As hoped, Baker took the Seventh District in 1844. Lincoln, his own ambitions bound up in the outcome, earnestly supported him. But the real test of Lincoln’s mettle and single-mindedness would lie in the next contest. He began to make moves in September 1845, almost a year before polling day. Securing from Baker a promise not to run against him, Lincoln visited Hardin, who would make no such pledge. Six months of political fencing followed, during which Lincoln kept the initiative, thanks essentially to his use of the Pekin agreement of 1843 and the argument that “Turn about is fair play.”13 By not running in 1844 Hardin had appeared to endorse the idea of “rotation of office,” though he now denied it and declared the principle antirepublican.14 Many of the party’s leaders thought well of the Jacksonville Whig, but some had already committed themselves to Lincoln before Hardin had declared his interest. Lincoln made delicate and effective use of the press, especially in Sangamon and the pivotal northern counties, and encouraged the idea that Hardin should run for governor, not Congress. Outflanked, Hardin charged Lincoln with impropriety and “maneuvering” in pursuit of the nomination. Striving to control his temper, Lincoln managed, crucially, to keep the worst of their differences from the press. Hardin withdrew from the field as precinct and county conventions endorsed the growing view “that it is Abraham’s turn now.”15
After this strenuous struggle for the party nomination, Lincoln’s battle with the Democratic candidate, Peter Cartwright, was rather a low-key affair. Lincoln did not take victory over the famed Methodist preacher for granted, but in the event Cartwright, though a scourge of Calvinists, total immersionists, and backsliders, proved no match for the Whigs. Lincoln was carried to Washington by a handsome majority. However, as he told his friend Joshua Speed, his electoral success had “not pleased me as much as I expected,” and his term in Congress, rather than being a springboard for achieving a national reputation, proved anticlimactic and largely undistinguished. Even so, Lincoln would happily have sought a second term had it not been for the principle of rotation in office. He had declared at the outset that he would not stand again, “more from a wish to deal fairly with others . . . than for any cause personal to myself”; he could not go back on his “word and honor,” unless “it should so happen that nobody else wishes to be elected.”16 With elective office thus closed off he was induced, reluctantly at first, to seek the most prestigious patronage appointment available to aspiring Illinoisans: commissioner of the General Land Office. When the new Whig administration of President Zachary Taylor instead awarded the job to Justin Butterfield, an able land lawyer from Chicago, who unlike himself had done little to secure the president’s victory, Lincoln was bitterly disappointed. In the right hands—his own—he believed the post and the patronage it controlled could be the ideal means of building a stronger Whig machine in a state where Democrats, the majority party, dominated the presidential and gubernatorial races. An opportunity to benefit the most ambitious leaders of Whiggery had been lost. When offered the governorship of Oregon Territory by way of compensation, Lincoln declined what he (and his wife) judged a political dead end.
Abraham Lincoln, around 1846, shortly before he left for Washington as a newly elected congressman. In his untypically kempt hair we may detect a solicitous, wifely hand.
Lincoln’s return to the law in 1849, by now in partnership with William Herndon, marked the beginning of a period of relative withdrawal from politics that ended only in 1854. The degree of that withdrawal and the significance of those midlife years for Lincoln’s personal development are contested. Lincoln himself later wrote that at this time he “practiced law more assiduously than ever before” and “was losing interest in politics,” and that by 1854 “his profession had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind.” He did not demur when in 1860 he read in William Dean Howells’s campaign biography that after 1849 “ambition could not tempt him.” He declined suggestions that he should run once more for Congress or the state legislature, and even missed some landmark political meetings. But there is no reason to believe that Lincoln had stopped yearning for public distinction. These were years marked by periods of deep introspection and depression, and by nightmares. We can only speculate on the sources of his unhappiness, but it may have had to do with his sense of failure. Herndon noted that on his return from Congress Lincoln “despaired of ever rising again in the political world.” Compared with that of his long-standing rival, Stephen A. Douglas, a comet in the Democratic firmament, his career remained stubbornly terrestrial. But he did not write himself off politically. He continued in party management. He worked as a national committeeman and campaign speaker for the Whigs’ presidential candidate, Winfield Scott, in 1852. He delivered eulogies on the deaths of Zachary Taylor and Henry Clay. If the political opportunity was there to be seized, as would become the case in 1854, he had not lost the ambition to seize it.17
Why did Lincoln’s unresting ambition find its particular expression in the search for political office? In this, as in other questions about him, speculation has to decorate fact. It was not an odd choice of career: the most well-traveled route to distinction in the developing western states was not business but politics, and its handmaiden, the law. At a prosaic level, political office provided a livelihood for a debt-ridden young man who possessed no formal qualifications but had self-confidence, a clear head for analysis, and a proper estimate of his talent for public speaking. In due course Mary Todd Lincoln, fiercely political, played a role, certainly in urging Lincoln on to higher political achievement and perhaps in shaping a sometimes discordant domestic environment from which he sought relief; but Lincoln’s political career and ambitions were well established long before she entered his life. We can be certain that Lincoln, who had a natural humility, was not attracted to political leadership by megalomania or a “cheap desire to lord it over others.” He warned against tyrants in his speech at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield in January 1838, and it takes a special kind of historical contortionism to read this as a confession of sinister designs. During his later years, Lincoln may have looked to political achievement as a way of transcending death, but when he was a young man the psychological imperative may have lain in an urge to repair the damage that his early years’ rusticity, educational deficiencies, and “emotional malnutrition” inflicted on his self-esteem. He was possibly embarrassed by his marks of physical eccentricity: his remarkable height, long arms, and general ungainliness. Politics may have promised acceptance and affirmation. In his first campaign address, to the voters of his county in 1832, he wrote, “Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. . . . I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.”18
POLITICAL VISION
Behind Lincoln’s appetite for political power lay much more than the drive for personal recognition. His ambition was nourished by a vision of what the nation should be. Lincoln issued no early, comprehensive statement of political faith; but his election addresses and his performance in state and national legislatures offered what amounted to a largely consistent political program, reflecting a clear philosophy and ethical stance. At its heart was a belief in meritocracy: in the right of all individuals, through their industry, enterprise, and self-discipline, to rise in an increasingly market-oriented society. Essential to his hopes for the poor were the nation’s economic development and material advance. These were to be promoted and nurtured by an interventionist, forward-looking government, doing “for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.”19 The logic of Lincoln’s economic thought was a social and moral order at odds with slavery. It was an order whose well-being, he believed, was protected and enhanced by a Union of states loyal to the Founders’ vision of republican liberty.
Well before the family trekked from Indiana, Lincoln’s experience of personal struggle had fused with the
political prescriptions he read in the Louisville Journal and other anti-Jacksonian newspapers to give definition to his thought. In Henry Clay’s “American System”—comprising a national bank, a protective tariff, and better roads and waterways (“internal improvements”) for transporting goods—Lincoln identified the essential means of the young republic’s economic development. Taken as a whole, the program of the emerging Whig party would speed the transition from a subsistence to a market economy and draw ever more farmers and mechanics into the newly emerging commercial and industrial order. When Lincoln arrived in central Illinois he saw in the richness of the soil, the abundance of the state’s natural resources, and the burgeoning immigration of southern-born and Yankee settlers the potential for formidable growth. His earliest political speech, at Decatur, dwelt on the need for improved waterborne transportation. In his first bid for office, two years later, the main burden of his address to Sangamon County’s electors was the need to improve the region’s poor communications: How else could they sell their surplus meat and cereals, and acquire the manufactured goods they needed? Presenting himself as a knowledgeable river pilot and adopting a tone of financial prudence, Lincoln commended the plan of clearing the Sangamon River, by which New Salem’s commercial future might be assured.20
Over the next decade ambitious internal improvements sat at the heart of Lincoln’s political agenda, the means by which he expected Illinois as a whole to achieve new levels of prosperity, increase its land values, and pull in new settlers. He told Joshua Speed he wanted to be “the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois”: the New York state governor’s celebrated Erie Canal could surely be copied further west.21 The special session of the state legislature during the winter of 1835–36 proved a watershed. Legislators, faced with a plan to build the Illinois–Michigan Canal, to link the Mississippi with the Great Lakes, the Erie Canal, and the Atlantic, authorized a $500,000 loan. Previously Lincoln had called for such projects to be supported by federal aid, raised by the sale of public lands; others had insisted on private funding alone. Now, carried along on the swelling speculative tide of the 1830s and alert to the grandiose projects under way in other states, and with private capital unforthcoming, they not only agreed to the principle of state-level funding, but in the subsequent Assembly sanctioned a massive railroad and river scheme to supplement the canal project. Two trunk roads, six spurs, and a variety of smaller projects—intended to secure the broadest possible base of political support—elicited a government loan of over $10 million. All was agreed without detailed estimates or proper surveys. Roads not only would be run at a debt-clearing profit, but would increase the price of land, allowing the state to sell off its domain, not least to foreign capitalists. As the party with most of the votes in the Assembly, the Democrats (notably Stephen A. Douglas) were the prime legislative movers, but Lincoln, the Whig leader, and his Sangamon colleagues gave support at every turn.
Then came the financial panic of 1837, the collapse of land sales, falling prices and wages, and bankruptcies. The so-called Illinois System shuddered as revenues fell. Lincoln, determined to prevent its collapse, considered new ways of financing it. In particular, he came up with an imaginative if unrealistic plan to buy all federally owned land in the state at a discount and sell it at a profit to settlers, using the proceeds to pay off the debt: he secured the Assembly’s support, but Washington was not interested. He also endorsed a graduated land tax to replace the current levies, which were quite unrelated to land values. He thought the measure would be acceptable to the people “because it does not increase the tax upon the ‘many poor’ but upon the ‘wealthy few.’ ” The Illinois public, however, facing a deepening depression in 1839, turned increasingly against the system, and many previous political supporters jumped ship. Lincoln, though, remained steadfast, steeled by economic conviction and a sense of moral obligation. Even when it was plain that the plan must sink, he persisted in trying “to save something to the State, from the general wreck,” particularly the canal project. But he failed to convince the vast majority of legislators, who knew their constituents had no stomach for adding to the state’s financial obligations. It would take Illinois forty years to pay off the debt on a project of which almost nothing except the canal was saved.22
Lincoln’s advocacy of internal improvements was interwoven with his staunch defense of banks. Like Clay, he championed federal control of the banking system. However, after President Jackson’s successful assault on the national bank, the Bank of the United States, Lincoln put the banking needs of his state before party loyalty. When Illinois legislators considered the incorporation of the State Bank in 1835, Lincoln cast his vote with pro-bank Democrats to secure what he judged an essential mechanism of the new capitalist order. A well-regulated bank would provide a sound, elastic currency, protecting the public against the extreme prescriptions of the hard-money men on one side and the paper inflationists on the other; it would be a safe depository for public funds and provide the credit mechanisms needed to sustain state improvements; it would bring an end to extortionate money-lending. These advantages, he believed, would benefit all Illinoisans. While nostalgic agrarians, mainly hard-money Democrats, saw banks as a symbol of an avaricious new order, serving only politicians, bankers, and their rich friends, Lincoln was convinced that the “honest . . . farmer and mechanic” benefited as much as the plutocrat. In a speech to the Illinois House in January 1837, responding to the anti-bank forces’ call for an investigation into the management of the Springfield corporation, Lincoln deftly represented the attack on the bank as “exclusively the work of politicians; a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people, and who, to say the most of them, are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men. I say this with the greater freedom because, being a politician myself, none can regard it as personal.” By contrast, ordinary Illinoisans found no fault in the bank. “It has doubled the prices of the products of their farms,” he claimed (with more political than economic acuity), “and filled their pockets with a sound circulating medium.”23
Westerners’ animus against bankers turned more deadly when the banks suspended specie payments after the panic of 1837 and when temporary resumption was succeeded by a further suspension in 1839. Lincoln fought as tenaciously to defend the State Bank as he did the improvements scheme, whose fate was bound up with the credit system. But the further devaluation of its paper, mortgage foreclosures, and the calling in of loans only reduced its political chances. The Democrats sought to make the bank resume specie payments to its suffering note-holders. Lincoln and the pro-bank Whigs knew as well as their enemies that compulsory resumption could prove mortal, for the insatiable specie demands of all the western states would devour its coin. A moment of embarrassing theater offered a measure of Lincoln’s determination. To stop the Democrats prematurely adjourning the House, which would bring to an end the period of suspended specie payments agreed upon by the previous Assembly, Whigs stayed away to prevent a quorum. Lincoln and a few colleagues watched as the arrival of halt and lame Democrats made the body quorate. To take the numbers under the voting threshold again, the clutch of Whigs tried to leave. When the doorkeeper prevented their exit, they jumped out the window. But their presence had been recorded. Adjournment, credit resumption, and Democratic ridicule followed. Lincoln, the respecter of law and constitutional order, who “deprecated everything that savored of the revolutionary,” always regretted the action.24
This was not Lincoln’s last effort for the State Bank, but he could be in little doubt about the strength of popular prejudice against the banking system. The electoral experience of 1840 offered little encouragement. Much of the Whig effort for William Henry Harrison in the effervescent Log Cabin campaign aimed to cloak, not delineate, policy positions; but Lincoln, by contrast, set out to address and clarify a substantive issue: federal banking. In speech after speech, he tirelessly argued that a national bank would be a better fiscal agent for the Washington gove
rnment than the system of independent federal depositories proposed by Jackson’s Democratic successor, Martin Van Buren. Despite a few populist touches, he took a reasoned and technical, if essentially derivative, approach, stressing the hazardous, deflationary impact of the reduced money supply that would follow the Democrats’ scheme, the disabling effect on the purchasing power of poor farmers and laborers, and the superiority of a central bank in maintaining “a sound and uniform state of currency.” Lincoln’s paltry reward for taking banks seriously, however, was defeat for the Whig ticket of presidential electors, as well as a drop in his own personal vote for reelection to the Assembly.25
The State Bank finally failed in 1842. But neither that nor the clattering debris of the Illinois System could shake Lincoln’s faith in the potential of the credit system and the “transportation revolution” to transform the lives and hopes of ordinary Americans. He blamed not a flawed Whig vision for the hard times after 1837, but the misguided policies of the national administrations. Even so, by 1843 improvements and banking had become electoral liabilities. When setting out the Whigs’ position, in his “Address to the People of Illinois” and in his campaign speeches in 1844, he gave priority instead to the third element of the presidential candidate’s American System: the protective tariff.
Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power Page 3