In a speech in Cincinnati, on September 17, 1859, he attributed “the enviable or unenviable distinction of having first expressed that idea” to an editorial published on May 6, 1856, in the Richmond Enquirer, written, a paper that Lincoln clipped and whose lead editorialist, George Fitzhugh, wrote a proslavery tract, Sociology for the South, or The Failure of Free Society, published in 1854, that particularly antagonized him. The Enquirer editorial stated, “Social forms so widely differing as those of domestic slavery and (attempted) universal liberty cannot long co-exist in the Great Republic of Christendom. They cannot be equally adapted to the wants and interests of society. Two opposite and conflicting forms of society cannot, among civilized men, coexist and endure. The one must give way and cease to exist; the other become universal. If free society be unnatural, immoral, unchristian, it must fall, and give way to slave society—a social system old as the world, universal as man.” This Southern version of “a house divided” was a proslavery polemic.
The parable of a “house divided” had its origins in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In the biblical prophecies the house divided “cannot stand,” “is laid waste,” and “falls.” According to Matthew, Jesus’ presence creates the division: “He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad.” In Mark, Jesus divides his family into those that follow him and those that do not. In Luke, Jesus sets fathers against sons and mothers against daughters, and that verse is preceded by Jesus’ warning: “Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division.”
Lincoln knew the King James Bible as well as he knew Shakespeare. He clarified what he meant by the “house divided” in the lines he read next to Herndon: “Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.”
Lincoln had quoted Fitzhugh since the publication of his book in 1854 to make his point that proslavery forces did not have limited aims but intended to transform the whole nation into a slavery society. After Taney’s decision in Dred Scott, Lincoln had more than a book and newspaper editorials to underscore his argument; he had a Supreme Court ruling to illustrate the boundless design of the Slave Power. So, he read Herndon his next line: “Have we no tendency to the latter condition?”
Just before the convention, Lincoln held a rehearsal, inviting about a dozen of his advisers and friends to the law library at the State House. Upon finishing his reading, they were unanimous—Lincoln must not give the speech. One gently told him it was “ahead of its time.” Another, less kindly, called it a “damned fool utterance.” Lincoln turned to Herndon. “Lincoln,” Herndon said, “deliver that speech as read and it will make you president.” Lincoln stood up from his chair and, according to Herndon, declared, “Friends, this thing has been retarded long enough. The time has come when these sentiments should be uttered; and if it is decreed that I should go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked to the truth—let me die in the advocacy of what is just and right.” Whether through the prism of Herndon’s memory this was an accurate rendering of Lincoln’s words, though two other witnesses claim they were, Lincoln was set on delivering the speech.
The Republican convention gathered in Springfield on June 16 to nominate its full slate of candidates. Charles L. Wilson, editor of the Chicago Journal, also a delegate, submitted a resolution “greeted with shouts of applause, and unanimously adopted: Resolved, That Abraham Lincoln is the first and only choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the United States Senate, as the successor of Stephen A. Douglas.”
The next night, before perspiring delegates packed into the Hall of the House of Representatives, who “all felt like exploding . . . with electric bolts, shivering what we struck,” according to Herndon, Lincoln spoke deliberately in his high-pitched voice, stressing key words he had underlined. His speech had a familiar timbre to his listeners. Its opening and closing echoed the language, including a number of the same words, of one of the best-known orations of the day, Daniel Webster’s “Second Reply to Hayne,” the Massachusetts senator’s speech in 1830 in defense of the federal union and American nationalism against Senator Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina’s advocacy of states’ rights. One account of Lincoln’s “Lost Speech” at Bloomington reported that he had ended by directly quoting Webster’s ringing conclusion: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” (In his speech, Webster also referred to “the people’s Constitution, the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.”)
Once he had uttered the words of a “house divided” and explained their meaning as the limitless ambition of slavery, Lincoln laid out an overarching political history since 1854 that placed Douglas at the center of intrigue. “Let any one who doubts, carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination—piece of machinery so to speak—compounded of the Nebraska doctrine, and the Dred Scott decision. Let him consider not only what work the machinery is adapted to do, and how well adapted; but also, let him study the history of its construction, and trace, if he can, or rather fail, if he can, to trace the evidences of design, and concert of action, among its chief bosses, from the beginning.”
Lincoln started his story with Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act, which “opened all the national territory to slavery; and was the first point gained.” Buchanan’s election was “the second point gained,” but “not overwhelmingly reliable and satisfactory” because he failed to win a popular majority of the votes. The Dred Scott decision immediately followed. Douglas endorsed it. Buchanan and Douglas, however, fell into “a squabble” over Lecompton, centered “on the mere question of fact, whether the Lecompton constitution was or was not, in any just sense, made by the people of Kansas; and in that squabble the latter declares that all he wants is a fair vote for the people, and that he cares not whether slavery be voted down or voted up.” Douglas’s indifference to slavery, his “care not policy, constitute the piece of machinery, in its present state of advancement. This was the third point gained.” Douglas throughout, despite his quarrel with Buchanan, was consistent in his political motive “to educate and mould public opinion, at least Northern public opinion, to not care whether slavery is voted down or voted up. This shows exactly where we now are; and partially also, whither we are tending.”
Lincoln raised the suspicion of collusion surrounding the Dred Scott case that Seward had framed. “Why the delay of a reargument? Why the incoming President’s advance exhortation in favor of the decision?” The incident was merely one in a series. He explained that the events of the past few years were not random or coincidental but could in hindsight be understood as planned.
We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen,—Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance,—and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few—not omitting even scaffolding—or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring such piece in—in such a case, we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.
Lincoln had a subtle and practical political mind with an insight into human nature and an aversion to grand theories. He underplayed the factors of personality he knew inflected the politics—Douglas’s overweening ambitio
n and reckless risk taking, Pierce’s pathos and malleability, Taney’s choleric and sclerotic rigidities, and Buchanan’s pomposity and vanity. To be sure, there was collusion, more than was known at the time, such as Buchanan’s intervention with the Supreme Court on Dred Scott. But in his willingness to propound his conspiracy theory, Lincoln proved something else, that most Republicans also believed in it.
Lincoln explained the endgame of all the planning, the ultimate goal to be “gained,” was the transformation of the whole of the United States into a slave nation. If Douglas were to be followed that is how the “house divided” would become “all one thing, or the other.” “We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free,” said Lincoln, “and we shall awake to the reality instead that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a Slave State. To meet and overthrow the power of that dynasty is the work now before all those who would prevent that consummation. That is what we have to do. How can we best do it?”
Standing before his most ardent supporters, Lincoln spoke beyond them to the Eastern Republicans who “yet whisper us softly, that Senator Douglas is the aptest instrument.” Douglas could not possibly be their champion, for he did not believe in their case at all. “Judge Douglas, if not a dead lion, for this work is at least a caged and toothless one. How can he oppose the advances of slavery? He don’t care anything about it. His avowed mission is impressing the ‘public heart’ to care nothing about it.” Lincoln acknowledged that a man might change his position, but Douglas had not done that except by “vague inference,” and that was hardly a principled basis for embracing him.
Lincoln drew a line in the sand that was a moral test for the Eastern Republicans. “But clearly, he is not now with us—he does not pretend to be—he does not promise ever to be.” Lincoln would not allow the Eastern Republicans to define Republicanism. He would set the standard for them. Had they fought to become Republicans only to surrender “our great cause” for the false promise of a false leader?
Lincoln’s peroration was as literary and political in his sources as his opening was biblical. He appealed to Republicans as Henry V did to his band of brothers in Shakespeare’s St. Crispin’s Day speech. He called on “hands” and “hearts,” tropes that run through Shakespeare’s romances and tragedies. He summoned “the four winds,” the four humors of Shakespeare’s storms, and held up “fire” as the element for forging a new army. He borrowed from Webster’s “Second Reply to Hayne” the words “dissevered,” “discordant,” and “belligerent”—Webster in his grandeur who described the nightmare of “the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood!”
“Our cause, then,” Lincoln said, “must be entrusted to, and conducted by, its own undoubted friends—those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the work, who do care for the result. Two years ago the Republicans of the nation mustered over thirteen hundred thousand strong. We did this under the single impulse of resistance to a common danger, with every external circumstance against us. Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds, and formed and fought the battle through, under the constant hot fire of a disciplined, proud and pampered enemy. Did we brave all then, to falter now,—now, when that same enemy is wavering, dissevered and belligerent? The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail; if we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate, or mistakes delay it, but sooner or later, the victory is sure to come.”
Immediately after concluding his speech to the “wildest enthusiasm,” he handed his text to the Chicago Journal’s correspondent, Horace White, for publication, joining him later that evening in the Illinois State Journal’s composing room to correct page proofs, and regaling him with the story of how his friends had tried to get him to leave out his statement about a “house divided.” Newspapers across the state printed the speech in full. “Masterly,” the Chicago Tribune called it. The Republican State Committee circulated thousands of copies as a pamphlet. And, a week after Lincoln delivered the speech, the New York Tribune published it in its entirety under the headline: “REPUBLICAN PRINCIPLES.” Greeley stopped promoting Douglas’s Senate bid.
But John L. Scripps of the Chicago Tribune warned Lincoln on June 22 that his talk of a “house divided” and the “ultimate extinction” of slavery put off conservative voters. “Some of my Kentucky friends who want to be Republicans, but who are afraid we are not sufficiently conservative, who are also somewhat afraid of our name, but who hate ‘Locofocoism’ {democrats}most cordially, have objected to the following on the ground of its ‘ultraism.’ ” Scripps suggested to Lincoln it would be “advisable” to tell those voters he was not for “political warfare under legal forms against slavery in the States.”
A few weeks later, Norman Judd conferred with Lincoln about printing the speech. “Well Lincoln,” he said, “had I seen that speech I would have made you strike out that house divided part.” “You would—would you Judd,” Lincoln replied.
“The first ten lines of that speech defeated him for the Senate,” insisted Leonard Swett. “It was a speech made at the commencement of a campaign and apparently made for the campaign. Viewing it in this light, nothing could have been more unfortunate or inappropriate. It was saying the wrong thing first, yet he saw it was an abstract truth, and standing by the speech would ultimately find him in the right place.”
Swett recalled, “In the Summer of 1859 when Lincoln was dining with a party of his intimate friends at Bloomington the subject of his Springfield speech was raised. We all insisted it was a great mistake, but he justified himself, and finally said, ‘Well Gentlemen, you may think that Speech was a mistake, but I never have believed it was, and you will see the day when you will consider it was the wisest thing I ever said.’ ”
But opinion at the time was divided.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE HIGHER OBJECT
The Little Giant staged his heroic return to Chicago to launch his campaign on July 9. He proudly wore the badges of an infidel, apostate, and heretic. He bore the Washington Union’s labels of “traitor” and “renegade.” “Kill him off,” editorialized the pro-administration Indianapolis Sentinel, an organ of Jesse Bright. “Neither the frowns of power nor the influences of patronage will change my action, or drive me from my principles,” Douglas told the Senate on March 22. Though nearly endorsing the English bill—a spectacular bribe of millions of acres in land grants to settlers only if the proslavery Lecompton Constitution was accepted—a moment of private indecision that few knew about, he decided his best strategy was to run on defiance.
Abraham Lincoln, 1858
“The whole thing was of course ‘spontaneous,’ ” reported the pro-Lincoln Chicago Tribune, “the program having been advertised for several days in the columns of a newspaper and a special train having been chartered to add to the enthusiasm of the masses.” Douglas arrived in the evening at the central depot to the firing of artillery, and then proceeded in a carriage drawn by six horses in a grand procession led by bands and two companies of militia, under banners strung across the streets lighted with extra gas lamps, to the downtown Tremont House, where he mounted the balcony to address the crowd. “I regard, therefore,” he declared about the struggle over Lecompton, “the great principle of Popular Sovereignty as having been vindicated and made triumphant.”
Douglas turned to the task at hand, cutting apart his opponent. “In the first place,” he said, “he sets out in his speech to say, quoting from Scripture, that a house divided against itself cannot stand. . . . He advocates, boldly and clearly, a war of sections—a war of the North against the South—of the free States against the slave States—a war of extermination to be continued relentlessly until the one or the other shall be universal, and all the States shall either become free or become slave.”
Douglas also
charged that his opponent “goes for a warfare upon the Supreme Court of the United States, because of their Judicial decision. . . . He objects to the Dred Scott decision because it does not put the negro in possession of the rights of citizenship on an equality with the white man. I am utterly opposed to negro equality with white men. I repeat, that this nation is a nation of white people, a people composed of European descendants, a people that have established this government for themselves and their posterity, and I am in favor of preserving not only the purity of their blood, but the purity of the government from all mixed races or amalgamations.”
Lincoln’s talk of “a house divided” had “totally misapprehended the great principle upon which our government rests.” Lincoln was proposing “that all States must be free or all must be slave,” which would be “despotism.” Lincoln would destroy the idea that “this Government of ours is founded on a white basis. It was made by white men for the benefit of white men, to be administered by white men in such a manner as they should determine”—a government of white men, for white men, by white men.
Lincoln, who had accused Douglas of being at the center of a conspiracy, was the perpetrator of a conspiracy—“an unholy, unnatural alliance . . . with men who are trying to divide the Democratic Party for the purpose of electing a Republican senator in my place, are just as much the agents and tools of the supporters of Mr. Lincoln.”
“Thus,” said Douglas, “you have the outline of the propositions which I intend to discuss before the people of Illinois during the coming campaign.”
As soon as he left the balcony, a few shouts from the crowd rang out. “Lincoln! Lincoln!” Lincoln was there, standing amidst the throng, listening to Douglas’s stem-winding speech. In Chicago that day to argue a case before the federal court, Lincoln positioned himself beneath the hotel balcony to listen to Douglas. While Lincoln may have turned up by coincidence it had long been his custom to stalk Douglas. His tactic was to take advantage of crowds that had been initially attracted by Douglas. Once again, this was his plan. “My recent experience shows that speaking at the same place the next day after D. is the very thing,” Lincoln explained later that year. Just before he began speaking, Douglas spotted him and invited him to sit near him. Lincoln demurred. He would speak tomorrow. The band played the “Marseillaise,” barrels of tar were ignited that shot up flames, and fireworks set off, spelling in the sky: “POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY.”
All the Powers of Earth Page 47
