After failing to secure the services of the Chicago lawyer Isaac N. Arnold, Harding in June sent his associate, Peter Watson, a patent lawyer in Washington, to Springfield to see if Lincoln might do. Calling without notice at the house at Eighth and Jackson streets, Watson encountered “a very tall man having on neither coat nor vest, who said he was Lincoln and was just putting up a bed.” Impressed neither by Lincoln’s dress nor by his small, plainly furnished house, Watson concluded this was not the associate Harding wanted but thought it would be impolitic to risk his anger by turning him down after consulting him. Consequently he paid Lincoln a $400 retainer, arranged for a fee—reputedly $1,000—and left him with the impression that he was to make an argument at the hearing.
Lincoln began studying the case and went out to Rockford, where Manny’s factory was located, so that he could examine the machines closely. Puzzled that Watson failed to send him copies of the depositions and other legal papers, he went to the United States District Court in Chicago and had his own copies made. From the newspapers he learned that the case would be heard not in Chicago but in Cincinnati, where Supreme Court Justice John McLean would preside, but neither Watson nor anybody else on Harding’s team told him when the hearing was to be held or invited him to be present.
Nevertheless, he took the train to Cincinnati, where he called on Harding at the Burnet House. The Philadelphia lawyer was not impressed; he described Lincoln as “a tall rawly boned, ungainly back woodsman, with coarse, ill-fitting clothing, his trousers hardly reaching his ankles, holding in his hands a blue cotton umbrella with a ball on the end of the handle.” This fellow clearly would not do, especially now that Edwin McMasters Stanton, the brilliant Pittsburgh lawyer, had joined the defense team. “Why did you bring that d——d long armed Ape here,” Stanton asked Harding; “he does not know any thing and can do you no good.” They made it clear to Lincoln that he could not participate in the trial. Lincoln remained in Cincinnati for the week of the hearing, closely observing the proceedings, but the other lawyers ignored him. “We were all at the same hotel,” Harding recalled; but neither he nor Stanton “ever conferred with him, ever had him at our table or sat with him, or asked him to our room, or walked to or from the court with him, or, in fact, had any intercourse with him.”
At the end of the week Lincoln left for home, feeling insulted and indignant. When he received a check for the remainder of his fee, he sent it back, saying that he had made no argument and therefore was not entitled to anything beyond the original retainer. But when Watson returned the check to him, with a note explaining that he had earned it, he cashed it. Lincoln said little to his Springfield associates about the trial, though he did tell Herndon that he had been “roughly handled by that man Stanton.” But the snub was a painful one, and it added to his dejection over the loss of the Senate election.
IX
Even though Lincoln’s law practice occupied most of his time during 1855, he kept up a silent but active interest in public affairs. Following events closely, he anxiously observed the consolidation of Southern opinion in favor of slavery. Where earlier Southern statesmen like Thomas Jefferson had hoped for the gradual extinction of the peculiar institution, a new breed of fire-eaters favored its perpetuation and, indeed, its extension. Lincoln & Herndon subscribed to the Charleston Mercury and the Richmond Enquirer, both rabidly proslavery, and sadly noted that an institution once lamented as a necessary evil was now promoted as a positive good. Herndon bought a copy of Sociology for the South, by George Fitzhugh, the able and extreme Virginia polemicist, who argued that slave labor was preferable to free labor, because under slavery workers had security and greater real freedom.
The specious logic of Fitzhugh’s ideas troubled Lincoln, and in memoranda to himself he pointed out the flaws in the Virginian’s arguments. “Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing,” he noted, “we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.” The contention that slavery offered labor the greatest real freedom ran into the inescapable fact “that the most dumb and stupid slave that ever toiled for a master, does constantly know that he is wronged.” Defenses of slavery were, in fact, reversible arguments: “If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B.—why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?” If slavery was justified on the ground that masters were white while slaves were black, Lincoln warned, “By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.” If it was defended on the ground that masters were intellectually the superiors of blacks, the same logic applied: “By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.”
The more Lincoln thought about these questions, the more pessimistic he became. In the summer of 1855 he wrote a Kentucky friend that decades of experience had demonstrated “that there is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us.” “The condition of the negro slave in America ... is now as fixed, and hopeless of change for the better, as that of the lost souls of the finally impenitent,” he lamented, predicting, “The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.” With voluntary emancipation nowhere in sight, the United States had to face up to reality: “Can we, as a nation, continue together permanently—forever half slave, and half free?” To this question he would return in the future, but now he evaded an answer: “The problem is too mighty for me. May God, in his mercy, superintend the solution.”
Events in Kansas made the future of slavery an immediately pressing issue. As Lincoln had predicted, there could not have been “a more apt invention to bring about collision and violence, on the slavery question” than the Kansas-Nebraska Act. “It was,” he said, “conceived in violence, passed in violence, is maintained in violence, and is being executed in violence.” While the settlement of Nebraska went on in a peaceful fashion, Kansas was in turmoil. Settlers who rushed in to claim the best land and the most advantageously situated town sites discovered that there were no government land offices. The area was still technically an Indian reserve, and no effort had yet been made to settle the Indian claims. Land claims could only be defended by the six-shooter and the bowie knife. Inevitably there was friction among the settlers. By opening the territory to slavery, the Kansas-Nebraska Act served as a challenge to the antislavery forces, and organizations like Eli Thayer’s New England Emigrant Aid Company began funneling in free-state immigrants, equipped with rifles and ammunition. Proslavery forces in Missouri countered by pouring over the border, ready to fight in order to keep Kansas a slave state. As Missourians swamped the polls, the election of a territorial legislature proved a farce, and the delegates chosen made it a felony to question the right to hold slaves in Kansas and a capital offense to give aid to a fugitive slave. Lincoln learned of these developments not merely from the national newspapers, like the New York Tribune, which gave incessant coverage to proslavery “outrages” in Kansas, but from the frequent letters he received from Mark W. Delahay, an old friend and distant relative, who was editing a free-state paper at Leavenworth.
Reports of proslavery aggression made Herndon and other antislavery men in Springfield almost frantic, and they urged “the employment of any means, however desperate, to promote and defend the cause of freedom” in the territory. Lincoln, as usual, intervened to calm his excitable partner, reminding the little group of radicals that “physical rebellions and bloody resistances” were wrong and unconstitutional. Nevertheless, he made a contribution to the Kansas cause, with the restriction that his money should be sent only when Judge Logan decided it was necessary for the defense of the people of that territory. But he ended by urging the abolitionist group to think of “other more effective channels” of action—namely, politics.
The problem was to know how political action could be effective. Reluc
tantly Lincoln was obliged to recognize that the Whig party, with which he had acted all his adult life, was dying. For some years Whig economic policies calling for federal promotion of economic growth had been sounding less and less realistic, and the prosperity that followed the discovery of gold in California in 1848 made the party’s program obsolete. Nor did the Whigs have more to offer in the way of political policies after they joined with the Democrats in endorsing the Compromise of 1850 as a finality. With the differences between the major parties blurred, party loyalties waned. Opponents of slavery, discouraged by the repeated waffling of the Whigs, began to look to a third party. So did the large number of Whigs who were hostile to foreigners, suspicious of the Catholic Church, and opposed to the sale of alcoholic beverages. After 1852, when Winfield Scott’s managers made an inept and unsuccessful effort to attract foreign-born and Catholic voters, who had always supported the Democratic party, large numbers of native-born Whigs flocked to the Know Nothing banner.
Lincoln had trouble defining his own position. A practical man, he knew—as he had remarked in his eulogy of Henry Clay—that in America “the man who is of neither party, is not—cannot be, of any consequence.” But it was not clear what party he should choose. When his old friend Joshua F. Speed, with whom he now differed politically, inquired where he now stood, he replied: “That is a disputed point. I think I am a whig; but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist.” But, he went on to explain, he resented efforts to “unwhig” him, since he was doing no more than oppose “the extension of slavery,” which had long been the position of most Northern Whigs. Certainly, he explained to Speed, he was not a Know Nothing. “How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?” The United States began with the declaration that all men are created equal; it now was practically read as “all men are created equal, except negroes,” and if the Know Nothings gained control it would read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When things came to this pass, he told Speed, “I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.”
By the end of 1855 he found it easier to choose his political course. The Whig party was no longer a viable political organization. The abolitionist Republican party of Codding and Lovejoy was too extreme to attract a wide following. The nativist movement had crested, as the defeat of a statewide prohibition referendum, sponsored by the Know Nothings and the temperance organizations, demonstrated. What was now needed in Illinois was what had already taken place in many other Northern states—a fusion of all the opponents to the extension of slavery in a new political party.
Lincoln was ready to take the lead. In January 1856, when Paul Selby of the Jacksonville Morgan Journal proposed a conference of anti-Nebraska editors to plan for the next presidential election, Lincoln endorsed his idea, and when the editors met at Decatur on February 22, he was the sole nonjournalist in attendance. With his guidance the group drafted a conservative declaration that called for restoration of the Missouri Compromise, upheld the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act, and pledged noninterference with slavery in the states where it already existed. To appease the more radical antislavery element, the resolutions also affirmed the basic free-soil doctrine, which Salmon P. Chase and Charles Sumner had most forcibly enunciated, that the United States was founded on the principle that freedom was national, and slavery exceptional. To win foreign-born voters, the platform advocated religious toleration and opposed any changes in the naturalization laws, and to attract the Know Nothings it denounced “attacks” on the common school system—meaning Catholic efforts to secure aid for parochial schools. Still avoiding the name “Republican,” the conference called for a state fusion convention to be held at Bloomington on May 29.
On the night the conference adjourned, the editors attended a banquet, where Lincoln played a conspicuous role. When one speaker suggested that he ought to be the candidate of the new party for governor, he emphatically refused, stating that an anti-Nebraska Democrat would be more available for that post. But in response to a toast praising him “as the warm and consistent friend of Illinois, and our next candidate for the U.S. Senate,” he rose, after prolonged applause, and said “the latter part of that sentiment I am in favor of.” Pointing out that he felt a little out of place at this gathering, where he was the only noneditor, he capitalized on his odd appearance by saying that he felt like the ugly man riding through a wood who met a woman, also on horseback, who stopped and said: “Well, for land sake, you are the homeliest man I ever saw.”
“Yes, madam, but I can’t help it,” he replied.
“No, I suppose not,” she remarked, “but you might stay at home.”
Having thus disarmed criticism, he went on to announce “his hearty concurrence in the resolutions adopted by the Convention” and “his willingness to buckle on his armor” for the coming fight with the Democrats.
Despite Lincoln’s very active role at the Decatur gathering, some of his more conservative friends were unaware he was so fully committed to the new political movement. On May 10, Herndon, who had been named a member of the anti-Nebraska state committee at the editors’ meeting, published a call for a meeting of Sangamon County citizens opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act to select delegates to the Bloomington convention. Though Lincoln was out of the office, attending court in Pekin, Herndon signed both his name and Lincoln’s. Dismayed at this evidence of radicalism, John Todd Stuart rushed into the Lincoln & Herndon office to ask whether Lincoln had actually signed the call. Herndon admitted his responsibility. “Then you have ruined him,” muttered Stuart. But Herndon knew he was doing just what his partner wanted—just what the Decatur convention had expected him to do. To placate Stuart, he wired Lincoln that the announcement was causing a stir among conservative Whigs, and his partner promptly responded: “All right; go ahead. Will meet you—radicals and all.”
Elected a delegate to the Bloomington convention, Lincoln was committed to the new anti-Nebraska party but was nevertheless nervous about the outlook. In view of the failure of several previous attempts to organize a statewide antislavery party, he had reason to worry that leading politicians might not attend and that southern Illinois, where Douglas was so strong, might send no representatives. Arriving in Bloomington early, he had time on his hands and, restless, left David Davis’s mansion, where he was staying, to prowl the streets of the little city. To help pass the minutes, he stopped in a small jewelry store, where he bought his first pair of spectacles for 37½ cents. He “kinder” needed them, he told Henry C. Whitney, who accompanied him, because he was now forty-seven years old. Not until he met the late train from Chicago and found it filled with delegates to the convention was he satisfied that the political decision he had made was a wise one.
On May 29 about 270 delegates assembled in Major’s Hall to organize the Illinois Republican party. All shades of opinion were represented: conservative Whigs like Lincoln, anti-Nebraska Democrats like Norman Judd, Know Nothings like newly elected Representative Jesse O. Norton, Germans like Adolph Mayer, and abolitionists like Lovejoy. After conferring with about twenty influential politicians representing all shades of opinion, Orville Browning, the conservative Quincy lawyer, constructed a platform on which all could stand. To placate an estimated 20,000 German voters, it included a pledge to proscribe no one “on account of religious opinions, or in consequence of place of birth”—a promise so vague that it did not alienate the Know Nothings. On slavery questions the platform ignored abolitionist demands and offered a mild declaration that Congress had the power and the duty to exclude slavery from the national territories. The slate of officers nominated was carefully balanced: William H. Bissell, an anti-Nebraska Democrat who was also a hero of the Mexican War, was the candidate for governor; the German leader Francis A. Hoffmann
was nominated for lieutenant governor; and three other offices went to Know Nothings who were former Whigs.
The delegates recognized Lincoln’s role in creating the new party by calling him to the platform to make the last major speech before adjournment. Obviously delighted that the proceedings had gone so smoothly, and undoubtedly relieved that at last his break with the Whig party was public and irrevocable, he gave what was universally acclaimed as the best speech of his life. Because he spoke extemporaneously, there was no reliable record of what he said. Even Herndon, who usually took notes when his partner spoke, gave up after about fifteen minutes and, as he said, “threw pen and paper away and lived only in the inspiration of the hour.”
Only the Alton Weekly Courier, in a brief report, gave the highlights of this major address. After enumerating “the pressing reasons of the present movement,” Lincoln identified slavery as the cause of the nation’s problems. Mistaking the idiosyncratic George Fitzhugh as a representative thinker, he claimed that Southerners were more and more arguing not merely that slavery was a positive good for blacks but that it should be extended to white laborers as well. Quite erroneously he claimed that because of Southern pressure, Northern Democrats like Douglas, who had once advocated “the individual rights of man,” were beginning to accept this argument. “Such was the progress of the National Democracy.” To oppose this heresy, Lincoln urged a union of all who opposed the expansion of slavery, and again he pledged that he was “ready to fuse with anyone who would unite with him to oppose slave power.” If the united opposition of the North caused Southerners to raise “the bugbear [of] disunion,” they should be told bluntly, “the Union must be preserved in the purity of its principles as well as in the integrity of its territorial parts.” Firmly he made Daniel Webster’s thundering reply to the South Carolina nullifiers the motto of the Republican party: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”
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