Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (16 page)

Lincoln opposed slavery’s expansion, too—if America did not “find new places for it to live in,” he wrote, it would die “
a natural
death”—but he thought, as he had in 1844, that the Whigs were the best means of achieving that goal. He campaigned for Taylor in Maryland, Massachusetts, and back home in Illinois. Taylor won with 163 electoral votes to Cass’s 127. The Free Soil Party won no electoral votes, though it got 10 percent of the popular vote. Once again the Democrats took Illinois.

Lincoln was not rewarded for backing the winner. He angled for a federal appointment as a land office administrator; the new administration gave it instead to a former Clay backer. He was offered a job in the Oregon Territory as a consolation prize, but decided to stay in Illinois and (for now) in private life.

Lincoln found Clay to be a mixed political leader. But he endorsed Clay’s economic program wholeheartedly.

Clay’s vision, which he called the American System, was an interlocking structure of internal improvements, a national bank, and protective tariffs (though he was willing to cut tariffs when a crisis loomed). As a young politician Lincoln had supported both internal improvements in Illinois and the Second Bank of the United States.

But the purpose of the American System was not just to make infrastructure or make money; it was to make men—to develop the talents of individual Americans and the national character. Clay wanted an economy that was diversified and progressive, which would give his countrymen the chance to move beyond hardscrabble farming. He is credited, wrongly, with inventing the phrase “self-made man.” But he had highlighted it in
a long Senate speech expounding his economic views during the 1832 campaign. “In Kentucky,” he said, every factory “known to me is in the hands of enterprising, self-made men, who have acquired whatever wealth they possess by patient and diligent labor.”
Enterprising, self-made, patient, diligent
—these words were moral and economic touchstones for Clay.

Who would reject such a vision? Plenty of people. There was already in American politics a long thread of polemic against the wealthy, especially businessmen or bankers—anyone who seemed to have too much money. Madison, cofounder with Jefferson of the first Republican Party, dismissed such folk as “
the opulent.” Andrew Jackson’s Democrats carried on the attack in their struggle against the Second Bank of the United States. Jefferson, Madison, and Jackson were wealthy men, but since their wealth came from agriculture, not manufacturing, they and their supporters considered it virtuous.

Clay addressed that point in 1832. Manufacturing, he admitted, was accused of “favoring the growth of aristocracy. . . . But is there more tendency to aristocracy in a . . . factory supporting hundreds of freemen, or in a cotton plantation, with its not less numerous slaves, sustaining, perhaps, only two white families—that of the master and the overseer?” Lincoln might have added another point of comparison to Clay’s—though there was no tendency to aristocracy in a farm like Thomas Lincoln’s, it offered little reward (beyond subsistence) for patient and diligent labor.

Neither party was a monolith. The Democrats of Clay’s and Lincoln’s day, like the first Republican Party, embraced many self-made men—workers, artisans, businessmen—while the Whigs made a successful pitch for the rural poor with the Log Cabin Campaign of 1840. But each party had its favorite stock of tropes, which they strove (inconsistently) to live up to. Clay, Lincoln, and most Whigs believed in economic development leading to self-improvement.

There was a founding father from whom Lincoln could have learned this message. Alexander Hamilton was the self-made man among the founders, even more than Benjamin Franklin (both started poor, but Hamilton, an illegitimate immigrant, started even further back). As first treasury secretary, Hamilton had offered a program of national development, including the first Bank of the United States and a vision of a diverse American economy, with factories as well as farms. His goal was
to foster a nation of Hamiltons—economics as soul-craft. “When all the different kinds of industry obtain in a community,” he wrote, “each individual can find his proper element, and can call into activity the whole
vigor of his nature.”

Lincoln seems to have been hardly aware of Hamilton (he appears briefly in Weems’s
Life of Washington
not as treasury secretary but as a heedless duelist, “pursuing the phantom honor up to
the pistol’s mouth”). Hamilton’s early death in 1804, and the death of his Federalist Party a dozen years later, left a vacuum where his reputation should have been. Hamilton’s Republican enemies—Jefferson, Madison, Monroe—not only outlived him, they occupied the White House for twenty-four years. The Federalists, meanwhile, were disgraced by their opposition to the War of 1812. In New York, Hamilton’s state, and in New England, where Federalism survived the longest, he was still sometimes remembered. Elsewhere he was an honored cipher—a hero of the Revolution (Weems conceded that he was “gallant”), whose widow was entitled to a seat on the podium when the cornerstone of the Washington Monument was laid, but not a usable political example.

Henry Clay was usable, even though his economic program had suffered as many setbacks as his presidential ambitions. Tariffs had to be cut after the Nullification Crisis, and the Second Bank of the United States had never been resurrected. Yet Clay remained a living advocate of ideas that went beyond his hunger for office. Lincoln tired of him as a presidential candidate, but thought he was right.

When Clay returned to the Senate for the last time in December 1849, the issue before the country was not economics, but the fate of its new Southwest.

California was in the midst of a gold rush and clamoring for immediate statehood. Texas claimed a western border running all the way to Santa Fe. The question of slavery embittered every other question. Would the Missouri line, drawn to resolve a crisis thirty years earlier, be
extended all the way to the Pacific, splitting California in half? Would Texas be allowed to carry slavery into New Mexico, where it did not exist? Should slavery be allowed into all of America’s new territories? Into none of them? The answers to these questions would reach beyond the Southwest to touch the balance of power in Congress and the future of American politics.

America’s divisions over slavery seemed to be woven into Clay’s own life. For all his mockery of cotton planters, he was himself a slave owner—the largest in Kentucky (his plantation in Lexington grew hemp, which was made into rope in Louisville factories—so the American System was still upheld). Yet Clay had hoped that his state might take the route of gradual emancipation. Two state constitutional conventions, fifty years apart—in 1799 and 1849—actually considered the question, but failed to act.

Perhaps Clay’s split personality made him the ideal man to settle the question of slavery nationally. In his last compromise—the Compromise of 1850—he tried to offer something to everyone. California would be admitted, whole, as a free state. Utah, home of the persecuted Mormons, and New Mexico, which included present-day Arizona, could be future slave territories if they chose. Texas would accept a restricted boundary in return for having the United States pay off its independence-era debts. In addition, Clay offered to end the slave trade in the District of Columbia—no more Negro livery stables on Capitol Hill—and to impose a tough federal fugitive slave law.

Clay invoked George Washington, displaying on the Senate floor a fragment of his coffin. (Clay was close to the grave himself, age seventy-two going on seventy-three, and coughing from tuberculosis.) A man who was interested in preserving Mount Vernon, Washington’s old estate, had given Clay “the precious relic” while he was working on his speech in support of the compromise. Was it, Clay asked, “a sad presage” of the impending death of the country? He answered his own question: “No, sir, no. It was a warning voice” asking Congress “to beware, to pause,
to reflect.”

After six months of reflection, the Senate rejected Clay’s compromise. Free Soil northerners did not want slavery to expand anywhere. Southern diehards could not accept California as a free state, or Texas’s loss of its far western border. These, united with mere obstructionists who had personal quarrels with the old orator, managed to block his last great effort. Clay retired to Newport, Rhode Island, to take care of his ravaged lungs.

But his last effort was salvaged by an acquaintance of Lincoln’s—Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. Douglas had risen from clashing with Lincoln in local disputes to winning all the prizes that were open to a talented Democrat in a Democratic state—secretary of state, state supreme court judge, congressman, and, since 1847, US senator. Once he had vaulted onto the national stage, he had assumed a starring role. In midsummer 1850 Douglas split Clay’s compromise into its constituent parts, and by the middle of September he had rounded up enough votes for each proposal to pass all of them.

Lincoln watched from afar but made no comments on the great compromise—except possibly in one exchange with his first law partner, John Stuart. Sometime in 1850, as Stuart remembered it, he and Lincoln were on the road, tending to legal business in Tazewell County, south of Peoria. “As we were coming down [a] hill . . . I said, ‘Lincoln, the time is coming when we shall have to be all either Abolitionists or Democrats.’” Stuart assumed that, in a reshuffling of parties, the Democrats would be the party of slavery. Lincoln, he went on, “thought a moment and then answered, ruefully and emphatically, ‘When that time comes my mind is made up, for I believe the slavery question can never be
successfully compromised.’”

Stuart was hazy about the date; possibly he was imputing more foresight to himself and to Lincoln than they had shown. By the end of 1850, thanks to Henry Clay (and Stephen Douglas), the future of slavery in the United States seemed settled—provided everyone kept to the settlement.

Clay died, age seventy-five, at the end of June 1852. The founders were dead, and now so was the new race of heroes to which Clay had
nominated himself. Lincoln
delivered a eulogy in Springfield a week later. The eulogy showed some reserve, some holding back, especially on the subject of Clay’s oratory. But Lincoln found something important in the dead man’s life and words—a path, back through Clay himself, to the founders and the first principles of America.

Lincoln began with a coincidence. Clay was born in the first year after the United States’ birth (April 1777). “The infant nation, and the infant child began the race of life together. For three quarters of a century they have travelled hand in hand.” Lincoln equated Clay with America—but what about him was particularly American?

He described Clay’s eloquence with a quotation from an obituary—two pages of what was, in effect, oratory about an orator. Useful for pressing flowers, maybe. Then Lincoln decided, as Herndon might have put it, to dig up the root. “Mr. Clay’s predominant sentiment, from first to last, was a deep devotion to the cause of human liberty. . . . He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country.” Clay was known as the Great Compromiser, and Lincoln was about to survey his achievements in that line. But he asserted that Clay’s compromises all had a goal, which was freedom.