Lincoln experimented with a new rhetorical genre after his Senate loss—a lyceum-style lecture on the history of inventions, from writing to the development of patent laws. Lincoln had a quirky curiosity about things and processes. “Clocks, omnibuses, language, paddle-wheels, and idioms never escaped his observation and analysis,” wrote Herndon (Lincoln never escaped Herndon’s observation and analysis). But the lecture on inventions was a failure. Unharnessed from the great issues with which he had been engaged, Lincoln’s humor unraveled into whimsy; his interest in history shrank to a harvest of trivia. “That doesn’t look much like his being President,” wrote one newspaper that reviewed the talk. Lincoln gave it a few times early in 1859, to smaller and smaller audiences, then let his career as a lecturer die.
The newspaper notice of Lincoln’s talk was mocking, but was he running, as early as 1859, for president? Of course he was. George Washington had won the first two presidential elections by acclamation, but after his retirement every conceivable politician, and many inconceivable ones, fancied themselves in the role. Still, like any prudent long shot, Lincoln had to be discreet. He could not yet speak about himself; instead he spoke about the founding fathers.
In the spring of 1859 Henry Pierce, a chocolate manufacturer, invited him to a celebration of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday on April 13 in Boston. Lincoln had to decline, thanks to the demands of his legal practice, but the letter he wrote Pierce gave him an opportunity to restate his views on the Declaration of Independence and slavery. In his Peoria speech he had compared the Declaration to a sheet anchor. Now he compared its author to Euclid: Jefferson’s principles—that all men were equally endowed with certain basic rights—were “the definitions and axioms of free society.” He ended with a lofty peroration: “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” Lincoln had clearly labored over this paean; it was ready to be chiseled in stone—or printed in Republican newspapers, which in fact ran with it.
In the fall of 1859 came invitations to address Republicans throughout the Midwest. These Lincoln accepted, regardless of his legal practice. The fall was off-year election season, and he needed to be visible.
Douglas helped him plan his itinerary. The senator had published a defense of popular sovereignty in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine, and that month Douglas spoke in Columbus and Cincinnati (Ohio was the third most populous state in the country, and a Republican and a Douglas Democrat were running against each other for governor). Lincoln followed Douglas to both cities and rebutted his Harper’s article; even as the Lincoln/Douglas debates had begun years before their senate race, so now they continued after it.
The opinions of the two men on the future of slavery were unchanged: Douglas was for letting popular sovereignty determine it, Lincoln for containment and ultimate extinction.
The political trajectories of the two men had not changed since the fight over the Lecompton Constitution. In December 1858 southern Democrats had stripped Douglas of his chairmanship of the Committee on Territories as punishment for his aggressive anti-Lecompton stance. If Douglas were to reach the White House, it would have to be with northern support, including the support of Republicans. Although Douglas could scarcely hope for a Republican nomination after the spirited partisan race he had run in 1858, he might still steal the party’s followers out from under its leadership. Lincoln was determined to stop him. In a letter to an Ohio politician he called Douglas “the most dangerous enemy of liberty, because the most insidious.” In fighting to stop Douglas, he incidentally advanced himself.
At issue once again were the two men’s portraits of the founders, and their own self-portraits as founders’ sons. Their argument over slavery and politics had become a fratricidal contest over which of them was the Revolution’s legitimate heir.
Douglas’s article in Harper’s, “The Dividing Line Between Federal and Local Authority: Popular Sovereignty in the Territories,” was long—seventeen and a half double-column pages—but its point was simple: “The ideas and principles of the fathers of the Revolution” were identical to popular sovereignty, as expounded by Douglas. After a long survey of American legislation, going back beyond the founding to colonial times, Douglas distilled his version of the American creed: “The people of every separate political community (dependent colonies, Provinces and Territories, as well as sovereign states) have an inalienable right to govern themselves in respect to their internal polity.” That included governing themselves in respect to slavery.
Douglas’s founding fathers were permissive parents, as far as white men were concerned. White men should be able to do as they pleased with black men. Lincoln’s founding fathers, by contrast, were lawgivers. They believed in sheet anchors and axioms; they laid down the law of liberty, based on human nature.
Lincoln had given the Republicans of Boston the Declaration; he now gave the Republicans of Ohio the Northwest Ordinance. It had, he said, an unimpeachable founding pedigree. The Ordinance had been “made by the very men who were the actors in the Revolution,” and it had been ratified as the Constitution “was in process of being framed.” What did it show? That when “the revolutionary heroes” considered whether slavery should go into the Northwest Territory, they forbade it. No popular sovereignty on this question for them: “From first to last, they clung to freedom.”
In Cincinnati, Lincoln threw out a new idea, tying his belief in liberty to his Whiggish theories of work: “Whereas God Almighty has given every man one mouth to be fed, and one pair of hands adapted to furnish food for that mouth, if anything can be proved to be the will of Heaven, it is . . . that that mouth is to be fed with those hands, without being interfered with by any other man who has also his mouth to feed and his hands to labor with.” He went on to add a joke: If God had intended to divide mankind into classes of drones and drudges, he would have given the first class mouths and no hands, and the second hands and no mouths.
This little set piece on hands and mouths was a gloss on Lincoln’s moving image, two years earlier, of the black woman whose right to eat the bread she earned with her own hands equaled anyone else’s. It was also his gloss on the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson had written that “all men . . . are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” among them “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” At first glance Lincoln’s right to eat the bread one has earned may not seem as grand as Jefferson’s triad of rights; but bread sustains life, liberty, and any pursuing of happiness anyone might do. Jefferson never worked with his hands, and Lincoln was not a very happy man, so they drew on different life experiences to illustrate their thoughts, but their thinking was essentially the same.
Ironically, Lincoln’s test case for liberty evoked agricultural labor—before bakers make bread, farmers have to grow the wheat and millers have to turn it into flour. This was labor Lincoln loathed. But the source of his loathing was the fact that through his twenty-first year he had not been paid; thirty years later, he was able to sympathize with slaves who were in a similar position.
Finally, both Lincoln and Jefferson—though neither of them was a Christian—traced these rights to God.
That fall Lincoln got yet another speaking invitation, which he promptly accepted: it was to make his New York debut.
New York was the most populous city in the country. It was already a financial hub, and increasingly a cultural and media hub as well (Harper’s, the magazine in which Douglas presented his self-justification, was published there; so was Greeley’s Tribune). Lincoln’s invitation, from New York–area Republicans, asked him to come to Brooklyn, across the East River, then a separate city, which was itself the country’s third largest. Lincoln’s venue was to be Plymouth Church, the pulpit of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, an ecclesiastical showman and abolitio
nist firebrand; the date was set for February 1860. Lincoln bought a new black suit for the occasion for $100, quite a sum. At the last minute the sponsors, hoping to lure a bigger crowd, moved the lecture to Manhattan, to Cooper Union, a free school for the working class.
Lincoln had told his sponsors that he would make a political speech. His mere presence in New York guaranteed that. New York State was the nation’s largest, and a bastion of the Republican Party. The party leader there was the senior senator William Seward. Seward had several points in common with Lincoln: he was an ex-Whig; he was funny-looking—short rather than rail-tall, with a big nose and big ears; he was an indifferent dresser (one of his outfits was described as “a coat and trousers made apparently twenty years ago and by a bad tailor at that”). Seward had characterized the future of slavery and freedom in America in a phrase as portentous as the “house divided”: the two systems, he said in an 1858 speech in Rochester, New York, were locked in an “irrepressible conflict.”
But as of February 1860 Seward’s reputation was already made, while Lincoln’s was still being made. Seward, who was eight years older than Lincoln, had been a senator for a decade and governor of New York before that. His adviser and right hand was an Albany journalist and wire-puller who had the greatest name that has ever been, or ever will be, in American politics: Thurlow Weed. (Thurlow, the last name as first name, suggesting everything that inspires respect, from high ideals to cash on hand. Weed, what follows in every politician’s footsteps, from backroom deals to stabs in the back.) Seward was the acknowledged front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. To speak in Seward’s back yard was, by definition, a raid. Lincoln would still aim his fire at Douglas, but other Republicans would now suffer by comparison. The better Lincoln looked against Douglas, the better he might look as a possible Republican candidate.
The New Yorkers who saw Lincoln on the Cooper Union stage had the same first impression of him that audiences always had. The adjectives scattered through one man’s recollection of him sum it up: “weird . . . long . . . clumsy . . . gaunt.” When Lincoln opened his mouth, a western whine came out. His speech, however, was his most carefully wrought so far, one of the best he would ever give. It was also his most thorough account of the founding fathers and their stance on slavery. At Cooper Union he would make his most elaborate case that he was the founders’ son.
Lincoln’s speech began with a technique borrowed from sermons: the preacher quotes a biblical text, then expounds on it. Lincoln’s text came from one of Douglas’s speeches in Ohio the past September. “Our fathers,” Douglas said then, “when they framed the government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.” “This question” was the one Douglas had addressed in his Harper’s article: whether local authority (popular sovereignty) or federal authority controlled slavery in the territories. Douglas naturally thought “our fathers” understood it exactly as he did.
Lincoln announced that he “fully” agreed with Douglas’s premise: “our fathers” did indeed understand that question as well or better than anyone in 1860. But he proposed to show that “our fathers” understood it not as Douglas did, but as Lincoln did.
First he defined his terms: for the purpose of answering Douglas’s question, the “fathers” were the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution. They had written and endorsed the nation’s fundamental law; they were the men who had “framed the government under which we live.” Then for the next forty-five minutes Lincoln walked his audience through what exactly these men thought and did.
They had left a legislative trail thirty-six years long. Lincoln began with the Northwest Ordinance. Three fathers-to-be had voted in the old Congress for Jefferson’s ban on trans-Appalachian slavery in 1784, and two more for the final bill banning it in the old Northwest in 1787. Then, in 1789, in the first Congress under the Constitution, sixteen fathers (six of them serving as representatives, ten as senators) voted to confirm the Northwest Ordinance; George Washington, the greatest father of them all, signed it into law as president.
In 1798 and 1804 Congress organized territories in the future states of Mississippi and Louisiana, places long marinated in slavery. But Congress nevertheless forbade any slaves to be imported into them from abroad, even though the slave trade was then still legal. Four fathers, all senators, approved these restrictions. Finally, in 1819, the fight over Missouri statehood began. One of the last fathers to hold public office, still serving in the Senate, voted consistently against the expansion of slavery.
Lincoln summed up: of the thirty-nine fathers “who framed the government under which we live,” twenty-one had acted to ban or restrict slavery in territories. Some had done so more than once, as different bills came before them at different points in their careers. Sixteen of the fathers had never been in a position to vote on such questions, while two of them—a member of the old Congress in 1784, and a representative in 1819–1820—had indeed voted against restricting slavery in particular territories. But twenty-one out of thirty-nine was, as Lincoln said, “a clear majority.”
Lincoln did not stop with this tally. Among the fathers who never voted one way or the other were “noted anti-slavery men”: he mentioned Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton (who had belonged to manumission societies in their home states) and Gouverneur Morris (who had assailed slavery, the slave trade, and the three-fifths rule in speeches during the Constitutional Convention). Surely, he argued, they would have sided with the twenty-one if they had had the chance.
The Taney Court had maintained in Dred Scott that the Fifth Amendment protected property in the territories, including slaves, and therefore that restrictions like the Missouri line were unconstitutional. But Lincoln pointed out that the first ten amendments had been passed by the same Congress that confirmed the Northwest Ordinance. “Is it not a little presumptuous . . . to affirm that the two things which that Congress deliberately framed and carried to maturity at the same time are absolutely inconsistent with each other?”
There was a dry wit in Lincoln’s careful parsings—so dry as almost to have evaporated. But the force of the Cooper Union speech came not from humor, but from well-paced repetition. Lincoln turned pedantry into music. He ended his first example, of the three fathers who had voted to restrict slavery in 1784, in this way: “In their understanding, no line dividing local from federal authority, nor anything else, properly forbade the federal government to control as to slavery in federal territory.” As the speech marched on, he rang that long formula, sometimes word for word, sometimes with slight variations, a dozen times, like a watchman tolling a bell. Shorter phrases—“our fathers,” “the thirty-nine,” “the government under which we live”—popped up, time after time, like grace notes.
But maybe the best metaphor for Lincoln’s rhetoric at Cooper Union was not music, but wrestling. His absent opponent, Douglas, had unwisely given him a hold; Lincoln gripped him and threw him, again and again and again.
Lincoln devoted the second half of his speech to two appeals and a warning. He urged Republicans to avoid mere passion and ill-temper. He urged southerners to realize that Republicans did not mean to deprive them of “any right, plainly written down in the Constitution.” (“Plainly written” was meant to exclude Dred Scott, which Lincoln considered a rogue decision.) His warning was that the Republicans would not relent in their efforts to restrict the spread of slavery. They would not relent because that was “the old policy of the fathers,” and because that was the right policy. Lincoln’s last sentence went straight from the Cooper Union stage to immortality (some typesetter, or perhaps Lincoln himself, capitalized the line when the speech was published): “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.”
The crowd gave him a long, hat-waving standing ovation. Afterward, the New York Tribune’s reporter, asked what he thought of the speaker, replied, stunned, “He’s the greatest man since
St. Paul.”
Lincoln concluded his trip east with a swing through New England, to capitalize on the impression he had made in New York, then returned home to cram in some more legal work. His political contest with Douglas would continue through the fall and the presidential election, but Lincoln would give no more major speeches. The back-and-forth of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which had begun in 1854, was done.
Lincoln had challenged Douglas in his home state, making himself the great Democrat’s principal rival, even more than fellow Illinoisan Lyman Trumbull. Trumbull, not Lincoln, had made it to the Senate, but Lincoln, not Trumbull, had fought Douglas on the same podiums, as well as refuting his arguments from Peoria to Cooper Union.
Lincoln had kept Douglas and the national Republican Party apart. The marriage that eastern Republicans had fancied after Douglas denounced the Lecompton Constitution had been forestalled by the 1858 Senate race, while Douglas’s seduction of potential Republican voters had been chilled by Lincoln’s ongoing criticisms. Horace Greeley registered the change like a weather vane. In 1858 his newspaper had touted Douglas; in 1860 it reported the Cooper Union speech rapturously. Lincoln had gone from being dispensable to being praiseworthy.
Douglas raised Lincoln up to national prominence. Coming from any other state, a one-term congressman and local wheelhorse would have struggled in vain for national attention. As the gadfly of such an important Democrat, Lincoln became important himself.
Illinois also raised Lincoln up to national prominence. The 1856 election showed that Republicans could count on a solid North, Democrats on a solid South. James Buchanan had won the White House by carrying Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey; Republicans would have to carry Pennsylvania plus at least one of the other middle states if they hoped to win in 1860. The Lincoln-Douglas debates had highlighted two contenders from a swing state.
Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln Page 15
