The voting took place amid great excitement, for it represented the first congressional action limiting the domestic slave trade. This dramatic gesture struck fear into the hearts of Southern senators and Representatives, who warned that their region might withdraw from the Union if the Free States did not back down. Senators John C. Calhoun of South Carolina and Henry Foote of Mississippi (the would-be lyncher of Senator Hale) organized a caucus of Southern members of Congress to respond to what they considered Northern acts threatening the interests of their section. A Boston journalist astutely observed that scoffers at Southern truculence “have no idea of the deep, and hidden, and giant-like under-current of emotion that is flowing through the hearts of many Southrons.”195 Representatives from below the Mason-Dixon line had been complaining during the debates on slavery that they felt “wounded and offended at the style of language so often indulged in by gentlemen on this floor, who treat the question as men of a single idea, denouncing the institution and those who live in its midst.”196 That undercurrent would eventually lead to a war that cost 620,000 men their lives.
Intimidated by the prospect of disunion, the House on January 10 voted (with Lincoln and fifteen other Northern Whigs in the 119–81 majority) to reconsider the Gott resolution, thus effectively consigning it to oblivion. These votes on Gott’s resolution caused Horace Greeley to term Lincoln “one of the very mildest type of Wilmot Proviso Whigs from the free States” and Indiana Congressmen George W. Julian to deem him “a moderate Wilmot Proviso man” whose “anti-slavery education had scarcely begun.”197
But in fact Lincoln’s antislavery education was well advanced, as he demonstrated the very day that he voted to reconsider the Gott resolution: he announced he would offer a substitute for that measure, a bill more advanced than the New Yorker’s resolution, calling for the abolition of slavery itself—not just slave trading—in the District of Columbia. (Twelve years earlier, as a state legislator, he had unsuccessfully tried to help facilitate the abolition of slavery in the District.) He evidently agreed with William Lloyd Garrison that the “abolition of the slave traffic … is impractical while slavery exists. There is no reason why slave-trading should be prohibited if slave-holding is justified and allowed.”198 Lincoln proposed that, starting in 1850, all children born to slave mothers in the District were to be free; that their mothers’ owners would be responsible for supporting and educating those children; that the children in return “would owe reasonable service, as apprentices, to such owners … until they respectively arrive at the age of—years when they shall be entirely free”; that if owners emancipated slaves in the District, Congress would compensate them at full market value (to be determined by a board consisting of the president and his secretaries of state and the treasury); and that fugitive slaves reaching the District would be extradited by municipal authorities. (Lincoln was evidently trying to mollify those who feared that abolition would make Washington a mecca for runaways.) The bill was to take effect only if a majority of the voters of the District approved it. Lincoln announced “that he was authorized to say, that about fifteen of the leading citizens of the District of Columbia to whom this proposition had been submitted, there was not one but who approved of the adoption of such a proposition.”199
When colleagues shouted out, “Who are they?” “Give us their names!” Lincoln did not reply. Two were Joseph Gales, co-editor of the National Intelligencer, and his partner William S. Seaton, the mayor of Washington. A day earlier, Giddings and Lincoln had called on Seaton. Years later Lincoln told an interviewer: “I visited Mayor Seaton, and others whom I thought best acquainted with the sentiments of the people, to ascertain if a bill such as I proposed would be endorsed by them.… Being informed that it would meet with their hearty approbation I gave notice in congress that I should introduce a Bill. Subsequently I learned that many leading southern members of Congress, had been to see the Mayor, and the others who favored my Bill and had drawn them over to their way of thinking. Finding that I was abandoned by my former backers and having little personal influence, I dropped the matter knowing it was useless to prosecute the business at that time.”200 Lincoln’s measure suffered the fate of earlier such proposals. Between 1805 and 1862, none ever reached a vote.
As president, Lincoln would introduce a scheme for gradual, compensated emancipation, with a provision offering federal assistance to freed slaves wishing to leave the country; no such clause appeared in his 1849 measure. A plan for colonization might have rendered his statute more palatable to whites. One Washington correspondent believed that if a gradual, compensated emancipation bill were accompanied by “a law prohibiting free blacks from settling here, every [white] man in the district will hold up both hands in favor of the measure. A more lazy, dirty, impudent set of rascals never breathed than the free blacks who infest Washington.”201
Some Southerners condemned Lincoln as an abolitionist. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, the antislavery purist Wendell Phillips regarded Lincoln’s proposal to end slavery in the District as “one of the poorest and most confused specimens of pro-slavery compromise.”202 Joshua Giddings, however, praised Lincoln’s bill, which he had helped draft. On January 8, 1849, the Ohio antislavery militant recorded in his diary: “Mr. [John] Dickey of P[ennsylvani]a and Mr. Lincoln of Illinois were busy preparing resolutions to abolish slavery in the D C this morning. I had a conversation with them and advised them to draw up a bill for that purpose and push it through. They hesitated and finally accepted my proposition.… Mr. Lincoln called on me this evening and read his bill and asked my opinion which I freely gave.” Three days later, Giddings confided to his diary that “our whole mess remained in the dining-room after tea, and conversed upon the subject of Mr. Lincoln’s bill to abolish slavery. It was approved by all; I believe it as good a bill as we could get at this time, and am willing to pay for slaves in order to save them from the Southern market.”203
Giddings’s judgment was echoed by The National Era, whose abolitionist editor, Gamaliel Bailey, said two weeks before Lincoln announced his plan: “we should like to see a bill [emancipating slaves in the capital] prepared, submitting the question to the [legally] qualified [i.e., adult white male] voters of the District, with the distinct information that a liberal appropriation would be made to aid in the act of emancipation. Such a bill, we doubt not, would pass Congress, and we have just as little doubt as to the decision of the citizens of this District under it.” A measure of that sort “would be giving to thousands of citizens, unrepresented in any legislative body, an opportunity to do a high act of justice, with some grace; and would also result in the emancipation, not transfer, of the victims of Slavery. Pass an act of abolition, without such provision as we have suggested, and before it could take effect, almost every slave in the District would be sold to the South.”204
Some abolitionists objected to compensating slaveholders, but others (including Elihu Burritt, Gerrit Smith, and Abel Stevens) did not. In Washington the leading abolitionists and most active conductors on the local underground railroad—William L. Chaplin and Jacob Bigelow—originally opposed compensation but eventually endorsed it. In 1848, Chaplin called upon antislavery forces to spurn “all that class of cute philosophers, who raise doubt about buying people out of bondage” and to “reject the dogma, that money is lost which is paid for slaves. Every dollar thus paid is a most effective sermon to the conscience of the guilty.” Five years later, Bigelow wrote that “On the subject of paying for slaves, to secure their freedom, I acknowledge that I once theorised against it; but was, long ago very summarily cured of my theory, when I came to practice upon it.”205 Some leading antislavery politicians, among them William Henry Seward and Salmon P. Chase, also supported compensation for Washington slaveowners. (Like Lincoln, Seward favored compensated emancipation in the District of Columbia only if a majority of voters there approved it.)
Horace Greeley decried Lincoln’s provision to require that the electorate of the District vo
te on emancipation: “it seemed to me much like submitting to a vote of the inmates of a penitentiary a proposition to double the length of their respective terms of imprisonment.”206 But in fact many citizens of the District had long opposed slavery and slave trading in their midst. In 1828, nearly 600 Washingtonians had petitioned Congress to abolish slavery there. Moreover, because Congress controlled the District, and because no senators or Representatives were elected by its residents, some argued that it would be unjust to deny the voters there a say in the matter; the electorate of a state (or its representatives) had to be consulted if slavery were to be abolished within its borders. Congress might technically have the power to abolish slavery in the District without such a referendum, but it would be unwise to do so, said the Baltimore Sun, citing Shakespeare: “it is well to have a giant’s strength, but tyrannous to use it like a giant. We submit, however, that to abolish slavery in the District without the consent of a majority of the white population would be a wanton exercise of that absolutism with which Congress has been vested in its legislative relation to the people of the District.… For our part, we believe it would be greatly conducive to the peace of the nation on this subject, if slavery was abolished there by their own consent and free will.”207 The Georgetown Advocate, a pro-Taylor journal, agreed that compensated emancipation in Washington, D.C., would face few objections. A congressman in late 1847 reported that there was evidently “a very large party in the District favorable to the gradual abolition of slavery in the District, and a small party in favor of the immediate abolition. A majority of Congress is disposed to leave this matter to the voters of the District.”208 In 1854, Lincoln himself said that six years earlier “I heard no one express a doubt that a system of gradual emancipation, with compensation to owners, would meet the approbation of a large majority of the white people of the District.”209 In 1850, Illinois Congressman (and future governor) William Bissell, referring to the possible abolition of slavery in Washington, reported from the capital that “it is well understood here that if the question was submitted to the people of the District a large majority would vote in favour of it.”210
In offering compensation to slaveowners, Lincoln had majority opinion on his side. When Lincoln announced that he planned to submit such a bill, a correspondent for the pro-Taylor Boston Atlas noted that it was “believed that there is a large majority of the House in favor of some such proposition” and “that the sooner some step of the kind is taken, the better it will be for the peace and union of the country.” It was universally agreed, said the paper, that “whatever action may be had in the premises, compensation must follow. This may be the ground of compromise that will continue. We must take men and the laws as they are, not as one would have them, and regulate our legislation on those principles of justice and expediency, which so marked and honored the national councils of our fathers.”211 A New York Herald reporter who opposed slavery declared that it would be “dishonorable in the extreme” to “free at once all slaves, without compensating their owners.”212 House Speaker Robert C. Winthrop believed that “compensation must go hand in hand with emancipation. It is this view which takes away the idea of selfishness from Northern philanthropy. If we admit that we are to unite with the South in bearing the burdens & defraying the cost of Abolition, we make it a matter of joint interest in regard to which our voices may fairly be heard.” The only way to persuade slaveowners to accept emancipation would be to offer compensation, he argued. “Those who oppose such a course, however philanthropic they may be in theory, are practically riveting the bonds which they desire to break.”213
In framing his bill, Lincoln may have been influenced by Great Britain’s abolition of West Indian slavery in 1834. Parliament had appropriated £20,000,000 to compensate the owners of 800,000 liberated bondsmen. Similarly, Congress during the Revolutionary War had offered to compensate slaveowners whose bondsmen served in the army and thus gained their freedom. Lincoln might also have considered the example set by Pennsylvania, whose legislature abolished slavery gradually, liberating children born to slave mothers after a specified date once those children had attained their majority. New Jersey and New York had followed Pennsylvania’s lead.
In 1860, Wendell Phillips triggered a lively debate by denouncing Lincoln as “the slave hound of Illinois” because his 1849 emancipation bill included a fugitive slave clause.214 In a public letter to Phillips, Joshua Giddings defended Lincoln: “his conversing with the people of the District, the preparation of his bill, the avowal of his intention to present it, were important.” Such actions placed him among “those who were laboring in the cause of humanity. He avowed his intention to strike down slavery and the slave trade in the District; to strike from our statute book the act by which freemen were transformed into slaves; to speak, and act, and vote for the right,” and “cast aside the shackles of party, and took his stand upon principle.” Chiding Phillips, Giddings added: “You speak of that act with great severity of condemnation. I view it as one of high moral excellence, marking the heroism of the man. He was the only member among the Whigs proper [as opposed to the handful of antislavery Ultraists] of that session, who broke the silence on the subject of those crimes.”215
Sydney Howard Gay, managing editor of the New York Tribune and a militant opponent of slavery, also challenged his old friend Phillips. In August 1860, William Herndon, probably speaking for Lincoln, told Gay: “Your reply to Wendell Phillips’s article in the Liberator was correct.” Gay, Herndon said, was “familiar—too familiar—with legislative business not to know that … no one man can possibly get his own ideas put into any statute—any law, or any Constitution.” Passing bills involved “concession—compromise.” When “Lincoln was in Congress this State of affairs Existed: he was then a strong Anti-Slavery man and is now the same. This I know, though he wishes and will act under the Constitution: he is radical in heart, but in action he must Conform to Law & Constitution as Construed in good old times.” Herndon, a conspicuous admirer of Phillips, concluded: “Lincoln, in reference to the Bill about which Mr. Phillips wrote his articles, was actuated by Anti-Slavery sentiments alone.… In doing this he had to consult his friends’ feelings and ideas or he could do nothing; and so his bill was drawn up with a reference to all the aforesaid Conditions—conflicting sentiments & ideas.” Lincoln “wanted the slave trade in the District of Columbia cut up by the roots and slavery gradually abolished.”216
Echoing Herndon, a New York Tribune correspondent in the fall of 1849 described Lincoln as “conspicuous in the last Congress—especially during the last session, when he attempted to frame and put through a bill for the gradual Abolition of Slavery in the District of Columbia. He is a strong but judicious enemy to Slavery, and his efforts are usually very practical, if not always successful.”217 Eleven years later, Joshua Giddings declared that while he and Lincoln were in Congress “they became intimately acquainted—boarding at the same house, and sitting opposite each other at meals; that he thought he knew the heart of Abraham Lincoln as well as any living man, and speaking from that knowledge, he believed that every beat of ‘honest Abe’s’ heart was a throb of sincerity and truth—in a word, that he is that noblest work of God—an honest man. He believed Lincoln’s loyalty to republican principles, and to the cause of freedom and humanity, was unquestionable and beyond suspicion.”218
Throughout the winter of 1848–1849, antislavery forces battled various schemes to finesse the Wilmot Proviso. When Whig Congressman William B. Preston of Virginia, following the lead of Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, proposed the admission of the Mexican Cession as a single state, calling this expedient “the only door” through which a compromise acceptable to both North and South could pass, Northern Whigs balked, demanding that the Wilmot Proviso be applied to that territory. An attempt to omit it was defeated, pleasing antislavery congressmen like Horace Mann, who exclaimed “Glorious!!”219 On February 27, the House killed Preston’s bill.
Another attempt to ci
rcumvent the Wilmot Proviso was made late in the session when Wisconsin Senator Isaac P. Walker proposed to abrogate the laws of Mexico, including statutes dealing with slavery, in the Mexican Cession and allow the president to frame appropriate rules for that territory. Though it passed in the senate, it died by a vote of 114–100 in the House. The next day (the final one of the session), supporters of that measure tried to railroad it through, provoking such a heated debate that fisticuffs broke out in both houses, causing blood to flow freely. A congressman reported that some colleagues “were fiercely exasperated & had the north been as ferocious as the south, or the whigs as violent as the Democrats, it is probable there would have been a general melée.”220 A Kentuckian described the mayhem in the lower chamber more vividly: “Imagine 230 tom cats fastened in a room, from which escape is impossible, with tin cans tied to their tails—raging and screaming, and fighting, and flying about from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M., twelve hours—and you will have some idea of the last jubilee in the House. About ten o’clock, [Richard K]. Meade of Virginia, and Giddings of Ohio, had a fight—Meade drunk. About 3 A.M., Sunday morning, [Jacob] Thompson of Mississippi, and [Orlando B.] Ficklin of Illinois, had a knock down—both drunk. Many members were drunk, as I was assured by one of their own body—as eyes and ears informed me.”221 Observed an Alabamian: “The whole matter … was disgraceful to the Congress of the United States.”222
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 52
