IN THE ONLY COUNTRY founded on the principle that men should and could govern themselves, where self-government dominated every level of human association from the smallest village to the nation’s capital, it was natural that politics should be a consuming, almost universal concern.
“Scarcely have you descended on the soil of America,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in the year Lincoln was serving his first term in the state legislature, “when you find yourself in the midst of a sort of tumult; a confused clamor is raised on all sides; a thousand voices come to your ear at the same time, each of them expressing some social needs. Around you everything moves: here, the people of one neighborhood have gathered to learn if a church ought to be built; there, they are working on the choice of a representative; farther on, the deputies of a district are going to town in all haste in order to decide about some local improvements; in another place, the farmers of a village abandon their furrows to go discuss the plan of a road or a school.”
“Citizens assemble with the sole goal of declaring that they disapprove of the course of government,” Tocqueville wrote. “To meddle in the government of society and to speak about it is the greatest business and, so to speak, the only pleasure that an American knows…. An American does not know how to converse, but he discusses; he does not discourse, but he holds forth. He always speaks to you as to an assembly.”
In an illustration from Noah Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book, widely read in Lincoln’s generation, a man strikes a heroic pose as he stands on a wooden barrel, speaking to a crowd of enthralled listeners. Behind him the Stars and Stripes wave proudly, while a poster bearing the image of the national eagle connotes the bravery and patriotism of the orator. “Who can wonder,” Ralph Waldo Emerson asked, at the lure of politics, “for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator? He has his audience at his devotion. All other fames must hush before his.”
For many ambitious young men in the nineteenth century, politics proved the chosen arena for advancement. Politics attracted Bates in Missouri, Seward in upstate New York, Lincoln in Illinois, and Chase in Ohio.
THE OLDEST OF THE FOUR, Edward Bates was the first drawn into politics during the 1820 crusade for Missouri’s statehood. As the petition was debated in the U.S. Congress, an argument arose as to whether the constitutional protection for slavery in the original states applied to the newly acquired territories. An antislavery representative from New York introduced an amendment requiring Missouri first to agree to emancipate all children of slaves on their twenty-first birthday. The so-called “lawyer faction,” including Edward Bates, vehemently opposed an antislavery restriction as the price of admission to the Union. Bates argued that it violated the Constitution by imposing a qualification on a state beyond providing “a republican form of government,” as guaranteed by the Constitution.
To Northerners who hoped containment in the South would lead inevitably to the end of slavery, its introduction into the new territories aroused fear that it would now infiltrate the West and, thereby, the nation’s future. For Southerners invested in slave labor, Northern opposition to Missouri’s admission as a slave state posed a serious threat to their way of life. At the height of the struggle, Southern leaders declared their intent to secede from the Union; many Northerners seemed willing to let them go. “This momentous question,” Jefferson wrote at the time, “like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.”
The Senate ultimately stripped the bill of the antislavery amendment, bringing Missouri into the Union as a slave state under the famous Missouri Compromise of 1820. Fashioned by Kentucky senator Henry Clay, who earned the nickname the “Great Pacificator,” the Compromise simultaneously admitted Maine as a free state and prohibited slavery in all the remaining Louisiana Purchase territory north of the latitude 36°30'. That line ran across the southern border of Missouri, making Missouri itself an exception to the new division.
Later that spring, Bates campaigned successfully for a place among the forty-one delegates chosen to write the new state’s constitution. Though younger than most of the delegates, he “emerged as one of the principal authors of the constitution.” When the time came to select candidates for state offices, the “lawyer faction” received the lion’s share. David Barton and Thomas Benton were sent to Washington as Missouri’s first senators, and Edward Bates became the state’s first attorney general; his partner, Joshua Barton, became the first secretary of state. Two years later, Bates won a seat in the Missouri House, and two years after that, Frederick Bates was elected governor of the state.
This inner circle did not remain united for long, for tensions developed between Senators Barton and Benton. Barton’s followers were primarily merchants and landowners, while Benton gradually aligned himself with the agrarian disciples of Jacksonian democracy. A tragic duel made the split irrevocable. In the course of his legal practice, Bates’s partner, Joshua Barton, found proof of corruption in the office of Benton’s friend and ally, Missouri’s land surveyor-general, William Rector. Rector challenged Barton to a duel in which Barton was killed. Bates was devastated by the loss of his friend. He and David Barton went public with Joshua Barton’s indictment implicating Benton as well as Rector. They demanded an investigation from U.S. Attorney General William Wirt, Chase’s mentor and friend. The investigation sustained most of the charges and resulted in President Monroe’s dismissal of Rector. The affair came to an end, but the rift between Barton and Benton never healed.
Proponents of Barton, including Bates, eventually coalesced into the Whig Party, while the Bentonites became Democrats. The Whigs favored public support for internal improvements designed to foster business in a new market economy. Their progressive agenda included protective tariffs, and a national banking system to develop and strengthen the resources of the country. The Democrats, with their base of power in the agrarian South, resisted these measures, appealing instead to the interests of the common man against the bankers, the lawyers, and the merchants.
Despite his immersion in the whirlpool of Missouri politics, an event occurred in 1823 that altered Bates’s life and forever shifted his focus—he fell in love with and married Julia Coalter. Thereafter, home and family domesticity eclipsed politics as the signal pleasure of his life. His first child, named Joshua Barton Bates in honor of his slain partner, was born in 1824. Over the next twenty-five years, sixteen more children were born.
When Julia was young, family friend John Darby recalled, she was “a most beautiful woman.” She came from a distinguished South Carolina family that settled in Missouri when she was a child. Her father was a wealthy man, having invested successfully in land. The husband of one of her sisters became governor of South Carolina. Another sister was married to the chancellor of the state of Missouri. A third sister married Hamilton Rowan Gamble, who served as a justice on Missouri’s supreme court and wrote a dissenting opinion in the Dred Scott case. Despite these connections, Julia had little interest in politics. Her attentions were fully focused on her family. Her surviving letters, unlike those of Frances Seward, said nothing about the issues of the day, concentrating instead on her children’s activities, their eating habits, their games, their broken bones. Her entire being, Darby observed, “was calculated to impart happiness around the domestic circle.”
She succeeded in this beyond ordinary measure, providing Edward with what their friends uniformly described as an ideal home life. The enticements of public office gradually diminished in his contented eyes. When he sought and won a seat in the U.S. Congress in 1826, three years after his marriage, his pleasure in the victory was dimmed by the necessity of leaving home and hearth. Even short absences from Julia proved painful for him. “I have never found it so difficult to keep up my spirits,” he confessed to her at one point when she had gone to visit friends for several days. “Indeed, ever since you left me, I have felt a painful consciousness of being alone. At court I can do well enough, but when I come home, to bed or board, I feel so utterly solitary, that I can enjoy neither eating nor sleeping. I mention these things not because it is either proper or becoming to feel them, but because they are novel to me. I never before had such a restless, dissatisfied, indefinable feeling; and never wish to have it again.”
Disquiet returned a hundredfold when he departed on the lonely journey to take up his congressional seat in Washington, leaving his pregnant wife and small son at home. Writing from various taverns and boardinghouses along the way, he confessed that he was in “something of a melancholy and melting mood.” There was a “magic” in her loveliness, which left him “like a schoolboy lover” in the absence of his “dear Julia.” Now, after only a few weeks away, he was moved to cry, “a plague upon the vanity of petty ambition! Were I great enough to sway the destinies of the nation, the meed of ambition might be worth the sacrifice which it requires; but a mere seat in Congress as a subaltern member, is a contemptible price for the happiness which we enjoy with each other. It was always your opinion, & now I feel it to be true.”
His spirits revived somewhat when he settled into a comfortable Washington boardinghouse and took his seat in Congress alongside David Crockett, James Polk, and Henry Clay. Though Bates seldom went out to parties, preferring to spend his nights reading and writing to his wife, he was thrilled, he told Julia, to spend a private evening with Henry Clay. “That man grows upon me more and more, every time I see him,” he wrote. “There is an intuitive perception about him, that seems to see & understand at a glance, and a winning fascination in his manners that will suffer none to be his enemies who associate with him.”
The main issues that confronted Bates during his congressional term concerned the disposition of western lands, internal improvements, and the tariff. On each of these issues, Senators Benton and Barton were antagonists. Benton had introduced a bill under which the federal government would make its lands available to settlers at a price so low that it was almost free. Cheap land, he argued, would bridle the rampant speculation that profited the few over the many. Barton countered with the claim that such cheap land would depress the entire Western economy. Bates sided with Barton, voting against the popular bill.
During the dispute over public lands, Bates published a pamphlet denouncing Benton that so angered “Old Bullion,” as he was known, that the two men did not speak for nearly a quarter of a century. “My piece is burning into his reputation,” Bates told Julia, “like aquafortis upon iron—the mark can never be effaced.” Beyond his open quarrel with Benton, Bates got along well with his colleagues. His natural warmth and easy manner created respect and affection. Night sessions he found particularly amusing and intriguing, despite the “roaring disorder” of people “hawking, coughing, thumping with their canes & kicking about spit boxes.” The hall, suffused with candlelight from members’ desks, and from the massive chandelier suspended from the domed ceiling, “exhibit[ed] a most magnificent appearance.”
Nonetheless, these few moments of pleasure could not compensate for missing the birth of his first daughter, Nancy. “As yet I only know that she is,” he lamented, “I long to know how she is—what she is—who she is like…whether she has black eyes or gray—a long nose or a pug—a wide mouth or a narrow one—and above all, whether she has a pretty foot,” for without a pretty foot, like her mother’s, he predicted, she could never make “a fine woman.”
“Oh! How I long to see & press you to my bosom,” he told Julia, “if it were but for a moment. Sometimes, I almost realize the vision—I see you with such vivid and impassioned precision, that the very form developing is in my eye.” In letter after letter, the physical immediacy of their relationship becomes clear. Responding to Julia’s admission of her own downcast spirits, he wrote: “O, that I could kiss the tear from that cheek whose cheerful brightness is my sunshine.”
Still, public life enticed him, and at the behest of his friends and supporters, Bates agreed to run for a second term. Despite his great personal popularity, he lost his bid for reelection in the wake of the great Jacksonian landslide that gave Benton and the Democrats complete control of Missouri politics. During the last days of his term, the usually soft-spoken Bates got into a heated argument with Congressman George McDuffie of South Carolina on the floor of the House. McDuffie ridiculed him personally, and Bates impulsively challenged the South Carolinian to a duel. Fortunately, McDuffie declined, agreeing to apologize for his offensive language. Years later, reflecting on the Southern “Code” of dueling, Bates’s friend Charles Gibson maintained that as wicked as the code was, the vulgar public behavior following the demise of the practice was worse still. “The code preserved a dignity, justice and decorum that have since been lost,” he argued, “to the great detriment of the professions, the public and the government. The present generation will think me barbarous but I believe that some lives lost in protecting the tone of the bar and the press, on which the Republic itself so largely depends, are well spent.”
As the thirty-six-year-old Bates packed up his documents and books to return home, he assured Julia that he was genuinely relieved to have lost. While he loved his friends “as much as any man,” he wrote, “for happiness I look alone to the bosom of my own family.” Not a day passed, he happily reported, that he did not “divide and subdivide” his time by making plans for their future. He meant first of all “to take & maintain a station in the front rank” of his profession, so that he could provide for his family all the “various little comforts & amusements we have often talked over & wished we possessed.”
Months and years slipped by, and Bates remained true to his word. Though he served two terms in the state legislature, where he was regarded as “the ablest and most eloquent member of that body,” he decided in 1835 to devote his full attention to his flourishing law practice, rather than run for reelection. Throughout the prime of his life, therefore, Bates found his chief gratification in home and family.
His charming diary, faithfully recorded for more than three decades, provides a vivid testament to his domestic preoccupations. While ruminations upon ambition, success, and power are ubiquitous in Chase’s introspective diary, Bates focused on the details of everyday life, the comings and goings of his children, the progress of his garden, and the social events in his beloved St. Louis. His interest in history, he once observed, lay less in the usual records of wars and dynasties than in the more neglected areas of domestic laws, morals, and social manners.
The smallest details of his children’s lives fascinated him. When Ben, his fourteenth child, was born, he noted the “curious fact” that the child had a birthmark on the right side of his belly resembling a frog. Attempting to explain “one of the Mysteries in which God has shrouded nature,” he recalled that a few weeks before the child was born, while his wife lay on the bed reading, she was unpleasantly startled by the sudden appearance of a tree frog. At the time, “she was lying on her left side, with her right hand resting on her body above the hip,” Bates noted, “and in the corresponding part of the child’s body is the distinct mark of the frog.”
Faith in the powers of God irradiates the pages of his diary. His son Julian, a “bad stammerer from his childhood”—the family had begun to fear that “he was incurable”—miraculously began one day to speak without the slightest hesitation. “A new faculty,” Bates recorded, “is given to one who seemed to have been cut off from one of the chief blessings of humanity.” In return for this restoration to speech, Bates hoped that his son would eventually “qualify himself to preach the Gospel,” for he had “never seen in any youth a more devoted piety.” Sadly, the “miracle” did not last long; within six months Julian was stuttering again.
On rare occasions when his wife left to visit relatives, Bates mourned her absence from the home where she was both “Mistress & Queen.” He reminded himself that he must not “begrudge her the short respite” from the innumerable tasks of caring for a large family. Giving birth to seventeen children in thirty-two years, Julia was pregnant throughout nearly all her childbearing years. Savoring the warmth of his family circle, Bates felt the loss of each child who grew up and moved away. “This day,” he noted in 1851, “my son Barton, with his family—wife and one child—moved into his new house…. He has lived with us ever since his marriage in March 1849. This is a serious diminution of our household, being worried that, as our children are fast growing up, & will soon scatter about, in search of their own futures, we may soon expect to have but a little family in a large house.”
The diaries Bates kept also reveal a deep commitment to his home city of St. Louis. Every year, on April 29, he marked the anniversary of his first arrival in the town. As the years passed, he witnessed “mighty changes in population, locomotion, commerce and the arts,” which made St. Louis the jewel of the great Mississippi Valley and would, he predicted, eventually make it “the ruling city of the continent.” His entries proudly record the first gas illumination of the streets, the transmission of the first telegraph between St. Louis and the eastern cities, and the first day that a railroad train moved west of the Mississippi.
Bates witnessed a great fire in 1849 that reduced the commercial section of the city to rubble and endured a cholera epidemic that same year that killed more than a hundred each day, hearses rolling through the muddy streets from morning till night. In one week alone, he recorded, the total deaths numbered nearly a thousand. His own family pulled through “in perfect health,” in part, he believed, because they rejected the general opinion of avoiding fruits and vegetables. He agonized over the medical ignorance about the origin of the disease or its remedy. “No two of them agree with each other, and no one agrees with himself two weeks at a time.” As the epidemic worsened, scores of families left the city in fear of contagion, but Bates refused to do so. To a friend who had offered sanctuary on his plantation outside of the city, he explained: “I am one of the oldest of the American inhabitants, have a good share of public respect & confidence, and consequently, some influence with the people. I hold it to be a sacred duty, that admits of no compromise, to stand my ground and be ready to do & to bear my part…. I should be ashamed to leave St. Louis under existing circumstances…. It would be an abandonment of a known duty.”
Beyond commentary on his family and his city, Bates filled the pages of his diary with observations of the changing seasons, the progress of his flowers, and the phases of the moon. He celebrated the first crocus each year, his elm trees shedding seed, oaks in full tassel, tulips in their prime. So vivid are his descriptions of his garden that the reader can almost hear the rustling leaves of fall, or “the frogs…croaking, in full chorus” that filled the spring nights. With an acute eye he observed that plants change color with age. Meticulously noting variation and difference, he never felt that he was repeating the same patterns of activity year after year. He was a contented man.
However, he never fully abandoned his interest in politics. His passion for the development of the West led him to a major role in the River and Harbor Convention called in the late 1840s to protest President Polk’s veto of the Whig-sponsored internal improvements bill. The assembly is said to have been “the largest Convention ever gathered in the United States prior to the Civil War.” More than 5,000 accredited delegates and countless other spectators joined Chicago’s 16,000 inhabitants, filling every conceivable room in every hotel, boardinghouse, and private dwelling. Desperate visitors to the overcrowded city even sought places to sleep aboard boats in Chicago’s harbor.
Former and future governors, congressmen, and senators were there, including Tom Corwin from Ohio, Thurlow Weed and New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley from New York, and Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, who was chosen to serve as secretary of the convention. New York was also represented by Democrat David Dudley Field, designated to present Polk’s arguments against federal appropriations for internal improvements in the states. Also in attendance, Greeley wrote, was “Hon. Abraham Lincoln, a tall specimen of an Illinoian, just elected to Congress from the only Whig District in the State.” It was Lincoln’s first mention in a paper of national repute.
“No one who saw [Lincoln] can forget his personal appearance at that time,” one delegate recalled years later. “Tall, angular and awkward, he had on a short-waisted, thin swallow-tail coat, a short vest of same material, thin pantaloons, scarcely coming down to his ankles, a straw hat and a pair of brogans with woolen socks.”
On the first day, Edward Bates was chosen president of the convention, much to his “deep astonishment,” given the presence of so many eminent delegates. “If notice had been given me of any intention to nominate me for the presidency of the Convention, I should have shrunk from it with dread & repressed the attempt,” Bates confided to his diary. He was apprehensive that party politics would render the convention unsuccessful and that he would then bear the brunt of responsibility for its failure. Yet so skillfully and impartially did he conduct the proceedings and so eloquently did he make the case for internal improvements and development of the inland waterways that he “leaped at one bound into national prominence.” On a much smaller scale, Lincoln impressed the audience with his clever rebuttal of the arguments against public support for internal improvements advanced by Democrat Field.
At the close of the convention, Bates delivered the final speech. No complete record of this speech was made, for once Bates began speaking, the reporters, Weed confessed, were “too intent and absorbed as listeners, to think of Reporting.” “No account that can now be given will do it justice,” Horace Greeley wrote in the New York Tribune the following week. In clear, compelling language, Bates described the country poised at a dangerous crossroad “between sectional disruption and unbounded prosperity.” He called on the various regions of the nation to speak in “voices of moderation and compromise, for only by statesmanlike concession could problems of slavery and territorial acquisition be solved so the nation could move on to material greatness.” While he was speaking, Weed reported, “he was interrupted continually by cheer upon cheer; and at its close, the air rung with shout after shout, from the thousands in attendance.” Overwhelmed by the reaction, Bates considered the speech “the crowning act” of his life, received as he “never knew a speech received before.”
“The immense assembly,” Bates noted in his diary, “seemed absolutely mesmerized—their bodies and hearts & minds subjected to my will, and answering to my every thought & sentiment with the speed and exactness of electricity. And when I ceased to speak there was one loud, long and spontaneous burst of sympathy & joyous gratification, the like of which I never expect to witness again.”
Bates acknowledged when he returned home that his vanity had been “flattered,” his “pride of character stimulated in a manner & a degree far beyond what I thought could ever reach me in this life-long retirement to which I have withdrawn.” The experience was “more full of public honor & private gratification than any passage of my life…those three days at Chicago have given me a fairer representation & a higher standing in the nation, than I could have hoped to attain by years of labor & anxiety in either house of Congress.”
With that single speech, Bates had become a prominent national figure, his name heralded in papers across the country as a leading prospect for high public office once the Whigs were returned to power. “The nation cannot afford to be deprived of so much integrity, talent, and patriotism,” Weed concluded at the end of a long, flattering piece calling on Bates to reenter political life.
While Bates initially basked in such acclaim, within weeks of the convention’s close, he convinced himself he no longer craved what he later called “the glittering bauble” of political success. Declining Weed’s appeal that he return to public life, he wrote the editor a pensive letter. Once, he revealed to Weed, he had entertained such “noble aspirations” to make his mind “the mind of other men.” But these desires were now gone, his “habits formed and stiffened to the standard of professional and domestic life.” Consequently, there was “no office in the gift of prince or people” that he would accept. His refusal, he explained, was “the natural result” of his social position, his domestic relations, and his responsibilities to his large family.
SEWARD WAS NEXT to enter public life, realizing after several uninspired years of practicing law that he “had no ambition for its honors.” Though resigned to his profession “with so much cheerfulness that [his] disinclination was never suspected,” he found himself perusing newspapers and magazines at every free moment, while scrutinizing his law books only when he needed them for a case. He was discovering, he said, that “politics was the important and engrossing business of the country.”
Fate provided an introduction to Thurlow Weed, the man who would secure his entry into the political world and facilitate his rise to prominence. Seward was on an excursion to Niagara Falls with Frances, her father, and his parents when the wheel of their stagecoach broke off, throwing the passengers into a swampy ravine. A tall, powerfully built man with deep-set blue eyes appeared and helped everyone to safety. He introduced himself as Thurlow Weed, editor of a Rochester newspaper, which “he printed chiefly with his own hand.” That encounter sparked a friendship that would shape the destinies of both men.
Four years Seward’s senior, Thurlow Weed could see at a glance that his new acquaintance was an educated young man belonging to the best society. Weed himself had grown up in poverty, his father frequently imprisoned for debt, his family forced to move from one upstate location to another. Apprenticed in a blacksmith’s shop at eight years old, with only a few years of formal schooling behind him, he had fought to educate himself. He had walked miles to borrow books, studying history and devouring newspapers by firelight. A classic example of a self-made man, he no sooner identified an obstacle to his progress than he worked with discipline to counteract it. Concerned that he lacked a native facility for remembering names and appointments, and believing that “a politician who sees a man once should remember him forever,” Weed consciously trained his memory. He spent fifteen minutes every night telling his wife, Catherine, everything that had happened to him that day, everyone he had met, the exact words spoken. The nightly mnemonics worked, for Weed soon became known as a man with a phenomenal recall. Gifted with abundant energy, shrewd intelligence, and a warm personality, he managed to carve out a brilliant career as printer, editor, writer, publisher, and, eventually, as powerful political boss, familiarly known as “the Dictator.”
Weed undoubtedly sensed in the younger Seward an instinct for power and a fascination with politics that matched his own. In an era when political parties were in flux, Weed and Seward gravitated toward the proponents of a new infrastructure for the country, by deepening waterways and creating a new network of roads and rails. Such measures, Seward believed, along with a national banking system and protective tariffs, would enable the nation to “strengthen its foundations, increase its numbers, develop its resources, and extend its dominion.” Eventually, those in favor of “the American system,” as it came to be called, coalesced behind Henry Clay’s Whig Party.
Weed’s star rose rapidly in New York when, with Seward’s help, he launched the Albany Evening Journal, first published in March 1830. The influential Journal, which eventually became the party organ for the Whigs (and later, for the Republicans), gave Weed a powerful base from which he would brilliantly shape public opinion for nearly four decades. Through his newspapers, Weed engineered Seward’s first chance for political office. In September 1830, Seward secured the nomination for a seat in the state senate from the seventh district. That November, with Weed managing every step of the campaign, Seward won a historic victory as the youngest member to enter the New York Senate. He was twenty-nine.
Albany had nearly doubled in size since Seward had first seen it, but it was still a small town of 24,000 inhabitants. Originally settled by the Dutch, the state’s capital boasted a stately array of brick mansions that belonged to wealthy merchant princes. The year before Seward’s arrival, ground had been broken for the country’s “first steam-powered railroad.” This sixteen-mile track connecting Albany with Schenectady was “the first link in an eventual nationwide web of tracks.”
The legislature consisted of 32 senators and 128 representatives, most of whom boarded in either the Eagle Tavern on South Market Street or around the corner on State Street, at Bemont’s Hotel. Such close quarters, while congenial to politicians, were ill suited to families—especially those, like Seward’s, with small children. Consequently, Seward decided to attend the four-month winter session alone.
“Weed is very much with me, and I enjoy his warmth of feeling,” Seward confided to Frances after he had settled into Bemont’s, describing his friend as “one of the greatest politicians of the age…the magician whose wand controls and directs” the party. Despite Weed’s eminence, Seward proudly noted, he “sits down, stretches one of his long legs out to rest on my coal-box, I cross my own, and, puffing the smoke of our cigars into each other’s faces, we talk of everything, and everybody, except politics.” They enjoyed a mutual love of the theater and a passion for the novels of Charles Dickens and Walter Scott. Their shared ambition, for each other and their country, became a common bond that would keep their friendship alive until the end of their days.
Seward’s gregarious nature was in perfect harmony with the clublike atmosphere of the boardinghouses, where colleagues took their daily meals together and spent evenings in one another’s quarters gathered by the fire. “My room is a thoroughfare,” he told Frances. Early in the session, he befriended an older colleague, Albert Haller Tracy, a senator from Buffalo who had served three terms in the U.S. Congress and had once been touted as a candidate for vice president. In recent years, however, a series of debilitating illnesses had stalled Tracy’s political ambitions and “crushed all his aspirings.” In Seward, perhaps, he found a young man who could fulfill the dreams he had once held dear. “I believe Henry tells him everything that passes in his mind,” Frances Seward wrote to her sister, Lazette. “He and Henry appear equally in love with each other.”
“It shames my manhood that I am so attached to you,” Tracy confessed to Seward after several days’ absence from Albany. “It is a foolish fondness from which no good can come.” His friendship with another colleague, Tracy explained, was “just right, it fills my heart exactly, but yours crowds it producing a kind of girlish impatience which one can neither dispose of nor comfortably endure…every day and almost every hour since [leaving] I have suffered a womanish longing to see you. But all this is too ridiculous for the subject matter of a letter between two grave Senators, and I’ll leave unsaid three fourths of what I have been dreaming on since I left Albany.”
Seward at first reciprocated Tracy’s feelings, professing a “rapturous joy” in discovering that his friend shared the “feelings which I had become half ashamed for their effeminancy to confess I possessed.” In time, however, Tracy’s intensity began to wear on the relationship. When Seward did not immediately respond to one of his letters, Tracy penned a petulant note. “My feelings confined in narrow channels have outstripped yours which naturally are more diffused—I was foolish enough to make an almost exclusive attachment the measure for one which is…divided with many.”
Tracy’s ardor would fuel an intense rivalry with Thurlow Weed. “Weed has never been to see us since Tracy came,” Frances told her sister during a visit to Albany. “I am sorry for this although I can hardly account for it.” Confronted with the need to choose, Seward turned to Weed, not Tracy, for vital collaboration. Although Tracy continued a cordial association with Seward, he harbored a smoldering resentment over Seward’s increasing closeness to Weed. “Love—cruel tyrant as he is,” Tracy reminded Seward, “has made reciprocity both the bond and aliment of our most hallowed affections.” Absent that reciprocity, Tracy warned, it would be impossible to sustain the glorious friendship that they had once enjoyed.
A strange turn in Tracy’s affections likely resulted from his mounting sense of distance from Seward. He transferred his unrequited love from Henry to Frances, who also was feeling distant from her husband. Though still deeply in love after ten years of marriage, Frances worried that her husband’s passion for politics and worldly achievement surpassed his love for his family. She mourned “losing my influence over a heart I once thought so entirely my own,” increasingly apprehensive that she and her husband were “differently constituted.”
In 1832, Seward convinced Frances to accompany him to Albany for the legislative session that ran from January to March. Their quarters on the first floor of Bemont’s Hotel were just below those taken by Tracy and his wife, Harriet. The two couples would often spend evenings or weekends together, and Tracy often tagged along with Henry and Frances when his wife was on one of her frequent trips to their home in Buffalo. He joined them on walks, shopping trips, and excursions with the children. “He is a singular being,” Frances confided to Lazette. “He certainly knows more than any man I ever was acquainted with.” His conversation, she marveled, “reminds me of a book of synonyms. He hardly ever makes use of the same words to express ideas that have a shade of difference.”
Capitalizing on Frances’s hunger for companionship, Tracy insinuated himself into the private emotional world she once shared only with her husband. He spoke with her freely about his quarrels with his wife. He invited her into his sitting room to read poetry and study French. They talked about their battles with ill health. “I believe at present he could convince me that a chameleon was blue, green or black just as he should choose,” Frances admitted to Lazette. Following one extended absence, Frances announced unabashedly that she was “very glad to see him as I love him very much.” Though there is no indication that Frances and Tracy ever shared a physical relationship, they had entered into something that was considered, in the subtle realm of Victorian social mores, almost as shameful and inappropriate—a private emotional intimacy.
The following summer, Seward left his wife and family in Auburn to accompany his father on a three-month voyage to Europe. While his aging father’s need for companionship provided a rationale for the sojourn, Seward relished the opportunity to see foreign lands and observe new cultures. Father and son traveled extensively through England, Ireland, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and France. “What a romance was this journey that I was making!” Seward recalled years later. Everywhere he went, however, his thoughts returned to America and his faith in his country’s unique future.
“It is not until one visits old, oppressed, suffering Europe, that he can appreciate his own government,” he observed, “that he realizes the fearful responsibility of the American people to the nations of the whole earth, to carry successfully through the experiment…that men are capable of self-government.” He hungrily sought out American newspapers in library reading rooms, noting with regret ubiquitous reports of “malicious political warfare.”
While Lincoln, Chase, and Bates would never visit the Old World, Seward, at the age of thirty-two, mingled comfortably with members of Parliament and received invitations to elegant receptions and dinner parties throughout Europe. In France, Seward spent a long weekend visiting with the Revolutionary War hero General Lafayette at his home, La Grange.
In Seward’s absence, Frances corresponded frequently with Tracy. When Judge Miller noticed a letter in an unknown hand awaiting Frances on the mantelpiece, he demanded to see it. Frances did not know what to do, she explained to her sister. “I handed it to him and he very deliberately commenced breaking the seal for the purpose of reading it. My first impulse was to jump up and snatch the letter from his hand, which I did and then apologized by saying I would prefer reading it myself first. He appeared very much astonished that I should be so unreasonable.”
As Tracy’s letters multiplied, the deeply religious Frances began to contemplate the perilous shift in their friendship. Mortified in front of Henry, now returned from Europe, she proffered the letters, asking him to determine if Tracy was endeavoring to break their marital peace. At first Seward refused to read them, unwilling to impute such dishonorable intentions to Tracy. When a further letter arrived that caused Frances to collapse in tears, believing herself dishonored in both Tracy’s and her husband’s eyes, Seward resolved to confront him.
The next time the two men met in Albany, however, Seward made no mention of the delicate situation. Nor did he bring it up in the following months, for his attention was increasingly consumed by politics. Four years in the state senate had proved Seward an eloquent voice for reform. He had denounced imprisonment for debt, urged separate prisons for men and women, and pushed for internal improvements, all the while maintaining friendly relations on both sides of the aisle. It was time, Weed believed, to push his protégé toward higher office.
At the September 1834 convention in Utica, New York, Weed convinced members of the newly organized Whig Party that the young, energetic Seward would wage the best campaign for governor against the heavily favored Democrats. Seward was thrilled. Needing all the support he could gather, he did not want to risk alienating the influential Albert Tracy. Promises he had made to his wife could wait.
Brimming with high expectations in his upstart race, Seward eagerly embraced the Whig platform that promised to deliver for the nation something of the progress he had achieved for himself. Despite Weed’s caution that he faced an uphill battle, his native optimism would not be dampened. The campaign, complete with slogans and songs, was a lively affair. To counter charges that the boyish, red-haired Seward was too young for high office, the Whigs offered a gallery of historical figures who had achieved greatness in their youth, including Charlemagne, Napoleon, Lafayette, Mozart, Newton, and, of course, Whig leader Henry Clay himself. Seward anticipated victory until the final votes were tallied over a three-day period in November 1834.
Defeat shook the usually buoyant Seward to the core. He began to reevaluate his present life, his marriage, and his future. Obliged to return to Albany that December for the final session of the state senate, where he was a lame duck, he fell into an uncharacteristic state of melancholy. Unable to sleep, Seward feared that his consuming ambition, which had kept him away from his wife and children for months, had jeopardized his marriage.
“What a demon is this ambition,” he lamented from Albany, baring his soul in a long, emotional letter to his wife. Ambition had led him to stray, he now realized, “in thought, purpose, communion and sympathy from the only being who purely loves me.” He confessed that he had thought her love only “an incident” among his many passions, when, in truth, it was “the chief good” of his life. This realization, he feared, had come too late “to win back” her love: “I banished you from my heart. I made it so desolate, so destitute of sympathy for you, of everything which you ought to have found there, that you could no longer dwell in it, and when the wretched T. [Tracy] took advantage of my madness and offered sympathies, and feelings and love such as I [never did], and your expelled heart was half won by his falsehoods…. God be praised for the escape of both of us from that fearful peril…. Loved, injured and angel spirit, receive this homage of my first return to reason and truth—say to me that understanding my own feelings, yours are not crushed.”
Failing to receive an immediate reply from Frances, Seward tossed in his bed. He felt cold, clammy, and feverish. For the first time, the possibility occurred to him that his wife might have fallen out of love, and he was horrified. “I am growing womanish in fears,” he admitted in a second heartfelt letter. “Tell me in your own dear way that I am loved and cherished in your heart as I used to be when I better deserved so happy a lot.”
Finally, Seward received the answer he longed to hear. “You reproach yourself dear Henry with too much severity,” Frances wrote. “Never in those times when I have wept the most bitterly over the decay of my young dreams…have I thought you otherwise than good and kind…. When I realized most forcibly that ‘love is the whole history of woman and but an episode in the life of man’…even then I imputed it not to you as a fault but reproached myself for wishing to exact a return for affections which I felt were too intense.” She assured him that “the love of another” could never bring her “consolation”—God had kept her “in the right path.”
By return mail Seward pledged that he desired nothing but to return home, to share the family duties and read by the fireside on the long winter nights, “to live for you and for our dear boys,” to be “a partner in your thoughts and cares and feelings.” With Frances to support him, Seward promised to renew his Episcopal faith and attempt to find his way to God. He was “count[ing] with eagerness,” he concluded, “the hours which intervene between this period and the time when that life will commence.”
As Seward took leave of the many friends he had made in his four years in Albany, he decided against confronting Tracy. The day before his scheduled departure, however, a curious letter from his old friend provoked an immediate response. The letter opened with halcyon recollections of the early days of their acquaintance, when Tracy still possessed “golden dreams, of a devoted, peculiar friendship. How much I suffered,” he wrote, “when I was first awakened to the perception that these were only dreams…. For this you are no way responsible. You loved me as much as you could…but it was less far less than I hoped.” He explained that “this pain, this disappointment is my excuse for the capriciousness, and too frequent unkindness which I have displayed towards you.”
In an emotional reply, Seward explained that Tracy misunderstood completely the nature of the “alienation” that had befallen them. “Availing yourself of the relation existing between us,” Seward charged, “you did with or without premeditated purpose what as a man of honor you ought not to have done—pursued a course of conduct which but for the virtue and firmness of the being dearest to me” would have destroyed his entire family. Seward related his initial reluctance to read the letters Frances had surrendered to him; and his conclusion, after reading them, that Tracy “had failed to do me the injury you recklessly contemplated.
“Thenceforth Tracy,” he wrote, “you lost that magic influence you once possessed over me…. You still have my respect as a man of eminent talents and of much virtue but you can never again be the friend of my secret thoughts. I part without anger, but without affection.” Even at this heavy moment, Seward remained the consummate politician, unwilling to burn his bridges completely.
If Seward believed the crisis with Frances had forever muted the voice of his public ambitions with a contented domesticity, he was mistaken. No sooner had he returned to Auburn than he admitted to a friend: “It is seldom that persons who enjoy intervals of public life are happy in their periods of seclusion.” Within days, he was writing to Weed, pleading with his old friend and mentor to “keep me informed upon political matters, and take care that I do not so far get absorbed in professional occupation, that you will cease to care for me as a politician.”
In the summer of 1835, seeking distraction from the tedium of his legal practice, the thirty-four-year-old Seward organized a family expedition to the South. He and Frances occupied the backseat of a horse-drawn carriage, while their five-year-old son, Fred, sat up front with the coachman, former slave William Johnson. Their elder son, Gus, remained at home with his grandfather. Seward, as always, was thrilled by the journey. “When I travel,” he explained, “I banish care and thought and reflection.” Over a three-month period, the little party traveled through Pennsylvania and Virginia, stopping at the nation’s capital on their way back. While their letters home extolled the warmth and generous hospitality extended to them by Southerners all along their route, their firsthand encounter with the consequences of slavery profoundly affected their attitudes toward the South.
At the time of their journey, three decades of immigration, commercial enterprise, and industrial production had invigorated Northern society, creating thriving cities and towns. The historian Kenneth Stampp well describes how the North of this period “teemed with bustling, restless men and women who believed passionately in ‘progress’ and equated it with growth and change; the air was filled with the excitement of intellectual ferment and with the schemes of entrepreneurs; and the land was honeycombed with societies aiming at nothing less than the total reform of mankind.”
Yet, crossing into Virginia, the Sewards entered a world virtually unchanged since 1800. “We no longer passed frequent farm-houses, taverns, and shops,” Henry wrote as the family carriage wound its way through Virginia’s Allegheny Mountains, “but our rough road conducted us…[past] low log-huts, the habitations of slaves.” They rarely encountered other travelers, finding instead “a waste, broken tract of land, with here and there an old, decaying habitation.” Seward lamented: “How deeply the curse of slavery is set upon this venerated and storied region of the old dominion. Of all the countries I have seen France only whose energies have for forty years been expended in war and whose population has been more decimated by the sword is as much decayed as Virginia.”
The poverty, neglect, and stagnation Seward surveyed seemed to pervade both the landscape and its inhabitants. Slavery trapped a large portion of the Southern population, preventing upward mobility. Illiteracy rates were high, access to education difficult. While a small planter aristocracy grew rich from holdings in land and slaves, the static Southern economy did not support the creation of a sizable middle class.
While Seward focused on the economic and political depredations of slavery, Frances responded to the human plight of the enslaved men, women, and children she encountered along the journey. “We are told that we see slavery here in its mildest form,” she wrote her sister. But “disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, slavery, thou art a bitter draught.” She could not stop thinking of the “wrongs of this injured race.”
One day Frances stopped the carriage to converse with an old blind slave woman, who was at work “turning the ponderous wheel of a machine” in a yard. The work was hard, but she had to do something, she explained, “and this is all I can do now, I am so old.” When Frances asked about her family, she revealed that her husband and all her children had been sold long ago to different owners and she had never heard from any of them again. This sad encounter left a lasting impression on Frances. She recorded the interview in detail, and later read it out loud to family and friends in Auburn.
A few days afterward, the Sewards came across a group of slave children chained together on the road outside of Richmond. Henry described the sorrowful scene: “Ten naked little boys, between six and twelve years old, tied together, two and two, by their wrists, were all fastened to a long rope, and followed by a tall, gaunt white man, who, with his long lash, whipped up the sad and weary little procession, drove it to the horse-trough to drink, and thence to a shed, where they lay down on the ground and sobbed and moaned themselves to sleep.” The children had been purchased from different plantations that day and were on their way to be auctioned off at Richmond.
Frances could not endure to continue the journey. “Sick of slavery and the South,” she wrote in her diary; “the evil effects constantly coming before me and marring everything.” She begged her husband to cancel the rest of their tour, and he complied. Instead of continuing south to Richmond, they “turned their horses’ heads northward and homeward.” For decades afterward, indelible images of Southern poverty and the misery of enslaved blacks would strengthen Seward’s hostility to slavery and mold Frances’s powerful social conscience.
WHEN SEWARD RETURNED to Auburn, a lucrative opportunity beckoned. The Holland Land Company, which held more than three hundred thousand acres of undeveloped land in western New York, was searching for a manager to parcel the land and negotiate contracts and deeds with prospective settlers. The company offered Seward a multiyear contract with an annual salary of $5,000 plus a share in the profits. Though accepting the position meant he would reside for months at a time in Chautauqua County, more than a hundred miles from his family and home in Auburn, Seward did not hesitate.
He took a leave from his law firm and rented a five-bedroom house in Westfield, “more beautiful than you can have an idea,” hopeful that his wife and family would join him during the summer months. In the meantime, he invited Weed’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Harriet, to keep Frances company in Auburn, and to help with the two boys and their new baby girl, Cornelia, born in August 1836.
Seward soon found the land-developing business more engaging than law. The six young clerks he hired quickly became a surrogate domestic circle, though he assured Frances in his nightly letters that he missed her and his children terribly. Once more he reiterated how he yearned for the day when they would read aloud to each other by the fire. He had just finished and enjoyed three of Scott’s Waverley novels, but “there are a thousand things in them, as in Shakespeare, that one may enjoy more and much longer if one has somebody to converse with while dwelling upon them.” His children pined for him and the vibrant life his presence brought to the household. More than a half century later, his son Fred “so vividly remembered” one particular evening when his father read aloud from the works of Scott and Burns that he realized “it must have been a rare event.”
Life in Westfield, meanwhile, settled into a pleasant routine. So long as Seward kept intact the image of his happy home in Auburn, he could fully immerse himself in new adventure elsewhere. His serenity was shattered when his little girl contracted smallpox and died in January 1837. Returning home for three weeks, he begged Frances, who had plunged into depression, to come back with him to Westfield. She refused to leave her two boys and “did not think it would be quite right to take them both from their Grandpa.”
Back in Westfield, Seward wrote anxiously to Frances that the “lightness that was in all my heart when I thought of you and your sanctuary, and those who surrounded you there, was the main constituent of my cheerfulness.” But now “I imagine you sitting alone, drooping, desponding, and unhappy; and, when I think of you in this condition, I cannot resist the sorrow that swells within me. If I could be with you, to lure you away to more active pursuits, to varied study, or more cheerful thoughts, I might save you for yourself, for your children, for myself.”
The following summer, Frances was finally persuaded to join him in Westfield. In an exultant letter to Weed, Seward expressed his contentment. “Well, I am here for once, enjoying the reality of dreams,” he wrote. “I read much, I ride some, and stroll more along the lake-shore. My wife and children are enjoying a measure of health which enables them to participate in these pleasures.” He lacked but one thing to complete his happiness: “If you were here,” he told Weed, “we would enjoy pleasures that would have seduced Cicero and his philosophic friends from Tusculum.”
While Frances enjoyed her summer, she was unable to share her husband’s great contentment. Returning to Auburn in September, she told Harriet Weed she had “found Westfield a very pleasant little village…but it was not my home and you can very well understand that I am more happy to be here—There is a sort of satisfaction, melancholy it is, in being once more in the room where my darling babe lived and died—in looking over her little wardrobe—in talking with those who missed and loved her.”
By the fall of 1837, an economic slump had spread westward to Chautauqua County. This “panic” of 1837 brought widespread misery in its wake—bankrupt businesses, high unemployment, a run on banks, plummeting real estate values, escalating poverty. “I am almost in despair,” Seward wrote home. “I have to dismiss three clerks; they all seem near to me as children, and are almost as helpless.”
Once again, fortune smiled upon Seward in uncanny fashion. Because Democrats were blamed for the depression, the shrinking economy enlarged his party’s political prospects. In the elections that fall, the Whigs swept the state. “There is such a buzz of ‘glorious Whig victories’ ringing in my ears,” Seward wrote Weed, “that I hardly have time to think.” Replying from Albany, where he was back in control, Weed was jubilant. “I have been two days endeavoring to snatch a moment for communion with you, to whom my heart always turns in joy or grief…. It is a great triumph—an overwhelming revolution. May that Providence which has given us deliverance, give us also wisdom to turn our power into healthful channels.”
In the months that followed, Seward and Weed worked together to broaden the Whig Party beyond its base of merchants, industrialists, and prosperous farmers. Hoping to appeal to the masses of workingmen, who had generally voted Democratic since Andrew Jackson’s day, Weed raised money for a new partisan weekly. Horace Greeley was chosen editor for the fledgling journal. The slight, rumpled-looking, nearsighted young Greeley occupied a garret in New York where he had edited a small magazine called The New Yorker. The new partisan weekly became an instant success, eventually evolving into the powerful New York Tribune. For nearly a quarter of a century, Weed, Seward, and Greeley collaborated to build support first for the Whigs and, later on, for the Republicans. For much of that time, the three were like brothers. If they often quarreled among themselves, they presented a united front to the world.
In the summer of 1838, Weed believed the time was right for Seward’s second bid to become governor. At the Whig convention that September, “the Dictator” was everywhere, persuading one delegate after another that Seward was the strongest possible choice to top the ticket. To bolster his case, he distributed statistics from the 1834 gubernatorial race showing that, despite the Whigs’ loss, Seward had claimed more votes than all the other Whig candidates. Weed’s magic worked: his protégé received the nomination on the fourth ballot. “Well, Seward, we are again embarked upon a ‘sea of difficulties,’ and must go earnestly to work.” In fact, most of the work was left to Weed, since it was thought improper in those days for candidates to stump on their own. And Weed did his job well. When the votes were counted, the thirty-seven-year-old Seward was the overwhelming victor.
Seward was thrilled to be back in the thick of things. “God bless Thurlow Weed!” he exulted. “I owe this result to him.” Within a week of the election, however, Seward’s nerve began to fail. “It is a fearful post I have coveted,” he confided to his mentor. “I shudder at my own temerity, and have lost confidence in my ability to manage my own private affairs.” Frances, pregnant with their third son, Will, had suffered weeks of illness and was nervous about the move to Albany. Confessing that he did not “know how to keep a house alone,” he wondered if he could instead take up rooms at the Eagle Tavern.
Weed arrived in Auburn and immediately took charge. He secured a mansion with a full-time staff for the governor to rent, and convinced Frances to join her husband. The yellow brick house, Seward’s son Fred recalled, “was in all respects well adapted for an official residence.” Set on four acres, it contained a suite of parlors, a ballroom, a spacious dining room, and a library in one wing, with a suite of family rooms in another. While Seward combed through books on history and philosophy, preparing what proved to be a brilliant inaugural message to the legislature, Weed stocked the residence with wine and food, chose Seward’s inaugural outfit, and met with hundreds of office seekers, eventually selecting every member of the governor’s cabinet. Seward believed “it was [his] duty to receive, not make a cabinet.”
During the transition period, Seward’s impulsive remarks often aggravated the ever-cautious Weed. “Your letter admonishes me to a habit of caution that I cannot conveniently adopt,” Seward replied. “I love to write what I think and feel as it comes up.” Nonetheless, Seward generally deferred to Weed, recognizing a superior strategic prudence and experience. “I had no idea that dictators were such amiable creatures,” he told Weed, no doubt provoking the approval of his proud mentor. “There were never two men in politics who worked together or understood each other better,” Weed wrote years later in his memoir. “Neither controlled the other…. One did not always lead, and the other follow. They were friends, in the best, the rarest, and highest sense.”
In later years, Seward told the story of a carriage ride he took from Albany shortly after his election. He had struck up a lively conversation with the coachman, who eventually asked him who he was. When Seward replied that he was governor of New York, the coachman laughed in disbelief. Seward said they had only to consult the proprietor of the next tavern along the road to confirm the truth. When they reached the tavern, Seward went in and asked, “Am I the Governor of the State of New York or not?” The man did not hesitate. “No, certainly not!” “Who is, then?” queried Seward. “Why…Thurlow Weed!” the man replied.
The youthful governor’s inaugural address on New Year’s Day, 1839, laid out an ambitious agenda: a vast expansion of the public school system (including better schools for the black population), the promotion of canals and railways, the creation of a more humane system for the treatment of the insane, and the abolition of imprisonment for debt. His vision of an ever-expanding economy, built on free labor, widespread public education, and technological progress, offered a categorical rejection of the economic and cultural malaise he had witnessed on his Southern trip in 1835.
“Our race is ordained to reach, on this continent, a higher standard of social perfection than it has ever yet attained; and that hence will proceed the spirit which shall renovate the world,” he proclaimed to the New York legislature in the year of his election. If the energy, ingenuity, and ambitions of Northern free labor were “sustained by a wise and magnanimous policy on our part,” Seward promised, “our state, within twenty years, will have no desert places—her commercial ascendancy will fear no rivalry, and a hundred cities will enable her to renew the boast of ancient Crete.”
Looking once more to broaden the appeal of the Whig Party, Seward advocated measures to attract the Irish and German Catholic immigrants who formed the backbone of the state Democratic Party. He called on his fellow Americans to welcome them with “all the sympathy which their misfortunes at home, their condition as strangers here, and their devotion to liberty, ought to excite.” He argued that America owed all the benefits of citizenship to these new arrivals, who helped power the engine of Northern expansion. In particular, he proposed to reform the school system, where the virulently anti-Catholic curriculum frightened immigrants away, dooming vast numbers to illiteracy, poverty, and vice. To get these children off the streets and provide them with opportunities to advance, Seward hoped to divert some part of the public school funds to support parochial schools where children could receive instruction from members of their own faith.
Seward’s school proposal provoked a violent reaction among nativist Protestants. They accused him of plotting “to overthrow republican institutions” by undoing the separation of church and state. Handbills charged that Seward was “in league with the Pope” and schemed to throw Protestant children into the hands of priests. In the end, the legislature passed a compromise plan that simply expanded the public school system. But the nativists, whose strength would grow dramatically in the decades ahead, never forgave Seward. Indeed, their opposition would eventually prove a fatal stumbling block to Seward’s hopes for the presidential nomination in 1860.
If Seward’s progressive policies on education and immigration made him an influential and controversial figure in New York State, his defiant stand against slavery in the “Virginia Case” brought him into national prominence in the late 1830s and early 1840s. In September 1839, a vessel sailing from Norfolk, Virginia, to New York was found to have carried a fugitive slave. The slave was returned to his master in Virginia in compliance with Article IV, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution that persons held to service or labor in one state escaping into another should be delivered up to the owner. When Virginia also demanded the arrest and surrender of three free black seamen who had allegedly conspired to hide the slave on the vessel, the New York governor refused.
In a statement that brought condemnation throughout the South, Seward argued that the seamen were charged with a crime that New York State did not recognize: people were not property, and therefore no crime had been committed. On the contrary, “the universal sentiment of civilized nations” considered helping a slave escape from bondage “not only innocent, but humane and praiseworthy.”
As controversy over the fate of the three sailors was prolonged, the Commonwealth of Virginia enacted a series of retaliatory measures to damage the commerce of New York, calling upon other Southern states to pass resolutions denouncing Seward and the state of New York for “intermeddling” with their time-honored “domestic institutions.” Democratic periodicals in the North warned that the governor’s stance would compromise highly profitable New York trade connections with Virginia and other slave states. Seward was branded “a bigoted New England fanatic.” This only emboldened Seward’s resolve to press the issue. He spurred the Whig-dominated state legislature to pass a series of antislavery laws affirming the rights of black citizens against seizure by Southern agents, guaranteeing a trial by jury for any person so apprehended, and prohibiting New York police officers and jails from involvement in the apprehension of fugitive slaves.
Such divisive incidents—the “new irritation” foreseen by Jefferson in 1820—widened the schism between North and South. Though few slaves actually escaped to the North each year—an estimated one or two hundred out of the millions held in bondage—the issue exacerbated rancor on both sides. In the North, William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, the Liberator, called for immediate emancipation and racial equality, denouncing slavery as sinful and inhumane, advocating “all actions, even in defiance of the Constitution,” to bring an end to “The Empire of Satan.” Such scathing criticisms moved Southern leaders to equally fierce defenses. They proclaimed slavery a “positive good” rather than a mere necessity, of immense benefit to whites and blacks alike. As discord between North and South escalated, many Northerners turned against the abolitionists. Fear that the movement would destroy the Union incited attacks on abolitionist printers in the North and West. Presses were burned, editors threatened with death should their campaign persist.
In 1840, Seward was reelected governor, but by a significantly smaller margin. His dwindling support was blamed on the parochial school controversy, the protracted fight with Virginia, and a waning enthusiasm for social reform. Horace Greeley editorialized that Seward would “henceforth be honored more for the three thousand votes he has lost, considering the causes, than for all he has received in his life.” Nonetheless, Seward decided not to run a third time: “All that can now be worthy of my ambition,” he explained to a friend, “is to leave the State better for my having been here, and to entitle myself to a favorable judgment in its history.”
Throughout the dispute with the state of Virginia, and every other controversy that threatened Seward’s highly successful tenure, Weed had proved a staunch ally and friend, answering critics in the legislature, publishing editorials in the Albany Evening Journal, ever sustaining Seward’s spirits. “What am I to deserve such friendship and affection?” Seward asked him in 1842 as his second term drew to its close. “Without your aid how hopeless would have been my prospect of reaching the elevation from which I am descending. How could I have sustained myself there…how could I have secured the joyous reflections of this hour, what would have been my prospect of future life, but for the confidence I so undenyingly reposed on your affection?”
Returning to Auburn, Seward resumed his law practice, concentrating now on lucrative patent cases. He found that his fight with Virginia had endeared him to antislavery men throughout the North. Members of the new Liberty Party bandied about his name in their search for a presidential candidate in 1844. Organized in 1840, the Liberty Party was born of frustration with the failure of either major party to deal head-on with slavery. The abrogation of slavery was their primary goal. Though flattered by the attention, Seward could not yet conceive of leaving the Whig Party.
Meanwhile, he continued to speak out on behalf of black citizens. In March 1846, a terrifying massacre took place in Seward’s hometown. A twenty-three-year-old black man named William Freeman, recently released from prison after serving five years for a crime it was later determined he did not commit, entered the home of John Van Nest, a wealthy farmer and friend of Seward’s. Armed with two knives, he killed Van Nest, his pregnant wife, their small child, and Mrs. Van Nest’s mother. When he was caught within hours, Freeman immediately confessed. He exhibited no remorse and laughed uncontrollably as he spoke. The sheriff hauled him away, barely reaching the jail ahead of an enraged mob intent upon lynching him. “I trust in the mercy of God that I shall never again be a witness to such an outburst of the spirit of vengeance as I saw while they were carrying the murderer past our door,” Frances Seward told her husband, who was in Albany at the time. “Fortunately, the law triumphed.”
Frances recognized at once an “incomprehensible” aspect to the entire affair, and she was correct. Investigation revealed a history of insanity in Freeman’s family. Moreover, Freeman had suffered a series of floggings in jail that had left him deaf and deranged. When the trial opened, no lawyer was willing to take Freeman’s case. The citizens of Auburn had threatened violence against any member of the bar who dared to defend the cold-blooded murderer. When the court asked, “Will anyone defend this man?” a “death-like stillness pervaded the crowded room,” until Seward rose, his voice strong with emotion, and said, “May it please the court, I shall remain counsel for the prisoner until his death!”
Seward’s friends and family, including Thurlow Weed and Judge Miller, roundly criticized Seward for his decision. Only Frances stood proudly by her husband during the outburst that followed, assuring her sister that “he will do what is right. He will not close his eyes and know that a great wrong is perpetrated.” To her son Gus she noted that “there are few men in America who would have sacrificed so much for the cause of humanity—he has his reward in a quiet conscience and a peaceful mind.” Though her house and children were her entire world, she never flinched when retaliation against Seward’s decision threatened her family. She remained steadfast throughout. Then in her early forties, she was a handsome woman, despite the hard, drawn look imparted by ill health. Over the years she had grown intellectually with her husband, sharing his passion for reading, his reformer’s spirit, and his deep hatred of slavery. Defying her father and her neighbors, she sat in the courtroom each day, her quiet bearing lending strength to her husband.
Seward spent weeks investigating the case, interviewing Freeman’s family, and summoning five doctors who testified to the prisoner’s extreme state of mental illness. In his summation, he pleaded with the jury not to be influenced by the color of the accused man’s skin. “He is still your brother, and mine…. Hold him then to be a man.” Seward continued, “I am not the prisoner’s lawyer…I am the lawyer for society, for mankind, shocked beyond the power of expression, at the scene I have witnessed here of trying a maniac as a malefactor.” He argued that Freeman’s conduct was “unexplainable on any principle of sanity,” and begged the jury not to seek the death sentence. Commit him to an asylum for the term of his natural life, Seward urged: “there is not a white man or white woman who would not have been dismissed long since from the perils of such a prosecution.”
There was never any doubt that the local jury would return a guilty verdict. “In due time, gentlemen of the jury,” Seward concluded, “when I shall have paid the debt of nature, my remains will rest here in your midst, with those of my kindred and neighbors. It is very possible they may be unhonored, neglected, spurned! But, perhaps years hence, when the passion and excitement which now agitate this community shall have passed away, some wandering stranger, some lone exile, some Indian, some negro, may erect over them a humble stone, and thereon this epitaph, ‘He was Faithful!’” More than a century afterward, visitors to Seward’s grave at the Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn would find those very words engraved on his tombstone.
While Seward endured the hostility of his hometown, his defense of Freeman became famous throughout the country. His stirring summation was printed in dozens of newspapers and reprinted in pamphlet form for still wider distribution. Salmon Chase, himself a leading proponent of the black man’s cause, conceded to his abolitionist friend Lewis Tappan that he esteemed Seward as “one of the very first public men of our country. Who but himself would have done what he did for that poor wretch Freeman?” His willingness to represent Freeman, Chase continued, “considering his own personal position & the circumstances, was magnanimous in the highest degree.”
So in the mid-1840s, as Seward settled back into private life in Auburn, his optimism about the future remained intact. He had established a national reputation based upon principle and a vision of national progress. He trusted that when his progressive principles once more gained favor with the masses, he would return to public life.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, like Seward and Bates, was drawn to politics in his early years. At the age of twenty-three, after only six months in New Salem, Illinois, he decided to run for the state legislature from Sangamon County. While it must have seemed next to impossible that a new settler who had just arrived in town with no family connections and little formal education could compete for office, his belief in himself and awareness of his superior intellectual abilities proved to be powerful motivators. Both his ambition and his uncertainty are manifest in the March 1832 statement formally announcing his candidacy on an essentially Whig platform that called for internal improvements, public education, and laws against usury: “Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition,” he wrote. “I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed.”
Lincoln already possessed the lifelong dream he would restate many times in the years that followed—the desire to prove himself worthy, to be held in great regard, to win the veneration and respect of his fellow citizens. “I am young and unknown to many of you,” he continued. “I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or popular relations to recommend me. My case is thrown exclusively upon the independent voters of this county, and if elected they will have conferred a favor upon me, for which I shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate. But if the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.” At the same time he made it clear that this try would not be his last, telling voters that only after being defeated “some 5 or 6 times” would he feel disgraced and “never to try it again.”
His campaign was interrupted when he joined the militia to fight against the Sac and Fox Indians in what became known as the Black Hawk War. Mustered out after three months, he returned home shortly before the election. Not surprisingly, when the votes were tallied, the little-known Lincoln had lost the election. Despite his defeat, he took pride that in his own small town of New Salem, where he “made friends everywhere he went,” he had received 277 of the 300 votes cast. This astonishing level of support was attributed to his good nature and the remarkable gift for telling stories that had made him a favorite of the men who gathered each night in the general store to share opinions and gossip. “This was the only time,” Lincoln later asserted, that he “was ever beaten on a direct vote of the people.” Two years later, he ran for the seat a second time. By then he had widened his set of acquaintances beyond New Salem and won easily, capturing the first of four successive terms in the state legislature. Until he joined the new Republican Party, Lincoln would remain a steadfast Whig—as were Seward, Bates, and, for a brief moment, Chase.
Lincoln’s four successful campaigns for the legislature were conducted across a sparsely populated frontier county the size of Rhode Island. Young Lincoln was “always the centre of the circle where ever he was,” wrote Robert Wilson, a political colleague. “His Stories…were fresh and Sparkling. never tinctured with malevolence.” Though his face, in repose, revealed nothing “marked or Striking,” when animated by a story, “Several wrinkles would diverge from the inner corners of his eyes, and extend down and diagonally across his nose, his eyes would Sparkle, all terminating in an unrestrained Laugh in which every one present willing or unwilling were compelled to take part.” This rapid illumination of Lincoln’s features in conversation would be observed by countless others throughout his entire life, drawing many into his orbit.
During the campaigns, candidates journeyed on horseback across “entirely unoccupied” prairies, speaking at country stores and small villages. “The Speaking would begin in the forenoon,” Wilson recalled, “the candidates Speaking alternately until all who could Speak had his turn, generally consuming the whole afternoon.” Nor were the contests limited to speeches on public issues. At Mr. Kyle’s store, west of Springfield, a group of Democrats made a wager. “‘See here Lincoln, if you can throw this Cannon ball further than we Can, We’ll vote for you.’ Lincoln picked up the large Cannon ball—felt it—swung it around—and around and said, ‘Well, boys if thats all I have to do I’ll get your votes.’” He then proceeded to swing the cannonball “four or Six feet further than any one Could throw it.”
When he moved to Springfield in 1837, Lincoln began to attract the circle of friends and admirers who would play a decisive role in his political ascent. While he worked during the day to build his law practice, evenings would find him in the center of Springfield’s young men, gathered around a fire in Speed’s store to read newspapers, gossip, and engage in philosophical debates. “They came there,” Speed recalled, “because they were sure to find Lincoln,” who never failed to entertain with his remarkable stories. “It was a sort of social club,” Speed observed. Whigs and Democrats alike gathered to discuss the events of the day. Among the members of this “club” were three future U.S. senators: Stephen Douglas, who would become Lincoln’s principal rival; Edward Baker, who would introduce him at his first inaugural and become one of the first casualties of the Civil War; and Orville Browning, who would assist his fight for the presidential nomination.
Throughout his eight years in the state legislature, Lincoln proved an extraordinarily shrewd grassroots politician, working to enlist voter support in the precincts for his party’s candidates. While Seward could concentrate on giving voice to the party platform, relying on Weed to build poll lists and carry voters to the polls, Lincoln engaged in every aspect of the political process, from the most visionary to the most mundane. His experience taught him what every party boss has understood through the ages: the practical machinery of the party organization—the distribution of ballots, the checklists, the rounding up of voters—was as crucial as the broad ideology laid out in the platform. The same intimate involvement in campaign organization that he displayed in these early years would characterize all of Lincoln’s future campaigns.
His 1840 campaign plan divided the party organization into three levels of command. The county captain was “to procure from the poll-books a separate list for each Precinct” of everyone who had previously voted the Whig slate. The list would then be divided by each precinct captain “into Sections of ten who reside most convenient to each other.” The captain of each section would then be responsible to “see each man of his Section face to face, and procure his pledge…[to] vote as early on the day as possible.”
That same year, Lincoln and four Whig colleagues, including Joshua Speed, published a circular directed at the presidential campaign of William Henry Harrison. “Our intention is to organize the whole State, so that every Whig can be brought to the polls.” To this end, the publication outlined a plan whereby each county would be divided into small districts, each responsible for making “a perfect list” of all their voters, designating which names were likely from past behavior to vote with the Whigs and which were doubtful. Committees in each district would then “keep a constant watch on the doubtful voters, and from time to time have them talked to by those in whom they have the most confidence.” These committees were to submit monthly progress reports to the central state committee, ensuring an accurate survey of voters in each county before election day. Party workers could then be dispatched to round up the right voters and get them to the polls to support the Whig Party. In setting forth his campaign plan, as meticulously structured as any modern effort to “get out the vote,” Lincoln did not neglect the necessity of fund-raising, asking each county to send “fifty or one hundred dollars” to subscribe to a newspaper “devoted exclusively to the great cause in which we are engaged.”
LINCOLN LIKENED his politics to an “old womans dance”—“Short & Sweet.” He stood for three simple ideas: a national bank, a protective tariff, and a system for internal improvements. A state legislator could do little to promote a national bank or raise tariffs, but internal improvements, which then usually meant the improvement of roads, rivers, harbors, and railways, were largely a local matter. Many Whigs, Seward and Bates among them, spoke of improving waterways, but Lincoln had actually worked on a flatboat to bring meat and grain down the Mississippi to New Orleans; he had a flatboatman’s knowledge of the hazards posed by debris and logs while navigating the Sangamon River. Nor would he ever forget the thrill of receiving his first dollar for transporting two gentlemen on his flatboat from the riverbank to their steamer, which was anchored “in the middle of the river.” The experience of earning two half dollars in a single day made the world seem “wider and fairer,” giving him confidence in the future.
Lincoln knew firsthand the deprivations, the marginal livelihood of the subsistence farmer unable to bring produce to market without dependable roads. He had been paid the meager wages of the hired hand. Primitive roads, clogged waterways, lack of rail connections, inadequate schools—such were not merely issues to Lincoln, but hurdles he had worked all his life to overcome in order to earn an ampler share of freedom. These “improvements” to the infrastructure would enable thousands of farming families to emerge from the kind of poverty in which the Lincoln family had been trapped, and would permit new cities and towns to flourish.
Lincoln’s dedication to internal improvements and economic development was given strength, nourishment, and power, so the historian Gabor Boritt persuasively argues, by his passionate commitment “to the ideal that all men should receive a full, good, and ever increasing reward for their labors so they might have the opportunity to rise in life.” Economic development provided the basis, Lincoln said much later, that would allow every American “an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” To Lincoln’s mind, the fundamental test of a democracy was its capacity to “elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all.” A real democracy would be a meritocracy where those born in the lower ranks could rise as far as their natural talents and discipline might take them.
Young Lincoln’s great ambition in the 1830s, he told Joshua Speed, was to be the “DeWitt Clinton of Illinois.” The pioneering New York governor had opened opportunities for all New Yorkers and left a permanent imprint on his state when he persuaded the legislature to support the Erie Canal project. In the Illinois legislature, Lincoln hoped to leave a similar imprint by way of an ambitious program of internal improvements.
During these same years, the young state legislator made his first public statement on slavery. The rise of abolitionism in the North and the actions of governors, such as Seward, who refused to fully respect fugitive slave provisions in the Constitution, led legislatures in both South and North to pass resolutions that censured abolitionism and confirmed the constitutional right to slavery. In conservative Illinois, populated by many citizens of Southern birth, the general assembly fell in line. By the lopsided vote of 77–6, the assembly resolved that “we highly disapprove of the formation of abolition societies,” hold “sacred” the “right of property in slaves,” and believe that “the General Government cannot abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, against the consent of the citizens.”
Lincoln was among the six dissenting voices. With one other colleague who had also voted against the resolution, he issued a formal protest. This protest did not endorse abolitionism, for Lincoln believed then, as later, that the Constitution did not give Congress the power to interfere with slavery in the states where it was already established. Instead, resisting the tide of public opinion in Illinois, Lincoln proclaimed that “the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy,” and affirmed the constitutional power of Congress to abolish slavery in areas under federal control, such as the District of Columbia, though he recommended “that that power ought not to be exercised unless at the request of the people of said District.”
Lincoln always believed, he later said, that “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” and he could not remember when he did not “so think, and feel.” Though he was born in the slave state of Kentucky, his parents had been antislavery. Their opposition had led them to change religious congregations, and eventually, they had moved to the free state of Indiana “partly on account of slavery.” Decades later, in his short autobiography written for the 1860 presidential campaign, Lincoln would describe his protest in the Illinois legislature as one that “briefly defined his position on the slavery question; and so far as it goes, it was then the same that it is now.”
In these early years, however, Lincoln paid the slavery issue less attention than Seward or Chase, believing that so long as slavery could be restricted to places where it already existed, it would gradually become extinct. He did not share Chase’s professional and personal aversion to slaveowners and did not hesitate to take whatever clients came his way. In the course of his practice, Lincoln defended both slaveowners and fugitive slaves. While he hated to see fugitive slaves hunted down, he publicly criticized the governor of Maine when he, like Seward, refused to give up two men who had aided a fugitive slave from Georgia. For Lincoln, the constitutional requirements for the return of fugitive slaves could not be evaded.
Lincoln’s dreams of becoming the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois collapsed when a sustained recession hit the state in 1837. Public sentiment turned against the costly and still-unfinished internal improvements system. For months, Lincoln fervently defended the system against the rising tide of criticism, likening the abandonment of the canal to “stopping a skift in the middle of a river—if it was not going up, it would go down.” Although his arguments fell on deaf ears, he refused to give ground, abiding by his father’s old maxim: “If you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter.” His unwillingness to abandon the policies he had championed became self-destructive stubbornness. By 1840, the fourth year of recession, the mood in the legislature was set against continuing these projects. With funds no longer forthcoming, the improvements system collapsed. The state bank was forced to liquidate. Land values fell precipitously, and new pioneers were deterred from emigrating to Illinois.
As a vocal proponent of the system that had aggravated the state’s fiscal catastrophe, Lincoln received a significant share of the blame. Though he managed to win a fourth term in 1840, he polled the least number of votes among the victorious candidates, his poorest showing since his first election. Belief in himself and his progressive agenda shaken, he resolved to retire from the legislature after his term was completed.
THIS FAILURE of Lincoln’s political ambition coincided with a series of crises in his personal life. Despite his humor, intellectual passion, and oratorical eloquence, he had always been awkward and self-conscious in the presence of women. “He was not very fond of girls,” his stepmother remembered. His gangly appearance and uncouth behavior did little to recommend him to the ladies. “He would burst into a ball,” recalled a friend, “with his big heavy Conestoga boots on, and exclaim aloud—‘Oh—boys, how clean those girls look.’” This was undoubtedly not the compliment the girls were looking for. Lincoln’s friend Henry Whitney provides a comic recollection of leaving Lincoln alone with some women at a social gathering and returning to discover him “as demoralized and ill at ease as a bashful country boy. He would put his arms behind him, and bring them to the front again, as if trying to hide them, and he tried apparently but in vain to get his long legs out of sight.” His female friendships were confined mostly to older, safely married women.
Never at ease talking with women, Lincoln found writing to them equally awkward, “a business which I do not understand.” In Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic poem John Brown’s Body, Lincoln expresses his difficulties with the fairer sex.
…when the genius of the water moves,
And that’s the woman’s genius, I’m at sea
In every sense and meaning of the word,
With nothing but old patience for my chart,
And patience doesn’t always please a woman.
His awkwardness did not imply a lack of sexual desire. “Lincoln had terribly strong passions for women—could scarcely keep his hands off them,” said his law partner, William Herndon, who added that his “honor and a strong will…enabled him to put out the fires of his terrible passion.” Judge David Davis, Lincoln’s companion on the circuit, agreed with this assessment, noting that “his Conscience Kept him from seduction—this saved many—many a woman.” Before his marriage Lincoln enjoyed close relations with young women and almost certainly found outlets for his sexual urges among the prostitutes who were readily available on the frontier.
A year after Ann Rutledge’s death, Lincoln courted Mary Owens, the sister of his friend Mrs. Elizabeth Abell. Mary Owens was said to be “handsome,” with dark blue eyes and “much vivacity.” Well educated, she hailed from a comfortably affluent family in Kentucky and was noted as “a good conversationalist and a splendid reader.”
Lincoln had met Miss Owens several years earlier when she visited her sister for a month in New Salem. In the aftermath of Ann Rutledge’s death, Elizabeth Abell told Lincoln she thought the young pair would make a good match and proposed going to Kentucky to bring her sister back. Lincoln was “confoundedly well pleased” with the idea. He remembered that she was likable, smart, and a good companion, although somewhat “oversize.”
When the twenty-eight-year-old Mary Owens returned to Illinois, however, a disturbing transformation had taken place. “She now appeared,” he later wrote, with perhaps some exaggeration, “a fair match for Falstaff,” with a “want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance,” and a size unattainable in “less than thirtyfive or forty years.” He tried in vain to persuade himself “that the mind was much more to be valued than the person.” He attempted “to imagine she was handsome, which, but for her unfortunate corpulency, was actually true.” He conjured up ways he “might procrastinate the evil day” when he had to make good on his promise of marriage, but finally felt honor-bound to keep his word.
His proposal, written on May 7, 1837, may well be one of the most curiously unappealing ever penned. “This thing of living in Springfield is rather a dull business after all,” he observed of the dismal life she might share. “I am afraid you would not be satisfied. There is a great deal of flourishing about in carriages here, which it would be your doom to see without shareing in it. You would have to be poor without the means of hiding your poverty. Do you believe you could bear that patiently?…What I have said I will most positively abide by, provided you wish it. My opinion is that you had better not do it. You have not been accustomed to hardship, and it may be more severe than you now immagine. Yours, &c.—Lincoln.”
Not surprisingly, Mary Owens turned him down. Her rejection prompted Lincoln to write a humorous, self-deprecating letter to his friend Eliza Browning, Orville Browning’s wife. He acknowledged that he was “mortified almost beyond endurance” to think that “she whom I had taught myself to believe no body else would have, had actually rejected me with all my fancied greatness; and to cap the whole, I then, for the first time, began to suspect that I was really a little in love with her.” He resolved “never again to think of marrying; and for this reason; I can never be satisfied with any one who would be block-head enough to have me.”
Despite his disclaimer, eighteen months later, the thirty-one-year-old Lincoln became engaged to the lively and intelligent Mary Todd. The Edwards mansion on the hill, where Mary had come to stay with her sister, Elizabeth, was the center of Springfield society. Lincoln was among the many young men who gathered in the Edwards parlor, where the girls, dressed in the latest fashion, shared food, drink, and merry conversation.
To their friends and relatives, Mary and Abe seemed “the exact reverse” of each other—“physically, temperamentally, emotionally.” She was short and voluptuous, her ample bosom accentuated by stays; he was uncommonly tall and cadaverous. While Mary possessed an open, passionate, and impulsive nature, “her face an index to every passing emotion,” he was, even Mary admitted, a self-controlled man. What “he felt most deeply,” Mary observed, “he expressed, the least.” She was in her element at social gatherings, “the very creature of excitement.” Vivacious and talkative, she was capable of making “a Bishop forget his prayers.” While Lincoln’s good nature made him “a welcome guest everywhere,” one Springfield woman recalled, “he rarely danced,” much preferring a position amid the men he could entertain effortlessly with his amusing stories.
For all their differences, the couple had much in common. Lincoln had always been attracted to intelligent women, and Mary was a woman of intellectual gifts who had earned “the highest marks” in school and taken home “the biggest prizes.” Endowed with an excellent memory, a quick wit, and a voracious appetite for learning, she shared Lincoln’s love for discussing books and poetry. Like Lincoln, she could recite substantial passages of poetry from memory, and they shared a love of Robert Burns. Indeed, four years after Lincoln’s death, Mary journeyed to the poet’s birthplace in Scotland, where, recalling one of her favorite poems about a lost love, she “sighed over poor ‘Highland Mary’s’ grave.”
Also, like Lincoln, she was fascinated by politics, having grown up in a political household. Among her happiest childhood memories were the sparkling dinner parties at her elegant brick house in Lexington, hosted by her father, Robert Todd, a Whig loyalist who had served in both the Kentucky House and Senate. At these sumptuous feasts, Lincoln’s idol Henry Clay was a frequent guest, along with members of Congress, cabinet members, governors, and foreign ministers. Mesmerized by their discussions, Mary became, her sisters recalled, “a violent little Whig,” convinced that she was “destined to be the wife of some future President.”
Undoubtedly, Mary told Lincoln of her many personal contacts with Clay, including how she once proudly rode her new pony to the statesman’s house. And she shared with him a vital interest in the political struggles of the day. “I suppose like the rest of us Whigs,” she wrote a close friend in 1840, “you have been rejoicing in the recent election of Gen [William Henry] Harrison, a cause that has excited such deep interest in the nation and one of such vital importance to our prosperity—This fall I became quite a politician, rather an unladylike profession, yet at such a crisis, whose heart could remain untouched while the energies of all were called in question?” Lincoln was deeply engaged at the same time in “the great cause” of electing the “Old hero.”
Beyond their love of poetry and politics, Mary and Abraham had both lost their mothers at an early age. Mary was only six when her thirty-one-year-old mother, Eliza Parker Todd, died giving birth to her seventh child. Eliza’s death, unlike the death of Nancy Hanks, did not disrupt the physical stability of the household. The Todd slaves continued to cook the meals, care for the children, fetch the wood, bank the fires, and drive the carriages as they had always done. If Lincoln was fortunate in his father’s choice of a second wife, however, Mary’s loss was aggravated by her father’s remarriage. Elizabeth Humphreys, a severe stepmother with cold blue eyes, gave birth to nine additional children, openly preferring her brood of Todds to the original clan. From the moment her stepmother moved in, Mary later recalled, her childhood turned “desolate.” Henceforth, she lamented, her only real home was the boarding school to which she was exiled at the age of fourteen.
This estrangement, combined with a family history of mental instability and a tendency toward severe migraines, produced in Mary what one friend described as “an emotional temperament much like an April day, sunning all over with laughter one moment, the next crying as though her heart would break.” She could be affectionate, generous, and optimistic one day; vengeful, depressed, and irritable the next. In the colloquial language of her friends, she was “either in the garret or cellar.” In either mood, she needed attention, something the self-contained Lincoln was not always able to provide.
As their courtship proceeded, the very qualities that had first attracted the couple to each other may have become sources of conflict. Initially drawn to Mary by her ability to command any gathering with her intense energy, Lincoln may well have determined that this reflected a tiresome and compulsive need. Mary may have come to define Lincoln’s patience and objectivity as aloofness and inconsiderateness. We know only that at some point in the winter of 1840–41, as they approached marriage, a break occurred in their relationship.
While the inner lives of men and women living long ago are never easy to recover, the difficulty is compounded here by the absence of intimate letters between Mary and Abraham. Seward, Chase, and Bates disclosed their deepest feelings in their diaries and letters, but not a single letter survives from the days of the Lincolns’ courtship, and only a precious few remain from the years of their marriage. While the emotional lives of Lincoln’s rivals still seem alive to us more than a century and a half after their deaths, the truth about Lincoln’s courtship is harder to recapture. Inevitably, in the vacuum created by the absence of documents, gossip and speculation flourish.
Mary may have precipitated the break, influenced by the objections of her sister, Elizabeth, and her brother-in-law, Ninian Edwards, who believed she was marrying beneath her. Elizabeth warned Mary that she did not think that “Mr. L. & [she] were Suitable to Each other.” The couple considered that Mary and Abraham’s “natures, mind—Education—raising &c were So different they Could not live happy as husband & wife.” Mary had other suitors, including Edwin Webb, a well-to-do widower; Stephen Douglas, the up-and-coming Democratic politician; and, as Mary wrote her friend, Mercy Ann Levering, “an agreeable lawyer & grandson of Patrick Henry—what an honor!” Still, she insisted, “I love him not, & my hand will never be given, where my heart is not.” With several good men to choose from, Mary may have decided she needed time to think through her family’s pointed reservations about Lincoln.
Far more likely, Lincoln’s own misgivings prompted a retreat from this second engagement. Though physically attracted to Mary, he seemed to question the strength of his love for her as he approached a final commitment. Joshua Speed recalled that “in the winter of 40 & 41,” Lincoln “was very unhappy about his engagement to [Mary]—Not being entirely satisfied that his heart was going with his hand.” Speed’s choice of the same phrase that Mary used suggests that it must have been a common expression to indicate an embrace of marriage without the proper romantic feelings. “How much [Lincoln] suffered,” Speed recalled, “none Know so well as myself—He disclosed his whole heart to me.”
Recent scholarship has suggested that Lincoln’s change of heart was influenced by his affection for Ninian Edwards’s cousin Matilda Edwards, who had come to spend the winter in Springfield. “A lovelier girl I never saw,” Mary herself conceded upon first meeting Matilda. Orville Browning traced Lincoln’s “aberration of mind” to the predicament in which he found himself: “engaged to Miss Todd, and in love with Miss Edwards, and his conscience troubled him dreadfully for the supposed injustice he had done, and the supposed violation of his word.” While there is no evidence that Lincoln ever made his feelings known to Matilda, Browning’s observation is supported by an acquaintance’s letter describing the complicated situation. Though Lincoln was committed to Mary, Springfield resident Jane Bell observed, he could “never bear to leave Miss Edward’s side in company.” He thought her so perfect that if “he had it in his power he would not have one feature in her face altered.” His indiscreet behavior drew criticism from his friends, Bell claimed, who “thought he was acting very wrong and very imprudently and told him so and he went crazy on the strength of it.”
Possibly, Lincoln’s infatuation with Matilda was merely a distraction from the anxiety surrounding his impending marriage to Mary. According to Elizabeth Edwards, Lincoln was apprehensive about “his ability and Capacity to please and support a wife,” and doubtful about the institution of marriage itself. He likely feared that a wife and family would undermine his concentration and purpose. He would be responsible for the life and happiness of a woman accustomed to wealth and luxury; he would be unable to read late into the nights, pursuing new knowledge and the mastery of law and politics.
His fear that marriage might hinder his career was a common one. The uncertainties of establishing a legal practice in the new-market economy of the mid-nineteenth century caused many young lawyers to delay wedlock, driving up the marriage age. The Harvard law professor Joseph Story is famously quoted as saying that the law “is a jealous mistress, and requires a long and constant courtship.” What applied to the law applied still more to politics. For Lincoln, struggling to establish himself in both, marriage must have presented pitfalls for his enormous ambitions.
Lincoln drafted a letter to Mary ending the engagement. He asked Speed to deliver it, but Speed refused, warning that he should talk to her instead, for “once put your words in writing and they Stand as a living & eternal Monument against you.” Lincoln did go to see Mary and, according to Speed, told her that he did not love her. As soon as she began to weep, he lost his nerve. “To tell you the truth Speed, it was too much for me. I found the tears trickling down my own cheeks. I caught her in my arms and kissed her.” The engagement was temporarily renewed, and Lincoln was forced into another meeting to sever the engagement. This second confrontation left him devastated—both because he had hurt Mary and because he had long held his “ability to keep [his] resolves when they are made…as the only, or at least the chief, gem of [his] character.”
DURING THIS GRIM WINTER, sorrows came to Lincoln “not single spies/But in battalions.” Joshua Speed announced his intention to return in a few months’ time to his family’s plantation in Louisville, Kentucky. Speed’s father had died, and he felt responsible for his grieving mother. On January 1, 1841, he sold his interest in the general store where he had lived and worked for seven years. Speed’s departure would bring an end to the pleasant evenings around the fireplace, where the young men of Springfield had gathered to discuss politics. More discouraging for Lincoln, Speed’s departure meant the loss of the one friend to whom he had opened his heart in free and easy communion. “I shall be verry lonesome without you,” Lincoln told Speed. “How miserably things seem to be arranged in this world. If we have no friends, we have no pleasure; and if we have them, we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained by the loss.”
The awkward dissolution of his engagement to Mary and the anticipated loss of his best friend combined with the collapse of the internal improvement projects and the consequent damage to his reputation to induce a state of mourning that deepened for weeks. He stopped attending the legislature and withdrew from the lively social life he had enjoyed. His friends worried that he was suicidal. According to Speed, “Lincoln went Crazy—had to remove razors from his room—take away all Knives and other such dangerous things—&c—it was terrible.” He was “delirious to the extent of not knowing what he was doing,” Orville Browning recalled, and for a period of time was incapable of talking coherently. “Poor L!” James Conkling wrote to his future wife, Mercy Ann Levering; “he is reduced and emaciated in appearance and seems scarcely to possess strength enough to speak above a whisper. His case at present is truly deplorable.”
In Lincoln’s time, this combination of symptoms—feelings of hopelessness and listlessness, thoughts of death and suicide—was called hypochondriasis (“the hypo”) or “the vapours.” Its source was thought to be in the hypochondria, that portion of the abdomen which was then considered the seat of emotions, containing the liver, gallbladder, and spleen. Treatment for the liver and digestive system was recommended.
“I have, within the last few days, been making a most discreditable exhibition of myself in the way of hypochondriaism,” Lincoln confessed to his law partner and friend John Stuart on January 20, 1841. Desperately, he sought a post office job for Dr. Anson Henry, who would leave Springfield if the job did not materialize. His presence, Lincoln told Stuart, was “necessary to my existence.”
Three days later, Lincoln wrote Stuart again. “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.”
Hoping medical treatment might assuage his sorrow, Lincoln consulted not only Dr. Henry but Dr. Daniel Drake at the medical college in Cincinnati; Drake was perhaps the most eminent medical scientist in the West. Lincoln described his condition at length in a letter and asked for counsel. The doctor wisely replied that he could not offer a diagnosis for Lincoln “without a personal interview.”
Throughout the nadir of Lincoln’s depression, Speed stayed at his friend’s side. In a conversation both men would remember as long as they lived, Speed warned Lincoln that if he did not rally, he would most certainly die. Lincoln replied that he was more than willing to die, but that he had “done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived, and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man was what he desired to live for.”
Even in this moment of despair, the strength of Lincoln’s desire to engrave his name in history carried him forward. Like the ancient Greeks, Lincoln seemed to believe that “ideas of a person’s worth are tied to the way others, both contemporaries and future generations, perceive him.” Unable to find comfort in the idea of a literal afterlife in heaven, he found consolation in the conviction that in the memories of others, some part of us remains alive. “To see memory as the essence of life came naturally to Lincoln,” Robert Bruce observes, for he was a man who “seemed to live most intensely through the process of thought, the expression of thought, and the exchange of thought with others.” Indeed, in a poem inspired by a visit to his childhood home, Lincoln emphasized the centrality of memory, which he described as “thou midway world/’Twixt Earth and paradise.”
Fueled by his resilience, conviction, and strength of will, Lincoln gradually recovered from his depression. He understood, he told Speed later, that in times of anxiety it is critical to “avoid being idle,” that “business and conversation of friends” were necessary to give the mind “rest from that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea threadbare and turn it to the bitterness of death.” He returned to his law practice and his duties in the legislature, resuming his work on behalf of the Whig Party. That summer of 1841, he remedied the absence of good conversation and intimate friendship with a monthlong visit to Speed in Kentucky. The following February, he delivered an eloquent address to a temperance society in Springfield. This speech not only revealed a man in full command of his powers; it illustrated Lincoln’s masterful approach to leadership: he counseled temperance advocates that if they continued to denounce the dram seller and the drinker in “thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,” nothing would be accomplished. Far better to employ the approach of “erring man to an erring brother,” guided by the old adage that a “drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.”
Mental health, contemporary psychiatrists tell us, consists of the ability to adapt to the inevitable stresses and misfortunes of life. It does not mean freedom from anxiety and depression, but only the ability to cope with these afflictions in a healthy way. “An outstanding feature of successful adaptation,” writes George Vaillant, “is that it leaves the way open for future growth.” Of course, Abraham Lincoln’s capacity for growth would prove enormous.
In the same month that he delivered his temperance address, Lincoln reported to Speed that he was “quite clear of the hypo” and “even better than I was along in the fall.” So long as he remained unsure of his feelings, however, he kept himself apart from Mary. During the long months of their separation, Mary missed him tremendously. In a letter to a friend she lamented that she had been “much alone of late,” having not seen Lincoln “in the gay world for months.”
She whimsically considered taking up Lyman Trumbull—a former beau of her friend Mercy Ann—a Democrat who was then serving as secretary of state for Illinois. “I feel much disposed in your absence, to lay in my claims, as he is talented & agreeable & sometimescountenances me,” she told Mercy Ann. But in fact, she had no serious desire to take up with someone else, so long as Lincoln remained a possibility. Her patience paid off. During the summer of 1842, after the couple had gone nearly eighteen months without personal contact, mutual friends conspired to bring Mary and Abraham back together.
This time around, thanks in part to the wise counsel Lincoln had provided Speed regarding his friend’s tortured love affair with a young woman he had met in Kentucky, Lincoln recognized in his own forebodings “the worst sort of nonsense.” Learning that Speed was plagued with doubts following his betrothal to Fanny Henning, Lincoln labored to convince him that he truly loved the young woman. The problem, he told Speed, was simply an unrealistic expectation of what love was supposed to be like. Speaking of himself as well, Lincoln rhapsodized: “It is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me, to dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that any thing earthly can realize.” Indeed, Lincoln mused, had he understood his own muddled courtship as well as he understood Speed’s, he might have “sailed through clear.”
His doubts about marriage beginning to fade, he searched for final reassurance from his newly married friend. “‘Are you now, in feeling as well as in judgement, glad you are married as you are?’ From any body but me, this would be an impudent question not to be tolerated; but I know you will pardon it in me. Please answer it quickly as I feel impatient to know.” Assured that his closest friend had survived the ordeal of marriage and was, in fact, very happy, Lincoln summoned the courage to renew his commitment to Mary.
On the evening of November 4, 1842, before a small group of friends and relatives in the parlor of the Edwards mansion, Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd were married. “Nothing new here,” Lincoln wrote a friend a week later, “except my marrying, which to me, is a matter of profound wonder.” Three days short of nine months after the marriage, a son, Robert Todd, was born to the Lincolns, to be followed three years later by a second son, Edward.
LOOKING BACK to the winter of Lincoln’s discontent, there is little doubt that he suffered what would later be called an incapacitating depression. While biographers have rightly looked to the twin losses of Mary Todd and Joshua Speed to explain Lincoln’s descent into depression, less attention has been paid to the blow he must have suffered with the seeming disintegration of the political dreams that had sustained him for so many years. Manifestations of despair after Ann Rutledge’s death had been awful to endure, but this episode was compounded by the shadow of a damaged reputation and diminished hope for the future.
Conscious of his superior powers and the extraordinary reach of his mind and sensibilities, Lincoln had feared from his earliest days that these qualities would never find fulfillment or bring him recognition among his fellows. Periodically, when the distance between his lofty ambition and the reality of his circumstances seemed unbridgeable, he was engulfed by tremendous sadness. If he rarely spoke of his inner feelings, he often expressed emotions through the poetry he admired. Gray’s “Elegy,” which Lincoln quoted in his small autobiography to explain his attitude toward his childhood poverty, asserts that “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” The poet laments a dead young villager of immense but untapped talent. “Here rests his head upon the lap of earth/A youth to fortune and to fame unknown/Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth/And Melancholy marked him for her own.” Lincoln’s life had been a continuing struggle to escape such a destiny. In that troubling winter of 1841, he must have felt, at least for the moment, that his long struggle had been fruitless.
Some students of Lincoln have suggested that he suffered from chronic depression. One confusion in making this designation is the interchangeable use of the terms “sadness,” “melancholy,” and “depression.” To be sure, Lincoln was a melancholy man. “His melancholy dript from him as he walked,” said his law partner, William Herndon, an observation echoed by dozens of others. “No element of Mr. Lincoln’s character was so marked, obvious and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy,” recalled Henry Whitney. “This melancholy was stamped on him while in the period of his gestation. It was part of his nature and could no more be shaken off than he could part with his brains.”
At times Lincoln’s melancholy signaled a withdrawal to the solitude of thought. As a child, he would retreat from others to read. In later life, he would work a problem through in private—whether a proof of Euclidean geometry or the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. Only when he had resolved the problems and issues in his own mind did he display the results of his private meditations. It is little wonder that others saw these withdrawals as evidence of melancholy. Furthermore, the very contours of Lincoln’s face in repose lent him a sorrowful aspect. One observer remarked that “his face was about the saddest I ever looked upon.” Another contemporary described his face as “slightly wrinkled about the brows, but not from trouble. It was intense, constant thought that planted the wrinkles there.”
Unlike depression, melancholy does not have a specific cause. It is an aspect of temperament, perhaps genetically based. One may emerge from the hypo, as Lincoln did, but melancholy is an indelible part of one’s nature. Lincoln understood this: “a tendency to melancholly,” he told Joshua’s sister, Mary, “is a misfortune not a fault.”
“Melancholy,” writes the modern novelist Thomas Pynchon, “is a far richer and more complex ailment than simple depression. There is a generous amplitude of possibility, chances for productive behavior, even what may be identified as a sense of humor.” And, as everyone connected with Lincoln testified, he was an extraordinarily funny man. “When he first came among us,” wrote a Springfield friend, “his wit & humor boiled over.” When he told his humorous stories, Henry Whitney marveled, “he emerged from his cave of gloom and came back, like one awakened from sleep, to the world in which he lived, again.” His storytelling, Speed believed, was “necessary to his very existence—Most men who have been great students such as he was in their hours of idleness have taken to the bottle, to cards or dice—He had no fondness for any of these—Hence he sought relaxation in anecdotes.” Lincoln himself recognized that humor was an essential aspect of his temperament. He laughed, he explained, so he did not weep. He saw laughter as the “joyous, universal evergreen of life.” His stories were intended “to whistle off sadness.”
Modern psychiatry regards humor as probably the most mature and healthy means of adapting to melancholy. “Humor, like hope, permits one to focus upon and to bear what is too terrible to be borne,” writes George Valliant. “Humor can be marvelously therapeutic,” adds another observer. “It can deflate without destroying; it can instruct while it entertains; it saves us from our pretensions; and it provides an outlet for feeling that expressed another way would be corrosive.”
The melancholy stamped on Lincoln’s nature derived in large part from an acute sensitivity to the pains and injustices he perceived in the world. He was uncommonly tenderhearted. He once stopped and tracked back half a mile to rescue a pig caught in a mire—not because he loved the pig, recollected a friend, “just to take a pain out of his own mind.” When his schoolmates tortured turtles by placing hot coals on their backs to see them wriggle, he told them “it was wrong.” He refused to hunt animals, which ran counter to frontier mores. After he had broken with Mary, he wrote that the only thing that kept him from happiness was “the never-absent idea” that he had caused Mary to suffer.
Lincoln’s abhorrence of hurting another was born of more than simple compassion. He possessed extraordinary empathy—the gift or curse of putting himself in the place of another, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires. The philosopher Adam Smith described this faculty: “By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation…we enter as it were into his body and become in some measure him.” This capacity Smith saw as “the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others…by changing places in fancy with the sufferer…we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels.” In a world environed by cruelty and injustice, Lincoln’s remarkable empathy was inevitably a source of pain. His sensibilities were not only acute, they were raw. “With his wealth of sympathy, his conscience, and his unflinching sense of justice, he was predestined to sorrow,” observed Helen Nicolay, whose father would become Lincoln’s private secretary.
Though Lincoln’s empathy was at the root of his melancholy, it would prove an enormous asset to his political career. “His crowning gift of political diagnosis,” suggested Nicolay, “was due to his sympathy…which gave him the power to forecast with uncanny accuracy what his opponents were likely to do.” She described how, after listening to his colleagues talk at a Whig Party caucus, Lincoln would cast off his shawl, rise from his chair, and say: “From your talk, I gather the Democrats will do so and so…I should do so and so to checkmate them.” He proceeded to outline all “the moves for days ahead; making them all so plain that his listeners wondered why they had not seen it that way themselves.” Such capacity to intuit the inward feelings and intentions of others would be manifest throughout his career.
LINCOLN’S FEARS that marriage might hinder his ambitions proved unfounded. He and Mary eventually settled in a comfortable frame house at the corner of Eighth and Jackson, within easy walking distance of his law office. For the first time, he enjoyed the security and warmth of a family circle, without neglecting his devotion to reading, studying, traveling on the legal circuit, and cultivating politics. While the marriage was tumultuous at times, it provided Lincoln with a protected harbor from which he could come and go as he pleased while he continued his lifelong quest to become an educated person.
The adjustment to married life was harder for Mary than for her husband. Raised in a Southern mansion attended by slaves, she had never had to cook a meal, scrub the floor, chop wood, or pump water from the well. Nor, while living with her sister in the finest house in Springfield, had she ever worried about money, or hesitated before inviting friends for dinner parties and receptions. Now she was confronted with the innumerable chores of running a household when the money Lincoln earned barely covered living expenses. Though Lincoln helped with the marketing and the dishes and insisted, even in the leanest years of his practice, that she hire a maid to help with the children, most household tasks fell on Mary’s shoulders.
Certainly such “hardships” were not shared by the wives of Lincoln’s later rivals. When Julia Coalter married Edward Bates, her husband had upward of twenty slaves to nurse the children, clean the house, plant the vegetables, cook the meals, and drive the carriages. After Bates emancipated his slaves in the 1850s, several remained with the family as freedmen and women, while additional servants were found among the Irish and German immigrants in St. Louis. For Frances Seward, there was never a time when she was left alone to handle household chores. When she and Seward agreed to live in her father’s Auburn estate, she inherited the faithful servants who had worked in the big house for decades. As governor, Seward was supplied with an experienced staff of household servants; while in Washington, he maintained a live-in staff to accommodate and entertain the endless stream of guests at dinner parties and receptions. When Frances suffered from migraine headaches, she could take to her bed without worrying that the domestic work would be left undone.
It was not simply Mary’s relative poverty that made her early married life difficult. Both she and Lincoln had essentially detached themselves from their previous lives, cutting themselves off from parents and relatives and thereby creating a domestic lifestyle closer to the “nuclear family” of a later age than the extended family still common in the mid-nineteenth century. When Lincoln was away, Mary was left alone to deal with her terror of thunderstorms, her worries over the children’s illnesses, and her spells of depression. Too proud to let her Springfield sisters know the difficulties she faced in these early years—particularly after the disapproval they had voiced over her choice of husband—Mary struggled stoically and proudly on her own.
Once again, her isolation stands in stark contrast to the familial support enjoyed by Frances Seward and Julia Bates. Frances could depend on the companionship not only of her widowed father but of three generations of women living in the same household—her favorite aunt, Cornelia; her sister and closest friend, Lazette, who spent months at a time in the Auburn house; and her beloved daughter, Fanny. Likewise, Julia Bates was surrounded by her children, several of whom continued to live with the family even after they married; and by her parents; her sisters; her brothers; and her husband’s mother, all of whom lived nearby.
If Mary’s solitary life with her husband brought hardship, the birth of two sons within the first forty months of their marriage brought great happiness. Both boys were high-spirited, intelligent, and dearly loved by their parents. In later years, Mary proudly noted that Lincoln was “the kindest—most tender and loving husband & father in the world…. Said to me always when I asked him for any thing—You know what you want—go and get it. He never asked me if it was necessary.”
He was, by all accounts, a gentle and indulgent father who regularly took the boys on walks around the neighborhood, played with them in the house, and brought them to his office while he worked. While Herndon believed that Lincoln was too indulgent, that the children “litterally ran over him,” leaving him “powerless to withstand their importunities,” Lincoln maintained that children should be allowed to grow up without a battery of rules and restrictions. “It is my pleasure that my children are free—happy and unrestrained by paternal tyrrany,” Mary recalled his saying. “Love is the chain whereby to lock a child to its parent.”
WHEN, AT LAST, Illinois began to emerge from recession, Lincoln’s hopes for a future in politics revived. “Now if you should hear any one say that Lincoln don’t want to go to Congress,” he wrote a friend three months after his marriage, “tell him…he is mistaken.” His objective was the Seventh Congressional District—including Sangamon County—where the Whigs had a majority in a state that was otherwise solidly Democratic.
Lincoln’s first goal was to win the endorsement of the Sangamon County Convention, which would appoint delegates to the congressional district nominating convention. The convention system had just been adopted by the Whigs to unify party members in the general election. “That ‘union is strength’ is a truth that has been known, illustrated and declared, in various ways and forms in all ages of the world,” said Lincoln in support of the new system, pointing out that “he whose wisdom surpasses that of all philosophers, has declared that ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand.’” Much later, of course, he would famously widen the application of this same biblical phrase beyond Sangamon County Whigs to the nation as a whole.
Lincoln’s adversary in his home county was Edward Baker, a close friend after whom he named his second-born son. Despite a vigorous campaign, Lincoln fell short by a narrow margin. “We had a meeting of the whigs of the county here on last monday to appoint delegates to a district convention,” Lincoln reported to Speed, “and Baker beat me & got the delegation instructed to go for him.” Having been chosen a delegate himself, Lincoln ruefully remarked, “I shall be ‘fixed’ a good deal like a fellow who is made groomsman to the man what has cut him out, and is marrying his own dear ‘gal.’”
Though bound not to oppose Baker in his own county, Lincoln still harbored a lingering hope that he might be nominated by another county, explaining to a friend in neighboring Menard County that his defeat in Sangamon was partially explained by his marriage into the Todd/Edwards clan. “It would astonish if not amuse, the older citizens of your County who twelve years ago knew me a strange[r], friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flat boat…to learn that I have been put down here as the candidate of pride, wealth, and arristocratic family distinction.”
At the district convention in Pekin, the nomination went neither to Lincoln nor to Baker but to another young lawyer, John Hardin. At this convention, Lincoln successfully introduced a resolution that Baker would be the next candidate for the U.S. Congress, hoping to establish the idea of rotating terms that would later redound to his benefit. Baker was duly elected two years later, but when his term came to an end, Hardin wanted to return to Congress and was unwilling to yield to Lincoln.
Lincoln left nothing to chance in the contest that followed, seeking to prevent Whig papers from supporting Hardin, pressuring friends to influence neutrals in his favor. He asked friends to share the names of those who were against him. He sent letters to influential Whigs in every precinct. He planned “a quiet trip” through several counties, though he warned his friends, “Dont speak of this, or let it relax any of your vigilance.”
His message remained the same throughout the campaign. Hardin and Baker had already served their terms in Congress, and now it was his turn. “That Hardin is talented, energetic, usually generous and magnanimous,” he wrote a supporter, “I have, before this, affirmed to you, and do not now deny. You know that my only argument is that ‘turn about is fair play.’” He wrote a long letter to Hardin, recalling the old understanding, but insisting that if he were “not, (in services done the party, and in capacity to serve in future) near enough your equal, when added to the fact of your having had a turn, to entitle me to the nomination, I scorn it on any and all other grounds.”
Thoroughly outmaneuvered, Hardin withdrew from the contest. Lincoln was nominated, then easily elected to Congress, where the stage had already been set for the debate over the extension of slavery that would dominate the decade to come.
SALMON CHASE TRAVELED a different road to power than his three rivals. For many years he stayed clear of elective politics. “I am not a politician,” he told a friend. “I feel disgusted with party strife and am greatly chagrined on seeing the means to which both parties resort to gain their ends.”
The train of events that led Chase into the political world began in 1836, when James G. Birney, an Ohio abolitionist, began publishing the antislavery weekly Philanthropist, in Cincinnati. The paper’s publication created consternation among Cincinnati’s leading merchants and bankers, most of whom had substantial ties to the Southern plantation market. Adjacent to Kentucky, the state of Ohio depended on trade relations with its slaveholding neighbor to sustain a thriving economy. Birney himself had been a wealthy slaveowner in Kentucky before becoming an abolitionist. As soon as distribution of the Philanthropist commenced, a group of white community leaders, including many of the merchants Chase represented, attempted to close Birney down. When peaceful pressure failed, the group turned to violence.
On a hot summer night in July 1836, an organized mob broke into the shop where the abolitionist weekly was printed, dismantled the press, and tore up the edition that was about to be circulated. Refusing to be driven out, Birney continued to publish. Two weeks later, the mob returned. This time they succeeded in tearing apart the entire office. They threw tables and other equipment from the second-story window and then, to the cheers of the crowd, shoved out the printing press. While the mayor gazed on approvingly and the police were conspicuously absent, the press was hauled through the streets to the river. After it sank, the crowd began to shout for action against Birney himself, calling for the publisher to be tarred and feathered.
Though Chase had yet to take a public stand on the issue of abolition, he was appalled by the violence. Hearing of the mob’s intention to raid the Franklin House where Birney was thought to reside, he raced to the hotel to warn the publisher. As the mob surged forward, Chase braced his arms against the door frame, blocking the hotel’s entrance with his body. Six feet two, with broad shoulders, a massive chest, and a determined set to his jaw, Chase gave the rioters pause. The crowd demanded to know who he was. “Salmon P. Chase,” the young lawyer replied. “You will pay for your actions,” a frustrated member of the mob told him. “I [can] be found at any time,” Chase said. “His voice and commanding presence caught the mood of the mob at just the right time,” his biographer observes. The hour was late and the mob backed off.
The dramatic encounter had a profound effect on Chase. He became a hero in the antislavery community and began to see his future in a different way. In the years that followed, he became a leader in the effort to protect antislavery activists and their organizations. “No man of his time,” the historian Albert Hart argues, “had a stronger conception of the moral issues” involved in the antislavery movement; “none showed greater courage and resolution.” His passionate awakening to the antislavery cause was not surprising, given his receptiveness to religious arguments in favor of emancipation and equality. As time went by, however, Chase could not separate his own ambition from the cause he championed. The most calculating decisions designed to forward his political career were justified by advancement of the cause. His personal defeats would be regarded as setbacks for freedom itself. “By dedicating himself to moral activism,” the historian Stephen Maizlish argues, “Chase could join his passion for personal advancement to the demands of his religious convictions…. ‘Fame’s proud temple’ could be his and he need feel no guilt in its pursuit.”
In 1837, a year after he had faced down the anti-Birney mob, Chase once more lent his support to the abolitionist publisher. He undertook the defense of a light-skinned young slave named Matilda, brought to Ohio on a business trip by a Missouri planter who was both her master and her natural father. While in Ohio, encountering black men and women in a free society, she begged her father to grant her liberty. When he refused, she took matters into her own hand, seeking refuge in Cincinnati’s black community until her father returned to Missouri. She eventually secured employment in Birney’s house, where she remained until she was discovered by a slave catcher and brought before a judge to be remanded to Missouri under the Fugitive Slave Law enacted by Congress in 1793 to enforce the constitutional provision requiring that slaves escaping from one state to another “be delivered up” to their original owners.
Perhaps Chase could have argued successfully that Matilda was not a fugitive from Missouri, since she had been brought into Ohio by her father. Rather, he chose to make a fundamental assault on the applicability of the Fugitive Slave Law to the free state of Ohio. He argued that as soon as Matilda stepped into Ohio, she acquired the legal right to freedom guaranteed by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which forbade the introduction of slavery into the vast Northwest Territory later occupied by the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. To many opponents of slavery in later years, including Abraham Lincoln, the Ordinance of 1787 became, like the Declaration of Independence, a sacred document expressing the intent of the founding fathers to confine slavery within the boundaries of the existing states, prohibiting forever its future spread.
“Every settler within the territory, by the very act of settlement, became a party to this compact,” Chase argued, “forever entitled to the benefit of its provisions.” These provisions, he maintained, “are the birthright of the people of Ohio. It is their glorious distinction, that the genuine principles of American liberty are imbedded, as it were, in their very soil, and mingled with their very atmosphere…. Wherever [slavery] exists at all, it exists only in virtue of positive law…[and] can have no existence beyond the territorial limits of the state which sanctions it.” The right to hold a person in bondage “vanishes when the master and the slave meet together” in a place, like Ohio, “where positive law interdicts slavery.”
The conservative judge, as expected, ruled against Chase. The next day, Matilda was forcibly removed to the South and returned to slavery. The philosophical and legal arguments Chase had advanced, however, were considered so important by the antislavery community that they were printed in pamphlet form and distributed throughout the nation.
Publication of his arguments in the Matilda case brought Chase immediate acclaim in Northern intellectual circles. By anchoring his arguments firmly in history and law, he opened an antislavery approach that differed from the tactics of the allies of Garrison, who eschewed political organization, dismissed the founding fathers, and considered the Constitution “a covenant with death, an agreement with hell,” because it condoned slavery. Where the Garrisonians called for a moral crusade to awaken the sleeping conscience of the nation, Chase targeted a political audience, hopeful that abolition could be achieved through politics, government, and the courts.
The time had come, Chase decided, to try for public office. Though he had not been active in party politics, he sought a nomination from the Whig Party to the state senate. To his disappointment, he was rebuffed as an abolitionist. Three years later, he tried again, seeking the Whig nomination for the Cincinnati City Council. Although he succeeded in gaining office, he was defeated for reelection after a single term, largely due to his position on temperance, which had led him to unpopular votes denying liquor licenses to city establishments.
Surveying the political landscape, Chase was unable to see a future for himself as either a Democrat or a Whig. Both parties, he wrote, submitted to the South upon the “vital question of slavery.” Consequently, in 1841, he joined the fledgling Liberty Party, which was struggling to establish a solid base of support. The previous year, James Birney, since moved to New York to head the American Anti-Slavery Society, had gained the party’s nomination for president. Unknown beyond abolitionist circles, Birney garnered only 7,000 votes.
Through the 1840s, Chase sought to guide the Liberty Party to a more moderate image so that it could gain wider appeal. Working closely with Gamaliel Bailey, Birney’s astute successor at the Philanthropist, Chase persuaded the Ohio Liberty Party to adopt a resolution that explicitly renounced any intention “to interfere with slavery in the states where it exists.” Concurring with Lincoln, Bates, and a number of progressive Whigs, they pledged to focus only on those areas where slavery was present “without constitutional warrant”—in the District of Columbia, on the high seas, in the new territories. At the same time, Chase encouraged his fellow party members to consider reaching outside their ranks to find a presidential candidate who could command a larger vote than the radical Birney, who, as Chase said, “has seen so little of public service.”
In an 1842 letter to Joshua Giddings, the abolitionist congressman from Ohio’s Western Reserve, Chase suggested that if John Quincy Adams or William Henry Seward “would accept the nomination, great additional strength might be gained for the party.” He had no idea whether either man would accept, but ranked Governor Seward, “for his age,” as “one of the first statesmen in the country,” while former president Adams was “perhaps, the very first.”
Though he had never met Seward, Chase opened an intriguing correspondence with the governor, in which they freely debated the role of third parties. Seward expressed his belief that “there can be only two permanent parties.” In his view, the Democratic Party, with its strong base in the South, would always be the party of slavery, while the Whig Party would champion the antislavery banner, “more or less,” depending “on the advancement of the public mind and the intentness with which it can be fixed on the question of Slavery.” Seward conceded that while he was disheartened by the Whig Party’s current “lukewarmness on the Subject of Slavery,” he had no choice but to stay with the party he loved, and to hope for a more advanced position in the future. “To abandon a party and friends to whom I owe so much, whose confidence I do in some degree possess,” he wrote, “would be criminal, and not more criminal than unwise.”
Chase saw the situation differently. Though originally “educated in the Whig school,” with Whiggish views of the tariff, banking, and government, he had never considered party loyalty among his defining characteristics. Nor had he experienced the camaraderie of fellow party loyalists that Seward enjoyed when he and his colleagues boarded together in Albany during the lengthy legislative sessions. For Chase, the decision to leave the Whigs for the Liberty Party was not the momentous separation that it would have been for Seward.
Chase clearly understood that so long as the Liberty Party remained a “one idea” party, it would never attract majority support. Risking the displeasure of his abolitionist friends, who wanted no diminution of their principles, he envisioned a gradual movement of the Liberty Party toward one of the major parties. His efforts revealed a practical side to his principled stance, but old acquaintances in Ohio were troubled by his decision to set his sights on the more powerful Democratic Party, where he had a greater chance of statewide success than with the Whigs.
In his bid to cultivate Democratic leaders, Chase shifted his positions on the tariff and the banking system to align himself with the Democrats, though he insisted that the economic policies of either party were insignificant compared to the issue of slavery. For the moment, since neither major party would take a resolute stand on slavery, he remained with the Liberty Party, attending conventions, drawing up resolutions, and searching for candidates.
In the years that followed, in part because the free city of Cincinnati was a natural destination for runaways crossing the Ohio River from the slave state of Kentucky, a number of fugitive slave cases ended up in the Cincinnati courts. Chase volunteered his services in many such cases. The eloquent power of his arguments soon earned him the honorary title “Attorney General for the Negro.” In the famous case that inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe’s good-hearted John Van Trompe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Chase represented John Van Zandt, an old farmer who had moved from Kentucky to Ohio so that he might live in a free state.
On an April night in 1842, Van Zandt was returning from the Cincinnati market to his home twenty miles north. On the road, he encountered a group of slaves who had crossed the river from Kentucky. “Moved by sympathy,” Chase would argue, the farmer “undertook to convey them in his wagon to Lebanon or Springfield.” En route, two slave catchers accosted the wagon. They captured the slaves and returned them to their Kentucky owner, receiving a $450 bounty for their efforts.
The owner then brought suit against Van Zandt for “harboring and concealing” the slaves, in violation of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. Chase “very willingly” agreed to represent the elderly farmer, who faced substantial penalties if found guilty. Chase’s defense of Van Zandt transcended the particulars of the Matilda case, directly challenging the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law. That law, he maintained, deprived fugitives of life and liberty without due process of law. “Under the constitution,” he declared, “all the inhabitants of the United States are, without exception, persons,—persons, it may be, not free, persons, held to service…but still, persons,” and therefore possessed of every right guaranteed under the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
“What is a slave?” he asked. “A slave is a person held, as property, by legalized force, against natural right…. The very moment a slave passes beyond the jurisdiction of the state, in which he is held as such, he ceases to be a slave; not because any law or regulation of the state which he enters confers freedom upon him, but because he continues to be a man and leaves behind him the law of force, which made him a slave.” Chase depicted slavery as “a creature of state law” and not a national institution. He argued that any slave state created after 1787, the year the Northwest Ordinance became law, existed in violation of the Constitution and the wishes of the founding fathers.
As most observers expected, the Cincinnati court refused to accept Chase’s argument. Van Zandt was found guilty. As Chase left the courtroom, according to Harriet Beecher Stowe, then a Cincinnati resident, one of the judges reflected on the unpopularity of professed abolitionists: “There goes a young man who has ruined himself to-day.”
Far from ruining his prospects, the Van Zandt case added considerable luster to Chase’s national reputation. Appealing the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, Chase enlisted Seward’s help as co-counsel. The case moved slowly through the docket, affording the two men time to craft their written arguments. Chase presented the constitutional arguments, while Seward dealt with the technical ones. Though the Southern-dominated court wasted little time in affirming the lower court’s ruling, the constitutional arguments Chase outlined became pillars of antislavery party doctrine.
Chase acknowledged that “poor old Van Zandt” was never able to recover from the loss and the damages inflicted upon him. Still, he believed that “even though my poor old client be sacrificed, the great cause of humanity will be a gainer.” He had his 108-page argument reprinted in pamphlet form for wide distribution, and was delighted with the positive response it provoked. Antislavery activist Charles Sumner wrote from Massachusetts that “the question under the Ordinance of 1787 was novel” and might well “rally a political movement.” President John Quincy Adams’s son, Charles Francis, extolled Chase, as did New Hampshire’s Senator John Hale. Nothing gave him more satisfaction, than the praise he received from Seward, who expressed fervent hope that the “chaste and beautiful eloquence” of Chase’s brief would be forever “preserved for the benefit of the cause of Freedom and for [Chase’s] own fame.” The fact that the case brought a personal and intellectual contact with Seward, Chase told abolitionist Lewis Tappan, proved “one of the gratifications, and one of the greatest too,” of all his efforts.
Politicians were not alone in recognizing Chase’s commitment. In gratitude for public service “in behalf of the oppressed” and his “eloquent advocacy of the rights of man,” the black pastor of the Baker Street Church collected donations from his parishioners. In an emotional ceremony on May 6, 1845, attended by a large black congregation, Chase was honored with a beautifully engraved sterling silver pitcher. Presenting the gift on behalf of “the Colored People of Cincinnati,” the Reverend A. J. Gordon told the enthusiastic gathering that “whenever the friendless objects of slaveholding cupidity” struggled to find freedom, they found in Chase “a firm, zealous and devoted friend.” He assured Chase that his deeds on behalf of fugitive slaves and the black race would be “engraven on the tablets of our hearts…as long as memory retains her seat.” Reverend Gordon avowed that when Chase was finally “called from [his] earthly labors,” he would be ushered into paradise by God Himself, with the words “Well done thou good and faithful servant, enter into the joys of thy Lord. For inas-much as you did it unto the least of these my brethren, you did it unto me!”
Chase was profoundly moved by the ceremony. Accepting the engraved pitcher, which he treasured the rest of his life, he pledged to continue his fight for freedom until “the colored man and white man are equal before the law.” In his own state of Ohio, he lamented, various legal provisions known as the Black Laws excluded free blacks from public schools, the witness box, and the voting booth. These exclusions, he asserted (two years before Seward would make a similar argument), were clear infringements of the Constitution. “True Democracy makes no enquiry about the color of the skin, or the place of nativity,” he ardently claimed. “Wherever it sees a man, it recognizes a being endowed by his Creator with original inalienable rights.”
Laws denying black children public school education, while simultaneously requiring that their parents pay school taxes, were reprehensible, he argued. More unjust, blacks were banned from the witness box in all cases where either party was white. This exclusion exposed the black population “to every species of violence and outrage” from whites who felt secure from punishment so long as they committed their crimes only in the presence of black witnesses. “Every law on the statute book so wrong and mean that it cannot be executed, or felt, if executed, to be oppressive and unjust,” averred Chase, “tends to the overthrow of all law, by separating in the minds of the people, the idea of law from the idea of right….
“For myself,” Chase concluded, “I am ready to renew my pledge—and I will venture to speak also in behalf of my co-workers,—that we go straight on, without faltering or wavering, until every vestige of oppression shall be erased from the statute book:—until the sun in all his journey from the utmost eastern horizon, through the mid-heaven, till he sinks beyond the western mountains into his ocean bed, shall not behold, in all our broad and glorious land, the foot print of a single slave.” A tremendous round of applause was followed by an emotional rendition of the hymn “America.” With a benediction, the exercises were brought to a close.
CHASE, UNLIKE SEWARD and Lincoln, did not make friends easily. A contemporary reporter observed that he knew “little of human nature,” and that while “profoundly versed in man, he was profoundly ignorant of men.” His abstractedness often lent an air of preoccupation, aggravated by his extreme nearsightedness. Both prevented him from gauging the reactions of others. Furthermore, his natural reserve, piety, temperance, and lack of humor made for uneasy relationships. Even his stately proportions and fastidious dress worked against social intimacy.
Despite his difficulty in making friends and instilling personal loyalties, Chase did form one significant relationship during the decade of the forties. His bond with Edwin M. Stanton would have important consequences during the Civil War, when the two men would serve together in Lincoln’s cabinet. Six years younger than Chase, Stanton was a brilliant young lawyer from Steubenville, Ohio. He had been active in Democratic politics from his earliest days. A short, stout man, with thick brows and intense black eyes hidden behind steel-rimmed glasses, Stanton had grown up in a Quaker family dedicated to abolition. He later told the story that “when he was a boy his father had—like the father of Hannibal against Rome—made him swear eternal hostility to slavery.”
When Chase and Stanton first met in Columbus in the early 1840s, each was dealing with appalling personal loss, for death had pursued Stanton much as it had pursued Chase. In the five-year span from 1841 to 1846, Stanton had lost his only daughter, Lucy; his young wife, Mary; and his only brother, Darwin. Confronting a similar reign of grief at almost the same time, Chase found in Stanton a solace and friendship more intense than if they had met at a different juncture in their lives.
In the summer of 1846, Stanton spent several days with Chase at his Cincinnati home. The wide-ranging conversations they enjoyed left a lasting impression on Stanton. “Since our pleasant intercourse together last summer,” Stanton wrote Chase, “no living person has been oftener in my mind;—waking or sleeping,—for, more than once, I have dreamed of being with you. The strength of my regard and affection for you, I can, thus, tell more freely than were we face to face.”
More than sorrow bound Chase and Stanton together. At the time of their acquaintance in the mid-1840s, both men were trying to find a footing in quick-shifting political currents. Chase had already taken his stand with the Liberty Party. Stanton, though intrigued by the newly formed party, remained a loyal Democrat. Over the course of many hours, in conversation and then by letter, they debated the merits of the new Liberty Party. Responding to Chase’s worry about the narrowness of the party’s platform, Stanton cited examples of single ideas that had achieved great triumphs: most notably, “Taxation & Representation,” the slogan that guided the American Revolution. “I go for one idea in party,” he wrote, “and in friendship my one idea is strong & sincere love for you.” With Chase, Stanton felt free to criticize the Democratic Party, which had gravely disappointed him in a recent election when its candidate for governor came out in favor of the discriminatory Black Laws.
Chase tried to involve Stanton in the Van Zandt appeal, but Stanton declined, fearing he had neither the “physical nor intellectual strength sufficient to engage in the cause. Events of the past summer have broken my spirits, crushed my hopes, and without energy or purpose in life, I feel indifferent to the present, careless of the future.” Chase apparently did not reply to this letter. “Many weeks have gone by,” Stanton wrote in January 1847, “but your voice reaches me no more. Why is it? The question arises, as I move slowly & disappointed from the post office each day.”
The correspondence picked up again in the spring, when Chase sent Stanton his argument in the Van Zandt case. “Rejoicing, as I do, to call you friend,” Stanton wrote after reading through the lengthy document, “it gives me pleasure to acknowledge its intellectual merit.” Rather than discuss it in writing, he hoped that he and Chase could soon meet and “spend two or three days” together. “I want to hear from you,” Stanton concluded, “and so may as well confess it at once & throw myself upon your mercy.”
They finally met in Cincinnati in July, but the visit was too abbreviated to satisfy Stanton. The desire for his friend’s company had been lodged in his heart for so long, Stanton explained to Chase upon returning home to Steubenville, that the visit, while enjoyable, had left him ungratified. In the months that followed, however, they saw each other on a number of occasions and opened their hearts in correspondence. After receiving a particularly affectionate letter from Chase, Stanton fervently replied that it “filled my heart with joy; to be loved by you, and be told that you value my love is a gratification beyond my power to express.” He went on to downplay reports Chase had heard that he had developed a “magnetic attraction” for a new woman. “I wish it were so,” he admitted. “To love, and to be loved, is a necessary condition of my happiness…I have met with no one that exercises upon me the least attraction beyond the general qualities of the sex.”
In the meantime, his friendship with Chase, and his memories of their time together, sustained him. “Allow me my dear friend again this evening to enter your study—you know I like it better than the parlor even without fire—but the fire is blazing there—let me take you by the hand throw my arm around you, say I love you, & bid you farewell.”
As their friendship grew, Chase urged Stanton to involve himself more deeply in the struggle against slavery. He promised Stanton, who remained a Democrat, that he would join his campaign should he run for governor. But Stanton, who was now supporting his brother’s family as well as his own, did not feel he could make the financial sacrifice. “How much I regret that your voice is not to be heard,” a disappointed Chase wrote. “We have but a short life to live here my dear friend. But let us make it long by noble deeds. You have great gifts of God, energy, enthusiasm, talent, utterance. And now a great cause demands you.”
Stanton’s inability to commit himself more fully to the antislavery crusade cast a shadow on his relationship with Chase. When Stanton failed to attend a Democratic convention in Columbus where antislavery issues were on the agenda, Chase chastised him for placing personal interests above political duties. “Why—why are you not here?” Chase lamented. “If I had foreseen you would not attend the Convention, I am certain I should not have left home.” Stanton’s reply expressed hurt at the censure in Chase’s letter, explaining that it was not merely private concerns that kept him away but a collision of obligations. “The practice of law,” he conceded, “furnishes employment for all my time and faculties…. Such to be sure is not the condition that dreams of early love pictured for my manhood—but in the field of life some as sentinels must perform the lonely round while others enjoy the social festivity of the camp.”
For Stanton, more than for Chase, the importance of the friendship exceeded political events and even personal ambition. “While public honors affords gratification,” Stanton wrote, “such friendship as yours is to me of inestimable value.” With sadness, he conceded that he was “well aware that public duties, the increasing pressure of private affairs as age advances, domestic vicissitudes and the inclination of the heart must cool the fervor of friendship among men.” Still, he hoped that he and Chase might someday stand side by side in the struggle against slavery.
So as 1847 drew to a close, the four men who would contend for the 1860 presidential nomination were deeply and actively involved in the political, social, and economic issues that would define the growing nation. Each embraced a different position along the spectrum of growing opposition to slavery. Yet while Seward, Chase, and Bates had each developed a national renown, few beyond Illinois knew of the raw-boned young congressman coming to the nation’s capital for the first time in his life.