On one feature of Lincoln’s thought there was no disagreement. Lincoln described himself as a lifelong fatalist, and none demurred. “What is to be will be,” he told Congressman Isaac Arnold. “I have found all my life as Hamlet says: ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.’ ” Mary Todd heard that formulation many times, for as she confirmed to Herndon, Lincoln’s “maxim and philosophy was—‘What is to be will be and no cares of ours can arrest the decree.’ ” Not that Herndon needed reminding. He recalled many conversations about predestination in which Lincoln had asserted that “all things were fixed, doomed in one way or the other, from which there was no appeal,” and that “no efforts or prayers of ours can change, alter, modify, or reverse the decree.” Lincoln often told his law partner that he had a foreboding of “some terrible end,” but when Joseph Gillespie and others urged him to take precautions against assassination, he took a fatalistic view. “I will be cautious,” he told an anxious acquaintance shortly before his final departure from Springfield, “but God’s will be done. I am in his hands . . . and what he does I must bow to—God rules, and we should submit.”64
The predestinarian ethos of Lincoln’s hyper-Calvinist, Baptist upbringing undoubtedly molded this view of fate: throughout his life he would allude to the determining power of “Divine Providence,” “the Divine Being” and “the providence of God.” This was a God, he told Isaac Cogdal, that “predestined things—and governed the universe by Law—nothing going by accident.” Lincoln’s determinism, though, had more secular roots. According to Herndon, Lincoln believed that all conscious human action was shaped by “motives”—that is, self-interested, rational, and predictable responses to surrounding conditions “that have somewhat existed for a hundred thousand years or more.” There was thus no freedom of the will: as Lincoln put it in an election handbill of 1846, explaining his belief in the “Doctrine of Necessity,” he had found persuasive the idea “that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.” Defensively, Lincoln stressed that this was an opinion consistent with religious faith, as “held by several of the Christian denominations,” but as Allen Guelzo has shrewdly observed, there were nonreligious influences working here, too, including British utilitarian ideas, as mediated by American legal reformers. Lincoln’s views on motives, interests, and the lack of freedom of the moral will powerfully resembled Jeremy Bentham’s. Whatever their sources, Lincoln’s views were anathema to many mainstream Christians—Methodists and “Arminianized” Calvinists—who viewed the “doctrine of necessity” as a godless creed that denied moral responsibility. Lincoln, though, continued mainly to present his deterministic faith in a religious language that invoked an all-controlling God.65
In this fragment of text Lincoln addresses the “Pro-slavery Theology” of Frederick A. Ross’s book, Slavery Ordained by God (1857). On the next sheet he concludes his remarks: “As a good thing, slavery is strikingly perculiar, in this, that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of, for himself. Nonsense! Wolves devouring lambs, not because it is good for their own greedy maws, but because it [is] good for the lambs!!!”
This hybrid religious faith, with its rationalist, Universalist, Unitarian, fatalist, but only residually Calvinist elements, helped shape Lincoln’s approach to slavery as a morally charged political issue. The Declaration of Independence, in which he rooted his arguments during the 1850s, was for Lincoln more than a time-bound expression of political grievance. It was a near-sanctified statement of universal principles, and one that squared with essential elements of his personal faith: belief in a God who had created all men equal and whose relations with humankind were based on the principles of justice. Lincoln found the scriptural basis for the Declaration in the book of Genesis: if humankind was created in the image of God, then “the justice of the Creator” had to be extended equally “to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man.” As he told an audience at Lewistown, Illinois, the Founders had declared that “nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.” In setting down the Declaration’s self-evident truths, they had provided a basis for resistance “in the distant future” to a “faction” or “interest” determined to argue that “none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Sustain that document and you ensured that “truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues . . . [would] not be extinguished from the land.”66
Lincoln’s use of the Bible in the struggle over slavery was driven by conviction, not expediency. As Herndon recognized, whether or not Lincoln believed in the divine inspiration of Scripture, “he accepted the practical precepts of that great book as binding alike upon his head and his conscience”; late in life he described it as the means of distinguishing right from wrong. Not that Lincoln brandished the Bible as an all-purpose antislavery manual, but he was clear enough about where its principles led: “ ‘Give to him that is needy’ is the christian rule of charity; but ‘Take from him that is needy’ is the rule of slavery.” He was wryly scornful of those southern divines like the Presbyterian Frederick A. Ross, who had constructed a pro-slavery theology that concluded, as he put it, that “it is better for some people to be slaves; and, in such cases, it is the Will of God that they be such.” But how was God’s will to be established? Suppose Ross had a slave named Sambo. To the question “Is it the Will of God that Sambo shall remain a slave, or be set free?” God gives no audible answer, and the Bible, his revelation, “gives none—or, at most, none but such as admits of a squabble, as to its meaning.” But the fact that the question was to be resolved by Dr. Ross, who “sits in the shade, with gloves on his hands, and subsists on the bread that Sambo is earning in the burning sun,” gave little confidence that he would “be actuated by that perfect impartiality, which has ever been considered most favorable to correct decisions.”67
God’s words to Adam, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” provided Lincoln with a text for his theology of labor: that is, the burden of work, the individual’s duty to engage in it, and his moral right to enjoy the fruits of his labor.68 Equally, God’s arrangement of the human form was an expression of that theology and offered a physical argument for giving blacks the education and path to self-improvement which slavery denied them: “as the Author of man makes every individual with one head and one pair of hands, it was probably intended that heads and hands should cooperate as friends; . . . that that particular head, should direct and control that particular pair of hands[;] . . . that each head is the natural guardian, director, and protector of the hands and mouth inseparably connected with it; and that being so, every head should be cultivated, and improved, by whatever will add to its capacity for performing its charge.” Joseph Gillespie recorded the animation and almost Puritan earnestness with which Lincoln discussed the need to challenge slavery’s moral and social evils: ostentatious wealth, enervating leisure, and a view of labor as “vulgar and ungentlemanly.” Slavery “was a great & crying injustice [and] an enormous national crime”: the country, he told Gillespie, “could not expect to escape punishment for it.” Surfacing here in Lincoln’s thought was the Calvinist view of the political nation as a moral being. God punished wicked nations for their sins, just as he punished delinquent individuals.69
Punishment would bring reformation and progress: Lincoln, explained Leonard Swett, expected the “ultimate triumph of right, and the overthrow of wrong.” Here we see again Lincoln’s idea of destiny and his view that the universe followed a course fixed by divine laws. “He believed the results to which certain causes tended, would surely follow; he did not believe that those results could be materially hastened or impeded,” wrote Swett. “His whole political history, especially since the agitation of the Slavery question, has been based upon this theory.”70 It was a theory that
threw up two areas of paradox in his thought and practice toward the peculiar institution.
First, his scorn for the argument that slavery was good for people (“As a good thing, slavery is strikingly perculiar, in this, that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of, for himself”) stopped short of full-blown censure of slaveholders, or malice toward them. Believing that people are the product of their circumstances, that environments trap them into unbreakable habits and prompt actions according to the laws of motive, Lincoln was remarkably free from hate. Southerners did no more and no less than the people of the free states would have done had their positions been reversed. Moral opprobrium was inappropriate. “No man was to be eulogized for what he did or censured for what he did not do or did do,” Herndon explained. “I never heard him censure anyone but slightly, nor”—Jefferson and Clay excepted—“eulogize any.”71
Further, if Lincoln really did believe “that what was to be would be inevitably,” and that slavery was a doomed institution, why did he so energetically engage in efforts to prevent its spread? Those who have alluded to the essential “passivity” of Lincoln’s nature have used a misleading term: he may have been fatalistic, but he was also ambitious, enterprising, and determined. He was scarcely inert politically. How, then, does one square the circle? First, we should note that even those who made much of this trait in Lincoln were quick to caution against a picture of blind belief in destiny. As Herndon himself explained, “his fatalism was not of the extreme order like the Mahometan idea of fate”; Lincoln conceded that “the will to a very limited extent, in some fields of operation, was somewhat free.” Humans had the capacity to “modify the environments” which shaped them. Second, as Joseph Gillespie shrewdly observed, Lincoln yoked a belief in foreordained instrumentality with his faith in predestined ends, “and therefore he was extremely diligent in the use of means.” As Lincoln told a newly married Joshua Speed, “I believe God made me one of the instruments of bringing your Fanny and you together, which union, I have no doubt He had fore-ordained.” This was how he stood in regard to the agitation over slavery, which from the first, according to Swett, he expected to succeed and so “acted upon the result as though it was present from the beginning.” Much later, as president, he not only trusted deeply in God’s purpose to save the Union but, in Gillespie’s judgment, concluded “that he himself was an instrument foreordained to aid in the accomplishment of this purpose as well as to emancipate the slaves.”72
The fatalist and activist were thus fused in Lincoln, who was in this respect by no means a unique historical figure. As Allen Guelzo has remarked, the doctrine of inevitability has often generated a psychological imperative to action, for instance, amongst Puritan revolutionaries or the disciples of Marx and Lenin. In Lincoln’s case we may have a sense of paradox, but his views were not absurdly self-contradictory. Driven by a clear understanding of the Union’s purpose, by a view of slavery as a doomed aberration in an enterprising, egalitarian society, and by a personal need to achieve, a politically reinvigorated Lincoln embarked in 1854 on a period of earnest public activity. As Herndon recalled, Lincoln the limited fatalist “made efforts at all times to modify and change public opinion and to climb to the Presidential heights; he toiled and struggled in this line as scarcely any man ever did.”73 Winning power in a mass political system required more than personal drive, an agenda, and a purpose. It demanded, as Herndon implied, an engagement with a potent public opinion. That essential element in Lincoln’s progress to the highest office forms the subject of what follows.
CHAPTER 2
The Power of Opinion: Lincoln, the Illinois Public, and the New Political Order, 1854–58
Through the novel system of participatory democracy that evolved during the first half of the nineteenth century, ordinary Americans came to wield real political influence. By later standards, of course, it was a restrictive and discriminatory system, for it denied the formal vote to women and most nonwhites. Yet, measured against the practice of other political communities of the time, universal white manhood suffrage represented a radical new departure, one which seemed to herald the rule of the common man. When introduced, it demanded a revolution in thinking by the republic’s elite, many of them heirs of their eighteenth-century political world, where authority was synonymous with property and intellect. Some, lamenting the empowerment of the poor and unlettered, failed to adapt to the altered reality, but most politicians proved quick to develop new devices to deal with the challenge of the “sovereign crowd.”
Of these, the most significant was the mass-based political party. For Martin Van Buren, Thurlow Weed, and other astute professionals, party conventions, platforms, and networks provided a way of managing, channeling, mediating, and possibly even manipulating public opinion. By the 1830s and 1840s disciplined, organized, and recognizably modern parties had taken root in almost every part of the American Union and were intended to endure. Within what historians have termed the Jacksonian or second “party system,” most voters were either Whigs or Democrats.1 Even so, popular insurgency and the turbulence of democratic politics meant that the party managers’ control was often tenuous and never complete. In a system of almost constant electioneering, unresponsive candidates would be beached if they neglected shifts in popular tides and currents. Though shrewd managers acknowledged the need to respect public opinion, they contended with parties which, as coalitions of diverse interests, were often unstable. As well as articulating the material aspirations of ordinary people, politicians had to respond to prejudices and loyalties that frequently cut across the lines drawn by simple economic interest. In particular, they had to contend with the ethnic and religious hostilities of a heterogeneous, growing electorate, and the increasing intersectional animus that poisoned North-South relations in the quarter century before the Civil War.
The truth that in a mass democracy voters could be the ultimate arbiters of political power shone with dazzling clarity in the 1850s. The framework of the system within which politics had been conducted for twenty years buckled and then collapsed under the weight of popular revolt against the established parties. Native-born Americans, fearing the effects of mass immigration from Ireland and Germany, called for tough naturalization laws, stiff controls on the sale and consumption of alcohol, and the stout defense of Protestantism, especially in schools. When neither Democrats (the long-standing friends of the immigrant) nor Whigs (once sensitive to the anxieties of native-born voters but now fearful of offending a huge foreign-born constituency) moved energetically against rum and Romanism, hundreds of thousands of nativists jumped ship for a new vessel dedicated to the protection of the republic. Secretive and localized in its origins and structure, the new party—labeled the “Know-Nothings” in consequence of its members’ feigned ignorance when questioned—was initially a classic bottom-up political movement.
Insurgent nativism alone might have been enough to deliver the death blow to the mid-century party system. As it was, the established parties also had to contend with widespread popular distrust of their policies over slavery in the United States territories (those parts of the national domain that had yet to be admitted into full statehood). During the protracted political crisis from 1846 to 1850 a groundswell of “free-soil” opinion—opposed to the spread of slave labor into the federal territories—worked to erode support for the two main parties in the North, while a surge of pro-slavery radicalism upset the political balance in parts of the lower South. The political settlement, or compromise, of 1850 appeared to restore broad public faith in the major parties, but the suspicion that both had a rogue element capable of undermining their popular credibility proved only too well founded during the storm over Nebraska. A revolt of southern voters against a Whig party tainted by antislavery radicalism was paralleled by a hemorrhage of northern anti-Nebraska men from Stephen Douglas’s apparently pro-slavery Democrats. The party system of the Jacksonian era lay in ruins.
Lincoln entered the political
arena in the early 1830s, when the distinctive elements of American participatory democracy had clearly, if not definitively, emerged, and the first two decades of his public career coincided more or less precisely with the maturing of a mass democratic system. He lived in a society in which his fellow citizens came to accept and encourage boisterous electioneering, theatrical campaigns, unrationed oratory, and the vivid polemics of local newspaper editors. It was a world in which men turned out to vote in proportions rarely matched by Americans before or since. Lincoln possessed a natural aptitude for the new politics: as a stump speaker he felt at ease with himself and, mostly, with the voters he addressed. He also had a clear view about the role and responsibilities of the republican citizen, as well as the duties of democratic leaders toward “the people”—that is, whether politicians should lead or follow, teach or take instruction, act as pedagogue or demagogue. These issues—together with an analysis of Lincoln’s personal power over his audience and his alertness to the cultural and sectional fault lines within the Illinois electorate—form the substance of the discussion that immediately follows.
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