A Just and Generous Nation

by Harold Holzer

  The Cooper Union address was at one and the same time calm and impassioned, argumentative and scholarly, moderate in tone but accompanied by a forceful statement of moral purpose, and a clear vision of justice animated by the confident expectation that it would prevail. Lincoln used the occasion to present himself, as his future secretary John G. Nicolay would put it, as “yielding and accommodating in non-essentials” and “inflexibly firm in a principle or position deliberately taken.”

  The editor of the New York Times, Henry J. Raymond, a Seward loyalist, was convinced that the “pre-eminent ability” Lincoln displayed at Cooper Union “compelled” easterners to acknowledge him as not only a leader among westerners, but a national figure as well. Greeley’s Tribune agreed that “the speech of Abraham Lincoln . . . was one of the happiest and most convincing political arguments ever made in the city.” And William Cullen Bryant’s antislavery New York Evening Post headlined its recap “The Framers of the Constitution in Favor of Slavery Prohibition; The Republican Party Vindicated; Great Speech of Hon. Abraham Lincoln.”

  Lincoln emerged from New York a legitimate alternative to Seward for the Republican presidential nomination. Overnight, he achieved his goal of challenging both Republican Seward and Democrat Douglas for the ultimate prize. What was more, overnight reports of his Cooper Union triumph in the New York dailies inspired a series of invitations to speak in other northeastern states. On his way to see his son Robert at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, Lincoln stopped to make eleven more speeches, in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. Recycling the core of his Cooper Union address, Lincoln unfailingly reassured his audiences that their cause would prevail by invoking the rallying cry he had introduced in New York: “Let us have faith that right makes might.”

  “Right makes might” summed up his new presidential-year argument against the extension of slavery. Lincoln was cannily suggesting that the peculiar institution would thus peacefully fade away. He was now preaching a more optimistic approach than the fatalistic inevitability of a national conflagration implicit in the “house divided” speech. Arguably, there was no real space between the two visions. But the rallying cry “Right makes might” struck a more positive note, summoning the original intent of the founding fathers to justify placing slavery once more “in the course of ultimate extinction” by curbing its spread and reaffirming economic opportunity as the core value of American democracy, a society committed to the rejection of the Southern idea that people should remain in fixed positions in life.

  Lincoln made this view more explicit in some of his subsequent orations on his post–Cooper Union speaking tour in New England. The “‘equality of man’ principle which actuated our forefathers” was “right,” he declared at Hartford, and “slavery, being directly opposed to this,” was “wrong.” And in New Haven, site of a controversial labor strike at a shoe factory, he added, “What is the true condition of the laborer? I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good.” And then he offered his most direct synthesis of his economic beliefs: “I want every man to have a chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he can better his condition—when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him! That is the true system.”

  Within hours of his return from the East, Lincoln learned that his Cooper Union speech would be printed in pamphlet form by his hometown newspaper. And the Springfield daily was not alone. Lincoln’s speech was also printed in pamphlet form by the New York Tribune and the Chicago Tribune and was quoted widely by other Republican-oriented newspapers. More important, Republican politicians everywhere began speaking with one voice, identifying antislavery with the founders, attacking the Dred Scott decision, and drawing a dividing line on slavery extension. Lincoln was not the only Republican candidate who defined the issues this way, but he was frequently credited with having said it best. As the New York Tribune reported, “Mr. Lincoln’s is probably the most systematic and complete defense yet made of the Republican position with regard to slavery.”

  Lincoln exhibited exceptional tactical skills during his campaign for the presidential nomination. He knew the view that slavery should be abolished immediately was held by only a minority of Americans. He believed that calling for immediate abolition would keep him from being nominated for the presidency, preclude him from taking action as president to put slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction,” and prevent him from undertaking federal government initiatives based on his economic philosophy. While he continued to say that slavery was immoral and eventually needed to die out, he did not call for its immediate abolition. Lincoln said the federal government had the power to ban the extension of slavery to the western territories. But he accepted the constitutional provision that prevented the federal government from interfering with slavery in the existing slave states.

  After adopting a platform that called for free labor and free land, immigrant rights, internal improvements, and no extension of slavery, the delegates to the Republican National Convention commenced their voting for a presidential nominee in Chicago on May 18, 1860. The convention, conveniently located in Lincoln’s home state of Illinois, was packed with wildly cheering Lincoln enthusiasts who had used counterfeit tickets to elbow out Seward men from the galleries. The first ballot gave Seward 170½ votes, Lincoln 102, Pennsylvania senator Simon Cameron 50½, Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio 49, and elder statesman Edward Bates of Missouri 48. The surprise came in both Seward’s failure to get close to the 233 votes needed for the nomination and Lincoln’s strong second-place showing. Lincoln had won the unanimous support of the western delegations of Illinois and Indiana. Equally important, New Hampshire and Connecticut, states where Lincoln had spoken only a few months earlier, gave more votes to Lincoln than to Seward. On the second ballot, Seward gained only 11 votes, while Lincoln gained 79 from New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The second ballot ended in a virtual tie between Seward, with 184½ votes, and Lincoln, with 181. The trend seemed irreversible. The convention proceeded immediately to a third ballot. When Lincoln handily won the nomination on this final delegate count, the “wildest enthusiasm” erupted inside the Wigwam convention center.

  Almost from the moment he became the Republican candidate, Lincoln decided to follow the accepted tradition to make no further speeches. He would not “write, or speak anything upon doctrinal points.” He even assigned to an aide the task of sending form letters in response to all requests for his political opinions, emphasizing that his “positions were well known when he was nominated.” Lincoln had worked hard in the Lincoln-Douglas debates and in his Cooper Union address to make the case against the extension of slavery. He did not want to open the door to new interpretations of new words that were not as carefully crafted as his original speeches.

  Instead, Lincoln built his 1860 campaign for the presidency on his well-known uncompromising rejection of any expansion of the Southern economic, social, and political system. Silence spoke louder than words: he offered no new assurances to the Southern states and no hope of compromise on these crucial issues. That silence was deafening, especially to Southerners who feared—rightly so—that his election to the presidency would threaten their way of life.

  Lincoln was already on record as viewing slavery as “a moral, political and social wrong” that “ought to be treated as a wrong . . . with the fixed idea that it must and will come to the end.” That much about him voters already knew. They knew that he had not embraced immediate abolition, knowing, if nothing else, that such a position would have isolated him from mainstream white American voters and rendered him unelectable.

  Unalterably opposed to the extension of slavery, Lincoln remained willing to “tolerate” it where it already existed, believing that conta
inment would place it “in the course of ultimate extinction.” Lincoln was not alone in sincerely believing that slavery could be destroyed simply by hemming it in where it already existed and isolating the slave states with a border composed both of free states and oceans that no longer bore newly kidnapped slaves from Africa.

  Until the catharsis of rebellion made immediate abolition of slavery possible, Lincoln confessed that he thought slavery might exist in some form in Southern states, and without serious challenge, perhaps into the next century. Lincoln would say so himself as late as 1862, three months after issuing his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. He acknowledged slavery might not completely disappear from America until 1900.

  Ultimately, Lincoln and other adherents of the “ultimate extinction” philosophy believed, newly admitted free western states would join the already antislavery North to create a “supermajority” in Congress capable of passing constitutional remedies to eradicate slavery. This is precisely what did happen in 1865, of course, though it took the bloody Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation issued by the commander in chief finally to set the stage for national abolition through a constitutional amendment.

  Lincoln’s well-known commitment to prevent the expansion of slavery to the territories proved enough to alarm Southerners. When a worried visitor from New England nonetheless urged him, the very day before the election, to “reassure the men honestly alarmed” over the consequences of his victory, Lincoln hotly explained: “This is the same old trick by which the South breaks down every Northern victory. Even if I were personally willing to barter away the moral principle involved in this contest, for the commercial gain of a new submission to the South, I would go to Washington without the countenance of the men who supported me and were my friends before the election; I would be as powerless as a block of buckeye wood.”

  As for “those who will not read, or heed, what I have already publicly said,” Lincoln insisted, they “would not read, or heed, a repetition of it. He went on to say: “What is it I could say that would quiet alarm? Is it that no interference by the government, with slaves or slavery within the states, is intended? I have said this so often already, that a repetition of it is but mockery, bearing an appearance of weakness, and cowardice.”

  As the 1860 campaign reached its climax, Lincoln rejected anxious last-minute appeals, from supporters and opponents alike, that he simply assure the South that, if elected, he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it existed. A less astute politician might have regarded such reassurances as pabulum: easy to concoct, easier to swallow. But Lincoln not only maintained his eloquent silence; he spoke out to defend his silence, contending that any policy reiterations would be superfluous, a sign of indecisiveness that could cripple him as president-elect—and as president.

  Lincoln relied on his belief that right really could make might. He also relied on the prospects for a successful battle for political success against expansion of the Southern slave-based economic system. To achieve this goal would mean gaining public support for his belief that the future of the nation hinged on acceptance of his animating idea that economic opportunity required a level playing field and an equal chance in the race of life—for all.

  Three. CHAIN OF STEEL

  DEFENDER OF THE UNION

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN WON election as president of the United States by carrying every Northern state except New Jersey. No candidate—not even Thomas Jefferson in his divisive 1800 race against John Adams—had ever before taken the presidency with such an exclusively regional vote. Lincoln failed to carry a single Southern state—and his name did not even appear on the ballot in ten of them. But even in those Dixie states where voters could vote Republican if they so chose, Lincoln fared disastrously. In Virginia the Lincoln ticket received just 1,929 votes out of 167,223 statewide—barely 1 percent. The result was even more pronounced in his native Kentucky, where only 1,364 out of 146,216 voters, less than 1 percent, cast their ballots for the Republican candidate. Lincoln could find some solace in the fact that both of these Upper South states, along with Missouri, at least went for the moderate John Bell rather than the conservative Southern choice, Democrat John C. Breckinridge. As the ominously divided vote confirmed, and just as Southern foes had warned, Lincoln’s victory was entirely sectional. The total result gave Lincoln a decisive 54 percent in the North and West, but only 2 percent in the South—the most asymmetrical plurality in American election history. The Northern Democratic candidate, Stephen Douglas, finished in second place in the popular vote, but won almost no electoral votes.

  Lincoln’s election triggered the secession crisis. One by one, the seven states of the Lower South began to move toward separation from the Union. In Washington prominent senators proposed new compromise legislation designed to persuade the Southern states to stay in the Union by assuring them that the institution of slavery would remain untouched by the new administration—and all future administrations.

  The Lincoln Quick-Step—an 1860 campaign sheet-music cover by Thomas Sinclair of Philadelphia—highlighted the Lincolnian virtue of hard work. Note the scenes (top and bottom) of a young Lincoln splitting rails and piloting a flatboat and (left and right) the tools of those humble trades.

  FROM THE LINCOLN FINANCIAL FOUNDATION COLLECTION, COURTESY OF THE ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY AND INDIANA STATE MUSEUM AND HISTORIC SITES

  Lacking anything but symbolic power, and with sixteen long weeks remaining before his inauguration, Lincoln believed he could do nothing official to avert the crisis as long as the lame-duck James Buchanan administration remained in office. The new president-elect calculated that any public comment on his part during this period might prove fatally dangerous. He was worried that inflammatory statements might even jeopardize the Electoral College balloting that would make the November 6 presidential election results official in February.

  Lincoln and Douglas in a Presidential Footrace—an 1860 campaign cartoon by J. Sage & Son of Buffalo—shows the long-limbed Republican candidate proudly toting a rail splitter’s maul as he outdistances his short-legged rival toward the White House. Douglas is saddled with a bag marked “MC,” a reminder of the Missouri Compromise that his controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively repealed, opening the American Northwest to slavery. Outraged by that 1854 legislation, Lincoln had come roaring back into politics.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  For generations after 1800, Americans had regarded these sessions as mere formalities, a kind of postelection coronation devoid of suspense, with each of the 303 “delegates” firmly pledged in advance to support the ticket on which he had run. But nothing about this interregnum was going according to tradition. Never before had a president-elect been subjected to so much pressure to pronounce himself on doctrinal issues before his inauguration. Never before had an entire section of the country threatened to abandon the United States altogether in response to an election.

  Not even the electoral vote could be regarded as pro forma. What if Southern messengers withdrew their votes and threw the required quorum into jeopardy? What if the “fire-eaters” disrupted the meeting of electors—or, worse, prevented the votes from being counted or the vote from taking place at all?

  For better or worse, Lincoln concluded that whatever he might say would unavoidably alarm at least part of the country in such a way that he might not be able to govern when he took office. Soothing words of reassurance on the constitutional rights of slaveholders might inflame Northern Republicans who had just voted for him with the expectation that he would limit the spread of slavery. Defiant pronouncements on the sanctity of the Union would probably arouse Southern Democrats who had not voted for him and for whom anything less than substantial conciliation amounted to coercion. To Lincoln, saying nothing was preferable to saying too much.

  Lincoln likely believed, too, that expending political capital too early in the national arena might render him less effective when he took over the government in March. Historians who
have suggested that he misjudged the growing crisis by exaggerating Union sentiment in the South have both overestimated his legal and political ability to allay the growing panic and underestimated Lincoln’s logic-driven conviction that the best time to confront the secession crisis directly was after his inauguration.

  But that is not to suggest that Lincoln was unaware of the severity of the secession crisis. Indeed, as his private statements during the so-called secession winter make clear, it was very much on his mind, if not his chief concern. “I feel constrained, for the present, at least, to make no declaration for the public,” he said on November 10, 1860, in defense of his silence. Convinced that any such “declaration” might undo the perilous balance under which he had just been voted into office, he refused to modify the policy of restraint that had won him the election in the first place. Still fearful that he might embolden his foes by appearing weak or worried, and recognizing that the all-important Electoral College would not cast its votes for president for another three months and must not be impeded or threatened, Lincoln further justified his position this way: “I could say nothing which I have not already said, and which is in print, and open for the inspection of all. To press a repetition of this upon those who have listened, is useless; to press it upon those who have refused to listen, and still refuse, would be wanting in self-respect.” Lincoln’s views had been fully expressed in the recently published Lincoln-Douglas debates, the Cooper Union address, and the Republican Party platform. Popular sovereignty was dead. Under no circumstances would his new government allow slavery to spread into the West.