Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (33 page)

Lincoln’s address, at 3,600 words, was rather long for an inaugural, but the state of the nation demanded it.

He began by declaring what he had written privately to Stephens: slavery was safe in the South. To prove it, he quoted himself from the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

He then addressed the secession crisis. He started by saying that he held “the union of these states” to be “perpetual.” He offered several reasons, one from logic, one from law, and a number from history.

Lincoln the logician argued that no government ever provided for its own dismemberment. Leagues and alliances might dissolve, but they were not governments. “Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed,” by the nature of government itself.

Lincoln the lawyer added that if government were a mere contract, would not all the parties have to consent to its dissolution?

Lincoln the historian traced the Union back through the Revolution to its earliest stirrings. The Union had come into being in the First Continental Congress, in 1774; it was “matured” by the Declaration and “further matured” by the Articles of Confederation, the country’s first constitution, which had been in force from 1781 until 1788. (The Articles had asserted that “each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence,” but they had also several times described the confederation as “perpetual.”) He ended with the Preamble to the Constitution, which looked to a “more perfect” union. “But,” he noted, “if destruction of the union . . . be lawfully possible, the union is
less
perfect.”

This risked being arid, but it was very Lincolnian: trying to nail down principles, axioms, starting points.

Lincoln touched on several specific issues, trying, with varying degrees of success, to be mollifying. Some of the seceding states had complained of the difficulty of retrieving fugitive slaves, as guaranteed by the Constitution (Article IV, Section 2). Lincoln honored the guarantee. But he asked if there might not be “safeguards” (i.e., trials) to ensure that free blacks were not wrongfully seized by slave-catchers. Henry Clay had wanted such a provision in the federal fugitive slave law that was part of the Compromise of 1850, but it had not been incorporated into the final bill. No secessionist now would accept such a thing.

Lincoln proposed “to hold, occupy and possess the property and places belonging to the government.” In an early draft, he had said he would “
reclaim” property that had fallen to secessionists. Since that would have committed him to a battle over every post office in the Deep South, he took that pledge out. The final version would be sufficient cause for disagreement.

He iterated his views on the Supreme Court and the
Dred Scott
decision. The Supreme Court, he said, had the final word on cases brought before it, and its judgments were entitled to “very high respect and consideration” thereafter. But the people should not defer in every subsequent case or policy decision to “that eminent tribunal.” Chief Justice Taney, about to turn eighty-four, and looking like “a
galvanized corpse,” sat on the podium behind Lincoln. He kept his thoughts to himself.

Lincoln mentioned a proposed constitutional amendment that was being discussed in the corridors of the Capitol as a possible compromise. It would be the Thirteenth Amendment, and it would declare that the federal government could never interfere with slavery in the states where it existed. Lincoln said he believed that was “implied constitutional law already,” and so he had no objection to putting it in writing.

As he concluded he called on God. Lincoln asked Him to speak not through Bible verses, and certainly not through direct commands
a la
John Brown, but through politics and political history. “If the Almighty Ruler of nations . . . be on your side of the North, or on yours of the South,” His will would “surely prevail by the judgment of this great
tribunal, the American people.” This was more facile than Lincoln’s invocation of God as he left Springfield three weeks earlier. Then he had admitted that he needed God’s help. Now he pretended that God might go either way, although—if God truly spoke through the American people—He had already voted for Lincoln.

Lincoln ended not with God, but with an appeal to the founding fathers. Logic, law, history, politics, and theology were all very well. But Seward, after reading an early version of the speech, had urged Lincoln to add a last paragraph of emotion and poetry, and offered his own draft. Lincoln had
polished Seward’s words, and read his own version now: “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. . . . The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

A
chord
(spelled with an
h
) now means three or more notes played together. Chords in music are the building blocks of harmony (or the weapons of dissonance). But Lincoln used
chords
in an older sense, to mean the strings of an instrument. His instrument was the remembering mind, which clung to the founders and the Revolution, to all that they had fought for and all that it meant. This was not the poetry of the Lyceum Address, in which the founders were dead, but the poetry of Lincoln’s plea to the court for Rebecca Thomas, the old widow; the poetry of all his rhetoric about the Fourth of July, the Declaration, and the Battle of Trenton. See what they did for us, see what we have: their sacrifices made our peace and prosperity, their labor gave us our lives.

The chief justice administered the oath of office, and Lincoln became the sixteenth president. Not enough angels would touch his chords.

Before the war began there came another notable speech, by Alexander Stephens.

Stephens attended the January convention called by the State of Georgia to decide whether or not it should secede, where he argued to the last for patience and compromise. But when the convention voted to leave the Union, Stephens supported his state and secession. He served in a provisional Confederate congress that met in Montgomery, Alabama, in February, and was chosen by it to be the new Confederacy’s vice president. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, former congressman, senator, and secretary of war, was chosen as president. Davis had been a lifelong Democrat; Stephens would represent former Whigs.

On March 21 Stephens
spoke to a reception in his honor in Savannah. His remarks appear to have been impromptu, but Stephens, as Lincoln long ago observed, was a ready speaker and an intelligent man, and he rose to the occasion.

He praised the new Confederate constitution. It had, in his view, all the virtues of the American Constitution—and indeed borrowed much of its language, including the Preamble (with a reference to “Almighty God” added) and the first eight amendments of the Bill of Rights (relocated into the main body of the document itself). But the Confederate constitution also had several new structural features, which Stephens considered improvements: a man could serve in the congress and the cabinet simultaneously, making the Confederate system more like Britain’s, which Stephens admired; the president was limited to one six-year term, which removed the temptations of electioneering.

Stephens then mentioned yet another improvement—“though last, not least.” The constitution had “put to rest,
forever
, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists among us—[and] the proper
status
of the negro in our form of civilization.”

The Confederate constitution, unlike the American one, openly mentioned “slaveholding,” “slaves,” and “negro slavery”: although it forbade the foreign slave trade, it committed the new government to protecting property in slaves in all its territories. (The seven seceded states had as yet no territories, unless they could establish a claim to New Mexico,
but Cuba would be a likely target for expansion.) But Stephens did not bother about these details. No less than Lincoln, he had an instinct to dig up the root, and he now set about doing it.

Slavery, he said, “was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.” He invoked Jefferson, who had feared that slavery might break the country up (it would be “the
knell of the union,” as he wrote John Holmes in 1820). “He was right,” Stephens said simply. “What was conjecture with him is now a realized fact.”

Stephens stayed with Jefferson for a moment more. “The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away.” This could almost have been a paragraph in one of Lincoln’s speeches. Lincoln believed that Jefferson and the other founders had taken concrete steps to hasten slavery’s passing, allowing the slave trade to be banned after twenty years, and blocking slavery from expanding into the old Northwest. But Stephens and Lincoln agreed that the founders had thought that slavery was evil and had hoped that it would end.

Stephens went on. “Those ideas”—the ideas of Jefferson and his fellow statesmen—“were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. . . . Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” The reporter who covered Stephens’s speech for a local newspaper noted that at this point, there was “Applause.”

Lincoln had labored to depict himself as the loyal son of the founders. Stephens portrayed himself as the wiser son—wiser than Lincoln, wiser than the founders themselves.

Stephens elaborated on his newfound wisdom: “This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.” Slavery had been universal in the ancient world, but in those societies white men had enslaved other white men, which was wrong. The Confederate states put equally free white men above equally unfree black men, which was right: “This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.” Stephens cited other discoverers of great truths: Galileo, Adam Smith, William Harvey. All faced skepticism, all prevailed. Galileo put bodies in the hand of gravity; Smith put the economy under the invisible hand of the market; Harvey showed that blood moved at the pulse of the heart. The Confederacy put the Negro where he belonged. “He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.”

The curse against Canaan is described in Genesis 9:21–27: Noah cursed his son Ham for looking at his nakedness, and condemned Ham’s son Canaan to servitude. Genesis goes on to say that Canaan and his descendants lived between Sidon and Gaza—roughly modern Israel—though American slave-owners liked to think they populated Africa, and thus supplied their chattel.

Stephens drew on another Bible verse to wind up his thought: “This stone which was rejected by the first builders ‘is become the chief of the corner’—the real ‘corner-stone’—in our new edifice.” Again the reporter noted “Applause.”

Verses about the once-rejected stone occur
throughout the Bible. In the Book of Psalms, the “stone which the builders refused” is King David. In the New Testament the stone is Jesus or His followers. All these stones became cornerstones. David was hunted by Saul, then crowned. Jesus was crucified, then rose from the dead. Christians are tempted and tried, yet win salvation. Similarly, slavery had been viewed by Jefferson and the other founders with embarrassment and dismay, but the Confederacy proudly made it the cornerstone of society.

Stephens’s paean to slavery was the inversion of the Henry Clay paragraph that Lincoln loved so. Clay found the desire for freedom in the human heart, he heard it celebrated by the cannons that mark the Fourth of July, and he saw it working its way in the modern world. Stephens found slavery in nature; it triumphed over Jefferson and his mistaken Declaration, and it formed the basis of Stephens’s new country. With a few brisk arguments, the rhetorical equivalents of a sweep of the hand, Stephens corrected the founding and disposed of all the political foreground of the past thirty years (tariffs, Texas, popular sovereignty, the power of the Supreme Court). What counted was slavery. The founders were wrong about it; later Americans had talked around it; only the Confederacy put it in its proper place.