A Just and Generous Nation

by Harold Holzer

  There was little danger Lincoln could forget, even for a moment, the pressures that continued mounting for an official preinaugural statement. “Every newspaper he opened was filled with clear indications of an impending national catastrophe,” journalist Henry Villard observed from Springfield, Illinois. “Every mail brought him written, and every hour verbal, entreaties to abandon his paralyzed silence, repress untimely feelings of delicacy, and pour the oil of conciliatory conservative assurances upon the turbulent waves of Southern excitement.”

  But still Lincoln would not speak, believing that while he yet enjoyed no power to govern, he did possess significant potential for sparking further discontent through anything he might now declare. Lincoln believed he had as much to fear from dissatisfaction among his Northern allies as from secession-minded Southern fire-eaters. As if to punctuate that danger, black abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, speaking in Boston on December 3, declared with impolitic frankness: “I want the slaveholders to be made uncomfortable. . . . I rejoice in every uprising in the South.” How could Lincoln reply to such a provocative statement without either offending abolitionists with his condemnation or frightening pro-Union Southerners with a positive comment?

  In fact, Lincoln did not remain entirely silent during those tense weeks, however. Convinced as he was of the validity of this position, Lincoln knew disaster would follow if wavering border Southern states came to regard him as pro–equal rights. In one private letter to Henry J. Raymond, the influential pro-Republican editor of the New York Times, he did separate himself from the “radical” abolitionist view in support of racial equality. Speaking in the third person, he wrote, “Mr. Lincoln is not pledged to the ultimate extinctinction [sic] of slavery.” He went on to say that he “does not hold the black man to be the equal of the white, unqualifiedly . . . and never did stigmatize their white people as immoral & unchristian.” Lincoln fully expected the New York Times to present his views to the public without attribution.

  Judged by modern attitudes on race, of course, this was not Lincoln’s finest moment. But it was true to his long-expressed belief that the Constitution did not permit direct action to abolish slavery where it existed in the Southern and border states and with certainty did not provide the president or the Congress with the federal power to mandate civil or legal equality for African Americans.

  Lincoln’s public silence was tested yet again when he received the news that Congress, which convened in December, might appropriate to itself a legislative compromise to avert secession. This unsettled Lincoln. The president-in-waiting wanted nothing less than for a lame-duck House and Senate to enact policy that would bind the new administration, especially if it permitted slavery to expand westward in violation of the 1860 Republican platform and if that policy arrogated powers Lincoln believed he was elected to exercise, and certainly not if it left future decisions on slavery to local constituencies, in total disregard of his determined opposition to popular sovereignty.

  Keeping the western territories open to limitless opportunity for free white labor—and free of slaves—had been Lincoln’s holy grail since 1854, the year Douglas had engineered passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In Lincoln’s mind, his position on the Free Soil issue had gotten him elected in November and bound him to that policy for the future. Now, to his dismay, before he began his presidency, he sensed congressional Republicans might entertain softening the party’s opposition to slavery extension in return for guarantees against secession.

  Lincoln could easily have decided to accept a congressional compromise that might keep the country intact, to support a revival of the old Missouri Compromise line that would allow slavery to migrate into the Southwest. Or he could draw his own line in the sand and oppose compromise entirely.

  For Lincoln, drawing a line in the sand was the only choice he was willing to make. But even so, he remained unwilling to do so publicly. Privately, Lincoln decided to engage in unprecedented activity to prevent, even sabotage, any compromise solutions that would allow for the expansion of slavery. His letter to Henry Raymond was only the first of many such efforts. Making his feelings known only in private letters to loyal senators and congressmen, the president-elect insisted that Republicans hold fast to party principles and do nothing that might open the popular-sovereignty debate afresh. He especially did not want to give Southerners the hope that they might use their legislative power to extend slavery to territory west of the Mississippi or even by acquiring new territory in Cuba or elsewhere in the Caribbean.

  When William H. Seward, Lincoln’s first choice to lead his cabinet as secretary of state, began to make noises from Washington about bending to the compromisers, Lincoln fired off a confidential letter that made his unwavering position clearer than ever (even if it still remained only privately expressed). Lincoln was preoccupied with the early stages of composing his Inaugural Address, but he knew an existential threat when he faced one. He realized at once how crucial it was to assume leadership of the national party even in absentia, even without formal office, and even with private, not public, communication. So he wrote to Seward to clear up once and for all the issue of whether he was prepared to accept the expansion of slavery in return for peace and union. He was, he wrote, “inflexible,” explaining, “I am for no compromise which assists or permits the extension of the institution on soil owned by the nation. And any trick by which the nation is to acquire territory, and then allow some local authority to spread slavery over it, is as obnoxious as any other. I take it that to effect some such result as this, and to put us again on the high-road to a slave empire is the object of all these proposed compromises. I am against it.”

  Thus, Lincoln began injecting himself quietly but forcefully into the debate on Capitol Hill to ensure that there would be no additional compromise on the issue of extending slavery to the western territories. As self-conscious as he had been about assuming control of the secession crisis, Lincoln had in fact done just that. No previous president-elect ever made such a show of power and influence before his swearing in. The politically astute Lincoln still delivered no public speeches and issued no state papers on the compromise issue; to do so, he believed, would only exacerbate matters by angering both antislavery men and border-state conservatives. Instead, he made his views clear in many more remarkably tough private letters to key allies on Capitol Hill, which he probably knew would be widely shared with other Republicans.

  In a letter to his friend Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, Lincoln left little doubt where he stood. “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery,” came the pointed instructions. “If there be, all our labor is lost, and, ere long, must be done again. The dangerous ground—that into which some of our friends have a hankering to run—is Pop[ular]. Sov[reignty]. Have none of it. Stand firm. The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.” The very next day, Lincoln employed the same emphatic phrase in a similar message to Illinois congressman William Kellogg, who had joined the new House committee seeking “the remedy for the present difficulties.” Reiterated Lincoln: “The tug has to come & better now than later.”

  The president made the same line-in-the-sand point to Republican congressman Elihu Washburne, insisting that he would not bend on the crucial issue of slavery expansion. What was more, as the head of the Republican Party, he expected support from others. His self-assurance on manifest display, Lincoln reiterated on December 13: “Prevent, as far as possible, any of our friends from demoralizing themselves, and our cause, by entertaining propositions for compromise of any sort, on ‘slavery extention.’ There is no possible compromise upon it, but which puts us under again, and leaves all our work to do over again.” For good measure, the president-elect reminded New York State Republican boss Thurlow Weed: “My opinion is that no state can, in any way lawfully, get out of the Union, without the consent of the others; and that it is the duty of the President, and other government functionaries to run the machine as it is.” No doubt h
e expected that Weed and his ally Henry Raymond, editor of the New York Times, would make this view known and that Raymond would endorse it in his newspaper. Publication of such an editorial in the New York Times would be perceived as the official view of the upcoming administration.

  In the middle of December, that “machine” finally stopped functioning. The long-feared South Carolina secession convention opened in Charleston on December 17. Three days later, in an atmosphere of defiant celebration, delegates to the convention chose the course of secession, formally adopting an ordinance to take South Carolina out of the Union and “resume a separate, equal rank among nations.” Over the next nineteen days, while Lincoln watched from Springfield and Congress debated compromises that no longer seemed to matter, six more Southern states held referenda and elected delegates to secession conventions of their own: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. The momentum unleashed in South Carolina became impossible to contain. Secession fever had grown incurable.

  Although congressional maneuvering continued through the month in Washington, by late December meaningful compromise solutions appeared doomed. Lincoln had achieved his objectives. “Compromise has gone up the spout,” one newspaper reported on December 28, the day before a crucial vote. “The compromisers go about the street like mourners.” Any new constitutional amendment required approval of two-thirds of the House and Senate, and it seemed highly unlikely that enough Northern Republicans would support a compromise package to send it on to the states.

  In the end, Congress failed fully to heed Lincoln’s admonitions. Despite the warnings and clear signs that secession could not be averted, legislative leaders kept busy exploring compromises. Seeking refuge in a last-minute proposal advanced by an ad hoc “Peace Convention” that brought to Washington a collection of fossil politicians from many (but not all) the states, the House and Senate offered a token to the Southern states in the form of a proposed new amendment to the Constitution. It merely banned future congressional action to end slavery where it existed. Lincoln would later dutifully send it to the states, so the amendment proposal represented something of a political victory for the president-elect, one he could point to later as proof of his efforts to tolerate reasonable conciliation as long as it did not include the expansion of slavery. Although the amendment had no chance of ratification, it represented a sincere effort to forestall the crisis by codifying Lincoln’s oft-repeated vow not to interfere with slavery where it already existed.

  While the debates continued into January, Lincoln took up his pen to write a deeply felt private manifesto of principle that he shared with absolutely no one. It confirms Lincoln’s steadfast determination to preserve the permanence of the Union as the basis for extending the promise of economic opportunity. He had thought much about this question during the secession crisis, pondering concepts that went well beyond the planks of the Republican platform he so often cited. The result was an appeal not just to reason but also to emotion, a heartfelt justification for resisting any compromise that reneged on the original promise of the American Dream.

  Lincoln began his statement by referring to the nation’s outstanding economic growth since its founding: “Without the Constitution and the Union, we could not have attained the result; but even these, are not the primary cause of our great prosperity. There is something back of these, entwining itself more closely about the human heart. That something, is the principle of ‘Liberty to all’—the principle that clears the path for all—gives hope to all—and, by consequence, enterprize, and industry to all.” Lincoln was determined to sustain the survival of a government that “clears the path for all” to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the Northern economic system.

  Lincoln’s private musings, political statements, and political maneuvering make it clear that the incoming chief magistrate remained morally and politically committed to the democratic middle-class society of the Northern states. He was viscerally opposed to the aristocratic alternative in the Southern states and thus rejected the rationale for the political compromises advanced between the sections during the decade preceding the Civil War. Lincoln was determined that the new states to be admitted to the Union would have a political, social, and economic structure consistent with that of the Northern states rather than the Southern states. It was this determination that formed the basis for his willingness to engage in the Civil War. It was this determination that poet Ralph Waldo Emerson commemorated when he said in his eulogy to Abraham Lincoln in 1865: “This middle-class country had got a middle-class President, at last.”

  This determination would also serve Lincoln well as he faced an unprecedented challenge on the eve of his inauguration. Lincoln had spent the months between his election in November 1860 and his inauguration in March 1861 ensuring that his supporters would block congressional efforts at compromise. Throughout the secession winter, Lincoln had remained steadfast in his commitment to prevent any extension of slavery. The states of the Lower South were equally uncompromising. When Lincoln boarded the train that would take him out of Springfield toward Washington on February 11, 1861, one crisis had passed, while another loomed even larger. Virtually the entire Deep South—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—had seceded from the Union. While Lincoln’s election had itself been the trigger, his silence added to the determination of Southern leaders to protect their way of life at all costs. Even before Lincoln departed for his inauguration, they had formed a separate government and chosen its president: former US senator from Mississippi Jefferson Davis.

  As he headed east, Lincoln began to accept the idea that armed conflict might be required to protect political democracy, economic opportunity, and what he perceived as the national destiny. Southern secession based on what Lincoln believed to be an unjust defense of human slavery and the right to continue it forever was threatening the existing national order, majority rule, and the sanctity of the law.

  Still only president-elect, with no formal power to enforce national authority but on the move at last, Lincoln now began responding to the secession crisis in the way he knew best: through oratory. Compelled for the first time since 1860 to speak in public as his journey took him eastward, and then southward toward Washington, with more than a hundred scheduled stops along the way, secession was uppermost on his mind, but he pointedly refrained from acknowledging it directly. Instead, he insisted on “adherence to the Union and the Constitution.” Lincoln used the occasions not to pronounce new policy (this must be withheld, by custom, until his Inaugural Address), but to employ humor, assurance, and a purposefully benign confidence in the future.

  Lincoln knew the challenge of the “seceding” states was insurmountable as long as he refused conciliation that accepted the expansion of slavery. In a new kind of speech for him—short and almost elegiac, the harbinger of his future rhetorical style—he told his Springfield neighbors before boarding the train that he had “a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington,” an astounding claim in an age in which no living politician dared compare himself to the pater patriae. Going a step further, Lincoln now called not only on the loyal citizens of the country but on God to sustain him. “Trusting in Him, who can go with me, and remain with you and be every where for good,” he said at his parting, “let us confidently hope all will yet be well.”

  Lincoln never approached this level of sublimity during his subsequent preinaugural comments, nor did he ever use his many speaking opportunities to hammer away at specific policy demands. But in several speeches, he made manifest his ongoing, unbreakable commitment to the rule of law and majority rule as the essential features of American democracy.

  Perhaps the most impressive of Lincoln’s preinaugural speeches came when he appeared before the New Jersey state legislature on February 21. Here he harked back nostalgically to the American past, once again identifying himself with the enlightened “fathers” who had struggled to unite the disparate
colonies into a cohesive country four score years earlier:

  [A]way back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the younger members have ever seen, “Weems’ Life of Washington.” I remember all the accounts there given of the battle fields and struggles for the liberties of the country, and none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton, New-Jersey. The crossing of the river; the contest with the Hessians; the great hardships endured at that time, all fixed themselves on my memory more than any single revolutionary event; and you all know, for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for. I am exceedingly anxious that that thing which they struggled for; that something even more than National Independence; that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come; I am exceedingly anxious that this Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle.

  Against this backdrop, Lincoln had taken his pen to do what he did better than any politician of his day: express himself convincingly in a public speech. There is no doubt that Lincoln drafted his Inaugural Address—all of it—alone. Lincoln planned to use this message to reintroduce himself by reminding the public that he remained “bound by duty, as well as by inclination,” to the principles of the Republican platform, put forth at the convention in Chicago; by opposition to the spread of slavery; and by a commitment to a government that would “clear the path for all.”