Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [71]
It was not simply Mary’s relative poverty that made her early married life difficult. Both she and Lincoln had essentially detached themselves from their previous lives, cutting themselves off from parents and relatives and thereby creating a domestic lifestyle closer to the “nuclear family” of a later age than the extended family still common in the mid-nineteenth century. When Lincoln was away, Mary was left alone to deal with her terror of thunderstorms, her worries over the children’s illnesses, and her spells of depression. Too proud to let her Springfield sisters know the difficulties she faced in these early years—particularly after the disapproval they had voiced over her choice of husband—Mary struggled stoically and proudly on her own.
Once again, her isolation stands in stark contrast to the familial support enjoyed by Frances Seward and Julia Bates. Frances could depend on the companionship not only of her widowed father but of three generations of women living in the same household—her favorite aunt, Cornelia; her sister and closest friend, Lazette, who spent months at a time in the Auburn house; and her beloved daughter, Fanny. Likewise, Julia Bates was surrounded by her children, several of whom continued to live with the family even after they married; and by her parents; her sisters; her brothers; and her husband’s mother, all of whom lived nearby.
If Mary’s solitary life with her husband brought hardship, the birth of two sons within the first forty months of their marriage brought great happiness. Both boys were high-spirited, intelligent, and dearly loved by their parents. In later years, Mary proudly noted that Lincoln was “the kindest—most tender and loving husband & father in the world…. Said to me always when I asked him for any thing—You know what you want—go and get it. He never asked me if it was necessary.”
He was, by all accounts, a gentle and indulgent father who regularly took the boys on walks around the neighborhood, played with them in the house, and brought them to his office while he worked. While Herndon believed that Lincoln was too indulgent, that the children “litterally ran over him,” leaving him “powerless to withstand their importunities,” Lincoln maintained that children should be allowed to grow up without a battery of rules and restrictions. “It is my pleasure that my children are free—happy and unrestrained by paternal tyrrany,” Mary recalled his saying. “Love is the chain whereby to lock a child to its parent.”
WHEN, AT LAST, Illinois began to emerge from recession, Lincoln’s hopes for a future in politics revived. “Now if you should hear any one say that Lincoln don’t want to go to Congress,” he wrote a friend three months after his marriage, “tell him…he is mistaken.” His objective was the Seventh Congressional District—including Sangamon County—where the Whigs had a majority in a state that was otherwise solidly Democratic.
Lincoln’s first goal was to win the endorsement of the Sangamon County Convention, which would appoint delegates to the congressional district nominating convention. The convention system had just been adopted by the Whigs to unify party members in the general election. “That ‘union is strength’ is a truth that has been known, illustrated and declared, in various ways and forms in all ages of the world,” said Lincoln in support of the new system, pointing out that “he whose wisdom surpasses that of all philosophers, has declared that ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand.’” Much later, of course, he would famously widen the application of this same biblical phrase beyond Sangamon County Whigs to the nation as a whole.
Lincoln’s adversary in his home county was Edward Baker, a close friend after whom he named his second-born son. Despite a vigorous campaign, Lincoln fell short by a narrow margin. “We had a meeting of the whigs of the county here on last monday to appoint delegates to a district convention,” Lincoln reported