SEVEN

The Constitutional Rag

At 5:00 P.M. on a cold Saturday in March 1848, the remains of John Quincy Adams were interred in a stone vault in Quincy, Massachusetts. It was in a cemetery he had wandered in many times, meditating about time and transience. Across the street, in the church whose construction the former president had funded, the Reverend W. P. Lunt had memorialized Quincy’s famous son to a full house of distinguished mourners. By late afternoon, the day had been exhaustingly long for the participants. The procession to the church had been slowed down, the sun having turned frozen roads to mud. Adams’ only surviving child, Charles Francis, thought the sermon “elegant and happily conceived.” The text from Revelation, “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life,” had to seem to the five hundred or so mourners deftly appropriate. At such a moment, everyone would have been moved by the sentiment.

The only body fully at rest had started its journey from Washington earlier in the week. For the first time in American history, a nation in mourning paid its respects to a dead ex-president traveling by shrouded train from the nation’s capital to his grave site. The journey ascended entirely through a Northern landscape, as befitted the man in the coffin. In Philadelphia, the body was displayed for two days in Independence Hall. It was remarked that the spirit of his father’s presence was palpable. Then, with mourners lining the tracks, the special train slowly moved on to Boston. The next morning, an assemblage of city and state officials, the delegation from the state legislature, and representatives of both houses of Congress, accompanied by honor guards and militiamen, marched to the railroad station. Special trains of the Old Colony Railroad took them to Quincy. Joined by members of the Adams family and townspeople, organized into a procession they marched “to the Adams mansion,” Peacefield. At a quarter past two, the funeral cortege moved toward the Unitarian church. The Roxbury artillery fired minute guns. “By three o’clock all in the procession were seated in the church.”

It was a nonpartisan assemblage. Not everyone shed tears. Still, it was a momentous occasion, partly local, partly national. The House of Representatives, narrowly controlled by Adams’ party, had sent a delegation of thirty members, one from each state in the union, evenly split between Whigs and Democrats. The more widely publicized national funeral had occurred in Washington on February 26, three days after the eighty-one-year-old Adams died. His body had lain in state in the House Rotunda, its coffin lined with lead, his face “visible through a glass.” Amid funereal pomp, after a service more impressive for its assemblage than the sermon, the corpse was taken to the congressional cemetery for temporary burial. The elite of the three branches of government, dark in Victorian mourning dress, followed the cortege. President Polk noted in his diary that it had been “a splendid pageant.” Official Washington had self-consciously created a historically memorable spectacle.

Many hoped that the enactment of a more solemn ritual than had ever before memorialized an ex-president might provide a unifying occasion for a divided country. Only one previous president had died in office. Never before had an ex-president died in Washington. Adams had been, after his presidency and for eighteen years, a distinctive national presence, a singular exemplar and a living connection to the founding generation. There was magic in his name, lineage, and service. Memories of collegial years spent together on both sides of the aisle transcended ideological differences. South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, the premier pro-slavery theorist, Missouri’s Thomas Benton, a vigorous proponent of Western expansion, both Democrats, and Roger Taney, Andrew Jackson’s pro-slavery Chief Justice of the United States, served as pallbearers, assisted by antislavery associate Supreme Court justice John McLean and Pennsylvania’s Joseph Ingersoll, Adams’ fiery colleague against the gag rule and the annexation of Texas. It was a funeral of a sort that had never before occurred: the executive, the judiciary, Congress, and the general public in a performance of national unity, Americans celebrating the man and the history his life and name embodied. Whigs and Democrats, antislavery and pro-slavery, North and South—all could, for a moment, be less the partisans and more the patriots.

Walking in the funeral procession from the Capitol to the Congressional Cemetery was a man whose distinctive feature was his unusual height. He was one of about 270 congressmen in a phalanx of about 500 marchers. Was he in black mourning dress? Did he wear his characteristic black stovepipe hat? Slouching, beardless, thin, with a face almost gaunt, he may have wrapped his shoulders in a shawl to keep warm in the bright late-February weather. Thousands of citizens lined the streets. City and nation had been blessed with instant virtual attendance, from the moment Adams collapsed three days before, through the medium of the newly invented telegraph. Abraham Lincoln had gotten the news firsthand. He had been in the hall of the House when Adams fell. He would have seen the body lying in state, “the coffin . . . covered with black velvet and ornamented with silver lace.” And he had been designated a member of the Arrangements Committee. As the only Whig member of the Illinois delegation, he had been added by default to a bipartisan committee of thirty. The number had been intended to apply only to the committee accompanying the remains to Quincy. “At our first meeting, the mistake was discovered,” he later explained, “and . . . we delegated out authority to a sub-committee, of a smaller number of our own body, of which . . . I was not a member.” An eyewitness to the death, Lincoln had nothing more to say about these events, and not another word thereafter about Adams.

BUT THROUGH the first three months of the winter 1847/1848 session of the Thirtieth Congress, the freshman congressman and the ex-president, sitting in the same hall in the House of Representatives, had mostly voted the same way. Assigned to two minor committees, Lincoln had only a few opportunities to make himself visible. No doubt he was noted by some, and he took the opportunity to speak his mind, always with a political inflection and with the upcoming presidential election in view. His sarcastic, piercingly logical speech on the Mexican War, defending his “spot” resolutions and excoriating Polk, attracted enough attention to make party operatives decide that he would be a useful late summer and fall stump speaker for the likely Whig presidential nominee, Zachary Taylor. Lincoln was already on record as a supporter.

Adams probably was not present when Lincoln introduced his “spot” resolutions, challenging the Polk administration to name the exact spot at which Mexican troops had infringed on American soil. He was, though, at his seat when Lincoln got the floor on January 12 and spoke at length about the war. How much Adams or anyone else in the House actually heard is open to question. The hall was a noisy echo chamber where members talked, shouted, amused themselves, wandered in and out, often absorbed in personal and constituent business at their desks, mumbling, writing and engaged in inner and outer discussions, regardless of anything else that was occurring, especially when no one of particular distinction held the floor. The ex-president’s presence was strong but not his voice or body. A series of life-threatening strokes had enfeebled him. When, in February 1847, he had returned to his seat to a round of bipartisan applause, he put his colleagues on notice: “It is with much pleasure that I again return to your midst. Had I a more powerful voice, I might respond to the congratulations of my friends and the members of this House for the honor which has been done me. But enfeebled as I am by disease, I beg that you will excuse me.” He needed no other concessions, and he voted vigorously on every issue he felt passionately about: the Mexican War, the importance of funding for internal improvements, the evil of slavery. He would not have disagreed with anything Lincoln said about Polk and the war.

“Any people anywhere,” Lincoln proposed to the House, “being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable,—a most sacred right—a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.” It justified the creation of the Republic of Texas in 1836. The only necessary condition had been the consent of the majority of those living there. That principle had justified the creation of the United States in 1776. To deny this right would be to imply that the American Revolution itself had been unlawful, that the colonists had had no “right” to rebel. Lincoln also had in mind what Adams and many others had often proclaimed: the United States as a model for universal republicanism, for the overthrow of tyranny in an age of democratic revolutions, which had become a cliché of American self-congratulation on both sides of the aisle. “Nor is this right confined,” he continued, “to cases in which the whole people of an existing government, may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of the territory as they inhabit.” That of course justified the American residents of pre-annexation Texas in rebelling against Mexican sovereignty, creating a new state from what had been Mexican territory. “More than this,” Lincoln continued, “a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with, or near about them, who may oppose their movement.” Apparently, the Mexican government had been equally justified in attempting to suppress the rebellion. “Such minority,” Lincoln continued, “was precisely the case, of the Tories of our own revolution.” And the anti-Tory, pro-independence majority did in effect “suppress” the Tory minority. “It is a quality of revolutions,” Lincoln concluded, “not to go by old lines, or old laws; but to break up both, and make new ones.” Hence the United States of America.

Lincoln seems not to have been mindful of two other potential revolutions within the territory of the United States: a revolution in which millions of American slaves would do what the anti-Tories had done in 1776; and a revolution in which eight million white American Southerners would choose “not to go by old lines, or old laws; but to break up both, and make new ones.” By the extension of his logic, these were also “sacred” rights. Did slaves have the right to do this? Did white Southerners have the right to do this? Lincoln’s logic implied that they did. Focused on the Mexican War, he had nothing to say about the likelihood that any territory gained from the war would further exacerbate the issue of slavery extension. He was, in fact, advocating a sweeping theory of revolution. One of its manifestations was rebellion, another word for which in the South was secession. His argument would also justify slave insurrections. If a member of the House or reader of the speech had challenged him on this, what would Lincoln have said? Those threatening secession might have found Lincoln’s words apposite and agreeable, though they were probably paying little attention: his words more than recognized revolution as a historical reality. He claimed that revolutions, including civil wars, were justified, without qualification; that a dissatisfied people have a right to assert self-governance. It is not, he proposed, a conditional right. And those who are being rebelled against, he argued, have a right to suppress rebellion.

How closely was Adams listening? He had for years anticipated either a slave rebellion or Southern secession. Would he have heard in Lincoln’s words a theoretical justification for either, whatever Lincoln’s intentions? From December 1847 to late February 1848, both voted the same way in every instance in which slavery was an issue but with different underlying views about how to deal with the issue as a whole and with different expectations about how slavery would come to an end. They agreed on one important localization of antislavery moralism: the Constitution gave Congress authority to legislate about slavery for the District of Columbia and the territories. Both supported petitions against slavery in the District. Lincoln, though, conditioned his support: antislavery legislation for the District needed the consent of its white residents. Adams made no conditions: the evil needed to be eradicated from the capital. Dorcas Allen had to have been in his thoughts.

Beyond that, they were in serious disagreement, the difference between an antislavery moralist and an antislavery activist. Lincoln had many times made clear that abolitionism was beyond the pale. Adams had given up denying that he was an abolitionist. He had welcomed and publicly acknowledged the help of Theodore Weld, the brilliant abolitionist author and political activist who became Adams’ volunteer research assistant during the gag rule debates. Slaves and free blacks were here to stay, Adams believed. He would not support colonization. Blacks should and eventually would be citizens. Slavery, though, was the problem to be resolved—probably convulsively and violently, Adams anticipated. Peacefully, Lincoln hoped, and certainly not by a slave rebellion and not by secession. Abolitionism, which might encourage a rebellion, directly or indirectly, was to be denounced. Lincoln’s strict constitutionalism and Whig moderation required that he reject abolitionism in any form. Slavery, he granted, was legal where it existed. That was that, short of developing the political muscle to change the Constitution, which neither he nor anyone else thought possible. The most that could be hoped for was containment. As long as the Senate remained evenly divided, legislation to restrict slavery was difficult; to eliminate it, impossible. There would be no internal recalibration. Everyone had the right to earn his own bread by the sweat of his brow. That was the principle. But slavery itself was not a principle; it was a fact. Only a change in public opinion, including taxpayers’ willingness to compensate slave owners, might permit a recalibration. And beyond that there would be the question of where these millions of former slaves would live.

The immediate problem, though, was legal and constitutional. When the usually prudent Lincoln proclaimed, without qualification, that it was justifiable for people to rebel against the governing body to which they were subordinate, it’s unlikely he had in mind slaves rebelling against masters or the Southern states seceding from the Union. Like Jefferson, when he spoke of the right to revolutionize, to assert independence and a new sovereignty, he was thinking of a right, in the American context, that only white people had. Anything further would not have dawned on Lincoln. And the word only would not have come to mind. Neither could conceive that any part of the principle or claim about the right to revolutionize could apply to Negroes in America, who both Jefferson and Lincoln hoped would eventually not be here at all. As long as they were, though, they had no place in the polity or the discourse about rights and revolution.

Adams also had nothing to say about the right of blacks to revolutionize. He simply expected it to happen, or at least to be a likely possibility. Any legitimacy to that action inhered in the right of every human being to assert control over his own mind and body, to overthrow tyranny, much as the American colonists did in 1776. Though as much a legalist as Lincoln, he identified more with black suffering, and he had enough of an apocalyptic personality to imagine that there would be some correlation between the inevitable and the desirable. His Massachusetts roots and his family history had imbued him with a visceral hatred of slavery. He was activist enough to have tried to help Dorcas Allen. Lincoln had his compassionate moments, eloquently expressed in his letter to Joshua Speed evoking the chained slaves he had seen in 1841 (and, later, in his response to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law). He was, though, more tied to legal literalism than Adams, and his background had not made him feel compassion for, let alone give special assistance to, an individual Negro, whether slave or free.

Both tended to treat the Constitution reverently. Both, apprehensively and critically, acknowledged its one deep flaw: its acceptance of domestic slavery. But they differed on the reason for the flaw and how to deal with it. The flaw, Lincoln argued, was mostly in the eye of the beholder who misread the history and the text. The Founders, he believed, intended slavery to be contained and then eliminated. The Constitution’s tolerance for slavery was a temporary expedient. And, he argued, the founders all opposed its continued existence, let alone its spread. He was far from entirely correct. Anyway, by the late 1840s, most Southern leaders rejected that claim: to own slaves was an unalterable constitutional right granted to every state to implement or not, the bargain between the North and the South that had made the Union possible. Lincoln deemphasized the evil in the document, the compromise that had created the nation. He saw a good document that would, over time and with a change in public opinion, be purified. Adams believed the compromise to be a fatal flaw.

When President Polk ordered troops into Mexican territory, he had, both Adams and Lincoln agreed, neither interpreted nor amended the Constitution. He had defied it. He had broken the law. The Constitution was not at fault. For Lincoln, the legal issue was less important than the political. The Constitution had not been damaged; it had been taken advantage of. The prohibition against an executive-initiated war had been unconstitutionally flouted through the agency of a lie. No national emergency required that the United States defend itself against aggression by invading Mexico. It was once again real estate, real estate, real estate. And why that particular real estate? Antislavery moralists had reason to believe that the Polk administration had as one of its motivations new territory for slavery. Territorial conquest would add new slave states to the Union. Lincoln did not make much of this. Texas as a slave state was already in the Union, and there were other free states in the anteroom to help keep the balance, especially California and Oregon. And what could be done in response to Mr. Polk’s war? Politically very little, except to pass condemnatory resolutions, and it would not do to refuse to support troops in the field. Both Adams and Lincoln in 1847/1848 voted to pay for a war that was already in progress. That was a political and even moral necessity. But the war itself was a challenge to the integrity of the Constitution.

For Adams, the assault on the Constitution had been ongoing since 1803. From the start of his public life he had bewailed slavery’s being embedded in the Constitution, especially the three-fifths clause. That slaves should be counted as voters had seemed a knife wound in the heart of the republic. The knife needed to be withdrawn. The constitutional evil forced on the nation as a condition of its creation needed, eventually, to be transformed into constitutional freedom. For the South, though, slavery was an absolute, an unchangeable given, as permanent as the stipulation that every state, no matter its size, have two senators. While the Constitution itself did not forbid the elimination of the three-fifths clause, its elimination had proved to be, so far, politically impossible. The extension of slavery was another matter. On that, by any reasonable interpretation, Congress had rights. In 1803–1804, the South made clear that whatever the Constitution said on the matter, extension would depend on political power. Jefferson and the South had it. The southern part of the Louisiana Purchase would be slave territory, and as much beyond as possible, though the details were left to the future. The future came in 1819: Missouri became a slave state. Then, in 1845, came the annexation of Texas.

About Louisiana and Texas, Lincoln had little to say. He accepted the Missouri Compromise as a necessary foundation for the perpetuation of the Union. By 1848, it was for Lincoln an incontrovertible historical fact, the foundation of Western expansion and the basis for the harmonious perpetuation of the Union—not a matter to be raked up and gone over, and not to be thought of as an offense to the Constitution. In contrast, Adams felt that the Constitution had been assaulted and abused in each of these cases. Jefferson, the so-called strict constructionist, had made an end-run, Adams believed, around the Constitution in establishing governance for and slavery in Louisiana. Admitting Missouri as a slave state had been an undesirable extension of a constitutional evil—the state constitution, forbidding free blacks to settle in Missouri, was itself unconstitutional. But the most flagrant abuse of the Constitution had been the annexation of Texas. On February 28, 1845, “the heaviest calamity that ever befell myself and my country was this day consummated,” Adams wrote in his diary. By a vote of 27 to 25, the Senate adopted the House resolution to annex Texas. In Adams’ view, that should have required a constitutional amendment. It was a dirty business on two counts: constitutional integrity and slavery. Led by slave owners and expansionists, the twenty-five-year effort to make Texas U.S. territory had at last succeeded.

The strong were preying on the weak, Adams lamented. The United States had cheered on the rebellion of American settlers in Mexico’s Texas and the creation of the Republic of Texas. Mexico had prohibited slavery in its Texas province. An independent Texas immediately reinstituted slavery. For Adams, there was a moral component in revolutions. There had been none, it seemed to him, in the creation of the Republic of Texas, both in the state’s inception and in regard to slavery. Lincoln, in 1848, had proclaimed that a minority had an unconditional right to revolutionize. Adams was much less certain. There had to be just cause and a moral standard. He believed there had been both, even if self-servingly, for the Founding Fathers. But for America to annex Texas was a double affront: a new slave state and an assault on the integrity of the Constitution. There should have been an amendment, just as there should have been for Louisiana, not legislative legerdemain.

For Adams, it was a moment of passionate despair. The annexation of Texas seemed the ultimate betrayal of the Constitution. He was not yet, or ever, on the side of those who, like Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison, considered the Constitution a pact with the devil, to be torn up and discarded so that an entirely new start could be made. But he was deeply disgusted by the triumph of willful power over constitutional principle. The end of the Union as he had known it seemed in sight. Outraged and in pain, he expressed himself privately in the puritanical language of polluted blood and biblical example: “The Constitution is a menstruous rag, and the Union is sinking into a military monarchy, to be rent asunder like the empire of Alexander or the kingdoms of Ephraim and Judah.”

When, on February 21, 1848, he rose from his desk in the House and the cry went out that Mr. Adams was “sinking from his seat in what appeared to be the agonies of death,” was Lincoln at his seat in the House chamber? If so, what could he see from so far back? Perhaps he was wandering somewhere else in the hall. Or perhaps he had left momentarily for an errand. There’s no way of knowing. He had been at his desk minutes before. Like Adams, he had voted against a triumphal, chest-thumping resolution thanking military officers for “gallantry and military skill” in the victories at Vera Cruz and Cerro Gordo. The resolution ordered that eight gold medals be struck, one for each general. It passed 98 to 86. Lincoln never, as far as we know, referred to that memorable day. If he was indeed there at the moment of Adams’ fall, his silence about such an event is noteworthy. Was he uncomfortable with Adams’ passion? With Adams as an abolitionist? With Adams’ rejection of the American Colonization Society? With Adams’ concept of constitutional evil and how to think, feel, and act about it? And did he not clearly prefer Henry Clay for his own mentor and model? Adams had for some time been thinking about and preparing himself for an American apocalypse. Given his age, he did not expect to see it with his literal eyes. But he saw it with his prophetic imagination. Lincoln, to the extent that he was thinking about it at all in the late 1840s, was thinking about how best to avoid it. This was to be his permanent frame of mind.

LINCOLN’S APOCALYPTIC imagination was limited mostly to the theater and to dreams, which, to the extent that one remembers them, are a form of theater, the inner and primal theater of anxieties, shifting scenes, illogical and irrational events. Adams recorded some of his dreams in his diary. An accomplished classical scholar, he considered Cicero his favorite author from the ancient world. In one of his most telling dreams, he envisioned Cicero forced to kill himself as the Roman Republic that he had made his lifework became an empire of tyranny. In his last years of life, as the war he presided over moved toward its conclusion, Lincoln dreamed of his own death. The war he had tried hard to avoid seemed, in his nightmares, to become the likely instrument of his own demise.

In their waking lives, Adams and Lincoln were avid theatergoers. The stage was a place where dreams and waking life coalesced. On it, they could envision their private selves and their public roles. It was a place of both immersion and escape. In their years as public figures, both went to the theater at personal risk, asserting their right to free movement. Receiving no special protection, presidents were citizens like all others, sharing, except on political or ritual occasions, public streets, public transportation, public spaces. In indoor venues, a spectator, sitting for hours, was especially vulnerable. Starting in 1834, when he became the most prominent opponent of the gag rule in the House of Representatives, Adams received letter after life-threatening letter. All came from the South. Many were obscene, slavery and racism their aggressive thrust. Lincoln received similar, even nastier threats. In race-obsessed Southerners’ eyes, the Republican “baboon” was himself a “nigger.”

The ultimate threat, enacted in Booth’s theater, was perhaps the deadliest because it had never been inscribed in writing. No one who wrote a threatening letter to Adams or Lincoln had ever acted on it. Inveterate theatergoers such as John Quincy Adams knew they were especially vulnerable every time they went to a play. So did Lincoln, though the temper of the times—and its recourse to violence, great as it was—was less volatile in the 1830s and ’40s than it became in the 1860s. An actual war made a difference. Secession could proceed by individual as well as mass violence. And what were only occasional drumbeats and half-toned bugle blasts in the 1840s became, in the 1860s, total war, to be fought by every means, including assassination. By 1865, the temper of the times was also inflected by desperation and revenge for a cause already lost.

For both Adams and Lincoln, these realities were Shakespearean. Their favorite playwright provided the template for their private and political dramas: ambition, power, conflict, and assassination. An Americanized Shakespeare appeared regularly in America’s large cities, intermittently traveling to small towns throughout the country. Shakespeare also gave America, North and South, a powerful dramatization of racial anxieties. In Othello, a play that Adams had much to say about and Lincoln touched on indirectly, Shakespeare gave stage and dream presence to one of the most pervasive taboos of nineteenth-century American life: sexual relations between black men and white women. Adams adored Shakespeare; so did Lincoln. For Lincoln, the plays he loved were about ambition and tragedy; for Adams, about character, values, ideas, and race: Lincoln, the nineteenth-century man, born into the Romantic gestalt, though uneasy with it; Adams, the eighteenth-century man, a child of the American and European Enlightenment. Both lived Shakespeare awake and asleep, in the theater and in dreams. They vocalized the power of Shakespeare’s language, reciting it to themselves or aloud to others. Lincoln, who had something of the Method actor in him, recited Shakespeare with an actor’s feel for the power of the lines, with intense and personalized emotion, particularly the speeches of characters he especially identified with: Macbeth, both Richards, and Claudius. But not Othello.

Though the word miscegenation was not coined until 1863, white-black sexual relations had been a well-known reality of Southern life from the first importation of Africans into Virginia in the seventeenth century. Most Southern slave owners believed they could use their property in any way they pleased, including sexual relations by consent or force. Property rights were sacred, God-given, and legally ordained. How one treated one’s property was mostly a personal matter. Mixed-race families and all-white families, fathered by the same person, existing side by side, were not uncommon. Thomas Jefferson married the fully white daughter of a man who had two such families. As a widower, he took as his domestic companion for thirty years the half-black daughter of his father-in-law’s other family. Virginia law, for obvious reasons, never criminalized miscegenation, though, like many states, South and North, it prohibited mixed marriages until well into the twentieth century. It was legal to have sex with a slave but not to marry one. It was illegal until 1967 for a white person in Virginia to marry a free black.

Lincoln’s Illinois prohibited mixed-race marriages. Repeal did not come until 1874. Well aware that there were, in fact, households in which white men and black women lived together intimately, Lincoln probably knew, as gossip had it, that it was likely that Robert Matson and Jane Bryant had had sexual relations. He was not an innocent, and he was observant. In his visit to the Speed plantation in Kentucky in 1841, he would have seen light-skinned slaves and slaves who had white skin. The mulatto world had an unmistakable presence in the South. Miscegenation was obvious—in the North also, though in smaller numbers. A supporter of his state’s Black Codes, Lincoln opposed allowing a free black person to marry a white person. He had, though, little interest in and no reason to express a view about black-white sexual relations.

As a congressman in 1847/1848, Lincoln expressed no criticism of slave-owning colleagues, some of whom were fathers of mulatto children. Adams found their pro-slavery diatribes contemptible, their sexual conduct repulsive and hypocritical. When he touched on the subject, his Southern colleagues howled. Lincoln, in contrast, had no inclination to identify himself with attacks on slave owner hypocrisy. He would have much to lose politically; it would sound too much like abolitionism. Beyond that, he was, during the 1848 election, preoccupied almost entirely with the Mexican War, the administration’s policies, and Whig strategies, with a glance at a moderate plan for emancipation in the District of Columbia. By background and temperament, he was able to identify with those who had inherited an economic and social world based on slavery. “I have no prejudice against the Southern people,” he was to tell his audience in Peoria in October 1854. “They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up. . . . When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery, than we; I acknowledge the fact.” It was not a “fact” that Adams would have granted.

Was it a fact at all? By 1854, many Southerners were touting slavery as a “positive good,” and there never had been any active, broadly based movement in the South to eliminate slavery at any stage in its history. It was as much a given as the soil Southerners stood on. Why would they, first-time buyers included, not happily have bought and used slaves, especially in the Deep South, which was increasing the slave population by birth and interstate purchases? And even if one could not make the unqualified claim that nineteenth-century Southerners were “responsible for the origin of slavery,” an unbiased historical examination would have revealed that slavery, having been brought to the colonies by the earliest British-American settlers, was contentedly and profitably inherited by their descendants and by new colonists. In 1776 these slave owners became exclusively Americans. In 1787 they were largely responsible for the creation of a Constitution that perpetuated the legality of slavery.

For Lincoln, the question at issue was a practical one, which is also to say political: “I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution”—except to promote colonization, whose practical limitations he recognized. To make free blacks fellow citizens was out of the question. “My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. . . . Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot, then, make them equals.” Still, he had no hesitation in acknowledging that he shared this “universal feeling.” It was politically desirable to do so, and he was also sincere, though he himself would never find it advantageous to initiate discussion of the topic.

It was, though, forced on him. In 1858, as a member of the new Republican Party, he attempted to unseat Stephen Douglas, Illinois’ well-established U.S. senator, the embodiment of the Democratic Party’s combination of pro-slavery activism and indifference to slavery. Western expansion was Douglas’ highest priority, slavery a nuisance issue. Slavery should be put, he believed, very far back on the back burner. A moral issue, it actually had, he believed, no place in politics at all, though it had been forced on him as much as on Lincoln. Naturally, Douglas would not let Lincoln off the hook. The challenger’s antislavery moralism could easily be portrayed as implying civil rights for free blacks, including legalizing mixed-race marriages, which Illinois’ racist voters opposed. How would Lincoln defend himself against the charge? If he faltered, he would lose votes. At Charleston, Illinois, in the fourth debate with Douglas, he was ready to take the bait and turn it to his own advantage.

By tactic, personality, and conviction, he met the test. The tactic was anecdote, the tone humor. “While I was at the hotel today, an elderly gentleman called upon me to know whether I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people. [Great Laughter.]” The audience was with him, the charge preposterous. No Republican, ex-Democrat, or lingering Whig would have found it anything but ludicrous. And Lincoln would not allow the trap to close. “While I had not proposed to myself on this occasion to say much on that subject,” he began, “yet as the question was asked me I thought I would occupy perhaps five minutes in saying something in regard to it. I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”

He needed to make his position even clearer. “I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.” White superiority did not reduce the Negro to a nonhuman. Race mixing, though, was another matter, and Lincoln knew how to appeal to the common ground that he and his audience, Republican and Democratic, shared, using two of his oratorical gifts: humor and the personal voice. “I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. [Cheers and laughter.] My understanding is that I can just let her alone. I am now in my fiftieth year, and I certainly never have had a black woman for either a slave or a wife. So it seems to me quite possible for us to get along without making either slaves or wives of negroes.” He would give Senator Douglas “the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last stand by the law of this State, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes.”

Speaking in Chicago a few months before, he had said the same in a slightly different way. God and nature had some responsibility, and offered guidance: “As God made us separate, we can leave one another alone and do one another much good thereby. There are white men enough to marry all the white women, and enough black men to marry all the black women.” But to state that divinity had created two different races was, in this context, to claim that divinity had also mandated they be kept separate. But what if a free white woman wanted to marry a free black man who desired to marry her? Or a black man a white woman? And there was mutual consent? And even if the law prevented a marriage ceremony, as it did in many states, how to prevent the practical equivalent of a common-law marriage? Lincoln certainly knew of the most common form of race mixing in the North and South, white men in intimate nonmarital relationships with mulatto women. All this he veered away from. “Why, Judge,” he asserted, addressing the absent Stephen Douglas, “if we do not let them get together in the Territories[,] they won’t mix there.” That was the desirable focus. And he need not have said anything about miscegenation or sex between white masters and their slave property or between free blacks and whites outside marriage.

WHAT LINCOLN probably had no interest in even thinking about, Adams had been concerned about since he first read Othello as a young man. In 1786, while a student at Harvard, he delivered to his debating society a short essay on whether love or money “ought to be the chief inducement to marriage.” His focus was Othello, which hardly lent itself to the subject at hand. His actual topic was interracial marriage. What to make of white Desdemona and black Othello falling in love, marrying, and sharing a marital bed? It was not a salacious preoccupation, but it was emphatically racial. As a young boy, Lincoln would have read “Othello’s Apology for His Marriage” and “Othello’s Address to the Venetian Senate” in Lessons in Elocution, a textbook his stepmother put into his hands. In February 1857, in Springfield, he probably for the first time saw Othello performed. The well-known actor Charles Walter Couldock put on a series of widely publicized, well-attended plays, his performance in Othello highly praised in Springfield’s Daily Illinois Register. A few weeks before, Lincoln had been elected one of the eleven managers of the Illinois State Colonization Society, which had held its annual meeting in Springfield. Dedicated to facilitating the immigration of free blacks to Africa, the society’s members were unlikely to have recognized the irony in the co-existence of, on the one hand, a black African general, played by a white actor whose blackface performance the audience had paid to see, speaking Shakespeare’s beautiful verse, and on the other, the mostly impoverished, ill-treated free blacks on Illinois streets, let alone the enslaved former Africans in the South.

Of course, Othello was safer to Americans on the stage than in the street, in literature than life, though there were almost no performances of it in Southern theaters. Some Northern reviewers did express discomfort with the exhibition of a white woman and a black man in a marital relationship. Some evaded the issue with various stratagems. Others were horrified. Racism aside, if that were possible, many upper-class men, North and South, were especially revolted by the sight of a black man slapping and eventually killing a white woman, even onstage. It was the depths of dishonorable, racially transgressive conduct. No gentleman would ever do that. And the combination of dishonorable conduct and a mixed marriage threatened the bunker-like minds of slave owners, whose imaginations ran riot about both. Indeed, the play had incendiary potential for them, but it probably did not for Lincoln. There’s no reason to believe that he connected the race issue in the play with slavery.

When Lincoln made a list of his favorite Shakespeare plays for James H. Hackett, the actor whose performance of Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I Lincoln had attended in March 1863, Othello was not on it. He responded to a gift of Hackett’s book, Notes, Criticisms, and Correspondence upon Shakespeare’s Plays and Actors, with appreciation and enthusiasm. When, in October, he saw E. L. Davenport play Othello at Grover’s Theatre, he seems to have had nothing to say about the play. He himself was daily playing the real-life role of commander in chief of the Union army, a general of sorts. To the South, he was the “black Republican,” as terrifying an example of the race threat as Othello. He had begun enlisting free black men and escaped slaves, “contraband,” into the Union army. And he had recently issued an Emancipation Proclamation. The relevance of black Othello, the warrior and husband of a white wife, seems not to have registered, as far as we know, in Lincoln’s consciousness. Or perhaps he was wary of being pulled any further, beyond what he had already said in 1858, into a discussion of mixed marriage or race. Behind it all, it’s clear that Othello was not a play that had ever meant much to him, though he knew it well enough to quote lines from it occasionally.

It meant, though, a great deal to the Adams family. Hackett’s book contained John Quincy’s 1835 essay “The Character of Desdemona,” which focuses on a subject that had distressed John Quincy’s parents. Did Lincoln read it? He had it in hand. With so much pressing business to attend to, he may not have found time to read any of the Shakespeareana in Hackett’s volume. Anyway, his antislavery moralism tended toward the abstract. It had a nonparticularized essence, whereas plays are very concrete. Lincoln never cites specific examples of slaves who were suffering. Slaves existed, for Lincoln, as a group, a category, a collective entity, not as individuals. If he had read Adams’ essay, he would have found it resonant with contemporary applications, the most specific, sophisticated, and revealing pre–Civil War expression of the interplay between antislavery moralism and racism. And all this was embodied in two dynamic, physically vital, and particularized human characters. “The play’s the thing wherein to catch the conscience of the King.” But not in Lincoln’s case. And though Othello has multiple themes, it would have taken a special evasiveness or even blindness for a mid-nineteenth-century American, especially one concerned about slavery and mixed-race marriages, not to have noticed that these were central to its drama. If Lincoln noticed, he kept it to himself.

It was a theme the Adams family had grappled with for two generations. When John Quincy’s parents, Abigail and John, looked to express the epitome of slaveholder immorality, they invoked what was to them the horror of racial mixing: white slave owners having sexual relations with their black slaves. Slavery was an offense against God and man. But so, too, was a mixing of the races. The Adamses condemned both. To such moralists, the deepest flaw in Southern society was its embrace of slavery. Its acceptance of miscegenation exemplified Southern hypocrisy. And Southerners, apparently, loved their slaves more than they loved the union. To the Adamses, this was the foundational sin. Slavery, they believed, was an abomination, and they were not exclusionary racists in regard to civil rights for blacks. They supported citizenship equality, and they did not shy away from the presence of black people. Abigail’s free black servant, Phoebe, had been married to the black man of her choice in the Adams’ parlor, at Abigail’s suggestion. But black-white sexual relations were another matter. To the Adamses, they were an abomination, an unnatural assault on the God-given distinction between the races. “It is to me, one of the most delightful Ideas that is treasured in my Mind,” John Adams wrote to his wife from Philadelphia in 1796, “that my Children have no Brothers nor sisters of the half or quarter Blood. One such Consciousness would poison all the Happiness of my Life . . . and none could pierce my heart with such corrosive and deleterious Poison as this.”

The remark was an indirect comment on the world of Southern slave owners and their offspring that Adams had observed in Philadelphia. Its force and emphasis, though, came not from external observation but from instinctive feeling, an imaginative projection of how he would feel if one of his children or siblings should be the parent of a mulatto child. There is no record or even suggestion of interracial sex in any generation of the Adams family. Yet John Adams’ feelings are resonantly intense about the horror of it. The happiness of his life would have been destroyed. Sex between blacks and whites, let alone interracial marriage, poisoned the blood. It created mulatto children, embodiments of pollution and impurity, an existential assault on what it meant to be an Adams. And it was a horror experienced not only in the mind. The entire white body shuddered at the thought, let alone the sight.

In 1785, in London, Abigail Adams attended for the first time a performance of Othello. The visual reality had an impact that the words on the page had never had. “I was last Evening . . . at Drury Lane,” she wrote to her son-in-law, “and saw for the first time Mrs. Siddons,” an actress of great beauty and grace. “She . . . acted the part of Desdemona. Othello was represented blacker than any African. Whether it arises from the prejudices of Education or from a real natural antipathy I cannot determine, but my whole soul shuddered whenever I saw the sooty Moor touch the fair Desdemona.” Othello’s “most incomparable speech [’Farewell the tranquil mind’] . . . lost half its force and Beauty, because I could not Separate the colour from the Man.” Less racist than most of her contemporaries, Abigail nonetheless felt a shudder through her body at the sight. Why, she asked, had she recoiled? Was it intuitive and irrational, or tribal and socially generated, or both? Othello, she observed, was generous, noble, and manly. Yet “So powerfull was prejudice that I could not seperate the coulour from the Man.” She would have known that the word prejudice had its origin in the Medieval Latin for injustice. She immediately struck the line through, as if to erase the evidence of what she had acknowledged: that she had been startled by, if not ashamed of, her body’s involuntary response to the sight of a black man’s hands on a white woman’s body. She recognized that the fault might be not in her stars but in herself. Or it might be in the star under whose influence she had been born, and that she herself writ large was the society as a whole.

Fifty years after his first encounter, John Quincy returned to the same play. He could find no way to read it that allowed an escape from or an evasion of two elements that stuck in his craw: Desdemona’s rejection of filial piety and the sexual relationship between Desdemona and Othello. Desdemona had succumbed, against her father’s wishes, to her love for an inappropriate suitor. The sacrilege was twofold: no daughter should marry against her father’s express prohibition; and no white woman should marry a black man. Like his father, John Quincy believed that nature had set up an unmistakably visual prohibition between the mingling of black and white blood, the very distinction conflating the metaphorical and the biological. For nineteenth-century Americans, “blood” was equivalent to genetic inheritance. And culture and history also prohibited race mixing. White America often placed heavy penalties on the perpetrators. But even more important, nature was opposed. And the only way Adams could keep faith with his version of Shakespeare, the wisest and greatest of poets, was to interpret the tragedy of Othello as an exemplification of the inevitable result of breaking nature’s laws. Nature had decreed that white and black blood should not mingle. “The moral of the tragedy is that the marrying of black and white blood is a violation of the law of Nature. That is the lesson to be learned from the play.”

Blacks were not, for Adams, inferior to whites. There was no superior or inferior race, though there were races, especially the white European, that had benefited from a religious, cultural, and political history that had placed them on a higher rung on the ladder of civilization. But neither John Quincy nor his parents assumed that the ladder required stationary positions. It was, to some extent, in regard to all races, potentially an escalator. American blacks, Adams knew, had given evidence that they could move up the ladder, obstacles notwithstanding. But miscegenation and mixed-race marriages seemed an obstacle, not a facilitator, of cultural advancement. Racial purity and racial distinctiveness had been gifts of God and nature. They should not be denied. And if “the color of Othello is not vital to the whole tragedy,” Adams wrote, “then I have read Shakespeare in vain.”

He also had no doubt that Desdemona’s passion, not Othello’s jealousy, was the active agent in precipitating the tragedy, a consequence of her filial impiety and sexual aggressiveness. But much as his essay gives the impression that he was preoccupied with Desdemona, it was the topic of race that most energized his concern. Race, not sexual impropriety or filial disrespect, was the issue of the day, structurally and psychologically embedded in American life. In 1832, when Adams first took up his seat in the House of Representatives, he began his attacks on the gag rule. In 1835, he published his essay on Othello. In 1837, Lovejoy was murdered in a race riot, the culmination of a decade of pro-slavery mob violence and volatile anti-abolitionist propaganda, part of the widespread lawlessness that Lincoln focused on in his Springfield Lyceum address. By the late 1830s, slavery and the Southern-imposed gag rule had become the obsession of Adams’ public life. They were the dark poison in the white blood of his waking hours and his dreams.

He was, for himself, like most white Americans, clear on the issue of miscegenation as a political and biological phenomenon: the high proportion of mulattoes in the South testified to the hypocrisy of the slave power—the lust, arrogance, and will to national mastery of the Southern elite. The mixing of black and white blood, whether within marriage or not, was, John Quincy believed, against God and nature. Let the races, in that regard, remain distinct. But to believe that Negroes were less than human or inferior humans was absurd: they were no different from white Americans except in the color of their skin. Since, by historical reality, free blacks were just as much Americans as any white American, they were due every consideration of human equality—civic equality as well. History, Christianity, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution required that. And what about the millions of enslaved blacks, property as well as people? Adams asked. The Constitution kept them in slavery. Under what circumstances could that be changed?

USHER F. Linder kept reappearing in Lincoln’s rearview mirror. For the time being still a Whig, Linder found that his pro-slavery racism kept him, through the 1840s, reassessing his value to moderate antislavery Whigs and considering what advantages might accrue to him in a political world destabilized by the cross-party currents that the slavery issue had created. Deep down, he was loyal in his own way to his absolute conviction that the white race was superior to the black. Believing that slavery should exist in America indefinitely, he assumed that it would as long as radical antislavery activists were put in their place. He could abide antislavery moralists like Lincoln, wrong as they seemed to him in principle, but not antislavery activists. It was the difference between a disagreement among friends and violent conflict. In the case of Elijah Lovejoy, that meant the grave, and Linder, in Alton in 1837, had acted accordingly.

Lincoln wanted slavery to end, but the only practical and political position he and his colleagues would commit to was that it should not be extended to the territories. That was an expression of antislavery moral principle and of strategic politics. It became the Republican Party’s distinctive marker, its defining and distinguishing issue. It was the electoral banner under which antislavery moralists, whether racists or not, could vote for Lincoln rather than Stephen Douglas in 1858. Except for nonextension, slavery could exist for as long as it took to work out some way of eliminating it, which seemed a long way off—to be accomplished by a change in public opinion in the South and North, and then a change in the Constitution, with the creation of some mechanism that the majority could agree on and support, including compensated emancipation. For all practical purposes, the pro-slavery racist and the antislavery moralist ended up in the same place, at least for a long time, except on the issue of extension. Lincoln, of course, could no more control Linder than he could make slavery go away. And it is difficult to discover, except in selective instances, what was really going on in Lincoln’s head, about Linder or anyone else. He kept his thoughts mostly as private as his private life. When he spoke for the record or by the hot stove, he was either the advocate or the entertainer, or both. Unlike Adams, he kept no diary. He wrote few revealing letters. Those he did write and the meditative notes he composed in order to clarify his thoughts seem fragmentary embodiments of the hidden work of an active mind. Much more went on in his head and heart than we can know. So the effort to know, or guess, becomes ever the more stressful and often strained.

The area in which Lincoln reveals himself most is the political, the arena in which he most related to people, especially about the importance of winning elections. He had little to say, at least in writing, about those activities and national issues in which he did not have a direct interest. Only his Lyceum lecture in 1838, his Temperance Address in 1842, and a few speeches he gave in the 1850s have no direct connection to practical politics. Noticeably, he had nothing public to say about the widely reported Amistad trial. In February 1841, John Quincy Adams helped persuade the Supreme Court to conclude that fifty-three Africans aboard a ship that had drifted into American waters were free men. Abolitionists and some antislavery Whigs opposed efforts by the Van Buren administration to send the Africans back to slavery. Springfield’s Sangamo Journal, laudatory about Adams personally but uneasy with any Whig-abolitionist alliance, downplayed the trial. Lincoln had nothing to say about it, as if it were not taking place, though he had to have been aware of it. Writing to Mary Speed in September 1841 about the slave coffle aboard his Ohio River steamship, he avoided any larger context for his description, as if the trial had not recently occurred. No doubt he detested slavery, but practical politics, especially elections, took precedence. And he had no difficulty being friends with and collaborating in legal affairs and politics with pro-slavery racists.

When, in the presidential campaign of 1848, Linder’s racist principles conflicted with the Whigs’ willingness to accept abolitionist support if it was politically advantageous, Lincoln did have stringent words for his friend. Attacked by the Democrats, the Whigs felt vulnerable to the charge that they had obstructed the Mexican War effort. Attempting to straddle the fence, Linder wrote to Lincoln that he had been entirely in favor of Polk’s war and also supported the anti-Polk Whig presidential candidate, Zachary Taylor. Lincoln chastised Linder: an attempt to have it both ways would damage their candidate. “You know,” he assured Linder, that “I mean this in kindness, and wish it to be confidential.” Linder answered with a list of heterodox views. Fearing that Linder’s views might influence other influential Illinois Whigs, Lincoln responded with a long, analytical letter intended for Linder to share with others. His political energy overflowing, he attempted to stab and bleed out the heart of what, between the lines and sometimes overtly, underlay all Linder’s views about the Mexican War, President Polk, and the election. Linder’s extreme racism elevated ideology above practical considerations. Uninterested in racism as an ideological or a moral matter, Lincoln was not about to denounce it directly. Still, it was of paramount concern as a political consideration. The problem: Linder’s views transcended party; they were beyond political modulation. He had a higher commitment to his gut belief in the rightness of slavery and the criminality of abolitionism than to party affiliation; more in common with extreme pro-slavery advocates, mostly Southern Democrats, than with moderate antislavery Whigs.

Antislavery Whigs such as Lincoln also disapproved of abolitionists, but on a different level and in a different register. Linder might oppose Polk and the Democrats for ordinary political reasons, though he sometimes had to struggle to do so. But he was, in his deepest feelings and core ideology, sympathetic to the Mexican War and the spread of slavery. And, as the election approached, he was revolted by the likelihood that the Whig presidential candidate had taken a neutral position in the hope of getting the votes of Southern and Northern antislavery moralists. The main point for Lincoln was to win the election, but Linder was aghast. Since the Democratic candidate would undoubtedly be pro-slavery, some abolitionists would vote for Zachary Taylor as the lesser of two evils. Originally from Virginia, a slave owner, and now a resident of Louisiana, Taylor was a career soldier who silently opposed almost all traditional Whig public policies but also the extension of slavery to the Western territories. A war hero without a political record, he seemed a viable candidate in the South and North. Linder expressed to Lincoln his horror at the thought that a candidate he supported would have abolitionist support.

Lincoln set him right. “Friend Linder,” he responded, “your third question” is “have we as a party, ever gained anything, by falling in company with abolitionists?’ Yes, we gained our only national victory by falling in company with them in the election of Genl. Harrison. Not that we fell into abolition doctrines; but that we took up a man whose position induced them to join us in his election. But this question is not so significant as a question, as it is as a charge of abolitionism against those who have chosen to speak their minds against the President.” The opposition was tarring all who opposed the war as abolitionists. That was the danger, Lincoln warned. Linder cared less about the danger and more about even an inaccurate charge of an alliance with abolitionists. His skin crawled at the notion. To Lincoln, abolitionist votes were not a contaminant or even an itch. They were simply votes.

As the election approached, danger was arising on another front—though, like almost everything else in the 1840s and ’50s, it, too, could not be separated from the slavery issue. Like all Whigs, Lincoln abhorred the entrance of a spoiler into the race, a third-party candidate. Ex-president Martin Van Buren, whose re-election in 1840 Lincoln had campaigned against, now ran again, this time as the Free Soil Party’s candidate. Van Buren had wanted his Democratic Party’s 1848 nomination. After all, he had served the party well, as the main architect of Andrew Jackson’s victories in 1828 and 1832 and as a loyal senator, vice president, and president. His presidency had been damaged and his re-election balked by the depression of 1837. Though he understood that economic downturns usually deprive a president of a second term, he resented what seemed to him his party’s ungratefulness. In an endlessly drawn-out Machiavellian convention in 1844, the Democrats had nominated James Polk. The bitter Van Buren, who had never before opposed the Democrats’ pro-slavery ideology, embraced the small Free Soil Party’s opposition to the extension of slavery to the Western territories and accepted its nomination. He had almost no chance of winning, as he knew.

As the election campaign entered its final months, many Whigs feared that Van Buren might take away enough votes from Zachary Taylor to elect the pro-slavery Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass of Michigan. In October 1848, the Sangamo Journal detailed satirically, with biting irony, “Ten Reasons Why Antislavery Whigs Should Vote for Van Buren.” If Lincoln had not been traveling from New England, where he had been campaigning for Taylor, to Chicago to attend a Whig rally, it would be only a modest stretch to think he himself had written the article. It mocked Whigs who “are so violently opposed to Slavery that they intend voting for M. Van Buren, thereby assisting in the election of Gen. Cass, who is pledged to veto any bill restricting the extension of Slavery.” The Journal editorial did not prevent pro-slavery Cass from carrying Illinois, though he carried it by fewer than 100 votes, with the help of almost 16,000 Free Soil votes for Van Buren. Illinois’ Electoral College votes went to Cass. Still, the national vote favored Taylor. With a plurality of 47 percent, he became the twelfth president of the United States. Van Buren and his running mate, Charles Francis Adams, John Quincy’s youngest son, received 10 percent of the popular vote. But Van Buren had fulfilled his underlying mission: he had prevented any Democrat other than himself from being elected. And he had, unintentionally of course, helped make Lincoln a happy man. Disappointed that the Whigs had so narrowly lost Illinois, Lincoln still took great pleasure in the priority prize: his party had once again elected a president.

WAS LINDER, who never placed party first, disappointed? His immediate self-interest was with the Whigs, but his heart was extremely pro-slavery. As the calendar turned into the next decade, he switched his allegiance back to the party he had started with. Exactly when that happened is unclear, though probably it was with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. In 1853, he and Lincoln were still trading clients for mutual convenience, as they did until Lincoln’s death. And there’s no sign that there ever was any personal alienation. But by 1858, Linder had already returned to his first love. That was not Lincoln but Stephen Douglas. He had from their first meeting as young Illinois legislators in the mid-1830s bonded with Douglas, whose views about slavery he had more in common with than with Lincoln’s, though on that subject he made even Douglas seem a moderate.

In the 1840s, Linder thought Douglas a great man and Lincoln a talented but ordinary politician. Like many, he never thought it even possible that Lincoln would one day become president. Douglas, though, especially when he began a stellar career as a U.S. senator in 1847, seemed almost a certainty. Much as Linder and Lincoln were friendly colleagues, it was to Douglas that Linder had always given his heart. “I desire,” he wrote in 1874, “in these my memoirs, to lay an humble leaf of laurel on the grave of my friend. My intimacy and friendship with Douglas commenced in 1836, when I was a very young man, and he was, as it were, a mere boy. He looked like a boy . . . but when he spoke . . . he spoke like a man, and loomed up into the proportions of an intellectual giant. . . . I cannot add to his great name by anything I might say. I loved him with the love that Jonathan had for David—’A love that passeth the love of woman.’ . . . My personal intercourse with him was like that of a brother, which, in one respect, I was.” Not totally, though, in regard to slavery. Far to the right of Douglas’ moral neutrality, Linder always thought slavery an excellent good thing. Douglas accepted it as an unalterable fact to be lived with indefinitely. There were more important issues, particularly Western expansion, with or without slavery, the position he took in the hard-fought 1858 campaign to retain his Senate seat.

Douglas had, until the summer of 1858, assumed his re-election was a certainty. He had good reason to think so: his fame and achievements as a senator seemed a solid foundation for re-election and then the presidency. Alert to the overlapping fault lines between the old Whigs, the Northern and Southern Democrats, and the fast-growing Republicans, who combined antislavery moralism and opposition to extension with the Whig Party’s middle-class business-minded constituency, Douglas underestimated Lincoln. And he was only beginning to see that the divisions in his own Democratic base were irreconcilable. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, mostly Douglas’ brainchild, had proved a disaster for the Democrats. The slave-owning South wanted open access to the West and Northwest. Most Northern Democrats opposed that, and of course so did antislavery Whigs and Republicans. Abolitionists were up in arms. To solve the problem, Douglas proposed a variant on an old idea, “popular sovereignty”: the citizens of the place at issue would make the decision. When Southern Democrats, whose support Douglas needed, rejected “popular sovereignty,” he lost a crucial part of his national base. In 1857 the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, siding entirely with the slave owners’ view, made Douglas’ position even more precarious: why should any Southerner accept “popular sovereignty” when the law of the land now stated that slave owners were entitled to take their property anyplace in the country they pleased?

Under pressure, Douglas agreed to debate Lincoln in order to defend his Senate seat and strengthen his presidential candidacy in 1860. The first worked out well enough for him. He narrowly squeaked by. The second was a disaster, mostly because forces greater than those of any individual had already, triggered by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, made secession and a civil war likely, as Adams had predicted. Like many others, Douglas could not see that horror as likely: people of good faith, open minds, and love for the union would work together to prevent it. And that work was essentially political, the determination to follow traditional Democratic Party principles: states’ rights, local control, agrarian supremacy, Western expansion, and live-and-let-live with regard to slavery. After all, why should anyone argue with the premise that local decisions at the ballot box should determine slavery, jurisdiction by jurisdiction? And although, as Douglas believed, disagreeing with most pro-slavery Southern Democrats, the corrupt Lecompton pro-slavery vote in Kansas deserved to be invalidated, this was no reason to conclude that popular sovereignty was invalid. Anyway, as he began to argue, no jurisdiction could support slavery unless local enforcement laws were passed, and why make a fuss about allowing the possibility of voter-sanctioned slavery in the West when climate and geography made it economically untenable? Voters would not vote against their interests, he argued. Though his Democratic base was increasingly divided, the Republican base increasingly united, Douglas expected the center to hold. It did not seem to him possible that Southern Democrats would think themselves better outside the Union than in.

Eager to make the best case for himself and his party, he agreed to participate in a series of seven debates with Lincoln, starting in Ottawa, Illinois, in late August 1858 and ending in Alton in mid-October. After all, he had good reason to expect that he could win in Illinois. From the time of its admission to the union, the state had mostly elected Democrats. Since Andrew Jackson, it had always preferred a Democratic president. And he himself had been elected senator twice before, by large margins. He also firmly believed that his approach to slavery was the most sensible, the most practical. The antislavery moralists, however moderate they tried to make themselves appear, were essentially, he implied, abolitionists who elevated personal moral conviction into Union-destroying rhetoric. The country could not keep and sustain all the good things it had and would have if it gave priority to a moral crusade in defiance of property rights and the Constitution. And if Illinois elected Lincoln, he began to argue as the debates started, they would be electing a man who would help destroy the Union. Lincoln was, in effect, a closet abolitionist.

Of course Lincoln was not that at all. But as Douglas had reason to know, he was a formidable debater. And he had a substantial organization of political friends to support him. Many had helped pressure Douglas into agreeing to the debates in the first place. They had cheered Lincoln and taunted Douglas in a series of speeches Lincoln gave in places in which Douglas had spoken on the same day. Was Douglas afraid to appear on the same stage as his opponent? Feeling stalked and “attacked,” even when he “would be in bed asleep, worn out by the fatigues of the day,” he nevertheless felt compelled to accept the challenge. Telegraphing his friend and admirer Usher Linder, who could out-harangue almost anyone, he urged Linder “to meet him at Freeport, and travel around the State with him and help to fight off the hell-hounds, as he called them, that were howling on his path, and used this expression: ‘For God sake, Linder, come.’ ” Linder, of course, came. “Some very honest [dishonest] operator,” Linder wrote in his Reminiscences, “stole the telegram as it was passing over the wire, and published it in the Republican papers. They dubbed me thenceforth with the sobriquet of ‘For God’s Sake Linder,’ which I have worn with great pride and distinction ever since.” Meeting in St. Louis, they traveled “down through the Southern part of Illinois, speaking together at all his meetings—as far down as Cairo and up to Jonesborough, where he and Lincoln met in joint debate.”

Linder backed Douglas throughout, as his personal attendee and vocal advocate. And he probably squirmed almost as much as Douglas did when Lincoln, in late August at Freeport, forced his opponent into a defense of “popular sovereignty,” revealing Douglas to be more of a moderate on the extension of slavery than Southern Democrats could tolerate. In principle, Linder sided with the extreme pro-slavery position. In practice, Douglas’ popular sovereignty was the best he could get. Linder granted that the South had a constitutional right to take slaves anyplace in the United States and its territories. How could local law or the voting booth invalidate a right guaranteed by the highest law in the land, the Constitution? Seeking the conciliatory middle ground, Douglas would leave it to the voters, territory by territory, state by state. But since that would allow, if local voters assented, slavery to spread, Lincoln had the advantage, as popular sovereignty was also unacceptable to antislavery moralists, many of whom revered the example of Henry Clay, the supreme antislavery moralist, an advocate of containment and colonization. Though Lincoln narrowly lost the 1858 election, he narrowly won the popular vote. Illinois electoral law did not honor raw numbers, just as federal election law did not. Slightly dominated by Democrats, the state legislature was the equivalent of the Electoral College. Linder was delighted. The better man and the better way forward had won. Not that he undervalued Lincoln, but he overvalued Douglas. It was also a party issue. He had returned to the party whose core values he shared, particularly on the subject of slavery. And he looked forward to what he and many others believed was certain, a united party propelling Stephen Douglas to the presidency in 1860.

Linder, though, soon began to realize, even more quickly than Douglas, that the positions the senator had staked out leading up to and in the 1858 senatorial campaign damaged his viability as a national candidate, especially if there were to be a strong Republican contender—and probably even if not. For, if the Northern states all supported the opposition candidate, they could by themselves carry a majority in the Electoral College, even with only a plurality of the popular vote. An exclusively Southern candidate could not. Even more forebodingly, if the Democratic candidate could not hold the South, because the South preferred a candidate who asserted the right of slave owners to bring slaves anyplace, how could Douglas possibly win the presidency? Linder began to wonder and worry. Could the Northern and the Southern wings of the party hold together?

IN LATE April 1860, Linder, a delegate to the Democratic nominating convention, left Chicago with a group of pro-Douglas delegates traveling to Charleston to help nominate the next president. They stopped over in Washington City to meet with the great man. We

visited our friend Douglas, at his residence, in a body, and interchanged opinions in reference to uniting the Northern and Southern Democracy. Many of us had our doubts about doing so, but Mr. Douglas, with all his great common sense, upon that subject was perfectly infatuated. We all told him that such men as Yancey and other fire-eaters who controlled public opinion in the South, were very bitter towards him in consequence of his not letting Kansas come into the Union under the Lecompton Constitution, which history has recorded as the greatest fraud ever practiced upon a free people. “Well, gentlemen,” said he, “let the politicians do their worst, the Southern people will not go with them”; and went on to show us from information he had received from the South that such was the fact. And would you believe it? he convinced us all that he was right. But that was one of the saddest mistakes that Stephen A. Douglas ever made.

It was already, in early May, hot and insect-ridden in Charleston. The huge South Carolina Institute Hall felt like a literal and ideological hotbox to the Northern delegates. Linder knew from the start that pro-Douglas Democrats were in hostile territory: the site chosen for the convention indicated that the power center of the party was far below the Mason-Dixon line. Even this rabidly pro-slavery racist immediately realized that the literal heat was being stoked further by the “fire-eating” anti-Union extremists. They wanted nothing to do with Douglas and popular sovereignty; they wanted secession. No sooner had Linder and his Northern colleagues entered “the Southern States” than the ideological temperature intensified. “We began to feel that the South was lost to Douglas.” In Charleston, “we found the hostile feeling towards him at fever heat. While William L. Yancey, and others of his kidney, addressed the vast crowd that gathered nightly around the Mills House to hear their inflammatory speeches, not a single friend of Mr. Douglas was permitted to speak. Several of us attempted to do so, but they drowned what we said with the beating of drums and tin pans, and the blowing of horns, and many other unearthly noises!” When they found a venue where they could be heard, “our only auditors were the NorthWestern delegation. . . . We soon learned that the Southern sympathies were not with us Northern delegates, who were friendly to Mr. Douglas. The truth is, I believe they disliked him worse than they did Lincoln.” Not that Lincoln could have gotten a single vote in South Carolina. Neither could Douglas. But whoever the Republican candidate might be did not need them. Douglas did, as Linder well knew. Douglas, though, was also committed to the territorial integrity and perpetuation of the Union. So was Linder, who was startled to learn that his Southern pro-slavery brethren had it in mind to be brethren no longer in the Union that the Founding Fathers had created. It was an existential shock, as it was to be for Douglas and, later, Lincoln.

With his Northern colleagues, Linder stayed in Charleston for over two difficult weeks. They were treated like pariahs, cultural and ideological strangers from an alien world. “I had not been in that convention over three days till I discovered a deep-rooted hostility and burning dislike to Northern men and statesmen.” That they were pro-slavery or happy to be indifferent to slavery made no difference. It was not enough to bridge the cultural and ideological gap. They were not true enough believers. “I had no intercourse on my part with the Southern fire-eaters. I heard subdued murmurs of civil war uttered by them from various quarters. They evidently tried to frighten us, but we didn’t propose to be frightened.” As partisans of Douglas, they supported popular sovereignty and believed it was counterproductive, even delusional, for Southerners to insist that slavery be allowed to go wherever any Southerner chose to bring it. Most distressingly, they saw the writing of electoral defeat on the wall if Douglas was not the candidate of a united Democratic Party.

We did everything in our power to compromise with them, so as to prevent the cutting up and dividing of the Democratic party. They made an offer to us that we might select the candidate for the party if we would let them make up the platform—or let them select the candidate, and we might make the platform. Inevitable defeat awaited us in the acceptance of this proposition. If they had built the platform we should have had to stand on the Dred Scott decision, the Lecompton Constitution with the right of Southern slaveholders to carry their slaves into free territory, and hold them there as such against the wishes of the people of such territories. With such a platform as this, we could not have carried a single electoral vote north of Mason and Dixon’s line. Had we given them the candidate . . . the consequences would have been equally disastrous, for we would have lost the whole North and a considerable portion of the South.

No candidate in Charleston could get the votes necessary to be nominated. “We tried every expedient to convince our Southern friends that if they did not unite with us some Northern Abolitionist would be elected President, and that no man could foresee the consequences.” To the Democrats in Charleston, it seemed likely that William Seward, the antislavery ex-governor and senator from New York, would be the Republican nominee. Like his political mentor John Quincy Adams, Seward had predicted, in a widely quoted speech, an “irrepressible conflict,” his way of saying that slavery and freedom could not exist together in the same country indefinitely, a variant of Lincoln’s statement in 1856 that the country could not indefinitely continue half slave and half free. In Charleston, the Deep South delegates strategically collaborated on a platform that Northern Democrats could not accept: slavery legitimized in the territories, the Dred Scott decision affirmed. How, Linder and his Northern colleagues asked, could they win even a single Northern state? Probably the pro-secession delegates had calculated that the election of a Republican president would provoke Southern secession. When the Northern majority, helped by border state Democrats, passed an insufficiently aggressive platform, the core delegates from the Deep South walked out. Apparently, they had planned to do so from the start. There were now two Democratic Parties. The next month, in Baltimore, the Northern wing nominated Douglas. The Southern wing went its own way, with its own candidate, John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. As Linder feared, some “Northern Abolitionist,” the phrase stressfully and misleadingly applied, would be elected president. “At that time there was not a man north or south of the Mason and Dixon’s line that even dreamed of the nomination of Abraham Lincoln as the candidate of the Republican party.” Linder could not have imagined that in his wildest dreams.

He could not, of course, have imagined that just three and a half years later he would be deeply grateful to President Lincoln for the freedom of his Confederate son, a Union prisoner. The president’s old colleague and friend, who had himself, despite his pro-slavery beliefs, supported the Union war effort, humbly asked for his son’s release. Daniel Usher had chosen the wrong uniform. His father had not, and his age made an actual uniform out of the question. And he had done the state some service, which Lincoln apparently recognized. “Your son Dan, has just left me,” the president wrote to him the day after Christmas in 1863, “with my order to the Sec. of War, to administer to him the oath of allegiance, discharge him and send him to you.” It was a touching gesture, an affirmation of personal loyalty and sympathy with a father’s pain. Attorney General Edward Bates remarked that Lincoln released the young Confederate soldier “to gratify . . . the father, who is an old friend” and who still handled some of the legal business of Herndon and Lincoln. “A friend remembered Lincoln writing to Linder: ‘I am sending your boy to you to-day as a Christmas present. Keep him at home.’ ”

Though he had an “utter abhorrence of Abolitionists,” Linder, a nationalist in the Andrew Jackson mold, supported “a vigorous prosecution” of the war, urging in speech after speech “our young Illinois chivalry to arms.” He did not buy the allegation that Lincoln was an abolitionist. He knew better. And it was “a war,” Linder felt he had reason to believe, “to save the Union, and not to emancipate the negro, or to make him the equal of the white man . . . this was a white man’s government, made by white men and for the benefit of the white race.” He did not like the Emancipation Proclamation, which on January 1, 1863, modified the war rationale. But he begrudgingly accepted it “as a war measure, believing that it would end the war and prevent the further shedding of fraternal blood, in which belief,” he later concluded, “it seems I was badly mistaken.” Mistaken or not, he believed it was a step in the wrong direction. Nothing could ever make blacks equal to whites. America was and always should be a white man’s country. And the proclamation had complicated America’s future for the worse. How was it possible that two fundamentally antipathetic races could ever peacefully co-exist as citizens and equals? Linder thought it not only impossible but out of the question. Lincoln had his own doubts.

Linder found an admirable example of the best sort of relationship between blacks and whites on a stopover in Atlanta, Georgia, in mid-May 1860, on his way home to Chicago from the convulsive Democratic convention in Charleston. “The hotel where we stopped was one of the best kept I ever saw; and an incident occurred here which I’ll venture to relate, although my readers may think it of too trifling a character to find a place in these pages.” Writing in 1878, Linder would have known that neither he nor his readers would think the incident trifling. It made an important point, as relevant to white America during the latter stages of the failed attempt to create a race-free South as it had been in 1860. At dinner with his friend Thompson Campbell, Linder “noticed a very black negro man officiating as waiter, and I happened to be within hearing when the hotel-keeper, his master and owner, asked him for the loan of fifty or a hundred dollars. ‘Oh! certainly, massa,’ said he, and pulled it out and gave it to him.” The landlord left. “I called the negro to us and asked him how it happened that he was loaning money to his master, and where he got the money, ‘O, gemmen,’ said he, ‘I bought a ticket in the lottery and drew a prize of ten thousand dollars.’ ‘Well,’ said one of us, ‘It’s a wonder he don’t take it without asking it as a loan, for by the laws of Georgia both you and your money belong to him.’ ‘Yah! Yah! Yah!’ said he; ‘You don’t understand my massa; he be too good a man for dat.’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘Sambo, does he pay you back these loans?’ ‘Yes, sah, and offers me ten per cent interest, but I nebber takes it and nebber will.’ ‘Well,’ said I, again, ‘why don’t you purchase your freedom?’ After another negro laugh he replied: ‘O, God bless your precious heart, how can I be any freer than I am now? I goes when I pleases and comes when I pleases, and my massa never makes any complaint; I nussed him when he was a little child and massa lubs me and I lubs him, and I will nebber leave him while I lib, so long as he is willin’ to keep me.’ Campbell turned to me and remarked significantly, ‘I wish some of those d—d rabid Northern Abolitionists were here to hear what that nigger says.’ ”