These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  The full opinion of the court—a book running to more than six hundred pages—would not be printed until May of 1857. But by then, at meetings all over the country, black people and white people alike had condemned the ruling. “A large meeting of colored people” was held in Philadelphia in April, at which it was resolved that “the only duty the colored man owes to a Constitution under which he is declared to be an inferior and degraded being, having no rights which white men are bound to respect, is to denounce and repudiate it, and to do what he can by all proper means to bring it into contempt.”99 What were a people to do whose highest court denied the possibility of equality? “I groan with you over the iniquity of the times,” Longfellow wrote Sumner. “It is deplorable; it is heart-breaking; and I long to say some vibrant word, that should have vitality in it, and force.”100

  Lincoln delivered his opinion on the ruling in a speech in Springfield. The court’s opinion, he said, was “based on assumed historical facts which were not really true.” Taney had argued that the equality asserted in the Declaration of Independence was never intended to apply to black people. If this were true, Lincoln asked, what were the value of Jefferson’s words? Were “these truths” mere lies? Lincoln offered his own reading. “The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain,” he argued, “and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be, thank God, it is now proving itself, a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism.”101

  But the most powerful speech about the court’s ruling in Dred Scott was the speech given by Frederick Douglass. Jubilant slave owners said Dred Scott had settled the question of slavery for good. Douglass, looking to history, disagreed. “The more the question has been settled,” he wryly remarked, “the more it has needed settling.” In spite of the bleakness of the ruling—he called it a “vile and shocking abomination”—he found much reason for hope. “You may close your Supreme Court against the black man’s cry for justice, but you cannot, thank God, close against him the ear of a sympathising world, nor shut up the Court of Heaven.” Taney’s interpretation of the Constitution would be ignored, Douglass predicted. “Slavery lives in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people.”102

  Dred Scott, fifty-eight, died only months later. He’d been working as a porter in a hotel in St. Louis while suffering from tuberculosis, a slow sickness, a constitutional weakening, as relentless as the disease that wracked the nation itself. Frederick Douglass watched, and looked for a cure, an end to suffering, a lifting of the American people’s moral blindness. But it was as if the nation, like Oedipus of Thebes, had seen that in its own origins lay a curse, and had gouged out its own eyes.

  White-bearded Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, head in his hands, elbows perched on his desk, might have cast his mind back on the original ending he’d written for “The Building of the Ship,” in which the Union, its captain and sailors blinded in a storm, is “Lost, lost, wrecked and lost! / By the hurricane driven and tossed.” Instead, with Lincoln, he steered the ship of his soul out of the storm of despair and readied his cannons.

  Eight

  THE FACE OF BATTLE

  Photographs like Alexander Gardner’s portraits of the dead at Antietam chronicled the war and its many devastations.

  APHOTOGRAPH STOPS TIME, TRAPPING IT LIKE A BUTTERFLY in a jar. No other kind of historical evidence has this quality of instantaneity, of an impression taken in a moment, in a flicker, an eye opened and then shut. Photographs also capture the ordinary, the humble, the speechless. The camera discriminates between light and dark but not between the rich and the poor, the literate and the illiterate, the noisy and the quiet. The emergence of photography altered the historical record. It also shaped the course of American history.

  In March of 1839, during a trip to Europe to promote his telegraph, Samuel Morse visited the Parisian studio of the painter Louis Daguerre, fellow artist, fellow inventor. Two months before, Daguerre had presented to the French Academy of Sciences the results of experiments in which he took pictures by exposing to light polished, silver-coated copper sheets in the presence of the vapor of iodine crystals. The result was spectacular, an uncanny, ghostly likeness. In April, Morse wrote a letter home to his brother Sidney, editor of the New York Observer, describing Daguerre’s invention as “one of the most beautiful discoveries of the age.”1

  The first photograph seen in the United States would be displayed eight months later in a Broadway hotel in New York. Studios soon opened in cities and towns across the country, where photographers, adapting to a fast-changing technology, made portraits of copper (called daguerreotypes), of glass (ambrotypes), and of iron (tintypes). The art spread quickly; by the 1840s and 1850s, twenty-five million portraits were taken in the United States. Ordinary people couldn’t afford a painted portrait, but nearly everyone could afford a photograph; it became a technology of democracy. “Talk no more of ‘holding the mirror up to nature,’” wrote one newspaper editor. “She will hold it up to herself, and present you with a copy of her countenance for a penny.”2 They were “so life-like they almost speak,” people said, but portraits were also closely associated with death, with being trapped in time, on glass, for eternity, and, even more poignantly, with equality.3 With photography, Walt Whitman predicted, “Art will be democratized.”4

  Frederick Douglass, an early convert, became a theorist of photography. “Negroes can never have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists,” he said. “It seems to us next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features.” But a photograph was no caricature. Douglass therefore sat, again and again, in a portraitist’s studio: he became the most photographed man in nineteenth-century America, his likeness taken more often than Twain or even Lincoln. Douglass believed both that photography would set his people free by telling the truth about their humanity and that photography would help realize the promise of democracy by capturing rich and poor alike. “What was once the special and exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now the privilege of all,” he said. “The humblest servant girl may now possess a picture of herself such as the wealth of kings could not purchase fifty years ago.” Technological progress, he predicted, would usher in an age of equality, justice, and peace:

  The growing inter-communication of distant nations, the rapid transmission of intelligence over the globe—the worldwide ramifications of commerce—bringing together the knowledge, the skill, and the mental power of the world, cannot but dispel prejudice, dissolve the granite barriers of arbitrary power, bring the world into peace and unity, and at last crown the world with justice, liberty, and brotherly kindness.5

  But by then, the daguerreotype had been abandoned in favor of the paper print, set aside, one Philadelphian remarked, “like a dead language, never spoken, and seldom written.”6 And Americans would be fighting a war one against another, the first war whose devastation was captured by photography: fields of Union and Confederate soldiers, caught in the trap of time, in black and white.

  I.

  EVEN AS THE Union was falling apart, Americans indulged in the fantasy that technology could hold it together, and, not only that, but that technology could bind all of the peoples of the world to one another. On September 1, 1858, New Yorkers held a parade celebrating the completion of a cable stretching across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. “SEVERED JULY 4, 1776,” read one banner, “UNITED AUGUST 12, 1858.” Fifteen thousand people marched from the Battery through the city, past Barnum’s Museum, where the flags of Britain and the United States were tied together by telegraph wire. “Never before was anything purely human done in the history of the world and the race which stood for One-ness as the successful laying of the Atlantic Cable does!” cried one speaker. “We have hitherto lived in a he
misphere, and we now live on a globe—live not by halves, but as a whole—not as scattered members, but as the connected limbs of one organic body, the great common humanity.”7

  Morse had long predicted that the telegraph would usher in an age of world peace. “I trust that one of its effects will be to bind man to his fellow-man in such bonds of amity as to put an end to war,” he insisted.8 War was a failure of technology, Morse argued, a shortcoming of communication that could be remedied by way of a machine. Endowing his work with the grandest of purposes, he believed that the laying of telegraph wires across the American continent would bind the nation together into one people, and that the laying of cable across the ocean would bind Europe to the Americas, ushering in the dawn of an age of global harmony. And the telegraph did introduce radical changes into American life. By 1858, Chicago’s Board of Trade was posting grain prices from all over the continent. The nation was tied together by 50,000 miles of wire, 1,400 stations, and 10,000 telegraph operators.9 But war isn’t a failure of technology; it’s a failure of politics.

  In the summer of 1858, while New Yorkers were celebrating the laying of the Atlantic cable (a cable that, not long afterward, failed), the people of Illinois witnessed a different and more ancient kind of communication: debate. The debates staged that year between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas proved to be the greatest argument over the American experiment since the constitutional convention. Those debates didn’t avert the coming war between the states, but they illustrate, better than any other part of the historical record of a cloven time, the nature of the disagreement.

  Debate is to war what trial by jury is to trial by combat: a way to settle a dispute without coming to blows. The form and its rules had been established over centuries. They derived from rules used in the courts and in Parliament, and even from the rules of rhetoric used in the writing of poetry. Since the Middle Ages and the founding of the first universities, debate had been the foundation of a liberal arts education. (Etymologically and historically, the artes liberales are the arts acquired by people who are free, or liber.)10 In the eighteenth century, debate was understood as the foundation of civil society. In 1787, delegates to the constitutional convention had agreed to “to argue without asperity, and to endeavor to convince the judgment without hurting the feelings of each other.” Candidates for office debated face-to-face. With the expansion of the franchise, debating spread: beginning in the 1830s, debating classes were offered to ordinary citizens as a form of civic education. Debating societies popped up in cities and even the smallest of towns, where anyone who could vote was expected to know how to debate, although this meant, in turn, that anyone who couldn’t vote was expected not to debate. (Women, who couldn’t vote, were not allowed to debate in public, and when they did, it was considered scandalous. In 1837, when Angelina Grimké agreed to debate two men, the local newspaper refused to publish the results.)11 Still, that didn’t stop people who couldn’t vote from studying argument. Frederick Douglass, as a boy of twelve, and while still a slave, read the debates in a schoolbook called The Columbian Orator, which included a “Dialogue between a Master and Slave”:

  MASTER: You were a slave when I fairly purchased you.

  SLAVE: Did I give my consent to the purchase?

  MASTER: You had no consent to give. You had already lost the right of disposing of yourself.

  SLAVE: I had lost the power, but how the right? I was treacherously kidnapped in my own country. . . . What step in all this progress of violence and injustice can give a right?12

  Studying this debate, Douglass had first begun to ask himself these questions: “Why are some people slaves, and others masters? Was there ever a time when this was not so?”13 Douglass escaped slavery, but he also defeated his bondage by argument.

  Banned in Congress under the gag rule, open debate about slavery nevertheless took place elsewhere—in 1855, in Connecticut, the southern aristocrat George Fitzhugh debated the abolitionist Wendell Phillips on the question of “The Failure of Free Society”—but it was uncommon.14 That made the debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas all the more remarkable.

  Lincoln and Douglas had given speeches back-to-back in 1854, during the Kansas-Nebraska crisis; but they’d never faced each other. In the spring and early summer of 1858, Lincoln, running for a U.S. Senate seat held by Douglas, had been following Douglas from campaign stop to campaign stop, listening to him speak and then speaking to the same crowd the next day, or even later on the same day, which gave Lincoln the last word but left him with a much smaller audience, since Democrats seldom stayed to listen to him. Lincoln’s supporters urged him to challenge Douglas: “Let him act the honorable part by agreeing to meet you in regular Debate, giving a fair opportunity to all to hear both sides.” On July 24, Lincoln wrote to his political rival, inviting him to debate: “Will it be agreeable to you and myself to divide time and address the same audiences?” Douglas, with some reluctance, agreed.15

  Some twelve thousand people showed up for their first debate, at two o’clock in the afternoon on August 21, in Ottawa, Illinois. There were no seats; the audience stood, without relief, for three hours. The two men, standing together on a stage, looked as though they might have been displayed together in Barnum’s Museum: Lincoln, six foot four and as straight as a tree, Douglas, a full foot shorter, his whole body clenched as tight as a fist. They’d agreed to strict rules: the first speaker would speak for an hour and the second for an hour and a half, whereupon the first speaker would offer a thirty-minute rebuttal.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Douglas began, “we are present here to-day for the purpose of having a joint discussion, as the representatives of the two great political parties of the State and Union, upon the principles in issue between those parties.”

  The audience was as rapt as it was rowdy. “Hit him again!” the crowd cried, when Douglas scored a point against Lincoln. Douglas reminded his audience of Lincoln’s opposition to the Dred Scott decision.

  “I ask you, are you in favor of conferring upon the negro the rights and privileges of citizenship?” he called to the crowd.

  “No, no!” came the reply.

  The debate turned on the interpretation offered by the two men, and by their parties, of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Douglas argued that Lincoln misread the Declaration of Independence if he believed that it applied to blacks as well as whites. “This Government was made by our fathers on the white basis,” Douglas said. “It was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.” As to the institution of slavery, that was up to the electorate, Douglas insisted: “I care more for the great principle of self-government, the right of the people to rule, than I do for all the negroes of Christendom.”

  Douglas charged Lincoln with being a zealot. This Lincoln denied. “I will say here, that I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists,” he said when he took the stage. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He contested Douglas’s assertion that he, Lincoln, believed in the equality of the races. “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races,” he said. “But I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The crowd cheered. “I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man,” he added, to another round of cheers.

  Douglas argued that claiming that blacks were included in the Declaration of Independence amounted to slandering Jefferson. Lincoln replied (calling Douglas, a former Illinois Supreme Court justice, “Judge”):

  I believe the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro w
as not included in the Declaration of Independence; I think I may defy Judge Douglas to show that he ever said so, that Washington ever said so, that any President ever said so, that any member of Congress ever said so, or that any living man upon the whole earth ever said so, until the necessities of the present policy of the Democratic party, in regard to slavery, had to invent that affirmation.

  As to which of the two men could speak best for Jefferson, Lincoln laid down a gauntlet:

  And I will remind Judge Douglas and this audience, that while Mr. Jefferson was the owner of slaves, as undoubtedly he was, in speaking upon this very subject, he used the strong language that “he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just”; and I will offer the highest premium in my power to Judge Douglas if he will show that he, in all his life, ever uttered a sentiment at all akin to that of Jefferson.

  “Hit him again!” the crowd continued to holler at each of the next debates, as if watching a political prize fight, boxers in the ring, taunting, jabbing, dodging. Newspapers printed full transcriptions, including all the interjections from the crowd, the bloodthirsty calls, the thunderous applause. Lincoln began keeping a scrapbook of pasted newspaper columns. An inveterate archivist, he also knew that one day he’d make use of that record.

  Their final debate took place in Alton, Illinois, on October 15, just weeks before the election. Not for the first time and not for the last, Lincoln bemoaned the suppression of plain talk about slavery, the endless avoidance of the question at hand. “You must not say anything about it in the free states because it is not here. You must not say anything about it in the slave states because it is there. You must not say anything about it in the pulpit, because that is religion and has nothing to do with it. You must not say anything about it in politics because that will disturb the security of ‘my place.’ There is no place to talk about it as being a wrong, although you say yourself it is a wrong.” And, as to the wrongness of slavery, he called it tyranny, and the idea of its naturalness as much an error as a belief in the divine right of kings. The question wasn’t sectionalism or nationalism, the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. The question was right against wrong. “That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent,” Lincoln said.16