Indignation swept the Free States, where voters had been relatively indifferent to the slavery issue since the Compromise of 1850. “There is a North, thank God,” exclaimed a New England abolitionist in March 1854. “We have found out where even the people of N[ew] Hampshire had a heart and soul, stored away in a secret place under their waistcoats. We thought they had no such articles about them.”3 Antislavery Democrats in Congress denounced Douglas’s bill “as a gross violation of a sacred pledge, as a criminal betrayal of precious rights, as part and parcel of an atrocious plot” to transform free territory into “a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves,” and condemned Douglas for sacrificing the peace of the nation to gratify his insatiable ambition.4 “We are in the midst of a Revolution,” declared the New York Tribune. “The attempted passage of this measure is the first great effort of Slavery to take American freedom directly by the throat.… Should success attend the movement, it is tantamount to a civil Revolution, and an open Declaration of War between Freedom and Slavery on the North American Continent, to be ceaselessly waged till one or the other party finally and absolutely triumphs.”5 New York Senator William Henry Seward reported from Washington that protests against the Kansas-Nebraska bill from Northern legislatures, clergymen, and citizens’ assemblies were “coming down upon us as if a steady but strong North wind was rattling through the country.”6 In February 1854, Charles Henry Ray, editor of a paper in northern Illinois, told a friend: “I am up to my neck in Nebraska. Great God! how I hate and despise the movers of that infamous scheme, and I have but just begun to hate them, and to fight it.”7 Such hatred was so widespread that when Douglas returned to Illinois, he said of his trip: “I could travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own [burning] effigy at night.”8
Whigs in Illinois, Lincoln observed, “were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion.” But quickly they arose in a fighting mood, each one “grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.”9 Lincoln’s weapon of choice was the pen, which he used to write editorials condemning the Kansas-Nebraska Act and urging voters to elect opponents of that measure. When some of his fellow Whigs who shared his anger at the “encroachments of slavery” seemed unwilling to take action against them, Lincoln reportedly said “if we hold these opinions in regard to the outrages upon the black man why should we fear to avow them and say what we think and do what we can in behalf of right and justice?”10 Similarly, upon learning of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act he told his friend and fellow Whig leader T. Lyle Dickey that the nation could not continue to exist half-slave and half-free.
Lincoln did not, however, call at this time for the establishment of a new party. In an editorial that he may well have written, the Illinois State Journal predicted in July 1854: “there will be, in our opinion, no large third party. There always have been but two large permanent parties in the country; and when the Nebraska matter is disposed of, the members of the free soil party will fall into the ranks of one of the parties.”11 Similarly, Lincoln’s political ally David Davis urged Massachusetts Senator Julius Rockwell to “save the Whig party. I don[’]t fancy its being abolitionized—although no one can be more opposed to [the] admission [of] Nebraska than I am.”12 Throughout the Free States, Whigs in 1854 hoped to reunite the party’s northern and southern wings for the next presidential contest. Only in 1856 would Lincoln and other antislavery Whigs in the Prairie State help form a new party to combat the expansion of slavery and thus fulfill the prophecy of the New York Tribune that the “passage of the Nebraska bill will arouse and consolidate the most gigantic, determined and overwhelming party for freedom that the world ever saw.”13
Northern Racism
Diving once again into the political waters, Lincoln found himself swimming in a sea of Negrophobia. Illinois Democrats blatantly attacked Lincoln and other opponents of Douglas’s legislation as “nigger worshippers,” “nigger agitators,” and “niggerstealers.”14 In September 1854, the Quincy Herald alleged that the “abolitionists of Chicago partake too largely of the instincts of the nigger himself to be ‘ashamed’ of anything they do.”15 The Herald claimed that there “are hundreds of abolitionists that wouldn’t hesitate a minute … to marry nigger women.”16 The Herald was joined by other race-baiting Illinois Democratic journals, including the Springfield Register, the Morris Gazette, and the Pike County Union. Douglas’s own organ, the Chicago Times, attacked those who opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act for allegedly promoting miscegenation at the 1847 constitutional convention, where they had voted “to legalize in this State this identical intercourse between negroes and white women, and to place such intercourse, filthy and repulsive as it is, upon the same equal footing as marriages between our white citizens.”17 In western Illinois, a newspaper made the same allegation against a Whig congressional candidate: “He voted [in 1847] against a proposition preventing the intermarriage of whites with blacks; which was equivalent to voting that whites and niggers might intermarry.”18
Illinoisans were among the most bigoted of all Northerners. The constitutional convention of 1847 had endorsed a ban on black migration into the Prairie State, a provision that voters overwhelming approved the following year. In debates on that provision, anti-black sentiment was freely expressed. George Lemon of Marion, for example, doubted that blacks “were altogether human beings. If any gentleman thought they were, he would ask him to look at a negro’s foot! (Laughter) What was his leg doing in the middle of it? If that was not sufficient, let him go and examine their nose; (roars of laughter) then look at their lips. Why, their sculls were three inches thicker than white people’s.”19 Lemon’s remarks captured the feelings of many Illinoisans who were vehemently opposed to the presence of blacks in their state.
The Chicago Times asserted that there “is in the great masses of the people a natural and proper loathing of the negro, which forbids contact with him as with a leper,” and proudly boasted that the Prairie State “wisely kept her soil for white men alone … inhibited the negro from coming within her limits for settlement … denied to the negro an equal participation in the right to settlement … and declared that Illinois should never be cursed with slavery, and that her people should not be crowded and inconvenienced by an inferior and deteriorated race.”20 An antislavery journalist noted that the black man in Illinois “has no rights, except the right of being taxed; he has no privileges, except the privilege of paying. His children are booted out of public schools, while no provision is made for their separate education; his testimony is not received in a Court of justice; his accounts, though he may be an honest hard-working mechanic, are worth nothing in evidence; his friends, if they remove hither from any other State, though perchance just redeemed from the thrall of chattel Slavery, are liable to be thrust into prison and thence sold into bondage.”21 The editors of the Illinois State Journal acknowledged that they shared “in common with nineteen-twentieths of our people, a prejudice against the nigger.”22 The militantly antislavery Chicago Tribune explained that many Illinoisans resisted abolition because they feared “that if the slaves were liberated, they would become roaming, vicious vagrants; that they would overrun the North, and subsist by mendicancy and vagrancy; and that from the day they were made free, they would cease to work.”23 The Chicago Herald referred to blacks as members of a “poor, ignorant and imbecile race” and applauded a Milwaukee theater proprietor who expelled a black from the audience. “We utterly despise that spirit that would debase our own race to a social equality with the inferior races,” the Herald proclaimed. When a slave ship was captured, the Herald regretted that abolitionists did not peer into the hold “to see a couple of thousand of those naked, musky, greasy cannibals at one of their usual feasts of raw beef and dead negroes.”24 Democrats in Illinois and Ohio decorated wagons carrying young white women with banners reading: “Fathers protect us from Negro Equality.”25
Such antiblack sen
timent, though especially vehement in Illinois, was far from unique in the Old Northwest. In 1858, Indiana Congressman George W. Julian referred to his state and Illinois as “outlying provinces of the empire of slavery” and lamented that Hoosiers “hate the negro with a perfect, if not a supreme hatred.”26 Another Indiana congressman declared that his constituents had three strong “antipathies”: “abolitionism, free-niggerism, and slavery.”27 In 1851, an overwhelming majority of Indiana voters (108,513 to 20,951) approved a constitutional clause forbidding blacks to settle in their state. Their counterparts in Wisconsin rejected black suffrage by a margin of 40,915 to 23,074. A Republican senator from the Badger State, Timothy O. Howe, viewed blacks “in the main … as so much animal life,” while the editor of a Republican newspaper in Grant County summarized the party’s creed bluntly: “No slaveholders and no niggers in the territories—white men must own and forever occupy the great west.”28 In Ohio, the Republican-dominated legislature forbade blacks to join the state militia, prompting a Democratic journal to observe: “Black Republicans regard the nigger as good enough to make political capital with but consider his skin too black, nose too flat and heel too long to be permitted to unite with them in a corn stalk muster.”29 A prominent Ohio Republican newspaper said “it is really desirable that the negro should be expelled.”30 Ohio Senator Ben Wade, an antislavery Radical, supported colonization of blacks in order “to hear no more about negro equality or anything of that kind.… we shall be … glad to rid ourselves of these people.”31 In Missouri, antislavery partisans held similar views because, as some St. Louis workingmen declared, they wanted “White Men for Our City, and Our City for White Men!”32
Elsewhere in the North opponents of slavery expansion demonstrated little fondness for blacks. The editor of the New York Tribune declared: “we make no pretensions to special interest in or liking for the African Race. We love Liberty, Equality, Justice, Humanity—we maintain the right of every man to himself and his own limbs and muscles; for in so doing we maintain and secure our own rights; but we do not like negroes, and heartily wish no individual of that race had ever been brought to America. We hope the day will come when the whole negro race in this country, being fully at liberty, will gradually, peacefully, freely, draw off and form a community by themselves.”33 The editor of that paper, Horace Greeley, criticized free blacks in New York, maintaining that they “have great faults,” being “vicious,” “indolent,” “dissipated,” “generally ignorant,” and “groveling in their tastes and appetites.”34 An 1855 Tribune editorial calling for equal suffrage for all races noted: “As a class, the Blacks are indolent, improvident, servile, and licentious; and their inveterate habit of appealing to White benevolence or compassion whenever they realize a want or encounter a difficulty, is eminently baneful and enervating.”35 The Tribune in 1857 observed that “the children of the emancipated slaves of our own State, who have now enjoyed some thirty years of comparative freedom, ought to be more industrious, energetic, thrifty, [and] independent, than a majority of them are,” that “they have not done so well as might fairly have been expected of them,” and that “the cause of Emancipation throughout the world is thereby embarrassed and retarded.” According to the Tribune, in “their private conversation, no men are more frank in acknowledgment and reproof of negro sloth and vice than Abolitionists.”36
A case in point was the eminent antislavery divine, Theodore Parker of Boston, who in 1857 told a friend: “There are inferior races which have always borne the same ignoble relation to the rest of men, and always will. For two generations, what a change there will be in the condition and character of the Irish in New England! But in twenty generations, the negroes will stand just where they are now; that is, if they have not disappeared. In Massachusetts there are no laws now to keep the black man from any pursuit, any office, that he will: but there has never been a rich negro in New England; not a man with ten thousand dollars, perhaps none with five thousand dollars; none eminent in any thing except the calling of a waiter.”37 Parker told a Massachusetts antislavery convention that the “African is the most docile and pliant of all the races of men; none has so little ferocity.… No race is so strong in the affectional instinct which attaches man to man by tender ties; none so easy, indolent, confiding, so little warlike.”38 In a commentary on John Brown’s 1859 raid at Harper’s Ferry, which he backed, Parker wrote that the “Anglo-Saxon with common sense does not like this Africanization of America; he wishes the superior race to multiply rather than the inferior.”39 Another Unitarian minister, William Ellery Channing, lamented that antislavery societies “ought never to have permitted our colored brethren to unite with us in our associations!”40 A black preacher observed that some abolitionists, no matter how much they might hate slavery, nonetheless “hate a man who wears a colored skin worse.”41
One of Parker’s most enthusiastic fans, Lincoln’s partner William Herndon, wrote to a congressman in 1859: “I see you have got the nigger up in the House ‘a—ready.’ Can you kick him out when you want him gone? Niggers are great institutions, are they not? My colored brethren here say—‘Why—Good Lord-a-massy Billy—de nigger am de great object of the American Gobernment—dey am always de talk—Can’t legislate for mail bags: but that de nigger am in the threads—in de whole bag massa—What am you going—you white folks—to do with the darkey?’ ” Herndon added: “ ‘The Niggers’ (as they themselves say) are America’s great home-made institution.”42 A correspondent for the abolitionist paper that first published Uncle Tom’s Cabin declared that “the real evil of the Negro race” is “that they are so fit for slavery as they are.”43
The New York Journal of Commerce articulated a common theme of antiblack prejudice when it declared that “the negroes held in slavery in the United States, are much better off, physically and morally, than their ignorant and degraded brothers in Africa.” On that continent the typical native “is an habitual drunkard, a thief, a liar, revengeful, licentious, groveling in his habits, almost destitute of natural affection, [and] unprogressive in character.” Any student of ethnology “knows that a superior and an inferior race cannot continue to occupy the same territory on terms of equality. Either the inferior race will be enslaved, and in that condition increase and multiply, if treated with reasonable kindness,—or, in the attempt to compete with the superior race, be ultimately wiped out of existence by their greater skill and strength.”44
Ethnologists like Louis Agassiz did in fact preach the doctrine of black racial inferiority. That eminent professor of zoology and geology at Harvard opposed both slavery and social equality for blacks, whom he described as “indolent, playful, sensual, imitative, subservient, good-natured, versatile, unsteady in their purpose, devoted and affectionate.” They were “entitled to their freedom, to the regulation of their own destiny, to the enjoyment of their life, of their earnings, of their family circle. But with all this nowhere do they appear to have been capable of rising, by themselves, to the level of the civilized communities of the whites, and therefore I hold that they are incapable of living on a footing of social equality with the whites in one and the same community without becoming an element of social disorder.”45
At Illinois College, an abolitionist hotbed, Professor Jonathan Baldwin Turner offered a similar ethnological analysis in The Three Great Races of Men (1861). Turner described whites as polar people and blacks as equatorial people. The “great mission” of the former “is to analyze and to conquer,” while that of the latter was “to enjoy and adore … as one is a being of intellect, of the head—the other of sentiment, of the heart.” If they lived with whites, blacks were bound to be subordinate. “The two races cannot dwell together … first because God never designed that they should … and second, because each race is still essentially barbarian in the only line where the other has begun to be civilized—the one in the head, the other in the heart.” Turner recommended that blacks be colonized to Haiti or other tropical lands south of the United States.46
<
br /> Julian Sturtevant, president of Illinois College, supported emancipation but held that colonization was not necessary because blacks, unable to compete with whites, would die out once they were freed. Other leading opponents of slavery—including the Reverend Mr. James Freeman Clarke, Moncure Conway, Theodore Tilton, and Samuel Gridley Howe—all thought blacks were intellectually inferior to whites. The eminent author and Radical Republican, Bayard Taylor, called blacks “the lowest type of humanity known on the face of the earth.”47
If Negrophobia was strong among antislavery Northerners, it was much more rampant among Democrats who, according to Ohio Republican leader Salmon P. Chase, wanted “simply to talk about the universal nigger question, as they call it. All that they seem to say is ‘nigger, nigger, nigger.’ ”48 In 1858, a leading newspaper of New England, the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican, observed that for Northern Democrats “Negrophobia is … pretty much all that is left for stump uses”; hence, their campaign documents are “all about niggers—nothing but niggers.”49
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 65
