Lincoln (16 page)

Most disturbing of all were the outbreaks of mob violence, which “pervaded the country, from New England to Louisiana.” Two particular incidents Lincoln called to the attention of his audience: a vigilante outbreak in Mississippi, which began with the execution of gamblers but continued until “dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side; and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss”; and the burning to death in St. Louis of a mulatto man named Mclntosh, accused of murdering a prominent citizen. If “persons and property, are held by no better tenure than the caprice of a mob,” “if the laws be continually despised and disregarded,” Lincoln warned, citizens’ affection for their government must inevitably be alienated.

As a remedy, Lincoln urged what he called a simple solution: “Let every
American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap—let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges;—let it be written in Primmers, spelling books, and in Almanacs;—let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.” “In short,” he urged, “let it become the
political religion
of the nation.”

This was, for the most part, standard Whig rhetoric, of a piece with Lincoln’s speech in the legislature the previous year defending the State Bank against the “lawless and mobocratic spirit... abroad in the land.” But at this point in the lyceum lecture, when most listeners must have thought he had nearly finished, Lincoln, in effect, began again, asking why the danger to American political institutions was so much greater now than it had been for the past fifty years. In the first half of the lecture he had offered essentially a sociological interpretation of the danger; now he offered a psychological explanation.

In previous generations, he suggested, when the outcome of the American venture in self-government was still in doubt, “all that sought celebrity and fame, and distinction, expected to find them in the success of that experiment.” Even now there were “many great and good men” who aspired “to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair.” But, he added, in a rare moment of self-revelation,
“such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.”
Such honors were not enough for “men of ambition and talents.” These routine offices would not satisfy “an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon,” from whom the greatest danger to popular government must be expected. “Towering genius disdains a beaten path,” Lincoln reminded his audience. “It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.... It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.”

Probably most of Lincoln’s listeners thought this nothing more than another rhetorical flourish at the end of a long speech. Few could have realized that he was unconsciously describing himself. His ambition was no secret. As Herndon said, it was “a little engine that knew no rest.” But only Speed understood how avid was his thirst for distinction. To this one intimate friend Lincoln confessed his ambition “to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man,” and in his darker moods he lamented “that he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.”

It was to guard against “men of ambition and talents”—like himself—that Lincoln urged a second, and fundamentally different, way to preserve American political institutions. In the first half of his speech he had used
conventional conservative rhetoric to favor the slow, organic growth of national feeling. Now he proposed erecting a new “temple of liberty,” not resting on emotion and custom but carved “from the solid quarry of sober reason.”

That invocation of reason accounted for one otherwise inexplicable omission from his lyceum address: his failure to mention the one instance of mob violence closest to Springfield and most familiar to his listeners. In November 1837 a mob at Alton, Illinois, had killed Elijah P. Lovejoy, editor of the abolitionist paper the
Observer.
The Maine-born minister, who dedicated his paper to a war on slavery, intemperance, and “popery,” had been driven out of Missouri by the proslavery elements and the enraged Catholics of St. Louis, and he renewed his campaign from Alton, twenty-five miles up the Mississippi River, on the Illinois side. Breaking his repeated pledges to edit his paper in the interests of the Presbyterian Church alone, Lovejoy became increasingly strident in his abolitionism. Irate residents of Alton, tied by kinship and trade to the South, twice threw his printing presses into the river. When he and sixty young armed abolitionists from towns nearby vowed to defend a third press, the mob burned the warehouse where the press was stored and shot Lovejoy. This brutal infringement of the freedom of the press sent a shock wave through the North and provoked protest meetings in all the major cities. But when Lincoln spoke out against mob violence, he did not mention Lovejoy or Alton by name and offered only a passing condemnation of persons who—among other outrages—“throw printing presses into rivers, [and] shoot editors.” Though Lincoln deplored the Alton riot, he also implicitly censured Lovejoy’s abolitionist agitation; both resulted from unbridled passions, which could lead to the overthrow of popular government.

Lincoln’s reservations about abolitionism extended to other humanitarian reform movements. For instance, he never joined the prohibition movement, even though he himself did not use liquor and often spoke at temperance rallies. But he disliked the emotionalism of the prohibitionists, who, he said, addressed drunkards and dramshop-keepers “in thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,” blaming them for “all the vice and misery and crime in the land” and condemning them as persons to be “shunned by all the good and virtuous, as moral pestilences.” To the outrage of local clergymen and do-gooders, he announced in an 1842 lecture that “if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class.” Consequently he refused to coerce them into temperance, but he enthusiastically backed the Washingtonian Society’s program of converting alcoholics by
“persuasion,
kind, unassuming persuasion.”

In all such matters what he feared was uncontrolled emotion. Passion, he remarked in the conclusion of his lyceum lecture, “will in future be our enemy.” In its stead the nation must rely on “reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason.” Only then, he told the Washingtonians, would come
the “happy day, when, all appetites controled, all passions subdued,...
mind,
all conquering
mind,
shall live and move the monarch of the world. Glorious consummation! Hail fall of Fury! Reign of Reason, all hail!”

The earnestness of Lincoln’s efforts to impose rationality on public life reflected his intense internal struggle to bring coherence to his own, still unshaped personality. He was not yet sure who he was or how he wished to be perceived. He liked to associate with the “aristocratic” element of Springfield, who gathered around the wealthy and snobbish Ninian W. Edwardses, but he also wanted, as he said, to be “one of the boys,” the young and active workingmen and clerks who time after time supported his election to the state legislature. In his role of courteous gentleman he could write a gallant letter to Mrs. Browning, urging her to accompany her husband to the meeting of the legislature in Springfield, where he promised to “render unto your Honoress due attention and faithful obedience”; but he knew that many in the house of representatives joined Ewing in thinking him a “coarse and vulgar fellow.” He wanted to be regarded as a generous opponent, unwilling to hurt the feelings of a colleague; yet, with his high temper still not under control, he was capable of flaring up in debate and truculently announcing that if his opponents wanted to settle a dispute “at another tribunal” he “was always ready, and never shrunk from responsibility.” He thought of himself as a speaker who advanced strong, logical arguments, yet he learned from the Democratic
Illinois State Register
that many deplored his habit in his public appearances of putting on “a sort of assumed clownishness in his manner which does not become him, and which does not truly belong to him.”

Even Lincoln’s style betrayed his inner uncertainty. In most of his public speeches and legal papers, he kept to simple, pithy statements, notably devoid of ornamentation or rhetorical flourish. But on occasion, as in the lyceum address, he adopted the florid style so common in nineteenth-century oratory. America need have no fear of foreign invasion, he boasted: “All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth... in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.” Or, in the unlikely context of defending the national bank, he announced: “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 and lone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors. Here, without contemplating consequences, before High Heaven, and in the face of the world, I swear eternal fidelity to the just cause ... of the land of my life, my liberty and my love.”

Similarly conflicted and contradictory were his attitudes toward women.
Lincoln liked women and he wanted to know them. A month after he moved to Springfield in 1837, he lamented, “I have been spoken to by but one woman since I’ve been here, and should not have been by her, if she could have avoided it.” But he was awkward and uncomfortable when he was around them. He did not know how to behave. Sometimes he turned up for evening affairs wearing his rough Conestoga boots, and he once disrupted a party by commenting, “Oh boys, how clean these girls look.”

He met eligible young women primarily at the Sunday soirees that Ninian and Elizabeth Edwards held at their luxurious mansion. Edwards was a snob who found Lincoln “a mighty rough man,” but this ambitious son of a former Illinois governor thought the young lawyer might be politically useful. Elizabeth Todd Edwards’s ambitions were matrimonial; she seemed always to have as a guest an unmarried friend or relative who was looking for a husband. She had just married off one sister, Frances, to a local physician, William Wallace, and was ready to welcome others from her Kentucky home.

Around the Edwardses gathered the brightest and best of Springfield society. The handsome and soldierly John J. Hardin, a relative of Mrs. Edwards and likely candidate for Congress, attended most of their parties. So did Edward D. Baker, the enormously popular young Whig orator, who might one day have aspired to the presidency but for his British birth. O. H. Browning represented the conservative, better-educated element of the Whig party. Though the Edwardses were staunch Whigs, their soirees were nonpartisan, and they welcomed Stephen A. Douglas, now the leading Democrat in the state, already known as the “Little Giant” because his power belied his size. Democrat James Shields, the handsome Irish-born state auditor, was often a guest.

The Edwards entourage included the most attractive young women in Springfield. From time to time, Ninian Edwards welcomed a relative, such as his niece, the beautiful and pious Matilda Edwards. Julia Jayne, daughter of a Springfield doctor, nearly always attended the Edwards parties, as did Mercy Ann Levering when she was visiting from Baltimore. But nobody in the Edwards circle attracted more interest than Mrs. Edwards’s younger sister, Mary Todd.

The daughter of Robert S. Todd, a prosperous merchant and banker of Lexington, Kentucky, Mary had grown up in luxury, attended by family slaves and educated in the best private schools. Unable to get along with her stepmother, she decided, after a preliminary jaunt in 1837, to pay her sister an extended visit in 1839. Immediately this small, pretty young woman of twenty-two years, with beautiful fair skin, light chestnut hair, and remarkably vivid blue eyes, enchanted the other members of the group. Even Herndon, who came to hate her, described Mary as “young, dashing, handsome—witty... cultured—graceful and dignified,” though he also noted that she could be “sarcastic—haughty—aristocratic.” “She was an excellent conversationalist,” Herndon continued, “and she soon became the belle of the town, leading the young men of the town a merry dance.”

Abraham Lincoln was one of those who danced in attendance—literally so, since he first met Mary Todd at one of the Edwards’ parties and told her he wanted to dance with her “in the worst way.” And, Mary laughed, he did. Lincoln was enchanted by this vivacious, intelligent young woman, and soon he was one of her regular attendants at parties, on horseback rides, on jaunts to neighboring towns. Mary was entirely different from anyone he had ever known. He did not even feel awkward when talking to her, for she made up for his deficiencies as a conversationalist. Mrs. Edwards recalled that when they were together “Mary led the conversation—Lincoln would listen and gaze on her as if drawn by some superior power, irresistably [sic] so; he listened—never scarcely said a word.” Lincoln, she added, “could not hold a lengthy conversation with a lady—was not sufficiently educated and intelligent in the female line to do so. He was charmed with Mary’s wit and fascinated with her quick sagacity—her will—her nature—and culture.”

In receiving Lincoln’s attentions, Mary had to think of him, as she did of the other young men who gathered around her, as a potential husband. Marriage was now very much on her mind. She was just short of becoming an old maid, and, except for schoolteaching, no other career was open to women of her class. There were not many eligible bachelors. She very much liked Douglas, with whom she flirted outrageously, to their mutual amusement, but both quickly recognized that his mind was on his career and he was not seriously interested in matrimony. She found Speed handsome and charming, but he seemed attracted to the devout Matilda Edwards. The widower Edwin B. Webb, another Springfield attorney, was an earnest suitor, but he suffered from the disadvantages of being considerably older than Mary and of having what she called “two
sweet little objections,”
the children of his first marriage. She was realistic enough to recognize that, despite all the attentions she received, “my beaux have
always
been
hard bargains.”