Lincoln Nominates Zachary Taylor, Responds to His Wife, Goes to Massachusetts

Massachusetts State House On June 11, 1848, congressman Abraham Lincoln arrived back in Washington, D.C. after having traveled all night from Philadelphia, where he attended the Whig National Convention that nominated Zachary Taylor for president. Upon his return he finds a letter from his wife Mary, who has been visiting her family in Kentucky for several months. These two events begin a campaign and a mystery.

Zachary Taylor was an odd choice to be the Whig nominee. Had had been fairly apolitical up to this point, having spent most of his life in the military. In fact, it was his military service in the Mexican War that ingratiated him to the American public, who clamored for him to be the next president of the United States. He was so popular that both the Whig and Democratic parties vied to make him their nominee. Taylor at first said he would only agree if he could do so “untrammeled with party obligations or interests of any kind,” the sort of divine elevation that George Washington had enjoyed after the Revolutionary War. Both the Whigs and Democrats quickly disavowed him of that politically naïve delusion. He agreed to sign on with the Whigs, finding them slightly less objectionable than the conservative Democrats of the South.

For his part, while Lincoln was in Philadelphia at the Whig Convention, he spurned his old beau ideal of a statesman, Henry Clay, and spoke out in favor of Taylor. Clay had been a nominee three times before, losing every time. Ever the vote counter, Lincoln wrote a friend that “Mr. Clay’s chance for an election, is just no chance at all,” going on to enumerate which states Clay could not carry. Based on his read of public sentiment, Lincoln noted, “in my judgment, we can elect nobody but Gen. Taylor.” And so Taylor became the Whig nominee. Lincoln was assigned to go to Massachusetts to make the case for Taylor, which as a I will discuss in future posts and in my forthcoming book, Unable to Escape This Toil: In Search of Abraham Lincoln’s Forgotten New England Tours, was not an easy task.

Which gets to the letter from Mrs. Lincoln. Mary and their two sons (Robert and Eddie) had been visiting her family in Lexington, Kentucky for months. They had been in a small boarding house room with Lincoln since he arrived in Washington to serve as Whig representative from Illinois, but boredom and conflicts with other tenants sent her south. Now she was planning to return to Washington. Lincoln, who had been happy to see her go, now seemed happy to have her come back. In his letter back to her the next day he wrote:

The leading matter in your letter, is your wish to return to this side of the Mountains. Will you be a good girl in all things, if I consent? Then come along, and that as soon as possible. Having got the idea in my head, I shall be impatient till I see you.

After noting that the congressional session was expected to end by July 17th, he added:

Come on just as soon as you can. I want to see you, and our dear—dear boys very much. Every body here wants to see our dear Bobby.

Here is where the mystery arises. When did Mary arrive in Washington, and did she accompany Lincoln on his tour of Massachusetts, which started on September 9th? On July 2nd he again wrote to Mary, who he presumed to have just started back, but then the record goes silent. The Lincoln Log mentions on July 23rd that “Mrs. Lincoln and boys probably arrive from Lexington about this time,” but this is merely conjecture based on Lincoln’s letter from three weeks before. No mention of Mary and the boys is recorded in the press or in the letters of Lincoln or any of his political escorts during Lincoln’s Massachusetts trip. The only indication that Mary was there comes from a letter she wrote in December 1867 (2.5 years after Lincoln’s assassination) rebutting statements by painter Francis Carpenter and claiming that “Mr. L. accompanied by my two little boys & myself, visited B[oston] & remained there 3 weeks, detained by the illness of our youngest son….” That would seem to confirm her presence, but there are several glaring errors in the letter that make suspect her memory of events that happened 20 years previously, especially given the extent of trauma she had experienced in that time. I dig more into this in a paper I’m writing for the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association.

Notwithstanding whether he was accompanied by his family or not, Lincoln definitely went to Massachusetts where he found more internal Whig conflicts than he could have imagined and learned valuable lessons that would position him for greatness.

[Photo by David J. Kent, bust of Lincoln in the Massachusetts State House, Boston, MA]

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