln’s courtship of Mary as a betrayal of his democratic origins in favor of the wealth and aristocracy of Springfield; he was not invited to their wedding. “This woman was to me a terror,” Herndon remarked many years later; he thought she was “imperious, proud, aristocratic, insolent witty and bitter.”
Doubtless Mary disliked her husband’s choice of Herndon as a law partner. She might have preferred someone more socially respectable, like John Todd Stuart or James C. Conkling. In her judgment Herndon ran with a rowdy set in Springfield, and she knew that from time to time he was known to take too much to drink. She was not impressed by his active support of the local library association, of the temperance movement, or of women’s rights, nor did Herndon’s election as mayor of Springfield in 1854 change her opinion of him. But she recognized that the law practice was in her husband’s sphere of activities, not in her domestic sphere, and she managed to maintain formal, if distant, relations with his partner. She came to the law office only infrequently, and he was never invited to a meal in the Lincoln house. Years later she summarized: “Mr. Herndon had always been an utter stranger to me, he was not considered an habitué, at our house. The office was more, in his line.”
The antagonism between his wife and his law partner, which might have driven another man to distraction, troubled Lincoln not at all. Indeed, he rather thrived on the creative tension between Billy and Mary, both of whom were devoted to his interests but wanted his undivided attention. The knowledge that Mary was jealously watching helped spur Herndon to greater exertions and more care in the conduct of the law office, and the awareness that Herndon was a critical observer doubtless did something to curb Mary’s demonstrations of temper.
The years following Lincoln’s return from Congress were, then, relatively peaceful and prosperous. According to William Dean Howells’s 1860 campaign biography, Lincoln, after turning away from politics to the law, was “successful in his profession, happy in his home, secure in the affection of his neighbors, with books, competence, and leisure—ambition could not tempt him.” When a friend asked Lincoln to read Howells’s book and mark any inaccuracies, he allowed this passage to stand unchanged.
CHAPTER SEVEN
There Are No Whigs
Howells’s description of Lincoln in retirement was accurate enough—but it did not capture the whole picture. During the years after his service in Congress he never truly lost interest in politics, nor did he completely withdraw from public life. He continued to worry about the nation’s problems, and he constantly thought about how he could help solve them. As always, he yearned for distinction, but opportunities were few. Even though he was a highly successful lawyer, he often felt melancholy about his future. “How hard,” he remarked to Herndon, “oh how hard it is to die and leave one’s Country no better than if one had never lived for it.”
I
A former congressman and a man of influence, Lincoln was repeatedly asked to endorse applications for jobs or candidates for office. Though he firmly declined to run for another term in Congress in 1850, he remained active in party management.
Privately he advised Richard Yates, the ambitious young Whig seeking election to the congressional seat Lincoln had occupied, how to deal with campaign issues. As Congress continued to wrangle over the issue of slavery in the territories acquired from Mexico, Lincoln urged Yates to be cautiously noncommittal. On the one hand, he should announce his opposition to the extension of slavery and his support for the Wilmot Proviso; on the other, he should make it clear that if adherence to the proviso would endanger the Union he “would at once abandon it,” because “of all political objects the preservation of the Union stands number one.” Yates ought to downplay Southern threats to secede, and he should endorse the Compromise of 1850, which, among other things, admitted California as a free state, permitted the inhabitants of the New Mexico and Utah territories to make their own choice about allowing slavery, and gave the South a stringent new fugitive-slave law.
In the 1852 presidential campaign Lincoln played an active, though not a highly visible, role, and he was named Whig national committeeman for Illinois. When the party nominated Winfield Scott, Lincoln gave a long campaign address before the Springfield Scott Club in which he offered perfunctory praise for his party’s candidate and made a rollicking attack on Franklin Pierce, the Democratic nominee, whose qualifications appeared to be that, at the age of seventeen, he was able to spell the word “but” for his father. But Scott’s prospects were so dismal that, in the words of Howells’s campaign biography, Lincoln “did less in this Presidential struggle than any in which he had ever engaged.”
II
From time to time, Lincoln’s behavior suggested that he was not entirely happy in his role of elder statesman. His lackluster speeches during the 1852 presidential campaign came alive only when he referred to Stephen A. Douglas, who was campaigning vigorously for Pierce. He sneered at Douglas’s claim to be the true father of the Compromise of 1850 and accused the senator of stealing the ideas of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. When Douglas correctly charged that the 1852 Whig platform was ambiguous, Lincoln sarcastically exclaimed: “What wonderful acumen the Judge displays on the construction of language!!!” The edge to Lincoln’s remarks went beyond campaign banter and suggested his disappointment that his old rival Douglas, now the most powerful member of the United States Senate, was “a giant,” while Lincoln remained one of the “common mortals.”
There were other hints of Lincoln’s unhappiness. Some days he would arrive at the office in a cheerful mood, but then, as Herndon recorded, he might fall into “a sad terribly gloomy state—pick up a pen—sit down by the table and write a moment or two and then become abstracted.” Resting his chin on the palm of his left hand, he would sit for hours in silence, staring vacantly at the windows. Other days he was so depressed that he did not even speak to Herndon when he entered the office, and his partner, sensing his mood, would pull the curtain across the glass panel in the door and leave for an hour or so, locking the door behind him to protect the privacy of “this unfortunate and miserable man.”
Lincoln’s companions on the circuit also noticed his unpredictable moodiness. Henry Clay Whitney, who began traveling Judge Davis’s circuit after 1854, reported that Lincoln was afflicted by nightmares. One night, when they were sharing a room, Whitney woke to see his companion “sitting up in bed, his figure dimly visible by the ghostly firelight, and talking the wildest and most incoherent nonsense all to himself.” “A stranger to Lincoln would have supposed he had suddenly gone insane,” Whitney added. Awaking suddenly, Lincoln jumped out of bed, “put some wood on the fire, and then sat in front of it, moodily, dejectedly, in a most sombre and gloomy spell, till the breakfast bell rang.”
>
Herndon attributed Lincoln’s melancholy to his domestic unhappiness; others, with about as much evidence, found the cause in his chronic constipation or in the blue-mass pills that he took to overcome it. Perhaps there was truth in all these theories, but they missed the essential point that Lincoln was frustrated and unhappy with a political career that seemed to be going nowhere.
Though he was out of office, he had no intention of being out of the public eye. This was the golden age of the lyceum movement, when men and women thronged the lecture halls and listened for hours to speakers who might edify, enlighten or, at least, amuse them. By the 1850s, with the completion of the railroad network, Springfield was on the regular circuit for Eastern lecturers, and residents raptly listened to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Greeley, and Bayard Taylor, as well as to numerous local speakers. Lincoln thought he might as well join the parade.
His efforts to become a popular lecturer were uniformly unhappy. His dithyramb on Niagara Falls was probably intended to be part of a lecture before he wisely decided to abandon it. He also aborted a proposed lecture on the law, which he began on a negative note: “I am not an accomplished lawyer. I find quite as much material for a lecture, in those points wherein I have failed, as in those wherein I have been moderately successful.”
His most ambitious and curious effort was what he called “a sort of lecture” entitled “Discoveries and Inventions,” which he first read to the Young Men’s Association in Bloomington on April 6, 1858. The first half was Lincoln’s version of the history of discoveries, ranging from Adam’s invention of the fig-leaf apron in the Garden of Eden to the steam engine. The second half dealt with the invention of writing and printing—together with the discovery of America, the introduction of patent laws, and what Lincoln called, oddly enough, “the invention of negroes, or, of the present mode of using them.” It was a commonplace production, resting on a few articles in the Encyclopedia Americana and on Old Testament references to such subjects as spinning and weaving. Over the next twelve months Lincoln delivered this lecture in several Illinois towns, but, though by this time he was a possible presidential candidate, it attracted only small and unenthusiastic audiences. It was, as Herndon said, “a lifeless thing—a dull dead thing, ‘died a bornin [sic].’”
Lincoln was scarcely more successful in two eulogies he pronounced. Attending court in Chicago when Zachary Taylor died in July 1850, Lincoln was invited by members of the Common Council to memorialize the late President. “The want of time for preparation will make the task, for me, a very difficult one to perform, in any degree satisfactory to others or to myself,” he replied, but he felt obliged to accept the assignment as a duty, which would incidentally keep his name before the growing population of northern Illinois. His address was largely a pedestrian recital of the facts of Taylor’s life, interrupted by an occasional rhetorical flourish: “And now the din of battle nears the fort and sweeps obliquely by;... they fly to the wall; every eye is strained—it is—it is—the stars and stripes are still aloft!”
Only slightly more successful was the eulogy Lincoln delivered in Springfield on Henry Clay. He genuinely admired the Kentucky statesman, and he was beginning to think of himself as Clay’s successor in leading a revitalized Whig party. But his analytical cast of mind kept him from indulging in effusive praise of anyone. Instead, he confined himself largely to a factual review of Clay’s career, which unintentionally revealed more about the speaker than his subject. Clay’s lack of formal education, Lincoln suggested in a clearly autobiographical passage, “teaches that in this country, one can scarcely be so poor, but that, if he will, he can acquire sufficient education to get through the world respectably.” Clay’s eloquence, he observed, did not consist “of types and figures—of antithesis, and elegant arrangement of words and sentences”; it derived its strength “from great sincerity and a thorough conviction, in the speaker of the justice and importance of his cause.” Precisely the same could be said of the best of Lincoln’s own productions.
III
Largely perfunctory, Lincoln’s eulogy on Henry Clay came alive only in its final paragraphs. Of the hundreds of funeral addresses’ on the Kentucky statesman, Lincoln’s was one of the very few that explicitly dealt with Clay’s views on slavery. Clay “did not perceive, that on a question of human right, the negroes were to be excepted from the human race,” Lincoln announced; consequently, “he ever was, on principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery.” Because Clay recognized that it could not be “at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil,” he supported the efforts of the American Colonization Society to transport African-Americans back to Africa and served for many years as president of that organization.
Endorsing Clay’s views on colonization, Lincoln revealed a change in his own attitude toward slavery. He had all along been against the peculiar institution, but it had not hitherto seemed a particularly important or divisive issue, partly because he had so little personal knowledge of slavery. But in Washington his strongly antislavery friends in Congress, like Joshua R. Giddings and Horace Mann, helped him see that the atrocities that occurred every day in the national capital were the inevitable results of the slave system. As Lincoln’s sensitivity to the cruelty of slavery changed, so did his memories. In 1841, returning from the Speed plantation, he had been amused by the cheerful docility of a gang of African-Americans who were being sold down the Mississippi. Now, reflecting on that scene, he recalled it as “a continual torment,” which crucified his feelings.
He also began to understand the effect that slavery had on white Southerners. He took great interest in affairs in Kentucky, where his father-in-law, Robert S. Todd, along with Henry Clay, was working for gradual emancipation, which they hoped the Kentucky constitutional convention of 1849 would endorse. But the convention overwhelmingly rejected all plans to end slavery or even to ameliorate it. Todd, a candidate for the senate, died during the campaign; had he lived, he could have been disastrously defeated. These developments gave Lincoln a new insight into Southern society. Even nonslaveholders, who constituted an overwhelming majority of the Kentucky voters, were opposed to any form of emancipation. The prospect of owning slaves, he learned, was “highly seductive to the thoughtless and giddy headed young men,” because slaves were “the most glittering ostentatious and displaying property in the world.” As a young Kentuckian told him, “You might have any amount of land; money in your pocket or bank stock and while travelling around no body would be any wiser, but if you had a darkey trudging at your heels every body would see him and know that you owned slaves.”
Lincoln looked for a rational way to deal with the problems caused by the existence of slavery in a free American society, and he believed he had found it in colonization. Like Clay and Chief Justice John Marshall, who belonged to the American Colonization Society, he became convinced that transporting African-Americans to Liberia would defuse several social problems. By relocating free Negroes from the United States—and, at least initially, all those transported were to be freedmen—colonization would remove what many white Southerners considered the most disruptive elements in their society. Consequently, Southern whites would more willingly manumit their slaves if they were going to be shipped off to Africa. At the same time, Northerners would give more support for emancipation if freedmen were sent out of the country; they could not migrate to the free states where they would compete with white laborers. Moreover, colonization could elevate the status of the Negro race by proving that blacks, in a separate, self-governing community of their own, were capable of making orderly progress in civilization. Thus, Lincoln thought, voluntary emigration of the blacks—and, unlike some other colonizationists, he never favored forcible deportation—would succeed both “in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery” and “in restoring a captive people to their long-lost father-land, with bright prospects for the future.”
The plan was entirely rational—and wholly impracticable. Amer
ican blacks, nearly all of whom were born and raised in the United States, had not the slightest desire to go to Africa; Southern planters had no intention of freeing their slaves; and there was no possibility that the Northern states would pay the enormous amount of money required to deport and resettle millions of African-Americans. From time to time, even Lincoln doubted the colonization scheme would work. He would like “to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia—to their own native land,” he announced in 1854. “But,” he added, “a moment’s reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope, (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible. If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days.”
Though reality sometimes broke in, Lincoln persisted in his colonization fantasy until well into his presidency. For a man who prided himself on his rationality, his adherence to such an unworkable scheme was puzzling, though not inexplicable. His failure to take into account the overwhelming opposition of blacks to colonization stemmed from his lack of acquaintance among African-Americans. Of nearly 5,000 inhabitants of Springfield in 1850, only 171 were blacks, most of whom labored in menial or domestic occupations. Mariah Vance, who worked two days a week as a laundress in the Lincoln home and sometimes helped out with the cooking, was one of these; another was the Haitian, William de Fleurville, better known as “Billy the Barber,” whom Lincoln advised on several small legal problems. These were not people who could speak out boldly to say that they were as American as any whites, that they had no African roots, and that they did not want to leave the United States.
Lincoln Page 24