Lincoln Part 13

Lincoln tried to maintain this balance after he took his seat in the House of Representatives. He took no part in the repeated and acrimonious debates over the Wilmot Proviso, which prohibited slavery in the territories acquired as a result of the Mexican War. During his first session in Congress his primary objective was the election of a Whig President, and, working closely with Southern Whigs like Stephens, he did not want to stir up sectional animosities. But he found it impossible to avoid the issue completely, and on at least five occasions, when the proviso was an issue, directly or indirectly, in a roll call, he voted for it.

He found it harder to stay aloof in his second congressional session. Antislavery congressmen, frustrated in their repeated attempts to pa.s.s the Wilmot Proviso, now turned their energies toward ending, or at least restricting, slavery in the District of Columbia. This was a question on which Lincoln and other members of Congress had mixed feelings. On the one hand, he wished to be conciliatory toward the South, and he deplored abolitionist agitation as counterproductive. On the other, he, like most other free-state men, found slavery in Washington a perpetual source of offense and of embarra.s.sment. Every congressman had some contact with the two thousand slaves in the national capital. Joshua Giddings's experience was not unique. At Mrs. Sprigg's boardinghouse he, along with the other boarders-possibly including Lincoln-was present when three armed men forced their way in to arrest one of the black waiters. The man had been working to purchase his freedom and had paid off all but sixty dollars of the price, when his master changed his mind and ordered the police to take him into custody. Even more troubling was the slave trade in Washington. Only seven blocks from the Capitol stood the warehouse of Franklin & Armfield, the country's largest slave traders. Here, in what Lincoln called "a sort of Negro livery-stable," droves of slaves were collected, kept temporarily, and then sent on for sale to the Deep South. This notorious slave trade, which offended many Southerners as well as Northerners, was the source of repeated taunts from foreign observers who pointed out the irony of men and women being sold within sight of the Capitol of a nation supposedly dedicated to liberty.

Day after day, antislavery congressmen presented pet.i.tions from their const.i.tuents, calling for an end to slavery and the slave trade in the national capital. John Gorham Palfrey, one of the more aggressive Free-Soil representatives from Ma.s.sachusetts, proposed to repeal all acts establishing or maintaining slavery in the federal district. Joshua Giddings favored holding a plebiscite in which residents of the District of Columbia could express their wishes as to the continuance of slavery. When pushed, Giddings announced that blacks as well as whites should vote in this election, saying that "when he looked abroad upon the family of man, he knew no distinctions" of race. The most successful of these efforts was that of Daniel Gott, a New York Whig representative, who managed, at a time when many Southerners were out of the chamber, to get the House to vote that the slave trade in the District of Columbia was "contrary to natural justice and the fundamental principles of our political system,... notoriously a reproach to our country throughout Christendom, and a serious hinderance [sic] to the progress of republican liberty among the nations of the earth."

In the angry discussion of these measures Lincoln rarely partic.i.p.ated. He gave no explanation for his silence, but his position emerged from his votes. Firmly believing in the First Amendment right of all citizens to pet.i.tion the government for a redress of grievances, he consistently favored receiving all memorials and pet.i.tions, from whatever source, on the subject of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia. But with equal consistency he voted against resolutions like Gott's that required the abolition of slavery or the ending of the slave trade without the consent of the inhabitants of Washington. His att.i.tude was precisely what he had announced in 1837: he believed "that the Congress of the United States has the power, under the const.i.tution, to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia; but that that power ought not to be exercised unless at the request of the people of said District."

Holding this view, Lincoln sought a compromise to end the debates that were beginning to tear his party apart just before a new Whig President was to be inaugurated. He prepared the way carefully. After drafting a proposal for compensated emanc.i.p.ation, he read it to Giddings and the other antislavery congressmen at Mrs. Sprigg's mess and secured their approval. In principle, Giddings was opposed to paying any compensation to slave owners, but, as he noted in his diary, "I believed it as good a bill as we could get at this time, and was willing to pay for slaves in order to save them from the southern market as I suppose nearly every man... would sell his slaves if he saw that slavery was to be abolished." Almost certainly Lincoln also got the blessing of Horace Mann, the Ma.s.sachusetts anitslavery representative elected to succeed John Quincy Adams; years later he remembered how reasonable and kind Mann had been, adding, "It was something to me at that time to have him so-for he was a distinguished man in his way-and / was n.o.body." Then he consulted William W. Seaton, the conservative Whig mayor of Washington, who edited the influential National Intelligencer, and, as he stated, "about fifteen of the leading citizens of the District of Columbia." Hesitantly they endorsed his plan in principle-in Seaton's case because he was sure that Giddings and his a.s.sociates would kill it in the House. Lincoln, as Giddings recorded, "did not undeceive him."

On January 10, 1849, Lincoln gained the floor of the House to introduce a proposed subst.i.tute for Gott's resolution, which was being reconsidered. He called for a referendum on slavery in the District of Columbia, in which "every free white male citizen" could partic.i.p.ate. If a majority approved, slavery in the District would end, except for the personal servants of federal officials. Persons presently held in bondage would remain slaves, but the United States Treasury would pay "full cash value" to owners who agreed to free them. Children born of slave mothers after 1850 should be free. To sweeten this proposal for the slaveholding states, Lincoln required the munic.i.p.al authorities in the District "to provide active and efficient means to arrest, and deliver up to their owners, all fugitive slaves escaping into said District."

Through quiet, patient negotiations, which would later be the hallmark of his presidential administration, Lincoln had worked out a compromise that both antislavery men and defenders of Southern rights could accept. He believed his reasonable, moderate approach was one that Whigs should adopt toward all major national problems.

Encouraged by the endors.e.m.e.nts he received from the two extremes, Lincoln planned to submit a bill embodying his resolutions-only to find that support for his measure vanished once his plan was made public. On the Northern side, many antislavery men objected that paying slaveholders to emanc.i.p.ate their chattels would recognize the legitimacy of the "peculiar inst.i.tution." They also could not endorse the fugitive-slave provision of Lincoln's proposal; in the mind of Wendell Phillips and other uncompromising abolitionists, it branded Lincoln permanently as "that slave hound from Illinois." Ardent Southerners also rallied against Lincoln's plan. Southern congressmen visited Mayor Seaton and persuaded him to withdraw his support of the plan because it was a covert first step toward abolishing slavery throughout the country. Not deigning to mention Lincoln by name, John C. Calhoun, the great Southern spokesman, used this proposal of "a member from Illinois" as one of the reasons why Southerners must band together to protect their rights; only thus could the North be "brought to a pause, and to a calculation of consequences."

Lincoln never introduced his bill. "Finding that I was abandoned by my former backers and having little personal influence," he explained much later, "I dropped the matter knowing that it was useless to prosecute the business at that time." He also began to feel that it was futile to hope that the Whig party could unite behind any constructive program.

VII

His discouragement was greater because the Taylor administration, which a.s.sumed office in March 1849, failed to use the patronage to cement the bonds of Whig party unity. Throughout the country Whigs a.s.sumed that Taylor's victory meant that Democratic officeholders would be removed and replaced by the party faithful, and Lincoln, like every other Whig congressman, was besieged by applications from hungry const.i.tuents. Everybody, it seemed, wanted an appointment-as register of the land office in Vandalia, United States attorney, secretary to the governor of the Territory of Minnesota, United States marshal for the District of Illinois, purser in the United States Navy, postmaster in Springfield, pension agent, and so on.

Conscious that every applicant who did not receive a job was potentially a political enemy, Lincoln took great pains to give encouragement without building false hopes. "I shall lay your letter by," he told an early applicant; "and if the disposition of these offices falls into my hands, in whole or in part, you shall have a fair hearing." To another he wrote frankly: "Two others, both good men, have applied for the same office before. I have made no pledge; but if the matter falls into my hands, I shall, when the time comes, try to do right, in view of all the lights then before me." Still another gained a.s.surance that his application would receive "that consideration, which is due to impartiality, fairness, and friendship."

In making recommendations to the incoming administration, Lincoln made it clear that he thought the spoils of office ought to be used to strengthen the Whig party. Recognizing that President Taylor was disinclined to make wholesale removals of Democratic inc.u.mbents, Lincoln insisted that "when an office or a job is not already in democratic hands, that it should be'given to a Whig"; otherwise, he warned, "I verily believe the administration can not be sustained." Whenever he learned that a Democratic appointee was strongly partisan, he favored replacing him with a Whig. For instance, in supporting the candidacy of Walter Davis to be receiver of the land office in Springfield, Lincoln wrote candidly to the Secretary of the Interior that the present inc.u.mbent had adequately discharged the duties of that office, but he added: "He is a very warm partizan; and openly and actively opposed the election of Gen: Taylor ... the whigs here, almost universally desire his removal." Similarly, in asking that his old friend, A. Y. Ellis, be appointed postmaster of Springfield, he wrote: "J. R. Diller, the present inc.u.mbent, I can not say has failed in the proper discharge of any of the duties of the office. He, however, has been an active partizan in opposition to us ... [and] he has been ... a member of the Democratic State Central Committee."

Several of the applicants that Lincoln recommended for minor jobs did receive appointments, but he found the whole process frustrating and unsatisfactory. A lame-duck congressman, about to be succeeded by a Democrat, he did not have much influence with the Taylor administration. He was obliged to share control over the Illinois patronage with Baker, elected as a Whig representative in the next Congress, and inevitably there was a certain amount of friction. No one in Washington seemed to be listening to Lincoln's requests or to acknowledge that his exertions in behalf of the Taylor cam'-paign ent.i.tled him to special consideration. By the beginning of May he lamented: "Not one man recommended by me has yet been appointed to any thing, little or big, except a few who had no opposition."

At the outset of Taylor's administration Lincoln himself was not an office-seeker but supported Baker's claim for a place in the cabinet or a foreign mission. At Lincoln's urging, Speed appealed to the influential John J. Crittenden on his friend's behalf, but the Kentucky governor had no favorable impression of Baker. "There is Lincoln," Crittenden said, "whom I regard as a rising man-if he were an applicant I would go for him." But the flattery did not turn Lincoln's head. "There is nothing about me which would authorize me to think of a first cla.s.s office," he told Speed; "and a second cla.s.s one would not compensate me for being snarled at by others who want it for themselves."

Shortly afterward he was ensnared in the very trap that he was trying to avoid. It became clear that the highest appointment to be given to any Illinois Whig would be that of commissioner of the General Land Office, a position that not merely paid the handsome salary of $3,000 a year but carried with it a great deal of power and some patronage. The commissioner was in general charge of all the public lands; his decisions determined how and when the lands were sold. He could do much to encourage the settlement of the West, and, since he controlled the sale of public lands to the state governments, he could promote the building of railroads and other internal improvements. Westerners thought it important to have the office filled by someone who knew Western laws and understood the needs of Western farmers and railroad developers; Illinois Whigs saw in the appointment a way of strengthening their party.

Some of Lincoln's friends urged him to apply for the post. It would be better than returning to his law practice, which, Judge David Davis warned, "at present promises you but poor remuneration for the labor." "Were I in your place," Davis suggested, "could I get it, I would take the Land Office." The judge might also have mentioned that this need not be a dead-end job, instancing that James Shields, Lincoln's old enemy, had held the office under President Polk, only to go on to election as senator from Illinois.

But Lincoln's interest was, at most, tepid. He was confident that "almost by common consent" the Whigs in Congress would support his candidacy, and he knew the job would pay him more than he could otherwise make; but he was reluctant to make "a final surrender of the law" as a career. Anyway, well before Taylor's inauguration he had promised to give his support to Cyrus Edwards, a former Whig legislator and unsuccessful Whig candidate for governor, who was a relative of his brother-in-law, Ninian W. Edwards.

But Edwards, it turned out, could not get the job because Baker disliked him and favored another candidate, James L. D. Morrison. As letters supporting both Edwards and Morrison piled up on the desk of Secretary of the Interior Thomas Ewing, there was a stalemate, and it seemed likely that Illinois might not receive the land commissioner's appointment after all.

At this point Lincoln's friends insisted that he must seek the position himself. He continued to hesitate, because he and Baker had agreed that if either Morrison or Edwards could be persuaded to withdraw they would support the other. "In relation to these pledges," Lincoln told his supporters, "I must not only be chaste but above suspicion." He could take the appointment only if both Edwards and Morrison declined it.

In April a new candidate appeared on the scene. Whigs in the rapidly growing northern section of Illinois felt that all appointments were going to the central and southern counties. "Mr. Lincoln," one of them grumbled, "can see nothing North of Springfield and Jacksonville in a favorable light." They were joined by E. B. Washburne and his Galena friends, eager to cut down Baker's influence. Jointly they came up with the name of Justin b.u.t.terfield, a distinguished Whig lawyer of Chicago who had served as United States attorney under Harrison and Tyler. b.u.t.terfield had the endors.e.m.e.nt of both Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, and Secretary Ewing considered him "the most profound lawyer in the state, especially as a Land lawyer."

The news of b.u.t.terfield's candidacy aroused Lincoln. "He is my personal friend, and is qualified to do the duties of the office," he admitted; "but of the quite one hundred Illinoisians, equally well qualified, I do not know one with less claims to it." b.u.t.terfield had supported Clay, not Taylor, for the 1848 nomination and had hardly lifted a finger for the President's election. His appointment would be "an egregious political blunder," which would "gratify no single whig in the state, except it be Mr. B. himself." Lincoln resolved to enter the field himself, and he began soliciting letters of support from leading Illinois Whigs and from congressmen he had known in Washington. In order to blanket the country, he even enlisted Mary to write letters.

His campaign was strong enough to persuade the President to delay the appointment for three weeks, so that both b.u.t.terfield and Lincoln could rush to Washington and present their cases in person. Favoring b.u.t.terfield from the start, Secretary Ewing was impressed by the endors.e.m.e.nts he gathered, including an anti-Lincoln pet.i.tion signed by disgruntled Whigs from Springfield itself, who declared they were "dissatisfied with the course of Abraham Lincoln as a member of Congress from this Congressional District." One of them followed up with a letter declaring that Lincoln's stand on the Mexican War had rendered him "very unpopular, and inflicted a deep and mischievous wound upon the Whole Whig party of the State." In the end, Taylor followed his standard practice of allowing each cabinet member to make the appointments in his department and gave the office to b.u.t.terfield. Fuming, Lincoln declared that the President was getting "the unjust and ruinous character of being a mere man of straw."

Lincoln was disappointed, not so much for himself as for the Whig party. "I opposed the appointment of Mr. B. because I believed it would be a matter of discouragement to our active, working friends here, and I opposed it for no other reason," he wrote Ewing. "I never did, in any true sense, want the office myself." In his view b.u.t.terfield belonged to the "old fossil" wing of the party, content to live on occasional federal appointments without ever building a strong state organization. Lincoln saw the land commissioner's appointment as a means of building a viable Whig party in Illinois, which had never won in a presidential election or in a gubernatorial race. Properly used, that office could supplement the active local organizations that Lincoln had encouraged and the convention system that he had helped to establish.

At the end of his congressional career Lincoln returned to private life, discouraged about the prospects of his party. It did not relieve his gloom when Secretary of State John M. Clayton offered him, as a consolation prize, the office of secretary to the governor of the Oregon Territory, which he promptly declined. Then Interior Secretary Ewing, realizing the snub they had given to the most active Illinois Whig, tendered him the governorship of the Oregon Territory. Lincoln briefly toyed with the possibility but quickly concluded that it led nowhere. Oregon was strongly Democratic, and once it was admitted to the Union, it would hardly choose a Whig like Lincoln as governor or senator. Anyway, moving to the West Coast would be difficult and dangerous, especially because Eddie's health was uncertain. He declined the offer, putting the blame, as husbands so often do, on his wife, who, he said, put her foot down about moving.

With that his public career was apparently over. As he settled back in Springfield, he must have remembered a note he gave a few months earlier to an autograph collector who requested his "signature with a sentiment": "I am not a very sentimental man; and the best sentiment I can think of is, that if you collect the signatures of all persons who are no less distinguished than I, you will have a very undistinguishing ma.s.s of names."

CHAPTER SIX

At the Head of His Profession in This State

"From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, [I] practiced law more a.s.siduously than ever before," Lincoln wrote in an 1859 autobiographical sketch. This was a time for redirecting his career. He needed, first, to resettle his family after his sojourn in Washington, and the Lincolns moved back into their little house on Eighth and Jackson streets in Springfield. Next he had to resume his law career, his sole source of income now that he was no longer receiving a government salary. He turned down the tempting offer of Grant Goodrich to join his Chicago law firm, saying that if he moved to the city he "would have to sit down and study hard" and "it would kill him," because "he tended to consumption." Instead he and Herndon continued their partnership.

Political prospects played little part in these decisions. As he noted in an 1860 biography, "His profession had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind." Illinois offered no future for an ambitious Whig politician. He recognized that his public career was at an end.

In these years of relative tranquillity Lincoln had time for self-examination. His years in Washington did nothing to undermine his supreme self-confidence, but he could not help observing that he had less education and professional training than most of his fellow congressmen. In a brief autobiography prepared for a congressional biographical directory, he commented tersely: "Education defective." He began, as Herndon said, "to realize a certain lack of discipline-a want of mental training and method." Believing, as did most of his contemporaries, that mental faculties, like muscles, could be strengthened by rigorous exercise, he secured a copy of Euclid's principles of geometry and with determination set himself to working out the theorems and problems. With quiet pride he reported in 1860 that he had "studied and nearly mastered the Six-books of Euclid."

I

Though some of his clients had drifted away during his term in Congress, it did not take long for Lincoln to reestablish his position at the bar. He retained some clients whose cases had begun before his election to Congress and were still pending. For instance, he continued to be involved in the never-ending litigation of Nancy Robinson Dorman to recover land in Gallatin County wrongfully diverted by her stepfather. After becoming Dorman's attorney in 1842, Lincoln kept an interest in her suit while in Congress and finally succeeded in winning a judgment in her favor in 1852. He had little difficulty in attracting new clients, because people remembered his enviable record of success in the courts before his election. Doubtless his reputation got a boost when he was admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court in 1849, where he effectively argued a case.

After his return to Springfield he developed a sizable practice before the Illinois Supreme Court. Some of his early cases were trivial. For example, in 1851 he was asked to appear in the case of one Robert Nuckles, who was suing for damage Elijah Bacon's cattle did to his corn. Not satisfied with the $2.50 awarded him by the local justice of the peace, Nuckles employed a local attorney to sue Bacon in the Macon County Circuit Court. This time a jury awarded him damages in the amount of $3.33. Unhappy with the verdict, Bacon wanted his lawyer to engage Lincoln's services for an appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court. But soon Lincoln was involved in more important litigation, such as the suit of Oliver. W. Browning, who fell and broke his leg on an unrepaired street in Springfield and sued the city for failing to maintain its roads. The common law provided no remedy for Browning, but Lincoln argued that the city charter required Springfield to keep its streets in repair. Adopting Lincoln's arguments, the supreme court ruled for Browning, establishing an often cited precedent in munic.i.p.al law.

In these supreme court cases Lincoln and Herndon worked as a team. An omnivorous and rapid reader, Herndon made it his job in each case to go through all the relevant decisions he could locate in the well-stocked State Library and the Supreme Court Library, which had the reports of all the state supreme courts and the federal courts, as well as the usual legal reference works and dictionaries. Because so many of the subjects of litigation were repet.i.tious, he compiled a kind of legal index in a large commonplace book, where he recorded the precedents he discovered on a wide variety of topics, from Streets and Improvements (a subject directly relevant to the Browning case) and Negligence in Building Bridges to larger subjects such as Corrupt Motives, Physical or Moral Nuisances, Trusts, and Specific Performances. As Lincoln & Herndon came more and more to deal with business firms, the junior partner prepared a separate, smaller notebook he ent.i.tled "Corporations," where he listed precedents on topics like Organization, Subscription, Forfeiture of Stock, and Forfeiture of Charter. In addition, he drew up briefs for many individual cases, outlining the princ.i.p.al issues and precedents.

For his part, Lincoln did virtually all the paperwork involved in these supreme court cases, preparing even the most formal and routine doc.u.ments in his own hand. Because Herndon in 1848 began serving as deputy clerk of court, he was not free to make frequent appearances before that bench, and Lincoln usually appeared alone or with some other attorney. But both partners recognized the contribution that Herndon's research made to Lincoln's courtroom victories, and they continued to divide the fees from these cases equally.

Lincoln & Herndon also developed a thriving practice before the United States Circuit and District courts in Illinois, which handled suits between citizens of different states, suits brought by the United States government, and other miscellaneous types of cases. Admitted to practice before the United States courts in 1839, Lincoln had appeared in at least sixty-two cases before he left for Congress, and on his return he naturally sought to pick up additional business in the federal courts, where cases were likely to involve larger questions and greater fees than the purely local litigation of the state courts. Because the court system had changed somewhat during his absence, he found abundant opportunity. The growth of Chicago made it imperative to hold sessions of the federal courts there as well as in Springfield, and Congress in 1855 divided the state into two judicial districts, with Judge Thomas Drummond presiding in Chicago and Judge Samuel H. Treat in Springfield. This multiplication of jurisdictions was a boon to lawyers, and Lincoln was soon making fairly regular appearances in the United States courts in Chicago as well as in Springfield.

In the federal courts Lincoln handled almost every kind of proceeding, including, improbably enough, a case in admiralty, involving a salvage operation on a ferryboat in the Mississippi River. Much of his time was taken by suits for debt, brought against citizens of Illinois by plaintiffs residing in other states. In seventeen cases he represented Samuel C. Davis & Company, a wholesale firm in St. Louis, which sued to collect unpaid bills in Illinois. This was not work that Lincoln enjoyed, nor was it remunerative, because he had to hire a man to visit each of the localities where a debtor lived and appraise his property in order to determine whether a court decree could be executed. As other more interesting and rewarding cases came his way, he resolved to drop Davis & Company as a client, and he wrote the firm: "My mind is made up. I will have no more to do with this cla.s.s of business. I can do business in Court, but I can not, and will not follow executions all over the world."

Other litigation in the federal courts he continued to find fascinating, especially when it involved mechanical devices and patents. His very first case in the Chicago federal court (Z. Parker v. Charles Hoyt) had to do with Hoyt's alleged infringement of Parker's patent for a waterwheel. Along with Grant Goodrich, Lincoln represented Hoyt. Defending their client with great energy, Lincoln explained to the jury in clear, simple language that Hoyt's device was not a copy of Parker's patented waterwheel but was simply an application of an age-old principle of waterpower. He reinforced his point by describing his early experience as an operator of Offutt's sawmill at New Salem, which had been powered by the Sangamon River. When the jury came in with a verdict for the defendant, Lincoln said he "regarded this as one of the most gratifying triumphs of his professional life."

II