Lincoln (37 page)

As a result of these efforts, Lincoln steadily gained strength during the early weeks of the legislative session. By careful negotiation his aides were able to win over all of what he called “the extreme Anti-Slavery men,” conceding to them the speakership and all of the lesser offices in the house of representatives. But during the same time he lost the support of at least three Whig members, including an old friend, J. L. D. Morrison, of St. Clair County, who was married to a Catholic and distrusted Lincoln’s reported connections with the Know Nothings. He could not afford to lose others. As January 31, the scheduled day for the election, approached, he still was about three votes short of a majority, and he did not see where they could come from.

A small group of Independent Democrats held the balance of power in the legislature—men like Norman B. Judd of Chicago, and John M. Palmer of Carlinville, who had been loyal Democrats all their lives but had broken with Douglas over the Kansas-Nebraska Act. They had little in common with the other elements in the anti-Douglas coalition: they detested the radical antislavery men who styled themselves Republicans; they rejected even the tacit support of the Know Nothings; and they strongly suspected the motives of the Whigs, against whom they had fought in election after election. These anti-Nebraska Democrats had no personal objection to Lincoln, but they announced that “having been elected as Democrats they could not vote for any one but a Democrat for US senator.” Their candidate was Lyman Trumbull, the lifelong Democrat from Alton, in southern Illinois, whose hatred for slavery compelled him to give up his safe place on the Illinois Supreme Court to run a bitter, and successful, anti-Douglas campaign for a seat in the United States House of Representatives. As Lincoln summarized the situation, these four or five anti-Nebraska legislators were “men who
never could
vote for a whig; and without the votes of two of whom I
never could
reach the requisite number to make an election.”

Voting was delayed by a fierce snowstorm, the worst since 1831, which isolated Springfield for twelve days and prevented the assembling of a quorum in the state legislature, but in the initial ballot on February 8 the results
were pretty much what Lincoln had anticipated. He led with 45 votes, to Shields’s 41, and Trumbull had 5.

Most significant, however, was the one vote cast for Governor Joel A. Matteson, for it suggested the Democrats’ strategy. Aware that they probably could not elect Shields, local Democrats rejected Douglas’s advice and quietly began rallying around the governor, a wealthy contractor for public works. Matteson had said just enough in favor of the Kansas-Nebraska Act not to offend Douglas but in private had expressed enough opposition to convince many of Douglas’s enemies. His strength in the legislature came from members in the districts along the Illinois and Michigan Canal, whom he had repeatedly assisted with favors, both legal and otherwise, in connection with his construction work.

The Democrats stuck with Shields for six ballots, and then, by prearrangement, they switched to Matteson on the seventh. Lincoln’s vote was dwindling, while Trumbull’s was gradually increasing. On the ninth ballot Lincoln was down to 15 hard-core loyalists, while Trumbull had 35 votes and Matteson, with 47, lacked only three of election. The danger at this point was that Matteson might use his wealth and his patronage to bribe a few of Trumbull’s supporters, and, according to one story, Lincoln learned of a “contract” that the governor had arranged with one of these men—Frederick S. Day, of La Salle County.

Once Lincoln was aware of the danger, he promptly directed that his fifteen remaining supporters go for Trumbull on the tenth ballot. Bitterly disappointed, Logan urged him to hold on to his support and try one or two ballots more, but Lincoln was firm. “I am for Trumbull,” he told his followers, and they loyally cast their votes as he directed. On the tenth ballot Lyman Trumbull was elected to the United States Senate.

Privately, according to friends, Lincoln was “disappointed and mortified” by the outcome and found it hard to accept that his 45 supporters had to yield to Trumbull’s five. “A less good humored man than I, perhaps would not have consented to it,” he grumbled. Immediately after his defeat he was so dejected that he told Joseph Gillespie, an old friend, that “he would never strive for office again,” because “he could bear defeat inflicted by his enemies with a pretty good grace—but it was hard to be wounded in the house of his friends.” Logan was furious over Lincoln’s defeat, as was David Davis, who distrusted Trumbull as “a Democrat all his life—dyed in the wool—as ultra as he could be.” Mary Lincoln was bitterly disappointed with the outcome; after Trumbull’s victory, she refused to speak to Mrs. Trumbull, the former Julia Jayne, who had been one of her oldest and most intimate friends.

But in public Lincoln gave no expression to his natural disappointment. “I regret my defeat moderately,” he wrote Washburne, “but I am not nervous about it,” adding, with an uncharacteristic lack of generosity, that Matteson’s “defeat now gives me more pleasure than my own gives me pain.” He expressed no animosity toward the four anti-Nebraska Democrats who had
blocked his election, two of whom—Norman B. Judd and John M. Palmer—became wheel horses in his later political campaigns. He went to considerable pains to make it clear that Trumbull had engaged in no underhand dealings or maneuvers, and on the night after the election he made a point of appearing at a reception that the Ninian Edwardses gave for the victor—a reception that had originally been planned to honor Lincoln himself. There he was at his smiling best, and when his hostess said she knew how disappointed he must be, he moved forward to shake the hand of the newly elected senator, saying, “Not
too
disappointed to congratulate my friend Trumbull.”

On reflection, Lincoln did not consider his defeat a disaster. After all, he had entered the contest dubious of success. He could take satisfaction in knowing that the outcome was a blistering rebuke to Douglas and his popular-sovereignty ideas, and he knew that Trumbull, who had endless persistence and a sharp tongue, would make life miserable for the senior senator from Illinois. In addition, this election cleared the way for Lincoln to run against Douglas himself in 1858. On the night after Trumbull’s victory, the anti-Nebraska Democrats of the legislature, gratified by Lincoln’s conduct, pledged to support him in the next Senate race. Later Trumbull confirmed that pledge when he wrote Lincoln: “I shall continue to labor for the success of the Republican cause and the advancement at the next election to the place now occupied by Douglas of that
Friend,
who was instrumental in promoting my own.”

In March, Lincoln had to explain to a client why he had neglected some legal business directed to him back in December. “I was dabbling in politics; and, of course, neglecting business,” he wrote, adding, “Having since been beaten out, I have gone to work again.” For a full twelve months after his defeat, he made no speeches or public statements on political affairs but devoted himself to his law business trying, as he said, “to pick up my lost crumbs of last year.”

Much of the summer and fall of 1855 he spent in preparing to participate in the patent infringement suit that Cyrus Hall McCormick, the inventor of the reaper, had brought against John H. Manny, who was building closely similar machines. The suit was an important one, for it was already apparent that the mechanical reaper was transforming wheat cultivation, and there was a huge market for these machines, which could replace thousands of farm laborers. In the hope of breaking McCormick’s patent, a number of other Eastern and Western manufacturers helped finance Manny’s defense, and he employed a team of the leading patent lawyers in the country, headed by George Harding of Philadelphia. Because it seemed likely that Judge Thomas Drummond, of the United States Court for the Northern District of Illinois, would hear the case, Harding thought the team should include a
local Illinois attorney who knew the judge and had his confidence—though, he said in his superior Eastern way, “we were not likely to find a lawyer there who would be of real assistance in arguing such a case.”

After failing to secure the services of the Chicago lawyer Isaac N. Arnold, Harding in June sent his associate, Peter Watson, a patent lawyer in Washington, to Springfield to see if Lincoln might do. Calling without notice at the house at Eighth and Jackson streets, Watson encountered “a very tall man having on neither coat nor vest, who said he was Lincoln and was just putting up a bed.” Impressed neither by Lincoln’s dress nor by his small, plainly furnished house, Watson concluded this was not the associate Harding wanted but thought it would be impolitic to risk his anger by turning him down after consulting him. Consequently he paid Lincoln a $400 retainer, arranged for a fee—reputedly $1,000—and left him with the impression that he was to make an argument at the hearing.

Lincoln began studying the case and went out to Rockford, where Manny’s factory was located, so that he could examine the machines closely. Puzzled that Watson failed to send him copies of the depositions and other legal papers, he went to the United States District Court in Chicago and had his own copies made. From the newspapers he learned that the case would be heard not in Chicago but in Cincinnati, where Supreme Court Justice John McLean would preside, but neither Watson nor anybody else on Harding’s team told him when the hearing was to be held or invited him to be present.

Nevertheless, he took the train to Cincinnati, where he called on Harding at the Burnet House. The Philadelphia lawyer was not impressed; he described Lincoln as “a tall rawly boned, ungainly back woodsman, with coarse, ill-fitting clothing, his trousers hardly reaching his ankles, holding in his hands a blue cotton umbrella with a ball on the end of the handle.” This fellow clearly would not do, especially now that Edwin McMasters Stanton, the brilliant Pittsburgh lawyer, had joined the defense team. “Why did you bring that d——d long armed Ape here,” Stanton asked Harding; “he does not know any thing and can do you no good.” They made it clear to Lincoln that he could not participate in the trial. Lincoln remained in Cincinnati for the week of the hearing, closely observing the proceedings, but the other lawyers ignored him. “We were all at the same hotel,” Harding recalled; but neither he nor Stanton “ever conferred with him, ever had him at our table or sat with him, or asked him to our room, or walked to or from the court with him, or, in fact, had any intercourse with him.”

At the end of the week Lincoln left for home, feeling insulted and indignant. When he received a check for the remainder of his fee, he sent it back, saying that he had made no argument and therefore was not entitled to anything beyond the original retainer. But when Watson returned the check to him, with a note explaining that he had earned it, he cashed it. Lincoln said little to his Springfield associates about the trial, though he did tell
Herndon that he had been “roughly handled by that man Stanton.” But the snub was a painful one, and it added to his dejection over the loss of the Senate election.

Even though Lincoln’s law practice occupied most of his time during 1855, he kept up a silent but active interest in public affairs. Following events closely, he anxiously observed the consolidation of Southern opinion in favor of slavery. Where earlier Southern statesmen like Thomas Jefferson had hoped for the gradual extinction of the peculiar institution, a new breed of fire-eaters favored its perpetuation and, indeed, its extension. Lincoln & Herndon subscribed to the
Charleston Mercury
and the
Richmond Enquirer,
both rabidly proslavery, and sadly noted that an institution once lamented as a necessary evil was now promoted as a positive good. Herndon bought a copy of
Sociology for the South,
by George Fitzhugh, the able and extreme Virginia polemicist, who argued that slave labor was preferable to free labor, because under slavery workers had security and greater real freedom.

The specious logic of Fitzhugh’s ideas troubled Lincoln, and in memoranda to himself he pointed out the flaws in the Virginian’s arguments. “Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing,” he noted, “we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it,
by being a slave himself.
” The contention that slavery offered labor the greatest real freedom ran into the inescapable fact “that the most dumb and stupid slave that ever toiled for a master, does constantly
know
that he is wronged.” Defenses of slavery were, in fact, reversible arguments: “If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B.—why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?” If slavery was justified on the ground that masters were white while slaves were black, Lincoln warned, “By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.” If it was defended on the ground that masters were intellectually the superiors of blacks, the same logic applied: “By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.”

The more Lincoln thought about these questions, the more pessimistic he became. In the summer of 1855 he wrote a Kentucky friend that decades of experience had demonstrated “that there is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us.” “The condition of the negro slave in America ... is now as fixed, and hopeless of change for the better, as that of the lost souls of the finally impenitent,” he lamented, predicting, “The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.” With voluntary emancipation nowhere in sight, the United States had to face up to reality: “Can we, as a nation, continue together
permanently—forever
half slave, and half free?” To this question he would return in the future, but now he evaded an answer: “The problem is too mighty for me. May God, in his mercy, superintend the solution.”