The Dred Scott decision’s blatant miscarriage of justice sullied Lincoln’s faith in the Supreme Court as the impartial judicial institution that the framers intended. Thereafter he believed that judicial rulings were valid as far as they concurred with the beliefs of the president and majorities in Congress: “If the policy of the government, upon vital questions affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decision of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having . . . resigned their government into the hands of the . . . tribunal.”6 In rejecting the concept of judicial review, Lincoln abandoned a key constitutional principle of Hamiltonianism and embraced its opposed doctrine in Jeffersonism.
Kansas was the Buchanan administration’s most pressing political issue.7 The territory was split between the slavocrat Lecompton and Free Soil Topeka governments and was ravaged by worsening violence. Buchanan was determined to uphold the Lecompton government as recognized by his Democratic predecessor and the Democratic-controlled Congress and to crush the upstart Topeka government. For this mission he appointed as governor his friend Robert Walker, a Democratic senator and slaveholder from Mississippi who favored slavery’s extension and Cuba’s acquisition.
Although Walker clearly had the ideological, political, and economic credentials for this hatchet job, he lacked a crucial ingredient—amorality. He soon learned that the slavocrats had rigged the elections and initiated the cycle of violence. He understood that the territory’s legally approved government would never achieve legitimacy without the support of most Kansas citizens. To this end he implored Free Soilers to vote in the territory’s legislative elections scheduled for October 1857.
The Free Soilers ignored Walker’s pleas and continued to boycott anything associated with the Lecompton government. As a result, voter turnout was low, with only 2,200 of 9,250 registered voters actually showing up at the polls. But once again the slavocrats made up for that with thousands of fraudulent votes. The cheating was astonishingly blatant. Over 1,200 names came from a Cincinnati residential directory, while 2,900 were cast in two rural districts that had only 130 registered voters between them.
Walker threw out these returns even though Buchanan pressured him to certify the election no matter how rigged it was. The fraudulent vote made an utter mockery of Stephen Douglas’s notion of “popular sovereignty.” In what may have been his finest hour, on December 3, Douglas strode angrily into the White House and confronted President Buchanan with the cheating. Buchanan not only denied this reality but he and other leading Democratic slavocrats vowed to do all they could to undercut Douglas’s prominence within the party. The resulting split in the Democratic Party would bring the Republicans to power three years later.
Meanwhile the Lecompton government ignored Walker’s directives and, on November 7, held a convention that approved a proslavery state constitution to be submitted for approval in a referendum scheduled for December 21. Free Soilers once again sat out the vote. Slavocrats approved their handiwork by 6,226 to 569; an investigation later found 2,720 fraudulent votes. The Topeka government held its own referendum on January 4, 1858. The result was 10,226 against and 138 for the Lecompton constitution.
Although clearly several thousand more people opposed than approved the Lecompton constitution, Buchanan sent it as a bill to Congress on February 2. The Senate approved it by 33 to 25 on March 23, but it died in the House with only 112 to 120 votes on April 1, 1858. A conference committee devised a compromise bill that on April 30 passed the Senate by 31 to 22 and the House by 112 to 103 and was signed into law by Buchanan. But this had to be approved by Kansas voters. Buchanan promised that federal officials would carefully monitor the referendum scheduled for August 2, 1858. Free Soilers turned out and rejected the revised Lecompton constitution by 11,300 to 1,788. In its efforts to establish a legitimate government, Kansas was back at square one, but this time the seesaw of political power had shifted decisively toward Free Soilers.
Violence between groups with starkly opposed ways of seeing the world was not confined to Kansas. The Mormons, or Church of Latter-Day Saints, began suffering persecution not long after Joseph Smith gathered his first disciples in 1830.8 Although Mormons insisted that they were faithful followers of Jesus Christ, most Christians viewed their religion as heretical, especially their practice of “plural marriage” for men. The conflict was not confined to theology. A vicious cycle pursued the group everywhere they tried to settle. The Mormons would seek to protect themselves by dominating their region’s business and politics, which would provoke reactions that would turn violent and drive them into another exile. In 1839 a mob killed seventeen Mormons at Haun’s Mill, Missouri. In 1844 officials arrested Smith and his brother for destroying the printing press of a Mormon dissenter. A mob broke into the jail at Nauvoo, Illinois, where the Smiths were incarcerated and murdered them.
Brigham Young assumed the Mormon leadership and, Moses-like, in 1846 led the first of a series of groups westward to refuge in the Great Salt Lake valley. There they built a small, flourishing civilization in the desert. Salt Lake City became the metropolis for a cluster of settlements. In 1849 the Mormons held a constitutional convention and applied to Congress to become a state named Deseret.9
Congress rejected that petition in 1850 and instead designated as Utah Territory a vast swath of the Great Basin where the Mormons had settled. Although President Fillmore appointed Young as the territory’s governor and Indian superintendent, he also tapped three non -Mormons as federal judges. These judges were appalled by Young’s cult-like theocracy, with its polygamy and discrimination against non -Mormons. In 1854 President Franklin Pierce pointedly did not renew Young’s appointment as governor, but he could not initially find any non-Mormon willing to take that post. Legally this let Young retain the governorship until someone officially replaced him.
Young and the Mormon ruling council decided to try to pressure Washington into granting them the autonomy they had long sought. They initiated a series of aggressive acts that culminated not in autonomy but in a quasi-war between them and the federal government. In December 1856 a mob broke into the office of Judge George Stiles, whom the Mormons had excommunicated, burned his law books, and stole the court records. In early 1857 the Mormons intimidated a federal surveying party into withdrawing from the territory. Around the same time Mormons murdered an apostate father and son.
The worsening anarchy in Utah Territory forced the Buchanan administration to act. The consensus was for Buchanan to appoint a new governor and three new judges and send them to the territory under a military escort large enough to restore order. Col. Albert Sidney Johnson commanded the fifteen-hundred-man expedition.
Learning of the expedition, Young gathered twenty-five hundred militia and fortified Echo Canyon, through which the main trail led to the Mormon homeland. As Johnson’s force neared, Young sent out a raiding party that attacked three separate supply trains and altogether burned seventy-four wagons and stole fourteen hundred head of cattle and horses. Without supplies, Johnson and his men had to winter at Fort Bridger on the Green River, 115 miles east of Salt Lake City. Mormon raiders attacked an emigrant wagon train that was passing through the territory en route to California, murdered over 120 men, women, and children, and took 18 babies back for adoption, a vicious atrocity that became known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre.10
The Mormons escaped prosecution for these horrendous crimes. Buchanan and his cabinet agreed to appease rather than crush their rebellion. The Mormons were far away, while the administration faced a worsening crisis across the rest of the country.
In 1857 a speculation-fueled financial bubble burst and plunged the U.S. economy into a prolonged depression. Over the proceeding half-dozen years the number of banks had more than doubled, to fifteen hundred. No federal bank or laws existed to regulate the industry to deter reckless financial gambles and fraud. Only states could charter and oversee banks; they competed with each o
ther to charter ever more banks while turning a blind eye to excesses and irregularities.11
The immediate trigger for the financial panic was the collapse of several New York banks when European investors liquidated their holdings and demanded hard coin in exchange. With virtually all banks in debt to each other, the collapse of some either bankrupted or devastated the others. The panic coincided with sharp cutbacks in European purchases of American wheat, which was no longer needed after the Crimean War ended the previous year. The collapse of the financial and farm markets in turn dragged down other economic sectors in a domino effect of failed businesses. Increasingly more people had less income and thus bought fewer goods or started fewer new enterprises.
The depression prompted Republicans to try to push through Congress their economic agenda. They proposed bills for internal improvements, a protective tariff, a central bank, a homestead act, a transcontinental railroad, and a land-grant college act. The Democrats killed every one of these proposals. For now the Hamiltonian agenda appeared dead. Within a few years it would experience a stunning revival.
Abraham Lincoln made his latest attempt at a political comeback in 1858 when the Illinois Republican Party nominated him to run against Stephen Douglas for his Senate seat. Upon learning who would oppose him, Douglas worried that “I shall have my hands full.” He generously described Lincoln as a man who was “as honest as he is shrewd and if I beat him, my victory will be hardly won.”12
Lincoln opened his campaign with some of his most famous words: “‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”13
Shortly thereafter he challenged Douglas to join him on the campaign trail for a series of debates around the state.14 To his credit, Douglas accepted even though as the favored candidate he was better off ignoring than debating his lesser-known opponent. The result was seven debates, starting at Ottawa on August 21, then Freeport on August 27, Jonesboro on September 15, Charleston on September 18, Galesburg on October 7, Quincy on October 13, and ending at Alton on October 15. The format was to alternate who spoke first, with the lead speaker allowed an hour, his opponent an hour and a half to reply, then back to the first for a half-hour rebuttal. Douglas opened four and Lincoln three of the debates.
The men clashed in more than an ideological sense. At a very lean six foot four inches tall, Lincoln towered above the “Little Giant,” who at a stout five foot six inches rose only to his rival’s shoulder. Douglas’s baritone voice boomed while Lincoln’s high-pitched voice twanged. Douglas’s gestures were fluid and theatrical; Lincoln’s were awkward. Douglas’s clothing was tailored and stylish; Lincoln’s was rumpled and ill-fitting.
Between debates the candidates did not quietly rest up for the next. During the campaign, Douglas made 130 campaign speeches and journeyed 5,227 miles around the state; Lincoln made 63, or half as many, speeches but traveled 4,350 miles—3,400 by train, 600 by carriage, and 350 by boat.15 All along Lincoln was essentially his own campaign manager, secretary, and fund-raiser. He was aided, of course, by each local Republican Party branch that turned out to cheer, feed, and lodge him before sending him onward.
During the Freeport debate, Lincoln asked the crucial constitutional and political question that the Supreme Court answered with its Dred Scott decision: “Can the people of a United States territory in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a state constitution?”16
That question forced Douglas to face a philosophical and political dilemma. If he agreed and cited his “popular sovereignty” doctrine, he would repudiate the Dred Scott decision and alienate potential southern Democrats for his intended presidential campaign in 1860. If he flip-flopped on popular sovereignty he would alienate northern Democrats and might lose his current reelection campaign. He tried to bridge this chasm with generalities that praised both state and congressional authority. He then counterattacked by accusing Lincoln of being a radical abolitionist who “believes that the Almighty made the Negro equal to the white man. He thinks that the Negro is his brother. . . . I believe that this government of ours is founded on the white basis. It was made by the white man for the benefit of the white man, to be administered by white men. . . . Preserve the purity of our Government as well as the purity of our race; no amalgamation, political or otherwise, with inferior races!” He condemned “any mixture or amalgamation with inferior races” as leading to “degeneration, demoralization, and degradation.”17
Three powerful forces shaped Lincoln’s views on race: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and his own conscience.18 He presented overwhelming evidence that the nation’s founders hated slavery, tried to contain it, and looked forward to its eventual demise: “The framers of the Constitution found the institution of slavery amongst their other institutions at the time. They found that by an effort to eradicate it, they might lose much of what they had already gained. They were obliged to bow to the necessity. They gave power to Congress to abolish the slave trade at the end of twenty years. They also prohibited slavery in the Territories where it did not exist. They did what they could and yielded to the necessity for the rest.”19 He distinguished between slavery in the existing states, which he believed was constitutional, and slavery’s extension to new territories, which he opposed and believed that Congress was empowered to determine. He also believed that Congress was empowered to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia.
For Lincoln, the debates boiled down to one crucial issue—“the differences between the men who think slavery is wrong and those who do not think it wrong.”20 He condemned slavery as simply evil: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” He explained the stark and unbridgeable chasm between himself and his opponent: “It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle.”21 He demolished the slavocrat arguments for slavery. As for the allegation that slaves are better off than white laborers, he noted that “we never hear of the man who wishes to take good of it by being a slave himself.” He pointed out that even “the most dumb and stupid slave that ever toiled for a master does constantly know that he is wronged.” And if skin color is the criteria for slavery then by “this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet with a fairer skin than your own.” As for the argument that an alleged superior intelligence gives whites the right to enslave blacks, by “this rule you are to be slave to the first man you meet with an intellect superior to your own.”22 The Declaration of Independence made no racial distinction in asserting that “all men [are] created equal—equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’” He argued that “there is no reason in the world why the Negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in that Declaration.”23
Yet, having said all that, Lincoln nonetheless believed that the white and black races should remain separate. Like his hero Henry Clay, he favored the voluntary resettlement of blacks in Liberia or Latin America.24 As for the vast majority of blacks who remained in the United States, he could not imagine let alone promote a time when they would be accepted as politically equal and socially and economically integrated with whites. He reassured the public that “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.” He believed that the “physical difference between the white and black races . . . will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” To those who condemned abolition for leading to miscegenation, he dismissed that “counterfeit logic which concludes that because I do not want a
black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife.”25 Yet he was never recorded as expressing the common belief of his time that blacks were intellectually or morally inferior to whites.
The election was virtually a dead heat, with about 125,000 votes for the Republicans, 121,000 for the Douglas Democrats, and 5,000 for the Buchanan Democrats. It was the gerrymandered districts that decided the contest, allocating fifty-three seats to the Democrats and forty-seven to the Republicans. In the legislative election for the Senate seat on January 5, 1859, Douglas beat Lincoln by fifty-four to forty-six votes.26
Lincoln was at once disappointed and philosophical about his defeat: “I am glad I made the last race. It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I have had in no other way; and though I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.” He insisted that the “fight must go on. The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one or even one hundred defeats.”27 And so it would, but for progressives this struggle increasingly seemed a lost cause.
Abolitionists were all but powerless. They were only a sliver of the North’s population. Over the decades all their petitions, pamphlets, and protests, along with their aid to escaped slaves, inspired few converts to their cause. Instead, as slaveholders felt more morally besieged, they became more extreme in defending their way of life. For decades nearly all slaveholders upheld a country half slave and half free, while only a handful of fire-eaters demanded secession. This balance tilted during the 1850s until by 1861 most slaveholders zealously insisted on having their own country.28
The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876 Page 10