Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Lincoln clung to the Whigs long after the party had, for all practical political purposes, asphyxiated. He had no sympathy with the Know-Nothings, and until he was convinced that another Whiggish alternative would survive as a platform for his ambitions, he was reluctant to abandon the party of Clay, which had got him elected to Congress. By the end of 1855, however, the slavery issue and Kansas-Nebraska had put the Whigs past any hope of resuscitation as far as Lincoln could see, and the mounting demands of the mysterious “Slave Power” for the extension of slavery everywhere in the territories tipped Lincoln over to the new Republican Party. In May 1856 Lincoln helped lead a coalition of anti-slavery Whigs (including his partner, William Herndon) and free-soil Democrats (such as Lyman Trumbull) into the Republican camp.

  At length, in 1858, Lincoln got what he wanted most: the chance to bring down the chief perpetrator of the Kansas-Nebraska betrayal, Stephen A. Douglas, as Douglas ran for reelection in Illinois to the Senate. Not surprisingly, Lincoln was dumb-founded when he began to hear suggestions by eastern Republicans that Illinois Republicans stand aside and let Douglas be reelected without opposition. “What does the New-York Tribune mean by its constant eulogising, and admiring, and magnifying [of] Douglas?” Lincoln demanded of Lyman Trumbull during the last week of 1857. “Have they concluded that the republican cause, generally, can be best promoted by sacrificing us here in Illinois? If so we would like to know it soon; it will save us a great deal of labor to surrender at once.”30

  Lincoln need not have feared: his standing among the Illinois Republicans was too high to be jeopardized by the editorials of the New York Tribune. On June 16, 1858, Lincoln was endorsed by the Republican state convention in Springfield as “the first and only choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the U.S. Senate, as the successor of Stephen A. Douglas.”31 That evening Lincoln addressed the convention in one of his greatest speeches, the “House Divided” speech. At the very beginning, Lincoln hammered at the folly of expecting that popular sovereignty could resolve the sectional crisis:

  We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. “A House divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

  He then attacked the notion that Douglas, the author of this failed policy, was now to be hailed as the adopted son of the Republicans. “They do not tell us, nor has he told us, that he wishes any such object to be effected,” Lincoln observed. Just because Douglas had a quarrel with Buchanan and Taney over popular sovereignty did not mean that he had become a Republican or, more to the point, an opponent of slavery. “How can he oppose the advances of slavery?” Lincoln asked, mimicking Douglas’s announcement that he didn’t care whether slavery was voted up or voted down in Kansas, so long as the vote was properly conducted. “He don’t care anything about it.”

  To the contrary, Lincoln argued, the entire progress of events from Kansas-Nebraska up through Dred Scott showed that “don’t care” was merely a front, that everything in Kansas-Nebraska and Dred Scott had been prearranged deliberately to advance slavery, and that Douglas was as much as part of that conspiracy as Buchanan, Pierce, or Taney. “Let any one who doubts, carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination—piece of machinery so to speak—compounded of the Nebraska doctrine, and the Dred Scott decision,” Lincoln declared darkly.

  When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance—and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting… we find it impossible to not believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft.32

  With that, Lincoln called upon Illinois Republicans to rally to his standard and display a united front against Douglas.

  Douglas cast a wary eye on Lincoln, recognizing him as “the strong man of the [Republican] party—full of wit, facts, dates—and he is the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West. He is as honest as he is shrewd, and if I beat him my victory will be hardly won.”33 Douglas’s best policy would have been to stay away from Lincoln and rely on his own enormous prestige in Illinois to carry him back to the Senate. But Douglas could never resist a fight when offered, and when Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of debates across the state, Douglas accepted—with the stipulation that the number of debates be set at seven and that Douglas be given the upper hand in rebuttals. The debates began on August 21 in Ottawa, Illinois, and ranged across the state to Freeport on August 27, Jonesboro on September 15, Charleston on September 18, Galesburg on October 7, Quincy on October 13, and Alton (where Elijah Lovejoy had been murdered twenty-one years before) on October 15.

  Douglas’s plan for the debates was to paint himself as the champion of a white man’s democracy and Lincoln as an abolitionist fanatic whose opposition to popular sovereignty would let down Illinois’s barriers to black immigration. The “House Divided” speech, in Douglas’s hands, was the principal evidence that Lincoln was a reckless “Black Republican” partisan who wanted equal civil rights for blacks more than he wanted a stable and peaceful Union. “He tells you this Republic cannot endure permanently divided into Slave and Free states, as our fathers made it,” Douglas roared during the third debate. “Why can it not last, if we will execute the Government in the same spirit and upon the same principles upon which it is founded?” It would last just fine, Douglas insisted, if Lincoln and the Republicans would simply leave off trying to impose abolition on the South or upon the territories. “It can thus exist if each State will carry out the principles upon which our institutions were founded… the right of each State to do as it pleases, without meddling with its neighbors.” Giving each state active popular sovereignty over its affairs (and each territory passive popular sovereignty over its organization) was the only way to guarantee peace among the states. “There is but one path of peace in this Republic,” Douglas declared, “and that is to administer this Government as our fathers made it, divided into Free and Slave States.” The best signpost to that path was popular sovereignty, “allowing each State to decide for itself whether it wants slavery or not.”34

  It mattered nothing to Douglas whether slavery itself was right or wrong, or whether there was a moral imperative that justified its restriction no matter what damage that requirement did to the rights of an individual state. If each state and territory were left to “settle the slavery question for herself, and mind her own business and let her neighbors alone… there will be peace between the North and South, and in the whole Union.” Lest this seem too much a triumph of political expediency over a question of morality, Douglas was quick to remind his white Illinois listeners of whom their moral discomforts were being lavished upon—the Negro, whose presence they loathed anyway. He asked them to suppose that slavery was wrong, and so wrong that restriction and abolition was the only cure: what would the result be for Illinois? “Do you desire to turn this beautiful State into a free negro colony, in order that when Missouri abolishes slavery she can send one hundred thousand emancipated slaves into Illinois, to become citizens and voters, on an equality with yourselves?” Douglas asked. Thus race came to the rescue of expediency and calmed the queasy consciences of those who were wondering if peace by popular sovereignty might come at too high a price to democracy. Douglas, in fact, played the race hatred card repeatedly and shamelessly throughout the debates. “All I have to say on that subject is,” Douglas announced in Freeport, “that those of you who believe that the negro is your equal and ought
to be on an equality with you socially, politically, and legally, have a right to entertain those opinions, and of course will vote for Mr. Lincoln.” Down with the negro, growled the vast throng of listeners.35

  Lincoln was not willing to be thrown on the defensive so easily. Principally, Lincoln attacked the popular sovereignty scheme as having no meaning after Dred Scott. In the debate at Freeport, Lincoln forced the spotlight onto the incompatibility of popular sovereignty with Dred Scott by posing a question to Douglas: “Can the people of the United States Territory, in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a State constitution?” Douglas had no choice, at Freeport and elsewhere, but to answer yes, in order to preserve his own political integrity and win an election in Illinois, where white voters wanted assurances that popular sovereignty really would keep slavery out. “It matters not what way the Supreme Court may hereafter decide as to the abstract question whether slavery may or may not go into a Territory under the Constitution, the people have the lawful means to introduce it or exclude it as they please,” Douglas irritably responded. The people could do this, in spite of Dred Scott, by passively refusing to enact slave codes, since “slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere, unless it is supported by local police regulations.”36

  That meant, as Lincoln later pointed out, that what the Supreme Court had declared lawful—slavery in the territories—could somehow be rendered unlawful without the rendering being in any way contradictory. In turn, it meant that any territory that voted itself free might just as easily vote itself slave if the popular will later on altered its “police regulations.” Illinoisans who hated abolition because (as Douglas put it) abolition meant an influx of freed blacks into Illinois had to be just as suspicious of popular sovereignty, since (as Lincoln put it in his own appeal to white racial prejudice) Illinoisans who emigrated to a free territory today might find it a slave territory tomorrow. “I am in favor,” added Lincoln, of keeping the territories as “an outlet for free white people everywhere, the world over,—in which … all other men from all the world, may find new homes and better their condition in life.”37 This effectively reduced popular sovereignty to what Lincoln had all along insisted it was, a subterfuge.

  Moreover, urged Lincoln, even if popular sovereignty could somehow ensure that the Union could peacefully endure half slave and half free, such a divided arrangement flew in the face of the real intentions of the framers of the American republic. “When this Government was first established,” Lincoln said, “it was the policy of its founders to prohibit the spread of slavery into the new Territories of the United States, where it had not existed.” All that Lincoln asked “is that it should be placed back again upon the basis that the fathers of our Government originally placed it upon. I have no doubt that it would become extinct… if we but re-adopted the policy of the fathers, by restricting it to the limits it has already covered,—restricting it from the new Territories.” Douglas’s dogma of popular sovereignty was not perpetuating the American republic; it was perverting it. And instead of popular sovereignty guaranteeing peace, it would only guarantee contention. “What right have we then to hope,” Lincoln asked, “that the trouble will cease,—that the agitation will come to an end,—until it shall either be placed back where it originally stood, and where the fathers originally placed it, or, on the other hand until it shall entirely master all opposition.”38 At that point, slavery would plant itself not only in the territories but in the free states as well, and Douglas would be responsible for the very racial strife that he had fastened on Lincoln.

  Lincoln had a larger point to make than merely the theoretical inconsistencies of popular sovereignty. Douglas’s error lay not only in failing to see that popular sovereignty was an impractical instrument for containing slavery but also in failing to see that slavery itself was a moral wrong, a violation of the natural right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” written into the very frame of human nature, and “made so plain by our good Father in Heaven, that all feel and understand it, even down to brutes and creeping insects.” Even “the ant, who has toiled and dragged a crumb to his nest, will furiously defend the fruit of his labor, against whatever robber assails him.” If the ants understood by simple instinct that the robbery of what they had worked for was naturally wrong, then it was plain that human beings must, too—“so plain, that the most dumb and stupid slave that ever toiled for a master, does constantly know that he is wronged.”39

  As a violation of natural law, slavery did not deserve, and should not claim, the protection of popular sovereignty. Douglas had advertised himself as the champion of democratic government by insisting that the people, not Congress or the Supreme Court, were the only ones who had the right to choose whether their states should be slave or free. Lincoln replied that the will of the people could never be so absolute as to vote some people into slavery and others into freedom. That would make amoral nonsense of democracy. The right of the black slave to “eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns,” was so much a matter of natural law that no bare majority of white voters had the power to deny him. In that sense, the black slave was the natural equal of any other human being—“my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”40

  Democracy must be not simply the vote of the majority but the choice by the majority of what is morally right, and the position of the Republicans was that slavery was so much a moral wrong that no amount of popular sovereignty could ever make slavery right for an American territory. In the last debate of the series, Lincoln insisted that “the real issue in this controversy—the one pressing upon every mind—is the sentiment on the one part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and on another class that does not look upon it as a wrong.”

  It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. … It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” [Loud applause.] No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.41

  Perhaps it is worth saying, in Douglas’s defense, that the Little Giant did not believe that slavery was actually right, nor did Lincoln in 1858 believe that it was wrong enough to justify direct intervention in the affairs of states where it was already domesticated, or that natural equality immediately translated into civil equality. Natural rights were permanent, common, and intuitive, and defined the person as a human being; civil rights were bestowed by communities and could be changed, altered, revoked, or bestowed as a community saw fit, without that in any way impairing the essential humanity of the individuals involved. “Society,” as even one New England abolitionist wrote, “in forming its institutions and organizations has a right to with-hold [voting rights] from any person or class of persons who it believes cannot exercise it understandingly.”42 Natural rights, however, were not the gift of “society.” They were possessed equally by all human beings simply by virtue of being human, and for Lincoln in 1858, black people were certainly the equals of whites in terms of their natural humanity. That made slavery a wrong that should be contained wherever there was opportunity to contain it.

  For Douglas, black people were so far from being the equals of whites in any sense, natural or civil, that the misfortune of their enslavement was simply not worth antagonizing half the Union, especially when opening up half the continent was at stake. For Douglas, the question about slavery was not natural rights but workaday politics—shall we let this quarrel over inferior beings wreck the Union? For the time being, that was the basic outlook of most Illinoisans.

  Douglas Democrats won the majority of the Illinois legislative seats on el
ection day, November 2, and since the Illinois legislature was still the legal forum for electing the state’s U.S. senators, it was the legislature and not the popular vote of the people of Illinois that on January 5 sent Douglas back to Washington.

  Lincoln tried to put as jolly a face on the situation as he could. On his way home on election night, “the path” he walked “had been worn hog-backed & was slippering. My foot slipped from under me, knocking the other one out of the way, but I recovered myself & lit square: and I said to myself, ‘It’s a slip and not a fall.’” And that would be how he would try to understand his defeat—a slip and not a fall. In his bleaker moments, though, he could not help seeing this defeat as being of a piece with all his other political disappointments. “I have no regrets for having… resolutely made the struggle,” he wrote to Salmon Chase of Ohio, the one Republican worthy who had come to Illinois to campaign for Lincoln in 1858—although “I would have preferred success.”43 Yet his loss really was a significant one. By forcing out into the open the inconsistencies of the popular sovereignty dogma, Lincoln had made it impossible both for anti-slavery Republicans to see Douglas as an ally and for pro-slavery Southerners to see him as a friend to slavery’s unlimited expansion. Incidentally, he had also made himself a national figure, with results that people were already beginning to speculate upon.

  NEVER BE PURGED BUT WITH BLOOD

  When James Buchanan became president in 1856 it was fervently hoped that he would have the political tools necessary to put the slavery agitation to rest. Buchanan had to his credit almost forty years of experience in Congress, the cabinet, and most recently in diplomatic service. Although he was a Pennsylvanian by birth and a Northern Democrat by conviction, he nevertheless sympathized with the South’s ever-mounting demands for reassurance, and the hope that he would be able to please everyone was the single most important factor in his victory over the fatally divided Whigs. “This question of domestic slavery is the weak point in our institutions,” Buchanan admitted as early as 1836. That meant it was all the more important for him to show it the loftiest respect: “Touch this question of slavery seriously—let it once be made manifest to the people of the South that they cannot live with us, except in a state of continual apprehension and alarm for their wives and their children, for all that is near and dear to them upon the earth,—and the Union is from that moment dissolved.”44