In February 1850, one of the “blessed fellows” was gone. The grieving father would not forget him.
A week after the boy’s death, a poetic eulogy, “Eddie,” appeared in the Springfield Journal. The poem was long thought to have been written by Mary Todd Lincoln, in part because its last line—“Of such is the kingdom of Heaven”—appeared on Eddie’s tombstone in Hutchinson’s Cemetery in Springfield. Actually, the poem was written in 1849 by the St. Louis poet Ethel Grey and appeared in her volume Sunset Gleams from the City of the Mounds.19 The Springfield Journal published Grey’s poem “By Request,” which suggests that the Lincolns may have known of the poem and submitted it to the paper. The poem bathed its deceased subject in images of the Good Death, which was nineteenth-century America’s way of making death meaningful and consoling.20 The Eddie of the poem is now “the angel child, / With the harp and the crown of gold, / Who warbles now at the Saviour’s feet,” a “blossom of heavenly love,” who “Dwells in the spirit-world above.”21
Did the rationalist Lincoln take this pious attitude toward Eddie’s death? The Springfield minister who conducted Eddie’s funeral, the Reverend James Smith, claimed that Lincoln at this time began an exploration of religion that led him to embrace Christianity. A native of Glasgow, Scotland, Smith had been a deist in his youth who later experienced a religious conversion and became the pastor of Springfield’s First Presbyterian Church. Mary Todd Lincoln, raised a Presbyterian, had been attending the Episcopal church in Springfield but was so impressed by Smith that she joined his church in 1852. Although Lincoln never became a member of the church, he rented a family pew there and sometimes attended services with Mary.
Smith based his claim about Lincoln’s alleged religious turn on discussions he had with Lincoln, who reportedly read Smith’s book The Christian’s Defence, a detailed rebuttal of atheism, deism, and polytheism. As the story goes, while visiting Lexington, Lincoln found the book in his father-in-law’s library, read it, and consulted with Smith about religion when he returned to Illinois.22 Perhaps this was true, but we cannot tell how seriously Lincoln took The Christian’s Defence. Herndon recalled that he brought the book into the law office, “threw it down upon our table—spit upon it as it were—and never opened it to my knowledge.”23 Robert Bray, an authority on Lincoln’s reading, gives The Christian’s Defence a “C” (“Somewhat unlikely”) among the books Lincoln read.24
Nonetheless, the 1850–51 period did see at least a temporary upswing in Lincoln’s religious faith. This becomes clear when we look at a letter he wrote in January 1851 to his stepbrother John D. Johnston in which he offered religious comfort to his dying father. He explained that he could not come to Coles County because he was occupied with, among other things, Mary’s postnatal illness (she had given birth to William Wallace Lincoln on December 20, nearly eleven months after the death of Eddie). He also said that seeing his father would not be good for either of them—a sign of the distance that had grown between father and son. But he wrote in a pious tone, asking Johnston to tell his father “to remember to call upon, and confide in, our great, and good, and merciful Maker; who will not turn away from him in any extremity. He notes the fall of a sparrow, and numbers the hairs of our heads; and He will not forget the dying man, who puts his trust in Him. Say to him that . . . if it be his lot to go now, he will soon have a joyous [meeting] with many loved ones gone before; and where [the rest] of us, through the help of God, hope ere-long [to join] them.”25
The Good Death couldn’t be described more succinctly: God watches over us, cares for us, and ushers us to an afterlife where we will be with lost loved ones, soon to be joined by those left behind.
Lincoln here identifies with the sentimental culture of his day—the culture that yielded the inspiring death of Stowe’s angelic Eva, ornate gravestones, and novels about the daily life in heaven like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s bestseller The Gates Ajar. One could argue that the disruptions of the 1846–52 period—the polarization in Congress, the direct exposure to the harshness of slavery, the succession of deaths in the family—shook him and impelled him to seek solace in a higher power.
As with Stowe, his personal grief, coupled with his concern over the social crisis, led him to embrace an attitude toward slavery that was at once human and spiritual, allied with both feeling and the higher law. She swayed a large portion of the Northern public by projecting these impulses in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the most popular work of the age.
Although we don’t know for certain if Lincoln read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, his “well worn” copy of it suggests that he did. At any rate, his law partner William Herndon bought the book when it appeared in 1852 and surely talked about it in the law office.26 Also, newspapers in central Illinois, as everywhere else in the North, ran regular ads and stories about the novel, which became an inescapable cultural presence.
HUMANITY, SLAVERY, AND POLITICS
Uncle Tom’s Cabin vivified the humanity of enslaved people, a theme that became an underpinning of Lincoln’s approach to slavery. Southerners’ treatment of the enslaved as nonhuman was a standard object of criticism among abolitionists, from Theodore Dwight Weld through Charles Sumner, who frequently quoted Judge George Stroud’s 1827 dictum that “the cardinal principle of slavery,—that the slave is not to be ranked among sentient beings, but among things—is an article of property—a chattel personal,—obtains as undoubted law in all of these [slave] states.” A Maryland law, for example, stipulated that “personal property shall consist of specific articles, such as SLAVES, WORKING BEASTS, ANIMALS OF ANY KIND, stock, furniture, plate, books, and SO FORTH.”27 In the words of a proslavery politician, the enslaved “were just as much property as horses, cattle or land.”28 Frederick Douglass made a tremendous impact while giving antislavery lectures when he stood tall, expanded his arms wide, and declared, “I am one of the things of the South! Behold the thing!”29
Stowe’s exposure to this principle came from many sources, including the case of the Underground Railroad conductor John Van Zandt, the prototype of the heroic John Von Trompe in her novel. In his plea on behalf of Van Zandt before the US Supreme Court, the lawyer Salmon Chase (Lincoln’s future secretary of the treasury) emphasized the humanity of blacks. Chase declared, “No legislature can make right wrong, or wrong right. . . . No legislature can make men, things, or things, men.”30 An early subtitle of a draft of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the ironic The Man That Was a Thing (eventually changed to Life Among the Lowly). The novel exposes the cruelty of slavery’s dehumanization of blacks. Its enslaved characters express a range of human emotions—family loyalty, devotion to God, joy, pain, bitterness, revenge, and hope—but are treated like animals or other property.
The book’s characters represented the kind of suffering Lincoln could have witnessed during his Lexington visits. The whipping of an enslaved man for minor offenses provides the climax of Stowe’s novel, in which the kindly Tom dies at the hands of henchmen of the slave owner Simon Legree. The novel centers on the forced separation of slave families, a phenomenon that Lincoln had witnessed on the steamboat in 1841 and, most likely, on the auction block in Lexington. The sexual exploitation of enslaved women, one of Lewis Robards’s business practices in Lexington, is dramatized in Stowe’s portraits of the kept woman Cassy and the breeder Prue.
Despite these and other correspondences between Stowe’s novel and Lincoln’s experience with slavery, it’s important to note that Lincoln departed in important ways not only from her but also from other reformers.
The response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin was notably mixed. In the North, it pushed popular attitudes in an antislavery direction. It was a main reason why Lincoln could report in 1855 that “the great body of the Northern people” opposed slavery. In the South, the book was excoriated and, in some places, criminalized. “The wide dissemination of such dangerous volumes [as Uncle Tom’s Cabin],” a Richmond newspaper announced, could lead to “the ultimate overthrow of the framework of Southern society amid circumstances of tragic convulsion from which the imagination starts back with horror!”31 A black minister in Maryland was sentenced to ten years in the state penitentiary for having the book in his house.32 Stowe received hate mail, including an envelope from the South containing an ear cut from the head of an enslaved person, sent in payment, as a note explained, for her defense of “D—n niggers.
The very vividness of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—its emotional intensity and sensationalism—made it divisive. Lincoln, who regarded slavery as “an apple of discord” that threatened the Union, in his public statements avoided the kind of melodramatic passion that made Stowe’s novel so captivating to some and so hateful to others.34
Here he differed not only from Stowe but also from other antislavery figures of the day. Herndon was his main conduit to radical reformers. “I was the abolitionist,” Herndon wrote, “and kept on my table such speeches as Theodore Parker’s, Giddings’s, Phillips’s, Sumner’s, Seward’s, etc. . . . I purchased all the anti-slavery histories, biographies, etc., and kept them on my table, and when I found a good thing, a practical thing, I would read it to Lincoln.” He and Lincoln read the prominent
antislavery newspapers, including the Liberator, the National Era, the Chicago Tribune, the New-York Tribune, and the Anti-Slavery Standard.35
When Lincoln said that he “hated slavery . . . as much as any Abolitionist,” therefore, he was making a well-informed comparison.36 He had a wide-ranging knowledge of antislavery activism. He shared the loathing of slavery that was the common denominator among all its varieties, including Garrisonian radicalism, the evangelicalism of the Beechers and Finneys, Transcendentalist individualism, and the political approach of the Liberty and Free Soil Parties. Of the varieties, he strongly preferred the latter, which remained within the confines of the democratic system established by the Founders in the Constitution. But he had not campaigned for antislavery third parties in the 1840s because they drew votes away from the Whig Party, which he then saw as the best means for bridging the sectional divide and fending off what his fellow Whig Alexander Stephens called “the centrifugal tendency.”37
In the early 1850s, however, this tendency overtook the Whig Party, which fragmented due to the very sectional tensions it had tried to heal. In 1852, Lincoln campaigned for Winfield Scott, who turned out to be the Whig Party’s last presidential candidate. As America’s leading army general, Scott appeared to have the potential for attracting Southern votes for his exemplary record in the Mexican War and Northern ones because of his antislavery leanings. But he was a weak presidential candidate. Old Fuss and Feathers, as he was called, was a stickler for discipline who was known for military prowess and physical heft (he weighed more than three hundred pounds) but not for political acuity.
Lincoln was hard-pressed to defend him. If the Whig Party was spinning apart, Lincoln’s speech before Springfield’s Scott Club in late August 1852 was itself centrifugal. In contrast to his finest efforts, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address, which were tightly focused on social justice, the Scott speech was slashing, meandering, and crassly humorous. In this partisan diatribe, Lincoln spent most of his time attacking Stephen Douglas’s arguments on behalf of the Democratic candidate Franklin Pierce while offering little positive support of Winfield Scott or the Whigs. He decimated many Democratic arguments but replaced them with virtually nothing. To expose Franklin Pierce’s “ludicrous and laughable” record as a brigadier general in the Mexican War, he told an anecdote about Pierce and his horse rolling in the mud, which he compared with a mock-militia story borrowed from frontier humor.38 Caricaturing Pierce’s waffling on the slavery issue, he repeated racist lines from a sea shanty in Frederick Marryat’s Diary in America: “Sally is a bright Mullatter, / Oh Sally Brown— / Pretty gal, but can’t get at her, / Oh, Sally Brown.” Lincoln added, “Now, should Pierce ever be President, he will, politically speaking, not only be a mulatto; but he will be a good deal darker one than Sally Brown.” These are odd words, indeed, coming from one destined to become the Great Emancipator.
The speech’s randomness was uncharacteristic of Lincoln, but it reflected the political atmosphere of the early 1850s. The parties reshuffled due to the Compromise of 1850, a bipartisan settlement of the slavery issue that made certain concessions to the North (the admission of California as a free state and the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia) and others to the South (notably the Fugitive Slave Act).39 As Lincoln said in his Scott speech, “the compromise measures were not party measures— . . . for praise or blame, they belonged to neither party to the exclusion of the other.”40 He noted that Whigs like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster had forged the Compromise along with Democrats like Stephen Douglas. By coming together in what was touted as a permanent resolution of the slavery crisis, the two parties lost the sharp edge of competition that had separated them in the previous decade. Compromise yielded flaccidness. Both parties equivocated on slavery; in Lincoln’s metaphor, both were Sally Browns. The lack of political electricity in 1852 dampened voter turnout, which was the lowest, percentage-wise, of any presidential race between 1840 and 1904.41
The absence of sharply defined issues had the positive effect of contributing to the literature of the American Renaissance. The masterpieces of the 1850–55 period—The Scarlet Letter, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass, and Walden, among them—reflected the party turmoil, which unleashed a whirl of social and cultural images, unattached to fixed political programs, that became free for recombination and transformation in literary art.42
The political disorder also opened the way to unique achievements of the Antislavery Renaissance, including such groundbreaking novels as Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1852), and William Wells Brown’s Clotel: or, The President’s Daughter (1853).
But the same conditions that fostered cultural expression stymied forceful political leadership. The election of 1852 brought to power Franklin Pierce, the charming, weak-kneed alcoholic from New Hampshire who bowed to the Southern slave power during his presidency. Pierce’s successor, the Pennsylvanian James Buchanan, another heavy drinker, also proved to be a lackey of the South’s. Walt Whitman branded the presidencies just before Lincoln as “our topmost warning and shame.”43 Historians rank Pierce and Buchanan in the lowest tier of American presidents.
The dialectic of party collapse and cultural flowering also yielded the Abraham Lincoln we venerate. The conditions that drove lesser politicians to turpitude and ineptness turned him into a significant moral presence on the political scene.
His development was sped by his meditation on the deaths of two Whig leaders: Zachary Taylor and Henry Clay.
The death in 1850 of the sixty-six-year-old Taylor, after just sixteen months in office, shocked the nation. On July 4, he had attended festivities at the site where the Washington Monument was to be built. He spent hours in the hot sun and returned to the White House at 4:00 p.m. Famished, he consumed large quantities of iced milk and cherries. That evening he felt ill, and over the next few days he suffered from nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and dehydration. At times he appeared to respond to calomel treatment, but he died on July 9. His doctor identified the cause of death as cholera morbus, an intestinal illness (unrelated to Asiatic cholera) that was probably gastroenteritis.
Two weeks after Taylor’s death, Lincoln delivered a eulogy for the president in Chicago. Lincoln described Taylor’s record as a battlefield leader who succeeded against overwhelming odds. Unflappable courage and doggedness in pursuit of victory—these qualities, which he saw in Taylor, were ones he would later seek in his Civil War generals, discovering them in Grant and Sherman. “His rarest military trait,” Lincoln said, “was a combination of negatives—absence of excitement and absence of fear. He could not be flurried, and he could not be scared.”44 Taylor was fair to his soldiers and officers; though a strong leader, he never behaved like a tyrant, and he avoided vindictive behavior. Was he a great president? Lincoln backed off from that question by saying the presidency is “not a bed of roses,” and Taylor did not “escape censure.” But Old Zack had “the confidence and devotion of the people” to a rare degree.
Above all, Taylor made viable a centrist position that, Lincoln thought, could alone bring about slavery’s demise without disrupting the Union. Although Taylor held some 140 people in bondage, Lincoln viewed him as a noncontroversial Southerner who would not veto the Wilmot Proviso and who thus would prevent slavery from spreading. Lamenting that Taylor’s death lessened the chances of resolving the conflict over slavery, Lincoln said: “I fear the one great question of the day, is not
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