Lincoln Unbound (14 page)

The railroads had a revolutionary impact not just by connecting markets but through their very operation. They needed more capital than had any business venture before, and therefore drove innovations in finance. They had to oversee vast, highly complex operations spanning greater distances and involving more workers than in any business venture before, and therefore led the way in new methods of corporate management. They had a hunger for iron, and therefore contributed to advances in iron-­making. They reliably fed factories with raw materials and carried their finished products to the wide market, and therefore supported the development of mass-­production manufacturing.

If Thoreau warned that “we do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us,” Lincoln saw in the railroad the heroic extension of human potential. He might have agreed with the poet Joaquin Miller, who maintained that “there is more poetry in the rush of a single railroad across the continent than in all the gory story of the burning of Troy.” Or with the economist Joseph Nimmo, who later in the century noted that “the railroad with its vast possibilities for the advancement of the commercial, industrial, and social interests of the world ran directly counter to the pre-­existing order of things.”

The nature of farming changed. To buy the goods now coming from the East, farmers needed cash and to get cash they had to grow for the market. Subsistence farming gave way to commercial farming, and specialization. The population of the free states west of the Alleghenies boomed and by 1850, the Midwest had caught the Northeast in population. To feed ever-­increasing demand, manufacturing grew and the factory system took hold. Productivity soared. According to historian Bruce Levine, from 1840 to 1860 value added in agriculture grew by 90 percent and in manufacturing by 350 percent. Urbanization proceeded at an astonishing clip.

In Illinois, Chicago exploded. The Illinois & Michigan Canal and the railroads fed its growth. Within four years of its incorporation in 1833, it was the largest town in the state. The city went from one minor railroad line in 1849 to an intricate and far-­reaching network just a few years later. Travel time getting there from New York collapsed to three days whereas it had previously taken more than three weeks. Chicago was on its way to surpassing St. Louis as a transportation hub. The extensive countryside connected to it became one of the greatest breadbaskets on earth, and Illinois produced more corn and wheat than anywhere else in the country. Exports of grain jumped from 10,000 bushels prior to 1840 to 31 million twenty years later. On top of this, the city was a rapidly industrializing juggernaut.

It used to be that settlement had to be concentrated near rivers, but the railroads cleared the way for more ­people to live in the state's interior. As Eric Foner notes, Illinois boomed, becoming the fourth largest state in the country after its population doubled in a decade, to 1.7 million by 1860. The urban population increased three-fold, rising to almost a quarter of a million from 64,000. Immigrants from eastern states and from abroad settled at a rapid clip, overwhelming settlers from the south. The Republican stronghold of the North benefited most from the economic and demographic transformation. Illinois was becoming an ever more thoroughly Lincolnian state.

Changes that many deemed impossible had come to his ­adopted home. It hadn't been long ago that Jacksonians could insist: “The West is agricultural; it has no manufactures, and it never will have any of importance.” To the contrary, by the 1850s Illinois was a rising manufacturing power. Gabor Boritt notes that Lincoln must have had contempt for the argument that inherent economic constraints would preserve the status quo in Illinois. Lincoln might call to mind, he writes, “the old British free trade argument that Americans could no more have complex manufactures than orange crops. Within his lifetime the United States had not only developed complex industries but, after acquiring new territories, was producing oranges. The lessons of the first half of the nineteenth century were plain. Natural limits could both be surmounted and outflanked.”

Milton Hay, uncle of John Hay, Lincoln's White House secretary, described the epochal changes in life brought by the railroads. It was, he maintained, the “dividing line in point of time between the old and the new. Not only our homemade manufactures, but our homemade life and habits to a great measure disappeared. . . . We farmed not only with different implements but in a different mode. Then we began to inquire what the markets were and what product of the farm we could raise and sell to the best advantage. The farmer enlarged his farm and no longer contented himself with the land that himself or his boys could cultivate, but he must have hired hands and hired help to cultivate his large possessions.”

Lincoln knew the homemade world all too well and exulted in its eclipse. Returning in 1859 to Indiana, near where he had been raised, he elicited laughter when he said “he grew up to his present enormous height on our own good soil of Indiana.” But he noted that the former “unbroken wilderness” had given way to “wonderfully different” conditions. In his New Haven speech in 1860, he celebrated development in the Northeast: “Up here in New England, you have a soil that scarcely sprouts black-­eyed beans, and yet where will you find wealthy men so wealthy, and poverty so rarely in extremity? There is not another such place on earth!” In an undated fragment for himself perhaps composed circa 1858 or 1859, he wrote: “We proposed to give
all
a chance; and we expected the weak to grow ­stronger, the ignorant, wiser; and all better, and happier together. We made the experiment; and the fruit is before us. Look at it—­think of it. Look at it, in it's aggregate grandeur, of extent of country, and numbers of population—­of ship, and steamboat, and rail.”

Lincoln didn't just thirst for his country's glory; he also sought his own. Joshua Speed told Herndon that after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, they had a conversation where “he alluded to an incident in his life, long passed, when he was so much deppressed that he almost contemplated suicide—­At the time of his deep deppression—­He said to me that he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived—­and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day & generation and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man was what he desired to live for.”

Linking his name to something great must have seemed a far-­off prospect when he returned to Springfield in 1849 from his single term in Congress, having failed to secure a patronage appointment from the incoming administration of Zachary Taylor. According to Herndon, Lincoln “despaired of ever rising again in the political world.” He had been the lone Whig in the state's seven-­person congressional delegation, and he couldn't attain any higher office given the partisan terrain in Illinois. His restless upward march had been checked.

Lincoln had been left far behind by his political rival, Stephen Douglas. In the mid-­1850s, Lincoln wrote a private note about Douglas that was unsparing in its honesty and its envy: “Twenty-­two years ago Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted. We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much so as he. With
me
, the race of ambition has been a failure—­a flat failure; with
him
it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown, even, in foreign lands. I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has reached. So reached, that the oppressed of my species, might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch's brow.”

The final sentence makes reference to the intrusion of slavery in a central, unavoidable place in the nation's politics. It raised questions much deeper than economic development, questions about the country's meaning and its very survival. Douglas had an outsize role in the coming crisis. He became the inadvertent architect of, and foil for, Lincoln's rise to destiny.

Chapter 4

“Our Fathers”: The Lincoln-­Douglas Debates and the Purpose of America

They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence. . . .

—­
A
BRAHAM
L
INCOLN,
S
PEECH IN
S
PRINGFIELD,
I
LLINOIS, 1857

I
n June 1858, Lincoln was about to accept the Republican nomination for Senate. Parties usually didn't endorse candidates until after the election of state legislators, who, in the days before the Seventeenth Amendment provided for direct election of senators, decided who would represent their state in the U.S. Senate. But Illinois Republicans wanted to make a point. The party's power brokers back east had been flirting with Stephen Douglas after he broke with Southern Democrats. The state party made its zeal for Lincoln unmistakable at an enthusiastic convention in Springfield. It declared him “the first and only choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the U.S. Senate, as the successor of Stephen A. Douglas.”

Lincoln knew this moment was coming, since support had been steadily building for him in county conventions. He spent a month preparing his speech, according to Herndon. He wrote notes on “slips, put these slips in his hat, numbering them, and when he was done with the ideas, he gathered up the scraps, put them in the right order, and wrote out his speech.” A few days before the event, Springfield Republican John Armstrong recalled, Lincoln gathered some friends “in the Library Room in the State house in the city of Springfield, for the purpose of getting their opinion of the policy of delivering that Speech.”

Eight or twelve of them sat at a round table and Lincoln read what would become its immortal House Divided opening passage: “ ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half
slave
and half
free
.” He read the beginning “slowly & cautiously so as to let Each man fully understand it.” The reaction around the table was cool, to say the least. “Every Man among them,” Armstrong told ­Herndon later, “Condemned the speech in Substance & Spirit,” and the House Divided language “as unwise & impolitic, if not false.”

About it being impolitic, they were indisputably correct. ­Stephen Douglas came back to Lincoln's House Divided language again and again during the campaign as proof Lincoln was a radical bent on disunion.

One interpretation of the speech is that Lincoln was playing chess when everyone else was playing checkers, and already had his eye on the presidential race in 1860 rather than the lowly Senate race in 1858. Historian Don Fehrenbacher notes how fanciful it is to believe Lincoln was anything but deadly intent on beating Douglas in the race at hand. He points to a campaign strategy memo Lincoln wrote categorizing and breaking down the 1856 vote by each legislative district. After pages of tabulation, Lincoln writes:

By this, it is seen, we give up the districts numbered 1.2.3. 4.5.7.8.10.11.15.16.17.18.19.20.23.28.29.&30, with 22 representatives—­

We take to ourselves, without question 37.40.42.43.44.45. 46.47.48.49.50.51.52.53.54.55.56.57.& 58. with 27 representatives—­

Put as doubtful, and to be struggled for, 6.9.12.13.14.21.22.24.25.26.27.31.32.33.34.35.36.38.39& 41. with 26 representatives”

These aren't the calculations of someone blithely unconcerned with victory.

Lincoln delivered the House Divided speech because he wanted to accentuate his difference with Douglas, but more fundamentally because he believed it. The sentiment wasn't new for him. In a scorching 1855 letter to the Kentuckian George Robertson, Lincoln vented his despair over achieving the peaceful extinction of slavery. He concluded, “Our political problem now is ‘Can we, as a nation, continue together permanently—­forever—­half slave, and half free?' The problem is too mighty for me.” T. Lyle Dickey, an Illinois lawyer and politico, recalled hearing Lincoln say much the same thing at a political meeting in the fall of 1856. Dickey told Herndon, “After the Meeting was over—­Mr Lincoln & I returned to Pike House—­where we occupied the Same room—­Immediately on reaching the room I said to Mr Lincoln—­‘What in God's name could induce you to promulgate such an opinion.' ”

In Lincoln's view, at stake in the debate with Douglas and with apologists for slavery was what he called our “central idea,” upon which our government ultimately depends. We could either stay true to the idea bequeathed to us by 1776, or resort to a new one accommodating slavery's spread and its permanent place in our national life. That was the choice. For his part, Lincoln planted his flag firmly in the Declaration of Independence.

“I believe the declara[tion] that ‘all men are created equal' is the great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest,” Lincoln wrote in an 1858 letter. It had made America a land of individual effort and advancement and, therefore, of stupendous abundance. “We are a great empire,” Lincoln said in a speech at Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1856. “We are eighty years old. We stand at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world, and we must enquire what it is that has given us so much prosperity, and we shall understand that to give up that one thing, would be to give up all future prosperity. This cause is that every man can make himself.”

In the Senate contest in 1858, Lincoln waged a fight to preserve and to extend that “one thing.” He happened to be doing it in a campaign against the man he had debated, envied, and scorned throughout his career. This latest iteration of the Lincoln-­Douglas struggle implicated the deepest ideals of the republic. Douglas, too, was a railroad man. He shepherded the bill to passage granting Illinois the land for the Illinois Central. Douglas, too, wanted to see the country grow, and in fact was more enthusiastic about its westward expansion than was Lincoln. Douglas agitated for a transcontinental railroad and a tide of settlers sweeping toward the Pacific. He sounded just like Lincoln when, shortly after his arrival in Illinois, he wrote back east, in fulsome praise of the state's potential: “Illinois possesses more natural advantages, and is destined to possess greater artificial and acquired advantages, than any other state in the union or on the globe.”

The question between the two wasn't the country's economic policies or its extent, so much as its very nature, the basis on which the House Divided would be made whole. Lincoln insisted that it be on the ground of the Declaration, which he considered the acid test for the American Dream, the Great Writ of American aspiration, the timeless guarantor of the equality of opportunity that would elevate all through the workings of commercial enterprise. In the ensuing existential crisis of the union, Lincoln translated into national gospel his vision of a republic of striving.

Stephen Douglas's background made him more natural Whig material than did Lincoln's. Douglas came from Vermont, and was the son of a doctor. He had been educated in a preparatory school in a pedagogical splendor unknown to Lincoln. But he, too, had to struggle to rise and found his way upward through the law and politics. His father died when he was an infant. When his mother moved in with her brother, Douglas had to work for his uncle as a laborer and didn't appreciate the arrangement any more than Lincoln would have. As a young man, he headed west and arrived in Illinois via Cleveland and St. Louis not too long after Lincoln, with just a ­couple of bucks in his pocket. When he left home, he supposedly told his mother, who was curious when he would be back to visit, “On my way to Congress, Mother.”

Despite his New England roots, Douglas embraced the hero of the West, Andrew Jackson, and the populism of his Democratic Party. He had fallen for Jackson back in Vermont during the campaign of 1828. “From this moment,” he remembered, “my politics became fixed, and all subsequent reading, reflection and observation have but confirmed my early attachment to the cause of Democracy.” In the 1830s, he declared, “in this country there are two opposing parties,” on one side “the advocates of the rights of the ­people” and on the other “the advocates of the privileges of Property.”

At five feet, four inches tall, with remarkably short legs, Douglas was all energy and aggression, “a perfect steam engine in breeches,” as one fellow lawyer put it. Reckless and risk-­taking by nature, Douglas was ferociously ambitious. He got himself selected as a state's attorney within about a year of becoming a lawyer.

The paths of the two young politicians in a hurry constantly intersected. Mary Todd had flirted with Douglas back when she was single. Ninian Edwards told Herndon how Lincoln at one point fell for his comely young cousin, Matilda Edwards. She fielded a score of entreaties for marriage, including, according to Edwards, from Douglas, whom “she refused . . . on the grounds of his bad morals.”

Lincoln and Douglas served in the state legislature together. By that time, Douglas was already known as the “Little Giant,” although his opponents mocked him as the “Peoria Bantling.” In a sly reference to his diminutive stature, Lincoln wrote to a fellow Whig legislator in 1837: “We have adopted it as part of our policy here, to never speak of Douglass at all. Is'nt that the best mode of treating so small a matter?” (Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton would once say of Douglas that “his legs are too short, sir. That part of his body, sire, which men wish to kick, is too near the ground!”)

The two met often on the rhetorical battlefield. Before there were
the
Lincoln-­Douglas Debates, there were Lincoln-­Douglas debates. A newspaper report recorded a Lincoln stop in Tremont, Illinois, during the 1858 campaign: “He went through with a rapid account of the times when he had advocated the doctrines of the Whig party in Tazewell County during the successive campaigns of 1840–'44–'48 and '52, and alluded to the fact that he had often met Douglas upon the very steps upon which he was speaking, before as now to oppose his political doctrines.”

When Lincoln's law partner John Stuart ran against Douglas for Congress in 1838 (beating him by all of thirty-­six votes), Lincoln berated the Democrat in anonymous letters in the
Sangamo Journal
that Douglas denounced for their “vindictive, fiendish spirit.” Lincoln did all he could to get Stuart over the top and may even have taken his place at a debate in Bloomington when his friend was ill.

In late 1839, in the run-­up to the presidential campaign in the coming year, the political banter between the Whigs and Democrats hanging around the Springfield store owned by Joshua Speed became particularly heated. According to Herndon, Douglas “sprang up and abruptly made a challenge to those who differed with him to discuss the whole matter publicly, remarking that, ‘This store is no place to talk politics.' ” Lincoln participated in the ensuing debates. In an initial contest, Douglas beat him badly. Lincoln “left the stump literally whipped off of it,” a Democratic newspaper happily related, “even in the estimation of his own friends.”

Joseph Gillespie wrote Herndon about the episode: “He was very sensitive where he thought he had failed to come up to the expectations of his friends. I remember a case. He was pitted by the Whigs in 1840 to debate with Mr Douglass the Democratic champion. Lincoln did not come up to the requirements of the occasion. He was conscious of his failure and I never saw any man so much distressed. He begged to be permitted to try it again and was reluctantly indulged and in the next effort he transcended our highest expectations.”

This was Lincoln's widely praised and reproduced speech filleting the Van Buren independent Treasury plan. He began by noting the small audience present. “I am, indeed, apprehensive,” he said, “that the few who have attended, have done so, more to spare me of mortification, than in the hope of being interested in any thing I may be able to say. This circumstance casts a damp upon my spirits, which I am sure I shall be unable to overcome during the evening. But enough of preface.”

After lashing the Van Buren proposal, Lincoln reserved some of his firepower for Douglas at the end. He recalled a Douglas speech on an earlier night justifying the expenditures of the Van Buren administration: “Those who heard Mr. Douglass, recollect that he indulged himself in a contemptuous expression of pity for me. ‘Now he's got me,' thought I.” Then, Lincoln said he realized that the reasons proffered by Douglas for the spending were “untrue” or even “supremely ridiculous.” He said he then realized that he had nothing to worry about: “when I saw that he was stupid enough to hope, that I would permit such groundless and audacious assertions to go unexposed, I readily consented, that on the score both of veracity and sagacity, the audience should judge whether he or I were the more deserving of the world's contempt.”

A minor triumph for Lincoln, but nothing to compare to the continual rise of Stephen Douglas, who was prodigiously talented and unbelievably successful. He became the state's youngest secretary of state in 1840, right before being named to the state's supreme court. (He liked to be called “judge” ever after.) He arrived in the House of Representatives four years before Lincoln and got promoted to the Senate in 1846 at the same time Lincoln was elected to his one unremarkable and unsatisfying term in the House, where he languished as a freshman in the back of the chamber on “Cherokee Strip.” Such was Lincoln's obscurity that the Republican politician John Wentworth wrote to Herndon that when Lincoln was nominated for president, “few of his old [congressional] colleagues remembered him,” and “Speaker Winthrop, of his own party, is said to have asserted . . . that he would not recognize [him] if he should meet him in the street.”