Lincoln (21 page)

At night they stopped wherever they could find lodgings. Sometimes, Herndon remembered, they slept “with 20 men in the same room—some on old ropes—some on quilts—some on sheets—a straw or two under them.” When they arose the next morning, a pitcher of cold water outside and a single towel served for their ablutions; those who got up late often found the towel too wet to use. After a breakfast of greasy food and what Leonard Swett, the Bloomington lawyer who regularly traveled the Eighth Circuit, called “pretty tough coffee—pretty mean,” the caravan moved on toward the next county seat. Arriving on a Saturday or a Sunday, the lawyers resorted to a favorite hotel or tavern near the courthouse, where, again, they slept two or three to a bed.

The next morning the lawyers would be approached by litigants, often with their local counsel, who were glad to have the help of more experienced attorneys from Springfield and Bloomington—the two largest towns on the circuit. Business had to be transacted speedily—declarations and traverses drafted, petitions written, lists of witnesses drawn up—so that the judge could hear cases on Monday afternoon. There was little time to study cases closely, much less to look up precedents; lawyers on the circuit had to rely mostly on general knowledge and common sense.

Clients and local counsel eagerly sought Lincoln’s services. On the circuit his reputation for integrity and fairness was even more important than in more technically difficult cases appealed to the state supreme court. In about a third of the cases in which Lincoln appeared on the circuit, he acted alone; in the others he worked with local counsel. He had few criminal cases and not many cases in chancery. Herndon enumerated the kinds of cases that formed the bulk of his circuit practice: “assault and battery—suits on notes—small disputes among neighbors—slander—warranties on horse trades—larceny of a small kind.” Lincoln nearly always had as much business as he could readily handle, but it was never as great as that of the most prominent local attorneys.

After the court adjourned each day the lawyers had leisure to prepare new cases or they could explore the meager resources of the little towns
they visited, all of which, except Springfield, Bloomington, and Pekin, had fewer than one thousand inhabitants. Mostly the attorneys had to amuse themselves, and, according to Herndon, they engaged in “fights—foot and horse races—knock down—wrestling—gambling etc.” “Whiskey,” he noted, “was abundant and freely used.” After supper the judge and the lawyers might attend some local amusement, like a circus or a lecture, but if there was no other diversion they would sit before the fire and swap tall tales and anecdotes. When that happened, Lincoln, of course, was a center of attention, and, as Herndon remembered, “Judges—Jurors—Witnesses—Lawyers—merchants—etc etc have laughed at these jokes ... till every muscle—nerve and cell of the body in the morning was sore at the whooping and hurrahing exercise.” By the end of the week the session was ended, and the judge and the attendant lawyers moved on to the next county seat.

It took at least ten weeks to complete the circuit—and then the whole process had to be repeated in the fall. Consequently Lincoln spent about three months of every year traveling the Eighth Judicial Circuit—and he sometimes made additional trips on legal business to other counties that were not on this circuit. Many of the other attorneys returned to their homes over the weekends, but Lincoln generally remained with the court. In the early years of his marriage friends reported that he was “desperately homesick and turning his head frequently towards the south,” and he usually broke the long fall term with a visit to Springfield. But it made no sense for him to keep rushing home; he was on the circuit to earn money, and the longer he stayed in the small county towns, the better acquainted he became with the local lawyers who could throw cases his way. His investment of time and energy paid off; he probably earned more than $150 a week, beyond expenses, while he was on the circuit.

Staying in these small towns also gave him a political advantage, and in his future political contests his strongest supporters were attorneys and clients he met on the circuit. He got to know thousands of central Illinois voters by name. In 1847, when J. H. Buckingham, a reporter for the
Boston Courier,
made a stage-coach trip through central Illinois with Lincoln, he found that he “knew, or appeared to know, every body we met, the name of the tenant of every farm-house, and the owner of every plat of ground.” “Such a shaking of hands—such a how-d’ye-do—such a greeting of different kinds, as we saw, was never seen before,” the newspaperman continued; “it seemed as if... he had a kind word, a smile and a bow for every body on the road, even to the horses, and the cattle, and the swine.”

In addition, Lincoln remained on the circuit because he enjoyed the life. What others considered hardships were matters of complete indifference to him. He did not care where he slept, and he ate whatever food was put in front of him. If there were drawbacks to life on the circuit, the hearty, masculine atmosphere more than compensated for them. Traveling the circuit gave him relief from a domesticity that he sometimes found smothering.

The Lincolns’ domestic life was often troubled. Husband and wife were as different in temperament as they were in physique. He was slow, moody, given to bouts of melancholy and long periods of silence. He depended on his inner resources. She was lively, talkative, and sociable, constantly needing the attention and admiration of others. Indifferent to what other people thought, he was not troubled when visitors found him in his favorite position for reading, stretched out at full length on the floor. She, who had grown up in houses with liveried black servants, was embarrassed when he answered the doorbell in his shirtsleeves.

A shortage of money contributed to their problems. Because Lincoln’s income was low during the early years of their marriage, they could afford only a tiny house. Overcrowded when they moved in, it became more so after 1846 with the birth of their second son, Edward—named after Lincoln’s political associate and friendly rival, Edward D. Baker. A minor remodeling of the house to create a new downstairs bedroom did not do much to ease the situation. Yet Mary loyally never made any public complaint about their straitened circumstances nor spoke of financial stringency in her letters. Instead she let gossip blame her for failing to show hospitality, when her house was so small that it had no dining room and meals had to be served in the kitchen. Similarly, she gained a reputation for stinginess when, in fact, she was trying to run a household on a very limited budget.

Lincoln, immersed in his own work, probably had no idea how hard his wife had to labor. She had to cook, clean, and scrub. She had to pump the water in the backyard and haul it into the house for heating. She had to keep the wood fire going in the kitchen stove and, during much of the year, in the living-room fireplace. Though Lincoln had his suits made by Benjamin R. Biddle, the local tailor, she had to sew all her own clothes, as well as those of her children; her purchases at John Irwin & Company, the Springfield general store, included needles, buttons, thread, muslin, calico, cambric, whalebones, and corset lace. And, above all, she had to pay close attention to her babies, especially to little Eddie, who was a sickly child. Despite the money her father gave her, she only occasionally had assistance in any of these chores. For a short time Harriet Hanks, one of Lincoln’s cousins, who was attending the Springfield Female Seminary, helped out in the house, but she and Mary did not get along. More often she had an Irish-born maid—one of the “wild Irish,” as she called them—but she thought they were undependable and lazy, and she quarreled with them all.

Mary Lincoln’s bad temper was famous in Springfield. Everybody heard stories about the tongue-lashings that she gave to maids, to workmen about the house, to street vendors—and to her husband. In part, these were the result of overwork and exhaustion on the part of a woman who up to the time of her marriage had never turned her hand. In part, they reflected
the unsteady condition of her health. Every spring she was afflicted with excruciating headaches—possibly the result of an allergy—and she suffered much from menstrual cramps. Highly emotional, she was terrified of lightning storms, of dogs, of robbers, and when she was in a panic, she could not control her actions.

In considerable measure Mary Lincoln’s outbursts were reactions to her husband’s behavior; he was a very difficult man to live with. For three months out of every year he was off riding the circuit, and she was left alone in her tiny house with two squalling children and, at best, an incompetent maid. She understood, and did not protest, the financial needs that sent Lincoln traveling, but she sadly told a neighbor “if her husband had staid at home as he ought to that she could love him better.”

Even when he was at home, he did not provide the comfort, the warmth, the affection that she craved. After a busy day at work, seeing clients and attending to cases in court, he wanted to sit quietly before the fire, reading, and he failed to realize that his wife, cooped up in the house all day with no one to talk to but infants, longed for adult conversation. Sometimes his inattention made her fly off the handle. On one occasion as he sat reading in his rocking chair in the living room while she cooked dinner, she warned him that the fire was about to go out. Absorbed in his reading, he did not respond, and she called out again, and then a third time. Furious at being ignored, she found a way of getting his attention: she struck him on the nose with a piece of firewood.

Such episodes were infrequent. The subject of much gossip in Springfield, they incorrectly represented the Lincolns’ marriage. For all their quarrels, they were devoted to each other. In the long years of their marriage Abraham Lincoln was never suspected of being unfaithful to his wife. She, in turn, was immensely proud of him and was his most loyal supporter and admirer. When someone compared her husband unfavorably to Douglas, she responded stoutly: “Mr. Lincoln may not be as handsome a figure ... but the people are perhaps not aware that his heart is as large as his arms are long.”

Their children further cemented their marriage. Both the Lincolns had to learn that parenting is a difficult art, and inevitably they made mistakes, especially with their first son, a short, chubby fellow, who from birth seemed to resemble the Todds more than the Lincolns. High-strung and overprotective, Mary constantly worried over Bob, and when the little boy disappeared from her sight for a few minutes, she was likely to alert the whole neighborhood that he was lost. Lincoln, for his part, gave too little attention to his oldest son. He did not ignore the child deliberately, but nothing in his upbringing suggested that a father should be comforting and nurturing. Occasionally he took the boy for walks, and when he was chopping firewood in the backyard he let his son help by splitting kindling. There is a touching account of Bob as a four-year-old trying to walk in his father’s gigantic boots.
But Robert’s principal memory of his father during these years was of his loading his saddlebags in preparation for going out on the circuit.

Both parents made some attempt to discipline their firstborn, who seems to have been a perfectly normal little boy, no more given to mischief than other children his age. But the whippings Mary administered were ineffectual—the more so because her husband made fun of her efforts—and when he tried to correct the child, she gave him a tongue-lashing. After the birth of Eddie, both parents pretty well gave up disciplining their offspring. Years later Mary reported that her husband said: “It is my pleasure that my children are free, happy and unrestrained by parental tyranny. Love is the chain whereby to bind a child to its parents.”

Pride in their children helped the Lincolns through even the worst of their domestic discord. When Robert was only three years old, Lincoln described him to Speed in a characteristic understatement that could not conceal his satisfaction with his firstborn: “He is quite smart enough. I some times fear he is one of the little rare-ripe sort, that are smarter at about five than ever after.” A few years later Mary did her own boasting when she wrote a friend: “I have a boy studying latin and greek and will be ten years old in a few days.”

Politics was another bond that held the Lincoln marriage together. Mary Lincoln, like her husband, was an ardent Whig. In a sense, they inherited their politics, for Mary’s father was an influential Whig spokesman in Kentucky and Thomas Lincoln hoped for the election of a Whig President who would make “Locofoco [i.e., Democratic] principals crmble to dust.” Both the Lincolns admired Henry Clay, the founder of the Whig party—Mary, because he was a friend of the Todd family in Lexington, her husband because Clay was his “beau ideal of a statesman.”

From the beginning of Lincoln’s political career he supported the Whig party. As late as 1859 he characterized himself as “always a whig in politics.” He was a strong defender of Whig economic policies against the proposals offered by the rival Democrats, and he usually stressed one principal issue in each campaign. In 1840, for instance, he repeatedly argued for a national bank, favored by most Whigs, and opposed the Independent Treasury system, endorsed by the Democrats. During the presidential election of 1844, Lincoln, like most other Northern Whigs, made the protective tariff his weapon to combat the Democrats, who favored low customs duties or free trade.

On all these issues Lincoln closely followed the national Whig party line, which he sometimes seemed to echo rather than to understand. In the 1840 campaign his frequently repeated address attacking the Democrats’ subtreasury plan and advocating a new national bank was a respectable,
though certainly not an original, piece of work. His speeches in 1843–1844 on the tariff were confused and demagogic. A protective tariff, he claimed, would have no effect at all on the common man; it would be collected only from “those whose pride, whose abundance of means, prompt them to spurn the manufactures of our own country, and to strut in British cloaks, and coats, and pantaloons.” On the stump he tried to argue that a high tariff made everything the farmers bought cheaper, but, according to a hostile reporter, “said also he could not tell the reason, but that it was so.”