A humbler but perhaps more accurate explanation is the reminder that he was son to Thomas the unstable.  What happened in Lincoln’s mind when he returned defeated from Washington, that ghost-like rising of the impulses of old Thomas, recurred more than once thereafter.  In fact there is a period well-defined, a span of thirteen years terminating suddenly on a day in 1862, during which the ghost of old Thomas is a thing to be reckoned with in his son’s life.  It came and went, most of the time fortunately far on the horizon.  But now and then it drew near.  Always it was lurking somewhere, waiting to seize upon him in those moments when his vitality sank, when his energies were in the ebb, when his thoughts were possessed by a sense of futility.

The year 1859 was one of his ebb tides.  In the previous year the rising tide, which had mounted high during his success on the circuit, reached its crest The memory of his failure at Washington was effaced.  At Freeport he was a more powerful genius, a more dominant personality, than he had ever been.  Gradually, in the months following, the high wave subsided.  During 1859 he gave most of his attention to his practice.  Though political speech-making continued, and though he did not impair his reputation, he did nothing of a remarkable sort.  The one literary fragment of any value is a letter to a Boston committee that had invited him to attend a “festival” in Boston on Jefferson’s birthday.  He avowed himself a thoroughgoing disciple of Jefferson and pronounced the principles of Jefferson “the definitions and axioms of free society.”  Without conditions he identified his own cause with the cause of Jefferson, “the man who in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that today and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression."(1)

While the Boston committee were turning their eyes toward this great new phrase-maker of the West, several politicians in Illinois had formed a bold resolve.  They would try to make him President.  The movement had two sources—­the personal loyalty of his devoted friends of the circuit, the shrewdness of the political managers who saw that his duel with Douglas had made him a national figure.  As one of them said to him, “Douglas being so widely known, you are getting a national reputation through him.”  Lincoln replied that he did not lack the ambition but lacked altogether the confidence in the possibility of success.(2)

This was his attitude during most of 1859.  The glow, the enthusiasm, of the previous year was gone.  “I must in candor say that I do not think myself fit for the Presidency,” he wrote to a newspaper editor in April.  He used the same words to another correspondent in July.  As late as November first, he wrote, “For my single self, I have enlisted for the permanent success of the Republican cause, and for this object I shall labor faithfully in the ranks, unless, as I think not probable, the judgment of the party shall assign me a different position."(3)