Op-edding

This posting does double duty. It originated as an op-ed piece on Lincoln for the esteemed History News Network on the web. You can't escape it. In case you avoid it there (requested by HNN's editor, it was just submitted today), duck, for here it is again.


Lincoln’s Political Sabbatical

When his one term in Congress ended in 1849, Abraham Lincoln was at a dead end in politics. His record in Congress was unexceptional, indeed counterproductive. He was in trouble at home in Illinois for his opposition to the U.S.-Mexican War. And he had been ill treated in the patronage game by the new Whig president Zachary Taylor, whom he had labored vigorously to help elect.

No longer seeing a place for himself either in national or Illinois politics, he returned full time to his law practice and to traveling the Eighth Judicial Circuit, where he found some solace. He basically believed then that his career in politics was over. And it hurt. He was an ambitious man and this perceived failure to make an enduring mark grieved him.

In an outburst of despair, he told his law partner, Billy Herndon, “How hard—oh, how more than hard—it is to die and leave one’s country no better for the life of him that lived and died her child!”

His reading of the newspapers of the day didn’t ease his despair. The lethal issue of slavery was tearing at the unity of the Union.
“The world is dead to hope,” he told Herndon, “deaf to its own death struggle made known by a universal cry. What is to be done? Is nothing to be done? Who can do anything and how can it be done? Did you ever think on these things?”

What Lincoln did not know then was that something could be done and would be done--by him. There began, unknown to anybody-- unknown to him--five years in which he would be preparing himself for future greatness.

For those five years, practicing law, traveling the circuit, Lincoln read intently and thought deeply. John Stuart, a former law partner and fellow lawyer on the circuit, remembers how evenings after court Lincoln would strip off his coat and lie down on the bed and read and reflect and digest what he was reading. After supper he would slip into his nightshirt, light a candle, draw up a chair or table, and read late into the night.

Lincoln boned the issue of Union-threatening slavery in the territories. He read widely in the newspapers, driving Billy Herndon nearly out of his mind by insisting on reading them aloud in the law office, so as to ”catch the idea by two senses”—simultaneously hearing and seeing it. That way Lincoln told Herndon, “I remember it better, if I do not understand it better.”

Lincoln also read the works of great writers. He carried Shakespeare on the circuit with him. He loved and read Robert Burns and could quote the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. He was reputedly introduced to the powerful writing of the poet Walt Whitman. And to hone his power of reasoning he mastered the six books of Euclid. He was, perhaps unconsciously, honing his eloquence and his reasoning to razor sharpness.

By the end of this five years of political eclipse Lincoln probably had a better grip on the divisive issue of slavery than any man in the country, including his long time great Democratic rival, Senator Stephen A. Douglas. As Lincoln languished in the political shadows, Douglas’s brilliant star had soared. It was generally conceded that the stumpy “Little Giant,” whom Lincoln had known so well in Illinois, and had crossed his political sword with so often in the past, was destined for the presidency.

Douglas had been the chief architect of the Compromise of 1850, which had put a temporary lid on the simmering controversy over slavery in the territories. Douglas believed that the answer, the cure-all, to slavery agitation in America was “popular sovereignty”--letting every territory decide for itself whether it would enter the Union a free state or a slave state. Douglas claimed not to care if slavery was voted up or voted down, as long as the decision accurately mirrored the will of the people of the territory.

Lincoln’s five years of reading and his lifetime of thinking slavery wrong, rebelled at this proposed solution to the problem. In his eyes Douglas’s “popular sovereignty” ignored the moral issue—the immorality of slavery--and therefore it was wrong, as slavery itself was wrong.

In 1854, to clear the way for the widespread implementation of his popular sovereignty solution in the territories, Douglas rammed through Congress—and strong armed President Franklin Pierce into signing--the Kansas-Nebraska Act. That act, which stirred outrage in the North, abolished the dividing line between North and South that had kept slavery from expanding into free territory since 1820. Under this new law, slavery would not continue to be contained in the South alone, but could expand into all the territories, North as well as South.

This, Lincoln believed, would never do. It must be vigorously resisted. When the law passed, all of Lincoln’s five years of silent preparation flowered. Armed by all the thinking and reading of those past five years, he stormed out of eclipse to meet Douglas and his popular sovereignty solution head on. He immediately became the Little Giant’s most eloquent, most devastatingly effective antagonist, and the weapon that all anti-Kansas-Nebraska men in Illinois, and eventually in the Union, would wield against him.

Lincoln dogged Douglas as he stumped for support of his new act in Illinois in 1854, speaking after Douglas spoke, refuting his pro-Kansas-Nebraska arguments on every possible platform. Newly joined to the newly formed Republican Party, Lincoln became the obvious choice to run against Douglas for his senate in Illinois in 1858. Together those two “giants” from Illinois waged the great debates over the slavery issue that immortalized them in American political history. Lincoln lost to Douglas in that campaign. But two years later, now an acknowledged political power in his own right, a man who could stand toe-to-toe to Douglas, it would be he, not Douglas, who would be elected president.

In his five years of political hibernation, when he believed himself dead in politics, Lincoln had, unwittingly perhaps, deeply prepared himself to play out his destiny—the man who had to do what had to be done.