The first widespread Republican appeal to the people failed. In 1856, the first Republican candidate for president, John C. Fremont, lost to the Democrat James Buchanan. The Democrats had a strong hand: their base in the South was solid, and their presence in the North—largely courtesy of Stephen Douglas—still formidable. Had Fremont prevailed, Lincoln would have been rewarded for his toil with a choice of offices. His prominence in the national party could be seen when, at the first national Republican convention, more than one hundred delegates identified him as their top choice for vice president. But after the election, he was again without a place in government. His old nemesis, Stephen Douglas, meanwhile, had free access to the White House. “With me,” Lincoln wrote in 1856, “the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown, even, in foreign lands.”
This bald statement of his own lack of success led to an equally bald statement of his fundamental desires. “I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has reached. So reached, that the oppressed of my species, might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s brow.” With slavery, Lincoln had urged, people had to take the long view. They had to fight for its eventual extinction and set themselves to making it happen—not expect too much too quickly, and not give up the fight until right eventually prevailed. And as he developed his gospel of the imperfect, he pressed it to himself in private. Faced with the prospect of defeat, he responded by clarifying his sense of personal mission. Lincoln’s mental instincts and the events of his life were in a dynamic exchange. Much the way a healthy ecosystem integrates decay and death with growth and life, Lincoln was able to integrate his difficulty into his overall purpose.
In March of 1857, the stakes of the fight became even clearer. Just after President Buchanan took the oath of office, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. A slave who had lived for a time in a federal installation in Illinois, Scott sued for his freedom on the grounds that he had been living in free territory. The Court was divided on the case. The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, a slaveholder and staunch supporter of the institution, held that Scott had no standing to sue in federal court because no Negro, free or slave, had that right. Not only that, but Scott could not have achieved freedom by going into free territory, the Court ruled, because Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories. What had just a few years before been only an outrageous specter seemed a realistic prospect: that northern laws against slavery would be ruled unconstitutional. What’s more, in the fall of 1857, President Buchanan said he would accept Kansas into the Union with a constitution written in Lecompton by a proslavery minority—an illustration of slavery’s vise grip on the Democratic party.
Stephen Douglas had endorsed the Dred Scott decision, but the Lecompton constitution proved too much for him. He broke with his party over it and fought to keep a slave Kansas out of the Union. Suddenly the Republicans’ archenemy looked like a new ally. Party leaders like Horace Greeley, the powerful editor of the New York Tribune, began to look on Douglas with great interest. Lincoln, who had his eye on a race against the Little Giant for the Senate in 1858, was aghast. “What does the New-York Tribune mean by it’s constant eulogising, and admiring, and magnifying Douglas?” he wrote to Lyman Trumbull in December 1857. “Does it, in this, speak the sentiments of the republicans at Washington? Have they concluded that the republican cause, generally, can be best promoted by sacraficing us here in Illinois? If so we would like to know it soon; it will save us a great deal of labor to surrender at once.” The truth was that Greeley did speak for many powerful Republicans. “The Republican standard is too high,” Greeley told Herndon, who went to see him on Lincoln’s behalf. “We want something more practical.”
This sentiment was Lincoln’s most vexing obstacle yet. For three years he had labored faithfully against Douglas, creating in Illinois one of the bedrocks of the nationally ascendant Republican party. Now the party’s leaders threatened to cut him off—and, more severely, cut off the principle that he had devoted himself to. Privately, Lincoln was in a funk that Greeley would support Douglas, “a veritable dodger,” over himself, a “true Republican . . . tried already in the hottest part of the anti-slavery fight.” He said to Herndon, on a day of profound gloom, “Greeley is not doing me right.” What was worse, to go with Douglas was to adopt his argument that slavery had no standing as a moral concern, that it mattered not whether it was voted up or down. In other words, as Lincoln put it, if a man decided to make a slave of another, no third man should object.
Lincoln regarded Douglas as a political con man with no sense of right and wrong, who took whatever position best suited his immediate aim. He never failed, because when cornered he altered himself, or his cause, in order to win. He was attended, Lincoln said, by an “evil genius.” “What will Douglas do now?” Lincoln wrote to himself at one point. “He does not quite know himself. Like a skillful gambler he will play for all the chances . . . He never lets the logic of principle, displace the logic of success.”
In self-conscious opposition to his nemesis, Lincoln approached a brink, and the way he crossed it shows the man he had become. He wanted to be the next senator from Illinois, but he wanted more to strike a blow for a cause he believed in. “I have never professed an indifference to the honors of official station,” he wrote in the summer of 1858, in another revealing private note, “and were I to do so now, I should only make myself ridiculous. Yet I have never failed—do not now fail—to remember that in the republican cause there is a higher aim than that of mere office.” In the struggle over slavery in Great Britain, Lincoln noted, the proslavery forces dominated for generations. Two of the main anti-slavery advocates, Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce, did not live to see the abolition bill become law. Nevertheless, Lincoln wrote, even schoolboys knew of Sharp and Wilberforce. And who could name one of their opponents? “Though they blazed, like tallow-candles for a century, at last they flickered in the socket, died out, stank in the dark for a brief season, and were remembered no more, even by the smell.” “Remembering these things,” Lincoln concluded, “I can not but regard it as possible that the higher object of this contest may not be completely attained within the term of my natural life.” This was a logical extension of his idea. If one expected to move a cause only a bit forward—or, in harder times, to lean one’s weight against it and keep it from sliding too far back—one could not expect to see, personally, much in return. “Whoever heard of a reformer reaping the reward of his labors in his lifetime?” he asked. Lincoln not only articulated this principle but, in the heat of a great political campaign, acted on it, too.
In the summer of 1858, the state Republicans met at Springfield and endorsed Lincoln as their sole choice for the Senate. Lincoln drafted a speech for the occasion and showed it to his colleagues for their comment. They said it would lose him the Senate and maybe end his career. Lincoln confidently replied that it would prove to be the most valuable thing he’d ever said. But he didn’t tell his friends that they were wrong. He explained that he wanted to “strike home to the minds of men in order to raise them up to the peril of the times,” and that if “it is decreed that I should go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked to the truth.”
The speech began, “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.” The Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln noted, had promised to put an end to “slavery agitation.” In fact, though,
that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not
expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.
With this opening salvo, Lincoln defined his campaign against Douglas, which would be amplified in seven head-to-head debates in August, September, and October. It would be a campaign on the fundamental question of the future of slavery—whether it was right or wrong, whether it should spread or be restricted. Douglas came into the campaign wanting to argue that no choice needed to be made, that a middle ground existed and its name was “popular sovereignty.” Lincoln denied the possibility of papering over such a question—and helped precipitate the very crisis that he said would have to be reached, and passed.
It was one thing for Lincoln to privately reconcile himself to the possibility that he would not live to see the fruits of his work. It was quite another for him to strategically diminish his own chances at high office in exchange for striking a blow for his cause. Yet this is precisely what he did, not only with the “House Divided” speech but with another highlight of the 1858 campaign, the question that elicited Douglas’s Freeport Doctrine. As we have seen, Douglas had endorsed the Dred Scott decision, which held that the Constitution guaranteed the right of slaves as property in the territories. At their second debate, in Freeport, Lincoln demanded that he explain whether it was possible, then, for a territory to legally proscribe slavery. He knew that Douglas would say, as he had previously, that yes, a territory could proscribe slavery simply by withholding the legislation necessary to protect it. It didn’t serve Lincoln’s immediate interests for Douglas to highlight this point, which endeared him to Illinois voters. Indeed, Lincoln’s allies berated him for giving Douglas the opening, telling him he’d lose the race for senator. “I am after larger game,” Lincoln answered. “The battle of 1860 is worth a hundred of this.” Lincoln reckoned that he could help drive a wedge into the crack between Douglas and the slave power and ensure their split for the election of 1860.
We need to remember that Lincoln had no idea that he would be a part of the presidential race in 1860. He didn’t plan to take a fall in order to win a larger office in two years. So far as he knew, this was his last, best chance to win an office, to receive some personal reward in honor and in salary. The “larger game” was not his career but the cause of liberty. Indeed, throughout the campaign Lincoln continually placed the struggle of the moment in the context of the past and the vast future, “when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent.” “Think nothing of me,” Lincoln said at Lewistown on August 17; “take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever, but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence. You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed these sacred principles. You may not only defeat me for the Senate, but you may take me and put me to death.”
Douglas replied that the “Black Republicans” wanted only to elevate Negroes to superiority and force black men on white women. To illustrate this point, he told of how the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a black man, was being driven around Illinois in the back of a carriage with a white woman while her husband drove the team. Having been hammered by Douglas on these points, Lincoln began the fourth debate with a response. “I am not,” he said, “nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.” It is sobering, to say the least, to see Lincoln articulating white supremacy, as it was to hear him tell racist jokes and propose colonization. A growing number of critics insist on accounting for his racism.
The harshest critics of Lincoln often fail to see just how ugly were his opponents’ ideas and tactics. While Lincoln frankly dismissed the possibility of black equality, then turned again to his argument against slavery, Stephen Douglas constantly stoked racist fears. At the same time, defenders of Lincoln often fail to fully acknowledge the whole truth of his limitations. But both can find common ground in Lincoln’s spirit of progress. If anyone was prepared to admit his imperfections—the ones he could see and the ones he could not—it was the man himself. To pretend that all traces of racism must be scrubbed out of his life in order for him to have been a champion of progress is to create a claim that any but a perfect person must fail.
This point of view, applied to Lincoln, misses one of the essential aspects of his life, in his belief and in his biography. In both the man was imperfect, and in both the man embraced the reality of his imperfection. In his belief, Lincoln argued that Negroes were embraced by the founding principle of the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” This document, in his view, did not speak to the immediate necessity of legislating equal rights, but rather to the long-term promise of a nation that would be forever trying to improve itself, to move toward perfection. As Lincoln said, “There is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man.”
The principle of equality that Lincoln sought to sustain the Union was one of equality of opportunity. Every person had the ability and the right, he thought, to work in order to better his condition. Occasionally Lincoln made it explicit that he was an example of how that right could bear fruit. “I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House,” he told a group of soldiers as president. “I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has.”
Lincoln had educated himself; he had worked hard in a country where he had the right and privilege to do so. It is a step in interpretation, but a justifiable one, to say that Lincoln’s own sense of improvement probably came, in some measure, from what he had gained emotionally, too. Indeed, Lincoln conceived improvement—and the slavery that could prevent it—as more than merely material. There was a time, he said, when men “were utterly unconscious, that their conditions, or their minds were capable of improvement. They not only looked upon the educated few as superior beings; but they supposed themselves to be naturally incapable of rising to equality . . . It is difficult for us, now and here to conceive how strong this slavery of the mind was; and how long it did, of necessity, take, to break it’s shackles, and to get a habit of freedom of thought, established.” He not only supported material freedom but also declared it a “great task” to “immancipate the mind from this false and under estimate of itself.”
Throughout this period, Lincoln struggled to maintain his own “freedom of thought” and feeling. We recall how, beginning in the mid-1840s, Lincoln began to stand apart from crowds, exhibiting a sense, to all who saw him, that he was caught in the throes of melancholy. Reports of these spells increase after the fall of 1854. This maybe partly due to the fact that Lincoln was more in the public eye, so people who crossed his path were more inclined to take notice of him. Even so, the intensity of the spells seems to have increased. What had looked like a sad, faraway look now seemed an intense and morbid preoccupation, which could last for hours at a time.
By the late 1850s, Lincoln regularly sat for photographs, a new and popular art form. Lincoln’s portraits, showing his sunken cheeks, his unruly hair, his thick lips pressed solemnly together, have inspired wonder in many generations, and they communicate—even to those who know not a whit of the evidence of his melancholy—a feeling of it. In fact, according to those who witnessed his spells firsthand, the photographs do represent them, but not fully. Because Lincoln had to hold his expression for several minutes for the camera’s long exposure, his countenance in the images did reflect his gloom. But his contemporaries said that no one could truly apprecia
te the gloom without seeing the awful contrast between his face when at ease and when in agony. “The pictures we see of him only half represent him,” said the lawyer Orlando B. Ficklin. Observing him in the motion of storytelling, and then falling back into misery, made the latter state all the more dramatic.
A young man who first saw Lincoln in 1859 showed what that looked like in real time. John Widmer was in Ottawa, Illinois, when he heard that “Abe Lincoln is up from Springfield” to argue a case before the Illinois Supreme Court. He walked over to the courtroom and saw a man with a “lank, gaunt figure” sitting near a table and “thoughtfully studying the floor.” “I did not take my eyes off of him during the short time I was in the room,” Widmer recalled. “I noticed that he had a very pale, long face, big hands and feet, but the thing that impressed me most of all in regard to Abraham Lincoln was the extreme sadness of his eyes. Lincoln had the saddest eyes of any human being that I have ever seen.” After a few minutes, “his melancholy expression had so impressed me that I should not have felt more solemn if I had been at a funeral.” Soon Lincoln stood and addressed the court, and when he began to tell a funny story, his eyes brightened and a “faint smile spread over his features.” When he sat down, Widmer said, “it was but a few minutes until that old, sorrowful look came over him.”
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