Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
Born in Boston, Caleb Smith had migrated west as a young man, ending up in Indiana, where he read law, was admitted to the bar, and entered politics as a Whig. He was a “handsome, trimly-built man,” with a “smooth oval face.” Despite a lisp, his power on the stump was celebrated far and wide. It was said that he could make you “feel the blood tingling through your veins to your finger ends and all the way up your spine.” Indeed, one contemporary observer considered Smith a more compelling public speaker than Lincoln. Later, at the 1860 Republican Convention, Smith would help swing the Indiana delegation to Lincoln, a move that would lay the foundation for Lincoln’s presidential nomination.
Joshua Giddings had faced obstacles as formidable as Lincoln. He had left his family and small farming community in Ashtabula County, Ohio, to study law in the town of Canfield, Ohio. His decision stunned his friends and neighbors. “He had lived with them from childhood, and toiled with them in the fields,” his son-in-law, George Julian, observed. “He had never enjoyed the means of obtaining even a common-school education, and they regarded his course as the effect of a vain desire to defeat the designs of Providence, according to which they believed that people born in humble life should be content with their lot.” Fourteen years older than Lincoln, Giddings was first elected to Congress in 1838. Reelected continuously after that, he threw himself at once into John Quincy Adams’s valiant struggle over the right of Congress to receive antislavery petitions. While Giddings was decidedly more militant on the slavery issue than Lincoln, the two became close friends. Boarding together at Mrs. Spriggs’s house in Carroll Row on Capitol Hill, they shared hundreds of meals, conversations, and stories. So much did Giddings like and respect Lincoln that seven years later, in 1855, when Lincoln ran for the Senate, Giddings proclaimed that he “would walk clear to Illinois” to help elect him.
Among Lincoln’s Whig colleagues was Alexander Stephens of Georgia, later vice president of the Confederate states. Transfixed by Stephens’s eloquent speaking style, Lincoln wrote a friend that “a little slim, pale-faced, consumptive man…has just concluded the very best speech, of an hour’s length, I ever heard. My old, withered, dry eyes, are full of tears yet.” (Lincoln was not yet forty.) Many years later, the classically educated Stephens recalled: “Mr. Lincoln was careful as to his manners, awkward in his speech, but was possessed of a very strong, clear and vigorous mind. He always attracted the riveted attention of the House when he spoke; his manner of speech as well as thought was original…his anecdotes were always exceedingly apt and pointed, and socially he always kept his company in a roar of laughter.”
Lincoln’s ability to win the respect of others, to earn their trust and even devotion, would prove essential in his rise to power. There was something mysterious in his persona that led countless men, even old adversaries, to feel bound to him in admiration.
T
AKING UP HIS LAW PRACTICE
once more, Lincoln began to feel, he later remarked, that he “was losing interest in politics.” The likely reality was that his position on the Mexican War had temporarily closed the door to political office. Furthermore, this withdrawal from office was never complete. He worked to secure political posts for fellow Illinoisans, and joined in a call for a convention to reorganize the Whig Party. Through his lengthy eulogies for several Whig leaders, he spoke out on national issues, referring to slavery as “the one
great
question of the day.” And he never missed an opportunity to criticize Stephen Douglas, now a leading national figure.
In the interim, he resolved to work at the law with “greater earnestness.” His Springfield practice flourished, providing a steady income. Mary was able to enlarge their home, hire additional help with the household chores, and entertain more freely. These years should have been happy ones for Mary, but death intervened to crush her spirits. In the summer after Lincoln returned from Washington, Mary’s father died during a cholera epidemic. He was only fifty-eight at the time, still vigorous and actively involved in politics; in fact, he was running for a seat in the Kentucky Senate when he succumbed to the epidemic. Six months later, Eliza Parker, Mary’s beloved maternal grandmother, died in Lexington. To this grandmother, the six-year-old Mary had turned for love and consolation when her mother died.
February 1, 1850, brought Mary’s most terrible loss: the death of her second son, three-year-old Eddie, from pulmonary tuberculosis. That destiny had branded her for misery became her conviction. For seven weeks, Mary had worked to arrest the high fever and racking cough that accompanied the relentless disease. Despite her ministrations, Eddie declined until he fell into unconsciousness and died early on the morning of the 1st. Neighbors recalled hearing Mary’s inconsolable weeping. For days, she remained in her bed, refusing to eat, unable to stop crying. Only Lincoln, though despairing himself, was able to reach her. “Eat, Mary,” he begged her, “for we must live.”
Finally, Mary found some solace in long conversations with the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, James Smith, who had conducted the funeral service for Eddie. So comforting was the pastor’s faith in an eternal life after death that Mary was moved to join his congregation and renew her religious faith. A grateful Lincoln rented a family pew at the First Presbyterian and occasionally accompanied Mary to church, though he remained unable to share her thought that Eddie awaited their reunion in some afterlife.
Though Mary became pregnant again a month after Eddie’s death, giving birth to a third son, William Wallace, in December 1850, and a fourth son, Thomas, in April 1853, Eddie’s death left an indelible scar on her psyche—deepening her mood swings, magnifying her weaknesses, and increasing her fears. Tales of her erratic behavior began to circulate, stories of “hysterical outbursts” against her husband, rumors that she chased him through the yard with a knife, drove him from the house with a broomstick, smashed his head with a chunk of wood. Though the outbursts generally subsided as swiftly as they had begun, her instability and violent episodes unquestionably caused great upheavals in the family life.
When Mary fell into one of these moods, Lincoln developed what one neighbor called “a protective deafness,” which doubtless exasperated her fury. Instead of engaging Mary directly, he would lose himself in thought, quietly leave the room, or take the children for a walk. If the discord continued, he would head to the state library or his office, where he would occasionally remain through the night until the emotional storm had ceased.
Had his marriage been happier, Lincoln’s friends believed, he would have been satisfied as a country lawyer. Had he married “a woman of more angelic temperament,” Springfield lawyer Milton Hay speculated, “he, doubtless, would have remained at home more and been less inclined to mingle with people outside.”
Though a tranquil domestic union might have made Lincoln a happier man, the supposition that he would have been a contented homebody, like Edward Bates, belies everything we know of Lincoln’s fierce ambition and extraordinary drive—an ambition that drove him to devour books in every spare moment, memorize his father’s stories in order to captivate his friends, study law late into the night after a full day’s work, and run for office at the age of twenty-three. Indeed, long before his political career even took shape, he had been determined to win the veneration of his fellow men by “rendering [himself] worthy” of their esteem.
Even as Lincoln focused his attention on the law, he was simply waiting for events to turn, waiting for the right time to reenter public life.
I
F
L
INCOLN’S AMBITIONS
appeared to have stalled, the careers of Seward and Chase gathered new momentum. Zachary Taylor’s triumph at the polls created a Whig majority in the New York state legislature for the first time in many years. Because U.S. senators at the time were elected by state legislatures rather than by popular vote, Thurlow Weed focused his magic on the legislature to propel Seward into the U.S. Senate. His task was complicated by the division of the state’s Whig Party into two distinct factions. Millard Fillmore, bolstered by his election as vice president, led the conservative wing, composed of merchants, capitalists, and cotton manufacturers who preferred to defuse the slavery issue. Weed and Seward represented the liberal wing.
Weed’s difficulties were compounded when New York papers reported a fiery speech Seward delivered in Cleveland, putting him at odds with the more moderate stance of the new administration. “There are two antagonistical elements of society in America,” Seward had proclaimed, “freedom and slavery. Freedom is in harmony with our system of government and with the spirit of the age, and is therefore passive and quiescent. Slavery is in conflict with that system, with justice, and with humanity, and is therefore organized, defensive, active, and perpetually aggressive.” Free labor, he said, demands universal suffrage and the widespread “diffusion of knowledge.” The slave-based system, by contrast “cherishes ignorance because it is the only security for oppression.” Sectional conflict, Seward warned, would inevitably arise from these two intrinsically different economic systems, which were producing dangerously divergent cultures, values, and assumptions.
Seward stood before his Cleveland audience and called for the abolition of the black codes that prevented blacks from voting, sitting on juries, or holding office in Ohio. Slavery, he conceded, was once the sin of all the states. “We in New York are guilty of slavery still, by withholding the right of suffrage from the race we have emancipated. You in Ohio are guilty in the same way, by a system of black-laws still more aristocratic and odious.” Seward’s support that day for the black vote, black presence on juries, and black officeholding was startlingly radical for a mainstream politician. Even a full decade later, during his debates with Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln would maintain that he had never been in favor “of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry.”
Although the difference in their positions was due largely to the contrasting political environments of the more progressive New York and the conservative, Southern-leaning Illinois, Seward was more willing than Lincoln to employ language designed to ignite the emotions of particular crowds, tailoring his rhetoric to suit the convictions of his immediate audience. Knowing that his audience in the Western Reserve was likely far more progressive than many Eastern audiences, Seward ventured further toward abolitionism than he had in the past. Even so, the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
charged, Seward fell short of the antislavery zeal that put the Reserve a decade ahead of the East Coast.
Nor did Seward stop with his condemnation of the Black Laws, he proceeded to deliver a powerful attack against the Fugitive Slave Law, written, he claimed, in violation of divine law. He brought his speech to a close with a stirring appeal intended to rouse his audience to act. “‘Can nothing be done for freedom because the public conscience is inert?’ Yes, much can be done—everything can be done. Slavery can be limited to its present bounds, it can be ameliorated, it
can
be and
must
be abolished and you and I can and must do it.”
Seward’s speech worried Weed. Though he agreed that slavery was “a political crime and a national curse—a great moral and political evil,” he predicted that “this question of slavery, when it becomes a matter of political controversy, will shake, if not unsettle, the foundations of our Government. It is too fearful, and too mighty, in all its bearings and consequences, to be recklessly mixed up in our partisan conflicts.”
At a time when professed abolitionists remained an unpopular minority, subjected in some Northern cities to physical assault, Weed warned Seward that his provocative language would place him in the same camp with extremist figures such as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Seward weighed Weed’s concerns, acknowledging that the emancipation issue had not fully “ripened.” In the weeks that followed, he muted his stridency on slavery, allowing Weed the space necessary to carry his protégé to the next level. Weed ingratiated Seward with the legislators one by one. He rounded up the liberals and assured the moderates that when Seward talked about slavery, he “wanted to level society up, not down.” Furthermore, he promised the Taylor administration that Seward would loyally follow the moderate party line. Despite the split in the party and Fillmore’s rising star, Weed managed to corral a majority and send his friend Seward to the Senate.
“Probably no man ever yet appeared for the first time in Congress so widely known and so warmly appreciated,” declared the
New York Tribune
after his election. Seward arrived with an aura of celebrity, even notoriety. Yet Weed proved correct when he anticipated that Seward’s radical speech in Cleveland would come back to haunt him. Not long after the young New Yorker was sworn into the Senate, a Southern senator rose from his seat and read aloud the peroration in which Seward told his audience that slavery “can and must be abolished.” It was said that “a shudder” ran through the chamber. “If we ever find you in Georgia,” one letter writer warned Seward, “you will forfeit your odious neck.”
S
ALMON
C
HASE’S BID
for success through a viable antislavery party came to fruition in 1849. Thirteen Free-Soilers had been elected to the seventy-two-member Ohio state legislature, which would choose the next U.S. senator. Neither the Whigs nor the Democrats had a controlling majority, which gave the tiny Free Soil bloc enormous leverage. Though many assumed that former Whig Joshua Giddings, who had championed the antislavery cause in Congress for more than a decade, had earned the right to be considered the front-runner, Chase managed to gain the seat for himself. Ironically, his winning tactics in pursuit of this goal would shadow his career and ultimately bring him the lasting enmity of many important figures in his own state.