Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

as incentives. The Whigs were the party of up-and-coming men, the businessmen, the self-improvers and self-transformers who did not want to be bound by the old loyalties of the past, and who saw at the core of American democracy the opportunity to transform themselves. Lincoln believed that what made the United States “at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world” was that, in America, “every man can make himself.” Whigs such as Lincoln embraced this self-making model as the guarantee of “hope to all, and energy, and progress and improvement of condition to all.” So Lincoln took Henry Clay (a fellow Kentuckian) as his political idol, as Lincoln’s “beau ideal of a statesman.” His first electoral platform—he ran for the state legislature but only came in eighth in a field of thirteen candidates—was dedicated to the need for tax-funded internal improvements. “He was,” said Stephen T. Logan, his second law partner, “as stiff as a man could be in his Whig doctrines.”11

In 1834 Lincoln won his first seat in the Illinois state legislature as a Whig, and served four successive terms there. In the process, he helped lead the Illinois legislature into the sponsorship of transportation projects and, in 1837, the passage of a $10 million appropriation for railroad construction. His first major speech in the Illinois legislature praised the operation of the Illinois State Bank for having “doubled the prices of the products” of Illinois farms and filled farmers’ pockets “with a sound circulating medium,” noting that the farmers were “all well-pleased with its operations.” Democratic attacks on banks and bank charters, Lincoln explained, would never hurt “men of wealth,” who are “beyond the power of fortune,” but they would “depreciate the value of its paper [currency] in the hands of the honest and unsuspecting farmer and mechanic.”12

Having helped to put much of this program in place, Lincoln saw it promptly turned to ashes. A national economic depression, caused in large measure by the Democratic assault on the banks, crushed the American economy in 1837. Illinois had financed its railroad appropriation on bank borrowing, and the collapse of the banks saddled the state legislature (and the unforgiving taxpayers) with an indebtedness that took years to pay off.13

This did nothing to discourage Lincoln’s urges for social betterment and education. While still a state legislator, Lincoln began teaching himself law out of an assortment of borrowed law books, and in 1836 he was licensed to practice in the state circuit courts. The choice of law as a profession was part and parcel of his Whiggish economic aspirations, since lawyers were (in the phrase of historian Charles G. Sellers) the “shock troops” of market capitalism, and from John Marshall’s Supreme Court on down, American lawyers were becoming the guardians of commercial contracts and property. It was in pursuit of the market—and of the financial and social respectability that came with it—that Lincoln moved to the Illinois state capital, Springfield, and entered a law firm there with another young lawyer, John Todd Stuart. Even then Lincoln was not content. “That man,” wrote his later law partner, William Henry Herndon, “who thinks Lincoln calmly gathered his robes about him, waiting for the people to call him, has a very erroneous knowledge of Lincoln. He was always calculating and planning ahead. His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.”14

Eventually, that “little engine” succeeded. In 1842 Lincoln married Mary Todd, the daughter of a prominent Lexington, Kentucky, family, who brought him a lifelong schooling in social graces. Even more important, Lincoln labored with ferocious intensity at becoming a successful lawyer and Whig politician. Herndon noticed that Lincoln seemed to think “that there were no limitations to the force and endurance of his mental and vital powers,” and he watched Lincoln wear himself to the point of breakdown in “a continuous, severe, persistent, and exhaustive thought” on a problem. Herndon described Lincoln as “persistent, fearless, and tireless in thinking.”15

His thoroughness, his feel for the practical in legal issues, and his remarkably retentive memory made Lincoln an outstanding courtroom performer. He was not “a learned lawyer,” recalled Herndon, but he was a first-rate case lawyer with an uncanny ability to bend juries to his point of view. “He was wise as a serpent in the trial of a cause,” one legal associate, Leonard Swett, recalled, “but I have got too many scars from his blows to certify that he was harmless as a dove.” He was not a schemer. “Discourage litigation,” was Lincoln’s own advice to aspiring lawyers. “Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser—in fees, expenses, and waste of time.” If anything, he was renowned for his scrupulous honesty. Among his fellow lawyers, “Mr. Lincoln’s character for professional honor stood very high.” The entire “frame-work of his mental and moral being was honesty,” Herndon remembered, “open, candid and square in his profession, never practicing on the sharp or low.” Herndon watched him warn clients with shaky cases, “You are in the wrong of the case and I would advise you to compromise, or if you cannot do that, do not bring a suit on the facts of your case because you are in the wrong and surely [be] defeated and have to pay a big bill of costs.”16

Yet, as unbending as Lincoln could be about ends, he was surprisingly flexible about means. “Mr. Lincoln was a very patient man generally,” said Herndon, “but if you wished to be cut off at the knee, just go at Lincoln with abstractions.” This was a pattern that, in later years, would also characterize his political solutions. “Secret, silent, and a very reticent-minded man,” Lincoln was “a riddle and a puzzle to his friends and neighbors,” and in political combat he could be deceptively hard, evasive and dangerous to underestimate. “Any man,” warned Leonard Swett, “who took Lincoln for a simple minded man would very soon wake [up] with his back in a