Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [100]
The specter of some domestic hell is not necessary to justify Lincoln’s devotion to his law career. Life on the circuit provided Lincoln the time and space he needed to remedy the “want of education” he regretted all his life. During his nights and weekends on the circuit, in the absence of domestic interruptions, he taught himself geometry, carefully working out propositions and theorems until he could proudly claim that he had “nearly mastered the Six-books of Euclid.” His first law partner, John Stuart, recalled that “he read hard works—was philosophical—logical—mathematical—never read generally.”
Herndon describes finding him one day “so deeply absorbed in study he scarcely looked up when I entered.” Surrounded by “a quantity of blank paper, large heavy sheets, a compass, a rule, numerous pencils, several bottles of ink of various colors, and a profusion of stationery,” Lincoln was apparently “struggling with a calculation of some magnitude, for scattered about were sheet after sheet of paper covered with an unusual array of figures.” When Herndon inquired what he was doing, he announced “that he was trying to solve the difficult problem of squaring the circle.” To this insoluble task posed by the ancients over four thousand years earlier, he devoted “the better part of the succeeding two days…almost to the point of exhaustion.”
In addition to geometry, Lincoln’s solitary researches allowed him to study the astronomy, political economy, and philosophy that his fellow lawyers had learned in college. “Life was to him a school,” fellow circuit rider Leonard Swett observed, “and he was always studying and mastering every subject which came before him.”
Lincoln’s time on the circuit was certainly difficult for Mary; his long absences from home were “one of the greatest hardships” of their marriage. For Lincoln, circuit life was invaluable. Beyond the congeniality of boardinghouse life and the opportunity to continue his lifelong education, these travels provided the chance to walk the streets in dozens of small towns, eat at local taverns in remote corners of the state, and gain a firsthand knowledge of the desires, fears, and hopes of thousands of ordinary people in Illinois—the people who would become his loyal base of support in the years ahead when the time came to return to his first love: politics.`
WHILE LINCOLN was productively engaged on the circuit, Seward was dispirited by what he perceived as a reactionary turn in the country’s mood. “If I muzzle not my mouth on the subject of slavery,” he wrote Frances, “I shall be set down as a disturber, seeking to disturb the Whig Administration and derange the Whig party.” Responding to the public mood, he muted his strident voice on slavery and turned his attention to the less controversial issues of education, internal improvements, and foreign policy. Progress on emancipation, he endeavored to convince himself, could come only with the gradual enlightenment of the American public. When both Henry Clay and Daniel Webster died in 1852, he delivered such glowing eulogies on the Senate floor that his more radical friends took offense. “They cannot see,” Seward complained to Frances, “how much of the misery of human life is derived from the indulgence of wrath!”
The idealistic Frances accepted her husband’s rationale for the eulogies but could not countenance his reluctance to resist the reactionary zeal that enveloped the country after the Compromise. When it appeared that the 1852 Whig Convention was on the verge of endorsing the Compromise in an attempt to create a moderate platform for its presidential candidate, General Winfield Scott, Frances begged