Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (2 page)

CHAPTER 1

Inner Power: Lincoln’s Ambition and Political Vision, 1809–54

I
t is tempting to treat Abraham Lincoln’s progress to national visibility and power as an instance of dramatic transfiguration: the story of how, during the mid-1850s, a moderately successful provincial politician—after some two decades of conventional party organizing, stump speaking, and periodic legislative service, including a largely unremarkable two-year term in Washington—successfully seized his chance to play out politics on a larger stage, extend his moral reach, and win national recognition. It is a plausible interpretation. It properly reflects the sense of increased seriousness and maturity which Lincoln’s contemporaries saw in him after 1854, a watershed year in national politics, and it serves as a healthy antidote to the biographical pietism that too easily detects in every footstep of the younger Lincoln the marking out of a course to greatness.

The burden of what follows, however, is that in important ways Lincoln’s route to political power was characterized by continuity. His inner drive, personal qualities, and political ideas were scarcely fashioned de novo in mid-career. The desire for political distinction, which so clearly propelled him from 1854, was no new appetite. His ambition—and particularly his hunger for public recognition—had been evident from his young manhood in the early 1830s. Equally, the essential elements of Lincoln’s social and moral project remained constant over time: the construction of an enterprising, commercially prosperous nation in which, under the equal operation of the laws, each and every citizen would enjoy both the right to rise and the education needed to seize the opportunities presented by a fluid and expanding society. This Union, built on the philosophical foundations of the Declaration of Independence, was inevitably compromised by the persistence of slavery: Lincoln’s conviction that the South’s “peculiar institution” was both morally repugnant and economically unjust had long been a feature of his thought. What changed during the 1850s was less Lincoln’s vision than the evolving challenge to it from national events. His speeches in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 sprang out of well-established elements in his thought.

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 appetite 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.