Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  To defeat Douglas’s “double game” Lincoln had to convince his party colleagues that the senator was hardly a true believer in their principles. Republican leaders in Washington were still urging their Illinois counterparts to back Douglas. (On the eve of the state convention, Lincoln received word that his friend from the Thirtieth Congress, Representative Richard W. Thompson of Indiana, and his messmate at Mrs. Sprigg’s boardinghouse, journalist Nathan K. Sargent, wanted Lincoln to step aside in favor of the Little Giant.) In private correspondence and anonymous journalism, Lincoln had for months been arguing against fusion with Douglas; at the Republican state convention, he seized the opportunity to make his case in what would become one of his most famous speeches.

  Nomination for the Senate

  On June 16, Republican delegates crowded into the Hall of Representatives in Springfield, where they speedily adopted a platform similar to the one passed at the 1856 Bloomington Convention and nominated candidates for the two state offices to be contested that fall. In the midst of their deliberations, the Chicago delegation unfurled a banner reading “Cook County for Abraham Lincoln,” which was greeted with loud shouts. When it was suggested that the text be amended to read: “Illinois for Abraham Lincoln,” the motion received a deafening barrage of hurrahs. Later that day, Charles L. Wilson, editor of the Chicago Journal, unexpectedly offered a resolution which won unanimous, enthusiastic approval: “Resolved that Abraham Lincoln is the first and only choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the United States Senate, as the successor to Stephen A. Douglas.”85 Wilson sought to counter the Democrats’ whispering campaign alleging that if the Republicans won the legislature, they would send John Wentworth to the senate.

  A journalist reported that “[u]nanimity is a weak word to express the universal and intense feeling of the convention. Lincoln! LINCOLN!! LINCOLN!!! was the cry everywhere, whenever the senatorship was alluded to. Delegates from Chicago and from Cairo, from the Wabash and the Illinois, from the north, the center, and the south, were alike fierce with enthusiasm, whenever that loved name was breathed.”86 This was an extraordinary development, for state parties did not usually endorse a candidate for senate before the election of the legislature, which would decide who would fill that post. But so intensely did the Republicans of Illinois resent Horace Greeley, Anson Burlingame, and other Easterners who urged them to support Douglas that, in many counties, they had passed resolutions endorsing Lincoln for the senate. The Chicago Press and Tribune declared: “We assure our eastern contemporaries who have been so sorely troubled with fear that the Republicans of Illinois could not take care of their own affairs, that this action, where not spontaneous, has been provoked by their interference, though it is the result of no arrangement or concert. It is the natural and expected remonstrance against outside intermeddling.”87

  That evening Lincoln addressed the delegates, uncharacteristically reading from a manuscript. He had been working steadily on his speech for over a week, taking great pains trying to make it accurate. He delivered it slowly and carefully, fully aware that his auditors might be startled by his arguments. Lincoln aimed to show that Douglas’s rebellion against Buchanan, which rendered the Little Giant so attractive to many opponents of slavery, was superficial and that the senator and the president fundamentally agreed on basic principles and had cooperated, either by design or coincidence, in promoting the interests of the slaveholding South.

  Lincoln began with a paraphrase of what he considered “the very best speech that was ever delivered,” Daniel Webster’s second reply to Senator Robert Y. Hayne in 1830.88 “If we could first know where, we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.” (Webster had begun his famous address thus: “When the mariner has been tossed for many days in thick weather, and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course. Let us imitate this prudence, and, before we float farther on the waves of this debate, refer to the point from which we departed, that we may at least be able to conjecture where we now are.”)89

  Since the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a measure “with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation,” that agitation “has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.” Such agitation, Lincoln predicted, “will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.” That was inevitable, he said, because “[a] house divided against itself cannot stand,” as Jesus had long ago warned. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.”

  After prophesying the future, Lincoln analyzed the past, arguing that a conspiracy to expand slavery had been actively pursued over the past four years. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act “opened all the national territory to slavery; and was the first point gained.” The “popular sovereignty” justification for this momentous change Lincoln scornfully defined as the belief that “if any one man, choose to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object.” The election of James Buchanan in 1856 was the second point gained, for it seemingly endorsed the popular sovereignty doctrine, as did the final annual message of President Franklin Pierce in December 1856. A third point gained by the proslavery forces was the Dred Scott decision in 1857. Lincoln thought it noteworthy that when Douglas was asked if “the people of a territory can constitutionally exclude slavery from their limits,” the Little Giant had replied, “That is a question for the Supreme Court.” Equally noteworthy was Buchanan’s inaugural address calling on all Americans to abide by whatever decision the court might reach in the case of Dred Scott. Two days later (a suspiciously short time), the justices handed down their controversial decision, ruling not only that blacks were excluded from citizenship and that Congress could not prohibit slavery from entering the territories, but in addition that “whether the holding a negro in actual slavery in a free State, makes him free, as against the holder, the United States courts will not decide, but will leave to be decided by the courts of any slave State the negro may be forced into by the master.” This last point, Lincoln said, was “made, not to be pressed immediately; but, if acquiesced in for a while, and apparently indorsed by the people at an election, then to sustain the logical conclusion that what Dred Scott’s master might lawfully do with Dred Scott, in the free State of Illinois, every other master may lawfully do with any other one, or one thousan d slaves, in Illinois, or in any other free State.”

  The behavior of Douglas, Pierce, Buchanan, and the Supreme Court (presided over by Roger B. Taney) aroused Lincoln’s suspicion. “These things look like the cautious patting and petting a spirited horse, preparatory to mounting him, when it is dreaded that he may give the rider a fall,” he said. Switching the metaphor, he continued: “We can not absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert.” Nevertheless, “when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen—Stephen [Douglas], Franklin [Pierce], Roger [B. Taney], and James [Buchanan], for instance—and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few—not omitting even scaffolding—or, if a single piece be lacking, we can see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared to yet br
ing such piece in—in such a case, we find it impossible to not believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.”

  Lincoln pointedly asked why the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s provision regarding the people of a state as well as of a territory was “lugged into this merely territorial law” and why the justices of the Supreme Court had failed to “declare whether or not the … Constitution permits a State, or the people of a State, to exclude it.” These anomalies and this recent history convinced Lincoln that “we may, ere long, see … another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a state to exclude slavery from its limits.” Illinoisans “shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State,” Lincoln predicted, “unless the power of the present political dynasty shall be met and overthrown.”

  Reaching the central point of his address, Lincoln maintained that to achieve the overthrow of the slave power, its opponents must resist the overtures of the Douglasites. Relentlessly he argued that the Little Giant was not “the aptest instrument” to thwart the slavery expansionists; the senator and his followers wanted to give the impression that he sought to keep slavery from expanding, but in fact there was little reason to believe it. Douglas’s resistance to the Lecompton Constitution, though admirable, did not prove the point, for the quarrel with Buchanan was about a matter of fact, not principle. Lincoln noted that Douglas’s supporters “remind us that he is a very great man, and that the largest of us are very small ones.” Conceding the point, Lincoln quoted from Ecclesiastes: “a living dog is better than a dead lion” and maintained that even though the Little Giant was not exactly a deceased lion, he was “a caged and toothless one.” (Democrats used this unfortunate metaphor to ridicule Lincoln throughout the campaign, comparing him to “a puppy-dog fighting a lion.”)90 How, Lincoln asked, could Douglas “oppose the advances of slavery? He don’t care anything about it,” and his “avowed mission is impressing the ‘public heart’ to care nothing about it.” Nor would Douglas necessarily resist calls for reopening the African slave trade. “For years he has labored to prove it a sacred right of white men to take negro slaves into the new territories. Can he possibly show that it is less a sacred right to buy them where they can be bought cheapest? And, unquestionably they can be bought cheaper in Africa than in Virginia.”

  On the issue most dear to Republicans—prohibiting the expansion of slavery—“clearly, he [Douglas] is not now with us—he does not pretend to be—he does not promise to ever be.” The Republican cause “must be entrusted to, and conducted by its own undoubted friends—those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the work—who do care for the result.” He reminded his party colleagues that though they were a combination of “strange, discordant, and even, hostile elements,” they had successfully “fought the battle through, under the constant hot fire of a disciplined, proud, and pampered enemy” who was now “wavering, dissevered and belligerent.” (Here again Lincoln borrowed from Webster’s second reply to Hayne, in which the Massachusetts orator alluded to “States dissevered, discordant, belligerent.”)91 This was no time to falter. Optimistically, he predicted that “sooner or later the victory is sure to come.”92

  Lincoln had worried about the nation becoming all slave as far back as 1849, when antislavery forces were trounced at the Kentucky constitutional convention. He told Joseph Gillespie that he had asked a Kentuckian why the peculiar institution had such a powerful grip on a state with relatively few slaveowners. The reply was revealing: “you might have any amount of land, money in your pocket or bank stock and while travelling around no body would be any the wiser but if you had a darkey trudging at your heels every body would see him & know that you owned slaves—It is the most glittering ostentatious & displaying property in the world and now says he if a young man goes courting the only inquiry is how many negroes he or she owns and not what other property they may have. The love for Slave property was swallowing up every other mercenary passion. Its ownership betokened not only the possession of wealth but indicated the gentleman of leisure who was above and scorned labour.” According to Gillespie, “These things Mr Lincoln regarded as highly seductive to the thoughtless and giddy headed young men who looked upon work as vulgar and ungentlemanly. Mr Lincoln was really excited and said with great earnestness that this spirit ought to be met and if possible checked. That slavery was a great & crying injustice an enormous national crime and that we could not expect to escape punishment for it.” He also predicted that a few years hence “we will be ready to accept the institution in Illinois and the whole country will adopt it.”93

  Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech was hardly the first public expression of the thesis that either slavery or freedom would inevitably triumph. Lincoln explicitly denied that he was “entitled to the enviable or unenviable distinction of having first expressed that idea. The same idea was expressed by the Richmond Enquirer in 1856.”94 He was “forcibly attracted” to an editorial by George Fitzhugh which appeared in that paper on May 6, 1856: “Social forms so widely differing as those of domestic slavery, and (attempted) universal liberty, cannot long co-exist in the Great Republic of Christendom. They cannot be equally adapted to the wants and interests of society. The one form or the other, must be very wrong, very ill suited, to promote the quiet, the peace, the happiness, the morality, the religion and general well-being of the community. Disunion will not allay excitement and investigation,—much less beget lasting peace. The war between the two systems rages every where; and will continue to rage till the one conquers and the other is exterminated.—If with disunion, we could have ‘the all and end all there,’ the inducements would be strong to attempt it.”95 The Richmond paper also declared that “[t]wo opposite and conflicting forms of society cannot, among civilized men, co-exist and endure. The one must give way and cease to exist, the other become universal. If free society be unnatural, immoral, unchristian, it must fall, and give way to a slave society—a social system old as the world, universal as man.”96 The Richmond Whig insisted that “far from believing that slavery must die, we have long held the opinion that it is the normal and only humane relation which labor can sustain toward capital.”97

  Nor was there any novelty in the speculation that Illinois might welcome slavery. Dumas J. Van Deren, editor of the Matoon National Gazette, declared in 1857: “We candidly and firmly believe today that if Illinois were a slave state, the best men of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and even states farther South, would be here as soon as they could remove their families, and the prairies of Illinois would be made to smile as a lovely garden.”98 From the South came comments like those in the Jackson Mississippian: “Establish slavery in Illinois and it would give us the key to the great West. The South should not content herself with maintaining her ground; she should progress. She should expand her institutions wherever soil, climate, and production are adapted to them.”99

  For decades, abolitionists had been making Lincoln’s point about the incompatibility of slavery and freedom. In 1835, William Goodell predicted that one or the other “must prevail to the destruction of the other. The laborers at the south will be free, or the laborers at the north will lose their freedom.”100 The following year, James G. Birney insisted that if “slavery live at the South, liberty must die at the North. There is no middle ground.”101 Eleven years later, a New Hampshire Free Soiler editorialized: “Slavery or freedom must triumph” for “unless justice is a phantom and all liberty a lie they cannot live and flourish in the same land together.”102

  In the fateful year 1854, several militant opponents of slavery stressed that argument. Frederick Douglass told a Chicago audience that “liberty and slavery cannot dwell in the United States in peaceful relations.… [O]ne o
r the other of these must go to the wall. The South must either give up slavery, or the North must give up liberty. The two interests are hostile, and irreconcilable. The just demands of liberty are inconsistent with the overgrown exactions of the slave power.”103 Henry Ward Beecher declared that “the two great principles must come into collision and fight till one or the other is dead. It is like a battle between a vulture and an eagle. Slavery is a vulture, of base talons and polluted beak; and liberty is … an eagle. They must fight till there is a declaration of victory on one side or the other.”104 Benjamin F. Wade told the senate, “Slavery must now become general, or it must cease to be at all.”105 Theodore Parker, whom Lincoln admired, analyzed the political situation of the country in similar fashion: “These two Ideas [freedom and slavery] are now fairly on foot. They are hostile; they are both mutually invasive and destructive. They are in exact opposition to each other, … and one will overcome the other.”106 The New York Tribune asserted that the “permanence of the Union is predictable only upon one of two conditions, either the South must put an end to slavery or the North must adopt it.”107

  In 1857, Lincoln’s law partner predicted that there would soon be “[u]niversal freedom for all the race, or universal despotism for white and black.”108 The previous year, James S. Pike, the New York Tribune’s Washington correspondent and a radical opponent of slavery, made the same point, calling “the longer continuance of the existing political Union … a political impossibility,” unless the North and South agreed “to go back to the position of the founders of the Government, and regard Slavery as an exceptional institution, and administer the Government in the interest of universal Freedom.”109 (A Maine Republican told Pike, “your opinion is by no means a heretical or unusual one but is shared by nearly all of the intelligent thinkers in the country who are opposed to slavery.”)110 Five months after Lincoln delivered his “House Divided” speech, a leading Republican spokesman, William Henry Seward, made the same point when he famously described the “collision” between North and South as “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding nation or entirely a free-labor nation.”111