While Stephen Douglas set out for Washington, dreaming of glory on the floor of the House, Abraham Lincoln remained behind in Springfield. For once, he had more important things to worry about than politics—specifically, his young wife and the commencement of their rather complex life together. “Nothing new here except my marrying, which to me, is a matter of profound wonder,” he told an acquaintance one week after getting married. At thirty-three, Lincoln was ten years older than Mary Todd, whom he sometimes called, a little dryly, “my child bride.” (He also called her “Puss,” “Little Woman,” or “Molly,” as the mood struck him.) Their on-again, off-again courtship had been the talk of Springfield for months. Her sister and brother-in-law had actively discouraged the match, which had begun in their own drawing room. The new couple, they told Mary, “had better not ever marry,” noting that “their natures, mind—education—raising etc. were so different they could not live happily as man and wife.” Nor did Mary’s family back in Kentucky endorse the relationship, believing with some justice that Lincoln came from “nowhere” and had “nebulous” prospects. Lincoln had his own reservations about his patrimony, if not his future, but he still resented the implication that he was somehow socially inferior.“One d was enough to spell God,” he observed sourly, “but it took two d’s to spell Todd.”1
There is some evidence that Lincoln also questioned the wisdom of their union. Not only did he abruptly call off their first engagement, but he subsequently fell into one of his periodic depressions, this one so severe that his best friend and roommate, Joshua Speed, felt obliged to remove all razors, knives, and other sharp objects from their room. “I am now the most miserable man living,” Lincoln told his former law partner, John Stuart. “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth. I must die or be better.” Eventually, he snapped out of his funk and began peppering Speed, who in the interim had moved back to Kentucky to get married himself, with questions about matrimony. “Are you now, in feeling as well as judgment, glad you are married?” Lincoln asked. Reassured by Speed’s happy reply, Lincoln returned to work and, with the help of Sangamo Journal editor Simeon Francis’s wife, Eliza, secretly resumed courting Mary, meeting her at the Francis home, safely away from the prying eyes of Mary’s disapproving relatives. To mark their reconciliation, he gave her an unusual but not inappropriate gift: the election returns from his last three legislative races, tied in a pink ribbon. Both of them were ardent Whigs, and Mary shared her beau’s love of politics. Lincoln, for his part, was intrigued to hear about his hero Henry Clay’s frequent visits to Mary’s childhood home, including the time her father hosted a dinner for the senator during his unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1832 and thirteen-year-old Mary boldly announced her enduring support for the candidate and her intention to live in Washington herself one day.2
The relationship, founded as much on political as romantic grounds, took a potentially dangerous turn in the fall of 1842, following the publication of a series of anonymous letters in the Journal attacking Democratic state auditor James Shields as “a conceity dunce” and “a fool as well as a liar.” The crux of the letters, at least one of which was written by Lincoln, was a political wrangle between the Democrats and the Whigs over state banking matters. Purporting to be from an uncultured country woman named Aunt Becca, the letters went beyond mere politics to ridicule Shields, a dapper little Irishman, for his pompous airs and self-styled romanticism. Mary Todd and her best friend, Julia Jayne, were the authors of the most offensive letter, one in which Aunt Becca offered to let Shields “come here and he may squeeze my hand as hard as I squeeze the butter,” and almost dared him to take offense: “I know he’s a fighting man and would rather fight than eat.”3
Rising to the bait, Shields charged into the Journal offices and demanded to know who had defamed him in print. Lincoln gallantly claimed sole authorship of the letters, at which point Shields challenged him to a duel. Lincoln, who towered a good seven inches over Shields, chose broadswords as weapons, and the men agreed to meet on the aptly named Bloody Island, a spit of Missouri land directly across the Mississippi River from Alton, Illinois. At almost the last moment, cooler heads prevailed and the duel was called off, although Lincoln said later, still somewhat combative: “If it had been necessary I could have split him from the crown of his head to the end of his backbone.” Years later, when an impertinent army officer brought up the fray, Lincoln responded icily: “I do not deny it, but if you desire my friendship, you will never mention it again.”4
Touched by his chivalry, Mary accepted Lincoln’s wedding proposal a few days later and finally told her sister of their plans. The Edwardses agreed, however grudgingly, to host the wedding, which took place in their parlor on the rain-soaked night of November 4, 1842. Lincoln, dressed in black, “looked and acted as if he were going to the slaughter,” best man James Matheny reported later, adding that the wedding was “one of the funniest things to have witnessed imaginable—No description on paper can possibly do it justice.” Asked earlier by the young son of his landlord where he was going all dressed up, Lincoln groused, “To hell, I reckon.” It was not exactly an auspicious start to a marriage that few people—perhaps not even the bridegroom—expected to last. Neither Mary’s father nor Lincoln’s attended the ceremony, which had been thrown together so hurriedly that the wedding cake was still warm when it was sliced.5
The unlikely newlyweds set up housekeeping in a single room at the Globe Tavern, Springfield’s second-best hotel. Most of the Globe’s renters were transients, but the hotel also provided room and board for a few regular lodgers. Mary, to her credit, attempted to make the best of the situation, which represented a significant comedown from her accustomed standard of living. Lincoln, who had always lived rough, did not mind the accommodations—he was rarely there. Having lost his law partner, John Stuart, when Stuart went off to Congress in 1839, Lincoln had entered into partnership with another established Springfield lawyer, Todd family cousin and fellow Whig Stephen T. Logan. The eccentric Logan, who as circuit court judge had certified Lincoln’s enrollment in the Sangamon County bar in 1836, was perhaps the only man in Springfield who cared less about his personal appearance than Lincoln. A wizened little man with a wiry shock of red hair, Logan invariably wore an outfit consisting of baggy pants, too-large jacket, and twenty-five-cent straw hat. He was famous for his compulsive whittling—the local sheriff kept a ready supply of wood shingles in a sack for Logan at the courthouse—and preferred to remain behind the scenes while the better-spoken Lincoln handled their cases before juries.6
Business was brisk for the new firm of Logan & Lincoln. On a single day in November 1842, the same month that Lincoln got married, the partners handled seventeen cases before the Sangamon County circuit court. Nor was their practice confined to Springfield. While Mary kept house—such as it was—in their eight-by-fourteen-foot hotel room, Lincoln traveled the legal circuit, sometimes staying gone for a month or more at a time. Riding his favorite horse, “Old Tom,” Lincoln accompanied circuit court judge Samuel H. Treat and a vagabond lot of other Springfield lawyers on the judge’s semiannual sweep of the fourteen-county Eighth District. Covering as much as thirty-five miles a day, the legal caravan would pitch its tents for a day or two at a time in the widely dispersed hamlets of central Illinois. The circuit system was a holdover from the early days of the Republic, having been adopted by the First Congress in 1789 after the founders recognized the fact that there was not enough regular judicial business to merit placing a full-time judge in every county of the sprawling new nation. Instead, Congress devised a system that was part legal hearing, part traveling minstrel show. (The always irreverent Gouverneur Morris observed drolly that judges now would have to combine the legal learning of a scholar with the physical endurance of a postman.)7
Lincoln, with his rangy physique and wealth of stories, excelled at the often-exhausting practice. More than that, he enjoyed it. What was drudgery for many of his fellow attorneys was fun for Lincoln. He liked being out in the fresh air, swapping yarns with other lawyers as they traveled between towns, and he relished arguing cases—no matter how trivial—before a countrified jury of his peers. At night, he sat up late while the judge presided over a kangaroo court, convicting the lawyers for their earlier sins in the courtroom. On at least one occasion, Lincoln was fined for the “crime” of charging his client too small a fee. While not a drinker himself, Lincoln would regale a table full of rustic taverngoers with his bottomless fountain of jokes and yarns. “Judges—Jurors—Witnesses—Lawyers—merchants—etc etc have laughed at these jokes,” one attorney remembered, “till every muscle—nerve and cell of the body in the morning was sore at the whooping and hurrahing exercise.” Fellow circuit rider Usher Linder was more concise. “God, he was funny,” he recalled. Lincoln even tolerated the gruesome food, which future United States Supreme Court justice David Davis, a fellow traveler, complained “was hardly fit for the stomach of a horse.” At one rest stop where the proprietor had run out of meat and bread, Lincoln grabbed a plate and announced cheerfully, “Well, in the absence of anything to eat I will jump into this cabbage.”8
Besides earning Lincoln a comfortable living while he was out on the road—more than $150 a week during sessions—the circuit court also proved invaluable politically. It enabled Lincoln to maintain contacts with the leading judges and attorneys (who were often the leading politicians, as well) of every small town in the district. He also engendered good will among the many clients he represented in court, people who would vote in upcoming elections. J. H. Buckingham, a reporter for the Boston Courier, later accompanied Lincoln on one such trip and recorded his impressions. Lincoln, he said, “knew or appeared to know, everybody we met, the name of the tenant of every farm-house, and the owner of every plat of ground. Such a shaking of hands—such a how-d’ye-do—such a greeting of different kinds, as we saw, was never seen before. It seemed as if he had a kind word, a smile and a bow for everybody on the road, even to the horse, and the cattle, and the swine.”9
In his careful, plodding way, Lincoln was seeding the ground for a congressional bid in 1843. Stuart was retiring after two terms in office, and the Whig Party was looking around for a suitable successor. Jacksonville attorney John J. Hardin, a veteran of many Illinois political battles, was the favorite, while Springfield Whigs were split evenly between Lincoln and his good friend Edward Baker, Stephen Logan’s former law partner. Ironically, Lincoln’s recent marriage was used against him. Baker’s supporters charged that Lincoln had married into the elite Edwards-Stuart clan and was thus “the candidate of pride, wealth and aristocratic family distinction.” He was also accused, more or less accurately, of being a deist if not an atheist, and was criticized for his comic-opera near-duel with James Shields a few months earlier.10
The charges stuck and Lincoln lost the local endorsement to Baker, who in turn lost to Hardin at the state convention that May at Pekin. Cannily, Lincoln managed to turn present defeat into future victory. Taking a page from Stephen Douglas’s playbook, he convinced the Whigs to endorse the notion of open nominating conventions, something the Democrats had been doing for years. Using for the first time a biblical maxim that he would reuse with great effect a few years later, Lincoln warned that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” He also got the party to agree to a rotating term of office for congressmen in the Seventh District. Baker was anointed to run in 1844, with Lincoln waiting in the wings for his turn. For a third-place finisher who had not even won the support of his hometown district, it was a brilliant feat of political jujitsu. In the meantime, Lincoln went home to Mary and his well-thumbed law books.11
Outmaneuvered by Lincoln at the very moment of his triumph, Hardin joined Douglas as a freshman legislator in the Twenty-eighth Congress in December 1843. The two formerly bitter enemies, no longer fighting over the same political territory, could afford to be cordial to one another. They were just two new congressmen in an unusually large class of Washington neophytes (the result of a frenzied spate of gerrymandering in the House). Joining them for the ritual swearing-in were such future political stars as Alexander Stephens and Howell Cobb of Georgia, John Slidell of Louisiana, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, and Hannibal Hamlin of Maine. One of the reigning leaders of the lower chamber was a man long familiar to Douglas, former president John Quincy Adams, who would watch the younger man’s progress with gimlet-eyed disapproval from the Whig side of the aisle. Douglas took the lead in organizing a “mess,” or dining club, for members of the Illinois delegation, although the lengthy House sessions and late-night caucuses left little time to eat. “Having a seat in Congress is not the thing it is cracked up to be,” Hardin complained after a few weeks in Washington. “The hours of eating here destroy all business habits & the hours of the House destroy a man’s health.”12
Douglas’s maiden speech to the House, on January 6, 1844, did little to endear him to Adams or to Adams’s fellow Whigs. Pennsylvania congressman Charles J. Ingersoll had introduced a bill demanding the return to Andrew Jackson of the $1,000 (plus interest) that Jackson had been fined by United States district judge Dominick Hall for contempt of court after Jackson ignored a court order and instituted martial law in New Orleans during the War of 1812. Calling on his experience—slight though it was—as a lawyer and judge, Douglas delivered an impassioned defense of Jackson’s actions. “There are exigencies in the history of nations as well as individuals,” Douglas said, “when necessity becomes the paramount law…. In case of war and desolation, in times of peril and disaster, we should look at the substance, not the shadow of things. Talk not to me about rules and forms in court, when the enemy’s cannon are pointed at the door, and the flames encircle the cupola.” It was a politically effective, if legally dubious, defense, and even Adams admitted in his diary that Douglas had made “an eloquent, sophistical speech, prodigiously admired by the slave Democracy of the House.” A few months later, when Douglas called upon Jackson at the general’s home in Nashville, the Old Hero thanked him in person for his speech and endorsed a copy in his spidery hand: “This speech constitutes my defense; I lay it aside as an inheritance for my grandchildren.”13
The Jackson refund bill was the first shot in the 1844 presidential campaign. Democrats were determined to recapture the White House after the bizarre four-year interregnum of William Henry Harrison and his successor, Vice President John Tyler, who replaced Harrison after he died of pneumonia one short month into his term. Tyler, an apostate Democrat who had switched parties in protest of Jackson’s iron-fisted handling of the nullification crisis in 1832, had spent virtually his entire presidency governing as a Democrat anyway, much to the teeth-grinding chagrin of the Whigs. Derided by opponents as “His Accidency,” Tyler hoped to win the Democratic nomination in 1844. To improve his chances, he approved a treaty annexing the eight-year-old Republic of Texas as a U.S. territory. The Whigs, still in control of the Senate, blocked the treaty’s passage. In reaction, the Democrats decided to make annexation their main emphasis in the upcoming election. At the party convention in Baltimore, they selected a dark-horse candidate, former Tennessee governor and congressman James K. Polk, as their nominee. Polk, an ardent expansionist, combined the virtues of Andrew Jackson—he was called “Young Hickory” by his admirers—with an even more aggressive approach to expanding American territory. On the floor of the House,
Douglas praised Polk as “emphatically a Young Hickory. No man living possesses General Jackson’s confidence in a greater degree, or displayed more zeal…in carrying out the great republican principles with which his administration was identified.”14
After Congress adjourned in mid-June, Douglas returned to Illinois to battle for reelection from the Fifth District. Beating back a party challenge from former governor Thomas Carlin, he faced Whig nominee David M. Woodson, a Greene County lawyer and a former state legislator, in the general election. As a sidelight to the election, Douglas’s old New York neighbor, Mormon leader Joseph Smith, had decided to run for president on a platform calling for federal protection of religious minorities. But Smith’s belief in polygamy, and his alleged attempts to foist those beliefs onto the dubious wives of some of his fellow elders, caused a rift in the Mormon community at Nauvoo. After Smith’s supporters wrecked the offices of the Nauvoo Expositor, which had been critical of the prophet, Smith and his brother Hyrum, along with fifteen other supporters, surrendered to authorities at Carthage, Illinois. Charged with treason, a capital offense, the Smith brothers were held without bond. On the afternoon of June 27, a mob of 200 armed men, their faces painted red, yellow, and black, stormed the jail and fatally shot the Smiths.15
Douglas, like most Democrats, deplored the killings and used the crime against the Whigs, who were viewed as anti-Mormon and antiforeign (a holdover, perhaps, from Douglas’s successful courting of Irish canal builders in the 1837 congressional election). In the aftermath of Smith’s murder, the Mormons overwhelmingly backed Douglas in the August election, and he swamped Woodson by more than 1,700 votes, carrying all but one of the Fifth District’s twelve counties. All the other incumbent Democratic congressmen were reelected as well, and the party turned confidently to the looming presidential election between Polk and the Whig candidate, Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky. “Gallant Harry” was making his third run for president, having lost narrowly to John Quincy Adams in 1824 and badly to Andrew Jackson in 1832. “I am the most unfortunate man in the history of parties,” Clay complained when analyzing his chances, “always run by my friends when sure to be defeated.”16
That was by no means sure in 1844, but the nomination of James K. Polk added an element of uncertainty to the race, as did the still minor, if rising, note of antislavery agitation in the North, which the proposed annexation of Texas had struck with abolitionists. Clay, a slave owner himself, attempted to straddle the issue by insisting that he was “decidedly opposed to the immediate annexation of Texas to the United States,” but the obvious vagueness of his position managed to please no one. Southern Whigs called him a “nigger-loving abolitionist,” while abolitionists castigated him as a “man stealer, slave-holder, and murderer.” Democrats, for their part, accused Clay of having systematically broken, one by one, all Ten Commandments. “Clay,” said one political pamphlet, “spends his days at the gaming table and his nights in a brothel.” His campaign standard was “a pistol, a pack of cards, and a brandy bottle.”17
With the tide of public opinion running strongly toward expansionism, Clay and his surrogates hoped to switch the subject to the economy, which was still recovering from the Panic of 1837. As usual, the Whigs favored a high protective tariff on imported goods, and they sent out a raft of speakers to make their case. One such speaker was Abraham Lincoln, whose own inchoate views on the subject caused him a noticeable amount of discomfort on the stump. The tariff, he claimed, would not affect the common laborer or farmer “who never wore, nor never expects to wear, a single yard of British goods in his whole life,” but only “those whose pride, whose abundance of means, prompts them to spurn the manufacturers of our own country, and to strut in British cloaks, and coats, and pantaloons.” Challenged by a voter at Sugar Creek, Illinois, to explain why that was the case, Lincoln “said he could not tell the reason, but that it was so.” At that point, “Lincoln came near having a chicken fit, and choking to death,” reported a skeptical observer, “but fortunately some water was procured and he got over it.” Dissatisfied with his stumbling answer, Lincoln spent hours boning up on the issue while he continued to denounce “the absurdities of loco focoism” on the campaign trail.18
As a measure of their growing national prominence, both Lincoln and Douglas made campaign swings outside of Illinois for their parties’ presidential candidates in 1844. Following his reelection victory in August, Douglas traveled to Polk’s home state for a mass meeting of Democrats at a campground in Nashville. It was during this visit that Douglas paid a courtesy call on his hero, Andrew Jackson, at the Hermitage, where Jackson thanked him again for supporting the refund bill. Other encomiums also came Douglas’s way on the trip. The Nashville Union praised him “as a popular debater…equaled by few men,” and the Illinois State Register reported that Douglas had held a large St. Louis audience “in a breathless silence” for three hours while he denounced the tariff as “an act for the oppression and plunder of the American laborer for the benefit of a few large capitalists.” The “Young Giant of Illinois,” said the newspaper, “was an intellectual giant indeed.”19
Meanwhile, Lincoln traveled to Indiana on horseback to address Clay rallies at Vincennes and Rockport, repeating his support for the tariff and contrasting it adversely to a direct system of taxation that he warned would “cover the land with assessors and collectors, going forth like swarms of Egyptian locusts, devouring every blade of grass and other green thing.” The desolate imagery was in keeping with Lincoln’s mood that fall. His swing through Indiana brought him back to Gentryville, where he had spent his boyhood on the banks of Little Pigeon Creek and buried his mother, Nancy, and his older sister, Sarah. A chance encounter with Matthew Gentry, a former classmate who had suddenly and unaccountably gone insane at the age of nineteen, further darkened Lincoln’s mood. Gentry, he wrote in a bit of lugubrious verse, had become “a human form with reason fled,” a howling madman whose nighttime screams were “the funeral dirge/Of reason dead and gone.” Brooding somewhat self-consciously on “things decayed and loved ones lost,” Lincoln tramped the old cornfield where his father had sent him to work as a boy: “I range the fields with pensive tread,/And pace the hollow rooms;/And feel (companion of the dead)/I’m living in the tombs.”20
Part of Lincoln’s gloom, no doubt, was a reflection of the dire political landscape. Henry Clay was headed for a third and last defeat in his quarter-century pursuit of the presidency. No amount of halfhearted campaign literature likening “Ol’ Coon” Clay to “Old Tippecanoe” Harrison could recapture the magic of four years before. Nor could the song-happy Whigs make much music from the party ticket of Henry Clay and Theodore Frelinghuysen. “Hurrah! Hurrah! The country’s risin’/For Henry Clay and Frelinghuysen” did not exactly evoke the alliterative power of “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too.” Symbolic of the Whigs’ futility was a highly publicized effort to outdo the Democratic “Polkats” by raising an ashen pole that was higher than their opponents’ 150-foot-tall hickory pole. When the Whigs’ 2141/2-foot-high pole was raised at a rally in Springfield in August, it immediately toppled over, crushing two members of the Mechanics Union. Whigs charged that Democrats had cut the ropes; Democrats countered that the Whigs had callously ignored the injured mechanics and continued their ceremonies. When other mechanics began to fall ill with intestinal complaints, Sangamo Journal editor Simeon Francis accused the Democrats of literally poisoning the public well (it was later determined that a boy had accidentally dropped a package of horsefly salve into the water).21
In the end, Polk won the election, although by a surprisingly narrow margin of 38,175 votes out of a total of 2.7 million cast. A shift of some 2,106 votes in New York, where antislavery candidate James G. Birney won nearly 16,000 votes to his Liberty Party standard, would have made Clay president. (New York Whigs did their best—or worst—by urging Irish voters to back “Patrick O’Clay,” but it was not enough to carry the state.) Lincoln, always an acute analyzer of elections, agreed with New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley that the Liberty Party, by splitting the Whig vote, had “carried all these votes obliquely in favor of Annexation, War, and eternal Slavery.” Arguing that “union is strength,” Lincoln warned that unless the Whigs stood together, they would continue to see “the spoils chucklingly borne off by the common enemy.” By refusing to support Clay, Lincoln said, the abolitionists had played into the Democrats’ hands. “If the fruit of electing Mr. Clay would have been to prevent the extension of slavery,” he wrote, “could the act of electing have been evil?” Along with the need to maintain party discipline, Lincoln took another lesson from Clay’s defeat. The growing strength of the abolitionist movement was something that future candidates must keep in mind. He filed it away in that part of his brain that never forgot anything.22
A few weeks after the 1844 election, Lincoln dissolved his lucrative legal partnership with Logan. Having recently purchased a house on the corner of Eighth and Jackson streets in Springfield, Lincoln was feeling sufficiently flush to strike out on his own and take on a junior partner. His choice was a surprising one. Twenty-six-year-old William “Billy” Herndon had been studying law with Lincoln and Logan for the past two years, and had just received his license to practice. A small, excitable young man who dressed like a dandy in a tall silk hat, patent-leather shoes, and kid gloves, Herndon was as talkative as Lincoln was quiet. He fancied himself something of a philosopher, and had a library full of the works of Hegel, Kant, Bacon, and Emerson. He tried unsuccessfully to get Lincoln to read the weighty tomes, but Lincoln preferred reading the daily newspapers, which he frequently quoted aloud, thereby irritating Herndon. His mind, he explained to the younger man, was like an old jackknife: “It opens slowly and its points travel through a greater distance of space than your little knife: it moves slower than your little knife, but it can do more execution.” Still, Lincoln considered his new partner “a laborious, studious young man…far better informed on almost all subjects than I have been,” and he depended on Herndon to keep him in touch with the other “shrewd, wild boys about town” who were making inroads into local politics.23
The partners moved into a second-floor office in the dingy, brick Tinsley Building overlooking an alley behind the courthouse square. They furnished it with two desks, six cane-bottom chairs, a bookcase, a table, and a dilapidated old sofa upon which Lincoln liked to recline while pondering a case. Neither Lincoln nor Herndon was particularly neat, and legal papers and documents soon piled up about the office in dusty heaps. Lincoln kept handfuls of his records stuffed into his trademark stovepipe hat, which functioned, Herndon said, as “his desk and memorandum book.” In one corner was a capacious heap of papers, topped by a note in Lincoln’s handwriting: “When you can’t find it anywhere else, look in this.” Despite the haphazard filing system, the partners had more than enough cases to keep them busy. In a work-sharing arrangement that suited them both, Herndon usually stayed behind in Springfield, while Lincoln continued riding the legal circuit in the countryside.24
As always, Lincoln combined the practice of law with the practice of politics. It was necessary for him to do so—1845 was shaping up as a crucial year in his political career. In accordance with the agreement worked out two years earlier at the Whigs’ state convention in Pekin, Lincoln’s friend Edward Baker had been elected to the Seventh District seat in Congress. By rights, the next term should belong to Lincoln, but an unexpected complication had arisen. The previous occupant of the seat, Mary Lincoln’s cousin John Hardin, had decided that he liked Washington so well that he wanted to return. Hardin tried to convince Lincoln to agree to a new set of ground rules, doing away with the rotation system. Unsurprisingly, Lincoln rejected the notion, telling Hardin that he was “entirely satisfied with the old system under which you and Baker were successively nominated and elected to Congress.” Lincoln wrote to various newspaper editors, reminding them of the earlier agreement: “I want a fair shake and I want nothing more. Turn about is fair play.” Most Whigs agreed, one telling Hardin that “it is Abraham’s turn.” Hardin eventually pulled out of the race and enlisted in the army, which was mobilizing for an incipient war with Mexico. He would die at the Battle of Buena Vista in 1847, conveniently and permanently removing himself as a future rival.25
Having dispensed with Hardin, Lincoln faced off against his Democratic opponent in the general election. This time it was an easy race. Despite being a well-known circuit-riding Methodist minister and a former member of the Illinois legislature, Peter Cartwright was no match for Lincoln’s years of political experience. In desperation, he fell back on an old charge—that Lincoln was an infidel. Lincoln was sufficiently worried to print, at his own expense, a “Handbill Replying to Charges of Infidelity.” In the only public statement of faith he ever made during his more than three decades in politics, Lincoln conceded: “That I am not a member of any Christian Church is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.” Moreover, said Lincoln, “I do not think I could myself be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion.” In the end, Lincoln won a decisive victory, outpolling Cartwright 6,340 to 4,829.26
By the time the congressional elections were held in August 1846, the long-expected Mexican War had begun. Except for one brief statement in the Sangamo Journal calling for the nation’s “citizen soldiery to sustain her national character [and] secure our national rights,” Lincoln had ignored the war during the campaign. That was not the case, however, with the region’s leading Democrat. From the time of his first term in Congress, when President Tyler had proposed annexing Texas to the United States, Stephen Douglas had been an enthusiastic expansionist. One of his first major speeches in the House had been a historical critique of the nation’s sinuous dealings with Mexico over the future of Texas, from the 1803 treaty with France that cemented the Louisiana Purchase to the “fatal” 1819 treaty with Spain that his newfound enemy John Quincy Adams, then secretary of state, had helped to broker. The United States, Douglas maintained, had an obligation to the people of Texas to honor their request for annexation.27
When Congress declared war on Mexico in May 1846, Douglas took the floor of the House to defend the right of the United States to intervene in Texas’s behalf. Responding to a charge by Ohio Whig Columbus Delano that the war was “illegal, unrighteous, and damnable,” Douglas accused the critics of being “traitors in their hearts…. [H]onor and duty forbid divided counsels after our country has been invaded, and American blood has been shed on American soil by a treacherous foe.” Disputing the Whigs’ contention that the Rio Grande was not the proper northern boundary between Texas and Mexico, Douglas cited an 1819 dispatch written by Adams maintaining that it was. When Adams protested that he had never intended to claim the full extent of the Rio Grande for the border, Douglas challenged him to name the exact spot where the border diverged. Adams could not say. For once, “Old Man Eloquent” was at a loss for words. “It was a bombshell,” Pennsylvania newspaper editor John W. Forney said of Douglas’s speech. “It was a new thing to see John Quincy Adams retreating before anybody.”28
Back home in Illinois, patriotic hysteria gripped the populace. Congressmen John Hardin and Edward Baker and Abraham Lincoln’s old dueling opponent, Land Office commissioner James Shields, accepted generals’ commissions, and Douglas himself gave serious consideration to an invitation from Hardin to “go along with us” to Mexico. Only the last-minute intercession of President Polk, who urged Douglas to remain in place as one of his strongest voices in Congress, prevented the Little Giant from succumbing to a potentially fatal case of war fever. He settled instead for a new post as junior senator from Illinois, winning election by the state legislature in December 1846. The night before he returned to Washington, Douglas hosted the most lavish party ever held in Springfield, a blowout that set him back $1,500—a considerable sum for the time.29
Douglas’s strong support for the war brought him the approval of southern legislators, who saw the annexation of Texas as a way to add another state—perhaps several states—to their ranks. Since the end of the Revolutionary War, four new slave states had been added to the republic; Texas would make the fifth. During that same period, only Iowa had come into the Union as a free state. When Polk sent a special message to the House of Representatives requesting an additional $2 million to compensate Mexico for her lost territory, the abolitionists (or Free-Soilers, as they styled themselves) balked. Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot introduced an amendment to the funding bill that would prohibit slavery in any territory acquired forcibly from Mexico. The Wilmot Proviso, as it became known, lit a long-simmering fuse in American politics. Polk, a slaveholder himself, denounced Wilmot’s amendment as “mischievous and foolish,” adding, “What connection slavery had with making peace with Mexico it is difficult to conceive.” The House passed the amendment along sectional lines, with northern Democrats joining northern Whigs to support the provision, while southern Whigs crossed party lines to unite with southern Democrats in opposition to it.30
Douglas, one of only four northern Democrats to vote against the Wilmot Proviso, attempted to broker a workable compromise. As chairman of the House Committee on Territories, he was equally concerned with organizing the recently acquired Oregon territory along the 54°40' boundary line with Canada. He proposed a new amendment prohibiting slavery in Oregon under the existing terms of the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which had set the 36°40' parallel as the dividing line between free and slave states. This was “the most proper arrangement” for all concerned, Douglas argued. Free-Soil advocates disagreed. The Missouri Compromise, said Maine congressman Hannibal Hamlin, “had no more application to the Territory of Oregon than it had with the East Indies.” Douglas’s amendment was defeated, but it marked him in the eyes of the abolitionist press as one of the “betrayers of freedom” who had stood with the South on the issue of slavery. Douglas, said the editor of the Chicago Western Citizen, was “the most servile tool that has crawled in the slime and scum of slavery at the foot of the slave power.” It was Douglas’s introduction to “the vexed question of slavery in new territories,” one that would come to dominate the political landscape for the next dozen years.31
Douglas took time away from his congressional duties in April 1847 for a more pleasant task. At the age of thirty-three, he was getting married. His bride, twenty-two-year-old Martha Martin of Rockingham County, North Carolina, came with a somewhat troublesome dowry: the deed to a 2,500-acre cotton plantation on the Pearl River in Mississippi and the approximately 150 slaves who worked it. Martha’s father, Colonel Robert Martin, who owned a similar plantation in North Carolina, offered the Mississippi holdings to the happy couple as a wedding present. Douglas tactfully declined, urging the colonel to retain the property until he died, at which time it could be disposed of quietly in his will. It would not look proper for Douglas, a newly elected senator from a northern state, to be seen owning slaves. Under the terms of his father-in-law’s will, duly enacted after the colonel died fourteen months later, Douglas was named manager of the property, with a 20 percent commission on all profits. Dowry aside, it was a happy marriage. In time, Martha would give Douglas two sons, Robert Martin, named for her father, born in January 1849, and Stephen, Jr., called “Stevie,” born in November 1850.32
When Abraham Lincoln reached Washington in December 1847 with his own wife and growing family (two sons, Robert and Edward, had been born between 1843 and 1846), the war with Mexico was nearly over. En route to Washington, the Lincolns spent three weeks in Lexington visiting the Todds. While there, they attended a massive antiwar rally at which a grieving Henry Clay, who had lost a son at Buena Vista, denounced the conflict as one of “unnecessary and offensive aggression.” Lincoln was quickly coming around to the same view. He assured Herndon that “as you are all so anxious for me to distinguish myself, I have concluded to do so, before long.” Mary and the boys settled into a shabby boardinghouse favored by congressional Whigs a stone’s throw from the Capitol, while Lincoln worked on a series of lawyerly resolutions demanding to know the exact spot where Mexican troops had first attacked American forces and made the war (in President Polk’s view, anyway) inevitable.33
Lincoln posed his maiden speech to Congress in the form of a series of legal interrogatories for his fellow lawyer, the president. “Let him answer, fully, fairly, and candidly,” Lincoln demanded. “Let him answer with facts, and not with arguments.” What he wanted to know, said Lincoln, was “whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens who so shed, was, or was not, our own soil.” He had his doubts, since both countries conceded that the initial attack had occurred in the area of the Rio Grande valley long settled by Mexicans. If that was the case, then Polk had voluntarily started a war for “military glory—that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy.” Polk’s attempts to blame Mexico for the war, Lincoln said, were nothing more than “the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream” from the mind of a man who was “bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed…running hither and thither, like an ant on a hot stove.”34
It was a provocative speech, particularly for a freshman congressman, and it marked Lincoln’s return to the sort of virulent partisanship he had practiced during the 1840 presidential campaign. Then he had been distracted by his on-again, off-again courtship of Mary Todd; now, perhaps, he was unsettled by her obvious unhappiness with their new living arrangement in Washington. Their boardinghouse, run by Mrs. Ann Sprigg, was known locally as “Abolition House” because it had sheltered, at one time or another, such antislavery zealots as Ohio congressman Joshua Giddings and other Free-Soil Whigs. (No self-respecting Democrat would rent there.) Mary was the only wife on the premises, and the rather Spartan one-room accommodations were all too redolent of their early married life at the Globe Tavern in Springfield. While Lincoln worked late at the Capitol or took his ease at James Casparis’s nearby bowling alley, Mary stayed in the room with their two young sons. The boys were the only children in the house, and the other guests apparently resented their presence. (After Mary and the boys returned to Lexington that spring, Lincoln wrote to her that “all the house—or rather, all with whom you were on decided good terms—send their love to you. The others say nothing.”) The front of the boardinghouse looked out at the Capitol, whose graceful iron railing was only fifty feet away, but the rear provided a dismaying view of weather-beaten shanties and slouching lean-tos inhabited by “a loathsome community of the debauched, debased and drunken.” A few blocks away, the infamous “Georgia pen” housed hundreds of slaves, whose bodies were for sale to the highest bidder.35
Washington in the late 1840s was a city in transition. With a population of about 38,000 (not counting slaves), it was smaller and less cosmopolitan than New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore. An untended menagerie of pigs, cows, and chickens still wandered the streets. Only the lower part of Pennsylvania Avenue, near the White House, was paved, and the unfinished streets overflowed during rainstorms with a foul stream of mud and human waste. For a time, Mary made a brave show of adapting—“You know I enjoy city life,” she told a friend back home in Springfield—accompanying her husband and children to a performance of the blackface minstrels, the Ethiopian Serenaders, and to open-air concerts by the Marine Band on the grounds of the White House. But the one-room accommodations were entirely too small, particularly when one of the four people crowded inside them was six feet four inches tall, and soon Lincoln was complaining that Mary “hindered me some in attending to business.” The couple argued, and it was mutually decided that Mary and the boys would move back to Lexington. Once there, she bombarded Lincoln with long, complaint-filled letters, asking to return, and her husband at length relented, with a pointed stipulation: “Will you be a good girl in all things, if I consent?” In the end, Mary remained in Lexington, where she and her stepmother grated on each other’s nerves like a couple of untuned fiddles.36
Along with Mary’s manifest unhappiness, Lincoln had to contend with the surprisingly harsh reaction his “spot resolutions” had provoked back home. The ever-loyal Herndon warned Lincoln that he was committing “political suicide” by taking such a bitterly antiwar stand, and noted ominously that there had been “substantial defections” and “murmurs of dissatisfaction” among local Whigs. The Illinois State Register, dubbing him “Spotty Lincoln,” contrasted his finicky opposition to the war with the “gallantry and heroism” of the fallen Hardin, and a public rally in the martyred politician’s home county denounced Lincoln’s “base, dastardly, and treasonable assault upon President Polk” and predicted that “henceforth will this Benedict Arnold of our district be known here only as the Ranchero Spotty of one term.” It was the last dig that hurt the most. Lincoln had found, to his surprise, that he rather liked Washington, telling Herndon, “If it should so happen that nobody else wishes to be elected, I could not refuse the people the right of sending me again.” That was now unlikely, and Lincoln might have done well to ponder the hard-won wisdom of fellow Whig Justin Butterfield of Chicago, who refused to condemn the Mexican War (as he had the War of 1812) with a trenchant observation: “I opposed one war, and it ruined me. From now on I am for war, pestilence, and famine.”37
Lincoln’s opposition to the war did not extend to its most successful practitioner, Brigadier General Zachary Taylor. Eighteen forty-eight was an election year, and the Whigs were casting about again for a plausible presidential candidate. With the Mexican War drawing to a triumphant close, the party’s critics, Lincoln included, needed to find a way to demonstrate their patriotism without alienating the so-called Conscience Whigs who had opposed the war from the start. The party’s solution was an old one: it nominated a hero-general, gave him a catchy nickname, and fudged the details of his personal characteristics and qualifications for the presidency. Zachary Taylor, “Old Rough and Ready,” had won a series of battles during the opening campaign of the war before clashing openly with Polk and leaving the rest of the fighting to his fellow general Winfield Scott. A career soldier for forty years, Taylor was a much more accomplished military man than the late, lamented William Henry Harrison. He was also probably the least educated candidate since Andrew Jackson, and, unlike Jackson, he had never taken the least interest in politics—he had never even voted. Other than his battlefield triumphs, Taylor’s chief recommendations for the presidency were that he had quarreled with the current occupant of the White House and had never registered as a Democrat. In some circles that made him a Whig, although Taylor was careful to add the qualifying clarification that he was “not an ultra Whig,” whatever that meant.38
Lincoln, like other Whig leaders, was under no illusions about Taylor’s fitness to be president. Personally, he would have preferred Henry Clay, but as he explained to Herndon, “Mr. Clay’s chance for an election is just no chance at all.” Instead, he would work for Taylor as he had worked for Harrison, from a strictly partisan political stance. “I am in favor of Gen. Taylor,” he told party activist Thomas Flournoy, “because I am satisfied we can elect him, that he would give us a Whig administration, and that we cannot elect any other Whig. Our only chance is with Taylor.”39
Whether or not he truly believed that to be the case—he had never met the man—Lincoln jumped into the race wholeheartedly once Taylor received the party nomination. He made a humorous, well-received speech on the floor of the House in which he lampooned Democratic candidate Lewis Cass’s comparatively slight military service (he had fought briefly under Harrison during the War of 1812) by likening it to his own modest stint of soldiering in the Black Hawk War. Alluding to the claim that Cass had broken his sword in anger after Detroit was surrendered to the British, Lincoln clowned, “It is quite certain I did not break my sword, for I had none to break; but I bent a musket pretty badly on one occasion.” He had never seen any “live, fighting Indians,” he continued, “but I had a good many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes; and, although I never fainted from the loss of blood, I can truly say I was often very hungry.” By the time he finished his speech, even the Democratic congressmen were laughing along with Lincoln and shouting, “We give it up!”40
Stephen Douglas, who had supported Cass for the nomination four years earlier on the geographical grounds that “we must have a Western President,” now took to the stump for the more narrowly partisan reason of enforcing party loyalty. Douglas’s travels carried him through the South, which he had not visited prior to his marriage the previous year. He stopped first in North Carolina, where he endorsed the gubernatorial campaign of his friend and in-law David S. Reid, who had introduced Douglas to Reid’s cousin Martha on the floor of the House. Reid won the nomination with the help of a stirring address from Douglas that praised “the seven thousand brave men sent by his own beloved state to the fields of Mexico, to meet the diseases of the climate and the balls and bayonets of the common foe.” The Raleigh Register, not entirely swayed by Douglas’s visit, wondered aloud why a congressman from Illinois had come down to North Carolina to tell the people there how to vote.41
Douglas’s politicking was cut short by a sudden attack of “bilious fever and ague,” and he spent the rest of the summer and fall recuperating with his wife’s family. Meanwhile, Abraham Lincoln was electioneering in New England. It was his first foray on the national scene, and Lincoln took Mary and their sons along with him on the trip. They rattled across central Massachusetts by train, stopping in Worcester, New Bedford, Dedham, Taunton, Lowell, Cambridge, and Boston, where Lincoln shared the stage at Tremont Temple with another rising star of the Whig Party, former New York governor William Seward. Lincoln’s stump speech was largely an amalgam of broadly humorous jabs at Cass and pointed warnings that apostate Free-Soilers were in danger of helping to elect a Democrat president. He agreed with them that slavery was evil, but added, “We were not responsible for it and cannot affect it in the states of this Union where we do not live.”42
Seward was more forceful in his opposition to slavery, predicting that “the time will soon arrive when further demonstrations will be made against the institution of slavery” and hoping aloud that the party would come around to nominating a northern abolitionist for president rather than a southern slaveholder like Taylor. Years later, Seward remembered—a little conveniently—that Lincoln had told him: “Governor Seward, I have been thinking about what you said in your speech. I reckon you are right. We have got to deal with this slavery question, and got to give much more attention to it hereafter than we have been doing.” Perhaps Lincoln said it, but no one else heard him, and Lincoln’s most vivid memory of the trip was not of a conversation with Seward, but of a gala dinner hosted by former Massachusetts governor Levi Lincoln (no relation), to which “I went with hayseed in my hair to learn deportment in the most cultivated state in the Union. It was a grand dinner, a superb dinner; by far the finest I ever saw in my life. And the great men who were there, too! Why, I can tell you just how they were arranged at table.”43
Keeping an eye on the local races in Illinois, Lincoln urged Herndon to organize a Rough and Ready Club among Springfield’s other young Whigs and “let everyone play the part he can play best—some speak, some sing, and some holler.” As Lincoln realized all too well, it would take a fair amount of hollering to elect his designated replacement in Congress—his old law partner Stephen Logan. Saddled with Lincoln’s unpopular opposition to the war and his own votes in the Illinois legislature against a resolution supporting the war effort, Logan had little chance to win the election. The Democrats had nominated a real, live hero, Major Thomas Harris, to run against him. When the prickly Logan, as expected, went down to defeat, he ungenerously blamed his defeat on “Lincoln’s unpopularity, among other things.”44
Lincoln predicted accurately that Taylor would carry the district and win the election. For the second time in eight years, the party elected a war-hero president—not that it did Lincoln any good personally. He returned to Washington to serve out the remainder of his term, leaving Mary and the boys back in Springfield. Settling in at Abolition House, Lincoln pondered the slavery issue, particularly as it applied to the District of Columbia. After consulting with various leaders on all sides of the issue, Lincoln prepared a compromise resolution, one that called for a referendum on slavery in the district, followed by the voluntary release of slaves by owners who would be paid “full cash value” for their property. Meanwhile, authorities would strengthen their efforts to round up fugitive slaves inside the district and return them to their owners.45
The fugitive-slave provision induced abolitionist firebrand Wendell Phillips to hyperbolically label Lincoln “that slave hound from Illinois.” Southerners, for their part, also failed to support the measure. South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, without addressing Lincoln by name, warned that any emancipation of slaves would lead to “the prostration of the white race” and render the South “the permanent abode of disorder, anarchy, poverty, misery, and wretchedness.” In the end, Lincoln withdrew his resolution, and Congress enacted no antislavery measures whatsover during the session. Meanwhile, the firm of Franklin & Armfield, the nation’s largest slave traders, continued peddling their wares within sight of the Capitol. The firm’s swarming slave pen, said Lincoln, functioned as “a sort of Negro livery-stable, where droves of negroes were collected, temporarily kept, and finally taken to Southern markets, precisely like droves of horses.”46
Lincoln was no more successful at arranging his postcongressional career than he was at putting a stop to the slave trade inside the District of Columbia. Having worked hard to get Taylor elected, he felt entitled to some influence over the president’s patronage appointments in Illinois, specifically the lucrative post of General Land Office commissioner, which had been held in the Polk administration by Lincoln’s erstwhile dueling opponent, James Shields. When party regulars could not decide between two competing candidates, Lincoln applied for the job himself. To his bitter disappointment, Taylor chose Chicago attorney Justin Butterfield instead, even though Butterfield had supported Clay in the election and, in Lincoln’s words, “never spent a dollar or lifted a finger in the fight.” No reason was given for the mystifying decision, but it is likely that Taylor passed over Lincoln because of his all-too-public opposition to the war. Whatever the case, the selection left Lincoln angry and confused. As a consolation prize, Taylor offered Lincoln the post of territorial governor of Oregon. For a number of reasons, including Mary’s firmly stated opposition, Lincoln declined the appointment and returned to Springfield and his neglected law practice, having completed a single congressional term that he glumly conceded had been a comprehensive failure.47
For Douglas, too, the second session of the Thirtieth Congress proved to be frustrating. As a two-term senator and chairman of the powerful Committee on Territories, he operated at a somewhat more exalted position than a lame-duck congressman from Illinois’ Seventh District, but that merely served to highlight Douglas’s own legislative failures. Chief among them was the ringing rejection of his proposal to create the huge state of California out of the territory won from Mexico. The recent discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill had brought a torrent of gold rushers flocking to the West Coast, hastening the pressure for immediate territorial status or statehood. Douglas’s proposal, which left open the right to carve additional states from the land east of the Sierra Nevada, was intended to get around the Wilmot Proviso. Under existing laws, Douglas maintained, the residents of a territory automatically had the power to include or exclude slavery when they applied for statehood; there was no need to impose another stage to the process. As with Lincoln’s District of Columbia compromise, Douglas’s plan pleased neither abolitionists nor southerners. Lincoln’s adamantine housemate, Joshua Giddings, termed the proposal “one of the grossest frauds perpetrated upon a free people,” while John C. Calhoun told Douglas bluntly that his bill “would never do.” As expected, the bill failed after a raucous, all-night debate in the Senate.48
Clearly, Douglas’s persuasive powers were not yet as effective on the national scene as they were back home in Illinois. Mary Lincoln, one of his old flames, seconded that assessment, telling someone who dared to compare Douglas to her own husband: “Mr. Douglas is a very little, little giant by the side of my tall Kentuckian, and intellectually my husband towers above D just as he does physically. Mr. Lincoln may not be as handsome a figure, but the people are perhaps not aware that his heart is as large as his arms are long.” At the moment, the rest of the country remained generally unpersuaded that either man was a giant, however warm his heart might be. But times were changing, and so were the political statures of both Lincoln and Douglas. In the tempestuous decade to come, both men would stand very tall, indeed.49