Lincoln (40 page)

In furnishing the house, Mary Lincoln chose wall-to-wall carpets for the parlors and the sitting room, selecting a dark, floral pattern that had recently come’ in style. The parlors had light, patterned wallpaper, but for the sitting room and the bedrooms she picked dark, boldly figured paper, which was then popular. The heavy, swagged draperies, which hung from ceiling to floor, she economically had made of cotton damask rather than silk. The rooms were furnished comfortably and unpretentiously, in a variety of styles, and the house was remarkably uncluttered. “An air of quiet refinement pervaded the place,” a visitor reported. “You would have known instantly that she who presided over that modest household was a true type of American lady.”

That was precisely the impression that Mary Lincoln wanted it to convey, for the house on Eighth and Jackson Streets was the center of her world. Finally she felt comfortable. Her children were now old enough not to require constant supervision. Though the younger boys were still much in evidence and, as Mary complained, were
“disposed
to be noisy,” Robert after 1854 was away most days attending what was grandly called the Illinois State University—really a local preparatory school, so inadequate that in 1859 he failed all the entrance examinations when he tried to enter Harvard College and had to spend a year at the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Mary for the first time since her marriage had time to read and to write long, gossipy letters to her friends and relatives.

She also now felt able to entertain properly. Though her dining room was still small, she could give dinner parties for six or eight, and guests like Isaac N. Arnold of Chicago long remembered her excellent cooking and her table “loaded with venison, wild turkeys, prairie chickens, quails, and other game.” But she preferred to give larger buffet suppers, like the “very handsome
and agreable [sic] entertainment” she offered in February 1857—just possibly an unannounced party for her husband’s forty-eighth birthday. No fewer than five hundred guests were invited, and it was not clear how-she expected to squeeze all those people in. Fortunately a heavy rainstorm and a conflicting engagement kept many of them away. Even so, about three hundred had a chance to see her newly expanded and redecorated home. Weary but proud when the affair was over, she wrote her favorite sister in Kentucky, “You will think, we have enlarged
our borders,
since you were here.”

In part, the Lincolns’ hospitality was designed to maintain his network of political friends and acquaintances, because public office was never far from his mind. He was not dispirited by the outcome of the 1856 elections. After all, the Republicans had succeeded in electing William H. Bissell as governor. On the national scene, James Buchanan was chosen President only because the opposition vote was split between Frémont and Fillmore, who together had a majority of 400,000. If, he told a gathering of Chicago Republicans in December 1856, these factions could “let past differences, as nothing be” and could agree that the equality of men was “‘the central idea’ in our political public opinion,” they would surely carry the next election.

A decision handed down by the United States Supreme Court on March 6,1857, two days after Buchanan’s inauguration, made the need for a Republican victory both more necessary and more likely. The ruling concerned the fate of Dred Scott, a Missouri slave, who had been taken by his owner, an army surgeon, first to Rock Island, Illinois, a state where slavery was prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance and by its own constitution, and subsequently to Fort Snelling, in Minnesota Territory, from which slavery had been excluded by the Missouri Compromise. After returning with Scott to Missouri, his master died. Scott sued for his freedom on the ground that he had been resident first of a free state and then of a free territory. The case finally reached the Supreme Court. Speaking for a majority of the justices, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that Scott was not entitled to sue, because, as a Negro, he was not a citizen of the United States. At the time the nation was created, Taney pronounced, blacks were considered “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” and the Founding Fathers had not included them in either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. The Chief Justice held further that residence in free territory did not entitle Scott to freedom, since all congressional enactments that excluded slavery from the national territories, including specifically the Missouri Compromise, were “not warranted by the constitution” and were “therefore void.”

Antislavery spokesmen, like Horace Greeley of the
New York Tribune,
exploded in anger, denouncing the Court’s decision as deserving no more respect than if made by “a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room,” The
Chicago Tribune
predicted that it would force slavery upon the free states, so that Chicago might become a slave market, where men, women, and children would be sold on the block. Throughout the North antislavery clergymen erupted in denunciations of Taney and the majority of the Court, and opposition was so fierce that the
New York Herald
predicted that “the whole North will evidently be preached into rebellion against the highest constituted Court in the country.”

But Lincoln, like most Illinois Republican politicians, was slow to react to the Dred Scott decision. Not until late May did he even refer to the case, when, without mentioning it by name, he said the federal courts no longer exercised jurisdiction over litigation that “might redound to the benefit of a ‘nigger’ in some way.” This seeming indifference stemmed in part from the complexity of the Court’s decision. The justices offered nine separate opinions, none of which addressed exactly the same issues; two of them were strong dissenting opinions by antislavery Justices John McLean and Benjamin R. Curtis. An initial examination of the opinions failed to give Lincoln much cause for alarm. As he explained later, he “never... complained
especially
of the Dred Scott decision because it held a negro could not be a citizen”; he agreed with Taney on this subject. Nor was he exercised because the Court invalidated the Missouri Compromise; the Kansas-Nebraska Act had already expressly repealed that compromise.

Lincoln was reluctant to challenge the Court’s ruling. He had enormous respect for the law and for the judicial process. He felt these offered a standard of rationality badly needed in a society threatened, on the one side, by the unreasoning populism of the Democrats, who believed that the majority was always right, and the equally unreasonable moral absolutism of reformers like the abolitionists, who appealed to a higher law than even the Constitution. As recently as the 1856 campaign he had invoked the judiciary as the ultimate arbiter of disputes over slavery. “The Supreme Court of the United States is the tribunal to decide such questions,” he announced, and, speaking for the Republicans, he pledged, “We will submit to its decisions; and if you [the Democrats] do also, there will be an end of the matter.”

But the Dred Scott decision required him to rethink his position. If the Court had decided simply that Dred Scott was a slave, he “presumed, no one would controvert it’s correctness.” “If this important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with legal public expectation, and with the steady practice of the departments throughout our history,” he continued, it would be “factious, nay, even revolutionary,” not to accept it. But when a majority of the justices, overruling numerous previous judicial rulings and ignoring the extensive historical evidence that throughout American
history many states had recognized blacks as citizens, which Justice Curtis adduced in his dissent, extended their ruling to the entire African-American race, their decision was simply wrong.

What troubled Lincoln most about the Dred Scott decision was the Chief Justice’s gratuitous assertion that neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution was ever intended to include blacks. Lincoln declared bluntly that Taney was doing “obvious violence to the plain unmistakable language of the Declaration,” which had once been held sacred by all Americans and thought to include all Americans. Now, in order to make Negro slavery eternal and universal, the Declaration “is assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.” So blatant was the Chief Justice’s misreading of the law, so gross was his distortion of the documents fundamental to American liberty, that Lincoln’s faith in an impartial, rational judiciary was shaken; never again did he give deference to the rulings of the Supreme Court.

Lincoln kept these views to himself until June, when Douglas returned to Illinois and made a major address at Springfield defending the “honest and conscientious” judges who had handed down the Dred Scott decision and denouncing criticism of the highest tribunal as “a deadly blow at our whole republican system of government.” Recognizing that the Supreme Court’s ruling was unpopular, Douglas seized on Taney’s dictum that the Negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence as an excuse to appeal to Illinois negrophobia. Blacks, he announced, belonged to “an inferior race, who in all ages, and in every part of the globe,... had shown themselves incapable of self-government,” and he warned that Republicans favored the “amalgamation between superior and inferior races.”

Two weeks later Lincoln offered the Republican reply to the senator. Part of his speech was a slashing attack on Douglas’s popular-sovereignty doctrine as “a mere deceitful pretense for the benefit of slavery.” He spent much time explaining the Republican position on Dred Scott. “We think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous,” he declared unequivocally. “We know the court that made it, has often over-ruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to over-rule this. We offer no
resistance
to it.”

Not until Lincoln turned to the interpretation Taney and Douglas offered of the Declaration of Independence did his words take wings. He charged that the Chief Justice and the senator were working, together with other Democrats, to extend and to perpetuate slavery. To do so they joined in further oppression of the already oppressed Negro: “All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him.... They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in
the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.”

And Douglas, in order to make this oppression tolerable, lugged in the absurd charge that Republicans wanted “to vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes!” He was simply trying to capitalize on that “natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races.” Bluntly Lincoln rejected “that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a
slave
I must necessarily want her for a
wife.
” The authors of the Declaration of Independence never intended “to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity,” but they “did consider all men created equal—equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”

It was a powerful speech, but not a radical one. Indeed, Gustave Koerner, the German-American leader of the Republicans in Belleville, complained that it was “too much on the old conservative order” and concluded that Lincoln was “an excellent man, but no match to such impudent Jesuits and sophists as Douglas.” What Lincoln omitted from his argument was as significant as what he said. Though many observers recognized that the Dred Scott decision had gutted Douglas’s favorite doctrine of popular sovereignty by invalidating all congressional legislation concerning slavery in the national territories, Lincoln made no effort to point out the contradiction between the ideas of the Chief Justice and those of the senior senator from Illinois; nor did he discuss Douglas’s theory that territorial governments, despite the Court’s ruling in Dred Scott, could effectively exclude slavery by refusing to protect it. Lincoln’s object was not to show differences between the two Democratic spokesmen but to picture them as united in oppressing the African-American and in extending the institution of slavery.

That was his basic strategy for the upcoming 1858 elections, which would choose members of the state legislature that would name the next United States senator. Lincoln believed that Douglas was vulnerable, and this time he had no intention of waiting for the outcome of the elections before announcing his campaign for the Senate. As early as August 1857 he began encouraging fellow Republicans to do something
“now,
to secure the Legislature,” recommending that they draw up careful lists of voters by precincts. “Let all be so quiet that the adve[r]sary shall not be notified,” he warned.

In planning for the next Senate election, Lincoln gathered around him a group of dedicated and hardworking advisers. Some of them were familiar faces from his earlier campaigns. Herndon was, as ever, loyal if indiscreet,
valuable because of his contacts among abolitionists. Both Jesse K. Dubois, the state auditor, and Ozias M. Hatch, the secretary of state, were close political friends as well as neighbors in Springfield. Lamon and Whitney kept an eye on the north central part of the state. In the Bloomington area Lincoln counted on Leonard Swett and Judge Davis. In Chicago, Lincoln’s strongest supporter was Norman B. Judd, who had refused to vote for him in 1855 but had since worked closely with him in business and legal matters. Charles H. Ray, of the
Chicago Press and Tribune,
had overcome his earlier misgivings and was now one of Lincoln’s most loyal backers. In southern Illinois, Joseph Gillespie, with whom he had served in the state legislature, was his most effective supporter. It was Lincoln’s special gift not merely to attract such able and dedicated advisers—and other names could readily be added to the list—but to let each of them think that he was Lincoln’s closest friend and most trusted counselor.