The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (9 page)

Owing to the peculiar structure of the American government in which each state, regardless of its size or importance, is entitled to send two representatives to the Senate, the South held a control over this important body that was out of all proportion to her population or wealth. In 1850, the South had a fairly static population of about nine million people (nearly four million of whom were slaves). The North had a population of almost fourteen million which was increasing rapidly. With her greater population, the North could control the House of Representatives; since the number of states North and South were evenly balanced, the South could sway the Senate, and with the help of the Northern Democrats, she could dominate it. Each state that applied for admission to the Union endangered a balance already too delicately poised to suit the South. Thus the admission of a new state became a matter of tremendous importance. In a situation in which voting was likely to be decided on a purely sectional basis, two new senators could swing power to the section that had succeeded in bringing in another ally.

In 1849, California applied for admission as a free state. Her entry into the Union would give the North sixteen free states to the South’s fifteen. The South began to murmur threats of secession; she realized that in the battle of population
and wealth she must eventually lose. If she were to become a separate nation she would be free from Northern restrictions; she could set up a form of government that would be planned to protect her “peculiar institution” of slavery. In order to appease the South and hold the Union together, the Compromise of 1850 was drawn up under the sponsorship of Henry Clay. It granted the North the admission of California as a free state and abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia; it gave the South three concessions—the organization of Utah and New Mexico as territories that were to be permitted to enter the Union as either free or slave states as soon as they had sufficient population to warrant statehood; a satisfactory settlement of the boundary dispute between Texas and New Mexico, with Federal assumption of the national debt incurred by Texas during her brief existence as an independent nation; and, most important of all for its influence on future events, a new and harsher fugitive slave law. This law permitted escaped slaves to be retaken anywhere in the United States, brought before Federal courts where the slave was not to be allowed to testify in his own behalf, and then, if proof of ownership was established, the slave was to be returned to the South by Federal marshals who could call upon citizens to assist them if necessary. Anyone aiding a fugitive slave was liable to a fine of one thousand dollars and to a suit for damages which could be brought by his owner. This act, as the people of the North bitterly interpreted it, put the United States Government into the slave trade, and made it possible for anyone to be summoned from his home to help run down a Negro fugitive with dogs and guns.

The Compromise of 1850 served about as well as putting a stove lid over a volcano would. The aged Calhoun, who had once sponsored nullification, died denouncing the compromise measure. The North must guarantee the South perpetual equality in the government by constitutional amendment, he
said, and she must stop this endless agitation over slavery. Let free speech be stifled if necessary—it was less important than preserving the property rights of Southern slaveowners.

Daniel Webster lost the respect of his New England followers when he spoke in defense of the measure on March 7, 1850. It was his farewell gesture. He died in 1852, only a few months after the death of his life-long rival, Henry Clay. The old order was passing; the great men of the second generation of American statesmen who had held the nation together by a series of compromises, made this one last effort to keep it intact by the only means they knew. They were commanding the sun to stand still. Geology, climate, mechanization and the drive for industrial expansion were forcing the sections apart. The quiet legislative give-and-take methods of the early half of the nineteenth century were no longer sufficient to overcome the tremendous disparities between the North and the South. And under all the economic substrata ran the still deeper current of the moral issue of slavery—an issue that divided churches, brought the intellectuals of the day into the struggle and added the emotional fervor of a holy crusade to the already explosive situation.

Yet for all its obvious shortcomings, the Compromise of 1850 held the two hostile sections together in a sort of armed peace for a period of four years. And then, surprisingly enough, the whole matter was thrown into open agitation again, not by a Southern leader, but by a Northern one. Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s brother alumnus of the political debating society that had had its headquarters in Joshua Speed’s store, was the man who, more than any other one person, was responsible for the re-opening of the slavery issue.

While Lincoln remained in obscurity, riding the circuit to try petty lawsuits in provincial courts, Douglas had gone on from conquest to conquest. He had become judge of the
supreme court of Illinois, Congressman, Senator and one of the outstanding leaders of the Democratic party. He was four years younger than Lincoln and his opposite in every way. He was as aggressive as Lincoln was reserved; as winning in speech and personal presence as Lincoln was awkward. He was an outstanding example of an extroverted personality—whereas Lincoln, for all his ability to mix with other men and hold them entranced by his stories, was basically an introvert.

Even in their physical appearance the two men were opposite types. Lincoln was six feet four. Douglas was hardly more than five feet high. Lincoln had a thin narrow face supported by a long scrawny neck. Douglas had a huge round head set close upon massive shoulders. Lincoln was slow in movement, heavy and difficult to get under way. Douglas was quick, excitable and filled with a vast energy. These characteristics are not unimportant in determining a man’s attitude toward the world. Douglas had all the small man’s urge for the power needed to satisfy his personal vanity. Lincoln had the casual tolerance of a tall man who can look down upon the foibles and weaknesses of his fellow men with as much ease as he can view the tops of their heads.

Douglas had been born in Vermont but had gone to Illinois at an early age and risen to prominence there. He had become a Westerner by sympathy and economic interest, and he had that curious attachment for the South which Westerners often have. His greatest ambition was to build up the new West, to see it civilized, crossed by railroads and made an important part of the country. His political acumen made it easy for him to see that in working for the West he would also be furthering himself—he might even obtain the Presidency as a result of his maneuvers. His defenders, however, steadfastly maintain that what he did in connection with the Kansas-Nebraska Act was completely divorced from all personal interest.

He was Chairman of the Committee on Territories, a position
that enabled him to supervise any legislation regarding territorial matters, see that the act was written to suit his will and then be in a position to push it through Congress. The Compromise of 1850 had apparently settled for the time being the endlessly disputed question of the extension of slavery. Even the widespread opposition to the fugitive slave law had somewhat died down in the North by 1854. Douglas re-opened the whole matter. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, introduced into the Senate under his auspices, provided that the huge territory from which the states of Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and parts of Colorado and Wyoming were later carved out, was to be organized into two large sections, Kansas and Nebraska, and that the issue of slavery in these new sections was to be determined, not by Congress, but by the people who would settle there. This was in direct opposition to the principle laid down in 1820 under the terms of the Missouri Compromise which held that all the land acquired under the Louisiana Purchase north of 36°30’ (except Missouri itself) should be free from slavery. And it conflicted in spirit, if not in letter, with the intentions of the Compromise of 1850, which had been written to maintain peace between the sections.

The principle of “popular sovereignty,” or “squatter sovereignty” as it was called in derision, seems at first to be a harmless enough political idea. Let the people who were to live in a new country decide whether slavery should exist there or not. Unfortunately, the plan did not work out so well. A mad scramble took place on the part of both slavery and anti-slavery men to control the new territory. Instead of orderly governmental processes and free elections, frontier violence and mob rule dominated.

The Act was put through the Senate under Douglas’s skillful direction, but it met with great opposition in the House, and was finally passed there only by iron-handed party discipline in one of the most turbulent sessions in the history of
that body. On May 30, 1854, it was signed by Franklin Pierce, New Hampshire-born President, who was willing to serve the political purposes of the South more openly than any Southern-born President would have dared to do. The bill became a law; Douglas won his victory—but it was a victory that was to ruin him politically, break the strength of the Democratic party, eventually make his rival, Lincoln, President of the United States and—more than any one act of legislation ever passed by Congress—it was to breed civil war.

Opposition in the North was immediate and violent. Even while the Act was still in Congress, hundreds of mass meetings were held in Northern cities. Editors, clergymen and other intellectuals denounced the measure. The populace was wrought up to a frenzy that spread across the land, growing in fervor and moral earnestness as it spread. The amazing success of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, which had been published in 1852, and immediately had gone into printing after printing, had shown that Northern sentiment—in contradistinction to Northern political practice—was strongly opposed to the institution of slavery. Now that the issue had been forced upon the country by Douglas’s ill-advised Nebraska Act, men who had hitherto been willing to let slavery alone were stirred into activity. Abolitionism became respectable. The fugitive slave law was openly defied. The North was in revolt against Southern aggression, for it was now obvious to everyone that the South had no intention of keeping slavery within its present bounds. The move for the annexation of Cuba with which Pierce had been toying, and the attempt of the South to meddle in Central American affairs in order to promote insurrection (and slavery), became apparent as imperialistic gestures of a Southern oligarchy that was on the march to obtain new areas in which they could carry on a type of economy based on human exploitation of the crudest and most naked kind.

Douglas was the originator of this move, but the slave-holders
were quick to follow his lead. Whatever he may have hoped to gain in popularity in the South was more than offset by the hatred that rose up against him in the North. He was made the object of newspaper attack; ministers preached sermons in which they portrayed him as the incarnation of the devil; he was burned in effigy in dozens of Northern cities. A group of Ohio women sent him thirty pieces of silver. His own Illinois constituents turned against him. When he came back to Chicago to make an attempted extenuation, he was not allowed to speak. He tried vainly for two hours to silence a furious mob that howled at him until he had to give up in disgust.

Thousands of Northerners were compelled to realize that the issue of slavery could no longer be avoided. Among them was Abraham Lincoln, who rose up like a man awaking from a dream. He shook off his lethargy and began to take an active interest in political affairs. His first action was to take the stump to help Richard Yates be re-elected to Congress on the Whig ticket. But more important things were ahead for him. This was his opportunity and he knew it. Here was an issue—and an opponent—worth fighting against. And Douglas was an Illinois man whom Lincoln could meet on his own home ground.

The still-obscure Springfield lawyer neglected his own business to study American history and slavery as he had never studied before. He knew Douglas well, knew all his weaknesses, the chinks in the armor of his methods of reasoning, the manner of his speaking and all his tricks of oratory. Lincoln prepared himself to meet his adversary. He did not have to wait long for his opportunity.

There was a preliminary skirmish between the two men during the latter part of September, 1854. Then, on October 3, Douglas spoke at the State Fair in Springfield before a
large audience. The Democrats turned out in great numbers to lend support to their discredited hero. His speech, according to contemporary accounts, was a good defense of his position. On the next day, Lincoln replied to him, speaking in the Hall of Representatives in the State House.

The place and the time were ripe for a great speech, and Lincoln made one, the first really great speech of his career. In it he reviewed the history of slavery in the United States; he presented his own carefully thought-out arguments and marshaled facts and evidence against his wily opponent. What he said surprised Lincoln’s friends, who had not believed that this lawyer who had retired to private practice had the ability to oppose so successfully the leading political speaker of the Democratic party. This speech made Lincoln; he was called upon to repeat it, and he did so at Peoria,
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twelve days later, adding to it and replying to Douglas’s rebuttal.

Meanwhile, in the wave of resentment that had swept across the North as a result of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a great concourse of people had been called to meet together in Jackson, Michigan, on July 6. On this occasion a new political party had been formed—the Republican party. It was from the very beginning an anti-slavery party, sectional by nature. To it flocked the abolitionists, the dissatisfied Whigs and the disaffected Democrats. It even drew some of its strength from the short-lived Know-Nothing party which had been organized as a chauvinistically native American party, violently opposed to foreigners, Catholics and Negroes.