Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  Douglas was wrong, said Lincoln, in asserting that the extension of slavery into Kansas and Nebraska concerned only settlers in those territories: “The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these territories. We want them for the homes of free white people. This they cannot be, to any considerable extent, if slavery shall be planted within them.” Here Lincoln was not making the argument espoused by some Free Soilers, that they wanted slavery kept out of the territories because they disliked blacks and had no desire to live near them. Instead, Lincoln emphasized something that his own family had acted on four decades earlier: “Slave States are places for poor white people to remove FROM; not to remove TO. New free States are the places for poor people to go to and better their condition.” Lincoln objected not to the presence of blacks but to the presence of slaveowners and their hierarchical social system.

  (In asserting that Republicans wanted the territories to become “homes of free white people,” Lincoln was adopting what the Chicago Tribune called “a narrow method” for attacking slavery. It was necessary to appeal to white self-interest because, said the Tribune, “it is far easier to convince the multitude that Slavery is a baleful evil to them than to possess them with the idea that it is a cruel wrong to the enslaved.… [S]o inveterate are the prejudices of color; so deep rooted … is the conviction that the African is a being of an inferior order; so intolerant is the Caucasian of African assertion of equality; so low, under the depressing influence of ‘the institution,’ has the national morality descended, that this method, narrow and incomplete as it is, holds out the only promise of success.”)122

  Northern whites also had a stake in the outcome of the debate over slavery expansion, Lincoln averred, because of “constitutional relations between the slave and free States, which are degrading to the latter.” Free State residents did not wish to help catch runaway slaves, as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 mandated. It was, Lincoln said, “a sort of dirty, disagreeable job, which I believe, as a general rule the slave-holders will not perform for one another.” Northern whites also did not want more Slave States because the Constitution’s three-fifths clause permitted those states to have representation of their unfree population in the U.S. House and in the electoral college. Offering an argument which had been made repeatedly since 1789, Lincoln protested that it was grossly unfair for South Carolina, where 274,567 whites lived, to have the same number of Representatives in Congress as Maine, with a white population of over 580,000. The three-fifths rule, Lincoln calculated, gave the Slave States twenty more Representatives in the House and votes in the electoral college than they would have had in the absence of such a rule. Without those extra congressmen, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which passed the House by a seven-vote margin, might never have been adopted.

  Lincoln pledged to obey the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause and three-fifths rule “fairly, fully, and firmly,” but he balked at letting the settlers of Kansas and Nebraska—“a mere handful of men, bent only on temporary self-interest”—decide whether the nation should add more Slave States: “when I am told I must leave it altogether to OTHER PEOPLE to say whether new partners are to be bred up and brought into the firm, on the same degrading terms against me, I respectfully demur.” Lincoln insisted “that whether I shall be a whole man, or only, the half of one, in comparison with others, is a question in which I am somewhat concerned; and one which no other man can have a sacred right of deciding for me.” Scornfully he dismissed “this mighty argument, of self government. Go, sacred thing! Go in peace.”

  To those claiming that opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act posed a threat to the Union, Lincoln forcefully replied that it was Douglas and his supporters who imperiled national unity by needlessly reviving the slavery controversy, which had been defused by the Compromise of 1850. “It could not but be expected by its author, that it would be looked upon as a measure for the extension of slavery, aggravated by a gross breach of faith.” Speaking again with the moral passion of a biblical prophet like Amos or Hosea, Lincoln declared that “Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature—opposition to it, in his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks, and throes, and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.” Supporters of slavery might repeal the Missouri Compromise, the Declaration of Independence, and “all past history,” but “you still can not repeal human nature.” Paraphrasing Jesus, he said: “It still will be the abundance of man’s heart, that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.” Lincoln agreed that the Union was indeed worth preserving: “Much as I hate slavery, I would consent to the extension of it rather than see the Union dissolved, just as I would consent to any GREAT evil, to avoid a GREATER one.” (By 1861, he would change his mind on this question.) But the Kansas-Nebraska Act did endanger the Union, he insisted; quoting Hamlet, he added that it “hath no relish of salvation in it.”

  Lincoln pointed out a basic flaw in the popular sovereignty argument: its failure to specify at what point in the development of a territory its settlers could forbid slavery. “Is it to be decided by the first dozen settlers who arrive there? or is it to await the arrival of a hundred?” And just who would be empowered to take action against the peculiar institution; was it the territorial legislature, or the people in a referendum?

  To those Whigs who opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act but who hesitated to demand the restoration of the Missouri Compromise lest they be seen as pro-abolitionist, Lincoln counseled: “Stand with anybody that stands RIGHT. Stand with him while he is right and PART with him when he goes wrong. Stand WITH the abolitionist in restoring the Missouri Compromise; and stand AGAINST him when he attempts to repeal the fugitive slave law. In the latter case you stand with the southern disunionist. What of that? you are still right. In both cases you oppose the dangerous extremes.” That, he said, “is good old whig ground. To desert such ground, because of any company, is to be less than a whig—less than a man—less than an American.”

  Scouting Douglas’s attempt to enlist the Founding Fathers as supporters of popular sovereignty, Lincoln quite rightly pointed out that the “argument of ‘Necessity’ was the only argument they ever admitted in favor of slavery; and so far, and so far only as it carried them, did they ever go. They found the institution existing among us, which they could not help; and they cast blame upon the British King for having permitted its introduction.” In 1787, they forbade slavery from expanding from the original states into the Old Northwest. In writing the Constitution, “they forbore to so much as mention the word ‘slave,’ or ‘slavery,’ in the whole instrument.” So “the thing is hid away, in the constitution, just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.” The early Congresses followed suit, prohibiting the exportation of slaves in 1794; outlawing the importation of slaves into the Mississippi Territory in 1798; forbidding U.S. citizens from participation in the slave trade between foreign countries in 1800; restraining the internal slave trade in 1803; banning the importation of slaves in 1807; and declaring the African slave trade to be piracy in 1820. So the Founders showed “hostility to the PRINCIPLE” of slavery “and toleration, ONLY BY NECESSITY.”

  But, Lincoln argued, Douglas was forsaking the Founding Fathers by placing slavery “on the high road to extension and perpetuity; and, with a pat on its back, says to it, ‘Go, and God speed you.’ ” Warming to his task, Lincoln deplored this betrayal of the Framers’ vision: “Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for SOME men to enslave OTHERS is a ‘sacred right of self-government.’ These principles can not stand together. They are as opposite as God and mammon.” He was especially incensed at Indiana Senator John Petti
t who, in supporting the Kansas-Nebraska bill, referred to the Declaration of Independence as “a self-evident lie.” None of his colleagues in the Douglas camp rebuked Pettit for that statement. Passionately, Lincoln remarked that if such words had been spoken “to the men who captured Andre, the man who said it, would probably have been hung sooner than Andre was. If it had been said in old Independence Hall, seventy-eight years ago, the very door-keeper would have throttled the man, and thrust him into the street.” (“The applause that followed was continued for some minutes.”)123 The new cynicism about the Declaration was “a sad evidence that, feeling prosperity we forget [about] right—that liberty, as a principle, we have ceased to revere.”

  In his heartfelt peroration, Lincoln urged North and South alike to reconsider their views: “In our greedy chase to make profit of the negro, let us beware, lest we ‘cancel and tear to pieces’ even the white man’s charter of freedom. Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of ‘moral right,’ back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of ‘necessity.’ Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south—let all Americans—let all lovers of liberty everywhere—join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving; we shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.”124

  This statesmanlike speech, delivered with the utmost conviction, “attracted a more marked attention,” Lincoln observed, than had his earlier addresses and was published in the Illinois State Journal.125 Significantly, Lincoln devoted little attention to nativism, temperance, or any issue other than slavery. The Springfield Register thought it noteworthy that “Lincoln spoke of Judge Douglas in a less denunciatory manner than is the custom on such occasions.”126 He had come a long way since the 1830s and 1840s, when he heaped ridicule on James Adams, Dick Quinton, George Forquer, James Shields, Peter Cartwright, Lewis Cass, James K. Polk, Dick Taylor, Jesse B. Thomas, and other Democrats.

  Horace White recalled the occasion in Springfield vividly: “It was a warmish day in early October, and Mr. Lincoln was in his shirt sleeves when he stepped on the platform.” Although “awkward, he was not in the least embarrassed,” starting off in a “slow and hesitating manner, but without any mistakes of language, dates, or facts.” It became immediately clear that “he had mastered his subject, that he knew what he was going to say, and that he knew he was right.” Lincoln’s “thin, high-pitched falsetto voice of much carrying power … could be heard a long distance in spite of the bustle and tumult of the crowd.” Betraying his backwoods upbringing, Lincoln spoke with “the accent and pronunciation peculiar to his native State, Kentucky.” In time, as “he warmed up with his subject, his angularity disappeared,” and he took on an air “of unconscious majesty.” While progressing through his three-hour oration, “his words began to come faster and his face to light up with the rays of genius and his body to move in unison with his thoughts.” Lincoln’s gestures, “made with his body and head rather than with his arms,” were “the natural expression of the man, and so perfectly adapted to what he was saying that anything different from it would have been quite inconceivable.” He presented “not a graceful figure, yet not an ungraceful one”: a “tall, angular form with the long, angular arms, at times bent nearly double with excitement, like a large flail animating two smaller ones, the mobile face wet with perspiration which he discharged in drops as he threw his head this way and that like a projectile.” Now and then “his manner was very impassioned, and he seemed transfigured with his subject.” Sweat “would stream from his face, and each particular hair would stand on end.” At that point “the inspiration that possessed him took possession of his hearers also. His speaking went to the heart because it came from the heart.” The crowd “felt that he believed every word he said, and that, like Martin Luther, he would go to the stake rather than abate one jot or tittle of it.” At “such transfigured moments as these,” when his words resembled “electrical discharges of high tension,” Lincoln seemed to White like an “ancient Hebrew prophet.”127

  In his dispatch to the Chicago Journal, White described Lincoln as “a mammoth” who “had this day delivered a speech, the greatest ever listened to in the state of Illinois, unless himself has made a greater.” Douglas “never in his life received so terrible a back fall. For vigor of thought, strength of expression, comprehensiveness of scope, keenness of argument—extent of research, and candor of presentation, the speech of Mr. Lincoln has rarely been equaled in the annals of American eloquence.”128 White considered Lincoln’s address “one of the world’s masterpieces of argumentative power and moral grandeur, which left Douglas’s edifice of ‘Popular Sovereignty’ a heap of ruins.”129

  Herndon agreed, calling Lincoln’s speech “the profoundest, in our opinion, that he has made in his whole life.” Lincoln, according to Herndon, “quivered with emotion” as he “attacked the Nebraska bill with unusual warmth and energy” as well as “scorn and mockery.” He “felt upon his soul the truths burn which he uttered,” and the audience, “as still as death,” sensed “that he was true to his own soul” and “approved the glorious triumph of truth by loud and continued huzzahs. Women waved their white handkerchiefs in token of woman’s silent but heartfelt assent.” At certain passages his feelings “swelled within and came near stifling utterance,” most notably “when he said that the Declaration of Independence taught us that ‘all men are born free and equal’—that by the laws of nature and nature’s God, ‘all were free’—that the Nebraska law chained men, free and equal, and ‘that there was as much difference between the glorious truths of the immortal Declaration of Independence and the Nebraska bill, as there was between God and Mammon.’ These are his own words. They were spoken with emphasis, feeling, and true eloquence,—eloquent, because true, and because he felt, and felt deeply, what he said.”130

  Immediately after Lincoln finished, Douglas “took the stand actually quivering,” complained that “he had been grossly assailed though in a perfectly courteous manner,” that Lincoln had handled him “without mercy or gloves,” and argued that Lincoln and other critics aimed “to agitate until the people of the South would, from fear of their slaves, set them free.”131

  Democrats attacked the speech for alleging that “the white man had no right to pass laws for the government of the black man without the nigger’s consent.” The Springfield Register sneered at it as an act of lèse-majesté: “Endowed by heaven with a talent to hoodwink the blind, and with a facility of speech well calculated to deceive the ignorant, he vainly imagines himself a great man, and as such, endeavored to cope with such men.”132

  The Springfield-Peoria address greatly enhanced Lincoln’s stature in Illinois. “Hitherto he had been appreciated chiefly in his own Congressional District,” as one Douglas adherent put it. But at the capital, “men of influence from every county of the State, substantial men and politicians, who had gathered together at the holding of the Fair, had heard him. On that day he opened the outer gate of the path that he followed to the Presidency.”133

  This oratorical masterpiece was, as Ward Hill Lamon’s ghost-written biography of Lincoln maintained, “almost perfectly adapted to produce conviction upon a doubting mind. It ought to be carefully read by every one who desires to know Mr. Lincoln’s power as a debater, after his intellect was matured and ripened by years of hard experience.”134 It contained the seeds of his later powerful arguments against slavery.

  After Lincoln finished his memorable address in Springfield, two dozen of the state’s most militant opponents of sla
very met at the capitol, praised the speech, and formed what they styled the Republican Party of Illinois. Although Lincoln did not attend that conclave, the delegates elected him to the party’s twelve-member state central committee, an act that Democrats cited as proof positive of Lincoln’s radical abolitionism.

  On October 16, Lincoln delivered substantially the same speech in Peoria that he had given at Springfield, adding a response to Douglas’s most recent criticism of the October 4 address. Lincoln began by saying he “could appreciate an argument, and, at times, believed he could make one, but when one denied the settled and plainest facts of history, you could not argue with him; the only thing you could do would be to stop his mouth with a corn cob.”135 In fact, Douglas had made some egregious historical errors, asserting that Illinois had been admitted to the Union as a Slave State and that the Constitution had mandated the end of the African slave trade. But Lincoln was more concerned with Douglas’s moral arguments than his factual errors. The senator had maintained that the U.S. government was made by white men for white men. Lincoln thought this comment showed “that the Judge has no very vivid impression that the negro is a human; and consequently has no idea that there can be any moral question in legislating about him.” In Douglas’s opinion, Lincoln continued, “the question of whether a new country shall be slave or free, is a matter of as utter indifference, as it is whether his neighbor shall plant his farm with tobacco, or stock it with horned cattle.” Lincoln objected that “whether this view is right or wrong, it is very certain that the great mass of mankind take a totally different view.” By 1854, most people around the world had come to “consider slavery a great moral wrong; and their feelings against it, is not evanescent, but eternal. It lies at the very foundation of their sense of justice; and it cannot be trifled with. It is a great and durable element of popular action, and, I think, no statesman can safely disregard it.”136