Lincoln, the unknown Read online

  When the election came, Lincoln was defeated. It was the first political setback of his career.

  Two years later he ran again and won. Mary Lincoln was ecstatic; believing that his political triumphs had just begun, she ordered a new evening gown and polished up her French verbs. As soon as her husband reached the capital, she addressed her letters to "The Honorable A. Lincoln." But he put a stop to that at once.

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  She wanted to live in Washington, too, she longed to bask in the social prestige that she was sure awaited her. But when she came East to join him, she found things vastly different from what she had anticipated. Lincoln was so poor that he had had to borrow money from Stephen A. Douglas to pay his expenses until he got his first salary check from the Government; so Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln stopped at Mrs. Spriggs's boarding-house in Duff Green's Row. The street in front of Mrs. Spriggs's establishment was unpaved, the sidewalk was made of ashes and gravel, the rooms were bleak, and there was no plumbing. In her back yard Mrs. Spriggs had an outhouse, a goose-pen, and a garden; and, as the neighbors' hogs were constantly breaking in to eat her vegetables, her little boy had to run out at intervals with a club to drive the animals away.

  The city of Washington did not trouble in those days to collect the garbage; so Mrs. Spriggs dumped her refuse in the back alley, and depended upon the cows, pigs, and geese that wandered about the streets at will, to come and devour it.

  Mrs. Lincoln found the door to the exclusive society of Washington shut tightly against her. She was ignored, and left alone to sit in her bleak boarding-house bedroom, with her spoiled children and a headache—listening to Mrs. Spriggs's boy, shouting to drive the hogs out of the cabbage-patch.

  Disappointing as that was, it was nothing in comparison with the political disaster that lurked around the corner. When Lincoln entered Congress, the country had been waging a war against Mexico for twenty months—a shameful war of aggression, deliberately provoked by the slave power in Congress in order that the nation might acquire more territory where slavery would flourish and from which pro-slavery senators would be elected.

  America accomplished two things in that war. Texas had once belonged to Mexico and then seceded. We forced Mexico to renounce all of her claims to Texas; and, in addition, we deliberately robbed Mexico of half of all the territory she owned and carved it up into the States of New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California.

  Grant said it was one of the wickedest wars in all history, and that he could never forgive himself for having fought in it. A great many of the American soldiers rebelled and went over to the enemy; one famous battalion in Santa Anna's army was composed entirely of American deserters.

  Lincoln stood up in Congress and did what many other

  Whigs had already done: he attacked the President for having started "a war of rapine and murder, a war of robbery and dishonor," and declared that the God of heaven had "forgotten to defend the weak and innocent, and permitted the strong band of murderers and demons from hell to kill men, women, and children and lay waste and pillage the land of the just."

  The capital paid no attention whatever to this speech, for Lincoln was unknown. But back in Springfield, it raised a hurricane. Illinois had sent six thousand men to fight, as they believed, for the holy cause of liberty; and now their representative was standing up in Congress and calling their soldiers demons from hell, and accusing them of murder. In a rage, excited partizans held public meetings and denounced Lincoln as "base" . . . "dastardly" . . . "infamous" ... "a reasonable guerilla" ... "a second Benedict Arnold."

  At one meeting resolutions were adopted declaring that never until then had they "known disgrace so black." . . . "Such black odium and infamy heaped upon the living brave and illustrious dead can but excite the indignation of every true Illinoisan."

  The hatred was so bitter that it smoldered for more than a decade; and when Lincoln was running for the Presidency thirteen years later these denunciations were again hurled at his head.

  "I have committed political suicide," Lincoln confessed to his law partner.

  He dreaded to go back home now and face his resentful constituents; so he tried to secure a position that would keep him in Washington, and maneuvered to secure an appointment as Commissioner of the Land Office, but he failed.

  Then he tried to have himself named Governor of the Territory of Oregon, with the hope that he might be one of the first senators when it came into the Union, but he failed in that too.

  So he returned to Springfield and his dirty law office. Once more he hitched up Old Buck to his ramshackle buggy, and again he started driving over the circuit of the Eighth Judicial District—one of the most dejected men in all Illinois.

  He was determined now to forget all about politics, and devote himself to his profession. He realized that he had no method in his work, that he lacked mental discipline; and so, to train himself to reason more closely and to demonstrate a proposition, he bought a geometry and carried it with him as he rode the circuit.

  Herndon records in his biography:

  At the little country inns, we usually occupied the same bed. In most cases the beds were too short for Lincoln, and his feet would hang over the footboard, thus exposing a limited expanse of shin bone. Placing a candle on a chair at the head of the bed, he would read and study for hours. I have known him to study in this position until two o'clock in the morning. Meanwhile, I and others who chanced to occupy the same room would be safely and soundly asleep. On the circuit in this way he studied Euclid until he could with ease demonstrate all the propositions in the six books.

  After he had mastered geometry, he studied algebra, then astronomy, then he prepared a lecture on the origin and growth of languages. But no other study interested him as did Shakspere. The literary tastes that Jack Kelso had nurtured in New Salem still persisted.

  The most striking characteristic of Abraham Lincoln, from this time on to the end of his life, was a sadness so profound, a melancholy so deep that mere words can hardly convey its depths.

  When Jesse Weik was helping Herndon prepare his immortal biography, he felt that surely the reports of Lincoln's sadness must be exaggerated. So he went and discussed this point at length with the men who had been associated with Lincoln for years—men such as Stuart, Whitney, Matheny, Swett, and Judge Davis.

  Then Weik was firmly convinced "that men who never saw Lincoln could scarcely realize his tendency to melancholy," and Herndon, agreeing with him, went farther, making the statement from which I have already quoted: "If Lincoln ever had a happy day in twenty years, I never knew of it. A perpetual look of sadness was his most prominent feature. Melancholy dripped from him as he walked."

  When he was riding the circuit he would frequently sleep in the same room with two or three other attorneys. They would be awakened early in the morning by the sound of his voice and find him sitting on the edge of the bed, mumbling incoherently to himself. Getting up, he would start a fire and sit for hours, staring into the blaze. Frequently, on such occasions, he would recite "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?"

  Sometimes as he walked down the street, he was so deep ic

  despair that he took no notice of those who met him and spoke to him. Occasionally he shook hands with people without knowing what he was doing.

  Jonathan Birch, who all but worshiped Lincoln's memory, says:

  When attending court at Bloomington, Lincoln would keep his hearers in the court room, office or on the street convulsed with laughter at one hour and the next hour be so deeply submerged in speculation that no one dared arouse him. ... He would sit in a chair tilted against the wall, his feet on the lower rung, legs drawn up and knees level with his chin, hat tipped forward, hands clasped about knees, eyes infinitely sad, the very picture of dejection and gloom. Thus absorbed I have seen him sit for hours at a time, defying the interruption of even his closest friends.

  Senator Beveridge, after studying Lincoln's career perhaps more exhaustively than any one
else has ever done, came to the conclusion that "the dominant quality in Lincoln's life from 1849 to the end was a sadness so profound that the depths of it cannot be sounded or estimated by normal minds."

  Yet Lincoln's inexhaustible humor, his amazing capacity for telling stories, were as striking and inseparable a part of his personality as his sadness.

  At times Judge Davis even stopped court to listen to his boisterous humor.

  "Crowds thronged about him, crowds of two hundred and three hundred," says Herndon, holding their sides and laughing the hours away.

  One eye-witness declares that when Lincoln reached the "nub" of a good story, men "whooped" and rolled off their chairs.

  Those who knew Lincoln intimately agreed that "his abysmal sadness" was caused by two things: his crushing political disappointments and his tragic marriage.

  And so the poignant years of apparently permanent political oblivion dragged by—six of them—and then suddenly an event occurred that altered the whole course of Lincoln's life, and started him toward the White House.

  The instigator and moving spirit behind this event was Mary Lincoln's old sweetheart, Stephen A. Douglas.

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  n 1854, a tremendous thing happened to Lincoln. It came about as a result of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The Missouri Compromise, in brief, was this: In 1819, Missouri had wanted to come into the Union as a slave State. The North had opposed its doing so and the situation became serious. Finally, the ablest public men of that day arranged what is now known as the Missouri Compromise. The South got what it wanted: the admission of Missouri as a slave State. The North got what it wanted: thereafter slavery was never to be permitted in the West anywhere north of the southern boundary of Missouri. People thought that would stop the quarreling about slavery, and it did—for a while. But now, a third of a century later, Stephen A. Douglas secured the repeal of the Compromise, and made it possible for a new area lying west of the Mississippi and equal in size to the original thirteen States, to be blighted with the curse of slavery. He fought long and hard in Congress for the repeal. The struggle lasted for months. Once during the bitter debates in the House of Representatives, members leaped on top of their desks, knives flashed, and guns were drawn. But finally, after an impassioned plea by Douglas, lasting from midnight until almost dawn, the Senate passed his bill on March 4, 1854. It was a tremendous event. Messengers ran through the streets of the slumbering city of Washington, shouting the news. Cannon in the Navy Yard boomed to salute the dawn of a new era—a new era that was to be drenched in blood.

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  Why did Douglas do it? No one seems to know. Historians in skullcaps are still arguing about it. Of this much, however, we are certain: Douglas hoped to be elected President in 1856. He knew this repeal would help him in the South.

  But what of the North?

  "By God, I know it will raise a hell of a storm there," he declared.

  He was right. It did. It raised a regular tornado that blew both the great parties into bits, and eventually whirled the nation into civil war.

  Meetings of protest and indignation flared up spontaneously in hundreds of cities and villages and hamlets. Stephen Arnold Douglas was denounced as the "traitor Arnold." People said that he had been named after Benedict Arnold. He was branded as a modern Judas, and presented with thirty pieces of silver. He was given a rope and told to hang himself.

  The churches leaped into the fight with a holy frenzy. Three thousand and fifty clergymen in New England wrote a protest "in the name of Almighty God and in His presence," and laid it before the Senate. Fiery and indignant editorials fed the flames of public indignation. In Chicago even the Democratic papers turned upon Douglas with vindictive fierceness.

  Congress adjourned in August, and Douglas started home. Amazed at the sights that met his eyes, he declared afterward that he could have traveled all the way from Boston to Illinois by the light of burning effigies of himself hanging by the neck.

  Daring and defiant, he announced that he was going to speak in Chicago. The hatred against him there, in his own home town, amounted to nothing less than fanaticism. The press assailed him, and wrathful ministers demanded that he never again be permitted to "pollute the pure air of Illinois with his perfidious breath." Men rushed to the hardware stores, and, by sundown, there wasn't another revolver left for sale in all the city. His enemies swore that he should never live to defend his infamous deeds.

  The moment Douglas entered the city, boats in the harbor lowered their flags to half-mast; and bells in a score of churches tolled, mourning the death of Liberty.

  The night that he spoke was one of the hottest Chicago had ever known. Perspiration rolled down the faces of men as they sat idling in their chairs. Women fainted as they struggled to get out to the shore of the lake where they could sleep on the

  cool sands. Horses fell in their harness and lay dying in the streets.

  But notwithstanding the heat, thousands of excited men, guns in their pockets, flocked to hear Douglas. No hall in Chicago could hold the throng. They packed a public square, and hundreds stood on balconies and sat astride the roofs of near-by houses.

  The very first sentence that Douglas uttered was greeted with groans and hisses. He continued to talk—or, at least, he continued to try—and the audience yelled and booed and sang insulting songs and called him names that are unprintable.

  His excited partizans wanted to start a fight. Douglas begged them to be quiet. He would tame the mob. He kept on trying, but he kept on failing. When he denounced the "Chicago Tribune," the great gathering cheered the paper. When he threatened to stand there all night unless they let him speak, eight thousand voices sang: "We won't go home until morning. We won't go home until morning."

  It was a Saturday night. Finally, after four hours of futility and insult, Douglas took out his watch and shouted at the howling, bellowing, milling mob: "It is now Sunday morning, I'll go to church. And you can go to hell."

  Exhausted, he gave up and left the speaker's stand. The Little Giant had met humiliation and defeat for the first time in his life.

  The next morning the papers told all about it; and down in Springfield, a proud, plump brunette, trembling on the brink of middle age, read it with peculiar satisfaction. Fifteen years before, she had dreamed of being Mrs. Douglas. For years she had watched him mount on wings until he had become the most popular and powerful leader in the nation, while her husband had gone down in humiliating defeat; and, deep in her heart, she resented it.

  But now, thank God, the haughty Douglas was doomed. He had split his own party in his own State. And just before the election. This was Lincoln's chance. And Mary Lincoln knew it—his chance to win back the public favor that he had lost in 1848, his chance to reinstate himself politically, his chance to be elected to the United States Senate. True, Douglas still had four more years to serve. But his colleague was coming up for reelection in a few months.

  And who was his colleague? A swaggering, pugnacious Irish-

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  man named Shields. Mary Lincoln had an old score to settle with Shields, too. Back in 1842, largely because of insulting letters that she herself had written, Shields had challenged Lincoln to a duel; and the two of them, armed with cavalry swords and accompanied by their seconds, had met on a sand-bar in the Mississippi River, prepared to kill each other. But, at the last moment, friends interceded and prevented bloodshed. Since that time, Shields had gone up in politics, but Lincoln had gone down.

  But now Lincoln had struck bottom, and had started to rebound. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise had, as he said, "aroused" him. He could no longer remain quiet. He was determined to strike with all the vigor and conviction of his soul.

  So he began preparing his speech, working for weeks in the State library, consulting histories, mastering facts, classifying, clarifying, studying all the hot debates that had been thundered back and forth across the Senate chamber during the stormy passage of this bill.

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p; On October 3 the State Fair opened at Springfield. Thousands of farmers poured into town; men bringing their prize hogs and horses, their cattle and corn; women fetching their jellies and jam, their pies and preserves. But these displays were all but forgotten in the excitement of another attraction. For weeks it had been advertised that Douglas was to speak the opening day of the fair, and political leaders from all parts of the State had thronged there to hear him.

  That afternoon he spoke for more than three hours, going over his record, explaining, defending, attacking. He hotly denied that he was trying either "to legislate slavery into a territory or to exclude it therefrom." Let the people in a territory do whatever they pleased about slavery.

  "Surely," he shouted, "if the people of Kansas and Nebraska are able to govern themselves, surely they are able to govern a few miserable Negroes."

  Lincoln sat near the front, listening to every word, weighing every argument. When Douglas finished, Lincoln declared: "I'll hang his hide on the fence to-morrow."

  The next morning handbills were scattered all over town and the fair-grounds, announcing that Lincoln would reply to Douglas. The public interest was intense, and before two o'clock every seat was occupied in the hall where the speaking was to take place. Presently Douglas appeared and sat on the plat-

  form. As usual, he was immaculately attired and faultlessly groomed.

  Mary Lincoln was already in the audience. Before leaving the house that morning she had vigorously brushed Lincoln's coat, had laid out a fresh collar and carefully ironed his best tie. She was anxious to have him appear to advantage. But the day was hot, and Lincoln knew the air in the hall would be oppressive. So he strode onto the platform without a coat, without a vest, without a collar, without a tie. His long, brown, skinny neck rose out of the shirt that hung loosely on his gaunt frame. His hair was disordered, his boots rusty and unkempt. One single knitted "gallis" held up his short, ill-fitting trousers.