The Fiery Trial (16 page)

Lincoln’s single-minded focus on the question of slavery’s expansion also differentiated him from the Radicals. Unlike them, he rarely complained about the Constitution’s three-fifths clause, nor did he embrace the “freedom national” doctrine that envisioned an assault on slavery wherever it existed under federal jurisdiction. Lincoln eschewed language, common among the Radicals and, indeed, more moderate Republicans, that portrayed slavery as an obstacle to human progress and southerners as economically and socially backward and lacking in morality. During the 1850s, Republicans mobilized census statistics—everything from economic output and railroad mileage to the number of educational institutions and the circulation of books and newspapers—to demonstrate that the South lagged far behind the North in every index of civilization. The typical Republican speech, quipped Robert Winthrop, a longtime Whig leader in Massachusetts, consisted of one-third repeal of the Missouri Compromise, one-third outrages in Kansas, “and one-third disjoined facts, and misapplied figures…to prove that the South is, upon the whole, the very poorest, meanest, least productive, and most miserable part of creation.”

On this score, the contrast is striking between Lincoln and William H. Seward. During the Civil War, Seward, as secretary of state, would become Lincoln’s closest confidant in the cabinet and would be regarded by congressional Radicals as a conservative influence on administration policy. During the 1850s, however, Seward was widely considered the most prominent Radical Republican, thanks to his long career of antislavery politics and his penchant for using provocative phrases such as “higher law” and “irrepressible conflict” and for forthrightly challenging the South to a contest for the future of the territories and the nation. Both Lincoln and Seward traveled in the South as young men. What impressed Seward was how slavery impaired the region’s economic development. Virginia’s soil had been exhausted by overreliance on tobacco, and as for New Orleans, which he visited a few years after Lincoln, Seward concluded that because of slavery “the city is secondary” compared to what it might have become. In his speeches of the 1850s, Seward termed slavery a “blight,” a “pestilence,” an “element of national debility and decline,” and repeatedly contrasted western economic development with what he called the stagnation of the South. Lincoln did not describe the South in this manner.
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In his Lyceum speech of 1838, Lincoln had proclaimed his commitment to the rule of law. He rejected talk of a “higher law” than the Constitution. Seward had used this phrase during the debates over the Compromise of 1850 to condemn the proposed Fugitive Slave Act as illegitimate. In 1852, Lincoln distanced himself from Seward’s doctrine: “In so far as it may attempt to foment a disobedience to the constitution, or to the constitutional laws of the country, it has my unqualified condemnation.” Radicals like Owen Lovejoy avowed that in obedience to a higher law, they would never assist in returning a fugitive to bondage. Lincoln, as we have seen, found the hunting down of fugitives outrageous, but, he wrote, “I bite my lip and keep quiet.”
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Thus, in overall outlook, specific policies, and personal temperament, Lincoln differed considerably from the more radical members of the Republican party. Yet in persistently emphasizing both the moral dimensions of the sectional controversy and how the institution undermined the heritage of democratic self-government, and in seeking to exclude from political debate any issue that might divert attention from the centrality of slavery, he found himself allied with them. Lincoln’s language and his concentration on the slavery question made him appear more radical than his actual policy proposals. He may not have spoken of slavery as a sin, but during the 1850s he referred to it as a “monstrous injustice” (his words in the Peoria speech), “a vast moral evil,” an “odious institution,” a “cancer” capable of destroying the republic. He compared slavery to a “venomous snake” found in bed with a child—it could not be attacked directly but its activity must be constrained. By the mid-1850s, a gulf had opened between Lincoln and conservative Whigs such as Richard W. Thompson of Indiana. The two had voted almost identically on questions relating to slavery in the Thirtieth Congress. But Thompson now explicitly denied that “slavery, as it exists in this country, presents a
moral
question for our consideration.” Lincoln insisted this was precisely what it did.
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Lincoln was undoubtedly familiar with radical antislavery ideas. His law partner William Herndon, ten years Lincoln’s junior and somewhat in awe of his associate, later claimed to have been an abolitionist. This was perhaps an exaggeration, but he did correspond with Theodore Parker, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, and other eastern foes of slavery. In one letter of 1857, Herndon described how, in response to the events of the 1850s, he had evolved from one who “hated…the very name of Anti-Slavery,” to an advocate of “universal freedom.” Herndon subscribed to abolitionist periodicals such as the
National Anti-Slavery Standard
,
National Era
, and Chicago’s
Western Citizen
as well as more mainstream antislavery newspapers like the
New York Tribune
. He purchased copies of the speeches of Joshua R. Giddings, William H. Seward, Charles Sumner, and other Radicals, which accumulated in the law office he shared with Lincoln.
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After his emergence as a Republican leader early in 1856, Lincoln struggled to maintain unity in a party riven by internal discord. He found himself mediating disputes between former Democrats and former Whigs, nativists and immigrants, conservatives, moderates, and radicals. This was one reason why he stressed so single-mindedly the issue of slavery’s expansion, the lowest common denominator of Republican opinion and the one position on which these various elements could agree. Thus, he found himself making common cause with party Radicals, who had long desired, as one put it, “to make slavery the
first
question in our political affairs.”
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As he made the transition from a local to a statewide political leader, Lincoln recognized that the Republican party could not succeed without mobilizing the radical antislavery constituencies of northern Illinois. In July 1856, the Republican convention in the Third Congressional District, which included counties in both northern and central parts of the state, nominated the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy as its candidate for Congress, passing over Lincoln’s friend Leonard Swett, who was preferred by moderate former Whigs. Some of Swett’s supporters decided to nominate Judge T. Lyle Dickey, a Kentucky-born Old Line Whig who abhorred abolitionists, as an independent candidate, thereby splitting the Republican vote. Lincoln acted immediately to dissuade them.

“When I heard that Swett was beaten and Lovejoy nominated, it turned me blind,” Lincoln wrote to David Davis, who “hated” abolitionists and initially favored a Dickey candidacy. But, Lincoln continued, “on reaching that region, and seeing the people there—their great enthusiasm for Lovejoy—considering the activity they will carry into the contest with him…I really think it best to let the matter stand.” After receiving Lincoln’s letter, Davis urged Dickey to withdraw. Events like “the outrages in Kansas,” he wrote, had “made abolitionists of those who never dreamed they were drifting into it.” Meanwhile, Lovejoy took matters into his own hands by appearing at a gathering called by the dissidents and disclaiming any right to interfere with slavery in the states. In the end, Dickey abandoned the contest. Lincoln appeared on the same platform with Lovejoy a number of times during the campaign, and the voters elected Lovejoy to Congress.
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A similar set of events transpired in 1858. Once again, conservative Republicans, led by Davis, plotted to run an independent candidate in alliance with local Democrats. Even though it placed him at odds with Davis, Ward Hill Lamon, and other “highly valued friends,” Lincoln privately warned Lovejoy that spring not to be complacent about his renomination. It would be better for all concerned, Lincoln wrote to Charles H. Ray of the
Chicago Tribune
, to renominate Lovejoy “without a contest.” When Lamon conveyed to Lincoln his fear that Lovejoy’s election would “put this Congressional District irredeemably in the hands of the Abolitionists,” Lincoln beseeched Lamon not to support an independent: “It will result in nothing but disaster all round.” Lovejoy might be “known as an abolitionist,” but, Lincoln pointed out, he “is now occupying none but common ground.” Partly as a result of these events, Lovejoy and Lincoln developed a close political relationship. Lovejoy closed one letter to Lincoln with a salutation expressing how, in his view, they agreed on the fundamental question: “Yours for the
‘ultimate extinction of slavery
.’” During the Civil War, when other Radicals voiced harsh criticism of Lincoln’s policies, Lovejoy would always defend his antislavery credentials.
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More was involved here than Lincoln’s recognition of the paramount importance of party unity in the elections of 1856 and 1858 (when he was a candidate for the Senate). In July 1856, the
Chicago Tribune
observed that the “charge of abolitionism” constituted one of the greatest obstacles to Republican success. Fear of being “caught in cooperation with some abolitionist” had led “timid souls” to remain “aloof from the Republican movement.” Yet Lincoln was not afraid to work with abolitionists. He understood that without the public sentiment generated by abolitionist agitation outside the political system and by Radical Republicans within it, his new party could never succeed and that it needed to harness the intense commitment that Lovejoy’s supporters would bring to the campaign.

Lincoln was a moderate Republican, not a Radical. But during the 1850s, he came to see himself as part of a long struggle against slavery that stretched back to the eighteenth century and might, he said, continue for another hundred years. Every schoolboy, he wrote in 1858, recognized the names of William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp, leaders of the earlier struggle in Great Britain to outlaw the Atlantic slave trade. “But who,” he asked, “can now name a single man who labored to retard it?” (In the context of his Senate race with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, this remark implied that Douglas, by far the more famous of the two at that point, would be forgotten and Lincoln remembered by posterity.) Lincoln, who had always craved recognition, had found his life’s purpose. The “higher object of this contest,” he wrote, “may not be completely attained within the term of my natural life. But…I am proud…to contribute an humble mite to that glorious consummation, which my own poor eyes may not last to see.” There was no mistaking that the “consummation” Lincoln envisioned was the eventual eradication of slavery, not simply a halt to its expansion.
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In December 1856, a month after Frémont’s defeat, Lincoln addressed a Republican banquet in Chicago. He described the recent campaign as a battle not so much over specific public policies, but over bedrock political and moral principles. Republicans, he insisted, adhered to the idea, which, as always, he traced back to the revolutionary generation, of “the equality of men.” Democrats sought to “discard that central idea” and substitute “the opposite idea that slavery is right” and therefore ought to be perpetuated and extended. Which would triumph? “Our government,” Lincoln declared, “rests on public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion can change the government.” The task of Republicans was to counteract Democrats’ “gradual and steady debauching of public opinion” until it no longer valued the central ideal of equality.
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Like the abolitionists, Lincoln saw public sentiment as the terrain on which the crusade against slavery was to be waged. This was his most fundamental objection to Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty—its moral “indifference,” its assumption that it did not matter whether the people of a territory voted slavery “up or down.” “Moral principle,” Lincoln believed, was what “unites us in the North.” By the same token, the agitation of abolitionists and Radical Republicans helped to embed moral principle in the public mind, enabling—or compelling—politicians to take antislavery ground.

In the mass political system created during the Age of Jackson, leading politicians like Lincoln both reflected and helped to create public opinion. Speaking of William H. Seward, Wendell Phillips observed, “It is worth while to understand his course…. His position decides that of millions.” But by the same token, as Phillips knew well, the abolitionists helped to “create a public sentiment which will embolden men like Seward to speak their thoughts.” Never had the power of public opinion in a democracy been more evident than in the political earthquake of 1854–56, when leading politicians struggled to fathom and keep up with rapid shifts in popular sentiments.
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During the 1856 campaign, John Murray Forbes, a Boston railroad magnate and investor in southern plantations (and the man who handled the American investments of Alexis de Tocqueville), commented warily on the transformation he observed overtaking northern public opinion. Abolitionists, he wrote to a business associate, had little “direct influence” on party politicians. But the idea of “the wrong of slavery,” twenty years earlier confined to “a few fanatic men, and…enthusiastic women,” had now penetrated the northern consciousness. Forbes hoped for a Frémont victory so that the issue of expanding slavery could be settled once and for all before the future of the institution itself came into question. For were “northern feeling” against slavery to grow in the next four years “as fast as it has grown for four years past,” a “flood more dangerous and more sweeping than now” might well ensue, endangering slavery and the Union (and, of course, Forbes’s southern holdings).
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