Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (13 page)

Lincoln’s role at the February meeting, where he was toasted as “the next United States Senator,” gives the lie to the argument that he was especially diffident in advocating the prospective new party. Still, like Trumbull, Peck, and other anti-Nebraska moderates, both Whig and Democrat, he had two understandable reasons for anxiety as he looked ahead to Bloomington. Would Lovejoy and the radicals taint or control the movement? Even if not, would the disparate elements cohere, or prove unstable? As all came to recognize, these were risks that simply had to be run. There was no way back for the anti-Nebraska Democrats, with unforgiving Douglasites in control of the party. There was nowhere else for antislavery Whigs to go. As Herndon told Yates, “If you do not go, you, Lincoln, and all others will be buried politically forever.”
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In the event, the Bloomington convention was a brilliant success. Every stripe of antislavery opinion was there: radicals, moderates, and conservatives, Whigs and dissident Democrats, Germans and nativists. Yet harmony prevailed amongst the nearly three hundred delegates. Moderates set the tone, having controlled the local conventions that had selected many of those present. Lincoln seems to have worked to prevent conservatives from fleeing the unnerving presence of Lovejoy and Codding, but in fact the radicals, alert to the need for pragmatic compromise, caused no trouble. The presence of many volunteers, informal representatives of their communities, did much to give the assembly more the flavor of a mass meeting than a convention; but the party leaders, coordinated by the Whig lawyer Orville Browning, gave shape to the business.

Their task was made all the easier by very recent events in Kansas and Washington. Violence returned to the infant territory after a freezing winter. On May 21 a nasty little incident involving the looting and burning of a free-state press and hotel was promptly labeled “the sack of Lawrence” by antislavery propagandists. The following day, in the Senate chamber, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Charles Sumner, the antislavery senator from Massachusetts, about the head with a gutta-percha cane—to avenge what Brooks deemed Sumner’s dishonorable verbal assault on his state and his kinsman, Senator Andrew Butler. “Bleeding Kansas” and “bleeding Sumner” sharpened the Bloomington delegates’ determination to unite. They rallied around a platform framed under Lincoln’s eye and which showed the imprint of Decatur in its moderation on slavery, its silence on temperance, and its attack on the proscription of the foreign-born. They endorsed a diverse ticket of candidates that gave Democrats the prospect of more than their fair share of the best offices, including the governorship, and rewarded both Germans and former Know-Nothings. They appointed delegates to represent them at the imminent Republican national convention, while continuing to avoid using the term “Republican” in their own proceedings.

Lincoln brought the convention to its climax with a spellbinding ninety-minute speech of unequaled eloquence. Delivered extemporaneously, the address was so inspirational that the reporters present, including Herndon, stopped taking notes. But the brief account of the “lost speech” points to themes that were foreshadowed in his addresses of 1854, namely the alarming sea change in southern thought on slavery; the slaveholders’ reversal of the policy of the nation’s Founders; the need to defend not just the territorial integrity of the Union, but its republican values of freedom and equality; the decadent course of northern Democrats; and the need for all who would “oppose slave power” to fuse into a single crusading force. What gave the speech its additional strength, according to Herndon, was Lincoln’s moving beyond slavery as an issue to be argued “on grounds of policy,” to address “the question of the radical and the eternal right.” In his Peoria speech Lincoln had asserted that “the great mass of mankind . . . consider slavery a great moral wrong,” and that no statesman could safely disregard that feeling: there is something of the responsible political sociologist in this mode of leadership. At Bloomington, however, it seems Lincoln has become one of the “mass of mankind” himself, fired by the moral enormities of slavery as well as its policy implications. “Now he was newly baptized and freshly born,” Herndon recalled, “he had the fervor of a new convert; the smothered flame broke out; enthusiasm unusual to him blazed up; his eyes were aglow with an inspiration; he felt justice; his heart was alive to the right; his sympathies, remarkably deep for him, burst forth, and he stood before the throne of the eternal Right.” Herndon insisted that his description was not literary hyperbole. Lincoln really had blended logic, pathos, and enthusiasm to a degree he had never done before. The speech was “justice, equity, truth, and right set ablaze by the divine fires of a soul maddened by the wrong.”
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What led Lincoln to abandon his customary restraint and appeal so earnestly to the soul of his audience as well as to its head? In part the answer lies in the nature of the assembly and the occasion. Lincoln addressed a gathering broadly agreed on fundamentals. He was not on the stump, faced with coaxing the unpersuaded, the neutral, and the openly hostile. Addressing the faithful, Lincoln took on the coloring of his audience; in the company of enthusiasts and converts, even preachers, he saw his task to be one of rallying and inspiring them in preparation for the campaign ahead. But there was probably something deeper at work. Observing the success of the Bloomington convention, the usually self-contained Lincoln must have felt a sense of euphoria and release. The meeting was, if not the culmination, at least a major landmark on the way to establishing the effective political force for which Lincoln had implicitly called in his response to the Nebraska Act. The Peoria speech spoke of “the liberal party throughout the world”: its representatives in America (“lovers of liberty” appalled by a great moral wrong) expected their political leaders to address the ethical concerns that shaped public opinion.
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Implicit in much of Lincoln’s subsequent course was a recognition that the moral constituencies brought into focus by the Nebraska Act needed effective and articulate political leadership. Whether through a continuing Whig party or the subsequent Republican coalition, Lincoln acted from 1854 to 1860 in a way that sought to clarify and publicize the lines dividing what he saw as the two fundamental moral constituencies in the nation, those who saw slavery as wrong, and those who either did not care or praised it as a positive good.

Essential to Lincoln’s moral coalition were the huge numbers of reform-minded Protestants, especially the evangelicals. How might they be accommodated? The problem, as he saw only too well, was that their agenda was not just varied, but politically divisive. The nativist and temperance views of so many evangelicals, though compatible ideologically with antislavery, alienated other potential members of the coalition. Lincoln himself was no believer in the legal compulsion of prohibition, nor the friend of Know-Nothing proscription. He had neither the appetite nor the language actively to exploit the religious and cultural frictions on which nativism was constructed. But the fracture within national Know-Nothingism left the way open to recruit its reforming Protestants into a coalition centered on the moral certainties of antislavery and freedom. A number of these were present in Bloomington; and when Lincoln spoke, in celebration of a cemented coalition, he had every reason to speak with the evangelical enthusiasm of the “newly baptized and freshly born.”

In the fifty or so speeches he made while campaigning for the fall 1856 elections, Lincoln reverted to his more customary rhetorical style, reasoned and unemotional. It better suited his audience of conservative Whig-Americans in southern and central Illinois, whom he rightly identified as the swing voters. Once James Buchanan, untainted by the Kansas-Nebraska business, had won the Democrats’ nomination for president, and the American party had lined up behind an old-line Whig, ex-president Millard Fillmore, Lincoln hoped the Republican national convention would play equally safe and select John McLean, a Supreme Court justice and another former Whig. Instead it nominated the dashing western explorer John C. Frémont. For a while it looked as if Lincoln might secure the vice presidential place, which would have boosted the party in the Northwest (and reflected his increasing national reputation), but the position went to another ex-Whig, William L. Dayton of New Jersey. Lincoln saw at once the implications of the nominations and set about targeting the likely Fillmore voters, especially in his state’s central counties. Ideally, he hoped, the Americans would withdraw or unite with the Frémont men, but since that was unlikely, he used his speeches and lithographed letters to show how the American party’s campaign would be self-defeating and would promote a Democratic victory. In early August Lincoln estimated that Buchanan would win by seven thousand votes, or four percentage points, if it remained a three-way race.
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The prediction was impressively accurate: in November, Buchanan’s percentage margin was exactly that, his victory (by nine thousand votes, in a high turnout) due to Fillmore’s intervention. Conservative Whigs hated the Democrats, but they also feared the sectional stance of “Black” Republicans. Fillmore gave them a way of resisting the overtures of both.

Still, the November results were by no means disheartening. Lincoln could reflect that the Republican party (a name he continued to avoid throughout the campaign) had shown the staying power, the organization, the moderation of program, and the breadth of appeal to win the governorship and the other state offices. He could reflect, too, that he as much as anyone had helped to fashion the new party. He had done so by avoiding impetuous action at a time of profound, uncontrollable shifts in public opinion. By late 1856 the worst upheavals were over. Even so, the process of party construction was not yet complete—and Lincoln’s most sustained and celebrated personal engagement with the power of public opinion still lay ahead.

THE SENATORIAL CAMPAIGN OF 1858

Voters were due to return to the polls in 1858, to elect a new state legislature. That body in turn would choose a United States senator. Douglas’s term of office was drawing to a close, his reelection far from assured. Lincoln thought the “Little Giant” could be beaten and knew that many Illinois Republicans considered him the man to do it. These included a network of able and well-placed advisers: members of the new state administration, former political associates in the legislature, and fellow lawyers. Importantly, the leading Trumbull men of 1855, especially Norman B. Judd, acknowledged the force of Lincoln’s claim. Amongst the state’s main anti-Democrat papers Lincoln had the firm support of the
Chicago Press and Tribune
and the
Illinois State Journal.
No one could doubt that he wanted the senatorship. He had good-humoredly said as much to the gathering of editors at Decatur in February 1856. When a keen Republican wrote in the summer of 1857 urging “that something should be done
now,
to secure the next Legislature,” Lincoln did more than generally concur: behaving like a candidate, he gave detailed advice on how to prepare canvass lists—and urged that it be done discreetly, to avoid alerting the opposition.
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On the national stage, two political developments in the first twelve months or so of Buchanan’s presidency would deeply influence how Illinois Republicans made their nomination and then took their campaign to the people. First, in March 1857, the United States Supreme Court, sitting under Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, gave its ruling in the
Dred Scott
case. Scott was a slave who had been taken by his master, an army surgeon, into Illinois and then Wisconsin Territory, before being brought back to the slave state of Missouri. Since Illinois was a free state and Wisconsin a region from which slavery had been excluded by the Missouri Compromise, Scott sued for his freedom. By a majority decision, the Court rejected the claim. Taney declared that Scott, as a Negro, had no right to sue: the Founders of the republic, considering African-Americans inferior, had not meant them to enjoy the rights of citizenship guaranteed by the federal Constitution. Furthermore, in a startling use of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, Taney argued that the United States Congress had acted unconstitutionally when it passed the Missouri Compromise and prevented property-holding in slaves in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase.

Lincoln in 1857. He wrote that the “picture presented me in all [my hair’s] fright.”

The decision of the Democrat-leaning Court, dominated by southerners and southern sympathizers, seemed problematic for Douglas, for if slaveholders had the right to take their chattels into the territories, where did that leave popular sovereignty and local self-determination? Douglas remained unruffled, however, despite the popular outcry in the North. He noted that Taney’s ruling related solely to the powers of Congress, not of territorial legislatures, whose “police regulations” in defense of property were essential to protecting slaveowners’ rights: thus, he argued in a speech in Springfield on June 12, the decision “sustained” popular sovereignty. At the same time he buttressed his position by exploiting the deep racial prejudices of central Illinoisans, endorsing Taney’s view that blacks were not embraced by the Declaration of Independence, and classifying Republicans as “amalgamationists” bent on a complete social and sexual mixing of the races.