A Just and Generous Nation

by Harold Holzer

  Lincoln entitled his Lyceum speech “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.” Psychobiographers have found in Lincoln’s yearning for a new generation of accomplished successors to the nation’s founders a conscious and significant emergence on his part from the shadow of the fathers of the country—and perhaps from his own father as well. Lincoln certainly did make clear in his speech that he worried often that chances for fame and immortalization had ebbed. “The field is harvested,” he fretted aloud. And in the void, he warned, a tyrant yet might emerge to lull the people into danger.

  But the Lyceum speech was above all a call to reject violence, the “mobocratic spirit,” as Lincoln put it, “which all must admit, is now abroad in the land.” Lincoln did not mean to suggest that Illinois alone was experiencing an outbreak of rage. Violence was spreading everywhere. And Lincoln refused to deny that many of the acts had been perpetrated by proponents of slavery. As he reminded his audience:

  Those happening in the State of Mississippi, and at St. Louis, are, perhaps, the most dangerous in example, and revolting to humanity. . . . Turn, then, to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. . . . A mulatto man, by the name of McIntosh, was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman, attending to his own business, and at peace with the world. Such are the effects of mob law; and such are the scenes, becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order; and the stories of which, have even now grown too familiar, to attract anything more, than an idle remark.

  Violence loomed as a constant threat to progress—and an unfortunate aspect of political life—during the thirty years of Lincoln’s residence in Illinois. Even Senator Stephen Douglas was involved in dustups. Politicians routinely brawled in the streets and challenged each other to duels. Lincoln himself was once called out after he admitted to (or gallantly assumed responsibility for) writing a series of cruel newspaper satires mocking a Democratic officeholder named James Shields. The duel was called off at the last possible moment, when the combatants were already on the field to fight to the death. Lincoln was so embarrassed by the episode that he never again spoke of it and was known to silence people who unwisely attempted to bring up the subject.

  Lincoln believed he had a solution, for he knew there could be no progress anywhere without respect for law everywhere—especially when that respect was utterly lacking in many of the nation’s political leaders. More ominously, he feared that citizens were likely to turn on a government that “offers them no protection,” especially if they conclude “they have nothing to lose.” To combat these dangers, Lincoln had proposed in 1838 at the Springfield Lyceum a bold new commitment to order:

  Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap—let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges;—let it be written in Primmers [sic], spelling books, and in Almanacs;—let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.

  In fact, the case that had really aroused Lincoln he never mentioned by name: the recent assassination of antislavery editor Elijah Lovejoy in the downstate Illinois town of Alton. There, on November 7, 1837, a mob had attacked Lovejoy, sacked his printing press, and shot him to death while he was trying to defend his property. Yet the Lovejoy case seemed almost too controversial to cite with any specificity. Lovejoy had favored the immediate overthrow of slavery by any means, including violence, a radical notion that Lincoln thought truly dangerous. As Lincoln surely knew, there were plenty of citizens in Springfield, not only Democrats but fellow Whigs as well, who had no sympathy for the abolitionist victim and may even have believed he deserved his fate. Yet Lovejoy was also a brave entrepreneur trying to win an audience—and create a thriving business—in a hostile environment. And as such, Lincoln probably believed that he had a right to economic as well as physical security.

  Lincoln addressed the issue in general rather than specific language. As he put it at the Lyceum: “Whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last.” The solution lay not in the “mobocratic spirit” but with “good men, men who love tranquility, who desire to abide by the laws, and enjoy their benefits.”

  Such was the philosophy of Henry Clay. As a practical politician, Lincoln also knew that Clay paid for his idealistic approach to politics by repeatedly failing to win the highest office in the land. When abolitionist New York Whigs rebelled against Clay’s presidential candidacy in 1844, whatever purely emotional sympathy Lincoln may ever have harbored for abolitionism probably ended. These Empire State Whig abolitionist defections helped Democrat James Knox Polk win the state—and cost Lincoln’s beloved “beau ideal” the White House.

  This was to Lincoln inexcusable, an example of political extremism whose consequences would be felt for years. One costly by-product of that miscalculation by New York Whig Party abolitionists, Lincoln later pointed out, was Polk’s controversial war with Mexico, as a result of which the United States acquired vast new southern territory ripe for slavery. Lincoln’s experience during the 1844 election taught him that it was time for men of progressive conscience to form alliances to gain political victory.

  Lincoln would attempt to put the lessons he had learned from 1844 into practice during the presidential election four years later. As a thirty-nine-year-old congressman in 1848, Lincoln tried to encourage his fellow Whigs to seek abolitionist support for the party’s latest presidential nominee, General Zachary Taylor. Lincoln’s law colleague Usher Linder challenged him, demanding to know: “Have we, as a party, ever gained any thing, by falling in company with abolitionists?” Lincoln, who had learned that compromise and coalition building were necessary to win elections, was quick to answer in the affirmative: “Yes. We gained our only national victory by falling in company with them in the election of Genl. Harrison [in 1840]. Not that we fell into abolition doctrines; but that we took up a man whose position induced them to join us in his election. But this question is not so significant as a question, as it is as a charge of abolitionism against those who have chosen to speak their minds against the President.”

  To counter this charge, Lincoln took pains to point out that among the thirty-six fellow Whigs then serving alongside him in the House of Representatives in 1849, there were enough who represented slave states to make certain that the Whig Party’s synchronized opposition to the Mexican war was based purely on its being “unnecessary and unconstitutional,” and not because of latent “abolitionism!” Coordination between Whig Party representatives from free and slave states proved successful in 1848 when Zachary Taylor became only the second Whig candidate ever to win a presidential election. Lincoln, in this instance, had forsaken Henry Clay to support the more electable war hero. Finally, the proeconomic development Whig Party had a president, though not for long (Taylor died sixteen months after his inauguration).

  While in Washington, Lincoln fell in with a group that held a more proabolitionist point of view, and it is fair to say that he slowly learned from them. He moved into a boarding establishment that was populated by so many antislavery members of his own Whig Party that it acquired the nickname the “Abolition House” (not meant as a compliment). Here Lincoln met and socialized with a range of new acquaintances that included Joshua Giddings of Ohio, one of the leading abolitionist voices in Congress, a legislator who had been censured a few years earlier merely for defying the prevailing gag rule an
d attempting to raise the slavery issue on the floor of the House. It was here, too, that Lincoln and his fellow boarders helped their waiter buy his freedom after being unjustly denied it.

  By no means did this new environment transform Lincoln into a proponent of immediate abolition everywhere in the United States, but his experiences there surely opened his eyes. So did Washington itself, a city filled with horrific slave pens where African Americans were shamelessly herded, stored, and sold in facilities far worse than the capital’s prisons. Lincoln’s antislavery views led him in 1849 to propose a bill to ban slavery entirely from the District of Columbia with compensation to owners. The measure went nowhere, but it marked the first time Lincoln made a major legislative move against slavery. Though it marked a personal milestone, it was something of a lost cause, too. The idea of ending slavery in Washington, or anywhere in the South, still lacked enough support to succeed in a Congress focused hungrily on how to divide the huge new territory recently acquired from Mexico. During these floor debates, Lincoln supported the Wilmot Proviso, which sought to ban slavery from all territory acquired from Mexico. That measure failed as well—and repeatedly—though Lincoln later proudly recalled that he had voted for it every time it came before the House. If he could not force freedom on the capital, he would try to ban slavery from the West—and at least bring the American Dream to the new territories.

  The abolitionist movement received an unexpected boost from the work of the most widely read antislavery author, Harriet Beecher Stowe. The daughter of the notable Congregational preacher Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, across the river from slave state Kentucky. As a young woman, she first encountered abolitionist ideas at family gatherings with her father’s friends, including such important Cincinnati political figures as Salmon P. Chase, senator from Ohio who later became a member of Lincoln’s cabinet. Harriet Beecher married Calvin Stowe in 1836, and the family moved to Massachusetts in 1852. While raising eight children, she found time to build a career writing short stories and articles for popular magazines. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Stowe began writing a story about slavery. She used her early experience of visiting plantations in Kentucky and conversations with freed slaves to provide an accurate view of slavery for her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. To expand her knowledge of the evils of the slave system, she asked abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass to put her in touch with former slaves. The weekly publication National Era began publishing installments of her novel on June 5, 1851. By using the story form to communicate the pain and suffering of people under slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe gave her readers an intimate understanding of the substance of her father’s preaching that slavery is a sin.

  The positive response from readers led to the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in book form in 1852. The novel sold more than three hundred thousand copies in the United States in its first year and added countless supporters to the abolitionist cause in the years following its publication. Often forgotten in assessments of the morally transformative aspect of the book was the economic success it brought its author. And Lincoln always admired people who worked hard to make themselves successful. So it is not surprising that, as president, Lincoln asked to meet her in 1862 and is reported to have said, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

  Lincoln’s nuanced position at the beginning of his campaign to unseat Democratic incumbent senator Stephen Douglas in 1858 seemed to place him closer to the center of Republican political thinking on slavery. In fact, his opposition to the spread of slavery pushed him further in the direction of its antislavery wing. This reminds us of an unavoidable fact of life in the midcentury North: though abolitionists had been courageous advocates for change and voices of conscience in American culture for decades, they remained in 1858 well outside the political mainstream. And no mainstream politician outside of New England could hope to win elected office if he supported an immediate end to Southern slavery, which threatened to bring with it, many believed, racial violence and ramped-up competition from free African Americans for jobs. Still, it would be wrong to conclude that Lincoln eschewed abolitionism only because he desired to remain electable. At this point in his career, Lincoln genuinely mistrusted the idea of immediate abolition. He thought it would result in chaos. And he had thought so for decades.

  Lincoln never escaped the charge of being a closet abolitionist, especially when he joined the new antislavery Republican Party in 1854 and launched his political comeback five years after his Whig congressional career ended. Lincoln’s 1856 speech at Springfield prompted the town’s Democratic newspaper, the Illinois State Register, to say that Lincoln was “boldly” avowing that “there could be no Union with slavery” and went on to charge that Lincoln had come close to preaching the “ultra abolitionism” of the leaders of the abolitionist movement, “convincing his audience . . . that his niggerism has as dark a hue as that of Garrison or Fred Douglass.”

  For his part, Senator Stephen A. Douglas routinely attacked Lincoln during their 1858 senatorial debates for harboring a covert plan to make African Americans social equals, voters, and jurors. “In the extreme northern part of Illinois,” Douglas railed, “he can proclaim as bold and radical abolitionism as ever Giddings, Lovejoy, or Garrison enunciated, but when he gets down a little further south he claims that he is an old line Whig, a disciple of Henry Clay . . . and declares that he still adheres to the old line Whig creed, and has nothing whatever to do with Abolitionism, or negro equality, or negro citizenship.”

  Lincoln denied such charges at the Charleston debate with comments that have haunted his reputation since (“I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races”). But at the time, that opinion would have been a common one, especially among listeners in a southern Illinois city like Charleston. Evidence of how extreme the idea of equality remained to the voting public can be found in the transcript of the Charleston debate. Lincoln began his remarks by saying that he had been approached by an “elderly gentleman” who asked “whether I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people.” The mere suggestion of such a radical position elicited “great laughter,” according to a stenographer from the Republican-leaning Chicago Tribune transcribing the speech. Mainstream voters and their candidates still did not take abolitionism, or abolitionists, seriously.

  That did not prevent Douglas from repeating the attack on Lincoln at their penultimate debate at Quincy, charging that his opponent had said something entirely different “when addressing the Chicago abolitionists,” maintaining that “all distinctions of race must be discarded.” As Douglas put it, “Did old Giddings, when he came down among you four years ago, preach more radical abolitionism than that? Did Lovejoy, or Lloyd Garrison, or Wendell Phillips, or Fred. Douglass, ever take higher abolition ground than that?”

  Events a year later would further fan the fears of Southern—and many Northern—whites about the effects of abolition. In 1859 abolitionist leader John Brown led an ill-fated attempt to incite a slave insurrection in Virginia. Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry created a national sensation and put Republicans, even moderate antislavery Republicans like Lincoln, on the defensive. Democrats now revived the charge that the opposition party, no matter how it tried to hide behind calls for an unthreatening “ultimate extinction” of slavery by attrition, inevitably fomented radical, murderous abolitionists like John Brown merely by failing to allow whites to decide for themselves whether to carry slavery into the new territories.

  John Brown—the most famous, feared, and revered abolitionist of the 1850s—whose armed raid into Harpers Ferry, Virginia, led to his own execution but unleashed renewed pressure on the Republican Party to support black freedom, along with renewed resolve by Southern Democrats to resist it.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  The charges that Lincoln himself was a sup
porter of violent abolitionist actions never went away and were made with only greater force and bile in the wake of Brown’s failed raid. Lincoln tried to fight back. “He believed the attack of Brown wrong for two reasons,” a newspaper reported after Lincoln spoke at Elwood, Kansas, around the time of Brown’s execution in December 1859. “It was a violation of law and it was, as all such attacks must be, futile as far as any effect it might have on the extinction of a great evil.” In his Cooper Union address in New York a few months later, Lincoln took pains to respond to critics who refused to accept Republican insistence that Brown was a radical with no connection to Republican moderates: “You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves,” Lincoln declared in his February 27, 1860, oration. “We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper’s Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise.” Of course, several abolitionists partial to the Republicans had, in fact, supported Brown—including New York’s own former congressman Geritt Smith. But this fact Lincoln conveniently skirted. “John Brown’s effort was peculiar,” Lincoln insisted at Cooper Union. “It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed.” To Lincoln, it was equally absurd that opponents now tried to use John Brown to “break up the Republican organization.”