The Kansas-Nebraska Act, in contrast, gave the North nothing in exchange for its support.
A major problem Lincoln had with the principle of popular sovereignty was his fervent belief that some things were not negotiable and should not be subject to majority rule or popular decision, including the morality of slavery, which a growing number of Americans believed was wrong. Another problem was that popular sovereignty “enables the first FEW, to deprive the succeeding MANY, of a free exercise of the right of self-government.”183 It was not just bad that Douglas and the Democrats were arguing that popular majority could decide who was human and who was property, but that once those popular majorities had their way, they could keep others subjugated.
Next, Lincoln considered “whether the repeal, with its avowed principle, is intrinsically right.”184 He likened the fight over the extension of slavery to a fight in which the South considered any compromise a defeat. Reverting to a useful metaphor, Lincoln explained, “It is as if two starving men had divided their only loaf; the one had hastily swallowed his half, and then grabbed the other half just as he was putting it to his mouth.”185 He further illustrated the injustice and absurdity of the South’s position by pointing to how the South wanted both to allow jurisdictions to permit slavery but to bar jurisdictions from keeping slaveholders out. In this way, the South could never lose and the North could never win.186
At the end, Lincoln contested Douglas’s claim that Clay and Webster were not in agreement with Lincoln’s side of the argument:
They were great men; and men of great deeds. But where have I assailed them? For what is it, that their life-long enemy, shall now make profit, by assuming to defend them against me, their life-long friend? I go against the repeal of the Missouri compromise; did they ever go for it? They went for compromise of 1850; did I ever go against them? They were greatly devoted to the Union; to the small measure of my ability, was I ever less so? Clay and Webster were dead before this question arose; by what authority shall our Senator say they would espouse his side of it, if alive? Mr. Clay was the leading spirit in making the Missouri compromise; is it very credible that if now alive, he would take the lead in the breaking of it? The truth is that some support from whigs is now a necessity with [Douglas], and for thus it is, that the names of Clay and Webster are now invoked. His old friends have deserted him in such numbers as to leave too few to live by.187
Never before had Lincoln reached such rhetorical heights, and never before had he focused so clearly and forcefully on the immorality of slavery. He would return to these themes throughout the remainder of the decade, time and again defending and aligning himself with Clay’s legacy of compromise and long-held belief that the framers did not design the Constitution to protect slavery but rather to allow the federal government to regulate, even abolish, slavery.
Douglas stayed for the entire Peoria speech and quickly charged onto the stage the moment it ended. In front of hundreds of people, Douglas challenged Lincoln to a debate. Lincoln surprised him by immediately asking Douglas to debate him in Peoria on October 16. After some hesitation, Douglas agreed to speak the same day as Lincoln but not at the same time; he spoke in the afternoon, before the evening, when Lincoln was scheduled to speak. In Peoria, Lincoln gave the same speech he had given in Springfield, but this time he wrote it out in full for publication over a week’s issues in the Illinois State Journal.188 After Peoria, he delivered the same speech in Urbana. The speeches reminded the voters of Illinois that Lincoln was a political force to be reckoned with. They belied any notion that he had retired from politics. Indeed, he had never left it.
Chapter Five
Becoming President
(1856–1860)
There was no dramatic moment when Lincoln suddenly became the man who would be the mythic, beloved president he became. It is tempting to think there must have been some epiphany, such as when in the 1850s Lincoln awoke with a start to tell his friend Judge Dickey, “This nation cannot exist half slave and half free.” But Lincoln was not a man of fits and starts. He was invariably cautious, deliberate in his actions, probing issues from every angle until he was content that he fully grasped them. The 1850s were no exception.
For much of the nation, the biggest and most sudden political surprise of the 1850s was Abraham Lincoln. The split between North and South had been coming for decades. Pierce’s actions led to violence between abolitionist and proslavery forces in Kansas. This conflict known as “Bleeding Kansas” was an intermittent five-year guerrilla war begun when proslavery militias sacked the abolitionist town of Lawrence, burning down the Free State Hotel and destroying the presses of the two newspapers. (One of the raiders suffered the only known death, killed by a piece of the collapsing hotel.) The violent strife was a precursor of the bloodletting that would spread outside the state’s borders and culminate in the Civil War.
Meanwhile, in the 1850s, a new generation of leaders fought their elders to take control of each of the major parties. Stephen Douglas’s star continued to rise, but it was older Democrats, like James Buchanan of Pennsylvania (a man Clay dismissed as one of the “subordinates of Democracy” unworthy of his respect), Clay’s former friend John Crittenden of Kentucky, and New Jersey’s William Dayton, who vied for the Democratic Party’s soul. As the Whig Party collapsed, William Seward, Salmon Chase, Edward Bates, and Orville Browning were among the prominent former Whigs intent on establishing a new party devoted to the abolition of slavery. Both of the major parties traced their origins to Thomas Jefferson, Democrats taking their name from half of Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party, while part of the Whig diaspora claimed the other half.
Few gave a second thought to Lincoln. He was in Illinois, practicing law, while the man who outmaneuvered Douglas to win the presidency in 1856, James Buchanan, was hastening civil war. Buchanan had snatched the Democratic Party’s nomination from Pierce, but like the man he’d defeated, he backed slave-owners’ interests over those of abolitionists, placed federal power on the side of slavery, and blamed abolitionists for the nation’s troubles. The spirit of compromise had died with Henry Clay.
In Washington, all eyes were on Douglas. Democratic leaders saw him as a lock on the 1860 presidential nomination as long as he won his reelection campaign in 1858. They saw no reason for him to be worried about reelection, but Douglas did. He was acutely aware—and well informed—that Lincoln was still a popular Whig leader in their home state and Lincoln was planning a run against him.
In declaring himself a “flat failure,” Lincoln had lowered any expectations that he would ever be returning to the national stage.1 Yet those closest to Lincoln—David Davis, Orville Browning, William Herndon, Leonard Swett, to name a few—knew that lowering expectations served Lincoln’s political purposes. His self-deprecation reinforced his “humble” image as a “self-made man.” This was, of course, fully in line with Clay’s presentation of himself, a braid of himself and a lot of tactics. Drawing on one of Aesop’s most famous fables, Lincoln was the tortoise in this race; the others, the hares, bounding ahead to the audition. Few saw Lincoln coming. Douglas did. They both knew that, in a nation that was tearing itself apart, only the man in the middle could mend it.
I
* * *
In the aftermath of the violent fallout from the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Pierce’s strong backing of slavery interests in Kansas, Lincoln faced two immediate challenges. The first was to decide what, if any, role he expected to play in helping to establish a new political party to replace the Whigs. Lincoln’s second challenge was figuring out his future in politics. Surmounting both challenges was crucial for Lincoln’s newest ambition—a run for the Senate.
In making his decision, Lincoln was following the examples set much earlier by both Jackson and Clay. With the Whig Party dead, Lincoln had to find a new political home. “The man who is of neither party is not—cannot be, of any consequence,” Lincoln said of Clay in his eulogy.2 Jackson, too, showed that the path to higher offic
e could be traveled only with a unified party behind a candidate with a clear constitutional vision that voters could rally around.
As Leonard Swett recalled, Lincoln “believed from the first, I think, that the agitation of Slavery would produce its overthrow, and he acted upon the result as though it was present from the beginning. His tactics were, to get himself in the right place and remain there still, until events would find him in that place.”3 John W. Bunn, a fellow Whig partisan and a merchant who funded Lincoln’s campaigns, found that “Lincoln was a practical politician, but he was not altogether like many other practical politicians. He had his personal ambitions, but he never told any man his deeper plans and few, if any, knew his inner thoughts.”4 In the absence of such disclosures, Lincoln can best be judged on the basis of what he did; his actions revealed his plans. He recognized that he needed the support of a party system, so it was to the party that he knew best that he next turned: the remains of the Whig Party apparatus and the party faithful in Illinois.
Perhaps by design, Lincoln managed not to be in Springfield in October 1854, when the newly formed Republican Party held its convention there. Its platform urged an end to slavery in all federal territories and a repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The Republicans, including Browning, designated Lincoln as a member of the state central committee. Ever sensitive to keeping the different factions within the party as happy as possible, Lincoln pointedly neither accepted nor declined membership on the committee. He likely shaded the truth when he told a friend on the committee, “I have been perplexed some to understand why my name was placed on that committee. I was not consulted on the subject; nor was I apprized [sic] of the appointment, until I discovered it by accident two or three weeks afterwards.”5 Thinking about his run for the Senate the next year, Lincoln explained, “I supposed my opposition to the principle of slavery is as strong as that of any member of the Republican party; but I had also supposed that the extent to which I feel authorized to carry that opposition, practically, was not at all satisfactory to that party.”6 Lincoln still saw himself as closely aligned with the policies of Clay, as he made clear in his Peoria speech, where he had declared that he was not opposed to the elimination of slavery in all the territories but that he still accepted the Fugitive Slave Act (as long as it was narrowly enforced), even expressing sympathy for Southerners. While Democrats who opposed slavery were turning their backs on Pierce, Buchanan, and Douglas, they were still nominally Democrats, who were nonetheless interested in leaving the party for a more sympathetic base. Lincoln was trying to walk a narrow path that could win old-time Whigs, former Whigs who called themselves Republicans, and Democrats, as well as those who were aligned with the anti-immigration, anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party. He retook a seat in the Illinois House to remind the legislators that he was one of them but perhaps alienated some of his constituents when he resigned it after only twenty-two days to focus on joining Douglas in the Senate.
The new Illinois state legislature, assembled on January 1, 1855, would select the state’s next senator. Lincoln told Herndon that he thought he had twenty-five members committed to his candidacy for the Senate. His difficulty was that he needed twenty-five more to get the majority needed from the assembly to secure the open seat, but he was unsure where he could find the requisite support. It would be difficult, given that almost half the general assembly were Democrats who likely supported the incumbent congressman James Shields, an old rival. Lincoln enlisted support from Judge David Davis and Stephen Logan, who had been elected to the Illinois House of Representatives; they estimated on the day of the election in the legislature that Lincoln was only three votes away from the majority he needed to win. What they did not count on was the support enjoyed by Lyman Trumbull, who had bolted the Democratic Party in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and was currently a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
On the initial ballot, Lincoln had forty-five votes to Shields’s forty-one; Trumbull had five votes, and one member went for Governor Joel Mattison. After six ballots, nothing changed, but on the seventh, the Democrats who supported Shields shifted their support to Mattison, and by the ninth ballot, Lincoln’s support had dwindled to fifteen, Trumbull’s had increased to thirty-five, and Mattison’s forty-seven was only three away from the majority he needed for election to the Senate. Lincoln, still loyal to his Whig roots, made the snap judgment to ask his supporters to vote for Trumbull on the tenth ballot. They did, and Trumbull handily won the seat. Lincoln later confessed, perhaps with false modesty, that “a less good humored man than I, perhaps would not have consented to it.”7 Privately, Lincoln was angry and so, too, was David Davis, who made known that he distrusted Trumbull as “a Democrat all his life—dyed in the wool—as ultra as he could be.”8 Mary Todd was so outraged that she refused to speak to Trumbull’s wife, who once had been a friend of hers.
Lincoln learned from this defeat, as he had learned from every one of the ups and downs in his career. If Clay, Jackson, and Taylor had anything in common besides their strong fidelity to the Union, it was the fact that they were always planning their next move. Lincoln had said as much in his eulogies for Taylor and Clay, but he had once again moved too slowly in corralling support. He had begun hustling for the Senate seat a year earlier, but it was not early enough. Taking this lesson to heart, Lincoln did what he had not done before: he began moving quickly and decisively to position himself well in advance to run for the state’s other Senate seat in 1858. On the night after Trumbull won his seat, the Anti-Nebraska Democrats (those opposed to allowing slavery by popular sovereignty), who were gratified that Lincoln had made an appearance that same evening to show his support for his former foe, pledged in return to support him in the next Senate race. Lincoln was also able to get two other Anti-Nebraska Democrats, Norman Judd and John Palmer, both from Chicago, to pledge their future support. Each had previously bankrolled successful Whig candidates.
Thus backed, Lincoln focused on challenging Douglas’s reelection bid in 1858. Lincoln had more than two years to plan, but he understood that victory required him to choose his party as soon as possible. Jackson first ran for the presidency as a Democratic-Republican in 1824, while Clay first ran as the candidate for the National Republicans in 1832. In 1833, a year after he had run against Jackson, Clay founded the Whig Party as a foil to Jackson and a base for future runs for the presidency. With the Whig Party in ruins, the Republican Party was the logical place for Lincoln to go, but in 1855 and 1856 it had not yet become the home for all the opponents of slavery.
Lincoln pondered his options, as revealed in a letter to his friend and fellow former Whig Joshua Speed of Kentucky. Speed told Lincoln of his strong opposition to slavery and his view that the Union ought to be dissolved if Kansas declared itself proslavery, and his hope—against all the evidence to the contrary—that Kansas might still find a way to vote itself a free state. Lincoln struck a pragmatic tone in response. He wrote that he thought of the Kansas-Nebraska Act “not as a law, but as violence from the beginning,”9 a brazen effort to force the spread of slavery. He disagreed with Speed’s view that the men enforcing the law were the problem; Lincoln believed that “the way it is being executed is quite as good as any of its antecedents. It is being executed in the precise way which was intended from the first; else why does no Nebraska man express astonishment or condemnation?”10 Not yet ready to fully commit to the newly minted Republican Party, Lincoln answered Speed, who’d asked where he stood. “I think I am a whig; but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist.”11 He reminded Speed, “When I was in Washington I voted for the Wilmot Proviso as good as forty times, and I never heard of anyone attempting to unwhig me for that. I now do more than oppose the extension of slavery.”12 In fact, Lincoln voted for the Wilmot Provision far fewer times, but his support for it was consistent. Next, he ruled out the Know Nothing Party. Indeed, he had hosted Fillmore when he came through Springfield in June 1854. Fillmore was then considering h
is third-party run for the Know Nothing Party’s presidential nomination, but Lincoln had no interest in joining a party that did not stand on the same principles on which the Whig Party had been founded. As Lincoln explained to his friend Speed in 1855,
I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.13
On February 22, 1856, Lincoln and Herndon secured invitations as two nonjournalists to attend the conference of Anti-Nebraska newspaper editors who were planning for the upcoming presidential election later that year. With Lincoln’s input, the conference drafted a declaration that called for restoring the Missouri Compromise, upholding the constitutionality of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and promising noninterference with slavery in the states where it currently existed. It is little wonder that Lincoln would fit in so comfortably with the group; they were endorsing Clay’s compromises of 1850. At the same time, the group endorsed Free Soil doctrine, recommending that freedom be guaranteed in federal districts and territories but not abolished by force in slave states. Free Soilers urged religious toleration and opposed restrictive changes in immigration laws. Though the conference avoided calling itself Republican, it was in all but name, and it planned at a statewide convention in Bloomington, Illinois, on May 29, 1856, to formalize the establishment of the Republican Party in Illinois. On the night of the final banquet for the program, the editors toasted Lincoln “as the warm and consistent friend of Illinois, and our next candidate for the U.S. Senate.”14
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