LINCOLN THE CANDIDATE
LINCOLN CAME LATE to the fight over extending slavery into America’s western territories. He was only twelve years old and living in isolation on the prairie when the conflict between northern and southern members of Congress led to the Missouri Compromise of 1820–1821, which was intended to settle the issue for all time.
When the controversy resurfaced thirty years later with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Lincoln was ready to do battle against slavery on economic as well as moral terms. By then he had begun to interpret his own escape from poverty as a cautionary argument against keeping people in a hopelessly fixed condition for life.
The Missouri Compromise between proslavery Southern states and antislavery Northern states specified that western territories below the Mason-Dixon line—interpreted at 36°30’ latitude—would remain open to slavery, while those above would remain free, with slavery barred. When Lincoln served in Congress from 1847 to 1849, he did not focus much on the future of slavery in the territories beyond his support of the ill-fated Wilmot Proviso, prohibiting slavery from all western lands acquired in the Mexican-American War (the measure failed repeatedly). For all intents and purposes, the issue had been settled by law, leaving white Americans free to pursue their ambitions and dreams in the territories north of the Mason-Dixon line.
Then in 1850 Whig Party leader Henry Clay, Lincoln’s “beau ideal of a statesman,” persuaded Congress to pass the Compromise of 1850—with considerable help from an increasingly influential young Democratic senator from Illinois: Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln was by then back home in Illinois, out of office, and soured on politics. This new compromise barred the slave trade in Washington, DC, admitted California as a free state, introduced the nation’s first fugitive slave law, and ushered in the idea of “popular sovereignty” by giving New Mexico and Utah the right to leave to its white voters the question of whether to organize as slave or free states. Four years later Senator Douglas, who had shepherded Clay’s Compromise of 1850 through Congress, was extending the use of “popular sovereignty” by persuading Congress to pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Douglas hoped his plan for giving white western settlers the right to vote slavery up or down in new states would calm the ongoing conflict between the North and South.
Lincoln’s personal history made him different from most politicians of this period and perhaps more attuned to America’s unique promise to its citizens. Somehow, he had escaped a life of physical labor, hunger, and hardship and taught himself to be an attorney. Understandably, Lincoln became a lawyer with a pronounced sympathy for clients whose pursuit of upward mobility was frustrated by powerful interests or archaic precedents. When he turned to politics as a man of the people, he naturally began to interpret his own escape from poverty as a cautionary argument against keeping people, white or black, in a fixed condition for life.
It was Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act that spurred Lincoln to reenter politics and defend the economic system he saw as crucial to the American way of life. By 1854 Lincoln was prepared to argue that the battle over the economic structure of the western territories amounted to an unavoidable conflict over the future of the United States. Lincoln saw no value in the Douglas plan for the West, even if Douglas meant it to spur economic expansion to the Pacific. It was in response to Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act that former congressman Abraham Lincoln was “aroused,” as he put it, to return to politics and argue against popular sovereignty.
Lincoln’s experience as a lawyer in civil cases had taught him that there was no requirement that litigants bring opposing viewpoints together with a compromise solution. When compromise failed and Lincoln found himself trying a case in a court of law, he was willing to go all out to make an overarching argument based on first principles. Looking at the Kansas-Nebraska Act, what was at stake was the basic right of American citizens to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Lincoln and his contemporaries lived in a nonstop political environment. Voters found politics the major public entertainment, and participation in the political process was almost universal. The voters—some barely literate—avidly craved public oratory and came out to hear candidates speak for hours at a time. Community response to political speech making was reminiscent of the level of interest in old-time preaching at revival meetings or modern enthusiasm for sporting events and rock concerts. Elections of some kind occurred throughout the calendar year. Voters followed politics continuously and took their families to political events as eagerly as they might go to the community church or the annual county fair. Famous political figures enjoyed a built-in audience. Their speeches were not just all talk. They were frequently accompanied by fireworks, music, torch-lit processions, and still more speeches.
The future president thrived in this culture. Even Douglas, his lifelong rival, acknowledged that Lincoln was “full of wit, facts, dates—and the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes.” Lincoln was wise not only in the ways of enthralling crowds, but also in creating words that could be reprinted in newspapers, the only medium of the time that provided regular information to party loyalists and other voters. For many voters, especially those locked into rural isolation far from the scenes of rallies and lyceums, newspapers were their primary access to the ideas and arguments of aspiring politicians.
Lincoln initiated his reentry into Illinois politics with a speech in Peoria on October 16, 1854. Showcasing a leaner new oratorical style, he fashioned the address in the form of a lawyer’s argument and made the case against Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act largely on economic terms. As he put it, “The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these territories. We want them for homes of free white people. This they cannot be, to any considerable extent, if slavery shall be planted within them. Slave States are places for poor white people to remove FROM, not to remove TO. New free States are the places for poor people to go to and better their condition. For this use, the nation needs these territories.”
Lincoln’s emphasis on slavery’s economic consequences was quite different from the argument of the abolitionists of his time, who insisted on immediate action to end slavery and begin the process of establishing racial equality. As Lincoln argued in Peoria, slavery might remain legal in the South, but that did not mean it should or could be introduced in the western territories. What set Lincoln apart from many of his Northern contemporaries was his refusal to affix sole blame for slavery on white Southerners. Had their climates been reversed, he often volunteered, Northerners might well have embraced and defended slavery with equal vigor.
When southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery, than we; I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists; and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. . . . When they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them, not grudgingly, but fully and fairly; and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives, which should not, in its stringency, be more likely to carry a free man into slavery, than our ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.
But all this; to my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting slavery to go into our own free territory, than it would for reviving the African slave trade by law.
While Lincoln was adamantly opposed to the extension of slavery to the western territories, he made it clear he was not joining the abolitionists in demanding racial equality in the South or in the North. “Let it not be said I am contending for the establishment of political and social equality between the whites and blacks,” he said. Indeed, Lincoln did not even support the elimination of the Black Laws that banned free people of color from living in many Northern states, including his own Illinois. Rather, he took the position that the fight against slavery should center on expanding the Northern economic system in the West for the benefit of future generations of aspiring white Americans. Even this was a radical notion in the halls of Congress in 1854.
Lincoln couched his opposition to the spread of slavery with a cautious mix of constitutional interpretation and muted moral indignation. But behind his argument—though it remained unstated—was a shrewd political calculus. If slavery was banned forever from the West, then every new state admitted to the Union in the future would be a free state, with each of them sending antislavery congressmen and senators to Washington. As often as Lincoln assured Southern interests that he would never interfere with slavery where it existed, the slow but sure arrival of an ever-growing western antislavery bloc meant that at some point in the future, there might be sufficient votes on Capitol Hill for Congress to initiate the death knell of slavery with an achievable constitutional amendment to prohibit slavery everywhere. Lincoln understood this potential future tipping point. And it helps explain his seemingly restrained and limited public antislavery sentiments: time was on his side, as long as slavery did not spread.
Southern proslavery elements comprehended this from the start, too, which is why they remained so fearful of Lincoln’s political rise. Presenting himself as a common man who rose because of American guarantees of freedom and economic opportunity, Lincoln was the one populist who might actually place slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction.” The absolute prohibition of slavery from the western territories was his way to achieve the ultimate goal of ensuring that the United States would continue to provide equality and economic opportunity for its white citizens.
It was not that Lincoln ignored morality and was solely interested in the economic impact of the extension of the Southern slave system on white Americans in the Northern states and western territories. Lincoln clearly believed that slavery was fundamentally immoral because it deprived slaves of the just economic rewards they earned from their labor. At Peoria on October 16, 1854, an impassioned Lincoln decried “the spread of slavery . . . because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself.” He was not averse to criticizing the slave system or its adherents, for slavery violated the founding fathers’ belief in the individual right to freely engage in the pursuit of happiness: “I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”
The Peoria speech—with its extraordinary emphasis on America’s responsibility to inspire the expansion of democracy worldwide—signaled Lincoln’s reentry into politics as a major figure in the emerging Republican Party of Illinois. Between 1854 and 1858, he traveled the state to rally support for himself and his views with a continuing emphasis on the largely economic argument presented in his Peoria speech. In 1858 Lincoln captured the Republican nomination to oppose Democrat Stephen Douglas for the US Senate seat from Illinois. In an immediately controversial, and justly famous, speech accepting the Republican designation, Lincoln threw down the gauntlet not only to Douglas but also to the slave states and all supporters of compromise:
Under the operation of the policy of compromise, the agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing or all the other.
Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.
Lincoln on April 25, 1858, the year of his legendary senatorial campaign debates with Stephen A. Douglas, as photographed by Samuel Alschuler in Quincy, Illinois. Alschuler thought Lincoln’s coat unsuitable for a rising political leader and lent his subject his own velvet-trimmed jacket to pose.
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As Lincoln put it, “Have we no tendency to the latter condition?” Here he referred to the Southern effort to extend slavery based on the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case in 1857, which gave slaveholders the “right” to take their human property everywhere in the United States without restriction. That decision forbade Congress and local legislatures from banning slavery in the western territories. Lincoln was reminding his audience that unless its geographic spread was restricted, the Southern economic, social, and political system was threatening to expand nationwide immediately. Here he was speaking not just for a faction of the Republican Party, but for the large body of outraged Republicans who believed that Douglas and his compatriots in Congress were engaged in a “conspiracy” to make slavery “perpetual, national and universal.”
Throughout the summer and fall of 1858, in their widely publicized debates across Illinois, Lincoln and Douglas clashed repeatedly over popular sovereignty, the Dred Scott decision, the extension of slavery, the dire warnings in Lincoln’s “house divided” speech, and one issue that the Democrats repeatedly denounced and the Republicans consistently deflected: equal rights for blacks.
Lincoln-Douglas debate at Charleston, Illinois—at which Lincoln insisted he believed in equal opportunity, but not yet in equality of the races. Douglas, an unrepentant race-baiter, can be seen at Lincoln’s right. The scene was envisioned by artist Robert Marshall Root, who was born ten years after the event.
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For Lincoln and the vast majority of his fellow Republicans, the extension of slavery remained an issue that principally concerned white people in the North. Black slavery was tolerable, if hateful, where it had long existed, below the Mason-Dixon line and east of the Mississippi River. There the Constitution protected it. But when it expanded into the new territories, it threatened to limit opportunity for free white labor in a growing nation. Knowing they could not appeal to mainstream white voters by inviting sympathy for oppressed blacks at a time when even freedmen generally lacked the right to vote, Republicans like Lincoln often expressed their opposition to slavery by stressing that it poisoned white citizens’ opportunities to succeed in life. As Lincoln warned his audience of Northern white voters, the “greedy chase to make profit of the negro” could “‘cancel and tear to pieces’ even the white man’s charter of freedom.” Slavery’s effect on the enslaved was never his primary public consideration, although to his credit Lincoln did insist, throughout his debates with Douglas, that blacks were inalienably entitled to the pursuit of happiness.
He reiterated this position during the Lincoln-Douglas debates: “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races.” This sentiment placed him squarely within prevailing white sensibilities of the day, however regressive they sound in the twenty-first century. What elevated Lincoln above the prejudices of most of his contemporaries was this insistence: “But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”
Lincoln further argued that there should be a moral core to American economic democracy—that every person, black or white, deserved to benefit from the fruits of his labor. Slavery was morally wrong, both repugnant to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and alien to the founders’ concept of natural rights, which included the right to economic opportunity. Even though slavery’s existence in the United States was acknowledged in the Constitution, the expectation that it would, in the long run, cease to exist had been acknowledged by the framers with the abolition of the slave trade. Lincoln argued both that slavery was immoral and that preventing any extension of slavery to the western territories was necessary to reaffirm the commitment to a national future free of slavery and open to economic opportunity for white Americans. This was politically astute. It gave Lincoln an argument against slavery that did not explicitly run counter to the majority opinion of Northern whites that African Americans were inferior and therefore not entitled to all the same rights as white Americans.
The wildly popular Lincoln-Douglas debates established Lincoln as a significant figure in the leadership of the Republican Party and familiarized people with the party’s platform. The disappointing result was still a promising one for the fledgling Republican Party. Lincoln and Republican candidates statewide won a bit more of the popular vote. But Senate elections were then decided by state legislatures, Douglas kept his Senate seat in Illinois, and Lincoln himself was catapulted onto the national stage.
Lincoln’s ambition was not deflected by his failure to win the Senate seat in 1858. Wisely, he decided to take advantage of the publicity-generating debate of ideas with Douglas. He understood that his best hope of keeping his name alive was to continue as if nothing had really been decided by the Senate election, especially since Lincoln’s party had won the popular vote.
Douglas unknowingly facilitated Lincoln’s rebuttal efforts with an inflammatory article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in September 1859. In one sense, Douglas’s piece presented a response to the “house divided” arguments “advocated and defended by the distinguished Republican standard bearer” in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Douglas continued to insist that it revealed Lincoln as inviting civil war over slavery. The article also gave Lincoln the opportunity to claim an increasingly important place in the political hierarchy. Lincoln was able to claim that Douglas had put Lincoln’s argument that “this government ‘cannot endure permanently half slave and half free’” on a par with the argument of the leading Republican aspirant to the presidency, Senator William H. Seward of New York, who foresaw “an ‘irrepressible conflict’ between the principles of free and slave labor.” Now, Lincoln could boast that Douglas believed that Seward and Lincoln were equally important when he described them as equally guilty of seeing “no truce in the sectional strife,” because they refused to accept the Union as the founders had created it: “divided into free and slave States.”
The publicly combative Lincoln-Douglas relationship flared up again when, hungry for the Democratic nomination for president in 1860, the senator marched into Ohio in September 1859 to deliver speeches on behalf of local candidates. Douglas continued advocating popular sovereignty in speeches throughout Ohio. Worried Ohio Republicans asked Lincoln to provide a counterweight. Not surprisingly, Lincoln packed his bags and headed to the Buckeye State, acting as if he was resuming his debates with Douglas. He spoke in Columbus on September 16 and then went on to Dayton and Cincinnati. On October 9, in Cincinnati, Douglas replied: “Did you ever hear a Republican that dissented from Lincoln’s warnings of a house divided?” Lincoln replied on October 17: “We want, and must have, a national policy, as to slavery, which deals with it as being a wrong.” The battle was never drawn more sharply. Douglas persisted in attempting to portray Lincoln as a radical threat to national unity, while Lincoln was painting his Democratic rival as a reactionary threat to national moral principles and economic opportunity for all.
An exhausted Lincoln returned to Springfield on October 15. The night before his arrival home, voters in Ohio and many other states across the country went to the polls in contests for governor and other statewide offices. Republicans triumphed not only in Ohio, but also in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota. Lincoln was welcomed home from his successful campaign in Ohio by several hundred cheering Republicans and a brass band serenading him from the street. To his ardent supporters, Lincoln had not only saved the day for the advocates of the Free Soil position—those who believed in the moral and economic superiority of the free labor system—but also emerged as an important regional, perhaps national, spokesman for the Republican Party and its point of view.
Among the pile of letters waiting for Lincoln at home was a telegram with an invitation to deliver yet another speech, this time in New York. Lincoln at once understood that it offered an opportunity to advance his ambitions to office at the national level. After all, his latest regional efforts in support of the Republican Party had been a success. He had boldly followed the leading national Democratic presidential candidate to Ohio to continue the Lincoln-Douglas debate over the major issue that divided not only them but the rest of the country: the extension of slavery. Ohio had gone Republican in 1859 by seventeen thousand votes. It was reasonable to believe the tide was turning on the issue and that Lincoln himself could claim some responsibility for it.
An ambitious, ingenious politician who hungered for a return to elective office, Lincoln knew that the biggest prize of all, the presidency of the United States, would be decided only a year down the road. He sensed that Senator Douglas would likely become the Democratic candidate for the White House in 1860. Now, amid the excitement of Lincoln’s return from his successful speaking tour in Ohio, it suddenly seemed possible that the Republican candidate for president might actually beat Douglas in 1860. Improbable as it seemed just a few hours before the election results had filtered in from across the country in 1859, Lincoln now had substantial reason to imagine himself that candidate. And here was an invitation to introduce himself where he was least known: in New York, the heart of the vote-rich East.
The invitation to speak in New York suggested the date of November 29, 1859. But Lincoln, ever the savvy politician, asked for a later date, closer to the Republican National Convention, scheduled for May 1860. The negotiations proved successful, and the date for his New York address was rescheduled to February 27, 1860.
Lincoln was a deliberate politician. He was totally committed to his continuing effort to achieve high office as a way to prove to himself, as well as to others, that he was worthy of high regard. Losing an election or failing to secure a nomination only spurred him to continue his efforts in the next election. But personal ambition was not his only motivation. Lincoln was determined to make a difference, to leave a lasting legacy to future generations of Americans. The issue on which he believed he could influence both politics and history was economic opportunity for all, and slavery was the stubborn impediment to his long-standing belief in that cause. The person who knew Lincoln best, his law partner, William H. Herndon, captured these two facets of Lincoln’s life in a private letter written in 1866. “I love Mr. Lincoln dearly, almost worship him,” Herndon wrote. “He’s the purest politician I ever saw, and the justest man.”
On a purely political level, Lincoln recognized that his speech in New York might propel him into contention for the Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States. He focused on writing the speech as if preparing an argument in a court of law before a jury of his peers.
Lincoln’s first task was to define the issue of the impending election on his own terms. He had already said in the Lincoln-Douglas debates all there was to say about the moral, economic, and philosophical issues underlying the debate over the extension of slavery to the territories. For this speech in New York, he decided to confront the claim of Douglas and other Democrats, North and South, that the framers of the Constitution had not taken a position on the morality of slavery and had expressly said the federal government should take no actions to regulate its future. Douglas had made this the central point of his recent article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.
Superb advocate that he was, Lincoln proceeded to direct all his talents to making a case for his position. First, he thoroughly researched the question of what each of the signers of the Constitution really said and did on the slavery question, both before and after the constitutional convention. The more Lincoln researched, the more framers he determined to have been opposed to the extension of slavery. Washington, for one, had said that slavery could indeed be controlled by “legislative authority” and had expressed his personal conviction, “There is no man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it.” By his estimation—flawed and oversimplified though it may have been—Lincoln calculated that of the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution who expressed any opinion on the subject, twenty-three had clearly indicated that they believed the federal government had the power to regulate slavery.
With no researchers to assist him, no professional scholars to unearth documents, and no private secretary to take dictation, Lincoln sought his own access to history. Never in his life did Lincoln labor over an address so strenuously, over such an extended period of time, and in the face of major ongoing political and business distractions that competed for his precious time.
Working to develop arguments that would connect his newly assembled facts into a coherent narrative, Lincoln hit upon a novel device. The best way to present the fruits of his research was to make the facts themselves the core of his speech. Douglas might try to convince the public that the federal government had no right to control slavery in the federal territories, “[B]ut he has no right,” Lincoln wrote in his draft, “to mislead others, who have less access to history, and less leisure to study it, into the false belief that the founders believed any such thing.”
Six days before his scheduled speech in New York, the Chicago Tribune, the most influential newspaper in Illinois, endorsed Lincoln for president. He was no longer just a potential candidate for the nomination; he was now his state’s favorite son.
Almost as if to welcome him to the city, Horace Greeley’s newspaper, the New York Tribune, provided a two-column life story of the speaker together with an announcement of his scheduled speech at Cooper Union. Never particularly impressed by Lincoln—they had served together briefly in Congress more than a decade earlier—Greeley was suddenly viewing the visiting orator not just as a spokesman for free labor, but as a living example of its promise. The seeds of a legend—the self-made rail splitter—were taking shape. The biographical sketch praised Lincoln for “hard work and plenty of it, the rugged experiences of aspiring poverty . . . the education born of the log-cabin.” He had evolved into the remarkable Republican whose party had outpolled Stephen Douglas’s Democrats in the senatorial race in Illinois less than two years ago. “Such is Abraham Lincoln, emphatically a man of the people,” trumpeted the Tribune, “a champion of Free Labor, of diversified and prosperous industry, and of that policy which leads through peaceful progress to universal intelligence, virtue and freedom.”
Lincoln’s mission at Cooper Union, now that he had been endorsed at home as a presidential candidate, was to defeat two formidable potential opponents at the same time: Senator William H. Seward of New York, the prevailing favorite for the Republican presidential nomination, and Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic opponent in the general election. Lincoln surely understood too that the Cooper Union address would be his last major political speech both before and after the Republican nominating convention in May. If he were to win the nomination, Lincoln knew that the prevailing political culture dictated that he should remain silent until after the national election.
When Lincoln began to speak at Cooper Union in New York on February 27, 1860, the stakes could not have been higher. But Lincoln rose to the challenge, pointedly reminding the audience that the real issue remained the extension of slavery. Almost immediately, he quoted the words Douglas had used to support his argument for compromise on slavery: “Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.” The orator then surprised his audience, declaring, “I fully endorse this.” He was perfectly willing for the great divisive issue of the day to be left to the founders. Lincoln was prepared to describe their true views. Douglas had introduced them as expert witnesses. Lincoln, in rebuttal, proceeded to recite their history on slavery extension from the days of the early Republic.
As an initially dubious, eventually mesmerized crowd listened with increased attentiveness, Lincoln drew from his vast arsenal of historical data, legalistic argumentation, and rhetorical flourish to offer three distinct speeches in one: an appeal to history, a criticism of the South, and a rallying cry aimed at his natural constituency—Northern Republicans.
In the speech’s first section, Lincoln invoked the memory of the founding fathers, harnessing their implicit endorsement for his antislavery position by offering a staggering quantity of historical data about the views of the majority of the founders in support of the power of the federal government to restrict the spread of slavery. Implicitly, he invited personal endorsements of Lincoln himself for his ability to master the nuances of the historical investigation.
Lincoln cited the words of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin and reported on the views of the less memorable founding fathers as well. In a brilliant display of lawyerly technique and witty argumentation, Lincoln demonstrated that Douglas and the Democrats were tampering with the lessons of “our fathers.” The orator reminded his audience again and again that the founding fathers understood the slavery issue better than Douglas and other American Democratic politicians in 1860. Lincoln said the founders supported the elimination of the slave trade, thus preventing any new importing of slaves into the United States. And he reminded his fellow Republicans that preventing the extension of slavery to the western territories would provide new economic opportunities for white people who chose to settle in the territories.
In Lincoln’s widely reported speech accepting the Senate nomination two years earlier, the message “a house divided against itself cannot stand” had been biblical: slavery was doomed according to the word of God as revealed in the books of Matthew and Mark. Now at Cooper Union, he was documenting that slavery was doomed by the word of the secular gods of the American Dream, the founding fathers, the architects of what he had once dubbed America’s civil religion.
Lincoln as he looked the day of his career-transforming “right makes might” Cooper Union address in New York City, February 27, 1860, photographed just hours before by Mathew B. Brady at his Broadway gallery.
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In the second part of his speech, while ostensibly asking Southerners for patience, peace, and understanding, he seasoned his conciliatory words with an implicit warning: if disaffection led to disunion, it would be the fault of a hostile South, not a tolerant North (especially if the country was led by moderates like Lincoln).
Then in the third part, Lincoln turned his attention to his fellow Republicans and, in a majestic coda, urged them never to abandon the very principles that were unnerving Southerners in the first place. Lincoln brought his argument back from scholarly historical fact to emotional fervor, making the positive case for his antislavery position. Lincoln said, “Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government. . . . LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.”
The Cooper Union address was at one and the same time calm and impassioned, argumentative and scholarly, moderate in tone but accompanied by a forceful statement of moral purpose, and a clear vision of justice animated by the confident expectation that it would prevail. Lincoln used the occasion to present himself, as his future secretary John G. Nicolay would put it, as “yielding and accommodating in non-essentials” and “inflexibly firm in a principle or position deliberately taken.”
The editor of the New York Times, Henry J. Raymond, a Seward loyalist, was convinced that the “pre-eminent ability” Lincoln displayed at Cooper Union “compelled” easterners to acknowledge him as not only a leader among westerners, but a national figure as well. Greeley’s Tribune agreed that “the speech of Abraham Lincoln . . . was one of the happiest and most convincing political arguments ever made in the city.” And William Cullen Bryant’s antislavery New York Evening Post headlined its recap “The Framers of the Constitution in Favor of Slavery Prohibition; The Republican Party Vindicated; Great Speech of Hon. Abraham Lincoln.”
Lincoln emerged from New York a legitimate alternative to Seward for the Republican presidential nomination. Overnight, he achieved his goal of challenging both Republican Seward and Democrat Douglas for the ultimate prize. What was more, overnight reports of his Cooper Union triumph in the New York dailies inspired a series of invitations to speak in other northeastern states. On his way to see his son Robert at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, Lincoln stopped to make eleven more speeches, in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. Recycling the core of his Cooper Union address, Lincoln unfailingly reassured his audiences that their cause would prevail by invoking the rallying cry he had introduced in New York: “Let us have faith that right makes might.”
“Right makes might” summed up his new presidential-year argument against the extension of slavery. Lincoln was cannily suggesting that the peculiar institution would thus peacefully fade away. He was now preaching a more optimistic approach than the fatalistic inevitability of a national conflagration implicit in the “house divided” speech. Arguably, there was no real space between the two visions. But the rallying cry “Right makes might” struck a more positive note, summoning the original intent of the founding fathers to justify placing slavery once more “in the course of ultimate extinction” by curbing its spread and reaffirming economic opportunity as the core value of American democracy, a society committed to the rejection of the Southern idea that people should remain in fixed positions in life.
Lincoln made this view more explicit in some of his subsequent orations on his post–Cooper Union speaking tour in New England. The “‘equality of man’ principle which actuated our forefathers” was “right,” he declared at Hartford, and “slavery, being directly opposed to this,” was “wrong.” And in New Haven, site of a controversial labor strike at a shoe factory, he added, “What is the true condition of the laborer? I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good.” And then he offered his most direct synthesis of his economic beliefs: “I want every man to have a chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he can better his condition—when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him! That is the true system.”
Within hours of his return from the East, Lincoln learned that his Cooper Union speech would be printed in pamphlet form by his hometown newspaper. And the Springfield daily was not alone. Lincoln’s speech was also printed in pamphlet form by the New York Tribune and the Chicago Tribune and was quoted widely by other Republican-oriented newspapers. More important, Republican politicians everywhere began speaking with one voice, identifying antislavery with the founders, attacking the Dred Scott decision, and drawing a dividing line on slavery extension. Lincoln was not the only Republican candidate who defined the issues this way, but he was frequently credited with having said it best. As the New York Tribune reported, “Mr. Lincoln’s is probably the most systematic and complete defense yet made of the Republican position with regard to slavery.”
Lincoln exhibited exceptional tactical skills during his campaign for the presidential nomination. He knew the view that slavery should be abolished immediately was held by only a minority of Americans. He believed that calling for immediate abolition would keep him from being nominated for the presidency, preclude him from taking action as president to put slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction,” and prevent him from undertaking federal government initiatives based on his economic philosophy. While he continued to say that slavery was immoral and eventually needed to die out, he did not call for its immediate abolition. Lincoln said the federal government had the power to ban the extension of slavery to the western territories. But he accepted the constitutional provision that prevented the federal government from interfering with slavery in the existing slave states.
After adopting a platform that called for free labor and free land, immigrant rights, internal improvements, and no extension of slavery, the delegates to the Republican National Convention commenced their voting for a presidential nominee in Chicago on May 18, 1860. The convention, conveniently located in Lincoln’s home state of Illinois, was packed with wildly cheering Lincoln enthusiasts who had used counterfeit tickets to elbow out Seward men from the galleries. The first ballot gave Seward 170½ votes, Lincoln 102, Pennsylvania senator Simon Cameron 50½, Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio 49, and elder statesman Edward Bates of Missouri 48. The surprise came in both Seward’s failure to get close to the 233 votes needed for the nomination and Lincoln’s strong second-place showing. Lincoln had won the unanimous support of the western delegations of Illinois and Indiana. Equally important, New Hampshire and Connecticut, states where Lincoln had spoken only a few months earlier, gave more votes to Lincoln than to Seward. On the second ballot, Seward gained only 11 votes, while Lincoln gained 79 from New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The second ballot ended in a virtual tie between Seward, with 184½ votes, and Lincoln, with 181. The trend seemed irreversible. The convention proceeded immediately to a third ballot. When Lincoln handily won the nomination on this final delegate count, the “wildest enthusiasm” erupted inside the Wigwam convention center.
Almost from the moment he became the Republican candidate, Lincoln decided to follow the accepted tradition to make no further speeches. He would not “write, or speak anything upon doctrinal points.” He even assigned to an aide the task of sending form letters in response to all requests for his political opinions, emphasizing that his “positions were well known when he was nominated.” Lincoln had worked hard in the Lincoln-Douglas debates and in his Cooper Union address to make the case against the extension of slavery. He did not want to open the door to new interpretations of new words that were not as carefully crafted as his original speeches.
Instead, Lincoln built his 1860 campaign for the presidency on his well-known uncompromising rejection of any expansion of the Southern economic, social, and political system. Silence spoke louder than words: he offered no new assurances to the Southern states and no hope of compromise on these crucial issues. That silence was deafening, especially to Southerners who feared—rightly so—that his election to the presidency would threaten their way of life.
Lincoln was already on record as viewing slavery as “a moral, political and social wrong” that “ought to be treated as a wrong . . . with the fixed idea that it must and will come to the end.” That much about him voters already knew. They knew that he had not embraced immediate abolition, knowing, if nothing else, that such a position would have isolated him from mainstream white American voters and rendered him unelectable.
Unalterably opposed to the extension of slavery, Lincoln remained willing to “tolerate” it where it already existed, believing that containment would place it “in the course of ultimate extinction.” Lincoln was not alone in sincerely believing that slavery could be destroyed simply by hemming it in where it already existed and isolating the slave states with a border composed both of free states and oceans that no longer bore newly kidnapped slaves from Africa.
Until the catharsis of rebellion made immediate abolition of slavery possible, Lincoln confessed that he thought slavery might exist in some form in Southern states, and without serious challenge, perhaps into the next century. Lincoln would say so himself as late as 1862, three months after issuing his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. He acknowledged slavery might not completely disappear from America until 1900.
Ultimately, Lincoln and other adherents of the “ultimate extinction” philosophy believed, newly admitted free western states would join the already antislavery North to create a “supermajority” in Congress capable of passing constitutional remedies to eradicate slavery. This is precisely what did happen in 1865, of course, though it took the bloody Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation issued by the commander in chief finally to set the stage for national abolition through a constitutional amendment.
Lincoln’s well-known commitment to prevent the expansion of slavery to the territories proved enough to alarm Southerners. When a worried visitor from New England nonetheless urged him, the very day before the election, to “reassure the men honestly alarmed” over the consequences of his victory, Lincoln hotly explained: “This is the same old trick by which the South breaks down every Northern victory. Even if I were personally willing to barter away the moral principle involved in this contest, for the commercial gain of a new submission to the South, I would go to Washington without the countenance of the men who supported me and were my friends before the election; I would be as powerless as a block of buckeye wood.”
As for “those who will not read, or heed, what I have already publicly said,” Lincoln insisted, they “would not read, or heed, a repetition of it. He went on to say: “What is it I could say that would quiet alarm? Is it that no interference by the government, with slaves or slavery within the states, is intended? I have said this so often already, that a repetition of it is but mockery, bearing an appearance of weakness, and cowardice.”
As the 1860 campaign reached its climax, Lincoln rejected anxious last-minute appeals, from supporters and opponents alike, that he simply assure the South that, if elected, he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it existed. A less astute politician might have regarded such reassurances as pabulum: easy to concoct, easier to swallow. But Lincoln not only maintained his eloquent silence; he spoke out to defend his silence, contending that any policy reiterations would be superfluous, a sign of indecisiveness that could cripple him as president-elect—and as president.
Lincoln relied on his belief that right really could make might. He also relied on the prospects for a successful battle for political success against expansion of the Southern slave-based economic system. To achieve this goal would mean gaining public support for his belief that the future of the nation hinged on acceptance of his animating idea that economic opportunity required a level playing field and an equal chance in the race of life—for all.