Extra Credit Questions

[David Lockmiller]

(05-13-2024 09:19 PM)Rob Wick Wrote:  Nonsense. Just because one path is closed off doesn't mean another wouldn't open and would lead to the same result.

The fact of the matter is most of our lives are ruled by chance. The mere fact that something does or doesn't happen rarely means a life would either be different or the same.

Best
Rob

At one time in his political life, Lincoln thought about accepting the position of Governor of the Oregon territory.

Mary put her foot down and said no.

If he had done so, he would have lost his requisite close political base of support in Illinois. This asset was critical to Lincoln being elected President of the United States. The mistake to his political career would have been irreparable.

And, his practice and studies as a lawyer were necessary, even imperative, to his presidential success. How would he have responded as President to Chief Justice Taney on the constitutional issue of habeas corpus without the legal training and experience to do so?

I wrote this and then consulted Professor Burlingame's work on the subject (See Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Vol. One, page 307):

[Lincoln] was offered the more lucrative and prestigious governorship of Oregon (paying $3000 per year), which tempted him. John Todd Stuart and Lincoln were in Bloomington attending Court when a special messenger arrived informing him of the Oregon governorship offer. When Lincoln asked Stuart if he should accept, his former law partner said he “thought it was a good thing: that he could go out there and in all likelihood come back from there as a Senator when the State was admitted.” Lincoln “finally made up his mind that he would accept the place if Mary would consent to go. But Mary would not consent to go out there.” Joshua Speed later told Stuart “that Lincoln wrote to him that if he [Speed] would go along, he would give him any appointment out there which he might be able to control. Lincoln evidently thought that if Speed and Speed’s wife were to go along, it would be an inducement for Mary to change her mind and consent to go. But Speed thought he could not go, and so the matter didn’t come to anything. "During her husband’s presidency Mary Lincoln “did not fail to remind him that her advice, when he was wavering, had restrained him from ‘throwing himself away’ on a distant territorial governorship.” She “had had enough of frontier life.”

And so Lincoln returned to Springfield. Shortly after his defeat by Butterfield, while pacing the floor of his room, he suddenly stopped and “looking up to the ceiling in his peculiar manner” told a friend: “I am worth about three Thousand Dollars. I have a little property paid for and owe no debts. It is perhaps well that I did not get this appointment. I will go home and resume my practice at which I can make a living – and perhaps some day the People may have use for me.”

Some thought Lincoln’s defeat a blessing in disguise. Richard W. Thompson believed that Lincoln’s failure to win the commissionership of the General Land Office was “most fortunate both for him and the country.” If he had been successful, Thompson speculated, he would have stayed on in Washington, “separated from the people of Illinois,” sinking “down into the grooves of a routine office, so that he would never have reached the eminence he afterwards achieved as a lawyer, or have become President of the United States."