ABRAHAM LINCOLN, William Henry Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates were members of a restless generation of Americans, destined to leave behind the eighteenth-century world of their fathers. Bates, the oldest, was born when George Washington was still president; Seward and Chase during Jefferson’s administration; Lincoln shortly before James Madison took over. Thousands of miles separate their birthplaces in Virginia, New York, New Hampshire, and Kentucky. Nonetheless, social and economic forces shaped their paths with marked similarities. Despite striking differences in station, talent, and temperament, all four aspirants for the Republican nomination left home, journeyed west, studied law, dedicated themselves to public service, joined the Whig Party, developed a reputation for oratorical eloquence, and became staunch opponents of the spread of slavery.
It was a country for young men. “We find ourselves,” the twenty-eight-year-old Lincoln told the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, “in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.” The founding fathers had crafted a government more favorable to liberty “than any of which the history of former times tells us.” Now it was up to their children to preserve and expand the great experiment.
The years following the Revolution fostered the belief that the only barriers to success were discipline and the extent of one’s talents. “When both the privileges and the disqualifications of class have been abolished and men have shattered the bonds which once held them immobile,” marveled the French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville, “the idea of progress comes naturally into each man’s mind; the desire to rise swells in every heart at once, and all men want to quit their former social position. Ambition becomes a universal feeling.”
The same observation that horrified Mrs. Frances Trollope on a visit to America, that “any man’s son may become the equal of any other man’s son,” propelled thousands of young men to break away from the small towns and limited opportunities their fathers had known. These ambitious youngsters ventured forth to test their luck in new careers as merchants, manufacturers, teachers, and lawyers. In the process, hundreds of new towns and cities were born, and with the rapid expansion of roads, bridges, and canals, a modern market economy emerged. Vast new lands and possibilities were opened when the Louisiana Purchase doubled the extent of America’s territorial holdings overnight.
The newly liberated Americans crossed the Appalachian Mountains, which had separated the original colonies from the unsettled West. “Americans are always moving on,” wrote Stephen Vincent Benét. “The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried/The metal sleeping in the mountainside.” In the South, pioneers moved through the Gulf States toward the Mississippi River, extending cotton cultivation and slavery as they went. In the North, the movement west from New England and the mid-Atlantic brought settlers who created a patchwork of family farms and planted the seeds of thriving cities.
Bates traveled farthest, eight hundred miles from his home state of Virginia across Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana to the young city of St. Louis in the newly established territory of Missouri. Chase made the arduous journey from New Hampshire to Cincinnati, Ohio, a burgeoning city recently carved from a forest rich with wild game. Seward left his family in eastern New York for the growing city of Auburn in the western part of the state. Lincoln traveled from Kentucky to Indiana, and then on to Illinois, where he would become a flatboatman, merchant, surveyor, and postmaster before studying law.
“Every American is eaten up with longing to rise,” Tocqueville wrote. These four men, and thousands more, were not searching for a mythical pot of gold at the edge of the western rainbow, but for a place where their dreams and efforts would carve them a place in a fast-changing society.
OF THE CONTENDERS, William Henry Seward enjoyed the most privileged childhood. Blessed with a sanguine temperament that seemingly left him free from inner turmoil, he launched himself into every endeavor with unbounded vitality—whether competing for honors in school, playing cards with his classmates, imbibing good food and wine, or absorbing the pleasures of travel.
Henry Seward, as he would be called, was born on May 16, 1801. The fourth of six children, he grew up in the hill country of Orange County, New York, in the village of Florida, about twenty-five miles from West Point. His father, Samuel Seward, had accumulated “a considerable fortune” through his various employments as physician, magistrate, judge, merchant, land speculator, and member of the New York state legislature. His mother, Mary Jennings Seward, was renowned in the community for her warmth, good sense, and kindly manner.
Affectionate and outgoing, with red hair and intelligent blue eyes, Henry was singled out among his brothers for a college education, “then regarded, by every family,” he later wrote, “as a privilege so high and so costly that not more than one son could expect it.” His “destined preferment,” as he called it, led him at the age of nine to a preparatory academy in the village of Goshen, and then back to his own town when a new academy opened its doors. His day of study began, he recalled, “at five in the morning, and closed at nine at night.” The regime imposed by the schoolmaster was rigorous. When young Henry faltered in his translations of Caesar or failed to decipher lines of Virgil’s poetry, he was relegated to a seat on the floor “with the classic in one hand and the dictionary in the other.” Although sometimes the pressure was “more than [he] could bear,” he persisted, knowing that his father would never accept failure.
After the isolated hours consumed by books, Henry delighted in the sociability of winter evenings, when, he recalled, “the visit of a neighbor brought out the apples, nuts, and cider, and I was indulged with a respite from study, and listened to conversation, which generally turned upon politics or religion!” His pleasure in these social gatherings left Seward with a lifelong memory and appetite. Years later, when he established his own home, he filled evenings with a continuous flow of guests, always providing abundant food, drink, and conversation.
The Sewards, like other well-to-do families in the area, owned slaves. As a small child, Henry spent much of his time in the slave quarters, comprised of the kitchen and the garret above it. Basking in the warmth of the fireplace and the aroma of the turkeys and chickens roasting on the spit, he savored the “loquacious” and “affectionate” company of the garret’s residents. They provided a welcome respite from the “severe decorum” of his parents’ parlor on the other side of the house. As he grew older, however, he found it difficult to accept the diminished status of these slave friends, whose lives were so different from his own.
Although his father, an exception in the village, permitted his slaves to join his own children in the local schoolhouse, Henry puzzled over why “no other black children went there.” More disturbing still, he discovered that one of his companions, a slave child his own age who belonged to a neighboring family, was regularly whipped. After one severe beating, the boy ran away. “He was pursued and brought back,” Seward recalled, and was forced to wear “an iron yoke around his neck, which exposed him to contempt and ridicule,” until he finally “found means to break the collar, and fled forever.” Seward later would credit this early unease and personal awareness of the slaves’ plight for his resolve to fight against slavery.
The youthful Seward was not alone in his budding dislike for slavery. In the years after the Revolutionary War, the state legislatures in eleven Northern states passed abolition laws. Some states banned slavery outright within their boundaries; others provided for a system of gradual emancipation, decreeing that all slaves born after a certain date would be granted freedom when they attained adulthood. The slaves Seward knew as a child belonged to this transitional generation. By 1827, slavery would be fully eradicated in New York. While Northern legislatures were eliminating the institution, however, slavery had become increasingly important to the economic life of the cotton-growing South.
At fifteen, Seward enrolled in upstate New York’s prestigious Union College. His first sight of the steamboat that carried him up the Hudson was one he would never forget. Invented only a decade earlier, the steamboat seemed to him “a magnificent palace…a prodigy of power.” His first glimpse of Albany, then a rural village with a population of twelve thousand, thrilled him—“so vast, so splendid, so imposing.” Throughout his life, Seward retained an awe of the new technologies and inventions that fostered the industrial development of his rapidly expanding country.
At Union, Seward’s open, affable nature made him dozens of friends. Upon his arrival, he later confessed, “I cherished in my secret thoughts aspirations to become…the valedictorian of my class.” When he realized that his competitors for the honor seemed isolated from the social life of the school, he wondered if the prize was worth the cost. His ambitions were revitalized, however, when the president of Union announced that the Phi Beta Kappa Society “had determined to establish a fourth branch at Union College,” with membership conferred on the top scholars at the end of junior year. There were then only three active branches of Phi Beta Kappa—at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth. To gain admission, Seward realized, would place him in the company of “all the eminent philosophers, scholars, and statesmen of the country.”
He made a pact with his roommate whereby the two “rose at three o’clock in the morning, cooked and spread our own meals, washed our own dishes, and spent the whole time which we could save from prayers and recitations, and the table, in severe study, in which we unreservedly and constantly aided each other.” Years later, his jovial self-confidence intact, Seward wrote: “Need I say that we entered the great society without encountering the deadly blackball?”
Seward began his senior year in good spirits. Without sacrificing his popularity with classmates, he was poised to graduate as valedictorian. But his prideful character temporarily derailed him. Strapped by the stingy allowance his father provided, he had fallen into debt with various creditors in Schenectady. The bills, mostly to tailors, were not large, but his father’s refusal to pay spurred a rash decision to leave college for good, so that he might work to support himself. “I could not submit to the shame of credit impaired,” he later wrote. Without notifying his parents, he accompanied a classmate to Georgia, where he found a good job teaching school. When his father discovered Henry’s whereabouts, he “implored [him] to return,” mingling promises of additional funds with threats that he would pursue the trustees of the school “with the utmost rigor of the law…if they should continue to harbor the delinquent.”
If his father’s threats increased his determination to stay, a letter from his mother, revealing “a broken heart,” prompted Seward’s return to New York. The following fall, after working off his debt that summer, he resumed his studies at Union. “Matters prosper in my favor,” he wrote to a friend in January 1820, “and I have so far been inferior to none in my own opinion.” He was back on track to become valedictorian, and his election as graduation speaker seemed likely. If denied the honor, he told his friend, “his soul would disdain to sit in the hearing of some, and listen to some whom he considers beneath even his notice.” His goals were realized. He graduated first in his class and was unanimously elected by classmates and faculty to be Union College’s commencement orator in June 1820.
From his honored place at Union College, Seward glided smoothly into the profession of law. In an era when “reading the law” under the guidance of an established attorney was the principal means of becoming a lawyer, he walked directly from his graduation ceremony to the law office of a distinguished Goshen lawyer, and then “was received as a student” in the New York City office of John Anthon, author of a widely known book on the legal practice. Not only did Seward have two eminent mentors, he also gained access to the “New York Forum,” a society of ambitious law students who held mock trials and prosecutions to hone their professional skills before public audiences.
Accustomed to winning the highest honors, Seward was initially chagrined to discover that his legal arguments failed to bring the loudest applause. His confidence as a writer faltered until a fellow law student, whose orations “always carried away the audience,” insisted that the problem was not Henry’s compositions, which were, in fact, far superior to his own, but his husky voice, which a congenital inflammation in the throat rendered “incapable of free intonation.” To prove this point, Seward’s friend offered to exchange compositions, letting Seward read one of his while he read one of Seward’s. Seward recalled that he read his friend’s address “as well as I could, but it did not take at all. He followed me with my speech, and I think Broadway overheard the clamorous applause which arose on that occasion in Washington Hall.”
During his stay in New York, Seward formed an intimate friendship with a bookish young man, David Berdan, who had graduated from Union the year after him. Seward believed that Berdan possessed “a genius of the highest order.” He had read more extensively than anyone Seward knew and excelled as a scholar in the classics. “The domains of History, Eloquence, Poetry, Fiction & Song,” Seward marveled, “were all subservient to his command.” Berdan had entered into the study of law at the same office as Seward, but soon discovered that his vocation lay in writing, not law.
Together, the two young men attended the theater, read poetry, discussed books, and chased after women. Convinced that Berdan would become a celebrated writer, Seward stood in awe of his friend’s talent and dedication. All such grand expectations and prospects were crushed when Berdan, still in his twenties, was “seized with a bleeding at the lungs” while sojourning in Europe. He continued traveling, but when his tuberculosis worsened, he booked his passage home, in “the hope that he might die in his native land.” The illness took his life before the ship reached New York. His body was buried at sea. Seward was devastated, later telling his wife that he had loved Berdan as “never again” could he “love in this world.”
Such intimate male attachments, as Seward’s with Berdan, or, as we shall see, Lincoln’s with Joshua Speed and Chase’s with Edwin Stanton, were “a common feature of the social landscape” in nineteenth-century America, the historian E. Anthony Rotundo points out. The family-focused and community-centered life led by most men in the colonial era was transformed at the dawn of the new century into an individual and career-oriented existence. As the young men of Seward and Lincoln’s generation left the familiarity of their small communities and traveled to seek employment in fast-growing, anonymous cities or in distant territories, they often felt unbearably lonely. In the absence of parents and siblings, they turned to one another for support, sharing thoughts and emotions so completely that their intimate friendships developed the qualities of passionate romances.
After passing the bar examination, Seward explored the western part of the state, seeking the perfect law office from which to launch an illustrious career. He found what he wanted in Auburn when Judge Elijah Miller offered him a junior partnership in his thriving firm. Seward quickly assumed responsibility for most of the legal work passing through the office, earning the senior partner’s trust and respect. The fifty-two-year-old judge was a widower who shared with his daughters—Lazette and Frances—the grandest residence in Auburn. It seemed to follow naturally that, less than two years later, Seward should woo and win Miller’s twenty-year-old daughter, the beautiful, sensitive Frances. The judge insisted, as a condition of consent to the marriage, that the young couple join his household, which included his mother and unmarried sister.
Thus, at twenty-three, Seward found himself the tenant of the elegant country mansion where he and Frances would live for the rest of their lives. With a brilliant marriage and excellent prospects in his chosen profession, he could look ahead with confidence. To the end of his long life, he gazed optimistically to the future, believing that he and his countrymen were steadily advancing along a road toward increased knowledge, achievement, prosperity, and moral development.
SALMON PORTLAND CHASE, in contrast to the ever buoyant Seward, possessed a restless soul incapable of finding satisfaction in his considerable achievements. He was forever brooding on a station in life not yet reached, recording at each turning point in his life his regret at not capitalizing on the opportunities given to him.
He was born in the rolling hills of Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1808, the eighth of eleven children. His ancestors had lived in the surrounding country for three generations, becoming pillars of the community. Chase would remember that “the neighboring folk used to say” of the substantial Chase homestead that “in that yellow house more brains were born than in any other house in New England.” Three of his father’s brothers attended Dartmouth College. One became a distinguished lawyer, another a U.S. senator, and the third an Episcopalian bishop.
Salmon’s father, Ithamar Chase, was a successful farmer, a justice of the peace, and a representative from his district to the New Hampshire council. He was “a good man,” Chase recalled, a kind father and a loving husband to his young wife, Janette Ralston. He governed his large family without a single “angry word or violent e[x]clamation from his lips.” Chase long remembered a day when he was playing a game of ninepins with his friends. His father interrupted, saying he needed his son’s help in the field. The boy hesitated. “Won’t you come and help your father?” That was all that needed to be said. “Only a look…. All my reluctance vanished and I went with a right good will. He ruled by kind words & kind looks.”
Young Salmon, like Seward, demonstrated an unusual intellectual precocity. His father singled him out to receive a better education “than that given to his other children.” The boy thrived in the atmosphere of high expectations. “I was…ambitious to be at the head of my class,” he recalled. During the summer months, his elder sister, Abigail, a schoolteacher in Cornish, kept him hard at work studying Latin grammar. If he failed to grasp his lessons, he would retreat to the garden and stay there by himself until he could successfully read the designated passages. At Sunday school, he strove to memorize more Bible verses than anyone else in his class, “once repeating accurately almost an entire gospel, in a single recitation.” Eager to display his capacity, Chase would boast to adults that he enjoyed studying volumes of ancient history and perusing the plays of Shakespeare “for the entertainment they afforded.”
While he was considered “quite a prodigy” in his written work, Chase was uneasy reciting in public. In contrast to Lincoln, who loved nothing better than to entertain his childhood friends and fellow students with stories, sermons, or passages from books, the self-conscious Chase was terrified to speak before fellow students, having “little notion of what I had to do or of the way to do it.” With his “hands dangling and head down,” he looked as awkward as he felt.
From his very early days, Chase showed signs of the fierce, ingrained rectitude that would both fortify his battle against slavery and incur the enmity of many among his fellows. Baptized Episcopalian in a pious family, where the Lord’s day of rest was strictly kept, the young boy needed only one Sunday scolding for “sliding down hill with some boys on the dry pine leaves” to know that he would never “transgress that way again.” Nor did he argue when his mother forbade association with boys who used profane language: he himself found it shocking that anyone would swear. Another indelible childhood memory made him abhor intemperance. He had stumbled upon the dead body of a drunken man in the street, his “face forward” in a pool of water “not deep enough to reach his ears,” but sufficient, in his extreme state of intoxication, to drown him. The parish priest had delivered sermons on “the evils of intemperance,” but, as Chase observed, “what sermon could rival in eloquence that awful spectacle of the dead drunkard—helplessly perishing where the slightest remnant of sense or strength would have sufficed to save.”
When Chase was seven years old, his father made a bold business move. The War of 1812 had put a halt to glass imports from Europe, creating a pressing demand for new supplies. Sensing opportunity, Ithamar Chase liquidated his assets in Cornish to invest in a glass factory in the village of Keene. His wife had inherited some property there, including a fourteen-room tavern house. Chase moved his family into one section of the tavern and opened the rest to the public. While a curious and loquacious child like the young Lincoln might have enjoyed the convivial entertainments of a tavern, the reticent Salmon found the move from his country estate in Cornish unsettling. And for his father, the relocation proved calamitous. With the end of the war, tariff duties on foreign goods were reduced and glass imports saturated the market. The glass factory failed, sending him into bankruptcy.
The Chase family was unable to recover. Business failure led to humiliation in the community and, eventually, to loss of the family home. Ithamar Chase succumbed to a fatal stroke at the age of fifty-three, when Salmon was nine. “He lingered some days,” Chase recalled. “He could not speak to us, and we stood mute and sobbing. Soon all was over. We had no father…the light was gone out from our home.”
Left with heavy debts and meager resources, Janette Chase was forced to assume the burden of housing, educating, and providing for her numerous children on her own. Only by moving into cheap lodgings, and scrimping “almost to suffering,” was she able to let Salmon, her brightest and most promising child, continue his studies at the local academy, fulfilling her promise to his “ever lamented and deceased father.” When she could no longer make ends meet, she was forced to parcel her children out among relatives. Salmon was sent to study under the tutelage of his father’s brother, the Episcopal bishop Philander Chase, who presided over a boys’ school in Worthington in the newly formed state of Ohio. In addition to his work as an educator, Philander Chase was responsible for a sizable parish, and owned a farm that provided food and dairy products for the student body. Young Chase, in return for milking cows and driving them to pasture, building fires, and hauling wood, would be given room and board, and a classical and religious education.
In 1819, at the age of twelve, the boy traveled westward, first by wagon through Vermont and New York, then by steamboat across Lake Erie to Cleveland, a tiny lakeside settlement of a few hundred residents. There Salmon was stranded until a group of travelers passed through en route to Worthington. In the company of strangers, the child made his way on foot and horseback through a hundred miles of virgin forest to reach his uncle’s home.
The bishop was an imposing figure, brilliant, ambitious, and hardworking. His faith, Chase observed, “was not passive but active. If any thing was to be done he felt that he must do it; and that, if he put forth all his energy, he might safely & cheerfully leave the event to Divine Providence.” Certainty gave him an unbending zeal. He was “often very harsh & severe,” recalled Chase, and “among us boys he was almost and sometimes, indeed, quite tyrannical.” The most insignificant deviation from the daily regimen of prayer and study was met with a fearful combination of physical flogging and biblical precept.
“My memories of Worthington on the whole are not pleasant,” Chase said of the time he spent with his domineering uncle. “There were some pleasant rambles—some pleasant incidents—some pleasant associates: but the disagreeable largely predominated. I used to count the days and wish I could get home or go somewhere else and get a living by work.” One incident long remained in Chase’s memory. As punishment for some infraction of the daily rules, he was ordered to bring in a large stack of wood before daybreak. He completed the task but complained to a fellow student that his uncle was “a darned old tyrant.” Upon hearing these words, the bishop allowed no one to speak to the boy and forbade him to speak until he confessed and apologized. Days later, Chase finally recanted, and the sentence was revoked. “Even now,” Chase said, telling the story decades later, “I almost wish I had not.”
When the bishop was made president of Cincinnati College, Chase accompanied his uncle to Cincinnati. At thirteen, he was enrolled as a freshman at the college. The course of study was not difficult, leaving boys time to indulge in “a good deal of mischief & fun.” Salmon Chase was not among them. “I had little or nothing to do with these sports,” he recalled. “I had the chores to do at home, & when I had time I gave it to reading.” Even Chase’s sympathetic biographer Robert Warden observed that his “life might have been happier” had he “studied less and had more fun!” These early years witnessed the development of the rigid, self-denying habits that, throughout his life, prevented Chase from fully enjoying the companionship of others.
When Chase turned fifteen, his uncle left for England to secure funding for the new theological seminary that would become Kenyon College. At last, Chase was allowed to return to his mother’s home in Keene, New Hampshire, where he planned to teach while preparing for admittance to Dartmouth College. His first position lasted only weeks, however. Employing the harsh methods of his uncle rather than the gentle precepts of his father, he administered corporal punishment to discipline his students. When irate parents complained, he was dismissed.
When Chase made his application to Dartmouth, he found that his schooling in Ohio, though filled with misery, had prepared him to enter as a third-year student. At Dartmouth, for the first time, he seemed to relax. Though he graduated with distinction and a Phi Beta Kappa key, he began to enjoy the camaraderie of college life, forging two lifelong friendships with Charles Cleveland, an intellectual classmate who would become a classics professor, and Hamilton Smith, who would become a well-to-do businessman.
No sooner had he completed his studies than he berated himself for squandering the opportunity: “Especially do I regret that I spent so much of my time in reading novels and other light works,” he told a younger student. “They may impart a little brilliancy to the imagination but at length, like an intoxicating draught, they enfeeble and deaden the powers of thought and action.” With dramatic flair, the teenage Chase then added: “My life seems to me to have been wasted.” While Seward joyfully devoured the works of Dickens and Scott, Chase found no room for fiction in his Spartan intellectual life. After finishing the new novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the author of The Last Days of Pompeii, he conceded that “the author is doubtless a gifted being—but he has prostituted God’s noblest gifts to the vilest purposes.”
The years after his graduation found nineteen-year-old Chase in Washington, D.C., where he eventually established a successful school for boys that attracted the sons of the cabinet members in the administration of John Quincy Adams, as well as the son of Senator Henry Clay. Once again, instead of taking pleasure in his position, he felt his talents went unappreciated. There were distinct classes of society in Washington, Chase told Hamilton Smith. The first, to which he aspired, included the high government officials; the second, to which he was relegated, included teachers and physicians; and the third mechanics and artisans. There was, of course, a still lower class comprised of slaves and laborers. The problem with teaching, he observed, was that any “drunken, miserable dog who could thre’d the mazes of the Alphabet” could set himself up as a teacher, bringing the “profession of teachers into utter contempt.” Chase was tormented by the lowly figure he cut in the glittering whirl of Washington life. “I have always thought,” he confessed, “that Providence intended me as the instrument of effecting something more than falls to the lot of all men to achieve.”
Though this thirst to excel and to distinguish himself had been instilled in Chase early on by his parents, and painfully reinforced by the years with Philander Chase, such sleepless ambition was inflamed by the dynamic American society in the 1820s. Visitors from Europe, the historian Joyce Appleby writes, “saw the novelty of a society directed almost entirely by the ambitious dreams that had been unleashed after the Revolution in the heated imagination of thousands of people, most of them poor and young.”
Casting about for a career befitting the high estimation in which he held his own talents, Chase wrote to an older brother in 1825 for advice about the different professions. He was contemplating the study of law, perhaps inspired by his acquaintance with Attorney General William Wirt, the father of two of his pupils. Wirt was among the most distinguished figures in Washington, a respected lawyer as well as a literary scholar. He had served as U.S. Attorney General under President James Monroe and had been kept in office by John Quincy Adams. His popular biography of the patriot and lawyer Patrick Henry had made a small name for him in American letters.
A warmhearted, generous man, Wirt welcomed his sons’ teenage instructor into his family circle, inviting the lonely Chase to the small dinner parties, private dances, and luxurious levees attended by Washington’s elite. At the Wirt household, filled with music and lively conversation, Chase found a respite from the constant pressure he felt to read and study in order to stay ahead of his students. More than three decades later, in the midst of the Civil War, Chase could still summon up vivid details of the “many happy hours” he spent with the Wirt family. “Among women Mrs. [Elizabeth] Wirt had few equals,” he recalled. Particularly stamped in his memory was an evening in the garden when Elizabeth Wirt stood beside him, “under the clusters of the multiflora which clambered all over the garden portico of the house and pointed out…the stars.”
Though supportive and eager to mentor the ambitious and talented young man, the Wirts delicately acknowledged—or so Chase felt—the social gulf that divided Chase from their family. Any attempt on the young teacher’s part to move beyond friendship with any one of their four beautiful daughters was, he thought, discouraged. Since he was surrounded by the tantalizing fruits of professional success and social eminence in the Wirt family’s parlor, it is no wonder that a career in law beckoned. His brother Alexander warned him that of all the professions, law entailed the most strenuous course of preparation: success required mastery of “thousands of volumes” from “centuries long past,” including works of science, the arts, and both ancient and contemporary history. “In fine, you must become a universal scholar.” Despite the fact that this description was not an accurate portrait of the course most law students of the day embarked upon, typically, Chase took it to heart, imposing a severe discipline upon himself to rise before daybreak to begin his monumental task of study. Insecurity and ambition combined, as ever, to fuel his efforts. “Day and night must be witness to the assiduity of my labours,” he vowed in his diary; “knowledge may yet be gained and golden reputation…. Future scenes of triumph may yet be mine.”
Wirt allowed Salmon to read law in his office and offered encouragement. “You will be a distinguished writer,” he assured Chase. “I am sure of it—You have all the sensibility, talent and enthusiasm essential to success in that walk.” The young man wrote breathlessly to Wirt in return, “God [prospering] my exertions, I will imitate your example.” As part of his self-designed course of preparation, Chase diligently took notes in the galleries of the House and Senate, practiced his elocution by becoming a member of Washington’s Blackstone debating club, and read tirelessly while continuing his duties as a full-time teacher. After hearing the great Daniel Webster speak before the Supreme Court, “his voice deep and sonorous; and his sentiments high and often sublime,” he promised himself that if “any degree of industry would enable me to reach his height, how day and night should testify of my toils.”
Neither his opportunities nor his impressive discipline yielded Chase much in the way of satisfaction. Rather than savoring his progress, he excoriated himself for not achieving enough. “I feel humbled and mortified,” he wrote in his diary, as the year 1829 drew to a close, “by the conviction that the Creator has gifted me with intelligence almost in vain. I am almost twenty two and have as yet attained but the threshold of knowledge…. The night has seldom found me much advanced beyond the station I occupied in the morning…. I almost despair of ever making any figure in the world.” Fear of failure, perhaps intensified by the conviction that his father’s failure had precipitated his death and the devastation of his family, would operate throughout Chase’s life as a catalyst to his powerful ambition. Even as he scourged himself, he continued to believe that there was still hope, that if he could “once more resolve to struggle earnestly for the prize of well-doing,” he would succeed.
As Seward had done, Chase compressed into two years the three-year course of study typically followed by college-educated law students. When the twenty-two-year-old presented himself for examination at the bar in Washington, D.C., in 1829, the presiding judge expressed a wish that Chase “study another year” before attempting to pass. “Please,” Chase begged, “I have made all my arrangements to go to the Western country & practice law.” The judge, who knew Chase by reputation and was aware of his connection with the distinguished William Wirt, relented and ordered that Chase be sworn in at the bar. Chase had decided to abandon Washington’s crowded professional terrain for the open vista and fresh opportunities afforded by the growing state of Ohio.
“I would rather be first in Cincinnati than first in Baltimore, twenty years hence,” Chase immodestly confessed to Charles Cleveland. “As I have ever been first at school and college…I shall strive to be first wherever I may be.” Cincinnati had become a booming city in 1830, one of the West’s largest. Less than two decades earlier, when the state was founded, much of Ohio “was covered by the primeval forest.” Chase knew the prospects for a young lawyer would be good in the rapidly developing region, but could not help feeling, as he had upon his arrival in Washington, like “a stranger and an adventurer.”
Despite past achievements, Chase suffered from crippling episodes of shyness, exacerbated by his shame over a minor speech defect that lent an unusual tone to his voice. “I wish I was as sure of your elocution as I am of everything else,” William Wirt cautioned. “Your voice is a little nasal as well as guttural, and your articulation stiff, laborious and thick…. I would not mention these things if they were incurable—but they are not, as Demosthenes has proved—and it is only necessary for you to know the fact, to provide the remedy.” In addition to the humiliation he felt over his speaking voice, Salmon Chase was tormented by his own name. He fervently wished to change its “awkward, fishy” sound to something more elegant. “How wd. this name do (Spencer de Cheyce or Spencer Payne Cheyce),” he inquired of Cleveland. “Perhaps you will laugh at this but I assure you I have suffered no little inconvenience.”
Bent on a meteoric rise in this new city, Chase redoubled his resolve to work. “I made this resolution today,” he wrote in his diary soon after settling in. “I will try to excel in all things.” Pondering the goals he had set for his new life in the West, Chase wrote: “I was fully aware that I must pass thro’ a long period of probation…. That many obstacles were to be overcome, many difficulties to be surmounted ere I could hope to reach the steep where Fame’s proud temple shines,” complete with “deserved honor, eminent usefulness and a ‘crown of glory.’”
Nonetheless, he had made a good beginning. After struggling for several years to secure enough legal business to support himself, he developed a lucrative practice, representing various business interests and serving as counsel for several large Cincinnati banks. At the same time, following Benjamin Franklin’s advice for continual self-improvement, he founded a popular lecture series in Cincinnati, joined a temperance society, undertook the massive project of collecting Ohio’s scattered statutes into three published volumes, tried his hand at poetry, and wrote numerous articles for publication in various magazines. To maintain these multiple pursuits, he would often arise at 4 a.m. and occasionally allowed himself to work on Sundays, though he berated himself whenever he did so.
The more successful Chase became, the more his pious family fretted over his relentless desire for earthly success and distinction. “I confess I almost tremble for you,” his elder sister Abigail wrote him when he was twenty-four years old, “as I observe your desire to distinguish yourself and apparent devotedness to those pursuits whose interests terminate in this life.” If his sister hoped that a warm family life would replace his ambition with love, her hopes were brutally crushed by the fates that brought him to love and lose three young wives.
His first, Catherine “Kitty” Garniss—a warm, outgoing, attractive young woman whom he loved passionately—died in 1835 from complications of childbirth after eighteen months of marriage. She was only twenty-three. Her death was “so overwhelming, so unexpected,” he told his friend Cleveland, that he could barely function. “I wish you could have known her,” he wrote. “She was universally beloved by her acquaintances…. She was gifted with unusual intellectual power…. And now I feel a loneliness the more dreadful, from the intimacy of the connexion which has been severed.”
His grief was compounded by guilt, for he was away on business in Philadelphia when Kitty died, having been assured by her doctor that she would recover. “Oh how I accused myself of folly and wickedness in leaving her when yet sick,” he confided in his diary, “how I mourned that the prospect of a little addition to my reputation…should have tempted me away.”
Chase arrived home to find his front door wreathed in black crepe, a customary sign “that death was within.” There “in our nuptial chamber, in her coffin, lay my sweet wife,” Chase wrote, “little changed in features—but oh! the look of life was gone…. Nothing was left but clay.” For months afterward, he berated himself, believing that “the dreadful calamity might have been averted, had I been at home to watch over her & care for her.” Learning that the doctors had bled her so profusely that she lost consciousness shortly before she died, he delved into textbooks on medicine and midwifery that persuaded him that, had she been treated differently, she need not have died.
Worst of all, Chase feared that Kitty had died without affirming her faith. He had not pushed her firmly enough toward God. “Oh if I had not contented myself with a few conversations on the subject of religion,” he lamented in his diary, “if I had incessantly followed her with kind & earnest persuasion…she might have been before her death enrolled among the professed followers of the Lamb. But I procrastinated and now she is gone.”
His young wife’s death shadowed all the days of his life. He was haunted by the vision that when he himself reached “the bar of God,” he would meet her “as an accusing spirit,” blaming him for her damnation. His guilt rekindled his religious commitment, producing a “second conversion,” a renewed determination never to let his fierce ambition supersede his religious duties.
The child upon whom all his affections then centered, named Catherine in honor of her dead mother, lived only five years. Her death in 1840 during an epidemic of scarlet fever devastated Chase. Losing one’s only child, he told Charles Cleveland, was “one of the heaviest calamities which human experience can know.” Little Catherine, he said, had “lent wings to many delightful moments…I fondly looked forward to the time when her increasing attainments and strength would fit her at once for the superintendence of my household & to be my own counsellor and friend.” Asking for his friend’s prayers, he concluded with the thought that “no language can describe the desolation of my heart.”
Eventually, Chase fell in love and married again. The young woman, Eliza Ann Smith, had been a good friend of his first wife. Eliza was only twenty when she gave birth to a daughter, Kate, named in memory of both his first wife and his first daughter. For a few short years, Chase found happiness in a warm marriage sustained by a deep religious bond. It would not last, for after the birth and death of a second daughter, Eliza was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which took her life at the age of twenty-five. “I feel as if my heart was broken,” Chase admitted to Cleveland after he placed Eliza’s body in the tomb. “I write weeping. I cannot restrain my tears…. I have no wife, my little Kate has no mother, and we are desolate.”
The following year, Chase married Sarah Belle Ludlow, whose well-to-do father was a leader in Cincinnati society. Belle gave birth to two daughters, Nettie and Zoe. Zoe died at twelve months; two years later, her mother followed her into the grave. Though Chase was only forty-four years old, he would never marry again. “What a vale of misery this world is,” he lamented some years later when his favorite sister, Hannah, suffered a fatal heart attack at the dining room table. “To me it has been emphatically so. Death has pursued me incessantly ever since I was twenty-five…. Sometimes I feel as if I could give up—as if I must give up. And then after all I rise & press on.”
LIKE SALMON CHASE, Edward Bates left the East Coast as a young man, intending, he said, “to go West and grow up with the country.” The youngest of twelve children, he was born on a plantation called Belmont, not far from Richmond, Virginia. His father, Thomas Fleming Bates, was a member of the landed gentry with an honored position in his community. Educated in England, the elder Bates was a planter and merchant who owned dozens of slaves and counted Thomas Jefferson and James Madison among his friends. His mother, Caroline Woodson Bates, was of old Virginia stock.
These aristocratic Southerners, recalled Bates’s old friend Charles Gibson, were “as distinctly a class as any of the nobility of Western Europe.” Modeled on an ideal of English manorial life, they placed greater value on family, hospitality, land, and honor than on commercial success or monetary wealth. Writing nostalgically of this antebellum period, Bates’s grandson Onward Bates claimed that life after the Civil War never approached the “enjoyable living” of those leisurely days, when “the visitor to one of these homesteads was sure of a genial welcome from white and black,” when “the negroes adopted the names and held all things in common with their masters, including their virtues and their manners.”
Life for the Bates family was comfortable and secure until the Revolutionary War, when Thomas Bates, a practicing Quaker, set aside his pacifist principles to take up arms against the British. He and his family were proud of his service in the Continental Army. The flintlock musket he carried was handed down to the next generations with the silver-plated inscription: “Thomas F. Bates, whig of the revolution, fought for liberty and independence with this gun. His descendants keep it to defend what he helped to win.” His decision to join the military, however, cost him dearly. Upon returning home, he was ostracized from the Quaker meetinghouse and never recovered from the debts incurred by the family estate while he was away fighting. Though he still owned extensive property, he struggled thenceforth to meet the needs of his seven sons and five daughters.
Like Seward and Chase, young Edward revealed an early aptitude for study. Though schools in Goochland County were few, Edward was taught to read and write by his father and, by the age of eight, showed a talent for poetry. Edward was only eleven when his father’s death brought an abrupt end to family life at Belmont. Left in straitened circumstances, his mother, like Chase’s, sent the children to live with various relatives. Edward spent two years with his older brother Fleming Bates, in Northumberland, Virginia, before settling into the home of a scholarly cousin, Benjamin Bates, in Hanover, Maryland. There, under his cousin’s tutelage, he acquired a solid foundation in the fields of mathematics, history, botany, and astronomy. Still, he missed the bustle and companionship of his numerous siblings, and pined for his family’s Belmont estate. At fourteen, he entered Charlotte Hall, a private academy in Maryland where he studied literature and the classics in preparation for enrollment at Princeton.
He never did attend Princeton. It is said that he sustained an injury that forced him to end his studies at Charlotte Hall. Returning to Belmont, he enlisted in the Virginia militia during the War of 1812, armed with his father’s old flintlock musket. In 1814, at the age of twenty-one, he joined the flood of settlers into Missouri Territory, lured by the vast potential west of the Appalachian Mountains, lately opened by the Louisiana Purchase. Over the next three decades, the population of this western region would explode at three times the rate of the original thirteen states. From his home in Virginia, Bates set out alone on the arduous journey that would take him across Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana to the Missouri Territory, “too young to think much of the perils which he might encounter,” he later mused, “the West being then the scene of many Indian outrages.”
Young Bates could not have chosen a better moment to move westward. President Jefferson had appointed Bates’s older brother Frederick secretary of the new Missouri Territory. When Edward arrived in the frontier outpost of St. Louis, Missouri was seven years away from statehood. Bates saw no buildings or homes along the riverbank, only battered canoes and flatboats chafing at their moorings. Some 2,500 villagers dwelt predominantly in primitive cabins or single-story wooden houses. When he walked down Third Street to the Market, he recalled, “all was in commotion: a stranger had come from the States! He was ‘feted’ and followed by young and old, the girls looking at him as one of his own town lasses, in Virginia, would have regarded an elk or a buffalo!”
With help from his brother, Bates secured a position reading law with Rufus Easton, a distinguished frontier lawyer who had served as a territorial judge and delegate to Congress. “After years of family and personal insecurity,” Bates’s biographer Marvin Cain writes, “he at last had a stable situation through which he could achieve the ambition that burned brightly in him.” Mentored by his older brother Frederick, the lawyer Easton, and a close circle of St. Louis colleagues, Bates, too, passed his bar examination after two years of study and instantly plunged into practice. Lawyers were in high demand on the rapidly settling frontier.
The economic and professional prospects were so promising in St. Louis that the Bates brothers determined to bring the rest of their family there. Edward returned to Virginia to sell his father’s estate, auction off any family slaves he would not transport to Missouri, and arrange to escort his mother and his older sister Margaret on the long overland journey. “The slaves sold pretty well,” he boasted to Frederick, “a young woman at $537 and a boy child 5 years old at $290!” As for the land, he expected to realize about $20,000, which would allow the family to relocate west “quite full-handed.”
Edward’s attempts to settle family affairs in Virginia dragged on, complicated by the death of his brother Tarleton, a fervent Jeffersonian, killed in a duel with a Federalist. “I am ashamed to say I am still in Goochland,” he wrote Frederick in June 1818, nearly a year after he had left St. Louis; it is “my misfortune rather than my fault for I am the greatest sufferer by the delay.” Finally, with his female relatives ensconced in a carriage and more than twenty slaves following on horseback and on foot, the little party set forth on an exasperating, difficult expedition. “In those days,” one of Bates’s friends later recalled, “there were no boats on the Western rivers, and no roads in the country.” To cross the wilds of Illinois and Indiana, a guide was necessary. The slow pace caused Bates to worry that Frederick would think him “a lazy or squandering fellow.” He explained that if accompanied only by his family, he could have reached St. Louis “in a tenth part of the time & with 1/4 of the trouble and expense—the slaves have been the greatest objects of my embarrassment.” The journey did have benefits, he reported: “Mother & Sister are more active, more healthy & more cheerful than when they started. They bear the fatigues of hot dry traveling surprisingly.” And once they reached St. Louis, Bates assured his brother, he would “make up in comfort & satisfaction for the great suspense and anxiety I must have occasioned you.”
As he again settled into the practice of law in St. Louis, the twenty-five-year-old Bates fully appreciated the advantages gained by his older brother’s prominence in the community. In a fulsome letter, he expressed fervent gratitude to his “friend and benefactor,” realizing that Fred’s “public reputation” as well as his “private wealth & influence” would greatly enhance his own standing. His brother also introduced him to the leading figures of St. Louis—including the famed explorer William Clark, now governor of the Missouri Territory; Thomas Hart Benton, editor of the Missouri Enquirer; and David Barton, speaker of the territorial legislature and the guiding hand behind Missouri’s drive for statehood. Before long, he found himself in a partnership with Joshua Barton, the younger brother of David Barton. Together, the two well-connected young men began to build a lucrative practice representing the interests of influential businessmen and landholders.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN faced obstacles unimaginable to the other candidates for the Republican nomination. In sharp contrast to the comfortable lifestyle the Seward family enjoyed, and the secure early childhoods of Chase and Bates before their fathers died, Lincoln’s road to success was longer, more tortuous, and far less likely.
Born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin on an isolated farm in the slave state of Kentucky, Abraham had an older sister, Sarah, who died in childbirth when he was nineteen, and a younger brother who died in infancy. His father, Thomas, had never learned to read and, according to Lincoln, never did “more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name.” As a six-year-old boy, young Thomas had watched when a Shawnee raiding party murdered his father. This violent death, Lincoln later suggested, coupled with the “very narrow circumstances” of his mother, left Thomas “a wandering laboring boy,” growing up “litterally without education.” He was working as a rough carpenter and hired hand when he married Nancy Hanks, a quiet, intelligent young woman of uncertain ancestry.
In the years following Abraham’s birth, the Lincolns moved from one dirt farm to another in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. On each of these farms, Thomas cleared only enough land for his family’s use. Lack of ambition joined with insufficient access to a market for surplus goods to trap Thomas in relentless poverty.
In later life, Lincoln neither romanticized nor sentimentalized the difficult circumstances of his childhood. When asked in 1860 by his campaign biographer, John Locke Scripps, to share the details of his early days, he hesitated. “Why Scripps, it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence…you will find in Gray’s Elegy: ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’”
The traces of Nancy Hanks in history are few and fragmentary. A childhood friend and neighbor of Lincoln’s, Nathaniel Grigsby, reported that Mrs. Lincoln “was a woman Know(n) for the Extraordinary Strength of her mind among the family and all who knew her: she was superior to her husband in Every way. She was a brilliant woman.” Nancy’s first cousin Dennis Hanks, a childhood friend of Abraham’s, recalled that Mrs. Lincoln “read the good Bible to [Abe]—taught him to read and to spell—taught him sweetness & benevolence as well.” She was described as “beyond all doubt an intellectual woman”; said to possess “Remarkable” perception; to be “very smart” and “naturally Strong minded.”
Much later, Lincoln, alluding to the possibility that his mother had come from distinguished stock, told his friend William Herndon: “All that I am or hope ever to be I get from my mother, God bless her.”
In the early autumn of 1818, when Abraham was nine, Nancy Lincoln contracted what was known as “milk sickness”—a fatal ailment whose victims suffered dizziness, nausea, and an irregular heartbeat before slipping into a coma. The disease first struck Thomas and Elizabeth Sparrow, Nancy Lincoln’s aunt and uncle, who had joined the Lincolns in Indiana the previous winter. The Sparrows had parented Nancy since she was a child and served as grandparents to young Lincoln. The deadly illness took the lives of the Sparrows in rapid succession, and then, before a fortnight had passed, Lincoln’s mother became gravely ill. “I am going away from you, Abraham,” she reportedly told her young son shortly before she died, “and I shall not return.”
In an era when men were fortunate to reach forty-five, and a staggering number of women died in childbirth, the death of a parent was commonplace. Of the four rivals, Seward alone kept parents into his adulthood. Chase was only eight when he lost his father. Bates was eleven. Both of their lives, like Lincoln’s, were molded by loss.
The impact of the loss depended upon each man’s temperament and the unique circumstances of his family. The death of Chase’s father forced young Salmon to exchange the warm support of a comfortable home for the rigid boarding school of a domineering uncle, a man who bestowed or withdrew approval and affection on the basis of performance. An insatiable need for acknowledgment and the trappings of success thenceforth marked Chase’s personality. Carl Schurz perceived this aspect of Chase’s temperament when he commented that, despite all the high honors Chase eventually achieved, he was never satisfied. “He restlessly looked beyond for the will-of-the-wisp, which deceitfully danced before his gaze.”
For Edward Bates, whose family of twelve was scattered by his father’s death, the loss seems to have engendered a lifelong urge to protect and provide for his own family circle in ways his father never could. To his wife and eight surviving children, he dedicated his best energies, even at the cost of political ambition, for his happiness depended on his ability to give joy and comfort to his family.
While the early death of a parent had a transforming impact on each of these men, the loss of Lincoln’s mother had a uniquely shattering impact on his family’s tenuous stability. In the months following her death, his father journeyed from Indiana to Kentucky to bring back a new wife, abandoning his two children to a place Lincoln later described as “a wild region,” where “the panther’s scream, filled the night with fear and bears preyed on the swine.” While Thomas was away, Lincoln’s twelve-year-old sister, Sarah, did the cooking and tried to care for both her brother and her mother’s cousin Dennis Hanks. Sarah Lincoln was much like her brother, a “quick minded woman” with a “good humored laugh” who could put anyone at ease. But the lonely months of living without adult supervision must have been difficult. When Sarah Bush Johnston, Lincoln’s new stepmother, returned with Thomas, she found the abandoned children living like animals, “wild—ragged and dirty.” Only after they were soaped, washed, and dressed did they seem to her “more human.”
Within a decade, Lincoln would suffer another shattering loss when his sister Sarah died giving birth. A relative recalled that when Lincoln was told of her death, he “sat down on a log and hid his face in his hands while the tears rolled down through his long bony fingers. Those present turned away in pity and left him to his grief.” He had lost the two women he had loved. “From then on,” a neighbor said, “he was alone in the world you might say.”
Years later, Lincoln wrote a letter of condolence to Fanny McCullough, a young girl who had lost her father in the Civil War. “It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it.”
Lincoln’s early intimacy with tragic loss reinforced a melancholy temperament. Yet his familiarity with pain and personal disappointment imbued him with a strength and understanding of human frailty unavailable to a man of Seward’s buoyant disposition. Moreover, Lincoln, unlike the brooding Chase, possessed a life-affirming humor and a profound resilience that lightened his despair and fortified his will.
Even as a child, Lincoln dreamed heroic dreams. From the outset he was cognizant of a destiny far beyond that of his unlettered father and hardscrabble childhood. “He was different from those around him,” the historian Douglas Wilson writes. “He knew he was unusually gifted and had great potential.” To the eyes of his schoolmates, Lincoln was “clearly exceptional,” Lincoln biographer David Donald observes, “and he carried away from his brief schooling the self-confidence of a man who has never met his intellectual equal.” His mind and ambition, his childhood friend Nathaniel Grigsby recalled, “soared above us. He naturally assumed the leadership of the boys. He read & thoroughly read his books whilst we played. Hence he was above us and became our guide and leader.”
If Lincoln’s developing self-confidence was fostered initially by his mother’s love and approval, it was later sustained by his stepmother, who came to love him as if he were her own child. Early on, Sarah Bush Lincoln recognized that Abraham was “a Boy of uncommon natural Talents.” Though uneducated herself, she did all she could to encourage him to read, learn, and grow. “His mind & mine—what little I had seemed to run together—move in the same channel,” she later said. “Abe never gave me a cross word or look and never refused in fact, or Even in appearance, to do any thing I requested him. I never gave him a cross word in all my life. He was Kind to Every body and Every thing and always accommodate[d] others if he could—would do so willingly if he could.” Young Lincoln’s self-assurance was enhanced by his physical size and strength, qualities that were valued highly on the frontier. “He was a strong, athletic boy,” one friend related, “good-natured, and ready to out-run, out-jump and outwrestle or out-lift anybody in the neighborhood.”
In their early years, each of his rivals shared a similar awareness of unusual talents, but Lincoln faced much longer odds to realize his ambitions. His voyage would require a Herculean feat of self-creation. Perhaps the best evidence of his exceptional nature, as well as the genesis of his great gift for storytelling, is manifest in the eagerness with which, even at six or seven, he listened to the stories the adults exchanged as they sat by his father’s fireplace at night. Knob Creek farm, where Lincoln lived from the age of two until seven, stood along the old Cumberland Trail that stretched from Louisville to Nashville. Caravans of pioneers passed by each day heading toward the Northwest—farmers, peddlers, preachers, each with a tale to tell.
Night after night, Thomas Lincoln would swap tales with visitors and neighbors while his young son sat transfixed in the corner. In these sociable settings, Thomas was in his element. A born storyteller, he possessed a quick wit, a talent for mimicry, and an uncanny memory for exceptional stories. These qualities would prove his greatest bequest to his son. Young Abe listened so intently to these stories, crafted from experiences of everyday life, that the words became embedded in his memory. Nothing was more upsetting to him, he recalled decades later, nothing made him angrier, than his inability to comprehend everything that was told.
After listening to adults chatter through the evening, he would spend, he said, “no small part of the night walking up and down, and trying to make out what was the exact meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings.” Unable to sleep, he would reformulate the conversations until, as he recalled, “I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend.” The following day, having translated the stories into words and ideas that his friends could grasp, he would climb onto the tree stump or log that served as an impromptu stage and mesmerize his own circle of young listeners. He had discovered the pride and pleasure an attentive audience could bestow. This great storytelling talent and oratorical skill would eventually constitute his stock-in-trade throughout both his legal and political careers. The passion for rendering experience into powerful language remained with Lincoln throughout his life.
The only schools in rural Kentucky and Indiana were subscription schools, requiring families to pay a tuition. Even when frontier families could afford the expense, their children did not always receive much education. “No qualification was ever required of a teacher,” Lincoln recalled, “beyond ‘readin, writin, and cipherin,’ to the Rule of Three. If a straggler supposed to understand latin, happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizzard.” Allowed to attend school only “by littles” between stints of farmwork, “the aggregate of all his schooling,” Lincoln admitted years later, “did not amount to one year.” He had never even set foot “inside of a college or academy building” until he acquired his license to practice law. What he had in the way of education, he lamented, he had to pick up on his own.
Books became his academy, his college. The printed word united his mind with the great minds of generations past. Relatives and neighbors recalled that he scoured the countryside for books and read every volume “he could lay his hands on.” At a time when ownership of books remained “a luxury for those Americans living outside the purview of the middle class,” gaining access to reading material proved difficult. When Lincoln obtained copies of the King James Bible, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Aesop’s Fables, and William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution, he could not contain his excitement. Holding Pilgrim’s Progress in his hands, “his eyes sparkled, and that day he could not eat, and that night he could not sleep.”
When printing was first invented, Lincoln would later write, “the great mass of men…were utterly unconscious, that their conditions, or their minds were capable of improvement.” To liberate “the mind from this false and under estimate of itself, is the great task which printing came into the world to perform.” He was, of course, also speaking of himself, of the transforming liberation of a young boy unlocking the miraculous mysteries of language, discovering a world of possibilities in the small log cabin on the frontier that he later called “as unpoetical as any spot of the earth.”
“There is no Frigate like a Book,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “to take us Lands away.” Though the young Lincoln never left the frontier, would never leave America, he traveled with Byron’s Childe Harold to Spain and Portugal, the Middle East and Italy; accompanied Robert Burns to Edinburgh; and followed the English kings into battle with Shakespeare. As he explored the wonders of literature and the history of the country, the young Lincoln, already conscious of his own power, developed ambitions far beyond the expectations of his family and neighbors. It was through literature that he was able to transcend his surroundings.
He read and reread the Bible and Aesop’s Fables so many times that years later he could recite whole passages and entire stories from memory. Through Scott’s Lessons in Elocution, he first encountered selections from Shakespeare’s plays, inspiring a love for the great dramatist’s writings long before he ever saw a play. He borrowed a volume of the Revised Statutes of Indiana from the local constable, a work that contained the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787—documents that would become foundation stones of his philosophical and political thought.
Everywhere he went, Lincoln carried a book with him. He thumbed through page after page while his horse rested at the end of a long row of planting. Whenever he could escape work, he would lie with his head against a tree and read. Though he acquired only a handful of volumes, they were seminal works of the English language. Reading the Bible and Shakespeare over and over implanted rhythms and poetry that would come to fruition in those works of his maturity that made Abraham Lincoln our only poet-president. With remarkable energy and tenacity he quarried the thoughts and ideas that he wanted to remember. “When he came across a passage that Struck him,” his stepmother recalled, “he would write it down on boards if he had no paper,” and “when the board would get too black he would shave it off with a drawing knife and go on again.” Then once he obtained paper, he would rewrite it and keep it in a scrapbook so that it could be memorized. Words thus became precious to him, never, as with Seward, to be lightly or indiscriminately used.
The volumes to feed Lincoln’s intellectual hunger did not come cheaply. The story is often recounted of the time he borrowed Parson Weems’s Life of George Washington from Josiah Crawford, a well-to-do farmer who lived sixteen miles away. Thrilled by this celebrated account of the first president’s life, he took the book to his loft at night, where, by the light of a tallow candle, or if tallow was scarce, by a grease lamp made from hickory bark gathered in the woods, he read as long as he could stay awake, placing the book on a makeshift shelf between the cabin logs so he could retrieve it at daybreak. During a severe rainstorm one night, the book was badly soiled and the covers warped. Lincoln went to Crawford’s house, explained what had happened, and offered to work off the value of the book. Crawford calculated the value of two full days’ work pulling corn, which Lincoln considered an unfair reimbursement. Nevertheless, he straightway set to work and kept on until “there was not a corn blade left on a stalk.” Then, having paid his debt, Lincoln wrote poems and songs lampooning “Josiah blowing his bugle”—Crawford’s large nose. Thus Crawford, in return for loaning Lincoln a book and then exorbitantly penalizing him, won a permanent, if unflattering, place in American history.
A lucid, inquisitive, and extraordinarily dogged mind was Lincoln’s native endowment. Already he possessed a vivid sensibility for the beauty of the English language. Often reading aloud, he was attracted to the sound of language along with its meaning—its music and rhythms. He found this in poetry, and to the end of his life would recite poems, often lengthy passages, from memory. He seemed especially drawn to poetry that spoke of our doomed mortality and the transience of earthly achievements. For clearly Lincoln, this acolyte of pure reason and remorseless logic, was also a romantic. All three of Lincoln’s rivals shared his early love of books, but none had as difficult a task securing them or finding the leisure to read. In the household of his classically educated father, Seward had only to pick a book from well-stocked shelves, while both local academies he attended and Union College maintained substantial collections of books on history, logic, rhetoric, philosophy, chemistry, grammar, and geography. Chase, likewise, had access to libraries, at his uncle’s boys’ school in Worthington and at Dartmouth College. And while books were not plentiful where Bates grew up, he had the luxury of his scholarly relative’s home, where he could peruse at will an extensive collection.
The distance between the educational advantages Lincoln’s rivals enjoyed and the hardships he endured was rendered even greater by the cultural resistance Lincoln faced once his penchant for reading became known. In the pioneer world of rural Kentucky and Indiana, where physical labor was essential for survival and mental exertion was rarely considered a legitimate form of work, Lincoln’s book hunger was regarded as odd and indolent. Nor would his community understand the thoughts and emotions stirred by his reading; there were few to talk to about the most important and deeply experienced activities of his mind.
While Lincoln’s stepmother took “particular Care not to disturb him—would let him read on and on till [he] quit of his own accord,” his father needed help with the tiresome chores of felling trees, digging up stumps, splitting rails, plowing, weeding, and planting. When he found his son in the field reading a book or, worse still, distracting fellow workers with tales or passages from one of his books, he would angrily halt the activity so work could continue. The boy’s endeavors to better himself often incurred the resentment of his father, who occasionally destroyed his books and may have physically abused him.
Lincoln’s relationship with his father grew strained, particularly when his last chance for schooling was foreclosed by his father’s decision to hire him out. He labored for various neighbors butchering hogs, digging wells, and clearing land in order to satisfy a debt the family had incurred. Such conflict between father and son was played out in thousands of homes as the “self-made” men in Lincoln’s generation sought to pursue ambitions beyond the cramped lives of their fathers.
The same “longing to rise” that carried Seward away from the Hudson Valley brought Chase to the infant state of Ohio, and sent Bates to the Missouri Territory propelled Lincoln from Indiana to New Salem, Illinois. At twenty-two, he departed his family home with all his meager possessions bundled on his shoulder. New Salem was a budding town, with twenty-five families, three general stores, a tavern, a blacksmith shop, a cooper shop, and a tannery. Working simply to “keep body and soul together” as a flatboatman, clerk, merchant, postmaster, and surveyor, he engaged in a systematic regimen of self-improvement. He mastered the principles of English grammar at night when the store was closed. He carried Shakespeare’s plays and books of poetry when he walked along the streets. Seated in the local post office, he devoured newspapers. He studied geometry and trigonometry while learning the art of surveying. And then, at the age of twenty-five, he decided to study law.
In a time when young men were apprenticed to practicing lawyers while they read the law, Lincoln, by his own account, “studied with nobody.” Borrowing law books from a friend, he set about on his own to gain the requisite knowledge and skills. He buried himself in the dog-eared pages of Blackstone’s Commentaries; he unearthed the thoughts in Chitty’s Pleadings; he analyzed precepts in Greenleaf’s Evidence and Story’s Equity Jurisprudence. After a long day at one of his various jobs, he would read far into the night. A steadfast purpose sustained him.
Few of his colleagues experienced so solitary or steep a climb to professional proficiency. The years Seward and Chase spent in college eased the transition into legal study by exposing them to history, classical languages, and scientific reasoning. What is more, Lincoln had no outlet for discourse, no mentor such as Seward found in the distinguished author of The Practice. Nor did Lincoln have the social advantages Chase enjoyed by reading law with the celebrated William Wirt or the connections Bates derived from Rufus Easton.
What Lincoln lacked in preparation and guidance, he made up for with his daunting concentration, phenomenal memory, acute reasoning faculties, and interpretive penetration. Though untutored in the sciences and the classics, he was able to read and reread his books until he understood them fully. “Get the books, and read and study them,” he told a law student seeking advice in 1855. It did not matter, he continued, whether the reading be done in a small town or a large city, by oneself or in the company of others. “The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places…. Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.”
I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union,
But through separation.
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!
—Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology
At New Salem, Lincoln would take his law books into the woods and stretch out on a “wooded knoll” to read. On these forays he was likely accompanied by Ann Rutledge, whose father owned Rutledge’s Tavern, where Lincoln boarded from time to time.
Ann Rutledge was, to our knowledge, Lincoln’s first and perhaps most passionate love. Years after her death, he reportedly divulged his feelings for her to an old friend, Isaac Cogdal. When Cogdal asked whether he had been in love, Lincoln replied, “it is true—true indeed…she was a handsome girl—would have made a good loving wife…I did honestly—& truly love the girl & think often—often of her now.”
Not a single piece of correspondence has been uncovered to document the particulars of their relationship. It must be pieced together from the recollections of neighbors and friends in the small, closely knit community of New Salem. Ann was a few years younger than Lincoln, had “Eyes blue large, & Expressive,” auburn hair, and a beautiful face. “She was beloved by Every body.” Her intellect was said to be “quick—Sharp—deep & philosophic as well as brilliant.” New Salem resident William Greene believed “she was a woman worthy of Lincoln’s love.” What began as a friendship between Ann and Abraham turned at some point into romance. They shared an understanding, according to friends, that they would marry after Ann completed her studies at the Female Academy at Jacksonville.
Ann was only twenty-two in the summer of 1835. While New Salem sweltered through one of the hottest summers in the history of the state, a deadly fever, possibly typhoid, spread through the town. Ann, as well as several of Lincoln’s friends, perished in the epidemic. After Ann’s death, Abraham seemed “indifferent, to transpiring Events,” one neighbor recalled, “had but Little to say, but would take his gun and wander off in the woods by him self.” Elizabeth Abell, a New Salem neighbor who had become a surrogate mother to Lincoln, claimed she had “never seen a man mourn for a companion more than he did.” His melancholy deepened on dark and gloomy days, for he could never “be reconcile[d],” he said, “to have the snow—rains and storms to beat on her grave.” Acquaintances feared he had become “temporarily deranged,” and that unless he pulled himself together, “reason would desert her throne.”
Lincoln himself admitted that he ran “off the track” a little after Ann’s death. He had now lost the three women to whom he was closest—his mother, his sister, and Ann. Reflecting on a visit to his childhood home in Indiana some years later, he wrote a mournful poem.
I hear the loved survivors tell
How naught from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.
He “was not crazy,” maintained Elizabeth Abell. He was simply very sad. “Only people who are capable of loving strongly,” Leo Tolstoy wrote, “can also suffer great sorrow; but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heal them.”
Had Lincoln, like Chase, lived in a large city when Ann died, he might have concealed his grief behind closed doors. In the small community of New Salem, there was no place to hide—except perhaps the woods toward which he gravitated. Moreover, as he brooded over Ann’s death, he could find no consolation in the prospect of a reunion in the hereafter. When his New Salem friend and neighbor Mrs. Samuel Hill asked him whether he believed in a future realm, he answered no. “I’m afraid there isn’t,” he replied sorrowfully. “It isn’t a pleasant thing to think that when we die that is the last of us.” Though later statements make reference to an omnipotent God or supreme power, there is no mention in any published document, the historian Robert Bruce observes—except in one ambiguous letter to his dying father—of any “faith in life after death.” To the end of his life, he was haunted by the finality of death and the evanescence of earthly accomplishments.
Lincoln’s inability to take refuge in the concept of a Christian heaven sets him apart from Chase and Bates. While Chase admitted that his “heart was broken” when he buried his second wife, Eliza Smith, he was convinced that “all is not dark. The cloud is fringed with light.” Unlike his first wife, Kitty, Eliza had died “trusting in Jesus.” He could therefore picture her in heaven, waiting for him to join her in eternal companionship.
Sharing the faith that gave solace to Chase, Bates was certain when his nine-year-old daughter, Edwa, died that she had been called by God “to a higher world & to higher enjoyment.” In the child’s last hours, he related, she “talked with calmness, and apparently without alarm, of her approaching death. She did not fear to die, still the only reason she gave for not wishing to die, was that she would rather stay with her mother.”
Seward shared Lincoln’s doubt that any posthumous reunion beckoned. When his wife and precious twenty-one-year-old daughter, Fanny, died within sixteen months of each other, he was devastated. “I ought to be able to rejoice that [Fanny] was withdrawn from me to be reunited with [her mother] the pure and blessed spirit that formed her own,” he told a friend. “But, unfortunately I am not spiritual enough to find support in these reflections.”
If Lincoln, like Seward, confronted the loss of loved ones without prospect of finding them in the afterlife to assuage the loss, one begins to comprehend the weight of his sorrow when Ann died. Nonetheless, he completed his study of law and received his law license and the offer to become a partner with John Stuart, the friend whose law books he had borrowed.
IN APRIL 1837, twenty months after Ann Rutledge’s death, Lincoln left New Salem for Springfield, Illinois, then a community of about fifteen hundred people. There he planned to embark upon what he termed his “experiment” in law. With no place to stay and no money to buy provisions, he wandered into the general store in the town square. He asked the young proprietor, Joshua Speed, how much it would cost to buy “the furniture for a single bed. The mattress, blankets, sheets, coverlid, and pillow.” Speed estimated the cost at seventeen dollars, which Lincoln agreed was “perhaps cheap enough,” though he lacked the funds to cover that amount. He asked if Speed might advance him credit until Christmastime, when, if his venture with law worked out, he would pay in full. “If I fail in this,” added Lincoln abjectly, “I do not know that I can ever pay you.”
Speed surveyed the tall, discomfited figure before him. “I never saw a sadder face,” he recalled thinking at the time. Though the two men had never met, Speed had heard Lincoln speak a year earlier and came away deeply impressed. Decades later, he could still recite Lincoln’s concluding words. Turning to Lincoln, Speed said: “You seem to be so much pained at contracting so small a debt, I think I can suggest a plan by which you can avoid the debt and at the same time attain your end. I have a large room with a double bed upstairs, which you are very welcome to share with me.” Lincoln reacted quickly to Speed’s unexpected offer. Racing upstairs to deposit his bags in the loft, he came clattering down again, his face entirely transformed. “Beaming with pleasure he exclaimed, ‘Well, Speed, I am moved!’”
Five years younger than Lincoln, the handsome, blue-eyed Speed had been raised in a gracious mansion on his family’s prosperous plantation, cultivated by more than seventy slaves. He had received an excellent education in the best Kentucky schools and at St. Joseph’s College at Bards-town. While he could have remained at home, enjoying a life of ease, he determined to make his way west with the tide of his restless generation. Arriving in Springfield when he was twenty-one, he had invested in real estate and become the proprietor of the town’s general store.
Lincoln and Speed shared the same room for nearly four years, sleeping in the same double bed. Over time, the two young men developed a close relationship, talking nightly of their hopes and their prospects, their mutual love of poetry and politics, their anxieties about women. They attended political meetings and forums together, went to dances and parties, relaxed with long rides in the countryside.
Emerging from a childhood and young adulthood marked by isolation and loneliness, Lincoln discovered in Joshua Speed a companion with whom he could share his inner life. They had similar dispositions, both possessing an ambitious impulse to improve themselves and rise in the world. No longer a boy but not yet an established adult, Lincoln ended years of emotional deprivation and intellectual solitude by building his first and deepest friendship with Speed. Openly acknowledging the strength of this attachment, the two pledged themselves to a lifelong bond of friendship. Those who knew Lincoln well pointed to Speed as his “most intimate friend,” the only person to whom he ever disclosed his secret thoughts. “You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting,” Lincoln assured Speed, “that I will never cease, while I know how to do any thing.”
Some have suggested that there may have been a sexual relationship between Lincoln and Speed. Their intimacy, however, like the relationship between Seward and Berdan and, as we shall see, between Chase and Stanton, is more an index to an era when close male friendships, accompanied by open expressions of affection and passion, were familiar and socially acceptable. Nor can sharing a bed be considered evidence of an erotic involvement. It was common practice in an era when private quarters were a rare luxury, when males regularly slept in the same bed as children and continued to do so in academies, boardinghouses, and overcrowded hotels. The room above Speed’s store functioned as a sort of dormitory, with two other young men living there part of the time as well as Lincoln and Speed. The attorneys of the Eighth Circuit in Illinois where Lincoln would travel regularly shared beds—with the exception of Judge David Davis, whose immense girth left no room for a companion. As the historian Donald Yacovone writes in his study of the fiercely expressed love and devotion among several abolitionist leaders in the same era, the “preoccupation with elemental sex” reveals more about later centuries “than about the nineteenth.”
If it is hard to delineate the exact nature of Lincoln’s relationship with Speed, it is clear that this intimate friendship came at a critical juncture in his young life, as he struggled to define himself in a new city, away from home and family. Here in Springfield he would carry forward the twin careers that would occupy most of his life: law and politics. His accomplishments in escaping the confines of his barren, death-battered childhood and his relentless self-education required luck, a stunning audacity, and a breadth of intelligence that was only beginning to reveal itself.