The rough-and-tumble spirit of American public life permeated Lincoln’s immediate political world in Illinois. Springfield’s sheriff, Garrett Elkin, responding to attacks on him in the Republican, horsewhipped the paper’s editor, George R. Weber, whose brother stabbed Elkin and another man with a knife. The brother’s assault provoked a duel challenge against Weber. Lincoln witnessed a fracas at a political meeting in July 1836, when Ninian Edwards leaped on a table and called a Democratic opponent, the Reverend Jacob Early, a liar. A duel was barely averted; during the back-and-forth, Edwards drew a pistol, and “the whigs & democrats had a general quarrel then & there.”48 Two years later, while running against each other for Congress, Lincoln’s friend John T. Stuart and Stephen Douglas engaged in fisticuffs in a local tavern. A witness said, “They both fought till Exhausted—grocery floor Slippery with Slop.” Another time in the campaign, when the hot-headed Douglas again angered Stuart, the latter seized the diminutive man by the neck and pulled him around until Douglas bit his thumb, scarring him for life. Douglas was so upset by a piece in the Sangamo Journal that he used his cane to attack the paper’s editor, Simeon Francis, who jammed the Little Giant against a cart before being pulled away by spectators. What Douglas lacked in physical power he made up for in rhetorical vigor. His speeches were savage, often alcohol-fueled denunciations meant to humiliate opponents. In Sidney Blumenthal’s words, his speaking style “resembled that of a frontier fighter, spitting, shooting, and gouging,” filled with “ranting, illogic, and invective, peppered with frequent use of the word ‘nigger.’”49 Douglas’s bludgeoning style, Lincoln saw, was hard to combat because many audiences willingly accepted absurdities if they were delivered with enough force. As Lincoln later wrote of Douglas, “A neatly varnished sophism would be readily penetrated, but a great, rough non sequitur was sometimes twice as dangerous as a well polished fallacy.”50
Early in his political career, Lincoln tested out the popular sensational style, mastering invective and abrasive humor. In the legislative races of 1832 and 1834 he was restrained, but in 1836 he unleashed his caustic wit. During the campaign he “used the weapons of sarcasm and ridicule, and always prevailed,” an observer noted.51 When a Democrat wrote a piece falsely charging him with opposing repayment of a state loan, Lincoln in a handbill stated that “the author is a liar and a scoundrel, and that if he will avow the authorship to me, I promise to give his proboscis a good wringing.”52 A decade before George Lippard and other popular writers used Gothic images to unmask their opponents, Lincoln did so with such force that the Sangamo Journal likened him to a tomb raider: “The Van Buren men . . . are taking shelter like ghosts under the rotten bones and tombstones of the dead acts of the administration. Mr. Lincoln, however, lifted the lid, and exposed to the eye the wretched condition of some of the acts of the Van Buren party.”53 Lincoln contributed to “Sampson’s Ghost,” a six-part newspaper series partly in the Gothic style in which a ghoulish “unearthly visitant” terrorizes James Adams, an attorney whom Lincoln charged with forgery and fraud in depriving the heirs of Joseph Anderson of their rightful inheritance.54
He made innovations on the sensational style, using animals and things in ways that typified his humor and storytelling. He compared a Democrat who greatly exaggerated the expenses of internal improvements to a Hoosier bachelor who fired at what he thought was a distant squirrel that was in fact a louse on his eyelash. Lincoln said of his opponent, “He imagined he could see squirrels every day, when they were nothing but lice.”55 In an 1837 speech on Van Buren’s subtreasury system, he compared Democrats who absconded with public funds to a man in an Irish folk song who had a cork leg that ran faster the more he tried to stop it. In the same speech, he used his awareness of vibrant matter and the overwhelming power of nature to expose what he saw as corruption streaming out of the Van Buren White House:
I know that the great volcano at Washington, aroused and directed by the evil spirit that reigns there, is belching forth the lava of political corruption, in a current broad and deep, which is sweeping with frightful velocity over the whole length and breadth of the land, bidding fair to leave unscathed no green spot or living thing, while on its bosom are riding like demons on the waves of Hell, the imps of that evil spirit, and fiendishly taunting all those who dare resist its destroying course, with the hopelessness of their effort; and knowing this, I cannot deny that all may be swept away.56
This spiraling sentence reaches gloomy depths of the sort we find in what I describe elsewhere as dark reform literature: popular writing that exposes social abuses in sensational images so graphic that the images themselves, rather than the abuses, seize our attention.57 In this passage, Lincoln ostensibly addresses corruption, but what we see is an evil spirit and all-destroying lava alive with devils who mock everyone. Such post-Calvinist images anticipated the dark reform writing of George Lippard, whose 1845 novel The Quaker City, one of the era’s huge sellers, features a nightmarish scene in which massive corruption creates a dystopic America that heaves and then explodes like a volcano.58 Herman Melville, who praised the Calvinistic “power of blackness” in his contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne, extensively used dark reform images in his early fiction that set the stage for his vast, appalling white whale, relentlessly pursued by the “grand, ungodly, god-like” Captain Ahab, who is a kind of overreaching dark reformer intent on piercing the greatest “whited sepulcher” of all, Moby-Dick.59 Other Lincoln contemporaries influenced by dark reform were Whitman, whose 1842 temperance novel Franklin Evans emphasized the aberrant results of alcohol abuse, and Poe, who in stories like “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado” probed the psychology of alcohol-crazed murderers.
Did Lincoln hope to follow the path of others and become an author? He certainly tested his literary abilities in the 1830s and ’40s. He wrote an uncounted number of pieces for Springfield’s Whig paper, the Sangamo Journal, which he virtually coedited during this time. The paper printed “The Suicide’s Soliloquy,” the first of his three published poems (later to include “My Childhood Home I See Again” and “The Bear Hunt”).60 In “The Suicide’s Soliloquy,” Lincoln tried to gain poetic control over private tensions that were evidently left over from Ann Rutledge’s death. “The Suicide’s Soliloquy” was a means for him to imaginatively purge and simultaneously gain literary control over his self-destructive impulses. Like his two later published poems, “Soliloquy” regulates a melancholy theme with steady iambic meter and regular rhymes. Like Lincoln’s stories, it is filled with nature images. The poem is the last utterance of a wretched man, alone at midnight in the woods as an owl hoots, who imagines wolves eating his carcass, buzzards picking at his bones, a raven cawing, and so forth. He also has a vision of leaping off a precipice into the burning waves of hell, where screeching devils surround him. The moment of suicide is described physically: the “sweet steel” of the dagger “rip[s] up the organ of my breath / And draws my blood in showers.” “I strike!” he cries. “It quivers in my heart,” as he draws out the dagger and kisses it, “my last, my only friend.”
The poem channels not only desperate personal passion but also dark cultural energies. The newspapers of the time were filled with reports of suicides—the more sensational the better. The Sangamo Journal published many such stories, including “Most Melancholy—Double Suicide,” about lovers, depressed by opposition from their parents, who hang themselves; “Singular Suicides,” about four sisters who separately kill themselves days or weeks apart; the report of an “extremely prepossessing” girl, falsely charged with robbery, who swallows arsenic; and what is, understandably, called “the most extraordinary suicide in the world’s record,” about a German woman whose husband is so depressed that she stabs herself after hearing doctors say that only a “real misfortune” will shock the man back to sanity—indeed, the man recovers nicely after her suicide, prompting the doctors to say that “no medicine could have worked with such potency on either mind or body.”61
Compared with such tawdry sensational news stories, Lincoln’s “The Suicide’s Soliloquy” brings poetic control and resonance to a popular theme that had particularly strong meaning for him in the aftermath of the loss of Ann Rutledge. Three years after he published this poem, he fell into another depression that again produced suicidal thoughts. He called himself “the most miserable man living,” and those close to him described him as “Crazy as a Loon,” in peril of becoming “a lunatic for life.”62 The occasion this time is murky, but it was believed on all sides to be related to his recent breakup with Mary Todd.
Biographers have identified a number of factors that contributed to Lincoln’s break with Mary and his subsequent melancholy. They include his doubts about his love for Mary, to whom he nonetheless felt committed; the opposition of her family to the marriage; his sudden infatuation with the lovely eighteen-year-old Matilda Edwards; his attraction to an even younger teenager, Sarah Rickard, who was half his age; his financial uncertainty as a junior lawyer and a low-paid legislator; his sorrow over the impending departure to Kentucky of his friend and bedmate, Joshua Speed; and Mary’s reported flirtation with other men. There were exterior factors, too, including the embarrassing episode in December 1840 in which Lincoln and two Whig colleagues jumped out a state house window to prevent Democrats from having a quorum on a disputed bill. Also disconcerting for Lincoln, who had championed ample funds for internal improvements in Illinois, was the resulting financial default of the state on January 1, 1841, a date known locally as “the fatal first.”63
It’s mistaken to isolate any single factor in his withdrawal from Mary and his psychological tailspin. Lincoln himself, if asked, probably could not have explained why the “hypo” came over him with devastating force.
What really matters for history is that he soon recovered and went on to marry Mary Todd, who helped push him along the path to the presidency. The relevant questions are: How did he recover emotional stability, and what made him change his mind about marrying Mary? The standard explanation is that sometime in late summer or early fall of 1842 Eliza Rumsey Francis, the wife of the newspaper editor Simeon Francis, reintroduced Abe and Mary, who had some private meetings that led to a rapprochement. Such encounters rekindled the romance, and Lincoln’s sterling sense of personal honor impelled him to fulfill the promise of marriage he had previously made to Mary Todd.
There were also significant cultural factors at work that have been ignored. One is the lessons he learned from political conflicts over class issues, which put him at risk of death a few times in the 1836–42 period. Another is his relationship to the era’s most popular reform, the temperance movement. A third is his and Mary’s participation in progressive ideas about gender and marriage that emerged around the time they reunited.
Only by exploring these cultural phenomena do we understand Lincoln’s psychological rehabilitation and his life-defining commitment to Mary Todd.
FIGHTING OVER PARTY AND CLASS
In a memorable political episode of 1840, Lincoln dealt with an issue that was becoming highly sensitive for him and for America at large: the relationship between political affiliation and social class. At a public rally that summer, the Democrat Richard Taylor criticized Whigs as the party of the rich, whose aristocratic airs distanced them from average Americans. Enraged at this representation of his party, Lincoln, who was standing to Taylor’s side, slowly edged up to the speaker and, when he got close, jerked open his vest. Out tumbled shirt frills “like a pile of Entrails” and “gold chains—gold watches with large seals” that “hung heavily & massively down.”64 The audience roared in mockery of the hypocritical Taylor. Lincoln told the crowd that not long ago he had been a flatboat man wearing buckskin pants that shrank so much that they exposed his lower legs and left a purple mark on them. “If you call this aristocracy,” Lincoln declared, “I plead guilty to the charge.”
Politics and class were vexing issues for Lincoln at a time when he was mingling with Springfield’s social elite on Aristocracy Hill and simultaneously campaigning for the Whig presidential candidate William Henry Harrison, a large landowner and scion of a wealthy family who was being sold to the public as the quintessential common man, one who purportedly occupied a log cabin and drank hard cider. This was neither the first nor the last time that image trumped substance in American elections, but it was among the most significant instances of such distortion. One might think that Lincoln, with his genuinely humble background, would not have to prove his working-class credentials, but he did, because Whigs were commonly dubbed “aristocrats” or “ruffled-shirt gentry.”65 And so he followed the example of others involved in Harrison’s Log Cabin campaign, which in its populist hoopla anticipated the image-filled promotion of the Illinois Rail-splitter in the 1860 presidential race.
The Democrats in 1840 were still riding the coattails of the immensely popular Andrew Jackson, whose successor, Martin Van Buren, had kept some of Old Hickory’s policies alive in his first term and was running for reelection. The Whigs did what they could to make Van Buren, the self-made farmer’s son, seem aristocratic, charging him with living in decadent opulence in the White House. It is no wonder that the political parties struggled vigorously over the issue of class. With the rise of a market economy, class divisions deepened during the antebellum era, creating social tensions. Between 1774 and 1860, the percentage of total assets owned by the richest 1 percent of Americans increased from 12.6 percent to 29 percent, while that controlled by the top 10 percent rose from less than half to nearly three quarters.66 The rich lived in mansions in areas, like Springfield’s Aristocracy Hill, that seemed distanced, economically if not geographically, from the humbler, more crowded neighborhoods of the working class or the poor. Class anxieties fostered popular novels that contrasted the so-called upper ten—the “idle” rich who lived off the labor of others—and the “lower million,” the underpaid workers and the oppressed poor. It was to no politician’s advantage to be associated with the upper ten, especially at a time when voter participation was extremely high; it reached 80.2 percent of eligible voters in 1840.67
Lincoln began fighting publicly over social class in the 1836 state election, when he “skinned” opponents by emphasizing their upper-class associations. His most famous critique that year was aimed at the political turncoat George Forquer, a former Whig who had become a Democrat, apparently to win favors from President Jackson, who appointed him as the high-salaried land register of Illinois. Forquer owned Springfield’s largest house, on which he installed a lightning rod, a device new to that region. At a political meeting, Forquer, calling Lincoln a “young man” who had to be “taken down,” gave a speech so severe that the Clary’s Grove Boys, Lincoln’s ardent supporters
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