Lincoln Unbound

by Rich Lowry

  We take to ourselves, without question 37.40.42.43.44.45. 46.47.48.49.50.51.52.53.54.55.56.57.& 58. with 27 representatives—­

  Put as doubtful, and to be struggled for, 6.9.12.13.14.21.22.24.25.26.27.31.32.33.34.35.36.38.39& 41. with 26 representatives”

  These aren’t the calculations of someone blithely unconcerned with victory.

  Lincoln delivered the House Divided speech because he wanted to accentuate his difference with Douglas, but more fundamentally because he believed it. The sentiment wasn’t new for him. In a scorching 1855 letter to the Kentuckian George Robertson, Lincoln vented his despair over achieving the peaceful extinction of slavery. He concluded, “Our political problem now is ‘Can we, as a nation, continue together permanently—­forever—­half slave, and half free?’ The problem is too mighty for me.” T. Lyle Dickey, an Illinois lawyer and politico, recalled hearing Lincoln say much the same thing at a political meeting in the fall of 1856. Dickey told Herndon, “After the Meeting was over—­Mr Lincoln & I returned to Pike House—­where we occupied the Same room—­Immediately on reaching the room I said to Mr Lincoln—­‘What in God’s name could induce you to promulgate such an opinion.’ ”

  In Lincoln’s view, at stake in the debate with Douglas and with apologists for slavery was what he called our “central idea,” upon which our government ultimately depends. We could either stay true to the idea bequeathed to us by 1776, or resort to a new one accommodating slavery’s spread and its permanent place in our national life. That was the choice. For his part, Lincoln planted his flag firmly in the Declaration of Independence.

  “I believe the declara[tion] that ‘all men are created equal’ is the great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest,” Lincoln wrote in an 1858 letter. It had made America a land of individual effort and advancement and, therefore, of stupendous abundance. “We are a great empire,” Lincoln said in a speech at Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1856. “We are eighty years old. We stand at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world, and we must enquire what it is that has given us so much prosperity, and we shall understand that to give up that one thing, would be to give up all future prosperity. This cause is that every man can make himself.”

  In the Senate contest in 1858, Lincoln waged a fight to preserve and to extend that “one thing.” He happened to be doing it in a campaign against the man he had debated, envied, and scorned throughout his career. This latest iteration of the Lincoln-­Douglas struggle implicated the deepest ideals of the republic. Douglas, too, was a railroad man. He shepherded the bill to passage granting Illinois the land for the Illinois Central. Douglas, too, wanted to see the country grow, and in fact was more enthusiastic about its westward expansion than was Lincoln. Douglas agitated for a transcontinental railroad and a tide of settlers sweeping toward the Pacific. He sounded just like Lincoln when, shortly after his arrival in Illinois, he wrote back east, in fulsome praise of the state’s potential: “Illinois possesses more natural advantages, and is destined to possess greater artificial and acquired advantages, than any other state in the union or on the globe.”

  The question between the two wasn’t the country’s economic policies or its extent, so much as its very nature, the basis on which the House Divided would be made whole. Lincoln insisted that it be on the ground of the Declaration, which he considered the acid test for the American Dream, the Great Writ of American aspiration, the timeless guarantor of the equality of opportunity that would elevate all through the workings of commercial enterprise. In the ensuing existential crisis of the union, Lincoln translated into national gospel his vision of a republic of striving.

  Stephen Douglas’s background made him more natural Whig material than did Lincoln’s. Douglas came from Vermont, and was the son of a doctor. He had been educated in a preparatory school in a pedagogical splendor unknown to Lincoln. But he, too, had to struggle to rise and found his way upward through the law and politics. His father died when he was an infant. When his mother moved in with her brother, Douglas had to work for his uncle as a laborer and didn’t appreciate the arrangement any more than Lincoln would have. As a young man, he headed west and arrived in Illinois via Cleveland and St. Louis not too long after Lincoln, with just a ­couple of bucks in his pocket. When he left home, he supposedly told his mother, who was curious when he would be back to visit, “On my way to Congress, Mother.”

  Despite his New England roots, Douglas embraced the hero of the West, Andrew Jackson, and the populism of his Democratic Party. He had fallen for Jackson back in Vermont during the campaign of 1828. “From this moment,” he remembered, “my politics became fixed, and all subsequent reading, reflection and observation have but confirmed my early attachment to the cause of Democracy.” In the 1830s, he declared, “in this country there are two opposing parties,” on one side “the advocates of the rights of the ­people” and on the other “the advocates of the privileges of Property.”

  At five feet, four inches tall, with remarkably short legs, Douglas was all energy and aggression, “a perfect steam engine in breeches,” as one fellow lawyer put it. Reckless and risk-­taking by nature, Douglas was ferociously ambitious. He got himself selected as a state’s attorney within about a year of becoming a lawyer.

  The paths of the two young politicians in a hurry constantly intersected. Mary Todd had flirted with Douglas back when she was single. Ninian Edwards told Herndon how Lincoln at one point fell for his comely young cousin, Matilda Edwards. She fielded a score of entreaties for marriage, including, according to Edwards, from Douglas, whom “she refused . . . on the grounds of his bad morals.”

  Lincoln and Douglas served in the state legislature together. By that time, Douglas was already known as the “Little Giant,” although his opponents mocked him as the “Peoria Bantling.” In a sly reference to his diminutive stature, Lincoln wrote to a fellow Whig legislator in 1837: “We have adopted it as part of our policy here, to never speak of Douglass at all. Is’nt that the best mode of treating so small a matter?” (Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton would once say of Douglas that “his legs are too short, sir. That part of his body, sire, which men wish to kick, is too near the ground!”)

  The two met often on the rhetorical battlefield. Before there were the Lincoln-­Douglas Debates, there were Lincoln-­Douglas debates. A newspaper report recorded a Lincoln stop in Tremont, Illinois, during the 1858 campaign: “He went through with a rapid account of the times when he had advocated the doctrines of the Whig party in Tazewell County during the successive campaigns of 1840–’44–’48 and ’52, and alluded to the fact that he had often met Douglas upon the very steps upon which he was speaking, before as now to oppose his political doctrines.”

  When Lincoln’s law partner John Stuart ran against Douglas for Congress in 1838 (beating him by all of thirty-­six votes), Lincoln berated the Democrat in anonymous letters in the Sangamo Journal that Douglas denounced for their “vindictive, fiendish spirit.” Lincoln did all he could to get Stuart over the top and may even have taken his place at a debate in Bloomington when his friend was ill.

  In late 1839, in the run-­up to the presidential campaign in the coming year, the political banter between the Whigs and Democrats hanging around the Springfield store owned by Joshua Speed became particularly heated. According to Herndon, Douglas “sprang up and abruptly made a challenge to those who differed with him to discuss the whole matter publicly, remarking that, ‘This store is no place to talk politics.’ ” Lincoln participated in the ensuing debates. In an initial contest, Douglas beat him badly. Lincoln “left the stump literally whipped off of it,” a Democratic newspaper happily related, “even in the estimation of his own friends.”

  Joseph Gillespie wrote Herndon about the episode: “He was very sensitive where he thought he had failed to come up to the expectations of his friends. I remember a case. He was pitted by the Whigs in 1840 to debate with Mr Douglass the Democratic champion. L
incoln did not come up to the requirements of the occasion. He was conscious of his failure and I never saw any man so much distressed. He begged to be permitted to try it again and was reluctantly indulged and in the next effort he transcended our highest expectations.”

  This was Lincoln’s widely praised and reproduced speech filleting the Van Buren independent Treasury plan. He began by noting the small audience present. “I am, indeed, apprehensive,” he said, “that the few who have attended, have done so, more to spare me of mortification, than in the hope of being interested in any thing I may be able to say. This circumstance casts a damp upon my spirits, which I am sure I shall be unable to overcome during the evening. But enough of preface.”

  After lashing the Van Buren proposal, Lincoln reserved some of his firepower for Douglas at the end. He recalled a Douglas speech on an earlier night justifying the expenditures of the Van Buren administration: “Those who heard Mr. Douglass, recollect that he indulged himself in a contemptuous expression of pity for me. ‘Now he’s got me,’ thought I.” Then, Lincoln said he realized that the reasons proffered by Douglas for the spending were “untrue” or even “supremely ridiculous.” He said he then realized that he had nothing to worry about: “when I saw that he was stupid enough to hope, that I would permit such groundless and audacious assertions to go unexposed, I readily consented, that on the score both of veracity and sagacity, the audience should judge whether he or I were the more deserving of the world’s contempt.”

  A minor triumph for Lincoln, but nothing to compare to the continual rise of Stephen Douglas, who was prodigiously talented and unbelievably successful. He became the state’s youngest secretary of state in 1840, right before being named to the state’s supreme court. (He liked to be called “judge” ever after.) He arrived in the House of Representatives four years before Lincoln and got promoted to the Senate in 1846 at the same time Lincoln was elected to his one unremarkable and unsatisfying term in the House, where he languished as a freshman in the back of the chamber on “Cherokee Strip.” Such was Lincoln’s obscurity that the Republican politician John Wentworth wrote to Herndon that when Lincoln was nominated for president, “few of his old [congressional] colleagues remembered him,” and “Speaker Winthrop, of his own party, is said to have asserted . . . that he would not recognize [him] if he should meet him in the street.”

  By 1852, Douglas was a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, finishing third at the convention. Lincoln was out of office back in Illinois, lamenting of Douglas, “time was when I was in his way some.” Now, he commented, “such small men as I, can hardly be considered as worthy of his notice; & I may have to dodge & get between his legs.”

  When the Kansas-­Nebraska Act passed in 1854, repealing the Missouri Compromise, Douglas was in the midst of the national debate, indeed driving the national debate, while Lincoln was practicing law. He hadn’t quit politics, but was relatively inactive. Lincoln later recalled in his autobiographical statement for John Scripps that “his profession had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind, when the repeal of the Missouri compromise aroused him as he had never been before.”

  The Kansas-­Nebraska Act had begun as an effort by Douglas to establish a government for the unorganized territory west of Iowa and Missouri, a parcel of the northern portion of the Louisiana Purchase including what would eventually become the states of Kansas and Nebraska. The Missouri Compromise had banned slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36'30" parallel. The Kansas-­Nebraska Act would efface the Missouri Compromise prohibition and let the ­people in the territory decide the status of slavery “under the doctrine of popular sovereignty.”

  With a keen eye for the main chance, Douglas didn’t lack for reasons to push the act. He wanted a transcontinental railroad and wanted a route benefiting Illinois (and making his own real estate holdings more valuable). That was impossible so long as Southerners blocked legislation to organize the Kansas-­Nebraska territory. They considered the Missouri Compromise’s prohibition on slavery in the Northern territories an affront. If Douglas could get them on board, it would have the additional benefit of enhancing his standing in the South and increasing his odds as a presidential candidate. Popular sovereignty would in theory cool national passions on the issue by making it a matter of democratic choice by voters in each locale. In any case, climate and soil would naturally check the spread of slavery into new territory in the north. For Douglas, it looked like a win-­win several times over.

  At first, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was left implicit in the act. Under pressure from Southerners, though, Douglas added language declaring it “inoperative and void.” He knew that the proposal, disturbing a long-­standing dispensation at the behest of the South, would “raise a hell of a storm.” So it did. But Douglas was nothing if not a genius legislative mechanic. It was he, not the “Great Compromiser” Henry Clay, who had figured out how to get the Compromise of 1850 through Congress, settling what had been the prior major sectional flare-­up over the country’s new territory. With the support of the administration of President Franklin Pierce, and a healthy helping of patronage to bring around reluctant Northern Democrats, Douglas cajoled, argued, and strategized his way to victory in the spring of 1854. “I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the whole controversy in both houses,” he boasted.

  Douglas reaped the whirlwind, and so did the country. The South’s prospective expansion into what had been considered territory locked away for freedom outraged and galvanized antislavery forces in the North. Douglas said burning effigies of him could light his way “from Boston to Chicago.” When he showed up in the latter city to defend the act, he got hooted at and lashed back, “Abolitionists of Chicago! It is now Sunday morning. I’ll go to church and you may go to Hell.” The law soon enough issued in a low-­simmering civil war between pro-­ and antislavery forces fighting over the status of “bloody Kansas.” “I look upon that enactment not as a law,” ­Lincoln wrote of Kansas-Nebraska in an 1855 letter to Joshua Speed, “but as violence from the beginning. It was conceived in violence, passed in violence, is maintained in violence, and is being executed in violence.”

  The forces unleashed by Kansas-­Nebraska buffeted both parties, but destroyed Lincoln’s Whigs. For a time it seemed that the nativist Know-­Nothing party would emerge ascendant. It, too, was torn apart by sectional conflict, though, and a significant drop in immigration sapped some of its energy. After a period of partisan chaos, with every state embarking on its own path, the anti-­Nebraska forces coalesced into the new Republican Party. Lincoln wrote in that same letter to Speed, “You enquire where I now stand. That is a disputed point. I think I am a whig; but ­others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist.”

  He made a gradual transition into the new Republican Party that channeled the natural anti-­aristocratic feelings of the public into its attacks on the slave South, or “the Slave Power,” capitalized. It enjoyed the protection of a South that overawed American government for much of its early existence. Slave­holders won most of the country’s first sixteen presidential elections. Through 1861, twenty-­three of the thirty-­six speakers of the House had been Southerners. Supreme Court justices had been ­disproportionately from the South. The federal government had a distinctively Southern flavor that benefited the region intensely protective of its peculiar institution.

  From the first, slavery was overwhelmingly, although not entirely, a Southern phenomenon. In 1790, New York had more slaves than any other city besides Charleston, South Carolina. Even then, though, fewer than 6 percent of all slaves were in the North. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, slave labor tended to be concentrated in tobacco, rice, and indigo, grown in the Chesapeake area and the Carolinas and Georgia. The revolution in cotton production with the advent of Eli Whitney’s gin greased its spread throughout the westward-expanding south.

  By 1850, about two-­t
hirds of slaves worked on cotton plantations. Altogether, about a fourth of Southern whites owned slaves as of 1860. They ranged from owners of five to six slaves who worked alongside their chattel, to a better-­off group of about a quarter of all slaveholders who owned up to fifty slaves, to the top three thousand families, who alone owned about a tenth of all the slaves.

  Slavery was quite simply the cornerstone of the South, to borrow the phrase of the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens. In 1860, the South’s nearly 4 million slaves were collectively worth about $3 billion, or more than all the nation’s banks, railroads, and factories put together, according to historian Eric Foner. As the rest of the world experienced a wave of emancipations, the South stood with the likes of Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico on the ramparts of slavery. Even Russia was emancipating the serfs.

  The South craved more territory. It wanted to spread slavery and to forge new slave states to maintain the balance between North and South in the Senate. It eagerly supported the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the ensuing war with Mexico. The most ­aggressive Southerners coveted additional ground even farther south, in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America. This push fed the tragicomic Southern tradition of filibustering, whereby a rogue’s gallery of Southern politicians and adventurers sought to take Latin American territory through their private exertions for the glory of Southern empire.

  For his part, Lincoln had always opposed slavery, but with cat’s feet, cautiously, moderately. “I am naturally anti-­slavery,” Lincoln averred in April 1864. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.”

  He didn’t have much direct experience of it. Lincoln remembered “a tedious low-­water trip, on a Steam Boat from Louisville to St. Louis” with Joshua Speed in 1841. About a dozen slaves were on board, “shackled together with irons.” He told Speed in a letter years later that the “sight was a continual torment to me.” Such a spectacle, repeated whenever he touched a slave state, “has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable.”