The Real Lincoln
Who was the man behind the myth? New research delves into Abe's early years
Myth. However successful he may have been, Lincoln the young attorney, like the young politician, was not quite the man of principle he would become. "One of the enduring myths about Lincoln the lawyer is this heroic image of a guy who would only take clients and causes with which he was philosophically and politically comfortable," says Davis, "which is nonsense." Lincoln represented people across the philosophical and political spectrum--from murderers to farmers fighting over cows, from adulterers to doctors accused of malpractice. In one celebrated case in 1847, he even defended a Kentucky slave owner who wanted to keep some of his slaves in Illinois, where slavery was illegal. Lincoln lost.
But again, he seems to have gained something of great value from this period. An advantage of traveling the circuit court up to six months a year, as Lincoln was doing in the 1850s, was the opportunity to meet a lot of people. His name was soon known throughout the state. Lincoln may have taken on dubious clients, but some of them--several high-profile railroad companies, in particular--brought him national attention. "It's one of those historical coincidences," says Davis: Lincoln just happened to be working in Illinois when the railroads came through needing legal counsel. "But this is the first time he was noticed by the people in Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston." The exposure would come in handy later.
As Lincoln pondered another run at politics, there is no doubt he was conscious of his own weaknesses. "Lincoln himself was deeply aware of how imperfect he was and how limited he was," says Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of an upcoming book on Lincoln's melancholy. But for today's historians, it is the existence of a more complicated Lincoln--riddled with doubt as a young man, inured to the sordid political games of his era, a man who used his law practice in not entirely principled ways--that makes his rise so impressive. He was, in the end, thoroughly human.
And yet, unlike so many other thoroughly human men, when push came to shove, Lincoln rose above his shortcomings and tackled, head on, the most challenging issue of his day. After stumbling out of Congress in 1849, Lincoln's real political rise began five years later, in 1854, when two new territories were established--Kansas and Nebraska--in a wave of controversy. His future nemesis, Stephen Douglas, pushed the bill through Congress, called the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which created the future states, including a provision that would allow voters in the territories to determine for themselves whether slavery would be allowed in their area. Antislavery forces felt Douglas had opened Pandora's box: In a single stroke, he had overturned more than 30 years of legislation preventing slavery from expanding northward.
For Lincoln, it was a massive political jolt--and his great opportunity. "Kansas-Nebraska was a wake-up call--a shock that re-energized him," says McPherson. He had never been much of a race man in the past. Remember, says Daniel Stowell, director of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, this was a man whose "ideal statesman was a Kentucky slave owner named Henry Clay." But he had seen slavery in action and would write to Speed's sister in 1841 about being haunted by the sight of shackled slaves on the Ohio River, "like so many fish upon a trot-line [sic]."
advertisement
