Modern psychiatry regards humor as probably the most mature and healthy means of adapting to melancholy. “Humor, like hope, permits one to focus upon and to bear what is too terrible to be borne,” writes George Valliant. “Humor can be marvelously therapeutic,” adds another observer. “It can deflate without destroying; it can instruct while it entertains; it saves us from our pretensions; and it provides an outlet for feeling that expressed another way would be corrosive.”
The melancholy stamped on Lincoln’s nature derived in large part from an acute sensitivity to the pains and injustices he perceived in the world. He was uncommonly tenderhearted. He once stopped and tracked back half a mile to rescue a pig caught in a mire—not because he loved the pig, recollected a friend, “just to take a pain out of his own mind.” When his schoolmates tortured turtles by placing hot coals on their backs to see them wriggle, he told them “it was wrong.” He refused to hunt animals, which ran counter to frontier mores. After he had broken with Mary, he wrote that the only thing that kept him from happiness was “the never-absent idea” that he had caused Mary to suffer.
Lincoln’s abhorrence of hurting another was born of more than simple compassion. He possessed extraordinary empathy—the gift or curse of putting himself in the place of another, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires. The philosopher Adam Smith described this faculty: “By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation…we enter as it were into his body and become in some measure him.” This capacity Smith saw as “the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others…by changing places in fancy with the sufferer…we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels.” In a world environed by cruelty and injustice, Lincoln’s remarkable empathy was inevitably a source of pain. His sensibilities were not only acute, they were raw. “With his wealth of sympathy, his conscience, and his unflinching sense of justice, he was predestined to sorrow,” observed Helen Nicolay, whose father would become Lincoln’s private secretary.
Though Lincoln’s empathy was at the root of his melancholy, it would prove an enormous asset to his political career. “His crowning gift of political diagnosis,” suggested Nicolay, “was due to his sympathy…which gave him the power to forecast with uncanny accuracy what his opponents were likely to do.” She described how, after listening to his colleagues talk at a Whig Party caucus, Lincoln would cast off his shawl, rise from his chair, and say: “From your talk, I gather the Democrats will do so and so…I should do so and so to checkmate them.” He proceeded to outline all “the moves for days ahead; making them all so plain that his listeners wondered why they had not seen it that way themselves.” Such capacity to intuit the inward feelings and intentions of others would be manifest throughout his career.
LINCOLN’S FEARS that marriage might hinder his ambitions proved unfounded. He and Mary eventually settled in a comfortable frame house at the corner of Eighth and Jackson, within easy walking distance of his law office. For the first time, he enjoyed the security and warmth of a family circle, without neglecting his devotion to reading, studying, traveling on the legal circuit, and cultivating politics. While the marriage was tumultuous at times, it provided Lincoln with a protected harbor from which he could come and go as he pleased while he continued his lifelong quest to become an educated person.
The adjustment to married life was harder for Mary than for her husband. Raised in a Southern mansion attended by slaves, she had never had to cook a meal, scrub the floor, chop wood, or pump water from the well. Nor, while living with her sister in the finest house in Springfield, had she ever worried about money, or hesitated before inviting friends for dinner parties and receptions. Now she was confronted with the innumerable chores of running a household when the money Lincoln earned barely covered living expenses. Though Lincoln helped with the marketing and the dishes and insisted, even in the leanest years of his practice, that she hire a maid to help with the children, most household tasks fell on Mary’s shoulders.
Certainly such “hardships” were not shared by the wives of Lincoln’s later rivals. When Julia Coalter married Edward Bates, her husband had upward of twenty slaves to nurse the children, clean the house, plant the vegetables, cook the meals, and drive the carriages. After Bates emancipated his slaves in the 1850s, several remained with the family as freedmen and women, while additional servants were found among the Irish and German immigrants in St. Louis. For Frances Seward, there was never a time when she was left alone to handle household chores. When she and Seward agreed to live in her father’s Auburn estate, she inherited the faithful servants who had worked in the big house for decades. As governor, Seward was supplied with an experienced staff of household servants; while in Washington, he maintained a live-in staff to accommodate and entertain the endless stream of guests at dinner parties and receptions. When Frances suffered from migraine headaches, she could take to her bed without worrying that the domestic work would be left undone.
It was not simply Mary’s relative poverty that made her early married life difficult. Both she and Lincoln had essentially detached themselves from their previous lives, cutting themselves off from parents and relatives and thereby creating a domestic lifestyle closer to the “nuclear family” of a later age than the extended family still common in the mid-nineteenth century. When Lincoln was away, Mary was left alone to deal with her terror of thunderstorms, her worries over the children’s illnesses, and her spells of depression. Too proud to let her Springfield sisters know the difficulties she faced in these early years—particularly after the disapproval they had voiced over her choice of husband—Mary struggled stoically and proudly on her own.
Once again, her isolation stands in stark contrast to the familial support enjoyed by Frances Seward and Julia Bates. Frances could depend on the companionship not only of her widowed father but of three generations of women living in the same household—her favorite aunt, Cornelia; her sister and closest friend, Lazette, who spent months at a time in the Auburn house; and her beloved daughter, Fanny. Likewise, Julia Bates was surrounded by her children, several of whom continued to live with the family even after they married; and by her parents; her sisters; her brothers; and her husband’s mother, all of whom lived nearby.
If Mary’s solitary life with her husband brought hardship, the birth of two sons within the first forty months of their marriage brought great happiness. Both boys were high-spirited, intelligent, and dearly loved by their parents. In later years, Mary proudly noted that Lincoln was “the kindest—most tender and loving husband & father in the world…. Said to me always when I asked him for any thing—You know what you want—go and get it. He never asked me if it was necessary.”
He was, by all accounts, a gentle and indulgent father who regularly took the boys on walks around the neighborhood, played with them in the house, and brought them to his office while he worked. While Herndon believed that Lincoln was too indulgent, that the children “litterally ran over him,” leaving him “powerless to withstand their importunities,” Lincoln maintained that children should be allowed to grow up without a battery of rules and restrictions. “It is my pleasure that my children are free—happy and unrestrained by paternal tyrrany,” Mary recalled his saying. “Love is the chain whereby to lock a child to its parent.”
WHEN, AT LAST, Illinois began to emerge from recession, Lincoln’s hopes for a future in politics revived. “Now if you should hear any one say that Lincoln don’t want to go to Congress,” he wrote a friend three months after his marriage, “tell him…he is mistaken.” His objective was the Seventh Congressional District—including Sangamon County—where the Whigs had a majority in a state that was otherwise solidly Democratic.
Lincoln’s first goal was to win the endorsement of the Sangamon County Convention, which would appoint delegates to the congressional district nominating convention. The convention system had just been adopted by the Whigs to unify party members in the general election. “That ‘union is stre
ngth’ is a truth that has been known, illustrated and declared, in various ways and forms in all ages of the world,” said Lincoln in support of the new system, pointing out that “he whose wisdom surpasses that of all philosophers, has declared that ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand.’” Much later, of course, he would famously widen the application of this same biblical phrase beyond Sangamon County Whigs to the nation as a whole.
Lincoln’s adversary in his home county was Edward Baker, a close friend after whom he named his second-born son. Despite a vigorous campaign, Lincoln fell short by a narrow margin. “We had a meeting of the whigs of the county here on last monday to appoint delegates to a district convention,” Lincoln reported to Speed, “and Baker beat me & got the delegation instructed to go for him.” Having been chosen a delegate himself, Lincoln ruefully remarked, “I shall be ‘fixed’ a good deal like a fellow who is made groomsman to the man what has cut him out, and is marrying his own dear ‘gal.’”
Though bound not to oppose Baker in his own county, Lincoln still harbored a lingering hope that he might be nominated by another county, explaining to a friend in neighboring Menard County that his defeat in Sangamon was partially explained by his marriage into the Todd/Edwards clan. “It would astonish if not amuse, the older citizens of your County who twelve years ago knew me a strange[r], friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flat boat…to learn that I have been put down here as the candidate of pride, wealth, and arristocratic family distinction.”
At the district convention in Pekin, the nomination went neither to Lincoln nor to Baker but to another young lawyer, John Hardin. At this convention, Lincoln successfully introduced a resolution that Baker would be the next candidate for the U.S. Congress, hoping to establish the idea of rotating terms that would later redound to his benefit. Baker was duly elected two years later, but when his term came to an end, Hardin wanted to return to Congress and was unwilling to yield to Lincoln.
Lincoln left nothing to chance in the contest that followed, seeking to prevent Whig papers from supporting Hardin, pressuring friends to influence neutrals in his favor. He asked friends to share the names of those who were against him. He sent letters to influential Whigs in every precinct. He planned “a quiet trip” through several counties, though he warned his friends, “Dont speak of this, or let it relax any of your vigilance.”
His message remained the same throughout the campaign. Hardin and Baker had already served their terms in Congress, and now it was his turn. “That Hardin is talented, energetic, usually generous and magnanimous,” he wrote a supporter, “I have, before this, affirmed to you, and do not now deny. You know that my only argument is that ‘turn about is fair play.’” He wrote a long letter to Hardin, recalling the old understanding, but insisting that if he were “not, (in services done the party, and in capacity to serve in future) near enough your equal, when added to the fact of your having had a turn, to entitle me to the nomination, I scorn it on any and all other grounds.”
Thoroughly outmaneuvered, Hardin withdrew from the contest. Lincoln was nominated, then easily elected to Congress, where the stage had already been set for the debate over the extension of slavery that would dominate the decade to come.
SALMON CHASE TRAVELED a different road to power than his three rivals. For many years he stayed clear of elective politics. “I am not a politician,” he told a friend. “I feel disgusted with party strife and am greatly chagrined on seeing the means to which both parties resort to gain their ends.”
The train of events that led Chase into the political world began in 1836, when James G. Birney, an Ohio abolitionist, began publishing the antislavery weekly Philanthropist, in Cincinnati. The paper’s publication created consternation among Cincinnati’s leading merchants and bankers, most of whom had substantial ties to the Southern plantation market. Adjacent to Kentucky, the state of Ohio depended on trade relations with its slaveholding neighbor to sustain a thriving economy. Birney himself had been a wealthy slaveowner in Kentucky before becoming an abolitionist. As soon as distribution of the Philanthropist commenced, a group of white community leaders, including many of the merchants Chase represented, attempted to close Birney down. When peaceful pressure failed, the group turned to violence.
On a hot summer night in July 1836, an organized mob broke into the shop where the abolitionist weekly was printed, dismantled the press, and tore up the edition that was about to be circulated. Refusing to be driven out, Birney continued to publish. Two weeks later, the mob returned. This time they succeeded in tearing apart the entire office. They threw tables and other equipment from the second-story window and then, to the cheers of the crowd, shoved out the printing press. While the mayor gazed on approvingly and the police were conspicuously absent, the press was hauled through the streets to the river. After it sank, the crowd began to shout for action against Birney himself, calling for the publisher to be tarred and feathered.
Though Chase had yet to take a public stand on the issue of abolition, he was appalled by the violence. Hearing of the mob’s intention to raid the Franklin House where Birney was thought to reside, he raced to the hotel to warn the publisher. As the mob surged forward, Chase braced his arms against the door frame, blocking the hotel’s entrance with his body. Six feet two, with broad shoulders, a massive chest, and a determined set to his jaw, Chase gave the rioters pause. The crowd demanded to know who he was. “Salmon P. Chase,” the young lawyer replied. “You will pay for your actions,” a frustrated member of the mob told him. “I [can] be found at any time,” Chase said. “His voice and commanding presence caught the mood of the mob at just the right time,” his biographer observes. The hour was late and the mob backed off.
The dramatic encounter had a profound effect on Chase. He became a hero in the antislavery community and began to see his future in a different way. In the years that followed, he became a leader in the effort to protect antislavery activists and their organizations. “No man of his time,” the historian Albert Hart argues, “had a stronger conception of the moral issues” involved in the antislavery movement; “none showed greater courage and resolution.” His passionate awakening to the antislavery cause was not surprising, given his receptiveness to religious arguments in favor of emancipation and equality. As time went by, however, Chase could not separate his own ambition from the cause he championed. The most calculating decisions designed to forward his political career were justified by advancement of the cause. His personal defeats would be regarded as setbacks for freedom itself. “By dedicating himself to moral activism,” the historian Stephen Maizlish argues, “Chase could join his passion for personal advancement to the demands of his religious convictions…. ‘Fame’s proud temple’ could be his and he need feel no guilt in its pursuit.”
In 1837, a year after he had faced down the anti-Birney mob, Chase once more lent his support to the abolitionist publisher. He undertook the defense of a light-skinned young slave named Matilda, brought to Ohio on a business trip by a Missouri planter who was both her master and her natural father. While in Ohio, encountering black men and women in a free society, she begged her father to grant her liberty. When he refused, she took matters into her own hand, seeking refuge in Cincinnati’s black community until her father returned to Missouri. She eventually secured employment in Birney’s house, where she remained until she was discovered by a slave catcher and brought before a judge to be remanded to Missouri under the Fugitive Slave Law enacted by Congress in 1793 to enforce the constitutional provision requiring that slaves escaping from one state to another “be delivered up” to their original owners.
Perhaps Chase could have argued successfully that Matilda was not a fugitive from Missouri, since she had been brought into Ohio by her father. Rather, he chose to make a fundamental assault on the applicability of the Fugitive Slave Law to the free state of Ohio. He argued that as soon as Matilda stepped into Ohio, she acquired the legal right to freedom guaranteed by the Northwest Ordinance of
1787, which forbade the introduction of slavery into the vast Northwest Territory later occupied by the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. To many opponents of slavery in later years, including Abraham Lincoln, the Ordinance of 1787 became, like the Declaration of Independence, a sacred document expressing the intent of the founding fathers to confine slavery within the boundaries of the existing states, prohibiting forever its future spread.
“Every settler within the territory, by the very act of settlement, became a party to this compact,” Chase argued, “forever entitled to the benefit of its provisions.” These provisions, he maintained, “are the birthright of the people of Ohio. It is their glorious distinction, that the genuine principles of American liberty are imbedded, as it were, in their very soil, and mingled with their very atmosphere…. Wherever [slavery] exists at all, it exists only in virtue of positive law…[and] can have no existence beyond the territorial limits of the state which sanctions it.” The right to hold a person in bondage “vanishes when the master and the slave meet together” in a place, like Ohio, “where positive law interdicts slavery.”
The conservative judge, as expected, ruled against Chase. The next day, Matilda was forcibly removed to the South and returned to slavery. The philosophical and legal arguments Chase had advanced, however, were considered so important by the antislavery community that they were printed in pamphlet form and distributed throughout the nation.
Publication of his arguments in the Matilda case brought Chase immediate acclaim in Northern intellectual circles. By anchoring his arguments firmly in history and law, he opened an antislavery approach that differed from the tactics of the allies of Garrison, who eschewed political organization, dismissed the founding fathers, and considered the Constitution “a covenant with death, an agreement with hell,” because it condoned slavery. Where the Garrisonians called for a moral crusade to awaken the sleeping conscience of the nation, Chase targeted a political audience, hopeful that abolition could be achieved through politics, government, and the courts.