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

The plainest example of this evasiveness was his awkward embarrassment over his crude backcountry origins. “Lincoln’s ambition,” remarked Herndon, was “to be distinctly understood by the common people.” Yet no man wanted less to be one of them. Once Lincoln moved to Springfield, he rarely cast a backward glance at his humble origins: neither Thomas nor Sarah Lincoln was invited to their son’s wedding, and Lincoln was too embarrassed and alienated by his father’s crudeness even to attend the old man’s funeral in 1851. His stepbrother’s pleas that Lincoln come down to the Coles County farmhouse where Thomas Lincoln lay dying were met with a frosty refusal: “Say to him that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.”18

When the same stepbrother tried to talk Lincoln into a loan to pay off his debts, Lincoln bluntly refused: “You are now in need of some ready money; and what I propose is, that you shall go to work, ‘tooth and nails’ for some body who will give you money [for] it. Let father and your boys take charge of things at home—prepare for a crop, and make the crop; and you go to work for the best money wages, or in discharge of any debt you owe, that you can get”—in other words, join the cash economy. Lincoln had no love for Thomas Jefferson’s republic of yeoman farmers, nor would he have much use for utopian dreams of cooperative commonwealths in which all results were leveled. What he wanted for the Union was what he wanted for himself: an upwardly mobile society of successful small-scale producers and professionals, with equal liberty to pursue their own interests. “I hold the value of life is to improve one’s condition,” Lincoln said in 1861, and the star he navigated by was the “promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”19

The practice of law gave Lincoln his first “equal chance.” Although much of his reputation as a trial lawyer was made on the state circuit courts, riding from one plank-and-shingle courthouse to another over the Illinois prairies, by the 1850s he was appearing regularly before the Illinois Supreme Court, where he handled appeals in 402 cases, and in the federal circuit court for northern Illinois, where he handled over 300 cases for bankruptcy and debt. In addition to a demanding legal practice that may have amounted to more than 5,100 cases and upward of 100,000 separate legal documents, Lincoln even managed to sit as a judge in more than a hundred cases on the state circuit courts when a regular judge was sick or unavailable. He was involved in six cases before the United States Supreme Court (one of which involved oral argument before no less than Roger B. Taney) and developed a long-term association as counsel for the Illinois Central Railroad (sublimely confident in the benefits of pushing the boundaries of markets deeper and deeper into the west, Lincoln managed to persuade the state court to have the Illinois Central declared tax-exempt as a “public work”).20

Lincoln was not a sentimentalist about the law. “There was nothing of the milksop about him,” remarked Henry Clay Whitney, who practiced alongside Lincoln on the Eighth Circuit. Although his two most famous trials—his defenses of Duff Armstrong and Peachy Quinn Harrison on murder indictments—were criminal cases, criminal law accounted for only about 6 percent of his case load over twenty-four years; the bulk of his practice was civil and commercial, and the single largest category included bankruptcies and debt collections; Whitney “never found him unwilling to appear in behalf of a great ‘soulless corporation.’” Lincoln had no animus against capital: “Men who are industrious, and sober, and honest in the pursuit of their own interests should after a while accumulate capital, and after that should be allowed to enjoy it in peace, and also if they should choose when they have accumulated it to use it to save themselves from actual labor and hire other people to labor for them is right. In doing so they do not wrong the man they employ.” Nor did Lincoln propose any “war upon capital.” He took it for granted that “it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can.” He merely wished Americans “to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else.” Lincoln certainly labored to practice what he preached: by the 1850s, Lincoln was commanding an annual income of more than $5,000 per annum—approximately twenty times that figure if we reckon in today’s currency—owned a large frame house in Springfield, had his eldest son in a private school in Springfield, and had investments in real estate, mortgages, notes, bank accounts, and insurance policies amounting to over $20,000.21

Despite his successes, Abraham Lincoln arrived at his mid-forties dissatisfied and restless. Rigidly self-controlled, Lincoln refused even the relaxation of liquor, and Robert Lincoln, his eldest son, afterward recollected that he had “seen him take a sip of a glass of ale and also of a glass of champagne… on two or three occasions in my life, not more.” When self-control or his control of his circumstances escaped him, Lincoln had always been possessed by a strain of moody introspection, and he easily lapsed into periods of sustained and almost suicidal depression. “You flaxen men with broad faces are born with cheer and don’t know a cloud from a star,” he told one optimistic Iowa politician. “I am of another temperament.” Whatever religion he may have been taught by his parents he had exchanged for an emotionless rationalistic deism, and he proclaimed his faith not in a personal God but in “reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason,” as “all the materials for our future support and defence.” Yet all his life he retained a streak of the superstitious, in the form of belief in dreams and