The Fiery Trial (13 page)

The Peoria speech closed with a powerful peroration that summarized Lincoln’s argument against both Douglas and slavery:

Juxtaposed with Lincoln’s sweeping condemnation of slavery, his actual policy aim—restoring the Missouri Compromise—seemed anticlimactic. But he recognized that to accomplish even this required a reordering of northern politics. Identifying himself as “an old Whig,” Lincoln urged members of his party not to be afraid to unite with others, including abolitionists. “Stand with anybody that stands right,” he advised his listeners, “and part with him when he goes wrong.”
⁶

Lincoln’s expression of kind regard for southerners and his willingness to adhere fully and without reservations to the Constitution’s provisions regarding slavery distinguished him from more radical northerners. So did his repudiation of the idea of “political and social equality” for blacks and his embrace of colonization. Yet clearly, despite Lincoln’s insistence on maintaining the “distinction” between them, the Peoria speech was as much an attack on slavery as on its expansion. Its language, a Democratic newspaper complained, could easily “have come from Giddings or Sumner, and that class of abolitionists.”
⁷

With the Peoria speech (delivered in essentially the same form in various parts of Illinois in the fall of 1854) Lincoln emerged as his state’s most eloquent opponent of the expansion of slavery. His public presentations, Lincoln later recalled, attracted “more marked attention than they had ever done before.” In part, this resulted from his exceptional clarity of expression and his reliance on the logic of his argument rather than rhetorical ornamentation to persuade his listeners. In his preference for direct speech and the language of ordinary life he resembled Thomas Paine, whose works he had read and admired as a younger man. As a writer, Lincoln was indeed a conscious craftsman who chose his words, as a friend later wrote, to “make himself understood by all classes.” Horace White, then a young antislavery journalist and later editor-in-chief of the
Chicago Tribune
, heard Lincoln deliver his address in Springfield, twelve days before he did so in Peoria. He described it as the “greatest” speech ever delivered in Illinois, “for vigor of thought, strength of expression, comprehensiveness of scope…rarely equalled in the annals of American eloquence.” Half a century later, White would write that “the speech of 1854 made so profound an impression on me that I feel under its spell to this day.”
⁸

Although Lincoln subsequently deepened and expanded his arguments, the Peoria speech laid the foundation for his approach to the slavery question for the next six years. Before 1854, Lincoln had mentioned the Declaration of Independence only twice in public remarks—a passing reference in his Lyceum speech of 1838 and a more extended one in the Clay eulogy of 1852. Henceforth, he would repeatedly invoke the Declaration as the basis of what he had once called America’s “civil religion.” He knew that the Declaration’s theme of equality had a powerful effect on ordinary northerners. In 1858, he would describe the Declaration as the “electric cord…that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together.” In Philadelphia on the way to assuming the presidency in 1861, Lincoln would declare that all his political sentiments sprang from the Declaration of Independence.
⁹

Lincoln was hardly alone among critics of slavery in claiming inspiration from Jefferson, who in 1784 had unsuccessfully proposed to bar the institution from all the western territories then part of the United States. (The Northwest Ordinance, enacted in 1787 when Jefferson was in Paris, included Jefferson’s rejected language, but applied it only to territories north of the Ohio River).
¹⁰
Nor did Lincoln originate the idea that the founders had launched the nation on an antislavery course. Garrisonian abolitionists, who “ransacked the past for the needs of the present,” repeatedly made this argument. So did Liberty party leaders such as Salmon P. Chase. In 1850, Chase filled three single-spaced pages of the
Congressional Globe
with quotations from letters by Jefferson and Madison, town meeting resolutions, congressional debates, and other documents to demonstrate the antislavery convictions of the revolutionary era. In the 1850s no Republican campaign speech or political platform could be considered complete without references to Jefferson and other founders to demonstrate that they hoped for an end to slavery. By 1860, one Republican member of Congress could assure his colleagues that he would not “weary” them with such quotations since the evidence would “readily occur to all intelligent men.” Lincoln did not originate this part of the Republican outlook, but he played a key role in disseminating it to a broad popular audience.
¹¹

History, it has been said, is what the present chooses to remember about the past. Like any narration of history inspired by the search for a “usable past,” Lincoln’s and other Republicans’ account of the attitudes of the revolutionary generation toward slavery was highly selective. It required them to transform a hesitant, ambiguous commitment into a coherent antislavery credo. In fact, the debates over slavery at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were conspicuously devoid of a moral component. Many of the founders did profess antislavery ideas, but few did anything to implement them and some had no desire whatever to see slavery end. Douglas, who called popular sovereignty the “Jeffersonian plan” because it rested on the principle of local self-government, also claimed the founders’ legacy. So, too, in 1861, did southern secessionists, who said they were acting out the right of revolution enshrined in the Declaration.

Just as Lincoln had exaggerated Henry Clay’s antislavery record, so he made Jefferson’s far more consistent than it actually had been. Jefferson, to be sure, had written the egalitarian preamble of the Declaration of Independence and the proposal in the 1780s to ban slavery in the western territories. But a full reckoning with his career would have to take into account his persistent reluctance to endorse action against slavery in Virginia, the protection for slave property written into the Louisiana Purchase treaty of 1803, and his support, at the time of the Missouri debates, for slavery’s westward “diffusion” on the patently absurd grounds that this would improve the condition of the slaves and weaken the institution. (Jefferson, however, had opposed Edward Coles’s plan, mentioned in chapter 1, to free his slaves and settle them in Illinois.) The same federal government that barred slavery north of the Ohio River sanctioned, indeed encouraged, its expansion into the Gulf states during the terms of the Virginia presidents Jefferson, Madison, and James Monroe in the early nineteenth century.
¹²

Lincoln later stated that slavery had been “a minor question with me” before 1854 because he “always believed that everybody was against it, and that it was in course of ultimate extinction.” This seemed an almost willful misreading of history when one reflected that between the ratification of the Constitution and 1854 nine new slave states had entered the Union and the slave population had grown from 700,000 to over 3 million. The black abolitionist H. Ford Douglas pointedly challenged Lincoln’s account of history. “The Republicans,” he remarked in 1860, “say they are bringing the government back to the policy of the fathers. I do not desire to do this; the policy of the fathers was not uncompromising opposition to oppression.”
¹³

Nonetheless, during the 1850s Jefferson joined and eventually supplanted Henry Clay as Lincoln’s touchstone of political wisdom. And the argument that the founders had tried to place the institution on the road to extinction became the cornerstone of his case against Douglas and popular sovereignty. His selective reading of history allowed Lincoln to present his opposition to the expansion of slavery as “eminently conservative,” a return to the policy inaugurated by the revolutionary generation, rather than what in fact it was—a form of antislavery advocacy that marked a radical departure from national policies that for decades had fostered the spread of slavery. Despite his insistence on respecting white southerners and their constitutional rights, Lincoln’s account of history in effect erased proslavery Americans from the nation’s founding. “We,” he said in 1858, had created a nation based on principles enunciated in the Declaration, but “we” had to compromise with slavery to “get our constitution.” Lincoln’s “we”—his definition of the American nation—did not seem to include the proponents of slavery.
¹⁴

II

S
HORTLY BEFORE
the 1860 election, Frederick Douglass offered a succinct summary of the dilemma confronting opponents of slavery, like Lincoln, committed to working within the existing political and constitutional system. Abstractly, Douglass wrote, most northerners would agree that slavery was wrong. The challenge was to find a way of “translating antislavery sentiment into antislavery action.” At Peoria in 1854, Lincoln for the first time embraced the idea that moral revulsion against slavery had become “a great and durable element of popular action” and that northerners should unite in making opposition to the expansion of slavery their central political tenet. But this belief did not immediately produce a formula for political action. Eventually, the collapse of the Whig party freed Lincoln from the pressure of reconciling his views on slavery with the need for intersectional party harmony. But the dissolution of Whiggery took place slowly. The Nebraska bill, declared the
New York Tribune
in 1854, “inaugurates the era of a geographical division of political parties.” But not until late in 1855 did Lincoln commit his political future to a sectional antislavery party.
¹⁵

The year 1854 witnessed an extremely complicated political revolution throughout the North. “Fusion” movements uniting Whigs, antislavery Democrats, Free Soilers, and advocates of prohibition and nativism swept to victory in nearly every free state. But the balance of power within these coalitions varied enormously. In some states, the new Know-Nothing party, dedicated to curtailing the influence of immigrants and Roman Catholics in American politics, emerged as the primary force. In others, antislavery advocates, some calling their new organization the Republican party, dominated.
¹⁶

Whig leaders like Lincoln struggled to adjust to the rapidly changing political situation. Many Whigs hoped the furor over the Kansas-Nebraska Act offered their party an opportunity to resuscitate itself by advocating the restoration of the Missouri Compromise, thus appealing both to Americans who opposed the expansion of slavery and to those, including southerners, who dreaded the revival of sectional controversy. But it soon became clear that the political crisis had resulted in what a southern newspaper called the “denationalization of the Whig party.” In February 1854, a caucus of southern Whig congressmen decided to support Douglas’s measure. Northern Whigs were outraged. “We have no longer any bond to Southern Whigs,” proclaimed William H. Seward. Even Seward, however, remained convinced that the Whigs could survive by refashioning themselves as the party of opposition to the expansion of slavery.
¹⁷

Especially in central and southern Illinois, many Whigs looked aghast at the idea of their party “being abolitionized,” as Lincoln’s friend David Davis put it. When a group of abolitionists and Free Soilers from northern Illinois met in Springfield on October 5 to launch a Republican party in the state, Lincoln declined an invitation to address them, even though his powerful antislavery speech, which he had delivered in the same city the previous day, had included a call for political cooperation among all those opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He turned down an appointment to the executive committee of the new party. As Lincoln explained to the abolitionist Ichabod Codding, one of the gathering’s organizers, “I suppose my opposition to the principle of slavery is as strong” as any member of the convention, but he felt unable to “carry that opposition, practically,” in the way Codding desired. Lincoln could scarcely join a new party that seemed to have no support in his political base of central Illinois.
¹⁸

“Probably not since the organization of the government,” declared a Chicago newspaper, “were political parties in such a state of inextricable confusion.” In the congressional races that fall, Illinois Whigs “fused” with Free Soilers in three northern congressional districts, offered their own candidates in five districts in the central and southern parts of the state, and in one race endorsed Lyman Trumbull, running as an anti-Douglas Democrat. Trumbull, the three fusionists, and one Whig were elected, but in the Springfield region Democrats defeated Richard Yates, for whom Lincoln had campaigned. To the
Free West
, Chicago’s abolitionist newspaper, the lesson was clear: “the Whig party is dead.”
¹⁹

Further complicating Lincoln’s situation was his emergence as a leading candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by James Shields, an ally of Douglas’s whose term was about to expire. It is not clear exactly when this possibility occurred to Lincoln. During the summer of 1854 he announced himself as a candidate for a seat in the legislature. Lincoln claimed he was running to help Yates’s campaign for Congress. But in August and September Lincoln began making speeches to audiences far afield from his and Yates’s district. Before the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, state legislatures, not the voters, chose U.S. Senators. In November 1854, when the voters of Illinois chose a legislature with an “anti-Nebraska” majority, Lincoln resigned the seat to which he had been elected so that he could seek election to the Senate, which Illinois law barred members of the legislature from doing.
²⁰