CHAPTER XVI
A FORTUNATE ESCAPE
When Congress came together again in December, there was such a change in the temper of its members that no one would have imagined, on seeing the House divided, that it was the same body which had assembled there a year before. The election was over; the Whigs were to control the Executive Department of the Government for four years to come; the members themselves were either reflected or defeated; and there was nothing to prevent the gratification of such private feelings as they might have been suppressing during the canvass in the interest of their party. It was not long before some of the Northern Democrats began to avail themselves of this new liberty. They had returned burdened with a sense of wrong. They had seen their party put in deadly peril by reason of its fidelity to the South, and they had seen how little their Southern brethren cared for their labors and sacrifices, in the enormous gains which Taylor had made in the South, carrying eight out of fifteen slave States. They were in the humor to avenge themselves by a display of independence on their own account, at the first opportunity. The occasion was not long in presenting itself. A few days after Congress opened, Mr. Root, of Ohio, introduced a resolution instructing the Committee on Territories to bring in a bill "with as little delay as practicable" to provide territorial governments for California and New Mexico, which should "exclude slavery there-from." This resolution would have thrown the same House into a panic twelve months before, but now it passed by a vote of 108 to 80—in the former number were all the "Whigs from the North and all the Democrats but eight," and in the latter the entire South and the eight referred to.
The Senate, however, was not so susceptible to popular impressions, and the bill, prepared in obedience to the mandate of the House, never got farther than the desk of the Senate Chamber. The pro-slavery majority in that body held firmly together till near the close of the session, when they attempted to bring in the new territories without any restriction as to slavery, by attaching what is called "a rider" to that effect to the Civil Appropriation Bill. The House resisted, and returned the bill to the Senate with the rider unhorsed. A committee of conference failed to agree. Mr. McClernand, a Democrat from Illinois, then moved that the House recede from its disagreement, which was carried by a few Whig votes, to the dismay of those who were not in the secret, when Richard W. Thompson (who was thirty years afterwards Secretary of the Navy) instantly moved that the House do concur with the Senate, with this amendment, that the existing laws of those territories be for the present and until Congress should amend them, retained. This would secure them to freedom, as slavery had long ago been abolished by Mexico. This amendment passed, and the Senate had to face the many-pronged dilemma, either to defeat the Appropriation Bill, or to consent that the territories should be organized as free communities, or to swallow their protestations that the territories were in sore need of government and adjourn, leaving them in the anarchy they had so feelingly depicted. They chose the last as the least dangerous course, and passed the Appropriation Bill in its original form.
Mr. Lincoln took little part in the discussions incident to these proceedings; he was constantly in his seat, however, and voted generally with his party, and always with those opposed to the extension of slavery. He used to say that he had voted for the Wilmot proviso, in its various phases, forty-two times. He left to others, however, the active work on the floor. His chief preoccupation during this second session was a scheme which links itself characteristically with his first protest against the proscriptive spirit of slavery ten years before in the Illinois Legislature and his immortal act fifteen years afterwards in consequence of which American slavery ceased to exist. He had long felt in common with many others that the traffic in human beings under the very shadow of the Capitol was a national scandal and reproach. He thought that Congress had the power under the Constitution to regulate or prohibit slavery in all regions under its exclusive jurisdiction, and he thought it proper to exercise that power with due regard to vested rights and the general welfare. He therefore resolved to test the question whether it were possible to remove from the seat of government this stain and offense.
[Sidenote: Gidding's diary, January 8, 9, and 11, 1849: published in the "Cleveland Post," March 31, 1878.]
He proceeded carefully and cautiously about it, after his habit. When he had drawn up his plan, he took counsel with some of the leading citizens of Washington and some of the more prominent members of Congress before bringing it forward. His bill obtained the cordial approval of Colonel Seaton, the Mayor of Washington, whom Mr. Lincoln had consulted as the representative of the intelligent slave-holding citizens of the District, and of Joshua R. Giddings, whom he regarded as the leading abolitionist in Congress, a fact which sufficiently proves the practical wisdom with which he had reconciled the demands of right and expediency. In the meantime, however, Mr. Gott, a member from New York, had introduced a resolution with a rhetorical preamble directing the proper committee to bring in a bill prohibiting the slave-trade in the District. This occasioned great excitement, much caucusing and threatening on the part of the Southern members, but nothing else. In the opinion of the leading antislavery men, Mr. Lincoln's bill, being at the same time more radical and more reasonable, was far better calculated to effect its purpose. Giddings says in his diary: "This evening (January 11), our whole mess remained in the dining-room after tea, and conversed upon the subject of Mr. Lincoln's bill to abolish slavery. It was approved by all; I believe it as good a bill as we could get at this time, and am willing to pay for slaves in order to save them from the Southern market, as I suppose every man in the District would sell his slaves if he saw that slavery was to be abolished." Mr. Lincoln therefore moved, on the 16th of January, as an amendment to Gott's proposition, that the committee report a bill for the total abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, the terms of which he gave in full. They were in substance the following:
The first two sections prohibit the bringing of slaves into the district or selling them out of it, provided, however, that officers of the Government, being citizens of slave-holding States, may bring their household servants with them for a reasonable time and take them away again. The third provides a temporary system of apprenticeship and eventual emancipation for children born of slavemothers after January 1, 1850. The fourth provides for the manumission of slaves by the Government on application of the owners, the latter to receive their full cash value. The fifth provides for the return of fugitive slaves from Washington and Georgetown. The sixth submits this bill itself to a popular vote in the District as a condition of its promulgation as law.
These are the essential points of the measure and the success of Mr. Lincoln in gaining the adhesion of the abolitionists in the House is more remarkable than that he should have induced the Washington Conservatives to approve it. But the usual result followed as soon as it was formally introduced to the notice of Congress, It was met by that violent and excited opposition which greeted any measure, however intrinsically moderate and reasonable, which was founded on the assumption that slavery was not in itself a good and desirable thing. The social influences of Washington were brought to bear against a proposition which the Southerners contended would vulgarize society, and the genial and liberal mayor was forced to withdraw his approval as gracefully or as awkwardly as he might. The prospects of the bill were seen to be hopeless, as the session was to end on the 4th of March, and no further effort was made to carry it through. Fifteen years afterwards, in the stress and tempest of a terrible war, it was Mr. Lincoln's strange fortune to sign a bill sent him by Congress for the abolition of slavery in Washington; and perhaps the most remarkable thing about the whole transaction, was that while we were looking politically upon a new heaven and a new earth,—for the vast change in our moral and economic condition might justify so audacious a phrase,—when there was scarcely a man on the continent who had not greatly shifted his point of view in a dozen years, there was so little change in Mr. Lincoln. The same hatred of slavery, the same sympathy with the slave, the same consideration for the slaveholder as the victim of a system he had inherited, the same sense of divided responsibility between the South and the North, the same desire to effect great reforms with as little individual damage and injury, as little disturbance of social conditions as possible, were equally evident when the raw pioneer signed the protest with Dan Stone at Vandalia, when the mature man moved the resolution of 1849 in the Capitol, and when the President gave the sanction of his bold signature to the act which swept away the slave-shambles from the city of Washington.
[Illustration: JOSHUA R. GIDDINGS.]
His term in Congress ended on the 4th of March, 1849, and he was not a candidate for reflection. A year before he had contemplated the possibility of entering the field again. He then wrote to his friend and partner Herndon: "It is very pleasant for me to learn from yon that there are some who desire that I should be reelected. I most heartily thank them for their kind partiality; and I can say, as Mr. Clay said of the annexation of Texas, that 'personally I would not object' to a reelection, although I thought at the time [of his nomination], and still think, it would be quite as well for me to return to the law at the end of a single term. I made the declaration that I would not be a candidate again, more from a wish to deal fairly with others, to keep peace among our friends, and keep the district from going to the enemy, than for any cause personal to myself, so that, if it should so happen that nobody else wishes to be elected, I could not refuse the people the right of sending me again. But to enter myself as a competitor of others, or to authorize any one so to enter me, is what my word and honor forbid."
But before his first session ended he gave up all idea of going back, and heartily concurred in the nomination of Judge Logan to succeed him. The Sangamon district was the one which the Whigs of Illinois had apparently the best prospect of carrying, and it was full of able and ambitious men, who were nominated successively for the only place which gave them the opportunity of playing a part in the national theater at Washington. They all served with more or less distinction, but for eight years no one was ever twice a candidate. A sort of tradition had grown up, through which a perverted notion of honor and propriety held it discreditable in a member to ask for reelection. This state of things was not peculiar to that district, and it survives with more or less vigor throughout the country to this day, to the serious detriment of Congress. This consideration, coupled with what is called the claim of locality, must in time still further deteriorate the representatives of the States at Washington. To ask in a nominating convention who is best qualified for service in Congress is always regarded as an impertinence; but the question "what county in the district has had the Congressman oftenest" is always considered in order. For such reasons as these Mr. Lincoln refused to allow his name to go before the voters again, and the next year he again refused, writing an emphatic letter for publication, in which he said that there were many Whigs who could do as much as he "to bring the district right side up."
Colonel Baker had come back from the wars with all the glitter of Cerro Gordo about him, but did not find the prospect of political preferment flattering in Sangamon County, and therefore, with that versatility and sagacity which was more than once to render him signal service, he removed to the Galena district, in the extreme north- western corner of the State, and almost immediately on his arrival there received a nomination to Congress. He was doubly fortunate in this move, as the nomination he was unable to take away from Logan proved useless to the latter, who was defeated after a hot contest. Baker therefore took the place of Lincoln as the only Whig member from Illinois, and their names occur frequently together in the arrangements for the distribution of "Federal patronage" at the close of the Administration of Polk and the beginning of that of Taylor.
[Sidenote: MS letter from Lincoln to Schooler. Feb. 2, 1869.]
During the period while the President-elect was considering the appointment of his Cabinet, Lincoln used all the influence he could bring to bear, which was probably not very much, in favor of Baker for a place in the Government. The Whig members of the Legislatures of Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin joined in this effort, which came to nothing. The recommendations to office which Lincoln made after the inauguration of General Taylor are probably unique of their kind. Here is a specimen which is short enough to give entire. It is addressed to the Secretary of the Interior: "I recommend that William Butler be appointed Pension Agent for the Illinois agency when the place shall be vacant. Mr. Hurst, the present incumbent, I believe has performed the duties very well. He is a decided partisan, and I believe expects to be removed. Whether he shall be, I submit to the Department. This office is not confined to my district, but pertains to the whole State; so that Colonel Baker has an equal right with myself to be heard concerning it. However, the office is located here (at Springfield); and I think it is not probable any one would desire to remove from a distance to take it."
We have examined a large number of his recommendations—for with a complete change of administration there would naturally be great activity among the office-seekers—and they are all in precisely the same vein. He nowhere asks for the removal of an incumbent; he never claims a place as subject to his disposition; in fact, he makes no personal claim whatever; he simply advises the Government, in case a vacancy occurs, who, in his opinion, is the best man to fill it. When there are two applicants, he indicates which is on the whole the better man, and sometimes adds that the weight of recommendations is in favor of the other! In one instance he sends forward the recommendations of the man whom he does not prefer, with an indorsement emphasizing the importance of them, and adding: "From personal knowledge I consider Mr. Bond every way worthy of the office and qualified to fill it. Holding the individual opinion that the appointment of a different gentleman would be better, I ask especial attention and consideration for his claims, and for the opinions expressed in his favor by those over whom I can claim no superiority." The candor, the fairness and moderation, together with the respect for the public service which these recommendations display, are all the more remarkable when we reflect that there was as yet no sign of a public conscience upon the subject. The patronage of the Government was scrambled for, as a matter of course, in the mire into which Jackson had flung it.
For a few weeks in the spring of 1849 Mr. Lincoln appears in a character which is entirely out of keeping with all his former and subsequent career. He became, for the first and only time in his life, an applicant for an appointment at the hands of the President. His bearing in this attitude was marked by his usual individuality. In the opinion of many Illinoisans it was important that the place of Commissioner of the General Land Office should be given to a citizen of their State, one thoroughly acquainted with the land law in the West and the special needs of that region. A letter to Lincoln was drawn up and signed by some half-dozen of the leading Whigs of the State asking him to become an applicant for that position.
He promptly answered, saying that if the position could be secured for a citizen of Illinois only by his accepting it, he would consent; but he went on to say that he had promised his best efforts to Cyrus Edwards for that place, and had afterwards stipulated with Colonel Baker that if J. L. D. Morrison, another Mexican hero, and Edwards could come to an understanding with each other as to which should withdraw, he would join in recommending the other; that he could not take the place, therefore, unless it became clearly impossible for either of the others to get it. Some weeks later, the impossibility referred to having become apparent, Mr. Lincoln applied for the place; but a suitor for office so laggard and so scrupulous as he, stood very little chance of success in contests like those which periodically raged at Washington during the first weeks of every new administration. The place came, indeed, to Illinois, but to neither of the three we have mentioned. The fortunate applicant was Justin Butterfield, of Chicago, a man well and favorably known among the early members of the Illinois bar, [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote relocated to chapter end.] who, however, devoted less assiduous attention to the law than to the business of office-seeking, which he practiced with fair success all his days.
It was in this way that Abraham Lincoln met and escaped one of the greatest dangers of his life. In after days he recognized the error he had committed, and congratulated himself upon the happy deliverance he had obtained through no merit of his own. The loss of at least four years of the active pursuit of his profession would have been irreparable, leaving out of view the strong probability that the singular charm of Washington life to men who have a passion for politics might have kept him there forever. It has been said that a residence in Washington leaves no man precisely as it found him. This is an axiom which may be applied to most cities in a certain sense, but it is true in a peculiar degree of our capital.
To the men who go there from small rural communities in the South and the West, the bustle and stir, the intellectual movement, such as it is, the ordinary subjects of conversation, of such vastly greater importance than anything they have previously known, the daily, even hourly combats on the floor of both houses, the intrigue and the struggle of office-hunting, which engage vast numbers besides the office-seekers, the superior piquancy and interest of the scandal which is talked at a Congressional boarding-house over that which seasons the dull days at village-taverns—all this gives a savor to life in Washington the memory of which doubles the tedium of the sequestered vale to which the beaten legislator returns when his brief hour of glory is over. It is this which brings to the State Department, after every general election, that crowd of specters, with their bales of recommendations from pitying colleagues who have been reelected, whose diminishing prayers run down the whole gamut of supplication from St. James to St. Paul of Loando, and of whom at the last it must be said, as Mr. Evarts once said after an unusually heavy day, "Many called, but few chosen." Of those who do not achieve the ruinous success of going abroad to consulates that will not pay their board, or missions where they avoid daily shame only by hiding their penury and their ignorance away from observation, a great portion yield to their fate and join that fleet of wrecks which floats forever on the pavements of Washington.
It is needless to say that Mr. Lincoln received no damage from his term of service in Washington, but we know of nothing which shows so strongly the perilous fascination of the place as the fact that a man of his extraordinary moral and mental qualities could ever have thought for a moment of accepting a position so insignificant and incongruous as that which he was more than willing to assume when he left Congress. He would have filled the place with honor and credit— but at a monstrous expense. We do not so much refer to his exceptional career and his great figure in history; these momentous contingencies could not have suggested themselves to him. But the place he was reasonably sure of filling in the battle of life should have made a subordinate office in Washington a thing out of the question. He was already a lawyer of skill and reputation; an orator upon whom his party relied to speak for them to the people. An innate love of combat was in his heart; he loved discussion like a medieval schoolman. The air was already tremulous with faint bugle-notes that heralded a conflict of giants on a field of moral significance to which he was fully alive and awake, where he was certain to lead at least his hundreds and his thousands. Yet if Justin Butterfield had not been a more supple, more adroit, and less scrupulous suitor for office than himself, Abraham Lincoln would have sat for four inestimable years at a bureau-desk in the Interior Department, and when the hour of action sounded in Illinois, who would have filled the place which he took as if he had been born for it? Who could have done the duty which he bore as lightly as if he had been fashioned for it from the beginning of time?
His temptation did not end even with Butterfield's success. The Administration of General Taylor, apparently feeling that some compensation was due to one so earnestly recommended by the leading Whigs of the State, offered Mr. Lincoln the governorship of Oregon. This was a place more suited to him than the other, and his acceptance of it was urged by some of his most judicious friends [Footnote: Among others John T. Stuart, who is our authority for this statement.] on the ground that the new Territory would soon be a State, and that he could come back as a senator. This view of the matter commended itself favorably to Lincoln himself, who, however, gave it up on account of the natural unwillingness of his wife to remove to a country so wild and so remote.
This was all as it should be. The best place for him was Illinois, and he went about his work there until his time should come.
[Relocated Footnote: Butterfield had a great reputation for ready wit and was suspected of deep learning. Some of his jests are still repeated by old lawyers in Illinois, and show at least a well-marked humorous intention. On one occasion he appeared before Judge Pope to ask the discharge of the famous Mormon Prophet, Joe Smith, who was in custody surrounded by his church dignitaries. Bowing profoundly to the court and the ladies who thronged the hall, he said: "I appear before you under solemn and peculiar circumstances. I am to address the Pope, surrounded by angels, in the presence of the holy apostles, in behalf of the Prophet of the Lord." We once heard Lincoln say of Butterfield that he was one of the few Whigs in Illinois who approved the Mexican war. His reason, frankly given, was that he had lost an office in New York by opposing the war of 1812. "Henceforth," he said with cynical vehemence, "I am for war, pestilence, and famine." He was once defending the Shawneetown Bank and advocating the extension of its charter; an opposing lawyer contended that this would be creating a new bank. Butterfield brought a smile from the court and a laugh from the bar by asking "whether when the Lord lengthened the life of Hezekiah he made a new man, or whether it was the same old Hezekiah?">[