Authors: Stephen B. Oates
Contrary to mythology, Lincoln was anything but a common man. In point of fact, he was one of the most ambitious human beings his friends had ever seen, with an aspiration for high station in life that burned in him like a furnace. Instead of reading with an accomplished attorney, as was customary in those days, he taught himself the law entirely on his own. He was literally a self-made lawyer. Moreover, he entered the Illinois legislature at the age of twenty-five and became a leader of the state Whig party, an indefatigable party campaigner, and a regular candidate for public office.
By the 1850s, Lincoln was one of the most sought-after attorneys in Illinois, with a reputation as a lawyer's lawyerâa knowledgeable jurist who argued appeal cases for other attorneys. He did his most influential legal work, not in the circuit courts as mythology claims, but in the Supreme Court of Illinois, where he participated in 243 cases and won most of them. He commanded the respect of his colleagues, all of whom called him “Mr. Lincoln” or just “Lincoln.” He typically signed letters to his friends “Yours as ever, A. Lincoln.” Even Mary referred to him as “Mr. Lincoln,” or “Father.” Nobody called him “Abe”âat least not to his faceâbecause he loathed the nickname. It did not befit a
respected professional who had struggled hard to overcome the limitations of his frontier background. In sum, Lincoln was an outstanding attorney in a flourishing, populous western state that had left its pioneer past behind, as he had.
Frankly Lincoln enjoyed his status as a prominent Illinois lawyer and politician. And he liked money, too, and used it to measure his worth. He was fair and reasonable when it came to legal fees, but he did expect prompt remuneration for his services. “I have news from Ottawa,” he wrote an associate, “that we
win
our Galatin & Saline county case. As the dutch Justice said, when he married folks, âNow, vere ish my hundred tollars.'” And if clients refused to pay up, Lincoln sued them to get his money. By the 1850s, thanks to a combination of talent and sheer hard work, Lincoln was a man of considerable wealth. He had an annual income of $5,000 or moreâthe equivalent of many times that todayâand large financial and real-estate investments.
While Lincoln handled a remarkable variety of bread-and-butter cases out on the circuit, he became known in the 1850s as a railroad lawyer. And this was true to the extent that he and Herndon regularly defended the Illinois Central and other railroad companies. After all, these were years of prodigious railroad construction all over the Midwest, and this in turn created a whole new area of law and legal practice in which Lincoln was anxious to participate. Moreover, the coming of the Iron Horse marked the end of steamboating's golden age and precipitated a titanic struggle in the Midwest between rail and water interests for commercial supremacy. And that struggle offered lucrative rewards for attorneys like Lincoln who could command a mass of technical data.
And he harvested the rewards, collecting fees of $400 to $5,000 for precedent-setting victories in both state and federal appeals courts. Yet Lincoln never used the law for nefarious personal gain, never used it to acquire cheap land and other property as did many of his associates. No, Lincoln was as honest in real life as in the legend. Even his enemies conceded that he was incorruptible.
“Resolve to be honest at all events,” he urged potential attorneys; “and if in your judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer.”
Moreover, Lincoln had broad humanitarian views, some of them in advance of his time. Even though he was a teetotaler, he was extremely tolerant of alcoholics in a day when most temperance advocates branded them as criminals who ought to be locked up. Lincoln did not view them that way. In his opinion, alcoholics were unfortunates who deserved understanding, not vilification. He noted that some of the world's most gifted artists had succumbed to alcoholism, because they were too sensitive to cope with their insights into the human condition. When he said that, of course, church and temperance people accused Lincoln of favoring drunkenness.
When it came to religion, Lincoln was an open-minded man who regarded the entire subject as a matter of individual conscience. Personally he believed in God and was an avid student of the Scriptures. A religious fatalist like his mother Nancy, he maintained that nothing could hinder the designs of Providence, that whatever would be would be and people could do nothing about it. Yet, because he belonged to no church and read freethinkers like Voltaire and Thomas Paine, church folk often put Lincoln down as an atheist and opposed him in his political campaigns. For example, in Springfieldâhis homeâtwenty-one of twenty-four ministers voted against him in 1860, in large part because they considered him an infidel.
Lincoln also had a liberal mind in the matter of women's rights. This was not a leading issue in Illinois politics, so Lincoln's position cannot be attributed to political considerations. That position, as he publicly declared in 1836, was that women, like men, should have the right to vote so long as all paid taxes. “In this statement,” as one specialist has stressed, “Lincoln was far ahead of most of his political contemporaries, and by no means behind even the crusading feminists and abolitionists of the day.”
He stood out on another issue, too. His was an age of obstreper
ous “Americanism,” a xenophobic time when native-born white Protestants campaigned and legislated against Catholics, Irish, and immigrants. Yet Lincoln had no ethnic prejudices. His law partner William Herndon, who raved against the Irish, reported that Lincoln was not at all bigoted against “the foreign element, toleratingâas I never couldâeven the Irish.”
In the mid-1850s, nativism was so potent a force that it gave rise to the American or Know-Nothing party, which set out to halt immigration, suppress Catholics, and save the United States from the menace of “Popery.” Lincoln would have none of it. “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” he wrote Joshua Speed. “As a nation, we began by declaring that â
all men are created equal
.' We now practically read it âall men are created equal,
except negroes
.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read âall men are created equal, except negroes,
and foreigners, and catholics
.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving libertyâto Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
Lincoln's letter affords considerable insight into his feelings about prejudice and oppression, and his awareness of what was going on in the world. But before turning to the political Lincoln, let us summarize what we have seen of him in the prism of history. Thus far, we have seen a complex, richly human Lincoln, a self-made man who was witty and tolerant, proud of his achievements, substantially wealthy, morbidly fascinated with madness, obsessed with death, troubled with recurring bouts of melancholy, and gifted with major talent for literary expression. This is a remarkably different Lincoln from the rumpled, simple, joke-cracking commoner of mythology, or the villainous bigot of the countermyths. But there are other differences between the historical and mythical Lincoln that are even more profound, particularly in the combustible matter of slavery and Negro rights, the burning political issue of Lincoln's day.
In presidential polls taken by
Life
Magazine in 1948, the
New York Times Magazine
in 1962, and the
Chicago Tribune Magazine
in 1982, historians and political scholars ranked Lincoln as the best chief executive in American history. They were not trying to mythologize the man, for they realized that errors, vacillations, and human flaws marred his record. Their rankings indicate, however, that the icon of mythology did rise out of a powerful historical figure, a man who learned from his mistakes and made a difference. Indeed, Lincoln led the lists because he had a moral vision of where his country must go to preserve and enlarge the rights of all her people. He led the lists because he had an acute sense of historyâan ability to identify himself with a historical turning point in his time and to articulate the promise that held for the liberation of oppressed humanity the world over. He led the lists because he perceived the truth of his age and embodied it in his words and deeds. He led the lists because, in his interaction with the spirit and events of his day, he made momentous
moral
decisions that affected the course of humankind.
It cannot be stressed enough how much Lincoln responded to the spirit of his age. From the 1820s to the 1840s, while Lincoln was growing to manhood and learning the art and technique of politics, the Western world seethed with revolutionary ferment. In the 1820s, revolutions broke out not only in Poland, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, and France, but blazed across Spain's ramshackle South American empire as well, resulting in new republics
whose capitals rang with the rhetoric of freedom and independence. The Republic of Mexico even produced laws and promulgations that abolished slavery throughout the nation, including Mexico's subprovince of Texas. In that same decade, insurrection panics rocked the Deep South, especially the South Carolina tidewater, as America's disinherited Africans reflected the revolutionary turbulence sweeping the New World. In 1831, in an effort to liberate his people, a visionary slave preacher named Nat Turner incited the most violent slave rebellion in American history, a revolt that shook the South to its foundations and cleared the way for the Great Southern Reaction against the human-rights upheavals of the time. In the 1830s, a vociferous abolitionist movement sprang up in the free states; Great Britain eradicated slavery in the Empire; and impassioned English emancipators came to crusade in America as well. In distant Russia, Czar Nicholas I established an autonomous communal structure for Russia's millions of serfsâthe first step in their eventual emancipation two decades later. In the 1840s, while Lincoln practiced law and ran for Congress, reformist impulses again swept Europe. Every major country there had liberal parties that clamored for representative government, self-rule, civil liberties, and social and economic reform. In 1848, the year Congressman Lincoln denounced “Mr. Polk's War” against Mexico, defended the right of revolution, and voted against slavery expansion, revolutions again blazed across Europe, flaring up first in France against the July Monarchy, then raging through Italy and central Europe. These were revolutions against monarchy, despotism, exploitation by the few, revolutions that tried to liberate individuals, classes, and nationalities alike from the shackles of the past. In sum, it was an age of revolution, a turbulent time when people throughout the Western world were searching for definitions of liberty, fighting and dying for liberty, against reactionary forces out to preserve the status quo.
Out in Illinois, Lincoln identified himself with the liberating forces of his day. In fact, he became the foremost political spokes
man for those impulses in the United States, a man with a world view of the meaning and mission of his young country in that historic time.
From earliest manhood, Lincoln was a fervent nationalist in an age when a great many Americans, especially in Dixie, were aggressive localists. His broad outlook began when he was an Indiana farm boy tilling his father's mundane wheatfield. During lunch breaks, when he was not studying grammar and rhetoric, Lincoln would peruse Parson Weems's eulogistic biography of George Washington, and he would daydream about the Revolution and the origins of the Republic, daydream about Washington, Jefferson, and Madison as great national statesmen who shaped the course of history. By the time he became a politician in the 1830s, Lincoln idolized the Founding Fathers as apostles of liberty (never mind for now that many of those apostles were also southern slaveowners). Young Lincoln extolled the Fathers for beginning a noble experiment in popular government on these shores, to demonstrate to the world that a free people could govern themselves without hereditary monarchs and aristocracies. And the foundation of the American experiment was the Declaration of Independence, which in Lincoln's view proclaimed the highest political truths in history: that all men were created equal and entitled to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This meant that men like Lincoln were not chained to the conditions of their births, that they could better their station in life and realize the rewards of their own talent and toil.
A good example, Lincoln believed, was his political idol, Whig national leader Henry Clay of Kentucky. Born into a poor farm family, Clay lifted himself all the way to the United States Senate and national and international fame. For Lincoln, this taught a “profitable lesson”â“it teaches that in this country, one can scarcely be so poor, but that, if he
will
, he
can
acquire sufficient education to get through the world respectably.” Thanks to the Declaration, which guaranteed Americans “the right to rise,” Lincoln himself had acquired enough education to “get through
the world respectably.” Thus he had a deep, personal reverence for the Declaration and insisted that all his political sentiments flowed from that document.
All his economic beliefs derived from that document, too. Indeed, Lincoln's economics were as nationalistic and deeply principled as his politics. Schooled in the Whig doctrine of order and national unity, Lincoln advocated a strong federal government to maintain a prosperous, stable economy for the benefit of all Americansâ“the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions,” as he would say. Thus he championed a national bank, internal improvements financed by the federal government, federal subsidies to help the states build their own canals, turnpikes, and railroads, and state banks whose task was to ensure financial growth and stability. “The legitimate object of government,” Lincoln asserted later, “is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.”
Lincoln's national economic program was part of his large vision of the American experiment in popular government. By promoting national prosperity, stability, and unity, his economics would help guarantee his “American dream”âthe right of all Americans to rise, to harvest the full fruits of their labors, and so to better themselves as their own talent and industry allowed. Thus the American experiment ensured two things essential to liberty: the right of self-government and the right of self-improvement.
Nor was the promise of America limited to the native-born. Her frontier, Lincoln said, should function as an outlet for people the world over who wanted to find new homes, a place to “better their conditions in life.” For Lincoln, the American experiment was the way of the future for nations across the globe. A child of the Enlightenment, the American system stood as a beacon of hope for “the liberty party throughout the world.”
Yet this beacon of hope harbored a monstrous thing, a relic of
despotism in the form of Negro slavery. In Lincoln's view, bondage was the one retrograde institution that disfigured the American experiment, and he maintained that he had always hated it, as much as any abolitionist. His family had opposed slavery, and he had grown up and entered politics thinking it wrong. In 1837, in his first public statement on slavery, Lincoln contended that it was “founded both on injustice and bad policy,” and he never changed his mind. But before 1854 (and the significance of this date will become clear), Lincoln generally kept his own counsel about slavery and abolition. After all, slavery was the most inflammable issue of his generation, and Lincoln observed early on what violent passions Negro bondageâand the question of race that underlay itâcould arouse in white Americans. In his day, slavery was a tried and tested means of race control in a South dedicated to white supremacy. Moreover, the North was also a white supremacist region, where the vast majority of whites opposed emancipation lest it result in a flood of southern “Africans” into the free states. And Illinois was no exception, as most whites there were anti-Negro and anti-abolition to the core. Lincoln, who had elected to work within the American system, was not going to ruin his career by trumpeting an unpopular cause. To be branded as an abolitionist in central Illinoisâhis constituency as a legislator and a U.S. congressmanâwould have been certain political suicide.
Still, slavery distressed him. He realized that it should never have existed in a self-proclaimed free and enlightened Republic. He who cherished the Declaration of Independence understood only too well how bondage mocked and contradicted that noble document. Yes, he detested slavery. It was a blight on the American experiment in popular government, the one institution that robbed the Republic of its just example in the world, robbed the United States of the hope it should hold out to oppressed people everywhere.
He opposed slavery, too, because he had witnessed some of its evils firsthand. In 1841, on a steamboat journey down the Ohio
River, he saw a group of manacled slaves on their way to the cruel cotton plantations of the Deep South. Lincoln was appalled at the sight of those chained Negroes. Fourteen years later he wrote that the spectacle “was a continual torment to me” and that he saw something like it every time he touched a slave border. Slavery, he said, “had the power of making me miserable.”
Again, while serving in Congress from 1847 to 1849, he passed slave auction blocks in Washington, D.C. In fact, from the windows of the Capitol, he could observe the infamous “Georgia pen”â“a sort of Negro livery stable,” as he described it, “where droves of negroes were collected, temporarily kept, and finally taken to southern markets, precisely like droves of horses.” The spectacle offended him. He agreed with a Whig colleague that the buying and selling of human beings in the United States capital was a national disgrace. Accordingly Lincoln drafted a gradual abolition bill for the District of Columbia. But powerful southern politicians howled in protest, and his own Whig support fell away. At that, Lincoln dropped the bill and sat in gloomy silence as Congress rocked with debatesâwith drunken fights and rumbles of disunionâover the status of slavery in the territories. Shocked at the behavior of his colleagues, Lincoln confessed that slavery was the one issue that threatened the stability of the Union.
Yet Attorney Lincoln had to concede that bondage was a thoroughly entrenched institution in the southern states, one protected by the U.S. Constitution and a web of national and state laws. This in turn created a painful dilemma for Lincoln: a system he deeply loved had institutionalized a thing he abominated. What could be done? Lincoln admitted that the federal government had no legal authority in peacetime to harm a state institution like slavery. And yet it should not remain in what he considered “the noblest political system the world ever saw.”
Caught in an impossible predicament, Lincoln persuaded himself that if slavery were confined to the South and left alone there, time would somehow solve the problem and slavery would ultimately die out. Once it was no longer workable, he believed,
southern whites would gradually liberate the blacks on their own. They would do so voluntarily.
And he told himself that the Founding Fathersâthat Washington, Jefferson, and Madisonâhad felt the same way, that they too had expected slavery to perish some day. In Lincoln's interpretation, the Fathers had tolerated slavery as a necessary evil, one that could not be removed where it already existed without causing wide-scale chaos and destruction, But, Lincoln contended, they had taken steps to restrict the growth of bondage (had prohibited it in the old Northwest Territories, had outlawed the international slave trade) and thus to place the institution on the road to extinction. And he decided that this was why the Fathers had not included the words
slave
or
slavery
in the Constitution. When bondage did disappear, “there should be nothing on the face of the great charter of liberty suggesting that such a thing as negro slavery had ever existed among us.”
So went Lincoln's argument before 1854. Thanks to the Founding Fathers, slavery was on its way to its ultimate doom. And he believed that southerners and northerners alike accepted this as axiomatic. The task of his generation, Lincoln thought, was to keep the Republic firmly on the course charted by the Fathers, guiding America toward that ultimate day when slavery would finally be removed, the nation righted at last with her own ideals, and popular government preserved for all humankind. It was this visionâthis sense of America's historic mission in the progress of human libertyâthat shaped Lincoln's beliefs and actions throughout his mature years.
Still, despite his passionate convictions about popular government and human liberty, Lincoln before the Civil War did not envision black people as permanent participants in the great American experiment. On the contrary, he feared that white Americans were too prejudiced to let Negroes live among them as equals. If it was impossible for blacks to be completely free in America, then he preferred that they be free somewhere else. Once slavery died out in Dixie, he insisted that the federal govern
ment should colonize all blacks in Africa, an idea he got from Henry Clay.