Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (24 page)

The New Yorkers who saw Lincoln on the Cooper Union stage had the same first impression of him that audiences always had. The adjectives scattered through one man’s recollection of him sum it up: “weird . . . long . . .
clumsy . . . gaunt.” When Lincoln opened his mouth, a western whine came out. His speech, however, was his most carefully wrought so far, one of the best he would ever give. It was also his most thorough account of the founding fathers and their stance on slavery. At Cooper Union he would make his most elaborate case that he was the founders’ son.

Lincoln’s speech began with a technique borrowed from sermons: the preacher quotes a biblical text, then expounds on it. Lincoln’s text came from one of Douglas’s speeches in Ohio the past September. “Our fathers,” Douglas said then, “when they framed the government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.” “This question” was the one Douglas had addressed in his
Harper’s
article: whether local authority (popular sovereignty) or federal authority controlled slavery in the territories. Douglas naturally thought “our fathers” understood it exactly as he did.

Lincoln announced that he “fully” agreed with Douglas’s premise: “our fathers” did indeed understand that question as well or better than anyone in 1860. But he proposed to show that “our fathers” understood it not as Douglas did, but as Lincoln did.

First he defined his terms: for the purpose of answering Douglas’s question, the “fathers” were the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution. They had written and endorsed the nation’s fundamental law; they were the men who had “framed the government under which we live.” Then for the next forty-five minutes Lincoln walked his audience through what exactly these men thought and did.

They had left a legislative trail thirty-six years long. Lincoln began with the Northwest Ordinance. Three fathers-to-be had voted in the old Congress for Jefferson’s ban on trans-Appalachian slavery in 1784, and two more for the final bill banning it in the old Northwest in 1787. Then, in 1789, in the first Congress under the Constitution, sixteen fathers (six of them serving as representatives, ten as senators) voted to confirm the Northwest Ordinance; George Washington, the greatest father of them all, signed it into law as president.

In 1798 and 1804 Congress organized territories in the future states of Mississippi and Louisiana, places long marinated in slavery. But Congress nevertheless forbade any slaves to be imported into them from abroad, even though the slave trade was then still legal. Four fathers, all senators, approved these restrictions. Finally, in 1819, the fight over Missouri statehood began. One of the last fathers to hold public office, still serving in the Senate, voted consistently against the expansion of slavery.

Lincoln summed up: of the thirty-nine fathers “who framed the government under which we live,” twenty-one had acted to ban or restrict slavery in territories. Some had done so more than once, as different bills came before them at different points in their careers. Sixteen of the fathers had never been in a position to vote on such questions, while two of them—a member of the old Congress in 1784, and a representative in 1819–1820—had indeed voted against restricting slavery in particular territories. But twenty-one out of thirty-nine was, as Lincoln said, “a clear majority.”

Lincoln did not stop with this tally. Among the fathers who never voted one way or the other were “noted anti-slavery men”: he mentioned
Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton (who had belonged to manumission societies in their home states) and Gouverneur Morris (who had assailed slavery, the slave trade, and the three-fifths rule in speeches during the Constitutional Convention). Surely, he argued, they would have sided with the twenty-one if they had had the chance.

The Taney Court had maintained in
Dred Scott
that the Fifth Amendment protected property in the territories, including slaves, and therefore that restrictions like the Missouri line were unconstitutional. But Lincoln pointed out that the first ten amendments had been passed by the same Congress that confirmed the Northwest Ordinance. “Is it not a little presumptuous . . . to affirm that the two things which that Congress deliberately framed and carried to maturity at the same time are absolutely inconsistent with each other?”

There was a dry wit in Lincoln’s careful parsings—so dry as almost to have evaporated. But the force of the Cooper Union speech came not from humor, but from well-paced repetition. Lincoln turned pedantry into music. He ended his first example, of the three fathers who had voted to restrict slavery in 1784, in this way: “In their understanding, no line dividing local from federal authority, nor anything else, properly forbade the federal government to control as to slavery in federal territory.” As the speech marched on, he rang that long formula, sometimes word for word, sometimes with slight variations, a dozen times, like a watchman tolling a bell. Shorter phrases—“our fathers,” “the thirty-nine,” “the government under which we live”—popped up, time after time, like grace notes.

But maybe the best metaphor for Lincoln’s rhetoric at Cooper Union was not music, but wrestling. His absent opponent, Douglas, had unwisely given him a hold; Lincoln gripped him and threw him, again and again and again.

Lincoln devoted the second half of his speech to two appeals and a warning. He urged Republicans to avoid mere passion and ill-temper. He urged southerners to realize that Republicans did not mean to deprive them of “any right, plainly written down in the Constitution.” (“Plainly
written” was meant to exclude
Dred Scott
, which Lincoln considered a rogue decision.) His warning was that the Republicans would not relent in their efforts to restrict the spread of slavery. They would not relent because that was “the old policy of the fathers,” and because that was the right policy. Lincoln’s last sentence went straight from the Cooper Union stage to immortality (some typesetter, or perhaps Lincoln himself, capitalized the line when the speech was published): “LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.”

The crowd gave him a long, hat-waving standing ovation. Afterward, the
New York Tribune
’s reporter, asked what he thought of the speaker, replied, stunned, “He’s the greatest man
since St. Paul.”

Lincoln concluded his trip east with a swing through New England, to capitalize on the impression he had made in New York, then returned home to cram in some more legal work. His political contest with Douglas would continue through the fall and the presidential election, but Lincoln would give no more major speeches. The back-and-forth of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which had begun in 1854, was done.

Lincoln had challenged Douglas in his home state, making himself the great Democrat’s principal rival, even more than fellow Illinoisan Lyman Trumbull. Trumbull, not Lincoln, had made it to the Senate, but Lincoln, not Trumbull, had fought Douglas on the same podiums, as well as refuting his arguments from Peoria to Cooper Union.

Lincoln had kept Douglas and the national Republican Party apart. The marriage that eastern Republicans had fancied after Douglas denounced the Lecompton Constitution had been forestalled by the 1858 Senate race, while Douglas’s seduction of potential Republican voters had been chilled by Lincoln’s ongoing criticisms. Horace Greeley registered the change like a weather vane. In 1858 his newspaper had touted Douglas; in 1860 it reported the Cooper Union
speech rapturously. Lincoln had gone from being dispensable to being praiseworthy.

Douglas raised Lincoln up to national prominence. Coming from any other state, a one-term congressman and local wheelhorse would have struggled in vain for national attention. As the gadfly of such an important Democrat, Lincoln became important himself.

Illinois also raised Lincoln up to national prominence. The 1856 election showed that Republicans could count on a solid North, Democrats on a solid South. James Buchanan had won the White House by carrying Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey; Republicans would have to carry Pennsylvania plus at least one of the other middle states if they hoped to win in 1860. The Lincoln-Douglas debates had highlighted two contenders from a swing state.

Douglas had made, over and over, a powerful argument. The essence of the American system was self-government. Letting popular sovereignty determine whether slavery should exist in the territories was self-government in action. Douglas saw himself as the champion of the American ideal.

Lincoln had to make a relatively subtle counterargument. Self-government can undermine itself. He had made it most succinctly in Peoria: if a man governs himself, that is self-government, but if he governs another by slavery, that is despotism. Slavery had to be accepted where it was (a further subtlety), but to spread it willfully or allow it to be spread through indifference soiled republicanism.

Lincoln’s cure for the disease of self-government was self-government. A towering genius, like Napoleon, might fix a broken system by overturning it and imposing a new one, controlled by himself. Lincoln used the means of ordinary politics, making his case on the hustings to voters in Illinois and, as soon as his speeches were reported and reprinted, throughout the North.

Thus Lincoln the reasoner. But there was another way to settle a disputed question. That was to ask your father. Lincoln had never asked Thomas Lincoln for much of anything. But he had found wiser and
better fathers who were as serious, as curious, and as eloquent as he could ever hope to be. They had considered the questions of freedom and slavery, and they had come up with an answer. They believed that all men are created equal, and they meant to put slavery into the course of ultimate extinction.

They had fought for their answer in the Revolution, and they had put their answer into words—in the Declaration of Independence—and into action—in the Northwest Ordinance, in the Constitution (as read by Lincoln), and in other laws. Their answer was Lincoln’s answer, not Douglas’s.

When Lincoln was a baby, Henry Clay had called for a new race of heroes. Lincoln wanted a new race of heroes, too, so long as they would agree with the old race of heroes.
As he put it at Cooper Union, “Let [us] speak as they spoke, and act as they acted.”

Ten

T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON AND THE
D
ECLARATION OF
I
NDEPENDENCE
. T
HE
T
OWERING
G
ENIUS
(I)

B
UT DID
L
INCOLN IN FACT SPEAK AND ACT AS THE FOUNDING
fathers had? Did he rightly characterize their intentions and their legacy concerning slavery?

Lincoln had prepared for both the opening and closing speeches of his six-year debate with Douglas—Peoria and Cooper Union—by “
nosing” in the Illinois state library for facts about the founding fathers. Thanks to modern editions of papers, letters, and diaries, we know much more about the founders than Lincoln did (in some ways, we know more about the founders than they themselves did, since they were not privy
to each other’s private papers). But by the mid-nineteenth century a fair amount was already on the record.

Lincoln owned a set of
Elliot’s Debates
, an 1836 collection of documents about the writing and ratifying of the Constitution. The state library in Springfield owned James Madison’s
Papers
, published in 1840, which included his copious notes on the Constitutional Convention. It also owned copies of the debates and proceedings of early Congresses, and the first biographies of Jefferson and Washington. These last were attempts at scholarly work, not tales
a la
Parson Weems, though sometimes the level of scholarship that went into them was not much higher. One early Washington biographer, Jared Sparks, had asked the elderly James Madison about a long unused draft of the First Inaugural Address that he had found in Washington’s papers. When Madison (who had ghosted the shorter version that Washington actually delivered) told him the draft was not important, Sparks sliced it into pieces and handed them out to friends as autograph samples.

When Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech was published in September 1860 in a pamphlet supervised by Lincoln himself, it appeared with a preface hailing it as a model of “patient research and historical labor” and a long train of historical footnotes. Lincoln had disposed of his own notes by the time the speech went to press, but two young Republican lawyers in New York had compiled a set of their own, which
Lincoln glanced over and approved. Though the notes as published were not his research, they represented the kind of research he had done.