Views in the North were practically the opposite. In the decades before the Civil War, the notion of material progress and the dream of social mobility took fire in the northern mind. The opportunity of “ordinary people” to acquire land or work as independent artisans encouraged the growing sense of equality of all citizens. For the first time, voting rights existed for all adult male citizens, not just for all property holders. Northern and western states from New York to Illinois actively pursued internal improvements and built up their public infrastructure to support the dream of equality and the reality of opportunity.
America was increasingly dividing into two distinct sectional societies. The North was expanding its internal economy, while the South clung to its highly profitable slave-based agricultural economy, heavily reliant on cotton exports to Great Britain.
Two different economies, with different, and in many respects opposed, sets of interests now coexisted anxiously under one flag. And with the two economies came two different cultures and worldviews, North and South, one dependent, to be sure, on the output of slaves. The growing sectional divide—the growing crisis between North and South—initially played out as a struggle over economic policy. Only later did it also become an explicit conflict over the morality of slavery.
During the three decades before the Civil War, politicians dedicated to the Union struggled to keep the division over slavery from tearing the nation apart. What ultimately forced the issue was the nation’s continued westward expansion. Would the new states added to the Union have an economy based on slave labor or free labor? The repeal of the Missouri Compromise that accompanied passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 forced the issue of slavery in the territories to the center of the national stage. The Kansas-Nebraska Act specified that each territory could choose between the northern and southern economic systems through a political solution dubbed “popular sovereignty.” In each territory, this encouraged an explosive political battle between supporters of each system, bringing the long-seething conflict to the heart of national life.
It was during this tumultuous period that the new Republican Party was founded. It was an uncoordinated combination of Whigs and antislavery former Democrats, but what unified them was an economic vision. Lincoln was the best and most philosophical, though by no means the only, exponent of its outlook. Its watchword was the concept of free labor. This becomes especially clear against the background of its alternative: the aristocratic economic life as it was known in the slave-owning South. The vision, especially in Lincoln’s eyes, was aimed primarily at improving the lot of ordinary citizens, of building and sustaining a middle-class country.
When his hero Henry Clay died in 1852, Lincoln delivered a eulogy in his Springfield, Illinois, hometown, parts of which were less a description of Clay than a thinly veiled self-portrait of Lincoln. The heart of the eulogy featured a description of the very core of Lincoln’s political and economic philosophy, which he artfully attributed to Clay: “Mr. Clay’s predominant sentiment, from first to last, was a deep devotion to the cause of human liberty—a strong sympathy with the oppressed everywhere, and an ardent wish for their elevation. With him, this was a primary and all controlling passion. . . . He desired the prosperity of his countrymen partly because they were his countrymen, but chiefly to show to the world that free men could be prosperous.”
Significantly, for Lincoln and the new Republican Party, the doctrine of “free labor” implied an active role for government in fulfilling this mission. It was the slave-owning South, rather than the Republican North, that adhered to the doctrine of pure “free-market” economics. It was the slave-owning South that sought to diminish the size and powers of the federal government. It was the slave owners of the South, secure in their vast personal wealth, who saw little point to investments in the public sector to build a national infrastructure. It was the South that was sharply divided between the few rich and the many poor, a region with minimal social mobility and no ethic of social responsibility. It was the open society of the North that provided the economic opportunity for all free men to build a middle-class life. That society, Lincoln believed, came closest to fulfilling the American Dream, and as such should expand and endure.
Two. RIGHT MAKES MIGHT
LINCOLN THE CANDIDATE
LINCOLN CAME LATE to the fight over extending slavery into America’s western territories. He was only twelve years old and living in isolation on the prairie when the conflict between northern and southern members of Congress led to the Missouri Compromise of 1820–1821, which was intended to settle the issue for all time.
When the controversy resurfaced thirty years later with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Lincoln was ready to do battle against slavery on economic as well as moral terms. By then he had begun to interpret his own escape from poverty as a cautionary argument against keeping people in a hopelessly fixed condition for life.
The Missouri Compromise between proslavery Southern states and antislavery Northern states specified that western territories below the Mason-Dixon line—interpreted at 36°30’ latitude—would remain open to slavery, while those above would remain free, with slavery barred. When Lincoln served in Congress from 1847 to 1849, he did not focus much on the future of slavery in the territories beyond his support of the ill-fated Wilmot Proviso, prohibiting slavery from all western lands acquired in the Mexican-American War (the measure failed repeatedly). For all intents and purposes, the issue had been settled by law, leaving white Americans free to pursue their ambitions and dreams in the territories north of the Mason-Dixon line.
Then in 1850 Whig Party leader Henry Clay, Lincoln’s “beau ideal of a statesman,” persuaded Congress to pass the Compromise of 1850—with considerable help from an increasingly influential young Democratic senator from Illinois: Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln was by then back home in Illinois, out of office, and soured on politics. This new compromise barred the slave trade in Washington, DC, admitted California as a free state, introduced the nation’s first fugitive slave law, and ushered in the idea of “popular sovereignty” by giving New Mexico and Utah the right to leave to its white voters the question of whether to organize as slave or free states. Four years later Senator Douglas, who had shepherded Clay’s Compromise of 1850 through Congress, was extending the use of “popular sovereignty” by persuading Congress to pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Douglas hoped his plan for giving white western settlers the right to vote slavery up or down in new states would calm the ongoing conflict between the North and South.
Lincoln’s personal history made him different from most politicians of this period and perhaps more attuned to America’s unique promise to its citizens. Somehow, he had escaped a life of physical labor, hunger, and hardship and taught himself to be an attorney. Understandably, Lincoln became a lawyer with a pronounced sympathy for clients whose pursuit of upward mobility was frustrated by powerful interests or archaic precedents. When he turned to politics as a man of the people, he naturally began to interpret his own escape from poverty as a cautionary argument against keeping people, white or black, in a fixed condition for life.
It was Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act that spurred Lincoln to reenter politics and defend the economic system he saw as crucial to the American way of life. By 1854 Lincoln was prepared to argue that the battle over the economic structure of the western territories amounted to an unavoidable conflict over the future of the United States. Lincoln saw no value in the Douglas plan for the West, even if Douglas meant it to spur economic expansion to the Pacific. It was in response to Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act that former congressman Abraham Lincoln was “aroused,” as he put it, to return to politics and argue against popular sovereignty.
Lincoln’s experience as a lawyer in civil cases had taught him that there was no requirement that litigants bring opposing viewpoints together with a compromise solution. When compromise failed and Lincoln found himself trying a case in a court of law, he was willing to go
all out to make an overarching argument based on first principles. Looking at the Kansas-Nebraska Act, what was at stake was the basic right of American citizens to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Lincoln and his contemporaries lived in a nonstop political environment. Voters found politics the major public entertainment, and participation in the political process was almost universal. The voters—some barely literate—avidly craved public oratory and came out to hear candidates speak for hours at a time. Community response to political speech making was reminiscent of the level of interest in old-time preaching at revival meetings or modern enthusiasm for sporting events and rock concerts. Elections of some kind occurred throughout the calendar year. Voters followed politics continuously and took their families to political events as eagerly as they might go to the community church or the annual county fair. Famous political figures enjoyed a built-in audience. Their speeches were not just all talk. They were frequently accompanied by fireworks, music, torch-lit processions, and still more speeches.
The future president thrived in this culture. Even Douglas, his lifelong rival, acknowledged that Lincoln was “full of wit, facts, dates—and the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes.” Lincoln was wise not only in the ways of enthralling crowds, but also in creating words that could be reprinted in newspapers, the only medium of the time that provided regular information to party loyalists and other voters. For many voters, especially those locked into rural isolation far from the scenes of rallies and lyceums, newspapers were their primary access to the ideas and arguments of aspiring politicians.
Lincoln initiated his reentry into Illinois politics with a speech in Peoria on October 16, 1854. Showcasing a leaner new oratorical style, he fashioned the address in the form of a lawyer’s argument and made the case against Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act largely on economic terms. As he put it, “The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these territories. We want them for homes of free white people. This they cannot be, to any considerable extent, if slavery shall be planted within them. 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. For this use, the nation needs these territories.”
Lincoln’s emphasis on slavery’s economic consequences was quite different from the argument of the abolitionists of his time, who insisted on immediate action to end slavery and begin the process of establishing racial equality. As Lincoln argued in Peoria, slavery might remain legal in the South, but that did not mean it should or could be introduced in the western territories. What set Lincoln apart from many of his Northern contemporaries was his refusal to affix sole blame for slavery on white Southerners. Had their climates been reversed, he often volunteered, Northerners might well have embraced and defended slavery with equal vigor.
When southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery, than we; I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists; and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. . . . When they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them, not grudgingly, but fully and fairly; and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives, which should not, in its stringency, be more likely to carry a free man into slavery, than our ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.
But all this; to my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting slavery to go into our own free territory, than it would for reviving the African slave trade by law.
While Lincoln was adamantly opposed to the extension of slavery to the western territories, he made it clear he was not joining the abolitionists in demanding racial equality in the South or in the North. “Let it not be said I am contending for the establishment of political and social equality between the whites and blacks,” he said. Indeed, Lincoln did not even support the elimination of the Black Laws that banned free people of color from living in many Northern states, including his own Illinois. Rather, he took the position that the fight against slavery should center on expanding the Northern economic system in the West for the benefit of future generations of aspiring white Americans. Even this was a radical notion in the halls of Congress in 1854.
Lincoln couched his opposition to the spread of slavery with a cautious mix of constitutional interpretation and muted moral indignation. But behind his argument—though it remained unstated—was a shrewd political calculus. If slavery was banned forever from the West, then every new state admitted to the Union in the future would be a free state, with each of them sending antislavery congressmen and senators to Washington. As often as Lincoln assured Southern interests that he would never interfere with slavery where it existed, the slow but sure arrival of an ever-growing western antislavery bloc meant that at some point in the future, there might be sufficient votes on Capitol Hill for Congress to initiate the death knell of slavery with an achievable constitutional amendment to prohibit slavery everywhere. Lincoln understood this potential future tipping point. And it helps explain his seemingly restrained and limited public antislavery sentiments: time was on his side, as long as slavery did not spread.
Southern proslavery elements comprehended this from the start, too, which is why they remained so fearful of Lincoln’s political rise. Presenting himself as a common man who rose because of American guarantees of freedom and economic opportunity, Lincoln was the one populist who might actually place slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction.” The absolute prohibition of slavery from the western territories was his way to achieve the ultimate goal of ensuring that the United States would continue to provide equality and economic opportunity for its white citizens.
It was not that Lincoln ignored morality and was solely interested in the economic impact of the extension of the Southern slave system on white Americans in the Northern states and western territories. Lincoln clearly believed that slavery was fundamentally immoral because it deprived slaves of the just economic rewards they earned from their labor. At Peoria on October 16, 1854, an impassioned Lincoln decried “the spread of slavery . . . because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself.” He was not averse to criticizing the slave system or its adherents, for slavery violated the founding fathers’ belief in the individual right to freely engage in the pursuit of happiness: “I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”
The Peoria speech—with its extraordinary emphasis on America’s responsibility to inspire the expansion of democracy worldwide—signaled Lincoln’s reentry into politics as a major figure in the emerging Republican Party of Illinois. Between 1854 and 1858, he traveled the state to rally support for himself and his views with a continuing emphasis on the largely economic argument presented in his Peoria speech. In 1858 Lincoln captured the Republican nomination to oppose Democrat Stephen Douglas for the US Senate seat from Illinois. In an immediately controversial, and justly famous, speech accepting the Republican designation, Lincoln threw down the gauntlet not only to Douglas but also to the slave states and all supporters of compromise:
Under the operation of the policy of compromise, the agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
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p; 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 the 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.
Lincoln on April 25, 1858, the year of his legendary senatorial campaign debates with Stephen A. Douglas, as photographed by Samuel Alschuler in Quincy, Illinois. Alschuler thought Lincoln’s coat unsuitable for a rising political leader and lent his subject his own velvet-trimmed jacket to pose.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
As Lincoln put it, “Have we no tendency to the latter condition?” Here he referred to the Southern effort to extend slavery based on the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case in 1857, which gave slaveholders the “right” to take their human property everywhere in the United States without restriction. That decision forbade Congress and local legislatures from banning slavery in the western territories. Lincoln was reminding his audience that unless its geographic spread was restricted, the Southern economic, social, and political system was threatening to expand nationwide immediately. Here he was speaking not just for a faction of the Republican Party, but for the large body of outraged Republicans who believed that Douglas and his compatriots in Congress were engaged in a “conspiracy” to make slavery “perpetual, national and universal.”
A Just and Generous Nation Page 4
