The Fiery Trial (22 page)

In some respects, what Lincoln did not say is as important as what he did. He could turn racism into a political weapon, as he had done early in his career against Van Buren and again in 1852 in a speech quoting a sailor’s sea chanty about a “bright Mullater” to criticize Franklin Pierce, the Democratic presidential candidate, for seeking antislavery votes by criticizing the Fugitive Slave Act. In the 1858 debates, Lincoln charged that Douglas’s policies, by promoting the spread of slavery, would also encourage “amalgamation.” But generally speaking, in the 1850s Lincoln’s comments on race came in response to Democratic charges of “Negro equality.” Unlike many contemporaries, he was not given to orations on the glories of the Anglo-Saxon “race” and its supposed love of liberty. He did not express contempt for free blacks, or refer to them as a vicious and degraded group, descriptions ubiquitous among Democrats and hardly unknown among Republicans. In his 1852 eulogy for Henry Clay he spoke of the “troublesome presence of the free negroes.” But later in the same paragraph, when he identified a “dangerous presence” in the United States, Lincoln referred not to free blacks, but to slavery itself. Lincoln justified discrimination on the basis not of innate racial inferiority but the will of the (white) majority in a political democracy. When speaking of black capacity his remarks were usually cautious and tentative. In his Springfield speech of July 1858, he said, “Certainly, the negro is not our equal in color—perhaps not in many other respects.” Even in the debate at Charleston, when he said the two races could never coexist in the same country on the basis of equality, the reason he advanced was “physical,” not moral or intellectual, difference.
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Lincoln’s personal dealings with blacks did not reveal prejudice. Springfield when Lincoln lived there was a small city (its population had not reached 10,000) with a tiny black population (171 persons in 1850). Nonetheless, Lincoln could not have been unaware of the black presence. In the 1850s, more than twenty black men, women, and children lived within three blocks of his house. He and his wife employed at least four free black women to work as domestic servants at one time or another. Lincoln befriended and gave free legal assistance to William Florville, the city’s most prosperous black resident, known as “Billy the Barber.” In 1857, Lincoln and Herndon paid a fine incurred by John Shelby, a free black resident of Springfield who had been jailed in New Orleans while working on a Mississippi River steamboat, securing his release. W. J. Davis, a former slave who lived in Bloomington, Illinois, and claimed during the Civil War to have been “personally acquainted” with Lincoln since the mid-1850s, described him as “a kind-hearted, sociable kind of man.”
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In 1860, the black community of Illinois numbered fewer than 8,000 in a population of over 1.7 million. How Lincoln in his heart of hearts viewed black people probably mattered less to this tiny group than his refusal to take a principled stand against racial inequality. He may not have fully embraced racism, but he did not condemn it. The most he would say, as at Peoria, was that in a democratic society, a “universal” prejudice could not be “safely disregarded,” regardless of whether it accorded with “justice and sound judgment.” This was an oddly agnostic position for a politician who repeatedly emphasized that the fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans lay in the former’s refusal to address the morality of slavery.

In at least some of his responses to the
Dred Scott
decision, Lincoln seemed to endorse the idea of free black citizenship. But, at a time when nearly all the rights of citizens derived from the states, Lincoln was not among the Illinois Republicans who spoke out against his state’s oppressive Black Laws, nor did he assist the members of the legislature who tried to have them modified. The black abolitionist H. Ford Douglas, a Virginia-born slave who escaped from bondage and moved to Chicago, claimed that in 1858 he asked both Lincoln and Trumbull to sign a petition for repeal of the Black Laws, whose provisions, Douglas observed, “would disgrace any Barbary State.” Both, Douglas related, refused. Lincoln had not thought through how free blacks could enjoy the opportunity to rise if denied physical mobility, access to education, testifying in court, and serving on juries—essential attributes of free society. Was there really a difference, asked Henry L. Dawes, a prominent Massachusetts Republican, between discriminatory laws like those of Illinois and the idea that “the negro has
no
rights which the white man is bound to respect”?
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Abolitionists saw the fights against slavery and racism as symbiotically related. Racism, as Frederick Douglass put it, constituted “the greatest of all obstacles in the way of the anti-slavery cause,” and he accused Republicans of betraying their own moral beliefs when they stood “opposed to Negro equality, to Negro advancement, to Negro suffrage, to Negro citizenship.” Lincoln, by contrast, saw the question of “Negro equality” as a false one, an attempt to “divert the public mind from the real issue—the extension or non-extension of slavery.” “Negro equality! Fudge!” Lincoln wrote in notes for a speech in 1858. “How long…shall there continue knaves to vend, and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagoguism as this?”
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In an undated fragment written in the 1850s, Lincoln mused on the logical absurdity of proslavery arguments:

The same problem, he continued, existed if the right to enslave another were grounded in superior intelligence, or simply in self-interest. But Lincoln failed to acknowledge that precisely the same argument could be made against laws, like those of Illinois, in which the white majority imposed all sorts of disabilities on the free black population.

Lincoln challenged prevailing prejudices when it came to blacks’ enjoyment of natural rights, but he would go no further. As was typical of Lincoln in the 1850s, his position occupied the middle ground of Republican opinion. In the context of the North as a whole, Lincoln’s views on race fell far short of abolitionist egalitarianism, but differed substantially from the virulent and gratuitous racism of the Democrats, not to mention Chief Justice Taney’s ruling in the case of
Dred Scott
. At this point in his career, Lincoln had not yet given serious thought to the role blacks might play in a post-slavery America. He distinguished between an entitlement to natural rights, which he always claimed for blacks, and membership in the American nation. “What I would most desire,” he explained at Springfield in 1858, “would be the separation of the white and black races”—that is, the colonization of blacks outside the United States.
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V

B
Y THE LATE
1850
S,
the American Colonization Society seemed moribund. The
New York Herald
called its annual convention an “old fogy affair.” In 1859, out of a black population, slave and free, of well over four million, the Society sent around 300 persons to Liberia. “Can anything be more ridiculous,” the
Herald
asked, “than keeping up such a society as this?”
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Yet at this very moment the idea of colonization experienced a revival within the Republican party. As in the days of Henry Clay, support for the idea centered in the border slave states and the lower Northwest.

The most avid Republican promoters of colonization were the Blair family: the venerable Francis P. Blair, once a close adviser to President Andrew Jackson and editor of the
Washington Globe
, the Democratic party’s organ in the nation’s capital, and his sons Francis Jr. (Frank) and Montgomery. As an editor and member of Jackson’s unofficial “kitchen cabinet,” the elder Blair had exerted enormous political influence in the 1830s and 1840s. Having joined the Republican party, he expected to do so again, as did his sons. The Blairs were self-important, indomitable, and, as critics of slavery living in slave states, courageous. In 1856, Frank Blair won election to Congress from St. Louis as an antislavery Democrat but soon switched parties, becoming the first Republican representative from a slave state. Two years later he began to manumit slaves he had inherited from his mother. Montgomery represented Dred Scott before the Supreme Court and his fellow Marylander Chief Justice Taney. The Blairs saw themselves as the vanguard of a movement that would rid the Upper South, and eventually the nation, of slavery and the black presence.

Colonization was central to the Blairs’ plan to speed the rise of the Republican party and the progress of gradual, compensated emancipation in border states where slavery was weak or in decline. The Blairs looked to Central America, not Africa, as the future homeland of black Americans and hoped that the promise of land and financial aid would make a colony attractive enough for a large number of blacks to settle there. Frank Blair developed an elaborate scheme, not unlike a proposal of Henry Clay’s in the 1830s, for Missouri to use the proceeds of public land sales to purchase the state’s slaves and transport them to Central America. This would be followed by an influx of white immigrants into Missouri and a restructuring of its economy on the model of the free-labor North. The Blairs believed that the United States should be reserved for “the Anglo-Saxon race,” while blacks, “worse than useless” in this country, would flourish in the tropics, to which they were naturally suited. They attacked slavery not on moral grounds but for degrading nonslaveholding whites and retarding southern economic development.
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The colonization movement had long been divided between those who saw it as a way of ridding the country of free blacks and others for whom it formed part of a long-term strategy for ending slavery. Despite their overt racism, the Blairs were firmly in the latter camp. Before the Civil War, no one, except perhaps John Brown, could conceive of a way to end slavery without the consent of slaveowners; there was simply no constitutional way that this could be accomplished. And it seemed impossible that whites would ever consent to emancipation unless coupled with the removal of the black population. Republican endorsement of colonization, the Blairs insisted, would be “an enabling act to the emancipationists of the South.” Colonization would refute the charge that abolition meant racial equality. In the late 1850s, Republican conventions in the border states endorsed colonization while simultaneously repudiating “negro equality and…all who favor negro equality.”
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The Blair plan would have the added bonus of expanding the American commercial presence in the Caribbean (the region would become “our India,” said Frank Blair) and blocking southern efforts to create a slave empire embracing the West Indies, Mexico, and Central America, an idea that gained increasing currency during the 1850s. In mid-decade, the filibusterer William Walker conquered Nicaragua, established himself as president, and during his brief reign legalized slavery and reopened the slave trade. Similar expeditions landed in Mexico, Ecuador, Honduras, and Cuba. Colonization, Frank Blair told Congress in 1858, would enable black emigrants to secure American access to “the intertropical region” while preventing “the propagation of slavery” there.
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During the late 1850s, Frank Blair tirelessly promoted the idea of colonization in speeches throughout the North and in letters to prominent Republicans. In 1860, he delivered a major speech at New York’s Cooper Institute one month before Lincoln’s celebrated oration at the same venue. In it, Blair touted colonization as “the only solution to the Negro question” and presented a curious proposal for the acquisition of tropical areas that would be open to settlement only by owners who emigrated with their slaves and promised them eventual freedom and landownership.
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The idea of colonization remained highly controversial in Republican ranks. Many Radicals shared the abolitionists’ conviction that such proposals, by denying that blacks were part of the American nation, added to the obstacles to racial equality within the United States. After Blair spoke in Chicago in 1858, the
Press and Tribune
felt compelled to chide him for “ignoring the moral and religious aspects of the slavery question, and basing all anti-slavery movements on the superior claims of the white race.” Others deemed the idea unworkable. But Blair won the support of a number of Republican leaders, including Senator James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin, the governors of Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Ohio, and such prominent members of Congress as Lyman Trumbull and James Ashley. Trumbull told the Senate that the “idea of the deportation of the free negro population” would become “part of the creed of the Republican party.” Most but by no means all of the Blairs’ supporters were westerners. But Hannibal Hamlin of Maine endorsed the plan, and even Charles Sumner, the party’s most stalwart defender of black rights, concluded that it did not violate “any principle of justice,” so long as emigration remained voluntary. Eastern Republican newspapers such as the
New York Times
and
New York Tribune
spoke favorably of the Blair plan.
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A variety of motives inspired these endorsements, including political expediency, racial prejudice, the belief that blacks were innately suited to a tropical climate, and a desire to assist slave-state Republicans. After Benjamin F. Wade told the Senate that he wanted his party to include colonization in its platform, a constituent commended him: “I like this new touch of colonizing the niggers. I believe practically it is a d——n humbug. But it will take with the people.” Whatever one thought of the idea, Charles Francis Adams wrote in 1859 after hearing Frank Blair speak in Boston, “we must respect it as coming from an earnest and sincere emancipationist in a slave state.”
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