Team Of Rivals Part 11

When Lincoln returned to Congress for the rump session, influenced, perhaps, by his encounter with Seward, he drafted a proposal for the gradual emanc.i.p.ation 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 abolis.h.i.+ng slavery in the District would open the door to abolis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d 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 a.n.a.logous device existed to refloat a political career run aground. His securely Whig congressional district had turned Democratic, a s.h.i.+ft many Whigs blamed on Lincoln's criticisms of the war. He was out of office, with little immediate prospect of return. a.s.sessing 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 relations.h.i.+ps 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 pet.i.tions. 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 cla.s.sically 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 ch.o.r.es, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 succ.u.mbed 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 pa.s.sive 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 a.s.sumptions.

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 emanc.i.p.ated. 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, the Cleveland 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 a.s.sault, 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 emanc.i.p.ation issue had not fully "ripened." In the weeks that followed, he muted his stridency on slavery, allowing Weed the s.p.a.ce necessary to carry his protege to the next level. Weed ingratiated Seward with the legislators one by one. He rounded up the liberals and a.s.sured 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 a.s.sumed 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 speakers.h.i.+p 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 rea.s.sured 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 pa.s.sed. "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 circ.u.mstances 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 circ.u.mstances 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 s.h.i.+ft, he betrayed old a.s.sociates 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 Ma.s.sachusetts. "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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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

CHAPTER 5

THE TURBULENT FIFTIES

THE AMERICA OF 1850 was a largely rural nation of about 23 million people in which politics and public issues-at every level of government-were of consuming interest. Citizen partic.i.p.ation in public life far exceeded that of later years. Nearly three fourths of those eligible to vote partic.i.p.ated in the two presidential elections of the decade.

The princ.i.p.al weapon of political combatants was the speech. A gift for oratory was the key to success in politics. Even as a child, Lincoln had honed his skills by addressing his companions from a tree stump. Speeches on important occasions were exhaustively researched and closely reasoned, often lasting three or four hours. There was demagoguery, of course, but there were also metaphors and references to literature and cla.s.sical history and occasionally, as with some of Lincoln's speeches, a lasting literary glory.

The issues and declamations of politics were carried to the people by newspapers-the media of the time. The great majority of papers were highly partisan. Editors and publishers, as the careers of Thurlow Weed and Horace Greeley ill.u.s.trate, were often powerful political figures. Newspapers in the nineteenth century, author Charles Ingersoll observed, "were the daily fare of nearly every meal in almost every family; so cheap and common, that, like air and water, its uses are undervalued."

"Look into the morning trains," Ralph Waldo Emerson marveled, which "carry the business men into the city to their shops, counting-rooms, workyards and warehouses." Into every car the newsboy "unfolds his magical sheets,-twopence a head his bread of knowledge costs-and instantly the entire rectangular a.s.sembly, fresh from their breakfast, are bending as one man to their second breakfast." A European tourist was amazed at the central role newspapers played in the life of the new nation. "You meet newspaper readers everywhere; and in the evening the whole city knows what lay twenty-four hours ago on newswriters' desks.... The few who cannot read can hear news discussed or read aloud in ale-and-oyster houses."

Seventeen years before the decade had begun, President Andrew Jackson had prophesied: "The nullifiers in the south intend to blow up a storm on the slave question...be a.s.sured these men would do any act to destroy this union and form a southern confederacy bounded, north, by the Potomac river."

And now the storm had come.

The slavery issue had been a source of division between North and South from the beginning of the nation. That difference was embodied in the Const.i.tution itself, which provided that a slave would be counted as three fifths of a person for purposes of congressional representation and which imposed an obligation to surrender fugitive slaves to their lawful masters. Although slavery was not named in the Const.i.tution, it was, as antislavery Congressman John Quincy Adams said, "written in the bond," which meant that he, like everyone else, must "faithfully perform its obligations."

The const.i.tutional compromise that protected slavery in states where it already existed did not apply to newly acquired territories. Thus, every expansion of the nation reignited the divisive issue. The Missouri Compromise had provided a temporary solution for nearly three decades, but when Congress was called upon to decide the fate of the new territories acquired in the Mexican War, the stage was set for the renewal of the national debate. "If by your legislation you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico, purchased by the common blood and treasure of the whole people," Robert Toombs of Georgia warned, "I am for disunion." Mississippi called for a convention of Southern states to meet in Nashville for the defense of Southern rights.

The issue of slavery could no longer be put aside. It would dominate the debates in Congress. As Thomas Hart Benton once colorfully observed: "We read in Holy Writ, that a certain people were cursed by the plague of frogs, and that the plague was everywhere! You could not look upon the table but there were frogs, you could not sit down at the banquet but there were frogs, you could not go to the bridal couch and lift the sheets but there were frogs!" A similar affliction infested national discourse as every other topic was subsumed by slavery. "We can see nothing, touch nothing, have no measures proposed, without having this pestilence thrust before us. Here it is, this black question, forever on the table, on the nuptial couch, everywhere!"