Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (19 page)

At other points, he dispensed with humor and served logic straight up. Stephen Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty expressed an old American principle (based on even older English principles):
self-government. Should there be slavery, or not? Let the people decide. Lincoln agreed that men should govern themselves. That was “right—absolutely and eternally right.”

But, he argued, the application of self-government to the admission of slavery into Kansas and Nebraska “depends upon whether a Negro is
not
or
is
a man. If he is
not
a man, why in that case, he who
is
a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just as he pleases with him. But if the Negro
is
a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern
himself
?” Lincoln had screwed this point down pretty tight, but he gave it one more turn. “When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs
another
man, that is
more
than self-government—
that is despotism.” If you have a good thing and add something more to it, you make it better, said Douglas. Depends what you add, said Lincoln: if you add slavery to liberty, you negate and destroy it. Euclid was never more terse, Paine never more pointed.

The founding fathers marched through Lincoln’s speech—no longer dead and gone, but living presences. He invoked the “pure, fresh, free breath of the revolution” as he began his oration, and “the principle of the REVOLUTION” (Lincoln’s capital letters) as he wound up. He insisted that his position on slavery was the founders’ position. “The plain unmistakable spirit of [their] age towards slavery was hostility to the PRINCIPLE and toleration
ONLY BY NECESSITY” (Lincoln’s capitals). Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act had betrayed the founders. Lincoln wanted to return to their example, and he did it by citing three founding documents. Two of them expressed the founders’ hostility to slavery.

The first that Lincoln cited was the Northwest Ordinance. In discussing the prehistory of this law, he made a mistake. In the early 1780s, Virginia had ceded to Congress a claim, derived from its colonial charter, to the old Northwest (many of the original thirteen colonies had paper claims to vast chunks of North America). What had once belonged to the colony and state of Virginia would now belong to the United States.
In Peoria Lincoln said that Virginia, in ceding its claim, had stipulated that its former territory be free of slavery—a stipulation he attributed to Thomas Jefferson, then a member of Congress.

But neither Virginia nor Jefferson had made any such stipulation. What Jefferson had actually done, in 1784, was propose to Congress that the entire American West, from the Appalachians to the Mississippi, be free of slavery. His plan was rejected, but three years later (Jefferson was in Paris at the time, serving as minister to France) Congress revisited the subject and passed the Northwest Ordinance, banning slavery there. In later years, Lincoln
corrected the error.

But Lincoln was right to connect Jefferson in spirit with the Northwest Ordinance. The man who had wanted all of the West to be free certainly wanted the old Northwest to be free. By 1854 the Northwest Territory had become five states—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin—which were now, Lincoln said, “what Jefferson foresaw and intended—the happy home of teeming millions of free, white, prosperous people, and
no slave amongst them.” Lincoln was right to appeal to Jefferson—and shrewd: he appropriated the founder of Douglas’s party (Democrats claimed Jefferson and the first Republican Party as their direct ancestors). He also wrapped the Northwest Ordinance, via Jefferson, in the aura of the Revolution.

The second example of the founders’ hostility toward slavery that Lincoln cited was the Declaration of Independence. He called it “the sheet anchor of American republicanism,” the expression of “our ancient faith. . . . If the Negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal;’ and there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a
slave of another.” A sheet anchor is the strongest anchor a ship has, the last resort in a storm.

If there was no moral right in slavery, why then wasn’t Lincoln an abolitionist? Because the founders, he explained, had accepted the existence of slavery “BY NECESSITY” (his capital letters) in the third founding document he cited, the Constitution.

The Constitution gave slavery certain guarantees: Lincoln mentioned the protection of the slave trade for twenty years, the obligation to return fugitive slaves, and the three-fifths rule, whereby slaves were counted in the apportionment of the House of Representatives. These had been necessary concessions to get slave states to accept the Constitution, and Lincoln accepted them in that spirit. “[They are] in the constitution; and I do not . . . propose to destroy, or alter, or disregard the constitution. I stand to it, fairly,
fully, and firmly.”

The founders, said Lincoln, had accepted slavery out of necessity. But acknowledging necessity did not mean approving slavery. “Necessity drove [the founders] so far, and farther,
they would not go.” Therefore Lincoln would not go farther himself. “Let us turn slavery . . . back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of ‘necessity.’ Let us return it to the position our founders gave it, and there let it
rest in peace.”

In his eulogy for Henry Clay, Lincoln had rebuked extremists who rejected either the Declaration or the Constitution. In Peoria, and for the rest of his life, he presented himself as the man who upheld both.

Several times in the Peoria speech Lincoln emphasized the oldness of the founders. The Declaration was “my
ancient faith” and “our ancient faith”: “I love the sentiments of those old-time men,” he added a moment later. He may have intended a biblical echo; in the Book of Daniel, God is called “the Ancient of Days” (“the Ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow” [Daniel 7:9]). In his own mind, he was turning his premature decrepitude to advantage: his old, withered, dry eyes made him like those old-time men.

Lincoln gave the founders another feature often associated with age: disease. In one of his references to the Constitution, he noted that the words “slave” and “slavery” never appear in it. Fugitive slaves are referred to as “Person[s] held to service or labour”; the slave trade as the “importation” of “Persons.” “Thus,” said Lincoln, “the thing is hid away in the constitution, just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he
bleed to death.”
Those old-time men left a congenital illness, as well as an ancient faith. At least they had been ashamed of it.

How would Lincoln cut out the cancer? He gave hints only, none of them, he admitted, very attractive. Colonization was a possibility (“my first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia”), but he knew that could happen only over the long run. Letting former slaves live as freemen in America would create its own problems. Either they would remain a permanent class of “underlings” or they would become the social and political equals of whites. The first option might not be much better than slavery; white people would not accept the second. Lincoln included himself as a recalcitrant white person: “My own feelings
will not admit of ” complete equality.

Those were problems for the future. Lincoln’s goal at Peoria was to undo Douglas’s law and stop the spread of slavery. His climax was poetic, almost prophetic: “Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the
blood, of the Revolution.” In the Bible the Ancient of Days wears a white garment, and so do the souls of the saved: “These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 7:14). Lincoln wanted a political salvation; he hoped it would not be a bloody one.

At Peoria Lincoln laid out themes that he would return to for years: accept slavery where it was, out of necessity; stop it from going anywhere else, out of principle; send freed slaves somewhere else at some later time, but recognize meanwhile that they were men. Do all these things in the spirit of the founders. Lincoln claimed the Northwest Ordinance as an Illinoisan, he admired the Declaration as a reasoner from first principles, and he honored the Constitution as a lawyer. He loved the Revolution as a poet, no longer of death and decay (“the silent artillery of time”), but of a powerful animating spirit.

Eight

1855–1858: R
UNNING FOR
S
ENATE

I
N LATER YEARS
, L
INCOLN WOULD SAY THAT HE HAD NOT
“controlled events, but confess plainly that
events have controlled me.”

He knew how to poor-mouth himself in order to deflect unwanted attention, and this line was in part such a maneuver.
Don’t look at me, look at events (meanwhile, I will control all the events I can)
.

But Lincoln’s line also reflected the realism of the politician. You put your principles in order (if you have any). Then events bombard you with opportunities and conundrums. Politics is like making a journey on horseback that you have never made before. You may have directions, but they can be wrong. There may be roads, but they can turn out to be impassible or dead ends. Events always control you; they are the things you must deal with. How you deal with them is up to you.

The years following the Peoria speech placed both Lincoln and Douglas in a thicket of events as they fought for office. Along the way, they fought over the founders—each claiming them as guides and allies.

The first event, which their October speeches were made to affect, was the 1854 election in Illinois. It was a rebuke to Douglas—anti-Nebraska men won five of the state’s nine seats in the House of Representatives and a narrow majority in the Illinois legislature.

Until ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution in the next century, state legislatures selected those who would be sent to Washington as US senators. Lincoln hoped the legislature would send him to the Senate in 1855 alongside Douglas. The incumbent, who was standing for a second term, was a Douglas ally, James Shields, the man whom Lincoln had almost dueled.

The Illinois legislature had 100 members. When it met in February 1855, Lincoln won 45 votes on the first ballot to 41 for Shields. But 5 votes went to Lyman Trumbull, an anti-Nebraska Democrat from Alton, with the rest scattered. Trumbull was not well-served by photographs, which show pinched eyes peering through narrow spectacles. Trumbull’s supporters, who were already defying Douglas, could not go one step further and vote for an old Whig like Lincoln. On the seventh ballot, pro-Nebraska Democrats sprang a new candidate—Governor Joel Matteson. He, too, backed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but not so vehemently as Shields, and he might win some Democrats by appealing to party loyalty, or by simply
buying their votes. (Some things never change in Illinois.) Lincoln’s total, meanwhile, began to dwindle as his supporters lost heart. On the tenth ballot he asked his diehards to switch to Trumbull, making him senator.

It was hard, Lincoln wrote afterward, for more than forty men to give way to five, “and a less good humored man than I perhaps would not have
consented to it.” Mary Lincoln never forgave Mrs. Trumbull, who had been one of her best friends. But Lincoln wanted a united front to
put an anti-Nebraska man in the Senate. Later, that united front might unite behind him.

The next event to confront Lincoln and Douglas was the 1856 presidential election.

Anti-Nebraska men in northern states formed a new political party, bringing together Whigs and Democrats, Free Soilers and abolitionists. They took the name of Jefferson’s old party, the Republicans. In Illinois its leaders included Lincoln, Trumbull, and Owen Lovejoy, younger brother of the murdered abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy. Herndon was an enthusiastic member; John Stuart, a dyed-in-the-wool Whig, would not join it, and was aghast that Lincoln had.