Young Man Lincoln - The Mister Lincoln Lecture Series Part 1 - Gettysburg College

thank you and good evening I'm so pleased to see all of you out here this evening for a second year worth of a lecture series it reminds me of a story Lincoln liked to tell about a preacher who went to the Illinois Secretary of State's office in the old State Capitol the man wanted to use the old State Capitol for a revival meeting and so he made application to the Secretary of State for that well the Secretary of State sit in the old State Capitol sitting in Springfield Illinois was a little dubious about this proposition so he asked the preacher what he planned to make is the subject of the revival meeting he wanted to hold the preacher replied he intended to make as the subject the second coming of Jesus Secretary of State replied no no no that won't do if he's been to Springfield once he won't be back again but here we we all are back again and it's a wonderful thing to see so many familiar faces here this evening and to talk about a subject that is very important to me and that is Abraham Lincoln the boy such as he was then always loved to talk while his father and his stepmother were walking or riding the half mile and a half that separated them in the indiana forest from the tiny log church they attended the boy would meanwhile gather his stepbrother and stepsister around take down the bible read a verse get out of him he would preach and we would do the crying any time he was taken to church the boy I could afterward go out to work in the field get up on a stump and repeat almost word-for-word the sermon he had heard the Sunday before he would also make political speeches such as he had heard spoken or seen written that his cousin Dennis Hanks recalled that he would frequently make political and other speeches to the boys he was so good at this that he could not resist showing off to the enormous irritation of his father when strangers would ride along and up to his father's fence recall Dennis Hanks the boy always through pride and to tease his father would be sure to ask the stranger the first question for which his father but sometimes knock him a rod the father Thomas should not have blamed the boy so severely because the boy's talent owed a good deal to the example of Thomas himself who was passionately fond of humorous jokes and stories according to one old acquaintance the first of this family in the new world an apprentice named Samuel arrived in New England in 1637 from Lincolnshire in England carrying with him the regions named Lincoln and in 1644 Samuel inherited five acres of land in Hingham Massachusetts and set himself up there as a farmer thereafter the Lincoln's were relentless in their search for more and more land by the 1730's Samuel Lincoln's grandsons Mordecai and Abraham owned hundreds of acres of land in New Jersey and in Pennsylvania another generation of Lincoln's brought descendants of Samuel Lincoln to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and marriage into the first families of the valley and finally in 1782 yet another Abraham Lincoln bolted over the Appalachians to stake out 1,200 acres of prime Kentucky forest land and it was there that the rise of the Lincoln's came to an abrupt halt sometime in 1784 according to the memories of Thomas Lincoln while clearing ground around the stockade at Hughes station Abraham Lincoln was ambushed and killed by a party of marauding Indians the story was handed down vividly to every Lincoln thereafter how Abraham had been shot by an Indian while laying up fence rails how the Indian had snatched up Abraham's eight-year-old son Thomas as a prize Thomas is 14 year old brother Mordecai had picked up his father's rifle and taking aim at a silver ornament or metal on the Indians chest shot the Indian dead it was a heroic story but heroism aside the death of Abraham Lincoln was a disaster for the Lincoln family and not only for the loss of the head of the household Kentucky in 1784 was still a province of the state of Virginia and governed by Virginia's laws of inheritance and the bulk of the property left over after sales and taxes went to young Mordechai nothing went to Thomas Lincoln for his two siblings and instead of opening up a new chapter in the expanding story of the Lincoln family young Thomas Lincoln found himself at age 16 right back where his ancestor Samuel had been in 1637 apprenticed to a cabinet maker even so Thomas could not quite get the Lincoln passion for land out of his system and as early as 1803 he purchased a small plot of land north of Elizabethtown Kentucky in 1806 he married Nancy Hanks and in February of 1807 the Lincoln's first child a daughter Sarah was born he evidently decided to make cabinet making a sideline after her birth and moved to a small farm on Noland Creek near Hodgenville Kentucky to take up farming where his father had left off 14 years before and it was there On February 12 1809 that a son was born and perhaps with the consciousness that he was trying to pick up the threads of a life that the Indians had cut short with his own father's death Thomas Lincoln named the boy for his grandfather Abraham Lincoln try as he might though Thomas Lincoln was spectacularly unsuccessful in reconnecting with the ambitions of his Lincoln forebears Kentucky land titles were like Kentucky and heritance laws still governed by slipshod Virginia land policies which were riddled with enough cross claims and defective titles to keep a sea full of lawyers in business thomas lincoln's Hodgenville farm turned out to have a lien against it from an earlier owner and Thomas lost the property he bought a smaller farm on Knob Creek in the same County but in 1815 a neighboring land owner claimed title to the Lincoln property and Thomas found himself embroiled in another suit eventually won that suit but the winning might not have been worth it the Knob Creek farm was difficult land to rest a living from half a century later Abraham Lincoln would remember that this farm lay in a valley surrounded by high hills and deep gorges and on one occasion after planting corn and pumpkins a big rain in the Hills flooded the valley and washed ground corn pumpkin seeds and all clear off the field the difficulty in farming such land was compounded by Thomas Lincoln's own lackadaisical approach to making a living there was some part of the ancestral passion of the Lincoln's for land and for growth which never seemed to have caught fire in Thomas Lincoln because all of his neighbors remembered him as lazy and worthless an excellent specimen of poor white trash who could barely read and write a pig ler always doing but doing nothing great was happy lived easy and contented it didn't he'll be there that Kentucky farming was increasingly becoming dominated by large-scale plantations that used the labor of black slaves to raise crops against big time competition like that a small farmer like Thomas Lincoln stood little chance of carving out any great commercial success Thomas Lincoln's solution to his problems was to move again this time to Indiana where the federal government under the terms of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had not only laid out secure land the surveys that guaranteed secure title but also banned the import of slave labor so in 1816 Thomas Lincoln gathered up his small family and migrated north across the Ohio River the thick forests of South Western Indiana where he had filed claim took a quarter section of Congress land 160 acres for which he made a down payment of $16.63 tainted from grazing on the poisonous snake root plant and died Thomas remarried in December 1819 and it was his one good stroke of fortune that his new wife a widow named Sarah Bush Johnston with three children of her own turned into the perfect nurturer for the two motherless Lincoln children she was a woman of great energy a remarkable good sense very industrious wrote her grandson in law august h chapman she took an especial liking to young Abe her love for him was warmly returned and continued to the day of his death few children loved their parents as he loved this stepmother it was just as well that young Abraham found so much in the way of affection from Sarah Lincoln because he certainly found little from his father Thomas Lincoln never showed by his actions that he thought much of his son Abraham when a boy August Chapman recalled he treated him rather unkind than otherwise and it's not hard to see why where Thomas was slow and complacent his son was quick-witted and of uncommon natural talents where Thomas was barely literate young Abraham was not industrious as a worker on the farm or at any other kind of manual labor he only showed industry in attainment of knowledge and Thomas occasionally beat him for neglecting his work by reading Thomas Lincoln that at least been willing to send Abraham to school so that as Lincoln said later I should be well educated but as he then added Thomas Lincoln's version of being well educated man having me cipher to the rule of three above all father and son split over the issue of religion Thomas Lincoln belonged to the separate Baptists a small Baptist sect which preached absolute predestination that God controlled all the vents down to the smallest human choice young Abraham by contrast might mimic sermons but without believing them his stepmother remembered that Abe had no particular religion didn't think of that question of that time if he ever did he never talked about it eventually Abraham began to chafe at the restraints his father's agricultural life placed around him in 1830 Thomas Lincoln decided to move again this time to Illinois although Illinois had been organized as a territory like Indiana by the old Northwest Ordinance it had only been a state of the union for a little more than a decade sheep federal lands could be bought there in sufficient quantity to provide for Thomas in old age and for Sally Lincoln's children John Elizabeth at Mathilda Johnston so the entire extended Lincoln clan crossed the icy Wabash River and Illinois and set up camp on the banks of the Sangamon River near Decatur Abraham turned 21 the following year which made him legally independent of Thomas and the tall gawky young man at once struck out on the first adventure he could find a commercial entrepreneur named Denton often hired him to help take a flatboat of goods down the Sangamon River to the Illinois River and the Mississippi and thence to New Orleans and off it was so pleased with Lincoln's handling of the trip that he hired him as a store manager for a new outlet off it was opening in the Sangamon River town of New Salem from that day until he died Abraham Lincoln never cast one look back to his father or his father's way of life on the farm looked out on any map of central Illinois New Salem seemed ideally situated to become the great commercial center of the state built on high bluffs above the Sangamon River where an extensive mill was already in operation New Salem looked like being in the perfect position to take advantage of Robert Fulton's new invention the steamboat in bringing cargos up and down the Sangamon from the Mississippi Abraham Lincoln also turned out to be the ideal store manager for Denton Offutt he was meticulous in his accounting and although he had a reputation for making fun of religion that even wrote a short essay attacking Christian belief as irrational and impossible Lincoln was no Carozza more than religion he preferred to talk about Shakespeare and Robert Burns and he was quick with funny stories and good reading Moffat grew so confident in Lincoln's ability to do almost anything but he boasted to a group of neighborhood hooligans who work for a rival store that Lincoln could whip their leader the leaders name was Jack Armstrong and Lincoln surprised Armstrong by wrestling him to a draw and thereby earning the friendship of both arms strong and Armstrong's New Salem Rowdies when an Indian uprising in northern Illinois known as the Blackhawk war forced the governor of Illinois to call out the militia Armstrong and his friends unanimously elected Lincoln captain of the local news Salem Company although the Blackhawk war lasted for only a few months and Lincoln saw no action apart from marching aimlessly around northern Illinois he instantly made friends that attracted attention wherever he went I fell in with Lincoln first when he was a captain recalled the prominent Illinois lawyer and politician John Todd Stewart he was then noted mainly for his great strength and skill in wrestling wrestling and athletic sports a kind genial and companionable man a great lover of jokes and teller of stories everybody liked him he became very popular in the army he nearly parlayed that popularity directly into political office he announced himself as a candidate for the state legislature in 1832 from Sangamon County and lost only because his black walk Blackhawk war service cut into his campaign time it ran again in 1830 for mounting stumps and wag beds to preach politics as si had once repeated sermons in that shrill monotone style of speaking that enabled his audience however large to hear distinctly the lowest sound of his voice this time in 1834 Lincoln was the second highest vote getter in the district and since under the Illinois system the top four vote getters on a county ticket won seats in the legislature Abraham Lincoln had earned his first victory in politics on the other hand 1834 was not a good year for an aspiring politician to make a debut because the political life of the American Republic was about to come generally unglued and it all had to do with the appearance of a new political party on the American horizon no one who had participated in the original convention that wrote the American Constitution in 1787 had thought to include anything in and about political parties simply because none yet existed and because many of the founding fathers hoped that the American nation would prove to be so single-minded in its devotion to republican and democratic principles that there would be no need for special interest political parties to represent different interpretations of those principles those homes perished within a decade of the Constitution's ratification and American politics became polarized into Federalists with George Washington John Adams and Alexander Hamilton as their leaders and Democrats headed by Thomas Jefferson the Federalists filled their policies around Alexander Hamilton & Hamilton's three great reports of the 1790s on manufacturing the national debt and on a national banking system Hamilton's reports were brilliant articulations of the need for the new federal government to encourage and underwrite a commercial and manufacturing sector for the New Republic and Hamilton's greatest success was in convincing Washington to allow him as Secretary of the Treasury to establish a Bank of the United States which could provide capital for new American businesses but to Thomas Jefferson banking and commerce were evil banks lent money and that created debt which entrapped naive farmers and unsuspecting citizens commerce involved the swapping of paper paper stock certificates of deposit paper money which represented unreal and illusory wealth and Men of Commerce according to Jefferson were all unsavory characters who used money to concentrate influence and power in their hands and thus destroy Liberty to Jefferson the only real wealth was land and the ownership of land and the only genuinely virtuous way of making a living was agriculture so let the decadent monarchies of Europe build empires on trade and exploitation the American Republic should remain a nation of farmers raising what they needed for all their needs at home and having nothing to do with European commercial entanglements this may not have made very much economic sense Jefferson after all was anything but a virtuous farmer himself since he relied on the coerced labor of black slaves to support his own lavish agricultural experiments at Monticello but it certainly played well to the fears and anxieties of American farmers who were by far the dominant sector of the American economy so in 1800 Jefferson swept to the presidency in a landslide that made the Federalist Party a dead-letter and installed Jefferson's Democrats as the dominant party in American politics for the next 60 years and in 1808 Jefferson let the Charter of Alexander Hamilton's Bank of the United States Wow if this was a signal for rejoicing among American farmers the rejoicing was premature in 1812 Jefferson's hand-picked successor is President James Madison over confidently allowed the United States to be sucked into war with the great commercial Satan Great Britain in the war of 1812 the result was a near catastrophe the underfunded under-equipped and under clothed armies of virtuous Jeffersonian farmers were repeatedly routed by British troops equipped with the latest material the resoundingly commercial British economy could provide and in 1814 the British actually chased President Madison out of Washington and burned the White House the disgrace of the war of 1812 produced some severe second thoughts among many Jeffersonian Democrats and in no one more than the talented Kentucky congressman Henry Clay although Clay had howled before the war for an end to Hamilton's Bank and for war with written and for annexing Canada he changed his tune drastically after he watched President Madison forced to go cap in hand to borrow money from private financiers during the war just to keep the federal government going in 1816 clay called for the refounding of a second bank of the United States and he followed that with proposals for legislation that would offer government backing for national transportation projects to cut the costs of manufacturing and marketing and a national tariff which would protect American manufacturing from competition with foreign goods many Democrats were chastened enough by the dismal outcome of the war of 1812 to rally around Henry Clay but the emerging chief of the Democratic Party the war hero Andrew Jackson would tolerate no deviations from Jeffersonian orthodoxy clay frustrated Jackson's attempt to win the presidency in 1824 that when Jackson finally won election in 1828 it was clear that a political civil war was brewing within the Democratic Party in 1833 Jackson vetoed congressional legislation extending the charter of the second bank of the United States the next year Henry Clay declared the formation of a new political party to oppose Jackson and gave it the name of the old english party which had opposed monarchy and tyranny in the 18th century the Queen's the fringe started life as a party simply and purely in opposition to Andrew Jackson whom they accused of being a dictator who yearned to become king Andrew but as the Whigs rallied the support of American business and American religion they soon became distinguished for their stands on three basic issues the first of these issues was Economic Opportunity the fries became the party of small scale urban business and finance and usually urban businesses and Finance ears who were part of international networks of investment and trade or trade which crossed state and regional boundaries although this opened the wigs to the accusation that they were simply a party for the rich the Whigs replied that what it really meant was that they were the party of Economic Opportunity who are the rich man of our country ask the wind newspaper there are the enterprising mechanic who raises himself by his ingenious Labor's from the dust and turmoil of his workshop to an abode of his and elegance the industrious tradesmen whose patient frugality enables him at last or accumulate enough to forego the duties of the counter and indulge a well-earned leisure along with economic opportunity the Whigs became identified with social morality a successful business depends upon economic regularity and self-discipline but self-discipline and regularity are also moral issues and the Whig pursuit of both led the Whigs in no close alliance with American religion which in the 1830s overwhelmingly meant Protestant Christian religious denominations plagued economics would supply the opportunity Protestant Christianity would supply the morality and presumably the nation would prosper economically and morally the third principle around which the flags rallied was National Union one way to ensure that American commerce would never prosper was to allow individual states to write their own separate rules for economics that way the chaos of separate regulations would make large-scale business operation and impossibility for the Whigs then suppressing local regional and state diversity was a necessity and nothing came to matter more to them than affirming the sovereignty of the federal government over a single unified American people that meant that when South Carolina tried to unilaterally nullify federal tariffs because those tariffs favored northern business interests and penalized southern plantation owners Whigs like Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster rose to denounce nullification as an attack on the Union ultimately when northern opponents of slavery demanded a confrontation with the southern states over slavery Whigs like Henry Clay rose to propose one national compromise after another on the slave issue in order to hold the southern states in the Union and this despite Clay's personal belief that slavery was a moral wrong it was to the Whigs that Abraham Lincoln attached himself from his first day as a state legislator he was already disposed to think in the fleeing fashion from his long and unpleasant relationship with his father his father who could have been a poster boy for the kind of self-sufficient American farmer glorified by Jefferson and Jackson instead said Lincoln I desire to see the time when education and by its means morality sobriety enterprise and industry shall become much more general than at present and he added I should be gratified to have it in my power to contribute something to the advancement of any measure which might have a tendency to accelerate the happy appear when Lincoln left the farm to work for off its store he was in effect casting a silent vote in favor of the kind of commercial system Henry Clay was proposing in Congress and when Lincoln announced his first candidacy for the legislature in 1832 it was on a platform of government sponsored transportation projects similar to Henry Clay's by the time that Lincoln was elected to the legislature in 1834 Henry Clay had become Lincoln's Bo ideal of a statesman an opinion he maintained for the rest of his life and contemporaries would find Abraham Lincoln as stiff as a man can be and his wig doctrines the boy on the stomach became the Whig legislature one of the two principal men we relied on in the legislature to make speeches for us and as one further step away from the course world of Jeffersonian farming that he identified with his father Lincoln turned in 1837 to a new profession the profession most closely identified not only with talking but with the protection of American commercial interests he became a lawyer and we'll find out where that takes in after we take a break Abraham Lincoln arrived for his first session as a member of the Illinois legislature in November of 1834 at age 25 he was already an odd side six feet four inches with most of his height in his legs so that watching him walk must have been like watching two stilts in action like his Lincoln forebears his face was long angular and homely big cheekbones deep-set eyes under a shock of thick coarse black hair he had nothing in his appearance that was marred or striking said when fellow representative in the legislature and yet nobody could make a worse mistake than to underestimate this awkward stranger especially when he began talking for when enlivened in conversation or engaged in telling or hearing some mirth inspiring story his countenance would brighten up the expression would light up his eyes would sparkle all terminating in an unrestrained laugh in which everyone present willing or unwilling were compelled to take part to sell in the militia two years before had once began to pay him dividends as he connected with influential Illinois politico's who had first met in the militia service chief among these was John Todd Stewart also a state representative and one of the principal leaders of the new Whig party in the Illinois legislature Stewart who had kept a careful eye on Lincoln as a young man of promise took Lincoln under his wing as a sort of legislative apprentice and in short order Lincoln was trying out his talking talents on the floor of the State House of Representatives as a twig there was a great deal for a Whig to talk about in Illinois in 1834 the Illinois Whigs were impatiently demanding that Illinois not be left out of the overall economic development of the United States and without in view the Illinois Whigs demanded support for state-level versions of the same agenda that Henry Clay was agitating for in Washington first on that agenda was an Illinois State Bank which could issue paper money in 1834 the federal government issued money from its mints only as hard coin as what was called in those days specie there was paper money in circulation but this paper money was issued as bank notes by banks not by the federal government people who accepted banknotes in payment for goods and services did so at the risk of discovering that the bank which had originally issued those notes might be out of business or in deep financial trouble thanks were supposed to issue no more banknotes than their own reserves of hard coin could back up but there were a few regulations to prevent them from doing otherwise especially if times were good and the demand for borrowing money was high perhaps that should have scared more people away from using bank money but the truth was that it was hard to transact any forms of large-scale business in hard coin a thousand dollars in bank notes was a whole lot more portable than a thousand dollars in gold coins as significantly safer to store that difficulty of course suited Jacksonian Democrats just fine they were not interested in encouraging large-scale commercial transactions anyway but to the whims and unreliable paper currency meant that entrepreneurs would be unable or unwilling to embark on the kinds of made your economic ventures that Quigs believed were the only way to make the United States competitive against the global economic bullies like the British the only solution then was for the state and the federal governments to step in and guarantee the value of somebody's paper money and the best way to do that was to establish state banks which would regulate and backup the value of the paper money they issued with the Full Faith and Credit of the state Illinois had established such a state bank in its territorial days and Lincoln emerged as the Illinois State Banks most vigorous defender against democratic critics the second part of the program that Lincoln and the Illinois we exaggerated for works transportation projects internal improvements there was no sense in providing the capital for business investment if it turned out afterward that those businesses had no way to get their goods to market and that seemed to be the principal problem that Illinois presented Illinois in 1834 was virtually landlocked Chicago on Lake Michigan was little more than a military village and the rest of the state had only rivers like the Sangam on that's highways for getting goods in and out again this suited Illinois Democrats just fine because that ensured that virtuous Illinois farmers would produce only for themselves and for their own neighborhood needs and would have no reason to connect with the corrupting networks of Commerce and competition in the world around them but the flames had few illusions about the virtues of isolated farmers and Lincoln became a prime advocate in the legislature for state funding of canals roads River and harbor dredging and the new railroad which would bring Illinois farmers in to ease a connection with distant markets and during those markets with all the allure of new goods into the heart of the Illinois Prairie and then the third thing which is going to be a major Whig agenda the sale of public lands like the house the Jack built internal improvements projects depended on the capital made available through the state bank and the state bank depended on revenues and its way by the legislature great where was the Illinois legislature to get such money one obvious way was by taxation but projects of the sort that Lincoln and the Whigs were backing would require ruinous levels of taxation and delighted Democrats which seized on this at once that's proof of an evil commercial conspiracy to enslave independent Illinois farmers and reduce them to tax slavery but there was one other source of funding and capital Illinois had originally been organized as a Federal Territory by Congress out of the Old Northwest Territory even after Illinois achieved statehood in 1818 the federal government retained title to hundreds of thousands of acres of prime Illinois farmland some of this land had already been sold to farmers like Thomas Lincoln other parts of it had simply been occupied by squatters who hoped at some later time to buy the land they were squatting on and still more of it simply lay open and undeveloped Democrats favored keeping things that way so that the sale of public lands would provide only a modest stream of revenue for federal government and therefore eliminate any excuse for supporting a bank of the United States but the wings saw no purpose in tying up all of that land in federal hands while the nation's economic development went up begging and so Lincoln become a prominent voice in calling for the federal government to you title to the public lands in Illinois so that the lands could be sold to fund the state bank and the state bank in turn could fund the internal improvements projects all of this made Lincoln into one of the chief promoters of a business friendly and entrepreneur friendly environment in Illinois and he was remarkably successful in managing the adoption by the State House of Representatives of an Illinois and Michigan canal which would link Lake Michigan with the Mississippi River a bill to fund an Illinois Central Railroad and a variety of bridge and road projects reelected in 1836 and again in 1838 Lincoln became conspicuous for bringing forward and sustaining the economic development of Illinois and when his mentor John Todd Stewart left the legislature to run for Congress Abraham Lincoln became the acknowledged leader of the Whigs in the Illinois State House oddly enough Lincoln's own personal business ventures routinely flopped when he returned from his service in the militia in 1832 he found Denton offered store in New Salem closed and himself without means and out of business he invested the bounty money that he had received for his militia service in a new store along with a partner William berry that store failed to leaving Lincoln almost a thousand dollars in debt he was forced to find odd jobs to make ends meet and eventually his friends and New Salem wrangled him appointments as the New Salem postmaster and his deputy surveyor for Sangamon County but he could not keep the living from hand to mouth this way and after the close of his first legislative session Lincoln yielded to the proposal of John Todd Stewart that he begins studying law from books that Stewart loaned him to learn from reading was Lincoln's favorite way to learn anything and west of the Appalachians it was virtually the only way anybody had of acquiring schooling and law there were no law schools in Illinois and a standard process for anyone aspiring to a career in law was to begin directed reading of the standard law textbooks in the office of an already established lawyer so the same boy who had loved talking so much and who had such unbounded confidence in himself that he would smart-aleck his own father never hesitated about plunging into law his Lincoln wrote years later he borrowed books of Stuart tripped them home with him to New Salem and went at it with good earnest in the fall of 1836 he received a law license in Sangamon County and the following year was licensed to practice at the state level as well and in April of 1837 Stuart formally invited him to join him as a junior partner in Stuart's office in Springfield Illinois and Lincoln who had once had such high hopes of commercial success in New Salem left for Springfield and a career as a lawyer and once again never looked back that did not mean however that Lincoln had left the world of Commerce when Lincoln came up to Springfield in April of 1837 to join Stuart he came to join a practice all leading up to its years in contract litigation especially over debts land and bankruptcy well he had had enough on the subject of debt from his partnership with William berry to know what that meant and what was more working with John Todd Stewart meant that he would be working with someone who was already a skilled practitioner of law in Sangamon County so having as he said gone at the subject with good earnest he now joined in the practice of commercial law this did not make him rich at once far from it lawyering in Springfield intimidated Lincoln Springfield had only just become the new state capital and Lincoln was painfully self-conscious of his social ignorance his uncouth manners his slipshod habits of dress and his less than debonair appearance this thing of living in Springfield is rather a dull business after all he wrote on a letter in 1837 I am quite as lonesome here as ever I was anywhere in my life I have been spoken to by but one woman since I've been here and should not have been by her if she could have avoided it I've never been to church yet because I'm conscious I should not know how to behave myself and yet Lincoln's constant good humor his boundless capacities as a talker and what his friend Orville Hickman Browning called his conviction that he was born for better things than then seemed likely or even possible could not help but make him irresistible to a constantly expanding circle of young friends eventually he became this center of a debating or literary society composed of the young lawyers and clerks in Springfield he liked to tantalize them with his mockery of religion I think that when I first knew mr. Lincoln he was skeptical as to the great truths of the Christian religion recalled Joshua speed that's another member of their circle remembered how Lincoln would talk about religion pick up a Bible read a passage and then comment on it show its falsity and its follies on the ground of reason this was not the sort of thing in an age when religion was the most serious personal pursuit of most Americans that it was always wise to do but one Springfield er insisted that no man ever had an easier time of it in his early days he had always had influential and financial friends to help him he'll most fought each other for the privilege of assisting Lincoln principled among these friends was John Todd Stewart and Stewart's extended chain of relatives and friends in Illinois who not only brought Lincoln into the law and into politics but into the prime Whig social circles of Springfield no one ever doubted that Lincoln was an odd man in Springfield drawing-rooms but is very oddness drew Springfield's Prime hostesses to take Stewart's talented Protege under there and introducing to the aspiring and unattached young ladies of the city and it was in just such an environment that in 1839 Lincoln was introduced to John Todd Stuart's cousin Mary Todd of Lexington Kentucky on the surface Mary Todd was everything Abraham Lincoln was not the lexington Todd's were wealthy slaveholding League merchants and personal friends of Henry Clay three of the Todd daughters had married into the commercial and political elite of Springfield and Mary had been well educated and wrote and spoke French the Todd's were so much the socially superior of Abraham Lincoln that he once made the comment 1d was good enough for the Todd rather 1d was good enough for God the Todd's needed to Mary Todd was also in addition to the other acquisitions more than a foot shorter than the gangly Lincoln Mary Todd was in the view of one Springfield er rather Pleasant polite civil rather graceful than her movements intelligent witty and sometimes bitter too she was a polished girl well educated and a good linguist a fine conversationalist and on every point what seemed to be the diametric opposite of Abraham Lincoln but there was under the surface much that linked her very easily to her cousin Stuart's junior partner both of them Mary and Abraham were ambitious both had endured the trauma of the death of a mother both were ardent wings and both had nowhere to go back to because Mary's stepmother had made it clear that Mary was not welcome in the new Tod household in Lexington what Mary Todd saw in Lincoln was the same thing that her cousin had seen a young man oh yes Roth manners but undoubted talent as she set her cap for Lincoln she had taken a fancy to mr. Lincoln Orville Hickman Browning remarked years later and I always thought she did most of the courting nevertheless it was not an easy courtship Lincoln may have been convinced that he was bound for better things but that did nothing to add lay his anxieties about looking like a fool in the here and now and at one point in January of 1841 he abruptly backed out of any relationship with Mary but eventually despite the ups and downs in November of 1842 they were married and the marriage almost at once began to pay Lincoln political dividends as his new in-laws many of whom had frankly told Mary not to waste her time on this moneyless oath agreed to open doors forever newer political achievements in 1843 Congress abolished the practice of electing at-large congressmen and decreed a dramatic redrawing of congressional districts across the nation the redistricting created an entirely new seventh congressional district in central Illinois conveniently drawn around Springfield and creating the only congressional district in Illinois with a majority of Whig voters Lincoln would have happily stepped right up for the nomination for such a plum seat but the first opportunity to represent the district was handed out by the Whig political managers to party stalwart John Hardin and from then on nominations for the seat would be awarded by the Illinois Whigs on a strict rotation basis lincoln's turn came next in 1846 he ran against the colorful Methodist preacher Peter Cartwright who tried to drive a wedge between Lincoln and religious Whig voters by broadcasting Lincoln's reputation as an infidel around the district Lincoln hastily issued a statement which artfully acknowledged that I am NOT a member of any Christian Church but which insisted that I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general or of any denomination of Christians in particular this was enough to reassure pious claims and Lincoln was elected to the 30th Congress carrying eight of the eleven counties in the seventh District by a healthy majority of fifteen hundred votes election to Congress should have been Lincoln's next rung up the ladder of political success ambitious political types of both parties often used the term in Congress as a launching pad for more ambitious campaigns either for governorships or for the senate or for a pointed political office since federal job placement in the 1840s was unregulated by any civil service rules and was entirely up to whatever Party controlled the White House Federal jobs were also more lucrative than most private sector employment and little prevented federal job holders from keeping a hand on their previous professions at the same time the words conflict of interest had not yet come into existence the circumstances defeated every one of lincoln's ambitions for one thing he arrived in Washington in the middle of the Mexican War of 1846 to 48 this was a war brought on by a Democratic president James Knox Polk a war bitterly criticized by the Whigs as a bloody way to promote Democratic popularity at the polls Lincoln joined in feed criticisms of President Polk and the Mexican war only to find that opposition to the war was likely to offend the patriotic sentiments of Illinois voters of all stripes when Lincoln rose on the floor of a House of Representatives to demand that President Polk show Americans the exact spot where American blood was supposed to have been shed by Mexicans in an unprovoked attack on American soil Lincoln was laughed to scorn by the press as spotty Lincoln even loyal Whig political friends warned Lincoln that they could not support criticism of the president in time of war that killed off in a small hope Lincoln might have had for re-election Lincoln instead threw himself into the 1848 presidential campaign on behalf queeg war hero Zachary Taylor he hoped that a Taylor presidential victory might translate into a federal office appointment for himself Taylor won the election but when Lincoln presented his claim for political reward by asking to be appointed commissioner of the public land office in Springfield the appointment went instead to a do nothing wig hack named Justin Butterfield there was nothing for Lincoln to do at the end of his congressional term but pack his bags and returned to Springfield empty-handed I was then so disgusted with politics that I made up my mind to retired a private life and practice my profession with greater earnestness than ever before political failure was not his only setback the Lincoln family now counted two children Robert Todd Lincoln born in 1843 and Edward Baker Lincoln born in 1846 but in early 1850 shortly after congressman Lincoln returned to Springfield to take up law again three year old Eddie Lincoln died after a lengthy illness of 56 days the death of his child plundered Lincoln into bloom and the clergyman who conducted the funeral the Reverend James Smith of Springfield's first presbyterian church found Lincoln very much depressed and downcast at the death of his son perplexed and unsettled on the fundamentals of religion by speculative difficulty is connected with Providence and revelation in his run for Congress he had learned from Peter Cartwright just how politically unwise it was to flaunt religious unbelief to the general public now he learned from personal sorrow how little he stood to gain from at religion then in little more than a year his father Thomas Lincoln died Lincoln's stepbrother John Johnston had written to Lincoln that the dying old farmer was asking to see his son but Lincoln had grown so alienated from his father that he declined to come to his father's deathbed in downstate Illinois if we could meet now it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than Pleasant the only gesture Lincoln made to his father's memory came in 1853 when he named his fourth and last child Thomas the one great consolation Lincoln enjoyed in the midst of these midlife disappointments was his law practice Lincoln had been John Todd Stewart's junior partner until a steward decided to run for Congress in 1841 Lincoln then briefly partnered with Stephen T Logan but Logan was a legal prima donna who annoyed Lincoln with his presumption that Lincoln was a bumpkin in need of advice and so the partnership was dissolved in 1844 instead thereafter Lincoln would no longer play second fiddle to any other lawyer he took on a younger Whig lawyer named William Henry Herndon as a junior partner the mash turned out to be an ideal one Herndon was finicky and detail-oriented he was the perfect office lawyer to supply Lincoln as a backstop while Lincoln developed into the perfect courtroom Pleader the Lincoln Herndon caseload more than doubled between 1850 and 1855 from 150 to over 400 cases a year most of it personal and property litigation Lincoln had very little taste for criminal law a great deal of this practice occurred in the small county courthouses that in central Illinois but by the mid 1850s Lincoln had also developed a substantial practice in the Illinois Supreme Court and in the federal circuit court in Chicago above all Lincoln build up a highly lucrative practice representing the major illinois railroad lines and especially the Illinois Central Railroad and the railroads used Lincoln as their principal counsel in disputes over the title to public lands that the railroad laid track across one case alone netted Lincoln a $5,000 fee from the Illinois Central Railroad mother later 1850s Lincoln's income had ballooned to almost three thousand dollars a year without any indebtedness and in 1857 Lincoln completely rebuilt the story and a half home he owned at eighth and Jackson streets in Springfield and yet for all of these successes Lincoln mourned the seeming death of his political ambitions mr. Lincoln was an extremely ambitious man and that ambition found its gratification only in the political field earned and wrote long afterward politics were his life and newspapers his food merely using the law as a stepping-stone to a political life and it was in this field that he seemed to be happy Lincoln little suspected as his life broadened into middle-age that in 1854 politics would turn again to offer him the opportunity for advancement he earned for but believed had been passed by and that opportunity this second time we catapult him in six short years to nothing less than the presidency of the United States and how he got there is what we will take up again on December 4th we'll see you all

Channel: Gettysburg College

Views: 15,327

Rating: 4.852941 out of 5

Keywords: history, lincoln, civil war, lecture

Id: zJOWviT67p0

Length: 63min 44sec (3824 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 07 2013