Lincoln

by David Herbert Donald

  “His speech was full of fire and energy and force,” Herndon recalled; “it was logic; it was pathos; it was enthusiasm; it was justice, equity, truth, and right set ablaze by the divine fires of a soul maddened by the wrong; it was hard, heavy, knotty, gnarly, backed with wrath.” To his partner Lincoln seemed seven feet tall that day.

  X

  Lincoln recognized that the Republican party faced formidable problems in the 1856 presidential contest. Not only was it a new and imperfectly articulated organization, but it had powerful competition. Shrewdly the Democrats passed over the controversial Douglas and nominated James Buchanan, the former Secretary of State, who had a distinguished career of public service—and the inestimable blessing of having been out of the country, as minister to Great Britain, during the controversy over the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The nativists, now calling themselves the American party, nominated ex-President Millard Fillmore, whose highly respectable Whig antecedents made him attractive to conservatives of all persuasions. Even Mary Lincoln, usually wholly committed to her husband’s political views, confessed that her “weak woman’s heart” compelled her to favor Fillmore, who understood “the necessity of keeping foreigners, within bounds.”

  To counter the appeal of these two conservative candidates, Lincoln thought it important for the Republican party, holding its first national convention in Philadelphia on June 17–19, to recognize that nine-tenths of the anti-Nebraska voters had formerly been Whigs. He wrote Trumbull, who attended the convention at his urging, that the nomination of Supreme Court Justice John McLean of Ohio “would save every whig, except such as have already gone over hook and line” to the Democrats, but he carefully explained that he was not inflexible in his choice. “I am in,’ he pledged, “and shall go for any one nominated unless he be ’platformed expressly, or impliedly, on some ground which I may think wrong.”

  The Philadelphia convention did not follow his advice, nor did it nominate either of the most conspicuous leaders in the Republican movement, William H. Seward of New York, or Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. Instead, it chose the flamboyant, highly popular John C. Frémont, widely known as the “Pathmarker of the West” because of his explorations of the Rocky Mountains.

  But when it came to selecting a vice presidential nominee, the delegates did look to former Whigs. The most popular candidate was William L. Dayton, a former senator from New Jersey. Unhappy that the new party was failing to recognize the importance of the Northwest, Illinois delegates caucused, and Nathaniel G. Wilcox proposed that they present Lincoln’s name to the convention. Trumbull, who was not a delegate but attended the caucus, agreed that Lincoln was a ’very good man,” and all the other members backed Lincoln’s candidacy. All through the evening they worked to secure support in other delegations, convincing the Indiana members that the nomination of Dayton would do great injustice to the Western states.

  On June 19 the Illinois delegation arranged to have John Allison of Pennsylvania put Lincoln’s name in nomination as “the prince of good fellows, and an Old-Line Whig.” Then Illinois delegate William B. Archer seconded the nomination, saying that he had known Lincoln for thirty years and had always found him “as pure a patriot as ever lived.” Anti-Nebraska Democrat John M. Palmer, who had been instrumental in preventing Lincoln’s election to the senate in 1855, added his endorsement, announcing, “We [in Illinois] can lick Buchanan any way, but I think we can do it a little easier if we have Lincoln on the ticket with John C. Frémont.”

  But the Illinois movement got under way too late, after most of the delegates were already committed to other candidates. In an informal ballot for vice presidential nominee, Dayton received 253 votes to Lincoln’s 110. Lincoln was, of course, flattered by the support he received, which was evidence that he was becoming nationally known as a leader of the new party, but he pretended indifference. On the circuit in Urbana when Davis and Whitney brought him the news, he said with charming false modesty, “I reckon that ain’t me; there’s another great man in Massachusetts named Lincoln, and I reckon it’s him.”

  The nomination of Frémont did not discourage Lincoln. As he wrote Trumbull, in a carefully chosen double negative, he was “not without high hopes for the state,” though Illinois Republicans would have had an easier time had McLean been nominated. From the start of the campaign he made it his mission to win over Fillmore’s supporters to the Republican cause. Most of these were, as a man in Clinton wrote him, “still tender, old time whigs,... partly with and partly not with us,” and they looked to Lincoln for leadership. “In you they do place more confidence than in any other man,” his correspondent continued. “Others may make fine speeches, but it would not be ’Lincoln said so in his speech.

  Responding to the need, Lincoln entered the campaign wholeheartedly and, as he remembered, made more than fifty speeches in behalf of the Republican ticket. Most of them were delivered in the central and southern parts of the state, where Fillmore was strong, and there Republican editors, attempting to appeal to the Southern-born voters, stressed that Lincoln was a Kentuckian, “a Southerner, with eloquence that would bear a comparison with Henry Clay’s.”

  Few of Lincoln’s 1856 campaign speeches were preserved—or were worth preserving. In them he only occasionally praised Frémont, as “our young, gallant and world-renowned commander,” or attacked “Buchanan, and his gang.” He made few attempts to excite his audiences with tales of recent atrocities against free-state men in Kansas; he did not mention the quasi-war raging between the proslavery Lecompton regime and the free-state Topeka government in the territory and said nothing about the sack of Lawrence by pro-Southern ruffians on May 21. Nor did he refer to the attack that South Carolina Representative Preston S. Brooks made the following day upon Charles Sumner in the Senate chamber because of his antislavery speeches. Instead, Lincoln offered low-key, reasonable arguments to persuade American voters opposed to the expansion of slavery not to waste their votes on Fillmore, who had no chance of winning.

  In private letters to old Whig friends, Lincoln made the same argument, stressing that a vote for Fillmore was really a vote for Buchanan. “This,” he told them, “is as plain as the adding up of the weights of three small hogs.” Because he had no secretarial assistance and wanted to reach a larger number of his former political associates, Lincoln had lithographed a form letter, marked “Confidential,” expressing these views. Filling in the date and salutation by hand, he sent out several dozen of these until one fell into the hands of a Democratic editor, who exposed them as form letters.

  What effect Lincoln had on the outcome of the 1856 election in Illinois was hard for him or anybody else to determine. In Republican newspapers his speeches were invariably praised as “unanswerable,” showing “great eloquence and power.” Democratic papers described his speeches as “prosy and dull in the extreme.” He himself was under no illusions about the impact of his campaigning, though he was pleased when local Republican leaders said they were “tolerably well satisfied” with his work.

  In the end, the canvass verified the prediction Lincoln had made at the start: “With the Frémont and Fillmore men united, here in Illinois, we have Mr. Buchanan in the hollow of our hand; but with us divided,... he has us.” The antislavery vote was split, and in November, Buchanan carried Illinois and won the election.

  When Lincoln looked back on the events of the past two years, he had to recognize that he had received some severe rebuffs. He had been defeated in his quest for a Senate seat, he had been snubbed by Eastern lawyers in the McCormick reaper case, and he had been passed over for the first Republican vice presidential nomination. On the other side of the ledger he could enter the solid distinction he had earned in the campaign against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the respect that was due him as the principal architect of the Republican party in Illinois, and the admiration he received as a powerful orator for the free-soil cause. After 1856 he found no further occasion to lament to Herndon about his future or to grieve that he had done nothing to m
ake his country better.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A House Divided

  After the 1856 elections Lincoln tried to maintain a low political profile. He declined most invitations to speak with the explanation, “Having devoted the most of last year to politics, it is a necessity with me to devote this, to my private affairs.” He turned to his law practice with great assiduity, and 1857 became the busiest and most profitable year of his professional life. But he had no-idea of giving up politics, and he worked, mostly behind the scenes, to maintain and perfect the Republican organization so that it could mount an effective challenge to the reelection of Stephen A. Douglas in 1858.

  I

  Two weeks after the 1856 presidential election the fall term of the Sangamon County Circuit Court opened, and Lincoln & Herndon had five cases on the first day, ten on the second. Thereafter the partners appeared in court day after day, mostly in suits of a routine sort. In addition to his usual work in the circuit courts, Lincoln in 1857 argued cases more and more frequently in the United States courts, both in Springfield and in Chicago. Often these suits involved greater issues—and brought larger fees—than trials in the local courts. For example, the trial of the Effie Afton case, which involved the rights of steamship companies as against those of the railroads, kept him in Chicago for most of September.

  Lincoln devoted a good deal of time during the summer to collecting from the Illinois Central Railroad for his services in the McLean County tax case. He was obliged to sue for his fee, and when the local railroad officials failed to pay it, he went to New York, probably in the hope of collecting it at the company headquarters. Mary accompanied him on what became more of a vacation than a business trip, for the Illinois Central officials were not forthcoming, and the Lincolns spent some time, as Mary said, “most pleasantly in travelling east,” visiting Niagara and Canada. On their return, Lincoln decided not to wait longer and secured a court order against the railroad’s property. With that, the Illinois Central paid up—and just in time, for a month later the panic of 1857 struck and the road went into bankruptcy.

  This was perhaps the happiest time of Mary Lincoln’s life. Her marriage to one of the leading public figures in Illinois satisfied her need for status, and her husband’s more than respectable income from his law practice soothed her chronic anxiety over financial insecurity. He was now well enough off to take his half of the Illinois Central fee (Herndon received the other half) out of the bank and lend it to Chicago attorney N. B. Judd, who was speculating in Iowa lands. Not needing the income immediately, Lincoln allowed the interest to accumulate, so that Judd’s note was worth $5,400 when it was redeemed.

  Because the Lincolns were now moderately well-to-do, Mary Lincoln could turn to expanding and renovating the mean little cottage in which she had lived uncomplainingly for thirteen years. By the mid-1850s it was bursting at the seams, housing husband, wife, three sons, and at times a live-in maid; anyway, it was not a residence becoming a prominent public man. Mary probably took the lead in the renovation, and she may have been able to pay for it with her own money, since in the fall of 1854 she received $1,200 for the eighty acres of Sangamon County farmland that her father had given to her ten years earlier. By April 1856 the contractors, Hannon & Ragsdale, were at work, and Springfield was buzzing about the changes that the Lincolns were making. “Mr Lincoln has commenced raising his back building two stories high,” Mrs. John Todd Stuart reported to her daughter. “I think they will have room enough before they are done.” And she added, a bit maliciously, “particularly as Mary seldom ever uses what she has.”

  The construction was completed while Lincoln was away on the circuit, and he returned to find the cottage transformed into a handsome two-story Greek Revival house, tastefully painted chocolate brown, with dark green shutters. Pretending bewilderment, he sauntered up to a neighbor. “Stranger, do you know where Lincoln lives?” he asked. “He used to live here.” As so often happened, his humor miscarried, and it was seriously reported that Mary Lincoln had remodeled the house without her husband’s knowledge or consent. Of course, he had known about the remodeling, but he did complain to his wife about the cost of the project. Thereafter she developed the bad habit of concealing her expenditures from her husband.

  Adding a full second story to the house at least doubled the Lincolns’ living space. The entrance to the house remained the same, but to the right of the front corridor there now was a large sitting room, a comfortable place where the parents could read and the children could play. A front parlor to the left of the corridor served as a formal room for receiving guests. It was connected by double sliding doors with a back parlor that was Lincoln’s library and study. In a more pretentious household the two rooms would have been identically furnished, as a double parlor, but the Lincolns kept them as two separate rooms, which could be opened into one on the rare occasions of a large party.

  On the second floor Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln now had separate, but connecting, bedrooms, which were large and comfortable. This was not a signal that intimacy, or sexual relations, between husband and wife had ended; it was the arrangement highly recommended for well-to-do couples by fashionable interior decorators. Separate bedrooms also meant that Mary was less frequently disturbed by her husband’s insomnia and nightmares. Robert now had his own room on this floor, and Willie and Tad shared one adjacent to it. There was a handsome guest room and, at the rear, a small room for a maid. The remodeled Lincoln house was not a mansion like the Edwardses,’ nor did it rival the very expensive home that Governor Matteson had just built, but it was one of the best in Springfield.

  In furnishing the house, Mary Lincoln chose wall-to-wall carpets for the parlors and the sitting room, selecting a dark, floral pattern that had recently come’ in style. The parlors had light, patterned wallpaper, but for the sitting room and the bedrooms she picked dark, boldly figured paper, which was then popular. The heavy, swagged draperies, which hung from ceiling to floor, she economically had made of cotton damask rather than silk. The rooms were furnished comfortably and unpretentiously, in a variety of styles, and the house was remarkably uncluttered. “An air of quiet refinement pervaded the place,” a visitor reported. “You would have known instantly that she who presided over that modest household was a true type of American lady.”

  That was precisely the impression that Mary Lincoln wanted it to convey, for the house on Eighth and Jackson Streets was the center of her world. Finally she felt comfortable. Her children were now old enough not to require constant supervision. Though the younger boys were still much in evidence and, as Mary complained, were “disposed to be noisy,” Robert after 1854 was away most days attending what was grandly called the Illinois State University—really a local preparatory school, so inadequate that in 1859 he failed all the entrance examinations when he tried to enter Harvard College and had to spend a year at the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Mary for the first time since her marriage had time to read and to write long, gossipy letters to her friends and relatives.

  She also now felt able to entertain properly. Though her dining room was still small, she could give dinner parties for six or eight, and guests like Isaac N. Arnold of Chicago long remembered her excellent cooking and her table “loaded with venison, wild turkeys, prairie chickens, quails, and other game.” But she preferred to give larger buffet suppers, like the “very handsome and agreable [sic] entertainment” she offered in February 1857—just possibly an unannounced party for her husband’s forty-eighth birthday. No fewer than five hundred guests were invited, and it was not clear how-she expected to squeeze all those people in. Fortunately a heavy rainstorm and a conflicting engagement kept many of them away. Even so, about three hundred had a chance to see her newly expanded and redecorated home. Weary but proud when the affair was over, she wrote her favorite sister in Kentucky, “You will think, we have enlarged our borders, since you were here.”

  II

  In part, the Lincolns’ hospitality was designed
to maintain his network of political friends and acquaintances, because public office was never far from his mind. He was not dispirited by the outcome of the 1856 elections. After all, the Republicans had succeeded in electing William H. Bissell as governor. On the national scene, James Buchanan was chosen President only because the opposition vote was split between Frémont and Fillmore, who together had a majority of 400,000. If, he told a gathering of Chicago Republicans in December 1856, these factions could “let past differences, as nothing be” and could agree that the equality of men was “‘the central idea’ in our political public opinion,” they would surely carry the next election.

  A decision handed down by the United States Supreme Court on March 6,1857, two days after Buchanan’s inauguration, made the need for a Republican victory both more necessary and more likely. The ruling concerned the fate of Dred Scott, a Missouri slave, who had been taken by his owner, an army surgeon, first to Rock Island, Illinois, a state where slavery was prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance and by its own constitution, and subsequently to Fort Snelling, in Minnesota Territory, from which slavery had been excluded by the Missouri Compromise. After returning with Scott to Missouri, his master died. Scott sued for his freedom on the ground that he had been resident first of a free state and then of a free territory. The case finally reached the Supreme Court. Speaking for a majority of the justices, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that Scott was not entitled to sue, because, as a Negro, he was not a citizen of the United States. At the time the nation was created, Taney pronounced, blacks were considered “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” and the Founding Fathers had not included them in either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. The Chief Justice held further that residence in free territory did not entitle Scott to freedom, since all congressional enactments that excluded slavery from the national territories, including specifically the Missouri Compromise, were “not warranted by the constitution” and were “therefore void.”