By the midterm elections of 1858, then, both sides had evolved convenient conspiracy explanations for the worsening sectional crisis. The slave power controlled the presidency and the courts, rigged elections, prohibited open debate, and stacked the Kansas constitutional application according to abolitionists. As Southerners saw it, radical abolitionists and Black Republicans now dominated Congress, used immigration to pack the territories, and connived to use popular sovereignty as a code phrase for free-soil and abolitionism. Attempting to legislate from the bench, Taney’s Court had only made matters worse by bringing the entire judiciary system under the suspicion of the conspiracy theorists.
Simmering Kansas Boils Over
The turmoil in Kansas reached new proportions. When the June 1857 Kansas election took place, only 2,200 out of 9,000 registered voters showed up to vote on the most controversial and well-known legislation of the decade, so there could be no denying that the free-soil forces sat out the process. Fraud was rampant: in one county no election was held at all, and in another only 30 out of 1,060 people voted. In Johnson County, Kansas governor Robert J. Walker found that 1,500 “voters” were names directly copied from a Cincinnati directory.115 Free-soilers warned that the proslavery forces controlled the counting and that their own ballots would be discarded or ignored. As a result, Free-Soilers intended to boycott the election. An outcome ensuring dominance by the proslavery forces was thus ensured.
Meanwhile, Buchanan had sent Walker, a Mississippi Democrat and Polk cabinet official, to serve as the territorial governor of Kansas. Walker announced his intention to see that the “majority of the people of Kansas…fairly and freely decided [the slavery] question for themselves by a direct vote on the adoption of the [state] Constitution, excluding all fraud or violence.”116 By appointing Walker, Buchanan hoped to accomplish two goals in one fell swoop—ending the Kansas controversy and making the state another Democratic stronghold to offset Oregon and Minnesota, whose admission to the Union was imminent (and became official in 1859). On the day Walker departed for Lecompton, Kansas, however, the Democratic house newspaper fully endorsed the Lecompton Constitution. Walker arrived too late to shape the Kansas constitutional convention of the radical proslavery delegates.
Douglas, his fidelity to popular sovereignty as strong as ever, condemned the Lecompton Constitution and urged a free and fair vote. His appeals came as a shock to Democrats and a blessing to Republicans, who internally discussed the possibility of making him their presidential candidate in 1860. Perceived as Buchanan’s man in the Senate, Douglas and Buchanan engaged in a fierce argument in December 1857, which culminated in Buchanan’s reminding the senator he would be “crushed” if he “differed from the administration” the way Andrew Jackson had excommunicated rebel Democrats in his day. Douglas, sensing the final rift had arrived, curtly told Buchanan, “General Jackson is dead.”117
Buchanan knew he faced a dilemma.118 He had supported the territorial process in Kansas as legitimate and had defended the Lecompton Constitution. To suddenly repudiate it would destroy his Southern base: the large majority of his electoral vote. If he read the Southern newspapers, he knew he was already in trouble there. The Charleston Mercury had suggested that Buchanan and Walker go to hell together, and other publications were even less generous. An even more ominous editorial appeared in the New Orleans Picayune, warning that the states of Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and “perhaps others” would hold secession conventions if Congress did not approve the Lecompton Constitution.119 No matter how the advocates of the Lecompton Constitution framed it, however, it still came down to a relative handful of proslavery delegates determining that Kansas could have a constitution with slavery, no matter what “choice” the voters on the referendum made. When the free-soil population boycotted the vote, Lecompton was the constitution.
The Kansas Territorial Legislature, on the other hand, was already dominated by the free-soil forces. It wasted no time calling for another referendum on Lecompton, and that election, without the fraud, produced a decisive vote against the proslavery constitution. Now Kansas had popular sovereignty speaking against slavery from Topeka and the proslavery forces legitimizing it from Lecompton.
Buchanan sank further into the quicksand in which he had placed himself. Committed to the Lecompton Constitution, yet anxious to avoid deepening the rift, he worked strenuously for the free-state congressmen to accept the Lecompton Constitution. When the Senate and House deadlocked, Democrat William English of Indiana offered a settlement. As part of the original constitution proposal, Kansas was to receive 23 million acres of federal land, but the antislavery forces had whittled that down to 4 million. English sought to attach the reduced land grant to a free constitution, or bribe the Kansans with the 23 million for accepting Lecompton. There was a stick along with this carrot: if Kansas did not accept the proposal, it would have to wait until its population reached ninety thousand to apply for statehood again.
Kansas voters shocked Buchanan and the South by rejecting the English bill’s land grant by a seven-to-one margin and accepting as punishment territorial status until 1861. It was a crushing defeat for the slavery forces. When the Kansas episode ended, the South could look back at a decade and a half of political maneuvers, compromises, threats, intrigue, and bribes with the sobering knowledge that it had not added a single inch of new slave territory to its core of states and in the process had alienated millions of Americans who previously were ambivalent about slavery, literally creating thousands of abolitionists. Southern attempts to spread slavery killed the Whig Party, divided and weakened the Democrats, and sparked the rise of the Republicans, whose major objective was a halt to the spread of slavery in the territories. The only thing the South had not yet done was to create a demon that would unite the slave states in one final, futile act. After 1858 the South had its demon.
A New Hope
For those who contend they want certain institutions—schools, government, and so on—free of values or value neutral, the journey of Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas in the 1850s is instructive. Douglas emerged as the South’s hero. His role in the Compromise of 1850 convinced many Southerners that he had what it took to be president, truly a “Northern man of Southern principles.” But “the Judge” (as Lincoln often called him) had his own principles, neither purely Southern nor Northern. Rather, in 1858, Douglas stood where he had in 1850: for popular sovereignty. In claiming that he was not “personally in favor” of slavery—that it ought to be up to the people of a state to decide—Douglas held the ultimate value-neutral position. In fact such a position has its own value, just as Abraham Lincoln would show. Not to call evil, evil, is to call it good.
Douglas’s stance derived from a Madisonian notion that local self-government best resolved difficult issues and epitomized democracy. He supported the free-soil majority in Kansas against the Lecompton proslavery forces, and in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, he attacked the bench’s abuse of power and infringement on popular sovereignty.120 Yet consistency did not impress Southern slave owners if it came at the expense of slavery, for which there could be no middle ground. Seeking the presidency, though, also positioned Douglas to regain control of the Democratic Party for the North and to wrest it from the slave power.
Whatever Douglas’s aspirations for higher office or party dominance, he first had to retain his Illinois senate seat in the election of 1858. Illinois Republicans realized that Douglas’s popular sovereignty position might appear antislavery to Northern ears, and wisely concluded they had to run a candidate who could differentiate Douglas’s value-free approach to slavery from their own. In that sense, Lincoln was the perfect antithesis to Douglas.
The details of Abraham Lincoln’s life are, or at least used to be, well known to American schoolchildren. Born on February 12, 1809, in a Kentucky log cabin, Lincoln’s family was poor, even by the standards of the day. His father, Thomas, took the family to Indiana, and shortly thereafter Lincoln�
��s mother died. By that time he had learned to read and continued to educate himself, reading Robinson Crusoe, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Franklin’s Autobiography, and law books when he could get them. He memorized the Illinois Statutes. One apocryphal story had it that Lincoln read while plowing, allowing the mules or oxen to do the work and turning the page at the end of each row. Lincoln took reading seriously, making mental notes of the literary style, syncopation, and rhythm. Though often portrayed as a Deist, Lincoln read the Bible as studiously as he had the classics. His speeches resound with scriptural metaphors and biblical phrases, rightly applied, revealing he fully understood the context.
Put to work early by his father, Lincoln labored with his hands on a variety of jobs, including working on flatboats that took him down the Mississippi in 1828. The family moved again, to Illinois in 1830, where the young man worked as a mill manager near Springfield. Tall (six feet four inches) and lanky (he later belonged to a group of Whig legislators over six feet tall—the “long nine”), Lincoln had great stamina and surprising strength, and just as he had learned from literature, he applied his work experiences to his political reasoning. As a young man, he had impressed others with his character, sincerity, and humor, despite a recurring bout of what he called the hypos, or hypochondria. Some suspect he was a manic depressive; he once wrote an essay on suicide and quipped that when he was alone, his depression overcame him so badly that “I never dare carry a penknife.”121
Elected captain of a volunteer company in the Black Hawk War (where his only wound came from mosquitoes), Lincoln elicited a natural respect from those around him. While teaching himself the law, he opened a small store that failed when a partner took off with all the cash and left Lincoln stuck with more than a thousand dollars in obligations. He made good on them all, working odd jobs, including his famous rail splitting. He was the town postmaster and then, in 1834, was elected to the state assembly, where he rose to prominence in the Whig Party.
Lincoln obtained his law license in 1836, whereupon he handled a number of bank cases, as well as work for railroads, insurance companies, and a gas-light business. Developing a solid practice, he (and the firm) benefited greatly from a partnership with William Herndon, who later became his biographer. The scope and variety of cases handled by this self-taught attorney was impressive; delving into admiralty law, corporate law, constitutional law, and criminal law, Lincoln practiced before every type of court in Illinois.
He also worked at politics as an active Whig, casting his first political vote for Clay. “My politics can be briefly stated,” he said in the 1830s: “I am in favor of the internal improvement system, and a high protective tariff.”122 Winning a seat in Congress in 1847, his entire campaign expenditure was seventy-five cents for a single barrel of cider. Lincoln soon lost support with his “Spot Resolution,” but he campaigned for Taylor in 1848. He hoped to receive a patronage position as commissioner of the General Land Office, and when he did not, Lincoln retired to his private law practice, convinced his political career was over.
If Lincoln doubted himself, his wife, Mary Todd, never did. She announced to her friends, “Mr. Lincoln is to be president of the United States some day. If I had not thought so, I would not have married him, for you can see he is not pretty.”123 Indeed, Abraham Lincoln was hardly easy on the eye, all angles and sharp edges. Yet observers—some of whom barely knew him—frequently remarked on his commanding presence. Despite a high, almost screechy voice, Lincoln’s words carried tremendous weight because they were always well considered before uttered. It is one of the ironies of American history that, had Lincoln lived in the age of television, his personal appearance and speech would have doomed him in politics.
Lincoln was homely, but Mary Todd was downright sour looking, which perhaps contributed to his having left her, literally, standing at the altar one time. Lincoln claimed an illness; his partner Willie Herndon believed that he did not love Mary, but had made a promise and had to keep it. Herndon, however, is hardly a credible witness. He strongly disliked Mary—and the feeling was mutual—and it was Herndon who fabricated the myth of Ann Rutledge as Lincoln’s only true love.124 What we do know is that when Lincoln finally did wed Mary, in 1842, he called it a “profound wonder.” Mary wrote in the loftiest terms of her mate, who exceeded her expectations as “lover—husband—father, all!”125 She prodded her husband’s ambitions, and not so gently. “Mr. Douglas,” she said, “is a very little, little giant compared to my tall Kentuckian, and intellectually my husband towers above Douglas as he does physically.”126 To the disorganized, even chaotic Lincoln, Mary brought order and direction. She also gave him four sons, only one of whom lived to maturity. Robert, the first son (known as the Prince of Rails), lived until 1926; Eddie died in 1850; Willie died in 1862; and Tad died in 1871 at age eighteen. The deaths of Eddie and Willie fed Lincoln’s depression; yet, interestingly, he framed the losses in religious terms. God “called him home,” he said of Willie. Mary saw things differently, having lived in constant terror of tragedy. When Robert accidentally swallowed lime, she became hysterical, screaming, “Bobby will die! Bobby will die!”127 She usually took out her phobias in massive shopping sprees, returning goods that did not suit her, followed by periods of obsessive miserliness. If spending money did not roust her from the doldrums, Mary lapsed into real (or feigned) migraine headaches. Lincoln dutifully cared for his “Molly” and even finally helped her recover from the migraines.
Perhaps no aspect of Abraham Lincoln’s character is less understood than his religion. Like many young men, he was a skeptic early in life. He viewed the “good old maxims of the Bible” as little different from the Farmer’s Almanac, admitting in the 1830s, “I’ve never been to church yet, nor probably shall not [sic] be soon.”128 An oft-misunderstood phrase Lincoln uttered—purportedly that he was a Deist—was, in fact, “Because I belonged to no church, [I] was suspected of being a deist,” an absurdity he put on the same plane as having “talked about fighting a duel.”129 Quite the contrary, to dispute an 1846 handbill that he was “an open scoffer at Christianity,” Lincoln produced his own handbill in which he admitted, “I am not a member of any Christian Church…but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures.”130 Some Lincoln biographers dismiss this as campaign propaganda, but Lincoln’s religious journey accelerated the closer he got to greatness (or, perhaps, impelled him to it).
A profound change in Lincoln’s faith occurred from 1858 to 1863. Mary had brought home a Bible, which Lincoln read, and after the death of Eddie at age four, he attended a Presbyterian church intermittently, paying rent for a pew for his wife. He never joined the church, but by 1851 was already preaching, in letters, to his own father: “Remember to call upon, and confide in, our great, and good, and merciful Maker…. He will not forget the dying man, who puts his trust in Him.”131 After 1860 Lincoln himself told associates of a “change,” a “true religious experience,” a “change of heart.” Toward what? Lincoln prayed every day and read his Bible regularly. He followed Micah 6:8 to a tee, “…to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.” When a lifelong friend, Joshua Speed, commented that he remained skeptical of matters of faith, Lincoln said, “You are wrong, Speed; take all of this book [the Bible] upon reason you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier and better man.”132
What kept Lincoln from formal church association was what he viewed as overly long and complicated confessions of faith, or what might be called denominationalism. “When any church will inscribe over its altar the Saviour’s condensed statement of law and gospel, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all they mind, and love thy neighbor as thyself,’ that church I will join with all my heart.”133 In fact, he thought it beneficial that numerous denominations and sects existed, telling a friend, “The more sects…the better. They are all getting somebody [into heaven] that others would not.”134 To Lincoln, an important separation
of politics and religion existed during the campaign: “I will not discuss the character and religion of Jesus Christ on the stump! That is no place for it.”135 It was Gettysburg, however, where Lincoln was born again. His own pastor, Phineas Gurley, noted the change after Gettysburg: With “tears in his eyes,” Gurley wrote, Lincoln “now believed his heart was changed and that he loved the Saviour, and, if he was not deceived in himself, it was his intention soon to make a profession of religion.”136 Did he actually make such a profession? An Illinois clergyman asked Lincoln before his death, “Do you love Jesus?” to which Lincoln gave a straight answer:
When I left Springfield I asked the people to pray for me. I was not a Christian. When I buried my son, the severest trial of my life, I was not a Christian. But when I went to Gettysburg and saw the graves of thousands of our soldiers, I then and there consecrated myself to Christ. Yes, I love Jesus.137
During the war Lincoln saw God’s hand in numerous events, although in 1862 he wrote, “The will of God prevails. In great contests, each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for, or against, the same thing at the same time.”138 Significantly, at Gettysburg, he again referred to God’s own purposes, noting that the nation was “dedicated to the proposition” that “all men are created equal.” Would God validate that proposition? It remained, in Lincoln’s spirit, to be determined.139 He puzzled why God allowed the war to continue, which reflected his fatalistic side that discounted human will in perpetuating evil. Lincoln called numerous days of national prayer—an unusual step for a supposed unbeliever. The evidence that Lincoln was a spiritual, even devout, man, and toward the end of his life a committed Christian, is abundant.
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