Lincoln looked with disfavor, even during those ill-regulated days, upon the methods employed by unscrupulous politicians to attain their ends. He denounced the whole class as “a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people, and who, to say the most of them, are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men.” The “holier-than-thou” tone of this criticism must have flashed at the moment through his mind, for he hastened to add: “I say this with the greater freedom because, being a politician myself, none can regard it as personal.”[v-31]
Somewhat of that same disapproval was more pithily expressed in another country, at a later date, by no less a personage than Benjamin Disraeli when, after sounding the depths and scaling the heights of English public life through a period of strenuous years, he remarked to a colleague: “Look at it as you will, ours is a beastly profession.”
Benjamin and Abraham had not many traits in common: they were the products of vastly different systems; yet a striking resemblance runs through their fine sense of personal honor, their prolonged struggles with debt, their disregard for money, and their contempt of those engaged in politics to serve corrupt private ends. Venality among office-holders early aroused Lincoln’s indignation. He could sympathize with nearly any human weakness but dishonesty, and the dishonesty of trusted public servants seemed to him doubly reprehensible. Consequently, in dealing with such thieves, this gentle man, usually so tender of other men’s sensibilities, smote and spared not. In fact, so severe could be his blows that the scholarly English leader—expert at sarcasm though he was—is credited with no more scathing utterance than the Illinoisan pronounced against certain rogues who had robbed the American Government. Their castigation furnished a stirring incident to the famous debate on “Subtreasuries” that took place at Springfield, during December, 1839. Seven participants—four Democrats and three Whigs—had spoken, when Lincoln closed the series in what some considered the best effort of all. Addressing himself to the argument made by a predecessor in the opposing camp, he said:—
“Mr. Lamborn insists that the difference between the Van Buren Party and the Whigs is that although the former sometimes err in practice, they are always correct in principle, whereas the latter are wrong in principle; and, better to impress this proposition, he uses a figurative expression in these words, ‘The Democrats are vulnerable in the heel, but they are sound in the head and the heart.’ The first branch of the figure,—that is, that the Democrats are vulnerable in the heel,—I admit is not merely figuratively, but literally true. Who that looks but for a moment at their Swartwouts, their Prices, their Harringtons, and their hundreds of others, scampering away with the public money to Texas, to Europe, and to every spot of the earth where a villain may hope to find refuge from justice, can at all doubt that they are most distressingly affected in their heels with a species of ‘running itch.’ It seems that this malady of their heels operates on these sound-headed and honest-hearted creatures very much like the cork leg in the comic song did on its owner; which, when he had once got started on it, the more he tried to stop it, the more it would run away. At the hazard of wearing this point threadbare, I will relate an anecdote which seems too strikingly in point to be omitted. A witty Irish soldier, who was always boasting of his bravery when no danger was near, but who invariably retreated without orders at the first charge of an engagement, being asked by his captain why he did so, replied,—‘Captain, I have as brave a heart as Julius Cæsar ever had; but, somehow or other, whenever danger approaches, my cowardly legs will run away with it.’
“So with Mr. Lamborn’s party. They take the public money into their hand for the most laudable purpose that wise heads and honest hearts can dictate; but before they can possibly get it out again, their rascally ‘vulnerable heels’ will run away with them.”[v-32]
These thieving officials were of a type common—far too common—among the spoilsmen billeted upon their country by the party in power during those easy-going days. Yet, numerous as the grafters must have been, Lincoln did not allow mere weight of numbers to unbalance his sense of their guilt. Nor was he less keenly alive to other forms of dishonesty that manifested themselves, from time to time, among certain self-seeking politicians, who, trimming their sails deftly at critical moments between conflicting breezes, somehow turned up, with charters revised to date, in any snug-harbor which, by an odd coincidence, happened to contain the lucrative offices.
How hard he could be upon such gentry may be inferred from the oft-related retort to George Forquer. It was uttered early in Lincoln’s career, before he had attained any considerable public standing, against a man, moreover, who as a lawyer, Representative, State Senator, Attorney-General, and Secretary of State, appears to have ranked for years among the ablest leaders in Illinois. Forquer, having recently swung over from the Whigs to the Democrats, had just been rewarded with an appointment to the Registry of the Land Office at Springfield. He cut a wide swathe, and his newly erected mansion, the finest in the city, attracted attention, not alone for its beauty, but also because, conspicuously displayed on the structure, rose the only lightning-rod to be seen throughout the community. It was at about this time that the two men crossed swords. Lincoln, making the canvass of 1836 for his reëlection to the Legislature, spoke at a Springfield meeting with such effect as to stir the listening Forquer, an acknowledged master of invective, into a reply. The Register felt obliged to vindicate his recently acquired Democratic principles, but what moved him most was a conviction, as he explained it, that “this young man would have to be taken down.” With a lofty assumption of superiority, the orator went on to express regret over the unpleasant task which a sense of duty had imposed upon him; yet the sentiment was apparently not allowed to dull the keen edge of his sarcasm. For the onslaught is said to have been uncommonly severe.
At its conclusion Lincoln, who had stood near, laboring under manifest excitement while attentively regarding his assailant, remounted the platform and made a rejoinder that has become historic. The final words lingered for many years in the memories of those who heard them. One listener, a devoted friend, has thus recalled what he believes to be substantially Lincoln’s language: “Mr. Forquer commenced his speech by announcing that the young man would have to be taken down. It is for you, fellow citizens, not for me to say whether I am up or down. The gentleman has seen fit to allude to my being a young man; but he forgets that I am older in years than I am in the tricks and trades of politicians. I desire to live, and I desire place and distinction; but I would rather die now than, like the gentleman, live to see the day that I would change my politics for an office worth three thousand dollars a year, and then feel compelled to erect a lightning-rod to protect a guilty conscience from an offended God.”[v-33]
The effect was electric. Forquer’s rod had not averted the lightning. He had, in fact, received a grievous stroke. His antagonist was borne from the court-house on the crest of an enthusiastic crowd; and during the brief remainder of the turncoat’s life, Lincoln’s reproach stuck in the man’s fame like a burdock on a woolly goat.