has been campaigning hard for “Hard Cider, Abolition,” and “dear Massa Harrison, de friend ob de nigger.” He predicts that he will rise so high socially that he will be able to purchase white people and hold them as slaves. He concludes: “Stan back and let de darkie come, he go de whole figger, / For Harrison, White Slavery, and free rights ob de nigger.”39
Harrison’s victory was not followed by the advance of black people. Harrison died after just thirty days in office, and his successor, John Tyler, took a conservative course on race. A Virginia gentleman, Tyler was attended by enslaved workers in the White House. Blacks lost legal ground under Tyler. In Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) the Supreme Court ruled that the fugitive slave law of 1793 invalidated the personal liberty laws that several Northern states had passed. Tyler set the stage for virulent controversy when he called for the annexation of Texas. Opponents and supporters of annexation vocally aired their views on what rapidly became the prelude to a momentous struggle over slavery’s role in westward expansion.
Lincoln, despite his hatred of slavery, at first showed little concern with the proposed annexation of Texas. “I never was much interested in the Texas question,” he wrote in October 1845. “I never could see much good to come of annexation; . . . on the other hand, I never could very clearly see how the annexation would augment the evil of slavery.”40 His opinion would change after he heard admonitory speeches on the Mexican War as a Whig politician from 1846 to 1848. For the time being, maintaining party unity was chiefly on his mind. In March 1843 he wrote a Whig declaration, “Address to the People of Illinois,” that called for more extensive use of the convention system in the selection of the party’s candidates. Lincoln delivered a loud and clear message of unity. He declared, “That ‘union is strength’ is a truth that has been known, illustrated and declared, in various ways and forms in all ages of the world.” To illustrate the point, he mentioned the fable of the bundle of sticks told by “that great fabulist and philosopher, Aesop.” He also cited “he whose wisdom surpasses that of all philosophers,” Jesus, who “has declared that ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand’” (Matthew 12:25; Mark 3:25; Luke 11:17).41
Later, Lincoln would famously apply the house divided image to the nation as a whole, but for the time being he concentrated on the Illinois Whig Party. In areas of the state where Whigs did not hold conventions, he noted, candidates were “‘on their own hook,’ . . . not contending shoulder to shoulder against the common enemy, but divided into factions, and fighting furiously with one another.” In the name of unified action, he wrote, “we urge the adoption of the Convention System.”
Lincoln’s party loyalty was put to the test that spring when a convention was used to select a Whig candidate for the US Congress from the state’s seventh district. Lincoln wanted the nomination. “The truth is,” he wrote, “I would like to go [to Congress] very much.”42 Lincoln, thirty-four years old, was competing for the nomination against John J. Hardin of Morgan County and Edward D. Baker of Sangamon County, both of whom were fellow lawyers and friends of Lincoln’s since the time of the Black Hawk War. But in a preliminary election in Sangamon County, Baker beat Lincoln, reportedly because of Lincoln’s reputation as a skeptical deist and his association with Aristocracy Hill due to his marriage into the wealthy Todd family. Lincoln reluctantly accepted an appointment as a county delegate representing Edward Baker at the Whig Party convention, held in Pekin, Illinois, on May 1. “In getting Baker the nomination,” Lincoln remarked, “I shall be ‘fixed’ a good deal like a fellow who is made groomsman to the man what has cut him out, and is marrying his own dear ‘gal.’”43 As it turned out, the convention chose Hardin, not Baker. Though disappointed, Lincoln reported to Joshua Speed, “So far as I can judge from present appearances, we shall have no split or trouble about the matter; all will be harmony.” Lincoln assured Hardin that he would push to get tremendous Whig support for him in Sangamon County. “We make it a matter of honor and pride to do it; . . . because we love the whig cause; [and] . . . we like you personally.”
The show of good feelings at the Pekin convention benefited Lincoln, who proposed at the meeting a resolution for a rotation arrangement by which Hardin would serve out his congressional term and Baker would be the next nominee for Congress. The resolution passed, and the rotation began. Hardin served in Congress from 1843 to 1845 and was followed by Baker, whose term lasted from March 1845 until he resigned from Congress in December 1846 to serve in the US Army.
Lincoln’s turn for a congressional run came next. In 1846, he competed against an old foe, the Democrat preacher Peter Cartwright, in the race to succeed Baker. In the campaign, Lincoln skillfully circumvented one of the Methodist Cartwright’s main charges against him: that he was a nonbeliever. His July 1846 “Handbill Replying to Charges of Infidelity,” published in local newspapers, is a masterwork of equivocation. Instead of directly admitting to his doubts about church religion and the literal truth of the Bible, Lincoln wrote that, while not a member of a Christian church, he had never spoken disrespectfully of religion. He added that he could never support a political candidate “whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion.”44 The key word here was “open.” Privately, Lincoln had often scoffed at religion. Publicly, he knew that it was a valuable tool for political ascendancy.
In the August 1846 election against Cartwright, Lincoln won by a large margin. But he was not entirely comfortable with the prospect of going to Washington. In October he wrote Speed, “Being elected to Congress, though I am very grateful to our friends, for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected.”45
His trepidation may have been due in part to the exigencies of building a middle-class lifestyle in Springfield, developing his law practice, and providing for his growing family, which by the spring included the three-year-old Bob and the newly arrived Eddie. Lincoln described Eddie as “very much such a child as Bob was at his age—rather of a longer order.” As for Bob, he seemed “quite smart enough,” but, Lincoln wrote, “I some times fear he is one of the little rare-ripe sort, that are smarter at about five than ever after.” He was also wild. Lincoln reported, Bob indulged in “a great deal of that sort of mischief, that is the offspring of much animal spirits.” Earlier that day, for example, he had run off and was lost, and then retrieved. His mother “had him whip[p]ed,” Lincoln said, but “by now, very likely he is run away again.”46
As a doting parent, Lincoln observed his son’s wildness with amused detachment. It was far more difficult to know how to deal with a national crisis that threatened to spin out of control. That crisis was the escalating battle over slavery. By going to Congress, Lincoln knew he would find himself in the thick of the slavery debate.
The crisis seemed especially severe to Whigs like Lincoln who were strongly committed to programs for government funding of internal improvements. In the mid-1840s, these defining Whig programs collided with the aim of the Democratic president James K. Polk to pursue aggressively the war against Mexico. The Whigs were furious that Polk had vetoed a bill calling for internal improvements, which he dismissed as a waste of money, while he poured huge sums into a war that Northern Whigs saw as an illegal takeover of western territory, where slavery could spread.
The conflict between support of internal improvements and pursuit of the Mexican War was made vivid to Lincoln at a national convention he attended in July 1846, four months before he went to Washington, and stayed with him until his term in Congress ended two years later. The conflict led him to think deeply about the role of the federal government in addressing social problems. He emerged with the conviction that the government must be an activist in a positive direction: it must materially benefit citizens, not lead them into bloody wars of aggression.
He now faced two main political crises: the intensifying debate between Northerners and Southerners over slavery—a debate that already produced talk of disunion and civil war—and the military takeover of lands formerly controlled by Mexico. There was, however, a source of hope for him: the fact that Midwesterners, positioned centrally geographically and politically, could help to resolve escalating tensions and maintain national unity.
A WATCHFUL POLITICIAN
On the sweltering morning of July 5, 1846, a brilliant sun shone on the milling thousands who had come from around the nation to Chicago for the three-day River and Harbor Convention. In the crowd was the thirty-seven-year-old Whig politician from central Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, who had been recently elected to serve in the Thirtieth Congress, which would convene in December. Lincoln had taken a four-day carriage ride north from Springfield to attend the convention. He cut an odd figure. “Tall, angular and awkward,” an observer noted, “he had on a short-waisted, thin swallow-tail coat, a short vest of the same material, thin pantaloons, scarcely coming down to his ankles, a straw hat and a pair of brogans with woolen socks.”47 Some law associates of his were sitting under a hotel veranda when they spotted him. One of them, the attorney S. Lisle Smith, cried, “There is Lincoln on the other side of the street. Just look at ‘Old Abe.’” Another lawyer, Elihu B. Washburne, was taken aback by the remark: “Old Abe, as applied to him, seems strange enough, as he was then a young man.” Though new to Washburne, the nickname had been previously used for Lincoln. It would never suit the physical Lincoln, even when, during the Civil War, his face became furrowed and sunken. With his dark hair and youthful body, he did not look elderly when he died at fifty-six. But to many, he was “Old Abe”: avuncular, trustworthy, familiar.
Old Abe must have been delighted by the River and Harbor Convention. More than ten thousand Americans traveled to Chicago—the flat, spread-out city of sixteen thousand inhabitants whose streets were mud or dust, according to the weather—to celebrate what had long been one of his priorities: internal improvements. The convention offered the buoyant prospect of national unity. People of all political viewpoints were there, from proslavery types to abolitionists. A Chicago journalist noted: “Old Babel never witnessed more discordant tongues than there were sentiments . . . among the crowd. . . . We had the Boston differences, the New York differences, the Missouri differences, and the sectional differences everywhere. Then we had our differences here at home.” For the moment, though, all were “members of one great party actuated by one impulse and with the same great end in view”: the development of midwestern harbors, rivers, and railroads that would increase the commerce of the nation.48
Attendees were determined to persuade the federal government to fund improvements, wherever they were needed. A journalist affirmed that the convention would be recalled as a time “when party predilections were obliterated; when sectional interests were forgotten,” when nineteen states came together “in one grand harmony” in the interest of “common humanity.”49
There was even the promise that the growing divide between the North and the South would be healed by the work of the convention. The meeting, held under a huge tent, began with addresses hailing the Midwest as the site of a salubrious mingling of competing cultural elements. In his opening speech, “The Relation of New England Puritanism to the Growth and Prosperity of the West,” the Massachusetts minister William Allen declared that the Midwest was populated by “swarms from the New England hive, who led the march of emigration towards the setting sun.” The “descendants of Yankees,” he said, were founding colleges, plowing prairies, and building cities like Chicago. By teaming up at the convention with people from different sections with the same goal, “the descendants of the Puritans . . . find themselves associated with many others, in whose veins flowed different blood, and sprung from different sources all uniting here, and forming one Great Brotherhood.”50
The next speaker, Senator Tom Corwin of Ohio, drove home the message. Not only Puritans, he declared, but Pennsylvanians, and Kentuckians, and “huge swarms from Ohio” are settling the Midwest and today are “here united, forming a Congress of the American People.” Corwin argued that the convention challenged centrifugalism, as indicated by the presence of a Georgia delegate who is “to learn here whether our glorious republic is destined to be composed of widely disjointed fragments, or whether it is to become, and remain united until the ‘last syllable of recorded time.’” Let there be no section or party here, Corwin demanded—no Whig, no Democrat, “nothing but American.”
Such declarations, repeated frequently during the convention, affirmed the ideal of “UNIONISM” that Walt Whitman later identified as the foundation of Lincoln’s character.51
But the appearance of unity was deceptive. Shadows were cast over the convention by President James K. Polk and the Mexican War. The convention had been originally planned in reaction to Polk’s August 1846 veto of a river and harbor bill that appropriated $500,000 to internal improvements. Polk insisted that funding rivers and harbors drained money from the Treasury that was needed for the war against Mexico. He stated, “It would seem the dictate of wisdom under such circumstances to husband our means and not waste them on comparatively unimportant objects.”52
Opponents of Mr. Polk’s War, which eventually cost the nation more than $100 million, were infuriated by his attitude. The president, they insisted, was diverting funds away from projects that would bind the nation to a war that was dividing it. Polk’s veto was “an insult to the country,” one critic wrote: “‘Husband our means,’ forsooth. Are not millions being squandered by this same James K. Polk for the invasion of Mexico and the extension of slavery? . . . Are not the Treasury doors unbarred whenever the ‘open sesame’ is whispered by the slave-driver? And yet Mr. Polk outrages the intelligence of the people, his masters, by claiming . . . that the object for which we ask is comparatively unimportant!”
There was also the issue of the constitutionality of improvements. The Constitution gives Congress the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.” Polk put a strict-constructionist spin on the clause, which, he said, covered international and interstate commerce but not local improvements. For instance, since the Illinois River and Chicago harbor were in only one state, they did not qualify for federal funding under the commerce clause. And, he insisted, “regulate” did not mean “create”; the government’s job was to oversee intrastate commerce, not to create new canals, harbors, or river passages in particular states.53
At the Chicago convention, Lincoln addressed the constitutional question. The crowd called him up to respond to a speech given earlier by a Polk ally, the lawyer David Dudley Field. To Field’s contention that the government should not fund rivers in individual states, Lincoln asked “how many states the lordly Hudson ran through”—a reference to the fact that Congress had funded the improvement of the New York river.54 Lincoln generalized that Congress should indeed provide
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