Lincoln (24 page)

Lincoln immediately made himself at home in the boardinghouse, charming the other guests with his jokes and anecdotes. One of his fellow boarders, Dr. Samuel Busey, recalled that when there was a controversy over political issues, or especially over the subject of slavery, Lincoln would “interrupt it by interposing some anecdote, thus diverting it into a hearty and general laugh, and so completely disarrange the tenor of the discussion.” For recreation Lincoln joined other members of the mess in bowling at the nearby alley owned by James Casparis. “He was a very awkward bowler,” Dr. Busey remembered, “but played the game with great zest and spirit, solely for exercise and amusement.” He punctuated his bowling by telling stories—“some of which were very broad”—and a crowd of listeners always gathered when he was playing.

Initially both the Lincolns found life in the national capital an exciting adventure. Washington, with its 40,000 inhabitants—including 2,000 slaves and 8,000 free blacks—was the largest and most cosmopolitan place either of them had ever known. The Capitol building, which they could see from Mrs. Sprigg’s windows, was an imposing, though still unfinished, structure, its temporary, wooden dome suggesting the fragility of the federal Union. At the opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue loomed the White House, certainly the grandest residence either of the Lincolns had seen. South of the Executive Mansion, preparations were under way for the laying of the cornerstone of the vast obelisk of the Washington Monument; as congressman, Lincoln took part in the dedication ceremonies. Most of the streets in the capital were still unpaved, but a cobblestoned stretch of Pennsylvania offered a tempting array of specialty shops with luxury goods.

As transients, the Lincolns, like other congressional families, were not admitted to the exclusive social life of long-term capital residents, but they could always find amusements. There were levees at the White House, though these were not heavily attended, since the Polks forbade dancing and offered guests neither food nor drink, and there were biweekly concerts by the Marine Band in the President’s grounds. In the evenings there were sometimes lectures and concerts. On one notable occasion the Lincolns attended a performance by the Ethiopian Serenaders, minstrels in blackface who had recently sung for Queen Victoria and the royal family.

But Mary soon became dissatisfied. Her husband, busy with the work of Congress, had little time to spend with her; indeed, he wrote later, he thought she “hindered me some in attending to business.” She lacked female companionship, because few of the congressmen were accompanied by their wives. The four Lincolns lived in a single large room, and she appeared downstairs only at meal times. Because the Lincoln children were noisy and undisciplined, there was inevitably friction with the other boarders.
Robert, one of them remembered, was a bright boy, who “seemed to have his own way”; Eddie was sick much of the time. In the spring Mary Lincoln decided to take the children back to Lexington, Kentucky, where she stayed with her father. When Lincoln wrote her, he hinted at the sometimes tense relations at Mrs. Sprigg’s: “All the house—or rather, all with whom you were on decided good terms—send their love to you. The others say nothing.”

Lincoln was so absorbed in his congressional duties that at first he hardly missed her. Enthusiastically he threw himself into the work of the House, establishing a conspicuous record for faithful attendance. Of the 456 roll-call votes during his two years of service, he missed only 13. Appropriately, in view of his experience as a postmaster, he was assigned to the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, and he also served on the Committee on Expenditures in the War Department. In both committees he did his share of the work and effectively presented reports from the Post Office Committee to the House. He regularly and promptly submitted petitions from his constituents, most of which dealt with requests for land grants for constructing railroads. He did his best to help his friends who sought appointments from the federal government, even though he knew that there was little reason to think a Democratic administration would shower patronage on a freshman Whig congressman. Much of his time was spent in answering his correspondence, without, of course, the aid of a secretary or assistant. After he began making speeches in the House of Representatives, he took great pains to see that they reached his home audience, purchasing no fewer than 7,580 copies, which he painstakingly addressed and franked in his own hand—far more than most of the other members of the Congress.

The House of Representatives did not overawe him. If he was new to Washington, so were two hundred of the other representatives in this Thirtieth Congress, and his four terms in the Illinois state legislature had made him familiar with parliamentary procedures. Like any other freshman congressman, he had a little stage fright when he first gained the floor to make a few remarks, but he got over it quickly. “I find speaking here and elsewhere about the same thing,” he reported to Herndon. “I was about as badly scared, and no worse, as I am when I speak in court.”

Quickly he began to take the measure of his fellow representatives. Unlike the Senate, where his old rival Stephen A. Douglas now joined such august solons as Webster, John C. Calhoun, and Thomas Hart Benton, the House, for the most part, was composed of men of mediocre ability and only local reputation. The one great exception was John Quincy Adams, distinguished alike for his rocklike integrity and his implacable hatred of slavery, but the former President died early in the session, before Lincoln really got to know him. Apart from Giddings, whose presence Lincoln felt more as a moral than a political force, he was most taken by Georgia Whig Alexander H. Stephens, whom he described as “a little slim, pale-faced, consumptive man”; the young Southerner, like Lincoln, was looking for a
way to rejuvenate and reunite the Whig party. Looking about the hall, Lincoln could readily identify a number of other industrious and competent representatives—men like David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, author of the celebrated proviso that would bar slavery from all territories gained in the Mexican War; Caleb B. Smith, the astute Indiana political manager, who would become Lincoln’s first Secretary of the Interior; and Robert C. Schenck, of Ohio, whom Lincoln would one day appoint major general in the army. Not a modest man, Lincoln saw no reason to feel that these flickering lights outshined him.

He found his party in disarray. Though the Whigs had done very well in the off-year elections of 1846, party leaders were troubled by the outlook for the 1848 presidential election. The Democratic administration of James K. Polk had been extraordinarily successful: the President settled the festering boundary dispute with Great Britain over the Oregon Territory; by signing the Walker Tariff, which imposed very low duties, he set policy for the next decade; by firmly vetoing an internal improvements bill, he killed that question as a political issue; and he presided over a highly successful war that was about to add California and New Mexico to the Union. Whigs recognized that it would be very difficult to defeat the Democrat most often mentioned as Polk’s probable successor, Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan, whose contradictory positions on the Wilmot Proviso allowed all factions to favor him.

The only issue on which the Democrats appeared to be vulnerable was the President’s role in originating the Mexican War. This was not a subject to which Lincoln hitherto had given much attention. Like every other American, he knew about the Texas revolt from Mexico in 1836, and because he thought of the Mexicans as “greasers,” he no doubt was pleased when Texas gained its independence. But in 1844 when President John Tyler urged the annexation of Texas to the United States, Lincoln, like Henry Clay, former President Van Buren, and Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, branded the move as “altogether inexpedient.” He did not share Tyler’s enthusiasm for territorial expansion because, as he later declared, he “did not believe in enlarging our field, but in keeping our fences where they are and cultivating our present possession, making it a garden, improving the morals and education of the people.”

He had nothing to say when Texas was annexed or when President Polk sought aggressively to protect the new territory and also to settle longstanding claims and complaints against Mexico. In April 1846 fighting broke out between the Mexican army and American troops commanded by Zachary Taylor in territory between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, a region claimed by both the United States and Mexico. The United States declared war. Unpopular in New England, the conflict stirred patriotic enthusiasm in other parts of the country, and in Illinois there was a rush to enlist in the volunteer army. Both Hardin and Baker, Lincoln’s predecessors, became officers. But the Mexican War never surfaced as an issue in the congressional
campaign that Lincoln and Peter Cartwright were waging. Lincoln’s only utterance on the subject was a “warm, thrilling and effective” speech that he gave on May 30 at a public meeting to encourage volunteering. Even after he was elected to Congress, he made no comment on the war, believing, as he said later, “that all those who, because of knowing too
little,
or because of knowing too
much,
could not conscientiously approve the conduct of the President, in the beginning of it, should... as good citizens and patriots, remain silent..., at least till the war should be ended.”

By the time Lincoln arrived in Washington, he felt free to speak out, because the fighting was substantially over. In hard-fought battles at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, Monterrey, and Buena Vista, General Taylor repeatedly routed the Mexican forces in the North, while General Winfield Scott led an expedition that captured Veracruz and, eventually, Mexico City itself. In his annual message of December 1847, President Polk asked Congress for additional funds to bring the war to a close, claiming the vast territories of New Mexico and California as partial indemnity. With a note of triumph he announced that he was about to conclude a war that Mexico had initiated by “invading the territory of the State of Texas, striking the first blow, and shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil.”

The message was the pretext for a sustained Whig attack upon the President, his administration, and, in general, the Democratic party. Lincoln led the assault on Polk. On December 22 he introduced a series of resolutions requiring the President to provide the House with “all the facts which go to establish whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our
citizens
was so shed, was, or was not,
our own soil”
In the manner of a prosecuting attorney, he demanded that the President inform the Congress whether that spot had ever been part of Texas and whether its inhabitants had ever “submitted themselves to the government or laws of Texas,... by
consent,
or by
compulsion,
either by accepting office, or voting at elections, or paying taxes, or serving on juries, or ...
in any other way.”
Lincoln clearly intended to show that the American army had begun the war by making an unprovoked attack on a Mexican settlement, despite the fact that “Genl. Taylor had, more than once, intimated to the War Department that... no such movement was necessary to the defence or protection of Texas.”

The attack became more general on January 3, when Representative George Ashmun of Massachusetts introduced a resolution declaring that the war had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.” It was adopted by the votes of eighty-five Whig representatives, including Lincoln’s. A few days later Lincoln continued the campaign against Polk in a long speech, on which he had worked very hard. Subjecting Polk’s version of the origins of the war to a close, lawyerly scrutiny, he chided the President for the gaps in his evidence and his logic. The mistakes could not be unintentional, because “Mr. Polk is too good a lawyer not to know that is wrong.” After sifting “the whole of the President’s evidence,” he demanded that Polk respond to the interrogatories he had posed:
“Let him answer, fully, fairly, and candidly. Let him answer with
facts,
and not with arguments.” Piously he professed that if the President could do so, “then I am with him for his justification.” But if he failed to respond, that would show “that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong—that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.” The President, Lincoln speculated with a freedom that he would never have permitted himself in a courtroom, must have begun the war motivated by a desire for “military glory—that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy.” When that aim failed, his mind, “tasked beyond it’s power,” began “running hither and thither, like an ant on a hot stove,” and this “bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man” could now only speak in “the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream.”

Proud of his effort, Lincoln hoped it would establish his place in the House of Representatives. Now feeling very much at home, he began to think of Washington as a very pleasant place, and he regretted his pledge that he—like Hardin and Baker before him—would serve only one term. When Herndon reported that some people thought he should be reelected, he replied that his word and honor forbade him to enter the race, but he added coyly, “If it should so happen that nobody else wishes to be elected, I could not refuse the people the right of sending me again.”

His expectations were quickly dashed. In Washington nobody paid much attention to his resolutions, which the House neither debated nor adopted, or to his speech. The President made no response to Lincoln’s interrogatories; he never mentioned Lincoln’s name, even in his voluminous diaries. Congressmen were for the most part equally indifferent, regarding Lincoln’s attack as part of the general Whig assault upon a Democratic administration. One obscure Indiana Democrat did chide Lincoln for having failed to tell his constituents during his election campaign that he was opposed to the war, and Representative John Jameson of Missouri professed to be astonished that the successor of John J. Hardin, killed at Buena Vista, and of E. D. Baker, a hero of the battle of Cerro Gordo, should make such an unpatriotic speech. There was little newspaper comment. The
Baltimore Patriot
carried a squib commending his “Spot” resolutions and commenting: “Evidently there is music in that very tall Mr. Lincoln,” and the St. Louis
Missouri Republican
called his speech “one of great power,... replete with the strongest and most conclusive arguments.” But none of the newspapers with national circulation paid attention to either Lincoln’s resolutions or his address.