On an ordinary Saturday in late January 1838, twenty-nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln stepped up to the platform of the Springfield, Illinois, Baptist church to deliver a lecture. His audience was the Young Men’s Lyceum. Always a nervous speaker, he preferred to have a well-revised, polished text, and he had one now. He had friends in the audience, some of them founding members of the speaking association: his law partner, pro-slavery John T. Stuart, who had just taken the novice lawyer into his firm; Dan Stone, a businessman and legislator with whom Lincoln had, ten months before, coauthored a resolution in the Illinois State legislature stating that slavery was an evil but that abolition was equally bad; and his friend Simeon Francis, the editor of the Sangamo Journal, all middle-of-the-road Whigs.
The young lawyer had never before delivered a lecture. Despite the church setting, this was an occasion for Lincoln, who had no religious affiliation, to speak on a secular topic that many newspapers, including Springfield’s Sangamo Journal, had been full of for much of the previous year. His subject, the complete text to be published in the next issue of the Journal: “The perpetuation of our political institutions.” It was a stock political topic of the day: let me tell you how and why our political institutions are under attack and how we can save them. Many Americans believed there was good reason to worry that some of the written and unwritten covenants created by the Founders of the republic were no longer fully enough determining the tenor of American public life. There seemed to be a caustic, cold anxiety in the national air.
The year that had just ended had been especially difficult for Illinois and for Lincoln. It had been a “winter of starving time,” so cold that “a man riding a horse from Chatham to Springfield to procure a marriage license . . . was so firmly frozen to the saddle, that he and the saddle were carried into the house and thawed next to the fire.” As the year ended, Lincoln was unhappily in love. His standing as a state legislator, traveling the unpaved frozen roads between the state capital in Vandalia and his new home in Springfield, had not impressed a woman he courted, Mary Owen. He mostly kept his depression at bay while he slogged out his low-earning contributions to Stuart’s law firm. And he found his most secure anchor in his legislative tasks.
Through most of 1837 he led the effort to move the state capital to Springfield; he strongly supported the Illinois State Bank; and he involved himself in a prolonged controversy about the legitimacy of a deed in an inheritance case, publishing satirical letters in the Sangamo Journal. As a Whig newspaper, the Journal, like Lincoln, had no doubt that the Van Buren administration, doubling-down on the anti-bank, anti–paper money, and anti-business policies of the Andrew Jackson administration, was responsible for the start of the worst economic depression in early American history. Illinois seemed likely to default on its infrastructure projects; the existence of the state bank was under threat; the state and national economies were starved for capital; businesses and farms were closing, tax receipts plunging, the federal government unable to pay its bills. Congress seemed paralyzed. The economic ideology of the Democrats required that government not interfere with the business cycle: austerity, patience, and a return to hard currency would make the economy healthy again. The Journal carried lengthy reports of Washington speeches and debates, often quoting John Quincy Adams on banking, financial regulation, and monetary issues. Anti-administration and pro-Whig views dominated its pages.
For the Journal and other Whig partisans, it was also a political opportunity. They hoped that placing the blame where they believed it lay would increase Whig representation nationwide and elect a Whig president in 1840. On the same Saturday that Lincoln rose to address the Springfield Lyceum, the Journal reprinted an editorial from the New York Express. Headed “THE CLOSING YEAR,” it summarized the anger, disappointment, and sense of national crisis about the economy felt by most Whigs and many Americans. And it made clear its view about who was responsible. The year 1837 was remarkable, the editorial began,
as beginning the Administration of an Executive educated in a new school of politicians,—among wily and designing demagogues—who have lost all good impressions of their ancestors and all care for the paternity of their government. The merchants will remember it as the Iron Age of our history; the mechanic will remember it as the year which threatened him with beggary and want, and the poor man will think of it as the year of despondency. It has been a season for making and unmaking of Executives,—of unparalleled distress among the entire business community, the year of SUSPENSION,—not merely of the payments promised by nearly a thousand Banking Institutions, but a suspension of nearly all the avenues of prosperity, which promised us national and individual wealth [a year in which the national government has become almost bankrupt]. . . . He who has survived it, and escaped unscathed from its evils, may survive almost anything, in the history of human events, and to such a survivor, it is as I have said, the year of jubilee, while to others it has been the beginning of the seven years’ bondage.
It was far from a year of jubilee for Lincoln. Still, he had survived it satisfactorily; the year was highlighted by his recent admission to the bar. When he stepped to the Lyceum platform, he believed that he had a relevant message, and that he had a local role, minor as it was, in delivering the news. His message had nothing to do with the economy. Instead, it focused on a series of events, which had begun a few years before and had reached, in November 1837, a notorious apogee with the murder of Elijah Lovejoy. They were events that, in the view of Lincoln and many Americans, represented a change in the values of the nation that would have long-lasting consequences. Bad as it was, the current economic depression was temporary. But “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country,” he told his audience, “the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts,” the murderous acts of “savage mobs” that, in New England, in the South, and in Missouri and Illinois, had taken the law into their own hands, threatened the rule of law and the constitutional basis of public safety. These mobs “spring up among the pleasure hunting masters of Southern slaves, and the order loving citizens of the land of steady habits.” In Mississippi, an extrajudicial mob had hanged gamblers legally at work and lynched Negroes suspected of favoring insurrection. In St. Louis, Francis McIntosh had been burned to death by a mob instead of turned over to the authorities for lawful prosecution.
Even if he had limited himself to the years 1835 to 1837, there were at least a half dozen examples that Lincoln could have cited. They included Southern mobs burning abolitionist pamphlets, a race riot in Washington, D.C., and the burning of a Catholic convent in Boston. “Whatever, then, their cause may be, it is common to the whole country,” Lincoln remarked. And “it would be tedious, as well as useless, to recount the horrors of all of them.” Mob law was no law at all, he emphasized. And though he did not hesitate to state that agitation about slavery and racial hatred was one of the incitements to mob violence, it was the extrajudicial violence he condemned, not slavery. “Mobism,” he lamented, “in Charlestown [Massachusetts] . . . burns a Convent over the head of defenceless women; in Baltimore it desecrates the Sabbath, and works all that day in demolishing a private citizen’s house; in Vicksburg it hangs up gamblers, three or four in a row; and in St. Louis it forces a man—a hardened wretch certainly, and one that deserved to die, but not thus to die—it forces him from beneath the aegis of our constitution and laws, hurries him to the stake and burns him alive.”
Had Lincoln read Lovejoy’s editorial about the McIntosh incident, “Awful Murder and Savage Barbarity,” or anything written or published by Lovejoy? The editorial about McIntosh was not reprinted in the Sangamo Journal, and it’s unlikely that Lincoln had access to a religious weekly as obscure as the Observer. But the major St. Louis newspapers were available in New Salem and Springfield, and one of the most trenchant sentences of Lovejoy’s May 1836 editorial is close to Lincoln’s language in his address to the Springfield Lyceum: “We must stand by the constitution and laws,” Lovejoy wrote, “or ALL is GONE.” The week after Lovejoy’s murder, the Sangamo Journal reprinted from the Alton Spectator Mayor John Krum’s accurate account of the mob violence that had killed Lovejoy and destroyed his press. The November 18 issue contained a Stuart and Lincoln advertisement for their legal services. It’s likely that Lincoln read Krum’s narrative. When, in December 1837, an Alton grand jury, impaneled to consider indicting the defenders of Lovejoy’s press, had heard a racist harangue by the lead prosecutor, Attorney General Usher F. Linder, it was also impaneled to consider charging members of the mob. It was a spectacle in judicial absurdity. In the end, the grand jury declined to indict either faction. Though the Journal did not reprint an account of the hearings, other regional newspapers did, and it may not have been possible for Lincoln to avoid knowing about what was a topic of print in St. Louis and of conversation in Springfield.
The subject of Lincoln’s speech was the threat to the perpetuation of U.S. institutions, particularly the law and the courts, and the right to have the laws protect one’s person and property. By itself, it was a fairly safe topic. Lincoln’s approach was safe and conservative. It was also intellectually and rhetorically impressive for a twenty-nine-year-old self-educated lawyer on the provincial frontier. “By such examples, by instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished, the lawless in spirit, are encouraged,” he summarized, “to become lawless in practice; and having been used to no restraint, but dread of punishment, they thus become, absolutely unrestrained. Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane, they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much, as its total annihilation.”
Americans were given to “wild and furious passions,” Lincoln observed, and counterproductive hatreds, especially for those with whom they disagreed, the worst of our politics virtually a blood sport for self-serving and unhinged people. Disrespect for the law, for the collective democratic will as embodied in legitimate, time-honored institutions, and antigovernment hostility that preferred no national government rather than even the small government of the 1830s threatened American prosperity. Eventually, he warned, political polarization would lead to autocratic government, even to tyranny, probably of a military sort, a Caesar or a Napoléon to bring order out of chaos. He and his fellow Whigs had in mind the example of Andrew Jackson, the anti–George Washington of Whig history. We need, Lincoln concluded, to replace the Founding Fathers with a new generation that will also use “reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” for “our future support and defence. Let those [materials] be molded into general intelligence, [sound] morality and, in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws. . . . Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.”
The latter expostulation, though rhetorically effective, was in fact overly prescriptive and undiscriminating. There could be little to no disagreement about the pernicious corrosiveness of mob violence. But “never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country” and apparently “never,” at any level, even of sympathy, “tolerate their violation by others”? Lincoln noticeably steered away from what an outspoken minority, and he himself to a limited extent, believed: there were bad laws and bad lawful institutions. The primary example was the Constitution’s legalization of slavery. That previous March, Lincoln had put on record in the state legislature his belief that slavery was immoral. But what to do about slavery, how to eliminate it, was another matter. For Lincoln, until late 1862, voluntary manumission, persuasion, colonization, and the ballot box were the only legal instruments for correcting or eliminating slavery—calmly, carefully, rationally, and over the very long haul. Abolitionists, Lincoln believed, had the potential to make all voices shrill, passions rise, the particulars of the law irrelevant, and blood flow.
Not surprisingly, in his Lyceum address Lincoln only glancingly referred to Lovejoy’s murder. Alton was less than seventy miles from Springfield. Across the Mississippi, St. Louis was twenty-four miles from Alton. A triangle can be drawn with Springfield as its northeastern point; its northwestern point, Mark Twain’s Hannibal, Missouri. At the triangle’s apex, descending southeast, is Alton. Lincoln lived the geography and culture of the Illinois portion of the triangle. Activities in St. Louis were well known in Springfield. Still, all Lincoln had to say in his Lyceum address about Lovejoy’s murder and the destruction of his printing press he relegated to an indirect mention, a phrase hanging onto his larger theme: “Whenever this effect shall be produced among us; whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors [my italics], and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last.” Though registering the oddity of this, Lincoln’s modern editor rejects the possibility that Lincoln was “being politic,” surmising that “it seems possible that he chose a subtler way of pricking the conscience of his audience than by direct denunciation.” Not likely. Lovejoy and Lovejoy’s murder were not comfortable topics for Lincoln to partner with. His views about abolition and his politics made that impolitic.
In this, Lincoln had considerable support among his Springfield contemporaries. When twelve members of the Second Presbyterian Church set out for Alton in October 1837 to participate in Beecher and Lovejoy’s antislavery convention, they did not represent many of Springfield’s citizens. This was a newly formed breakaway church; its small congregation probably contained most of the overt abolitionists in Springfield. There had been anti-abolitionist demonstrations when the Illinois Presbyterian Synod met there earlier in the year. Afraid that abolitionism was about to have a riotous presence, numbers of residents threatened violence and repression. Five days before the Alton convention met, Illinois Supreme Court judge Thomas C. Browne, a prominent Springfield citizen, chaired a meeting to put on record how strongly Springfield’s elite deplored abolitionism. Browne already had become a mentor to Lincoln; the senior judge was a welcome friend to the young lawyer. Lincoln’s leadership in moving the state capital to Springfield had brought him to the attention of the local elite. And he was soon to sign, along with a long list of Springfield notables, a promissory note to guarantee payment for the land to be used for the site of the new statehouse. Judge Browne was, in 1842, to be one of the few guests at Lincoln’s wedding. Standing behind the groom as he took the marriage oath with the words “With this ring I thee endow with all my goods, chattels, lands, and tenements,” Browne, known for his bluntness, blurted out, “God Almighty, Lincoln, the statute fixes all that.”
The Springfield anti-abolition meeting on October 23 resolved “that as citizens of a free State and a peaceable community, we deprecate any attempt to sow discord among us, or to create an excitement as to abolition which can be productive of no good result. Resolved, That in the opinion of this meeting the doctrine of immediate emancipation of slaves in this country (although promulgated by those who profess to be Christians) is at variance with Christianity, and its tendency is to breed contention, broils and mobs, and the leaders of those calling themselves abolitionists, are designing, ambitious men, and dangerous members of the society, and should be shunned by all good citizens.” No doubt at least one of the Christians referred to was Lovejoy. “Resolved, That the proceedings of this meeting be published in the Sangamo Journal and Illinois Republican.” They were published on Saturday, October 28, two days after the Alton convention met.
On the day that Judge Browne called the anti-abolition meeting to order, Lincoln was in Springfield. No list of the attendees exists. Possibly he did not attend. The resolutions the meeting drafted appeared in the Sangamon Journal, directly beneath one of Lincoln’s long letters about a controversial local matter. It’s hard to imagine he could keep his eyes off either column, and Lincoln had said much the same about abolitionists to the Illinois state legislature the previous March. Reporting the resolutions of the Springfield meeting, the Sangamo Journal made clear its detestation of abolition and abolitionists. Public opinion, it editorialized, “is likely to check at once the perfidy of these fanatical men.” Emancipation would be a disaster for the South and for the nation. That Lincoln considered Lovejoy one of these “fanatical men” seems an inevitable conclusion.
Much as he had to say about lawlessness in his Lyceum address, Lincoln made no allusion to the congressional debates in progress during the first half of 1837 that focused dramatically on his topic. John Quincy Adams had narrowly escaped a vote of censure that winter. His theme was congressional lawlessness, the insistence by a Southern-led majority that, despite the Constitution, the House of Representatives not accept any petitions about slavery. On the same day that Lincoln delivered his Lyceum address, Adams’ mind was on the furor that he anticipated would erupt when he introduced another batch. An additional thirty-one antislavery petitions had arrived in his mail the previous day. He spent the evening “assorting, filing, endorsing, and entering them on my list, without completing the work. With these petitions I receive many letters, which I have not time to answer. Most of them are so flattering, and expressed in terms of such deep sensibility, that I am in imminent danger of being led by them into presumption and puffed up with vanity. The abolition newspapers the Liberator, Emancipator, Philanthropist, National Enquirer, and New York Evangelist, all of which are regularly sent to me contribute to generate and nourish this delusion, which the treacherous, furious, filthy, and threatening letters from the South on the same subject cannot sufficiently counteract. My duty to defend the free principles and institutions is clear; but the measures by which they are to be defended are involved in thick darkness. The path of right is narrow, and I have need of a perpetual control over passion.” By late the next day, he had 120 petitions in hand.
The Sangamo Journal reported in detail on Adams’ trial by pro-slavery fire during 1837–1838. To Adams, it was Congress that was being lawless. Under Southern leadership and with Northern Democratic collaboration, it was acting as an organized mob. And it was encouraging if not condoning the violent acts of anti-abolitionist mobs. Lincoln shared Adams’ belief that slavery was against nature and nature’s God. Lincoln would not go the next step, though, from antislavery moralism to antislavery activism. In fact, he did not believe that there was a desirable next step other than the eventual voluntary removal of all free blacks and all emancipated slaves to some actual or invented ancestral home. Unlike Adams, Lincoln would not touch the third rail of American politics. He easily brushed off the charge, which he continued to reject until the last years of his life, that because he thought slavery immoral he was necessarily an abolitionist. From the start of his public life, he helped keep this distinction clear by saying, in his address to the Lyceum, little to nothing about Elijah Lovejoy or about the many other incidents in which mob violence had arisen almost exclusively as racist hostility to pro-abolition ideas and acts.
A TENSE crowd of partisans on both sides of the abolition issue pushed into Boston’s Faneuil Hall on the first day of the second week of December 1837, exactly one month and a day after Lovejoy’s assassination. Much of the nation, especially the business-intense New England and Middle Atlantic states, was licking the wounds of a difficult year. The entire country felt the economic pain. Businesses were failing, banks closing. Large numbers of unemployed workers loitered on urban streets. Farmers were desperate. There was reason to be angry at those who advocated that the two or more million black slaves, mostly in the South, become free agents seeking employment and a place of equality in the American sun.
Though abolitionists were a minuscule minority in Boston, they had a more concentrated presence there than anywhere else in the country, with the exception of Quaker Philadelphia. To most people, “abolition” meant “immediate abolition.” By “emancipation,” most meant freedom in the distant future, compensating slaveholders and filtering manumitted slaves through a slow process of acculturation that would civilize them. Gradual emancipation would equip them eventually to go to a country of their own. The idea had its adherents even in the South, where the American Colonization Society gave cover to slaveholders who wanted the satisfaction of being morally antislavery but to keep their slaves indefinitely. Abolition, almost always accompanied by the word radical, was not popular even in Boston; emancipation more so, though many were indifferent and even more were hostile to proposals favoring freedom for an inferior race that they believed hardly qualified to be called human.
The crowd that entered Faneuil Hall on December 8, 1837, split itself into a small number who favored abolition and a large number who did not. The majority divided into those who accepted slavery as it was, called Cotton Whigs, mostly well-to-do businesspeople benefiting economically from the slave-based cotton industry; and those who, on moral grounds, wanted slavery ended gradually. Each group had people who favored long-term colonization. But the ostensible occasion for this mass meeting was not the topic of slavery: it was freedom of the press. And the meeting had been called, against considerable opposition, because of Elijah Lovejoy’s murder.
There was little sympathy or even connection between Springfield and Boston, though both were Whig cities. The city on the Atlantic was the center of elite American culture, history, and wealth; Springfield, a mud-and-wooden-plank provincial backwater. Newly designated the state capital, with a small-city Midwestern future, it would never be Boston, New York, or Chicago. Its future prosperity would be the offspring of the growth of state government and the afterlife of its most famous citizen. When Daniel Webster visited in June 1837, it was a grand civic occasion Such visitors were rare. Lincoln probably came to the grove where Webster spoke. Ralph Waldo Emerson lectured in Springfield in January 1853, a celebrity occasion that Lincoln attended. Like Lincoln, Webster and Emerson opposed slavery. Neither was an abolitionist, though Emerson’s vague rhetoric might have allowed him to be thought one. Even in Boston, moderates such as Emerson preferred to claim Lovejoy as a martyr for freedom of speech. The minister’s abolitionist views could be disregarded. “I sternly rejoice,” Emerson wrote in his journal in late 1837, “that one was found to die for humanity and her rights of free speech and opinion.”
The voices of the small cadre of abolitionists in Boston were rarely heard in Springfield. Such names hardly appeared in the Sangamo Journal in the 1830s and ’40s. Even Lovejoy was, on the whole, too hot to handle. No meeting occurred in Springfield to defend freedom of the press, let alone to protest Lovejoy’s assassination. Other than reprinting the account by the mayor of Alton, the Journal had nothing to say about Lovejoy’s death. Springfield’s leaders wanted nothing to do with pro-abolition and anti-abolition tension. In Boston, Lovejoy and abolitionism had a public voice, though there were loud counter-voices. Still, in Massachusetts the law itself did not make blacks second-class citizens. Equally important, public opinion defended free speech and personal security. In 1831, abolitionists had initiated their own newspaper, the Liberator. Its outspoken editor, William Lloyd Garrison, a working-class young man with a thin, meek appearance, his fingers stained with printer’s ink, combined Christian values with personal courage. A radical by temperament, he denounced Whigs and Democrats equally on the two issues that mattered most to him: abolition and women’s rights.
Lincoln’s Springfield world, in contrast, directed considerable venom at abolitionism. Its cohort of middle-of-the-road anti-abolitionist Whigs, led by the Sangamo Journal, had no alternative but to give Boston’s John Quincy Adams prominent billing and high praise. The former president’s congressional pronouncements on the tariff, the national bank, and infrastructure were music to their ears. So, too, was his opposition to the expansion of slavery, especially the potential annexation of Texas, constantly advocated by Southern leaders during the 1830s and ’40s. But the Journal had little to say about Adams’ abolitionist sympathies. And despite every other public policy affinity, the laudatory pen portraits, and the positive accounts in the Journal of Adams’ congressional battles, Lincoln made so few references to Adams in what survives of his letters and lectures that it is hard not to conclude that the exclusion was purposeful. Abolitionists such as Garrison have almost no presence at all. In these years, Illinois, a border state like Kentucky, had many formidable anti-abolitionists on every level of society, including some among Lincoln’s friends, extended family, political allies, and political opponents. Even those who, like Lincoln, were morally opposed to slavery believed, unhesitatingly, that the United States should be a white man’s country exclusively.
Those who took their seats in Faneuil Hall in early December 1837 knew that there would be at least verbal fireworks. All would have felt, with some degree of emotional intensity, the mythic presence of Boston’s orators of Revolutionary days. Fiery James Otis and volatile John Adams had, in that same place, advocated bold action for American independence. Portraits of Otis, John Hancock, and the most defiant Son of Liberty, Samuel Adams, blessed Boston’s civic futurity. What is now a food-and-trinket emporium was still a hallowed hall dedicated to public meetings, an eighteenth-century gift to the city from its wealthiest merchant, Peter Faneuil. William Ellery Channing, Boston’s senior Unitarian minister, had issued the call for the meeting. A leader of Calvinism’s transformation into a Unitarianism emphasizing God’s love, he confidently expected public approval for a resolution affirming free speech.
When the Boston Town Council refused a permit for the meeting, Channing was shocked. Others were not. The council and the newly elected Massachusetts attorney general, James T. Austin, feared, even expected, that the meeting would advance abolitionist propaganda, a verbal assault on Boston’s peace, an affront to many citizens who feared the South would retaliate against their business interests. “The rich and fashionable belong to the same caste with the slaveholder,” Channing had written, “and men are apt to sympathize with their own caste more readily than with those beneath them.” A prudent moralist, Channing abhorred slavery. It caused him moral pain. He also anticipated how much pain immediate abolition, which he opposed, would cause to “the rich and fashionable,” including many of New England’s most successful merchants and financiers. When he appealed the council’s decision, under pressure to appear nonpartisan, the council granted the permit.
In his best clerical and ameliorative manner, the bald, bespectacled Channing, who had preached hundreds of sermons and chaired many meetings, called to order what the New York Evening Post called one of the largest crowds ever to assemble in Faneuil Hall. A number of resolutions were proposed: “Freedom of speech and the press [require] that the citizen shall be protected from violence in uttering opinions opposed to those which prevail around him,” and legal enactments that guaranteed freedom of speech were “the only forms though which the sovereignty of the people is exercised.” No one objected to the resolutions. They condemned “lawless force” on all sides. On the face of it, the resolutions were innocuous enough, obvious statements of basic first principles. For many, the resolutions were acceptable pro forma givens. For others, they were either too weak or too strong. If the former, why did they not specifically mention Lovejoy and slavery? If the latter, were they an implied approval of Lovejoy and condemnation of the pro-slavery mob?
Led by Channing, the moderates in the hall would have been happy to leave the subtext submerged. The previous August, Channing had written a public letter to Senator Henry Clay, the Whig champion of moderation. “A spirit of lawlessness pervades the community,” Channing wrote, “which, if not repressed, threatens the dissolution of our present forms of society. Even in the old states, mobs are taking the government into their hands, and a profligate newspaper finds little difficulty in stirring up multitudes to violence.” The issue was the possible annexation of Texas, which, Channing feared, would create violent conflict between pro-slavery partisans and those who opposed slavery’s extension. That was not, though, the subject of the Faneuil Hall meeting. It was Channing’s hope that the issue of free speech and lawful assemblage, to which everyone paid at least lip service, could be separated from the issue of slavery. Could an uncomplicated pro–free speech resolution be passed?
Prepared for this moment and primed for rhetorical warfare, James T. Austin, rising from his seat in the balcony, demanded that he be recognized. No one could deny this, certainly not the pacific Channing. An energetic speaker, with a touch of the demagogue, Austin had recently published a pro-slavery pamphlet. “Suppose,” Austin had written, that blacks “emerge from Slavery, intelligent, moral and industrious, with all the capacity and inclinations of the white man. They would be negroes still. Two distinct classes of men could not live upon terms of equality in the same country and under the same government. The more their intelligence, the greater would be the mutual hostility of the two races; and the final possession of power would be the result of a war of extermination, in which one or the other race would perish. Is it supposed they could amalgamate? God forbid!” Our pure white daughters would give birth to “thick-lipped, woollyheaded children of African fathers.” Rather than that “the negro should be seated in the halls of Congress and his sooty complexion glare upon us from the bench of justice, rather than he should mingle with us in the familiar intercourse of domestic life and taint the atmosphere of our homes and firesides . . . debased and degraded by such indiscriminate and beastly connexion . . . —I will BRAVE MY SHARE OF ALL THE RESPONSIBILITY OF KEEPING HIM IN SLAVERY.” Elijah Lovejoy, Austin told his Faneuil Hall audience, “was like a man who insisted on breaking open cages containing wild beasts and setting them free to prey on the populace. . . . The people of Missouri had as much reason to be afraid of their slaves,” Austin insisted, “as we should have of the wild beasts of the menagerie.” Much as mobs are to be deplored, Lovejoy had been to blame for his own death.
This was, essentially, the view of most of those assembled in Faneuil Hall and most white Americans, North and South, whether in Boston, Springfield, or Charleston, whether because of self-interest or racism or the belief that slavery was ineradicable—or some combination of any or all of these. Austin expressed what most Americans believed: abolition would result either in a race war in which one race would exterminate the other or in a mixed-race society, destructive to both races. The underside of the argument—widely expressed in working-class bars and in the streets; in jokes, racial taunts, anti-black laws, and mob attacks on “nigger lovers”; in serious pamphlets, books, and speeches by the literate elite; and in political campaigns throughout the country, especially in Congress—was: if there is a Negro insurrection, your daughters and wives will be raped by black men; if there is “amalgamation,” your daughters will give birth to “woolly-headed children.” From the most virulent pro-slavery racist to moderate antislavery Democrats and Whigs, this threat, no matter the degree of moral condemnation of slavery itself and no matter the political calculation, was deeply felt in the gut, beyond anything to do with rationality or religion. To anti-abolitionists there were only two alternatives: the perpetuation of slavery forever or gradual colonization.
How to end slavery, if one favored ending it at all, seemed a question without a satisfactory solution. Christian antislavery moderates, like Channing, felt its moral repugnance. How to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem, a stain on Christian values and the Christian conscience? Others who disapproved of slavery took refuge in less intellectual balancing acts: frustration, postponement, acceptance, evasion, resignation, and the American Colonization Society. Even for those who advocated immediate abolition, its aftermath was difficult to envision. What could be done to make two million ex-slaves productive citizens of American society? How much money would it take? Who would pay? How long would it take? Where would they live? And if they lived in integrated communities, how would it be possible for the two races to live peacefully together? No one had convincing answers. For abolitionists, the moral imperative dominated. But what would come next, if there was to be a next, was less concrete. James Austin could speak to his Faneuil Hall audience with self-assured specificity. His bigotry and belligerence created clarity: the real issue, he emphasized, was not free speech but slavery. The next day, the Boston Daily Evening Transcript had it right: “The speech of Attorney General Austin reflected the true spirit of the meeting and the citizens of Boston.”
As soon as Austin took his seat, a slim, dark-haired, thin-faced man stood up. Twenty-seven-year-old Wendell Phillips, who had not intended to say anything at this meeting, surprised himself and everyone else. The son of a distinguished Boston lawyer, civic leader, and philanthropist, Wendell, like his widely respected father, was a Harvard graduate and a lawyer. John Quincy Adams had heard “the youngest son of my old friend and associate, John Phillips, perform admirably” at the Harvard graduation ceremony in August 1831. The descendent of a pious Congregationalist family—the Phillips clan arrived with the first settlement of Massachusetts—the young man had won plaudits at college. With a cultured voice, self-possession, and high-caste idealism, he seemed to some too much the Brahmin snob, to others a gifted young man in search of a mission. Six years before, William Lloyd Garrison had begun publishing the Liberator a stone’s throw from the Phillipses’ Beacon Street mansion. Wendell Phillips had been interested but far from fully convinced. His conservative Whig family disapproved. His long-widowed mother, the respected matriarch of the family, thought the Liberator abominable and abolitionists seditious troublemakers. When Garrison was attacked by a pro-slavery mob as he was about to speak to the Boston Female Antislavery Society, Wendell would have been almost in sight of the uproar. The wealthy abolitionist bluestocking whom he married in 1836 and of whom his family disapproved may have been at the meeting. Phillips soon became active in Boston’s small abolitionist circle.
When he stood up to answer Austin at Faneuil Hall, Phillips was in the process of beginning a lifelong commitment to the abolitionist cause. He had become convinced that racial injustice was at the heart of everything wrong with America. His speech that day, though, was not about slavery. It did not mention the word or allude to the institution. From the moment he rose, he could see and hear that most of his audience was hostile. Voices from the crowded hall urged him to sit down and shut up: an abolitionist was not welcome to speak! Equally loud but more dignified voices demanded respect for free speech. “No gag!” they called out, using ex-president Adams’ widely publicized exhortation, his refrain in Congress all through 1837.
At his moment of oratorical inauguration, Phillips took the high road of discretion. He stuck to the topic of free speech. “As much as thought is better than money, so much is the cause in which Lovejoy died nobler than a mere question of taxes.” The issue now, Phillips proclaimed, is even more central to our secular and religious values than
taxation without representation. James Otis thundered in this Hall when the King did but touch his pocket. Imagine, if you can, his indignant eloquence, had England offered to put a gag upon his lips. [Great applause.] The question that stirred the Revolution touched our civil interests. This concerns us not only as citizens, but as immortal beings. Wrapped up in its fate, saved or lost with it, are not only the voice of the statesman, but the instructions of the pulpit, and the progress of our faith. . . . It is good for us to be here. When Liberty is in danger, Faneuil Hall has the right, it is her duty, to strike the key-note for these United States. I am glad, for one reason, that remarks such as those to which I have alluded have been uttered here. The passage of these resolutions, in spite of this opposition . . . will show more clearly, more decisively, the deep indignation with which Boston regards this outrage.
The indignation was real, though thinner on the ground than Channing had expected, and mostly among the elite. Probably Garrison, who pulled no punches on free speech, slavery, immediate abolition, or women’s rights, was not at the Faneuil Hall meeting. On that day, Phillips, who would have many occasions in the next decades to speak his mind about abolition and slavery, had gone as far as he judged it safe to go. Lovejoy was indeed a martyr to free speech, but the real text would be eloquently delivered on other occasions at other times.
The national Whig establishment also had gone as far as it could safely go when it deplored Lovejoy’s assassination and affirmed the right of free speech. In the press and the pulpit, Whig spokesmen accompanied the affirmation with the warning that those who used the right of free speech to discuss slavery and advocate abolition were dangerously reckless. Free speech best fulfilled the country’s values and contributed to its prosperity when under the control of voluntary restraint. Abolitionists were sowing the wind. They would reap the whirlwind. Lovejoy’s death should be deplored, mob violence condemned. But those who advocated abolition, though exercising a constitutional right, were troublemakers, the creators of a symbiotic dynamic with those who felt threatened by insurrectionary language and resorted to violence in self-defense. Newspapers from St. Louis to Boston to Charleston and in any other loop around the country, with some exceptions in New England and the Middle Atlantic states, concluded that abolitionism was a threat to civic order and the perpetuation of the Union. This was Lincoln’s position in 1837. Antislavery moralists and champions of free speech warned that the extremes threatened the existence of the center.
IF SLAVERY were to continue in place, John Quincy Adams believed, eventually the center would not hold. In early spring 1838, he had the courage to do what no other moderate Whig, from Channing in Boston to the unknown Lincoln in Illinois, would consider safe. In response to a request from Elijah Lovejoy’s brothers, he wrote a learned and brilliant introduction to their edition of their murdered brother’s memoir/biography, which had been synthesized from his letters, editorials, and poetry, and from newspaper articles and commentary. It was, Adams argued, slavery that had made Elijah Lovejoy the “first American martyr.” Unlike either Channing or Lincoln, Adams had become a convert to abolitionism, though he also had no clear idea of how the practical transition from slavery to citizenry could be effected. His conviction that, sooner or later, slavery would produce a slave insurrection or the breakup of the Union, or both, dominated his mind and feelings. He also had the political independence to speak his mind, his congressional district the only electorate he would ever need to face again. Though divided over abolition, the district was overwhelmingly antislavery. It opposed the suppression of free speech on any subject. It also respected the Adams family tradition of service and appreciated the advantage of having an ex-president represent it in Congress. In 1838, at the age of seventy-one, with no higher office possible and no need to solicit support from a national coalition or constituency, Adams was freer than most of his political contemporaries to be himself on the subject of slavery, to be what his family values, his conscience, his learning, and his personality required.
In mid-January 1837, Adams, in Washington, had received a letter from an unknown young man named Joseph Lovejoy. His older brother had, the previous year, moved his pro-abolition newspaper from St. Louis to Alton. With his brother Owen, Joseph had trekked across the country from the Lovejoy family home in Albion, Maine, to join Elijah. Adams had never heard the name Lovejoy before. Joseph’s letter focused not on slavery but on the widespread corruption of government officials. It emphasized one of Adams’ lifelong themes: the corruption that political parties imposed on American political life. “Could the People be shown,” Joseph Lovejoy wrote, “the moral corruption and depravity of these men by whom they have in a measure been led they would at once put a stop to all the political juggling, and the country would once more be found in a happy and prosperous condition.”
It was also a fan letter. Adams, Lovejoy believed, was one of the few honest politicians in Washington. That the day “is dawning when this will take place I am happy to perceive, by the triumph with which you have attained over your enemies.” Lovejoy was alluding to the congressman’s opposition to the gag rule. “In the last session when we were in danger of being carried away captive, you interposed your arm and saved us.” The latter phrase arose from the depths of Lovejoy’s immersion in the Old Testament. Like many of his abolitionist contemporaries, he had a biblical and apocalyptic imagination. Abolitionists were, he believed, like the ancient Hebrew prophets: modern-day embodiments of God’s word and God’s gift of freedom to every human being. They were all in danger, as was the country itself, of being carried off, like the ancient Hebrews, into captivity, to be enslaved in Babylon or kept in bondage in Egypt, slaves to the dominance of the slave power. Their commitment was existential, one of life or death.
As always, his desk piled high with letters, Adams answered every one. In April 1837 he responded to Joseph Lovejoy. The young man’s words had touched a chord. After all, Adams had for decades been urging young Americans to become morally engaged with the life of the republic, its history, its government, and the threats to its well-being. An unreconstructed New Englander but also a fervent nationalist, Adams looked to the West as the proving ground of America’s character. Its future was there. He may never have heard of Alton, Illinois, but he undoubtedly knew that there was an Adams County, Illinois, created in 1825 and named after him. In it was a city on the Mississippi called Quincy. And though he was never to travel any farther west than Ohio, he had a great interest in Western expansion (to be accomplished, he hoped, without war or slavery), and the expectation that promising young men would come out of the West to lead the nation to a better way and a better time.
The Washington leadership was not as pervasively corrupt, Adams assured Joseph Lovejoy, as widely believed. “I hope and believe that your impressions of deep and general corruption among the leaders of the great parties of this country are the result of your anxiety and exaggerated fears for the virtues of the people.” Striking a long-standing theme of his father’s generation that he felt universally valid, he preached a post-Calvinistic sermon about American materialism. “Corruption is too often the consequence of great prosperity and for the last twenty-two years we have been visited with the temptation of that state, as no people ever were before.” An all too prosperous America had become an embodiment of material self-indulgence. Through the agency of parties, politics had become a vehicle of corrupt self-interest. “That some relaxation from the virtues of our earlier age has followed cannot be denied, and party spirit the most infectious of all corruptions of a free people has undoubtedly tainted the political morality of almost all the public men now the leaders of the Union.” There is “little to choose between them. To purify and refine their characters, the trial of adversity must come, as I have no doubt it will, and that will sift the wheat from the chaff and restore many of the principles of Republican virtue, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.”
When, in November 1837, Adams read the horrendous news of the anti-abolitionist Alton mob and its murder of Elijah Lovejoy, he assumed that “this Lovejoy” was the man who had written him the letter “which I answered in April.” The name had stayed in the back of his retentive memory. He was unaware that there were three brothers. “One of the leading abolitionists of the time . . . he was a man of strong religious, conscientious feeling,” Adams wrote in his diary, “deeply indignant at what he deemed the vices and crimes of the age. Such men are often fated to be martyrs.” Adams of course would have understood that, in the larger context, it made no difference which of the Lovejoy brothers had been murdered. The event spoke to larger issues. It was “the most atrocious case of rioting which ever disgraced this country.” And the incident epitomized the extent to which the proponents of the gag rule and their allies were willing to go, including the almost daily death threats that Adams received in the mail. On the subject of slavery, he had reason to conclude, there was no personal security or security for free speech and the perpetuation of the Union. He assumed that there would be more martyrs to come. Those who loved him worried that he would be one, that there was an assassin’s bullet ready to fly at him, whether in the streets he walked or the theaters he attended so regularly (especially when any Shakespeare play was being performed), or even in the corridors of Congress.
Late in December, the Washington reporter for the Sangamo Journal told its Springfield readers that the apoplectic turmoil in Congress about the gag rule and slavery now reflected the national discourse. In the Senate, “I never saw Mr. Calhoun so much agitated.” In both houses, Southern voices threatened disunion. As usual, Henry Clay attempted to calm the waters, to protect both slavery and the Union, to find some middle ground. “Clay repudiates the idea that the Union can be dissolved either by abolition or anti-abolition, by any faction or excitement.” For the moment, the dramatic action was in the Senate. “In the House of Representatives, Mr. Adams has commenced his presentation of abolition and anti-Texian memorials, and they were all of them after a hard struggle laid on the table. The question of reception was raised in regard to the abolition petitions. . . . Much is to be feared from a continuation of discussion about slavery even among the people,” the Journal correspondent continued, “and for some weeks past, there has been so much agitation on the subject in Boston, and in other places that another Alton tragedy has been looked for. The consequences of the introduction of the topic into Congress would be fatal to the harmony of that body.”
Yet there had been no harmony in Congress for years on anything to do with slavery, and the only way to maintain even a semblance of harmony was to exclude the subject altogether. Indirectly, the Journal was supporting the gag rule and a gradual suppression of the significance of Lovejoy’s assassination. It was the overwhelmingly popular view everywhere except in the Northeast, where there was public opinion on both sides and where a small number of abolitionists, white and black, were, short of physical suppression, not to be silenced. A resolution passed at a public meeting of the “COLOURED CITIZENS OF NEW YORK” in late November 1837, at Reverend Theodore S. Wright’s First Colored Presbyterian Church in Harlem, unflinchingly stated the position of the American Abolition Society and of a substantial number of black Americans: Lovejoy had been assassinated “in sustaining the liberty of the press and the holy principles of Abolition, to which he was honored of God to become the first Martyr in this nation.” Heartened by the widespread attention paid to the Alton events, Joseph and Owen Lovejoy were not supporting silence about their brother’s death and the cause for which he had died. In the South, moderate elites balanced the view that Elijah had been responsible for his own death with condemnation of mob violence. Free speech, except on the subject of slavery, readily lent itself to support everywhere. That mob violence was pernicious seemed self-evident. But slavery itself was kept offstage as much as possible, even in the North.
Within a month of Elijah’s death his brothers began to collect materials for a memoir, a privately published book of vindication to be distributed as widely as possible in as large a print run as funds would allow. They had much of the manuscript in hand by late February 1838, hoping to publish in March. In late February, Owen visited Washington. Adams, who “was very glad to see me and treated me very kindly,” Owen wrote, learned that there had been three Lovejoy brothers. Joseph also made his first trip to Washington. He was “introduced to J. Q. Adams, had him alone an hour or two—was charmed with his immense resources. He was very social and kind and feels deeply interested in the Alton matter.” Adams agreed to write an introduction. In New York, Owen anxiously waited for Adams’ manuscript. If it didn’t come soon, they would try someone else. Then, late in March, Adams’ introduction was in Owen’s hands. “It is done at last,” Owen wrote to his mother. He had six thousand copies printed, then headed west to Illinois. Starting in the 1850s, he became an active facilitator of the Underground Railroad and then a fervent Lincoln Republican. Serving in Congress in the years leading up to and during the Civil War, he would become a living memorial to his brother’s martyrdom.
The six thousand copies of Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy; Who Was Murdered in Defence of the Liberty of the Press. At Alton, Illinois, Nov. 7, 1837 prominently displayed on its title page “Introduction by John Quincy Adams.” It was a coup for the brothers. After all, the congressman was a busy man besieged by moral and political obligations. No doubt, though, he felt compelled to speak out once again, the Lovejoy example and his own mission dovetailing beyond any pressure of time and energy that the elderly Adams might have felt. The Lovejoy brothers had come to the right man. Joseph’s letter of the previous year had turned out to be an unintended introduction to the task, and in visiting Washington the brothers had benefited from Adams’ open door. Anyone had access to him, either by mail or in person. This had been Adams’ commitment since his induction into government service. And Elijah Lovejoy had been a martyr to two things Adams cared deeply about: freedom of the press and antislavery. They were subjects about which Adams already had said much and now had more to say.
The subject was human freedom, the form a vigorously written and readable essay of about 2,500 words. The argument was simple, the exposition compelling: “The absolute despotisms of antiquity,” Adams wrote, “under which the lives, persons, and property of the subject were utterly unprotected from the will of the despot, vanished very early by the adoption of the Christian faith as the religion of the Roman empire. But that life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness were inextinguishable rights of all mankind, had never been proclaimed as the only rightful foundation of human association and government, until the Declaration of Independence, laid it down, as the corner stone of the North American Union. It was a discovery in the combined science of morals and politics.”
The two originators of the rights and principles of freedom that the modern world proclaims as its highest obligation to every individual are the Christianity of its inspired founder and the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Christianity “commands obedience to the laws. It enjoins reverence to the powers that be—but it lays down first principles, before which, carried to their unavoidable conclusions, all oppression, tyranny and wrong must vanish from the face of the earth. That all mankind are of one blood, and that the relation between them is that of brothers. That the rule of social intercourse between them is that each should do to all, as he would that all should do to him. This is Christianity—and this is the whole duty of man to man.” It forbids war, and it forbids slavery. “The second great victory of the Christian system of morals was over oppressive governments—and that victory has not yet been consummated.” It was a work in progress even in the United States. But “it is the pride and glory of the confederated North American Republic, that in the instrument of their first association they solemnly declared and proclaimed these truths, derived by clear unequivocal deduction, from the first principles of the Christian faith, to be self-evident—and announced them as the first principles both of their Union and of their Independence.”
Still, first principles need effective implementation. As he had been articulating for decades, the flaw was in the implementation. The Constitution had perpetuated slavery in a series of compromises between the North and the South. The task of creating a nation in which powerful constituencies demanded accommodation as the price of assent had resulted in a contradiction so morally corrosive and materially divisive that the existence of the Union could not indefinitely continue without correction. Matters would only get worse. Ultimately, the power of first principles would implode the structures that defied them. Governments over historical time, “whether civil, ecclesiastical, or military,” have been agents “of tyranny and oppression,” Adams argued, but not “the most pernicious. . . . The laws of war, and the institutions OF DOMESTIC SLAVERY, have been far more effective instruments for converting the bounties of the Creator to the race of man into a curse, than all the tyrannies of emperors and kings that ever existed upon earth. War is a perpetual violation of the right of human beings to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Slavery is “the base-born progeny of war.”
For decades, Adams had helped lead the United States through the complicated international and political minefields of the African slave trade. Slavery itself was the crime, the original sin. It was “politically incompatible with a free Constitution, and religiously incompatible with the laws of God. . . . That an American citizen, in a state whose Constitution repudiates all Slavery, should die a martyr in defence of the freedom of the press, is a phenomenon in the history of this Union. It forms an era, in the progress of mankind towards universal emancipation.” It marks an “epoch in the annals of human liberty.” Lovejoy’s assassination was like the “shock as of an earthquake throughout this continent, which will be felt in the most distant regions of the earth.” He is the “first American Martyr to THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, AND THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE.”
THE MAN who was to become the second American martyr to the freedom of the slave probably never read Adams’ introduction to the memoir of Elijah Lovejoy. Adams and others anticipated that there would be more martyrs to come. Adams worried that he himself might be one. Lincoln’s path to martyrdom was, of course, totally different from Lovejoy’s, and the story of how an anti-abolition moderate Whig, by conviction and personality embracing compromise and conciliation, and America as a white man’s country, was elevated to the highest level of presidential immortality by an assassin’s bullet and a war he did everything he could to avoid has its twists, turns, and ironies. Lincoln of course knew about Lovejoy’s death, which he deplored in his brief allusion to the martyr in his Springfield Lyceum address. Whatever he thought beyond that, he kept his public and rhetorical distance.
In 1908 a letter from Lincoln came to light that revealed that he had had much more to say about Lovejoy than the meager allusion in his 1838 address. The letter’s discovery was a wish come true for those eager to emphasize Lincoln’s commitment to emancipation and black citizenship, and to create a mythical Lincoln who throughout his life dedicated himself to the high ideal of the Declaration of Independence and applied it to all races without qualification. That he had never believed that the principle applied to American blacks had the potential to create an undesirable counternarrative. Popular history and national mythmaking prefer simple stories. The Lincoln letter that the Belleville (Illinois) Weekly Advocate published in April 1908 filled in and completed a heretofore puzzlingly incomplete Lincoln/Lovejoy story. It came from a collection of notes and letters originating with James Lemen, a Revolutionary War veteran who settled in Illinois early in the nineteenth century, the founder of the first Baptist church in the state and a prominent opponent of slavery. His notes and letters, republished in 1915 with a scholarly introduction as The Relations of Thomas Jefferson and James Lemen in the Exclusion of Slavery from Illinois and the Northwest Territory with Related Documents 1781–1818, provides an account of Leman’s secret Jefferson-sponsored mission to do everything in his power to keep slavery out of Illinois. Among the letters in the collection attesting to Lemen’s antislavery credentials were two written in 1857, one by Stephen Douglas, the other by Abraham Lincoln.
“Friend Lemen,” Lincoln wrote from Springfield on March 2, 1857, to the son of James Lemen, thanks “for your warm appreciation of my views in a former letter as to the importance in many features of your collection of old family notes and papers.” He would
add a few words more as to Elijah P. Lovejoy’s case. His letters among your old family notes were of more interest to me than even those of Thomas Jefferson, written to your father. . . . Both your father and Lovejoy were pioneer leaders in the cause of freedom, and it has always been difficult for me to see why your father, who was a resolute, uncompromising, and aggressive leader, who boldly proclaimed his purpose to make both the territory and the state free, never aroused nor encountered any of that mob violence which both in St. Louis and Alton confronted or pursued Lovejoy, and which finally doomed him to a felon’s death and a martyr’s crown. . . . Lovejoy, one of the most inoffensive of men, for merely printing a small paper, devoted to the freedom of the body and mind of man, was pursued to his death; while his older comrade in the cause of freedom, Rev. James Lemen, Sr., who boldly and aggressively proclaimed his purpose to make both the territory and the state free, was never molested a moment by the minions of violence. The madness and pitiless determination with which the mob steadily pursued Lovejoy to his doom, marks it as one of the most unreasoning and unreasonable in all time, except that which doomed the Savior to the cross. If ever you should come to Springfield again, do not fail to call. The memory of our many “evening sittings” here and elsewhere, as we called them, suggests many a pleasant hour, both pleasant and helpful. Truly yours, A. Lincoln.
The letter is a forgery. Lincoln was in Chicago, not Springfield, at the beginning of March 1857. The vocabulary, the syntax, the sentence rhythms, and the lengthy (here omitted) comparison drawing on the New Testament, comparing James Lemen to the apostle John and Lovejoy to Peter, has no parallel in anything Lincoln ever wrote. He knew his Bible better than that. A master of American colloquial prose, Lincoln could no more write like this than a donkey can sing on key. His genius with language never allowed him to write in this flat, fawning, conventional style and tone. The forgery highlights the assumption that Lincoln and Lovejoy had so much in common that surely Lincoln had more to say about him (and favorably) than his brief allusion in the 1838 Springfield address. It assumed that Lovejoy’s assassination must have had a great impact on young Lincoln’s views about slavery. In fact, Lovejoy and Lincoln were worlds apart on how to deal with slavery. Most post–Civil War recollections of Lincoln are voluntary or requested responses to the question “Ah, did you once see Lincoln plain?” The self-serving optics were, for many, irresistible. Reflected glory and modified history create a powerfully satisfying delusion.