Team of Rivals (28 page)

This time Salmon Chase assumed the leadership of the antislavery forces. Seward understood that the bill was “a mighty subject” that “required research and meditation,” but he was distracted by a multitude of issues and the demands of Washington’s social life. With “the street door bell [ringing] every five minutes,” the popular New Yorker was unable to find the time to construct a great speech or to marshal the opposition. Consequently, while Seward’s speeches against the Nebraska bill were simply “essays against slavery,” Stephen Douglas later said, “Chase of Ohio was the leader.”

Chase, along with Sumner and Ohio congressman Joshua Giddings, conceived the idea of reaching beyond the Senate to the country at large with an open “Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States.” The “Appeal” was originally printed in
The National Era,
the abolitionist newspaper that had first serialized
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Deemed by historians “one of the most effective pieces of political propaganda ever produced,” the Appeal was reprinted in pamphlet form to organize opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

“We arraign this bill as a gross violation of a sacred pledge,” the Appeal began, charging that a rapacious proslavery conspiracy was determined to subvert the old Missouri compact, which forever had excluded slavery in all the territory acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase. Passage of the Nebraska Act would mean that “this immense region, occupying the very heart” of the continent, would, in “flagrant disregard” of a “sacred faith,” be transformed into “a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.” The manifesto urged citizens to protest by any means available. Its authors promised to call on their constituents “to come to the rescue of the country from the domination of slavery…for the cause of human freedom is the cause of God.”

“Chase’s greatest opportunity had at last come to him,” his biographer Albert Hart observes, “for in the Kansas-Nebraska debate he was able to concentrate all the previous experience of his life.” By the time he rose to speak on the Senate floor on February 3, 1854, the country was aroused and prepared for a great battle. “By far the most numerous audience of the season listened to Mr. Chase’s speech,” the
New York Times
reported. “The galleries and lobbies were densely crowded an hour before the debate began, and the ladies even crowded into and took possession of, one-half the lobby seats on the floor of the Senate.”

In the course of the heated debate, Chase accused Douglas of sponsoring the bill to aid his quest for the presidency, an allegation that brought the Illinois senator to such a “high pitch of wrath” that he countered, accusing Chase of entering the Senate by a corrupt bargain. “Do you say I came here by a corrupt bargain?” Chase demanded to know. “I said the man who charged me with having brought in this bill as a bid for the Presidency did come here by a corrupt bargain,” Douglas replied. “Did you mean me? If so, I mean you.”

Seated beside his friend, Sumner watched with rapturous attention as Chase refuted Douglas’s claim that the concept of “popular sovereignty” would provide a final settlement of all territorial questions. On the contrary, Chase predicted, “this discussion will hasten the inevitable reorganization of parties.” Moreover, he asked, “What kind of popular sovereignty is that which allows one portion of the people to enslave another portion? Is that the doctrine of equal rights?…No, sir, no! There can be no real democracy which does not fully maintain the rights of man, as man.”

At midnight, Douglas began his concluding speech, which lasted nearly four hours. At one point, Seward interrupted to ask for an explanation of something Douglas had said. “Ah,” Douglas retorted, “you can’t crawl behind that free nigger dodge.” In reply, Seward said: “Douglas, no man will ever be President of the United States who spells ‘negro’ with two gs.”

“Midnight passed and the cock crew, and daylight broke before the vote was taken,” the
New York Tribune
reported. The all-night session was marked by “great confusion, hard words between various Senators and intense excitement in which the galleries participated.” Many of the senators were observed to be “beastly drunk,” their grandiloquence further inflated by “too frequent visits to one of the ante-chambers of the Senate room.”

When the Senate majority cast its votes in favor of the bill at 5 a.m. on the morning of March 4, the antislavery minority was crushed. “The Senate is emasculated,” Senator Benton exclaimed. As Chase and Sumner descended the sweeping steps of the Capitol, a distant cannonade signaled passage of the bill. “They celebrate a present victory,” Chase said, “but the echoes they awake will never rest until slavery itself shall die.”

“Be assured, be assured, gentlemen,”
New York Tribune
reporter James Pike warned the Southerners, that “you are sowing the wind and you will reap the whirlwind…. No man can stand in the North in that day of reckoning who plants himself on the ground of sustaining the repeal of the Missouri Compromise…. [Here is] the opening of a great drama that…inaugurates the era of a geographical division of political parties. It draws the line between North and South. It pits face to face the two opposing forces of slavery and freedom.”

In the weeks that followed, mass protest meetings spread like wildfire throughout the North, fueled by the enormous reach of the daily newspaper. “The tremendous storm sweeping the North seemed to gather new force every week,” writes the historian Allan Nevins. Resolutions against the law were signed by tens of thousands in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. In New York, the
Tribune
reported, two thousand protesters marched up Broadway, “led by a band of music, and brilliant with torches and banners.” On college campuses and village squares, in town halls and county fairgrounds, people gathered to make their voices heard.

L
INCOLN WAS RIDING
the circuit in the backcountry of Illinois when the news reached him of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. A fellow lawyer, T. Lyle Dickey, sharing a room with Lincoln, reported that “he sat on the edge of his bed and discussed the political situation far into the night.” At dawn, he was still “sitting up in bed, deeply absorbed in thought.” He told his companion—“I tell you, Dickey, this nation cannot exist half-slave and half-free.”

Lincoln later affirmed that the successful passage of the bill roused him “as he had never been before.” It permanently recast his views on slavery. He could no longer maintain that slavery was on course to ultimate extinction. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise persuaded him that unless the North mobilized into action against the proslavery forces, free society itself was in peril. The Nebraska Act “took us by surprise,” Lincoln later said. “We were thunderstruck and stunned.” The fight to stem the spread of slavery would become the great purpose Lincoln had been seeking.

Before speaking out against the Nebraska Act, Lincoln spent many hours in the State Library, studying present and past congressional debates so that he could reach back into the stream of American history and tell a clear, reasoned, and compelling tale. He would express no opinion on anything, Herndon observed, until he knew his subject “inside and outside, upside and downside.” Lincoln told Joshua Speed, “I am slow to learn and slow to forget that which I have learned. My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch any thing on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out.”

Lincoln delivered his first great antislavery speech in Springfield at the annual State Fair before a crowd of thousands on October 4, 1854. Farmers and their families had journeyed to the capital from all over the state, filling every hotel room, tavern, and boardinghouse. Billed as the largest agricultural fair in the history of the state, the exhibition featured the most advanced farm implements and heavy machinery, including a “world-renowned” plow. Residents took pride in what was considered the finest display of livestock ever assembled in one place. Games and amusements, music and refreshments were provided from morning until night, ensuring, as one reporter wrote, that “a jolly good time ensued.”

The previous day, Lincoln had heard Stephen Douglas hold forth for three hours before the same audience. Douglas, stunned by the widespread hostility in northern Illinois to his seminal role in passing the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act, had chosen the State Fair as the best forum for a vigorous defense of the bill. Rain forced the event into the house of representatives chamber, but the change of venue didn’t diminish the impact of Douglas’s speech. Sharpening arguments he had made in the Senate, Douglas emphasized that his bill rested on the unassailable principle of self-government, allowing the people themselves to decide whether or not to allow slavery into their own territorial lands.

The expressive face of “the Little Giant,” as the short, stocky Douglas was called, was matched by his stentorian voice. “He had a large head, surmounted by an abundant mane,” one reporter observed, “which gave him the appearance of a lion prepared to roar or crush his prey.” In the midst of speaking, he would “cast away his cravat” and undo the buttons on his coat, captivating his audience with “the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist.” “He was frequently interrupted by cheers and hearty demonstrations of applause,” the
Peoria Daily Press
reported, “thus showing that a large majority of the meeting was with him.” When he finished, Lincoln jumped up and announced to the crowd that a rebuttal would be delivered the following day.

The next afternoon, with Douglas seated in the front row, Lincoln faced most likely the largest audience of his life. He appeared “awkward” at first, in his shirtsleeves with no collar. “He began in a slow and hesitating manner,” the reporter Horace White noted. Yet, minutes into his speech, “it was evident that he had mastered his subject, that he knew what he was going to say, and that he knew he was right.” White was only twenty at the time but was aware even then, he said, that he was hearing “one of the world’s masterpieces of argumentative power and moral grandeur.” Sixty years later, that conviction remained. The initial impression was “overwhelming,” White told an audience in 1914, “and it has lost nothing by the lapse of time.”

Although Lincoln’s voice was “thin, high-pitched,” White observed, it had “much carrying power” and “could be heard a long distance in spite of the bustle and tumult of the crowd.” As Lincoln hit his stride, “his words began to come faster.” Gesturing with his “body and head rather than with his arms,” he grew “very impassioned” and “seemed transfigured” by the strength of his words. “Then the inspiration that possessed him took possession of his hearers also. His speaking went to the heart because it came from the heart. I have heard celebrated orators who could start thunders of applause without changing any man’s opinion. Mr. Lincoln’s eloquence was of the higher type, which produced conviction in others because of the conviction of the speaker himself.”

While Douglas simply asserted his points as self-evident, Lincoln embedded his argument in a narrative history, transporting his listeners back to their roots as a people, to the founding of the nation—a story that still retained its power to arouse strong emotion and thoughtful attention. Many of his arguments were familiar to those who had followed the Senate debate and had read Chase’s masterly “Appeal”; but the structure of the speech was so “clear and logical,” the
Illinois Daily Journal
observed, the arrangement of facts so “methodical,” that the overall effect was strikingly original and “most effective.”

At the State Fair, and twelve nights later, by torchlight in Peoria, where the debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act was repeated, Lincoln presented his carefully “connected view” for better than three hours. In order to make his argument, Lincoln decided to begin with nothing less than an account of our common history, the powerful narrative of how slavery grew with our country, how its growth and expansion had been carefully contained by the founding fathers, and how on this fall night in 1854 the great story they were being told—the story of the Union—had come to such an impasse that the exemplary meaning, indeed, the continued existence of the story, hung in the balance.

For the first time in his public life, his remarkable array of gifts as historian, storyteller, and teacher combined with a lucid, relentless, yet always accessible logic. Instead of the ornate language so familiar to men like Webster, Lincoln used irony and humor, laced with workaday, homespun images to build an eloquent tower of logic. The proslavery argument that a vote for the Wilmot Proviso threatened the stability of the entire Union was reduced to absurdity by analogy—“because I may have refused to build an addition to my house, I thereby have decided to destroy the existing house!” Such flashes of figurative language were always available to Lincoln to drive home a point, gracefully educating while entertaining—in a word,
communicating
an enormously complicated issue with wit, simplicity, and a massive power of moral persuasion.

At the time the Constitution was adopted, Lincoln pointed out, “the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the
principle,
and toleration,
only by necessity,”
since slavery was already woven into the fabric of American society. Noting that neither the word “slave” nor “slavery” was ever mentioned in the Constitution, Lincoln claimed that the framers concealed it, “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; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.” As additional evidence of the framers’ intent, Lincoln brought his audience even further back, to the moment when Virginia ceded its vast northwestern territory to the United States with the understanding that slavery would be forever prohibited from the new territory, thus creating a “happy home” for “teeming millions” of free people, with “no slave amongst them.” In recent years, he said, slavery had seemed to be gradually on the wane until the fateful Nebraska law transformed it into “a sacred right,” putting it “on the high road to extension and perpetuity”; giving it “a pat on its back,” saying, “‘Go, and God speed you.’”