Abraham Lincoln

by Stephen B. Oates

  Now why is this? Lincoln asked southern whites. Is it not because your human sympathy tells you “that the poor negro has some natural right to himself—that those who deny it, and make mere merchandise of him, deserve kickings, contempt and death?” He beseeched southerners not to deny their true feelings about slavery. He beseeched them to regard bondage strictly as a necessity, as the Fathers had so regarded it, and to contain its spread as those “old-time men” had done.

  “Fellow countrymen—Americans south, as well as north,” Lincoln cried, let us prevent the spirit of Kansas-Nebraska from displacing the spirit of the Revolution. “Let us turn slavery from its claims of ‘moral right,’ back upon its existing legal rights…and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south—let all Americans—let all lovers of liberty everywhere—join the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.”

  But Lincoln’s entreaties fell on deaf ears in Dixie. Across the region, in an age of revolutionary agitation, proslavery apologists disparaged the Declaration of Independence and the idea of human equality as “a self-evident lie.” They trumpeted Negro bondage as a great and glorious good, sanctioned by the Bible and ordained by God throughout eternity. They contended that Negroes were subhuman and belonged in chains as naturally as cattle in pens. Cranky George Fitzhugh even exhorted southerners to destroy free society (or capitalism), revive the halcyon days of feudalism, and enslave all workers—white as well as black. And he ranted at abolitionists for allying themselves with the “uncouth, dirty, naked little cannibals of Africa.” Because “free society” was “unnatural, immoral, unchristian,” the proslavery argument went, “it must fall and give way to a slave society—a system as old as the world.” For “two opposite and conflicting forms of society cannot, among civilized men, co-exist and endure. The one must give way and cease to exist—the other become universal.” “Free society!” shrieked one Alabama paper. “We sicken of the name! What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moonstruck theorists?”

  Such pronouncements made Lincoln grimace. They convinced him that a contemptible breed of men had taken over in the South and “debauched” the public mind there about the moral right of slavery. “The slave-breeders and slave-traders, are a small, odious and detested class, among you,” he wrote a southern friend; “and yet in politics, they dictate the course of all of you, and are as completely your masters, as you are the masters of your own negroes.” But to Lincoln’s despair, proslavery, anti-northern declarations continued to roar out of Dixie. Worse still, in 1857 the pro-southern Supreme Court handed down the infamous Dred Scott decision, which sent Republicans reeling. In it, the court decreed that Negroes were inferior beings who were not and never had been United States citizens and that the Constitution and Declaration were whites-only charters that did not apply to them. What was more, the court ruled that neither Congress nor a territorial government could outlaw slavery in the national lands, because that would violate southern property rights as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. As Lincoln and other Republicans observed, the net effect of the decision was to legalize slavery in all federal territories from Canada to Mexico.

  The ominous train of events from Kansas-Nebraska to Dred Scott shook Lincoln to his foundations. By 1858, he and a lot of other Republicans began to see a treacherous conspiracy at work in the United States—a plot on the part of southern leaders and their northern Democratic allies to reverse the whole course of modern history, to halt the progress of human liberty as other reactionary forces in the world were attempting to do. As Lincoln and his colleagues saw it, the first stage of the conspiracy was to betray the Fathers and expand bondage across the West, ringing the free North with satellite slave states. At the same time, proslavery theorists were out to discredit the Declaration and replace the idea of the equality of men with the principles of inequality and human servitude. The next step, Lincoln feared, would be to nationalize slavery. The Supreme Court would hand down another decision, one declaring that states could not exclude slavery either because that too violated the Fifth Amendment. Then the institution would sweep into Illinois, sweep into Indiana and Ohio, sweep into Pennsylvania and New York, sweep into Massachusetts and New England, sweep all over the northern states, until at last slavery would be nationalized and America would end up a slave house. At that, as Fitzhugh advocated, the conspirators would enslave all American workers regardless of color. The northern free-labor system would be expunged, the Declaration of Independence overthrown, self-government abolished, and the conspirators would restore despotism with class rule, an entrenched aristocracy, and serfdom. All the work since the Revolution of 1776 would be annihilated. The world’s best hope—America’s experiment in popular government—would be destroyed, and humankind would spin backward into feudalism.

  For Lincoln, the Union had reached a monumental crisis in its history. If the future of a free America was to be saved, it was imperative that Lincoln and his party block the conspiracy in its initial stage—the expansion of slavery onto the frontier. To do that, they demanded that slavery be excluded from the territories by federal law and once again placed on the road to its ultimate doom. In 1858 Lincoln set out after Douglas’s Senate seat, inveighing against the Little Giant for his part in the proslavery plot and warning Illinois—and all northerners beyond—that only the Republicans could save their free-labor system and their free government.

  Now Lincoln openly and fiercely declaimed his antislavery sentiments. He hated the institution. Slavery was “a vast moral evil” he could not but hate. He hated it because it degraded blacks and whites alike. He hated it because it violated America’s “central idea”—the idea of equality and the right to rise. He hated it because it was cruelly unjust to the Negro, prevented him from eating “the bread that his own hands have earned,” reduced him to “stripes, and unrewarded toils.” He hated slavery because it imperiled white Americans, too. For if one man could be enslaved because of the color of his skin, Lincoln realized, then any man could be enslaved because of skin color. Yet, while branding slavery an evil and doing all they could to contain it in Dixie, Lincoln and his Republican colleagues would not, legally could not, molest the institution in those states where it already existed.

  Douglas, fighting for his political life in free-soil Illinois, lashed back at Lincoln with unadulterated race baiting. Throughout the Great Debates of 1858, Douglas smeared Lincoln and his party as Black Republicans, as a gang of radical abolitionists out to liberate southern slaves and bring them stampeding into Illinois and the rest of the North, where they would take away white jobs and copulate with white daughters. Douglas had made such accusations before, but never to the extent that he did in 1858. Again and again, he accused Lincoln of desiring intermarriage and racial mongrelization.

  Lincoln did not want to discuss such matters. He complained bitterly that race was not the issue between him and Douglas. The issue was whether slavery would ultimately triumph or ultimately perish in the United States. But Douglas understood the depth of anti-Negro feeling in Illinois, and he hoped to whip Lincoln by playing on white racial fears. And so he kept warning white crowds: Do you want Negroes to flood into Illinois, cover the prairies with black settlements, and eat, sleep, and marry with white people? If you do, then vote for Lincoln and the “Black Republicans.” But I am against Negro citizenship, Douglas cried. I want citizenship for whites only. I believe that this government “was made by the white man, for the benefit of the white man, to be administered by white men.” “I do not question Mr. Lincoln’s conscientious belief that the negro was made his equal, and hence his brother”—great laughter at that—“but for my own part, I do not regard the negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother or any kin to me whate
ver.”

  Such allegations forced Lincoln to take a stand. It was either that or risk political ruin in white-supremacist Illinois. What he said carefully endorsed the kind of racial discrimination then enforced by Illinois law. Had he not done so, as one scholar has reminded us, “the Lincoln of history simply would not exist.” At Charleston, Illinois, Lincoln conceded that he was not and never had been in favor “of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.” There was, he said at Ottawa, “a physical difference” between the black and white races that would “probably” always prevent them from living together in perfect equality. And Lincoln wanted the white race to have the superior position so long as there must be a difference. Therefore any attempt to twist his views into a call for perfect political and social equality was “but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse.”

  We shall probably never know whether Lincoln was voicing his own personal convictions in speeches like these, given in the heat of political debate before all-white audiences. To be sure, this is one of the most hotly disputed areas of Lincoln scholarship, with several white historians siding with Bennett and Harding and labeling Lincoln a white supremacist. Certainly in the 1850s he had ambivalent feelings about what specific social and political rights black people ought to enjoy. But so did a good many principled and dedicated white abolitionists. When compared to the white-supremacist, anti-Negro attitudes of Douglas and most other whites of that time, Lincoln was an enlightened man in the matter of race relations. In those same 1858 debates, he consistently argued that if Negroes were not the equal of Lincoln and Douglas in moral or intellectual endowment, they were equal to Lincoln, Douglas, and “every living man” in their right to liberty, equality of opportunity, and the fruits of their own labor. (Later he insisted that it was bondage that had “clouded” the slaves’ intellects and that Negroes were capable of thinking like whites.) Moreover, Lincoln rejected “the counterfeit argument” that just because he did not want a black woman for a slave, he therefore wanted her for a wife. He could just let her alone. He could let her alone so that she could also enjoy her freedom and “her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands.”

  While Douglas (like the Supreme Court) emphatically denied that the Declaration of Independence applied to Negroes, Lincoln’s position held that it did. The Negro was a man; Lincoln’s “ancient faith” taught him that all men were created equal; therefore there could be no “moral right” in one man’s enslaving another. As historian Richard N. Current has said, Lincoln left unstated the conclusion of his logic: that there was no moral right in one man’s making a political and social inferior of another on grounds of race.

  In the debate at Alton, Lincoln took his reasoning even further as far as the Declaration was concerned. “I think the authors of that notable document intended to include all men,” Lincoln said, “but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity.” What they meant was that all men, black as well as white, were equal in their inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When they drafted the Declaration, they realized that blacks did not then have full equality with whites, and that whites did not at that time have full equality with one another. The Founding Fathers did not pretend to describe America as it was in 1776. “They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society,” Lincoln said, “which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”

  By stressing “to all people of all colors everywhere,” Lincoln reminded his countrymen that the American experiment remained an inspiration for the entire world. But he reminded them, too, as historian Current has noted, that “it could be an effective inspiration for others only to the extent that Americans lived up to it themselves.” No wonder Lincoln said he hated Douglas’s indifference toward slavery expansion. “I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself,” Lincoln explained at Ottawa. “I hate it because it…enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.”

  Exasperated with Douglas and white Negrophobia in general, Lincoln begged American whites “to discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race as being inferior,” begged them to unite as one people and defend the ideal of the Declaration of Independence and its promise of liberty and equality for all humankind.

  Lincoln’s remarks, however, aggravated a lot of common people in Illinois; they voted for Douglas candidates in 1858 and helped return Lincoln’s rival to the Senate.* The historical Lincoln even lost Springfield and Sangamon County, because his controversial views on slavery and the Negro, as one historian has argued, were too advanced for his neighbors. If we are to understand Lincoln’s attitudes on slavery and race, it is imperative that we weigh them in proper historical context. We can learn nothing, nothing at all, if his words are lifted from their historical setting and judged only by the standards of another time.

  3: MY DISSATISFIED FELLOW COUNTRYMEN

  We return to why Lincoln still ranks as the best President Americans have had. In large measure, it was because of his sense of history and his ability to act on that. It was because he saw the slavery problem and the future of his country in a world dimension. He saw that what menaced Americans of his day affected the destinies of people everywhere. On the stump in Illinois, Ohio, and New York, he continued to warn free men of the heinous efforts to make bondage permanent in the United States. He would not let up on his countrymen about the moral issue of slavery. “If slavery is not wrong,” he warned them, “nothing is wrong.” He would not let up on “the miners and sappers” of returning despotism, as he called proslavery spokesmen and their northern allies, and on the historical crisis threatening his generation, a crisis that would determine whether slavery or freedom—despotism or popular government, the past or the future—would triumph in his impassioned time.

  Yet in the late 1850s Lincoln’s goal was not the presidency. One of the more popular misconceptions about him was that he had his eye on the White House even in the Great Debates. Yet there is not a scintilla of reliable evidence to support this. What Lincoln wanted, and wanted fervently, was a seat in the national Senate, because in the antebellum years it was the Senate that featured the great orators of the day—men like Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and especially Lincoln’s idol, Henry Clay. The presidency, by contrast, was a mundane administrative job that offered little to a man of Lincoln’s oratorical abilities. No, he preferred the national Senate, because in that august body he could defend the containment of slavery, defend free labor, defend popular government and the American experiment, in speeches that would be widely read and preserved for posterity in the Congressional Globe. As a loyal Republican, he would take any respectable national office that would simultaneously “advance our cause” and give him personal fulfillment. But throughout 1859 and early 1860, he kept his eye on Douglas’s Senate seat in 1864.

  So it was that Lincoln kept assailing Douglas for his role in the proslavery plot Lincoln saw at work in his country. And he reminded northerners of the Republican vision of a future America—a better America than now existed—an America of thriving farms and bustling villages and towns, an America of self-made agrarians, merchants, and shopkeepers who set examples and provided jobs for self-improving free workers—an America, however, that would never come about if slavery, class rule, and despotism triumphed in Lincoln’s time.

  Meanwhile, he kept trying to reach the southern people, to reason with them about slavery and the future of the Union, to woo them away from th
eir reactionary leaders. He observed how ironic it was that the Democrats had abandoned their Jeffersonian heritage and that the Republicans—supposedly the descendants of the old Federalists—now defended Jeffersonian ideals. He warned southerners that “This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves.”

  “I think Slavery is wrong, morally, and politically,” he told southern whites at Cincinnati in 1859, still speaking to them as though they were in his audience. “I desire that it should gradually terminate in the whole Union.” But “I understand you differ radically with me upon this proposition.” You believe that “Slavery is a good thing; that Slavery is right; that it ought to be extended and perpetuated in this Union.” But we Republicans not only disagree with you; we are going to “stand by our guns” and beat you in a fair election. Yet we will not hurt you. We will treat you as Washington, Jefferson, and Madison treated you, and will leave slavery alone where it already exists among you. “We mean to remember that you are as good as we are; that there is no difference between us other than the difference of circumstances. We mean to recognize and bear in mind always that you have as good hearts in your bosoms as other people, or as we claim to have, and treat you accordingly. We mean to marry your girls when we have a chance—the white ones I mean—[laughter] and I have the honor to inform you that I once did have a chance that way.”

  But he cautioned southerners about their threats to disrupt the Union should the Republicans win the government in 1860. How will disunion help you? Lincoln demanded. If you secede, you will no longer enjoy the protection of the Constitution, and we will no longer be forced to return your fugitive slaves. What will you do—build a wall between us? Make war on us? You are brave and gallant, “but man for man, you are not better than we are, and there are not so many of you as there are of us.” Because you are inferior in numbers, “you will make nothing by attempting to master us.”