A. Lincoln A Biography

Chapter 8
The Truth Is, I Would Like to Go Very Much 1843–46

LET THE PITH OF THE WHOLE ARGUMENT BE “TURN ABOUT IS FAIR PLAY.”

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Letter to Benjamin F. James, editor, Tazewell Whig, December 6, 1845

ADOOR TO LARGER POLITICAL SERVICE UNEXPECTEDLY OPENED for Abraham Lincoln at the beginning of 1843. John Todd Stuart, his former law partner who had represented the Third Congressional District as the first Whig congressman from Illinois, announced that he would not seek a third term in the House of Representatives. Lincoln, having declined in the previous year to run for a fifth term in the state legislature, eagerly stepped forward to present his credentials for Congress.
When Lincoln arrived in Illinois in 1830, the state was still entitled to only one representative, the same as when it achieved statehood in 1818. By 1833, with rising immigration, the number increased to two, and then three in 1835. For the elections of 1843, Illinois would have seven seats. The new Seventh Congressional District would be made up of eleven counties, the majority of the population coming from Sangamon County.
The Whigs believed they could win the new Seventh District. Three men—John J. Hardin, Edward D. Baker, and Abraham Lincoln—all young lawyers, veterans of the Black Hawk War, and friends in the Illinois legislature, now became rivals for the Whig nomination to Congress. Everyone knew that winning the Whig nomination would be tantamount to winning the general election. The political race was on.
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JOHN J. HARDIN, one year younger than Lincoln, was born in 1810 into a prominent political family in Frankfort, Kentucky. He graduated from Transylvania University in Lexington, studied law with Chief Justice John Boyle of the Kentucky Supreme Court, and entered the legal profession in 1831. That same year, Hardin moved to Illinois, setting up a law practice in Jacksonville, the county seat of Morgan County. Tall, with dark hair and dark eyes, Hardin had a bold face that reflected his determined personality. He was an excellent speaker, even though he had a slight speech impediment. He served in the Black Hawk War in 1832. First elected to the state legislature in 1836, he gave up his seat in 1842, the same year that Lincoln stepped down. As a fellow Whig, Hardin had actively opposed Lincoln on the internal improvements legislation. As a personal friend, Hardin had attempted to stop the duel between Lincoln and James Shields.
Edward D. Baker, two years younger than Lincoln, was born in London, England, and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1816. Baker lived in Philadelphia until 1825, when his family moved to British socialist Robert Owens’s utopian community in New Harmony, Indiana. Later that same year, they settled in Illinois, first in Belleville and then in Carrollton. In 1835, Baker opened a law office in Springfield. Stunningly handsome and tall, with blue eyes, Baker was an inspiring if impetuous person. He was a lay minister in the Disciples of Christ Church, a denomination formed in 1832 from two revival streams, “Christian” and “Disciples,” which aimed to restore New Testament Christianity. Baker’s preaching experience prepared him to be a persuasive orator at Whig political rallies. He was elected to the state legislature in 1837 and to the state senate in 1840. Whig politics brought Baker and Lincoln together as kindred spirits.


John J. Hardin, a talented lawyer and politician from Jacksonville, counted himself as one of Lincoln’s friends but became his opponent for the Whig nomination to Congress in 1843.



Lincoln thought so much of Whig politician Edward D. Baker that he named his second son Edward after his good friend. Baker and Lincoln vied for the support of the Sangamon County Whigs in the run-up to the congressional election of 1843.

IN HIS CAMPAIGN for Congress, Lincoln employed an aggressive multi-pronged strategy. Months before the election, he began writing Whig friends about his congressional aspirations. On February 14, 1843, he wrote Richard S. Thomas, fellow lawyer and active Whig from Virginia, Illinois. “Now if you should hear any one say that Lincoln don’t want to go to Congress, I wish you as a personal friend of mine, would tell him you have reason to believe he is mistaken. The truth is, I would like to go very much.” Lincoln’s political ambition, muted in his first races for the state legislature, became more direct and visible when he decided to run for Congress.
On March 4, 1843, the Whigs published an “Address to the People of Illinois,” signed collectively by five politicians, including Lincoln, who likely penned it. Who else but Lincoln would have pled for political action by appealing to Aesop, “that great fabulist and philosopher,” and to Jesus, “he whose wisdom surpasses that of all philosophers,” who “declared that ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand’ ”? The campaign circular concluded, “At every election, let every whig act as though he knew the result to depend upon his action.”
In advocating a convention system for nominating candidates, Lincoln moved to the front rank of Whigs. He knew the Democrats had advanced their party’s interests in recent years in part because of their adoption of a convention system, which ensured that the party would unite behind one candidate rather than divide its votes among several candidates. Many Whigs had resisted a convention system because they feared party bosses would easily manipulate it, putting forward candidates who were not the choice of the people. But Lincoln could see that a convention system could help Whigs at both the state and national level. The first nominating convention for the new Seventh District was scheduled to be held on May 1, 1843.
As the convention approached, two difficulties clouded Lincoln’s candidacy. First, his opponents charged that as a result of his recent marriage to Mary Todd, he was now a candidate of the wealthy and influential. These detractors accused Lincoln of being a member of “the Junto,” a group of prominent business and political leaders in Springfield. Lincoln’s new brother-in-law Ninian Edwards was also a member of the Junto. Edwards’s aristocratic airs did not go over well with the Whigs, and Lincoln became guilty by association. Lincoln commented on the irony of this in a letter to Martin S. Morris, a delegate from Menard County. “It would astonish if not amuse the older citizens to learn that I (a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working at ten dollars per month) have been put down as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.”
A second problem was the issue of religion. It was well known that Lincoln was not a member of any church. Mary attended the Episcopal Church, viewed by many as the church of the wealthy. Baker, on the other hand, was an active member of the Disciples of Christ Church and had become known for his spellbinding lay sermons. The Whigs had always taken pride in their affirmation of Protestant Christian values. They criticized Democrats for either having no religious faith or having the wrong faith, by which they meant the Catholic faith.
In his letter to Morris, Lincoln wrote, “There was the strangest combination of church influence against me.” He said that Mary had relatives in both the Presbyterian and Episcopal churches, and that often “I had been set down as either the one or the other.” But lately, he complained, “it was everywhere contended that no ch[r]istian ought to go for me, because I belonged to no church, was suspected of being a deist, and had talked about fighting a duel.” He went on to tell Morris that Baker was not the cause of his problems. “I only mean that those influences levied a tax of a considerable per cent, upon my strength throughout the religious community.” Lincoln’s letter points to the role of religion in American politics in Lincoln’s day.
Whigs from across Sangamon County met for the first step in the nominating process on March 20, 1843. The Baker followers arrived early at the statehouse in Springfield and managed to outmaneuver the Lincoln supporters. After the first ballots, Baker led. In the afternoon, the Baker supporters asked Lincoln, in the name of party unity, to withdraw his name, for it had become obvious that he would not win.
But then an odd thing happened. The group wanted Lincoln to become the chairman of the Sangamon County delegation. He tried to decline, but they persisted, and Lincoln, an early advocate of the convention system, found it difficult to say no. And so it was that Lincoln arrived in the morning a candidate for Congress and left in the evening chairman of a delegation pledged to Baker. Lincoln, able to see the humor in any situation, wrote to Speed, “In getting Baker the nomination, I shall be fixed a good deal like a fellow who is made a groomsman to a man who has cut him out and is marrying his own dear gal.”
LINCOLN JOINED WHIGS from across the district who assembled for the convention at the Tazewell County Courthouse in Pekin on May 1. Lincoln arrived at the head of the Baker delegation. He knew he had lost his bid to be elected in 1843, but he had not lost his ambition to serve in Congress.
John J. Hardin won the Whig nomination for Congress. At this point Lincoln stood and urged the convention to adopt a resolution endorsing Baker as “a suitable person to be voted for by the Whigs of the district” in the succeeding election. The district convention adopted his motion by a vote of 18 to 14. In effect, the delegates were agreeing that Hardin should serve only a single term. Lincoln argued for a principle of rotation, a practice already in place in many states. The agreement, in spirit if not in letter, would hopefully assure Lincoln the nomination after Baker.


The Whig convention to select their candidate for Congress in 1843 was held at the Tazewell County Courthouse in Pekin. Lincoln lost the nomination to Hardin, but suggested a rotation system whereby first Edward Baker and then he would be assured nomination as the candidates for future terms.

Lincoln left Pekin on good terms with Baker, but in disagreement with Hardin about the principle of rotation. Ten days later, Lincoln, having heard that Hardin had some doubts “whether the whigs of Sangamon will support [him] cordially,” wrote to Hardin. “You must at once, dismiss all fears on that subject. We have already resolved to make a particular effort to give you the largest majority possible in our county.” He sought to reassure Hardin. “We have many objects for doing it. We make it a matter of honor and pride to do it; we do it, because we love the whig cause; we do it, because we like you personally.”
On Election Day, Lincoln voted for the offices of justice of the peace and constable, but for no other candidates. Since voting was still done by voice, Lincoln’s vote became known. He did not vote for Hardin or any of the Whig candidates for county and state offices. An explanation was never offered. Hardin won the seat for Congress in the new Seventh District, receiving a majority of 504 votes in Sangamon County.
THE CONGRESSIONAL CAMPAIGN of 1843 began just as Abraham and Mary Lincoln started their married life together. They rented one room at the Globe Tavern, a two-story plain wooden hotel on the north side of Adams Street, for four dollars a month, including board. The Lincolns lived in a cramped eight-by-fourteen-foot room on the second floor and took their meals in a common room with both long-term boarders and hotel guests. A gathering place for Whig politicians, the Globe was noisy day and night, in part because the hotel doubled as the main office for the stage lines serving Springfield. A bell rang at odd hours announcing the arrival of a stage.
The Lincolns’ first child, Robert Todd Lincoln, named after Mary’s father, was born on August 1, 1843, nine months after their wedding. They called him Bob. The joy of his birth took some of the sting out of losing the nomination. After the baby’s birth, Lincoln began addressing his wife as “Mother.” She called him, in Victorian fashion, “Mr. Lincoln.”
Shortly after Robert’s birth, Abraham and Mary rented a frame cottage at 214 South Fourth Street for $100 per year. This three-room residence was but a way station on the road to purchasing a house. Lincoln, now making about $1,500 a year as an up-and-coming lawyer and working hard to retire the last of his “National Debt” from his New Salem days, began looking for a permanent home.
Early in 1844, Abraham and Mary purchased their first home, the very same one-and-a-half-story frame house at Eighth and Jackson where Lincoln had called on the Reverend Henry Dresser on the day of their wedding sixteen months earlier. Lincoln agreed to pay Dresser $1,200 in cash plus the transfer of a lot immediately west of the public square that Lincoln and his law partner Stephen T. Logan had acquired together two years earlier.
Abraham, Mary, and nine-month-old Bob moved into their new home on Friday, May 3, 1844. What mixed emotions this event must have brought. Abraham’s mind may have wandered back to the many places he had lived over the past thirteen years, none of which he could call home. Mary might have remembered the grand brick homes she had lived in while growing up in Lexington, Kentucky, or the magnificent Springfield home of her sister and brother-in-law, Elizabeth and Ninian Edwards, where she had lived for three years. This new home was far less than anything she had known before, while for Lincoln it was far more.
The house, situated on a slight elevation, appeared a bit higher than some of the neighboring homes. Built in a Greek Revival style, it was typical of many of the newer Springfield homes and located a mere seven blocks from Springfield’s center and Lincoln’s law office.
Since houses were not numbered in Springfield until 1873, they were usually identified with nameplates on the front door. The front door of the Lincoln home bore a simple black doorplate inscribed with silvered Roman characters: “A. Lincoln.”
THE NEW HOUSE would remain the Lincoln family’s center for the next seventeen years. A second child, Edward Baker Lincoln, named after Edward Baker, Lincoln’s friend and political colleague, was born on March 10, 1846.
Harriet Chapman, the daughter of Lincoln’s stepsister Sarah Elizabeth Johntson Hanks, came to the Lincoln home shortly after they moved in, working as a hired girl for a year and a half. She reported how much Lincoln enjoyed reading, especially aloud. His typical posture was to “turn a Chair down on the floor and put a pillow on it and lie there for hours and read.” She added her voice to the general observation that Lincoln was “remarkably fond of Children.”
Mary was also an avid reader. She, too, typically read aloud, and Abraham sometimes asked her to read to him. After their wedding, the Lincolns subscribed to the semiweekly Lexington Observer and Reporter. Mary took pleasure in reading aloud from her home paper to her husband.
She enjoyed reading the novels and poems of Sir Walter Scott to her eldest son, Bob. One day she heard noises outside the front window. She looked to see Bob and a little playmate engaged in “a battle royal.” Bob was brandishing a fence paling instead of a lance, and declaring in a shrill voice, “ ‘This rock shall fly from its firm base as soon as I.’ ” Mary, sparkling with laughter, exclaimed from Scott’s Lady of the Lake, “ ‘Gramercy, brave knights. Pray be more merciful than you are brawny.’ ”
IN THE SPRING OF 1841, Lincoln began working with his new partner, Stephen T. Logan. Though the two men were quite different in temperament, Lincoln enjoyed a much closer working relationship with Logan, nine years older, than with Stuart. The senior partner was conscientious, industrious, and exact in his approach to the law. Logan was no orator, but he argued his cases with persuasive, rational power. In the aftermath of the financial panic of 1837, Congress passed the Bankruptcy Act on February 1, 1842, the first such act in forty years. Logan and Lincoln pled more than seventy cases, representing both creditors and debtors but primarily arguing for relief for debtors, before the act was repealed thirteen months later.
Lincoln and Logan moved into offices on the third floor of the new Tinsley building on Springfield’s downtown square in August 1843. A trapdoor connected the offices to the federal courtroom, from which the lawyers could listen in on the proceedings below. Lincoln was presenting more and more cases before the Supreme Court of Illinois, and his professional reputation was growing. Lawyers who lived far from Springfield began to refer their cases to him, confident that he would argue them with skill before the state’s highest court.
A fresh opportunity opened up for Lincoln when Logan decided to give up traveling and asked his junior partner to represent the firm on the Eighth Judicial Circuit. By 1843, the Eighth Judicial Circuit in cluded fourteen counties in central Illinois. Lincoln, on occasion, traveled beyond the circuit, all the way to Clark County, near the Indiana line, and into Madison County, on the Missouri border, to participate in cases. The firm was becoming one of the most prominent in the state.
Logan grew to appreciate his young partner’s distinctive skills. “I have seen him get a case and seem to be bewildered at first, but he would go at it and after a while he would master it. He was very tenacious in his grasp of a thing that he once got hold of.”
After three successful years, Lincoln’s partnership with Logan came to an end in 1844. Logan informed Lincoln that he wished to take his son David as a partner. This was understandable, and the partners parted and remained friends.
Logan and Lincoln handled approximately 850 cases together. Lincoln learned self-discipline and the art of case preparation from Logan, who had served previously as a circuit judge and had taught Lincoln to see cases from every possible point of view. Having learned much about the law and the courts, Lincoln was eager to start his own firm and began to search for a partner.
IN DECEMBER 1844, Lincoln selected an unlikely candidate, one that got Springfield’s tongues wagging. William Herndon, an intellectually curious but opinionated and garrulous young man, was born in Greens-burg, Kentucky, on December 25, 1818; his father, Archer Herndon, had moved his family to Illinois in 1820. After struggling with farming, they relocated in Springfield in 1825. Archer started the Indian Queen Tavern and Hotel, the first hotel of any prominence in Springfield, located at Second and Jefferson. Seven-year-old Billy had helped his father serve drinks and stable horses. Archer served in the Illinois Senate for eight years and had been one of the “Long Nine” who joined Lincoln’s effort to move the state capital from Vandalia to Springfield.
Archer Herndon possessed no formal education, but he was determined his children should receive what he was denied. After paying for his son to attend the Springfield schools, he sent Billy to the preparatory department of Illinois College in Jacksonville in the fall of 1836.
During his year there, Billy enhanced his budding interest in philosophy, borrowing from the library the school’s allotment of one large book or two small books for each student each week. He also got into more than his allotment of trouble with school officials for his clowning around and practical jokes.
Illinois College had grown from the dream of John M. Ellis, a Presbyterian missionary, who embraced the need for education in the West in 1829. Edward Beecher left his pulpit at the renowned Park Street Church in Boston to become the first president of the college in 1830. President Beecher and faculty members Jonathan B. Turner and Julian M. Sturtevant all brought their antislavery convictions with them from New England. They believed that immediate conversion should put people on the road to immediate abolition, the urgent goal of American moral reform. Beecher played a major role in the founding of the first antislavery society in Illinois in 1837.
Archer Herndon, a Jackson Democrat and pro-slavery man, had sent his son off to college, not expecting he would return as a convinced Whig and an antislavery man. When Billy came home to Springfield he argued with his father over his new antislavery convictions and moved out of his father’s house. He ended up working in Speed’s general store and was invited to stay in the room above the store with Speed and Lincoln.
Lincoln had encouraged Herndon to read law in the office of Logan and Lincoln in 1841. Herndon was admitted to the bar on December 9, 1844. When Lincoln invited Billy to join his practice, he was twenty-six, nine years younger than Lincoln.
Lincoln and Herndon rented an office in the new Tinsley Building on the public square in Springfield. A shingle with the names “Lincoln & Herndon” hung from hinges at the foot of the stairway.
From the beginning, Lincoln called Herndon “Billy,” while the junior partner addressed him as “Mr. Lincoln.” In their partnership, Lincoln decided he would travel the circuit while young Herndon would manage the firm and look after the books, a task Lincoln never liked. But Herndon proved no more adept at fiscal accountability than Lincoln; much of the time the books went neglected. As Logan’s junior partner, Lincoln had received only one-third of the firm’s proceeds. Although he was now the senior partner, Lincoln split all fees evenly with his new younger colleague.
EVEN AS LINCOLN was changing law partners, he became deeply involved in the political campaigns of 1844. The presidential contest pitted Henry Clay of Kentucky, leader of the Whigs, against James K. Polk of Tennessee, who as Speaker of the House had been President Andrew Jackson’s chief lieutenant in the bank war. James G. Birney of Michigan, a former Whig, was the standard-bearer of the antislavery Liberty Party. Throughout the campaign, Lincoln received many invitations to speak on behalf of Clay and various Whig candidates, which reflected his growing stature as a rising Whig politician.
He was invited to speak in southern Indiana and looked forward to returning to his boyhood home for the first time in fifteen years. On Thursday morning, October 24, 1844, Lincoln left Springfield by horseback. Journeying from the prairies of Illinois east to Indiana he met the changing colors of fall in the maple, oak, beech, hickory, and walnut forests of southern Indiana.
While speaking about a protective tariff at Rockport on October 30, 1844, a man about Lincoln’s age entered the courthouse. In the middle of his speech, Lincoln exclaimed, “There is Nat.” Lincoln had recognized his old schoolmate Nathaniel Grigsby. He stopped, “walked over the benches,” and joyfully greeted his boyhood friend.
The next day, Lincoln traveled to Gentryville where he visited more old friends. His visit to his boyhood haunts in the Pigeon Creek area stirred mixed memories. “I went into the neighborhood in that State in which I was raised, where my mother and only sister were buried,” he told an acquaintance later.
A year and a half later, in letters to Andrew Johnston, a lawyer in Quincy, Lincoln wrote of the “poetizing mood” triggered by the emotional experience of returning to his boyhood home. Lincoln included a poem about his feelings of visiting Indiana again.
My childhood’s home I see again,
And sadden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
There’s pleasure in it too.
Lincoln confessed he was not sure “whether my expression of those feelings is poetry.” Even so, he needed to articulate such deep emotions.
Near twenty years have passed away
Since here I bid farewell
To woods and fields, and scenes of play,
And playmates loved so well.
He concluded with a sense of death and loss.
I range the field with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms,
And feel (companion of the dead)
I’m living in the tombs.
Lincoln told Johnston that he could publish these words, anonymously, if he wished, in the Quincy Whig, which Johnston did two and a half years later.
THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF November 1844 disappointed Lincoln and the Whigs. James K. Polk, a rather colorless Democrat, out-polled Clay, with Birney, the antislavery candidate of the Liberty Party, a distant third. The contest turned on just a few counties in several states. Clay, a slaveholder, was nonetheless the infinitely better candidate than Polk, who had promised the annexation of Texas, which meant the possibility of the extension of slavery into a new state. Lincoln, deeply disappointed, believed if Birney had not been in the race, Clay would have won.
The defeat taught Lincoln that abolitionists and other extreme anti-slavery men would rather be right—what he called “righteous”—than win. That the election result continued to gnaw at him was evident in correspondence eleven months later with Williamson Durley of Hen-nepin, who called himself an abolitionist and a “Liberty man.” Lincoln told Durley, “If the whig abolitionists of New York had voted with us last fall, Mr. Clay would now be president, whig principles in the ascendant, and Texas not annexed.”
Lincoln recounted to Durley that he had met another Liberty man who said his religious principles forbade him to vote for Clay, a slaveholder. “We are not to do evil that good may come,” the man had said. Lincoln, quite exercised, offered both his own religion and logic in response. “This general, proposition is doubtless correct; but did it apply? If by your votes you could have prevented the extention, &c. of slavery, would it not have been good and not evil to have used your votes even though it involved the casting of them for a slaveholder?” Using biblical imagery, Lincoln stated, “By the fruit the tree is to be known. An evil tree can not bring forth good fruit. If the fruit of electing Mr. Clay would have been to prevent the extension of slavery, could the act of electing have been evil?” Sensitive to the misuse of religion, Lincoln would never forget this political lesson.
IN THE FALL OF 1845, Lincoln began his campaign to win the Whig nomination for Congress, even though the Whig district convention was eight months away. He had met with Baker, who had succeeded Hardin, and received assurances that he would not run for a second term. In September, Lincoln traveled to Jacksonville to meet with Hardin. Two months later, he wrote Henry E. Dummer, Stuart’s former law partner, “I strongly suspect, that Genl. Hardin wishes to run again.” Lincoln knew he needed to make sure that Hardin would not be in a favorable position to seek another nomination.
He decided to put in place a comprehensive strategy. He wrote letters to prospective delegates, appealing to their sense of fairness. In his letter to Dummer, Lincoln reminded him of the agreement in 1843 between Hardin, Baker, and himself. “I know of no argument to give me a preference over him, unless it be ‘Turn about is fair play.’ ” Lincoln was careful not to disparage Hardin. To Dr. Robert Boal of Lacon, he wrote, “That Hardin is talented, energetic, usually generous and magnanimous, 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.’ This he, practically at least, denies.” On January 8, 1846, Congressman Baker published in the Sangamo Journal his declaration of withdrawal, the timing of his announcement coordinated between him and Lincoln. Three days later Boal wrote to Hardin, “I do not well see how we can avoid adopting the maxim that ‘turn about is fair play,’ whether right or wrong, this is my only reason for favoring the pretensions of Mr. Lincoln.”
Lincoln began courting newspaper editors. His new law partner, William Herndon, observed, “He never overlooked a newspaper man who had it in his power to say a good or bad thing of him.” Lincoln understood the power of the press to influence public opinion. He wrote four letters to Benjamin F. James, editor of the Tazewell Whig, in December 1845 and January 1846, discussing the campaign and asking him about the likely positions of other editors and newspapers. Lincoln told James he needed seventeen votes to win the nomination over Hardin at the Whig convention and then listed where they were likely to come from in each county. He concluded by counseling the editor, “In doing this, let nothing be said against Hardin … nothing deserves to be said against him. Let the pith of the whole argument be ‘Turn about is fair play.’ ”
Lincoln had become practiced in the politics of personal persuasion. He decided to visit as many delegates, or persons influential with delegates, as he could. “It is my intention to take a quiet trip through the towns and neighbourhoods of Logan county, Delevan, Tremont, and on to & through the upper counties.” At the same time, Lincoln did not want to take anything for granted. He told editor James, “Don’t speak of this, or let it relax any of your vigilance.”
Lincoln believed that he was poised to win the nomination at the district convention. Hardin received this same message, even from his friends. One of Hardin’s ardent supporters wrote him that Lincoln “spins a good yarn, is what we call a clever fellow, has mixed much with our citizens, and has done much in sustaining Whig principles in Illinois. … Our people think that it is Abraham’s turn now.”
Still, Hardin pursued his goal of returning to Congress. He and his supporters proposed Lincoln for governor, but he was not interested. Next, Hardin put forward a plan to cancel the district convention and instead have a district primary in each county, stipulating that each candidate and his friends could not campaign outside their own county.
Behind these public maneuvers, a private correspondence was taking place between the two political opponents. Hardin wrote Lincoln on January 16, 1846, about his new rules for electing candidates. He argued that the convention system, which Lincoln had labored to put in place, was undemocratic because it limited those who could run for office. Lincoln replied on January 19, “I am entirely satisfied with the old system under which you and Baker were successively nominated and elected to congress.” Hardin replied to Lincoln in a second letter. The contents of that letter, not preserved, can be inferred, for Lincoln returned a lengthy letter, answering Hardin point by point. Lincoln, who had every reason to be irritated by Hardin, wrote with conciliation. “I believe you do not mean to be unjust or ungenerous; and I, therefore am slow to believe that you will not yet think better and think differently of this matter.” Hardin was not yet ready to accept Lincoln’s reasoning, for he sent his complete twelve-step proposal to the Sangamo Journal on February 16.
Within days of receiving Hardin’s proposals, however, the Sangamo Journal and other Whig newspapers printed an announcement that Hardin was withdrawing from the contest.
The Whigs of the Seventh Congressional District convened in the Menard County Courthouse in Petersburg on Friday, May 1, 1846. The Committee on Nominations put forward Abraham Lincoln’s name, which was unanimously adopted. Starting with the May 7, 1846, issue, the Sangamo Journal carried as its masthead:
AUGUST ELECTIONS
For Congress

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
of Sangamon County

WITHIN TWO WEEKS of Lincoln’s nomination, distant dramatic events began that would have unforeseen implications for Lincoln’s political career. Military skirmishes between U.S. and Mexican forces in a disputed borderland prompted President Polk to declare war against Mexico on May 11, 1846. Though there were questions about who had initiated the hostilities, when Congress concurred with the president on May 13, war fever swept the country. Large cities and small hamlets alike rallied around the flag in patriotic rallies.
Springfield held a mass rally on May 30, 1846. John Hardin, a brigadier general in the Illinois militia, volunteered to organize the First Illinois Regiment of Volunteers, and seventy men signed up. Edward Baker, in Washington, announced he would soon lead the Fourth Illinois Regiment. Addresses offered by a number of leaders, including Lincoln and Governor Thomas Ford, called for “prompt and united action to support the Mexican War.”
Some influential Whigs saw Polk’s war declaration as a thinly disguised attempt to gain more territory for slavery. But these Whigs were immediately caught in the dilemma of how they could simultaneously resist the president, support the troops, and not appear to be unpatriotic.
TWO DAYS BEFORE the Springfield rally, the Democrats announced Lincoln’s opponent in the election for Congress: Peter Cartwright, one of the most colorful figures on the frontier. Cartwright, famous as a revivalist, had traveled by horseback through Methodist circuits in Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. A preacher and a re former, he became an avowed enemy of both slavery and whiskey.
Twenty-four years older than Lincoln, Cartwright was born on September 1, 1785, in Amherst County, Virginia. As a young child, he moved with his family to Logan County, Kentucky, near the Tennessee border. At the turn of the century, a series of camp meetings in the region ignited what was called “the Great Revival.” In 1801, in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, upward of twenty thousand people camped for days in a festival atmosphere in order to hear protracted preaching. The fifteen-year-old Cartwright was converted at one of those camp meetings. He joined the Methodist Church and quickly began his vocation as a revival preacher.
Cartwright settled in Sangamon County in 1824 because, as he would state in his autobiography, “I would get entirely clear of the evil of slavery.” Cartwright hated slavery, but he also despised abolitionism because he believed the rhetoric and tactics of abolitionists made it more difficult to speak with slave owners about changing their ways.
After four years in Illinois, Cartwright turned his religious convictions into political action by running for state office; he was elected to the Illinois General Assembly in 1828. Defeated in 1830, he ran again in 1832, this time coming in ahead of a young Abraham Lincoln from New Salem, defeated in his first run for political office.
Now, fourteen years later, Lincoln and Cartwright squared off to become the representative of the Illinois Seventh Congressional District. A rugged man, about five feet ten inches tall, Cartwright bore his nearly two hundred pounds on a medium frame. His resolute personality exuded from a face with high cheekbones, a firm jaw, and piercing black eyes. Cartwright’s Methodist district overlay some of the same territory as the Seventh District, but the Democrats knew they faced an uphill battle in the one supposedly safe Whig district in the state.
The trail of the campaign for Congress in 1846 has left few tracks. Lincoln and Cartwright never appeared together at any point in the contest. No debates took place.
In the latter days of the campaign, Whig friends informed Lincoln that “Mr. Cartwright was whispering the charge of [religious] infidelity against me” in some northern counties in the Seventh District. Lincoln was unsure of what to do. In a letter to Allen Ford, editor of the Illinois Gazette in Lacon, he stated that “Cartwright, never heard me utter a word in any way indicating my opinion on religious matters, in his life.” Lincoln thought that “nine out of ten have not heard the charge at all,” and to answer it might only lift up questions about his religious beliefs his opponent intended to raise. Lincoln finally decided to publish a handbill answering the charges, sent it to selected counties, and left it to the discretion of his friends as to whether it would help or harm.
In the handbill, Lincoln acknowledged that Cartwright had charged him to be “an open scoffer at Christianity.” In response he declared, “That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.” He admitted that “in early life,” he had believed in the “Doctrine of Necessity,” which he defined as “the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which he has no control.” He quickly added, “The habit of arguing thus however, I have, entirely left off for more than five years.” Finally, Lincoln declared, “I do not think I could myself, be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion.” Though distributed as a handbill, the statement was not published in newspapers until after the election.
Cartwright might have been a popular preacher and revivalist, but he was a poor campaigner. Some voters, including Democrats, did not believe a preacher should be involved in politics. By the time the voting took place, the result was a foregone conclusion. In the election, held on August 3, 1846, Lincoln received 6,340 votes to Cartwright’s 4,829. Lincoln won the most decisive victory so far in the Seventh District, running ahead of the winning margins of both his predecessors, Baker and Hardin.
“BEING ELECTED TO CONGRESS, though I am very grateful to our friends, for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected,” wrote Lincoln to Speed, two months after his election. Perhaps the lack of elation was in part due to the fact that in the political calendar of those years, it would be sixteen months before Lincoln would take up his seat in Washington in December 1847.
During this long interval, Lincoln decided to attend the great Rivers and Harbors Convention in the summer of 1847. He traveled by stagecoach for four days on his first visit to Chicago, joining more than ten thousand people in the mud-flat town on July 4, 1847. The first national convention ever held in this rising city of sixteen thousand drew businessmen and farmers, politicians and the press, eager to encourage navigation and business on rivers and lakes.
President Polk’s veto of the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Bill in August 1846 was the impetus for the convention. Polk called the effort at internal improvements unconstitutional, arguing that many of its appropriations were not federal in scope but limited to a single state. The Whigs, who had long championed internal improvements, seized a strategic opportunity to present their case. The decision to hold the convention “at the terminus of lake navigation,” recognized not simply the large number of rivers and lakes affected, but the huge migration of people to the West.
On the morning of July 6, 1847, David Dudley Field, a prominent New York lawyer, spoke in defense of the position of the Polk administration. He rejected the obligation of the federal government to help develop the navigation of the Illinois River, which traversed a solitary state.
Lincoln stood to offer a reply, speaking for the first time before a national audience. His full remarks were not recorded, but Field’s remarks brought out the best of Lincoln’s satire. Lincoln, who as usual had done his homework, learned that Field favored a federal appropriation for the Hudson River in New York. Lincoln asked “how many States the lordly Hudson ran through.”
Lincoln’s remarks made an indelible impression on a leading New York newspaper editor. Horace Greeley, a reformer and politician at heart, and founding editor of the New York Tribune, always had a nose for the up-and-coming. He thought he spied it in the tall congressman-elect. The next day, Greeley wrote in appreciation, “Hon. Abraham Lincoln, a tall specimen of an Illinoian, just elected to Congress from the only Whig District in the state, spoke briefly and happily in reply to Mr. Field.”
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CONGRESSMAN-ELECT ABRAHAM LINCOLN posed for his first photograph, a daguerreotype, sometime in the last half of 1846, perhaps shortly after his election to Congress. The daguerreotype was a process that created an extremely detailed image on a sheet of copper plate without the use of a negative.
Lincoln was the perfect candidate for early daguerreotypists, who sought out political figures to photograph so they could place their finished products in the front of their studios to attract other customers. By 1850, there were more than seventy daguerreotype studios in New York City. Even in the small city of Springfield there were as many as four photographers by the late 1840s.
Nicholas H. Shepherd opened his Daguerreotype Miniature Gallery above the drugstore of J. Brookie at the northwest corner of the square in Springfield. He first advertised his photographic services in the Sangamo Journal on October 30, 1845, and probably approached Lincoln as a rising political figure to pose for a photograph. He offered to take a separate daguerreotype of Mary. Robert Lincoln remembered that these photographs of his parents hung on the wall in a prominent place in their Springfield home.
Photography in 1846 was subject to the limitations of a craft and technology still in its infancy. Abraham and Mary had to sit still for up to fifteen minutes, which meant that their facial expressions appear direct and unsmiling. In his first photograph, Abraham Lincoln, at thirty-seven, wears the clothes of a successful lawyer and politician. His slicked-down hair is not the tousled mop familiar to Lincoln’s friends; it was surely arranged by the photographer or his assistant in an effort to reflect Lincoln’s station. His large, muscular hands are a striking feature that could not be rearranged. His eyes reflect a man determined to make his mark in Congress.


Lincoln admired three legislators for their oratory. Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts became known as “the Great Triumvirate.”