Lincoln in the World (5 page)

The real peril, Lincoln argued, “cannot come from abroad.” Instead, he feared “an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon” would spring up at home. The American population had been doubling every two decades—expanding six times faster than most other countries’. The economy was growing by almost 4 percent each year. And yet for the young lawyer beginning his career, personal wealth and power remained elusive. Money was so tight and housing so scarce that
Lincoln was forced to share a bedroom with several other bachelors above a Springfield dry-goods store.
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Lincoln’s roommates included Billy Herndon, then a nineteen-year-old clerk at the shop downstairs. Kinetic and sloe-eyed, with a wide smile and a mop of blue-black hair, Herndon had until recently been studying at a nearby college. Yet political developments had ultimately changed his plans. After an abolitionist newspaperman, Elijah Lovejoy, was murdered by a proslavery mob, Herndon had been swept up in the antislavery backlash on campus. Herndon’s father, a stalwart Democrat, had somehow learned of his son’s agitation. He halted the boy’s tuition payments, dismissing his son as “a damned abolitionist pup.” Herndon was on his own.
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The dry-goods store quickly turned into a meeting place for the capital’s young wits. The men gathered in the back around a wood-burning stove, discussing politics and reading poetry. Lincoln honed his debating and storytelling skills before a small audience that included some of the capital’s rising figures. Herndon, still a junior member, would sit on a keg, taking it all in. The philosophical discussions may have fired both men’s imaginations, but they still did not pay the bills. “Poverty,” Herndon wrote in 1842, “is staring us all in the face.”
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Priests, Dogs, and Servants

In Springfield, it was known as Aristocracy Hill. On top sat the mansion of Ninian W. Edwards, one of the wealthiest men in town. Edwards was Springfield royalty. His father had been the state’s governor, and had been named the first U.S. minister to Mexico. (After being caught up in a political controversy, however, he never actually made it to Mexico City.) In his gold-lace cloak and elegant broadcloth suit, the father would have looked at home in most of the world’s chancelleries. A Springfield resident remembered how the local patriarch flew around town in “a magnificent
carriage drawn by very spirited horses.” John Hay recalled the politician as “a magnificent old gentleman in fair top-boots and ruffled wristbands” who projected “the
grand Seigneur
airs of the Old School.” At his son’s two-story brick mansion on Aristocracy Hill, the hosts chattered in French as distinguished guests arrived for regular weekend salons.
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For a muddy backwater of twenty thousand, Sangamon County—dubbed Empire County by its optimistic early residents—could be surprisingly cosmopolitan. The local schools taught Latin and Greek, Spanish and French. After the state capital was moved to Springfield in the late 1830s, the public square sprouted new shops, taverns, and hotels. When the legislature was in session, pretty young women flooded into the city to attend the balls and “hops.” At private salons draped in velvet and damask, local hostesses poured blackberry cordials and homemade wine, and served pound cake on china and silver place settings. With no streetlamps, and only lard oil and candles to light the affairs, the whole town could be plunged into virtual blackness on a moonless night. Still, there was something decidedly European about the capital’s pretentions. Springfield society, according to one acquaintance of Lincoln and Herndon, came complete with “priests, dogs, and servants.”
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Lincoln was not immediately charmed by the capital. The whole place was “rather a dull business,” he told a friend shortly after arriving. The young bachelor was lonely. “I have been spoken to by but one woman since I’ve been here, and should not have been by her, if she could have avoided it,” he complained. He eventually began showing up at the Edwards mansion on Aristocracy Hill each Sunday, relaxing in the shade of the thick canopy of trees on the grounds, and getting to know members of the powerful political family. Gangly, with a shock of unkempt black hair and enormous hands, he initially struck his host as “a mighty rough man.” Lincoln must have known he was out of place. But he was ambitious, a young politician on the rise, and Edwards was a leading patron of the aristocratic “silk-stocking” faction of the Whig party. Lincoln
was impressed—if slightly intimidated—by the scene. There was, he wrote a friend, “a great deal of flourishing about in carriages” in Springfield.
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It was in the Edwards circle that Lincoln first met Mary Todd, the daughter of a Lexington banker who was staying at her brother-in-law’s mansion. Pretty but portly, with “clear blue eyes, long lashes, light brown hair with a glint of bronze, and a lovely complexion,” she was nearly as ambitious as Lincoln. Mary had grown up on a slaveholding estate in Kentucky, in a household full of French mahogany furniture and expensive Belgian rugs. She had studied her dance steps at Mentelle’s, a Lexington boarding school run by Parisian aristocrats. The schoolmistress, Madame Mentelle, could be slightly intimidating. As a girl in France, her father was said to have once locked her in a room with the corpse of an acquaintance to toughen her up. The young women were schooled as if the whole world were their salon. Mary, her cousin recalled, learned to speak “the purest Parisian.” Madame Mentelle’s husband, Augustus, would play the violin while the girls practiced steps that included “Spanish, Scottish, Polish, [and] Tyrolienne dances and the beautiful Circassian Circle.” In Springfield, Herndon later recalled, the urbane Mary “soon became one of the belles, leading the young men of the town [in] a merry dance.”
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Lincoln seemed like an odd match for the worldly-wise debutante. Mary was lively and outgoing. Lincoln was antisocial, a “cold man” who had “no affection,” Mary’s sister recalled. In the Edwards salon, Mary would do most of the talking, while Lincoln “would listen and gaze on her as if drawn by some superior power, irresistibly so.” Mary’s family was put off by Lincoln’s poor breeding. (The young woman’s stepmother liked to say that “it took seven generations to make a lady,” according to one historian.) But Mary was intrigued by the driven young lawyer. She told friends her ideal beau was a man destined for “position, fame, and power.” She was, her sister later recalled, “the most ambitious woman I ever saw.” More than a decade before the Civil War, Mary told a friend that she believed
Lincoln would one day become president. “If I had not thought so,” she added, “I never would have married him, for you can see he is not pretty.”
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Lincoln and Mary wed in November 1842. Herndon considered the bride “a polished girl, well educated, a good linguist, a fine conversationalist.” Still, Mary could also be “haughty.” Lincoln, Herndon recalled, had been attracted at least partly by Mary’s “family power.” Another old friend believed the marriage was “a policy match all around.” Mary provided Lincoln with an entrée not just to the party, but also to the wider world. The Whig ethos, the scholar Allen Guelzo has written, represented a promise of escape from “the restraints of locality and community”—an opportunity for young Americans “to refashion themselves on the basis of new economic identities in a larger world of trade.” The Edwards family, with their French conversationalists and worldly statesmen, seemed certain to widen Lincoln’s horizons. As a gift, Ninian W. Edwards once presented Lincoln with a copy of Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. Whatever Lincoln’s motives in courting Mary, he later told a friend that he considered his marriage a “matter of profound wonder.”
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Still, despite his new family’s influence in the party, Lincoln began noticing that his popularity with the city’s younger, working-class Whigs had dropped off after his marriage into Springfield’s aristocracy. In 1843 he wrote to a local politician complaining that he had been pigeonholed as “the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.” Even Lincoln sometimes mocked his inlaws’ pretensions. (“One ‘d’ was good enough for God,” he joked, “but not for the Todds.”) To succeed in Springfield politics, Lincoln would need a liaison to the city’s “young, rowdy set.” The energetic, likable Herndon had always carried weight with the “shrewd, wild boys about town” who resented the influence of the aristocrats. Shortly after his marriage to Mary, Lincoln asked the much less accomplished Herndon to be his law partner. “Billy,” Lincoln told the twenty-six-year-old, “I can trust you, if you can trust me.”
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The two men rented a spare, uninspiring office on Springfield’s central square. The place was usually a mess, and had windows that looked out over “stable-roofs, ash-heaps, and dingy back yards.” Lincoln stored some papers tucked into his stovepipe hat. He kept others among a bundle in a corner of the office with a note that read
WHEN YOU CAN
’
T FIND
IT
ANYWHERE ELSE, LOOK INTO THIS
. “The furniture, somewhat dilapidated, consisted of one small desk and a table, a sofa or lounge with a raised head at one end, and a half-dozen plain wooden chairs,” recalled a student who worked in the office. “The floor was never scrubbed.” Shelves above the desk bulged with law books. Lincoln liked to sprawl across the sofa and read aloud from the newspaper. Herndon found himself annoyed “almost beyond the point of endurance.” Lincoln neglected the office finances and shirked his legal research. Some days Herndon simply fled the office.
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Perhaps as escape from the drudgery of the law, both Lincoln and Herndon plunged into the national political swirl. As the 1844 presidential election approached, the debate over American expansion—specifically the annexation of Oregon and Texas—monopolized the national conversation. International affairs had long seeped into the American political dialogue; it had played a major role in both the 1796 and 1812 presidential elections. The 1844 contest, however, marks “the first presidential campaign fought primarily over foreign policy.” Though Lincoln considered annexation an “evil,” he later recalled that “individually I was never much interested in the Texas question.” He could not believe that absorbing the territory would make much of a difference either way. Lincoln soon discovered how wrong he was. In 1844, international relations would make for potent politics. For the young lawyer, the campaign proved to be a kind of foreign-affairs awakening.

For years American settlers had been flooding west and south. The slang GTT—“Gone to Texas”—was quickly taking its place in the national lexicon. The clamor for territory drowned out all other campaign issues. The Whig nominee, Henry Clay, made the case that taking Texas would shatter the sectional balance, touching off
“an insatiable and unquenchable thirst for foreign conquest.” During a speech at the Illinois statehouse one night in May, Lincoln agreed that annexation would be “altogether inexpedient.” He complained that Democrats were obsessed with the issue, and mockingly suggested that their campaign slogan be changed to “nothing but Texas.” Unfortunately for the Whigs, Americans were also captivated by annexation. In November 1844 the expansionist Democratic candidate, a relative unknown named James K. Polk, defeated Clay for the White House. A little over a year later, Congress voted to absorb Texas.
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American Blood upon American Soil

Polk moved swiftly to shore up his new acquisition. “The world has nothing to fear from military ambition in our government,” he declared during his inaugural address on a rainy March day. “Foreign powers should therefore look on the annexation of Texas to the United States not as the conquest of a nation seeking to extend her dominions by arms and violence, but as the peaceful acquisition of a territory once her own.” Still, Polk had designs on territory far beyond Texas. The president particularly coveted the land owned by Mexico that makes up modern-day California, with its Pacific ports and promises of trade far beyond the continental United States. Polk dispatched an envoy to Mexico City with an offer of $15 million to $20 million for the western regions. In case the Mexicans were inclined to waver, he also ordered a unit of two thousand troops under General Zachary Taylor to march deep into Texas, almost to the Rio Grande.
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The land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande was cowboy country, a dusty, sun-bleached stretch of territory that had long been populated mostly by longhorn cattle and the Mexican
rancheros
and
vaqueros
that tended to them. Texans claimed the Rio Grande as the legitimate border, but Mexicans—and even many Americans—considered the area disputed territory. Now Polk’s men
ordered Taylor to push as close to the Rio Grande “as prudence will dictate.” The general was instructed not to fire on the Mexicans unless they crossed the river or “an actual state of war should exist.” Yet when Polk’s envoy was rejected by Mexican officials in December, tensions increased decidedly. In January 1846, Polk ordered Taylor’s men still closer to the border. The general’s force, which had swelled to 3,550 men, marched to the river just across from the Mexican town of Matamoros. Before aiming their cannon at the town, the soldiers hoisted the American flag and obnoxiously blared “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
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By March, the American troops were eager for a fight. They had spent a long winter enduring torrential rains in leaking tents. Brawls broke out among the troops. Wary Mexicans carefully watched the gringos from their rooftops in Matamoros. To the Americans, Mexico seemed to beckon from across the river. The young men were desperate for female companionship. (One lieutenant, Ulysses S. Grant, was nearly drafted by his fellow soldiers to play a woman in a performance of
The Moor of Venice
.) American soldiers watched in amazement as pretty young Mexican women crept down to the Rio Grande, stripped off their clothes, and then leaped nude into the water.
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