Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (25 page)

He had made a few mistakes. When he delivered the speech, he included among the signers of the Constitution who had voted for the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 Abraham Baldwin of Georgia. Baldwin was simultaneously a delegate to Congress, which then sat in New York, and to the Constitutional Convention, meeting in Philadelphia. Other men with the same double assignment shuttled between the two cities. But Baldwin, once he arrived in Philadelphia in June, stayed put, and thus did not vote when Congress passed the Ordinance in
July. Lincoln’s New York assistants
caught the error, and the pamphlet version of the speech corrected it.

But Lincoln made two other mistakes that were not caught. He said that George Read of Delaware had agreed to bar the importation of foreign slaves into the Mississippi Territory in 1798. But Read had retired from Congress in 1793. The Read who was serving five years later was Jacob Read, a senator from South Carolina and no relation to George. Lincoln had confused the two; so did his helpers in New York.

To demonstrate Washington’s opposition to the spread of slavery, Lincoln referred to a letter he had written to Lafayette in 1798, praising the Northwest Ordinance. The relevant lines were quoted in a footnote: “I consider it [the Ordinance] a wise measure . . . and I trust we shall have a
confederation of free states.” But this letter to Lafayette is bogus. Washington did write his old friend in 1798, after Lafayette was released from an Austrian jail where he had been held as a prisoner of war (revolutionary France and Europe’s monarchies had been fighting for half a dozen years). But Washington’s letter was devoted to congratulations on Lafayette’s freedom and comments on American politics, with not a word about the Northwest Ordinance.

Lincoln and his footnote-makers may have gotten the supposed Washington letter from
a speech Lyman Trumbull had given in the Senate in December 1859. Or they may have spotted it in abolitionist publications, where it appeared
earlier in the 1850s. The Washington letter was pure projection: wishing that a great man thought one’s thoughts, and believed one’s beliefs. (Washington was a common hook for such daydreams: in the 1850s Catholics tweaked the story that he had prayed at Valley Forge; in their version, his prayer was answered by the Virgin Mary.)

These were not gross errors. Both Abraham Baldwin and George Read had voted to restrict slavery during their actual careers in Congress, and thus they legitimately belonged on Lincoln’s tally of twenty-one like-minded “fathers.” Washington had criticized slavery in letters that were authentic, and Lincoln’s young assistants quoted one such in
their notes: “There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for
the abolition of it,” Washington wrote Robert Morris in 1786. If anything these small blunders add the charm of effort to Lincoln’s research. He had no staff (except Herndon), and his last-minute helpers in New York worked without search engines. The lawyer-politician and his admirers had to hit the books themselves and root around. The wonder is that they found so much.

More serious than stray mistakes was the tone of special pleading that Lincoln used whenever he discussed the founders and slavery. He was a patriot appealing to the founders, a son appealing to his fathers. But he was also a lawyer making a case. He leaned hard on all the evidence that backed him up, and ignored or hastened over any evidence that didn’t.

In his swing through the Midwest at the end of 1859, he described “the early days of the Republic” as an era of wholehearted enthusiasm for liberty: “You may examine the debates under the Confederation, in the [Constitutional] Convention . . . and in the first session of Congress and you will not find a single man saying that Slavery is
a good thing.”

But this was not true. Lincoln had read in Madison’s
Papers
the debates that took place at the Constitutional Convention over the slave trade and the three-fifths rule. This was where he found the blazing antislavery polemics of Gouverneur Morris, the peg-legged delegate from Pennsylvania who had called slavery “a nefarious institution,” and “the curse of heaven on the states
where it prevailed.” This was where he read Madison himself insisting, Virginia slave-owner though he was, that it would be “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be
property in men” (hence the veiled language the Constitution used to discuss it).

But this was also where he encountered John Rutledge of South Carolina—the lawyer, planter, and patriot who served his state as governor during the Revolution and had his estate confiscated by the occupying British. Rutledge declared at the Constitutional Convention that “religion and humanity had nothing to do” with the slave trade. “Interest
alone is the governing principle with nations”—and with states. The people of North and South Carolina and Georgia would be “fools” if they allowed the slave trade to be restricted. Northern states, meanwhile, should welcome the slave trade, since more slave labor “will increase the commodities of which they will
become the carriers [merchants].”

Rutledge had not quite said that slavery and the slave trade were good things, but he certainly thought they were good for business. He would not defend them on the grounds of religion and humanity; he simply put interest above religion and humanity. And he insisted that his state and its neighbors would not sign the Constitution unless their interest in the slave trade was protected. (In the end, the Constitution guaranteed the slave trade until 1808—Article I, Section 9—and further stipulated that this provision could not be amended—Article V.) Lincoln admitted in his reckoning of the “fathers” at Cooper Union that
Rutledge could not be counted as an antislavery man.

One delegate to the first Congress had gone even further than Rutledge. In February 1789, nineteen years ahead of the constitutional guarantee, Quakers petitioned Congress to end the slave trade (they urged Congress to overlook such “seeming impediments”). They were answered by Rep. James Jackson of Georgia. Jackson had moved to Savannah from England in 1772 at the age of fifteen and had fought in the Revolution. In rebutting the Quakers, he went beyond the letter of the law to defend slavery itself. “Why do these men set themselves up in such a particular manner against slavery? Do they understand the rights of mankind, and the disposition of Providence better than others? If they were to consult [the Bible] they will find that slavery is not only allowed but commended. . . . If they fully examine the subject, they will find that slavery has been no novel doctrine since the
days of Cain.” Anything supported by both the Bible and Cain must be a good thing.

Jackson’s remarks were immortalized when Benjamin Franklin, in his last journalistic spoof, claimed to have found a seventeenth-century speech by a Barbary pirate defending the enslavement of Christians in
similar terms: “How grossly are they mistaken in imagining slavery to be disallowed by the Alcoran. . . since it is well known from it that God has given the world and all that it contains to his
faithful Musselmen.” Lincoln probably never read Franklin’s satire, but he might have stumbled across Jackson’s remarks when he was hunting for the first Congress’s votes on confirming the Northwest Ordinance. Jackson and other southerners were content to keep slavery out of the old Northwest, but they thought, and sometimes said, even in the early days of the republic, that it was a good thing for themselves.

But the most problematic of the founders, for Lincoln, was one of the very greatest: Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, when Lincoln was seventeen years old. Death linked him with the great event of his life, the Declaration of Independence, which Congress had approved fifty years earlier. George Washington was bound for the pantheon from the moment he became commander in chief. Thomas Paine, after he authored
The Age of Reason
, could only belong to the pantheon of village skeptics. Jefferson’s death on the jubilee of his Declaration was his apotheosis. Four months later, in November 1826, his apotheosis took visible form when John Trumbull’s heroic painting,
The Declaration of Independence
, was hung in the Capitol Rotunda. In it, Jefferson—taller than his fellow founders, and brighter (he wears a red waistcoat)—hands his immortal document to Congress, and to posterity.

But between 1776 and 1826, Jefferson had had a busy and controversial career. In 1791–1792 he had founded, with the help of James Madison, America’s first national political party, the Republicans (under Andrew Jackson they would change their name to the Democrats). Their struggles with their rivals, the Federalists, were as bitter as anything in the history of American politics apart from the Civil War. One story can stand for all: In 1798 a Republican congressman spat in the face of a Federalist colleague on the floor of the House. A few days later, the
Federalist caned the Republican, who defended himself with a pair of tongs from the cloakroom fireplace.

Jefferson’s party triumphed, giving the White House to him and to his fellow Virginians James Madison and James Monroe for two terms each—twenty-four years (1801–1825) of government by friends, neighbors, and soul-mates. But the long reign of the first Republican Party was not cloudless. Jefferson’s first term (1801–1805) glittered: he cut taxes, enjoyed peace, and bought Louisiana. But his second term (1805–1809) ended in a funk: his efforts to keep America out of renewed European wars by imposing a trade embargo made him odious. Jefferson left the White House in March 1809, when Lincoln was only three weeks old, a worn-out man. His long retirement at Monticello was a period of silent recovery.

In 1829, three years after his apotheosis, the first partial edition of his letters and papers appeared. Before that, stray letters of his had been published by indiscreet correspondents. But the appearance of a mass of his writing, followed over the years by other editions and biographies, took Jefferson out of both the shadows of retirement and the glory of death and revived all the controversies of his life.

In 1870 William Herndon tried to explain to a would-be Lincoln biographer what Lincoln had thought of his great predecessor. “Mr. Lincoln,” he wrote, “hated Thomas Jefferson as a man—rather, as a politician, and yet the highest compliment I ever heard or read of his was paid to the
memory of Jefferson.” By “highest compliment,” Herndon meant the paean Lincoln sent the Bostonians who had invited him to celebrate Jefferson’s birthday in 1859 (“All honor to Jefferson . . . ”). But what of the hatred?

Herndon stumbled at the very start of his sentence, writing first that Lincoln hated the man, then deciding that it was really the politician that he found hateful. But man and politician were fused in people’s opinions of Jefferson. Critics and admirers alike had been trying for years to explain his actions in the light of his character; yet both character and actions could defy explanation. It wasn’t just that
people sometimes disagreed with Jefferson; rather, that Jefferson so often seemed to disagree with himself.

Alexander Hamilton, Jefferson’s most eloquent enemy, called him crafty, unscrupulous, dishonest, and “a
contemptible hypocrite.” Madison, who loved Jefferson above all men, admitted that he shared, with “others of great genius,” a “habit . . . of expressing in strong and round terms
impressions of the moment.” We might love the impressions of some of Jefferson’s moments, but then there were the impressions of other, less lovable, moments; and in between were all the moments when he was neither strong nor round, but elusive, maybe even evasive. Who that thought seriously about Jefferson did not hate him, at least a little?

What mattered most to Lincoln, and what was the source of both the hatred Herndon said he felt and the honor he publicly offered, was Jefferson’s shifting thoughts about slavery.

Early in Jefferson’s career, in 1784, he had proposed that the old Congress keep slavery out of the West. Lincoln alluded to Jefferson’s proposal in his two historical speeches, Peoria and Cooper Union.