Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (icecream ebook reader txt) 📗

omens, and he transmuted the Calvinist predestination of his parents into “the Doctrine of Necessity—that is, that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.”22

One remedy for the depression lay in his peculiarly clownish sense of humor and the almost bottomless fund of jokes and funny stories he had collected from the folk humor of the Illinois frontier. His reputation as a storyteller was nearly as legendary as his eloquence as a lawyer; his jokes reeked of the cornfield, and occasionally of the barnyard. Some measure of Lincoln’s humor was consciously cultivated to appeal to popular audiences, and Lincoln used laughter to deadly effectiveness as a stump speaker (Douglas would later claim that he never feared Lincoln’s arguments, but “every one of his stories seems like a whack upon my back”). In a larger sense, Lincoln craved the escape from melancholy offered him by the jokes he could tell to a crowd of friends and admirers, making them howl with laughter. “Some of my friends are much shocked at what I suppose they consider my low tastes in indulging in stories some of which, I suppose, are not just as nice as they might be,” Lincoln admitted, “but I tell you the truth when I say that a real smutty story, if it has the element of genuine wit in its composition, as most of such stories have, has the same effect on me that I think a good square drink of whiskey has to an old toper. It puts new life into me. The fact is, I have always believed that a good laugh was good for both the mental and physical digestion.”23 It also reflected the division of Lincoln’s character, one side all seriousness and ambition and Republican honesty, the other bawdy, cunning, homespun, and secretive.

Part of Lincoln’s brooding was rooted in his complex and sometimes unhappy marriage to Mary Todd. Painfully aware of his own social awkwardness, Lincoln’s relationships with women were tentative and uncertain. His early passion for Ann Rutledge, the daughter of a New Salem tavern keeper, has often been dismissed as a fairy tale shaped by William Herndon to discomfit Mary Lincoln, but the evidence Herndon accumulated for the Rutledge story has more substance to it than the dismissals imply. Rutledge’s premature death, if we can rely on Herndon’s interviews with New Salemites years afterward, devastated Lincoln. A subsequent engagement to Mary Owens in 1836 fell through due to Lincoln’s hasty and not entirely becoming retreat from matrimony. For the most part, he avoided the society of women—not for lack of interest, but for fear of rejection and a strict observance of male-female proprieties. “Lincoln was a Man of strong passion for woman,” said David Davis, the presiding circuit judge before whom Lincoln practiced for many years, but “his Conscience Kept him from seduction—this saved many—many a woman.” In the end, only the determined intervention of friends and the equally determined strategy of Mary herself managed to tie the knot for Lincoln.24

As it was, Mary Todd was both a burden and a blessing to Lincoln. Criticized by her wealthy, slaveholding family for having married beneath herself, Mary constantly fed Lincoln’s “little engine” and provided him with the kind of reassurance and devotion that he needed to keep himself going. She was, said Herndon, “like a toothache, keeping her husband awake to politics day and night.” On the other hand, she could goad her husband into rage as easily as into politics. Mary was high-strung and irritable, and Herndon (whose dislike she returned, with interest), thought her a “terror… imperious, proud, aristocratic, insolent, witty, and bitter”; he (and almost everyone else who knew the Lincolns personally) characterized the Lincolns’ marriage as a “domestic hell.” It was this that explained to his contemporaries why Lincoln began to spend increasing amounts of time away from Springfield on the circuit or on railroad cases. “Mrs Lincoln had notions not very agreeable to him and which so affected his domestic peace as to force him off in the circuit,” wrote one Springfield neighbor. David Davis agreed: “Mr Lincoln was happy—as happy as he could be, when on this Circuit and happy no other place. This was his place of Enjoyment. As a general rule when all the lawyers of a Saturday Evening would go home and see their families & friends at home Lincoln would refuse to go home. It seemed to me that L was not domestically happy.” By the 1850s, Lincoln was away for almost twenty weeks of the year.25

Further aggravating Lincoln’s melancholy was his persistent failure at politics. In 1840 he had campaigned as a loyal Whig for William Henry Harrison, and in 1843 the Whig state committee recruited him to write a state party platform. He campaigned for Whig nominees in 1844, including Henry Clay, and in 1846 the Illinois Whigs successfully ran him for Congress as the representative for the Seventh Congressional District. But Lincoln’s performance in Washington fell far short of impressive. Although Lincoln struggled hard to make a name for himself as a Whig, little in his solitary term as a congressman was noticed, not even his opposition to President Polk and the Mexican War. In 1848 he stepped aside in accordance with party wishes to allow another Whig, Stephen Logan, to win the Seventh District seat, and Lincoln was sent out on the stump to promote the election of Zachary Taylor, the Whig candidate for president. Despite falling on his spear so loyally, Lincoln was offered as a political reward only the governorship of the Oregon Territory, a lusterless post so far removed from real political life that Lincoln turned it down.

Thus Abraham Lincoln in the mid-1850s was a man who had accomplished much, but not nearly as much as he craved. At this point his vision shifted from the unsatisfied and ambiguous conflicts of his private world to the equally unsatisfied and ambiguous conflicts of national