Lincoln Unbound

by Rich Lowry

  His family had lived on the borderlands of slavery. His native Kentucky was a slave state, although a somewhat attenuated one. Still, out of 7,500 ­people in Hardin County, where Lincoln spent his earliest years, more than 1,000 were slaves. At one point, ­Lincoln’s father worked on a milldam alongside slaves. His parents belonged to South Fork Baptist Church. When the church split over the issue of slavery, they joined the antislavery faction at Little Mount Baptist Church. Lincoln told Scripps that his father took the family across the Ohio River and into Indiana “partly on account of slavery.”

  “Slave States,” Lincoln would say much later, perhaps speaking from experience, “are places for poor white ­people to remove FROM; not to remove TO. New free States are the places for poor ­people to go to and better their condition.”

  He wasn’t often called on to legislate on the matter. In 1837, he was one of just six votes opposing resolutions in the Illinois legislature that excoriated abolitionism and declared that “the right of property in slaves is sacred.” Lincoln could manage to get only one other legislator, who wasn’t running for reelection, to sign onto a statement of dissent. It argued “that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy,” although it included the caveat that “the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than abate its evils.”

  As a congressman, he offered a plan for Washington, D.C., of gradual, compensated emancipation—­always his preference—­if approved by the District’s voters; it didn’t go anywhere. He opposed the Mexican War, offering his “spot” resolutions demanding to know the precise location of the alleged Mexican invasion of American soil that justified the war. This opened him to attack back home where the war was popular, as “Spotty Lincoln” or “Ranchero Spotty,” with his “pathetic lamentation over the fate of those Mexicans.” When Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania offered an amendment, the famous Wilmot Proviso, excluding slavery from land acquired from Mexico, Lincoln voted for it “as good as forty times,” he later claimed.

  Even after Kansas-­Nebraska, he never swung into the camp of the abolitionists. He favored the nonextension of slavery as a means toward its eventual extinction, with the endgame never exactly clear. He didn’t believe that natural conditions would stop its spread, as Douglas maintained. He pointed out that Illinois and Missouri were side by side, separated only by the Mississippi. Yet only Illinois was a free state, its status secured by a federal prohibition from the beginning. Nonextension had the political advantage of sidestepping or playing into anti-­black sentiment—­keeping slavery out of the West was indistinguishable from keeping out blacks. Taking this tendency a step further, ­Lincoln ­remained an advocate of the voluntary colonization of blacks years into the Civil War.

  Kansas-­Nebraska radicalized him, nonetheless. He staked his reputation and tethered his ambition to the cause of antislavery. In a fragment he wrote for himself in July 1858, he opened by noting, “I have never professed an indifference to the honors of official station.” Then he mused on all the opponents of abolishing the slave trade in Great Britain and how long they had succeeded in preserving the trade. “Though they blazed,” he wrote, “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. School-­boys know that Wilbeforce [sic], and Granville Sharpe [sic], helped that cause forward; but who can now name a single man who labored to retard it?”

  As the contest over slavery became the focus of his public advocacy, Lincoln’s rhetoric took on the majesty with which we now associate it. Beginning in August 1854, he made the case publicly against the Kansas-­Nebraska Act, several times directly in reply to Douglas. We have the record of his speech in Peoria in October 1854. The Whig paper in Springfield, the Illinois State Journal, took seven issues to print the speech’s nearly seventeen thousand words, carefully edited by Lincoln himself. As Lewis Lehrman points out, the speech is the urtext of Lincoln’s advocacy for the next decade, with nearly everything else an elaboration.

  Prior to the passage of the Kansas-­Nebraska Act, Lincoln referred to the Declaration only twice in public. Thereafter, it ­became a staple of his rhetoric and worldview, “his political chart and inspiration” in the words of his secretary John G. Nicolay. The Declaration had become a field of battle in the fight over slavery. Opponents of slavery brandished the glorious sentence from its preamble: “We hold these truths to be self-­evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Chicago abolitionist newspaper the Western Citizen published the preamble on the front of every edition.

  Lincoln may have first read the Declaration in the law book The Statutes of Indiana. Betraying his logical cast of mind, Lincoln referred to it as containing “the definitions and axioms of free society.” For the South, it was a pernicious invitation to error. John C. Calhoun in 1848 called the idea that “all men are born free and equal” nothing less than “the most false and dangerous of all political error.” Southern extremist George Fitzhugh agreed. “Liberty and equality are new things under the sun,” he wrote disapprovingly. Indiana senator John Pettit called the central contention of the Declaration “a self-­evident lie”—­a line that became a constant target for Lincoln.

  In his 1852 eulogy for Henry Clay, Lincoln already remarked on “an increasing number of men, who, for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and ridicule the white-­man’s charter of freedom—­the declaration that ‘all men are created free and equal.’ So far as I have learned, the first American, of any note, to do or attempt this, was the late John C. Calhoun.” From there, Lincoln jabbed, “it soon after found its way into some of the messages of the Governors of South Carolina. We, however, look for, and are not much shocked by, political eccentricities and heresies in South Carolina.”

  Lincoln cited a Virginia clergyman who had noted dismissively that the Declaration’s statement of universal equality is not found in the Bible but comes “from Saint Voltaire, and was baptized by Thomas Jefferson.” The man of the cloth went on to argue that he had never seen two men who were actually equal, although he admitted—­he must have styled himself a wit—­that “he never saw the Siamese twins.” Lincoln observed archly, “This sounds strangely in republican America,” and insisted that “the like was not heard in the fresher days of the Republic.”

  Distant from his own father, Lincoln felt a deep patriotic filial piety to “the fathers.” In the Lyceum address, he declared: “Let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father.” It is our duty to transmit “undecayed” our inheritance of constitutional liberty, out of “gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general.” At Peoria, he said, “I love the sentiments of those old time men.” In a stirring Chicago speech in 1858, he spoke of the “iron men” of the past, of “those old men,” and “that old Declaration of Independence.”

  A sense of loss suffuses his statements in the 1850s. At Peoria, he lamented that “Little by little, but steadily as a man’s march to the grave, we have been giving up the OLD for the NEW faith.” He imagined what would have happened had Senator Pettit denigrated the Declaration during the Founding generation: “If it had been said in old Independence Hall, seventy-­eight years ago, the very door-keeper would have throttled the man and thrust him into the street.”

  Lincoln sought to recapture what seemed to be slipping away, to catch the falling flag of our patriotic patrimony. “He endeavored to bring back things to the old land marks,” Joseph Gillespie wrote Herndon, “but he never would have attempted to invent and compose new systems. He had boldness enough when he found the building racked and going to decay to restore it to its original design but not to contrive a new & distinct edifice.” ­Lincoln wanted t
o “re-­adopt,” as he said at Peoria, the Declaration. The road to salvation ran through 1776, he argued in a gorgeous passage: “Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us re-­purify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution.”

  Lincoln believed that this renewal is exactly the purpose for which the Declaration had been intended. He had complicated feelings about Thomas Jefferson even though he categorized him as one of “those noble fathers—­Washington, Jefferson, and Madison.” Henry Clay argued that his was the party that truly continued in the tradition of Jefferson, and so did Lincoln. But Lincoln had no use for Jefferson the aristocrat, the hypocritical slaveholder and celebrant—­like Andrew Jackson—­of yeoman agriculture. It was Jefferson’s Declaration that he adored.

  Lincoln practically gushed in a 1859 letter to a Republican festival in Boston marking the anniversary of Jefferson’s birth: “All honor to Jefferson—­to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single ­people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-­day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-­block to the very harbingers of re-­appearing tyranny and oppression.”

  For Lincoln, the Declaration laid the philosophical foundation for the liberal capitalism he wanted to spread and vindicate. It made the case for human dignity and created the predicate for a system that endlessly developed human potential. It undergirded what Republicans extolled as “free-­labor civilization.”

  Lincoln saw a biblical warrant for the natural rights the Declaration enunciated. As far back as roughly 1847, he wrote in notes for himself about tariff policy, “In the early days of the world, the Almighty said to the first of our race ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.’ ” It follows that all good things come from labor and “such things belong to those whose labour has produced them.” Except that “it has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have laboured, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To [secure] each labourer the whole product of his ­labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.”

  In those notes, Lincoln ruminated on what he considered the wasted cost of transportation of bringing goods here from overseas. In the much more consequential debate over slavery, he returned again and again to the biblical injunction to live from your own sweat. He denounced “the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.” In contrast, Lincoln defended the principle that “each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor.” Or in more down-­to-­earth terms, “I always thought that the man who made the corn should eat the corn.”

  The truth of this proposition was obvious enough to be itself self-­evident. In a fragment written for himself probably in the late 1850s, Lincoln said it had been “made so plain by our good Father in Heaven, that all feel and understand it, even down to brutes and creeping insects. The ant, who has toiled and dragged a crumb to his nest, will furiously defend the fruit of his labor, against whatever robber assails him. So plain, that the most dumb and stupid slave that ever toiled for a master, does constantly know that he is wronged. So plain that no one, high or low, ever does mistake it, except in a plainly selfish way.”

  This view accorded with the thought of the philosophical inspirer of the Declaration, John Locke. The late-­seventeenth-­century English philosopher posited an inalienable right to life and liberty that extended to a right to property. Most fundamentally, we all have an equal and natural right to the inalienable possession of ourselves. “For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker,” Locke wrote, “they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure.” We extend ourselves to the outside world through work, and therefore acquire the right to property in particular things: “Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”

  It is this short chain of reasoning, legal scholar Bradford William Short argues, that binds the natural-­rights philosophy of the Declaration to the economic premises of Lincoln and his allies: “Free labor ideology is the theory of the inalienable right to life and liberty,” Short writes. “It is more than that too, of course, but it necessarily always includes the theory at least at its core, as one of its first premises.”

  Lincoln and his allies believed they had seen this view of the world play out in the North, “a dynamic, expanding capitalist society, whose achievements and destiny were almost wholly the result of the dignity and opportunities which it offered the average laboring man,” as Eric Foner puts it.

  The South begged to differ.

  Historian John McCardell traces the development of proslavery thought from an emphasis on a biblical, paternalistic foundation to a frankly racist argument, as the leadership of the South shifted from the old seaboard to the rapidly growing interior. In 1845, South Carolina governor James Hammond wrote letters defending slavery to a British abolitionist. Referring to the Bible and history, he maintained that slavery was “a moral and humane institution, productive of the greatest political and social advantages,” including free ­people who were “higher toned and more deeply interested in preserving a stable and well ordered Government.” The argument had a distinctly antidemocratic key. Hammond boasted that in the South, “intelligence and wealth” didn’t give way to the “reckless and unenlightened numbers.”

  Soon there arose a more “scientific” defense of slavery. ­Alabama doctor Josiah Nott championed a version of it that he charmingly deemed “niggerology.” He dispensed with the ­Bible to argue that blacks and whites were two different species, and published a collection of ethnological writing called Types of Mankind. In an ­essay directed to “The Non-­Slaveholders of the South,” influential journalist James De Bow underlined the implications: the white man “can look down at those who are beneath him, at an infinite remove.” Alabama’s William Lowndes Yancey said the South elevated the white man “amongst the master race and put the negro race to do this dirty work which God designed they should do.”

  The South boasted of the benefits of its system of racial hierarchy. In Slavery Justified, George Fitzhugh boasted how in the South “all is peace, quiet, plenty and contentment. We have no mobs, no trades unions, no strikes for higher wages, no armed resistance to law, but little jealousy of the rich by the poor.”

  In their indictment of Northern capitalism, the Southern ideologists focused on the rise of wage labor, or “wage slavery,” as they deemed it. It had begun to supplant independent proprietorship as the dominant form of economic activity. According to Foner, by 1850 there were more wage earners than slaves, and by 1860, possibly more wage earners than self-­employed workers. Fitzhugh insisted that wage earners, rather than experiencing the ­beneficence of one master, were “slaves of the community.” He located the source of the North’s inhumanity in the remorseless ethic of “every man for himself,” the “whole moral code of Free Society.”

  The attack on wage labor relied on a zero-­sum, class-­conflict analysis of the economy. The labor movement maintained this view even after the Civil War, and Jacksonians in the North could be just as fierce in their denunciations. The New England intellectual Orestes Brownson, a Democrat, denounced wages as a mere salve for those “tender consciences who would retain all the advantages of the slave system without the expense, trouble, and odium of being slaveholders.”

  No matter what the North told itself, according to this critique, the workers at the bottom of society couldn’t possibly escape their lot, any more than could field han
ds toiling in the cotton fields. They were doomed forever to remain the victims of Northern capitalism’s soulless individualism. South Carolina’s James Hammond deemed these workers the “mud sills,” part of the class in any society fated “to do the mean duties, to perform the drudgeries of life.” Only hypocrisy and self-­delusion keep the North from admitting, he thundered, that “[y]our whole class of manual laborers and operatives, as you call them, are slaves.”

  Lincoln had no patience for arguments in favor of a benevolent hierarchy made by the ­people who happened to live comfortably atop that hierarchy. Circa 1858, he wrote a spirited fragment for himself punctuated like a schoolgirl’s text message. He ­lampooned apologists for the South: “But, slavery is good for some ­people!!! As a good thing, slavery is strikingly peculiar, in this, that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of, for himself. Nonsense! Wolves devouring lambs, not because it is good for their own greedy maws, but because it [is] good for the lambs!!!”

  He took particular aim at one Frederick A. Ross, an Alabama minister and author of Slavery Ordained by God. In deciding whether or not a hypothetical slave (called Sambo by Lincoln) should be free or not, Dr. Ross doesn’t think to consult his slave. “While he consider[s] it,” Lincoln writes, “he sits in the shade, with gloves on his hands, and subsists on the bread that Sambo is earning in the burning sun.” Perhaps, Lincoln concludes, Ross might not be “actuated by that perfect impartiality, which has ever been considered most favorable to correct decisions.”

  Lincoln’s critique of the Slave South is inseparable from his view of the free economy as the field for self-improvement. He wrote in a note for a speech in the late 1850s: “Advancement—improvement of condition—is the order of things in a society of equals.” In his 1859 address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, he evoked the America of upward mobility as “the just, and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way to all—­gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.” The South’s ideal worker, in contrast, was “a blind horse upon a tread-­mill.”