Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [81]
On December 13, less than two weeks after his arrival in Washington, Lincoln wrote his law partner, William Herndon: “As you are all so anxious for me to distinguish myself, I have concluded to do so, before long.” Nine days later, he introduced a resolution calling on President Polk to inform the House “whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed” belonged to Mexico or to the United States. He challenged the president to present evidence that “Mexico herself became the aggressor by invading our soil in hostile array.”
The president, not surprisingly, did not respond to the unknown freshman congressman whose hasty reach for distinction earned him only the derisive nickname “spotty Lincoln.” A few weeks later, Lincoln voted with his Whig brethren on a resolution introduced by Massachusetts congressman George Ashmun, which stated that the war had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally” initiated by the president.
The following week, on January 12, 1848, Lincoln defended his spot resolutions and his vote on the Ashmun resolution in a major speech. He claimed that he would happily reverse his vote if the president could prove that first blood was shed on American soil; but since he “can not, or will not do this,” he suspected that the entire matter was, “from beginning to end, the sheerest deception.” Having provoked both countries into war, Lincoln charged, the president had hoped “to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory…that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy.” He went on to liken the president’s war message to “the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream.” Perhaps recalling the turtles tormented with hot coals by his boyhood friends, Lincoln employed the bizarre simile of the president’s confused mind “running hither and thither, like some tortured creature, on a burning surface, finding no position, on which it can settle down, and be at ease.”
This maiden effort was not the tone of reasoned debate that later characterized Lincoln’s public statements. Nor did it obey his oft-expressed belief that a leader should endeavor to transform, yet heed, public opinion. Compelling as Lincoln’s criticisms might have been, they fell flat at a time when the majority of Americans were delighted with the outcome of the war. The Democratic Illinois State Register charged that Lincoln had disgraced his district with his “treasonable assault upon President Polk,” claimed that “henceforth” he would be known as “Benedict Arnold,” and predicted that he would enjoy only a single term. Lincoln sought to clarify his position, arguing that although he had challenged the instigation of the war, he had never voted against supplies for the soldiers. To accept Polk’s position without question, he claimed, was to “allow the President to invade a neighboring nation…whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary.”
Even the loyal Herndon feared that Lincoln’s antiwar stance would destroy his political future. “I saw that Lincoln would ruin himself,” Herndon later explained. “I wrote to him on the subject again and again.” Herndon was right to worry, for as it turned out, Lincoln’s quest for distinction had managed only to infuriate the Democrats, worry fainthearted Whigs, and lose support in Illinois, where the war was extremely popular. A prominent Chicago politician, Justin Butterfield, asked if he was against the Mexican War, replied: “no, I opposed one War [the War of 1812]. That was enough for me. I am now perpetually in favor of war, pestilence and famine.” In the years ahead, Lincoln would write frequent letters defending his position. If he had hoped for reelection to Congress, however,