Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (6 page)

Lincoln’s attention here to the question of slavery—unusual amongst the avalanche of orations prompted by Clay’s death—shows how far the issue had moved up his political agenda. That speech, significantly, provides us with his first serious discussion of colonization as a means of tackling a problem he then judged intractable, perhaps insoluble. Clay had staunchly supported the American Colonization Society from its organization in 1816, serving as its president for many years. Its plan of voluntarily “returning” African-Americans to their “native” continent was regarded by the most radical opponents of slavery as a cruel deception designed not to weaken the slaves’ shackles but, by removing the troublesome free black population from the South, to tighten them. At the same time the society was the target of the suspicion and outright hostility of many planters, especially in the Deep South, who regarded it as an abolitionist front. In truth, it was a philosophical hybrid, attracting both racist deportationists and genuine humanitarians. Clay straddled the two positions. Lincoln himself chose to emphasize the moral grandeur of the scheme and its potential for redeeming a guilty nation, an affronted race, and the African continent. He spoke as a prophet: “Pharaoh’s country was cursed with plagues, and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea for striving to retain a captive people who had already served them more than four hundred years. May like disasters never befall us!” A gradualist, socially responsible scheme, colonization offered the best, if uncertain, means of “freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery; and . . . restoring a captive people to their long-lost father-land.” Like many, Lincoln overestimated the enthusiasm of blacks themselves and underestimated the obstacles to success. In time, logic and experience would lead Lincoln to see the illusion on which colonization was built. But for the moment he was a believer and took on a managing role with the Illinois State Colonization Society in the 1850s. It was a faith rooted as much in ethical concern as in self-deception.
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Lincoln saw slavery as a chronic blight on the essential purpose of the American Union, namely to perpetuate the “political edifice of liberty and equal rights” bequeathed by the republic’s architects. As we have seen, his vision of the Union operated at a more materialistic level, too: it would be the means of fulfilling the unique potential of what he described in 1838 as “the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.” But the physical grandeur and material endowments of the United States were mainly to be seen as adjuncts to the moral magnificence of the nation’s free institutions. Thus he praised Clay’s motives in seeking “the prosperity of his countrymen . . . chiefly to show to the world that freemen could be prosperous.” With an intensity far removed from his chill feelings toward his own father, Lincoln revered the nation’s Founders for fashioning a political system which conduced “more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.” The Declaration of Independence, with its philosophical celebration of equality and liberty, and the federal Constitution, the legal guarantor of those principles, were measures of American uniqueness. “
Most
governments
have been based, practically, on the denial of equal rights of men . . . ;
ours
began, by
affirming
those rights.
They
said, some men are too
ignorant,
and
vicious,
to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would always keep them ignorant, and vicious. We proposed to give
all
a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant, wiser; and all better, and happier together.” Lincoln attributed to the American Union a special role in world history, the duty of acting as a beacon of freedom to all. Sharing Clay’s view that the Union was “the world’s best hope,” he interpreted the European nationalist movements of the mid-nineteenth century—in Hungary, Ireland, France, and Germany—as part of “the general cause of Republican liberty.” At the same time, he saw the impurities in the American example: through the persistence of slavery, the ideals of the Fourth of July were inevitably compromised. If he was unable to imagine the process by which slavery might be uprooted, his vision for his country demanded there be no further erosion of the Jeffersonian credo that all men were created equal, and no interference with the natural process by which slavery would die “a natural death.”
³⁹

MORAL CRISIS: 1854

The year 1854 was both a watershed in antebellum politics and the defining passage of Lincoln’s pre-presidential public life. Stephen A. Douglas’s Nebraska Bill, by repealing the restrictions of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, dramatically opened up to slavery the northern portion of the Louisiana Purchase, an area of several million acres which for a generation had been regarded as forever free. The spectacular public storm over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the subsequent settlement of Kansas territory, had profound consequences for both Whigs and Democrats, repercussions which will be addressed in the next chapter. For Lincoln himself the Nebraska bombshell represented both a threat and an opportunity.

THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA ACT (
1854
): OPENING THE WEST TO SLAVERY

The Compromise of 1850 had, through popular sovereignty, opened to slavery much of the
land newly won from Mexico. In 1854, applying the same doctrine, the Kansas-Nebraska Act gave slaveholders access to the continental heartland. Antislavery campaigners played on the dramatic alteration to the nation’s map. “Will you examine the outline of our Country?” Republicans asked voters in 1856. “Will you see how little of its area has been consecrated to
Free Labor—how much is cursed with Slavery?”

Lincoln later reflected that he was “losing interest in politics when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again.” As a summary this was accurate enough. The electoral off-years of 1851 and 1853, a dispiriting Whig presidential campaign in 1852, the relative abeyance of issue politics, and the demands of his law practice all helped to blunt the edge of his political appetite; but by the end of 1854 he had established himself as one of the leaders of the anti-Nebraska movement in Illinois and had been returned as a Whig to the state legislature. What Lincoln’s statement does not explain, though, is why it took him several months to speak out against something which, by his own account, had left him “astounded” and “thunderstruck.” The bill was introduced in January, prompted immediate and concerted opposition from Salmon P. Chase, Joshua Giddings, and other free-soil radicals inside and outside Congress, and was signed by Douglas’s fellow Democrat, President Franklin Pierce, on May 30. All this time Lincoln was publicly silent. He remained so throughout the summer months, even as the free states resounded with calls for cross-party alliances to defeat the Pierce administration’s forces in the fall elections. Only in late August did he take up the issue, campaigning for the reelection of his district’s Whig congressman, Richard Yates.
⁴⁰

Why was Lincoln slow to take a public stand? Cynics might attribute his reticence to political calculation, self-interest, and opportunism: the shrewd politician may have been coolly waiting to see how opinion moved before committing himself.
⁴¹
But there are more compelling, less shallow explanations. In the earlier part of the year Lincoln had been preoccupied with one of the most important and demanding legal cases of his career, acting for the Illinois Central Railroad before the state’s supreme court. Thereafter, in spring and early summer, he had had more opportunity to speak out but no formal public position or platform from which to do so, and this at a time when the early opposition to Douglas in the state lacked coherence. Possibly, too, the naturally cautious Lincoln saw additional reason to be wary in the face of emergent nativism—that is, native-born Americans’ organized hostility to immigrant arrivals. Swelling numbers of foreign-born workers worked to loosen Illinois political anchorages in 1854. Lincoln was no xenophobe, but hesitancy was a realistic response to an unpredictable movement whose enthusiasts included some of his close political friends.

By temperament Lincoln favored careful reflection, not impulsive action. His circumstances now allowed him to follow a course of listening, reading, and thinking. Lincoln’s opponents would later write disparagingly of his “mousing about the libraries” in the statehouse.
⁴²
By the time he threw himself into the campaign, and then agreed to run for the legislature, his arguments were already well formulated. He delivered a number of speeches before engineering, early in October, what was in effect a joint debate with Douglas at Springfield. On an uncomfortably sticky afternoon, his three-hour address deeply impressed, even excited, a large audience in the hall of the House of Representatives. His words were not reported verbatim; but he later made available for statewide circulation a full transcript of what was essentially the same text, his speech at Peoria on October 16.
⁴³
Its intellectual quality, moral force, and rhetorical power made it the greatest speech of his political career to date, and its qualities provide their own argument that his campaign utterances were prompted by something more than political opportunism or convenience. The “Peoria speech” contained most of the essential elements of his public addresses over the next six years.

What most thrilled Lincoln’s hearers, including radical antislaveryites who had not previously considered him a kindred spirit, was the moral and philosophical clarity with which he identified the larger issues at stake in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. As well as engaging in a Union-threatening piece of political perfidy, Lincoln argued, Douglas and his allies had reversed the “settled policy” of the republic at a stroke. The new nation had followed Thomas Jefferson’s lead in excluding slavery from the territories of the Old Northwest, and in 1820 the terms of that exclusion had been applied again within the northern portion of the Louisiana Purchase. No other policy would have been consistent with the principles of natural rights, human equality, and political freedom laid out in the Virginian’s Declaration of Independence. Douglas’s novel principle of “popular sovereignty,” by contrast, assumed a moral neutrality toward slavery, leaving it to local communities to decide the issue for themselves—not with reference to the principles of civil liberty but in line only with material self-interest. His claim that the repeal of the Missouri Compromise had established “the sacred right of self-government” ran aground on the rocks of Negro manhood: “if the negro
is
a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern
himsel
f
? When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs
another
man, that is
more
than self-government—that is despotism. If the negro is a
man,
why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal’; and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.” Describing Jefferson’s Declaration as the “sheet anchor of American republicanism,” Lincoln insisted that no man was “good enough to govern another man,
without that other’s consent.
”

Douglas might proclaim a moral indifference toward slavery, Lincoln explained, but this posture masked his and his allies’ “covert
real
zeal” for its spread; the fraudulent, “lullaby” argument, that climate and natural conditions made the new territories unsuitable for slavery, diverted attention from “the great Behemoth of danger” threatened by slavery’s extension; the “first few” having once fixed slavery in Nebraska, “the subsequent many” would find it hard to be rid of it. This was the closest Lincoln got to employing what was one of the most powerful themes of anti-Nebraska agitation, the maneuverings of a conspiratorial southern “slave power.” Instead, his emphasis lay on the stark ethical choices which now confronted the nation. The Nebraska Act, by putting slavery “on the high road to extension and perpetuity,” endangered the moral foundations of the republic. It gave the peculiar institution new status; it assumed “that there
CAN
be
MORAL RIGHT
in the enslaving of one man by another.” But, observed Lincoln, slavery in reality “is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature—opposition to it, [in] . . . his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism.” With a preacher’s scorn he scoffed at the folly of the Nebraska men: “Repeal the Missouri compromise[,] . . . repeal the declaration of independence . . . [but] you still can not repeal human nature. It still will be the abundance of man’s heart, that slavery extension is wrong.”

In emphasizing the ethical polarities of slave and free societies, and by implication their incompatibility, Lincoln had set at least one foot on radical ground. He stood close to the position he would adopt explicitly in a private letter to the Kentucky lawyer George Robertson the following year: “Our political problem now is ‘Can we, as a nation, continue together
permanently—forever—
half slave, and half free?’ ” His most celebrated formulation of that question lay a few years off, to be posed in the celebrated “House Divided” speech, but the intellectual framework that supported it had been fashioned in his election addresses of 1854.