Abraham Lincoln. Baron Godfrey Rathbone Benson Charnwood
to have had much grasp of such matters. "In this respect alone," writes an admirer, "I have always considered Mr. Lincoln a weak man." It is only when (rarely, at first) constitutional or moral issues emerge that his politics become interesting. We can guess the causes which attached him to the Whigs. As the party out of power, and in Illinois quite out of favour, they had doubtless some advantage in character. As we have seen, the greatest minds among American statesmen of that day, Webster and Clay, were Whigs. Lincoln's simple and quite reasonable, if inconclusive, argument for Protection, can be found among his speeches of some years later. And schemes of internal development certainly fired his imagination.
After his failure in business Lincoln subsisted for a while on odd jobs for farmers, but was soon employed as assistant surveyor by John Calhoun, then surveyor of the county. This gentleman, who had been educated as a lawyer but "taught school in preference," was a keen Democrat, and had to assure Lincoln that office as his assistant would not necessitate his desertion of his principles. He was a clever man, and Lincoln remembered him long after as the most formidable antagonist he ever met in debate. With the help, again, of Mentor Graham, Lincoln soon learned the surveyor's business. He continued at this work till he was able to start as a lawyer, and there is evidence that his surveys of property were done with extreme accuracy. Soon he further obtained the local Postmastership. This, the only position except the Presidency itself which he ever held in the Federal Government, was not onerous, for the mails were infrequent; he "carried the office around in his hat"; we are glad to be told that "his administration gave satisfaction." Once calamity threatened him; a creditor distrained on the horse and the instruments necessary to his surveyorship; but Lincoln was reputed to be a helpful fellow, and friends were ready to help him; they bought the horse and instruments back for him. To this time belongs his first acquaintance with some writers of unsettling tendency, Tom Paine, Voltaire, and Volney, who was then recognised as one of the dangerous authors. Cock-fights, strange feats of strength, or of usefulness with axe or hammer or scythe, and a passion for mimicry continue. In 1834 he became a candidate again. "Can't the party raise any better material than that?" asked a bystander before a speech of his; after it, he exclaimed that the speaker knew more than all the other candidates put together. This time he was elected, being then twenty-five, and thereafter he was returned for three further terms of two years. Shortly before his second election in 1836 the State capital was removed to Springfield, in his own county. There in 1837 Lincoln fixed his home. He had long been reading law in his curious, spasmodically concentrated way, and he had practised a little as a "pettifogger," that is, an unlicensed practitioner in the inferior courts. He had now obtained his license and was very shortly taken into partnership by an old friend in Springfield.
2. In the Illinois Legislature.
Here his youth may be said to end. Springfield was a different place from New Salem. There were carriages in it, and ladles who studied poetry and the fashions. There were families from Virginia and Kentucky who were conscious of ancestry, while graver, possibly more pushing, people from the North-eastern States, soon to outnumber them, were a little inclined to ridicule what they called their "illusory ascendency." There was a brisk competition of churches, and mutual improvement societies such as the "Young Men's Lyceum" had a rival claim to attention with races and cock-fights.
And it was an altered Abraham Lincoln that came to inhabit Springfield. Arriving a day or two before his first law partnership was settled he came into the shop of a thriving young tradesman, Mr. Joshua Speed, to ask about the price of the cheapest bedding and other necessary articles. The sum for which Lincoln, who had not one cent, would have had to ask, and would have been readily allowed, credit, was only seventeen dollars. But this huge prospect of debt so visibly depressed him that Speed instantly proposed an arrangement which involved no money debt. He took him upstairs and installed him—Western domestic arrangements were and are still simple—as the joint occupant of his own large bed. "Well, Speed, I'm moved," was the terse acknowledgment. Speed was to move him later by more precious charity. We are concerned for the moment with what moved Speed. "I looked up at him," said he, long after, "and I thought then, as I think now, that I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face in my life." The struggle of ambition and poverty may well have been telling on Lincoln; but besides that a tragical love story (shortly to be told) had left a deep and permanent mark; but these influences worked, we may suppose, upon a disposition quite as prone to sadness as to mirth. His exceedingly gregarious habit, drawing him to almost any assembly of his own sex, continued all his life; but it alternated from the first with a habit of solitude or abstraction, the abstraction of a man who, when he does wish to read, will read intently in the midst of crowd or noise, or walking along the street. He was what might unkindly be called almost a professional humorist, the master of a thousand startling stories, delightful to the hearer, but possibly tiresome in written reminiscences, but we know too well that gifts of this kind are as compatible with sadness as they certainly are with deadly seriousness.
The Legislature of Illinois in the eight years from 1834 to 1842, in which Lincoln belonged to it, was, though not a wise, a vigorous body. In the conditions which then existed it was not likely to have been captured as the Legislatures of wilder and more thinly-peopled States have sometimes been by a disreputable element in the community, nor to have subsided into the hands of the dull mechanical class of professional politicians with which, rightly or wrongly, we have now been led to associate American State Government. The fact of Lincoln's own election suggests that dishonest adventurers might easily have got there, but equally suggests that a very different type of men prevailed. "The Legislature," we are told, "contained the youth and blood and fire of the frontier." Among the Democrats in the Legislature was Stephen Douglas, who was to become one of the most powerful men in the United States while Lincoln was still unknown; and several of Lincoln's Whig colleagues were afterwards to play distinguished or honourable parts in politics or war. We need not linger over them, but what we know of those with whom he had any special intimacy makes it entirely pleasant to associate him with them. After a short time in which, like any sensible young member of an assembly, he watched and hardly ever spoke, Lincoln soon made his way among these men, and in 1838 and 1840 the Whig members—though, being in a minority, they could not elect him—gave him their unanimous votes for the Speakership of the Assembly. The business which engrossed the Legislature, at least up to 1838, was the development of the natural resources of the State. These were great. It was natural that railways, canals and other public works to develop them should be pushed forward at the public cost. Other new countries since, with less excuse because with greater warning from experience, have plunged in this matter, and, though the Governor protested, the Illinois Legislature, Whigs and Democrats, Lincoln and every one else, plunged gaily, so that, during the collapse which followed, Illinois, though, like Lincoln himself, it paid its debts in the end, was driven in 1840 to suspend interest payments for several years.
Very little is recorded of Lincoln's legislative doings. What is related chiefly exhibits his delight in the game of negotiation and combination by which he and the other members for his county, together known as "the Long Nine," advanced the particular projects which pleased their constituents or struck their own fancy. Thus he early had a hand in the removal of the capital from Vandalia to Springfield in his own county. The map of Illinois suggests that Springfield was a better site for the purpose than Vandalia and at least as good as Jacksonville or Peoria or any of its other competitors. Of his few recorded speeches one concerns a proposed inquiry into some alleged impropriety in the allotment of shares in the State Bank. It is certainly the speech of a bold man; it argues with remarkable directness that whereas a committee of prominent citizens which had already inquired into this matter consisted of men of known honesty, the proposed committee of the Legislators, whom he was addressing, would consist of men who, for all he knew, might be honest, and, for all he knew, might not.
The Federal politics of this time, though Lincoln played an active local part in the campaigns of the Whig party, concern us little. The Whigs, to whom he did subordinate service, were, as has been said, an unlucky party. In 1840, in the reaction which extreme commercial depression created against the previously omnipotent Democrats, the Whig candidate for the Presidency was successful. This was General Harrison, a respected soldier of the last war, who was glorified as a sort of Cincinnatus and elected after an outburst of enthusiastic tomfoolery such as never before or since rejoiced the American people. But President Harrison had hardly been in office a