16. Abraham Lincoln

 

Ten score and two years ago one father brought forth on this continent a new son, conceived in Kentucky and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  I am confident that everyone reading this blog knows where the speech that I have paraphrased was given.  Certainly in recent years Lincoln is considered one of our greatest presidents.

Lincoln was born in 1809 in Kentucky to one of the richest men in the county.  Unfortunately, by the time Abe was seven, his father, Thomas, lost everything due to a faulty title.  His father moved the family across the Ohio river in 1816 to southwestern Indiana.  Tragedy struck again when Abe was nine-years-old;  his mother, Nancy, died of milk sickness (as well as her aunt and uncle who had followed them).  His older sister, Sarah, helped take care of him until his father remarried a year later to a widow named Sarah Johnston.  Abe became very close to his step-mother.  It was Sarah that taught Abraham to read and write.  Lincoln only had about one year of formal education in his entire life.

In 1830 there were reports of outbreaks of milk sickness along the Ohio river, and his father moved the family to Illinois.  It wasn’t long after this move that a twenty-two-year-old Abe moved out of the house and started his new life.  His next couple of years would see him transporting goods from New Salem, Illinois down the Mississippi River by flatboat to New Orleans, owning a small general store and running for the Illinois Legislature. He lost that election at the age of twenty-three.  Before the election occurred Lincoln was elected to captain in the Illinois militia to serve in the Black Hawk War.  The war saw two future presidents : Lincoln and Taylor.  On a side note (I need at least one digression) Zachary Taylor accepted Chief Black Hawk’s surrender and, with Jefferson Davis (future president of the Confederacy) and Robert Anderson (future commander of Fort Sumter), escorted the fallen chief to military barracks.

Winning election to the Illinois Legislature in 1834, Lincoln went on to serve four terms.  In that time, he supported expansion over voting rights to non-land-owning males, as well as women.  He was in favor of a strong federal government and supported business friendly laws.  During this time he was admitted to the bar (1836) and continued to study and practice law.  After he left office he focused on his law practice and started traveling on the circuit.  He literally traveled a circuit around fifteen Illinois counties for six months of the year defending cases in front of the judge that he was traveling with.  This had the added bonus of starting to create his political base.  In those days there wasn’t much in the way of entertainment so many people would go to court to hear the cases being argued.  The court houses began to fill up with spectators as Lincoln gained reputation as a dynamic speaker.

In 1846 Lincoln won election to the US House of Representatives where he served only one term.  Believing that the Mexican War was illegal, Lincoln demanded that President Polk show where exactly American troops were attacked and to prove that it was on American soil.  It was largely his opposition to the war that cost him re-election.

Back in Illinois, he resumed his law practice and became a well-known attorney, arguing cases in front of the Illinois Supreme Court exactly 175 times and the Chicago Federal Court.  In 1854 Lincoln ran unsuccessfully for an US Senate seat.  At the 1856 election of the young Republican party convention Lincoln came in second for the vice-presidential nomination.  This was followed by getting the Republican nomination for a US Senate seat, running against Stephen Douglas.  It was after receiving the nomination that Lincoln gave a speech with the famous phrase "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other." This campaign also featured one of the most famous series of debates, certainly in American history.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates consisted of a series of seven debates throughout the state.  As many as 15,000 showed up to listen to them.  The format was that the first speaker would get sixty minutes, the other would follow with ninety minutes and then the original speaker would finish with thirty minutes.  As the incumbent senator Douglass spoke first in four of the seven debates.  In those days, US Senators were not directly elected by the people; they were elected by the state legislatures.  This was important to the outcome, because Lincoln helped the Republicans get more popular votes, but the Democrats retained control of the legislature.  With the passage of the 17th amendment to the US Constitution in 1913, this is no longer the case.

After his loss, Lincoln was invited to speak in New York City at the Cooper Union.  What has become known as the Cooper Union Speech was what vaulted Lincoln to the top of the list of potential presidential candidates in the 1860 election.  I’ve attached a link to a YouTube video showing Sam Waterston reenacting the famous speech.  It really is an interesting speech if you have an extra hour and a half minutes to take a look.  Though he was still in the early stages of making a name for himself, his team worked the delegates hard to get them to agree to use Lincoln as their second choice if their preferred candidate couldn’t win.  His two main rivals for the Republican nomination were William Seward and Salmon Chase.  Those two factions wouldn’t budge and the nomination went to Lincoln as the second choice.

In a bit of an irony, the Democrats nominated his old debate buddy Stephen Douglas.  However, Douglas had lost some support in the South in part due to his statements on whether or not territories could outlaw slavery.  The southern Democrats suffered a schism on this matter and nominated John Breckinridge instead.  By splitting the party they almost insured the election of Lincoln.  Even with this advantage, Lincoln won with only forty percent of the popular vote!  I should note that in that particular election, there was over an eighty percent voter turnout.

To keep this blog post at a reasonable length I will skip the stuff you already know: the southern states seceded, Lincoln didn’t believe that was legal, he sent an army into the south to put down what he felt was an insurrection and we fought a civil war for four years.  Despite the top-notch people around him, Lincoln insisted on making the decisions himself.  He let his cabinet argue an issue for awhile and then he would decide.  There are many facets of Lincoln’s presidency one could focus on; the Emancipation Proclamation, the Homestead Act, the war itself and his relationship with the Union generals, etc.

There is a great book called Team of Rivals written by Doris Kearns Goodwin that talks about Lincoln and his cabinet.  Spielberg is making this book into a movie starring Daniel Day Lewis.  Lincoln was very careful in his selection to pick not only the leaders of his party for his cabinet, but also to balance it geographically.  His selections also kept equilibrium between the moderate and extremes of the Republican party.  Most notable in his cabinet were William Seward (Secretary of State, who stayed on with Johnson and negotiated the purchase of Alaska) and Salmon Chase (Secretary of the Treasury; Chase bank is named after him).

I believe that Lincoln understood that the question of slavery had to be dealt with once and for all.  When the southern states seceded, he believed that if they could be defeated, slavery could be abolished.

Lincoln was shot and killed on April 14th (died April 15th) in Ford’s Theater in Washington DC watching a play called “My American Cousin”, just 3 days after declaring the war’s end.  All three times that I have been to DC, the theater has been closed for renovation!  For many reasons, it is unfortunate that Lincoln was killed.  He believed that the southern states needed to be dealt with fairly.  Fair terms were proposed by Lincoln for the rebel soldiers.  In contrast, many of the radical Republicans wanted to punish the southern states and would get their chance after battling the much weaker Andrew Johnson.  To take a quote from Lincoln’s second Inaugural Address:

“Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether". With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

Lincoln is considered one of our greatest presidents because he held firm to his convictions and was decisive in a time of turmoil.  No aspect of the war escaped his attention.  At the same time, for maybe the first time, a president took the step of saying that because it was a time of war it gave the president sole authority over a lot of national issues.  This example was repeated by Wilson and F.D.R. during the world wars.

I highly recommend at least two things: read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book and visit the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois.  Both are well worth the time and effort.  I tried to focus on some of the lesser known facts of Lincoln, but it is difficult to tackle the complexity and multi-faceted aspects of Lincoln in a short blog posting.  Once I’ve completed the other presidents I may come back with another posting focused on his years in the White House.

Trivia

• Lincoln is the only president who was a licensed bartender.  He was the co-owner of a saloon in Springfield called Berry and Lincoln.
• He was the first president to be photographed at his inauguration.  In the photo John Wilkes Booth is standing nearby.
• Abraham’s son Robert Todd Lincoln was present for the assassination of three presidents; his father, James Garfield and William McKinley.  After McKinley was shot Robert vowed to never be seen in public with a sitting president.
• Lincoln was the first president to have a beard
• He is the only president to have received a patent (#6469)
• His son Willie was the first child to die in the White House
• The words “That these dead shall not have died in vain” were taken from a biography of George Washington.  It is the book that Lincoln borrowed and was destroyed by water.  It cost him some labor on the farmers land that he borrowed the book from.
• He was the first president born outside the original 13 states.
• Of his four sons only Robert lived to adulthood.
• In 1876 a group of men attempted to steal Lincolns body and hold it for ransom to get a counterfeiter out of jail.
• Lincoln was one of seven presidents to be born in a log cabin (the others were Jackson, Taylor, Fillmore, Buchanan, Grant, and Garfield, ironically W. H. Harrison is associated with being born in a log cabin due to his Log Cabin and Hard Cider campaign, he was neither born nor ever lived in a log cabin).