Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power

by Richard J. Carwardine

  What led Lincoln to abandon his customary restraint and appeal so earnestly to the soul of his audience as well as to its head? In part the answer lies in the nature of the assembly and the occasion. Lincoln addressed a gathering broadly agreed on fundamentals. He was not on the stump, faced with coaxing the unpersuaded, the neutral, and the openly hostile. Addressing the faithful, Lincoln took on the coloring of his audience; in the company of enthusiasts and converts, even preachers, he saw his task to be one of rallying and inspiring them in preparation for the campaign ahead. But there was probably something deeper at work. Observing the success of the Bloomington convention, the usually self-contained Lincoln must have felt a sense of euphoria and release. The meeting was, if not the culmination, at least a major landmark on the way to establishing the effective political force for which Lincoln had implicitly called in his response to the Nebraska Act. The Peoria speech spoke of “the liberal party throughout the world”: its representatives in America (“lovers of liberty” appalled by a great moral wrong) expected their political leaders to address the ethical concerns that shaped public opinion.34 Implicit in much of Lincoln’s subsequent course was a recognition that the moral constituencies brought into focus by the Nebraska Act needed effective and articulate political leadership. Whether through a continuing Whig party or the subsequent Republican coalition, Lincoln acted from 1854 to 1860 in a way that sought to clarify and publicize the lines dividing what he saw as the two fundamental moral constituencies in the nation, those who saw slavery as wrong, and those who either did not care or praised it as a positive good.

  Essential to Lincoln’s moral coalition were the huge numbers of reform-minded Protestants, especially the evangelicals. How might they be accommodated? The problem, as he saw only too well, was that their agenda was not just varied, but politically divisive. The nativist and temperance views of so many evangelicals, though compatible ideologically with antislavery, alienated other potential members of the coalition. Lincoln himself was no believer in the legal compulsion of prohibition, nor the friend of Know-Nothing proscription. He had neither the appetite nor the language actively to exploit the religious and cultural frictions on which nativism was constructed. But the fracture within national Know-Nothingism left the way open to recruit its reforming Protestants into a coalition centered on the moral certainties of antislavery and freedom. A number of these were present in Bloomington; and when Lincoln spoke, in celebration of a cemented coalition, he had every reason to speak with the evangelical enthusiasm of the “newly baptized and freshly born.”

  In the fifty or so speeches he made while campaigning for the fall 1856 elections, Lincoln reverted to his more customary rhetorical style, reasoned and unemotional. It better suited his audience of conservative Whig-Americans in southern and central Illinois, whom he rightly identified as the swing voters. Once James Buchanan, untainted by the Kansas-Nebraska business, had won the Democrats’ nomination for president, and the American party had lined up behind an old-line Whig, ex-president Millard Fillmore, Lincoln hoped the Republican national convention would play equally safe and select John McLean, a Supreme Court justice and another former Whig. Instead it nominated the dashing western explorer John C. Frémont. For a while it looked as if Lincoln might secure the vice presidential place, which would have boosted the party in the Northwest (and reflected his increasing national reputation), but the position went to another ex-Whig, William L. Dayton of New Jersey. Lincoln saw at once the implications of the nominations and set about targeting the likely Fillmore voters, especially in his state’s central counties. Ideally, he hoped, the Americans would withdraw or unite with the Frémont men, but since that was unlikely, he used his speeches and lithographed letters to show how the American party’s campaign would be self-defeating and would promote a Democratic victory. In early August Lincoln estimated that Buchanan would win by seven thousand votes, or four percentage points, if it remained a three-way race.35 The prediction was impressively accurate: in November, Buchanan’s percentage margin was exactly that, his victory (by nine thousand votes, in a high turnout) due to Fillmore’s intervention. Conservative Whigs hated the Democrats, but they also feared the sectional stance of “Black” Republicans. Fillmore gave them a way of resisting the overtures of both.

  Still, the November results were by no means disheartening. Lincoln could reflect that the Republican party (a name he continued to avoid throughout the campaign) had shown the staying power, the organization, the moderation of program, and the breadth of appeal to win the governorship and the other state offices. He could reflect, too, that he as much as anyone had helped to fashion the new party. He had done so by avoiding impetuous action at a time of profound, uncontrollable shifts in public opinion. By late 1856 the worst upheavals were over. Even so, the process of party construction was not yet complete—and Lincoln’s most sustained and celebrated personal engagement with the power of public opinion still lay ahead.

  THE SENATORIAL CAMPAIGN OF 1858

  Voters were due to return to the polls in 1858, to elect a new state legislature. That body in turn would choose a United States senator. Douglas’s term of office was drawing to a close, his reelection far from assured. Lincoln thought the “Little Giant” could be beaten and knew that many Illinois Republicans considered him the man to do it. These included a network of able and well-placed advisers: members of the new state administration, former political associates in the legislature, and fellow lawyers. Importantly, the leading Trumbull men of 1855, especially Norman B. Judd, acknowledged the force of Lincoln’s claim. Amongst the state’s main anti-Democrat papers Lincoln had the firm support of the Chicago Press and Tribune and the Illinois State Journal. No one could doubt that he wanted the senatorship. He had good-humoredly said as much to the gathering of editors at Decatur in February 1856. When a keen Republican wrote in the summer of 1857 urging “that something should be done now, to secure the next Legislature,” Lincoln did more than generally concur: behaving like a candidate, he gave detailed advice on how to prepare canvass lists—and urged that it be done discreetly, to avoid alerting the opposition.36

  On the national stage, two political developments in the first twelve months or so of Buchanan’s presidency would deeply influence how Illinois Republicans made their nomination and then took their campaign to the people. First, in March 1857, the United States Supreme Court, sitting under Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, gave its ruling in the Dred Scott case. Scott was a slave who had been taken by his master, an army surgeon, into Illinois and then Wisconsin Territory, before being brought back to the slave state of Missouri. Since Illinois was a free state and Wisconsin a region from which slavery had been excluded by the Missouri Compromise, Scott sued for his freedom. By a majority decision, the Court rejected the claim. Taney declared that Scott, as a Negro, had no right to sue: the Founders of the republic, considering African-Americans inferior, had not meant them to enjoy the rights of citizenship guaranteed by the federal Constitution. Furthermore, in a startling use of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, Taney argued that the United States Congress had acted unconstitutionally when it passed the Missouri Compromise and prevented property-holding in slaves in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase.

  Lincoln in 1857. He wrote that the “picture presented me in all [my hair’s] fright.”

  The decision of the Democrat-leaning Court, dominated by southerners and southern sympathizers, seemed problematic for Douglas, for if slaveholders had the right to take their chattels into the territories, where did that leave popular sovereignty and local self-determination? Douglas remained unruffled, however, despite the popular outcry in the North. He noted that Taney’s ruling related solely to the powers of Congress, not of territorial legislatures, whose “police regulations” in defense of property were essential to protecting slaveowners’ rights: thus, he argued in a speech in Springfield on June 12, the decision “sustained” popular sovereignty. At the same time he buttressed his posit
ion by exploiting the deep racial prejudices of central Illinoisans, endorsing Taney’s view that blacks were not embraced by the Declaration of Independence, and classifying Republicans as “amalgamationists” bent on a complete social and sexual mixing of the races.

  The decision confronted Republicans, too, with a problem. If Congress lacked the power to exclude slavery from the territories, where did that leave the unifying core of the party’s program, the use of national power to stop slavery from spreading? Lincoln’s response, like that of many of his colleagues, was tempered by his respect for the courts: he saw judicial process, in the historian David Donald’s words, as an essential defense against “the unreasoning populism of the Democrats, who believed that the majority was always right, and the equally unreasonable moral absolutism of reformers like the abolitionists, who appealed to a higher law than even the Constitution.”37 But, as he explained in his riposte to Douglas on June 26, he found it impossible to submit to what he considered the “erroneous” decision of “a divided court,” a decision based on historical misrepresentation and studied blindness to precedent, and one which could be honestly questioned because it had “not yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country.” He denied that Republican criticisms amounted to lawless resistance. It was Douglas, the Democrats, and their allies on the Court who were engaged in an assault on the constitutional rights of the black race, bound and free. Their exclusionist interpretation of the Declaration of Independence was a corrupting novelty, designed to tighten the grip of slavery: “if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.” Confronting Douglas’s amalgamationist smears, Lincoln protested “against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife.” The Founders had not meant “to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity.” They did, however, consider them “equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ”38

  Lincoln used the Dred Scott decision, and Douglas’s defense of it, to contrast the ethical positions of the two parties. Republicans found in the Declaration “a standard maxim for free society,” for which all should labor and which “even though never perfectly attained” should be “constantly approximated,” so that its deepening influence would increase “the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.” But Douglas’s version, by limiting its meaning by time and place to the struggle of white colonists against the British crown, “frittered away” the document’s value as a universal statement of rights, leaving it a “mangled ruin.” Starkly put, “Republicans inculcate, with whatever of ability they can, that the negro is a man; that his bondage is cruelly wrong, and that the field of his oppression ought not to be enlarged.” Democrats, by contrast, “deny his manhood; deny, or dwarf to insignificance, the wrong of his bondage; so far as possible, crush all sympathy for him, and cultivate and excite hatred and disgust against him; . . . and call the indefinite outspreading of his bondage ‘a sacred right of self-government.’ ”39

  Within a year of the Supreme Court’s ruling, political developments in troubled Kansas worked to complicate these simple polarities of party conflict. In the town of Lecompton a constitutional convention met to prepare the way for Kansas statehood. Free-state men, fearing trickery, had boycotted the election of delegates, who set about drawing up a constitution that sustained the slave status of the two hundred bondmen already in the territory. The convention also stipulated a referendum—not on the entire document, but only on a clause that would allow further slaves into the state. In view of the Lecompton Constitution’s pro-slavery character, ten thousand free-state men abstained, leaving the way clear for the endorsement of the constitution “with slavery” by a vote of 6,143 to a mere 569. Buchanan would have preferred the whole document to have been submitted to a popular vote, but he could see no illegality in what had been done by a properly constituted body, and was keen to remove a tense if no longer bleeding Kansas from the national political arena. Knowing that his party had the congressional votes to secure its passage, the president gave the Lecompton Constitution his approval.

  A defiant Douglas stunned the political world during the early months of 1858 by leading the fight in Washington against its adoption. His energetic revolt against the administration, and unprecedented disloyalty to his party, was a measure of how personally threatening the senator found the president’s action. Having badly misjudged popular feeling in the Northwest in 1854 by surrendering on the Missouri Compromise, Douglas could not afford now to abandon his personal gold standard of popular sovereignty out of deference to a southern-dominated administration. Meekly accepting the Lecompton solution, considered even by many northern Democrats as a flouting of the popular will, would be an act of political suicide. Mustering all his considerable skills in debating and infighting, the Little Giant insisted that the slavery clause was not the issue; what concerned him was the paramountcy of local majority sentiment. Under his generalship the disparate forces of opposition, Republican and Democrat, free-soiler and abolitionist, succeeded in blocking the passage of the constitution through Congress. By virtue of a compromise it was resubmitted to the people of Kansas in August and drew the support of just one voter in seven.

  The Lecompton battle won Douglas the everlasting enmity of Buchanan and the extravagant plaudits of long-standing foes. Most outspoken of the band of eastern Republican admirers was Horace Greeley, the editor of the influential New York Tribune, which circulated widely throughout the free states and had some ten thousand readers in Illinois. As the congressional struggle reached its climax in the spring, Greeley began to contemplate giving anti-Lecompton Democrats a clear run in the fall elections, perhaps even welcoming them into the party. Lincoln sounded a note of alarm as early as December 1857, complaining to Lyman Trumbull about the Tribune’s “eulogizing, and admiring, and magnifying” of Douglas. “Does it, in this, speak the sentiments of the republicans at Washington? Have they concluded that the republican cause generally, can be best promoted by sacraficing us here in Illinois?” Mixing exasperation and sarcasm, he added, “If so we would like to know it soon; it will save us a great deal of labor to surrender at once.” Illinois Republicans overwhelmingly shared Lincoln’s indignation at eastern meddling and could not conceive of burying the hatchet with Douglas, their abusive and bitter archenemy, in pursuit of “an unholy alliance.” Party leaders, encouraged by Lincoln, decided to call a state convention in Springfield on June 16. Its chief purpose would be to announce to the world that Lincoln was the “first and only choice” of Republicans for the Senate.40

  In so acting, the Springfield meeting offered a rebuke to eastern brethren and shored up the party against slippage toward Douglas Democracy. Selecting Lincoln also denied regular Democrats the opportunity of fomenting voter confusion and even Republican disunity during the fall campaign: it removed the fear that a newly elected legislature would send to Washington some other Republican, perhaps the wayward and powerful “Long John” Wentworth of Chicago, a renegade Democrat. The resolution nominating Lincoln, as he himself intimated, “was passed more for the object of closing down upon this everlasting croaking about Wentworth” by hostile editors.41 Pragmatism, then, underlay the action of the Springfield delegates. But what they did, imposing on the state legislature a subordinate role in selecting a U.S. senator by morally removing its freedom to choose, was practically unheard of. The implications for the campaign that followed could scarcely have been more profound. Voters would in effect directly choose their senator. In 1854 Lincoln’s campaign for the Senate had followed the November polls; the targeted voters were the newly elected general assemblymen. Now Lincoln and Douglas—confirmed as the preeminent Democrat at his party’s state convention in April—would take their candidacies straight to the people.

  The Linc
oln-Douglas contest of 1858 brilliantly revealed the extraordinary appetite of the Illinois public for democratic engagement. Later generations have added layers of romantic embellishment to the story, but even after these are peeled away we are still left with a remarkable example of sustained participatory politics. For four months, starting in the heat and dust of summer, the two men stumped their way across the state, covering between them some ten thousand miles by rail, river, and road, and delivering around sixty set speeches each, in addition to dozens of shorter, impromptu addresses. It was a punishing schedule demanding great physical endurance, but both candidates drew much psychological strength from contact with tens of thousands of enthusiastic voters, courteous and attentive more often than not. Neither canceled a speaking engagement, though by the end of the campaign Douglas’s voice had largely given out, while Lincoln seemed still to be growing in energy. Regiments of support troops—candidates, speakers, organizers, newspaper editors, musical bands—gave every locality the opportunity to share in what by common consent was a remarkable and unprecedented canvass. “The prairies are on fire,” reported the correspondent of an eastern paper. “It is astonishing how deep an interest in politics this people take.”42