The Fiery Trial (21 page)

In these speeches, Lincoln elaborated more fully than at any other time in his career a vision of northern society and “the true, genuine principle of free labor.” In the free states, Lincoln told an audience at the Wisconsin State Fair in late September 1859,

Lincoln’s ideal America, the world of small independent producers, should not be confused with the humble self-sufficiency of his youth. In his Wisconsin address and in a lecture on discoveries and inventions he delivered a number of times between 1858 and 1860, Lincoln spoke, rather, of an interconnected society of farms, shops, and mercantile establishments, of new inventions, improving agriculture, and a constantly rising standard of living. He advised farmers to abandon traditional ways in favor of new methods of plowing and crop rotation and new fertilizers, seeds, and agricultural machinery. Lincoln chided Young America for excessive materialism, but could not suppress his own enthusiasm for the globalized consumerism the market revolution had brought to the United States—“cotton fabrics from Manchester and Lowell,…silk from France; furs from the Arctic regions…tea from China, and spices from India.” Inventions and the circulation of material goods, Lincoln declared, had made possible not only a continual improvement in the standard of living, but intellectual advancement as well—liberation from the “slavery of the mind.” This was the engine of progress in free society.
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Lincoln’s vision of northern life arose from the world he knew: agrarian and small-town Illinois, with its widely dispersed farm ownership, small-scale manufacturing, numerous family-owned businesses, and rising living standards during the decade of the 1850s. In Springfield, where Lincoln had become one of the wealthiest residents, the gap between the classes was growing, and what his wife called “palaces of homes” were rising during the 1850s. But many of the richest residents had in fact begun life in humble circumstances. In Illinois as a whole, the majority of male heads of household (although not the seven-eighths Lincoln claimed in one speech) owned productive property. Lincoln’s understanding of wage labor as a permanent feature of northern life, but a temporary status for individuals, still seemed plausible. The free-labor ideology seemed far less appropriate to the urban centers and factory towns of the Northeast, where a permanent wage-earning class had come into existence, inequalities of wealth were increasing, and wages had stagnated during the 1850s. This was not a world Lincoln knew or found easy to explain. In free society, he believed, every man controlled his own destiny. If one did not rise above the condition of wage-earner, it was “not the fault of the system,” as advocates of slavery claimed, “but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.”
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Lincoln had little sense of the emerging class relations of an industrializing society. He spoke of economic relations as a “race of life,” a metaphor that dated back at least as far as Adam Smith and that encapsulated a meritocratic view of social justice in which individuals competed for advancement and success went to the most talented, so long as the competition was fair. In March 1860, Lincoln lectured in Connecticut at the height of a strike that paralyzed shoe manufacturing throughout New England (involving 20,000 workers, it was the largest strike in American history before the Civil War). Fitzhugh saw strikes as symptoms of the failure of free society. To Lincoln, they exemplified the superiority of free labor to slave: “I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers
can
strike.” But as the speech made clear, Lincoln understood striking essentially as leaving one’s job to find another. He never really confronted the implications for “free society” if wage labor was not simply a way station for a young “beginner” on the road to economic independence, but a large and permanent feature of economic life. Ironically, the Civil War would give a powerful impetus to the very economic forces that undermined the free-labor world of Lincoln’s America.
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Despite its palpable limitations, Lincoln’s invocation of the free-labor ideology added a powerful new dimension to his antislavery outlook. It took the slavery controversy out of the realm of moral judgments and made it, as the
New York Times
put it, a matter of “social and political economy,” emphasizing the threat the institution posed to the economic self-interest of white northerners and the prosperity of the entire nation. Whether or not one cared about the plight of the slave, the prospect of slavery expanding westward threatened the promise of social advancement, the key attribute of free society. As Lincoln explained,

And without the safety valve of westward expansion, would not northern society eventually come to resemble the rigidly class-stratified economic order of the Old World, thus fatally undermining the promise of American exceptionalism?

Some Republicans invoked the idea of free labor in an explicitly racist manner. Their language suggested that the presence of blacks in the territories, not the presence of slavery, degraded white labor. A month after Lincoln spoke in Ohio, Salmon P. Chase expressed his concern over a tendency in the party “to lower our principles…to talk of white labor against negro labor rather than of free labor against slave labor.” Lincoln himself on occasion spoke of the importance of “free white men” having access to the territories. But he continued to insist that the Declaration of Independence, America’s “Charter of Freedom” with its bedrock principle of a universal right to the pursuit of happiness—now defined as enjoyment of the fruits of one’s labor—“applies to the slave as well as to ourselves.” “I want every man,” he said at New Haven in March 1860, “to have the chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he
can
better his condition.”
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IV

T
HE
S
ENATE CAMPAIGN
and his speeches of 1859 offered the first full airing of Lincoln’s views on the rights of black Americans and of how he situated himself on the spectrum of contemporary racial thought. In a society deeply imbued with racism, incessant Democratic charges that “Negro equality” was “the necessary, logical, and inevitable sequence of [Republican] policies,” as one congressman put it, posed a serious problem for the party. Lincoln was hardly the only Republican leader to struggle to find a consistent response. “If we suffer the Dems to present the issue which Douglas offers…to wit the equality of the black with the white race,” wrote an Indiana Republican, “we shall be beaten…from this time forward.”

Compounding the Republican dilemma was the fact that in antebellum America ideas about race and nationality were confused and contested. Contradictions abounded even in advanced antislavery circles. Benjamin F. Wade, the Radical senator from Ohio, for example, supported civil equality for blacks but freely used the word “nigger” in his private correspondence. Throughout his political career, William H. Seward defended the right of free blacks to vote. Under the Constitution, he maintained, “a white man…was no better than a black man.” But Seward also described the “African race” as an exotic element in American life, incapable of “assimilation and absorption.”
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As Benjamin Stanton, a Republican member of Congress from Ohio, put it in 1859, a “great variety of sentiment” existed within the party “as to the political and civil rights” to which blacks were entitled. Some Republicans tried to ignore the entire question, dismissing Democratic racism as an appeal to “low, vulgar prejudice.” Others insisted that their party’s goal was not so much to benefit blacks as to preserve the western territories for free white labor. A few Radicals, most notably Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, forthrightly condemned racism and insisted that free blacks ought to enjoy precisely the same rights as white Americans.
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Complicating the situation further, most Americans distinguished sharply between different kinds of rights. Nearly all Republicans, like Lincoln, agreed that blacks were entitled to the natural rights of mankind, as enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. Most, but by no means all, also felt that basic civil rights—protections of individual liberty and security of person and property—ought to be enjoyed by free blacks. Political rights were another question entirely. These were regulated by the individual states, and Republicans differed widely on whether they should be extended to free blacks. Social rights were even more contentious. “Social equality” was more a term of abuse than a legal or analytical category. It implied support for interracial sexual relations and marriage, which most white Americans viewed with disgust and which nearly every state, North and South, prohibited by law. Even the most radical Republicans believed that social rights stood outside the ken of legislation.
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Republicans’ racial outlooks were strongly affected by geographical and ideological differences and differences in political antecedents. Former Democrats seemed more prone to use overtly racist language than former Whigs. Radical Republicans were far more committed to civic and political equality for free blacks than other members of the party. Salmon P. Chase, Thaddeus Stevens, Joshua Giddings, George Julian, and Republican leaders in New England like Sumner had long fought to repeal laws discriminating against northern blacks and to guarantee their right to vote. Chase insisted on the repeal of Ohio’s Black Laws as part of the 1849 political bargain that elevated him to the U.S. Senate in exchange for Free Soilers, who held the balance of power in the state legislature, throwing their support to the Democrats. The repeal allowed free blacks to enter Ohio without posting a bond, send their children to public schools, and testify in court against whites. Overnight, Ohio went from being one of the most restrictive northern states with regard to black rights to one of the most tolerant.
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Even in New England, where five states allowed black men to vote, a Republican newspaper described the organization as “the white man’s party” and charged the Democrats with “fighting for more niggers and slavery.” Nonetheless, racism seemed far more prevalent among western Republicans than eastern. Benjamin Stanton of Ohio told Congress in 1860 that in the entire Northwest not one Republican in a thousand favored “extending equal social and political privileges to the negroes.” He went on to add, however, that blacks were entitled to “certain natural, inherent, and inalienable rights…. The right to live, the right to the enjoyment of a man’s own earnings, the right of locomotion, to go from place to place” (the rights, that is, of free labor).
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Similar crosscurrents characterized the Illinois Republican party. When the legislature enacted its “Negro exclusion” law in 1853, which included a provision for auctioning black persons who entered the state and could not pay a fine, Norman Judd, soon to become the state Republican chairman, told the Senate that the title should be amended to read “An Act to establish perpetual slavery in Illinois.” In 1857 and 1859, a majority of the Republican members of the legislature supported amending the Black Laws to allow blacks to testify in court and attend public schools, but unanimous Democratic opposition plus the votes of more conservative Republicans defeated the proposals. Richard Yates, like Lincoln a party leader in central Illinois, denounced the Black Laws as inhumane and called for their repeal; this did not prevent his election as governor in 1860. On the other hand, many Republicans, including Lyman Trumbull, who had fought to eradicate the state’s indenture system in the 1840s, freely employed antiblack rhetoric. Republicans, Trumbull declared in 1858, “want…nothing to do with” blacks. A year later he reiterated, “We are for the free white man, and for making white labor acceptable and honorable, which it can never be when negro slave labor is brought into competition with it.” Trumbull’s “noble stand” against “negro suffrage, personal negro rights, etc.,” one constituent reported, had had a “telling effect” among voters previously reluctant to support the Republican party.
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Efforts to assess Lincoln’s own racial outlook run the danger of exaggerating the importance of race in his thinking. Race is our obsession, not Lincoln’s. Other than in 1857–58, this was not a subject to which he devoted much attention before the Civil War. Many aspects of the slavery controversy—the rights of free labor, domination of the federal government by the Slave Power, the way slavery violated basic American values—were only marginally related to race. Although he carefully read proslavery books and newspapers, Lincoln evinced no interest in his era’s extensive literature of racial theorizing, with its predictions about racial destinies and debates over ethnography, separate genesis, and inborn racial difference. What was “political” or “strategic” in Lincoln’s statements during the 1858 campaign was not his disavowal of racial equality, but that he felt the need to outline his views on race at all.
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Nonetheless, it is clear that while Lincoln had disengaged from many aspects of frontier culture and was hardly unwilling to take unpopular political positions—as his long career as a Whig stalwart demonstrated—he shared many of the prejudices of the society in which he lived. Lincoln used the word “nigger” privately and, occasionally, in public. He enjoyed going to blackface minstrel shows, and his seemingly endless repertoire of stories and jokes included overtly racist humor.
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As we have seen, when pressed by Douglas in the campaign of 1858, Lincoln disavowed belief in black citizenship and civil and political equality. There is no reason to think that Lincoln, at this point in the development of his ideas, was not sincere in these statements. On the other hand, he consistently emphasized that blacks were entitled to enjoy the natural rights of mankind, especially the right to the fruits of their labor, a position that undoubtedly cost him votes in parts of Illinois. His definition of equality as an aspirational principle whose full accomplishment lay in the future could be taken to imply the possibility of improvement in the black condition.