WASHINGTON WAS A CITY in progress when the Lincolns arrived at the wooden railroad station in December 1847 for the opening of the congressional session. The corner-stone of the Washington Monument would not be laid until the following summer. Cobblestoned Pennsylvania Avenue was one of only two paved streets. Not yet fitted with its familiar high dome, the Capitol stood on a hill that boasted “a full view of the cities of Washington, Georgetown, and Alexandria, and the varied and forest-clad hills in Maryland and Virginia.” In the backs of most houses, recalled one of Lincoln’s colleagues, “stood pig-styes, cow-sheds, and pens for the gangs of unyoked geese. During the day the animals and fowls roamed at will in lordly insolence, singly or in herds and flocks, through the streets and over the fields.”
Nevertheless, with forty thousand inhabitants (including several thousand slaves), the capital was a metropolis compared to little Springfield. It was filled with the landmarks and memorials of the history that so captivated the Lincolns. Some of the most illustrious personages of the age still walked the halls of Congress—John Quincy Adams tirelessly battling on behalf of antislavery petitions; the eloquent Daniel Webster, whose words, Lincoln believed, would outlive the age; John Calhoun, the acknowledged spokesman for the South, who had already led one effort at rebellion. These titans who had shaped the history of the past decades were joined by those who would play leading roles in the great drama to unfold—Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, future president and vice president of the Confederacy; Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s great rival; and Robert Barnwell Rhett, agitator of rebellion.
The Lincolns took up residence in Mrs. Spriggs’s Boarding House on Capitol Hill, on the site of the present Library of Congress. Soon a favorite among his fellow boarders, Lincoln was always ready with a story or anecdote to entertain, persuade, or defuse argument. Samuel Busey, a young doctor who took his meals at the boardinghouse, recalled that whenever Lincoln was about to tell a story, “he would lay down his knife and fork, place his elbows upon the table, rest his face between his hands, and begin with the words ‘that reminds me,’ and proceed. Everybody prepared for the explosions sure to follow.”
For recreation, Lincoln took up bowling with his fellow boarders. Though a clumsy bowler, according to Dr. Busey, Lincoln “played the game with great zest and spirit” and “accepted success and defeat with like good nature and humor.” When word spread “that he was in the alley there would assemble numbers of people to witness the fun which was anticipated by those who knew of his fund of anecdotes and jokes.” As ever, his quick wit and droll geniality provided a source of “merriment” for everyone around him.
While Lincoln attended meetings and congressional sessions, Mary was largely confined to the single room she shared with her husband and two small children—Robert, now five, and Eddie, two, whose often boisterous antics and excited running through the corridors did not endear Mary to her fellow boarders. None of the other congressmen in their boardinghouse were accompanied by wives. Indeed, most of the legislators in the city had left their families behind. Without female friends, Mary was compelled to spend most of the day alone with the children. Furthermore, the mores of the day forbade her to attend social gatherings and parties without her continually occupied husband. After a few months, by mutual consent, Mary and the children left Washington. Unable to return to their Springfield home, which was rented out for the congressional term, she took the children to her father’s elegant house in Lexington, Kentucky, beginning what would be the longest continuous separation from her husband in their twenty-three-year marriage.
EIGHTEEN MONTHS before Abraham Lincoln arrived in Washington, history had taken an irrevocable turn when Democratic president James Polk ordered American troops to occupy disputed territory between the borders of the United States and Mexico. Relations between Mexico and the United States had been strained for decades as quarrels over boundary lines simmered. Announcing that Mexico had fired upon American soldiers on American soil, Polk called on Congress not to declare war but to recognize that a state of war already existed.
The onset of war with Mexico aroused the patriotic spirit of the American people, who regarded the war as “a romantic venture in a distant and exotic land.” The Congress called for 50,000 men, but within weeks, 300,000 volunteers had poured into recruiting centers. Lincoln’s former rival, John Hardin, was “the first to enlist” in Illinois. He would be elected colonel of his regiment and would die a hero’s death at the Battle of Buena Vista. Edward Baker, still retaining his seat in Congress, would raise a regiment and, “with drums rolling and fifes shrilling,” would lead his troops “through flag-bedecked streets crowded with cheering thousands, amid the weeping farewells of women, the encouraging God-speeds of men.”
From the start, many leading Whigs questioned both the constitutionality and the justice of the war. “It is a fact,” Lincoln would later say, “that the United States Army, in marching to the Rio Grande, marched into a peaceful Mexican settlement, and frightened the inhabitants away from their homes and their growing crops.” By the time Lincoln took his congressional oath, the combat had come to an end. The peace treaty had only to be signed, on terms spectacularly advantageous for the victorious United States. At this point, Lincoln conceded, it would have been easier to remain silent about the questionable origins of the war. The Democrats, however, would “not let the whigs be silent.” When Congress reconvened, they immediately introduced resolutions blaming the war on Mexican aggression, thereby demanding that Congress endorse “the original justice of the war on the part of the President.”
On December 13, less than two weeks after his arrival in Washington, Lincoln wrote his law partner, William Herndon: “As you are all so anxious for me to distinguish myself, I have concluded to do so, before long.” Nine days later, he introduced a resolution calling on President Polk to inform the House “whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed” belonged to Mexico or to the United States. He challenged the president to present evidence that “Mexico herself became the aggressor by invading our soil in hostile array.”
The president, not surprisingly, did not respond to the unknown freshman congressman whose hasty reach for distinction earned him only the derisive nickname “spotty Lincoln.” A few weeks later, Lincoln voted with his Whig brethren on a resolution introduced by Massachusetts congressman George Ashmun, which stated that the war had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally” initiated by the president.
The following week, on January 12, 1848, Lincoln defended his spot resolutions and his vote on the Ashmun resolution in a major speech. He claimed that he would happily reverse his vote if the president could prove that first blood was shed on American soil; but since he“can not, or will not do this,” he suspected that the entire matter was, “from beginning to end, the sheerest deception.” Having provoked both countries into war, Lincoln charged, the president had hoped “to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory…that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy.” He went on to liken the president’s war message to “the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream.” Perhaps recalling the turtles tormented with hot coals by his boyhood friends, Lincoln employed the bizarre simile of the president’s confused mind “running hither and thither, like some tortured creature, on a burning surface, finding no position, on which it can settle down, and be at ease.”
This maiden effort was not the tone of reasoned debate that later characterized Lincoln’s public statements. Nor did it obey his oft-expressed belief that a leader should endeavor to transform, yet heed, public opinion. Compelling as Lincoln’s criticisms might have been, they fell flat at a time when the majority of Americans were delighted with the outcome of the war. The Democratic Illinois State Register charged that Lincoln had disgraced his district with his “treasonable assault upon President Polk,” claimed that “henceforth” he would be known as “Benedict Arnold,” and predicted that he would enjoy only a single term. Lincoln sought to clarify his position, arguing that although he had challenged the instigation of the war, he had never voted against supplies for the soldiers. To accept Polk’s position without question, he claimed, was to “allow the President to invade a neighboring nation…whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary.”
Even the loyal Herndon feared that Lincoln’s antiwar stance would destroy his political future. “I saw that Lincoln would ruin himself,” Herndon later explained. “I wrote to him on the subject again and again.” Herndon was right to worry, for as it turned out, Lincoln’s quest for distinction had managed only to infuriate the Democrats, worry fainthearted Whigs, and lose support in Illinois, where the war was extremely popular. A prominent Chicago politician, Justin Butterfield, asked if he was against the Mexican War, replied: “no, I opposed one War [the War of 1812]. That was enough for me. I am now perpetually in favor of war, pestilence and famine.” In the years ahead, Lincoln would write frequent letters defending his position. If he had hoped for reelection to Congress, however, despite the unofficial agreement with his colleagues that he would serve only one term, his prospects rapidly evaporated in the fever of war. Indeed, when Stephen Logan, the Whig nominee to replace him, was defeated, his loss was blamed on Lincoln.
As Seward understood better than Lincoln, Manifest Destiny was in the air. “Our population,” Seward predicted, “is destined to roll its resistless waves to the icy barriers of the north, and to encounter Oriental civilization on the shores of the Pacific.” Though he wasn’t in favor of the war, Seward’s political astuteness told him it was a mistake to argue against it. He warned that he did “not expect to see the Whig party successful in overthrowing an Administration carrying on a war in which the Whig party and its statesmen are found apologizing for our national adversaries.”
Back in Ohio, Salmon Chase told the abolitionist Gerrit Smith that he “would not have engaged in” the war, but in public he muted his opposition. For Chase was caught in a political dilemma. On the one hand, his antislavery allies in the Liberty Party were strongly against the war. If he wanted a seat in the U.S. Senate, however, he would need the support of Ohio Democrats, a task that would not be made easier by assaulting a Democratic president.
Of the four future presidential rivals, only Edward Bates matched the vehemence of Lincoln’s opposition. He charged Polk with “gross & palpable lying,” arguing that the true object of the war was “plunder & conquest.” Bates said he was ashamed of his Whig brethren who voted for the war, “actuated by a narrow & groveling policy, and a selfish fear of injuring their own popularity, & injuriously affecting the coming Presidential election.” To Bates, the war was part of a conspiracy to extend the reach of slavery—a belief he shared with many other Whigs, though not with Lincoln, who argued it was simply “a war of conquest brought into existence to catch votes.”
Whether or not it was begun to extend slavery, the war brought the issue of slavery expansion to the forefront. While the early battles were still raging, a little-known congressman from Pennsylvania, David Wilmot, had penned a historic amendment to a war appropriations bill providing that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory” acquired from Mexico—lands that would eventually comprise California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. This Wilmot Proviso was repeatedly passed in the House and repeatedly blocked in the Southern-dominated Senate. Its status became a battleground in the conflict between North and South. The issue of slavery in the territories would become the defining issue in the years that followed.
Seward, Chase, and Lincoln all favored the ban on slavery from entering the territories acquired from Mexico. Even before the Wilmot Proviso had been introduced, Lincoln positioned himself against the expansion of slavery, a position he would hold for the rest of his career, arguing that while the Constitution protected slavery in the states where it already existed, “we should never knowingly lend ourselves directly or indirectly, to prevent that slavery from dying a natural death—to find new places for it to live in, when it can no longer exist in the old.”
In Missouri, Bates also supported the Wilmot Proviso, though for different reasons. Bates considered the problem of extending slavery into these new lands a practical rather than a moral question. If Southerners brought their slaves into the West in large numbers, he feared that migration of free whites would come to a halt, thereby precluding growth and progress in the region. More important, he worried that the agitation over the slavery issue, which he blamed equally on Northern abolitionists and Southern extremists, would pull the country apart.
Bates had reason to fear so. South Carolina’s John Calhoun led the vocal opposition to the Proviso, denouncing it as an unconstitutional act that would deny Southerners the right to move freely “with their property” into commonly held American territory. Moreover, if slavery were banned from the new territories, free states would join the Union and skew the balance of power. The South, already losing ground in the House of Representatives to the more populous North, would lose its historic strength in the Senate as well. Southern interests would be subject to the dictates of an increasingly hostile North. This was a future the South would never accept. “The madmen of the North and North West,” editorialized the Richmond Enquirer, “have, we fear, cast the die, and numbered the days of this glorious Union.” Thus the debate over the war became a conflict over slavery and a threat to the Union itself.
DURING THIS PERIOD of great political stress and turmoil, Lincoln came to sorely miss the companionship of his wife and the presence of his children. The couple’s correspondence from this time gives us nearly all the direct evidence we have of their relationship. Almost all other information must be gleaned from outside observers, some of whom regarded Mary with extreme hostility or believed that she was unworthy of her husband.
“When you were here,” Lincoln wrote Mary on April 16, 1848, “I thought you hindered me some in attending to business; but now, having nothing but business—no variety—it has grown exceedingly tasteless to me…I hate to stay in this old room by myself.” He recounted with pride that he had gone shopping for the children, and told her how he enjoyed her letters. He was pleased to hear that, for the first springtime since he had known her, she had been “free from head-ache.” Then he added teasingly, “I am afraid you will get so well, and fat, and young, as to be wanting to marry again.”
“My dear Husband,” Mary answered, writing on a Saturday night after the children were asleep. “How much, I wish instead of writing, we were together this evening, I feel very sad away from you.” She described the children and their doings, and coyly needled that Mr. Webb, who had unsuccessfully sought her hand in their Springfield days, was coming to Shelbyville, Kentucky. “I must go down about that time & carry on quite a flirtation, you know we, always had a penchant that way.” In closing, she reassured him: “Do not fear the children, have forgotten you…. Even E(ddy’s) eyes brighten at the mention of your name—My love to all.”
Lincoln quickly responded: “The leading matter in your letter, is your wish to return to this side of the Mountains. Will you be a good girl in all things, if I consent?” Most likely, he was referring here to the problems Mary had experienced with the other boarders, and her unhappiness about the amount of work he had to do. Assuming that she had already affirmatively answered his question, he continued: “Then come along, and that as soon as possible. Having got the idea in my head, I shall be impatient till I see you.” These letters are replete with gossip about their acquaintances in Washington and Springfield, detailed news of the children, some mention of Lincoln’s political activities, gentle teasing, and expressions of longing, both for companionship and, by implication, for intimacy. In the fall of 1848, Mary and the children returned to Washington.
In June of that year, Lincoln joined his fellow Whigs in Philadelphia, where they nominated Mexican War hero General Zachary Taylor for president, hoping that military glory could work its magic once more, as it had for George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and William Henry Harrison. “I am in favor of Gen: Taylor,” Lincoln wrote, “because I am satisfied we can elect him…and that we can not elect any other whig.” He explained to Herndon that the nomination of Taylor would strike the Democrats “on the blind side. It turns the war thunder against them. The war is now to them, the gallows of Haman, which they built for us, and on which they are doomed to be hanged themselves.”
Seward was not happy with his party’s choice of Taylor, a slaveholder with no political affiliation. Even worse was the selection of his rival New Yorker Millard Fillmore for vice president. Nor did he like the party’s gauzy platform, which avoided any discussion of important national issues, including the divisive Wilmot Proviso. He said that he would “very willingly” throw his support “in favor of a different candidate if it could be seen that it would hasten the triumph of Universal Freedom.” Thurlow Weed, desiring above all to win, insisted that Taylor was fundamentally a nationalist who would protect Northern interests better than the Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass of Michigan. Cass was considered a “doughface”—a Northern man with Southern principles. Moreover, the Democratic platform explicitly opposed Wilmot’s attempt to introduce the slavery issue into congressional deliberations. Finally, Seward, like Lincoln and Bates, supported Taylor, in the hope that his candidacy would allow the minority Whigs to attract Northern Democrats and independent voters, and thereby widen their base.
Chase, once again, pursued a different strategy. With the question of slavery in the territories at the forefront of national politics, he believed the time had come for a broad Northern party that would unite Liberty men with antislavery Democrats and “conscience” Whigs. He joined together with others, including Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, to convene an antislavery party convention in Buffalo, in August 1848. Ten thousand men answered the call. The spirited gathering elected Chase president of the convention and placed him in charge of drafting a platform for the new party, the Free Soil Party.
During the deliberations, a Buffalo delegate wrote to Bates asking if his name could be entered as a candidate for the vice presidency. That Bates would even be considered illustrates the fluidity of parties at this juncture, for even though he opposed slavery’s expansion, he himself remained a slaveowner, his belief in the inferiority of the black race reflecting his Southern upbringing. In contrast to Seward and Chase, he supported Northern codes that prevented blacks from voting, sitting on juries, or holding office. When one of his female slaves escaped to Canada, he had been incredulous. “Poor foolish thing,” he wrote in his diary. “She will never be as well off as she was in our house.” She had left behind three daughters, whom he promptly sold, “determined at once to be no longer plagued with them.”
Not surprisingly, Bates declined the Free Soil nomination. While he endorsed the party’s “true doctrine” that “Congress ought never to establish slavery where they did not find it,” he did not believe that this sole principle could sustain a national party. Even if offered the chance to be president, he claimed, he would never agree to “join a sectional, geographical party.”
After several days of deliberation, the Buffalo convention nominated former president Martin Van Buren for president and Charles Francis Adams for vice president. Following the motto suggested by Chase of “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor and Free Men,” the party pledged to “prohibit slavery extension” to the territories, setting in motion a hard-fought three-way contest.
In September 1848, with Congress in recess, Lincoln made his first foray into presidential politics, campaigning for Zachary Taylor throughout the Northeast. Arriving uninvited in Worcester, Massachusetts, he was happy to oblige the chairman of a Whig gathering who found himself without a speaker. Reporting on Lincoln’s impromptu speech, the Boston Daily Advertiser observed that the tall congressman had “an intellectual face, showing a searching mind, and a cool judgment,” and that he carried “the audience with him in his able arguments and brilliant illustrations.” When he finished, “the audience gave three enthusiastic cheers for Illinois, and three more for the eloquent Whig member from that State.”
During this campaign swing, at a great Whig rally at the Tremont Temple in Boston, Seward and Lincoln met for the first time. Lincoln later acknowledged that his meeting with Seward that night “had probably made a stronger impression on his memory than it had on Governor Seward’s.”
Both men were seated on the same platform in the spacious hall that served Boston as a religious and a secular meeting place. Seward, as the star attraction, spoke first, monopolizing most of the evening. Whereas most Whig speakers concentrated on internal improvements, the tariff, and public lands, Seward focused on slavery. He defended Taylor as a good man, trustworthy to support the Whigs’ determination to prevent slavery from expanding into those territories acquired by the Mexican War, though he hoped “the time will come, and that not far distant, when the citizens of the whole country, as well as Massachusetts, will select for their leader a freeman of the north, in preference to a slaveholder.” Gaining momentum, Seward predicted the “time will soon arrive when further demonstrations will be made against the institution of slavery,” eventually moving public conscience to liberate all the nation’s slaves.
The hour was late when Lincoln was introduced, but he captivated his audience with what the Boston Courier described as “a most forcible and convincing speech,” which scored a series of capital “hits” against both Democrat Cass and Free-Soiler Van Buren, whom he nicknamed the “artful dodger” of Kinderhook, referring to his frequent shifts of party and position. He concluded “amidst repeated rounds of deafening applause.” Recalling Lincoln’s “rambling, story-telling” speech more than two decades later, Seward agreed that it put “the audience in good humor,” but he pointedly noted that it avoided “any extended discussion of the slavery question.”
The next night, Seward and Lincoln shared the same room in a Worcester hotel. “We spent the greater part of the night talking,” Seward remembered years later, “I insisting that the time had come for sharp definition of opinion and boldness of utterance.” Listening with “a thoughtful air,” Lincoln said: “I reckon you are right. We have got to deal with this slavery question, and got to give much more attention to it hereafter than we have been doing.” While Lincoln had consistently voted for the Wilmot Proviso, he had not delivered a single speech on the issue of slavery or initiated anything to promote the issue. As the conversation drew to a close and the two men went to sleep side by side, they must have presented a comical image—the one nearly half a foot longer and a decade younger; Seward’s disorderly mass of straw-colored hair on the pillow beside Lincoln’s wiry shock of black hair.
Years later, as president, Lincoln recalled his trip to Massachusetts. “I went with hay seed in my hair to learn deportment in the most cultivated State in the Union.” He recalled in vivid detail a dinner at the governor’s house—“a superb dinner; by far the finest I ever saw in my life. And the great men who were there, too! Why, I can tell you just how they were arranged at table,” whereupon he proceeded to do just that.
The Whigs triumphed at the polls that November, bringing Zachary Taylor to the White House. It was to be the last national victory for the Whigs, who, four years later, divided on the slavery issue, would win only four states. To Chase’s delight, Free-Soiler Martin Van Buren polled more than 10 percent of the vote among the Northern electorate—enough to prove that antislavery had become a force in national politics. Indeed, in several Northern states, including New York, the votes for Van Buren that otherwise might have gone to the Democrats spelled victory for the Whigs.
When Lincoln returned to Congress for the rump session, influenced, perhaps, by his encounter with Seward, he drafted a proposal for the gradual emancipation of slaves in the nation’s capital, pending approval by the District’s voters. Similar proposals had been attempted before, but Lincoln now added several elements. He included provisions to compensate owners for the full value of the slaves with government funds and to allow government officials from slaveholding states to bring their servants while on government business. Finally, to mitigate the fears of Southern slaveholders in surrounding states, he added a provision requiring District authorities “to provide active and efficient means to arrest, and deliver up to their owners, all fugitive slaves escaping into said District.” It was this last provision that prompted abolitionist Wendell Phillips to castigate him as “that slave hound from Illinois.”
Through long and careful conversations with dozens of fellow Whigs, Lincoln thought he had devised a reasonable compromise that could gain the support of both moderates in the South and the strong antislavery wing in the North. Yet, once the proposal was distributed, Lincoln found that his support had evaporated. Increasingly bitter divisiveness had eclipsed any possibility of compromise. Zealous antislavery men objected to both the fugitive slave provision and the idea of compensating owners in any way, while Southerners argued that abolishing slavery in the District would open the door to abolishing slavery in the country at large. Disappointed but realistic in his appraisal of the situation, Lincoln never introduced his bill. “Finding that I was abandoned by my former backers and having little personal influence,” he said, “I dropped the matter knowing it was useless to prosecute the business at that time.”
His congressional term ending in March 1849, Lincoln campaigned vigorously for a presidential appointment as Commissioner of the Land Office—the highest office that would go to Illinois. On the strength of his services to the Taylor campaign, he believed he deserved the position. As commissioner, he would be responsible for deciding how to distribute all the public lands in the state. The office was awarded to another. It was just as well that Abraham Lincoln was not appointed. His strengths were those of the public leader, not the bureaucratic manager. “If I have one vice,” he later quipped, “and I can call it nothing else,—it is not to be able to say no!” He then smiled and added: “Thank God for not making me a woman, but if He had, I suppose He would have made me just as ugly as He did, and no one would ever have tempted me.”
Before he returned to Springfield, the former flatboatman applied to patent a method of lifting boats over shoals and bars by means of inflatable “buoyant chambers.” Unfortunately, no analogous device existed to refloat a political career run aground. His securely Whig congressional district had turned Democratic, a shift many Whigs blamed on Lincoln’s criticisms of the war. He was out of office, with little immediate prospect of return. Assessing his brief congressional tenure, there was little to celebrate. His term, John Nicolay wrote, “added practically nothing to his reputation.” He had been a diligent congressman, making nearly all the roll calls and serving his party faithfully, but his efforts to distinguish himself—to make a mark—had failed.
All these disappointments notwithstanding, Lincoln had forged relationships and impressed men who would contribute significantly to his future success, including Caleb Smith of Indiana and Joshua Giddings of Ohio, Westerners whose political careers were similar to his.
Born in Boston, Caleb Smith had migrated west as a young man, ending up in Indiana, where he read law, was admitted to the bar, and entered politics as a Whig. He was a “handsome, trimly-built man,” with a “smooth oval face.” Despite a lisp, his power on the stump was celebrated far and wide. It was said that he could make you “feel the blood tingling through your veins to your finger ends and all the way up your spine.” Indeed, one contemporary observer considered Smith a more compelling public speaker than Lincoln. Later, at the 1860 Republican Convention, Smith would help swing the Indiana delegation to Lincoln, a move that would lay the foundation for Lincoln’s presidential nomination.
Joshua Giddings had faced obstacles as formidable as Lincoln. He had left his family and small farming community in Ashtabula County, Ohio, to study law in the town of Canfield, Ohio. His decision stunned his friends and neighbors. “He had lived with them from childhood, and toiled with them in the fields,” his son-in-law, George Julian, observed. “He had never enjoyed the means of obtaining even a common-school education, and they regarded his course as the effect of a vain desire to defeat the designs of Providence, according to which they believed that people born in humble life should be content with their lot.” Fourteen years older than Lincoln, Giddings was first elected to Congress in 1838. Reelected continuously after that, he threw himself at once into John Quincy Adams’s valiant struggle over the right of Congress to receive antislavery petitions. While Giddings was decidedly more militant on the slavery issue than Lincoln, the two became close friends. Boarding together at Mrs. Spriggs’s house in Carroll Row on Capitol Hill, they shared hundreds of meals, conversations, and stories. So much did Giddings like and respect Lincoln that seven years later, in 1855, when Lincoln ran for the Senate, Giddings proclaimed that he “would walk clear to Illinois” to help elect him.
Among Lincoln’s Whig colleagues was Alexander Stephens of Georgia, later vice president of the Confederate states. Transfixed by Stephens’s eloquent speaking style, Lincoln wrote a friend that “a little slim, pale-faced, consumptive man…has just concluded the very best speech, of an hour’s length, I ever heard. My old, withered, dry eyes, are full of tears yet.” (Lincoln was not yet forty.) Many years later, the classically educated Stephens recalled: “Mr. Lincoln was careful as to his manners, awkward in his speech, but was possessed of a very strong, clear and vigorous mind. He always attracted the riveted attention of the House when he spoke; his manner of speech as well as thought was original…his anecdotes were always exceedingly apt and pointed, and socially he always kept his company in a roar of laughter.”
Lincoln’s ability to win the respect of others, to earn their trust and even devotion, would prove essential in his rise to power. There was something mysterious in his persona that led countless men, even old adversaries, to feel bound to him in admiration.
TAKING UP HIS LAW PRACTICE once more, Lincoln began to feel, he later remarked, that he “was losing interest in politics.” The likely reality was that his position on the Mexican War had temporarily closed the door to political office. Furthermore, this withdrawal from office was never complete. He worked to secure political posts for fellow Illinoisans, and joined in a call for a convention to reorganize the Whig Party. Through his lengthy eulogies for several Whig leaders, he spoke out on national issues, referring to slavery as “the one great question of the day.” And he never missed an opportunity to criticize Stephen Douglas, now a leading national figure.
In the interim, he resolved to work at the law with “greater earnestness.” His Springfield practice flourished, providing a steady income. Mary was able to enlarge their home, hire additional help with the household chores, and entertain more freely. These years should have been happy ones for Mary, but death intervened to crush her spirits. In the summer after Lincoln returned from Washington, Mary’s father died during a cholera epidemic. He was only fifty-eight at the time, still vigorous and actively involved in politics; in fact, he was running for a seat in the Kentucky Senate when he succumbed to the epidemic. Six months later, Eliza Parker, Mary’s beloved maternal grandmother, died in Lexington. To this grandmother, the six-year-old Mary had turned for love and consolation when her mother died.
February 1, 1850, brought Mary’s most terrible loss: the death of her second son, three-year-old Eddie, from pulmonary tuberculosis. That destiny had branded her for misery became her conviction. For seven weeks, Mary had worked to arrest the high fever and racking cough that accompanied the relentless disease. Despite her ministrations, Eddie declined until he fell into unconsciousness and died early on the morning of the 1st. Neighbors recalled hearing Mary’s inconsolable weeping. For days, she remained in her bed, refusing to eat, unable to stop crying. Only Lincoln, though despairing himself, was able to reach her. “Eat, Mary,” he begged her, “for we must live.”
Finally, Mary found some solace in long conversations with the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, James Smith, who had conducted the funeral service for Eddie. So comforting was the pastor’s faith in an eternal life after death that Mary was moved to join his congregation and renew her religious faith. A grateful Lincoln rented a family pew at the First Presbyterian and occasionally accompanied Mary to church, though he remained unable to share her thought that Eddie awaited their reunion in some afterlife.
Though Mary became pregnant again a month after Eddie’s death, giving birth to a third son, William Wallace, in December 1850, and a fourth son, Thomas, in April 1853, Eddie’s death left an indelible scar on her psyche—deepening her mood swings, magnifying her weaknesses, and increasing her fears. Tales of her erratic behavior began to circulate, stories of “hysterical outbursts” against her husband, rumors that she chased him through the yard with a knife, drove him from the house with a broomstick, smashed his head with a chunk of wood. Though the outbursts generally subsided as swiftly as they had begun, her instability and violent episodes unquestionably caused great upheavals in the family life.
When Mary fell into one of these moods, Lincoln developed what one neighbor called “a protective deafness,” which doubtless exasperated her fury. Instead of engaging Mary directly, he would lose himself in thought, quietly leave the room, or take the children for a walk. If the discord continued, he would head to the state library or his office, where he would occasionally remain through the night until the emotional storm had ceased.
Had his marriage been happier, Lincoln’s friends believed, he would have been satisfied as a country lawyer. Had he married “a woman of more angelic temperament,” Springfield lawyer Milton Hay speculated, “he, doubtless, would have remained at home more and been less inclined to mingle with people outside.”
Though a tranquil domestic union might have made Lincoln a happier man, the supposition that he would have been a contented homebody, like Edward Bates, belies everything we know of Lincoln’s fierce ambition and extraordinary drive—an ambition that drove him to devour books in every spare moment, memorize his father’s stories in order to captivate his friends, study law late into the night after a full day’s work, and run for office at the age of twenty-three. Indeed, long before his political career even took shape, he had been determined to win the veneration of his fellow men by “rendering [himself] worthy” of their esteem.
Even as Lincoln focused his attention on the law, he was simply waiting for events to turn, waiting for the right time to reenter public life.
IF LINCOLN’S AMBITIONS appeared to have stalled, the careers of Seward and Chase gathered new momentum. Zachary Taylor’s triumph at the polls created a Whig majority in the New York state legislature for the first time in many years. Because U.S. senators at the time were elected by state legislatures rather than by popular vote, Thurlow Weed focused his magic on the legislature to propel Seward into the U.S. Senate. His task was complicated by the division of the state’s Whig Party into two distinct factions. Millard Fillmore, bolstered by his election as vice president, led the conservative wing, composed of merchants, capitalists, and cotton manufacturers who preferred to defuse the slavery issue. Weed and Seward represented the liberal wing.
Weed’s difficulties were compounded when New York papers reported a fiery speech Seward delivered in Cleveland, putting him at odds with the more moderate stance of the new administration. “There are two antagonistical elements of society in America,” Seward had proclaimed, “freedom and slavery. Freedom is in harmony with our system of government and with the spirit of the age, and is therefore passive and quiescent. Slavery is in conflict with that system, with justice, and with humanity, and is therefore organized, defensive, active, and perpetually aggressive.” Free labor, he said, demands universal suffrage and the widespread “diffusion of knowledge.” The slave-based system, by contrast “cherishes ignorance because it is the only security for oppression.” Sectional conflict, Seward warned, would inevitably arise from these two intrinsically different economic systems, which were producing dangerously divergent cultures, values, and assumptions.
Seward stood before his Cleveland audience and called for the abolition of the black codes that prevented blacks from voting, sitting on juries, or holding office in Ohio. Slavery, he conceded, was once the sin of all the states. “We in New York are guilty of slavery still, by withholding the right of suffrage from the race we have emancipated. You in Ohio are guilty in the same way, by a system of black-laws still more aristocratic and odious.” Seward’s support that day for the black vote, black presence on juries, and black officeholding was startlingly radical for a mainstream politician. Even a full decade later, during his debates with Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln would maintain that he had never been in favor “of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry.”
Although the difference in their positions was due largely to the contrasting political environments of the more progressive New York and the conservative, Southern-leaning Illinois, Seward was more willing than Lincoln to employ language designed to ignite the emotions of particular crowds, tailoring his rhetoric to suit the convictions of his immediate audience. Knowing that his audience in the Western Reserve was likely far more progressive than many Eastern audiences, Seward ventured further toward abolitionism than he had in the past. Even so, theCleveland Plain Dealer charged, Seward fell short of the antislavery zeal that put the Reserve a decade ahead of the East Coast.
Nor did Seward stop with his condemnation of the Black Laws, he proceeded to deliver a powerful attack against the Fugitive Slave Law, written, he claimed, in violation of divine law. He brought his speech to a close with a stirring appeal intended to rouse his audience to act. “‘Can nothing be done for freedom because the public conscience is inert?’ Yes, much can be done—everything can be done. Slavery can be limited to its present bounds, it can be ameliorated, it can be and must be abolished and you and I can and must do it.”
Seward’s speech worried Weed. Though he agreed that slavery was “a political crime and a national curse—a great moral and political evil,” he predicted that “this question of slavery, when it becomes a matter of political controversy, will shake, if not unsettle, the foundations of our Government. It is too fearful, and too mighty, in all its bearings and consequences, to be recklessly mixed up in our partisan conflicts.”
At a time when professed abolitionists remained an unpopular minority, subjected in some Northern cities to physical assault, Weed warned Seward that his provocative language would place him in the same camp with extremist figures such as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Seward weighed Weed’s concerns, acknowledging that the emancipation issue had not fully “ripened.” In the weeks that followed, he muted his stridency on slavery, allowing Weed the space necessary to carry his protégé to the next level. Weed ingratiated Seward with the legislators one by one. He rounded up the liberals and assured the moderates that when Seward talked about slavery, he “wanted to level society up, not down.” Furthermore, he promised the Taylor administration that Seward would loyally follow the moderate party line. Despite the split in the party and Fillmore’s rising star, Weed managed to corral a majority and send his friend Seward to the Senate.
“Probably no man ever yet appeared for the first time in Congress so widely known and so warmly appreciated,” declared the New York Tribune after his election. Seward arrived with an aura of celebrity, even notoriety. Yet Weed proved correct when he anticipated that Seward’s radical speech in Cleveland would come back to haunt him. Not long after the young New Yorker was sworn into the Senate, a Southern senator rose from his seat and read aloud the peroration in which Seward told his audience that slavery “can and must be abolished.” It was said that “a shudder” ran through the chamber. “If we ever find you in Georgia,” one letter writer warned Seward, “you will forfeit your odious neck.”
SALMON CHASE’S BID for success through a viable antislavery party came to fruition in 1849. Thirteen Free-Soilers had been elected to the seventy-two-member Ohio state legislature, which would choose the next U.S. senator. Neither the Whigs nor the Democrats had a controlling majority, which gave the tiny Free Soil bloc enormous leverage. Though many assumed that former Whig Joshua Giddings, who had championed the antislavery cause in Congress for more than a decade, had earned the right to be considered the front-runner, Chase managed to gain the seat for himself. Ironically, his winning tactics in pursuit of this goal would shadow his career and ultimately bring him the lasting enmity of many important figures in his own state.
Most of the Free-Soilers were former Whigs who would not vote with the Democrats. They favored Giddings. Two independents, meanwhile, vacillated: Dr. Norton Townshend, once a Democrat, who had been a member of the Liberty Party; and John F. Morse, formerly a “conscience Whig.” The decisions of these two men would prove pivotal. Working behind the scenes, Chase drafted a deal with Samuel Medary, the boss of the Democratic Party in Ohio. If Chase delivered Townshend and Morse to the Democrats, Medary would see to it that Chase became the new U.S. senator. In addition, the Democrats would vote to repeal the Black Laws, a condition Morse insisted upon before he would agree to the deal. In return, the Democrats would have the House speakership and control of the extensive patronage that office enjoyed. For Medary, control of the state was far more important than naming a senator.
Chase worked ceaselessly to deliver Townshend and Morse to the Democrats. While Giddings remained in Washington, Chase journeyed to Columbus and took a room at the Neil House close to the state Capitol so he could attend Free Soil caucuses at night and negotiate with individual Democrats during the day. He planted articles in key newspapers, praising not only himself but Townshend and Morse. He lent money to more than one paper, and when the needs of the Free Soil weekly, the Columbus Daily Standard, exceeded his means, he reassured its editor: “After the Senatorial Election, whether the choice falls on me or another, I can act more efficiently, and you may rely on me.” He advanced money to the Standard and later agreed to a loan but refused to take a mortgage on the newspaper as security because he did not want his name publicly connected, “which could not be avoided in case of a mortgage to myself.”
Knowing that Morse was introducing a bill to establish separate schools for blacks, Chase enlisted the editor of the Standard to help get it passed. “It is really important,” he urged, “and if it can be got through with the help of democratic votes, will do a great deal of good to the cause generally & our friend Morse especially.” Certainly, it would do a great deal of good for the career of Salmon Chase, who sanctimoniously told Morse that the only consideration in determining the next senator should be ability to best advance the cause: “Every thing, but sacrifice of principle, for the Cause, and nothing for men except as instruments of the Cause.” Advancement of self and advancement of the cause were intertwined in Chase’s mind. In Chase’s mind, both were served when Morse and Townshend voted with the Democrats to organize the legislature and the victorious Medary swung his new Democratic majority to Chase for senator.
The unusual circumstances of Chase’s election provoked negative comment in the press. “Every act of his was subsidiary to his own ambition,” charged the Ohio State Journal: “He talked of the interests of Free Soil, he meant His Own.” This judgment by a hostile paper was perhaps unduly harsh, for the deal with the Democrats did indeed end up promoting the Free Soil cause. As Medary had promised, the Democrats voted to repeal the hated Black Laws. And when Chase reached the Senate, he would become a stalwart leader in the antislavery cause.
Nonetheless, fallout from Chase’s Senate election eventually found its way into the widely circulated pages of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Editorializing on the machinations involved, Greeley declared that he did “not see how men who desire to maintain a decent reputation can countenance or profit by it.” Indeed, the suspicions and mistrust engendered by the peculiar circumstances of the Senate election would never be wholly erased. “It lost to him at once and forever the confidence of every Whig of middle age in Ohio,” a fellow politician observed. “Its shadow never wholly dispelled, always fell upon him, and hovered near and darkened his pathway at the critical places in his political after life.” The Whigs, and their later counterparts, the Republicans, would deny Chase the united support of the Ohio delegation so vital to his hopes for the presidential nomination in 1860. And Chase, for his part, would never forgive them.
Showing little intuitive sense of how others might view his maneuvering, Chase failed to appreciate that with each party shift, he betrayed old associates and made lifelong enemies. Certainly, his willingness to sever bonds and forge new alliances, though at times courageous and visionary, was out of step with the political custom of the times.
Though troubled by the criticism attending his election, Chase was thrilled with his victory. So was Charles Sumner, who would join Chase two years later in the Senate by way of a similar alliance between Free-Soilers and independent Democrats in Massachusetts. “I can hardly believe it,” Sumner wrote. “It does seem to me that this is ‘the beginning of the end.’ Your election must influence all the Great West. Still more your presence in the Senate will give an unprecedented impulse to the discussion of our cause.”
When Chase took his seat in the handsome Senate chamber in March 1849, nearly twenty years had elapsed since his early days as a poor teacher living on the margins of the city’s social whirl. Now, as a renowned political organizer, prominent lawyer, and fabled antislavery crusader, Chase could claim a place in the first tier of Washington society. William Wirt would have been proud. For a brief moment, Chase’s relentless need “to be first wherever I may be” was sated.
As the 1840s drew to a close, William Henry Seward and Salmon P. Chase had moved toward the summit of political power in the United States Senate. Edward Bates, though spending most of his days at his country home with his ever-growing family, had become a widely respected national figure, considered a top prospect for a variety of high political posts. Abraham Lincoln, by contrast, was practicing law, regaling his fellow lawyers on the circuit with an endless stream of anecdotes, and reflecting with silent absorption on the great issues of the day.
POLITICAL MAP OF THE UNITED STATES, CIRCA 1856
