“He was as ambitious of earthly honors as any man of his time. Furthermore, he was an adept at log-rolling or any political game that did not involve falsity.... Nobody knew better how to turn things to advantage politically, and nobody was readier to take such advantage, provided it did not involve dishonorable means. He could not cheat the people out of their votes any more than out of their money. The Abraham Lincoln that some people have pictured to themselves, sitting in his dingy law office, working over his cases till the voice of duty roused him, never existed. If this had been his type he never would have been called at all.”
It helps one to realize the man who afterwards roused the soul of the Republic to resist the degradation of slavery and the shock of war to read what he wrote from Washington to Mr. Herndon in 1848:
“Now, as to the young men, you must not wait to be brought forward by the older men. For instance, do you suppose that I should ever have got into notice if I had waited to be hunted up and pushed forward by older men? You young men get together and form a Rough and Ready club, and have regular meetings and speeches. Take in everybody that you can get.... As you go along, gather up the shrewd, wild boys about town, whether just of age or just a little under. Let every one play the part he can play best—some speak, some sing, and all halloo.”
And in 1836 we catch sight of Lincoln, again a candidate for the Legislature, leaping forward, with flashing eyes to answer a taunt of a Mr. Forquer, who had a lightning rod on his new house, and had just left the Whig party for a place in the Land Office: “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.”
Yes, Lincoln was a politician who could seize your attention by the very witchery of his grotesque personality, twist his opponent into helplessness by the stinging shrewdness of a humorous story, make you laugh or cry alternately, reach down into your humanity by some frank confession of his poverty and rough beginnings, and then suddenly stir the highest instincts of your nature by a sublime moral appeal.
It is true that in his second term in the Legislature he voted for all manner of extravagant and preposterous schemes of “internal improvements.” But that was a day of inflated hope, and Illinois was delirious with land gambling. Lincoln, like the other politicians of the State, was swept along by the current of popular enthusiasm. He swaggered, dreamed, bragged and voted with the rest. The voters wanted railways, canals and river improvements. So the Legislature authorized thirteen hundred miles of railways, a canal between the Illinois River and Lake Michigan, and endless improvements of rivers and streams; and to carry out this staggering programme of improvements in a poor, half-settled frontier State, a loan of twelve million dollars was voted.
Not only did Lincoln in his early life vote for this audacious and spendthrift scheme, in response to a harebrained popular demand, but he advocated woman suffrage; proposed a usury rate, with the naive suggestion that “in cases of extreme necessity there could always be found means to cheat the law”; wrote foolish love letters to blue-eyed Mary Owens, offering to keep his supposed marriage engagement to her, but advising her for her own sake not to hold him to it; and developed into a more or less ranting, downright country politician, ready to make a stump speech, tell a story, shake hands with a crowd or thrash a ruffian on the slightest provocation.
And when the capital of Illinois was changed to Springfield, he rode into that town on a borrowed horse, with “two saddlebags, containing two or three law books and a few pieces of clothing,” and, not having seventeen dollars with which to buy a bed and furnishings, accepted a free room over the store of his friend, Mr. Speed, dropped his saddlebags on the floor and smilingly said, “Well, Speed, I’m moved.” That was his entrance into the town which saw his rise to the Presidency.
Around the fireplace in Speed’s store Lincoln used to sit with Douglas, Baker, Calhoun, Browning, Lamborn and other rising politicians and orators of the West. Here every question under heaven was debated, stories were told, jokes cracked, poems recited; and it would take the pen of a Balzac to describe the scenes of merriment, or serious, sharp contest, that happened before those blazing logs, with an attentive ring of friends listening to the never-ceasing flow of wit and wisdom.
Again and again Lincoln was elected to the Illinois Legislature, always as a Whig. Yet he remained humble in spirit. In answer to the taunt that the Whigs were aristocrats, he made a speech showing that he understood how the political sympathies of the West were to be won: