Lincoln's Mentors Read online

  Dedication

  IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER, SHIVIA LEE GERHARDT (1929–2020). HER SELFLESS DEVOTION, LOVE, PATIENCE, COURAGE, AND SUPPORT ARE ENDURING BLESSINGS AND MODELS TO US ALL.

  Epigraph

  Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject we as a people can be engaged in.

  —ABRAHAM LINCOLN, First Campaign Speech, March 9, 1832

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction: The Search for Lincoln’s Teachers

  Chapter One: Finding His Mentors (1809–1834)

  Chapter Two: Finding the Path to Congress (1834–1844)

  Chapter Three: Clay Man in the House (1844–1850)

  Chapter Four: Learning from Failure (1849–1856)

  Chapter Five: Becoming President (1856–1860)

  Chapter Six: “He Was Entirely Ignorant Not Only of the Duties, But of the Manner of Doing Business” (1860–1861)

  Chapter Seven: Commander in Chief (1861–1864)

  Chapter Eight: Final Act (1864–1865)

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  The Search for Lincoln’s Teachers

  In times of crisis, Americans look to Abraham Lincoln. That impulse has been especially strong in the year 2020, as the nation has simultaneously grappled with a pandemic costing more than a quarter of a million American lives, a recession causing unemployment exceeding Depression-level numbers, mass protests against racism and police brutality, waves of violence across the land, and an impending presidential election bound to inflame divisions among America’s public. For such a fraught time, Lincoln’s eloquence, steady hand, and determination in leading an embattled nation to overcome secession, brutal civil war, and a severely weakened economy have become touchstones for Americans yearning for unifying, calming leadership.

  Yet, at the heart of Abraham Lincoln’s successes and story is a mystery that has intrigued historians and admirers. How did a man with no executive experience and only a single term in Congress become America’s greatest president? That is the question nearly everyone asks about Lincoln. This book suggests an answer. The most common view of Lincoln as a political genius does not give Lincoln his due. To be certain, his political acumen and soaring rhetoric are matched by few others in American history. But Lincoln had a handful of men to whom he turned for guidance and inspiration throughout his life. Even as a young man, Lincoln knew enough to know he needed mentors. He could not learn in isolation all the skills he needed to become a great leader.

  Consider, for example, the popular depiction of Abraham Lincoln in the years 1849–1856 as lost, alone, and in desperate need of inspiration. True, when Lincoln returned home to Springfield, Illinois, after his seemingly lackluster two years in the U.S. House of Representatives, his prospects were bleak. After years of struggling to make a mark in national politics, he worried that he had failed and that his political career was over. The Whig Party opposed nominating him for a second term, in spite of his loyal service to the party for more than a decade. He did not want to leave office, but the strong stance he had taken in opposition to the Mexican War had eroded his local support, given that Illinois had been among the states with the largest numbers of volunteers for the conflict. Many of the people back home, including his fellow Whigs, mocked him as “Spotty Lincoln,” a nickname they coined after he failed to persuade the House to approve a resolution criticizing President James Polk for lying to Congress about the exact spot where Mexicans had fired the first shots that started the Mexican War. Lincoln had campaigned for Zachary Taylor in 1848, but, once in office, Taylor denied his application to become the commissioner of the Land Office. Worse still, Taylor died in 1850, elevating to the presidency his vice president, Millard Fillmore, a Whig who did not take Lincoln seriously.

  By the time Fillmore left office in 1853, Lincoln had to confront the fact that the Whig Party was dying. Its demise left him without a party apparatus to sustain his political future. Dispirited, he turned his attention to reviving his law practice with William Herndon, building it into a highly respected but ultimately not very lucrative firm. His dreams of becoming a great lawyer were crushed when the nationally renowned Edwin Stanton of Ohio dismissed him from the biggest case of his career in 1855.

  As Lincoln’s fortunes dimmed in the 1850s, his longtime Democratic rival, Stephen Douglas, had become a senator for Lincoln’s home state of Illinois and a rapidly rising star in national politics. In 1854, Douglas took center stage nationally in drafting and securing passage of the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act, a law that allowed voters in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether or not to permit slavery within their borders. As violence erupted in Kansas and President Franklin Pierce ordered the federal government to support proslavery forces there, Lincoln did little. Home was no respite. His sagging prospects exacerbated tensions with his wife, Mary Todd, who had great ambitions for him. Seemingly adrift, he read Euclid to sharpen his mind. He worried that he would never make a lasting mark on the world. His friends worried about his sanity.

  Yet Lincoln’s vexation was of a deliberative sort, a pause—albeit forced by circumstance—and not a surrender. His aspirations had not eroded, nor had much of his support for high office. In fact, his development as a serious presidential contender had begun many years earlier, and in 1849–1856, Lincoln was not so much reinventing himself as adapting the lessons he had learned over more than two decades in politics and law. In every critical phase of his life, including those seven years, Lincoln followed the same strategy, and it was not to turn completely inward. Besides reading voraciously to learn more about political philosophy, issues, and history of concern to him, he looked to others for guidance on the skills, vision, and strategies he needed in order to achieve his ambitions.

  Certainly, the books, newspapers, plays, and poetry he read offered him a foundation that went beyond the accumulation of facts and phrases; they filled the vacuum left by the traumatizing absence of his father and the death of his mother when he was nine. An older, wiser Lincoln, who had benefited from years of self-education, noted that “a capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to what has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and a facility, for successfully pursuing the unsolved ones.”1 Books, unlike people, would never let him down. Yet he also realized that the words he read on the page could tell him only so much. To ascend in the tumultuous world of politics required a different sort of study.

  Many people who knew Lincoln in his middle to late years spoke of how he read purely for utilitarian purposes, forgoing the pleasures of fiction. Even his study of poetry and drama was in pursuit of mastering the cadence of public speaking and better understanding human nature. Both as a boy and later in his life, Lincoln was intrigued with the founding of the republic, particularly with stories of the great men who were responsible for it, giants who still tread the earth in his lifetime. The books and speeches he read and reread sparked a lifelong fascination with politics, rhetoric, and the Constitution, and the debates in Illinois and throughout the nation were extensions of those the Founders had had in framing and ratifying the Constitution. Those men were hardly a distant memory for Lincoln and his generation. The nation had elected its first president only twenty years before Lincoln was born.

  Lincoln
’s ambition to make an enduring mark on the world led him to five men, whose experiences, political insights, vision of the Constitution, example, and guidance helped him navigate the path to the presidency. From these five, Lincoln learned valuable lessons on how to master party politics, to campaign for office, to understand and use executive power, to negotiate, to manage a Cabinet, to craft a speech, and to develop policies and a constitutional vision that fit the times and became his most enduring legacy. In the nineteenth century, it was common, particularly for enterprising young men, to find flesh-and-blood mentors, men who would serve not only as father figures but also as teachers of the skills they needed to succeed. Lincoln’s mentors were something different. For him, mentors were not just the men he actually interacted with but also sources of inspiration and instruction—men to be emulated, men whose mistakes he was determined to avoid, and men with whom he could argue or take issue without fear of alienation or retaliation. There is no reliable evidence that he ever met two of the men who so profoundly helped him steer his course to the White House. Yet Lincoln referred to these two men as mentors, seeing them as far more than inspirational figures. I have followed Lincoln’s lead.

  It is common for those who adore Lincoln to dismiss Andrew Jackson as a mentor because Lincoln campaigned so vigorously against Jackson and his political heirs, Martin Van Buren, James Polk, and Franklin Pierce, and for Jackson’s most notable foe, Henry Clay. Yet Jackson bracketed Lincoln’s life: he was the president during Lincoln’s formative years, and he was the first president to appoint Lincoln to federal office. Jackson was the president who initiated the Black Hawk War, in which Lincoln became captain of a company of volunteers, and Jackson was the only other president who formulated a coherent and compelling case against secession and the only one whose portrait hung in Lincoln’s office throughout his presidency. Furthermore, Lincoln agreed with Jackson’s declaration of the unique position of the president as the only federal official elected by and therefore representative of all the people of the Union. He adapted Jackson’s understanding of democracy to the circumstances the nation confronted in a civil war, and he emulated Jackson’s suspension of habeas corpus and Supreme Court–defying strategy.

  Throughout his life, Lincoln was surrounded by Democrats who revered Jackson and by Whigs who cheered Jackson’s great rival Henry Clay. Navigating this world sharpened Lincoln’s ability to maintain lasting friendships with men who opposed him politically.

  In 1832, Lincoln cast his first vote in a presidential election for Clay, not Jackson. For the rest of his life, he proudly proclaimed himself a Clay Whig and praised Clay as his “teacher,” “mentor,” and “beau ideal of a statesman.” Lincoln followed both Clay and Jackson into the law, as a means for earning a living and making political and social connections. He considered himself to be a “self-made man” like Clay.

  Clay was someone Lincoln cited often, not only in his debates with Douglas, but also later as president. Clay’s oratory was more than a model that Lincoln studied and emulated. Lincoln also followed Clay’s lead and that of Thomas Jefferson, whom Clay followed, in developing his vision, as a Senate candidate and later as president, of a connection between the promise of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” and the Constitution as the implementation of that pledge.

  Lincoln’s third mentor was Zachary Taylor. Lincoln followed Taylor closely when he led his army to important victories in the Mexican War, and Lincoln was among the first national politicians to back Taylor for the presidency in 1848. Lincoln admired Taylor as another “self-made man” and lauded Taylor’s devotion, like that of Clay and Jackson, to standing firmly against secession and against rebels threatening the Union.

  Taylor bookends the years 1849 to 1861 for Lincoln, who eulogized him in 1850 and then, as he traveled to his own inauguration as president, singled Taylor out to a friendly audience in Pittsburgh as the man responsible for “my political education.” The phrase political education meant something special to Lincoln and his generation; it referred to what people learned from real political experiences rather than books. Lincoln was not so idealistic that he perpetually ignored the chilly pragmatism of several of his mentors, especially Clay and Jackson. Recognizing the political advantages of such hardheaded expediency, he not only changed his mind about issues but also changed allegiances—even when it meant undermining those who had guided his ascent. He’d backed Taylor for president at the expense of Clay’s candidacy, despite the fact that there may have been no politician who shaped Lincoln’s beliefs more than Clay. Lincoln cited many of Taylor’s actions as precedent for his own, including making record numbers of recess appointments and treating Southern forces as rebels and traitors. Lincoln followed Taylor in believing (as Jackson did) that a president must sometimes lead Congress, not the other way around, in fashioning national policy—in some ways a rejection of his earlier Whig conviction that legislative bodies should be paramount. On the other hand, Lincoln was not blinded by his mentors’ virtues. The strategy he used to form his Cabinet was a barbed rejection of Taylor’s choice not to use appointments to unify his party and administration.

  A fourth mentor was Mary Todd’s cousin John Todd Stuart. Lincoln met Stuart when Lincoln was assisting Sangamon County surveyor John Calhoun, a staunch Jacksonian (and no relation to the famous South Carolina senator of the same name). Stuart and Lincoln crossed paths again during the Black Hawk War. Jackson had appointed among his officers as colonel Zachary Taylor, a personal friend who had served with him in the second Seminole war begun in 1835. Stuart introduced Lincoln to law and politics in Illinois. He was a model for Lincoln in debating political opponents (they both faced off against Stephen Douglas, but Stuart did so much earlier) and in courtroom appearances, particularly in jury trials. Stuart made it possible for Lincoln to meet many of the people who would help him rise in Illinois politics. Lincoln sought Stuart’s counsel and respected him even after Stuart joined the Democratic Party in 1856.

  Orville Browning is the least likely of any of these men to have been a mentor to Lincoln. Whereas Browning, like Stuart, was a friend of Lincoln’s, Browning, unlike Stuart, was a sometime rival. Yet Lincoln repeatedly turned to him for advice throughout his life. Their alliance helped move Whig policies through their respective chambers of the Illinois state legislature. Sometimes Browning (and Stuart, too) counseled Lincoln about his personal life. Browning and his wife tried to advise Lincoln through several amorous relationships, including the one they (as well as Stuart) thought the most troublesome, Lincoln’s marriage to Mary Todd. Browning helped to found the national Republican Party as well as the Republican Party in Illinois. He constructed the Illinois Republican Party platform in 1856, on which Lincoln ran against Douglas. And Browning’s advice after Lincoln’s election to the presidency foreshadowed the strategy that Lincoln followed to keep the two promises he made in his First Inaugural Address—not to initiate hostilities with the South and to protect the Union.

  The impact of these mentors on Lincoln’s life is evident in his rise to power and his years as president. Only in the last few months of his presidency, with his reelection secured and the war won, did he begin to forgo consulting them. By then, his confidence in his political acumen, vision, and rhetoric was at its peak.

  The giant figure of Lincoln seated in the iconic monument honoring him in the nation’s capital captures the myth of Lincoln sitting alone, nearly godlike, contemplating the great issues of his day, head and shoulders above the fray. That is not how Lincoln learned to lead. This book is the story of how he did.

  Chapter One

  Finding His Mentors

  (1809–1834)

  In 1832, the United States was at a crossroads. It was hurtling toward its twelfth presidential election. The young nation, slightly more than four decades old, was sharply divided—politically, economically, regionally, and racially. No conflict generated more controversy and division than the legitimacy and maintenance o
f the institution of slavery. In 1832, there were twenty-four states, nearly equally divided over the future of slavery. The newest state, Missouri, was a slave state. Neighboring Illinois, admitted into the Union in 1818, was relatively small and had a peculiarly mixed record on slavery—with a state constitution adopted in 1819 forbidding it but a harsh Black Code adopted by the state legislature that restricted the presence and activities of African Americans.

  The deep political divisions in the nation were reflected in the two fierce rivals vying for the nation’s highest office. The contest pitted the stubborn, combative incumbent and champion of ordinary citizens and states’ rights to regulate commercial interests and slavery without federal oversight, Andrew Jackson, against his most hated rival, Henry Clay, America’s best-known orator and legislator, who championed a strong national government devoted to economic development and compromise, even on the question of the future of slavery in America.

  As flatboats and other vessels navigated up and down the Mississippi and between these two westernmost states, their crews and passengers could not help but see their stark differences. Among those pilots was a young man who reputedly expressed his revulsion when he saw African Americans in chains auctioned along his route. Abraham Lincoln was not alone in such sentiments, but in his case his thoughts may well have gone beyond mere observation. Perhaps he might be the one to change things, to eradicate such demonic commerce. Enamored with the exploits of great men, he yearned to become one of them, though he did not come from a prosperous or powerful family and regularly had no money in his pocket. He had to start somewhere, and he chose to settle in the small town of New Salem, Illinois, home to no more than a few hundred people. Many of its residents came from Kentucky, where he had been born, but although the frontier could be merciless, young Abraham Lincoln believed there were no immutable limits on what a determined man might become. The only things he needed were the opportunities to educate himself and to find the right men who could help him earn his place in America’s story.