Lincoln was a rebel from the beginning. He had immense confidence in his own intellectual abilities, to the point of arrogance, so from childhood on he didn’t mind going against the grain. While his family was subsisting on what they could forage for and kill, he disdained hunting and even wrote a childhood treatise on animal rights. Surrounded by frontier piety, he was a skeptic and a deist. Surrounded by frontier tough-guyism, he didn’t drink, smoke, chew, gamble or swear.
To us today, Lincoln’s life embodies the American dream. But in autobiographical sketches he wrote in 1858 through 1860, he dismissed his childhood as tough, poor, uninteresting and even embarrassing. He said that his education in frontier one-room schoolhouses didn’t amount to so much as a year. His father was illiterate and his birth mother was illegitimate. The family literally hacked a series of homesteads out of the wilderness; at eight years old Lincoln was compelled to use an axe to help his father clear forests and build poorly-chinked cabins for the family to live in. His father did not allow him to attend school and spurned him for his reading. Later Lincoln claimed, in reference to these years, that he had himself once been a slave. Although Lincoln was a forgiving and generous man, he never quite forgave his father, according to scholar William Freehling. Among his backwoods community, only his stepmother encouraged his intellectual pursuits.
He left his family at 21, as soon as he was legally allowed to, and drifted to New Salem, a rough riverfront town. He got a job as a clerk in a store, then spent his free time reading and studying. The six years in New Salem were probably his most formative, according to this author. He lived in poverty until he discovered a way out through politics and the law.
He loved to debate, which led him first to politics and then to the law. Freehling says, “As usual, Lincoln did things in reverse.” At 25 he was elected to the state legislature, then began studying law on his own. In 1837 he combined his two passions and managed to get the state capital moved to Springfield, a town in his own county. He then moved to Springfield as a legislator and got hired as a junior partner in a law firm. It was not an easy transition for him, since he was still pretty callow and uncouth.
He lived in Springfield for 24 years; it was his only true home. He became solidly middle-class, then with the help of wife Mary Todd began plotting a course that eventually led to the presidency. He was able to use his unsophisticated manner to his advantage as a lawyer, since it appealed to the common man on the jury. He also used the new medium of photography to good political effect, deliberately mussing up his hair for photos so that frontier people would recognize him as one of them.
He was a Whig at heart. Whigs were the party of more and bigger government, more railroads and transportation, and a national banking system. While personally he was anti-slavery, he didn’t at first address it politically, because the issue of slavery was bound up in the issue of states’ rights. He only began to involve himself in the slavery issue in 1854, after Stephen A. Douglas managed to overturn the Missouri Compromise.
Thomas Jefferson had predicted that if the Missouri Compromise was passed, the Union would be broken, and by the 1850s his prophecy was beginning to come true.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 declared that except for Missouri, slavery was not permitted in the northern part of the former Louisiana Territory, and this kept the slavery issue from exploding until mid-century, when America’s victory in the Mexican-American War added huge new territory in the West.
In 1854 Douglas overturned the Missouri Compromise with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which gave the white male voters of those territories the right to decide for themselves whether they wanted to allow slavery. This added to the country’s factionalism.
When the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed, Lincoln spotted a political opening, and decided to take on Douglas in a series of debates that lasted for four years. He never tried to alienate the South by proposing to abolish slavery in states where it existed, only to stop its spread.
In 1857, the infamous Dred Scott decision heated things up even more. It declared that no black person, slave or free, could be a U.S. citizen, and that furthermore the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.
The final series of formal debates between Lincoln and Douglas took place the following year. Lincoln lost his bid for the the office of Republican senator from Illinois; Stephen Douglas was reelected in 1859.
(Kostyal 17 – 29)
Stories from American History 