The Real Lincoln
Who was the man behind the myth? New research delves into Abe's early years
Whatever the root of Lincoln's romantic struggles, his political career, too, seemed to be getting off to a rough start. "The fact is, in his 20s and 30s, he was something of a political hack," says Burlingame, who is writing a four-volume biography of Lincoln. A member of the Whig Party, he made a habit, not uncommon at the time, of publishing anonymous letters in local newspapers ridiculing and mocking his party's political opponents, the Democrats. Burlingame, in his research, says he has come across more than 200 such letters he believes were penned by Lincoln. In them, Lincoln is more hatchet man than Honest Abe: He could be clever, but on more than a few occasions, he was simply disappointing--engaging in the same race-baiting politics he would later deplore. In the presidential elections of 1836 and 1840, for example, he accused the Democratic candidate, Martin Van Buren, of having supported black suffrage--a cardinal sin, he seemed to suggest. The bottom line, says Burlingame, is that "he took the low road in politics much more than people acknowledge."
Here, too, though, Lincoln seems to have learned an important lesson. In 1842, in the midst of his prenuptial problems with Mary, Lincoln wrote a pseudonymous letter in a local paper mocking the Democratic state auditor, James Shields, for being, among other things, "a fool as well as a liar." Outraged, Shields managed to identify his slanderer and challenged Lincoln to a duel.
Honor. Broadswords in hand, Shields and Lincoln crossed into Missouri together (dueling was illegal in Illinois), but, fortunately for both men, the duel never came to a head. Lincoln agreed to withdraw his claim, and their seconds persuaded them to call it off. The young politician was clearly shaken by the episode, and historians think it had a deep impact: "Lincoln may, for the first time, have understood 'honor' and honorable behavior as all-important, as necessary, as a matter of life and death," writes Wilson. And though he would occasionally dabble in political mudslinging again in his life, he refused to dive into this sort of politics in any serious way again. As he told an Army officer who asked him about the affair when he was president, "I do not deny it, but if you desire my friendship, you will never mention it again."
In spite of this setback, Lincoln's star continued to rise--for a few more years, at least. In 1846, four years after his dust-up with Shields, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Many supporters thought his time had finally come. But when he moved to Washington, ready to seize the national stage, he was flummoxed: He couldn't get any of his bills passed. His only notable speech, criticizing the ongoing Mexican War, was considered vaguely disloyal back home. And after two humdrum years in office, Lincoln returned to Springfield, telling Herndon he considered himself "politically dead."
His career on the ropes, Lincoln went back to work at what historians now realize was a hugely successful law practice. "Law may not have been his first love--politics was--but law was his bread and butter," says Cullom Davis, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois-Springfield, who recently oversaw the completion of the Lincoln Legal Papers Project, which has brought together some 96,000 legal documents pertaining to Lincoln. According to Davis's estimates, Lincoln probably handled around 5,100 cases over the course of his career--twice as many as previous historians had assumed--and earned perhaps twice as much money. "His campaign supporters like to make him a simple man from a log cabin," says Davis, "but by the mid-1850s, you'd have to say he was enjoying an upper-middle-class lifestyle." By some estimates, he was one of the wealthiest lawyers in the state.
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