The Zealot and the Emancipator

by H. W. Brands

  Dickens visited the Capitol. “The House of Representatives is a beautiful and spacious hall, of semi-circular shape, supported by handsome pillars,” he wrote. “One part of the gallery is appropriated to the ladies, and there they sit in the front rows, and come in and go out as at a play or concert. The chair is canopied and raised considerably above the floor of the House, and every member has an easy chair and a writing desk to himself.” After listening to some speeches, Dickens added, “It is an elegant chamber to look at, but a singularly bad one for all purposes of hearing.”

  The legislators themselves were a picturesque bunch. “They are striking men to look at, hard to deceive, prompt to act, lions in energy,” he wrote. They were jealous of their honor and quick to resent insult. Dickens didn’t personally witness any duels between lawmakers but was told on good authority that they happened regularly. He was initially puzzled by the lopsided, swollen cheeks he saw at nearly every desk. A glance at the floor resolved the mystery. “Both houses are handsomely carpeted, but the state to which these carpets are reduced by the universal disregard for the spittoon with which every honourable member is accommodated, and the extraordinary improvements on the pattern which are squirted and dabbled upon in every direction, do not admit of being described.” Dickens noted the lack of marksmanship at disgustingly close range. “Several gentlemen called upon me who, in the course of conversation, frequently missed the spittoon at five paces, and one (but he was certainly short-sighted) mistook the closed sash for the open window at three.”

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  LINCOLN DIDN’T CHEW tobacco. Mary Lincoln wouldn’t have stood for it, and Mary accompanied him to Washington. They stayed at a boardinghouse a stone’s throw from the Capitol. Mary was one of the few wives who accompanied their husbands to the capital for the congressional session, and she remained only weeks, soon put off by the lack of female company and the general uncouthness of the place. She wasn’t universally appreciated by those she shared quarters with. “All the house—or rather all with whom you were on decided good terms—send their love to you,” Lincoln wrote to Mary after she had left. “The others say nothing.”

  Lincoln made more friends than Mary did, being a friendlier sort. But he didn’t make much of an impact. With most of his fellow Whigs, he distrusted James Polk, the Democratic president, and he challenged Polk’s account of the origins of the war as growing out of an attack by Mexican troops against American troops on the American soil of Texas. What Polk called American soil, Lincoln told the House, was at best in dispute, with the evidence actually favoring Mexican ownership. “The country bordering on the east bank of the Rio Grande was inhabited by native Mexicans, born there under the Mexican government, and had never submitted to nor been conquered by Texas or the United States,” he said.

  Lincoln insisted that Polk substantiate his claims. The president must reveal the precise spot where the American blood had been spilled, and prove that this was American soil. “Let him answer, fully, fairly, and candidly,” Lincoln said. “Let him answer with facts and not with arguments.” If Polk could show that the spot was honestly American, Lincoln would support him. But if he couldn’t or wouldn’t, his failure would convict him of the grossest abuse of power. “Then I shall be fully convinced of what I more than suspect already, that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong—that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.”

  Polk ignored Lincoln and his “spot resolutions,” which never came to a vote of the House and won no honor for their author. In fact, in subsequent years Lincoln was ridiculed for his persistence in this bootless quest, with critics taunting him for his “spotty” record.

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  NOR DID ANOTHER Lincoln initiative gain traction. Upon the encouragement of Joshua Giddings, an Ohio Whig and a strong opponent of slavery, Lincoln and a colleague drafted a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. On Lincoln’s part the measure grew out of his resolution in the Illinois legislature, and it reiterated the arguments he had made there. The Constitution gave the states control over slavery within their borders, but the federal district was Congress’s own. Congress could abolish slavery there, and Lincoln thought it should.

  Lincoln’s measure called for gradual emancipation. Slaves currently in the district would remain slaves, but new slaves could not be brought into the district, and children born of slave mothers starting in 1850 would be free. Moreover, masters might emancipate their slaves and receive fair market value in compensation from the federal government.

  There was a condition, though. Emancipation would not begin until it received the approval of voters in the district. If they disapproved, the project died. Lincoln didn’t think this would be a problem. He told the House he had explained his bill to more than a dozen residents of the district. “There was not one but who approved,” he said. “Every one of them desired that some proposition like this should pass.”

  The support was unsurprising. Slaves in Washington were personal servants, shop workers and others whose labor wasn’t unlike that of free workers in Philadelphia, New York and Boston. The Washington slaves could become paid workers with no great jolt to the economy. Plantation slavery, the part of the slave system deemed essential to the Southern economy, didn’t exist there. And Lincoln’s proposal would allow Southerners to bring their personal slaves to Washington when they came on business or to visit, in the way Southerners could take their servants to Northern cities and states.

  Even so, his bill went nowhere. Lincoln’s own Whigs had other priorities. By no means were they all opposed to slavery, and many hoped their party would win the presidential election in 1848 behind the candidacy of a slaveholding hero of the war, Zachary Taylor. Lincoln yielded to political reality. “Finding that I was abandoned by my former backers and having little personal influence, I dropped the matter,” he said later.

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  A DIFFERENT MEASURE addressing slavery came closer to approval, though it wasn’t Lincoln’s. Democrat David Wilmot of Pennsylvania proposed to exclude slavery from any territory acquired from Mexico in the war. The Wilmot Proviso won approval in the House of Representatives, where the North had a majority. It failed in the Senate, where the South wielded a veto. Its half success irked both sides: the South for the insult to slavery, the North for this new evidence of the power of the planters.

  Lincoln’s election to Congress had been part of a deal among Springfield Whigs to rotate in office. He kept his side of the bargain and stepped down when his two-year term ended. He didn’t mean to retire from politics, but his return from Washington amounted to retirement. Although the Whigs’ Taylor strategy indeed won them the presidency, it didn’t prevent the party from fracturing over the slavery issue. Taylor proved to be the last elected Whig president, and after he suddenly died after a year in office, the party passed into eclipse—taking Lincoln, apparently, with it.

  Making the best of things, he threw himself into the practice of law. Before long he was thinking that his political days were over. “His profession had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind,” he recalled of himself.

  5

  THE REASON Frederick Douglass had met John Brown in Springfield was that Brown had once more grown restless. He moved the family to western Massachusetts, farther from slavery but closer to the center of the abolitionist movement. William Lloyd Garrison in Boston thundered louder than ever, assailing the Constitution as “a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell”—for sheltering slavery—and demanding its annulment, to be followed by a separation of the virtuous North from the sinful South. Yet Garrison disavowed violence, predicting that the end of slavery could come by peaceful methods. This seemed a non sequitur to many abolitionists, especially after Congress approved the Compromise of 1850, a package of laws addressing issues arising out
of the recent war against Mexico. California, taken from Mexico, was admitted to the Union as a free state, tipping the sectional balance in Congress against the South; as compensation, the Fugitive Slave Act significantly enhanced the ability of Southern slave-catchers to capture fugitive slaves. Sheriffs and courts in the North, even private individuals, were dragooned into complicity in the seizure.

  The Fugitive Slave Act outraged many in the North. William Lloyd Garrison naturally condemned it. Antislavery activists vowed popular resistance in order to prevent the law’s enforcement. Frederick Douglass reconsidered his own nonviolent philosophy.

  John Brown conjured something he called the League of Gileadites. Gilead was the Old Testament name for the mountainous territory east of the Jordan River. As Brown had explained to Douglass, he envisioned fugitive slaves and free blacks banding together for self-defense in the Alleghenies. But he would start by battling the new law in Massachusetts. “Nothing so charms the American people as personal bravery,” he wrote, in what amounted to a charter for the league. Brown urged blacks to resist the fugitive law by force, including lethal force. “The trial for life of one bold and to some extent successful man, for defending his rights in good earnest, would arouse more sympathy throughout the nation than the accumulated wrongs and sufferings of more than three millions of our submissive colored population.” And it would serve the one on trial. “No jury can be found in the Northern states that would convict a man for defending his rights.”

  Brown spelled out tactics. “Should one of your number be arrested, you must collect together as quickly as possible, so as to outnumber your adversaries who are taking an active part against you. Let no able-bodied man appear on the ground unequipped or with his weapons exposed to view; let that be understood beforehand. Your plans must be known only to yourself, and with the understanding that all traitors must die, wherever caught and proven to be guilty.”

  Steadfastness was essential. “Do not delay one moment after you are ready; you will lose all your resolution if you do. Let the first blow be the signal for all to engage; and when engaged do not do your work by halves, but make clean work with your enemies.” Courage was crucial. “Let it be understood that you are not to be driven to desperation without making it an awful dear job to others as well as to you.”

  Brown was not above cynicism in this struggle. “After effecting a rescue, if you are assailed, go into the houses of your most prominent and influential white friends with your wives,” he said. “That will effectually fasten upon them the suspicion of being connected with you, and will compel them to make common cause with you, whether they would otherwise live up to their profession or not. This would leave them no choice in the matter.”

  Again he commanded courage. “Hold on to your weapons, and never be persuaded to leave them, part with them, or have them far away from you. Stand by one another and by your friends while a drop of blood remains; and be hanged if you must, but tell no tales out of school. Make no confession. Union is strength.”

  Brown’s words inspired more than forty black men and women to take the Gileadite pledge. But that was about all they did. The armed resistance Brown urged didn’t appear, nor did the existence of the Gileadites conspicuously disrupt the activities of slave-catchers in the Springfield area.

  Still, the manifesto revealed the change occurring in Brown. The man who had once thought to shame the slaveholders into abolition by educating young blacks had become a promoter of violence against the agents of the slaveholders. He spoke of fighting to the last drop of blood; of executing traitors to the abolitionist cause; of falsely implicating reluctant whites. He hadn’t yet volunteered to lead the armed campaign against slavery, but he was getting closer.

  6

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN ENDORSED the principle of the Fugitive Slave Act, if not the details of its implementation. The act was anchored in the Constitution, which Lincoln revered. The Constitution’s Article IV declared, “No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” The Fugitive Slave Act codified this constitutional mandate. Lincoln himself had written a version of the mandate into his proposal for emancipating the slaves of the District of Columbia.

  The Fugitive Slave Act, moreover, was a legacy of Henry Clay, whom Lincoln esteemed as the model of everything a statesman should be. The Kentucky senator was the author of three great compromises that had held the Union together at critical moments: the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the South Carolina compromise of 1833, and the Compromise of 1850, which included the Fugitive Slave Act. When Clay died in 1852, Lincoln delivered a eulogy that detailed the careful balance Clay struck on the issue that vexed American democracy. “He ever was, on principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery,” Lincoln said. Clay had long worked for emancipation in Kentucky, and hoped to see it in the country at large. “And yet Mr. Clay was the owner of slaves.” Clay appreciated that emancipation was a practical issue as well as a moral one, and practical matters had to be acknowledged. “Cast into life where slavery was already widely spread and deeply seated, he did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself.”

  In lauding Clay, Lincoln revealed his own views. “His feeling and his judgment, therefore, ever led him to oppose both extremes of opinion on the subject,” he said of Clay, and of himself. The radical abolitionists—“those who would shiver into fragments the Union of these states, tear to tatters its now venerated Constitution, and even burn the last copy of the Bible rather than slavery should continue a single hour”—were no less dangerous to freedom than the Southern fire-eaters. In opposing both, Clay had served his country well. “Such a man the times have demanded, and such in the providence of God was given us,” Lincoln said. Now that he was gone, the burden passed to his successors. “Let us strive to deserve, as far as mortals may, the continued care of Divine Providence, trusting that, in future national emergencies, He will not fail to provide us the instruments of safety and security.”

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  LINCOLN WAS less enamored of Stephen Douglas, though Lincoln knew—and Clay himself would have admitted—that without Douglas, Clay’s 1850 compromise might never have cleared Congress. Months into the struggle for the compromise, the energy of the aging Clay had faltered; when Clay stepped aside to recuperate, Douglas stepped forward to push the program the final yards to victory. Yet Lincoln wasn’t inclined to honor Douglas. Douglas was a Democrat, for one thing. Lincoln knew enough of American politics to recognize that progress, however one defined it, came through the efforts of parties. Lincoln would always put Clay, the patron saint of the Whigs, above any Democrat, including Douglas.

  There was a personal side to the story as well. Lincoln knew that Douglas had courted Mary Todd before she and Lincoln became engaged. Though Mary had chosen Lincoln, a tinge of the rivalry remained.

  And then there was Douglas himself, an impressive fellow yet not a likable one. “He was a man of low stature, but broad-shouldered and big-chested,” said Carl Schurz, a recent German immigrant who was assessing the lay of America’s political land. “His head, sitting upon a stout, strong neck, was the very incarnation of forceful combativeness; a square jaw and broad chin; a rather large, firm-set mouth; the nose straight and somewhat broad; quick, piercing eyes with a deep, dark, scowling, menacing horizontal wrinkle between them; a broad forehead and an abundance of dark hair which at that period he wore rather long and which, when in excitement, he shook and tossed defiantly like a lion’s mane. The whole figure was compact and strongly knit and muscular, as if made for constant fight.”

  Schurz didn’t like Douglas but couldn’t turn away. Schurz had ne
ver seen or heard a more effective speaker. “His sentences were clear-cut, direct, positive,” he said. “They went straight to the mark like bullets, and sometimes like cannon-balls, tearing and crashing. There was nothing ornate, nothing imaginative in his language, no attempt at ‘beautiful speaking.’ ” Douglas could hit high; he could also hit low. “It would be difficult to surpass his clearness and force of statement when his position was right; or his skill in twisting logic or in darkening the subject with extraneous, unessential matter when he was wrong; or his defiant tenacity when he was driven to defend himself, or his keen and crafty alertness to turn his defense into attack, so that, even when overwhelmed with adverse arguments, he would issue from the fray with the air of the conqueror.”

  Douglas gave no quarter. “He was utterly unsparing of the feelings of his opponents. He would nag and nettle them with disdainful words of challenge, and insult them with such names as ‘dastards’ and ‘traitors.’ Nothing could equal the contemptuous scorn, the insolent curl of his lip with which, in the debates to which I listened, he denounced the anti-slavery men in Congress as ‘the Abolition confederates,’ and at a subsequent time, after the formation of the Republican party, as ‘Black Republicans.’ ” Truth was malleable to Douglas. “He would, with utter unscrupulousness, malign his opponents’ motives, distort their sayings, and attribute to them all sorts of iniquitous deeds or purposes of which he must have known them to be guiltless. Indeed, Douglas’s style of attack was sometimes so exasperatingly offensive that it required, on the part of the anti-slavery men in the Senate, a very high degree of self-control to abstain from retaliating.”