Lincoln (15 page)

Something more than face-saving lay behind Lincoln’s support of internal improvements. He continued to think of America as buoyant and prosperous, a land of opportunity where poor boys like himself could get ahead. He had no doubt of the rich resources of Illinois, which, he said, “surpasses every other spot of equal extent upon the face of the globe,
in fertility
of soil” and was therefore capable of “sustaining a greater amount of agricultural wealth and population than any other equal extent of territory in the world.” Railroads and canals were desperately needed to bring the state’s produce to the world’s markets. It was a terrible misfortune that the panic had occurred when the internal improvements plan was getting under way, just at the time when the largest investment was required and the least return could be expected. Consequently the state found itself “at a point which may aptly be likened to the dead point in the steam-engine—a point extremely difficult of turning.” But he was confident that, “once turned,” it would “present no further difficulty, and all again will be well.” Using a different metaphor, he argued that stopping support of these projects now would be “very much like stopping a skift in the middle of a river—if it was not going up, it
would
go down.”

Acknowledging “his share of the responsibility devolving upon us in the present crisis,” Lincoln looked for alternative ways to finance the building of roads and canals. For a time he placed much hope in a plan, similar to one he had advanced earlier, for Illinois to purchase from the federal government all publicly owned lands in the state for $5 million. Profits from the sale of these lands to actual settlers would more than pay the cost of internal improvements, he argued. The legislature agreed to make the offer to Washington, but nothing came of it. Reluctantly he turned to taxation and favored a graduated levy on land, which had hitherto been taxed at a flat rate. Believing the change to be “equitable within itself,” he reminded legislators that the increased levy would fall on the
“wealthy few,”
who, “it is still to be remembered,... are not sufficiently numerous to carry the elections.” As the economy continued to deteriorate, Lincoln sought to retrieve something “from the general wreck” of the internal improvements scheme by continuing to fund “at least one work calculated to yield something towards defraying its expense,” but, as he anticipated, his colleagues allowed the internal improvements system to be “put down in a lump.”

Lincoln’s pertinacity in defending the internal improvements system was equaled only by the vigor of his support for the State Bank of Illinois. Like most Whigs, he preferred a strong national bank. After Andrew Jackson destroyed the power of the Bank of the United States, Lincoln gave his allegiance to the State Bank, and particularly to its central branch in Springfield,
which had been created during his first term in the legislature. Again and again, he voted to defeat Democratic proposals for investigating the bank, and in 1839, when the Democratic majority succeeded in authorizing a committee to look into the bank’s affairs, Lincoln made sure that he was one of the members. He attended the meetings of the committee with fair regularity, despite the heavy calls on his time for other legislative business, and he saw to it that the long report of the investigation attributed the bank’s suspension of specie payments “not... to any organic defects of the institutions themselves but to the irresistable law of trade and exchange which cannot be controaled by country banks.”

The fate of the bank remained in doubt, as Democrats, opposed to all banks on principle and especially hostile to this Whiggish bank in Springfield, mounted campaign after campaign for its destruction. At times even Lincoln gave up on saving it, lamenting that the legislature was allowing the bank to forfeit its charter and that there was “but verry little disposition to resuscitate it.”

Nevertheless, he persisted, and in December 1840 he demonstrated the extent of his devotion to the bank in an episode that became celebrated as what he called “that jumping scrape.” The bank had been authorized to continue its suspension of specie payments only until the end of the legislative session, which was scheduled for the first week in December. Knowing that the bank would immediately be bankrupt if forced to pay out specie, Lincoln and his fellow Whigs hoped to prevent the adjournment of the legislature, now holding its first session in the newly completed capitol at Springfield. Of course, Democrats, who wanted to kill the bank, favored adjournment. The only way the Whigs could keep the legislature in session was by absenting themselves, so that there was no quorum. They left Lincoln, together with one or two of his trusted lieutenants, to watch the proceedings and to demand roll calls when the Democrats tried to adjourn. The session dragged on into the evening, and candles had to be brought in. Several Democrats rose from their sickbeds to help form a quorum. Rattled, Lincoln and his aides lost their heads and voted on the next roll call. Then, still hoping to block adjournment, they unsuccessfully tried to get out of the locked door. When the sergeant at arms rebuffed them, they jumped out the first-story window. Their effort was in vain, because the speaker recorded them as present and voting, and, with the quorum assured, the house adjourned and the bank was killed. The whole affair became the subject of much amusement among the Democrats, who ridiculed “Mr. Lincoln and his flying brethren” and noted that his celebrated leap caused him no harm because “his legs reached nearly from the window to the ground!”

Disliking to appear ridiculous, Lincoln allowed his affection for the bank to cool, and when the subject was introduced again the next year, he was noticeably less active in its defense. After one particularly sharp debate with John A. McClernand and other Democrats, who were, he said, trying to “crush the Bank” while he was trying to save “both it and the state,” he
wearily announced that he was “tired of this business.” “If there was to be this continual warfare against the Institutions of the State,” he went on, “the sooner it was brought to an end the better.”

In addition to serving as the leader of the Whigs in the state legislature, Lincoln labored indefatigably to organize his party, and he became one of the best-known Whig leaders not merely in Springfield but in central Illinois. In 1838, combining politics with his legal business at all the county courthouses where he practiced, he solicited votes for Stuart, who was running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Lincoln exhibited special enthusiasm in his partner’s behalf because the Democratic opponent was Stephen A. Douglas, whom he had already begun to consider his main political rival. Repeatedly Lincoln urged his friends to be vigilant: “If we do our duty we shall succeed in the congressional election, but if we relax an
iota,
we shall be beaten.” Elected by a plurality of only thirty-six votes, Stuart faced a likely challenge to his credentials from Douglas, but Lincoln, along with other Springfield Whigs, mounted a counteroffensive designed to show that Douglas had received votes from unnaturalized foreigners, minors, and persons who had not resided in the state for the required six months. Shortly afterward Lincoln was able to report to Stuart with some glee that the Democrats would probably drop the challenge, though, he added,” You know that if we had heard Douglass say that he had abandoned the contest, it would not be verry authentic.”

Eager for victory, Lincoln readily acquiesced when the Whigs deserted Henry Clay, one of the founders of the party, and nominated William Henry Harrison, the hero of the battle of Tippecanoe, to run against Martin Van Buren in 1840. Thinking “the chance of carrying the state, verry good,” he began systematically organizing the Whigs of central Illinois. When a Democratic editor sneeringly referred to Harrison as a simple old man who wanted nothing better than to live in a log cabin and drink hard cider, Whigs capitalized on his blunder. His charge proved their candidate, in contrast to the aristocratic Van Buren, was a man of the people. Lincoln was afraid his party’s rollicking populist campaign might not translate into votes. By this time his earlier aversion to nominating conventions and the other machinery of party organization, which he shared with most Whigs, had disappeared. He explained that the Democrats, by recruiting “their double-drilled-army” of supporters, had “set us the example of organization; and we, in self defence, are driven into it.” He now drew up a semimilitary plan for getting out the Whig votes. In order to bring about “the overthrow of the corrupt powers that now control our beloved country,” he urged the appointment of county, precinct, and section captains to make sure “that every Whig can be brought to the polls in the coming presidential contest.”

Lincoln also did his part in bringing the issues before the people. An
assiduous reader of the newspapers and a careful student of the
Congressional Globe,
which published in full the interminable debates in the national legislature, he was thoroughly prepared to defend Whig economic policies. In the almost nightly meetings around the fireplace at the back of Speed’s store, where he and other young Springfield politicians argued these questions, he had sharpened his debating skills. His opportunity to use them came when the discussion became heated one night and Douglas, now chairman of the Democratic state committee, challenged his Whig opponents to a full-scale public discussion of the issues in the campaign. Lincoln willingly accepted.

The first round of debate, on November 19, 1839, attracted much attention. Douglas, John Calhoun, the county surveyor who had once employed Lincoln, and two other Democrats opposed four leading Whigs: Edward D. Baker (the attorney who had made a name for himself in his oration at the laying of the cornerstone of the new capitol), Logan, Browning, and Lincoln. Most observers thought the contest a draw, but Lincoln felt he had not come up to the expectations of his friends. “He was conscious of his failure,” Joseph Gillespie reported, “and I never saw any man so much distressed.” He begged for another chance and challenged the Democrats to a return engagement in December. By the time Lincoln had his turn, on the day after Christmas, attendance was so embarrassingly small as to cast a damp upon his spirits. Nevertheless, he proceeded to deliver a carefully written address that, Gillespie recalled, “transcended our highest expectations.”

His basic theme was the merits of a national bank as contrasted to the Independent Treasury system of federal depositories, independent both of state banks and private business, which the Democrats favored. Inevitably it contained a certain amount of rodomontade, such as a jeer at Douglas’s “stupid” belief that his “groundless and audacious assertions” could go unchallenged, and a sneer that hundreds of Democratic officeholders were “scampering away with the public money to Texas, to Europe, and to every spot of the earth where a villain may hope to find refuge from justice.” But for the most part it was a sober, reasoned defense of the economic stability provided by a national bank and a prediction of the adverse effects of the Democrats’ subtreasury plan. Lincoln took pains to keep his arguments down to earth. Not content with generalizing that the Independent Treasury would bring about “distress, ruin, bankruptcy and beggary,” he brought the issue home by showing that if it was established the man who “
now
raises money sufficient to purchase 80 acres, will
then
raise but sufficient to purchase 40, or perhaps not that much.”

This address, published in full in the
Sangamo Journal
and also as a pamphlet, contained little that was new, but it showed that Lincoln had now mastered the standard Whig arguments on economic issues. It served as his basic text throughout the 1840 presidential campaign. Wherever his law practice took him or wherever he was invited, he made political speeches—at Jacksonville, Carlinville, Alton, Belleville, Tremont, Waterloo, Mount
Vernon, Carmi, Shawneetown, and Equality. Sometimes he made solo appearances, but as often he engaged in debates with Democratic leaders, especially Douglas.

In these speeches Lincoln at times indulged in the usual political rhetoric, demagogically attacking Van Buren for supporting the right of free blacks in New York to vote and offering what Whig papers called “a successful vindication of the civil and military reputation of the Hero of Tippecanoe.” Remarkably, though, at a time when many Whigs were carefully avoiding all discussion of issues in favor of a mindless log-cabin-and-hard-cider campaign, Lincoln spent most of his time on the stump soberly discussing Whig economic policies.

That course should have come as no surprise to those who had carefully followed Lincoln’s career since his arrival in Springfield. As early as January 1838, in an address to the Young Men’s Lyceum entitled “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” he had attacked hyperemotionalism in politics, warning that the nation’s “proud fabric of freedom” was endangered by the passions of the people—“the jealousy, envy, and avarice, incident to our nature.”

His central theme was the threat posed by social disorder. His topic was a conventional one for these lyceum meetings, where aspiring young men of the town tested their rhetorical skill and improved their elocution before their peers, but Lincoln developed it in a highly personal way. Like many of his contemporaries, Lincoln was troubled by what he perceived as the rapid rate of change in American life. Canals and railroads were bringing about a transportation revolution; the population was swiftly spreading across the continent; immigration was beginning to seem a threat to American social cohesion; sectionalism was becoming ever more divisive as the controversy over slavery mounted; the political battles of the Jackson era had destroyed the national political consensus.