Lincoln Unbound (9 page)

For all Lincoln's tenderheartedness and his homespun charm, the Johnston letters hint at a chill in his character. He could be remote. Lost in thought, he would sometimes pass friends on the street without acknowledging them. Herndon described him, when he was studying law, as “often walking unconscious, his head on one side, thinking and talking, to himself.” Mary Todd's sister Elizabeth Edwards called him “not Social—­was abstracted—­thoughtful.” She said she had “seen him Sit down at the table and never unless recalled to his Senses, would he think of food.”

He ultimately remained a closed book to his acquaintances. His friend and supporter David Davis said that “Lincoln had no spontaneity—­nor Emotional Nature—­no Strong Emotional feelings for any person—­Mankind or thing.” He “was not a social man by any means: his Stories—­jokes &c. which were done to whistle off sadness are no evidences of sociality.” Davis called him “the most reticent—­Secretive man I Ever Saw—­or Expect to See.” Herndon wrote of one of his interviews with John Stuart, “Stuart says he has been at L's house a hundred times, never was asked to dinner.” The way Lincoln's close political ally Joseph Gillespie put it is that “he loved the masses but was not strikingly partial to any particular individual.” His secretaries in the White House, John G. Nicolay and John Milton Hay, said that when it came to familiarity with Lincoln “there was a line beyond which no one ever thought of passing.”

Lincoln fortified himself behind a sense of his own dignity. Michael Burlingame points out that ­people began calling him “old” when he was still in his thirties. He never liked the nickname Abe. At his law office, according to David Herbert Donald, he called his younger partner William Herndon “Billy”; Herndon called him “Mr. Lincoln.” His wife, too, called him “Mr. Lincoln”; before they had children and he began calling her “Mother,” he addressed her as “Puss,” “little woman,” or “child wife.” Mary said that Lincoln “was
not
a demonstrative man, when he felt most deeply, he expressed the least.”

His marriage to her, despite its famous trials over the years, was another act of self-­improvement. Lincoln arrived in Springfield not exactly a ladies' man. Years later he said, “Women are the only things that cannot hurt me that I am afraid of.” He never looked like much. One girl in Illinois declared him as “thin as a beanpole and as ugly as a scarecrow!” Nor was he inclined to finery. William Butler, who boarded him in Springfield, recalled: “In all the time he stayed at my house, he never bought a hat or a pair of socks, or a coat. Whenever he needed them, my wife went and bought them for him, and put them in the drawer where he would find them.” The sartorial carelessness stayed with him in the White House and drove Mary Todd to distraction. She couldn't stand, among other offenses, that his shirt cuffs were frayed and he never learned to remove his hat properly.

Lincoln hardly made up these deficiencies with an effortless social grace. Elizabeth Edwards said he “Could not hold a lengthy Conversation with a lady—­was not sufficiently Educated & intelligent in the female line to do so.” His courtship with Mary Owen in the late 1830s ended badly. Her sister, a friend of ­Lincoln, proposed bringing her from Kentucky so the two could get engaged. Lincoln agreed, having met Mary years before and finding her quite pleasing. When he saw her again, he changed his mind. “I knew she was over-­size,” Lincoln wrote in a letter to a friend afterward, “but now she appeared a fair match for Falstaff.” Out of a sense of obligation, he proposed anyway, and was shocked and “mortified” to be rejected. “Mr. Lincoln was deficient in those little links,” she explained later in a letter to Herndon, “which make up the great chain of womans happiness.”

In Mary Todd, he “married up,” as male politicians always like to say. The uneducated, penniless boy married a woman who had learned French at Madame Charlotte Mentelle's academy in Lexington, Kentucky. From a prosperous Kentucky family, she once showed off her new pony at Henry Clay's mansion. A highly desirable catch, Mary was “quick, lively, gay—­frivalous it may be, Social and loved glitter Show & pomp & power,” in her sister Elizabeth's description. For her, marrying Lincoln was a come-­down in social status. She grew up in a household with personal servants and slaves, then went to living in a four-­dollar-­a-­week room in the Globe Tavern in Springfield, where the ­couple stayed after their marriage. For him, the marriage was a step up. ­Lincoln joked of the family that once might have seemed impossibly ­august to him, “One ‘d' was good enough for God, but not the Todds.”

Mary's sister Elizabeth had married Ninian Edwards, a Whig politician and son of the former territorial governor of Illinois. The two lived in a Springfield mansion where they entertained the great and good of Illinois politics. Lincoln met Mary there. Through the marriage, he had allied himself to one of the most prominent Whig families in the state, and his wife took an active interest in politics. “She was an Extremely Ambitious woman,” Elizabeth Edwards said. Elizabeth initially supported the union, on grounds that Lincoln “was a rising man,” before doubting the ­couple's personal compatibility. John Stuart called the marriage a “policy Match all around.” He told Herndon, “His wife made him Presdt. . . . She had the fire—­will and ambition—­Lincolns talent and his wifes Ambition did the deed.”

I
n her ambition for her husband, Mary was of course pushing on an open door. William Miller sets out the impressive catalogue of Lincoln's office-seeking: in 1832, 1834, 1836, 1838, 1840, and 1854 (for the Illinois House); in 1843, 1845, and 1846 (for his party's nomination to Congress and for the congressional seat itself ); in 1855 and 1858 (for the U.S. Senate). He took a leading role in the presidential campaigns in the state for Henry Clay in 1844 and Zachary Taylor in 1848, as well as laboring on the hustings for William Henry Harrison in 1840 and Winfield Scott in 1852. Herndon said politics was “his life and newspapers his food.”

The politics of the day was robustly participatory; in 1840 turnout was 80 percent. It made a great spectacle, with some gladiatorial combat occasionally mixed in. Lincoln's triumph of reason, hoped for in the most soaring passages of his addresses, would have to wait—­a good long time. Thomas Ford, a chronicler of Illinois and former governor, described the trajectory of the typical raucous political event: “The stump speeches being over, then commenced the drinking of liquor, and long before night a large portion of the voters would be drunk and staggering about town, cursing, swearing, hallooing, yelling, huzzaing for their favorite candidates, throwing their arms up and around, threatening to fight, and fighting.”

In 1840, the Whigs put up William Harrison as their counter to Andrew Jackson, a general and a man of the ­people. His hard-­cider-­and-­log-­cabin campaign ran on hoopla and revelry. Songs and parades, freely dispensed hard cider, and joyfully blatant symbols—­coonskins, log-­cabin raisings, whiskey in bottles shaped like log cabins—­were the order of the day. A Whig rally in Springfield in June was like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and a July Fourth celebration wrapped into one, with a barbecue for fifteen thousand ­people and a “flood” of oratory. A Springfield merchant described the party when the Whigs won the election: “I do not believe there has ever been such a jollification since then. The center of the celebration was a big saloon, and there champagne flowed like water. It was a favorite trick to knock the neck off the bottle by striking it on the stove. Lincoln was present and made a great deal of sport with his speeches, witty sayings and stories. He even played leap-­frog.” (But, the merchant added, “he did not drink a thing.”)

In this rollicking environment, Lincoln's physicality served him well. One Springfieldite recalled an 1836 Lincoln speech in Mechanicsburg: “[John] Neal had a fight at the time—­the roughs got on him and Lincoln jumped in and Saw fair play.” He also remembered Lincoln debating someone at the court house: “The whigs & democrats had a general quarrel then & there. N. W. Edwards [Lincoln's brother-­in-­law] drew a pistol on ­Achilles ­Morris.” In a debate that turned into a tussle with the Whig candidate John Todd Stuart when Stephen Douglas was running against him for Congress, Douglas bit Stuart's thumb. Douglas tried to cane Simeon Francis, the editor of the
Sangamo Journal
, a prominent Whig newspaper in Springfield, for an offending article. Douglas failed after the editor, in Lincoln's words, caught him “by the hair and jammed him back against a market-­cart.” Lincoln added, “The whole affair was so ludicrous that Francis and everybody else (Douglas excepted) have been laughing about it ever since.”

Lincoln wielded his verbal acuity and his wit as his weapons. His particularly merciless take-­downs of opponents were called “skinnings,” like the famous “skinning of Thomas.” During the 1840 campaign, Lincoln got entangled in a controversy with Jesse B. Thomas Jr., a young lawyer from a prominent family who was a Whig but not a reliable one. At an event in Springfield, Thomas accused—­correctly, it seems—­Lincoln and his confederates of writing an anonymous political letter and falsely attributing it to him. Lincoln responded savagely. “He imitated Thomas in gesture and voice,” Herndon reported, “at times caricaturing his walk and the very motion of his body. Thomas, like everybody else, had some peculiarities of expression and gesture, and these Lincoln succeeded in rendering more prominent than ever. The crowd yelled and cheered as he continued. Encouraged by these demonstrations, the ludicrous features of the speaker's performance gave way to intense and scathing ridicule.” Thomas left the platform in tears, and Lincoln eventually apologized.

Lincoln's taste for ridiculing the opposition led to his own scrape with an affair of honor. He had to admit to writing a pseudonymous article viciously lampooning the state's prickly state auditor, a Democrat, James Shields. The offended official ­issued a challenge. Even though dueling was illegal in Illinois, with his honor at stake, Lincoln accepted. The episode now reads like farce, yet no one treated it as one at the time.

As the challenged party, Lincoln had the choice of weapons and picked “Cavalry broad swords of the largest size, precisely equal in all respects.” He further stipulated that the clash would take place in a box set out on the ground and divided in two, with the penalty of death for overstepping the center line and surrender of the contest for overstepping the back line. Lincoln had fashioned a fight depending largely on who had the longer and strong arms. Shields was five-­eight or nine, and Lincoln was about half a foot taller. As his colleague in the legislature Robert L. Wilson attested, Lincoln had arms “longer than any man I ever knew, when standing Straiht, and letting his arms fall down his Sides, the points of his fingers would touch a point lower on his legs by nearly three inches than was usual with other persons.”

Later, the lawyer and politician Usher Linder asked Lincoln why the choice of such odd weapons: “To tell you the truth, Linder, I did not want to kill Shields, and felt sure that I could disarm him, having had about a month to learn the broadsword exercise; and furthermore, I didn't want the d—­d fellow to kill me, which I rather think he would have done if we had selected pistols.” Once the parties arrived at the designated dueling ground, a spot known as “Bloody Island” in the middle of the Mississippi River, the dispute was “adjusted” and the swordplay avoided. Embarrassed by the imbroglio, Lincoln never liked to talk about it afterward.

(On the way to meet Shields, Lincoln had seen a family mired in the mud and in typical fashion simply couldn't bear to pass by, despite presumably having other things on his mind. A witness recalled: “Lincoln was about to stop when one of his Company—­‘Now Lincoln don't make a d—­d fool of yourself—­Come—­Come along—­' Lincoln didn't pay no attention to what the man said—­got off his horse—­L took my horse & his own & tied them to the strangers waggon by ropes—­Straps & strings—­pulled the man with his family—­When we got through scarcely any man Could have told what or who we were.”)

Lincoln's forensic and intellectual talents—­misapplied in the anonymous and pseudonymous articles he ceased writing after the Shields affair—­made him a natural political leader. As soon as he joined the Illinois legislature, his colleagues looked to him for assistance writing speeches and legislation, just as his family and neighbors had with letters when he was a boy. Joseph Gillespie said that “as early [as] 1834, 5, he was put forward as the spokesman of the whig party, and he never disappointed them or fell below their expectation.”

Robert Wilson explained the keys to his persuasive force. “He was, on the stump, and in the Halls of Legislation a ready Debater, manifesting extraordinary ability in his peculiar manner of presenting his subject,” he wrote in a letter to Herndon. “He did not follow the beaten track of other Speakers, and Thinkers, but appeared to comprehend the whole situation of the Subject, and take hold of its first principles; He had a remarkable faculty for concentration, enabling him to present his subject in such a manner as nothing but conclusions were presented.” According to Wilson, Lincoln's memory gave him a store of material to illustrate “every Subject however complicated with annecdotes drawn from all classes of Society, accomplishing the double purpose, of not only proving his Subject by the annecdote, But the annecdote itself possessing so much point and force, that no one ever forgets, after hearing Mr Lincoln tell a Story, either the argument of the Story, the Story itself, or the author.”

Lincoln thrilled to the nitty-­gritty of elections and legislative mechanics and ladled out partisan invective with relish, but underneath his politics rested a foundation of substance. John Stuart said Lincoln “felt no special interest in any man or thing—­Save & Except politics—­loved principles and such like large political & national ones.”