Lincoln Unbound

by Rich Lowry

  Lincoln gave the Founders a favorable gloss. The federal government was happy to see slavery expand into the Gulf states in the first part of the nineteenth century. Eric Foner points out that between the ratification of the Constitution and 1854, nine slave states entered the union and the slave population grew from 700,000 to more than 3 million. But Lincoln was right that we had regressed since the Founding. In percentage terms, there were fewer free blacks in the South in 1860 than half a century earlier, both because free blacks left and the South had made it even harder for blacks to earn their freedom. From 1830 on, the South tightened its legal grip, seeking to deny any light of hope from shining through cracks in the system. States made it illegal even for masters to teach slaves to read. In a wave of restriction in the late 1850s, Louisiana generously passed a law called “An Act to Permit Free Persons of African Descent to Select a Master and Become Slaves for Life.” Arkansas gave free blacks the choice of leaving or getting enslaved.

  Lincoln wanted the mark of disapprobation back on slavery. This was the crux of the matter: the morality of human bondage. “When Judge Douglas says that whoever, or whatever community, wants slaves, they have a right to have them,” Lincoln explained at Quincy, “he is perfectly logical if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.” Douglas met the question with an evasion. “He has the high distinction,” Lincoln said, “so far as I know, of never having said slavery is either right or wrong. Almost everybody else says one or the other, but the Judge never does.”

  Lincoln obviously didn’t have this problem. In the debates, he called slavery “a moral, social and political wrong.” It follows that, he continued in Quincy, “We deal with it as with any other wrong, in so far as we can prevent its growing any larger, and so deal with it that in the run of time there may be some promise of an end to it.”

  He argued that the Douglas view opened the way for two potential developments favorable to the entrenchment and spread of slavery. The first was further Southern expansionism, which Douglas himself cited as a benefit of his approach. “If Judge Douglas’ policy upon this question succeeds,” Lincoln said at Galesburg, “and gets fairly settled down, until all opposition is crushed out, the next thing will be a grab for the territory of poor Mexico, an invasion of the rich lands of South America, then the adjoining islands will follow, each one of which promises additional slave fields.” The second, another Dred Scott decision, built upon the country’s moral indifference to slavery.

  The first decision had been bad enough. The Supreme Court held in 1857 that blacks couldn’t be citizens and there was no power under the Constitution to prohibit slavery in the territories. The Court did Douglas one better, and ruled the ­Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. In his decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney spoke of the Negro as an “ordinary article of merchandise and traffic,” “so far inferior that [he] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The Radical Republican congressman Thaddeus Stevens said of that line that it “damned [Taney] to everlasting fame; and, I fear, to everlasting fire.”

  Among other things, Dred Scott made a mockery of popular sovereignty. Douglas had constructed his entire edifice upon ­people freely choosing whether or not to open their territories to slavery. Then the Supreme Court said it couldn’t be done. Lincoln pressed Douglas on this point with his famous questions at Freeport, which Douglas answered with his Freeport Doctrine—­as a practical matter, slavery could be excluded by “unfriendly legislation,” no matter what the high court said. Lincoln ridiculed the idea that local laws could override the Supreme Court. And he feared the next easy step to the nationalization of slavery: “It is merely,” he said at Ottawa, “for the Supreme Court to decide that no State under the Constitution can exclude it, just as they have already decided that under the Constitution neither Congress nor the Territorial Legislature can do it.”

  Throughout the debates, Douglas spoke of blacks in the same key as Taney. One of his most reliable arguments was the low-­down, unembarrassed pander to negrophobia, in his struggle with what he constantly referred to as the Black Republicans.

  At the first debate in Ottawa, he put it to listeners this way: “Do you desire to turn this beautiful State into a free negro colony, in order that when Missouri abolishes slavery she can send one hundred thousand emancipated slaves into Illinois, to become citizens and voters, on an equality with yourselves?” In the final debate at Alton, he made this ringing affirmation: “I would not blot out the great inalienable rights of the white men for all the negroes that ever existed.”

  In Freeport, he scraped bottom when he referred to the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass as one of Lincoln’s advisers. He told the story of how the last time he had been in town, “I saw a carriage and a magnificent one it was, drive up and take a position on the outside of the crowd; a beautiful young lady was sitting on the box seat, whilst Fred. Douglass and her mother reclined inside.” He generously allowed how “if you, Black Republicans, think that the negro ought to be on a social equality with your wives and daughters, and ride in a carriage with your wife, whilst you drive the team, you have a perfect right to do so.” George Wallace called this putting the hay down low where the goats can get it. This riff was met with a cry of “Down with the negro.”

  For his part Lincoln drew a distinction between natural rights, which he believed extended to everyone, and political and social rights, which he thought should be circumscribed depending on circumstance. In the first debate in Ottawa, he quoted from his speech at Peoria when he had considered the possibility of freeing blacks and making them “politically and socially, our equals.” He had said, “My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white ­people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-­founded, can not be safely disregarded.”

  In Charleston, located in the middle of the state and heavily populated by conservative Whigs, Lincoln opened his presentation with a disclaimer: “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.” He added “that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

  “I do not understand,” he added, “that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I can just let her alone. I am now in my fiftieth year, and I certainly never have had a black woman for either a slave or a wife. So it seems to me quite possible for us to get along without making either slaves or wives of negroes.”

  To our ears all this sounds damnable, but context matters. Lincoln never had the luxury of addressing a Vassar College faculty meeting. All of the states where Lincoln had resided—­Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois—­at one point banned blacks. Any black person coming into Illinois had to post a one-­thousand-­dollar bond. A referendum in 1848 to allow the state legislature to prohibit free blacks from entering the state got 70 percent of the vote.

  Lincoln’s opposition to the full panoply of rights for blacks is less remarkable than his forthright defenses of their humanity. In Chicago in 1858, at the beginning of the campaign, he gave Douglas yet more fodder when he said, “Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—­this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position. . . . Let us discard all these things, and unite as one ­people throughout this land, until we s
hall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”

  Lincoln himself so “quibbled” during the debates, but only under constant racist attack and only under the pressure of a close-­fought election where winning over anti-­black voters was imperative. It is Lincoln’s high points that are most extraordinary. And it was to them that he would prove true in the coming years of great testing.

  In the final debate at Alton, Lincoln cast the choice over slavery as another battle in “the eternal struggle between these two principles—­right and wrong—­throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the ­people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”

  That tyrannical principle strikes at the core of who we are not just as a ­people, but as ­people. At Alton, Lincoln said of the racially exclusive view of the Declaration: “I combat it as having a tendency to dehumanize the negro—­to take away from him the right of ever striving to be a man.” Appealing to the self interest of his listeners (again, in language jarring to modern sensibilities), Lincoln evoked an American West free of slavery, as a wide-­open platform for aspiration: “Now irrespective of the moral aspect of this question as to whether there is a right or wrong in enslaving a negro, I am still in favor of our new Territories being in such a condition that white men may find a home—­may find some spot where they can better their condition—­where they can settle upon new soil and better their condition in life.” He wanted the West as “an outlet for free white ­people everywhere, the world over—­in which Hans and Baptiste and Patrick, and all other men from all the world, may find new homes and better their conditions in life.”

  Whatever the allure of this vision, it didn’t get Lincoln over the top against Douglas, of course. More ­people voted in Illinois in 1858 than in the presidential election of 1856. Republicans won the popular vote yet the apportionment of legislative districts favored Democrats and allowed Douglas to prevail anyway. Democrats held the south, the Republicans the north, and Lincoln lost the race in the Whig belt in the middle of the state. Henry Whitney recalled in a letter to William Herndon that Lincoln thought he could only count on the loyalty of his law partner: “He said to me on the day Douglas was elected to the U.S. Senate—­& bitterly too—­‘I expect everyone to desert me except Billy.’ ”

  Instead, he ascended to glory. In time, he won the larger argument—­at a cost in blood and treasure that would have seemed unimaginable to him standing on those debate platforms with Douglas. After his election to the presidency, on his long trip to Washington in early 1861, making stops and speeches along the way, he addressed the New Jersey Senate. He remembered how “away back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the younger members have ever seen, ‘Weem’s Life of Washington.’ ” He said the events surrounding the battle at Trenton transfixed him and stayed with him still: “You all know, for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for.” That something, he continued, “held out a great promise to all the ­people of the world to all time to come.”

  He stopped at Independence Hall in Philadelphia to lead a raising of the new flag bearing thirty-­four stars, after Kansas had just joined the union and Oregon in 1859. In an impromptu talk, he invoked the deeper promise of the founding generation “that in due time the weights should be lifted from the ­shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” With threats to his personal safety in mind, he continued, “But, if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle—­I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.”

  He wouldn’t be assassinated. Not yet. Not on that spot. Not before he waged and won a war that defeated the Southern system and opened the way for the ascendance of the vision that had motivated him from his very first stirrings as a politician.

  Chapter 5

  “A Great Empire”: Lincoln’s Vision Realized

  I chant the new empire grander than any before . . . My sail-­ships and steam-­ships threading the archipelagoes, My stars and stripes fluttering in the wind.

  —­WALT WHITMAN, “A BROADWAY PAGEANT,” 1860

  Right after his reelection in 1864, Lincoln wrote the first draft of his annual message to Congress, on pieces of pasteboard or boxboard.

  In a passage of the data-­laden document, he evoked the waxing strength of the Union. He noted its increasing population as shown in the higher number of voters than in 1860. “A table is appended showing particulars,” he noted, before getting to the larger point: “The important fact remains demonstrated, that we have more men now than we had when the war began; that we are not exhausted, nor in process of exhaustion; that we are gaining strength, and may, if need be, maintain the contest indefinitely. This as to men. Material resources are now more complete and abundant than ever. The national ­resources, then, are unexhausted, and, as we believe, inexhaustible.”

  He exaggerated only slightly.

  In the war, Lincoln’s industrializing, rapidly growing capitalist republic overwhelmed the agrarian South partly through sheer demographic and economic muscle. Hamilton trumped Jefferson. Free labor beat slavery. The dynamic North—­hustling, innovating, pulling ­people in from abroad—­bested the underdeveloped South. “We began without capital and if we should lose the greater part of it before this [war] is over,” Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase boasted in 1863, “labor would bring it back again and with a power hitherto unfelt among us.”

  The notion that the war itself, a charnel house for America’s youth and a great grinding wheel of material destruction, drove the industrialization of the North is a myth. But it represented a victory of Lincoln’s style of modernizing capitalism. It wiped out slavery and vindicated his view of the American creed. It decisively broke the South’s political power, and the remnants of the South’s economic model moldered in a region that became as “peculiar” in the American context as the institution of bound labor that had precipitated the war. The country set out on a path of robust democratic capitalism that made it richer—­and better—­than if it had chosen any other alternative. In the aftermath, the country emerged a budding world power with, in the words of Herman Melville, “empire in her eyes.”

  Before General Winfield Scott ever had reason to come up with his Anaconda Plan (“Scott’s Great Snake”) to subdue the Confederacy, the South felt squeezed. On the cusp of the nineteenth century, the North and the South had similar populations. The immigrants who poured into the country—­5 million in the four decades prior to the war—­overwhelmingly made their home in the more congenial free North rather than the South. Another 800,000 came during the course of the war. In 1860, the North had 19 million ­people to the South’s 12 million, counting the almost 4 million slaves. In 1800, the South accounted for 46 percent of Congress; in 1860, just 35 percent.

  In the early 1850s, the likes of Massachusetts politician Henry Wilson—­eventually a senator and a vice president—­could already vow to “surround the slave States with a cordon of free States and, in a few years, not withstanding the immense interests combined in the cause of oppression, we shall give liberty to the millions in bondage.” The South didn’t consider it an idle threat. It feared the creation of more free states in the West, and the chipping away of the protective cocoon it had built
around the slave system, from the Dred Scott ruling to the prohibitions of abolitionist literature in the mails. Robert Toombs, a senator from Georgia, warned of the pernicious effects of Republican patronage powers alone, predicting their exercise “would abolitionize Maryland in a year, raise a powerful abolition party in Va., Kentucky and Missouri in two years, and foster and rear up a free labour party in [the] whole South in four years.”

  Slavery suffered from the abrasions inherent in its contact with the free North and with urban civilization. Border states and cities had relatively high populations of free blacks. As of the late 1850s, half of blacks in Maryland were free. Slave owners feared the dangerously subversive effects of urban life and industrial employment, although Southern industry did resort to slave labor. Frederick Law Olmsted, the great landscape designer and journalist, noted how owners hesitated to rent their slaves out to ironmongers and the like for fear the slaves “had too much liberty, and were acquiring bad habits. They earned money by overwork, and spent it for whisky, and got a habit roaming about and taking care of themselves.”

  With the Republican victory in the 1860 election, the Northern system was certain to wax rather than wane, as its industry continued to grow and it settled a free West. The Southern Democrats and their 1860 presidential nominee, John Breckinridge (destined to become the Confederate secretary of war), wanted a federal government favorable to slavery. They wanted it to take Cuba as another slave state and eschew assistance to industry or the free settlement of the West. Failing that, there was the option of secession. “We must,” one planter with 2,000 slaves said, “do it now or never. If we don’t secede now the political power of the South is broken.” It chose now. As William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama put it, “We propose to do as the Israelites did of old under Divine direction—­to withdraw our ­people from under the power that oppresses them and in doing so, like them to take with us the Ark of the Covenant of our liberties.”