A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  And he did not know for sure which way the political winds were blowing. In the 1850s, the nation experienced its largest reordering of political parties in its history. The Liberty Party, abolitionists energized by an evangelical perfectionist theology, had experienced some success in the early 1840s, especially in New York, but its base was too radical and its ideology too focused to allow it to become a national party. The Free Soil Party showed promise of broader appeal in 1848, enticing both Whigs and Democrats in New England, New York, and across the northern tiers of the Midwestern states to join its ranks, but it had yet to achieve a wider appeal. Both parties developed from a groundswell of Northern antislavery and sectional sentiment.

  In these same years, Lincoln was discouraged by the nativism sweeping the country. Immigration had surged in the 1840s, bringing newcomers fleeing revolutions in continental Europe and famine in Ireland. In response, an anti-immigration movement had sprung up. Various secret societies coalesced in the early 1850s into the American Party, popularly known as Know-Nothings, because members, when asked about their organization, steadfastly declared their ignorance of the party. The largest group of immigrants—the Irish—as well as many Germans, were Catholic and became the target of Protestant attacks. Many Americans viewed Catholic obedience to a conservative pope as a threat to the liberal American belief in religious liberty. Paradoxically, Know-Nothings and other nativist groups often attracted the same voters who were for temperance, hostile to the hard-drinking Irish Catholics, and against slavery. This appeal to nationalism united Whigs, Democrats, and Free Soilers into a Know-Nothing movement that experienced some spectacular election victories in 1854 and 1855. The New York Herald even predicted the Know-Nothings would win the presidency in 1856.

  Lincoln became heartsick as he watched the Know-Nothings make inroads into the Whig Party. He wrote to Owen Lovejoy, abolitionist minister of the Congregational church in Princeton, Illinois, whose brother, Elijah, had been killed in 1837 for defending his printing press in Alton, “I do not perceive how any one professing to be sensitive to the wrongs of the negroes, can join in a league to degrade a class of white men.” He was more adamant in a letter to his old friend Joshua Speed. “I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be?” Lincoln then addressed the dizzying events unfolding across the nation.

  Lincoln became dismayed by the nativist movement’s inroads into the Whig Party in the 1850s. “The Know Nothing Citizen” depicts a fair-haired young man meant to be the embodiment of the native-born citizen.

  Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal. ” We now practically read it, “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “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 pretence of loving liberty—Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

  LINCOLN WATCHED FROM A DISTANCE as another new party struggled to be born. Starting in 1852, a moderate antislavery movement began to attract disgruntled Whigs, Democrats, and Free Soilers. If the problem of slavery became a primary catalyst for this new movement, its first leaders also expressed long-held economic beliefs about protective tariffs, internal improvements, and the use of public lands in the West. The urgency to act now grew from their sense that their ideas were being blocked by a Southern oligarchy that for too long had exercised too much power in Washington. Opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act led to local meetings in Wisconsin and Michigan, as well as in Vermont, Maine, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. This new movement was called by different names, but the name “Republican”—probably first used in Ripon, Wisconsin, in February 1854—quickly became its calling card. Concerned about the future, these early Republican leaders saw themselves as heirs to the old Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans of the past.

  IN 1854 OR 1855, Lincoln wrote two notes on slavery.

  The first, perhaps referring to George Fitzhugh’s Sociology of Slavery, stated, “Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.” Fitzhugh, a Virginia lawyer and social theorist, had argued in his 1854 book that the slave was “but a grown up child” who needed the protections provided by Southern society, whereas free labor in the North could be easily exploited.

  Lincoln began his second note with a philosophical question. “If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B.—why not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A? … You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker?” He tried out the same argument with the characteristics of “intellectual superiority” and “interest.” In each case, his response is, be careful, “you are to be slave to the first man you meet,” with a color, intellect, or interest superior to yours. This fragment is a rare glimpse of a private Lincoln puzzling out the most public problem of the day.

  Lincoln’s reading, contemplation, and writing was his means not simply to acquire more knowledge or to prepare for a future speech, but to forge his moral character. Always an astute observer of the character of others, he was keenly aware of his own moral development. Lincoln attempted to clarify his ethical identity even as he prepared to speak with new clarity about the moral issues facing the nation.

  Many of the ideas in these notes, and sometimes the exact language, would later find their way into his speeches. Although remembered as a grand spontaneous speaker, Lincoln increasingly preferred careful preparation before making a speech.

  He also listened. On a warm July day in 1854, Cassius M. Clay, an antislavery editor from Kentucky, lectured in Springfield as part of his tour of Illinois. Denied the use of the rotunda of the statehouse because of his abolitionist views, Clay spoke in a grove of trees at the edge of town. Lincoln was present, “whittling sticks as he lay on the turf.”

  Clay aimed his rhetorical guns at Douglas and his Springfield mouthpiece, the Illinois State Register, edited by Douglas defender Charles H. Lamphier. Clay, born the son of a large Kentucky slaveholder, was a cousin of Henry Clay, Lincoln’s political hero. As a student at Yale, young Cassius became impressed with the dynamism of New England’s free white labor economy. On his return to Kentucky, he saw with fresh eyes the impoverishment of his own region, which he attributed to its reliance on black slave labor. The way that Clay connected free men with free labor struck a responsive chord in Lincoln.

  Clay centered his remarks in Springfield on fidelity to the Declaration of Independence as the key to the present debate on slavery. “The Declaration of Independence asserted an immortal truth. It declared political equality as to personal, civil, and religious rights.” When he turned his firepower on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Clay took aim at the economic impact on the new states. “As men of commerce, mere men of the world, conscious that slavery leads back to barbarism, we cannot look with indifference upon the conversion of this vast region to slavery.” Lincoln, imbued with a belief in everyone’s right to rise, was critical of slavery for denying that right.

  LINCOLN FINALLY SPOKE out in late August 1854, three months after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He spoke in response to a request from Richard Yates to assist in his campaign for reelection to Congress in Lincoln’s home district. Yates was an early opponent of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, condemning it in March on the floor of the House of Representatives. On Friday, August 25, Lincoln traveled to Yates’s home in Jacksonville and stayed overnight; the two traveled together to the Scott County Whig Convention in Winchester. Lincoln’s speech focused on “the great wrong and injustice of the Missouri Compromise, and the extension of slavery into free territory.” The local newspaper believed Lincoln offered “a masterful effort … equal to any upon the same subject in Congress.”

&
nbsp; On September 12, 1854, Lincoln addressed a German anti-Nebraska gathering in Bloomington, Illinois. The German immigrants in Illinois, numbering more than thirty thousand by 1850, had been moving away from their initial support for the Democratic Party over the issue of slavery. In a season of increasingly incendiary rhetoric, Lincoln addressed the German audience in a decidedly different tone. He was inclusive rather than abusive. “He first declared that the Southern slaveholders were neither better, nor worse than we of the North,” reported the Bloomington Pantagraph. He further stated, “If we were situated as they are, we should act and feel as they do; and if they were situated as we are, they should act and feel as we do. We never ought to lose sight of this fact in discussing the subject.” Lincoln, who in his early political career had attacked opponents without mercy, began his remarks with a plea for understanding for the people of the South, who others just now joining the anti-Nebraska coalition delighted in vilifying.

  Lincoln’s speech was more a history lesson than a harangue. He recounted the story of the development of the Mississippi River valley after it was acquired from the French. He invoked the name and precedent of Thomas Jefferson, whom Lincoln identified as a Southerner—a Virginian—who had declared that “slavery should never be introduced into” the territories. Lincoln appealed to the precedent of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which declared that for all time the territories north of the 36°30’ latitude line, the southern boundary of Missouri, “should be free.”

  IN THE 1850S, STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS was becoming one of the most visible national politicians. The Little Giant, small in stature, wielded a mighty hammer with his potent words. Douglas’s friends and critics puzzled over how such an astute politician could so misread the signs on the Nebraska horizon. Did he not understand that his actions would raise a storm of protest? Personal motives are exceedingly complex, and Douglas acted from an assortment of them. He started with a belief in local self-government. Douglas also had a desire to help the West grow. He wanted to damp down the extremists, both in the North and South, on the slavery issue. He hoped his actions could bring the Democratic Party together. Last—some would say first—Douglas was a man with an enormous political ambition.

  Whoever dared challenge Douglas would inevitably create a large space for himself. Beginning in late 1854, Lincoln stepped into that space; he would challenge Douglas again and again in the coming months and years.

  When Congress adjourned on August 7, 1854, Douglas hurried home to Illinois to defend both his bill and his reputation. Some friends urged him to stay away. He joked that he could have journeyed to Illinois by the light of the burning effigies of himself.

  On September 1, 1854, Douglas prepared to speak in Chicago. In the early evening, the bells of local churches began a steady funeral dirge to sound their disapproval. More than eight thousand people crammed into Market Square on a sultry summer evening, with hundreds more sitting in the windows and on the rooftops of adjoining buildings. As the Little Giant began to speak, the audience greeted him with an eerie silence. Before long, his words were met by catcalls and hisses. Shaking his fists, his face flushed with anger, he accused the crowd of being a mob. After suffering two hours of alternating taunts and silence, he gave up and stomped off the platform.

  Determined to make his case, Douglas set out on a statewide speaking tour trailed by newspaper reporters, and always met by a variety of anti-Nebraska speakers eager to rebut his remarks. Douglas’s announced purpose was to educate the public about the true meaning of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Learning from the Chicago experience, he attempted to restrain his temper, but he could not restrain himself from shouting epithets—“Abolitionists,” “Black Republicans,” and “Nigger-lovers”—as the crowds grew hostile.

  When Douglas arrived in Bloomington on September 26, 1854, Lincoln was waiting. He was eager to bring his months of solitary reading and preparation, and his weeks of honing his speeches, into an engagement with the author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Illinois State Register groused that Lincoln “had been nosing for weeks in the State Library pumping his brain and his imagination for points and arguments.” Bloomington resident Jesse W. Fell, a friend of Lincoln’s, proposed that Douglas join Lincoln in a debate, but Douglas refused, replying that this was his meeting. Douglas spoke in the afternoon at the courthouse. As he concluded, the crowd called out, “Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln.” Although present, Lincoln declined to respond at that moment, instead inviting the crowd to return to hear him speak in the evening.

  A few hours later, Lincoln responded to Douglas’s characterization of the new party as “Black Republicans,” dismissing this remark as a “pander to prejudice.” Lincoln asked the audience to compare the old Douglas of 1849 with the new Douglas of 1854. The old Douglas had spoken “in language much finer and more eloquent than” Lincoln had about the Missouri Compromise. “This Compromise had become canonized in the hearts of the American people as a sacred thing, which no ruthless hand should attempt to disturb.” Lincoln then asked, “Who was it that uttered this sentiment? What ‘Black Republican’?” As the crowd roared in laughter, a voice cried out: “Douglas.” Lincoln laid out in elaborate detail the “sophistry” by which the Missouri Compromise had been abandoned in order to pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lincoln had done his historical detective work. He carried with him clippings of Douglas’s speeches. His speech at Bloomington sparkled with wisdom and wit.

  ONE WEEK LATER, both Lincoln and Douglas attended the opening of the Illinois State Fair in Springfield. Douglas spoke outdoors on October 3, 1854, and for a second time he turned down an invitation to appear on the same platform with Lincoln. When heavy rains swamped the fairgrounds, Douglas spoke in the hall of the House of Representatives. While Douglas made his address, Lincoln listened in the lobby, pacing back and forth. With the speech over and the crowd leaving the hall, Lincoln stood on the stairway announcing that he would answer Douglas the next day.

  The next afternoon, Lincoln appeared at two o’clock in the Hall of Representatives, which was crowded to overflowing on a muggy afternoon. Lincoln, dressed only in shirt sleeves and ill-fitting pants, invited Douglas, in his usual formal attire, to sit directly in front of him in the first row.

  Horace White, a twenty-year-old correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, later wrote that Lincoln spoke that day with “a thin, high-pitched falsetto voice of much carrying power, that could be heard a long distance in spite of the hustle and bustle of the crowd … [with] the accent and pronunciation peculiar to his native state, Kentucky.”

  Lincoln’s speech at Springfield bore the marks of an orator who had revised and refined a basic speech that he had given for more than a month. In the highly charged atmosphere he began with conciliation. “I do not propose to question the patriotism, or to assail the motives of any man, or class of men; but rather to strictly confine myself to the naked merits of the question.” As for slavery, he made it clear that throughout his speech he intended to “MAKEand KEEP the distinction between the EXISTING institution, and the EXTENSION of it.” Lincoln offered “a clear understanding” of the logic and meaning of the Missouri Compromise by again focusing on Jefferson, whom he called “the most distinguished politician of our history.” He took pains to point out that Jefferson, who opposed the extension of slavery in the legislation of the Northwest Ordinance, was himself a slaveholder.

  At the heart of the speech Lincoln took up Douglas’s “sacred right of self-government.” Douglas had argued that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was not about slavery, going so far as to say that he was “indifferent” about slavery. At this point in his speech, Lincoln’s historical narrative suddenly became an ethical indictment.

  This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. 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.

  Lincoln asked his audience to consider what “popular sovereignty” would become at the end of the day. This line of thinking, Lincoln said, “forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticising the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but selfinterest.”

  In this speech, and his others in 1854, Lincoln developed an alternating rhythm of conciliation and challenge. Having exercised his moral indignation over the slavery he hated, he quickly returned to empathy for the people of the South. He began with a bow to the past. “When southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery, than we; I acknowledge the fact.” He then moved from past to present. “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.” Finally, he personalized the problem by putting the onus on himself, and by implication, his audience, when he declared, “I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself.” With these generous words, he identified with not only the South, but many in the central Illinois audience he was attempting to persuade.

  Lincoln, who delighted in rhetorical contrasts, then quoted Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, “ ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,’ ” and told his audience, “At the hazard of being thought one of the fools … I rush in, I take the bull by the horns.” He was at his best in winsomely combining high and low culture, often through self-deprecation.

  Lincoln focused his attention on the “great argument” for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the right of self-government. He set about to unmask the doctrine, but first gave it its due. “The doctrine of self government is right—absolutely and eternally right—but it has no just application, as here attempted.” Why not? For Lincoln, it was a prior belief that needed to be settled: “It all depends upon whether a negro is not or is a man.” His voice rising in intensity and volume, he declared: “When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism.”