Throughout the summer and fall of 1858, in their widely publicized debates across Illinois, Lincoln and Douglas clashed repeatedly over popular sovereignty, the Dred Scott decision, the extension of slavery, the dire warnings in Lincoln’s “house divided” speech, and one issue that the Democrats repeatedly denounced and the Republicans consistently deflected: equal rights for blacks.
Lincoln-Douglas debate at Charleston, Illinois—at which Lincoln insisted he believed in equal opportunity, but not yet in equality of the races. Douglas, an unrepentant race-baiter, can be seen at Lincoln’s right. The scene was envisioned by artist Robert Marshall Root, who was born ten years after the event.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM—ALPLM
For Lincoln and the vast majority of his fellow Republicans, the extension of slavery remained an issue that principally concerned white people in the North. Black slavery was tolerable, if hateful, where it had long existed, below the Mason-Dixon line and east of the Mississippi River. There the Constitution protected it. But when it expanded into the new territories, it threatened to limit opportunity for free white labor in a growing nation. Knowing they could not appeal to mainstream white voters by inviting sympathy for oppressed blacks at a time when even freedmen generally lacked the right to vote, Republicans like Lincoln often expressed their opposition to slavery by stressing that it poisoned white citizens’ opportunities to succeed in life. As Lincoln warned his audience of Northern white voters, the “greedy chase to make profit of the negro” could “‘cancel and tear to pieces’ even the white man’s charter of freedom.” Slavery’s effect on the enslaved was never his primary public consideration, although to his credit Lincoln did insist, throughout his debates with Douglas, that blacks were inalienably entitled to the pursuit of happiness.
He reiterated this position during the Lincoln-Douglas debates: “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races.” This sentiment placed him squarely within prevailing white sensibilities of the day, however regressive they sound in the twenty-first century. What elevated Lincoln above the prejudices of most of his contemporaries was this insistence: “But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”
Lincoln further argued that there should be a moral core to American economic democracy—that every person, black or white, deserved to benefit from the fruits of his labor. Slavery was morally wrong, both repugnant to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and alien to the founders’ concept of natural rights, which included the right to economic opportunity. Even though slavery’s existence in the United States was acknowledged in the Constitution, the expectation that it would, in the long run, cease to exist had been acknowledged by the framers with the abolition of the slave trade. Lincoln argued both that slavery was immoral and that preventing any extension of slavery to the western territories was necessary to reaffirm the commitment to a national future free of slavery and open to economic opportunity for white Americans. This was politically astute. It gave Lincoln an argument against slavery that did not explicitly run counter to the majority opinion of Northern whites that African Americans were inferior and therefore not entitled to all the same rights as white Americans.
The wildly popular Lincoln-Douglas debates established Lincoln as a significant figure in the leadership of the Republican Party and familiarized people with the party’s platform. The disappointing result was still a promising one for the fledgling Republican Party. Lincoln and Republican candidates statewide won a bit more of the popular vote. But Senate elections were then decided by state legislatures, Douglas kept his Senate seat in Illinois, and Lincoln himself was catapulted onto the national stage.
Lincoln’s ambition was not deflected by his failure to win the Senate seat in 1858. Wisely, he decided to take advantage of the publicity-generating debate of ideas with Douglas. He understood that his best hope of keeping his name alive was to continue as if nothing had really been decided by the Senate election, especially since Lincoln’s party had won the popular vote.
Douglas unknowingly facilitated Lincoln’s rebuttal efforts with an inflammatory article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in September 1859. In one sense, Douglas’s piece presented a response to the “house divided” arguments “advocated and defended by the distinguished Republican standard bearer” in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Douglas continued to insist that it revealed Lincoln as inviting civil war over slavery. The article also gave Lincoln the opportunity to claim an increasingly important place in the political hierarchy. Lincoln was able to claim that Douglas had put Lincoln’s argument that “this government ‘cannot endure permanently half slave and half free’” on a par with the argument of the leading Republican aspirant to the presidency, Senator William H. Seward of New York, who foresaw “an ‘irrepressible conflict’ between the principles of free and slave labor.” Now, Lincoln could boast that Douglas believed that Seward and Lincoln were equally important when he described them as equally guilty of seeing “no truce in the sectional strife,” because they refused to accept the Union as the founders had created it: “divided into free and slave States.”
The publicly combative Lincoln-Douglas relationship flared up again when, hungry for the Democratic nomination for president in 1860, the senator marched into Ohio in September 1859 to deliver speeches on behalf of local candidates. Douglas continued advocating popular sovereignty in speeches throughout Ohio. Worried Ohio Republicans asked Lincoln to provide a counterweight. Not surprisingly, Lincoln packed his bags and headed to the Buckeye State, acting as if he was resuming his debates with Douglas. He spoke in Columbus on September 16 and then went on to Dayton and Cincinnati. On October 9, in Cincinnati, Douglas replied: “Did you ever hear a Republican that dissented from Lincoln’s warnings of a house divided?” Lincoln replied on October 17: “We want, and must have, a national policy, as to slavery, which deals with it as being a wrong.” The battle was never drawn more sharply. Douglas persisted in attempting to portray Lincoln as a radical threat to national unity, while Lincoln was painting his Democratic rival as a reactionary threat to national moral principles and economic opportunity for all.
An exhausted Lincoln returned to Springfield on October 15. The night before his arrival home, voters in Ohio and many other states across the country went to the polls in contests for governor and other statewide offices. Republicans triumphed not only in Ohio, but also in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota. Lincoln was welcomed home from his successful campaign in Ohio by several hundred cheering Republicans and a brass band serenading him from the street. To his ardent supporters, Lincoln had not only saved the day for the advocates of the Free Soil position—those who believed in the moral and economic superiority of the free labor system—but also emerged as an important regional, perhaps national, spokesman for the Republican Party and its point of view.
Among the pile of letters waiting for Lincoln at home was a telegram with an invitation to deliver yet another speech, this time in New York. Lincoln at once understood that it offered an opportunity to advance his ambitions to office at the national level. After all, his latest regional efforts in support of the Republican Party had been a success. He had boldly followed the leading national Democratic presidential candidate to Ohio to continue the Lincoln-Douglas debate over the major issue that divided not only them but the rest of the country: the extension of slavery. Ohio had gone Republican in 1859 by seventeen thousand votes. It was reasonable to believe the tide was turning on the issue and that Lincoln himself could claim some responsibility for it.
An ambitious, ingenious politician who hungered for a return to elective office, Lincoln knew that the biggest prize of all, the presidency of the United States, would be decided only a year down the road. He sensed that Senator Douglas would likely become the Democratic candidate for the White House in 1860. Now, a
mid the excitement of Lincoln’s return from his successful speaking tour in Ohio, it suddenly seemed possible that the Republican candidate for president might actually beat Douglas in 1860. Improbable as it seemed just a few hours before the election results had filtered in from across the country in 1859, Lincoln now had substantial reason to imagine himself that candidate. And here was an invitation to introduce himself where he was least known: in New York, the heart of the vote-rich East.
The invitation to speak in New York suggested the date of November 29, 1859. But Lincoln, ever the savvy politician, asked for a later date, closer to the Republican National Convention, scheduled for May 1860. The negotiations proved successful, and the date for his New York address was rescheduled to February 27, 1860.
Lincoln was a deliberate politician. He was totally committed to his continuing effort to achieve high office as a way to prove to himself, as well as to others, that he was worthy of high regard. Losing an election or failing to secure a nomination only spurred him to continue his efforts in the next election. But personal ambition was not his only motivation. Lincoln was determined to make a difference, to leave a lasting legacy to future generations of Americans. The issue on which he believed he could influence both politics and history was economic opportunity for all, and slavery was the stubborn impediment to his long-standing belief in that cause. The person who knew Lincoln best, his law partner, William H. Herndon, captured these two facets of Lincoln’s life in a private letter written in 1866. “I love Mr. Lincoln dearly, almost worship him,” Herndon wrote. “He’s the purest politician I ever saw, and the justest man.”
On a purely political level, Lincoln recognized that his speech in New York might propel him into contention for the Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States. He focused on writing the speech as if preparing an argument in a court of law before a jury of his peers.
Lincoln’s first task was to define the issue of the impending election on his own terms. He had already said in the Lincoln-Douglas debates all there was to say about the moral, economic, and philosophical issues underlying the debate over the extension of slavery to the territories. For this speech in New York, he decided to confront the claim of Douglas and other Democrats, North and South, that the framers of the Constitution had not taken a position on the morality of slavery and had expressly said the federal government should take no actions to regulate its future. Douglas had made this the central point of his recent article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.
Superb advocate that he was, Lincoln proceeded to direct all his talents to making a case for his position. First, he thoroughly researched the question of what each of the signers of the Constitution really said and did on the slavery question, both before and after the constitutional convention. The more Lincoln researched, the more framers he determined to have been opposed to the extension of slavery. Washington, for one, had said that slavery could indeed be controlled by “legislative authority” and had expressed his personal conviction, “There is no man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it.” By his estimation—flawed and oversimplified though it may have been—Lincoln calculated that of the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution who expressed any opinion on the subject, twenty-three had clearly indicated that they believed the federal government had the power to regulate slavery.
With no researchers to assist him, no professional scholars to unearth documents, and no private secretary to take dictation, Lincoln sought his own access to history. Never in his life did Lincoln labor over an address so strenuously, over such an extended period of time, and in the face of major ongoing political and business distractions that competed for his precious time.
Working to develop arguments that would connect his newly assembled facts into a coherent narrative, Lincoln hit upon a novel device. The best way to present the fruits of his research was to make the facts themselves the core of his speech. Douglas might try to convince the public that the federal government had no right to control slavery in the federal territories, “[B]ut he has no right,” Lincoln wrote in his draft, “to mislead others, who have less access to history, and less leisure to study it, into the false belief that the founders believed any such thing.”
Six days before his scheduled speech in New York, the Chicago Tribune, the most influential newspaper in Illinois, endorsed Lincoln for president. He was no longer just a potential candidate for the nomination; he was now his state’s favorite son.
Almost as if to welcome him to the city, Horace Greeley’s newspaper, the New York Tribune, provided a two-column life story of the speaker together with an announcement of his scheduled speech at Cooper Union. Never particularly impressed by Lincoln—they had served together briefly in Congress more than a decade earlier—Greeley was suddenly viewing the visiting orator not just as a spokesman for free labor, but as a living example of its promise. The seeds of a legend—the self-made rail splitter—were taking shape. The biographical sketch praised Lincoln for “hard work and plenty of it, the rugged experiences of aspiring poverty . . . the education born of the log-cabin.” He had evolved into the remarkable Republican whose party had outpolled Stephen Douglas’s Democrats in the senatorial race in Illinois less than two years ago. “Such is Abraham Lincoln, emphatically a man of the people,” trumpeted the Tribune, “a champion of Free Labor, of diversified and prosperous industry, and of that policy which leads through peaceful progress to universal intelligence, virtue and freedom.”
Lincoln’s mission at Cooper Union, now that he had been endorsed at home as a presidential candidate, was to defeat two formidable potential opponents at the same time: Senator William H. Seward of New York, the prevailing favorite for the Republican presidential nomination, and Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic opponent in the general election. Lincoln surely understood too that the Cooper Union address would be his last major political speech both before and after the Republican nominating convention in May. If he were to win the nomination, Lincoln knew that the prevailing political culture dictated that he should remain silent until after the national election.
When Lincoln began to speak at Cooper Union in New York on February 27, 1860, the stakes could not have been higher. But Lincoln rose to the challenge, pointedly reminding the audience that the real issue remained the extension of slavery. Almost immediately, he quoted the words Douglas had used to support his argument for compromise on slavery: “Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.” The orator then surprised his audience, declaring, “I fully endorse this.” He was perfectly willing for the great divisive issue of the day to be left to the founders. Lincoln was prepared to describe their true views. Douglas had introduced them as expert witnesses. Lincoln, in rebuttal, proceeded to recite their history on slavery extension from the days of the early Republic.
As an initially dubious, eventually mesmerized crowd listened with increased attentiveness, Lincoln drew from his vast arsenal of historical data, legalistic argumentation, and rhetorical flourish to offer three distinct speeches in one: an appeal to history, a criticism of the South, and a rallying cry aimed at his natural constituency—Northern Republicans.
In the speech’s first section, Lincoln invoked the memory of the founding fathers, harnessing their implicit endorsement for his antislavery position by offering a staggering quantity of historical data about the views of the majority of the founders in support of the power of the federal government to restrict the spread of slavery. Implicitly, he invited personal endorsements of Lincoln himself for his ability to master the nuances of the historical investigation.
Lincoln cited the words of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin and reported on the views of the less memorable founding fathers as well. In a brilliant display of lawyerly technique and witty argumentation, Lincoln demonstrated th
at Douglas and the Democrats were tampering with the lessons of “our fathers.” The orator reminded his audience again and again that the founding fathers understood the slavery issue better than Douglas and other American Democratic politicians in 1860. Lincoln said the founders supported the elimination of the slave trade, thus preventing any new importing of slaves into the United States. And he reminded his fellow Republicans that preventing the extension of slavery to the western territories would provide new economic opportunities for white people who chose to settle in the territories.
In Lincoln’s widely reported speech accepting the Senate nomination two years earlier, the message “a house divided against itself cannot stand” had been biblical: slavery was doomed according to the word of God as revealed in the books of Matthew and Mark. Now at Cooper Union, he was documenting that slavery was doomed by the word of the secular gods of the American Dream, the founding fathers, the architects of what he had once dubbed America’s civil religion.
Lincoln as he looked the day of his career-transforming “right makes might” Cooper Union address in New York City, February 27, 1860, photographed just hours before by Mathew B. Brady at his Broadway gallery.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
In the second part of his speech, while ostensibly asking Southerners for patience, peace, and understanding, he seasoned his conciliatory words with an implicit warning: if disaffection led to disunion, it would be the fault of a hostile South, not a tolerant North (especially if the country was led by moderates like Lincoln).
Then in the third part, Lincoln turned his attention to his fellow Republicans and, in a majestic coda, urged them never to abandon the very principles that were unnerving Southerners in the first place. Lincoln brought his argument back from scholarly historical fact to emotional fervor, making the positive case for his antislavery position. Lincoln said, “Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government. . . . 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.”
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