Lincoln’s persistent advocacy of colonization served an unconscious purpose of preventing him from thinking too much about a problem that he found insoluble. He confessed that he did not know how slavery could be abolished: “If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution.” Even if he had a plan, there was no way of putting it into effect. After the Compromise of 1850 both the Whig and the Democratic parties had agreed that, in Lincoln’s words, questions relating to slavery were “settled forever.” For a man with a growing sense of urgency about abolishing, or at least limiting, slavery, who had no solution to the problem and no political outlet for making his feelings known, colonization offered a very useful escape.
IV
In 1854 reality replaced fantasy. On January 4, Stephen A. Douglas, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, introduced a bill to establish a government for the Nebraska Territory (which constituted the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase, including the present states of Kansas and Nebraska). The measure was much needed. Immigrants from Missouri and Iowa were already pushing across the border into the unorganized region, and a favored route for the proposed transcontinental railroad ran through Nebraska. Slavery had been prohibited in this area by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, but Southerners, fearful of the growing population and wealth of the North, had killed previous efforts to organize Nebraska as a free territory. Douglas sought to avoid a similar fate for his new bill by providing that the territory, “when admitted as a State or States,... shall be received into the Union, with or without slavery, as their constitution may prescribe.” Taking these words from the 1850 acts organizing New Mexico and Utah, Douglas thus extended the doctrine of “popular sovereignty” to the Nebraska Territory. But because his measure said nothing about slavery in Nebraska during its territorial stage or about the Missouri Compromise restriction, proslavery senators pressed him to include an explicit repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Reluctantly he agreed, though he knew it would “raise a hell of a storm,” and at the same time he assented to the division of the region into two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. Endorsed by the Pierce administration, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed by the Congress after a bitter struggle and became law on May 30.
This act, Lincoln said a few months later, “took us by surprise—astounded us We were thunderstruck and stunned.” His immediate actions suggested that he was more stunned than astounded. He made no comment, public or private, on the Kansas-Nebraska measure while Douglas, with brilliant parliamentary management and unrelenting ferocity toward his opponents, forced it through both houses of Congress. He said nothing about the “Appeal of the Independent Democrats,” drawn up by free-soil senators Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, with assistance from other antislavery congressmen, which assailed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise “as a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of previous rights; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.” Certainly he read the congressional debates studiously, and he followed the crescendo of attacks on Douglas and his bill both in the New York Tribune and the Chicago Tribune, to which Lincoln & Herndon subscribed, and in the abolitionist papers, such as the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Emancipator, and National Era, which Herndon received. Herndon sent away for the speeches of antislavery spokesmen such as Sumner, Chase, and Senator William H. Seward of New York, and he regularly received those of Theodore Parker, the great Boston preacher, and Wendell Phillips, the abolitionist orator; and he made sure that his partner knew about them all. But Lincoln said and wrote nothing.
He was silent partly because he was extraordinarily busy at just the time the Kansas-Nebraska bill was working its way through the Congress. In addition to the demands of his regular legal practice, the suit of the Illinois Central Railroad v. McLean County was to be heard in the Illinois Supreme Court on February 28, and in the weeks before the hearing Lincoln spent all the time he could spare preparing his brief and his oral argument in a case that was probably the most important and certainly was the most remunerative in his entire legal career.
As a private citizen, holding and seeking no public office, he did not feel called upon to make a public statement about the Kansas-Nebraska bill. Neither Douglas nor his measure would come directly before the Illinois electorate in 1854. The only general election that year was for state treasurer, whose selection would not depend on his support of or opposition to Kansas-Nebraska. In the fall there would, of course, be elections for representatives in Congress and for the members of the state legislature, but the political situation was so confused that it was not clear how Lincoln could make any meaningful intervention.
In Illinois, as throughout the North, there was a firestorm of opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but Douglas’s enemies were badly divided. In Chicago much of the hostility to Douglas was personal, led by his rival, the erratic but popular John Wentworth, who controlled the influential Chicago Democrat. The Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Democratic Press also kept up a drumbeat of criticism. Elsewhere in northern Illinois, where the Liberty party had shown strength in 1840 and 1844 and the Free-Soil party had won a considerable following in 1848, opposition to Douglas was more ideological, and New England-bred abolitionists like Owen Lovejoy found in the Kansas-Nebraska Act the occasion to launch a new antislavery party, which they christened “Republican.” Southern Illinois, staunchly Democratic, was equally angered at the Kansas-Nebraska Act, because residents feared that opening Kansas to slaveholders would prevent the settlement of small farmers like themselves. Violently negrophobic, voters in this section wanted to have nothing to do with abolitionism; they fought under the banner of Anti-Nebraska Democrats. In central Illinois, hostility to Kansas-Nebraska was also strong, but the dominant conservatives had no desire to see that opposition translated into a general antislavery movement; they remained firm in their allegiance to the Whig party. Despite frequent calls for a fusion ticket, these disparate elements continued to march under different banners. In an October speech Lincoln graphically recaptured the “utter confusion” of Douglas’s opponents, who were united only in their hostility toward the Kansas-Nebraska Act: “We rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.” It was no wonder, he remarked, “that our drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform.”
These divisions were enough to cause a politician to hesitate, but there were other cross-cutting fractures that made it even more difficult to take a stand. A rising tide of immigration fed the endemic American nativist sentiment. In Illinois the large number of foreign-born who came to build the railroad network aroused fear of foreign tongues and behavior and of the Catholic Church, to which many immigrants belonged. Fear became resentment when the sharp recession of 1854–1855 put a temporary halt to railroad construction and threw immigrant laborers into competition with local blue-collar workers. Native-born Protestants began to join secret societies, like the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, which advocated lengthening the term for naturalization and restricting the rights of the Catholic Church. Just how large the Order was, nobody could tell, because members were sworn to reply to questions from outsiders about the movement, “I know nothing.” When the Order, styling itself the Native American party, entered politics and secretly endorsed candidates, it seemed to pose more of a threat to normal political alignments than even the agitation over Kansas-Nebraska.
Lincoln had no sympathy for nativism, but he had to recognize that Know Nothings were a powerful political force when some of his strongest backers, including Simeon Francis, the editor of the Illinois State Journal, which had always been Lincoln’s newspaper voice in the state capital, joined the movement. Later charges that Lincoln himself was a Kno
w Nothing and that he had been seen at a Native American lodge in Quincy were roorbacks, but he did not go out of his way to alienate his old political friends who had become nativists. When a local committee solicited his support, he tried to avoid a commitment by deliberately misunderstanding their meaning. “Do [the Native Americans] not wear breech-clout and carry tomahawk?” he asked. “We pushed them from their homes and now turn upon others not fortunate enough to come over as early as we or our forefathers.”
In public his position on nativism was circumspect. Initially he professed to know nothing—and perhaps the words themselves were significant—about the secret party. “If there was an order styled the Know-Nothings, and there was any thing bad in it, he was unqualifiedly against it,” he said; “and if there was anything good in it, why, he said God speed it!”
With the political situation so volatile, Lincoln held back all summer, even though it was becoming clear that Illinois would be a major battleground for Douglas and the popular-sovereignty issue. Prominent antislavery men like Salmon P. Chase and Joshua R. Giddings spoke, and Lincoln carefully studied reports of their addresses. In July, Cassius M. Clay, the fiery Kentucky abolitionist, appeared in Springfield to denounce the Kansas and Nebraska outrage and call for “an organization of men of whatever politics, of Free Soilers, Whigs and Democrats, who should bury past animosities, and... unite in hurling down the gigantic evil which threatened even their own liberty.” While Clay spoke, Lincoln lounged on the grass whittling and listening. It took him time to assimilate all these arguments and to make them his own.
He did not act until the end of August, when he spoke at the Scott County Whig convention in Winchester, attacking “the great wrong and injustice of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the extension of slavery into free territory.” His purpose in entering the campaign was a limited one; as he wrote later, “he took the stump with no broader practical aim or object than to secure, if possible, the reelection of Hon Richard Yates to congress.” That purpose defined the role that Lincoln was prepared to play in repudiating Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act: he campaigned as a Whig—not as an abolitionist, or an anti-Nebraska man, or even a fusionist—who was seeking the reelection of a fellow Whig to the House of Representatives.
V
Once Lincoln decided to take part in the campaign, he showed no further hesitation. Feeling again the joy of political combat, he devoted all his time to the anti-Nebraska cause, except for his necessary commitments to court cases. He became, in effect, Yates’s campaign manager, spending hours conferring with the Whig candidate and advising him on tactics. Learning that English settlers in Morgan County were disturbed by reports that Yates was a Know Nothing, he drafted a letter denying the charge, which could be distributed “at each precinct where any considerable number of the foreign citizens, german as well as english—vote.” When he heard that Democrats were whispering that Yates, though professing to be a temperate man, was a secret drinker, he recognized that the rumor might cost the Whigs the large prohibitionist vote and sought to kill the allegation. “I have never seen him drink liquor, nor act, or speak, as if he had been drinking, nor smelled it on his breath,” he wrote. But then—almost as if he realized that the future would show that Yates did indulge in liquor, to the point of being intoxicated when he was inaugurated as governor of Illinois in 1861—Lincoln carefully explained his own position to a friend: “Other things being equal, I would much prefer a temperate man, to an intemperate one; still I do not make my vote depend absolutely upon the question of whether a candidate does or does not taste liquor.”
Though Lincoln wanted to bolster Yates’s candidacy, he resisted a plan to strengthen the Whig cause in Sangamon County by allowing himself to be nominated for the state legislature. This was not a position he wanted. Election to the state legislature, after a term in the United States House of Representatives, looked like a backward movement in his career. But several local antislavery leaders promised if he ran they would vote for him—and, implicitly, for Yates as well. At about the same time, a committee of Springfield Know Nothings informed Lincoln that their party was secretly nominating him for the legislature. Lincoln told his visitors frankly that “he was not in sentiment with this new party,” but in the end he agreed that “they might vote for him if they wanted to; so might the Democrats.” Even then he did not promise to run.
On September 3, while Lincoln was in Jacksonville campaigning for Yates, Dr. William Jayne, a prominent Springfield Whig who was also a Know Nothing, published an announcement of Lincoln’s candidacy for the state legislature in the Illinois State Journal. Mary Lincoln, who was obviously well informed of her husband’s wishes, rushed to the Journal office and demanded that Lincoln’s name be withdrawn. When Lincoln returned, Jayne called on him at his house and insisted that he must run. He found Lincoln “the saddest man I ever saw—the gloomiest.” As Jayne remembered many years later, he walked up and down the room, almost crying, as he resisted the appeal. “No—I can’t,” he insisted. “You don’t know all. I say you don’t begin to know one-half and that’s enough.”
Neither then nor later did Lincoln explain his misgivings, but in all probability he had his own political future in mind. He knew, of course, that the legislature to be elected in the fall of 1854 would choose a United States senator to succeed James Shields, the incumbent Democrat. Aware of the growing strength of the opposition to Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he could foresee that the next senator would probably come from the anti-Nebraska coalition, and, not being a modest man, he realized that he would be a strong candidate for that office. But as a lawyer, he knew that the Illinois state constitution prohibited the election of a state legislator to the United States Congress. He did not know what to do. If he ran, he might be putting an end to his cherished hope for higher office; if he refused to run, he might well cause the defeat of the Whig ticket in Sangamon County (and also the defeat of Yates in the congressional district) and consequently would have no claim for support in the senatorial election. Unhappily he allowed Jayne to overcome his objections, and the Journal made his candidacy official.
Once he had committed himself, Lincoln wholeheartedly worked to build a coalition of all who were opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Feeling “anxious... that this Nebraska measure shall be rebuked and condemned every where,” he tried to enlist Democrats known to be critical of Douglas. Learning that John M. Palmer, a state senator from Macoupin County, had “determined not to swallow the wrong,” Lincoln begged him to make a few public speeches explaining his course. “Of course ... I do not expect you to do any thing which may be wrong in your own judgment,” Lincoln wrote, “nor would I have you do anything personally injurious to yourself.”
Lincoln himself vigorously campaigned for Yates and against the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In the month after his first appearance he spoke at Whig rallies at Carrollton, at Jacksonville, and twice at Bloomington, being very careful not to alienate either the Know Nothings or the temperance advocates, since support from these two groups was essential to Whig success in central Illinois. At his second appearance in Bloomington he had an opportunity to make a tacit appeal to the prohibitionists. Douglas had spoken there in the afternoon, in defense of his Kansas policy, and Lincoln replied in an evening speech. Calling on Douglas, Lincoln found him surrounded by fellow Democrats, with whom the senator offered to share a decanter of red liquor. When Lincoln got ready to leave, Douglas asked: “Mr. Lincoln, won’t you take something?”
“No, I think not,” Lincoln replied.
“What! are you a member of the Temperance Society?” Douglas quizzed him.
“No,” said Lincoln, “I am not a member of any temperance society; but I am temperate, in this, that I don’t drink anything.”
Lincoln’s friends widely circulated reports of the encounter among prohibitionists.
VI
Alarmed when the elections in Iowa and Maine, both Democratic strongholds, went against his party, Dougla
s undertook a nonstop campaign to explain and defend the Kansas-Nebraska Act to Illinois voters. Everywhere his message was the same: he argued that it was his duty, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, to provide for a government in the Nebraska region, which was rapidly being settled. The Missouri Compromise, prohibiting the introduction of slavery into that region, had been “superseded” by the Compromise of 1850, which wrote into law the Democratic principle of popular sovereignty. That principle derived from the fundamental right of self-government. By extending popular sovereignty to the territories, the Congress was merely granting the citizens of those regions the same right enjoyed by free men throughout the nation, the right to choose their own social institutions, including slavery. Under popular sovereignty the inhabitants of the territories would speedily organize governments and these would readily be admitted to the Union, without the rancorous controversies that had hitherto held up national expansion. Since the climate and soil of Kansas and Nebraska made it highly unlikely that anyone would bring slaves into those territories, they were destined to become free states. Opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act came from abolitionists, who sought to stir up sectional hatreds, and from Know Nothings, who were fomenting ethnic and religious strife. It was a powerful case, and Douglas presented it with passion and sincerity.
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