Abraham Lincoln; the politician and the man

Front matter

OY aig ae . * A ee SA MONG po) ord Holden, R. P.

Abraham Lincoln.

EAST CLEVELAND PUBLIC LIBRARY

Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7. Chapter 8 Chapter 9

CHAPTER I0.

A FRONTIER DEBTOR AND HIS WORLD NEW FRIENDS AND OLD CONFLICTS THE TENDED TREE BEARS FRUIT

THE PERILS OF EVASION HUMILIATION AND MARRIAGE .

THE GENTLEMAN FROM ILLINOIS .

A CIRCUIT LAWYER ON THE STUMP

THE TOP OF THE LADDER .

Part Two—the Birth Of A Man A Nation And Its Leader

DISASTER

THE ARTIST OF THE COMMON MIND VINDICATION AND OPPORTUNITY .

VICTORY .

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE POLITICIAN BECOME A MAN . . . . . . Frontispiece

THE GENTLEMAN FROM SANGAMON COUNTY ABRAHAM LINCOLN AT HOME

THE LINCOLN WHO FACED DOUGLAS

“THE RAIL CANDIDATE”

“OUR PRESIDENTIAL MERRYMAN

ABRAHAM LINCOLN UNDER THE STRAIN OF WAR

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ENTERING RICHMOND, APRIL 3RD, 1865

FACING PAGE

CHAPTER ONE N the Old World Napoleon, being dead, had become easy

to laugh at. The Continent which he had kept in terror saw the old systems of life dying away. In America, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun were alive, and the old systems were still young. But they were, under the skin, dying just the same.

Among the grassy prairies of Illinois, four thousand miles from Europe, the new postmaster of the village of New Salem went stalking about on an absurdly long pair of legs, carrying his mail in his hat. It was the year 1833, the year which emancipated the slaves of the British Empire, but the postmaster of New Salem was not thinking about slavery. He had been born in a slave state and thought little of it, one way or the other. His name was Abraham Lincoln. As he walked or sat on a barrel outside the store that served as a postoffice, he read a book on surveying, or the latest copy of the I/linois Advocate and State Register. In the book he read of rods, perches, chains, angles and levels, to be translated into terms of prairie grass. In the newspaper he read of high doings in Washington under the hand of Andrew Jackson, of rewards offered for the return of fugitive Negroes, of the curious bombastic noises being made in Congress, of canals and railroads, money and the prices of produce.

New Salem, Illinois, was a tiny station on the westward march of the European race. Other than in the high thoughts of its ae founders, there was no reason for its existence. Abraham Lincoln, who, through the efforts of sympathetic friends, had just been installed in the postmastership of that village, to which he had come by accident two years before, was in a bad way. The obscure problems of slavery did not bother him at all. The nationally advertised question of a national bank only a little. But other things bothered him a great deal.

He was twenty-four years old, out of work, heavily burdened with debt as the result of an ambitious but unsuccessful pluage into the local grocery business, still feeling a little persecuted because the people of his own county had, the year before, refused to send him as their representative to the legislature at Vandalia, and utterly at a loss to know how, other than— through the exercise of that droll good humor which was characteristic of him, he should go about making a place for himself in the free and easy but often uncharitable world of the © pioneer.

As this depressed young postmaster wandered about New Salem in the summer of 1833, with an inch or so of bare leg showing between his socks and his trousers and another inch of something not properly external showing between the top of his pants and his coat, it would have been difficult for a casual visitor to the town to understand his melancholy. For everywhere he went people had a gay word for him, men went out of their way to stop him and speak to him, and frequently, before waving him on his way, could have been seen to be so affected by their contact with him as to double up and give off roars of laughter. And this hale and hearty intercourse was not limited to the © more reserved folk of New Salem proper, but extended itself to the roughneck lads of nearby Clary’s Grove who had taken — a liking to Abraham’s penchant for exhibiting his strength, and also to the surprising and barrier-destroying vulgarity of his stories. |

But the same qualities which gave Abraham his genius for amusing himself and other people, for catching the light of the common eye and showing it shining back from his own, were sometimes a torment to him. Shining inward with their opposite face they often made him solemn and sad, sent him sometimes around corners to avoid meeting anyone, or walking aimlessly along, talking to himself. It seemed to him at such times that no one ever liked him for the right reason, that nothing he ever did led him anywhere but to other states of poverty and helplessness, never by any chance along the road toward preferment at the hands of those fellow-beings who loved to hear his juicy narratives of common life, his harangues, his jokes, but who never seemed able to take him seriously.

And Abraham Lincoln had left the home of his unpromising father because he intended to be taken seriously. Thomas Lincoln, in spite of a second wife who was a fine rugged spirit and knew how to make something out of nothing, was always moving about aimlessly. Sarah Bush Johnston had had a little property and a lot of the sense of how to care for a family when she married the widower of Nancy Hanks, but you would scarcely know that to look at the household of Lincoln, senior, now. Goose Nest Prairie, in Coles County, Illinois, where the old man was living, was no place for a young man,of twenty-four who wanted to get on in the world, even if he could get on with Thomas Lincoln. Besides, it was the third place in which Thomas and Sarah had lived in three years. You could never make any-

thing of raw prairie earth if you kept on running about like stray cattle all the time. ¢

Abraham, coming home from an expedition piloting a flatboat load of hogs and supplies down the Big River to New Orleans the year before had paid a visit to the paternal cabin in Goose Nest Prairie. One visit was enough. As a paternal cabin it didn’t amount to much. Abraham was through with that sort of thing. The hut stood in the tall grass of an open, wind-swept prairie, without a tree or a shrub around it, graced by the presence of neither stable nor outhouse. It was little better than a © hovel, and the other places where the family had lived had been much the same, sometimes worse. As a homesteader, Thomas Lincoln simply was not very bright. He had picked out a place in Indiana once, and lived there till the “milk-sick” and the general itch to be moving drove him out. It was a place from which you had to go a mile to the spring for water. That sort of thing was bound to tell in the long run. Abraham simply decided that there were other ways of living, and that they were meant for him.

For one thing, Abe liked to be where there were people. He was as gregarious as a starling. The open, lonely country, the wood full of screaming, fluttering hordes of wild pigeons, the creeks with their fish, nights and misty mornings floating quietly down the Great Mississippi, the glitter of the sun on the Ohio in his boating days, the jungle-like darkness of the overhanging virgin forest; these things meant a lot to him. But they were woven together in his memory like a net into which his consciousness bounced safely when it fell from the trapeze of human companionship. They were protective, but they were not the whole act. The high flying was the thing that gave him ideas. As a matter of fact, it was his one idea.

He did not reflect much. He was like a barrel that was just a barrel until somebody dipped something out of it. It took conversation and laughter, the look of eyes, antagonism or question, to make Abraham conscious of what he thought. Somewhere in him was a pattern of darkness and despair to which all his actions kept reverting.

No one ever came close enough to Abraham to know what made that pattern. It was the mark, the effect, of something in his heritage of unknown, early days. It was the bent twig that determined the inclination of his mind’s tree. Perhaps his mother Nancy Hanks, bright woman that she was, had bent it by something that she had been, or by having had no known father. Perhaps some reproachful misunderstanding of his own boyish fires had done the deed for Abe. Perhaps it was some disarrangement of interior balance that came in the wake of his too early leap to six-foot stature. No one ever learned. Probably not even Abraham himself.

"He was a little shy about his looks, sensitive that he scaled six-feet four in his stocking feet, and yet a little boyishly proud of the strength within his stature.’He was bitterly annoyed that he owed people hundreds of dollars merely because the men to ‘whom he and William Berry had sold out their grocery business had skipped the country before the time had come to pay off the note they gave in exchange for the stock and the good will. Abraham was puzzled too about politics, and when he wasn't talking to someone about the how and the why of the two struggling parties, he didn’t know that he had any idea what it was all about. Give him someone to talk to and he could convince the listener as well as himself, even of something that he had never had in his head until he began talking. But you couldn’t talk all the time.

And here he was in New Salem, himself new, everyone else new, nothing to do but new things, nowhere to go but new places, the romantic life of established places and peoples lying with its street-lamps, its frilled shirts, its glittering dinner services, its great buildings and fine ladies and carriages, back beyond the Alleghanies, upstream against the current which was carrying him along.

Abraham thought of pioneer life as an accident of birth, not as a gift of freshness but as something to be outlived. He wanted to be among the chosen, the leaders. He badly wanted to. But he lacked confidence, and his occasional depressions, his memory of his mother’s illegitimacy, and his own distrust of the passionate pleasure which he took in the sight of girls, fortified the lack. He remembered his stay in Major Warnick’s house a few years back, in Menard County. He had frozen his feet in the big snow. The Major was kind, but made Abe feel that he was considered inferior. This projection of the idea of social status so that it fell upon Abraham, was as disquieting to the lank peasant in him as was Polly Warnick’s projection of the sense of her body into the region where a frightened young man walked watching her and wanting to grab her with his greedy, clammy hands. Women and mannered society both terrified the overgrown frontier youth by making subtle demands upon him.

Abraham knew that he must improve himself, make himself fit to take what he had resolved to get. He did not care much about books or learning as such, but he wanted to know the face of things. And that want set him to studying what books he could get, asking questions of everyone, looking into everything, taking things apart to see what made them go.

It was a little difficult to tell what made New Salem go. It did not go for very long, but, like a cheap watch, stopped ticking before it had fairly got to running on time. The Sangamon River, in spite of the fact that Lincoln had managed to pilot a steamboat up it in 1832, never became navigable. The annual increment of pioneers heaped itself elsewhere and there was no one to trade with. There was no tradition to outwit the logic of economics. New Salem was just a bad guess. It must have been its few inhabitants that made it go. These Abraham could and did know. He had not been a resident of the moribund infant village very long before he knew everyone and everyone knew him.

Very few men with a wide, back-slapping acquaintance fail to think themselves important elements of their community. Lincoln, for all that sense of inferiority which the dark secret of his mind gave him, was no exception to this rule. He conceived of himself now as a person with political possibilities, a man who has got his salt and only needs to get near enough to the bird’s tail.

In 1833 Abraham Lincoln conceived of the tail of the bird of politics as feathered with methods of interesting your neighbors. In a frontier community national and international ideas were no part of the scheme of things. You had to tell your friends that you would see to it that the Sangamon River was made navigable if it took an earthquake to do it. You had to make them feel that, by guarding their interests, you would bring prosperity to their doors without any effort on their part. You had to insist that you would see that they were helped when they wanted to bother the government about things like the recovery of stray cattle, and that the government was never allowed to bother them even if their stray cattle knocked down the State House.

Abraham Lincoln of New Salem, believed in what he heard the most people saying. In Sangamon County, unlike most of Illinois, they were upholding the National Bank. Abraham believed in a National Bank. President Jackson was willing to knock the country to bits, if he had to, by way of expressing his distaste for such an anti-popular thing, and for the eastern plutocrats who were back of it and had been back of the finger-inthe-pie Federalist idea ever since the day of Washington and Hamilton.

Although the tradition in Abraham’s family, such as it was, was very much on the side of Jackson, life in Sangamon County had led him out of the fold. The pioneers of Sangamon felt that something had to be done to make things different. Lincoln, with his ear to the ground, went with them. Most of the influential men he had met recently, men like William Jones, David Turnham, and William Wood, all leaders of pioneer life, were anti-Jackson men, National Republicans, devoted champions of Henry Clay, although the measure of popular feeling in the nation was illustrated in the election of 1832 when, for president, Jackson received 219 electoral votes to 49 for Clay and 18 for other candidates. Perhaps neither Abraham, nor these influential gentlemen who talked about the “principles of George Washington” understood how completely the National Government had, at the start, been the oyster of the country’s aristocrats. Abraham, at least, whose contact with organized civilization had been as limited as that of a child, did not understand what had happened at the presumably Olympian pow-wow in Philadelphia in 1787.

He did not know that the Constitutional Convention had accomplished, not the formation of a government calculated to run in the direction of abstract political science and the doctrines of political philosophers, but of a protective institution made to free business from its hampering obstacles, to stabilize public credit, and to make private property safer than life.* Abraham did not realize that he, as a representative of the poorer classes,

* Beard, Chas. A. Economic Interpretation of the Constitution.

would have found no one in that convention acting for him, nor even interested in him.

He did not understand, having been born in the wilderness and educated in the lore of the backwoods, with trimmings by Parson Weems, what the inauguration of his hero Washington had portended. He could not very well see the nervous General, standing up in 1789 in the presence of Senators and Representatives—in his brown suit, trimmed with metal eagle buttons, his white stockings, his sword and his bag—trying to get one of his hands in his coat front so it wouldn’t annoy him by hanging at his side, holding his speech in the other hand and fumbling at it all the time. Abraham would have been puzzled to have been there and, with his usual quick apprehension, to have understood that Washington thought he was being inaugurated president of a colorless, party-less, half-utopian state in which the people should not have very much to say and the politicians should have nothing about which to differ. *

This original notion of the American Republic which had been given to the world, had brought about the conditions which made the National Bank an important issue in the world of politics upon which Abraham Lincoln was entering in 1833. The Confederation under which the American States were governed for ten years prior to the adoption of the Federal Constitution had acquired a national debt of more than forty million dollars, a tremendous sum in the America of the last half of the eighteenth century. To this the government set up by the Constitution in 1789, by a clever bargain, added thirty-odd millions of state debts, mostly to men of wealth, contracted in the course of the Revolutionary War. For the government under Washington, in spite of the fact that the General was a patriot and a

*Journal of William Maclay.

Virginian, was a government in the interests of the merchant princes and manufacturer barons of the seacoast states. And it was to the interest of this group to concentrate power in the hands of the National Government in order to have a centralized agency for the protection of the goose of commerce, busy hatching its golden egg. The southern states, some of whom had already paid their state debts and who cared little about commerce, were very much disturbed at the turn affairs were taking. Perhaps they saw, as one of their leaders, Jefferson, did, how the small farmers, the laborers, the patriot veterans of the war, were, each in their way, being bled by the activities of the great commercial interests.*

These unorganized Americans had been paid for their produce and their services in Continental currency, of which, from the expression, “not worth a continental,” we know the value. They had had no choice. The law and the propaganda of the time had forced them to accept these bills.t When the state debts were assumed by the federal government foresighted speculators got busy telling everyone that the government would never redeem the paper it had forced upon the impecunious, and offering to buy it at from two to five shillings the pound. The impoverished holders of this debased medium, many of them starving, were only too eager to get what they could, not knowing that the speculators had picked up information from inner sources that the government was going to redeem the money at par. Thus at even that early date was the man in the street and on the farm being victimized by the professional acquisitor. And, in the time of Washington and Hamilton, that sort of thing was done with-

* Simons, A. M. Social Forces in American History. + Dewey, D. R. Financial History of the U. S.

out rebuke because most of the sufferers, being debtors without property qualification, could not vote.

As Jefferson said, speaking of the beneficiaries of this painful trickery, “Men thus enriched by the dexterity of a leader would follow of course the chief who was leading them to fortune, and become the zealous instrument of all his enterprises.” The speculators did follow and support the Federalist idea as well under Hamilton as later. They followed to the extent, at least, of being willing to see a National Bank established of which the shares could be purchased in the proportion of seventy-five per cent of their value by exchange for certificates of indebtedness, notes, that is, which the government or state had given to wealthy lenders. Almost all of the stock of the bank went curiously enough to the manufacturing and commercial states of the North. And it was the vote of these states in Congress which carried the measure establishing the National Bank.

The original National Bank, and the bank which was rechartered in 1816, after it had been subdued for five years through the efforts of Jefferson and the states who wanted to do their own banking, was unequivocally supported by the business interests of the country and until the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 had never been called to account for the arbitrary manner in which it used its position, as the fiscal agent of the whole people, to serve the acquisitive rapacity of an unscrupulous few.

By the election of 1832, which Abraham Lincoln, then twentyone, was old enough to observe, property restrictions upon voting had in most states been abolished. It is not surprising that the popular voice against the dreaded combinations of capital was, in this election, pleasantly overwhelming. Yet Lincoln, because of local interests, believed in the party which the voters had at that time repudiated, the party which, whether openly or not, certainly supported the aristocratic money régime that had been so dear to Alexander Hamilton. But Abraham was not thinking of himself as a supporter of anti-popular tyranny. To him the issues were local, of personal, rather than of national importance. He saw nothing of the background of injustice and knavery which had done so much to create, not only the popular opposition to the Bank, but the grave and irreconcilable feeling of the ~ South, that the North was out for its blood. If he had, the gentle justice of his nature might have been expected to oppose it. At that stage of his career it would have been all but impossible for a young frontiersman to be aware of the crass implications of his nation’s early history.

Abraham saw New Salem only, with a side glance at Vandalia and Springfield. He saw Washington’s nation as it was in Illinois in 1833. This man Jackson, the first president to get away from the genteel, drawing-room tradition of Europe, or the counting house tradition of New England, brought with him the tang and energy of something Europe could not have understood. But Lincoln understood it, and distrusted it, not as humanity but as leadership. Jackson was a westerner, but was he safe? After all, if you wanted preferment, wasn’t it better to try to fit into what existed than to try, perhaps vainly, to lead something new, to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear? You could get a running start that way.

The National Bank furore was a case in point. Good or bad, four years of an administration opposed to that institution, had left money in a very low state. That was hard on westerners. Even if the present western president had thought he was helping them when he opposed the bank, it was hard. No, Abraham was not going to accept Jackson just because he was a frontiersman. You didn’t have to accept him. There was Henry Clay.

He thought that opposition to the Bank was a crime, calculated to ruin the country financially. For Jackson’s opposition had put the Bank, and hence credit, in a precarious position. He didn’t think that it was giving the people’s resources over into the hands of the money clique. And Henry Clay was no plutocratic enemy of the common man. He was just a good National Republican. And Abraham was a pretty good National Republican in many ways by this time. It needed but little to make him solid.

President Jackson had certainly, in the previous December, put a firm quietus on the lively sentiments of discord which were being expressed in South Carolina over the right of the Federal Government to collect duties in the ports of a state whose institutions were not benefited by the tariff, and whose social system did not meet with approval everywhere. The Nullification Proclamation was a good thing for the Union which had been founded by the Aristocrats of 1787 and which was now become too comfortable a hide for the organism of the common man of the 1830's to shed. But there were other issues. Abe Lincoln, child of the western prairie, postmaster of New Salem, ex-Captain of volunteers who had gone through the Black Hawk war and never had a shot at a live Indian, defeated candidate for the state legislature, greedy consumer of the newspapers of three states, never let anyone who could tell about it afterwards know what he thought of President Jackson. President Jackson represented the undeveloped country and the common man, breaking a long line of office-holding in the tradition of the Federalists. Lincoln was of the West, and of the mass of the common man, but the way to preferment in Sangamon County was not through the party of Andrew Jackson. And Abe needed preferment very badly.

Anyone who had seen him repairing log cabins, splitting wood, husking corn, milking, or killing pigs, to earn enough money to get bread into his mouth during the past six months would have known without a second look that Abraham needed preferment. It was his friends that helped him. They got him the postmaster’s job which brought him a little return. They advised him to study law, they helped him get through Flint and Gibson on Surveying, and Kirkman’s grammar in order that he might assist the County Surveyor and thus earn a little more. And every time anyone helped him it was fun for the helper as well as help for Lincoln, because he knew the simple ways of human contact and gave of himself as much as he ever got from anyone.

Abraham was not a very apt young man when it came to books. He would much rather have talked than read, much rather have lain flat on his back than bent over a table. He had to read over everything he wanted two or three times before he got it just right. But, once he had got it, it stayed with him and a little of it was sure to come up the next time intercourse with his fellow beings put the dipper in his barrel. He was no brighter than the next man—years of huddling in lean-tos and cabins here and there along the fantastic line of march of the Kentucky pioneer, with never enough to eat, to wear, to find out, had seen to that—but he was ambitious and persevering and he read, albeit with distaste for the effort, whatever he could lay his hands on. Anything, that is, so long as it represented something more than mere abstract ideas, things which being lacking in himself, did not appeal to him in the wit of others. What he learned, he learned not from the quick anticipation of brilliance but from the slow, painful, draught-horse pull of diligence and determination.

It was as a result of this struggle that Abraham learned the rudiments of surveying, which knowledge had an important

Shay SNe bearing upon his career. In the first place he was able to get the job of Assistant County Surveyor, assistant to a New Eng-

_— land Irishman named John Calhoun, who curiously enough was not even remotely connected with the southern statesman of that name. In the second place, Abraham’s job took him about the county more widely than his postmastership had permitted him to travel. And he took his ready friendliness with him, endearing people to him wherever he went, leaving with them the recollection of an uncommon personality, the possessor of which they would be bound to recognize as a friend even though they saw him in the haughty distance of a political campaign.

At this time, East, West, North and South, everywhere in the British Empire, the slaves were awaiting the operation of the Emancipation Act. The haut monde of England was gossiping about William the Fourth. The general public in that ancient land was struggling through mingled emotions to understand what was going on in its first reform parliament. The French, having parted with Charles the Tenth without any especial pain, had abolished the hereditary nobility and under Louis Philippe were about to mourn the death of one who linked their memories with what seemed a greater day, the Marquis de Lafayette. In Germany revolt against the monarchic order had risen and been suppressed and a boy of fifteen named Karl Marx was putting two and two together.

Converging upon the sloping forehead of the postmastersurveyor of New Salem, Illinois, were the states and territorial possessions of that confederacy called the United States of America, by the grace of God and considerable human chicanery, free

_and independent. They were made up of some thirteen millions of people, about a quarter of the number black, among whom was distributed very unequally a considerable amount of actual wealth. Most of the wealth, indeed practically all, was in the hands of the members of a few social groups, consisting of the hereditary gentry, the operators of great plantations, the great merchants, and the living beneficiaries of the amazing amount of profiteering which had gone on during the Revolution and the War of 1812. These groups had taken fairly good care to guard their accumulations by mutual intermarriage, and were sitting at comfortable ease on the top of North American society. Beneath them were other groups of potential financial power— manufacturers, shippers and landowners on a smaller scale. Beneath these, only recently become convinced that their day was at hand, were the small farmers, the laborers and artisans, the hewers of wood and drawers of water. And in the South, largely taking the place of these last, were some two and a half million actual slaves. In the West, all about Abraham Lincoln, were the members of the bottom and middle strata of society who had dared to take advantage of that opportunity to shake off the oppressive life of the eastern seaboard which the undeveloped regions beyond the Alleghanies offered.