Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [174]
The visiting correspondents from Republican papers had nothing but praise for Mary. “Whatever of awkwardness may be ascribed to her husband, there is none of it in her,” a journalist from the New York Evening Post wrote. “She converses with freedom and grace, and is thoroughly au fait in all the little amenities of society.” Frequent mention was made of her distinguished Kentucky relatives, her sophisticated education, her ladylike courtesy, her ability to speak French fluently, her son’s enrollment in Harvard College, and her membership in the Presbyterian Church. Mrs. Lincoln is “a very handsome woman, with a vivacious and graceful manner,” another reporter observed; “an interesting and often sparkling talker.”
Reporters were fascinated by the contrast between a cultured woman from a refined background and the self-made rough-hewn Lincoln. Party leaders began to cultivate the legend of Lincoln that would permeate the entire campaign and, indeed, evolve into the present day. He was depicted as “a Man of the People,” an appealing political title after the rustic Andrew Jackson first supplanted the Eastern elites who had occupied the presidency for the forty years from Washington through John Quincy Adams.
The log cabin was emblematic of the dignity of honest, common, impoverished origins ever since William Henry Harrison had been triumphantly dubbed the “log-cabin, hard-cider” candidate twenty years earlier. Harrison had merely been posed in front of a log cabin. Lincoln had actually been born in one. One Republican worker wrote: “It has also afforded me sincere pleasure to think of Mr. Lincoln taking possession of the White House; he, who was once the inmate of the log cabin—were he the pampered, effeminated child of fortune, no such pleasing emotions would be inspired.” Answering the charge that Lincoln would be a “nullity,” the New York Tribune suggested that a “man who by his own genius and force of character has raised himself from being a penniless and uneducated flat boatman on the Wabash River to the position Mr. Lincoln now occupies is not likely to be a nullity anywhere.”
This aura of the Western man, the man of the prairie, had been reinforced during the Chicago convention, when Republicans paraded through the streets carrying the rails Lincoln had supposedly split. Although Lincoln—Honest Abe—was careful not to verify that any particular rail had been his handiwork, in one interview he held a rail aloft and said: “here is a stick I received a day or two since from Josiah Crawford…. He writes me that it is a part of one of the rails that I cut for him in 1825.”
Lincoln was aware that being “a Man of the People” was an advantage, especially in the raw and growing Western states critical to the election of a Republican candidate. Prior to the campaign, he had reinforced this politically potent image with descriptions of his poor schooling, years of poverty, and manual labor. Although his grim beginnings held no fascination for him, Lincoln was astute enough to capitalize upon this invaluable political asset.
From the outset, he decided that “it would be both imprudent, and contrary to the reasonable expectation of friends for me to write, or speak anything upon doctrinal points now. Besides this, my published speeches contain nearly all I could willingly say.” When his friend Leonard Swett asked his approval of a letter expressing the candidate’s sentiments, Lincoln replied, “Your letter, written to go to N.Y. is…substantially right.” However, he advised, “Burn this, not that there is any thing wrong in it; but because it is best not to be