In his private reflection, Lincoln engaged in a systematic examination of all the issues involved in sectionalism. He began by exploring the ways Democrats tried to make the Republican question—“Shall slavery be allowed to extend into U.S. territories, now legally free?”—into a sectional issue. In his answer, Lincoln engaged in a long backward gaze at previous candidates for president, noting which ones were from free and slave states. He pointed out that in 1844, the Democratic Party had nominated a Southern candidate, James Polk of Tennessee, but since 1848, as the debate over the extension of slavery escalated, the Democrats nominated only Northern candidates, “each vieing to outbid the other for the Southern vote.”
Questions punctuate every paragraph in Lincoln’s note. Toward the end, he asked, “Then, which side shall yield?” His answer:
Do they really think the right ought to yield to the wrong? Are they afraid to stand by the right? Do they fear that the constitution is too weak to sustain them in the right? Do they really think that by right surrendering to wrong, the hopes of our constitutions, our Union, and our liberties, can possibly be bettered?
This note demonstrates a major reason Lincoln was becoming such a persuasive public speaker. He was willing to engage in the hard task of examining an opponent’s arguments fully and fairly.
WHILE IN CHICAGO to try cases before the federal court, Lincoln accepted an invitation to address a Saturday evening open-air meeting in Dearborn Park on July 19, 1856. Referring to the Democrats’ nomination of Buchanan, Lincoln said it “showed how the South does not put up her own men for the Presidency, but holds up the prize that the ambition of Northern men may make bids for it.” The Chicago Democratic Press reported that Lincoln “demonstrated in the strongest manner, that the only issue before us, is freedom or slavery.”
In Galena on July 23, 1856, Lincoln spoke of the challenge of Mil-lard Fillmore, candidate of the Know-Nothings, who in 1856 officially adopted the name the “American Party.” Fillmore, elected as the Whig vice president in 1848, had succeeded to the presidency in 1850 upon the death of Zachary Taylor. As president, Fillmore’s signing of the Fugitive Slave Act in September 1850 quickly alienated many Whigs. When the Whig Party collapsed in the early 1850s, Fillmore refused to join the new Republicans. The Know-Nothing American Party nominated Fillmore at their convention in February.
Fillmore’s appeal came from his nativist platform commitment: “Americans must rule America.” He accused both the Democrats and the Republicans of being “Disunionists.” Lincoln was deeply concerned that Fillmore’s American Party could deny the Republicans an election victory by playing the role of the spoiler, as he had seen the Liberty Party do before. In the conclusion of his Galena speech, Lincoln exclaimed, “All this talk about the dissolution of the Union is humbug—nothing but folly. We won’t dissolve the Union, and you SHANT.
During the 1856 campaign, Lincoln received invitations to speak in Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa—recognition of his growing national stature within the Republican Party. The only out-of-state invitation he accepted was to a huge Republican state “concourse” in Kalamazoo, Michigan. On August 27, Lincoln followed the logic of his July private note by declaring that the crux of the campaign was “to learn what people differ about.” He stated, “The question of slavery, at the present day, should be not only the greatest question, but very nearly the sole question.” He presented the arguments of his opponents, repeating the questionable charge of the Richmond Enquirer “that their slaves are far better off than Northern freemen.” He also responded to the complaint that Frémont and his supporters were abolitionists and that the Republicans were disunionists. Lincoln’s rhetorical strategy was to ask his audience the questions that he wanted to answer. After praising the United States as “the wonder and admiration of the whole world,” he responded to the question, “What is it that has given us so much prosperity?” by responding, “That every man can make himself.”
LINCOLN RETURNED HOME ON October 28, 1856, after four months of vigorous campaigning. By his own count he had spoken more than fifty times during the presidential campaign. Although his speeches appeared to reporters and audiences to be extemporaneous, little did they realize how much prior effort, including writing his private notes, went into them. The Amboy Times captured the distinctiveness of Lincoln’s maturing political speaking, observing, “His language is pure and respectful, he attacks no man’s character or motives, but fights with arguments.”
Lincoln came home to a house divided. Mary did not support Frémont. She wrote her younger half sister Emilie Todd Helm in Lexington, contrasting her political views with those of her husband. Knowing Emilie’s strong Southern viewpoint, Mary first defended her husband. “ Altho’ Mr L is, or was a Fremont man, you must not include him with so many of those, who belong to that party, an Abolitionist.” She further explained, “All he desires is, that slavery, shall not be extended, let it remain where it is.” Mary then explained her own political position. “My weak woman’s heart was too Southern in feeling, to sympathize with any but Fillmore.”
On Tuesday, November 4, 1856, a cold and muddy election day in Springfield, Lincoln was the 226th voter at polling place number two. Across the nation there was intense interest and an immense turnout. People stood in queues for more than two hours in New York City to vote. Nearly 83 percent of the nation’s eligible voters went to the polls, up nearly 7 percent from the election of 1852.
Lincoln had to wait for several days before the results became known in Illinois. In the end, Frémont lost, but William Bissell won for governor by a majority of five thousand, the first statewide victory for the new Republican Party. As Lincoln had feared, the Fillmore vote hurt Frémont, but the American Party vote ran below expectations.
Although Buchanan triumphed in the electoral college with 174 votes to 114 for Frémont and 8 for Fillmore, he did not win a majority of the popular vote. He received 1,832,955 votes (45.3 percent) compared to 1,340,537 (33.1 percent) for Frémont, and 871,955 (21.6 percent) for Fillmore. Buchanan won five Northern states—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, and California—and every Southern state except Maryland, which went for Fillmore. Frémont won Maine, New Hampshire, and Michigan, which had been Democratic mainstays. But he received only 1,196 votes in the South.
President-elect Buchanan, greeting supporters at Wheatland, his estate on the outskirts of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, offered his interpretation of his victory. “The storm of abolition against the South has been gathering for almost a quarter of a century,” he said, a reference to the growth of antislavery sentiment in the North. More recently, “Republicanism was sweeping across the North like a tornado.” Then he offered a prediction for the future, one that would prove entirely wrong. “The night is departing, and the roseate and propitious morn now breaking upon us promises a long day of peace and prosperity for our country.”
Upon reflection, Republicans called the 1856 presidential election a “victorious defeat.” Privately, many Republican leaders complained that Frémont had proved to be long on bravado and short on both political experience and wisdom. There were, however, many encouraging signs for the future. Frémont had defeated Buchanan by more than 80,000 votes in New York. Buchanan’s margin of victory in Indiana was less than 2,000 votes, and less than 1,000 votes in Pennsylvania. If the Frémont and Fillmore votes were combined, Frémont would have won both Illinois and New Jersey. If Frémont had won Pennsylvania, and either Indiana or Illinois, the Republicans would have been victorious. In less than twelve months, the Republican Party had become the strongest party in the North. The Republican candidate in 1860 would stand a real chance of winning the presidential election.
LINCOLN HAD PLAYED A VITAL ROLE in the 1856 election. With his help, Republicans had won the complete state ticket in Illinois. Although without office, he had nevertheless become the leading Republican in Illinois by the end of 1856. One month after the election, Lincoln was introduced to the “deafening cheers
” of three hundred people at a Republican banquet at the Tremont House in Chicago. Recalling that throughout the campaign the Republicans had been “assailed as the enemies of the Union,” Lincoln declared that the new party was, above all, “the friend of the Union.” Responding to the recent final annual message of outgoing president Franklin Pierce, in which he had trumpeted the “triumph of good principles and good men,” Lincoln declared that Buchanan did not triumph in the recent election, but that “all of us who did not vote for Mr. Buchanan, taken together, are a majority of four hundred thousand.” He noted that during the campaign, the Richmond Enquirer, “an avowed advocate of slavery,” had invented the phrase “State equality.” In his closing charge to these Republican stalwarts, Lincoln declared, “Let us reinaugurate the good old ‘central ideas’ of the Republic.” What did these ideas mean in the present crisis? “We shall again be able not to declare, that ‘all States as States, are equal,’ nor yet that ‘all citizens as citizens are equal,’ but to renew the broader, better declaration, including both these but much more, that ‘all men are created equal.’ ” Lincoln asked his audience, “Can we not come together” around this basic belief?
Even in the midst of his growing public esteem, Lincoln struggled privately with insecurity when he compared his political career to that of his longtime rival, Stephen Douglas, the senior senator from Illinois. In December 1856, Lincoln spelled out his struggle on a scrap of paper. “Twenty-two years ago Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted.” Lincoln, for his eyes only, admitted, “Even then, we were both ambitious; I perhaps, quite as much so as he.” What about today? “With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success.” He quickly added, “I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has reached.” Having confessed his envy, though, Lincoln offered a soulful affirmation about his hope that others could share in his own search for eminence, “so reached, that the oppressed of my species, might have shared with me in the elevation.” Lincoln, knowing of Douglas’s disdain for African-Americans, declared that whatever ascent he may yet experience might be accompanied by the rise of the “oppressed”—those who had been the subject of every one of his addresses since 1854. He concluded, “I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s brow.”
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THE STORY IS TOLD of Lincoln returning to Springfield after three months away on the circuit. When he encountered his neighbor, James Gourley, Lincoln asked in jest, “Do you know where Lincoln lives?” After a moment, Lincoln, with a wry smile, pointed to his house and exclaimed, “He used to live here!” Lincoln’s feigned disorientation was a sharp comment on what Mary Lincoln had wrought.
Thirteen years after the purchase of their home at Eighth and Jackson, Mary began the effort to raise their modest cottage into a full two-story house. Having grown increasingly independent through her husband’s long absences, Mary had become the manager of the Lincoln household. She wanted more space for a family of three rambunctious boys, Robert, Tad, and Willie, plus a live-in maid. Her husband was now making about three thousand dollars a year from his law practice. She believed the Lincolns deserved a home more in keeping with her husband’s position as a prominent lawyer and politician, and where she could entertain more. In September 1854, she sold eighty acres of farmland in Sangamon County her father had given her for $1,200, further enhancing her independence.
Contractors Daniel Hannon and Thomas A. Ragsdale began constructing a new east wing of the house. Mary’s cousin’s wife said in a letter that the Lincolns had “commenced raising” the back part of their house. “I think they will have room enough before they are done, particularly as Mary seldom uses what she has.” The new construction meant that Mary and Abraham would have separate but connecting bedrooms. This arrangement was common in middle-class families and not a commentary on their marriage or sexual relations. Visitors reported that Lincoln often entertained business guests in his bedroom.
As the project approached completion, Mary bought wallpaper and new furniture from John Williams and Company. She shifted some of her massive Empire pieces upstairs and placed the new, early Victorian pieces in the downstairs formal front parlor and the family sitting room. The final cost of the expansion was $1,300. Lincoln returned to find a fine-looking home newly adorned with light brown paint and dark green shutters. The renovations were in the Greek Revival tradition of the times, which Lincoln approved, with its associations with classical tradition and democracy.
Mary Lincoln was very ambitious for her husband’s political career. Her many dinners and receptions in their newly renovated house provided space for him to network with political friends visiting the Illinois state capital. In the winter of 1857, conversations at these gatherings often turned to politics and the U.S. Supreme Court.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, in his travels in America in the 1830s, had examined the place of the Supreme Court in comparison to the high courts of England and other nations in Europe. He concluded, “A more immense judicial power has never been constituted in any people.” Yet in the growing political crisis of the 1850s, the Court had been largely silent. It was the only one of the three branches of government not deeply involved in the conflict over the extension of slavery into the federal territories. But the Court was about to exercise its power. Beginning in December 1856, news spread that the Supreme Court would consider a case that had been making its way through the lower courts for more than ten years.
Chief Justice Roger Taney delivered the majority opinion in the Dred Scott case in 1857.
In 1830, Dr. John Emerson, an army surgeon working at the Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis, bought a slave named Dred Scott. Scott accompanied Emerson to Fort Armstrong at Rock Island, Illinois, in 1833, and then to Fort Snelling, in the northern part of the Louisiana Territory, near present-day St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1836. Scott returned with Emerson to Missouri in 1838. When Emerson died in 1843, Scott sought to buy his freedom from Emerson’s widow. When she refused, he petitioned the Missouri Circuit Court at St. Louis on April 6, 1846, seeking his freedom, arguing that he had lived for three years in a free state.
Scott lost his first trial on a technicality but won a second trial in 1850 when the Missouri court ruled that once a slave left Missouri he should be considered free. Mrs. Emerson proved to be as determined as Scott, appealing the court’s decision.
Scott’s final hope was an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Montgomery Blair, a former resident of St. Louis, agreed to represent Scott without fee. Blair, at age forty-one, whose father, Francis Preston Blair, Sr., had been a member of Andrew Jackson’s “kitchen cabinet,” had established his own reputation as a lawyer in Washington. The Supreme Court announced it would hear the case during its term in December 1856.
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney presided at the December hearing. Taney, born into a wealthy slaveholding family in southern Maryland in 1777, had served as both attorney general and secretary of the treasury in the Jackson administration, before being appointed the fifth chief justice of the United States in 1836. Standing before Taney and eight associate justices, Blair contended that Emerson had emancipated Scott when he took him both to the free state of Illinois and to the Louisiana Territory, where slavery was prohibited. He also presented examples from five states that had treated African-Americans as citizens, as had Missouri in earlier years.
Montgomery Blair represented Scott, contending that he became emancipated when his owner brought him into free territory.
Politicians and the press buzzed with rumors of what the Court would or would not do. Congressman Alexander Stephens of Georgia wrote to a friend, “The decision will be a marked epoch in our history.” The New York Courier wrote, prophetically, “The Court, in trying this case, is itself on trial.”
Reading reports of the trial, Lincoln wrote a private note on the Dred Scott case, probably in January 1857. He began with a question: “What would be the eff
ect of this, if it should ever be the creed of a dominant party in the nation?” He pondered the “full scope” and the “narrow scope” of the result if the Supreme Court ruled that Dred Scott was still a slave. Lincoln did not argue his own position, but was preparing himself if the position of Douglas and his followers in the Democratic Party prevailed. He wrote that whatever the Court’s decision on this constitutional question, it must be obeyed.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on February 11, 1857. Senator Henry Geyer of Missouri argued that “blacks are not citizens” even if taken into free territories. Reverdy Johnson, the former attorney general of the United States, presented an impassioned defense of slavery, contending, “Slavery promises to exist through all time, so far as human vision can discover.”
Interest in the case heightened when President Buchanan referred to it in his inaugural address on March 4, 1857. Buchanan, coming into office convinced the problems in the country were the fault of the Northern abolitionists, was determined to reach out to the Southern pro-slavery members of his own party. He believed the long-awaited decision in the Dred Scott case could be a major step in that direction. In his address he stated that “it is understood” that the case will “be speedily and finally settled.” How did he come to this understanding? He had spoken with Chief Justice Taney in late February and learned the basic outline of the verdict. Trying to head off opposition, Buchanan declared, “To their decision, in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit.”
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