Lincoln (25 page)

Very different were the responses from Illinois. As was to be expected, Democratic newspapers were uniformly critical. In Springfield, the
Illinois State Register
contrasted Lincoln’s opposition to the war with the “gallantry
and heroism” of Hardin, who had rushed to enlist in the army. Later the
Register
called Lincoln’s speech “politically motivated,” predicted that his ideas would be “repudiated by the great mass of people who voted for him,” and warned that Lincoln would “have a fearful account to settle” with the veterans when they returned from Mexico. Other Democratic newspapers joined the attack. According to the Charleston
Illinois Globe,
Lincoln’s resolutions showed “conclusively that the littleness of the pettifogging lawyer has not merged into the greatness of the statesman,” and the
Peoria Press
denounced this “miserable man of ‘spots’” for his “traitorous course in Congress.” Throughout the Seventh District, public meetings—largely Democratic, though some were labeled nonpartisan—condemned Lincoln’s course. The rally in Morgan County, where Hardin had lived, expressed “deep mortification” at Lincoln’s “base, dastardly, and treasonable assault upon President Polk,” and prophesied that “henceforth will this Benedict Arnold of our district be known here only as the Ranchero Spotty of one term.”

Condemnation from Democrats was to be expected, and discounted, but Lincoln was troubled by the faintness of praise he received from fellow Whigs. Simeon Francis’s
Illinois State Journal
(formerly the
Sangamo Journal)
loyally supported him, as did B. F. James’s
Tazewell Whig.
Some Whig newspapers reported that his “crack speech” had placed him in the “front rank of the best speakers in the House.” But most of the other editors imitated the
Quincy Whig,
which published Lincoln’s resolutions with the mild comment that they were “based upon facts which cannot be successfully controverted.”

More disturbing were the private messages he received from his political friends in Illinois. Dr. Henry strongly dissented from the prevailing Whig view of the war. If Illinois Whigs followed Henry Clay and opposed all territorial annexations as a result of the war, he warned, they would continue to be “the minority party for a long time.” Soberly he wrote Lincoln, “It would be painful in the extreme to part company with you after having fought with you side by side so long.” The Reverend John Mason Peck, a prominent Baptist of St. Clair County, sent a similar message, concluding “that the Government of the United States committed no aggression on Mexico.”

Herndon, too, reported that “murmurs of dissatisfaction began to run through the Whig ranks.” He deplored Lincoln’s vote for the Ashmun resolution, took it for granted that Lincoln’s opposition to the war meant that he would not vote to supply the armies in the field, and warned that his partner’s course would not be well received by “the whig men who have participated in the war.” Herndon argued that instead of condemning President Polk for invading Mexico and starting a war on Mexican soil, Lincoln ought to follow the law of nations and argue “that if it shall become
necessary, to repel invasion,
the President may, without violation of the Constitution, cross the line, and
invade
the territory of another country.”

Because Herndon claimed to speak for a considerable Whig constituency in Illinois, Lincoln went to some pains to refute his arguments. As for the Ashmun resolution, he replied, he had no choice; if he had opposed it, he would have voted a lie. Though he censured the President’s conduct in beginning the war, he had every intention of voting for supplies to the armies. As for the attitude of returning Whig soldiers, he pointed out that veterans in Washington, with hardly an exception, did “not hesitate to denounce, as unjust, the Presidents conduct in the beginning of the war.” Lincoln dismissed Herndon’s constitutional arguments: “Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever
he
shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion,... and you allow him to make war at pleasure.” Thus Herndon would place “our President where kings have always stood.”

The acerbity that crept into Lincoln’s replies to Herndon reflected his discomfort that his partner, and whatever other Whigs he represented, had failed to understand the real intent of his attack on Polk. Now that the fighting was over and the peace treaty was expected in Washington momentarily, the only purpose that Lincoln and other Whigs had for assailing the President’s course in beginning the war was political. Their object was to hurt the Democrats in the next presidential election.

They were aware that this course entailed a considerable risk; attacking the President’s actions in beginning the war might easily be misunderstood as opposing the war itself. Whigs with a long memory knew how dangerous that position could be. When someone asked Justin Butterfield, a leading Chicago Whig, whether he would condemn the Mexican War as he had once denounced the War of 1812, he responded: “No, indeed! I opposed one war, and it ruined me. From now on I am for war, pestilence, and famine.” But Lincoln, working closely with Alexander H. Stephens and the small group of other Whigs in the House who called themselves the Young Indians, thought he could resolve the difficulty. Whigs could assail the Democrats for having wrongly begun the war—and then demonstrate how loyally they supported their country’s cause by nominating a general who was winning that war.

That general had to be Zachary Taylor, despite his total ignorance of public affairs and his lack of any political experience. Nobody knew where he stood on anything. That made him an available candidate, and Lincoln, eager to see new leadership in the Whig party, jumped on the Taylor bandwagon. “I am in favor of Gen: Taylor as the whig candidate for the Presidency,” he announced, “because I am satisfied we can elect him, that he would give us a whig administration, and that we can not elect any other whig.” “Our only chance is with Taylor,” he explained. “I go for him, not because I think he would make a better president than Clay, but because I think he would make a better one than Polk, or Cass, or Buchanan, or any such creatures, one of whom is sure to be elected, if he is not.”

Throughout the spring Lincoln worked earnestly to secure Taylor’s nomination, and in early June he attended the Whig National Convention at Philadelphia, where he attracted a good deal of attention as the only Whig
representative from Illinois. After the convention nominated Taylor on the fourth ballot, Lincoln, along with three other members of the House, addressed a ratification meeting in Wilmington, Delaware. Introduced as the “Lone Star of Illinois,” he was received with three hearty cheers as he predicted a Whig victory in the fall. Taylor’s nomination, he wrote Herndon, took the Democrats “on the blind side,” by turning “the war thunder against them.” Grimly jubilant, he told his partner, “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.”

Along with the other Young Indians, Lincoln hoped not just to elect a presidential candidate but to formulate a new set of beliefs for the Whig party in place of old doctrines that no longer aroused public interest. Without some vital, controlling principles, there was a danger that Whigs might follow local, sectional interests. In the South some Whigs were tempted to make a defense of slavery their central issue, so that they could demonstrate that they, rather than the Democrats, more truly represented their region’s interests. In the Northeast many Whigs, troubled by the huge influx of immigrants, who tended to vote Democratic, flirted with the Native American party. Other party leaders thought that a strong antislavery platform could win back the Conscience Whigs, mostly in New England, who were so opposed to any extension of slavery that they were ready to join antislavery Democrats in nominating ex-President Martin Van Buren on the new Free-Soil ticket. All these approaches were tempting—and all would disastrously split the party. Even if Taylor was elected, he would find that he could not govern.

To avoid these dangers, Lincoln urged Taylor to put himself above all local and regional issues. The proper Whig policy ought to be one of “making Presidential elections, and the legislation of the country, distinct matters; so that the people can elect whom they please, and afterwards, legislate just as they please, without any hindrance [from the Chief Executive], save only so much as may guard against infractions of the constitution, undue haste, and want of consideration.” He wanted Taylor to announce: “Were I president, I should desire the legislation of the country to rest with Congress, uninfluenced by the executive in it’s origin or progress, and undisturbed by the veto unless in very special and clear cases.” When Taylor made this pledge, Lincoln was jubilant, and he took the floor of the House of Representatives to explain what it meant: “In substance, it is this: The people say to Gen: Taylor ‘If you are elected, shall we have a national bank?’ He answers
Your
will, gentlemen, not
mine.’
‘What about the Tariff?’ ‘Say yourselves.’ ‘Shall our rivers and harbours be improved?’ ‘Just as you please.’”

Even on the most divisive issues relating to slavery, Lincoln believed Taylor’s position should be the same. Though Taylor was a Southerner and the owner of more than two hundred slaves, he should declare that if Congress passed the Wilmot Proviso prohibiting the extension of slavery into the territories acquired from Mexico, he would not veto it. (Lincoln did
not explain that this contingency was highly unlikely, since no version of the Wilmot Proviso could pass the Senate, which was dominated by Southerners.) This position, Lincoln maintained, was “the best sort of principle” for a party, “the principle of allowing the people to do as they please with their own business.”

Lincoln’s efforts to promote Taylor’s election and to reformulate Whig ideology led him to advocate policies that would later come back to haunt him. His demand that President Polk prove that the United States owned the spot on which the first blood of the Mexican War was shed gave him the enduring sobriquet “Spotty Lincoln.” Stephen A. Douglas repeatedly taunted him with it in their 1858 debates, and even during his presidency it was used to question his patriotism.

Equally embarrassing was Lincoln’s argument that Polk acted unconstitutionally in ordering American troops into territory disputed with Mexico. He claimed that the Constitution gave the war-making power to Congress, not to the Chief Executive. The Founding Fathers, he told Herndon, had recognized that war was “the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions” and they “resolved to so frame the Constitution that
no one man
should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.” This was the very argument that Lincoln’s enemies used during the Civil War to combat what they called his executive tyranny.

They also invoked Lincoln’s statement about the right of revolution, which he included as a curious digression in his speech attacking Polk. Forgetting his own advice that “it is good policy to never
plead
what you
need
not, lest you oblige yourself to
prove
what you
can
not,” Lincoln argued that the title to the disputed land between the Nueces and the Rio Grande depended on whether the inhabitants of that area had engaged in a revolution against Mexico. “Any people anywhere... have the
right
to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better,” he announced. “Any portion of such people that
can, may
revolutionize, and make their
own,
of so much of the territory as they inhabit.” “This,” he declared, “is a most valuable,—a most sacred right—a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.” These were words he would have to eat in 1860–1861.

In another speech Lincoln went out of his way to challenge Polk’s argument that federal funding of internal improvements required an amendment to the Constitution. Lincoln opposed any change in that document. “We would do much better to let it alone,” he argued. “Better... habituate ourselves to think of it, as unalterable. It can scarcely be made better than it is.” It was a peculiar position for a future President whose name would always be connected with the Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery.

The argument that Lincoln advanced during the 1848 campaign that
would have the most pernicious effect on his own administration was for a weak Chief Executive who would not veto measures passed by the Congress or dictate policies to his cabinet members. These were not new ideas for Whigs. The party had been founded to oppose that “detestable, ignorant, reckless, vain and malignant tyrant,” Andrew Jackson, who made the entire government subject to
“one responsibility, one discretion, one will.”
But up to this time Whigs had opposed a strong President largely because they objected to the policies he advocated. Now, with the nomination of General Taylor, they favored a weak Chief Executive to conceal the fact that their candidate stood for nothing. But Lincoln was convinced by his own arguments, and his preference for a do-nothing President persisted into the Civil War years. Claiming that it was “better that congress should originate, as well as perfect its measures, without external bias,” Lincoln as President exercised little influence over the legislative branch and used the veto power sparingly. On most issues he followed Whig doctrine by giving his cabinet members such a free hand that at times it seemed that his administration had no policy at all.