Lincoln Unbound (7 page)

As the National Republican presidential nominee in 1832, Clay hoped that a fight over rechartering the Bank of the United States would open up a powerful new avenue of attack for him. The Second Bank of the United States—­the first had been the baby of Alexander Hamilton—­acted as an incipient central bank. Its notes were the country's best paper currency and it provided some regulatory check on regional and local banks. A mixed public-­private corporation, it also held potential for abuse by the well connected—­imagine the Federal Reserve run by ­people seeking to make a profit. The headstrong president of the bank, Nicholas Biddle, pushed for a recharter four years early to force the issue. If in his zeal to kill the bank Jackson vetoed the measure after it passed Congress, Clay and his allies thought it would backfire on him. They calculated that it would turn off all the ­people in the South and the West who were dependent on access to cheap credit and reliable currency, and that Jackson's high-­handedness would alienate congressional leaders.

Instead, Jackson famously executed one of the most punishing acts of political jujitsu in American history. He hated the bank—­as a bank, as an issuer of invidious paper currency, as a fount of privilege, and as a competing center of power. He issued a rousing veto message inveighing against it as an unconstitutional excrescence on the body politic tending toward its corruption: “Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress.” Biddle sniffed that the message had “all the fury of a chained panther biting the bars of his cage.” But it worked. Clay got crushed. He won fewer electoral votes than Adams in 1828 and got no votes at all in Georgia, Alabama, or Mississippi. “The election of 1832,” Holt writes, “clearly stamped the National Republican party as a loser and as the tool of the northeastern elite.”

From the ashes of the National Republicans, the Whigs gradually arose. States' righters alienated by Jackson's robust nationalism in the nullification crisis of 1832–33 (South Carolina defied the federal government over the tariff) provided the seedbed of Whig parties in the South. Jackson's insistence on withdrawing deposits from the Bank of the United States (still in business until 1837, although not rechartered) in defiance of the law gave his opponents another hook to portray him as dangerous King Andrew the First and galvanized his adversaries in the Congress. Jackson ran through two Treasury secretaries before settling on the redoubtable Roger Taney—­long before his star turn in
Dred Scott
—­to work his will as interim secretary. The Senate censured Jackson, who fumed that he wanted to duel Clay over it, and Clay's allies took over key Senate committees in a victory for the inchoate party.

It managed to unite the wildly divergent strands of the anti-­Jacksonian forces under the banner “Whig,” a hallowed name borrowed from the American Revolution and first promoted by a newspaper editor. At its core was opposition to executive usurpation, exemplified by Jackson with his willful temperament and authoritarian style. “The Whigs of the present day,” Clay said in 1834, were heirs of the Whigs who rose up against George III. He vowed to extend “the campaign of 1777.” But the revival of the spirit of the revolution got off to a bumpy start. In 1836, the Whigs didn't manage to hold a national convention, nominate a unified candidate for president, or beat Jackson's chosen successor, Martin Van Buren, who lacked all the animal political power of Old Hickory.

This is the motley, politically pressed crew to whom Lincoln hitched his political fortunes. “Always a whig in politics,” Lincoln attested to Jesse Fell in 1859, although this might not have been quite right (and, as a technical matter, the Whigs didn't formally organize in Illinois until 1838). Dennis Hanks told Herndon, “I opposed Abe in Politics when he became whig—­was till 20 years of age a Jackson Democrat—­turned whig—­or whiggish about 1828–9.” Nathaniel Grigsby, a neighbor and schoolmate of Lincoln's, remembered: “Lincoln in Early years—­say from 1820 to 25 was tending towards Democracy—­He afterwards Changed.” This was right around the time Jackson was crushing John ­Adams nationally, and of course in Indiana (by double digits) and in Illinois (by a 2–1 margin). In the next presidential election, in 1832, Henry Clay got all of 31 percent of the vote in Illinois. Lincoln proudly noted years later that even though he lost his first legislative race, he won his own precinct 227–7. “And this too,” he wrote of himself, “while he was an avowed Clay man, and the precinct the autumn afterwards, giving a majority of 115 to Genl. Jackson over Mr. Clay.”

What attracted Lincoln to the Whigs? Why did he gravitate to the party that would never quite live down the idea that it was the heir to the defunct, aristocratic-­friendly Federalists, that it was the party—­in the abusive terms of the Democrats—­of the “British-­bought, bank-­Federal-­Whig gentry who wear ruffle shirts, silk stockings and Kid gloves”? Why did he associate himself, even before he had left home, even before he was out of Indiana, even before he made any money or had a profession, with the party of the snobs and the elitists, the moralists and the do-­gooders? Because he wanted to be one of them. And because he wanted
others
to be like them, too.

Lincoln's Whiggery was a statement of distinctiveness from his surroundings, and the assumptions and behaviors that came with them. It qualifies as one of what historian William Miller calls his “refusals, rejections, and disengagements.”

Lincoln grew up among Democrats. They were his neighbors and his family. They loved Andrew Jackson, the Mars of the backwoods, the vindicator of the West and the South and of the common farmer. “We were all Jackson boys & men at this time in Indiana,” recalled Nathaniel Grigsby. Having suffered enough of agricultural life, Lincoln didn't look kindly on the agrarian romanticism of the Jacksonians. In a typical sentiment, the Jacksonian journalist William Leggett contrasted “ploughmen” with “merchants.” He preferred “hardy rustics” to “lank and sallow accountants, worn out with the sordid anxieties of traffic and the calculations of gain.”

Lincoln didn't mind the accountants. It is telling that an early Whig influence on Lincoln was William Jones—­a storekeeper. Lincoln worked for him in Indiana and, in the words of one contemporary, “young Abe was warmly attached to Jones.” The merchant was such a party stalwart that when Whig standard-­bearer Henry Clay lost the presidential election in 1844, he supposedly took it so hard he couldn't work for days. The store would have been a locus for political discussion and newspaper reading. Dennis Hanks said, “[I] think Col Jones made him [Lincoln] a whig.” Nathaniel Grigsby thought Jones was Lincoln's “guide & teacher in Politics.” Another contemporary recalled, “Col Jones told me that Lincoln read all his books,” and “often said that Lincoln would make a great man one of these days.”

If the party's typical adherents in Lincoln's early life were represented by his farmer father, probably a Democrat in Indiana (although there is contention over it), and a merchant like Jones, Lincoln would take the storekeeper every time. Those two men fit within the broad demographic schema of the two parties.

Lincoln's father matched the profile of a non-­immigrant, non-­Catholic Democrat. “Throughout the nation,” Michael Holt explains, “Democratic voting strength was concentrated among subsistence farmers in the most remote and economically underdeveloped regions of states—­among voters, that is, who feared becoming ensnared in precisely the kind of commercial-­monetary network Whigs wanted to foster. In addition, Democrats drew votes heavily from immigrants, Catholics, and others who resented the self-­righ­teous moral imperialism of the dominant Protestant groups they associated with the Whigs.”

Jones, on the other hand, was a standard-­issue Whig: “Repelled by strident Democratic rhetoric about class conflict, appalled by the consequences of the negative state, and attracted by what they perceived as the economic benefits of the Whig program, the vast majority of wealthy businessmen, professionals, and planters supported the Whig party. So did most ­people in those areas most deeply involved in the commercial economy—­farmers who grew cash crops, miners, manufacturers and their workers, artisans, merchants, and tradesmen.”

These were Lincoln's types. Andrew Jackson himself must have had limited appeal to him, even if their backgrounds were similar. Jackson, too, was born in a log cabin. They both fought in Indian wars, although Jackson obviously with much more consequence than Lincoln, who bragged of his mock exploits in the Black Hawk War (“I had a good many bloody struggles with the musquetoes; and, although I never fainted from loss of blood, I can truly say I was often very hungry”). Jackson also made himself a lawyer, a politician, and an up-­from-­the-­bootstraps success story. Yet these were superficialities on top of yawning differences of character and worldview.

Surely Lincoln recoiled from Jackson the duelist, the slave owner and gambler, the high-­living plantation owner, the ­unreflective man of action, the emotional volcano. Jackson exemplified what the Whigs scorned as the “passions.” He nearly got entangled in an affair of honor with John Quincy Adams's secretary of the navy
during the 1828 presidential campaign
. He was reputed to have staked his slaves in bets on horse races. He once offered a fifty-­dollar reward for a runaway, stipulating “ten dollars extra for every hundred lashes a person will give to the amount of three hundred.” All this would have been anathema to a Lincoln who worshipped lawfulness, the careful cultivation of talent, and self-­control.

As a young man, Clay wasn't so different from Jackson. He, too, was an impulsive gambler and duelist. But he sought to overcome it. The British writer Harriet Martineau, who chronicled her travels in the United States, thought him “a man of an irritable and impetuous nature, over which he has obtained a truly noble mastery.” Most of the time. When Senator John Randolph of Virginia called him a “blackleg,” or a gambler who cheats, Clay challenged him to a duel despite his personal vow two years earlier not to participate in such so-­called affairs of honor. The stand-­off ended harmlessly enough because Clay—­then serving as secretary of state—­couldn't aim and Randolph didn't want to kill him. Clay articulated the standard that he tried to uphold as a general matter thusly: “All legislation, all government, all society, is formed upon the principle of mutual concession, politeness, comity, courtesy.”

The Whig program of economic development and cultural uplift suited Lincoln the practitioner and apostle of self-­improvement. Lincoln fashioned himself into an almost perfectly archetypal Whig. It wasn't just that he was ambitious. Plenty of ­people were ambitious. It was how he was ambitious and for what. His ambition was refracted through a quest for order. Historian Robert Kelley writes that Lincoln joined the party “because he preferred what Whigs believed to be a more civilized way of life.” The words “more civilized” are apt. Life on the frontier could be nasty, brutish, and extraordinarily drunken. Lincoln made himself into a sort of countercultural figure. He stood aloof from all that was degrading or prone to check his advancement.

Liquor lubricated everyday life for men and women alike. ­People considered it an aid to labor, a great tool of medicine, and a guarantee of health. Lincoln himself stated its pervasiveness in an 1842 address to the Springfield Washington Temperance Society: “When all such of us, as have now reached the years of maturity, first opened our eyes upon the stage of existence, we found intoxicating liquor, recognized by every body, used by every body and repudiated by nobody. It commonly entered into the first draught of the infant, and the last draught of the dying man. From the sideboard of the parson, down to the ragged pocket of the houseless loafer, it was constantly found. Physicians prescribed it in this, that, and the other disease. Government provided it for its soldiers and sailors; and to have a rolling or raising, a husking or hoe-­down, any where without it, was
positively insufferable.
”

Lincoln didn't drink. Alcohol made him feel “flabby and undone.” His stepmother said, “He never drank whiskey or other strong drink—­was temperate in all things—­too much so I thought sometimes.” In a tobacco-­soaked environment worthy of a smoking lounge at a European airport or a major-­league dugout, ­Lincoln didn't smoke or chew tobacco, either. He loved to tell the story of sharing a trip on the railroad with a friendly gentleman from Kentucky who offered him sequentially a plug of tobacco, a cigar, and a glass of brandy. After Lincoln refused each offer, the Kentuckian commented, “See here, my jolly companion, I have gone through the world a great deal and have had much experience with men and women of all classes, and in all climes, and I have noticed one thing.” What was it? “Those who have no vices have d—­d few virtues.”

Lincoln didn't gamble, at horse races or cards, and despite his off-­color stories, he didn't swear. Reportedly, he once tossed a man out of his store for swearing in front of ladies. As president, he used the phrase “by jings” in the telegraph office and apologized: “By jings is swearing, for my good old mother taught me that anything that had a
by
before it is swearing.”

On the frontier, coarse language or a plug of tobacco was the least of it. Fighting constituted a rite of passage, and a matter of honor. Lincoln would eventually get a reputation as a peacemaker, although his record wasn't spotless. Back in Indiana, one family thought that he, “like all his Indiana cronies, was pretty much of a rowdy, and certainly, was not of a saintly nature.” When he was nineteen years old, his stepbrother John Johnston fought an adversary named William Grigsby. The son of one of the farmers Lincoln worked for told Herndon: “Wm Grigsby was too much for Lincoln's man—­Johnson [
sic
]. After they had fought a long time—­and it having been agreed not break the ring, Abe burst through, caught Grigsby—­threw him off some feet—­stood up and swore he was the big buck at the lick. . . . After Abe did this—­it being a general invitation for a general fight they all pitched in and had quite a general fight.”