The speech concludes with these swelling words: "Mr. Lamborn refers to the late elections in the States, and from their results confidently predicts every State in the Union will vote for Mr. Van Buren at the next Presidential election. Address that argument to cowards and slaves: with the free and the brave it will affect nothing. It may be true; if it must, let it. Many free countries have lost their liberty, and ours may lose hers; but if she shall, be it my proudest plume, not that I was the last to desert, but that I never deserted her. I know that the great volcano at Washington, aroused and directed by the evil spirit that reigns there, is belching forth the lava of political corruption in a current broad and deep, which is sweeping with frightful velocity over the whole length and breadth of the land, bidding fair to leave unscathed no green spot or living thing; while on its bosom are riding, like demons on the wave of Hell, the imps of the Evil Spirit, and fiendishly taunting all those who dare to resist its destroying course with the hopelessness of their efforts; and knowing this, I cannot deny that all may be swept away. Broken by it I, too, may be; bow to it, I never will. The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just. It shall not deter me. If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its almighty architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly alone, hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors. Here, without contemplating consequences, before Heaven, and in face of the world, I swear eternal fealty to the just cause, as I deem it, of the land of my life, my liberty, and my love. And who that thinks with me will not fearlessly adopt that oath that I take? Let none falter who thinks he is right, and we may succeed. But if after all we should fail, be it so. We still shall have the proud consolation of saying to our consciences, and to the departed shade of our country's freedom, that the cause approved of our judgment, and adored of our hearts, in disaster, in chains, in torture, in death, we never faltered in defending."

These perfervid and musical metaphors of devotion and defiance have often been quoted as Mr. Lincoln's heroic challenge to the slave power, and Bishop Simpson gave them that lofty significance in his funeral oration. But they were simply the utterances of a young and ardent Whig, earnestly advocating the election of "old Tippecanoe" and not unwilling, while doing this, to show the people of the capital a specimen of his eloquence. The whole campaign was carried on in a tone somewhat shrill. The Whigs were recovering from the numbness into which they had fallen during the time of Jackson's imperious predominance, and in the new prospect of success they felt all the excitement of prosperous rebels. The taunts of the party in power, when Harrison's nomination was first mentioned, their sneers at "hard cider" and "log-cabins," had been dexterously adopted as the slogan of the opposition, and gave rise to the distinguishing features of that extraordinary campaign. Log-cabins were built in every Western county, tuns of hard cider were filled and emptied at all the Whig mass meetings; and as the canvass gained momentum and vehemence a curious kind of music added its inspiration to the cause; and after the Maine election was over, with its augury of triumph, every Whig who was able to sing, or even to make a joyful noise, was roaring the inquiry, "Oh, have you heard how old Maine went?" and the profane but powerfully accented response, "She went, hell-bent, for Governor Kent, and Tippecanoe, and Tyler too."

It was one of the busiest and most enjoyable seasons of Lincoln's life. He had grown by this time thoroughly at home in political controversy, and he had the pleasure of frequently meeting Mr. Douglas in rough-and-tumble debate in various towns of the State as they followed Judge Treat on his circuit. If we may trust the willing testimony of his old associates, Lincoln had no difficulty in holding his own against his adroit antagonist, and it was even thought that the recollection of his ill success in these encounters was not without its influence in inducing Douglas and his followers, defeated in the nation, though victorious in the State, to wreak their vengeance on the Illinois Supreme Court.

[Sidenote: Copied from the MS. in Major Stuart's possession.]

[Sidenote: Noah W. Matheny, County Clerk.]

In Lincoln's letters to Major Stuart, then in Washington, we see how strongly the subject of politics overshadows all others in his mind. Under date of November 14, 1839, he wrote: "I have been to the Secretary's office within the last hour, and find things precisely as you left them; no new arrivals of returns on either side. Douglas has not been here since you left. A report is in circulation here now that he has abandoned, the idea of going to Washington; but the report does not come in very authentic form so far as I can learn. Though, speaking of authenticity, you know that if we had heard Douglas say that he had abandoned the contest, it would not be very authentic. There is no news here. Noah, I still think, will be elected very easily. I am afraid of our race for representative. Dr. Knapp has become a candidate; and I fear the few votes he will get will be taken from us. Also some one has been tampering with old squire Wyckoff, and induced him to send in his name to be announced as a candidate. Francis refused to announce him without seeing him, and now I suppose there is to be a fuss about it. I have been so busy that I have not seen Mrs. Stuart since you left, though I understand she wrote you by to-day's mail, which will inform you more about her than I could. The very moment a speaker is elected, write me who he is. Your friend, as ever."

Again he wrote, on New Year's Day, 1840, a letter curiously destitute of any festal suggestions: "There is a considerable disposition on the part of both parties in the Legislature to reinstate the law bringing on the Congressional elections next summer. What motive for this the Locos have, I cannot tell. The Whigs say that the canal and other public works will stop, and consequently we shall then be clear of the foreign votes, whereas by another year they may be brought in again. The Whigs of our district say that everything is in favor of holding the election next summer, except the fact of your absence; and several of them have requested me to ask your opinion on the matter. Write me immediately what you think of it.

"On the other side of this sheet I send you a copy of my Land Resolutions, which passed both branches of our Legislature last winter. Will you show them to Mr. Calhoun, informing him of the fact of their passage through our Legislature! Mr. Calhoun suggested a similar proposition last winter; and perhaps if he finds himself backed by one of the States he may be induced to take it up again."

After the session opened, January 20, he wrote to Mr. Stuart, accurately outlining the work of the winter: "The following is my guess as to what will be done. The Internal Improvement System will be put down in a lump without benefit of clergy. The Bank will be resuscitated with some trifling modifications."

State affairs have evidently lost their interest, however, and his soul is in arms for the wider fray. "Be sure to send me as many copies of the Life of Harrison as you can spare. Be very sure to send me the Senate Journal of New York for September, 1814,"—he had seen in a newspaper a charge of disloyalty made against Mr. Van Buren during the war with Great Britain, but, as usual, wanted to be sure of his facts,—"and in general," he adds, "send me everything you think will be a good war-club, The nomination of Harrison takes first-rate. You know I am never sanguine; but I believe we will carry the State. The chance for doing so appears to me twenty-five per cent, better than it did for you to beat Douglas. A great many of the grocery sort of Van Buren men are out for Harrison. Our Irish blacksmith Gregory is for Harrison.... You have heard that the Whigs and Locos had a political discussion shortly after the meeting of the Legislature. Well, I made a big speech which is in progress of printing in pamphlet form. To enlighten you and the rest of the world, I shall send you a copy when it is finished." The "big speech" was the one from which we have just quoted.

The sanguine mood continued in his next letter, March 1: "I have never seen the prospects of our party so bright in these parts as they are now. We shall carry this county by a larger majority than we did in 1836 when you ran against May. I do not think my prospects individually are very flattering, for I think it probable I shall not be permitted to be a candidate; but the party ticket will succeed triumphantly. Subscriptions to the 'Old Soldier' pour in without abatement. This morning I took from the post-office a letter from Dubois, inclosing the names of sixty subscribers, and on carrying it to Francis [Simeon Francis, editor of the 'Sangamo Journal'] I found he had received one hundred and forty more from other quarters by the same day's mail.... Yesterday Douglas, having chosen to consider himself insulted by something in the 'Journal,' undertook to cane Francis in the street. Francis caught him by the hair and jammed him back against a market-cart, where the matter ended by Francis being pulled away from him. The whole affair was so ludicrous that Francis and everybody else, Douglas excepted, have been laughing about it ever since."

Douglas seems to have had a great propensity to such rencontres, of which the issue was ordinarily his complete discomfiture, as he had the untoward habit of attacking much bigger and stronger men than himself. He weighed at that time little, if anything, over a hundred pounds, yet his heart was so valiant that he made nothing of assaulting men of ponderous flesh like Francis, or of great height and strength like Stuart. He sought a quarrel with the latter, during their canvass in 1838, in a grocery, with the usual result. A bystander who remembers the incident says that Stuart "jest mopped the floor with him." In the same letter Mr. Lincoln gives a long list of names to which he wants documents to be sent. It shows a remarkable personal acquaintance with the minutest needs of the canvass: this one is a doubtful Whig; that one is an inquiring Democrat; that other a zealous young fellow who would be pleased by the attention; three brothers are mentioned who "fell out with us about Early and are doubtful now"; and finally he tells Stuart that Joe Smith is an admirer of his, and that a few documents had better be mailed to the Mormons; and he must be sure, the next time he writes, to send Evan Butler his compliments.

It would be strange, indeed, if such a politician as this were slighted by his constituents, and in his next letter we find how groundless were his forebodings in that direction. The convention had been held; the rural delegates took all the nominations away from Springfield except two, Baker for the Senate, and Lincoln for the House of Representatives. "Ninian," he says, meaning Ninian W. Edwards, "was very much hurt at not being nominated, but he has become tolerably well reconciled. I was much, very much, wounded myself, at his being left out. The fact is, the country delegates made the nominations as they pleased, and they pleased to make them all from the country, except Baker and me, whom they supposed necessary to make stump speeches. Old Colonel Elkin is nominated for Sheriff— that's right."

Harrison was elected in November, and the great preoccupation of most of the Whigs was, of course, the distribution of the offices which they felt belonged to them as the spoils of battle. This demoralizing doctrine had been promulgated by Jackson, and acted upon for so many years that it was too much to expect of human nature that the Whigs should not adopt it, partially at least, when their turn came, But we are left in no doubt as to the way in which Lincoln regarded the unseemly scramble. It is probable that he was asked to express his preference among applicants, and he wrote under date of December 17: "This affair of appointments to office is very annoying—more so to you than to me doubtless. I am, as you know, opposed to removals to make places for our friends. Bearing this in mind, I express my preference in a few cases, as follows: for Marshal, first, John Dawson, second, B. F. Edwards; for postmaster here, Dr. Henry; at Carlinville, Joseph C. Howell."

The mention of this last post-office rouses his righteous indignation, and he calls for justice upon a wrong-doer. "There is no question of the propriety of removing the postmaster at Carlinville, I have been told by so many different persons as to preclude all doubt of its truth, that he boldly refused to deliver from his office during the canvass all documents franked by Whig members of Congress."

Once more, on the 23d of January, 1841, he addresses a letter to Mr. Stuart, which closes the correspondence, and which affords a glimpse of that strange condition of melancholia into whose dark shadow he was then entering, and which lasted, with only occasional intervals of healthy cheerfulness, to the time of his marriage. We give this remarkable letter entire, from the manuscript submitted to us by the late John T. Stuart:

DEAR STUART: Yours of the 3d instant is received, and I proceed to answer it as well as I can, though from the deplorable state of my mind at this time I fear I shall give you but little satisfaction. About the matter of the Congressional election, I can only tell you that there is a bill now before the Senate adopting the general ticket system; but whether the party have fully determined on its adoption is yet uncertain. There is no sign of opposition to you among our friends, and none that I can learn among our enemies; though of course there will be if the general ticket be adopted. The Chicago "American," Peoria "Register," and Sangamo "Journal" have already hoisted your flag upon their own responsibility; and the other Whig papers of the district are expected to follow immediately. On last evening there was a meeting of our friends at Butler's, and I submitted the question to them and found them unanimously in favor of having you announced as a candidate. A few of us this morning, however, concluded that as you were already being announced in the papers we would delay announcing you, as by your authority, for a week or two. We thought that to appear too keen about it might spur our opponents on about their general ticket project. Upon the whole I think I may say with certainty that your reelection is sure, if it be in the power of the Whigs to make it so.

For not giving you a general summary of news, you must pardon me; it is not in my power to do so. I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me. The matter you speak of on my account you may attend to as you say, unless you shall hear of my condition forbidding it. I say this because I fear I shall be unable to attend to any business here, and a change of scene might help me. If I could be myself, I would rather remain at home with Judge Logan. I can write no more. Your friend as ever.

A. LINCOLN.



CHAPTER XI

MARRIAGE

The foregoing letter brings us to the consideration of a remarkable passage in Lincoln's life. It has been the cause of much profane and idle discussion among those who were constitutionally incapacitated from appreciating ideal sufferings, and we would be tempted to refrain from adding a word to what has already been said if it were possible to omit all reference to an experience so important in the development of his character.

In the year 1840 he became engaged to be married to Miss Mary Todd, of Lexington, Kentucky, a young lady of good education and excellent connections, who was visiting her sister, Mrs. Ninian W. Edwards, at Springfield. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote relocated to chapter end.] The engagement was not in all respects a happy one, as both parties doubted their compatibility, and a heart so affectionate and a conscience so sensitive as Lincoln's found material for exquisite self-torment in these conditions. His affection for his betrothed, which he thought was not strong enough to make happiness with her secure; his doubts, which yet were not convincing enough to induce him to break off all relations with her; his sense of honor, which was wounded in his own eyes by his own act; his sense of duty, which condemned him in one course and did not sustain him in the opposite one—all combined to make him profoundly and passionately miserable. To his friends and acquaintances, who were unused to such finely wrought and even fantastic sorrows, his trouble seemed so exaggerated that they could only account for it on the ground of insanity. But there is no necessity of accepting this crude hypothesis; the coolest and most judicious of his friends deny that his depression ever went to such an extremity. Orville H. Browning, who was constantly in his company, says that his worst attack lasted only about a week; that during this time he was incoherent and distraught; but that in the course of a few days it all passed off, leaving no trace whatever. "I think," says Mr. Browning, "it was only an intensification of his constitutional melancholy; his trials and embarrassments pressed him down to a lower point than usual."



[Sidenote: "Western Characters," p. 134.]

This taint of constitutional sadness was not peculiar to Lincoln; it may be said to have been endemic among the early settlers of the West. It had its origin partly in the circumstances of their lives, the severe and dismal loneliness in which their struggle for existence for the most part went on. Their summers were passed in the solitude of the woods; in the winter they were often snowed up for months in the more desolate isolation of their own poor cabins. Their subjects of conversation were limited, their range of thoughts and ideas narrow and barren. There was as little cheerfulness in their manners as there was incentive to it in their lives. They occasionally burst out into wild frolic, which easily assumed the form of comic outrage, but of the sustained cheerfulness of social civilized life they knew very little. One of the few pioneers who have written their observations of their own people, John L. McConnell, says, "They are at the best not a cheerful race; though they sometimes join in festivities, it is but seldom, and the wildness of their dissipation is too often in proportion to its infrequency. There is none of that serene contentment which distinguishes the tillers of the ground in other lands.... Acquainted with the character [of the pioneer], you do not expect him to smile much, but now and then he laughs."

Besides this generic tendency to melancholy, very many of the pioneers were subject in early life to malarial influences, the effect of which remained with them all their days. Hewing out their plantations in the primeval woods amid the undisturbed shadow of centuries, breaking a soil thick with ages of vegetable decomposition, sleeping in half- faced camps, where the heavy air of the rank woods was in their lungs all night, or in the fouler atmosphere of overcrowded cabins, they were especially subject to miasmatic fevers. Many died, and of those who survived, a great number, after they had outgrown the more immediate manifestations of disease, retained in nervous disorders of all kinds the distressing traces of the maladies which afflicted their childhood. In the early life of Lincoln these unwholesome physical conditions were especially prevalent. The country about Pigeon Creek was literally devastated by the terrible malady called "milk- sickness," which carried away his mother and half her family. His father left his home in Macon County, also, on account of the frequency and severity of the attacks of fever and ague which were suffered there; and, in general, Abraham was exposed through all the earlier part of his life to those malarial influences which made, during the first half of this century, the various preparations of Peruvian bark a part of the daily food of the people of Indiana and Illinois. In many instances this miasmatic poison did not destroy the strength or materially shorten the lives of those who absorbed it in their youth; but the effects remained in periodical attacks of gloom and depression of spirits which would seem incomprehensible to thoroughly healthy organizations, and which gradually lessened in middle life, often to disappear entirely in old age.

[Sidenote: "Western Characters" p. 126.]

Upon a temperament thus predisposed to look at things in their darker aspect, it might naturally be expected that a love-affair which was not perfectly happy would be productive of great misery. But Lincoln seemed especially chosen to the keenest suffering in such a conjuncture. The pioneer, as a rule, was comparatively free from any troubles of the imagination. To quote Mr. McConnell again: "There was no romance in his [the pioneer's] composition. He had no dreaminess; meditation was no part of his mental habit; a poetical fancy would, in him, have been an indication of insanity. If he reclined at the foot of a tree, on a still summer day, it was to sleep; if he gazed out over the waving prairie, it was to search for the column of smoke which told of his enemies' approach; if he turned his eyes towards the blue heaven, it was to prognosticate tomorrow's rain or sunshine. If he bent his gaze towards the green earth, it was to look for 'Indian sign' or buffalo trail. His wife was only a helpmate; he never thought of making a divinity of her." But Lincoln could never have claimed this happy immunity from ideal trials. His published speeches show how much the poet in him was constantly kept in check; and at this time of his life his imagination was sufficiently alert to inflict upon him the sharpest anguish. His reverence for women was so deep and tender that he thought an injury to one of them was a sin too heinous to be expiated. No Hamlet, dreaming amid the turrets of Elsinore, no Sidney creating a chivalrous Arcadia, was fuller of mystic and shadowy fancies of the worth and dignity of woman than this backwoods politician. Few men ever lived more sensitively and delicately tender towards the sex.

Besides his step-mother, who was a plain, God-fearing woman, he had not known many others until he came to live in New Salem. There he had made the acquaintance of the best people the settlement contained, and among them had become much attached to a young girl named Ann Rutledge, the daughter of one of the proprietors of the place. She died in her girlhood, and though there does not seem to have been any engagement between them, he was profoundly affected by her death. But the next year a young woman from Kentucky appeared in the village, to whom he paid such attentions as in his opinion fully committed him as a suitor for her hand. He admired her, and she seems to have merited the admiration of all the manhood there was in New Salem. She was handsome and intelligent and of an admirable temper and disposition. While they were together he was constant in his attentions, and when he was at Vandalia or at Springfield he continued his assiduities in some of the most singular love-letters ever written. They are filled mostly with remarks about current politics, and with arguments going to show that she had better not marry him! At the same time he clearly intimates that he is at her disposition if she is so inclined. At last, feeling that his honor and duty were involved, he made a direct proposal to her, and received an equally direct, kind, and courteous refusal. Not knowing but that this indicated merely a magnanimous desire to give him a chance for escape, he persisted in his offer, and she in her refusal. When the matter had ended in this perfectly satisfactory manner to both of them, he sat down and wrote, by way of epilogue to the play, a grotesquely comic account of the whole affair to Mrs. O. H. Browning, one of his intimate Vandalia acquaintances.



This letter has been published and severely criticised as showing a lack of gentlemanlike feeling. But those who take this view forget that he was writing to an intimate friend of a matter which had greatly occupied his own mind for a year; that he mentioned no names, and that he threw such an air of humorous unreality about the whole story that the person who received it never dreamed that it recorded an actual occurrence until twenty-five years afterwards, when, having been asked to furnish it to a biographer, she was warned against doing so by the President himself, who said there was too much truth in it for print. The only significance the episode possesses is in showing this almost abnormal development of conscience in the young man who was perfectly ready to enter into a marriage which he dreaded simply because he thought he had given a young woman reason to think that he had such intentions. While we admit that this would have been an irremediable error, we cannot but wonder at the nobleness of the character to which it was possible.

In this vastly more serious matter, which was, we may say at once, the crucial ordeal of his life, the same invincible truthfulness, the same innate goodness, the same horror of doing a wrong, are combined with an exquisite sensibility and a capacity for suffering which mark him as a man "picked out among ten thousand." His habit of relentless self-searching reveals to him a state of feeling which strikes him with dismay; his simple and inflexible veracity communicates his trouble and his misery to the woman whom he loves; his freedom, when he has gained it, yields him nothing but an agony of remorse and humiliation. He could not shake off his pain, like men of cooler heads and shallower hearts. It took fast hold of him and dragged him into awful depths of darkness and torture. The letter to Stuart, which we have given, shows him emerging from the blackest period of that time of gloom. Immediately after this, he accompanied his close friend and confidant, Joshua F. Speed, to Kentucky, where, in a way so singular that no writer of fiction would dare to employ the incident, he became almost cured of his melancholy, and came back to Illinois and his work again.

Mr. Speed was a Kentuckian, carrying on a general mercantile business in Springfield—a brother of the distinguished lawyer, James Speed, of Louisville, who afterwards became Attorney-General of the United States. He was one of those men who seem to have to a greater extent than others the genius of friendship, the Pythias, the Pylades, the Horatios of the world. It is hardly too much to say that he was the only—as he was certainly the last—intimate friend that Lincoln ever had. He was his closest companion in Springfield, and in the evil days when the letter to Stuart was written he took him with brotherly love and authority under his special care. He closed up his affairs in Springfield, and went with Lincoln to Kentucky, and, introducing him to his own cordial and hospitable family circle, strove to soothe his perturbed spirit by every means which unaffected friendliness could suggest. That Lincoln found much comfort and edification in that genial companionship is shown by the fact that after he became President he sent to Mr. Speed's mother a photograph of himself, inscribed, "For Mrs. Lucy G. Speed, from whose pious hand I accepted the present of an Oxford Bible twenty years ago."

But the principal means by which the current of his thoughts was changed was never dreamed of by himself or by his friend when they left Illinois. During this visit Speed himself fell in love, and became engaged to be married; and either by a singular chance or because the maladies of the soul may be propagated by constant association, the feeling of despairing melancholy, which he had found so morbid and so distressing an affliction in another, took possession of himself, and threw him into the same slough of despondency from which he had been laboring to rescue Lincoln. Between friends so intimate there were no concealments, and from the moment Lincoln found his services as nurse and consoler needed, the violence of his own trouble seemed to diminish. The two young men were in Springfield together in the autumn, and Lincoln seems by that time to have laid aside his own peculiar besetments, in order to minister to his friend. They knew the inmost thoughts of each other's hearts and each relied upon the honesty and loyalty of the other to an extent rare among men. When Speed returned to Kentucky, to a happiness which awaited him there, so bright that it dazzled and blinded his moral vision, Lincoln continued his counsels and encouragements in letters which are remarkable for their tenderness and delicacy of thought and expression. Like another poet, he looked into his own heart and wrote. His own deeper nature had suffered from these same fantastic sorrows and terrors; of his own grief he made a medicine for his comrade.

While Speed was still with him, he wrote a long letter, which he put into his hands at parting, full of wise and affectionate reasonings, to be read when he should feel the need of it. He predicts for him a period of nervous depression—first, because he will be "exposed to bad weather on his journey, and, secondly, because of the absence of all business and conversation of friends which might divert his mind and give it occasional rest from the intensity of thought which will sometimes wear the sweetest idea threadbare, and turn it to the bitterness of death." The third cause, he says, "is the rapid and near approach of that crisis on which all your thoughts and feelings concentrate." If in spite of all these circumstances he should escape without a "twinge of the soul," his friend will be most happily deceived; but, he continues, "if you shall, as I expect you will at some time, be agonized and distressed, let me, who have some reason to speak with judgment on the subject, beseech you to ascribe it to the causes I have mentioned, and not to some false and ruinous suggestion of the devil." This forms the prelude to an ingenious and affectionate argument in which he labors to convince Speed of the loveliness of his betrothed and of the integrity of his own heart; a strange task, one would say, to undertake in behalf of a young and ardent lover. But the two men understood each other, and the service thus rendered was gratefully received and remembered by Speed all his life.

Lincoln wrote again on the 3d of February, 1842, congratulating Speed upon a recent severe illness of his destined bride, for the reason that "your present distress and anxiety about her health must forever banish those horrid doubts which you feel as to the truth of your affection for her." As the period of Speed's marriage drew near, Lincoln's letters betray the most intense anxiety. He cannot wait to hear the news from his friend, but writes to him about the time of the wedding, admitting that he is writing in the dark, that words from a bachelor may be worthless to a Benedick, but still unable to keep silence. He hopes he is happy with his wife, "but should I be mistaken in this, should excessive pleasure still be accompanied with a painful counterpart at times, still let me urge you, as I have ever done, to remember in the depth and even agony of despondency, that very shortly you are to feel well again." Further on he says: "If you went through the ceremony calmly, or even with sufficient composure not to excite alarm in any present, you are safe beyond question," seeking by every device of subtle affection to lift up the heart of his friend.

With a solicitude apparently greater than that of the nervous bridegroom, he awaited the announcement of the marriage, and when it came he wrote (February 25): "I opened the letter with intense anxiety and trepidation; so much that, although it turned out better than I expected, I have hardly yet, at the distance of ten hours, become calm. I tell you, Speed, our forebodings, for which you and I are peculiar, are all the worst sort of nonsense. I fancied from the time I received your letter of Saturday that the one of "Wednesday was never to come," and yet it did come, and, what is more, it is perfectly clear, both from its tone and handwriting, that ... you had obviously improved at the very time I had so much fancied you would have grown worse. You say that something indescribably horrible and alarming still haunts you. You will not say that three months from now, I will venture." The letter goes on in the same train of sympathetic cheer, but there is one phrase which strikes the keynote of all lives whose ideals are too high for fulfillment: "It is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me to dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that anything earthly can realize."

But before long a letter came from Speed, who had settled with his black-eyed Kentucky wife upon a well-stocked plantation, disclaiming any further fellowship of misery and announcing the beginnings of that life of uneventful happiness which he led ever after. His peace of mind has become a matter of course; he dismisses the subject in a line, but dilates, with a new planter's rapture, upon the beauties and attractions of his farm. Lincoln frankly answers that he cares nothing about his farm. "I can only say that I am glad you are satisfied and pleased with it. But on that other subject, to me of the most intense interest whether in joy or sorrow, I never had the power to withhold my sympathy from you. It cannot be told how it now thrills me with joy to hear you say you are 'far happier than you ever expected to be.'.. I am not going beyond the truth when I tell you that the short space it took me to read your last letter gave me more pleasure than the total sum of all I have enjoyed since the fatal 1st of January, 1841. Since then it seems to me I should have been entirely happy, but for the never-absent idea that there is one still unhappy whom I have contributed to make so. That still kills my soul. I cannot but reproach myself for even wishing myself to be happy while she is otherwise."

During the summer of 1842 the letters of the friends still discuss, with waning intensity, however, their respective affairs of the heart. Speed, in the ease and happiness of his home, thanks Lincoln for his important part in his welfare, and gives him sage counsel for himself. Lincoln replies (July 4, 1842): "I could not have done less than I did. I always was superstitious; I believe God made me one of the instruments of bringing your Fanny and you together, which union I have no doubt he foreordained. Whatever he designs, he will do for me yet." A better name than "superstition" might properly be applied to this frame of mind. He acknowledges Speed's kindly advice, but says: "Before I resolve to do the one thing or the other, I must gain my confidence in my own ability to keep my resolves when they are made. In that ability you know I once prided myself, as the only or chief gem of my character; that gem I lost, how and where you know too well. I have not yet regained it; and until I do I cannot trust myself in any matter of much importance. I believe now, that had you understood my case at the time as well as I understood yours afterwards, by the aid you would have given me I should have sailed through clear; but that does not afford me confidence to begin that, or the like of that, again." Still, he was nearing the end of his doubts and self-torturing sophistry. A last glimpse of his imperious curiosity, kept alive by saucy hopes and fears, is seen in his letter to Speed of the 5th of October. He ventures, with a genuine timidity, to ask a question which we may believe has not often been asked by one civilized man of another, with the hope of a candid answer, since marriages were celebrated with ring and book. "I want to ask you a close question— Are you now, in feeling as well as judgment, glad you are married as you are? From anybody but me this would be an impudent question, not to be tolerated; but I know you will pardon it in me. Please answer it quickly, as I am impatient to know." It is probable that Mr. Speed replied promptly in the way in which such questions must almost of necessity be answered. On the 4th of November, 1842, a marriage license was issued to Lincoln, and on the same day he was married to Miss Mary Todd, the ceremony being performed by the Rev. Charles Dresser. Four sons were the issue of this marriage: Robert Todd, born August 1, 1843; Edward Baker, March 10, 1846; William Wallace, December 21, 1850; Thomas, April 4, 1853. Of these only the eldest lived to maturity.

In this way Abraham Lincoln met and passed through one of the most important crises of his life. There was so much of idiosyncrasy in it that it has been, and will continue to be for years to come, the occasion of endless gossip in Sangamon County and elsewhere. Because it was not precisely like the experience of other people, who are married and given in marriage every day without any ado, a dozen conflicting stories have grown up, more or less false and injurious to both contracting parties. But it may not be fanciful to suppose that characters like that of Lincoln, elected for great conflicts and trials, are fashioned by different processes from those of ordinary men, and pass their stated ordeals in a different way. By circumstances which seem commonplace enough to commonplace people, he was thrown for more than a year into a sea of perplexities and sufferings beyond the reach of the common run of souls.

It is as useless as it would be indelicate to seek to penetrate in detail the incidents and special causes which produced in his mind this darkness as of the valley of the shadow of death. There was probably nothing worth recording in them; we are only concerned with their effect upon a character which was to be hereafter for all time one of the possessions of the nation. It is enough for us to know that a great trouble came upon him, and that he bore it nobly after his kind. That the manner in which he confronted this crisis was strangely different from that of most men in similar circumstances need surely occasion no surprise. Neither in this nor in other matters was he shaped in the average mold of his contemporaries. In many respects he was doomed to a certain loneliness of excellence. There are few men that have had his stern and tyrannous sense of duty, his womanly tenderness of heart, his wakeful and inflexible conscience, which was so easy towards others and so merciless towards himself. Therefore when the time came for all of these qualities at once to be put to the most strenuous proof, the whole course of his development and the tendency of his nature made it inevitable that his suffering should be of the keenest and his final triumph over himself should be of the most complete and signal character. In that struggle his youth of reveries and day-dreams passed away. Such furnace-blasts of proof, such pangs of transformation, seem necessary for exceptional natures. The bread eaten in tears, of which Goethe speaks, the sleepless nights of sorrow, are required for a clear vision of the celestial powers. Fortunately the same qualities that occasion the conflict insure the victory also. From days of gloom and depression, such as we have been considering, no doubt came precious results in the way of sympathy, self-restraint, and that sober reliance on the final triumph of good over evil peculiar to those who have been greatly tried but not destroyed. The late but splendid maturity of Lincoln's mind and character dates from this time, and, although he grew in strength and knowledge to the end, from this year we observe a steadiness and sobriety of thought and purpose, as discernible in his life as in his style. He was like a blade forged in fire and tempered in the ice- brook, ready for battle whenever the battle might come.

[Relocated Footnote: Mrs. Lincoln was the daughter of the Hon. Robert S. Todd of Kentucky. Her great-uncle John Todd, and her grandfather Levi Todd, accompanied General George Rogers Clark to Illinois, and were present at the capture of Kaskaskia and Vincennes. In December, 1778, John Todd was appointed by Patrick Henry, Governor of Virginia, to be lieutenant of the county of Illinois, then a part of Virginia. He was killed at the battle of the Blue Licks, in 1782. His brother Levi was also at that battle and was one of the few survivors of it.

Colonel John Todd was one of the original proprietors of the town of Lexington, Ky. While encamped on the site of the present city, he heard of the opening battle of the Revolution and named his infant settlement in its honor.—Arnold's "Life of Lincoln," p. 68.]



CHAPTER XII

THE SHIELDS DUEL

An incident which occurred during the summer preceding Mr. Lincoln's marriage, and which in the opinion of many had its influence in hastening that event, deserves some attention, if only from its incongruity with the rest of his history. This was the farce—which aspired at one time to be a tragedy—of his first and last duel. Among the officers of the State Government was a young Irishman named James Shields, who owed his post as Auditor, in great measure, to that alien vote to gain which the Democrats had overturned the Supreme Court. The finances of the State were in a deplorable condition: the treasury was empty; auditor's warrants were selling at half their nominal value; no more money was to be borrowed, and taxation was dreaded by both political parties more than disgrace. The currency of the State banks was well-nigh worthless, but it constituted nearly the only circulating medium in the State.

In the middle of August the Governor, Auditor, and Treasurer issued a circular forbidding the payment of State taxes in this depreciated paper. This order was naturally taken by the Whigs as indicating on the part of these officers a keener interest in the integrity of their salaries than in the public welfare, and it was therefore severely attacked in all the opposition newspapers of the State.

The sharpest assault it had to endure, however, was in a communication, dated August 27, and printed in the "Sangamo Journal" of September 2, not only dissecting the administration circular with the most savage satire, but covering the Auditor with merciless personal ridicule. It was written in the dialect of the country, dated from the "Lost Townships," and signed "Rebecca," and purported to come from a farmer widow of the county, who expressed in this fashion her discontent with the evil course of affairs.

Shields was a man of inordinate vanity and a corresponding irascibility. He was for that reason an irresistible mark for satire. Through a long life of somewhat conspicuous public service, he never lost a certain tone of absurdity which can only be accounted for by the qualities we have mentioned. Even his honorable wounds in battle, while they were productive of great public applause and political success, gained him scarcely less ridicule than praise. He never could refrain from talking of them himself, having none of Coriolanus's repugnance in that respect, and for that reason was a constant target for newspaper wits.

After Shields returned from the Mexican war, with his laurels still green, and at the close of the canvass which had made him Senator, he wrote an incredible letter to Judge Breese, his principal competitor, in which he committed the gratuitous folly of informing him that "he had sworn in his heart [if Breese had been elected] that he should never have profited by his success; and depend upon it," he added, in the amazing impudence of triumph, "I would have kept that vow, regardless of consequences. That, however, is now past, and the vow is canceled by your defeat." He then went on, with threats equally indecent, to make certain demands which were altogether inadmissible, and which Judge Breese only noticed by sending this preposterous letter to the press.

[Sidenote: "National Intelligencer," Feb. 28, 1849.]

It may easily be imagined that a man who, after being elected a Senator of the United States, was capable of the insane insolence of signing his name to a letter informing his defeated competitor that he would have killed him if the result had been different, would not have been likely, when seven years younger, to bear newspaper ridicule with equanimity. His fury against the unknown author of the satire was the subject of much merriment in Springfield, and the next week another letter appeared, from a different hand, but adopting the machinery of the first, in which the widow offered to make up the quarrel by marrying the Auditor, and this, in time, was followed by an epithalamium, in which this happy compromise was celebrated in very bad verses. In the change of hands all the humor of the thing had evaporated, and nothing was left but feminine mischief on one side and the exasperation of wounded vanity on the other.

Shields, however, had talked so much about the matter that he now felt imperatively called upon to act, and he therefore sent General Whitesides to demand from the "Journal" the name of its contributor. Mr. Francis, the editor, was in a quandary. Lincoln had written the first letter, and the antic fury of Shields had induced two young ladies who took a lively interest in Illinois politics—and with good reason, for one was to be the wife of a Senator and the other of a President—to follow up the game with attacks in prose and verse which, however deficient in wit and meter, were not wanting in pungency. In his dilemma he applied to Lincoln, who, as he was starting to attend court at Tremont, told him to give his name and withhold the names of the ladies. As soon as Whitesides received this information, he and his fiery principal set out for Tremont, and as Shields did nothing in silence, the news came to Lincoln's friends, two of whom, William Butler and Dr. Merryman, one of those combative medical men who have almost disappeared from American society, went off in a buggy in pursuit. They soon came in sight of the others, but loitered in the rear until evening, and then drove rapidly to Tremont, arriving there some time in advance of Shields; so that in the ensuing negotiations Abraham Lincoln had the assistance of friends whose fidelity and whose nerve were equally beyond question.

It would be useless to recount all the tedious preliminaries of the affair. Shields opened the correspondence, as might have been expected, with blustering and with threats; his nature had no other way of expressing itself. His first letter was taken as a bar to any explanation or understanding, and he afterwards wrote a second, a little less offensive in tone, but without withdrawing the first. At every interview of the seconds General Whitesides deplored the bloodthirsty disposition of his principal, and urged that Mr. Lincoln should make the concessions which alone would prevent lamentable results. These representations seemed to avail nothing, however, and the parties, after endless talk, went to Alton and crossed the river to the Missouri shore. It seemed for a moment that the fight must take place. The terms had been left by the code, as then understood in the West, to Lincoln, and he certainly made no grudging use of his privilege. The weapons chosen were "cavalry broadswords of the largest size"; and the combatants were to stand on either side of a board placed on the ground, each to fight in a limit of six feet on his own side of the board. It was evident that Lincoln did not desire the death of his adversary, and did not intend to be materially injured himself. The advantage morally was altogether against him. He felt intensely the stupidity of the whole affair, but thought he could not avoid the fight without degradation; while to Shields such a fracas was a delight. The duel came to its natural end by the intervention of the usual "gods out of a machine," the gods being John J. Hardin and one Dr. English, and the machine a canoe in which they had hastily paddled across the Mississippi. Shields suffered himself to be persuaded to withdraw his offensive challenge. Lincoln then made the explanation he had been ready to make from the beginning; avowing the one letter he had written, and saying that it had been printed solely for political effect, and without any intention of injuring Shields personally.

One would think that, after a week passed in such unprofitable trifling, the parties, principal and secondary, would have been willing to drop the matter forever. We are sure that Lincoln would have been glad to banish it, even from his memory; but to men like Shields and Whitesides, the peculiar relish and enjoyment of such an affair is its publicity. On the 3d of October, therefore, eleven days after the meeting, as public attention seemed to be flagging, Whitesides wrote an account of it to the "Sangamo Journal," for which he did not forget to say, "I hold myself responsible!" Of course he seized the occasion to paint a heroic portrait of himself and his principal. It was an excellent story until the next week, when Dr. Merryman, who seems to have wielded a pen like a scalpel, gave a much fuller history of the matter, which he substantiated by printing all the documents, and, not content with that, gave little details of the negotiations which show, either that Whitesides was one of the most grotesque braggarts of the time, or that Merryman was an admirable writer of comic fiction. Among the most amusing facts he brought forward was that Whitesides, being a Fund Commissioner of the State, ran the risk of losing his office by engaging in a duel; and his anxiety to appear reckless and dangerous, and yet keep within the statute and save his salary, was depicted by Merryman with a droll fidelity. He concluded by charging Whitesides plainly with "inefficiency and want of knowledge of those laws which govern gentlemen in matters of this kind," and with "trying to wipe out his fault by doing an act of injustice to Mr. Lincoln."



The town was greatly diverted by these pungent echoes of the bloodless fight, and Shields and Whitesides felt that their honor was still out of repair. A rapid series of challenges succeeded among the parties, principals and seconds changing places as deftly as dancers in a quadrille. The Auditor challenged Mr. Butler, who had been very outspoken in his contemptuous comments on the affair. Butler at once accepted, and with a grim sincerity announced his conditions—"to fight next morning at sunrising in Bob Allen's meadow, one hundred yards' distance, with rifles." This was instantly declined, with a sort of horror, by Shields and Whitesides, as such a proceeding would have proved fatal to their official positions and their means of livelihood. They probably cared less for the chances of harm from Butler's Kentucky rifle than for the certainty of the Illinois law which cut off all duelists from holding office in the State.

But, on the other hand,—so unreasonable is human nature as displayed among politicians,—General Whitesides felt that if he bore patiently the winged words of Merryman, his availability as a candidate was greatly damaged; and he therefore sent to the witty doctor what Mr. Lincoln called "a quasi-challenge," hurling at him a modified defiance, which should be enough to lure him to the field of honor, and yet not sufficiently explicit to lose Whitesides the dignity and perquisites of Fund Commissioner. Merryman, not being an office-holder and having no salary to risk, responded with brutal directness, which was highly unsatisfactory to Whitesides, who was determined not to fight unless he could do so lawfully; and Lincoln, who now acted as second to the doctor in his turn, records the cessation of the correspondence amid the agonized explanations of Whitesides and the scornful hootings of Merryman, "while the town was in a ferment and a street fight somewhat anticipated." In respect to the last diversion the town was disappointed.

Shields lost nothing by the hilarity which this burlesque incident created. He was reserved for a career of singular luck and glory mingled with signal misfortunes. On account of his political availability he continued throughout a long lifetime to be selected at intervals for high positions. After he ceased to be Auditor he was elected a judge of the Supreme Court of Illinois; while still holding that position he applied for the place of Commissioner of the General Land Office, and his application was successful. When the Mexican war broke out he asked for a commission as brigadier-general, although he still held his civil appointment, and, to the amazement of the whole army, he was given that important command before he had ever seen a day's service. At the battle of Cerro Glordo he was shot through the lungs, and this wound made him a United States Senator as soon as he returned from the war. After he had served one term in the Senate, he removed from Illinois, and was soon sent back to the same body from Minnesota. In the war of the rebellion he was again appointed a brigadier-general by his old adversary, and was again wounded in a battle in which his troops defeated the redoubtable Stonewall Jackson; and many years after Lincoln was laid to sleep beneath a mountain of marble at Springfield, Shields was made the shuttlecock of contending demagogues in Congress, each striving to make a point by voting him money—until in the impulse of that transient controversy, the State of Missouri, finding the gray-headed soldier in her borders, for the third time sent him to the Senate of the United States for a few weeks—a history unparalleled even in America.

We have reason to think that the affair of the duel was excessively distasteful to Lincoln. He did not even enjoy the ludicrousness of it, as might have been expected. He never—so far as we can learn—alluded to it afterwards, and the recollection of it died away so completely from the minds of people in the State, that during the heated canvass of 1860 there was no mention of this disagreeable episode in the opposition papers of Illinois. It had been absolutely forgotten.

This was Mr. Lincoln's last personal quarrel. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote relocated to chapter end.] Although the rest of his life was passed in hot and earnest debate, he never again descended to the level of his adversaries, who would gladly enough have resorted to unseemly wrangling. In later years it became his duty to give an official reprimand to a young officer who had been court-martialed for a quarrel with one of his associates. The reprimand is probably the gentlest recorded in the annals of penal discourses, and it shows in few words the principles which ruled the conduct of this great and peaceable man. It has never before been published, and it deserves to be written in letters of gold on the walls of every gymnasium and college:

The advice of a father to his son, "Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, bear it that the opposed may beware of thee!" is good, but not the best. Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper and the loss of self-control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.

[Relocated Footnote: Lincoln's life was unusually free from personal disputes. We know of only one other hostile letter addressed to him. This was from W. G. Anderson, who being worsted in a verbal encounter with Lincoln at Lawrenceville, the county-seat of Lawrence County, Ill., wrote him a note demanding an explanation of his words and of his "present feelings." Lincoln's reply shows that his habitual peaceableness involved no lack of dignity; he said. "Your note of yesterday is received. In the difficulty between us of which you speak, you say you think I was the aggressor. I do not think I was. You say my words 'imported insult.' I meant them as a fair set-off to your own statements, and not otherwise; and in that light alone I now wish you to understand them. You ask for my 'present feelings on the subject.' I entertain no unkind feeling to you, and none of any sort upon the subject, except a sincere regret that I permitted myself to get into any such altercation." This seems to have ended the matter—although the apology was made rather to himself than to Mr. Anderson. (See the letter of William C. Wilkinson in "The Century Magazine" for January, 1889.)]



CHAPTER XIII

THE CAMPAIGN OF 1844

In the letter to Stuart which we have quoted, Lincoln announced his intention to form a partnership with Judge Logan, which was soon carried out. His connection with Stuart was formally dissolved in April, 1841, and one with Logan formed which continued for four years. It may almost be said that Lincoln's practice as a lawyer begins from this time. Stuart, though even then giving promise of the distinction at which he arrived in his profession later in life, was at that period so entirely devoted to politics that the business of the office was altogether a secondary matter to him; and Lincoln, although no longer in his first youth, being then thirty-two years of age, had not yet formed those habits of close application which are indispensable to permanent success at the bar. He was not behind the greater part of his contemporaries in this respect. Among all the lawyers of the circuit who were then, or who afterwards became, eminent practitioners, [Footnote: They were Dan Stone, Jesse B. Thomas, Cyrus Walker, Schuyler Strong, Albert T. Bledsoe, George Forquer, Samuel H. Treat, Ninian W. Edwards, Josiah Lamborn, John J. Hardin, Edward D. Baker, and others.] there were few indeed who in those days applied themselves with any degree of persistency to the close study of legal principles. One of these few was Stephen T. Logan. He was more or less a politician, as were all his compeers at the bar, but he was always more a lawyer than anything else. He had that love for his profession which it jealously exacts as a condition of succeeding. He possessed few books, and it used to be said of him long afterwards that he carried his library in his hat. But the books which he had he never ceased to read and ponder, and we heard him say when he was sixty years old, that once every year since he came of age he had read "Blackstone's Commentaries" through. He had that old-fashioned, lawyer-like morality which was keenly intolerant of any laxity or slovenliness of mind or character. His former partner had been Edward D. Baker, but this brilliant and mercurial spirit was not congenial to Logan; Baker's carelessness in money matters was Intolerable to him, and he was glad to escape from an associate so gifted and so exasperating. [Footnote: Logan's office was, in fact, a nursery of statesmen. Three of his partners, William L. May, Baker, and Lincoln, left him in rapid succession to go to Congress, and finally the contagion gained the head of the firm, and the judge was himself the candidate of his party, when it was no longer able to elect one. After he had retired from practice, the office, under his son-in-law and successor, Milton Hay, retained its prestige for cradling public men. John M. Palmer and Shelby M. Cullom left it to be Governors of the State, and the latter to be a Congressman and Senator.]

Needing some one, however, to assist him in his practice, which was then considerable, he invited Lincoln into partnership. He had, as we have seen, formed a favorable opinion of the young Kentuckian the first time they had met. In his subsequent acquaintance with him he had come to recognize and respect his abilities, his unpretending common sense, and his innate integrity. The partnership continued about four years, but the benefit Lincoln derived from it lasted all his life. The example of Judge Logan's thrift, order, and severity of morals; his straightforward devotion to his profession; his close and careful study of his cases, together with the larger and more important range of practice to which Lincoln was introduced by this new association, confirmed all those salutary tendencies by which he had been led into the profession, and corrected those less desirable ones which he shared with most of the lawyers about him. He began for the first time to study his cases with energy and patience; to resist the tendency, almost universal at that day, to supply with florid rhetoric the attorney's deficiency in law; in short, to educate, discipline, and train the enormous faculty, hitherto latent in him, for close and severe intellectual labor. Logan, who had expected that Lincoln's chief value to him would be as a talking advocate before juries, was surprised and pleased to find his new partner rapidly becoming a lawyer. "He would study out his case and make about as much of it as anybody," said Logan, many years afterwards. "His ambition as a lawyer increased; he grew constantly. By close study of each case, as it came up, he got to be quite a formidable lawyer." The character of the man is in these words. He had vast concerns intrusted to him in the course of his life, and disposed of them one at a time as they were presented. At the end of four years the partnership was dissolved. Judge Logan took his son David—afterwards a well-known politician and lawyer of Oregon—into his office, and Lincoln opened one of his own, into which he soon invited a young, bright, and enthusiastic man named William Henry Herndon, who remained his partner as long as Lincoln lived.

The old partners continued close and intimate friends. They practiced at the same bar for twenty years, often as associates, and often as adversaries, but always with relations of mutual confidence and regard. They had the unusual honor, while they were still comparatively young men, of seeing their names indissolubly associated in the map of their State as a memorial to future ages of their friendship and their fame, in the county of Logan, of which the city of Lincoln is the county-seat.

They both prospered, each in his way. Logan rapidly gained a great reputation and accumulated an ample fortune. Lincoln, while he did not become rich, always earned a respectable livelihood, and never knew the care of poverty or debt from that time forward, His wife and he suited their style of living to their means, and were equally removed from luxury and privation. They went to live, immediately after their marriage, at a boarding-house [Footnote: This house is still standing, opposite St, Paul's church.] called "The Globe," which was "very well kept by a widow lady of the name of Beck," and there their first child was born, who was one day to be Secretary of War and Minister to England, and for whom was reserved the strange experience of standing by the death-bed of two assassinated Presidents. Lincoln afterwards built a comfortable house of wood on the corner of Eighth and Jackson streets, where he lived until he removed to the White House.

Neither his marriage nor his new professional interests, however, put an end to his participation in politics. Even that period of gloom and depression of which we have spoken, and which has been so much exaggerated by the chroniclers and the gossip of Springfield, could not have interrupted for any length of time his activity as a member of the Legislature. Only for a few days was he absent from his place in the House. On the 19th of January, 1841, John J. Hardin apologized for the delay in some committee business, alleging Mr. Lincoln's indisposition as an excuse. On the 23d the letter to Stuart was written; but on the 26th Lincoln had so far recovered his self- possession as to resume his place in the House and the leadership of his party. The journals of the next month show his constant activity and prominence in the routine business of the Legislature until it adjourned. In August, Stuart was reflected to Congress. Lincoln made his visit to Kentucky with speed, and returned to find himself generally talked of for Governor of the State. This idea did not commend itself to the judgment of himself or his friends, and accordingly we find in the "Sangamo Journal" one of those semi- official announcements so much in vogue in early Western politics, which, while disclaiming any direct inspiration from Mr. Lincoln, expressed the gratitude of his friends for the movement in his favor, but declined the nomination. "His talents and services endear him to the Whig party; but we do not believe he desires the nomination. He has already made great sacrifices in maintaining his party principles, and before his political friends ask him to make additional sacrifices, the subject should be well considered. The office of Governor, which would of necessity interfere with the practice of his profession, would poorly compensate him for the loss of four of the best years of his life."

He served this year as a member of the Whig Central Committee, and bore a prominent part in the movement set on foot at that time to check intemperance in the use of spirits. It was a movement in the name and memory of "Washington," and the orators of the cause made effective rhetorical use of its august associations. A passage from the close of a speech made by Lincoln on February 22, 1842, shows the fervor and feeling of the hour: "Washington is the mightiest name of earth—long since mightiest in the cause of civil liberty; still mightiest in moral reformation. On that name no eulogy is expected. It cannot be. To add brightness to the sun or glory to the name of Washington is alike impossible. Let none attempt it. In solemn awe pronounce the name, and in its naked, deathless splendor leave it shining on."

A mass meeting of the Whigs of the district was held at Springfield on the 1st of March, 1843, for the purpose of organizing the party for the elections of the year. On this occasion Lincoln was the most prominent figure. He called the meeting to order, stated its object, and drew up the platform of principles, which embraced the orthodox Whig tenets of a protective tariff, national bank, the distribution of the proceeds of the public lands, and, finally, the tardy conversion of the party to the convention system, which had been forced upon them by the example of the Democrats, who had shown them that victory could not be organized without it. Lincoln was also chairman of the committee which was charged with the address to the people, and a paragraph from this document is worth quoting, as showing the use which he made at that early day of a pregnant text which was hereafter to figure in a far more momentous connection, and exercise a powerful influence upon his career. Exhorting the Whigs to harmony, he says: "That union is strength is a truth that has been known, illustrated, and declared in various ways and forms in all ages of the world. That great fabulist and philosopher, Aesop, illustrated it by his fable of the bundle of sticks; and He whose wisdom surpasses that of all philosophers has declared that 'a house divided against itself cannot stand.'" He calls to mind the victory of 1840, the overwhelming majority gained by the Whigs that year, their ill success since, and the necessity of unity and concord that the party may make its entire strength felt.

Lincoln was at this time a candidate for the Whig nomination to Congress; but he was confronted by formidable competition. The adjoining county of Morgan was warmly devoted to one of its own citizens, John J. Hardin, a man of an unusually gallant and chivalrous strain of character; and several other counties, for reasons not worth considering, were pledged to support any one whom Morgan County presented. If Lincoln had carried Sangamon County, his strength was so great in Menard and Mason, where he was personally known, that he could have been easily nominated. But Edward D. Baker had long coveted a seat in Congress, and went into the contest against Lincoln with many points in his favor. He was of about the same age, but had resided longer in the district, had a larger personal acquaintance, and was a much readier and more pleasing speaker. In fact, there are few men who have ever lived in this country with more of the peculiar temperament of the orator than Edward Dickinson Baker, It is related of him that on one occasion when the circumstances called for a policy of reserve, he was urged by his friends to go out upon a balcony and address an impromptu audience, which was calling for him. "No," he replied, mistrusting his own fluency; "if I go out there, I will make a better speech than I want to." He was hardly capable of the severe study and care by which great parliamentary speakers are trained; but before a popular audience, and on all occasions where brilliant and effective improvisation was called for, he was almost unequaled. His funeral oration over the dead body of Senator Broderick in California, his thrilling and inspiriting appeal in Union Square, New York, at the great meeting of April, 1861, and his reply to Breckinridge in the Senate delivered upon the impulse of the moment, conceived as he listened to the Kentuckian's peroration, leaning against the doorway of the Chamber in full uniform, booted and spurred, as he had ridden into Washington from the camp, are among the most remarkable specimens of absolutely unstudied and thrilling eloquence which our annals contain. He was also a man of extremely prepossessing appearance. Born in England of poor yet educated parents, and brought as a child to this country, his good looks and brightness had early attracted the attention of prominent gentlemen in Illinois, especially of Governor Edwards, who had made much of him and assisted him to a good education. He had met with considerable success as a lawyer, though he always relied rather upon his eloquence than his law, and there were few juries which could resist the force and fury of his speech, and not many lawyers could keep their equanimity in the face of his witty persiflage and savage sarcasm. When to all this is added a genuine love of every species of combat, physical and moral, we may understand the name Charles Sumner—paraphrasing a well-known epigram—applied to him in the Senate, after his heroic death at Ball's Bluff, "the Prince Rupert of battle and debate."

If Baker had relied upon his own unquestionable merits he would have been reasonably sure of succeeding in a community so well acquainted with him as Sangamon County. But to make assurance doubly sure his friends resorted to tactics which Lincoln, the most magnanimous and placable of men, thought rather unfair. Baker and his wife belonged to that numerous and powerful sect which has several times played an important part in Western politics—the Disciples. They all supported him energetically, and used as arguments against Lincoln that his wife was a Presbyterian, that most of her family were Episcopalians, that Lincoln himself belonged to no church, and that he had been suspected of deism, and, finally, that he was the candidate of the aristocracy. This last charge so amazed Lincoln that he was unable to frame any satisfactory answer to it. The memory of his flat-boating days, of his illiterate youth, even of his deer-skin breeches shrunken by rain and exposure, appeared to have no power against this unexpected and baleful charge. When the county convention met, the delegates to the district convention were instructed to cast the vote of Sangamon for Baker. It showed the confidence of the convention in the imperturbable good-nature of the defeated candidate that they elected him a delegate to the Congressional convention charged with the cause of his successful rival. In a letter to Speed, he humorously refers to his situation as that of a rejected suitor who is asked to act as groomsman at the wedding of his sweetheart.

It soon became evident that Baker could not get strength enough outside of the county to nominate him. Lincoln in a letter to Speed, written in May, said: "In relation to our Congress matter here, you were right in supposing I would support the nominee. Neither Baker nor I, however, is the man, but Hardin, so far as I can judge from present appearances. We shall have no split or trouble about the matter; all will be harmony." A few days later this prediction was realized. The convention met at Pekin, and nominated Hardin with all the customary symptoms of spontaneous enthusiasm. He was elected in August, [Footnote: The opposing candidate was James A. McDougall, who was afterwards, as Senator from California, one of the most remarkable and eccentric figures in Washington life.] after a short but active canvass, in which Lincoln bore his part as usual. Hardin took his seat in December. The next year the time of holding elections was changed, and always afterwards the candidates were elected the year before vacancies were to occur. In May, 1844, therefore, Baker attained the desire of his heart by being nominated, and in August he was elected, defeating John Calhoun, while Lincoln had the laborious and honorable post of Presidential Elector.



It was not the first nor the last time that he acted in this capacity. The place had become his by a sort of prescription. His persuasive and convincing oratory was thought so useful to his party that every four years he was sent, in the character of electoral canvasser, to the remotest regions of the State to talk to the people in their own dialect, with their own habits of thought and feeling, in favor of the Whig candidate. The office had its especial charm for him; if beaten, as generally happened, the defeat had no personal significance; if elected, the functions of the place were discharged in one day, and the office passed from existence. But there was something more than the orator and the partisan concerned in this campaign of 1844. The whole heart of the man was enlisted in it—for the candidate was the beloved and idolized leader of the Whigs, Henry Clay. It is probable that we shall never see again in this country another such instance of the personal devotion of a party to its chieftain as that which was shown by the long and wonderful career of Mr. Clay. He became prominent in the politics of Kentucky near the close of the last century at twenty-three years of age. He was elected first to the Senate at twenty-nine. He died a Senator at seventy-five, and for the greater part of that long interval he was the most considerable personal influence in American politics. As Senator, Representative, Speaker of the House, and diplomatist, he filled the public eye for half a century, and although he twice peremptorily retired from office, and although he was the mark of the most furious partisan hatred all his days, neither his own weariness nor the malice of his enemies could ever keep him for any length of time from that commanding position for which his temperament and his nature designed him. He was beloved, respected, and served by his adherents with a single-hearted allegiance which seems impossible to the more complex life of a later generation. In 1844, it is true, he was no longer young, and his power may be said to have been on the decline. But there were circumstances connected with this his last candidacy which excited his faithful followers to a peculiar intensity of devotion. He had been, as many thought, unjustly passed over in 1840, and General Harrison, a man of greatly inferior capacity, had been preferred to him on the grounds of prudence and expediency, after three days of balloting had shown that the eloquent Kentuckian had more friends and more enemies than any other man in the republic. He had seemed to regain all his popularity by the prompt and frank support which he gave to the candidacy of Harrison; and after the President's death and the treachery of Tyler had turned the victory of the Whigs into dust and ashes, the entire party came back to Clay with passionate affection and confidence, to lead them in the desperate battle which perhaps no man could have won. The Whigs, however, were far from appreciating this. There is evident in all their utterances of the spring and early summer of 1844, an ardent and almost furious conviction, not only of the necessity but the certainty of success. Mr. Clay was nominated long before the convention met in Baltimore. The convention of the 1st of May only ratified the popular will; no other name was mentioned. Mr. Watkins Leigh had the honor of presenting his name, "a word," he said "that expressed more enthusiasm, that had in it more eloquence, than the names of Chatham, Burke, Patrick Henry, and," he continued, rising to the requirements of the occasion, "to us more than any other and all other names together." Nothing was left to be said, and Clay was nominated without a ballot; Mr. Lumpkin, of Georgia, then nominated Theodore Frelinghuysen for Vice-President, not hesitating to avow, in the warmth and expansion of the hour, that he believed that the baptismal name of the New Jersey gentleman had a mystical appropriateness to the occasion.

In the Democratic convention Mr. Van Buren had a majority of delegates pledged to support him; but it had already been resolved in the inner councils of the party that he should be defeated. The Southern leaders had determined upon the immediate and unconditional annexation of Texas, and Mr. Van Buren's views upon this vital question were too moderate and conservative to suit the adventurous spirits who most closely surrounded President Tyler. During the whole of the preceding year a steady and earnest propaganda of annexation had been on foot, starting from the immediate entourage of the President and embracing a large number of Southern Congressmen. A letter had been elicited from General Jackson, declaring with his usual vehemence in favor of the project, and urging it upon the ground that Texas was absolutely necessary to us, as the most easily defensible frontier against Great Britain. Using the favorite argument of the Southerners of his school, he said: "Great Britain has already made treaties with Texas; and we know that far-seeing nation never omits a circumstance in her extensive intercourse with the world which can be turned to account in increasing her military resources. May she not enter into an alliance with Texas? And, reserving, as she doubtless will, the North-western boundary question as the cause of war with us whenever she chooses to declare it—let us suppose that, as an ally with Texas, we are to fight her. Preparatory to such a movement she sends her 20,000 or 30,000 men to Texas; organizes them on the Sabine, where supplies and arms can be concentrated before we have even notice of her intentions; makes a lodgment on the Mississippi; excites the negroes to insurrection; the lower country falls, with it New Orleans; and a servile war rages through the whole South and West." [Footnote: This letter was dated at the Hermitage, near Nashville, Tennessee, Feb. 13, 1843, and was printed a year later in the "National Intelligencer," with the date altered to 1844. ]

[Sidenote: T. H. Benton, "Thirty Years View."]

These fanciful prophecies of evil were privately circulated for a year among those whom they would be most likely to influence, and the entire letter was printed in 1844, with a result never intended by the writer. It contributed greatly, in the opinion of many, to defeat Van Buren, whom Jackson held in great esteem and regard, and served the purposes of the Tyler faction, whom he detested. The argument based on imaginary British intrigues was the one most relied upon by Mr. Tyler's successive secretaries of state. John C. Calhoun, in his dispatch of the 12th of August, 1844, instructed our minister in Paris to impress upon the Government of France the nefarious character of the English diplomacy, which was seeking, by defeating the annexation of Texas, to accomplish the abolition of slavery first in that region, and afterwards throughout the United States, "a blow calamitous to this continent beyond description." No denials on the part of the British Government had any effect; it was a fixed idea of Calhoun and his followers that the designs of Great Britain against American slavery could only be baffled by the annexation of Texas. Van Buren was not in principle opposed to the admission of Texas into the Union at the proper time and with the proper conditions, but the more ardent Democrats of the South were unwilling to listen to any conditions or any suggestion of delay. They succeeded in inducing the convention to adopt the two-thirds rule, after a whole day of stormy debate, and the defeat of Van Buren was secured. The nomination of Mr. Polk was received without enthusiasm, and the exultant hopes of the Whigs were correspondingly increased.

Contemporary observers differ as to the causes which gradually, as the summer advanced, changed the course of public opinion to such an extent as to bring defeat in November upon a party which was so sure of victory in June. It has been the habit of the antislavery Whigs who have written upon the subject to ascribe the disaster to an indiscretion of the candidate himself. At the outset of the campaign Mr. Clay's avowed opinion as to the annexation of Texas was that of the vast majority of his party, especially in the North. While not opposing an increase of territory under all circumstances, he said,— in a letter written from Raleigh, N.C., two weeks before his nomination,—"I consider the annexation of Texas, at this time, without the consent of Mexico, as a measure compromising the national character, involving us certainly in war with Mexico, probably with other foreign powers, dangerous to the integrity of the Union, inexpedient in the present financial condition of the country, and not called for by any expression of public opinion." He supported these views with temperate and judicious reasons which were received with much gratification throughout the country.

Of course they were not satisfactory to every one, and Mr. Clay became so disquieted by letters of inquiry and of criticism from the South, that he was at last moved, in an unfortunate hour, to write another letter to a friend in Alabama, which was regarded as seriously modifying the views he had expressed in the letter from Raleigh. He now said: "I have no hesitation in saying that, far from having any personal objections to the annexation of Texas, I should be glad to see it—without dishonor, without war, with the common consent of the Union, and upon just and fair terms ... I do not think the subject of slavery ought to affect the question one way or the other, whether Texas be independent or incorporated in the United States. I do not believe it will prolong or shorten the duration of that institution. It is destined to become extinct, at some distant day, in my opinion, by the operation of the inevitable laws of population. It would be unwise to refuse a permanent acquisition, which will exist as long as the globe remains, on account of a temporary institution." Mr. Clay does not in this letter disclaim or disavow any sentiments previously expressed. He says, as any one might say, that provided certain impossible conditions were complied with, he would be glad to see Texas in the Union, and that he was so sure of the ultimate extinction of slavery that he would not let any consideration of that transitory system interfere with a great national advantage. It might naturally have been expected that such an expression would have given less offense to the opponents than to the friends of slavery. But the contrary effect resulted, and it soon became evident that a grave error of judgment had been committed in writing the letter.

[Sidenote: "American Conflict," p. 167.]

The principal opposition to annexation in the North had been made expressly upon the ground that it would increase the area of slavery, and the comparative indifferences with which Mr. Clay treated that view of the subject cost him heavily in the canvass. Horace Greeley, who should be regarded as an impartial witness in such a case, says, "The 'Liberty Party,' so-called, pushed this view of the matter beyond all justice and reason, insisting that Mr. Clay's antagonism to annexation, not being founded in antislavery conviction, was of no account whatever, and that his election should, on that ground, be opposed." It availed nothing that Mr. Clay, alarmed at the defection in the North, wrote a third and final letter, reiterating his unaltered objections to any such annexation as was at that time possible. The damage was irretrievable. It is not probable that his letters gained or saved him a vote in the South among the advocates of annexation. They cared for nothing short of their own unconditional scheme of immediate action. They forgot the services rendered by Mr. Clay in bringing about the recognition of Texan independence a few years before.