The Fiery Trial (7 page)

Lincoln said almost nothing about the rights of black Americans during the first part of his career, but he was not above appealing to prevailing racial prejudices for political purposes. During the 1836 and 1840 presidential campaigns, he and other Whigs seized on Democrat Martin Van Buren’s support at the 1821 New York constitutional convention for a provision allowing blacks to vote if they owned $250 worth of property. This actually represented a severe restriction on the political rights of blacks in New York, previously the same as those of whites, since hardly any of the state’s African-American population could meet the new qualification. Nonetheless, Whigs in Illinois and elsewhere accused Van Buren of favoring black suffrage. Lincoln repeated the charge in speeches and anonymous newspaper articles. In one 1840 debate, Stephen A. Douglas vehemently denied Lincoln’s accusation. At their next encounter, Lincoln read from a campaign biography of Van Buren to substantiate the charge, whereupon Douglas declared the book a forgery, grabbed it from Lincoln’s hands, and threw it into the crowd. The
Old Soldier
, a campaign newspaper edited by Lincoln and a group of other Whigs, also chastised Van Buren for allowing two blacks to testify in court against a white naval officer during his presidency. Clearly, whatever his beliefs about slavery, Lincoln shared his state’s prevailing view that blacks did not belong to the “political nation.”
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Eventually, Lincoln would come to see the abolitionists and himself as part of a common antislavery struggle. Many ideas first advanced by abolitionists found their way into his speeches. Without a direct personal connection to the abolitionist movement, however, Lincoln lacked exposure to the radical egalitarianism that pervaded the cause. This helps to explain why, if Lincoln early in his career made clear his dislike of slavery, it took him a long time to begin to glimpse the possibility of racial equality in America.

I

“
A
LWAYS A
W
HIG IN POLITICS.”
With these words, Lincoln in 1859 summarized the first part of his political career. Lincoln joined the Whig party at its birth in the 1830s and left only when it disintegrated in the mid-1850s. Throughout these years, Lincoln remained a party stalwart and perennial aspirant for public office. While many Whigs viewed party organization with discomfort, Lincoln became a skilled political manager. He pushed for the development of an effective Whig political machine down to local precinct captains throughout Illinois. He contributed literally hundreds of unsigned articles to the Whig newspaper in Springfield. Two decades before using the phrase in one of his most celebrated speeches, Lincoln, commenting on the need for better party discipline, declared, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Lincoln took his own advice about grassroots party organizing. A Boston reporter who accompanied him on a stagecoach ride from Peoria to Springfield in 1847 noted that Lincoln (then a congressman-elect) “knew, or appeared to know, every body we met.”
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Unfortunately, being a Whig in Illinois meant almost always ending up on the losing side. In the party’s twenty-year history, never once was one of its candidates elected a governor or senator, nor did its presidential candidate ever carry the state. To be sure, central Illinois, where Lincoln lived, was the party’s one reliable stronghold, consistently electing Whigs to the state legislature and Congress. But “the tendency in Illinois,” Lincoln’s law partner John Todd Stuart later remarked, “was for every man of ambition to turn Democrat.” “I should as leave think of seeing one rise from the dead,” Lincoln’s friend David Davis wrote in 1845, as to expect to see Illinois “ever being Whig.”
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Nonetheless, it is not surprising that a person with Lincoln’s deeply rooted desire for self-improvement found the Whig outlook appealing. Both major parties in the Age of Jackson were broad coalitions, attracting support in every part of the country and across the social spectrum. But in general, social classes most attuned to the market revolution—merchants, industrialists, professionals, and commercial farmers, including, in the South, the largest planters—tended to vote Whig. Democratic support centered on urban laborers and small farmers isolated from national markets. Religious and ethnic identities also distinguished the parties. Whigs drew support from evangelical Protestants, including many attracted to the era’s myriad social reform movements—temperance, school reform, and, in the North, antislavery. Democrats did well among more traditional Protestant sects as well as Roman Catholics, among them the growing number of immigrants from Germany and Ireland.
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The outlooks of the two parties reflected these social realities. Whigs, North and South, viewed government as an agent of economic development, moral improvement, and national unity. They rallied to Henry Clay’s American System, a comprehensive program of government-sponsored economic modernization. The plan centered on a tariff on imported manufactured goods to aid industry and protect American workers from the competition of low-wage foreign labor; government aid to internal improvements like the roads, canals, and railroads that formed the infrastructure of the market economy; and a national bank to provide a stable currency. They also believed government should improve the moral character of the citizenry by building schools and discouraging drinking, violations of the Sabbath, and other vices.
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Whigs insisted that in an expanding economy all classes shared a harmony of interests. Government-promoted economic growth created the context in which “self-made men” (a phrase coined by Calvin Colton, Henry Clay’s campaign biographer) could achieve economic success and assimilate into the republic of property holders. During the 1850s, this emphasis on individual opportunity would become the foundation of the Republican party’s “free labor” ideology and be linked to a critique of slave society for stifling economic advancement. But during Lincoln’s early career, northern Whigs celebrated social opportunity in contrast not so much to slavery as to the critique of growing class inequality advanced by the Democratic party and the early labor movement. The Whig economic outlook formed part of a broad vision of national unity undisturbed by class, regional, or sectional conflict.
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Democrats charged that Whig economic policies favored the rich and well connected. They warned that “non-producers” such as merchants and bankers sought to use government to advance their own interests at the expense of honest workingmen. Active government appeared to Democrats as a threat to personal liberty, and they preferred to allow individuals to pursue economic advancement without outside interference. Their hands-off economic policy complemented moral laissez-faire. Democrats adamantly defended the separation of church and state and insisted that government should not impose any single definition of morality on a heterogeneous nation.
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Of course, many exceptions existed to this general pattern of party support. Lincoln, who had grown up on a farm in the backwoods of Indiana and never embraced revivalist religion, seemed to fit the Democratic mold. Certainly, he did not share the evangelical outlook so prominent among northern Whigs. Lincoln had a deep familiarity with the Bible, which he quoted frequently in his speeches. He attended religious services but, quite unusually for a Whig, never became a member of a church. Lincoln’s religious views evolved over time, but they had more in common with the deism of the Enlightenment, which posited a God who did not regularly intervene in human affairs, than the personal Jesus of revivalist Protestantism. According to local lore, as a young man in New Salem, Illinois, where he lived from 1831 to 1837, Lincoln read Tom Paine’s great attack on revealed religion,
The Age of Reason
, and wrote a manuscript denying the divinity of the Bible, which he then destroyed at the urging of friends. Lincoln’s one public statement about his religious beliefs before the Civil War came in 1846 during his campaign for Congress. His opponent Peter Cartwright, a Methodist preacher, accused him of infidelity. Lincoln responded by publishing a handbill denying ever speaking with “intentional disrespect of religion in general.” What is remarkable about this document is that nowhere in it did Lincoln actually affirm any religious faith except for a fatalistic “doctrine of necessity” whereby “some power” worked out mankind’s destiny in ways human beings could not fathom. It was hardly the statement of a devout Christian.
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Lincoln may have differed from most northern Whigs in his religious outlook, but he found appealing the party’s vision of an integrated, modernizing economy that offered opportunities for hardworking individuals to rise in society. He always considered himself one of the self-made men celebrated by Whig ideology.

Lincoln’s early life coincided with far-reaching changes in transportation, the early development of manufacturing, and the growing dominance of a cash economy. Despite the rapid spread of market relations, however, farm families like the Lincolns in the southern Northwest still concentrated on growing food for their own needs. During Lincoln’s youth, little money circulated and the barter of labor and goods was common. The Indiana farm where Lincoln grew up lay sixteen miles north of the Ohio River, quite a distance given the primitive state of transportation. Stocked with hogs, cattle, horses, and sheep, and growing wheat and corn, it was basically self-sufficient. The family tanned leather, sewed clothing, and made its own cloth. The surrounding forest teemed with wild game that they hunted for food. Physically strong, Lincoln was assigned to manual labor from an early age. Indiana law, like the law of nearly every state in the Union, gave parents the right to the “service” of their children until the age of twenty-one, and Thomas Lincoln frequently sent his son to work for neighbors to pay off debts. One of his acquaintances later recalled Lincoln remarking, “I used to be a slave,” a reference to his father’s appropriation of his labor. In Lincoln’s early experiences may lie the origins of his intense later commitment to the idea that all persons have a natural right to the fruits of their toil.
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Lincoln’s two round-trip journeys to New Orleans (in which he traveled by both flatboat and steamboat) illustrated how he grew to adulthood in a period of transition between old and new technologies, and between the household and market economies. Even when the Lincoln family moved in 1830 to the rich farming land of Sangamon County in central Illinois, river transport remained unreliable and commerce restricted. When frontier families produced a surplus, they were eager to market it to local merchants, who, in turn, shipped it to New Orleans. In exchange, farm families and residents of small towns acquired products that could not be produced at home, including glass, tableware, and other consumer goods transported from the East via Pittsburgh and the Ohio River, or from St. Louis. Nonetheless, New Salem and Springfield, where Lincoln moved in 1837, were small communities isolated from larger markets. Merchants tended to fail, as Lincoln did when he ran a store in New Salem. Residents of Illinois stood poised between “rude unsophisticated life and a civilized comfort,” in the words of a journalist who visited the state. Not until the 1840s, when the National Road reached Illinois from Maryland and railroad construction began, did the state become fully integrated into the national market economy.
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Lincoln never romanticized his backwoods youth. When his 1860 campaign biographer John L. Scripps asked about his upbringing, Lincoln replied with a line from the English poet Thomas Gray’s
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
: “the short and simple annals of the poor.” Early in life, Lincoln decided that he did not want to live like his father, who in his son’s eyes exemplified the values of the pre-market world where people remained content with a subsistence lifestyle. From age twenty-one, Lincoln lived in towns and cities and evinced no interest in returning to the farm or to manual labor. He held jobs—storekeeper, lawyer, and surveyor—essential to the market economy. The storekeeper brought manufactured goods from afar to isolated communities. The bulk of legal work revolved around land titles, business arrangements, bankruptcy cases, and the credit and debt that oiled the market revolution. The surveyor transformed land into private property with clearly identified boundaries, ready to be bought and sold. Lincoln was so enmeshed in market society that during the 1840s and 1850s, even while pursuing his legal and political careers, he provided credit reports about his Springfield neighbors to the Mercantile Agency, a credit rating company founded in New York City by the abolitionist Lewis Tappan.
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Like many ambitious, successful sons, Lincoln did everything he could to distance himself from his father. He did not invite Thomas Lincoln to his wedding or, indeed, to visit his family in Springfield at any time. In 1851, when Lincoln’s stepmother informed him that his father lay on his deathbed a hundred miles from Springfield, Lincoln declined to visit him, explaining that “if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.” In the autobiographical account he composed for Scripps, Lincoln wrote that his father “never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name,” a description so uncharitable that Scripps chose not to include it in the biography he produced. Lincoln had a similar attitude toward his stepbrother, John D. Johnston, another self-sufficient farmer. When Johnston asked for a loan in 1848, Lincoln chastised him for laziness and advised him to join the cash economy: “Go to work for the best money wages.” He refused the loan but offered to match any income that Johnston earned.
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Lincoln, who enjoyed less than one year of formal schooling, was essentially self-educated. He read widely in nineteenth-century political economy, including the works of the British apostle of economic liberalism John Stuart Mill and the Americans Henry Carey and Francis Wayland. Although these writers differed on specific policies—Carey was among the most prominent advocates of a high tariff while Wayland favored free trade—all extolled the virtues of entrepreneurship and technological improvement in a modernizing market economy. (Wayland, the president of Brown University and a polymath who published works on ethics, religion, and philosophy, made no direct reference to slavery in his 400-page tome,
Elements of Political Economy
, but did insist that people did not work productively unless allowed to benefit from their own labor, an argument Lincoln would reiterate in the 1850s.) Throughout his life, Lincoln remained fascinated by technological innovations, even receiving a patent in 1849 for “a new and improved manner of combining adjustable buoyant chambers with steam boats.” A decade later, he listed patent laws along with the art of writing and the “discovery” of America as the three greatest improvements in human history. When he delivered a lecture to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in 1859, Lincoln noted, “I have thought a good deal, in an abstract way, about a steam plow.” He lauded the advantages of scientific, mechanized farming, urging agriculturalists to combine physical labor with “cultivated thought.” These attitudes were characteristic of the Whig party.
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By the 1840s, having married a woman from a prosperous family and established a good career as a lawyer, Lincoln had achieved respectability. Yet along the way, he had experienced poverty and failure. In New Salem in the 1830s, he invested his meager funds in stores that “winked out” (went bankrupt), accumulating debts that took many years to repay. Lincoln took all sorts of odd jobs in New Salem, working at a grain and saw mill, harvesting crops, and splitting rails. He received assistance from his friends in fending off creditors and from the local, state, and national governments, relying on employment as a postmaster, surveyor, and member of the legislature to make ends meet. Like his idol Henry Clay, Lincoln saw government as an active force promoting opportunity and advancement. Its “legitimate object,” he wrote in an undated memorandum, “is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do…for themselves.” He offered as examples building roads and public schools and providing relief to the poor. To Lincoln, Whig policies offered the surest means of creating economic opportunities for upwardly striving men like himself.
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