In Boston, Lincoln shared the platform with William Henry Seward, who declared that “all Whigs agree—that Slavery shall not be extended into any Territory now free—and they are doubtless willing to go one step further—that it shall be abolished where it now exists under the immediate protection of the General Government [i.e., in Washington, D.C.]”169 Lincoln then followed with what Seward described as “a rambling story-telling speech, putting the audience in good humor, but avoiding any extended discussion of the slavery question.”170 The following day, Lincoln “with a thoughtful air” told the New York senator: “I have been thinking about what you said in your speech. I reckon you are right. We have got to deal with this slavery question, and got to give much more attention to it hereafter than we have been doing.”171 In 1860, Lincoln reminisced with Seward: “Twelve years ago you told me that this cause would be successful, and ever since I have believed that it would be.”172
(Seward was not the only U.S. senator whose antislavery speeches impressed Lincoln. One day in the capitol he listened intently to Hannibal Hamlin of Maine denouncing human bondage; the Illinois Representative nodded enthusiastically whenever the Pine State senator scored a telling point. When they met as president-elect and vice-president-elect in 1860, Lincoln told Hamlin: “I have just been recalling the time when, in ’48, I went to the Senate to hear you speak. Your subject was not new, but the ideas were sound. You were talking about slavery, and I now take occasion to thank you for so well expressing what were my own sentiments at that time.”)173
Edward Lillie Pierce, an antislavery radical, asserted that during Lincoln’s Massachusetts campaign swing, he “did not rise at any time above partisanship, and he gave no sign of the great future which awaited him as a political antagonist, a master of language, and a leader of men.”174 That was true of Lincoln’s political career in general during the 1830s and 1840s.
In late September, while returning to Illinois, Lincoln stopped in Albany to visit Thurlow Weed, an influential Whig journalist and political operative who introduced him to the Whig vice-presidential candidate, Millard Fillmore. Then, as he sailed from Buffalo to Chicago, Lincoln observed a steamboat aground on a Detroit river sandbar. The sight inspired him to devise plans for a boat with an apparatus like water wings allowing it to float over such obstacles. After the November elections he worked on his idea, for which he obtained a patent.
Lincoln spent the latter part of October extensively canvassing his district in Illinois, where he continued urging Free Soilers to vote for Taylor. At Lacon on November 1, he “scored with the most scathing language, that ‘consistency’ of the Abolitionists, which, while they professed great horror at the proposed extension of slave territory, they [had in 1844] aided in the election of Mr. Polk; for which, and its disastrous consequences, they were responsible, as they held the balance of power.”175 Lincoln defended Taylor’s purported egotism, “saying that in order to do what Taylor had done a man had to be somewhat egotistical.”176
On election day, Taylor made such a strong showing in the lower South and Pennsylvania that he was able to defeat Cass (who lost New York thanks to the defection of antislavery Democrats to Van Buren) by a margin of 45 percent to 42 percent in the popular vote and 163 to 127 in the electoral college. Taylor carried Massachusetts with 61,070 votes to Van Buren’s 38,058 and Cass’s 35,281. The Hero of Buena Vista also won the Seventh District of Illinois by a majority of 1,481 but lost statewide to Cass, 45 percent to 42 percent, even though he received 7,009 more ballots than Clay had in 1844 and 18,550 more votes than Whigs had gotten in congressional contests the previous August. Taylor captured nearly 60 percent of the vote in Springfield.
Dealing with the Slavery Issue
Upon returning to Washington in December for the brief second session of the Thirtieth Congress, slated to expire in March 1849, Lincoln participated in a fierce legislative struggle over slavery. Both major parties, sobered by the electoral showing of the Free Soilers, hoped to neutralize those upstarts somehow.
The slavery debates had actually begun in earnest during the first session, in 1848, and Lincoln’s awareness of the issue increased significantly before his term ended. As Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson recalled, “the subject of slavery in the abstract was a topic of frequent discussion in the XXXth Congress. Its sinfulness, its wrongs, its deleterious influences, its power over the government and the people, were perhaps more fully discussed in that than in any previous Congress.”177 In fact, slavery was by far the most frequently discussed topic in that congress. Lincoln paid special attention to the subject in the second session, as he had told William Henry Seward he would.
During the previous session, Lincoln had done little about it other than voting with the antislavery bloc. He may have avoided speaking on the slavery issue for fear of endangering party unity in a presidential election year. Joshua R. Giddings, the leading antislavery member of Congress, helped shape Lincoln’s views. A fellow Representative from Illinois, Orlando B. Ficklin, recalled that Lincoln “was thrown in a mess [rooming house] with Joshua R. Giddings. In this company his views crystallized, and when he came out from such association he was fixed in his views on emancipation.”178 Early in his congressional career, on December 21, 1847, Lincoln had supported Giddings’s motion to refer an antislavery petition from District of Columbia residents to the Judiciary Committee. It was a divisive vote; Illinois Congressman John Wentworth reported that “I have never known a reference of a petition to cause such an excitement before.”179 A motion to table was defeated 98–97, with Speaker Winthrop casting a tie-breaking vote. A week later, Lincoln voted for a motion by Caleb B. Smith of Indiana similar to Giddings’. Two days thereafter, he opposed tabling a petition “praying that the public lands may be appropriated in aid of the extinction of slavery.”180
In the summer of 1848, the debate over slavery in the territories grew intense, posing the gravest threat to national unity since the South Carolina nullification crisis of 1832–1833. In late June, Congressman Wentworth told a friend: “we are just now in an awful state of excitement. A dissolution of the Union is threatened on every side.… Here is the battle ground; & it appears that, what is to be done for free principles, must be done within a few weeks. Some kind of a compromise will pass the Senate. Then comes the House, where a desperate fight will be made.”181
As Wentworth predicted, a compromise was proposed in the senate by John M. Clayton of Delaware, who urged the establishment of territorial governments in Oregon, California, and New Mexico. While retaining the antislavery statutes passed by the unofficial provisional government of Oregon, Clayton’s bill would have kept the legislatures of the other two territories from adopting laws relating to slavery, thus leaving the question to the Southern-dominated U.S. Supreme Court. Clayton and many other Southern Whigs had hoped thereby to avoid a direct vote on the controversial Wilmot Proviso. Southern Whigs in the lower chamber viewed the Clayton Compromise as a threat to Taylor’s presidential hopes. Northern Whigs suspected that this legislation might facilitate the expansion of slavery; they also feared that it might help support Texas’s claim to much of New Mexico, thus increasing substantially the area of a slave state. Antislavery militants denounced the compromise as a sellout to the South. “The fate of millions & millions is to be voted upon,” observed Massachusetts Representative Horace Mann, a Conscience Whig; as the House was polled, the customary bedlam in the chamber died down, and “it was still as a church. Every man wanted to know how every other man voted.”182 By a margin of 112–97, the House tabled Clayton’s bill, thus killing it.
Then the lower chamber passed a bill of its own, establishing a territorial government for Oregon with the proviso that Thomas Jefferson’s antislavery Northwest Ordinance should be applied there. Lincoln supported the measure, which passed 128–71. A week later, he joined the majority in rejecting President Polk’s recommendation to extend the 1820 Missouri Compromise line to the West Coast, widely regarded as a measure fav
orable to slavery expansion because most of the Mexican Cession lay south of that line.
By the time Congress adjourned in mid-August, Oregon had finally become a territory, one without slavery. The attempt to fasten the peculiar institution on California and New Mexico had been thwarted, and those territories remained unorganized. A journalist called these developments “the only signal defeat the slave power has ever experienced under this government.”183 An antislavery congressman exulted over the “great triumph,” which he considered “one of the most glorious things that has happened this century.”184
On only three occasions during the long first session of the Thirtieth Congress did Lincoln vote against Giddings and other antislavery militants. In April 1848, he sided with a 130–42 majority in tabling Conscience Whig John G. Palfrey’s resolutions calling for an investigation of riots following the attempt of many Washington slaves to escape. Twenty other Northern Whigs, among them five from New England, joined Lincoln; thirty-six, including twelve from New England, supported the resolution. An antislavery congressman from Massachusetts explained that “we were all glad that the subject of Mr. Palfrey’s resolutions had their quietus” because “if the matter had been sent to a committee, it would have been found, that there was really no sufficient cause, for the interference of the House, on the grounds he presented. It would seem, therefore, like a failure on our side & a triumph on theirs. But, as the whole matter of those resolutions was laid on the table, it was a kind of drawn game,—the opponents [i.e., proslavery forces], indeed, having an advantage, but not such an advantage as they would otherwise have gained.”185
The following month, Lincoln was the only Northern Whig opposing Amos Tuck’s motion to suspend the rules to permit the introduction of a resolution directing relevant committees to report a bill outlawing slavery and the slave trade in Washington. The motion lost by a 90–54 margin. It is difficult to understand Lincoln’s vote, for he was no friend of either slavery or the slave trade in the capital, as his actions during the second session of the Thirtieth Congress would show dramatically. In the July and August debates over slavery in the territories, Lincoln voted with the Giddings bloc on thirteen of fourteen roll calls. He broke with them to join the 104–69 majority favoring the suspension of the rules to permit consideration of a joint resolution declaring it expedient to establish civil government in New Mexico, Oregon, and California. Nine other Northern Whigs voted to suspend the rules, including Joseph Root, a witty, sharp-tongued, militant opponent of slavery from the Western Reserve of Ohio. Lincoln also differed with the Giddings–Palfrey–Tuck–Mann forces (known as “Ultraists”) on the presidential question; they preferred John McLean to Taylor.
Lincoln’s antislavery voting record in the first session served as a prelude to his more dramatic action in the second session.
Though doing little about the peculiar institution in 1848, other than voting with the antislavery forces, Lincoln that year expanded his knowledge of slavery through firsthand observation, as he had done in Kentucky the previous autumn. In the late 1840s, Washington was a predominantly Southern town. John Randolph of Virginia called it “a depot for a systematic slave market—an assemblage of prisons where the unfortunate beings, reluctant, no doubt, to be torn from their connections, and the affections of their lives, were incarcerated and chained down, and thence driven in fetters like beasts, to be paid for like cattle.”186 In 1854, with obvious distaste, Lincoln spoke about Washington’s slave pens: “in view from the windows of the capitol, a sort of negro-livery stable, where droves of negroes were collected, temporarily kept, and finally taken to Southern markets, precisely like droves of horses, had been openly maintained for fifty years.”187 Lincoln was alluding to the Georgia Pen, also known as Robey’s Pen, which an observer called a “a wretched hovel, ‘right against’ the Capitol,” encircled “by a wooden paling fourteen or fifteen feet in height,” where “all colors, except white … both sexes, and all ages, are confined, exposed indiscriminately to all the contamination which may be expected in such society and under such seclusion.”188
Lincoln observed slavery up close when, in January 1848, slave traders seized a black waiter at Mrs. Sprigg’s boardinghouse and, before the horrified eyes of his wife, clapped him in irons and dragged him off to a slave prison. The unfortunate victim had been buying his freedom for $300, all but approximately $60 of which he had paid by the time he was abducted. In response, Giddings introduced a resolution (supported by Lincoln) calling for an investigation of the matter and for the repeal of slave trading in the District. The following month, Lincoln opposed tabling a resolution nearly identical to the Wilmot Proviso.
In April 1848, over seventy slaves in the District of Columbia boldly tried to escape aboard the schooner Pearl, which had been chartered by an abolitionist sympathizer, Daniel Drayton. Betrayed by a black man, the fugitives, after traveling 140 miles, were overtaken, imprisoned, promptly sold, and removed farther south. The capital was in a frenzy of excitement as hundreds of incensed whites marched on the office of an antislavery newspaper, The National Era, demanding that its editor, Gamaliel Bailey, leave the District. When Bailey refused, the mob began to stone the building, but the police, assisted by leading citizens who feared that the capital might be moved to another city, restored order before significant damage was done or blood was shed. When Joshua Giddings went to the District jail to assure Drayton and Sayers that they would receive legal counsel, a mob threatened the congressman’s life. Doubtless this episode reminded Lincoln and many others of the fatal attack on Elijah Lovejoy’s newspaper office in Alton, Illinois, a decade earlier.
In the House, Giddings and John G. Palfrey introduced resolutions of inquiry, which touched off an angry debate marred by fierce rhetoric and a menacing tone. An antislavery congressman reported that “we have had threats, insults, the invocation of mob-rule & lynch law, &, indeed, all the whole Southern armory has been exhausted upon us. Their orators … begin as tho’ they were calling up a herd of slaves from a distant cotton-field” and “gesticulate, as tho’ they had the lash in hand, & were cutting into the flesh, before & behind.”189 One such Southerner, Andrew Johnson, who in 1865 would become president, tauntingly asked Palfrey if he wanted his daughter to marry a black man. In the upper chamber, Henry S. Foote of Mississippi invited New Hampshire Senator John P. Hale, a leading antislavery spokesman, to visit his state and promised that his constituents, with the assistance of their senator, would lynch him.
Lincoln had been a silent observer of these episodes and debates during the first session, which forced him to think about the peculiar institution more seriously than he had done since 1837. Then he had condemned slavery as an institution “based on injustice and bad policy.”
In the second session of the Thirtieth Congress, Lincoln acted on his increased sensitivity to the slavery issue. Early in that session, Palfrey of Massachusetts, one of the handful of antislavery militants in the House, asked leave to submit a bill abolishing slavery in Washington, D.C. Because it contained no provision for compensating owners, Lincoln voted against it; he was one of only six Northern Whigs to do so. That same day he voted twice to support a motion by Joseph Root instructing the committee on territories to propose legislation excluding slavery from California and New Mexico. An effort to table lost 106–80; the resolution then passed 108–80. Palfrey called the latter vote “very encouraging.”190 On December 18, Lincoln again voted in favor of Root’s measure. That day Giddings introduced legislation to allow District residents, including blacks, to express their opinion on abolishing the peculiar institution; it was tabled by a vote of 106–79, with Lincoln and nine other Northern Whigs siding with the majority. A Whig journalist complained that Giddings, Palfrey, and their allies “come nearly every day with a number of sixpenny propositions, which have had the effect to exasperate and madden the Southern members.”191
On December 21, when Daniel Gott of New York submitted a resolution calling for the abolition of the
slave trade in the District, Lincoln, for unclear reasons, joined three other Northern Whigs in an unsuccessful bid to table it. Giddings condemned this vote by Lincoln and others as “direct support of the slave trade.”192 But Lincoln, like some fellow Whigs, thought the resolution’s preamble—which stated that slave trading in the District was “contrary to natural justice” and “notoriously a reproach to our country throughout Christendom and a serious hindrance to the progress of republican liberty among the nations of the earth”—was too abrasive.193 Resolutions like Gott’s had been offered many times, but without such a controversial preamble, which Whig Congressman Caleb B. Smith, an opponent of slavery, criticized for its tendency to “inflame or excite the people of the South” and “hold them up to the odium of the country.”194 Horace Greeley, who wrote the preamble and persuaded Gott to adopt it, insisted that the same forces would have opposed the measure even if the preamble had not been included. Perhaps Lincoln opposed Gott’s resolution not only because he objected to the inflammatory preamble but also because he himself was preparing a stronger measure. Later that day, when Gott’s resolution was adopted 98–87, Lincoln and two other Northern Whigs voted with the minority.
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 51
