Lincoln

by David Herbert Donald

  He continued to worry about the fatal attraction that Stephen A. Douglas had for many Republicans. Though reelected to the Senate, Douglas had lost much Southern support because of his Freeport Doctrine. The almost unprecedented action of the Democratic Senate caucus in removing him from his cherished chairmanship of the Committee on Territories in December 1858 indicated just how few his Southern followers were. Shrewd and realistic, Douglas began making moves to attract backing from Republicans, just as he had done in the Lecompton controversy. He reminded them that he had consistently opposed enacting a slave code that would protect slavery in all the national territories and had fought the reopening of the African slave trade—both measures dear to Southern extremists.

  Always suspicious of his great rival, Lincoln thought that Douglas was playing a double game. Douglas was presenting himself as a strong candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1860 but at the same time was so positioning himself that if the Democrats rejected him he would “bolt at once, turn upon us, as in the case of Lecompton, and claim that all Northern men shall make common cause in electing him President as the best means of breaking down the Slave power.” Lincoln knew that some Republicans, like Horace Greeley, had never recovered from their earlier infatuation with Douglas, and he was even more troubled when Kansas Republicans, after rejecting the Lecompton Constitution and thus ensuring that their state would be free, began speaking of their victory as a triumph of popular sovereignty. In Lincoln’s first political appearance after the 1858 campaign, he warned Chicago Republicans of the dangers of “Douglasism”: “Let the Republican party of Illinois dally with Judge Douglas; let them fall in behind him and make him their candidate, and they do not absorb him; he absorbs them.”

  Lincoln’s anxiety became greater when he read the long article “The Dividing Line Between Federal and Local Authority: Popular Sovereignty in the Territories,” which Douglas published in the September 1859 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Taking as his texts Lincoln’s house-divided speech and Seward’s even more radical “irrepressible conflict” address, Douglas developed at great length his argument that popular sovereignty had consistently been the American policy from the days of the Revolution; that “great principle” meant “that the people of every separate political community (dependent Colonies, Provinces, and Territories as well as sovereign States) have an inalienable right to govern themselves in respect to their internal polity.” By fairly tortuous reasoning he discovered that even the Dred Scott decision had recognized that right. He claimed that popular sovereignty, correctly construed, would block both the Republican efforts to exclude slavery from the territories by congressional act and Southern attempts to enact a national slave code.

  Widely discussed, if not widely read, Douglas’s article was a bold attempt to create a new party of the center—one that would unite moderate Democrats and conservative former Whigs and reject both Southern and Northern radicals. To bring this message to a larger audience, Douglas welcomed the opportunity to participate in the 1859 Ohio campaign, where he supported the local Democratic candidates but urged “all conservative men—all lovers of peace and of the law—all friends of the Union”—to rally in support of the great principle of popular sovereignty.

  Lincoln found Douglas’s activities decidedly threatening. Considering the Little Giant “the most dangerous enemy of liberty, because the most insidious one,” he readily accepted an invitation from the Ohio Republican state central committee to participate in the campaign and thus “to head off the little gentleman.”

  He did not appear on the same platform with Douglas in Ohio, but his speeches at Columbus, Dayton, Hamilton, and Cincinnati (September 16–17), as well as one he delivered in Indianapolis two days later, were, in effect, continuations of the 1858 senatorial debates. For the most part, Lincoln presented arguments that he had advanced during those debates, but he was now freer in his criticisms of Douglas, apparently taking to heart Joseph Medill’s advice: “As you are not a candidate you can talk out as boldly as you please Do not fail to get off some of your ‘anecdotes and bits’... hit below the belt as well as above, and kick like thunder.” He took obvious delight in mocking what he called Douglas’s “gur-reat pur-rinciple” of popular sovereignty. As explained in “nineteen mortal pages of Harper,” it amounted to saying “that, if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man nor anybody else has a right to object.”

  Lincoln now developed some elements of his argument more fully than he had done in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The real danger posed by Douglas, he explained, came from his “gradual and steady debauching of public opinion.” Douglas’s attempts to prove that the Declaration of Independence did not include African-Americans had already changed the way most whites viewed blacks. His recent remark “that he was for the negro against the crocodile, but for the white man against the negro” helped spread the opinion “that the negro is no longer a man but a brute;... that he ranks with the crocodile and the reptile.” “Public opinion in this country is everything,” Lincoln observed, and Douglas and his friends were serving as “the miners and sappers” to undermine resistance to the spread of slavery, so that state laws excluding slavery would soon be overruled, a national slave code enacted, and the African slave trade revived.

  In these 1859 addresses Lincoln also elaborated on a subject that he had slighted during debates with Douglas: how “the mass of white men are really injured by the effect of slave labor in the vicinity of the fields of their own labor.” The argument required him to lay out his view of American economic development. Like Francis Wayland and the other political economists whose books he had read years earlier, he firmly adhered to the labor theory of value: “labor is the source from which human wants are mainly supplied.” Labor was thus “prior to, and independent of, capital”; indeed “capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.” But capital, though derivative, performed a valuable service in a free society, because those who had it could offer employment to “the prudent, penniless beginner in the world” who owned “nothing save two strong hands that God has given him, [and] a heart willing to labor.” If this novice worked industriously and behaved soberly, he could in a year or two save enough to buy land for himself, to settle, marry, and beget sons and daughters, and presently he, too, would begin employing other laborers. Reminding his Ohio audiences that “at an early age, I was myself a hired laborer, at twelve dollars per month,” he insisted that in a free society there was “no such thing as a man who is a hired laborer, of a necessity, always remaining in his early condition.”

  Lincoln’s version of the American dream was in some ways a curiously limited one. Confident that advancement was open to all who worked hard, he was untroubled by the growing disparity of wealth between the poor and the rich. Viewing himself as a man of the people, he did not find it incongruous that some of his most loyal supporters were large-scale farmers like Isaac Funk, of McLean County, who owned 25,000 acres of prairie land, and William Scully, of Logan County, who owned 30,000 acres. Nor did he find it remarkable that his strongest political backer was David Davis, who was becoming one of the wealthiest landlords and land speculators in the state. Though Lincoln regularly represented railroads, the largest corporations in the country, he thought of economic opportunity primarily in terms of individual enterprise. In his analysis he gave scant attention to the growing number of factory workers, who had little prospect of upward social mobility.

  To the free economy that Lincoln idealized, he juxtaposed the slave society of the South. There it was assumed that labor must always remain subordinate; there, as James Henry Hammond, of South Carolina, proclaimed, labor was the mudsill on which the social edifice was erected. In a slave society, Lincoln observed, “a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be—all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understanding.”

  The
free economy and the slave society had coexisted, more or less peacefully, since the founding of the republic, but now they were increasingly in competition and conflict. Like most Republicans, Lincoln believed that slavery had to expand or die; the exhaustion of the soil and the natural increase of the slave population meant that slaveholders were forced to move into new lands. But free society had also the imperative to expand. The basic impulse to improve one’s condition, an “inherent right given to mankind directly by the Maker,” required room. The national territories were “God-given for that purpose,” and he had long believed that their best use was “for the homes of free white people.” But if Douglas and the Southern Democrats had their way, free laborers who moved to the territories would be in competition with the unpaid slaves. Consequently, Lincoln exhorted his audiences, “it is due to yourselves as voters, as owners of the new territories, that you shall keep those territories free, in the best condition for all such of your gallant sons as may choose to go there.”

  II

  The warm reception that Lincoln’s speeches received in Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Kansas during the last half of 1859 gave plausibility to suggestions that he ought to be nominated for high office. The idea had emerged right after the 1858 election, when some of his followers, bitter over his defeat and convinced “he is one of the best men God ever made,” began to ask: “Cant we make him President or vice.”

  Perhaps the obscure Lacon Illinois Gazette was the first newspaper seriously to propose Lincoln’s name for the presidency, but a November 6 story in the Sandusky (Ohio) Commercial Register calling on Republicans to nominate Lincoln received more attention. Presently the Olney (Illinois) Times began running “Abram [sic] Lincoln for President for 1860” below its masthead, and favorable mention of his possible candidacy appeared in papers as diverse as the New York Herald, the Rockford (Illinois) Republican, and the Reading (Pennsylvania) Journal.

  Neither Lincoln nor anybody else took these suggestions very seriously. He did not think himself presidential timber. During the 1858 campaign against Douglas he confided to the journalist Henry Villard that he doubted his ability to be a senator, though his wife was confident that he would one day become President. “Just think,” he exclaimed, wrapping his long arms around his knees and giving a roar of laughter, “of such a sucker as me as President.” Most of the newspaper stories were intended only to suggest that Lincoln was a prominent Republican, who deserved recognition as a favorite son of Illinois on the first ballot. Some of them were designed to promote his candidacy for the second place on the Republican ticket; the Hennepin (Illinois) Tribune endorsed him while frankly acknowledging that it favored William H. Seward for President, with Lincoln for Vice President. Wentworth’s organ, the Chicago Democrat, seemed to be endorsing Lincoln, “the Great Man of Illinois,” when it urged Republicans to nominate him for either President or Vice President; but it gave the editor’s game away by also recommending Lincoln for governor, rather than Wentworth’s archrival, Judd.

  To all such suggestions Lincoln gave essentially the same answer. “I must, in candor, say I do not think myself fit for the Presidency,” he wrote the admiring editor of the Rock Island Register, who wanted to promote the simultaneous announcement of Lincoln’s candidacy in Republican newspapers across the state. He gave an identical answer to Samuel Galloway, who was trying to organize a Lincoln-for-President movement in Ohio.

  In issuing these disclaimers Lincoln was not being coy, but realistic. To all outward appearances he was less prepared to be President of the United States than any other man who had run for that high office. Without family tradition or wealth, he had received only the briefest of formal schooling. Now fifty years old, he had no administrative experience of any sort; he had never been governor of his state or even mayor of Springfield. A profound student of the Constitution and of the writings of the Founding Fathers, he had limited acquaintance with the government they had established. He had served only a single, less than successful term in the House of Representatives and for the past ten years had held no public office. Though he was one of the founders of the Republican party, he had no close friends and only a few acquaintances in the populous Eastern states, whose vote would be crucial in the election. To be sure, his debates with Douglas had brought him national attention, but he had lost the senatorial election both in 1855 and in 1859. Dismissing his chances for the presidency, one of Hatch’s Boston correspondents remarked scornfully: “As for Lincoln I am afraid he will kick the beam again as he is in the habit of doing.”

  Despite these handicaps, of which no one was more conscious than Lincoln himself, he did think about the presidency. Indeed, any public man with intelligence and ambition, looking over the sorry run of recent chief executives, was forced to consider whether he could not occupy the White House as satisfactorily as, say, Franklin Pierce or James Buchanan.

  When Lincoln allowed himself to consider the possibility of running for President, his chances for securing the Republican nomination seemed better than average. The party had several strong candidates, but all had flaws. The leading name was William H. Seward, the senator and former governor of New York, an unquestionably able, experienced, and adroit politician of Whig antecedents, who was handicapped by an undeserved reputation for extremism because of his speeches proclaiming a higher law than the Constitution and predicting an irrepressible conflict between slavery and freedom; in addition, his emphatic opposition to nativism would alienate former Know Nothing voters. Pennsylvania Republicans, irate because the low tariff of 1857 had removed protection from their iron industry, mostly favored Simon Cameron, but he had few followers outside that state and was widely suspected of financial improprieties or even gross corruption. Salmon P. Chase, the Republican governor of Ohio, earnestly sought the nomination, and many of the more dedicated antislavery members of the party backed him; but he lacked personal magnetism as well as political adroitness. Another possibility was Edward Bates of Missouri, a conservative, free-soil Whig now sixty-six years old, who was not even a member of the Republican party; he was the improbable favorite of the erratic Horace Greeley, who was willing to back anybody who could defeat his former friend and now bitter rival, Seward. In addition to these front-runners, there were secondary candidates who might become winners if the convention was deadlocked: John C. Frémont, the defeated Republican candidate in 1856; William L. Dayton of New Jersey, who had been Frémont’s running mate; Cassius M. Clay, the fiery, unstable Kentucky abolitionist; and Benjamin F. Wade, the blunt antislavery senator and Chase’s principal rival in Ohio.

  Shrewdly Lincoln recognized that his own chances against these better-known rivals could best be advanced not by an open announcement of his candidacy but by small, private moves to consolidate his strength and expand his influence. To ensure wider circulation of his ideas, he took an active role in compiling and preserving his 1858 debates with Douglas. With the assistance of Henry C. Whitney he collected the reports of his speeches that appeared in the Chicago Press and Tribune and those of Douglas in the Chicago Times. These he carefully pasted in a large scrapbook, which he hoped to have published. After plans for having a book printed in Springfield failed, he turned over the project to Follett, Foster & Company of Columbus, Ohio, which shortly before the national nominating conventions of 1860 issued a 268-page book titled Political Debates Between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, in the Celebrated Campaign of 1858, in Illinois. It immediately became a best-seller.

  In December 1859, Lincoln made another quiet move to gain broader recognition by preparing an autobiography for campaign purposes. Jesse W. Fell, a Bloomington politician, forwarded a request from Joseph J. Lewis, of the Chester County (Pennsylvania) Times, for biographical information he could use in preparing an article on Lincoln. Lincoln complied with a terse sketch that reviewed his homespun beginnings, summarized his public career, and ended: “If any personal description of me is thought desirable, it may be said, I am, in height, six
feet, four inches, nearly; lean in flesh, weighing, on an average, one hundred and eighty pounds; dark complexion, with coarse black hair, and grey eyes—no other marks or brands recollected.” This he sent to Fell, noting, “There is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me.” Lewis evidently found the sketch meager, for he embroidered it with remarks on Lincoln’s oratorical gifts and on his long record of support for a protective tariff, so dear to Pennsylvanians. His article, widely copied in other Republican newspapers, was the first published biography of Lincoln.

  An even stronger indication of Lincoln’s growing interest in a presidential race was the alacrity with which he accepted an invitation from New York to lecture at Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn in February 1860. Knowing that he would appear before a sophisticated Eastern audience, he promptly began more careful research and preparation than for any other speech of his life. He also ordered a brand-new black suit for the occasion, for which he paid the local tailors, Woods & Henckle, $100.

  By the time he arrived in the East, sponsorship of the address had been taken over by the Young Men’s Central Republican Union, a body that included sixty-five-year-old William Cullen Bryant, forty-nine-year-old Horace Greeley, and other such youths, who were organizing a stop-Seward movement. Lincoln’s was the third in a series of lectures—following addresses by Frank Blair, the Missouri antislavery leader, and Cassius M. Clay, the Kentucky abolitionist—designed, according to the sponsors, “to call out our better, but busier citizens, who never attend political meetings.” Without informing Lincoln, the Young Republicans also shifted the lecture from Brooklyn to the Cooper Union in Manhattan. Learning of the change after he arrived and registered at the Astor House, Lincoln spent his first day in New York revising his address, so as to make it more suitable for a general political audience than for a religious congregation.