Lincoln's Mentors

by Michael J. Gerhardt

  The committee’s chair, Stephen Douglas, devised a plan to promote western expansion and facilitate construction of a transcontinental railroad. (As a lawyer for the rail lobby, he received sizable payment for his support.) Douglas figured the vast plains west of the Missouri could be broken into two new federal territories, Kansas and Nebraska. The most controversial part of the original plan was his proposal to organize the new territories in accordance with the principle of popular sovereignty, which he believed had the greatest promise of averting civil war.

  In pushing his plan, Douglas initially tried to avoid saying anything about repealing the Missouri Compromise. He hoped to report out of his committee a bill giving settlers in Kansas and Nebraska the right to draft their own state constitutions at the time of statehood. Southern Whigs and Douglas’s fellow Democrats told him, however, that they would not support the proposed bill unless it allowed the local residents of both Kansas and Nebraska to vote on the slavery question during the territorial years. This required repealing the Missouri Compromise, which had forbidden the extension of slavery west of Missouri.

  Until then, neither Pierce nor his Cabinet knew about the negotiations over Douglas’s bill. Douglas pushed a reluctant Pierce to meet with his Cabinet on Saturday, January 21, 1854, to discuss whether the Missouri Compromise should be repealed. With the backing of a majority of his Cabinet, Pierce agreed to bring the question to the Supreme Court, which he expected, given that a majority of its members had been appointed by Democratic presidents (including himself), to declare the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional on the ground that stripping slave-owners of their property (slaves) when they traveled through the territory violated the Fifth Amendment’s ban on seizing property without due process of law. This way, Pierce could let the Court take the heat for dismantling the Missouri Compromise.

  Later on January 21, Douglas consented to a repeal of the Missouri Compromise to maintain the support of Southern Whigs and Democrats for his planned Kansas-Nebraska bill. Because he had to present the amended bill on Monday or have the bill take a backseat to other pressing legislative business, he realized that he had to meet Pierce the next day, Sunday, January 22, 1854. But Pierce had vowed, after becoming president, not to do any business on Sunday. It was a decision prompted by tragedy. When Pierce, his wife, and their son, Bennie, were traveling to Washington for the inauguration, their train car derailed, and, as it fell off an embankment, Pierce and his wife watched with horror as their only son was crushed to death in front of them. Pierce’s wife swore never to forgive him, and Pierce promised to attend church services and spend his time contemplating spiritual matters and doing penance on Sundays. To get a meeting then, Douglas had to find some way—or some person—to persuade the president to make an exception to his rule.

  Early on Sunday morning, Douglas went to the one man he believed could persuade Pierce to do business on a Sunday, Pierce’s secretary of war, Jefferson Davis. Davis had become Pierce’s closest and most trusted confidant. Douglas brought a group of Southern Democrats with him to Davis’s residence, where they met with Davis and stressed the need to move as quickly as possible on the Kansas-Nebraska Act. They persuaded Davis to intercede with Pierce and arrange a meeting with him for later that same day. Democrats had the numbers in both the House and the Senate to get the bill passed, but they needed Pierce’s support to ensure that it would become law. If Pierce were inclined to keep his promise to abide by the Missouri Compromise, Douglas and Davis knew they did not have the numbers to muster the two thirds necessary to override his veto. Moreover, Democrats held only a bare majority in the House, and they needed every vote to get the bill through. Davis and the group then went to the White House, and Davis met privately with Pierce to urge that he meet with them. After some hesitation, Pierce agreed.

  Douglas and Davis took charge of the meeting. They explained to Pierce that the bill was consistent with the constitutionally protected rights of states and slaveholders and the ideal of popular sovereignty. Pierce agreed to support their bill. Determined that Pierce not change his mind, Douglas took the extraordinary step of asking him to write out in his own hand the portion of the bill repealing the Missouri Compromise. Pierce agreed.

  The wheels in motion, Pierce did everything he could to get the law approved in both chambers of Congress. The Democratic majority was so large in the Senate that passage was a virtual certainty, but Pierce made support for the bill a test of loyalty in the House, vowing to withhold patronage and other favors from any Democrat who opposed it. When the dust settled, a coalition of more than half the Northern Democrats and most Southerners approved the bill 35–13 in the Senate and 113–100 in the House. Eight days later, on May 30, 1854, Pierce signed it into law.

  The Kansas-Nebraska Act instantaneously transformed the constitutional landscape. By repealing the Missouri Compromise, Pierce and Congress were rejecting one of Henry Clay’s greatest achievements, which had been predicated on the principle that had been a fixture of American law since Monroe’s administration—that Congress had the authority to bar slavery in the territories. The new law was based on the entirely different constitutional principle of popular sovereignty. This new principle was largely untested; it had worked in Nebraska, where the people overwhelmingly voted to oppose slavery, but Pierce, Douglas, Davis, and the majority of each chamber in Congress were betting that popular sovereignty would solve the fight over slavery in Kansas.

  The bet was a bust of monumental proportions. Southern Democrats and the people of Nebraska were content to leave the slavery question to the people of Kansas, but the Democratic Party suffered huge losses in the midterm elections. In the congressional elections, Democrats lost in every antislavery state except California and New Hampshire. Losing more than fifty seats in the House, the Democrats went from having a solid majority in the first two years of Pierce’s administration to a minority in what would be its last two years. While Democrats actually increased their number of seats in the Senate, the gains were illusory: The coalition that had brought Pierce to the White House was shattered, and Democrats who opposed slavery would flee the party.

  Lincoln did not know all the machinations that had brought the new law into being, but even from as far away as Illinois, he knew the Kansas-Nebraska Act was a disaster for everything that he, Henry Clay, and the Whigs had worked to attain over decades. Just two years before, Lincoln’s eulogy for Clay had placed the Missouri Compromise that he had forged in 1820 at the center of his legacy. Now, two years later, the Whig Party and the Missouri Compromise lay in ruins. It was unclear what or who would take their place. A new antislavery party, the Republican Party, had been established in Ripon, Wisconsin, on March 20, 1854, but it was too soon to tell whether it would have any more success than the Free Soil and Know-Nothing parties.

  Still thinking of himself as a Whig, Lincoln would not let the destruction of one of Clay’s greatest legacies go unaddressed. On October 3, 1854, Douglas appeared in the House of Representatives hall at the Illinois state capitol to defend the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lincoln waited in the wings as Douglas spoke and shouted at Douglas once he finished that he wished to offer a rejoinder the next day on the same stage. Douglas reluctantly agreed.

  Lincoln arrived well-prepared, reading his well-researched speech, dissecting Douglas’s arguments one by one. Douglas sometimes interjected, but the interjections did not disrupt Lincoln’s flow, establishing a pattern they would repeat during their 1858 contest for the Senate. On this occasion, as he would twelve days later in Peoria, Illinois, when Douglas repeated the same speech, Lincoln meticulously explained his objections to popular sovereignty and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, defended the Missouri Compromise, and explained his moral objections to slavery. As he did so, Lincoln did not mince words; the very opening of his speech reflected his awareness of the damage just done to a rightfully valued centerpiece of Clay’s legacy.

  He began, “The repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the propriety of its restorat
ion, constitute the subject of what I am about to say.”158 He laid out the foundations of the Missouri Compromise, which he said had been based on the Northwest Ordinance, a law enacted by the Continental Congress that prohibited slavery in the new territories that were eligible for admission into the Union as new states. Lincoln explained how the Northwest Ordinance had been fashioned in 1787 by Thomas Jefferson, “the author of the Declaration of Independence, and otherwise a chief actor in the revolution; then a delegate in Congress; afterwards twice President; who was, is, and perhaps will continue to be, the most distinguished politician in our history.”159 Seventeen when Jefferson died in 1826, Lincoln was drawn to Jefferson’s political philosophy before becoming a fan of Clay. Indeed, Lincoln rarely thought of one without the other, Jefferson having crafted the vision that Clay and then Lincoln followed. “All honor to Jefferson,” Lincoln declared later in 1859:

  a man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.160

  Back in Peoria in 1854, Lincoln did not need to tell his audience that Jefferson was the same man whose political vision Henry Clay had always argued he was attempting to champion. Lincoln said it was “with Jefferson” that “the policy of prohibiting slavery in new territory originated”161 and that the Missouri Compromise followed the example of the Northwest Ordinance, which the Continental Congress adopted on July 13, 1787. “The Missouri Compromise,” he reminded his audience, and Douglas, “had been in practical operation for about a quarter of a century, and had received the sanction and approbation of men of all parties in every section of the Union.”162 Lincoln then recounted the history of that landmark agreement, which had been fashioned by “Henry Clay, as its prominent champion,” and argued that popular sovereignty could not supersede the Northwest Ordinance and the Missouri Compromise.163 Lincoln conveniently left out of his history that the fugitive slave clause in the original Constitution had first appeared in the last article of the ordinance.

  If the North and South were locked into positions on slavery that they could not easily or naturally abandon, Lincoln wondered, what national solution to the problem was feasible? He confessed that he did not know the answer, even while maintaining that owning slaves was immoral: “When southern people tell us that 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. If all earthly power were given me,” he confessed, “I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution.”164 Lincoln acknowledged further the problems with some proposed solutions: “My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,—to their own native land. But a moment’s reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible.”165 He explained that “if [the slaves] were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them in many times ten days.”166 Unable to go beyond what he thought the people of the state could accept, he asked, “What next?”

  Free them and make them politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment is not the sole question, if indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot, then, make them equals. It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted; but for their tardiness in this, I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the south.167

  Nevertheless, try as he might not to be critical of Southerners as a people (he had many close friends from the South, including Alexander Stephens), Lincoln had gently suggested that the likeliest solution to the problem was the one that Clay had championed—gradual emancipation—for which Lincoln had praised Clay at the end of his eulogy168 but which conflicted with the desires of Southern leaders to protect slavery, not to do away with it.

  Lincoln went further to dismiss the disingenuous arguments Douglas had made that conditions in Kansas and Nebraska were somehow not hospitable to the entry of slavery; it was a poison that Lincoln knew would threaten to consume these territories if given the chance, and Douglas had given them that chance. Lincoln acknowledged, “The doctrine of self-government is right—absolutely and eternally right—but,” he added,

  it has no just application, as here attempted. Or perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such just application depends upon whether a negro is not or is a man. If he is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just as he pleases with him. But if he is a man, is it not to that extent, a total of destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself that is self-government, but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism.169

  Lincoln attacked the morality of slavery itself, just as Henry Clay had done and he had lauded Clay for doing. He argued that the slaves were people, not animals, and consequently possessed certain natural rights. “If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal’; and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.”170 He continued, “No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent. I say this is the leading principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism.”171

  It followed, then, that the extension of slavery into the territories and, prospectively, “to every other part of the wide world, where men can be found inclined to take it,” was equally wrong.172 So was Douglas’s “declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery.”173 Lincoln had arrived at the core of his political and constitutional belief, derived from the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.”174 He explained that the Founders understood that slavery was wrong.175 For practical reasons they could not outlaw it altogether at the time of the founding, but instead they “hedged and hemmed it in to the narrowest limits of necessity.”176 Indeed, they did not allow the word slavery in the Constitution but permitted only indirect references to it, “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.”177

  Lincoln added, “The Missouri Compromise ought to be restored. For the sake of the Union, it ought to be restored.”178 Whether it be the Whigs or whatever party took their place, Lincoln was urging his fellow citizens “to elect a House of Representatives which will vote its restoration. If by any means, we omit to do this, what follows?”179 Lincoln predicted it would not be just the possibility of slavery being approved in Kansas, but something worse—the loss of “the SPIRIT of COMPROMISE; for who after this will ever trust in a national compromise? The spirit of mutual concession—that spirit which first gave us the constitution, and which has thrice saved the Union” (by the Northwest Ordinance, the Missouri Compromise, and the Compromise of 1850), the spirit of Henry Clay, would be lost again.180 Lincoln denounced slavery again for its immorality:

  Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature—opposition to it, is his Love of justice. These principles are in eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks, and throes, a
nd convulsions must ceaselessly follow. Repeal the Missouri compromise—repeal all compromises—repeal the declaration of independence—repeal all past history, you still can not repeal human nature. It still will be the abundance of man’s heart, that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.181

  Lincoln devoted much of the rest of the speech to exposing the fallacies of Douglas’s claims that the principle of popular sovereignty developed from or was perfectly consistent with the principles of the earlier compromises over slavery. (Nearly every one of Clay’s great speeches had a list of reasons for opposing any alternative to Clay’s proposals.) Douglas claimed that the Compromise of 1850 established the precedent for the new law, but Lincoln argued that “the North consented to” allowing Utah and New Mexico to decide whether to come into the Union “with or without slavery as they shall then see fit,”

  not because they considered it right in itself; but because they were compensated. . . . They, at the same time, got California into the Union as a free State. This was far the best part of all they had struggled for by the Wilmot Proviso. They also got the area of slavery somewhat narrowed in the settlement of the boundary of Texas. Also, they got the slave trade abolished in the District of Columbia. For all these desirable objects the North could afford to yield something, and they did yield to the South the Utah and New Mexico provision.182