A. Lincoln A Biography

Chapter 9
My Best Impression of the Truth 1847–49

AS YOU ARE ALL SO ANXIOUS FOR ME TO DISTINGUISH MYSELF, I HAVE CONCLUDED TO DO SO, BEFORE LONG.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN to WILLIAM H. HERNDON,
December 13, 1847

ABRAHAM AND MARY LINCOLN PREPARED TO LEAVE SPRINGFIELD for Washington on October 25, 1847, cheered on by Springfield’s Illinois State Journal. “Success to our talented member of Congress! He will find many men in Congress who possess twice the good looks, and not half the good sense, of our own representative.”
Two days before departing, Lincoln leased their family home at Eighth and Jackson to Cornelius Ludlum, a brick contractor from Jacksonville, for ninety dollars a year. As the Lincolns embarked on their six-week journey, they looked forward to visiting Mary’s family in Lexington. It was her first visit home since 1839. Her father, Robert S. Todd, had visited Springfield, but her stepmother, Elizabeth, and stepbrothers and -sisters, had never met her husband.
The Lincolns traveled from Springfield by stage to Alton, where they boarded a packet steamboat to take them down the muddy waters of the Mississippi past St. Louis. At Cairo, the southernmost tip of Illinois, they transferred to a river steamer to journey up the clearer waters of the Ohio River. As the steamboat plowed north, with autumn colors in view on both the Indiana and Kentucky shores, Lincoln may have remembered his first trip on the Ohio thirty-one years before. He passed Thompson’s Landing where, as a nine-year-old boy, he and his family disembarked in 1816 and began the trek to their new home at Pigeon Creek. The four Lincolns continued by boat on the Kentucky River to Frankfort, Kentucky, where they boarded the Lexington and Ohio train, which consisted of a small steam locomotive and a solitary coach car, for the bumpy thirty-mile ride to Lexington. On November 2, 1847, a raw, windy day, the whole Todd family stood near the front of the brick mansion on West Main Street to greet them. Mary walked in first with little Eddie in her arms, followed by Abraham carrying four-year-old Bob.
The three-week sojourn in Lexington gave Lincoln plenty of opportunity to observe slavery once again. Every day he encountered it in the Todd household. Slave auctions were held at Cheapside in the center of Lexington most weeks. Lincoln also confronted the issue every time he picked up a Lexington newspaper. On November 3, 1847, the Lexington Observer and Reporter printed a notice:
NEGROES FOR SALE.
35 negroes in lots to suit purchasers or the whole, consisting of field hands, house servants, a good carriage-driver, hostlers, a blacksmith, and women & children of all descriptions.
James H. Farish
Lincoln would also have seen plenty of advertisements about runaway slaves. A reward of five hundred dollars was offered for the arrest of a forty-year-old slave named Joshua, “who is slow of speech, with a slight choking when agitated and who professes to be a preacher.”
While in Lexington, Lincoln was afforded the singular opportunity to attend a political meeting organized by Mary’s father featuring an address by Henry Clay. Lincoln had long admired Clay, but they had never met. His political vision had long been indebted to Clay’s “American System” of economic advancement through internal improvements and fiscal accountability. How fortuitous to hear Clay, his political hero, discuss the vexing subjects of the war with Mexico and American slavery just weeks before Lincoln would take his seat in the Thirtieth Congress.
At age seventy, Clay evoked strongly mixed emotions among his political friends and foes. Some labeled him the “Star of the West,” a courageous, brilliant, eloquent politician who had devoted his life to the noble cause of the Union. Others found Clay ambitious, ruthless, and a demagogue, whose silver voice was not to be believed, and who was taking power away from the states and giving it to the federal government. Despite his age and the counsel of friends, Clay was testing the waters for a fourth run for the presidency.


Lincoln, stopping in Lexington, Kentucky, on his way to Washington, heard Clay deliver a fiery speech declaring his opposition to war with Mexico.

Clay began his speech by telling his Lexington audience that the day was “dark and gloomy, unsettled and uncertain,” because of the “unnatural” war with Mexico. Clay’s son, Henry, Jr., had been killed at the battle of Buena Vista the previous February. By the summer of 1847, the Mexican War had become a partisan issue, with most Whigs opposing it, and Democrats, appealing to a sense of Manifest Destiny and seeing it as an opportunity to extend slavery, supporting it. In vivid detail, Clay recounted the blunders and lies that had led to the “perils and dangers” the United States now faced.
He contrasted the war with Mexico with what he called “the British War” of 1812, arguing that the earlier war was defensive and “just,” while the present engagement with Mexico was “no war of defense, but one unnecessary and of offensive aggression.” Clay laid the blame at the feet of President Polk. The Kentucky senator rose to the height of his oratory in declaring that although Congress may have initially acquiesced in supporting the president’s request to raise fifty thousand troops, “no earthly consideration would have ever tempted or provoked me to vote for a bill, with a palpable falsehood stamped on its face.” He invoked the Constitution in urging the Congress to stand up and now resolve the proper purposes of the war.
In concluding, Clay asked his audience to join with him “to disavow, in the most positive manner, any desire, on our part, to acquire any foreign territory whatever, for the purpose of introducing slavery into it.” He reiterated his “well known” beliefs about slavery. “I have ever regarded slavery as a great evil,” but the slaves were here, and their future should be finally resolved “with a due consideration of all the circumstances affecting the security, safety, and happiness of both races.”
THE LINCOLNS PREPARED TO LEAVE Lexington on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1847. In the morning they attended services in the new sanctuary of the Second Presbyterian Church. The guest preacher was Robert J. Breckenridge, a well-known Presbyterian minister and politician, “noted for his hostility to slavery.” Breckenridge’s opinions were printed regularly in the Lexington Observer and Reporter, but the words of the sermon that Lincoln heard on his final day in Lexington were not preserved.
In the afternoon, the Lincolns began their trip by stage, boat, and finally by train to Washington. They arrived in the nation’s capital six days later on the evening of December 2, 1847. They went directly to Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel, a marble-fronted moderately priced hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. Lincoln registered his family as “A. Lincoln & Lady 2 children, Illinois.”
They did not stay long at Brown’s, soon moving into rooms at a boardinghouse operated by Ann Sprigg, a widow from Virginia. The boardinghouse was the fourth in a row of houses known as Carroll Row on East First Street between A and East Capitol streets, located where the Library of Congress stands today.
LINCOLN ARRIVED EAGER TO EXPLORE Washington, which had a population of more than thirty-five thousand, including nearly eight thousand slaves and two thousand free Negroes. It was only the thirteenth largest city in the nation. Many members of Congress lived in one of the new hotels in the downtown area, such as the United States and the National. In 1847, shortly before the Lincolns arrived, the City Hotel, at the northwest corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street, had been remodeled by the brothers Edwin D. and Henry A. Willard. The new Willard Hotel quickly achieved the reputation as the finest hotel in Washington.
The national capital, not quite five decades old, remained an almost-city. Carriages rattled over the rough cobblestones of Pennsylvania Avenue, the main thoroughfare. Charles Dickens, visiting the United States five years earlier, had described Washington as “the City of Magnificent Intentions,” with “spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete.” Pennsylvania Avenue was the lone street lit by oil lamps, and only when Congress was in session.
“Washington may be called the headquarters of tobacco tinctured saliva,” wrote Dickens, appalled by the manners, especially the pervasiveness of chewing tobacco, of his American cousins. He described a scene where “several gentlemen called upon me who, in the course of the conversation, frequently missed the spittoon at five paces.” More seriously, Dickens expressed his disgust at the slave pens and slave auctions in the nation’s capital.
THE THIRTIETH CONGRESS of the United States convened on December 6, 1847, the customary first Monday of December. The Capitol was located directly across the street from Ann Sprigg’s boardinghouse. Each day, Lincoln passed the colossal statue of George Washington by American sculptor Horatio Greenough in the eastern Capitol gardens. The controversial neoclassical statue, commissioned for the Capitol in 1832, had proved to be too heavy for its floor.
The House of Representatives met in a space south of the Rotunda that would become today’s National Statuary Hall. The original chamber, burned by the British in 1814, had been rebuilt and reopened in 1819. A statue of Clio, the muse of history, stood above the entrance. The Hall appeared like an ancient Greek theater, with a richly draped Speaker’s chair at the front. For all of its architectural beauty, the Hall, like the older chamber, was an acoustical nightmare. Not only was it hard to hear, but the lofty arched ceiling redirected speeches and conversations.
The Thirtieth Congress comprised 232 members, or only a little more than half of the 435 members of today’s House of Representatives. The national legislature represented a cross-section of a rapidly changing nation. Over half the members were, like Lincoln, serving their first term. Only two members in the whole House were over sixty-two.


Abraham Lincoln arrived in Washington in December 1847, to be greeted by this view of the Capitol located directly across from Ann Spriggs boardinghouse, where he and Mary lived.

On their second day in session, the representatives drew their seat locations by lot. The seats were arranged in six semicircular rows. Lincoln drew seat 191, placing him in the back row on the left, or Whig, side. Lincoln received appointments to two committees: Post Offices and Post Roads and the Expenditures of the War Department.
The House membership of the Thirtieth Congress included a few men who would play significant roles in the country’s future political struggles. Joshua R. Giddings, a strapping six-foot-two-inch Whig from the Western Reserve of Ohio, led the radical antislavery forces in the House and would become a prominent abolitionist in the years before the Civil War. Democrat Andrew Johnson, six weeks older than Lincoln and his future vice president, represented Tennessee. Johnson voted against almost every government appropriation, including the painting of portraits of presidents, paving Washington’s streets, and establishing the Smithsonian Institution, as well as all antislavery activity.
From the day he arrived, Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, began trying to reform the House, especially its penchant for waste and greed. The mileage paid to members for their travel to and from Congress was supposed to be computed according to the most direct route. Determined to take on the “mileage-elongators,” Greeley published in the Tribune the monies received by each member. For just one session of Congress, Greeley calculated an excess of $47,223.80. Greeley’s list revealed that Lincoln was one of the chief culprits. Congressman-elect Lincoln understood that he would be reimbursed for this trip to Washington at the amount of forty cents per mile. The shortest route from Springfield to Washington was 840 miles. Lincoln sent in a bill for 1,626 miles, almost twice the shortest route, and thereby collected $1,300.80 in reimbursement. Greeley published, for all to see, $676.80 as the excess amount received by Lincoln.
One Southerner especially caught Lincoln’s eye and ear. Alexander H. Stephens, a Whig congressman from Georgia, introduced a resolution arguing against seizing Mexican territory. The war was “a wanton outrage upon the Constitution.” In a blistering one-hour speech, Stephens attacked President Polk’s policies as “dishonorable,” “reckless,” and “disgraceful.” Young Charles Lanman, the future historian of Congress, was present in the House gallery for the first time and was captivated by the “wonderful earnestness” of Stephens’s speech. But Lanman also said to a friend seated with him that he did not think the gaunt speaker “would live to finish his speech.”


Lincoln was impressed with Alexander Stephens, a small Whig congressman from Georgia, after hearing him deliver a speech criticizing the war with Mexico.

Lincoln, too, found himself deeply impressed with Stephens’s speech. He wrote to “Billie,” “Mr. Stephens of Georgia, a little slim, pale-faced, consumptive man, with a voice like Logan’s, has just concluded the very best speech, of an hour’s length, I ever heard.” Lincoln, who always appreciated splendid oratory, concluded, “My old, withered, dry eyes, are full of tears yet.”
Lincoln was eager to see the oldest and most distinguished member of Congress. John Quincy Adams was eighty when the Thirtieth Congress convened. Adams, son of the nation’s second president, John Adams, was the only person to be elected to the House of Representatives after serving as president. He had defended the slave mutineers of the Amistad in 1839. In 1844, he finally achieved the removal of the “gag rule” that had long prevented the introduction of antislavery petitions. Adams had been feeble since a stroke in 1846, and Lincoln immediately sensed an aura of greatness about the ancient New England patriarch who would die shortly after Lincoln’s arrival.
Although diligent in his attendance in the House, Lincoln sometimes crossed over to sit in the Senate gallery and listen to the speeches. He had heard Henry Clay, not presently in the Senate, in Lexington. Now he wanted to hear the other two giants of “the Great Triumvirate.”


Lincoln was eager to see John Quincy Adams, former president and a member of the Thirtieth Congress.

The first, Daniel Webster, born in 1782, had risen to fame in New England as a lawyer and a politician. Friends said he looked like a lion, a large man with a great head—“Godlike Daniel” some called him—with black hair and black eyes. He spoke with an eloquent voice that often prompted tears in his audience, as when he spoke in 1820 at the two hundredth anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. Steeped in the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton, Webster became a spokesman for the collective aspirations of first New England and then the Union. Lincoln was thoroughly familiar with Webster’s 1830 Senate debate with South Carolina’s Robert Hayne over states’ rights and slavery: Webster had defended the Union with these famous words, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”
The third member of the triumvirate, John C. Calhoun, was born two months after Webster, on March 18, 1782, on a flourishing farm in the red hills of South Carolina’s up-country. He traveled eight hundred miles north to study at Yale College, graduating in 1804. Calhoun was an angular figure, whose age accentuated his pale face and submerged eyes; his graying hair stood straight up on his head. For the past four decades Calhoun had served in both the House and Senate, as secretary of war and secretary of state, and as vice president of the United States under Presidents John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Calhoun had earned a reputation as a “metaphysical” politician who approached issues theoretically. In the final session of the Twenty-ninth Congress, he presented a series of resolutions on slavery, and Lincoln may well have heard Calhoun speak of them during the Thirtieth Congress. Calhoun argued that Congress did not have the power to legislate on the presence of slavery in the new territories. To prevent citizens of Southern states to enter any of the territories with their property—slaves—would discriminate against the equality of the citizens of those states.
On December 12, 1847, Lincoln wrote Herndon telling him, “As soon as the Congressional Globe and Appendix [the official record of the proceedings of Congress], begins to issue, I shall send you a copy of it regularly.” He asked his law partner “to preserve all the numbers so that we can have a complete file of it.” The new congressman may have only been on the job one week, but he was already thinking of building his political files for the future.
Lincoln also took advantage of the free mailing privileges for members of Congress by sending to his constituents copies of many speeches. He sent out 7,080 copies of his own speeches, as well as 5,560 copies of speeches by other members, including Daniel Webster.
JOSHUA GIDDINGS, THE CONGRESSMAN FROM OHIO, used Ann Sprigg’s boardinghouse as a place to bring antislavery congressmen together. In addition to Lincoln, eight other Whigs boarded there, including several leading abolitionists. Their presence guaranteed that slavery was a regular topic of conversation at meals. Lincoln had never before been around so many able politicians with such deep and earnest moral convictions about slavery.
Samuel C. Busey, a young medical doctor who took his meals at the boardinghouse, found himself intrigued with Lincoln’s manner in conversations. Busey said that Lincoln would often interrupt tense conversations with an anecdote that had a healing effect on everyone, including the disputants. “When about to tell an anecdote during a meal he would lay down his knife and fork, place his elbows upon the table, rest his face between his hands, and begin with the words, ‘that reminds me.’ ” As Lincoln began, “everybody prepared for the explosions sure to follow.” Lincoln had the ability to influence “the tenor of the discussion” so that the parties engaged would either separate in good humor or continue the conversation free of discord. Dr. Busey recalled that Lincoln’s “amicable disposition made him very popular with the household.”
SPEECHES REMAINED AT the heart of the daily working of the House of Representatives in this sixth decade after the nation’s founding. Both the House and Senate still retained a parliamentary ethos that would entirely disappear in the next century. Modern-day tourists, on their first visit to Congress, might be shocked to learn that a speaker often speaks to an empty chamber. In Lincoln’s time, visitors lined up to hear such celebrated speakers as the Great Triumvirate orate grandly on the leading issues of the day. The best legislators were by common agreement the best speakers, persons who could persuade their colleagues in long, well-attended speeches.
Most congressmen and senators prepared their speeches carefully, spending hours and sometimes days writing and rewriting. But they never read their speeches. A contemporary observer reported, “They would have been laughed out of the House had they come into the hall with, and attempted to read a written speech.” This was not a possibility. “These men met each other face to face,” speaking with eloquence and passion.
Good speaking and good listening, however, did not always go together. Maria Horsford, the wife of New York Whig congressman Jerediah Horsford, in writing home to her children, described the high intensity and noise of the House chamber. “The confusion and noise of the House of Representatives is wearying. … I never saw a district school dismissed at noon so rude and noisy … more like a hundred swarms of bees.” The noise was continually punctuated by cries of “Speaker”—“Speaker”—“Speaker” in voices rising “higher and higher.”
On the second day of the session, President Polk delivered his third annual message to Congress, the vast majority of it dealing with the war with Mexico. Calling the United States “the aggrieved nation,” Polk claimed, “History presents no parallel of so many glorious victories achieved by any nation within so short a period.” Indeed, by the time Lincoln heard Polks message, the fighting was all but over. General Zachary Taylor had won victories at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, and Monterrey, and fought off a Mexican attack at Buena Vista in February 1847. General Winfield Scott had led an expedition of ten thousand U.S. soldiers to capture Veracruz and then led an assault on the capital, Mexico City, securing the surrender of the Mexican defenders on September 14, 1847.
Polk came to Congress seeking ratification of his plan to demand that Mexico pay the United States an indemnity in a cession “of a portion of her territory.” The president appealed to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the cession of Florida of 1819 as precedents. He rejected the attacks of critics who said that the United States should take the high moral ground of accepting no territory. Polk replied, “The doctrine of no territory is the doctrine of no indemnity … and if sanctioned would be a public acknowledgment that our country was wrong and that the war declared by Congress with extraordinary unanimity was unjust and should be abandoned—an admission unfounded in fact and degrading to the national character.”
Freshmen congressmen sometimes struggled to find their speaking voices in the new terrain of the nation’s capital. But Lincoln, only one week after he took his seat in the Thirtieth Congress, wrote a third time to Herndon, declaring, “As you are all so anxious for me to distinguish myself, I have concluded to do so, before long.”
Two weeks after Polk’s annual message, on December 22, 1847, Lincoln rose to introduce a series of eight resolutions asking the president to inform the House about specific actions of the United States. Lincoln’s speech began by using direct quotes from President Polk’s message to Congress of May 11, 1846, and his annual message to Congress in December 1846 and 1847. Lincoln’s purpose was to challenge the president’s veracity. The burden of the first-term congressman’s remarks was contained in his preface to the resolutions: “This House desires to obtain a full knowledge of all the facts which to establish whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed, was, or was not, our own soil, at that time.” Lincoln was directly challenging the president’s assertion that the Mexicans fired the first shot in the war. He used the word “spot” again in the first resolution, as well as in the second and in the third, driving home his point that the spot was not on our soil but actually on the soil of Mexico, thus making the United States the initial aggressor. Lincoln’s resolutions were not remarkable, offering a summary of objections that had been heard by other Whigs in the hallways of Washington and in newspapers throughout the country. But because of Lincoln’s use of the innocuous word “spot,” the challenges would become known as the “spotty” resolutions. He was only getting started.
THE WHIGS’ ATTACKS on “Mr. Polk’s War” resumed in the new year. On January 3, 1848, in the course of a debate on a resolution offering thanks to General Taylor, Congressman George Ashmun of Massachusetts proposed an amendment stating that the war with Mexico had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.” The amendment received the votes of eighty-five Whigs, including Lincoln.
Nine days later, Lincoln rose again, this time to speak to the broader implications of the war. In a thoroughly prepared speech, Lincoln articulated the difference between supporting the troops and supporting the president and his policies. He stated that back in May 1846, he believed that whatever concerns there might be about the constitutionality or necessity of the war, “as citizens and patriots,” persons should “remain silent on that point, at least until the war had ended.” He said he continued to hold this view until he took his seat in Congress and heard President Polk “argue every silent vote given for supplies, into an endorsement of the justice and wisdom of his conduct.”


Lincoln challenged President Polk’s assertion that Mexican troops fired the first shot in the war with Mexico. Lincoln demanded to know whether the particular “spot of soil” where the blood was shed was in the United States.

Lincoln told the House that he had examined all of the president’s messages to see if Polk’s assertions about precedents measured up to the truth. “Now I propose to show, that the whole of this,—issue and evidence—is, from the beginning to end, the sheerest deception.” After analyzing six propositions of the president’s evidence, Lincoln offered his own precedent. “Let him answer with facts, and not with arguments. Let him remember he sits where Washington sat, and so remembering, let him answer as Washington would answer.” In the heat of a present-day controversy, Lincoln found it useful to appeal to the founding fathers.
In escalating rhetoric, Lincoln went on to question both Polk’s motives and conscience. “I more than suspect already, that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong—that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.” Lincoln concluded with a final pummel. President Polk “is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man,” he said. Lincoln’s strong words against the sitting president spread quickly beyond the nation’s capital.
BACK IN ILLINOIS, Lincoln’s forceful assault on President Polk took Lincoln’s friends and foes by surprise. Yes, many Whigs were against the war, but after Lincoln’s speech many people in his district came to believe his words bordered on treason. Illinoisans, proud of the effort of the American troops, resented what they said was Lincoln’s failure to support them.
From so long a distance, Lincoln’s votes were misrepresented by his local opponents and misunderstood by many of his friends. Lincoln went on to vote yes on all bills to fund the troops and their supplies. On January 12, 1848, he gave a speech meant to show that one could support the troops and not the president, a distinction difficult to communicate in a time of patriotic fever.
The Democratic Illinois State Register in Springfield tore into Lincoln. “Thank heaven, Illinois has eight representatives who will stand by the honor of the nation.” Recalling the military heroism of Illinois soldiers, the Register said of Lincoln, “He will have a fearful account to settle with them, should he lend his aid in an effort to neutralize their efforts and blast their fame.” The Register printed what they hoped would be Lincoln’s political epitaph: “Died of Spotted Fever.”
Even Billy Herndon expressed concern about his law partner’s vote for the Ashmun Amendment, firing off a letter on January 19, 1848. Lincoln replied immediately, “If you misunderstand, I fear other friends will also.” Lincoln told Herndon, “I will stake my life, that if you had been in my place, you would have voted just as I did.” He asked Hern-don, “Would you have voted what you felt you knew to be a lie?”
What really upset Lincoln was the way Polk and the Democrats shrewdly tried to conflate support for the war and voting to send supplies for the troops. “I have always intended, and still intend, to vote supplies,” Lincoln told Herndon. The Democrats, he said, “are untiring in their effort to make the impression that all who vote supplies … of necessity, approve the President’s conduct in the beginning of it.” The Whig position, as Lincoln explained, “from the beginning, made and kept the distinction between the two.”
Herndon wrote a second letter and Lincoln replied again. It was obvious now that the partners did not agree on whether any president becomes the “sole judge” in initiating war. Lincoln defended the “provision of the Constitution giving war-making power to Congress.” He told Herndon, “Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure.”
IN MARCH 1848, Lincoln’s curiosity about his ancestors in America became jogged by correspondence from a long-lost relative named Solomon Lincoln. In replying to a letter of inquiry from Solomon Lincoln, Lincoln wrote, “We have a vague tradition, that my greatgrand father, John Lincoln, went from Pennsylvania to Virginia; and that he was a quaker. Further back than that, I have never heard anything.” His curiosity aroused, Lincoln decided to ask James McDowell, the former governor of Virginia and now a colleague in the House, “whether he knew persons of our name there.” McDowell replied he did know of a David Lincoln. Lincoln wrote a second letter to Solomon Lincoln three weeks later telling him of this new discovery.
Lincoln, “much gratified,” received a letter from David Lincoln on March 30, 1848. He quickly replied, “There is no longer any doubt that your uncle Abraham, and my grandfather was the same man.” Lincoln peppered David Lincoln with questions. “Was he or not, a Quaker? About what time did he emigrate from Berks count, Pa. to Virginia? Do you know any thing of your family (or rather I may now say, our family) farther back than your grandfather?” Far from being uninterested in his family background, Lincoln wanted to find out more. Ironically, Solomon Lincoln wrote to Abraham Lincoln from Hingham, Massachusetts, where Lincoln’s ancestors first settled in America—a fact that Abraham Lincoln would never know.
IN THE SPRING OF 1848, Mary Lincoln and their boys left Washington and returned to Lexington. She had grown weary of her confinement in Ann Sprigg’s boardinghouse, where much of the time she found herself alone with her two small children. Lincoln attended sessions of Congress during the day and often spent his evenings in Whig caucuses.
The correspondence between Abraham and Mary from the spring of 1848—some of the few letters between them that have survived—reveals how their affection grew stronger in absence. Lincoln wrote on April 16, 1848, “In this troublesome world, we are never quite satisfied. When you were here, I thought you hindered me in attending to business but now, having nothing but business—no vanity—it has grown exceedingly tasteless to me.” Lincoln admitted, “I hate to stay in the old room by myself.” He wanted to include a greeting from others, but remembered that not everyone at Ann Sprigg’s thought kindly of her, so he wrote, “All the house—or rather all with whom you were on decided good terms—send their love to you. The others say nothing.” He also asked Mary, in the future, “Suppose you do not prefix the “Hon” to the address on your letters to me any more.”
Mary wrote in May telling Abraham that she wanted to return to Washington to be with him. He replied, playfully, “Will you be a good girl in all things, if I consent?” This was undoubtedly another reference to her behavior with other guests at the boardinghouse. “Then come along, and that as soon as possible. Having got the idea in my head, I shall be impatient till I see you.”
The correspondence between Abraham and Mary, in the sixth year of their marriage, brings to light both the depth of their love and the difficulties in their relationship. Lincoln, as was often his way, gently teased Mary about her strained relations with some of the boarders, but his comments also hint at tensions between them. Mary, pretty and perky, could also be difficult and demanding.
WITH MARY AND the two boys gone, Lincoln had more time to continue his self-education. He attended sessions of the U.S. Supreme Court, hearing Daniel Webster argue a case before the highest court in the land. He certainly got a glimpse of Roger B. Taney of Maryland, who in 1836 had been appointed by President Andrew Jackson to replace the legendary John Marshall as chief justice of the United States.
Lincoln frequently walked across the street from the boardinghouse to the Library of Congress. The Library began in 1800 when the capital moved from Philadelphia to Washington. During the War of 1812, when the British burned the Capitol, they used books from the Library of Congress to kindle the inferno. The Library began to rebuild itself when former president Thomas Jefferson offered his private library to Congress. After partisan wrangling, Jefferson’s offer was accepted and Congress purchased his library of 6,487 volumes for $23,950. The books were transported by wagons from Monticello to Washington. The fledgling Library continued in its temporary quarters until August 1824, the last year of James Monroe’s presidency, when it moved into its new home in the center of the west front of the Capitol.
Twenty-three years later, Abraham Lincoln became one of the Library of Congress’s most active borrowers. Where the new congressman spent his free time became “a puzzle, and a subject of amusement” to his fellow representatives. They observed, “He did not drink, or use tobacco, or bet, or swear.” What Lincoln was doing was “mousing among the books” at the Library. Lincoln often selected books to take to his room at the boardinghouse, wrapping them in a bandana, placing a stick in the knot, and transporting them over his shoulder. To his fellow congressmen, whatever else they thought of Lincoln, many were convinced: “He is a bookworm!”
THERE WAS A presidential election in 1848, and in June Lincoln attended the Whig convention in the Chinese Museum Hall in Philadelphia. The contest pitted Henry Clay against General Zachary Taylor. Intellectually, Lincoln leaned toward Clay and his ideas, but he supported Taylor for a strictly pragmatic reason: The Whigs needed to win. The Whigs took a page from the Democrats, who had nominated General Andrew Jackson in 1828 and 1832, and nominated their own military hero, General Zachary Taylor, as their presidential candidate in 1848.
Taylor, a down-home fellow known as “Old Rough and Ready,” had served in the military for forty years. He was best known for leading his troops to an unlikely victory at the desperate battle of Buena Vista in the Mexican War. He did not write or speak well and was woefully ignorant of foreign affairs. The Whigs hoped that Taylor, a strong nationalist, could appeal to their Northern constituents because of his experience in the military. At the same time, they hoped he would also draw in Southerners because he was from Louisiana and owned a plantation with one hundred slaves in Mississippi.


Lincoln made the pragmatic decision to back General Zachary Taylor, a hero of the Mexican War, over Henry Clay in the 1848 presidential election.

Taylor’s nomination allowed Lincoln and other young Whigs in the House to continue to attack the Democrats for beginning an unjust war, but at the same time extol one of the generals responsible for winning it. Taylor’s political record was nonexistent, but he offered the hope of electability. “I am in favor of Gen: Taylor as the whig candidate for the Presidency because I am satisfied we can elect him, that he would give us a whig administration, and that we can not elect any other whig.” The other Whig, unnamed, was Henry Clay. Lincoln said as much in a letter to a friend in Illinois: “Our only chance is with Taylor. I go for him, not because I think he would make a better president than Clay, but because I think he would make a better one than Polk, or Cass, or Buchanan.” In 1848, Lincoln’s political pragmatism triumphed over his idealism.
The Democrats nominated Lewis Cass of Michigan. Cass had fought in the War of 1812, had been secretary of war in the Jackson administration, and was serving as U.S. senator from Michigan. On the slavery issue, Cass favored what he called “popular sovereignty,” letting the residents of each of the new territories decide whether they wanted slavery or not.
A third antislavery party, the Free Soil Party, emerged in 1847–48 as a protest to both Cass, who they feared would allow “squatter sovereignty” in the territories, and to Taylor, a slave owner. The Free Soil Party nominated former president Martin Van Buren as their candidate in 1848. This loose coalition of former Liberty Party men, plus antislavery Whigs and Democrats, campaigned on the slogan “Free soil, free speech, free labor, free men.”
As the long, hot summer term of Congress wound down, presidential politicking warmed up. Presidential campaigning in the early nineteenth century was largely the work of surrogates. Most Americans thought it unseemly for candidates to speak on their own behalf. Before the Thirtieth Congress adjourned, the candidates’ supporters took to the floor to give their best political orations. On July 27, 1848, Lincoln found himself speaking eighth behind three Democrats and four Whigs in the House before a packed gallery. After hours and hours of speeches, how could Lincoln stand out?
He decided to turn the Cass criticism of Taylor against their man. The Democratic speakers that day had complained that they did not know either the principles or policies of General Taylor. Lincoln answered by giving an exposition of Whig principles—tariff, currency, and internal improvements. But Democrats contended that the Whigs had deserted all of their principles and taken refuge under General Taylor’s military armor. Lincoln could smell an opening.
What about the military coattail of General Jackson? “Like a horde of hungry ticks you have stuck to the tail of the Hermitage lion to the end of his life.” Part of Cass’s reputation was his military exploits in the War of 1812. As Lincoln zeroed in on Cass, he exclaimed, “You democrats are now engaged in dovetailing onto the great Michigander … tying him to a military tail.”
Lincoln now raised suspicions about Cass’s war record by presenting a self-deprecating recital of his own military record. “By the way, Mr. Speaker, did you know that I am a military hero?” Lincoln captivated his listeners by declaring, “Yes, sir; in the days of the Black Hawk war, I fought, bled, and came away.” By now it was clear that he was mocking Cass’s military career. “Speaking of Gen: Cass’ career, reminds me of my own.” Lincoln spoke satirically with a set of derisive comparisons about battles, weapons, and enemies, all meant to say that Cass saw no more action than Lincoln did. Finally, in sardonic humor, Lincoln told his colleagues, now convulsed in laughter, “If he saw any live, fighting Indians, it was more than I did; but I had a good many bloody struggles with musquetoes.”
Reporting on Lincoln’s speech, the Baltimore American described his power to mesmerize an audience. Lincoln “was so good natured, and his style so peculiar, that he kept the House in a continuous roar of merriment.” Lincoln’s mannerisms caught the eye of the reporter as it did that of his fellow congressmen. “He would commence a point in his speech far up one of the aisles, and keep on talking, gesticulating, and walking until he would find himself, at the end of a paragraph, down in the center of the area in front of the speaker’s desk. He would then go back and take another bead, and work down again.” Lincoln, perhaps feeling more at home, offered an old-fashioned Illinois stump speech in the well of the House of Representatives.
MARY, BOB, AND EDDIE returned to Washington at the end of July, finding husband and father busily engaged in the last two weeks of the first session of Congress. After an all-night meeting on August 13, 1848, Congress adjourned for the summer. Lincoln decided to spend the recess working for Taylor’s election.
In early September, with a basic stump speech in hand, Lincoln left Washington with his family for a campaign tour in Massachusetts. The Bay State had been a Whig stronghold, led by such giants as Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate, but lately Whig unity and dominance was fracturing. Many members, outraged about the lack of progress on the issue of slavery, were joining the emerging Free Soil Party just as the 1848 presidential campaign got into full swing. By the middle of the 1840s, two groups of New England Whigs had fallen into dispute. “Conscience Whigs” saw the battle over slavery as a moral struggle; “Cotton Whigs,” while admitting the evils of slavery, nevertheless did not want to completely alienate the South, whose cotton was needed in New England’s textile mills. As Lincoln prepared to speak in Massachusetts, he knew many Massachusetts Whigs were deeply upset that the Whig presidential candidate, General Taylor, owned slaves in Louisiana.
Lincoln arrived in Worcester on Tuesday, September 12, 1848, the eve of the Whig state convention. Andrew Bullock, a local Whig politician, was planning a public rally for the evening but all of the speakers had declined his invitation to speak. Hearing that the Illinois congressman was in Worcester, he found Lincoln at the Worcester House and asked him to address the rally. That evening at 7 p.m., Lincoln, dressed in a long linen duster, arrived at the city hall to find more than one thousand people crammed inside. The chairman of the meeting introduced Lincoln as a “Free Soil Whig,” which he did not deny.
Dusting off the speech he gave in the Congress in July, Lincoln spoke for two hours. He had two main goals in mind. First, he wanted to assure the audience that Taylor did embody Whig values. Second, Lincoln drove home the point that Van Buren, the Free Soil candidate, could not win the election; a vote for Van Buren would end up being a vote for the Democratic candidate Cass. Lincoln had vowed never to forget the lesson of the presidential campaign of 1844, that moral purity can be self-defeating if it opens the door to political defeat. The Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican reported that the audience “frequently interrupted” Lincoln “by loud cheering.” The Boston Daily Advertiser was impressed with his initial speech. “Mr. Lincoln has a very tall and thin figure, with an intellectual face, showing a searching mind, and a cool judgment.” The Whig newspaper called Lincoln’s oration a “truly masterly and convincing speech.”
Three days later, Lincoln arrived by train in Boston. The different districts in this city of 130,000 were connected not by horsecars but by a number of stagecoach lines. Used to rude hostelries in central Illinois, Lincoln and his family enjoyed their stay at the stylish Tremont House.
In succeeding days, Lincoln traveled by train to speak in Lowell, Dorchester, Chelsea, Dedham, Cambridge, and Taunton. On Thursday evening, September 21, 1848, Lincoln addressed the Union Hall in Taunton, a city humming with industrialization. A Taunton Whig newspaper, the Old Colony Republican, captured the dynamism of Lincoln as a public speaker and described the way Lincoln “advanced upon his hearers.”
It was an altogether new show for us—a western stump speaker. … Leaning himself up against the wall, as he commenced, and talking in the plainest manner, and in the most indifferent tone, yet gradually fixing his footing, and getting command of his limbs, loosening his tongue, and firing up his thoughts, until he had got possession of himself and of his audience.
The content of Lincoln’s speech struck the reporter as even more distinctive. “Argument and anecdote, wit and wisdom, hymns and prophecies, platforms and syllogisms, came flying before the audience like wild game before the fierce hunter of the prairie.” The reporter concluded, “There has been no gathering of any party in a region where the responses of the audience were so frequent and so vigorous.”
The climax of his speaking tour was a giant Whig open-air rally in the evening in Boston. The main speaker for the evening was not Lincoln, but William H. Seward. A former governor of New York, the slender Seward had been elected to the Senate in 1848 and spoke in Boston as an established leader in the antislavery movement. Seward gave a formal address, arguing that a third Free Soil Party, however well intentioned in their ideas, could only draw away votes from the Whigs and help elect Democrats who would do nothing to stop the spread of slavery.
Seward gave such a lengthy speech that by the time Lincoln was introduced, it was already 9:30. But Lincoln was not about to cut short his remarks. He spoke for a full hour, the Boston Courier reporting that Lincoln spoke “in a most forcible and convincing speech, which drew down thunders of applause.” The next evening Lincoln and Seward, who would go on to become Lincoln’s secretary of state, shared a room in Worcester. Seward recalled, “We spent the greater part of the night talking about anti-slavery positions and principles.” Lincoln told Seward, “I have been thinking about what you said in your speech. 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.”
WITH HIS SPEAKING obligations in New England completed, Lincoln and his family finally started for home. He stopped in Albany, New York, to meet Millard Fillmore, the Whig vice presidential candidate, and Thurlow Weed, founder of the Albany Evening Journal and a close friend of Seward’s. In Buffalo, the Lincolns took a boat trip to see Niagara Falls. Lincoln was “overwhelmed in the contemplation of the vast power the sun is constantly exerting in quiet, noiseless operation of lifting water up to be rained down again.” He wrote some notes about this experience, thinking of turning it into an essay. “It calls up the indefinite past. When Columbus first sought this continent—when Christ suffered on the cross—when Moses led Israel through the Red Sea—nay, even when Adam first came from the hand of his Maker—then as now, Niagara was roaring here.”
The Lincolns traveled on the steamer Globe from Buffalo to Chicago, covering the 1,047 miles in the astounding time of sixty hours. During the voyage, the ship became stranded on a sandbar. The captain called for the hands to collect loose planks and empty casks and barrels and try to force them under the boat to help lift it off the sandbar. Lincoln observed this operation closely, perhaps remembering similar problems in navigating the Sangamon and the Mississippi.
On October 10, 1848, the Lincolns finally arrived home in Springfield. Lincoln quickly learned that many of his constituents held him in disfavor. While campaigning for Taylor in the Seventh District, Lincoln found himself criticized for opposing President Polk on the war with Mexico. The Illinois State Register wrote, “Lincoln has made nothing by coming to this part of the country to make speeches. He had better have stayed away.” Nevertheless, on Election Day, November 7, Lincoln joined the cheering in his hometown when Taylor won the presidency, carrying the Seventh District by nearly fifteen hundred votes.
IN LATE NOVEMBER Lincoln left Springfield to return to Washington for the final, short, session of the Thirtieth Congress, reporting “present” on Saturday, December 7, 1848.
The rump session would be dominated by rancorous debates on slavery, both about the territories and in the nation’s capital. Lincoln had been largely silent during the debates over slavery in the first session, but he returned to Washington determined to offer a compromise measure. Twelve years earlier, in the Illinois legislature, Lincoln had advocated the abolition of slavery in the nation’s capital, but only with the approval of Washington’s citizens. He now wrote a proposal in the same spirit. Lincoln showed it to Joshua Giddings on January 8, 1849, who encouraged him to go forward even though the abolitionist Ohio congressman disapproved of the feature of compensation for the owners of slaves.
Lincoln stood on January 10 to announce his intention to present a bill in his final session in the House. Lincoln aimed for conciliation in a bitterly divided Congress. On the one hand his bill would allow officers of slaveholding states to bring their slaves to the nation’s capital while on government business. Lincoln’s bill also allowed for the arrest of fugitive slaves who might escape into the District. But Lincoln was clear in his first and main point: “No person within the District shall ever be held in slavery within it.”
The next evening, at Mrs. Spriggs’s boarding house, the Whig boarders remained after dinner to discuss Lincoln’s bill. Giddings wrote in his diary of Lincoln’s proposal: “I believed it as good a bill as we could get at this time.”


In March 1849, Lincoln applied for a patent in Washington for his invention to help lift boats over sandbars or shoals.

On January 12, Lincoln intended to introduce his bill but ultimately did not. In a matter of days he discovered that support for his compromise measure had dried up and his bill never made it into the hopper, the wooden box near the Speaker’s desk in which all new bills were deposited before being printed for consideration by committees. In speaking of what Lincoln hoped would be the results of compensated emancipation, he crafted language (“such slaves shall be forever free”) that he would revisit at a future time.
ON FEBRUARY 12, 1849, Congressman Abraham Lincoln turned forty. Three weeks later, the Thirtieth Congress worked all night to conclude its business, finally adjourning at 7 a.m. on Sunday, March 4. On Monday, March 5, a gray cloudy day, Lincoln attended the inauguration of President Zachary Taylor.
Two days later, Lincoln argued his first and only case before the U.S. Supreme Court. While in Congress he had watched cases argued, but now he had the delight of standing before the nine black-robed justices. On March 7, 1849, Lincoln argued Lewis for use of Longworth v. Lewis, referred to the high court from the U.S. Circuit Court in Illinois, which involved a disputed meaning of a statute of limitations. On March 13, 1849, Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled against Lincoln’s plea.
Three days later, Lincoln applied for a patent, the only president ever to do so. Lincoln had long had an engineer’s curiosity about mechanical appliances. When staying with a farmer while traveling on the circuit, he delighted in getting down on the ground and inspecting from every angle a new farm implement. The impetus for this patent grew from his experience on his trip home the previous October, when his boat became stuck on a sandbar. Once back in Springfield, Lincoln built a scale model of his invention with help from Walter Davis, a mechanic with an office near Lincoln’s law office. In his application for a patent, Lincoln stated he had “invented a new and improved manner of combining adjustable buoyant air chambers with a steam boat or other vessel for the purpose of enabling their draught of water to be readily lessened to enable them to pass over bars, or through shallow water, without discharging their cargoes.”
Lincoln was pleased with his new patent, but ship owners did not flock to use it. Herndon, always a bit skeptical about his partner’s idealistic schemes, reported that “the threatened revolution in steamboat architecture and navigation never came to pass.”
Lincoln remained in Washington working tirelessly on political patronage and taking part in speaking engagements in cities near Washington. He advocated a number of claims for fellow Illinois citizens with the new administration. As the only Whig congressman from Illinois, he viewed these patronage opportunities as ways to strengthen the Whig Party. Lincoln wrote many letters recommending everyone from Edward Baker for a place in the cabinet to many friends in Illinois for local offices. Despite his efforts, Lincoln bemoaned, “Not one man recommended by me has yet been appointed to any thing, little or big, except a few who had no opposition.”
The leading patronage office in Illinois was the commissioner of the General Land Office, land being the key commodity in the West. The position offered a salary of three thousand dollars per year. Initially, Lincoln lobbied for Cyrus Edwards, brother of Ninian Edwards. But Lincoln’s friend Edward Baker, now a member of Congress from Galena, had his own candidate, Don Morrison. Neither the candidates nor the sponsors could agree to compromise. Some of Lincoln’s friends suggested that he himself become the compromise candidate, but he declined. “I must not only be chaste but above suspicion.”
Finally, on March 20, 1849, Lincoln started the arduous trip home to Illinois. A chastened Lincoln arrived in Springfield on Saturday evening, March 31. His return was not greeted with the well wishes of the press and public with which he had left for Washington only sixteen months earlier. The Whigs, adhering to the rotation system, had run Lincoln’s former law partner Stephen Logan for Congress, but he had suffered a narrow defeat in his effort to become the fourth consecutive Whig to represent the Seventh Congressional District. Lincoln received plenty of blame for the defeat. Democrats murmured that Lincoln had provided “aid and comfort to the enemy.” Wiser pundits recognized that Logan’s crusty manner and lack of speaking ability did not measure up to that of Lincoln and the previous Whig candidates.
The deadlock for the Land Office position threatened to be broken when another candidate suddenly entered the contest. Justin Butter-field, a prominent Chicago attorney and ardent supporter of Clay, had contested the presidential campaign of Zachary Taylor to the end, and had not worked to build up the Whig Party in Illinois. Lincoln wondered aloud why he should now receive this patronage plum. “He is my personal friend, and is qualified to do the duties of the office but of the one hundred Illinoisians, equally well qualified, I do not know of one with less claims to it.”
Learning that Butterfield was Secretary of the Interior Thomas Ewing’s probable choice, and upset by the cumulative evidence that Taylor supporters were not receiving their deserved patronage positions, Lincoln decided to pursue the position for himself. He quickly orchestrated a letter-writing campaign by his friends to Secretary Ewing, even asking Mary to write letters to supporters on his behalf. He also tried to go around Ewing and appeal directly to President Taylor. But unknown to Lincoln, several Whigs in Springfield had written to Secretary Ewing criticizing Lincoln for his speech in Congress against the Mexican War, “which inflicted a deep and mischievous wound upon the Whole Whig party of the state.”
On June 10, 1849, Lincoln rushed back to Washington to lobby for the job, believing that letters sent to Ewing had somehow been withheld from President Taylor. He arrived on June 19 only to learn two days later that Taylor had followed Secretary Ewing’s recommendation and appointed Butterfield. Lincoln was devastated.
When Lincoln returned to Springfield he wrote Ewing, “I opposed the appointment of Mr. B because I believed it would be a matter of discouragement to our active, working friends here, and I opposed it for no other reason.” He told the secretary of the interior, “I never did, in any true sense, want the job for myself.”
In August 1849, Lincoln was offered a second-place prize: secretary of the Oregon Territory. He quickly wrote to Secretary of State John M. Clayton to decline the office. In September, Secretary Ewing offered him the governorship of Oregon. He took some time to consider this offer, which Mary argued against. Lincoln recognized the future power of the states forming in the Far West, but he also knew that Oregon was at that moment in the hands of Democrats, and thus he saw little future there for a Whig politician. He believed the office would mean political exile. He declined the position.
LINCOLN HAD CAMPAIGNED for the Illinois legislature by vowing to be a legislator who would faithfully advocate the beliefs and opinions of the people he represented; he was now criticized for taking a position on the Mexican War that was unrepresentative of the beliefs of the people of his district. Secretary of State Clayton and Secretary of the Interior Ewing had offered him positions he did not want and refused to give him the one position he would have accepted. Herndon would say later that when Lincoln returned to Springfield, he “determined to eschew politics from that time forward and devote himself entirely to the law.”