Lincoln Unbound (15 page)

By 1852, Douglas was a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, finishing third at the convention. Lincoln was out of office back in Illinois, lamenting of Douglas, “time was when I was in his way some.” Now, he commented, “such small men as I, can hardly be considered as worthy of his notice; & I may have to dodge & get between his legs.”

When the Kansas-­Nebraska Act passed in 1854, repealing the Missouri Compromise, Douglas was in the midst of the national debate, indeed driving the national debate, while Lincoln was practicing law. He hadn't quit politics, but was relatively inactive. Lincoln later recalled in his autobiographical statement for John Scripps that “his profession had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind, when the repeal of the Missouri compromise aroused him as he had never been before.”

The Kansas-­Nebraska Act had begun as an effort by Douglas to establish a government for the unorganized territory west of Iowa and Missouri, a parcel of the northern portion of the Louisiana Purchase including what would eventually become the states of Kansas and Nebraska. The Missouri Compromise had banned slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36'30" parallel. The Kansas-­Nebraska Act would efface the Missouri Compromise prohibition and let the ­people in the territory decide the status of slavery “under the doctrine of popular sovereignty.”

With a keen eye for the main chance, Douglas didn't lack for reasons to push the act. He wanted a transcontinental railroad and wanted a route benefiting Illinois (and making his own real estate holdings more valuable). That was impossible so long as Southerners blocked legislation to organize the Kansas-­Nebraska territory. They considered the Missouri Compromise's prohibition on slavery in the Northern territories an affront. If Douglas could get them on board, it would have the additional benefit of enhancing his standing in the South and increasing his odds as a presidential candidate. Popular sovereignty would in theory cool national passions on the issue by making it a matter of democratic choice by voters in each locale. In any case, climate and soil would naturally check the spread of slavery into new territory in the north. For Douglas, it looked like a win-­win several times over.

At first, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was left implicit in the act. Under pressure from Southerners, though, Douglas added language declaring it “inoperative and void.” He knew that the proposal, disturbing a long-­standing dispensation at the behest of the South, would “raise a hell of a storm.” So it did. But Douglas was nothing if not a genius legislative mechanic. It was he, not the “Great Compromiser” Henry Clay, who had figured out how to get the Compromise of 1850 through Congress, settling what had been the prior major sectional flare-­up over the country's new territory. With the support of the administration of President Franklin Pierce, and a healthy helping of patronage to bring around reluctant Northern Democrats, Douglas cajoled, argued, and strategized his way to victory in the spring of 1854. “I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the whole controversy in both houses,” he boasted.

Douglas reaped the whirlwind, and so did the country. The South's prospective expansion into what had been considered territory locked away for freedom outraged and galvanized antislavery forces in the North. Douglas said burning effigies of him could light his way “from Boston to Chicago.” When he showed up in the latter city to defend the act, he got hooted at and lashed back, “Abolitionists of Chicago! It is now Sunday morning. I'll go to church and you may go to Hell.” The law soon enough issued in a low-­simmering civil war between pro-­ and antislavery forces fighting over the status of “bloody Kansas.” “I look upon that enactment not as a
law
,” ­Lincoln wrote of Kansas-Nebraska in an 1855 letter to Joshua Speed, “but as
violence
from the beginning. It was conceived in violence, passed in violence, is maintained in violence, and is being executed in violence.”

The forces unleashed by Kansas-­Nebraska buffeted both parties, but destroyed Lincoln's Whigs. For a time it seemed that the nativist Know-­Nothing party would emerge ascendant. It, too, was torn apart by sectional conflict, though, and a significant drop in immigration sapped some of its energy. After a period of partisan chaos, with every state embarking on its own path, the anti-­Nebraska forces coalesced into the new Republican Party. Lincoln wrote in that same letter to Speed, “You enquire where I now stand. That is a disputed point. I think I am a whig; but ­others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist.”

He made a gradual transition into the new Republican Party that channeled the natural anti-­aristocratic feelings of the public into its attacks on the slave South, or “the Slave Power,” capitalized. It enjoyed the protection of a South that overawed American government for much of its early existence. Slave­holders won most of the country's first sixteen presidential elections. Through 1861, twenty-­three of the thirty-­six speakers of the House had been Southerners. Supreme Court justices had been ­disproportionately from the South. The federal government had a distinctively Southern flavor that benefited the region intensely protective of its peculiar institution.

From the first, slavery was overwhelmingly, although not entirely, a Southern phenomenon. In 1790, New York had more slaves than any other city besides Charleston, South Carolina. Even then, though, fewer than 6 percent of all slaves were in the North. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, slave labor tended to be concentrated in tobacco, rice, and indigo, grown in the Chesapeake area and the Carolinas and Georgia. The revolution in cotton production with the advent of Eli Whitney's gin greased its spread throughout the westward-expanding south.

By 1850, about two-­thirds of slaves worked on cotton plantations. Altogether, about a fourth of Southern whites owned slaves as of 1860. They ranged from owners of five to six slaves who worked alongside their chattel, to a better-­off group of about a quarter of all slaveholders who owned up to fifty slaves, to the top three thousand families, who alone owned about a tenth of all the slaves.

Slavery was quite simply the cornerstone of the South, to borrow the phrase of the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens. In 1860, the South's nearly 4 million slaves were collectively worth about $3 billion, or more than all the nation's banks, railroads, and factories put together, according to historian Eric Foner. As the rest of the world experienced a wave of emancipations, the South stood with the likes of Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico on the ramparts of slavery. Even Russia was emancipating the serfs.

The South craved more territory. It wanted to spread slavery and to forge new slave states to maintain the balance between North and South in the Senate. It eagerly supported the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the ensuing war with Mexico. The most ­aggressive Southerners coveted additional ground even farther south, in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America. This push fed the tragicomic Southern tradition of filibustering, whereby a rogue's gallery of Southern politicians and adventurers sought to take Latin American territory through their private exertions for the glory of Southern empire.

For his part, Lincoln had always opposed slavery, but with cat's feet, cautiously, moderately. “I am naturally anti-­slavery,” Lincoln averred in April 1864. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.”

He didn't have much direct experience of it. Lincoln remembered “a tedious low-­water trip, on a Steam Boat from Louisville to St. Louis” with Joshua Speed in 1841. About a dozen slaves were on board, “shackled together with irons.” He told Speed in a letter years later that the “sight was a continual torment to me.” Such a spectacle, repeated whenever he touched a slave state, “has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable.”

His family had lived on the borderlands of slavery. His native Kentucky was a slave state, although a somewhat attenuated one. Still, out of 7,500 ­people in Hardin County, where Lincoln spent his earliest years, more than 1,000 were slaves. At one point, ­Lincoln's father worked on a milldam alongside slaves. His parents belonged to South Fork Baptist Church. When the church split over the issue of slavery, they joined the antislavery faction at Little Mount Baptist Church. Lincoln told Scripps that his father took the family across the Ohio River and into Indiana “partly on account of slavery.”

“Slave States,” Lincoln would say much later, perhaps speaking from experience, “are places for poor white ­people to remove FROM; not to remove TO. New free States are the places for poor ­people to go to and better their condition.”

He wasn't often called on to legislate on the matter. In 1837, he was one of just six votes opposing resolutions in the Illinois legislature that excoriated abolitionism and declared that “the right of property in slaves is sacred.” Lincoln could manage to get only one other legislator, who wasn't running for reelection, to sign onto a statement of dissent. It argued “that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy,” although it included the caveat that “the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than abate its evils.”

As a congressman, he offered a plan for Washington, D.C., of gradual, compensated emancipation—­always his preference—­if approved by the District's voters; it didn't go anywhere. He opposed the Mexican War, offering his “spot” resolutions demanding to know the precise location of the alleged Mexican invasion of American soil that justified the war. This opened him to attack back home where the war was popular, as “Spotty Lincoln” or “Ranchero Spotty,” with his “pathetic lamentation over the fate of those Mexicans.” When Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania offered an amendment, the famous Wilmot Proviso, excluding slavery from land acquired from Mexico, Lincoln voted for it “as good as forty times,” he later claimed.

Even after Kansas-­Nebraska, he never swung into the camp of the abolitionists. He favored the nonextension of slavery as a means toward its eventual extinction, with the endgame never exactly clear. He didn't believe that natural conditions would stop its spread, as Douglas maintained. He pointed out that Illinois and Missouri were side by side, separated only by the Mississippi. Yet only Illinois was a free state, its status secured by a federal prohibition from the beginning. Nonextension had the political advantage of sidestepping or playing into anti-­black sentiment—­keeping slavery out of the West was indistinguishable from keeping out blacks. Taking this tendency a step further, ­Lincoln ­remained an advocate of the voluntary colonization of blacks years into the Civil War.

Kansas-­Nebraska radicalized him, nonetheless. He staked his reputation and tethered his ambition to the cause of antislavery. In a fragment he wrote for himself in July 1858, he opened by noting, “I have never professed an indifference to the honors of official station.” Then he mused on all the opponents of abolishing the slave trade in Great Britain and how long they had succeeded in preserving the trade. “Though they blazed,” he wrote, “like tallow-­candles for a century, at last they flickered in the socket, died out, stank in the dark for a brief season, and were remembered no more, even by the smell. School-­boys know that Wilbeforce [sic], and Granville Sharpe [sic], helped that cause forward; but who can now name a single man who labored to retard it?”

As the contest over slavery became the focus of his public advocacy, Lincoln's rhetoric took on the majesty with which we now associate it. Beginning in August 1854, he made the case publicly against the Kansas-­Nebraska Act, several times directly in reply to Douglas. We have the record of his speech in Peoria in October 1854. The Whig paper in Springfield, the
Illinois State Journal
, took seven issues to print the speech's nearly seventeen thousand words, carefully edited by Lincoln himself. As Lewis Lehrman points out, the speech is the urtext of Lincoln's advocacy for the next decade, with nearly everything else an elaboration.

Prior to the passage of the Kansas-­Nebraska Act, Lincoln referred to the Declaration only twice in public. Thereafter, it ­became a staple of his rhetoric and worldview, “his political chart and inspiration” in the words of his secretary John G. Nicolay. The Declaration had become a field of battle in the fight over slavery. Opponents of slavery brandished the glorious sentence from its preamble: “We hold these truths to be self-­evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Chicago abolitionist newspaper the
Western Citizen
published the preamble on the front of every edition.

Lincoln may have first read the Declaration in the law book
The Statutes of Indiana
. Betraying his logical cast of mind, Lincoln referred to it as containing “the definitions and axioms of free society.” For the South, it was a pernicious invitation to error. John C. Calhoun in 1848 called the idea that “all men are born free and equal” nothing less than “the most false and dangerous of all political error.” Southern extremist George Fitzhugh agreed. “Liberty and equality are new things under the sun,” he wrote disapprovingly. Indiana senator John Pettit called the central contention of the Declaration “a self-­evident lie”—­a line that became a constant target for Lincoln.

In his 1852 eulogy for Henry Clay, Lincoln already remarked on “an increasing number of men, who, for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and ridicule the white-­man's charter of freedom—­the declaration that ‘all men are created free and equal.' So far as I have learned, the first American, of any note, to do or attempt this, was the late John C. Calhoun.” From there, Lincoln jabbed, “it soon after found its way into some of the messages of the Governors of South Carolina. We, however, look for, and are not much shocked by, political eccentricities and heresies in South Carolina.”