The Zealot and the Emancipator

by H. W. Brands

  Yet the future of slavery in the states was not the issue. Lincoln made clear where he stood on slavery per se; it was a “monstrous injustice.” But this was neither here nor there for the moment. The Constitution guaranteed states the right to decide on slavery within their own borders. The pressing issue was slavery in the territories. This was the well-settled issue Stephen Douglas had insisted on reopening. Douglas claimed that the public had demanded the reopening. Yet he had produced no evidence of such demand. “I conclude then that the public never demanded the repeal of the Missouri compromise,” Lincoln said.

  Douglas and the other repealers declared that equal justice to the South required that they be allowed to take their slaves into Nebraska and Kansas. “That is to say, inasmuch as you do not object to my taking my hog to Nebraska, therefore I must not object to you taking your slave,” Lincoln paraphrased. This was logical only if there were no differences between hogs and slaves. But not even slaveholders defended this absurdity. The slaveholders had accepted a ban on the importation of slaves from overseas; there was no ban on the import of hogs. More recently the South had joined the North in declaring the Atlantic slave trade to be piracy, and to mandate death for violators. “Why did you do this? If you did not feel that it was wrong, why did you join in providing that men should be hung for it? The practice was no more than bringing wild negroes from Africa, to sell to such as would buy them. But you never thought of hanging men for catching and selling wild horses, wild buffaloes or wild bears.” Slave dealers were treated as scum by genteel Southerners; no such disdain was exhibited toward horse dealers.

  Allowing the extension of slavery, leading to the creation of new slave states, would magnify the voting advantage the Constitution had granted to slaveholders from the start. Slaves could not vote, but three-fifths of their number counted toward representation in the lower house of Congress. As a result, white Southerners wielded more power per person than white Northerners. Lincoln cited two states: South Carolina and Maine. Each had six representatives and therefore eight presidential electors. “In the control of the government, the two states are equals precisely.” But Maine had more than twice as many white people as South Carolina. “Thus each white man in South Carolina is more than the double of any man in Maine.”

  Stephen Douglas had touted the Kansas-Nebraska Act as a Union-saving measure. “I, too, go for saving the Union,” Lincoln said. “Much as I hate slavery, I would consent to the extension of it rather than see the Union dissolved, just as I would consent to any great evil to avoid a greater one.” But the act was having just the opposite effect. “When it came upon us, all was peace and quiet. The nation was looking to the forming of new bonds of Union; and a long course of peace and prosperity seemed to lie before us. In the whole range of possibility, there scarcely appears to me to have been anything out of which the slavery agitation could have been revived, except the very project of repealing the Missouri compromise.” Yet repeal had come. “And here we are, in the midst of a new slavery agitation, such, I think, as we have never seen before.”

  The race to determine the fate of Kansas was on. And it was shaping up far differently than Douglas had foretold. “Bowie-knives and six-shooters are seen plainly enough,” Lincoln said. They would surely be used. He wondered where it all was leading. “Will not the first drop of blood so shed be the real knell of the Union?”

  If the Missouri Compromise were not restored, democracy’s fate would be grim, Lincoln declared. He saw the two sections of the country glaring at each other over the ruins of the compromise: “The South flushed with triumph and tempted to excesses; the North, betrayed, as they believe, brooding on wrong and burning for revenge. One side will provoke; the other resent. The one will taunt, the other defy; one aggresses, the other retaliates.”

  But if the compromise were restored—what then? “We thereby reinstate the spirit of concession and compromise, that spirit which has never failed us in past perils, and which may be safely trusted for all the future.” Southerners should be able to see this as well as Northerners, for it would benefit both sections. “It would be worth to the nation a hundred years’ purchase of peace and prosperity.”

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  CHEERS FROM the Whigs in the audience greeted Lincoln’s conclusion. The Democrats affected to be unimpressed. Stephen Douglas lit into him with the vigor his supporters expected, and their cheers outdid those of the Whigs for Lincoln. The Democrats proclaimed Douglas the day’s victor.

  But he himself was wary of Lincoln. Years later a Douglas friend, W. C. Gowdy, recounted having dinner with the senator the night before the Peoria debate. “After the evening meal Judge Douglas exhibited considerable restlessness, pacing back and forth on the floor of the room, evidently with mental preoccupation,” Gowdy said. Gowdy asked Douglas what was on his mind. “It cannot be that you have any anxiety with reference to the outcome of the debate you are to have with Mr. Lincoln,” he suggested. “You cannot doubt of your ability to dispose of him.”

  Douglas stopped his pacing. “Yes, Gowdy, I am troubled over the progress and outcome of this debate,” he said. He had watched and measured Lincoln, and he knew what he was getting into. “I regard him as the most difficult and dangerous opponent that I have ever met.”

  Douglas wasn’t misled by the applause he received at the next day’s debate. He knew Lincoln had scored points. And he guessed Lincoln wouldn’t go away.

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  LINCOLN HOPED to elevate his rivalry with Douglas to the Senate. His performance during the summer of 1854 prompted Springfield Whigs to nominate him for the state legislature, and though Lincoln showed little interest in the office, thinking his days as a mere state lawmaker were behind him, the voters of his district elected him.

  He declined the honor. His eye was on the Senate. The Illinois legislature would choose a partner to Douglas in early 1855, and Lincoln feared that membership in the legislature would complicate if not preclude his selection.

  He lobbied hard for the Senate seat, and he entered the legislative selection process as the favorite. On the first ballot he led all candidates, falling just five votes shy of a winning majority. But his momentum began to wane, and the position went to Lyman Trumbull, an antislavery Democrat.

  A year earlier, Lincoln hadn’t seen himself in politics at all. Then Stephen Douglas scuttled the Missouri Compromise, and Lincoln rejoined the fight, successfully enough to come within a handful of votes of election to the Senate. The failure, after getting so close, stung badly. “I never saw him so dejected,” one of his allies remarked. “He said the fates seemed to be against him, and he thought he would never strive for office again.”

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  HIS DISCOURAGEMENT didn’t last. Ironically, it might have been Lincoln’s deeper, background depression that snapped him out of his post-race funk, for he realized that the excitement of the attempt had pushed his chronic blues aside. William Herndon watched his partner closely during this period. “He was always calculating, and always planning ahead,” Herndon recalled. “His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest. The vicissitudes of a political campaign brought into play all his tact and management and developed to its fullest extent his latent industry.”

  Lincoln had another reason to try again. Mary Todd Lincoln had chosen Lincoln over Stephen Douglas not least because she thought she saw more promise in him. But in the years since then, Douglas, not her husband, was the one whose career had flourished. Douglas was the lion of the Senate; his words and actions moved the country. He had an inside track to the White House. As for Lincoln, he remained a small-town lawyer. His shaggy-dog stories mortified Mary; his ill-fitting suits and homely appearance caused her to wonder what a girl who had grown up with money was doing with such a character. Hoping to make Mary happy—to give her reason to believe that her gamble on their marriage wasn’t a dead loss—Lincoln determin
ed to keep trying.

  Yet discovering how and where to try was no easy task. The political ground was shifting beneath his feet. The slavery debate was tearing at both political parties, but while the Democrats had Stephen Douglas to hold them together, the Whigs had lost their bridge-builder, Henry Clay. They never found a substitute, and they fell into pieces. Lincoln became a man without a party.

  Some Whigs joined the American, or Know-Nothing, party, which ranted in opposition to immigrants and Catholics. Some visited the antislavery Free Soil party. But most eventually reached the new Republican party, which knowingly took its name from the party of Thomas Jefferson, who had sought an end to slavery while appreciating the difficulty of getting there.

  For many months Lincoln wasn’t sure where he stood. “I think I am a Whig,” he wrote to Joshua Speed, a friend, as late as August 1855. “But others say there are no Whigs, and that I am an abolitionist.” Lincoln again denied the charge. “I now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery.” He knew what else he was not. “I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

  Lincoln knew he and Speed—a Kentucky native like Lincoln, but one who had moved back to Kentucky—didn’t see eye to eye on slavery. In this letter Lincoln examined his own thinking as he explained his position to his friend. “You suggest that in political action now, you and I would differ,” Lincoln wrote. “I suppose we would; not quite as much, however, as you may think. You know I dislike slavery; and you fully admit the abstract wrong of it. So far there is no cause of difference. But you say that sooner than yield your legal right to the slave, especially at the bidding of those who are not themselves interested, you would see the Union dissolved.” Lincoln thought this a false choice. “I am not aware that anyone is bidding you to yield that right; very certainly I am not. I leave that matter entirely to yourself. I also acknowledge your rights and my obligations, under the Constitution, in regard to your slaves. I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, and unrewarded toils; but I bite my lip and keep quiet.” Lincoln recalled a steamboat trip he and Speed had taken from Louisville to St. Louis a decade earlier. “You may remember, as I well do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were, on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border. It is hardly fair for you to assume that I have no interest in a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable. You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union.”

  Turning to the issue of the day, Lincoln continued, “I do oppose the extension of slavery, because my judgment and feelings so prompt me; and I am under no obligation to the contrary. If for this you and I must differ, differ we must.” Like Lincoln, Speed had condemned the violence that attended the opening of Kansas to settlement, especially the hijacking of the territorial elections by the Missouri ruffians. Speed had gone so far as to advocate hanging the ringleaders. Lincoln thought this punishment extreme, but he shared Speed’s anger. Yet he didn’t think Speed had thought things through. “If Kansas fairly votes herself a slave state, she must be admitted, or the Union must be dissolved,” Lincoln acknowledged. But what if the vote was unfair, skewed by the border ruffians, whom Speed wanted to hang? “Must she still be admitted, or the Union be dissolved? That will be the phase of the question when it first becomes a practical one.”

  And it was the fatal flaw in Stephen Douglas’s popular-sovereignty formula, Lincoln judged. “I look upon that enactment not as a law, but as violence from the beginning,” he told Speed, referring to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. “It was conceived in violence, passed in violence, is maintained in violence, and is being executed in violence. I say it was conceived in violence, because the destruction of the Missouri Compromise, under the circumstances, was nothing less than violence. It was passed in violence, because it could not have passed at all but for the votes of many members, in violent disregard of the known will of their constituents. It is maintained in violence because the elections since clearly demand its repeal, and this demand is openly disregarded.”

  Lincoln judged that Kansas was lost. “That Kansas will form a slave constitution, and, with it, will ask to be admitted into the Union, I take to be an already settled question, and so settled by the very means you so pointedly condemn,” he said. So what was to be done? What would Lincoln do? “In my humble sphere, I shall advocate the restoration of the Missouri Compromise, so long as Kansas remains a territory, and when, by all these foul means, it seeks to come into the Union as a slave-state, I shall oppose it.” Yet Kansas would be but one state; the Union would go on.

  The problem was that the Democratic party had become beholden to the slave power, Lincoln said. Speed, a Democrat, had told Lincoln that if the Kansans made their state free by a fair vote, he as a Christian would rejoice. Lincoln thought such a statement meaningless. “All decent slave-holders talk that way, and I do not doubt their candor,” he said. “But they never vote that way.” Lincoln asked Speed to consider his own actions. “Although in a private letter or conversation you will express your preference that Kansas shall be free, you would vote for no man for Congress who would say the same thing publicly.” Writ large, this was the condition of the Democratic party. “No such man could be elected from any district in any slave-state. You think Stringfellow & Co.”—Benjamin Stringfellow was a leader of the Missouri ruffians—“ought to be hung, and yet at the next presidential election you will vote for the exact type and representative of Stringfellow. The slave-breeders and slave-traders, are a small, odious and detested class, among you, and yet in politics they dictate the course of all of you, and are as completely your masters as you are the masters of your own negroes.”

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  IF LINCOLN WAS too radical for Joshua Speed, he was too conservative for William Herndon. The troubles in Kansas outraged and mobilized antislavery groups in Illinois, as elsewhere. “At Springfield we were energetic, vigilant, almost revolutionary,” Herndon recalled. “We recommended the employment of almost any means, no matter how desperate, to promote and defend the cause of freedom.” Not so Lincoln. “At one of these meetings Lincoln was called on for a speech. He responded to the request, counseling moderation and less bitterness in dealing with the situation before us. We were belligerent in tone and clearly out of patience with the government. Lincoln opposed the notion of coercive measures with the possibility of resulting bloodshed, advising us to eschew resort to the bullet.”

  Herndon recalled Lincoln’s words: “Revolutionize through the ballot box, and restore the government once more to the affections and hearts of men by making it express, as it was intended to do, the highest spirit of justice and liberty. Your attempt, if there be such, to resist the laws of Kansas by force is criminal and wicked, and all your feeble attempts will be follies and end in bringing sorrow on your heads and ruin the cause you would freely die to preserve.”

  By Herndon’s account, Lincoln’s caution cooled the ardor of his radical friends. But it didn’t prevent Lincoln from contributing to a free-Kansas fund Herndon and the others had raised.

  On another oc
casion, too, Lincoln fought slavery with his money. The free son of a black woman of Springfield had taken a job on a boat heading down the Mississippi to New Orleans. Upon reaching that city, he was thrown into prison. This wasn’t an unusual fate; the “black code” in much of the South prescribed detention for free black visitors, lest their example of walking about unhindered and unowned put thoughts of freedom into the heads of black slaves. But the young man had failed to bring papers proving his freedom, and when his boat left for the return north, he remained in fetters. His mother appealed to Lincoln and Herndon, who took the case to the Illinois governor. The governor pleaded legal incapacity: Louisiana made its own laws. They then appealed to the governor of Louisiana, who less believably told them that the situation was beyond his control as well. Lincoln and Herndon feared that the young man might be sold into slavery to defray prison costs, and once sold, be lost forever. Despairing of winning his release by recourse to law, they took up a subscription among friends to purchase him. They forwarded the money to a New Orleans associate, and the young man was freed.