Lincoln Part 15

The Illinois Supreme Court heard the case of Illinois Central Railroad v. The County of McLean in its spring 1854 term, with Lincoln's two former partners, Logan and Stuart, representing the county. Lincoln and James F. Joy, the railroad's attorney, appeared for the Illinois Central. Lincoln and Herndon prepared for the case very carefully. Drawing on Herndon's research, Lincoln developed a brief maintaining that the legislature had been const.i.tutionally competent when it exempted the railroad property from local taxation, and he cited in support of his argument previous court decisions in New Jersey, Illinois, Maryland, Alabama, Indiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.

Neither the plaintiff nor the defendant convinced the Illinois Supreme Court, which required a further hearing on the const.i.tutionality of the legislative exemption, and the case was reargued at the December 1855 term. The court's decision, delivered in January 1856, completely accepted Lincoln's argument, citing, for the most part, precedents that Herndon had supplied.

The case was a major one, and, according to Herndon, Lincoln initially asked the Illinois Central for a fee of $2,000. "This is as much as Daniel Webster himself would have charged," railroad officials huffed. "We cannot allow such a claim." After consulting with six other prominent Illinois attorneys, Lincoln submitted a revised bill for $5,000, and when the railroad, short of funds, failed to pay, he brought suit. At the hearing before David Davis in McLean County, Lincoln argued his own case, pointing out that his fee was not unreasonable. Had the decision gone the other way, the railroad company would have had to pay out half a million dollars a year in local taxes. The court promptly returned a verdict in his favor, and he divided $5,000-less the $250 already received as a retainer-equally with Herndon. The action did not interrupt his amicable relationship with the Illinois Central Railroad, which he continued to represent in numerous subsequent cases.

Lincoln was also involved in another type of suit involving railroads-the inevitable litigation that arose when the bridges built to carry the trains interfered with navigation on the streams they crossed. Personally Lincoln saw merit on both sides of the dispute. As an old riverboat man, he had always favored water transportation, and as recently as 1848, on his return trip from Congress, he grew so interested in the problems encountered by vessels on the Great Lakes that he invented and patented a device using "adjustable buoyant chambers" to lift steamers over shoals. But he also had been, from his earliest days in the state legislature, a supporter of railroads as the key agent for economic growth.

When suits arose between railroad and steamboat interests, Lincoln represented the side that engaged his services. In 1851 he appeared in the United States Circuit Court on behalf of the plaintiff in the important Peoria bridge case (technically Columbus Insurance Co. v. Curtenius et al.), which arose after a ca.n.a.l boat struck a railroad bridge across the Illinois River and sank. The boat was insured by the Columbus Insurance Company, which sued the bridge builders for damages. The defendants countered that construction had been authorized by the state legislature. In his argument Lincoln challenged "the power of a state to authorize a total obstruction of a navigable stream running within its territorial limits," and Judge Thomas Drummond agreed that navigation of the Illinois River must "ever remain free, clear and uninterrupted." The trial, to determine whether the bridge in fact const.i.tuted an obstruction to navigation, resulted in a hung jury, and the case was finally settled out of court.

In 1857, Lincoln appeared on the opposite side of a quite similar case. In the Effie Afton case (as Hurd v. Rock Island Bridge Co. was generally known) he represented the railroad interests. The Rock Island Bridge Company had built the first bridge across the Mississippi River, to carry the tracks of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad. When the steamboat Effie Afton ran into one of its piers, was set on fire, and burned up, its owner, John S. Hurd, sued the bridge company. This landmark case pitted St. Louis and the river interests, which supported Hurd and free navigation on the inland waterways, against Chicago and its railroad interests, which required bridges to complete the rail network. Consequently the case attracted some of the best legal talent in the West. In preparation for the trial, which was held in the United States District Court in Chicago, Lincoln made a visit to Rock Island, where he carefully inspected the rebuilt bridge, measured the currents in the river, and interviewed riverboat men. In the trial he was able to argue, on the basis of his firsthand observation as well as his own experience as a pilot, that the Effie Afton crashed into the bridge pier not because it was an obstruction to traffic but because the steamer's starboard paddle wheel failed. Not content with technical arguments, he also put the case in a broader context of national economic development. Paying tribute to the importance of river transportation, he stressed that there was "a travel from East to West, whose demands are not less important than that of the river." To this East-West railroad connection he attributed "the astonishing growth of Illinois, having grown within his memory to a population of a million and a half,... [of] Iowa and the other young and rising communities of the Northwest." In the end, the jury in the case was deadlocked, and the court dismissed the case, in what amounted to a victory for the railroad.

In these railroad cases Lincoln acted on behalf of his clients. Unlike some of his great contemporaries at the bar, such as Rufus Choate of Ma.s.sachusetts and David Dudley Field of New York, he had no consistent legal philosophy that he sought to push, nor did he leave behind him a record of cases that made a major contribution to the development of American legal thought. He sometimes argued for the railroads and sometimes represented their opponents, just as, in a different context, he had appeared both to secure the freedom of the African-American girl Nance and to return the Matson slaves into bondage. He was, as Herndon said accurately but with undeserved censure, "purely and entirely a case lawyer."

VI

In addition to greatly increasing Lincoln's income, the coming of the railroads made a great difference in his family life. Up through 1853 his semiannual trips around the Eighth Judicial Circuit kept him away from home for weeks at a time. In 1851, for instance, he was absent from Springfield from April 2 until June 4. But with the spread of the rail network, it became possible for him to come home weekends, while keeping his full load of cases in the circuit courts. In April 1855, for example, he began the circuit as usual, in Logan and McLean counties, but he returned to Springfield on April 21; then he attended court at Metamora for three days but came back to Springfield for the weekend.

He could now devote more time to the needs of his family. After the death of one child and the birth of two others, Mary was not in good physical or emotional shape, and she needed frequent rea.s.surance and support from her husband. When he was away, she often felt threatened-once she panicked when an old bearded umbrella-mender knocked at her door-and was at times on the edge of hysteria. After she learned that the maid was allowing a man to sneak into her bedroom at night, she was in an agony of fear and pitifully begged a neighbor, James Gourley, to protect her. "Mr Gourley-come-do come and stay with me all night-You can sleep in the bed with Bob and I." The invitation did not necessarily have s.e.xual implications; the Lincolns still had only one bed for grownups.

Even when Lincoln was at home, his wife's behavior was unpredictable. Weeks of quiet family life could go by, with pleasant meals and long evenings of reading together by the fire. Naturally cheerful and lively, Mary would entertain her husband with accounts of the latest novel she was reading-he did not read fiction-with neighborhood gossip, and with speculation about politics, in which she retained a lively, if unladylike, interest. She was capable of great generosity and kindness toward her neighbors. Shortly after Tad's birth, when young Mrs. Charles Dallman was sick and unable to nurse her newborn infant, Mary breast-fed that baby along with her own. When she was feeling well, there would be parties and games for the Lincoln children. She could rarely entertain guests for dinner, because even after she created a dining room by part.i.tioning off part of the kitchen, no more than six people could comfortably sit at her table; but she delighted in having sociables and strawberry parties. Then something would trigger her temper. Perhaps she was simply bored by being cooped up in a tiny house much too small for her growing family. Perhaps she was affected by the mental instability that was evident in several other members of her family. At any rate, she sometimes unpredictably flew off the handle at her husband. On one occasion, as Springfield gossip remembered years later, she chased him out of the house and down the street with a butcher knife-or maybe it was a broomstick-in her hand.

Lincoln tried to ignore these tantrums. When "Mrs. L. got the devil in her," James Gourley remembered, "Lincoln paid no attention-would pick up one of the children and walk off-would laugh at her." Often he went to the office until his wife's temper was spent. Her outbursts were usually short-lived, and afterward she felt ashamed and ill. Lincoln did not scold her but tried to remain more often at home so that he could offer her the constant support and rea.s.surance she needed.

Now that he spent most weekends in Springfield, Lincoln also could see more of his children. He had been away so much while Robert was growing up that he never developed a close bond with his oldest son, but he was devoted to Willie and Tad. A sweet-tempered little boy, Willie was bright, articulate, and exceptionally sensitive toward the feelings of others. Lincoln believed the child's mind was much like his own. Watching Willie solve a difficult problem, he told a visitor, "I know every step of the process by which that boy arrived at his satisfactory solution of the question before him, as it is by just such slow methods I attain results." Affectionate and impulsive, Tad had a temperament more like his mother's. He was especially dear to his father because he was handicapped by a speech impediment and a bad lisp, made worse when his teeth grew in crooked.

Both the Lincolns were convinced that they had remarkable children, and whenever they had guests, they would dress the boys up and, as Herndon wrote, "get them to monkey around-talk-dance-speak-quote poetry etc." Mary would exhaust the English language in her rhapsodies over the boys, and Lincoln would try to conceal his pride by saying: "These children may be something sometimes, if they are not merely rareripes-rotten ripes-hot house plants."

When Lincoln could, he helped with the baby-sitting for the two little boys-a practice so unusual that Springfield gossips called him "hen pecked." Perhaps he felt an obligation to take over because Mary was overworked and often not well; possibly the recent death of his father caused him to reflect on how much he had needed a nurturing parent when he was a boy. When Willie and Tad were very small, he would haul them around in a little wagon, pulling it up and down the street in front of his house, often reading from a book that he held in his hand. Sometimes he became so lost in thought that he forgot about his charges, and neighbors remembered the time he took the two children for a ride in their wagon and did not notice when one of them fell out. When the boys were a little older, they used to walk with him downtown, each holding onto a gigantic hand or perhaps his coattail. Inevitably one would complain that he was tired, and he would be hoisted on Lincoln's shoulders for a ride home. Once Frances Wallace, Lincoln's sister-in-law, saw him carrying Tad in this fashion and scolded: "Why, Mr. Lincoln, put down that great big boy. He's big enough to walk." But Lincoln replied: "Oh, don't you think his little feet get too tired?"

On Sundays, while Mary was at church, Lincoln often brought the boys with him to the law office, where Herndon found them a nuisance. "These children," Herndon remembered, "would take down the books-empty ash buckets-coal ashes-inkstands-papers-gold pens-letters, etc. etc in a pile and then dance on the pile. Lincoln would say nothing, so abstracted was he and so blinded to his children's faults. Had they s-t in Lincoln's hat and rubbed it on his boots, he would have laughed and thought it smart." "I have felt many and many a time," he recalled years later, "that I wanted to wring their little necks and yet out of respect for Lincoln I kept my mouth shut."

Herndon's animus toward the Lincoln children reflected his dislike, verging on hatred, of their mother. He had never got along with Mary Todd Lincoln. He met her first in 1837, when, as visiting belle from Kentucky, she attended a ball given by Colonel Robert Allen. Herndon asked her to dance and, intending to compliment her, observed that she "seemed to glide through the waltz with the ease of a serpent." Miss Todd, never distinguished by a sense of humor, flashed back: "Mr. Herndon, comparison to a serpent is rather severe irony, especially to a newcomer"-and she left him on the dance floor. Neither ever forgot that episode. Herndon strongly opposed Lincoln's courtship of Mary as a betrayal of his democratic origins in favor of the wealth and aristocracy of Springfield; he was not invited to their wedding. "This woman was to me a terror," Herndon remarked many years later; he thought she was "imperious, proud, aristocratic, insolent witty and bitter."

Doubtless Mary disliked her husband's choice of Herndon as a law partner. She might have preferred someone more socially respectable, like John Todd Stuart or James C. Conkling. In her judgment Herndon ran with a rowdy set in Springfield, and she knew that from time to time he was known to take too much to drink. She was not impressed by his active support of the local library a.s.sociation, of the temperance movement, or of women's rights, nor did Herndon's election as mayor of Springfield in 1854 change her opinion of him. But she recognized that the law practice was in her husband's sphere of activities, not in her domestic sphere, and she managed to maintain formal, if distant, relations with his partner. She came to the law office only infrequently, and he was never invited to a meal in the Lincoln house. Years later she summarized: "Mr. Herndon had always been an utter stranger to me, he was not considered an habitue, at our house. The office was more, in his line."

The antagonism between his wife and his law partner, which might have driven another man to distraction, troubled Lincoln not at all. Indeed, he rather thrived on the creative tension between Billy and Mary, both of whom were devoted to his interests but wanted his undivided attention. The knowledge that Mary was jealously watching helped spur Herndon to greater exertions and more care in the conduct of the law office, and the awareness that Herndon was a critical observer doubtless did something to curb Mary's demonstrations of temper.

The years following Lincoln's return from Congress were, then, relatively peaceful and prosperous. According to William Dean Howells's 1860 campaign biography, Lincoln, after turning away from politics to the law, was "successful in his profession, happy in his home, secure in the affection of his neighbors, with books, competence, and leisure-ambition could not tempt him." When a friend asked Lincoln to read Howells's book and mark any inaccuracies, he allowed this pa.s.sage to stand unchanged.

CHAPTER SEVEN

There Are No Whigs

Howells's description of Lincoln in retirement was accurate enough-but it did not capture the whole picture. During the years after his service in Congress he never truly lost interest in politics, nor did he completely withdraw from public life. He continued to worry about the nation's problems, and he constantly thought about how he could help solve them. As always, he yearned for distinction, but opportunities were few. Even though he was a highly successful lawyer, he often felt melancholy about his future. "How hard," he remarked to Herndon, "oh how hard it is to die and leave one's Country no better than if one had never lived for it."

I

A former congressman and a man of influence, Lincoln was repeatedly asked to endorse applications for jobs or candidates for office. Though he firmly declined to run for another term in Congress in 1850, he remained active in party management.

Privately he advised Richard Yates, the ambitious young Whig seeking election to the congressional seat Lincoln had occupied, how to deal with campaign issues. As Congress continued to wrangle over the issue of slavery in the territories acquired from Mexico, Lincoln urged Yates to be cautiously noncommittal. On the one hand, he should announce his opposition to the extension of slavery and his support for the Wilmot Proviso; on the other, he should make it clear that if adherence to the proviso would endanger the Union he "would at once abandon it," because "of all political objects the preservation of the Union stands number one." Yates ought to downplay Southern threats to secede, and he should endorse the Compromise of 1850, which, among other things, admitted California as a free state, permitted the inhabitants of the New Mexico and Utah territories to make their own choice about allowing slavery, and gave the South a stringent new fugitive-slave law.

In the 1852 presidential campaign Lincoln played an active, though not a highly visible, role, and he was named Whig national committeeman for Illinois. When the party nominated Winfield Scott, Lincoln gave a long campaign address before the Springfield Scott Club in which he offered perfunctory praise for his party's candidate and made a rollicking attack on Franklin Pierce, the Democratic nominee, whose qualifications appeared to be that, at the age of seventeen, he was able to spell the word "but" for his father. But Scott's prospects were so dismal that, in the words of Howells's campaign biography, Lincoln "did less in this Presidential struggle than any in which he had ever engaged."

II

From time to time, Lincoln's behavior suggested that he was not entirely happy in his role of elder statesman. His lackl.u.s.ter speeches during the 1852 presidential campaign came alive only when he referred to Stephen A. Douglas, who was campaigning vigorously for Pierce. He sneered at Douglas's claim to be the true father of the Compromise of 1850 and accused the senator of stealing the ideas of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. When Douglas correctly charged that the 1852 Whig platform was ambiguous, Lincoln sarcastically exclaimed: "What wonderful ac.u.men the Judge displays on the construction of language!!!" The edge to Lincoln's remarks went beyond campaign banter and suggested his disappointment that his old rival Douglas, now the most powerful member of the United States Senate, was "a giant," while Lincoln remained one of the "common mortals."

There were other hints of Lincoln's unhappiness. Some days he would arrive at the office in a cheerful mood, but then, as Herndon recorded, he might fall into "a sad terribly gloomy state-pick up a pen-sit down by the table and write a moment or two and then become abstracted." Resting his chin on the palm of his left hand, he would sit for hours in silence, staring vacantly at the windows. Other days he was so depressed that he did not even speak to Herndon when he entered the office, and his partner, sensing his mood, would pull the curtain across the gla.s.s panel in the door and leave for an hour or so, locking the door behind him to protect the privacy of "this unfortunate and miserable man."

Lincoln's companions on the circuit also noticed his unpredictable moodiness. Henry Clay Whitney, who began traveling Judge Davis's circuit after 1854, reported that Lincoln was afflicted by nightmares. One night, when they were sharing a room, Whitney woke to see his companion "sitting up in bed, his figure dimly visible by the ghostly firelight, and talking the wildest and most incoherent nonsense all to himself." "A stranger to Lincoln would have supposed he had suddenly gone insane," Whitney added. Awaking suddenly, Lincoln jumped out of bed, "put some wood on the fire, and then sat in front of it, moodily, dejectedly, in a most sombre and gloomy spell, till the breakfast bell rang."

Herndon attributed Lincoln's melancholy to his domestic unhappiness; others, with about as much evidence, found the cause in his chronic constipation or in the blue-ma.s.s pills that he took to overcome it. Perhaps there was truth in all these theories, but they missed the essential point that Lincoln was frustrated and unhappy with a political career that seemed to be going nowhere.

Though he was out of office, he had no intention of being out of the public eye. This was the golden age of the lyceum movement, when men and women thronged the lecture halls and listened for hours to speakers who might edify, enlighten or, at least, amuse them. By the 1850s, with the completion of the railroad network, Springfield was on the regular circuit for Eastern lecturers, and residents raptly listened to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Greeley, and Bayard Taylor, as well as to numerous local speakers. Lincoln thought he might as well join the parade.

His efforts to become a popular lecturer were uniformly unhappy. His dithyramb on Niagara Falls was probably intended to be part of a lecture before he wisely decided to abandon it. He also aborted a proposed lecture on the law, which he began on a negative note: "I am not an accomplished lawyer. I find quite as much material for a lecture, in those points wherein I have failed, as in those wherein I have been moderately successful."

His most ambitious and curious effort was what he called "a sort of lecture" ent.i.tled "Discoveries and Inventions," which he first read to the Young Men's a.s.sociation in Bloomington on April 6, 1858. The first half was Lincoln's version of the history of discoveries, ranging from Adam's invention of the fig-leaf ap.r.o.n in the Garden of Eden to the steam engine. The second half dealt with the invention of writing and printing-together with the discovery of America, the introduction of patent laws, and what Lincoln called, oddly enough, "the invention of negroes, or, of the present mode of using them." It was a commonplace production, resting on a few articles in the Encyclopedia Americana and on Old Testament references to such subjects as spinning and weaving. Over the next twelve months Lincoln delivered this lecture in several Illinois towns, but, though by this time he was a possible presidential candidate, it attracted only small and unenthusiastic audiences. It was, as Herndon said, "a lifeless thing-a dull dead thing, 'died a bornin [sic].'"

Lincoln was scarcely more successful in two eulogies he p.r.o.nounced. Attending court in Chicago when Zachary Taylor died in July 1850, Lincoln was invited by members of the Common Council to memorialize the late President. "The want of time for preparation will make the task, for me, a very difficult one to perform, in any degree satisfactory to others or to myself," he replied, but he felt obliged to accept the a.s.signment as a duty, which would incidentally keep his name before the growing population of northern Illinois. His address was largely a pedestrian recital of the facts of Taylor's life, interrupted by an occasional rhetorical flourish: "And now the din of battle nears the fort and sweeps obliquely by;... they fly to the wall; every eye is strained-it is-it is-the stars and stripes are still aloft!"

Only slightly more successful was the eulogy Lincoln delivered in Springfield on Henry Clay. He genuinely admired the Kentucky statesman, and he was beginning to think of himself as Clay's successor in leading a revitalized Whig party. But his a.n.a.lytical cast of mind kept him from indulging in effusive praise of anyone. Instead, he confined himself largely to a factual review of Clay's career, which unintentionally revealed more about the speaker than his subject. Clay's lack of formal education, Lincoln suggested in a clearly autobiographical pa.s.sage, "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." Clay's eloquence, he observed, did not consist "of types and figures-of ant.i.thesis, and elegant arrangement of words and sentences"; it derived its strength "from great sincerity and a thorough conviction, in the speaker of the justice and importance of his cause." Precisely the same could be said of the best of Lincoln's own productions.

III