That spiritual journey paralleled another road traveled by Lincoln. His path to political prominence, although perhaps cut in his early Whig partisan battles, was hewed and sanded by his famous contest with Stephen Douglas in 1858 for the Illinois Senate seat. Together the two men made almost two hundred speeches between July and November. The most famous, however, came at seven joint debates from August to October in each of the remaining seven congressional districts where the two had not yet spoken.
In sharp contrast to the content-free televised debates of the twentieth century, where candidates hope to merely avoid a fatal gaffe, political debates of the nineteenth century were festive affairs involving bands, food, and plenty of whiskey. Farmers, merchants, laborers, and families came from miles away to listen to the candidates. It was, after all, a form of entertainment: the men would challenge each other, perhaps even insult each other, but usually in a good-natured way that left them shaking hands at the end of the day. Or, as David Morris Potter put it, “The values which united them as Americans were more important than those which divided them as candidates.”140 By agreeing to disagree, Lincoln and Douglas reflected a nineteenth-century view of tolerance that had no connection to the twentieth-century understanding of indifference to values—quite the contrary, the men had strong convictions that, they agreed, could only be solved by the voters.
To prepare for his debates with Douglas, Lincoln honed his already sharp logic to a fine point. Challenging notions that slavery was “good” for the blacks, Lincoln proposed sarcastically that the beneficial institution should therefore be extended to whites as well. Then, at the state convention at Springfield, Lincoln gave what is generally agreed as one of the greatest political speeches in American history:
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…. That agitation has not ceased but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis has been reached and passed. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect that it will cease to be divided.141
He continued to argue that the opponents of slavery would stop its spread, or that the proponents would make it lawful in all states.
Sufficiently determined to make slavery the issue, Lincoln engaged Douglas in the pivotal debates, where he boxed in the Little Giant over the issue of popular sovereignty on the one hand and the Dred Scott decision on the other. Douglas claimed to support both. How was that possible, Lincoln asked, if the Supreme Court said that neither the people nor Congress could exclude slavery, yet Douglas hailed popular sovereignty as letting the people choose? Again, contrary to mythology, Lincoln had not raised an issue Douglas had never considered. As early as 1857, Douglas, noting the paradox, produced an answer: “These regulations…must necessarily depend entirely upon the will and wishes of the people of the territory, as they can only be prescribed by the local legislatures.”142 What was novel was that Lincoln pounded the question in the debates, forcing Douglas to elaborate further than he already had: “Slavery cannot exist a day in the midst of an unfriendly people with unfriendly laws.”143
Without realizing it—and even before this view was immortalized as the Freeport Doctrine—Douglas had stepped into a viper’s pit, for he had raised the central fact that slavery was not a cultural or economic institution, but that it was a power relationship. In its most crystal form, slavery was political oppression. Yet the question was asked, and answered, at the debate at Freeport, where Lincoln maneuvered Douglas into a categorical statement: “It matters not what way the Supreme Court may…decide as to the abstract question of whether slavery may or may not go into a Territory…. The people have the lawful means to introduce it or exclude it as they please.”144
To fire eaters in the South, Douglas had just given the people of the territories a legitimate rationale for breaking the national law. He had cut the legs out from under the Dred Scott decision, and all but preached rebellion to nonslave owners in the South. Lincoln’s aim, however, was not to shatter Douglas’s Southern support, as it had no bearing whatsoever on the Senate race at hand. Rather, he had shifted the argument to a different philosophical plane, that of the morality of slavery. Douglas had gone on record as saying that it did not matter if slavery was right or wrong, or even if the Constitution (as interpreted by the Supreme Court) was right or wrong.
In short, the contest pitted republicanism against democracy in the purest sense of the definition, for Douglas advocated a majoritarian dictatorship in which those with the most votes won, regardless of right or wrong. Lincoln, on the other hand, defended a democratic republic, in which majority rule was proscribed within the rule of law.145 Douglas’s defenders have argued that he advocated only local sovereignty, and he thought local majorities “would be less prone to arbitrary action, executed without regard for local interests.”146 America’s federal system did emphasize local control, but never at the expense of “these truths,” which the American Revolutionaries held as “self-evident.”
“The real issue,” Lincoln said at the last debate, “is the sentiment on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong…. The Republican Party,” he said, “look[s] upon it as being a moral, social and political wrong…and one of the methods of treating it as a wrong is to make provision that it shall grow no larger…. That is the real issue.”147 A “moral, a social, and a political wrong,” he called slavery at Quincy in the October debate.148 Lincoln went further, declaring that the black man was “entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…. In the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”149
What made Lincoln stand out and gain credibility with the voters was that he embraced the moral and logical designation of slavery as an inherent evil, while distancing himself from the oddball notions of utopian perfectionists like the Grimké sisters or wild-eyed anti-Constitutionalists like William Lloyd Garrison. He achieved this by refocusing the nation on slavery’s assault on the concept of law in the Republic.
Lincoln had already touched on this critical point of respect for the law in his famous 1838 Lyceum Address, in which he attacked both abolitionist rioters and proslavery supporters. After predicting that America could never be conquered by a foreign power, Lincoln warned that the danger was from mob law. His remedy for such a threat was simple: “Let every American, every lover of liberty…swear by the blood of the Revolution never to violate the least particular laws of the country, and never to tolerate their violation by others.”150 Then came the immortal phrase,
Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap; let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in primers, spelling-books, and in almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in the legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation.151
It was inevitable that he would soon see the South as a threat to the foundations of the Republic through its blatant disregard for the law he held so precious.
Left-wing historians have attempted to portray Lincoln as a racist because he did not immediately embrace full voting and civil rights for blacks. He had once said, in response to a typical “Black Republican” comment from Stephen Douglas, that just because he did not want a black woman for a slave did not mean he wanted one for a wife. Such comments require consideration of not only their time, but their setting—a political campaign. Applying twenty-first-century values to earlier times, a historical flaw known as presentism, makes understanding the context of the day even mor
e difficult.
On racial issues, Lincoln led; he didn’t follow. With the exception of a few of the mid-nineteenth-century radicals who, it must be remembered, used antislavery as a means to destroy all social and family relationships of oppression—Lincoln marched far ahead of most of his fellow men when it came to race relations. By the end of the war, despite hostile opposition from his own advisers, he had insisted on paying black soldiers as much as white soldiers. Black editor Frederick Douglass, who had supported a “pure” abolitionist candidate in the early part of the 1860 election, eventually campaigned for Lincoln, and did so again in 1864. They met twice, and Douglass, although never fully satisfied, realized that Lincoln was a friend of his cause. Attending Lincoln’s second inaugural, Douglass was banned from the evening gala. When Lincoln heard about it, he issued orders to admit the editor and greeted him warmly: “Here comes my friend Douglass,” he said proudly.
By the 1850s, slavery had managed to corrupt almost everything it touched, ultimately even giving Abraham Lincoln pause—but only for a brief few years. He was, to his eternal credit, one politician who refused to shirk his duty and to call evil, evil. Virtually alone, Lincoln refused to hide behind obscure phrases, as Madison had, or to take high-minded public positions, as had Jefferson, while personally engaging in the sin.
Lincoln continually placed before the public a moral choice that it had to make. Although he spoke on tariffs, temperance, railroads, banks, and many other issues, Lincoln perceived that slavery alone produced a giant contradiction that transcended all sectional issues: that it put at risk both liberty and equality for all races, not just equality as is often presumed. He perceived politically that the time soon approached when a Northern man of Northern principles would be elected president, and through his appointment power could name federal judges to positions in the South where they would rule in favor of runaway slaves, uphold slaves’ rights to bring suits or to marry, and otherwise undermine the awful institution.
Lincoln, again nearly alone, understood that the central threat to the Republic posed by slavery lay in its corruption of the law. It is to that aspect of the impending crisis that we now turn.
The Crisis of Law and Order
Questions such as those posed by Lincoln in the debates, or similar thoughts, weighed heavily on the minds of an increasing number of Americans, North and South. In the short term, Douglas and the Buchanan Democrats in Illinois received enough votes to elect forty-six Democratic legislators, while the Republicans elected forty-one. Douglas retained his seat. In an ominous sign for the Democrats, though, the Republicans won the popular vote.
Looking back from a vantage point of more than 140 years, it is easy to see that Douglas’s victory was costly and that Lincoln’s defeat merely set the stage for his presidential race in 1860. At the time, however, the biggest losers appeared to be James Buchanan, whose support of Lecompton had been picked clean by Douglas’s Freeport Doctrine, and Abraham Lincoln, who now had gone ten years without holding an elected office. But the points made by Lincoln, and his repeated emphasis on slavery as a moral evil on the one hand, and the law as a moral good on the other, soon took hold of a growing share of public opinion. Equally important, Douglas had been forced into undercutting Dred Scott—had swung the pendulum back away from the South yet again. This swing, destroying as it did the guts of the Supreme Court’s ruling, took on a more ominous tone with John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry raid in October 1859.
John Brown illustrated exactly what Lincoln meant about respect for the laws, and the likelihood that violence would destroy the nation if Congress or the courts could not put slavery on a course to extinction. Lincoln, who had returned to his legal work before the Urbana circuit court, despised Brown’s vigilantism.152 Mob riots in St. Louis had inspired his Lyceum Address, and although Lincoln thought Brown courageous and thoughtful, he also thought him a criminal. Brown’s raid, Lincoln observed, represented a continuing breakdown in law and order spawned by the degrading of the law in the hands of the slave states. More disorder followed, but of a different type.
When the Thirty-fifth Congress met in December, only three days after Brown had dangled at the end of a rope, it split as sharply as the rest of the nation. The Capitol Building in which the legislators gathered, had nearly assumed its modern form after major construction and remodeling between 1851 and 1858. The physical edifice grew in strength and grandeur at the same time that the invisible organs and blood that gave it life—the political parties—seemed to crumble more each day. Democrats held the Senate, but in the House the Republicans had 109 votes and the Democrats 101. To confuse matters even more, more than 10 percent of the Democrats refused to support any proslavery Southerner. Then there were the 27 proslavery Whigs who could have held the balance, but wishing not to be cut out of any committees, treaded carefully. When the election for Speaker of the House took place, it became clear how far down the path of disunion the nation had wandered.
It took 119 votes to elect a Speaker, but once the procedures started, it became obvious that the Southern legislators did not want to elect a Speaker at all, but to shut down the federal government. Acrimony characterized floor speeches, and Senator James Hammond quipped that “the only persons who do not have a revolver and a knife are those who have two revolvers.”153 Republicans wanted John Sherman of Ohio, whereas the fragmented Democrats continued to self-destruct, splitting over John McClernand of Illinois and Thomas Bocock of Virginia. Ultimately, Sherman withdrew in favor of a man who had recently converted from the Whig Party to the Republican, William Pennington of New Jersey, widely viewed as a weak, if not incompetent, Speaker. He won just enough votes for election, thanks to a few Southerners who supported him because of his strong stand in favor of the Fugitive Slave Law eight years earlier. It would not be long until Congress either shut down entirely or operated with utterly maladroit, ineffectual, and politically disabled men at the top.
At the very moment when, to save slavery, the South should have mended fences with discordant Northern Democrats, many Southerners searched frantically for a litmus test that would force a vote on some aspect of slavery. This mandatory allegiance marked the final inversion of Van Buren’s grand scheme to keep slavery out of the national debate by creating a political party: now some in the Democratic Party combed legislative options as a means to bring some aspect of slavery—any aspect—up for a vote in order to legitimize it once and for all. Their quest led them to argue for reopening the African slave trade.154 Leading Southern thinkers analyzed the moral problem of a ban on the slave trade. “If it was right to buy slaves in Virginia and carry them to New Orleans, why is it not right to buy them in Africa and carry them here?” asked William Yancey.155 Lincoln might have reversed the question: if it is wrong to enslave free people in Africa and bring them to Virginia, why is it acceptable to keep slaves in either Virginia or New Orleans?
In fact, 90 percent of Southerners, according to Hammond’s estimate, disapproved of reopening the slave trade. Reasoning that slaves already here were content, and that the blacks in Africa were “cannibals,” according to one writer, provided a suitable psychological salve that prevented Southerners from dealing with the contradictions of their views.
Debates over reopening the slave trade intensified after the case of the Wanderer, a 114-foot vessel launched in 1857 from Long Island that had docked in Savannah, where it was purchased (through a secret deal in New York) by Southern cotton trader Charles A. L. Lamar. The new owner made suspicious changes to the ship’s structure before sailing to Southern ports. From Charleston, the Wanderer headed for Africa, where the captain purchased six hundred slaves and again turned back to the South, specifically, a spot near Jekyll Island, Georgia. By that time, only about three hundred of the slaves had survived the voyage and disease, and when rumors of the arrivals of new slaves circulated, a Savannah federal marshal started an investigation. Eventually, the ship was seized, and Lamar indicted and tried. During the court proceedings,
it became clear how thick the cloud of obfuscation and deceit was in Southern courts when it came to legal actions against slavery. Judges stalled, no one went to trial, and even the grand jurors who had found the indictments in the first place publicly recanted. And in the ultimate display of the corruption of the legal system in the South, Lamar was the only bidder on the appropriated Wanderer when it was put up for auction, announcing that the episode had given him good experience in the slave trade that he would apply in the future.156
Federal officials realized from the case of the Wanderer and a few other similar cases that no Southern court would ever enforce any federal antislavery laws, and that no law of the land would carry any weight in the South if it in any way diminished slaveholding. Lamar had lost most of his investment—more than two thirds of the slaves died either en route or after arrival—but the precedent of renewing the slave trade was significant. It was in this context that the Civil War began. Two sections of the nation, one committed to the perpetual continuation of slavery, one committed to its eventual extinction, could debate, compromise, legislate, and judge, but ultimately they disagreed over an issue that had such moral weight that one view or the other had to triumph. Their inability to find an amicable solution gives lie to modern notions that all serious differences can yield to better communication and diplomacy. But, of course, Lincoln had predicted exactly this result.
A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror Page 49
