SIDE by side with Lincoln’s life at the bar ran a different yet kindred career—that of the politician. These twin pursuits claimed him at almost the outset, as they claim so many men who enter upon the law. But in his case the customary order was reversed, for he had been elected to public office before he became a lawyer.
Early during the spring of 1832, while still a clerk in Denton Offutt’s grocery store at New Salem, Lincoln announced himself to be an aspirant for electoral honors. How this came about is not without interest. According to his own explanation, offered in a little speech made at the time, he had been “solicited by many friends”[v-1] to become a candidate for the State Legislature. The phrase doubtless passed more nearly at its face value on that occasion than is usual with such euphemisms of the stump. For in very truth, this young man—newcomer though he was, and but just past his twenty-third birthday—had won the good will of the people about him to a remarkable degree. Sunning themselves in the charm of his kindly nature, laughing at his jokes and applauding his feats of physical strength, admiring the scanty learning which he employed with so much common sense, and confiding, above everything, in an integrity that had already been subjected, as we have seen, to numerous little tests, the voters of New Salem might well have “solicited” Lincoln to enter the political field. They had known him, it is true, less than nine months, but may not that brief period have teemed with as many experiences as ordinarily fill the corresponding number of years in more conservative communities? For time seems measured by heartbeats, so to say, rather than by hours, when it is quickened with the stress and strain of life on a Western frontier. Under the primitive conditions that prevail there, elemental qualities push to the front, men stand revealed for what they really are, and true leadership comes speedily into its own. So the smiling young clerk, whose tall, angular form towered above Offutt’s counter, impressed himself upon his customers as a suitable person to be entrusted with the not too onerous duties of representing them in the General Assembly. They had seen enough of him to believe that those ungainly lines overlay a group of faculties which might be relied on for effective political service; and, what was infinitely more important, they felt assured that whenever these faculties were exerted, they would move in harmony with the laws of honor.
Honor, in the fine, exalted sense of the term, however, hardly entered at this time into the calculations of the New Salem constituents. No far-reaching moral principle apparently claimed their attention, and such interests as they had in that particular election itself were commonplace enough. The voters desired a member who could be trusted to look loyally, with unsoiled hands, after their material needs at the State Capital. They wanted good faith there, rather than high ideals. The candidate—not less practical, for that matter, and a politician true to type in the making—wanted an office. To say that he entered upon this initial canvass with any exceptionally lofty programme, is to anticipate the full-orbed halo of later days, at a period when only the first faint prophetic glow might, perhaps, now and then have been discernible. In sober truth, as Lincoln frankly explained, “Offutt’s business was failing—had almost failed.” [v-2] It would soon become necessary to find a new job, and the pay of a Representative, though limited to day’s wages for short terms, with mileage, looked sufficiently inviting. Moreover, this call from “among his immediate neighbors,” [v-2] to quote him again, touched perhaps the most vulnerable point in Abe’s character—his personal ambition. The “last infirmity of noble mind” may sometimes also be the first. From Lincoln’s earliest youth the passion to surpass others had dominated him at every turn. Pitting his strength, whether of mind or body, against that of his associates, he had lost no opportunity of excelling them, until it seemed almost second nature for this homely mixture of modesty and self-assertion, of good humor and mastery, to become the central figure in every group through which he moved. So confirmed grew these habits of leadership that as Lincoln reached manhood the craving for distinction, the aspiration to be big where once he had been little, must have entered into the very core of his being. It was not overstating the case, accordingly, for him to tell his “fellow-citizens,” in a printed address issued at the beginning of this canvass: “Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say, for one, that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.”[v-3]
These phrases, stripped of their conventional wrappings, really meant that the writer had set his heart, above all things, upon popularity.
The very intensity of such an aspiration must have put him severely to the test. How far he went in gratifying it, and to what extent, if any, inconvenient moral scruples were allowed to impede his eager progress, are pertinent questions. Was he, in other words, under the absolute sway of the master passion, as so many eager souls have been, or did an alert conscience at crucial points apply the controlling brake? Conclusive answers to these queries can, we are aware, be given only after a survey of the man’s entire career; yet back there, almost at the beginning of things, on the threshold, so to say, of his public life, one group of circumstances dimly prefigured, in a way, the whole story.
When Lincoln essayed this first short flight into politics, Democratic men and measures were supreme on well-nigh every hand. The reign of Andrew Jackson was at its height. Under his imperious leadership—he had just completed three years in the White House—“radical doctrines,” so-called, commanded ever-increasing support; while his own magnetic personality attracted many followers who were as ardent in their support of him as they grew intolerant of those who opposed him. No predecessor had carried the rewarding of friends and the punishing of enemies to such an extreme. Partisanship was in the saddle. Proscription became the order of the day. Taking their cue from the despotic decrees issued, time and again at Washington, the “whole-hog Jackson men,” as the most zealous among the President’s adherents were not inaptly called, stationed themselves across the highways to preferment and crushed out the political lives of candidates who failed to respond with the familiar shibboleths of the party.[v-4] When methods so coercive are pursued by a powerfully intrenched majority, place-hunters in great numbers throng to its standard. Their huzzas may be heard above the voices of the faithful, and patronage, rather than political creed, directs—if indeed it does not control—the devious operations of partisan machinery. Such was the scene that presented itself to the young Lincoln’s anxious eyes, as he looked over this new, this untried field for a point of vantage from which a beginner might try his wings.
Nor was the prospect nearer home essentially different. There, too, the uncompromising Democracy that swayed so much of the country at large seemed all powerful. Illinois, in fact, was counted by this potent majority among its rock-ribbed strongholds, and though factional differences, from time to time, disturbed local harmony, the journalist who described “Jacksonism” as dominating that State with “the strength of Gibraltar,”[v-5] hardly overdrew the picture. Sangamon County, it is true, contained a considerable number who did not favor the President, yet even there his majorities were decisive. So, all in all, an ambitious tyro, making a maiden appeal to the voters of that district from the obscure little village of New Salem, had every incentive, apparently, for enrolling himself in the ranks of these triumphant Democrats.
Such a course would not have run counter one whit to Lincoln’s early sympathies. His father, we are told, was a Democrat, or a Democratic Republican, to use the older designation; his own youthful associations had been largely with people of the same stripe; and, like many other lads of the period, he regarded the picturesque chieftain of the party with a personal admiration which neither time nor political changes wholly effaced.[v-6] But as Abraham reached manhood, a greater statesman—greater in not a few requisites of leadership—had attracted his favor; and he found himself, ere long, at one with those who were enlisted under the banner of Henry Clay.
That eminent campaigner’s personality captivated the younger man’s imagination. It presented a magnet to which the true metal in Lincoln’s nature could not but respond. There were elements, moreover, in “gallant Harry’s” character, no less than in his achievements so far as they had then been unfolded, that compelled profound respect. Clay’s early poverty, of which no sordid traces were perceptible in a singularly winning presence, his breadth of human sympathy and largeness of vision, a chivalrous manner that accorded well with an ardently sanguine temperament, his unswerving integrity with regard to pecuniary matters, the lofty standard that he had set himself for the practice of his profession as a lawyer, his equally lofty standards of public duty,—then still unshaken by the shifts of a beguiling ambition,—the splendid courage, not to say genius, with which he rose to the demands of great political occasions, a generous patriotism that inspired him to carry peace-winning concessions across the barriers raised by conflicting parties, his steadily expanding record which at every turn, whether in the Kentucky Legislature, the United States Senate, the House of Representatives, the Speaker’s chair, the diplomatic service, or the President’s Cabinet, had thus far been marked by the élan and dash of a brilliant intellect, an eloquence that baffled description, yet left his audiences for the rest of their days under the spell of its witchery,—all this and more had brought Lincoln to a point well-nigh bordering upon hero-worship.
Naturally, so strong a preference for “the Great Commoner” himself extended, in a way, to his public policies. Clay’s political programme, comprising by that time three notable issues,—the demands for a federal bank, a high protective tariff, and a continental scheme of internal improvements,—may also be said to have left its impress upon Lincoln’s mind. He was not deeply concerned, it is true, during those callow days, with national questions; yet so far as he held any views on such matters, they favored “Clay’s American System” and the principles generally of the National Republican Party.