Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  Northerners and Southerners alike had used the quotation from Jesus about “a house divided” long before Lincoln cited it. In 1847, Daniel Webster said: “If a house be divided against itself, it will fall, and crush every body in it.”112 In 1806, a Maryland critic of slavery, John Parrish, observed that “[a] house divided against itself cannot stand; neither can a government or constitution: this is coincident with the present Chief Magistrate’s [Jefferson’s] opinion in his Notes on the State of Virginia.”113 In 1852, the Boston abolitionist Edmund Quincy wrote: “It was said more than eighteen hundred years ago that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and the truth of the saying is written on every page of history.” Quincy predicted that slavery would either be abolished or it would “at last make a fissure that will shatter into heaps the proud structure upon the heads of those that put their trust into it.”114 Theodore Parker, sermonizing about slavery, said that there “can be no national welfare without national Unity of Action.… Without that a nation is a ‘house divided against itself.’ ”115 In 1850, a Southern secessionist declared that the American “system of government rests on ‘the broad basis of the people,’ ” who “are not homogenious, they do not assimilate, they are opposed in interests, at variance in opinions—they are at war, inevitable, unavoidable war.… The cement is broken, the house is divided against itself. It MUST FALL.”116 Five years later, the American Anti-Slavery Society adopted the following resolution: “a Church or Government which accords the same rights and privileges to Slavery as to Liberty, is a house divided against itself, which cannot stand.”117

  Lincoln’s other prediction—regarding a second Dred Scott decision—was not far-fetched. The Bloomington Pantagraph had mentioned such a possibility less than a week after the Supreme Court ruled in the first one. Lincoln was probably alluding to Lemmon vs. the People, which had begun in New York in 1852 and dealt with the right of slaveholders to take their slaves with them into Free States. In 1841, the New York Legislature adopted a law stipulating that “no person imported, introduced or brought into this State,” could be held in bondage. In October 1857, the Lemmon case was argued before the New York Supreme Court, which upheld the statute by a 5–3 vote. While the case was being considered by the state’s court of appeals, opponents of slavery feared that it would eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court, where Taney and his colleagues might overrule New York’s statute and pave the way for nationalizing slavery. The case was pending in 1858 and not argued before the New York Court of Appeals until 1860. In 1854, Harriet Beecher Stowe had warned that the Taney court might decide the case in such a way that “it may be declared lawful for slave property to be held in the northern free States. Should this come to pass, it is no more improbable that there may be, four years hence, slave depots in New York City, than it was four years ago, that the South would propose a repeal of the ‘Missouri Compromise.’ ”118 Theodore Parker predicted that the court would rule in the Lemmon case “that a Master may take his Slaves in transit through a free State, & keep them in it a reasonable time, subject not only to his own caprice, but defiant of the Laws of that State.”119 In 1858, Lyman Trumbull echoed that warning: “There is now a case pending, known as the ‘Lemmon Case,’ and when the country gets prepared to receive the decision, you will probably hear again from the Supreme Court of the United States, the doctrine announced, that under the Constitution Slavery goes into all the States of the Union.”120

  Earlier that year several senators—including Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, James Harlan of Iowa, Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, and William Pitt Fessenden of Maine—had warned of a new Dred Scott decision forbidding states to outlaw slavery. The organ of the Buchanan administration declared that Southerners had a right to take slaves into Free States. In February 1858, the California Supreme Court determined that the slave Archy Lee was to remain the property of his owner, who had moved to Sacramento from Mississippi in 1857.

  Many others before Lincoln charged that a conspiracy was afoot to nationalize slavery; among them were the New York Tribune, Congressman David Wilmot, Senators Benjamin F. Wade and William Pitt Fessenden, and the Independent Democrats who had issued the famous denunciation of the Kansas-Nebraska bill when it was first introduced. In all likelihood, Lincoln sincerely believed his allegation of conspiracy. In a draft of a speech written during the 1858 campaign, he declared: “I claim no extraordinary exemption from personal ambition. That I like preferment as well as the average of men may be admitted. But I protest I have not entered upon this hard contest solely, or even chiefly, for a mere personal object. I clearly see, as I think, a powerful plot to make slavery universal and perpetual in this nation. The effort to carry that plot through will be persistent and long continued, extending far beyond the senatorial term for which Judge Douglas and I are just now struggling. I enter upon the contest to contribute my humble and temporary mite in opposition to that effort.” The evidence to prove a conspiracy was, he admitted, “circumstantial only,” but the “string of incontestable facts” appeared to him “inconsistent with every hypothesis, save that of the existence of such conspiracy.… Judge Douglas can so explain them if any one can. From warp to woof his handiwork is everywhere woven in.”121

  Unbeknownst to Lincoln, there was solid evidence of collusion between Buchanan and the U.S. Supreme Court. In February 1857, only the five Southern justices favored overturning the Missouri Compromise. Worried that such a split decision might not sit well with Northerners, Buchanan urged his friend, Justice Robert C. Grier of Pennsylvania, to side with his colleagues from below the Mason-Dixon line. Grier complied and let Buchanan know that the court would decide the case soon after his inauguration. Buchanan, who may well have seen a draft of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s majority opinion, prepared his inaugural address accordingly, urging the public to abide by whatever decision the court might reach.

  The Republican press in Illinois hailed Lincoln’s speech as “able, logical, and most eloquent.”122 In Vermont, the Burlington Free Press praised its “sound doctrine, lucid statements, clear distinctions, and apt illustrations.”123 William Herndon called Lincoln’s “quite compact—nervous—eloquent” speech “the best executive expression of the ideas of political Republicanism, as at present organized, that I have seen.”124 At the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, the New Orleans Delta reported that “[s]omebody named Lincoln, who in the eyes of his friends is an unshorn Sampson of Free-soilism,.… made a speech in which he hit the ‘Little Giant’ some terrible blows.”125 Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune ran the text of the speech, which it deemed “admirable,” “compact,” “forcible,” “concise,” “able,” and “caustic.” Lincoln, said the Tribune, “never fails to make a good speech, … and this is one of his best efforts.”126 (The speech did not change Greeley’s mind about Douglas, however. In July, he still privately chided Illinois Republicans for opposing the senator’s reelection: “You have repelled Douglas, who might have been conciliated, and attached to our own side, whatever he may now find it necessary to say, or do, and, instead of helping us in other states, you have thrown a load upon us that may probably break us down.”)127 In 1860, Thurlow Weed’s newspaper said that this speech “called back the Republicans to their original creed,” thus preventing a “great calamity,” namely, accepting Douglas and popular sovereignty. “This great speech … marked Abraham Lincoln as no ordinary man. Thoughtful men saw in its author a statesman who had the sagacity to discover the peril that awaited the Republican party if it dallied with the specious theory of Stephen A. Douglas.”128

  Douglas’s supporters took heart from the “House Divided” speech because it seemed too radical for Illinois. “I had thought until recently that the Little Giant was dead in Illinois—until I saw the speech Mr Lincoln made to the Republican Convention in Springfield,” remarked a Democrat in Bloomington. “I do not believe that there is any Western State that can upon a fair canvass be brought to endorse the sentiments of that Springfield Speec
h. It is abolition and disunion so absolutely expressed that it should be made to burn Mr Lincoln as long as he lives.”129 The Democratic press reviled the speech as an incitement to civil war and a call for abolition.

  Lincoln was probably unsurprised by such attacks; before he delivered it, his political confidants had warned that the speech was too extreme and advised him to tone it down. He rejected their advice. When Samuel C. Parks suggested that he modify one passage before publishing it, Lincoln asked: “Isn’t it true?”

  “Certainly it is true, but it is premature. The people are not prepared for it, and Douglas will beat us with it all over the state.”

  “I think that the time has come to say it, and I will let it go as it is.”130

  After the election, some friends told Lincoln that his defeat was due to the radicalism of the speech. “Well Gentlemen, you may think that Speech was a mistake, but I never have believed it was, and you will see the day when you will consider it was the wisest thing I ever said.”131 Lincoln told Horace White that “all of his wise friends had objected to that ‘house’ paragraph, but he thought the people were much nearer to the belief than the politicians generally supposed.” Therefore, “while he was willing to assume all the risks incident to the use of that phrase, he did not consider the risk great.”132

  The warnings were valid, however. A few days after the speech John Locke Scripps told Lincoln that its opening lines were too “ultra” for some of his Kentucky-born friends “who want to be Republicans, but who are afraid we are not sufficiently conservative, who are also somewhat afraid of our name, but who hate ‘Locofoism’ most cordially.” Those Kentuckians interpreted the “House Divided” segment of the speech as “an implied pledge on behalf of the Republican party to make war upon the institution in the States where it now exists. They do not perceive that you refer to a moral tendency, but insist that your meaning goes to a political warfar[e] under legal forms against slavery in the States.”133 In reply, Lincoln insisted that his address was not an abolitionist document: “I am much mortified that any part of it should be construed so differently from any thing intended by me,” he told Scripps. “The language, ‘place it [slavery] where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction,’ I used deliberately, not dreaming then, nor believing now, that it asserts, or intimates, any power or purpose, to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists.” Emphatically he declared that “whether the clause used by me, will bear such construction or not, I never so intended it.”134 The charge of “ultraism” would dog Lincoln throughout the campaign as he tried to woo conservative former Whigs.

  The Senate Campaign Begins

  Douglas and his allies tried to discredit Lincoln by asserting that as a congressman he had opposed funding supplies for the troops during the Mexican War. The Chicago Times, Douglas’s organ, made the outrageous claim that Lincoln swore an oath to “refuse to vote one dollar to feed, clothe, or minister to the wants of the sick and dying volunteers from my own State, who are suffering in Mexico. Let them die like dogs! Let them die for want of medicine! Let the fever-parched lips of my Illinois neighbors crack in painful agony—not one drop of cooling liquid shall soothe them if I can help it.”135 Other Democratic papers joined in the attack, calling Lincoln “a friend of the ‘greasers’ ” and an “apologist of Mexico” who “pandered to [the] greasers’ profit and advantage” and whose “tory demagogism” and “mountebank antics” provided “ ‘aid and comfort’ to a foreign enemy during a bloody war.”136

  Joseph Medill warned Lincoln that “thousands of our party are old Democrats, and you know their sentiments on this Mexican War supply question. It ruined [Ohio Senator Thomas] Corwin. The game of the Times is to make a personal issue … and not a party fight.” Henry C. Whitney told Lincoln that the Times’s allegation was “the most potent & dangerous weapon that can be used against you in the rural districts” and urged that Lincoln not “lose ground by inattention to these apparently trifling but really formidable matters:—the fight is one effectually between you & Douglas as if you were in the field for a popular vote.” In Egypt, Democrats reportedly exhumed “the Skeletons of all those who died on the plains of Mexico and attempted to prove by the use of Volcanic thunder—ignoring sound arguments—that they all died at the hands of Abe Lincoln.”137

  Lincoln swiftly provided Medill an account of his congressional votes on Mexican War appropriations, which he had always supported, and protested that the Chicago Times, “in its’ blind rage to assail me,” had ascribed to him a vote that had been cast by another Illinois congressman, John Henry, before Lincoln had taken his seat in the House. Scornfully, he observed: “I scarcely think any one is quite vile enough to make such a charge in such terms, without some slight belief in the truth of it.”138 Medill’s paper denounced “the intense meanness which prompted the Times to falsify his position, and the intenser meanness which induces it not to retract its calumnies.”139 Other Republican papers called the allegation “a blistering and cowardly misrepresentation,” a “self-evident lie,” and an example of “the kind of ammunition with which these Black Democrats are compelled to fight.”140 To their credit, the Democratic Illinois State Register acknowledged that the Times’s charge was erroneous, and the Matoon Gazette, which had originated the allegation, apologetically retracted it. In the end, Lincoln said later, the Times’s abusive tactics had “helped him amazingly.”141 This was not the last dirty trick that Douglas and his organ would play on Lincoln, for the Little Giant and his editor-friend James W. Sheahan would prove to be unscrupulous opponents, willing to make false charges, garble Lincoln’s words, resort to bribery, and engage in shameless demagoguery.

  Each candidate ran scared. A week after his nomination, Lincoln predicted that the Republican nominees for statewide office (Newton Bateman for superintendent of public instruction and James Miller for state treasurer) “will be elected without much difficulty,” but he guessed that “with the advantages they [the Democrats] have of us, we shall be very hard run to carry the Legislature,” which would choose the next senator.142 In July, Herndon reported that his partner meticulously calculated Republican prospects in each county and was “gloomy—rather uncertain, about his own success.”143 In assessing Douglas’s strengths, Lincoln said “that he was a very strong logician; that he had very little humor or imagination, but where he had right on his side very few could make a stronger argument; that he was an exceedingly good judge of human nature, knew the people of the state thoroughly and just how to appeal to the[ir] prejudices and was a very powerful opponent, both on and off the stump.”144 Douglas reciprocated the sentiment. Upon hearing of Lincoln’s nomination, he told a friend: “I shall have my hands full. He is the strong man of his party—full of wit, facts, dates, and the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West. He is as honest as he is shrewd; and if I beat him, my victory will be hardly won.”145 More profanely, the Little Giant later said: “Of all the G-d d—d Whig rascals of Springfield Abe Lincoln is the most honest.”146

  On July 9 Douglas opened his reelection campaign with a speech before a crowd of several thousand Chicagoans. He began by complimenting Lincoln, describing him as “a kind, amiable, and intelligent gentleman, a good citizen and an honorable opponent.” In general, the tone of this address was so conciliatory that the Chicago Press and Tribune hoped that the senator “will conduct the canvass before him with proper regard for the decencies which he has so far repeatedly violated, and for fairness that he never observed.”147 In that speech, Douglas denounced Lincoln’s “House Divided” address for advocating “boldly and clearly a war of sections, a war of the North against the South, of the free states against the slave states—a war of extermination—to be continued relentlessly until the one or the other shall be subdued.” The Little Giant argued that Lincoln’s policy of “uniformity” would lead to despotism, for if people did not have the right to decide for themselves whether to allow slaver
y in their midst, they were no longer free. The true safeguard of liberty, Douglas asserted, was “diversity,” not “uniformity.”

  Turning to the race issue, which he was to emphasize heavily throughout the campaign, Douglas attacked Lincoln’s criticism of the Dred Scott decision. In a characteristic appeal to the intense Negrophobia of Illinoisans, Douglas flatly declared: “this government was made by the white man, for the benefit of the white man, to be administered by white men, in such manner as they should determine.… I am opposed to negro equality. I repeat that this nation is a white people—a people composed of European descendants—a people that have established this government for themselves and their posterity, and I am in favor of preserving not only the purity of the blood, but the purity of the government from any mixture or amalgamation with inferior races. I have seen the effects of this mixture of superior and inferior races—this amalgamation of white men and Indians and negroes; we have seen it in Mexico, in Central America, in South America, and in all the Spanish-American states, and its result has been degeneration, demoralization, and degradation below the capacity for self-government. I am opposed to taking any step that recognizes the negro man or the Indian as the equal of the white man. I am opposed to giving him a voice in the administration of the government.” (A Cherokee protested to Douglas that his tribe and others in the West were “vastly superior, in every respect, to any portion of the Negro race” and urged the Little Giant “to draw the necessary distinction between Indians and negroes.”)148 Among those inferior races were the Chinese, Douglas implied: “I do not acknowledge that the Cooley must necessarily be put upon an equality with the white race.” The senator closed with a salvo against the “unholy, unnatural” alliance between the Republicans and the pro-Buchanan Democrats.149