Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (14 page)

Lincoln’s local campaigns played out against a backdrop of turbulent presidential politics, exacerbated by questions of expansion and war.

President Tyler, who had the unusual distinction of having betrayed both major parties, was the candidate of neither in 1844. The Whigs nominated Henry Clay of Kentucky, former congressman, Speaker of the House, secretary of state, and senator—a fixture in national politics since before the War of 1812 (he had already run for president—unsuccessfully—in 1824 and 1832). The Democrats chose James Polk, who had his own achievements—he, too, had been Speaker of the House, as well as governor of Tennessee. Yet Polk, who was almost twenty years younger than Clay—forty-eight years old to Clay’s sixty-seven—was a fresher face.

Polk also had a clear issue—national expansion. The United States had been essentially the same size since the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Polk now argued for annexing the Pacific Northwest and Texas, an independent country run by American emigrants who had revolted from Mexico in 1836.

Clay, like most Whigs, feared that annexing Texas would provoke a war with Mexico; the boundary between the two countries was disputed, and Mexico had never recognized the independence of its former province. But he also wanted votes in the South, where Texas—a republic of slave owners—would be welcomed as a new slave state. So Clay hedged, and a tiny abolitionist third party, the Liberty Party, peeled off enough anti-Texas Whigs in New York to cost Clay the state and its 36 electoral votes. Polk took 49.5 percent of the popular vote and 170 electoral votes, Clay won 48 percent and 105 electoral votes. If Clay had carried New York he would have won, with 141 electoral votes to 136. As usual, the Democrats carried Illinois.

Lincoln had stumped for Clay throughout his district and even across the state line in southwestern Indiana, his former home. He analyzed the Whig loss in a letter to a Liberty Party supporter in northern Illinois. Lincoln assumed that Clay, for all his waffling, would not have annexed Texas, and asked why the Liberty Party had turned on him. “As
I always understood it, the Liberty-men deprecated the annexation of Texas extremely; and, this being so, why they should refuse to so cast their votes as to prevent it . . .
seemed wonderful.” Lincoln did not believe in compromise for its own sake, or in surrendering essential goals; he was telling the Liberty man that he should have swallowed Clay in order to achieve his goal.

Polk accepted Texas as a new state in 1845 and sent troops to its disputed border (their commander was Zachary Taylor, a veteran of the Black Hawk War). In the spring of 1846 there was a clash, and the war Clay had feared came to pass.

America won an astonishing string of victories, but the fighting was brutal. John Hardin was killed on Washington’s Birthday in 1847 at the Battle of Buena Vista (so was one of Clay’s sons). James Shields, who had challenged Lincoln to a duel, was wounded at the Battle of Cerro Gordo in April; Edward Baker took charge of Shields’s unit in his place. Lincoln was a lifelong civilian after his Black Hawk War days, but he could not insulate himself from battle and its handiwork. The fighting finally ended in September 1847, when American troops under Winfield Scott captured Mexico City.

In the nineteenth century there was a long lag between elections and convening new sessions of Congress. Although Lincoln had won his seat in November 1846, he did not occupy it until December 1847.

He left Springfield for Washington at the end of October with his family—Mary and their two sons, Robert, born in 1843, and Edward, born in 1846 (despite his rivalry with Edward Baker, Lincoln named a son after him). The Lincolns would have two more children—William (Willie) in 1850 and Thomas (Tad) in 1853. Lincoln was an indulgent parent—there would be no laboring in the fields for these boys, and virtually no discipline of any kind. Herndon thought the Lincoln children were brats—but then he also disliked their mother (he was jealous of anyone who might be closer to his idol than he was).

By the beginning of Lincoln’s congressional term, the war was over; only the terms of the peace treaty remained to be worked out. But the Whigs, who had rallied to the flag once the fighting began, still sniped at Polk any way they could. Lincoln threw himself into this political warfare as soon as he arrived in Washington.

He tried to refight the opening shots of the war. Polk claimed the fighting had started on the American side of the Texas border: American troops had repelled an attack on them, in American territory. But the Whigs insisted that the fighting started only after American troops had crossed into Mexico. In December Lincoln introduced a set of resolutions in the House demanding that the president reveal “the
spot of soil” on which the first hostilities had occurred. In January 1848 he gave a speech repeating his demands, and warning Polk to respond truthfully. Lincoln invoked the mightiest name: “Let [Polk] remember he sits where Washington sat, and so remembering, let him answer as
Washington would answer.”

Lincoln’s questions backfired. Democratic newspapers in Illinois seized on the humorous possibilities of the word “spot,” calling him
“spotty Lincoln” and reporting that he had come down with “spotted fever.” Lincoln’s invocation of George Washington also fell flat. It was not as turgid as the conclusion of his Temperance Address, but it was equally hollow. He might have cited Washington’s opinions with effect—the first president was a military hero who nevertheless urged his countrymen to “cultivate
peace and harmony” with all nations. Lincoln did none of that; he simply gestured at Washington as at a moral yardstick.

A better anti-Polk speech was given in February by one of Lincoln’s fellow Whigs, Alexander Stephens of Georgia. Three years younger than Lincoln, he was in his third term in the House. Lincoln described him as a “little slim, pale-faced, consumptive man”—he never weighed over one hundred pounds—but he was intelligent, eloquent, and caustic. He savaged the terms Polk was trying to impose on Mexico at war’s end, and concluded with a denunciation of the president’s
appetite for Mexican territory. “I have heard of nations whose honor could be satisfied with gold . . . but never did I expect to live to see the day when the Executive of this country should announce that our honor . . . must feed on earth—gross,
vile dirt!” In a letter to Herndon, Lincoln called this “the very best speech of an hour’s length
I ever heard.” Lincoln did not say what he admired about it, but Stephens’s reduction of a grand but false idea (war with Mexico) to something concrete and small (dirt) was a technique Lincoln had read in Paine and would later use himself.

Polk paid no attention to Lincoln’s questions or Stephens’s speech. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in Mexico the very day Stephens spoke, gave the United States quite a bit of dirt: a comfortable border for Texas, plus the Mexican provinces of Nueva Mexico and Alta California (the future states of New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah as well as slices of Wyoming and Colorado)—750,000 square miles.

That summer official Washington attended a more solemn invocation of Washington’s name when the cornerstone of his monument was laid.

America had begun scrambling to honor Washington in his own lifetime. The State of Virginia commissioned a statue of him from the great French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon that still stands, in more than regal dignity, in the statehouse in Richmond. After Washington’s death and burial at Mount Vernon there was talk of exhuming and reburying him under the dome of the US Capitol; the Washington family vetoed that plan. After many false starts the construction of the present monument began on July 4, 1848.

There were no founders left to attend the ceremony, but there were two founders’ widows on the podium, as frail as Lincoln’s client Rebecca Thomas back in Illinois: Dolley Madison (eighty years old) and Eliza Hamilton (almost ninety-one). Also in attendance was George Washington Parke Custis, the founding father’s last surviving step-grandchild
(spry, only relatively, at sixty-seven). America clutched at these survivors as living ghosts.

The honor of giving the oration was offered to another living ghost, former president John Quincy Adams. After leaving the White House, Adams had served in the House of Representatives as a Whig from Massachusetts. More relevant to his task as orator, he was the son of a founder, John Adams, and acquainted with many of the other founders personally; he had been given his first government job—minister to Holland—by George Washington himself. Adams declined the offer to speak, however, pleading ill health, and then died in February. The oration was instead delivered by the Speaker of the House, Robert Winthrop, another Massachusetts Whig.

Winthrop’s most original touch was to link Washington to current events in Europe. A wave of revolution had washed over the continent in 1848, beginning with riots in Paris. After more than forty years under an emperor and three kings, France had become a republic once more. The New World, said Winthrop, could be an example to the Old, a thought he expressed in a lively if clumsy metaphor: “The great upward and downward trains on the track of human freedom have at last come into collision! . . . The great America-built locomotive, ‘Liberty,’ still holds on its course, unimpeded and unimpaired.”

Winthrop offered Washington’s self-control and devotion to republican government as models to European revolutionaries, and quoted Europeans who agreed with him: “The want of the age,” said the poet Alphonse de Lamartine, provisional leader of the new French government, “is a European Washington.” A great model, but a hard one to emulate. Lamartine was falling from power even as Winthrop spoke. The Second Republic would
sputter along for three more years, when another Napoleon, nephew of the first, overthrew it.

But Winthrop knew that his most important theme must be what Washington could offer in 1848 to America. Winthrop’s answer was reverence for the Union: “complete, cordial and indissoluble.” Maintaining the Union had indeed been a preoccupation of Washington’s.
His presidency had seen an armed tax revolt in Pennsylvania and the rancorous birth of the first two-party system. (The husbands of the old ladies on the podium had been among the most prominent partisans: James Madison, cofounder of the Republicans, and Alexander Hamilton, champion of the Federalists.) Although Washington was himself a Federalist, he feared, with some reason, that political passions might cause the country over which he presided to fly apart. In his Farewell Address at the end of his second term, he urged Americans to “cherish a cordial, habitual,
immovable attachment” to the Union.

The fate of the Union would become problematic once again thanks to the windfall of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Peace would be even more contentious than the Mexican War. What would become of those 750,000 newly acquired square miles? How would they be administered? What states would be carved from them? Mexico had abolished slavery in 1824. Would the territory America had taken from her be slave or free?

Winthrop had nothing to say about that. “I may not, I will not, disturb the harmony of the scene before me by the slightest allusion of a party character.” Winthrop’s reticence was ironic. After praising the Union in his Farewell Address, Washington had gone on to give a rather partisan speech, singling out policies—sound finances at home, peace abroad—that were the special concern of Federalists. The founding father wanted unity—but he wanted it on his terms. He was bolder, and more particular, than his children.

Winthrop’s speech was delivered at a grander occasion than Lincoln using Washington to needle the president, or holding him up as a model of moral reformation. Yet all three occasions partook of the same spirit. Their version of Washington was a man of marble, spotless but blank. Lincoln had done better when he invoked the Revolution to help Rebecca Thomas get her husband’s pension. His appeals to Washington in the 1840s were opportunistic or empty. Unfortunately, orators more prominent than he was made the same noises.