Lincoln’s speech from its start seemed to be a straightforward, even statistical primer on the constitutional history of slavery; but that was just his predicate. His method was intrinsic to his mission. He had a more subtle and deeper motive than to win the case on the evidence. He intended to assert the primacy of fact to defeat falsehood and of history to expose demagogy. The facts spoke for themselves, but that was not enough for Lincoln. He surgically took apart each and every point that threw the Republicans on the defensive. As he wielded the facts to puncture and deflate his opponents, he answered sweeping questions of who was the true American, who was “sectional,” and who was the patriot. Standing on reason he rejected fanaticism even as he acknowledged its righteous springs in the antislavery cause. In a feat of alchemy, he transformed conservatism into the revolution of the saints. In a burst of eloquence, he gave voice to the innermost feelings of those struggling against a greater power and facing vilification and persecution for their beliefs. The wrinkled suit, the disorderly hair, and the hayseed accent were the shock before the recognition. Once he was heard his initially off-putting appearance had a reverse effect of giving a depth of credence to his words. Lincoln vindicated the Republican Party. He stood as its exemplar. He was the standard-bearer.
“The facts with which I shall deal this evening are mainly old and familiar; nor is there anything new in the general use I shall make of them. If there shall be any novelty, it will be in the mode of presenting the facts, and the inferences and observations following that presentation.”
Lincoln immediately claimed as his own Douglas’s central idea: “Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.” “I fully endorse this, and I adopt it as a text for this discourse,” declared Lincoln. Systematically reviewing the records of signers of the Constitution he proved that twenty-one out of thirty-nine supported federal control over slavery in the territories and that of the rest their positions were unknown but likely to be in line with the others. “Among that sixteen were several of the most noted anti-slavery men of those times—as Dr. Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris—while there was not one now known to have been otherwise, unless it may be John Rutledge, of South Carolina.”
Lincoln made clear that in appealing to the authority of the “fathers,” he was not adhering to a doctrine of original intent. He was emphatically not what would later be called an “originalist,” but believed the Constitution was a living document. “Now, and here, let me guard a little against being misunderstood. I do not mean to say we are bound to follow implicitly in whatever our fathers did. To do so, would be to discard all the lights of current experience—to reject all progress—all improvement.” Lincoln declared that he believed in “evidence so conclusive, and argument so clear,” and that Douglas, who argued that the founders denied power to the federal government to prohibit slavery was engaged in an act of misleading.
But he has no right to mislead others, who have less access to history, and less leisure to study it, into the false belief that “our fathers, who framed the Government under which we live,” were of the same opinion—thus substituting falsehood and deception for truthful evidence and fair argument. If any man at this day sincerely believes “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live,” used and applied principles, in other cases, which ought to have led them to understand that a proper division of local from federal authority or some part of the Constitution, forbids the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the federal territories, he is right to say so. But he should, at the same time, brave the responsibility of declaring that, in his opinion, he understands their principles better than they did themselves; and especially should he not shirk that responsibility by asserting that they “understood the question just as well, and even better, than we do now.”
After demolishing the false foundation of Douglas’s popular sovereignty and Taney’s Dred Scott decision, Lincoln swiveled to “address a few words to the Southern people.” Of course, Southerners were absent from the bastion of Northern antislavery opinion arrayed before Lincoln. He was not debating Southerners so much as demonstrating to his audience how they could refute them.
“I would say to them:—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 a 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.’ In all your contentions with one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation of ‘Black Republicanism’ as the first thing to be attended to. Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable prerequisite—license, so to speak—among you to be admitted or permitted to speak at all.”
One after another, Lincoln examined the smears against Republicans, debunking them and reversing the accusation on the accusers. With each one, he stated the charge, followed with, “We deny it.” By his use of the plural “we,” he put himself as the spokesman for the Republican Party.
On sectionalism: “We deny it.” “The fact that we get no votes in your section, is a fact of your making, and not of ours.” Here Lincoln turned a political condition into an evidentiary one, flourishing “fact.” Relying on the authority of history, he cited Washington’s letter to Lafayette in favor of the prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Territories. “Could Washington himself speak, would he cast the blame of that sectionalism upon us, who sustain his policy, or upon you who repudiate it?”
On conservatism: “What is conservative?” It was not the Southerners who properly fit the classic definition, but the Republicans. “Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated. Consider, then, whether your claim of conservatism for yourselves, and your charge or destructiveness against us, are based on the most clear and stable foundations.”
On “revolutionary”: “We deny it. 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.”
The most potentially damaging of the charges was that Republicans were secretly behind John Brown. “You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper’s Ferry! John Brown!!” Here Lincoln not only refuted the charge, but used it to describe the political motive behind the “slander,” an attempt to influence state elections “near at hand, and you were in evident glee with the belief that, by charging the blame upon us, you could get an advantage of us in those elections.” But, he pointed out, the tactic had backfired. “In your political contests among yourselves, each faction charges the other with sympathy with Black Republicanism; and then, to give point to the charge, defines Black Republicanism to simply be insurrection, blood and thunder among the slaves.”
Drawing upon history again, Lincoln reminded the Southerners that insurrections were “no more common now than they were before the Republican Party was organized. What induced the Southampton insurrection, twenty-eight years ago, in which, at least, three times as many lives were lost as at Harper’s Ferry.” Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia in 1831 required no outside agitator. “You can scarcely stretch your very elastic fancy to the conclusion that Southampton was ‘got up by Black Republicanism.’ ” Slaves had reason to revolt. If they failed to do so, it was not because they loved slavery, but because they were repressed and isolated. “The indispensable concert of action cannot be attained.” But the absence of a general slave uprising was not evidence of contentment. “The explosive materials are everywhere in parcels; but there neither are, nor can be supplied, the indispensable connecting trains.”
Lincoln stepped back in his argument to view Harpers Ferry as a historical event with a measure of objectivity. “John Brown’s effort w
as 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.”
Lincoln compared the psychology of revolutionary virtue of John Brown to his European counterparts. This led him into his longest reflection on the nature of political assassination. “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. Orsini’s attempt on Louis Napoleon, and John Brown’s attempt at Harper’s Ferry were, in their philosophy, precisely the same.”
Yet in both cases the target was tyranny. “The eagerness to cast blame on old England in the one case, and on New England in the other, does not disprove the sameness of the two things.” Nor would repression solve the issue. “And how much would it avail you, if you could, by the use of John Brown, Helper’s Book, and the like, break up the Republican organization? Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed. There is a judgment and a feeling against slavery in this nation, which cast at least a million and a half of votes. You cannot destroy that judgment and feeling—that sentiment—by breaking up the political organization which rallies around it. You can scarcely scatter and disperse an army which has been formed into order in the face of your heaviest fire; but if you could, how much would you gain by forcing the sentiment which created it out of the peaceful channel of the ballot-box, into some other channel? What would that other channel probably be? Would the number of John Browns be lessened or enlarged by the operation?”
Unable to succeed politically, the Southerners would tear down the Constitution in the name of constitutional originalism. “But you will break up the Union rather than submit to a denial of your Constitutional rights.” And yet, Lincoln said, there were no such rights. “When you make these declarations, you have a specific and well-understood allusion to an assumed Constitutional right of yours, to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. But no such right is specifically written in the Constitution. That instrument is literally silent about any such right. We, on the contrary, deny that such a right has any existence in the Constitution, even by implication.”
Rising to prophecy, Lincoln foresaw the Southerners’ perverse originalism as a thin cover to maintain their oppressive power even unto secession. “Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that 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 in all events.”
With the election only eight months away, the crisis of American democracy was drawing near. “But 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 turned to his audience as though he had just been speaking beyond it. “A few words now to Republicans.” Here in the most condensed section of his speech he attempted his most difficult and paradoxical political task. Just as in ostensibly speaking indirectly to Southerners about Republicans, in speaking directly to Republicans he was appealing for Republicans to adopt a strategic attitude and by implication the strategist.
Lincoln saw through the calls for a false civility, deference to the Slave Power that was simply appeasement. “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.” His rhetoric paced from paradox to paradox, from conciliation to defiance. Proposing harmony, “let us calmly consider their demands,” but he suggested that nothing, really, would work. “Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. . . . Will it satisfy them, if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not.”
He reconsidered the original quandary. “The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must, somehow, convince them that we do let them alone.” Convincing them, he went on, meant conceding everything Republicans believed in. “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. . . . We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.”
In the interest of fairness, he admitted, “they do not state their case precisely in this way.”
But in the interest of frankness he said they could not stop themselves from careening down their reckless course toward their ultimate goal. “Demanding what they do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this consummation. 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.”
He moved toward his conclusion in the form of a rhetorical question. “Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right, but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them?” In one long breath, through parallel construction, he compactly stated his policy, ending once again in a question that was a challenge to his audience, crafted to arouse them to understand and accept the whole of his strategy. “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; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States?” And his answer to the aggressive reach of the Slave Power: “If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively.”
Then came Lincoln’s peroration in two seamless but distinct paragraphs, the first a succinct and fervent critique of Stephen A. Douglas’s demagogy without mentioning his name, the refined acuity of Lincoln’s decades of observation and engagement, aimed as well by inference at the leading lights of the Eastern Republicans who had flirted with Douglas in the senatorial contest, some seated in the hall.
Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man—such as a policy of “don’t care” on a question about which all true men do care—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—such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did.
Finally, unapologetically and unreservedly, liberated from conditional tenses and question marks, no longer speaking to imaginary figments, he issued a crusader’s call to battle for Republicans that would have raised the roof on Beecher’s Plymouth Church.
He did not mention John Brown, the dragnet for his followers, the smears of Republicans as his aiders and abettors, the Mason Committee, Douglas’s call for a sedition act, the near explosion on the floor of the Congress over Lovejoy reminiscent of the near murder of Sumner, the near duel of Pryor and Potter, the duel that kille
d Broderick, the threats of Jefferson Davis to try Seward for treason, the threats against Cassius Clay, the heated spirit of violence.
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.
The crowd that had been taken aback ninety minutes earlier by the appearance of the “ungainly” speaker now rose as a body, cheering and cheering again, waving hats and handkerchiefs. As the tumult died down Greeley was summoned to the stage and as Lincoln sat near him the editor who had caused him so much grief in his campaign against Douglas now declared that the people present had witnessed “a specimen of what free labor and free expression of ideas could produce.”
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