These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  In November, Lincoln narrowly lost to Douglas. But he had become a leader of the Republican Party—and indisputably its most powerful speaker. “Though I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten,” he wrote, “I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.”17 But Lincoln had yet to leave his lasting mark.

  The year Lincoln debated Douglas, John Brown, with eyes like water and hair like a forest, held a constitutional convention in a hushed river town in Canada, fifty miles east of Detroit, a last stop on the Underground Railroad. Brown, fifty-eight, had fathered twenty children. He spoke of prophecies and scourges. He’d once founded a secret society called the League of Gileadites. A tanner, sheep farmer, and failed businessman, he’d first had his portrait taken by a black daguerreotype artist named Augustus Washington. In Washington’s portrait, Brown, lean and fearsome, with furrowed brow, stands beside the flag of the Underground Railroad and holds up a hand, as if he might break the very glass beneath which his image is trapped. In the 1850s, Brown became a militant abolitionist, fighting in Kansas with his sons. He sounded like a patriarch out of the Old Testament, Abraham sacrificing Isaac. In his 1858 constitution, Brown and his followers—forty-four black men and eleven white men—replaced “we the people” with “we, citizens of the United States and the oppressed people . . . who have no rights,” proclaimed bondage to be “in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence,” and declared war on slavery.18 They began stockpiling weapons.

  African American photographer Augustus Washington captured this likeness of John Brown in his daguerreotype studio in Connecticut in 1846 or 1847. Brown, his right hand raised as if taking an oath, stands in front of the flag of the Subterranean Pass-Way, his more militant version of the Underground Railroad. In the 1850s, while antislavery conviction grew in the free states, pro-slavery fervor grew in the slave states, not least because the price of slaves was on the rise, from an average of $900 in 1850 to $1,600 ten years later. The high price meant that owners, who spared no pains in the hunting of men, women, and children, were less worried about slave rebellion than about a mass exodus from slave states to free, a much-feared and, in the South, widely reported “slave stampede” that was nothing so much as legions of people emancipating themselves.19

  Some slave states, blaming the exodus on the influence of free blacks, tried to ban them. Arkansas required that all free blacks leave the state by the end of 1859 or be reenslaved. Meanwhile, some new states entering the Union adopted a “whites-only” policy: Oregon’s proposed constitution, which also placed severe restrictions on the growing number of immigrants from China—“No Negro, Chinaman, or Mulatto shall have the right of suffrage”—both prohibited slavery and barred blacks from entering the state.20

  The price of slaves grew so high that a sizable number of white southerners urged the reopening of the African slave trade. In the 1850s, legislatures in several states, including South Carolina, proposed reopening the trade. Adopting this measure would have violated federal law. Some “reopeners” believed that the federal ban on the trade was unconstitutional; others were keen to nullify it, in a dress rehearsal for secession.

  While John Brown and his men were drafting a new constitution in Canada, the Louisiana House of Representatives passed an act to reopen the trade. In 1859, anticipating the success of this movement, men from Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana formed the African Labor Supply Association. A Southern Commercial Convention meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, voted that “all laws, State and Federal, prohibiting the African slave trade, ought to be repealed.” Not content to wait for any of these laws to pass, southern vigilantes known as “filibusters” outfitted ships with arms and ammunition and attempted to conquer Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, and Brazil in order to extend a market for slaves. A leading reopener, Leonidas Spratt of South Carolina, said, “If the trade is wrong so be the condition which results from it”; the two could not be separated. Alabama’s William Yancey, born on the banks of the Ogeechee River in Georgia, said that the real issue was labor, and that the only difference between labor in the North and the South was that “one comes under the head of importation, the other under the head of immigration.” He said, “If it is right to buy slaves in Virginia and carry them to New Orleans, why is it not right to buy them in Cuba, Brazil, or Africa and carry them there?”21

  Proslavery southerners made these arguments under the banner of “free trade,” their rhetorical answer to “free labor.” To George Fitzhugh, all societies were “at all times and places, regulated by laws as universal and as similar as those which control the affairs of bees,” and trade itself, including the slave trade, was “as old, as natural, and irresistible as the tides of the ocean.”22 In 1855, David Christy, the author of Cotton Is King, wrote about the vital importance of “the doctrine of Free Trade,” which included abolishing the tariffs that made imported English goods more expensive than manufactured goods produced in the North. As one southerner put it, “Free trade, unshackled industry, is the motto of the South.”23

  If proslavery southerners defended free trade and pro-labor northerners defended free soil and free labor, abolitionists defended free speech. If southern Democrats came to Congress armed and ready to fight, and northern Whigs, Democrats, and Free-Soilers had usually come unarmed, northern Republicans nevertheless went to Congress ready to do battle. One Massachusetts congressman, heading to Washington for the 1855 session of Congress, was met at the train station by his constituents, bearing a gift. It was a pistol, engraved “Free Speech.”24

  When the South began referring to its economy as “unshackled,” matters had plainly arrived at an ideological impasse. By the end of 1858, many observers had come around to Lincoln’s point of view that the United States would either be one thing or another, but not both. William H. Seward, a Florida-born senator from New York, called the dispute between the states an unavoidable conflict, moral, and absolute: “It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.” Seward had no doubt which side would prevail, since his theory of history was a theory of progress, in a march from slavery to freedom and from inequality to equality. “I know, and you know, that a revolution has begun,” he told his audience. “I know, and the world knows, that revolutions never go backwards.”25

  John Brown believed that the conflict was irrepressible, too, but he didn’t fear the nation slipping into it; he wanted to start it. In the spring of 1859, Brown and a party of his followers made their way to Maryland, where they planned a military operation that would begin with the seizing of a U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now part of West Virginia). In August, Frederick Douglass went to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, to meet with Brown, who had also tried, and failed, to enlist the support of Harriet Tubman. Brown and Douglass met at an abandoned stone quarry outside of town. Brown told Douglass about his plan. Douglass warned him against it, saying “it would . . . array the whole country against us.” The more Douglass heard, the more he worried. He later wrote, “All his arguments, and all his descriptions of the place, convinced me that he was going into a perfect steel trap, and that once in he would never get out alive.”26

  On the night of Sunday, October 16, 1859, Brown and twenty-one men attacked the arsenal and captured it. They halted a train leaving Harpers Ferry but then let it go. As the train sped through the Maryland countryside to Baltimore, passengers threw hastily written notes out the windows, warning people about the insurrection. Barely twelve hours after the raid had begun, headlines were being telegraphed across the continent: “INSURRECTION . . . at Harper’s Ferry . . . GENERAL STAMPEDE OF SLAVES.”

  Brown had fallen into the perfect steel trap that Douglass feared. He’d hoped that word of the attack would stir up a widespread revo
lt, that black men and women would take up arms. But while word spread across the country by telegraph, it did not reach the slave cabins on plantations in neighboring Maryland and Virginia; slaves, marooned and isolated from the technology of the telegraph, remained unaware of the insurrection. U.S. Marines and soldiers commanded by Robert E. Lee retook the arsenal, capturing Brown and killing or capturing all of his men. “The result proves the plan was the attempt of a fanatic or madman,” Lee said. Among the men killed was Dangerfield Newby, a free black man who was hoping to rescue his wife, Harriet, and their children from slavery in Virginia. His pocket held a letter from Harriet: “if I thought I shoul never see you,” she wrote him, “this earth would have no charms for me.”27

  Brown had planned to lead an armed revolution throughout the South. At the nearby farm and school where he and his men had assembled, soldiers found sixteen boxes of weapons and ammunition, along with boxes of papers, including thousands of copies of his 1858 constitution and maps of the South, printed on cambric cloth, and with places where blacks outnumbered whites marked with Xs. They also found, rolled up into a scroll, a “Declaration of Liberty by the Representatives of the Slave Population of the United States of America.”

  “We hold these truths to be Self Evident; That All Men are Created Equal,” it began, proceeding to establish a right to revolution: “The history of Slavery in the Unites States, is a history of injustice & Cruelties inflicted upon the Slave in evry conceivable way, & in barbarity not surpassed by the most Savage Tribes. It is the embodiment of all that is Evil, and ruinous to a Nation; and subversive of all Good.”28

  News of Brown’s attack convinced southern slave owners that their worst fears were right: abolitionists were murderers. The so-called Secret Six, northern men who’d funded Brown, either denied their involvement or fled. Douglass, who’d not supported Brown’s plan but had known of it, escaped to Canada and then to England. “I am most miserably deficient in courage,” he confessed. But what most outraged slave owners was the number and stature of northerners who, on learning of Brown’s raid, celebrated him as a hero and a martyr. On October 30, in Concord, Henry David Thoreau, shoulders slumped, hat to his chest, delivered “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” “Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?” Thoreau asked. Brown, he said, was, for his commitment to equality, “the most American of us all.”29

  Thoreau’s own commitment to abolition was strengthened by his reading a book just published in London. The same was true of many of his contemporaries. The book had made its way to Concord even as Brown was raiding Harpers Ferry: Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Thoreau, a naturalist, a man of beans and bumblebees and frogs and herons, had been following Darwin’s work, and when the book appeared, he read it with a passionate interest, filling the pages of six notebooks with his notes. Darwin’s Origin of Species would have a vast and lingering influence on the world of ideas. Most immediately, it refuted the racial arguments of ethnologists like Louis Agassiz. And, in the months immediately following the book’s publication—the last, unsettling months before the beginning of the Civil War—abolitionists took it as evidence of the common humanity of man.30

  During his trial, fifty-nine-year-old Brown, who’d been wounded during the battle, lay on a cot, unable to stand. Found guilty of murder, conspiracy, and treason, he was allowed to speak at his sentencing, on November 2. This speech earned Brown still more support in the North. “If it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments,” he said, “I submit.”31

  Brown went to the gallows three weeks before Christmas, in the last month of the most tumultuous decade in American history. To northern abolitionists, his death marked the beginning of a second American Revolution. “The second of December, 1859,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his diary. “This will be a great day in our history; the date of a new Revolution,—quite as much needed as the old one.”32 Longfellow, building upon the verses he’d written in Poems on Slavery, decided to write a poem to stir the North to the cause of emancipation, to tie one revolution to another. He called it “Paul Revere’s Ride.”33

  In Virginia, fifteen hundred soldiers gathered to watch Brown’s execution. Among them was John Wilkes Booth, serving with a troop from Richmond. Brown gave no speech on the gallows, but on the morning of his execution he handed a guard a note he’d scribbled on a scrap of paper: “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with Blood.”34

  Six days later, on December 8, 1859, the day of John Brown’s funeral, Mississippi congressman Reuben Davis gave a speech in Congress: “John Brown, and a thousand John Browns, can invade us, and the Government will not protect us.” The Union had betrayed the South, Davis argued. And so, he resolved, “To secure our rights and protect our honor we will dissever the ties that bind us together, even if it rushes us into a sea of blood.”35

  WEEKS AFTER DAVIS’S dire warning, lanky Abraham Lincoln visited Mathew Brady’s studio in New York. He posed for a photograph standing by a small table over which he towered, his left hand resting on a stack of books that looked, compared to him, as if they belonged in a dollhouse. His face was gaunt, his eyes hollow. Later that day, Lincoln delivered a speech at Cooper Union that launched his campaign for the Republican nomination for the presidency. The portrait, made into a miniature tintype, became a presidential campaign button.

  Like everyone else running for president that year, Lincoln believed that the election turned on the interpretation of the Constitution. He set about making the case, once again, against Stephen Douglas, who was seeking the Democratic nomination. And, in a reprise of what he’d said during the great debates of 1858, he insisted both that Douglas’s interpretation of the Constitution was in error and that his argument amounted to anarchy: “Your purpose, then, plainly stated,” Lincoln charged, “is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please.”36

  Mathew Brady’s 1860 daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln, cropped, was reproduced as a campaign button. Lincoln had labored over the scrapbook he’d assembled of newspaper transcriptions of his 1858 debates with Douglas. The time had come to put them to use. He faithfully edited them for publication, not changing the speeches, omitting only the “cheers” and “laughter” and other reactions from the crowds. Political Debates Between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas was first advertised on May 5, 1860, eleven days before the Republican National Convention, with promotional copy that boasted, fairly enough: “There is probably no better exposition of the doctrines of the Democratic and Republican Parties than is contained in this volume.” When people invited Lincoln to speak, he very often told them to read the Debates instead. Douglas, incensed, complained that his speeches had been “mutilated,” a charge without foundation, but one that suggests that Douglas knew, as Lincoln knew, that even if Douglas had won that election, Lincoln had won those debates.37

  The Democratic Party held its national convention in Charleston, South Carolina, in April, just before the published Debates appeared. The platform committee had been unable to bind together the two arms of the party, producing both a Majority Report, endorsed by southern delegates, and a Minority Report, submitted by northerners, whereupon the Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida delegations walked out of the convention in protest of the platform’s failure to include a guarantee of the rights of citizens to hold “all descriptions of property” (meaning slaves). Unable to nominate a candidate, the remaining delegates decided to hold a second convention—to gather in Baltimore in June.

  The Republicans met in Chicago in May, in a massive building called the Wigwam, after its arched wooden ceiling. The party endorsed the Declaration of Inde
pendence and the Constitution—leading one delegate to observe that, while he also believed in the Bible and the Ten Commandments, he didn’t see why these documents needed mentioning—but specifically disavowed any proslavery interpretation of the Constitution as “a dangerous political heresy.”38 For the nomination, Lincoln was something of a dark horse. But Lincoln’s supporters successfully courted delegates and resorted, too, to political chicanery. The day the balloting began, Lincoln’s campaign managers printed thousands of fake admission tickets and handed them out to Lincoln supporters, who then packed the hall and thundered their applause whenever Lincoln’s name was mentioned. Lincoln won the nomination, to still more thunder.39

  William Dean Howells, twenty-three and prodigiously talented, agreed to write a campaign biography for Lincoln.40 Howells, at the time, was an unknown poet from Ohio; he would go on to become one of the century’s most esteemed men of letters. He wrote his Life of Abraham Lincoln in a matter of weeks, as much as a satire of the form as an example of it. Howells had never met Lincoln and knew very little about him; what he did know was that campaign biographies were overwrought, ridiculous, and fabulous.41 He had not the least idea who Lincoln’s ancestors were; he somehow worked that out to be a credit to the candidate. “There is a dim possibility that he is of the stock of the New England Lincolns, of Plymouth colony,” he wrote, “but the noble science of heraldry is almost obsolete in this country, and none of Mr. Lincoln’s family seems to have been aware of the preciousness of long pedigrees.” Later, in the White House, Lincoln checked Howells’s book out of the Library of Congress, in order to check Howells’s facts. He made corrections in the margins. Howells had claimed that in the 1820s Lincoln had been “a stanch Adams man”—a supporter of John Quincy Adams. Lincoln crossed out “Adams” and wrote “anti-Jackson.” Among Howells’s many tall tales, he’d told about how, as a young congressman, Lincoln had walked for miles to the Illinois legislature, Lincoln scribbled in the margin: “No harm, if true; but, in fact, not true. L.”42