I was about eighteen years of age, and belonged, as you know, to what they call down South the “Scrubs;” people who do not own land and slaves are nobody there…. I was contemplating my new boat, and wondering whether I could make it stronger or improve it in any part, when two men, with trunks, came down to the shore in carriages, and looking at the different boats, singled out mine, and asked…“Will you,” said one of them, “take us and our trunks out to the steamer…?” Each of them took from his pocket a silver half-dollar and threw it on the bottom of my boat. I could scarcely believe my eyes as I picked up the money. You may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me like a trifle, but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work I had earned a dollar. The world seemed wider and fairer before me; I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time.
—Abraham Lincoln
“I have with me here”—Stephen Douglas was shouting—“a speech made by Fred. Douglass in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., a short time since.” It was September 18, 1858, and the senator was in Charleston, Illinois, responding to Abraham Lincoln during the fourth of their seven debates. Lincoln claimed that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were promised to blacks as well as to whites; that was what the Founders believed, he said. They believed no such thing, Douglas insisted. Lincoln’s argument was pure abolitionism, “black republicanism,” sedition masquerading as patriotism. The proof, he said, was the speech Frederick Douglass recently gave praising Abraham Lincoln for standing his ground against Stephen Douglas. What better evidence could there be of Lincoln’s radicalism? Here were the very words of America’s most infamous black abolitionist as he “conjures all the friends of negro equality and negro citizenship to rally as one man around Abraham Lincoln.” You may not believe me when I call Lincoln a radical, Senator Douglas was saying, but surely it counts for something that Frederick Douglass himself had embraced Lincoln as “the perfect embodiment” of his own principles.1
Actually, Frederick Douglass had praised Lincoln for upholding the principles of the Republican Party, not the principle of racial equality. Lincoln was no advocate of racial equality, but he did hate slavery. He said so three times in his first major antislavery speech, at Peoria in 1854. First he said that he “can not but hate” Stephen Douglas’s professed indifference to slavery. “I hate it,” Lincoln then explained, “because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself.” And finally, “I hate it” because it disgraced American freedom in the eyes of the world.2 This was strong stuff coming from a man who prided himself on restraining his passion, particularly in public. Though Lincoln had never before spoken of slavery in such forceful terms, he claimed that he felt this way all his life. “I have always hated slavery,” he declared in 1858, “I think as much as any Abolitionist.”3 And in 1864 he wrote that he was “naturally anti-slavery.” If slavery was not wrong, he added, “nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think and feel.”4Was this true? Did Lincoln always hate slavery?
In Kentucky, where Lincoln was born and spent his earliest years, his parents belonged to the Little Mount Baptist Church, whose minister, the Reverend Jesse Head, filled them with “notions about the wrong of slavery and the rights of man.”5 Running for President in 1860, Lincoln recalled that as a small boy his father had moved the family from Kentucky to Indiana “partly on account of slavery.”6 This may or may not have been true, or it may not really matter. The fact that Lincoln remembered it that way—that he could not recall a time when he did not hate slavery—may be just as important. Lincoln almost certainly disliked slavery by the time he was a young man. Caleb Carman first met Lincoln in 1826 and recalled, some forty years later, that his young friend “was opposed to Slavery & said he thought it a curse to the Land.” Orlando Ficklin remembered the same thing. Thirty years after he and Lincoln had served together in the Illinois legislature Ficklin recalled Lincoln as a man who “was conscientiously opposed to slavery all his life.” Samuel Parks, who knew Lincoln from about 1840, later affirmed the truth of Lincoln’s claim that he “always hated slavery as much as any abolitionist.”7 These are mere scraps; it would be nice to have more substantial evidence. But Carman, Ficklin, and Parks are valuable witnesses nonetheless. They are consistent with one another and with Lincoln’s own claim that he hated slavery for as long as he could remember.
“The slavery question often bothered me as far back as 1836–40,” Lincoln recalled sometime later.8 And it was during those years, 1837 to be precise, when he was still in his twenties, that Lincoln for the first time appeared in the public record as an opponent of slavery. He was representing Sangamon County during his second term in the Illinois legislature. Along with only five other legislators—out of eighty—he voted against a set of resolutions condemning abolitionism and defending the constitutionality of slavery. Rather than declare that the Constitution protected slavery, Lincoln would only allow that it restricted Congress’s right to interfere with slavery where it already existed. Slavery itself, the resolution declared, “is founded on both injustice and bad policy.”9 This was hardly abolitionism—in fact Lincoln thought abolitionism made matters worse—but it is clear enough that by 1837 Lincoln objected to slavery, and it is probably true that he always had.
But Lincoln’s youthful hatred of slavery had little to do with his youthful politics. For most of his career he agreed with the reigning political consensus that the slavery issue should be banished from the political mainstream. Then, in 1854, in an abrupt reversal, slavery became the only issue that mattered to him. By 1858 Lincoln had distilled the Republican Party’s message down to a brilliantly effective sound bite: We think slavery is wrong and they don’t. It required neither deception nor exaggeration for Lincoln to express himself in this way.
THE LOYAL WHIG
Lincoln was a politician long before he was an antislavery politician. He called himself an old-line Henry Clay Whig, and he called Clay his beau-ideal of a statesman. Like Clay, Lincoln supported the Bank of the United States to ensure a stable currency and high tariffs to promote the development of American industry. Like Clay, Lincoln advocated government support for “internal improvements,” the turnpikes, canals, and railroads that would extend the market’s reach deep into the heartland. These policies, taken together, were supposed to promote the development of a truly national economy powerful enough to bind every region of the country together, to build one national identity at the expense of competing regional identities. Clay called this the American System, and from 1830 to 1854 it was the heart and soul of Abraham Lincoln’s political life.
In its own way it was idealistic politics. Lincoln cared deeply for the Union, and he probably agreed with Clay’s argument for the unifying effects of a federally directed program of economic development. But the case Lincoln made for Whig projects had less to do with political economy than with personal experience. He had grown up on a struggling farm in a backwoods area that offered little in the way of opportunity for intelligent and ambitious young men, men like himself. From an early age he dreamed of escape. And when he left home and entered public life, Lincoln committed himself to Whig policies that would pepper the American countryside with the institutional props of upward mobility: banks and railroads, canals and turnpikes, but especially schools.
In principle Whig economics fused nicely with Whig antislavery. Lincoln believed, for example, that everyone had a “right to rise” in this world, and when he spoke against slavery, he often said that all working people, black and white alike, had a right to the fruits of their own labor. Lincoln certainly believed this precept was incompatible with slavery. But for him the right to rise was a moral conviction as much as a principle of political economy. Whig morality, not Whig political economy, most shaped Lincoln’s view of the matter. And once again it was Henry Clay who established the terms on which Lincoln eventually entered the slavery debate. As late as 1864 he reminded a former Whig that they both had been followers of “that great statesman, Henry Clay, and I tell you,” Lincoln added, “I never had an opinion upon the subject of slavery in my life that I did not get from him.”10 To understand Lincoln’s early views on slavery, then, one must peek into the mind of Henry Clay.
Clay deplored the presence of slavery and hoped for its eventual disappearance from the United States. At the same time he sponsored several momentous sectional compromises in a determined effort to prevent slavery from disrupting American politics. His own solution to the problem of slavery envisioned the colonization of emancipated slaves in their “ancestral” home of Africa. By removing blacks Clay hoped to remove yet another obstacle to national unity. But colonization was more of a rhetorical gesture than a practical agenda. Removing blacks from America was a dream, a fantasy really, that Henry Clay never dared impose on any slaveholder, including himself. Clay’s inability to dispense with his own slaves translated easily into the conviction that slavery was a curse in part because there was no easy way to eradicate it. The principles upon which the nation was founded cried out for the abolition of slavery, Clay said, but he could think of no practical way to escape either his or the South’s dependence on this moral eyesore. Clay was the most prominent Whig politician in America, and his position on slavery enhanced the party’s national appeal. His antislavery sentiments resonated with many northern voters; his adamant opposition to any policy that infringed on the rights of the slaveholders appealed to many a southern planter.
Lincoln took Henry Clay’s hatred of slavery seriously. Because Clay had been defeated by James K. Polk in 1844, Lincoln wrote the following year, Texas was being annexed and slavery extended. None of this “evil” would have happened, Lincoln complained, had the antislavery men in New York voted for the Whig candidate.11 When Clay died in 1852, Lincoln published a eulogy that scarcely mentioned the American System. Instead he praised Clay almost exclusively for his position on slavery. It had the great virtue of moderation, Lincoln said. Clay had proclaimed his hatred of slavery in unambiguous terms yet had been critical of abolitionists and proslavery zealots alike. Lincoln then quoted, for the first but by no means the last time, one of Clay’s most eloquent statements on slavery. The Declaration of Independence made emancipation inevitable because it established universal freedom as the American standard, Clay argued. What, then, must slavery’s supporters do to perpetuate human bondage in America? Clay’s answer was compelling, and Lincoln quoted it at length. They “must blow out the moral lights around us, and extinguish that greatest torch of all which America presents to a benighted world…. They must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate the light of reason, and the love of liberty. Then, and not till then, when universal darkness and despair prevail, can you perpetuate slavery, and repress all sympathy, and all humane, and benevolent efforts among free men, in behalf of the unhappy portion of our race doomed to bondage.”12
Lincoln loved that passage. He had nothing but sympathy for Clay’s inability to extract himself from the hateful slave system. He assumed that Clay’s views reflected the thinking of a broad class of enlightened southerners. So, unlike Frederick Douglass, Lincoln never let loose with denunciations of the slaveholders, never called them sinners or hypocrites or sadists. On the contrary, Lincoln often said that if their positions were reversed, northerners would behave exactly as southerners did. Born to a world where slavery already existed, the slaveholders could hardly be blamed for clinging to what they knew. He would scarcely know how to eliminate slavery, Lincoln said, even if he had all the power in the world. And so, like Clay, Lincoln was content to let the problem of slavery work itself out over time. To agitate the question only made matters worse.
Through four terms in the Illinois legislature Lincoln spent nearly all his political energy defending the state bank, promoting public schools, and trying to send pork barrels home to Sangamon County. By 1842 he was tired of it and decided not to run again. The great battles over banks and tariffs and internal improvements were becoming a spent force, while off in the distance a new issue, the expansion of slavery, was beginning to make headway. Campaigning for Congress in 1846, Lincoln was visited by a delegation of antislavery men eager to flush out the candidate’s views on slavery. It was a familiar tactic within antislavery politics, but it is unlikely that such a delegation had ever visited Lincoln before. The visitors left thoroughly satisfied, and he easily won the election. For someone who had always hated slavery, the transition to antislavery politics should have been smooth and comfortable. Instead it made Lincoln squirm.
THE TRANSITION
By the time Congressman Lincoln reached Washington, D.C., in December 1847 the nation’s capital was consumed by the slavery issue. A Democratic President, James Knox Polk, had annexed Texas in 1845 and a year later provoked a war with Mexico, hoping to add much of it to the United States. Because Polk was a slaveholder and an ardent foe of abolitionism, many northerners suspected that the Mexican War was a proslavery swindle. Out of those suspicions a new political alignment began to coalesce in opposition to slavery’s expansion rather than to slavery itself. It was at this point, for example, that Frederick Douglass began to contemplate the possibilities of broad-based political agitation against slavery. A great many northern Whigs feared that the South was becoming militantly proslavery, and more than a few renegade northern Democrats agreed. Hence David Wilmot’s famous proviso, which would have excluded slavery from all the territories acquired during the Mexican War. The congressional struggle over the Wilmot Proviso reached its crescendo while Abraham Lincoln was in Washington.
At first Lincoln dismissed all the agitation over slavery as a “distracting question.” Among friends at his Washington boardinghouse he often used humor to deflect any political discussions that veered toward the expansion of slavery. But the discomfort did not indicate any retreat from Lincoln’s antislavery convictions. He later remembered voting for the Wilmot Proviso at least forty times, although four times was closer to the truth. He also voted for a bill to end the slave trade in Washington, D.C. And he drafted his own bill to allow district residents to abolish slavery entirely in the nation’s capital. But he still shared the hopes of men like Henry Clay that a compromise, a “final settlement” of the dispute over western lands that would once and for all remove slavery from the national political agenda, could be reached. By some accounts Lincoln became rather fatalistic about slavery. After the annexation of Texas, he said in early 1854, he came to believe that “God will settle” the slavery question “and settle it right, and that he will, in some inscrutable way, restrict the spread of so great an evil.” But “for the present,” he concluded, “it is our duty to wait.”13 Not everyone was willing to wait.
As he campaigned for Whig candidates during the 1848 elections Lincoln discovered, to his frustration, that many of his fellow Whigs were planning to vote instead for the newly formed Free Soil Party. Lincoln shared the commitment to halting the expansion of slavery into new territories, but he wondered why anyone would throw away his vote on a Free Soil candidate who could not possibly win when the Whig Party took the exact same position. Congress had no right to interfere with slavery where it already existed, he said, but it had every right to restrict the expansion of slavery into new territories. That position was not the problem, according to the Massachusetts Free Soilers. The problem was Lincoln’s misplaced faith in the Whig Party’s commitment to that position. The problem was Lincoln’s failure to realize the growing strength of the proslavery forces in Washington. The problem, in short, was Lincoln’s naive assumption that everybody “agreed that slavery was an evil.” Nonsense, the Free Soilers told him. The Whigs were not to be trusted, and anyway, Lincoln’s opening premise was wrong: Not everyone agreed that slavery was wrong.
The 1848 elections may have shaken Lincoln, and not simply because of the Free Soil challenge. While campaigning in Boston, Lincoln attended an antislavery speech by William Seward, the New York governor who later became Lincoln’s secretary of state. “I have been thinking about what you said in your speech,” Lincoln reportedly told Seward after listening to the speech. “I reckon you are right. We have got to deal with this slavery question, and got to give much more attention to it hereafter than we have been doing.”14 Politicians across the North were beginning to demand a more assertive antislavery stance, and Lincoln seemed to be listening. Two years later Lincoln’s former law partner John Stuart predicted that at some point the only political options remaining would be abolitionists or Democrats. “When that time comes, my mind is made up,” Lincoln said. “The slavery question can’t be compromised.”15 Still, he hesitated.
Antislavery politics was the logical place for Lincoln to go. Instead he went home. Illinois Whigs had agreed to rotate his congressional seat, so he had no chance of being reelected to Congress. Illinois was a Democratic state, so there was no prospect of higher office back home. Nor were there any issues with which Lincoln could win an election. For the next few years he turned his attention to his increasingly prosperous law practice. He later claimed that he was “losing interest” in politics. Maybe so. But even in his semiretirement from public life Lincoln could not help noticing that the slavery issue was threatening to rip the nation apart. For the time being the Union was saved by the Compromise of 1850, a series of measures devised by Lincoln’s old hero, Henry Clay, and pushed through Congress by Lincoln’s longtime rival, Stephen Douglas. Whigs and Democrats alike swore unbending allegiance to the compromise as the “final settlement” of the slavery problem. Politicians North and South vowed never to breathe a whisper about slavery. It didn’t work.
The northern reaction against the compromise erupted almost immediately, provoked in large part by the details of one of its measures, the Fugitive Slave Act. The Constitution protected the right of slaveholders to secure the return of their runaway slaves, but it was up to Congress to enforce the Constitution by specifying the procedures for the capture of fugitives. Many northern states had long tried to ensure that some measure of due process be preserved so as to prevent the kidnapping of free blacks. But the Fugitive Slave Act took runaway cases out of the northern courts, stripping away the due process rights of the accused. It also set up a payment schedule that seemed to bias the new system in favor of slave catchers. All this provoked an unanticipated furor in the North, not to mention a terrifying crisis among northern blacks. Rightly or not, voters held the Whigs responsible.
By 1852 the Whig Party was fighting for its life. Never was the strain between Lincoln’s professed hatred of slavery and his continued commitment to the Whig Party more in evidence. His published eulogy for Henry Clay read like a nostalgic cry for a return to the days when everyone agreed that slavery was wrong. Lincoln had always criticized abolitionists for their sanctimonious denunciations of the South, but he never doubted that in their hatred of slavery they were fundamentally right. What shocked Lincoln now was the emergence of a new extreme in American politics, proslavery partisans who openly rejected the promise of equal rights contained in the Declaration of Independence. But he was still unable to formulate a political position that reflected his concerns over slavery. Politically Lincoln was lost. His 1852 campaign speeches picked at the sickly remains of banks, internal improvements, and protective tariffs. Nobody cared. When the returns came in, it was clear that the Whig Party was dead. So was Lincoln’s undistinguished political career, unless he could establish a new political identity.
It took some time for that to happen. As the Whig Party died, a new political coalition—the American Party, commonly referred to as the Know-Nothings—attracted voters disturbed by the massive immigration of Irish and German Catholics. Lincoln had no taste for such things. “I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain,” he explained. “How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people.” So what was he? “That is a disputed point,” Lincoln said. “I think I am a whig; but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist.”16 True, he opposed the extension of slavery, but he had done that as a Whig congressman, and back then nobody had thought that made him an abolitionist. Unwilling to take up anti-immigrant politics, Lincoln turned instead to antislavery.
ANTISLAVERY POLITICS
For many northerners it was the Mexican War; for others it was the Fugitive Slave Act. But Abraham Lincoln’s conversion to antislavery politics was prompted by, of all things, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, passed by Congress on May 30, 1854. It allowed the people living in the Nebraska Territory to decide for themselves whether to exclude slavery, instead of having Congress decide for them. The bill’s sponsor was none other than Illinois Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, Douglas said, did nothing more than uphold the great principle of popular sovereignty. Just as the Constitution left the regulation of slavery to the individual states, Douglas reasoned, so Congress should leave each territory free to decide for itself about admitting or excluding slavery. Who could object to so basic a principle of American democracy? Douglas asked. In fact he knew that a lot of people would object. What he did not know was that the most important of those who objected would turn out to be his longtime Springfield neighbor and rival Abraham Lincoln.
But why did the Kansas-Nebraska Act provoke Lincoln to break a lifelong habit of near silence on the slavery issue? The problem was that until Douglas rammed his bill through Congress, slavery had been outlawed in the Nebraska Territory by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. To bypass this inconvenient fact—and to satisfy proslavery southerners—Douglas added to the final bill a provision explicitly repealing the Missouri Compromise. It was this, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, that provoked a huge backlash in the North.
The Nebraska bill “took us by surprise—astounded us,” Lincoln said. “We were thunderstruck and stunned.”17 Throughout the summer of 1854, as the controversy escalated, Lincoln squirreled himself away in the state library in Springfield, researching the history of slavery in the United States. Armed with his findings, he took to the stump in late August, dramatically reentering public life as one of the nation’s most articulate antislavery politicians. Douglas was touring the state in a desperate attempt to contain the damage, but Lincoln hounded the senator wherever he went. In half a dozen speeches Lincoln denounced “the great wrong and injustice of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the extension of slavery into free territory.” Lincoln was goading Senator Douglas into public debate, and eventually Douglas had no choice but to meet Lincoln’s challenge. Several debates followed, and each time Lincoln rehearsed his argument until, on October 16, in Peoria, he summed up his position and printed it in the Illinois Journal. The Peoria speech was the first major statement, in Lincoln’s own words, of his antislavery politics.
Having publicly committed himself, Lincoln set about to help build an antislavery coalition with the broadest possible appeal. The coalition became known as the Republican Party. Coming to terms with antislavery politics was never as difficult for Abraham Lincoln as it was for Frederick Douglass, but even for Lincoln, it took some getting used to, and it took a lot of work. In the first years after 1854 Lincoln worked to keep the party’s antislavery message clear and simple: Slavery was wrong; its expansion should therefore be restricted. He was willing to “fuse” with anybody, even the Know-Nothings, but only if they were willing to stand on the same ground: moral opposition to slavery extension, and nothing more. He knew that this ground would be attractive to many abolitionists, but he wanted his fellow Republicans to steer clear of anything that smacked of radicalism. Republicans, Lincoln insisted, had no intention of interfering with slavery in the states where it already existed and every intention of enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act. He warned Lyman Trumbull in 1856 that a radical Republican candidate or platform would surely scare off the old conservative Whigs. He warned Salmon P. Chase that if Ohio Republicans supported repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, the party in Illinois would be doomed.
But in Lincoln’s mind the biggest obstacle was the lingering party allegiances that made it hard for many Whigs and Democrats to join together as Republicans. Had the antislavery forces been united in 1856, he believed, they would have defeated the Democrat James Buchanan in the presidential election. “Can we not come together, for the future,” Lincoln asked former Whigs and Democrats, “let bygones be bygones?” Lincoln was an exemplary practitioner of the art of putting aside old differences. He hoped his new antislavery message would carry him into the U.S. Senate, but when the first opportunity arose, he was outmaneuvered. To save the seat for the new party, Lincoln threw his support to Lyman Trumbull, an old antislavery Democrat now turned Republican. His magnanimous gesture was repaid in 1858, when the Republicans nominated him to run for the other Illinois Senate seat, the one occupied by Stephen Douglas.
Lincoln was the obvious person to take Douglas on. But to Lincoln’s amazement influential eastern Republicans, notably Horace Greeley, seriously considered endorsing Douglas. Greeley, the powerful editor of the New York Tribune, had been impressed by Douglas’s recent war of words with the Buchanan administration over the admission of Kansas. Lincoln was stunned by the news of a possible eastern defection. “Have they concluded that the republican cause, generally, can be best promoted by sacrificing us here in Illinois? If so,” Lincoln wrote to Trumbull, “we would like to know it soon; it will save us a great deal of labor to surrender at once.”18That influential Republicans could think that there was any basis for allying with Stephen Douglas suggested only one thing: The Republican Party was still not unified around its core principle.
Lincoln quickly switched gears. After struggling for several years to keep the party from straying into radicalism, he spent the next two years making sure that Republicans did not abandon their core antislavery message. Douglas tussled with the administration over whether the state constitution that Kansas had submitted to Congress was valid. But as Lincoln was quick to point out, no Republican ever disagreed with Douglas on that point. Mesmerized by Douglas’s fight with Buchanan, Greeley and company had blinded themselves to Douglas’s fundamental differences with the Republicans. There remained, Lincoln wrote in May 1858, “all the difference there ever was between Judge Douglas & the Republicans.” Republicans believed Congress should keep slavery out of the territories, he said; Stephen Douglas did not.19
Slavery in the territories was merely the immediate issue, Lincoln argued. Beneath it lay the fundamental conflict over the right and wrong of slavery itself. This was what Greeley and the other eastern Republicans threatened to lose sight of in their ill-considered dalliance with Stephen Douglas. And so, from 1858 to 1860, Lincoln sharpened his message and urged his fellow Republicans not to become distracted by secondary issues but to stand by the “great principle” that united the party: “[S]lavery is a moral, political and social wrong, and ought to be treated as a wrong.”20 The “real issue” dividing Douglas and him, Lincoln said, “is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world.
They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.21
Lincoln’s lifelong hatred of slavery had finally fused with his new antislavery politics. From his first reentry into politics in 1854 he repeatedly denounced slavery as an evil. At various times he called slavery a “cancer,” a “poison,” or “a great national crime.” As a matter of public policy, he said, slavery should be “resisted as a wrong” and treated “as a wrong.” The sum of Lincoln’s antislavery politics could not have been clearer.
WHY WAS SLAVERY WRONG?
Some people thought it was a sin for one human being to enslave another. Some focused on slavery’s physical brutality; others on the way it undermined the slave family or the way it dehumanized its victims. Intellectuals and politicians often said that slavery was an irrational and inefficient way to organize labor. The expansion of slavery bothered some whites because they wanted to keep blacks out of the western territories. Still others complained of a “Slave Power” that controlled the federal government. Lincoln accepted some of these arguments, but none was central to his own antislavery politics. He scoffed at the idea of a proslavery Bible, but not until the very end of his life did he suggest that slavery was a sin, and even then the sin was the nation’s rather than any one master’s. He never publicly condemned slaveholders as sinners, nor did he label Christian masters hypocrites. He believed that slavery was brutal, but he almost never mentioned whipping, sexual abuse, or the breakup of slave families. He assumed that the westward pattern of migration would ensure that most territorial settlers would be white, but he never so much as hinted that he opposed slavery’s expansion in order to keep blacks out of the territories. Nor did he believe that black settlers should be excluded from the territories. On the contrary, when Missourians declared that they opposed slavery out of concern for white men, Lincoln objected on the ground that “I must take into account the rights of the poor Negro.”22While campaigning for the Senate in 1858, he accused Stephen Douglas of participating in a conspiracy to make slavery national and perpetual, but he dropped that charge once the election was over, and he never made the more common claim that there was a vague Slave Power conspiracy operating in America. Instead he spoke of a “tendency” toward making slavery national and perpetual, but it was a tendency that anyone could discern without resort to conspiracy theories.
Lincoln was much more inclined to denounce slavery for denying men and women the hard-earned fruits of their own labor. He was clearly familiar with the classical economic argument against slavery, but he mentioned it only briefly. In 1845, for example, he said that allowing slavery to expand would “prevent that slavery from dying a natural death.”23 But this was a passing reference made in a private letter; it was never central to his critique of slavery. Lincoln also argued that it was much easier to prevent slavery from entering a new territory than to expel it once it was already established. Even in a democracy wealth translated into social influence and political power, he argued, and since the slaveholders were bound to be the wealthiest members of their communities, they would be hard to dislodge even where they constituted only a small minority. They would buy up the largest tracts of the best lands, limiting the opportunities for free farmers attempting to make new starts for their families. Slavery thus undermined the opportunity for upward mobility even for free men, the very thing that made the territories so attractive.
Upward mobility got closer to the heart of Lincoln’s case against slavery. By asserting that wage labor was a temporary condition in the North, he disputed the proslavery theorists who claimed that the slaves were better off than northern wage earners. “The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him.” Like Frederick Douglass, Lincoln occasionally offered his own rise from poverty to prosperity as a living example of what was possible in America and impossible under slavery. But this was a glib one-liner. Before 1859 Lincoln did not even attempt to formulate a coherent defense of the superiority of free labor that went much further. Even then Lincoln was practically tongue-tied in his attempt to answer proslavery theorists with his own theory of labor. He usually resorted to the increasingly dubious claim that only a small percentage of northern laborers worked for wages and that most of those who did would eventually become self-employed.24
After he became President, Lincoln found the eloquence he had been groping for since 1859. On July 4, 1861, in a message to a special session of Congress, he declared that the war between the North and the South was “essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”25 By December, in his first annual message to Congress, Lincoln had finally managed to clarify his ideas about the relationship between capital and labor. Because capital was merely the fruit of labor, he said, labor was “the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” There would always be a few men with capital who did not need to work, men who paid wages to others to work for them. Nevertheless, in the free states there was simply no such thing “as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition of life.” But Lincoln stretched his reasoning beyond the upward mobility of individual workers to the larger decency of the northern way of life. Free labor, Lincoln said, “is the just, and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way to all—gives hope to all, and consequent energy, and progress, and improvement to condition to all.” It was a powerful argument, powerfully made, and it was the last time he ever made it. His excursion into political economy turned out to be rather brief, commencing in late 1859 and coming to a close two years later.26 Thereafter he returned to the theme that had preoccupied him throughout the 1850s.
When Lincoln talked about free labor, he usually preferred to emphasize the moral premise of his defense: that all men and women were equally entitled to the fruits of their labor and with it a fair chance to raise their prospects in life. In this argument economics and morality were inseparable. Most of the time Lincoln avoided strictly economic arguments. His major antislavery speeches in the 1850s—Peoria in 1854, the “House Divided” speech of 1858, the Cooper Union address of 1860—mentioned upward mobility only fleetingly, sometimes never. But if he was reticent about political economy, it was not because he disagreed with the economic critique of slavery. More likely, he did not feel intellectually at home in the realm of political economy. His law partner William Herndon once commented that if there was “a question of political economy,” Lincoln was susceptible to the influence of friends. But on questions of justice, right, and liberty, “no man can move him—no set of men can.”27 For Lincoln upward mobility fell into the latter category; it was more a question of right than of economics. He believed that every human being was born with arms to work and a mouth to eat and that it was immoral for some people to eat while others did all the work. But he drew this conviction less from Adam Smith than from Thomas Jefferson.
“THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL”
This is what Lincoln preferred to say about slavery: that it was wrong because it violated the moral principle of fundamental human equality; that in proclaiming universal freedom in their Declaration of Independence, the Founders had tilted the new nation on an antislavery bias; that to defend slavery was to deny that all men are created equal; that to reject the principle of human equality was to strip the United States of its historic mission as a beacon of universal liberty in the world. Until 1854, Lincoln believed, only a handful of proslavery extremists made that denial. But with the repeal of the Missouri Compromise the Founders’ bias against slavery was tossed aside, and the entire trajectory of American history was altered. Much more than popular sovereignty was at stake in western territories. If the Kansas-Nebraska Act were allowed to stand, national policy would no longer be based on the premise that slavery was wrong. As Lincoln saw it, the guiding principle of the American nation was under assault. To prove it, he developed his own interpretation of American history.
He began with the Declaration of Independence. It established the nation’s great ideal, the right of every human being to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By this the Founders meant to say a great deal, but they did not mean to say everything. They “did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects,” Lincoln was careful to note. “They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity.” Nor did they “mean to assert the obvious untruth” that all men were at present actually enjoying an equality of rights or that such an equality could be achieved immediately. But with those caveats out of the way, Lincoln went on to state precisely what the Founders did mean to do when they declared that all men were created equal. It was really quite simple: They had established the ideal that would guide the nation through its history. The Declaration of Independence, Lincoln said, “set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors….” The Declaration “contemplated the progressive improvement in the condition of all men everywhere.”28 More to the point, it contemplated a world without slavery.
But the Founders lived in the real world with a slave system they found difficult to eradicate. They faced this reality in the Constitution, a document as crucial to Lincoln’s argument as it was to Frederick Douglass’s. Yet unlike Douglass or William Lloyd Garrison, Lincoln saw the Constitution as neither a clarion call to abolition nor a proslavery scandal. It was a compromise. It recognized slavery, but only out of necessity and only three times. First was the provision that prohibited Congress from interfering with the Atlantic slave trade until 1808. In the long run this was an antislavery clause, for it eventually empowered the federal government to interfere with slavery, as Congress did at the earliest possible date. The two remaining references—the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause—actually protected slavery. Unlike the Garrisonians, Lincoln accepted those clauses as the necessary concessions that made the creation of the Union possible. Unlike Frederick Douglass, Lincoln did not claim those concessions had not been made. He accepted them, but that didn’t mean he liked them.
In fact Lincoln detested the fugitive slave clause, the provision giving masters the right to recapture their runaway slaves in the northern states. The whole idea of it was “distasteful to me,” he said. If he were called upon by a federal marshal “to assist in catching a fugitive slave, I should suggest to him that others could run a great deal faster than I could.” He did not like the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 either. “It is ungodly; it is ungodly; no doubt it is ungodly!” Lincoln said in 1860. “But it is the law of the land, and we must obey it as we find it.”29 He would have preferred legislation that guaranteed suspected runaways the same legal protections afforded to suspects by the criminal laws of the North. But if the Fugitive Slave Law went further than it needed to go, it did not go beyond the Constitution. “We are under legal obligations to catch and return their runaway slaves for them,” Lincoln admitted, despite the fact that it was “a sort of dirty, disagreeable job.” He was even more blunt in a private letter to his friend Joshua Speed, a slaveholder in Kentucky. “I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, and unrewarded toils,” Lincoln wrote in 1855, “but I bite my lip and keep quiet.” So did most northerners. “You ought rather to appreciate,” Lincoln told Speed, “how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the constitution and the Union.”30 Because he acknowledged that the Fugitive Slave Law was constitutional, the abolitionists gave Lincoln no end of grief. They were not in the habit of biting their lips and crucifying their feelings.
Lincoln took a similar view of the three-fifths clause. He didn’t like it, but there it was in the Constitution, so he and his fellow northerners accepted it. The clause counted three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of representation in the House. Lincoln, along with many northerners, complained that the three-fifths clause increased the number of slave state representatives in Congress and thus the number of presidential electors as well. This was “manifestly unfair.” But because it was part of the Constitution, Lincoln would stand by it, “fairly, fully, and firmly.” However, neither he nor any other northerner was required to admit new states to the Union “on the same degrading terms.” To those who insisted that slavery was none of the North’s business, Lincoln pointed out that the three-fifths clause made the expansion of slavery an issue of considerable interest to the North. Every new slave state admitted to the Union extended the unfair advantage enjoyed by the slave over the free states. Under the circumstances, the northerners had a direct interest in thwarting slavery’s expansion.31
As disturbing as the three-fifths and fugitive slave clauses were, Lincoln believed they were put into the Constitution out of necessity, whereas in principle most of the Founders were opposed to slavery. This was clear, he said, from the way the Constitution was written. Because its authors assumed that the document would outlast slavery, they would not so much as allow the word “slavery” to appear anywhere in it. Instead they resorted to euphemism. “Thus, the thing is hid away, in the constitution, just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death.”32The Founders put slavery into the Constitution only because they had to, not because they wanted to. Because it could not be eradicated at the time without putting the creation of the new nation at risk. Because no one could imagine a way to free more than a million slaves right then and there.
But didn’t this fatally taint the Constitution, exactly as the Garrisonians said? No, Lincoln argued, because the ideals of the Declaration were embodied in the Constitution. To repudiate it in the name of antislavery was to reject the very thing that kept the promise of universal freedom alive in the United States. For this reason Lincoln clung to the Constitution and to the Union it created. “Much as I hate slavery,” Lincoln said, “I would consent to the extension of it rather than see the Union dissolved.”33 By this Lincoln did not mean merely that he valued the Union more than he hated slavery. Loyal Whig that he was, Lincoln accepted Daniel Webster’s dictum: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” Only within the Union, only under the Constitution, could the dream of universal liberty be realized. The “best means to advance that liberty,” Lincoln believed, was to remain “true to the Union and the Constitution.” They were inseparable, “Liberty, the Union, and the Constitution.” If the Union died, if the Constitution failed, so would the principle of liberty “for all men.”34
Lincoln’s history lesson did not end with 1789. Although compelled to protect slavery where it already existed, the Founders put nothing in the Constitution to prevent Congress from restricting slavery’s expansion. Indeed, they themselves repeatedly interfered with slavery and prevented its spread in the territories. Even before the Constitutional Convention the Continental Congress meeting under the Articles of Confederation enacted the Ordinance of 1787. Also known as the Northwest Ordinance, it excluded the importation of slaves into the Northwest territory, from which the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin were formed. Once the new Constitution was ratified, the very first Congress, filled with the very same Founders, quickly reenacted the ordinance. Congress did recognize slavery in those territories where it already existed, Mississippi and Alabama, but not before prohibiting even those territories from importing slaves from the Atlantic slave trade. Thus well before the Constitution allowed the federal government to ban the Atlantic slave trade entirely, Congress signaled its determination to thwart it. In short, the First Congress interfered with slavery in the territories where it already existed. Needless to say, at the earliest possible moment, on January 1, 1808, Congress closed down America’s participation in the Atlantic slave trade altogether. Finally, as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 Congress drew a line from east to west across the Louisiana Territory and prohibited slavery’s expansion north of it.
Lincoln studied the Founders and concluded that their legacy was not as simple as the abolitionists made it out to be. The Constitution recognized and protected slavery where it had been unavoidably necessary, but it was written by men who hated slavery, hemmed it in where they could, and hoped it would eventually die. For Lincoln this divided legacy led to a crucial legal distinction between slavery in the states and slavery in the territories. Under the Constitution, the federal government could not interfere with slavery in those states where it already existed. The fugitive slave and the three-fifths clauses not only recognized the legality of slavery in the southern states but also required the federal government to defend the slaveholders’ right to recover their fugitives. No elected official could swear to uphold the Constitution and subsequently refuse to enforce its slavery provisions. On the other hand, the federal government had every right to regulate slavery in the territories even to the point of forbidding its expansion. Lincoln said this many times, never more clearly than at Peoria in 1854: “I wish to MAKE and to KEEP the distinction between the EXISTING institution, and the EXTENSION of it.”35 Indeed, Congress had a moral obligation to prevent the extension of slavery, because slavery was wrong and had to be treated as such.
Such was the legacy of the founding generation. It had proclaimed universal freedom as the guiding principle of the new nation. It had abolished slavery in every northern state. It had provided for the eventual withdrawal of the United States from the Atlantic slave trade. Out of necessity, the Constitution had recognized slavery in those places where it already existed, but even as it did so, it was carefully cleansed of the word “slavery.” The same men who wrote the Constitution also restricted the expansion of slavery into the territories of the Old Northwest, interfered with it in the territories of the Old Southwest, and excluded it from most of the territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, including Kansas and Nebraska. The Founders did all this, Lincoln said, because they recognized that slavery was incompatible with the principle of fundamental human equality. If they did not go further in abolishing slavery where it already existed, it was because they could not have established the new nation had they tried to do so. More important, having restricted slavery’s expansion and cut it off from any new source of African slaves, they believed that they had put slavery on the course of ultimate extinction.
Most Americans believed it as well, or so Lincoln said. From 1776 to 1820, while “the whole Union was acquiescing in it,” the Founders had followed a policy restricting slavery’s expansion. The “whole country looked forward to the ultimate extinction of the institution.”36This was the antislavery consensus, and it played a critical role in Lincoln’s argument against slavery.
THE COLLAPSE OF THE ANTISLAVERY CONSENSUS
When Lincoln said he hated slavery as much as did any abolitionist, he added that he “always believed that everybody was against it, and that it was in the course of ultimate extinction.”37 It is possible that Lincoln did grow up believing this. He was raised in a family in which the evil of slavery was taken for granted. His parents attended an antislavery church. As a young man he was attracted to the Whig Party, which he assumed to be antislavery. “[A]ll agreed that slavery was an evil,” he had claimed in 1848, provoking the scorn of Massachusetts Free Soilers. It is possible that in Lincoln’s own mind there really was a time when everybody hated slavery. He even hinted that it was almost unnatural to defend slavery. The “great mass of mankind,” he said, “consider slavery a great moral wrong, and their feelings against it, is [sic] not evanescent, but eternal. It lies at the very foundation of their sense of justice; and it cannot be trifled with. It is a great and durable element of popular action, and, I think, no statesman can safely disregard it.”38
Up until 1854, then, “the whole public mind” rested secure that slavery’s fate had been sealed by its geographical restriction. “I might have been mistaken,” Lincoln added, but that was what “I had believed, and now believe.”39 From the American Revolution through the Compromise of 1850 most Americans looked forward to the ultimate extinction of slavery.
There is something almost willfully naive in this vision of American history. Prior to the American Revolution slavery in the colonies pretty much hugged the Atlantic coast, held in place by imperial restrictions or ecological limits. The largest slave-produced crops in the colonies—tobacco, rice, indigo—were relatively minor players in an Atlantic slave economy dominated by the great sugar plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean. Only after the Revolution, with the invention of the cotton gin and the opening of western lands, did the southern slave economy spill across the Appalachian barrier and with dizzying speed fill half a continent with cotton plantations whose combined wealth dwarfed every other enterprise in the country. By 1850 the United States boasted one of the largest slave economies in history. Yet as this was happening before the entire world’s eyes, Lincoln insisted, “the whole public mind” hated slavery and believed that its growth had been restricted and that it was on the course of ultimate extinction. So Lincoln said, and so, apparently, he believed.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 changed everything, Lincoln said, precisely because it was designed to overthrow the antislavery consensus bequeathed by the Founders. Of course, Stephen Douglas claimed that the true founding principle of American liberty was popular sovereignty. Not only was this a nonsensical version of American history, Lincoln argued, but the very name of the principle was a fraud. A genuinely popular sovereignty would leave every individual free “to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man’s rights.” Nothing could be further from Douglas’s bogus definition of popular sovereignty, which amounted to nothing more than “the liberty of making slaves of other people.” This, Lincoln said, was a form of liberty that “Jefferson never thought of.” Nor had the previous generation. Nor had anyone as recently as a year ago.40
Stephen Douglas also insisted that he was perfectly neutral toward slavery, that he had no strong feelings about it one way or the other. He would not say that it was right or that it was wrong, and he professed not to care whether the people of a territory voted slavery up or down. Lincoln thought this was absurd. He joked that everyone on earth had an opinion about slavery except Stephen Douglas. But the joke exposed an improbable moral evasion, Lincoln argued. If you won’t say slavery is wrong, you must think slavery is perfectly all right, since you cannot logically say that you “care not” whether people vote in favor of something that is morally wrong. At the very least you must believe that “slavery is as good as freedom.” Douglas thought of slavery “as something having no moral question in it,” and that, Lincoln insisted, was not what the Founders thought.41
Here was the point at which history and politics fused to form Lincoln’s central argument against slavery. Armed with his interpretation of the nation’s origins, Lincoln pronounced Stephen Douglas’s politics to be something radically new, something the Founders would never have sanctioned, something downright immoral. “I particularly object to the NEW position which the avowed principle of this Nebraska law gives to slavery in the body politic,” Lincoln said. “I object to it because it assumes that there CAN be MORAL RIGHT in the enslaving of one man by another.” There can be no such right in a free republic, Lincoln insisted. “[N]o man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent,” he declared. This, he said, “is the leading principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism.”42
Douglas likewise claimed that there was a natural, even a divine basis for the distinction between slave and free states. Just as small farms flourished in the Midwest, just as fishing flourished along the New England coast, so did cotton and slavery flourish in the southern states. Why worry about a hypothetical expansion of slavery into northern territories where it could not flourish? Lincoln flatly rejected this. The supposed natural barrier to slavery expansion was a “lullaby.” If slavery could flourish on the southern bank of the Ohio River, he said, it could just as easily flourish on the northern bank. There was a moral objection as well. Slavery could not be right in one place and wrong in another. “Once admit the position that a man rightfully holds another man as property on one side of the line, and you must, when it suits his convenience to come to the other side, admit that he has the same right to hold his property there.”43 Once you take away the moral presumption of slavery’s evil, Lincoln insisted, you have no reason left for resisting its expansion.
And it would expand, Lincoln warned. Slavery encroached “by slow degrees.”44 Once allowed in, slavery was nearly impossible to get out. Ask the people of a territory where there were no slaves if they wanted slavery to come in and the answer would be no. But let slaveholders establish themselves in a territory, and no matter how small their numbers, slavery would become hard to remove. Those with slaves would be the wealthiest of the settlers and thus influential beyond their numbers. With slavery already in place, the settlers face a different question: Will you emancipate your neighbors’ slaves? This they would find hard to do, and by this means slavery would make its way into Nebraska.
But it would not stop there, Lincoln warned, and in 1857 the Supreme Court proved his point by handing down the Dred Scott decision. Whereas Stephen Douglas had merely sponsored the legislative repeal of the Missouri Compromise, Chief Justice Roger Taney gratuitously pronounced it unconstitutional. Whereas Douglas had said it was best for Congress to let the territories themselves regulate slavery, Taney went further and declared that not even the territories could prohibit slavery. Why not? Because, Taney said, the Constitution expressly affirmed a right of property in slaves. Every master who chose to do so had the right to bring his slaves into the territories along with his cattle and furniture. By contrast, blacks—free and slave alike—had no rights that white men were bound to respect.
Consider the implications of Taney’s decision, Lincoln warned. The judges said that the people of the territories had a constitutional right to their slaves if they wanted them. “Then I say that the people of Georgia have the right to buy slaves in Africa, if they want them, and I defy any man on earth to show any distinction between the two things.” Moreover, if a constitutional right to slaves did exist, and if that right prevented the territories from restricting slavery, how could the northern states thwart the same constitutional right by abolishing slavery? The reasoning the Court had used to pry open the territories for slavery applied just as well to the states. All it would take, Lincoln warned, was one more Supreme Court decision to complete the process of making slavery national and perpetual. “We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State.”45
It would be hard to name anything in Lincoln’s political life that made him angrier than Dred Scott. It was a “burlesque upon judicial decisions,” a “slander and profanation” upon the Founders. “Dred Scottism,” he said, was of a piece with “Nebraskaism.” Both covered over slavery—“the sum of all villanies”—with the “deceitful cloak” of self-government in an effort to conceal the “hateful carcass” beneath. Both had to be “repulsed and rolled back.” Dred Scott itself “must be overruled, and expunged from the books of authority.”46 Lincoln had vowed not to interfere with the Fugitive Slave Act and had bitten his lip and put up with the three-fifths clause, for these were clearly grounded in the Constitution. But nowhere did the Constitution “expressly” affirm the right of property in slaves, no matter what the chief justice said. “If I were in Congress, and a vote should come up on a question whether slavery should be prohibited in a new territory,” Lincoln announced, “in spite of that Dred Scott decision, I would vote that it should,” adding, “Somebody has to reverse that decision, and we mean to reverse it.”47 When Stephen Douglas denounced him for resisting a decision of the United States Supreme Court, Lincoln replied with a technicality: Neither he nor anyone else would resist the Court’s specific decision to deny Dred Scot his petition for freedom.
But Lincoln left no doubt that he didn’t much like the specific decision either, and he took the occasion to turn the argument back against Senator Douglas. “Racial Amalgamation” was one of Douglas’s bugaboos, and Lincoln had taken to pointing out that most “mulattoes” were born in the South. If Douglas was so worried about race mixing, Lincoln would say, he should advocate restricting slavery’s expansion since most race mixing occurred under slavery. A few months after the Supreme Court announced its ruling, Lincoln used Dred Scott as a hypothetical example of what he meant. He pointed out that Scott’s wife and two daughters were also involved in the suit. Had Lincoln had his way, the Court would have recognized their citizenship and thereby diminished “the chances of these black girls, ever mixing their blood with that of white people.” By contrast Stephen Douglas was “delighted” that the Court had decided they were slaves “and thus left subject to the forced concubinage of their masters, and liable to become the mothers of mulattoes in spite of themselves.”48 This was extraordinary. Unlike Frederick Douglass, who laced his writings with innuendo about the sexual abuse of slaves, Lincoln said almost nothing about it. That he raised the issue on this occasion, in such a provocative and personal way, testifies to the depth of his anger over the Dred Scott decision. It was no wonder Lincoln was upset. In 1854 Congress had altered the course of American history; three years later the Supreme Court reversed it entirely.
THE “DEBAUCHMENT” OF PUBLIC SENTIMENT
Lincoln blamed the Court’s decision on politicians and editors who had spent several years educating the public to accept the idea that there was nothing wrong with slavery. The republican form of government rested on public opinion, Lincoln explained. “With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.” The “central idea” of the American Republic, from its founding until recently, had been “the equality of men,” and with it the idea that slavery was wrong. But since 1854, since the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, politicians and editors had been cutting that central idea down to size, narrowing its meaning, limiting its scope. Some were now saying that the only equality that mattered was the equality of states rather than of men. The Supreme Court now said that the Declaration of Independence meant only that all white men are created equal. Proslavery writers went so far as to claim that slavery, rather than being an abstract evil, was a positive good. In the old days “our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all, and thought to include all,” Lincoln said, “but now, to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.”49
As far as Lincoln was concerned, the person most responsible for this terrible reversal of public sentiment was Stephen Douglas. “Judge Douglas is a man of large influence,” Lincoln said. “His bare opinion goes far to fix the opinion of others.” The “susceptible young hear lessons from him, such as their fathers never heared [sic] when they were young.” What would happen, Lincoln warned, if Douglas succeeded “in moulding public sentiment to a perfect accordance with his own?” What if he persuaded Americans that court decisions should be endorsed “without caring to know whether they are right or wrong?” What if he convinced most people “that there is no moral question about slavery?” What if Douglas got enough people to believe “that liberty and slavery are perfectly consistent” or that “for a strong man to declare himself the superior of a weak one, and thereupon enslave the weak one, is the very essence of liberty—the most sacred right of self government”? If Douglas succeeded in bringing public sentiment “to all this,” Lincoln cried, “in the name of heaven, what barrier will be left against making slavery lawful every where?”50
The key to Douglas’s strategy, Lincoln concluded, was his effort to persuade large numbers of whites “that negroes are not men.” Unlike John C. Calhoun and other proslavery extremists, Stephen Douglas did not reject the principle of fundamental human equality; on the contrary, he defiantly asserted his devotion to the Declaration of Independence. But he and a growing legion of followers were now arguing that the principle did not apply to blacks because blacks were somehow less than human. Douglas “has no very vivid impression that the negro is a human,” Lincoln said in 1854, “and consequently he has no idea that there can be any moral question in legislating about him.” The only way to make Douglas’s beloved principle of popular sovereignty consistent with slavery, Lincoln said, was to assume that “the negro is not a man” but a piece of property.51 This deplorable assumption was, under Douglas’s dangerous influence, becoming ever more popular among Americans. We are approaching the point at which “when men are spoken of, the negro is not meant; that when negroes are spoken of, brutes alone are contemplated.”52 The consequences were already apparent.
Thanks to Douglas’s stategy, Lincoln argued, the position of free blacks in America was rapidly worsening. When Chief Justice Taney tried to justify his decision by claiming that blacks were viewed more harshly during the revolutionary era, Lincoln blew a loud whistle. “In some trifling particulars,” Lincoln said, “the condition of that race has been ameliorated; but, as a whole, in this country, the change between then and now is decidedly the other way.” The “ultimate destiny” of blacks in America, he said, “has never appeared so hopeless.” The voting rights of blacks had been taken away in several northern states. In the South the master’s right to free his slaves had been curtailed. Emancipation was once the province of the state legislatures, but some southern states had recently adopted constitutions that prohibited their legislatures from abolishing slavery. More and more Americans were sneering at the idea, once universally accepted, that the Declaration of Independence embraced blacks and whites alike. And in one of the most searing images he ever conjured up Lincoln depicted the worsening condition of the African American as a nightmarish prison. “All the powers of the earth seem rapidly combining against him,” he warned. “Mammon is after him….
They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.
Taney’s claim that “the public estimate of the negro is more favorable now than it was at the origin of the government” was a grotesque inversion of the truth.53With each passing year, Lincoln declared, things were getting worse and worse and worse.
This “tendency to dehumanize the negro” was not merely wrong. It was degenerate. Our “progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” he told Joshua Speed in 1855. “We began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it as ‘all men are created equal, except for negroes.’”54 For Lincoln human equality was a moral principle; to attack that principle was to tear at the moral core of the nation. No wonder he was increasingly attracted to Henry Clay’s claim that those who denied the evil of slavery were “blowing out the moral lights around us.” By the late 1850s Lincoln had taken to asking audiences if they had ever heard any politician, as recently as five years back, declare that the Declaration of Independence did not embrace blacks. A process that began with “this insidious Popular Sovereignty” would shortly bring the United States to a revival of the African slave trade, a federal slave code imposed on all the territories, and a second Dred Scott decision carrying slavery into the free states. All this was bound to follow from the “gradual and steady debauching of public opinion.”55
In a roundabout way, this brought Lincoln’s antislavery politics close to one of abolitionism’s central themes, the dehumanization of slaves. But where Frederick Douglass exposed the ways in which slaves themselves were brutalized and degraded, Lincoln exposed Stephen Douglas’s brutalizing rhetoric. It was not that Lincoln failed to appreciate the dehumanizing nature of slavery itself. He once recalled that in the slave markets of the nation’s capital, blacks were driven off to the South “precisely like droves of horses.” But Frederick Douglass’s archenemy was southern slavery itself, whereas Lincoln’s political opponents were northern Democrats. They were the ones who “require me to deny the humanity of the negro” by accepting that slaves could be carried into Kansas like any other form of property.56 Lincoln therefore revised the abolitionist argument so that the critique of dehumanization worked as a political argument against the extension of slavery.
Nor was that the only echo of abolitionism in Lincoln’s antislavery politics. The importance he attached to public opinion was not all that different from the abolitionist goal of persuading Americans that slavery was wrong. Lincoln hated the way politicians like Stephen Douglas were “debauching” the public sentiment of the nation, and his own antislavery politics were, in large measure, an attempt to counter what Douglas and the Democrats were doing. After 1854 Lincoln used politics to persuade as many Americans as possible that slavery was wrong. And like that of many an abolitionist, Lincoln’s goal was not so much to end slavery immediately as to restore immediately the consensus that slavery should be ended. “[W]e have taught a great many thousands of people to hate” slavery, he said in 1859, people “who had never given it a thought before.”57 That was the point of antislavery politics: to teach people who had never given it much thought that slavery was wrong and ought to be treated as such.
But if large numbers of Americans had to be taught to hate slavery, how could it be that up until 1854 everyone already agreed that slavery was hateful? Either the Republicans wanted to convert people to antislavery for the first time, or they wanted to restore the antislavery consensus that favored the Missouri Compromise, but they could not logically want both. In any case, by the late 1850s Lincoln was beginning to doubt that such a restoration was possible. He was beginning to suspect that slavery was doomed, not because of northern hostility but because of southern intransigence.
“SLAVERY IS DOOMED”
Lincoln once wrote, privately, that he did not expect to see slavery ended in his lifetime but that if its expansion was halted, the end “will come in due time.” At one point in his debates with Stephen Douglas Lincoln said that a peaceful extinction of slavery would take “a hundred years at least,” but he did not elaborate on that either.58 Still, he was increasingly certain that the end was near. He had been moving toward this conclusion at least since 1854. Slavery and freedom, he said after the Kansas-Nebraska Act had been passed, “are like two wild beasts in sight of each other, but chained and held apart.” Someday, he predicted, “these deadly antagonists will one or the other break their bonds, and then the question will be settled.” Up to now—this was still 1854—only “the most artful means” had kept these “two great ideas” apart.59 But ever since then slavery and freedom had been in open warfare, and by 1859, Lincoln concluded, the South’s increasingly aggressive demands had sealed slavery’s fate. There was no way to avoid it. At some point the American house, divided against itself over slavery, would cease to be so. William Seward was right to claim that the conflict between slavery and freedom was irreconcilable. The only way slavery could triumph in the great struggle with freedom was for the South to silence all further public discussion of the subject. It must squash slavery as a political issue, thoroughly and permanently. Only then would slavery be safe from the natural animosity of free people everywhere. If, however, the South pressed ahead on its reckless course, slavery was doomed. The North need only stand its ground. The Republicans need only reaffirm their intention to uphold the constitutional guarantees of slavery. The South itself would do the rest, and slavery would die.
Lincoln believed that once a certain tendency was set in motion it was almost impossible to alter its course. Nothing any human being could do would divert the tendency from lurching toward its prescribed destiny. This was how Lincoln viewed the agitation over slavery, his friend Leonard Swett wrote. “He believed from the first, I think, that the agitation of Slavery would produce its overthrow.”60 On this Lincoln was more forthright in private than in public. “Slavery is doomed,” he said in September 1859, “and that within a few years.” What sealed slavery’s fate was the now unstoppable public discussion of it. “[A]n evil can’t stand discussion,” Lincoln said. “What kills the skunk is the publicity it gives itself.”61 By their own aggressive and irresponsible demands the slaveholders had provoked the agitation over slavery, setting in motion the course of events that could end only in the extermination of slavery itself.
Republicans had no need to make any provocative gestures toward the South. They must say that they meant only to limit slavery’s expansion and nothing more, Lincoln told his listeners at Cooper Union in February 1860. They must affirm their determination to uphold the Constitution. They must promise to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. They must swear that they had no intention of interfering with slavery in the states where it already existed. They could say all these things, Lincoln told his New York audience, and should. But it wouldn’t make any difference. The South could no longer be satisfied. Republicans could cede all the territories to slavery, and still, that would not be enough for the South. They could thwart all future slave rebellions, and the South would still want more. What would satisfy them? Lincoln asked. What would convince them? “This, and only this: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.” And that, Lincoln said, Republicans could never do. That would be “reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance.” When it came down to the right and wrong of slavery, there was no room for compromise; there was no middle way. The North needed only stand its ground, do its duty, and “HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT.”62The South would take care of the rest.
Cooper Union was the most important speech of Lincoln’s political life up to that point. It was 1860, a presidential election year, and prominent eastern Republicans stocked the audience to have a look at this potential candidate. Russell Cornwell remembered sitting in the impressive new hall watching as Lincoln started out, nervously losing his place two or three times. But Lincoln, already a great public speaker, recovered quickly, and once he gained his footing, Cornwell and the rest of the audience were quickly enraptured by “the wonderful beauty and lofty inspiration of that magnificent address.” Then came the climactic moment, etched in Cornwell’s memory, when Abraham Lincoln quoted none other than Frederick Douglass: “It is written in the sky of America that the slaves shall some day be free.” With that, Cornwell recalled, “the applause was so great that the building trembled and I felt the windows shake behind me.” The most exhilarating moment of the most important speech of Lincoln’s life came when he quoted the most famous runaway slave in America.63 There was just one problem. Lincoln never quoted Frederick Douglass, at Cooper Union or anywhere else. It was there in Russell Cornwell’s memory, but it was not there in the text of the speech.
Cornwell’s lapse is easily forgiven, for if Frederick Douglass’s words were absent, his sentiments were almost certainly present. Lincoln may not have said that upon the American sky it was written “that the slaves shall some day be free,” but he almost certainly believed it. There was no more room for compromise. A mighty struggle between slavery and freedom could no longer be avoided. “No man has the right to keep his fellow man in bondage, be he black or white,” Lincoln said on the eve of the 1860 election, “and the time will come, and must come, when there will not be a single slave within the borders of this country.”64 It wasn’t Frederick Douglass, but it could have been.