Abraham Lincoln's "School of Events" - By Matthew Pinsker

Abraham Lincoln’s “School of Events”
By Matthew Pinsker

       The family moved from Massachusetts to New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania (where Lincoln’s
grandfather, also called Abraham, was born) to Virginia and then ultimately to Kentucky. When the younger
Abraham Lincoln was only seven, the Lincolns moved into the newly created state of Indiana, and then just
before he reached adulthood, they migrated westward into central Illinois. For six generations, the Lincoln
family had thus followed the coastlines, mountains and valleys of the eastern side of the North American
continent, always in search of better land and greater opportunities. Whether this migratory experience
fueled Thomas Lincoln’s nationalism (as it did for his son) or engendered a kind of bread-and-butter
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parochialism is a subject that must be left for speculation.

        We do know that Thomas Lincoln had strong opinions about some subjects. He opposed slavery,
for instance. According to his son, the family actually left Kentucky “partly on account of slavery.” Lincoln’s
parents had belonged to an antislavery Baptist congregation, and Thomas Lincoln, who never owned slaves,
appeared to bitterly resent the political and legal power of slave holders –a resentment shared by many
of the poorer white families in the upper South. The Lincolns were not poor—Thomas Lincoln owned a
decent amount of land in central Kentucky—but they were not secure either. In fact, Thomas had never
known much security in his lifetime. His father, Abraham, had been killed by Indians when he was only
eight-years-old, leaving him, in his son’s cold words, “a wandering laboring boy” who “grew up literally
without education.” Fiercely self-made, Thomas Lincoln seemed to despise those who benefited from the
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coerced labor of others.

        That didn’t stop him, however, from demanding the labor of his own son. Abraham Lincoln later
recalled that he “had an axe put into his hands at once” upon the family’s arrival in the “wild region” of
Indiana and continued “almost constantly handling that most useful instrument” until he was young man of
twenty-three. It was here, by the way, that the future president cleared the many bald (and “illegitimate”)
cypress trees of southern Indiana that would later provide the earthy wisdom and fond memories for him
as he examined the diverse foliage around the Soldiers’ Home grounds. Yet at the time, the labor did not
always suit him, and a cousin who lived with the family recalled that Thomas Lincoln would sometimes have
to “slash him for neglecting his work by reading.”

       Why did young Abe Lincoln, who admitted freely that he had been “raised to farm work,” develop
such a passion for educating himself? There was certainly little in southern Indiana that seemed to
encourage such ambition. “If a straggler supposed to understand latin, happened to so-journ in the
neighborhood,” Lincoln wrote sardonically, “he was looked upon as a wizzard.” Scholars now estimate
that the future president had no more than about a year of formal schooling during the entire span of his
childhood. Yet he read on his own voraciously—the Bible, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Aesop’s Fables,
Parson Weem’s Life of George Washington, and many other classic texts.6

       One reason for Lincoln’s reading was undoubtedly for escape. His childhood was often difficult. His
beloved mother Nancy Hanks Lincoln died when he was only nine-years-old. Earlier he had lost an infant

brother named Thomas. His father remarried to Sarah Bush Johnston, a woman whom Abraham grew
to adore, but according to several accounts his sense of loss never fully diminished. Adding to the turmoil
within the young man’s mind was the death of his last remaining sibling, a sister named Sarah, who
succumbed during childbirth in an incident that ripped the local settlement (called Pigeon Creek) apart.
The extended Lincoln clan blamed Sarah’s husband’s family (the small community’s most prominent) for
not bringing medical care to her quickly enough. The tragedy seemed painfully unnecessary. Death came
frequently to frontier households in the nineteenth century, and the Lincolns were no exception. But
Abraham Lincoln seemed to be more sensitive to these losses than most. Whether this was the product of
an intelligent mind or to some degree of clinical depression is a topic that continues to fuel debate among his
biographers.

         One conclusion, however, is indisputable. If Lincoln did suffer from depression, it did practically
nothing to hinder his rapid progress in life. In short order after his family had arrived in Illinois, the
determined young man struck out on his own, arrived in the village of New Salem, established a network of
loyal friends, ran for his first public office (at the age of 23) and began a series of jobs and business ventures
that culminated with his successful entry into the legal profession in 1836. The next year he moved to the
new state capital, Springfield, and began to insinuate himself into the state’s political, legal and even social
elite. Thus, after handling an axe on his father’s farm “almost constantly” until he was twenty-three, Lincoln
suddenly, in the span of about six years, became a respected state legislator and a promising young attorney.
He was clearly, in the memorable words of historian Gabor Boritt, an enduring emblem of the universal
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“right to rise.”

        This is not to say that Lincoln’s rise to prominence was uninterrupted or easy. The real world “school
of events” tested the young man in ways that might have broken other souls. He lost his first political
campaign in 1832, finishing eighth out of thirteen candidates competing to win four seats in the state
legislature. Soon afterwards, he found himself unemployed as the grocery store where he had clerked went
out of business. The aspiring politician stayed in New Salem, though, because as he later remembered it, he
had “nothing elsewhere to go to.” One of his subsequent forays into co-owning a grocery store also proved
disastrous as the operation quickly “winked out,” leaving the young bachelor with crushing bills that took
years to repay, what he mordantly termed his “National Debt.”
Coming of Age

        During this period, Lincoln also struggled to define his future as a family man. According to some of
his neighbors in New Salem, he fell in love with a woman named Ann Rutledge who was already engaged to
a mutual friend. They apparently reached some type of understanding about marrying themselves while the
hapless fiancé was away on an extended business trip. Yet this relationship ended tragically with Rutledge’s
unexpected death from typhoid fever in 1835. Devastated by grief and wracked by guilt, Lincoln seemed
almost suicidal to some of his friends—at least according to their recollections of the episode, which not all
historians have accepted. Yet just over a year later, Lincoln began courting another, slightly older woman
named Mary Owens, who was a visitor from Kentucky. Though he later mocked her to friends as an “old
maid” who was “a fair match for Falstaff,” he did make an awkward invitation for marriage in the fall of 1837.
She rejected him, believing to the end of her life that he was “deficient in those little links which make up
the chain of woman’s happiness.” Interestingly, unlike the more romantic Rutledge tale, the embarrassing
elements of the tepid Owens courtship can be documented with letters written by the couple.8

       All of Lincoln’s previous romantic entanglements, however, paled in comparison to the storm of

passion and controversy soon brought into his life by the permanent arrival of Mary Todd in Springfield
during the spring of 1839. She was the daughter of a prominent Kentucky banker and slaveholder named
Robert Todd. Colonel Todd, as he was called, was just the sort of southern aristocrat whom Thomas Lincoln
had always resented. His son shared none of this social antipathy, however, and soon began pursuing Mary
Todd as a potential wife. She was nearly a decade younger, though much better educated and far worldlier.
The couple shared an abiding interest in politics and a deep admiration for the great Kentucky Whig
political leader, Henry Clay, who was a friend of Mary Todd’s father and the man Lincoln later called his
“beau ideal of a statesman.” On a physical level, they made a striking pair. He was tall, lanky, and generally
considered homely (over 6’ 4” and then probably weighing about 200 pounds) while she was short (5’ 2”)
and pretty, though already tending toward plump.

         They young lovers did not see each other as much as you might expect. The couple was together
in Springfield only intermittently during the first eighteenth months of their courtship. Letters (since
destroyed) became their principal medium of communication, documents that were apparently equal parts
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flirtation and political updates on the exciting presidential campaign of 1840.

         What exactly happened next remains the subject of debate among historians. Before too long,
Lincoln and Todd had become engaged to each other. Yet their mutual understanding about marriage
somehow unraveled, leading to what Lincoln referred to as the “fatal first of Jan. ‘41,” which marked an
abrupt end to their relationship. After much melodrama (where Lincoln reportedly threw “two Cat fits and
a Duck fit”) and following a long passage of time, they eventually reconciled in the autumn of the following
year and married on Friday, November 4, 1842. Almost exactly nine months later, they celebrated the birth
of their first son, Robert Todd Lincoln. They would remain together for the rest of Abraham Lincoln’s
lifetime; enjoying (or enduring) over twenty-two years of marriage in a union that eventually produced four
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sons.
         For Lincoln, the problems in his courtship almost certainly revolved around questions about his sense
of obligation. It is difficult in the twenty-first century to convey the significance of honor in pre-modern
cultures. On the one hand, Lincoln was an attorney and politician who aspired to build a fully modern
America, with efficient banks, commercial infrastructure (such as canals and railroads) and a sober, educated
citizenry. Yet on the other hand, he came from the southern backcountry, with its unique codes of clannish
loyalty and manly virtues, and entered politics in an age that still remained ambivalent about the need for
political parties and mass mobilization. Perhaps nothing better illustrates the differences between Lincoln’s
cultural milieu and our own than the fact that it was a duel which ultimately helped bring him and Mary
Todd back together again in the autumn of 1842. When James Shields, a self-important local Democratic
politician, got offended by some anonymous attacks in Springfield’s partisan press, he challenged the author
to reveal himself. Mary Lincoln and a friend had actually written the contributions which disturbed the fiery
Democrat, but Abraham Lincoln, who had written some of the earlier broadsides, stepped forward to accept
responsibility. What ensued was familiar to nineteenth-century Americans, but appears almost laughable
today. The men engaged in an elaborate protocol of challenge and response, complete with appointed
seconds and handlers, until they very nearly engaged in an illegal saber duel on the banks of the Mississippi
River. Lincoln’s gentlemanly behavior impressed his future wife, though interestingly, he was later so
embarrassed by his involvement in the shenanigans that he banned any discussion of it in his presence.

       The early 1840s was the great coming of age moment for Abraham Lincoln. He matured noticeably,
leaving behind many youthful habits and attachments. For example, after the Shields duel, Lincoln
essentially abandoned anonymous satire as a political tactic—something he had excelled in throughout the

1830s. Lincoln’s first decade in politics had been quite rough. During one of his early legislative campaigns,
the future president denounced an opponent as “a liar and a scoundrel,” offering gamely to “give his
proboscis a good wringing.” Though future contests sometimes proved equally heated, the older Lincoln
conducted himself with much greater public restraint. The moodiness and occasional melodrama of
Lincoln’s bachelor life also subsided. He steadily left behind a cohort of colorful frontier friends and
became a fixture of the Springfield establishment, such as it was in the small western capital.

         Finally, there was a streak of youthful contrarianism that abruptly disappeared from Lincoln’s
repertoire. Among his friends in New Salem and during the early years in Springfield, Lincoln was known
to argue for a version of fatalism that he dubbed, “The Doctrine of Necessity,” and to ridicule, according to
some, the tenets and practices of organized religion. He stopped doing this in the 1840s. Few evolutions
in Lincoln’s life are more striking than this one. Though he never actually joined a congregation, Lincoln
increasingly found sustenance in the Bible and through occasional church attendance. As president during
a bloody war, he invoked God in ways that surprised many of his oldest friends. When Joshua Speed came
to visit Lincoln at the Soldiers’ Home in the summer of 1864, he was stunned to find his old friend reading
from the Bible and teased him for changing his mind about matters of faith. “You are wrong, Speed,”
Lincoln replied earnestly; “take all of this book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you
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will live and die a happier and better man.”

Politician and Attorney
        With greater maturity naturally came greater ambitions. Two years after his marriage, Lincoln
established his own law firm, taking on a younger man, William Herndon, as his junior partner. Prior to
this, Lincoln had served under two more prominent (and domineering) attorneys, first with John Todd
Stuart, an old friend from the Black Hawk War and an early political mentor, and then with Stephen T.
Logan, widely considered one of the most brilliant members of the Illinois bar. In 1844, the Lincolns had
also purchased their first home, a cottage with two bedrooms on the corner of Eighth and Jackson streets in
Springfield, in a good, quiet neighborhood and not far from the state capitol building. Yet Lincoln’s political
interests now stretched far beyond the world of Illinois state politics. He had been an active state legislator
throughout the second half of the 1830s, serving four terms in the Illinois General Assembly (1835-1841)
during a period of great economic upheaval in the state and across the nation. He emerged as a floor leader
for his political party, the Whigs, and became a key figure in statewide politics. But by the early years of his
marriage, approaching his mid-thirties, Lincoln wanted more. He dreamed of a seat in Congress. It took a
few years of maneuvering, but in the summer of 1846 (Illinois still held some political contests in August),
he was elected as the only Whig member of the state’s congressional delegation. Once again, Lincoln had
overcome the “vicissitudes” of his life and proven himself in the face of several serious tests.

        During the ten years following his arrival in Springfield, Abraham Lincoln had met and married his
wife, a woman who belonged to one of Kentucky’s more prominent families. They began a family of their
own and purchased a respectable home. He finished out his service in the state legislature as a key party
leader and eventually earned himself a seat in Congress. He established his own law firm, paid off his old
debts and steadily became more prosperous. There were struggles and periods of doubt, but there was
hardly any hint of failure about him.

       No testimony better illustrates Lincoln’s state of supreme self-satisfaction on the eve of his
departure for Washington than a newspaper account written for a Boston journal in December 1847. The
correspondent had come to Chicago to cover the River & Harbors Convention (an important regional

political meeting) and to provide some travelogue describing what his readers considered to be the nation’s
young (and wild) western frontier states, places such as Illinois, Indiana and Iowa. Congressman-elect
Lincoln had also attended the Chicago convention and shared a stage coach with the reporter during one of
the legs of his journey. What makes this contemporary testimony so fascinating is that the cynical easterner
found the tall, western politician to be such a comical figure. He had no inkling about Lincoln’s future
greatness, but instead skewered him for his readers in vividly sarcastic terms. “Such a shaking of hands –such
a how-d’ye-do—such a greeting of different kinds, as we saw, was never seen before,” wrote the journalist
about Lincoln’s inveterate politicking. “It seemed as if he knew every thing, and he had a kind word, a smile
and a bow for every body on the road, even to the horses, and the cattle, and the swine!” 12

        Lincoln’s single term in Congress had the unexpected effect of dashing this enthusiasm for politics.
He had achieved so much, and yet in Washington he became quite miserable. “In this troublesome world,”
he wrote plaintively to his wife, “we are never quite satisfied. On his fortieth birthday, he complained to
David Davis, a judge from back home and a good friend, that he was lonely. “Out of more than than [sic]
three hundred letters received this session,” he noted pointedly, “yours is the second one manifesting the
least interest for me personally.” He also felt ineffective. The Whigs were in the minority both in Illinois
and across the nation. James Polk, a Democrat, ruled in the White House, leading the nation through a
successful and generally popular war with Mexico. Like most Whigs, Representative Lincoln had opposed
the conflict and tried to engage the Administration in a critique of the conflict’s dubious origins once he
reached the House. Naturally, the freshman congressman was ignored everywhere but back in central
Illinois, where local patriots grumbled loudly about his seemingly anti-war position. Lincoln also toyed with
the idea of introducing an equally unpopular anti-slavery measure, (upholding his family traditions and some
of his earlier actions in the Illinois legislature), but he found no interest and quickly abandoned his grandiose
plans for abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. 13

         The low-point for Lincoln actually came just after his disappointing term had concluded. By pre-
arrangement with other local Whig leaders, he had not run for reelection. Yet in the aftermath of the 1848
election, the Whigs now controlled the White House, so unexpected opportunities presented themselves.
Lincoln applied to President Zachary Taylor to receive appointment as head of the General Land Office,
a mid-level but lucrative and regionally powerful political post. Ignoring what had been Lincoln’s loyal
support for his nomination, Taylor tabbed someone else, a Chicago attorney who had actually opposed him
in the early stages of the campaign. It was a bitter pill for Lincoln. As a consolation prize, the Administration
then offered the outgoing Whig congressman an appointment as governor of the Oregon territory. Lincoln
declined and instead pursued the practice of law once again in Springfield.

Rise to Power
        Lincoln did not return to Washington for the next twelve years. He held no public office during
that period (though he was elected once again to the state legislature in 1854, a post he resigned before
serving). Nonetheless, he inched steadily toward ever greater political accomplishment, an astounding rise
that culminated with his arrival in the capital as president-elect in 1861, on the eve of war. The seemingly
improbable tale begs the question: how did he do it?

       The answer is that Lincoln spent most of the 1850s helping to shape a political party that both stood
on principle and ran like a machine. He was an organizer of the Republican Party in Illinois and the national
movement’s first successful presidential candidate (in only their second outing). His tightly constructed
speeches contributed mightily to the emerging Republican free soil and free labor ideology—a philosophy

that advocated the containment of slavery and the spread of market capitalism. He was also a determined
nationalist during a period of bitter sectional conflict. In achieving these milestones, Lincoln simply applied
the lessons of his life (the “school of events”) to the nation at large. Since he embodied the “right to rise,”
then any institution, such as slavery, which negated that great self-made ethos must be wrong. Yet since
Lincoln had also learned that passion could be both turbulent and destructive, he repeatedly counseled
patience, humility and moderation. Perhaps most important, Lincoln, a product of several generations of
American pioneers, never let the sectional appeal of the Republican platform allow him to lose sight of the
ultimate national purpose—a union dedicated to freedom. For these reasons, Lincoln became a pivotal figure
during a period of unprecedented partisan upheaval.

        Prior to the mid-1850s, Lincoln had always been a Whig in politics. Since the early republic, factions
had existed in American political life, but groups such as the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans who
had argued through the Jeffersonian era over issues such as the embargo were not truly modern political
parties. They did not have much formal structure and devoted little attention to mass mobilization. In part
that was a reflection of the rules of the game, where voting was more a privilege than a right. The process
opened up in the 1820s and 1830s, ushering in an era of universal white male suffrage and the birth of
popular politics. Campaigns then evolved into exciting spectacles with rallies, stump speaking, trinkets and
even partisan songs. This was the culture of Lincoln’s early years in politics, dominated by the war between
Whigs and Democrats, who divided over a series of mostly cultural and economic issues.

         Like all other innovations, however, the ballyhoo of early American partisanship eventually grew stale.
Public frustration with politics as usual coincided with Lincoln’s withdrawal from office-seeking during
the early 1850s. He spent those several years after leaving Congress devoting most of his time and energy
to rebuilding the Lincoln & Herndon law practice, creating one of the most successful firms in the state.
Doing so, however, also reaped indirect political benefits, because Lincoln’s efforts brought him around the
Eighth Judicial Circuit, which then covered most of the fast-growing region of north central Illinois. Like
many other attorneys of that era, Lincoln spent his days and nights traveling from county seat to county
seat, as part of a roving legal circus, soliciting clients on the steps of the courthouse and engaging in all forms
of legal representation. Lincoln’s legal skills and friendly demeanor made him exceptionally popular. For
the middle-age circuit attorney, who had been so miserable during his isolation in Congress, the experience
was truly liberating. He relished the camaraderie of the circuit, bonding with friends such as Judge David
Davis or fellow attorney Leonard Swett, in a manner reminiscent of his old grocery store days in New Salem
and Springfield. He enjoyed the talk at the courthouse steps and the rhythms of circuit travel. Nor did he
seem to mind the long absences from his wife and growing family (three young boys by the mid-1850s, after
a fourth son, Eddie, had died as an infant). In some ways, he was a characteristically remote nineteenth-
century father and husband, focused infinitely more on his responsibilities in the public sphere than on
his attachments in the private sphere. There are some historians who would dispute that conclusion, but
the increasingly erratic behavior of his attention-starved wife and the later sour recollections of eldest son
Robert Lincoln underscore the palpable sense of paternal absence felt within the household. 14

        The absences only grew longer after 1854, which marked the pivotal year in antebellum American
politics because of the fight over the Kansas-Nebraska Act. From that point forward, Lincoln not only
rode the legal circuit, but also became a nearly full-time participant on the electoral track. In 1854,
Senator Stephen Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois and an old rival of Lincoln’s, shepherded through
the controversial measure which promised to organize territories from the former Louisiana Purchase by
repealing the Missouri Compromise and allowing the prospective western states to decide the fate of slavery

within their borders by referendum or what was called, “popular sovereignty.” The prospect of an extension
of slavery westward horrified Abraham Lincoln and many other northerners. Their rallying cry—and the
foundation of the new Republican Party—became the containment of slavery.

        The simplicity of this containment doctrine masked a number of complicated factors. The principle
of no more slave states did not mean an indifference to the fate of slavery where it already existed. While
Lincoln and other Republicans repeatedly proclaimed that they had no intention of interfering with slavery
in the South, most also believed, as Lincoln expressed it, that “a House Divided cannot stand.” Lincoln
was convinced that if Republicans could only stop the spread of slavery, then they would guarantee the
eventual destruction of the institution. This position is largely what separated Lincoln and other political
antislavery figures within the Republican coalition from abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison who
were not at all inclined to wait for slavery’s demise. Thus, when abolitionist or radical critics of Lincoln and
the Republicans accused them of reaching for the lowest common denominator (in a corrupt effort to win
office), they underestimated the depth of the party’s antipathy to slavery. Simplicity, in this case, was both a
political and moral virtue, and not a cop-out. At least that was how Lincoln defined himself and his cause.

        On the other hand, not even Lincoln’s most ardent defender could argue that his pre-war opposition
to the spread of slavery translated into supporting civil rights for blacks. During the 1850s, Lincoln was
unconvinced that blacks could remain in the United States as citizens (even though free blacks had enjoyed
citizenship in several northern states for decades). In several speeches, he supported the idea of voluntary
colonization, or sending former slaves to Africa. However, unlike many others, he never advocated forced
colonization and never seemed comfortable with the ubiquitous race-baiting of the age. In other words, by
the standards of his age, Lincoln was politically courageous about slavery and remarkably tolerant about race
relations. Yet by the standards of most abolitionists, or by our own conceptions of racial attitudes, Lincoln
was simply too cautious about the gravest social injustice in American history.

        Nowhere was this complicated attitude more evident than during the famous Lincoln-Douglas
debates of 1858. In the face of repeated taunts by Douglas and his supporters, Lincoln was forced to deny
that he sought the integration of the races or the advancement of black people at the expense of whites.
During the campaign, Lincoln nervously called it “a false logic” to assume “because a man did not want
a negro woman for a slave, he must needs want her for a wife.” These were disheartening moments for
believers in the universality of the Declaration. Yet Lincoln also managed to hold firm on the issue of
slavery’s ultimate immorality and refused to concede any ground on that front. “That is the real issue,” he
told the audience in the final debate.

       That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and
myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout
the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever
continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is
the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and
earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’

       The great debates in 1858 are often characterized as senatorial debates, but technically they were
speeches on behalf of legislative candidates. In those years, state legislatures—not voters—selected
U.S. senators. The Lincoln-Douglas campaign in autumn 1858 was thus an indirect one, and one that
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Republicans were always likely to lose because of regional demographics and holdovers in the state senate.

That is why even though Lincoln “lost” to Douglas in 1858 (and lost an earlier, equally critical,
senatorial contest in 1855), he still won recognition as a rising Republican star. What he was doing so
successfully in the 1850s was organizing a critical swing state while articulating a national vision useful for all
northern Republicans. Lincoln emerged from the Lincoln-Douglas campaign as the universally
acknowledged leader of his state Republican Party and as a nationally much sought-after Republican
speaker. He added to his growing celebrity by arranging for the successful publication of the debates and
by undertaking a series of speaking tours in 1859 and 1860 that carried him quite literally across the North.
The culmination of this effort was the famous Cooper Union speech given in New York City in February
1860, which helped propel the experienced western politician toward the national Republican presidential
nomination.

        Once nominated by the Republicans in May 1860, Lincoln had little else to say or do, at least in
public. The customs of that age dictated that presidential candidates not appear too eager for the office.
They had to rely almost exclusively on their respective party organizations and surrogate speakers. Lincoln’s
law partner, William Herndon, recalled that the candidate was thus “bored” and “bored badly” because
he was so unused to this kind of enforced inactivity. But the Republican faithful were highly motivated,
energized by years of agitation over the slavery extension issue. They also held all the trump cards, because
of the population advantages in the North and the divisions among their opponents. Democrats had
splintered into two regional factions at odds with each other as much as with the Republicans. Stephen
Douglas led the Northern Democratic faction, but John Breckinridge, who served as Vice-President
under James Buchanan, spearheaded a separate Democratic electoral ticket in the South. Like the nation,
Democrats were divided over slavery. Douglas and his supporters were content to allow the expansion of
slavery to be determined by referendum and local regulations. Breckinridge and the “fire-eaters” of the
South wanted a federal slave code for the territories and warned of secession if the Republicans won power.
A fourth party, the Constitutional Unionists, emerged in response to this secessionist threat, offering a
weak alternative the eschewed all controversy over slavery in favor of a placid unionism. The result was
a Republican electoral landslide (180 out of 303 electoral votes), even though Lincoln barely managed to
receive 40 percent of the popular vote (and almost none of the vote in the slave states). 16

       When his election sparked southern movement toward secession, Lincoln remained unmoved.
There was some panicked talk of compromise in Washington, but when Republican senators approached
the president-elect for his views, they received an adamant and bracing response. “The tug has to come,”
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Lincoln wrote, “and better now than any time hereafter.” It was the right decision. Decades of patching
together one inadequate compromise after another had finally ceased. The House Divided would not stand
any longer on the basis of enslavement. In retrospect, it seems unsurprising that Lincoln measured up to
what was at that time the greatest test ever put to an American politician. His personal “school of events”
had been in session for over fifty years, and he had never failed before—at least not for any length of time.
He believed that he was not about to fail now.

Conclusion
         And yet he nearly did. When President-Elect Lincoln left Springfield in February 1861, on the eve
of his fifty-second birthday, he was forced to acknowledge the grave crisis facing him and the nation. “I now
leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return,” he said soberly in his eloquent Farewell Address,
“with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.” Yet Lincoln was both confident
enough to invoke God and also to expect divine intervention. “Without the assistance of that Divine Being,
who ever attended him, I cannot succeed,” he noted. “With that assistance I cannot fail.” Still, during a

series of campaign-like appearance across the North on his pre-inaugural train journey to Washington,
Lincoln stumbled in his efforts to rally the nation. The president-elect tried to keep his remarks brief and
uncontroversial—determined not to make policy until he had the authority to enforce policy—but the result
was often awkward and unsatisfactory. On several occasions, you can almost hearLincoln straining to explain
the national purpose during what had become the worst secession crisis since the Hartford Convention
winter of 1814-15. Speaking to the New Jersey state senate, he recalled reading Parson Weems’s famous
biography of George Washington and how at that point he began to understand his countrymen’s deep-
rooted nationalism. “I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was,” he said, “that there must have been
something more than common that those men [the Revolutionary soldiers] struggled for.”

         I am exceedingly anxious that that thing which they struggled for; that something even more than National
         Independence; that something held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come; I am
         exceedingly anxious that this Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in
         accordance with the original idea for which the struggle was made, and I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be
         an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the
         object of that great struggle.

Of course, what appeared then, in that difficult period, as only “that thing” or “that something” which
Americans “struggled for” became, under the crucible of war, a definitive mission statement for a “nation,
conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” 18

        But the nation was far away from the somber certitude of Gettysburg. Aides warned Lincoln of an
assassination plot in Baltimore, designed to disrupt his arrival in Washington, and he was compelled to slip
into the city, partially in disguise and unannounced. Southern and Democratic newspapers ridiculed the
incoming president as cowardly. Those who feared for the nation’s future became even more dismayed.
Thus, as Lincoln faced his tenuous inauguration in March 1861, it required great courage for him to offer the
sweeping peroration of that impressive address:

         I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have
         strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-
         field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of
         the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

         One must ask where this deep reservoir of optimism and confidence came from? The answer lies, as
Lincoln once suggested, in his personal “school of events.” He had been tested and had succeeded. Though
the early years of the war proved to be extraordinarily difficult, Lincoln eventually would succeed again
during that grave test as well. However, this is why the experience at the Soldiers’ Home is so integral to
understanding the success of the Lincoln presidency. The retreat to the outskirts of the District during the
war’s second year offered Lincoln and his family a prism of the life they had left behind. It was not only their
sanctuary in a time of grief after the loss of a son, but also a bridge between two very different worlds. For
the weary and often overwhelmed wartime president, the daily commute from Soldiers’ Home to White
House restored at least some of the rhythms of the old judicial circuit. The quiet parlor in the Lincoln
cottage and the steady stream of visitors (many from Illinois) offered the family a comforting version of
their former life at Eighth and Jackson in Springfield. But perhaps most important for President Lincoln,
the bucolic grounds and rural scenes around the Soldiers’ Home, with their hints of a lost boyhood in the
former “wild region” of southern Indiana, offered the greatest reminder of all –that he had come very far in
his lifetime and thus almost certainly had the strength to keep going even further.

End Notes
1
 The article from the San Francisco Bulletin which opened this essay appeared on May 20,1865 and was reprinted in
Milton H. Shutes, Lincoln and California (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1943. The quotations appeared on
pages 254-257. See also Matthew Pinsker, Lincoln’s Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers’ Home (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003), 171-172.
2
    Shutes, 255.
3
 Background on the embargo crisis and national politics during Lincoln’s early years can be found in any number of
sources. Linda K. Kerber’s Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1970) offers a particularly shrewd portrait of curmudgeonly figures such as Timothy Pickering. A
reliable general reference is Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., The Almanac of American History (New York: Barnes &
Noble Books, 1993).
4
 Kenneth J. Winkle’s The Young Eagle: The Rise of Abraham Lincoln (Dallas, TX: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2001) is
the new standard treatment of Lincoln’s ancestry and early years. According to Winkle, the American Lincolns were
“an extremely migratory family” and none of the Lincoln men who were direct descendants of the future president ever
“stayed put in one place through an entire lifetime” (2-3).
5
 Background on Lincoln’s father and on other aspects of his childhood comes in part from David Herbert Donald,
Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). The quotations from Lincoln himself can be found in his “Autobiography
Written for John L. Scripps,” c. June 1860, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols., ed. Roy P. Basler (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Pres, 1953), 4: 60-68.
6
 The statements by Lincoln on his youth come from his “Autobiographical Sketch” written for Jesse W. Fell, December
20, 1859, in Collected Works 3:511-12. The recollection from cousin Dennis Hanks appears in Douglas L. Wilson and
Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1998), 41.
7
 For Lincoln’s early career and a classic interpretation of how it embodied the “right to rise,” see Gabor S. Boritt,
Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Memphis, TN: Memphis State University Press, 1978).
8On other aspects of Lincoln’s career and early romantic troubles, I have generally relied upon Donald’s Lincoln (1995),
Douglas L. Wilson, Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), and
Matthew Pinsker, Abraham Lincoln (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2002). The grocery store quotations come from
Lincoln’s 1860 autobiographical statement. Mary Owens (Vineyard’s) verdict on Lincoln’s early problems with women
can be found in Herndon’s Informants, p. 256.
9
 On the Lincoln-Todd courtship, see David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (1995), Douglas L. Wilson, Honor’s Voice (1998),
Jennifer Fleischner, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between A First Lady and
a Former Slave (New York: Broadway Books, 2003), and Jean H. Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1987). It was Fleischner who makes the perceptive observation about the relatively limited time Lincoln
and Todd spent together.
10
 The questions that absorb students of the Lincoln marriage invariably involve highly contested matters of motivation
and emotion that are nearly impossible to resolve. Were they happy or miserable together? What happened on that
“fatal first” and why? Some believe that Lincoln fell in love with another woman named Matilda Edwards and that Mary
Lincoln angrily released him from their engagement. Others believe that Lincoln was actually attracted to Joshua Speed,
his closest friend and sometime bed-mate. Lincoln and Speed had shared a bed in a room above a grocery store since
Lincoln’s arrival in Springfield in 1837. Admittedly, there were other men in the room and Lincoln and Speed were only
occasionally at home together, but the notion of the Great Emancipator in bed with another man has captivated recent
public attention. Most historians discount the possibility of homosexuality, but the Lincoln-Speed relationship offers an
important sidebar to the president’s later experiences at the Soldiers’ Home, since he reportedly also briefly shared his
bed with a man there as well (Captain David V. Derickson). In fact, Lincoln, like almost every other man in nineteenth-
century America, shared beds with other men, often quite frequently and throughout his life. It was the customary
behavior of friends and travelers, not the tell-tale sign of the love that dared not speak its name.
          Yet there was clearly something about the prospect of marrying that unnerved both Lincoln and Speed. Their

letters from the period reflect deep-seated anxieties about the institution of marriage, about their own capabilities as
heads of households, about their prospective wives and even (obliquely) about sex. Still, all in all, these seem to be little
more than the eternal anxieties of bachelors about to embark on life-changing decisions. Yet visitors to the Soldiers’
Home will invariably ask questions and require answers on these sometimes sensitive issues. Douglas Wilson charts
Lincoln’s turbulent emotions during this period as well as anyone in his book Honor’s Voice (1998). His conclusion is
that Lincoln’s greatest struggle in the early 1840s was with himself and his own sense of honor. The future president
wanted so much to do well by doing right that he grew almost unreasonably upset with himself whenever he fell short of
his sometimes impossible ideals.
11
 For “liar and a scoundrel,” see Collected Works, 8: 429. For “Doctrine of Necessity,” and Lincoln’s response to Speed
in 1864, see Pinsker, Lincoln’s Sanctuary, 151.
12
 For the vivid description of Lincoln bowing to everyone, including the “cattle” and “swine,” see Matthew Pinsker,
Abraham Lincoln (Washington DC: CQ Press, 2002), 58.
13
 Lincoln’s comments on the “troublesome world” come from Collected Works, 1: 465. The fortieth birthday comment
to Judge Davis appears in the first supplement to Lincoln’s Collected Works, on page 14.
14
 The best treatment of Lincoln’s political career after his term in Congress and throughout the 1850s is David Herbert
Donald, Lincoln (1995), but other important works that provided useful background for this essay include Richard J.
Carwardine, Lincoln: Profiles in Power (Pearson Longman, 2003), Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln
in the 1850s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech
That Made Abraham Lincoln President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), and Matthew Pinsker, Abraham Lincoln
(Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2002).
15
 Lincoln’s quotations from the Collected Works, 2: 541; 3: 315.
16
 Herndon’s quote about Lincoln’s boredom can be found in Donald, page 254.
17
 Lincoln’s advice to the Republicans in the Senate was offered in a letter to Lyman Trumbull, December 10, 1860.
18
 Collected Works, 4: 235-236.

© National Trust for Historic Preservation, 2005. All rights reserved.