360 Chapter 13 The Coming of the Civil War
tariff duties to the lowest levels in nearly half a century.
As prices plummeted and unemployment rose, they
attributed the collapse to foreign competition and
accused the South of having sacrificed the prosperity of
the rest of the nation for its selfish advantage. The
South in turn read in its relative immunity from the
depression proof of the superiority of the slave system,
which further stimulated the running sectional debate
about the relative merits of free and slave labor.
Dissolution threatened the Union. To many
Americans, Stephen A. Douglas seemed to offer the
best hope of preserving it. For this reason unusual
attention was focused on his campaign for reelection
to the Senate in 1858. The importance of the contest
and Douglas’s national prestige put great pressure on
the Republicans of Illinois to nominate someone who
would make a good showing against him. The man
they chose was Abraham Lincoln.
After a towering figure has passed from the stage, it
is always difficult to discover what he was like before his
rise to prominence. This is especially true of Lincoln,
who changed greatly when power, responsibility, and
fame came to him. Lincoln was not unknown in 1858,
but his public career had not been distinguished. He
was born in Kentucky in 1809, and the story of his early
life can be condensed, as he once said himself, into a
single line from Gray’s Elegy: “The short and simple
annals of the poor.” His illiterate father, Thomas
Lincoln, was a typical frontier wanderer. When
Abraham was seven years old, the family moved to
Indiana. In 1830 they pushed west again into southern
Illinois. The boy received almost no formal schooling.
However, Lincoln had a good mind, and he was
extremely ambitious.^2 He cut loose from his family,
made a trip to New Orleans, and for a time managed
a general store in New Salem, Illinois. In 1834, when
barely twenty-five, he won a seat in the Illinois legisla-
ture as a Whig. Meanwhile, he studied law and was
admitted to the bar in 1836.
Lincoln remained in the legislature until 1842, dis-
playing a perfect willingness to adopt the Whig position
on all issues. In 1846 he was elected to Congress. While
not engaged in politics he worked at the law, maintain-
ing an office in Springfield and following the circuit,
taking a variety of cases, few of much importance. He
earned a decent but by no means sumptuous living.
After one term in Congress, marked by his partisan
opposition to Polk’s Mexican policy, his political career
petered out. He seemed fated to pass his remaining
years as a small-town lawyer.
Even during this period Lincoln’s personality was
extraordinarily complex. His bawdy sense of humor
and his endless fund of stories and tall tales made him
a legend first in Illinois and then in Washington. He
was admired in Illinois as an expert axman and a
champion wrestler. He was thoroughly at home with
toughs like the “Clary’s Grove Boys” of New Salem
and in the convivial atmosphere of a party caucus. But
in a society where most men drank heavily, he never
touched liquor. And he was subject to periods of pro-
found melancholy. Friends spoke of him as having
“cat fits,” and he wrote of himself in the early 1840s,
“I am now the most miserable man living. If what I
felt were equally distributed to the whole human fam-
ily, there would not be one cheerful face on earth.”
In a region swept by repeated waves of religious
revivalism, Lincoln managed to be at once a man of
calm spirituality and a skeptic without appearing
offensive to conventional believers. He was a party
wheelhorse, a corporation lawyer, even a railroad lob-
byist, yet his reputation for integrity was stainless.
The revival of the slavery controversy in 1854
stirred Lincoln deeply. No abolitionist, he had tried to
take a “realistic” view of the problem. The Kansas-
Nebraska bill led him to see the moral issue more
clearly. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” he
stated with the directness and simplicity of expression
for which he later became famous. Compromises made
in the past for the sake of sectional harmony had
always sought to preserve as much territory as possible
for freedom. Yet unlike most Free Soilers, he did not
blame the Southerners for slavery. “They are just what
we would be in their situation,” he confessed.
Thus Lincoln was at once compassionate toward
the slave owner and stern toward the institution. “A
house divided against itself cannot stand,” he warned.
“I believe this government cannot endure perma-
nently half slave and half free.” Without minimizing
the difficulties or urging a hasty or ill-considered
solution, Lincoln demanded that the people look
toward a day, however remote, when not only Kansas
but the entire country would be free.The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
As Lincoln developed these ideas his reputation grew. In
1855 he almost won the Whig nomination for senator.
He became a Republican shortly thereafter, and in June
1856, at the first Republican National Convention, he
received 110 votes for the vice-presidential nomination.
He seemed the logical man to pit against Douglas in- The Lincoln-Douglas debates were well-attended
and widely reported, for the idea of a direct confronta-
tion between candidates for an important office cap-
tured the popular imagination.
The choice of the next senator lay, of course, in the
hands of the Illinois legislature. Technically, Douglas
and Lincoln were campaigning for candidates for the
legislature who were pledged to support them for the
(^2) His law partner, William Herndon, said that Lincoln’s ambition
was “a little engine that knows no rest.”