Pursuing a Seat in Congress (1843-1847) in 1843, Mary Lincoln
Chapter Seven “I Have Got the Preacher by the Balls”: Pursuing a Seat in Congress (1843-1847) In 1843, Mary Lincoln, “anxious to go to Washington,” urged her husband to run for Congress.1 He required little goading, for his ambition was strong and his chances seemed favorable.2 Voters in the Sangamon region had sent a Whig, John Todd Stuart, to Congress in the two previous elections; whoever secured that party’s nomination to run for Stuart’s seat would probably win.3 POLITICAL RIVALS Lincoln faced challengers, the most important of whom were his friends John J. Hardin and Edward D. Baker. Charming, magnetic, and strikingly handsome, the 1 Reminiscences of a son (perhaps William G. Beck) of the proprietress of the Globe Tavern, Mrs. Sarah Beck, widow of James Beck (d. 1828), in Effie Sparks, “Stories of Abraham Lincoln,” 30-31, manuscript, Ida M. Tarbell Papers, Allegheny College. On Mrs. Beck, see Boyd B. Stutler, “Mr. Lincoln’s Landlady,” The American Legion Magazine 36 (1944): 20, 46-47; James T. Hickey, “The Lincolns’ Globe Tavern: A Study in Tracing the History of a Nineteenth-Century Building” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 56 (1963): 639-41. In 1843-44, Mrs. Beck rented the Globe from Cyrus G. Saunders. See her testimony in the case of Barret v. Saunders & Beck, Martha L. Benner and Cullom Davis et al., eds., The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: Complete Documentary Edition, DVD-ROM (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), hereafter cited as LPAL, case file # 02608. The Illinois congressional elections scheduled for 1842 had been postponed one year because of delays in carrying out the reapportionment necessitated by the 1840 census.
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