The political chemistry among Whigs during the Thirtieth Congress put the two in the same camp. The thin, sickly Stephens was bold in his opposition to Mr. Polk’s War. After two months in Congress, in early February 1848, Lincoln wrote to William Herndon saying that the “little slim, pale-faced, consumptive” Stephens had “just concluded the very best speech, of an hour’s length, I ever heard. My old, withered, dry eyes, are full of tears yet.”85
In the speech, Stephens attacked the Mexican War much the way Lincoln had in his Spot Resolutions. Polk had launched a war of aggression on soil that didn’t belong to the United States, Stephens said. The Nueces, not the Rio Grande, was the southern border of Texas; the land in between, where Americans first went on the attack, belonged to Mexico. Polk had acted despotically instead of following the Constitution, which assigns to Congress the power of declaring war. Therefore, patriotic Americans like Henry Clay’s son had died in a war that had been unwisely started by a power-hungry president. Like Lincoln, Stephens drew from the biblical story of Cain killing Abel. Lincoln had said “that [Polk] is deeply conscious of being in the wrong—that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.”86 Similarly, Stephens declared, “The mark is fixed upon [Polk] as indelibly as that stamped upon the brow of Cain by the finger of God. His friends may say ‘out, foul spot,’ but I say it will not ‘out.’”87 In an emotional appeal against this “disgraceful and infamous” war, Stephens said, “I have very little hope for the country until the people begin to feel; they will then reflect, they will then speak, and they will then act.”
If this speech brought tears to Lincoln, the one Stephens gave ten days later surely alarmed him. Stephens declared that the nation, faced with “difficulties of no ordinary magnitude,” had entered a “night of storms and tempests—of gloomy and appalling darkness, with no light to cheer the heart, and no star to guide a hope.” A tyrannical president had caused a war that might very well divide the nation. Will the Union be destroyed? Stephens asked. That would be tragic because “The Union is not only the life, but the soul of these States.” The Wilmot Proviso did not bode well. The South would never tolerate the North’s insistence on forbidding slavery’s extension. “Will the South submit to this restriction?” Stephens asked. “Will the North ultimately yield? Or shall these two great sections of the Union be arrayed against each other? When the elements of discord are fully aroused, who shall direct the storm?”
Who, indeed, would direct the storm? Surely not a radical Northerner like Giddings, who was prepared to see the Union fragment if his antislavery goals were not met. And not a Southerner like Stephens, for whom the Union, while precious, was not as sacred as his section’s right to preserve slavery. Stephens had supported Taylor as the only electable Whig candidate, but when Old Rough and Ready assumed office, he turned out not to be as pro-Southern as Stephens had imagined. By early 1850, when Taylor had been in office less than a year, Stephens viewed the president as a mere tool in the hands of Northern abolitionists. “The North is insolent and unyielding” in its pursuit of the Wilmot Proviso, Stephens fumed. “My Southern blood and feelings are up.”88 Announcing that he was “prepared to fight at all hazards and to the last extremity” to defend slavery, he wrote, “Everything I see around me augurs the approach of anarchy . . . I see no prospect of the continuance of this Union long.” During the Civil War, Lincoln would have a recurrent dream of being on a boat moving without direction on a foggy ocean. For Stephens in 1850, America itself was already lost at sea. “Everything here is uncertain,” he wrote. “We are like a set of fellows at sea, trying to make port in a fog. There is no seeing a rod before you, and no one pretends to know where we are drifting.” Compromises, like the one being proposed in Congress by Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, would only delay what Stephens saw as the inevitable dissolution of the Union. Stephens noted, “The temper of the country is fretful. The centrifugal tendency in our system is decidedly in the ascendant.”
With “the centrifugal tendency” in the ascendant, a Free Soil journalist in Brooklyn, Walter Whitman, in 1850 responded to the crisis by writing political poems in a loose yet balanced style that augured the 1855 Leaves of Grass, in which he announced himself as “one of that centripetal and centrifugal gang,” the “equalizer of his age and land”—the Answerer for the distracted nation, which, he was confident, would be healed when it absorbed him affectionately.89 But when it did not absorb him, he declared he would be “much pleased to see some heroic, shrewd, fully-inform’d, healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or boatman come down from the West across the Alleghenies, and walk into the Presidency.”90 His geographical specificity was telling. A Brooklynite, Whitman sensed that the nation’s savior would not come from the Northeast or the South, which were divided politically and culturally, but from what was then the West, beyond the Alleghenies. Only a westerner could mediate between the conflicting sections.
Lincoln, who lived in the central section of a western state, also knew the importance of geography. In his 1848 pro-Taylor speech he paused to identify correctly his home locale: “I am a Northern man, or rather, a Western free state, with a constituency I believe to be, and with personal feelings I know to be, against the extension of slavery.”91 He got added confirmation of geography’s importance from a speech before the House given by the Indiana representative William Wick in late April 1848. Lincoln wrote a Washington printer requesting three hundred copies of the speech for distribution. He was stirred by Wick’s message: Midwesterners were crucial to the survival of the Union. Wick said that he had heard talk of “the dissolution of the Union” from extremists in both the North and the South, but “in the Middle and Western states a very different feeling prevails. In the West, we consider the Union our ALL.”92 The West’s function was to “keep the peace of the antislavery sons of the Pilgrims and the Cavaliers, to each of whom this subject [slavery] is one on which they like ‘to pile up the agony.’” To the warring sections, Wick announced, “Divide the Union you will not! WE SWEAR IT! . . . And if you talk about a fight, I give you notice that you cannot make the territory of the Middle States your battle-field.” Both sides shared the burden of guilt: the South for enslaving people, the North for participating in the triangle trade. But the Puritans and Cavaliers had better beware: there was an “impassable barrier” between them—the middle and western states. Wick warned, “The Western States hear the Union being threatened, and are feeling ‘wolfy.’ So look out Mssrs. Pilgrim and Cavalier, or you will hear thunder.”
Although Lincoln never got this militant in his defense of the Middle West, he resembled William Wick in promoting the political role of his area of the nation. In a time when the opposing sections drew the nation toward separation, geographical centrism bolstered Lincoln’s political centrism.
“IS THE CENTER NOTHING?”
Centrism was hard to maintain in the contentious Thirtieth Congress, which may in part explain Lincoln’s frustrations with his Washington experience. Within a few months of the Lincolns’ arrival in the capital, Mary and the boys returned to her father’s home in Lexington. Since most congressmen were not accompanied by their families in Washington, Mary may have been lonely there. Also, evidence suggests that her erratic behavior irritated some of the boarders at Mrs. Sprigg’s. In early April 1848, Lincoln wrote her glumly, “In this troublesome world, we are never quite satisfied. When you were here, I thought you hindered me some in attending to business; but now, having nothing but business—no variety—it has grown exceedingly tasteless to me. I hate to sit down and direct documents, and I hate to stay in this old room by myself.”93 Affectionately, he shared small news: he had been looking for plaid stockings for “Eddy’s dear little feet,” and he had bought shirt studs. Delighted to hear that Mary was free of her usual spring migraines, he joked, “I am afraid you will get so well, and fat, and young, as to be wanting to marry again.” By midsummer, he missed her terribly. On July 12, he wrote, “Come on just as soon as you can. I want to see you, and our dear—dear boys very much.”94 She came with Bobby and Eddie later that month.
In August, he was asked to campaign for Taylor in New England, where the Whigs feared they would lose voters to the Free Soil Party, which was organized that month in Buffalo. After his congressional session ended, he and his family traveled north to New York and then to New England.
Perhaps inspired by William Wick’s promotion of the Middle West as the potential savior of the Union, Lincoln put on his best midwestern performance when in September he toured Massachusetts, the center of New England abolitionism. In Worcester, he addressed slavery, saying that “the people of Illinois agreed entirely with the people of Massachusetts on this subject, except perhaps that they did not keep so constantly thinking about it.” He associated the Midwest with a sensible view of slavery, which, he said, should be prevented from spreading but not tampered with in states where it already existed. He also pointed out that the Whig agenda under Taylor addressed far more issues than slavery, which was the Free Soil Party’s only concern. Tapping, as usual, into popular humor, he remarked that the Free Soil Party’s single-issue platform reminded him of “the pair of pantaloons the Yankee pedler offered for sale, ‘large enough for any man, small enough for any boy.’”95 Voting for Van Buren, the Free Soil candidate, was, he said, like voting for the Democrat Cass, since the new party had no chance for victory. The best choice for antiextensionists, then, was Taylor. The Taunton crowd was geographically specific when it applauded Lincoln: “At the close of this truly masterly and convincing speech, the audience gave three enthusiastic cheers for Illinois, and three more for the eloquent Whig member from that State.”
His midwestern identity stood out to Massachusetts audiences. In describing Lincoln, some reporters used the word Sucker, vernacular for Illinoisan (a term apparently derived from a state fish). “Mr. Lincoln . . . is a capital specimen of a ‘Sucker’ Whig, six feet at least in his stockings,” remarked a Cambridge journalist—seconded by a Taunton one, who commented, “Mr. Lincoln is a genuine Sucker, and is well versed in the political tactics of the Western country. His speech was full of humor. . . .”96 A Worcester politician reported, “His style and manner of speaking were novelties in the East.”97 The assumed clownishness he had developed on the Illinois hustings struck an observer who wrote, “His awkward gesticulations, the ludicrous management of his voice and the comical expression of his countenance, all conspired to make his hearers laugh at the mere anticipation of the joke before it appeared.
New Englanders also linked his good sense with the Midwest. In Boston, he gave a speech “replete with good sense, sound reasoning, and irresistible argument, and spoken with that perfect command of manner and matter which so eminently distinguishes the Western orators.”99
However, one wonders how comfortable Lincoln was in promoting Taylor at the expense of the Free Soil Party, whose antislavery agenda was close to the Republican Party agenda he would later champion. He argued that Taylor, as a centrist who followed the popular will, was positioned to resolve the slavery issue. But Taylor, after all, was a Southerner. A Taunton reporter plausibly questioned Lincoln’s idea that Taylor would do more than any other candidate to get the Wilmot Proviso passed. For that to happen, the proviso must first get through the Senate, which was virtually impossible due to the strong Southern presence there. And could effective antislavery leadership come from “the unrepentant slaveholder, Zachary Taylor”? What was needed, the reporter noted, was to break up the current parties and rally the North around antislavery principles.100
This reshuffling of the parties, indeed, happened over the next six years, which saw the collapse of the Whigs and the rise of the antislavery Republicans. But in 1848, Whig Party unity was still foremost in Lincoln’s mind. His reasoning that Taylor was the only electable candidate with antislavery potential that year proved accurate. In the November election, Taylor gained the White House by winning 47 percent of the popular vote and 163 electoral votes. The Free Soil candidate, Van Buren, won 10 percent of the popular vote but did not carry a state. The time was not yet ripe for a national antislavery party.
On their return trip to Illinois, via Albany, Buffalo, and the Great Lakes, the Lincolns stopped to see Niagara Falls. For Lincoln, the sight of the Falls took him far beyond political centrism to the perennial center: nature, the earth. He would later quip, “The thing that struck me most forcibly when I saw the Falls was, where in the world did all that water come from?”101 But his written response to Niagara in 1848 was rhapsodic; it anchored unity in nature and historical origins. The Falls, he noted, have universal appeal. He began by asking: “By what mysterious power is it that millions and millions, are drawn from all parts of the world, to gaze upon Niagara Falls?” In a purely physical sense, he noted, there was little mystery. With the specificity of a natural scientist, he explained that five hundred thousand tons of water, fed by two or three hundred thousand square miles of rain on the earth’s surface, cascaded a hundred feet, crashed, and exploded upward. But, he continued, the “great charm” of the sight was its “power to excite reflection, and emotion.” The air absorbed the rising mist and later sent it back to the earth as rain. This cycle of water tumbling, rising, and returning was timeless. The origins of the Falls reached back to earliest history:
When Columbus first sought this continent—when Christ suffered on the cross—when Moses led Israel through the Red-Sea—nay, even, when Adam first came from the hand of his Maker—then as now, Niagara was roaring here. . . . The Mammoth and Mastadon—now so long dead, that fragments of their monstrous bones, alone testify, that they ever lived, have gazed on Niagara. In that long—long time, never still for a single moment. Never dried, never froze, never slept, never rested[.]102
For Lincoln, Niagara Falls represented nature’s corralling of chaotic energy: millions of gallons of water, from all over, were channeled to a powerful center that was forever present, forever alluring, and always fresh—a true constant over time.
If explaining the Falls scientifically and philosophically gave Lincoln intellectual control over wild nature, so did his reflections on an experience he had on a steamboat while returning to Illinois. When the boat got stuck on a sandbar, the captain ordered that planks and empty casks be put under the hull in order to lift the craft. The incident led to Lincoln’s invention of “buoyant chambers” for boats—inflatable bladders designed to float vessels over obstacles. When he reached Springfield, having given Whig speeches in Chicago and Lacon, he got the assistance of a local mechanic to design a wooden model of his invention, which he whittled in his law office. In early December, Lincoln was back in Washington for the second session of the Thirtieth Congress, and by March he had filed a patent for “An Improved Method of Lifting Vessels over Shoals,” with long, exact specifications for producing and installing his “adjustable buoyant chambers.” Nothing came of Lincoln’s patent, which was destined to fall into history’s trivia bin as the only one ever filed by an American president.103
Another idea Lincoln proposed that winter in Washington—the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia—had a brighter future, though it was frustrated in the short run. Abolitionists had long brought attention to the incongruous presence of slaveholding and slave trading in the District. Proposals by antislavery congressmen like John Quincy Adams to abolish slavery there had come to naught. Passions over the issue flamed up in April 1848, when seventy-six fugitives were spirited away from Washington on the schooner Pearl and recaptured before the vessel made it out of the Potomac River. Lincoln’s messmate Joshua Giddings drew national attention when he defended the enslaved people (most of whom were sold to the Deep South), faced down a proslavery lynch mob, and gave a withering speech in the House about the irony of the existence of slavery in the nation’s capital.
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