unclear. In one version, Abe was getting the better of Jack, at which point Jack committed a foul that enraged Abe, who seized Jack by the throat, held him straight out, and shook him like a doll. A different rendering had Abe getting the better of Jack and provoking the anger of Jack’s friends, who en masse threatened to attack Abe, who faced them and declared that he was ready for all comers. The most likely story is that the two fighters came to a draw and broke off the fight, perhaps because of a foul committed by Jack.
At any rate, what really matters is that Abe endured a frontier initiation ritual that aided his political ambitions. Whether or not he emerged as “the best man” that day, he won the deep loyalty of the Clary’s Grove Boys, who thereafter supported him at political rallies and at the polls. As an early commentator noted, Lincoln now had on his side “‘the barefoot boys,’ ‘the huge-pawed boys,’ or ‘the butcher knife boys,’ who in the elections of those days so often held the balance of power.”56
He gained the respect of the Clary’s Grove Boys not only as a political candidate but also as their leader in the Black Hawk War, which he and they participated in during the spring and summer of 1832. This short-lived war was one of many results of the United States’ ongoing occupation of the ancestral lands of Native Americans. The story of Black Hawk, a leader of the Sauk and Fox tribes, was sadly typical. Through unfair treaties, William Henry Harrison in 1804 had wrested fifty million acres of land in northwestern Illinois and parts of Wisconsin and Missouri from the Sauks and Foxes, who were promised a federal annuity and the right to continue to occupy their land until the US government sold it to settlers. Pressured by encroaching whites, the natives finally moved west to Iowa. But in early April 1832, a food shortage induced Black Hawk, along with about a thousand men, women, and children, to move back into a small portion of their former Illinois lands, evidently to raise crops there. His reentry into Illinois alarmed state leaders like Governor John Reynolds, who called up troops to drive out the Indians. At the time, all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five had to do militia duty. Among those called up were sixty-eight men from the New Salem area, including Lincoln and the Clary’s Grove Boys. Now a person of stature among the frontiersmen, Lincoln was elected captain of a company in the Fourth Regiment of Mounted Volunteers. Jack Armstrong, his wrestling opponent, was his first sergeant. The rest of the unit struck observers as “the hardest set of men he ever saw,” “the wildest company in the world,” but Lincoln, though inexperienced militarily, gained his troops’ respect and affection.57
In the Black Hawk War, Lincoln also befriended several future lawyers or politicians, including John Todd Stuart, John J. Hardin, Edward D. Baker, Joseph Gillespie, and Orville Hickman Browning, all of whom later became important to his career.
That Lincoln was popular with both the wild set and the professionals showed again that he was capable of bridging social groups. For the roughs, his physical strength and mental toughness made him stand out. As J. Rowan Herndon explained, Lincoln “Became very Poupular [sic] in the army” because “he could throw Down any man that took hold of him,” “outjump the Best of them,” “outbox the Best of them,” and tell the best stories and jokes.58 Actually, the throwing down part was not completely true. When Lorenzo Dow Thompson, the leader of another militia unit, competed with Lincoln for a campsite by engaging him in a wrestling match, Lincoln had a surprise. “You see,” Lincoln recalled later, “I had never been thrown. . . . You may think a wrestle, or ‘wrastle,’ as we call such contests of skill and strength, was a small matter, but I tell you the whole army was out there to see it.”59 Thompson threw him twice, but Lincoln’s supporters admired his courage in taking on the powerful Thompson. Lincoln had more success with “the champion of the Southern companies,” who was taller and heavier than Abe. “I reckoned that I was the most wiry,” Lincoln said, “and soon after I had tackled him I gave him a hug, lifted him off the ground, and threw him flat on his back. That settled his hash.”60
Lincoln appealed to different types because of his flexible personality. A fellow militiaman said that Abe was “always cheerful, and his spirit and temper such as would engender the like cheerfulness in all surrounding minds: in fact the whole company, even amid trouble and suffering, received Strength & fortitude, by his buoyancy & elasticity.”61 John Todd Stuart explained that Abe was “exceedingly popular” because he was “so good natured, genial, upright.”62 Upright, perhaps, but capable of escapades. Stuart recalled that Abe, General James T. Henry, and he “went to the hoar houses” in Galena, in northern Illinois. “All went purely for fun—devilment—nothing Else.”63
Although Lincoln saw no military action during his fifty-one days of service in the Black Hawk War, he encountered gruesome scenes. In mid-May 1832, he witnessed the bloody aftermath of the Battle of Stillman’s Run, in which an outnumbered Indian band had defeated 275 Illinois militia under Major Isaiah Stillman. Lincoln’s company was part of a force that found the corpses of eleven soldiers, all of them scalped, some with their heads cut off, and others with the throats cut or genitals scooped out.64 Lincoln helped bury the dead. Later his unit came upon an old woman the natives had slaughtered, her scalp hanging on a ramrod, with a young woman lying nearby, her belly ripped open and her infant hanging from a tree branch.65
The Black Hawk War, ironically enough, brought out Lincoln’s sympathy for ethnic others. Discussion of Lincoln and race usually neglect to mention that, while his public racial pronouncements were sometimes conservative, on a personal level he showed compassion toward people of color. One evening an Indian came into the army camp bearing a signed letter from Lewis Cass saying that he was “a good & true man.”66 Lincoln’s men wanted to kill the guest. Lincoln announced that he would fight or duel anyone who tried to do so. No one took up the challenge.
While performing his militia duties, Lincoln must have been gratified that he did not have to wage battle against the natives. But other militiamen did, and like most white-Indian encounters in the nineteenth century, the brief Black Hawk War ended wretchedly for the Indians. Black Hawk tried to surrender under a flag of truce, but his envoys were slaughtered. By early August, the defeated chief tried to move with his remaining party west across the river to Iowa, but hundreds of women, children, and warriors were massacred during the retreat. More than half of the original Indian party were killed during the war. Black Hawk was captured and taken on a tour of the eastern states so that he could witness the power of white civilization. He was finally released to his tribe in Iowa. He recalled his former lands in Illinois as “a beautiful country. I loved my towns, my corn fields, and the home of my people.”67 All of northern Illinois, as a historian of the time noted, “was now ready for white possession.”
During his first year in Illinois, Lincoln had experienced firsthand the kind of violence and sensationalism that most Americans of the day only read about. Frontier humor, with its ring-tailed roarers and bloody Indian battles, became so popular that the leading example of this humor, the Crockett almanacs, would be featured in a 1946 exhibition by New York’s Grolier Club among the “One Hundred Influential American Books Published Before 1900,” along with Huckleberry Finn, the Declaration of Independence, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Gettysburg Address, and other classics.68 As the cultural historian Franklin J. Meine writes, “Through the medium of the Almanacks, the fantastic tales of the Davy Crockett myth mushroomed like an atom-bomb cloud” in nineteenth-century America, and for more than fifty years “the fabulous Davy reigned more or less supreme as the popular symbol of the American frontiersman.” Lincoln for a time virtually inhabited a real-life Crockett almanac; he engaged in repeated contests of frontier manliness and witnessed the bloody
ravages of Indian warfare. That he did so without indulging in the typical vices of real and fictional frontiersmen—drunkenness, tobacco chewing, eye gouging, cruel pranks, and blood sports—made him a notably improved version of the frontier rough, one with the energy of a Crockett or a Clary’s Grove Boy but without the excesses.
POLITICS AND GEOGRAPHY
Abe returned to New Salem from the Black Hawk War just two weeks before the August 1832 election. Before joining the war in the spring, he had entered his name as a candidate for the Illinois state legislature. That he ran for office after having spent only a short time in Illinois, at the young age of twenty-three, attests to his already vigorous political ambition. He appealed to both respectable and rough types in a short speech he gave at Papsville, a now-defunct village outside Springfield. The speech appealed to anti-Jackson voters who would soon consolidate locally and nationally as the Whig Party. Lincoln’s words, as reported by a witness, were:
Fellow citizens, I presume you all know who I am—I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the legislature. My policies are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a National Bank, I am in favor of the internal improvement system, and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. If elected I shall be thankful; and if not, it will be all the same.69
It would be hard to find a more condensed statement of what was emerging as Whig Party doctrine, most famously advanced by Lincoln’s political idol, Henry Clay. When Lincoln proclaimed support for the national bank, he was placing himself in opposition to President Andrew Jackson, who was running for reelection in 1832 on a platform that highlighted his plan to dismantle the Second Bank of the United States. The Hamiltonian national bank, anticipating the Federal Reserve Bank, centered monetary policy in the federal government instead of distributing it to the states, as Jackson and the Democratic Party aimed to do. The protective tariff, another Whig priority that Lincoln mentioned, was designed to shield American industry from unfair foreign competition while encouraging the manufacture of goods in the United States. Internal improvements, a third part of the Whig program, referred to the canals, railroads, roads, and other advances in the movement of goods and people.
Just as significant as the Whig message of Lincoln’s “short and sweet” speech was his bullish behavior that day. One of his supporters in the audience, J. Rowan Herndon, got into a fight with a gang of roughs just as Lincoln was preparing to speak. Upon spotting the melee, Lincoln went to Herndon’s aid; he charged the attackers and, in Herndon’s words, “threw them about like boys.”70 This aggressive action quieted the roughs, and Lincoln delivered his speech.
In March 1832, Lincoln issued a “Communication to the People of Sangamon County” in which he announced his main motive for running for state office: to promote internal improvements. He supported a central railroad in Illinois but called its $290,000 price tag too high to make it immediately feasible. His “Communication” (presumably a handbill) grew from his immersion in the natural environment of New Salem and Springfield. He announced that he had a unique knowledge of the Sangamon River, having observed it closely as a flatboat navigator and a mill worker. “From my peculiar circumstances,” he wrote, “it is probable that for the last twelve months I have given as particular attention to the stage of the water in this river, as any other person in the country.”71 He showed the same kind of sensitivity to changes in water levels that Thoreau later would observe in Walden Pond, but unlike the Concord naturalist, Lincoln wanted to put his knowledge of nature to economic use. The Sangamon River was a twisting stream, clogged with debris and snags, that, Lincoln argued, could be made navigable by large boats, perhaps all the way to Springfield, if a channel was cut through the prairie to reduce its bends. The straightened river would not only become shorter, but areas of floating timber would be avoided. “I believe the improvement of the Sangamon River,” Lincoln announced, “to be vastly important and highly desirable to the people of this county.” If elected, he promised, he would push for this project.
The election that took place just after his return from the war was a chastening experience. His popularity with local people of all types led to his winning all but twenty-three of New Salem’s three hundred votes cast in the August 1832 election. But he fared less well countywide, and he came in eighth among the twelve candidates from Sangamon County who were vying for four seats in the Illinois General Assembly.
Among those who defeated him that year was Peter Cartwright, an early nemesis of Lincoln’s who would later run against Abe for the US Congress. A Methodist revivalist of immense personal magnetism, Cartwright, twenty-three years older than Lincoln, had successfully run for state office in 1828 and had served in the legislature. Born in Virginia to poor parents who migrated west after the Revolution, Cartwright was raised in Logan County, Kentucky. He moved to Illinois in 1823 and settled in Pleasant Plains, eight miles southwest of the future New Salem. Like Lincoln, he was morally opposed to slavery and yet also mistrusted Garrisonian abolitionism, which he considered disruptive. He was wonderful at telling stories and jokes, skills he memorably used in the pulpit.
He was a pioneer of the new religious style—the anecdotal, pungent sermon style that influenced many nineteenth-century Americans, including Lincoln, who made his own innovative uses of religious images. Cartwright, in his twenty years as a traveling Methodist minister, baptized more than twelve thousand converts and gave more than eight thousand extemporaneous sermons brimming with entertaining lines and vivid warnings of God’s judgment. At religious camp meetings, a witness reported, “his wild, waggish, peculiar eloquence poured forth, splashing and foaming, like a mountain torrent. Glancing arrows of wit, the most galling satire, well-directed shafts of ridicule, and sidesplitting anecdotes were hurled in every direction with such wonderful effect, that in a very short time the whole encampment was in a perfect uproar of laughter.” This “torrent of indescribable humor” was followed by descriptions of hell and heaven that overwhelmed his hearers.72 At revivals, it was not unusual for scores of his listeners to fall senseless to the ground or have visions or trances that made them jerk, dance, run, bark, or laugh hysterically. Some would be taken home and would lie motionless for days, without eating or drinking, and awake to describe their visions. A middle-size, muscular man with thick black hair and a rugged head on which perched a furry white-beaver hat, Cartwright was the quintessential frontier preacher, as ready with his fists as with his stories. He was known to go into his audience, seek out scoffers or drunkards, threaten them, and, in some cases, pummel them.
0 Comments