The Fiery Trial (12 page)

Lincoln drew a lesson from these events. Three years later he would write that he had despaired of the “peaceful extinction of slavery…. The signal failure of Henry Clay, and other good and great men [including his late father-in-law], in 1849, to effect any thing in favor of gradual emancipation in Kentucky, together with a thousand other signs, extinguishes that hope utterly.” “Not a single state,” Lincoln noted, had rid itself of slavery since the revolutionary era. “That spirit which desired the peaceful extinction of slavery, has itself become extinct…. The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.” Lincoln concluded on a note of desperation: “The problem is too mighty for me.” “Peaceful, voluntary emancipation” appeared to be impossible.
⁵⁹

Yet what was the alternative? In effect, in outlining Clay’s position on slavery Lincoln described his own. Until well into the Civil War, Lincoln would continue to adhere to the outlook he associated with Clay in this speech—blacks were entitled to the basic human rights outlined in the Declaration of Independence, slavery should be ended gradually and with the consent of slaveholders, and abolition should be accompanied by colonization.

As to the Whig party, to which Clay and Lincoln had devoted their political careers, it too needed a eulogy. Its presidential candidate, Winfield Scott, another Mexican War hero, suffered a disastrous defeat in the 1852 presidential election, carrying only four states. In that year, Lincoln’s brother-in-law Ninian Edwards defected to the Democrats. Lincoln served as a Whig elector but took a smaller part in this campaign than any presidential election since 1836. His few speeches dealt mostly with traditional economic issues that no longer seemed to matter to most voters.
⁶⁰
Yet in 1852, Whig congressional candidates did carry four districts in northern Illinois by running candidates who could attract abolitionist and Free Soil voters. The
Western Citizen
, the abolitionist newspaper published in Chicago, urged its readers to vote for Elihu B. Washburne, an antislavery Whig whose victory launched a career of eight consecutive terms in the House of Representatives.
⁶¹

By 1852, Lincoln had developed antislavery ideas but not a coherent antislavery ideology; he had cast antislavery votes but had not yet devised a way to pursue antislavery goals within the political system. If Winfield Scott’s defeat threw into question the future of the Whig party, Elihu B. Washburne’s success offered a harbinger of a new alignment of northern parties that in the next few years would transform the politics of Illinois and the nation and sweep Lincoln back into public life as his state’s foremost opponent of the expansion of slavery.

O
N THE EVENING OF
O
CTOBER
16, 1854, Lincoln stood before an audience in Peoria, Illinois, and delivered a powerful indictment of the nation’s new policy regarding the westward expansion of slavery. Nine months earlier, Stephen A. Douglas had introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate to organize the Nebraska Territory, a part of the old Louisiana Purchase from which slavery had been barred by the Missouri Compromise of 1821. By the time the bill became law in May, it had evolved into the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which explicitly repealed that compromise, substituting for the ban on slavery what Douglas called “popular sovereignty”—the right of settlers to decide for themselves whether to allow or prohibit the institution. Douglas had made a name for himself through bold, sometimes impetuous, actions. In 1850, after Henry Clay failed to get his plan for resolving sectional issues through Congress, Douglas had seized the political initiative and steered the Compromise measures to passage. This time, however, he seriously miscalculated. The Kansas-Nebraska Act aroused a storm of protest throughout the North. Suddenly, the prospect beckoned of slavery spreading not simply into the faraway lands recently acquired from Mexico, but into the heart of the trans-Mississippi West, an area long regarded as the domain of free labor.

Many northerners saw the Kansas-Nebraska Act as the first step in an “atrocious plot” to spread slavery throughout the western United States. These were the words of the
Appeal of the Independent Democrats
, issued in January 1854 by Salmon P. Chase, Joshua R. Giddings, and a handful of other antislavery members of Congress. It called on northerners to unite across party lines to oppose the bill.
¹
Over the course of the next two years, the furor aroused by Douglas’s measure redrew the nation’s political map. The Whig party disappeared and in its place arose the Republican, dedicated to halting once and for all the expansion of slavery.

The year 1854 marked the turning point in Lincoln’s pre–Civil War career. “At last,” a friend wrote to Chase in February 1854, “the great opportunity of your life has crossed your path.”
²
The same could be said of Lincoln. He brilliantly seized the opportunity to revive his dormant life in politics. Before 1854 he had remained essentially a local politician. His name had rarely appeared in newspapers in Chicago, let alone outside Illinois. By 1860 he had become one of the North’s major political leaders, part of a generation that included Douglas and William H. Seward, men, like Lincoln, who built or rebuilt their careers on the basis not of the economic issues of the Jacksonian era but their positions regarding slavery.

During these years, Lincoln held no office; he rose to prominence on the basis of oratory, not a record of public service. Many factors contributed to his emergence, among them the good luck of inhabiting the same political space as Douglas, the most prominent politician of the 1850s. Virtually every major speech of Lincoln’s between 1854 and 1860 originated as a response to some action or statement by Douglas. In Springfield, where Lincoln delivered his critique of the Kansas-Nebraska Act a few days before presenting it in Peoria, he did so as a reply to Douglas’s long defense of the measure in the same city that very afternoon. Four years later, Lincoln acquired a national reputation by virtue of his debates with Douglas. As one newspaper put it in 1859, “Without Douglas, Lincoln would be nothing.”
³
Yet Lincoln’s rise also reflected his success at fashioning a position on slavery that articulated the shared principles of those who were joining the new Republican party.

In the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln’s public statements underwent a profound transformation. He had long believed slavery to rest “on both injustice and bad policy” (as he put it in his 1837 “protest”) but had never considered opposition to its expansion the basis on which a political party could or should be formed. Now, he concluded, “that question [slavery] is a paramount one.” In language that achieved an eloquence and moral power not presaged in his previous speeches, Lincoln condemned slavery as a violation of the nation’s founding principles as enunciated in the Declaration of Independence: human equality and mankind’s natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He spoke openly of achieving slavery’s “ultimate extinction,” although he acknowledged that he had little idea how this could be accomplished. During the 1850s, Illinois, a state divided between a southern section closely tied to the Border South and a rapidly growing northern region populated from the Northeast, became, in the words of Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon, “the battleground for the Slave Power and for the Republicans.”
⁴
And no one played a more important part in the battle for Illinois, and therefore the nation, than Abraham Lincoln.

I

L
INCOLN
did not immediately raise his voice in opposition to Douglas’s bill. While “anti-Nebraska” meetings sprang up throughout the North in the first few months of 1854, he remained silent. But Lincoln was hardly inactive. He contributed unsigned editorials condemning Douglas’s measure to the
Illinois State Journal
, Springfield’s Whig newspaper. According to a Democratic journalist writing in the early fall, Lincoln had been “nosing around for weeks in the state library.” There, he consulted the founders’ statements about slavery, previous congressional debates, Douglas’s own speeches, and even census returns. He began speaking publicly in mid-August. Fragmentary newspaper accounts report that he urged opponents of slavery’s expansion to unite to achieve repeal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, while insisting on respect for the constitutionally guaranteed rights of slaveowners. He probably delivered much the same speech at a number of venues. But not until he presented it at Peoria did a full copy, provided by Lincoln himself, appear in the press. At 17,000 words it was the longest speech he ever delivered. To publish it in its entirety, the
State Journal
devoted a considerable part of seven consecutive issues to the speech.
⁵

Lincoln had finally found a subject worthy of his intellectual talent and political ambition. The Peoria speech entirely ignored the economic issues that had dominated his career until 1854. It said nothing about other questions roiling the political landscape, such as temperance, immigration, and anti-Catholicism. Instead, Lincoln offered a prolonged examination of the history of the slavery question and a series of reflections on how to think about slavery’s place in American life. His basic argument was straightforward: Douglas’s bill represented a profound departure from the original intention of the founding fathers, who sought to restrict the spread of slavery and hoped to see it eventually die out. In the Declaration of Independence, they had established a set of maxims about equality and liberty that defined the essence of the American experiment and that slavery violated fundamentally. The Constitution contained unavoidable compromises that protected slavery, and thus the North must respect the rights of slaveholders where the institution already existed. But no such obligation applied to the territories. Lincoln emphasized his determination to maintain an iron-clad “distinction” between “the existing institution, and the extension of it.” Yet at several points in the speech he moved seamlessly from the right and wrong of the expansion of slavery to the right and wrong of slavery itself. His language and the logic of his argument unavoidably called into question the future of slavery in the United States.

Douglas’s willingness to see slavery spread, Lincoln declared, violated the core principles of American nationality and fatally compromised the country’s world-historical mission:

Earlier in his career, Lincoln had described slavery as unjust, but never before had he referred to it as a “monstrous injustice.” This was the language of abolitionism, not party politics. Yet just as, in his Washingtonian speech, he had advocated temperance without denigrating drinkers, Lincoln differentiated himself from those whose condemnation of slavery extended to slaveholders: “I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation…. If [slavery] did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up.”

And what of the future of slavery? Here, Lincoln candidly admitted his own uncertainty:

Lincoln then turned to a dissection of popular sovereignty. He condemned the idea of leaving the issue of slavery to the voters of a territory as specious and unworkable. History demonstrated that to keep it out, slavery must be prohibited from the first days of settlement, as the Northwest Ordinance had done for Illinois (and even then, slavery had lingered for many years). The Kansas-Nebraska Act, moreover, failed to explain when and by whom the decision on slavery would be made—by a few dozen initial settlers, a few hundred, the territorial legislature? But beyond practicality lay the question of morality. Douglas had repeatedly insisted that by allowing residents of the territories to decide on their own local institutions, popular sovereignty exemplified “the great fundamental principle of self-government.” Clearly, Lincoln responded, most issues of concern to communities should be decided locally—this was the essence of democracy. But because of its moral gravity, slavery was different:

Yet, after what could only be taken as a critique of slavery wherever it existed and, indeed, of racial inequality, Lincoln immediately drew back: “Let it not be said I am contending for the establishment of political and social equality between the whites and the blacks…. I am combating what is set up as moral argument for allowing them to be taken where they have never yet been.”

Douglas’s policy, moreover, defined whether slavery expanded into Kansas and Nebraska as a matter of purely local concern. In fact, Lincoln insisted, it must be decided by a national majority (that is, by the North). “The whole nation,” he declared, “is interested that the best use shall be made of these territories. We want them for the homes of free white people…or poor people to go to and better their condition.” Were slavery permitted, this avenue of self-improvement would be closed off.

At various points in the Peoria speech, Lincoln insisted that despite the injustice of slavery, the issue must be approached within the existing constitutional framework. Even as he claimed that the framers of the Constitution had intentionally omitted the word “slave” because of their distaste for the institution, Lincoln also acknowledged that they had had no choice but to include protections for the institution where it had already been established. It followed that northerners must adhere, “not grudgingly, but fully, and fairly,” to the constitutional rights of the slave states. He described the recapture of men and women who had escaped from slavery as “a dirty, disagreeable job” but affirmed that because of the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause, he would support “any legislation, for the reclaiming of their fugitives, which should not, in its stringency, be…likely to carry a free man into slavery.” (This was a veiled rebuke of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which accorded no due process rights whatever to accused runaways.) Indeed, Lincoln went on, he would even consent to the extension of slavery if the alternative were “to see the Union dissolved, just as I would consent to any great evil, to avoid a greater one.” Yet what really endangered the Union, Lincoln insisted, was Douglas’s precipitous abrogation of a time-honored sectional compromise. The remedy was to reenact the Missouri Compromise and, by so doing, return to the nation’s original policy regarding slavery, thereby restoring “the national faith, the national confidence, the national feeling of brotherhood.”