One Man Great Enough: Abraham Lincoln's Road to Civil War

415 Pages·2007·7.9 MB·English

by  John C. Waugh

One Man Great Enough
Abraham Lincoln's Road to Civil
War
John C. Waugh
Harcourt, Inc.
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Copyright © 2007 by John C. Waugh
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Waugh, John C.
One man great enough : Abraham Lincoln's road to
Civil War / John C. Waugh.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Childhood and youth. 2. Lincoln, Abraham,
1809–1865—Political career before 1861. 3. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—
Political and social views. 4. Presidents—United States—Biography. 5. United
States—Politics and government—1837–1841. 6. United States—Politics and
government—1841–1845. 7. United States—Politics and government—1845–
1861.
8. United States—History-Civil War, 1861–1865—Causes. 9. Illinois—Politics
and
government—To 1865. I. Title.
E457.3.W25 2007
973.7092—dc22 2007009588
978-0-15-101071-4
Text set in Simoncini Garamond
Designed by Lydia D'moch
Printed in the United States of America
First edition
C E G I K J H F D B
For my father,
who had a sense of humor
Lincoln would have appreciated.
CONTENTS
Prologue The Uncoiling of the Serpent 1
PART ONE • WHO HE WAS AND WHERE HE CAME FROM 5
Chapter 1 The Dark and Bloody Ground 7
Chapter 2 The Hoosier Years 11
PART TWO • MAKING HIS WAY 21
Chapter 3 New Salem 23
Chapter 4 Politics 33
Chapter 5 Vandalia 39
PART THREE • THE ISSUE'S DARK SIDE 47
Chapter 6 Death in Alton 49
PART FOUR • POLITICAL ENEMIES AND FEMALE ENIGMAS 61
Chapter 7 Springfield 63
Chapter 8 Young Hickory 73
Chapter 9 The Ballyhoo Campaign 85
Chapter 10 Lincoln in Love 105
PART FIVE • ON THE NATIONAL STAGE 117
Chapter 11 The Steam Engine in Breeches and the Engine that Knew No
Rest 119
Chapter 12 "Who Is James K. Polk?" 129
Chapter 13 Laying Congressional Pipe 143
Chapter 14 Seeing Spots 153
PART SIX • ECLIPSE 165
Chapter 15 Lincoln's Other Life 167
Chapter 16 What He Had Become 183
Chapter 17 Tempest 193
PART SEVEN • CLASH OF THE GIANTS 201
Chapter 18 Lincoln Emerges 203
Chapter 19 Political Earthquake 221
Chapter 20 At the Crossroads 233
Chapter 21 Axe Handles and Wedges 239
Chapter 22 A House Divided 249
Chapter 23 The Debates 265
PART EIGHT • ON THE GLORY ROAD 285
Chapter 24 Spreading the Gospel 287
Chapter 25 Cooper Union 295
Chapter 26 Reaching for the Brass Ring 309
Chapter 27 Chicago 319
PART NINE • FROM BALLOTS TO BULLETS 339
Chapter 28 The Four Legged Race 341
Chapter 29 Firebell in the Night 359
Chapter 30 Getting There 377
Chapter 31 The War Comes 397
Epilogue Twilight of the Little Giant 413
In Appreciation 419
Notes 422
Sources Cited 455
Index 464
PROLOGUE
The Uncoiling of the Serpent
The new two-story statehouse in Vandalia, Illinois, stood unfinished in early
1837. Workmen had slapped plaster on the walls just before the Tenth General
Assembly convened in December. Its damp, displeasing essence still hung in the
legislative chambers upstairs.1
Abraham Lincoln, a young Whig legislator from Sangamon County, was
beginning his second term. He was not as new to politics as the plaster was to
the walls, but the plaster was more likely to stick than what he was about to do.
In a bold move, he was about to drop a resolution into the record that ran
emphatically against dominant public opinion in his state—on slavery, which
raised hackles as no other issue did.
The issue was uncoiling across the country like a hissing serpent. Abolition
societies proliferated in the North, blanketing the Union with incendiary
antislavery pamphlets. Alarmed and angry Southern legislators were passing
resolutions violently condemning these "fire brands of discord and disunion." 2
The South's mightiest guns, its most articulate and powerful ideologues, were
answering in kind, showering shot and shell on abolitionism in the defense of
their "peculiar institution."
Southern legislatures were not only passing angry resolutions against
abolitionists, they were demanding that Northern legislatures do the same.
Virginia, Alabama, and Mississippi had sent memorials to Illinois, which
Governor Joseph Duncan had transmitted to the General Assembly in December
1836.
In January, the Illinois legislature resoundingly passed a set of sympathizing
resolutions—that "we highly disapprove of the formation of abolition societies,
and of the doctrines promulgated by them"; that the right of property in slaves is
"sacred to the slaveholding States by the Federal Constitution, and that they can't
be deprived of that right without their consent."3
Lincoln quietly voted against the resolutions, one of only six of the
legislature's ninety-one members who did. In early March, three days before
adjournment, he wanted to quietly add something more to the record.
The issue was important to many in Illinois, but it mattered to Lincoln in a
different way. For the most part, the people of Illinois were emigrants from
Southern states, as was Lincoln himself—born in Kentucky and grown to
manhood in southern Indiana. Most of these former Southerners were for slavery
and against anything that wasn't.
Lincoln, though a Southerner, didn't see it exactly that way. Not that this
gangly young lawmaker bought into the idea of Negro equality. He didn't. With
most white opinion, Northern and Southern, he embraced white supremacy. He
opposed black suffrage, voting in his first term for a resolution "that the elective
franchise should be kept pure from contamination by the admission of colored
votes." 4 He rejected outright the idea of racial intermarriage.
But in Lincoln's mind slavery was a different matter. It was immoral,
crowding the outer limit of inhumanity. He was to say, "I am naturally
antislavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I
did not so think, and feel."5
In March 1837, he wanted to introduce a resolution that would mirror this
feeling. But he was playing with dynamite. The wording had to be hedged; it
would be political suicide in Illinois to be lumped with abolitionists. And he
would have to do it virtually alone. The only other House member willing to go
with him was Dan Stone, a fellow Whig legislator who had brought his
antislavery psyche with him from his native Vermont.
On March 3 they introduced their resolution, protesting the longer ones passed
in January. It was entered in the record without comment or debate. It said:
"Resolutions upon the subject of domestic slavery having passed both branches
of the General Assembly at its present session, the undersigned hereby protest
against the passage of the same. They believe that the institution of slavery is
founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition
doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils."6
That was the nub of it. Abolitionist agitation was bad enough, but the greater
evil was slavery itself. The original resolutions hadn't said that. There was a
moral issue here. And that was the distinction Lincoln and Stone wanted to
make. They made it quietly, as they went out the door.
Softly introduced, those lines made virtually no noise in the state. But it was
the first public stand that this young politician ever took on the institution of
slavery. It was to be the first of many on a road that would lead him—and his
country—to the very gates of disunion and civil war.
PART ONE
Who He Was and Where He Came From