Lincoln in the World (7 page)

A Spirit of Wild Adventure

The Lincolns stopped at Mary’s family home in Kentucky on their way to Washington, arriving in Lexington on a bitterly cold November day. The entire Todd family crowded into their chilly front hallway as the visitors stepped inside. Mary, then a twenty-nine-year-old beauty, entered first. “To my mind,” recalled her half-sister, Emilie, “she was lovely,” with “clear, sparkling blue eyes … smooth white skin with a fresh, faint wild-rose color in her cheeks; and glossy light brown hair, which fell in soft, short curls behind each ear.” Lincoln, clutching his son Robert, followed behind his wife. As the congressman-elect placed the boy on the floor, Emilie, then just a small girl, could not help but think of the story of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” She feared, she later recalled, that Lincoln “might be the hungry giant of the story.” Lincoln wore a black cloak draped over his shoulders and a fur cap with ear straps that covered most of his face. “Expecting to hear the, ‘Fee, fi, fo, fum!,’ ” Emilie remembered, “I shrank closer to my mother and tried to hide behind her voluminous skirts.”
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Lexington was nearly deserted. Many of the city’s young men were still away fighting in Mexico. The national euphoria was tempered by a deep sense of sorrow for some of the city’s most prominent citizens who had been killed in the war. Henry Clay Jr., the son
of the Todds’ illustrious neighbor, was one casualty. Like Hardin, the young man had been killed at the Battle of Buena Vista, speared multiple times by enemy lances. By the time Lincoln arrived in Lexington, the Sage of Ashland was complaining that he had been “tortured” by the stories of his son’s death and “the possible outrages committed upon his body.” Clay, Lincoln was soon to find out, had turned bitterly against the Mexican War by the fall of 1847.
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In the stately Todd home, Lincoln spent most of his time upstairs in a back parlor and a narrow passageway filled with bookshelves. The Todd library included copies of Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, and lives of Cromwell and Napoleon. Still, for Lincoln, the highlight of the Lexington stop must have been the opportunity to see his idol Henry Clay in person. Lincoln once remarked that he “almost worshipped” the Whig elder. Clay, Lincoln said, was his “beau ideal of a statesman.” At one point the Railsplitter even began dressing like his hero, sporting a denim suit instead of English broadcloth, to support local manufactures. In early November, the local newspaper reported that the famed orator would deliver an address on the Mexican War at the Lexington courthouse. Lincoln would not have missed the performance.
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Clay, like Lincoln, had at first mildly rallied behind the Mexican War effort. “I felt half inclined to ask for some little nook or corner in the army in which I might serve in avenging the wrongs to my country,” Clay told a banquet audience in New Orleans in late 1846, perhaps attempting to make a joke. “I have thought that I might yet be able to capture or to slay a Mexican.” Yet when his own son decided to join the U.S. troops, Clay balked. Though he ultimately gave his son a couple of pistols to take with him to Mexico, the father complained that he wished the war were “more reconcilable with the dictates of conscience.” If he had any remaining sympathies for the war effort, they evaporated after his boy was killed at Buena Vista. By April 1847 the Sage of Ashland was deriding the war as “calamitous, as well as unjust and unnecessary.”
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By Lincoln’s visit, Clay was past his prime. At seventy-one, he
had failed in several bids for the presidency. The Great Compromiser acknowledged that he was “in the autumn of life” and felt “the frost of age.” Yet when he spoke, the old man could still draw a crowd. His voice, one contemporary recalled, could sound “soft as a lute or full as a trumpet.” On the Friday night before his remarks, supporters flooded into Lexington, filling the local taverns. The audience grew so large that the event’s organizers, which included Lincoln’s father-in-law, moved it from the courthouse to a large brick building that could accommodate the throng. Clay took his place at the head of a makeshift platform organizers had thrown up at the front of the room. Rain had been pouring down on the city when the statesman began to speak.
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As Clay began his remarks, he noted that the weather was “dark and gloomy, unsettled and uncertain, like the condition of our country, in regard to the unnatural war with Mexico.” He insisted that the war should be brought to “a satisfactory close.” The conflict, he told the crowd, “is no war of defense, but one unnecessary and of offensive aggression. It is Mexico that is defending her fire-sides, her castles and her altars, not we.”

The war threatened to shatter the union’s delicate sectional balance, and was slowly eroding the American character. “War unhinges society, disturbs its peaceful and regular industry, and scatters poisonous seeds of disease and immorality, which continue to germinate and diffuse their baneful influence long after it has ceased,” he said. “Dazzling by its glitter, pomp and pageantry, it begets a spirit of wild adventure and romantic enterprise, and often disqualifies those who embark in it, after their return from the bloody fields of battle, from engaging in the industrious and peaceful vocations of life.”

Clay subtly criticized his own party. Whigs, he said, had “lent too ready a facility” to the prosecution of the conflict, “without careful examination into the objects of the war.” Congress had an obligation to exert its constitutional authority and force President Polk to more clearly define the war’s aims. “Such a vast and tremendous power ought not to be confided to the perilous exercise of one single
man,” he said. If Polk had the power to start a war alone, he asked, “where is the difference between our free government and that of any other nation which may be governed by an absolute czar, emperor, or king?” Clay insisted that he was particularly “shocked and alarmed” by the increasingly loud talk of annexing the entire country of Mexico. “Of all the dangers and misfortunes which could befall this nation,” he said, “I should regard that of its becoming a warlike and conquering power the most direful and fatal.”
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Clay spoke for two and a half hours, reviewing the history of the Mexican War and offering his prescriptions for ending it. Soon after he concluded his remarks, news of the speech flashed throughout the country. James Gordon Bennett, editor of the
New York Herald
, paid $500 to charter a train to take the text of Clay’s speech from Lexington to Cincinnati. From there telegraph operators beamed it to the newspaper’s offices in Manhattan. Britain’s foreign minister, Lord Palmerston, praised the speech for rejecting Polk’s “aggressive policy.” At least some Illinois Whigs, however, worried that Clay’s bold anti-war stance could hurt the party in the next year’s presidential election. “That speech of Mr. Clay,” an Illinois friend wrote Lincoln, “will beat us as a party for years to come, unless we can unite upon ‘Old Zac’ [Zachary Taylor].”
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Lincoln may have had the opportunity to continue the dialogue over a dinner with Clay that November. An acquaintance of Lincoln’s later insisted that the two men had shared a meal at Ashland during this visit. Historians find this difficult to believe, since Lincoln never mentioned the encounter and there is no corroborating evidence to support the claim. In any case, Lincoln later told friends that he was slightly disappointed with his first impression of the statesman. Clay had read from a prepared text rather than speaking extemporaneously. His delivery, one of Lincoln’s acquaintances later recalled, “did not come up to Mr. Lincoln’s expectations.” Still, the remarks clearly made a deep impression on the congressman-elect. In just two months, he would heed Clay’s call and bring the fight to President Polk on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
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The So-Called City of Washington

The nation’s capital in the fall of 1847 was still “an ill-contrived, ill-arranged, rambling, scrambling village.” Farm animals, including pigs and geese, wandered through the city’s muddy streets. Only Pennsylvania Avenue, with its rows of shops selling “French wines, Parisian millinery, and fine English woolens” held much charm for worldly visitors. One French diplomat complained that the whole place amounted to “neither city nor village” and said it displayed “a miserable, desolate look.” The diplomat derided the capital as “the so-called city of Washington.”
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The Lincolns arrived at the central station late on the night of December 2, 1847. At the depot, the usual throng of bums and pushy hackney-cab drivers likely provided an unpleasant welcome. The congressman-elect and his family made their way to Brown’s “Indian Queen” Hotel, a local flophouse with an image of Pocahontas on the sign out front. In the reservation book, someone scrawled a terse record of their visit: “A. Lincoln & Lady 2 children, Illinois.” The family soon moved to Mrs. Sprigg’s, a pleasant boardinghouse on the current location of the Library of Congress, with windows overlooking the “shade trees and shrubbery” of Capitol Park.
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From Mrs. Sprigg’s, it was only a short walk for Lincoln to the House chamber in the Capitol building. The hall resembled a Greek amphitheater, with rows of mahogany desks arranged in a semicircle around a “richly draped” speaker’s platform. Lincoln drew seat number 191—a dismal spot in the last row. In front of Lincoln sat Alexander Stephens, a slight, wiry figure who would one day become the vice president of the Confederacy. Stephens thought his new colleague was “careless as to his manners and awkward in his speech,” but Lincoln also possessed a peculiar brand of magnetism. “Socially,” recalled Stephens, “he always kept his company in a roar of laughter.”
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Lincoln’s fellow Whig congressmen included former president John Quincy Adams, who had eschewed retirement in exchange for a chance to settle some old Washington grudges. Adams could be
eccentric and ornery, especially in later life. He liked to skinny-dip in the Potomac and described himself as “an unsocial savage.” Yet even in the late 1840s, he remained one of the nation’s most thoughtful and accomplished foreign-policy thinkers. As a young man, Adams had served as a U.S. envoy in Russia. With Henry Clay, he had helped to negotiate an end to the War of 1812 with British diplomats in Belgium. Adams could be a vigorous, self-righteous expansionist. He believed that God had anointed Americans to spread across the entire continent. Still, his moralistic worldview also came with a powerful sense of justice. “Your conscience,” his father, John Adams, had once written to his son at his post in St. Petersburg, “is the minister plenipotentiary of God Almighty in your breast. See to it that this minister never negotiates in vain. Attend to him in opposition to all the courts in the world.”
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Adams’s conscience (and perhaps his political instincts) told him that the Mexican War was all wrong. The United States, the former president once declared in another context, “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” Adams now counted himself among fourteen “irreconcilables” in the House who had voted against the declaration of war. The curmudgeonly former president had little patience for the rowdy new brand of expansionism embodied in “Mr. Polk’s War.” In the House chamber one day, legislators cheerfully debated among themselves about the correct pronunciation of the word “Illinois.” Overhearing the conversation, Adams snapped that judging “from the character of the representatives in this congress from that state, I should decide unhesitatingly that the proper pronunciation was ‘All noise.’ ”
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The House swore in Lincoln and the other freshman representatives on December 6. The following day the war over the war began. On December 7, President Polk sent his annual message—a forerunner of the modern State of the Union—to Congress. A clerk read it before the assembled chamber. The president shrewdly sought to capitalize on the national elation over the capture of Mexico City. He lauded the “rapid and brilliant success of our arms and the vast
extent of the enemy’s territory, which [has] been overrun and conquered.” Polk faulted Mexican troops for “striking the first blow, and shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil.” The United States, the president claimed, was “the aggrieved nation” and was “compelled in self-defense to repel the invader and to vindicate the national honor and interests by prosecuting [the war] with vigor until we could obtain a just and honorable peace.”

Now, Polk asserted, the U.S. was entitled to seize a large swath of Mexican territory as an indemnity. He did not want to annex the entire country. “It has never been contemplated by me, as an object of the war, to make a permanent conquest of the Republic of Mexico or to annihilate her separate existence as an independent nation,” Polk said. Still, the regions that comprise modern-day New Mexico and California presented an alluring prize. The mineral wealth of the great Southwest beckoned, and the port of San Francisco promised a critical gateway to Pacific trade. The California harbors, Polk suggested, “would afford shelter for our Navy, for our numerous whale ships, and other merchant vessels employed in the Pacific Ocean, and would in a short period become the marts of an extensive and profitable commerce with China and other countries of the East.” Now that the West was won, Polk warned, it “should never be surrendered to Mexico.”
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Polk’s message ignited a firestorm over what to do with the conquered Mexican land. Some Democrats, particularly in the northeast and northwest, wanted Polk to annex the entire country. Polk preferred to hang on to some strategic Mexican territory, including the land that would become California, New Mexico, Arizona, and other Western states—but give Mexico City and other areas back to the Mexicans. Still, the All Mexico movement, fueled by breathless editorials in the penny press, had begun gaining momentum after the military victories at Buena Vista and Vera Cruz. For months Democratic newspapers in New York and the Midwest had been ringing the annexation bell. “It is a gorgeous prospect, this annexation of all Mexico,” declared the
New York Herald
. “Like the Sabine
virgins, she will soon learn to love her ravishers.” The
Illinois State Register
took a higher-toned approach, but the policy prescription was the same. The conflict had become a “war of philanthropy and benevolence,” the paper claimed. Only a sustained American effort to bring backward Mexico into the nineteenth century would satisfy the country’s new sense of national mission.
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