It is therefore not to be wondered at that Lincoln’s single term in the House of Representatives at Washington added practically nothing to his reputation.  He did not attempt to shine forth in debate by either a stinging retort or a witty epigram, or by a sudden burst of inspired eloquence.  On the contrary, he took up his task as a quiet but earnest and patient apprentice in the great workshop of national legislation, and performed his share of duty with industry and intelligence, as well as with a modest and appreciative respect for the ability and experience of his seniors.

“As to speech-making,” he wrote, “by way of getting the hang of the House, I made a little speech two or three days ago on a post-office question of no general interest.  I find speaking here and elsewhere about the same thing.  I was about as badly scared, and no worse, as I am when I speak in court.  I expect to make one within a week or two in which I hope to succeed well enough to wish you to see it.”  And again, some weeks later:  “I just take my pen to say that Mr. Stephens of Georgia, a little, slim, pale-faced consumptive man with a voice like Logan’s, has just concluded the very best speech of an hour’s length I ever heard.  My old, withered, dry eyes are full of tears yet.”

He was appointed the junior Whig member of the Committee on Post-offices and Post-roads, and shared its prosaic but eminently useful labors both in the committee-room and the House debates.  His name appears on only one other committee,—­that on Expenditures of the War Department,—­and he seems to have interested himself in certain amendments of the law relating to bounty lands for soldiers and such minor military topics.  He looked carefully after the interests of Illinois in certain grants of land to that State for railroads, but expressed his desire that the government price of the reserved sections should not be increased to actual settlers.

During the first session of the Thirtieth Congress he delivered three set speeches in the House, all of them carefully prepared and fully written out.  The first of these, on January 12, 1848, was an elaborate defense of the Whig doctrine summarized in a House resolution passed a week or ten days before, that the Mexican War “had been unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President,” James K. Polk.  The speech is not a mere party diatribe, but a terse historical and legal examination of the origin of the Mexican War.  In the after-light of our own times which shines upon these transactions, we may readily admit that Mr. Lincoln and the Whigs had the best of the argument, but it must be quite as readily conceded that they were far behind the President and his defenders in political and party strategy.  The former were clearly wasting their time in discussing an abstract question of international law upon conditions existing twenty months before.  During those twenty months the American arms had won victory after victory, and planted the American flag on the “halls of the Montezumas.”  Could even successful argument undo those victories or call back to life the brave American soldiers who had shed their blood to win them?