One Man Great Enough

John C. Waugh

Description

From the author of The Class of 1846: “A swift-paced narrative of Lincoln’s pre-presidential life.” —The Washington Post Book World

How did Abraham Lincoln, long held as a paragon of presidential bravery and principled politics, find his way to the White House? How did he become the one man great enough to risk the fate of the nation on the well-worn but cast-off notion that all men are created equal?
 
Here, award-winning historian John C. Waugh takes readers on Lincoln’s road to the Civil War. From his first public rejection of slavery to his secret arrival in the capital, from his stunning debates with Stephen Douglas to his contemplative moments considering the state of the country he loved, Waugh shows us America as Lincoln saw and described it. Much of this wonderful story is told by Lincoln himself, detailing through his own writing his emergence onto the political scene and the evolution of his beliefs about the Union, the Constitution, democracy, slavery, and civil war. Waugh sets Lincoln’s path in new relief by letting the great man tell his own story, at a depth that brings us ever closer to understanding this mysterious, complicated, and truly great man.
 
“Lively prose backed with solid research.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“[Waugh’s] judicious use of the historical record and his dramatic prose make for an enjoyable read.” —Kirkus Reviews

Sujets

• Illinois
• Springfield
• Stephen A. Douglas
• Émancipation
• Whig Party (United States)
• History of the United States
• Slavery in the United States
• Lincoln?Douglas debates of 1858
• Racism in the United States
• Presidential Diaries
• 1800s
• Abe lincoln
• Honest Abe

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 13 février 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9780547350738
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
The Uncoiling of the Serpent
Who He Was and Where He Came From
The Dark and Bloody Ground
The Hoosier Years
Making His Way
New Salem
Politics
Vandalia
The Issue’s Dark Side
Death in Alton
Political Enemies and Female Enigmas
Springfield
Young Hickory
The Ballyhoo Campaign
Lincoln in Love
On the National Stage
The Steam Engine in Breeches and the Engine that Knew No Rest
“Who Is James K. Polk?”
Laying Congressional Pipe
Seeing Spots
Eclipse
Lincoln’s Other Life
What He Had Become
Tempest
Clash of the Giants
Lincoln Emerges
Political Earthquake
At the Crossroads
Axe Handles and Wedges
A House Divided
The Debates
Photos
On the Glory Road
Spreading the Gospel
Cooper Union
Reaching for the Brass Ring
Chicago
From Ballots to Bullets
The Four-Legged Race
Firebell in the Night
Getting There
The War Comes
Twilight of the Little Giant
In Appreciation
Notes
Sources Cited
Index
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Footnotes
Copyright © 2007 by John C. Waugh

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Waugh, John C. One man great enough : Abraham Lincoln’s road to Civil War / John C. Waugh.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Childhood and youth. 2. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Political career before 1861. 3. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Political and social views. 4. Presidents—United States—Biography. 5. United States—Politics and government—1837–1841. 6. United States—Politics and government—1841–1845. 7. United States—Politics and government—1845–1861. 8. United States—History-Civil War, 1861–1865—Causes. 9. Illinois—Politics and government—To 1865. I. Title. E457.3.W25 2007 973.7092—dc22 2007009588 978-0-15-101071-4

e ISBN 978-0-547-35073-8 v4.1116
 
For my father, who had a sense of humor Lincoln would have appreciated.
PROLOGUE
The Uncoiling of the Serpent
The new two-story statehouse in Vandalia, Illinois, stood unfinished in early 1837. Workmen had slapped plaster on the walls just before the Tenth General Assembly convened in December. Its damp, displeasing essence still hung in the legislative chambers upstairs. 1
Abraham Lincoln, a young Whig legislator from Sangamon County, was beginning his second term. He was not as new to politics as the plaster was to the walls, but the plaster was more likely to stick than what he was about to do. In a bold move, he was about to drop a resolution into the record that ran emphatically against dominant public opinion in his state—on slavery, which raised hackles as no other issue did.
The issue was uncoiling across the country like a hissing serpent. Abolition societies proliferated in the North, blanketing the Union with incendiary antislavery pamphlets. Alarmed and angry Southern legislators were passing resolutions violently condemning these “fire brands of discord and disunion.” 2 The South’s mightiest guns, its most articulate and powerful ideologues, were answering in kind, showering shot and shell on abolitionism in the defense of their “peculiar institution.”
Southern legislatures were not only passing angry resolutions against abolitionists, they were demanding that Northern legislatures do the same. Virginia, Alabama, and Mississippi had sent memorials to Illinois, which Governor Joseph Duncan had transmitted to the General Assembly in December 1836.
In January, the Illinois legislature resoundingly passed a set of sympathizing resolutions—that “we highly disapprove of the formation of abolition societies, and of the doctrines promulgated by them”; that the right of property in slaves is “sacred to the slave-holding States by the Federal Constitution, and that they can’t be deprived of that right without their consent.” 3
Lincoln quietly voted against the resolutions, one of only six of the legislature’s ninety-one members who did. In early March, three days before adjournment, he wanted to quietly add something more to the record.
The issue was important to many in Illinois, but it mattered to Lincoln in a different way. For the most part, the people of Illinois were emigrants from Southern states, as was Lincoln himself—born in Kentucky and grown to manhood in southern Indiana. Most of these former Southerners were for slavery and against anything that wasn’t.
Lincoln, though a Southerner, didn’t see it exactly that way. Not that this gangly young lawmaker bought into the idea of Negro equality. He didn’t. With most white opinion, Northern and Southern, he embraced white supremacy. He opposed black suffrage, voting in his first term for a resolution “that the elective franchise should be kept pure from contamination by the admission of colored votes.” 4 He rejected outright the idea of racial intermarriage.
But in Lincoln’s mind slavery was a different matter. It was immoral, crowding the outer limit of inhumanity. He was to say, “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.” 5
In March 1837, he wanted to introduce a resolution that would mirror this feeling. But he was playing with dynamite. The wording had to be hedged; it would be political suicide in Illinois to be lumped with abolitionists. And he would have to do it virtually alone. The only other House member willing to go with him was Dan Stone, a fellow Whig legislator who had brought his anti-slavery psyche with him from his native Vermont.
On March 3 they introduced their resolution, protesting the longer ones passed in January. It was entered in the record without comment or debate. It said: “Resolutions upon the subject of domestic slavery having passed both branches of the General Assembly at its present session, the undersigned hereby protest against the passage of the same. They believe that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils.” 6
That was the nub of it. Abolitionist agitation was bad enough, but the greater evil was slavery itself. The original resolutions hadn’t said that. There was a moral issue here. And that was the distinction Lincoln and Stone wanted to make. They made it quietly, as they went out the door.
Softly introduced, those lines made virtually no noise in the state. But it was the first public stand that this young politician ever took on the institution of slavery. It was to be the first of many on a road that would lead him—and his country—to the very gates of disunion and civil war.
 
PART ONE
Who He Was and Where He Came From
1
The Dark and Bloody Ground
A BRAHAM L INCOLN’S ANCESTRAL LINE , like so many others in the New World, followed a southwesterly drift—from England to Massachusetts, into New Jersey and Pennsylvania to Virginia, then through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky. In the late 1700s, Lincoln’s Grandfather Abraham followed the flood of migration to the Wilderness Road through that Gap, the “great cleft” in the mountains, 1 past dark cliffs “so wild and horrid” in aspect “that it is impossible to behold them without terror.” 2
The Wilderness Road itself, that track through Kentucky beyond the Gap, was just as terrorizing—“a lonely and houseless path” into “a wild and cheerless land.” 3 The road was an ancient Indian warrior path over a hunting ground still bitterly disputed by fierce, unwelcoming, massacre-minded Shawnee, Iroquois, Cherokee, and Chickasaw. Kentucky, crossed by that rough Indian road, was faithful to its reputation and definition—“the dark and bloody ground.” 4
But these pioneers were pilgrims, drawn irresistibly over this “gash through the wilderness,” 5 to an abundant, rich, and beckoning promised land. The abiding presence of instant death by rifle, tomahawk, or arrow seemed worth the cost for such ground. Moses Austin, himself a pilgrim to Texas, said of them, “hundreds Travelling hundreds of Miles, they know not for what Nor Whither, except its to Kentuckey . . . the Promised land . . . the land of Milk and Honey.” 6
Lincoln’s grandfather pushed “on the crest of the wave of Western settlement,” deep into this land of milk and honey to settle on over 5,000 acres of ground near Bear Grass Fort, the site of present day Louisville. There he built a log cabin, and soon the dark and bloody ground claimed him. In a