The Lincoln of this period did indeed evince a new seriousness in tone and a sharper moral edge. This seems to have been related to a greater thoughtfulness about religion. Although the churchgoing and Scripture-quoting Lincoln of the 1850s was no orthodox Trinitarian Christian, he had evidently moved away from the skepticism, even iconoclasm, of his youth. But here, too, there is evidence of continuity in his thought, as a seam of fatalism, shaped by the strict Calvinist milieu of his upbringing, repeatedly surfaced in his private conversations and in his ideas about the course of history.
AMBITION
Unquenchable ambition was a valuable if not essential commodity for candidates pursuing political office in the rough-and-tumble of the world’s first mass democracy. Though his antebellum contemporaries have bequeathed us widely divergent views about the private Abraham Lincoln, those who knew him well were at least agreed over one thing: his passionate yearning to make a mark. His Illinois neighbors and fellow lawyers largely shared the view of his partner, William Herndon, that Lincoln was “the most ambitious man in the world.” He was particularly fascinated by Shakespeare’s depiction of Richard III, Macbeth, and Claudius, all preternaturally ambitious characters. According to Sophie Hanks, his cousin, “Abe always had a natural idea that he was going to be something.”1
A degree of mystery surrounds the sources of that inner drive toward political recognition. We can be sure that it was related to Lincoln’s earnest desire to improve himself. But that, too, is not so simply accounted for, though the pointers may seem obvious. Extreme material hardship marked his childhood. The family left Kentucky when he was seven, Lincoln’s father having failed to establish himself as an independent farmer in a slave state blighted by insecure land titles. Lincoln’s own dispiriting memories included the rain washing away the pumpkin seed he had planted through a day of backbreaking labor. Migration to Indiana, in 1816, meant the taming of the wilderness, the threat of wild beasts, and the wielding of axes to clear the land. It meant the death of his mother, Nancy, from consuming the milk of cows that had grazed on poisonous white snakeroot. It meant a farming regimen which allowed few opportunities for formal education and intellectual growth: the periods of Lincoln’s own schooling, scattered across several winters, amounted to less than twelve months in all. Together these elements may seem more than adequate explanation for Lincoln’s aversion to the farmer’s life and his snatching every opportunity for reading and mental activity. But poverty, drudgery, loneliness, and rural wildness need not of themselves breed enterprise and aspiration, as his own father’s outlook made only too clear. Thomas Lincoln’s straitened circumstances and total lack of education seem to have fused with his Separate Baptist faith—a strict Calvinism—to fashion a fatalistic, easygoing acceptance of a near-subsistence, rustic lot quite characteristic of border-state southerners of his time. Lincoln himself remarked that the ill-qualified teachers of the so-called blab schools did “absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education.” What then was it that prompted his drive for self-improvement, what his White House secretaries described as his “fixed and inflexible will to succeed”?2
We can only speculate, for the intensely private Lincoln offered few clues. Part of the explanation may lie quite simply in natural endowment: Lincoln himself believed that his mother was the illegitimate daughter of Lucy Hanks and “a well-bred,” “broad-minded” Virginian planter, to whom he attributed his own mental attributes and ambitious striving.3 Also significant may have been the influence of his stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, whose marriage to Thomas Lincoln in 1819, the year after Nancy Lincoln’s death, brought spruceness, good order, and even a degree of luxury to the family’s Indiana cabin. She evidently acted as a counterbalance to her husband, whose uneasy and even antagonistic relationship with his son reflected their temperamental incompatibility and his exasperation at Lincoln’s reading and intellectual aspirations. The young Abraham certainly cherished Sarah’s encouragement and affection, which contrasted with his father’s efforts to rent out his services and, indirectly if not deliberately, thwart his studies.
Lincoln was legally required to remain obedient to his father and stay at home until he was twenty-one. He felt, but resisted, the temptation to run away. He even deferred the moment of leave-taking until he had assisted the family’s removal, by pioneer wagon, to the fertile soil of Macon County in central Illinois, cleared and fenced the ground, and seen them through their first, harsh, isolated winter. But in the spring of 1831 he left home to take a flatboat of goods to New Orleans for Denton Offutt, a local entrepreneur. It marked a critical turning point in Lincoln’s journey of self-improvement. His companions—his cousin, John Hanks, and stepbrother, John D. Johnston—soon returned to a life of farming, but Lincoln would never go back. He subsequently saw little of, and wanted little to do with, his father. Even when he knew that Thomas was near to death, in 1851, Lincoln asked his stepbrother to tell him “that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.”4 He invited none of his family to the ceremony when he married the refined Mary Todd. His separation from them signaled his repudiation of rural life.
In July 1831 Lincoln settled in New Salem, an aspiring commercial hamlet set on the cliff above the Sangamon River, where Offutt had promised to employ him as a clerk on his return from New Orleans. With water-powered mills, artisan shops, general stores, a tavern, and a population of about a hundred, the village had grown impressively from nothing in just two years. Its future growth would depend on its ability to develop navigable waterway links between its surrounding countryside and eastern and southern towns. During his six years’ residence there Lincoln pursued a variety of occupations, following no particular blueprint, but in each case was able to exploit and enhance his reputation as an agreeable young man of dependable, ingenious, and persevering habits. When, as Lincoln put it, Offutt’s overblown schemes “petered out,” he lost his job as store clerk and mill manager, but was temporarily rescued from joblessness by the outbreak of the Black Hawk War, which followed the attempt of Sauk and Fox Indians to reoccupy their old lands east of the Mississippi: he served as a militia captain but saw no fighting. Then he considered the blacksmith’s trade, for which he had the physique but not the appetite, before seizing the chance to buy (jointly, with William F. Berry, and on credit) one of the village’s general stores. It was a mistake: the business “winked out,” a consequence of the stuttering growth of New Salem, and left Lincoln with Berry’s worthless notes and the moral obligation of paying off what he called “the national debt.”5 He was able to make a little money through splitting fence rails before his friends successfully interceded to secure him the office of postmaster. The position was not burdensome, but neither did it provide a living. When the new county surveyor, John Calhoun, asked Lincoln to become his assistant, he accepted a job for which he had no training but much aptitude, and whose fees allowed him to start meeting his debts.
Lincoln’s escape from a life of common laboring owed much to his conscientious attempts to improve his mind. He read widely and purposefully. In his early years his books had been restricted to his classroom texts and those his stepmother had brought with her to Indiana, notably the Bible, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Aesop’s Fables, Parson Weems’s Life of George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. These were many times reread. (His cousin recalled how, at the end of the farming day, Lincoln would take a piece of cornbread and a book, and “sitting on his shoulder-blades,” “cock his legs up as high as his head, and read.”)6 As storekeeper and postmaster in New Salem he now had time to indulge his love of poetry, broaden his grasp of political philosophy, immerse himself in the newspapers that passed through his office, and engage in strenuous study. His self-discipline impressed his neighbors. At his Indiana fireside he had nightly scribbled essays and arithmetical exercises on a wooden shovel, then shaved off the evidence and started again. Now he showed the same appet
ite for mental drill in his study of Kirkham’s English Grammar, a copy of which he had walked miles to secure. Teaching himself the principles of surveying, which called for a grasp of geometry, trigonometry, and logarithms, demanded even greater application.
Though some described the pre-Illinois Lincoln as “lazy,” alluding to his frustration with physical work, they missed his natural industriousness, and his mental energy and toughness. Lincoln’s flight from the land had nothing to do with indolence and all to do with self-fulfillment. He was deeply impatient of sloth. “The leading rule” for men of all callings, he later wrote, “is diligence. Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today.” When his stepbrother, to whom he often lent money, sought to borrow more, he offered a sharp reprimand: “You are not lazy, and still you are an idler. I doubt whether since I saw you, you have done a good whole day’s work, in any one day. . . . This habit of uselessly wasting time, is the whole difficulty; and it is vastly important to you, and still more to your children that you should break this habit.” When later asked by a prospective law student how to succeed, Lincoln replied, “Work, work, work, is the main thing.” Effort and endeavor were not only good in themselves but the means to financial self-sufficiency. Not that Lincoln was driven by the desire for wealth alone: money was important as the route to bourgeois civility, not as an end in itself. Years later David Davis, Lincoln’s legal associate, reminisced that his friend, even when he enjoyed a good income from his practice of law, maintained “simple and unostentatious habits,” kept his charges low, since few of his clients were rich, and showed no interest in accumulating a fortune.7 Unlike most of the Illinois political elite in the 1850s, he largely resisted the lure of land speculation.
LINCOLN’S CREDO
Lincoln’s brief letter to a young lawyer sets out crisply his personal rule of self-improvement through hard work.
In Lincoln’s ambitious striving there was something of the temper of the New England Puritan, a “Yankee” blend of self-discipline, character-building, and initiative, though he did not subscribe to the moral coerciveness shared by many of that breed. His celebration of enterprise and individual effort had much more in common with the advancing tide of “modern,” or Arminianized, Calvinism, and its preoccupation with human responsibility, than with traditional, rural predestinarianism. Significantly, he disliked alcohol, which left him feeling “flabby,” and tobacco: these ubiquitous elements of frontier life threatened the individual’s self-control and self-reliance. Though he retained a natural humility and many of the badges of his rural origins—his accent and turn of phrase, his physical strength, his earthy humor and storytelling—he found many other features of frontier primitivism repugnant. Lincoln hated cruelty to animals, disliked hunting, would not use a gun, and had no respect for revivalist religion’s raw emotionalism and theological oversimplifications.
The possibility of self-fulfillment through a career in politics struck Lincoln early on, though exactly when is not certain. As well as the Life of George Washington, his youthful reading included William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution. During his limited schooling in Indiana, he wrote essays on politics and entertained his fellow pupils with his efforts at public speaking and storytelling. He was a regular reader of the political press well before he left for Illinois, and not long after his arrival he delivered an impromptu speech in Decatur, during the campaign for the state legislature. Two years later, only twenty-three, and impressing his New Salem neighbors with his integrity, forceful mind, and folksy charm, he was urged by several men of influence, including the justice of the peace and the president of the debating society, to run for the legislature himself.
In Lincoln they saw a popular, confident young man who they knew was determined to foster New Salem’s commercial interests, notably by securing government support for improved and cheaper river transportation. Setting out his stall in an election statement, Lincoln advocated low-interest credit, better navigation, and educational opportunity as the means of fostering an industrious, enterprising, and moral community.8 In this he implicitly allied himself with the stance of the embryonic Whig party and the economic program of the national political leader whom he admired above all others, Henry Clay. But he chose to avoid any direct reference to national issues and politics, probably because of the popularity which Clay’s rival for the White House, the incumbent Democratic president, Andrew Jackson, enjoyed locally and throughout the western states.
Soon after Lincoln declared his candidacy, the Black Hawk War provided him with heartening evidence of his local popularity, for the men of his volunteer company elected him captain; nearly thirty years later he would declare this “a success which gave me more pleasure than any I have had since.” Three months’ war service left him little time for campaigning in the elections for the state Assembly, but he made a few speeches and did himself no harm. Judge Stephen T. Logan encountered him for the first time, and though considering him “gawky, and rough-looking” (“his pantaloons didn’t meet his shoes by six inches”), he was much impressed by the novelty with which Lincoln set out his ideas: “He had the same individuality that he kept through all his life.”9 Lincoln won almost all the votes of New Salem village, but was not well enough known across the electoral district to prevent the disappointment of defeat.
That defeat did not dent his ambition or self-confidence. He had gained experience, as well as the friendship of Logan and other leading Whigs, including the urbane John Todd Stuart of Springfield. Running again in 1834, when thirteen candidates contested four legislative places, Lincoln was this time elected, and stepped into a new world. He bought a suit with borrowed money and, encouraged by Stuart, who lent him books and overcame the young man’s reservations about his inadequate education, turned to the study of law. The legislative session ending in February, Lincoln spent much of 1835 mastering Blackstone’s Commentaries and other legal texts by the same means as he had acquired his knowledge of surveying: studying alone and, in his own words, going “at it in good earnest.”10 Impressively, within two years he was equipped to take the oath of admission to the Illinois bar. He rode out of New Salem for good in April 1837, heading the short distance to Springfield, the Sangamon County seat and a raw, bustling town of fifteen hundred inhabitants, where Stuart had offered him a partnership. A law practice was the ideal complement to a career in politics. It not only provided a livelihood and the technical grasp needed for the drafting of legislation, but offered a valuable social network and—since litigation was relatively uncomplicated—considerable time for public political conversation and debate, in front of curious and admiring onlookers.
At Vandalia, the state capital, Lincoln remained largely inconspicuous through his first term of office, listening, observing, and quietly impressing. After his reelection in 1836 the Sangamon County Whig delegation, known as the “Long Nine” since each was over six feet tall, made him their floor leader out of respect for his parliamentary skills, a confidence fully repaid by his masterly handling of the bill to move the state capital to Springfield. Two more terms, from 1838 and 1840, further enhanced his confidence and reputation. He led the Whigs in the House, and was twice candidate for speaker, on one occasion failing by just a single vote. Though he chose not to stand for reelection at the end of his fourth term, this did not signal the end of political ambition, nor did his refusing (in 1841, and again in 1844) to run as a candidate for governor. Rather, it showed a clearheaded realism. In the Illinois legislature he had shown his political mastery and had nothing further to prove, while in a Democrat-controlled state a Whig could not seriously expect to win the governorship. He may have had the idea of running for the state Senate, but if so it came to nothing. More significantly, he was chosen as a Whig “presidential elector” for the campaign of 1840, when he stumped the state for the party’s nominee, William Henry Harrison, and once more in 1844, when he traveled even farther afield on behalf of his “beau ideal of a statesman,” Henry Clay. This gave him experience
of, as well as an appetite for, politics on a larger stage. Lincoln may already have had his sights fixed on the United States Congress when he finally left the state Assembly in 1841. It is certain that when John Todd Stuart revealed that he did not intend to seek reelection as congressman in 1843, Lincoln was determined to throw his hat into the ring.11
The newly formed Seventh Congressional District embraced the areas of greatest Whig strength in the state. Whoever won the Whig nomination would surely go on to win the congressional election. The district also boasted many of the ablest Whig leaders. Lincoln’s hunger for his party’s nomination was obvious, and he worked energetically for support. He told a fellow lawyer, Richard S. Thomas: “If you should hear any one say that Lincoln don’t want to go to Congress, I wish you . . . would tell him you have reason to believe he is mistaken. The truth is, I would like to go very much.” When his great friend and glittering rival, Edward D. Baker, instead won the support of the Sangamon County Whigs, Lincoln was bitterly upset. As one of the delegates appointed to carry that endorsement to the district convention, he considered himself “ ‘fixed’ a good deal like a fellow who is made groomsman to the man what has cut him out, and is marrying his own dear ‘gal.’ ”12 He did nothing to hinder Baker’s nomination but sought equally to prevent any drifting away of his own support in the counties where he was strong. When the delegates met, at Pekin in May 1843, both men suffered disappointment, losing out to the gifted and equally ambitious John J. Hardin of Jacksonville. But Lincoln usefully secured the adoption of a resolution which in effect limited Hardin to a single congressional term in Washington, to be followed by Baker. It implicitly left open the possibility of his own nomination two elections on. Even so, the depth of Lincoln’s disappointment may be measured by what looked like a rare act of vengeance, his refusal to cast a ballot for Hardin when election day arrived.
Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power Page 2