The Fiery Trial (11 page)

Less than a week after Congress convened, Palfrey requested permission to introduce a bill to abolish slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia, but the House refused to grant it. A few days later, on December 18, 1848, Giddings presented his own bill, which called for a plebiscite on slavery’s future in Washington in which “all male inhabitants” would cast ballots marked either “Slavery” or “Liberty.” When Patrick Tompkins of Mississippi asked if he meant to allow slaves and free blacks to vote, Giddings replied that he did. If Tompkins, he continued, wished to exclude slaveholders as well as slaves from the referendum, he would agree, but he “never would submit to give one man the control of another man’s liberty.” The House quickly tabled Giddings’s bill. Even the
National Era
, Washington’s antislavery newspaper, called it too extreme. Then, on December 21, Daniel Gott introduced a resolution directing the Judiciary Committee to report a bill abolishing not slavery but the slave trade in the District. The resolution’s preamble denounced the trade as “contrary to natural justice,” Christianity, and “republican liberty.” A move to table the Gott resolution failed, and the House then approved it. But a few days later, the members agreed to vote in two weeks on whether to reconsider their approval.

Both partisan and sectional loyalties affected these debates. In the wake of the strong showing by the Free Soil party, many northern congressmen desired to demonstrate their antislavery credentials. Lincoln had always feared the disruptive effects of sectional antagonism on party politics. Moreover, with his congressional term soon coming to an end, he was actively seeking a patronage appointment from President-elect Taylor, whose allies were attempting to suppress discussion of slavery. How these considerations influenced his course it is impossible to say. But in these December votes, Lincoln diverged sharply from nearly all the other northern Whigs. Thus, forty-nine northern Whigs voted in favor of allowing Palfrey to introduce his bill abolishing slavery in the District; only six, including Lincoln, opposed. Lincoln was one of ten northern Whigs to vote to table Giddings’s bill for abolition, while fifty-five opposed. Only four northern Whigs, Lincoln among them, voted in favor of tabling the Gott resolution, while fifty-five voted against. And when the House adopted the Gott resolution, the votes of northern Whigs stood 65 to 3, with Lincoln among the tiny minority. Only George W. Dunn and Richard W. Thompson of Indiana, among the most conservative of northern Whigs, matched Lincoln’s voting record. Lincoln’s “anti-slavery education,” the Radical Republican George W. Julian later remarked in his memoirs, “had scarcely begun.”
⁵⁰

Had the debate ended here, Lincoln would probably be remembered as one of those politicians Giddings chastised as so desperate for jobs with the new administration that they went along with the president-elect in seeking to suppress the slavery issue. But early in January 1849, even as Lincoln continued his quest for a government job, Giddings recorded in his diary that Lincoln had begun “preparing resolutions to abolish slavery in the D. C.” Lincoln met at least twice with Giddings at their boardinghouse for advice on a draft bill, and the two visited Washington’s Whig mayor, William W. Seaton, to talk about the plan. On January 10, 1849, when the motion to reconsider the vote approving the Gott resolution for the abolition of the slave trade in the District came before the House, Lincoln announced that if reconsideration passed (thus killing the resolution), he planned to introduce his own bill. He claimed it had been approved by fifteen “leading citizens” of the capital. He then read his bill to the House.
⁵¹

Lincoln’s plan provided that all slave children born in the District after January 1, 1850, would labor as “apprentices” for their owners until they reached adulthood (the exact age to be determined), when they would become free. All living slaves would remain in that condition unless freed by the owners, in which case the federal government would pay monetary compensation. Slaves could not be removed from the District or brought in from outside it, except by officers of the government and citizens of slaveholding states in transit. At the same time, Washington’s authorities would provide “active and efficient” support for the capture of fugitive slaves. The entire proposal would be voted on by the “free white male citizens” of the capital the following April. Later that day, Lincoln voted with the majority to reconsider and thus kill the Gott resolution. He was one of seventeen northern Whigs to do so, while fifty opposed the motion.
⁵²

Lincoln never explained why he suddenly shifted from voting “squarely on the side of the South,” as Julian later put it, to collaborating with Giddings. Nor did Lincoln reveal how he drew up his proposal. But its various elements clearly reflected both his own long-standing views and the experience of previous emancipations. In providing for approval by the white residents Lincoln adhered to the condition he had laid out in his 1837 “protest.” Compensation, as noted in chapter 1, was a feature of most previous emancipations. One of Lincoln’s 1860 campaign biographies explained that Lincoln had opposed the earlier Palfrey bill for abolition in the District because it did not provide compensation to slaveowners. The clause concerning fugitive slaves reflected Lincoln’s conviction that the compromises of the Constitution, no matter how distasteful, had to be obeyed. In providing freedom only for the children of slaves born after a certain date, Lincoln followed the precedent of emancipation in the northern states as well as Henry Clay’s well-known preference for such a method. The apprenticeship clause seemed reminiscent of British emancipation in the West Indies. All these provisions would remain elements of Lincoln’s approach to the slavery question for years to come. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates he would reiterate his support for abolition in the District along the lines he had proposed in 1849. During the first two years of the Civil War, he would present for the approval of slaveholders a number of plans for gradual, compensated emancipation. Not until January 1, 1863, when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, would Lincoln embark on a different road to black freedom, and even after that date, he would continue to speak on occasion of gradual abolition, compensation to slaveowners, and apprenticeship as a halfway house on the road to freedom.
⁵³

Giddings considered Lincoln’s plan “as good a bill as we could get at this time.” Abolitionists outside Congress, however, were appalled. Controversy surrounding it resurfaced when Lincoln ran for president in 1860. In that year, the abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips would dub him “the Slave-Hound of Illinois” because of the bill’s clause relating to fugitives from bondage. Lincoln’s plan, Phillips charged, “is no credit to any man, being one of the poorest and most confused specimens of pro-slavery compromise.” Giddings immediately rose to Lincoln’s defense, chastising Phillips for failing to take into account the political circumstances of 1849. Giddings considered it “heroic” that Lincoln had “cast aside the shackles of party, and took his stand…with those who were laboring in the cause of humanity.” Giddings’s strong affirmation of Lincoln’s antislavery credentials, inspired by the events of January 1849, helped to persuade Radical Republicans in 1860 that Lincoln shared their hatred of slavery.
⁵⁴

Southerners had no more interest in Lincoln’s plan than those of Palfrey, Giddings, or Gott. Years later, Lincoln recalled that as soon as his bill became public, his “former backers” in the District deserted him.
⁵⁵
He never actually introduced the bill. After Lincoln left Congress, the Compromise of 1850, originally proposed by Henry Clay and piloted to passage by Stephen A. Douglas, now a senator from Illinois, abolished the slave trade in the nation’s capital, while also providing for a strong Fugitive Slave Act and the organization of territories acquired from Mexico without reference to slavery. Slave dealers, however, simply moved their businesses across the Potomac River to Alexandria. Slavery in the District survived until 1862. When in that year Lincoln signed the measure that abolished it, he noted his pleasure that the law respected the principle of monetary compensation for slaveholders.

Even as the debate over slavery in the District ran its course early in 1849, a different version of the compensation issue came before Congress. This involved a slave, Lewis, who had been hired as a guide by the U.S. Army in Florida during the Second Seminole War (1835–42) and later either was captured by the Seminoles or escaped to them. The heirs of Lewis’s owner, Antonio Pacheco, requested a monetary payment of $1,000 from Congress.

The Pacheco case anticipated a major public question of the early years of the Civil War: Is the federal government obligated to compensate slaveholders for slaves lost as a result of military operations? Or, as an Illinois Democrat defined the “main issue” of the debate, “Does the Constitution of the United States recognize the right of property in slaves?” In an impassioned speech against payment, Joshua R. Giddings insisted that the Declaration of Independence and the principle of natural rights barred the federal government from acknowledging such a property right. Many northern congressmen agreed, at least in this particular case, since Florida, then a territory, had been under congressional control at the time of the Seminole War and therefore no state law applied. Every member of the House, declared William Duer of New York, understood that slaves “were property within the slaveholding states.” But the Constitution, he argued, “had not nationalized in any degree the institution.” Thus, when the army hired Lewis, it was obligated to consider him a human being, not property, and no compensation was in order. In a sense, in the Pacheco case, the Liberty party principle of “freedom national” suddenly entered the mainstream of congressional debate.
⁵⁶

Southern members found this alarming. “Every civilized nation on earth,” claimed Richard K. Meade of Virginia, agreed that governments had an obligation to indemnify owners for property lost through military operations. To refuse was to deny the legitimacy of property in slaves. In these discussions, Lincoln remained silent. But along with nearly all the northern Whigs and a majority of northern Democrats, he voted consistently against providing compensation. In one instance, where the closeness of the vote created confusion about the outcome, Lincoln spoke up to ensure that he had been recorded in the negative. Eventually, the House approved the claim of Pacheco’s heirs. But Lincoln had made clear that for him, as for many other northerners by 1849, property in slaves differed significantly from other forms of property.
⁵⁷

The adjournment of the Thirtieth Congress in 1849 appeared to mark the end, at the age of forty, of Lincoln’s political career. He failed to get the job he sought from the Taylor administration and failed again at the end of 1850, when his name was mentioned for an appointment by Millard Fillmore, who had become president after Taylor’s death. Lincoln’s political ambitions appeared hopelessly blocked, and he returned to Illinois to devote himself to his law career. For the next five years, Lincoln said little about slavery. But in July 1852 it became clear that he was clarifying his ideas on the subject. The occasion was his eulogy for Henry Clay, which Lincoln delivered in Springfield a week after the death of his political idol and which offered his most extended public discussion so far on slavery. His speech differed from most of the innumerable tributes to Clay that summer. Most eulogists hailed Clay as the Great Compromiser, the man who had almost single-handedly saved the Union in a series of sectional crises. Lincoln, by contrast, ignored both Clay’s work as a sectional conciliator and his economic program, to which Lincoln had devoted so much attention in the past. Instead, he devoted a significant portion of his speech to a (somewhat exaggerated) account of Clay’s devotion to the “cause of human liberty.”

Reflecting on Clay’s career, Lincoln identified “negro slavery” as the main source of “discord” in the republic. He took note of Clay’s efforts in 1799 and again in 1849 to persuade Kentucky constitutional conventions to adopt plans for gradual emancipation. Lincoln hailed Clay for occupying a position between two “extremes”—the abolitionists, whose assaults on slavery threatened the Union, and proslavery zealots who had begun to repudiate the very idea of human equality embedded in the Declaration of Independence, which Lincoln called the “white man’s charter of liberty.” He quoted extensively from Clay’s speech before the American Colonization Society in 1827 in which he charged that those who looked to no end to slavery must “blow out the moral lights around us”—an evocative phrase Lincoln would appropriate in his own speeches later in the 1850s. And for the first time in his career, he publicly embraced the idea of returning both free and emancipated blacks to their “long-lost fatherland” in Africa. Indeed, Lincoln implied that Americans, like the ancient Egyptians, might one day suffer divine punishment for “striving to retain a captive people” (a theme to which he would return in his second inaugural in 1865). Lincoln had not previously coupled emancipation with colonization—his abolition bill of 1849 made no mention of sending freed slaves out of the country. But he would henceforth support the idea until well into the Civil War. Like Clay, Lincoln at this point in his career seemed to view blacks as a people who had been violently and unnaturally removed from their homeland, not as part of American society.
⁵⁸

In retrospect, Lincoln’s speech appears as a eulogy not only for Clay but also for the kind of antislavery politics Clay represented. Surely, Lincoln recognized that Clay’s half century of advocacy of gradual emancipation had accomplished nothing. Between 1799, when Clay first proposed his plan to rid Kentucky of slavery, and 1849, when another constitutional convention met and Clay again urged it to take up his idea, the state’s slave population had grown from 40,000 to 210,000. Lincoln had been in Lexington, Kentucky, on legal business during the convention’s deliberations in 1849. Slavery had been much discussed in the press. The majority of the delegates, however, displayed more interest in strengthening the institution than eliminating it.