Lincoln Part 11

After his election victory Lincoln could relax. Since the Thirtieth Congress, to which he had been chosen, did not a.s.semble until December 1847, he had over a year to prepare for his move to Washington. His only notable public appearance during the intervening months was as a delegate to a gigantic River and Harbor Convention, which met in Chicago in July to protest President James K. Polk's veto of a bill that would have provided federal funding for internal improvements. As the sole Whig congressman-elect from Illinois, Lincoln attracted some attention, and his name first appeared in a nationally circulated newspaper when Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune mentioned that this "tall specimen of an Illinoisian... spoke briefly and happily" to the convention.

But for the most part Lincoln spent his time contentedly attending to his family and cultivating his law practice. A daguerreotype made about this time-his first photographic likeness-showed a young congressman well satisfied with himself. In his best suit he sat stiffly for the photographer, obviously proud of his tailor-made clothing, his carefully b.u.t.toned satin waistcoat, his stiff, starched shirt with gold studs, his intricately knotted black tie. Because of photographic distortion his hands appeared even more enormous than they actually were, but it was not the daguerreotypist's fault that his chest looked thin and his head too small for such a tall body.

"He was not a pretty man by any means-nor was he an ugly one," wrote Herndon, who left the most vivid description of his partner's appearance; "he was a homely looking man." At this time Lincoln weighed about 160 pounds, and he was so thin that he appeared even taller than his six feet, four inches. His height, as Herndon pointed out, was due to the abnormal length of his legs. "In sitting down on common chairs," Herndon observed, "he was no taller than ordinary men from the chair to the crown of his head. A marble placed on his knee thus sitting would roll hipward, down an inclined plane.... It was only when he stood up that he loomed above other men."

"Mr. Lincoln's head," Herndon noted minutely, "was long and tall.... The size of his hat, measured at the hatters block was 7, his head being from ear to ear 6 inches-and from the front to the back of brain 8 inches. Thus measured it was not below the medium size." "Mr. Lincoln's forehead was narrow but high," Herndon continued. "His hair was dark-almost black and lay floating where the fingers or the winds left it, piled up at random. His cheek bones were high-sharp and prominent. His eye brows heavy and jutting out. Mr. Lincolns jaws were long up curved and heavy. His nose was large-long and blunt, having the tip glowing in red, and a little awry toward the right eye. His chin was long-sharp and up curved. His eye brows cropped out like a huge rock on the brow of a hill. His face was long-sallow-cadaverous-shrunk-shrivelled-wrinkled and dry, having here and there a hair on the surface. His cheeks were leathery and flabby, falling in loose folds at places, looking sorrowful and sad. Mr. Lincoln's ears were extremely large-and ran out almost at right angles from his head-caused by heavy hats and partly by nature."

For all Herndon's detail, he failed quite to capture the feeling conveyed by that 1846 daguerreotype. Because a sitter had to hold a pose for several seconds without moving, it showed Lincoln's face as grave and unsmiling, but it managed to convey a sense of a man who had attained his goals. No longer was he attempting to impose the rule of reason upon impa.s.sioned emotions; no longer was he afflicted by swings of mood that went from Napoleonic ambition to deep melancholy. He was at peace with himself.

He now felt able to come to terms with the painful memories of his early years. During the 1844 presidential campaign he had accepted an invitation to speak to the Whigs of Rockport, in southern Indiana-an invitation that suggested his growing recognition as leader of his party in the West-and for the first time in fifteen years he returned to the area where he had spent his youth. He was making his usual speech advocating the protective tariff, a subject which, a partisan paper ungrammatically declared, he "handled... in a manner that done honor to himself and the whig cause," when he spotted his old schoolmate, Nathaniel Grigsby, and, interrupting himself, called out, "There is Nat." Walking out into the audience, he greeted his old chum most cordially and insisted that he must stay overnight. After he finished his address, the two men returned to the house where Lincoln was staying and, as Grigsby remembered, they spent most of the night "telling stories and talking over old times." The next day they went on to Gentryville, where Lincoln saw friends he had grown up with and revisited "the neighborhood ... in which I was raised, where my mother and only sister were buried."

That visit broke an emotional barrier that for years had kept him from mentioning the death of his mother or the loss of his sister. He could now complete the unfinished process of grieving over his mother-a process interrupted by the suddenness of her death, her hasty burial, the absence of religious service at her grave, and his father's prompt remarriage. His emotions welled up, and, over the next several months, he sought to master them by expressing them in verse. "That part of the country is, within itself, as unpoetical as any spot of the earth," he wrote a friend to whom he sent what he wrote; "but still, seeing it and its objects and inhabitants aroused feelings in me which were certainly poetry."

Lincoln expressed those feelings in four-line, rhyming stanzas, which he planned to arrange into "four little divisions or cantos." The first recaptured a bittersweet mixture of sorrow and joy produced by the visit. It began:

My childhood's home I see again,

And sadden with the view;

And still, as memory crowds my brain,

There's pleasure in it too.

His verses mixed backwoods slang with archaic words from his favorite British poets, and he was quite correct in doubting "whether my expression of those feelings is poetry." But he accurately conveyed a fuguelike sense of almost forgotten memories, "Where things decayed, and loved ones lost / In dreamy shadows rise." No longer were the hardships and the sorrows of his youth important; now, "freed from all that's earthly vile," his early memories were "Like scenes in some enchanted isle, / All bathed in liquid light."

With his childhood experiences unlocked, Lincoln could explore another of his deepest concerns: the overthrow of reason. In his lyceum address he had urged the reign of reason to protect society against both mob violence and dictatorial ambition, and no doubt his deep, debilitating bouts of depression caused him also to realize the importance of reason as an internal gyroscope. His own fear of madness was too painful to explore, but he was able to deal with the case of Matthew Gentry, a schoolmate, whom he encountered again at Gentryville. Three years older than Lincoln, Gentry had been "rather a bright lad, and the son of the rich man of our very poor neighbourhood." "At the age of nineteen," Lincoln recalled, "he unaccountably became furiously mad, from which condition he gradually settled down into harmless insanity." After seeing his childhood friend in this sad plight, Lincoln felt impelled to describe in verse the condition of "A human form with reason fled,/While wretched life remains." The meter was lame, but Lincoln's lines managed to recapture the genuine terror he had felt at the acts of this "howling crazy man," who maimed himself, fought with his father, and sought to kill his mother. He could not erase from his memory the madman's maniac laughter and his mournful night screams; they seemed to him "the funeral dirge... / Of reason dead and gone." "O death!" Lincoln's poem concluded, in an apostrophe that linked the now harmless madman to the shadowy ghosts of Nancy and Sarah Lincoln, "Why dost thou tear more blest ones hence, / And leave him ling'ring here?"

With that Lincoln had exhausted his poetical inspiration. A third "canto" containing a spirited description of a frontier bear hunt was entirely different in tone, and at this point his muse deserted him, so that he never completed a proposed fourth section. He was proud enough of his effort to send a copy of his verses to a friend in Quincy, authorizing him to print them anonymously in the Quincy Whig. "Let names be suppressed by all means," he explained. "I have not sufficient hope of the verses attracting any favorable notice to tempt me to risk being ridiculed for having written them."

At home with himself, at peace with his past, Lincoln completed arrangements to depart for Washington. He leased his house in Springfield to Cornelius Ludlum, a brick contractor, for ninety dollars a year, carefully reserving one of the upstairs loft rooms for storing his furniture. With Herndon he agreed that the law firm of Lincoln & Herndon should continue while he was in Congress, with the expectation that the senior partner would resume his active practice after his term was over. On October 25 the Lincoln family left for Washington.

CHAPTER FIVE

Lone Star of Illinois

"Being elected to Congress, though I am very grateful to our friends, for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected," Lincoln wrote Speed several weeks after his victory over Peter Cartwright. As the only Whig representative from Illinois, he knew that he could have very little influence on the Democratic administration of President Polk. He hoped, however, to offer constructive leadership in his own party, which, despite its narrow majority in the House of Representatives, was foundering. Its most prominent national leaders, like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, still yearned for another chance at the presidency, but they were clearly over the hill. Equally out of date were many of the traditional Whig issues, like a national bank, federal support of internal improvements, and a protective tariff. Lincoln saw his two years in Congress as an opportunity to help the Whig party to find fresh leadership and to adopt a program relevant to the times. He devoted himself to promoting the presidential prospects of General Zachary Taylor and to developing a new Whig ideology. In the first goal he was successful, but he failed in the second. At the end of his term he left Washington disappointed not so much with his own performance as with that of the political party to which he belonged.

I

The Lincolns arrived in Washington on December 2, 1847, just a few days before the Thirtieth Congress convened, and they went to Brown's Hotel. Presently they removed to the boardinghouse of Mrs. Ann G. Sprigg, where both Stuart and Baker had resided when they were in Congress. It was just east of the Capitol, in a row of houses on land now occupied by the Library of Congress. Eight other congressmen, all Whigs, boarded with Mrs. Sprigg, the most notable of whom was Joshua R. Giddings of Ohio, the stalwart and uncompromising enemy of slavery.

Lincoln immediately made himself at home in the boardinghouse, charming the other guests with his jokes and anecdotes. One of his fellow boarders, Dr. Samuel Busey, recalled that when there was a controversy over political issues, or especially over the subject of slavery, Lincoln would "interrupt it by interposing some anecdote, thus diverting it into a hearty and general laugh, and so completely disarrange the tenor of the discussion." For recreation Lincoln joined other members of the mess in bowling at the nearby alley owned by James Casparis. "He was a very awkward bowler," Dr. Busey remembered, "but played the game with great zest and spirit, solely for exercise and amus.e.m.e.nt." He punctuated his bowling by telling stories-"some of which were very broad"-and a crowd of listeners always gathered when he was playing.

Initially both the Lincolns found life in the national capital an exciting adventure. Washington, with its 40,000 inhabitants-including 2,000 slaves and 8,000 free blacks-was the largest and most cosmopolitan place either of them had ever known. The Capitol building, which they could see from Mrs. Sprigg's windows, was an imposing, though still unfinished, structure, its temporary, wooden dome suggesting the fragility of the federal Union. At the opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue loomed the White House, certainly the grandest residence either of the Lincolns had seen. South of the Executive Mansion, preparations were under way for the laying of the cornerstone of the vast obelisk of the Washington Monument; as congressman, Lincoln took part in the dedication ceremonies. Most of the streets in the capital were still unpaved, but a cobblestoned stretch of Pennsylvania offered a tempting array of specialty shops with luxury goods.

As transients, the Lincolns, like other congressional families, were not admitted to the exclusive social life of long-term capital residents, but they could always find amus.e.m.e.nts. There were levees at the White House, though these were not heavily attended, since the Polks forbade dancing and offered guests neither food nor drink, and there were biweekly concerts by the Marine Band in the President's grounds. In the evenings there were sometimes lectures and concerts. On one notable occasion the Lincolns attended a performance by the Ethiopian Serenaders, minstrels in blackface who had recently sung for Queen Victoria and the royal family.

But Mary soon became dissatisfied. Her husband, busy with the work of Congress, had little time to spend with her; indeed, he wrote later, he thought she "hindered me some in attending to business." She lacked female companionship, because few of the congressmen were accompanied by their wives. The four Lincolns lived in a single large room, and she appeared downstairs only at meal times. Because the Lincoln children were noisy and undisciplined, there was inevitably friction with the other boarders. Robert, one of them remembered, was a bright boy, who "seemed to have his own way"; Eddie was sick much of the time. In the spring Mary Lincoln decided to take the children back to Lexington, Kentucky, where she stayed with her father. When Lincoln wrote her, he hinted at the sometimes tense relations at Mrs. Sprigg's: "All the house-or rather, all with whom you were on decided good terms-send their love to you. The others say nothing."

Lincoln was so absorbed in his congressional duties that at first he hardly missed her. Enthusiastically he threw himself into the work of the House, establishing a conspicuous record for faithful attendance. Of the 456 roll-call votes during his two years of service, he missed only 13. Appropriately, in view of his experience as a postmaster, he was a.s.signed to the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, and he also served on the Committee on Expenditures in the War Department. In both committees he did his share of the work and effectively presented reports from the Post Office Committee to the House. He regularly and promptly submitted pet.i.tions from his const.i.tuents, most of which dealt with requests for land grants for constructing railroads. He did his best to help his friends who sought appointments from the federal government, even though he knew that there was little reason to think a Democratic administration would shower patronage on a freshman Whig congressman. Much of his time was spent in answering his correspondence, without, of course, the aid of a secretary or a.s.sistant. After he began making speeches in the House of Representatives, he took great pains to see that they reached his home audience, purchasing no fewer than 7,580 copies, which he painstakingly addressed and franked in his own hand-far more than most of the other members of the Congress.

The House of Representatives did not overawe him. If he was new to Washington, so were two hundred of the other representatives in this Thirtieth Congress, and his four terms in the Illinois state legislature had made him familiar with parliamentary procedures. Like any other freshman congressman, he had a little stage fright when he first gained the floor to make a few remarks, but he got over it quickly. "I find speaking here and elsewhere about the same thing," he reported to Herndon. "I was about as badly scared, and no worse, as I am when I speak in court."

Quickly he began to take the measure of his fellow representatives. Unlike the Senate, where his old rival Stephen A. Douglas now joined such august solons as Webster, John C. Calhoun, and Thomas Hart Benton, the House, for the most part, was composed of men of mediocre ability and only local reputation. The one great exception was John Quincy Adams, distinguished alike for his rocklike integrity and his implacable hatred of slavery, but the former President died early in the session, before Lincoln really got to know him. Apart from Giddings, whose presence Lincoln felt more as a moral than a political force, he was most taken by Georgia Whig Alexander H. Stephens, whom he described as "a little slim, pale-faced, consumptive man"; the young Southerner, like Lincoln, was looking for a way to rejuvenate and reunite the Whig party. Looking about the hall, Lincoln could readily identify a number of other industrious and competent representatives-men like David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, author of the celebrated proviso that would bar slavery from all territories gained in the Mexican War; Caleb B. Smith, the astute Indiana political manager, who would become Lincoln's first Secretary of the Interior; and Robert C. Schenck, of Ohio, whom Lincoln would one day appoint major general in the army. Not a modest man, Lincoln saw no reason to feel that these flickering lights outshined him.

He found his party in disarray. Though the Whigs had done very well in the off-year elections of 1846, party leaders were troubled by the outlook for the 1848 presidential election. The Democratic administration of James K. Polk had been extraordinarily successful: the President settled the festering boundary dispute with Great Britain over the Oregon Territory; by signing the Walker Tariff, which imposed very low duties, he set policy for the next decade; by firmly vetoing an internal improvements bill, he killed that question as a political issue; and he presided over a highly successful war that was about to add California and New Mexico to the Union. Whigs recognized that it would be very difficult to defeat the Democrat most often mentioned as Polk's probable successor, Senator Lewis Ca.s.s of Michigan, whose contradictory positions on the Wilmot Proviso allowed all factions to favor him.

The only issue on which the Democrats appeared to be vulnerable was the President's role in originating the Mexican War. This was not a subject to which Lincoln hitherto had given much attention. Like every other American, he knew about the Texas revolt from Mexico in 1836, and because he thought of the Mexicans as "greasers," he no doubt was pleased when Texas gained its independence. But in 1844 when President John Tyler urged the annexation of Texas to the United States, Lincoln, like Henry Clay, former President Van Buren, and Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, branded the move as "altogether inexpedient." He did not share Tyler's enthusiasm for territorial expansion because, as he later declared, he "did not believe in enlarging our field, but in keeping our fences where they are and cultivating our present possession, making it a garden, improving the morals and education of the people."

He had nothing to say when Texas was annexed or when President Polk sought aggressively to protect the new territory and also to settle longstanding claims and complaints against Mexico. In April 1846 fighting broke out between the Mexican army and American troops commanded by Zachary Taylor in territory between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, a region claimed by both the United States and Mexico. The United States declared war. Unpopular in New England, the conflict stirred patriotic enthusiasm in other parts of the country, and in Illinois there was a rush to enlist in the volunteer army. Both Hardin and Baker, Lincoln's predecessors, became officers. But the Mexican War never surfaced as an issue in the congressional campaign that Lincoln and Peter Cartwright were waging. Lincoln's only utterance on the subject was a "warm, thrilling and effective" speech that he gave on May 30 at a public meeting to encourage volunteering. Even after he was elected to Congress, he made no comment on the war, believing, as he said later, "that all those who, because of knowing too little, or because of knowing too much, could not conscientiously approve the conduct of the President, in the beginning of it, should... as good citizens and patriots, remain silent..., at least till the war should be ended."

By the time Lincoln arrived in Washington, he felt free to speak out, because the fighting was substantially over. In hard-fought battles at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, Monterrey, and Buena Vista, General Taylor repeatedly routed the Mexican forces in the North, while General Winfield Scott led an expedition that captured Veracruz and, eventually, Mexico City itself. In his annual message of December 1847, President Polk asked Congress for additional funds to bring the war to a close, claiming the vast territories of New Mexico and California as partial indemnity. With a note of triumph he announced that he was about to conclude a war that Mexico had initiated by "invading the territory of the State of Texas, striking the first blow, and shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil."

The message was the pretext for a sustained Whig attack upon the President, his administration, and, in general, the Democratic party. Lincoln led the a.s.sault on Polk. On December 22 he introduced a series of resolutions requiring the President to provide the House with "all the facts which go to establish whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed, was, or was not, our own soil" In the manner of a prosecuting attorney, he demanded that the President inform the Congress whether that spot had ever been part of Texas and whether its inhabitants had ever "submitted themselves to the government or laws of Texas,... by consent, or by compulsion, either by accepting office, or voting at elections, or paying taxes, or serving on juries, or ... in any other way." Lincoln clearly intended to show that the American army had begun the war by making an unprovoked attack on a Mexican settlement, despite the fact that "Genl. Taylor had, more than once, intimated to the War Department that... no such movement was necessary to the defence or protection of Texas."

The attack became more general on January 3, when Representative George Ashmun of Ma.s.sachusetts introduced a resolution declaring that the war had been "unnecessarily and unconst.i.tutionally begun by the President of the United States." It was adopted by the votes of eighty-five Whig representatives, including Lincoln's. A few days later Lincoln continued the campaign against Polk in a long speech, on which he had worked very hard. Subjecting Polk's version of the origins of the war to a close, lawyerly scrutiny, he chided the President for the gaps in his evidence and his logic. The mistakes could not be unintentional, because "Mr. Polk is too good a lawyer not to know that is wrong." After sifting "the whole of the President's evidence," he demanded that Polk respond to the interrogatories he had posed: "Let him answer, fully, fairly, and candidly. Let him answer with facts, and not with arguments." Piously he professed that if the President could do so, "then I am with him for his justification." But if he failed to respond, that would show "that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong-that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him." The President, Lincoln speculated with a freedom that he would never have permitted himself in a courtroom, must have begun the war motivated by a desire for "military glory-that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood-that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy." When that aim failed, his mind, "tasked beyond it's power," began "running hither and thither, like an ant on a hot stove," and this "bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man" could now only speak in "the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream."

Proud of his effort, Lincoln hoped it would establish his place in the House of Representatives. Now feeling very much at home, he began to think of Washington as a very pleasant place, and he regretted his pledge that he-like Hardin and Baker before him-would serve only one term. When Herndon reported that some people thought he should be reelected, he replied that his word and honor forbade him to enter the race, but he added coyly, "If it should so happen that n.o.body else wishes to be elected, I could not refuse the people the right of sending me again."

II

His expectations were quickly dashed. In Washington n.o.body paid much attention to his resolutions, which the House neither debated nor adopted, or to his speech. The President made no response to Lincoln's interrogatories; he never mentioned Lincoln's name, even in his voluminous diaries. Congressmen were for the most part equally indifferent, regarding Lincoln's attack as part of the general Whig a.s.sault upon a Democratic administration. One obscure Indiana Democrat did chide Lincoln for having failed to tell his const.i.tuents during his election campaign that he was opposed to the war, and Representative John Jameson of Missouri professed to be astonished that the successor of John J. Hardin, killed at Buena Vista, and of E. D. Baker, a hero of the battle of Cerro Gordo, should make such an unpatriotic speech. There was little newspaper comment. The Baltimore Patriot carried a squib commending his "Spot" resolutions and commenting: "Evidently there is music in that very tall Mr. Lincoln," and the St. Louis Missouri Republican called his speech "one of great power,... replete with the strongest and most conclusive arguments." But none of the newspapers with national circulation paid attention to either Lincoln's resolutions or his address.

Very different were the responses from Illinois. As was to be expected, Democratic newspapers were uniformly critical. In Springfield, the Illinois State Register contrasted Lincoln's opposition to the war with the "gallantry and heroism" of Hardin, who had rushed to enlist in the army. Later the Register called Lincoln's speech "politically motivated," predicted that his ideas would be "repudiated by the great ma.s.s of people who voted for him," and warned that Lincoln would "have a fearful account to settle" with the veterans when they returned from Mexico. Other Democratic newspapers joined the attack. According to the Charleston Illinois Globe, Lincoln's resolutions showed "conclusively that the littleness of the pettifogging lawyer has not merged into the greatness of the statesman," and the Peoria Press denounced this "miserable man of 'spots'" for his "traitorous course in Congress." Throughout the Seventh District, public meetings-largely Democratic, though some were labeled nonpartisan-condemned Lincoln's course. The rally in Morgan County, where Hardin had lived, expressed "deep mortification" at Lincoln's "base, dastardly, and treasonable a.s.sault upon President Polk," and prophesied that "henceforth will this Benedict Arnold of our district be known here only as the Ranchero Spotty of one term."

Condemnation from Democrats was to be expected, and discounted, but Lincoln was troubled by the faintness of praise he received from fellow Whigs. Simeon Francis's Illinois State Journal (formerly the Sangamo Journal) loyally supported him, as did B. F. James's Tazewell Whig. Some Whig newspapers reported that his "crack speech" had placed him in the "front rank of the best speakers in the House." But most of the other editors imitated the Quincy Whig, which published Lincoln's resolutions with the mild comment that they were "based upon facts which cannot be successfully controverted."

More disturbing were the private messages he received from his political friends in Illinois. Dr. Henry strongly dissented from the prevailing Whig view of the war. If Illinois Whigs followed Henry Clay and opposed all territorial annexations as a result of the war, he warned, they would continue to be "the minority party for a long time." Soberly he wrote Lincoln, "It would be painful in the extreme to part company with you after having fought with you side by side so long." The Reverend John Mason Peck, a prominent Baptist of St. Clair County, sent a similar message, concluding "that the Government of the United States committed no aggression on Mexico."