Lincoln

by David Herbert Donald

  Antislavery spokesmen, like Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, exploded in anger, denouncing the Court’s decision as deserving no more respect than if made by “a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room,” The Chicago Tribune predicted that it would force slavery upon the free states, so that Chicago might become a slave market, where men, women, and children would be sold on the block. Throughout the North antislavery clergymen erupted in denunciations of Taney and the majority of the Court, and opposition was so fierce that the New York Herald predicted that “the whole North will evidently be preached into rebellion against the highest constituted Court in the country.”

  But Lincoln, like most Illinois Republican politicians, was slow to react to the Dred Scott decision. Not until late May did he even refer to the case, when, without mentioning it by name, he said the federal courts no longer exercised jurisdiction over litigation that “might redound to the benefit of a ‘nigger’ in some way.” This seeming indifference stemmed in part from the complexity of the Court’s decision. The justices offered nine separate opinions, none of which addressed exactly the same issues; two of them were strong dissenting opinions by antislavery Justices John McLean and Benjamin R. Curtis. An initial examination of the opinions failed to give Lincoln much cause for alarm. As he explained later, he “never... complained especially of the Dred Scott decision because it held a negro could not be a citizen”; he agreed with Taney on this subject. Nor was he exercised because the Court invalidated the Missouri Compromise; the Kansas-Nebraska Act had already expressly repealed that compromise.

  Lincoln was reluctant to challenge the Court’s ruling. He had enormous respect for the law and for the judicial process. He felt these offered a standard of rationality badly needed in a society threatened, on the one side, by the unreasoning populism of the Democrats, who believed that the majority was always right, and the equally unreasonable moral absolutism of reformers like the abolitionists, who appealed to a higher law than even the Constitution. As recently as the 1856 campaign he had invoked the judiciary as the ultimate arbiter of disputes over slavery. “The Supreme Court of the United States is the tribunal to decide such questions,” he announced, and, speaking for the Republicans, he pledged, “We will submit to its decisions; and if you [the Democrats] do also, there will be an end of the matter.”

  But the Dred Scott decision required him to rethink his position. If the Court had decided simply that Dred Scott was a slave, he “presumed, no one would controvert it’s correctness.” “If this important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with legal public expectation, and with the steady practice of the departments throughout our history,” he continued, it would be “factious, nay, even revolutionary,” not to accept it. But when a majority of the justices, overruling numerous previous judicial rulings and ignoring the extensive historical evidence that throughout American history many states had recognized blacks as citizens, which Justice Curtis adduced in his dissent, extended their ruling to the entire African-American race, their decision was simply wrong.

  What troubled Lincoln most about the Dred Scott decision was the Chief Justice’s gratuitous assertion that neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution was ever intended to include blacks. Lincoln declared bluntly that Taney was doing “obvious violence to the plain unmistakable language of the Declaration,” which had once been held sacred by all Americans and thought to include all Americans. Now, in order to make Negro slavery eternal and universal, the Declaration “is assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.” So blatant was the Chief Justice’s misreading of the law, so gross was his distortion of the documents fundamental to American liberty, that Lincoln’s faith in an impartial, rational judiciary was shaken; never again did he give deference to the rulings of the Supreme Court.

  Lincoln kept these views to himself until June, when Douglas returned to Illinois and made a major address at Springfield defending the “honest and conscientious” judges who had handed down the Dred Scott decision and denouncing criticism of the highest tribunal as “a deadly blow at our whole republican system of government.” Recognizing that the Supreme Court’s ruling was unpopular, Douglas seized on Taney’s dictum that the Negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence as an excuse to appeal to Illinois negrophobia. Blacks, he announced, belonged to “an inferior race, who in all ages, and in every part of the globe,... had shown themselves incapable of self-government,” and he warned that Republicans favored the “amalgamation between superior and inferior races.”

  Two weeks later Lincoln offered the Republican reply to the senator. Part of his speech was a slashing attack on Douglas’s popular-sovereignty doctrine as “a mere deceitful pretense for the benefit of slavery.” He spent much time explaining the Republican position on Dred Scott. “We think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous,” he declared unequivocally. “We know the court that made it, has often over-ruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to over-rule this. We offer no resistance to it.”

  Not until Lincoln turned to the interpretation Taney and Douglas offered of the Declaration of Independence did his words take wings. He charged that the Chief Justice and the senator were working, together with other Democrats, to extend and to perpetuate slavery. To do so they joined in further oppression of the already oppressed Negro: “All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him.... They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.”

  And Douglas, in order to make this oppression tolerable, lugged in the absurd charge that Republicans wanted “to vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes!” He was simply trying to capitalize on that “natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races.” Bluntly Lincoln rejected “that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife.” The authors of the Declaration of Independence never intended “to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity,” but they “did consider all men created equal—equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”

  It was a powerful speech, but not a radical one. Indeed, Gustave Koerner, the German-American leader of the Republicans in Belleville, complained that it was “too much on the old conservative order” and concluded that Lincoln was “an excellent man, but no match to such impudent Jesuits and sophists as Douglas.” What Lincoln omitted from his argument was as significant as what he said. Though many observers recognized that the Dred Scott decision had gutted Douglas’s favorite doctrine of popular sovereignty by invalidating all congressional legislation concerning slavery in the national territories, Lincoln made no effort to point out the contradiction between the ideas of the Chief Justice and those of the senior senator from Illinois; nor did he discuss Douglas’s theory that territorial governments, despite the Court’s ruling in Dred Scott, could effectively exclude slavery by refusing to protect it. Lincoln’s object was not to show differences between the two Democratic spokesmen but to picture them as united in oppressing the African-American and in extending the institution of slavery.

  III

  That was his basic strategy for the upcoming 1858 elections, which would choose members of t
he state legislature that would name the next United States senator. Lincoln believed that Douglas was vulnerable, and this time he had no intention of waiting for the outcome of the elections before announcing his campaign for the Senate. As early as August 1857 he began encouraging fellow Republicans to do something “now, to secure the Legislature,” recommending that they draw up careful lists of voters by precincts. “Let all be so quiet that the adve[r]sary shall not be notified,” he warned.

  In planning for the next Senate election, Lincoln gathered around him a group of dedicated and hardworking advisers. Some of them were familiar faces from his earlier campaigns. Herndon was, as ever, loyal if indiscreet, valuable because of his contacts among abolitionists. Both Jesse K. Dubois, the state auditor, and Ozias M. Hatch, the secretary of state, were close political friends as well as neighbors in Springfield. Lamon and Whitney kept an eye on the north central part of the state. In the Bloomington area Lincoln counted on Leonard Swett and Judge Davis. In Chicago, Lincoln’s strongest supporter was Norman B. Judd, who had refused to vote for him in 1855 but had since worked closely with him in business and legal matters. Charles H. Ray, of the Chicago Press and Tribune, had overcome his earlier misgivings and was now one of Lincoln’s most loyal backers. In southern Illinois, Joseph Gillespie, with whom he had served in the state legislature, was his most effective supporter. It was Lincoln’s special gift not merely to attract such able and dedicated advisers—and other names could readily be added to the list—but to let each of them think that he was Lincoln’s closest friend and most trusted counselor.

  By fall, events in Kansas and in Washington made it necessary for Lincoln and his advisers to be especially alert. In the hope of ending the turmoil and bloodshed in the Kansas Territory, President Buchanan, along with many other Democrats, favored the speedy admission of Kansas as a state, and in February the territorial government ordered an election for a constitutional convention. It was, as Lincoln remarked, “the most exquisite farce ever enacted.” Free-soil voters, certain that the election was rigged to favor the proslavery faction, stayed at home, and only about 2,200 out of 9,000 registered voters participated. Nevertheless, the delegates assembled in Lecompton in September and October, drew up a constitution, and submitted it for the approval of the President and Congress. A proslavery document, it guaranteed not merely that the two hundred or so slaves already in Kansas would remain in bondage but that their offspring should also be slaves. The constitution could not be amended for seven years. Against the advice of both President Buchanan and Robert J. Walker, whom he had appointed territorial governor, the convention provided for a referendum not on the constitution itself but only on the question of whether more slaves could be introduced into the state. Eager to have the Kansas crisis finally settled, Buchanan, ignoring his previous pledges, approved this Lecompton Constitution and recommended it to the Congress.

  Douglas decided to oppose it. He knew he was facing a strenuous reelection campaign in Illinois, where Lincoln almost certainly would be his opponent. He had lost much strength by his advocacy of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and his endorsement of the Dred Scott decision, even though tepid, had cost him more. Support of the patently proslavery Lecompton Constitution would weaken him even further. As one of Trumbull’s correspondents wrote: “if Kansas is admited under the Lecompton Constitution, there would not be a grease spot left of Douglas in Illinois.” Aside from political considerations, Douglas felt that the document subverted his cardinal principle, popular sovereignty, because it denied the inhabitants of the Kansas territory the right to choose their own form of government. He vowed to “make the greatest effort of his life in opposition to this juggle.” Breaking with President Buchanan, Douglas led the fight in the Senate against the Lecompton Constitution, denouncing it as a “flagrant violation of popular rights in Kansas,” and an outrage on the “fundamental principles of liberty upon which our institutions rest.” He made it clear that his objection was to the process by which the constitution was adopted rather than to particular provisions of that document. On the slavery referendum he professed neutrality. “It is none of my business which way the slavery clause is decided,” he told the Senate, adding a statement that Lincoln would repeatedly quote out of context: “I care not whether it is voted down or voted up.”

  Douglas’s opposition to Lecompton, and to the President, delighted Republicans. Horace Greeley, the influential editor of the New York Tribune, which was thought to have between 5,000 and 10,000 readers in Illinois, announced that Douglas’s course was not merely right but “conspicuously, courageously, eminently so.” Greeley began conferring with the senator on ways to defeat the measure, as did former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Massachusetts Republican Nathaniel P. Banks, and Benjamin F. Wade, the abolitionist senator from Ohio. Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts believed that Douglas was about to move into the Republican party, where he would be “of more weight to our cause than any other ten men in the country.”

  Lincoln’s initial reaction to what he called the “rumpus” among the Democrats over Lecompton was to urge Republicans to stand clear of the quarrel, because both Buchanan and Douglas were in the wrong. He was convinced that Douglas’s opposition to Lecompton was only a trick to deceive unwary Republicans. Douglas and his friends were “like boys who have set a bird-trap” and were now “watching to see if the birds are picking at the bait and likely to go under.”

  But by late December he began to fear that Greeley and other Eastern Republicans were walking into the trap. “What does the New-York Tribune mean by it’s constant eulogising, and admiring, and magnifying [of] Douglas?” he angrily asked Senator Trumbull. “Does it, in this, speak the sentiments of the republicans at Washington? Have they concluded that the republican cause, generally, can be best promoted by sacraficing us here in Illinois?” During the spring Lincoln’s suspicions increased as Eastern Republicans continued to praise Douglas’s heroic, and ultimately successful, opposition to Lecompton. Further reinforcement came when Herndon, making a long-planned pleasure trip to Washington and the Northeast, reported that prominent Eastern Republicans favored Douglas’s reelection and that Horace Greeley thought Illinois Republicans were fools to oppose him.

  Resentful of outside interference, Illinois Republicans spurned the suggestion that they ought to drop Lincoln and back Douglas for reelection. “God forbid,” exploded Jesse K. Dubois, “Are our friends crazy?” Such a shift was impossible, Herndon angrily wrote Greeley. “Douglas’ abuse of us as Whigs—as Republicans—as men in society, and as individuals, has been so slanderous—dirty—low—long, and continuous, that we cannot soon forgive and can never forget”

  Lincoln and his friends were also troubled by the possibility that former Democrats might defect, as they had in 1855, and back another candidate for the Senate. The most likely possibility was “Long John” Wentworth of Chicago, the erratic but enormously popular former Democratic congressman who had broken with Douglas over Kansas-Nebraska and had recently been elected Republican mayor of Chicago by the largest majority ever given in that city. Wentworth probably did have vague ambitions for the senatorship, but he wisely recognized that Lincoln was the choice of most Republicans and took no steps to make himself available. But Democratic newspapers, hoping to divide their opponents, touted his candidacy, claiming that he said Lincoln could never be elected and that he intended to pack the state convention with delegates “pledged to vote for him through thick and thin.” Some of Lincoln’s backers—notably Judd, who had repeatedly battled Wentworth in Chicago—took the threat seriously, as did Lincoln himself.

  To prevent any erosion of Republican solidarity, Lincoln’s friends began carefully planning for the fall elections, which would choose eighty-seven members of the next legislature. (There were thirteen holdover members of the state senate.) Though Lincoln himself remained curiously passive, his supporters in county convention after county convention passed resolutions declaring that he was their first, last,
and only choice for senator. Then they arranged, for only the second time in American history, to have a party’s state convention nominate a senatorial candidate. The procedure was so unprecedented that it attracted much attention, and a Philadelphia editor called this “dangerous innovation” a “revolutionary effort to destroy the true intent and spirit of the constitution.” Its purpose, however, was much less grand. The nomination was designed, as Lincoln said, “more for the object of closing down upon this everlasting croaking about Wentworth, than anything else.” Equally important, it was intended to give a clear signal to Eastern Republicans like Greeley that Illinois Republicans would never unite behind Douglas.