These earnest claims to moderation and conservatism were designed to counter the charges of the Bell-Everett and Douglas men that their opponents’ “House Divided” radicalism would shiver the Union into fragments. Republicans treated the disunionist threats of southern radicals with skepticism, remaining insouciant in the face of incendiary, lurid propaganda that predicted bloody convulsions should the emancipationist Lincoln win. But Union-loving conservatives in the lower North mattered electorally, as Breckinridge hotheads did not, and the party moved to meet the challenge of wooing voters who disliked slavery but hated abolitionism. Presenting themselves and their candidate as the heirs of Henry Clay, Republican speakers insisted that the Chicago platform embodied old, “national” Whiggery and lauded Lincoln as “a sound conservative man.”59 Lincoln himself, despite calls to quiet public alarm, said nothing, confident that those who were genuinely open-minded would find reassurance in his published speeches. For the past decade he had been at pains to show how southerners and Democrats were themselves the constitutional iconoclasts, reinterpreting the Declaration of Independence to exclude black Americans, and willing to “reject, and scout, and spit upon” the policies of the nation’s Founders. The House Divided speech had warned against the new extremism that threatened to make slavery national. More recently, the theme of Republican “conservatism” formed the core of his widely distributed Cooper Union address.60
Promising to embargo slave labor outside its existing state boundaries served, second, to crystallize the Republicans’ appeal as economic modernizers. The platform set out policies designed to establish the party’s progressive credentials. The promise of river and harbor improvements, and of a railroad link to the Pacific, addressed the interests of northwestern farmers and grain exporters aggrieved by Buchanan’s pocket veto of a friendly measure early in 1860. A pledge to make farming land freely available was designed to give Republicans a credibility amongst native and foreign-born workingmen that their Whig predecessors, with their evident lack of enthusiasm for westward movement, had not enjoyed. In some western areas, the issue of “free homesteads” overshadowed all other issues following the panic of 1857, when thousands of farmers were faced with foreclosure or selling the land they were struggling to buy under the Preemption Law. When President Buchanan vetoed an already weakened homestead bill in June 1860, he cut western Democrats off at the knees. “Does anybody suppose that Abraham Lincoln would ever veto such a bill?” asked a jubilant Greeley, perhaps recalling that when they were fellow congressmen Lincoln had shown an un-Whiggish sympathy for the homestead cause.61
There was no greater euphoria at Chicago than amongst the Pennsylvania delegates when the committee on resolutions reported the tariff plank. Protection was a politically explosive issue. As Lincoln himself knew, the old Whig policy of high duties to safeguard domestic manufacturing might well inspire the iron interests of the Keystone State, without which the election would probably be lost, but many western Republicans and even some easterners remained at best unenthusiastic at the prospect of higher charges for imported raw materials and manufactures. In the event, the platform was short on specifics but pregnant with possibility. It did enough to underscore the main difference between the party’s economic program and the Democrats’, and to enthuse those protectionist voters who mattered, not only in Pennsylvania but also in parts of the Northwest. Republican campaigners celebrated Lincoln’s pedigree as a “Clay tariff man” and reveled in the Democrats’ maladroit blocking of Justin Morrill’s tariff bill in the Senate. Pennsylvania Democrats were aghast at their party’s self-inflicted wound, and complained to Douglas that in the state’s manufacturing districts the Republicans “say nothing of the nigger question, but all is made to turn on the Tariff.”62
Improvements, homesteads, and tariffs helped Republicans reach out beyond the Whigs’ natural middle-class constituency to embrace workingmen eager to share in America’s burgeoning capitalist economy. But more important than any of these in signaling the party’s devotion to economic progress, social opportunity, and meritocracy was the promise to seal the boundaries of slavery—the badge of an archaic, frozen social order, inimical to technological, scientific, and intellectual advance. Seward’s “irrepressible conflict” invoked the class, not racial, antagonism between North and South: the incompatibility of slaveowners who selfishly eyed the western territories, and free laborers who patriotically aimed to stop them: “There is no negro question about it at all. It is an eternal question . . . between aristocracy and democracy.” Innumerable other speeches, including Schurz’s appeals to German workingmen, similarly located the two labor systems in a set of irreconcilable values.63
Lincoln’s own words harmonized sweetly with the broader chorus. During the 1858 debates he had not paid much attention to the economic effects of slavery on white labor, but several of his addresses in 1859 and 1860 showed signs of giving it careful thought. In his widely distributed Cincinnati speech, he had drawn on his understanding of the labor theory of value to explain the relationship of labor and capital. Labor was the prior engine of human activity. Through their industry, sobriety, and honesty men accumulated wealth. With that capital, laborers enjoyed the freedom to hire those who lacked land or their own workshops. Such hired hands were not consigned to permanent dependence and formed only a small proportion of the country’s laborers (one in eight, he estimated). Rather, they understood, just as he had in his youth, the meaning of hope, opportunity, and self-improvement. Slaves, however, knew only the lash and unremitting hopelessness. This was why “the mass of white men are really injured by the effect of slave labor in the vicinity of the fields of their own labor.”64 Some months later, while he was in the East, a shoemakers’ strike gave him a pertinent setting for reasserting these differences: ‘I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers CAN strike when they want to. . . . I like the system which lets a man quit when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere.” And, with more color-blindness than was the case in many of his western speeches (where the economic aspirations of white men often seemed the whole story), he added: “I want every man to have the 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.”65
Symbols proved even more potent than words in establishing Lincoln as the purest exponent of free labor ideology. Splintered fence rails decorated the campaign as obtrusively as cider barrels had refreshed the canvassers of 1840. The Decatur originals made their appearance in Lincoln’s Chicago headquarters, “lighted up by tapers, and trimmed with flowers by enthusiastic ladies,” a bizarre altar to meritocracy and self-help. The party’s dedicated campaign newspaper in the Northwest took the name The Rail Splitter, while Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert, was punningly rechristened the “Prince of Rails.” The crude symbols of ax and log cabin obscured the more complex reality: of a candidate supported by some of the wealthiest farmers and land speculators in Illinois; of a lawyer who had fled with relief from a life on the land to become the agent of the biggest corporate interests in the Northwest, the railroads. But if the symbols conjured an unsubtle image, it was by no means a false one. Lincoln fused a personal history of extraordinary social mobility with a continuing warmth toward the ordinary folk amongst whom he had lived and worked. David Davis was innocent of simple sentimentalizing when he reflected that his friend “loved the struggling masses—all uprising toward a higher Civilization had his assent & his prayer.”66
Republican campaigners’ promise to bar the door against southern expansionists worked, third, on an ethical level. Strenuously determined not to be tarred with the brush of abolitionism, leaders from both the radical and moderate sections of the party nonetheless couched their anti-extensionism in the earnest language of conscience and moral purpose. Their campaign became a cru
sade. Some passengers on the Republican vessel might be there for reasons of political habit or material calculation, but the crew spoke in language designed to harness the potent forces of millennialist Protestants. Addressing evangelicals’ worries about the “steady and tireless march” of aggressive slaveholders, as incanted in sermons, church resolutions, and far-flung newspaper editorials, party spokesmen set the antislavery battle in a gospel context, appealing for Christian soldiers to take up arms in what George Washington Julian described as “a fight . . . between God and the Devil—between heaven and hell!” According to William Burleigh, the belief in an irrepressible conflict between free and slave labor was “Christ’s doctrine of righteousness conflicting with evil.” Joshua Giddings’s principled stand at Chicago—the prophetic appeal of a Presbyterian stalwart—served as a metaphor for the wider canvass.67
Lincoln’s own rhetorical and political strategy since 1854 entirely legitimized this crusading element of the Republican campaign. He had more and more clearly sought to draw an indelible line of political cleavage between those who thought slavery right and those convinced it was wrong, and so to build a single anti-Democrat coalition. His Ohio speeches of 1859 retained the sharp moral perspective of the final three joint debates with Douglas. At Cincinnati he had told an audience that included Kentucky slaveholders: “I think Slavery is wrong, morally, and politically. I desire that it should be no further spread in these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually terminate in the whole Union.” There must, he continued, be “a national policy in regard to the institution of slavery, that acknowledges and deals with that institution as being wrong. . . . I do not mean to say that this general government is charged with the duty of redressing or preventing all the wrongs in the world; but I do think it is charged with the duty of preventing and redressing all wrongs which are wrongs to itself.” He urged “all the elements of the Opposition” to unite on the principled anti-extensionist ground that Republicans could never vacate. To applause he said, “The good old maxims of the Bible are applicable, and truly applicable to human affairs, and in this as in other things, we may say here that he who is not for us is against us; he who gathereth not with us scattereth.” Six months later Lincoln’s riveting Cooper Union speech marked the rhetorical climax of this strategy, celebrating the party’s role as the home for those dedicated to the “faith that right makes might.” Republicans should not be misled by “sophistical contrivances . . . such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man[;] . . . such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance.”68
Parading in the robes of righteousness and godliness, Republicans in 1860 brandished their Whiggish pedigree. Just as Whigs had striven to present themselves as the guardians of Christian respectability, so Lincoln’s party aimed to marshal the energies of the religiously devout behind a standard-bearer seen to be, in the words of the Chicago Press and Tribune, “worthy of the holy cause.”69 In doing so they buttressed Lincoln’s sound antislavery credentials by claiming two related qualities for him: firm Christian piety and incorruptible honesty. Each of these connected to the larger theme of Republicans’ devotion to the Protestant faith and its values.
Lincoln the candidate took on the hue of sound Protestant orthodoxy. As Scripps’s biography explained: “He is a regular attendant upon religious worship, and though not a communicant, is a pew-holder and liberal supporter of the Presbyterian church in Springfield, to which Mrs. Lincoln belongs.” Lincoln was extolled in the press as one who had “always held up the doctrines of the Bible, and the truths and examples of the Christian religion, as the foundation of all good.” He enjoyed the confidence of the religious community and was a staunch believer in Sabbath schools; the Albany Evening Journal exulted that an opinion poll of Sunday school excursionists from Ogdensburgh, New York, overwhelmingly supported him. Party publicists also celebrated Lincoln as a man of blameless behavior. He never used profane language. He did not gamble. He avoided all intoxicating liquor, even wine.70 In this portrait there was enough truth to absolve Republican editors of outright perjury. Lincoln had indeed attended the First Presbyterian Church since 1850; he was known amongst his neighbors, including the Baptist minister Noyes W. Miner, as “a temperance man” who was “never known to profane the name of God.” But, as we have seen, Lincoln was no pious evangelical Protestant.71
The reality of Lincoln’s private beliefs, however, mattered less than that his promoters kept him clear of the taint of “infidelity,” so electorally troublesome for him in the 1840s, and projected him as the rescuer of the nation “from the rule of a Godless . . . Administration.” Republicans, as had the Whigs before them, commonly castigated Democrats for a moral laxness which they ascribed to religious heterodoxy, and especially to the ethical ravages wrought by Catholic influence. Lincoln himself never sought directly to exploit religious sectarianism for electoral gain, but amongst the Republican editors who upheld his Christian integrity were those who eagerly branded Stephen Douglas with the mark of the Beast. They cast the Little Giant as a renegade: born in Vermont, he emigrated “early enough to avoid contracting many of the Puritan virtues which add luster to the character of that people.” A moral leper and a drunkard (one report told of his being helped, inebriated, out of his railroad car), Douglas “trifle[d] with the law of Sinai as freely as a hoary-headed gambler would . . . throw dice on a New Orleans sugar barrel for ‘pig tail’ tobacco!” Having abandoned his family’s Calvinism in favor of close ties with the Catholic hierarchy, he had visited Rome and allegedly submitted to the pope, receiving absolution and “the right hand of fellowship.” His marriage to a Catholic wife and the support of Romanist voters in 1858 pointed to his “secret understanding” with Church leaders, “whereby he is to have their votes . . . for a consideration.” The “troop of wild Irish” would surely support Douglas again in 1860 and, with their man in the White House, make Archbishop John Hughes “the keeper of the conscience of the King.” But vote for Lincoln, insisted the Rail Splitter, “and this Government [would] still remain in Protestant control.”72
Republicans’ anti-Catholicism played upon a number of related but distinct fears: the theological-ecclesiastical anxieties of staunch Protestants who regarded Rome as the Antichrist and the murderer of religious liberties; the social phobia of nativists who equated Catholicism with Irish immigrants and a dram-shop culture of “blackguardism, . . . riot and soul-sickening blasphemy”; and the political antipathy of antislavery reformers who believed the Roman Church to be minted from the same metal as a slave power equally hostile to republican freedoms. The Republican platform stood silent on the Catholic question. But the party’s anti-Catholic posture had been well established through the later 1850s, and many of its speakers and candidates in 1860 were known nativists and anti-Romanists. “Catholicism and Republicanism are as plainly incompatible as oil and water,” declared Charles Ray’s Chicago Press and Tribune early in the campaign, recognizing that Republican success depended on attracting the “Protestant” American party voters of 1856, not least in Lincoln’s own backyard of Sangamon County. When a possible fusion of Bell’s Constitutional Union men and Douglas Democrats threatened to weaken Lincoln’s prospects in New York and elsewhere, Republicans sneered at the unnatural yoking of “the Puritan and the Black-leg,” of “rowdyism and conservatism,” and of “seditionists and law-abiders.”73 In the event, the “Protestant” Lincoln benefited from an anti-Catholic animus which he had done nothing to inflame and of whose political exploitation he almost certainly disapproved. Curiously, the Democrats generally failed to exploit the ambiguities of Lincoln’s “infidel” past, by which they might have compromised his value as a Protestant champion of orthodoxy, an omission which appears even odder in the light of their creativity in 1856, when they had regaled vote
rs with imaginative tales of John Frémont’s “Catholicism.”74
If winning nativist support was essential to Republican victory, so, too, was garnering a decent proportion of foreign-born voters. The party’s leaders knew that immigrants comprised a critical 20 percent of the electorate in the Northwest. The Irish were mostly barnacled to the Democratic party, but the large German population provided a more plausible target for Republican propaganda. At Chicago Schurz had helped design the homestead plank and repudiate the Massachusetts naturalization law with the specific aim of appeasing the Germans. He and Koerner left the convention confident that they could loosen the Democrats’ hold over their fellow countrymen. From New York to Wisconsin they energized a cadre of German-language speakers and newspaper editors, each appealing to free-soil consciences, and rebuking audiences of Democrat-inclined farmers, tradesmen, and laborers for tamely submitting to “party-serfdom.” They faced an uphill but not impossible struggle. Democrats tried to connect Lincoln with his party’s nativist elements, by alleging that he had been a member of a Know-Nothing lodge in Quincy at the height of the “dark lantern” excitement. Lincoln resisted a public denial, which might have cost him valuable nativist votes, trusting that his “Canisius letter” of the previous year and the influence of the Illinois Staats-Anzeiger would be enough to stymie Democratic maneuvers.75 Stunningly—thanks to the volubility of Schurz and other loyal Germans, and to Lincoln’s silence—Republicans managed to mix anti-Catholic oil and pro-immigrant water.
Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power Page 18