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  The Sangamon River was New Salem’s lifeline. Upon it, settlers sent their produce to market and received necessary goods. Unless the obstacles to its navigability were surmounted, unless channels could be dredged and drifting logs removed, New Salem would never develop into a full-fledged community. The previous year Lincoln had piloted a flatboat on the river, gaining firsthand knowledge. He spoke with competence and confidence about a subject closely entwined with his own ambitions. If rivers and roads could be improved, if the government could aid in economic growth and development, hundreds of small hamlets like New Salem would thrive. “If elected,” Lincoln pledged, any law providing dependable roads and navigable streams for “the poorest and most thinly populated” communities “shall receive my support.”

  On the topic of education, he declared, “I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in.” He wanted every man to read the history of his country, “to appreciate the value of our free institutions,” to treasure literature and the scriptures. Lincoln spoke of education with the passion of a young man who had made ferocious efforts to educate himself in the hope of building a bridge between “the humble walks of life” and his dreams of an expansive future. The education he continued to seek for himself was one he wanted available for every man.

  In this first foray into politics, Lincoln also pledged that if his opinions on any subject turned out to be erroneous, he stood “ready to renounce them.” With this commitment, Lincoln revealed early on a quality that would characterize his leadership for the rest of his life—a willingness to acknowledge errors and learn from his mistakes.

  The pact Lincoln offered the people—the promise of unremitting labor in return for their support—was for him a covenant. The business of a vote or an election expressed a bond of affection that united people together; it was a question of trust. From the start, the destiny he sought was no simple craving for individual fame and distinction; his ambitions were, first and always, linked with the people.

  While uncertain about his prospects in this first election, Lincoln made it clear that failure did not intimidate him. Should he lose, he had said when declaring his intention to run, he had been “too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.” And yet, he forewarned, only after being defeated “some 5 or 6 times” would he deem it “a disgrace” and be certain “never to try it again.” So, along with the uncertainty of whether his ambition would be realized was the promise of resilience.

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  His campaign had scarcely begun when he volunteered to join the Illinois militia to fight against the Sac and Fox Indians during what became known as the Black Hawk War. To his surprise, he later said, he was elected captain of his company. No later “success in life,” he told a journalist a month after he had been nominated for president, had provided him “so much satisfaction.”

  When he returned to New Salem after three months of service, he had only four weeks to campaign before the August election. Traveling by horseback across a sparsely populated county the size of Rhode Island, Lincoln spoke at country stores and small village squares. On Saturdays, he joined his fellow candidates in the largest towns, where farmers gathered at auctions, “vandoos”—“to dispose of produce, buy supplies, see their neighbors and get the news.” The speaking would start in mid-morning and last until sunset. Each candidate was given a turn. Lincoln, one contender recalled, “did not follow the beaten track of other Speakers.” He set himself apart by the candid way in which he approached every question and by his habit of illustrating his arguments with stories based on observations “drawn from all classes of Society” between men and women in their daily lives. At times, his language was awkward, as were his gestures, but few who heard him speak ever forgot “either the argument of the Story, the Story itself, or the author.”

  When the votes were counted, Lincoln found he had lost the election. His lack of success, however, “did not dampen his hopes nor sour his ambition,” a friend recalled. On the contrary, he gained confidence from the knowledge that in his own town of New Salem, he had received an overwhelming total of 277 of the 300 votes cast. After the election, Lincoln worked several jobs to procure bread and keep “body and soul together.” He served as New Salem’s postmaster, and then, after teaching himself the principles of geometry and trigonometry involved in determining boundaries of land parcels, he was appointed deputy surveyor for Sangamon County, a position that allowed him to travel from one village to another. So swiftly did his reputation for storytelling precede him, a friend of Lincoln’s recalled, that no sooner had he arrived in a village than “men and boys gathered from far and near, ready to carry chains, drive stakes, and blaze trees, if they could hear Lincoln’s odd stories and jokes.”

  In 1834, now twenty-five, he ran for the state legislature once again, making good on his seriocomic warning that he would keep trying a half-dozen times before giving up. Once again, he traversed the district on horseback, delivering speeches, shaking hands, introducing himself, joining in local activities. Seeing thirty men in the field during a harvest, he offered to help, taking hold of the scythe “with perfect ease,” thereby winning every vote in the crowd. His ungainly appearance initially put people off. “Can’t the party raise a better candidate than that,” a doctor asked upon first seeing Lincoln. Then, after hearing him talk, he changed his mind: “Why, he knows more than all of them put together.”

  This time, having expanded his contacts throughout the county, Lincoln easily won. As he prepared to leave for the capital to take up his seat in the legislature, his friends chipped in to help him buy “suitable clothing” that would allow him “to maintain his new dignity.” They recognized a leader in their midst just as surely as he had begun to feel the makings of a leader within himself.

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  The rookie assemblyman was, in the words of his friend William Herndon, “anything but conspicuous” during the opening session of the state legislature. He remained “quietly in the background,” patiently educating himself about how the Assembly operated, acquainting himself with the intricacies of parliamentary procedure. He carefully monitored debates and discerned the ideological rifts between his fellow Whigs and the Democrats. Aware that he was in the presence of an unusually talented group of legislators (including two future presidential candidates, six future United States senators, eight future congressmen, and three State Supreme Court justices), Lincoln was neither bashful nor timid. He was simply paying close attention, absorbing, readying to act as soon as he had accumulated sufficient knowledge to do so. A finely developed sense of timing—knowing when to wait and when to act—would remain in Lincoln’s repertoire of leadership skills the rest of his life.

  Between legislative sessions, Lincoln began to read law, knowing that a legal education would nourish his political career. An autodidact by necessity, he “studied with nobody,” he later said, poring over cases and precedents deep into the night after working long days as surveyor and postal clerk. He borrowed law books, one at a time, from the set of John Stuart, a fellow legislator who had a law practice in Springfield. After finishing each book, he would hike the twenty miles from New Salem to Springfield to secure another loaner. An unwavering purpose supported him. “Get the books, and read and study them,” he told a law student seeking advice two decades later. “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.”

  At the commencement of the second session, the transformation of Lincoln’s demeanor and activity was clear. He was suddenly conspicuous, as if something in him had awakened. So thoroughly had he mastered both the legalese required for writing legislation and the intricacies of parliamentary procedure that his colleagues called on him to draft bills and amendments. The clear, legible handwriting he had perfected as a child proved invaluable when public laws and documents were initially written in longhand. More importantly, when he finally rose to speak on the Assembly floor, hi
s colleagues witnessed what the citizens of New Salem had already seen—a young man with a remarkable array of oratorical gifts. “They say I tell a great many stories,” Lincoln told a friend. “I reckon I do; but I have learned from long experience that plain people, take them as they run, are more easily influenced through the medium of a broad and humorous illustration than any other way.” As people read his speeches in the newspapers or heard about his lively metaphors and analogies through word of mouth, awareness of Lincoln’s signal ability to communicate spread throughout the state.

  Heralded for his leadership in moving the state capital from Vandalia to Springfield, Lincoln, the second youngest member of the Assembly, was selected by the full Whig caucus as their minority leader. Their choice signified not only their deference to Lincoln’s language skills and his mastery of parliamentary procedure, but what became known as his “crowning gift of political diagnosis”—his ability to intuit the feelings and intentions of his fellow Whigs and the opposing Democrats as well. After silently considering his colleagues’ strategy and opinions, he would stand and simply say: “From your talk, I gather the Democrats will do so and so.” If we want “to checkmate them,” here are the maneuvers we should take in the days that follow. So clear was his recommended course of action that “his listeners wondered why they had not seen it that way themselves.” It was “his thorough knowledge of human nature,” one fellow legislator observed, that “made him an overmatch for his compeers and for any man that I have ever known.”

  “We followed his lead,” a Whig colleague recalled, “but he followed nobody’s lead; he hewed the way for us to follow, and we gladly did so. He could grasp and concentrate the matters under discussion, and his clear statement of an intricate or obscure subject was better than an ordinary argument.” Democrats, of course, felt otherwise. How Lincoln responded to attacks directed against him and his party reveals much about his temperament and the character of his developing leadership. Such was the lure of politics in the antebellum era that discussions and debates between Whigs and Democrats regularly attracted the fanatic attention of hundreds of people. Opponents attacked each other in fiery, abusive language, much to the delight of raucous audiences, inciting an atmosphere that could burst into fistfights, even, on occasion, guns being drawn. While Lincoln was as thin-skinned and prickly as most politicians, his retorts were generally full of such good-humored raillery that members of both parties could not help but laugh and relax in the pleasure of his entertaining and well-told stories.

  So memorable were several of Lincoln’s counterattacks that citizens could recite them afterward word for word. The “lightning-rod” episode is a case in point. A crowd was beginning to disperse from a spirited rally at which Lincoln had spoken, when George Forquer stood up. A prominent Whig who had recently shifted to the Democratic Party after receiving a lucrative appointment as land register, Forquer had lately built a fancy house, complete with a newfangled lightning rod. Standing on the stage, Forquer declared that it was time for someone to take young Lincoln down, which he attempted to do with ridicule. Though the attack had “roused the lion within him,” Lincoln remained quiet until Forquer finished, silently preparing his rejoinder. “The gentleman commenced by saying the young man would have to be taken down,” Lincoln began, drolly admitting, “I desire to live, and I desire place and distinction; but I would rather die now than, like the gentleman, live to see the day I would change my politics for an office worth three thousand dollars a year, and then feel compelled to erect a lightning-rod to protect a guilty conscience from an offended God.” The outburst of laughter provoked from the audience was thunderous.

  On certain occasions, however, Herndon recalled, Lincoln’s humor ran amok, his light mockery turning vindictive, even cruel. After Democrat Jesse Thomas had “indulged in some fun” at Lincoln’s expense, Lincoln displayed an aspect of his great theatrical skill, resorting to mimicry, at which he had no rival. “He imitated Thomas in gesture and voice, at times caricaturing his walk and the very motion of his body.” As the crowd responded with yells and cheers, Lincoln “gave way to intense and scathing ridicule,” mocking still further the “ludicrous” way Thomas spoke. Seated in the audience, Thomas broke down in tears, and soon the “skinning of Thomas” became “the talk of the town.” Realizing he had badly overstepped, Lincoln went to Thomas and gave him a heartfelt apology, and for years afterward, the memory of that night filled Lincoln “with the deepest chagrin.” Increasingly, though not always, he was able to rein in his impulse to throw a hurtful counterpunch. He was after something more significant than the gratification of an artfully delivered humiliation.

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  Even early on, Lincoln’s moral courage and convictions outweighed his ferocious ambition. At the age of twenty-six, he made a public statement on slavery that threatened to drastically diminish his support in a state that was then largely settled by southerners. The rise of abolitionism in the Northeast, coupled with the refusal of some northern states to return fugitive slaves, had led legislatures in both South and North to pass resolutions confirming the constitutional right to slavery. The General Assembly in Illinois fell in line. By the disproportionate vote of seventy-seven to six, the assembly resolved that “we highly disapprove of the formation of abolition societies” and hold “sacred” the “right of property in slaves.” Lincoln was among the six who voted no. Registering a formal protest, he proclaimed that “the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy.” He had always believed, he later said, that “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Lincoln’s protest stopped well short of abolitionism. Until such time as the Constitution empowered Congress to eliminate slavery, he felt that his hands were tied against interfering where slavery was already established. Fearing anarchy above all, he believed it essential to abide by a law until that settled law be lawfully changed. Though carefully worded and “pruned of any offensive allusions,” the protest was, nonetheless, writer William Stoddard observed, “a bold thing to do, in a day when to be an antislavery man, even at the North, was to be a sort of social outcast and political pariah.”

  Remaining true to his original promise to do everything he could to secure governmental aid for infrastructure improvements, however, was more personal and pressing to Lincoln in these early years of his political career than the issue of slavery. He used the power of his leading position in the Assembly to mobilize support behind a series of bills authorizing millions of dollars for a spectacular range of projects to widen rivers, build railroads, dig canals, and create roads. From prairie and first-growth forest, from clogged creeks and rivers, from black earth perfect for farming but untenable for road and train beds during the spring melts and fall rains, Lincoln envisioned a massive infrastructure system. Drawn from his firsthand knowledge of the land, his plan would provide the vital connectors to create a circulatory system of people and their products—a living social body necessary to build and sustain a growing economy. His dream, he told a friend, was to be known as the “DeWitt Clinton of Illinois”—invoking the celebrated governor of New York who had vastly spurred economic development and left a lasting imprint on his state when he secured legislation to support the building of the Erie Canal. In like fashion, Lincoln hoped that with the completion of these projects, markets would develop, bustling towns would spring up, living standards would rise, new settlers would come, greater opportunities would open for more people. Those born in the lower ranks would rise as far as their talents and discipline might take them, and the promise of the American dream would be realized.

  When a sustained recession hit the state in 1837, however, public sentiment began to rear up against such expensive and still unfinished internal improvement projects. As the state debt rose to monumental proportions, Lincoln continued to stoutly defend the infrastructure system against the surge of condemnation, likening the abandonment of the new canal system to stopping a small boat “in the middle of a river—if it was not going
up, it would go down.” To relinquish the program of improvements, he repeatedly warned, would leave behind only failure and debt, resilted canals, obstructed waterways, half-built roads and bridges. Adamantly, he refused to give ground, abiding by his father’s old maxim: “If you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter.” His dogged resistance to abandon the policies he had so passionately advocated seemed to some a sign of stubbornness, but he held fast to his vision, as if his innermost hopes, personal dreams, and ambitions were under direct assault. Which was exactly the case.

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  Six years after first declaring his own “peculiar ambition” to his new neighbors in New Salem, the twenty-nine-year-old Lincoln elaborated on the nature of ambition and the thirst for distinction in an address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield. He opened his address with a warning that “something of ill-omen,” was developing among the people—a tendency to substitute violence, murder, and lynching for the rule of law, the courts, and the Constitution. Two months earlier, the entire North had been rocked when a proslavery mob in Alton, Illinois, killed the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy. In Mississippi, a group of Negroes, suspected of inciting insurrection, were hanged, as were a group of whites suspected of aiding the Negroes. If this moblike spirit continued to spread, Lincoln cautioned, the “good men, men who love tranquility,” would become alienated from a government too weak to protect them. The country would then be vulnerable to the imposition of order from above.