Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  The opening portion of Lincoln’s address contained an elaborate refutation of Douglas’s article in Harper’s Magazine on “The Dividing Line between Federal and Local Authority,” though it was not mentioned by name. (Lincoln did, however, repeatedly speak of the “line dividing local from Federal authority.”) In a brilliant piece of historical research and analysis, he examined the views of the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution as manifested in votes on the Northwest Ordinances of 1784 and 1787, a 1789 bill enforcing the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, a 1798 bill forbidding the importation of slaves into the Mississippi Territory from abroad, an 1804 statute regulating slavery in the Louisiana Territory, and the Missouri Compromise of 1820. On those measures, twenty-three of the thirty-nine signers expressed an opinion through their votes; of those twenty-three, twenty-one indicated their belief that Congress could regulate slavery in the territories; two did not. Among the sixteen signers whose opinion could not be inferred from voting records were leading critics of slavery, including Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Gouverneur Morris. The first Congress, which passed the Fifth and Tenth Amendments, cited by those who denied that Congress had the power to regulate slavery in the territories, also passed legislation implementing the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. If the men who passed those amendments really believed that the Constitution did not empower the federal government to regulate slavery in the territories, why would they have given effect to the Ordinance? It would be “presumptuous,” nay “impudently absurd,” to maintain that the authors of those statutes and amendments were acting inconsistently. Lincoln then chastised Douglas (without naming him) for “substituting falsehood and deception for truthful evidence and fair argument.”

  In the second section of his hour-and-a-half speech, Lincoln addressed Southern whites, who would not respond to Republicans except “to denounce us as reptiles” and men “no better than outlaws.” Lincoln urged them to abandon their insults and to deal rationally with their opponents’ arguments. Would you break up the Union if the Republicans won the 1860 election, he asked. Such a rule-or-ruin approach was unjustified, for Republicans were hardly depriving the South “of some right, plainly written down in the Constitution.” Indignantly, he said of Southern threats to secede: “you will not abide the election of a Republican President! In that supposed event, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!’ ” Lincoln denied that the Republican Party could be held responsible for John Brown’s raid, which he likened to attempted assassinations of monarchs. “An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution.”

  Lincoln directed the final segment of the speech to Republicans, urging them to remain patient in the face of Southern provocations. “It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace, and in harmony, with one another,” said Lincoln. “Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can.” But what would placate the Southerners? Only if we “cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.” As proof, he cited Douglas’s proposed statute virtually outlawing criticism of slavery. Southerners would eventually demand the repeal of Free State constitutions forbidding slavery, Lincoln predicted. Republicans must stand fast by their determination to halt the spread of the peculiar institution.

  In a mighty crescendo, he concluded: “Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong … —such as a policy of ‘don’t care’ on a question about which all true men do care—such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance—such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did. Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”173

  This ringing conclusion touched off thunderous applause. One auditor shouted like a “wild Indian” and proclaimed Lincoln “the greatest man since St. Paul.” Richard C. McCormick of the New York Evening Post said he “never saw an audience more thoroughly carried away by an orator.”174 The “vast assemblage frequently rang with cheers and shouts of applause, which were prolonged and intensified at the close,” reported the New York Tribune. Not since the era of Clay and Webster had a man “spoken to a larger assemblage of the intellect and mental culture of our City.” Lincoln was “one of Nature’s orators, using his rare powers solely and effectively to elucidate and to convince, though their inevitable effect is to delight and electrify as well.” The printed version of the speech was eloquent, “yet the tones, the gestures, the kindling eye and the mirth-provoking look, defy the reporter’s skill.” No speaker “ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New-York audience.” The Tribune called Lincoln’s speech “probably the most systematic and complete defense yet made of the Republican position with regard to Slavery. We believe no speech has yet been made better calculated to win intelligent minds to our standard.”175

  William Cullen Bryant, who thought this address “was the best political speech he ever heard in his life,” singled out for special praise Lincoln’s analysis of the Founders’ views on slavery expansion and his closing argument about the unreasonable demands of the “arrogant innovators” in the South. Though there was little new in the speech, Bryant remarked, “it is wonderful how much a truth gains by a certain mastery of clear and impressive statement.”176 Another poet, Edmund C. Stedman, wrote that “no public man has so ably commended himself to the respect of his hearers in a first appearance before the New York public. I heard a leading politician and able critic say, the next morning that it was by far the ablest effort made in the Cooper Institute since its erection two years ago. This is high praise, when ’tis remembered that such men as Cassius M. Clay and Thomas Corwin have spoken within its walls.”177

  Newspapers sang Lincoln’s praises. “There was not a word in it of vulgar stump speaking—not a word of the ‘spread eagle’ style of oratory—not a word of claptrap,” said the New York Independent; “it was straight-forward argument on the great questions of the times, and was as able as it was honest.”178 In Boston, Republican editors declared that the “completeness with which popular sovereignty and its progenitor were used up has rarely, if ever, been equaled” and praised Lincoln for being “clear in his style, with no pretensions to oratory, but apt and forcible.”179 Horace Greeley called it “the very best political address to which I ever listened—and I have heard some of Webster’s grandest.”180 Several papers ran the full text of the speech. A Washington correspondent reported that “Republicans here, from all sections of the Union, are loud in their praises of Lincoln’s magnificent speech in New York. It has stamped him as one of the leaders of the progressive thought of the age, and has caused his claims as a Presidential candidate to be fully discussed among many men who had not previously given them much consideration. A Senator, a well-known Seward man, said to me a few days since, ‘I don’t know but we shall have to nominate Lincoln at Chicago.’ ”181

  Lincoln provided the New York Tribune with the manuscript of his speech and carefully examined the galleys with the proofreader, who threw away the document when he w
as finished. In September, a reprint was published with elaborate notes by Cephas Brainerd and Charles C. Nott, who ransacked every library in New York to identify Lincoln’s sources. Nott offered a perceptive appraisal of the speech’s scholarly merits: “No one who has not actually attempted to verify its details can understand the patient research and historical labor which it embodies. The history of our earlier politics is scattered through numerous journals, statutes, pamphlets, and letters; and these are defective in completeness and accuracy of statement, and in indices and tables of contents. Neither can any one who has not travelled over this precise ground appreciate the accuracy of every trivial detail, or the self-denying impartiality with which Mr. Lincoln has turned from the testimony of ‘the Fathers,’ on the general question of slavery, to present the single question which he discusses. From the first line to the last—from his premises to his conclusion, he travels with swift, unerring directness which no logician ever excelled—an argument complete and full, without the affectation of learning, and without the stiffness which usually accompanies dates and details. A single, easy, simple sentence of plain Anglo-Saxon words contains a chapter of history that, in some instances, has taken days of labor to verify and which must have cost the author months of investigation to acquire.”182 Lincoln declared that “no acts of his New York friends had pleased him so much” as this description of his speech.183

  The Republican Congressional Document Committee mailed over 100,000 copies of that edition. Leaders of the New York Young Men’s Republican Union of New York, which published the pamphlet, boasted that it was “the most elaborate and popular campaign document ever issued.”184

  The Democratic press was less enthusiastic. The New York Herald called Lincoln’s speech a “hackneyed, illiterate composition” and “unmitigated trash, interlarded with coarse and clumsy jokes,” and the Boston Post objected to Lincoln’s alleged misrepresentation of James Madison’s views.185 The Illinois State Register, however, deemed the address “a more maturely conceived effort than any of his speeches during the Douglas campaign,” though it criticized Lincoln for accepting a speaker’s fee of $200.186

  Lincoln’s triumph at Cooper Institute unleashed a flood of speaking invitations from Republicans in New England, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. He had originally intended to visit his son Robert at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and then return to Springfield promptly but agreed to take to the stump in Rhode Island and Connecticut, where state elections were scheduled for April. The race in Connecticut was especially important, for Democrats believed that their popular candidate, Thomas Seymour, could capture the governorship, thus breaking the Republican hold on New England and inspiring Democrats everywhere. During the next two weeks Lincoln gave hastily scheduled addresses in Providence and Woonsocket, Rhode Island; Manchester, Exeter, Concord, and Dover, New Hampshire; and Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, Norwich, and Meriden, Connecticut. In the midst of that whirlwind tour, he complained to his wife: “I have been unable to escape this toil. If I had foreseen it I think I would not have come East at all. The speech at New-York, being within my calculation before I started, went off passably well, and gave me no trouble whatever. The difficulty was to make nine others, before reading audiences, who have already seen all my ideas in print.”187

  In most of his talks Lincoln repeated his Cooper Institute address, but in Connecticut he added a new element: a discussion of the laborers’ right to strike. At Hartford on March 5, he attacked Douglas for condemning a strike by Massachusetts shoemakers. “I am glad to know that there is a system of labor where the laborer can strike if he wants to!” Lincoln exclaimed. “I would to God that such a system prevailed all over the world.” If the encroachments of slavery were not resisted, “instead of white laborers who can strike, you’ll soon have black laborers who can’t strike.”188 The next day in New Haven he elaborated on his support of the right to strike and his faith in the free labor system, which left “each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else.” Ringingly he declared “I want every man to have the chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he can better his condition—when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him! That is the true system. Up here in New England, you have a soil that scarcely sprouts black-eyed beans, and yet where will you find wealthy men so wealthy, and poverty so rarely in extremity?”189 A Yale professor of rhetoric found Lincoln’s speech so impressive that he lectured his class on its merits, and a student from the South, who had come to jeer him, remarked at the close, “That fellow could shut up old Euclid himself, to say nothing of Steve Douglas.”190 Another undergraduate recalled that Lincoln “never paused for a word nor for an idea” and that he “gave a western intonation” to a few words.191

  At Hartford, Lincoln decried the opposition’s charge that Republicans had incited John Brown to raid Harper’s Ferry. Scornfully he predicted that “if they think they are able to slander a woman into loving them, or a man into voting with them, they will learn better presently.” Of white Southerners he sarcastically remarked: “If a slave runs away, they overlook the natural causes which impelled him to the act; do not remember the oppression or the lashes he received, but charge us with instigating him to flight. If he screams when whipped, they say it is not caused by the pains he suffers, but he screams because we instigate him to outcrying.” Senator James M. Mason of Virginia, who wore homespun clothes to protest Northern criticism of slavery, received a blast of Lincoln’s ridicule: “To carry out his idea, he ought to go barefoot! If that’s the plan, they should begin at the foundation, and adopt the well known ‘Georgia costume’ of a shirt-collar and a pair of spurs!”192 In the Connecticut capital, Lincoln’s down-to-earth style and appearance pleased his audience, which regarded him as a true man of the people.

  In New Haven, Lincoln chided Douglas for going “into hydrophobia and spasms of rage” when discussing Seward’s “irrepressible conflict” speech. There Lincoln also used a homely metaphor that he had tried out a few days earlier in New Hampshire. In describing the danger presented by the expansion of slavery into the territories, he said: “If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road, any man would say I might seize the nearest stick and kill it; but if I found that snake in bed with my children, that would be another question.” To strike at the snake in the bed might injure the youngsters or provoke the snake to bite them. By the same token, “if I found it in bed with my neighbor’s children, and I had bound myself by a solemn compact not to meddle with his children under any circumstances,” then he would leave it alone. “But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide!”193

  In Meriden, a heckler interrupted Lincoln, asking whether the Republicans would be able to inaugurate a president if they should win the November election. Lincoln replied, to the delight of his audience: “I reckon, friend, that if there are votes enough to elect a Republican President, there’ll be men enough to put him in.”194

  At another seat of learning—Exeter, New Hampshire (home to Phillips Exeter Academy)—Lincoln also impressed his audience. Many townspeople were highly educated, and the audience contained Lincoln’s son, Robert, and his Academy schoolmates. During his presentation Lincoln threw out questions; receiving no answers, he remarked, “You people here don’t jaw back at a fellow as they do out West.” Despite his unusual style, Lincoln captured his listeners, even those who had found his appearance uncouth and his Western expressions peculiar. When Lincoln first took the stage, one boy whispered, “Don’t you feel kind of sorry for Bob?
” A girl remarked, “Isn’t it too bad Bob’s got such a homely father?” But after his speech, the students no longer pitied Robert; they took pride in his father. Lincoln had Robert with him on his next stops at Concord, Manchester, and Dover, where he continued to impress his audiences.195

  On the rainy afternoon of March 1 in Concord, Lincoln spoke to a hastily assembled crowd, which included the influential journalist George G. Fogg, who despaired when he heard the speaker’s halting and awkward opening remarks. Called aside briefly during the speech, Fogg was astonished when he returned to see the “hesitating and almost grotesque speaker commanding the audience by his tones and his gestures, and holding them as completely in his power as the graceful [Wendell] Phillips or the majestic [Daniel] Webster could have done.”196 Fogg’s newspaper praised Lincoln’s effort as “one of the ablest, most closely reasoned and eloquent speeches ever listened to in Concord.”197

  Calvin C. Webster was so impressed by Lincoln’s oratory that he predicted: “That man will be the next president of the United States.” When he made the same prophecy to Lincoln, the Illinoisan “replied that a good many men wanted to be president.”198 Sharing Webster’s view was the New Hampshire State Republican chairman, Edward H. Rollins, who introduced Lincoln at the New Hampshire capital. (A few weeks later Rollins would play a key role in the Republican national convention in Chicago as chairman of the New Hampshire delegation.) Rollins earnestly promoted Lincoln’s candidacy after hearing him speak and predicted that if Lincoln were to campaign for three more weeks in the Granite State, the Republicans would carry the state with a majority of 10,000. When an abolitionist frequently interrupted Lincoln during his speech in Manchester, the audience tried to hush the man. Lincoln, however, said: “No! I want you to jaw back. This is the man I want to meet here. What did you say, sir?” By the end of the evening, his erstwhile heckler hurried to the platform to congratulate the speaker.199 One journalist reported that “Lincoln exhibited less … energy than was expected.”200 He was doubtless fatigued, having given a talk in Concord that afternoon.