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

case in 1854, he had not lost the ambition to seize it. 17
    Why did Lincoln’s unresting ambition find its particular expression in the search for political office? In this, as in other questions about him, speculation has to decorate fact. It was not an odd choice of career: the most well-traveled route to distinction in the developing western states was not business but politics, and its handmaiden, the law. At a prosaic level, political office provided a livelihood for a debt-ridden young man who possessed no formal qualifications but had self-confidence, a clear head for analysis, and a proper estimate of his talent for public speaking. In due course Mary Todd Lincoln, fiercely political, played a role, certainly in urging Lincoln on to higher political achievement and perhaps in shaping a sometimes discordant domestic environment from which he sought relief; but Lincoln’s political career and ambitions were well established long before she entered his life. We can be certain that Lincoln, who had a natural humility, was not attracted to political leadership by megalomania or a “cheap desire to lord it over others.” He warned against tyrants in his speech at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield in January 1838, and it takes a special kind of historical contortionism to read this as a confession of sinister designs. During his later years, Lincoln may have looked to political achievement as a way of transcending death, but when he was a young man the psychological imperative may have lain in an urge to repair the damage that his early years’ rusticity, educational deficiencies, and “emotional malnutrition” inflicted on his self-esteem. He was possibly embarrassed by his marks of physical eccentricity: his remarkable height, long arms, and general ungainliness. Politics may have promised acceptance and affirmation. In his first campaign address, to the voters of his county in 1832, he wrote, “Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. . . . I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.” 18
    POLITICAL VISION
    Behind Lincoln’s appetite for political power lay much more than the drive for personal recognition. His ambition was nourished by a vision of what the nation should be. Lincoln issued no early, comprehensive statement of political faith; but his election addresses and his performance in state and national legislatures offered what amounted to a largely consistent political program, reflecting a clear philosophy and ethical stance. At its heart was a belief in meritocracy: in the right of all individuals, through their industry, enterprise, and self-discipline, to rise in an increasingly market-oriented society. Essential to his hopes for the poor were the nation’s economic development and material advance. These were to be promoted and nurtured by an interventionist, forward-looking government, doing “for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do,
at all,
or can not,
so well do,
for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.” 19 The logic of Lincoln’s economic thought was a social and moral order at odds with slavery. It was an order whose well-being, he believed, was protected and enhanced by a Union of states loyal to the Founders’ vision of republican liberty.
    Well before the family trekked from Indiana, Lincoln’s experience of personal struggle had fused with the political prescriptions he read in the
Louisville Journal
and other anti-Jacksonian newspapers to give definition to his thought. In Henry Clay’s “American System”—comprising a national bank, a protective tariff, and better roads and waterways (“internal improvements”) for transporting goods—Lincoln identified the essential means of the young republic’s economic development. Taken as a whole, the program of the emerging Whig party would speed the transition from a subsistence to a