Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power Read Online Free PDF Page A

precinct and county conventions endorsed the growing view “that it is Abraham’s turn now.” 15
    After this strenuous struggle for the party nomination, Lincoln’s battle with the Democratic candidate, Peter Cartwright, was rather a low-key affair. Lincoln did not take victory over the famed Methodist preacher for granted, but in the event Cartwright, though a scourge of Calvinists, total immersionists, and backsliders, proved no match for the Whigs. Lincoln was carried to Washington by a handsome majority. However, as he told his friend Joshua Speed, his electoral success had “not pleased me as much as I expected,” and his term in Congress, rather than being a springboard for achieving a national reputation, proved anticlimactic and largely undistinguished. Even so, Lincoln would happily have sought a second term had it not been for the principle of rotation in office. He had declared at the outset that he would not stand again, “more from a wish to deal fairly with others . . . than for any cause personal to myself”; he could not go back on his “word and honor,” unless “it should so happen that nobody else wishes to be elected.” 16 With elective office thus closed off he was induced, reluctantly at first, to seek the most prestigious patronage appointment available to aspiring Illinoisans: commissioner of the General Land Office. When the new Whig administration of President Zachary Taylor instead awarded the job to Justin Butterfield, an able land lawyer from Chicago, who unlike himself had done little to secure the president’s victory, Lincoln was bitterly disappointed. In the right hands—his own—he believed the post and the patronage it controlled could be the ideal means of building a stronger Whig machine in a state where Democrats, the majority party, dominated the presidential and gubernatorial races. An opportunity to benefit the most ambitious leaders of Whiggery had been lost. When offered the governorship of Oregon Territory by way of compensation, Lincoln declined what he (and his wife) judged a political dead end.

    Abraham Lincoln, around 1846, shortly before he left for Washington as a newly elected congressman. In his untypically kempt hair we may detect a solicitous, wifely hand.
    Lincoln’s return to the law in 1849, by now in partnership with William Herndon, marked the beginning of a period of relative withdrawal from politics that ended only in 1854. The degree of that withdrawal and the significance of those midlife years for Lincoln’s personal development are contested. Lincoln himself later wrote that at this time he “practiced law more assiduously than ever before” and “was losing interest in politics,” and that by 1854 “his profession had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind.” He did not demur when in 1860 he read in William Dean Howells’s campaign biography that after 1849 “ambition could not tempt him.” He declined suggestions that he should run once more for Congress or the state legislature, and even missed some landmark political meetings. But there is no reason to believe that Lincoln had stopped yearning for public distinction. These were years marked by periods of deep introspection and depression, and by nightmares. We can only speculate on the sources of his unhappiness, but it may have had to do with his sense of failure. Herndon noted that on his return from Congress Lincoln “despaired of ever rising again in the political world.” Compared with that of his long-standing rival, Stephen A. Douglas, a comet in the Democratic firmament, his career remained stubbornly terrestrial. But he did not write himself off politically. He continued in party management. He worked as a national committeeman and campaign speaker for the Whigs’ presidential candidate, Winfield Scott, in 1852. He delivered eulogies on the deaths of Zachary Taylor and Henry Clay. If the political opportunity was there to be seized, as would become the