Hogan’s rosy scenario proved wildly inaccurate. The bargain crafted by Lincoln wound up benefiting Springfield at the expense of Illinois. Governor Thomas Ford called the internal improvements scheme “the most senseless and disastrous policy which ever crippled the energies of a growing country.”217 In 1832, Lincoln had sensibly warned voters about the “heart-appalling” costs of railroads and canals. Four years later he cavalierly ignored his own good counsel and that of friends like Stephen T. Logan, Orville H. Browning, John J. Hardin, Alexander P. Field, and Edwin B. Webb and helped saddle Illinois with a $14 million system of internal improvements that its population of 500,000 could ill afford. Among the approved projects were the laying of 1,300 miles of railroads, deepening the channels of five rivers, constructing a mail route from Vincennes to St. Louis, and awarding $200,000 to compensate the counties through which neither a canal nor a railroad would pass. The interest on the necessary loans exceeded the entire revenue raised by the state in 1836. When the economy collapsed in 1837, any slight chance that the state could pay for the many projects went glimmering. Illinois suspended interest payments on its debt, and for years thereafter its credit rating was poor and its treasury strapped. The state, as Governor Ford noted, “became a stench in the nostrils of the civilized world.”218 In 1843, John Todd Stuart complained: “Our reputation is very much that of a set of swindlers.”219 Illinois did not finally pay off the loans incurred for the internal improvement system until 1880.
When at the same session the General Assembly voted to increase its members’ pay from $3 per day to $4, protests deluged the statehouse. One indignant constituent, “a blunt, hard-working yeoman,” berated Lincoln, for he “could and would not understand why men should be paid four dollars per day for ‘doing nothing but talking and sitting on benches,’ while he averaged only about one [dollar] for the hardest kind of work.” He asked angrily, “what in the world made you do it?” Lincoln replied: “I reckon the only reason was that we wanted the money.”220
In addition to passing the internal improvements bill, the statute removing the capital to Springfield, and the pay hike, the legislature continued its routine work of incorporating businesses, schools, and towns; of authorizing roads and declaring streams navigable; and of defining the boundaries of counties. Lincoln participated in these matters, answering all but 17 of the 220 roll calls taken during the first session of the Tenth General Assembly.
Between the time that Lincoln declared his candidacy in 1832 and his triumph as the champion of Springfield’s bid to become the state capital, he had become an adept partisan, renowned for logrolling and scourging Democrats, but little more. The day before the General Assembly adjourned, however, he took a step that foreshadowed the statesmanship of his later career.
On March 3, 1837, he and another member of the Long Nine, Dan Stone, filed a protest against anti-abolitionist resolutions that the legislature had adopted six weeks earlier by the lopsided vote of 77–6 in the House and 18–0 in the senate. Lincoln and Stone were part of the tiny minority who opposed the resolutions—less than 7 percent of the entire General Assembly. The overwhelmingly popular resolutions were introduced at the behest of Southern state legislatures outraged by the American Antislavery Society’s pamphlets depicting slaveowners as cruel brutes. Equally objectionable was the Society’s massive petition drive calling for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. The resolutions passed in Vandalia declared that Illinois legislators “highly disapprove of the formation of abolition societies, and of the doctrines promulgated by them,” that “the right of property in slaves is sacred to the slave-holding States by the Federal Government, and that they cannot be deprived of that right without their consent,” and that “the General Government cannot abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, against the will of the citizens of said District.”221
Lincoln wrote a protest against these resolutions and circulated it among his colleagues. None would sign except for Stone, a native of Vermont and a graduate of Middlebury College who was not seeking reelection (he would soon become a judge). Lincoln declared in the document, which he and Stone entered into the journal of the House of Representatives, “that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy.”222 This statement was a precursor of his landmark 1854 Peoria speech attacking the “monstrous injustice of slavery.” In 1860, a newspaper widely regarded as his organ explained that “Lincoln could not, and did not vote in favor of the resolutions … because the old Calhoun doctrine embraced in the second of the series [‘that the right of property in slaves is sacred to the slave-holding states by the Federal Government’] was abhorrent to his ideas of the true meaning of the Constitution.”223
To proclaim that “slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy” was a remarkably bold gesture for 1837, when antislavery views enjoyed little popularity in central Illinois—or elsewhere in the nation for that matter. Several months after Lincoln and Stone issued their protest, the quasi-Democratic governor of Illinois, Joseph Duncan, speaking for the clear majority of his constituents, denounced all efforts “to agitate the question of abolishing slavery in this country, for it can never be broached without producing violence and discord,” even in the Free States. Duncan added that “if I read my Bible right, which enjoins peace and good-will as the first Christian duties, it must be wicked and sinful to agitate this subject in the manner it has been done by some Abolitionists, especially after our Southern neighbors have repeatedly and earnestly appealed to us not to meddle with it, and assured us their having done so has not only jeopardised their own safety and domestic peace, but in many cases has caused bloodshed and rebellion, which has compelled them, as a measure of prudence and protection, to use more rigidity and severity with their slaves.” Furthermore, Duncan argued, abolition without the consent of the Southern states would violate the Constitution. He believed that “it will neither be consistent with sound policy or humanity by a single effort to free all the slaves in the Union, ignorant, vicious, and degraded as they are known to be, and then turn them loose upon the world without their possessing the least qualification for civil government, or knowledge of the value of property, or the use of liberty.”224
Political leaders outside of Illinois held similar views. Henry Clay, Lincoln’s “beau ideal of a statesman,” condemned abolitionists as “extremely mischievous” fire-brands who “would see the administration of the Government precipitate the nation into absolute ruin” and “nullify the Constitution.” He predicted that “if they are not checked in their progress,” the day would come “when the free States will have to decide on the alternative of repudiating them or repudiating the Union.”225 In 1836, Massachusetts Governor Edward Everett urged the state legislature to outlaw abolitionists, arguing that “everything that tends to disturb the relations created by this compact [i.e., the Constitution] is at war with its spirit, and whatever by direct and necessary operation is calculated to excite an insurrection among the slaves has been held by highly respectable legal authority an offence against the peace of this Commonwealth.”226 New York Governor William L. Marcy called abolitionists “sinister, reckless agitators,” then advised his legislature that it might behoove the Free States to provide “for the trial and punishment by their own judicatories, of residents within their limits, guilty of acts therein, which are calculated and intended to excite insurrection and rebellion in a sister state.”227
Seven months after the Lincoln-Stone protest, Springfield residents publicly condemned abolitionism. While the Presbyterian synod was meeting there, citizens banded together to disrupt the proposed delivery of an antislavery sermon. Mob violence was averted, but some townspeople met on October 23 and adopted the following resolutions: “as citizens of a free State and a peaceable community, we deprecate any attempt to sow discord among us, or to create an excitement as to abolition which can be productive of no good result … the doctrine of immediate emancipation in this country, (although promulgat
ed by those who profess to be christians,) is at variance with christianity, and its tendency is to breed contention, broils and mobs, and the leaders of those calling themselves abolitionists are designing, ambitious men, and dangerous members of society, and should be shunned by all good citizens.”228 Simeon Francis’s newspaper rejoiced “that public opinion in the frontier states is likely to check at once the perfidy of these fanatical men [i.e., the abolitionists].” Westerners “could not be induced to visit upon the South such an accumulation of horrors as is embraced in the meaning of those two words—‘universal emancipation.’ ”229
Francis was right: the antislavery movement had difficulty taking root in Illinois. Between 1817 and 1824, some Illinoisans had waged a successful battle against the introduction of slavery into their state constitution, but thereafter enthusiasm for the antislavery cause dramatically waned. Before 1837 only one county in the state—Putnam—had an auxiliary of the American Antislavery Society. Attempts to circulate antislavery petitions in 1837 fizzled. In 1841, when the Illinois Antislavery Society dispatched an agent to spread the abolition gospel, Springfield authorities denied him permission to speak. Three years later, Ichabod Codding’s attempt to deliver an abolitionist lecture in the capital was thwarted by a mob of more than one hundred men brandishing sticks and boards and blowing horns. They made such a racket that Codding could not be heard. Some of the mob hurled eggs at the speaker while Springfield’s police passively observed the commotion and laughed. Simeon Francis noted that abolitionist “is an odious epithet among us; and we do not believe that there are a dozen men to be found in Sangamon county to whom it can be properly applied.”230
As a Morgan County abolitionist noted in 1845, there were many “warm friends to the slave” in his town. Yet “quite a large portion of western people, who are anti-slavery in principle and who will subscribe to all the views of the abolitionists when presented to them in private conversation, still abhor the name abolitionist,” which they associate with “not only all that does belong to it, but every thing that possibly can be attached to it that is false, such as amalgamation, circulating inflammatory papers among the negroes in order to instigate them to insurrection, and a desire to do away with slavery by physical force. They also attach to the name all the views of [William Lloyd] Garrison.”231 An Urbana newspaper observed that abolition is “considered synonymous with treason, … disunion, civil war, anarchy and every horror [of] which an American can conceive.”232
In such a region at such a time, Lincoln could scarcely expect criticism of slavery, even that which stopped short of abolitionism, to win him popularity. Yet Lincoln clearly had come to loathe slavery by 1837. Two decades later he said that “I have always hated slavery, I think as much as any Abolitionist.”233 He had not emphasized the slavery issue before 1854, he explained, because until then the peculiar institution seemed to be on the wane. His friend Samuel C. Parks asserted that “Lincoln told the truth when he said he had ‘always hated slavery as much as any Abolitionist’ but I do not know that he deserved a great deal of credit for that for his hatred of oppression & wrong in all its forms was constitutional—he could not help it.”234 Lincoln expressed compassion for white men forced to labor like slaves. One day at Beardstown, he observed a steamboat crew “lugging freight on board, working like galley slaves and being cursed every moment by the brutal mate.” To a friend he “freely expressed his disgust at the tyranny of the mate and his tender sympathy for the white slaves.”235 In 1864, Lincoln publicly declared that “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.”236 In 1858, he said: “The slavery question often bothered me as far back as 1836–1840. I was troubled and grieved over it.”237 A friend remembered that in 1837, “Lincoln was talking and men were standing up around him listening to the conversation.… One of them asked him if he was an abolitionist. Mr. Lincoln in reply, reached over and laid his hand on the shoulder of Mr. [Thomas] Alsopp who was a strong abolitionist and said, ‘I am mighty near one.’ ”238 In 1860, Lincoln stated that the protest he and Stone had issued in 1837 “briefly defined his position on the slavery question; and so far as it goes, it was then the same that it is now.”239
Lincoln and Stone, while condemning slavery, also criticized abolitionists: “the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its [slavery’s] evils.” In this position, they faintly echoed the committee report to which they were objecting. That document asserted that abolitionists had “forged new irons for the black man,” “added an hundred fold to the rigors of slavery,” “scattered the fire brands of discord and disunion,” and “aroused the turbulent passions of the monster mob.” The committee could not “conceive how any true friend of the black man can hope to benefit him through the instrumentality of abolition societies.”240 This view that uncompromising abolitionism was detrimental to the true welfare of slaves was common, even among foes of slavery. Elijah P. Lovejoy, the antislavery editor who would die a martyr’s death at Alton, Illinois, in 1837, had three years earlier denounced abolitionists as “the worst enemies the poor slaves have” and charged that their efforts were “riveting the chains they seek to break.”241 Henry Clay declared that abolitionists “have done incalculable mischief … to the very cause which they have espoused.”242 In 1838, another Whig leader, the future president William Henry Harrison, similarly remarked that the efforts of the abolitionists (“deluded men”) would “end with more firmly riveting the chains … of those whose cause they advocate.”243 In 1854, the Springfield Register claimed that if it had not been for abolitionism, “slavery would have been abolished in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and probably in other states. The south by the war made on her rights by the abolitionists, is compelled, by every principle of self respect and local pride, to maintain her position, and she will do it so long as this war is kept up. The abolitionists, instead of aiding the emancipation of the blacks, only perpetuate their bondage.”244
Abolitionists’ tactics and rhetoric could be inflammatory as they pursued what they termed “the duty to rebuke which every inhabitant of the Free States owes to every slaveholder.”245 The leading exemplar of unconditional abolitionism, William Lloyd Garrison, thundered that “every American citizen who retains a human being in involuntary bondage as his property, is … a man-stealer.” He characterized the “desperadoes from the South, in Congress” as “the meanest of thieves and the worst of robbers” who were not “within the pale of Christianity, of republicanism, of humanity.”246 Garrison called the U.S. Constitution a “covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.”247 To critics of his approach, Garrison said in the famous lead editorial of his newspaper, The Liberator, “I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation.”248
Such an approach to reform was diametrically opposed to Lincoln’s. In a temperance address delivered in 1842, he criticized hectoring crusaders: “It is an old and a true maxim, that a ‘drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.’ So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.” Previous temperance efforts had failed, Lincoln said, because they were led by “Preachers, Lawyers, and hired agents” whose lack of “approachability” proved “fatal to their success.” They “are supposed to have no sympathy of feeling or interest, with those very persons whom it is their object to convince and persuade.” They indulged in “[t]oo much denunciation against dram sellers and dram-drinkers,” a strategy that was “impolitic, because, it is not much in the nature of man to be driven to any thing; still less to be driven about that which is exclusively his own business; and least of all, where such driving is to be submitted to, at the expense of pecuniary interest, or burning appetite.” To expect denunciation to bring about r
eform “was to expect a reversal of human nature, which is God’s decree, and never can be reversed. When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted.” During the Civil War, Lincoln bemoaned what he called the “self-righteousness of the Abolitionists” and “the petulant and vicious fretfulness of many radicals.” He doubtless felt the same way about some abolitionists of the 1830s, whose vituperative, intolerant style alienated potential recruits to their worthy cause. In fact, Lincoln may have been trying to persuade abolitionists to exercise more tact. Clearly, the abolition of slavery was on his mind, for in the peroration of this temperance address appeared a seeming non sequitur: “When the victory shall be complete—when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth—how proud the title of that Land, which may truly claim to be the birth-place and cradle of both those revolutions, that shall have ended in that victory.”249
Lincoln may also have been repelled by the anti-Catholic bigotry of some abolitionists, including Elijah P. Lovejoy, a contentious, sternly puritanical newspaper editor and Presbyterian minister who argued with little evidence that slavery was a papist enterprise. In 1836 he was hounded out of St. Louis, whose numerous Catholics disliked his reference to their church as the “Mother of Abominations” and his warning that Catholicism “was approaching the Fountain of Protestant Liberty” with a “stealthy, cat-like step” and a “hyena grin,” seeking to “cast into it the poison of her incantations, more accursed than was ever seethed in the Caldron of Hecate.”250 (One Catholic warned Lovejoy that “should you continue to advance in your dishonest and dishonorable cause of vilifying my religion, I venture to predict your speedy extinction as an Editor in St. Louis.”)251
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