The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (56 page)

When the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was first proposed, at the North there was literally “nobody” in favor of it. In February, 1854, our legislature met in called, or extra, session.
From them Douglas sought an indorsement of his then pending measure of repeal. In our legislature were about seventy Democrats to thirty Whigs. The former held a caucus, in which it was resolved to give Douglas the desired indorsement. Some of the members of the caucus bolted—would not stand it—and they now divulge the secrets. They say that the caucus fairly confessed that the repeal was wrong, and they pleaded the determination to indorse it solely on the ground that it was necessary to sustain Douglas. Here we have the direct evidence of how the Nebraska bill obtained its strength in Illinois. It was given, not in a sense of right, but in the teeth of a sense of wrong, to sustain Douglas. So Illinois was divided. So New England for Pierce, Michigan for Cass, Pennsylvania for Buchanan, and all for the Democratic party.

And when by such means they have got a large portion of the Northern people into a position contrary to their own honest impulses and sense of right, they have the impudence to turn upon those who do stand firm, and call them sectional. Were it not too serious a matter, this cool impudence would be laughable, to say the least. Recurring to the question, “Shall slavery be allowed to extend into United States territory now legally free?” This is a sectional question—that is to say, it is a question in its nature calculated to divide the American people geographically. Who is to blame for that? Who can help it? Either side can help it; but how? Simply by yielding to the other side; there is no other way; in the whole range of possibility there is no other way. Then, which side shall yield? To this, again, there can be but one answer—the side which is in the wrong. True, we differ as to which side is wrong, and we boldly say, let all who really think slavery ought to be spread into free territory, openly go over against us; there is where they rightfully belong. But why should any go who really think slavery ought not to spread? Do they really think the right ought to yield to the wrong? Are they afraid to stand by the
right? Do they fear that the Constitution is too weak to sustain them in the right? Do they really think that by right surrendering to wrong the hopes of our Constitution, our Union, and our liberties can possibly be bettered?

The Republican candidate, Frémont, had been defeated in November, but the Republicans had made substantial gains in local and state elections. They had also polled a large national vote. As a result there was much rejoicing in the new party, and its prospects looked bright. A banquet was given in Chicago at the Tremont House which was attended by three hundred good party men from Northern Illinois—Lincoln among them. At this banquet the phrase “1860!—There’s a good time coming, boys!” appeared on the printed program. President Pierce had delivered his last annual message to Congress only a few days before this banquet was held. He was a Northern President who was wholeheartedly devoted to the Southern cause. In response to a toast, Lincoln took the opportunity to attack Pierce’s message. He also defines here his idea of the relationship between public opinion and popular government.

December 10, 1856

W
E
HAVE
another annual Presidential message. Like a rejected lover making merry at the wedding of his rival, the President [Pierce] felicitates himself hugely over the late Presidential election. He considers the result a signal triumph of good principles and good men, and a very pointed rebuke of bad ones. He says the people did it. He forgets that the “people,” as he complacently calls only those who voted for Buchanan, are in a minority of the whole people by about four hundred thousand
votes—one full tenth of all the votes. Remembering this, he might perceive that the “rebuke” may not be quite as durable as he seems to think—that the majority may not choose to remain permanently rebuked by that minority.

The President thinks the great body of us Frémonters, being ardently attached to liberty, in the abstract, were duped by a few wicked and designing men. There is a slight difference of opinion on this. We think he, being ardently attached to the hope of a second term, in the concrete, was duped by men who had liberty every way. He is the cat’s-paw. By much dragging of chestnuts from the fire for others to eat, his claws are burnt off to the gristle, and he is thrown aside as unfit for further use. As the fool said of
King Lear
, when his daughters had turned him out of doors, “He’s a shelled peascod.”

So far as the President charges us “with a desire to change the domestic institutions of existing States,” and of “doing everything in our power to deprive the Constitution and the laws of moral authority,” for the whole party on belief, and for myself on knowledge, I pronounce the charge an unmixed and unmitigated falsehood.

Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion can change the government practically just so much. Public opinion, on any subject, always has a “central idea,” from which all its minor thoughts radiate. That “central idea” in our political public opinion at the beginning was, and until recently has continued to be, “the equality of men.” And although it has always submitted patiently to whatever of inequality there seemed to be as matter of actual necessity, its constant working has been a steady progress toward the practical equality of all men. The late Presidential election was a struggle by one party to discard that central idea and to substitute for it the opposite idea that slavery is right in the abstract, the workings of which as a central idea may be the perpetuity of human slavery and its extension to all countries
and colors. Less than a year ago the Richmond
Enquirer
, an avowed advocate of slavery, regardless of color, in order to favor his views, invented the phrase “State equality,” and now the President, in his message, adopts the
Enquirer’s
catch-phrase, telling us the people “have asserted the constitutional equality of each and all of the States of the Union as States.” The President flatters himself that the new central idea is completely inaugurated; and so indeed it is, so far as the mere fact of a Presidential election can inaugurate it. To us it is left to know that the majority of the people have not yet declared for it, and to hope that they never will. All of us who did not vote for Mr. Buchanan, taken together, are a majority of four hundred thousand.

But in the late contest we were divided between Frémont and Fillmore. Can we not come together for the future? Let every one who really believes, and is resolved, that free society is not and shall not be a failure, and who can conscientiously declare that in the past contest he has done only what he thought best—let every such one have charity to believe that every other one can say as much. Thus let bygones be bygones; let past differences as nothing be; and with steady eye on the real issue, let us reinaugurate the good old “central ideas” of the republic. We can do it. The human heart is with us; God is with us. We shall again be able not to declare that “all States as States are equal,” nor yet that “all citizens as citizens are equal,” but to renew the broader, better declaration, including both these and much more, that “all men are created equal.”

The Dred Scott decision had been made public a few days after Buchanan’s inauguration. Douglas had been invited to speak in Springfield on June 12 to defend the decision. Lincoln had been present at this occasion. The crux of Douglas’s argument had been that his principle of popular sovereignty was the panacea that would solve all difficulties. So far as the Dred Scott decision was concerned, it was simply the duty of every citizen to submit to any decision that might be made by the highest court of the land. Then, through popular sovereignty, people in the territories would be able to decide for themselves whether free or slave states should be formed in these areas. Douglas, furthermore, stated that if equality were granted the Negro, every slave must be freed, and Negroes would have to be permitted to intermarry with the whites. In the same Hall of Representatives in which Douglas had spoken, Lincoln made his reply. In the speech he delivered that night may be seen the foreshadowing of the arguments he was to use during his formal debates with Douglas in 1858.

The “rebellion in Utah” to which Lincoln alludes was restlessness among the Mormons who had attempted to escape from the jurisdiction of the United States in 1847-48 when they settled in the Great Salt Lake Valley. The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the Mexican War had again placed them under United States law. They applied for Utah’s admission into the Union as a state or territory in 1849, and in 1850 Utah had been admitted as a territory. The Mormons, however, were still insurgent; several outbursts of violence between them and Federal troops took place, and later in 1857 the famous Mountain Meadows massacre occurred
.

The election which had just been held in Kansas on June 15 was for delegates to a constitutional convention. The Free State men there, who had been tricked again and again in fraudulent elections at which proslavery supporters from Missouri entered
the territory to vote illegally, were suspicious of the proposal to draw up a constitution. They refrained from voting; fewer than one-fourth of the registered voters went to the polls; proslavery delegates met at Lecompton, and the long controversy over the constitution named for that town began
.

June 26, 1857

F
ELLOW-CITIZENS
: I am here tonight, partly by the invitation of some of you, and partly by my own inclination. Two weeks ago Judge Douglas spoke here on the several subjects of Kansas, the Dred Scott decision, and Utah. I listened to the speech at the time, and have the report of it since. It was intended to controvert opinions which I think just, and to assail (politically, not personally) those men who, in common with me, entertain those opinions. For this reason I wished then, and still wish, to make some answer to it, which I now take the opportunity of doing.

I begin with Utah. If it prove to be true, as is probable, that the people of Utah are in open rebellion to the United States, then Judge Douglas is in favor of repealing their territorial organization, and attaching them to the adjoining states for judicial purposes. I say, too, if they are in rebellion, they ought to be somehow coerced to obedience; and I am not now prepared to admit or deny that the judge’s mode of coercing them is not as good as any. The Republicans can fall in with it without taking back anything they have ever said. To be sure, it would be a considerable backing down by Judge Douglas from his much-vaunted doctrine of self-government for the Territories; but this is only additional proof of what was very plain from the beginning, that that doctrine was a mere deceitful pretense for the benefit of slavery. Those who could not see that much in the Nebraska Act itself, which forced governors, and secretaries, and judges on the people of the Territories without their choice or consent,
could not be made to see, though one should rise from the dead.

But in all this, it is very plain the judge evades the only question the Republicans have ever pressed upon the Democracy in regard to Utah. That question the judge well knew to be this: “If the people of Utah shall peacefully form a State constitution tolerating polygamy, will the Democracy admit them into the Union?” There is nothing in the United States Constitution or law against polygamy; and why is it not a part of the judge’s “sacred right of self-government” for the people to have it, or rather to keep it, if they choose? These questions, so far as I know, the judge never answers. It might involve the Democracy to answer them either way, and they go unanswered.

As to Kansas. The substance of the judge’s speech on Kansas is an effort to put the free-State men in the wrong for not voting at the election of delegates to the constitutional convention. He says: “There is every reason to hope and believe that the law will be fairly interpreted and impartially executed, so as to insure to every
bona fide
inhabitant the free and quiet exercise of the elective franchise.”

It appears extraordinary that Judge Douglas should make such a statement. He knows that, by the law, no one can vote who has not been registered; and he knows that the free-State men place their refusal to vote on the ground that but few of them have been registered. It is possible that this is not true, but Judge Douglas knows it is asserted to be true in letters, newspapers, and public speeches, and borne by every mail and blown by every breeze to the eyes and ears of the world. He knows it is boldly declared that the people of many whole counties, and many whole neighborhoods in others, are left unregistered; yet he does not venture to contradict the declaration, or to point out how they can vote without being registered; but he just slips along, not seeming to know there is any such question of fact, and complacently declares: “There is
every reason to hope and believe that the law will be fairly and impartially executed, so as to insure to every
bona fide
inhabitant the free and quiet exercise of the elective franchise.”

I readily agree that if all had a chance to vote, they ought to have voted. If, on the contrary, as they allege, and Judge Douglas ventures not to particularly contradict, few only of the free-State men had a chance to vote, they were perfectly right in staying from the polls in a body.

By the way, since the judge spoke, the Kansas election has come off. The judge expressed his confidence that all the Democrats in Kansas would do their duty—including “free-State Democrats,” of course. The returns received here as yet are very incomplete; but so far as they go, they indicate that only about one-sixth of the registered voters have really voted; and this, too, when not more, perhaps, than one-half of the rightful voters have been registered, thus showing the thing to have been altogether the most exquisite farce ever enacted. I am watching with considerable interest to ascertain what figure “the free-State Democrats” cut in the concern. Of course they voted—all Democrats do their duty—and of course they did not vote for slave-State candidates. We soon shall know how many delegates they elected, how many candidates they had pledged to a free State, and how many votes were cast for them.