Chapter Three.

Abraham Lincoln Takes Control.

      As he rode up Pennsylvania Avenue in a carriage with President Buchanan sitting beside him, Abraham Lincoln, a deeply meditative man anyway, must have reflected upon the extraordinary circumstances that had brought him to this momentous day.  “Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him (George Washington), I cannot succeed,” he had proclaimed on February 11, 1861,  when he had boarded a train and had set out on a tour of Northern cities that would last for almost two weeks.[i]  Now, thankfully, Lincoln’s  long journey to power was almost over.  Looking spiffy in his shiny black boots, a new black suit, and a fashionable stovepipe hat, this gangly, newly-bearded, 52-year-old attorney from Springfield, Illinois, who enjoyed the reputation of being a skillful orator and sagacious advocate, and who was about to assume the supreme political office in the United States, had begun his days in simple, almost squalid, dirt-floored log houses on the  Kentucky and Indiana frontier.[ii]

Thomas Lincoln

     Lincoln’s father, Thomas Lincoln, was a powerful, barrel-chested, gregarious man who eked out a living as a carpenter and farmer.  Thomas liked to spend his few moments of relaxation sitting around the stove in the local store telling tall tales and sharing bawdy jokes with the other garrulous fellows who lived in the neighborhood.  In adulthood Abraham Lincoln became a talented storyteller too.  “As he related his yarns, fun danced in his eyes and grotesque expressions appeared on his face, until all his features appeared to take part in the performance,” comments one scholar.[iii]  “In the role of a story-teller I am prone to regard Mr. Lincoln as without an equal,” said William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner.[iv]

     Thomas Lincoln was barely able to write his own name.  Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, was illiterate.  Of obscure origin, she spent her days dutifully performing the routine chores of frontier domesticity.  She was a gloomy, low-spirited woman, who often stared out the crude window of her cabin, tears welling up in her eyes and tumbling down her sun-soaked cheeks. Her younger child, Abraham, was similarly afflicted.  “Lincoln remained a moody, melancholy man, given to long introspections about things like death and mortality,” writes historian Stephen Oates.  “He spoke of the transitory nature of human life, spoke how all people are destined to die in the end--all are destined to die.”[v]  Like his mother, Lincoln was a fatalist.  Although he was not a church member, Lincoln believed that the destiny of mankind is shaped ultimately by the designs of Providence.[vi]

Nancy Hanks

     Abraham Lincoln, named for his paternal grandfather who had been killed by Indians, was born on  February 12, 1809, on a farm about two and a half miles from the tiny village of  Hodgenville, Kentucky.  “Nancy had about as hard a time as most women, I reckon,” said a woman who assisted Lincoln’s mother with the birth of her son.[vii]  In 1811, the young boy, his older sister Sarah,  and his mother were transported by Thomas about ten miles northeast to a 230-acre farm where the soil was a bit more fertile.  It was there that Abraham had his earliest memories.  He vaguely remembered trudging behind his father and dropping pumpkin seeds into holes that Thomas had just dug with a hoe.  Life was difficult for the Lincolns and their neighbors.  People sweated and toiled from sunup to sundown. They slopped hogs.  They plowed fields.  They chopped down trees.  They split rails.  They drank lots of corn whiskey, and they went for months without taking baths. Disease fed upon this filth. Lincoln’s mother, her “tongue turned brownish,” died on October 5, 1818, when Abraham was only nine years old.[viii]  By then the family had moved again, this time to southern Indiana.[ix]

Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln, Lincoln's Stepmother

     Abraham Lincoln was ashamed of the circumstances of his upbringing. The popular image of Lincoln as a kindly, serene fellow who viewed himself as a man of the people bears little semblance to reality.  “Between us and the man stands a larger body of myth than surrounds any other figure in American history,” states Andrew Belbanco in The Portable Lincoln.[x]   Despite the persistence of a southern Indiana dialect in his speech  (he said “howdy” to visitors and “keered” for his friends), Lincoln spent the greater part of his days endeavoring to put his humble backwoods origins behind him.  He had a fierce, driving determination to succeed and to elevate his social position.  “In point of fact, he was one of the most ambitious human beings his friends had ever seen, with an aspiration for high station in life that burned in him like a furnace,” says Oates.[xi]  As an adult, Lincoln hated the nickname “Abe,”  because it did not comport with his yearnings to be a sophisticated man of ideas and public affairs.  He sent his oldest son, Robert Lincoln (1843-1926), to Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and to Harvard.  These distinguished institutions bore little resemblance to the so-called “blab schools,” (all students read their lessons out loud at the same time) which Lincoln and his sister Sarah had attended intermittently for less than a year total  and where they had learned the bare rudiments of reading and mathematics.  In 1842, Lincoln married Mary Todd (1818-1882).  She was the daughter of a distinguished banker and slaveowner from Lexington, Kentucky.  Not surprisingly, some of her relatives were horrified by the news that Mary was planning to marry a man so far below her station in life.  They tried valiantly, albeit unsuccessfully,  to prevent the union.

Abraham Lincoln's boyhood home in southern Indiana

     Abraham Lincoln first established himself as an independent adult in the small village of New Salem, Illinois in 1831, where he became a clerk in a general store.  New Salem was a typically raucous frontier town. It had about a dozen houses and a population of about one hundred.  Hard-bitten farmers, whores and drunks meandered down the dusty street in front of the store where Lincoln worked. Abraham Lincoln was a teetotaler  Partly a child of the Enlightenment, Lincoln believed that one should keep one’s mind clear, so that one could grasp and follow the dictates of reason. Although Lincoln participated in such favorite activities of the town’s meaner sort as wrestling and obscene storytelling, he also sought to penetrate New Salem’s more genteel social circles.  He studied grammar and became active in the local debating society, where he astonished many in the audience by delivering reasoned arguments in his piercing tenor voice. According to Oates, “Young Lincoln fell in love with language, with metaphors, with assonance and alliteration.”[xii]  Lincoln was not an effective extemporaneous speaker.  He had to select his words beforehand and  write them down carefully.

    As a store clerk in New Salem, Lincoln naturally participated in casual political discussions with customers who came in to pass the time of day.  People, especially men,  liked Lincoln.  He was a good conversationalist, and he enjoyed making folks laugh.  “Lincoln was flexible, pragmatic, with a sense of humor to smooth relationships,” writes historian James M. McPherson.[xiii]  Always looking for some means to gain recognition and to advance himself, Lincoln came to appreciate how running for public office might help him achieve his goals.[xiv]  Like his father, with whom he became personally estranged,  Abraham Lincoln admired Henry Clay and was a supporter of the Whig Party.  Accordingly, Lincoln advocated a protective tariff, internal improvements, a strong national bank, and favored the gradual freeing of slaves and sending them all back to Africa.[xv]

New Salem, Illinois

      In 1832, Lincoln ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the Illinois legislature.  Two years later he entered the race again, and this time he won.  He found politics exhilarating.  Lincoln always struggled against profound feelings of personal inadequacy.  He was ashamed of his looks and was painfully awkward in his relationships with women.  But on the campaign trail, where he stood on boxes or stumps and explained his political views, the six-foot-four-inch Lincoln felt competent and capable for the first time in his life.  He had an uncanny capacity to select  just the right words to convey his message.   Lincoln could “hold an audience of fifteen thousand spellbound when reading from a written address, speaking out in a shrill, high-pitched voice of great power,” says Stephen Oates.[xvi]  Politics was to become Lincoln’s life-long passion, and he eventually acquired enormous self confidence as a public official.

     Abraham Lincoln enjoyed money and what money could buy. Aspiring to become a professional man, Lincoln borrowed books from a law firm in nearby Springfield, Illinois, which would soon become the State capital, and began teaching himself the techniques of jurisprudence.  He passed his bar examinations and received his law license in September, 1836, and opened his office soon thereafter.  For the next 25 years Lincoln toured the courthouses in central Illinois, representing clients accused of everything from robbery, to simple assault, to murder.  Moving from New Salem to Springfield in 1837, where he was to make his home until he left for Washington, D.C. in February, 1861, Lincoln also continued to pursue his political career.  He was reelected as a Whig to the Illinois legislature in 1836, 1838,  and 1840.  In August, 1846, Lincoln, still a Whig, was elected to the United States House of Representatives and served a single, undistinguished term.  After returning to Springfield, which had a population of about 5,000, of whom 171 were blacks, Lincoln set his sights on running for the United States Senate.

     Abraham Lincoln was above all else a political realist.  Illinois was a free state.  It possessed neither the staple crops nor the plantation system that made the owning of bondsmen and bondswomen an economically viable labor system.  One cannot help but speculate that if Lincoln had lived in Mississippi, instead of Illinois, he would have been an ardent defender of slavery.  Worth noting in this regard is the fact that Jefferson Davis was born in a log cabin in Kentucky less than 100 miles from Tom Lincoln’s home.  “An ironic coincidence, surely--nothing more--that the two men who opposed each other as chief executives of a divided nation in 1861 should have their origins less than a year apart in the backwoods of Kentucky,” write William and Bruce Catton in Two Roads To Sumter.[xvii]

Abraham Lincoln as a young attorney

    This is not to suggest that Abraham Lincoln was a charlatan or a chameleon.  Evidence abounds that he was widely regarded, and justifiably so, as a person of high scruples and impeccable character.  “Even his enemies conceded that he was incorruptible,” proclaims Stephen Oates.[xviii] It is to suggest that Lincoln, like any ambitious politician, had to express the viewpoints held by a majority of his constituents if he wished to be elected. David Donald, Lincoln’s preeminent biographer, contends that Lincoln exhibited “reluctance to take the initiative and make bold plans” and “preferred to respond to the actions of others.”[xix] In short, Lincoln was a political counterpuncher.   At his core, Abraham Lincoln was a provincial politician who sought to defeat his enemies by all legal means available.  “It was said he was transparently honest,” contended Southern apologist E. A. Pollard in The Lost Cause, first published in 1866.  “But his honesty was rather the facile disposition that readily took impressions from whatever was urged on it.”[xx]

   Lincoln’s views on slavery were intimately bound up with his romantic notions concerning the role he believed the United States was destined to play in human history.  To his way of thinking, the United States stood at the very heart of a great revolutionary epoch during which long-standing  impediments to individual advancement were finally falling by the wayside.  To be indifferent to the spread of slavery into the Western territories,  Lincoln insisted, “deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world--enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites--causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity.”[xxi]  In June, 1858, immediately following the close of the Republican State convention in Springfield, which had selected him to be the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, Lincoln delivered his famous “House Divided” speech.  In ringing tones he predicted that one day slavery would expire everywhere in the county, even in the South, or it would spread like a malignant tumor into the North and the territories.  “A house divided against itself  cannot stand,” he proclaimed to a wildly-cheering audience.  Lincoln continued:

 

                        I believe this government cannot endure, permanently

                        half slave and half free.

                        I do not expect the Union to be dissolved--I do not

                        expect the house to fall--but I do expect it will cease

                        to be divided.

                        It will become all one thing, or all the other.

                        Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further

                        spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall

                        rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction;

                        or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become

                        alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new--North

                        as well as South.[xxii]

                       

     Lincoln continued to make impassioned anti-slavery pronouncements during the now famous series of debates he held with Democrat Stephen A. Douglas (1813-1861) in the summer and fall of 1858.  Douglas was Lincoln’s opponent in the campaign for the contested U. S. Senate seat in Illinois. In speech after speech Lincoln accused Douglas, the incumbent, of being an accomplice, perhaps unwittingly, in a grand conspiracy to introduce slavery into all sections of the country, including Illinois.  “I think, that he, and those acting with him, have placed that institution on a new basis, which looks to the perpetuity and nationalization of slavery,” Lincoln proclaimed at Ottawa, Illinois on August 21st.[xxiii]  In support of this contention Lincoln cited Senator Douglas’s sponsorship of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.  An anathema to opponents of human bondage, this legislation had repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820–21, which had prohibited slavery from those parts of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36 degrees 30 minutes latitude. According to the principle of  “popular sovereignty,” the people of Kansas and Nebraska were given the right to decide whether their land would be slave or free.  “The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms,” Lincoln had declared in 1854.[xxiv]  Further exacerbating Northern fears concerning the spread of slavery was the decision  of the Supreme Court  in the Dred Scott Case of 1856-57.  Headed by Chief Justice Roger Taney (1777-1864) of Maryland, the Court ruled that Congress had no authority to limit slavery in the territories.

Lincoln Douglas Debates

     Lincoln insisted that his position regarding slavery was identical to that of the Founding Fathers.  In his opinion, the United States was a noble experiment in popular government which would determine once and for all time whether individuals could shape their own destinies without respect to class or race.  The Declaration of Independence states that  “all men are created equal.”  “This is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world,” Lincoln proclaimed in July, 1858.[xxv]

     Lincoln maintained that slavery must be treated as an evil, as an abomination.  First, it had to be contained and prevented from spreading beyond the States where it already existed.  Second, a program of gradual, compensated emancipation must be begun in the South.  Lincoln was not an extreme abolitionist.  He did not favor the immediate destruction of slavery.  During the debate in Ottawa with Senator Douglas he said:  “I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.”[xxvi]  Lincoln would issue this pledge time and time again.  Still, in Lincoln’s view, the institution of human bondage was incompatible with the fundamental canons of the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.  Therefore,  it had to be eliminated --  slowly but surely.  “Now, I believe, if we could arrest the spread, and place it where Washington, and Jefferson, and Madison placed it, it would be in the course of ultimate extinction,” he declared in his first debate with Douglas.[xxvii]

      Lincoln argued that the best solution was to free the slaves and dispatch them back to Africa.  “My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,” he proclaimed in 1856.[xxviii]  According to today’s standards, Lincoln would be considered a racist.  “I have said that the separation of the races is the only perfect prevention of amalgamation,” he stated in 1857.[xxix]  In 1858, at Ottawa, Lincoln said, “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races.”[xxx]  But in one elemental way Lincoln did believe that black men were the equals of whites.  “Certainly the Negro is not our equal in color--perhaps not in many other respects; still, in the right to put into his mouth the bread that his own hands have earned, he is the equal of every other man, white or black,” he stated in July, 1858.[xxxi]  According to Lincoln, slavery eventually had to be expunged from the nation, because it denied blacks the fundamental right to receive the rewards of their own labor. Put simply, Lincoln, a frontiersman, believed that every man, even blacks,  should be able to rise as fast and as far as their own talents and labor could take them.  The “free labor system,” Lincoln insisted, “opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.”[xxxii] 

     Abraham Lincoln lost the U.S. Senate race in Illinois in 1858.  Realizing that his literary gifts, penchant for rational debate, and ability to deliver eloquent speeches thoughtfully prepared beforehand would serve him well as a Senator, Lincoln planned to challenge Stephen Douglas again in 1864.  Several Illinois newspapers did mention Lincoln as a possible Republican candidate for the Presidency in 1860, but most political pundits pointed to either Senator William H. Seward (1801-1872) of New York or Governor Samuel P. Chase (1808-1873) of Ohio as the probable nominee.  At the Republican Convention in Chicago in May, 1860, however, the delegates selected Lincoln as a compromise candidate.  As was the custom, Lincoln did no campaigning on his own but left the solicitation of votes to party functionaries who distributed his printed speeches.  His opponents included his old nemesis Stephen Douglas, the nominee of the Northern Democrats,  John C. Breckinridge (1821-1875) of Kentucky, the standard bearer of the Southern Democrats and Buchanan’s Vice President, and Tennessean John Bell (1797-1869) the Speaker of the House of Representatives and candidate of the Constitutional Union Party. The Republican platform was unambiguous in its opposition to slavery.  It ridiculed popular sovereignty as “deception and fraud” and proclaimed  that the Republican Party would never allow human bondage to spread  into the territories.  It condemned all efforts to reopen the international slave trade and labeled Southern talk about secession as “contemplated treason.”[xxxiii]

    Lincoln prevailed.  On election day, November 6th, he received 1,866,452 votes or about 40 percent of the popular vote.  He did not win any of the Southern or border States, but his victory in the North and in California and Oregon gave Lincoln 180 votes in the Electoral College, comfortably above the 152 needed to become President.   “A good deal could be said in criticism of a system under which a candidate who polled only a large third of the popular vote  could carry the electoral college so decisively,” writes historian Allan Nevins.  “Lincoln had not received a single ballot in nearly one-third of the States, and had not gained a single elector in the entire South, yet he was now to be head of the entire country.”[xxxiv]

     During the campaign, conservative Republicans had urged Lincoln to make conciliatory statements that hopefully would placate the South.  Lincoln had refused. “What is it I could say which would quiet alarm?”, the Republican candidate had asked in October.  “Is it that no interference by the government, with slaves or slavery within the states is intended?  I have said this so often already, that a repetition of it is but mockery, bearing an appearance of weakness.”[xxxv]  The majority of Republicans believed that the secession crisis would ultimately pass, just as it had in 1820 or 1850.  Surely, people of this persuasion argued, the Southern extremists would ultimately lose out to those in the South who retained deep feelings of affection for the Union.  “The cardinal error of the Republicans was their failure to treat the now imminent danger of secession with the candor and emphasis which it required,” contends Nevins.[xxxvi]  “The good people of the South,” Lincoln said, “have too much good sense and good temper to attempt the ruin of the government.”[xxxvii]   Lincoln was wrong. 

    On three points President Lincoln was unyielding.  First, he was determined to prohibit slavery from the territories by national law.  Second, he would preserve the Union.  The President believed that to allow the South to secede simply because it refused to accept the results of a fair and democratic election would destroy the principle of self-government and propel the American people into an era of endless anarchy.  Third, he would hold Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens.  Lincoln would do nothing on these issues to appease the South.  There was in Lincoln the feeling that the fundamental issue of slavery and its place in the future of the country had to be faced head-on.  No more compromising.  No more dilly-dallying.  If the South chose to resist the Republican mandate by going to war, so be it.  Better to fight for the sake of righteousness than to seek a shameful  reconciliation with evil.  “Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government nor of dungeons to ourselves,” Lincoln had proclaimed in February, 1860.  “LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.”[xxxviii]

      On December 21, 1860, the day after South Carolina had seceded, Lincoln set forth in a letter to Winfield Scott the policy he would pursue toward the forts and other Federal property in the South.  The President-elect left no doubt about what he intended to do once he took office.  “Please present my respects to the General, and tell him, confidentially, I shall be obliged to him to be as well prepared as he can to either hold, or retake, the forts, as the case may require, at and after the inauguration.”[xxxix] In February, 1861, in a speech at Indianapolis, while journeying from Springfield to Washington, Lincoln asked: “But if the Government, for instance, but simply insists upon holding its own forts, or retaking those forts which belong to it, or the enforcement of the laws of the United States in the collection of duties upon foreign importations, . . . would any or all of these things be coercion?”[xl]

     Lincoln continued to assume an unbending stance in his inaugural address on March 4th, which he delivered to a crowd of several thousand on the east side of the Capitol.  “Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy,” he avowed.[xli] “The power confided to me,” Lincoln stated, “will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts . . . .”[xlii]  The President, speaking with steel-rimmed glasses carefully balanced on his nose, underscored again his commitment to leaving slavery alone where it already existed.  He even pledged his support for a Constitutional amendment that would preclude Congress from interfering with the institution of human bondage in the slave States. But Lincoln made it clear that he would take no part in any efforts to emasculate the platform on which he had been elected. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war,”