Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (15 page)

Lincoln wrote no letter to Herndon, or to anyone else, about Winthrop’s speech.

Lincoln’s congressional term ended with an idea that was interesting but stillborn. He proposed a plan to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia.

Although the District was small—Washington was barely in the top twenty of American cities, just ahead of Newark, New Jersey, but behind Providence, Rhode Island—it was symbolically important as the home of the federal government. The presence of slaves and slave traders there—“a sort of
negro livery stable,” as Lincoln called it, stood only seven blocks from the Capitol—seemed grotesque to antislavery men.

In a brief speech on the House floor in January 1849 Lincoln offered a plan of gradual and compensated emancipation. Any children of slaves born in the District after 1849 should be free; slaves who were living there as of 1849 could be freed by the federal government paying full value to their owners.

Lincoln limited his plan in several ways. The freeborn children of the future would have to serve apprenticeships to their masters until they reached adulthood; any slave owner who did not want to free a slave in return for payment would not have to do it. Finally, Lincoln’s plan had to be submitted to the District’s voters; it would go into effect only if they approved. In this, Lincoln was consistent with his 1837 Protest on Slavery in the Illinois legislature. Then, he and Dan Stone had noted that Congress had the power to abolish slavery in the District, though it should only do so “at the request of the people
of said District.”

Lincoln believed emancipation had to come via voter approval. This was an obligation of republican government; a “duty,” as he put it, “due . . . to liberty itself
(paradox though it may seem).” Free men had to choose to free their slaves.

It is always easier to free slaves from the top down. The greatest manumission in the world so far, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, had been such an act. Seven hundred thousand slaves in the West Indies were freed not by the assemblies of the colonies
in which they were held, but by Parliament in London. In 1848 there were smaller manumissions in the empires of France and Denmark that happened in the same way: as acts of imperial noblesse oblige, not self-government. In the Lyceum Address, Lincoln had even warned that emancipation from on high might be one of the projects of the tyrannical “towering genius.” He wanted no part of that.

Lincoln told the House his plan had the support of “
leading citizens” in the District (the mayor of Washington, DC, was a fellow Whig). Once Lincoln offered his plan publicly, however, the citizens got cold feet (no leadership from them). He let his suddenly friendless proposal drop, never even introducing it as a bill.

Lincoln had been cautious and careful: he had built on his own earlier efforts, and he had accomplished nothing. Two months later, on March 4, 1849, Congress adjourned. The Whig nomination in his district had rotated in 1848 to yet another politician, Stephen Logan, his second law partner, who lost to a Democratic Mexican War veteran. Lincoln’s career as a congressman was over.

Six

H
ENRY
C
LAY AND THE
F
OURTH OF
J
ULY

T
HE MAIN FIGURE IN
L
INCOLN’S POLITICAL WORLD DURING
the 1840s was the aging Whig lion Henry Clay. Clay charmed Americans with his eloquence, and loomed over successive presidential elections on account of his mountainous ambition. Lincoln was not so impressed with him as an orator or a presidential candidate. He had more sympathy with Clay’s mastery of the arts of compromise and with his economic program.

Most important, at the end of this period of Lincoln’s life Clay shaped his understanding of the founding and showed him its relevance to the politics of slavery. Though not a founder himself, Clay taught Lincoln what the Fourth of July meant, and what it might mean to a country that was tearing itself apart. He led Lincoln to what would become one of the touchstones of his career, the Declaration of Independence.

Clay, born in 1777 in Virginia, moved to Kentucky in 1797—the same path as Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, though Clay was marked for greater things. As a teenager, he had read law with the Virginian jurist George Wythe, signer of the Declaration and teacher of Thomas Jefferson. In Kentucky Clay opened a practice, married a rich man’s daughter, and made a brilliant start in politics. He joined the first Republican Party—there were few Federalists in Kentucky—and was elected to the state legislature, which twice sent him to the US Senate to serve the stubs of terms left vacant by resignation. In 1810 he was elected to the House of Representatives, which chose him to be Speaker on his first day in office (the first, and still the only member of Congress to have risen so fast). He was only thirty-four years old.

Over the next forty years Kentucky sent him to the House or the Senate more or less whenever he wished (he took time off in the 1820s to be US secretary of state). He was a man of many political talents—a wily parliamentarian and a patient deal-maker—but his hold on the public rested on his skill as a performer. One listener described him in full cry: “He spoke to his audience very much as an ardent lover speaks to his sweetheart. . . . His voice was full, rich, clear, sweet, musical, and as inspiring as a trumpet. . . . His tall form would seem to grow taller and taller with every new statement, until it reached a supernatural height.” He was “the
livest
man of whom it is
possible to conceive.”

Clay was one of the first politicians to note the aging of the founders (not yet their passing, for Jefferson and Madison were still active when he first came to Washington). As early as 1810 he spoke of them thus: “The withered arm and wrinkled brow of the illustrious founders of our freedom are melancholy indications that they will shortly be removed from us. . . . We shall want the presence and living example of a new race of heroes to
supply their places.”

Clay intended to be one of those heroes. He showed his mettle by defusing two crises as great as anything Washington had faced as president.

In 1819—when Lincoln was still a child in Indiana—Missouri applied for statehood. It would be the second state carved out of the Louisiana Territory, after Louisiana itself, and the first that was entirely west of the Mississippi. Would the new state in the new American West admit slaves? The House, where the more populous free states commanded a majority, wanted Missouri to be free, but the Senate, where slave states and free states were in balance, would not agree. House and Senate, North and South, became fixed in an acrid deadlock. Clay, who was Speaker as the crisis began, engineered a compromise whereby Missouri would be admitted as a slave state, balanced by Maine (hitherto a part of Massachusetts) as a free state, while in the rest of the Louisiana Territory slavery would be forbidden north of a line running west at latitude 36°30' N—known thereafter as the Missouri line. He had saved the Union, though southern diehards never quite trusted him again.

In 1832 came a second almost-explosion. South Carolina was rich in slaves and cotton but dependent for its necessities on imports. After Congress passed a high tariff to protect northern manufacturers, the state announced that it would nullify the law within its borders. President Jackson threatened, South Carolina blustered. Clay, now a senator, arranged a gradual lessening of the tariff, and the rebellious state withdrew its ordinance of nullification.

The Missouri clash split the country on sectional lines; South Carolina’s nullification ordinance challenged the very structure of the Constitution, where setting tariffs is made the responsibility of the federal government (Article I, Sections 8 and 10). The last of the founders anxiously watched these threats to their handiwork. Jefferson called the Missouri crisis “the
knell of the union.” Madison accused the South Carolina nullifiers of fomenting “
disgust with the union.” Clay had helped beat back both threats; his handiwork earned him the title of the Great Compromiser.

But he coveted an even greater title. Clay reputedly said he would rather be right than president. His desire to be right must have been very great then, for he desperately wanted to be president. He first ran
in 1824, in the four-way race to succeed the last founder president, James Monroe. He came in fourth, with 37 electoral votes. One of the other candidates—all of them, like Clay, Republicans—was Andrew Jackson; their rivalry would polarize the next two-party system. In 1832 Clay ran head to head against Jackson, this time calling himself a National Republican; Jackson buried him, with 219 electoral votes to 49. Clay lost again in 1844, running as a Whig—which made him the first three-time loser in the history of presidential elections. But Clay had wanted two more shots, seeking (and failing) to win the Whig nomination in 1840 and 1848.

What did Lincoln think of this gaudy, capable, egotistical man?

Lincoln never heard Clay speak in Congress, for Clay left the Senate in 1842 to prepare for his next presidential campaign and did not return until 1849, after Lincoln left the House. Lincoln did hear him in November 1847 in Lexington, Kentucky, when the Lincoln family stopped in Mary’s hometown on their way to Washington. Clay denounced the Mexican War as a war of aggression—the very argument Lincoln would make in his “spot” resolutions the following month.

Lincoln never said much about Clay’s oratory; the one time he praised it, after Clay’s death, he did so by quoting a newspaper obituary—praise at arm’s length. Their styles would never be alike. Lincoln learned to summon the passions, but he never addressed audiences as sweethearts (he hardly addressed his sweethearts as sweethearts). As Lincoln came into his own as a speaker, he strove for the hard glow of literary permanence. Clay’s speeches, as even his admirers admitted, were not meant to be read, but to be absorbed in the
rush of the moment. Clay’s compromises were more to Lincoln’s taste, as his letter to the Illinois Liberty Party supporter showed. If you keep your main point, why not surrender subsidiary ones?

Clay was most disappointing to Lincoln as a presidential candidate. Lincoln the Whig stalwart wanted victories—and Clay was unable to supply them. In addition to the talents he actually possessed, Clay fancied himself a clever campaigner. He was ever thinking of the twist, the
turn, the quickstep that would carry him over the finish line, but he only managed to stumble. In 1839, he gave a speech attacking abolitionists, because he honestly deplored their criticism of the Constitution, and because he wanted to shore up support in the South. But he went so far that he only offended northern Whig leaders, who swung the party’s nomination to Harrison. As the Whig candidate in 1844, Clay made a similar mistake concerning the annexation of Texas, driving northern voters to the Liberty Party. Despite all his efforts to conciliate the South, supporters of slavery mocked him; one rhymester wrote of Clay and his 1844 running mate, Theodore Frelinghuysen: “De niggar vote am quite surprising, / We’s all for
Clay and Frelinghuysing.”

As the 1848 election approached, Clay stirred again (he would be seventy-one years old). A cadre of younger Whigs, called Young Indians, was determined to stop him and nominate a war hero instead. That credential had worked for Harrison in 1840; as it happened, the two best generals of the Mexican War, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, were both Whigs. The party could still blame Polk for waging the war, so long as it was led by one of the men who had won it.

Alexander Stephens, the congressman whose speech Lincoln had so admired, was a Young Indian. So was Lincoln. In June 1848 Lincoln went to the Whig convention in Philadelphia to support Taylor, who was nominated on the first ballot. “We shall have a most overwhelming,
glorious triumph,” Lincoln predicted in a letter to Herndon. The Democrats nominated Lewis Cass, a Michigan politician who had served in the War of 1812 (in a speech in the House, Lincoln laughingly compared Cass’s slender war record with his own in the Black Hawk War). There was also a significant third party in this contest, called Free Soil—a coalition of Liberty Party abolitionists and those who would not end slavery outright, but opposed letting it expand into the territories that America had wrung from Mexico. Their nomination went to former president Martin Van Buren, trying to get back into the game.