Page:Life of Abraham Lincoln - Bowers - 1922.djvu/19

 Rh his bride were of necessity very frugal. In 1841 he might have had the nomination for Governor, but he declined it; having given up his ambition to become the "DeWitt Clinton of Illinois." It will be remembered that the internal improvement theories had not worked so well in practice. The panic of 1837 had convinced both him and his supporters of the unwisdom of attempting such improvements on too large a scale at one time. Though he had been mistaken he seems not to have lost the support of his followers, for they were mistaken with him; and the experience shows that "it is more popular for a politician to be with his constituents in the wrong than to be in the right against them."

Though he declined the nomination for Governor, his ambitious wife encouraged his natural inclination to keep his eye on the political field, and to glance in the direction of Congress. His ambitions were temporarily thwarted. On Washington's birthday in 1842, during the Washington Temperance movement he made a speech on temperance. While the whole address was admirable and conceived in a high humanitarian tone it did not please all. He was full of a wise and gentle tolerance that sprang alike from his knowledge and his love of men.

When accused of being a temperance man he said "I don't drink."

He was criticised, and because of this, and because his wife was an Episcopalian, and an aristocrat, and because he had once accepted a challenge to fight a duel, which friends pre-