Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (11 page)

Lincoln’s campaigning experience kept him alert not just to the importance of these cultural fault lines within public opinion, but to the often pivotal role of the religious affiliations of voters and candidates in shaping electoral outcomes. When, in the summer of 1846, he stood for election to Congress, his opponent was the formidable Methodist circuit-rider Peter Cartwright. During the final days of the campaign Lincoln discovered that the Democrats were slyly circulating defamatory charges that he was “an open scoffer at Christianity.” His private disclaimers failing to stop the smears, Lincoln arranged for the publication of a handbill setting out his religious position. “That I am not a member of any Christian Church,” he wrote, “is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.” Following his comfortable victory on August 3, Lincoln asked the editor of the
Illinois Gazette
to publish the text of the handbill as a means of laying Cartwright’s claims firmly and finally to rest.
¹⁶

Cartwright’s actions and Lincoln’s response indicated a political cosmos profoundly shaped by popular religious culture and especially by its most powerful element, the forces of evangelical Protestantism. The evangelical religion that blossomed during the popular religious insurgency of the early decades of the nineteenth century, the so-called Second Great Awakening, far from being sealed off into its own private world, exerted a potent political influence, encouraging civic responsibility and popular participation in public affairs, shaping party loyalties and agendas, and providing the coin of politics. When Lincoln wrote in the handbill, “I do not think I could myself, be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion,” and “[no] man has the right thus to insult the feelings, and injure the morals, of the community in which he may live,” he recognized both the social grip of religion and the duty of politicians to respect the religious sensibilities of voters. He had expressed similar sentiments three years earlier, in 1843, when privately explaining his failure to secure the Whig nomination for the congressional seat: “it was every where contended that no christian ought to go for me, because I belonged to no church, [and] was suspected of being a deist.” These influences, he judged, might not have been determinative, but “they were very strong” and “levied a tax of a considerable per cent upon my strength throughout the religious community.” He offered no complaint, however. Referring to the successful candidate, Edward D. Baker, who was a member of the Disciples of Christ (the “Christian” church of Alexander Campbell), he wrote tellingly: “As to his own church going for him, I think that was right enough.”
¹⁷

Under the mature second-party system both Whigs and Democrats annexed the support of elements within evangelical Protestantism and other Christian traditions, but each party projected itself differently toward that variegated constituency. Democrats offered a home to a variety of “outsider” religious groups, including those who had suffered at the hands of the recently disestablished churches. In contrast, Whigs made a bid for the support of evangelicals who, while committed to the classic Protestant virtues of self-control and self-discipline, also welcomed an interventionist government that would regulate social behavior and maintain moral standards in public life. The party’s publicists presented it as the friend of educational provision, temperance, and the humane treatment of those who stood in a dependent relationship to the state, including Indians. They commonly portrayed their opponents as atheists and religious perverts, the allies of Mormons, freethinkers, and Roman Catholics. In successive elections in the 1840s Whigs made much of their credentials as “the Christian party.”

Lincoln’s explanation of his failure to win the Whig nomination in 1843 was entirely consistent with this understanding of Whig political culture. He did not blame Christian influence alone for his defeat, but he was certain that Baker had been preferred at least in part because he was known to belong to a socially powerful and numerous Protestant denomination, while Lincoln belonged to no church and was understood to hold unorthodox beliefs. Lincoln also judged that his involvement in an absurd duel with James Shields, an episode about which he seems to have felt considerable embarrassment, even shame, had alienated necessary Christian support. It may even be that Lincoln’s temperance address to the Washingtonians of Springfield in 1842 had, as William Wolf has suggested, “rubbed many church members the wrong way” and acted as an additional liability at the Whig convention in 1843.
¹⁸
Lincoln’s experience did not mean that there was no room in the party for those tainted with religious heterodoxy. After all, Lincoln won the Whig nomination and the subsequent congressional election in 1846. But there were enough Whigs of conventional piety to make an issue of candidates’ religious orientation and moral standing.

Lincoln also reflected on the likelihood that, as a member of the Disciples, Baker had with few exceptions “got all that church.” Moreover, he noted, Mary Todd Lincoln and some of her relatives were Presbyterians, while others were Episcopalians, “and therefore, wherever it would tell, I was set down as either the one or the other.”
¹⁹
Lincoln was uncomfortable with religious sectarianism, but he knew that interdenominational conflict was an inseparable part of the experience of central Illinoisans, and that intense religious loyalties and antagonisms, and attitudes toward the proper role of government in sustaining a Christian republic, could determine their choice of party.
²⁰
Though the devout were to be found in all parties, and though local context mattered, certain denominations showed much stronger support for one party over another. Reform-minded, new-school Calvinists were strongly Whig; Democrats’ particular strength lay amongst Catholics, predestinarian “antimission” Baptists, and Protestants of a more liturgical, ritualist disposition. Many Methodists, Baptists, and old-school Calvinists rallied to Whiggery, though vast numbers in these churches, especially the southern-born, remained loyal to a Democratic party rooted in Jeffersonian tolerance of religious pluralism.

ILLINOIS PUBLIC OPINION AND THE ANTI-NEBRASKA FUSION MOVEMENT

Lincoln’s sensitivity to popular opinion would prove especially valuable during the period of political revolt and party confusion in the mid-1850s, when his Whig party ceased to exist. Illinois Whigs had stayed within range of their customary share of the vote during the fall elections of 1852, taking 42 percent of the ballots cast, and they even increased their congressional representation in Washington. Yet within four years, by the time of the next presidential contest, most of them had accompanied Lincoln into the Republican camp. Forming the majority in the new party, they helped it to an impressive sweep of state offices. Their votes for the Republicans’ first presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, came close to adding Illinois to the column of eleven free states which would support him in the electoral college.

During the complex process of party realignment even the most experienced political leaders kept only a tenuous grip on a volatile and unpredictable electorate. Lincoln, both as an observer of that upheaval and as one of those most deeply involved in forging the Republican coalition, combined a pragmatic respect for the realities of voters’ deeply held attitudes with a conviction that political leaders had the duty to crystallize into a coherent moral case what the public had begun only hesitantly to express. Lincoln’s natural political caution combined with his assured reading of Illinois opinion to help fashion a party that would challenge the Democrats far more successfully than the Whigs had ever done.

The two main parties in Illinois owed their stability and continuity after 1840 less to their political structures, which were relatively weak, than to the relevance of their principles to their supporters’ lives. Voters looked with suspicion on party organizers. It took time for them to accept that the discipline of party might be consistent with republican values. (Lincoln himself criticized the Democrats’ newfangled convention system early in his career, as “
subversive of individual freedom and private judgment,
” though in time he grew into a thorough-going party regular.)
²¹
Even at the height of the Whig-Democrat party system many voters switched parties or split their tickets. Parties lacked permanent, centralized governing councils, and had to depend on conventions, committees, private political clubs, and other short-term campaigning bodies for their institutional energy. In consequence, as the economic issues on which voters’ support had been built in the 1830s and 1840s lost their relevance, so party organization proved inadequate to maintain discipline. When two new clusters of public issues asserted themselves in the early 1850s, the party coalitions began to look ominously brittle.

By 1850 one in every eight of Illinois’s 850,000 inhabitants was foreign-born, and as the population doubled over the next decade the proportion grew to one in five. They included thousands of German and Irish immigrants, mostly Catholic and many employed in railroad construction. It is hard to chart with any precision the hostile nativist response to these arrivals: the secrecy of the local societies formed to pursue a native American agenda kept them very largely hidden from view. But as well as urging restrictions on citizenship, they included many who wanted to crack down on the newcomers’ consumption of lager, whiskey, and other liquor, from which the civic life of well-regulated Protestant communities was apparently at risk. Their temperance demands threw both major parties into some confusion. Whigs stayed silent from electoral caution, even though their constituency included many prohibitionists; Democrats, historically the refuge of the foreign-born, could scarcely risk supporting a temperance law that reeked of xenophobia and thus limited themselves to a pious declaration against the evils of alcohol. The beneficiaries of both parties’ timidity were the Know-Nothings.

At the same time, even before the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, both parties were reminded of how much the issues of slavery and race might threaten their cohesion. The Black Law that passed the state legislature in 1853 prevented slaveowners from freeing their slaves in Illinois and prohibited the immigration of free blacks. It enjoyed massive public support, but each party—and especially the Whigs—had a dissenting minority. The next year, when Douglas pushed through the Nebraska Bill, he was quite unprepared for the public reaction that followed and the danger it posed to party unity. He noted ruefully that he could have traveled home by the light of his own burning effigies; and when he did make the journey back to Illinois from Washington in September, he encountered ominous disaffection in Chicago, where flags hung at half-mast and bells were tolled for an hour. Lincoln scarcely exaggerated when he declared that Douglas had stunned his fellow citizens, who “reeled and fell in utter confusion.”
²²
The proliferation in the summer of 1854 of cross-party protest meetings, comprising Illinoisans of all classes and conditions, gave both parties warning of the potential wrecking power of popular outrage. In the event, Douglas’s network of personal alliances, his formidable control of patronage, and his making Nebraska a test of loyalty allowed his party to survive, though not before it suffered losses that would seriously handicap it in electoral battles to come. The Whigs, though, would splinter fatally.

Neither party’s future course was at all clear, however, when Lincoln and other Illinois leaders looked ahead to the state’s fall elections in 1854. Until late August, Lincoln had publicly kept his own counsel, reading and listening to the arguments of others. Only then did he speak out, working energetically to secure the return of his district’s Whig congressman, Richard Yates. Lacking cast-iron evidence about Lincoln’s personal hopes and strategic view of the campaign, we have to infer them from his speeches, circumstantial indications, and secondhand reports. These leave little room to doubt that he saw early on the political opportunities that Douglas’s dangerous measure had opened up. If he could harness the popular revolt against Douglas into the service of an enlarged Whig party, conservative and antislavery, he would both serve the cause of freedom and construct the means by which he might return to Washington, this time as a United States senator.

According to William Jayne, the Lincoln family’s physician and a staunch free-soiler, Lincoln had reacted with unexplained despair when Jayne, without prompting, inserted in the Whig
Illinois State Journal
early in September a declaration that Lincoln would himself run for the state legislature. Far from welcoming this announcement, Jayne later recalled, Lincoln “was then the saddest man I Ever Saw—the gloomiest: he walked up and down . . . almost crying.” To Jayne’s insistence that he remain a candidate Lincoln replied, “No—I can’t—you don’t Know all—I Say you don’t begin to Know one half and that’s Enough.”
²³
Lincoln knew that the state constitution prohibited the election of serving legislators to the United States Senate. To run for the legislature, which was imminently to choose a successor to the incumbent Democratic senator, would rule him out of consideration. But to decline to run would be an act of disloyalty to the party, costing him the very support he needed for his grander objective. Reluctantly Lincoln became an official candidate.

In running as a Whig and campaigning for a fellow Whig, Lincoln stood with those who thought that anti-Nebraska voters would be most effectively mobilized through existing parties. There may have been an element of straightforward political self-interest at work here: any politician looking to be chosen as their U.S. senator by the next legislature could be more confident of influencing familiar colleagues in an old party than in an uncertain new one. At the same time, however, events showed Lincoln’s pragmatic wisdom. He recognized that in Illinois (in contrast to other parts of the Old Northwest, where new “fusion” parties enjoyed some success) there was as yet little enthusiasm for blending all of Douglas’s opponents into a single organization. The minority of more radical Whigs in Chicago and the northern counties, of largely Yankee and English extraction, warmed to the idea of working with radical third-party men—the “Free Soilers”—in a unified new antislavery force that would replace “dead and lifeless” organizations, and resist the expansion of slavery.
²⁴
But in central and southern areas, Lincoln’s fellow Whigs, conservative and largely southern-born, remained unimpressed. Most called simply for the restoration of the Missouri Compromise; a few even sided with Douglas. Lincoln knew that to reconstitute Whiggery in a new Fusion, or “Republican,” party would alienate many more voters than it would bring in.