Lincoln in the World (9 page)

Lincoln, for his part, went on the attack. The following month, in one of his most cutting and effective speeches in the House, the Illinois congressman hammered the Democratic presidential nominee, Lewis Cass. The Michigan senator had been lauded for his military record in the Black Hawk War a decade and a half before. Now Lincoln mocked the senator, claiming that Cass had “invaded Canada without resistance, and outvaded it without pursuit.” The Illinois congressman walked up and down the House aisles as he made his case, flailing his arms and keeping the chamber in “a continuous roar of merriment.” Lincoln reiterated his opposition to Polk’s provocative maneuvers along the Rio Grande. “The marching [of] an army into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, frightening the inhabitants away, leaving their growing crops, and other property to destruction, to
you
may appear a perfectly amiable, peaceful, un-provoking procedure,” Lincoln said, “but it does not appear so to us.” Cass’s election, he declared, would lead “to new wars, new acquisitions of territory and still further extensions of slavery.”
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Lincoln also tempered his expansionism when he spoke before dovish audiences. In the fall of 1848, the Illinois congressman traveled to New England to campaign for Taylor. A radical group of former northeastern Whigs, objecting to Taylor’s candidacy, had created its own new Free Soil Party and nominated Martin Van Buren for the presidency. Lincoln tried to persuade his listeners to back the Whigs and Taylor instead. At one stop, in Worcester, Massachusetts, Lincoln addressed an audience in the town’s cavernous Mechanics Hall. He tried to appeal to the sympathies of the Northeasterners, who traditionally had been much less comfortable with territorial expansion than Westerners. The Whig Party, Lincoln declared, “did not believe in enlarging our field, but in keeping our fences where they are and cultivating our present possession, making it a garden.” By the end of the speech the Illinois congressman “brought down the house,” one witness recalled, and had his audience shouting, “Go on! Go on!”
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The pro-Taylor assault of Lincoln and the other Young Indians
ultimately paid off. The general defeated both Cass and Van Buren for the presidency, although Taylor’s margin in the popular vote amounted to only three percentage points. At the general’s inauguration, on a “cold, gusty day, filled with flurries of rain and snow,” Lincoln shared in the revelry with mixed feelings. Although thrilled at the Whig victory, Lincoln appeared a little sad at the prospect of leaving Washington as the end of his term approached. He had campaigned for his office on the principle that “turn about is fair play.” Now, honoring his promise, he was obliged to eschew a second term in order to give his former law partner Stephen Logan his own opportunity. With his return to Springfield looming, Lincoln tried to enjoy himself, remaining at Taylor’s inaugural ball until after four a.m. When he finally left, the staff had already gone home, leaving the hats and coats in a heap on the floor. Drunken revelers began throwing punches as they scrambled to recover their possessions. Lincoln ultimately left the ball without finding his hat. He walked home to his boardinghouse in the cold.
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Lincoln’s opposition to Polk’s conduct of the Mexican War is often viewed as an early political failure. Herndon (and many of Lincoln’s other early biographers) certainly saw it that way. There is some evidence that Lincoln himself regretted his uncompromising stance. John Hay later reported Lincoln as president quoting his fellow Illinois Whig Justin Butterfield about the wisdom of enthusiastically supporting one’s country in wartime. “I opposed one war,” Lincoln recalled Butterfield saying. “That was enough for me. I am now perpetually in favor of war, pestilence and famine.”
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Modern historians, however, have questioned whether Lincoln’s opposition was really such a political disaster. His stance, after all, was not so different from his other Midwestern Whig colleagues in Congress.
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A larger but related question is whether Lincoln’s position was a principled stance against American foreign-policy excess or a cynical attempt to get ahead in party politics. The answer is neither and both. Lincoln—and this was a large part of his brilliance and originality as a statesman—was somehow able to remain both
a principled idealist and a pragmatic realist throughout his career. That combination would serve the sixteenth president well in his relations with the great powers of Europe, whose leaders were often masters of that same mysterious art.
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In any event, there is no denying that by the end of his term in Congress, Lincoln had evolved considerably as a foreign-policy thinker. As a young man he had viewed foreign affairs simply as a source of adventure and a means of escape from Midwestern drudgery. Until the debate over Texas annexation and the subsequent Mexican War, he had given the topic little serious thought. Yet over the course of Lincoln’s time in Congress, he had begun to develop what would later become a sound and nuanced approach to foreign affairs. He understood that some territorial expansion was inevitable in a young and growing country. Yet he worked ceaselessly to keep it from upsetting the sectional balance and violating the principles of international justice that many Americans held dear.
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In the winter of 1848, however, Lincoln still remained a long way from the paragon of executive power that he would later become. His opposition to Polk’s conduct had been based on the principle that “no one man” could launch a war—a stark challenge to the office of the presidency. He was determined, as he told Herndon, to keep presidents from occupying the space “where kings have always stood.” Lincoln’s moral sense and political instincts during the Mexican War had proved sound. Yet it would take the brutal necessities of the Civil War to convince him that the exigencies of foreign affairs would often demand the strong hand of a determined executive—sometimes, as Polk had demonstrated, even in defiance of Congress.

Lincoln returned to Springfield in early 1849. His friends noticed that he brought a considerable new trove of off-color stories home with him from Washington. (The young politician, a friend once remarked, had a lifelong “insane love in telling dirty and smutty stories.”) Yet Lincoln had also acquired a renewed “soberness of thought.” Lincoln had witnessed his young country in the throes of
its first major growing pains. He had also seen the White House up close—a tantalizing prize. As Lincoln returned to his law practice, friends noticed a peculiar vacant stare that would sometimes flash across their former congressman’s face. It resembled, one of them later recalled to Billy Herndon, a “stargazing thinking look.”
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Ghosts of the Mexican War

To residents of Ottawa, Illinois, the columns of pilgrims streaming into town—cantering on horseback, drifting on boats, bouncing along in carriages—looked like a vast army preparing for battle. Rows of campfires blinked along the approaches into the village, warming travelers who could find no room in local hotels. The following morning, August 21, 1858, so many visitors stomped through Ottawa’s dirt roads that the whole place “resembled a vast smokehouse.” The unforgiving late summer sun and oppressive heat offered no quarter to the standing-room-only crowd that had assembled to watch Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debate.
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A decade had elapsed since Lincoln’s term in Congress. Now he wanted to return to Washington. He had spent the interval building up his law practice, traveling the frontier circuit, and dabbling in the increasingly acrimonious debate over slavery—a battle that the Mexican War had helped to touch off. Now Lincoln was seeking a seat in the U.S. Senate as a candidate from the newly formed Republican Party. As Lincoln took his place on the platform in Ottawa, the ghosts of the Mexican War almost immediately came back to haunt him.

Stephen Douglas was a short, fat man whose body was topped by a “disproportionately huge head.” Cheeks punched with dimples flanked his “pug nose.” But when he spoke, he put his entire body into the effort, often to great effect. Today, as he hammered Lincoln on his Mexican War stance, the Little Giant “threw himself into contortions, shook his head, shook his fists.” Douglas’s entire body
quivered “as with a palsy; his eyes protruded from their sockets; he raved like a mad bull.” The voice of Lincoln’s opponent sounded to one local reporter like “a demonized howl.”
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In his opening remarks, Douglas sketched out his vision for America—an increasingly powerful young nation beginning to assert itself on the world stage. The United States had grown “from a feeble nation,” he boomed, to “the most powerful on the face of the earth.” If the country followed Douglas’s policy proposals, it was destined to “go forward increasing in territory, in power, in strength and in glory until the republic of America shall be the North Star that shall guide the friends of freedom throughout the civilized world.” Douglas tore into Lincoln over his old Mexican War speeches. “Whilst in Congress,” the Little Giant began, Lincoln “distinguished himself by his opposition to the Mexican War, taking the side of the common enemy against his own country. And when he returned home, he found that the indignation of the people followed him everywhere, and he was again submerged or obliged to retire into private life, forgotten by his former friends.” The overheated audience whooped and groaned at Douglas’s opening volley.
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Lincoln, when it came time for his rejoinder, defended himself from Douglas’s assault. He reminded that while he opposed the way Polk had begun the conflict, he had always voted supplies to the troops. Yet Lincoln and Douglas were not simply bickering over an old war. The classic debates, which stretched out over two months during the fall of 1858, really amounted to a profound conversation over the nature of American power itself.
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By the fall of 1858, Douglas had amassed a lengthy record of encouraging U.S. expansion. He had long lobbied for a transcontinental railroad, and he had supported the annexation of Texas and Oregon. In a subsequent debate, Douglas compared antiexpansionists to fathers who wanted to place their twelve-year-old sons in hoops to keep them from growing up. “Either the hoop must burst and be rent asunder,” Douglas insisted, “or the child must die. So it would be with this great nation.”
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Lincoln, for his part, argued that he was “not generally opposed to honest acquisition of territory.” The real test, he said, would be whether expansion “would or would not aggravate the slavery question.” Yet Douglas was relentless. By late October the Democrat was still hounding Lincoln about his Mexican War votes. Douglas maintained that Lincoln’s statements on the war “were all sent to Mexico and printed in the Mexican language, and read at the head of the Mexican army.” Lincoln’s opposition, Douglas claimed, “induced the Mexicans to hold out the longer, and the guerrillas to keep up their warfare on the roadside, and to poison our men, and to take the lives of our soldiers wherever and whenever they could.”
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Billy Herndon did his best to defend his law partner. He threw himself into the campaign, stumping through the state visiting out-of-the-way schoolhouses and small-town churches. For the debates with Douglas, Herndon helped Lincoln compile scrapbooks stuffed with newspaper clippings to bolster the candidate’s arguments. Lincoln and Herndon must have known that American power and expansion would factor heavily into the debates. The pocket-size, leather-bound notebooks, currently archived at the Library of Congress, overflow with statistics about America’s rising material strength and tables comparing the United States to European and other foreign countries. The United States boasted “the longest railroad on the globe,” produced $15 million worth of nonagricultural products each year, and possessed 33,000 miles of overland telegraph wires—nearly as many as all of Europe—according to the clips. America’s gold, copper, lead, and iron mines, according to another clipping, were “among the richest in the world.”
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Herndon had always displayed an ambivalent attitude toward power. On the one hand, he sometimes seemed to embrace a muscular foreign policy—as his Mexican War stance and his at least occasional advocacy for Cuban annexation demonstrate. Although he always remained firmly in Lincoln’s corner, Herndon admired Douglas’s nerve and once acknowledged that he had “a kind of undeveloped feeling” for the Little Giant. And yet, even as he sometimes supported
expansion, Herndon’s crusading temperament never allowed him to feel comfortable with the unprincipled pursuit of the national interest. For Herndon, power was a dirty word—something to cleanse or expel. “I hate power,” he once told an Illinois acquaintance.
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Lincoln, on the other hand, had long since made his peace with the gritty realities of power. He had put in his time on Aristocracy Hill, married one of their own. When it was politically necessary, he embraced convenient hypocrisies. He accepted power and sin as facts of life, things that could be managed but never completely eliminated. Understanding Lincoln’s attitude toward power is critical to making sense of Lincoln’s Mexican War policy—and later his approach to foreign affairs during the Civil War.

“The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject anything, is not whether it have
any
evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good,” Lincoln once told an audience as a young congressman. “There are few things
wholly
evil, or
wholly
good. Almost everything, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.”
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Lincoln applied his mixed assessment of human nature to personal relationships as well as foreign affairs.
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When Lincoln finally lost his 1858 Senate race to Douglas, he assumed he would be abandoned by the leaders of his party. After so many years in politics, he had little faith in the unconditional goodwill of powerful men. Lincoln appeared resentful and heartbroken when an acquaintance visited him at his Springfield law office on the day Douglas was reelected. “I expect everyone to desert me,” Lincoln said, “except Billy.”
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