All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  The founders, Douglas insisted, were without exception unabashed racists in order to “preserve the purity” of the white race and “prevent any species of amalgamation.” He offered a brief history of the founders as race men based on their ethnographic repellence. “They had witnessed the sad and melancholy results of the mixture of the races in Mexico, South America and Central America” and the “demoralization and degradation” that “operated as a warning to our revolutionary fathers to preserve the purity of the white race. . . . They understood that great natural law which declares that amalgamation, between superior and inferior races, brings their posterity down to the lower level of the inferior, but never elevates them to the higher level of the superior race.”

  Douglas ended triumphantly with a challenge. “The Supreme Court of the United States has decided that, under the constitution, a negro is not and cannot be a citizen. The Republican or Abolition party pronounce that decision cruel, inhuman and infamous, and appeal to the American people to disregard and refuse to obey it. Let us join issue with them and put ourselves upon the country for trial.”

  Douglas played a deck of race cards. He carefully raised every fear of racial equality, asking his audience to imagine blacks “at the polls, in the jury box, on the bench, in the executive chair, and in the councils of the nation,” until “the African race” was joined “in the domestic circle.” Douglas’s ultimate race card was sexual panic.

  Douglas had always practiced the politics of race as it suited him, calculating and commonplace. He freely used the word “nigger,” even on the floor of the Senate. He was a native Vermonter, but had transformed himself into a Westerner, appealing to the Kentuckians who populated Illinois and wanted nothing to do with blacks. He knew that Illinois had the most draconian laws restricting free blacks of any Northern state. He understood that his tarring of the “Black Republicans” tainted them. These politics had never failed him in Illinois. With popular sovereignty as his platform Douglas had been able to play the issue of slavery both ways and at the same time remain above it. He left the question of whether the territory he had opened up under the repeal of the Missouri Compromise would be slave or free to whoever the phantom people that inhabited it might be. The difference between Douglas’s repeal and Taney’s ruling that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, however, was fundamental. Taney, emphatic that slavery could not be prohibited, demolished Douglas’s cultivated ambiguity. Douglas’s response was to embrace the Dred Scott decision as though it said nothing of the kind and ratified his views. While feigning that Taney concurred on popular sovereignty he scurried to stand on that part of the opinion stating blacks had no rights. Through his sleight of hand Douglas had performed more than a clever trick. It was more than his usual demagogy trying to force his opponents to spend their time defending themselves from convoluted smears. He replaced the equivocality of popular sovereignty with the certitude of white supremacy. After Dred Scott revealed his claim about popular sovereignty as artifice, his appeal to racism in all its forms from the political to the sexual became his central theme. As the leader of the Northern wing of the Democratic Party and its presumptive candidate for president, he put the party firmly on the basis of “the purity of the white race.” “Is it true that the negro is our equal and our brother? The history of the times clearly show that our fathers did not regard the negro race as any kin to them, and determined so to lay the foundations of society and government that they should never be of any kin to their posterity.”

  “The curtain of 1860 is partially lifted, and we have a peep behind the scenes,” reported the New York Herald.

  We have here the open sesame of Mr. Douglas to the White House. It is the clearly foreshadowed position of Mr. Douglas as a favorite of the Southern ultras, and his extraordinary movement for the Southern inside trade for the succession, in direct hostility to the just and conciliatory policy of Mr. Buchanan’s administration. . . . And this is the Southern bid of Mr. Douglas for the next Presidency. Such a speech and such a purpose are not the results of accident. . . . As a democratic Presidential aspirant, Mr. Douglas is now without a rival in the great Northwest. . . . In securing Mr. Douglas, therefore, the Southern ultras, would seem, have secured a good foothold for undermining the administration and for controlling the whole democratic party. . . . Mr. Douglas is with them, and is doubtless fully informed of the good will of Mr. Senator Hunter, Mr. Jefferson Davis and their colleagues.

  But, first, Douglas had to retain his Senate seat in 1858. Now it was Lincoln’s turn to weigh in. On the evening of June 26, carrying a pile of books under his arm, he walked to the podium in the Hall of Representatives before a sparse crowd, perhaps half the size that had come to hear Douglas. He began in a lawyerly frame of mind. “Judge Douglas does not discuss the merits of the decision; and, in that respect, I shall follow his example, believing I could no more improve on McLean and Curtis, than he could on Taney.” Without relitigating the details of the case Lincoln aligned himself with the dissenters and consigned Douglas as Taney’s clerk. It was argument by subtle condescension.

  “He denounces all who question the correctness of that decision, as offering violent resistance to it. But who resists it? Who has, in spite of the decision, declared Dred Scott free, and resisted the authority of his master over him?” To explain the absurdity of Douglas’s accusation Lincoln offered a legal lesson. “Judicial decisions have two uses—first, to absolutely determine the case decided, and secondly, to indicate to the public how other similar cases will be decided when they arise. For the latter use, they are called ‘precedents’ and ‘authorities.’ We believe, as much as Judge Douglas, (perhaps more) in obedience to, and respect for the judicial department of government. We think its decisions on Constitutional questions, when fully settled, should control, not only the particular cases decided, but the general policy of the country, subject to be disturbed only by amendments of the Constitution as provided in that instrument itself. More than this would be revolution. But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it, has often over-ruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to over-rule this. We offer no resistance to it.”

  Lincoln systematically laid out how the division of the court deprived the decision of unchallengeable legitimacy.

  If this important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with legal public expectation, and with the steady practice of the departments throughout our history, and had been in no part, based on assumed historical facts which are not really true; or, if wanting in some of these, it had been before the court more than once, and had there been affirmed and re-affirmed through a course of years, it then might be, perhaps would be, factious, nay, even revolutionary, to not acquiesce in it as a precedent. But when, as it is true we find it wanting in all these claims to the public confidence, it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat it as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country. But Judge Douglas considers this view awful.

  Though Lincoln said he would not discuss the merits of the case he homed in on Taney’s fallacious history. “I have said, in substance, that the Dred Scott decision was, in part, based on assumed historical facts which were not really true; and I ought not to leave the subject without giving some reasons for saying this; I therefore give an instance or two, which I think fully sustain me. Chief Justice Taney, in delivering the opinion of the majority of the Court, insists at great length that negroes were no part of the people who made, or for whom was made, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution of the United States.”

  Lincoln turned to Curtis’s dissent for factual refutation. “On the contrary, Judge Curtis, in his dissenting opinion, shows that in five of the then thirteen states, to wit, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and North Carolina, free negroes were voters, and, in proportion to their
numbers, had the same part in making the Constitution that the white people had. He shows this with so much particularity as to leave no doubt of its truth.” Lincoln quoted Curtis’s own words on the historical evidence to repudiate Taney’s faulty assertion, which he also quoted.

  Lincoln made a new argument that Curtis had not in order to deny Taney’s history. Taney, he said, “does not directly assert, but plainly assumes, as a fact, that the public estimate of the black man is more favorable now than it was in the days of the Revolution. This assumption is a mistake. In some trifling particulars, the condition of that race has been ameliorated; but, as a whole, in this country, the change between then and now is decidedly the other way; and their ultimate destiny has never appeared so hopeless as in the last three or four years.” Lincoln offered as proof Taney’s mangling of the Declaration of Independence to justify white supremacy and the advent of new oppressive laws in the states against restricting slavery. “In those days, our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all, and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.” Lincoln’s framers were not Taney’s or Douglas’s.

  Then Lincoln took flight beyond the law into poetry. His precise mind escaped into metaphor to capture the captivity of the slave.

  All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him; ambition follows, and philosophy follows, and the Theology of the day is fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.

  The jailer was only one of a hundred men, the low man in the chain of slavery. He was performing his task prescribed by the philosopher of slavery, the preacher of slavery, and the politician of slavery. Lincoln portrayed the dark scene from inside the depths of the prison from the point of view of the prisoner. He inhabited through empathy the terror of hopelessness. Slavery was not only physical but metaphysical. The slave stripped of all resources could not free himself. He did not have the key, much less a hundred keys, “no prying instrument.” Lincoln’s slave was condemned to isolation but a representative figure of millions equally isolated in their common powerlessness. Lincoln’s tactile rendering of the door, the bolt, and the key made for a picture of crushing power. It was an absolute power but not a simple power. It was a complex system of power controlled by concurrent keys held by many men. It was an arrogant and confident power. It was an overwhelming power. It held power over the slave so complete that it could not envision any escape. Lincoln projected into the inner thoughts of the men of slavery “musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter” could tighten its oppression. The Slave Power was the ultimate political power that Lincoln contemplated. If “all the powers of earth” were against the slave they were also arrayed against those against slavery. It was not only the slave held captive but the country. He had set himself on the path to discover the “prying instrument,” the “invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter” of emancipation. Lincoln’s mission was to create such a power that would overthrow “all the powers of earth.” That power “of mind and matter” must be his “invention.”

  Lincoln returned back to earth to answer the immediate charge that Douglas flung at him, that Republicans, if they believed the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal” did not exclusively apply to white men, they also necessarily favored “amalgamation” of the races. Douglas had extended Taney’s definition of the Declaration from the historical to the sexual. He intertwined the two questions and Lincoln felt duty bound to unwrap them. In Douglas’s case, the sexual was the cynical.

  There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races; and Judge Douglas evidently is basing his chief hope, upon the chances of being able to appropriate the benefit of this disgust to himself. If he can, by much drumming and repeating, fasten the odium of that idea upon his adversaries, he thinks he can struggle through the storm. He therefore clings to this hope, as a drowning man to the last plank. He makes an occasion for lugging it in from the opposition to the Dred Scott decision. He finds the Republicans insisting that the Declaration of Independence includes ALL men, black as well as white; and forthwith he boldly denies that it includes negroes at all, and proceeds to argue gravely that all who contend it does, do so only because they want to vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes! He will have it that they cannot be consistent else. Now I protest 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. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of anyone else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.

  Lincoln’s deflection replied only to Douglas’s sexual claim. He was silent by omission on Douglas’s political claim that Republicans believed blacks could have the right to vote. In his defense of the Declaration, however, Lincoln suggested by inference that they might have that right. He pointed out that both Taney and Douglas “argue that the authors of that instrument did not intend to include negroes, by the fact that they did not at once, actually place them on an equality with the whites. Now this grave argument comes to just nothing at all, by the other fact, that they did not at once, or ever afterwards, actually place all white people on an equality with one or another. And this is the staple argument of both the Chief Justice and the Senator, for doing this obvious violence to the plain unmistakable language of the Declaration.”

  In Lincoln’s account, the framers did not designate all men equal in every characteristic but in their rights.

  I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This they said, and this meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.

  Lincoln defined the Declaration as a document intended for the future, a charter to expand rights and a shield against tyranny. “The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, nor for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be, thank God, it is now proving itself, a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appe
ar in this fair land and commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack.”

  To Lincoln, the Declaration was not fundamentalist scripture decreed from olden times to be used as a bludgeon to limit rights according to a warped understanding of original intent. “I had thought the Declaration contemplated the progressive improvement in the condition of all men everywhere,” he said, and quoted Douglas following Taney to mock them. “But no, it merely ‘was adopted for the purpose of justifying the colonists in the eyes of the civilized world in withdrawing their allegiance from the British crown, and dissolving their connection with the mother country.’ Why, that object having been effected some eighty years ago, the Declaration is of no practical use now—mere rubbish—old wadding left to rot on the battle-field after the victory is won.”

  The Fourth of July was a little more than a week after Lincoln’s speech. “I understand you are preparing to celebrate the ‘Fourth,’ tomorrow week,” he continued.

  What for? The doings of that day had no reference to the present; and quite half of you are not even descendants of those who were referred to at that day. But I suppose you will celebrate; and will even go so far as to read the Declaration. Suppose after you read it once in the old fashioned way, you read it once more with Judge Douglas’ version. It will then run thus: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all British subjects who were on this continent eighty-one years ago, were created equal to all British subjects born and then residing in Great Britain.” And now I appeal to all—to Democrats as well as others,—are you really willing that the Declaration shall be thus frittered away?—thus left no more at most, than an interesting memorial of the dead past? thus shorn of its vitality, and practical value; and left without the germ or even the suggestion of the individual rights of man in it?

  Sliding past the natural peroration of his speech, Lincoln could not help himself from attempting another answer to the “amalgamation” accusation. He openly exposed the sexual truth that would not speak its name without incurring a caning. Few other Northern politicians were willing to talk about the predatory sexual exploitation of female slaves by slaveholders. When Charles Sumner insisted on discussing this sordid reality he provoked his antagonists to a violent boiling point. “Let us see,” said Lincoln. “In 1850 there were in the United States, 405,751, mulattoes. Very few of these are the offspring of whites and free blacks; nearly all have sprung from black slaves and white masters. . . . In 1850 there were in the free states, 56,649 mulattoes; but for the most part they were not born there—they came from the slave States, ready made up. In the same year the slave States had 348,874 mulattoes all of home production. . . . These statistics show that slavery is the greatest source of amalgamation; and next to it, not the elevation, but the degeneration of the free blacks. Yet Judge Douglas dreads the slightest restraints on the spread of slavery, and the slightest human recognition of the negro, as tending horribly to amalgamation.”