The secession question was intertwined with the issue of the extent to which the Constitution permitted the federal government to regulate slavery or required protecting it. Back in Illinois, Lincoln followed the great debate in newspapers and correspondence. Lots of people, including Whigs like Lincoln, read Webster’s comments as accepting the legitimacy of secession and confirming what Lincoln and many other Whigs had suspected for some time—that there could be no real compromise possible between those who demanded abolition and those who demanded the protection and expansion of slavery. As early as 1850, John Todd Stuart had told Lincoln that he predicted that soon all men would have to choose between abolitionism and the Democratic Party.130 Stuart leaned in favor of joining the latter, while Lincoln agreed the choice had to be made but added, “in an Emphatic tone” that, “when that time comes my mind is made up. The Slavery question can’t be compromised.”131
VI
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Henry Clay never returned to the Senate. Too ill to go home to Lexington, he died of tuberculosis in Washington on June 29, 1852. Rutgers College president Theodore Frelinghuysen, a former senator and Clay’s running mate in 1844, delivered his eulogy in Washington. In Congress, members of each chamber rose to pay homage to Clay, and there was an outpouring of eulogies around the country.
Eight days after Clay’s death, Abraham Lincoln delivered his. Eulogies are notoriously unreliable, for they tend to accentuate, if not overstate, the positive. (Clay’s for Calhoun was a perfect example.) This was no doubt as true of the eulogies given by former colleagues and rivals of Clay as it was of Lincoln’s. His eulogy was noteworthy because it was his highest-profile address since leaving Congress, and he had arranged, with editors he’d known in Illinois and met in Washington, for the eulogy to be printed in newspapers all over the country.
Today, people read Lincoln’s eulogy of Clay for how it illuminates Lincoln’s vision of himself. At the time he delivered and distributed it, his tribute reminded Whigs that he was still alive and well and one of them. Speaking at a podium at the front of the Hall of Representatives in the Illinois state capitol, he could not have asked for a more dramatic setting, and if anyone had previously missed Lincoln’s persistent declarations of fealty to Clay, they could not miss them now.
Lincoln began, as Clay and classical funeral orations characteristically did, with an acknowledgment of the circumstances. Just a few days before, the nation had celebrated Independence Day, and Lincoln recognized that Clay’s life and the life of the United States had nearly been identical; Clay was born one year after independence from Britain. As Lincoln remarked, “The infant nation, and the infant child began the race of life together. For three quarters of a century they have travelled hand in hand. They have been companions ever.”132 He reminded his audience of the crucible that the nation had been fused in then, perhaps not unlike those that forged Clay’s character in public life. “The nation has passed its perils, and is free, prosperous, and powerful. The child has reached his manhood, his middle age, his old age, and is dead. In all that concerned the nation the man ever sympathized; and now the nation mourns for the man.”133
Lincoln knew that the Whig Party, which Clay had built and Lincoln had long supported, was splintering under the stress of the Compromise of 1850. It had always been Clay’s greatest aspiration to place the country’s needs above his own and those of his party. Lincoln cleverly elaborated on that theme by quoting from “one of the public Journals, opposed to him politically.”134 What followed (the longest quote from another source in the eulogy) underscored Clay’s patriotism.
Ah, it is at times like these, that the petty distinctions of mere party disappear. We see only the great, the grand, the noble features of the departed statesman. . . . Henry Clay belonged to his country—to the world; mere party cannot claim men like him. His career has been national, his fame has filled the earth, his memory will endure to the last syllable of recorded time.135
Lincoln quoted the journal’s description of the distinctive attributes of Clay’s patriotism, noting that his “character and fame are national property.”136 This portion echoed the epitaph that Clay had written for his tombstone: “He knew no North, no South, no East, no West, but only the Union, which held them all in its sacred circle, so now his countrymen will know no grief, that is not as widespread as the bounds of the confederacy.”137
Lincoln, drawing his words from the same source, recalled Clay’s remarkable career of public service, trying to bring peace whenever and wherever he could, through deeds and words: “‘His eloquence has not been surpassed. In the effective power to move the heart of man, Clay was without an equal.’” In the fights that threatened to rip the Union apart, he “‘has quelled our civil commotions, by a power and influence, which belonged to no other statesman of his age and times.’”138
Lincoln then began to sketch in his own words the course of Clay’s life. He remarked that “Mr. Clay’s lack of a more perfect early education, however it may be regretted generally, teaches at least one profitable lesson: it teaches that in this country, one can scarcely be so poor, but that, if he will, he can acquire sufficient education to get through the world respectably.”139
He proceeded to review Clay’s career, beginning with his legal studies, his law practice, election to the Kentucky state legislature, election to the U.S. Senate, reelection to the Kentucky House of Representatives, selection as the speaker of the Kentucky House, service again for the remainder of an open term in the Senate, election to the U.S. House of Representatives, selection as speaker there, commissioner for negotiating an end to the war with Britain in 1819, reelection to the House, reselection as speaker, selection as secretary of state, his return to the practice of law, and reelection to the U.S. Senate more than once. Through that remarkable public career, Lincoln suggested, “there never has been a moment since 1824 till after 1848 when a very large portion of the American people did not cling to him with an enthusiastic hope and purpose of still elevating him to the Presidency. With other men, to be defeated, was to be forgotten; but to him, defeat was but a trifling incident.”140
Lincoln found Clay as averse to quitting as Taylor (and of course himself). “Even those of both political parties, who have been preferred to him for the highest office, have run far briefer courses than he, and left him, still shining, high in the heavens of the political world. Jackson, Van Buren, Harrison, Polk, and Taylor, all rose after, and set long before him.”141 (Lincoln did not bother including Tyler or Fillmore, neither of whom had been elected; they were accidents.) Clay, unlike any other man in Lincoln’s estimation, “was surpassingly eloquent; but many eloquent men fail utterly; and they are not, as a class, generally successful. His judgment was excellent; but many men of good judgment, live and die unnoticed. His will was indomitable; but this quality often secures to its owner nothing better than a character for useless obstinacy.”142 Taken together, these qualities “are rarely combined in a single individual; and this is probably the reason why such men as Henry Clay are so rare in the world.”143 Emulating Clay meant refining several attributes, not just one; a great and inspiring leader like him led not only through example, but through excellence in judgment, eloquence, and determination. Clay had shown Lincoln—and now Lincoln was trying to show his fellow Whigs—that party was only part of a man, that party came second, after allegiance to the nation and its perpetuity. The Whig Party could fracture, but the nation had to endure.
Clay’s eloquence required further comment. Webster’s excellence as an orator was based on his beautiful declarations, while Calhoun’s oratory was based on the remorseless logic of his arguments. But Clay’s rhetoric, Lincoln suggested,
did not consist, as many fine specimens of eloquence do, of types and figures—of antithesis, and elegant arrangement of words and sentences; but rather of that deeply earnest and impassioned tone, and manner, which can proceed only from great sincerity and a thorough conviction, in the speaker of the justice and im
portance of his cause.
In fact, as many had concluded, Clay’s eloquence was a matter of theatrics. Lincoln nonetheless suggested that Clay stood out as an orator because “no one was so habitually careful to avoid all sectional ground. Whatever he did, he did for the whole country.”144 Even if this was not entirely true of Clay, Lincoln understood that a great orator seeks to cast his rhetoric on a higher plane for a higher purpose than mere partisan interest. In the case of Clay, Lincoln said that higher purpose was “a deep devotion,” like Clay’s, “to the cause of human liberty—a strong sympathy with the oppressed everywhere, and an ardent wish for their elevation.”145
Where there was division, Clay relentlessly looked for unity. Lincoln surveyed Clay’s uncanny knack at working out deals to avert disaster and achieve compromise. Lincoln brought up the decades-earlier controversy about the admission of Missouri into the Union as a slave state, which would have thrown off the equilibrium between proslavery and antislavery forces in Congress. He recalled Thomas Jefferson’s remembrance that “‘this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened, and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.’”146 Just starting his storied career in Congress at that point, Clay forged the Missouri Compromise, which allowed for the admission of Maine (a free state) with Missouri (a slave state) at the same time. The deal also provided that, except for Missouri, slavery was to be excluded from the Louisiana Purchase lands above an imaginary line drawn by Congress at 36°30′ north latitude.
Lincoln saved the most difficult subject—slavery—for the last several paragraphs of his eulogy. He knew that Clay had arranged for his own slaves to be gradually released after his death and that he was committed to gradual emancipation all of his life. Indeed, Lincoln said, Clay “did not perceive, that on a question of human right, the negroes were to be excepted from the human race.”147 Lincoln suggested that even though Clay owned slaves, he “did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself.”148 Lincoln said Clay had the virtue of not being at either extreme in the slavery debate, while it was the extremists at both ends who raised the specter of disunion.149 No one missed the obvious fact that, in 1852, Lincoln still thought of Clay’s vision—an indissoluble Union and gradual emancipation—as his own.
Without naming his target, Lincoln took direct aim at the proslavery theologian Alexander Campbell, who had sneered at the “declaration that ‘all men are created free and equal’” and dismissed it as not being in his Bible.150 Lincoln identified that position with Calhoun and others who had contempt for “republican America. The like was not heard in the fresher days of the Republic,”151 and he contrasted such hateful rhetoric “with the language of that truly national man, whose life and death we now commemorate and lament.”152 He quoted from a speech given in 1827 by Clay to the American Colonization Society, of which Clay had long been president. In it, Clay responded to the critics of the society who defended slavery and opposed their efforts to return enslaved African Americans to their native lands. Lincoln quoted Clay: “If they would repress all tendencies towards liberty, and ultimate emancipation, they must do more than put down the benevolent efforts of this society. They must go back to the era of our liberty and independence, and muzzle the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return. They must renew the slave trade with all its train of atrocities.”153 Worse, he said,
they must blow out the moral lights around us, and extinguish that greatest torch of all which America presents to a benighted world—pointing the way to their rights, their liberties, and their happiness. And when they have achieved all those purposes their work will be yet incomplete. 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.154
Lincoln could not match Clay’s eloquence in his final two paragraphs, so he did not try. Instead, he returned to Clay’s hope for “a glorious consummation” when slavery could be abolished.155 “And if, to such a consummation, the efforts of Mr. Clay shall have contributed, it will be what he most ardently wished, and none of his labors will have been more valuable to his country and his kind.” Lincoln ended by reminding his audience—thanks to the pending distribution of his speech, an audience well beyond that in front of him—that the nation still was “prosperous and powerful” in part because of Henry Clay.156 “Such a man,” he declared, “the times have demanded, and such, in the providence of God was given us. But he is gone. Let us strive to deserve, as far as mortals may, the continued care of Divine Providence, trusting that, in future national emergencies, He will not fail to provide us the instruments of safety and security.”157
Lincoln concluded with repeated references to the divine, putting both Clay and himself on the side of the angels. Lincoln never mentioned the enormous impact Clay had on him, at least not in so many words, nor did he quote from Clay’s more recent speeches, particularly his last. Instead, he quoted most extensively Clay’s earlier speeches, no less great than his later ones, to show the longevity and consistency of Clay’s thoughts. Those, of course, had been the speeches that Lincoln had studied and recited for years.
On October 24, 1852, four months after Clay passed away, Daniel Webster died. The “great triumvirate,” Calhoun, Clay, and Webster—the three men who had dominated national discourse for decades—were no more. Though Lincoln admired (and often modeled) Webster’s oratory, he made no public eulogy for Webster as he had done for Taylor and Clay. Lincoln knew Webster and respected him, but he never felt the ideological kinship to him that he had felt for Clay. Besides the fact that Webster was from Massachusetts and the other two from his home state, Webster had been more equivocal over secession than either Taylor or Clay had been. Clay and Taylor had always opposed secession, and while Clay had supported a fugitive slave law, he did so in the spirit of compromise, without the zeal with which Webster had defended it. Webster’s ambiguous rhetoric over secession and his over-the-top support for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 confirmed Lincoln’s reluctance to honor him. Silence would be Lincoln’s farewell.
VII
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As the presidential election of 1852 approached, Lincoln was aware that the Whig Party was nearly defunct. Regional differences had weakened it, but the Compromise of 1850 finished the job once and for all. It divided the Whigs into proslavery and antislavery camps, with fault lines so deep they made Fillmore the first sitting president to fail to receive his party’s support for another term. Instead, the party eventually agreed on its fifty-third ballot to nominate the old general Winfield Scott for president. Scott’s long-standing opposition to slavery discouraged support anywhere in the South, while the Whig Party’s discrepant decisions not to embrace the Compromise of 1850 and not to denounce slavery in its platform cost it support throughout the North. That left Scott only one option—to lose, which he did, to a lackluster former senator, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire. Pierce likened himself to Jackson and Polk, though unlike either of them, he had a drinking problem so severe that his wife had forced him to leave the Senate to deal with it. It was the last time the Whig Party nominated a presidential candidate.
Besides his drinking problem, Pierce had other distinctions, none good. He had never sponsored any bill in his two terms in the House or his single term in the Senate. He had been a major in the Mexican War but was discharged early after he was injured when his horse fell on him. When informed her husband had won the Democratic Party nomination for president, Pierce’s wife fainted. She was convinced that if he won the general election, the pressure of the presidency would lead him to start drinking again. Though Pierce called himself Young Hickory of the Granite Hills to invoke the notion that he was Andr
ew Jackson reincarnated, his most notable attribute was that he was a “doughface,” a proslavery Northerner.
As Pierce took the oath of office, Lincoln was still practicing law in Springfield and traveling the circuit, but he watched with consternation as Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and now President Pierce, yet another pretender to Jackson’s legacy, pushed a scheme that brought the nation closer to civil war.
It began with a constitutional conundrum that Pierce largely made for himself and had to confront. Strict constructionists, like Pierce, who claimed to read powers-granting provisions of the Constitution narrowly, had argued that Congress lacked the power to restrict slavery in the territories, but as a candidate Pierce had promised to uphold the Compromise of 1850, which, in reauthorizing the original Missouri Compromise, had barred slavery from the federal territories it covered. Kansas and Nebraska had been included in the land that the French sold the United States in the Louisiana Purchase, and by 1854, farmers, ranchers, and prospectors were moving out west to seek their fortunes. The surge intensified the pressure for organizing territorial governments in Kansas and Nebraska to the extent that it became impossible for Pierce and Congress to ignore it. Abolitionists wished for the two areas to be free, while their opponents wanted to extend slavery into both, but the Missouri Compromise stood in their way, and although Pierce urged vigorous enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, he did not want to revisit the Missouri Compromise. He left the crafting of a solution to Congress, meaning the Senate Committee on Territories.
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