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by John G. Nicolay and John Hay

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Title: Abraham Lincoln: A History V1

Author: John G. Nicolay and John Hay

Release Date: November, 2004 [EBook #6812]
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ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A HISTORY
BY JOHN G. NICOLAY AND JOHN HAY

VOLUME ONE




TO THE HONORABLE ROBERT TODD LINCOLN

  THIS WORK IS DEDICATED
    IN TOKEN OF
  A LIFE-LONG FRIENDSHIP
    AND ESTEEM




AUTHORS' PREFACE


A generation born since Abraham Lincoln died has already reached
manhood and womanhood. Yet there are millions still living who
sympathized with him in his noble aspirations, who labored with him in
his toilsome life, and whose hearts were saddened by his tragic death.
It is the almost unbroken testimony of his contemporaries that by
virtue of certain high traits of character, in certain momentous lines
of purpose and achievement, he was incomparably the greatest man of
his time. The deliberate judgment of those who knew him has hardened
into tradition; for although but twenty-five years have passed since
he fell by the bullet of the assassin, the tradition is already
complete. The voice of hostile faction is silent, or unheeded; even
criticism is gentle and timid. If history had said its last word, if
no more were to be known of him than is already written, his fame,
however lacking in definite outline, however distorted by fable, would
survive undiminished to the latest generations. The blessings of an
enfranchised race would forever hail him as their liberator; the
nation would acknowledge him as the mighty counselor whose patient
courage and wisdom saved the life of the republic in its darkest hour;
and illuminating his proud eminence as orator, statesman, and ruler,
there would forever shine around his memory the halo of that tender
humanity and Christian charity in which he walked among his fellow-
countrymen as their familiar companion and friend.

It is not, therefore, with any thought of adding materially to his
already accomplished renown that we have written the work which we now
offer to our fellow-citizens. But each age owes to its successors the
truth in regard to its own annals. The young men who have been born
since Sumter was fired on have a right to all their elders know of the
important events they came too late to share in. The life and fame of
Lincoln will not have their legitimate effect of instruction and
example unless the circumstances among which he lived and found his
opportunities are placed in their true light before the men who never
saw him.

To write the life of this great American in such a way as to show his
relations to the times in which he moved, the stupendous issues he
controlled, the remarkable men by whom he was surrounded, has been the
purpose which the authors have diligently pursued for many years. We
can say nothing of the result of our labor; only those who have been
similarly employed can appreciate the sense of inadequate performance
with which we regard what we have accomplished. We claim for our work
that we have devoted to it twenty years of almost unremitting
assiduity; that we have neglected no means in our power to ascertain
the truth; that we have rejected no authentic facts essential to a
candid story; that we have had no theory to establish, no personal
grudge to gratify, no unavowed objects to subserve. We have aimed to
write a sufficiently full and absolutely honest history of a great man
and a great time; and although we take it for granted that we have
made mistakes, that we have fallen into such errors and inaccuracies
as are unavoidable in so large a work, we claim there is not a line in
all these volumes dictated by malice or unfairness.

Our desire to have this work placed under the eyes of the greatest
possible number of readers induced us to accept the generous offer of
"The Century Magazine" to print it first in that periodical. In this
way it received, as we expected, the intelligent criticism of a very
large number of readers, thoroughly informed in regard to the events
narrated, and we have derived the greatest advantage from the
suggestions and corrections which have been elicited during the serial
publication, which began in November, 1886, and closed early in 1890.
We beg, here, to make our sincere acknowledgments to the hundreds of
friendly critics who have furnished us with valuable information.

As "The Century" had already given, during several years, a
considerable portion of its pages to the elucidation and discussion of
the battles and campaigns of the civil war, it was the opinion of its
editor, in which we coincided, that it was not advisable to print in
the magazine the full narrative sketch of the war which we had
prepared. We omitted also a large number of chapters which, although
essential to a history of the time, and directly connected with the
life of Mr. Lincoln, were still episodical in their nature, and were
perhaps not indispensable to a comprehension of the principal events
of his administration. These are all included in the present volumes;
they comprise additional chapters almost equal in extent and fully
equal in interest to those which have already been printed in "The
Century." Interspersed throughout the work in their proper connection
and sequence, and containing some of the most important of Mr.
Lincoln's letters, they lend breadth and unity to the historical
drama.

We trust it will not be regarded as presumptuous if we say a word in
relation to the facilities we have enjoyed and the methods we have
used in the preparation of this work. We knew Mr. Lincoln intimately
before his election to the Presidency. We came from Illinois to
Washington with him, and remained at his side and in his service--
separately or together--until the day of his death. We were the daily
and nightly witnesses of the incidents, the anxieties, the fears, and
the hopes which pervaded the Executive Mansion and the National
Capital. The President's correspondence, both official and private,
passed through our hands; he gave us his full confidence. We had
personal acquaintance and daily official intercourse with Cabinet
Officers, Members of Congress, Governors, and Military and Naval
Officers of all grades, whose affairs brought them to the White House.
It was during these years of the war that we formed the design of
writing this history and began to prepare for it. President Lincoln
gave it his sanction and promised his cordial cooperation. After
several years' residence in Europe, we returned to this country and
began the execution of our long-cherished plan. Mr. Robert T. Lincoln
gave into our keeping all the official and private papers and
manuscripts in his possession, to which we have added all the material
we could acquire by industry or by purchase. It is with the advantage,
therefore, of a wide personal acquaintance with all the leading
participants of the war, and of perfect familiarity with the
manuscript material, and also with the assistance of the vast bulk of
printed records and treatises which have accumulated since 1865, that
we have prosecuted this work to its close.

If we gained nothing else by our long association with Mr. Lincoln we
hope at least that we acquired from him the habit of judging men and
events with candor and impartiality. The material placed in our hands
was unexampled in value and fullness; we have felt the obligation of
using it with perfect fairness. We have striven to be equally just to
friends and to adversaries; where the facts favor our enemies we have
recorded them ungrudgingly; where they bear severely upon statesmen
and generals whom we have loved and honored we have not scrupled to
set them forth, at the risk of being accused of coldness and
ingratitude to those with whom we have lived on terms of intimate
friendship. The recollection of these friendships will always be to us
a source of pride and joy; but in this book we have known no
allegiance but to the truth. We have in no case relied upon our own
memory of the events narrated, though they may have passed under our
own eyes; we have seen too often the danger of such a reliance in the
reminiscences of others. We have trusted only our diaries and
memoranda of the moment; and in the documents and reports we have
cited we have used incessant care to secure authenticity. So far as
possible, every story has been traced to its source, and every
document read in the official record or the original manuscript.

We are aware of the prejudice which exists against a book written by
two persons, but we feel that in our case the disadvantages of
collaboration are reduced to the minimum. Our experiences, our
observations, our material, have been for twenty years not merely
homogeneous--they have been identical. Our plans were made with
thorough concert; our studies of the subject were carried on together;
we were able to work simultaneously without danger of repetition or
conflict. The apportionment of our separate tasks has been dictated
purely by convenience; the division of topics between us has been
sometimes for long periods, sometimes almost for alternate chapters.
Each has written an equal portion of the work; while consultation and
joint revision have been continuous, the text of each remains
substantially unaltered. It is in the fullest sense, and in every
part, a joint work. We each assume responsibility, not only for the
whole, but for all the details, and whatever credit or blame the
public may award our labors is equally due to both.

We commend the result of so many years of research and diligence to
all our countrymen, North and South, in the hope that it may do
something to secure a truthful history of the great struggle which
displayed on both sides the highest qualities of American manhood, and
may contribute in some measure to the growth and maintenance
throughout all our borders of that spirit of freedom and nationality
for which Abraham Lincoln lived and died.

John G. Nicolay
John Hay
[signatures]




ILLUSTRATIONS

VOL. I


ABRAHAM LINCOLN From a photograph taken about 1860 by Hesler, of
Chicago; from the original negative owned by George B. Ayres,
Philadelphia.

LAND WARRANT, ISSUED TO ABRAHAM LINKHORN (LINCOLN)

FAC-SIMILE FROM THE FIELD-BOOK OF DANIEL BOONE

SURVEYOR'S CERTIFICATE FOR ABRAHAM LINKHORN (LINCOLN)

HOUSE IN WHICH THOMAS LINCOLN AND NANCY HANKS WERE MARRIED

FAC-SIMILE OF THE MARRIAGE BOND OF THOMAS LINCOLN

CERTIFICATE, OR MARRIAGE LIST, CONTAINING THE NAMES OF THOMAS LINCOLN
AND NANCY HANKS

SARAH BUSH LINCOLN AT THE AGE OF 76 From a photograph in possession of
William H. Herndon.

CABIN ON GOOSE-NEST PRAIRIE, ILL., IN WHICH THOMAS LINCOLN LIVED AND
DIED

MODEL OF LINCOLN'S INVENTION FOR BUOYING VESSELS

FAC-SIMILE OF DRAWINGS IN THE PATENT OFFICE

LEAF FROM ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S EXERCISE BOOK

SOLDIER'S DISCHARGE FROM THE BLACK HAWK WAR, SIGNED BY A. LINCOLN,
CAPTAIN

BLACK HAWK. From a portrait by Charles B. King, from McKenny & Hall's
"Indian Tribes of North America."

STEPHEN T. LOGAN From the portrait in possession of his daughter, Mrs.
L. H. Coleman.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S SURVEYING INSTRUMENTS, SADDLE BAG, ETC

PLAN OF ROADS SURVEYED BY A. LINCOLN AND OTHERS

FAC-SIMILE OF LINCOLN'S REPORT OF THE ROAD SURVEY

O. H. BROWNING From a photograph by Waide.

MARTIN VAN BUREN From a photograph by Brady.

COL. E. D. BAKER From a photograph by Brady, about 1861.

LINCOLN AND STUART'S LAW-OFFICE, SPRINGFIELD

LINCOLN'S BOOKCASE AND INKSTAND From the Keyes Lincoln Memorial
Collection, Chicago.

GLOBE TAVERN, SPRINGFIELD Where Lincoln lived after his marriage.

WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON From a painting, in 1841, by Henry Inman, owned
by Benjamin Harrison.

FAC-SIMILE OF MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

JOSHUA SPEED AND WIFE From a painting by Healy, about 1864.

HOUSE IN WHICH ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS MARRIED

GEN. JAMES SHIELDS From a photograph owned by David Delany.

HENRY CLAY After a photograph by Rockwood, from the daguerreotype
owned by Alfred Hassack.

ZACHARY TAYLOR From the painting by Vanderlyn in the Corcoran Gallery.

JOSHUA R. GIDDINGS From a photograph by Brady.

DAVID DAVIS From a photograph by Brady.

JAMES K. POLK From a photograph by Brady.

FRANKLIN PIERCE From a photograph by Brady.

LYMAN TRUMBULL Prom a photograph by Brady.

OWEN LOVEJOY From a photograph.

DAVID E. ATCHISON From a daguerreotype.

ANDREW H. REEDER From a photograph by R. Knecht.

JAMES H. LANE By permission of the Strowbridge Lithographing Co. MAPS

MAP SHOWING LOCALITIES CONNECTED WITH EARLY EVENTS IN THE LINCOLN
FAMILY

MAP OF NEW SALEM, ILL., AND VICINITY

MAP OF THE BOUNDARIES OF TEXAS

HISTORICAL MAP OF THE UNITED STATES IN 1854




TABLE OF CONTENTS

VOL. I


CHAPTER I. LINEAGE The Lincolns in America. Intimacy with the Boones.
Kentucky in 1780. Death of Abraham Lincoln the Pioneer. Marriage of
Thomas Lincoln. Birth and Childhood of Abraham

CHAPTER II. INDIANA Thomas Lincoln leaves Kentucky. Settles at
Gentryville. Death of Nancy Hanks Lincoln. Sarah Bush Johnston.
Pioneer Life in Indiana. Sports and Superstitions of the Early
Settlers. The Youth of Abraham. His Great Physical Strength. His
Voyage to New Orleans. Removal to Illinois

CHAPTER III. ILLINOIS IN 1830 The Winter of the Deep Snow. The Sudden
Change. Pioneer Life. Religion and Society. French and Indians.
Formation of the Political System. The Courts. Lawyers and
Politicians. Early Superannuation

CHAPTER IV. NEW SALEM Denton Offutt. Lincoln's Second Trip to New
Orleans. His Care of His Family. Death of Thomas Lincoln. Offutt's
Store in New Salem. Lincoln's Initiation by the "Clary's Grove Boys."
The Voyage of the _Talisman_

CHAPTER V. LINCOLN IN THE BLACK HAWK WAR Black Hawk. The Call for
Volunteers. Lincoln Elected Captain. Stillman's Run. Lincoln
Reenlists. The Spy Battalion. Black Hawk's Defeat. Disbandment of the
Volunteers

CHAPTER VI. SURVEYOR AND REPRESENTATIVE Lincoln's Candidacy for the
Legislature. Runs as a Whig. Defeated. Berry and Lincoln Merchants.
Lincoln Begins the Study of Law. Postmaster. Surveyor. His Popularity.
Elected to the Legislature, 1834

CHAPTER VII. LEGISLATIVE EXPERIENCE Lincoln's First Session in the
Legislature. Douglas and Peek. Lincoln Reelected. Bedlam Legislation.
Schemes of Railroad Building. Removal of the Capital to Springfield

CHAPTER VIII. THE LINCOLN-STONE PROTEST The Pro-Slavery Sentiment in
Illinois. Attempt to Open the State to Slavery. Victory of the Free-
State Party. Reaction. Death of Lovejoy. Pro-Slavery Resolutions. The
Protest

CHAPTER IX. COLLAPSE OF "THE SYSTEM" Lincoln in Springfield. The
Failure of the Railroad System. Fall of the Banks. First Collision
with Douglas. Tampering with the Judiciary

CHAPTER X. EARLY LAW PRACTICE Early Legal Customs. Lincoln's
Popularity in Law and Politics. A Speech in 1840. The Harrison
Campaign. Correspondence with Stuart. Harrison Elected. Melancholia

CHAPTER XI. MARRIAGE Courtship and Engagement, The Pioneer
Temperament. Lincoln's Love Affairs. Joshua F. Speed. Lincoln's Visit
to Kentucky. Correspondence with Speed. Marriage

CHAPTER XII. THE SHIELDS DUEL A Political Satire. James Shields.
Lincoln Challenged. A Fight Arranged and Prevented. Subsequent
Wranglings. The Whole Matter Forgotten. An Admonition

CHAPTER XIII. THE CAMPAIGN OF 1844 Partnership with Stephen T. Logan.
Lincoln Becomes a Lawyer. Temperance Movement. Baker and Lincoln
Candidates for the Whig Nomination to Congress. Baker Successful. Clay
Nominated for President. The Texas Question. Clay Defeated

CHAPTER XIV. LINCOLN'S CAMPAIGN FOR CONGRESS Schemes of Annexation.
Opposition at the North. Outbreak of War. Lincoln Nominated for
Congress. His Opponent Peter Cartwright. Lincoln Elected. The Whigs in
the War. E. D. Baker in Washington and Mexico

CHAPTER XV. THE THIRTIETH CONGRESS Robert C. Winthrop Chosen Speaker.
Debates on the War. Advantage of the Whigs. Acquisition of Territory.
The Wilmot Proviso. Lincoln's Resolutions. Nomination of Taylor for
President. Cass the Democratic Candidate. Lincoln's Speech, July 27,
1848. Taylor Elected

CHAPTER XVI. A FORTUNATE ESCAPE Independent Action of Northern
Democrats. Lincoln's Plan for Emancipation in the District of
Columbia. His Bill Fails to Receive Consideration. A Similar Bill
Signed by Him Fifteen Years Later. Logan Nominated for Congress and
Defeated. Lincoln an Applicant for Office. The Fascination of
Washington

CHAPTER XVII. THE CIRCUIT LAWYER The Growth and Change of Legal
Habits. Lincoln on the Circuit. His Power and Value as a Lawyer.
Opinion of David Davis. Of Judge Drummond. Incidents of the Courts.
Lincoln's Wit and Eloquence. His Life at Home

CHAPTER XVIII. THE BALANCE OF POWER Origin of the Slavery Struggle.
The Ordinance of 1787. The Compromises of the Constitution. The
Missouri Compromise. Cotton and the Cotton-Gin. The Race between Free
and Slave States. The Admission of Texas. The Wilmot Proviso. New
Mexico and California. The Compromise Measures of 1850. Finality

CHAPTER XIX. REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE Stephen A. Douglas. Old
Fogies and Young America. The Nomination of Pierce. The California
Gold Discovery. The National Platforms on the Slavery Issue.
Organization of Western Territories. The Three Nebraska Bills. The
Caucus Agreement of the Senate Committee. Dixon's Repealing Amendment.
Douglas Adopts Dixon's Proposition. Passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act

CHAPTER XX. THE DRIFT OF POLITICS The Storm of Agitation. The Free
Soil Party. The American Party. The Anti-Nebraska Party. Dissolution
of the Whig Party. The Congressional Elections. Democratic Defeat.
Banks Elected Speaker

CHAPTER XXI. LINCOLN AND TRUMBULL The Nebraska Question in Illinois.
Douglas's Chicago Speech. Lincoln Reappears in Politics. Political
Speeches at the State Fair. A Debate between Lincoln and Douglas.
Lincoln's Peoria Speech. An Anti-Nebraska Legislature Elected.
Lincoln's Candidacy for the Senate. Shields and Matteson. Trumbull
Elected Senator. Lincoln's Letter to Robertson

CHAPTER XXII. THE BORDER RUFFIANS The Opening of Kansas Territory.
Andrew H, Reeder Appointed Governor. Atchison's Propaganda. The
Missouri Blue Lodges. The Emigrant Aid Company. The Town of Lawrence
Founded. Governor Reeder's Independent Action. The First Border
Ruffian Invasion. The Election of Whitfield

CHAPTER XXIII. THE BOGUS LAWS Governor Reeder's Census. The Second
Border Ruffian Invasion. Missouri Voters Elect the Kansas Legislature.
Westport and Shawnee Mission. The Governor Convenes the Legislature at
Pawnee. The Legislature Returns to Shawnee Mission. Governor Reeder's
Vetoes. The Governor's Removal. Enactment of the Bogus Laws. Despotic
Statutes. Lecompton Founded

CHAPTER XXIV. THE TOPEKA CONSTITUTION The Bogus Legislature Defines
Kansas Politics. The Big Springs Convention. Ex-Governor Reeder's
Resolutions. Formation of the Free-State Party. A Constitutional
Convention at Topeka. The Topeka Constitution. President Pierce
Proclaims the Topeka Movement Revolutionary. Refusal to Recognize the
Bogus Laws. Chief-Justice Lecompte's Doctrine of Constructive Treason,
Arrests and Indictment of the Free-State Leaders. Colonel Sumner
Disperses the Topeka Legislature

CHAPTER XXV. CIVIL WAR IN KANSAS Wilson Shannon Appointed Governor.
The Law and Order Party Formed at Leavenworth. Sheriff Jones. The
Branson Rescue. The Wakarusa War. Sharps Rifles. Governor Shannon's
Treaty. Guerrilla Leaders and Civil War. The Investigating Committee
of Congress. The Flight of Ex-Governor Reeder. The Border Ruffians
March on Lawrence. Burning of the Free-State Hotel




ABRAHAM LINCOLN




CHAPTER I

LINEAGE


[Sidenote: 1780.]

In the year 1780, Abraham Lincoln, a member of a respectable and well-
to-do family in Rockingham County, Virginia, started westward to
establish himself in the newly-explored country of Kentucky. He
entered several large tracts of fertile land, and returning to
Virginia disposed of his property there, and with his wife and five
children went back to Kentucky and settled in Jefferson County. Little
is known of this pioneer Lincoln or of his father. Most of the records
belonging to that branch of the family were destroyed in the civil
war. Their early orphanage, the wild and illiterate life they led on
the frontier, severed their connection with their kindred in the East.
This, often happened; there are hundreds of families in the West
bearing historic names and probably descended from well-known houses
in the older States or in England, which, by passing through one or
two generations of ancestors who could not read or write, have lost
their continuity with the past as effectually as if a deluge had
intervened between the last century and this. Even the patronymic has
been frequently distorted beyond recognition by slovenly pronunciation
during the years when letters were a lost art, and by the phonetic
spelling of the first boy in the family who learned the use of the
pen. There are Lincolns in Kentucky and Tennessee belonging to the
same stock with the President, whose names are spelled "Linkhorn" and
"Linkhern." All that was known of the emigrant, Abraham Lincoln, by
his immediate descendants was that his progenitors, who were Quakers,
came from Berks County, Pennsylvania, into Virginia, and there throve
and prospered. [Footnote: We desire to express our obligations to
Edwin Salter, Samuel L. Smedley, Samuel Shackford, Samuel W.
Pennypacker, Howard M. Jenkins, and John T. Harris, Jr., for
information and suggestions which have been of use to us in this
chapter.] But we now know, with sufficient clearness, through the
wide-spread and searching luster which surrounds the name, the history
of the migrations of the family since its arrival on this continent,
and the circumstances under which the Virginia pioneer started for
Kentucky.

The first ancestor of the line of whom we have knowledge was Samuel
Lincoln, of Norwich, England, who came to Hingham, Massachusetts, in
1638, and died there. He left a son, Mordecai, whose son, of the same
name,--and it is a name which persists in every branch of the family,
[Footnote: The Lincolns, in naming their children, followed so strict
a tradition that great confusion has arisen in the attempt to trace
their genealogy. For instance, Abraham Lincoln, of Chester County, son
of one Mordecai and brother of another, the President's ancestors,
left a fair estate, by will, to his children, whose names were John,
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Mordecai, Rebecca, and Sarah--precisely the
same names we find in three collateral families.]--removed to
Monmouth, New Jersey, and thence to Amity township, now a part of now
a part of Berks County, Pennsylvania, where he died in 1735, fifty
years old. From a copy of his will, recorded in the office of the
Register in Philadelphia, we gather that he was a man of considerable
property. In the inventory of his effects, made after his death, he is
styled by the appraisers, "Mordecai Lincoln, Gentleman." His son John
received by his father's will "a certain piece of land lying in the
Jerseys, containing three hundred acres," the other sons and daughters
having been liberally provided for from the Pennsylvania property.
This John Lincoln left New Jersey some years later, and about 1750
established himself in Rockingham County, Virginia. He had five sons,
to whom he gave the names which were traditional in the family:--
Abraham, the pioneer first mentioned,--Isaac, Jacob, Thomas, and John.
Jacob and John remained in Virginia; the former was a soldier in the
War of the Revolution, and took part as lieutenant in a Virginia
regiment at the siege of Yorktown. Isaac went to a place on the
Holston River in Tennessee; Thomas followed his brother to Kentucky,
lived and died there, and his children then emigrated to Tennessee
[Footnote: It is an interesting coincidence for the knowledge of which
we are indebted to Colonel John B. Brownlow, that a minister named
Mordecai Lincoln a relative of the President, performed, on the 17th
of May, 1837, the marriage ceremony of Andrew Johnson, Mr. Lincoln's
succesor, in the Presidency.] With the one memorable exception the
family seem to have been modest, thrifty, unambitious people. Even the
great fame and conspicuousness of the President did not tempt them out
of their retirement. Robert Lincoln, of Hancock County, Illinois, a
cousin--German, became a captain and commissary of volunteers; none of
the others, so far as we know, ever made their existence known to
their powerful kinsman during the years of his glory. [Transcriber's
Note: Lengthy footnote relocated to chapter end.]

It was many years after the death of the President that his son
learned the probable circumstances under which the pioneer Lincoln
removed to the West, and the intimate relations which subsisted
between his family and the most celebrated man in early Western
annals. There is little doubt that it was on account of his
association with the, famous Daniel Boone that Abraham Lincoln went to
Kentucky. The families had for a century been closely allied. There
were frequent intermarriages [Footnote: A letter from David J.
Lincoln, of Birdsboro, Berks County, Pennsylvania, to the writers,
says, "My grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, was married to Anna Boone, a
first cousin of Daniel Boone, July 10, 1760." He was half-brother of
John Lincoln, and afterwards became a man of some prominence in
Pennsylvania, serving in the Constitutional Convention in 1789-90.]
among them--both being of Quaker lineage. By the will of Mordecai
Lincoln, to which reference has been made, his "loving friend and
neighbor" George Boone was made a trustee to assist his widow in the
care of the property. Squire Boone, the father of Daniel, was one of
the appraisers who made the inventory of Mordecai Lincoln's estate.
The intercourse between the families was kept up after the Boones had
removed to North Carolina and John Lincoln had gone to Virginia.
Abraham Lincoln, son of John, and grandfather of the President, was
married to Miss Mary Shipley [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote
relocated to chapter end.] in North Carolina. The inducement which led
him to leave Virginia, where his standing and his fortune were
assured, was, in all probability, his intimate family relations with
the great explorer, the hero of the new country of Kentucky, the land
of fabulous richness and unlimited adventure. At a time when the
Eastern States were ringing with the fame of the mighty hunter who was
then in the prime of his manhood, and in the midst of those
achievements which will forever render him one of the most picturesque
heroes in all our annals, it is not to be wondered at that his own
circle of friends should have caught the general enthusiasm and felt
the desire to emulate his career.

Boone's exploration of Kentucky had begun some ten years before
Lincoln set out to follow his trail. In 1769 he made his memorable
journey to that virgin wilderness of whose beauty he always loved to
speak even to his latest breath. During all that year he hunted,
finding everywhere abundance of game. "The buffalo," Boone says, "were
more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements, browsing on
the leaves of the cane, or cropping the herbage on these extensive
plains, fearless because ignorant of the violence of man. Sometimes we
saw hundreds in a drove, and the numbers about the salt springs were
amazing." In the course of the winter, however, he was captured by the
Indians while hunting with a comrade, and when they had contrived to
escape they never found again any trace of the rest of their party.
But a few days later they saw two men approaching and hailed them with
the hunter's caution, "Hullo, strangers; who are you?" They replied,
"White men and friends." They proved to be Squire Boone and another
adventurer from North Carolina. The younger Boone had made that long
pilgrimage through the trackless woods, led by an instinct of doglike
affection, to find his elder brother and share his sylvan pleasures
and dangers. Their two companions were soon waylaid and killed, and
the Boones spent their long winter in that mighty solitude
undisturbed. In the spring their ammunition, which was to them the
only necessary of life, ran low, and one of them must return to the
settlements to replenish the stock. It need not be said which assumed
this duty; the cadet went uncomplaining on his way, and Daniel spent
three months in absolute loneliness, as he himself expressed it, "by
myself, without bread, salt, or sugar, without company of my fellow-
creatures, or even a horse or dog." He was not insensible to the
dangers of his situation. He never approached his camp without the
utmost precaution, and always slept in the cane-brakes if the signs
were unfavorable. But he makes in his memoirs this curious reflection,
which would seem like affectation in one less perfectly and simply
heroic: "How unhappy such a situation for a man tormented with fear,
which is vain if no danger comes, and if it does, only augments the
pain. It was my happiness to be destitute of this afflicting passion,
with which I had the greatest reason to be afflicted." After his
brother's return, for a year longer they hunted in those lovely wilds,
and then returned to the Yadkin to bring their families to the new
domain. They made the long journey back, five hundred miles, in peace
and safety.

For some time after this Boone took no conspicuous part in the
settlement of Kentucky. The expedition with which he left the Yadkin
in 1773 met with a terrible disaster near Cumberland Gap, in which his
eldest son and five more young men were killed by Indians, and the
whole party, discouraged by the blow, retired to the safer region of
Clinch River. In the mean time the dauntless speculator Richard
Henderson had begun his occupation with all the pomp of viceroyalty.
Harrodsburg had been founded, and corn planted, and a flourishing
colony established at the Falls of the Ohio. In 1774 Boone was called
upon by the Governor of Virginia to escort a party of surveyors
through Kentucky, and on his return was given the command of three
garrisons; and for several years thereafter the history of the State
is the record of his feats of arms. No one ever equaled him in his
knowledge of Indian character, and his influence with the savages was
a mystery to him and to themselves. Three times he fell into their
hands and they did not harm him. Twice they adopted him into their
tribes while they were still on the war-path. Once they took him to
Detroit, [Footnote: Silas Farmer, historiographer of Detroit, informs
us that Daniel Boone was brought there on the 10th of March, 1778, and
that he remained there a month.] to show the Long-Knife chieftains of
King Greorge that they also could exhibit trophies of memorable
prowess, but they refused to give him up even to their British allies.
In no quality of wise woodcraft was he wanting. He could outrun a dog
or a deer; he could thread the woods without food day and night; he
could find his way as easily as the panther could. Although a great
athlete and a tireless warrior, he hated fighting and only fought for
peace. In council and in war he was equally valuable. His advice was
never rejected without disaster, nor followed but with advantage; and
when the fighting once began there was not a rifle in Kentucky which
could rival his. At the nine days' siege of Boonesboro' he took
deliberate aim and killed a negro renegade who was harassing the
garrison from a tree five hundred and twenty-five feet away, and whose
head only was visible from the fort. The mildest and the quietest of
men, he had killed dozens of enemies with his own hand, and all this
without malice and, strangest of all, without incurring the hatred of
his adversaries. He had self-respect enough, but not a spark of
vanity. After the fatal battle of the Blue Licks,--where the only
point of light in the day's terrible work was the wisdom and valor
with which he had partly retrieved a disaster he foresaw but was
powerless to prevent,--when it became his duty, as senior surviving
officer of the forces, to report the affair to Governor Harrison, his
dry and naked narrative gives not a single hint of what he had done
himself, nor mentions the gallant son lying dead on the field, nor the
wounded brother whose gallantry might justly have claimed some notice.
He was thinking solely of the public good, saying, "I have encouraged
the people in this country all that I could, but I can no longer
justify them or myself to risk our lives here under such extraordinary
hazards." He therefore begged his Excellency to take immediate
measures for relief. During the short existence of Henderson's
legislature he was a member of it, and not the least useful one. Among
his measures was one for the protection of game.

[Illustration:   LAND WARRANT ISSUED TO ABRAHAM LINKHORN (LINCOLN). The
original, of which this is a reduced fac-simile, is in the possession
of Colonel R. T, Durrett, Louisville, Ky.]

[Sidenote: Jefferson County Records.]

Everything we know of the emigrant Abraham Lincoln goes to show that
it was under the auspices of this most famous of our pioneers that he
set out from Rockingham County to make a home for himself and his
young family in that wild region which Boone was wresting from its
savage holders. He was not without means of his own. He took with him
funds enough to enter an amount of land which would have made his
family rich if they had retained it. The county records show him to
have been the possessor of a domain of some seventeen hundred acres.
There is still in existence [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote
relocated to chapter end.] the original warrant, dated March 4, 1780,
for four hundred acres of land, for which the pioneer had paid "into
the publick Treasury one hundred and sixty pounds current money," and
a copy of the surveyor's certificate, giving the metes and bounds of
the property on Floyd's Fork, which remained for many years in the
hands of Mordecai Lincoln, the pioneer's eldest son and heir. The name
was misspelled "Linkhorn" by a blunder of the clerk in the
land-office, and the error was perpetuated in the subsequent record.

Kentucky had been for many years the country of romance and fable for
Virginians. Twenty years before Governor Spotswood had crossed the
Alleghanies and returned to establish in a Williamsburg tavern that
fantastic order of nobility which he called the Knights of The Golden
Horseshoe, [Footnote: Their motto was _Sic jurat transcendere
montes_.] and, with a worldly wisdom which was scarcely consistent
with these medieval affectations, to press upon the attention of the
British Government the building of a line of frontier forts to guard
the Ohio River from the French. Many years after him the greatest of
all Virginians crossed the mountains again, and became heavily
interested in those schemes of emigration which filled the minds of
many of the leading men in America until they were driven out by
graver cares and more imperative duties. Washington had acquired
claims and patents to the amount of thirty or forty thousand acres of
land in the West; Benjamin Franklin and the Lees were also large
owners of these speculative titles. They formed, it is true, rather an
airy and unsubstantial sort of possession, the same ground being often
claimed by a dozen different persons or companies under various grants
from the crown or from legislatures, or through purchase by
adventurers from Indian councils. But about the time of which we are
speaking the spirit of emigration had reached the lower strata of
colonial society, and a steady stream of pioneers began pouring over
the passes of the mountains into the green and fertile valleys of
Kentucky and Tennessee. They selected their homes in the most eligible
spots to which chance or the report of earlier explorers directed
them, with little knowledge or care as to the rightful ownership of
the land, and too often cleared their corner of the wilderness for the
benefit of others. Even Boone, to whose courage, forest lore, and
singular intuitions of savage character the State of Kentucky owed
more than to any other man, was deprived in his old age of his hard-
earned homestead through his ignorance of legal forms, and removed to
Missouri to repeat in that new territory his labors and his
misfortunes.

[Illustration:   FAC-SIMILE FROM THE FIELD BOOK OF DANIEL BOONE. This
record of the Lincoln Claim on Licking River is from the original in
posession of Lyman C. Draper, Madison, Wis.]

[Sidenote: 1780.]

The period at which Lincoln came West was one of note in the history
of Kentucky. The labors of Henderson and the Transylvania Company had
begun to bear fruit in extensive plantations and a connected system of
forts. The land laws of Kentucky had reduced to something like order
the chaos of conflicting claims arising from the various grants and
the different preemption customs under which settlers occupied their
property. The victory of Boone at Boonesboro' against the Shawnees,
and the capture of Kaskaskia and Vincennes by the brilliant audacity
of George Rogers Clark, had brought the region prominently to the
attention of the Atlantic States, and had turned in that direction the
restless and roving spirits which are always found in communities at
periods when great emigrations are a need of civilization. Up to this
time few persons had crossed the mountains except hunters, trappers,
and explorers--men who came merely to kill game, and possibly Indians,
or to spy out the fertility of the land for the purpose of
speculation. But in 1780 and 1781 a large number of families took up
their line of march, and in the latter year a considerable contingent
of women joined the little army of pioneers, impelled by an instinct
which they themselves probably but half comprehended. The country was
to be peopled, and there was no other way of peopling it but by the
sacrifice of many lives and fortunes; and the history of every country
shows that these are never lacking when they are wanted. The number of
those who came at about the same time with the pioneer Lincoln was
sufficient to lay the basis of a sort of social order. Early in the
year 1780 three hundred "large family boats" arrived at the Falls of
the Ohio, where the land had been surveyed by Captain Bullitt seven
years before, and in May the Legislature of Virginia passed a law for
the incorporation of the town of Louisville, then containing some six
hundred inhabitants. At the same session a law was passed confiscating
the property of certain British subjects for the endowment of an
institution of learning in Kentucky, "it being the interest of this
commonwealth," to quote the language of the philosophic Legislature,
"always to encourage and promote every design which may tend to the
improvement of the mind and the diffusion of useful knowledge even
among its remote citizens, whose situation in a barbarous neighborhood
and a savage intercourse might otherwise render them unfriendly to
science." This was the origin of the Transylvania University of
Lexington, which rose and flourished for many years on the utmost
verge of civilization.

[Illustration:   SURVEYOR'S CERTIFICATE (SLIGHTLY REDUCED), TAKEN FROM
RECORD BOOK "B," PAGE 60, IN THE OFFICE OF JEFFERSON COUNTY,
KENTUCKY.]

The "barbarous neighborhood" and the "savage intercourse" undoubtedly
had their effect upon the manners and morals of the settlers; but we
should fall into error if we took it for granted that the pioneers
were all of one piece. The ruling motive which led most of them to the
wilds was that Anglo-Saxon lust of land which seems inseparable from
the race. The prospect of possessing a four-hundred-acre farm by
merely occupying it, and the privilege of exchanging a basketful of
almost worthless continental currency for an unlimited estate at the
nominal value of forty cents per acre, were irresistible to thousands
of land-loving Virginians and Carolinians whose ambition of
proprietorship was larger than their means. Accompanying this flood of
emigrants of good faith was the usual froth and scum of shiftless
idlers and adventurers, who were either drifting with a current they
were too worthless to withstand, or in pursuit of dishonest gains in
fresher and simpler regions. The vices and virtues of the pioneers
were such as proceeded from their environment. They were careless of
human life because life was worth comparatively little in that hard
struggle for existence; but they had a remarkably clear idea of the
value of property, and visited theft not only with condign punishment,
but also with the severest social proscription. Stealing a horse was
punished more swiftly and with more feeling than homicide. A man might
be replaced more easily than the other animal. Sloth was the worst of
weaknesses. An habitual drunkard was more welcome at "raisings" and
"logrollings" than a known faineant. The man who did not do a man's
share where work was to be done was christened "Lazy Lawrence," and
that was the end of him socially. Cowardice was punished by inexorable
disgrace. The point of honor was as strictly observed as it ever has
been in the idlest and most artificial society. If a man accused
another of falsehood, the ordeal by fisticuffs was instantly resorted
to. Weapons were rarely employed in these chivalrous encounters, being
kept for more serious use with Indians and wild beasts; nevertheless
fists, teeth, and the gouging thumb were often employed with fatal
effect. Yet among this rude and uncouth people there was a genuine and
remarkable respect for law. They seemed to recognize it as an absolute
necessity of their existence. In the territory of Kentucky, and
afterwards in that of Illinois, it occurred at several periods in the
transition from counties to territories and states, that the country
was without any organized authority. But the people were a law unto
themselves. Their improvised courts and councils administered law and
equity; contracts were enforced, debts were collected, and a sort of
order was maintained. It may be said, generally, that the character of
this people was far above their circumstances. In all the accessories
of life, by which we are accustomed to rate communities and races in
the scale of civilization, they were little removed from primitive
barbarism. They dressed in the skins of wild beasts killed by
themselves, and in linen stuffs woven by themselves. They hardly knew
the use of iron except in their firearms and knives. Their food
consisted almost exclusively of game, fish, and roughly ground corn-
meal. Their exchanges were made by barter; many a child grew up
without ever seeing a piece of money. Their habitations were hardly
superior to those of the savages with whom they waged constant war.
Large families lived in log huts, put together without iron, and far
more open to the inclemencies of the skies than the pig-styes of the
careful farmer of to-day. An early schoolmaster says that the first
place where he went to board was the house of one Lucas, consisting of
a single room, sixteen feet square, and tenanted by Mr. and Mrs.
Lucas, ten children, three dogs, two cats, and himself. There were
many who lived in hovels so cold that they had to sleep on their shoes
to keep them from freezing too stiff to be put on. The children grew
inured to misery like this, and played barefoot in the snow. It is an
error to suppose that all this could be undergone with impunity. They
suffered terribly from malarial and rheumatic complaints, and the
instances of vigorous and painless age were rare among them. The lack
of moral and mental sustenance was still more marked. They were
inclined to be a religious people, but a sermon was an unusual luxury,
only to be enjoyed at long intervals and by great expense of time.
There were few books or none, and there was little opportunity for the
exchange of opinion. Any variation in the dreary course of events was
welcome. A murder was not without its advantages as a stimulus to
conversation; a criminal trial was a kind of holiday to a county. It
was this poverty of life, this famine of social gratification, from
which sprang their fondness for the grosser forms of excitement, and
their tendency to rough and brutal practical joking. In a life like
theirs a laugh seemed worth having at any expense.

[Illustration:   HOUSE NEAR BEECHLAND, KENTUCKY, IN WHICH THOMAS LINCOLN
AND NANCY HANKS WERE MARRIED.]

But near as they were to barbarism in all the circumstances of their
daily existence, they were far from it politically. They were the
children of a race which had been trained in government for centuries
in the best school the world has ever seen, and wherever they went
they formed the town, the county, the court, and the legislative power
with the ease and certainty of nature evolving its results. And this
they accomplished in the face of a savage foe surrounding their feeble
settlements, always alert and hostile, invisible and dreadful as the
visionary powers of the air. Until the treaty of Greenville, in 1795,
closed the long and sanguinary history of the old Indian wars, there
was no day in which the pioneer could leave his cabin with the
certainty of not finding it in ashes when he returned, and his little
flock murdered on his threshold, or carried into a captivity worse
than death. Whenever nightfall came with the man of the house away
from home, the anxiety and care of the women and children were none
the less bitter because so common.

[Illustration:   MAP SHOWING VARIOUS LOCALITIES CONNECTED WITH EARLY
EVENTS IN THE LINCOLN FAMILY.]

The life of the pioneer Abraham Lincoln soon came to a disastrous
close. He had settled in Jefferson County, on the land he had bought
from the Government, and cleared a small farm in the forest.
[Footnote: Lyman C. Draper, of the Wisconsin Historical Society, has
kindly furnished us with a MS account of a Kentucky tradition
according to which the pioneer Abraham Lincoln was captured by the
Indians, near Crow's Station, in August, 1782, carried into captivity,
and forced to run the gauntlet. The story rests on the statement of a
single person, Mrs. Sarah Graham.] One morning in the year 1784, he
started with his three sons, Mordecai, Josiah, and Thomas, to the edge
of the clearing, and began the day's work. A shot from the brush
killed the father; Mordecai, the eldest son, ran instinctively to the
house, Josiah to the neighboring fort, for assistance, and Thomas, the
youngest, a child of six, was left with the corpse of his father.
Mordecai, reaching the cabin, seized the rifle, and saw through the
loophole an Indian in his war-paint stooping to raise the child from
the ground. He took deliberate aim at a white ornament on the breast
of the savage and brought him down. The little boy, thus released, ran
to the cabin, and Mordecai, from the loft, renewed his fire upon the
savages, who began to show themselves from the thicket, until Josiah
returned with assistance from the stockade, and the assailants fled.
This tragedy made an indelible impression on the mind of Mordecai.
Either a spirit of revenge for his murdered father, or a sportsmanlike
pleasure in his successful shot, made him a determined Indian-stalker,
and he rarely stopped to inquire whether the red man who came within
range of his rifle was friendly or hostile. [Footnote: Late in life
Mordecai Lincoln removed to Hancock County, Illinois, where his
descendants still live.]

[Illustration:   FAC-SIMILE OF THE MARRIAGE BOND OF THOMAS LINCOLN.]

The head of the family being gone, the widow Lincoln soon removed to a
more thickly settled neighborhood in Washington County. There her
children grew up. Mordecai and Josiah became reputable citizens; the
two daughters married two men named Crume and Brumfield. Thomas, to
whom were reserved the honors of an illustrious paternity, learned the
trade of a carpenter. He was an easy-going man, entirely without
ambition, but not without self-respect. Though the friendliest and
most jovial of gossips, he was not insensible to affronts; and when
his slow anger was roused he was a formidable adversary. Several
border bullies, at different times, crowded him indiscreetly, and were
promptly and thoroughly whipped. He was strong, well-knit, and sinewy;
but little over the medium height, though in other respects he seems
to have resembled his son in appearance.

On the 12th of June, 1806, [Footnote: All previous accounts give the
date of this marriage as September 23d. This error arose from a
clerical blunder in the county record of marriages. The minister, the
Rev. Jesse Head, in making his report, wrote the date before the
names; the clerk, copying it, lost the proper sequence of the entries,
and gave to the Lincolns the date belonging to the next couple on the
list.] while learning his trade in the carpenter shop of Joseph Hanks,
in Elizabethtown, he married Nancy Hanks, a niece of his employer,
near Beechland, in Washington County. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy
footnote (1) relocated to chapter end.] She was one of a large family
who had emigrated from Virginia with the Lincolns and with another
family called Sparrow. They had endured together the trials of pioneer
life; their close relations continued for many years after, and were
cemented by frequent intermarriage.

Mrs. Lincoln's mother was named Lucy Hanks; her sisters were Betty,
Polly, and Nancy who married Thomas Sparrow, Jesse Friend, and Levi
Hall. The childhood of Nancy was passed with the Sparrows, and she was
oftener called by their name than by her own. The whole family
connection was composed of people so little given to letters that it
is hard to determine the proper names and relationships of the younger
members amid the tangle of traditional cousinships. [Footnote: The
Hanks family seem to have gone from Pennsylvania and thence to
Kentucky about the same time with the Lincolns. They also belonged to
the Communion of Friends.--"Historical Collections of Gwynnedd," by H.
M. Jenkins.] Those who went to Indiana with Thomas Lincoln, and grew
up with his children, are the only ones that need demand our
attention.

There was no hint of future glory in the wedding or the bringing home
of Nancy Lincoln. All accounts represent her as a handsome young woman
of twenty-three, of appearance and intellect superior to her lowly
fortunes. She could read and write,--a remarkable accomplishment in
her circle,--and even taught her husband to form the letters of his
name. He had no such valuable wedding gift to bestow upon her; he
brought her to a little house in Elizabethtown, where he and she and
want dwelt together in fourteen feet square. The next year a daughter
was born to them; and the next the young carpenter, not finding his
work remunerative enough for his growing needs, removed to a little
farm which he had bought on the easy terms then prevalent in Kentucky.
It was on the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek, in what was then Hardin
and is now La Rue County, three miles from Hodgensville. The ground
had nothing attractive about it but its cheapness. It was hardly more
grateful than the rocky hill slopes of New England. It required full
as earnest and intelligent industry to persuade a living out of those
barren hillocks and weedy hollows, covered with stunted and scrubby
underbrush, as it would amid the rocks and sands of the northern
coast.

Thomas Lincoln settled down in this dismal solitude to a deeper
poverty than any of his name had ever known; and there, in the midst
of the most unpromising circumstances that ever witnessed the advent
of a hero into this world, Abraham Lincoln was born on the 12th day of
February, 1809.

Four years later, Thomas Lincoln purchased a fine farm of 238 acres on
Knob Creek, near where it flows into the Rolling Fork, and succeeded
in getting a portion of it into cultivation. The title, however,
remained in him only a little while, and after his property had passed
out of his control he looked about for another place to establish
himself.

[Illustration:   This Certificate, or Marriage List (here shown in
reduced fac-simile), written by the Rev. Jesse Head, was lost sight of
for many years, and about 1886 was discovered through the efforts of
W. F. Booker, Clerk of Washington County, Kentucky.]

Of all these years of Abraham Lincoln's early childhood we know almost
nothing. He lived a solitary life in the woods, returning from his
lonesome little games to his cheerless home. He never talked of these
days to his most intimate friends. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy
footnote (2) relocated to chapter end.] Once, when asked what he
remembered about the war with Great Britain, he replied: "Nothing but
this. I had been fishing one day and caught a little fish which I was
taking home. I met a soldier in the road, and, having been always told
at home that we must be good to the soldiers, I gave him my fish."
This is only a faint glimpse, but what it shows is rather
pleasant--the generous child and the patriotic household. But there is
no question that these first years of his life had their lasting
effect upon the temperament of this great mirthful and melancholy man.
He had little schooling. He accompanied his sister Sarah [Footnote:
This daughter of Thomas Lincoln is sometimes called Nancy and
sometimes Sarah. She seems to have borne the former name during her
mother's life-time, and to have taken her stepmother's name after Mr.
Lincoln's second marriage.] to the only schools that existed in their
neighborhood, one kept by Zachariah Riney, another by Caleb Hazel,
where he learned his alphabet and a little more. But of all those
advantages for the cultivation of a young mind and spirit which every
home now offers to its children, the books, toys, ingenious games, and
daily devotion of parental love, he knew absolutely nothing.

[Relocated Footnote: Soon after Mr. Lincoln arrived in Washington in
1861, he received the following letter from one of his Virginia
kinsmen, the last communication which ever came from them. It was
written on paper adorned with a portrait of Jefferson Davis, and was
inclosed in an envelope emblazoned with the Confederate flag:

"To ABRAHAM LINCOLN, Esq., _President of the Northern Confederacy_.

"SIR: Having just returned from a trip through Virginia, North
Carolina, and Tennessee, permit me to inform you that you will get
whipped out of your boots. To-day I met a gentleman from Anna,
Illinois, and although he voted for you he says that the moment your
troops leave Cairo they will get the spots knocked out of them. My
dear sir, these are facts which time will prove to be correct.

"I am, sir, with every consideration, yours respectfully,

"MINOR LINCOLN,

"Of the Staunton stock of Lincolns."

There was a young Abraham Lincoln on the Confederate side in the
Shenandoah distinguished for his courage and ferocity. He lay in wait
and shot a Drunkard preacher, whom he suspected of furnishing
information to the Union army. (Letter from Samuel W. Pennypacker.)]

[Relocated Footnote: In giving to the wife of the pioneer Lincoln the
name of Mary Shipley we follow the tradition in his family. The Hon.
J. L. Nall, of Missouri, grandson of Nancy (Lincoln) Brumfield,
Abraham Lincoln's youngest child, has given us so clear a statement of
the case that we cannot hesitate to accept it, although it conflicts
with equally positive statements from other sources. The late Gideon
Welles, Secretary of the Navy, who gave much intelligent effort to
genealogical researches, was convinced that the Abraham Lincoln who
married Miss Hannah Winters, a daughter of Ann Boone, sister of the
famous Daniel, was the President's grandfather. Waddell's "Annals of
Augusta County" says he married Elizabeth Winter, a cousin of Daniel
Boone. The Boone and Lincoln families were large and there were
frequent intermarriages among them, and the patriarchal name of
Abraham was a favorite one. There was still another Lincoln, Hannaniah
by name, who was also intimately associated with the Boones. His
signature appears on the surveyor's certificate for Abraham Lincoln's
land in Jefferson County, and he joined Daniel Boone in 1798 in the
purchase of the tract of land on the Missouri River where Boone died.
(Letter from Richard V. B. Lincoln, printed in the "Williamsport
[Pa.] Banner," Feb. 25, 1881.)]

[Relocated Footnote: In the possession of Colonel Reuben T. Durrett,
of Louisville, a gentleman who has made the early history of his State
a subject of careful study, and to whom we are greatly indebted for
information in regard to the settlement of the Lincolns in Kentucky.
He gives the following list of lands in that State owned by Abraham
Lincoln:

1. Four hundred acres on Long Run, a branch of Floyd's Fork, in
Jefferson County, entered May 29, 1780, and surveyed May 7, 1785. We
have in our possession the original patent issued by Governor Garrard,
of Kentucky, to Abraham Lincoln for this property. It was found by
Col. A. C. Matthews, of the 99th Illinois, in 1863, at an abandoned
residence near Indianola, Texas.

2. Eight hundred acres on Green River, near Green River Lick, entered
June 7, 1780, and surveyed October 12, 1784.

3. Five hundred acres in Campbell County, date of entry not known, but
surveyed September 27, 1798, and patented June 30, 1799--the survey
and patent evidently following his entry after his death. It is
possible that this was the five-hundred-acre tract found in Boone's
field-book, in the possession of Lyman C. Draper, Esq., Secretary of
the Wisconsin Historical Society, and erroneously supposed by some to
have been in Mercer County. Boone was a deputy of Colonel Thomas
Marshall, Surveyor of Fayette County.]

[Relocated Footnote (1): The following is a copy of the marriage bond:

"Know all men by these presents, that we, Thomas Lincoln and Richard
Berry, are held and firmly bound unto his Excellency, the Governor of
Kentucky, in the just and full sum of fifty pounds current money to the
payment of which well and truly to be made to the said Governor and his
successors, we bind ourselves, our heirs, etc., jointly and severally,
firmly by these presents, sealed with our seals and dated this 10th day
of June, 1806. The condition of the above obligation is such that
whereas there is a marriage shortly intended between the above bound
Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, for which a license has issued, now if
there be no lawful cause to obstruct the said marriage, then this
obligation to be void, else to remain in full force and virtue in law.

  "THOMAS LINCOLN [Seal].
  "RICHARD BERRY [Seal].
  "_Witness_, JOHN H. PARROTT, Guardian."

Richard Berry was a connection of Lincoln; his wife was a Shipley.]

[Relocated Footnote (2): There is still living (1886) near Knob Creek
in Kentucky, at the age of eighty, a man who claims to have known
Abraham Lincoln in his childhood--Austin Gollaher. He says he used to
play with Abe Lincoln in the shavings of his father's carpenter shop.
He tells a story which, if accurate, entitles him to the civic crown
which the Romans used to give to one who saved the life of a citizen.
When Gollaher was eleven and Lincoln eight the two boys were in the
woods in pursuit of partridges; in trying to "coon" across Knob Creek
on a log, Lincoln fell in and Gollaher fished him out with a sycamore
branch--a service to the Republic, the value of which it would be
difficult to compute.]




CHAPTER II

INDIANA


[Sidenote: 1818.]

By the time the boy Abraham had attained his seventh year, the social
condition of Kentucky had changed considerably from the early pioneer
days. Life had assumed a more settled and orderly course. The old
barbarous equality of the earlier time was gone; a difference of
classes began to be seen. Those who held slaves assumed a distinct
social superiority over those who did not. Thomas Lincoln, concluding
that Kentucky was no country for a poor man, determined to seek his
fortune in Indiana. He had heard of rich and unoccupied lands in Perry
County in that State, and thither he determined to go. He built a rude
raft, loaded it with his kit of tools and four hundred gallons of
whisky, and trusted his fortunes to the winding water-courses. He met
with only one accident on his way: his raft capsized in the Ohio
River, but he fished up his kit of tools and most of the ardent
spirits, and arrived safely at the place of a settler named Posey,
with whom he left his odd invoice of household goods for the
wilderness, while he started on foot to look for a home in the dense
forest. He selected a spot which pleased him in his first day's
journey. He then walked back to Knob Creek and brought his family on
to their new home. No humbler cavalcade ever invaded the Indiana
timber. Besides his wife and two children, his earthly possessions
were of the slightest, for the backs of two borrowed horses sufficed
for the load. Insufficient bedding and clothing, a few pans and
kettles, were their sole movable wealth. They relied on Lincoln's kit
of tools for their furniture, and on his rifle for their food. At
Posey's they hired a wagon and literally hewed a path through the
wilderness to their new habitation near Little Pigeon Creek, a mile
and a half east of Gentryville, in a rich and fertile forest country.

Thomas Lincoln, with the assistance of his wife and children, built a
temporary shelter of the sort called in the frontier language "a half-
faced camp"; merely a shed of poles, which defended the inmates on
three sides from foul weather, but left them open to its inclemency in
front. For a whole year his family lived in this wretched fold, while
he was clearing a little patch of ground for planting corn, and
building a rough cabin for a permanent residence. They moved into the
latter before it was half completed; for by this time the Sparrows had
followed the Lincolns from Kentucky, and the half-faced camp was given
up to them. But the rude cabin seemed so spacious and comfortable
after the squalor of "the camp," that Thomas Lincoln did no further
work on it for a long time. He left it for a year or two without
doors, or windows, or floor. The battle for existence allowed him no
time for such superfluities. He raised enough corn to support life;
the dense forest around him abounded in every form of feathered game;
a little way from his cabin an open glade was full of deer-licks, and
an hour or two of idle waiting was generally rewarded by a shot at a
fine deer, which would furnish meat for a week, and material for
breeches and shoes. His cabin was like that of other pioneers. A few
three-legged stools; a bedstead made of poles stuck between the logs
in the angle of the cabin, the outside corner supported by a crotched
stick driven into the ground; the table, a huge hewed log standing on
four legs; a pot, kettle, and skillet, and a few tin and pewter dishes
were all the furniture. The boy Abraham climbed at night to his bed of
leaves in the loft, by a ladder of wooden pins driven into the logs.

This life has been vaunted by poets and romancers as a happy and
healthful one. Even Dennis Hanks, speaking of his youthful days when
his only home was the half-faced camp, says, "I tell you, Billy, I
enjoyed myself better then than I ever have since." But we may
distrust the reminiscences of old settlers, who see their youth in the
flattering light of distance. The life was neither enjoyable nor
wholesome. The rank woods were full of malaria, and singular epidemics
from time to time ravaged the settlements. In the autumn of 1818 the
little community of Pigeon Creek was almost exterminated by a
frightful pestilence called the milk-sickness, or, in the dialect of
the country, "the milk-sick." It is a mysterious disease which has
been the theme of endless wrangling among Western physicians, and the
difficulty of ascertaining anything about it has been greatly
increased by the local sensitiveness which forbids any one to admit
that any well-defined case has ever been seen in his neighborhood,
"although just over the creek (or in the next county) they have had it
bad." It seems to have been a malignant form of fever--attributed
variously to malaria and to the eating of poisonous herbs by the
cattle--attacking cattle as well as human beings, attended with
violent retching and a burning sensation in the stomach, often
terminating fatally on the third day. In many cases those who
apparently recovered lingered for years with health seriously
impaired. Among the Pioneers of Pigeon Creek, so ill-fed, ill-housed,
and uncared for, there was little prospect of recovery from such a
grave disorder. The Sparrows, husband and wife, died early in October,
and Nancy Hanks Lincoln followed them after an interval of a few days.
Thomas Lincoln made the coffins for his dead "out of green lumber cut
with a whipsaw," and they were all buried, with scant ceremony, in a
little clearing of the forest. It is related of young Abraham, that he
sorrowed most of all that his mother should have been laid away with
such maimed rites, and that he contrived several months later to have
a wandering preacher named David Elkin brought to the settlement, to
deliver a funeral sermon over her grave, already white with the early
winter snows. [Footnote: A stone has been placed over the site of the
grave "by P. E. Studebaker, of South Bend, Indiana." The stone bears
the following inscription: "Nancy Hanks Lincoln, mother of President
Lincoln, died October 5th, A. D. 1818, aged 35 years. Erected by a
friend of her martyred son, 1879."]

This was the dreariest winter of his life, for before the next
December came his father had brought from Kentucky a new wife, who was
to change the lot of all the desolate little family very much for the
better. Sarah Bush had been an acquaintance of Thomas Lincoln before
his first marriage; she had, it is said, rejected him to marry one
Johnston, the jailer at Elizabethtown, who had died, leaving her with
three children, a boy and two girls. When Lincoln's widowhood had
lasted a year, he went down to Elizabethtown to begin again the wooing
broken off so many years before. He wasted no time in preliminaries,
but promptly made his wishes known, and the next morning they were
married. It was growing late in the autumn, and the pioneer probably
dreaded another lonely winter on Pigeon Creek. Mrs. Johnston was not
altogether portionless. She had a store of household goods which
filled a four-horse wagon borrowed of Ralph Grume, Thomas Lincoln's
brother-in-law, to transport the bride to Indiana. It took little time
for this energetic and honest Christian woman to make her influence
felt, even in those discouraging surroundings, and Thomas Lincoln and
the children were the better for her coming all the rest of their
lives. The lack of doors and floors was at once corrected. Her honest
pride inspired her husband to greater thrift and industry. The goods
she brought with her compelled some effort at harmony in the other
fittings of the house. She dressed the children in warmer clothing and
put them to sleep in comfortable beds. With this slight addition to
their resources the family were much improved in appearance, behavior,
and self-respect.

[Illustration:   SARAH BUSH LINCOLN AT THE AGE OF SEVENTY-SIX.]

Thomas Lincoln joined the Baptist church at Little Pigeon in 1823; his
oldest child, Sarah, followed his example three years later. They were
known as active and consistent members of that communion. Lincoln was
himself a good carpenter when he chose to work at his trade; a walnut
table made by him is still preserved as part of the furniture of the
church to which he belonged.

[Sidenote: MS. letter from the Rev. T.V. Robertson, pastor of the
Little Pigeon Baptist church.]

Such a woman as Sarah Bush could not be careless of so important a
matter as the education of her children, and they made the best use of
the scanty opportunities the neighborhood afforded. "It was a wild
region," writes Mr. Lincoln, in one of those rare bits of
autobiography which he left behind him, "with many bears and other
wild animals still in the woods. There were some schools so-called,
but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond 'readin',
writin', and cipherin' to the Rule of Three.' If a straggler supposed
to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was
looked upon as a wizard. There was absolutely nothing to excite
ambition for education." But in the case of this ungainly boy there
was no necessity of any external incentive. A thirst for knowledge as
a means of rising in the world was innate in him. It had nothing to do
with that love of science for its own sake which has been so often
seen in lowly savants, who have sacrificed their lives to the pure
desire of knowing the works of God. All the little learning he ever
acquired he seized as a tool to better his condition. He learned his
letters that he might read books and see how men in the great world
outside of his woods had borne themselves in the fight for which he
longed. He learned to write, first, that he might have an
accomplishment his playmates had not; then that he might help his
elders by writing their letters, and enjoy the feeling of usefulness
which this gave him; and finally that he might copy what struck him in
his reading and thus make it his own for future use. He learned to
cipher certainly from no love of mathematics, but because it might
come in play in some more congenial business than the farm-work which
bounded the horizon of his contemporaries. Had it not been for that
interior spur which kept his clear spirit at its task, his schools
could have done little for him; for, counting his attendance under
Riney and Hazel in Kentucky, and under Dorsey, Crawford, and Swaney in
Indiana, it amounted to less than a year in all. The schools were much
alike. They were held in deserted cabins of round logs, with earthen
floors, and small holes for windows, sometimes illuminated by as much
light as could penetrate through panes of paper greased with lard. The
teachers were usually in keeping with their primitive surroundings.
The profession offered no rewards sufficient to attract men of
education or capacity. After a few months of desultory instruction
young Abraham knew all that these vagrant literati could teach him.
His last school-days were passed with one Swaney in 1826, who taught
at a distance of four and a half miles from the Lincoln cabin. The
nine miles of walking doubtless seemed to Thomas Lincoln a waste of
time, and the lad was put at steady work and saw no more of school.

But it is questionable whether he lost anything by being deprived of
the ministrations of the backwoods dominies. When his tasks ended, his
studies became the chief pleasure of his life. In all the intervals of
his work--in which he never took delight, knowing well enough that he
was born for something better than that--he read, wrote, and ciphered
incessantly. His reading was naturally limited by his opportunities,
for books were among the rarest of luxuries in that region and time.
But he read everything he could lay his hands upon, and he was
certainly fortunate in the few books of which he became the possessor.
It would hardly be possible to select a better handful of classics for
a youth in his circumstances than the few volumes he turned with a
nightly and daily hand--the Bible, "Aesop's Fables," "Robinson Crusoe,"
"The Pilgrim's Progress," a history of the United States, and Weem's
"Life of Washington." These were the best, and these he read over and
over till he knew them almost by heart. But his voracity for anything
printed was insatiable. He would sit in the twilight and read a
dictionary as long as he could see. He used to go to David Turnham's,
the town constable, and devour the "Revised Statutes of Indiana," as
boys in our day do the "Three Guardsmen." Of the books he did not own
he took voluminous notes, filling his copy-book with choice extracts,
and poring over them until they were fixed in his memory. He could not
afford to waste paper upon his original compositions. He would sit by
the fire at night and cover the wooden shovel with essays and
arithmetical exercises, which he would shave off and then begin again.
It is touching to think of this great-spirited child, battling year
after year against his evil star, wasting his ingenuity upon devices
and makeshifts, his high intelligence starving for want of the simple
appliances of education that are now offered gratis to the poorest and
most indifferent. He did a man's work from the time he left school;
his strength and stature were already far beyond those of ordinary
men. He wrought his appointed tasks ungrudgingly, though without
enthusiasm; but when his employer's day was over, his own began. John
Hanks says: "When Abe and I returned to the house from work he would
go to the cupboard, snatch a piece of corn-bread, take down a book,
sit down, cock his legs up as high as his head, and read." The picture
may be lacking in grace, but its truthfulness is beyond question. The
habit remained with him always. Some of his greatest work in later
years was done in this grotesque Western fashion,--"sitting on his
shoulder-blades."

[Sidenote: W. H. Lamou "Life of Lincoln," p. 37.]

[Sidenote: Damon, p. 80.]

Otherwise his life at this time differed little from that of ordinary
farm-hands. His great strength and intelligence made him a valuable
laborer, and his unfailing good temper and flow of rude rustic wit
rendered him the most agreeable of comrades. He was always ready with
some kindly act or word for others. Once he saved the life of the town
drunkard, whom he found freezing by the roadside, by carrying him in
his strong arms to the tavern, and working over him until he revived.
It is a curious fact that this act of common humanity was regarded as
something remarkable in the neighborhood; the grateful sot himself
always said "it was mighty clever of Abe to tote me so far that cold
night." It was also considered an eccentricity that he hated and
preached against cruelty to animals. Some of his comrades remember
still his bursts of righteous wrath, when a boy, against the wanton
murder of turtles and other creatures. He was evidently of better and
finer clay than his fellows, even in those wild and ignorant days. At
home he was the life of the singularly assorted household, which
consisted, besides his parents and himself, of his own sister, Mrs.
Lincoln's two girls and boy, Dennis Hanks, the legacy of the dying
Sparrow family, and John Hanks (son of the carpenter Joseph with whom
Thomas Lincoln learned his trade), who came from Kentucky several
years after the others. It was probably as much the inexhaustible good
nature and kindly helpfulness of young Abraham which kept the peace
among all these heterogeneous elements, effervescing with youth and
confined in a one-roomed cabin, as it was the Christian sweetness and
firmness of the woman of the house. It was a happy and united
household: brothers and sisters and cousins living peacefully under
the gentle rule of the good stepmother, but all acknowledging from a
very early period the supremacy in goodness and cleverness of their
big brother Abraham. Mrs. Lincoln, not long before her death, gave
striking testimony of his winning and loyal character. She said to Mr.
Herndon: "I can say, what scarcely one mother in a thousand can say,
Abe never gave me a cross word or look, and never refused in fact or
appearance to do anything I asked him. His mind and mine--what little
I had--seemed to run together.... I had a son John, who was raised
with Abe. Both were good boys, but I must say, both now being dead,
that Abe was the best boy I ever saw or expect to see." Such were the
beginnings of this remarkable career, sacred as we see from childhood,
to duty and to human kindliness.

"We are making no claim of early saintship for him. He was merely a
good boy, with sufficient wickedness to prove his humanity. One of his
employers, undazzled by recent history, faithfully remembers that
young Abe liked his dinner and his pay better than his work: there is
surely nothing alien to ordinary mortality in this. It is also
reported that he sometimes impeded the celerity of harvest operations
by making burlesque speeches, or worse than that, comic sermons, from
the top of some tempting stump, to the delight of the hired hands and
the exasperation of the farmer. His budding talents as a writer were
not always used discreetly. He was too much given to scribbling coarse
satires and chronicles, in prose, and in something which had to him
and his friends the air of verse. From this arose occasional heart-
burnings and feuds, in which Abraham bore his part according to the
custom of the country. Despite his Quaker ancestry and his natural
love of peace, he was no non-resistant, and when he once entered upon
a quarrel the opponent usually had the worst of it. But he was
generous and placable, and some of his best friends were those with
whom he had had differences, and had settled them in the way then
prevalent,--in a ring of serious spectators, calmly and judicially
ruminant, under the shade of some spreading oak, at the edge of the
timber. Before we close our sketch of this period of Lincoln's life,
it may not be amiss to glance for a moment at the state of society
among the people with whom his lot was cast in these important years.

In most respects there had been little moral or material improvement
since the early settlement of the country. Their houses were usually
of one room, built of round logs with the bark on. We have known a man
to gain the sobriquet of "Split-log Mitchell" by indulging in the
luxury of building a cabin of square-hewn timbers. Their dress was
still mostly of tanned deer-hide, a material to the last degree
uncomfortable when the wearer was caught in a shower. Their shoes were
of the same, and a good Western authority calls a wet moccasin "a
decent way of going barefoot." About the time, however, when Lincoln
grew to manhood, garments of wool and of tow began to be worn, dyed
with the juice of the butternut or white walnut, and the hides of
neat-cattle began to be tanned. But for a good while it was only the
women who indulged in these novelties. There was little public
worship. Occasionally an itinerant preacher visited a county, and the
settlers for miles around would go nearly in mass to the meeting. If a
man was possessed of a wagon, the family rode luxuriously; but as a
rule the men walked and the women went on horseback with the little
children in their arms. It was considered no violation of the
sanctities of the occasion to carry a rifle and take advantage of any
game which might be stirring during the long walk. Arriving at the
place of meeting, which was some log cabin if the weather was foul, or
the shade of a tree if it was fair, the assembled worshipers threw
their provisions into a common store and picnicked in neighborly
companionship. The preacher would then take off his coat, and go at
his work with an energy unknown to our days.

There were few other social meetings. Men came together for
"raisings," where a house was built in a day; for "log-rollings,"
where tons of excellent timber were piled together and wastefully
burned; for wolf-hunts, where a tall pole was erected in the midst of
a prairie or clearing, and a great circle of hunters formed around it,
sometimes of miles in diameter, which, gradually contracting with
shouts and yells, drove all the game in the woods together at the pole
for slaughter; and for horse-races, which bore little resemblance to
those magnificent exhibitions which are the boast of Kentucky at this
time. In these affairs the women naturally took no part; but weddings,
which were entertainments scarcely less rude and boisterous, were
their own peculiar province. These festivities lasted rarely less than
twenty-four hours. The guests assembled in the morning. There was a
race for the whisky bottle; a midday dinner; an afternoon of rough
games and outrageous practical jokes; a supper and dance at night,
interrupted by the successive withdrawals of the bride and of the
groom, attended with ceremonies and jests of more than Rabelaisian
crudeness; and a noisy dispersal next day.

[Sidenote: O. H. Smith, "Early Indiana Trials," p. 285.]

The one point at which they instinctively clung to civilization was
their regard for law and reverence for courts of justice. Yet these
were of the simplest character and totally devoid of any adventitious
accessories. An early jurist of the country writes: "I was Circuit
Prosecuting Attorney at the time of the trials at the falls of Fall
Creek, where Pendleton now stands. Four of the prisoners were
convicted of murder, and three of them hung, for killing Indians. The
court was held in a double log cabin, the grand jury sat upon a log in
the woods, and the foreman signed the bills of indictment, which I had
prepared, upon his knee; there was not a petit juror that had shoes
on; all wore moccasins, and were belted around the waist, and carried
side-knives used by the hunters." Yet amidst all this apparent
savagery we see justice was done, and the law vindicated even against
the bitterest prejudices of these pioneer jurymen.

[Sidenote: Lamon, p. 44.]

They were full of strange superstitions. The belief in witchcraft had
long ago passed away with the smoke of the fagots from old and New
England, but it survived far into this century in Kentucky and the
lower halves of Indiana and Illinois--touched with a peculiar tinge of
African magic. The pioneers believed in it for good and evil. Their
veterinary practice was mostly by charms and incantations; and when a
person believed himself bewitched, a shot at the image of the witch
with a bullet melted out of a half-dollar was the favorite curative
agency. Luck was an active divinity in their apprehension, powerful
for blessing or bane, announced by homely signs, to be placated by
quaint ceremonies. A dog crossing the hunter's path spoiled his day,
unless he instantly hooked his little fingers together, and pulled
till the animal disappeared. They were familiar with the ever-
recurring mystification of the witch-hazel, or divining-rod; and the
"cure by faith" was as well known to them as it has since become in a
more sophisticated state of society. The commonest occurrences were
heralds of death and doom. A bird lighting in a window, a dog baying
at certain hours, the cough of a horse in the direction of a child,
the sight, or worse still, the touch of a dead snake, heralded
domestic woe. A wagon driving past the house with a load of baskets
was a warning of atmospheric disturbance. A vague and ignorant
astronomy governed their plantings and sowings, the breeding of their
cattle, and all farm-work. They must fell trees for fence-rails before
noon, and in the waxing of the moon. Fences built when there was no
moon would give way; but that was the proper season for planting
potatoes and other vegetables whose fruit grows underground; those
which bore their product in the air must be planted when the moon
shone. The magical power of the moon was wide in its influence; it
extended to the most minute details of life.

[Sidenote: Lamon, p. 52.]

Among these people, and in all essential respects one of them, Abraham
Lincoln passed his childhood and youth. He was not remarkably
precocious. His mind was slow in acquisition, and his powers of
reasoning and rhetoric improved constantly to the end of his life, at
a rate of progress marvelously regular and sustained. But there was
that about him, even at the age of nineteen years, which might well
justify his admiring friends in presaging for him an unusual career.
He had read every book he could find, and could "spell down" the whole
county at their orthographical contests. By dint of constant practice
he had acquired an admirably clear and serviceable handwriting. He
occasionally astounded his companions by such glimpses of occult
science as that the world is round and that the sun is relatively
stationary. He wrote, for his own amusement and edification, essays on
politics, of which gentlemen of standing who had been favored with a
perusal said with authority, at the cross-roads grocery, "The world
can't beat it." One or two of these compositions got into print and
vastly increased the author's local fame. He was also a magnanimous
boy, with a larger and kindlier spirit than common. His generosity,
courage, and capability of discerning two sides to a dispute, were
remarkable even then, and won him the admiration of those to whom such
qualities were unknown. But perhaps, after all, the thing which gained
and fixed his mastery over his fellows was to a great degree his
gigantic stature and strength. He attained his full growth, six feet
and four inches, two years before he came of age. He rarely met with a
man he could not easily handle. His strength is still a tradition in
Spencer County. One aged man says that he has seen him pick up and
carry away a chicken-house weighing six hundred pounds. At another
time, seeing some men preparing a contrivance for lifting some large
posts, Abe quickly shouldered the posts and took them where they were
needed. One of his employers says, "He could sink an axe deeper into
wood than any man I ever saw." With strength like this and a brain to
direct it, a man was a born leader in that country and at that time.
There are, of course, foolish stories extant that Abraham used to
boast, and that others used to predict, that he would be President
some day. The same thing is daily said of thousands of boys who will
never be constables. But there is evidence that he felt too large for
the life of a farmhand on Pigeon Creek, and his thoughts naturally
turned, after the manner of restless boys in the West, to the river,
as the avenue of escape from the narrow life of the woods. He once
asked an old friend to give him a recommendation to some steamboat on
the Ohio, but desisted from his purpose on being reminded that his
father had the right to dispose of his time for a year or so more. But
in 1828 an opportunity offered for a little glimpse of the world
outside, and the boy gladly embraced it. He was hired by Mr. Gentry,
the proprietor of the neighboring village of Gentryville, to accompany
his son with a flat-boat of produce to New Orleans and intermediate
landings. The voyage was made successfully, and Abraham gained great
credit for his management and sale of the cargo. The only important
incident of the trip occurred at the plantation of Madame Duchesne, a
few miles below Baton Rouge. The young merchants had tied up for the
night and were asleep in the cabin, when they were aroused by
shuffling footsteps, which proved to be a gang of marauding negroes,
coming to rob the boat. Abraham instantly attacked them with a club,
knocked several overboard and put the rest to flight; flushed with
battle, he and Allen Gentry carried the war into the enemy's country,
and pursued the retreating Africans some distance in the darkness.
They then returned to the boat, bleeding but victorious, and hastily
swung into the stream and floated down the river till daylight.
Lincoln's exertion in later years for the welfare of the African race
showed that this nocturnal battle had not led him to any hasty and
hostile generalizations.

The next autumn, John Hanks, the steadiest and most trustworthy of his
family, went to Illinois. Though an illiterate and rather dull man, he
had a good deal of solidity of character and consequently some
influence and consideration in the household. He settled in Macon
County, and was so well pleased with the country, and especially with
its admirable distribution into prairie and timber, that he sent
repeated messages to his friends in Indiana to come out and join him.
Thomas Lincoln was always ready to move. He had probably by this time
despaired of ever owning any unencumbered real estate in Indiana, and
the younger members of the family had little to bind them to the place
where they saw nothing in the future but hard work and poor living.
Thomas Lincoln handed over his farm to Mr. Gentry, sold his crop of
corn and hogs, packed his household goods and those of his children
and sons-in-law into a single wagon, drawn by two yoke of oxen, the
combined wealth of himself and Dennis Hanks, and started for the new
State. His daughter Sarah or Nancy, for she was called by both names,
who married Aaron Grigsby a few years before, had died in childbirth.
The emigrating family consisted of the Lincolns, John Johnston, Mrs.
Lincoln's son, and her daughters, Mrs. Hall and Mrs. Hanks, with their
husbands.

Two weeks of weary tramping over forest roads and muddy prairie, and
the dangerous fording of streams swollen by the February thaws,
brought the party to John Hanks's place near Decatur. He met them with
a frank and energetic welcome. He had already selected a piece of
ground for them a few miles from his own, and had the logs ready for
their house. They numbered men enough to build without calling in
their neighbors, and immediately put up a cabin on the north fork of
the Sangamon River. The family thus housed and sheltered, one more bit
of filial work remained for Abraham before assuming his virile
independence. With the assistance of John Hanks he plowed fifteen
acres, and split, from the tall walnut-trees of the primeval forest,
enough rails to surround them with a fence. Little did either dream,
while engaged in this work, that the day would come when the
appearance of John Hanks in a public meeting, with two of these rails
on his shoulder, would electrify a State convention, and kindle
throughout the country a contagious and passionate enthusiasm, whose
results would reach to endless generations.




CHAPTER III

ILLINOIS IN 1830


[Sidenote: Roy. J. M. Sturtevant, "Address to Old Settlers of Morgan
County."]

[Sidenote: Thomas Buckles, of McLean County.]

[Sidenote: J.C. Power, "Early Settlers of Sangamon County," p. 62.]

[Sidenote: "Old Times in McLean County," p. 414.]

[Illustration:   GOOSE-NEST PRAIRIE, NEAR FARMINGTON ILLINOIS, WHERE
THOMAS LINCOLN LIVED AND DIED.]

The Lincolns arrived in Illinois just in time to entitle themselves to
be called pioneers. When, in after years, associations of "Old
Settlers" began to be formed in Central Illinois, the qualification
for membership agreed upon by common consent was a residence in the
country before "the winter of the deep snow." This was in 1830-31, a
season of such extraordinary severity that it has formed for half a
century a recognized date in the middle counties of Illinois, among
those to whom in those days diaries and journals were unknown. The
snowfall began in the Christmas holidays and continued until the snow
was three feet deep on level ground. Then came a cold rain, freezing
as it fell, until a thick crust of ice gathered over the snow. The
weather became intensely cold, the mercury sinking to twelve degrees
below zero, Fahrenheit, and remaining there for two weeks. The storm
came on with such suddenness that all who were abroad had great
trouble in reaching their homes, and many perished. One man relates
that he and a friend or two were out in a hunting party with an ox-
team. They had collected a wagon-load of game and were on their way
home when the storm struck them. After they had gone four miles they
were compelled to abandon their wagon; the snow fell in heavy masses
"as if thrown from a scoop-shovel"; arriving within two miles of their
habitation, they were forced to trust to the instinct of their
animals, and reached home hanging to the tails of their steers. Not
all were so fortunate. Some were found weeks afterwards in the snow-
drifts, their flesh gnawed by famished wolves; and the fate of others
was unknown until the late spring sunshine revealed their resting-
places. To those who escaped, the winter was tedious and terrible. It
is hard for us to understand the isolation to which such weather
condemned the pioneer. For weeks they remained in their cabins hoping
for some mitigation of the frost. When at last they were driven out by
the fear of famine, the labor of establishing communications was
enormous. They finally made roads by "wallowing through the snow," as
an Illinois historian expresses it, and going patiently over the same
track until the snow was trampled hard and rounded like a turnpike.
These roads lasted far into the spring, when the snow had melted from
the plains, and wound for miles like threads of silver over the rich
black loam of the prairies. After that winter game was never again so
plentiful in the State. Much still remained, of course, but it never
recovered entirely from the rigors of that season and the stupid
enterprise of the pioneer hunters, who, when they came out of their
snow-beleaguered cabins, began chasing and killing the starved deer by
herds. It was easy work; the crust of the snow was strong enough to
bear the weight of men and dogs, but the slender hoofs of the deer
would after a few bounds pierce the treacherous surface. This
destructive slaughter went on until the game grew too lean to be worth
the killing. All sorts of wild animals grew scarce from that winter.
Old settlers say that the slow cowardly breed of prairie wolves, which
used to be caught and killed as readily as sheep, disappeared about
that time and none but the fleeter and stronger survived.

Only once since then has nature shown such extravagant severity in
Illinois, and that was on a day in the winter of 1836, known to
Illinoisans as "the sudden change." At noon on the 20th of December,
after a warm and rainy morning, the ground being covered with mud and
slush, the temperature fell instantly forty degrees. A man riding into
Springfield for a marriage license says a roaring and crackling wind
came upon him and the rain-drops dripping from his bridle-reins and
beard changed in a second into jingling icicles. He rode hastily into
the town and arrived in a few minutes at his destination; but his
clothes were frozen like sheet iron, and man and saddle had to be
taken into the house together to be thawed apart. Geese and chickens
were caught by the feet and wings and frozen to the wet ground. A
drove of a thousand hogs, which were being driven to St. Louis, rushed
together for warmth, and became piled in a great heap. Those inside
smothered and those outside froze, and the ghastly pyramid remained
there on the prairie for weeks: the drovers barely escaped with their
lives. Men killed their horses, disemboweled them, and crept into the
cavity of their bodies to escape the murderous wind. [Footnote:
Although the old settlers of Sangamon County are acquainted with these
facts, and we have often heard them and many others like them from the
lips of eye-witnesses, we have preferred to cite only these incidents
of the sudden change which are given in the careful and conscientious
compilation entitled "The Early Settlers of Sangamon County," by John
Carroll Power.]

The pioneer period of Illinois was ending as Thomas Lincoln and his
tall boy drove their ox-team over the Indiana line. The population of
the State had grown to 157,447. It still clung to the wooded borders
of the water-courses; scattered settlements were to be found all along
the Mississippi and its affluents, from where Cairo struggled for life
in the swamps of the Ohio to the bustling and busy mining camps which
the recent discovery of lead had brought to Galena. A line of villages
from Alton to Peoria dotted the woodland which the Illinois River had
stretched, like a green baldric, diagonally across the bosom of the
State. Then there were long reaches of wilderness before you came to
Fort Dearborn, where there was nothing as yet to give promise of that
miraculous growth which was soon to make Chicago a proverb to the
world. There were a few settlements in the fertile region called the
Military Tract; the southern part of the State was getting itself
settled here and there. People were coming in freely to the Sangamon
country. But a grassy solitude stretched from Galena to Chicago, and
the upper half of the State was generally a wilderness. The earlier
emigrants, principally of the poorer class of Southern farmers,
shunned the prairies with something of a superstitious dread. They
preferred to pass the first years of their occupation in the wasteful
and laborious work of clearing a patch of timber for corn, rather than
enter upon those rich savannas which were ready to break into
fertility at the slightest provocation of culture. Even so late as
1835, writes J. F. Speed, "no one dreamed the prairies would ever be
occupied." It was thought they would be used perpetually as grazing-
fields for stock. For years the long processions of "movers" wound,
over those fertile and neglected plains, taking no hint of the wealth
suggested by the rank luxuriance of vegetable growth around them, the
carpet of brilliant flowers spread over the verdant knolls, the
strong, succulent grass that waved in the breeze, full of warm and
vital odor, as high as the waist of a man. In after years, when the
emigration from the Northern and Eastern States began to pour in, the
prairies were rapidly taken up, and the relative growth and importance
of the two sections of the State were immediately reversed. Governor
Ford, writing about 1847, attributes this result to the fact that the
best class of Southern people were slow to emigrate to a State where
they could not take their slaves; while the settlers from the North,
not being debarred by the State Constitution from bringing their
property with them, were of a different class. "The northern part of
the State was settled in the first instance by wealthy farmers,
enterprising merchants, millers, and manufacturers. They made farms,
built mills, churches, school-houses, towns, and cities, and
constructed roads and bridges as if by magic; so that although the
settlements in the southern part of the State are from twenty to fifty
years in advance on the score of age, yet are they ten years behind in
point of wealth and all the appliances of a higher civilization."

[Sidenote: Thomas Ford, "History of Illinois," p. 280.]

At the time which we are specially considering, however, the few
inhabitants of the south and the center were principally from what
came afterwards to be called the border slave States. They were mostly
a simple, neighborly, unambitious people, contented with their
condition, living upon plain fare, and knowing not much of anything
better. Luxury was, of course, unknown; even wealth, if it existed,
could procure few of the comforts of refined life. There was little or
no money in circulation. Exchanges were effected by the most primitive
forms of barter, and each family had to rely chiefly upon itself for
the means of living. The neighbors would lend a hand in building a
cabin for a new-comer; after that he must in most cases shift for
himself. Many a man arriving from an old community, and imperfectly
appreciating the necessities of pioneer life, has found suddenly, on
the approach of winter, that he must learn to make shoes or go
barefoot. The furniture of their houses was made with an axe from the
trees of the forest. Their clothing was all made at home. The buckskin
days were over to a great extent, though an occasional hunting-shirt
and pair of moccasins were still seen. But flax and hemp had begun to
be cultivated, and as the wolves were killed off the sheep-folds
increased, and garments resembling those of civilization were spun and
woven, and cut and sewed, by the women of the family. When a man had a
suit of jeans colored with butternut-dye, and his wife a dress of
linsey, they could appear with the best at a wedding or a quilting
frolic. The superfluous could not have been said to exist in a
community where men made their own buttons, where women dug roots in
the woods to make their tea with, where many children never saw a
stick of candy until after they were grown. The only sweetmeats known
were those a skillful cook could compose from the honey plundered from
the hollow oaks where the wild bees had stored it. Yet there was
withal a kind of rude plenty; the woods swarmed with game, and after
swine began to be raised, there was the bacon and hoe-cake which any
south-western farmer will say is good enough for a king. The greatest
privation was the lack of steel implements. His axe was as precious to
the pioneer as his sword to the knight errant. Governor John Reynolds
speaks of the panic felt in his father's family when the axe was
dropped into a stream. A battered piece of tin was carefully saved and
smoothed, and made into a grater for green corn.

[Sidenote: William H. Herndon's speech at Old Settlers' Meeting,
Menard County.]

[Sidenote: "Old Times in McLean County," p. 194.]

They had their own amusements, of course; no form of society is
without them, from the anthropoid apes to the Jockey Club. As to the
grosser and ruder shapes taken by the diversions of the pioneers, we
will let Mr. Herndon speak--their contemporary annalist and ardent
panegyrist: "These men could shave a horse's mane and tail, paint,
disfigure, and offer it for sale to the owner. They could hoop up in a
hogshead a drunken man, they themselves being drunk, put in and nail
fast the head, and roll the man down hill a hundred feet or more. They
could run down a lean and hungry wild pig, catch it, heat a ten-plate
stove furnace hot, and putting in the pig, could cook it, they dancing
the while a merry jig." Wild oats of this kind seem hardly compatible
with a harvest of civilization, but it is contended that such of these
roysterers as survived their stormy beginnings became decent and
serious citizens. Indeed, Mr. Herndon insists than even in their hot
youth they showed the promise of goodness and piety. "They attended
church, heard the sermon, wept and prayed, shouted, got up and fought
an hour, and then went back to prayer, just as the spirit moved them."
The camp-meeting may be said, with no irreverent intention, to have
been their principal means of intellectual excitement. The circuit
preachers were for a long time the only circulating medium of thought
and emotion that kept the isolated settlements from utter spiritual
stagnation. They were men of great physical and moral endurance,
absolutely devoted to their work, which they pursued in the face of
every hardship and discouragement. Their circuits were frequently so
great in extent that they were forced to be constantly on the route;
what reading they did was done in the saddle. They received perhaps
fifty dollars from the missionary fund and half as much more from
their congregations, paid for the most part in necessaries of life.
Their oratory was suited to their longitude, and was principally
addressed to the emotions of their hearers. It was often very
effective, producing shouts and groans and genuflections among the
audience at large, and terrible convulsions among the more nervous and
excitable. We hear sometimes of a whole congregation prostrated as by
a hurricane, flinging their limbs about in furious contortions, with
wild outcries. To this day some of the survivors of that period insist
that it was the spirit of the Almighty, and nothing less, that thus
manifested itself. The minister, however, did not always share in the
delirium of his hearers. Governor Reynolds tells us of a preacher in
Sangamon County, who, before his sermon, had set a wolf-trap in view
from his pulpit. In the midst of his exhortations his keen eyes saw
the distant trap collapse, and he continued in the same intonation
with which he had been preaching, "Mind the text, brethren, till I go
kill that wolf!" With all the failings and eccentricities of this
singular class of men, they did a great deal of good, and are entitled
to especial credit among those who conquered the wilderness. The
emotions they excited did not all die away in the shouts and
contortions of the meeting. Not a few of the cabins in the clearings
were the abode of a fervent religion and an austere morality. Many a
traveler, approaching a rude hut in the woods in the gathering
twilight, distrusting the gaunt and silent family who gave him an
unsmiling welcome, the bare interior, the rifles and knives
conspicuously displayed, has felt his fears vanish when he sat down to
supper, and the master of the house, in a few fervent words, invoked
the blessing of heaven on the meal.

There was very little social intercourse; a visit was a serious
matter, involving the expenditure of days of travel. It was the custom
among families, when the longing for the sight of kindred faces was
too strong to withstand, to move in a body to the distant settlement
where their relatives lived and remain with them for months at a time.
The claims of consanguinity were more regarded than now. Almost the
only festivities were those that accompanied weddings, and these were,
of course, of a primitive kind. The perils and adventures through
which the young pioneers went to obtain their brides furnish forth
thousands of tales by Western firesides. Instead of taking the rosy
daughter of a neighbor, the enterprising bachelor would often go back
to Kentucky, and pass through as many adventures in bringing his wife
home as a returning crusader would meet between Beirut and Vienna. If
she was a young woman who respected herself, the household gear she
would insist on bringing would entail an Iliad of embarrassments. An
old farmer of Sangamon County still talks of a featherbed weighing
fifty-four pounds with which his wife made him swim six rivers under
penalty of desertion.

It was not always easy to find a competent authority to perform the
ceremony. A justice in McLean County lived by the bank of a river, and
his services were sometimes required by impatient lovers on the other
bank when the waters were too torrential to cross. In such cases,
being a conscientious man, he always insisted that they should ride
into the stream far enough for him to discern their features, holding
torches to their faces by night and by storm. The wooing of those days
was prompt and practical. There was no time for the gradual approaches
of an idler and more conventional age. It is related of one Stout, one
of the legendary Nimrods of Illinois, who was well and frequently
married, that he had one unfailing formula of courtship. He always
promised the ladies whose hearts he was besieging that "they should
live in the timber where they could pick up their own firewood."

Theft was almost unknown; property, being so hard to get, was
jealously guarded, as we have already noticed in speaking of the
settlement of Kentucky. The pioneers of Illinois brought with them the
same rigid notions of honesty which their environment maintained. A
man in Macoupin County left his wagon, loaded with corn, stuck in the
prairie mud for two weeks near a frequented road. When he returned he
found some of his corn gone, but there was money enough tied in the
sacks to pay for what was taken. Men carrying bags of silver from the
towns of Illinois to St. Louis rather made a display of it, as it
enhanced their own importance, and there was no fear of robbery. There
were of course no locks on the cabin doors, and the early merchants
sometimes left their stores unprotected for days together when they
went to the nearest city to replenish their stock. Of course there
were rare exceptions to this rule, but a single theft alarmed and
excited a whole neighborhood. When a crime was traced home, the family
of the criminal were generally obliged to remove.

[Sidenote: N.W. Edwards, "Life and Times of Ninian Edwards," p. 163.]

There were still, even so late as the time to which we are referring,
two alien elements in the population of the State--the French and the
Indians. The French settlements about Kaskaskia retained much of their
national character, and the pioneers from the South who visited them
or settled among them never ceased to wonder at their gayety, their
peaceable industry and enterprise, and their domestic affection, which
they did not care to dissemble and conceal like their shy and reticent
neighbors. It was a daily spectacle, which never lost its strangeness
for the Tennesseeans and Kentuckians, to see the Frenchman returning
from his work greeted by his wife and children with embraces of
welcome "at the gate of his door-yard, and in view of all the
villagers." The natural and kindly fraternization of the Frenchmen
with the Indians was also a cause of wonder to the Americans. The
friendly intercourse between them, and their occasional
intermarriages, seemed little short of monstrous to the ferocious
exclusiveness of the Anglo-Saxon. [Footnote: Michelet notices this
exclusiveness of the English, and inveighs against it in his most
lyric style. "Crime contre la nature! Crime contre l'humanite! Il sera
expie par la sterilite de l'esprit."] The Indians in the central part
of Illinois cut very little figure in the reminiscences of the
pioneers; they occupied much the same relation to them as the tramp to
the housewife of to-day. The Winnebago war in 1827 and the Black Hawk
war in 1831 disturbed only the northern portion of the State. A few
scattered and vagrant lodges of Pottawatomies and Kickapoos were all
the pioneers of Sangamon and the neighboring counties ever met. They
were spared the heroic struggle of the advance-guard of civilization
in other States. A woman was sometimes alarmed by a visit from a
drunken savage; poultry and pigs occasionally disappeared when they
were in the neighborhood; but life was not darkened by the constant
menace of massacre. A few years earlier, indeed, the relations of the
two races had been more strained, as may be inferred from an act
passed by the territorial Legislature in 1814, offering a reward of
fifty dollars to any citizen or ranger who should kill or take any
depredating Indian. As only two dollars was paid for killing a wolf,
it is easy to see how the pioneers regarded the forest folk in point
of relative noxiousness. But ten years later a handful only of the
Kickapoos remained in Sangamon County, the specter of the vanished
people. A chief named Machina came one day to a family who were
clearing a piece of timber, and issued an order of eviction in these
words: "Too much come white man. T'other side Sangamon." He threw a
handful of dried leaves in the air to show how he would scatter the
pale faces, but he never fulfilled his threats further than to come in
occasionally and ask for a drink of whisky. That such trivial details
are still related, only shows how barren of incident was the life of
these obscure founders of a great empire. Any subject of conversation,
any cause of sensation, was a godsend. When Vannoy murdered his wife
in Springfield, whole families put on their best clothes and drove
fifty miles through bottomless mud and swollen rivers to see him
hanged.

[Sidenote: Power, "Early Settlers of Sangamon County," p. 88.]

It is curious to see how naturally in such a state of things the
fabric of political society developed itself from its germ. The county
of Sangamon was called by an act of the Legislature in 1821 out of a
verdant solitude of more than a million acres, inhabited by a few
families. An election for county commissioners was ordered; three men
were chosen; they came together at the cabin of John Kelly, at Spring
Creek. He was a roving bachelor from North Carolina, devoted to the
chase, who had built this hut three years before on the margin of a
green-bordered rivulet, where the deer passed by in hundreds, going in
the morning from the shady banks of the Sangamon to feed on the rich
green grass of the prairie, and returning in the twilight. He was so
delighted with this hunters' paradise that he sent for his brothers to
join him. They came and brought their friends, so it happened that in
this immense county, several thousand square miles in extent, the
settlement of John Kelly at Spring Creek was the only place where
there was shelter for the commissioners; thus it became the temporary
county-seat, duly described in the official report of the
commissioners as "a certain point in the prairie near John Kelly's
field, on the waters of Spring Creek, at a stake marked Z and D (the
initials of the commissioners), to be the temporary seat of justice
for said county; and we do further agree that the said county-seat be
called and known by the name of Springfield." In this manner the
future capital received that hackneyed title, when the distinctive and
musical name of Sangamon was ready to their hands. The same day they
agreed with John Kelly to build them a court-house, for which they
paid him forty-two dollars and fifty cents. In twenty-four days the
house was built--one room of rough logs, the jury retiring to any
sequestered glade they fancied for their deliberation. They next
ordered the building of a jail, which cost just twice as much money as
the court-house. Constables and overseers of the poor were appointed,
and all the machinery of government prepared for the population which
was hourly expected. It was taken for granted that malefactors would
come and the constables have employment; and the poor they would have
always with them, when once they began to arrive. This was only a
temporary arrangement, but when, a year or two later, the time came to
fix upon a permanent seat of justice for the county, the resources of
the Spring Creek men were equal to the emergency. When the
commissioners came to decide on the relative merits of Springfield and
another site a few miles away, they led them through brake, through
brier, by mud knee-deep and by water-courses so exasperating that the
wearied and baffled officials declared they would seek no further, and
Springfield became the county-seat for all time; and greater destinies
were in store for it through means not wholly dissimilar. Nature had
made it merely a pleasant hunting-ground; the craft and the industry
of its first settlers made it a capital.

[Sidenote: "History Of Sangamon County," p. 83.]

[Sidenote: "Old Times in McLean County," p. 235.]

[Sidenote: Ford, "History of Illinois," p. 53.]

The courts which were held in these log huts were as rude as might be
expected; yet there is evidence that although there was no superfluity
of law or of learning, justice was substantially administered. The
lawyers came mostly from Kentucky, though an occasional New Englander
confronted and lived down the general prejudice against his region and
obtained preferment. The profits of the profession were inconceivably
small. One early State's Attorney describes his first circuit as a
tour of shifts and privations not unlike the wanderings of a mendicant
friar. In his first county he received a fee of five dollars for
prosecuting the parties to a sanguinary affray. In the next he was
equally successful, but barely escaped drowning in Spoon River. In the
third there were but two families at the county-seat, and no cases on
the docket. Thence he journeyed across a trackless prairie sixty
miles, and at Quincy had one case and gained five dollars. In Pike
County our much-enduring jurist took no cash, but found a generous
sheriff who entertained him without charge. "He was one of nature's
noblemen, from Massachusetts," writes the grateful prosecutor. The
lawyers in what was called good practice earned less than a street-
sweeper to-day. It is related that the famous Stephen A. Douglas once
traveled from Springfield to Bloomington and made an extravagant
speech, and having gained his case received a fee of five dollars. In
such a state of things it was not to be wondered at that the
technicalities of law were held in somewhat less veneration than what
the pioneer regarded as the essential claims of justice. The
infirmities of the jury system gave them less annoyance than they give
us. Governor Ford mentions a case where a gang of horse-thieves
succeeded in placing one of their confederates upon a jury which was
to try them; but he was soon brought to reason by his eleven
colleagues making preparations to hang him to the rafters of the jury
room. The judges were less hampered by the limitations of their legal
lore than by their fears of a loss of popularity as a result of too
definite charges in civil suits, or too great severity in criminal
cases. They grew very dexterous in avoiding any commitment as to the
legal or moral bearings of the questions brought before them. They
generally refused to sum up, or to comment upon evidence; when asked
by the counsel to give instructions they would say, "Why, gentlemen,
the jury understand this case as well as you or I. They will do
justice between the parties." One famous judge, who was afterwards
governor, when sentencing a murderer, impressed it upon his mind, and
wished him to inform his friends, that it was the jury and not the
judge who had found him guilty, and then asked him on what day he
would like to be hanged. It is needless to say that the bench and bar
were not all of this class. There were even at that early day lawyers,
and not a few, who had already won reputation in the older States, and
whose names are still honored in the profession. Cook, McLean,
Edwards, Kane, Thomas, Reynolds, and others, the earliest lawyers of
the State, have hardly been since surpassed for learning and ability.

[Sidenote: Ford, "History of Illinois," p. 31.]

[Sidenote: Ford, p. 81.]

In a community where the principal men were lawyers, where there was
as yet little commerce, and industrial enterprise was unknown, it was
natural that one of the chief interests of life should be the pursuit
of politics. The young State swarmed with politicians; they could be
found chewing and whittling at every cross-roads inn; they were busy
at every horse-race, arranging their plans and extending their
acquaintance; around the burgoo-pot of the hunting party they
discussed measures and candidates; they even invaded the camp-meeting
and did not disdain the pulpit as a tribune. Of course there was no
such thing as organization in the pioneer days. Men were voted for to
a great extent independently of partisan questions affecting the
nation at large, and in this way the higher offices of the State were
filled for many years by men whose personal character compelled the
respect and esteem of the citizens. The year 1826 is generally taken
as the date which witnessed the change from personal to partisan
politics, though several years more elapsed before the rule of
conventions came in, which put an end to individual candidacy. In that
year, Daniel Pope Cook, who had long represented the State in Congress
with singular ability and purity, was defeated by Governor Joseph
Duncan, the candidate of the Jackson men, on account of the vote given
by Cook which elected John Quincy Adams to the Presidency. The bitter
intolerance of the Jackson party naturally caused their opponents to
organize against them, and there were two parties in the State from
that time forward. The change in political methods was inevitable, and
it is idle to deplore it; but the former system gave the better men in
the new State a power and prominence which they have never since
enjoyed. Such men as Governor Ninian Edwards, who came with the
prestige of a distinguished family connection, a large fortune, a good
education, and a distinction of manners and of dress--ruffles, gold
buttons, and fair-topped boots--which would hardly have been pardoned
a few years later; and Governor Edward Coles, who had been private
secretary to Madison, and was familiar with the courts of Europe, a
man as notable for his gentleness of manners as for his nobility of
nature, could never have come so readily and easily to the head of the
government after the machine of the caucus had been perfected. Real
ability then imposed itself with more authority upon the ignorant and
unpretending politicians from the back timber; so that it is remarked
by those who study the early statutes of Illinois that they are far
better drawn up, and better edited, than those of a later period, when
illiterate tricksters, conscious of the party strength behind them,
insisted on shaping legislation according to their own fancy. The men
of cultivation wielded an influence in the Legislature entirely out of
proportion to their numbers, as the ruder sort of pioneers were
naturally in a large majority. The type of a not uncommon class in
Illinois tradition was a member from the South who could neither read
nor write, and whose apparently ironical patronymic was Grammar. When
first elected he had never worn anything except leather; but regarding
his tattered buckskin as unfit for the garb of a lawgiver, he and his
sons gathered hazelnuts enough to barter at the nearest store for a
few yards of blue strouding such as the Indians used for breech-
clouts. When he came home with his purchase and had called together
the women of the settlement to make his clothes, it was found that
there was only material enough for a very short coat and a long pair
of leggins, and thus attired he went to Kaskaskia, the territorial
capital. Uncouth as was his appearance, he had in him the raw material
of a politician. He invented a system--which was afterwards adopted by
many whose breeches were more fashionably cut--of voting against every
measure which was proposed. If it failed, the responsibility was
broadly shared; if it passed and was popular, no one would care who
voted against it; if it passed and did not meet the favor of the
people, John Grammar could vaunt his foresight. Between the men like
Coles and the men like Grammar there was a wide interval, and the
average was about what the people of the State deserved and could
appreciate. A legislator was as likely to suffer for doing right as
for doing wrong. Governor Ford, in his admirable sketch of the early
history of the State, mentions two acts of the Legislature, both of
them proper and beneficial, as unequaled in their destructive
influence upon the great folks of the State. One was a bill for a loan
to meet the honest obligations of the commonwealth, commonly called
"the Wiggins loan"; and the other was a law to prevent bulls of
inferior size and breed from running at large. This latter set loose
all the winds of popular fury: it was cruel, it was aristocratic; it
was in the interest of rich men and pampered foreign bulls; and it
ended the career of many an aspiring politician in a blast of
democratic indignation and scorn. The politician who relied upon
immediate and constant contact with the people certainly earned all
the emoluments of office he received. His successes were hardly
purchased by laborious affability. "A friend of mine," says Ford,
"once informed me that he intended to be a candidate for the
Legislature, but would not declare himself until just before the
election, and assigned as a reason that it was so very hard to be
clever for a long time at once." Before the caucus had eliminated the
individual initiative, there was much more of personal feeling in
elections. A vote against a man had something of offense in it, and
sometimes stirred up a defeated candidate to heroic vengeance. In 1827
the Legislature elected a State treasurer after an exciting contest,
and before the members had left the house the unsuccessful aspirant
came in and soundly thrashed, one after the other, four of the
representatives who had voted against him. Such energy was sure to
meet its reward, and he was soon after made clerk of the Circuit
Court. It is related by old citizens of Menard County, as a
circumstance greatly to the credit of Abraham Lincoln, that when he
was a candidate for the Legislature a man who wanted his vote for
another place walked to the polls with him and ostentatiously voted
for him, hoping to receive his vote in return. Lincoln voted against
him, and the act was much admired by those who saw it.

One noticeable fact is observed in relation to the politicians of the
day--their careers were generally brief. Superannuation came early. In
the latter part of the last century and the first half of this, men
were called old whom we should regard as in the prime of life. When
the friends of Washington were first pressing the Presidency upon him
in 1788, he urged his "advanced age" as an imperative reason for
declining it: he was fifty-six years old. When Ninian Edwards was a
candidate for Governor of Illinois in 1826, he was only fifty-one, and
yet he considered it necessary in his published addresses to refer to
the charge that he was too old for the place, and, while admitting the
fact that he was no longer young, to urge in extenuation that there
are some old things,--like old whisky, old bacon, and old friends,--
which are not without their merits. Even so late as 1848, we find a
remarkable letter from Mr. Lincoln, who was then in Congress, bearing
upon the same point. His partner, William H. Herndon, had written him
a letter, complaining that the old men in Sangamon County were
unwilling to let the young ones have any opportunity to distinguish
themselves. To this Lincoln answered in his usual tone of grave
kindness: "The subject of your letter is exceedingly painful to me;
and I cannot but think there is some mistake in your impression of the
motives of the old men. I suppose I am now one of the old men, and I
declare on my veracity, which I think is good with you, that nothing
could afford me more satisfaction than to learn that you and others of
my young friends at home were doing battle in the contest and
endearing themselves to the people and taking a stand far above any I
have ever been able to reach in their admiration. I cannot conceive
that other old men feel differently. Of course, I cannot demonstrate
what I say; but I was young once, and I am sure I was never
ungenerously thrust back." The man who thus counseled petulant youth
with the experienced calmness of age was thirty-nine years old. A
state of society where one could at that age call himself or be called
by others an old man, is proved by that fact alone to be one of
wearing hardships and early decay of the vital powers. The survivors
of the pioneers stoutly insist upon the contrary view. "It was a
glorious life," says one old patriarch; "men would fight for the love
of it, and then shake hands and be friends; there is nothing like it
now." Another says, "I never enjoy my breakfast now as I used to, when
I got up and ran down a deer before I could have anything to eat." But
they see the past through a rosy mist of memory, transfigured by the
eternal magic of youth. The sober fact is that the life was a hard
one, with few rational pleasures, few wholesome appliances. The strong
ones lived, and some even attained great length of years; but to the
many age came early and was full of infirmity and pain. If we could go
back to what our fore-fathers endured in clearing the Western
wilderness, we could then better appreciate our obligations to them.
It is detracting from the honor which is their due to say that their
lives had much of happiness or comfort, or were in any respect
preferable to our own.




CHAPTER IV

NEW SALEM


During the latter part of "the winter of the deep snow," Lincoln
became acquainted with one Denton Offutt, an adventurous and
discursive sort of merchant, with more irons in the fire than he could
well manage. He wanted to take a flat-boat and cargo to New Orleans,
and having heard that Hanks and Lincoln had some experience of the
river, he insisted on their joining him. John Johnston was afterwards
added to the party, probably at the request of his foster-brother, to
share in the golden profits of the enterprise; for fifty cents a day,
and a contingent dividend of twenty dollars apiece, seemed like a
promise of immediate opulence to the boys. In the spring, when the
rivers broke up and the melting snows began to pour in torrents down
every ravine and gully, the three young men paddled down the Sangamon
in a canoe to the point where Jamestown now stands; whence they walked
five miles to Springfield, where Offutt had given them rendezvous.
They met him at Elliott's tavern and far from happy. Amid the
multiplicity of his engagements he had failed to procure a flat-boat,
and the first work his new hands must do was to build one. They cut
the timber, with frontier innocence, from "Congress land," and soon
had a serviceable craft afloat, with which they descended the current
of the Sangamon to New Salem, a little village which seems to have
been born for the occasion, as it came into existence just before the
arrival of Lincoln, nourished for seven years while he remained one of
its citizens, and died soon after he went away. His introduction to
his fellow-citizens was effected in a peculiar and somewhat striking
manner. Offutt's boat had come to serious embarrassment on Rutledge's
mill-dam, and the unwonted incident brought the entire population to
the water's edge. They spent a good part of the day watching the
hapless flat-boat, resting midships on the dam, the forward end in the
air and the stern taking in the turbid Sangamon water. Nobody knew
what to do with the disaster except "the bow-oar," who is described as
a gigantic youth "with his trousers rolled up some five feet," who was
wading about the boat and rigging up some undescribed contrivance by
which the cargo was unloaded, the boat tilted and the water let out by
boring a hole through the bottom, and everything brought safely to
moorings below the dam. This exploit gained for young Lincoln the
enthusiastic admiration of his employer, and turned his own mind in
the direction of an invention which he afterwards patented "for
lifting vessels over shoals." The model on which he obtained this
patent--a little boat whittled by his own hand in 1849, after he had
become prominent as a lawyer and politician--is still shown to
visitors at the Department of the Interior. We have never learned that
it has served any other purpose.

[Illustration:   MODEL OF LINCOLN'S INVENTION, IN THE PATENT OFFICE,
WASHINGTON.]

[Illustration:   REDUCED FAC-SIMILE OF DRAWINGS IN THE PATENT OFFICE.]

[Sidenote: Lamon, p. 83.]

They made a quick trip down the Sangamon, the Illinois, and the
Mississippi rivers. Although it was but a repetition in great part of
the trip young Lincoln had made with Gentry, it evidently created a
far deeper impression on his mind than the former one. The simple and
honest words of John Hanks leave no doubt of this. At New Orleans, he
said, they saw for the first time "negroes chained, maltreated,
whipped, and scourged. Lincoln saw it; his heart bled; said nothing
much, was silent, looked bad. I can say, knowing it, that it was on
this trip that he formed his opinion of slavery. It run its iron in
him then and there, May, 1831. I have heard him say so often." The
sight of men in chains was intolerable to him. Ten years after this he
made another journey by water with his friend Joshua Speed, of
Kentucky. Writing to Speed about it after the lapse of fourteen years,
he says: "In 1841 you and I had together a tedious low-water trip on a
steamboat from Louisville to St. Louis. You may remember, as I well
do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were on board
ten or a dozen slaves shackled together with irons. That sight was a
continual torment to me, and I see something like it every time I
touch the Ohio or any other slave border. It is not fair for you to
assume that I have no interest in a thing which has, and continually
exercises, the power of making me miserable."

There have been several ingenious attempts to show the origin and
occasion of Mr. Lincoln's antislavery convictions. They seem to us an
idle waste of labor. These sentiments came with the first awakening of
his mind and conscience, and were roused into active life and energy
by the sight of fellow-creatures in chains on an Ohio River steamboat,
and on the wharf at New Orleans.

The party went up the river in the early summer and separated in St.
Louis. Abraham walked in company with John Johnston from St. Louis to
Coles County, and spent a few weeks there with his father, who had
made another migration the year before. His final move was to Goose
Nest Prairie, where he died in 1851, [Footnote: His grave, a mile and
a half west of the town of Farmington, Illinois, is surmounted by an
appropriate monument erected by his grandson, the Hon. Robert T.
Lincoln.] at the age of seventy-three years, after a life which,
though not successful in any material or worldly point of view, was
probably far happier than that of his illustrious son, being unvexed
by enterprise or ambition. Abraham never lost sight of his parents. He
continued to aid and befriend them in every way, even when he could
ill afford it, and when his benefactions were imprudently used. He not
only comforted their declining years with every aid his affection
could suggest, but he did everything in his power to assist his
stepbrother Johnston--a hopeless task enough. The following rigidly
truthful and yet kindly letters will show how mentor-like and
masterful, as well as generous, were the relations that Mr. Lincoln
held to these friends and companions of his childhood:

DEAR JOHNSTON: Your request for eighty dollars I do not think it best
to comply with now. At the various times when I have helped you a
little, you have said to me, "We can get along very well now," but in
a very short time I find you in the same difficulty again. Now this
can only happen by some defect in your conduct.

What that defect is I think I know. You are not _lazy_, and still
you are an _idler_. I doubt whether, since I saw you, you have
done a good whole day's work in any one day. You do not very much
dislike to work, and still you do not work much, merely because it
does not seem to you that you could get much for it. This habit of
uselessly wasting time is the whole difficulty, and it is vastly
important to you, and still more so to your children, that you should
break the habit. It is more important to them because they have longer
to live, and can keep out of an idle habit before they are in it
easier than they can get out after they are in.

You are now in need of some money; and what I propose is that you
shall go to work "tooth and nail" for somebody who will give you money
for it. Let father and your boys take charge of things at home,
prepare for a crop, and make the crop; and you go to work for the best
money wages, or in discharge of any debt you owe, that you can get;
and to secure you a fair reward for your labor, I now promise you that
for every dollar you will, between this and the first of next May, get
for your own labor, either in money or as discharging your own
indebtedness, I will then give you one other dollar. By this, if you
hire yourself at ten dollars a month, from me you will get ten more,
making twenty dollars a month for your work. In this I do not mean you
should go off to St. Louis, or the lead mines, or the gold mines in
California; but I mean for you to go at it for the best wages you can
get close to home, in Coles County. Now, if you will do this you will
soon be out of debt, and, what is better, you will have a habit that
will keep you from getting in debt again. But if I should now clear
you out of debt, next year you would be just as deep in as ever. You
say you would almost give your place in heaven for seventy or eighty
dollars. Then you value your place in heaven very cheap, for I am sure
you can with the offer I make get the seventy or eighty dollars for
four or five months' work. You say if I will furnish you the money you
will deed me the land, and if you don't pay the money back you will
deliver possession. Nonsense. If you can't now live with the land, how
will you then live without it? You have always been kind to me, and I
do not mean to be unkind to you. On the contrary, if you will but
follow my advice, you will find it worth more than eighty times eighty
dollars to you.

Here is a later epistle, still more graphic and terse in statement,
which has the unusual merit of painting both confessor and penitent to
the life:

  SHELBYVILLE, Nov. 4, 1851.

DEAR BROTHER: When I came into Charleston, day before yesterday, I
learned that you were anxious to sell the land where you live and move
to Missouri. I have been thinking of this ever since, and cannot but
think such a notion is utterly foolish. What can you do in Missouri
better than here? Is the land any richer? Can you there, any more than
here, raise corn and wheat and oats without work? Will anybody there,
any more than here, do your work for you? If you intend to go to work,
there is no better place than right where you are; if you do not
intend to go to work, you cannot get along anywhere. Squirming and
crawling about from place to place can do no good. You have raised no
crop this year, and what you really want is to sell the land, get the
money, and spend it. Part with the land you have, and, my life upon
it, you will never after own a spot big enough to bury you in. Half
you will get for the land you will spend in moving to Missouri, and
the other half you will eat and drink and wear out, and no foot of
land will be bought. Now, I feel it is my duty to have no hand in such
a piece of foolery. I feel that it is so even on your own account, and
particularly on mother's account. The eastern forty acres I intend to
keep for mother while she lives; if you will not cultivate it, it will
rent for enough to support her; at least, it will rent for something.
Her dower in the other two forties she can let you have, and no thanks
to me. Now do not misunderstand this letter. I do not write it in any
unkindness. I write it in order, if possible, to get you to face the
truth, which truth is, you are destitute because you have idled away
all your time. Your thousand pretenses deceive nobody but yourself. Go
to work is the only cure for your case.

A volume of disquisition could not put more clearly before the reader
the difference between Abraham Lincoln and the common run of Southern
and Western rural laborers. He had the same disadvantages that they
had. He grew up in the midst of poverty and ignorance; he was poisoned
with the enervating malaria of the Western woods, as all his fellows
were, and the consequences of it were seen in his character and
conduct to the close of his life. But he had, what very few of them
possessed any glimmering notion of, a fixed and inflexible will to
succeed. He did not love work, probably, any better than John
Johnston; but he had an innate self-respect, and a consciousness that
his self was worthy of respect, that kept him from idleness as it kept
him from all other vices, and made him a better man every year that he
lived.

We have anticipated a score of years in speaking of Mr. Lincoln's
relations to his family. It was in August of the year 1831 that he
finally left his father's roof, and swung out for himself into the
current of the world to make his fortune in his own way. He went down
to New Salem again to assist Offutt in the business that lively
speculator thought of establishing there. He was more punctual than
either his employer or the merchandise, and met with the usual reward
of punctuality in being forced to waste his time in waiting for the
tardy ones. He seemed to the New Salem people to be "loafing"; several
of them have given that description of him. He did one day's work
acting as clerk of a local election, a lettered loafer being pretty
sure of employment on such an occasion. [Footnote: Mrs. Lizzie H. Bell
writes of this incident: "My father, Menton Graham, was on that day,
as usual, appointed to be a clerk, and Mr. McNamee, who was to be the
other, was sick and failed to come. They were looking around for a man
to fill his place when my father noticed Mr. Lincoln and asked if he
could write. He answered that 'he could make a few rabbit tracks.'"]
He also piloted a boat down the Sangamon for one Dr. Nelson, who had
had enough of New Salem and wanted to go to Texas. This was probably a
task not requiring much pilot-craft, as the river was much swollen,
and navigators had in most places two or three miles of channel to
count upon. But Offutt and his goods arrived at last, and Lincoln and
he got them immediately into position, and opened their doors to what
commerce could be found in New Salem. There was clearly not enough to
satisfy the volatile mind of Mr. Offutt, for he soon bought Cameron's
mill at the historic dam, and made Abraham superintendent also of that
branch of the business.

It is to be surmised that Offutt never inspired his neighbors and
customers with any deep regard for his solidity of character. One of
them says of him with injurious pleonasm, that he "talked too much
with his mouth." A natural consequence of his excessive fluency was
soon to be made disagreeably evident to his clerk. He admired Abraham
beyond measure, and praised him beyond prudence. He said that Abe knew
more than any man in the United States; and he was certainly not
warranted in making such an assertion, as his own knowledge of the
actual state of science in America could not have been exhaustive. He
also said that Abe could beat any man in the county running, jumping,
or "wrastling." This proposition, being less abstract in its nature,
was more readily grasped by the local mind, and was not likely to pass
unchallenged.

[Illustration:   MAP OF NEW SALEM AND VICINITY]

Public opinion at New Salem was formed by a crowd of ruffianly young
fellows who were called the "Clary's Grove Boys." Once or twice a week
they descended upon the village and passed the day in drinking,
fighting, and brutal horse-play. If a stranger appeared in the place,
he was likely to suffer a rude initiation into the social life of New
Salem at the hands of these jovial savages. Sometimes he was nailed up
in a hogshead and rolled down hill; sometimes he was insulted into a
fight and then mauled black and blue; for despite their pretensions to
chivalry they had no scruples about fair play or any such
superstitions of civilization. At first they did not seem inclined to
molest young Lincoln. His appearance did not invite insolence; his
reputation for strength and activity was a greater protection to him
than his inoffensive good-nature. But the loud admiration of Offutt
gave them umbrage. It led to dispute, contradictions, and finally to a
formal banter to a wrestling-match. Lincoln was greatly averse to all
this "wooling and pulling," as he called it. But Offutt's indiscretion
had made it necessary for him to show his mettle. Jack Armstrong, the
leading bully of the gang, was selected to throw him, and expected an
easy victory. But he soon found himself in different hands from any he
had heretofore engaged with. Seeing he could not manage the tall
stranger, his friends swarmed in, and by kicking and tripping nearly
succeeded in getting Lincoln down. At this, as has been said of
another hero, "the spirit of Odin entered into him," and putting forth
his whole strength, he held the pride of Clary's Grove in his arms
like a child, and almost choked the exuberant life out of him. For a
moment a general fight seemed inevitable; but Lincoln, standing
undismayed with his back to the wall, looked so formidable in his
defiance that an, honest admiration took the place of momentary fury,
and his initiation was over. As to Armstrong, he was Lincoln's friend
and sworn brother as soon as he recovered the use of his larynx, and
the bond thus strangely created lasted through life. Lincoln had no
further occasion to fight his own battles while Armstrong was there to
act as his champion. The two friends, although so widely different,
were helpful to each other afterwards in many ways, and Lincoln made
ample amends for the liberty his hands had taken with Jack's throat,
by saving, in a memorable trial, his son's neck from the halter.

This incident, trivial and vulgar as it may seem, was of great
importance in Lincoln's life. His behavior in this ignoble scuffle did
the work of years for him, in giving him the position he required in
the community where his lot was cast. He became from that moment, in a
certain sense, a personage, with a name and standing of his own. The
verdict of Clary's Grove was unanimous that he was "the cleverest
fellow that had ever broke into the settlement." He did not have to be
constantly scuffling to guard his self-respect, and at the same time
he gained the good-will of the better sort by his evident
peaceableness and integrity.

[Illustration:   LEAF FROM ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S EXERCISE BOOK. The page
here shown in reduced fac-simile is from the Exercise Book presented
by William H. Herndon to the Keyes-Lincoln Memorial Collection. When
the book was written Lincoln was about seventeen.]

He made on the whole a satisfactory clerk for Mr. Offutt, though his
downright honesty must have seemed occasionally as eccentric in that
position as afterwards it did to his associates at the bar. Dr.
Holland has preserved one or two incidents of this kind, which have
their value. Once, after he had sold a woman a little bill of goods
and received the money, he found on looking over the account again
that she had given him six and a quarter cents too much. The money
burned in his hands until he locked the shop and started on a walk of
several miles in the night to make restitution before he slept. On
another occasion, after weighing and delivering a pound of tea, he
found a small weight on the scales. He immediately weighed out the
quantity of tea of which he had innocently defrauded his customer and
went in search of her, his sensitive conscience not permitting any
delay. To show that the young merchant was not too good for this
world, the same writer gives an incident of his shop-keeping
experience of a different character. A rural bully having made himself
especially offensive one day, when women were present, by loud
profanity, Lincoln requested him to be silent. This was of course a
cause of war, and the young clerk was forced to follow the incensed
ruffian into the street, where the combat was of short duration.
Lincoln threw him at once to the ground, and gathering a handful of
the dog fennel with which the roadside was plentifully bordered, he
rubbed the ruffian's face and eyes with it until he howled for mercy.
He did not howl in vain, for the placable giant, when his discipline
was finished, brought water to bathe the culprit's smarting face, and
doubtless improved the occasion with quaint admonition.

A few passages at arms of this sort gave Abraham a redoubtable
reputation in the neighborhood. But the principal use he made of his
strength and his prestige was in the capacity of peacemaker, an office
which soon devolved upon him by general consent. Whenever old feuds
blossomed into fights by Offutt's door, or the chivalry of Clary's
Grove attempted in its energetic way to take the conceit out of some
stranger, or a canine duel spread contagion of battle among the
masters of the beasts, Lincoln usually appeared upon the scene, and
with a judicious mixture of force and reason and invincible good-
nature restored peace.

While working with Offutt his mind was turned in the direction of
English grammar. From what he had heard of it he thought it a matter
within his grasp, if he could once fall in with the requisite
machinery. Consulting with Menton [Footnote: This name has always been
written in Illinois "Minter," but a letter from Mr. Graham's daughter,
Mrs. Bell, says that her father's name is as given in the text.]
Graham, the schoolmaster, in regard to it, and learning the
whereabouts of a vagrant "Kirkham's Grammar," he set off at once and
soon returned from a walk of a dozen miles with the coveted prize. He
devoted himself to the new study with that peculiar intensity of
application which always remained his most valuable faculty, and soon
knew all that can be known about it from rules. He seemed surprised,
as others have been, at the meager dimensions of the science he had
acquired and the ease with which it yielded all there was of it to the
student. But it seemed no slight achievement to the New Salemites, and
contributed not a little to the prevalent impression of his learning.

His name is prominently connected with an event which just at this
time caused an excitement and interest in Salem and the neighboring
towns entirely out of proportion to its importance. It was one of the
articles of faith of most of the settlers on the banks of the Sangamon
River that it was a navigable stream, and the local politicians found
that they could in no way more easily hit the fancy of their hearers
than by discussing this assumed fact, and the logical corollary
derived from it, that it was the duty of the State or the nation to
clear out the snags and give free course to the commerce which was
waiting for an opportunity to pour along this natural highway. At last
one Captain Vincent Bogue, of Springfield, determined to show that the
thing could be done by doing it. The first promise of the great
enterprise appears in the "Sangsmo Journal" of January 26, 1832, in a
letter from the Captain, at Cincinnati, saying he would ascend the
Sangamon by steam on the breaking up of the ice. He asked that he
might be met at the mouth of the river by ten or twelve men, having
axes with long handles, to cut away the overhanging branches of the
trees on the banks. From this moment there was great excitement,--
public meetings, appointment of committees, appeals for subscriptions,
and a scattering fire of advertisements of goods and freight to be
bargained for,--which sustained the prevailing interest. It was a day
of hope and promise when the advertisement reached Springfield from
Cincinnati that "the splendid upper-cabin steamer Talisman" would
positively start for the Sangamon on a given day. As the paper
containing this joyous intelligence also complained that no mail had
reached Springfield from the east for three weeks, it is easy to
understand the desire for more rapid and regular communications. From
week to week the progress of the _Talisman_, impeded by bad weather
and floating ice, was faithfully recorded, until at last the party
with long-handled axes went down to Beardstown to welcome her. It is
needless to state that Lincoln was one of the party. His standing as a
scientific citizen of New Salem would have been enough to insure his
selection even if he had not been known as a bold navigator. He
piloted the _Talisman_ safely through the windings of the Sangamon,
and Springfield gave itself up to extravagant gayety on the event that
proved she "could no longer be considered an inland town." Captain
Bogue announced "fresh and seasonable goods just received per
steamboat _Talisman_," and the local poets illuminated the columns of
the "Journal" with odes on her advent. The joy was short-lived. The
_Talisman_ met the natural fate of steamboats a few months later,
being burned at the St. Louis wharf. Neither State nor nation has ever
removed the snags from the Sangamon, and no subsequent navigator of
its waters has been found to eclipse the fame of the earliest one.




CHAPTER V

LINCOLN IN THE BLACK HAWK WAR


[Sidenote: 1832.]

A new period in the life of Lincoln begins with the summer of 1832. He
then obtained his first public recognition, and entered upon the
course of life which was to lead him to a position of prominence and
great usefulness.

The business of Offutt had gone to pieces, and his clerk was out of
employment, when Governor Reynolds issued his call for volunteers to
move the tribe of Black Hawk across the Mississippi. For several years
the raids of the old Sac chieftain upon that portion of his patrimony
which he had ceded to the United States had kept the settlers in the
neighborhood of Rock Island in terror, and menaced the peace of the
frontier. In the spring of 1831 he came over to the east side of the
river with a considerable band of warriors, having been encouraged by
secret promises of cooperation from several other tribes. These failed
him, however, when the time of trial arrived, and an improvised force
of State volunteers, assisted by General E. P. Gaines and his
detachment, had little difficulty in compelling the Indians to re-
cross the Mississippi, and to enter into a solemn treaty on the 30th
of June by which the former treaties were ratified and Black Hawk
and his leading warriors bound themselves never again to set foot on
the east side of the river, without express permission from the
President or the Governor of Illinois.

[Sidenote: Reynolds, "Life and Times," p. 325.]

[Sidenote: Ford, "History of Illinois," p. 110.]

But Black Hawk was too old a savage to learn respect for treaties or
resignation under fancied wrongs. He was already approaching the
allotted term of life. He had been a chief of his nation for more than
forty years. He had scalped his first enemy when scarcely more than a
child, having painted on his blanket the blood-red hand which marked
his nobility at fifteen years of age. Peace under any circumstances
would doubtless have been irksome to him, but a peace which forbade
him free access to his own hunting-grounds and to the graves of his
fathers was more than he could now school himself to endure. He had
come to believe that he had been foully wronged by the treaty which
was his own act; he had even convinced himself that "land cannot be
sold," a proposition in political economy which our modern socialists
would be puzzled to accept or confute. Besides this, the tenderest
feelings of his heart were outraged by this exclusion from his former
domain. He had never passed a year since the death of his daughter
without making a pilgrimage to her grave at Oquawka and spending hours
in mystic ceremonies and contemplation. He was himself prophet as well
as warrior, and had doubtless his share of mania, which is the
strength of prophets. The promptings of his own broken heart readily
seemed to him the whisperings of attendant spirits; and day by day
these unseen incitements increased around him, until they could not be
resisted even if death stood in the way.

He made his combinations during the winter, and had it not been for
the loyal attitude of Keokuk, he could have brought the entire nation
of the Sacs and Foxes to the war-path. As it was, the flower of the
young men came with him when, with the opening spring, he crossed the
river once more. He came this time, he said, "to plant corn," but as a
preliminary to this peaceful occupation of the land he marched up the
Rock River, expecting to be joined by the Winnebagoes and
Pottawatomies. But the time was passed for honorable alliances among
the Indians. His oath-bound confederates gave him little assistance,
and soon cast in their lot with the stronger party.

This movement excited general alarm in the State. General Henry
Atkinson, commanding the United States troops, sent a formal summons
to Black Hawk to return; but the old chief was already well on his way
to the lodge of his friend, the prophet Wabokishick, at Prophetstown,
and treated the summons with contemptuous defiance. The Governor
immediately called for volunteers, and was himself astonished at the
alacrity with which the call was answered. Among those who enlisted at
the first tap of the drum was Abraham Lincoln, and equally to his
surprise and delight he was elected captain of his company. The
volunteer organizations of those days were conducted on purely
democratic principles. The company assembled on the green, an election
was suggested, and three-fourths of the men walked over to where
Lincoln was standing; most of the small remainder joined themselves to
one Kirkpatrick, a man of some substance and standing from Spring
Creek. We have the word of Mr. Lincoln for it, that no subsequent
success ever gave him such unmixed pleasure as this earliest
distinction. It was a sincere, unsought tribute of his equals to those
physical and moral qualities which made him the best man of his
hundred, and as such was accepted and prized.

[Sidenote: Reynolds, "Life and Times," p. 363.]

At the Beardstown rendezvous, Captain Lincoln's company was attached
to Colonel Samuel Thompson's regiment, the Fourth Illinois, which was
organized at Richland, Sangamon County, on the 21st of April, and
moved on the 27th, with the rest of the command under General Samuel
Whitesides, for Yellow Banks, where the boats with provisions had been
ordered to meet them. It was arduous marching. There were no roads and
no bridges, and the day's task included a great deal of labor. The
third day out they came to the Henderson River, a stream some fifty
yards wide, swift and swollen with the spring thaws, with high and
steep banks. To most armies this would have seemed a serious obstacle,
but these backwoodsmen swarmed to the work like beavers, and in less
than three hours the river was crossed with the loss of only one or
two horses and wagons. When they came to Yellow Banks, on the
Mississippi, the provision-boats had not arrived, and for three days
they waited there literally without food; very uncomfortable days for
Governor Reynolds, who accompanied the expedition, and was forced to
hear the outspoken comments of two thousand hungry men on his supposed
inefficiency. But on the 6th of May the _William Wallace_ arrived, and
"this sight," says the Governor with characteristic sincerity, "was, I
presume, the most interesting I ever beheld." From there they marched
to the mouth of Rock River, and thence General Whitesides proceeded
with his volunteers up the river some ninety miles to Dixon, where
they halted to await the arrival of General Atkinson with the regular
troops and provisions. There they found two battalions of fresh
horsemen under Majors Stillman and Bailey, who had as yet seen no
service and were eager for the fray. Whitesides's men were tired with
their forced march, and besides, in their ardor to get forward, they
had thrown away a good part of their provisions and left their baggage
behind. It pleased the Governor, therefore, to listen to the prayers
of Stillman's braves, and he gave them orders to proceed to the head
of Old Man's Creek, where it was supposed there were some hostile
Indians, and coerce them into submission. "I thought," says the
Governor in his memoirs, "they might discover the enemy."

[Illustration:   A SOLDIER'S DISCHARGE FROM THE BLACK HAWK WAR, SIGNED
BY A. LINCOLN, CAPTAIN. IN THE POSSESSION OF O. H. OLDROTD,
SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS.]

The supposition was certainly well founded. They rode merrily away,
came to Old Man's Creek, thereafter to be called Stillman's Run, and
encamped for the night. By the failing light a small party of Indians
was discovered on the summit of a hill a mile away, and a few
courageous gentlemen hurriedly saddled their horses, and, without
orders, rode after them. The Indians retreated, but were soon
overtaken, and two or three of them killed. The volunteers were now
strung along a half mile of hill and valley, with no more order or
care than if they had been chasing rabbits. Black Hawk, who had been
at supper when the running fight began, hastily gathered a handful of
warriors and attacked the scattered whites. The onset of the savages
acted like an icy bath on the red-hot valor of the volunteers; they
turned and ran for their lives, stampeding the camp as they fled.
There was very little resistance--so little that Black Hawk, fearing a
ruse, tried to recall his warriors from the pursuit, but in the
darkness and confusion could not enforce his orders. The Indians
killed all they caught up with; but the volunteers had the fleeter
horses, and only eleven were overtaken. The rest reached Dixon by twos
and threes, rested all night, and took courage. General Whitesides
marched out to the scene of the disaster the next morning, but the
Indians were gone. They had broken up into small parties, and for
several days they reaped the bloody fruit of their victory in the
massacre of peaceful settlements in the adjacent districts.

The time of enlistment of the volunteers had now come to an end, and
the men, seeing no prospect of glory or profit, and weary of the work
and the hunger which were the only certain incidents of the campaign,
refused in great part to continue in service. But it is hardly
necessary to say that Captain Lincoln was not one of these homesick
soldiers. Not even the trammels of rank, which are usually so strong
among the trailers of the saber, could restrain him from what he
considered his simple duty. As soon as he was mustered out of his
captaincy, he re-enlisted on the same day, May 27, as a private
soldier. Several other officers did the same, among them General
Whitesides and Major John T. Stuart. Lincoln became a member of
Captain Elijah Iles's company of mounted volunteers, sometimes called
the "Independent Spy Battalion," an organization unique of its kind,
if we may judge from the account given by one of its troopers. It was
not, says Mr. George M. Harrison, "under the control of any regiment
or brigade, but received orders directly from the Commander-in-Chief,
and always, when with the army, camped within the lines, and had many
other privileges, such as having no camp duties to perform and drawing
rations as much and as often as we pleased," which would seem to liken
this battalion as nearly as possible to the fabled "regiment of
brigadiers." With this _elite_ corps Lincoln served through his
second enlistment, though it was not his fortune to take part in
either of the two engagements in which General James D. Henry, at the
Wisconsin Bluffs and the Bad Axe, broke and destroyed forever the
power of Black Hawk and the British band of Sacs and Foxes.

After Lincoln was relieved of the weight of dignity involved in his
captaincy, the war became a sort of holiday, and the tall private from
New Salem enjoyed it as much as any one. He entered with great zest
into the athletic sports with which soldiers love to beguile the
tedium of camp. He was admitted to be the strongest man in the army,
and, with one exception, the best wrestler. Indeed, his friends never
admitted the exception, and severely blamed Lincoln for confessing
himself defeated on the occasion when he met the redoubtable Thompson,
and the two fell together on the turf. His popularity increased from
the beginning to the end of the campaign, and those of his comrades
who still survive always speak with hearty and affectionate praise of
his character and conduct in those rough yet pleasantly remembered
days.

[Sidenote: MS. Letters from Thomas, Gregg and others.]

The Spy Battalion formed no part of General Henry's forces when, by a
disobedience of orders as prudent as it was audacious, he started with
his slender force on the fresh trail which he was sure would lead him
to Black Hawk's camp. He found and struck the enemy at bay on the
bluffs of the Wisconsin River on the 21st of July, and inflicted upon
them a signal defeat. The broken remnant of Black Hawk's power then
fled for the Mississippi River, the whole army following in close
pursuit--General Atkinson in front and General Henry bringing up the
rear. Fortune favored the latter once more, for while Black Hawk with
a handful of men was engaging and drawing away the force under
Atkinson, General Henry struck the main trail, and brought on the
battle of the Bad Axe, if that could be called a battle which was an
easy slaughter of the weary and discouraged savages, fighting without
heart or hope, an army in front and the great river behind. Black Hawk
escaped the fate of his followers, to be captured a few days later
through the treachery of his allies. He was carried in triumph to
Washington and presented to President Jackson, to whom he made this
stern and defiant speech, showing how little age or disaster could do
to tame his indomitable spirit: "I am a man and you are another. I did
not expect to conquer the white people. I took up the hatchet to
avenge injuries which could no longer be borne. [Footnote: It is a
noteworthy coincidence that President Lincoln's proclamation at the
opening of the war calls for troops "to redress wrongs already long
enough endured."] Had I borne them longer my people would have said:
'Black Hawk is a squaw; he is too old to be a chief; he is no Sac.'
This caused me to raise the war-whoop. I say no more of it; all is
known to you." He returned to Iowa, and died on the 3d of October,
1838, at his camp on the river Des Moines. He was buried in gala
dress, with cocked hat and sword, and the medals presented him by two
governments. He was not allowed to rest even in his grave. His bones
were exhumed by some greedy wretch and sold from hand to hand till
they came at last to the Burlington Museum, where they were destroyed
by fire.

[Illustration:   BLACK HAWK]

It was on the 16th of June, a month before the slaughter of the Bad
Axe, that the battalion to which Lincoln belonged was at last mustered
out, at Whitewater, Wisconsin. His final release from the service was
signed by a young lieutenant of artillery, Robert Anderson, who,
twenty-nine years later, in one of the most awful crises in our
annals, was to sustain to Lincoln relations of prodigious importance,
on a scene illuminated by the flash of the opening guns of the civil
war. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote relocated to chapter end.]
The men started home the next day in high spirits, school-boys for
their holidays. Lincoln had need, like Horatio, of his good spirits,
for they were his only outfit for the long journey to New Salem, he
and his mess-mate Harrison [Footnote: George M. Harrison, who gives an
account of his personal experiences in Lamon, p. 116.] having had
their horses stolen the day before by some patriot over-anxious to
reach home. But, as Harrison says, "I laughed at our fate, and he
joked at it, and we all started off merrily. The generous men of our
company walked and rode by turns with us, and we fared about equal
with the rest. But for this generosity our legs would have had to do
the better work; for in that day this dreary route furnished no horses
to buy or to steal; and, whether on horse or afoot, we always had
company, for many of the horses' backs were too sore for riding." It
is not hard to imagine with what quips and quirks of native fancy
Lincoln and his friends beguiled the way through forest and prairie.
With youth, good health, and a clear conscience, and even then the
dawn of a young and undefiled ambition in his heart, nothing was
wanting to give zest and spice to this long, sociable walk of a
hundred leagues. One joke is preserved, and this one is at the expense
of Lincoln. One chilly morning he complained of being cold. "No
wonder," said some facetious cavalier, "there is so much of you on the
ground." [Footnote: Dr. Holland gives this homely joke (Life of
Lincoln, p. 71), but transfers it to a time four years later, when
Lincoln had permanently assumed shoes and had a horse of his own.] We
hope Lincoln's contributions to the fun were better than this, but of
course the prosperity of these jests lay rather in the liberal ears
that heard them than in the good-natured tongues that uttered them.

Lincoln and Harrison could not have been altogether penniless, for at
Peoria they bought a canoe and paddled down to Pekin. Here the
ingenious Lincoln employed his hereditary talent for carpentry by
making an oar for the frail vessel while Harrison was providing the
commissary stores. The latter goes on to say: "The river, being very
low, was without current, so that we had to pull hard to make half the
speed of legs on land; in fact, we let her float all night, and on the
next morning always found the objects still visible that were beside
us the previous evening. The water was remarkably clear for this river
of plants, and the fish appeared to be sporting with us as we moved
over or near them. On the next day after we left Pekin we overhauled a
raft of saw-logs, with two men afloat on it to urge it on with poles
and to guide it in the channel. We immediately pulled up to them and
went on the raft, where we were made welcome by various
demonstrations, especially by an invitation to a feast on fish, corn-
bread, eggs, butter, and coffee, just prepared for our benefit. Of
these good things we ate almost immoderately, for it was the only warm
meal we had made for several days. While preparing it, and after
dinner, Lincoln entertained them, and they entertained us for a couple
of hours very amusingly." Kindly human companionship was a luxury in
that green wilderness, and was readily appreciated and paid for.

The returning warriors dropped down the river to the village of
Havana--from Pekin to Havana in a canoe! The country is full of these
geographical nightmares, the necessary result of freedom of
nomenclature bestowed by circumstances upon minds equally destitute of
taste or education. There they sold their boat,--no difficult task,
for a canoe was a staple article in any river-town,--and again set out
"the old way, over the sand-ridges, for Petersburg. As we drew near
home, the impulse became stronger and urged us on amazingly. The long
strides of Lincoln, often slipping back in the loose sand six inches
every step, were just right for me; and he was greatly diverted when
he noticed me behind him stepping along in his tracks to keep from
slipping." Thus the two comrades came back from their soldierings to
their humble homes, from which Lincoln was soon to start on the way
marked out for him by Providence, with strides which no comrade, with
whatever goodwill, might hope to follow.

He never took his campaigning seriously. The politician's habit of
glorifying the petty incidents of a candidate's life always seemed
absurd to him, and in his speech, made in 1848, ridiculing the effort
on the part of General Cass's friends to draw some political advantage
from that gentleman's respectable but obscure services on the frontier
in the war with Great Britain, he stopped any future eulogist from
painting his own military achievements in too lively colors. "Did you
know, Mr. Speaker," he said, "I am a military hero! In the days of the
Black Hawk war I fought, bled, and came away. I was not at Stillman's
defeat, but I was about as near it as General Cass was to Hull's
surrender; and, like him, I saw the place very soon afterwards. It is
quite certain I did not break my sword, for I had none to break, but I
bent my musket pretty badly on one occasion. If General Cass went in
advance of me picking whortleberries, I guess I surpassed him in
charges on the wild onions. If he saw any live fighting Indians, it
was more than I did, but I had a good many bloody struggles with the
mosquitoes; and although I never fainted from loss of blood, I can
truly say I was often very hungry. If ever I should conclude to doff
whatever our Democratic friends may suppose there is of black-cockade
Federalism about me, and thereupon they shall take me up as their
candidate for the Presidency, I protest that they shall not make fun
of me, as they have of General Cass, by attempting to write me into a
military hero."

[Relocated Footnote: A story to the effect that Lincoln was mustered
into service by Jefferson Davis has for a long time been current, but
the strictest search in the records fails to confirm it. We are
indebted to General R. C. Drum, Adjutant-General of the Army, for an
interesting letter giving all the known facts in relation to this
story. General Drum says: "The company of the Fourth Regiment Illinois
Mounted Volunteers, commanded by Mr. Lincoln, was, with others, called
out by Governor Reynolds, and was organized at Richland, Sangamon
County, Illinois, April 21, 1832. The muster-in roll is not on file,
but the records show that the company was mustered out at the mouth of
Fox River, May 27, 1832, by Nathaniel Buckmaster, Brigade-Major to
General Samuel Whitesides's Illinois Volunteers. On the muster-roll of
Captain Elijah Iles's company, Illinois Mounted Volunteers, A. Lincoln
(Sangamon County) appears as a private from May 27, 1832, to June 16,
1832, when the company was mustered out of service by Lieutenant
Robert Anderson, Third United States Artillery and Colonel (Assistant
Inspector-General) Illinois Volunteers. Brigadier-General Henry
Atkinson, in his report of May 30, 1832, stated that the Illinois
Volunteers were called out by the Governor of that State, but in haste
and for no definite period of service. On their arrival at Ottawa they
became clamorous for their discharge, which the Governor granted,
retaining--of those who were discharged and volunteered for a further
period of twenty days--a sufficient number of men to form six
companies, which General Atkinson found at Ottawa on his arrival there
from Rock River. General Atkinson further reports that these companies
and some three hundred regular troops, remaining in position at Rock
River, were all the force left him to keep the enemy in check until
the assemblage of the three thousand additional Illinois militia
called out by the Governor upon his (General A.'s) requisition, to
rendezvous at Ottawa, June 12-15, 1832,

"There can be no doubt that Captain Iles's company, mentioned above,
was one of the six which served until June 16, 1832, while the fact is
fully established that the company of which Mr. Lincoln was a member
was mustered out by Lieutenant Robert Anderson, who, in April, 1861,
was in command of Fort Sumter. There is no evidence to show that it
was mustered in by Lieutenant Jefferson Davis. Mr. Davis's company (B,
First United States Infantry) was stationed at Fort Crawford,
Wisconsin, during the months of January and February, 1832, and he is
borne on the rolls as 'absent on detached service at the Dubuque mines
by order of Colonel Morgan.' From March 26 to August 18, 1832, the
muster-rolls of his company report him as absent on furlough."]




CHAPTER VI

SURVEYOR AND REPRESENTATIVE


[Sidenote: 1832.]

The discharged volunteer arrived in New Salem only ten days before the
August election, in which he had a deep personal interest. Before
starting for the wars he had announced himself, according to the
custom of the time, by a handbill circular, as a candidate for the
Legislature from Sangamon County. [Footnote: We are aware that all
former biographers have stated that Lincoln's candidacy for the
Legislature was subsequent to his return from the war, and a
consequence of his service. But his circular is dated March 9, 1832,
and the "Sangamo Journal" mentions his name among the July, and
apologizes candidates in for having accidentally omitted it in May.]
He had done this in accordance with his own natural bent for public
life and desire for usefulness and distinction, and not without strong
encouragement from friends whose opinion he valued. He had even then
considerable experience in speaking and thinking on his feet. He had
begun his practice in that direction before leaving Indiana, and
continued it everywhere he had gone. Mr. William Butler tells us that
on one occasion, when Lincoln was a farmhand at Island Grove, the
famous circuit-rider, Peter Cartwright, came by, electioneering for
the Legislature, and Lincoln at once engaged in a discussion with him
in the cornfield, in which the great Methodist was equally astonished
at the close reasoning and the uncouth figure of Mr. Brown's
extraordinary hired man. At another time, after one Posey, a
politician in search of office, had made a speech in Macon, John
Hanks, whose admiration of his cousin's oratory was unbounded, said
that "Abe could beat it." He turned a keg on end, and the tall boy
mounted it and made his speech. "The subject was the navigation of the
Sangamon, and Abe beat him to death," says the loyal Hanks. So it was
not with the tremor of a complete novice that the young man took the
stump during the few days left him between his return and the
election.

[Sidenote: Reynolds, "My Own Times," p. 291.]

He ran as a Whig. As this has been denied on authority which is
generally trustworthy, it is well enough to insist upon the fact. We
have a memorandum in Mr. Lincoln's own handwriting in which he says he
ran as "an avowed Clay man." In one of the few speeches of his, which,
made at this time, have been remembered and reported, he said: "I am
in favor of a national bank; I am in favor of the internal improvement
system, and of a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and
political principles." Nothing could be more unqualified or outspoken
than this announcement of his adhesion to what was then and for years
afterwards called "the American System" of Henry Clay. Other testimony
is not wanting to the same effect. Both Major Stuart and Judge Logan
[Footnote: The Democrats of New Salem worked for Lincoln out of their
personal regard for him. That was the general understanding of the
matter here at the time. In this he made no concession of principle
whatever. He was as stiff as a man could be in his Whig doctrines.
They did this for him simply because he was popular--because he was
Lincoln. STEPHEN T. LOGAN. July 6, 1875.] say that Lincoln ran in 1832
as a Whig, and that his speeches were unevasively in defense of the
principles of that party. Without discussing the merits of the party
or its purposes, we may insist that his adopting them thus openly at
the outset of his career was an extremely characteristic act, and
marks thus early the scrupulous conscientiousness which shaped every
action of his life. The State of Illinois was by a large majority
Democratic, hopelessly attached to the person and policy of Jackson.
Nowhere had that despotic leader more violent and unscrupulous
partisans than there. They were proud of their very servility, and
preferred the name of "whole-hog Jackson men" to that of Democrats.
The Whigs embraced in their scanty ranks the leading men of the State,
those who have since been most distinguished in its history, such as
S. T. Logan, Stuart, Browning, Dubois, Hardin, Breese, and many
others. But they were utterly unable to do anything except by dividing
the Jackson men, whose very numbers made their party unwieldy, and by
throwing their votes with the more decent and conservative portion of
them. In this way, in the late election, they had secured the success
of Governor Reynolds--the Old Ranger--against Governor Kinney, who
represented the vehement and proscriptive spirit which Jackson had
just breathed into the party. He had visited the General in
Washington, and had come back giving out threatenings and slaughter
against the Whigs in the true Tennessee style, declaring that "all
Whigs should be whipped out of office like dogs out of a meat-house";
the force of south-western simile could no further go. But the great
popularity of Reynolds and the adroit management of the Whigs carried
him through successfully. A single fact will show on which side the
people who could read were enlisted. The "whole-hog" party had one
newspaper, the opposition five. Of course it would have been
impossible for Reynolds to poll a respectable vote if his loyalty to
Jackson had been seriously doubted. As it was, he lost many votes
through a report that he had been guilty of saying that "he was as
strong for Jackson as any reasonable man should be." The Governor
himself, in his naive account of the canvass, acknowledges the
damaging nature of this accusation, and comforts himself with quoting
an indiscretion of Kinney's, who opposed a projected canal on the
ground that "it would flood the country with Yankees."

It showed some moral courage, and certainly an absence of the
shuffling politician's fair-weather policy, that Lincoln, in his
obscure and penniless youth, at the very beginning of his career, when
he was not embarrassed by antecedents or family connections, and when,
in fact, what little social influence he knew would have led him the
other way, chose to oppose a furiously intolerant majority, and to
take his stand with the party which was doomed to long-continued
defeat in Illinois. The motives which led him to take this decisive
course are not difficult to imagine. The better sort of people in
Sangamon County were Whigs, though the majority were Democrats, and he
preferred through life the better sort to the majority. The papers he
read were the Louisville "Journal" and the "Sangamo Journal," both
Whig. Reading the speeches and debates of the day, he sided with
Webster against Calhoun, and with Clay against anybody. Though his
notions of politics, like those of any ill-educated young man of
twenty-two, must have been rather crude, and not at all sufficient to
live and to die by, he had adopted them honestly and sincerely, with
no selfish regard to his own interests; and though he ardently desired
success, he never abated one jot or tittle of his convictions for any
possible personal gain, then or thereafter.

In the circular in which he announced his candidacy he made no
reference to national politics, but confined himself mainly to a
discussion of the practicability of improving the navigation of the
Sangamon, the favorite hobby of the place and time. He had no monopoly
of this "issue." It formed the burden of nearly every candidate's
appeal to the people in that year. The excitement occasioned by the
trip of the _Talisman_ had not yet died away, although the little
steamer was now dust and ashes, and her bold commander had left the
State to avoid an awkward meeting with the sheriff. The hope of seeing
Springfield an emporium of commerce was still lively among the
citizens of Sangamon County, and in no one of the handbills of the
political aspirants of the season was that hope more judiciously
encouraged than in the one signed by Abraham Lincoln. It was a well-
written circular, remarkable for its soberness and, reserve when we
consider the age and the limited advantages of the writer. It
concluded in these words: "Upon the subjects of which I have treated,
I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or
all of them; but holding it a sound maxim that it is better only
sometimes to be right than at all times wrong, so soon as I discover
my opinions to be erroneous I shall be ready to renounce them....
Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or
not, I can say for one, that I have no other so great as that of being
truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their
esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to
be developed. I am young, and unknown to many of you. I was born and
have ever remained in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy
or powerful relations or friends to recommend me. My case is thrown
exclusively upon the independent voters of the county; and, if
elected, they will have conferred a favor upon me, for which I shall
be unremitting in my labors to compensate. But if the good people in
their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been
too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined."

This is almost precisely the style of his later years. The errors of
grammar and construction which spring invariably from an effort to
avoid redundancy of expression remained with him through life. He
seemed to grudge the space required for necessary parts of speech. But
his language was at twenty-two, as it was thirty years later, the
simple and manly attire of his thought, with little attempt at
ornament and none at disguise. There was an intermediate time when he
sinned in the direction of fine writing; but this ebullition soon
passed away, and left that marvelously strong and transparent style in
which his two inaugurals were written.

Of course, in the ten days left him after his return from the field, a
canvass of the county, which was then--before its division--several
thousand square miles in extent, was out of the question. He made a
few speeches in the neighborhood of New Salem, and at least one in
Springfield. He was wholly unknown there except by his few comrades in
arms. We find him mentioned in the county paper only once during the
summer, in an editorial note adding the name of Captain Lincoln to
those candidates for the Legislature who were periling their lives on
the frontier and had left their reputations in charge of their
generous fellow-citizens at home. On the occasion of his speaking at
Springfield, most of the candidates had come together to address a
meeting there to give their electors some idea of their quality. These
were severe ordeals for the rash aspirants for popular favor. Besides
those citizens who came to listen and judge, there were many whose
only object was the free whisky provided for the occasion, and who,
after potations pottle-deep, became not only highly unparliamentary
but even dangerous to life and limb. This wild chivalry of Lick Creek
was, however, less redoubtable to Lincoln than it might be to an urban
statesman unacquainted with the frolic brutality of Clary's Grove.
Their gambols never caused him to lose his self-possession. It is
related that once, while he was speaking, he saw a ruffian attack a
friend of his in the crowd, and the rencontre not resulting according
to the orator's sympathies, he descended from the stand, seized the
objectionable fighting man by the neck, "threw him some ten feet,"
then calmly mounted to his place and finished his speech, the course
of his logic undisturbed by this athletic parenthesis. Judge Logan saw
Lincoln for the first time on the day when he came up to Springfield
on his canvass this summer. He thus speaks of his future partner: "He
was a very tall, gawky, and rough-looking fellow then; his pantaloons
didn't meet his shoes by six inches. But after he began speaking I
became very much interested in him. He made a very sensible speech.
His manner was very much the same as in after life; that is, the same
peculiar characteristics were apparent then, though of course in after
years he evinced more knowledge and experience. But he had then the
same novelty and the same peculiarity in presenting his ideas. He had
the same individuality that he kept through all his life."

There were two or three men at the meeting whose good opinion was
worth more than all the votes of Lick Creek to one beginning life:
Stephen T. Logan, a young lawyer who had recently come from Kentucky
with the best equipment for a _nisi prius_ practitioner ever
brought into the State; Major Stuart, whom we have met in the Black
Hawk war, once commanding a battalion and then marching as a private;
and William Butler, afterwards prominent in State politics, at that
time a young man of the purest Western breed in body and character,
clear-headed and courageous, and ready for any emergency where a
friend was to be defended or an enemy punished. We do not know whether
Lincoln gained any votes that day, but he gained what was far more
valuable, the active friendship of these able and honorable men, all
Whigs and all Kentuckians like himself.

The acquaintances he made in his canvass, the practice he gained in
speaking, and the added confidence which this experience of measuring
his abilities with those of others gave, were all the advantages which
Lincoln derived from this attempt. He was defeated, for the only time
in his life, in a contest before the people. The fortunate candidates
were E. D. Taylor, J. T. Stuart, Achilles Morris, and Peter
Cartwright, the first of whom received 1127 votes and the last 815.
Lincoln's position among the eight defeated candidates was a very
respectable one. He had 657 votes, and there were five who fared
worse, among them his old adversary Kirkpatrick. What must have been
especially gratifying to him was the fact that he received the almost
unanimous vote of his own neighborhood, the precinct of New Salem, 277
votes against 3, a result which showed more strongly than any words
could do the extent of the attachment and the confidence which his
genial and upright character had inspired among those who knew him
best.

Having been, even in so slight a degree, a soldier and a politician,
he was unfitted for a day laborer; but being entirely without means of
subsistence, he was forced to look about for some suitable occupation.
We know he thought seriously at this time of learning the trade of a
blacksmith, and using in that honest way the sinew and brawn which
nature had given him. But an opening for another kind of business
occurred, which prevented his entering upon any merely mechanical
occupation. Two of his most intimate friends were the brothers
Herndon, called, according to the fashion of the time, which held it
unfriendly to give a man his proper name, and arrogant for him to
claim it, "Row" and "Jim." They kept one of those grocery stores in
which everything salable on the frontier was sold, and which seem to
have changed their occupants as rapidly as sentry-boxes. "Jim" sold
his share to an idle and dissolute man named Berry, and "Row" soon
transferred his interest to Lincoln. It was easy enough to buy, as
nothing was ever given in payment but a promissory note. A short time
afterwards, one Reuben Radford, who kept another shop of the same
kind, happened one evening to attract the dangerous attention of the
Clary's Grove boys, who, with their usual prompt and practical
facetiousness, without a touch of malice in it, broke his windows and
wrecked his store. The next morning, while Radford was ruefully
contemplating the ruin, and doubtless concluding that he had had
enough of a country where the local idea of neighborly humor found
such eccentric expression, he hailed a passer-by named Greene, and
challenged him to buy his establishment for four hundred dollars. This
sort of trade was always irresistible to these Western speculators,
and Greene at once gave his note for the amount. It next occurred to
him to try to find out what the property was worth, and doubting his
own skill, he engaged Lincoln to make an invoice of it. The young
merchant, whose appetite for speculation had just been whetted by his
own investment, undertook the task, and, finding the stock of goods
rather tempting, offered Greene $250 for his bargain, which was at
once accepted. Not a cent of money changed hands in all these
transactions. By virtue of half a dozen signatures, Berry and Lincoln
became proprietors of the only mercantile establishment in the
village, and the apparent wealth of the community was increased by a
liberal distribution of their notes among the Herndons, Radford,
Greene, and a Mr. Rutledge, whose business they had also bought.

Fortunately for Lincoln and for the world, the enterprise was not
successful. It was entered into without sufficient reflection, and
from the very nature of things was destined to fail. To Berry the
business was merely the refuge of idleness. He spent his time in
gossip and drank up his share of the profits, and it is probable that
Lincoln was far more interested in politics and general reading than
in the petty traffic of his shop. In the spring of the next year,
finding that their merchandise was gaining them little or nothing,
they concluded to keep a tavern in addition to their other business,
and the records of the County Court of Sangamon County show that Berry
took out a license for that purpose on the 6th of March, 1833.
[Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (1) relocated to chapter end.]
But it was even then too late for any expedients to save the moribund
partnership. The tavern was never opened, for about this time Lincoln
and Berry were challenged to sell out to a pair of vagrant brothers
named Trent, who, as they had no idea of paying, were willing to give
their notes to any amount. They soon ran away, and Berry expired,
extinguished in rum. Lincoln was thus left loaded with debts, and with
no assets except worthless notes of Berry and the Trents. It is
greatly to his credit that he never thought of doing by others as
others had done by him. The morality of the frontier was deplorably
loose in such matters, and most of these people would have concluded
that the failure of the business expunged its liabilities. But Lincoln
made no effort even to compromise the claims against him. He promised
to pay when he could, and it took the labor of years to do it; but he
paid at last every farthing of the debt, which seemed to him and his
friends so large that it was called among them "the national debt."

[Illustration:   JUDGE STEPHEN T. LOGAN.]

He had already begun to read elementary books of law, borrowed from
Major Stuart and other kindly acquaintances. Indeed, it is quite
possible that Berry and Lincoln might have succeeded better in
business if the junior member of the firm had not spent so much of his
time reading Blackstone and Chitty in the shade of a great oak just
outside the door, while the senior quietly fuddled himself within.
Eye-witnesses still speak of the grotesque youth, habited in homespun
tow, lying on his back with his feet on the trunk of the tree, and
poring over his book by the hour, "grinding around with the shade," as
it shifted from north to east. After his store, to use his own
expression, had "winked out," he applied himself with more continuous
energy to his reading, doing merely what odd jobs came to his hand to
pay his current expenses, which were of course very slight. He
sometimes helped his friend Ellis in his store; sometimes went into
the field and renewed his exploits as a farm-hand, which had gained
him a traditional fame in Indiana; sometimes employed his clerkly hand
in straightening up a neglected ledger. It is probable that he worked
for his board oftener than for any other compensation, and his hearty
friendliness and vivacity, as well as his industry in the field, made
him a welcome guest in any farmhouse in the county. His strong arm was
always at the disposal of the poor and needy; it is said of him, with
a graphic variation of a well-known text, "that he visited the
fatherless and the widow and chopped their wood."

In the spring of this year, 1833, he was appointed Postmaster of New
Salem, and held the office for three years. Its emoluments were
slender and its duties light, but there was in all probability no
citizen of the village who could have made so much of it as he. The
mails were so scanty that he was said to carry them in his hat, and he
is also reported to have read every newspaper that arrived; it is
altogether likely that this formed the leading inducement to his
taking the office. His incumbency lasted until New Salem ceased to be
populous enough for a post-station and the mail went by to Petersburg.
Dr. J. G. Holland relates a sequel to this official experience which
illustrates the quaint honesty of the man. Several years later, when
he was a practicing lawyer, an agent of the Post-office Department
called upon him, and asked for a balance due from the New Salem
office, some seventeen dollars. Lincoln rose, and opening a little
trunk which lay in a corner of the room, took from it a cotton rag in
which was tied up the exact sum required. "I never use any man's money
but my own," he quietly remarked. When we consider the pinching
poverty in which these years had been passed, we may appreciate the
self-denial denial which had kept him from making even a temporary use
of this little sum of government money.

[Illustration:   A. LINCOLN'S SURVEYING INSTRUMENTS AND SADDLE-BAG. IN
THE POSSESSION OF THE LINCOLN MONUMENT COLLECTION.]

John Calhoun, the Surveyor of Sangamon County, was at this time
overburdened with work. The principal local industry was speculation
in land. Every settler of course wanted his farm surveyed and marked
out for him, and every community had its syndicate of leading citizens
who cherished a scheme of laying out a city somewhere. In many cases
the city was plotted, the sites of the principal buildings, including
a courthouse and a university, were determined, and a sonorous name
was selected out of Plutarch, before its location was even considered.
For this latter office the intervention of an official surveyor was
necessary, and therefore Mr. Calhoun had more business than he could
attend to without assistance. Looking about for a young man of good
character, intelligent enough to learn surveying at short notice, his
attention was soon attracted to Lincoln. He offered young Abraham a
book containing the elements of the art, and told him when he had
mastered it he should have employment. The offer was a flattering one,
and Lincoln, with that steady self-reliance of his, accepted it, and
armed with his book went out to the schoolmaster's (Menton Graham's),
and in six weeks' close application made himself a surveyor.
[Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (2) relocated to chapter end.]

[Illustration:   AUTOGRAPH PLAN OF ROAD SURVEYED BY A. LINCOLN AND
OTHERS. The lower half is the right-hand side of the plan which, in
the original, is in one piece.]

[Illustration:   Fac-simile of Lincoln's Report of the road survey.]

It will be remembered that Washington in his youth adopted the same
profession, but there were few points of similarity in the lives of
the two great Presidents, in youth or later manhood. The Virginian had
every social advantage in his favor, and was by nature a man of more
thrift and greater sagacity in money matters. He used the knowledge
gained in the practice of his profession so wisely that he became
rather early in life a large land-holder, and continually increased
his possessions until his death. Lincoln, with almost unbounded
opportunities for the selection and purchase of valuable tracts, made
no use whatever of them. He employed his skill and knowledge merely as
a bread-winner, and made so little provision for the future that when
Mr. Van Bergen, who had purchased the Radford note, sued and got
judgment on it, his horse and his surveying instruments were taken to
pay the debt, and only by the generous intervention of a friend was he
able to redeem these invaluable means of living. He was, nevertheless,
an excellent surveyor. His portion of the public work executed under
the directions of Mr. Calhoun and his successor, T. M. Neale, was well
performed, and he soon found his time pretty well employed with
private business which came to him from Sangamon and the adjoining
counties. Early in the year 1834 we find him appointed one of three
"viewers" to locate a road from Salt Creek to the county line in the
direction of Jacksonville. The board seems to have consisted mainly of
its chairman, as Lincoln made the deposit of money required by law,
surveyed the route, plotted the road, and wrote the report.
[Transcriber's Note: (3) Lengthy footnote relocated to chapter end.]

Though it is evident that the post-office and the surveyor's compass
were not making a rich man of him, they were sufficient to enable him
to live decently, and during the year he greatly increased his
acquaintance and his influence in the county. The one followed the
other naturally; every acquaintance he made became his friend, and
even before the end of his unsuccessful canvass in 1832 it had become
evident to the observant politicians of the district that he was a man
whom it would not do to leave out of their calculations. There seemed
to be no limit to his popularity nor to his aptitudes, in the opinion
of his admirers. He was continually called on to serve in the most
incongruous capacities. Old residents say he was the best judge at a
horse-race the county afforded; he was occasionally second in a duel
of fisticuffs, though he usually contrived to reconcile the
adversaries on the turf before any damage was done; he was the arbiter
on all controverted points of literature, science, or woodcraft among
the disputatious denizens of Clary's Grove, and his decisions were
never appealed from. His native tact and humor were invaluable in his
work as a peacemaker, and his enormous physical strength, which he
always used with a magnanimity rare among giants, placed his off-hand
decrees beyond the reach of contemptuous question. He composed
differences among friends and equals with good-natured raillery, but
he was as rough as need be when his wrath was roused by meanness and
cruelty. We hardly know whether to credit some of the stories,
apparently well-attested by living witnesses, of his prodigious
muscular powers. He is said to have lifted, at Rutledge's mill, a box
of stones weighing over half a ton! It is also related that he could
raise a barrel of whisky from the ground and drink from the bung--but
the narrator adds that he never swallowed the whisky. Whether these
traditions are strictly true or not, they are evidently founded on the
current reputation he enjoyed among his fellows for extraordinary
strength, and this was an important element in his influence. He was
known to be capable of handling almost any man he met, yet he never
sought a quarrel. He was everybody's friend and yet used no liquor or
tobacco. He was poor and had scarcely ever been at school, yet he was
the best-informed young man in the village. He had grown up on the
frontier, the utmost fringe of civilization, yet he was gentle and
clean of speech, innocent of blasphemy or scandal. His good qualities
might have excited resentment if displayed by a well-dressed stranger
from an Eastern State, but the most uncouth ruffians of New Salem took
a sort of proprietary interest and pride in the decency and the
cleverness and the learning of their friend and comrade, Abe Lincoln.

It was regarded, therefore, almost as a matter of course that Lincoln
should be a candidate for the Legislature at the next election, which
took place in August, 1834. He was sure of the united support of the
Whigs, and so many of the Democrats also wanted to vote for him that
some of the leading members of that party came to him and proposed
they should give him an organized support. He was too loyal a partisan
to accept their overtures without taking counsel from the Whig
candidates. He laid the matter before Major Stuart, who at once
advised him to make the canvass. It was a generous and chivalrous
action, for by thus encouraging the candidacy of Lincoln he was
endangering his own election. But his success two years before, in the
face of a vindictive opposition led by the strongest Jackson men in
the district, had made him somewhat confident, and he perhaps thought
he was risking little by giving a helping hand to his comrade in the
Spy Battalion. Before the election Lincoln's popularity developed
itself in rather a portentous manner, and it required some exertion to
save the seat of his generous friend. At the close of the poll, the
four successful candidates held the following relative positions:
Lincoln, 1376; Dawson, 1370; Carpenter, 1170; and Stuart, at that time
probably the most prominent young man in the district, and the one
marked out by the public voice for an early election to Congress,
1164.

[Relocated Footnote (1): The following is an extract from the court
record: "March 6, 1833. Ordered that William F. Berry, in the name of
Berry and Lincoln, have license to keep a tavern in New Salem, to
continue twelve months from this date, and that they pay one dollar in
addition to six dollars heretofore prepaid as per Treasurer's receipt,
and that they be allowed the following rates, viz.: French brandy, per
pint, 25; Peach, 183/4; Apple, 12; Holland Gin, 183/4; Domestic,
121/2; Wine, 25; Rum, 183/4; Whisky, 121/2; Breakfast, dinner, or
supper, 25; Lodging for night, 121/2; Horse for night, 25; Single
feed, 121/2; Breakfast, dinner, or supper, for stage passengers,
371/2. Who gave bond as required by law."]

[Relocated Footnote (2): There has been some discussion as to whether
Lincoln served as deputy under Calhoun or Neale. The truth is that he
served under both of them. Calhoun was surveyor in 1833, when Lincoln
first learned the business. Neale was elected in 1835, and immediately
appointed Lincoln and Calhoun as his deputies. The "Sangamo Journal"
of Sept, 12, 1835, contains the following official advertisement:

"SURVEYOR'S NOTICE.--I have appointed John B. Watson, Abram Lincoln,
and John Calhoun deputy surveyors for Sangamon County. In my absence
from town, any persons wishing their land surveyed will do well to
call at the Recorder's office and enter his or their names in a book
left for that purpose, stating township and range in which they
respectively live, and their business shall be promptly attended to.

"T. M. NEALE."

An article by Colonel G. A. Pierce, printed April 21, 1881, in the
Chicago "Inter-Ocean," describes an interview held in that month with
W.G. Green, of Menard County, in which this matter is referred to. But
Mr. Green relies more on the document in his possession than on his
recollection of what took place in 1833. "'Where did Lincoln learn
his surveying?' I asked. 'Took it up himself,' replied Mr. Green, 'as
he did a hundred things, and mastered it too. When he acted as
surveyor here he was deputy of T. M. Neale, and not of Calhoun, as has
often been said. There was a dispute about this, and many sketches of
his life gave Calhoun (Candle-box Calhoun, as he was afterwards known
during the Kansas troubles and election frauds) as the surveyor, but
it was Neale.' Mr. Green turned to his desk and drew out an old
certificate, in the handwriting of Lincoln, giving the boundaries of
certain lands, and signed, 'T. M. Neale, Surveyor, by A. Lincoln,
Deputy,' thus settling the question. Mr. Green was a Democrat, and has
leaned towards that party all his life, but what he thought and thinks
of Lincoln can be seen by an endorsement on the back of the
certificate named, which is as follows:"

(Preserve this, as it is the noblest of God's creation--A. Lincoln,
the 2d preserver of his country. May 3, 1865.--Penned by W. G. Green,
who taught Lincoln the English grammar in 1831.)]

[Relocated Footnote (3): As this is probably the earliest public document
extant written and signed by Lincoln, we give it in full:

"March 3, 1834. Reuben Harrison presented the following petition: We,
the undersigned, respectfully request your honorable body to appoint
viewers to view and locate a road from Musick's ferry on Salt Creek,
via New Salem, to the county line in the direction of Jacksonville.

"And Abram Lincoln deposited with the clerk $10, as the law directs.
Ordered, that Michael Killion, Hugh Armstrong, and Abram Lincoln be
appointed to view said road, and said Lincoln to act as surveyor.

"To the County Commissioners' Court for the county of Sangamon, at its
June term, 1834. We, the undersigned, being appointed to view and
locate a "Whole length of road, 26 road, beginning at Musick's ferry
on Salt Creek, via New Salem, to the county line in the direction to
Jacksonville, respectfully report that we have performed the duties of
said view and location, as required by law, and that we have made the
location on good ground, and believe the establishment of the same to
be necessary and proper.

"The inclosed map gives the courses and distances as required by law.
Michael Killion, Hugh Armstrong, A. Lincoln."

(Indorsement in pencil, also in Lincoln's handwriting:)

"A. Lincoln, 5 days at $3.00, $15.00. John A. Kelsoe, chain-bearer, for
5 days at 75 cents, $3.75. Robert Lloyd, at 75 cents, $3.75. Hugh
Armstrong, for services as axeman, 5 days at 75 cents, $3.75. A.
Lincoln, for making plot and report, $2.50."

(On Map.)  "Whole length of road, 26 miles and 70 chains. Scale, 2
inches to the mile."]




CHAPTER VII

LEGISLATIVE EXPERIENCE


The election of Mr. Lincoln to the Legislature may be said to have
closed the pioneer portion of his life. He was done with the wild
carelessness of the woods, with the jolly ruffianism of Clary's Grove,
with the petty chaffering of grocery stores, with odd jobs for daily
bread, with all the uncouth squalor of the frontier poverty. It was
not that his pecuniary circumstances were materially improved. He was
still, and for years continued to be, a very poor man, harassed by
debts which he was always working to pay, and sometimes in distress
for the means of decent subsistence. But from this time forward his
associations were with a better class of men than he had ever known
before, and a new feeling of self-respect must naturally have grown up
in his mind from his constant intercourse with them--a feeling which
extended to the minor morals of civilized life. A sophisticated reader
may smile at the mention of anything like social ethics in Vandalia in
1834; but, compared with Gentryville and New Salem, the society which
assembled in the winter at that little capital was polished and
elegant. The State then contained nearly 250,000 inhabitants, and the
members of the Legislature, elected purely on personal grounds,
nominated by themselves or their neighbors without the intervention of
party machinery, were necessarily the leading men, in one way or
another, in their several districts. Among the colleagues of Lincoln
at Vandalia were young men with destinies only less brilliant than his
own. They were to become governors, senators, and judges; they were to
organize the Whig party of Illinois, and afterwards the Republican;
they were to lead brigades and divisions in two great wars. Among the
first persons he met there--not in the Legislature proper, but in the
lobby, where he was trying to appropriate an office then filled by
Colonel John J. Hardin--was his future antagonist, Stephen A. Douglas.
Neither seemed to have any presentiment of the future greatness of the
other. Douglas thought little of the raw youth from the Sangamon
timber, and Lincoln said the dwarfish Vermonter was "the least man he
had ever seen." To all appearance, Vandalia was full of better men
than either of them--clever lawyers, men of wit and standing, some of
them the sons of provident early settlers, but more who had come from
older States to seek their fortunes in these fresh fields.

During his first session Lincoln occupied no especially conspicuous
position. He held his own respectably among the best. One of his
colleagues tells us he was not distinguished by any external
eccentricity; that he wore, according to the custom of the time, a
decent suit of blue jeans; that he was known simply as a rather quiet
young man, good-natured and sensible. Before the session ended he had
made the acquaintance of most of the members, and had evidently come
to be looked upon as possessing more than ordinary capacity. His
unusual common-sense began to be recognized. His name does not often
appear in the records of the year. He introduced a resolution in favor
of securing to the State a part of the proceeds of the sales of public
lands within its limits; he took part in the organization of the
ephemeral "White" party, which was designed to unite all the anti-
Jackson elements under the leadership of Hugh L. White, of Tennessee;
he voted with the minority in favor of Young against Robinson for
senator, and with the majority that passed the Bank and Canal bills,
which were received with great enthusiasm throughout Illinois, and
which were only the precursors of those gigantic and ill-advised
schemes that came to maturity two years later, and inflicted
incalculable injury upon the State.

Lincoln returned to New Salem, after this winter's experience of men
and things at the little capital, much firmer on his feet than ever
before. He had had the opportunity of measuring himself with the
leading men of the community, and had found no difficulty whatever in
keeping pace with them. He continued his studies of the law and
surveying together, and became quite indispensable in the latter
capacity--so much so that General Neale, announcing in September,
1835, the names of the deputy surveyors of Sangarnon County, placed
the name of Lincoln before that of his old master in the science, John
Calhoun. He returned to the Legislature in the winter of 1835-6, and
one of the first important incidents of the session was the election
of a senator to fill the vacancy occasioned by the death of Elias Kent
Kane. There was no lack of candidates. A journal of the time says:
"This intelligence reached Vandalia on the evening of the 26th of
December, and in the morning nine candidates appeared in that place,
and it was anticipated that a number more would soon be in, among them
'the lion of the North,' who, it is thought, will claim the office by
preemption." [Footnote: "Sangamo Journal," January 2.] It is not
known who was the roaring celebrity here referred to, but the
successful candidate was General William L. D. Ewing, who was elected
by a majority of one vote. Lincoln and the other Whigs voted for him,
not because he was a "White" man, as they frankly stated, but because
"he had been proscribed by the Van Buren party." Mr. Semple, the
candidate for the regular Democratic caucus, was beaten simply on
account of his political orthodoxy.

A minority is always strongly in favor of independent action and
bitterly opposed to caucuses, and therefore we need not be surprised
at finding Mr. Lincoln, a few days later in the session, joining in
hearty denunciation of the convention system, which had already become
popular in the East, and which General Jackson was then urging upon
his faithful followers. The missionaries of this new system in
Illinois were Stephen A. Douglas, recently from Vermont, the shifty
young lawyer from Morgan County, who had just succeeded in having
himself made circuit attorney in place of Colonel Hardin, and a man
who was then regarded in Vandalia as a far more important and
dangerous person than Douglas, Ebenezer Peck, of Chicago. Peck was
looked upon with distrust and suspicion for several reasons, all of
which seemed valid to the rural legislators assembled there. He came
from Canada, where he had been a member of the provincial parliament;
it was therefore imagined that he was permeated with secret hostility
to republican institutions; his garb, his furs, were of the fashion of
Quebec; and he passed his time indoctrinating the Jackson men with the
theory and practice of party organization, teachings which they
eagerly absorbed, and which seemed sinister and ominous to the Whigs.
He was showing them, in fact, the way in which elections were to be
won; and though the Whigs denounced his system as subversive of
individual freedom and private judgment, it was not long before they
were also forced to adopt it, or be left alone with their virtue. The
organization of political parties in Illinois really takes its rise
from this time, and in great measure from the work of Mr. Peck with
the Vandalia Legislature. There was no man more dreaded and disliked
than he was by the stalwart young Whigs against whom he was organizing
that solid and disciplined opposition. But a quarter of a century
brings wonderful changes. Twenty-five years later Mr. Peck stood
shoulder to shoulder with these very men who then reviled him as a
Canadian emissary of tyranny and corruption,--with S. T. Logan, 0. H.
Browning, and J. K. Dubois,--organizing a new party for victory under
the name of Abraham Lincoln.

[Illustration:   O. H. Browning.]

The Legislature adjourned on the 18th of January, having made a
beginning, it is true, in the work of improving the State by statute,
though its modest work, incorporating canal and bridge companies and
providing for public roads, bore no relation to the ambitious essays
of its successor. Among the bills passed at this session was an
Apportionment act, by which Sangamon County became entitled to seven
representatives and two senators, and early in the spring eight
"White" statesmen of the county were ready for the field--the ninth,
Mr. Herndon, holding over as State Senator. It seems singular to us of
a later day that just eight prominent men, on a side, should have
offered themselves for these places, without the intervention of any
primary meetings. Such a thing, if we mistake not, was never known
again in Illinois. The convention system was afterwards seen to be an
absolute necessity to prevent the disorganization of parties through
the restless vanity of obscure and insubordinate aspirants. But the
eight who "took the stump" in Sangamon in the summer of 1836 were
supported as loyally and as energetically as if they had been
nominated with all the solemnity of modern days. They became famous in
the history of the State, partly for their stature and partly for
their influence in legislation. They were called, with Herndon, the
"Long Nine;" their average height was over six feet, and their
aggregate altitude was said to be fifty-five feet. Their names were
Abraham Lincoln, John Dawson, Dan Stone, Ninian W. Edwards, William F.
Elkin, R. L. Wilson, and Andrew McCormick, candidates for the House of
Representatives, and Job Fletcher for the Senate, of Illinois.

Mr. Lincoln began his canvass with the following circular:


     NEW SALEM/June 13, 1836.
   To the Editor of the "Journal."

In your paper of last Saturday I see a communication over the
signature "Many Voters" in which the candidates who are announced in
the "Journal" are called upon to "show their hands." Agreed. Here's
mine.

I go for all sharing the privileges of the Government who assist in
bearing its burdens. Consequently I go for admitting all whites to the
right of suffrage who pay taxes or bear arms (by no means excluding
females).

If elected, I shall consider the whole people of Sangamon my
constituents, as well those that oppose as those that support me.

While acting as their representative I shall be governed by their will
on all subjects upon which I have the means of knowing what their will
is, and upon all others I shall do what my own judgment teaches me
will best advance their interests. Whether elected or not, I go for
distributing the proceeds of the sales of the public lands to the
several States, to enable our State, in common with others, to dig
canals and construct railroads without borrowing money and paying
interest on it.

If alive on the first Monday in November, I shall vote for Hugh L.
White for President. [Footnote: This phrase seems to have been adopted
as a formula by the anti-Jackson party. The "cards" of several
candidates contain it.]

   Very respectfully,
     A. LINCOLN.


It would be hard to imagine a more audacious and unqualified
declaration of principles and intentions. But it was the fashion of
the hour to promise exact obedience to the will of the people, and the
two practical questions touched by this circular were the only ones
then much talked about. The question of suffrage for aliens was a
living problem in the State, and Mr. Lincoln naturally took liberal
ground on it; and he was also in favor of getting from the sale of
public lands a portion of the money he was ready to vote for internal
improvements. This was good Whig doctrine at that time, and the young
politician did not fancy he could go wrong in following in such a
matter the lead of his idol, Henry Clay.

He made an active canvass, and spoke frequently during the summer. He
must have made some part of the campaign on foot, for we find in the
county paper an advertisement of a horse which had strayed or been
stolen from him while on a visit to Springfield. It was not an
imposing animal, to judge from the description; it was "plainly marked
with harness," and was "believed to have lost some of his shoes"; but
it was a large horse, as suited a cavalier of such stature, and
"trotted and paced" in a serviceable manner. In July a rather
remarkable discussion took place at the county-seat, in which many of
the leading men on both sides took part. Ninian Edwards, son of the
late Governor, is said to have opened the debate with much effect. Mr.
Early, who followed him, was so roused by his energetic attack that he
felt his only resource was a flat contradiction, which in those days
meant mischief. In the midst of great and increasing excitement Dan
Stone and John Calhoun made speeches which did not tend to pour oil on
the waters of contention, and then came Mr. Lincoln's turn. An article
in the "Journal" states that he seemed embarrassed in his opening, for
this was the most important contest in which he had ever been engaged.
But he soon felt the easy mastery of his powers come back to him, and
he finally made what was universally regarded as the strongest speech
of the day. One of his colleagues says that on this occasion he used
in his excitement for the first time that singularly effective clear
tenor tone of voice which afterwards became so widely known in the
political battles of the West. The canvass was an energetic one
throughout, and excited more interest, in the district than even the
presidential election, which occurred some months later. Mr. Lincoln
was elected at the head of the poll by a majority greatly in excess of
the average majority of his friends, which shows conclusively how his
influence and popularity had increased. The Whigs in this election
effected a revolution in the politics of the county. By force of their
ability and standing they had before managed to divide the suffrages
of the people, even while they were unquestionably in the minority;
but this year they completely defeated their opponents and gained that
control of the county which they never lost as long as the party
endured.

If Mr. Lincoln had no other claims to be remembered than his services
in the Legislature of 1836-7, there would be little to say in his
favor. Its history is one of disaster to the State. Its legislation
was almost wholly unwise and hurtful. The most we can say for Mr.
Lincoln is that he obeyed the will of his constituents, as he promised
to do, and labored with singular skill and ability to accomplish the
objects desired by the people who gave him their votes. The especial
work intrusted to him was the subdivision of the county, and the
project for the removal of the capital of the State to Springfield.
[Footnote: "Lincoln was at the head of the project to remove the seat
of government to Springfield; it was entirely intrusted to him to
manage. The members were all elected on one ticket, but they all
looked to Lincoln as the head" STEPHEN T, LOGAN.] In both of these he
was successful. In the account of errors and follies committed by the
Legislature to the lasting injury of the State, he is entitled to no
praise or blame beyond the rest. He shared in that sanguine epidemic
of financial and industrial quackery which devastated the entire
community, and voted with the best men of the country in favor of
schemes which appeared then like a promise of an immediate millennium,
and seem now like midsummer madness.

[Sidenote: Ford, p. 102.]

[Footnote: Reynolds, "Life and Times."]

He entered political life in one of those eras of delusive prosperity
which so often precede great financial convulsions. The population of
the State was increasing at the enormous rate of two hundred percent
in ten years. It had extended northward along the lines of the wooded
valleys of creeks and rivers in the center to Peoria; on the west by
the banks of the Mississippi to Galena; on the east with wide
intervals of wilderness to Chicago. The edge of the timber was
everywhere pretty well occupied, though the immigrants from the forest
States of Kentucky and Tennessee had as yet avoided the prairies. The
rich soil and equable climate were now attracting an excellent class
of settlers from the older States, and the long-neglected northern
counties were receiving the attention they deserved. The war of Black
Hawk had brought the country into notice; the utter defeat of his
nation had given the guarantee of a permanent peace; the last lodges
of the Pottawatomies had disappeared from the country in 1833. The
money spent by the general Government during the war, and paid to the
volunteers at its close, added to the common prosperity. There was a
brisk trade in real estate, and there was even a beginning in Chicago
of that passion for speculation in town lots which afterwards became a
frenzy.

It was too much to expect of the Illinois Legislature that it should
understand that the best thing it could do to forward this prosperous
tendency of things was to do nothing; for this is a lesson which has
not yet been learned by any legislature in the world. For several
years they had been tinkering, at first modestly and tentatively, at a
scheme of internal improvements which should not cost too much money.
In 1835 they began to grant charters for railroads, which remained in
embryo, as the stock was never taken. Surveys for other railroads were
also proposed, to cross the State in different directions; and the
project of uniting Lake Michigan with the Illinois River by a canal
was of too evident utility to be overlooked. In fact, the route had
been surveyed, and estimates of cost made, companies incorporated, and
all preliminaries completed many years before, though nothing further
had been done, as no funds had been offered from any source. But at
the special session of 1835 a law was passed authorizing a loan of
half a million dollars for this purpose; the loan was effected by
Governor Duncan the following year, and in June, aboard of canal
commissioners having been appointed, a beginning was actually made
with pick and shovel.

[Sidenote: Ford, p. 181.]

A restless feeling of hazardous speculation seemed to be taking
possession of the State. "It commenced," says Governor Ford, in his
admirable chronicle, "at Chicago, and was the means of building up
that place in a year or two from a village of a few houses to be a
city of several thousand inhabitants. The story of the sudden fortunes
made there excited at first wonder and amazement; next, a gambling
spirit of adventure; and lastly, an all-absorbing desire for sudden
and splendid wealth. Chicago had been for some time only one great
town-market. The plots of towns for a hundred miles around were
carried there to be disposed of at auction. The Eastern people had
caught the mania. Every vessel coming west was loaded with them, their
money and means, bound for Chicago, the great fairy-land of fortunes.
But as enough did not come to satisfy the insatiable greediness of the
Chicago sharpers and speculators, they frequently consigned their
wares to Eastern markets. In fact, lands and town lots were the staple
of the country, and were the only article of export." The contagion
spread so rapidly, towns and cities were laid out so profusely, that
it was a standing joke that before long there would be no land left in
the State for farming purposes.

The future of the State for many years to come was thus discounted by
the fervid imaginations of its inhabitants. "We have every requisite
of a great empire," they said, "except enterprise and inhabitants,"
and they thought that a little enterprise would bring the inhabitants.
Through the spring and summer of 1836 the talk of internal
improvements grew more general and more clamorous. The candidates for
office spoke about little else, and the only point of emulation among
the parties was which should be the more reckless and grandiose in its
promises. When the time arrived for the assembling of the Legislature,
the members were not left to their own zeal and the recollection of
their campaign pledges, but meetings and conventions were everywhere
held to spur them up to the fulfillment of their mandate. The
resolutions passed by the principal body of delegates who came
together in December directed the Legislature to vote a system of
internal improvements "commensurate with the wants of the people," a
phrase which is never lacking in the mouth of the charlatan or the
demagogue.

[Sidenote: "Ford's History," p. 184.]

These demands were pressed upon a not reluctant Legislature. They
addressed themselves at once to the work required of them, and soon
devised, with reckless and unreasoning haste, a scheme of railroads
covering the vast uninhabited prairies as with a gridiron. There was
to be a rail-road from Galena to the mouth of the Ohio River; from
Alton to Shawneetown; from Alton to Mount Carmel; from Alton to the
eastern State boundary--by virtue of which lines Alton was to take the
life of St. Louis without further notice; from Quincy to the Wabash
River; from Bloomington to Pekin; from Peoria to Warsaw;--in all, 1350
miles of railway. Some of these terminal cities were not in existence
except upon neatly designed surveyor's maps. The scheme provided also
for the improvement of every stream in the State on which a child's
shingle-boat could sail; and to the end that all objections should be
stifled on the part of those neighborhoods which had neither railroads
nor rivers, a gift of two hundred thousand dollars was voted to them,
and with this sop they were fain to be content and not trouble the
general joy. To accomplish this stupendous scheme, the Legislature
voted eight million dollars, to be raised by loan. Four millions were
also voted to complete the canal. These sums, monstrous as they were,
were still ridiculously inadequate to the purpose in view. But while
the frenzy lasted there was no consideration of cost or of
possibilities. These vast works were voted without estimates, without
surveys, without any rational consideration of their necessity. The
voice of reason seemed to be silent in the Assembly; only the
utterances of fervid prophecy found listeners. Governor Ford speaks of
one orator who insisted, amid enthusiastic plaudits, that the State
could well afford to borrow one hundred millions for internal
improvements. The process of reasoning, or rather predicting, was easy
and natural. The roads would raise the price of land; the State could
enter large tracts and sell them at a profit; foreign capital would be
invested in land, and could be heavily taxed to pay bonded interest;
and the roads, as fast as they were built, could be operated at a
great profit to pay for their own construction. The climax of the
whole folly was reached by the provision of law directing that work
should be begun at once at the termini of all the roads and the
crossings of all rivers.

It is futile and disingenuous to attempt, as some have done, to fasten
upon one or the other of the political parties of the State the
responsibility of this bedlam legislation. The Governor and a majority
of the Legislature were elected as Jackson Democrats, but the Whigs
were as earnest in passing these measures as their opponents; and
after they were adopted, the superior wealth, education, and business
capacity of the Whigs had their legitimate influence, and they filled
the principal positions upon the boards and commissions which came
into existence under the acts. The bills were passed,--not without
opposition, it is true, but by sufficient majorities,--and the news
was received by the people of the State with the most extravagant
demonstrations of delight. The villages were illuminated; bells were
rung in the rare steeples of the churches; "fire-balls,"--bundles of
candle-wick soaked in turpentine,--were thrown by night all over the
country. The day of payment was far away, and those who trusted the
assurances of the sanguine politicians thought that in some mysterious
way the scheme would pay for itself.

Mr. Lincoln is continually found voting with his friends in favor of
this legislation, and there is nothing to show that he saw any danger
in it. He was a Whig, and as such in favor of internal improvements in
general and a liberal construction of constitutional law in such
matters. As a boy, he had interested himself in the details of local
improvements of rivers and roads, and he doubtless went with the
current in Vandalia in favor of this enormous system. He took,
however, no prominent part in the work by which these railroad bills
were passed. He considered himself as specially commissioned to
procure the removal of the State capital from Vandalia to Springfield,
and he applied all his energies to the accomplishment of this work.
The enterprise was hedged round with difficulties; for although it was
everywhere agreed, except at Vandalia, that the capital ought to be
moved, every city in the State, and several which existed only on
paper, demanded to be made the seat of government. The question had
been submitted to a popular vote in 1834, and the result showed about
as many cities desirous of opening their gates to the Legislature as
claimed the honor of being the birthplace of Homer. Of these
Springfield was only third in popular estimation, and it was evident
that Mr. Lincoln had need of all his wits if he were to fulfill the
trust confided to him. It is said by Governor Ford that the "Long
Nine" were not averse to using the hopes and fears of other members in
relation to their special railroads to gain their adherence to the
Springfield programme, but this is by no means clear. We are rather
inclined to trust the direct testimony of Jesse K. Dubois, that the
success of the Sangamon County delegation in obtaining the capital was
due to the adroit management of Mr. Lincoln--first in inducing all the
rival claimants to unite in a vote to move the capital from Vandalia,
and then in carrying a direct vote for Springfield through the joint
convention by the assistance of the southern counties. His personal
authority accomplished this in great part. Mr. Dubois says: "He made
Webb and me vote for the removal, though we belonged to the southern
end of the State. We defended our vote before our constituents by
saying that necessity would ultimately force the seat of government to
a central position. But in reality we gave the vote to Lincoln because
we liked him, because we wanted to oblige our friend, and because we
recognized him as our leader." To do this, they were obliged to
quarrel with their most intimate associates, who had bought a piece of
waste land at the exact geographical center of the State and were
striving to have the capital established there in the interest of
their own pockets and territorial symmetry.

The bill was passed only a short time before the Legislature
adjourned, and the "Long Nine" came back to their constituents wearing
their well-won laurels. They were complimented in the newspapers, at
public meetings, and even at subscription dinners. We read of one at
Springfield, at the "Rural Hotel," to which sixty guests sat down,
where there were speeches by Browning, Lincoln, Douglas (who had
resigned his seat in the Legislature to become Register of the Land
Office at the new capital), S. T. Logan, Baker, and others, whose wit
and wisdom were lost to history through the absence of reporters.
Another dinner was given them at Athens a few weeks later. Among the
toasts on these occasions were two which we may transcribe: "Abraham
Lincoln: He has fulfilled the expectations of his friends, and
disappointed the hopes of his enemies"; and "A. Lincoln: One of
Nature's noblemen."




CHAPTER VIII

THE LINCOLN-STONE PROTEST


[Sidenote: 1837.]

On the 3rd of March, the day before the Legislature adjourned, Mr.
Lincoln caused to be entered upon its records a paper which excited
but little interest at the time, but which will probably be remembered
long after the good and evil actions of the Vandalia Assembly have
faded away from the minds of men. It was the authentic record of the
beginning of a great and momentous career. The following protest was
presented to the House, which was read and ordered to be spread on the
journals, to wit:


   Resolutions upon the subject of domestic slavery having
   passed both branches of the General Assembly at its
   present session, the undersigned hereby protest against the
   passage of the same.

   They believe that the institution of slavery is founded
   on both injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation
   of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than
   abate its evils.

   They believe that the Congress of the United States
   has no power under the Constitution to interfere with the
   institution of slavery in the different States.

   They believe that the Congress of the United States
   has the power, under the Constitution, to abolish slavery
   in the District of Columbia, but that the power ought not
   to be exercised, unless at the request of the people of the
   District.

   The difference between these opinions and those contained
   in the above resolutions is their reason for entering
   this protest.

  (Signed)
     DAN STONE,
     A. LINCOLN,
     Representatives from the county of Sangamon.


It may seem strange to those who shall read these pages that a protest
so mild and cautious as this should ever have been considered either
necessary or remarkable. We have gone so far away from the habits of
thought and feeling prevalent at that time that it is difficult to
appreciate such acts at their true value. But if we look a little
carefully into the state of politics and public opinion in Illinois in
the first half of this century, we shall see how much of inflexible
conscience and reason there was in this simple protest.

[Sidenote: Edwards, "History of Illinois," p. 179.]

[Sidenote: Edwards, p. 180.]

The whole of the North-west territory had, it is true, been dedicated
to freedom by the ordinance of 1787, but in spite of that famous
prohibition, slavery existed in a modified form throughout that vast
territory wherever there was any considerable population. An act
legalizing a sort of slavery by indenture was passed by the Indiana
territorial Legislature in 1807, and this remained in force in the
Illinois country after its separation. Another act providing for the
hiring of slaves from Southern States was passed in 1814, for the
ostensible reason that "mills could not be successfully operated in
the territory for want of laborers, and that the manufacture of salt
could not be successfully carried on by white laborers." Yet, as an
unconscious satire upon such pretenses, from time to time the most
savage acts were passed to prohibit the immigration of free negroes
into the territory which was represented as pining for black labor.
Those who held slaves under the French domination, and their heirs,
continued to hold them and their descendants in servitude, after
Illinois had become nominally a free territory and a free State, on
the ground that their vested rights of property could not have been
abrogated by the ordinance, and that under the rule of the civil law
_partus sequitur ventrem_.

But this quasi-toleration of the institution was not enough for the
advocates of slavery. Soon after the adoption of the State
Constitution, which prohibited slavery "hereafter," it was evident
that there was a strong under-current of desire for its introduction
into the State. Some of the leading politicians, exaggerating the
extent of this desire, imagined they saw in it a means of personal
advancement, and began to agitate the question of a convention to
amend the Constitution. At that time there was a considerable
emigration setting through the State from Kentucky and Tennessee to
Missouri. Day by day the teams of the movers passed through the
Illinois settlements, and wherever they halted for rest and
refreshment they would affect to deplore the short-sighted policy
which, by prohibiting slavery, had prevented their settling in that
beautiful country. When young bachelors came from Kentucky on trips of
business or pleasure, they dazzled the eyes of the women and excited
the envy of their male rivals with their black retainers. The early
Illinoisans were perplexed with a secret and singular sense of
inferiority to even so new and raw a community as Missouri, because of
its possession of slavery. Governor Edwards, complaining so late as
1829 of the superior mail facilities afforded to Missouri, says: "I
can conceive of no reason for this preference, unless it be supposed
that because the people of Missouri have negroes to work for them they
are to be considered as gentlefolks entitled to higher consideration
than us plain 'free-State' folks who have to work for ourselves."

The attempt was at last seriously made to open the State to slavery by
the Legislature of 1822-3. The Governor, Edward Coles, of Virginia, a
strong antislavery man, had been elected by a division of the pro-
slavery party, but came in with a Legislature largely against him. The
Senate had the requisite pro-slavery majority of two-thirds for a
convention. In the House of Representatives there was a contest for a
seat upon the result of which the two-thirds majority depended. The
seat was claimed by John Shaw and Nicholas Hansen, of Pike County. The
way in which the contest was decided affords a curious illustration of
the moral sense of the advocates of slavery. They wanted at this
session to elect a senator and provide for the convention. Hansen
would vote for their senator and not for the convention. Shaw would
vote for the convention, but not for Thomas, their candidate for
senator. In such a dilemma they determined not to choose, but
impartially to use both. They gave the seat to Hansen, and with his
vote elected Thomas; they then turned him out, gave the place to Shaw,
and with his vote carried the act for submitting the convention
question to a popular vote. They were not more magnanimous in their
victory than scrupulous in the means by which they had gained it. The
night after the vote was taken they formed in a wild and drunken
procession, and visited the residences of the Governor and the other
free-State leaders, with loud and indecent demonstrations of triumph.

They considered their success already assured; but they left out of
view the value of the moral forces called into being by their insolent
challenge. The better class of people in the State, those heretofore
unknown in politics, the schoolmasters, the ministers, immediately
prepared for the contest, which became one of the severest the State
has ever known. They established three newspapers, and sustained them
with money and contributions. The Governor gave his entire salary for
four years to the expenses of this contest, in which he had no
personal interest whatever. The antislavery members of the Legislature
made up a purse of a thousand dollars. They spent their money mostly
in printer's ink and in the payment of active and zealous colporteurs.
The result was a decisive defeat for the slave party. The convention
was beaten by 1800 majority, in a total vote of 11612, and the State
saved forever from slavery.

[Illustration:   MARTIN VAN BUREN.]

But these supreme efforts of the advocates of public morals,
uninfluenced by considerations of personal advantage, are of rare
occurrence, and necessarily do not survive the exigencies that call
them forth. The apologists of slavery, beaten in the canvass, were
more successful in the field of social opinion. In the reaction which
succeeded the triumph of the antislavery party, it seemed as if there
had never been any antislavery sentiment in the State. They had voted,
it is true, against the importation of slaves from the South, but they
were content to live under a code of Draconian ferocity, inspired by
the very spirit of slavery, visiting the immigration of free negroes
with penalties of the most savage description. Even Governor Coles,
the public-spirited and popular politician, was indicted and severely
fined for having brought his own freedmen into the State and having
assisted them in establishing themselves around him upon farms of
their own. The Legislature remitted the fine, but the Circuit Court
declared it had no constitutional power to do so, though the Supreme
Court afterwards overruled this decision. Any mention of the subject
of slavery was thought in the worst possible taste, and no one could
avow himself opposed to it without the risk of social ostracism. Every
town had its one or two abolitionists, who were regarded as harmless
or dangerous lunatics, according to the energy with which they made
their views known.

From this arose a singular prejudice against New England people. It
was attributable partly to the natural feeling of distrust of
strangers which is common to ignorance and provincialism, but still
more to a general suspicion that all Eastern men were abolitionists.
Mr. Cook, who so long represented the State in Congress, used to
relate with much amusement how he once spent the night in a farmer's
cabin, and listened to the honest man's denunciations of "that----
Yankee Cook." Cook was a Kentuckian, but his enemies could think of no
more dreadful stigma to apply to him than that of calling him a
Yankee. Senator James A. McDougall once told us that although he made
no pretense of concealing his Eastern nativity, he never could keep
his ardent friends in Pike County from denying the fact and fighting
any one who asserted it. The great preacher, Peter Cartwright, used to
denounce Eastern men roundly in his sermons, calling them "imps who
lived on oysters" instead of honest corn-bread and bacon. The taint of
slavery, the contagion of a plague they had not quite escaped, was on
the people of Illinois. They were strong enough to rise once in their
might and say they would not have slavery among them. But in the petty
details of every day, in their ordinary talk, and in their routine
legislation, their sympathies were still with the slave-holders. They
would not enlist with them, but they would fight their battles in
their own way.

Their readiness to do what came to be called later, in a famous
speech, the "dirty work" of the South was seen in the tragic death of
Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, in this very year of 1837. He had for some
years been publishing a religious newspaper in St. Louis, but finding
the atmosphere of that city becoming dangerous to him on account of
the freedom of his comments upon Southern institutions, he moved to
Alton, in Illinois, twenty-five miles further up the river. His
arrival excited an immediate tumult in that place; a mob gathered
there on the day he came--it was Sunday, and the good people were at
leisure--and threw his press into the Mississippi. Having thus
expressed their determination to vindicate the law, they held a
meeting, and cited him before it to declare his intentions. He said
they were altogether peaceful and legal; that he intended to publish a
religious newspaper and not to meddle with politics. This seemed
satisfactory to the people, and he was allowed to fish out his press,
buy new types, and set up his paper. But Mr. Lovejoy was a predestined
martyr. He felt there was a "woe" upon him if he held his peace
against the wickedness across the river. He wrote and published what
was in his heart to say, and Alton was again vehemently moved. A
committee appointed itself to wait upon him; for this sort of outrage
is usually accomplished with a curious formality which makes it seem
to the participants legal and orderly. The preacher met them with an
undaunted front and told them he must do his duty as it appeared to
him; that he was amenable to law, but nothing else; he even spoke in
condemnation of mobs. Such language "from a minister of the gospel"
shocked and infuriated the committee and those whom they represented.
"The people assembled," says Governor Ford, "and quietly took the
press and types and threw them into the river." We venture to say that
the word "quietly" never before found itself in such company. It is
not worth while to give the details of the bloody drama that now
rapidly ran to its close. There was a fruitless effort at compromise,
which to Lovejoy meant merely surrender, and which he firmly rejected.
The threats of the mob were answered by defiance; from the little band
that surrounded the abolitionist. A new press was ordered, and
arrived, and was stored in a warehouse, where Lovejoy and his friends
shut themselves up, determined to defend it with their lives. They
were there besieged by the infuriated crowd, and after a short
interchange of shots Lovejoy was killed, his friends dispersed, and
the press once more--and this time finally--thrown into the turbid
flood.

These events took place in the autumn of 1837, but they indicate
sufficiently the temper of the people of the State in the earlier part
of the year.

[Sidenote: Law approved Dec. 26, 1831.]

The vehemence with which the early antislavery apostles were
conducting their agitation in the East naturally roused a
corresponding violence of expression in every other part of the
country. William Lloyd Garrison, the boldest and most aggressive non-
resistant that ever lived, had, since 1831, been pouring forth once a
week in the "Liberator" his earnest and eloquent denunciations of
slavery, taking no account of the expedient or the possible, but
demanding with all the fervor of an ancient prophet the immediate
removal of the cause of offense. Oliver Johnson attacked the national
sin and wrong, in the "Standard," with zeal and energy equally hot and
untiring. Their words stung the slave-holding States to something like
frenzy. The Georgia Legislature offered a reward of five thousand
dollars to any one who should kidnap Garrison, or who should bring to
conviction any one circulating the "Liberator" in the State. Yet so
little known in their own neighborhoods were these early workers in
this great reform that when the Mayor of Boston received remonstrances
from certain Southern States against such an incendiary publication as
the "Liberator," he was able to say that no member of the city
government and no person of his acquaintance had ever heard of the
paper or its editor; that on search being made it was found that "his
office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy,
and his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all colors."
But the leaven worked continually, and by the time of which we are
writing the antislavery societies of the North-east had attained a
considerable vitality, and the echoes of their work came back from the
South in furious resolutions of legislatures and other bodies, which,
in their exasperation, could not refrain from this injudicious
advertising of their enemies. Petitions to Congress, which were met by
gag-laws, constantly increasing in severity, brought the dreaded
discussion more and more before the public. But there was as yet
little or no antislavery agitation in Illinois.

[Sidenote: Jan 25, 1837.]

There was no sympathy with nor even toleration for any public
expression of hostility to slavery. The zeal of the followers of
Jackson, although he had ceased to be President, had been whetted by
his public denunciations of the antislavery propaganda; little more
than a year before he had called upon Congress to take measures to
"prohibit under severe penalties" the further progress of such
incendiary proceedings as were "calculated to stimulate the slaves to
insurrection and to produce all the horrors of civil war." But in
spite of all this, people with uneasy consciences continued to write
and talk and petition Congress against slavery, and most of the State
legislatures began to pass resolutions denouncing them. In the last
days of 1836 Governor Duncan sent to the Illinois Legislature the
reports and resolutions of several States in relation to this subject.
They were referred to a committee, who in due time reported a set of
resolves "highly disapproving abolition societies"; holding that "the
right of property in slaves is secured to the slave-holding States by
the Federal Constitution"; that the general Government cannot abolish
slavery in the District of Columbia against the consent of the
citizens of said District, without a manifest breach of good faith;
and requesting the Governor to transmit to the States which had sent
their resolutions to him a copy of those tranquilizing expressions. A
long and dragging debate ensued of which no record has been preserved;
the resolutions, after numberless amendments had been voted upon, were
finally passed, in the Senate, unanimously, in the House with none but
Lincoln and five others in the negative. [Footnote: We are under
obligations to John M. Adair for transcripts of the State records
bearing on this matter.] No report remains of the many speeches which
prolonged the debate; they have gone the way of all buncombe; the
sound and fury of them have passed away into silence; but they woke an
echo in one sincere heart which history will be glad to perpetuate.

There was no reason that Abraham Lincoln should take especial notice
of these resolutions, more than another. He had done his work at this
session in effecting the removal of the capital. He had only to shrug
his shoulders at the violence and untruthfulness of the majority, vote
against them, and go back to his admiring constituents, to his dinners
and his toasts. But his conscience and his reason forbade him to be
silent; he felt a word must be said on the other side to redress the
distorted balance. He wrote his protest, saying not one word he was
not ready to stand by then and thereafter, wasting not a syllable in
rhetoric or feeling, keeping close to law and truth and justice. When
he had finished it he showed it to some of his colleagues for their
adhesion; but one and all refused, except Dan Stone, who was not a
candidate for reelection, having retired from politics to a seat on
the bench. The risk was too great for the rest to run. Lincoln was
twenty-eight years old; after a youth, of singular privations and
struggles he had arrived at an enviable position in the politics and
the society of the State. His intimate friends, those whom he loved
and honored, were Browning, Butler, Logan, and Stuart--Kentuckians
all, and strongly averse to any discussion of the question of slavery.
The public opinion of his county, which was then little less than the
breath of his life, was all the same way. But all these considerations
could not withhold him from performing a simple duty--a duty which no
one could have blamed him for leaving undone. The crowning grace of
the whole act is in the closing sentence: "The difference between
these opinions and those contained in the said resolutions is their
reason for entering this protest." Reason enough for the Lincolns and
Luthers.

He had many years of growth and development before him. There was a
long distance to be traversed between the guarded utterances of this
protest and the heroic audacity which launched the proclamation of
emancipation. But the young man who dared declare, in the prosperous
beginning of his political life, in the midst of a community imbued
with slave-State superstitions, that "he believed the institution of
slavery was founded both on injustice and bad policy,"--attacking thus
its moral and material supports, while at the same time recognizing
all the constitutional guarantees which protected it,--had in him the
making of a statesman and, if need be, a martyr. His whole career was
to run in the lines marked out by these words, written in the hurry of
a closing session, and he was to accomplish few acts, in that great
history which God reserved for him, wiser and nobler than this.




CHAPTER IX

COLLAPSE OF THE SYSTEM


Mr. Lincoln had made thus far very little money--nothing more, in
fact, than a subsistence of the most modest character. But he had made
some warm friends, and this meant much among the early Illinoisans. He
had become intimately acquainted, at Vandalia, with William Butler,
who was greatly interested in the removal of the capital to
Springfield, and who urged the young legislator to take up his
residence at the new seat of government. Lincoln readily fell in with
this suggestion, and accompanied his friend home when the Legislature
adjourned, sharing the lodging of Joshua F. Speed, a young Kentucky
merchant, and taking his meals at the house of Mr. Butler for several
years.

[Sidenote: "Sangamon Journal," November 7, 1835.]

[Sidenote: Reynolds, "Life and Times" p. 237.]

In this way began Mr. Lincoln's residence in Springfield, where he was
to remain until called to one of the highest of destinies intrusted to
men, and where his ashes were to rest forever in monumental marble. It
would have seemed a dreary village to any one accustomed to the world,
but in a letter written about this time, Lincoln speaks of it as a
place where there was a "good deal of flourishing about in carriages"
--a town of some pretentious to elegance. It had a population of 1500.
The county contained nearly 18,000 souls, of whom 78 were free
negroes, 20 registered indentured servants, and six slaves. Scarcely a
perceptible trace of color, one would say, yet we find in the
Springfield paper a leading article beginning with the startling
announcement, "Our State is threatened to be overrun with free
negroes." The county was one of the richest in Illinois, possessed of
a soil of inexhaustible fertility, and divided to the best advantage
between prairie and forest. It was settled early in the history of the
State, and the country was held in high esteem by the aborigines. The
name of Sangamon is said to mean in the Pottawatomie language "land of
plenty." Its citizens were of an excellent class of people, a large
majority of them from Kentucky, though representatives were not
wanting from the Eastern States, men of education and character.

There had been very little of what might be called pioneer life in
Springfield. Civilization came in with a reasonably full equipment at
the beginning. The Edwardses, in fair-top boots and ruffled shirts;
the Ridgelys brought their banking business from Maryland; the Logans
and Conklings were good lawyers before they arrived; another family
came from Kentucky, with a cotton manufactory which proved its
aristocratic character by never doing any work. With a population like
this, the town had, from the beginning, a more settled and orderly
type than was usual in the South and West. A glance at the advertising
columns of the newspaper will show how much attention to dress was
paid in the new capital. "Cloths, cassinetts, cassimeres, velvet,
silk, satin, and Marseilles vestings, fine calf boots, seal and
morocco pumps, for gentlemen," and for the sex which in barbarism
dresses less and in civilization dresses more than the male, "silks,
bareges, crepe lisse, lace veils, thread lace, Thibet shawls, lace
handkerchiefs, fine prunella shoes, etc." It is evident that the young
politician was confronting a social world more formidably correct than
anything he had as yet seen.

[Sidenote: Ford's "History," p. 94.]

Governor Ford began some years before this to remark with pleasure the
change in the dress of the people of Illinois: the gradual
disappearance of leather and, linsey-woolsey, the hunting-knife and
tomahawk, from the garb of men; the deerskin moccasin supplanted by
the leather boot and shoe; the leather breeches tied around the ankle
replaced by the modern pantaloons; and the still greater improvement
in the adornment of women, the former bare feet decently shod, and
homespun frocks giving way to gowns of calico and silk, and the heads
tied up in red cotton turbans disappearing in favor of those
surmounted by pretty bonnets of silk or straw. We admit that these
changes were not unattended with the grumbling ill-will of the pioneer
patriarchs; they predicted nothing but ruin to a country that thus
forsook the old ways "which were good enough for their fathers." But
with the change in dress came other alterations which were all for the
better--a growing self-respect among the young; an industry and thrift
by which they could buy good clothes; a habit of attending religious
service, where they could show them; a progress in sociability,
civility, trade, and morals.

The taste for civilization had sometimes a whimsical manifestation.
Mr. Stuart said the members of the Legislature bitterly complained of
the amount of game--venison and grouse of the most delicious quality--
which was served them at the taverns in Vandalia; they clamored for
bacon--they were starving, they said, "for something civilized." There
was plenty of civilized nourishment in Springfield. Wheat was fifty
cents a bushel, rye thirty-three; corn and oats were twenty-five,
potatoes twenty-five; butter was eight cents a pound, and eggs were
eight cents a dozen; pork was two and a half cents a pound.

The town was built on the edge of the woods, the north side touching
the timber, the south encroaching on the prairie. The richness of the
soil was seen in the mud of the streets, black as ink, and of an
unfathomable depth in time of thaw. There were, of course, no
pavements or sidewalks; an attempt at crossings was made by laying
down large chunks of wood. The houses were almost all wooden, and were
disposed in rectangular blocks. A large square had been left in the
middle of the town, in anticipation of future greatness, and there,
when Lincoln began his residence, the work of clearing the ground for
the new State-house was already going forward. In one of the largest
houses looking on the square, at the north-west corner, the county
court had its offices, and other rooms in the building were let to
lawyers. One of these was occupied by Stuart and Lincoln, for the
friendship formed in the Black Hawk war and strengthened at Vandalia
induced "Major" Stuart to offer a partnership to "Captain" Lincoln.
[Footnote: It is not unworthy of notice that in a country where
military titles were conferred with ludicrous profusion, and borne
with absurd complacency, Abraham Lincoln, who had actually been
commissioned, and had served as captain, never used the designation
after he laid down his command.]

Lincoln did not gain any immediate eminence at the bar. His
preliminary studies had been cursory and slight, and Stuart was then
too much engrossed in politics to pay the unremitting attention to the
law which that jealous mistress requires. He had been a candidate for
Congress the year before, and had been defeated by W. L. May. He was a
candidate again in 1838, and was elected over so agile an adversary as
Stephen Arnold Douglas. His paramount interest in these canvasses
necessarily prevented him from setting to his junior partner the
example which Lincoln so greatly needed, of close and steady devotion
to their profession. It was several years later that Lincoln found
with Judge Logan the companionship and inspiration which he required,
and began to be really a lawyer. During the first year or two he is
principally remembered in Springfield as an excellent talker, the life
and soul of the little gatherings about the county offices, a story-
teller of the first rank, a good-natured, friendly fellow whom
everybody liked and trusted. He relied more upon his influence with a
jury than upon his knowledge of law in the few cases he conducted in
court, his acquaintance with human nature being far more extensive
than his legal lore.

Lincoln was not yet done with Vandalia, its dinners of game, and its
political intrigue. The archives of the State were not removed to
Springfield until 1839, and Lincoln remained a member of the
Legislature by successive reelections from 1834 to 1842. His campaigns
were carried on almost entirely without expense. Joshua Speed told the
writers that on one occasion some of the Whigs contributed a purse of
two hundred dollars which Speed handed to Lincoln to pay his personal
expenses in the canvass. After the election was over, the successful
candidate handed Speed $199.25, with the request that he return it to
the subscribers. "I did not need the money," he said. "I made the
canvass on my own horse; my entertainment, being at the houses of
friends, cost me nothing; and my only outlay was seventy-five cents
for a barrel of cider, which some farm-hands insisted I should treat
them to." He was called down to Vandalia in the summer of 1837, by a
special session of the Legislature. The magnificent schemes of the
foregoing winter required some repairing. The banks throughout the
United States had suspended specie payments in the spring, and as the
State banks in Illinois were the fiscal agents of the railroads and
canals, the Governor called upon the law-makers to revise their own
work, to legalize the suspension, and bring their improvement system
within possible bounds. They acted as might have been expected:
complied with the former suggestion, but flatly refused to touch their
masterpiece. They had been glorifying their work too energetically to
destroy it in its infancy. It was said you could recognize a
legislator that year in any crowd by his automatic repetition of the
phrase, "Thirteen hundred--fellow-citiztens!--and fifty miles of
railroad!" There was nothing to be done but to go on with the
stupendous folly. Loans were effected with surprising and fatal
facility, and, "before the end of the year, work had begun at many
points on the railroads. The whole State was excited to the highest
pitch of frenzy and expectation. Money was as plenty as dirt.
Industry, instead of being stimulated, actually languished. We
exported nothing," says Governor Ford, "and everything from abroad was
paid for by the borrowed money expended among us." Not only upon the
railroads, but on the canal as well, the work was begun on a
magnificent scale. Nine millions of dollars were thought to be a mere
trifle in view of the colossal sum expected to be realized from the
sale of canal lands, three hundred thousand acres of which had been
given by the general Government. There were rumors of coming trouble,
and of an unhealthy condition of the banks; but it was considered
disloyal to look too curiously into such matters. One frank patriot,
who had been sent as one of a committee to examine the bank at
Shawneetown, when asked what he found there, replied with winning
candor, "Plenty of good whisky and sugar to sweeten it."

[Sidenote: Ford, "History," p. 197.]

But a year of baleful experience destroyed a great many illusions, and
in the election of 1838 the subject of internal improvements was
treated with much more reserve by candidates. The debt of the State,
issued at a continually increasing discount, had already attained
enormous proportions; the delirium of the last few years was ending,
and sensible people began to be greatly disquieted. Nevertheless, Mr.
Cyrus Edwards boldly made his canvass for Governor as a supporter of
the system of internal improvements, and his opponent, Thomas Carlin,
was careful not to commit himself strongly on the other side. Carlin
was elected, and finding that a majority of the Legislature was still
opposed to any steps backward, he made no demonstration against the
system at the first session. Lincoln was a member of this body, and,
being by that time the unquestioned leader of the Whig minority, was
nominated for Speaker, and came within one vote of an election. The
Legislature was still stiff-necked and perverse in regard to the
system. It refused to modify it in the least, and voted, as if in
bravado, another eight hundred thousand dollars to extend it.

But this was the last paroxysm of a fever that was burnt out. The
market was glutted with Illinois bonds; one banker and one broker
after another, to whose hands they had been recklessly confided in New
York and London, failed, or made away with the proceeds of sales. The
system had utterly failed; there was nothing to do but repeal it, stop
work upon the visionary roads, and endeavor to invent some means of
paying the enormous debt. This work taxed the energies of the
Legislature in 1839, and for some years after. It was a dismal and
disheartening task. Blue Monday had come after these years of
intoxication, and a crushing debt rested upon a people who had been
deceiving themselves with the fallacy that it would somehow pay itself
by acts of the Legislature.

[Illustration:   "COLONEL E. D. BAKER."]

Many were the schemes devised for meeting these oppressive obligations
without unduly taxing the voters; one of them, not especially wiser
than the rest, was contributed by Mr. Lincoln. It provided for the
issue of bonds for the payment of the interest due by the State, and
for the appropriation of a special portion of State taxes to meet the
obligations thus incurred. He supported his bill in a perfectly
characteristic speech, making no effort to evade his share of the
responsibility for the crisis, and submitting his views with
diffidence to the approval of the Assembly. His plan was not adopted;
it was too simple and straightforward, even if it had any other
merits, to meet the approval of an assembly intent only upon getting
out of immediate embarrassment by means which might save them future
trouble on the stump. There was even an undercurrent of sentiment in
favor of repudiation. But the payment of the interest for that year
was provided for by an ingenious expedient which shifted upon the Fund
Commissioners the responsibility of deciding what portion of the debt
was legal, and how much interest was therefore to be paid. Bonds were
sold for this purpose at a heavy loss.

This session of the Legislature was enlivened by a singular contest
between the Whigs and Democrats in relation to the State banks. Their
suspension of specie payments had been legalized up to "the
adjournment of the next session of the Legislature." They were not now
able to resume, and it was held by the Democrats that if the special
session adjourned _sine die_ the charter of the banks would be
forfeited, a purpose the party was eager to accomplish. The Whigs, who
were defending the banks, wished to prevent the adjournment of the
special session until the regular session should begin, during the
course of which they expected to renew the lease of life now held
under sufferance by the banks--in which, it may be here said, they
were finally successful. But on one occasion, being in the minority,
and having exhausted every other parliamentary means of opposition and
delay, and seeing the vote they dreaded imminent, they tried to defeat
it by leaving the house in a body, and, the doors being locked, a
number of them, among whom Mr. Lincoln's tall figure was prominent,
jumped from the windows of the church where the Legislature was then
holding its sessions. "I think," says Mr. Joseph Gillespie, who was
one of those who performed this feat of acrobatic politics, "Mr.
Lincoln always regretted it, as he deprecated everything that savored
of the revolutionary."

Two years later the persecuted banks, harried by the demagogues and
swindled by the State, fell with a great ruin, and the financial
misery of the State was complete. Nothing was left of the brilliant
schemes of the historic Legislature of 1836 but a load of debt which
crippled for many years the energies of the people, a few miles of
embankments which the grass hastened to cover, and a few abutments
which stood for years by the sides of leafy rivers, waiting for their
long delaying bridges and trains.

During the winter of 1840-1 occurred the first clash of opinion and
principle between Mr. Lincoln and his life-long adversary, Mr.
Douglas. There are those who can see only envy and jealousy in that
strong dislike and disapproval with which Mr. Lincoln always regarded
his famous rival. But we think that few men have ever lived who were
more free from those degrading passions than Abraham Lincoln, and the
personal reprobation with which he always visited the public acts of
Douglas arose from his sincere conviction that, able as Douglas was,
and in many respects admirable in character, he was essentially
without fixed political morals. They had met for the first time in
1834 at Vandalia, where Douglas was busy in getting the circuit
attorneyship away from John J. Hardin. He held it only long enough to
secure a nomination to the Legislature in 1836. He went there to
endeavor to have the capital moved to Jacksonville, where he lived,
but he gave up the fight for the purpose of having himself appointed
Register of the Land Office at Springfield. He held this place as a
means of being nominated for Congress the next year; he was nominated
and defeated. In 1840 he was engaged in another scheme to which we
will give a moment's attention, as it resulted in giving him a seat on
the Supreme Bench of the State, which he used merely as a perch from
which to get into Congress.

There had been a difference of opinion in Illinois for some years as
to whether the Constitution, which made voters of all white male
inhabitants of six months' residence, meant to include aliens in that
category. As the aliens were nearly all Democrats, that party insisted
on their voting, and the Whigs objected. The best lawyers in the State
were Whigs, and so it happened that most of the judges were of that
complexion. A case was made up for decision and decided adversely to
the aliens, who appealed it to the Supreme Court. This case was to
come on at the June term in 1840, and the Democratic counsel, chief
among whom was Mr. Douglas, were in some anxiety, as an unfavorable
decision would lose them about ten thousand alien votes in the
Presidential election in November. In this conjuncture one Judge
Smith, of the Supreme Court, an ardent Democrat, willing to enhance
his value in his party, communicated to Mr. Douglas two important
facts: first, that a majority of the court would certainly decide
against the aliens; and, secondly that there was a slight imperfection
in the record by which counsel might throw the case over to the
December term, and save the alien vote for Van Buren and the
Democratic ticket. This was done, and when the Legislature came
together with its large Democratic majority, Mr. Douglas handed in a
bill "reforming" the Judiciary--for they had learned that serviceable
word already. The circuit judges were turned out of office, and five
new judges were added to the Supreme Court, who were to perform
circuit duty also. It is needless to say that Judge Douglas was one of
these, and he had contrived also in the course of the discussion to
disgrace his friend Smith so thoroughly by quoting his treacherous
communication of matters which took place within the court, that Smith
was no longer a possible rival for political honors.

It was useless for the Whigs to try to prevent this degradation of the
bench. There was no resource but a protest, and here again Lincoln
uttered the voice of the conscience of the party. He was joined on
this occasion by Edward D. Baker [Footnote: Afterwards senator from
Oregon, and as colonel of the 71st Pennsylvania (called the 1st
California) killed at Ball's Bluff.] and some others, who protested
against the act because

1st. It violates the principles of free government by subjecting the
Judiciary to the Legislature.

2d. It is a fatal blow at the independence of the judges and the
constitutional term of their offices.

3d. It is a measure not asked for or wished for by the people.

4th. It will greatly increase the expense of our courts or else
greatly diminish their utility.

5th. It will give our courts a political and partisan character,
thereby impairing public confidence in their decisions.

6th. It will impair our standing with other States and the world.

7th. It is a party measure for party purposes from which no practical
good to the people can possibly arise, but which may be the source of
immeasurable evils.

The undersigned are well aware that this protest will be altogether
unavailing with the majority of this body. The blow has already fallen;
and we are compelled to stand by, the mournful spectators of the
ruin it will cause.

[Sidenote: Ford's "History," p. 221.]

It will be easy to ridicule this indignant protest as the angry outcry
of beaten partisans; but fortunately we have evidence which cannot be
gainsaid of the justice of its sentiments and the wisdom of its
predictions. Governor Ford, himself a Democratic leader as able as he
was honest, writing seven years after these proceedings, condemns them
as wrong and impolitic, and adds, "Ever since this reforming measure
the Judiciary has been unpopular with the Democratic majorities. Many
and most of the judges have had great personal popularity--so much so
as to create complaint of so many of them being elected or appointed
to other offices. But the Bench itself has been the subject of bitter
attacks by every Legislature since." It had been soiled by unclean
contact and could not be respected as before.




CHAPTER X

EARLY LAW PRACTICE


During all the years of his service in the Legislature, Lincoln was
practicing law in Springfield in the dingy little office at the corner
of the square. A youth named Milton Hay, who afterwards became one of
the foremost lawyers of the State, had made the acquaintance of
Lincoln at the County Clerk's office and proposed to study law with
him. He was at once accepted as a pupil, and his days being otherwise
employed he gave his nights to reading, and as his vigils were apt to
be prolonged he furnished a bedroom adjoining the office, where
Lincoln often passed the night with him. Mr. Hay gives this account of
the practice of the law in those days:

"In forming our ideas of Lincoln's growth and development as a lawyer,
we must remember that in those early days litigation was very simple
as compared with that of modern times. Population was sparse and
society scarcely organized, land was plentiful and employment
abundant. There was an utter absence of the abstruse questions and
complications which now beset the law. There was no need of that close
and searching study into principles and precedents which keeps the
modern law-student buried in his office. On the contrary, the very
character of this simple litigation drew the lawyer into the street
and neighborhood, and into close and active intercourse with all
classes of his fellow-men. The suits consisted of actions of tort and
assumpsit. If a man had a debt not collectible, the current phrase
was, 'I'll take it out of his hide.'

[Illustration:   LINCOLN AND STUART'S LAW-OFFICE, SPRINGFIELD.]

"This would bring on an action for assault and battery. The free
comments of the neighbors on the fracas or the character of the
parties would be productive of slander suits. A man would for his
convenience lay down an irascible neighbor's fence, and indolently
forget to put it up again, and an action of trespass would grow out of
it. The suit would lead to a free fight, and sometimes furnish the
bloody incidents for a murder trial. Occupied with this class of
business, the half-legal, half-political lawyers were never found
plodding in their offices. In that case they would have waited long
for the recognition of their talents or a demand for their services.
Out of this characteristic of the times also grew the street
discussions I have adverted to. There was scarcely a day or hour when
a knot of men might not have been seen near the door of some prominent
store, or about the steps of the court-house eagerly discussing a
current political topic--not as a question of news, for news was not
then received quickly or frequently, as it is now, but rather for the
sake of debate; and the men from the country, the pioneers and
farmers, always gathered eagerly about these groups and listened with
open-mouthed interest, and frequently manifested their approval or
dissent in strong words, and carried away to their neighborhoods a
report of the debaters' wit and skill. It was in these street talks
that the rising and aspiring young lawyer found his daily and hourly
forum. Often by good luck or prudence he had the field entirely to
himself, and so escaped the dangers and discouragements of a decisive
conflict with a trained antagonist."

[Illustration:   LINCOLN'S BOOKCASE AND INKSTAND. ]

Mr. Stuart was either in Congress or actively engaged in canvassing
his district a great part of the time that his partnership with
Lincoln continued, so that the young lawyer was thrown a good deal on
his own resources for occupation. There was not enough business to
fill up all his hours, and he was not at that time a close student, so
that he soon became as famous for his racy talk and good-fellowship at
all the usual lounging-places in Springfield as he had ever been in
New Salem. Mr. Hay says, speaking of the youths who made the County
Clerk's office their place of rendezvous, "It was always a great treat
when Lincoln got amongst us. We were sure to have some of those
stories for which he already had a reputation, and there was this
peculiarity about them, that they were not only entertaining in
themselves, but always singularly illustrative of some point he wanted
to make." After Mr. Hay entered his office, and was busily engaged
with his briefs and declarations, the course of their labors was often
broken by the older man's wise and witty digressions. Once an
interruption occurred which affords an odd illustration of the
character of discussion then prevalent. We will give it in Mr. Hay's
words: "The custom of public political debate, while it was sharp and
acrimonious, also engendered a spirit of equality and fairness. Every
political meeting was a free fight open to every one who had talent
and spirit, no matter to which party the speaker belonged. These
discussions used often to be held in the court-room, just under our
office, and through a trap-door, made there when the building was used
for a store-house, we could hear everything that was said in the hall
below. One night there was a discussion in which E. D. Baker took
part. He was a fiery fellow, and when his impulsiveness was let loose
among the rough element that composed his audience there was a fair
prospect of trouble at any moment. Lincoln was lying on the bed,
apparently paying no attention to what was going on. Lamborn was
talking, and we suddenly heard Baker interrupting him with a sharp
remark, then a rustling and uproar. Lincoln jumped from the bed and
down the trap, lighting on the platform between Baker and the
audience, and quieted the tumult as much by the surprise of his sudden
apparition as by his good-natured and reasonable words."

[Lamon p. 396.]

He was often unfaithful to his Quaker traditions in those days of his
youth. Those who witnessed his wonderful forbearance and self-
restraint in later manhood would find it difficult to believe how
promptly and with what pleasure he used to resort to measures of
repression against a bully or brawler. On the day of election in 1840,
word came to him that one Radford, a Democratic contractor, had taken
possession of one of the polling-places with his workmen, and was
preventing the Whigs from voting. Lincoln started off at a gait which
showed his interest in the matter in hand. He went up to Radford and
persuaded him to leave the polls without a moment's delay. One of his
candid remarks is remembered and recorded: "Radford! you'll spoil and
blow, if you live much longer." Radford's prudence prevented an actual
collision, which, it must be confessed, Lincoln regretted. He told his
friend Speed he wanted Radford to show fight so that he might "knock
him down and leave him kicking."

Early in the year 1840 it seemed possible that the Whigs might elect
General Harrison to the Presidency, and this hope lent added energy to
the party even in the States where the majority was so strongly
against them as in Illinois. Lincoln was nominated for Presidential
Elector and threw himself with ardor into the canvass, traversing a
great part of the State and speaking with remarkable effect. Only one
of the speeches he made during the year has been preserved entire:
this was an address delivered in Springfield as one of a series--a
sort of oratorical tournament participated in by Douglas, Calhoun,
Lamborn, and Thomas on the part of the Democrats, and Logan, Baker,
Browning, and Lincoln on the part of the Whigs. The discussion began
with great enthusiasm and with crowded houses, but by the time it came
to Lincoln's duty to close the debate the fickle public had tired of
the intellectual jousts, and he spoke to a comparatively thin house.
But his speech was considered the best of the series, and there was
such a demand for it that he wrote it out, and it was printed and
circulated in the spring as a campaign document.

[Illustration:   GLOBE TAVERN, SPRINGFIELD, WHERE LINCOLN LIVED AFTER
HIS MARRIAGE.]

It was a remarkable speech in many respects--and in none more than in
this, that it represented the highest expression of what might be
called his "first manner." It was the most important and the last
speech of its class which he ever delivered--not destitute of sound
and close reasoning, yet filled with boisterous fun and florid
rhetoric. It was, in short, a rattling stump speech of the kind then
universally popular in the West, and which is still considered a very
high grade of eloquence in the South. But it is of no kindred with his
inaugural addresses, and resembles the Gettysburg speech no more than
"The Comedy of Errors" resembles "Hamlet." One or two extracts will
give some idea of its humorous satire and its lurid fervor. Attacking
the corruptions and defalcations of the Administration party he said:
"Mr. Lamborn insists that the difference between the Van Buren party
and the Whigs is that, although the former sometimes err in practice
they are always correct in principle, whereas the latter are wrong in
principle; and the better to impress this proposition he uses a
figurative expression in these words, 'The Democrats are vulnerable in
the heel, but they are sound in the heart and head.' The first branch
of the figure--that is, the Democrats are vulnerable in the heel--I
admit is not merely figuratively but literally true. Who that looks
but for a moment at their Swartwouts, their Prices, their Harringtons,
and their hundreds of others scampering away with the public money to
Texas, to Europe, and to every spot of the earth where a villain may
hope to find refuge from justice, can at all doubt that they are most
distressingly affected in their heels with a species of running itch?
It seems that this malady of their heels operates on the sound-headed
and honest-hearted creatures, very much as the cork leg in the comic
song did on its owner, which, when he once got started on it, the more
he tried to stop it the more it would run away. At the hazard of
wearing this point threadbare, I will relate an anecdote which seems
to be too strikingly in point to be omitted. A witty Irish soldier who
was always boasting of his bravery when no danger was near, but who
invariably retreated without orders at the first charge of the
engagement, being asked by his captain why he did so, replied,
'Captain, I have as brave a heart as Julius Caesar ever had, but
somehow or other whenever danger approaches, my cowardly legs will run
away with it.' So with Mr. Lamborn's party--they take the public money
into their hands for the most laudable purpose that wise heads and
honest hearts can dictate; but before they can possibly get it out
again, their rascally vulnerable heels will run away with them."

[Illustration:   WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON.]

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."

[Illustration:   FAC-SIMILE OF THE MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE OF ABRAHAM
LINCOLN. From the original in the Keyes Lincoln Memorial Collection,
Chicago.]

[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.

[Illustration:   JOSHUA SPEED AND WIFE.]

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."

[Illustration:   HOUSE IN WHICH ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS MARRIED, THEN OWNED
BY NINIAN W. EDWARDS, NOW OCCUPIED AS ST. AGATHA'S SCHOOL.]

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.

[Illustration:   BRIG.-GEN. JAMES SHIELDS.]

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.

They saw that Mr. Polk was ready to risk everything--war,
international complications, even the dishonor of broken obligations--
to accomplish their purpose, and nothing the Whig candidate could say
would weigh anything in the balance against this blind and reckless
readiness. On the other hand, Mr. Clay's cautious and moderate
position did him irreparable harm among the ardent opponents of
slavery. They were not willing to listen to counsels of caution and
moderation. More than a year before, thirteen of the Whig antislavery
Congressmen, headed by the illustrious John Quincy Adams, had issued a
fervid address to the people of the free States, declaiming in
language of passionate force against the scheme of annexation as fatal
to the country, calling it, in fact, "identical with dissolution," and
saying that "it would be a violation of our national compact, its
objects, designs, and the great elementary principles which entered
into its formation of a character so deep and fundamental, and would
be an attempt to eternize an institution and a power of nature so
unjust in themselves, so injurious to the interests and abhorrent to
the feelings of the people of the free States, as in our opinion, not
only inevitably to result in a dissolution of the Union, but fully to
justify it; and we not only assert that the people of the free States
ought not to submit to it, but we say with confidence they would not
submit to it." To men in a temper like that indicated by these words,
no arguments drawn from consideration of political expediency could be
expected to have any weight, and it was of no use to say to them that
in voting for a third candidate they were voting to elect Mr. Polk,
the avowed and eager advocate of annexation. If all the votes cast for
James G. Birney, the "Liberty" candidate, had been cast for Clay, he
would have been elected, and even as it was the contest was close and
doubtful to the last. Birney received 62,263 votes, and the popular
majority of Polk over Clay was only 38,792.

There are certain temptations that no government yet instituted has
been able to resist. When an object is ardently desired by the
majority, when it is practicable, when it is expedient for the
material welfare of the country, and when the cost of it will fall
upon other people, it may be taken for granted that--in the present
condition of international ethics--the partisans of the project will
never lack means of defending its morality. The annexation of Texas
was one of these cases. Moralists called it an inexcusable national
crime, conceived by Southern statesmen for the benefit of slavery,
[Footnote: This purpose was avowed by John C. Calhoun in the Senate,
May 23, 1836; see also his speech of February 24, 1847.] carried on
during a term of years with unexampled energy, truculence and
treachery; in both houses of Congress, in the cabinets of two
Presidents, in diplomatic dealings with foreign powers, every step of
its progress marked by false professions, by broken pledges, by a
steady degradation of moral fiber among all those engaged in the
scheme. The opposition to it--as usually happens--consisted partly in
the natural effort of partisans to baffle their opponents, and partly
in an honorable protest of heart and conscience against a great wrong
committed in the interest of a national sin. But looking back upon the
whole transaction--even over so short a distance as now separates us
from it--one cannot but perceive that the attitude of the two parties
was in some sort inevitable and that the result was also sure,
whatever the subordinate events or incidents which may have led to it.
It was impossible to defeat or greatly to delay the annexation of
Texas, and although those who opposed it but obeyed the dictates of
common morality, they were fighting a battle beyond ordinary human
powers.

Here was a great empire offering itself to us--a State which had
gained its independence, and built itself into a certain measure of
order and thrift through American valor and enterprise. She offered us
a magnificent estate of 376,000 square miles of territory, all of it
valuable, and much of it of unsurpassed richness and fertility. Even
those portions of it once condemned as desert now contribute to the
markets of the world vast stores of wool and cotton, herds of cattle
and flocks of sheep. Not only were these material advantages of great
attractiveness to the public mind, but many powerful sentimental
considerations reinforced the claim of Texas. The Texans were not an
alien people. The few inhabitants of that vast realm were mostly
Americans, who had occupied and subdued a vacant wilderness. The
heroic defense of the Alamo had been made by Travis, Bowie, and David
Crockett, whose exploits and death form one of the most brilliant
pages of our border history. Fannin and his men, four hundred strong,
when they laid down their lives at Goliad [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy
footnote relocated to chapter end.] had carried mourning into every
South-western State; and when, a few days later, Samuel Houston and
his eight hundred raw levies defeated and destroyed the Mexican army
at San Jacinto, captured Santa Anna, the Mexican president, and with
American thrift, instead of giving him the death he merited for his
cruel murder of unarmed prisoners, saved him to make a treaty with,
the whole people recognized something of kinship in the unaffected
valor with which these borderers died and the humorous shrewdness with
which they bargained, and felt as if the victory over the Mexicans
were their own.

The schemes of the Southern statesmen who were working for the
extension of slavery were not defensible, and we have no disposition
to defend them; but it may be doubted whether there is a government on
the face of the earth which, under similar circumstances, would not
have yielded to the same temptation.

Under these conditions, the annexation, sooner or later, was
inevitable. No man and no party could oppose it except at serious
cost. It is not true that schemes of annexation are always popular.
Several administrations have lost heavily by proposing them. Grant
failed with Santo Domingo; Seward with St. Thomas; and it required all
his skill and influence to accomplish the ratification of the Alaska
purchase. There is no general desire among Americans for acquiring
outlying territory, however intrinsically valuable it may be; their
land-hunger is confined within the limits of that of a Western farmer
once quoted by Mr. Lincoln, who used to say, "I am not greedy about
land; I only want what jines mine." Whenever a region contiguous to
the United States becomes filled with Americans, it is absolutely
certain to come under the American flag. Texas was as sure to be
incorporated into the Union as are two drops of water touching each
other to become one; and this consummation would not have been
prevented for any length of time if Clay or Van Buren had been elected
in 1844. The honorable scruples of the Whigs, the sensitive
consciences of the "Liberty" men, could never have prevailed
permanently against a tendency so natural and so irresistible.
Everything that year seemed to work against the Whigs. At a most
unfortunate time for them, there was an outbreak of that "native"
fanaticism which reappears from time to time in our politics with the
periodicity of malarial fevers, and always to the profit of the party
against which its efforts are aimed. It led to great disturbances in
several cities, and to riot and bloodshed in Philadelphia. The Clay
party were, of course, free from any complicity with these outrages,
but the foreigners, in their alarm, huddled together almost as one man
on the side where the majority of them always voted, and this
occasioned a heavy loss to the Whigs in several States. The first
appearance of Lincoln in the canvass was in a judicious attempt to
check this unreasonable panic. At a meeting held in Springfield, June
12, he introduced and supported resolutions, declaring that "the
guarantee of the rights of conscience as found in our Constitution is
most sacred and inviolable, and one that belongs no less to the
Catholic than the Protestant, and that all attempts to abridge or
interfere with these rights either of Catholic or Protestant, directly
or indirectly, have our decided disapprobation, and shall have our
most effective opposition." Several times afterwards in his life
Lincoln was forced to confront this same proscriptive spirit among the
men with whom he was more or less affiliated politically, and he never
failed to denounce it as it deserved, whatever might be the risk of
loss involved.

Beginning with this manly protest against intolerance and disorder, he
went into the work of the campaign and continued in it with unabated
ardor to the end. The defeat of Clay affected him, as it did thousands
of others, as a great public calamity and a keen personal sorrow. It
is impossible to mistake the accent of sincere mourning which we find
in the journals of the time. The addresses which were sent to Mr. Clay
from every part of the country indicate a depth of affectionate
devotion which rarely falls to the lot of a political chieftain. An
extract from the one sent by the Clay Clubs of New York will show the
earnest attachment and pride with which the young men of that day
still declared their loyalty to their beloved leader, even in the
midst of irreparable disaster. "We will remember you, Henry Clay,
while the memory of the glorious or the sense of the good remains in
us, with a grateful and admiring affection which shall strengthen with
our strength and shall not decay with our decline. We will remember
you in all our future trials and reverses as him whose name honored
defeat and gave it a glory which victory could not have brought. We
will remember you when patriotic hope rallies again to successful
contest with the agencies of corruption and ruin; for we will never
know a triumph which you do not share in life, whose glory does not
accrue to you in death."

[Relocated Footnote: This massacre inspired one of the most remarkable
poems of Walt Whitman, "Now I tell you what I knew of Texas in my
early youth," in which occurs his description of the rangers:

   "They were the glory of the race of rangers,
   Matchless with horse, rifle, song, supper, courtship,
   Large, turbulent, generous, handsome, proud, and affectionate,
   Bearded, sunburnt, drest in the free costume of hunters,
   Not a single one over thirty years of age."]




CHAPTER XIV

CAMPAIGN FOR CONGRESS


In the months that remained of his term, after the election of his
successor, President Tyler pursued with much vigor his purpose of
accomplishing the annexation of Texas, regarding it as the measure
which was specially to illustrate his administration and to preserve
it from oblivion. The state of affairs, when Congress came together in
December, 1844, was propitious to the project. Dr. Anson Jones had
been elected as President of Texas; the republic was in a more
thriving condition than ever before. Its population was rapidly
increasing under the stimulus of its probable change of flag; its
budget presented a less unwholesome balance; its relations with
Mexico, while they were no more friendly, had ceased to excite alarm.
The Tyler government, having been baffled in the spring by the
rejection of the treaty for annexation which they had submitted to the
Senate, chose to proceed this winter in a different way. Early in the
session a joint resolution providing for annexation was introduced in
the House of Representatives, which, after considerable discussion and
attempted amendment by the anti-slavery members, passed the House by a
majority of twenty-two votes.

In the Senate it encountered more opposition, as might have been
expected in a chamber which had overwhelmingly rejected the same
scheme only a few months before. It was at last amended by inserting a
section called the Walker amendment, providing that the President, if
it were in his judgment advisable, should proceed by way of
negotiation, instead of submitting the resolutions as an overture on
the part of the United States to Texas. This amendment eased the
conscience of a few shy supporters of the Administration who had
committed themselves very strongly against the scheme, and saved them
from the shame of open tergiversation. The President, however, treated
this subterfuge with the contempt which it deserved, by utterly
disregarding the Walker amendment, and by dispatching a messenger to
Texas to bring about annexation on the basis of the resolutions, the
moment he had signed them, when only a few hours of his official
existence remained. The measures initiated by Tyler were, of course,
carried out by Polk. The work was pushed forward with equal zeal at
Washington and at Austin. A convention of Texans was called for the
4th of July to consider the American propositions; they were promptly
accepted and ratified, and in the last days of 1845 Texas was formally
admitted into the Union as a State.

Besides the general objections which the anti-slavery men of the North
had to the project itself, there was something especially offensive to
them in the pretense of fairness and compromise held out by the
resolutions committing the Government to annexation. The third section
provided that four new States might hereafter be formed out of the
Territory of Texas; that such States as were formed out of the portion
lying south of 36 degrees 30', the Missouri Compromise line, might be
admitted with or without slavery, as the people might desire; and that
slavery should be prohibited in such States as might be formed out of
the portion lying north of that line. The opponents of slavery
regarded this provision, with good reason, as derisive. Slavery
already existed in the entire territory by the act of the early
settlers from the South who had brought their slaves with them, and
the State of Texas had no valid claim to an inch of ground north of
the line of 36 degrees 30' nor anywhere near it; so that this clause, if it
had any force whatever, would have authorized the establishment of
slavery in a portion of New Mexico, where it did not exist, and where
it had been expressly prohibited by the Mexican law. Another serious
objection was that the resolutions were taken as committing the United
States to the adoption and maintenance of the Rio Grande del Norte as
the western boundary of Texas. All mention of this was avoided in the
instrument, and it was expressly stated that the State was to be
formed "subject to the adjustment by this Government of all questions
of boundary that may arise with other governments," but the moment the
resolutions were passed the Government assumed, as a matter beyond
dispute, that all of the territory east of the Rio Grande was the
rightful property of Texas, to be defended by the military power of
the United States.

Even if Mexico had been inclined to submit to the annexation of Texas,
it was nevertheless certain that the occupation of the left bank of
the Rio Grande, without an attempt at an understanding, would bring
about a collision. The country lying between the Nueces and the Rio
Grande was then entirely uninhabited, and was thought uninhabitable,
though subsequent years have shown the fallacy of that belief. The
occupation of the country extended no farther than the Nueces, and the
Mexican farmers cultivated their corn and cotton in peace in the
fertile fields opposite Matamoras.

It is true that Texas claimed the eastern bank of the Rio Grande from
its source to its mouth; and while the Texans held Santa Anna
prisoner, under duress of arms and the stronger pressure of his own
conscience, which assured him that he deserved death as a murderer,
"he solemnly sanctioned, acknowledged, and ratified" their
independence with whatever boundaries they chose to claim; but the
Bustamente administration lost no time in repudiating this treaty, and
at once renewed the war, which had been carried on in a fitful way
ever since.

[Illustration:   HENRY CLAY.]

[Sidenote: August 23, 1843.]

But leaving out of view this special subject of admitted dispute, the
Mexican Government had warned our own in sufficiently formal terms
that annexation could not be peacefully effected. When A. P. Upshur
first began his negotiations with Texas, the Mexican Minister of
Foreign Affairs, at his earliest rumors of what was afoot, addressed a
note to Waddy Thompson, our Minister in Mexico, referring to the
reported intention of Texas to seek admission, to the Union, and
formally protesting against it as "an aggression unprecedented in the
annals of the world," and adding "if it be indispensable for the
Mexican nation to seek security for its rights at the expense of the
disasters of war, it will call upon God, and rely on its own efforts
for the defense of its just cause." A little while later General
Almonte renewed this notification at Washington, saying in so many
words that the annexation of Texas would terminate his mission, and
that Mexico would declare war as soon as it received intimation of
such an act. In June, 1845, Mr. Donelson, in charge of the American
Legation in Mexico, assured the Secretary of State that war was
inevitable, though he adopted the fiction of Mr. Calhoun, that it was
the result of the abolitionist intrigues of Great Britain, which he
credited with the intention "of depriving both Texas and the United
States of all claim to the country between the Nueces and the Rio
Grande."

No one, therefore, doubted that war would follow, and it soon came.
General Zachary Taylor had been sent during the summer to Corpus
Christi, where a considerable portion of the small army of the United
States was placed under his command. It was generally understood to be
the desire of the Administration that hostilities should begin without
orders, by a species of spontaneous combustion; but the coolness and
prudence of General Taylor made futile any such hopes, if they were
entertained, and it required a positive order to induce him, in March,
1846, to advance towards the Rio Grande and to cross the disputed
territory. He arrived at a point opposite Matamoras on the 28th of
March, and immediately fortified himself, disregarding the summons of
the Mexican commander, who warned him that such action would be
considered as a declaration of war. In May, General Arista crossed the
river and attacked General Taylor on the field of Palo Alto, where
Taylor won the first of that remarkable series of victories, embracing
Resaca de la Palma, Monterey, and Buena Vista, all gained over
superior forces of the enemy, which made the American commander for
the brief day that was left him the idol alike of soldiers and voters.

After Baker's election in 1844, it was generally taken as a matter of
course in the district that Lincoln was to be the next candidate of
the Whig party for Congress. It was charged at the time, and some
recent writers have repeated the charge, that there was a bargain made
in 1840 between Hardin, Baker, Lincoln, and Logan to succeed each
other in the order named. This sort of fiction is the commonest known
to American politics. Something like it is told, and more or less
believed, in half the districts in the country at every election. It
arises naturally from the fact that there are always more candidates
than places, that any one who is a candidate twice is felt to be
defrauding his neighbors, and that all candidates are too ready to
assure their constituents that they only want one term, and too ready
to forget these assurances when their terms are ending. There is not
only no evidence of any such bargain among the men we have mentioned,
but there is the clearest proof of the contrary. Two or more of them
were candidates for the nomination at every election from the time
when Stuart retired until the Whigs lost the district.

At the same time it is not to be denied that there was a tacit
understanding among the Whigs of the district that whoever should, at
each election, gain the honor of representing the one Whig
constituency of the State, should hold himself satisfied with the
privilege, and not be a candidate for reelection. The retiring member
was not always convinced of the propriety of this arrangement. In the
early part of January, 1846, Hardin was the only one whose name was
mentioned in opposition to Lincoln. He was reasonably sure of his own
county, and he tried to induce Lincoln to consent to an arrangement
that all candidates should confine themselves to their own counties in
the canvass; but Lincoln, who was very strong in the outlying counties
of the district, declined the proposition, alleging, as a reason for
refusing, that Hardin was so much better known than he, by reason of
his service in Congress, that such a stipulation would give him a
great advantage. There was fully as much courtesy as candor in this
plea, and Lincoln's entire letter was extremely politic and civil. "I
have always been in the habit," he says, "of acceding to almost any
proposal that a friend would make, and I am truly sorry that I cannot
to this." A month later Hardin saw that his candidacy was useless, and
he published a card withdrawing from the contest, which was printed
and commended in the kindest terms by papers friendly to Lincoln, and
the two men remained on terms of cordial friendship.

[Sidenote: Lincoln to James, Nov. 24, 1845. Unpublished MS.]

[Sidenote: Lincoln to James, Jan. 14, 1846. Unpublished MS.]

[Sidenote: Ibid.]

It is not to be said that Lincoln relied entirely upon his own merits
and the sentiment of the constituents to procure him this nomination.
Like other politicians of the time, he used all proper means to attain
his object. A package of letters, written during the preliminary
canvass, which have recently come into our hands, show how intelligent
and how straightforward he was in the ways of politics. He had no fear
of Baker; all his efforts were directed to making so strong a show of
force as to warn Hardin off the field. He countenanced no attack upon
his competitor; he approved a movement--not entirely disinterested--
looking to his nomination for Grovernor. He kept up an extensive
correspondence with the captains of tens throughout the district; he
suggested and revised the utterances of country editors; he kept his
friends aware of his wishes as to conventions and delegates. He was
never overconfident; so late as the middle of January, he did not
share the belief of his supporters that he was to be nominated without
a contest. "Hardin," he wrote, "is a man of desperate energy and
perseverance, and one that never backs out; and, I fear, to think
otherwise is to be deceived.... I would rejoice to be spared the labor
of a contest, 'but being in' I shall go it thoroughly...." His
knowledge of the district was curiously minute, though he
underestimated his own popularity. He wrote: "As to my being able to
make a break in the lower counties, ... I can possibly get Cass, but I
do not think I will. Morgan and Scott are beyond my reach, Menard is
safe to me; Mason, neck and neck; Logan is mine. To make the matter
sure your entire senatorial district must be secured. Of this I
suppose Tazewell is safe, and I have much done in both the other
counties. In Woodford I have Davenport, Simms, Willard, Braken, Perry,
Travis, Dr. Hazzard, and the Clarks, and some others, all specially
committed. At Lacon, in Marshall, the very most active friend I have
in the district (if I except yourself) is at work. Through him I have
procured the names and written to three or four of the most active
Whigs in each precinct of the county. Still, I wish you all in
Tazewell to keep your eyes continually on Woodford and Marshall. Let
no opportunity of making a mark escape. When they shall be safe, all
will be safe--I think." His constitutional caution suggests those
final words. He did not relax his vigilance for a moment until after
Hardin withdrew. He warned his correspondents day by day of every move
on the board; advised his supporters at every point, and kept every
wire in perfect working order.

The convention was held at Petersburg on the 1st of May. Judge Logan
placed the name of Lincoln before it, and he was nominated
unanimously. The Springfield "Journal," giving the news the week
after, said: "This nomination was of course anticipated, there being
no other candidate in the field. Mr. Lincoln, we all know, is a good
Whig, a good man, an able speaker, and richly deserves, as he enjoys,
the confidence of the Whigs of this district and of the State."

The Democrats gave Mr. Lincoln a singular competitor--the famous
Methodist preacher, Peter Cartwright. It was not the first time they
had met in the field of politics. When Lincoln ran for the Legislature
on his return from the. Black Hawk war, in 1832, one of the successful
candidates of that year was this indefatigable circuit-rider. He was
now over sixty years of age, in the height of his popularity, and in
all respects an adversary not to be despised. His career as a preacher
began at the beginning of the century and continued for seventy years.
He was the son of one of the pioneers of the West, and grew up in the
rudest regions of the border land between Tennessee and Kentucky. He
represents himself, with the usual inverted pride of a class-leader,
as having been a wild, vicious youth; but the catalogue of his crimes
embraces nothing less venial than card-playing, horse-racing, and
dancing, and it is hard to see what different amusements could have
been found in southern Kentucky in 1801.

This course of dissipation did not continue long, as he was "converted
and united with the Ebenezer Methodist Episcopal Church" in June of
that year, when only sixteen years old, and immediately developed such
zeal and power in exhortation that less than a year later he was
licensed to "exercise his gifts as an exhorter so long as his practice
is agreeable to the gospel." He became a deacon at twenty-one, an
elder at twenty-three, a presiding elder at twenty-seven, and from
that time his life is the history of his church in the West for sixty
years. He died in 1872, eighty-seven years of age, having baptized
twelve thousand persons and preached fifteen thousand sermons. He was,
and will always remain, the type of the backwoods preacher. Even in
his lifetime the simple story of his life became so overgrown with a
net-work of fable that there is little resemblance between the simple,
courageous, prejudiced itinerant of his "Autobiography" and the
fighting, brawling, half-civilized, Protestant Friar Tuck of bar-room
newspaper legend.

It is true that he did not always discard the weapons of the flesh in
his combats with the ungodly, and he felt more than once compelled to
leave the pulpit to do carnal execution upon the disturbers of the
peace of the sanctuary; but two or three incidents of this sort in
three-quarters of a century do not turn a parson into a pugilist. He
was a fluent, self-confident speaker, who, after the habit of his
time, addressed his discourses more to the emotions than to the reason
of his hearers. His system of future rewards and punishments was of
the most simple and concrete character, and formed the staple of his
sermons. He had no patience with the refinements and reticences of
modern theology, and in his later years observed with scorn and sorrow
the progress of education and scholarly training in his own communion.
After listening one day to a prayer from a young minister which shone
more by its correctness than its unction, he could not refrain from
saying, "Brother--, three prayers like that would freeze hell over!"--
a consummation which did not commend itself to him as desirable. He
often visited the cities of the Atlantic coast, but saw little in them
to admire. His chief pleasure on his return was to sit in a circle of
his friends and pour out the phials of his sarcasm upon all the
refinements of life that he had witnessed in New York or Philadelphia,
which he believed, or affected to believe, were tenanted by a species
of beings altogether inferior to the manhood that filled the cabins of
Kentucky and Illinois. An apocryphal story of one of these visits was
often told of him, which pleased him so that he never contradicted it:
that becoming bewildered in the vastness of a New York hotel, he
procured a hatchet, and in pioneer fashion "blazed" his way along the
mahogany staircases and painted corridors from the office to his room.
With all his eccentricities, he was a devout man, conscientious and
brave. He lived in domestic peace and honor all his days, and dying,
he and his wife, whom he had married almost in childhood, left a
posterity of 129 direct descendants to mourn them. [Transcriber's
Note: Lengthy footnote (1) relocated to chapter end.]

With all his devotion to the cause of his church, Peter Cartwright was
an ardent Jackson politician, with probably a larger acquaintance
throughout the district than any other man in it, and with a personal
following which, beginning with his own children and grandchildren and
extending through every precinct, made it no holiday task to defeat
him in a popular contest. But Lincoln and his friends went
energetically into the canvass, and before it closed he was able to
foresee a certain victory.

An incident is related to show how accurately Lincoln could calculate
political results in advance--a faculty which remained with him all
his life. A friend, who was a Democrat, had come to him early in the
canvass and had told him he wanted to see him elected, but did not
like to vote against his party; still he would vote for him, if the
contest was to be so close that every vote was needed. A short time
before the election Lincoln said to him: "I have got the preacher, and
I don't want your vote."

The election was held in August, and the Whig candidate's majority was
very large--1511 in the district, where Clay's majority had been only
914, and where Taylor's, two years later, with all the glamour of
victory about him, was ten less. Lincoln's majority in Sangamon County
was 690, which, in view of the standing of his competitor, was the
most remarkable proof which could be given of his personal popularity;
[Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (2) relocated to chapter end.]
it was the highest majority ever given to any candidate in the county
during the entire period of Whig ascendancy until Yates's triumphant
campaign of 1852.

This large vote was all the more noteworthy because the Whigs were
this year upon the unpopular side. The annexation of Texas was
generally approved throughout the West, and those who opposed it were
regarded as rather lacking in patriotism, even before actual
hostilities began. But when General Taylor and General Ampudia
confronted each other with hostile guns across the Rio Grande, and
still more after the brilliant feat of arms by which the Americans
opened the war on the plain of Palo Alto, it required a good deal of
moral courage on the part of the candidates and voters alike to
continue their attitude of disapproval of the policy of the
Government, at the same time that they were shouting paeans over the
exploits of our soldiers. They were assisted, it is true, by the fact
that the leading Whigs of the State volunteered with the utmost
alacrity and promptitude in the military service. On the 11th of May,
Congress authorized the raising of fifty thousand volunteers, and as
soon as the intelligence reached Illinois the daring and restless
spirit of Hardin leaped forward to the fate which was awaiting him,
and he instantly issued a call to his brigade of militia, in which he
said: "The general has already enrolled himself as the first volunteer
from Illinois under the requisition. He is going whenever ordered. Who
will go with him? He confidently expects to be accompanied by many of
his brigade." The quota assigned to Illinois was three regiments;
these were quickly raised, [Footnote: The colonels were Hardin,
Bissell, and Forman.] and an additional regiment offered by Baker was
then accepted. The sons of the prominent Whigs enlisted as private
soldiers; David Logan was a sergeant in Baker's regiment. A public
meeting was held in Springfield on the 29th of May, at which Mr.
Lincoln delivered what was considered a thrilling and effective speech
on the condition of affairs, and the duty of citizens to stand by the
flag of the nation until an honorable peace was secured.

It was thought probable, and would Have been altogether fitting, that
either Colonel Hardin, Colonel Baker, or Colonel Bissell, all of them
men of intelligence and distinction, should be appointed general of
the Illinois Brigade, but the Polk Administration was not inclined to
waste so important a place upon men who might thereafter have views of
their own in public affairs. The coveted appointment was given to a
man already loaded to a grotesque degree with political employment--
Mr. Lincoln's old adversary, James Shields, He had left the position
of Auditor of State to assume a seat on the Bench; retiring from this,
he had just been appointed Commissioner of the General Land Office. He
had no military experience, and so far as then known no capacity for
the service; but his fervid partisanship commended him to Mr. Polk as
a safe servant, and he received the commission, to the surprise and
derision of the State. His bravery in action and his honorable wounds
at Cerro Gordo and Chapultepec saved him from contempt and made his
political fortune. He had received the recommendation of the Illinois
Democrats in Congress, and it is altogether probable that he owed his
appointment in great measure to the influence of Douglas, who desired
to have as few Democratic statesmen as possible in Springfield that
winter. A Senator was to be elected, and Shields had acquired such a
habit of taking all the offices that fell vacant that it was only
prudent to remove him as far as convenient from such a temptation. The
election was held in December, and Douglas was promoted from the House
of Representatives to that seat in the Senate which he held with such
ability and distinction the rest of his life.

[Sidenote: December 28, 1841.]

The session of 1846-7 opened with the Sangamon district of Illinois
unrepresented in Congress. Baker had gone with his regiment to Mexico,
It did not have the good fortune to participate in any of the earlier
actions of the campaign, and his fiery spirit chafed in the enforced
idleness of camp and garrison. He seized an occasion which was offered
him to go to Washington as bearer of dispatches, and while there he
made one of those sudden and dramatic appearances in the Capitol which
were so much in harmony with his tastes and his character. He went to
his place on the floor, and there delivered a bright, interesting
speech in his most attractive vein, calling attention to the needs of
the army, disavowing on the part of the Whigs any responsibility for
the war or its conduct, and adroitly claiming for them a full share of
the credit for its prosecution.

He began by thanking the House for its kindness in allowing him the
floor, protesting at the same time that he had done nothing to deserve
such courtesy. "I could wish," he said, "that it had been the fortune
of the gallant Davis [Footnote: Jefferson Davis, who was with the army
in Mexico.] to now stand where I do and to receive from gentlemen on
all sides the congratulations so justly due to him, and to listen to
the praises of his brave compeers. For myself, I have, unfortunately,
been left far in the rear of the war, and if now I venture to say a
word in behalf of those who have endured the severest hardships of the
struggle, whether in the blood-stained streets of Monterey, or in a
yet sterner form on the banks of the Rio Grande, I beg you to believe
that while I feel this a most pleasant duty, it is in other respects a
duty full of pain; for I stand here, after six months' service as a
volunteer, having seen no actual warfare in the field;"

Yet even this disadvantage he turned with great dexterity to his
service. He reproached Congress for its apathy and inaction in not
providing for the wants of the army by reinforcements and supplies; he
flattered the troops in the field, and paid a touching tribute to
those who had died of disease and exposure, without ever enjoying the
sight of a battle-field, and, rising to lyric enthusiasm, he repeated
a poem of his own, which he had written in camp to the memory of the
dead of the Fourth Illinois. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (3)
relocated to chapter end.] He could not refrain from giving his own
party all the credit which could be claimed for it, and it is not
difficult to imagine how exasperating it must have been to the
majority to hear so calm an assumption of superior patriotism on the
part of the opposition as the following: "As a Whig I still occupy a
place on this floor; nor do I think it worth while to reply to such a
charge as that the Whigs are not friends of their country because many
of them doubt the justice or expediency of the present war. Surely
there was all the more evidence of the patriotism of the man who,
doubting the expediency and even the entire justice of the war,
nevertheless supported it, because it was the war of his country. In
the one it might be mere enthusiasm and an impetuous temperament; in
the other it was true patriotism, a sense of duty. Homer represents
Hector as strongly doubting the expediency of the war against Greece.
He gave his advice against it; he had no sympathy with Paris, whom he
bitterly reproached, much less with Helen; yet, when the war came, and
the Grecian forces were marshaled on the plain, and their crooked
keels were seen cutting the sands of the Trojan coast, Hector was a
flaming fire, his beaming helmet was seen in the thickest of the
fight.

   They did not die in eager strife
     Upon a well-fought field;
   Nor from the red wound poured their life
     Where cowering foemen yield.
   Death's ghastly shade was slowly cast
     Upon each manly brow,
   But calm and fearless to the last,
     They sleep securely now.

  Yet shall a grateful country give
     Her honors to their name;
   In kindred hearts their memory live,
     And history guard their fame.
   Not unremembered do they sleep
     Upon a foreign strand,
   Though near their graves thy wild waves sweep,
     O rushing Rio Grande!

There are in the American army many who have the spirit of Hector; who
strongly doubt the propriety of the war, and especially the manner of
its commencement; who yet are ready to pour out their hearts' best
blood like water, and their lives with it, on a foreign shore, in
defense of the American flag and American glory."

Immediately after making this speech, Baker increased the favorable
impression created by it by resigning his seat in Congress and
hurrying as fast as steam could carry him to New Orleans, to embark
there for Mexico. He had heard of the advance of Santa Anna upon
Saltillo, and did not wish to lose any opportunity of fighting which
might fall in the way of his regiment. He arrived to find his troops
transferred to the department of General Scott; and although he missed
Buena Vista, he took part in the capture of Vera Cruz, and greatly
distinguished himself at Cerro Gordo. When Shields was wounded, Baker
took command of his brigade, and by a gallant charge on the Mexican
guns gained possession of the Jalapa road, an act by which a great
portion of the fruits of that victory were harvested.

His resignation left a vacancy in Congress, and a contest,
characteristic of the politics of the time, at once sprang up over it.
The rational course would have been to elect Lincoln, but, with his
usual overstrained delicacy, he declined to run, thinking it fair to
give other aspirants a chance for the term of two months. The Whigs
nominated a respectable man named Brown, but a short while before the
election John Henry, a member of the State Senate, announced himself
as a candidate, and appealed for votes on the sole ground that he was
a poor man and wanted the place for the mileage. Brown, either
recognizing the force of this plea, or smitten with a sudden disgust
for a service in which such pleas were possible, withdrew from the
canvass, and Henry got his election and his mileage.

[Illustration:   THE BOUNDARIES OF TEXAS. This map gives the boundary
between Mexico and the United States as defined by the treaty of 1828;
the westerly bank of the Sabine River from its mouth to the 32d degree
of longitude west from Greenwich; thence due north to the Arkansas
River, and running along its south bank to its source in the Rocky
Mountains, near the place where Leadville now stands; thence due north
to the 42d parallel of latitude, which it follows to the Pacific
Ocean. On the west will be seen the boundaries claimed by Mexico and
the United States after the annexation of Texas. The Mexican
authorities considered the western boundary of Texas to be the Nueces
River, from mouth to source; thence by an indefinite line to the Rio
Pecos, and through the elevated and barren Llano Estacado to the
source of the main branch of the Red River, and along that river to
the 100th meridian. The United States adopted the Texan claim of the
Rio Grande del Norte as their western limit. By the treaty of peace of
1848, the Mexicans relinquished to the United States the territory
between the Nueces and the Rio Grande del Norte; also the territory
lying between the last-named river and the Pacific Ocean, and north of
the Gila River and the southern boundary of New Mexico, which was a
short distance above the town of El Paso.]

[Illustration:   ZACHARY TAYLOR.]

[Relocated Footnote (1): The impressive manner of Mrs. Cartwright's
death, who survived her husband a few years, is remembered in the
churches of Sangamon County. She was attending a religious meeting at
Bethel Chapel, a mile from her house. She was called upon "to give her
testimony," which she did with much feeling, concluding with the
words, "the past three weeks have been the happiest of all my life; I
am waiting for the chariot."

When the meeting broke up, she did not rise with the rest. The
minister solemnly said, "The chariot has arrived."--"Early Settlers of
Sangamon County," by John Carroll Power.]

[Relocated Footnote (2):

  Stuart's maj. over May      in 1836  in Sangamon Co. was  543
     "      "     " Douglas    " 1838   "     "     "   "   295
     "      "     " Ralston    " 1840   "     "     "   "   575
  Hardin's  "     " McDougall  " 1843   "     "     "   "   504
  Baker's   "     " Calhoun    " 1844   "     "     "   "   373
  Lincoln's "     " Cartwright " 1846   "     "     "   "   690
  Logan's   "     " Harris     " 1848   "     "     "   "   263
  Yates's   "     " Harris     " 1850   "     "     "   "   336 ]

[Relocated Footnote (3): We give a copy of these lines, not on account
of their intrinsic merit, but as illustrating the versatility of the
lawyer, orator, and soldier who wrote them.

   Where rolls the rushing Rio Grande,
     How peacefully they sleep!
   Far from their native Northern land,
     Far from the friends who weep.
   No rolling drums disturb their rest
     Beneath the sandy sod;
   The mold lies heavy on each breast,
     The spirit is with God.

   They heard their country's call, and came
     To battle for the right;
   Each bosom filled with martial flame,
     And kindling for the fight.
   Light was their measured footsteps when
     They moved to seek the foe;
   Alas that hearts so fiery then
     Should soon be cold and low!]




CHAPTER XV

THE THIRTIETH CONGRESS


The Thirtieth Congress organized on the 6th of December, 1847. Its
roll contained the names of many eminent men, few of whom were less
known than his which was destined to a fame more wide and enduring
than all the rest together. It was Mr. Lincoln's sole distinction that
he was the only Whig member from Illinois. He entered upon the larger
field of work which now lay before him without any special diffidence,
but equally without elation. Writing to his friend Speed soon after
his election he said: "Being elected to Congress, though I am very
grateful to our friends for having done it, has not pleased me as much
as I expected,"--an experience not unknown to most public men, but
probably intensified in Lincoln's case by his constitutional
melancholy. He went about his work with little gladness, but with a
dogged sincerity and an inflexible conscience.

It soon became apparent that the Whigs were to derive at least a
temporary advantage from the war which the Democrats had brought upon
the country, although it was destined in its later consequences to
sweep the former party out of existence and exile the other from power
for many years. The House was so closely divided that Lincoln, writing
on the 5th, expressed some doubt whether the Whigs could elect all
their caucus nominees, and Mr. Robert C. Winthrop was chosen Speaker
the next day by a majority of one vote. The President showed in his
message that he was doubtful of the verdict of Congress and the
country upon the year's operations, and he argued with more solicitude
than force in defense of the proceedings of the Administration in
regard to the war with Mexico. His anxiety was at once shown to be
well founded. The first attempt made by his friends to indorse the
conduct of the Government was met by a stern rebuke from the House of
Representatives, which passed an amendment proposed by George Ashmun
that "the war had been unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced
by the President." This severe declaration was provoked and justified
by the persistent and disingenuous assertions of the President that
the preceding Congress had "with virtual unanimity" declared that "war
existed by the act of Mexico"--the truth being that a strong minority
had voted to strike out those words from the preamble of the supply
bill, but being outvoted in this, they were compelled either to vote
for preamble and bill together, or else refuse supplies to the army.

It was not surprising that the Whigs and other opponents of the war
should take the first opportunity to give the President their opinion
of such a misrepresentation. The standing of the opposition had been
greatly strengthened by the very victories upon which Mr. Polk had
confidently relied for his vindication. Both our armies in Mexico were
under the command of Whig generals, and among the subordinate officers
who had distinguished themselves in the field, a full share were
Whigs, who, to an extent unusual in wars of political significance,
retained their attitude of hostility to the Administration under whose
orders they were serving. Some of them had returned to their places on
the floor of Congress brandishing their laurels with great effect in
the faces of their opponents who had talked while they fought.
[Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (1) relocated to chapter end.]
When we number the names which leaped into sudden fame in that short
but sanguinary war, it is surprising to find how few of them
sympathized with the party who brought it on, or with the purposes for
which it was waged. The earnest opposition of Taylor to the scheme of
the annexationists did not hamper his movements or paralyze his arm,
when with his little band of regulars he beat the army of Arista on
the plain of Palo Alto, and again in the precipitous Resaca de la
Palma; took by storm the fortified city of Monterey, defended by a
greatly superior force; and finally, with a few regiments of raw
levies, posted among the rocky spurs and gorges about the farm of
Buena Vista, met and defeated the best-led and the best-fought army
the Mexicans ever brought into the field, outnumbering him more than
four to one. It was only natural that the Whigs should profit by the
glory gained by Whig valor, no matter in what cause. The attitude of
the opposition--sure of their advantage and exulting in it--was never
perhaps more clearly and strongly set forth than in a speech made by
Mr. Lincoln near the close of this session. He said:

As General Taylor is _par excellence_ the hero of the Mexican war, and
as you Democrats say we Whigs have always opposed the war, you think
it must be very awkward and embarrassing for us to go for General
Taylor. The declaration that we have always opposed the war is true or
false accordingly as one may understand the term "opposing the war."
If to say "the war was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced
by the President" be opposing the war, then the Whigs have very
generally opposed it. Whenever they have spoken at all they have said
this; and they have said it on what has appeared good reason to them;
the marching of an army into the midst of a peaceful Mexican
settlement, frightening the inhabitants away, leaving their growing
crops and other property to destruction, to _you_ may appear a
perfectly amiable, peaceful, unprovoking procedure; but it does not
appear so to _us_. So to call such an act, to us appears no other than
a naked, impudent absurdity, and we speak of it accordingly. But if
when the war had begun, and had become the cause of the country, the
giving of our money and our blood, in common with yours, was support
of the war, then it is not true that we have always opposed the war.
With few individual exceptions, you have constantly had our votes here
for all the necessary supplies. And, more than this, you have had the
services, the blood, and the lives of our political brethren in every
trial, and on every field. The beardless boy and the mature man, the
humble and the distinguished,--you have had them. Through suffering
and death, by disease and in battle, they have endured and fought and
fallen with you. Clay and Webster each gave a son, never to be
returned. From the State of my own residence, besides other worthy but
less-known Whig names, we sent Marshall, Morrison, Baker, and Hardin;
they all fought, and one fell, and in the fall of that one we lost our
best Whig man. Nor were the Whigs few in number or laggard in the day
of danger. In that fearful, bloody, breathless struggle at Buena
Vista, where each man's hard task was to beat back five foes or die
himself, of the five high officers who perished, four were Whigs.

There was no refuge for the Democrats after the Whigs had adopted
Taylor as their especial hero, since Scott was also a Whig and an
original opponent of the war. His victories, on account of the
apparent ease with which they were gained, have never received the
credit justly due them. The student of military history will rarely
meet with narratives of battles in any age where the actual operations
coincide so exactly with the orders issued upon the eve of conflict,
as in the official reports of the wonderfully energetic and successful
campaign in which General Scott with a handful of men renewed the
memory of the conquest of Cortes, in his triumphant march from Vera
Cruz to the capital. The plan of the battle of Cerro Gordo was so
fully carried out in action that the official report is hardly more
than the general orders translated from the future tense to the past.
The story of Chapultepec has the same element of the marvelous in it.
On one day the general commanded apparent impossibilities in the
closest detail, and the next day reported that they had been
accomplished. These successes were not cheaply attained. The Mexicans,
though deficient in science and in military intelligence, fought with
bravery and sometimes with desperation. The enormous percentage of
loss in his army proves that Scott was engaged in no light work. He
marched from Pueblo with about 10,000 men, and his losses in the basin
of Mexico were 2703, of whom 383 were officers. But neither he nor
Taylor was a favorite of the Administration, and their brilliant
success brought no gain of popularity to Mr. Polk and his Cabinet.

During the early part of the session little was talked about except
the Mexican war, its causes, its prosecution, and its probable
results. In these wordy engagements the Whigs, partly for the reasons
we have mentioned, partly through their unquestionable superiority in
debate, and partly by virtue of their stronger cause, usually had the
advantage. There was no distinct line of demarcation, however, between
the two parties. There was hardly a vote, after the election of Mr.
Winthrop as Speaker, where the two sides divided according to their
partisan nomenclature. The question of slavery, even where its
presence was not avowed, had its secret influence upon every trial of
strength in Congress, and Southern Whigs were continually found
sustaining the President, and New England Democrats voting against his
most cherished plans. Not even all the Democrats of the South could be
relied on by the Administration. The most powerful leader of them all
denounced with bitter earnestness the conduct of the war, for which he
was greatly responsible. Mr. Calhoun, in an attack upon the
President's policy, January 4, 1848, said: "I opposed the war, not
only because it might have been easily avoided; not only because the
President had no authority to order a part of the disputed territory
in possession of the Mexicans to be occupied by our troops; not only
because I believed the allegations upon which Congress sanctioned the
war untrue, but from high considerations of policy; because I believed
it would lead to many and serious evils to the country and greatly
endanger its free institutions."

[Sidenote: January 13, 1848.]

It was probably not so much the free institutions of the country that
the South Carolina Senator was disturbed about as some others. He
perhaps felt that the friends of slavery had set in motion a train of
events whose result was beyond their ken. Mr. Palfrey, of
Massachusetts, a few days later said with as much sagacity as wit that
"Mr. Calhoun thought that he could set fire to a barrel of gunpowder
and extinguish it when half consumed." In his anxiety that the war
should be brought to an end, Calhoun proposed that the United States
army should evacuate the Mexican capital, establish a defensive line,
and hold it as the only indemnity possible to us. He had no confidence
in treaties, and believed that no Mexican government was capable of
carrying one into effect. A few days later, in a running debate, Mr.
Calhoun made an important statement, which still further strengthened
the contention of the Whigs. He said that in making the treaty of
annexation he did not assume that the Rio del Norte was the western
boundary of Texas; on the contrary, he assumed that the boundary was
an unsettled one between Mexico and Texas; and that he had intimated
to our _charge d'affaires_ that we were prepared to settle the
boundary on the most liberal terms! This was perfectly in accordance
with the position held by most Democrats before the Rio Grande
boundary was made an article of faith by the President. C. J.
Ingersoll, one of the leading men upon that side in Congress, in a
speech three years before had said: "The stupendous deserts between
the Nueces and the Bravo rivers are the natural boundaries between the
Anglo-Saxon and the Mauritanian races"; a statement which, however
faulty from the point of view of ethnology and physical geography,
shows clearly enough the view then held of the boundary question.

The discipline of both parties was more or less relaxed under the
influence of the slavery question. It was singular to see Mr. McLane,
of Baltimore, rebuking Mr. Clingman, of North Carolina, for mentioning
that forbidden subject on the floor of the House; Reverdy Johnson, a
Whig from Maryland, administering correction to John P. Hale, an
insubordinate Democrat from New Hampshire, for the same offense, and
at the time screaming that the "blood of our glorious battle-fields in
Mexico rested on the hands of the President"; Mr. Clingman challenging
the House with the broad statement that "it is a misnomer to speak of
our institution at the South as peculiar; ours is the general system
of the world, and the _free_ system is the peculiar one," and Mr.
Palfrey dryly responding that slavery was natural just as barbarism
was, just as fig-leaves and bare skins were a natural dress. When the
time arrived, however, for leaving off grimacing and posturing, and
the House went to voting, the advocates of slavery usually carried the
day, as the South, Whigs and Democrats together, voted solidly, and
the North was divided. Especially was this the case after the arrival
of the treaty of peace between the United States and Mexico, which was
signed at Guadalupe Hidalgo on the 2d of February and was in the hands
of the Senate only twenty days later. It was ratified by that body on
the 10th of March, with a series of amendments which were at once
accepted by Mexico, and the treaty of peace was officially promulgated
on the national festival of the Fourth of July.

From the hour when the treaty was received in Washington, however, the
discussion as to the conduct of the war naturally languished; the
ablest speeches of the day before became obsolete in the presence of
accomplished facts; and the interest of Congress promptly turned to
the more important subject of the disposition to be made of the vast
domain which our arms had conquered and the treaty confirmed to us. No
one in America then realized the magnitude of this acquisition; its
stupendous physical features were as little appreciated as the vast
moral and political results which were to flow from its absorption
into our commonwealth. It was only known, in general terms, that our
new possessions covered ten degrees of latitude and fifteen of
longitude; that we had acquired, in short, six hundred and thirty
thousand square miles of desert, mountain, and wilderness. There was
no dream, then, of that portentous discovery which, even while the
Senate was wrangling over the treaty, had converted Captain Sutter's
mill at Coloma into a mining camp, for his ruin and the sudden up-
building of many colossal fortunes. The name of California, which
conveys to-day such opulent suggestions, then meant nothing but
barrenness, and Nevada was a name as yet unknown; some future
Congressman, innocent of taste and of Spanish, was to hit upon the
absurdity of calling that land of silver and cactus, of the orange and
the sage-hen, the land of snow. But imperfect as was the appreciation,
at that day, of the possibilities which lay hidden in those sunset
regions, there was still enough of instinctive greed in the minds of
politicians to make the new realm a subject of lively interest and
intrigue. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (2) relocated to
chapter end.] At the first showing of hands, the South was successful.
In the Twenty-ninth Congress this contest had begun over the spoils of
a victory not yet achieved. President Polk, foreseeing the probability
of an acquisition of territory by treaty, had asked Congress to make
an appropriation for that purpose. A bill was at once reported in that
sense, appropriating $30,000 for the expenses of the negotiation and
$2,000,000 to be used in the President's discretion. But before it
passed, a number of Northern Democrats [Footnote: Some of the more
conspicuous York; Wilmot, of Pennsylvania; among them were Hamlin, of
Brinckerhoff, of Ohio, and McClel-Maine; Preston King, of New land, of
Michigan.] had become alarmed as to the disposition that might be made
of the territory thus acquired, which was now free soil by Mexican
law. After a hasty consultation they agreed upon a proviso to the
bill, which was presented by David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania. He was a
man of respectable abilities, who then, and long afterwards, held a
somewhat prominent position among the public men of his State; but his
chief claim to a place in history rests upon these few lines which he
moved to add to the first section of the bill under discussion:

Provided, That as an express and fundamental condition to the
acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United
States, by virtue of any treaty that may be negotiated between them,
and to the use by the Executive of the moneys herein appropriated,
neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in any part of
said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be
duly convicted.

This condition seemed so fair, when first presented to the Northern
conscience, that only three members from the free States voted "no" in
committee. The amendment was adopted--eighty to sixty-four--and the
bill reported to the House. A desperate effort was then made by the
pro-slavery members to kill the bill for the purpose of destroying the
amendment with it. This failed, [Footnote: In this important and
significant vote all the Whigs but one and almost all the Democrats,
from the free States, together with Wm. P. Thomasson and Henry Grider,
Whigs from Kentucky, voted against killing the amended bill, in all
ninety-three. On the other side were all the members from slave-
holding States, except Thomasson and Grider, and the following from
free States, Douglas and John A. McClernand from Illinois, Petit from
Indiana, and Schenek, a Whig, from Ohio, in all seventy-nine.--
Greeley's "American Conflict," I. p. 189.] and the bill, as amended,
passed the House; but going to the Senate a few hours before the close
of the session, it lapsed without a vote.

As soon as the war was ended and the treaty of peace was sent to the
Senate, this subject assumed a new interest and importance, and a
resolution embodying the principle of the Wilmot proviso was brought
before the House by Mr. Harvey Putnam, of New York, but no longer with
the same success. The South was now solid against it, and such a
disintegration of conscience among Northern Democrats had set in, that
whereas only three of them in the last Congress had seen fit to
approve the introduction of slavery into free territory, twenty-five
now voted with the South against maintaining the existing conditions
there. The fight was kept up during the session in various places; if
now and then a temporary advantage seemed gained in the House, it was
lost in the Senate, and no permanent progress was made.

What we have said in regard to the general discussion provoked by the
Mexican war, appeared necessary to explain the part taken by Mr.
Lincoln on the floor. He came to his place unheralded and without any
special personal pretensions. His first participation in debate can
best be described in his own quaint and simple words: "As to speech-
making, by way of getting the hang of the House, I made a little
speech two or three days ago on a post-office question of no general
interest. I find speaking here and elsewhere about the same thing. I
was about as badly scared, and no worse, as I am when I speak in
court. I expect to make one within a week or two in which I hope to
succeed well enough to wish you to see it." He evidently had the
orator's temperament--the mixture of dread and eagerness which all
good speakers feel before facing an audience, which made Cicero
tremble and turn pale when rising in the Forum. The speech he was
pondering was made only four days later, on the 12th of January, and
few better maiden speeches--for it was his first formal discourse in
Congress--have ever been made in that House. He preceded it, and
prepared for it, by the introduction, on the 22d of December, of a
series of resolutions referring to the President's persistent
assertions that the war had been begun by Mexico, "by invading our
territory and shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil," and
calling upon him to give the House more specific information upon
these points. As these resolutions became somewhat famous afterwards,
and were relied upon to sustain the charge of a lack of patriotism
made by Mr. Douglas against their author, it may be as well to give
them here, especially as they are the first production of Mr.
Lincoln's pen after his entry upon the field of national politics. We
omit the preamble, which consists of quotations from the President's
message.

_Resolved by the House of Representatives,_ That the President of
the United States be respectfully requested to inform this House:

_First._ Whether the spot on which the blood of our citizens was
shed, as in his messages declared, was or was not within the territory
of Spain, at least after the treaty of 1819, until the Mexican
revolution.

_Second._ Whether that spot is or is not within the territory
which was wrested from Spain by the revolutionary government of
Mexico.

_Third._ Whether that spot is or is not within a settlement of
people, which settlement has existed ever since long before the Texas
revolution and until its inhabitants fled before the approach of the
United States army.

_Fourth._ Whether that settlement is or is not isolated from any
and all other settlements by the Gulf and the Rio Grande on the south
and west, and by wide uninhabited regions in the north and east.

_Fifth._ Whether the people of that settlement, or a majority of
them, or any of them, have ever submitted themselves to the government
or laws of Texas or of the United States, by consent or by compulsion,
either by accepting office, or voting at elections, or paying tax, or
serving on juries, or having process served upon them, or in any other
way.

_Sixth._ Whether the people of that settlement did or did not
flee from the approach of the United States army, leaving unprotected
their homes and their growing crops, _before_ the blood was shed,
as in the messages stated; and whether the first blood so shed was or
was not shed within the inclosure of one of the people who had thus
fled from it.

_Seventh._ Whether our citizens whose blood was shed, as in his
messages declared, were or were not at that time armed officers and
soldiers, sent into that settlement by the military order of the
President, through the Secretary of War.

_Eighth._ Whether the military force of the United States was or
was not so sent into that settlement after General Taylor had more
than once intimated to the War Department that in his opinion no such
movement was necessary to the defense or protection of Texas.

It would have been impossible for the President to answer these
questions, one by one, according to the evidence in his possession,
without surrendering every position he had taken in his messages for
the last two years. An answer was probably not expected; the
resolutions were never acted upon by the House, the vote on the Ashmun
proposition having sufficiently indicated the view which the majority
held of the President's precipitate and unconstitutional proceeding.
But they served as a text for the speech which Lincoln made in
Committee of the Whole, which deserves the attentive reading of any
one who imagines that there was anything accidental in the ascendency
which he held for twenty years among the public men of Illinois. The
winter was mostly devoted to speeches upon the same subject from men
of eminence and experience, but it is within bounds to say there was
not a speech made in the House, that year, superior to this in
clearness of statement, severity of criticism combined with soberness
of style, or, what is most surprising, finish and correctness. In its
close, clear argument, its felicity of illustration, its restrained
yet burning earnestness, it belongs to precisely the same class of
addresses as those which he made a dozen years later. The ordinary
Congressman can never conclude inside the limits assigned him; he must
beg for unanimous consent for an extension of time to complete his
sprawling peroration. But this masterly speech covered the whole
ground of the controversy, and so intent was Lincoln on not exceeding
his hour that he finished his task, to his own surprise, in forty-five
minutes. It is an admirable discourse, and the oblivion which overtook
it, along with the volumes of other speeches made at the same time,
can be accounted for only by remembering that the Guadalupe Treaty
came suddenly in upon the debate, with its immense consequences
sweeping forever out of view all consideration of the causes and the
processes which led to the momentous result.

Lincoln's speech and his resolutions were alike inspired with one
purpose: to correct what he considered an error and a wrong; to
rectify a misrepresentation which he could not, in his very nature,
permit to go uncontradicted. It gratified his offended moral sense to
protest against the false pretenses which he saw so clearly, and it
pleased his fancy as a lawyer to bring a truth to light which
somebody, as he thought, was trying to conceal. He certainly got no
other reward for his trouble. His speech was not particularly well
received in Illinois. His own partner, Mr. Herndon, a young and ardent
man, with more heart than learning, more feeling for the flag than for
international justice, could not, or would not, understand Mr.
Lincoln's position, and gave him great pain by his letters. Again and
again Lincoln explained to him the difference between approving the
war and voting supplies to the soldiers, but Herndon was obstinately
obtuse, and there were many of his mind.

Lincoln's convictions were so positive in regard to the matter that
any laxity of opinion among his friends caused him real suffering. In
a letter to the Rev. J. M. Peck, who had written a defense of the
Administration in reference to the origin of the war, he writes: this
"disappoints me, because it is the first effort of the kind I have
known, made by one appearing to me to be intelligent, right-minded,
and impartial." He then reviews some of the statements of Mr. Peck,
proving their incorrectness, and goes on to show that our army had
marched under orders across the desert of the Nueces into a peaceful
Mexican settlement, frightening away the inhabitants; that Fort Brown
was built in a Mexican cotton-field, where a young crop was growing;
that Captain Thornton and his men were captured in another cultivated
field. He then asks, how under any law, human or divine, this can be
considered "no aggression," and closes by asking his clerical
correspondent if the precept, "Whatsoever ye would that men should do
to you, do you even so to them," is obsolete, of no force, of no
application? This is not the anxiety of a politician troubled about
his record. He is not a candidate for reelection, and the discussion
has passed by; but he must stop and vindicate the truth whenever
assailed. He perhaps does not see, certainly does not care, that this
stubborn devotion to mere justice will do him no good at an hour when
the air is full of the fumes of gunpowder; when the returned
volunteers are running for constable in every county; when so good a
Whig as Mr. Winthrop gives, as a sentiment, at a public meeting in
Boston, "Our country, however bounded," and the majority of his party
are preparing--unmindful of Mr. Polk and all his works--to reap the
fruits of the Mexican war by making its popular hero President.

It was fortunate for Mr. Lincoln and for Whigs like him, with
consciences, that General Taylor had occupied so unequivocal an
attitude in regard to the war. He had not been in favor of the march
to the Rio Grande, and had resisted every suggestion to that effect
until his peremptory orders came. In regard to other political
questions, his position was so undefined, and his silence generally so
discreet, that few of the Whigs, however exacting, could find any
difficulty in supporting him. Mr. Lincoln did more than tolerate his
candidacy. He supported it with energy and cordiality. He was at last
convinced that the election of Mr. Clay was impossible, and he thought
he could see that the one opportunity of the Whigs was in the
nomination of Taylor. So early as April he wrote to a friend: "Mr.
Clay's chance for an election is just no chance at all. He might get
New York, and that would have elected in 1844, but it will not now
because he must now, at the least, lose Tennessee, which he had then,
and in addition the fifteen new votes of Florida, Texas, Iowa, and
Wisconsin." Later he wrote to the same friend that the nomination took
the Democrats "on the blind side. It turns the war thunder against
them. The war is now to them the gallows of Haman, which they built
for us, and on which they are doomed to be hanged themselves."

[Sidenote: J.G. Holland, "Life of Lincoln," p. 118.]

At the same time he bated no jot of his opposition to the war, and
urged the same course upon his friends. To Linder, of Illinois, he
wrote: "In law, it is good policy to never plead what you need not,
lest you oblige yourself to prove what you cannot." He then counseled
him to go for Taylor, but to avoid approving Polk and the war, as in
the former case he would gain Democratic votes and in the latter he
would lose with the Whigs. Linder answered him, wanting to know if it
would not be as easy to elect Taylor without opposing the war, which
drew from Lincoln the angry response that silence was impossible; the
Whigs must speak, "and their only option is whether they will, when
they speak, tell the truth or tell a foul and villainous falsehood."

[Sidenote: June 7, 1848.]

When the Whig Convention came together in Philadelphia, the
differences of opinion on points of principle and policy were almost
as numerous as the delegates. The unconditional Clay men rallied once
more and gave their aged leader 97 votes to 111 which Taylor received
on the first ballot. Scott and Webster had each a few votes; but on
the fourth ballot the soldier of Buena Vista was nominated, and
Millard Fillmore placed in the line of succession to him. It was
impossible for a body so heterogeneous to put forward a distinctive
platform of principles. An attempt was made to force an expression in
regard to the Wilmot proviso, but it was never permitted to come to a
vote. The convention was determined that "Old Rough and Ready," as he
was now universally nicknamed, should run upon his battle-flags and
his name of Whig--although he cautiously called himself "not an ultra
Whig." The nomination was received with great and noisy demonstrations
of adhesion from every quarter. Lincoln, writing a day or two after
his return from the convention, said: "Many had said they would not
abide the nomination of Taylor; but since the deed has been done they
are fast falling in, and in my opinion we shall have a most
overwhelming, glorious triumph. One unmistakable sign is that all the
odds and ends are with us,--Barnburners, native Americans, Tyler men,
disappointed office-seeking Loco-focos, and the Lord knows what. This
is important, if in nothing else, in showing which way the wind
blows."

General Taylor's chances for election had been greatly increased by
what had taken place at the Democratic Convention, a fortnight before.
General Cass had been nominated for the Presidency, but his militia
title had no glamour of carnage about it, and the secession of the New
York Anti-slavery "Barnburners" from the convention was a presage of
disaster which was fulfilled in the following August by the assembling
of the recusant delegates at Buffalo, where they were joined by a
large number of discontented Democrats and "Liberty" men, and the
Free-soil party was organized for its short but effective mission.
Martin Van Buren was nominated for President, and Charles Francis
Adams was associated with him on the ticket. The great superiority of
caliber shown in the nominations of the mutineers over the regular
Democrats was also apparent in the roll of those who made and
sustained the revolt. When Salmon P. Chase, Preston King, the Van
Burens, John P. Hale, William Cullen Bryant, David Wilmot, and their
like went out of their party, they left a vacancy which was never to
be filled.

It was perhaps an instinct rather than any clear spirit of prophecy
which drove the antislavery Democrats away from their affiliations and
kept the Whigs, for the moment, substantially together. So far as the
authorized utterances of their conventions were concerned, there was
little to choose between them. They had both evaded any profession of
faith in regard to slavery. The Democrats had rejected the resolution
offered by Yancey committing them to the doctrine of "non-interference
with the rights of property in the territories," and the Whigs had
never allowed the Wilmot proviso to be voted upon. But nevertheless
those Democrats who felt that the time had come to put a stop to the
aggression of slavery, generally threw off their partisan allegiance,
and the most ardent of the antislavery Whigs,--with some exceptions it
is true, especially in Ohio and in Massachusetts, where the strength
of the "Conscience Whigs," led by Sumner, the Adamses, and Henry
Wilson, was important,--thought best to remain with their party.
General Taylor was a Southerner and a slaveholder. In regard to all
questions bearing upon slavery, he observed a discretion in the
canvass which was almost ludicrous. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy
footnote (3) relocated to chapter end.] Yet there was a well-nigh
universal impression among the antislavery Whigs that his
administration would be under influences favorable to the restriction
of slavery. Clay, Webster, and Seward, all of whom were agreed at that
time against any extension of the area of that institution, supported
him with more or less cordiality. Webster insisted upon it that the
Whigs were themselves the best "Free-soilers," and for them to join
the party called by that distinctive name would be merely putting Mr.
Van Buren at the head of the Whig party. Mr. Seward, speaking for
Taylor at Cleveland, took still stronger ground, declaring that
slavery "must be abolished;" that "freedom and slavery are two
antagonistic elements of society in America;" that "the party of
freedom seeks complete and universal emancipation." No one then seems
to have foreseen that the Whig party--then on the eve of a great
victory--was so near its dissolution, and that the bolting Democrats
and the faithful Whigs were alike engaged in laying the foundations of
a party which was to glorify the latter half of the century with
achievements of such colossal and enduring importance.

There was certainly no doubt or misgiving in the mind of Lincoln as to
that future, which, if he could have foreseen it, would have presented
so much of terrible fascination. He went into the campaign with
exultant alacrity. He could not even wait for the adjournment of
Congress to begin his stump-speaking. Following the bad example of the
rest of his colleagues, he obtained the floor on the 27th of July, and
made a long, brilliant, and humorous speech upon the merits of the two
candidates before the people. As it is the only one of Lincoln's
popular speeches of that period which has been preserved entire, it
should be read by those who desire to understand the manner and spirit
of the politics of 1848. Whatever faults of taste or of method may be
found in it, considering it as a speech delivered in the House of
Representatives, with no more propriety or pertinence than hundreds of
others which have been made under like circumstances, it is an
extremely able speech, and it is by itself enough to show how
remarkably effective he must have been as a canvasser in the remoter
districts of his State where means of intellectual excitement were
rare and a political meeting was the best-known form of public
entertainment.

He begins by making a clear, brief, and dignified defense of the
position of Taylor upon the question of the proper use of the veto; he
then avows with characteristic candor that he does not know what
General Taylor will do as to slavery; he is himself "a Northern man,
or rather a Western free-State man, with a constituency I believe to
be, and with personal feelings I know to be, against the extension of
slavery" (a definition in which his caution and his honesty are
equally displayed), and he hopes General Taylor would not, if elected,
do anything against its restriction; but he would vote for him in any
case, as offering better guarantees than Mr. Cass. He then enters upon
an analysis of the position of Cass and his party which is full of
keen observation and political intelligence, and his speech goes on to
its rollicking close with a constant succession of bright, witty, and
striking passages in which the orator's own conviction and enjoyment
of an assured success is not the least remarkable feature. A few weeks
later Congress adjourned, and Lincoln, without returning home, entered
upon the canvass in New England, [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote
(4) relocated to chapter end.] and then going to Illinois, spoke night
and day until the election. When the votes were counted, the extent of
the defection among the Northern Whigs and Democrats who voted for Van
Buren and among the Southern Democrats who had been beguiled by the
epaulets of Taylor, was plainly seen. The bolting "Barnburners" had
given New York to Taylor; the Free-Soil vote in Ohio, on the other
hand, had thrown that State to Cass. Van Buren carried no electors,
but his popular vote was larger in New York and Massachusetts than
that of Cass. The entire popular vote (exclusive of South Carolina,
which chose its electors by the Legislature) was for Taylor 1,360,752;
for Cass 1,219,962; for Van Buren 291,342. Of the electors, Taylor had
163 and Cass 137.

[Relocated Footnote (1): The following extract from a letter of
Lincoln to his partner, Mr. Herndon, who had criticized his anti-war
votes, gives the names of some of the Whig soldiers who persisted in
their faith throughout the war: "As to the Whig men who have
participated in the war, so far as they have spoken to my hearing,
they do is not hesitate to denounce as unjust the President's conduct
the beginning of the war. They do not suppose that such denunciation
is directed by undying hatred to them, as 'the Register' would have it
believed, There are two such Whigs on this floor (Colonel Haskell and
Major James). The former fought as a colonel by the side of Colonel
Baker, at Cerro Gordo, and stands side by side with me in the vote
that you seem dissatisfied with. The latter, the history of whose
capture with Cassius Clay you well know, had not arrived here when
that vote was given; but, as I understand, he stands ready to give
just such a vote whenever an occasion shall present. Baker, too, who
is now here, says the truth is undoubtedly that way; and whenever he
shall speak out, he will say so. Colonel Doniphan, too, the favorite
Whig of Missouri and who overran all northern Mexico, on his return
home, in a public speech at St. Louis, condemned the Administration in
relation to the war, if I remember. G. T. M. Davis, who has been
through almost the whole war, declares in favor of Mr. Clay;" etc.]

[Relocated Footnote (2): To show how crude and vague were the ideas of
even the most intelligent men in relation to this great empire, we
give a few lines from the closing page of Edward D, Mansfield's
"History of the Mexican War," published in 1849: "But will the greater
part of this vast space ever be inhabited by any but the restless
hunter and the wandering trapper? Two hundred thousand square miles of
this territory, in New California, has been trod by the foot of no
civilized being. No spy or pioneer or vagrant trapper has ever
returned to report the character and scenery of that waste and lonely
wilderness. Two hundred thousand square miles more are occupied with
broken mountains and dreary wilds. But little remains then for
civilization."]

[Relocated Footnote (3): It is a tradition that a planter once wrote
to him: "I have worked hard and been frugal all my life, and the
results of my industry have mainly taken the form of slaves, of whom I
own about a hundred. Before I vote for President I want to be sure
that the candidate I support will not so act as to divest me of my
property." To which the general, with a dexterity that would have done
credit to a diplomatist, and would have proved exceedingly useful to
Mr. Clay, responded, "Sir: I have the honor to inform you that I too
have been all my life industrious and frugal, and that the fruits
thereof are mainly invested in slaves, of whom I own _three_
hundred. Yours, etc."--Horace Greeley, "American Conflict," Volume I.,
p. 193.]

[Relocated Footnote (4): Thurlow Weed says in his Autobiography, Vol.
I., p. 603: "I had supposed, until we now met, that I had never seen
Mr. Lincoln, having forgotten that in the fall of 1848, when he took
the stump in New England, he called upon me at Albany, and that we
went to see Mr. Fillmore, who was then the Whig candidate for
Vice-President." The New York "Tribune," September 14, 1848, mentions
Mr. Lincoln as addressing a great Whig meeting in Boston, September
12. The Boston "Atlas" refers to speeches made by him at Dorchester,
September 16; at Chelsea September 17; by Lincoln and Seward at
Boston, September 22, on which occasion the report says: "Mr. Lincoln,
of Illinois, next came forward, and was received with great applause.
He spoke about an hour and made a powerful and convincing speech which
was cheered to the echo."

Mr. Robert C. Winthrop, Jr., in his recent memoir of the Hon. David
Sears, says, the most brilliant of Mr. Lincoln's speeches in this
campaign "was delivered at Worcester, September 13, 1848, when, after
taking for his text Mr. Webster's remark that the nomination of Martin
Van Buren for the Presidency by a professed antislavery party could
fitly be regarded only as a trick or a joke, Mr. Lincoln proceeded to
declare that of the three parties then asking the confidence of the
country, the new one had less of principle than any other, adding,
amid shouts of laughter, that the recently constructed elastic
Free-Soil platform reminded him of nothing so much as the pair of
trousers offered for sale by a Yankee peddler which were 'large enough
for any man and small enough for any boy.'"

It is evident that he considered Van Buren, in Massachusetts at least,
a candidate more to be feared than Cass, the regular Democratic
nominee.]




CHAPTER XVI

A FORTUNATE ESCAPE


When Congress came together again in December, there was such a change
in the temper of its members that no one would have imagined, on
seeing the House divided, that it was the same body which had
assembled there a year before. The election was over; the Whigs were
to control the Executive Department of the Government for four years
to come; the members themselves were either reflected or defeated; and
there was nothing to prevent the gratification of such private
feelings as they might have been suppressing during the canvass in the
interest of their party. It was not long before some of the Northern
Democrats began to avail themselves of this new liberty. They had
returned burdened with a sense of wrong. They had seen their party put
in deadly peril by reason of its fidelity to the South, and they had
seen how little their Southern brethren cared for their labors and
sacrifices, in the enormous gains which Taylor had made in the South,
carrying eight out of fifteen slave States. They were in the humor to
avenge themselves by a display of independence on their own account,
at the first opportunity. The occasion was not long in presenting
itself. A few days after Congress opened, Mr. Root, of Ohio,
introduced a resolution instructing the Committee on Territories to
bring in a bill "with as little delay as practicable" to provide
territorial governments for California and New Mexico, which should
"exclude slavery there-from." This resolution would have thrown the
same House into a panic twelve months before, but now it passed by a
vote of 108 to 80--in the former number were all the "Whigs from the
North and all the Democrats but eight," and in the latter the entire
South and the eight referred to.

The Senate, however, was not so susceptible to popular impressions,
and the bill, prepared in obedience to the mandate of the House, never
got farther than the desk of the Senate Chamber. The pro-slavery
majority in that body held firmly together till near the close of the
session, when they attempted to bring in the new territories without
any restriction as to slavery, by attaching what is called "a rider"
to that effect to the Civil Appropriation Bill. The House resisted,
and returned the bill to the Senate with the rider unhorsed. A
committee of conference failed to agree. Mr. McClernand, a Democrat
from Illinois, then moved that the House recede from its disagreement,
which was carried by a few Whig votes, to the dismay of those who were
not in the secret, when Richard W. Thompson (who was thirty years
afterwards Secretary of the Navy) instantly moved that the House do
concur with the Senate, with this amendment, that the existing laws of
those territories be for the present and until Congress should amend
them, retained. This would secure them to freedom, as slavery had long
ago been abolished by Mexico. This amendment passed, and the Senate
had to face the many-pronged dilemma, either to defeat the
Appropriation Bill, or to consent that the territories should be
organized as free communities, or to swallow their protestations that
the territories were in sore need of government and adjourn, leaving
them in the anarchy they had so feelingly depicted. They chose the
last as the least dangerous course, and passed the Appropriation Bill
in its original form.

Mr. Lincoln took little part in the discussions incident to these
proceedings; he was constantly in his seat, however, and voted
generally with his party, and always with those opposed to the
extension of slavery. He used to say that he had voted for the Wilmot
proviso, in its various phases, forty-two times. He left to others,
however, the active work on the floor. His chief preoccupation during
this second session was a scheme which links itself characteristically
with his first protest against the proscriptive spirit of slavery ten
years before in the Illinois Legislature and his immortal act fifteen
years afterwards in consequence of which American slavery ceased to
exist. He had long felt in common with many others that the traffic in
human beings under the very shadow of the Capitol was a national
scandal and reproach. He thought that Congress had the power under the
Constitution to regulate or prohibit slavery in all regions under its
exclusive jurisdiction, and he thought it proper to exercise that
power with due regard to vested rights and the general welfare. He
therefore resolved to test the question whether it were possible to
remove from the seat of government this stain and offense.

[Sidenote: Gidding's diary, January 8, 9, and 11, 1849: published in
the "Cleveland Post," March 31, 1878.]

He proceeded carefully and cautiously about it, after his habit. When
he had drawn up his plan, he took counsel with some of the leading
citizens of Washington and some of the more prominent members of
Congress before bringing it forward. His bill obtained the cordial
approval of Colonel Seaton, the Mayor of Washington, whom Mr. Lincoln
had consulted as the representative of the intelligent slave-holding
citizens of the District, and of Joshua R. Giddings, whom he regarded
as the leading abolitionist in Congress, a fact which sufficiently
proves the practical wisdom with which he had reconciled the demands
of right and expediency. In the meantime, however, Mr. Gott, a member
from New York, had introduced a resolution with a rhetorical preamble
directing the proper committee to bring in a bill prohibiting the
slave-trade in the District. This occasioned great excitement, much
caucusing and threatening on the part of the Southern members, but
nothing else. In the opinion of the leading antislavery men, Mr.
Lincoln's bill, being at the same time more radical and more
reasonable, was far better calculated to effect its purpose. Giddings
says in his diary: "This evening (January 11), our whole mess remained
in the dining-room after tea, and conversed upon the subject of Mr.
Lincoln's bill to abolish slavery. It was approved by all; I believe
it as good a bill as we could get at this time, and am willing to pay
for slaves in order to save them from the Southern market, as I
suppose every man in the District would sell his slaves if he saw that
slavery was to be abolished." Mr. Lincoln therefore moved, on the 16th
of January, as an amendment to Gott's proposition, that the committee
report a bill for the total abolition of slavery in the District of
Columbia, the terms of which he gave in full. They were in substance
the following:

The first two sections prohibit the bringing of slaves into the
district or selling them out of it, provided, however, that officers
of the Government, being citizens of slave-holding States, may bring
their household servants with them for a reasonable time and take them
away again. The third provides a temporary system of apprenticeship
and eventual emancipation for children born of slavemothers after
January 1, 1850. The fourth provides for the manumission of slaves by
the Government on application of the owners, the latter to receive
their full cash value. The fifth provides for the return of fugitive
slaves from Washington and Georgetown. The sixth submits this bill
itself to a popular vote in the District as a condition of its
promulgation as law.

These are the essential points of the measure and the success of Mr.
Lincoln in gaining the adhesion of the abolitionists in the House is
more remarkable than that he should have induced the Washington
Conservatives to approve it. But the usual result followed as soon as
it was formally introduced to the notice of Congress, It was met by
that violent and excited opposition which greeted any measure, however
intrinsically moderate and reasonable, which was founded on the
assumption that slavery was not in itself a good and desirable thing.
The social influences of Washington were brought to bear against a
proposition which the Southerners contended would vulgarize society,
and the genial and liberal mayor was forced to withdraw his approval
as gracefully or as awkwardly as he might. The prospects of the bill
were seen to be hopeless, as the session was to end on the 4th of
March, and no further effort was made to carry it through. Fifteen
years afterwards, in the stress and tempest of a terrible war, it was
Mr. Lincoln's strange fortune to sign a bill sent him by Congress for
the abolition of slavery in Washington; and perhaps the most
remarkable thing about the whole transaction, was that while we were
looking politically upon a new heaven and a new earth,--for the vast
change in our moral and economic condition might justify so audacious
a phrase,--when there was scarcely a man on the continent who had not
greatly shifted his point of view in a dozen years, there was so
little change in Mr. Lincoln. The same hatred of slavery, the same
sympathy with the slave, the same consideration for the slaveholder as
the victim of a system he had inherited, the same sense of divided
responsibility between the South and the North, the same desire to
effect great reforms with as little individual damage and injury, as
little disturbance of social conditions as possible, were equally
evident when the raw pioneer signed the protest with Dan Stone at
Vandalia, when the mature man moved the resolution of 1849 in the
Capitol, and when the President gave the sanction of his bold
signature to the act which swept away the slave-shambles from the city
of Washington.

[Illustration:   JOSHUA R. GIDDINGS.]

His term in Congress ended on the 4th of March, 1849, and he was not a
candidate for reflection. A year before he had contemplated the
possibility of entering the field again. He then wrote to his friend
and partner Herndon: "It is very pleasant for me to learn from yon
that there are some who desire that I should be reelected. I most
heartily thank them for their kind partiality; and I can say, as Mr.
Clay said of the annexation of Texas, that 'personally I would not
object' to a reelection, although I thought at the time [of his
nomination], and still think, it would be quite as well for me to
return to the law at the end of a single term. I made the declaration
that I would not be a candidate again, more from a wish to deal fairly
with others, to keep peace among our friends, and keep the district
from going to the enemy, than for any cause personal to myself, so
that, if it should so happen that nobody else wishes to be elected, I
could not refuse the people the right of sending me again. But to
enter myself as a competitor of others, or to authorize any one so to
enter me, is what my word and honor forbid."

But before his first session ended he gave up all idea of going back,
and heartily concurred in the nomination of Judge Logan to succeed
him. The Sangamon district was the one which the Whigs of Illinois had
apparently the best prospect of carrying, and it was full of able and
ambitious men, who were nominated successively for the only place
which gave them the opportunity of playing a part in the national
theater at Washington. They all served with more or less distinction,
but for eight years no one was ever twice a candidate. A sort of
tradition had grown up, through which a perverted notion of honor and
propriety held it discreditable in a member to ask for reelection.
This state of things was not peculiar to that district, and it
survives with more or less vigor throughout the country to this day,
to the serious detriment of Congress. This consideration, coupled with
what is called the claim of locality, must in time still further
deteriorate the representatives of the States at Washington. To ask in
a nominating convention who is best qualified for service in Congress
is always regarded as an impertinence; but the question "what county
in the district has had the Congressman oftenest" is always considered
in order. For such reasons as these Mr. Lincoln refused to allow his
name to go before the voters again, and the next year he again
refused, writing an emphatic letter for publication, in which he said
that there were many Whigs who could do as much as he "to bring the
district right side up."

Colonel Baker had come back from the wars with all the glitter of
Cerro Gordo about him, but did not find the prospect of political
preferment flattering in Sangamon County, and therefore, with that
versatility and sagacity which was more than once to render him signal
service, he removed to the Galena district, in the extreme north-
western corner of the State, and almost immediately on his arrival
there received a nomination to Congress. He was doubly fortunate in
this move, as the nomination he was unable to take away from Logan
proved useless to the latter, who was defeated after a hot contest.
Baker therefore took the place of Lincoln as the only Whig member from
Illinois, and their names occur frequently together in the
arrangements for the distribution of "Federal patronage" at the close
of the Administration of Polk and the beginning of that of Taylor.

[Sidenote: MS letter from Lincoln to Schooler. Feb. 2, 1869.]

During the period while the President-elect was considering the
appointment of his Cabinet, Lincoln used all the influence he could
bring to bear, which was probably not very much, in favor of Baker for
a place in the Government. The Whig members of the Legislatures of
Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin joined in this effort, which came to
nothing. The recommendations to office which Lincoln made after the
inauguration of General Taylor are probably unique of their kind. Here
is a specimen which is short enough to give entire. It is addressed to
the Secretary of the Interior: "I recommend that William Butler be
appointed Pension Agent for the Illinois agency when the place shall
be vacant. Mr. Hurst, the present incumbent, I believe has performed
the duties very well. He is a decided partisan, and I believe expects
to be removed. Whether he shall be, I submit to the Department. This
office is not confined to my district, but pertains to the whole
State; so that Colonel Baker has an equal right with myself to be
heard concerning it. However, the office is located here (at
Springfield); and I think it is not probable any one would desire to
remove from a distance to take it."

We have examined a large number of his recommendations--for with a
complete change of administration there would naturally be great
activity among the office-seekers--and they are all in precisely the
same vein. He nowhere asks for the removal of an incumbent; he never
claims a place as subject to his disposition; in fact, he makes no
personal claim whatever; he simply advises the Government, in case a
vacancy occurs, who, in his opinion, is the best man to fill it. When
there are two applicants, he indicates which is on the whole the
better man, and sometimes adds that the weight of recommendations is
in favor of the other! In one instance he sends forward the
recommendations of the man whom he does not prefer, with an
indorsement emphasizing the importance of them, and adding: "From
personal knowledge I consider Mr. Bond every way worthy of the office
and qualified to fill it. Holding the individual opinion that the
appointment of a different gentleman would be better, I ask especial
attention and consideration for his claims, and for the opinions
expressed in his favor by those over whom I can claim no superiority."
The candor, the fairness and moderation, together with the respect for
the public service which these recommendations display, are all the
more remarkable when we reflect that there was as yet no sign of a
public conscience upon the subject. The patronage of the Government
was scrambled for, as a matter of course, in the mire into which
Jackson had flung it.

For a few weeks in the spring of 1849 Mr. Lincoln appears in a
character which is entirely out of keeping with all his former and
subsequent career. He became, for the first and only time in his life,
an applicant for an appointment at the hands of the President. His
bearing in this attitude was marked by his usual individuality. In the
opinion of many Illinoisans it was important that the place of
Commissioner of the General Land Office should be given to a citizen
of their State, one thoroughly acquainted with the land law in the
West and the special needs of that region. A letter to Lincoln was
drawn up and signed by some half-dozen of the leading Whigs of the
State asking him to become an applicant for that position.

He promptly answered, saying that if the position could be secured for
a citizen of Illinois only by his accepting it, he would consent; but
he went on to say that he had promised his best efforts to Cyrus
Edwards for that place, and had afterwards stipulated with Colonel
Baker that if J. L. D. Morrison, another Mexican hero, and Edwards
could come to an understanding with each other as to which should
withdraw, he would join in recommending the other; that he could not
take the place, therefore, unless it became clearly impossible for
either of the others to get it. Some weeks later, the impossibility
referred to having become apparent, Mr. Lincoln applied for the place;
but a suitor for office so laggard and so scrupulous as he, stood very
little chance of success in contests like those which periodically
raged at Washington during the first weeks of every new
administration. The place came, indeed, to Illinois, but to neither of
the three we have mentioned. The fortunate applicant was Justin
Butterfield, of Chicago, a man well and favorably known among the
early members of the Illinois bar, [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy
footnote relocated to chapter end.] who, however, devoted less
assiduous attention to the law than to the business of office-seeking,
which he practiced with fair success all his days.

It was in this way that Abraham Lincoln met and escaped one of the
greatest dangers of his life. In after days he recognized the error he
had committed, and congratulated himself upon the happy deliverance he
had obtained through no merit of his own. The loss of at least four
years of the active pursuit of his profession would have been
irreparable, leaving out of view the strong probability that the
singular charm of Washington life to men who have a passion for
politics might have kept him there forever. It has been said that a
residence in Washington leaves no man precisely as it found him. This
is an axiom which may be applied to most cities in a certain sense,
but it is true in a peculiar degree of our capital.

To the men who go there from small rural communities in the South and
the West, the bustle and stir, the intellectual movement, such as it
is, the ordinary subjects of conversation, of such vastly greater
importance than anything they have previously known, the daily, even
hourly combats on the floor of both houses, the intrigue and the
struggle of office-hunting, which engage vast numbers besides the
office-seekers, the superior piquancy and interest of the scandal
which is talked at a Congressional boarding-house over that which
seasons the dull days at village-taverns--all this gives a savor to
life in Washington the memory of which doubles the tedium of the
sequestered vale to which the beaten legislator returns when his brief
hour of glory is over. It is this which brings to the State
Department, after every general election, that crowd of specters, with
their bales of recommendations from pitying colleagues who have been
reelected, whose diminishing prayers run down the whole gamut of
supplication from St. James to St. Paul of Loando, and of whom at the
last it must be said, as Mr. Evarts once said after an unusually heavy
day, "Many called, but few chosen." Of those who do not achieve the
ruinous success of going abroad to consulates that will not pay their
board, or missions where they avoid daily shame only by hiding their
penury and their ignorance away from observation, a great portion
yield to their fate and join that fleet of wrecks which floats forever
on the pavements of Washington.

It is needless to say that Mr. Lincoln received no damage from his
term of service in Washington, but we know of nothing which shows so
strongly the perilous fascination of the place as the fact that a man
of his extraordinary moral and mental qualities could ever have
thought for a moment of accepting a position so insignificant and
incongruous as that which he was more than willing to assume when he
left Congress. He would have filled the place with honor and credit--
but at a monstrous expense. We do not so much refer to his exceptional
career and his great figure in history; these momentous contingencies
could not have suggested themselves to him. But the place he was
reasonably sure of filling in the battle of life should have made a
subordinate office in Washington a thing out of the question. He was
already a lawyer of skill and reputation; an orator upon whom his
party relied to speak for them to the people. An innate love of combat
was in his heart; he loved discussion like a medieval schoolman. The
air was already tremulous with faint bugle-notes that heralded a
conflict of giants on a field of moral significance to which he was
fully alive and awake, where he was certain to lead at least his
hundreds and his thousands. Yet if Justin Butterfield had not been a
more supple, more adroit, and less scrupulous suitor for office than
himself, Abraham Lincoln would have sat for four inestimable years at
a bureau-desk in the Interior Department, and when the hour of action
sounded in Illinois, who would have filled the place which he took as
if he had been born for it? Who could have done the duty which he bore
as lightly as if he had been fashioned for it from the beginning of
time?

His temptation did not end even with Butterfield's success. The
Administration of General Taylor, apparently feeling that some
compensation was due to one so earnestly recommended by the leading
Whigs of the State, offered Mr. Lincoln the governorship of Oregon.
This was a place more suited to him than the other, and his acceptance
of it was urged by some of his most judicious friends [Footnote: Among
others John T. Stuart, who is our authority for this statement.] on
the ground that the new Territory would soon be a State, and that he
could come back as a senator. This view of the matter commended itself
favorably to Lincoln himself, who, however, gave it up on account of
the natural unwillingness of his wife to remove to a country so wild
and so remote.

This was all as it should be. The best place for him was Illinois, and
he went about his work there until his time should come.

[Relocated Footnote: Butterfield had a great reputation for ready wit
and was suspected of deep learning. Some of his jests are still
repeated by old lawyers in Illinois, and show at least a well-marked
humorous intention. On one occasion he appeared before Judge Pope to
ask the discharge of the famous Mormon Prophet, Joe Smith, who was in
custody surrounded by his church dignitaries. Bowing profoundly to the
court and the ladies who thronged the hall, he said: "I appear before
you under solemn and peculiar circumstances. I am to address the Pope,
surrounded by angels, in the presence of the holy apostles, in behalf
of the Prophet of the Lord." We once heard Lincoln say of Butterfield
that he was one of the few Whigs in Illinois who approved the Mexican
war. His reason, frankly given, was that he had lost an office in New
York by opposing the war of 1812. "Henceforth," he said with cynical
vehemence, "I am for war, pestilence, and famine." He was once
defending the Shawneetown Bank and advocating the extension of its
charter; an opposing lawyer contended that this would be creating a
new bank. Butterfield brought a smile from the court and a laugh from
the bar by asking "whether when the Lord lengthened the life of
Hezekiah he made a new man, or whether it was the same old Hezekiah?"]




CHAPTER XVII

THE CIRCUIT LAWYER


In that briefest of all autobiographies, which Mr. Lincoln wrote for
Jesse Fell upon three pages of note-paper, he sketched in these words
the period at which we have arrived: "From 1849 to 1854, both
inclusive, I practiced law more assiduously than ever before ... I was
losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise
aroused me again." His service in Congress had made him more generally
known than formerly, and had increased his practical value as a member
of any law firm. He was offered a partnership on favorable terms by a
lawyer in good practice in Chicago; but he declined it on the ground
that his health would not endure the close confinement necessary in a
city office. He went back to Springfield, and resumed at once his
practice there and in the Eighth Judicial Circuit, where his
occupations and his associates were the most congenial that he could
anywhere find. For five years he devoted himself to his work with more
energy and more success than ever before.

It was at this time that he gave a notable proof of his unusual powers
of mental discipline. His wider knowledge of men and things, acquired
by contact with the great world, had shown him a certain lack in
himself of the power of close and sustained reasoning. To remedy this
defect, he applied himself, after his return from Congress, to such
works upon logic and mathematics as he fancied would be serviceable.
Devoting himself with dogged energy to the task in hand, he soon
learned by heart six books of the propositions of Euclid, and he
retained through life a thorough knowledge of the principles they
contain.

[Sidenote: I.N. Arnold in the "History of Sangamon County."]

The outward form and fashion of every institution change rapidly in
growing communities like our Western States, and the practice of the
law had already assumed a very different degree of dignity and
formality from that which it presented only twenty years before. The
lawyers in hunting-shirts and mocassins had long since passed away; so
had the judges who apologized to the criminals that they sentenced,
and charged them "to let their friends on Bear Creek understand it was
the law and the jury who were responsible." Even the easy familiarity
of a later date would no longer be tolerated. No successor of Judge
Douglas had been known to follow his example by coming down from the
bench, taking a seat in the lap of a friend, throwing an arm around
his neck, and in that intimate attitude discussing, _coram publico_,
whatever interested him, David Davis--afterwards of the Supreme Court
and of the Senate--was for many years the presiding judge of this
circuit, and neither under him nor his predecessor, S. H. Treat, was
any lapse of dignity or of propriety possible. Still there was much
less of form and ceremony insisted upon than is considered proper and
necessary in older communities.

The bar in great measure was composed of the same men who used to
follow the circuit on horseback, over roads impassable to wheels, with
their scanty wardrobes, their law-books, and their documents crowding
each other in their saddle-bags. The improvement of roads which made
carriages a possibility had effected a great change, and the coming of
the railway had completed the sudden development of the manners and
customs of the modernized community. But they could not all at once
take from the bar of the Eighth Circuit its raciness and its
individuality. The men who had lived in log-cabins, who had hunted
their way through untrodden woods and prairies, who had thought as
much about the chances of swimming over swollen fords as of their
cases, who had passed their nights--a half-dozen together--on the
floors of wayside hostelries, could never be precisely the same sort
of practitioners as the smug barristers of a more conventional age and
place. But they were not deficient in ability, in learning, or in that
most valuable faculty which enables really intelligent men to get
their bearings and sustain themselves in every sphere of life to which
they may be called. Some of these very colleagues of Lincoln at the
Springfield bar have sat in Cabinets, have held their own on the floor
of the Senate, have led armies in the field, have governed States, and
all with a quiet self-reliance which was as far as possible removed
from either undue arrogance or undue modesty. [Footnote: A few of the
lawyers who practiced with Lincoln, and have held the highest official
positions, are Douglas, Shields, Logan, Stuart, Baker, Samuel H.
Treat, Bledsoe, O. H. Browning, Hardin, Lyman Trumbull, and Stephen T.
McClernand.]

Among these able and energetic men Lincoln assumed and held the first
rank. This is a statement which ought not to be made without authority,
and rather than give the common repute of the circuit, we prefer to
cite the opinion of those lawyers of Illinois who are entitled to speak
as to this matter, both by the weight of their personal and
professional character and by their eminent official standing among the
jurists of our time. We shall quote rather fully from addresses
delivered by Justice David Davis, of the Supreme Court of the United
States, and by Judge Drummond, the United States District Judge for
Illinois. Judge Davis says:

I enjoyed for over twenty years the personal friendship of Mr.
Lincoln. We were admitted to the bar about the same time and traveled
for many years what is known in Illinois as the Eighth Judicial Court.
In 1848, when I first went on the bench, the circuit embraced fourteen
counties, and Mr. Lincoln went with the Court to every county.
Railroads were not then in use, and our mode of travel was either on
horseback or in buggies.

This simple life he loved, preferring it to the practice of the law in
a city, where, although the remuneration would be greater, the
opportunity would be less for mixing with the great body of the
people, who loved him, and whom he loved. Mr. Lincoln was transferred
from the bar of that circuit to the office of the President of the
United States, having been without official position since he left
Congress in 1849. In all the elements that constitute the great lawyer
he had few equals. He was great both at _nisi prius_ and before an
appellate tribunal. He seized the strong points of a cause, and
presented them with clearness and great compactness. His mind was
logical and direct, and he did not indulge in extraneous discussion.
Generalities and platitudes had no charms for him. An unfailing vein
of humor never deserted him; and he was able to claim the attention of
court and jury, when the cause was the most uninteresting, by the
appropriateness of his anecdotes. [Footnote: C. P. Linder once said to
an Eastern lawyer who expressed the opinion that Lincoln was wasting
his time in telling stories to the jury, "Don't lay that flattering
unction to your soul. Lincoln is like Tansey's horse, he 'breaks to
win.'"--T. W. S. Kidd, in the Lincoln Memorial Album.]

His power of comparison was large, and he rarely failed in a legal
discussion to use that mode of reasoning. The framework of his mental
and moral being was honesty, and a wrong cause was poorly defended by
him. The ability which some eminent lawyers possess, of explaining
away the bad points of a cause by ingenious sophistry, was denied him.
In order to bring into full activity his great powers, it was
necessary that he should be convinced of the right and justice of the
matter which he advocated. When so convinced, whether the cause was
great or small, he was usually successful. He read law-books but
little, except when the cause in hand made it necessary; yet he was
usually self-reliant, depending on his own resources, and rarely
consulting his brother lawyers, either on the management of his case
or on the legal questions involved.

Mr. Lincoln was the fairest and most accommodating of practitioners,
granting all favors which were consistent with his duty to his client,
and rarely availing himself of an unwary oversight of his adversary.

He hated wrong and oppression everywhere, and many a man whose
fraudulent conduct was undergoing review in a court of justice has
writhed under his terrific indignation and rebukes. He was the most
simple and unostentatious of men in his habits, having few wants, and
those easily supplied. To his honor be it said that he never took from
a client, even when his cause was gained, more than he thought the
services were worth and the client could reasonably afford to pay. The
people where he practiced law were not rich, and his charges were
always small. When he was elected President, I question whether there
was a lawyer in the circuit, who had been at the bar so long a time,
whose means were not larger. It did not seem to be one of the purposes
of his life to accumulate a fortune. In fact, outside of his
profession, he had no knowledge of the way to make money, and he never
even attempted it.

Mr. Lincoln was loved by his brethren of the bar, and no body of men
will grieve more at his death, or pay more sincere tributes to his
memory. His presence on the circuit was watched for with interest and
never failed to produce joy or hilarity. When casually absent, the
spirits of both bar and people were depressed. He was not fond of
litigation, and would compromise a lawsuit whenever practicable.

No clearer or more authoritative statement of Lincoln's rank as a
lawyer can ever be made than is found in these brief sentences, in
which the warmth of personal affection is not permitted to disturb the
measured appreciation, the habitual reserve of the eminent jurist.
But, as it may be objected that the friendship which united Davis and
Lincoln rendered the one incapable of a just judgment upon the merits
of the other, we will also give an extract from the address delivered
in Chicago by one of the ablest and most impartial lawyers who have
ever honored the bar and the bench in the West. Judge Drummond says:

With a probity of character known to all, with an intuitive insight
into the human heart, with a clearness of statement which was in
itself an argument, with uncommon power and felicity of illustration,
--often, it is true, of a plain and homely kind,--and with that
sincerity and earnestness of manner which carried conviction, he was
perhaps one of the most successful jury lawyers we ever had in the
State. He always tried a case fairly and honestly. He never
intentionally misrepresented the evidence of a witness nor the
argument of an opponent. He met both squarely, and if he could not
explain the one or answer the other, substantially admitted it. He
never misstated the law, according to his own intelligent view of it.
Such was the transparent candor and integrity of his nature, that he
could not well or strongly argue a side or a cause that he thought
wrong. Of course he felt it his duty to say what could be said, and to
leave the decision to others; but there could be seen in such cases
the inward struggle of his own mind. In trying a case he might
occasionally dwell too long upon, or give too much importance to, an
inconsiderable point; but this was the exception, and generally he
went straight to the citadel of the cause or question, and struck home
there, knowing if that were won the outworks would necessarily fall.
He could hardly be called very learned in his profession, and yet he
rarely tried a cause without fully understanding the law applicable to
it; and I have no hesitation in saying he was one of the ablest
lawyers I have ever known. If he was forcible before a jury, he was
equally so with the Court. He detected with unerring sagacity the weak
points of an opponent's argument, and pressed his own views with
overwhelming strength. His efforts were quite unequal, and it might
happen that he would not, on some occasions, strike one as at all
remarkable. But let him be thoroughly roused, let him feel that he was
right, and some principle was involved in his cause, and he would come
out with an earnestness of conviction, a power of argument, a wealth
of illustration, that I have never seen surpassed.

[Illustration:   DAVID DAVIS.]

[Sidenote: Lamon, p. 317.]

This is nothing less than the portrait of a great lawyer, drawn by
competent hands, with the lifelong habit of conscientious accuracy. If
we chose to continue we could fill this volume with the tributes of
his professional associates, ranging all the way from the commonplaces
of condolence to the most extravagant eulogy. But enough has been
quoted to justify the tradition which Lincoln left behind him at the
bar of Illinois. His weak as well as his strong qualities have been
indicated. He never learned the technicalities, what some would call
the tricks, of the profession. The sleight of plea and demurrer, the
legerdemain by which justice is balked and a weak case is made to gain
an unfair advantage, was too subtle and shifty for his strong and
straightforward intelligence. He met these manoeuvres sufficiently
well, when practiced by others, but he never could get in the way of
handling them for himself. On the wrong side he was always weak. He
knew this himself, and avoided such cases when he could consistently
with the rules of his profession. He would often persuade a fair-
minded litigant of the injustice of his case and induce him to give it
up. His partner, Mr. Herndon, relates a speech in point which Lincoln
once made to a man who offered him an objectionable case: "Yes, there
is no reasonable doubt but that I can gain your case for you. I can
set a whole neighborhood at loggerheads; I can distress a widowed
mother and her six fatherless children, and thereby get for you six
hundred dollars, which rightfully belongs, it appears to me, as much
to them as it does to you. I shall not take your case, but I will give
a little advice for nothing. You seem a sprightly, energetic man. I
would advise you to try your hand at making six hundred dollars in
some other way." Sometimes, after he had entered upon a criminal case,
the conviction that his client was guilty would affect him with a sort
of panic. On one occasion he turned suddenly to his associate and
said: "Swett, the man is guilty; you defend him, I can't," and so gave
up his share of a large fee. The same thing happened at another time
when he was engaged with Judge S. C. Parks in defending a man accused
of larceny. He said: "If you can say anything for the man, do it, I
can't; if I attempt it, the jury will see I think he is guilty, and
convict him." Once he was prosecuting a civil suit, in the course of
which evidence was introduced showing that his client was attempting a
fraud. Lincoln rose and went to his hotel in deep disgust. The judge
sent for him; he refused to come. "Tell the judge," he said, "my hands
are dirty; I came over to wash them." We are aware that these stories
detract something from the character of the lawyer; but this
inflexible, inconvenient, and fastidious morality was to be of vast
service afterwards to his country and the world.

The Nemesis which waits upon men of extraordinary wit or humor has not
neglected Mr. Lincoln, and the young lawyers of Illinois, who never
knew him, have an endless store of jokes and pleasantries in his name;
some of them as old as Howleglass or Rabelais. [Footnote: As a
specimen of these stories we give the following, well vouched for, as
apocrypha generally are: Lincoln met one day on the courthouse steps a
young lawyer who had lost a case--his only one--and looked very
disconsolate. "What has become of your case?" Lincoln asked. "Gone to
h---," was the gloomy response. "Well, don't give it up," Lincoln
rejoined cheerfully; "you can try it again there"--a quip which has
been attributed to many wits in many ages, and will doubtless make the
reputation of jesters yet to be.] But the fact is that with all his
stories and jests, his frank companionable humor, his gift of easy
accessibility and welcome, he was, even while he traveled the Eighth
Circuit, a man of grave and serious temper and of an unusual innate
dignity and reserve. He had few or no special intimates, and there was
a line beyond which no one ever thought of passing. Besides, he was
too strong a man in the court-room to be regarded with anything but
respect in a community in which legal ability was the only especial
mark of distinction.

Few of his forensic speeches have been preserved, but his
contemporaries all agree as to their singular ability and power. He
seemed absolutely at home in a court-room; his great stature did not
encumber him there; it seemed like a natural symbol of superiority.
His bearing and gesticulation had no awkwardness about them; they were
simply striking and original. He assumed at the start a frank and
friendly relation with the jury which was extremely effective. He
usually began, as the phrase ran, by "giving away his case"; by
allowing to the opposite side every possible advantage that they could
honestly and justly claim. Then he would present his own side of the
case, with a clearness, a candor, an adroitness of statement which at
once flattered and convinced the jury, and made even the bystanders
his partisans. Sometimes he disturbed the court with laughter by his
humorous or apt illustrations; sometimes he excited the audience by
that florid and exuberant rhetoric which he knew well enough how and
when to indulge in; but his more usual and more successful manner was
to rely upon a clear, strong, lucid statement, keeping details in
proper subordination and bringing forward, in a way which fastened the
attention of court and jury alike, the essential point on which he
claimed a decision. "Indeed," says one of his colleagues, "his
statement often rendered argument unnecessary, and often the court
would stop him and say, 'If that is the case, we will hear the other
side.'"

[Sidenote: Raymond "Life of Lincoln." p. 32.]

[Sidenote: I.N. Arnold, speech before the State Bar Association, Jan.
7, 1881.]

Whatever doubts might be entertained as to whether he was the ablest
lawyer on the circuit, there was never any dissent from the opinion
that he was the one most cordially and universally liked. If he did
not himself enjoy his full share of the happiness of life, he
certainly diffused more of it among his fellows than is in the power
of most men. His arrival was a little festival in the county-seats
where his pursuits led him to pass so much of his time. Several eye-
witnesses have described these scenes in terms which would seem
exaggerated if they were not so fully confirmed. The bench and bar
would gather at the tavern where he was expected, to give him a
cordial welcome; says one writer, "He brought light with him." This is
not hard to understand. Whatever his cares, he never inflicted them
upon others. He talked singularly well, but never about himself. He
was full of wit which never wounded, of humor which mellowed the
harshness of that new and raw life of the prairies. He never asked for
help, but was always ready to give it. He received everybody's
confidence, and rarely gave his own in return. He took no mean
advantages in court or in conversation, and, satisfied with the
respect and kindliness which he everywhere met, he sought no quarrels
and seldom had to decline them. He did not accumulate wealth; as Judge
Davis said, "He seemed never to care for it." He had a good income
from his profession, though the fees he received would bring a smile
to the well-paid lips of the great attorneys of to-day. The largest
fee he ever got was one of five thousand dollars from the Illinois
Central Railway, and he had to bring suit to compel them to pay it. He
spent what he received in the education of his children, in the care
of his family, and in a plain and generous way of living. One who
often visited him writes, referring to "the old-fashioned hospitality
of Springfield," "Among others I recall with a sad pleasure, the
dinners and evening parties given by Mrs. Lincoln. In her modest and
simple home, where everything was so orderly and refined, there was
always on the part of both host and hostess a cordial and hearty
Western welcome which put every guest perfectly at ease. Their table
was famed for the excellence of many rare Kentucky dishes, and for the
venison, wild turkeys, and other game, then so abundant. Yet it was
her genial manner and ever-kind welcome, and Mr. Lincoln's wit and
humor, anecdote and unrivaled conversation, which formed the chief
attraction."

Here we leave him for a while, in this peaceful and laborious period
of his life; engaged in useful and congenial toil; surrounded by the
love and respect of the entire community; in the fullness of his years
and strength; the struggles of his youth, which were so easy to his
active brain and his mighty muscles, all behind him, and the titanic
labors of his manhood yet to come. We shall now try to sketch the
beginnings of that tremendous controversy which he was in a few years
to take up, to guide and direct to its wonderful and tragical close.




CHAPTER XVIII

THE BALANCE OF POWER


We shall see in the course of the present work how the life of Abraham
Lincoln divides itself into three principal periods, with
corresponding stages of intellectual development: the first, of about
forty years, ending with his term in Congress; the second, of about
ten years, concluding with his final campaign of political speech-
making in New York and in New England, shortly before the Presidential
nominations of 1860; and the last, of about five years, terminating at
his death. We have thus far traced his career through the first period
of forty years. In the several stages of frontier experience through
which he had passed, and which in the main but repeated the trials and
vicissitudes of thousands of other boys and youths in the West, only
so much individuality had been developed in him as brought him into
the leading class of his contemporaries. He had risen from laborer to
student, from clerk to lawyer, from politician to legislator. That he
had lifted himself by healthy ambition and unaided industry out of the
station of a farm-hand, whose routine life begins and ends in a
backwoods log-cabin, to that representative character and authority
which seated him in the national Capitol to aid in framing laws for
his country, was already an achievement that may well be held to crown
honorably a career of forty years.

Such achievement and such distinction, however, were not so uncommon
as to appear phenomenal. Hundreds of other boys born in log-cabins had
won similar elevation in the manly, practical school of Western public
life. Even in ordinary times there still remained within the reach of
average intellects several higher grades of public service. It is
quite probable that the talents of Lincoln would have made him
Governor of Illinois or given him a place in the United States Senate.
But the story of his life would not have commanded, as it now does,
the unflagging attention of the world, had there not fallen upon his
generation the unusual conditions and opportunities brought about by a
series of remarkable convulsions in national politics. If we would
correctly understand how Lincoln became, first a conspicuous actor,
and then a chosen leader, in a great strife of national parties for
supremacy and power, we must briefly study the origin and development
of the great slavery controversy in American legislation which found
its highest activity and decisive culmination in the single decade
from 1850 to 1860. But we should greatly err if we attributed the new
events in Lincoln's career to the caprice of fortune. The conditions
and opportunities of which we speak were broadly national, and open to
all without restriction of rank or locality. Many of his
contemporaries had seemingly overshadowing advantages, by prominence
and training, to seize and appropriate them to their own advancement.
It is precisely this careful study of the times which shows us by what
inevitable process of selection honors and labors of which he did not
dream fell upon him; how, indeed, it was not the individual who gained
the prize, but the paramount duty which claimed the man.

It is now universally understood, if not conceded, that the Rebellion
of 1861 was begun for the sole purpose of defending and preserving to
the seceding States the institution of African slavery and making them
the nucleus of a great slave empire, which in their ambitious dreams
they hoped would include Mexico, Central America, and the West India
Islands, and perhaps even the tropical States of South America. Both a
real and a pretended fear that slavery was in danger lay at the bottom
of this design. The real fear arose from the palpable fact, impossible
to conceal, that the slave system was a reactionary obstacle in the
pathway of modern civilization, and its political, material,
philosophical, and religious development. The pretended danger was the
permanent loss of political power by the slave States of the Union, as
shown in the election of Lincoln to the presidency, which they averred
would necessarily throw all the forces of the national life against
the "peculiar institution," and crush it under forms of law. It was by
magnifying this danger from remote into immediate consequence that
they excited the population of the cotton States to resistance and
rebellion. Seizing this opportunity, it was their present purpose to
establish a slave Confederacy, consisting of the cotton States, which
should in due time draw to itself, by an irresistible gravitation of
sympathy and interest, first, the border slave States, and, in the
further progress of events, the tropical countries towards the
equator.

The popular agitation, or war of words between the North and the South
on the subject of slavery, which led to the armed insurrection was
threefold: First, the economic efforts to prevent the destruction of
the monetary value of four millions of human beings held in bondage,
who were bought and sold as chattels, and whose aggregate valuation,
under circumstances existing at the outbreak of the civil war, was
variously computed at $400,000,000 to $1,600,000,000; [Footnote: The
Convention of Mississippi, which passed the secession ordinance, in
its Declaration of Causes placed the total value of their property in
slaves at "four billions of money," This was at the rate of a thousand
dollars for each slave, an average absurdly excessive, and showing
their exaggerated estimate of the monetary value of the institution of
slavery.] second, a moral debate as to the abstract righteousness or
iniquity of the system; and, third, a political struggle for the
balance of power in government and public policy, by which the
security and perpetuity of the institution might be guaranteed.

This sectional controversy over the institution of slavery in its
threefold aspect had begun with the very birth of the nation, had
continued with its growth, and become intensified with its strength.
The year before the _Mayflower_ brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth Bock,
a Dutch ship landed a cargo of African slaves at Jamestown, in
Virginia. During the long colonial period the English Government
fostered and forced the importation of slaves to America equally with
English goods. In the original draft of the Declaration of
Independence, Thomas Jefferson invoked the reprobation of mankind upon
the British King for his share in this inhuman traffic. On reflection,
however, this was discovered to be but another case of Satan rebuking
sin. The blood money which reddened the hands of English royalty
stained equally those of many an American rebel. The public opinion of
the colonies was already too much debauched to sit in unanimous moral
judgment on this crime against humanity. The objections of South
Carolina and Georgia sufficed to cause the erasure and suppression of
the obnoxious paragraph. Nor were the Northern States guiltless:
Newport was yet a great slave-mart, and the commerce of New England
drew more advantage from the traffic than did the agriculture of the
South.

[Sidenote: J. C. Hurd, "Law of Freedom and Bondage," Vol. I. pp. 228-
311.]

All the elements of the later controversy already existed. Slave codes
and fugitive-slave laws, abolition societies and emancipation bills,
are older than our Constitution; and negro troops fought in the
Revolutionary war for American independence. Liberal men could be
found in South Carolina who hated slavery, and narrow men in
Massachusetts who defended it. But these individual instances of
prejudice or liberality were submerged and lost in the current of
popular opinion springing from prevailing interests in the respective
localities, and institutions molded principles, until in turn
principles should become strong enough to reform institutions. In
short, slavery was one of the many "relics of barbarism"--like the
divine right of kings, religious persecution, torture of the accused,
imprisonment and enslavement for debt, witch-burning, and kindred
"institutions"--which were transmitted to that generation from former
ages as so many burdens of humanity, for help in the removal of which
the new nation was in the providence of God perhaps called into
existence. The whole matter in its broader aspects is part of that
persistent struggle of the centuries between despotism and individual
freedom; between arbitrary wrong, consecrated by tradition and law,
and the unfolding recognition of private rights; between the thraldom
of public opinion and liberty of conscience; between the greed of gain
and the Golden Rule of Christ. Whoever, therefore, chooses to trace
the remote origin of the American Rebellion will find the germ of the
Union armies of 1861-5 in the cabin of the _Mayflower_, and the
inception of the Secession forces between the decks of that Dutch
slaver which planted the fruits of her avarice and piracy in the James
River colonies in 1619.

So elaborate and searching a study, however, is not necessary to the
purposes of this work. A very brief mention of the principal landmarks
of the long contest will serve to show the historical relation, and
explain the phraseology, of its final issues.

The first of these great landmarks was the Ordinance of 1787. All the
States tolerated slavery and permitted the slave-trade during the
Revolution. But in most of them the morality of the system was
strongly drawn in question, especially by the abolition societies,
which embraced many of the most prominent patriots. A public opinion,
not indeed unanimous, but largely in the majority, demanded that the
"necessary evil" should cease. When the Continental Congress came to
the practical work of providing a government for the "Western lands,"
which the financial pressure and the absolute need of union compelled
New York and Virginia to cede to the general Government, Thomas
Jefferson proposed, among other features in his plan and draft of
1784, to add a clause prohibiting slavery in all the North-west
territory after the year 1800. A North Carolina member moved to strike
out this clause. The form of the question put by the chairman was,
"Shall the clause stand?" Sixteen members voted aye and seven members
voted no; but under the clumsy legislative machinery of the
Confederation these seven noes carried the question, since a majority
of States had failed to vote in the affirmative.

Three years later, July 13, 1787, this first ordinance was repealed by
a second, establishing our more modern form of territorial government.
It is justly famed for many of its provisions; but its chief value is
conceded to have been its sixth article, ordaining the immediate and
perpetual prohibition of slavery. Upon this all the States present in
Congress--three Northern and five Southern--voted in the affirmative;
five States were absent, four Northern and one Southern. This piece of
legislation is remarkable in that it was an entirely new bill,
substituted for a former and altogether different scheme containing no
prohibition whatever, and that it was passed through all the forms and
stages of enactment in the short space of four days. History sheds
little light on the official transaction, but contemporary evidence
points to the influence of a powerful lobby.

Several plausible reasons are assigned why the three slave States of
Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina voted for this prohibition.
First, the West was competing with the Territory of Maine for
settlers; second, the whole scheme was in the interest of the "Ohio
Company," a newly formed Massachusetts emigrant aid society which
immediately made a large purchase of lands; third, the unsettled
regions south of the Ohio River had not yet been ceded to the general
Government, and were therefore open to slavery from the contiguous
Southern States; fourth, little was known of the extent or character
of the great West; and, therefore, fifth, the Ohio River was doubtless
thought to be a fair and equitable dividing line. The ordinance itself
provided for the formation of not less than three nor more than five
States, and under its shielding provisions Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,
Michigan, and Wisconsin were added to the Union with free
constitutions.

[Sidenote: "Ellior's Debates," Vol. V., p. 395.]

[Sidenote: Ibid., p. 392.]

It does not appear that sectional motives operated for or against the
foregoing enactment; they were probably held in abeyance by other
considerations. But it must not be inferred therefrom that the slavery
question was absent or dormant in the country. There was already a
North and a South. At that very time the constitutional convention was
in session in Philadelphia. George Washington and his fellow delegates
were grappling with the novel problems of government which the happy
issue of the Revolution and the lamentable failure of the
Confederation forced upon the country. One of these problems was the
presence of over half a million of slaves, nearly all in five Southern
States. Should they be taxed? Should they be represented? Should the
power to regulate commerce be allowed to control or terminate their
importation? Vital questions these, which went not merely to the
incidents but the fundamental powers of government. The slavery
question seemed for months an element of irreconcilable discord in the
convention. The slave-trade not only, but the domestic institution
itself, was characterized in language which Southern politicians of
later times would have denounced as "fanatical" and "incendiary."
Pinckney wished the slaves to be represented equally with the whites,
since they were the Southern peasantry. Gouverneur Morris declared
that as they were only property they ought not to be represented at
all. Both the present and the future balance of power in national
legislation, as resulting from slaves already in, and hereafter to be
imported into, old and new States, were debated under various
possibilities and probabilities.

Out of these divergent views grew the compromises of the Constitution.
1. The slaves were to be included in the enumeration for
representation, _five_ blacks to be counted as _three_ whites.
2. Congress should have the right to prohibit the slave-trade, but not
till the lapse of twenty years. 3. Fugitive slaves should be delivered
to their owners. Each State, large or small, was allowed two senators;
and the apportionment of representatives gave to the North thirty-five
members and fourteen senators, to the South thirty members and twelve
senators. But since the North was not yet free from slavery, but only
in process of becoming so, and as Virginia was the leading State of the
Union, the real balance of power remained in the hands of the South.

The newly formed Constitution went into successful operation. Under
legal provisions already made and the strong current of abolition
sentiment then existing, all the Eastern and Middle States down to
Delaware became free. This gain, however, was perhaps more than
numerically counterbalanced by the active importation of captured
Africans, especially into South Carolina and Georgia, up to the time
the traffic ceased by law in 1808. Jefferson had meanwhile purchased
of France the immense country west of the Mississippi known as the
Louisiana Territory. The free navigation of that great river was
assured, and the importance of the West immeasurably increased. The
old French colonies at New Orleans and Kaskaskia were already strong
outposts of civilization and the nuclei of spreading settlements.
Attracted by the superior fertility of the soil, by the limitless
opportunities for speculation, by the enticing spirit of adventure,
and pushed by the restless energy inherent in the Anglo-Saxon
character, the older States now began to pour a rising stream of
emigration into the West and the South-west.

In this race the free States, by reason of their greater population,
wealth, and commercial enterprise, would have outstripped the South
but for the introduction of a new and powerful influence which
operated exclusively in favor of the latter. This was the discovery of
the peculiar adaptation of the soil and climate of portions of the
Southern States, combined with cheap slave-labor, to the cultivation
of cotton. Half a century of experiment and invention in England had
brought about the concurrent improvement of machinery for spinning and
weaving, and of the high-pressure engine to furnish motive power. The
Revolutionary war was scarcely ended when there came from the mother-
country a demand for the raw fiber, which promised to be almost
without limit. A few trials sufficed to show Southern planters that
with their soil and their slaves they could supply this demand with a
quality of cotton which would defy competition, and at a profit to
themselves far exceeding that of any other product of agriculture. But
an insurmountable obstacle yet seemed to interpose itself between them
and their golden harvest. The tedious work of cleaning the fiber from
the seed apparently made impossible its cheap preparation for export
in large quantities. A negro woman working the whole day could clean
only a single pound.

[Illustration:   JAMES K. POLK.]

[Sidenote: Memoir of Eli Whitney, "American Journal of Science,"
1832.]

It so happened that at this juncture, November, 1792, an ingenious
Yankee student from Massachusetts was boarding in the house of friends
in Savannah, Georgia, occupying his leisure in reading law. A party of
Georgia gentlemen from the interior, making a visit to this family,
fell into conversation on the prospects and difficulties of cotton-
culture and the imperative need of a rapidly working cleaning-machine.
Their hostess, an intelligent and quick-witted woman, at once
suggested an expedient. "Gentlemen," said Mrs. Greene, "apply to my
young friend, Mr. Eli Whitney; he can make anything." The Yankee
student was sought, introduced, and had the mechanical problem laid
before him. He modestly disclaimed his hostess's extravagant praises,
and told his visitors that he had never seen either cotton or cotton-
seed in his life. Nevertheless, he went to work with such earnestness
and success, that in a few months Mrs. Greene had the satisfaction of
being able to invite a gathering of gentlemen from different parts of
the State to behold with their own eyes the working of the newly
invented cotton-gin, with which a negro man turning a crank could
clean fifty pounds of cotton per day.

[Sidenote: 1808.]

[Sidenote: Compendium, Eighth Census, p. 13.]

This solution of the last problem in cheap cotton-culture made it at
once the leading crop of the South. That favored region quickly drove
all competitors out of the market; and the rise of English imports of
raw cotton, from thirty million pounds, in 1790 to over one thousand
million pounds in 1860, shows the development and increase of this
special industry, with all its related interests. [Footnote: The
Virginia price of a male "field hand" in 1790 was $250; in 1860 his
value in the domestic market had risen to $1600.--SHERRARD CLEMENS,
speech in H. E. Appendix "Congressional Globe," 1860-1, pp. 104-5.] It
was not till fifteen years after the invention of the cotton-gin that
the African slave-trade ceased by limitation of law. "Within that
period many thousands of negro captives had been added to the
population of the South by direct importation, and nearly thirty
thousand slave inhabitants added by the acquisition of Louisiana,
hastening the formation of new slave States south of the Ohio River in
due proportion." [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (1) relocated to
chapter end.]

It is a curious historical fact, that under the very remarkable
material growth of the United States which now took place, the
political influence remained so evenly balanced between the North and
the South for more than a generation. Other grave issues indeed
absorbed the public attention, but the abeyance of the slavery
question is due rather to the fact that no considerable advantage as
yet fell to either side. Eight new States were organized, four north
and four south of the Ohio River, and admitted in nearly alternate
order: Vermont in 1791, _free_; Kentucky in 1792, _slave_; Tennessee
in 1796, _slave_; Ohio in 1802, _free_; Louisiana in 1812, _slave_;
Indiana in 1816, _free_; Mississippi in 1817, _slave_; Illinois in
1818, _free_. Alabama was already authorized to be admitted with
slavery, and this would make the number of free and slave States equal,
giving eleven States to the North and eleven to the South.

The Territory of Missouri, containing the old French colonies at and
near St. Louis, had attained a population of 60,000, and was eager to
be admitted as a State. She had made application in 1817, and now in
1819 it was proposed to authorize her to form a constitution. Arkansas
was also being nursed as an applicant, and the prospective loss by the
North and gain by the South of the balance of power caused the slavery
question suddenly to flare up as a national issue. There were hot
debates in Congress, emphatic resolutions by State legislatures, deep
agitation among the whole people, and open threats by the South to
dissolve the Union. Extreme Northern men insisted upon a restriction
of slavery to be applied to both Missouri and Arkansas; radical
Southern members contended that Congress had no power to impose any
conditions on new States. The North had control of the House, the
South of the Senate. A middle party thereupon sprang up, proposing to
divide the Louisiana purchase between freedom and slavery by the line
of 36 degrees 30', and authorizing the admission of Missouri with
slavery out of the northern half. Fastening this proposition upon the
bill to admit Maine as a free State, the measure was, after a struggle,
carried through Congress (in a separate act approved March 6, 1820),
and became the famous Missouri Compromise. Maine and Missouri were
both admitted. Each section thereby not only gained two votes in the
Senate, but also asserted its right to spread its peculiar polity
without question or hindrance within the prescribed limits; and the
motto, "No extension of slavery," was postponed forty years, to the
Republican campaign of 1860.

From this time forward, the maintenance of this balance of power,--the
numerical equality of the slave States with the free,--though not
announced in platforms as a party doctrine, was nevertheless steadily
followed as a policy by the representatives of the South. In pursuance
of this system, Michigan and Arkansas, the former a _free_ and
the latter a _slave_ State, were, on the same day, June 15, 1836,
authorized to be admitted. These tactics were again repeated in the
year 1845, when, on the 3d of March, Iowa, a _free_ State, and
Florida, a _slave_ State, were authorized to be admitted by one
act of Congress, its approval being the last official act of President
Tyler. This tacit compromise, however, was accompanied by another very
important victory of the same policy. The Southern politicians saw
clearly enough that with the admission of Florida the slave territory
was exhausted, while an immense untouched portion of the Louisiana
purchase still stretched away to the north-west towards the Pacific
above the Missouri Compromise line, which consecrated it to freedom.
The North, therefore, still had an imperial area from which to
organize future free States, while the South had not a foot more
territory from which to create slave States.

Sagaciously anticipating this contingency, the Southern States had
been largely instrumental in setting up the independent State of
Texas, and were now urgent in their demand for her annexation to the
Union. Two days before the signing of the Iowa and Florida bill,
Congress passed, and President Tyler signed, a joint resolution,
authorizing the acquisition, annexation, and admission of Texas. But
even this was not all. The joint resolution contained a guarantee that
"new States, of convenient size, not exceeding four in number, in
addition to the said State of Texas," and to be formed out of her
territory, should hereafter be entitled to admission--the Missouri
Compromise line to govern the slavery question in them. The State of
Texas was, by a later resolution, formally admitted to the Union,
December 29, 1845. At this date, therefore, the slave States gained an
actual majority of one, there being fourteen free States and fifteen
slave States, with at least equal territorial prospects through future
annexation.

If the North was alarmed at being thus placed in a minority, there was
ample reason for still further disquietude. The annexation of Texas
had provoked the Mexican war, and President Polk, in anticipation of
further important acquisition of territory to the South and West,
asked of Congress an appropriation of two millions to be used in
negotiations to that end. An attempt to impose a condition to these
negotiations that slavery should never exist in any territory to be
thus acquired was the famous Wilmot Proviso. This particular measure
failed, but the war ended, and New Mexico and California were added to
the Union as unorganized Territories. Meanwhile the admission of
Wisconsin in 1848 had once more restored the equilibrium between the
free and the slave States, there being now fifteen of each.

It must not be supposed that the important political measures and
results thus far summarized were accomplished by quiet and harmonious
legislation. Rising steadily after 1820, the controversy over slavery
became deep and bitter, both in Congress and the country. Involving
not merely a policy of government, but a question of abstract morals,
statesmen, philanthropists, divines, the press, societies, churches,
and legislative bodies joined in the discussion. Slavery was assailed
and defended in behalf of the welfare of the state, and in the name of
religion. In Congress especially it had now been a subject of angry
contention for a whole generation. It obtruded itself into all manner
of questions, and clung obstinately to numberless resolutions and
bills. Time and again it had brought members into excited discussion,
and to the very verge of personal conflict in the legislative halls.
It had occasioned numerous threats to dissolve the Union, and in one
or more instances caused members actually to retire from the House of
Representatives. It had given rise to resolutions of censure, to
resignations, and had been the occasion of some of the greatest
legislative debates of the nation. It had virtually created and
annexed the largest State in the Union. In several States it had
instigated abuse, intolerance, persecutions, trials, mobs, murders,
destruction of property, imprisonment of freemen, retaliatory
legislation, and one well-defined and formidable attempt at
revolution. It originated party factions, political schools, and
constitutional doctrines, and made and marred the fame of great
statesmen.

New Mexico, when acquired, contained one of the oldest towns on the
continent, and a considerable population of Spanish origin.
California, almost simultaneously with her acquisition, was peopled in
the course of a few months by the world-renowned gold discoveries.
Very unexpectedly, therefore, to politicians of all grades and
opinions, the slavery question was once more before the nation in the
year 1850, over the proposition to admit both to the Union as States.
As the result of the long conflict of opinion hitherto maintained, the
beliefs and desires of the contending sections had by this time become
formulated in distinct political doctrines. The North contended that
Congress might and should prohibit slavery in all the territories of
the Union, as had been done in the Northern half by the Ordinance of
1787 and by the Missouri Compromise. The South declared that any such
exclusion would not only be unjust and impolitic, but absolutely
unconstitutional, because property in slaves might enter and must be
protected in the territories in common with all other property. To the
theoretical dispute was added a practical contest. By the existing
Mexican laws slavery was already prohibited in New Mexico, and
California promptly formed a free State constitution. Under these
circumstances the North sought to organize the former as a Territory,
and admit the latter as a State, while the South resisted and
endeavored to extend the Missouri Compromise line, which would place
New Mexico and the southern half of California under the tutelage and
influence of slavery.

These were the principal points of difference which caused the great
slavery agitation of 1850. The whole country was convulsed in
discussion; and again more open threats and more ominous movements
towards disunion came from the South. The most popular statesman of
that day, Henry Clay, of Kentucky, a slaveholder opposed to the
extension of slavery, now, however, assumed the leadership of a party
of compromise, and the quarrel was adjusted and quieted by a combined
series of Congressional acts. 1. California was admitted as a free
State. 2. The Territories of New Mexico and Utah were organized,
leaving the Mexican prohibition of slavery in force. 3. The domestic
slave-trade in the District of Columbia was abolished. 4. A more
stringent fugitive-slave law was passed. 5. For the adjustment of her
State boundaries Texas received ten millions of dollars.

[Sidenote: Greeley, "American Conflict," Vol. I., p. 208.]

These were the famous compromise measures of 1850. It has been gravely
asserted that this indemnity of ten millions, suddenly trebling the
value of the Texas debt, and thereby affording an unprecedented
opportunity for speculation in the bonds of that State, was "the
propelling force whereby these acts were pushed through Congress in
defiance of the original convictions of a majority of its members."
But it must also be admitted that the popular desire for tranquillity,
concord, and union in all sections never exerted so much influence
upon Congress as then. This compromise was not at first heartily
accepted by the people; Southern opinion being offended by the
abandonment of the "property" doctrine, and Northern sentiment
irritated by certain harsh features of the fugitive-slave law. But the
rising Union feeling quickly swept away all ebullitions of discontent,
and during two or three years people and politicians fondly dreamed
they had, in current phraseology, reached a "finality" [Transcriber's
Note: Lengthy footnote (2) relocated to chapter end.] on this vexed
quarrel. The nation settled itself for a period of quiet to repair the
waste and utilize the conquests of the Mexican war. It became absorbed
in the expansion of its commerce, the development of its manufactures,
and the growth of its emigration, all quickened by the riches of its
marvelous gold-fields; until unexpectedly and suddenly it found itself
plunged once again into political controversies more distracting and
more ominous than the worst it had yet experienced.

[Relocated Footnote (1): No word of the authors could add to the force
and eloquence of the following from a recent letter of the son of the
inventor of the cotton-gin (to the Art Superintendent of "The
Century"), stating the claims of his father's memory to the gratitude
of the South, hitherto apparently unfelt, and certainly unrecognized:

"NEW HAVEN, CONN.," Dec. 4, 1886. "... I send you a photograph taken
from a portrait of my father, painted about the year 1821, by King, of
Washington, when my father, the inventor of the cotton-gin, was fifty-
five years old. He died January 25, 1825. The cotton-gin was invented
in 1793; and though it has been in use for nearly one hundred years,
it is virtually unimproved.... Hence the great merit of the South,
financially and commercially. It has made England rich, and changed
the commerce of the world. Lord Macaulay said of Eli Whitney: 'What
Peter the Great did to make Russia dominant, Eli Whitney's invention
of the cotton-gin has more than equaled in its relation to the power
and progress of the United States.' He has been the greatest
benefactor of the South, but it never has, to my knowledge,
acknowledged his benefaction in a public manner to the extent it
deserves--no monument has been erected to his memory, no town or city
named after him, though the force of his genius has original
invention. It has made caused many towns and cities to rise and
flourish in the South....

"Yours very truly, E. W. WHITNEY."]

[Relocated Footnote (2): Grave doubts, however, found occasional
expression, and none perhaps more forcibly than in the following
newspaper epigram--describing "Finality":

   To kill twice dead a rattlesnake,
   And off his scaly skin to take,
   And through his head to drive a stake,
   And every bone within him break,
   And of his flesh mincemeat to make,
   To burn, to sear, to boil, and bake,
   Then in a heap the whole to rake,
   And over it the besom shake,
   And sink it fathoms in the lake--
   Whence after all, quite wide awake,
   Comes back that very same old snake!]




CHAPTER XIX

THE REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE


The long contest in Congress over the compromise measures of 1850, and
the reluctance of a minority, alike in the North and the South, to
accept them, had in reality seriously demoralized both the great
political parties of the country. The Democrats especially, defeated
by the fresh military laurels of General Taylor in 1848, were much
exercised to discover their most available candidate as the
presidential election of 1852 approached. The leading names, Cass,
Buchanan, and Marcy, having been long before the public, were becoming
a little stale. In this contingency, a considerable following grouped
itself about an entirely new man, Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois.
Emigrating from Vermont to the West, Douglas had run a career
remarkable for political success. Only in his thirty-ninth year, he
had served as member of the legislature, as State's Attorney, as
Secretary of State, and as judge of the Supreme Court in Illinois, and
had since been three times elected to Congress and once to the Senate
of the United States. Nor did he owe his political fortunes entirely
to accident. Among his many qualities of leadership were strong
physical endurance, untiring industry, a persistent boldness, a ready
facility in public speaking, unfailing political shrewdness, an
unusual power in running debate, with liberal instincts and
progressive purposes. It was therefore not surprising that he should
attract the admiration and support of the young, the ardent, and
especially the restless and ambitious members of his party. His career
in Congress was sufficiently conspicuous. As Chairman of the Committee
on Territories in the Senate, he had borne a prominent part in the
enactment of the compromise measures of 1850, and had just met and
overcome a threatened party schism in his own State, which that
legislation had there produced.

In their eagerness to push his claims to the presidency, the partisans
of Douglas committed a great error. Rightly appreciating the growing
power of the press, they obtained control of the "Democratic Review,"
a monthly magazine then prominent as a party organ, and published in
it a series of articles attacking the rival Democratic candidates in
very flashy rhetoric. These were stigmatized as "old fogies," who must
give ground to a nominee of "Young America." They were reminded that
the party expects a "new man." "Age is to be honored, but senility is
pitiable"; "statesmen of a previous generation must get out of the
way"; the Democratic party was owned by a set of "old clothes-horses";
"they couldn't pay their political promises in four Democratic
administrations"; and the names of Cass and Marcy, Buchanan and
Butler, were freely mixed in with such epithets as "pretenders,"
"hucksters," "intruders," and "vile charlatans."

Such characterization of such men soon created a flagrant scandal in
the Democratic party, which was duly aired both in the newspapers and
in Congress. It definitely fixed the phrases "old fogy" and "Young
America" in our slang literature. The personal friends of Douglas
hastened to explain and assert his innocence of any complicity with
this political raid, but they were not more than half believed; and
the war of factions, begun in January, raged with increasing
bitterness till the Democratic National Convention met at Baltimore in
June, and undoubtedly exerted a decisive influence over the
deliberations of that body.

The only serious competitors for the nomination were the "old fogies"
Cass, Marcy, and Buchanan on the one hand, and Douglas, the pet of
"Young America," on the other. It soon became evident that opinion was
so divided among these four that a nomination could only be reached
through long and tedious ballotings. Beginning with some 20 votes,
Douglas steadily gained adherents till on the 30th ballot he received
92. From this point, however, his strength fell away. Unable himself
to succeed, he was nevertheless sufficiently powerful to defeat his
adversaries. The exasperation had been too great to permit a
concentration or compromise on any of the "seniors." Cass reached only
131 votes; Marcy, 98; Buchanan, 104; and finally, on the 49th ballot,
occurred the memorable nearly unanimous selection of Franklin Pierce--
not because of any merit of his own, but to break the insurmountable
dead-lock of factional hatred. Young America gained a nominal triumph,
old fogydom a real revenge, and the South a serviceable Northern ally.
Douglas and his friends were discomfited but not dismayed. Their
management had been exceedingly maladroit, as a more modest
championship would without doubt have secured him the coveted
nomination. Yet sagacious politicians foresaw that on the whole he was
strengthened by his defeat. From that time forward he was a recognized
presidential aspirant and competitor, young enough patiently to bide
his time, and of sufficient prestige to make his flag the rallying
point of all the free-lances in the Democratic party.

It is to this presidential aspiration of Mr. Douglas that we must look
as the explanation of his agency in bringing about the repeal of the
Missouri Compromise. As already said, after some factious opposition
the measures of 1850 had been accepted by the people as a finality of
the slavery question. Around this alleged settlement, distasteful as
it was to many, public opinion gradually crystallized. Both the
National Conventions of 1852 solemnly resolved that they would
discountenance and resist, in Congress or out of it, whenever,
wherever, or however, or under whatever color or shape, any further
renewal of the slavery agitation. This determination was echoed and
reechoed, affirmed and reaffirmed, by the recognized organs of the
public voice--from the village newspaper to the presidential message,
from the country debating school to the measured utterances of
senatorial discussion.

[Sidenote: Appendix "Congressional Globe" 1851-2, p. 63.]

[Sidenote: Douglas, Senate speech 1850. Appendix, 1849-50 pp. 369 to
372.]

[Sidenote: Douglas, Springfield speech, Oct. 28, 1849. Illinois
"Register."]

In support of this alleged "finality" no one had taken a more decided
stand than Senator Douglas himself. Said he: "In taking leave of this
subject I wish, to state that I have determined never to make another
speech upon the slavery question; and I will now add the hope that the
necessity for it will never exist.... So long as our opponents do not
agitate for repeal or modification, why should we agitate for any
purpose! We claim that the compromise [of 1850] is a final settlement.
Is a final settlement open to discussion and agitation and controversy
by its friends? What manner of settlement is that which does not
settle the difficulty and quiet the dispute? Are not the friends of
the compromise becoming the agitators, and will not the country hold
us responsible for that which we condemn and denounce in the
abolitionists and Free-soldiers? These are matters worthy of our
consideration. Those who preach peace should not be the first to
commence and reopen an old quarrel." In his Senate speeches, during
the compromise debates of 1850, while generally advocating his theory
of "non-intervention," he had sounded the whole gamut of the slavery
discussion, defending the various measures of adjustment against the
attacks of the Southern extremists, and specifically defending the
Missouri Compromise. More than this; he had declared in distinct words
that the principle of territorial prohibition was no violation of
Southern rights; and denounced the proposition of Calhoun to put a
"balance of power" clause into the Constitution as "a retrograde
movement in an age of progress that would astonish the world." These
repeated affirmations, taken in connection with his famous description
of the Missouri Compromise in 1849, in which he declared it to have
had "an origin akin to the Constitution," and to have become
"canonized in the hearts of the American people as a sacred thing
which no ruthless hand would ever be reckless enough to disturb," all
seemed, in the public mind, to fix his position definitely; no one
imagined that Douglas would so soon become the subject of his own
anathemas.

The full personal details of this event are lost to history. We have
only a faint and shadowy outline of isolated movements of a few chief
actors, a few vague suggestions and fragmentary steps in the formation
and unfolding of the ill-omened plot.

As the avowed representative of the restless and ambitious elements of
the country, as the champion of "Young America," Douglas had so far as
possible in his Congressional career made himself the apostle of
modern "progress." He was a believer in "manifest destiny" and a
zealous advocate of the Monroe doctrine. He desired--so the newspapers
averred--that the Caribbean Sea should be declared an American lake,
and nothing so delighted him as to pull the beard of the British lion.
These topics, while they furnished themes for campaign speeches, for
the present led to no practical legislation. In his position as
chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, however, he had
control of kindred measures of present and vital interest to the
people of the West; namely, the opening of new routes of travel and
emigration, and of new territories for settlement. An era of wonder
had just dawned, connecting itself directly with these subjects. The
acquisition of California and the discovery of gold had turned the
eyes of the whole civilized world to the Pacific coast. Plains and
mountains were swarming with adventurers and emigrants. Oregon, Utah,
New Mexico, and Minnesota had just been organized, and were in a
feeble way contesting the sudden fame of the Golden State. The Western
border was astir, and wild visions of lands and cities and mines and
wealth and power were disturbing the dreams of the pioneer in his
frontier cabin, and hurrying him off on the long, romantic quest
across the continent.

Hitherto, stringent Federal laws had kept settlers and unlicensed
traders out of the Indian territory, which lay beyond the western
boundaries of Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa, and which the policy of
our early Presidents fixed upon as the final asylum of the red men
retreating before the advance of white settlements. But now the
uncontrollable stream of emigration had broken into and through this
reservation, creating in a few years well-defined routes of travel to
New Mexico, Utah, California, and Oregon. Though from the long march
there came constant cries of danger and distress, of starvation and
Indian massacre, there was neither halting nor delay. The courageous
pioneers pressed forward all the more earnestly, and to such purpose
that in less than twenty-five years the Pacific Railroad followed
Fremont's first exploration through the South Pass.

[Illustration:   FRANKLIN PIERCE.]

Douglas, himself a migratory child of fortune, was in thorough
sympathy with this somewhat premature Western longing of the people;
and as chairman of the Committee on Territories was the recipient of
all the letters, petitions, and personal solicitations from the
various interests which were seeking their advantage in this exodus
toward the setting sun. He was the natural center for all the embryo
mail contractors, office-holders, Indian traders, land-sharks, and
railroad visionaries whose coveted opportunities lay in the Western
territories. It is but just to his fame, however, to say that he
comprehended equally well the true philosophical and political
necessities which now demanded the opening of Kansas and Nebraska as a
secure highway and protecting bridge to the Rocky Mountains and our
new-found El Dorado, no less than as a bond of union between the older
States and the improvised "Young America" on the Pacific coast. The
subject was not yet ripe for action during the stormy politics of
1850-1, and had again to be postponed for the presidential campaign of
1852. But after Pierce was triumphantly elected, with a Democratic
Congress to sustain him, the legislative calm which both parties had
adjured in their platforms seemed favorable for pushing measures of
local interest. The control of legislation for the territories was for
the moment completely in the hands of Douglas. He was himself chairman
of the Committee of the Senate; and his special personal friend and
political lieutenant in his own State, William A. Richardson, of
Illinois, was chairman of the Territorial Committee of the House, He
could therefore choose his own time and mode of introducing measures
of this character in either house of Congress, under the majority
control of his party--a fact to be constantly borne in mind when we
consider the origin and progress of "the three Nebraska bills."

[Sidenote: "Globe," Feb. 2, 1853, p. 474.]

[Sidenote: Ibid., Feb. 8, p. 542-544.]

[Sidenote: Ibid., Feb. 10, p. 566.]

[Sidenote: Ibid., Feb. 10, p. 559.]

The journal discloses that Richardson, of Illinois, chairman of the
Committee on Territories of the House of Representatives, on February
2, 1853, introduced into the House "A bill to organize the Territory
of Nebraska." After due reference, and some desultory debate on the
8th, it was taken up and passed by the House on the 10th. From the
discussion we learn that the boundaries were the Missouri River on the
east, the Rocky Mountains on the west, the line of 36 degrees 30' or
southern line of Missouri on the south, and the line of 43 degrees, or
near the northern line of Iowa, on the north. Several members opposed
it, because the Indian title to the lands was not yet extinguished,
and because it embraced reservations pledged to Indian occupancy in
perpetuity; also on the general ground that it contained but few white
inhabitants, and its organization was therefore a useless expense.
Howard, of Texas, made the most strenuous opposition, urging that
since it contained but about six hundred souls, its southern boundary
should be fixed at 39 degrees 30', not to trench upon the Indian
reservations. Hall, of Missouri, replied in support of the bill: "We
want the organization of the Territory of Nebraska not merely for the
protection of the few people who reside there, but also for the
protection of Oregon and California in time of war, and the protection
of our commerce and the fifty or sixty thousand emigrants who annually
cross the plains." He added that its limits were purposely made large
to embrace the great lines of travel to Oregon, New Mexico, and
California; since the South Pass was in 42 degrees 30', the Territory
had to extend to 43 degrees north.

[Sidenote: "Globe," Feb. 8, 1858, p. 543.]

[Sidenote: Ibid., Feb. 10, 1853, p. 565.]

The incident, however, of special historical significance had occurred
in the debate of the 8th, when a member rose and said: "I wish to
inquire of the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Giddings], who, I believe, is
a member of the Committee on Territories, why the Ordinance of 1787 is
not incorporated in this bill? I should like to know whether he or the
committee were intimidated on account of the platforms of 1852?" To
which Mr. Giddings replied that the south line of the territory was 36
degrees 30', and was already covered by the Missouri Compromise
prohibition. "This law stands perpetually, and I do not think that
this act would receive any increased validity by a reenactment. There
I leave the matter. It is very clear that the territory included in
this treaty [ceding Louisiana] must be forever free unless the law be
repealed." With this explicit understanding from a member of the
committee, apparently accepted as conclusive by the whole House, and
certainly not objected to by the chairman, Mr. Richardson, who was
carefully watching the current of debate, the bill passed on the 10th,
ninety-eight yeas to forty-three nays. Led by a few members from that
region, in the main the West voted for it and the South against it;
while the greater number, absorbed in other schemes, were wholly
indifferent, and probably cast their votes upon personal solicitation.

On the following day the bill was hurried over to the Senate, referred
to Mr. Douglas's committee, and by him reported back without
amendment, on February 17th; but the session was almost ended before
he was able to gain the attention of the Senate for its discussion.
Finally, on the night before the inauguration of President Pierce, in
the midst of a fierce and protracted struggle over the appropriation
bills, while the Senate was without a quorum and impatiently awaiting
the reports of a number of conference committees, Douglas seized the
opportunity of the lull to call up his Nebraska bill. Here again, as
in the House, Texas stubbornly opposed it. Houston undertook to talk
it to death in a long speech; Bell protested against robbing the
Indians of their guaranteed rights. The bill seemed to have no friend
but its author when, perhaps to his surprise, Senator D. R. Atchison,
of Missouri, threw himself into the breach.

[Sidenote: "Globe," March 3, 1853, p. 1113.]

Prefacing his remarks with the statement that he had formerly been
opposed to the measure, he continued: "I had two objections to it. One
was that the Indian title in that territory had not been extinguished,
or at least a very small portion of it had been. Another was the
Missouri Compromise, or, as it is commonly called, the Slavery
Restriction. It was my opinion at that time--and I am not now very
clear on that subject--that the law of Congress, when the State of
Missouri was admitted into the Union, excluding slavery from the
territory of Louisiana north of 36 degrees 30', would be enforced in
that territory unless it was specially rescinded; and whether that law
was in accordance with the Constitution of the United States or not,
it would do its work, and that work would be to preclude slaveholders
from going into that territory. But when I came to look into that
question, I found that there was no prospect, no hope, of a repeal of
the Missouri Compromise excluding slavery from that territory.... I
have always been of opinion that the first great error committed in
the political history of this country was the Ordinance of 1787,
rendering the North-west Territory free territory. The next great
error was the Missouri Compromise. But they are both irremediable....
We must submit to them. I am prepared to do it. It is evident that the
Missouri Compromise cannot be repealed. So far as that question is
concerned, we might as well agree to the admission of this territory
now as next year, or five or ten years hence."

[Sidenote: "Globe," March 3, 1853, p. 1117.]

Mr. Douglas closed the debate, advocating the passage of the bill for
general reasons, and by his silence accepting Atchison's conclusions;
but as the morning of the 4th of March was breaking, an unwilling
Senate laid the bill on the table by a vote of twenty-three to
seventeen, here, as in the House, the West being for and the South
against the measure. It is not probable, however, that in this course
the South acted with any mental reservation or sinister motive. The
great breach of faith was not yet even meditated. Only a few hours
afterwards, in a dignified and stately national ceremonial, in the
midst of foreign ministers, judges, senators, and representatives, the
new President of the United States delivered to the people his
inaugural address. High and low were alike intent to discern the
opening political currents of the new Administration, but none touched
or approached this particular subject. The aspirations of "Young
America" were not towards a conquest of the North, but the enlargement
of the South. A freshening breeze filled the sails of "annexation" and
"manifest destiny." In bold words the President said: "The policy of
my Administration will not be controlled by any timid forebodings of
evil from expansion. Indeed, it is not to be disguised that our
attitude as a nation and our position on the globe render the
acquisition of certain possessions not within our jurisdiction
eminently important for our protection, if not in the future essential
for the preservation of the rights of commerce and the peace of the
world." Reaching the slavery question, he expressed unbounded devotion
to the Union, and declared slavery recognized by the Constitution, and
his purpose to enforce the compromise measures of 1850, adding, "I
fervently trust that the question is at rest, and that no sectional or
ambitious or fanatical excitement may again threaten the durability of
our institutions, or obscure the light of our prosperity."

[Sidebar: Senate Report, No. 15, 1st Session, 33d Congress.]

When Congress met again in the following December (1853), the annual
message of President Pierce was, upon this subject, but an echo of his
inaugural, as his inaugural had been but an echo of the two party
platforms of 1852. Affirming that the compromise measures of 1850 had
given repose to the country, he declared, "That this repose is to
suffer no shock during my official term, if I have the power to avert
it, those who placed me here may be assured." In this spirit,
undoubtedly, the Democratic party and the South began the session of
1853-4; but unfortunately it was very soon abandoned. The people of
the Missouri and Iowa border were becoming every day more impatient to
enter upon an authorized occupancy of the new lands which lay a day's
journey to the west. Handfuls of squatters here and there had elected
two territorial delegates, who hastened to Washington with embryo
credentials. The subject of organizing the West was again broached; an
Iowa Senator introduced a territorial bill. Under the ordinary routine
it was referred to the Committee on Territories, and on the 4th
day of January Douglas reported back his second Nebraska bill,
still without any repeal of the Missouri Compromise. His elaborate
report accompanying this second bill, shows that the subject had
been most carefully examined in committee. The discussion was
evidently exhaustive, going over the whole history, policy, and
constitutionality of prohibitory legislation. Two or three sentences
are quite sufficient to present the substance of the long and wordy
report. First, that there were differences and doubts; second, that
these had been finally settled by the compromise measures of 1850;
and, therefore, third, the committee had adhered not only to the
spirit but to the very phraseology of that adjustment, and refused
either to affirm or repeal the Missouri Compromise.

[Sidenote: Senator Benjamin Senate Debate, May 8, 1860. "Globe," p.
1966.]

[Sidenote: Ibid.]

[Sidenote: Douglas, pamphlet in reply to Judge Black, October, 1859,
p. 6.]

This was the public and legislative agreement announced to the
country. Subsequent revelations show the secret and factional bargain
which that agreement covered. Not only was this territorial bill
searchingly considered in committee, but repeated caucuses were held
by the Democratic leaders to discuss the party results likely to grow
out of it. The Southern Democrats maintained that the Constitution of
the United States recognized their right and guaranteed them
protection to their slave property, if they chose to carry it into
Federal Territories. Douglas and other Northern Democrats contended
that slavery was subject to local law, and that the people of a
Territory, like those of a State, could establish or prohibit it. This
radical difference, if carried into party action, would lose them the
political ascendency they had so long maintained, and were then
enjoying. To avert a public rupture of the party, it was agreed "that
the Territories should be organized with a delegation by Congress of
all the power of Congress in the Territories, and that the extent of
the power of Congress should be determined by the courts." If the
courts should decide against the South, the Southern Democrats would
accept the Northern theory; if the courts should decide in favor of
the South, the Northern Democrats would defend the Southern view. Thus
harmony would be preserved, and party power prolonged. Here we have
the shadow of the coming Dred Scott decision already projected into
political history, though the speaker protests that "none of us knew
of the existence of a controversy then pending in the Federal courts
that would lead almost immediately to the decision of that question."
This was probably true; for a "peculiar provision" was expressly
inserted in the committee's bill, allowing appeals to the Supreme
Court of the United States in all questions involving title to slaves,
without reference to the usual limitations in respect to the value of
the property, thereby paving the way to an early adjudication by the
Supreme Court.

[Sidenote: "Globe," Jan. 15, 1854, p. 175.]

Thus the matter rested till the 16th of January, when Senator Dixon,
of Kentucky, apparently acting for himself alone, offered an amendment
in effect repealing the Missouri Compromise. Upon this provocation,
Senator Sumner, of Massachusetts, the next day offered another
amendment affirming that it was not repealed by the bill. Commenting
on these propositions two days later, the Administration organ, the
"Washington Union," declared they were both "false lights," to be
avoided by all good Democrats. By this time, however, the subject of
"repeal" had become bruited about the Capitol corridors, the hotels,
and the caucus rooms of Washington, and newspaper correspondents were
on the _qui vive_ to obtain the latest developments concerning
the intrigue. The secrets of the Territorial Committee leaked out, and
consultations multiplied. Could a repeal be carried? Who would offer
it and lead it? What divisions or schisms would it carry into the
ranks of the Democratic party, especially in the pending contest
between the "Hards" and "Softs" in New York? What effect would it have
upon the presidential election of 1856? Already the "Union" suggested
that it was whispered that Cass was willing to propose and favor such
a "repeal." It was given out in the "Baltimore Sun" that Cass intended
to "separate the sheep from the goats." Both statements were untrue;
but they perhaps had their intended effect, to arouse the jealousy and
eagerness of Douglas. The political air of Washington was heavy with
clouds and mutterings, and clans were gathering for and against the
ominous proposition.

So far as history has been allowed a glimpse into these secret
communings, three principal personages were at this time planning a
movement of vast portent. These were Stephen A. Douglas, chairman of
the Senate Committee on Territories; Archibald Dixon, Whig Senator
from Kentucky; and David R. Atchison, of Missouri, then president
_pro tempore_ of the Senate, and acting Vice-President of the
United States. "'For myself,' said the latter in explaining the
transaction, 'I am entirely devoted to the interest of the South, and
I would sacrifice everything but my hope of heaven to advance her
welfare.' He thought the Missouri Compromise ought to be repealed; he
had pledged himself in his public addresses to vote for no territorial
organization that would not virtually annul it; and with this feeling
in his heart he desired to be the chairman of the Senate Committee on
Territories when a bill was introduced. With this object in view, he
had a private interview with Mr. Douglas, and informed him of what he
desired--the introduction of a bill for Nebraska like what
[_sic_] he had promised to vote for, and that he would like to be
the chairman of the Committee on Territories in order to introduce
such a measure; and, if he could get that position, he would
immediately resign as president of the Senate. Judge Douglas requested
twenty-four hours to consider the matter, and if at the expiration of
that time he could not introduce such a bill as he (Mr. Atchison)
proposed, he would resign as chairman of the Territorial Committee in
Democratic caucus, and exert his influence to get him (Atchison)
appointed. At the expiration of the given time, Senator Douglas
signified his intention to introduce such a bill as had been spoken
of." [Footnote: Speech at Atchison City, September, 1854, reported in
the "Parkville Luminary."]

Senator Dixon is no less explicit in his description of these
political negotiations. "My amendment seemed to take the Senate by
surprise, and no one appeared more startled than Judge Douglas
himself. He immediately came to my seat and courteously remonstrated
against my amendment, suggesting that the bill which he had introduced
was almost in the words of the territorial acts for the organization
of Utah and. New Mexico; that they being a part of the compromise
measures of 1850 he had hoped that I, a known and zealous friend of
the wise and patriotic adjustment which had then taken place, would
not be inclined to do anything to call that adjustment in question or
weaken it before the country.

"I replied that it was precisely because I had been and was a firm and
zealous friend of the Compromise of 1850 that I felt bound to persist
in the movement which I had originated; that I was well satisfied that
the Missouri Restriction, if not expressly repealed, would continue to
operate in the territory to which it had been applied, thus negativing
the great and salutary principle of _non-intervention_ which
constituted the most prominent and essential feature of the plan of
settlement of 1850. We talked for some time amicably, and separated.
Some days afterwards Judge Douglas came to my lodgings, whilst I was
confined by physical indisposition, and urged me to get up and take a
ride with him in his carriage. I accepted his invitation, and rode out
with him. During our short excursion we talked on the subject of my
proposed amendment, and Judge Douglas, to my high gratification,
proposed to me that I should allow him to take charge of the amendment
and ingraft it on his territorial bill. I acceded to the proposition
at once, whereupon a most interesting interchange occurred between us.

"On this occasion Judge Douglas spoke to me in substance thus: 'I have
become perfectly satisfied that it is my duty, as a fair-minded
national statesman, to cooperate with you as proposed, in securing the
repeal of the Missouri Compromise restriction. It is due to the South;
it is due to the Constitution, heretofore palpably infracted; it is
due to that character for consistency which I have heretofore labored
to maintain. The repeal, if we can effect it, will produce much stir
and commotion in the free States of the Union for a season. I shall be
assailed by demagogues and fanatics there without stint or moderation.
Every opprobrious epithet will be applied to me. I shall be probably
hung in effigy in many places. It is more than probable that I may
become permanently odious among those whose friendship and esteem I
have heretofore possessed. This proceeding may end my political
career. But, acting under the sense of the duty which animates me, I
am prepared to make the sacrifice. I will do it.'

"He spoke in the most earnest and touching manner, and I confess that
I was deeply affected. I said to him in reply: 'Sir, I once recognized
you as a demagogue, a mere party manager, selfish and intriguing. I
now find you a warm-hearted and sterling patriot. Go forward in the
pathway of duty as you propose, and though all the world desert you, I
never will.'" [Footnote: Archibald Dixon to H. S. Foote, October 1,
1858. "Louisville Democrat" of October 3, 1858.]

[Sidenote: "Globe," Feb. 15, 1864, p. 421.]

Such is the circumstantial record of this remarkable political
transaction left by two prominent and principal instigators, and never
denied nor repudiated by the third. Gradually, as the plot was
developed, the agreement embraced the leading elements of the
Democratic party in Congress, reenforced by a majority of the Whig
leaders from the slave States. A day or two before the final
introduction of the repeal, Douglas and others held an interview with
President Pierce, [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (1) relocated
to chapter end.] and obtained from him in writing an agreement to adopt
the movement as an Administration measure. Fortified with this
important adhesion, Douglas took the fatal plunge, and on January 23
introduced his third Nebraska bill, organizing two territories instead
of one, and declaring the Missouri Compromise "inoperative." But the
amendment--monstrous Caliban of legislation as it was--needed to be
still further licked into shape to satisfy the designs of the South and
appease the alarmed conscience of the North. Two weeks later, after the
first outburst of debate, the following phraseology was substituted:
"Which being inconsistent with the principle of non-intervention by
Congress with slavery in the States and Territories, as recognized by
the legislation of 1850 (commonly called the Compromise measures), is
hereby declared inoperative and void; it being the true intent and
meaning of this act not to legislate slavery into any Territory or
State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof
perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in
their own way, subject only to the Constitution"--a change which Benton
truthfully characterized as "a stump speech injected into the belly of
the Nebraska bill." [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (2) relocated
to chapter end.]

The storm of agitation which this measure aroused dwarfed all former
ones in depth and intensity. The South was nearly united in its
behalf, the North sadly divided in opposition. Against protest and
appeal, under legislative whip and spur, with the tempting smiles and
patronage of the Administration, after nearly a four months'
parliamentary struggle, the plighted faith of a generation was
violated, and the repealing act passed--mainly by the great influence
and example of Douglas, who had only five years before so fittingly
described the Missouri Compromise as being "akin to the Constitution,"
and "canonized in the hearts of the American people as a sacred thing
which no ruthless hand would ever be reckless enough to disturb."

[Relocated Footnote (1): Jefferson Davis, who was a member of
President Pierce's Cabinet (Secretary of War), thus relates the
incident: "On Sunday morning, the 22d of January, 1854, gentlemen of
each committee {House and Senate Committees on Territories} called at
my house, and Mr. Douglas, chairman of the Senate Committee, fully
explained the proposed bill, and stated their purpose to them through
my aid, to obtain an interview on that day with the President, to
ascertain whether the bill would meet his approbation. The President
was known to be rigidly opposed to the reception of visits on Sunday
for the discussion of any political subject; but in this case it was
urged as necessary, in order to enable the committee to make their
report the next day. I went with them to the Executive Mansion, and,
leaving them in the reception-room, sought the President in his
private apartments, and explained to him the occasion of the visit. He
thereupon met the gentlemen, patiently listened to the reading of the
bill and their explanations of it, decided that it rested upon sound
constitutional principles, and recognized in it only a return to that
rule which had been infringed by the Compromise of 1820, and the
restoration of which had been foreshadowed by the legislation of 1850.
This bill was not, therefore, as has been improperly asserted, a
measure inspired by Mr. Pierce or any of his Cabinet."--Davis, "Rise
and Fall of the Confederate Government," Vol. I., p. 28.]

[Relocated Footnote (2): We have the authority of ex-Vice-President
Hannibal Hamlin for stating that Mr. Douglas (who was on specially
intimate terms with him) told him that the language of the final
amendment to the Kansas-Nebraska bill repealing the Missouri
Compromise was written by President Franklin Pierce. Douglas was
apprehensive that the President would withdraw or withhold from him a
full and undivided Administration support, and told Mr. Hamlin that he
intended to get from him something in black and white which would hold
him. A day or two afterwards Douglas, in a confidential conversation,
showed Mr. Hamlin the draft of the amendment in Mr. Pierce's own
handwriting.]




CHAPTER XX

THE DRIFT OF POLITICS


The repeal of the Missouri Compromise made the slavery question
paramount in every State of the Union. The boasted finality was a
broken reed; the life-boat of compromise a hopeless wreck. If the
agreement of a generation could be thus annulled in a breath, was
there any safety even in the Constitution itself? This feeling
communicated itself to the Northern States at the very first note of
warning, and every man's party fealty was at once decided by his
toleration of or opposition to slavery. While the fate of the Nebraska
bill hung in a doubtful balance in the House, the feeling found
expression in letters, speeches, meetings, petitions, and
remonstrances. Men were for or against the bill--every other political
subject was left in abeyance. The measure once passed, and the
Compromise repealed, the first natural impulse was to combine,
organize, and agitate for its restoration. This was the ready-made,
common ground of cooperation.

It is probable that this merely defensive energy would have been
overcome and dissipated, had it not at this juncture been inspirited
and led by the faction known as the Free-soil party of the country,
composed mainly of men of independent anti-slavery views, who had
during four presidential campaigns been organized as a distinct
political body, with no near hope of success, but animated mainly by
the desire to give expression to their deep personal convictions. If
there were demagogues here and there among them, seeking merely to
create a balance of power for bargain and sale, they were unimportant
in number, and only of local influence, and soon became deserters.
There was no mistaking the earnestness of the body of this faction. A
few fanatical men, who had made it the vehicle of violent expressions,
had kept it under the ban of popular prejudice. It had long been held
up to public odium as a revolutionary band of "abolitionists." Most of
the abolitionists were doubtless in this party, but the party was not
all composed of abolitionists. Despite objurgation and contempt, it
had become since 1840 a constant and growing factor in politics. It
had operated as a negative balance of power in the last three
presidential elections, causing by its diversion of votes, and more
especially by its relaxing influence upon parties, the success of the
Democratic candidate, James K. Polk, in 1844, the Whig candidate,
General Taylor, in 1848, and the Democratic nominee, Franklin Pierce,
in 1852.

This small party of antislavery veterans, over 158,000 voters in the
aggregate, and distributed in detachments of from 3000 to 30,000 in
twelve of the free States, now came to the front, and with its
newspapers and speakers trained in the discussion of the subject, and
its committees and affiliations already in action and correspondence,
bore the brunt of the fight against the repeal. Hitherto its aims had
appeared Utopian, and its resolves had been denunciatory and
exasperating. Now, combining wisdom with opportunity, it became
conciliatory, and, abating something of its abstractions, made itself
the exponent of a demand for a present and practical reform--a simple
return to the ancient faith and landmarks. It labored specially to
bring about the dissolution of the old party organizations and the
formation of a new one, based upon the general policy of resisting the
extension of slavery. Since, however, the repeal had shaken but not
obliterated old party lines, this effort succeeded only in favorable
localities.

[Illustration:   HISTORICAL MAP OF THE UNITED STATES IN 1854 SHOWING THE
VARIOUS ACCESSIONS OF TERRITORY ETC.

NOTE. _The number under the name of a State indicates the date of
its admission into the Union_ _The Boundary between the United
States and Mexico previous to 1845 & 1848 is indicated thus_ + + +]

For the present, party disintegration was slow; men were reluctant to
abandon their old-time principles and associations. The united efforts
of Douglas and the Administration held the body of the Northern
Democrats to his fatal policy, though protests and defections became
alarmingly frequent. On the other hand, the great mass of Northern
Whigs promptly opposed the repeal, and formed the bulk of the
opposition, nevertheless losing perhaps as many pro-slavery Whigs as
they gained antislavery Democrats. The real and effective gain,
therefore, was the more or less thorough alliance of the Whig party
and the Free-soil party of the Northern States: wherever that was
successful it gave immediate and available majorities to the
opposition, which made their influence felt even in the very opening
of the popular contest following the Congressional repeal.

It happened that this was a year for electing Congressmen. The
Nebraska bill did not pass till the end of May, and the political
excitement was at once transferred from Washington to every district
of the whole country. It may be said with truth that the year 1854
formed one continuous and solid political campaign from January to
November, rising in interest and earnestness from first to last, and
engaging in the discussion more fully than had ever occurred in
previous American history all the constituent elements of our
population.

In the Southern States the great majority of people welcomed,
supported, and defended the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, it
being consonant with their pro-slavery feelings, and apparently
favorable to their pro-slavery interests. The Democratic party in the
South, controlling a majority of slave States, was of course a unit in
its favor. The Whig party, however, having carried two slave States
for Scott in 1852, and holding a strong minority in the remainder, was
not so unanimous. Seven Southern Representatives and two Southern
Senators had voted against the Nebraska bill, and many individual
voters condemned it as an act of bad faith--as the abandonment of the
accepted "finality," and as the provocation of a dangerous antislavery
reaction. But public opinion in that part of the Union was fearfully
tyrannical and intolerant; and opposition dared only to manifest
itself to Democratic party organization--not to these Democratic party
measures. The Whigs of the South were therefore driven precipitately
to division. Those of extreme pro-slavery views, like Dixon, of
Kentucky,--who, when he introduced his amendment, declared, "Upon the
question of slavery I know no Whiggery and no Democracy,"--went boldly
and at once over into the Democratic camp, while those who retained
their traditional party name and flag were sundered from their ancient
allies in the Northern States by the impossibility of taking up the
latter's antislavery war-cry.

At this juncture the political situation was further complicated by
the sudden rise of an additional factor in politics, the American
party, popularly called the "Know-Nothings." Essentially, it was a
revival of the extinct "Native-American" faction, based upon a
jealousy of and discrimination against foreign-born voters, desiring
an extension of their period of naturalization, and their exclusion
from office; also based upon a certain hostility to the Roman Catholic
religion. It had been reorganized as a secret order in the year 1853;
and seizing upon the political disappointments following General
Scott's overwhelming defeat for the presidency in 1852, and profiting
by the disintegration caused by the Nebraska bill, it rapidly gained
recruits both North and South. Operating in entire secrecy, the
country was startled by the sudden appearance in one locality after
another, on election day, of a potent and unsuspected political power,
which in many instances pushed both the old organizations not only to
disastrous but even to ridiculous defeat. Both North and South its
forces were recruited mainly from the Whig party, though malcontents
from all quarters rushed to group themselves upon its narrow platform,
and to participate in the exciting but delusive triumphs of its
temporary and local ascendency.

When, in the opening of the anti-Nebraska contest, the Free-soil
leaders undertook the formation of a new party to supersede the old,
they had, because of their generally democratic antecedents, with
great unanimity proposed that it be called the "Republican" party,
thus reviving the distinctive appellation by which the followers of
Jefferson were known in the early days of the republic. Considering
the fact that Jefferson had originated the policy of slavery
restriction in his draft of the ordinance of 1784, the name became
singularly appropriate, and wherever the Free-soilers succeeded in
forming a coalition it was adopted without question. But the refusal
of the Whigs in many States to surrender their name and organization,
and more especially the abrupt appearance of the Know-Nothings on the
field of parties, retarded the general coalition between the Whigs and
the Free-soilers which so many influences favored. As it turned out, a
great variety of party names were retained or adopted in the
Congressional and State campaigns of 1854, the designation of "anti-
Nebraska" being perhaps the most common, and certainly for the moment
the most serviceable, since denunciation of the Nebraska bill was the
one all-pervading bond of sympathy and agreement among men who
differed very widely on almost all other political topics. This
affiliation, however, was confined exclusively to the free States. In
the slave States, the opposition to the Administration dared not raise
the anti-Nebraska banner, nor could it have found followers; and it
was not only inclined but forced to make its battle either under the
old name of Whigs, or, as became more popular, under the new
appellation of "Americans," which grew into a more dignified synonym
for Know-Nothings.

Thus confronted, the Nebraska and anti-Nebraska factions, or, more
philosophically speaking, the pro-slavery and antislavery sentiment of
the several American States, battled for political supremacy with a
zeal and determination only manifested on occasions of deep and vital
concern to the welfare of the republic. However languidly certain
elements of American society may perform what they deem the drudgery
of politics, they do not shrink from it when they hear warning of real
danger. The alarm of the nation on the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise was serious and startling. All ranks and occupations
therefore joined with a new energy in the contest it provoked.
Particularly was the religious sentiment of the North profoundly moved
by the moral question involved. Perhaps for the first time in our
modern politics, the pulpit vied with the press, and the Church with
the campaign club, in the work of debate and propagandism.

The very inception of the struggle had provoked bitter words. Before
the third Nebraska bill had yet been introduced into the Senate, the
then little band of "Free-Soilers" in Congress--Chase, Sumner,
Giddings, and three others--had issued a newspaper address calling the
repeal "a gross violation of a sacred pledge"; "a criminal betrayal of
precious rights"; "an atrocious plot," "designed to cover up from
public reprehension meditated bad faith," etc. Douglas, seizing only
too gladly the pretext to use denunciation instead of argument,
replied in his opening speech, in turn stigmatizing them as "abolition
confederates" "assembled in secret conclave" "on the holy Sabbath
while other Senators were engaged in divine worship"--"plotting," "in
the name of the holy religion"; "perverting," and "calumniating the
committee"; "appealing with a smiling face to his courtesy to get time
to circulate their document before its infamy could be exposed," etc.

[Sidenote: "Globe" March 14, 1854, p. 617.]

[Sidenote: Ibid., p. 618.]

The key-notes of the discussion thus given were well sustained on both
sides, and crimination and recrimination increased with the heat and
intensity of the campaign. The gradual disruption of parties, and the
new and radical attitudes assumed by men of independent thought, gave
ample occasion to indulge in such epithets as "apostates,"
"renegades," and "traitors." Unusual acrimony grew out of the zeal of
the Church and its ministers. The clergymen of the Northern States not
only spoke against the repeal from their pulpits, but forwarded
energetic petitions against it to Congress, 3050 clergymen of New
England of different denominations joining their signatures in one
protest. "We protest against it," they said, "as a great moral wrong,
as a breach of faith eminently unjust to the moral principles of the
community, and subversive of all confidence in national engagements;
as a measure full of danger to the peace and even the existence of our
beloved Union, and exposing us to the righteous judgment of the
Almighty." In return, Douglas made a most virulent onslaught on their
political action. "Here we find," he retorted, "that a large body of
preachers, perhaps three thousand, following the lead of a circular
which was issued by the abolition confederates in this body,
calculated to deceive and mislead the public, have here come forward
with an atrocious falsehood, and an atrocious calumny against this
Senate, desecrated the pulpit, and prostituted the sacred desk to the
miserable and corrupting influence of party politics." All his
newspapers and partisans throughout the country caught the style and
spirit of his warfare, and boldly denied the moral right of the clergy
to take part in politics otherwise than by a silent vote. But they, on
the other hand, persisted all the more earnestly in justifying their
interference in moral questions wherever they appeared, and were
clearly sustained by the public opinion of the North.

Though the repeal was forced through Congress under party pressure,
and by the sheer weight of a large Democratic majority in both
branches, it met from the first a decided and unmistakable popular
condemnation in the free States. While the measure was yet under
discussion in the House in March, New Hampshire led off by an election
completely obliterating the eighty-nine Democratic majority in her
Legislature. Connecticut followed in her footsteps early in April.
Long before November it was evident that the political revolution
among the people of the North was thorough, and that election day was
anxiously awaited merely to record the popular verdict already
decided.

The influence of this result upon parties, old and new, is perhaps
best illustrated in the organization of the Thirty-fourth Congress,
chosen at these elections during the year 1854, which witnessed the
repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Each Congress, in ordinary course,
meets for the first time about one year after its members are elected
by the people, and the influence of politics during the interim needs
always to be taken into account. In this particular instance this
effect had, if anything, been slightly reactionary, and the great
contest for the Speakership during the winter of 1855-6 may therefore
be taken as a fair manifestation of the spirit of politics in 1854.

The strength of the preceding House of Representatives, which met in
December, 1853, had been: Whigs, 71; Free-soilers, 4; Democrats, 159--
a clear Democratic majority of 84. In the new Congress there were in
the House, as nearly as the classification could be made, about 108
anti-Nebraska members, nearly 40 Know-Nothings, and about 75
Democrats; the remaining members were undecided. The proud Democratic
majority of the Pierce election was annihilated.

But as yet the new party was merely inchoate, its elements
distrustful, jealous, and discordant; the feuds and battles of a
quarter of a century were not easily forgotten or buried. The
Democratic members, boldly nominating Mr. Richardson, the House leader
on the Nebraska bill, as their candidate for Speaker, made a long and
determined push for success. But his highest range of votes was about
74 to 76; while through 121 ballotings, continuing from December 3 to
January 23, the opposition remained divided, Mr. Banks, the anti-
Nebraska favorite, running at one time up to 106--within seven votes
of an election. At this point, Richardson, finding it a hopeless
struggle, withdrew his name as a candidate, and the Democratic
strength was transferred to another, but with no better prospects.
Finally, seeing no chance of otherwise terminating the contest, the
House yielded to the inevitable domination of the slavery question,
and resolved, on February 2, by a vote of 113 to 104, to elect under
the plurality rule after the next three ballotings. Under this rule,
notwithstanding the most strenuous efforts to rescind it, Nathaniel P.
Banks, of Massachusetts, was chosen Speaker by 103 votes, against 100
votes for William Aiken, of South Carolina, with thirty scattering.
The "ruthless" repeal of the Missouri Compromise had effectually
broken the legislative power of the Democratic party.




CHAPTER XXI

LINCOLN AND TRUMBULL


[Sidenote: 1854.]

To follow closely the chain of events, growing out of the repeal of
the Missouri Compromise at Douglas's instigation, we must now examine
its effect upon the political fortunes of that powerful leader in his
own State.

The extreme length of Illinois from north to south is 385 miles; in
geographical situation it extends from the latitude of Massachusetts
and New York to that of Virginia and Kentucky. The great westward
stream of emigration in the United States had generally followed the
parallels of latitude. The pioneers planted their new homes as nearly
as might be in a climate like the one they had left. In process of
time, therefore, northern Illinois became peopled with settlers from
Northern or free States, bringing their antislavery traditions and
feelings; southern Illinois, with those from Southern or slave States,
who were as naturally pro-slavery. The Virginians and Kentuckians
readily became converts to the thrift and order of free society; but
as a class they never gave up or conquered their intense hatred of
antislavery convictions based on merely moral grounds, which they
indiscriminately stigmatized as "abolitionism." Impelled by this
hatred the lawless element of the community was often guilty of
persecution and violence in minor forms, and in 1837, as already
related, it prompted the murder of Lovejoy in the city of Alton by a
mob, for persisting in his right to publish his antislavery opinions.
This was its gravest crime. But a narrow spirit of intolerance
extending even down to the rebellion kept on the statute books a
series of acts prohibiting the settlement of free blacks in the State.

It was upon this field of radically diverse sentiment that in the year
1854 Douglas's sudden project of repeal fell like a thunderbolt out of
a clear sky. A Democratic Governor had been chosen two years before; a
Democratic Legislature, called together to consider merely local and
economic questions, was sitting in extra session at Springfield. There
was doubt and consternation over the new issue. The Governor and other
prudent partisans avoided a public committal. But the silence could
not be long maintained. Douglas was a despotic party leader, and
President Pierce had made the Nebraska bill an Administration
question. Above all, in Illinois, as elsewhere, the people at once
took up the discussion, and reluctant politicians were compelled to
avow themselves. The Nebraska bill with its repealing clause had been
before the country some three weeks and was yet pending in Congress
when a member of the Illinois Legislature introduced resolutions
indorsing it. Three Democratic State Senators, two from northern and
one from central Illinois, had the courage to rise and oppose the
resolutions in vigorous and startling speeches. They were N. B. Judd,
of Chicago, B. C. Cook, of La Salle, and John M. Palmer, of Macoupin.
This was an unusual party phenomenon and had its share in hastening
the general agitation throughout the State. Only two or three other
members took part in the discussion; the Democrats avoided the issue;
the Whigs hoped to profit by the dissension. There was the usual rush
of amendments and of parliamentary strategy, and the indorsing
resolutions, which finally passed in both Houses in ambiguous language
and by a diminished vote were shorn of much of their political
significance.

Party organization was strong in Illinois, and for the greater part,
as the popular discussion proceeded, the Democrats sustained and the
Whigs opposed the new measure. In the northern counties, where the
antislavery sentiment was general, there were a few successful efforts
to disband the old parties and create a combined opposition under the
new name of Republicans. This, it was soon apparent, would make
serious inroads on the existing Democratic majority. But an alarming
counter-movement in the central counties, which formed the Whig
stronghold, soon began to show itself. Douglas's violent denunciation
of "abolitionists" and "abolitionismn" appealed with singular power to
Whigs from slave States. The party was without a national leader; Clay
had died two years before, and Douglas made skillful quotations from
the great statesman's speeches to bolster up his new propagandism. In
Congress only a little handful of Southern Whigs opposed the repeal,
and even these did not dare place their opposition on antislavery
grounds. And especially the familiar voice and example of the
neighboring Missouri Whigs were given unhesitatingly to the support of
the Douglas scheme. Under these combined influences one or two erratic
but rather prominent Whigs in central Illinois declared their
adherence to Nebraskaism, and raised the hope that the Democrats would
regain in the center and south all they might lose in the northern
half of the State.

[Illustration:   LYMAN TRUMBULL]

One additional circumstance had its effect on public opinion. As has
been stated, in the opposition to Douglas's repeal the few avowed
abolitionists and the many pronounced Free-soilers, displaying
unwonted activity, came suddenly into the foreground to rouse and
organize public opinion, making it seem for the moment that they had
really assumed leadership and control in politics. This class of men
had long been held up to public odium. Some of them had, indeed, on
previous occasions used intemperate and offensive language; but more
generally they were denounced upon a gross misrepresentation of their
utterance and purpose. It so happened that they were mostly of
Democratic antecedents, which gave them great influence among
antislavery Democrats, but made their advice and arguments exceedingly
distasteful in strong Whig counties and communities. The fact that
they now became more prudent, conciliatory, and practical in their
speeches and platforms did not immediately remove existing prejudices
against them. A few of these appeared in Illinois. Cassius M. Clay
published a letter in which he advocated the fusion of anti-Nebraska
voters upon "Benton, Seward, Hale, or any other good citizen," and
afterwards made a series of speeches in Illinois. When he came to
Springfield, the Democratic officers in charge refused him the use of
the rotunda of the House, a circumstance, however, which only served
to draw him a larger audience in a neighboring grove. Later in the
summer Joshua B. Giddings and Salmon P. Chase, of Ohio, made a
political tour through the State, and at Springfield the future
Secretary and Chief-Justice addressed an unsympathetic audience of a
few hundreds in the dingy little court-house, almost unheralded, save
by the epithets of the Democratic newspapers. A few local speakers of
this class, of superior address and force, now also began to signalize
themselves by a new-born zeal and an attractive eloquence. Conspicuous
among these was Owen Lovejoy, of northern Illinois, brother of the man
who, for opinion's sake, had been murdered at Alton.

While thus in the northern half of Illinois the public condemnation of
Douglas's repeal was immediate and sweeping, the formation of
opposition to it was tentative and slow in the central and southern
counties, where, among Whigs of Southern birth, it proceeded rather
upon party feeling than upon moral conviction. The new question struck
through party lines in such a manner as to confuse and perplex the
masses. But the issue would not be postponed. The Congressional
elections were to be held in the autumn, and the succession of events
rather than the leadership of politicians gradually shaped the
campaign.

After a most exciting parliamentary struggle the repeal was carried
through Congress in May. Encouraged by this successful domination over
Representatives and Senators, Douglas prepared to force its acceptance
by the people. "I hear men now say," said he, "that they are willing
to acquiesce in it.... It is not sufficient that they shall not seek to
disturb Nebraska and Kansas, but they must acquiesce also in the
principle." [Footnote: Douglas's speech before the Union Democratic
Club of New York, June 3, 1854. New York "Herald," June 5, 1854.] In
the slave States this was an easy task. The most prominent Democrat
who had voted against the Nebraska bill was Thomas H. Benton. The
election in Missouri was held in August, and Benton was easily beaten
by a Whig who was as fierce for repeal as Douglas himself. In the free
States the case was altogether different. In Illinois the Democrats
gradually, but at last with a degree of boldness, shouldered the
dangerous dogma. The main body of the party rallied under Douglas,
excepting a serious defection in the north; on the other hand, the
Whigs in a body declared against him, but were weakened by a
scattering desertion in the center and south. Meanwhile both retained
their distinctive party names and organizations.

Congress adjourned early in August, but Douglas delayed his return to
Illinois. The 1st of September had come, when it was announced he
would return to his home in Chicago. This was an anti-slavery city,
and the current of popular condemnation and exasperation was running
strongly against him. Public meetings of his own former party friends
had denounced him. Street rowdies had burned him in effigy. The
opposition papers charged him with skulking and being afraid to meet
his constituents. On the afternoon of his coming many flags in the
city and on the shipping in the river and harbor were hung at half-
mast. At sunset sundry city bells were tolled for an hour to signify
the public mourning at his downfall. When he mounted the platform at
night to address a crowd of some five thousand listeners he was
surrounded by a little knot of personal friends, but the audience
before him was evidently cold if not actively hostile.

He began his speech, defending his course as well as he could. He
claimed that the slavery question was forever settled by his great
principle of "popular sovereignty," which took it out of Congress and
gave it to the people of the territories to decide as they pleased.
The crowd heard him in sullen silence for three-quarters of an hour,
when their patience gave out, and they began to ply him with
questions. He endured their fire of interrogatory for a little while
till he lost his own temper. Excited outcry followed angry repartee.
Thrust and rejoinder were mingled with cheers and hisses. The mayor,
who presided, tried to calm the assemblage, but the passions of the
crowd would brook no control. Douglas, of short, sturdy build and
imperious and controversial nature, stood his ground courageously,
with flushed and lowering countenance hurling defiance at his
interrupters, calling them a mob, and shaking his fist in their faces;
in reply the crowd groaned, hooted, yelled, and made the din of
Pandemonium. The tumultuous proceeding continued until half-past ten
o'clock at night, when the baffled orator was finally but very
reluctantly persuaded by his friends to give up the contest and leave
the stand. It was trumpeted abroad by the Democratic newspapers that
"in the order-loving, law-abiding, abolition-ridden city of Chicago,
Illinois's great statesman and representative in the United States
Senate was cried down and refused the privilege of speaking"; and as
usual the intolerance produced its natural reaction.

Since Abraham Lincoln's return to Springfield from his single term of
service in Congress, 1847 to 1849, though by no means entirely
withdrawn from politics, his campaigning had been greatly diminished.
The period following had for him been years of work, study, and
reflection. His profession of law had become a deeper science and a
higher responsibility. His practice, receiving his undivided
attention, brought him more important and more remunerative cases.
Losing nothing of his genial humor, his character took on the dignity
of a graver manhood. He was still the center of interest of every
social group he encountered, whether on the street or in the parlor.
Serene and buoyant of temper, cordial and winning of language,
charitable and tolerant of opinion, his very presence diffused a glow
of confidence and kindness. Wherever he went he left an ever-widening
ripple of smiles, jests, and laughter. His radiant good-fellowship was
beloved and sought alike by political opponents and partisan friends.
His sturdy and delicate integrity, recognized far and wide, had long
since won him the blunt but hearty sobriquet of "Honest Old Abe." But
it became noticeable that he was less among the crowd and more in the
solitude of his office or his study, and that he seemed ever in haste
to leave the eager circle he was entertaining.

It is in the midsummer of 1854 that we find him reappearing upon the
stump in central Illinois. The rural population always welcomed his
oratory, and he never lacked invitations to address the public. His
first speeches on the new and all-absorbing topic were made in the
neighboring towns, and in the counties adjoining his own. Towards the
end of August the candidates for Congress in that district were, in
Western phrase, "on the track." Richard Yates, afterwards one of the
famous "war governors," sought a reelection as a Whig. Thomas L.
Harris as a Douglas-Democrat strove to supplant him. Local politics
became active, and Lincoln was sent for from all directions to address
the people. When he went, however, he distinctly announced that he did
not purpose to take up his time with this personal and congressional
controversy. His intention was to discuss the principles of the
Nebraska Bill.

Once launched upon this theme, men were surprised to find him imbued
with an unwonted seriousness. They heard from his lips fewer anecdotes
and more history. Careless listeners who came to laugh at his jokes
were held by the strong current of his reasoning and the flashes of
his earnest eloquence, and were lifted up by the range and tenor of
his argument into a fresher and purer political atmosphere. The new
discussion was fraught with deeper questions than the improvement of
the Sangamon, protective tariffs, or the origin of the Mexican war.
Down through incidents of, legislation, through history of government,
even underlying cardinal maxims of political philosophy, it touched
the very bedrock of primary human rights. Such a subject furnished
material for the inborn gifts of the speaker, his intuitive logic, his
impulsive patriotism, his pure and poetical conception of legal and
moral justice.

Douglas, since his public rebuff at Chicago on September 1, had begun,
after a few days of delay and rest, a tour of speech-making southward
through the State. At these meetings he had at least a respectful
hearing, and as he neared central Illinois the reception accorded him
became more enthusiastic. The chief interest of the campaign finally
centered in a sort of political tournament which took place at the
capital, Springfield, during the first week of October; the State
Agricultural Fair having called together great crowds, and among them
the principal politicians of Illinois. This was Lincoln's home, in a
strong Whig county, and in a section of the State where that party had
hitherto found its most compact and trustworthy forces. As yet Lincoln
had made but a single speech there on the Nebraska question. Of the
Federal appointments under the Nebraska bill, Douglas secured two for
Illinois, one of which, the office of surveyor-general of Kansas, was
given to John Calhoun, the same man who, in the pioneer days twenty
years before, was county surveyor in Sangamon and had employed Abraham
Lincoln as his deputy. He was also the same who three years later
received the sobriquet of "John Candlebox Calhoun," having acquired
unenviable notoriety from his reputed connection with the "Cincinnati
Directory" and "Candlebox" election frauds in Kansas, and with the
famous Lecompton Constitution. Calhoun was still in Illinois doing
campaign work in propagating the Nebraska faith. He was recognized as
a man of considerable professional and political talent, and had made
a speech in Springfield to which Lincoln had replied. It was, however,
merely a casual and local affair and was not described or reported by
the newspapers.

The meetings at the State Fair were of a different character. The
audiences were composed of leading men from nearly all the counties of
the State. Though the discussion of party questions had been going on
all summer with more or less briskness, yet such was the general
confusion in politics that many honest and intelligent voters and even
leaders were still undecided in their opinions. The fair continued
nearly a week. Douglas made a speech on the first day, Tuesday,
October 3. Lincoln replied to him on the following day, October 4.
Douglas made a rejoinder, and on that night and the succeeding day and
night a running fire of debate ensued, in which John Calhoun, Judge
Trumbull, Judge Sidney Breese, Colonel E. D. Taylor, and perhaps
others, took part.

Douglas's speech was doubtless intended by him and expected by his
friends to be the principal and the conclusive argument of the
occasion. But by this time the Whig party of the central counties,
though shaken by the disturbing features of the Nebraska question, had
nevertheless reformed its lines, and assumed the offensive to which
its preponderant numbers entitled it, and resolved not to surrender
either its name or organization. In Sangamon County, its strongest
men, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen T. Logan, were made candidates for
the Legislature. The term of Douglas's colleague in the United States
Senate, General James Shields, was about to expire, and the new
Legislature would choose his successor. To the war of party principles
was therefore added the incentive of a brilliant official prize. The
Whigs were keenly alive to this chance and its influence upon their
possible ascendency in the State.

Lincoln's Whig friends had therefore seen his reappearance in active
discussion with unfeigned pleasure. Of old they knew his peculiar hold
and influence upon the people and his party. His few speeches in the
adjoining counties had shown them his maturing intellect, his
expanding power in debate. Acting upon himself, this renewed practice
on the stump crystallized his thought and brought method to his
argument. The opposition newspapers had accused him of "mousing about
the libraries in the State House." The charge was true. Where others
were content to take statements at second hand, he preferred to verify
citations as well as to find new ones. His treatment of his theme was
therefore not only bold but original.

By a sort of common consent his party looked to him to answer
Douglas's speech. This was no light task, and no one knew it better
than Lincoln. Douglas's real ability was, and remains, unquestioned.
In many qualities of intellect he was truly the "Little Giant" which
popular fancy nicknamed him. It was no mere chance that raised the
Vermont cabinet-maker's apprentice from a penniless stranger in
Illinois in 1833 to a formidable competitor for supreme leadership in
the great Democratic party of the nation in 1852. When after the lapse
of a quarter of a century we measure him with the veteran chiefs whom
he aspired to supplant, we see the substantial basis of his confidence
and ambition. His great error of statesmanship aside, he stands forth
more than the peer of associates who underrated his power and looked
askance at his pretensions. In the six years of perilous party
conflict which followed, every conspicuous party rival disappeared in
obscurity, disgrace, or rebellion. Battling while others feasted,
sowing where others reaped, abandoned by his allies and persecuted by
his friends, Douglas alone emerged from the fight with loyal faith and
unshaken courage, bringing with him through treachery, defeat, and
disaster the unflinching allegiance and enthusiastic admiration of
nearly three-fifths of the rank and file of the once victorious army
of Democratic voters at the north. He had not only proved himself
their most gallant chief, but as a final crown of merit he led his
still powerful contingent of followers to a patriotic defense of the
Constitution and government which some of his compeers put into such
mortal jeopardy.

We find him here at the beginning of this severe conflict in the full
flush of hope and ambition. He was winning in personal manner,
brilliant in debate, aggressive in party strategy. To this he added an
adroitness in evasion and false logic perhaps never equaled, and in
his defense of the Nebraska measure this questionable but convenient
gift was ever his main reliance. Besides, his long official career
gave to his utterances the stamp and glitter of oracular
statesmanship. But while Lincoln knew all Douglas's strong points he
was no less familiar with his weak ones. They had come to central
Illinois about the same time, and had in a measure grown up together.
Socially they were on friendly terms; politically they had been
opponents for twenty years. At the bar, in the Legislature, and on the
stump they had often met and measured strength. Each therefore knew
the temper of the other's steel no less than every joint in his armor.

It was a peculiarity of the early West--perhaps it pertains to all
primitive communities--that the people retained a certain fragment of
the chivalric sentiment, a remnant of the instinct of hero-worship. As
the ruder athletic sports faded out, as shooting-matches, wrestling-
matches, horse-races, and kindred games fell into disuse, political
debate became, in a certain degree, their substitute. But the
principle of championship, while it yielded high honor and
consideration to the victor, imposed upon him the corresponding
obligation to recognize every opponent and accept every challenge. To
refuse any contest, to plead any privilege, would be instant loss of
prestige. This supreme moment in Lincoln's career, this fateful
turning of the political tide, found him fully prepared for the new
battle, equipped by reflection and research to permit himself to be
pitted against the champion of Democracy--against the very author of
the raging storm of parties; and it displays his rare self-confidence
and consciousness of high ability, to venture to attack such an
antagonist.

[Sidenote: Correspondence of the "Missouri Republican," October 6,
1854.]

Douglas made his speech, according to notice, on the first day of the
fair, Tuesday, October 3. "I will mention," said he, in his opening
remarks, "that it is understood by some gentlemen that Mr. Lincoln, of
this city, is expected to answer me. If this is the understanding, I
wish that Mr. Lincoln would step forward and let us arrange some plan
upon which to carry out this discussion." Mr. Lincoln was not there at
the moment, and the arrangement could not then be made. Unpropitious
weather had brought the meeting to the Representatives' Hall in the
State House, which was densely packed. The next day found the same
hall filled as before to hear Mr. Lincoln. Douglas occupied a seat
just in front of him, and in his rejoinder he explained that "my
friend Mr. Lincoln expressly invited me to stay and hear him speak to-
day, as he heard me yesterday, and to answer and defend myself as best
I could. I here thank him for his courteous offer." The occasion
greatly equalized the relative standing of the champions. The familiar
surroundings, the presence and hearty encouragement of his friends,
put Lincoln in his best vein. His bubbling humor, his perfect temper,
and above all the overwhelming current of his historical arraignment
extorted the admiration of even his political enemies. "His speech was
four hours in length" wrote one of these, "and was conceived and
expressed in a most happy and pleasant style, and was received with
abundant applause. At times he made statements which brought Senator
Douglas to his feet, and then good-humored passages of wit created
much interest and enthusiasm." All reports plainly indicate that
Douglas was astonished and disconcerted at this unexpected strength of
argument, and that he struggled vainly through a two hours' rejoinder
to break the force of Lincoln's victory in the debate. Lincoln had
hitherto been the foremost man in his district. That single effort
made him the leader on the new question in his State.

The fame of this success brought Lincoln urgent calls from all the
places where Douglas was expected to speak. Accordingly, twelve days
afterwards, October 16, they once more met in debate, at Peoria.
Lincoln, as before, gave Douglas the opening and closing speeches,
explaining that he was willing to yield this advantage in order to
secure a hearing from the Democratic portion of his listeners. The
audience was a large one, but not so representative in its character
as that at Springfield. The occasion was made memorable, however, by
the fact that when Lincoln returned home he wrote out and published
his speech. We have therefore the revised text of his argument, and
are able to estimate its character and value. Marking as it does with
unmistakable precision a step in the second period of his intellectual
development, it deserves the careful attention of the student of his
life.

After the lapse of more than a quarter of a century the critical
reader still finds it a model of brevity, directness, terse diction,
exact and lucid historical statement, and full of logical propositions
so short and so strong as to resemble mathematical axioms. Above all
it is pervaded by an elevation of thought and aim that lifts it out of
the commonplace of mere party controversy. Comparing it with his later
speeches, we find it to contain not only the argument of the hour, but
the premonition of the broader issues into which the new struggle was
destined soon to expand.

The main, broad current of his reasoning was to vindicate and restore
the policy of the fathers of the country in the restriction of
slavery; but running through this like a thread of gold was the
demonstration of the essential injustice and immorality of the system.
He said:

This declared indifference but, as I must think, covert zeal for the
spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the
monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it 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;
and especially because it forces so many really good men among
ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of
civil liberty, criticizing the Declaration of Independence and
insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-
interest.

       *       *       *       *       *

The doctrine of self-government is right,--absolutely and eternally
right,--but it has no just application as here attempted. Or perhaps I
should rather say that whether it has such just application, depends
upon whether a negro is not, or is, a man. If he is not a man, in that
case he who is a man may as a matter of self-government do just what
he pleases with him. But if the negro is a man, is it not to that
extent a total destruction of self-government to say that he too shall
not govern himself? When the white man governs himself, that is self-
government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man,
that is more than self-government--that is despotism.

       *       *       *       *       *

What I do say is, that no man is good enough to govern another man
without that other's consent.

       *       *       *       *       *

The master not only governs the slave without his consent, but he
governs him by a set of rules altogether different from those which he
prescribes for himself. Allow all the governed an equal voice in the
government; that, and that only, is self-government.

       *       *       *       *       *

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature--opposition to
it, in his love of justice. These principles are an eternal
antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery
extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must
ceaselessly follow. Repeal the Missouri Compromise--repeal all
compromise--repeal the Declaration of Independence--repeal all past
history--still you cannot repeal human nature.

       *       *       *       *       *

I particularly object to the new position which the avowed principle
of this Nebraska law gives to slavery in the body politic. I object to
it because it assumes that there can be moral right in the enslaving
of one man by another. I object to it as a dangerous dalliance for a
free people,--a sad evidence that feeling prosperity, we forget
right,--that liberty as a principle we have ceased to revere.

       *       *       *       *       *

Little by little, but steadily as man's march to the grave, we have
been giving up the old for the new faith. Near eighty years ago we
began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that
beginning we have run down to the other declaration that for some men
to enslave others is a "sacred right of self-government." These
principles cannot stand together. They are as opposite as God and
mammon.

       *       *       *       *       *

Our Republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify
it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit if not the blood of
the Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of "moral right"
back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of "necessity."
Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it, and there let it
rest in peace. Let us readopt the Declaration of Independence, and the
practices and policy which harmonize with it. Let North and South--let
all Americans--let all lovers of liberty everywhere--join in the great
and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union,
but we shall have so saved it, as to make and to keep it forever
worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it that the succeeding
millions of free, happy people, the world over, shall rise up and call
us blessed to the latest generations.


[Sidenote: 1864.]

The election which, occurred on November 7 resulted disastrously for
Douglas. It was soon found that the Legislature on joint ballot would
probably give a majority for Senator against Shields, the incumbent,
or any other Democrat who had supported the Nebraska bill. Who might
become his successor was more problematical. The opposition majority
was made up of anti-Nebraska Democrats, of what were then called
"abolitionists" (Lovejoy had been elected among these), and finally of
Whigs, who numbered by far the largest portion. But these elements,
except on one single issue, were somewhat irreconcilable. In this
condition of uncertainty a host of candidates sprung up. There was
scarcely a member of Congress from Illinois--indeed, scarcely a
prominent man in the State of any party--who did not conceive the
flattering dream that he himself might become the lucky medium of
compromise and harmony.

Among the Whigs, though there were other aspirants, Lincoln, whose
speeches had contributed so much to win the election, was the natural
and most prominent candidate. According to Western custom, he
addressed a short note to most of the Whig members elect and to other
influential members of the party asking their support. Generally the
replies were not only affirmative but cordial and even enthusiastic.
But a dilemma now arose. Lincoln had been chosen one of the members
from Sangamon County by some 650 majority. The Constitution of
Illinois contained a clause disqualifying members of the Legislature
and certain other designated officials from being elected to the
Senate. Good lawyers generally believed this provision repugnant to
the Constitution of the United States, and that the qualifications of
Senators and Representatives therein prescribed could be neither
increased nor diminished by a State. But the opposition had only a
majority of one or two. If Lincoln resigned his membership in the
Legislature this might destroy the majority. If he refused to resign,
such refusal might carry some member to the Democrats.

[Illustration:   OWEN LOVEJOY.]

At last, upon full deliberation, Lincoln resigned his seat, relying
upon the six or seven hundred majority in Sangamon County to elect
another Whig. It was a delusive trust. A reaction in the Whig ranks
against "abolitionism" suddenly set in. A listless apathy succeeded
the intense excitement and strain of the summer's canvass. Local
rivalries forced the selection of an unpopular candidate. Shrewdly
noting all these signs the Democrats of Sangamon organized what is
known in Western politics as a "still-hunt." They made a feint of
allowing the special election to go by default. They made no
nomination. They permitted an independent Democrat, known under the
sobriquet of "Steamboat Smith," to parade his own name. Up to the very
day of election they gave no public sign, although they had in the
utmost secrecy instructed and drilled their precinct squads. On the
morning of election the working Democrats appeared at every poll,
distributing tickets bearing the name of a single candidate not before
mentioned by any one. They were busy all day long spurring up the
lagging and indifferent, and bringing the aged, the infirm, and the
distant voters in vehicles. Their ruse succeeded. The Whigs were taken
completely by surprise, and in a remarkably small total vote,
McDaniels, Democrat, was chosen by about sixty majority. The Whigs in
other parts of the State were furious at the unlooked-for result, and
the incident served greatly to complicate the senatorial canvass.

Nevertheless it turned out that even after this loss the opposition to
Douglas would have a majority on joint ballot. But how unite this
opposition made up of Whigs, of Democrats, and of so-called
abolitionists? It was just at that moment in the impending revolution
of parties when everything was doubt, distrust, uncertainty. Only the
abolitionists, ever aggressive on all slavery issues, were ready to
lead off in new combinations, but nobody was willing to encounter the
odium of acting with them. They, too, were present at the State Fair,
and heard Lincoln reply to Douglas. At the close of that reply, and
just before Douglas's rejoinder, Lovejoy had announced to the audience
that a Republican State Convention would be immediately held in the
Senate Chamber, extending an invitation to delegates to join in it.
But the appeal fell upon unwilling ears. Scarcely a corporal's guard
left the discussion. The Senate Chamber presented a discouraging array
of empty benches. Only some twenty-six delegates were there to
represent the whole State of Illinois. Nothing daunted, they made
their speeches and read their platform to each other. [Transcriber's
Note: Lengthy footnote (1) relocated to chapter end.] Particularly in
their addresses they praised Lincoln's great speech which they had
just heard, notwithstanding his declarations differed so essentially
from their new-made creed. "Ichabod raved," said the Democratic organ
in derision, "and Lovejoy swelled, and all indorsed the sentiments of
that speech." Not content with this, without consent or consultation,
they placed Lincoln's name in the list of their State Central
Committee.

[Sidenote: Lincoln to Codding, Nov. 27, 1854. MS.]

Matters remained in this attitude until their chairman called a
meeting and notified Lincoln to attend. In reply he sent the following
letter of inquiry: "While I have pen in hand allow me to say that I
have been perplexed to understand why my name was placed on that
committee. I was not consulted on the subject, nor was I apprised of
the appointment until I discovered it by accident two or three weeks
afterwards. I suppose my opposition to the principle of slavery is as
strong as that of any member of the Republican party; but I had also
supposed that the extent to which I feel authorized to carry that
opposition practically was not at all satisfactory to that party. The
leading men who organized, that party were present on the 4th of
October at the discussion between Douglas and myself at Springfield
and had full opportunity to not misunderstand my position. Do I
misunderstand them?"

Whether this letter was ever replied to is uncertain, though
improbable. No doubt it led to conferences during the meeting of the
Legislature, early in the year 1855, when the senatorial question came
on for decision. It has been suggested that Lincoln made dishonorable
concessions of principle to get the votes of Lovejoy and his friends.
The statement is too absurd to merit serious contradiction. The real
fact is that Mr. Giddings, then in Congress, wrote to Lovejoy and
others to support Lincoln. Various causes delayed the event, but
finally, on February 8, 1855, the Legislature went into joint ballot.
A number of candidates were put in nomination, but the contest
narrowed itself down to three. Abraham Lincoln was supported by the
Whigs and Free-soilers; James Shields by the Douglas-Democrats. As
between these two, Lincoln would easily have succeeded, had not five
anti-Nebraska Democrats refused under any circumstances to vote for
him or any other Whig, [Footnote: "All that remained of the anti-
Nebraska force, excepting Judd, Cook, Palmer, Baker, and Allen, of
Madison, and two or three of the secret Matteson men, would go into
caucus, and I could get the nomination of that caucus. But the three
Senators and one of the two Representatives above named 'could never
vote for a Whig,' and this incensed some twenty Whigs to 'think' they
would never vote for the man of the five."--Lincoln to the Hon. E. B.
Washburne, February 9, 1855. MS.] and steadily voted during six
ballots for Lyman Trumbull. The first vote stood: Lincoln, 45;
Shields, 41; Trumbull, 5; scattering, 8. Two or three Whigs had thrown
away their votes on this first ballot, and though they now returned
and adhered to him, the demoralizing example was imitated by various
members of the coalition. On the sixth ballot the vote stood: Lincoln,
36; Shields, 41; Trumbull, 8; scattering, 13.

At this stage of the proceedings the Douglas-Democrats executed a
change of front, and, dropping Shields, threw nearly their full
strength, 44 votes, for Governor Joel A. Matteson. The maneuver was
not unexpected, for though the Governor and the party newspapers had
hitherto vehemently asserted he was not a candidate, the political
signs plainly contradicted such statement. Matteson had assumed a
quasi-independent position; kept himself non-commital on Nebraska, and
opposed Douglas's scheme of tonnage duties to improve Western rivers
and harbors. Like the majority of Western men he had risen from humble
beginnings, and from being an emigrant, farmer, merchant, and
manufacturer, had become Governor. In office he had devoted himself
specially to the economical and material questions affecting Illinois,
and in this role had a wide popularity with all classes and parties.

The substitution of his name was a promising device. The ninth ballot
gave him 47 votes. The opposition under the excitement of non-partisan
appeals began to break up. Of the remaining votes Lincoln received 15,
Trumbull 35, scattering, 1. In this critical moment Lincoln exhibited
a generosity and a sagacity above the range of the mere politician's
vision. He urged upon his Whig friends and supporters to drop his own
name and join without hesitation or conditions in the election of
Trumbull. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (2) relocated to
chapter end.] This was putting their fidelity to a bitter trial. Upon
every issue but the Nebraska bill Trumbull still avowed himself an
uncompromising Democrat. The faction of five had been stubborn to
defiance and disaster. They would compel the mountain to go to
Mahomet. It seemed an unconditional surrender of the Whig party. But
such was Lincoln's influence upon his adherents that at his request
they made the sweeping sacrifice, though with lingering sorrow. The
proceedings had wasted away a long afternoon of most tedious suspense.
Evening had come; the gas was lighted in the hall, the galleries were
filled with eager women, the lobbies were packed with restless and
anxious men. All had forgotten the lapse of hours, their fatigue and
their hunger, in the absorption of the fluctuating contest. The
roll-call of the tenth ballot still showed 15 votes for Lincoln, 36
for Trumbull, 47 for Matteson. Amid an excitement which was becoming
painful, and in a silence where spectators scarcely breathed, Judge
Stephen T. Logan, Lincoln's nearest and warmest friend, arose and
announced the purpose of the remaining Whigs to decide the contest,
whereupon the entire fifteen changed their votes to Trumbull. This
gave him the necessary number of fifty-one, and elected him a Senator
of the United States.

At that early day an election to the United States Senate must have
seemed to Lincoln a most brilliant political prize, the highest,
perhaps, to which he then had any hopes of ever attaining. To school
himself to its loss with becoming resignation, to wait hopefully
during four years for another opportunity, to engage in the dangerous
and difficult task of persuading his friends to leave their old and
join a new political party only yet dimly foreshadowed, to watch the
chances of maintaining his party leadership, furnished sufficient
occupation for the leisure afforded by the necessities of his law
practice. It is interesting to know that he did more; that amid the
consideration of mere personal interests he was vigilantly pursuing
the study of the higher phases of the great moral and political
struggle on which the nation was just entering, little dreaming,
however, of the part he was destined to act in it. A letter of his
written to a friend in Kentucky in the following year shows us that he
had nearly reached a maturity of conviction on the nature of the
slavery conflict--his belief that the nation could not permanently
endure half slave and half free--which he did not publicly express
until the beginning of his famous senatorial campaign of 1858:

[Sidenote: MS.]


   SPRINGFIELD, ILLS., August 15, 1855
   Hon. GEO. ROBERTSON, Lexington, Ky.

MY DEAR SIR: The volume you left for me has been received. I am really
grateful for the honor of your kind remembrance, as well as for the
book. The partial reading I have already given it has afforded me much
of both pleasure and instruction. It was new to me that the exact
question which led to the Missouri Compromise had arisen before it
arose in regard to Missouri, and that you had taken so prominent a
part in it. Your short but able and patriotic speech on that occasion
has not been improved upon since by those holding the same views; and,
with all the lights you then had, the views you took appear to me as
very reasonable.

You are not a friend of slavery in the abstract. In that speech you
spoke of "the peaceful extinction of slavery" and used other
expressions indicating your belief that the thing was, at some time,
to have an end. Since then we have had thirty-six years of experience;
and this experience has demonstrated, I think, that there is no
peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us. The signal failure
of Henry Clay and other good and great men, in 1849, to effect
anything in favor of gradual emancipation in Kentucky, together with a
thousand other signs, extinguishes that hope utterly. On the question
of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were
the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called
the maxim that "all men are created equal" a self-evident truth; but
now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves
ourselves, we have become so greedy to be _masters_ that we call
the same maxim "a self-evident lie." The Fourth of July has not quite
dwindled away; it is still a great day for burning fire-crackers!

That spirit which desired the peaceful extinction of slavery has
itself become extinct with the occasion and the _men_ of the
Revolution. Under the impulse of that occasion, nearly half the States
adopted systems of emancipation at once; and it is a significant fact
that not a single State has done the like since. So far as peaceful,
voluntary emancipation is concerned, the condition of the negro slave
in America, scarcely less terrible to the contemplation of a free
mind, is now as fixed and hopeless of change for the better as that of
the lost souls of the finally impenitent. The Autocrat of all the
Russias will resign his crown and proclaim his subjects free
republicans, sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up
their slaves.

Our political problem now is, "Can we as a nation continue together
_permanently_--_forever_--half slave, and half free?" The
problem is too mighty for me. May God in his mercy superintend the
solution. Your much obliged friend, and humble servant,

A. LINCOLN.


The reader has doubtless already noted in his mind the curious
historical coincidence which so soon followed the foregoing
speculative affirmation. On the day before Lincoln's first
inauguration as President of the United States, the "Autocrat of all
the Russias," Alexander II., by imperial decree emancipated his serfs;
while six weeks after the inauguration, the "American masters," headed
by Jefferson Davis, began the greatest war of modern times, to
perpetuate and spread the institution of slavery.

[Relocated Footnote (1): Their resolutions were radical for that day,
but not so extreme as was generally feared. On the slavery question
they declared their purpose:

To restore Kansas and Nebraska to the position of free territories;
that as the Constitution of the United States vests in the States and
not in Congress the power to legislate for the rendition of fugitives
from labor, to repeal and entirely abrogate the fugitive slave law; to
restrict slavery to those States in which it exists; to prohibit the
admission of any more slave States; to abolish slavery in the District
of Columbia; to exclude slavery from all territories over which the
general Government has exclusive jurisdiction, and finally to resist
the acquirement of any more territories unless slavery shall have been
therein forever prohibited.]

[Relocated Footnote (2): "In the meantime our friends, with a view of
detaining our expected bolters, had been turning from me to Trumbull
till he had risen to 35 and I had been reduced to 15. These would
never desert me except by my direction; but I became satisfied that if
we could prevent Matteson's election one or two ballots more, we could
not possibly do so a single ballot after my friends should begin to
return to me from Trumbull. So I determined to strike at once; and
accordingly advised my remaining friends to go for him, which they
did, and elected him on that, the tenth ballot. Such is the way the
thing was done. I think you would have done the same under the
circumstances, though Judge Davis, who came down this morning,
declares he never would have consented to the 47 [opposition] men
being controlled by the five. I regret my defeat moderately, but am
not nervous about it."--Lincoln to Washburne, February 9, 1855. MS.]




CHAPTER XXII

THE BORDER RUFFIANS


[Sidenote: May 30, 1854.]

The passage of the Nebraska bill and the hurried extinction of the
Indian title opened nearly fifteen million acres of public lands to
settlement and purchase. The whole of this vast area was yet
practically tenantless. In all of Kansas there were only three
military posts, eight or ten missions or schools attached to Indian
reservations, and some scores of roving hunters and traders or
squatters in the vicinity of a few well-known camping stations on the
two principal emigrant and trading routes, one leading southward to
New Mexico, the other northward towards Oregon. But such had been the
interest created by the political excitement, and so favorable were
the newspaper reports of the location, soil, and climate of the new
country, that a few months sufficed to change Kansas from a closed and
prohibited Indian reserve to the emigrant's land of promise.

Douglas's oracular "stump speech" in the Nebraska bill transferred the
struggle for slavery extension from Congress to the newly organized
territories. "Come on, then, gentlemen of the slave States," said
Seward in a Senate discussion; "since there is no escaping your
challenge, I accept it in behalf of Freedom. We will engage in
competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to
the side that is stronger in numbers as it is in right." With fifteen
millions in the North against ten millions in the South, the result
could not be in doubt.

[Sidenote: 1854.]

Feeling secure in this evident advantage, the North, in general,
trusted to the ordinary and natural movement of emigration. To the
rule, however, there were a few exceptions. Some members of Congress,
incensed at the tactics of the Nebraska leaders, formed a Kansas Aid
Society in Washington City and contributed money to assist emigrants.
[Footnote: Testimony of the Hon. Daniel Mace, page 829, House Report
No. 200, 1st Session, 34th Congress. "Howard Report."] Beyond this
initiatory step they do not seem to have had any personal
participation in it, and its office and working operations were soon
transferred to New York. Sundry similar organizations were also formed
by private individuals. The most notable of these was a Boston company
chartered in April, named "The Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company."
The charter was soon abandoned, and the company reorganized June 13th,
under private articles of association; [Footnote: E. E. Hale, "Kansas
and Nebraska," p. 229. It was once more incorporated February 21, 1855,
under the name of "The New England Emigrant Aid Company."] and in this
condition it became virtually the working agency of philanthropic
citizens of New England, headed by Eli Thayer. There were several
auxiliary societies and a few independent associations. But from what
then and afterwards came to light, it appears that Mr. Thayer's
society was the only one whose operations reached any degree of
success deserving historical notice.

This company gave publicity, through newspaper advertisements and
pamphlets, of its willingness to organize emigrants into companies, to
send them to Kansas in charge of trustworthy agents, and to obtain
transportation for them at reduced rates. It also sent machinery for a
few saw-mills, the types and presses for two or three newspapers, and
erected a hotel or boarding-house to accommodate newcomers. It
purchased and held only the land necessary to locate these business
enterprises. It engaged in no speculation, paid no fare of any
emigrants, and expressly disavowed the requirement of any oath or
pledge of political sentiment or conduct. All these transactions were
open, honest, and lawful, carefully avoiding even the implication of
moral or political wrong.

Under the auspices of this society a pioneer company of about thirty
persons arrived in Kansas in July, 1854, and founded the town of
Lawrence. Other parties followed from time to time, sending out off-
shoots, but mainly increasing the parent settlement, until next to
Fort Leavenworth, the principal military post, Lawrence became the
leading town of the Territory. The erection of the society hotel, the
society saw-mills, and the establishment of a newspaper also gave it
leadership in business and politics as well as population. This humane
and praiseworthy enterprise has been gravely charged with the origin
and responsibility of the political disorders which folio wed in
Kansas. Nothing could be further from the truth. Before it had
assisted five hundred persons to their new homes, the Territory had by
regular and individual immigration, mainly from the Western States,
acquired a population of 8601 souls, as disclosed by the official
census taken after the first summer's arrivals, and before those of
the second had begun. It needs only this statement to refute the
political slander so industriously repeated in high places against the
Lawrence immigrants.

Deeper causes than the philanthropy or zeal of a few Boston
enthusiasts were actively at work. The balance of power between the
free and slave States had been destroyed by the admission of
California. To restore that balance the South had consummated the
repeal of the Missouri Compromise as a first and indispensable step.
The second equally indispensable step was to seize the political
control of the new Territory.

Kansas lay directly west of the State of Missouri. For a frontier
State, the pro-slavery sentiment of Missouri was very pronounced,
especially along the Kansas border. The establishment of slavery in
this new region had formed the subject of public and local discussion
before the Nebraska bill, and Senator Atchison had promised his
western Missouri constituents to labor for such a result. From the
time the unlooked-for course of Senator Douglas made it a practical
possibility, Atchison was all zeal and devotion to this object, which
he declared was almost as dear to him as his hope of heaven. When it
finally became a question to be decided perhaps by a single frontier
election, his zeal and work in that behalf were many times multiplied.

Current reports and subsequent developments leave no doubt that this
Senator, being then acting Vice-President of the United States,
[Footnote: By virtue of his office as President _pro tempore_ of
the United States Senate. The Vice-Presidency was vacant; William R.
King, chosen with President Pierce, had died.] immediately after the
August adjournment of Congress hurried away to his home in Platte
County, Missouri, and from that favorable situation personally
organized a vast conspiracy, running through nearly all the counties
of his State adjoining the Kansas border, to decide the slavery
question for Kansas by Missouri votes. Secret societies under various
names, such as "Blue Lodges," "Friends' Society," "Social Band," "Sons
of the South," were organized and affiliated, with all the necessary
machinery of oaths, grips, signs, passwords, and badges. The plan and
object of the movement were in general kept well concealed. Such
publicity as could not be avoided served rather to fan the excitement,
strengthen the hesitating, and frown down all dissent and opposition.
Long before the time for action arrived, the idea that Kansas must be
a slave State had grown into a fixed and determined public sentiment.

The fact is not singular if we remember the peculiar situation of that
locality. It was before the great expansion of railroads, and western
Missouri could only be conveniently approached by the single
commercial link of steamboat travel on the turbid and dangerous
Missouri River. Covering the rich, alluvial lands along the majestic
but erratic stream lay the heavy slave counties of the State, wealthy
from the valuable slave products of hemp and tobacco. Slave tenure and
slavery traditions in Missouri dated back a full century, to the
remote days when the American Bottom opposite St. Louis was one of the
chief bread and meat producing settlements of New France, sending
supplies northward to Mackinaw, southward to New Orleans, and eastward
to Fort Duquesne. When in 1763 "the Illinois" country passed by treaty
under the British flag, the old French colonists, with their slaves,
almost in a body crossed the Mississippi into then Spanish territory,
and with fresh additions from New Orleans founded St. Louis and its
outlying settlements; and these, growing with a steady thrift,
extended themselves up the Missouri River.

Slavery was thus identified with the whole history and also with the
apparent prosperity of the State; and it had in recent times made many
of these Western counties rich. The free State of Iowa lay a hundred
miles to the north, and the free State of Illinois two hundred to the
east; a wall of Indian tribes guarded the west. Should all this
security be swept away, and their runaways find a free route to Canada
by simply crossing the county line? Should the price of their personal
"chattels" fall one-half for want of a new market? With nearly fifteen
million acres of fresh land to choose from for the present outlay of a
trifling preemption fee, should not the poor white compel his single
"black boy" to follow him a few miles west, and hoe his tobacco for
him on the new fat bottom-lands of the Kaw River?

[Speech in Platte County. Wm. Phillips, "Conquest of Kansas," p. 48]

Even such off-hand reasoning was probably confined to the more
intelligent. For the greater part these ignorant but stubborn and
strong-willed frontiersmen were moved by a bitter hatred of
"abolitionism," because the word had now been used for half a century
by partisans high and low--Governors, Senators, Presidents--as a term
of opprobrium and a synonym of crime. With these as fathers of the
faith and the Vice-President of the United States as an apostle to
preach a new crusade, is it astonishing that there was no lack of
listeners, converts, and volunteers? Senator Atchison spoke in no
ambiguous words. "When you reside in one day's journey of the
Territory," said he, "and when your peace, your quiet, and your
property depend upon your action, you can without an exertion send
five hundred of your young men who will vote in favor of your
institutions. Should each county in the State of Missouri only do its
duty, the question will be decided quietly and peaceably at the
ballot-box. If we are defeated, then Missouri and the other Southern
States will have shown themselves recreant to their interests and will
deserve their fate."

Western water transportation found its natural terminus where the Kaw
or Kansas River empties into the Missouri. From this circumstance that
locality had for years been the starting-point for the overland
caravans or wagon-trains. Fort Leavenworth was the point of rendezvous
for those going to California and Oregon; Independence the place of
outfit for those destined to Santa Fe. Grouped about these two points
were half a dozen heavy slaveholding counties of Missouri,--Platte,
Clay, Bay, Jackson, Lafayette, Saline, and others. Platte County, the
home of Senator Atchison, was their Western outpost, and lay like an
outspread fan in the great bend of the Missouri, commanding from
thirty to fifty miles of river front. Nearly all of Kansas attainable
by the usual water transportation and travel lay immediately opposite.
A glance at the map will show how easily local sentiment could
influence or dominate commerce and travel on the Missouri River. In
this connection the character of the population must be taken into
account. The spirit of intolerance which once pervaded all
slaveholding communities, in whatever State of the Union, was here
rampant to an unusual degree. The rural inhabitants were marked by the
strong characteristics of the frontier,--fondness of adventure,
recklessness of exposure or danger to life, a boastful assertion of
personal right, privilege, or prowess, a daily and hourly familiarity
with the use of fire-arms. These again were heightened by two special
influences--the presence of Indian tribes whose reservations lay just
across the border, and the advent and preparation of each summer's
emigration across the great plains. The "Argonauts of '49" were not
all gamblers and cut-throats of border song and story. Generally,
however, they were men of decision and will, all mere drift-wood in
the great current of gold-seekers being soon washed ashore and left
behind. Until they finished their last dinner at the Planter's House
in St. Louis, the fledgelings of cities, the lawyers, doctors,
merchants, and speculators, were in or of civilization. Perhaps they
even resisted the contamination of cards and drink, profanity and
revolver salutations, while the gilded and tinseled Missouri River
steamboat bore them for three days against its muddy current and
boiling eddies to meet their company and their outfit.

[Illustration:   DAVID R. ATCHISON.]

But once landed at Independence or Leavenworth, they were of the
frontier, of the wilderness, of the desert. Here they donned their
garments of red flannel and coarse cloth or buckskin, thrust the legs
of their trousers inside the tops of their heavy boots, and wore their
bowie-knife or revolver in their outside belt. From this departure all
were subject to the inexorable equality of the camp. Eating, sleeping,
standing guard, tugging at the wheel or defending life and property,--
there was no rank between captain and cook, employer and employed,
savant and ignoramus, but the distribution of duty and the assignment
of responsibility. Toil and exposure, hunger and thirst, wind and
storm, danger in camp quarrel or Indian ambush, were the familiar and
ordinary vicissitudes of a three months' journey in a caravan of the
plains.

All this movement created business for these Missouri River towns.
Their few inhabitants drove a brisk trade in shirts and blankets, guns
and powder, hard bread and bacon, wagons and live stock. Petty
commerce busies itself with the art of gain rather than with the labor
of reform. Indian and emigrant traders did not too closely scan their
sources of profit. The precepts of the divine and the penalties of the
human law sat lightly upon them. As yet many of these frontier towns
were small hamlets, without even a pretext of police regulations.
Passion, therefore, ran comparatively a free course, and the personal
redress of private wrongs was only held in check by the broad and
acknowledged right of self-defense. Since 1849 and 1850, when the gold
fever was at its height, emigration across the plains had slackened,
and the eagerness for a revival of this local traffic undoubtedly
exerted its influence in procuring the opening of the territories in
1854. The noise and excitement created by the passage of the Kansas-
Nebraska Act awakened the hope of frontier traders and speculators,
who now greedily watched all the budding chances of gain. Under such
circumstances these opportunities to the shrewd, to the bold, and
especially to the unscrupulous, are many. Cheap lands, unlimited town
lots, eligible trading sites, the multitude of franchises and
privileges within the control of a territorial legislature, the
offices to be distributed under party favoritism, offer an abundant
lure to enterprise and far more to craft.

It was to such a population and under such a condition of things that
Senator Atchison went to his home in Platte County in the summer of
1854 to preach his pro-slavery crusade against Kansas. His personal
convictions, his party faith, his senatorial reflection, and his
financial fortunes, were all involved in the scheme. With the help of
the Stringfellows and other zealous co-workers, the town of Atchison
was founded and named in his honor, and the "Squatter Sovereign"
newspaper established, which displayed his name as a candidate for the
presidency. The good-will of the Administration was manifested by
making one of the editors postmaster at the new town.

President Pierce appointed as Governor of Kansas Territory Andrew H.
Keeder, a member of his own party, from the free State of
Pennsylvania. He had neither prominent reputation nor conspicuous
ability, though under trying circumstances he afterwards showed
diligence, judgment, integrity, and more than ordinary firmness and
independence. It is to be presumed that his fitness in a partisan
light had been thoroughly scrutinized by both President and Senate.
Upon the vital point the investigation was deemed conclusive. "He was
appointed," the "Washington Union" naively stated when the matter was
first called in question, "under the strongest assurance that he was
strictly and honestly a national man. We are able to state further, on
very reliable authority, that whilst Governor Reeder was in
Washington, at the time of his appointment, he conversed with Southern
gentlemen on the subject of slavery, and assured them that he had no
more scruples in buying a slave than a horse, and regretted that he
had not money to purchase a number to carry with him to Kansas." With
him were appointed three Federal judges, a secretary, a marshal, and
an attorney for the Territory, all doubtless considered equally
trustworthy on the slavery question. The organic act invested the
governor with very comprehensive powers to initiate the organization
of the new Territory. Until the first legislature should be duly
constituted, he had authority to fix election days, define election
districts, direct the mode of returns, take a census, locate the
temporary seat of government, declare vacancies, order new elections
to fill them, besides the usual and permanent powers of an executive.

[Sidenote: Ex-Governor Reeder's Testimony, "Howard Report," pp. 933-985.]

Arriving at Leavenworth in October, 1854, Governor Reeder was not long
in discovering the designs of the Missourians. He was urged to order
the immediate election of a territorial legislature. The conspirators
had already spent some months in organizing their "Blue Lodges," and
now desired at once to control the political power of the Territory.
But the Governor had too much manliness to become the mere pliant tool
they wished to make him. He resented their dictation; he made a tour
of inspection through the new settlements; and, acting on his own
judgment, on his return issued a proclamation for a simple election of
a delegate to Congress. At the appearance of this proclamation Platte
County took alarm, and held a meeting on the Kansas side of the river,
to intimidate him with violent speeches and a significant memorial.
The Governor retorted in a letter that the meeting was composed of
Missourians, and that he should resist outside interference from
friend, foe, or faction. [Footnote: Governor Reeder to Gwiner and
others, Nov. 21, 1854; copied into "National Era," Jan. 4, 1855.]
Pocketing this rebuff as best they might, Senator Atchison and his
"Blue Lodges" nevertheless held fast to their purpose. Paper
proclamations and lectures on abstract rights counted little against
the practical measures they had matured. November 29th, the day of
election for delegate, finally arrived, and with it a formidable
invasion of Missouri voters at more than half the polling places
appointed in the Governor's proclamation.

In frontier life it was an every-day experience to make excursions for
business or pleasure, singly or in parties, requiring two or three
consecutive days, perhaps a night or two of camping out, for which
saddle-horses and farm-wagons furnished ready transportation; and
nothing was more common than concerted neighborhood efforts for
improvement, protection, or amusement. On such occasions neighborly
sentiment and comity required every man to drop his axe, or unhitch
from the plow in the furrow, to further the real or imaginary weal of
the community. In urgent instances non-compliance was fatal to the
peace and comfort and sometimes to the personal safety of the settler.
The movement described above had been in active preparation for weeks,
controlled by strong and secret combinations, and many unwilling
participants were doubtless swept into it by an excited public opinion
they dared not resist.

A day or two before the election the whole Missouri border was astir.
Horses were saddled, teams harnessed, wagons loaded with tents,
forage, and provisions, bowie-knives buckled on, revolvers and rifles
loaded, and flags and inscriptions flung to the breeze by the more
demonstrative and daring. Crossing the river-ferries from the upper
counties, and passing unobstructed over the State line by the prairie-
roads and trails from the lower, many of them camped that night at the
nearest polls, while others pushed on fifty or a hundred miles to the
sparsely settled election districts of the interior. As they passed
along, the more scrupulous went through the empty form of an imaginary
settlement, by nailing a card to a tree, driving a stake into the
ground, or inscribing their names in a claim register, prepared in
haste by the invading party. The indifferent satisfied themselves with
mere mental resolves to become settlers. The utterly reckless silenced
all scruples in profanity and drunkenness.

[Sidenote: Nov. 29, 1854.]

On election morning the few real squatters of Kansas, endowed with
Douglas's delusive boon of "popular sovereignty," witnessed with mixed
indignation and terror acts of summary usurpation. Judges of election
were dispossessed and set aside by intimidation or stratagem, and pro-
slavery judges substituted without the slightest regard to regularity
or law; judges' and voters' oaths were declared unnecessary, or
explained away upon newly-invented phrases and absurd subtleties.
"Where there's a will, there's a way," in wrong and crime, as well as
in honest purpose and deed; and by more dishonest devices than we can
stop fully to record the ballot-boxes were filled, through invasion,
false swearing, riot, and usurpation, with ballots for Whitfield, the
pro-slavery candidate for delegate to Congress, at nine out of the
seventeen polling places--showing, upon a careful scrutiny afterwards
made by a committee of Congress, an aggregate of 1729 illegal votes,
and only 1114 legal ones.

This mockery of an election completed, the valiant Knights of the Blue
Lodge, the fraternal members of the Social Band, the philanthropic
groups of the Friends' Society, and the chivalric Sons of the South
returned to their axe and plow, society lodge and bar-room haunt, to
exult in a victory for Missouri and slavery over the "Abolition hordes
and nigger thieves of the Emigrant Aid Society." The "Border Ruffians"
of Missouri had written their preliminary chapter in the annals of
Kansas. The published statements of the Emigrant Aid Society show that
up to the date of election it had sent only a few hundred men, women,
and children to the Territory. Why such a prodigious effort was deemed
necessary to overcome the votes and influence of this paltry handful
of "paupers who had sold themselves to Eli Thayer and Co." was never
explained.




CHAPTER XXIII

THE BOGUS LAWS


As the event proved, the invasion of border ruffians to decide the
first election in Kansas had been entirely unnecessary. Even without
counting the illegal votes, the pro-slavery candidate for delegate was
chosen by a plurality. He had held the office of Indian Agent, and his
acquaintance, experience, and the principal fact that he was the
favorite of the conspirators gave him an easy victory. Governor Reeder
issued his certificate of election without delay, and Whitfield
hurried away to Washington to enjoy his new honors, taking his seat in
the House of Representatives within three weeks after his election.
Atchison, however, did not follow his example. Congress met on the
first Monday of December, and the services of the Acting Vice-
President were needed in the Senate Chamber. But of such importance
did he deem the success of the conspiracy in which he was the leader,
that a few weeks before the session he wrote a short letter to the
Senate, giving notice of his probable absence and advising the
appointment of a new presiding officer.

[Sidenote: Reeder Testimony, Howard Report, p. 934.]

[Sidenote: Howard Report, p. 9.]

As a necessary preliminary to organizing the government of the
Territory, Governor Reeder, under the authority of the organic act,
proceeded to take a census of its inhabitants. This work, carried on
and completed in the months of January and February, 1855, disclosed a
total population of 8601 souls, of whom 2905 were voters. With this
enumeration as a definite guide, the Governor made an apportionment,
established election districts, and, appointing the necessary officers
to conduct it, fixed upon the 30th of March, 1855, as the day for
electing the territorial legislature. Governor Reeder had come to
Kansas an ardent Democrat, a firm friend of the Pierce Administration,
and an enthusiastic disciple of the new Democratic dogma of "Popular
Sovereignty." But his short experience with Atchison's Border Ruffians
had already rudely shaken his partisanship. The events of the November
election exposed the designs of the pro-slavery conspiracy, and no
course was left him but to become either its ally or its enemy.

[Sidenote: Reeder instructions, Howard Report, pp. 107, 935.]

In behalf of justice, as well as to preserve what he still fondly
cherished as a vital party principle, he determined by every means in
his power to secure a fair election. In his appointment of election
officers, census-takers, justices of the peace, and constables, he was
careful to make his selections from both factions as fairly as
possible, excepting that, as a greater and necessary safeguard against
another invasion, he designated in the several election districts
along the Missouri border two "free-State" men and one pro-slavery man
to act as judges at each poll. He prescribed distinct and rigid rules
for the conduct of the election; ordering among other things that the
judges should be sworn, that constables should attend and preserve
order, and that voters must be actual residents to the exclusion of
any other home.

All his precautions came to nought. This election of a territorial
legislature, which, as then popularly believed, might determine by the
enactment of laws whether Kansas should become a free or a slave
State, was precisely the coveted opportunity for which the Border
Ruffian conspiracy had been organized. Its interference in the
November election served as a practical experiment to demonstrate its
efficiency and to perfect its plans. The alleged doings of the
Emigrant Aid Societies furnished a convenient and plausible pretext;
extravagant rumors were now circulated as to the plans and numbers of
the Eastern emigrants; it was industriously reported that they were
coming twenty thousand strong to control the election; and by these
misrepresentations the whole border was wrought up into the fervor of
a pro-slavery crusade.

[Sidenote: 1855.]

[Sidenote: Howard Report, pp. 9 to 44.]

[Sidenote: Howard Report, p. 30.]

[Sidenote: Ibid., p. 34.]

When the 30th of March, election day, finally arrived, the conspiracy
had once more mustered its organized army of invasion, and five
thousand Missouri Border Ruffians, in different camps, bands, and
squads, held practical possession of nearly every election district in
the Territory. Riot, violence, intimidation, destruction of
ballot-boxes, expulsion and substitution of judges, neglect or refusal
to administer the prescribed oaths, _viva voce_ voting, repeated
voting on one side, and obstruction and dispersion of voters on the
other, were common incidents; no one dared to resist the acts of the
invaders, since they were armed and commanded in frontier if not in
military fashion, in many cases by men whose names then or after-wards
were prominent or notorious. Of the votes cast, 1410 were upon a
subsequent examination found to have been legal, while 4908 were
illegal. Of the total number, 5427 votes were given to the pro-slavery
and only 791 to the free-State candidates. Upon a careful collation of
evidence the investigating committee of Congress was of the opinion
that the vote would have returned a free-State legislature if the
election had been confined to the actual settlers; as conducted,
however, it showed a nominal majority for every pro-slavery candidate
but one.

Governor Reeder had feared a repetition of the November frauds; but it
is evident that he had no conception of so extensive an invasion. It
is probable, too, that information of its full enormity did not
immediately reach him. Meanwhile the five days prescribed in his
proclamation for receiving notices of contest elapsed. The Governor
had removed his executive office to Shawnee Mission. At this place,
and at the neighboring town of Westport, Missouri, only four miles
distant, a majority of the persons claiming to have been elected now
assembled and became clamorous for their certificates. [Footnote:
Testimony of Ex-Governor Reeder, Howard Report, pp. 935-9; also
Stringfellow's testimony, p. 855.] A committee of their number
presented a formal written demand for the same; they strenuously
denied his right to question the legality of the election, and threats
against the Governor's life in case of his refusal to issue them
became alarmingly frequent. Their regular consultations, their open
denunciations, and their hints at violence, while they did not
entirely overawe the Governor, so far produced their intended effect
upon him that he assembled a band of his personal friends for his own
protection. On the 6th of April, one week after election, the Governor
announced his decision upon the returns. On one side of the room were
himself and his armed adherents; on the other side the would-be
members in superior numbers, with their pistols and bowie-knives.
Under this virtual duress the Governor issued certificates of election
to all but about one-third of the claimants; and the returns in these
cases he rejected, not because of alleged force or fraud, but on
account of palpable defects in the papers. [Transcriber's Note:
Lengthy footnote relocated to chapter end.]

The issue of certificates was a fatal error in Governor Reeder's
action. It endowed the notoriously illegal Legislature with a
technical authority, and a few weeks later, when he went to Washington
city to invoke the help of the Pierce Administration against the
usurpation, it enabled Attorney-General Cushing (if current report was
true) to taunt him with the reply: "You state that this Legislature is
the creature of force and fraud; which shall we believe--your official
certificate under seal, or your subsequent declarations to us in
private conversation?"

[Sidenote: April 16, 1855.]

The question of the certificates disposed of, the next point of
interest was to determine at what place the Legislature should
assemble. Under the organic act the Governor had authority to appoint
the first meeting, and it soon became known that his mind was fixed
upon the embryo town of Pawnee, adjoining the military post of Fort
Riley, situated on the Kansas River, 110 miles from the Missouri line.
Against this exile, however, Stringfellow and his Border Ruffian
lawmakers protested in an energetic memorial, asking to be called
together at the Shawnee Mission, supplemented by the private threat
that even if they convened at Pawnee, they would adjourn and come back
the day after. If the Governor harbored any remaining doubt that this
bogus Legislature intended to assume and maintain the mastery, it
speedily vanished. Their hostility grew open and defiant; they classed
him as a free-State man, an "abolitionist," and it became only too
evident that he would gradually be shorn of power and degraded from
the position of Territorial Executive to that of a mere puppet. Having
nothing to gain by further concession, he adhered to his original
plan, issued his proclamation convening the Legislature at Pawnee on
the first Monday in July, and immediately started for Washington to
make a direct appeal to President Pierce.

[Sidenote: "Squatter Sovereign," June 5, 1855.]

How Governor Reeder failed in this last hope of redress and support,
how he found the Kansas conspiracy as strong at Washington as on the
Missouri border, will appear further along. On the 2d of July the
Governor and the Legislature met at the town of Pawnee, where he had
convoked them--a magnificent prairie site, but containing as yet only
three buildings, one to hold sessions in, and two to furnish food and
lodging. The Governor's friends declared the accommodations ample; the
Missourians on the contrary made affidavit that they were compelled to
camp out and cook their own rations. The actual facts had little to do
with the predetermination of the members. Stringfellow had written in
his paper, the "Squatter Sovereign," three weeks before: "We hope no
one will be silly enough to suppose the Governor has power to compel
us to stay at Pawnee during the entire session. We will, of course,
have to 'trot' out at the bidding of his Excellency,--but we will trot
him back next day at our bidding."

[Sidenote: "House Journal Kansas Territory," 1855, p. 12.]

[Sidenote: "Journal of Council, Kansas Territory," p. 12.]

[Sidenote: "House Journal Kansas Territory," 1855, p. 29.]

The prediction was literally fulfilled. Both branches organized
without delay, the House choosing John H. Stringfellow for Speaker.
Before the Governor's message was delivered on the following day, the
House had already passed, under suspended rules, "An act to remove the
seat of government temporarily to the Shawnee Manual Labor School,"
which act the Council as promptly concurred in. The Governor vetoed
the bill, but it was at once passed over his veto. By the end of the
week the Legislature had departed from the budding capital to return
no more.

[Sidenote: Ibid., p. 30.]

The Governor was perforce obliged to follow his migratory Solons, who
adhered to their purpose despite his public or private protests, and
who reassembled at Shawnee Mission, or more correctly the Shawnee
Manual Labor School, on the 16th of July. Shawnee Mission was one of
our many national experiments in civilizing Indian tribes. This
philanthropic institution, nourished by the Federal treasury, was
presided over by the Rev. Thomas Johnson. The town of Westport, which
could boast of a post office, lay only four miles to the eastward, on
the Missouri side of the State line, and was a noted pro-slavery
stronghold. There were several large brick buildings at the Mission
capable of accommodating the Legislature with halls and lodging-rooms;
its nearness to an established post office, and its contiguity to
Missouri pro-slavery sentiment were elements probably not lost sight
of. Mr. Johnson, who had formerly been a Missouri slaveholder, was at
the March election chosen a member of the Territorial Council, which
in due time made him its presiding officer; and the bogus Legislature
at Shawnee Mission was therefore in a certain sense under its own
"vine and fig-tree."

[Illustration:   ANDREW H. REEDER.]

[Sidenote: "Squatter Sovereign," July 17, 1855.]

[Sidenote: Ibid., June 19, 1855.]

[Sidenote: "House Journal Kansas Territory," 1856, p. 12.]

The two branches of the Legislature, the Council with the Rev. Thomas
Johnson as President, and the House with Stringfellow of the "Squatter
Sovereign" as Speaker, now turned their attention seriously to the
pro-slavery work before them. The conspirators were shrewd enough to
realize their victory. "To have intimated one year ago," said the
Speaker in his address of thanks, "that such a result would be wrought
out, one would have been thought a visionary; to have predicted that
to-day a legislature would assemble, almost unanimously pro-slavery,
and with myself for Speaker, I would have been thought mad." The
programme had already been announced in the "Squatter Sovereign" some
weeks before. "The South must and will prevail. If the Southern people
but half do their duty, in less than nine months from this day Kansas
will have formed a constitution and be knocking at the door for
admission.... In the session of the United States Senate in 1856, two
Senators from the slave-holding State of Kansas will take their seats,
and abolitionism will be forever driven from our halls of
legislation." Against this triumphant attitude Governor Reeder was
despondent and powerless. The language of his message plainly betrayed
the political dilemma in which he found himself. He strove as best he
might to couple together the prevailing cant of office-holders against
"the destructive spirit of abolitionism" and a comparatively mild
rebuke of the Missouri usurpation. [Footnote: Its phraseology was
adroit enough to call forth a sneering compliment from Speaker
Stringfellow, who wrote to the "Squatter Sovereign": "On Tuesday the
Governor sent in his message, which you will find is very well
calculated to have its effect with the Pennsylvania Democracy. If he
was trustworthy I would" be disposed to compliment the most of it,
"but knowing how corrupt the author is, and that it is only designed
for political effect in Pennsylvania, he not expecting to remain long
with us, I will pass it by."--"Squatter Sovereign," July 17, 1855.]

[Sidenote: "House Journal Kansas Territory," 1855. Appendix, p. 10.]

Nevertheless, the Governor stood reasonably firm. He persisted in
declaring that the Legislature could pass no valid laws at any other
place than Pawnee, and returned the first bill sent him with a veto
message to that effect. To this the Legislature replied by passing the
bill over his veto, and in addition formally raising a joint committee
"to draw up a memorial to the President of the United States
respectfully demanding the removal of A. H. Reeder from the office of
governor"; and, as if this indignity were not enough, holding a joint
session for publicly signing it. The memorial was promptly dispatched
to Washington by special messenger; but on the way this envoy read the
news of the Governor's dismissal by the President.

This event appeared definitely to sweep away the last obstacle in the
path of the conspirators. The office of acting governor now devolved
upon the secretary of the Territory, Daniel Woodson, a man who shared
their views and was allied to their schemes. With him to approve their
enactments, the parliamentary machinery of the "bogus" Legislature was
complete and effective. They had at the very beginning summarily
ousted the free-State members chosen at the supplementary election on
May 22, and seated the pro-slavery claimants of March 30; and the only
two remaining free-State members resigned in utter disgust to avoid
giving countenance to the flagrant usurpation by their presence. No
one was left even to enter a protest.

[Sidenote: Report Judiciary Com., "House Journal Kansas Territory,"
1855. Appendix, p. 14.]

This, then, was the perfect flower of Douglas's vaunted experiment of
"popular sovereignty"--a result they professed fully to appreciate.
"Hitherto," said the Judiciary Committee of the House in a long and
grandiloquent report, "Congress have retained to themselves the power
to mold and shape all the territorial governments according to their
own peculiar notions, and to restrict within very limited and
contracted bounds both the natural as well as the political rights of
the bold and daring pioneer and the noble, hard-fisted squatter." But
by this course, the argument of the committee continued, "the pillars
which uphold this glorious union of States were shaken until the whole
world was threatened with a political earthquake," and, "the principle
that the people are capable of self-government would have been forever
swallowed up by anarchy and confusion," had not the Kansas-Nebraska
bill "delegated to the people of these territories the right to frame
and establish their own form of government."

[Sidenote: Report Judiciary Com., "House Journal Kansas Territory,"
1855. Appendix, p. 18.]

[Sidenote: Ibid., p. 18.]

What might not be expected of lawmakers who begin with so ambitious an
exordium, and who lay the cornerstone of their edifice upon the solid
rock of political principle? The anti-climax of performance which
followed would be laughably absurd, were it not marked by the cunning
of a well-matured political plot. Their first step was to recommend
the repeal of "all laws whatsoever, which may have been considered to
have been in force" in the Territory on the 1st day of July, 1855,
thus forever quieting any doubt "as to what is and what is not law in
this Territory"; secondly, to substitute a code about which there
should be no question, by the equally ingenious expedient of copying
and adopting the Revised Statutes of Missouri.

[Sidenote: Ibid., p. 14.]

These enactments were made in due form; but the bogus Legislature did
not seem content to let its fame rest on this single monument of self-
government. Casting their eyes once more upon the broad expanse of
American politics, the Judiciary Committee reported: "The question of
slavery is one that convulses the whole country, from the boisterous
Atlantic to the shores of the mild Pacific. This state of things has
been brought about by the fanaticism of the North and East, while up
to this time the people of the South, and those of the North who
desire the perpetuation of this Union and are devoted to the laws,
have been entirely conservative. But the time is coming--yea, it has
already arrived--for the latter to take a bold and decided stand that
the Union and law may not be trampled in the dust," etc., etc.

[Sidenote: "Statutes Territory of Kansas," 1855, p. 715.]

The "Revised Statutes of Missouri," recommended in bulk, and adopted
with hasty clerical modifications, [Footnote: To guard more
effectually against clerical errors, the Legislature enacted: "Sec.
1. Wherever the word 'State' occurs in any act of the present
legislative assembly, or any law of this Territory, in such
construction as to indicate the locality of the operation of such act
or laws, the same shall in every instance be taken and understood to
mean 'Territory,' and shall apply to the Territory of Kansas."--
"Statutes of Kansas," 1855, p. 718.] already contained the usual
slave-code peculiar to Southern States. But in the plans and hopes of
the conspirators, this of itself was insufficient. In order to "take a
bold stand that the Union and law might not be trampled in the dust,"
they with great painstaking devised and passed "an act to punish
offenses against slave property."

It prescribed the penalty of death, not merely for the grave crime of
inciting or aiding an insurrection of slaves, free negroes, or
mulattoes, or circulating printed matter for such an object, but also
the same extreme punishment for the comparatively mild offense of
enticing or decoying away a slave or assisting him to escape; for
harboring or concealing a fugitive slave, ten years' imprisonment; for
resisting an officer arresting a fugitive slave, two years'
imprisonment.

If such inflictions as the foregoing might perhaps be tolerated upon
the plea that a barbarous institution required barbarous safeguards,
what ought to be said of the last three sections of the act which, in
contempt of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of
the United States, annulled the freedom of speech and the freedom of
the press, and invaded even the right of individual conscience?

[Sidenote: "Statutes Territory of Kansas," 1855, p. 516.]

To write, print, or circulate "any statements, arguments, opinions,
sentiment, doctrine, advice, or innuendo, calculated to produce a
disorderly, dangerous, or rebellious disaffection among the slaves of
the Territory, or to induce such slaves to escape from the service of
their masters, or to resist their authority," was pronounced a felony
punishable by five years' imprisonment. To deny the right of holding
slaves in the Territory, by speaking, writing, printing, or
circulating books, or papers, was likewise made a felony, punishable
by two years' imprisonment. Finally it was enacted that "no person who
is conscientiously opposed to holding slaves, or who does not admit
the right to hold slaves in this Territory, shall sit as a juror on
the trial of any prosecution for any violation of any of the sections
of this act." Also, all officers were, in addition to their usual
oath, required to swear to support and sustain the Kansas-Nebraska Act
and the Fugitive-Slave Law.

[Sidenote: "Journal of Council Kansas Territory," 1855 p. 248.]

The spirit which produced these despotic laws also governed the
methods devised to enforce them. The Legislature proceeded to elect
the principal officers of each county, who in turn were empowered by
the laws to appoint the subordinate officials. All administration,
therefore, emanated from that body, reflected its will, and followed
its behest. Finally, the usual skeleton organization of a territorial
militia was devised, whose general officers were in due time appointed
by the acting Governor from prominent and serviceable pro-slavery
members of the Legislature.

[Sidenote: "Statutes Territory of Kansas," 1855, p. 332.]

Having secured their present domination, they sought to perpetuate
their political ascendency in the Territory. They ingeniously
prolonged the tenure of their various appointees, and to render their
success at future elections easy and certain they provided that
candidates to be eligible, and judges of election, and voters when
challenged, must swear to support the Fugitive-Slave Law. This they
knew would virtually disfranchise many conscientious antislavery men;
while, on the other hand, they enacted that each inhabitant who had
paid his territorial tax should be a qualified voter for all elective
officers. Under so lax a provision Missouri invaders could in the
future, as they had in the past, easily give an apparent majority at
the ballot-box for all their necessary agents and ulterior schemes.

In a technical sense the establishment of slavery in Kansas was
complete. There were by the census of the previous February already
some two hundred slaves in the Territory. Under the sanction of these
laws, and before they could by any possibility be repealed, some
thousands might be expected, especially by such an organized and
united effort as the South could make to maintain the vantage ground
already gained. Once there, the aggressiveness of the institution
might be relied on to protect itself, since all experience had shown
that under similar conditions it was almost ineradicable.

[Sidenote: Colfax, Speech in H.R., June 21, 1856.]

After so much patriotic endeavor on the part of these Border Ruffian
legislators "that the Union and law may not be trampled in the dust,"
it cannot perhaps be wondered at that they began to look around for
their personal rewards. These they easily found in the rich harvest of
local monopolies and franchises which lay scattered in profusion on
this virgin field of legislation, ready to be seized and appropriated
without dispute by the first occupants. There were charters for
railroads, insurance companies, toll-bridges, ferries, coal-mines,
plank roads, and numberless privileges and honors of present or
prospective value out of which, together with the county, district,
and military offices, the ambitious members might give and take with
generous liberality. One-sixth of the printed laws of the first
session attest their modest attention to this incidental squatters'
dowry. One of the many favorable opportunities in this category was
the establishment of the permanent territorial capital, authorized by
the organic act, where the liberal Federal appropriation for public
buildings should be expended. For this purpose, competition from the
older towns yielding gracefully after the first ballot, an entirely
new site on the open prairie overlooking the Kansas River some twelve
miles west of Lawrence was agreed upon. The proceedings do not show
any unseemly scramble over the selection, and no tangible record
remains of the whispered distribution of corner lots and contracts. It
is only the name which rises into historical notice.

[Sidenote: "House Journal Kansas Territory," 1855. Appendix, p. 3.]

One of the actors in the political drama of Kansas was Samuel Dexter
Lecompte, Chief-Justice of the Territory. He had been appointed from
the border State of Maryland, and is represented to have been a
diligent student, a respectable lawyer, a prominent Democratic
politician, and possessed of the personal instincts and demeanor of a
gentleman. Moved by a pro-slavery sympathy that was sincere, Judge
Lecompte lent his high authority to the interests of the conspiracy
against Kansas. He had already rendered the bogus Legislature the
important service of publishing an extra-judicial opinion, sustaining
their adjournment from Pawnee to Shawnee Mission. Probably because
they valued his official championship and recognized in him a powerful
ally in politics, they made him a member of several of their private
corporations, and gave him the honor of naming their newly founded
capital Lecompton. But the intended distinction was transitory. Before
the lapse of a single decade, the town for which he stood sponsor was
no longer the capital of Kansas.

[Relocated Footnote: Namely, because of a _viva voce_ vote certified
instead of a ballot, and because the prescribed oath and the words
"lawful resident voters" had been openly erased from the printed
forms. In six districts the Governor ordered a supplementary election,
which was duly held on the 22d of May following. When that day
arrived, the Border Ruffians, proclaiming the election to be illegal,
by their default allowed free-State men to be chosen in all the
districts except that of Leavenworth, where the invasion and tactics
of the March election were repeated now for the third time and the
same candidates voted for.--Howard Report, pp. 35-36. Indeed, the
Border Ruffian habit of voting in Kansas had become chronic, and did
not cease for some years, and sometimes developed the grimmest humors.
In the autumn of that same year an election for county-seat took place
in Leavenworth County by the accidental failure of the Legislature to
designate one. Leavenworth city aspired to this honor and polled six
hundred votes; but it had an enterprising rival in Kickapoo city, ten
miles up the river, and another, Delaware city, eight miles down
stream. Both were paper towns--"cottonwood towns," in border slang--of
great expectations; and both having more unscrupulous enterprise than
voters, appealed to Platte County to "come over." This was an appeal
Platte County could never resist, and accordingly a chartered
ferry-boat brought voters all election day from the Missouri side,
until the Kickapoo tally-lists scored 850. Delaware city, however, was
not to be thus easily crushed. She, too, not only had her chartered
ferry-boat, but kept her polls open for three days in succession, and
not until her boxes contained nine hundred ballots (of which probably
only fifty were legal) did the steam whistle scream victory! When the
"returning board" had sufficiently weighed this complicated electoral
contest, it gravely decided that keeping the polls open for three days
was "an unheard of irregularity." (J. N. Holloway, "History of
Kansas," pp. 192-4.) This was exquisite irony; but a local court on
appeal seriously giving a final verdict for Delaware, the transaction
became a perennial burlesque on "Squatter Sovereignty."]




CHAPTER XXIV

THE TOPEKA CONSTITUTION


[Sidenote: "House Journal Kansas Territory," 1855. p. 30; "Council
Journal," 1855, p. 253.]

The bogus Legislature adjourned late on the night of the 30th of
August, 1855. They had elaborately built up their legal despotism,
commissioned trusty adherents to administer it, and provided their
principal and undoubted partisans with military authority to see that
it was duly executed. Going still a step further, they proposed so to
mold and control public opinion as to prevent the organization of any
party or faction to oppose their plans. In view of the coming
presidential campaign, it was the fashion in the States for Democrats
to style themselves "National Democrats"; and a few newspapers and
speakers in Kansas had adopted the prevailing political name. To
stifle any such movement, both houses of the Legislature on the last
night of their session adopted a concurrent resolution declaring that
the proposition to organize a National Democratic party, having
already misled some of their friends, would divide pro-slavery Whigs
from Democrats and weaken their party one-half; that it was the duty
of the pro-slavery, Union-loving men of Kansas "to know but one issue,
slavery; and that any party making or attempting to make any other is
and should be held as an ally of abolitionism and disunion."

Had the conspiracy been content to prosecute its designs through
moderate measures, it would inevitably have fastened slavery upon
Kansas. The organization of the invasion in western Missouri, carried
on under pre-acknowledged leadership, in populous counties, among
established homes, amid well-matured confidence growing out of long
personal and political relationship, would have been easy even without
the powerful bond of secret association. On the other hand, the union
of the actual inhabitants of Kansas, scattered in sparse settlements,
personal strangers to each other, coming from widely separated States,
and comprising radically different manners, sentiments, and
traditions, and burdened with the prime and unyielding necessity of
protecting themselves and their families against cold and hunger, was
in the very nature of the case slow and difficult. But the course of
the Border Ruffians created, in less than six weeks, a powerful and
determined opposition, which became united in support of what is known
as the Topeka Constitution.

It is noteworthy that this free-State movement originated in
Democratic circles, under Democratic auspices. The Republican party
did not yet exist. The opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act were
distributed among Whigs, Know-Nothings, and Free-soilers in the
States, and had no national affiliation, although they had won
overwhelming triumphs in a majority of the Congressional districts in
the fall elections of 1854. Nearly if not quite all the free-State
leaders originally went to Kansas as friends of President Pierce, and
as believers in the dogma of "Popular Sovereignty."

Now that this usurping Legislature had met, contemptuously expelled
the free-State members, defied the Governor's veto, set up its
ingeniously contrived legal despotism, and commissioned its partisan
followers to execute and administer it, the situation became
sufficiently grave to demand defensive action. The real settlers were
Democrats, it was true; they had voted for Pierce, shouted for the
platform of '52, applauded the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and emigrated to
the Territory to enjoy the new political gospel of popular
sovereignty. But the practical Democratic beatitudes of Kansas were
not calculated to strengthen the saints or confirm them in the faith.
A Democratic invasion had elected a Democratic Legislature, which
enacted laws, under whose arbitrary "non-intervention" a Democratic
court might fasten a ball and chain to their ankles if they should
happen to read the Declaration of Independence to a negro, or carry
Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia" in their carpet-bags.

The official resolution which the bogus Legislature proclaimed as a
final political test left no middle ground between those who were for
slavery and those who were against slavery--those who were for the
bogus laws in all their enormity, and those who were against them--and
all who were not willing to become active co-workers with the
conspiracy were forced to combine in self-defense.

It was in the town of Lawrence that the free-State movement naturally
found its beginning. The settlers of the Emigrant Aid Society were
comparatively few in number; but, supported by money, saw-mills,
printing-presses, boarding-houses, they became from the very first a
compact, self-reliant governing force. A few preliminary meetings,
instigated by the disfranchised free-State members of the Legislature,
brought together a large mass convention. The result of its two days'
deliberations was a regularly chosen delegate convention held at Big
Springs, a few miles west of Lawrence, on the 5th of September, 1855.
More important than all, perhaps, was the presence and active
participation of ex-Governor Reeder himself, who wrote the
resolutions, addressed the convention in a stirring and defiant
speech, and received by acclamation their nomination for territorial
delegate.

The platform adopted repudiated in strong terms the bogus Legislature
and its tyrannical enactments, and declared "that we will endure and
submit to these laws no longer than the best interests of the
Territory require, as the least of two evils, and will resist them to
a bloody issue as soon as we ascertain that peaceable remedies shall
fail." It also recommended the formation of volunteer companies and
the procurement of arms. The progressive and radical spirit of the
convention is illustrated in its endorsement of the free-State
movement, against the report of its own committee.

[Sidenote: Howard Report, pp. 48-58.]

The strongest point, however, made by the convention was a
determination, strictly adhered to for more than two years, to take no
part in any election under the bogus territorial laws. As a result
Whitfield received, without competition, the combined pro-slavery and
Border Ruffian vote for delegate on the first of October, a total of
2721 ballots. Measures had meanwhile been perfected by the free-State
men to elect delegates to a constitutional convention. On the 9th of
October, at a separate election, held by the free-State party alone,
under self-prescribed formalities and regulations, these were duly
chosen by an aggregate vote of 2710, ex-Governor Reeder receiving at
the same polls 2849 votes for delegate.

[Sidenote: "Globe," March 24, 1856, p. 698.]

By this series of political movements, carried out in quiet and
orderly proceedings, the free-State party was not only fully
constituted and organized, but was demonstrated to possess a decided
majority in the Territory. Still following out the policy agreed upon,
the delegates chosen met at Topeka on the 23d of October, and with
proper deliberation and decorum framed a State constitution, which was
in turn submitted to a vote of the people. Although this election was
held near midwinter (Dec. 15, 1855), and in the midst of serious
disturbances of the peace arising from other causes, it received an
affirmative vote of 1731, showing a hearty popular endorsement of it.
Of the document itself no extended criticism is necessary. It
prohibited slavery, but made reasonable provision for existing
property-rights in slaves actually in the Territory. In no sense a
radical, subversive, or "abolition" production, the Topeka
Constitution was remarkable only as being the indignant protest of the
people of the Territory against the Missouri usurpation. [Footnote:
Still another election was January 15, 1856, to choose held by the
free-State party on State officers to act under the new organization,
at which Charles Robinson received 1296 votes for governor, out of a
total of 1706, and Mark W. Delahay for Representative in Congress,
1828. A legislature elected at the same time, met, according to the
terms of the newly framed constitution, on the 4th of March,
organized, and elected Andrew H. Reeder and James H. Lane United
States Senators.] The new constitution was transmitted to Congress and
was formally presented as a petition to the Senate by General Cass, on
March 24, 1856, [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (1) relocated to
chapter end.] and to the House some days later.

[Sidenote: February 22, 1856.]

The Republican Senators in Congress (the Republican party had been
definitely organized a few weeks before at Pittsburg) now urged the
immediate reception of the Topeka Constitution and the admission of
Kansas as a free State, citing the cases of Michigan, Arkansas,
Florida, and California as justifying precedents. [Footnote: They
based their appeal more especially upon the opinion of the Attorney-
General in the case of Arkansas, that citizens of Territories possess
the constitutional right to assemble and petition Congress for the
redress of grievances; that the form of the petition is immaterial;
and that, "as the power of Congress over the whole subject is plenary,
they may accept any constitution, however framed, which in their
judgment meets the sense of the people to be affected by it."] For the
present, however, there was no hope of admission to the Union with the
Topeka Constitution. The Pierce Administration, under the domination
of the Southern States, had deposed Governor Reeder. Both in his
annual message and again in a special message, the President denounced
the Topeka movement as insurrectionary.

[Sidenote: Senate Report No. 34, 1st Session, 34th Congress, p. 32.]

In the Senate, too, the application was already prejudged; the
Committee on Territories through Douglas himself as chairman, in a
long partisan report, dismissed it with the assertion "that it was the
movement of a political party instead of the whole body of the people
of Kansas, conducted without the sanction of law, and in defiance of
the constituted authorities, for the avowed purpose of overthrowing
the territorial government established by Congress." In the mouth of a
consistent advocate of "Popular Sovereignty," this argument might have
had some force; but it came with a bad grace from Douglas, who in the
same report indorsed the bogus Legislature and sustained the bogus
laws upon purely technical assumptions. Congress was irreconcilably
divided in politics. The Democrats had an overwhelming majority in the
Senate; the opposition, through the election of Speaker Banks,
possessed a working control of the House. Some months later, after
prolonged debate, the House passed a bill for the admission of Kansas
under the Topeka Constitution; but as the Senate had already rejected
it, the movement remained without practical result. [Transcriber's
Note: Lengthy footnote (2) relocated to chapter end.]

The staple argument against the Topeka free-State movement, that it
was a rebellion against constitutional authority, though perhaps
correct as a mere theory was utterly refuted by the practical facts of
the case. The Big Springs resolutions, indeed, counseled resistance to
a "bloody issue"; but this was only to be made after "peaceable
remedies shall fail." The free-State leaders deserve credit for
pursuing their peaceable remedies and forbearing to exercise their
asserted right to resistance with a patience unexampled in American
annals. The bogus territorial laws were defied by the newspapers and
treated as a dead letter by the mass of the free-State men; as much as
possible they stood aloof from the civil officers appointed by and
through the bogus Legislature, recorded no title papers, began no
lawsuits, abstained from elections, and denied themselves privileges
which required any open recognition of the alien Missouri statutes.
Lane and others refused the test oath, and were excluded from practice
as attorneys in the courts; free-State newspapers were thrown out of
the mails as incendiary publications; sundry petty persecutions were
evaded or submitted to as special circumstances dictated. But
throughout their long and persistent non-conformity, for more than two
years, they constantly and cheerfully acknowledged the authority of
the organic act, and of the laws of Congress, and even counseled and
endured every forced submission to the bogus laws. Though they had
defiant and turbulent spirits in their own ranks, who often accused
them of imbecility and cowardice, they maintained a steady policy of
non-resistance, and, under every show of Federal authority in support
of the bogus laws, they submitted to obnoxious searches and seizures,
to capricious arrest and painful imprisonment, rather than by
resistance to place themselves in the attitude of deliberate outlaws.
[Footnote: See Governor Robinson's message to the free-State
Legislature, March 4, 1856. Mrs. S. T. L. Robinson, "Kansas," pp. 352,
364.]

[Illustration:   James H. Lane.]

[Sidenote: February 11, 1856. "Statutes at Large," Vol. XI., p. 791.]

They were destined to have no lack of provocation. Since the removal
of Reeder, all the Federal officials of the Territory were affiliated
with the pro-slavery Missouri cabal. Both to secure the permanent
establishment of slavery in Kansas, and to gratify the personal pride
of their triumph, they were determined to make these recusant free-
State voters "bow down to the cap of Gessler." Despotism is never more
arrogant than in resenting all slights to its personal vanity. As a
first and necessary step, the cabal had procured, through its powerful
influence at Washington, a proclamation from the President commanding
"all persons engaged in unlawful combinations against the constituted
authority of the Territory of Kansas or of the United States to
disperse," etc. The language of the proclamation was sufficiently
comprehensive to include Border Ruffians and emigrant aid societies,
as well as the Topeka movement, and thus presented a show of
impartiality; but under dominant political influences the latter was
its evident and certain object.

With this proclamation as a sort of official fulcrum, Chief-Justice
Lecompte delivered at the May term of his court a most extraordinary
charge to the grand jury. He instructed them that the bogus
Legislature, being an instrument of Congress, and having passed laws,
"these laws are of United States authority and making." Persons
resisting these laws must be indicted for high treason. If no
resistance has been made, but combinations formed for the purpose of
resisting them, "then must you still find bills for constructive
treason, as the courts have decided that the blow need not be struck,
but only the intention be made evident." [Footnote: J. H. Gihon,
"Governor Geary's Administration," p. 77; also compare two copies of
the indictments, printed at full length in Phillips, "Conquest of
Kansas," pp. 351-4.] Indictments, writs, and the arrest of many
prominent free-State leaders followed as a matter of course. All these
proceedings, too, seemed to have been a part of the conspiracy. Before
the indictments were found, and in anticipation of the writs,
Robinson, the free-State Governor-elect, then on his way to the East,
was arrested while traveling on a Missouri River steamboat, at
Lexington in that State, detained, and finally sent back to Kansas
under the Governor's requisition. Upon this frivolous charge of
constructive treason he and others were held in military custody
nearly four months, and finally, at the end of that period, discharged
upon bail, the farce of longer imprisonment having become useless
through other events.

Apprehending fully that the Topeka movement was the only really
serious obstacle to their success, the pro-slavery cabal, watching its
opportunity, matured a still more formidable demonstration to suppress
and destroy it. The provisional free-State Legislature had, after
organizing on the 4th of March, adjourned, to reassemble on the 4th of
July, 1856, in order to await in the meantime the result of their
application to Congress. As the national holiday approached, it was
determined to call together a mass meeting at the same time and place,
to give both moral support and personal protection to the members.
Civil war, of which further mention will be made in the next chapter,
had now been raging for months, and had in its general results gone
against the free-State men. Their leaders were imprisoned or
scattered, their presses destroyed, their adherents dispirited with
defeat. Nevertheless, as the day of meeting approached, the remnant of
the provisional Legislature and some six to eight hundred citizens
gathered at Topeka, though without any definite purpose or pre-
arranged plan.

Governor Shannon, the second of the Kansas executives, had by this
time resigned his office, and Secretary Woodson was again acting
Governor. Here was a chance to put the free-State movement pointedly
under the ban of Federal authority which the cabal determined not to
neglect. Reciting the President's proclamation of February, Secretary
Woodson now issued his own proclamation forbidding all persons
claiming legislative power and authority as aforesaid from assembling,
organizing, or acting in any legislative capacity whatever. At the
hour of noon on the 4th of July several companies of United States
dragoons, which were brought into camp near town in anticipation of
the event, entered Topeka in military array, under command of Colonel
E. V. Sumner. A line of battle was formed in the street, cannon were
planted, and the machinery of war prepared for instant action. Colonel
Sumner, a most careful and conscientious officer and a free-State man
at heart, with due formality, with decision and firmness, but at the
same time openly expressing the painful nature of his duty, commanded
the provisional Legislature, then about to assemble, to disperse. The
members, not yet organized, immediately obeyed the order, having
neither the will nor the means to resist it. There was no tumult, no
violence, but little protest even in words; but the despotic purpose,
clothed in forms of law, made a none the less profound impression upon
the assembled citizens, and later, when the newspapers spread the
report of the act, upon the indignant public of the Northern States.
From this time onward, other events of paramount historical importance
supervene to crowd the Topeka Constitution out of view. In a feeble
way the organization still held together for a considerable length of
time. About a year later the provisional Legislature again went
through the forms of assembling, and although Governor Walker was
present in Topeka, there were no proclamations, no dragoons, no
cannon, because the cabal was for the moment defeated and disconcerted
and bent upon other and still more desperate schemes. The Topeka
Constitution was never received nor legalized; its officers never
became clothed with official authority; its scrip was never redeemed;
yet in the fate of Kansas and in the annals of the Union at large it
was a vital and pivotal transaction, without which the great conflict
between freedom and slavery, though perhaps neither avoided nor
delayed, might have assumed altogether different phases of
development.

[Relocated Footnote (1): Later, on April 7, General Cass presented to
the Senate another petition, purporting to be the Topeka Constitution,
which had been handed him by J. H. Lane, president of the convention
which framed it and Senator-elect under it ("Cong. Globe," 1856; April
7, p. 826). This paper proved to be a clerk's copy, with erasures and
interlineations and signatures in one handwriting, which being
questioned as probably spurious, Lane afterwards supplied the original
draft prepared by the committee and adopted by the convention, though
without signatures; also adding his explanatory affidavit ("Cong.
Globe," App. 1856, pp. 378-9), to the effect that, the committee had
devolved upon him the preparation of the formal copy, but that the
original signatures had been mislaid. The official action of the
Senate appears to have concerned itself exclusively with the copy
presented by General Cass on March 24. Lane's copies served only as
text for angry debate. As the Topeka Constitution had no legal origin
or quality, technical defeats were of little consequence, especially
in view of the action by the free-State voters of Kansas at their
voluntary elections for delegates on October 9, and to ratify it on
December 15, 1856.]

[Relocated Footnote (2): Nevertheless, the efforts of the free-State
party tinder this combination were not wholly barren. The contest
between Whitfield and Reeder for a seat in the House as territorial
delegate not only provoked searching discussion, but furnished the
occasion for sending an investigating committee to Kansas, attended by
the contestants in person. This committee with a fearless diligence
collected in the Territory, as well as from the border counties of
Missouri, a mass of sworn testimony amounting to some 1200 printed
pages, and which exposed the Border Ruffian invasions and the Missouri
usurpation in all their monstrous iniquity, and officially revealed to
the astounded North, for the first time and nearly two years after its
beginning, the full proportions of the conspiracy which held sway in
Kansas.]




CHAPTER XXV

CIVIL WAR IN KANSAS


Out of the antagonistic and contending factions mentioned in the last
two chapters, the bogus Legislature and its Border-Ruffian adherents
on the one hand, and the framers and supporters of the Topeka
Constitution on the other, grew the civil war in Kansas. The bogus
Legislature numbered thirty-six members. These had only received, all
told, 619 legal bond fide Kansas votes; but, what answered their
purposes just as well, 4408 Missourians had cast their ballots for
them, making their total constituency (if by discarding the idea of a
State line we use the word in a somewhat strained sense) 5427. This
was at the March election, 1855. Of the remaining 2286 actual Kansas
voters disclosed by Seeder's census, only 791 cast their ballots. That
summer's emigration, however, being mainly from the free States,
greatly changed the relative strength of the two parties. At the
election of October 1, 1855, in which the free-State men took no part,
Whitfield, for delegate, received 2721 votes, Border Ruffians
included. At the election for members of the Topeka Constitutional
Convention, a week later, from which the pro-slavery men abstained,
the free-State men cast 2710 votes, while Reeder, their nominee for
delegate, received 2849. For general service, therefore, requiring no
special effort, the numerical strength of the factions was about
equal; while on extraordinary occasions the two thousand Border-
Ruffian reserve lying a little farther back from the State line could
at any time easily turn the scale. The free-State men had only their
convictions, their intelligence, their courage, and the moral support
of the North; the conspiracy had its secret combination, the
territorial officials, the Legislature, the bogus laws, the courts,
the militia officers, the President, and the army. This was a
formidable array of advantages; slavery was playing with loaded dice.

With such a radical opposition of sentiment, both factions were on the
alert to seize every available vantage ground. The bogus laws having
been enacted, and the free-State men having, at the Big Springs
Convention, resolved on the failure of peaceable remedies to resist
them to a "bloody issue," the conspiracy was not slow to cover itself
and its projects with the sacred mantle of authority. Opportunely for
them, about this time Governor Shannon, appointed to succeed Reeder,
arrived in the Territory. Coming by way of the Missouri River towns,
he fell first among Border-Ruffian companionship and influences; and
perhaps having his inclinations already molded by his Washington
instructions, his early impressions were decidedly adverse to the
free-State cause. His reception speech at Westport, in which he
maintained the legality of the Legislature, and his determination to
enforce their laws, delighted his pro-slavery auditors. To further
enlist his zeal in their behalf, a few weeks later they formally
organized a "law-and-order party" by a large public meeting held at
Leavenworth. All the territorial dignitaries were present; Governor
Shannon presided; John Calhoun, the Surveyor-General, made the
principal speech, a denunciation of the "abolitionists" supporting the
Topeka movement; Chief-Justice Lecompte dignified the occasion with
approving remarks. With public opinion propitiated in advance, and the
Governor of the Territory thus publicly committed to their party, the
conspirators felt themselves ready to enter upon the active campaign
to crush out opposition, for which they had made such elaborate
preparations.

Faithful to their legislative declaration they knew but one issue,
slavery. All dissent, all non-compliance, all hesitation, all mere
silence even, were in their stronghold towns, like Leavenworth,
branded as "abolitionism," declared to be hostility to the public
welfare, and punished with proscription, personal violence, expulsion,
and frequently death. Of the lynchings, the mobs, and the murders, it
would be impossible, except in a very extended work, to note the
frequent and atrocious details. The present chapters can only touch
upon the more salient movements of the civil war in Kansas, which
happily were not sanguinary; if, however, the individual and more
isolated cases of bloodshed could be described, they would show a
startling aggregate of barbarity and loss of life for opinion's sake.
Some of these revolting crimes, though comparatively few in number,
were committed, generally in a spirit of lawless retaliation, by free-
State men.

Among other instrumentalities for executing the bogus laws, the bogus
Legislature had appointed one Samuel J. Jones sheriff of Douglas
County, Kansas Territory, although that individual was at the time of
his appointment, and long afterwards, United States postmaster of the
town of Westport, Missouri. Why this Missouri citizen and Federal
official should in addition be clothed with a foreign territorial
shrievalty of a county lying forty or fifty miles from his home is a
mystery which was never explained outside a Missouri Blue Lodge.

[Sidenote: Wm. Phillips, "Conquest of Kansas," p. 152, _et seq._]

A few days after the "law-and-order" meeting in Leavenworth, there
occurred a murder in a small settlement thirteen miles west of the
town of Lawrence. The murderer, a pro-slavery man, first fled, to
Missouri, but returned to Shawnee Mission and sought the official
protection of Sheriff Jones; no warrant, no examination, no commitment
followed, and the criminal remained at large. Out of this incident,
the officious sheriff managed most ingeniously to create an
embroilment with the town of Lawrence, Buckley, who was alleged to
have been accessory to the crime, obtained a peace-warrant against
Branson, a neighbor of the victim. With this peace-warrant in his
pocket, but without showing or reading it to his prisoner, Sheriff
Jones and a posse of twenty-five Border Ruffians proceeded to
Branson's house at midnight and arrested him. Alarm being given,
Branson's free-State neighbors, already exasperated at the murder,
rose under the sudden instinct of self-protection and rescued Branson
from the sheriff and his posse that same night, though without other
violence than harsh words.

[Sidenote: Shannon, proclamation, November 29, 1855. Senate Ex. Doc.,
3d Sess. 34th Cong., Vol. II., p. 56.]

[Sidenote: Phillips, p. 168.]

Burning with the thirst of personal revenge, Sheriff Jones now accused
the town of Lawrence of the violation of law involved in this rescue,
though the people of Lawrence immediately and earnestly disavowed the
act. But for Sheriff Jones and his superiors the pretext was all-
sufficient. A Border-Ruffian foray against the town was hastily
organized. The murder occurred November 21; the rescue November 26.
November 27, upon the brief report of Sheriff Jones, demanding a force
of three thousand men "to carry out the laws," Governor Shannon issued
his order to the two major-generals of the skeleton militia, "to
collect together as large a force as you can in your division, and
repair without delay to Lecompton, and report yourself to S. J. Jones,
sheriff of Douglas County." [Footnote: Governor Shannon, order to
Richardson, November 27, 1855. Same order to Strickler, same date.
Senate Executive Documents, 3d Sess. 34th Cong., Vol. II., p. 53.] The
Kansas militia was a myth; but the Border Ruffians, with their
backwoods rifles and shotguns, were a ready resource. To these an
urgent appeal for help was made; and the leaders of the conspiracy in
prompt obedience placarded the frontier with inflammatory handbills,
and collected and equipped companies, and hurried them forward to the
rendezvous without a moment's delay. The United States Arsenal at
Liberty, Missouri, was broken into and stripped of its contents to
supply cannon, small arms, and ammunition. In two days after notice a
company of fifty Missourians made the first camp on Wakarusa Creek,
near Franklin, four miles from Lawrence. In three or four days more an
irregular army of fifteen hundred men, claiming to be the sheriff's
posse, was within striking distance of the town. Three or four hundred
of these were nominal residents of the Territory; [Footnote: Shannon,
dispatch, December 11, 1855, to President Pierce. Senate Ex. Doc., 3d
Sess. 34th Cong., Vol. II., p. 63.] all the remainder were citizens of
Missouri. They were not only well armed and supplied, but wrought up
to the highest pitch of partisan excitement. While the Governor's
proclamation spoke of serving writs, the notices of the conspirators
sounded the note of the real contest. "Now is the time to show game,
and if we are defeated this time, the Territory is lost to the South,"
said the leaders. There was no doubt of the earnestness of their
purpose. Ex-Vice-President Atchison came in person, leading a
battalion of two hundred Platte County riflemen.

News of this proceeding reached the people of Lawrence little by
little, and finally, becoming alarmed, they began to improvise means
of defense. Two abortive imitations of the Missouri Blue Lodges, set
on foot during the summer by the free-State men, provoked by the
election invasion in March, furnished them a starting-point for
military organization. A committee of safety, hurriedly instituted,
sent a call for help from Lawrence to other points in the Territory,
"for the purpose of defending it from threatened invasion by armed men
now quartered in its vicinity." Several hundred free-State men
promptly responded to the summons. The Free-State Hotel served as
barracks. Governor Robinson and Colonel Lane were appointed to
command. Four or five small redoubts, connected by rifle-pits, were
hastily thrown up; and by a clever artifice they succeeded in bringing
a twelve-pound brass howitzer from its storage at Kansas City.
Meantime the committee of safety, earnestly denying any wrongful act
or purpose, sent an urgent appeal for protection to the commander of
the United States forces at Fort Leavenworth, another to Congress, and
a third to President Pierce.

Amid all this warlike preparation to keep the peace, no very strict
military discipline could be immediately enforced. The people of
Lawrence, without any great difficulty, obtained daily information
concerning the hostile camps. They, on the other hand, professing no
purpose but that of defense and self-protection, were obliged to
permit free and constant ingress to their beleaguered town. Sheriff
Jones made several visits unmolested on their part, and without any
display of writs or demand for the surrender of alleged offenders on
his own. One of the rescuers even accosted him, conversed with him,
and invited him to dinner. These free visits had the good effect to
restrain imprudence and impulsiveness on both sides. They could see
that a conflict meant serious results. With the advantage of its
defensive position, Lawrence was as strong as the sheriff's mob. On
one point especially the Border Ruffians had a wholesome dread. Yankee
ingenuity had invented a new kind of breech-loading gun called "Sharps
rifle." It was, in fact, the best weapon of its day. The free-State
volunteers had some months before obtained a partial supply of them
from the East, and their range, rapidity, and effectiveness had been
not only duly set forth but highly exaggerated by many marvelous
stories throughout the Territory and along the border. The Missouri
backwoods-men manifested an almost incredible interest in this
wonderful gun. They might be deaf to the "equalities" proclaimed in
the Declaration of Independence or blind to the moral sin of slavery,
but they comprehended a rifle which could be fired ten times a minute
and kill a man at a thousand yards.

The arrivals from Missouri finally slackened and ceased. The irregular
Border-Ruffian squads were hastily incorporated into the skeleton
"Kansas militia." The "posse" became some two thousand strong, and the
defenders of Lawrence perhaps one thousand.

[Sidenote: Richardson to Shannon, December 3, 1855; Phillips, p. 186.]

[Sidenote: Anderson to Richardson; Phillips, p. 210.]

Meanwhile a sober second thought had come to Governor Shannon. To
retrieve somewhat the precipitancy of his militia orders and
proclamations, he wrote to Sheriff Jones, December 2, to make no
arrests or movements unless by his direction. The firm defensive
attitude of the people of Lawrence had produced its effect. The
leaders of the conspiracy became distrustful of their power to crush
the town. One of his militia generals suggested that the Governor
should require the "outlaws at Lawrence and elsewhere" to surrender
the Sharps rifles; another wrote asking him to call out the Government
troops at Fort Leavenworth. The Governor, on his part, becoming
doubtful of the legality of employing Missouri militia to enforce
Kansas laws, was also eager to secure the help of Federal troops.
Sheriff Jones began to grow importunate. In the Missouri camp while
the leaders became alarmed the men grew insubordinate. "I have reason
to believe," wrote one of their prominent men, "that before to-morrow
morning the black flag will be hoisted, when nine out of ten will
rally round it, and march without orders upon Lawrence. The forces of
the Lecompton camp fully understand the plot and will fight under the
same banner."

[Sidenote: Sumner to Shannon. December 1, 1855; Phillips, p. 184.]

After careful deliberation Colonel Sumner, commanding the United
States troops at Fort Leavenworth, declined to interfere without
explicit orders from the War Department. These failing to arrive in
time, the Governor was obliged to face his own dilemma. He hastened to
Lawrence, which now invoked his protection. He directed his militia
generals to repress disorder and check any attack on the town.
Interviews were held with the free-State commanders, and the situation
was fully discussed. A compromise was agreed upon, and a formal treaty
written out and signed. The affair was pronounced to be a
"misunderstanding"; the Lawrence party disavowed the Branson rescue,
denied any previous, present, or prospective organization for
resistance, and under sundry provisos agreed to aid in the execution
of "the laws" when called upon by "proper authority." Like all
compromises, the agreement was half necessity, half trick. Neither
party was willing to yield honestly nor ready to fight manfully. The
free-State men shrank from forcible resistance to even bogus laws. The
Missouri cabal, on the other hand, having three of their best men
constantly at the Governor's side, were compelled to recognize their
lack of justification. They did not dare to ignore upon what a
ridiculously shadowy pretext the Branson peace-warrant had grown into
an army of two thousand men, and how, under the manipulation of
Sheriff Jones, a questionable affidavit of a pro-slavery criminal had
been expanded into the _casus belli_ of a free-State town. They
consented to a compromise "to cover a retreat."

[Sidenote: Shannon to President Pierce, December 11, 1855, Senate Ex.
Doc., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. II., pp. 63-5.]

When Governor Shannon announced that the difficulties were settled,
the people of Lawrence were suspicious of their leaders, and John
Brown manifested his readiness to head a revolt. But his attempted
speech was hushed down, and the assurance of Robinson and Lane that
they had made no dishonorable concession finally quieted their
followers. There were similar murmurs in the pro-slavery camps. The
Governor was denounced as a traitor, and Sheriff Jones declared that
"he would have wiped out Lawrence." Atchison, on the contrary,
sustained the bargain, explaining that to attack Lawrence under the
circumstances would ruin the Democratic cause. "But," he added with a
significant oath, "boys, we will fight some time!" Thirteen of the
captains in the Wakarusa camp were called together, and the situation
was duly explained. The treaty was accepted, though the Governor
confessed "there was a silent dissatisfaction" at the result. He
ordered the forces to disband; prisoners were liberated, and with the
opportune aid of a furious rain-storm the Border-Ruffian army
gradually melted away. Nevertheless the "Wakarusa war" left one bitter
sting to rankle in the hearts of the defenders of Lawrence, a free-
State man having been killed by a pro-slavery scouting party.

The truce patched up by this Lawrence treaty was of comparatively
short duration. The excitement which had reigned in Kansas during the
whole summer of 1855, first about the enactments of the bogus
Legislature, and then in regard to the formation of the Topeka
Constitution, was now extended to the American Congress, where it
raged for two long months over the election of Speaker Banks. In
Kansas during the same period the vote of the free-State men upon the
Topeka Constitution and the election for free-State officers under it,
kept the Territory in a ferment. During and after the contest over the
speakership at Washington, each State Legislature became a forum of
Kansas debate. The general public interest in the controversy was
shown by discussions carried on by press, pulpit, and in the daily
conversation and comment of the people of the Union in every town,
hamlet, and neighborhood. No sooner did the spring weather of 1856
permit, than men, money, arms, and supplies were poured into the
Territory of Kansas from the North.

[Sidenote: J.N. Holloway, "History of Kansas," pp. 275, 276.]

In the Southern States also this propagandism was active, and a number
of guerrilla leaders with followers recruited in the South, and armed
and sustained by Southern contributions and appropriations, found
their way to Kansas in response to urgent appeals of the Border
chiefs. Buford, of Alabama; Titus, of Florida; Wilkes, of Virginia;
Hampton, of Kentucky; Treadwell, of South Carolina, and others,
brought not only enthusiastic leadership, but substantial assistance.
Both the factions which had come so near to actual battle in the
"Wakarusa war," though nominally disbanded, in reality continued their
military organizations,--the free-State men through apprehension of
danger, the Border Ruffians because of their purpose to crush out
opposition. Strengthened on both sides with men, money, arms, and
supplies, the contest was gradually resumed with the opening spring.

The vague and double-meaning phrases of the Lawrence agreement
furnished the earliest causes of a renewal of the quarrel. "Did you
not pledge yourselves to assist me as sheriff in the arrest of any
person against whom I might have a writ?" asked Sheriff Jones of
Robinson and Lane in a curt note. "We may have said that we would
assist any proper officer in the service of any legal process," they
replied, standing upon their interpretation. This was, of course, the
original controversy--slavery burning to enforce her usurpation,
freedom determined to defend her birthright. Sheriff Jones had his
pockets always full of writs issued in the spirit of persecution, but
was often baffled by the sharp wits and ready resources of the free-
State people, and sometimes defied outright. Little by little,
however, the latter became hemmed and bound in the meshes of the
various devices and proceedings which the territorial officials
evolved from the bogus laws. President Pierce, in his special message
of January 24, declared what had been done by the Topeka movement to
be "of a revolutionary character" which would "become treasonable
insurrection if it reach the length of organized resistance."

Following this came his proclamation of February 11, leveled against
"combinations formed to resist the execution of the territorial laws."
Early in May, Chief-Justice Lecompte held a term of his court, during
which he delivered to the grand jury his famous instructions on
constructive treason. Indictments were found, writs issued, and the
principal free-State leaders arrested or forced to flee from the
Territory. Governor Robinson was arrested without warrant on the
Missouri River, and brought back to be held in military custody till
September. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote relocated to chapter
end.] Lane went East and recruited additional help for the contest.
Meanwhile Sheriff Jones, sitting in his tent at night, in the town of
Lawrence, had been wounded by a rifle or pistol in the attempt of some
unknown person to assassinate him. The people of Lawrence denounced
the deed; but the sheriff hoarded up the score for future revenge. One
additional incident served to precipitate the crisis. The House of
Representatives at Washington, presided over by Speaker Banks, and
under control of the opposition, sent an investigating committee to
Kansas, consisting of Wm. A. Howard, of Michigan, John Sherman,
[Footnote: Owing to the illness of Mr. Howard, chairman of the
committee, the long and elaborate majority report of this committee
was written by John Sherman. Its methodical analysis and powerful
presentation of evidence made it one of the most popular and
convincing documents ever issued.] of Ohio, and Mordecai Oliver, of
Missouri, which, by the examination of numerous witnesses, was probing
the Border-Ruffian invasions, the illegality of the bogus Legislature,
and the enormity of the bogus laws to the bottom.

[Sidenote: Howard Report, p. 66.]

Ex-Governor Reeder was in attendance on this committee, supplying
data, pointing out from personal knowledge sources of information,
cross-examining witnesses to elicit the hidden truth. To embarrass
this damaging exposure, Judge Lecompte issued a writ against the ex-
Governor on a frivolous charge of contempt. Claiming but not receiving
exemption from the committee, Beeder on his personal responsibility
refused to permit the deputy marshal to arrest him. The incident was
not violent, nor even dramatic. No posse was summoned, no further
effort made, and Reeder, fearing personal violence, soon fled in
disguise. But the affair was magnified as a crowning proof that the
free-State men were insurrectionists and outlaws.

It must be noted in passing that by this time the Territory had by
insensible degrees drifted into the condition of civil war. Both
parties were zealous, vigilant, and denunciatory. In nearly every
settlement suspicion led to combination for defense, combination to
some form of oppression or insult, and so on by easy transition to
arrest and concealment, attack and reprisal, expulsion, theft, house-
burning, capture, and murder. From these, again, sprang barricaded and
fortified dwellings, camps and scouting parties, finally culminating
in roving guerrilla bands, half partisan, half predatory. Their
distinctive characters, however, display one broad and unfailing
difference. The free-State men clung to their prairie towns and
prairie ravines with all the obstinacy and courage of true defenders
of their homes and firesides. The pro-slavery parties, unmistakable
aliens and invaders, always came from, or retired across, the Missouri
line. Organized and sustained in the beginning by voluntary
contributions from that and distant States, they ended by levying
forced contributions, by "pressing" horses, food, or arms from any
neighborhood they chanced to visit. Their assumed character changed
with their changing opportunities or necessities. They were squads of
Kansas militia, companies of "peaceful emigrants," or gangs of
irresponsible outlaws, to suit the chance, the whim, or the need of
the moment.

[Sidenote: Memorial, Senate Ex. Doc., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. II., p.
74.]

[Sidenote: Phillips, pp. 289-90.]

[Sidenote: Memorial, Senate Ex. Doc., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. II., p.
75.]

Since the unsatisfactory termination of the "Wakarusa war," certain
leaders of the conspiracy had never given up their project of
punishing the town of Lawrence. A propitious moment for carrying it
out seemed now to have arrived. The free-State officers and leaders
were, thanks to Judge Lecompte's doctrine of constructive treason,
under indictment, arrest, or in flight; the settlers were busy with
their spring crops; while the pro-slavery guerrillas, freshly arrived
and full of zeal, were eager for service and distinction. The former
campaign against the town had failed for want of justification; they
now sought a pretext which would not shame their assumed character as
defenders of law and order. In the shooting of Sheriff Jones in
Lawrence, and in the refusal of ex-Governor Beeder to allow the
deputy-marshal to arrest him, they discovered grave offenses against
the territorial and United States laws. Determined also no longer to
trust Governor Shannon, lest he might again make peace, United States
Marshal Donaldson issued a proclamation on his own responsibility, on
May 11, 1856, commanding "law-abiding citizens of the Territory" "to
be and appear at Lecompton, as soon as practicable and in numbers
sufficient for the proper execution of the law." Moving with the
promptness and celerity of preconcerted plans, ex-Vice-President
Atchison, with his Platte County Rifles and two brass cannon, the
Kickapoo Rangers from Leavenworth and Weston, Wilkes, Titus, Buford,
and all the rest of the free lances in the Territory, began to
concentrate against Lawrence, giving the marshal in a very few days a
"posse" of from 500 to 800 men, armed for the greater part with United
States muskets, some stolen from the Liberty arsenal on their former
raid, others distributed to them as Kansas militia by the territorial
officers. The Governor refused to interfere to protect the threatened
town, though an urgent appeal to do so was made to him by its
citizens, who after stormy and divided councils resolved on a policy
of non-resistance.

[Sidenote: Memorial, Senate Ex. Doc., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. II., p.
77.]

They next made application to the marshal, who tauntingly replied that
he could not rely on their pledges, and must take the liberty to
execute his process in his own time and manner. The help of Colonel
Sumner, commanding the United States troops, was finally invoked, but
his instructions only permitted him to act at the call of the Governor
or marshal. [Footnote: Sumner to Shannon, May 12, 1856. Senate Ex.
Doc., No. 10, 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. V., p. 7.] Private persons who
had leased the Free-State Hotel vainly besought the various
authorities to prevent the destruction of their property. Ten days
were consumed in these negotiations; but the spirit of vengeance
refused to yield. When the citizens of Lawrence rose on the 21st of
May they beheld their town invested by a formidable military force.

During the forenoon the deputy-marshal rode leisurely into the town
attended by less than a dozen men, being neither molested nor opposed.
He summoned half a dozen citizens to join his posse, who followed,
obeyed, and assisted him. He continued his pretended search and, to
give color to his errand, made two arrests. The Free-State Hotel, a
stone building in dimensions fifty by seventy feet, three stories high
and handsomely furnished, previously occupied only for lodging-rooms,
on that day for the first time opened its table accommodations to the
public, and provided a free dinner in honor of the occasion. The
marshal and his posse, including Sheriff Jones, went among other
invited guests and enjoyed the proffered hospitality. As he had
promised to protect the hotel, the reassured citizens began to laugh
at their own fears. To their sorrow they were soon undeceived. The
military force, partly rabble, partly organized, had meanwhile moved
into the town.

To save his official skirts from stain, the deputy-marshal now went
through the farce of dismissing his entire posse of citizens and
Border Ruffians, at which juncture Sheriff Jones made his appearance,
claiming the "posse" as his own. He planted a company before the
hotel, and demanded a surrender of the arms belonging to the free-
State military companies. Refusal or resistance being out of the
question, half a dozen small cannon were solemnly dug up from their
concealment and, together with a few Sharps rifles, formally
delivered. Half an hour later, turning a deaf ear to all remonstrance,
he gave the proprietors until 5 o'clock to remove their families and
personal property from the Free-State Hotel. Atchison, who had been
haranguing the mob, planted his two guns before the building and
trained them upon it. The inmates being removed, at the appointed hour
a few cannon balls were fired through the stone walls. This mode of
destruction being slow and undramatic, and an attempt to blow it up
with gunpowder having proved equally unsatisfactory, the torch was
applied, and the structure given to the flames. [Footnote: Memorial,
Senate Executive Document, 3d Session 34th Congress. Volume II, pp.
73-85.] Other squads had during the same time been sent to the several
printing-offices, where they broke the presses, scattered the type,
and demolished the furniture. The house of Governor Robinson was also
robbed and burned. Very soon the mob was beyond all control, and
spreading itself over the town engaged in pillage till the darkness of
night arrested it. Meanwhile the chiefs sat on their horses and viewed
the work of destruction.

[Sidenote: House Reports, 2d Sess., 36th Cong., Vol. III, part 1, p.
39.]

[Sidenote: Holloway, p. 351.]

[Sidenote: Memorial to the President.]

If we would believe the chief actors, this was the "law and order
party," executing the mandates of justice. Part and parcel of the
affair was the pretense that this exploit of prairie buccaneering had
been authorized by Judge Leeompte's court, the officials citing in
their defense a presentment of his grand jury, declaring the
free-State newspapers seditious publications, and the Free-State Hotel
a rebellious fortification, and recommending their _abatement_ as
nuisances. The travesty of American government involved in the
transaction is too serious for ridicule. In this incident, contrasting
the creative and the destructive spirit of the factions, the Emigrant
Aid Society of Massachusetts finds its most honorable and triumphant
vindication. The whole proceeding was so childish, the miserable plot
so transparent, the outrage so gross, as to bring disgust to the
better class of Border Ruffians who were witnesses and accessories.
The free-State men have recorded the honorable conduct of Colonel
Zadock Jackson, of Georgia, and Colonel Jefferson Buford, of Alabama,
as well as of the prosecuting attorney of the county, each of whom
denounced the proceedings on the spot.

[Relocated Footnote: Governor Robinson being on his way East, the
steamboat on which he was traveling stopped at Lexington, Missouri. An
unauthorized mob induced the Governor, with that persuasiveness in
which the Border Ruffians had become adepts, to leave the boat,
detaining him at Lexington on the accusation that he was fleeing from
an indictment. In a few days an officer came with a requisition from
Governor Shannon, and took the prisoner by land to Westport, and
afterwards from there to Kansas City and Leavenworth. Here he was
placed in the custody of Captain Martin, of the Kickapoo Rangers, who
proved a kind jailer, and materially assisted in protecting him from
the dangerous intentions of the mob which at that time held
Leavenworth under a reign of terror.

Mrs. Robinson, who has kindly sent us a sketch of the incident,
writes: "On the night of the 28th [of May] for greater security
General Richardson of the militia slept in the same bed with the
prisoner, while Judge Lecompte and Marshal Donaldson slept just
outside of the door of the prisoner's room. Captain Martin said: 'I
shall give you a pistol to help protect yourself if worse comes to
worst!' In the early morning of the next day, May 29, a company of
dragoons with one empty saddle came down from the fort, and while the
pro-slavery men still slept, the prisoner and his escort were on their
way across the prairies to Lecompton in the charge of officers of the
United States Army. The Governor and other prisoners were kept on the
prairie near Lecompton until the 10th of September, 1856, when all
were released."]




END OF VOL. I.






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