Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power

by Richard J. Carwardine

  By his words and deeds during the first week of October 1854, the time of the State Agricultural Fair in Springfield, Lincoln made especially clear his position on the proper relationship between his party and the radical forces. Speaking in the statehouse, he chided those conservative Whigs who were afraid that an anti-Nebraska stance would expose them to Democratic accusations of abolitionism. “Will they allow me as an old whig to tell them good humoredly, that I think this is very silly?” Good Whigs took firm “national” ground, between the extremes of Douglas-ite pro-slavery demagoguery and Constitution-defying abolitionism, and should welcome any who wanted to join them on it. “Stand with anybody that stands RIGHT. Stand with him while he is right and PART with him when he goes wrong. Stand WITH the abolitionist in restoring the Missouri Compromise; and stand AGAINST him when he attempts to repeal the fugitive slave law. In the latter case you stand with the southern disunionist. What of that? you are still right.”25 Lincoln recognized the importance of drawing antislavery radicals into the Whig coalition, but only on Whig terms. This had been the means of the party’s greatest presidential triumph, in 1840, and its absence had been influential in their most galling defeat four years later.

  Lincoln’s action the day after his Springfield speech made a similar statement, but now to a different constituency. A group of radicals from northern Illinois had come to the state capital to organize “a party which shall put the Government upon a Republican track.” They were led by Owen Lovejoy and Ichabod Codding, both New Englanders, both Congregational ministers, both with an abolitionist political pedigree. Lovejoy’s brother Elijah had been the nation’s first abolitionist martyr. They all heard Lincoln in the Hall of Representatives. Mesmerized by the tone and substance of the speech, Lovejoy invited him to join them at their convention the next day. Lincoln was reluctant to get involved. Instead he rode north to keep a court appointment. In his absence, and without permission, the “Republicans” appointed him to their state central committee. Discovering this by accident some weeks later, he declined the nomination. He told Codding, “I suppose my opposition to the principle of slavery is as strong as that of any member of the Republican party; but I had also supposed that the extent to which I feel authorized to carry that opposition, practically, was not at all satisfactory to that party.” It was one thing to cooperate with the radicals in opposition to the prevailing Nebraska policy, quite another to steer the Whig ship toward new moorings so as to give legitimacy to Democrats’ taunts that Lincoln was a covert abolitionist.26

  Lincoln knew that fusion presented as many difficulties for anti-Nebraska Democrats as it did for the Whigs. Douglas’s course had alienated several of his party’s ablest men, including Lyman Trumbull, John M. Palmer, Norman B. Judd, and John Wentworth. Lincoln saw the political risk they ran in attacking a measure that had been made a test of Democratic party loyalty. Moreover, to resist the Nebraska Bill was one thing, to throw in their lot with their historic Whig opponents quite another. Did cross-party agreement over extending slavery provide a basis for longer-term cooperation or unity? What was to stop the minority of able Democrats being swamped and subordinated in a Whig-dominated party? In the event, the elections showed the continuing power of traditional party loyalties, with many anti-Nebraska Democrats staying at home if there were no Democrat candidates to support, but otherwise turning out with enthusiasm.27

  Political nativism proved a further obstruction to the cause of fusion, and Lincoln needed few lessons in the uneasy fit between Know-Nothingism and the anti-Nebraska movement. Many nativists were evangelicals who regarded Catholicism and slavery as equally poisonous to the well-being of a Protestant republic; antislavery Whigs, for instance, commonly populated Know-Nothing lodges and temperance societies. But by no means all Illinois nativists were clear-eyed opponents of slavery. Nor were unyielding antislavery men necessarily sympathetic to nativism; those in this category naturally included the foreign-born themselves, especially the Germans, but it embraced native-born Americans, too. Lincoln himself was no friend of Know-Nothing principles and was privately contemptuous of nativist intolerance and irrationality. “How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?” he asked his friend Speed; Know-Nothings wanted to rewrite Jefferson’s Declaration to read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.”28 He was, though, wise enough to recognize nativism’s popular force. Many of his close Whig allies became Know-Nothings; the order’s local leaders wanted to run him for the legislature (an invitation he refused); and his own congressional candidate, the Methodist Richard Yates, was friendly with the same men. When, despite Lincoln’s efforts, and following the defection of foreign-born Whigs, Yates became one of the few anti-Nebraska men to lose to a Douglas Democrat, Lincoln had uncomfortable evidence of nativism’s destructive potential.

  Despite Yates’s defeat, the anti-Nebraska forces secured a majority in the General Assembly. This was not exactly a Democratic rout, but it was a chastening defeat for Douglas’s men in a state where his party was used to dominance. They relied more than ever on the loyalty of the Irish and those of southern stock, while anti-Nebraskans secured an unprecedented level of political cohesion amongst reform-minded Protestants. Lincoln himself enjoyed a comfortable margin of victory, reflecting his huge personal appeal in Sangamon County, and then embarked explicitly on what he had surely intended all along, a campaign to become the next U.S. senator from Illinois. Amongst other things, this meant refusing his seat in the legislature—the elective body—to make himself an eligible candidate, an action which appeared to put self before cause and did his reputation some harm amongst radical antislavery men.

  The new assembly comprised a heterogeneous and fragmented membership of one hundred, still acutely conscious of the old party labels. Lincoln calculated that forty-three were strictly Douglas men: these would seek the return of Congressman James Shields, a staunch supporter of the Nebraska Bill. The anti-Nebraska majority was constructed from Whigs and Democrats in a ratio of about two to one. Quite a number of these were drawn toward a fusion of all into a new Republican organization. To be elected as senator, Lincoln had to recruit well beyond the Whig core. Amongst radicals of the Fusion-Republican tendency he was compromised by his southern birth and associations, and by reports of his nativism (which, though false, he could not publicly deny without alienating the essential support of Know-Nothing members). But thanks to the intervention of the old antislavery warhorse, Joshua Giddings of Ohio, and to the local efforts of his supporters—David Davis, Leonard Swett, Hill Lamon, and Herndon, who had personal connections with the radicals—he won over all these Republicans to his cause.29

  To assure his election Lincoln also needed the anti-Nebraska Democrats who had broken with Douglas. They included Judd and Palmer, who with a handful of others in the balloting stood resolutely by their fellow Democrat, the impeccably antislavery Lyman Trumbull. They felt no kinship with Whigs or Know-Nothings and believed that their election as Democrats to a Democrat-dominated Assembly left them no other honorable course. Lincoln led on the first ballot, by forty-five votes to Shields’s forty-one. Trumbull secured just five votes, exactly the number Lincoln needed to win outright. But the Trumbull group refused to budge. Thereafter Lincoln’s vote gradually slipped. After six inconclusive rounds the regular Democrats dropped Shields for the more electable Joel A. Matteson, the state’s popular governor. Anti-Nebraska forces now began to shift toward Trumbull, and by the ninth round Lincoln’s total had dropped to fifteen. Sensing the danger of a victory for Matteson, Lincoln directed the remnant of his followers to help Trumbull, who was narrowly elected on the tenth ballot. Lincoln was deeply disappointed but, unlike his wife, showed no bitterness toward the new senator and his cluster of supporters, with whom he remained on good terms. After all, they owed a debt of gratitude which they would later repay with interest.

  The senatorial election delivered a blow to Douglas, bu
t it also showed the continued potency of the old party names and the need to rise above them if the full possibilities of the still divided anti-Nebraska movement were to be realized. The Whig label had hurt Lincoln as much as it had helped him. There were lessons to be learned, but at least he had the time in which to digest them: no election was due in Illinois until late 1856, and his immediate priority was to return to his neglected law practice. Over the next twelve months Lincoln watched as the swirls of public opinion around liquor and nativism prevented a full realignment of antislavery forces. In the summer of 1855 temperance men lost a referendum on prohibition, but only after a stirring campaign in which alliances over drink cut across those over slavery. A similar confusion grew out of the evolving politics of Know-Nothingism, which drove a wedge between native-born antislavery voters and a powerful bloc of immigrant antislaveryites, including an estimated twenty thousand Germans. The nativist movement continued to grow after the 1854 elections, pulling in well-placed Whigs and prompting the launch of the American party the following summer.

  This was an inauspicious setting for Owen Lovejoy’s renewed efforts during 1855 to engineer a fusion of all the anti-Nebraska elements. Emphasizing the readiness of the radicals to unite around a moderate platform, he joined Joshua Giddings in trying to persuade Lincoln to lead a new Republican party. Lincoln accepted that a new political combination was needed, but judged the time was not ripe: “I have no objection to ‘fuse’ with any body,” he wrote to Lovejoy in August, “provided I can fuse on ground which I think is right,” namely opposition to slavery’s extension. But the American party’s presence made the scheme premature. “Until we can get the elements of this organization, there is not sufficient materials to successfully combat the Nebraska democracy with. We can not get them so long as they cling to a hope of success under their own organization; and I fear an open push by us now, may offend them, and tend to prevent our ever getting them.” Responding the same month to an inquiry from his old friend Joshua Speed about his political moorings, Lincoln wrote, “That is a disputed point. I think I am a whig; but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist. . . . I now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery.”30 The essentials of the Whig doctrine that had prompted his support for the Wilmot Proviso remained, but the party structures that had accommodated those antislavery views were in flux. As he looked beyond the boundaries of Illinois in the fall of 1855, he saw victories for Republicans, Americans, and, ominously, renascent Democrats—but not Whigs. The year drew to a close with Lincoln and the state’s other anti-Nebraska men still lacking the common ground on which to build an inclusive antislavery organization.

  Yet forces were at play which would achieve that outcome within a matter of months. First, as Lincoln observed, political nativism proved less robust than its organizers had hoped, and the time would come when antislavery fusionists would be able to take advantage of its growing divisions. The national council of the American party had alienated many of its free-soil northern members by adopting an ambivalent position on slavery in the territories; a final split between northern and southern wings followed within the year. Moreover, the defeat of the prohibitionist forces in a statewide referendum gave antislavery fusionists firm grounds for rejecting an anti-liquor stance likely to repel voters.

  Second, and more important still, events outside Illinois during 1855 and the first half of 1856 ensured that even when the initial anger at the Nebraska Act had lost its edge, the disparate elements of the anti-Nebraska coalition continued to hold together. Month after month, presses throughout the free states carried opinion-shaping reports from Kansas territory, cataloging the intimidation suffered by valiant free-soil settlers at the hands of the pro-slavery forces, especially the “border ruffians” from Missouri. Newspaper editors lamented illegal voting, mass violence, draconian pro-slavery legal codes, and ineffectual territorial administration by the mediocre, timid agents of the remote and pro-southern president, Franklin Pierce. Not all the violence had to do with slavery, nor was it all on one side, but the upshot was white-hot indignation across the North. It stopped anti-Nebraska Democrats from slowly drifting back into the fold of their party. It nourished increased Fusionist-Republican ambition. It led antislavery Whigs to abandon thoughts of reviving their party. Kansas helped keep the steel in Lincoln’s soul, if it were needed. His friend Mark Delahay, a free-soil editor there, corresponded regularly with him, and Lincoln’s outrage at “the spirit of violence” and “foul means” in the territory roused him to give money for the defense of its bona fide settlers.31

  Increasingly sure that the only way forward lay in a new, moderate antislavery party, Lincoln set his compass in 1856, a presidential election year, by attending a state gathering of antislavery editors at Decatur on February 22. On the same day at Pittsburgh, representatives of Republican parties from across the North met in a national organizing convention. Lincoln, although selected as an Illinois delegate to that meeting, joined the journalists at Decatur instead: Republican fusion had made greater progress elsewhere in the free states than at home, and he knew that the first priority for Illinois was to secure an effective statewide anti-Nebraska party capable of winning the fall elections. He played a leading role in drafting the declaration of principles and the resolutions. The meeting avoided the name “Republican,” still tainted with abolitionism since the fusion effort in 1854. Taking an essentially moderate line on slavery, it called for the restoration of the Missouri Compromise, upheld the Fugitive Slave Law, and accepted noninterference with slavery in the existing slave states, but also affirmed the free-soil principle that slavery was the local exception to the rule of national freedom. To avoid alienating the foreign-born, the platform extolled religious toleration and opposed any change in the naturalization laws; at the same time it nodded toward the Know-Nothings by promising to repel attacks on the common school system—a reference to Catholic attempts to get public funds for their own parochial schools. A state anti-Nebraska convention on May 29 at Bloomington would nominate a state ticket.

  Lincoln’s role at the February meeting, where he was toasted as “the next United States Senator,” gives the lie to the argument that he was especially diffident in advocating the prospective new party. Still, like Trumbull, Peck, and other anti-Nebraska moderates, both Whig and Democrat, he had two understandable reasons for anxiety as he looked ahead to Bloomington. Would Lovejoy and the radicals taint or control the movement? Even if not, would the disparate elements cohere, or prove unstable? As all came to recognize, these were risks that simply had to be run. There was no way back for the anti-Nebraska Democrats, with unforgiving Douglasites in control of the party. There was nowhere else for antislavery Whigs to go. As Herndon told Yates, “If you do not go, you, Lincoln, and all others will be buried politically forever.”32

  In the event, the Bloomington convention was a brilliant success. Every stripe of antislavery opinion was there: radicals, moderates, and conservatives, Whigs and dissident Democrats, Germans and nativists. Yet harmony prevailed amongst the nearly three hundred delegates. Moderates set the tone, having controlled the local conventions that had selected many of those present. Lincoln seems to have worked to prevent conservatives from fleeing the unnerving presence of Lovejoy and Codding, but in fact the radicals, alert to the need for pragmatic compromise, caused no trouble. The presence of many volunteers, informal representatives of their communities, did much to give the assembly more the flavor of a mass meeting than a convention; but the party leaders, coordinated by the Whig lawyer Orville Browning, gave shape to the business.

  Their task was made all the easier by very recent events in Kansas and Washington. Violence returned to the infant territory after a freezing winter. On May 21 a nasty little incident involving the looting and burning of a free-state press and hotel was promptly labeled “the sack of Lawrence” by antislavery propagandists. The following day, in the Senate chamber, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Charle
s Sumner, the antislavery senator from Massachusetts, about the head with a gutta-percha cane—to avenge what Brooks deemed Sumner’s dishonorable verbal assault on his state and his kinsman, Senator Andrew Butler. “Bleeding Kansas” and “bleeding Sumner” sharpened the Bloomington delegates’ determination to unite. They rallied around a platform framed under Lincoln’s eye and which showed the imprint of Decatur in its moderation on slavery, its silence on temperance, and its attack on the proscription of the foreign-born. They endorsed a diverse ticket of candidates that gave Democrats the prospect of more than their fair share of the best offices, including the governorship, and rewarded both Germans and former Know-Nothings. They appointed delegates to represent them at the imminent Republican national convention, while continuing to avoid using the term “Republican” in their own proceedings.

  Lincoln brought the convention to its climax with a spellbinding ninety-minute speech of unequaled eloquence. Delivered extemporaneously, the address was so inspirational that the reporters present, including Herndon, stopped taking notes. But the brief account of the “lost speech” points to themes that were foreshadowed in his addresses of 1854, namely the alarming sea change in southern thought on slavery; the slaveholders’ reversal of the policy of the nation’s Founders; the need to defend not just the territorial integrity of the Union, but its republican values of freedom and equality; the decadent course of northern Democrats; and the need for all who would “oppose slave power” to fuse into a single crusading force. What gave the speech its additional strength, according to Herndon, was Lincoln’s moving beyond slavery as an issue to be argued “on grounds of policy,” to address “the question of the radical and the eternal right.” In his Peoria speech Lincoln had asserted that “the great mass of mankind . . . consider slavery a great moral wrong,” and that no statesman could safely disregard that feeling: there is something of the responsible political sociologist in this mode of leadership. At Bloomington, however, it seems Lincoln has become one of the “mass of mankind” himself, fired by the moral enormities of slavery as well as its policy implications. “Now he was newly baptized and freshly born,” Herndon recalled, “he had the fervor of a new convert; the smothered flame broke out; enthusiasm unusual to him blazed up; his eyes were aglow with an inspiration; he felt justice; his heart was alive to the right; his sympathies, remarkably deep for him, burst forth, and he stood before the throne of the eternal Right.” Herndon insisted that his description was not literary hyperbole. Lincoln really had blended logic, pathos, and enthusiasm to a degree he had never done before. The speech was “justice, equity, truth, and right set ablaze by the divine fires of a soul maddened by the wrong.”33