by H. W. Brands
The plan had appealed to Douglass. “Hating slavery as I did, and making its abolition the object of my life, I was ready to welcome any new mode of attack upon the slave system which gave any promise of success,” he said. “I readily saw that this plan could be made very effective in rendering slave property in Maryland and Virginia valueless by rendering it insecure. Men do not like to buy runaway horses, or to invest their money in a species of property likely to take legs and walk off with itself.” In the worst case, the plan would fail but would publicize the lengths to which brave men were willing to go to fight slavery. By that means, if not by the other, slavery would be rendered less secure.
The plan hung fire while Brown dealt with the affairs of Kansas and gathered support. Douglass saw Brown periodically, and certain remarks Brown made caused Douglass to believe that the old man’s plans were changing. “Once in a while he would say he could, with a few resolute men, capture Harper’s Ferry, and supply himself with arms belonging to the government at that place.” Douglass didn’t know whether to take this seriously. “He never announced his intention to do so. It was, however, very evidently passing in his mind as a thing he might do. I paid but little attention to such remarks.”
Not until the summer of 1859 did Douglass realize that Harpers Ferry had become the focus of Brown’s attention. “John Brown wrote to me, informing me that a beginning in his work would soon be made, and that before going forward he wanted to see me, and appointed an old stone-quarry near Chambersburg, Penn., as our place of meeting. Mr. Kagi, his secretary, would be there, and they wished me to bring any money I could command, and Shields Green along with me.” John Kagi was a twenty-four-year-old Ohioan who had met Brown in Kansas and quickly fallen under his spell. He was resourceful and obedient, and Brown made him secretary of war in his notional government. Shields Green was an escaped slave, from South Carolina, hardy and resourceful.
Brown was living under the name Ian Smith, and in this letter he posed as a miner. “He said that his ‘mining tools’ and stores were then at Chambersburg, and that he would be there to remove them,” Douglass recounted. Douglass managed to raise a small amount of money, and with Shields Green he went to Chambersburg.
“I approached the old quarry very cautiously, for John Brown was generally well armed, and regarded strangers with suspicion,” Douglass wrote. There was a bounty of thousands of dollars on his head, and Brown couldn’t be too cautious. “As I came near, he regarded me rather suspiciously, but soon recognized me, and received me cordially. He had in his hand when I met him a fishing-tackle, with which he had apparently been fishing in a stream hard by; but I saw no fish, and did not suppose that he cared much for his ‘fisherman’s luck.’ The fishing was simply a disguise, and was certainly a good one. He looked every way like a man of the neighborhood, and as much at home as any of the farmers around there. His hat was old and storm-beaten, and his clothing was about the color of the stone-quarry itself—his then present dwelling-place.”
The four men—Brown, Douglass, Kagi and Green—sat down amid the rocks of the quarry. “The taking of Harper’s Ferry, of which Captain Brown had merely hinted before, was now declared as his settled purpose, and he wanted to know what I thought of it.”
Nothing good, as Douglass explained. “I at once opposed the measure with all the arguments at my command.” The attack would be fatal to those who engaged in it and destructive of the prospects of freeing slaves. “It would be an attack upon the federal government, and would array the whole country against us.”
Brown was neither surprised nor deterred by Douglass’s dissent. “He did not at all object to rousing the nation,” Douglass said. “It seemed to him that something startling was just what the nation needed. He had completely renounced his old plan, and thought that the capture of Harper’s Ferry would serve as notice to the slaves that their friends had come, and as a trumpet to rally them to his standard. He described the place as to its means of defense, and how impossible it would be to dislodge him if once in possession.”
Douglass couldn’t match Brown for details, and he didn’t try. But he remained convinced the plan was lunacy. “I told him, and these were my words, that all his arguments, and all his descriptions of the place, convinced me that he was going into a perfect steel-trap, and that once in he would never get out alive; that he would be surrounded at once and escape would be impossible.”
Brown wouldn’t budge. “He was not to be shaken by anything I could say, but treated my views respectfully, replying that even if surrounded he would find means for cutting his way out; but that would not be forced upon him; he should, at the start, have a number of the best citizens of the neighborhood as his prisoners and that holding them as hostages he should be able, if worse came to worse, to dictate terms of egress from the town.”
Douglass began to question Brown’s sanity. “I looked at him with some astonishment, that he could rest upon a reed so weak and broken, and told him that Virginia would blow him and his hostages sky-high, rather than that he should hold Harper’s Ferry an hour.” The failure of the attack would simply fasten the fetters of the slaves more tightly.
Brown still refused to yield. So did Douglass. “Our talk was long and earnest; we spent the most of Saturday and a part of Sunday in this debate—Brown for Harper’s Ferry, and I against it; he for striking a blow which should instantly rouse the country, and I for the policy of gradually and unaccountably drawing off the slaves to the mountains, as at first suggested and proposed by him.”
In time Douglass ran out of breath and arguments. He said he was going home, and he invited Shields Green to join him.
Brown made one more plea. “He put his arms around me in a manner more than friendly, and said: ‘Come with me, Douglass; I will defend you with my life. I want you for a special purpose. When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them.’ ”
Douglass shook him off. “My discretion or my cowardice made me proof against the dear old man’s eloquence—perhaps it was something of both which determined my course.”
Douglass then looked to Shields Green. “When about to leave I asked Green what he had decided to do, and was surprised by his coolly saying, in his broken way, ‘I b’leve I’ll go wid de ole man.’ ”
28
WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN PREDICTED another explosion that would advance the cause of the Republican party, he was thinking of something like the Kansas-Nebraska Act or the Dred Scott decision. He was thinking of Stephen Douglas, not John Brown.
He had to think of his wife, too, and his children. Mary had borne Lincoln four sons. Robert turned fifteen amid his father’s Senate campaign against Douglas. Willie was six and Tad four that season. Another son, Eddie, the second born, had died before his fourth birthday. Mary endorsed her husband’s political ambitions; the idea of being married to a great man appealed to her more than ever. But growing boys had to eat and the family be cared for. Lincoln’s campaign against Douglas had brought him recognition but cost him income; as after his previous failures, he needed to recoup lost financial ground. “I have been on expenses so long without earning anything that I am absolutely without money now for even household purposes,” he wrote to a friend.
As before, he redoubled his efforts in his practice. At least he tried to. But his mind was elsewhere. “No man knows, when that presidential grub gets to gnawing at him, just how deep in it will get until he has tried it,” Lincoln observed afterward. His need to concentrate on his practice furnished an excuse when he received unappealing invitations to speak. “It is bad to be poor,” he responded to one such request. “I shall go to the wall for bread and meat, if I neglect my business this year as well as last. It would please me much to see the city, and good people, of Keokuk, but for this year it is little less than an impossibility.”
Yet he never declined the invitations he liked, the ones that would advance his a
mbitions. No sooner had the votes been counted in the Senate election than he was plotting his party’s course for 1860. “Douglas has gone South, making characteristic speeches, and seeking to re-instate himself in that section,” Lincoln reported to Lyman Trumbull, the other Illinois senator. “The majority of the Democratic politicians of the nation mean to kill him,” Lincoln continued, figuratively. “But I doubt whether they will adopt the aptest way to do it. Their true way is to present him with no new test, let him into the Charleston convention”—the Democrats’ 1860 national convention—“and then outvote him, and nominate another. In that case, he will have no pretext for bolting the nomination, and will be as powerless as they can wish.”
But Lincoln didn’t think Douglas’s enemies would take this tack. Southerners who reviled him for his Freeport formula of subverting the Dred Scott decision would try to force his hand. This would work to Douglas’s benefit—and to the Republicans’ peril. “If they push a slave code upon him, as a test, he will bolt at once, turn upon us, as in the case of Lecompton, and claim that all Northern men shall make common cause in electing him president as the best means of breaking down the slave power. In that case, the Democratic party go into a minority inevitably; and the struggle in the whole North will be, as it was in Illinois last summer and fall, whether the Republican party can maintain its identity, or be broken up to form the tail of Douglas’ new kite.” The former was the only viable course, Lincoln said. “The truth is, the Republican principle can in no wise live with Douglas; and it is arrant folly now, as it was last spring, to waste time and scatter labor already performed, in dallying with him.”
If the Republicans could avoid the snare of cooperating with Douglas, the future was theirs, Lincoln judged. “You must not let your approaching election in Ohio so result as to give encouragement to Douglasism,” Lincoln wrote to Salmon Chase, Ohio’s Republican governor. “That ism is all which now stands in the way of an early and complete success of Republicanism.”
Unity was crucial. Schuyler Colfax was a Republican congressman from Indiana; Lincoln wrote to him regretting that they had failed to meet on a recent visit by Colfax to Illinois. “Besides a strong desire to make your personal acquaintance, I was anxious to speak with you on politics, a little more fully than I can well do in a letter,” Lincoln said. “My main object in such conversation would be to hedge against divisions in the Republican ranks generally, and particularly for the contest of 1860.” What Lincoln feared most was the temptation of Republicans in different states to write platforms that played to local voters but divided the party as a whole. In New England, for instance, Republicans demanded repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, to widespread approval there. But the same demand in other regions could be fatal to Republican hopes. “In these things there is explosive matter enough to blow up half a dozen national conventions, if it gets into them; and what gets very rife outside of conventions is very likely to find its way into them,” Lincoln said. “What is desirable, if possible, is that in every local convocation of Republicans, a point should be made to avoid everything which will distract Republicans elsewhere.” A failure to coordinate would weaken the party internally; it would also allow the Democrats to attack the party with more telling effect. This must not be allowed. “In a word, in every locality we should look beyond our noses; and at least say nothing on points where it is probable we shall disagree.”
The Fugitive Slave Act especially worried Lincoln. “Please pardon the liberty I take in addressing you, as I now do,” he wrote to Salmon Chase. “It appears by the papers that the late Republican state convention of Ohio adopted a platform of which the following is one plank, ‘A repeal of the atrocious Fugitive Slave Law.’ ” Lincoln didn’t presume to tell Ohioans their business, but he believed he had to speak for Republicans in other states, starting with Illinois. “This is already damaging us here. I have no doubt that if that plank be even introduced into the next Republican national convention, it will explode it. Once introduced, its supporters and its opponents will quarrel irreconcilably. The latter believe the U.S. constitution declares that a fugitive slave ‘shall be delivered up’; and they look upon the above plank as dictated by the spirit which declares a fugitive slave ‘shall not be delivered up.’ I enter upon no argument one way or the other; but I assure you the cause of Republicanism is hopeless in Illinois if it be in any way made responsible for that plank. I hope you can, and will, contribute something to relieve us from it.”
While one threat to Republican unity came from within the party, another came from outside. Members of the American party spoke of amalgamating with disaffected Democrats and willing Republicans in a minimally antislavery coalition. Lincoln at once protested. “Of course I would be pleased to see all the elements of opposition”—to slavery—“united for the approaching contest of 1860,” he professed in a letter to one of the amalgamationists, Nathan Sargent. “But I confess I have not much hope of seeing it. You state a platform for such union in these words, ‘Opposition to the opening of the slave-trade; & eternal hostility to the rotten Democracy.’ You add, by way of comment, ‘I say, if the Republicans would be content with this, there will be no obstacle to a union of the opposition.’ ” Lincoln declared Sargent’s project absurd on its own terms. “Such a platform, unanimously adopted by a national convention, with two of the best men living placed upon it as candidates, would probably carry Maryland, and would certainly not carry a single other state. It would gain nothing in the South, and lose everything in the North.”
Citing his own state, Lincoln declared, “Last year the Republicans of Illinois cast 125,000 votes; on such a platform as yours they cannot cast as many by 50,000.” Lincoln was a Republican, and he would insist that the Republicans remain true to their bedrock principles. “Your platform proposes to allow the spread and nationalization of slavery to proceed without let or hindrance, save only that it shall not receive supplies directly from Africa,” he told Sargent. “Surely you do not seriously believe the Republicans can come to any such terms.” Sargent seemed to think his coalition would weaken the Democrats in the South; Lincoln thought this absurd, too. “If the rotten Democracy shall be beaten in 1860, it has to be done by the North; no human invention can deprive them of the South.”
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EVEN AS LINCOLN talked political strategy, he increasingly emphasized the moral element in Republican opposition to slavery. “Never forget that we have before us this whole matter of the right or wrong of slavery in this Union, though the immediate question is as to its spreading out into new territories and states,” he told an audience in Chicago. “I do not wish to be misunderstood upon this subject of slavery in this country. I suppose it may long exist, and perhaps the best way for it to come to an end peaceably is for it to exist for a length of time. But I say that the spread and strengthening and perpetuation of it is an entirely different proposition. There we should in every way resist it as a wrong, treating it as a wrong, with the fixed idea that it must and will come to an end.” This was the chief reason Republicans should resist making common cause with Democrats, and the party’s chief hope for ultimate triumph. “If we do not allow ourselves to be allured from the strict path of our duty by such a device as shifting our ground and throwing ourselves into the rear of a leader”—Stephen Douglas—“who denies our first principle, denies that there is an absolute wrong in the institution of slavery, then the future of the Republican cause is safe and victory is assured.”
After Douglas published an article in Harper’s Magazine elaborating the agnosticism that underpinned his philosophy of popular sovereignty, Lincoln shook his head in redoubled determination. “This will never do,” he said. “He puts the moral element out of this question. It won’t stay out.”
It certainly wouldn’t if Lincoln had his way. “Slavery is wrong, morally and politically,” he told an audience of Republicans in Cincinnati. “I desire that it should be no f
urther spread in these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually terminate in the whole Union.” He continued, “I think we want and must have a national policy in regard to the institution of slavery that acknowledges and deals with that institution as being wrong.” Compromise on this point would be fatal. “Whoever desires the prevention of the spread of slavery and the nationalization of that institution yields all when he yields to any policy that either recognizes slavery as being right, or as being an indifferent thing. Nothing will make you successful but setting up a policy which shall treat the thing as being wrong.”
Slavery was wrong for what it did to blacks; it was also wrong for what it did to whites. And because whites voted, while blacks did not, Lincoln took pains to stress what whites lost from slavery. Lincoln, with other Republicans, advanced an ideology of free labor, which decried slave labor but also stressed the dignity of the white working man. “I hold that if there is any one thing that can be proved to be the will of God by external nature around us, without reference to revelation, it is the proposition that whatever any one man earns with his hands and by the sweat of his brow, he shall enjoy in peace,” Lincoln told his Cincinnati audience. “I say that whereas God Almighty has given every man one mouth to be fed, and one pair of hands adapted to furnish food for that mouth, if anything can be proved to be the will of Heaven, it is proved by this fact, that that mouth is to be fed by those hands, without being interfered with by any other man who has also his mouth to feed and his hands to labor with. I hold that if the Almighty had ever made a set of men that should do all the eating and none of the work, he would have made them with mouths only and no hands, and if he had ever made another class that he had intended should do all the work and none of the eating, he would have made them without mouths and with all hands. But inasmuch as he has not chosen to make man in that way, if anything is proved, it is that those hands and mouths are to be cooperative through life and not to be interfered with.”