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00:00The only house the Lincolns ever owned stood on the corner of 8th and Jackson
00:28streets in downtown Springfield. Lincoln scraped together $1,200 to buy it in 1844.
00:39Here Abraham and Mary would live for the next 17 years, share the everyday routines of married
00:46life, raise a family.
00:51He moved quickly from living literally in log cabins to living in a house which by any
00:59standards represents the upper middle class of mid-19th century America.
01:03I mean, this is a guy who once he left the prairie, once he got out of New Salem, he never
01:09went back.
01:19Abraham Lincoln was certainly unschooled in the social niceties.
01:24Sometimes his shirts didn't match or his trousers were too short and she groomed him in terms
01:29of his appearance with one thing in mind, that he should physically live up in his appearance
01:35to the greatness of his mind.
01:45Nine months after their wedding, their first child, Robert Todd Lincoln, was born.
01:52The second son, Edward, came three years later.
01:57Lincoln now took to calling Mary mother.
02:00He was a father, which was very important to him.
02:06He found love and affection with Mary.
02:11He adored her.
02:15How can one minimize the significance of finding love and affection from somebody?
02:21And to be able to love somebody as well as be loved in return.
02:29He became a different man after his marriage.
02:33He didn't have to worry about his place in society.
02:38He didn't have to worry about courtship.
02:40He didn't have to worry about getting along with women.
02:42He could concentrate on the things that he did best, which was the man's world of politics.
02:51Lincoln continued to build his reputation as a politician while his work as a lawyer
02:56spread his name across the state.
02:59He rode the circuit from county courthouse to county courthouse, getting to know voters
03:04all across Illinois and picking up clients wherever he could find them.
03:10He liked to get out among the people.
03:13And he liked the art form of being a trial lawyer, of getting into a county seat the night before
03:20the case was to be heard, meeting with clients, one or two law books, very few pieces of stationery
03:27and ink, and doing up a case very quickly and effectively.
03:32In fact, he became so good at being a lawyer that he was referred cases by lawyers who lived
03:39in these county seats.
03:42You go to the tavern the night before the case was to be heard, there's maybe a fire going
03:47in the fireplace, the food was dismal, you had four or five lawyers to a bed, three beds
03:53to a room.
03:54There was a camaraderie.
03:57This was a very male-oriented culture.
04:00And Lincoln loved that.
04:02At night, he would swap stories with the other lawyers while the townspeople looked on laughing.
04:10No one made them laugh harder than Lincoln.
04:12His favorite jokes were ones which made him look bad or foolish or jokes about his ugliness,
04:21jokes about his height.
04:22He might say, well, I guess you wonder why I'm here.
04:26And I sometimes wonder myself why I'm here.
04:29And I'm reminded of the days back in Indiana when I was out chopping wood in the forest,
04:34and a woman came by on a horse.
04:36And she stopped and she looked at me and said, my, you are the ugliest man I ever saw.
04:42And I said to her, well, ma'am, there isn't a lot I can do about it.
04:47And she said, well, you could have stayed at home.
04:56He liked to make people laugh, and apparently he always laughed as loud as anybody.
04:59Despite the fact that he was the funniest storyteller around, he was also a very gloomy man.
05:06Lincoln told stories, a friend said, to whistle away the sadness.
05:14He was often withdrawn, given to spells of depression, which he called the hypo.
05:22Depression separates you from other people in profound ways.
05:28It is lonely, it's isolating, and Lincoln's use of humor was an effective way
05:36to fight that, to fend it off.
05:41It was a deeply human kind of humor that connected with people,
05:47that deepened the bonds in whatever audience he found himself.
05:53And for him, it was vital to whistle off sadness because it helped keep the depression at bay.
06:06When Lincoln rode the circuit, Mary stayed home with the children, where she found it hard going without her husband.
06:17She was haunted by fears of burglars, dogs, lightning storms.
06:24She suffered from blinding headaches, migraines that sent her to bed for days.
06:29Whenever Lincoln left Mary, she experienced his abandonment, pure and simple.
06:38She desperately yearned for him to be more available than he was.
06:43Now, for the most part, in the early years of their relationship, he did seem to meet most of those needs in her.
06:53When he could, Lincoln tried to calm her, running home from his law office during the lightning storms that so disturbed her.
07:05But he was incapable of giving her everything she needed.
07:11He was not a demonstrative man, she once said.
07:15When he felt most deeply, he expressed the least.
07:18Everybody liked him.
07:23No one was particularly close to him.
07:26So that his law partner, who sat in the law office with him every day for 16 years,
07:33when it was all said and done, asked about it, said,
07:36Lincoln was the most shut-mouthed man I ever knew.
07:39And Mary blurted everything out.
07:43She blurted it out in letters to her friends.
07:45She talked and talked and talked.
07:47I think Mary desperately yearned to have him there every moment.
07:52And yet, in her own confusions, when he was there, she would often get incredibly frustrated with his withdrawal.
08:09Lincoln never lost sight of his political career.
08:12And in 1844, when a group of Whigs invited him to speak in Indiana,
08:17he accepted.
08:19But this would be more than a political journey.
08:22It would be a journey back into his past.
08:39Lincoln's boyhood home was not very far from Springfield.
08:43But he had never gone back, as if he were afraid to revisit the scene of his mother's death.
08:51Now 35 years old, lawyer, legislator, husband and father, he felt he was ready.
09:01Lincoln never pretended to be a poet.
09:08But flooded by painful memories, he tried to turn his feelings into verse.
09:15Near twenty years have passed away, since here I bid farewell.
09:25To woods and fields and scenes of play, and playmates loved so well.
09:31The friends I left that parting day, how changed as time has sped.
09:39Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray, and half of all are dead.
09:45I arranged the fields with pensive tread, and paced the hollow rooms, and feel,
09:55companion of the dead, I'm living in the tombs.
09:59Lincoln was discovering that language could help him confront his darkest nightmares.
10:09All his life, he would wrestle with words,
10:13struggling first to give expression to his own feelings,
10:17and then to those of his fellow countrymen.
10:19Now if you should hear anyone say that Lincoln don't want to go to Congress,
10:30I wish you would tell him you have reason to believe he is mistaken.
10:34The truth is, I would like to go very much.
10:39In 1846, Lincoln ran for Congress,
10:43and was elected as a Whig to the House of Representatives.
10:46At last, he had arrived.
10:53Sometime that year, the new congressman and his wife
10:56proudly sat for their first photographs.
11:00Lincoln was 37, Mary 28.
11:04He is dressed up to have his picture taken because he is a man of importance.
11:09And yet you look at him and you still say,
11:11this is a pretty rough character. I'm not sure how far he can go.
11:17But you take a look at those eyes and you say,
11:20ah, he thinks he's going somewhere, and he's really very pleased with himself.
11:25His hair is slicked down on his head. He would never stay there more than five minutes,
11:29but just long enough for this photograph.
11:31You have the feeling that Mary had a brush with her right before this picture was taken,
11:35and she pushed it down so far that it doesn't even look like him.
11:40She looks very well put together. She looks stylish. There's an affectionate look on her face.
11:47There is a sensual quality to the way she's looking out at the world.
11:52She's dressed perfectly in silk, in lace. This is a woman who's established herself.
11:57You get the feeling that they've come somewhere together. He had been elected to the Congress.
12:03He was moving on to national politics. And beware, world. We're coming.
12:17In 1847, Congressman-elect Abraham Lincoln, his wife Mary, and their sons Robert and Eddie
12:23arrived in the nation's capital. The city was alive with excitements to dazzle a provincial couple.
12:30Lectures and plays. Concerts by the Marine Band.
12:46With its 50,000 people, more than 3,000 of them slaves,
12:51Washington was the largest city either of them had ever lived in.
12:56All four Lincolns moved into a single large room in a crowded boarding house,
13:01and Lincoln began his career as a congressman.
13:06If you look at the congressional directory that he filled out himself during his only term in Congress,
13:12they have a section that says education, and he wrote in defective.
13:21But Lincoln was in his element, delighting in cloakroom politics, learning how Washington worked,
13:29sending home more than 7,500 copies of his speeches, carefully addressing every envelope by hand.
13:39Politics were his life, his law partner remembered. Newspapers, his food. And his great ambition,
13:47his motive power. He delighted in politics. He reveled in it, as a fish does in water,
13:54as a bird disports itself on the sustaining air.
13:57But while Lincoln flourished, Mary found only disappointment. She had come to Washington,
14:09a friend said, hoping to loom largely. But with her husband away all day, she was left alone,
14:17with two small, restless, noisy boys.
14:19Most wives just stayed at home, especially for a first-term congressman, before you were sure how
14:26things were going to turn out. But Mary was determined to come along, and they ended up
14:32in a boarding house with a lot of other crusty old politicians. And it was a very difficult time for
14:39her. She realized that nobody was going to make a fuss over her husband. And what was she going to do with
14:43these two children? One was barely an infant. Confined to a boarding house with nowhere to entertain
14:52and nothing to do, Mary consoled herself by shopping, sometimes spending too much.
15:01She had this habit of living beyond her means, of spending rather recklessly, and of having a very
15:09slippery regard for debts. And she was keeping it from her husband.
15:22After just three months, she packed her bags, took the boys, and went back to her family home in Kentucky.
15:29With Mary gone, Lincoln lost himself in national politics. But no one in Washington paid any
15:41attention to his speeches or his proposals. He was frustrated and lonely.
15:47Dear Mary, In this troublesome world, we are never quite satisfied.
16:02When you were here, I thought you hindered me some in attending to business. But now,
16:09having nothing but business, it has grown exceedingly tasteless to me.
16:14My dear husband, I feel wearied and tired enough to know that this is Saturday night.
16:30Our babies are asleep.
16:34How much I wish, instead of writing, we were together this evening.
16:39I feel very sad away from you.
16:44What did Bobby and Eddie think of the little letters Father sent them?
16:48Don't let the blessed fellas forget Father.
16:52Do not fear the children have forgotten you.
16:55I was only jesting.
16:57Even Eddie's eyes brighten at the mention of your name.
17:03My dear wife,
17:05Last Wednesday, P.H. Hood and Company dunned me for a little bill of $5.38,
17:10and Walter Harper and Company another for $8.50, for goods which they say you bought.
17:19I hesitated to pay them because my recollection is that you told me there was nothing left unpaid.
17:27Kiss and love, the dear rascals.
17:29Affectionately, A. Lincoln
17:31In the fall of 1848, Lincoln set out for New England to help whip up support for the Whig candidate for president,
17:44General Zachary Taylor.
17:49Mary and the boys came along too.
17:51They toured Massachusetts and New York, then set out to see Niagara Falls.
17:57There, Lincoln, still experimenting with words, tried to describe his feelings.
18:06Niagara is strong and fresh today as 10,000 years ago.
18:11The mammoth and mastodon now so long dead that fragments of their monstrous bones alone testify that they ever live
18:20have gazed on Niagara.
18:23Lincoln attempted a rhapsody on Niagara Falls.
18:27All about this torrential water and the turbulence and the excitement, what this all portended.
18:34In that long, long time, never stilled for a single moment,
18:39never dried, never froze, never slept, never rested.
18:45And he broke off in the middle of it.
18:47This was clearly not his thing.
18:50Lincoln never finished his meditation.
18:53He was still learning how to write, still falling short of the mark,
18:57still searching for his own voice.
19:03Zachary Taylor was elected president on November 7th.
19:07And four months later, took the oath of office.
19:11Lincoln went to the inaugural ball.
19:13But his own term in Congress had expired the day before.
19:21Lincoln's one term in Congress was a learning experience.
19:24That's about all you could say from it.
19:26It had no concrete accomplishments.
19:29He thought pretty much that his political career was dead.
19:33Lincoln had promised to serve only one term.
19:37Illinois was overwhelmingly Democratic,
19:40and the chance to run for the state's only Whig Congressional seat now went to another Whig.
19:46So what political future could an obscure Illinois ex-Congressman have?
19:52He was depressed, and he went home essentially defeated,
19:57and largely withdrawing from politics for the next few years.
20:10The Lincolns had been home just nine months,
20:13when they were struck a devastating blow.
20:16Three-year-old Eddie Lincoln became dangerously ill with tuberculosis.
20:28For 52 days and nights, his parents took turns sitting by his bedside.
20:33The Lincolns died.
20:40On February 1st, 1850, Eddie died.
20:44Mary collapsed.
20:58Her father had died the previous summer,
21:01followed a few months later by her beloved grandmother.
21:07It took everything out of her.
21:09And for the first time, you began to see the side of her nature that refused to be comforted.
21:16That refused to accept.
21:21Mary stopped eating.
21:26Lincoln, even as he grieved, reached out to comfort her.
21:31Eat, Mary, for we must live.
21:39It's as though Mary's despair is so total and so complete,
21:46that it swallows up the capacity for him to grieve as well.
21:54What you see with Lincoln is not a disappearance of depression,
22:00but you find that he's able to control the depths to which he sinks.
22:09You find that he's able to control the depths of depression.
22:14Ten months after Eddie's death, William Wallace Lincoln was born.
22:19Willie, who was to become his mother and father's favorite,
22:24and seemed an almost miraculous replacement for the boy they had lost.
22:32Thomas, their fourth son, was born in 1853.
22:35His father nicknamed him Tad because his large head and small body reminded him of a tadpole.
22:51Lincoln was now more deeply involved in the law than he had ever been,
22:56arguing before the Illinois Supreme Court
22:58and earning the largest fees of his life as attorney for the Illinois Central Railroad.
23:05But he continued to keep up with the old unresolved issue that had now begun to consume the country.
23:11Slavery, which had divided America since its beginning, was threatening to tear it apart.
23:22Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law that gave slave owners the right to recapture runaway slaves.
23:31Abolitionists vowed to defy it.
23:33As African Americans were hunted down in the North, anti-slavery sentiment grew.
23:54Lincoln's law partner, William Herndon, an ardent abolitionist,
23:59remembered constantly urging Lincoln to speak out against slavery.
24:05But Lincoln believed above all in what he called reason,
24:09cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason.
24:12Billy, Lincoln said, you're too rampant and spontaneous.
24:17He hoped that slavery would be ended.
24:20He believed it would be ended in time.
24:23But he felt that you couldn't just say, let it be done, and have slavery ended.
24:29There was nothing anybody could do about it except to say, as Lincoln himself had said,
24:34that we deplore the institution.
24:38As the country seethed, Lincoln continued quietly to practice the law.
24:44His legal career is flourishing.
24:46He's doing very well.
24:47He's getting more respected.
24:48He's making money.
24:49And he's happy that that's happening,
24:51but not really passionately fulfilled by that,
24:54because his desires are elsewhere, and they're not being met by legal success.
25:01Mary Lincoln was unhappy too.
25:04Her behavior since Eddie's death had become increasingly erratic.
25:08She fired servant after servant, lashed out at neighbors, and at her husband.
25:19Lincoln was often away now, sometimes half the year riding the circuit.
25:25Even when he was home, he could remain distant and withdrawn.
25:29The political dreams the Lincolns had always shared seemed to be going nowhere.
25:37Once when he was reading his newspaper in front of the fire,
25:41and paid no attention when Mary twice asked him to bring in more logs,
25:46she hurled a chunk of wood at his head.
25:49There are clearly developing signs of Mary's fragility.
25:55She wants him to be involved in her life, to care, to attend to her, to listen to her.
26:01And her frustration leads to rage.
26:08Friends noticed that Lincoln now seemed even more tinged by sadness than usual.
26:15His marriage was troubled, and his political career at a standstill.
26:21His law partner remembered melancholy dripped from him as he walked.
26:31He's a man with great aspirations, but nothing to show for it yet.
26:38It was incredibly frustrating for somebody who dreamed of greatness
26:42to be a nothing in the public realm.
26:51Then the Democratic senator from Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas,
26:56the man they called the Little Giant, changed everything.
27:03Until 1854, despite the fiery disagreements over slavery,
27:07there was still a fragile balance of power between North and South.
27:13But on January 23rd of that year,
27:15Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska bill in Congress,
27:19based on what he called popular sovereignty.
27:23The bill would leave it to the people of the territories of Kansas and Nebraska
27:28to decide for themselves whether they wanted slavery.
27:32The South's peculiar institution now threatened to spread.
27:40With one stroke, Douglas had thrown the country into turmoil.
27:44Lincoln was arguing a case on the circuit when news reached him that the bill had passed.
27:56It roused him, he said, as he had never been before.
27:59He believed that under the Constitution, no one had the right to interfere with slavery
28:06where it already existed. But it must not be allowed to expand further.
28:13It was a Kansas-Nebraska act that brought him back on the scene and really got his blood up.
28:19The South kept saying slavery is a positive good,
28:22and as a positive good, it ought to have a right to spread anywhere.
28:31Lincoln was saying it's not a positive good.
28:34It's something that needs to be blocked up.
28:36It's something that needs to be stopped.
28:41He did not favor abolition.
28:43He did not call in the southern states to end slavery.
28:46But he said slavery was a morally reprehensible institution which we cannot endorse.
28:52For the first time, he's able to connect a major public issue and a large moral question.
29:08There's a new tone in his speeches. There is a tone of high moral outrage.
29:14This covert zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate.
29:23I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself.
29:28I hate it because it deprives our Republican example of its just influence in the world.
29:34And especially because it forces so many good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very
29:42fundamental principles of civil liberty, criticizing the Declaration of Independence and insisting that
29:49there is no right principle but self-interest.
29:52He spoke out logically. He spoke out morally. He spoke out emotionally.
29:58And he found his voice.
30:01And I think once you make a stand like that, something changes inside of you.
30:05It gives you the strength and the fervor to keep going.
30:07In 1855, Lincoln, now 46, ran for the Senate and lost.
30:16The following year, a new party was formed.
30:20The Republican Party. A party committed to stopping the expansion of slavery.
30:27Lincoln had to choose either the unproven Republicans or his own Whig Party,
30:33now split over slavery like the country itself.
30:37Lincoln faced a political dilemma.
30:40You can't do anything in American politics, he once said, unless you're a member of a political party.
30:46But what party was he going to be a member of?
30:49You can so easily cut off your political future if you join a party that's going to die within a year.
30:55If it didn't work, you would be lost.
30:57And yet, in the long run, the Republican Party was the only place that he felt he could go,
31:04and it represented principles that he favored.
31:11That summer, when the Republicans nominated the explorer John C. Fremont for president,
31:17the party had an energetic new member.
31:19Lincoln campaigned tirelessly for the Republican ticket, stumping the state, making over 50 speeches.
31:33Fremont lost.
31:36But Lincoln's hard work had paid off.
31:40The former Whig had won a loyal following and made himself one of the most prominent Republicans
31:46in the state of Illinois.
31:53By 1856, Lincoln had earned enough money to add a second story to their home.
31:59His law practice was booming.
32:0347 years old, he now had a new party, a cause he believed in, and three boisterous boys.
32:12The Lincolns couldn't resist spoiling them, giving them the run of the house.
32:16The Lincolns had a new party, a cause of the city.
32:19Mary Lincoln seemed more relaxed.
32:21As the wife of a successful lawyer and a rising political star,
32:25she was enjoying the attention that now came her way.
32:29She was a wonderful hostess.
32:31She was also a great sounding board.
32:33And when he would come home at the end of the day, they would talk politics.
32:38He would ask her opinion about this issue or that issue or this personality or that,
32:43and she would give it.
32:44Because she was his wife, she could be straight with him.
32:46She could be honest with him.
32:48And they worked as a team politically.
32:50I think it's important to realize that in Lincoln's political activities,
32:54Mary was, if often unseen, a very stalwart supporter.
32:59She wrote letters for him.
33:01She gave parties for his political friends.
33:04She did the very best that she could to support him.
33:11Quietly, Lincoln was working behind the scenes,
33:15waiting for his chance to run again for the Senate,
33:18this time for the seat held by Stephen Douglas himself.
33:21His chance came in 1858.
33:28On June 16th in the Capitol building at Springfield,
33:31he accepted his party's nomination in an address he delivered by heart.
33:37It was the most important speech he had ever made.
33:40A house divided against itself cannot stand.
33:52I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.
34:01I do not expect the union to be dissolved.
34:03I do not expect the house to fall.
34:08But I do expect it will cease to be divided.
34:12It will become all one thing or all the other.
34:26Lincoln challenged Senator Douglas to a series of debates.
34:30Douglas reluctantly accepted.
34:33The two men were renewing an old political rivalry.
34:37Lincoln had known Douglas for 20 years and had never liked him.
34:42He disliked Stephen A. Douglas because Douglas was politically successful and he wasn't.
34:48Douglas got everything he wanted.
34:50He was elected to everything, to judge, to Congress, to Senator.
34:55And look at Lincoln's record.
34:58One term in Congress he probably couldn't have won if he tried again.
35:01And defeated for the Senate in 1855, everything he wanted was always dashed from him,
35:08just as he's putting the cup to his lips.
35:13It was a long, grueling campaign.
35:16Lincoln and Douglas each traveled more than 4,000 miles, delivering scores of speeches,
35:23often for two or three hours, in a contest that captured the attention of the country.
35:28Lincoln traveled by regular passenger train, mingling with the voters.
35:37Douglas outfitted his own train, with a cannon trailing behind on a flat car to pull in the crowds.
35:43The 6-foot-4 Lincoln and the 5-foot-4 Douglas faced each other seven times.
35:53Lincoln was taking on one of the most powerful men in the Senate,
35:57and one of the most skillful debaters in the country.
35:59Their arguments over slavery would define the issue for the whole nation.
36:08Why can't the country endure half slave and half free, Douglas asked.
36:12It had for 82 years after all.
36:15I go for the principle of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he argued.
36:19The right of the people to decide for themselves.
36:22It would not do to minimize Douglas' very significant point.
36:28This is a free country, and if the people of Kansas, Nebraska, or other states,
36:33choose to adopt the institution of slavery, that is their business.
36:38We should not interfere and impose our moral standards.
36:41Lincoln countered that Douglas' reliance on majority rule was morally bankrupt.
36:47It's as thin as a soup made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death.
36:53Lincoln takes Douglas' argument that says that what the people in the territories decide is up to them.
37:00It's a democracy. If they vote for slavery, so be it. That's majority rule.
37:04And he says, no, there's an independent standard of right and wrong
37:07that's more important than the majority vote. Slavery is wrong.
37:12He believed so much that what the American system was all about
37:16was making it possible for other men to rise, as he had done.
37:20But slavery was completely against that.
37:23A person worked hard, they labored, and yet the fruits of their labor belonged to somebody else.
37:33Douglas tried to trap Lincoln by charging him with coddling the black man.
37:37Lincoln's response was clear.
38:02I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races.
38:13There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever
38:20forbid their living together on the footing of perfect equality. He is not my equal in many respects,
38:28certainly not in color, perhaps not in intellectual or moral endowment, but in the right to eat the bread
38:38which his own hand earns. He is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man.
38:46He was deeply ambivalent about the idea of racial equality in America.
38:55He says over and over and over again, he does not believe the races are equal.
39:03He made a clear distinction. I hate slavery. On the other hand, I cannot, I don't know what to do about
39:10ending slavery because I can't imagine that black and white can live together as equals in America.
39:19The racial attitudes of 19th century America among white people were essentially that African
39:26Americans were an inferior people. This was an attitude that had been handed down since the nation evolved.
39:34There had always been this sense of African American inferiority because of the color of their skin,
39:44because they came from a foreign land that was considered a land of barbarism,
39:49because many people in the northern and western states listened to southerners who said that African
39:55Americans would not work unless they were enslaved, that they were lazy, that they were shiftless,
40:01that the plantation system was a school for them, to civilize them. So all of these kinds of stereotypes
40:08Lincoln heard, and unfortunately Lincoln believed.
40:21In the middle of October, Lincoln took a steamboat down the Mississippi and met Douglas for the seventh
40:30debate at Alton, Illinois. For the last time, Douglas would argue that in a democracy, the majority rules.
40:40And once again, Lincoln would do his best to refute him.
40:44The real issue is the sentiment on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong,
40:54and another class that does not. That is the issue that will continue in this country,
41:02when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these
41:10two principles, right and wrong, throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face
41:18to face from the beginning of time and will ever continue to struggle.
41:30It rained as Illinois voters went to the polls on November 2nd. The fizzle gigs and fireworks,
41:36as Lincoln called them, were finally over. The outcome would be decided by the state legislators,
41:45meeting in the Capitol building where Lincoln had accepted his party's nomination.
41:50The results were as close as they could be. Lincoln's Republicans polled 4,000 more votes,
41:57but Douglas' Democrats controlled the legislature.
42:00For the third time in his political career, Lincoln lost.
42:10I feel just like the boy who stubbed his toe. I am too big to cry and too badly hurt to laugh.
42:18Still, he was glad he had made the race.
42:23It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age,
42:28which I could have had in no other way. And though I now sink out of view and shall be forgotten,
42:35I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.
42:47Lincoln had lost the election, but his debates with Douglas had been reprinted all over the country,
42:52and he now had a national following. He held the middle ground somewhere between the abolitionists
42:59and the slaveholders of the South.
43:03He continued speaking out across the Midwest, in Illinois, Kansas, Indiana, Wisconsin,
43:09and wrote notes for a campaign biography, which he introduced with characteristic self-deprecation.
43:16Here with is a little sketch. There is not much of it. For the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me.
43:25There was now talk that he might run for higher office than the Senate.
43:30Lincoln professed to be astonished.
43:32Just think of such a sucker as me as president, he told a reporter, although his wife, he added,
43:39was confident he would one day make it to the top.
43:45Then, in early 1860, Lincoln eagerly traveled to New York, where he had been invited to speak.
43:51The front runner for the Republican nomination for president that year was the popular senator from
43:59New York, William Seward. Lincoln would be speaking on Seward's home ground.
44:07It was a chance for the prairie politician to show the eastern leaders of the Republican Party
44:12what he could do.
44:131,500 curious people crowded the auditorium at the Cooper Union Institute.
44:21Lincoln later admitted he was uncomfortable, unsure of his audience, unsure of himself.
44:29Now, this is a man who entered the Cooper Union that night with his host genuinely concerned
44:36about the impression that this guy was going to make.
44:39This tall, angular, awkward man in clothes that didn't seem to fit him and said things like,
44:46Mr. Chairman, and frankly, most who were present said that when they first saw Lincoln,
44:52when he first stood up, their initial impression was, oh, my goodness, this will never do.
45:00But when Lincoln began to speak, doubts quickly vanished.
45:04Can we, while our votes were prevented, allow slavery to spread? If our sense of duty forbids this,
45:14then let us stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us have faith that right makes
45:21might. And in that faith, let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.
45:28The crowd rose to its feet when he had finished. No man, one reporter wrote ever before,
45:37made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience. He had proven he was a
45:44politician to be reckoned with, a serious candidate for president. The taste he admitted to a friend is in
45:53my mouth. On May 16th, the Republicans gathered in Chicago to pick their candidate for the highest office
46:02in the land. In a crowded field of candidates, the man to beat was still William Seward. Lincoln's own
46:22chances seemed slim. Lincoln's qualifications in 1860 really paled compared to the other leading
46:29Republicans. His sole experience on the national level had been as a one-term member of the House
46:35of Representatives, but nothing that would have prepared him for the kinds of responsibilities
46:39that he would face as president. Most people wouldn't have given Lincoln much of a chance at all.
46:47Lincoln didn't go to Chicago, but he saw to it that able lieutenants were on hand,
46:52determined to snatch the nomination for their man.
46:54There was this tremendous passion for Lincoln inside the convention hall, due in part to some
47:00maneuvering by Lincoln's supporters. They handed out duplicate tickets to make sure there were more
47:06Lincolnites there than Seward people. They hired professional shriekers, as they were called,
47:11these leather-lunged Midwesterners, to go in there and start screaming for Lincoln's nomination.
47:17Lincoln felt that his supporters could organize public sentiment on the convention floor and pull some
47:24backroom deals and things like that and carry the day.
47:28His becoming president was no accident. The wood fairy did not come down from the heavens and
47:34anoint him president and commander-in-chief. You just don't become president that way.
47:40That man who thinks Lincoln sat down and gathered his robes about him, waiting for the people to call him,
47:47has a very erroneous knowledge of Lincoln, his law partner remembered.
47:51He was always calculating, always planning ahead.
47:57His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.
48:07To relieve the tension while he waited for the results, Lincoln played handball at his home in Springfield.
48:14On the first ballot, Seward held a commanding lead, but Lincoln was running ahead of everyone else.
48:25On the second ballot, Seward began losing ground. He was considered too extreme in his opposition to slavery.
48:35Lincoln hoped his own reputation as a moderate would carry the day. He had given careful instructions to his supporters.
48:43My name is new in the field, and I suppose I'm not the first choice of a very great many.
48:49Our policy, then, is to give no offense to others. Leave them in a mood to come to us,
48:55if they shall be compelled to give up their first love.
48:59That is exactly what happened. On the third ballot, the Republicans at last united behind one man.
49:06The campaign to elect the 16th president of the United States was on.
49:21His name became known everywhere. But even his most ardent admirers were still unsure what he looked like.
49:31The opposition lampooned his looks and countrified ways.
49:34But to millions, he became known as Honest Abe and the rail splitter. Though no one dared call him Abe to his face,
49:44and he never wanted to split rails again.
49:47Lincoln, by this point, was a prominent, very prosperous lawyer living in a good house in Springfield,
49:53well-regarded in Illinois society with some national reputation.
49:58This was not a humble man of the people out chopping rails.
50:01On the other hand, there was a good deal of truth to this myth, and it was an immensely popular one as well.
50:08Well, he went along with it. I don't think he initiated it, but he did go along with it.
50:13They brought to the hall actual rails that he supposedly split, and he said,
50:18well, I might not have split those rails, but I've split a rail in my day.
50:24Thousands of people came to Springfield to pay Lincoln tribute.
50:27A parade of floats and marching bands blared past his gate.
50:31The candidate towered above the crowd.
50:35His excited sons hung out the windows.
50:40His wife looked on proudly.
50:48Mary Lincoln entertained now as never before.
50:52Newspapermen knocked at her door, eager to find out all they could about how the Lincolns
50:57lived, and Mrs. Lincoln eagerly showed them.
51:02The house was neatly without being extravagantly furnished, one wrote.
51:06An air of quiet refinement pervaded the place.
51:10There were flowers upon the table, pictures upon the walls.
51:14The hand of the domestic artist was everywhere visible.
51:19What a pleasant home Abe Lincoln has.
51:21Mary thrilled to all the attention she was getting.
51:27She delighted in talking politics with reporters, startling some of her husband's political allies
51:33by suggesting names for his cabinet.
51:37She began to conceive of herself in a way that no Victorian political wife ever did.
51:43As an equal partner to her husband, as his chief advisor.
51:49And she went into the presidential election believing this.
51:57But Lincoln was a very shrewd politician.
52:00And he had another life that she didn't know about.
52:03Involved with all these politicians, talking real strategy.
52:07The things that really were going to get him elected in the end.
52:14That June, Lincoln's prospects dramatically improved.
52:18The quarrel over slavery had split the Democrats.
52:22Northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas, who continued to champion popular sovereignty.
52:28Southern Democrats chose John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky,
52:32who argued that slavery should be allowed to spread to the territories.
52:36There was even a fourth candidate, John Bell, whose only platform, he said, was the Constitution.
52:43With the opposition splintered, Lincoln suddenly became the favorite.
52:48He continued to insist that slavery must not move farther west.
52:54But pledged he would not interfere with slavery where it already existed.
52:58Certainly, Lincoln was trying to reassure the South that he personally had no intention of interfering
53:09with their peculiar institution, or their culture, or their political power, or anything else.
53:18And yet they were not hearing that.
53:20Let the consequences be what they may, said a prominent Georgia editor.
53:26Whether the Potomac is crimsoned in gore and Pennsylvania Avenue is paved ten fathoms deep
53:32in mangled bodies, the South will never submit to such humiliation and degradation
53:39as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.
53:44To them, he was part of an organization, the Republican Party, that was bent on the destruction
53:51of their way of life, of their institutions, of their culture.
53:55There were plenty of warnings that if this black Republican abolitionist, and that's what his opponents
54:04called him, was elected president, that it would provoke the Southern states to secede.
54:09All kinds of people were warning that.
54:10But the Republicans said and thought that they were bluffing.
54:14Lincoln thought they were bluffing.
54:17To Lincoln, the American Union was a sacred institution.
54:21It guaranteed every man's right to rise as he had risen.
54:25He couldn't imagine it disintegrating.
54:38As election day approached, Mary admitted to a friend she was tense with excitement.
54:46Fortunately, the time is rapidly drawing to a close.
54:49A little more than two weeks will decide the contest.
54:53I scarcely know how I would bear up under defeat.
54:57I trust that we will not have the trial.
55:07Election day, November 6th.
55:11Lincoln and his supporters huddled in the state capitol, waiting for news.
55:15At 1.30 in the morning, it came.
55:37Fifty-one years old, with less than a year's formal schooling,
55:41Abraham Lincoln had been elected president of the United States.
55:48But his victory was far from overwhelming.
55:58He had polled just 40% of the popular vote, and it failed to win a single slave state.
56:04While fireworks raced across the Springfield sky,
56:09Southern politicians were already calling for an end to the Union.
56:16But Lincoln believed in the common sense of his fellow countrymen.
56:20He meant to be president of all the United States.
56:31As Lincoln stepped out into the street,
56:33a jubilant crowd of nearly 10,000 called for the president-elect to say something.
56:39Instead, he just waved.
56:41I guess I'll go down and tell Mary about it.
56:49When he neared home, he stepped up his pace and began to shout,
56:53Mary, Mary, we are elected.
57:01Everything for which the Lincolns had worked now seemed to be theirs.
57:06But they could not celebrate for long.
57:16Within 90 days, seven southern states would secede.
57:21Threats to kill Lincoln began arriving daily.
57:25His election had shattered the Union he held sacred.
57:30And would let loose a whirlwind.
57:36See youby b힘�ersalkkens.
57:37See you there.
57:38Have you watched your life?
57:39Have you watched that?
57:48You are like, oh yeah, but we did.
57:51We did get this opportunity to download this opportunity.
57:53The Markt you heard someone who ever remember,
57:55both of them are literally an hour.
57:58They're still alive tolerated.
58:00willisbergkens.
58:03The day was about men and certainly shops outside.