Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln
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The problem with Stephens’s plea was that Lincoln had already answered it. He had called John Brown violent, criminal, insane, and a failure. He had assured the South, as recently as Cooper Union, that Republicans intended no interference “whatever” with their slaves. He had said in the “House Divided” speech that the nation could not endure half slave and half free, but he had explained subsequently that its time of full freedom might take a century to arrive. Asking him to repeat what he had already said was a tic, a nervous ritual. Lincoln had his own Bible verse to characterize such requests, which he had given to another anxious southern correspondent, a minister in Tennessee: “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead” (Luke 16:31).
Stephens’s last-minute plea ignored the issue that did separate Lincoln and the South. Slavery was not a good thing protected by the laws, and disallowed only in certain states; it was a bad thing, to be discouraged by the laws and guaranteed only in certain states. Lincoln spelled it out in his letter of the 22nd: “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended, while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub.”
Lincoln and Stephens wrote no more, but Stephens would soon have another chance to express himself publicly on the peril facing the country.
The New Year came. South Carolina had accompanied her November 9 resolutions with an appeal for “the cooperation of her sister slaveholding states.” In January 1861 five states answered South Carolina’s call: Mississippi seceded on the 9th, Florida on the 10th, and Alabama on the 11th. Alabama’s ordinance of secession gave as a justification “the election of Abraham Lincoln . . . by a sectional party avowedly hostile to [our] domestic institutions.” Georgia followed on the 19th, and Louisiana on the 26th.
South Carolina was no longer an outlier, but a leader. The South felt a sense of encirclement that few in the North, and almost no one in the Republican Party, understood. The House had had a majority of free-state congressmen for years. With the admission of Kansas as a free state on January 29, in addition to California, Minnesota, and Oregon in the 1850s, the Senate’s balance of free and slave states had vanished forever, unless there was sweeping American expansion in Central America and the Caribbean. Now an antislavery northern party was about to move into the White House, from which position it could begin slowly reshaping the courts. Since the South stood alone in fact, perhaps its only safety was to make a formal break.
On January 31 Lincoln visited his past, going to Coles County, Illinois, to see his stepmother. Sarah Bush Lincoln was then seventy-two years old. Years later, she would say that she had not wanted her stepson to be president. “When he came down to see me after he was elected . . . something told me that something would befall Abe and that I should see him no more.” She recollected her fears after he had died; very likely his death altered her recollection. But Lincoln lived in a superstitious world. In the White House his wife would consult mediums who contacted the spirits of the dead; that was rather modern in the mid-nineteenth century, almost scientific. Lincoln, for all his skepticism, bore traces of an older world of folklore. He believed in the efficacy of mad stones (hair-balls from the innards of deer that reputedly cured bites and poisonings); he examined disturbing dreams for portents. Perhaps his stepmother felt some unease, which events chanced to confirm.
Back in Springfield Lincoln rented his house, wrapped up his law business, and bade farewell to the loyal Herndon. He left town by train on February 11, the day before his fifty-second birthday; it was cloudy and wet. “I go,” he said in brief remarks, “to assume a task more difficult than that which devolved upon General Washington.” No joking about back houses; this was serious—serious enough to invoke God. “Unless the great God who assisted him shall be with me and aid me, I must fail. . . . Let us all pray that the God of our fathers may not forsake us now.”
Lincoln’s trip to Washington was deliberately indirect. In twelve days he passed through seven states—Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland. There was some relaxation—he saw a new Verdi opera, Un Ballo in Maschera in New York—and some alarm—he hurried through Maryland in the dead of night to frustrate a supposed plot to assassinate him in Baltimore. But his primary purposes were dramatic and political. He spoke repeatedly, not saying anything new, or even much at all, but enough to secure his base and to reassure all who needed, and would accept, reassurance.
In the most historic spots he recapitulated his many efforts to connect himself to the founding fathers. On February 21, in Trenton, New Jersey, he recalled what Parson Weems had taught him about Washington’s desperate battle there: “I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for.” This was his answer to the Washington idolaters, Robert Winthrop and Edward Everett, whose Washington fought merely for unity. Lincoln’s Washington fought for liberty.
On February 22, in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Lincoln recalled a founding document: “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” he said. This was permissible hyperbole; although he had not referred to the Declaration in any serious way before his 1852 eulogy for Henry Clay, he had referred to it repeatedly since then. “What great principle,” he went on, “kept this Confederacy so long together[?] It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land; but something in the Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.” This was his answer to Jefferson Davis and Stephen Douglas. The Declaration was not only an act of separation or a declaration of equality for white people. It was both of those things. But America’s claim to independence, and the white man’s claim to equality, rested on all men’s equal right to liberty.
Lincoln arrived in Washington on February 23. On the same day, Texas voters ratified an ordinance of secession.
Meetings, receptions, discussions, rumors, crowds; all the madness of Springfield repeated and magnified by the normal hubbub of the capital and the abnormal shriek of a country splitting. Lincoln stayed at the Willard Hotel until he could move up the street into the White House.
Inauguration day was March 4, which began under clouds but cleared up in time for the ceremony. Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, still in active service at age seventy-four, had posted sharpshooters on nearby rooftops and watched the proceedings with his staff from a carriage stationed in a side street, ready for any emergency. If any rebels showed their heads, he had assured Lincoln that he would “blow them to hell.”
Lincoln gave his Inaugural Address on a platform at the East Portico of the Capitol, the preferred location for inaugurations for the previous twenty years. He was introduced by an old political colleague, Edward Baker, who had moved to Oregon and become a senator. He felt some confusion on rising to speak, in setting aside his top hat and cane, gaudy and unfamiliar appurtenances for him; Stephen Douglas, who sat on the podium, took them from him.
Lincoln’s address, at 3,600 words, was rather long for an inaugural, but the state of the nation demanded it.
He began by declaring what he had written privately to Stephens: slavery was safe in the South. To prove it, he quoted himself from the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
He then addressed the secession crisis. He started by saying that he held “the union of these states” to be “perpetual.” He offered several reasons, one from logic, one from law, and a number from history.
Lincoln the logician argued that no government ever provided for its own dismemberment. Leagues and alliances might dissolve, but they were not governments. “Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed,” by the nature of government itself.
Lincoln the historian traced the Union back through the Revolution to its earliest stirrings. The Union had come into being in the First Continental Congress, in 1774; it was “matured” by the Declaration and “further matured” by the Articles of Confederation, the country’s first constitution, which had been in force from 1781 until 1788. (The Articles had asserted that “each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence,” but they had also several times described the confederation as “perpetual.”) He ended with the Preamble to the Constitution, which looked to a “more perfect” union. “But,” he noted, “if destruction of the union . . . be lawfully possible, the union is less perfect.”
This risked being arid, but it was very Lincolnian: trying to nail down principles, axioms, starting points.
Lincoln touched on several specific issues, trying, with varying degrees of success, to be mollifying. Some of the seceding states had complained of the difficulty of retrieving fugitive slaves, as guaranteed by the Constitution (Article IV, Section 2). Lincoln honored the guarantee. But he asked if there might not be “safeguards” (i.e., trials) to ensure that free blacks were not wrongfully seized by slave-catchers. Henry Clay had wanted such a provision in the federal fugitive slave law that was part of the Compromise of 1850, but it had not been incorporated into the final bill. No secessionist now would accept such a thing.
Lincoln proposed “to hold, occupy and possess the property and places belonging to the government.” In an early draft, he had said he would “reclaim” property that had fallen to secessionists. Since that would have committed him to a battle over every post office in the Deep South, he took that pledge out. The final version would be sufficient cause for disagreement.
He iterated his views on the Supreme Court and the Dred Scott decision. The Supreme Court, he said, had the final word on cases brought before it, and its judgments were entitled to “very high respect and consideration” thereafter. But the people should not defer in every subsequent case or policy decision to “that eminent tribunal.” Chief Justice Taney, about to turn eighty-four, and looking like “a galvanized corpse,” sat on the podium behind Lincoln. He kept his thoughts to himself.
Lincoln mentioned a proposed constitutional amendment that was being discussed in the corridors of the Capitol as a possible compromise. It would be the Thirteenth Amendment, and it would declare that the federal government could never interfere with slavery in the states where it existed. Lincoln said he believed that was “implied constitutional law already,” and so he had no objection to putting it in writing.
As he concluded he called on God. Lincoln asked Him to speak not through Bible verses, and certainly not through direct commands a la John Brown, but through politics and political history. “If the Almighty Ruler of nations . . . be on your side of the North, or on yours of the South,” His will would “surely prevail by the judgment of this great tribunal, the American people.” This was more facile than Lincoln’s invocation of God as he left Springfield three weeks earlier. Then he had admitted that he needed God’s help. Now he pretended that God might go either way, although—if God truly spoke through the American people—He had already voted for Lincoln.
Lincoln ended not with God, but with an appeal to the founding fathers. Logic, law, history, politics, and theology were all very well. But Seward, after reading an early version of the speech, had urged Lincoln to add a last paragraph of emotion and poetry, and offered his own draft. Lincoln had polished Seward’s words, and read his own version now: “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. . . . The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
A chord (spelled with an h) now means three or more notes played together. Chords in music are the building blocks of harmony (or the weapons of dissonance). But Lincoln used chords in an older sense, to mean the strings of an instrument. His instrument was the remembering mind, which clung to the founders and the Revolution, to all that they had fought for and all that it meant. This was not the poetry of the Lyceum Address, in which the founders were dead, but the poetry of Lincoln’s plea to the court for Rebecca Thomas, the old widow; the poetry of all his rhetoric about the Fourth of July, the Declaration, and the Battle of Trenton. See what they did for us, see what we have: their sacrifices made our peace and prosperity, their labor gave us our lives.
The chief justice administered the oath of office, and Lincoln became the sixteenth president. Not enough angels would touch his chords.
Before the war began there came another notable speech, by Alexander Stephens.
Stephens attended the January convention called by the State of Georgia to decide whether or not it should secede, where he argued to the last for patience and compromise. But when the convention voted to leave the Union, Stephens supported his state and secession. He served in a provisional Confederate congress that met in Montgomery, Alabama, in February, and was chosen by it to be the new Confederacy’s vice president. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, former congressman, senator, and secretary of war, was chosen as president. Davis had been a lifelong Democrat; Stephens would represent former Whigs.
On March 21 Stephens spoke to a reception in his honor in Savannah. His remarks appear to have been impromptu, but Stephens, as Lincoln long ago observed, was a ready speaker and an intelligent man, and he rose to the occasion.
He praised the new Confederate constitution. It had, in his view, all the virtues of the American Constitution—and indeed borrowed much of its language, including the Preamble (with a reference to “Almighty God” added) and the first eight amendments of the Bill of Rights (relocated into the main body of the document itself). But the Confederate constitution also had several new structural features, which Stephens considered improvements: a man could serve in the congress and the cabinet simultaneously, making the Confederate system more like Britain’s, which Stephens admired; the president was limited to one six-year term, which removed the temptations of electioneering.
Stephens then mentioned yet another improvement—“though last, not least.” The constitution had “put to rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists among us—[and] the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.”
The Confederate constitution, unlike the American one, openly mentioned “slaveholding,” “slaves,” and “negro slavery”: although it forbade the foreign slave trade, it committed the new government to protecting property in slaves in all its territories. (The seven seceded states had as yet no territories, unless they could establish a claim to New Mexico, but Cuba would be a likely target for expansion.) But Stephens did not bother about these details. No less than Lincoln, he had an instinct to dig up the root, and he now set about doing it.
Slavery, he said, “was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.” He invoked Jefferson, who had feared that slavery might break the country up (it would be “the knell of the union,” as he wrote John Holmes in 1820). “He was right,” Stephens said simply. “What was conjecture with him is now a realized fact.”
Stephens stayed with Jefferson for a moment more. “The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away.” This could almost have been a paragraph in one of Lincoln’s speeches. Lincoln believe
d that Jefferson and the other founders had taken concrete steps to hasten slavery’s passing, allowing the slave trade to be banned after twenty years, and blocking slavery from expanding into the old Northwest. But Stephens and Lincoln agreed that the founders had thought that slavery was evil and had hoped that it would end.
Stephens went on. “Those ideas”—the ideas of Jefferson and his fellow statesmen—“were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. . . . Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” The reporter who covered Stephens’s speech for a local newspaper noted that at this point, there was “Applause.”
Lincoln had labored to depict himself as the loyal son of the founders. Stephens portrayed himself as the wiser son—wiser than Lincoln, wiser than the founders themselves.
Stephens elaborated on his newfound wisdom: “This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.” Slavery had been universal in the ancient world, but in those societies white men had enslaved other white men, which was wrong. The Confederate states put equally free white men above equally unfree black men, which was right: “This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.” Stephens cited other discoverers of great truths: Galileo, Adam Smith, William Harvey. All faced skepticism, all prevailed. Galileo put bodies in the hand of gravity; Smith put the economy under the invisible hand of the market; Harvey showed that blood moved at the pulse of the heart. The Confederacy put the Negro where he belonged. “He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.”