Lincoln Unbound (18 page)

Lincoln countered that, like it or not, we were indeed a House Divided. The difference between slavery and freedom wasn't a matter of a pleasing diversity among the states. “I shall very ­readily agree with him that it would be foolish for us to insist upon having a cranberry law here, in Illinois, where we have no cranberries, because they have a cranberry law in Indiana, where they have cranberries,” Lincoln said in Alton. “I should insist that it would be exceedingly wrong in us to deny to Virginia the right to enact oyster laws where they have oyster, because we want no such laws here.” But slavery was, obviously, a more consequential matter: “When have we had any difficulty or quarrel amongst ourselves about the cranberry laws of Indiana, or the oyster laws of Virginia, or the pine lumber laws of Maine, or the fact that Louisiana produces sugar, and Illinois flour?”

Lincoln charged that Douglas wanted the peace of surrender on slavery. “To be sure if we will all stop and allow Judge Douglas and his friends to march on in their present career until they plant the institution all over the nation, here and wherever else our flag waves, and we acquiesce in it, there will be peace. But let me ask Judge Douglas how he is going to get the ­people to do that?” The senator's position, Lincoln argued at Alton, was “that we are to care nothing about it! I ask you if it is not a false philosophy? Is it not a false statesmanship that undertakes to build up a system of policy upon the basis of caring nothing about
the very thing that every body does care the most about?
”

He objected to Douglas's contention that the Founders “made” the country half-­slave and half-­free. “The exact truth,” he said of slavery at Alton, “is that they found the institution existing among us, and they left it as they found it. But in making the government they left this institution with many clear marks of disapprobation upon it.”

As for Jefferson, Lincoln said at Galesburg, “that while Mr. Jefferson was the owner of slaves, as undoubtedly he was, in speaking upon this very subject, he used the strong language that ‘he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just'; and I will offer the highest premium in my power to Judge Douglas if he will show that he, in all his life, ever uttered a sentiment at all akin to that of Jefferson.”

Lincoln returned repeatedly to arguments about the Founders that were staples of his throughout the 1850s. They had set a date, 1808, for when the slave trade could be prohibited, and promptly prohibited it as soon as the day arrived. They excluded it from the Northwest territory—­the chunk of territory that would become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota (in part)—­in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. “Why stop its spread in one direction,” he asked at Alton, “and cut off its source in another, if they did not look to its being placed in the course of ultimate extinction?”

Lincoln gave the Founders a favorable gloss. The federal government was happy to see slavery expand into the Gulf states in the first part of the nineteenth century. Eric Foner points out that between the ratification of the Constitution and 1854, nine slave states entered the union and the slave population grew from 700,000 to more than 3 million. But Lincoln was right that we had regressed since the Founding. In percentage terms, there were fewer free blacks in the South in 1860 than half a century earlier, both because free blacks left and the South had made it even harder for blacks to earn their freedom. From 1830 on, the South tightened its legal grip, seeking to deny any light of hope from shining through cracks in the system. States made it illegal even for masters to teach slaves to read. In a wave of restriction in the late 1850s, Louisiana generously passed a law called “An Act to Permit Free Persons of African Descent to Select a Master and Become Slaves for Life.” Arkansas gave free blacks the choice of leaving or getting enslaved.

Lincoln wanted the mark of disapprobation back on slavery. This was the crux of the matter: the morality of human bondage. “When Judge Douglas says that whoever, or whatever community, wants slaves, they have a right to have them,” Lincoln explained at Quincy, “he is perfectly logical if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.” Douglas met the question with an evasion. “He has the high distinction,” Lincoln said, “so far as I know, of never having said slavery is either right or wrong. Almost everybody else says one or the other, but the Judge never does.”

Lincoln obviously didn't have this problem. In the debates, he called slavery “a moral, social and political wrong.” It follows that, he continued in Quincy, “We deal with it as with any other wrong, in so far as we can prevent its growing any larger, and so deal with it that in the run of time there may be some promise of an end to it.”

He argued that the Douglas view opened the way for two potential developments favorable to the entrenchment and spread of slavery. The first was further Southern expansionism, which Douglas himself cited as a benefit of his approach. “If Judge Douglas' policy upon this question succeeds,” Lincoln said at Galesburg, “and gets fairly settled down, until all opposition is crushed out, the next thing will be a grab for the territory of poor Mexico, an invasion of the rich lands of South America, then the adjoining islands will follow, each one of which promises additional slave fields.” The second, another
Dred Scott
decision, built upon the country's moral indifference to slavery.

The first decision had been bad enough. The Supreme Court held in 1857 that blacks couldn't be citizens and there was no power under the Constitution to prohibit slavery in the territories. The Court did Douglas one better, and ruled the ­Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. In his decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney spoke of the Negro as an “ordinary article of merchandise and traffic,” “so far inferior that [he] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The Radical Republican congressman Thaddeus Stevens said of that line that it “damned [Taney] to everlasting fame; and, I fear, to everlasting fire.”

Among other things,
Dred Scott
made a mockery of popular sovereignty. Douglas had constructed his entire edifice upon ­people freely choosing whether or not to open their territories to slavery. Then the Supreme Court said it couldn't be done. Lincoln pressed Douglas on this point with his famous questions at Freeport, which Douglas answered with his Freeport Doctrine—­as a practical matter, slavery could be excluded by “unfriendly legislation,” no matter what the high court said. Lincoln ridiculed the idea that local laws could override the Supreme Court. And he feared the next easy step to the nationalization of slavery: “It is merely,” he said at Ottawa, “for the Supreme Court to decide that no State under the Constitution can exclude it, just as they have already decided that under the Constitution neither Congress nor the Territorial Legislature can do it.”

Throughout the debates, Douglas spoke of blacks in the same key as Taney. One of his most reliable arguments was the low-­down, unembarrassed pander to negrophobia, in his struggle with what he constantly referred to as the Black Republicans.

At the first debate in Ottawa, he put it to listeners this way: “Do you desire to turn this beautiful State into a free negro colony, in order that when Missouri abolishes slavery she can send one hundred thousand emancipated slaves into Illinois, to become citizens and voters, on an equality with yourselves?” In the final debate at Alton, he made this ringing affirmation: “I would not blot out the great inalienable rights of the white men for all the negroes that ever existed.”

In Freeport, he scraped bottom when he referred to the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass as one of Lincoln's advisers. He told the story of how the last time he had been in town, “I saw a carriage and a magnificent one it was, drive up and take a position on the outside of the crowd; a beautiful young lady was sitting on the box seat, whilst Fred. Douglass and her mother reclined inside.” He generously allowed how “if you, Black Republicans, think that the negro ought to be on a social equality with your wives and daughters, and ride in a carriage with your wife, whilst you drive the team, you have a perfect right to do so.” George Wallace called this putting the hay down low where the goats can get it. This riff was met with a cry of “Down with the negro.”

For his part Lincoln drew a distinction between natural rights, which he believed extended to everyone, and political and social rights, which he thought should be circumscribed depending on circumstance. In the first debate in Ottawa, he quoted from his speech at Peoria when he had considered the possibility of freeing blacks and making them “politically and socially, our equals.” He had said, “My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white ­people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-­founded, can not be safely disregarded.”

In Charleston, located in the middle of the state and heavily populated by conservative Whigs, Lincoln opened his presentation with a disclaimer: “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.” He added “that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

“I do not understand,” he added, “that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I can just let her alone. I am now in my fiftieth year, and I certainly never have had a black woman for either a slave or a wife. So it seems to me quite possible for us to get along without making either slaves or wives of negroes.”

To our ears all this sounds damnable, but context matters. Lincoln never had the luxury of addressing a Vassar College faculty meeting. All of the states where Lincoln had resided—­Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois—­at one point banned blacks. Any black person coming into Illinois had to post a one-­thousand-­dollar bond. A referendum in 1848 to allow the state legislature to prohibit free blacks from entering the state got 70 percent of the vote.

Lincoln's opposition to the full panoply of rights for blacks is less remarkable than his forthright defenses of their humanity. In Chicago in 1858, at the beginning of the campaign, he gave Douglas yet more fodder when he said, “Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—­this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position. . . . Let us discard all these things, and unite as one ­people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”

Lincoln himself so “quibbled” during the debates, but only under constant racist attack and only under the pressure of a close-­fought election where winning over anti-­black voters was imperative. It is Lincoln's high points that are most extraordinary. And it was to them that he would prove true in the coming years of great testing.

In the final debate at Alton, Lincoln cast the choice over slavery as another battle in “the eternal struggle between these two principles—­right and wrong—­throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the ­people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”

That tyrannical principle strikes at the core of who we are not just as
a
­people, but as ­people. At Alton, Lincoln said of the racially exclusive view of the Declaration: “I combat it as having a tendency to dehumanize the negro—­to take away from him the right of ever striving to be a man.” Appealing to the self interest of his listeners (again, in language jarring to modern sensibilities), Lincoln evoked an American West free of slavery, as a wide-­open platform for aspiration: “Now irrespective of the moral aspect of this question as to whether there is a right or wrong in enslaving a negro, I am still in favor of our new Territories being in such a condition that white men may find a home—­may find some spot where they can better their condition—­where they can settle upon new soil and better their condition in life.” He wanted the West as “an outlet for free white ­people everywhere, the world over—­in which Hans and Baptiste and Patrick, and all other men from all the world, may find new homes and better their conditions in life.”

Whatever the allure of this vision, it didn't get Lincoln over the top against Douglas, of course. More ­people voted in Illinois in 1858 than in the presidential election of 1856. Republicans won the popular vote yet the apportionment of legislative districts favored Democrats and allowed Douglas to prevail anyway. Democrats held the south, the Republicans the north, and Lincoln lost the race in the Whig belt in the middle of the state. Henry Whitney recalled in a letter to William Herndon that Lincoln thought he could only count on the loyalty of his law partner: “He said to me on the day Douglas was elected to the U.S. Senate—­& bitterly too—­‘I expect everyone to desert me except Billy.' ”