Free Lincoln Unbound by Rich Lowry Page A

prominence, decided to rebut Lincoln and teach him a lesson. Speed writes, “Forquer had been a whig—­one of the Champions of the party—­But had then recently joined the Democratic party and Almost simultaneous with his change—­had been appointed Register of the land office—­which office he then held.”
    Forquer had apparently made the most of it: “Just about that time Mr F had Completed a neat frame house—­the best house then in the village of Springfield and upon it had erected a lightning rod—­the only one in the place and the first one Mr Lincoln had evr observed.”
    When Forquer rose at the event to counter Lincoln he “commenced by saying that this young man would have to be taken down and was sorry that the task devolved upon him.” According to Speed, during his answer “his whole manner asserted & claimed superiority.” When Forquer finished, Lincoln replied in turn. He homed in on Forquer’s party switch: “The gentleman has alluded to my being a young man—­I am older in years than I am in the tricks and trades of politicians—­I desire to live—­and I disire place and distinction as a politician—­but I would rather die now than like the gentleman live to see the day that I would have to erect a lightning rod to protect a guilty Conscience from an offended God.”
    A few years later, Lincoln lampooned another party-switcher named Josiah Lamborn with a story of the misadventure of a slave in Kentucky. The slave was supposed to deliver two puppies to a neighbor, but when he stopped for a drink on his way, pranksters substituted piglets for the puppies, unbeknownst to him. Surprised by the advent of the piglets when he arrived to make his delivery, he turned around to go back home with them. When he stopped for another drink, the jokesters switched the puppies back. The slave exclaimed to his master when he arrived home, “I isn’t drunk, but dem dar puppies can be pigs or puppies just when dey please!” Lamborn, too, Lincoln charged, could change parties “just when he pleased.”
    Lincoln’s Whiggery wasn’t subject to change. It derived from a place deep within his character. Lincoln felt drawn to the kind of ­people who tended to be Whigs, the “better sort,” ­people who were firmly embedded within the commercial economy and welcomed its ethos. As the great historian of the Whigs Daniel Walker Howe points out, Lincoln’s partisan commitment to the Whigs was the political expression of his individual drive, and the means by which he hoped to help his countrymen elevate themselves. He was a Whig out of aspiration—­both for himself and the nation. *
    This same spirit would eventually be transferred to his Republicanism, but his Whig politics matter on their own terms. He was a Whig during the entire existence of the party, for about twenty years in total. He was a proto-Whig before he ran for office and a Whig during the party’s breakup in the sectional tensions of the 1850s. He was a Whig for all of his legislative career, in the Illinois House and during his one term in Congress (his central Illinois was more favorable territory for the party). He worked to build the Whig Party in Illinois, to defend and refine its doctrines, and to elect its presidential candidates. If above all else Lincoln was a politician, he was first and foremost a Whig.
    And that meant, a Henry Clay man. J. Rowan Herndon, a cousin of William Herndon who lived in New Salem, called ­Lincoln, “one of the most Devoted Clay whigs in all the State. Henry Clay was his favorite of all the great men of the Nation[—­]he allbut worshiped his name.” Lincoln would cite Clay in his famous debates with Douglas dozens of times. In the first debate, he called Clay “my beau ideal of a statesman, the man for whom I fought all my humble life.” In a letter