Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
He had been studying the history of the nation, pondering the words and ideals of the Founding Fathers. He believed that the cornerstone of the American experiment in democracy was the Declaration of Independence, which states that "all men are created equal," and that all are entitled to "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Lincoln took this declaration personally. It meant that every poor man's son deserved the opportunities for advancement he had enjoyed. He felt that the Declaration of Independence expressed the highest political truths in history, and that blacks and whites alike were entitled to the rights it spelled out.
Although Lincoln was determined to oppose the spread of slavery, he admitted that he didn't know what to do about those states where slavery was already established, where it was protected by a complex web of state and national laws. "I have no prejudice against the Southern people," he said. "They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up....I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution."
By 1856, open warfare had broken out in Kansas. Antislavery Northerners and proslavery Southerners had both recruited settlers to move into the territory. "Bleeding Kansas" became a battleground of rigged elections, burnings, lynchings, and assassinations as the rival forces fought for control of the territory.
Violence reached even to the floor of Congress. After delivering an impassioned anti-Southern speech on "The Crime Against Kansas/' Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was beaten with a cane and almost killed by Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina.
Then the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision that shocked antislavery forces everywhere. In 1857, the court ruled in the Died Scott case that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in any of the nation's territories, because that would violate property rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Scott was a slave who sued for his freedom on grounds that his master had twice taken him onto free soil in the North. The court declared that as a black man, Scott was not and never had been a citizen. He was not entitled to the rights spelled out by the Declaration of Independence. Slaves were private property, the court said, and Congress could not pass laws depriving white citizens of "the right of property in a slave."
The Died Scott decision was a stunning setback for the opponents of slavery But it also helped mobilize antislavery opinion. Lincoln spent two weeks studying the decision so he could prepare an argument against it. Speaking in Springfield, he pointed to the "plain unmistakable language" of the Declaration of Independence. When its authors declared that all men have equal rights, "This they said, and this they meant," Lincoln argued. He urged respect for the courts, but he added: "We think the Died Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it has often overruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it overrule this."
By now, Lincoln had become a leading antislavery spokesman in Illinois. And he had switched his political allegiance. Since entering politics he had been a Whig, but the Whigs had not been able to unite in opposition to slavery, and now the party was splin tered and dying. Thousands of Whigs had gone over to the Republicans, a new party founded in 1854 to oppose the spread of slavery. Lincoln remained loyal to the Whigs until 1856, when he made up his mind to leave his "mummy of a party" and join the Republicans himself.
Charles Sumner, the ardent antislavery senator from Massachusetts.
A newspaper drawing shows Representative Preston Brooks attacking Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor.
He wanted to be in office again so he could influence public policy and this time he was after Stephen Douglas's Senate seat. The two men had been rivals for twenty years now. Douglas had risen to national prominence. He had been a judge of the Illinois Supreme Court, a congressman and a senator, an outstanding leader of the Democratic party. Lincoln's political career had floundered after his solitary term in Congress. "With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure," he remarked. "With him [Douglas] it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation and is not unknown, even, in foreign lands."
Lincoln had made an unsuccessful bid for the Senate as a Whig, in 1855. As a Republican he tried again, and in 1858 he won his new party's nomination. He launched his campaign on a sweltering lune evening with a rousing speech before twelve hundred shirt-sleeved delegates at the state Republican convention in Springfield.
Where was the nation headed? Lincoln asked them. More than four years had passed since the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, yet agitation over slavery had not ceased. "In my opinion," he sang out, "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.
"I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
"It will become all one thing, or all the other."
Lincoln warned that the opponents of slavery must stop its westward expansion. They must put slavery back on the "course of ultimate extinction." Otherwise slavery would spread its grip across the entire nation, "till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South."
There could be no fair fight between slavery and freedom, because one was morally wrong and the other morally right. Senator Douglas and the Democrats did not care about the advance of slavery, said Lincoln. The Republicans did care. The issue facing the country was the spread of slavery across the nation and into the future.
Some Republicans felt that the speech was too extreme, too much "ahead of its time." But most of the delegates in Lincoln's audience cheered him on. It was the strongest statement he had ever made about slavery. And it set the stage for his dramatic confrontation with Stephen Douglas.
The campaign between them during the summer of 1858 was to capture the attention of the entire nation. In July, Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of public debates. Douglas accepted the challenge, agreeing to seven three-hour debates in small Illinois towns.
At least twelve thousand people were on hand for the first debate at Ottawa on August 21. More than fifteen thousand showed up at Freeport a week later, even though it rained. At every stop, people came from miles around in wagons and buggies, on horseback and on foot, to see and hear the candidates and decide who was the better man. Town squares were festooned with banners and flags. Peddlers hawked Lincoln and Douglas badges, bands played, cannons roared, and marshals on horseback tried to maintain order among huge crowds as the candidates arrived in town.
Douglas traveled in high style, riding from town to town in a private railroad car, sipping brandy and smoking cigars, surrounded by friends and advisors and accompanied by his beautiful wife. Lincoln traveled more modestly as an ordinary passenger on the regular trains. Mary stayed home with Willie and Tad. She heard her husband speak only once, at the final debate in Alton.
With his opponent, Douglas, seated to his right, Lincoln addresses the crowd at Charleston, Illinois, on September 18, 1858. Lincoln and Douglas held seven debates, each lasting three hours. Painting by Robert Marshall Root.
Newspaper reporters trailed the candidates, taking down their speeches in shorthand and telegraphing stories to their newspapers back east. What the debators said in remote Illinois towns could be read the next day in Boston or Atlanta.
The striking contrast between Douglas and Lincoln—The Little Giant and Long Abe, as reporters called them—added color and excitement to the contests. Douglas was Lincoln's opposite in every way. Barely five feet four inches tall, he had a huge round head planted on massive shoulders, a booming voice, and an ag gressive, self-confident manner.
He appeared on the speakers' platform dressed "plantation style"—a navy coat and light trousers, a ruffled shirt, a wide-brimmed felt hat. Lincoln, tall and gangly, seemed plain in his rumpled suit, carrying his notes and speeches in an old carpetbag, sitting on the platform with his bony knees jutting into the air.
Left: Five feet four—Senator Stephen A. Douglas, nicknamed The Little Giant. His booming voice and confident manner made up for his small stature. Right: Six feet four—A. Lincoln, also known as Long Abe or The Tall Sucker. His eventual victory over Douglas earned him another nickname—The Giant Killer.
The give and take between them held audiences spellbound. Douglas defended his doctrine of popular sovereignty. The nation could endure half slave and half free, he argued. Each state had the right to decide for itself the question of slavery
Lincoln replied that popular sovereignty was just a smoke screen to allow the spread of slavery. The country had endured for decades half slave and half free only because most people believed that slavery would die out. Besides, slavery wasn't just a matter of states' rights. It was a moral issue that affected the whole country. "This government was instituted to secure the blessings of freedom," said Lincoln. "Slavery is an unqualified evil to the Negro, to the white man, to the soil, and to the State."
Douglas argued that the constitutional guarantee of equality applied only to white citizens, not to blacks. The Supreme Court had ruled that blacks weren't citizens at all. "I am opposed to Negro equality," said Douglas. "I believe this government was made by the white man for the white man to be administered by the white man."
Douglas pressed the issue of white supremacy. Was Lincoln in favor of Negro equality? Did he advocate a mixing of the races? In Illinois, where many voters opposed equal rights for blacks, these were touchy questions. Across the state, Douglas kept racebaiting Lincoln, warning white crowds that he was a "Black Republican" who wanted to liberate the slaves so they could stampede into Illinois to work, vote, and marry with white people.
Lincoln complained bitterly that Douglas was twisting and distorting the issue through a "fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse." The issue was not the social or political equality of the races, he protested defensively. He had never advocated that Negroes should be voters or office holders, or that they should marry whites. The real issue was whether slavery would spread and become permanent in America, or whether it would be confined to the South and allowed to die out gradually.
Lincoln appealed to the voters to "discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race as being inferior." And he added: "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. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man."
At the time, senators were elected by state legislatures, not by popular vote. When the returns came in, the Republicans had not won enough seats in the legislature to send Lincoln to the Senate. Douglas was reelected by a narrow margin. "The fight must go on," Lincoln told a friend. "The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one or even one hundred defeats." Even so, the defeat hurt. "I feel like the boy who stumped his toe," he said. "I am too big to cry and too badly hurt to laugh."
Lincoln lost the election, but the debates had catapulted him to national prominence. He continued to speak out on the issues in Illinois and throughout the North, and by 1860, he was being mentioned as a possible candidate for president. At first he doubted that he could win. "I must, in all candor, say I do not think myself fit for the presidency," he told an Illinois newspaper editor. But powerful Republican leaders felt that Lincoln had a good chance to carry the party banner to Victory. As they began to work for his nomination, he did not interfere. "The taste is in my mouth a little," he admitted.
When Illinois Republicans held their state convention on May 9, 1860, Lincoln was chosen unanimously as their favorite-son candidate. The cheering delegates lifted his long frame overhead and passed him hand-by-hand down to the speaker's platform.
A week later, the national convention of the Republican party met in Chicago. Several prominent Republicans were competing for the presidency, and Lincoln was not the first choice of many delegates. But he was acceptable to all factions of the party, and after some backstage maneuvering, he was nominated on the third ballot. He had spent the day quietly down in Springfield, waiting for news from the convention, and passing the time playing handball.
Meanwhile, the Democratic party had split in two. Northern Democrats meeting in Baltimore nominated Stephen Douglas for president. Southern Democrats, unwilling to accept any Northerner, held their own convention in Richmond, Virginia, and nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. Another group, the Constitutional Union party, also entered the contest with John Bell of Tennessee as their candidate.
It wasn't customary in those days for a Presidential candidate to campaign on his own behalf. Lincoln didn't even leave Springfield until after Election Day But his supporters carried on a spirited campaign, playing up Lincoln's humble background. At Republican rallies and parades all over the North, he was hailed as Honest Abe, the homespun rail-splitter from Illinois, a man of the people who was born in a log cabin and was headed for the White House.
Shortly before the election, Lincoln received a letter from Grace Bedell, an eleven-year-old girl in Westfield, New York, suggesting that he grow a beard. "...you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin," she wrote. "All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you." As he waited for the nation to vote, Lincoln took her advice.
On Election Day—November 6, 1860—Lincoln waited in the Springfield telegraph office until he was certain of victory. Then he went out into the streets of Springfield to be greeted by fireworks and torchlight parades. Mary joined him, radiant and beaming, at a Republican Ladies' supper that evening. A guest reported that the women paid "solicitous attention" to the president-elect, fetching him coffee, serving him sandwiches, and serenading him with "vigorous Republican choruses."
Republican victory poster, 1860.
A crowd of well-wishers gathers in front of Lincoln's home to celebrate his nomination as Republican candidate for president in 1860. Lincoln is standing to the right of the doorway in a white summer suit.
Lincoln received 1,866,000 votes and carried every Northern state. Douglas had 1,377,000 votes, and Breckinridge, the candidate of the Southern Democrats, 850,000 votes. The North had swept Lincoln into office. In the South, his name hadn't even appeared on the ballot.
Lincoln's last beardless portrait, August 13, 1860.
The president-elect sprouts whiskers, November 25, 1860.
Douglas had warned that a Republican victory would bring on "a war of sections, a war of the North against the South, of the free states against the slave states—a war of extermination." Southern leaders were saying that they would never accept this "Black Republican" as president. They were already threatening to withdraw from the Union and form an independent slave nation. An Atlanta newspaper declared: "Let the consequences be what they may ... the South will never submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln."
In December—three months before Lincoln took his oath of office—South Carolina led the way. The state announced that it had seceded from the Union. It was now a sovereign nation, dedicated to the preservation of slavery.
Lincoln with a full beard, January 13, 1861. "Old Abe is ... puttin' on (h)airs!" a newspaper joked.
February 9, 1861. Two days later, Lincoln left for Washington to become the first bearded president of the United States.
Thousands of people gather in front of the unfinished U.S. Capitol to witness Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861. Note the fashionable stovepipe hats scattered through the crowd.
FIVE
/> Emancipation
"If my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act."
On Inauguration Day—March 4, 1861—Washington looked like an armed camp. Cavalry and artillery had been clattering through the streets all morning. Troops were everywhere. Rumors of assassination plots, of Southern plans to seize the capital and prevent the inauguration, had put the army on the alert.
Shortly after noon, the carriage bearing President James Buchanan and President-elect Abraham Lincoln bounced over the cobblestones of Pennsylvania Avenue, heading for Capitol Hill. Infantrymen lined the parade route. Army sharpshooters crouched on nearby rooftops. Soldiers surrounded the Capitol building, and plainclothes detectives mingled with the crowds. On a hill overlooking the Capitol, artillerymen manned a line of howitzers and watched for trouble.
A long covered passageway had been built to protect the presidential party on its way to the speaker's platform in front of the Capitol. More than three hundred dignitaries crowded the platform, waiting to witness the swearing-in ceremony. Among them was Stephen Douglas, who had pledged to support the new administration.
Lincoln was visibly nervous. He was wearing a new black suit and sporting a neatly clipped beard. He held his silk stovepipe hat in one hand, a gold-headed cane in the other. He put the cane in a corner, then looked around, trying to find a place for the hat. Stephen Douglas smiled and took the hat from him.
Lincoln unrolled the manuscript of his inaugural address. He put on his steel-rimmed spectacles and faced the sunlit crowd below. Thousands of people jammed the broad square in front of the Capitol, waiting to hear the new president speak.
Lincoln: A Photobiography Page 4
