Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (20 page)

In May the Illinois Republicans held a convention in Bloomington, southwest of Peoria; Lincoln addressed them, giving what Herndon called the best speech of his life. “It was logic; it was pathos; it was enthusiasm; it was justice, equity, truth and right[;] . . . it was hard, heavy, knotty, gnarly,
backed with wrath.” Herndon was so carried away that he stopped taking notes after fifteen minutes. Unfortunately no one else recorded the speech either. We will have to be satisfied with the Lincoln speeches we have.

Douglas was nominated for president once again at the Democratic national convention in Cincinnati; he stayed in contention for sixteen ballots, peaking at second place. But all his labors for the Nebraska bill had given him not a clear path to the nomination, but a reputation as a fomenter of controversy. On the seventeenth ballot he gave way to James Buchanan, a sixty-five-year-old party hack who had spent the last four years of his long career in London, representing the United States at the Court of St. James, and thus had no record to defend on Douglas’s bill.

There was a third party in the race, the Americans (called by their enemies the Know-Nothings). The Americans were, in inspiration, a nativist party that had formed in reaction to the floods of Irish and
German immigrants who had been coming to the United States since the 1840s, driven by famine or political unrest. The Americans also became a shelter for conservative Whigs. For their candidate they tapped the last Whig president, Millard Fillmore.

The Republicans held their convention in Philadelphia in late June, the latest of the three major parties. Lincoln wanted the new party to appeal to the old Whigs in its ranks and suggested nominating quite an old Whig to do it—John McLean, a seventy-one-year-old US Supreme Court justice: “His nomination would
save every Whig,” Lincoln wrote Trumbull. The convention went in the other direction, picking John C. Frémont, a forty-three-year-old Free Soil Democrat who was famous for exploring the Rockies and liberating California during the Mexican War. Free Soil, Free Men, and Frémont made a catchy slogan.

Although Lincoln did not attend the national convention, he was not ignored. The Illinois delegation backed him for the vice-presidential nomination, and he finished second in a straw poll of delegates, with 110 votes out of 607. The second spot on the ticket, however, went not to him but to William Dayton, another former Whig who had actually been a senator from New Jersey.

Frémont carried New England, New York, Ohio, and the upper Midwest—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa—for 114 electoral votes. Fillmore took Maryland and its 8 votes. Buchanan carried every other state for 174 electoral votes and victory. His margin came from four swing states—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois—where he eked out tiny majorities (a hair over 50 percent in Pennsylvania, his home state) or won with pluralities. Frémont and Fillmore together took almost 56 percent of the vote in Illinois, but Buchanan’s 44 percent was first past the post. The new Republican Party would need to win Illinois and other states like it if it were to elect a president in 1860.

Buchanan was inaugurated on March 4, 1857. Two days later the Supreme Court handed down perhaps its worst decision ever, certainly
one of its most consequential. It forced both Lincoln and Douglas to scramble for new political ground.

Dred Scott was a slave whose master, an army surgeon, had taken him in the 1830s to forts in Illinois and the future Minnesota Territory, well north of the Missouri line. Later he served his master’s wife in Missouri. After the surgeon died, Scott, with the help of abolitionist lawyers, sued for his freedom, on the grounds that living in a free state and a free territory had liberated him.
Scott v. Sandford
had been argued before the Supreme Court in 1856.

The majority opinion was written by Roger Taney, who would shortly celebrate both his eightieth birthday and his twenty-first year as chief justice. Taney ruled that Scott had no right to sue. Only citizens could do that, and blacks could not be citizens under the Constitution, because at the time of its ratification they were considered “beings of an inferior order” who “had no rights which the white man was
bound to respect.” Since the founders would not have respected Dred Scott, neither did the Constitution or the chief justice.

Taney went on to state that the Missouri Compromise, under which Scott claimed freedom, thanks to his having lived in the future Minnesota Territory, violated the Fifth Amendment. Since “no person” could be “deprived of property without due process of law,” Congress could not pass a law that deprived slave owners of their property. Therefore owners could take their slaves into any territory whatsoever. Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act had repealed the Missouri Compromise; now Taney and the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. Since the purpose of the Republican Party was to restore the Missouri Compromise, the
Dred Scott
decision was, as political scientist Harry Jaffa puts it, “a summons to the Republicans
to disband.”

As a boy and as an adult Lincoln had encountered views of George Washington, propagated by chapters of Parson Weems and orators like Robert Winthrop, depicting him as a blank symbol of virtue or national unity. Now Roger Taney was advancing the view that the founding fathers collectively had been patrons of slavery and racial hierarchy—that
their Constitution treated slavery as a property right, and that they had regarded Negroes as beings with no rights.

In June 1857 Douglas addressed the
Dred Scott
decision in a speech in Springfield. On the face of it, Taney had demolished popular sovereignty along with the Missouri Compromise: If slaveholders had a right to bring their property into any territory, what point was there in letting the inhabitants pass laws about slavery? Douglas had found a loophole, however. The right to bring slaves would be “barren and worthless . . . unless sustained, protected and enforced by appropriate police regulations.” In other words, if the people of a territory imposed slight or no penalties on helping runaways or preaching abolition, they could make slave-owning so precarious that the right became a dead letter. “Hence,” he concluded, “the great principle of popular sovereignty . . .
is sustained.” Douglas could accept
Dred Scott
, yet at the same time urge Americans to evade it. This topic would come up again.

For the rest, Douglas agreed with Taney that blacks were an “inferior race,” and he added that Republicans desired “
amalgamation” with them.

Douglas’s racial rhetoric would ring down the years. Racism was not peculiar to him. Almost every white American felt it, from wealthy planters to hardscrabble farmers to immigrants just off the boat. “My own feelings
will not admit of ” racial equality, Lincoln admitted in his Peoria speech. But Douglas was making racism a creed and a partisan plank of northern Democrats. For him it was not a passive prejudice, a piece of mental furniture, but a fighting faith. “No man of his time,” wrote the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass (no relation) “has done more than he to intensify
hatred of the negro.” Douglas accompanied his racism with the charge that his Republican enemies were race-mixers (the word “
miscegenation” would be invented in 1864 by a Democratic journalist for use against Republicans).

Douglas had his own view of the founding fathers, somewhat different from Taney’s. He would expound it at length soon enough.

Lincoln answered both Taney and Douglas in Springfield later in June 1857. The question of how much deference should be accorded the
Court gave him some trouble. His old party, the Whigs, had come into existence to resist Andrew Jackson’s willfulness, exemplified by, among other things, his rejection of Supreme Court decisions he disliked. Now Lincoln quoted Jackson himself, blasting
McCulloch v. Maryland
, the 1819 decision that had upheld the constitutionality of the Second Bank of the United States.

Lincoln was trying to wrong-foot Douglas, who was a Democrat, an old Jacksonian, and a long-ago enemy of Lincoln’s in the Illinois bank wars:
here is what your old hero thought
. But in doing so, he risked wrong-footing himself:
I now find myself agreeing with my old villain
.

But Lincoln directed most of his fire not at the Supreme Court as an institution, but at Taney’s reasoning in
Dred Scott
, and he focused it specifically on Taney’s opinions of the founders. Lincoln seemed to shrug off Taney’s attacks on the Missouri Compromise and the Republican Party. What the founding fathers really meant was more important to him. If Lincoln could get that right, the rest would follow.

Taney, said Lincoln, “insists at great length that negroes were no part of the people who made, or for whom was made,” the Constitution or the Declaration. To prove that at least some Negroes were citizens under the Constitution, Lincoln relied on one of the dissenting opinions in
Dred Scott
, written by Justice Benjamin Curtis. Curtis noted that in 1787–1788, when the Constitution was ratified, five states (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina) had allowed free Negroes to vote. White men in those states, far from not respecting the rights of free black men, as Taney claimed, had respected their right to vote; free black men had voted, along with white men, on the Constitution itself.

To prove that Negroes were included in the Declaration, Lincoln relied on his own thoughts, inspired by Clay and expressed at Peoria. At the time of the founding, “our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all, and thought to include all.” Why then had the signers not freed America’s slaves? Because, said Lincoln, “they had no power to confer such a boon.” They were not making laws; they were laying
down a marker: “They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all.” For what purpose? “Its authors meant it to be, [as] 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.” Those in after times like Roger Taney and Stephen Douglas.

Lincoln had some fun with Douglas’s charge of race-mixing. It was “counterfeit logic,” he said, to argue “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.” This was a good line, and he would repeat it many times. It sprang from his own experience: he had left Mary Owens alone by dithering, and he left his wife alone by ignoring her whenever she bothered him; now he could use his difficulties with women in a higher cause.

But after the laughter, he passed immediately to moral reasoning. “In some respects [a black woman] certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.” Counterfeit logic gave way to logic so austere, it was almost poetry.

Lincoln ended with a pitch for colonization, comparing slaves to Jews in the Bible. “The children of Israel . . . went out of Egyptian bondage in a body.” So might Africans return to Africa.

The next events to come Lincoln’s and Douglas’s way arose in Kansas.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act had not only not pacified American politics, it had turned the Kansas Territory into a battlefield—literally. Settlers moving in from next-door Missouri and in greater numbers from the North came to blows, and soon there were two competing territorial governments adrift in a sea of freelance violence.
Terrorism
and
guerrilla war
were already familiar concepts, the first a legacy of the French Revolution, the second of the Napoleonic Wars in Spain. Now they stalked the plains.

In the summer of 1857, Kansas’s proslavery government called for the election of delegates for a convention to write a territorial constitution. Antislavery men boycotted the election, believing it to be rigged, with the result that a proslavery convention met in Lecompton, twenty miles east of Topeka, and wrote a proslavery document. On December 8, 1857, President Buchanan endorsed the proposed constitution in his Annual Message to Congress (the equivalent of a State of the Union address). The next day
Douglas responded in the Senate.