In June of that year, Lincoln joined his fellow Whigs in Philadelphia, where they nominated Mexican War hero General Zachary Taylor for president, hoping that military glory could work its magic once more, as it had for George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and William Henry Harrison. “I am in favor of Gen: Taylor,” Lincoln wrote, “because I am satisfied we can elect him…and that we can not elect any other whig.” He explained to Herndon that the nomination of Taylor would strike the Democrats “on the blind side. It turns the war thunder against them. The war is now to them, the gallows of Haman, which they built for us, and on which they are doomed to be hanged themselves.”
Seward was not happy with his party’s choice of Taylor, a slaveholder with no political affiliation. Even worse was the selection of his rival New Yorker Millard Fillmore for vice president. Nor did he like the party’s gauzy platform, which avoided any discussion of important national issues, including the divisive Wilmot Proviso. He said that he would “very willingly” throw his support “in favor of a different candidate if it could be seen that it would hasten the triumph of Universal Freedom.” Thurlow Weed, desiring above all to win, insisted that Taylor was fundamentally a nationalist who would protect Northern interests better than the Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass of Michigan. Cass was considered a “doughface”—a Northern man with Southern principles. Moreover, the Democratic platform explicitly opposed Wilmot’s attempt to introduce the slavery issue into congressional deliberations. Finally, Seward, like Lincoln and Bates, supported Taylor, in the hope that his candidacy would allow the minority Whigs to attract Northern Democrats and independent voters, and thereby widen their base.
Chase, once again, pursued a different strategy. With the question of slavery in the territories at the forefront of national politics, he believed the time had come for a broad Northern party that would unite Liberty men with antislavery Democrats and “conscience” Whigs. He joined together with others, including Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, to convene an antislavery party convention in Buffalo, in August 1848. Ten thousand men answered the call. The spirited gathering elected Chase president of the convention and placed him in charge of drafting a platform for the new party, the Free Soil Party.
During the deliberations, a Buffalo delegate wrote to Bates asking if his name could be entered as a candidate for the vice presidency. That Bates would even be considered illustrates the fluidity of parties at this juncture, for even though he opposed slavery’s expansion, he himself remained a slaveowner, his belief in the inferiority of the black race reflecting his Southern upbringing. In contrast to Seward and Chase, he supported Northern codes that prevented blacks from voting, sitting on juries, or holding office. When one of his female slaves escaped to Canada, he had been incredulous. “Poor foolish thing,” he wrote in his diary. “She will never be as well off as she was in our house.” She had left behind three daughters, whom he promptly sold, “determined at once to be no longer plagued with them.”
Not surprisingly, Bates declined the Free Soil nomination. While he endorsed the party’s “true doctrine” that “Congress ought never to establish slavery where they did not find it,” he did not believe that this sole principle could sustain a national party. Even if offered the chance to be president, he claimed, he would never agree to “join a sectional, geographical party.”
After several days of deliberation, the Buffalo convention nominated former president Martin Van Buren for president and Charles Francis Adams for vice president. Following the motto suggested by Chase of “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor and Free Men,” the party pledged to “prohibit slavery extension” to the territories, setting in motion a hard-fought three-way contest.
In September 1848, with Congress in recess, Lincoln made his first foray into presidential politics, campaigning for Zachary Taylor throughout the Northeast. Arriving uninvited in Worcester, Massachusetts, he was happy to oblige the chairman of a Whig gathering who found himself without a speaker. Reporting on Lincoln’s impromptu speech, the Boston Daily Advertiser observed that the tall congressman had “an intellectual face, showing a searching mind, and a cool judgment,” and that he carried “the audience with him in his able arguments and brilliant illustrations.” When he finished, “the audience gave three enthusiastic cheers for Illinois, and three more for the eloquent Whig member from that State.”
During this campaign swing, at a great Whig rally at the Tremont Temple in Boston, Seward and Lincoln met for the first time. Lincoln later acknowledged that his meeting with Seward that night “had probably made a stronger impression on his memory than it had on Governor Seward’s.”
Both men were seated on the same platform in the spacious hall that served Boston as a religious and a secular meeting place. Seward, as the star attraction, spoke first, monopolizing most of the evening. Whereas most Whig speakers concentrated on internal improvements, the tariff, and public lands, Seward focused on slavery. He defended Taylor as a good man, trustworthy to support the Whigs’ determination to prevent slavery from expanding into those territories acquired by the Mexican War, though he hoped “the time will come, and that not far distant, when the citizens of the whole country, as well as Massachusetts, will select for their leader a freeman of the north, in preference to a slaveholder.” Gaining momentum, Seward predicted the “time will soon arrive when further demonstrations will be made against the institution of slavery,” eventually moving public conscience to liberate all the nation’s slaves.
The hour was late when Lincoln was introduced, but he captivated his audience with what the Boston Courier described as “a most forcible and convincing speech,” which scored a series of capital “hits” against both Democrat Cass and Free-Soiler Van Buren, whom he nicknamed the “artful dodger” of Kinderhook, referring to his frequent shifts of party and position. He concluded “amidst repeated rounds of deafening applause.” Recalling Lincoln’s “rambling, story-telling” speech more than two decades later, Seward agreed that it put “the audience in good humor,” but he pointedly noted that it avoided “any extended discussion of the slavery question.”
The next night, Seward and Lincoln shared the same room in a Worcester hotel. “We spent the greater part of the night talking,” Seward remembered years later, “I insisting that the time had come for sharp definition of opinion and boldness of utterance.” Listening with “a thoughtful air,” Lincoln said: “I reckon you are right. We have got to deal with this slavery question, and got to give much more attention to it hereafter than we have been doing.” While Lincoln had consistently voted for the Wilmot Proviso, he had not delivered a single speech on the issue of slavery or initiated anything to promote the issue. As the conversation drew to a close and the two men went to sleep side by side, they must have presented a comical image—the one nearly half a foot longer and a decade younger; Seward’s disorderly mass of straw-colored hair on the pillow beside Lincoln’s wiry shock of black hair.
Years later, as president, Lincoln recalled his trip to Massachusetts. “I went with hay seed in my hair to learn deportment in the most cultivated State in the Union.” He recalled in vivid detail a dinner at the governor’s house—“a superb dinner; by far the finest I ever saw in my life. And the great men who were there, too! Why, I can tell you just how they were arranged at table,” whereupon he proceeded to do just that.
The Whigs triumphed at the polls that November, bringing Zachary Taylor to the White House. It was to be the last national victory for the Whigs, who, four years later, divided on the slavery issue, would win only four states. To Chase’s delight, Free-Soiler Martin Van Buren polled more than 10 percent of the vote among the Northern electorate—enough to prove that antislavery had become a force in national politics. Indeed, in several Northern states, including New York, the votes for Van Buren that otherwise might have gone to the Democrats spelled victory for the Whigs.
When Lincoln returned to Congress for the rump session, influenced, perhaps, by his encounter with Seward, he
drafted a proposal for the gradual emancipation of slaves in the nation’s capital, pending approval by the District’s voters. Similar proposals had been attempted before, but Lincoln now added several elements. He included provisions to compensate owners for the full value of the slaves with government funds and to allow government officials from slaveholding states to bring their servants while on government business. Finally, to mitigate the fears of Southern slaveholders in surrounding states, he added a provision requiring District authorities “to provide active and efficient means to arrest, and deliver up to their owners, all fugitive slaves escaping into said District.” It was this last provision that prompted abolitionist Wendell Phillips to castigate him as “that slave hound from Illinois.”
Through long and careful conversations with dozens of fellow Whigs, Lincoln thought he had devised a reasonable compromise that could gain the support of both moderates in the South and the strong antislavery wing in the North. Yet, once the proposal was distributed, Lincoln found that his support had evaporated. Increasingly bitter divisiveness had eclipsed any possibility of compromise. Zealous antislavery men objected to both the fugitive slave provision and the idea of compensating owners in any way, while Southerners argued that abolishing slavery in the District would open the door to abolishing slavery in the country at large. Disappointed but realistic in his appraisal of the situation, Lincoln never introduced his bill. “Finding that I was abandoned by my former backers and having little personal influence,” he said, “I dropped the matter knowing it was useless to prosecute the business at that time.”
His congressional term ending in March 1849, Lincoln campaigned vigorously for a presidential appointment as Commissioner of the Land Office—the highest office that would go to Illinois. On the strength of his services to the Taylor campaign, he believed he deserved the position. As commissioner, he would be responsible for deciding how to distribute all the public lands in the state. The office was awarded to another. It was just as well that Abraham Lincoln was not appointed. His strengths were those of the public leader, not the bureaucratic manager. “If I have one vice,” he later quipped, “and I can call it nothing else,—it is not to be able to say no!” He then smiled and added: “Thank God for not making me a woman, but if He had, I suppose He would have made me just as ugly as He did, and no one would ever have tempted me.”
Before he returned to Springfield, the former flatboatman applied to patent a method of lifting boats over shoals and bars by means of inflatable “buoyant chambers.” Unfortunately, no analogous device existed to refloat a political career run aground. His securely Whig congressional district had turned Democratic, a shift many Whigs blamed on Lincoln’s criticisms of the war. He was out of office, with little immediate prospect of return. Assessing his brief congressional tenure, there was little to celebrate. His term, John Nicolay wrote, “added practically nothing to his reputation.” He had been a diligent congressman, making nearly all the roll calls and serving his party faithfully, but his efforts to distinguish himself—to make a mark—had failed.
All these disappointments notwithstanding, Lincoln had forged relationships and impressed men who would contribute significantly to his future success, including Caleb Smith of Indiana and Joshua Giddings of Ohio, Westerners whose political careers were similar to his.
Born in Boston, Caleb Smith had migrated west as a young man, ending up in Indiana, where he read law, was admitted to the bar, and entered politics as a Whig. He was a “handsome, trimly-built man,” with a “smooth oval face.” Despite a lisp, his power on the stump was celebrated far and wide. It was said that he could make you “feel the blood tingling through your veins to your finger ends and all the way up your spine.” Indeed, one contemporary observer considered Smith a more compelling public speaker than Lincoln. Later, at the 1860 Republican Convention, Smith would help swing the Indiana delegation to Lincoln, a move that would lay the foundation for Lincoln’s presidential nomination.
Joshua Giddings had faced obstacles as formidable as Lincoln. He had left his family and small farming community in Ashtabula County, Ohio, to study law in the town of Canfield, Ohio. His decision stunned his friends and neighbors. “He had lived with them from childhood, and toiled with them in the fields,” his son-in-law, George Julian, observed. “He had never enjoyed the means of obtaining even a common-school education, and they regarded his course as the effect of a vain desire to defeat the designs of Providence, according to which they believed that people born in humble life should be content with their lot.” Fourteen years older than Lincoln, Giddings was first elected to Congress in 1838. Reelected continuously after that, he threw himself at once into John Quincy Adams’s valiant struggle over the right of Congress to receive antislavery petitions. While Giddings was decidedly more militant on the slavery issue than Lincoln, the two became close friends. Boarding together at Mrs. Spriggs’s house in Carroll Row on Capitol Hill, they shared hundreds of meals, conversations, and stories. So much did Giddings like and respect Lincoln that seven years later, in 1855, when Lincoln ran for the Senate, Giddings proclaimed that he “would walk clear to Illinois” to help elect him.
Among Lincoln’s Whig colleagues was Alexander Stephens of Georgia, later vice president of the Confederate states. Transfixed by Stephens’s eloquent speaking style, Lincoln wrote a friend that “a little slim, pale-faced, consumptive man…has just concluded the very best speech, of an hour’s length, I ever heard. My old, withered, dry eyes, are full of tears yet.” (Lincoln was not yet forty.) Many years later, the classically educated Stephens recalled: “Mr. Lincoln was careful as to his manners, awkward in his speech, but was possessed of a very strong, clear and vigorous mind. He always attracted the riveted attention of the House when he spoke; his manner of speech as well as thought was original…his anecdotes were always exceedingly apt and pointed, and socially he always kept his company in a roar of laughter.”
Lincoln’s ability to win the respect of others, to earn their trust and even devotion, would prove essential in his rise to power. There was something mysterious in his persona that led countless men, even old adversaries, to feel bound to him in admiration.
TAKING UP HIS LAW PRACTICE once more, Lincoln began to feel, he later remarked, that he “was losing interest in politics.” The likely reality was that his position on the Mexican War had temporarily closed the door to political office. Furthermore, this withdrawal from office was never complete. He worked to secure political posts for fellow Illinoisans, and joined in a call for a convention to reorganize the Whig Party. Through his lengthy eulogies for several Whig leaders, he spoke out on national issues, referring to slavery as “the one great question of the day.” And he never missed an opportunity to criticize Stephen Douglas, now a leading national figure.
In the interim, he resolved to work at the law with “greater earnestness.” His Springfield practice flourished, providing a steady income. Mary was able to enlarge their home, hire additional help with the household chores, and entertain more freely. These years should have been happy ones for Mary, but death intervened to crush her spirits. In the summer after Lincoln returned from Washington, Mary’s father died during a cholera epidemic. He was only fifty-eight at the time, still vigorous and actively involved in politics; in fact, he was running for a seat in the Kentucky Senate when he succumbed to the epidemic. Six months later, Eliza Parker, Mary’s beloved maternal grandmother, died in Lexington. To this grandmother, the six-year-old Mary had turned for love and consolation when her mother died.
February 1, 1850, brought Mary’s most terrible loss: the death of her second son, three-year-old Eddie, from pulmonary tuberculosis. That destiny had branded her for misery became her conviction. For seven weeks, Mary had worked to arrest the high fever and racking cough that accompanied the relentless disease. Despite her ministrations, Eddie declined until he fell into unconsciousness and died early on the morning of the 1st. Neighbors recalled hearing Mary’s inconsolable weeping. For days
, she remained in her bed, refusing to eat, unable to stop crying. Only Lincoln, though despairing himself, was able to reach her. “Eat, Mary,” he begged her, “for we must live.”
Finally, Mary found some solace in long conversations with the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, James Smith, who had conducted the funeral service for Eddie. So comforting was the pastor’s faith in an eternal life after death that Mary was moved to join his congregation and renew her religious faith. A grateful Lincoln rented a family pew at the First Presbyterian and occasionally accompanied Mary to church, though he remained unable to share her thought that Eddie awaited their reunion in some afterlife.
Though Mary became pregnant again a month after Eddie’s death, giving birth to a third son, William Wallace, in December 1850, and a fourth son, Thomas, in April 1853, Eddie’s death left an indelible scar on her psyche—deepening her mood swings, magnifying her weaknesses, and increasing her fears. Tales of her erratic behavior began to circulate, stories of “hysterical outbursts” against her husband, rumors that she chased him through the yard with a knife, drove him from the house with a broomstick, smashed his head with a chunk of wood. Though the outbursts generally subsided as swiftly as they had begun, her instability and violent episodes unquestionably caused great upheavals in the family life.
When Mary fell into one of these moods, Lincoln developed what one neighbor called “a protective deafness,” which doubtless exasperated her fury. Instead of engaging Mary directly, he would lose himself in thought, quietly leave the room, or take the children for a walk. If the discord continued, he would head to the state library or his office, where he would occasionally remain through the night until the emotional storm had ceased.