who were among the audience, squirmed with rage.68 When Forquer was done, Lincoln took the platform and, in a coolly sarcastic riposte, admitted that he was too inexperienced to know political tricks, but, “live long or die young, I would rather die now than, like the gentleman, change my politics, and with the change receive an office worth three thousand dollars a year, and then feel obliged to erect a lightning rod over my house, to protect a guilty conscience from an offended God.” This statement caused a sensation, and Forquer was humiliated.
This was the first of many public situations in which Lincoln used what the Illinois governor Thomas Ford called “the little big man” technique—that is, posing as humble or inferior for political effect.69 Lincoln would use this technique for the rest of his career, and he honed it in his early Illinois races. In January 1837, he used it against Usher Linder, a noted politician who wanted to divide Sangamon County and launch an investigation of the Illinois State Bank. Linder had a reputation, as a contemporary observed, as “the greatest orator of this State.”70 Lincoln began his speech by admitting that he knew Linder did not like “wasting ammunition on small game” such as himself. But he praised Linder only to damn him, for in the next breath, he said that Linder’s “decided superiority” lay in his faculty of “entangling the subject, so that neither himself or any other man can find head or tail to it.”71 In the rest of the speech, Lincoln gave a stinging, if not always logical, discussion of the bank issue in which Linder came off as ignorant, elitist, and possibly corrupt.
The most notorious of Lincoln’s little-big-man skinnings occurred in the 1840 legislative race, when he took aim at the Democratic opponent, Judge Jesse B. Thomas. In the Springfield courthouse, Thomas spoke against Lincoln and accused Whigs of forging letters related to Stephen A. Douglas, the state’s leading Democrat. In his reply, Lincoln put on his little-big-man pose, saying that he was “a humble member of the ‘Long Nine,’ so that he could not swell himself off to the great dimensions of his learned and eloquent adversary.” If he tried to do so, he feared he would “be attended with the fate of the frog in the fable, which tried to swell itself to the size of an ox.” But, he added, he could prick pinholes in his adversary and “bring him down to size.”72 What followed was a scathing ad hominem attack in which Lincoln, an excellent mimic, not only blasted the judge but imitated his distinctive speech, gait, and mannerisms. The mimicry caused real pain. As the audience cheered Lincoln on, Thomas began to “blubber like a baby, and withdrew from the assembly.” He cried for much of the rest of the day. Deeply ashamed, Lincoln soon apologized to Thomas.
As far as we know, none of these skinnings put Lincoln in physical danger. The same cannot be said of other hostile encounters. With his athletic skills and his rough frontier background, Lincoln was always ready for combat. Once when his Whig friend Edward Baker provoked Democrats in the audience, Lincoln seized a heavy pitcher and threatened to smash anyone who tried to attack Baker. Another time, he and Baker protected a colleague from hecklers by assuring him that “we both think we can do a little fighting, so we want you to walk between us until we get you to your hotel.”73
Some of Lincoln’s political battles led to life-threatening moments when the subjects of his attacks called for a duel. Although dueling had been outlawed since 1810 in Illinois, when it was still a territory, someone who wanted to engage in a duel got satisfaction by facing his opponent out of the state—a favorite spot was the no-man’s land called Bloody Island, between Illinois and Missouri. That evasion of the law became less attractive in 1848, when Illinois’s new constitution stipulated that no dueler could hold a position of honor or power in the state. Before then, challenges were common, though rarely did they result in a duel, because typically the parties reached a settlement. That was the case in 1837 when friends intervened to settle the dispute between Lincoln and the Democrat William L. D. Ewing, who appeared to be ready to have a duel over the issue of moving the state capital to Springfield.
In his next potentially fatal encounter, Lincoln became his own mediator. In late October 1840, while he was wrapping up the Harrison campaign in southern Illinois, Lincoln got into a verbal contretemps with William G. Anderson, a Democratic politician. Evidently, both men charged each other with falsifying party records. Lincoln’s remarks were abrasive enough that Anderson wrote a note saying that Lincoln’s words “imported insult,” adding, “I think you were the aggressor.”74 The note was clearly a challenge, but Lincoln defused the situation in a cautiously worded letter in which he told Anderson, “I entertain no unkind feeling to you, and none of any sort upon the subject, except a sincere regret that I permitted myself to get into such an altercation.”
THE VICTORY OVER DARK REFORM
Lincoln’s address to the Springfield Washington Temperance Society before a packed house in the town’s Second Presbyterian Church on February 22, 1842, was a key moment in his career as a public speaker. The dark reform rhetoric that characterized some of his earlier speeches—such as the devil-infested lava of corruption or the slashing sarcasm of the skinnings—was absent from his temperance address. A main argument of the speech was that American reformers had been too sensational and that a new, more rational way of addressing reform was needed. He saw that temperance, like abolitionism, was a well-meaning movement but that the dark images and hyperemotionalism of many of its proponents were self-defeating. Persuasive appeals to reason, he argued, must replace irrationalism and denunciation. The speech signaled his rational treatment of a hotly debated public issue.
Lincoln had long experience with the temperance movement. In Indiana he had written a temperance article that was published in an Ohio newspaper. In Springfield in 1838 he formally pledged “never to drink ardent spirits” (redundant in his case because he hated the taste of alcohol) and signed the constitution of the Sangamon Temperance Society along with 185 others, including his friend Simeon Francis.75 In the 1840s he rode by horse and buggy around central Illinois giving temperance talks.76 In 1853 he signed a group letter congratulating Springfield’s Presbyterian minister James Smith for a temperance speech he had given.77 During the Civil War, he greeted a delegation of the Sons of Temperance by declaring, “Intemperance is one of the greatest, if not the very greatest of all evils amongst mankind.” He added, on a note of caution, “The mode of cure is one about which there may be differences of opinion.”78
He knew those differences well. He recognized that the noble aim of combating alcoholism had been hindered by contests between various approaches to temperance reform and behavioral lapses on the part of reformers. He also knew that temperance, like other reforms, could be taken to an extreme. He had developed a relaxed, tolerant view of drinking that freed him of narrow views of alcohol consumption. Those who drank, he recognized, were fallible and yet basically as good as those who abstained. To win drunkards to sobriety through reasonable persuasion, he insisted, should be the temperance reformer’s goal.
In making this point, he was reacting against a tradition of dark temperance oratory and literature. He chastised “uncharitable” and “feelingless” reformers who excoriated drinkers as “the authors of all the misery and crime in the land,” whose “houses were workshops of the devil,” and who “should be shunned by all the good and virtuous, as moral pestilences. He had ample exposure to this kind of gloomy rhetoric. One of his main schoolbooks, William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution, included a story about Death, a grim king, who seeks a prime minister among many diseases—gout, asthma, palsy, and others—and decides to choose a woman named Intemperance, who asks the other illnesses, “Am I not your parent? The author of your beings?”80 As a teenager in Indiana, Lincoln sang the dark temperance song “John Anderson’s Lamentation” (aka “John Adkins’ Farewell”). In this bleak song, an alcoholic who is about to be executed for murdering his wife tearfully gives moral messages to other inebriates and to his own poor, parentless children. “Oh sinners! Poor sinners! Take warning by me,” the man cries. “The fruits of transgression, behold now and see.” The temperance message is stark:
Much intoxication my ruin has been.
And my dear companion I’ve barbarously slain; . . .
A whole life of sorrow can never atone,
For that cruel murder that my hands have done;
I am justly condemned, it’s right that I should die,
Therefore, let all drunkards take warning hereby.81
The song typified the popular dark temperance genre, which yielded countless poems, short stories, novels, and tracts. Mason Weems, one of Lincoln’s favorite authors, wrote the popular Drunkard’s Looking Glass, in which a preacher, lured by the devil, gets drunk and murders his father, rapes his sister, and hangs himself. The Reverend George B. Cheever’s Deacon Giles’ Distillery (1835) pictures a still in which devils produce barrels of rum emblazoned with labels like “Sickness,” “Poverty,” “Death,” “Hell,” and the like. Dark temperance fiction crowded newspapers and achieved bestselling status in Timothy Shay Arthur’s 1854 novel Ten Nights in a Bar-room, which traces the collapse of a once-respectable community after the introduction of a saloon and a distillery.
Lincoln had exposure to temperance reform in both New Salem, where John Allen founded a temperance society in 1831, and in Springfield, which had three temperance societies when Lincoln moved there in 1837. The Presbyterian Allen had founded the New Salem group because he found the village “a notoriously wicked and intemperate place.”82 Within two years of its founding, Allen’s society counted seventy-six members. By 1835, the group’s work had taken effect: New Salem had become largely a temperance town. Those who wanted to drink without inhibition moved to Petersburg, two and a half miles away, where “you could drink yourself to death and no one would interfere. Although the records of Allen’s society have not survived, we get a sense of the group’s approach to temperance from an 1834 address given by one of its members, Thomas J. Nance.84 The speech begins by advocating total abstinence, which, Nance says, cultivates reason in humans. While this part of the talk anticipated Lincoln’s praise of reason in the Washington Temperance Society speech, Nance makes the kind of dark turn that Lincoln avoids; he describes the disease, despair, broken homes, and crime that come from drinking. Nance tells a sensational story of the kind told endlessly by his contemporaries about a man who begins as a moderate drinker but who becomes a sot who loses his family and dies a miserable, lonely death.
If the temperance message of New Salem Society was typical of the era, so was the conflict between different approaches to drinking. When the town’s schoolmaster, Mentor Graham, joined John Allen’s society, he was expelled by his hard-shell Baptist church, which considered temperance reform a sacrilegious meddling with human character that must be left solely to God. At the same time that Graham was kicked out, so was a member of the congregation who was perpetually drunk. The church’s inconsistent response to alcohol use gave rise to a humorous predicament when a third congregant stood up in church, waved a half-filled flask of whiskey, and declared, “Brethering, you turned one member out because he did not drink, and another because he got drunk, and now I want to ask you, how much of this ’ere critter does a man have to drink to stay in full fellership in this church?”85 Another twist came when Mentor Graham got drunk and was expelled from Allen’s temperance society, at which point he rejoined the church.
Backsliding like Graham’s was so common that the figure of the “intemperate temperance reformer”—the person who advocated temperance but resumed drinking—became a standard figure of ridicule in popular culture. The overwhelming majority of those who pledged total abstinence eventually returned to the bottle.86 Lincoln had been familiar with such inconsistent behavior since early childhood. Three of the preachers who were most influential on his family—William Downs, David Elkin, and Jesse Head—had serious drinking problems, as did Father William de Rohan, a Catholic priest who had contact with the Lincolns in Kentucky. The Reverend Jesse Head was a bundle of contradictions: “Though an Abolitionist, he owned slaves. Though a temperance advocate, in common with the majority of the backwoods preachers, he would not refuse an occasional ‘dram.’”87 William Downs was bibulous, “disorderly, indolent, slovenly, and self-indulgent,” while David Elkin was “uncultivated” and “somewhat sullied” by “too free a use of strong drink.”88
The intemperate temperance reformer remained a standard figure in Lincoln’s experience. William Herndon, his longtime law partner, was an ardent temperance advocate from the early 1840s onward. He joined several temperance groups and, as mayor of Springfield in the mid-1850s, led the failed effort to institute prohibition there. But he was an alcoholic whose frequent drunkenness often tested Lincoln’s patience. (Mary Todd Lincoln, for her part, labeled Herndon a “wretched drunken madman.”)89 Other intemperate temperance men in Lincoln’s circle included the lawyers and politicians Usher Linder, Richard Yates, and Kirby Benedict. Linder eloquently advocated prohibition and yet was too inebriated to perform his lawyerly duties three times. Once he was reportedly so drunk at a dinner that when a platter of chicken was handed to him he dumped all the meat on his own plate and then handed the empty platter to Lincoln, saying, “Abe, have some chicken.”90 Lincoln’s friend Richard Yates, another fervent promoter of temperance, was so drunk at his inauguration as governor of Illinois in 1860 that he arrived late at the ceremony, where Lincoln and others had waited for him for half an hour, and he slumped on a chair while a clerk read his inaugural speech.91 The Decatur, Illinois, attorney Kirby Benedict was yet another temperance advocate—as a judge in New Mexico he enforced strict laws against drinking, gambling, and swearing on the streets—who drank heavily. When during his presidency Lincoln got complaints that Benedict was failing in New Mexico due to his tippling, Lincoln replied, “I know Benedict. We have been friends for thirty years. He may imbibe to excess, but Benedict drunk knows more law than all the others on the bench in New Mexico sober. I shall not disturb him.”92
The truth is that, unlike other promoters of temperance, Lincoln had a relaxed and charitable view of those who drank. After all, his ideal politician, Henry Clay, was a heavy drinker, as was one of his finest generals, Ulysses S. Grant. A binge drinker, Grant was an intemperate temperance man: before the war he had joined a temperance society after hearing a lecture by John Bartholomew Gough (himself a notorious backslider who preached temperance but was once found passed out in a brothel after a week of carousing). Grant was usually sober in important situations but periodically returned to the bottle. Shortly before Grant took Vicksburg, two temperance men approached Lincoln in the White House urging the removal of Grant because “he drank too much whiskey.” “Ah!” Lincoln said. “By the way, gentlemen, can either of you tell me where General Grant procures his whiskey? Because, if I can find out, I will send every general in the field a barrel of it.”93
Behind such a joke was Lincoln’s realistic recognition that while excessive alcohol use could be destructive, those who drank must not be rejected as a class. He was less bothered by drinkers or
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