Douglas proclaimed his support for the Dred Scott decision because it was “delivered by the highest judicial tribunal on earth, a tribunal established by the Constitution of the United States for that purpose, and hence that decision becomes the law of the land, binding on you, on me, and on every other good citizen, whether we like it or not.”15 Lincoln argued that the Dred Scott decision was based on false premises and that those false premises gave rise to its false conclusions.16 He pointed out that controversial court decisions had in the past been reversed or disregarded by other branches of the government. He pointed in particular to President Andrew Jackson’s rejection of the Supreme Court decision in McCulloch v. Maryland,17 upholding the constitutionality of the second Bank of the United States.18 Jackson was the hero of Douglas’s Democratic Party, but he persisted in his belief that the bank was unconstitutional despite the Supreme Court’s contrary pronouncement, and he vetoed its recharter. Lincoln argued that Supreme Court decisions could, and should, be overruled when it was determined that they were wrong. He did not propose to resist the Dred Scott decision. He did not “propose that when Dred Scott has been decided to be a slave by the court, we, as a mob, will decide him to be free.” But he did oppose the Supreme Court’s decision “as a political rule which shall be binding on the voter,” and he declared that he and the Republican Party proposed “so resisting it as to have it reversed if we can, and a new judicial rule established upon this subject.”19
The legal issues in the Effie Afton and Dred Scott cases were starkly different, but their political consequences were mutually reinforcing. Without Effie Afton, Lincoln might not have won the enthusiastic political support of Norman Judd in 1858 and beyond (or if he had won it, it might not have been as strong). Without Judd’s participation in the Republican state convention in Springfield in 1858, Lincoln might not have won the party’s senatorial nomination (or if he had won it, it might not have been as enthusiastic). Without the nomination and Judd’s support during the ensuing campaign, Lincoln’s profile might not have risen as high as it did. And without Lincoln’s vigorous and eloquent disagreement with the Dred Scott decision, voiced in his debates with Douglas, he might never have won the Republican presidential nomination in 1860 and gone on to win that year’s election.
There is no question that Lincoln’s debates with Douglas in 1858 were a springboard to his election as president of the United States. Shorthand reports of the debates were, ironically, taken down by the same two reporters who had covered the Effie Afton trial: Henry Binmore and Robert R. Hitt. Binmore had left the St. Louis Missouri Republican and was now working for the pro-Douglas Chicago Times, while Hitt was engaged by the pro-Lincoln Chicago Press and Tribune.20 First printed in Chicago, then copied in newspapers all over Illinois and beyond, reports of the debates helped to acquaint voters with the positions of Douglas and Lincoln on the great issues they debated and to increase popular interest in the election.
When the voters went to the polls in November, the statewide candidates of the Republican Party received more votes than their Democratic opponents, but the malapportionment of legislative districts resulted in a Democratic majority in the legislature, and Douglas won another term as senator.21 Lincoln was initially depressed by his defeat and wrote one of his old friends, “I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten.” In the same letter, however, he said, “I am glad I made the late race. It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way,” adding, “I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.”22 And he prepared a compilation of his debates with Douglas for publication in book form (using Binmore’s reports of Lincoln’s words and Hitt’s reports of Douglas’s), confident that it would find a receptive audience. He was right, for when The Political Debates between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas was issued in 1860, it became a runaway best-seller.23
In August 1859, Lincoln made a trip into Iowa with Ozias M. Hatch, the Illinois secretary of state. He traveled from Springfield to St. Joseph by train, then boarded a steamboat for the trip up the Missouri River to Council Bluffs, where Norman Judd owned land. Judd’s note to Lincoln was coming due, and Judd had proposed to give him a new note secured by some of his land in the Iowa town.24 Lincoln inspected the property, met some of the leading citizens in the town, and on August 13 gave a speech in the Council Bluffs Concert Hall on the subject of slavery and its expansion into the western territories. Iowans were for the most part supportive of Lincoln’s strong opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Stephen Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty, and his speech went well.25
While he was in Council Bluffs, Lincoln met Grenville M. Dodge, a young railroad surveyor who was employed by the Mississippi and Missouri Railroad, then building its lines from Iowa City west to the Missouri River. Lincoln and Dodge conversed for a couple of hours, in the course of which Dodge pressed on him the idea that the best route for the projected railroad to the Pacific lay through Council Bluffs and Omaha and then followed the bed of the Platte River Valley toward the Rocky Mountains.26
Years later, Dodge—who served as a major general in the Union Army and afterward became the chief engineer of the Union Pacific Railroad—remembered Lincoln’s enthusiasm about the projected line. “He stated that there was nothing more important before the nation at that time than the building of the railroad to the Pacific Coast,” Dodge recalled. “He ingeniously extracted a great deal of information from me.”27 Lincoln decided to accept Judd’s property as collateral, which Judd deeded to him on November 11, 1859. On their way home, Lincoln and Hatch traveled aboard a steamboat that ran aground in the Missouri River and delayed their arrival back in Springfield.28
In October 1859, Lincoln received an invitation to make a much longer trip, this time to New York to address a group of eastern Republicans at Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn.29 When he arrived in New York in February 1860, he found that the venue for the speech had been changed to Manhattan’s Cooper Union. He had carefully prepared for the speech he delivered at the Cooper Union on February 27, spending long hours in the Illinois State Library researching the history of slavery in the early days of the United States. His speech—ninety minutes long—reiterated the themes he had expressed in his debates with Stephen Douglas, including his views on the Dred Scott case, which he had continued to refine since his debate with Douglas in 1858. The speech demonstrated to Easterners the passion and eloquence that Illinoisans had seen and heard in 1858.30 In a letter to his wife, Lincoln said that the Cooper Union speech “went off passably well and gave me no trouble whatever.”31 In New York, however, it created a deep impression, inspiring Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune to comment: “No man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience.”32 The Tribune printed the speech in pamphlet form, and in Illinois it was republished by Springfield’s Illinois State Journal.33
Despite his political activity, Lincoln continued to apply himself to his legal practice in early 1860. It was, after all, the means by which he supported himself and his family, and if he did not take on clients and appear in court he would soon find himself in financial distress. The attorney for William Jones, a wealthy Chicago banker who owned some land along the city’s lakeshore, had for more than a year been asking Lincoln to join him in the trial of an important real estate case that was scheduled for the U.S. Circuit Court in the spring of 1860. Lincoln’s trial calendar was already congested, and his supporters in the Illinois Republican Party were making plans to put his name before the upcoming Republican National Convention as a candidate for the party’s presidential nomination. But he found room for the trial on his calendar, and went up to Chicago in late March to prepare for it.
Formally titled Johnston v. Jones and Marsh but informally called the Sand Bar case, the trial tested the ownership of a parcel of real estate formed by accretions of sand and gravel after the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers straightened the Chicago River and built two piers into Lake Michigan in the 1830s. It was recognized throughout Illinois as one of the most bitterly contested cases in Chicago’s history, for the disputed land (part of a larger tract formed by the accretions) was deemed to be worth hundreds of thousands—perhaps even as much as a million—dollars. Litigation in the case had begun in 1849 and already spanned three jury trials and one appeal to the United States Supreme Court, none of which had effectively settled the rights of the parties.34 The upcoming trial would be the fourth, and if sustained by the Supreme Court, it would finally end the legal wrangling.
Lincoln was one of four lawyers for William Jones who opposed three lawyers for William S. Johnston when the case went before the jury on March 23. He took an active part in the questioning of witnesses and the presentation of final arguments, all of which ended on April 4 with a verdict in favor of Lincoln’s client. Lincoln was pleased when, on the day the jury rendered its verdict, he received a fee of $350 for his work in the trial.35 Predictably, the case was again appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which heard it in late 1861. Associate Justice Noah Swayne of Ohio, whom Lincoln had appointed to the Supreme Court following the April 1861 death of John McLean, announced the opinion affirming the decision of the jury in Chicago.36
The extent to which Lincoln’s legal career had helped his political ambitions was vividly demonstrated when the Republican Party met in Chicago on May 16, 1860, just six weeks after the conclusion of the Sand Bar trial. Lincoln’s managers there were Leonard Swett, Stephen T. Logan, Jesse W. Fell, Ward Hill Lamon, Norman Judd, and David Davis. All of these men were Illinois lawyers (although Davis had been elevated to the judgeship of the Eighth Judicial Circuit) who had known and worked with Lincoln for many years and become enthusiastic supporters of his candidacy for the party’s presidential nomination. Judd, who had been Lincoln’s co-counsel in the Effie Afton trial and played a major role in his 1858 campaign for election to the Senate, gave the nominating speech for Lincoln, and David Davis acted as his manager during the balloting.
Against the opposition of New York’s William H. Seward, Pennsylvania’s Simon Cameron, Ohio’s Salmon P. Chase, and Missouri’s Edward Bates, all better-known politicians with greater national reputations than the Illinoisan now nicknamed “the Rail-Splitter,” Lincoln seemed at the outset to have little chance of capturing the presidential nod; but with the help of his lawyer friends, and the growing realization that all of the other candidates had weaknesses, he succeeded on the third ballot and, on May 18, won the nomination.37 In the presidential election that was held on November 6, Lincoln won more popular votes than any of his three opponents (Stephen Douglas, John C. Breckinridge, and John Bell), and on March 4, 1861, he was inaugurated in Washington, D.C., as the nation’s sixteenth president.
FOURTEEN
History’s Verdict
The day before Lincoln received the Republican convention’s presidential nomination, the party adopted its platform for the coming campaign. The document began by restating positions the Republican Party had already made well known: opposition to the spread of slavery into the western territories, condemnation of the reopening of the African slave trade (which it condemned as “a crime against humanity and a burning shame to our country and age”), an “abhorrence” for “all schemes for disunion, come from whatever source they may,” and support for the admission of Kansas into the Union as a free state. It added a strong position favoring protection for the rights of recent immigrants to the United States (thus opposing the nativist, or anti-Catholic policies of the Know-Nothing Party), favoring the adoption of a homestead act, which would give western settlers access to lands beyond the Mississippi, supporting a tariff that would “encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country,” and advocating federal aid for the construction of the long-sought-after railroad to the Pacific. In emphatic language, the platform declared that “a railroad to the Pacific Ocean is imperatively demanded by the interests of the whole country” and “the federal government ought to render immediate and efficient aid in its construction.”1
In his formal acceptance of the nomination, Lincoln made it clear that the platform met his “approval” and that it would be his “care not to violate, or disregard it, in any part.”2 After his inauguration he made serious—and mostly successful—efforts to carry out this promise, despite the overwhelming distractions that the secession of the southern states presented to him: the massive defiance of federal law that secession represented; the military attacks on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and other federal properties; the threat of a military invasion of the national capital; the need to assemble an army sufficient to beat back the southern threats and raise revenues adequate to fund the war effort; the conviction that slavery was at the heart of the crisis, and the growing conviction that it was his duty as president to meet it with emancipation; and his overarching passion to preserve the Union, a “nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that ‘all men are created equal,’” whose preservation he regarded as “the last best hope of earth.”3
On May 20, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the promised Homestead Act, giving 160 acres of public land to each settler who would occupy and improve it for five years.4 Then, on July 1, 1862, he signed the Pacific Railway Act, pledging federal aid for the construction of the railroad to the Pacific Ocean. Among other things, the Railway Act promised generous subsidies in the form of land grants and credits for the construction of the railroad; it also authorized the president to fix the width (gauge) of all of the rail lines built west and to establish the geographical point at which the rails should begin their westward course.5 Only one day later, he signed the so-called Morrill Act, which made generous grants of federal land to the states and territories for the creation of agricultural colleges.6 Nine days later, on July 11, 1862, he signed an act creating a federal arsenal at Rock Island, a move deemed necessary for the support of Union forces after the Confederate capture and destruction of the U.S. Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.7 On January 21, 1863, acting pursuant to the authority granted him in the Pacific Railway Act, he issued an order setting the gauge of the railroad from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean at five feet.8 (Congress, however, countermanded his order on March 3, setting the gauge at four feet eight and a half inches—a width used in the eastern states and popularly called the “standard gauge.”)9 On November 17, 1863, two days before he delivered his immortal address on the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he fixed the point at which the Pacific railroad would begin as “so much of the Western boundary of the State of Iowa as lies between the North and South boundaries of the United States Township, within which the City of Omaha is situated” (that is, a point directly opposite Council Bluffs, Iowa).10 On June 9, 1864, he delivered a message acknowledging his nomination for a second term as president in which he stated (among many other things) that he and his party were “in favor of the speedy construction of the Railroad to the Pacific coast.”11 On July 2, 1864, he signed an act amending the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, increasing the federal aid for the construction of the railroad by doubling the land grants and guaranteeing the payment of interest on bonds sold to raise cash for construction.12
The Pacific railroad was actually two railroads, one that built eastward from California under the direction of the California-incorporated Central Pacific Railroad Company, and a second that moved westward from Council Bluffs and Omaha under the direction of the federally incorporated Union Pacific. Construction was delayed, in part by the demands of the incorporators—many of whom had greater appetites for personal profit than for the actual laying of rails—and in part by the deserts and canyons, rivers and soaring mountain ranges that lay between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean.
The failure of the plaintiffs in the Effie Afton case to bring down the Rock Island Bridge enabled the span to remain open to rail traffic through the end
of the 1850s and into the 1860s. New settlers passed over the span into Iowa and the surrounding territories, bringing with them predominantly anti-slavery and pro-Union sentiments. If Jefferson Davis had been successful in locating the first railroad bridge over the Mississippi in the South, much the same might have been true in that region: slaveholders and their supporters could have crossed the river from east to west in great numbers, increasing their force in Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas.
Lincoln's Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America Page 21