• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1681 0

ruled had become a cliché of American politics. When he ran for reelection to the legislature in 1836, Lincoln took this principle further than most of his contemporaries by issuing a public letter stating that he favored “admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms, (by no means excluding females).” Very few women, mainly property-owning widows, would qualify, since none served in the militia and married women did not pay taxes in their own name. Nonetheless, Lincoln’s statement represented a remarkable departure from the prevailing gendered definition of “the people.” Simultaneously, however, as his statement made clear, Lincoln accepted the legitimacy of the racial boundary that excluded blacks from participation in American democracy.15

As with so many contemporaries in Jacksonian America, including his great rival Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln found in politics an unparalleled opportunity for social advancement. He ran for the Illinois House of Representatives for the first time in 1832 at the age of twenty-three—the only time, he later wrote, that he suffered defeat in a popular vote—and two years later was elected to the first of his four terms in the legislature. His earliest campaign pronouncements identified him as a supporter of government-sponsored economic development and the creation of a public infrastructure. He dwelled at length on the value of internal improvements, specifically making the Sangamon River navigable by steamboat (a plan never implemented) so that New Salem could export farmers’ surplus agricultural goods and import “necessary articles from abroad.” Even “the poorest and most thinly populated counties,” he added, could thrive through participation in the market economy. He also promoted public education—something he had barely enjoyed—as “the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in.”16

Lincoln rose rapidly in his party. As early as 1836, he had emerged as “the acknowledged leader of the Whigs in the House.” He played a key role in the shift of the state capital from Vandalia to Springfield in 1837, and then moved his residence from New Salem to the new center of government. And he became a key advocate of a vast plan for state financing of canals, railroads, and river improvements, paid for by borrowing. Joshua Speed later recalled Lincoln saying he wanted to be the “DeWitt Clinton of Illinois,” referring to the New York governor who built the Erie Canal, completed in 1825. The internal improvements scheme, expanded so that every corner of the state would receive some benefit from it, initially won support from both parties. But the economic depression that began in 1837 made it impossible for the state to pay interest on its bonds. Democrats called for scrapping the program while Lincoln, as he put it, tried to “save something to the State, from the general wreck.” When the House, in 1840, voted 77 to 11 to abandon the system, Lincoln was among the minority. The following year, when interest due on the internal improvements bonds considerably exceeded the state’s entire revenue, Illinois defaulted, essentially declaring bankruptcy. It took the state forty-five years to pay off the debt.17

During the 1840 presidential campaign, when Whigs passed over their leader Henry Clay to nominate the Indian-fighter William Henry Harrison for president, Lincoln made numerous speeches and participated in debates with prominent local Democrats, including Stephen A. Douglas, then the secretary of state of Illinois. With President Martin Van Buren weakened because of the economic downturn, Whigs repackaged themselves as supporters of popular democracy, portraying the wealthy Harrison as a man of the people and Van Buren, the son of a tavern keeper, as an aristocrat. “No one will seriously pretend that this was a campaign of ideas,” the Indiana political leader George W. Julian later recalled. Yet Lincoln’s speeches in fact offered well-reasoned arguments for Whig economic policies. He defended the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States, blamed