Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (26 page)

In the same decade, Jefferson had issued an almost biblical warning of what might happen if Congress and the states did not act to end slavery. In 1780 a French friend asked him to write a description of his state; Jefferson’s
Notes on the State of Virginia
was
published in 1787. There he wrote: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever; that . . . a revolution in the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in
such a contest.” Lincoln knew of this warning, too, and quoted the opening clause
several times.

Jefferson’s proposal to keep slavery out of the West reflected the boldness of a revolutionary, and his vision of a race war suggested the foresight of a prophet and the fears of a guilty soul. Yet as the years
passed, Jefferson’s initiative, if not his apprehensions, seemed to melt away. What happened?

One thing that was widely supposed to have happened was that Jefferson took his slave Sally Hemings as a concubine. The affair was supposed to have begun while he was in France, several years after the death of his wife, and to have produced a handful of children. Federalist journalists made the story a scandal during his presidency. Abolitionists repeated it after his death, more in sorrow than in anger (slavery, in their telling, had corrupted even the author of the Declaration). Foreigners irked by canting Americans thought it was hilarious. The Irish poet Thomas Moore and the English novelist Charles Dickens both mocked Jefferson for dreaming “of freedom in
a slave’s embrace.” In the election of 1860 Democrats would accuse Lincoln of having repeated this crack himself, back in his days as a Whig.
Lincoln denied it, and indeed, personal attacks of that sort were not his style; he would needle Democrats for their racial and sexual anxieties, but his own wariness about sex made him
slow to defame individuals.

Jefferson’s mixed thoughts about slavery could be read in his words, without rummaging in his sheets.

One of his classic mixed messages appeared in an 1814 letter to Edward Coles, the future governor of Illinois. The letter and its publication were tangled up in the story of Coles’s career. Coles was the young neighbor and disciple of Jefferson who decided to leave Virginia out of disgust with slavery, and liberate his slaves. Coles wrote Jefferson in 1814 outlining his plans and urging his idol to call for manumission in their home state, so that Virginia might “put into complete practice those hallowed principles contained in that renowned Declaration, of which you were
the immortal author.” Jefferson wrote back the next month, approving Coles’s sentiments and hoping he would stay in Virginia and lead the fight for manumission himself.

Coles would lead a fight for freedom, not in Virginia, but in Illinois, where he moved with his former slaves in 1819. Shortly after they arrived, they faced a campaign to make the new state a slave state.
(The Northwest Ordinance guaranteed its freedom so long as it was a territory, but a state could choose slavery or freedom at will.) Coles ran for governor to keep Illinois free, and after a long struggle he beat the supporters of slavery in his new home.

In 1824 the letter he had gotten from Jefferson a decade earlier appeared in an Illinois newspaper (probably
leaked by Coles himself). Jefferson’s old letter began with a condemnation of slavery, written in a tone, simultaneously sweet and lofty, that was peculiar to Jefferson at his best. “The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain.” Justice and patriotism pleaded for liberty; so did Jefferson; the ongoing bondage of slaves and the acquiescence of free men were alike deplorable. Here was approval, given in advance, of Coles’s course as a liberator and a politician.

But then Jefferson’s tone wobbled. “I had always hoped,” he continued, “that the younger generation” would oppose “oppression wherever found.” Jefferson himself, however, was too old to play any public role. Manumission in Virginia “shall have all my prayers, and these are the only weapons of an old man.” Jefferson shifted the responsibility to Coles, and ended with an exhortation from the Bible (Galatians 6:9): “Be not
weary in well doing.”

Jefferson’s letter was reprinted in newspapers and magazines over the years, and finally appeared in a biography in 1858. It was taken as proof of his commitment, even in retirement, to the cause of liberty. But what a feeble and unreliable advocate he had become; his letter amounted to saying,
I’m with you but I won’t do anything to show it
.

Back in 1814 Coles had written a reply to Jefferson that was respectful, yet devastating. The old, he argued, were the best leaders in such a cause. “To effect so great and difficult an object great and extensive powers both of mind and influence are required. . . . I looked to you, my dear sir, as the first of our aged worthies, to awaken
our fellow Citizens.” Then a quiet stinger: Benjamin Franklin was politically active past
your
age. (At the time of the Coles correspondence, Jefferson was
seventy-one; when Franklin had been seventy-one, he had yet to negotiate the Treaty of Paris, sign the Constitution—or mock James Jackson.) Coles’s letters to Jefferson were not published in Lincoln’s lifetime, but his point was obvious from Jefferson’s own letter: Jefferson was not too weary for well doing, he was simply unwilling to do any more good.

Jefferson wrote another ambiguous letter in 1820 in the homestretch of the Missouri crisis. Jefferson’s correspondent this time was John Holmes, a politician in the first Republican Party.
The letter, published by Holmes shortly after Jefferson’s death, became famous for two pulsating phrases, almost proverbial in their simplicity: Jefferson likened the Missouri crisis to “a fire-bell in the night” that “awakened and filled me with terror”; and he said, of slavery, “We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.”

Jefferson still professed to Holmes a hope that slaves might one day be free. “The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed”—slave owner that he was, Jefferson still denied that it was right to call slaves property—“would not cost me a second thought if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected.”
Free them and send them somewhere else; I’ll even give up my own, if everybody else does
.

But what to do until then? As of 1820, Jefferson’s answer was “diffusion.” If slavery were spread over the West, instead of being concentrated in the old South, it would be weakened. Wherever slavery was thin on the ground (or so went the theory), individual slaves were better treated and owners felt freer to manumit.

The diffusion theory reflected a truth: slavery was most brutal where it was most dense, as on the sugar islands of the Caribbean. But it ignored another truth: slavery was devilishly hard to extirpate wherever it got a foothold. New York State had begun a process of gradual manumission in 1799, but according to its timetable, the state’s last slaves would not be free until 1827.

Diffusion also mocked the early career of Thomas Jefferson. In 1784 he had wanted to confine slavery east of the Appalachians. By 1820 he
was asking for it to be spread to the Rockies. Diffusion was a confession of futility and despair.

Jefferson’s letter to Coles was readily available in Lincoln’s lifetime. Since Coles was a major figure in the history of freedom in Illinois, it is unlikely that Lincoln would have missed it. It is certain that he knew of the letter to John Holmes, for he quoted the most memorable portion of it—from the “fire-bell in the night” to “the wolf by the ears”—in his 1852 eulogy on Henry Clay, to illustrate the dangers that the Missouri Compromise had averted.

But Lincoln stopped quoting before Jefferson’s plea for the diffusion of slavery: he wanted Jefferson showing how momentous Clay’s task had been, not Jefferson arguing for a policy that flouted the principle of the Missouri line.

Small wonder that Lincoln looked, beyond these fits and starts of a man made even more fitful with age, to the great deed of his first manhood—the Declaration of Independence.

A motion to declare American independence had been made in the Continental Congress in June 1776, after more than a year of revolutionary warfare. It passed on July 2, which John Adams ever after argued should be Independence Day. The Declaration itself was approved two days later. (Adams, as if in defiance of his own argument, would die on July 4, 1826, the same day as Jefferson.)

The task of writing a formal statement had been given to a committee of five: Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman. The last two let the first three do all the work, and Adams and Franklin, in turn, passed the job to their thirty-three-year-old colleague, suggesting only a few small changes. (Jefferson called the truths “we hold” in his second paragraph “sacred and undeniable”; scientist Franklin made them “self-evident.”)

Jefferson felt all the tenderness of an artist toward his composition. From July 2 to 4, Congress made significant cuts to his draft, especially
in the long indictment of George III and in the peroration. Jefferson squirmed as his colleagues hacked, which gave rise to one of Franklin’s most charming stories. The sage told Jefferson about a man who wanted to open a hat shop, with a sign showing a picture of a hat and the words: “
John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money.” After various friends offered their suggestions for tightening the wording of his sign, all that was left was the picture of the hat and “John Thompson.” Jefferson had enough humor to tell this story on himself years later; enough pride always to prefer his own first draft.

But Jefferson also maintained that the importance of the Declaration was not owing to his artistry, but to the ideas it set forth, which were not his but everyone’s. The Declaration laid out “the common sense of the subject,” as he put it in a letter a year before he died, the subject being “our rights” and how Britain had violated them. Jefferson meant the Declaration to be “an expression of the American mind. . . . All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, such as Aristotle, Cicero,
Locke, Sidney, etc.” (You have to love the polymath’s magisterial “etc.”)
Pay no attention to me
, Jefferson was saying,
I was only the oracle of public opinion and eternal truths
.

There was one other feature of the Declaration that made it compelling: all thirteen states, colonies no more, had endorsed it. New York abstained on the July 2 vote for independence because its delegates to Congress lacked instructions from their home government, but as soon as they got them, they, too, signed the Declaration. (This was more unanimity than the Constitution would get at its birth: when George Washington was inaugurated as first president, North Carolina and Rhode Island had still not ratified.)

Jefferson claimed he had expressed the American mind; Congress proved it by signing off on his handiwork—literally. Its members signed off on the sublime rhetoric of his preamble: all the phrases about just powers and the consent of the governed; about self-evident truths and inalienable rights; about the laws of nature and nature’s God. They signed
off on his assertion that “all men are created equal.” Congress, when it was wielding its editorial pen, made only tiny changes to Jefferson’s opening section, and no change at all to the declaration of all men’s equality. Everyone accepted it, even though every state then permitted slavery. John Rutledge’s younger brother, Edward, accepted it; he signed for South Carolina. There it was, in black and white; there it was, for whites and blacks.

Lincoln the artist surely responded to Jefferson’s rhetoric. Lincoln liked a fair amount of junk, as many artists do. But he had also been training his ear on Paine and Byron, Shakespeare and the Bible. He would have thrilled to Jefferson’s snare drum rolls. But Jefferson could strike up the band even when he was being lazy or fearful (fire-bell in the night, wolf by the ears). Lincoln had reasons besides rhetoric to revere the Declaration.

Lincoln the lawyer and the politician appreciated the force of those thirteen sets of signatures, representing all the states. According to the rules of the Continental Congress, where major decisions required unanimity, that made a contract; according to the ordinary rules of nose-counting, thirteen out of thirteen was a pretty impressive majority.

Lincoln the reasoner seized on the Declaration’s self-evident truths. They were the starting point of the American project, and they described human nature. They were “the definitions and axioms of free society,” as Lincoln told the Bostonians, and they were—or had been—the axioms of American society. The truths of the Declaration were Lincoln’s great backstop against all the founders’ miscellaneous utterances that his research had not discovered, or that he, having discovered them, had chosen to minimize. Whatever their stray opinions or their stubborn practice, at the moment of America’s creation Jefferson had proposed that all men are created equal, and in Congress assembled all the United States had agreed.