Before speaking out against the Nebraska Act, Lincoln spent many hours in the State Library, studying present and past congressional debates so that he could reach back into the stream of American history and tell a clear, reasoned, and compelling tale. He would express no opinion on anything, Herndon observed, until he knew his subject "inside and outside, upside and downside." Lincoln told Joshua Speed, "I am slow to learn and slow to forget that which I have learned. My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch any thing on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out."
Lincoln delivered his first great antislavery speech in Springfield at the annual State Fair before a crowd of thousands on October 4, 1854. Farmers and their families had journeyed to the capital from all over the state, filling every hotel room, tavern, and boardinghouse. Billed as the largest agricultural fair in the history of the state, the exhibition featured the most advanced farm implements and heavy machinery, including a "world-renowned" plow. Residents took pride in what was considered the finest display of livestock ever a.s.sembled in one place. Games and amus.e.m.e.nts, music and refreshments were provided from morning until night, ensuring, as one reporter wrote, that "a jolly good time ensued."
The previous day, Lincoln had heard Stephen Douglas hold forth for three hours before the same audience. Douglas, stunned by the widespread hostility in northern Illinois to his seminal role in pa.s.sing the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act, had chosen the State Fair as the best forum for a vigorous defense of the bill. Rain forced the event into the house of representatives chamber, but the change of venue didn"t diminish the impact of Douglas"s speech. Sharpening arguments he had made in the Senate, Douglas emphasized that his bill rested on the una.s.sailable principle of self-government, allowing the people themselves to decide whether or not to allow slavery into their own territorial lands.
The expressive face of "the Little Giant," as the short, stocky Douglas was called, was matched by his stentorian voice. "He had a large head, surmounted by an abundant mane," one reporter observed, "which gave him the appearance of a lion prepared to roar or crush his prey." In the midst of speaking, he would "cast away his cravat" and undo the b.u.t.tons on his coat, captivating his audience with "the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist." "He was frequently interrupted by cheers and hearty demonstrations of applause," the Peoria Daily Press reported, "thus showing that a large majority of the meeting was with him." When he finished, Lincoln jumped up and announced to the crowd that a reb.u.t.tal would be delivered the following day.
The next afternoon, with Douglas seated in the front row, Lincoln faced most likely the largest audience of his life. He appeared "awkward" at first, in his shirtsleeves with no collar. "He began in a slow and hesitating manner," the reporter Horace White noted. Yet, minutes into his speech, "it was evident that he had mastered his subject, that he knew what he was going to say, and that he knew he was right." White was only twenty at the time but was aware even then, he said, that he was hearing "one of the world"s masterpieces of argumentative power and moral grandeur." Sixty years later, that conviction remained. The initial impression was "overwhelming," White told an audience in 1914, "and it has lost nothing by the lapse of time."
Although Lincoln"s voice was "thin, high-pitched," White observed, it had "much carrying power" and "could be heard a long distance in spite of the bustle and tumult of the crowd." As Lincoln hit his stride, "his words began to come faster." Gesturing with his "body and head rather than with his arms," he grew "very impa.s.sioned" and "seemed transfigured" by the strength of his words. "Then the inspiration that possessed him took possession of his hearers also. His speaking went to the heart because it came from the heart. I have heard celebrated orators who could start thunders of applause without changing any man"s opinion. Mr. Lincoln"s eloquence was of the higher type, which produced conviction in others because of the conviction of the speaker himself."
While Douglas simply a.s.serted his points as self-evident, Lincoln embedded his argument in a narrative history, transporting his listeners back to their roots as a people, to the founding of the nation-a story that still retained its power to arouse strong emotion and thoughtful attention. Many of his arguments were familiar to those who had followed the Senate debate and had read Chase"s masterly "Appeal"; but the structure of the speech was so "clear and logical," the Illinois Daily Journal observed, the arrangement of facts so "methodical," that the overall effect was strikingly original and "most effective."
At the State Fair, and twelve nights later, by torchlight in Peoria, where the debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act was repeated, Lincoln presented his carefully "connected view" for better than three hours. In order to make his argument, Lincoln decided to begin with nothing less than an account of our common history, the powerful narrative of how slavery grew with our country, how its growth and expansion had been carefully contained by the founding fathers, and how on this fall night in 1854 the great story they were being told-the story of the Union-had come to such an impa.s.se that the exemplary meaning, indeed, the continued existence of the story, hung in the balance.
For the first time in his public life, his remarkable array of gifts as historian, storyteller, and teacher combined with a lucid, relentless, yet always accessible logic. Instead of the ornate language so familiar to men like Webster, Lincoln used irony and humor, laced with workaday, homespun images to build an eloquent tower of logic. The proslavery argument that a vote for the Wilmot Proviso threatened the stability of the entire Union was reduced to absurdity by a.n.a.logy-"because I may have refused to build an addition to my house, I thereby have decided to destroy the existing house!" Such flashes of figurative language were always available to Lincoln to drive home a point, gracefully educating while entertaining-in a word, communicating an enormously complicated issue with wit, simplicity, and a ma.s.sive power of moral persuasion.
At the time the Const.i.tution was adopted, Lincoln pointed out, "the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the principle, and toleration, only by necessity," since slavery was already woven into the fabric of American society. Noting that neither the word "slave" nor "slavery" was ever mentioned in the Const.i.tution, Lincoln claimed that the framers concealed it, "just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time." As additional evidence of the framers" intent, Lincoln brought his audience even further back, to the moment when Virginia ceded its vast northwestern territory to the United States with the understanding that slavery would be forever prohibited from the new territory, thus creating a "happy home" for "teeming millions" of free people, with "no slave amongst them." In recent years, he said, slavery had seemed to be gradually on the wane until the fateful Nebraska law transformed it into "a sacred right," putting it "on the high road to extension and perpetuity"; giving it "a pat on its back," saying, ""Go, and G.o.d speed you.""
Douglas had argued that Northern politicians were simply manufacturing a crisis, that Kansas and Nebraska were destined, in any event, to become free states because the soil and climate in both regions were inhospitable to the cultivation of staple crops. Labeling this argument "a lullaby," Lincoln exhibited a map demonstrating that five of the present slave states had similar climates to Kansas and Nebraska, and that the census returns for 1850 showed these states held one fourth of all the slaves in the nation.
Finally, as the greatest bulwark against the Nebraska Act and the concept of "popular sovereignty," Lincoln invoked the Declaration of Independence. He considered the Nebraska Act simply a legal term for the perpetuation and expansion of slavery and, as such, nothing less than the possible death knell of the Union and the meaning of America. "The doctrine of self government is right-absolutely and eternally right," he argued, but to use it, as Douglas proposed, to extend slavery perverted its very meaning. "No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other"s consent. I say this is the leading principle-the sheet anchor of American republicanism." If the Negro was a man, which Lincoln claimed he most a.s.suredly was, then it was "a total destruction of self-government" to propose that he be governed by a master without his consent. Allowing slavery to spread forced the American people into an open war with the Declaration of Independence, depriving "our republican example of its just influence in the world."
By appealing to the moral and philosophical foundation work of the nation, Lincoln hoped to provide common ground on which good men in both the North and the South could stand. "I am not now combating the argument of necessity, arising from the fact that the blacks are already amongst us; but I am combating what is set up as moral argument for allowing them to be taken where they have never yet been." Unlike the majority of antislavery orators, who denounced the South and castigated slaveowners as corrupt and un-Christian, Lincoln pointedly denied fundamental differences between Northerners and Southerners. He argued that "they are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up.... When it is said that the inst.i.tution exists; and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself." And, finally, "when they remind us of their const.i.tutional rights, I acknowledge them...and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives."
Rather than upbraid slaveowners, Lincoln sought to comprehend their position through empathy. More than a decade earlier, he had employed a similar approach when he advised temperance advocates to refrain from denouncing drinkers in "thundering tones of anathema and denunciation," for denunciation would inevitably be met with denunciation, "crimination with crimination, and anathema with anathema." In a pa.s.sage directed at abolitionists as well as temperance reformers, he had observed that it was the nature of man, when told that he should be "shunned and despised," and condemned as the author "of all the vice and misery and crime in the land," to "retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart."
Though the cause be "naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel," the sanctimonious reformer could no more pierce the heart of the drinker or the slaveowner than "penetrate the hard sh.e.l.l of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him." In order to "win a man to your cause," Lincoln explained, you must first reach his heart, "the great high road to his reason." This, he concluded, was the only road to victory-to that glorious day "when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth."
Building on his rhetorical advice, Lincoln tried to place himself in the shoes of the slaveowner to reason his way through the sectional impa.s.se, by asking Southerners to let their own hearts and history reveal that they, too, recognized the basic humanity of the black man. Never appealing like Seward to a "higher law," or resorting to Chase"s "natural right" derived from "the code of heaven," Lincoln staked his argument in reality. He confronted Southerners with the contradictions surrounding the legal status of blacks that existed in their own laws and social practices.
In 1820, he reminded them, they had "joined the north, almost unanimously, in declaring the African slave trade piracy, and in annexing to it the punishment of death." In so doing, they must have understood that selling slaves was wrong, for they never thought of hanging men for selling horses, buffaloes, or bears. Likewise, though forced to do business with the domestic slave dealer, they did not "recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man.... Now why is this?" he asked. "You do not so treat the man who deals in corn, cattle or tobacco." Finally, he observed, over four hundred thousand free blacks in the United States had been liberated at "vast pecuniary sacrifices" by white owners who understood something about the human rights of Negroes. "In all these cases it is your sense of justice, and human sympathy, continually telling you" that the slave is a man who cannot be considered "mere merchandise."
As he wound to a close, Lincoln implored his audience to re-adopt the Declaration of Independence and "return [slavery] to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace." This accomplishment, he pledged, would save the Union, and "succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations." When he finished, the enthusiastic audience broke out in "deafening applause." Even the editors of the Democratic paper felt "compelled" to say that they had "never read or heard a stronger anti-Nebraska speech."
From that moment on, propelled by a renewed sense of purpose, Lincoln dedicated the major part of his energies to the antislavery movement. Conservative and contemplative by temperament, he embraced new positions warily. Once he committed himself, however, as he did in the mid-fifties to the antislavery cause, he demonstrated singular tenacity and authenticity of feeling. Ambition and conviction united, "as my two eyes make one in sight," as Robert Frost wrote, to give Lincoln both a political future and a cause worthy of his era.
CHAPTER 6
THE GATHERING STORM
AS 1854 GAVE WAY TO 1855, Abraham Lincoln"s long-dormant dream of high political office was reawakened, now infused with a new sense of purpose by the pa.s.sage of the Nebraska Act. He won a seat in the Illinois State a.s.sembly, then promptly declared himself a candidate for the U.S. Senate. In the Illinois state elections the previous fall, the loose coalition of antislavery Whigs and independent Democrats had gained a narrow majority over the Douglas Democrats in the legislature. The victory was "mainly attributed" to Lincoln"s leadership, observed state legislator Joseph Gillespie. With the new legislature set to convene in late January to choose the next U.S. senator from Illinois, Lincoln was "the first choice" of the overwhelming majority of anti-Nebraska members. His lifelong dream of achieving high political office seemed about to be realized at last.
On January 20, 1855, however, the worst blizzard in more than two decades isolated Springfield from the rest of the state, preventing a quorum from a.s.sembling in the state legislature. Immense snowdrifts cut off trains coming in from the North, and mail was halted for more than a week. While Springfield"s children relished "the merry sleigh bells" jingling through the snow, the "pulsation of business" was "nearly extinct." Finally, the weather improved sufficiently for the legislature to convene.
On Thursday morning, February 8, long before the balloting opened at three o"clock, the Capitol was "a beehive of activity." Representatives caucused and whispered in every corner. The anti-Nebraska caucus, composed mainly of Whigs, voted, as expected, to support Lincoln, but a small group of five anti-Nebraska Democrats was ominously absent. The Douglas Democrats, meanwhile, had decided to support the inc.u.mbent senator, James Shields, on the early ballots. If Shields"s campaign faltered, due to his outspoken endors.e.m.e.nt of the Nebraska bill, they had devised a plan to switch their support to the popular Democratic governor, Joel Matteson, who had not taken an open position on the bill. In this way, the Democrats believed, they might win over some members of the anti-Nebraska caucus.
By noon, the "lobby and the galleries of the Hall of the House of Representatives began to fill with senators, representatives and their guests." Notable among the ladies in the gallery were Mary Todd Lincoln and her friend Julia Jayne Trumbull, wife of Democrat Lyman Trumbull, who had recently been elected to Congress on an anti-Nebraska platform. The wife and daughter of Governor Matteson were also in attendance. Some weeks earlier, Lincoln had bought a stack of small notebooks to record, with Mary"s help, all hundred members of the two houses, identifying the party affiliation of each, as well as his stance on the Nebraska bill. Their calculations gave reason to hope, but the situation was complicated. To reach a majority of 51 votes, Lincoln would have to hold together the fragile coalition comprised of former rivals in the Whig and Democratic camps who had only recently joined hands against the Nebraska bill.
Led by the governor, the senators marched into the House chamber at the appointed hour. When all were sworn in, the balloting began. On the first ballot, Lincoln received 45 votes, against 41 for the Douglas Democrat, James Shields, and 5 for Congressman Lyman Trumbull. The five anti-Nebraska Democrats who voted for Trumbull were led by Norman Judd of Chicago. They had no personal animosity toward Lincoln, but "having been elected as Democrats...they could not sustain themselves at home," they claimed, if they voted for a Whig for senator.
In the ballots that followed, as daylight gave way to gaslights in the great hall, Lincoln reached a high point of 47 votes, only 4 shy of victory. Nonetheless, the little Trumbull coalition refused to budge, denying Lincoln the necessary majority. Finally, after nine ballots, Lincoln concluded that unless his supporters shifted to Trumbull, the Douglas Democrats, who had, as expected, switched their allegiance to Matteson, would choose the next senator.
Unwilling to sacrifice all the hard work of the antislavery coalition, Lincoln advised his floor manager, Stephen Logan, to drop him for Trumbull. Logan refused at first, protesting the injustice of the candidate with the much larger vote giving in to the candidate with the smaller vote. Lincoln was adamant, insisting that if his name remained on the ballot, "you will lose both Trumbull and myself and I think the cause in this case is to be preferred to men."
When Logan rose to speak, the tension in the chamber was so great that the "spectators scarcely breathed." In a sad voice, he announced that it was "the purpose of the remaining Whigs to decide the contest." Obeying his directions, Lincoln"s supporters switched their votes to Trumbull, giving him the 51 votes needed for victory. Lincoln"s friends were inconsolable, believing that this was "perhaps his last chance for that high position." Logan put his hands over his face and began to cry, while Davis stormily announced that had he been in Lincoln"s situation, "he never would have consented to the 47 men being controlled by the 5."
In public, Lincoln expressed no hard feelings toward either Trumbull or Judd. He deliberately showed up at Trumbull"s victory party, with a smile on his face and a warm handshake for the victor. Consoled that the Nebraska men were "worse whipped" than he, Lincoln insisted that Matteson"s defeat "gives me more pleasure than my own gives me pain.... On the whole, it is perhaps as well for our general cause that Trumbull is elected."
Lincoln"s magnanimity served him well. While Seward and Chase would lose friends in victory-Seward by neglecting at the height of his success his old friend Horace Greeley, and Chase by not understanding the lingering resentments that followed in the wake of his 1849 Senate victory-Lincoln, in defeat, gained friends. Neither Trumbull nor Judd would ever forget Lincoln"s generous behavior. Indeed, both men would a.s.sist him in his bid for the U.S. Senate in 1858, and Judd would play a critical role in his run for the presidency in 1860.
Mary Lincoln was unable to be so gracious. Convinced that Trumbull had acted with "cold, selfish, treachery," she never spoke another word to Trumbull"s wife, Julia, who had been a bridesmaid at her wedding and one of her closest friends. Though intermediaries tried in succeeding years to bring the two women together, the ruptured friendship never healed. Neither could Mary forgive Norman Judd for his role in supporting Trumbull. Though Judd, along with Davis, would do more than anyone else to a.s.sure Lincoln"s nomination at the Chicago convention, Mary did everything she could to blackball him from a cabinet post after her husband"s election.
Despite the dignity of Lincoln"s public demeanor, he privately suffered a brutal disappointment, describing the ordeal as an "agony." Though he had engineered Trumbull"s victory for the sake of the anti-Nebraska cause, it was difficult to accept the manner of his loss. "He could bear defeat inflicted by his enemies with a pretty good grace," he told his friend Gillespie, "but it was hard to be wounded in the house of his friends." After all the hard work, the interminable nights and weekends on the hustings, the conversations with fellow politicians, the hours spent writing letters to garner support, after so many years of patient waiting and hopefulness, he seemed as far from realizing his ambition as ever. Fate seemed to take a curious delight in finding new ways to shatter his dreams.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1855, disappointment piled upon disappointment. Six months after his loss to Trumbull, Lincoln"s involvement in a celebrated law case forced him to recognize that his legal reputation, secure as it might have been in frontier Illinois, carried little weight among the preeminent lawyers in the country.
The story began that June with the arrival in Springfield of Peter Watson, a young a.s.sociate in the distinguished Philadelphia firm headed by George Harding, a nationally renowned patent specialist. Harding had been hired by the John Manny Company of Rockford, Illinois, to defend its mechanical reaping machine against a patent infringement charge brought by Cyrus McCormick, the original inventor of the reaper. McCormick v. Manny, better known as the "Reaper" suit, was considered an important test case, pitting two outstanding patent lawyers, Edward d.i.c.kerson of New York and former Attorney General Reverdy Johnson for McCormick, against Harding for Manny. Since the case was to be tried before a judge in Chicago, Harding decided to engage a local lawyer who "understood the judge and had his confidence," though, from his Eastern perspective, he condescendingly expressed doubt he could find a lawyer in Illinois "who would be of real a.s.sistance" in arguing the case.
Watson was sent to Springfield to see if Abraham Lincoln, whose name had been recommended, was the right man for the position. His initial impression was not positive. Neither the small frame house on Eighth Street nor Lincoln"s appearance at the door with "neither coat nor vest" indicated a lawyer of sufficient standing for a case of this magnitude. After talking with Lincoln, however, Watson decided he might be "rather effective" after all. He paid Lincoln a retainer and arranged a substantial fee when the work was completed. Lincoln was thrilled with both the fee and the opportunity to test himself with the renowned Reverdy Johnson. He began working on the legal arguments for the case, understanding that Harding would present the scientific arguments.
Not long after Watson"s Springfield visit, Harding received word that the case had been transferred from Chicago to Cincinnati. The change of venue to Ohio "removed the one object" for employing Lincoln, allowing Harding to team up with the man he had wanted in the first place-the brilliant Edwin Stanton. Unaware of the changed situation, Lincoln continued to develop his case. "At our interview here in June," he wrote Watson in late July, "I understood you to say you would send me copies of the Bill and Answer...and also of depositions...I have had nothing from you since. However, I attended the U.S. Court at Chicago, and while there, got copies...I write this particularly to urge you to forward on to me the additional evidence as fast as you can. During August, and the remainder of this month, I can devote some time to the case, and, of course, I want all the material that can be had. During my day at Chicago, I went out to Rockford, and spent half a day, examining and studying Manny"s Machine."
Though Lincoln never heard from Watson, he pieced together what he needed and in late September set out for Cincinnati with a lengthy brief in his hands. Arriving at the Burnet House where all the lawyers were lodged, he encountered Harding and Stanton as they left for the court. Years later, Harding could still recall the shock of his first sight of the "tall, rawly boned, ungainly back woodsman, with coa.r.s.e, ill-fitting clothing, his trousers hardly reaching his ankles, holding in his hands a blue cotton umbrella with a ball on the end of the handle." Lincoln introduced himself and proposed, "Let"s go up in a gang." At this point, Stanton drew Harding aside and whispered, "Why did you bring that d--d long armed Ape here...he does not know any thing and can do you no good." With that, Stanton and Harding turned from Lincoln and continued to court on their own.
In the days that followed, Stanton "managed to make it plain to Lincoln" that he was expected to remove himself from the case. Lincoln did withdraw, though he remained in Cincinnati to hear the arguments. Harding never opened Lincoln"s ma.n.u.script, "so sure that it would be only trash." Throughout that week, though Lincoln ate at the same hotel, Harding and Stanton never asked him to join them for a meal, or accompany them to or from court. When Judge John McLean hosted a dinner for the lawyers on both sides, Lincoln was not invited.
The hearing continued for a week. The sophisticated arguments were "a revelation" to Lincoln, recalled Ralph Emerson, one of Manny"s partners. So intrigued was he by Stanton"s speech, in particular, that he stood in "rapt attention...drinking in his words." Never before, Emerson realized, had Lincoln "seen anything so finished and elaborated, and so thoroughly prepared." When the hearing was over, Lincoln told Emerson that he was going home "to study law." Emerson did not understand at first what Lincoln meant by this, but Lincoln explained. "For any rough-and-tumble case (and a pretty good one, too), I am enough for any man we have out in that country; but these college-trained men are coming West. They have had all the advantages of a life-long training in the law, plenty of time to study and everything, perhaps, to fit them. Soon they will be in Illinois...and when they appear I will be ready."
As Lincoln prepared to leave Cincinnati, he went to say goodbye to William d.i.c.kson, one of the few people who had shown him kindness that week. "You have made my stay here most agreeable, and I am a thousand times obliged to you," Lincoln told d.i.c.kson"s wife, "but in reply to your request for me to come again I must say to you I never expect to be in Cincinnati again. I have nothing against the city, but things have so happened here as to make it undesirable for me ever to return here."
After returning to Springfield, Lincoln received a check in the mail for the balance of his fee. He returned it, saying he had not earned it, never having made any argument. When Watson sent the check a second time, Lincoln cashed it.
Unimaginable as it might seem, after Stanton"s bearish behavior, at their next encounter six years later, Lincoln would offer Stanton "the most powerful civilian post within his gift"-the post of secretary of war. Lincoln"s choice of Stanton would reveal, as would his subsequent dealings with Trumbull and Judd, a singular ability to transcend personal vendetta, humiliation, or bitterness. As for Stanton, despite his initial contempt for the "long armed Ape," he would not only accept the offer but come to respect and love Lincoln more than any person outside of his immediate family.
Stanton"s surly condescension toward Lincoln must be considered in the context of his anxiety over the Reaper trial, which had a.s.sumed crucial importance for him. Ever since the death of his father when he was only thirteen, Stanton had been obsessed with financial security. Until his father, a successful physician, died from apoplexy at the age of forty, young Edwin had led a pampered existence in Steubenville, Ohio, surrounded by a loving family in a stately, two-story brick house with a large yard and fruitful garden. Taught to read when he was only three years old, the precocious child had ready access to his father"s large collection of books and received an excellent education at the Old Academy in Steubenville. But when his father died, leaving no estate, Edwin was forced to leave school to help support his widowed mother and three younger siblings. First came the forced sale of the house, then the sale of his father"s library, and finally, the necessity to move to much smaller quarters. Apprenticed to a bookseller, Stanton read books in every spare moment he could find and spent his evenings preparing for entrance to nearby Kenyon College, headed by Chase"s uncle Philander. An excellent student, he enjoyed two happy years at Kenyon before his family"s scarce resources required that he return to work, this time in a Columbus bookstore.
The following year, Stanton returned to Steubenville and secured an apprenticeship in a law office, where he simultaneously studied law and helped his mother with the younger children. In later years, his adoring sister Pamphila recalled Stanton"s critical role in anchoring the entire family, tenderly nursing his ailing mother, sending his brother Darwin to Harvard Medical School, and encouraging his younger sisters to memorize dozens of poems by Byron and Whittier, all the while reading Plutarch"s Lives and other works of history. Success in the law came quickly, the result of an intuitive mind, a prodigious capacity for work, and a forceful courtroom manner.
When he fell in love with Mary Lamson, he enjoyed what he much later called the "happiest hours of his life." A marvelously intellectual young woman, Mary shared his pa.s.sion for reading and study, coupled with a feminist determination that women could "regenerate the world" if only they were rightly educated. When their marriage produced a daughter, Lucy, and a son, Edwin Junior, Stanton had every reason to believe that fortune was smiling on him. His sister Pamphila later recalled that her brother seemed perpetually "bright and cheery." As his practice grew, he had the means not only to take care of his own family but to provide for his mother and younger siblings as well.
Stanton looked upon Mary as his life companion. They both loved history, literature, and poetry. Together, they read Gibbon, Carlisle, Macaulay, Madame de Stael, Samuel Johnson, Bancroft, and Byron. "We years ago were lovers," he wrote her after the children were born. "We are now parents; a new relation has taken place. The love of our offspring has opened up fresh fountains of love for each other. We look forward now to life, not for ourselves only, but for our children. I loved you for your beauty, and grace and loveliness of your person. I love you now for the richness and surpa.s.sing excellence of your mind. One love has not taken the place of the other, but both stand side by side. I love you now with a fervor and truth of affection which speech cannot express."
His happiness was short-lived: his daughter Lucy died after an attack of scarlet fever; three years later, in March, 1844, his beloved Mary developed a fatal bilious fever and died at the age of twenty-nine. Stanton was so brokenhearted, his grief "verged on insanity." Before he would allow her burial, he had a seamstress fashion a wedding dress for her. "She is my bride and shall be dressed and buried like a bride." After the funeral, he could not bring himself to work for months. Since he was involved in almost every case that came before the court in Jefferson County, Ohio, no court was held that spring. For months, he laid out Mary"s nightcap and gown on her pillow. His sister, Pamphila, who had come to stay with him, would never forget the horror of the long nights when, "with lamp in hand," he searched for Mary through every room of the house, "with sobs and tears streaming from his eyes," screaming over and over, "Where is Mary?"