Lincoln Part 16

Largely perfunctory, Lincoln's eulogy on Henry Clay came alive only in its final paragraphs. Of the hundreds of funeral addresses' on the Kentucky statesman, Lincoln's was one of the very few that explicitly dealt with Clay's views on slavery. Clay "did not perceive, that on a question of human right, the negroes were to be excepted from the human race," Lincoln announced; consequently, "he ever was, on principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery." Because Clay recognized that it could not be "at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil," he supported the efforts of the American Colonization Society to transport African-Americans back to Africa and served for many years as president of that organization.

Endorsing Clay's views on colonization, Lincoln revealed a change in his own att.i.tude toward slavery. He had all along been against the peculiar inst.i.tution, but it had not hitherto seemed a particularly important or divisive issue, partly because he had so little personal knowledge of slavery. But in Washington his strongly antislavery friends in Congress, like Joshua R. Giddings and Horace Mann, helped him see that the atrocities that occurred every day in the national capital were the inevitable results of the slave system. As Lincoln's sensitivity to the cruelty of slavery changed, so did his memories. In 1841, returning from the Speed plantation, he had been amused by the cheerful docility of a gang of African-Americans who were being sold down the Mississippi. Now, reflecting on that scene, he recalled it as "a continual torment," which crucified his feelings.

He also began to understand the effect that slavery had on white Southerners. He took great interest in affairs in Kentucky, where his father-in-law, Robert S. Todd, along with Henry Clay, was working for gradual emanc.i.p.ation, which they hoped the Kentucky const.i.tutional convention of 1849 would endorse. But the convention overwhelmingly rejected all plans to end slavery or even to ameliorate it. Todd, a candidate for the senate, died during the campaign; had he lived, he could have been disastrously defeated. These developments gave Lincoln a new insight into Southern society. Even nonslaveholders, who const.i.tuted an overwhelming majority of the Kentucky voters, were opposed to any form of emanc.i.p.ation. The prospect of owning slaves, he learned, was "highly seductive to the thoughtless and giddy headed young men," because slaves were "the most glittering ostentatious and displaying property in the world." As a young Kentuckian told him, "You might have any amount of land; money in your pocket or bank stock and while travelling around no body would be any wiser, but if you had a darkey trudging at your heels every body would see him and know that you owned slaves."

Lincoln looked for a rational way to deal with the problems caused by the existence of slavery in a free American society, and he believed he had found it in colonization. Like Clay and Chief Justice John Marshall, who belonged to the American Colonization Society, he became convinced that transporting African-Americans to Liberia would defuse several social problems. By relocating free Negroes from the United States-and, at least initially, all those transported were to be freedmen-colonization would remove what many white Southerners considered the most disruptive elements in their society. Consequently, Southern whites would more willingly manumit their slaves if they were going to be shipped off to Africa. At the same time, Northerners would give more support for emanc.i.p.ation if freedmen were sent out of the country; they could not migrate to the free states where they would compete with white laborers. Moreover, colonization could elevate the status of the Negro race by proving that blacks, in a separate, self-governing community of their own, were capable of making orderly progress in civilization. Thus, Lincoln thought, voluntary emigration of the blacks-and, unlike some other colonizationists, he never favored forcible deportation-would succeed both "in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery" and "in restoring a captive people to their long-lost father-land, with bright prospects for the future."

The plan was entirely rational-and wholly impracticable. American blacks, nearly all of whom were born and raised in the United States, had not the slightest desire to go to Africa; Southern planters had no intention of freeing their slaves; and there was no possibility that the Northern states would pay the enormous amount of money required to deport and resettle millions of African-Americans. From time to time, even Lincoln doubted the colonization scheme would work. He would like "to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia-to their own native land," he announced in 1854. "But," he added, "a moment's reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope, (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible. If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days."

Though reality sometimes broke in, Lincoln persisted in his colonization fantasy until well into his presidency. For a man who prided himself on his rationality, his adherence to such an unworkable scheme was puzzling, though not inexplicable. His failure to take into account the overwhelming opposition of blacks to colonization stemmed from his lack of acquaintance among African-Americans. Of nearly 5,000 inhabitants of Springfield in 1850, only 171 were blacks, most of whom labored in menial or domestic occupations. Mariah Vance, who worked two days a week as a laundress in the Lincoln home and sometimes helped out with the cooking, was one of these; another was the Haitian, William de Fleurville, better known as "Billy the Barber," whom Lincoln advised on several small legal problems. These were not people who could speak out boldly to say that they were as American as any whites, that they had no African roots, and that they did not want to leave the United States.

Lincoln's persistent advocacy of colonization served an unconscious purpose of preventing him from thinking too much about a problem that he found insoluble. He confessed that he did not know how slavery could be abolished: "If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing inst.i.tution." Even if he had a plan, there was no way of putting it into effect. After the Compromise of 1850 both the Whig and the Democratic parties had agreed that, in Lincoln's words, questions relating to slavery were "settled forever." For a man with a growing sense of urgency about abolishing, or at least limiting, slavery, who had no solution to the problem and no political outlet for making his feelings known, colonization offered a very useful escape.

IV

In 1854 reality replaced fantasy. On January 4, Stephen A. Douglas, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, introduced a bill to establish a government for the Nebraska Territory (which const.i.tuted the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase, including the present states of Kansas and Nebraska). The measure was much needed. Immigrants from Missouri and Iowa were already pushing across the border into the unorganized region, and a favored route for the proposed transcontinental railroad ran through Nebraska. Slavery had been prohibited in this area by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, but Southerners, fearful of the growing population and wealth of the North, had killed previous efforts to organize Nebraska as a free territory. Douglas sought to avoid a similar fate for his new bill by providing that the territory, "when admitted as a State or States,... shall be received into the Union, with or without slavery, as their const.i.tution may prescribe." Taking these words from the 1850 acts organizing New Mexico and Utah, Douglas thus extended the doctrine of "popular sovereignty" to the Nebraska Territory. But because his measure said nothing about slavery in Nebraska during its territorial stage or about the Missouri Compromise restriction, proslavery senators pressed him to include an explicit repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Reluctantly he agreed, though he knew it would "raise a h.e.l.l of a storm," and at the same time he a.s.sented to the division of the region into two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. Endorsed by the Pierce administration, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was pa.s.sed by the Congress after a bitter struggle and became law on May 30.

This act, Lincoln said a few months later, "took us by surprise-astounded us We were thunderstruck and stunned." His immediate actions suggested that he was more stunned than astounded. He made no comment, public or private, on the Kansas-Nebraska measure while Douglas, with brilliant parliamentary management and unrelenting ferocity toward his opponents, forced it through both houses of Congress. He said nothing about the "Appeal of the Independent Democrats," drawn up by free-soil senators Charles Sumner of Ma.s.sachusetts and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, with a.s.sistance from other antislavery congressmen, which a.s.sailed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise "as a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of previous rights; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves." Certainly he read the congressional debates studiously, and he followed the crescendo of attacks on Douglas and his bill both in the New York Tribune and the Chicago Tribune, to which Lincoln & Herndon subscribed, and in the abolitionist papers, such as the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Emanc.i.p.ator, and National Era, which Herndon received. Herndon sent away for the speeches of antislavery spokesmen such as Sumner, Chase, and Senator William H. Seward of New York, and he regularly received those of Theodore Parker, the great Boston preacher, and Wendell Phillips, the abolitionist orator; and he made sure that his partner knew about them all. But Lincoln said and wrote nothing.

He was silent partly because he was extraordinarily busy at just the time the Kansas-Nebraska bill was working its way through the Congress. In addition to the demands of his regular legal practice, the suit of the Illinois Central Railroad v. McLean County was to be heard in the Illinois Supreme Court on February 28, and in the weeks before the hearing Lincoln spent all the time he could spare preparing his brief and his oral argument in a case that was probably the most important and certainly was the most remunerative in his entire legal career.

As a private citizen, holding and seeking no public office, he did not feel called upon to make a public statement about the Kansas-Nebraska bill. Neither Douglas nor his measure would come directly before the Illinois electorate in 1854. The only general election that year was for state treasurer, whose selection would not depend on his support of or opposition to Kansas-Nebraska. In the fall there would, of course, be elections for representatives in Congress and for the members of the state legislature, but the political situation was so confused that it was not clear how Lincoln could make any meaningful intervention.

In Illinois, as throughout the North, there was a firestorm of opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but Douglas's enemies were badly divided. In Chicago much of the hostility to Douglas was personal, led by his rival, the erratic but popular John Wentworth, who controlled the influential Chicago Democrat. The Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Democratic Press also kept up a drumbeat of criticism. Elsewhere in northern Illinois, where the Liberty party had shown strength in 1840 and 1844 and the Free-Soil party had won a considerable following in 1848, opposition to Douglas was more ideological, and New England-bred abolitionists like Owen Lovejoy found in the Kansas-Nebraska Act the occasion to launch a new antislavery party, which they christened "Republican." Southern Illinois, staunchly Democratic, was equally angered at the Kansas-Nebraska Act, because residents feared that opening Kansas to slaveholders would prevent the settlement of small farmers like themselves. Violently negrophobic, voters in this section wanted to have nothing to do with abolitionism; they fought under the banner of Anti-Nebraska Democrats. In central Illinois, hostility to Kansas-Nebraska was also strong, but the dominant conservatives had no desire to see that opposition translated into a general antislavery movement; they remained firm in their allegiance to the Whig party. Despite frequent calls for a fusion ticket, these disparate elements continued to march under different banners. In an October speech Lincoln graphically recaptured the "utter confusion" of Douglas's opponents, who were united only in their hostility toward the Kansas-Nebraska Act: "We rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach-a scythe-a pitchfork-a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver." It was no wonder, he remarked, "that our drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform."

These divisions were enough to cause a politician to hesitate, but there were other cross-cutting fractures that made it even more difficult to take a stand. A rising tide of immigration fed the endemic American nativist sentiment. In Illinois the large number of foreign-born who came to build the railroad network aroused fear of foreign tongues and behavior and of the Catholic Church, to which many immigrants belonged. Fear became resentment when the sharp recession of 18541855 put a temporary halt to railroad construction and threw immigrant laborers into compet.i.tion with local blue-collar workers. Native-born Protestants began to join secret societies, like the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, which advocated lengthening the term for naturalization and restricting the rights of the Catholic Church. Just how large the Order was, n.o.body could tell, because members were sworn to reply to questions from outsiders about the movement, "I know nothing." When the Order, styling itself the Native American party, entered politics and secretly endorsed candidates, it seemed to pose more of a threat to normal political alignments than even the agitation over Kansas-Nebraska.

Lincoln had no sympathy for nativism, but he had to recognize that Know Nothings were a powerful political force when some of his strongest backers, including Simeon Francis, the editor of the Illinois State Journal, which had always been Lincoln's newspaper voice in the state capital, joined the movement. Later charges that Lincoln himself was a Know Nothing and that he had been seen at a Native American lodge in Quincy were roorbacks, but he did not go out of his way to alienate his old political friends who had become nativists. When a local committee solicited his support, he tried to avoid a commitment by deliberately misunderstanding their meaning. "Do [the Native Americans] not wear breech-clout and carry tomahawk?" he asked. "We pushed them from their homes and now turn upon others not fortunate enough to come over as early as we or our forefathers."

In public his position on nativism was circ.u.mspect. Initially he professed to know nothing-and perhaps the words themselves were significant-about the secret party. "If there was an order styled the Know-Nothings, and there was any thing bad in it, he was unqualifiedly against it," he said; "and if there was anything good in it, why, he said G.o.d speed it!"

With the political situation so volatile, Lincoln held back all summer, even though it was becoming clear that Illinois would be a major battleground for Douglas and the popular-sovereignty issue. Prominent antislavery men like Salmon P. Chase and Joshua R. Giddings spoke, and Lincoln carefully studied reports of their addresses. In July, Ca.s.sius M. Clay, the fiery Kentucky abolitionist, appeared in Springfield to denounce the Kansas and Nebraska outrage and call for "an organization of men of whatever politics, of Free Soilers, Whigs and Democrats, who should bury past animosities, and... unite in hurling down the gigantic evil which threatened even their own liberty." While Clay spoke, Lincoln lounged on the gra.s.s whittling and listening. It took him time to a.s.similate all these arguments and to make them his own.

He did not act until the end of August, when he spoke at the Scott County Whig convention in Winchester, attacking "the great wrong and injustice of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the extension of slavery into free territory." His purpose in entering the campaign was a limited one; as he wrote later, "he took the stump with no broader practical aim or object than to secure, if possible, the reelection of Hon Richard Yates to congress." That purpose defined the role that Lincoln was prepared to play in repudiating Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act: he campaigned as a Whig-not as an abolitionist, or an anti-Nebraska man, or even a fusionist-who was seeking the reelection of a fellow Whig to the House of Representatives.

V

Once Lincoln decided to take part in the campaign, he showed no further hesitation. Feeling again the joy of political combat, he devoted all his time to the anti-Nebraska cause, except for his necessary commitments to court cases. He became, in effect, Yates's campaign manager, spending hours conferring with the Whig candidate and advising him on tactics. Learning that English settlers in Morgan County were disturbed by reports that Yates was a Know Nothing, he drafted a letter denying the charge, which could be distributed "at each precinct where any considerable number of the foreign citizens, german as well as english-vote." When he heard that Democrats were whispering that Yates, though professing to be a temperate man, was a secret drinker, he recognized that the rumor might cost the Whigs the large prohibitionist vote and sought to kill the allegation. "I have never seen him drink liquor, nor act, or speak, as if he had been drinking, nor smelled it on his breath," he wrote. But then-almost as if he realized that the future would show that Yates did indulge in liquor, to the point of being intoxicated when he was inaugurated as governor of Illinois in 1861-Lincoln carefully explained his own position to a friend: "Other things being equal, I would much prefer a temperate man, to an intemperate one; still I do not make my vote depend absolutely upon the question of whether a candidate does or does not taste liquor."

Though Lincoln wanted to bolster Yates's candidacy, he resisted a plan to strengthen the Whig cause in Sangamon County by allowing himself to be nominated for the state legislature. This was not a position he wanted. Election to the state legislature, after a term in the United States House of Representatives, looked like a backward movement in his career. But several local antislavery leaders promised if he ran they would vote for him-and, implicitly, for Yates as well. At about the same time, a committee of Springfield Know Nothings informed Lincoln that their party was secretly nominating him for the legislature. Lincoln told his visitors frankly that "he was not in sentiment with this new party," but in the end he agreed that "they might vote for him if they wanted to; so might the Democrats." Even then he did not promise to run.

On September 3, while Lincoln was in Jacksonville campaigning for Yates, Dr. William Jayne, a prominent Springfield Whig who was also a Know Nothing, published an announcement of Lincoln's candidacy for the state legislature in the Illinois State Journal. Mary Lincoln, who was obviously well informed of her husband's wishes, rushed to the Journal office and demanded that Lincoln's name be withdrawn. When Lincoln returned, Jayne called on him at his house and insisted that he must run. He found Lincoln "the saddest man I ever saw-the gloomiest." As Jayne remembered many years later, he walked up and down the room, almost crying, as he resisted the appeal. "No-I can't," he insisted. "You don't know all. I say you don't begin to know one-half and that's enough."

Neither then nor later did Lincoln explain his misgivings, but in all probability he had his own political future in mind. He knew, of course, that the legislature to be elected in the fall of 1854 would choose a United States senator to succeed James Shields, the inc.u.mbent Democrat. Aware of the growing strength of the opposition to Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he could foresee that the next senator would probably come from the anti-Nebraska coalition, and, not being a modest man, he realized that he would be a strong candidate for that office. But as a lawyer, he knew that the Illinois state const.i.tution prohibited the election of a state legislator to the United States Congress. He did not know what to do. If he ran, he might be putting an end to his cherished hope for higher office; if he refused to run, he might well cause the defeat of the Whig ticket in Sangamon County (and also the defeat of Yates in the congressional district) and consequently would have no claim for support in the senatorial election. Unhappily he allowed Jayne to overcome his objections, and the Journal made his candidacy official.

Once he had committed himself, Lincoln wholeheartedly worked to build a coalition of all who were opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Feeling "anxious... that this Nebraska measure shall be rebuked and condemned every where," he tried to enlist Democrats known to be critical of Douglas. Learning that John M. Palmer, a state senator from Macoupin County, had "determined not to swallow the wrong," Lincoln begged him to make a few public speeches explaining his course. "Of course ... I do not expect you to do any thing which may be wrong in your own judgment," Lincoln wrote, "nor would I have you do anything personally injurious to yourself."

Lincoln himself vigorously campaigned for Yates and against the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In the month after his first appearance he spoke at Whig rallies at Carrollton, at Jacksonville, and twice at Bloomington, being very careful not to alienate either the Know Nothings or the temperance advocates, since support from these two groups was essential to Whig success in central Illinois. At his second appearance in Bloomington he had an opportunity to make a tacit appeal to the prohibitionists. Douglas had spoken there in the afternoon, in defense of his Kansas policy, and Lincoln replied in an evening speech. Calling on Douglas, Lincoln found him surrounded by fellow Democrats, with whom the senator offered to share a decanter of red liquor. When Lincoln got ready to leave, Douglas asked: "Mr. Lincoln, won't you take something?"

"No, I think not," Lincoln replied.

"What! are you a member of the Temperance Society?" Douglas quizzed him.

"No," said Lincoln, "I am not a member of any temperance society; but I am temperate, in this, that I don't drink anything."

Lincoln's friends widely circulated reports of the encounter among prohibitionists.

VI

Alarmed when the elections in Iowa and Maine, both Democratic strongholds, went against his party, Douglas undertook a nonstop campaign to explain and defend the Kansas-Nebraska Act to Illinois voters. Everywhere his message was the same: he argued that it was his duty, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, to provide for a government in the Nebraska region, which was rapidly being settled. The Missouri Compromise, prohibiting the introduction of slavery into that region, had been "superseded" by the Compromise of 1850, which wrote into law the Democratic principle of popular sovereignty. That principle derived from the fundamental right of self-government. By extending popular sovereignty to the territories, the Congress was merely granting the citizens of those regions the same right enjoyed by free men throughout the nation, the right to choose their own social inst.i.tutions, including slavery. Under popular sovereignty the inhabitants of the territories would speedily organize governments and these would readily be admitted to the Union, without the rancorous controversies that had hitherto held up national expansion. Since the climate and soil of Kansas and Nebraska made it highly unlikely that anyone would bring slaves into those territories, they were destined to become free states. Opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act came from abolitionists, who sought to stir up sectional hatreds, and from Know Nothings, who were fomenting ethnic and religious strife. It was a powerful case, and Douglas presented it with pa.s.sion and sincerity.

Lincoln was eager for an opportunity to challenge it. Thoroughly familiar with all of the senator's arguments, he carefully prepared to attack them, reading over the voluminous pamphlet literature, reviewing the laws and the speeches in Congress, and studying the census reports. The hostile Illinois State Register said that Lincoln "had been nosing for weeks in the State Library, pumping his brain and his imagination for points and arguments." He looked for a chance to debate Douglas, but the senator, who was attacked by the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy when he spoke in the northern part of the state, by Lyman Trumbull, the anti-Nebraska Democrat, when he appeared in the south, and by Chase and Giddings wherever they could find him, was unwilling to share his audiences with yet another opponent.

On October 3, when Douglas appeared in Springfield for the opening of the Illinois State Fair, he again declined to permit Lincoln to appear on the same platform. After a rainstorm forced the cancellation of a huge open-air rally, Douglas spoke in the hall of the House of Representatives in the state capitol. To mounting applause he delivered his defense of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, ending with a powerful attack on the Know Nothings. While he spoke, Lincoln paced back and forth in the lobby, listening carefully to every word. As the crowd dispersed, he appeared on the stairway to announce, in a shout, that he or Trumbull would answer Douglas the next day. He invited Douglas to be present and offered him a chance to respond.

The next afternoon when Lincoln appeared before a large crowd in the House of Representatives hall, he was fully prepared to meet all the arguments Douglas had advanced the previous day. The senator occupied a chair directly in front of the speaker and tried not to show any reaction until it came his chance to respond. But as Lincoln warmed the audience up with wry allusions to recent political events and compliments to "his distinguished friend, Judge Douglas," the senator felt he could not remain silent and from time to time engaged in banter with the speaker. When Lincoln cited Douglas's 1849 praise of the Missouri Compromise as "a sacred thing," the senator interjected, "A first-rate speech!" As Lincoln proved that Douglas had once attempted to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, the senator snorted, "And you voted against it!" But Lincoln got in the last word: "Precisely so.... I was in favor of running the line a great deal further south." The exchanges in themselves were of no consequence, but they helped establish the equality of the challenger and the challenged-something that Douglas. .h.i.therto had been unwilling to admit.

Before an audience described as "very large, intelligent, and attentive," Lincoln spoke for more than three hours. The afternoon was hot and sticky, and Lincoln, as though prepared for heavy physical labor, appeared in his shirtsleeves, without collar or tie. Unlike many other speakers, he did not pace back and forth on the platform or lean on the lectern; instead, as Herndon said, "he stood square on his feet, with both of his legs straight up and down, toe even with toe." As always, he was a little awkward at the outset, and initially his voice was "sharp-shrill piping and squeaky." Once he was under way, the pitch of his voice lowered and "became harmonious-melodious-musical." He nearly always held his hands behind his back when he began a speech, the left hand grasped in the palm of the right, but as he proceeded, would bring his hands forward, often holding the left lapel of his coat with his left hand while leaving the right hand free to emphasize his points. He did not gesture much with his hands, however, and mostly emphasized his points with a jerk and snap of his head. But occasionally he would stretch out his long right arm and his bony forefinger to drive an idea home, and at moments of great inspiration he would "raise both hands toward heaven at an angle of about 50 degrees, generally the palms up."

Lincoln began this address with several demurrers. He now concealed the sharp envy he had long felt toward Douglas and announced that he did "not propose to question the patriotism or to a.s.sail the motives of any man, or cla.s.s of men." He sought to make the important distinction between slavery in the existing states, which was guaranteed under the Const.i.tution, and the extension of slavery, for which there was no such authority. He made it clear that, unlike many in the anti-Nebraska coalition, he did not consider the repeal of the Missouri Compromise the result of a Southern plot, and he willingly recognized that the Southern people were "no more responsible for the origin of slavery, than we." Finally, he acknowledged that he thought it was impossible to free the slaves and make them "politically and socially, our equals." "My own feelings will not admit of this," he declared; nor would those of the majority of whites. "Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question," he added pragmatically. "A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded."

With these matters, which he considered irrelevant in the present contest, pushed aside, Lincoln could concentrate on the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the defenses that Douglas had made for it. He began with a long, careful review of the history of national legislation concerning the extension of slavery, from the Northwest Ordinance to the Missouri Compromise to the Compromise of 1850, ending with the bill Douglas had introduced in 1853 for the territorial organization of Nebraska, noting that they all had recognized the right of Congress to exclude slavery from the national territories. Then Douglas made his astonishing about-face in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.