Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

by Richard Brookhiser

  Douglas had made, over and over, a powerful argument. The essence of the American system was self-government. Letting popular sovereignty determine whether slavery should exist in the territories was self-government in action. Douglas saw himself as the champion of the American ideal.

  Lincoln had to make a relatively subtle counterargument. Self-government can undermine itself. He had made it most succinctly in Peoria: if a man governs himself, that is self-government, but if he governs another by slavery, that is despotism. Slavery had to be accepted where it was (a further subtlety), but to spread it willfully or allow it to be spread through indifference soiled republicanism.

  Lincoln’s cure for the disease of self-government was self-government. A towering genius, like Napoleon, might fix a broken system by overturning it and imposing a new one, controlled by himself. Lincoln used the means of ordinary politics, making his case on the hustings to voters in Illinois and, as soon as his speeches were reported and reprinted, throughout the North.

  Thus Lincoln the reasoner. But there was another way to settle a disputed question. That was to ask your father. Lincoln had never asked Thomas Lincoln for much of anything. But he had found wiser and better fathers who were as serious, as curious, and as eloquent as he could ever hope to be. They had considered the questions of freedom and slavery, and they had come up with an answer. They believed that all men are created equal, and they meant to put slavery into the course of ultimate extinction.

  They had fought for their answer in the Revolution, and they had put their answer into words—in the Declaration of Independence—and into action—in the Northwest Ordinance, in the Constitution (as read by Lincoln), and in other laws. Their answer was Lincoln’s answer, not Douglas’s.

  When Lincoln was a baby, Henry Clay had called for a new race of heroes. Lincoln wanted a new race of heroes, too, so long as they would agree with the old race of heroes. As he put it at Cooper Union, “Let [us] speak as they spoke, and act as they acted.”

  Ten

  THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. THE TOWERING GENIUS (I)

  BUT DID LINCOLN IN FACT SPEAK AND ACT AS THE FOUNDING fathers had? Did he rightly characterize their intentions and their legacy concerning slavery?

  Lincoln had prepared for both the opening and closing speeches of his six-year debate with Douglas—Peoria and Cooper Union—by “nosing” in the Illinois state library for facts about the founding fathers. Thanks to modern editions of papers, letters, and diaries, we know much more about the founders than Lincoln did (in some ways, we know more about the founders than they themselves did, since they were not privy to each other’s private papers). But by the mid-nineteenth century a fair amount was already on the record.

  Lincoln owned a set of Elliot’s Debates, an 1836 collection of documents about the writing and ratifying of the Constitution. The state library in Springfield owned James Madison’s Papers, published in 1840, which included his copious notes on the Constitutional Convention. It also owned copies of the debates and proceedings of early Congresses, and the first biographies of Jefferson and Washington. These last were attempts at scholarly work, not tales a la Parson Weems, though sometimes the level of scholarship that went into them was not much higher. One early Washington biographer, Jared Sparks, had asked the elderly James Madison about a long unused draft of the First Inaugural Address that he had found in Washington’s papers. When Madison (who had ghosted the shorter version that Washington actually delivered) told him the draft was not important, Sparks sliced it into pieces and handed them out to friends as autograph samples.

  When Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech was published in September 1860 in a pamphlet supervised by Lincoln himself, it appeared with a preface hailing it as a model of “patient research and historical labor” and a long train of historical footnotes. Lincoln had disposed of his own notes by the time the speech went to press, but two young Republican lawyers in New York had compiled a set of their own, which Lincoln glanced over and approved. Though the notes as published were not his research, they represented the kind of research he had done.

  He had made a few mistakes. When he delivered the speech, he included among the signers of the Constitution who had voted for the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 Abraham Baldwin of Georgia. Baldwin was simultaneously a delegate to Congress, which then sat in New York, and to the Constitutional Convention, meeting in Philadelphia. Other men with the same double assignment shuttled between the two cities. But Baldwin, once he arrived in Philadelphia in June, stayed put, and thus did not vote when Congress passed the Ordinance in July. Lincoln’s New York assistants caught the error, and the pamphlet version of the speech corrected it.

  But Lincoln made two other mistakes that were not caught. He said that George Read of Delaware had agreed to bar the importation of foreign slaves into the Mississippi Territory in 1798. But Read had retired from Congress in 1793. The Read who was serving five years later was Jacob Read, a senator from South Carolina and no relation to George. Lincoln had confused the two; so did his helpers in New York.

  To demonstrate Washington’s opposition to the spread of slavery, Lincoln referred to a letter he had written to Lafayette in 1798, praising the Northwest Ordinance. The relevant lines were quoted in a footnote: “I consider it [the Ordinance] a wise measure . . . and I trust we shall have a confederation of free states.” But this letter to Lafayette is bogus. Washington did write his old friend in 1798, after Lafayette was released from an Austrian jail where he had been held as a prisoner of war (revolutionary France and Europe’s monarchies had been fighting for half a dozen years). But Washington’s letter was devoted to congratulations on Lafayette’s freedom and comments on American politics, with not a word about the Northwest Ordinance.

  Lincoln and his footnote-makers may have gotten the supposed Washington letter from a speech Lyman Trumbull had given in the Senate in December 1859. Or they may have spotted it in abolitionist publications, where it appeared earlier in the 1850s. The Washington letter was pure projection: wishing that a great man thought one’s thoughts, and believed one’s beliefs. (Washington was a common hook for such daydreams: in the 1850s Catholics tweaked the story that he had prayed at Valley Forge; in their version, his prayer was answered by the Virgin Mary.)

  These were not gross errors. Both Abraham Baldwin and George Read had voted to restrict slavery during their actual careers in Congress, and thus they legitimately belonged on Lincoln’s tally of twenty-one like-minded “fathers.” Washington had criticized slavery in letters that were authentic, and Lincoln’s young assistants quoted one such in their notes: “There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it,” Washington wrote Robert Morris in 1786. If anything these small blunders add the charm of effort to Lincoln’s research. He had no staff (except Herndon), and his last-minute helpers in New York worked without search engines. The lawyer-politician and his admirers had to hit the books themselves and root around. The wonder is that they found so much.

  More serious than stray mistakes was the tone of special pleading that Lincoln used whenever he discussed the founders and slavery. He was a patriot appealing to the founders, a son appealing to his fathers. But he was also a lawyer making a case. He leaned hard on all the evidence that backed him up, and ignored or hastened over any evidence that didn’t.

  In his swing through the Midwest at the end of 1859, he described “the early days of the Republic” as an era of wholehearted enthusiasm for liberty: “You may examine the debates under the Confederation, in the [Constitutional] Convention . . . and in the first session of Congress and you will not find a single man saying that Slavery is a good thing.”

  But this was not true. Lincoln had read in Madison’s Papers the debates that took place at the Constitutional Convention over the slave trade and the three-fifths rule. This was where he found the blazing antislavery polemics of Gouverneur Morris, the peg-legged delegate from Pennsylvania who had
called slavery “a nefarious institution,” and “the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.” This was where he read Madison himself insisting, Virginia slave-owner though he was, that it would be “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men” (hence the veiled language the Constitution used to discuss it).

  But this was also where he encountered John Rutledge of South Carolina—the lawyer, planter, and patriot who served his state as governor during the Revolution and had his estate confiscated by the occupying British. Rutledge declared at the Constitutional Convention that “religion and humanity had nothing to do” with the slave trade. “Interest alone is the governing principle with nations”—and with states. The people of North and South Carolina and Georgia would be “fools” if they allowed the slave trade to be restricted. Northern states, meanwhile, should welcome the slave trade, since more slave labor “will increase the commodities of which they will become the carriers [merchants].”

  Rutledge had not quite said that slavery and the slave trade were good things, but he certainly thought they were good for business. He would not defend them on the grounds of religion and humanity; he simply put interest above religion and humanity. And he insisted that his state and its neighbors would not sign the Constitution unless their interest in the slave trade was protected. (In the end, the Constitution guaranteed the slave trade until 1808—Article I, Section 9—and further stipulated that this provision could not be amended—Article V.) Lincoln admitted in his reckoning of the “fathers” at Cooper Union that Rutledge could not be counted as an antislavery man.

  One delegate to the first Congress had gone even further than Rutledge. In February 1789, nineteen years ahead of the constitutional guarantee, Quakers petitioned Congress to end the slave trade (they urged Congress to overlook such “seeming impediments”). They were answered by Rep. James Jackson of Georgia. Jackson had moved to Savannah from England in 1772 at the age of fifteen and had fought in the Revolution. In rebutting the Quakers, he went beyond the letter of the law to defend slavery itself. “Why do these men set themselves up in such a particular manner against slavery? Do they understand the rights of mankind, and the disposition of Providence better than others? If they were to consult [the Bible] they will find that slavery is not only allowed but commended. . . . If they fully examine the subject, they will find that slavery has been no novel doctrine since the days of Cain.” Anything supported by both the Bible and Cain must be a good thing.

  Jackson’s remarks were immortalized when Benjamin Franklin, in his last journalistic spoof, claimed to have found a seventeenth-century speech by a Barbary pirate defending the enslavement of Christians in similar terms: “How grossly are they mistaken in imagining slavery to be disallowed by the Alcoran. . . since it is well known from it that God has given the world and all that it contains to his faithful Musselmen.” Lincoln probably never read Franklin’s satire, but he might have stumbled across Jackson’s remarks when he was hunting for the first Congress’s votes on confirming the Northwest Ordinance. Jackson and other southerners were content to keep slavery out of the old Northwest, but they thought, and sometimes said, even in the early days of the republic, that it was a good thing for themselves.

  But the most problematic of the founders, for Lincoln, was one of the very greatest: Thomas Jefferson.

  Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, when Lincoln was seventeen years old. Death linked him with the great event of his life, the Declaration of Independence, which Congress had approved fifty years earlier. George Washington was bound for the pantheon from the moment he became commander in chief. Thomas Paine, after he authored The Age of Reason, could only belong to the pantheon of village skeptics. Jefferson’s death on the jubilee of his Declaration was his apotheosis. Four months later, in November 1826, his apotheosis took visible form when John Trumbull’s heroic painting, The Declaration of Independence, was hung in the Capitol Rotunda. In it, Jefferson—taller than his fellow founders, and brighter (he wears a red waistcoat)—hands his immortal document to Congress, and to posterity.

  But between 1776 and 1826, Jefferson had had a busy and controversial career. In 1791–1792 he had founded, with the help of James Madison, America’s first national political party, the Republicans (under Andrew Jackson they would change their name to the Democrats). Their struggles with their rivals, the Federalists, were as bitter as anything in the history of American politics apart from the Civil War. One story can stand for all: In 1798 a Republican congressman spat in the face of a Federalist colleague on the floor of the House. A few days later, the Federalist caned the Republican, who defended himself with a pair of tongs from the cloakroom fireplace.

  Jefferson’s party triumphed, giving the White House to him and to his fellow Virginians James Madison and James Monroe for two terms each—twenty-four years (1801–1825) of government by friends, neighbors, and soul-mates. But the long reign of the first Republican Party was not cloudless. Jefferson’s first term (1801–1805) glittered: he cut taxes, enjoyed peace, and bought Louisiana. But his second term (1805–1809) ended in a funk: his efforts to keep America out of renewed European wars by imposing a trade embargo made him odious. Jefferson left the White House in March 1809, when Lincoln was only three weeks old, a worn-out man. His long retirement at Monticello was a period of silent recovery.

  In 1829, three years after his apotheosis, the first partial edition of his letters and papers appeared. Before that, stray letters of his had been published by indiscreet correspondents. But the appearance of a mass of his writing, followed over the years by other editions and biographies, took Jefferson out of both the shadows of retirement and the glory of death and revived all the controversies of his life.

  In 1870 William Herndon tried to explain to a would-be Lincoln biographer what Lincoln had thought of his great predecessor. “Mr. Lincoln,” he wrote, “hated Thomas Jefferson as a man—rather, as a politician, and yet the highest compliment I ever heard or read of his was paid to the memory of Jefferson.” By “highest compliment,” Herndon meant the paean Lincoln sent the Bostonians who had invited him to celebrate Jefferson’s birthday in 1859 (“All honor to Jefferson . . . ”). But what of the hatred?

  Herndon stumbled at the very start of his sentence, writing first that Lincoln hated the man, then deciding that it was really the politician that he found hateful. But man and politician were fused in people’s opinions of Jefferson. Critics and admirers alike had been trying for years to explain his actions in the light of his character; yet both character and actions could defy explanation. It wasn’t just that people sometimes disagreed with Jefferson; rather, that Jefferson so often seemed to disagree with himself.

  Alexander Hamilton, Jefferson’s most eloquent enemy, called him crafty, unscrupulous, dishonest, and “a contemptible hypocrite.” Madison, who loved Jefferson above all men, admitted that he shared, with “others of great genius,” a “habit . . . of expressing in strong and round terms impressions of the moment.” We might love the impressions of some of Jefferson’s moments, but then there were the impressions of other, less lovable, moments; and in between were all the moments when he was neither strong nor round, but elusive, maybe even evasive. Who that thought seriously about Jefferson did not hate him, at least a little?

  What mattered most to Lincoln, and what was the source of both the hatred Herndon said he felt and the honor he publicly offered, was Jefferson’s shifting thoughts about slavery.

  Early in Jefferson’s career, in 1784, he had proposed that the old Congress keep slavery out of the West. Lincoln alluded to Jefferson’s proposal in his two historical speeches, Peoria and Cooper Union.

  In the same decade, Jefferson had issued an almost biblical warning of what might happen if Congress and the states did not act to end slavery. In 1780 a French friend asked him to write a description of his state; Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia was published in 1787. There he wrote: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that
God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever; that . . . a revolution in the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.” Lincoln knew of this warning, too, and quoted the opening clause several times.

  Jefferson’s proposal to keep slavery out of the West reflected the boldness of a revolutionary, and his vision of a race war suggested the foresight of a prophet and the fears of a guilty soul. Yet as the years passed, Jefferson’s initiative, if not his apprehensions, seemed to melt away. What happened?

  One thing that was widely supposed to have happened was that Jefferson took his slave Sally Hemings as a concubine. The affair was supposed to have begun while he was in France, several years after the death of his wife, and to have produced a handful of children. Federalist journalists made the story a scandal during his presidency. Abolitionists repeated it after his death, more in sorrow than in anger (slavery, in their telling, had corrupted even the author of the Declaration). Foreigners irked by canting Americans thought it was hilarious. The Irish poet Thomas Moore and the English novelist Charles Dickens both mocked Jefferson for dreaming “of freedom in a slave’s embrace.” In the election of 1860 Democrats would accuse Lincoln of having repeated this crack himself, back in his days as a Whig. Lincoln denied it, and indeed, personal attacks of that sort were not his style; he would needle Democrats for their racial and sexual anxieties, but his own wariness about sex made him slow to defame individuals.