Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (23 page)

Lincoln’s most picturesque case had looked back to his past: early in 1858 he had saved the son of his old wrestling rival Jack Armstrong in a
murder trial, by showing that the prosecution’s main witness could not have seen the deed on a night that was (according to a dramatically produced almanac) moonless. But the case that would be most important to his future had been a summons to Cincinnati in 1855 to advise the defense for Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the reaper, in a patent infringement suit. On second thought, McCormick’s lawyers did not like the looks of their Illinois adviser, one of them, Edwin Stanton, calling him a “
damned long-armed ape”—not to the ape’s face, though Stanton’s attitude was all too clear. Lincoln, who was given nothing to do, felt insulted but pocketed the fee. He and Stanton would meet again.

Lincoln experimented with a new rhetorical genre after his Senate loss—a lyceum-style lecture on the history of inventions, from writing to the development of patent laws. Lincoln had a quirky curiosity about things and processes. “Clocks, omnibuses, language, paddle-wheels, and idioms never escaped his
observation and analysis,” wrote Herndon (Lincoln never escaped Herndon’s observation and analysis). But the lecture on inventions was a failure. Unharnessed from the great issues with which he had been engaged, Lincoln’s humor unraveled into whimsy; his interest in history shrank to a harvest of trivia. “That doesn’t look much like his
being President,” wrote one newspaper that reviewed the talk. Lincoln gave it a few times early in 1859, to smaller and smaller audiences, then let his career as a lecturer die.

The newspaper notice of Lincoln’s talk was mocking, but was he running, as early as 1859, for president? Of course he was. George Washington had won the first two presidential elections by acclamation, but after his retirement every conceivable politician, and many inconceivable ones, fancied themselves in the role. Still, like any prudent long shot, Lincoln had to be discreet. He could not yet speak about himself; instead he spoke about the founding fathers.

In the spring of 1859 Henry Pierce, a chocolate manufacturer, invited him to a celebration of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday on April 13
in Boston. Lincoln had to decline, thanks to the demands of his legal practice, but the letter he wrote Pierce gave him an opportunity to restate his views on the Declaration of Independence and slavery. In his Peoria speech he had compared the Declaration to a sheet anchor. Now he compared its author to Euclid: Jefferson’s principles—that all men were equally endowed with certain basic rights—were “the definitions and axioms of free society.” He ended with a lofty peroration: “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable
to all men and all times.” Lincoln had clearly labored over this paean; it was ready to be chiseled in stone—or printed in Republican newspapers, which in fact ran with it.

In the fall of 1859 came invitations to address Republicans throughout the Midwest. These Lincoln accepted, regardless of his legal practice. The fall was off-year election season, and he needed to be visible.

Douglas helped him plan his itinerary. The senator had published a defense of popular sovereignty in the September issue of
Harper’s Magazine
, and that month Douglas spoke in Columbus and Cincinnati (Ohio was the third most populous state in the country, and a Republican and a Douglas Democrat were running against each other for governor). Lincoln followed Douglas to both cities and rebutted his
Harper’s
article; even as the Lincoln/Douglas debates had begun years before their senate race, so now they continued after it.

The opinions of the two men on the future of slavery were unchanged: Douglas was for letting popular sovereignty determine it, Lincoln for containment and ultimate extinction.

The political trajectories of the two men had not changed since the fight over the Lecompton Constitution. In December 1858 southern Democrats had stripped Douglas of his chairmanship of the Committee on Territories as punishment for his aggressive anti-Lecompton
stance. If Douglas were to reach the White House, it would have to be with northern support, including the support of Republicans. Although Douglas could scarcely hope for a Republican nomination after the spirited partisan race he had run in 1858, he might still steal the party’s followers out from under its leadership. Lincoln was determined to stop him. In a letter to an Ohio politician he called Douglas “the most dangerous enemy of liberty, because the
most insidious.” In fighting to stop Douglas, he incidentally advanced himself.

At issue once again were the two men’s portraits of the founders, and their own self-portraits as founders’ sons. Their argument over slavery and politics had become a fratricidal contest over which of them was the Revolution’s legitimate heir.

Douglas’s article in
Harper’s
, “The Dividing Line Between Federal and Local Authority: Popular Sovereignty in the Territories,” was long—seventeen and a half double-column pages—but its point was simple: “The ideas and principles of the fathers of the Revolution” were identical to popular sovereignty, as expounded by Douglas. After a long survey of American legislation, going back beyond the founding to colonial times, Douglas distilled his version of the American creed: “The people of every separate political community (dependent colonies, Provinces and Territories, as well as sovereign states) have an inalienable right to govern themselves in respect to their internal polity.” That included governing themselves in respect to slavery.

Douglas’s founding fathers were permissive parents, as far as white men were concerned. White men should be able to do as they pleased with black men. Lincoln’s founding fathers, by contrast, were lawgivers. They believed in sheet anchors and axioms; they laid down the law of liberty, based on human nature.

Lincoln had given the Republicans of Boston the Declaration; he now gave the Republicans of Ohio the Northwest Ordinance. It had, he said, an unimpeachable founding pedigree. The Ordinance had been “made by the very men who were the actors in the Revolution,” and it
had been ratified as the Constitution “was in process of being framed.” What did it show? That when “the revolutionary heroes” considered whether slavery should go into the Northwest Territory, they forbade it. No popular sovereignty on this question for them: “From first to last,
they clung to freedom.”

In Cincinnati, Lincoln threw out a new idea, tying his belief in liberty to his Whiggish theories of work: “Whereas God Almighty has given every man one mouth to be fed, and one pair of hands adapted to furnish food for that mouth, if anything can be proved to be the will of Heaven, it is . . . that that mouth is to be fed with those hands, without being interfered with by any other man who has also his mouth to feed and his
hands to labor with.” He went on to add a joke: If God had intended to divide mankind into classes of drones and drudges, he would have given the first class mouths and no hands, and the second hands and no mouths.

This little set piece on hands and mouths was a gloss on Lincoln’s moving image, two years earlier, of the black woman whose right to eat the bread she earned with her own hands equaled anyone else’s. It was also his gloss on the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson had written that “all men . . . are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” among them “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” At first glance Lincoln’s right to eat the bread one has earned may not seem as grand as Jefferson’s triad of rights; but bread sustains life, liberty, and any pursuing of happiness anyone might do. Jefferson never worked with his hands, and Lincoln was not a very happy man, so they drew on different life experiences to illustrate their thoughts, but their thinking was essentially the same.

Ironically, Lincoln’s test case for liberty evoked agricultural labor—before bakers make bread, farmers have to grow the wheat and millers have to turn it into flour. This was labor Lincoln loathed. But the source of his loathing was the fact that through his twenty-first year he had not been paid; thirty years later, he was able to sympathize with slaves who were in a similar position.

Finally, both Lincoln and Jefferson—though
neither of them was a Christian—traced these rights to God.

That fall Lincoln got yet another speaking invitation, which he promptly accepted: it was to make his New York debut.

New York was the most populous city in the country. It was already a financial hub, and increasingly a cultural and media hub as well (
Harper’s
, the magazine in which Douglas presented his self-justification, was published there; so was Greeley’s
Tribune
). Lincoln’s invitation, from New York–area Republicans, asked him to come to Brooklyn, across the East River, then a separate city, which was itself the country’s third largest. Lincoln’s venue was to be Plymouth Church, the pulpit of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, an ecclesiastical showman and abolitionist firebrand; the date was set for February 1860. Lincoln bought a new black suit for the occasion for $100, quite a sum. At the last minute the sponsors, hoping to lure a bigger crowd, moved the lecture to Manhattan, to Cooper Union, a free school for the working class.

Lincoln had told his sponsors that he would make a political speech. His mere presence in New York guaranteed that. New York State was the nation’s largest, and a bastion of the Republican Party. The party leader there was the senior senator William Seward. Seward had several points in common with Lincoln: he was an ex-Whig; he was funny-looking—short rather than rail-tall, with a big nose and big ears; he was an indifferent dresser (one of his outfits was described as “a coat and trousers made apparently twenty years ago and by
a bad tailor at that”). Seward had characterized the future of slavery and freedom in America in a phrase as portentous as the “house divided”: the two systems, he said in an 1858 speech in Rochester, New York, were locked in an “
irrepressible conflict.”

But as of February 1860 Seward’s reputation was already made, while Lincoln’s was still being made. Seward, who was eight years older than Lincoln, had been a senator for a decade and governor of New York
before that. His adviser and right hand was an Albany journalist and wire-puller who had the greatest name that has ever been, or ever will be, in American politics: Thurlow Weed. (
Thurlow
, the last name as first name, suggesting everything that inspires respect, from high ideals to cash on hand.
Weed
, what follows in every politician’s footsteps, from backroom deals to stabs in the back.) Seward was the acknowledged front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. To speak in Seward’s back yard was, by definition, a raid. Lincoln would still aim his fire at Douglas, but other Republicans would now suffer by comparison. The better Lincoln looked against Douglas, the better he might look as a possible Republican candidate.