Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (29 page)

Lincoln dismissed such talk. Jefferson had been writing about men, and he meant all men. Jefferson, it is true, did not want free black men to live in America (he had told John Holmes he was for “expatriation”)—a view Lincoln shared. But Jefferson—and Lincoln—did not believe that black men, or any men, could justly be held as slaves.

Lincoln had said of the founding fathers, in his 1859 speech in Columbus, that “from first to last, they clung to freedom.” Jefferson proclaimed freedom at the first, in the Declaration, and to the last, he clung to it. Wearily, with bad faith, by his fingernails—but he clung to it. Lincoln, in turn, clung to Jefferson. He did it for his own advantage, to borrow Jefferson’s luster, and to wrong-foot the Democrats, Jefferson’s political heirs. But he also clung to Jefferson to save him. Sons need their fathers to be at their best; sometimes they need them to be better than they actually were.

Lincoln never spared much thought for Thomas Lincoln, but he gave thought, sympathy, and assistance to Thomas Jefferson.

In Lincoln’s long debate with Douglas, there were several noteworthy things he did not say, and arguments he did not make.

He did not dwell on the horrors of slavery. In 1855, he recalled the coffle of slaves he had seen in 1841 on a boat in the Ohio River, chained like fish on a line. Then, in the depths of depression, he had marveled at how happy even slaves could make themselves. Recalling the sight fourteen years later, he described it as a “
torment” to him. But this was in a letter to his old friend Joshua Speed; the two were arguing about politics, Lincoln denouncing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Speed replying as a slave-owning Kentucky Whig. Lincoln’s talk about how tormented slavery made him feel was not for publication, and Lincoln did not say such things in front of audiences.

Nor did he arraign the behavior of slaveholders. In his Peoria speech, he had even declared, “They are just what we would be
in their situation.” Like causes produce like effects. If you are born into a slave society, you will likely support slavery. All the more important, then, to prevent slavery from expanding. Lincoln preferred to focus on the political problem at hand, which was rallying the opinion of the North to a policy of containment. Berating southerners would have been a distraction.

There were other public figures making the arguments Lincoln did not make. In May 1856, just as the Illinois Republican Party was about to hold its first convention, Charles Sumner, a senator from Massachusetts, gave a two-day speech in Congress attacking slavery root and branch. His occasion was the nascent violence in Kansas, where proslavery gangs from Missouri had shot antislavery settlers and trashed Lawrence, an antislavery town. Sumner defended freedom in Kansas in fiery terms; he also excoriated proslavery southern politicians by name,
comparing one of his colleagues, Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, to Don Quixote (a madman) and slavery to his harlot. Days later, the senator’s nephew, Preston Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina, accosted Sumner in the Senate and beat him over the head with a
gold-tipped cane until Sumner lost consciousness; a friend of Brooks’s, also a congressman, held off onlookers trying to intervene at pistol point. The two congressmen rumbling on the House floor in 1798 had nothing on this.

Sumner was intelligent and eloquent. He was also arrogant, inhumane, and so in love with his own ideas and voice that he
could become unbalanced. Brooks was a thug who showed himself to be a coward: he backed out of a duel with a northern congressman, an ally of Sumner’s, who was a crack shot.

Two days after the caning of Sumner, John Brown and his sons took five proslavery settlers in Kansas from their homes in the middle of the night and killed them with broadswords.

John Brown, born in Connecticut in 1800, was a tanner and wool-dealer by profession, an abolitionist by destiny. The lynching of the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy in 1837 radicalized him; in the 1840s, he became active in the Underground Railroad. Brown came to live in the heart of the movement that Lincoln had always deplored.

Brown was one of many combatants drawn to Kansas. After his quintuple murder, he fought in several pitched battles with marauders from Missouri, acquitting himself well. In 1856, he returned east to raise money for a new plan. He had a network of respectable backers, including the Transcendentalist minister Theodore Parker; he knew the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and he visited freed slaves in Canada. Who knew what about Brown’s new plan and what they said to Brown about it is still not certain; Brown was intending to liberate slaves in the South.

In October 1859 Brown and eighteen followers seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). They rounded up some hostages, including a distant relative of George Washington’s who lived in the area, and planned to distribute the armory’s weapons to local slaves. But Brown and his men were surrounded, first by militia,
then by a party of Marines, and after two days of fighting, he was taken. Brown was tried for murder, conspiracy, and treason against the State of Virginia and hanged early in December.

Brown iconography typically highlights his Old Testament beard. In John Steuart Curry’s mural of him in the Kansas State Capitol, his beard mimics the swirls of a tornado filling the sky behind and above him. But his last statement to the court was not stormy, but calm: “[If I] had interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great . . . it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.” Brown then indicated the court’s Bible. “[That] teaches me . . . to ‘remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them’ [Hebrews 13:3]. I endeavored to act up
to that instruction.”

Brown became a political lightning rod. Abolitionists considered him a hero and a martyr. In Concord, Massachusetts, the smell of other people’s blood filled Henry David Thoreau with rapture: “For once we are lifted out of the trivialness and dust of politics into the region of
truth and manhood.” Back in the trivialness and dust of politics, Democrats tried to pin Brown on the Republican Party, which tried to have nothing to do with him.

Lincoln’s late 1859 swing through the Midwest took him to Kansas, where the subject of Brown was unavoidable. He gave Brown credit for courage, but
condemned him as violent, criminal, and insane. He elaborated at Cooper Union. In his passage of reassurance addressed to the South, he denied that the Republican Party had any responsibility for slave revolts, even indirectly. It intended no “interference whatever with your slaves, or with you about your slaves. Surely this does not encourage them to revolt.” He added a mild joke: the only way slaves ever even heard of the Republican Party was when they overheard their masters denounce it. Slave revolts, Lincoln went on more sternly, were an inescapable feature of life in slave societies. He mentioned Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831—Had the Republican Party caused that?

Lincoln ended by comparing Brown’s effort to failed assassinations: Guy Fawkes’s plot to blow up James I, or a recent attempt on the life of Napoleon III: “An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than
his own execution.” So Lincoln dismissed Brown as a zealot and a failure. So he also managed to equate slaveholders with royalty, a favorite maneuver of his.

Brown was more than an ordinary abolitionist. He was willing to free slaves by force, if necessary, and to do it not just in Kansas, but in the most venerable state in the South. Brown claimed he was not for a general uprising or a race war, but it is hard to imagine a program of armed raids leading to anything else.

Was Brown the towering genius, the Napoleonic destroyer that Lincoln had feared twenty years earlier? If drama belongs to rhetoric, Brown was a rhetorical genius. After six years of speeches, Lincoln had only just come to national attention. With a few bold strokes, Brown had riveted the world.

Brown was outside the channels of ordinary politics. He was not interested in Lincoln or Seward or Douglas, the Senate or the White House; he wanted to free slaves, and he set about it in the most direct way. But the towering genius is not apolitical. He wants a new politics that he controls. Brown hoped to lead a considerable organization, and before Harpers Ferry he even drew up a constitution for it, with an elaborate structure of congress, courts, and cabinet. (His lawyer would introduce it at his trial in an attempt to establish an insanity defense: only a lunatic could have drawn up such a plan.) But Brown’s rules were for an underground movement engaged in a guerrilla struggle, not laws for a new America.

Brown was too religious for politics—“commissioned by Heaven,” as Lincoln put it. A Puritan, as Thoreau said, more precisely: “He died lately in the time of Cromwell, but
he reappeared here.” Brown answered his call, and passed into legend.

Temperamentally and philosophically, Lincoln and Brown were strangers: Lincoln was humorous, Brown intent; Lincoln skeptical, Brown pious; Lincoln a lawyer-politician, Brown a lawbreaker and a killer. Lincoln preferred, as he had throughout his long debate with Douglas, to engage with Jefferson and the other founders, not such as Brown. But other candidates for the role of the towering genius would appear during the 1860s.

Eleven

T
HE
E
LECTION OF
1860. T
HE
T
OWERING
G
ENIUS
(II)

T
HE
C
OOPER
U
NION ADDRESS KICKED OFF
L
INCOLN’S RUN
for the White House; the next fourteen months were consumed with presidential politics and presidential responsibilities. But even in this rush the founders appeared in his thoughts, speeches, and jokes, and in the speeches of his rivals; they were by now woven into his life.

Presidential contests in Lincoln’s lifetime were much shorter than they are today. The nomination struggles that now take place over a months-long parade of caucuses and primaries were then compressed into a day, at worst two, of balloting at political conventions. The campaigns that followed were also, in one respect, quieter. Would-be candidates might
set themselves up with significant speeches before the contest formally began; Lincoln could point to a string of them going back six years. But once nominations were made, candidates were expected to maintain a dignified silence, while their supporters maintained a raucous hoopla in their behalf.

Despite his new prominence, Lincoln was not among the front-runners for the Republican nomination in 1860. The leader among the leaders was William Seward. Besides a long career and a base in the nation’s largest state, Seward was blessed with a winning personality, genial and charming. He was one of those men on whom fortune smiled, and who smiled back. But even the blessed acquire enemies in politics. Horace Greeley, who had long yearned to run for office himself in New York without a hint of encouragement from Seward, had become one such (one reason he had puffed the Cooper Union speech was simply to spite Seward).