Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (22 page)

LINCOLN AND HAMLIN CAMPAIGN BANNER,
1860

The oval portraits of the candidates, set in rustic frames, are linked by a Lincolnian
fence rail bearing the slogan “Free Speech, Free Homes, Free Territory,” a variant on
the party’s familiar motto “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men.” The banner offers the
promise of national well-being based on industrial and agricultural enterprise, by implication when the government is freed from the dead hand of slavery and the slave power. Lincoln’s portrait is a reproduction of a photograph taken most probably in 1858.

Republican organization gave structure and focus to the Republican campaign, but its impressive energy had its source elsewhere, in a cluster of potent ideas. In essence, Republicans plaited three strands of popular thought into the core policy of the Chicago platform, the nonextension of slavery. In declaring its hostility to an aggressive slave power, the party wore the mantle of conservative constitutionalists, defending the threatened ideals and intentions of the republic’s Founders. At the same time, by seeking to quarantine slavery, Republicans posed as the champions of economic enterprise, the dignity of work, and democratic capitalism. Finally, and perhaps most potent of all, the policy gave the party its purchase on the constituency of antislavery Protestants, for whom containment provided a plausible means of eventually extirpating a moral wrong. The record of Lincoln’s words and experience provided Republican campaigners with rich material for each of these themes.

First, the “slave power.” The Chicago platform’s policy on slavery was essentially radical. Denouncing popular sovereignty, it asserted the federal government’s constitutional duty to enforce what the due process clause demanded: a legal ban on slavery in the territories. The more inflammatory language of the 1856 platform was excised but, following Giddings’s intervention, delegates agreed to set out in full the egalitarian principles of the Declaration of Independence. Radicals like Schurz left Chicago proud of their achievement. Yet, at the same time, the platform gave Republicans the chance to campaign as conservatives and traditionalists who cherished the values and policies of the Founding Fathers. Their declared intent was not innovation but restoration: they offered a “primitivist” return to the nation’s republican roots, prising the levers of power from the hands of sectional “slaveocrats” bent on expanding slavery westward, reopening the Atlantic slave trade, and founding a new empire in the Caribbean. In deference to southerners’ constitutional rights, the platform implicitly disowned John Brown’s raid: the party would “maintain inviolate” the rights of each state “to order and control its own domestic institutions.” But, they insisted, banning the spread of slavery was no less respectful of the republic’s ancient landmarks. The real radicals were those demanding federal slave codes and the sanctification of slavery. Republicans’ rhetorical strategy was to show, in the words of Governor Morgan and the national committee, that they alone had the backbone to resist the “persistently insolent and aggressive” demands of a pernicious slave power.
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These earnest claims to moderation and conservatism were designed to counter the charges of the Bell-Everett and Douglas men that their opponents’ “House Divided” radicalism would shiver the Union into fragments. Republicans treated the disunionist threats of southern radicals with skepticism, remaining insouciant in the face of incendiary, lurid propaganda that predicted bloody convulsions should the emancipationist Lincoln win. But Union-loving conservatives in the lower North mattered electorally, as Breckinridge hotheads did not, and the party moved to meet the challenge of wooing voters who disliked slavery but hated abolitionism. Presenting themselves and their candidate as the heirs of Henry Clay, Republican speakers insisted that the Chicago platform embodied old, “national” Whiggery and lauded Lincoln as “a sound conservative man.”
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Lincoln himself, despite calls to quiet public alarm, said nothing, confident that those who were genuinely open-minded would find reassurance in his published speeches. For the past decade he had been at pains to show how southerners and Democrats were themselves the constitutional iconoclasts, reinterpreting the Declaration of Independence to exclude black Americans, and willing to “reject, and scout, and spit upon” the policies of the nation’s Founders. The House Divided speech had warned against the new extremism that threatened to make slavery national. More recently, the theme of Republican “conservatism” formed the core of his widely distributed Cooper Union address.
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Promising to embargo slave labor outside its existing state boundaries served, second, to crystallize the Republicans’ appeal as economic modernizers. The platform set out policies designed to establish the party’s progressive credentials. The promise of river and harbor improvements, and of a railroad link to the Pacific, addressed the interests of northwestern farmers and grain exporters aggrieved by Buchanan’s pocket veto of a friendly measure early in 1860. A pledge to make farming land freely available was designed to give Republicans a credibility amongst native and foreign-born workingmen that their Whig predecessors, with their evident lack of enthusiasm for westward movement, had not enjoyed. In some western areas, the issue of “free homesteads” overshadowed all other issues following the panic of 1857, when thousands of farmers were faced with foreclosure or selling the land they were struggling to buy under the Preemption Law. When President Buchanan vetoed an already weakened homestead bill in June 1860, he cut western Democrats off at the knees. “Does anybody suppose that Abraham Lincoln would ever veto such a bill?” asked a jubilant Greeley, perhaps recalling that when they were fellow congressmen Lincoln had shown an un-Whiggish sympathy for the homestead cause.
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There was no greater euphoria at Chicago than amongst the Pennsylvania delegates when the committee on resolutions reported the tariff plank. Protection was a politically explosive issue. As Lincoln himself knew, the old Whig policy of high duties to safeguard domestic manufacturing might well inspire the iron interests of the Keystone State, without which the election would probably be lost, but many western Republicans and even some easterners remained at best unenthusiastic at the prospect of higher charges for imported raw materials and manufactures. In the event, the platform was short on specifics but pregnant with possibility. It did enough to underscore the main difference between the party’s economic program and the Democrats’, and to enthuse those protectionist voters who mattered, not only in Pennsylvania but also in parts of the Northwest. Republican campaigners celebrated Lincoln’s pedigree as a “Clay tariff man” and reveled in the Democrats’ maladroit blocking of Justin Morrill’s tariff bill in the Senate. Pennsylvania Democrats were aghast at their party’s self-inflicted wound, and complained to Douglas that in the state’s manufacturing districts the Republicans “say nothing of the nigger question, but all is made to turn on the Tariff.”
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Improvements, homesteads, and tariffs helped Republicans reach out beyond the Whigs’ natural middle-class constituency to embrace workingmen eager to share in America’s burgeoning capitalist economy. But more important than any of these in signaling the party’s devotion to economic progress, social opportunity, and meritocracy was the promise to seal the boundaries of slavery—the badge of an archaic, frozen social order, inimical to technological, scientific, and intellectual advance. Seward’s “irrepressible conflict” invoked the class, not racial, antagonism between North and South: the incompatibility of slaveowners who selfishly eyed the western territories, and free laborers who patriotically aimed to stop them: “There is no negro question about it at all. It is an eternal question . . . between aristocracy and democracy.” Innumerable other speeches, including Schurz’s appeals to German workingmen, similarly located the two labor systems in a set of irreconcilable values.
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Lincoln’s own words harmonized sweetly with the broader chorus. During the 1858 debates he had not paid much attention to the economic effects of slavery on white labor, but several of his addresses in 1859 and 1860 showed signs of giving it careful thought. In his widely distributed Cincinnati speech, he had drawn on his understanding of the labor theory of value to explain the relationship of labor and capital. Labor was the prior engine of human activity. Through their industry, sobriety, and honesty men accumulated wealth. With that capital, laborers enjoyed the freedom to hire those who lacked land or their own workshops. Such hired hands were not consigned to permanent dependence and formed only a small proportion of the country’s laborers (one in eight, he estimated). Rather, they understood, just as he had in his youth, the meaning of hope, opportunity, and self-improvement. Slaves, however, knew only the lash and unremitting hopelessness. This was why “the mass of white men are really injured by the effect of slave labor in the vicinity of the fields of their own labor.”
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Some months later, while he was in the East, a shoemakers’ strike gave him a pertinent setting for reasserting these differences: ‘
I
am
glad
to
see
that
a
system
of
labor
prevails
in
New
England
under
which
laborers
CAN
strike
when they want to. . . . I
like
the system which lets a man quit when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere.” And, with more color-blindness than was the case in many of his western speeches (where the economic aspirations of white men often seemed the whole story), he added: “I want every man to have the chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he
can
better his condition—when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him! That is the true system.”
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Symbols proved even more potent than words in establishing Lincoln as the purest exponent of free labor ideology. Splintered fence rails decorated the campaign as obtrusively as cider barrels had refreshed the canvassers of 1840. The Decatur originals made their appearance in Lincoln’s Chicago headquarters, “lighted up by tapers, and trimmed with flowers by enthusiastic ladies,” a bizarre altar to meritocracy and self-help. The party’s dedicated campaign newspaper in the Northwest took the name
The Rail Splitter,
while Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert, was punningly rechristened the “Prince of Rails.” The crude symbols of ax and log cabin obscured the more complex reality: of a candidate supported by some of the wealthiest farmers and land speculators in Illinois; of a lawyer who had fled with relief from a life on the land to become the agent of the biggest corporate interests in the Northwest, the railroads. But if the symbols conjured an unsubtle image, it was by no means a false one. Lincoln fused a personal history of extraordinary social mobility with a continuing warmth toward the ordinary folk amongst whom he had lived and worked. David Davis was innocent of simple sentimentalizing when he reflected that his friend “loved the struggling masses—all uprising toward a higher Civilization had his assent & his prayer.”
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Republican campaigners’ promise to bar the door against southern expansionists worked, third, on an ethical level. Strenuously determined not to be tarred with the brush of abolitionism, leaders from both the radical and moderate sections of the party nonetheless couched their anti-extensionism in the earnest language of conscience and moral purpose. Their campaign became a crusade. Some passengers on the Republican vessel might be there for reasons of political habit or material calculation, but the crew spoke in language designed to harness the potent forces of millennialist Protestants. Addressing evangelicals’ worries about the “steady and tireless march” of aggressive slaveholders, as incanted in sermons, church resolutions, and far-flung newspaper editorials, party spokesmen set the antislavery battle in a gospel context, appealing for Christian soldiers to take up arms in what George Washington Julian described as “a fight . . . between God and the Devil—between heaven and hell!” According to William Burleigh, the belief in an irrepressible conflict between free and slave labor was “Christ’s doctrine of righteousness conflicting with evil.” Joshua Giddings’s principled stand at Chicago—the prophetic appeal of a Presbyterian stalwart—served as a metaphor for the wider canvass.
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Lincoln’s own rhetorical and political strategy since 1854 entirely legitimized this crusading element of the Republican campaign. He had more and more clearly sought to draw an indelible line of political cleavage between those who thought slavery right and those convinced it was wrong, and so to build a single anti-Democrat coalition. His Ohio speeches of 1859 retained the sharp moral perspective of the final three joint debates with Douglas. At Cincinnati he had told an audience that included Kentucky slaveholders: “I think Slavery is wrong, morally, and politically. I desire that it should be no further spread in these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually terminate in the whole Union.” There must, he continued, be “a national policy in regard to the institution of slavery, that acknowledges and deals with that institution as being wrong. . . . I do not mean to say that this general government is charged with the duty of redressing or preventing all the wrongs in the world; but I do think it is charged with the duty of preventing and redressing all wrongs which are wrongs to itself.” He urged “all the elements of the Opposition” to unite on the principled anti-extensionist ground that Republicans could never vacate. To applause he said, “The good old maxims of the Bible are applicable, and truly applicable to human affairs, and in this as in other things, we may say here that he who is not for us is against us; he who gathereth not with us scattereth.” Six months later Lincoln’s riveting Cooper Union speech marked the rhetorical climax of this strategy, celebrating the party’s role as the home for those dedicated to the “faith that right makes might.” Republicans should not be misled by “sophistical contrivances . . . such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man[;] . . . such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance.”
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