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In 1816 the Lincolns moved to
Indiana, "partly on account of slavery," Abraham recalled, "but
chiefly on account of difficulty in and titles in Kentucky." Land
ownership was more secure in Indiana because the Land Ordinance of
1785 provided for surveys by the federal government; moreover, the
Northwest Ordinance of 1787 forbade slavery in the area. Lincoln's
parents belonged to a faction of the Baptist church that disapproved
of slavery, and this affiliation may account for Abraham's later
statement that he was "naturally anti-slavery" and could not
remember when he "did not so think, and feel."
Indiana was a "wild region, with many
bears and other wild animals still in the woods." The Lincolns' life
near Little Pigeon Creek, in Perry (now Spencer) County, was not
easy. Lincoln "was raised to farm work" and recalled life in this
"unbroken forest" as a fight "with trees and logs and grubs." "There
was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education," Lincoln
later recalled; he attended "some schools, so called," but for less
than a year altogether. "Still, somehow," he remembered, "I could
read, write, and cipher to the Rule of Three; but that was all."
Lincoln's mother died in 1818, and
the following year his father married a Kentucky widow, Sarah Bush
Johnston. She "proved a good and kind mother." In later years
Lincoln could fondly and poetically recall memories of his
"childhood home." In 1828 he was able to make a flatboat trip to New
Orleans. His sister died in childbirth the same year.
In 1830 the Lincolns left Indiana for
Illinois. Abraham made a second flatboat trip to New Orleans, and in
1831 he left home for New Salem, in Sangamon County near
Springfield. The separation may have been made easier by Lincoln's
estrangement from his father, of whom he spoke little in his mature
life. In New Salem, Lincoln tried various occupations and served
briefly in the Black Hawk War (1832). This military interlude was
uneventful except for the fact that he was elected captain of his
volunteer company, a distinction that gave him "much satisfaction."
It opened new avenues for his life.
Illinois Legislator
Lincoln ran unsuccessfully for the
Illinois legislature in 1832. Two years later he was elected to the
lower house for the first of four successive terms (until 1841) as a
Whig. His membership in the Whig Party was natural. Lincoln's father
was a Whig, and the party's ambitious program of national economic
development was the perfect solution to the problems Lincoln had
seen in his rural, hardscrabble Indiana past. His first platform
(1832) announced that "Time and experience . . . verified . . . that
the poorest and most thinly populated countries would greatly
benefit by the opening of good roads, and in the clearing of
navigable streams. . . . There cannot justly be any objection to
having rail roads and canals."
As a Whig, Lincoln supported the
Second Bank of the United States, the Illinois State Bank,
government-sponsored internal improvements (roads, canals,
railroads, harbors), and protective tariffs. His Whig vision of the
West, derived from Henry Clay, was not at all pastoral. Unlike most
successful American politicians, Lincoln was unsentimental about
agriculture, calling farmers in 1859 "neither better nor worse than
any other people." He remained conscious of his humble origins and
was therefore sympathetic to labor as "prior to, and independent of,
capital." He bore no antagonism to capital, however, admiring the
American system of economic opportunity in which the "man who
labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and
next year he will hire others to labor for him." Slavery was the
opposite of opportunity and mobility, and Lincoln stated his
political opposition to it as early as 1837.
Lawyer and U.S. Representative
Encouraged by Whig legislator John
Todd Stuart, Lincoln became a lawyer in 1836, and in 1837 he moved
to Springfield, where he became Stuart's law partner. With a
succession of partners, including Stephen T. Logan and William H.
Herndon, Lincoln built a successful practice. Lincoln courted Mary
Todd, a Kentuckian of much more genteel origins than he. After a
brief postponement of their engagement, which plummeted Lincoln into
a deep spell of melancholy, they were married on Nov. 4, 1842. They
had four sons: Robert Todd (1843-1926), Edward Baker (1846-50),
William Wallace (1850-62), and Thomas "Tad" (1853-71). Mary Todd
Lincoln was a Presbyterian, but her husband was never a church
member.
Lincoln served one term (1847-49) as
a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, where he opposed the
Mexican War--Whigs did everywhere--as unnecessary and
unconstitutional. This opposition was not a function of
internationalist sympathy for Mexico (Lincoln thought the war
inevitable) but of feeling that the Democratic president, James
Polk, had violated the Constitution. Lincoln had been indifferent
about the annexation of Texas, already a slave territory, but he
opposed any expansion that would allow slavery into new areas;
hence, he supported the Wilmot Proviso, which would have barred
slavery from any territory gained as a result of the Mexican War. He
did not run for Congress again, returning instead to Springfield and
the law.
The
Slavery Issue and the Lincoln-Douglas Debates
Lincoln "was losing interest in
politics" when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed by Congress in
1854. This legislation opened lands previously closed to slavery to
the possibility of its spread by local option (popular sovereignty);
Lincoln viewed the provisions of the act as immoral. Although he was
not an abolitionist and thought slavery unassailably protected by
the Constitution in states where it already existed, Lincoln also
thought that America's founders had put slavery on the way to
"ultimate extinction" by preventing its spread to new territories.
He saw this act, which had been sponsored by Democratic Senator
Stephen A. Douglas, as a new and alarming development.
Lincoln vied for the U.S. Senate in
1855 but eventually threw his support to Lyman Trumbull. In 1856 he
joined the newly formed Republican Party, and two years later he
campaigned for the Senate against Douglas. In his speech at
Springfield in acceptance of the Republican senatorial nomination
(June 16, 1858) Lincoln suggested that Douglas, Chief Justice Roger
B. Taney, and Democratic presidents Franklin Pierce and James
Buchanan had conspired to nationalize slavery. In the same speech he
expressed the view that the nation would become either all slave or
all free: "A house divided against itself cannot stand."
The underdog in the senatorial
campaign, Lincoln wished to share Douglas's fame by appearing with
him in debates. Douglas agreed to seven debates: in Ottawa,
Freeport, Jonesboro, Charleston, Galesburg, Quincy, and Alton, Ill.
Lincoln knew that Douglas--now fighting the Democratic Buchanan
administration over the constitution to be adopted by Kansas--had
alienated his Southern support; and he feared Douglas's new appeal
to eastern Republicans now that Douglas was battling the South.
Lincoln's strategy, therefore, was to stress the gulf of principle
that separated Republican opposition to slavery as a moral wrong
from the moral indifference of the Democrats, embodied in
legislation allowing popular sovereignty to decide the fate of each
territory. Douglas, Lincoln insisted, did not care whether slavery
was "voted up or voted down." By his vigorous showing against the
famous Douglas, Lincoln won the debates and his first considerable
national fame. He did not win the Senate seat, however; the Illinois
legislature, dominated by Democratic holdovers in the upper house,
elected Douglas.
Election to the Presidency
In
February 1860, Lincoln made his first major political appearance in
the Northeast when he addressed a rally at the Cooper Union in New
York. He was now sufficiently well known to be a presidential
candidate. At the Republican national convention in Chicago in May,
William H. Seward was the leading candidate. Seward, however, had
qualities that made him undesirable in the critical states the
Republicans had lost in 1856: Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, and
New Jersey. As a result Lincoln won the nomination by being the
second choice of the majority.
He went on to win the presidential
election, defeating the Northern Democrat Douglas, the Southern
Democrat John C. Breckinridge, and the Constitutional Union
candidate John Bell. Lincoln selected a strong cabinet that included
all of his major rivals for the Republican nomination: Seward as
secretary of state, Salmon P. Chase as secretary of the treasury,
and Edward Bates as attorney general.
By the time of Lincoln's inauguration
in March 1861, seven states had seceded from the Union. His
conciliatory inaugural address had no effect on the South, and,
against the advice of a majority of his cabinet, Lincoln decided to
send provisions to Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. The fort was a
symbol of federal authority--conspicuous in the state that had led
secession, South Carolina--and it would soon have had to be
evacuated for lack of supplies. On Apr. 12, 1861, South Carolina
fired on the fort, and the Civil War began.
The
Civil War
As a commander in chief Lincoln was
soon noted for vigorous measures, sometimes at odds with the
Constitution and often at odds with the ideas of his military
commanders. After a period of initial support and enthusiasm for
George B. McClellan, Lincoln's conflicts with that Democratic
general helped to turn the latter into his presidential rival in
1864. Famed for his clemency for court-martialed soldiers, Lincoln
nevertheless took a realistic view of war as best prosecuted by
killing the enemy. Above all, he always sought a general, no matter
what his politics, who would fight. He found such a general in
Ulysses S. Grant, to whom he gave overall command in 1864.
Thereafter, Lincoln took a less direct role in military planning,
but his interest never wavered, and he died with a copy of Gen.
William Sherman's orders for the March to the Sea in his pocket.
Politics vied with war as Lincoln's
major preoccupation in the presidency. The war required the
deployment of huge numbers of men and quantities of material; for
administrative assistance, therefore, Lincoln turned to the only
large organization available for his use, the Republican party. With
some rare but important exceptions (for example, Secretary of War
Edwin M. Stanton), Republicans received the bulk of the civilian
appointments from the cabinet to the local post offices. Lincoln
tried throughout the war to keep the Republican party together and
never consistently favored one faction in the party over another.
Military appointments were divided between Republicans and
Democrats.
Democrats accused Lincoln of being a
tyrant because he proscribed civil liberties. For example, he
suspended the writ of habeas corpus in some areas as early as Apr.
27, 1861, and throughout the nation on Sept. 24, 1862, and the
administration made over 13,000 arbitrary arrests. On the other
hand, Lincoln tolerated virulent criticism from the press and
politicians, often restrained his commanders from overzealous
arrests, and showed no real tendencies toward becoming a dictator.
There was never a hint that Lincoln might postpone the election of
1864, although he feared in August of that year that he would surely
lose to McClellan. Democrats exaggerated Lincoln's suppression of
civil liberties, in part because wartime prosperity robbed them of
economic issues and in part because Lincoln handled the slavery
issue so skillfully.
The Constitution protected slavery in
peace, but in war, Lincoln came to believe, the commander in chief
could abolish slavery as a military necessity. The preliminary
Emancipation Proclamation of Sept. 22, 1862, bore this military
justification, as did all of Lincoln's racial measures, including
especially his decision in the final proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863,
to accept blacks in the army. By 1864, Democrats and Republicans
differed clearly in their platforms on the race issue: Lincoln's
endorsed the 13TH Amendment
to the Constitution abolishing slavery, whereas McClellan's pledged
to return to the South the rights it had had in 1860.
Lincoln's victory in that election
thus changed the racial future of the United States. It also
agitated Southern-sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, who began to
conspire first to abduct Lincoln and later to kill him. On Apr. 14,
1865, five days after Robert E. Lee's surrender to Grant at
Appomattox Court House, Lincoln attended a performance of Our
American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington. There, Booth
entered the presidential box and shot Lincoln. The next morning at
7:22 Lincoln died.
Lincoln's achievements--saving the
Union and freeing the slaves--and his martyrdom just at the war's
end assured his continuing fame. No small contribution was made by
his eloquence as exemplified in the Gettysburg Address (Nov. 19,
1863), in which he defined the war as a rededication to the
egalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence, and in his
second inaugural address (Mar. 4, 1865), in which he urged "malice
toward none" and "charity for all" in the peace to come. |
