Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  Lincoln offered some bantering comments about Douglas and the Know-Nothings. He found nothing unusual in Douglas’s attacks on the nativists, for he already had 95 percent of the foreign-born voters on his side, and no one could blame him for trying to win over the remaining 5 percent. (Douglas looked “grim as Mont Blanc” at this point.) Lincoln also addressed the Little Giant’s claim that the Whig Party had died. Pointing to the election returns in New England and Iowa, he observed that the Democratic Party was “in a very bad way.”108

  After these preliminaries, Lincoln traced the course of the slavery issue in American politics, showing how the Kansas-Nebraska Act was “wrong in its direct effect, letting slavery into Kansas and Nebraska—and wrong in its prospective principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the wide world, where men can be found inclined to take it.” Douglas often interrupted this historical survey to challenge Lincoln’s accuracy, as he had been invited to do. When Lincoln suggested that the senator was not the true author of the Nebraska bill—that in 1848 Democratic presidential candidate Lewis Cass had put forward the theory of popular sovereignty—the crowd laughed and applauded. Incensed, Douglas rose, shook his hair, and “looking much like a roused lion,” said “in his peculiarly heavy voice which he uses with so much effect when he wishes to be impressive, ‘No, Sir! I will tell you what was the origin of the Nebraska bill. It was this, Sir! God created man, and placed before him both good and evil, and left him free to choose for himself. That was the origin of the Nebraska bill.” Lincoln, who “looked the picture of good nature and patience,” smilingly replied: “I think it is a great honor to Judge Douglas that he was the first man to discover that fact.” The audience once again burst out laughing, to the Little Giant’s evident discomfiture.109

  Lincoln quoted from an 1849 speech in which Douglas lauded the Compromise of 1820: “The Missouri Compromise had been in practical operation for about a quarter of a century, and had received the sanction and approbation of men of all parties in every section of the Union. It had allayed all sectional jealousies and irritations growing out of this vexed question, and harmonized and tranquilized the whole country. All the evidences of public opinion at that day, seemed to indicate that this Compromise had been canonized in the hearts of the American people, as a sacred thing which no ruthless hand would ever be reckless enough to disturb.”

  Lincoln said of Douglas’s 1849 speech: “It is powerful and eloquent; the language is choice and rich. I wish I was such a master of language as my friend, the Judge.”

  Douglas interjected: “A first-rate speech.” (Renewed applause.)

  In dealing with the 36° 30’ line established in the Missouri Compromise, Lincoln was asked by Douglas: “And you voted against extending that line, Mr. Lincoln?” (Laughter)

  “Yes, sir, because I was in favor of running that line much further south. (Great applause.)” Turning to the Wilmot Proviso, Lincoln recounted that “the Judge introduced me to a particular friend of his, one Davy Wilmot, of Pennsylvania. (Laughter.)”

  “I thought you would be fit associates (great laughter),” quipped Douglas, to which Lincoln replied: “Well, in the end it proved we were, and I hope to convince this audience that we may be so yet. (Uproarious applause.)”110

  After sketching the historical background of the current crisis, Lincoln displayed intense moral conviction as he excoriated Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine. The senator had nothing to say about the morality of slavery, proclaiming that: “I do not know of any tribunal on earth that can decide the question of the morality of slavery or any other institution. I deal with slavery as a political question involving questions of public policy.”111 (Douglas did not always eschew moral argument in politics. When attacking nativism, he said: “To proscribe a man in this country on account of his birthplace or religious faith is subversive of all our ideas and principles of civil and religious freedom. It is revolting to our sense of justice and right.”)112 With unwonted vehemence, Lincoln denounced Douglas’s neutrality on such a burning moral issue: “This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate.” Hate was a word Lincoln rarely used, but he repeated it in this address: “I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticising the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”

  (Lincoln found slavery “monstrous” because, among other things, it represented the systematic theft of the fruits of hard labor, a kind of institutionalized robbery. In 1860, Lincoln remarked, “I always thought that the man who made the corn should eat the corn.”113 Thirteen years earlier, when first introduced to Ward Hill Lamon, he teased the younger man, a native of Virginia, about white Southerners’ aversion to hard work. When Lamon protested, Lincoln sarcastically replied, “Oh, yes; you Virginians shed barrels of perspiration while standing off at a distance and superintending the work your slaves do for you. It is different with us. Here it is every fellow for himself, or he doesn’t get there.”114 For the rest of his life, Lincoln was to stress this theme again and again, most memorably in his second inaugural address.)

  Lincoln then balanced his repeated use of the word hate with a conciliatory gesture toward slaveholders. “I think 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.” He acknowledged that “some southern men do free their slaves, go north, and become tip-top abolitionists; while some northern ones go south, and become most cruel slave-masters.” Whenever Southerners assert that “they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery, than we; I acknowledge that fact. When it is said that the institution exists; and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying.”

  Lincoln confessed that he saw no easy solution to the problem of slavery. “If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution.” His “first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,—to their own native land.” Yet that was impractical: “whatever of high hope, (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible.” Should all such slaves “landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days.” Moreover, “there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days.”

  If colonization was not feasible, what alternatives remained? “Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings?” It was not clear “that this betters their condition.” Still, Lincoln said, “I think I would not hold one in slavery.” What else could be done? “Free them, and make them politically and socially, our equals?” Lincoln confessed that “[m]y own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.” In a democracy, he added, a “universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded. We can not, then, make them equals.” Here he did not say that blacks were not the equals of whites; rather he implied that while they might be equal to whites in many respects, white prejudice would prevent blacks from being made equals, that is to say, given equal rights by a government responsive to the wishes of the overwhelmingly white electorate.

  In dealing with the controversial Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which outraged many Northerners, Lincoln conceded that when white Southerners “remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them, not grudgingly, but fully, and fairly;
and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives, which should not, in its stringency, be more likely to carry a free man into slavery, than our ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.”

  (While publicly supporting the Fugitive Slave Act, Lincoln privately denounced it as “very obnoxious” and exclaimed that it was “ungodly! no doubt it is ungodly!”115 A conductor on the underground railroad told a fellow abolitionist that Lincoln “was often a contributor to the funds needed for the protection of the fugitives.”116 In 1843, Luther Ransom, a prominent Springfield abolitionist, reportedly said that Lincoln “always helps me when I call upon him for a man that is arrested as a runaway.”117 In 1855, Lincoln told his best friend, Joshua Speed, while discussing captured runaway slaves: “I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, and unrewarded toils.”118 Five years later, when a leading abolitionist was jailed for resisting the Fugitive Slave Act, Lincoln recommended that the Republican Party pay his fines. As a lawyer, Lincoln avoided cases dealing with runaways because he was unwilling “to be a party to a violation of the Fugitive Slave Law, arguing that the way to overcome the difficulty was to repeal the law.”119 In 1857, Lincoln responded positively to the appeal of a free black woman whose son faced enslavement in New Orleans. The incautious young man had worked on a steamboat and was seized in the Crescent City because he lacked free papers. Lincoln asked his old friend Alexander P. Field, then practicing law in New Orleans, to represent the accused, a native of Springfield, and offered to pay all costs. With William Herndon, he also called on Illinois Governor William Bissell, who alleged that he had no power to help rescue the unfortunate fellow. According to Herndon, Lincoln “exclaimed with some emphasis: ‘By God, Governor, I’ll make the ground in this country too hot for the foot of a slave, whether you have the legal power to secure the release of this boy or not.’ ”120 Thwarted at first by technical complications, Lincoln eventually raised money to procure the young man’s freedom. As president, he similarly tried to cut through red tape to save a young slave by offering to pay the owner up to $500 for his freedom.)

  After conceding that the Fugitive Slave Act should be faithfully enforced, Lincoln insisted that “all this, to my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting slavery to go into our own free territory, than it would for reviving the African slave trade by law.” To Lincoln’s mind, the statute “which forbids the bringing of slaves from Africa; and that which has so long forbid[den] the taking [of] them to Nebraska, can hardly be distinguished on any moral principle.”

  Lincoln indignantly rejected Douglas’s justifications for repealing the Missouri Compromise, dismissing as an “absurdity” the contention that votes for the Wilmot Proviso showed that the Missouri Compromise had been abandoned in principle by supporters of that measure. Neither did the Compromise of 1850 vitiate the Missouri Compromise, for the former “had no more direct reference to Nebraska than it had to the territories of the moon.” Douglas’s contention that the original Nebraska bill, which he introduced on January 4 and which contained no reference to the Missouri Compromise, was no different from the revised version he submitted several days later, which repealed the Missouri Compromise, prompted a scornful response from Lincoln: “It is as if one should argue than white and black are not different.” It was therefore obvious, Lincoln concluded, that “the public never demanded the repeal of the Missouri compromise.”

  More importantly, the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise was “manifestly unjust.” The South and North had each made concessions in 1820; now the South wanted to renege on its end of the bargain while enjoying the benefits of the North’s concession. To illustrate this point, Lincoln employed one of his favorite images, a man unfairly taking food from another man who deserved it: “It is as if two starving men had divided their only loaf; the one had hastily swallowed his half, and then grabbed the other half just as he was putting it to his mouth!”

  Lincoln dismissed as an “inferior matter,” a “palliation,” and a “lullaby” the contention of Douglas and many others that slavery would never spread into Kansas and Nebraska even if popular sovereignty were applied there. Lincoln pointed out that over 860,000 slaves—fully 25 percent of the nation’s unfree population—lived north of the Missouri Compromise line (in Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, Virginia, Kentucky, and the District of Columbia). Moreover, in western Missouri, abutting Kansas, slavery flourished. The best way to keep Kansas free was to prevent the peculiar institution from entering it in the first place. By allowing slaves to be brought into that territory as soon as it was thrown open to settlement, Douglas guaranteed that slavery would fasten itself on Kansas in perpetuity. “To get slaves into the country simultaneously with the whites, in the incipient stages of settlement, is the precise stake played for, and won in this Nebraska measure,” Lincoln maintained. Slavery never sank deep roots in Illinois, he said, because the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had specifically banned the peculiar institution there. But neighboring Missouri, having no such ban, became a slave state.

  If Kansas and Nebraska were thrown open to slavery, it would encourage the outlawed African slave trade by increasing the demand for slaves, Lincoln predicted. Thus Douglas’s bill “does, in fact, make slaves of freemen by causing them to be brought from Africa, and sold into bondage.” That argument was somewhat strained.

  More solid was Lincoln’s fundamental point, which distinguished his position from Douglas’s: that blacks were fully human and thus entitled to certain basic rights. The popular sovereignty doctrine—resting on the assumption that if settlers in Kansas and Nebraska were allowed to take their swine with them, they should also be allowed to take their slaves—was, Lincoln contended, “perfectly logical” only “if there is no difference between hogs and negroes.” Lincoln flatly refused “to deny the humanity of the negro” and argued that white Southerners showed by their actions, if not their words, that they agreed with him. In both the North and the South there lived few “natural tyrants,” he said; most people in both sections “have human sympathies” that made them hostile to slavery. White Southerners revealed their own antislavery feelings in many ways. In 1820, Southern senators and Representatives joined with Northerners to declare African slave traders pirates subject to the death penalty. Addressing the citizens of the South, Lincoln asked: “Why did you do this? If you did not feel that it was wrong, why did you join in providing that men should be hung for it? The practice was no more than bringing wild negroes from Africa, to sell to such as would buy them. But you never thought of hanging men for catching and selling wild horses, wild buffaloes or wild bears.” Why did respectable white Southerners “utterly despise” slave dealers, refusing to socialize with them, befriend them, or even touch them, Lincoln asked. “You do not so treat the man who deals in corn, cattle or tobacco.” The existence in the United States of more than 430,000 free blacks, worth more than $200 million if enslaved, further showed that white Southerners realized that slaves were human beings, not mere chattel. “How comes this vast amount of property to be running about without owners?” The freedmen were slaves liberated by their masters or descendants of slaves who had been so liberated. What induced their owners to free them? “In all these cases,” Lincoln concluded, “it is your sense of justice, and human sympathy, continually telling you, that the poor negro has some natural right to himself—that those who deny it, and make mere merchandise of him, deserve kickings, contempt and death.” Rhetorically, he queried white Southerners: “why will you ask us to deny the humanity of the slave? and estimate him only as the equal of the hog? Why ask us to do what you will not do yourselves?” They were good questions.

  If blacks were human and not chattel, then Douglas’s argument that the Missouri Compromise violated “the sacred right of self government” was false. Lincoln agreed with the Little Giant’s basic premise: “The doctrine of self government is right—absolutely and eternally right,” but whether that doctri
ne was relevant in the current debate over Kansas and Nebraska depended “upon whether a negro is not or is a man. If he is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just as he pleases with him. But if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself?” Like an Old Testament prophet, Lincoln declared: “When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal;’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.” To Douglas’s contemptuous assertion that antislavery forces argued that the “white people of Nebraska are good enough to govern themselves, but they are not good enough to govern a few miserable negroes,”121 Lincoln replied: “no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent. I say this is the leading principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism.” After quoting the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln called the relationship between master and slave a “total violation” of its central principle: “The master not only governs the slave without his consent; but he governs him by a set of rules altogether different from those which he prescribes for himself. Allow ALL the governed an equal voice in the government, and that, and that only is self-government.”

  Lincoln explained that he was not advocating equal political rights for blacks, but rather was “combating what is set up as [a] MORAL argument” for permitting slaves “to be taken where they have never yet been—arguing against the EXTENSION of a bad thing, which where it already exists, we must of necessity, manage as best we can.”