Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (3 page)

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.

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