Lincoln (32 page)

Lincoln tried to ignore these tantrums. When “Mrs. L. got the devil in
her,” James Gourley remembered, “Lincoln paid no attention—would pick up one of the children and walk off—would laugh at her.” Often he went to the office until his wife’s temper was spent. Her outbursts were usually short-lived, and afterward she felt ashamed and ill. Lincoln did not scold her but tried to remain more often at home so that he could offer her the constant support and reassurance she needed.

Now that he spent most weekends in Springfield, Lincoln also could see more of his children. He had been away so much while Robert was growing up that he never developed a close bond with his oldest son, but he was devoted to Willie and Tad. A sweet-tempered little boy, Willie was bright, articulate, and exceptionally sensitive toward the feelings of others. Lincoln believed the child’s mind was much like his own. Watching Willie solve a difficult problem, he told a visitor, “I know every step of the process by which that boy arrived at his satisfactory solution of the question before him, as it is by just such slow methods I attain results.” Affectionate and impulsive, Tad had a temperament more like his mother’s. He was especially dear to his father because he was handicapped by a speech impediment and a bad lisp, made worse when his teeth grew in crooked.

Both the Lincolns were convinced that they had remarkable children, and whenever they had guests, they would dress the boys up and, as Herndon wrote, “get them to monkey around—talk—dance—speak—quote poetry etc.” Mary would exhaust the English language in her rhapsodies over the boys, and Lincoln would try to conceal his pride by saying: “These children may be something sometimes, if they are not merely rareripes—rotten ripes—hot house plants.”

When Lincoln could, he helped with the baby-sitting for the two little boys—a practice so unusual that Springfield gossips called him
“hen pecked.”
Perhaps he felt an obligation to take over because Mary was overworked and often not well; possibly the recent death of his father caused him to reflect on how much he had needed a nurturing parent when he was a boy. When Willie and Tad were very small, he would haul them around in a little wagon, pulling it up and down the street in front of his house, often reading from a book that he held in his hand. Sometimes he became so lost in thought that he forgot about his charges, and neighbors remembered the time he took the two children for a ride in their wagon and did not notice when one of them fell out. When the boys were a little older, they used to walk with him downtown, each holding onto a gigantic hand or perhaps his coattail. Inevitably one would complain that he was tired, and he would be hoisted on Lincoln’s shoulders for a ride home. Once Frances Wallace, Lincoln’s sister-in-law, saw him carrying Tad in this fashion and scolded: “Why, Mr. Lincoln, put down that great big boy. He’s big enough to walk.” But Lincoln replied: “Oh, don’t you think his little feet get too tired?”

On Sundays, while Mary was at church, Lincoln often brought the boys with him to the law office, where Herndon found them a nuisance. “These children,” Herndon remembered, “would take down the books—empty ash
buckets—coal ashes—inkstands—papers—gold pens—letters, etc. etc in a pile and then dance on the pile. Lincoln would say nothing, so abstracted was he and so blinded to his children’s faults. Had they s-t in Lincoln’s hat and rubbed it on his boots, he would have laughed and thought it smart.” “I have felt many and many a time,” he recalled years later, “that I wanted to wring their little necks and yet out of respect for Lincoln I kept my mouth shut.”

Herndon’s animus toward the Lincoln children reflected his dislike, verging on hatred, of their mother. He had never got along with Mary Todd Lincoln. He met her first in 1837, when, as visiting belle from Kentucky, she attended a ball given by Colonel Robert Allen. Herndon asked her to dance and, intending to compliment her, observed that she “seemed to glide through the waltz with the ease of a serpent.” Miss Todd, never distinguished by a sense of humor, flashed back: “Mr. Herndon, comparison to a serpent is rather severe irony, especially to a newcomer”—and she left him on the dance floor. Neither ever forgot that episode. Herndon strongly opposed Lincoln’s courtship of Mary as a betrayal of his democratic origins in favor of the wealth and aristocracy of Springfield; he was not invited to their wedding. “This woman was to me a terror,” Herndon remarked many years later; he thought she was “imperious, proud, aristocratic, insolent witty and bitter.”

Doubtless Mary disliked her husband’s choice of Herndon as a law partner. She might have preferred someone more socially respectable, like John Todd Stuart or James C. Conkling. In her judgment Herndon ran with a rowdy set in Springfield, and she knew that from time to time he was known to take too much to drink. She was not impressed by his active support of the local library association, of the temperance movement, or of women’s rights, nor did Herndon’s election as mayor of Springfield in 1854 change her opinion of him. But she recognized that the law practice was in her husband’s sphere of activities, not in her domestic sphere, and she managed to maintain formal, if distant, relations with his partner. She came to the law office only infrequently, and he was never invited to a meal in the Lincoln house. Years later she summarized: “Mr. Herndon had always been an utter stranger to me, he was not considered an habitué, at our house. The office was more, in his line.”

The antagonism between his wife and his law partner, which might have driven another man to distraction, troubled Lincoln not at all. Indeed, he rather thrived on the creative tension between Billy and Mary, both of whom were devoted to his interests but wanted his undivided attention. The knowledge that Mary was jealously watching helped spur Herndon to greater exertions and more care in the conduct of the law office, and the awareness that Herndon was a critical observer doubtless did something to curb Mary’s demonstrations of temper.

The years following Lincoln’s return from Congress were, then, relatively peaceful and prosperous. According to William Dean Howells’s 1860 campaign
biography, Lincoln, after turning away from politics to the law, was “successful in his profession, happy in his home, secure in the affection of his neighbors, with books, competence, and leisure—ambition could not tempt him.” When a friend asked Lincoln to read Howells’s book and mark any inaccuracies, he allowed this passage to stand unchanged.

There Are No Whigs

H
owells’s description of Lincoln in retirement was accurate enough—but it did not capture the whole picture. During the years after his service in Congress he never truly lost interest in politics, nor did he completely withdraw from public life. He continued to worry about the nation’s problems, and he constantly thought about how he could help solve them. As always, he yearned for distinction, but opportunities were few. Even though he was a highly successful lawyer, he often felt melancholy about his future. “How hard,” he remarked to Herndon, “oh how hard it is to die and leave one’s Country no better than if one had never lived for it.”

A former congressman and a man of influence, Lincoln was repeatedly asked to endorse applications for jobs or candidates for office. Though he firmly declined to run for another term in Congress in 1850, he remained active in party management.

Privately he advised Richard Yates, the ambitious young Whig seeking election to the congressional seat Lincoln had occupied, how to deal with campaign issues. As Congress continued to wrangle over the issue of slavery in the territories acquired from Mexico, Lincoln urged Yates to be cautiously noncommittal. On the one hand, he should announce his opposition to the extension of slavery and his support for the Wilmot Proviso; on the other, he should make it clear that if adherence to the proviso would endanger the Union he “would at once abandon it,” because “of all political objects the preservation of the Union stands number one.” Yates ought to downplay
Southern threats to secede, and he should endorse the Compromise of 1850, which, among other things, admitted California as a free state, permitted the inhabitants of the New Mexico and Utah territories to make their own choice about allowing slavery, and gave the South a stringent new fugitive-slave law.

In the 1852 presidential campaign Lincoln played an active, though not a highly visible, role, and he was named Whig national committeeman for Illinois. When the party nominated Winfield Scott, Lincoln gave a long campaign address before the Springfield Scott Club in which he offered perfunctory praise for his party’s candidate and made a rollicking attack on Franklin Pierce, the Democratic nominee, whose qualifications appeared to be that, at the age of seventeen, he was able to spell the word “but” for his father. But Scott’s prospects were so dismal that, in the words of Howells’s campaign biography, Lincoln “did less in this Presidential struggle than any in which he had ever engaged.”

From time to time, Lincoln’s behavior suggested that he was not entirely happy in his role of elder statesman. His lackluster speeches during the 1852 presidential campaign came alive only when he referred to Stephen A. Douglas, who was campaigning vigorously for Pierce. He sneered at Douglas’s claim to be the true father of the Compromise of 1850 and accused the senator of stealing the ideas of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. When Douglas correctly charged that the 1852 Whig platform was ambiguous, Lincoln sarcastically exclaimed: “What wonderful acumen the Judge displays on the construction of language!!!” The edge to Lincoln’s remarks went beyond campaign banter and suggested his disappointment that his old rival Douglas, now the most powerful member of the United States Senate, was “a giant,” while Lincoln remained one of the “common mortals.”

There were other hints of Lincoln’s unhappiness. Some days he would arrive at the office in a cheerful mood, but then, as Herndon recorded, he might fall into “a sad terribly gloomy state—pick up a pen—sit down by the table and write a moment or two and then become abstracted.” Resting his chin on the palm of his left hand, he would sit for hours in silence, staring vacantly at the windows. Other days he was so depressed that he did not even speak to Herndon when he entered the office, and his partner, sensing his mood, would pull the curtain across the glass panel in the door and leave for an hour or so, locking the door behind him to protect the privacy of “this unfortunate and miserable man.”

Lincoln’s companions on the circuit also noticed his unpredictable moodiness. Henry Clay Whitney, who began traveling Judge Davis’s circuit after 1854, reported that Lincoln was afflicted by nightmares. One night, when they were sharing a room, Whitney woke to see his companion “sitting up in bed, his figure dimly visible by the ghostly firelight, and talking the
wildest and most incoherent nonsense all to himself.” “A stranger to Lincoln would have supposed he had suddenly gone insane,” Whitney added. Awaking suddenly, Lincoln jumped out of bed, “put some wood on the fire, and then sat in front of it, moodily, dejectedly, in a most sombre and gloomy spell, till the breakfast bell rang.”

Herndon attributed Lincoln’s melancholy to his domestic unhappiness; others, with about as much evidence, found the cause in his chronic constipation or in the blue-mass pills that he took to overcome it. Perhaps there was truth in all these theories, but they missed the essential point that Lincoln was frustrated and unhappy with a political career that seemed to be going nowhere.

Though he was out of office, he had no intention of being out of the public eye. This was the golden age of the lyceum movement, when men and women thronged the lecture halls and listened for hours to speakers who might edify, enlighten or, at least, amuse them. By the 1850s, with the completion of the railroad network, Springfield was on the regular circuit for Eastern lecturers, and residents raptly listened to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Greeley, and Bayard Taylor, as well as to numerous local speakers. Lincoln thought he might as well join the parade.

His efforts to become a popular lecturer were uniformly unhappy. His dithyramb on Niagara Falls was probably intended to be part of a lecture before he wisely decided to abandon it. He also aborted a proposed lecture on the law, which he began on a negative note: “I am not an accomplished lawyer. I find quite as much material for a lecture, in those points wherein I have failed, as in those wherein I have been moderately successful.”

His most ambitious and curious effort was what he called “a sort of lecture” entitled “Discoveries and Inventions,” which he first read to the Young Men’s Association in Bloomington on April 6, 1858. The first half was Lincoln’s version of the history of discoveries, ranging from Adam’s invention of the fig-leaf apron in the Garden of Eden to the steam engine. The second half dealt with the invention of writing and printing—together with the discovery of America, the introduction of patent laws, and what Lincoln called, oddly enough, “the invention of negroes, or, of the present mode of using them.” It was a commonplace production, resting on a few articles in the
Encyclopedia Americana
and on Old Testament references to such subjects as spinning and weaving. Over the next twelve months Lincoln delivered this lecture in several Illinois towns, but, though by this time he was a possible presidential candidate, it attracted only small and unenthusiastic audiences. It was, as Herndon said, “a lifeless thing—a dull dead thing, ‘died a bornin [sic].’”