by H. W. Brands
A lawyer neighbor came up to Sanborn. He asked if Sanborn petitioned for habeas corpus, to stay the arrest.
“By all means!” said Sanborn.
The lawyer hurried the short distance to the home of a judge who in the years since passage of the Fugitive Slave Act had grown accustomed to such emergency appeals. His form book was handy in his library, and he at once filled in the blanks. He handed the writ to the sheriff, also familiar with the practice, and the sheriff ordered Sanborn’s captors to stand down.
They objected, claiming that their mandate superseded that of the judge. The sheriff at once enlisted the crowd that had surrounded the carriage as his posse comitatus. “I was forcibly snatched from senatorial custody,” Sanborn recounted. “At the same time my Irish neighbors rushed upon them and forced them to take their broken carriage and make off toward Lexington, the way they had driven up in the early evening. They were pursued by twenty or thirty of my townsmen, some of them as far as Lexington.”
36
AT THE TIME of John Brown’s death, Abraham Lincoln could congratulate himself on the progress of his campaign for president. He remained coy about his goal, lest he draw premature criticism, yet he could tell he was winning support. His swing around the West, from Ohio to Kansas, had introduced him to thousands of Republicans who had heard his name but never encountered him in person. Moncure Conway was one of the many who liked what they saw. “One warm evening in 1859, passing through the market-place in Cincinnati, I found there a crowd listening to a political speech in the open air,” Conway remembered. He was a Virginian whose religious faith had led him to the ministry and to abolitionism. By the 1850s this combination was untenable below the Mason-Dixon Line, and Conway was driven from his pulpit in Washington to Ohio, where he preached to Unitarians and worked against slavery. “The speaker stood in the balcony of a small brick house, some lamps assisting the moonlight,” he continued. “I had not heard of any meeting, and paused on the skirts of the crowd from curiosity, meaning to stay only a few moments. Something about the speaker, however, and some words that reached me, led me to press nearer. I asked the speaker’s name and learned that it was Abraham Lincoln.”
Conway studied Lincoln in the half-light. “The face had a battered and bronzed look, without being hard. His nose was prominent and buttressed a strong and high forehead; his eyes were high-vaulted and had an expression of sadness; his mouth and chin were too close together, the cheeks hollow. On the whole Lincoln’s appearance was not attractive until one heard his voice, which possessed variety of expression, earnestness, and shrewdness in every tone. The charm of his manner was that he had no manner. He was simple, direct, humorous. He pleasantly repeated a mannerism of his opponent—‘This is what Stephen Douglas calls his gur-reat perrinciple’; but the next words I remember were these: ‘Slavery is wrong!’ ”
Such conviction was what Conway wanted to hear, and what he had not been hearing from politicians in his vicinity. Cincinnati was separated from slave-state Kentucky by the Ohio River, narrow in this region and well bridged. Resident Ohioans could look across the river and see slaves laboring away; Kentuckians regularly crossed to take part in events in Cincinnati. Many Kentuckians had come to hear Lincoln; they booed and hissed when he said slavery was wrong. Lincoln was undeterred, and Conway was more impressed. “Slavery is wrong,” Lincoln repeated. “No compromise, no political arrangement with slavery, will ever last which does not deal with it as wrong.”
Conway’s reaction was repeated everywhere Lincoln went. Republicans in Kansas had favored William Seward as the most forthright of their party on the slavery question, but Lincoln won many over on his visit to the territory. They were gratified that he had come to Kansas at all. “There are but few statesmen who could have been forced to do the work in which Abraham Lincoln volunteered,” one recounted. “In the dead of winter he left the comforts of an attractive home to couple his energies with those of a young people in a distant territory battling for the right.” Lincoln’s words and actions earned him enthusiastic followers. “Here comes the next president of the United States,” a Leavenworth Republican proclaimed on introducing Lincoln. Another Kansan said the same thing to a group of Republicans gathered to meet the visitor. “Gentlemen, I tell you Mr. Lincoln will be our next president,” he declared. Lincoln tried to deflect the praise, to no avail. “I feel it, and I mean it,” his host said.
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BUT KANSAS WASN’T the country, not by a long way. Lincoln appealed to fellow westerners; the question was: Could he find support in the East?
He got a chance to find out in early 1860. The Young Men’s Republican Union of New York invited him to come to the city and speak at the Cooper Institute. Some of the host group were simply curious; others opposed William Seward and hoped Lincoln might head him off. If nothing else, the rustic westerner would afford the city folk an evening’s entertainment.
Lincoln took the opportunity most seriously. His political future hinged on this audition. He prepared for his speech by reviewing the arguments he had made against Stephen Douglas during the past several years. He couldn’t assume that many of his listeners had read his remarks, but on the other hand he didn’t want simply to repeat what he’d said earlier and annoy those who had.
He took as his text a statement in which Douglas claimed to be guided by America’s founders on the question of slavery in the territories. “Our fathers,” Douglas had said, “when they framed the government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.”
To which Lincoln responded, to the Cooper audience, “I fully endorse this.” The point at dispute was what the founders had understood on slavery in the territories, and what they intended for the institution there.
At lawyerly length Lincoln argued that the framers of the Constitution fully intended that Congress should have control of slavery in the territories. He noted that the same summer that witnessed the Constitutional Convention saw the passage of the Northwest Ordinance barring slavery north of the Ohio River. He remarked that of the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution, four were members of the Congress that approved the ordinance, and three of the four voted in favor. He observed that sixteen of the thirty-nine were members of the first Congress under the Constitution, which unanimously approved a bill implementing the ordinance. George Washington, another of the thirty-nine, signed the bill. During the first decades under the Constitution, while most of the framers still lived, Congress routinely regulated slavery in the territories.
The historical record was incontrovertible, Lincoln declared. “I defy any man to show that any one of them ever, in his whole life, declared that, in his understanding, any proper division of local from federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbade the federal government to control as to slavery in the federal territories.” He went further: “I defy anyone to show that any living man in the whole world ever did, prior to the beginning of the present century (and I might almost say prior to the beginning of the last half of the present century) declare that, in his understanding, any proper division of local from federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbade the federal government to control as to slavery in the federal territories.” Stephen Douglas claimed the founders for his side, but he was simply wrong. He should admit as much.
The Republicans were more than happy to embrace a correct reading of the founders’ intentions. “This is all Republicans ask—all Republicans desire—in relation to slavery,” Lincoln said. “As those fathers marked it, so let it be again marked, as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity.”
Lincoln addressed the people of the South, as if they were present. “You consider yourselves a reasonable and a just people; and I consider that in the general qualities
of reason and justice you are not inferior to any other people. Still, when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us as reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than outlaws. You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to ‘Black Republicans.’ ” Such language poisoned political discourse, Lincoln said, and jeopardized the interests of the South as well as the North. He made a modest request: “Bring forward your charges and specifications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or justify.”
Southerners called themselves conservatives while branding Republicans radicals, Lincoln said. He rejected the charge. “What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy”—slavery in the territories—“while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new.”
Southerners blamed Republicans for agitating the slavery question in politics. Lincoln rejected this charge too. “We admit that it is more prominent, but we deny that we made it so. It was not we, but you, who discarded the old policy of the fathers. We resisted, and still resist, your innovation; and thence comes the greater prominence of the question.”
Southerners said Republicans encouraged insurrection among the slaves. “What is your proof?” asked Lincoln. He supplied the most recent answer given by Southerners: “Harper’s Ferry! John Brown!!” Lincoln rejected this allegation as well, most vehemently. “John Brown was no Republican, and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harpers Ferry enterprise.” Lincoln dismissed the raid as the work of an unbalanced mind. “John Brown’s effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed. That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts, related in history, at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution.”
Southerners were getting carried away by their own rhetoric, Lincoln said. Many were calling for secession. “You will destroy the government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin.” Lincoln noted that some Southerners were threatening to disregard the result of the coming presidential contest. “You will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!’ ”
Lincoln now spoke to his fellow Republicans. “It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great confederacy shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the Southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can.”
But could Republicans yield, in good conscience? What were those Southern demands? Lincoln observed that with each concession by the North, Southern demands had increased. For decades Southerners had demanded the repeal of the Missouri Compromise; having achieved this in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, they insisted on repudiation of the congressional authority underlying the compromise, which the Dred Scott decision delivered. So what would satisfy the South? What must Republicans do? “Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must, somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them.”
What would convince the South? “This, and this only: Cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly, done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated; we must place ourselves avowedly with them.” Republicans must join Southerners as apologists for slavery. “Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing.”
This, of course, the Republicans could not do, and would not do. Slavery was wrong, and they would continue to call it wrong. But they might still be circumspect. “Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation.”
Conscience and circumspection were the true path forward for the Republican party and for the country, Lincoln concluded. “Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
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LINCOLN’S LISTENERS DIDN’T know what to make of him at first. “When Lincoln rose to speak I was greatly disappointed,” recalled one. “He was tall, tall—oh, how tall! and so angular and awkward that I had, for an instant, a feeling of pity for so ungainly a man. His clothes were black and ill-fitting, badly wrinkled—as if they had been jammed carelessly into a small trunk. His bushy head, with the stiff black hair thrown back, was balanced on a long and lean head-stalk, and when he raised his hands in an opening gesture, I noticed that they were very large. He began in a low tone of voice—as if he were used to speaking out-doors and was afraid of speaking too loud. He said, ‘Mr. Cheerman,’ instead of ‘Mr. Chairman,’ and employed many other words with an old-fashioned pronunciation. I said to myself, ‘Old fellow, you won’t do. It’s all very well for the wild West, but this will never go down in New York.’ ”
Yet Lincoln kept on, and the mood in the hall changed—slowly at first, then in a rush. “He began to get into his subject,” the skeptical New Yorker recounted. “He straightened up, made regular and graceful gestures; his face lighted up as with an inward fire; the whole man was transfigured. I forgot his clothes, his personal appearance, and his individual peculiarities. Presently, forgetting myself, I was on my feet with the rest, yelling like a wild Indian, cheering this wonderful man. In the close parts of his argument, you could hear the gentle sizzling of the gas-burners. When he reached a climax, the thunders of applause were terrific. It was a great speech. When I came out of the hall, my face glowing with excitement and my frame all aquiver, a friend, with his eyes aglow, asked me what I thought of Abe Lincoln, the rail-splitter. I said: ‘He’s the greatest man since St. Paul.’ ”
37
LINCOLN HADN’T EXPECTED to make a tour of the East, but his New York speech won such plaudits that Republicans nearby insisted he come stump for them. To Connecticut he went, racking his brain to discover new ways of saying the same things he had been saying for months or years. In New Haven he reiterated that he and the Republicans had no designs against slavery in the South. “If we were to form a government anew, in view of the actual presence of slavery, we should find it necessary to frame just such a government as our fathers did, giving to the slaveholder the entire control where the system was established,” he said. “From the necessities of the case we should be compelled to form just such a government as our blessed fathers gave us; and, surely, if they have so made it, that adds another reason why we should let slavery alone where it exists.” To this refrain he added a new verse. “If I saw a ven
omous snake crawling in the road, any man would say I might seize the nearest stick and kill it; but if I found that snake in bed with my children, that would be another question.” Lincoln’s audience laughed, but he wasn’t joking. “I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them.” His listeners applauded. “Much more, if I found it in bed with my neighbor’s children, and I had bound myself by a solemn compact not to meddle with his children under any circumstances, it would become me to let that particular mode of getting rid of the gentleman alone.” More laughter. “But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide!” Much laughter and cheering. Lest anyone miss his point, Lincoln concluded, “That is just the case! The new territories are the newly made bed to which our children are to go, and it lies with the nation to say whether they shall have snakes mixed up with them or not. It does not seem as if there could be much hesitation what our policy should be!” Applause all around.
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AS LINCOLN GREW more visible, he took greater care not to become too visible. He shunned controversy whenever possible. “My name is new in the field, and I suppose I am not the first choice of a very great many,” he wrote to an Ohio supporter. But he might be the second choice of a majority, and at the convention that could be enough. “Our policy, then, is to give no offence to others—leave them in a mood to come to us, if they shall be compelled to give up their first love.”
This was the key. Lincoln would let the bigger names in the party fight to a draw, leaving the convention to turn to a man no one much objected to—himself.