Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,845

This is the grave of Levi Lincoln.

Born in 1749 in Hingham, Massachusetts, Lincoln did not grow up particularly wealthy. His father apprenticed him out to a blacksmith. But Lincoln didn’t want to go. He hated that kind of work and hated most forms of hard labor and he protested and resisted and was just a terrible worker anyway. So his father finally gave him and somehow got him into Harvard. That was much more the young man’s bag. He graduated in 1772 and read for the law. He was a supporter of the Patriot cause in Massachusetts and briefly served in the militia after the Battles of Lexington and Concord. But he had better things to do than being a common soldier. Mostly that meant being a lawyer. He made a good business decision. He moved to Worcester. The reason that was smart is that Worcester’s elites were all Tories and so all the lawyers had bailed during the Revolution. He could walk right in and start a successful practice, which is exactly what he did.

In Worcester, Lincoln spent the next decade as a local elite kind of guy. He served in some local offices, was a delegate to the state constitutional convention, bought a lot of land, and helped found the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1780. He was anti-slavery and gained quite a bit of attention by representing Nathaniel Jennison, a slave claiming that the new state constitution made slavery illegal. The judge found in his favor, though Lincoln built the case on the larger argument that slavery was evil and should be banned for that reason rather than just because of the constitution. For quite awhile longer, Lincoln just built a local power base. He was elected to the Continental Congress in 1781, but turned it town. He did become increasingly ambitious, but the problem there was that he moved toward the policies of Thomas Jefferson and Worcester was a very Federalist city. He ran for Congress three times in the 1790s and lost each. But in 1800, he won on his fourth try.

However, Lincoln would only stay in Congress for a very short time, about three months. That’s because Jefferson named him Attorney General. Lincoln was a good lawyer and it was very much in the interest of the president and his allies to show their generosity to New England in order to promote the party there. He had pretty universal supporter, particularly from the influential Albert Gallatin. Lincoln was also a very willing party hack. The thing about being AG in 1801 is that there wasn’t that much to do. So half his job was being based in New England and promoting the Jeffersonian line and the requisite patronage positions. He started the National Aegis, his own newspaper to promote Jeffersonianism in New England and specifically to counter the harsh hatred of the administration from bitter Federalists. Plenty of that hate was directly targeted at Lincoln himself, who many Federalists saw as a traitor for uniting with that Virginian who was of course an unhinged Jacobin and the like. But Lincoln struck back. He published an 1802 pamphlet titled Letters to the People, by a Farmer that was an appeal to the broader masses of the ways that New England clergy were bought and sold by the Federalist Party and bringing politics into the churches. That had a sobering impact on the politicization of the New England churches.

Lincoln was fully on the president’s side in Marbury v. Madison, trying to pull an early version of executive privilege to not answer questions from the Marshall Court over how the administration was refusing to go away with the commissions of the late Adams administration. He was pilloried in the Federalist press for his performance, but what did they matter anymore? He was also involved in the Yazoo land scandal in Georgia, an early attempt by the states to sell land to political insiders at low prices, in this case, in modern Alabama and Mississippi. Lincoln had some of these favors, but was also on the commission to solve the problem and force the end of it. Lincoln also tried to advise Jefferson on foreign policy matters, not always to the most effective measures. He was the only member of the Cabinet to argue against sending the military to attack the Barbary pirates, claiming that only Congress could declare war. That was ignored. He also had a weird workaround idea when Napoleon offered the United States the entirety of Louisiana instead of just New Orleans, which everyone ignored because they realized no one was going to object to doubling the size of the nation’s lands, whatever constitutionality questions there might have been.

Lincoln stepped down as attorney general at the end of Jefferson’s first term. He returned to Massachusetts and became involved in state politics. Jeffersonians could now win in the Bay State and he was named the party’s candidate for lieutenant governor in 1806. He and the governor were reelected in 1808 and then the governor died, so Lincoln got to govern for the rest of the term. But by the time he ran on his own in 1809, Massachusetts had rebuked the Jeffersonians over the idiotic Embargo, one of the worst foreign policy ideas any president of this country has ever had. So he lost to Christopher Gore when trying to run for his own term.

Lincoln was still an important Jeffersonian in New England but he was aging. James Madison offered him a slot on the Supreme Court in 1811, but Lincoln declined due to his failing eyesight. He mostly moved back to Worcester, was involved in state politics, and helped create the American Antiquarian Society in 1812.

Lincoln died in 1820. He was 70 years old.

Levi Lincoln is buried in Worcester Rural Cemetery, Worcester, Massachusetts. This is not his first burial site. In fact, we don’t know where that was. But after that cemetery was established in 1838, that great age of creating cemeteries for both memory and for green space, Lincoln was reinterred there.

If you would like this series to visit other attorney generals, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Breckindrige, ancestor to the horrible 1860 Democratic presidential candidate, is in Lexington, Kentucky, and John Berrien is in Savannah, Georgia. Caesar Rodney, who was after Breckinridge, ended up dying in Buenos Aires and was moved around a couple of times and finally ended up in an unmarked common grave, so that’s kind of an interesting story. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.