Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (12 page)

Shields was not amused, and he challenged Lincoln to a duel. The deaths in duels of Alexander Hamilton in 1804 and of naval hero Stephen
Decatur in 1820 had thrown the practice into disrepute—somewhat. But Shields and Lincoln took the matter seriously. As the challenged party, Lincoln got to pick the weapons; he chose cavalry broadswords, to take advantage of his long arms (Shields was of average size). In September the parties and their seconds met on an island in the Mississippi, opposite Alton, where the affair was finally resolved short of combat, Lincoln declaring that Aunt Becca’s letter had been written “wholly
for political effect,” and not to impugn Shields’s character.

Lincoln learned from these encounters to make better vote counts, and not to push opponents too hard.

Such maneuvers and mind-games were the inside story of politics, absorbing to politicians and journalists, if to no one else. But there was also the outside story of politics: the public appeals that politicians and parties made to establish their claim to rule.

Lincoln’s party made one of the most effective appeals in American political history in the presidential election of 1840. After Jackson destroyed the Second Bank of the United States, the economy had collapsed on the head of his successor, Martin Van Buren. The Whigs were determined to ride through the ruins to victory—their first ever, if they succeeded. Their candidate in 1840 was William Henry Harrison, a hero of the War of 1812 who had also held a few political offices, though none of them recently. He seemed dignified and reasonably famous without being controversial.

Early in the campaign, a Democratic newspaper attacked Harrison as a nobody: if he were given a pension, he would “sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin.” The Whigs immediately realized that this jibe, aimed at Harrison’s obscurity, came off as disdain for his humble station in life—which also happened to be the station of the vast majority of voters. The Whigs embraced the insult, parading log cabins at Harrison rallies and marketing canes, handkerchiefs, soapboxes, joke books, and whiskey bottles decorated with log cabins.

The Log Cabin Campaign was literally false, since Harrison was no hick but the son of a Virginia grandee who had signed the Declaration of Independence. But the Whigs told a political truth: they had spent a decade in the wilderness, while Harrison’s opponent, Van Buren, was the insider’s insider presiding over a haggard administration. For all their hokum the Whigs had a point—in a two-party system, the challengers deserve a chance when the incumbents have been in office too long.

It was not the point Lincoln wished to make, however. He was an active Harrison supporter. He was a Whig presidential elector, in case Harrison carried Illinois; he ran a campaign newspaper called
The Old Soldier
; and he stumped the center of the state, debating Democrats. In one encounter with Stephen Douglas, another rising politician, Lincoln played the race card, reading from an old campaign biography of Van Buren to show that he had supported black suffrage in New York State (free blacks could not vote in Illinois). Lincoln did this to embarrass Douglas and he succeeded: “
Damn such a book,” Douglas cried, snatching it from his hands and flinging it into the crowd. Lincoln opposed lynching and called slavery unjust, but he was not above slyly trafficking in prejudice.

For the most part, however, he stuck to the issue that was then preoccupying him, and that would soon cause him to jump out the window of the state legislature: the Democratic Party’s war on banks. Lincoln “drew a vivid picture of our prosperous and
happy condition” under the Second Bank of the United States, according to one newspaper account of his stump speech. Lincoln, as the economic historian Gabor Boritt put it, was by nature a
single-issue candidate. His issue after the collapse of the System was banking, and he focused on it, rather than log cabins.

Yet he would have had to be insensible not to notice the populist hoopla of the Whig onslaught, and careless not to file it for future reference. A serious single-issue candidate might not engage in such antics himself, but he could let his supporters do it for him.

Harrison won, with 234 electoral votes to Van Buren’s 60, and 53 percent of the popular vote to Van Buren’s 47 percent. He did not win Democratic Illinois, however, which Van Buren carried narrowly. Lincoln would not be casting an electoral vote. He also experienced a personal setback, for although he was elected to a fourth term in the state legislature, he won by the smallest margin of any of his races so far. The collapse of the System had crimped his popularity.

Nationally, the Whig triumph was cut short when the sixty-eight-year-old Harrison caught pneumonia and died in April 1841, a month after his inauguration. For the first time in American history, a vice president was obliged to fill a vacancy in the White House. But Harrison’s vice president, John Tyler, was not a Whig at all, but a renegade Democrat who had been put on the ticket to increase its appeal. Once he became president he fought the Whigs who had unintentionally elevated him, vetoing a bill to restore the Second Bank of the United States. “By the course of Mr. Tyler,” wrote Lincoln sourly, “the policy of our opponents has
continued in operation.”

The election of 1840 was not a total loss for Lincoln, however, for it introduced him to his future wife—though their courtship would be harder and longer than a presidential campaign.

Mary Todd, almost ten years younger than Lincoln, grew up in a wealthy family in Lexington, Kentucky, bluegrass country—a different world from the one the Lincolns had left. She was a cousin of John Stuart, Lincoln’s law partner, and two of her sisters had married into the Springfield elite. Mary came to pay her relatives an extended visit late in 1839.

Mary Todd was short, plump, and attractive; smart, lively, and pert. There is a story that Lincoln told her, at a ball that December, that he wanted to dance with her “in the worst way,” and that she said later that “
he certainly did.” Some scholars doubt the truth of the tale, but its
interest lies in what it says about Mary: a woman who was dull or placid would not have been assigned such a punchline.

Politics drew them together. Mary and her family, as well as her Illinois connections, were all Whigs. She was passionate about politics, especially in the banner year of 1840. Whig women threw themselves into the Harrison campaign, one Democrat even complaining that they wore ribbons across their chests “with two names
printed on them” (Harrison and Tyler—one for each breast). For Lincoln and Mary the thrill of their newfound acquaintance was enhanced by the thrill of presidential politics.

Then, suddenly, it was over; the campaign romance did not survive the campaign. It is hard to figure out why exactly. Lincoln had more in common with his political lover than he had with Mary Owens. Perhaps the prospect of success alarmed him. Both Mary Todd and Lincoln began flirting with other people. In December 1840 Lincoln told his friend and roommate Joshua Speed that he had decided he would see Mary no more and that he would write her a letter saying so. Speed told him that he must tell her face to face. Mary cried, Lincoln kissed her. The campaign romance ended with a break-up kiss.

Lincoln was plunged into gloom. “I am now the most miserable man living,” he wrote Stuart. “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face
on the earth.” Speed
hid their knives and razors. Other acquaintances in the little world of Illinois politics gossiped about his distress. Lincoln reportedly had had “two cat fits and a duck fit,” one woman wrote her brother, a Whig legislator. “Is it true? Do
let us hear soon.”

Lincoln stayed sad, if not suicidal, for much of 1841. Speed sold his share of his Springfield store and moved back to his family’s estate outside Louisville, where Lincoln visited him in the late summer. Speed’s mother gave Lincoln a Bible, perhaps to steady him. On the steamboat going home, he saw a sight that impressed and chastened him, and he described it in a letter to one of Speed’s sisters: “A gentleman had purchased twelve Negroes . . . and was taking them to a farm in the South.
They were chained six and six together. A small iron clevis [a U-shaped shackle] was around the left wrist of each, and this fastened to the main chain . . . at a convenient distance from the others, so that the Negroes were strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line.” What struck Lincoln most was their good spirits. “In this condition they were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood,” and from their families and friends. “Yet amid all these distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board.” One played a fiddle; “others danced, sung, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards.”

There was a racist way to view the scene: Negroes are simple creatures, they will get over anything. Lincoln viewed it through the eyes of melancholy: even slaves can feel happy, unlike me. He spelled it out to Speed’s sister: “[God] renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while He permits the best to be nothing
better than tolerable.” Depression can seem absurdly self-aggrandizing to those who do not experience it themselves; that does not make it any less painful to those who do.

Lincoln began to emerge from his funk by helping Speed out of a funk of his own. In the summer of 1841 Speed fell in love with a young woman, Fanny Henning, and then fell into gloomy fears. He worried that he did not love her; he imagined that she would die young. Lincoln wrote him hortatory letters in January and February 1842 as his wedding day approached. Speed’s problem, Lincoln decided, was “
nervous debility.” Speaking as a fellow-sufferer, he assured Speed that “our forebodings . . . are all the worst sort of nonsense.” It was in these letters that Lincoln recalled his father’s saying: “If you make a bad bargain,
hug it the tighter.” A medical diagnosis that explained nothing, an airy dismissal, and an opaque proverb were not very lucid encouragements, but they may have helped get Speed over his reluctance; in February 1842 the wedding to Fanny came off as planned.

Once his friend was married, Lincoln turned his thoughts back to Mary Todd, though still with an odd passivity. Lincoln wrote Speed on the Fourth of July to say that, even as “God made me one of the instruments”
of your happiness, He would somehow provide for Lincoln, too. “Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord,” he added, quoting a command God gives Israel in the Bible, promising
to fight her battles Himself.

Lincoln’s almost-fight with James Shields in September 1842 seems to have concentrated his mind. Politics helped his courtship in the home stretch, as it had at the start: Whig friends arranged for him and Mary Todd to meet again. Mary was more persevering, and more forgiving, than Mary Owens. Lincoln wrote Speed a last nervous letter, asking if he was truly
glad to be married. Speed must have said yes; Lincoln and Mary Todd were married in November.