The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (8 page)

Lincoln was only forty years old when his term as Congressman expired, but he already considered himself an old man. The next few years were to age him rapidly. Life with Mary Todd could scarcely have been pleasant during this unhappy period. Their friends and neighbors testify to her bad temper, her nagging ways and her impatience with a husband who was a failure and who was apparently reconciled to remaining one.

The circuit with its tenth-rate hotels and shabby lodging places, its miserable food and long hard jumps from town to town, became infinitely more desirable than his home. He stayed away as much as he could. When court was held in a town near Springfield, all the lawyers and judges would ride home to spend the week end. Lincoln would remain where he was, lonely and miserable, putting up with the discomforts of a boardinghouse in order to find peace and to be left to nourish his own sense of failure without being nagged about it.

When he had to be in Springfield, he spent much of his time at his office in company with Billy Herndon. Although Lincoln had been greatly attracted to the law as a profession during his early youth, by this time the law had become pretty much of a routine matter to him, a means of making a living and not much more. His liking for abstract thought, his skill at argumentation and his ability to analyze any situation until he came to the kernel of its being stood him in good stead in his legal practice. According to Herndon, he had no use for detail; he hated writing legal papers and was generally careless
in his methods and in his advance preparation of cases. Yet he was a good lawyer—and an honest one. In 1850 he wrote out some notes for a law lecture in which he set down his profession of faith. In his conclusion he said: “Resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation, rather than one in the choosing of which you do, in advance, consent to be a knave.”

The law office he occupied with Herndon was Lincoln’s headquarters, his place of refuge, his study hall and conversation center where he could do exactly as he liked with no one to criticize his actions or his manners. As a result the office was not only exceedingly plain and simple—it was also disorderly and none too clean. One of the men who served as a clerk there said of it:

There was one long table in the center of the room, and a shorter one running in the opposite direction, forming a T, and both were covered with green baize.… In one corner was an old-fashioned secretary with pigeon-holes and a drawer, and here Mr. Lincoln and his partner kept their law papers. There was also a bookcase containing about 200 volumes of law as well as miscellaneous books.… Mr. Lincoln had been in Congress and had the usual amount of seeds to distribute.… Some of the seeds had sprouted in the dirt that had collected in the office.… There was no order in the office at all. The firm of Lincoln and Herndon kept no books. They divided their fees without taking any receipts or making any entries.

Lincoln had one favorite filing place for everything—the lining of his high silk hat. When he was through with current documents he stuck them away in mysterious places. After his death, Herndon came across a bundle of papers marked simply: “When you can’t find it anywhere else, look in this.”

Lincoln would often bring his children to the office. They were an unruly lot, since their father tried to exercise no more control over them than he did over his wife. “The boys
were absolutely unrestrained in their amusement,” Herndon said. “If they pulled down all the books from the shelves, bent the points of all the pens, overturned the spittoon, it never disturbed the serenity of their father’s good-nature.” The junior partner, however, did not possess such sublime indifference. “I have felt many and many a time that I wanted to wring their little necks,” he wrote in a confidential letter to a friend.

Lincoln’s apparent idleness in the office and at home may have seemed to be wasted time to a more energetic man like Herndon, yet Lincoln actually used his time well. During this period he took up the study of Euclid for mental discipline, and pored over the problems in his office and on the circuit until he had mastered everything in the first six books. He read a good deal, too, sticking to a few books to which he returned again and again. Shakespeare was his great favorite. He memorized whole passages and would quote them—if given an opportunity.

During these years of political retirement, Springfield came to look upon the familiar figure of Lincoln with that half-amused tolerance which small-town people display toward a person who has ability but who has never quite achieved success. The fact that he was somewhat eccentric in appearance and entirely unconscious of the condition of his attire probably influenced them in underestimating the ugly duckling in their midst. He was oblivious of everything that was not of major importance to him, and his mind often turned inward so completely that he was unaware of friends passing him on the streets. People shook their heads sadly as the tall shambling figure went by without noticing them. A story is told of his walking along near his home, dragging behind him a little cart on which one of his children had been riding. The child had fallen off and was lying on the sidewalk crying, but his father had not noticed what had happened and was calmly proceeding with the empty wagon.

Herndon has described in detail the odd appearance of Lincoln as he was seen by his friends in Springfield:

He was thin, wiry, sinewy, raw-boned; thin through the breast to the back, and narrow across the shoulders; standing he leaned forward—was what may be called stoop-shouldered, inclining to the consumptive by build. His usual weight was one hundred and eighty pounds. His organization—rather his structure and functions—worked slowly. His blood had to run a long distance from his heart to the extremities of his frame, and his nerve force had to travel through dry ground at a long distance before his muscles were obedient to his will.… The whole man, body and mind, worked slowly, as if it needed oiling. Physically he was a very powerful man, lifting with ease four hundred, and in one case six hundred pounds. His mind was like his body, and worked slowly but strongly. Hence there was very little bodily or mental wear and tear in him.…

When he walked he moved cautiously but firmly; his long arms and giant hands swung down by his side. He walked with even tread, the inner sides of his feet being parallel. He put the whole foot flat down on the ground at once, not landing on the heel; he likewise lifted his foot all at once, not rising from the toe, and hence he had no spring to his walk. His walk was undulatory—catching and pocketing tire, weariness, and pain, all up and down his person, and thus preventing them from locating. The first impression of a stranger, or a man who did not observe closely, was that his walk implied shrewdness and cunning—that he was a tricky man; but, in reality, it was the walk of caution and firmness. In sitting down on a common chair he was no taller than ordinary men. His legs and arms were abnormally, unnaturally long, and in undue proportion to the remainder of his body. It was only when he stood up that he loomed above other men.

Mr. Lincoln’s head was long, and tall from the base of the brain and from the eyebrows. His head ran backwards, his forehead rising as it ran back at a low angle, like Clay’s, and unlike Webster’s, which was almost perpendicular. The size of his hat measured at the hatter’s clock was seven and one-eighth, his head being, from ear to ear, six and one-half inches, and from the front to the
back of the brain eight inches. Thus measured it was not below medium size. His forehead was narrow but high; his hair was dark, almost black, and lay floating where his fingers or the winds left it, piled up at random. His cheekbones were high, sharp, and prominent; his jaws were long and upcurved; his nose was large, long, blunt and a little awry towards the right eye; his chin was sharp and upcurved; his eyebrows cropped out like a huge rock on the brow of a hill; his long, sallow face was wrinkled and dry, with a hair here and there on the surface; his cheeks were leathery; his ears were large, and ran out almost at right angles from his head, caused partly by heavy hats and partly by nature; his lower lip was thick, hanging, and undercurved, while his chin reached for the lip upcurved; his neck was neat and trim, his head being well balanced on it; there was the lone mole on the right cheek, and Adam’s apple on his throat.

Thus stood, walked, acted and looked Abraham Lincoln. He was not a pretty man by any means, nor was he an ugly one; he was a homely man, careless of his looks, plain-looking and plain-acting. He had no pomp, display, or dignity, so-called. He appeared simple in his carriage and bearing. He was a sad-looking man; his melancholy dripped from him as he walked. His apparent gloom impressed his friends, and created sympathy for him—one means of his great success. He was gloomy, abstracted, and joyous—rather humorous—by turns; but I do not think he knew what real joy was for many years.…

He was odd, but when that gray eye and that face and those features were lit up by the inward soul in fires of emotion, then it was that all those apparently ugly features sprang into organs of beauty and disappeared in the sea of inspiration that often flooded his face.…

Many of the people in Springfield had good reason to love this curious person who somehow stood apart from their lives in an inner world of his own. They knew that he would never refuse to do a favor and that he was always ready to defend the poor and the friendless in court. His court fees were notoriously low—so low that other lawyers complained of them—yet many of his cases were handled without thought of
any fee at all, and often, of course, the money due him for legal services was never collected.

Although the law was a refuge to him during this period, to a man with Lincoln’s ambition the enforced retirement from politics must have been irritating. However, he evidently believed that he would some day have another chance to re-enter the political field, for he spent his time reading, studying and keeping up with current issues. Herndon tried to interest him in world history, philosophy and general literature. But Lincoln would read only what he wanted to read; he could be influenced, perhaps, but he could not be led. Herndon’s efforts to make an abolitionist out of him failed also. Lincoln simply did not have the makings of an abolitionist in him. His mind did not work that way.

He listened politely to his partner’s abolitionist arguments but he would have none of them. He was willing enough to agree with Billy Herndon that slavery was an evil that must somehow, some day, be shaken off. But he could not tolerate the violence of expression and action that was associated with extreme abolitionism. He was essentially conservative, and the methods used by the abolitionists shocked and alienated him. Men like William Lloyd Garrison, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Theodore Parker (who was a good friend of Herndon’s and corresponded with him regularly) stood for principles of action that were repugnant to his cautious mind that had been devoted to legislation and that was trained in the horse-swapping policies of legal practice. He wanted to see slavery done away with just as much as they did, but he wanted to see it legislated out of existence, quietly, and over a long period of time, with some kind of compensation given to the slaveholders in exchange for their property. He knew that if slavery was extirpated suddenly, the whole economy of the country would be thrown out of joint; a billion dollars of American capital had been invested in slaves—the immediate destruction of such a huge investment would cause panic and
disrupt the financial structure of the nation. The Abraham Lincoln of the fifties was no abolitionist, no advocate of violent measures of any kind. That he was to be the agent for emancipating the slaves and the leader in a war fought primarily over the issue of slavery is one of the great ironies of history.

The whole matter of slavery was becoming more important every day. A change was taking place in the organization of the country that was forcing the issue to a climax. Hitherto the South had held a dominant position, politically and economically, in the structure of the nation. During the first half of the nineteenth century, cotton had become tremendously important. The invention of the cotton gin and the improvement of spinning machinery had made cotton a crop necessary to the economy of the world. Cotton acreage had increased, and with it the need for more slaves. The founding fathers of the nation had believed that slavery would die out of its own accord; they did not foresee the growing demand for cotton that was to keep it alive and make it a more active force than ever.

Coincident with the spread of slavery in the South, opposition to it had increased in the North. The polite anti-slavery societies of early years were supplanted by militant organizations determined to eradicate slavery at any cost. Heart-and-soul abolitionists were willing to spill blood, dismember the Union and tear up the Constitution to see the sin of human slavery erased from the land. They spoke of a “higher law,” of the God-given rights of freedom which were not to be compromised by any mundane devices of expediency. And, as abolitionists became more bitter in their denunciations of slavery, Southerners became more ardent in their defense of an institution of which they had once been rather ashamed.

The South had made money from slavery—but not much money. Slave labor was profitable only on the big plantations, and the wealth of the South was highly concentrated in very
few hands. By 1850, the North had already surpassed the South in economic power; in order to keep on growing, the North had to gain political power as well, for the South, which held the reins of government by her control over the Presidency and the Senate, was naturally unwilling to pass legislation that would favor her rival section. The South was agricultural, the North industrial; at this time the South was favoring free trade, the North protective tariffs to safeguard her infant industries; the South was in constant need of fresh capital to finance her agrarian enterprises, the North had become the money center of the nation, and all sections had to go to her for business loans.