Douglass assessed that Lincoln still believed in the South's constitutional right to hold slaves, despite his personal opposition to slavery's extension. Yet, there was no denying Lincoln's election signaled the breaking of slavery's effective stranglehold on the country's political workings, what abolitionists labeled "the slave power." A Republican president represented the end of decades of the nation taking "the law from the lips of an exacting, haughty and imperious slave oligarchy." The North had shown strength at last, because they had elected "if not an Abolitionist, at least an anti-slavery reputation to the Presidency of the United States."41
Though pleased, Douglass went on to warn that the Republicans would have to be pushed to take action against slavery. Worrying that the abolition movement might in fact lose momentum because of a perception that they at last had an ally in power, Douglass rallied radical abolitionists to "writing, publishing, organizing, lecturing, holding meetings, with the earnest aim not to prevent the extension of slavery, but to abolish the system altogether."42 They would need newfound energy and a unified voice to pressure Lincoln.
CHAPTER 4
"I Used to Be a Slave . . ."
Abraham Lincoln was essentially secretive in nature, reticent to let others peer too deeply into his inner self. Mary Lincoln wrote that he kept his emotions to himself, always. "Even between ourselves, when our deep and touching sorrows, were one and the same, his expressions were few."1The only son of four to survive into maturity, Robert Lincoln, a deeply reticent man himself, could recall only a few close conversations with his father and none that revealed any sense of the inner man. Those who knew Lincoln best did not deceive themselves that they truly understood him, or were in his close confidence, personally or politically. He was mysterious, bewildering to his friends and allies, and part of his sway, his powerfully attractive hold on others, was in this deep silence as to his plans, hopes, intentions, and, especially, his past. Judge David Davis, who probably spent as much time with Lincoln on the legal circuit as any man, called his friend, "the most reticent—Secretive man I ever saw—or Expect to see."2William Herndon, his longtime law partner, called Lincoln "the most closed mouth person there ever was," and added in notes to himself of his friend that he was "a profound mystery—an enigma—a sphinx—a riddle . . . incommunicative— silent—reticent—secretive . . ."3
Lincoln was reluctant to share much of his early life, even when it was clearly to his advantage as a politician to do so. Responding to requests for his life story, he twice wrote a few paragraphs about his early years, and only in the context of being forced to produce effective campaign literature, for which he was painfully curt and short, stating, "There is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me. If any thing be made out of it, I wish it to be modest, and not to go beyond the material."4One editor, John Scripps of the Chicago Press and Tribune, later described his difficulty in getting Lincoln to relate any of his early life: "He seemed to be painfully impressed with the extreme poverty of his early surroundings—the utter absence of all romantic and heroic elements. 'Why, Scripps,' said he on one occasion, 'it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence, and that sentence you will find in "Gray's Elegy": 'The short and simple annals of the poor.' That's my life, and that's all you or any one else can make of it.' "5
Above all, Lincoln resisted revisiting his youth, or dwelling on aspects of his life that he clearly found painful to recall, particularly the extreme deprivations of his past. He said in an early political speech, "we were all slaves one time or another," but that being white, he could free himself while a slave could not. He pointed to a friend, adding, "He used to be a slave, but he has made himself free, and I used to be a slave, but now I am so free that they let me practice law."6This whimsical note hardly conveys the extent of Lincoln's deep abhorrence of his childhood's grinding poverty and emotional neglect, particularly from his father Thomas's abusive behavior. In a poem written when he was thirty-seven, Lincoln described the desolate nature of prairie life, and the "loved ones lost/In dreamy shadows . . ." The poem contains the lines:
I hear the lone survivors tell
How nought from death could save,
Til every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.
I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms;
And feel (companions of the dead)
I'm living in the tombs.7
He had endured the death of his mother, Nancy, when he was eight years old. His only sister, Sally, died in childbirth when he was nineteen. Young Lincoln had every reason to be left numbed and embittered from the touch of death.
Lincoln took considerable pride in his success in law and his escape from the poverty of his origins. He rarely visited his Coles County relatives though, as a successful lawyer in Springfield, he lived only a few hours' travel from them. There is no record of any member of his family ever being invited to his Springfield home. More intensely, he avoided his father as best he could, and after turning down a request to visit the dying Thomas Lincoln, refused to attend his funeral. Lincoln never made a positive utterance about his father. There were deep chasms between the two men and Lincoln felt he knew what it was to be exploited and demoralized. His law partner William Herndon reported that Lincoln said "his father taught him to work; but he never taught him to love it." Lincoln wanted nothing to do with his origins, with the exception of his stepmother, Sarah, to whom he felt fondly grateful.
Lincoln calling himself a slave illustrates a great deal about how he arrived at his concept of freedom. He considered himself to have been in a state akin to oppression because of the manual labor, poverty, and lack of opportunity. Although he had never put on false airs, with his accent, manners, and tousled clothing certainly reflecting his western beginnings, he was privately chagrined at having been portrayed as the rail-splitter candidate. What Abraham Lincoln, Esq., ultimately became—through force of will, a passionate belief in work, and a shrewd and penetrating intelligence—was a wealthy railroad corporate lawyer, not rail-splitter.
President-elect Lincoln needed a place to plan for his new administration and to greet the hundreds of guests, reporters, and office seekers clambering for his attention, so he used the governor's corner office in the Springfield State House, recently vacant because of the death of Governor William Bissell. Abraham Lincoln walked each morning from his home on Eighth Street to climb the great steps to the spacious offices on the second floor.
There was no time to celebrate his unlikely rise to power as he struggled to keep up with his suddenly burgeoning correspondence, as well as playing host to a perpetual stream of visitors. Three weeks after the election, Henry Villard of the New York Herald watched Lincoln take a moment to relax with friends, with the president-elect in an expansive mood. When it was suggested that it was too bad that when he entered office as president, his first problem would be the question of slavery, Lincoln "told the story of the Kentucky justice of the peace whose first case was a criminal prosecution for the abuse of slaves. Unable to find any precedents, he exclaimed at last angrily: 'I will be damned if I don't feel almost sorry for being elected when the niggers is the first thing I have to attend to.' "8
It was ironic that a man who had entered politics thirty years before, absorbed with typical Whig topics such as internal improvements, tariffs, taxes, and westward expansion, now had chief responsibility for the fate of some four and a half million people held in slavery. This was the issue that would define his political life and beyond, his legacy and legend. Still, while Lincoln was no abolitionist, or even by instinct a reformer, he possessed a deep abhorrence of slavery. Finding slavery distasteful and contradictory to his vision of "free men, free labor," however, was far from casting his lot with the abolitionists; and working against the spread of slavery into the western territories was a long way from wishing to see it eradicated i
n the South. Through most of his presidency, Lincoln would be adamant that even if slavery were to finally end, slaveholders should have the right to a gradual (up to the year 1900 in one proposal), voluntary, and fully compensated "emancipation."
Lincoln was born in the slave state of Kentucky in 1809, though his parents attended a church opposed to slavery. When Lincoln was seven, in 1816, his father moved the family to Indiana, to settle in a county with only five black people. This limited number was not surprising because strict laws discouraged free blacks from entering the Northwest Territory.
One of the great quandaries of Lincoln's life was in explaining how he, not by temperament or philosophy in any sense an abolitionist, would still be a politician who disliked slavery in such a steadfast and visceral way. Perhaps the explanation lies in Lincoln's lifelong aversion to cruelty of any kind, and even more importantly, from the manner in which slavery so clearly violated the economic principle that an individual's labor was one's own. No man believed in the surging and hopeful capacity of the "self-made man" ideology more than Lincoln, whose entire political philosophy was firmly based on the notion that to rise, to re-create yourself through labor and hard work, was the essence of the American experiment.
From the beginning of his political career, Lincoln took his own roots in manual labor and near-poverty on the western frontier and fused them with a Whig economic philosophy that he never abandoned. In 1847, he stated that the purpose of politics was to secure "to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government." 9 There are dozens of such formulations in Lincoln's public statements, but he summed up his belief that the essence of America was not simply upward social and class mobility, but the primacy of labor and the right of all to profit from their work. As he said in the great debates and repeated many times, notably to fellow Kentuckian and abolitionist Cassius M. Clay, "I always thought that the man who made the corn should eat the corn."10
Lincoln demonstrated his aversion to slavery while a young state legislator in Illinois. In 1837, Lincoln and Daniel Stone were the only members to sign onto a resolution that affirmed "that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy." However, the two men also noted in the same remonstrance that abolitionism too must be blamed for this dire state of affairs, that those extremists actually tended "to increase than to abate its evils."11
During two brief years as a congressman in Washington, Lincoln first voted against ending slavery in the capital city, but later introduced a measure that would have allowed compensated and gradual emancipation in the District of Columbia. However during this time, and in the years he concentrated on his law practice, he came to believe there was no good solution to the problem of slavery.
When his sole term as a congressman ended, Lincoln retreated from politics until slavery brought him back from the lonely roads of the Illinois legal circuit. When Stephen Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, it nullified the old Missouri Compromise and opened the vast western territories to slavery. A visceral outraged reaction to this proposal, from a man he heartily distrusted, drew Lincoln back into politics. Between 1854 and I860, Lincoln's addresses held to a central theme of excluding slavery from new territories as the first step toward slavery's decline and eventual extinction.
For many who shared his Free Soil ideology, this aversion to slavery was not out of compassion for the slave's plight, but from a strong desire to exclude black people from the new territories, whether they were slave or free. During his time serving in Washington, Lincoln's home state easily passed a constitutional article forbidding black people from entering the state. Ensuring that this land would be for enterprising white men, not wealthy slaveholders and their hated slaves, gave these ideas appeal. Lincoln did not endorse these laws, but he did not repudiate them either.
Although Lincoln abhorred slavery, some of his friends were slaveholders. In 1855 after visiting Joshua Speed on his Farmington plantation outside of Louisville, Kentucky, the young lawyer wrote to his friend's sister Mary about seeing twelve slaves being transported on a passing boat. The twelve enslaved people were chained in two groups, with the clevises around their left wrists connected back to the main chain. He said they looked "like so many fish upon a trot-line," but Lincoln still saw their humanity, which many in his time did not.
In this condition they were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them, from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where . . . ,12
This was not the only time Lincoln referred to this incident. Many years later, writing to his slaveholding friend Joshua Speed, Lincoln carefully but honestly confronted their strong differences on the issue of slavery, "I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, and unrewarded toils; but I bite my lip and keep quiet." Then he brought up the long-ago memory of those slaves tied together on that steamboat: " . . . ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave border." Still, to Speed, he resisted the label of abolitionist, stating, "I now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery."13
His abhorrence of slavery was more abstract than personal. He believed the institution betrayed the Declaration of Independence's clear intent, allowing those who hated democracy to effectively deny its true power. In the end, the problem with slavery was that it "enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites."14Even so, Lincoln could not accept the abolitionist agenda either.
Lincoln did not deal with slavery with moral indifference. He repeatedly called it an evil, describing slavery as cancerous or a dangerous snake, and wished it would be contained in such a way that it would eventually be excised or wither away. However, he did not know if extinction could possibly happen in his lifetime, for he believed the Constitution protected the right of southerners to sustain the practice. As a lawyer, his relations with slavery revealed this ambivalence. In more than one Illinois case, Lincoln and Herndon— his partner was adamantly an abolitionist—defended the rights of newly freed slaves and beleaguered black clients. In 1847, however, Lincoln prosecuted the case of Robert Matson, a Kentucky slave owner trying to recover his runaway slaves in Coles County. The slaves claimed that they were free in a free state, but Lincoln pointed out that Matson deserved to retain them as slaves because of the so-called right of transit. He lost the case.15
Still, Lincoln genuinely could never comprehend southern assertions that blacks were "property in the same sense that hogs and horses are." Lincoln could clearly see "mind, feeling, souls, family affections, hopes, joys, sorrows—something that made them more than hogs or horses."16Despite this sensitivity, Lincoln had little familiarity with black people as individuals. After his election, a story began circulating that he had attended a gathering of free black people presenting Governor Salmon Chase of Ohio with a silver pitcher. Lincoln called the story a fiction and curtly wrote, "I never was in a meeting of negroes in my life . . . ,"17
While the black community was one he did not know well, he did befriend William de Fleurville, better known as "Billy the Barber." The Haitian emigrant first made his living cutting hair in Baltimore but headed west for new opportunities. He made it only as far as Illinois, where Lincoln met the hungry, desperate man in a tavern. Luckily for de Fleurville, Lincoln immediately recognized their common wit and resolved to help him set up a business in Springfield. Lincoln assisted him in obtaining a shop and found him his first clients. In time, the barbershop would be a second home for Lincoln, with law books strewn about the room as evidence of Lincoln's affinity for the place. Billy the Barber would go on to be a beloved fixture in an otherwise racist community.18
/> Opposition to slavery's extension did not mean Lincoln believed in social equality between the races. He long labored toward the goal of removing black people from the United States through voluntary colonization. Active in the Illinois State Colonization Society, he served in leadership positions, addressing the membership and donating money. In this, he was following Henry Clay, his ideal of a statesman. As a slave owner, Clay might have been expected to stoutly defend slavery, but he knew the institution well enough to be antislavery in his sentiments. Lincoln loved him for his "devotion to the cause of human liberty—a strong sympathy with the oppressed everywhere, and an ardent wish for their elevation." When Clay died, Lincoln was selected to offer his Springfield eulogy, in which he quoted his hero on colonization: "They must blow out the moral lights around us, and extinguish that greatest torch . . ." Lincoln used Clay's own summation: "There is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children . . ." To this, the young politician added a heartfelt, "Every succeeding year has added strength to the hope of its realization. May it indeed be realized!"19
Lincoln thought that politicians, such as Stephen Douglas, who accused him of championing black equality were raising a false issue; the real issue that mattered was that one sector of America looked upon the slavery as wrong while another "does not look upon it as a wrong."20He tried to present a calm demeanor when confronted with these effective taunts, but he showed his frustration privately, angrily scribbling on an undated piece of paper: "Negro equality! Fudge!! How long, in the government of a God, great enough to make and maintain this Universe, shall there continue knaves to vend, and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagougeism [sic] as this."21
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