Lincoln Part 19

Two weeks after the 1856 presidential election the fall term of the Sangamon County Circuit Court opened, and Lincoln & Herndon had five cases on the first day, ten on the second. Thereafter the partners appeared in court day after day, mostly in suits of a routine sort. In addition to his usual work in the circuit courts, Lincoln in 1857 argued cases more and more frequently in the United States courts, both in Springfield and in Chicago. Often these suits involved greater issues-and brought larger fees-than trials in the local courts. For example, the trial of the Effie Afton case, which involved the rights of steamship companies as against those of the railroads, kept him in Chicago for most of September.

Lincoln devoted a good deal of time during the summer to collecting from the Illinois Central Railroad for his services in the McLean County tax case. He was obliged to sue for his fee, and when the local railroad officials failed to pay it, he went to New York, probably in the hope of collecting it at the company headquarters. Mary accompanied him on what became more of a vacation than a business trip, for the Illinois Central officials were not forthcoming, and the Lincolns spent some time, as Mary said, "most pleasantly in travelling east," visiting Niagara and Canada. On their return, Lincoln decided not to wait longer and secured a court order against the railroad's property. With that, the Illinois Central paid up-and just in time, for a month later the panic of 1857 struck and the road went into bankruptcy.

This was perhaps the happiest time of Mary Lincoln's life. Her marriage to one of the leading public figures in Illinois satisfied her need for status, and her husband's more than respectable income from his law practice soothed her chronic anxiety over financial insecurity. He was now well enough off to take his half of the Illinois Central fee (Herndon received the other half) out of the bank and lend it to Chicago attorney N. B. Judd, who was speculating in Iowa lands. Not needing the income immediately, Lincoln allowed the interest to acc.u.mulate, so that Judd's note was worth $5,400 when it was redeemed.

Because the Lincolns were now moderately well-to-do, Mary Lincoln could turn to expanding and renovating the mean little cottage in which she had lived uncomplainingly for thirteen years. By the mid-1850s it was bursting at the seams, housing husband, wife, three sons, and at times a live-in maid; anyway, it was not a residence becoming a prominent public man. Mary probably took the lead in the renovation, and she may have been able to pay for it with her own money, since in the fall of 1854 she received $1,200 for the eighty acres of Sangamon County farmland that her father had given to her ten years earlier. By April 1856 the contractors, Hannon & Ragsdale, were at work, and Springfield was buzzing about the changes that the Lincolns were making. "Mr Lincoln has commenced raising his back building two stories high," Mrs. John Todd Stuart reported to her daughter. "I think they will have room enough before they are done." And she added, a bit maliciously, "particularly as Mary seldom ever uses what she has."

The construction was completed while Lincoln was away on the circuit, and he returned to find the cottage transformed into a handsome two-story Greek Revival house, tastefully painted chocolate brown, with dark green shutters. Pretending bewilderment, he sauntered up to a neighbor. "Stranger, do you know where Lincoln lives?" he asked. "He used to live here." As so often happened, his humor miscarried, and it was seriously reported that Mary Lincoln had remodeled the house without her husband's knowledge or consent. Of course, he had known about the remodeling, but he did complain to his wife about the cost of the project. Thereafter she developed the bad habit of concealing her expenditures from her husband.

Adding a full second story to the house at least doubled the Lincolns' living s.p.a.ce. The entrance to the house remained the same, but to the right of the front corridor there now was a large sitting room, a comfortable place where the parents could read and the children could play. A front parlor to the left of the corridor served as a formal room for receiving guests. It was connected by double sliding doors with a back parlor that was Lincoln's library and study. In a more pretentious household the two rooms would have been identically furnished, as a double parlor, but the Lincolns kept them as two separate rooms, which could be opened into one on the rare occasions of a large party.

On the second floor Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln now had separate, but connecting, bedrooms, which were large and comfortable. This was not a signal that intimacy, or s.e.xual relations, between husband and wife had ended; it was the arrangement highly recommended for well-to-do couples by fashionable interior decorators. Separate bedrooms also meant that Mary was less frequently disturbed by her husband's insomnia and nightmares. Robert now had his own room on this floor, and Willie and Tad shared one adjacent to it. There was a handsome guest room and, at the rear, a small room for a maid. The remodeled Lincoln house was not a mansion like the Edwardses,' nor did it rival the very expensive home that Governor Matteson had just built, but it was one of the best in Springfield.

In furnishing the house, Mary Lincoln chose wall-to-wall carpets for the parlors and the sitting room, selecting a dark, floral pattern that had recently come' in style. The parlors had light, patterned wallpaper, but for the sitting room and the bedrooms she picked dark, boldly figured paper, which was then popular. The heavy, swagged draperies, which hung from ceiling to floor, she economically had made of cotton damask rather than silk. The rooms were furnished comfortably and unpretentiously, in a variety of styles, and the house was remarkably uncluttered. "An air of quiet refinement pervaded the place," a visitor reported. "You would have known instantly that she who presided over that modest household was a true type of American lady."

That was precisely the impression that Mary Lincoln wanted it to convey, for the house on Eighth and Jackson Streets was the center of her world. Finally she felt comfortable. Her children were now old enough not to require constant supervision. Though the younger boys were still much in evidence and, as Mary complained, were "disposed to be noisy," Robert after 1854 was away most days attending what was grandly called the Illinois State University-really a local preparatory school, so inadequate that in 1859 he failed all the entrance examinations when he tried to enter Harvard College and had to spend a year at the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Mary for the first time since her marriage had time to read and to write long, gossipy letters to her friends and relatives.

She also now felt able to entertain properly. Though her dining room was still small, she could give dinner parties for six or eight, and guests like Isaac N. Arnold of Chicago long remembered her excellent cooking and her table "loaded with venison, wild turkeys, prairie chickens, quails, and other game." But she preferred to give larger buffet suppers, like the "very handsome and agreable [sic] entertainment" she offered in February 1857-just possibly an unannounced party for her husband's forty-eighth birthday. No fewer than five hundred guests were invited, and it was not clear how-she expected to squeeze all those people in. Fortunately a heavy rainstorm and a conflicting engagement kept many of them away. Even so, about three hundred had a chance to see her newly expanded and redecorated home. Weary but proud when the affair was over, she wrote her favorite sister in Kentucky, "You will think, we have enlarged our borders, since you were here."

II

In part, the Lincolns' hospitality was designed to maintain his network of political friends and acquaintances, because public office was never far from his mind. He was not dispirited by the outcome of the 1856 elections. After all, the Republicans had succeeded in electing William H. Bissell as governor. On the national scene, James Buchanan was chosen President only because the opposition vote was split between Fremont and Fillmore, who together had a majority of 400,000. If, he told a gathering of Chicago Republicans in December 1856, these factions could "let past differences, as nothing be" and could agree that the equality of men was "'the central idea' in our political public opinion," they would surely carry the next election.

A decision handed down by the United States Supreme Court on March 6,1857, two days after Buchanan's inauguration, made the need for a Republican victory both more necessary and more likely. The ruling concerned the fate of Dred Scott, a Missouri slave, who had been taken by his owner, an army surgeon, first to Rock Island, Illinois, a state where slavery was prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance and by its own const.i.tution, and subsequently to Fort Snelling, in Minnesota Territory, from which slavery had been excluded by the Missouri Compromise. After returning with Scott to Missouri, his master died. Scott sued for his freedom on the ground that he had been resident first of a free state and then of a free territory. The case finally reached the Supreme Court. Speaking for a majority of the justices, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that Scott was not ent.i.tled to sue, because, as a Negro, he was not a citizen of the United States. At the time the nation was created, Taney p.r.o.nounced, blacks were considered "so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect," and the Founding Fathers had not included them in either the Declaration of Independence or the Const.i.tution. The Chief Justice held further that residence in free territory did not ent.i.tle Scott to freedom, since all congressional enactments that excluded slavery from the national territories, including specifically the Missouri Compromise, were "not warranted by the const.i.tution" and were "therefore void."

Antislavery spokesmen, like Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, exploded in anger, denouncing the Court's decision as deserving no more respect than if made by "a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room," The Chicago Tribune predicted that it would force slavery upon the free states, so that Chicago might become a slave market, where men, women, and children would be sold on the block. Throughout the North antislavery clergymen erupted in denunciations of Taney and the majority of the Court, and opposition was so fierce that the New York Herald predicted that "the whole North will evidently be preached into rebellion against the highest const.i.tuted Court in the country."

But Lincoln, like most Illinois Republican politicians, was slow to react to the Dred Scott decision. Not until late May did he even refer to the case, when, without mentioning it by name, he said the federal courts no longer exercised jurisdiction over litigation that "might redound to the benefit of a 'n.i.g.g.e.r' in some way." This seeming indifference stemmed in part from the complexity of the Court's decision. The justices offered nine separate opinions, none of which addressed exactly the same issues; two of them were strong dissenting opinions by antislavery Justices John McLean and Benjamin R. Curtis. An initial examination of the opinions failed to give Lincoln much cause for alarm. As he explained later, he "never... complained especially of the Dred Scott decision because it held a negro could not be a citizen"; he agreed with Taney on this subject. Nor was he exercised because the Court invalidated the Missouri Compromise; the Kansas-Nebraska Act had already expressly repealed that compromise.

Lincoln was reluctant to challenge the Court's ruling. He had enormous respect for the law and for the judicial process. He felt these offered a standard of rationality badly needed in a society threatened, on the one side, by the unreasoning populism of the Democrats, who believed that the majority was always right, and the equally unreasonable moral absolutism of reformers like the abolitionists, who appealed to a higher law than even the Const.i.tution. As recently as the 1856 campaign he had invoked the judiciary as the ultimate arbiter of disputes over slavery. "The Supreme Court of the United States is the tribunal to decide such questions," he announced, and, speaking for the Republicans, he pledged, "We will submit to its decisions; and if you [the Democrats] do also, there will be an end of the matter."

But the Dred Scott decision required him to rethink his position. If the Court had decided simply that Dred Scott was a slave, he "presumed, no one would controvert it's correctness." "If this important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with legal public expectation, and with the steady practice of the departments throughout our history," he continued, it would be "factious, nay, even revolutionary," not to accept it. But when a majority of the justices, overruling numerous previous judicial rulings and ignoring the extensive historical evidence that throughout American history many states had recognized blacks as citizens, which Justice Curtis adduced in his dissent, extended their ruling to the entire African-American race, their decision was simply wrong.

What troubled Lincoln most about the Dred Scott decision was the Chief Justice's gratuitous a.s.sertion that neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Const.i.tution was ever intended to include blacks. Lincoln declared bluntly that Taney was doing "obvious violence to the plain unmistakable language of the Declaration," which had once been held sacred by all Americans and thought to include all Americans. Now, in order to make Negro slavery eternal and universal, the Declaration "is a.s.sailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it." So blatant was the Chief Justice's misreading of the law, so gross was his distortion of the doc.u.ments fundamental to American liberty, that Lincoln's faith in an impartial, rational judiciary was shaken; never again did he give deference to the rulings of the Supreme Court.

Lincoln kept these views to himself until June, when Douglas returned to Illinois and made a major address at Springfield defending the "honest and conscientious" judges who had handed down the Dred Scott decision and denouncing criticism of the highest tribunal as "a deadly blow at our whole republican system of government." Recognizing that the Supreme Court's ruling was unpopular, Douglas seized on Taney's dictum that the Negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence as an excuse to appeal to Illinois negrophobia. Blacks, he announced, belonged to "an inferior race, who in all ages, and in every part of the globe,... had shown themselves incapable of self-government," and he warned that Republicans favored the "amalgamation between superior and inferior races."

Two weeks later Lincoln offered the Republican reply to the senator. Part of his speech was a slashing attack on Douglas's popular-sovereignty doctrine as "a mere deceitful pretense for the benefit of slavery." He spent much time explaining the Republican position on Dred Scott. "We think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous," he declared unequivocally. "We know the court that made it, has often over-ruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to over-rule this. We offer no resistance to it."

Not until Lincoln turned to the interpretation Taney and Douglas offered of the Declaration of Independence did his words take wings. He charged that the Chief Justice and the senator were working, together with other Democrats, to extend and to perpetuate slavery. To do so they joined in further oppression of the already oppressed Negro: "All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him.... They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is."

And Douglas, in order to make this oppression tolerable, lugged in the absurd charge that Republicans wanted "to vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes!" He was simply trying to capitalize on that "natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races." Bluntly Lincoln rejected "that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife." The authors of the Declaration of Independence never intended "to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity," but they "did consider all men created equal-equal in 'certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'"

It was a powerful speech, but not a radical one. Indeed, Gustave Koerner, the German-American leader of the Republicans in Belleville, complained that it was "too much on the old conservative order" and concluded that Lincoln was "an excellent man, but no match to such impudent Jesuits and sophists as Douglas." What Lincoln omitted from his argument was as significant as what he said. Though many observers recognized that the Dred Scott decision had gutted Douglas's favorite doctrine of popular sovereignty by invalidating all congressional legislation concerning slavery in the national territories, Lincoln made no effort to point out the contradiction between the ideas of the Chief Justice and those of the senior senator from Illinois; nor did he discuss Douglas's theory that territorial governments, despite the Court's ruling in Dred Scott, could effectively exclude slavery by refusing to protect it. Lincoln's object was not to show differences between the two Democratic spokesmen but to picture them as united in oppressing the African-American and in extending the inst.i.tution of slavery.

III

That was his basic strategy for the upcoming 1858 elections, which would choose members of the state legislature that would name the next United States senator. Lincoln believed that Douglas was vulnerable, and this time he had no intention of waiting for the outcome of the elections before announcing his campaign for the Senate. As early as August 1857 he began encouraging fellow Republicans to do something "now, to secure the Legislature," recommending that they draw up careful lists of voters by precincts. "Let all be so quiet that the adve[r]sary shall not be notified," he warned.

In planning for the next Senate election, Lincoln gathered around him a group of dedicated and hardworking advisers. Some of them were familiar faces from his earlier campaigns. Herndon was, as ever, loyal if indiscreet, valuable because of his contacts among abolitionists. Both Jesse K. Dubois, the state auditor, and Ozias M. Hatch, the secretary of state, were close political friends as well as neighbors in Springfield. Lamon and Whitney kept an eye on the north central part of the state. In the Bloomington area Lincoln counted on Leonard Swett and Judge Davis. In Chicago, Lincoln's strongest supporter was Norman B. Judd, who had refused to vote for him in 1855 but had since worked closely with him in business and legal matters. Charles H. Ray, of the Chicago Press and Tribune, had overcome his earlier misgivings and was now one of Lincoln's most loyal backers. In southern Illinois, Joseph Gillespie, with whom he had served in the state legislature, was his most effective supporter. It was Lincoln's special gift not merely to attract such able and dedicated advisers-and other names could readily be added to the list-but to let each of them think that he was Lincoln's closest friend and most trusted counselor.

By fall, events in Kansas and in Washington made it necessary for Lincoln and his advisers to be especially alert. In the hope of ending the turmoil and bloodshed in the Kansas Territory, President Buchanan, along with many other Democrats, favored the speedy admission of Kansas as a state, and in February the territorial government ordered an election for a const.i.tutional convention. It was, as Lincoln remarked, "the most exquisite farce ever enacted." Free-soil voters, certain that the election was rigged to favor the proslavery faction, stayed at home, and only about 2,200 out of 9,000 registered voters partic.i.p.ated. Nevertheless, the delegates a.s.sembled in Lecompton in September and October, drew up a const.i.tution, and submitted it for the approval of the President and Congress. A proslavery doc.u.ment, it guaranteed not merely that the two hundred or so slaves already in Kansas would remain in bondage but that their offspring should also be slaves. The const.i.tution could not be amended for seven years. Against the advice of both President Buchanan and Robert J. Walker, whom he had appointed territorial governor, the convention provided for a referendum not on the const.i.tution itself but only on the question of whether more slaves could be introduced into the state. Eager to have the Kansas crisis finally settled, Buchanan, ignoring his previous pledges, approved this Lecompton Const.i.tution and recommended it to the Congress.

Douglas decided to oppose it. He knew he was facing a strenuous reelection campaign in Illinois, where Lincoln almost certainly would be his opponent. He had lost much strength by his advocacy of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and his endors.e.m.e.nt of the Dred Scott decision, even though tepid, had cost him more. Support of the patently proslavery Lecompton Const.i.tution would weaken him even further. As one of Trumbull's correspondents wrote: "if Kansas is admited under the Lecompton Const.i.tution, there would not be a grease spot left of Douglas in Illinois." Aside from political considerations, Douglas felt that the doc.u.ment subverted his cardinal principle, popular sovereignty, because it denied the inhabitants of the Kansas territory the right to choose their own form of government. He vowed to "make the greatest effort of his life in opposition to this juggle." Breaking with President Buchanan, Douglas led the fight in the Senate against the Lecompton Const.i.tution, denouncing it as a "flagrant violation of popular rights in Kansas," and an outrage on the "fundamental principles of liberty upon which our inst.i.tutions rest." He made it clear that his objection was to the process by which the const.i.tution was adopted rather than to particular provisions of that doc.u.ment. On the slavery referendum he professed neutrality. "It is none of my business which way the slavery clause is decided," he told the Senate, adding a statement that Lincoln would repeatedly quote out of context: "I care not whether it is voted down or voted up."

Douglas's opposition to Lecompton, and to the President, delighted Republicans. Horace Greeley, the influential editor of the New York Tribune, which was thought to have between 5,000 and 10,000 readers in Illinois, announced that Douglas's course was not merely right but "conspicuously, courageously, eminently so." Greeley began conferring with the senator on ways to defeat the measure, as did former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ma.s.sachusetts Republican Nathaniel P. Banks, and Benjamin F. Wade, the abolitionist senator from Ohio. Senator Henry Wilson of Ma.s.sachusetts believed that Douglas was about to move into the Republican party, where he would be "of more weight to our cause than any other ten men in the country."

Lincoln's initial reaction to what he called the "rumpus" among the Democrats over Lecompton was to urge Republicans to stand clear of the quarrel, because both Buchanan and Douglas were in the wrong. He was convinced that Douglas's opposition to Lecompton was only a trick to deceive unwary Republicans. Douglas and his friends were "like boys who have set a bird-trap" and were now "watching to see if the birds are picking at the bait and likely to go under."

But by late December he began to fear that Greeley and other Eastern Republicans were walking into the trap. "What does the New-York Tribune mean by it's constant eulogising, and admiring, and magnifying [of] Douglas?" he angrily asked Senator Trumbull. "Does it, in this, speak the sentiments of the republicans at Washington? Have they concluded that the republican cause, generally, can be best promoted by sacraficing us here in Illinois?" During the spring Lincoln's suspicions increased as Eastern Republicans continued to praise Douglas's heroic, and ultimately successful, opposition to Lecompton. Further reinforcement came when Herndon, making a long-planned pleasure trip to Washington and the Northeast, reported that prominent Eastern Republicans favored Douglas's reelection and that Horace Greeley thought Illinois Republicans were fools to oppose him.

Resentful of outside interference, Illinois Republicans spurned the suggestion that they ought to drop Lincoln and back Douglas for reelection. "G.o.d forbid," exploded Jesse K. Dubois, "Are our friends crazy?" Such a shift was impossible, Herndon angrily wrote Greeley. "Douglas' abuse of us as Whigs-as Republicans-as men in society, and as individuals, has been so slanderous-dirty-low-long, and continuous, that we cannot soon forgive and can never forget"

Lincoln and his friends were also troubled by the possibility that former Democrats might defect, as they had in 1855, and back another candidate for the Senate. The most likely possibility was "Long John" Wentworth of Chicago, the erratic but enormously popular former Democratic congressman who had broken with Douglas over Kansas-Nebraska and had recently been elected Republican mayor of Chicago by the largest majority ever given in that city. Wentworth probably did have vague ambitions for the senatorship, but he wisely recognized that Lincoln was the choice of most Republicans and took no steps to make himself available. But Democratic newspapers, hoping to divide their opponents, touted his candidacy, claiming that he said Lincoln could never be elected and that he intended to pack the state convention with delegates "pledged to vote for him through thick and thin." Some of Lincoln's backers-notably Judd, who had repeatedly battled Wentworth in Chicago-took the threat seriously, as did Lincoln himself.

To prevent any erosion of Republican solidarity, Lincoln's friends began carefully planning for the fall elections, which would choose eighty-seven members of the next legislature. (There were thirteen holdover members of the state senate.) Though Lincoln himself remained curiously pa.s.sive, his supporters in county convention after county convention pa.s.sed resolutions declaring that he was their first, last, and only choice for senator. Then they arranged, for only the second time in American history, to have a party's state convention nominate a senatorial candidate. The procedure was so unprecedented that it attracted much attention, and a Philadelphia editor called this "dangerous innovation" a "revolutionary effort to destroy the true intent and spirit of the const.i.tution." Its purpose, however, was much less grand. The nomination was designed, as Lincoln said, "more for the object of closing down upon this everlasting croaking about Wentworth, than anything else." Equally important, it was intended to give a clear signal to Eastern Republicans like Greeley that Illinois Republicans would never unite behind Douglas.

When the Republican state convention a.s.sembled in the statehouse at Springfield on June 16, the outcome was prearranged. Without dissent, the delegates adopted a noncontroversial platform Browning had drafted and nominated candidates for state treasurer and superintendent of education. Then they turned to the real business of the meeting. When Judd and the Chicago delegation brought in a banner inscribed COOK COUNTY IS FOR ABRAHAM LINCOLN, the delegates exploded in applause. A member from Peoria moved to change the motto to "Illinois is for Abraham Lincoln," and the convention went wild. Unanimously the delegates voted that Abraham Lincoln was "the first and only choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the United States Senate, as the successor of Stephen A. Douglas." It was, Herndon reported, "a grand affair," and the Republicans "all felt like exploding-not with ga.s.s [sic], but with electric bolts, shivering what we struck."

IV

That evening, at eight o'clock, Lincoln gave his acceptance speech. He had been thinking about it for several weeks, drafting sentences and paragraphs on stray pieces of paper and the backs of envelopes, storing them in his tall hat. Eventually he wrote out the entire speech with great care, closely revising every sentence. As long as possible, he kept the contents to himself, and when Dubois asked what he was writing, Lincoln replied gruffly: "It's something you may see or hear some time, but I'll not let you see it now." After he had finished the final draft, he read it aloud, first to Herndon and then to a dozen or so of his other close advisers. By the evening of the convention every word was fixed in his tenacious memory, and he had no need to refer to his ma.n.u.script when he delivered it.

In conscious imitation of the opening of Daniel Webster's celebrated reply to Robert Hayne, he began:

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.