Richard M. Young, incumbent commissioner of the General Land Office, had appointed Lucas as a temporary clerk in the Land Office in March 1849. Lucas was worried about his tenure with rumors swirling that Young was to be replaced. Lucas held onto his job through the spring, and he sent Lincoln a steady stream of letters informing Lincoln on the contest for commissioner and on appointments to land offices throughout Illinois.

Lucas wrote Lincoln that “a letter has been forced out of” Henry Clay endorsing Butterfield’s candidacy for commissioner. Lincoln intimates that Clay endorsed Butterfield because the latter supported Clay over Zachary Taylor as candidate of the Whig Party in the presidential election of 1848. In February 1848, Butterfield had written Lincoln that he believed Clay would receive the nomination, and asked Lincoln’s opinion. Lincoln had been actively working to advance Taylor’s candidacy as a member of the so-called “Young Indians,” a Whig Executive Committee created in the spring of 1847 to provide the Whig Party with a unified national organization for the imminent presidential campaign. Including principally but not exclusively Southern Whigs, the Young Indians made it their goal to nominate Taylor as the Whig Party standard bearer in 1848. Some Whigs condemned the movement for Taylor, a southern slaveholder who had no previous political affiliation, as an abandonment of Whig principles. Taylor’s insistence on an independent candidacy, separate from party affiliation, further eroded his following among the party faithful, including Clay, the party’s standard bearer in the 1844 election and still the nominal head of the party. As an act of protest, Clay and many others refused to endorse Taylor and participate in the campaign.

Lincoln and many Taylor supporters grew restive over the patronage policy of the administration, and conflicts and complaints over the distribution of patronage dominated the first nine months of the Taylor presidency.