Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (13 page)

The happy ending did not make for a happy marriage. Neither of the Lincolns was easy to live with. One friend of the couple described Mary as “always either in
the garret or the cellar”—exalted or downcast. Abraham was generally the latter. Mary’s mood swings were accompanied by a temper. In moments of distress she would beseech her husband, berate him, even
throw things at him. In response he would read the newspaper, play with his children, or otherwise detach himself.

Mary Lincoln’s eccentricities would cause Abraham political headaches during his presidency. Against this must be set her political interests, which kept her engaged in his career, and her political instincts, which could be sharp. (She accused him of being too trusting, which he was, though that probably benefited him in the long run.)

Lincoln’s marriage would be of no interest to history, except for what it lacked. Public achievements are not always compensations for personal deprivation; there have been great men whose private lives were filled with blessings—wonderful parents, happy marriages, splendid children. Lincoln, however, was a wanderer in his own life, looking for something he never quite had. He chose issues in public life for sufficient political and moral reasons, but he came to them with passion to spare.

In the depths of his depression in 1841 he told Speed that “he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.”
He did not expect family life to generate saving memories of him, and
he had not yet earned them from politics.

Lincoln’s law partner John Stuart had been elected to Congress in 1838 and reelected in 1840. In 1841 the two men recognized that the time Stuart spent in Washington made the partnership impracticable, so they dissolved it, and Lincoln joined forces with another Whig lawyer-politician, Stephen Logan. They worked together until 1844, when Lincoln took on his third, last, and longest-serving partner, Speed’s former clerk William Herndon.

Much of Lincoln’s legal work was done in Springfield, where the state supreme court and federal courts sat; but twice a year—in the spring and the fall—he traveled the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Illinois, arguing cases in county courthouses. The Eighth Circuit was as big as Connecticut, and each road trip took ten weeks. Accommodation could be almost as primitive as the family cabin back in Indiana, the cases were routine, and the fees were tiny. But Lincoln liked the camaraderie of his fellow lawyers, and his travels made him known throughout central Illinois (his judicial circuit overlapped most of his congressional district).

Lincoln the lawyer cut a homely figure. In his Springfield office he stuffed letters, bills, and notes to himself in an old silk hat, or in a bundle of papers on his desk with a reminder slipped under the string: “When you can’t find it anywhere else,
look in this.” On the road he wore a coat that was loose and pants that were short, and carried an umbrella that had no knob and a carpetbag packed with
documents and underwear. He was genuinely indifferent to what he wore and ate and where he slept, but his slovenliness was also an extension of his rube/boob persona, which served several functions. It put ordinary clients and jurors at ease, and it took opposing counsel off their guard. “Any man who took Lincoln for a simple minded man,” said one fellow lawyer, “would very soon wake up with
his back in a ditch.”

Lincoln’s strength as a lawyer was his ability to focus on the case at hand. Logan, his second law partner, rated his general knowledge of the law as “
never very formidable”—the legacy of his do-it-yourself education—but he bore down on anything he handled, mastering both the details of the case itself and the principles involved. “He not only went to the root of the question,” wrote Herndon, “but
dug up the root.”

When Lincoln took on Herndon as a law partner, he also acquired a biographer. Herndon put off writing until he was an old man who needed the help of an amanuensis, but preparing and planning the biography was the project of his life. Herndon realized early on that Lincoln was unusual; he observed him, and endeavored to draw him out. Much of what we know about Lincoln’s prepresidential appearance and habits comes from Herndon or from the many interviews with family and friends that Herndon conducted after Lincoln’s death. Herndon was alert to Lincoln’s melancholy, which “dripped from him
as he walked.” He understood how Lincoln used humor to keep himself afloat—“to
whistle off sadness,” as one of Herndon’s informants put it.

Herndon described a strain of fatalism that ran through Lincoln’s mind. Lincoln used a little catchphrase to express it that both Herndon and Mary Lincoln recalled: “What is to be will be, and no prayers of ours can
reverse the decree.” His fatalism may have begun as a legacy of his parents’ religion; the particular sect of Baptists to which they belonged believed in predestination. Lincoln left the church, but kept the belief. Fatalism became a way of explaining his gloom to himself: The reason I feel so bad is because it could not have been any other way. I am damned because I was doomed. “There are no accidents in my philosophy,” Lincoln told Herndon one day. Every action was a link in an “endless chain” of cause and effect. “The motive was born
before the man.” The motive, and the moods.

In the early 1850s, Lincoln pursued a new intellectual interest on the circuit, working his way through the first six books of Euclid’s
Elements of Geometry
. He was proud enough of this accomplishment to mention it in a campaign autobiography when he ran for president.
Euclid pleases minds enamored of logic. Thomas Hobbes admired him; so did Thomas Paine, who declared in
The Age of Reason
that Euclid, unlike the authors of the Bible, proved everything he said (Paine called the
Elements
a book of “
self-evident demonstration”). The chains of proof, each building on the one that went before, unwind like cause and effect in Lincoln’s view of the world. But Euclid offered something that fatalism did not: clarity and definition. He tells us what things are. Fatalism locks us in place; Euclid is a means, austere but certain, of understanding.

Lincoln the lawyer was no mere reasoning machine. He could summon the passions when he had to. Herndon recorded
the case of Rebecca Thomas, the widow of a Revolutionary War veteran, who had been bilked by an agent she had hired to collect her husband’s pension. She “came hobbling into the office” one day in 1846, Herndon wrote, “and told her story. It stirred Lincoln up.” The day before the trial he asked Herndon to get him a history of the Revolution, for refreshing his memory; the next day, in court, he went to work. He only called one witness—Mrs. Thomas herself—then summed up for the jury. He “drew a vivid picture of the hardships of Valley Forge, describing with minuteness the men, barefooted and with bleeding feet, creeping over the ice.” Shades of Weems and the crossing of the Delaware. Lincoln concluded: “Time rolls by, the heroes of ’76 have passed away and are encamped on the other shore. The soldier has gone to rest, and now, crippled, blind and broken, his widow comes to you and to me, gentlemen of the jury, to right her wrongs. She was not always thus. She was once a beautiful young woman. Her step was elastic, her face fair. . . . But now she is poor and defenseless. . . . She appeals to us, who enjoy the privileges achieved for us by the patriots of the Revolution, for our sympathetic and manly protection. All I ask is, shall we befriend her?” The jury was in tears; Lincoln won the case, and charged no fee.

This speech was not for a general audience and was not printed until Herndon published this reconstruction of it decades later. But it corrects what Lincoln said about the founders in the Lyceum Address.
The heroes of ’76 are dead, but they can be summoned; we, their beneficiaries, have an obligation to summon them, especially when there are wrongs to be righted. Even in death they help us (we enjoy the privileges they achieved); so we must help others (with sympathetic and manly protection); the heroic dead can inspire us to do it. Reason is powerful, but so is memory. Lincoln would make this appeal again, to a larger audience, for a greater cause.

While Lincoln practiced law, he simultaneously pursued his political career. Stuart decided not to run for Congress again in 1842, which opened up the one safe Whig seat in Illinois. Three Whig lawyers, all in their early thirties, wanted it: Lincoln, John Hardin, and Edward Baker.

One way Lincoln positioned himself to be a candidate was by campaigning for temperance. Temperance was a religiously tinged movement of moral reform, one of several that flourished in the 1830s and 1840s (Sabbath observance was another). Whigs tended to be more hospitable to such impulses than Democrats; Lyman Beecher, a Connecticut minister, wrote that the Democratic Party in his state had been founded by “rum-selling tippling folk, infidels and
ruff-scuff generally.” Lincoln did not drink, which suited him to this new role; on the other hand, temperance crusaders often employed a hectoring tone that he did not like.

On Washington’s Birthday in 1842 Lincoln gave a speech in Springfield’s Presbyterian Church to a meeting of a temperance society named for the first president. Lincoln urged the temperance advocates to drop the fire and brimstone: “It is an old and true maxim that a ‘drop of honey catches more flies than
a gallon of gall.’” Unfortunately the speech as a whole was the most fustian performance he would ever give; it ended with a paean to Washington as the Father of Temperance: “Washington is the mightiest name of earth—long since mightiest in the cause of civil liberty; still mightiest in
moral reformation.” This was the legacy of Weems’s stories about the apple orchard and the cherry tree, erecting
Washington into an icon of virtue—only now Lincoln, and those who had named the temperance society for Washington, were addressing adults. It seems that Lincoln overdid it: Herndon, who stood at the church door listening to the crowd as it left, claimed they thought Lincoln was making
fun of them. Thanks to carelessness, or unhappiness with his task, Lincoln had not made good use of Washington.

The three Whig politicians ended up trading the congressional seat among themselves, Hardin running in 1842, Baker in 1844, and Lincoln in 1846. It looked like a formal division of the spoils, but it was accompanied by much off-stage elbowing and body-blocking. One maneuver was for each man’s supporters to suggest that one of the other Whigs be their party’s candidate for governor instead. No one took the bait (in Democratic Illinois, Whig gubernatorial candidates were almost certain to lose).

As Baker’s term wound down in 1846, Hardin gave signs of wanting another term for himself. A congressional seat, he wrote Lincoln, was not “a horse which each candidate may mount and ride [for] a two mile heat.” Lincoln caught the metaphor and threw it back at him, asking Hardin if he thought the seat was “a horse which, the first jockey that can mount him, may whip and spur round and round, till jockey, or horse, or both,
fall dead.” Hardin backed off, and Lincoln won the Whig nomination in 1846 without a fight.

His Democratic opponent, Peter Cartwright, charged him with irreligion, raking up memories of his Paine-ite talk in New Salem and his early days in Springfield, which prompted Lincoln to issue a handbill declaring that he had never openly scoffed at Christianity. He admitted to being a fatalist, who believed “that the human mind is impelled to action or held in rest by some power over which the mind itself has no control.” But he noted that “several of
the Christian denominations” shared that opinion (his parents’ denomination, for instance). The Democratic charge did not stick, and Lincoln won handily.