This week is the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, which I will celebrate as a lover of Lincoln, whose guiding principle through the 1850s, "All men are created equal," can so serve us now in the time of American-endorsed occupation in Palestine. That said, here's an odd moment in Lincoln's writings I turned up last night when I was drifting off to sleep that suggests underhandedness and even corruption on Honest Abe's part.
Famously ambitious, Lincoln was a great politician–anybody who is elected president is by definition–and a good schemer and nose-counter. In 1849, President Zachary Taylor, a Whig, took office, and Lincoln, a loyal Whig, schemed to be named the Commissioner of the General Land Office in Taylor's Interior Department. Lincoln was then 40, a lawyer and former congressman in Springfield, Illinois. He wrote a lot of letters to friends trying to knock out his competition, Justin Butterfield, who he felt was undeserving–and whom he described as a "personal friend" and a "drone." Butterfield got the job, notwithstanding the fact that, per Lincoln, he had "never spent a dollar or lifted a finger in [a recent political] fight."
The conventional wisdom is that this loss (and the subsequent offer of the Oregon territory governorship to Lincoln, which he declined) dropped Lincoln out of politics for the next few years. Till the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854 rocked our world, and brought Lincoln to the highest stage, never to descend.
Anyway, Lincoln's campaign for the Land Office was strenuous enough to strain friendships and cause controversy. After the dust settled, Lincoln sought to defuse the bad blood by writing in October 1849 to Thomas Ewing, the Secretary of the Interior, to assure him that he'd been honorable in his efforts. In that letter, Lincoln quoted a letter that he believed Ewing had seen that cast aspersions on Lincoln: "[an informant] told me that there was a clique in Springfield determined to prevent Butterfield's confirmation; and that Lincoln would give a thousand dollars to have it done."
Lincoln went on to deny the first charge to Ewing: that there was any clique of which he was a part that was out to deny Butterfield the job. I'm no scholar, certainly not of this patch of history, but it seems to me this was a lie on Lincoln's part. Earlier in 1849 he had written to a half dozen confederates trying to get the Land Office job. You can read all those letters in the Library of America edition of his writings that I'm quoting here. Lincoln did not seek to deny the second part of the allegation: that he was offering $1000 to knock out Butterfield. Makes you wonder how politics worked. Then and now.
(Phil Weiss)
