Springfield.(9)
VII. THE SECOND START
Stung by his failure at Washington, Lincoln for a time put his whole
soul into the study of the law. He explained his failure to himself as
a lack of mental training.(1) There followed a repetition of his early
years with Logan, but with very much more determination, and with more
abiding result.
In those days in Illinois, as once in England, the judges held court in
a succession of towns which formed a circuit. Judge and lawyers
moved from town to town, "rode the circuit" in company,--sometimes on
horseback, sometimes in their own vehicles, sometimes by stage. Among
the reminiscences of Lincoln on the circuit, are his "poky" old horse
and his "ramshackle" old buggy. Many and many a mile, round and round
the Eighth Judicial Circuit, he traveled in that humble style. What
thoughts he brooded on in his lonely drives, he seldom told. During
this period the cloud over his inner life is especially dense. The outer
life, in a multitude of reminiscences, is well known. One of its salient
details was the large proportion of time he devoted to study.
"Frequently, I would go out on the circuit with him," writes Herndon.
"We, usually, at the little country inn, occupied the same bed. In most
cases, the beds were too short for him and his feet would hang over the
footboard, thus exposing a limited expanse of shin bone. Placing his
candle at the head of his bed he would read and study for hours. I have
known him to stay in this position until two o'clock in the morning.
Meanwhile, I and others who chanced to occupy the same room would be
safely and soundly asleep. On the circuit, in this way, he studied
Euclid until he could with ease demonstrate all the propositions in
the six books. How he could maintain his equilibrium or concentrate his
thoughts on an abstract mathematical problem, while Davis, Logan, Swett,
Edwards and I, so industriously and volubly filled the air with our
interminable snoring, was a problem none of, us--could ever solve."(2)
A well-worn copy of Shakespeare was also his constant companion.
He rose rapidly in the profession; and this in spite of his incorrigible
lack of system. The mechanical side of the lawyer's task, now, as in the
days with Logan, annoyed him; he left the preparation of papers to his
junior partner, as formerly he left it to his senior partner. But the
situation had changed in a very important way. In Herndon, Lincoln had
for a partner a talented young man who looked up to him, almost adored
him, who was quite willing to be his man Friday. Fortunately, for all
his adoration, Herndon had no desire to idealize his hero. He was not
disturbed by his grotesque or absurd sides.
"He was proverbially careless as to his habits," Herndon writes. "In a
letter to a fellow lawyer in another town, apologizing for his failure
to answer sooner, he explains: 'First, I have been very busy in the
United States Court; second, when I received the letter, I put it in my
old hat, and buying a new one the next day, the old one was set aside,
so the letter was lost sight of for the time.' This hat of Lincoln's--a
silk plug--was an extraordinary receptacle. It was his desk and his
memorandum book. In it he carried his bank-book and the bulk of his
letters. Whenever in his reading or researches, he wished to preserve
an idea, he jotted it down on an envelope or stray piece of paper and
placed it inside the lining; afterwards, when the memorandum was needed,
there was only one place to look for it." Herndon makes no bones about
confessing that their office was very dirty. So neglected was it that a
young man of neat habits who entered the office as a law student under
Lincoln could not refrain from cleaning it up, and the next visitor
exclaimed in astonishment, "What's happened here!"(3)
"The office," says that same law student, "was on the second floor of a
brick building on the public square opposite the courthouse. You went
up a flight of stairs and then passed along a hallway to the rear office
which was a medium sized room. There was one long table in the center of
the room, and a shorter one running in the opposite direction forming a
T and both were covered with green baize. There were two windows which
looked into the back yard. In one corner was an old-fashioned secretary
with pigeonholes and a drawer; and here Mr. Lincoln and his partner kept
their law papers. There was also a bookcase containing about two hundred
volumes of law and miscellaneous books." The same authority adds, "There
was no order in the office at all." Lincoln left all the money matters
to Herndon. "He never entered an item on the account book. If a fee was
paid to him and Herndon was not there, he would divide the money,
wrap up one part in paper and place it in his partner's desk with the
inscription, 'Case of Roe versus Doe, Herndon's half.' He had an odd
habit of reading aloud much to his partner's annoyance. He talked
incessantly; a whole forenoon would sometimes go by while Lincoln
occupied the whole time telling stories."(4)
On the circuit, his story-telling was an institution. Two other men,
long since forgotten, vied with him as rival artists in humorous
narrative. These three used to hold veritable tournaments. Herndon has
seen "the little country tavern where these three were wont to meet
after an adjournment of court, crowded almost to suffocation, with
an audience of men who had gathered to witness the contest among the
members of the strange triumvirate. The physicians of the town, all the
lawyers, and not infrequently a preacher, could be found in the crowd
that filled the doors and windows. The yarns they spun and the stories
they told would not bear repetition here, but many of them had morals
which, while exposing the weakness of mankind, stung like a whiplash.
Some were, no doubt, a thousand years old, with just enough of verbal
varnish and alterations of names and date to make them new and crisp. By
virtue of the last named application, Lincoln was enabled to draw from
Balzac a 'droll story' and locating it 'in Egypt' (Southern Illinois)
or in Indiana, pass it off for a purely original conception. . . I have
seen Judge Treat, who was the very impersonation of gravity itself, sit
up till the last and laugh until, as he often expressed it, 'he almost
shook his ribs loose.' The next day he would ascend the bench and listen
to Lincoln in a murder trial with all the seeming severity of an English
judge in wig and gown."(5)
Lincoln enjoyed the life on the circuit. It was not that he was always
in a gale of spirits; a great deal of the time he brooded. His Homeric
nonsense alternated with fits of gloom. In spite of his late hours,
whether of study or of story-telling, he was an early riser. "He would
sit by the fire having uncovered the coals, and muse and ponder and
soliloquize."(6) Besides his favorite Shakespeare, he had a fondness for
poetry of a very different sort--Byron, for example. And he never tired
of a set of stanzas in the minor key beginning: "Oh, why should the
spirit of mortal be proud?"(7)
The hilarity of the circuit was not by any means the whole of its charm
for him. Part of that charm must have been the contrast with his recent
failure at Washington. This world he could master. Here his humor
increased his influence; and his influence grew rapidly. He was a
favorite of judges, jury and the bar. Then, too, it was a man's world.
Though Lincoln had a profound respect for women, he seems generally to
have been ill at ease in their company. In what his friends would have
called "general society" he did not shine. He was too awkward, too
downright, too lacking in the niceties. At home, though he now owned
a house and was making what seemed to him plenty of money, he was
undoubtedly a trial to Mrs. Lincoln's sense of propriety. He could not
rise with his wife, socially. He was still what he had become so long
before, the favorite of all the men--good old Abe Lincoln that you could
tie to though it rained cats and dogs. But as to the ladies! Fashionable
people calling on Mrs. Lincoln, had been received by her husband in his
shirt-sleeves, and he totally unabashed, as oblivious of discrepancy
as if he were a nobleman and not a nobody.(8) The dreadful tradition
persists that he had been known at table to put his own knife into the
butter.
How safe to assume that many things were said commiserating poor Mrs.
Lincoln who had a bear for a husband. And some people noticed that
Lincoln did not come home at week-ends during term-time as often as he
might. Perhaps it meant something; perhaps it did not. But there could
be no doubt that the jovial itinerant life of the circuit was the life
for him--at least in the early 'fifties. That it was, and also that
he was becoming known as a lawyer, is evinced by his refusal of a
flattering invitation to enter a prosperous firm in Chicago.
Out of all this came a deepening of his power to reach and impress
men through words. The tournament of the story-tellers was a lawyers'
tournament. The central figure was reading, studying, thinking, as never
in his life before. Though his fables remained as broad as ever, the
merely boisterous character ceased to predominate. The ethical bent of
his mind came to the surface. His friends were agreed that what they
remembered chiefly of his stories was not the broad part of them, but
the moral that was in them.(9) And they had no squeamishness as critics
of the art of fable-making.
His ethical sense of things, his companionableness, the utterly
non-censorious cast of his mind, his power to evolve yarns into
parables--all these made him irresistible with a jury. It was a saying
of his: "If I can divest this case of technicalities and swing it to the
jury, I'll win it."(10)
But there was not a trace in him of that unscrupulousness usually
attributed to the "jury lawyer." Few things show more plainly the
central unmovableness of his character than his immunity to the lures of
jury speaking. To use his power over an audience for his own enjoyment,
for an interested purpose, for any purpose except to afford pleasure,
or to see justice done, was for him constitutionally impossible. Such
a performance was beyond the reach of his will. In a way, his nature,
mysterious as it was, was also the last word for simplicity, a terrible
simplicity. The exercise of his singular powers was irrevocably
conditioned on his own faith in the moral justification of what he was
doing. He had no patience with any conception of the lawyer's function
that did not make him the devoted instrument of justice. For the law as
a game, for legal strategy, he felt contempt. Never under any conditions
would he attempt to get for a client more than he was convinced the
client in justice ought to have. The first step in securing his services
was always to persuade him that one's cause was just He sometimes threw
up a case in open court because the course of it had revealed deception
on the part of the client. At times he expressed his disdain of the
law's mere commercialism in a stinging irony.
"In a closely contested civil suit," writes his associate, Ward Hill
Lamon, "Lincoln proved an account for his client, who was, though he did
not know it at the time, a very slippery fellow. The opposing attorney
then proved a receipt clearly covering the entire cause of action. By
the time he was through Lincoln was missing. The court sent for him to
the hotel. 'Tell the Judge,' said he, 'that I can't come; my hands are
dirty and I came over to clean them.'"(11)
"Discourage litigation," he wrote. "Persuade your neighbors to
compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner
is often a real loser, in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a
peacemaker, the lawyer has a Superior Opportunity of being a good man.
There will still be business enough."(12)
He held his moral and professional views with the same inflexibility
with which he held his political views. Once he had settled upon a
conviction or an opinion, nothing could move him. He was singularly
stubborn, and yet, in all the minor matters of life, in all his merely
personal concerns, in everything except his basal ideas, he was pliable
to a degree. He could be talked into almost any concession of interest.
He once told Herndon he thanked God that he had not been born a woman
because he found it so hard to refuse any request made of him. His
outer easiness, his lack of self-assertion,--as most people understand
self-assertion,--persist in an amusing group of anecdotes of the
circuit. Though he was a favorite with the company at every tavern,
those little demagogues, the tavern-keepers, quickly found out that
he could be safely put upon. In the minute but important favoritism
of tavern life, in the choice of rooms, in the assignment of seats at
table, in the distribution of delicacies, easy-going Lincoln was ever
the first one to be ignored. "He never complained of the food, bed, or
lodgings," says a judge of the circuit, David Davis. "If every other
fellow grumbled at the bill of fare which greeted us at many of the
dingy taverns, Lincoln said nothing."(13)
But his complacency was of the surface only. His ideas were his own.
He held to them with dogged tenacity. Herndon was merely the first
of several who discerned on close familiarity Lincoln's inward
inflexibility. "I was never conscious," he writes, "of having made much
of an impression on Mr. Lincoln, nor do I believe I ever changed his
views. I will go further and say that from the profound nature of his
conclusions and the labored method by which he arrived at them, no man
is entitled to the credit of having either changed or greatly modified
them."(14)
In these years of the early 'fifties, Herndon had much occasion to test
his partner's indifference to other men's views, his tenacious adherence
to his own. Herndon had become an Abolitionist. He labored to convert
Lincoln; but it was a lost labor. The Sphinx in a glimmer of sunshine
was as unassailable as the cheery, fable-loving, inflexible Lincoln. The
younger man would work himself up, and, flushed with ardor, warn Lincoln
against his apparent conservatism when the needs of the hour were so
great; but his only answer would be, "Billy, you are too rampant and
spontaneous."(15)
Nothing could move him from his fixed conviction that the temper of
Abolitionism made it pernicious. He persisted in classifying it with
slavery,--both of equal danger to free institutions. He took occasion
to reassert this belief in the one important utterance of a political
nature that commemorates this period. An oration on the death of Henry
Clay, contains the sentence: "Cast into life when slavery was already
widely spread and deeply sealed, he did not perceive, as I think no wise
man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated without producing
a greater evil even to the cause of human liberty itself."(16)
It will be remembered that the Abolitionists were never strongly
national in sentiment. In certain respects they remind one of the
extreme "internationals" of to-day. Their allegiance was not first of
all to Society, nor to governments, but to abstract ideas. For all such
attitudes in political science, Lincoln had an instinctive aversion. He
was permeated always, by his sense of the community, of the
obligation to work in terms of the community. Even the prejudices, the
shortsightedness of the community were things to be considered, to be
dealt with tenderly. Hence his unwillingness to force reforms upon a
community not ripe to receive them. In one of his greatest speeches
occurs the dictum: "A universal feeling whether well or ill-founded, can
not be safely disregarded."(17) Anticipating such ideas, he made in his
Clay oration, a startling denunciation of both the extreme factions of
"Those (Abolitionists) who would shiver into fragments the union of
these States, tear to tatters its now 'venerated Constitution, and even
burn the last copy of the Bible rather than slavery should continue a
single hour; together with all their more halting sympathizers, have
received and are receiving their just execration; and the name and
opinion and influence of Mr. Clay are fully and, as I trust, effectually
and enduringly arrayed against them. But I would also if I could, array
his name, opinion and influence against the opposite extreme, against
a few, but increasing number of men who, for the sake of perpetuating
slavery, are beginning to assail and ridicule the white man's charter of
freedom, the declaration that 'all men are created free and equal.'"(18)
In another passage he stated what he conceived to be the central
inspiration of Clay. Had he been thinking of himself, he could not
have foreshadowed more exactly the basal drift of all his future as a
statesman:
"He loved his country partly because it was his own country, and
mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for
its advancement, prosperity, and glory, because he saw in such the
advancement, prosperity and glory of human liberty, human right and
human nature."(19)
VIII. A RETURN TO POLITICS
Meanwhile, great things were coming forward at Washington. They centered
about a remarkable man with whom Lincoln had hitherto formed a curious
parallel, by whom hitherto he had been completely overshadowed. Stephen
Arnold Douglas was prosecuting attorney at Springfield when Lincoln
began the practice of law. They were in the Legislature together. Both
courted Mary Todd. Soon afterward, Douglas had distanced his rival. When
Lincoln went to the House of Representatives as a Whig, Douglas went
to the Senate as a Democrat. While Lincoln was failing at Washington,
Douglas was building a national reputation. In the hubbub that followed
the Compromise of 1850, while Lincoln, abandoning politics, immersed
himself in the law, Douglas rendered a service to the country by
defeating a movement in Illinois to reject the Compromise. When the
Democratic National Convention assembled in 1852, he was sufficiently
prominent to obtain a considerable vote for the presidential nomination.
The dramatic contrast of these two began with their physical appearance.
Douglas was so small that he had been known to sit on a friend's knee
while arguing politics. But his energy of mind, his indomitable force
of character, made up for his tiny proportions. "The Little Giant" was a
term of endearment applied to him by his followers. The mental contrast
was equally marked. Scarcely a quality in Lincoln that was not reversed
in Douglas--deliberation, gradualness, introspection, tenacity, were the
characteristics of Lincoln's mind. The mind of Douglas was first of all
facile. He was extraordinarily quick. In political Strategy he
could sense a new situation, wheel to meet it, throw overboard
well-established plans, devise new ones, all in the twinkle of an eye.
People who could not understand such rapidity of judgment pronounced him
insincere, or at least, an opportunist. That he did not have the deep
inflexibility of Lincoln may be assumed; that his convictions, such
as they were, did not have an ethical cast may be safely asserted.
Nevertheless, he was a great force, an immense human power, that did not
change its course without good reason of its own sort. Far more than
a mere opportunist. Politically, he summed up a change that was coming
over the Democratic party. Janus-like, he had two faces, one for his
constituents, one for his colleagues. To the voter he was still a
Jeffersonian, with whom the old phraseology of the party, liberty,
equality, and fraternity, were still the catch-words. To his associates
in the Senate he was essentially an aristocrat, laboring to advance
interests that were careless of the rights of man. A later age has
accused the Senate of the United States of being the citadel of Big
Business. Waiving the latter view, the historian may assert that
something suggestive of Big Business appeared in our politics in the
'fifties, and was promptly made at home in the Senate. Perhaps its
first definite manifestation was a new activity on the part of the great
slave-holders. To invoke again the classifications of later points
of view, certain of our historians to-day think they can see in
the 'fifties a virtual slavery trust, a combine of slave interests
controlled by the magnates of the institution, and having as real,
though informal, an existence as has the Steel Trust or the Beef
Trust in our own time. This powerful interest allied itself with the
capitalists of the Northeast. In modern phraseology, they aimed to
"finance" the slave interest from New York. And for a time the alliance
succeeded in doing this. The South went entirely upon credit. It bought
and borrowed heavily in the East New York furnished the money.
Had there been nothing further to consider, the invasion of the Senate
by Big Business in the 'fifties might not have taken place. But there
was something else. Slavery's system of agriculture was excessively
wasteful. To be highly profitable it required virgin soil, and the
financial alliance demanded high profits. Early in the 'fifties, the
problem of Big Business was the acquisition of fresh soil for slavery.
The problem entered politics with the question how could this be brought
about without appearing to contradict democracy? The West also had its
incipient Big Business. It hinged upon railways. Now that California
had been acquired, with a steady stream of migration westward, with
all America dazzled more or less by gold-mines and Pacific trade, a
transcontinental railway was a Western dream. But what course should it
take, what favored regions were to become its immediate beneficiaries?
Here was a chance for great jockeying among business interests in
Congress, for slave-holders, money-lenders, railway promoters to
manipulate deals to their hearts' content. They had been doing so amid
a high complication of squabbling, while Douglas was traveling in
Europe during 1853. When he returned late in the year, the unity of the
Democratic machine in Congress was endangered by these disputes. Douglas
at once attacked the problem of party harmony. He threw himself into
the task with all his characteristic quickness, all his energy and
resourcefulness.
By this time the problem contained five distinct factors: The upper
Northeast wanted a railroad starting at Chicago. The Central West wanted
a road from St. Louis. The Southwest wanted a road from New Orleans,
or at least, the frustration of the two Northern schemes. Big Business
wanted new soil for slavery. The Compromise of 1850 stood in the way of
the extension of slave territory.
If Douglas had had any serious convictions opposed to slavery the last
of the five factors would have brought him to a standstill. Fortunately
for him as a party strategist, he was indifferent. Then, too, he firmly
believed that slavery could never thrive in the West because of
climatic conditions. "Man might propose, but physical geography would
dispose."(1) On both counts it seemed to him immaterial what concessions
be made to slavery extension northwestward. Therefore, he dismissed
this consideration and applied himself to the harmonization of the four
business factors involved. The result was a famous compromise inside a
party. His Kansas-Nebraska Bill created two new territories, one lying
westward from Chicago; one lying westward from St. Louis. It also
repealed the Missouri Compromise and gave the inhabitants of each
territory the right to decide for themselves whether or not slavery
should be permitted in their midst. That is to say, both to the railway
promoter and the slavery financier, it extended equal governmental
protection, but it promised favors to none, and left each faction to
rise or fall in the free competition of private enterprise. Why--was not
this, remembering Douglas's assumptions, a master-stroke?