Note—Yesterday in the first entry in this blog series we noted the removal
and vandalism of statues of Abraham Lincoln, charges that he was a racist and
white supremist and traced his background and life from his log cabin birth
through his formative years in New Salem, Illinois where he established himself
as a man of local consequence. Today, we
trace his steady climb as a lawyer and politician.
In 1834 Abraham Lincoln was elected to the Illinois legislature and served four terms as a Whig gaining Prominence as one of the Long Nine who brokered the move of the capitol to nearby Springfield. He championed
construction of the Illinois and
Michigan Canal, and later was a Canal
Commissioner. He voted to expand suffrage beyond white landowners to all white males but took a free soil stance opposing both slavery and abolitionism. In 1837, he declared, the “Institution of slavery is founded on both
injustice and bad policy, but the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends
rather to increase than abate its evils.” He echoed his political
hero Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser, in his support for the American
Colonization Society which advocated a program
of abolition in conjunction with settling freed slaves in Liberia.
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In 1836 Lincoln was admitted to the Bar and moved to Springfield where his career took off working with important local lawyers until opening
his own firm with Stephen T. Logan and then young William Herndon in offices across the street from the new capitol
building. Riding the Circuit to county courthouses across
the state he steadily built a reputation as a skilled and formidable trial
combatant during cross-examinations and closing arguments. He also built wide circles of friends
for his folksy demeanor and story telling at inns, saloons, and entertaining the loafers who hung around the court houses.
It paid off in 1847 he was elected to the U.S. House of
Representatives, the only Whig in the Illinois delegation. He loyally voted with the party on issues
like internal improvements, tariffs, and banking reform. He did strike on his own to
draft legislation to abolish slavery in the District of
Columbia with compensation for the owners, enforcement of fugitive slaves laws, and a popular vote in the District. However, he abandoned the bill when he
failed to get Whig support.
Lincoln might have been an easily forgotten back bencher from the sticks except for the outbreak of the War with Mexico. His instinct to protect the underdog kicked
in and he rose in the House to condemn the war as a brazen attack by a powerful nation against a weaker one on a phony pretext. But he also recognized, as did a minority of mostly New England Whigs that the
huge landgrab would throw open vast territories to the introduction of slavery—Mexico had already been abolished
the practice.
That could disrupt the precarious balance between slave and free states giving the South control of the Senate and Electoral College. His speeches against the hugely popular war earned him
his first national attention.
Many folks assume that his opposition led to the end
of his House career after just one term. Not quite true. While he may have had a tough time in a re-election campaign he had
already committed to serving just once term in a deal with fellow Whigs to share the safe seat on a principle of “rotation in office.” He was able to return to
Springfield with the added prestige of being a former Congressman, which was very good
for his law practice.
He had already married
diminutive Kentucky
belle Mary Todd in 1842 besting his personal, legal, and political rival Democrat Stephen A. Douglas. The nuptials
had been abruptly abandoned
once and Lincoln expressed trepidation over the union to the notoriously mercurial lady. The daughter of the slave owning
aristocracy she was assumed to be sympathetic to the South and to the peculiar institution. She was also socially ambitious. Many believed that those ambitions drove an indifferent and unhappy Lincoln to reluctantly
advance his legal and political careers.
But Lincoln himself was ambitious as well as shrewd enough to know that he could retain his valuable folksy man-of-the-people reputation while on a continuous rise if it was viewed as result of being a henpecked
husband.
Although their marriage was not without turmoil, it seems to
have been genuinely happy and the ambitions of both rewarded.
By 1844 the couple bought and moved into a large two story home near his law offices. While not a
mansion it was comfortable and in a respectable neighborhood. They began to raise a family
together with the birth of son Robert Todd in 1843 in whom both parents invested dreams of a gentlemanly Ivy League education and a distinguished
career.
The Lincolns prospered especially when he became one
of the principal lawyers for the Illinois Central
Railroad and other corporate
clients.
But as he had foreseen, the newly conquered territories
ripped from Mexico quickly became a flashpoint of national political crisis as Southern firebrands led by John C. Calhoun of South Carolina demanded that all the territories be open to slavery. The Compromise
of 1850 was Henry Clay’s last attempt to “save the Union”
by a brokered deal that would give each side something it wanted without total satisfaction. He was unable to get a majority for the whole package including the admission of California as a Free State,
the waving by Texas of some of its northern and western territorial claims in return for debt relief, the establishment of New Mexico and Utah territories, a ban on the importation of slaves into the District of Columbia for sale, and a more stringent fugitive slave law. With the aid of Illinois Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the
measures were broken up and passed in five separate bills each one cobbled
together with narrow majorities of different interests and constituencies.
But the pot still simmered on the stove and soon would
come to the boiling point over what would happen to those former northern Texas
claims which included Indian Territory, and the unsettled territories that became Kansas
and Nebraska.
Douglas began advocating a compromise allowing popular sovereignty—majorities voters of new
settlers and residents to determine free or slave status. It seemed reasonable
and rallied Northern
Democrats and some border state and southern Whigs. But it set off years of Bloody Kansas as partisans of both sides recruited settlers, armed them, and backed them with irregular guerilla bands. Atrocities abounded on both sides including the burning and sacking of the free state stronghold Lawrence, Kansas, ambushes of immigrant trains, and the broadsword
executions of Southern sympathizers by abolitionist zealot John Brown.
It was against this turbulence in the 1850s that Lincoln
began his rise as a national figure opposing any extension of slavery. These years were also the source of many of
the quotes about equality of Blacks and their political
destinies that have become central
to depiction of him as a virulent racist who should not be honored with memorials or much of anything else.
When assessing these quotes, it is important to
consider the lessons Lincoln learned as a successful trial lawyer and politician. When trying to sway a jury or an audience to
act against their inclinations and prejudices it was important to assure them that they were not jeopardizing their most deeply held beliefs and interests. Lincoln would do it by assuring them that
despite firm action on the extension of slavery that he shared their views of Blacks and
would not act to “put them over the white man.”
To his Illinois constituencies
that may not have cared much one way or another
about the issue and that probably feared freed slaves would undercut wages he offered ringing moral appeals tempered by his promise that not much would change in their day-to-day lives. Whether these statements were true reflections of his opinions was less
important than their calculated purpose. In the absence of much evidence
in diaries or strictly personal correspondence it is difficult to determine what his real
attitudes were or how they evolved over time.
Lincoln first publicly weighed in on the expansion issue
after Douglas got Congress to narrowly pass the Kansas-Nebraska
Act and President Millard
Filmore to sign the measure which put popular sovereignty in place in 1853 sparking the bloody mini-civil war on the plains. In a speech the next year in Peoria he said the Act
had a:
…declared indifference, but as I must think, a covert real zeal for the
spread of slavery. I cannot but hate it. I hate it because of the monstrous
injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican
example of its just influence in the world …
This staked out his consistent position in the final ante-bellum
years and made him a leading spokesman for a limited cause.
In the presidential election of 1852, the old Whig Party whimpered to an end the victim of
the inherent tensions between New England slavery opponents, Southern pro-slavery anti-Democrats,
unionists like its presidential candidate General
Winfield Scott. Many
Northerners broke away into the new Free Soil Party. Before the 1854 election Lincoln
shifted his allegiance to the new entirely Northern
based Republican Party made up of former Whigs,
Free Soilers, some from the anti-immigrant Know
Nothings, and a few antislavery Northern Democrats. He became a campaign
surrogate for nominee John
C. Frémont and other Republicans. He was soon the
most important Illinois Republican.
He staked his name and reputation as an opponent of slavery as an institution but also with false equivalency denounced
it and abolitionism twin moral evils that could shake and destroy the Union. He was careful to thread a middle-ground between extremes that he felt had
the best chance for broad support—a classic political strategy that invites attacks by both “extremes” validating
moderation.
In 1858 Lincoln easily earned the Republican nomination
to challenge Douglas’s reelection. In accepting the nomination, he
delivered his House Divided
Speech, with the Biblical
reference to Mark 3:25.
A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.
The incumbent should have been a heavy favorite in mostly Democratic Illinois. Surprisingly both agreed to an unprecedented schedule of joint appearances and platform debates across the state. They hoped to
rally support for their party’s legislative candidates, especially for the state Senate which would vote on the U.S.
Senate seat under the Constitution which then barred
direct popular election to the Upper Chamber. But Douglas hoped the exposure would boost him for the
Democratic presidential nomination in 1860 and Lincoln hoped to build national support for Republicans. Internal
improvements and tariffs were issues, but slavery and its potential expansion were front and center.
Douglas accused Lincoln of joining the abolitionists and betraying white workers.
Lincoln warned that Douglas’ “Slave Power” threatened the values of republicanism and accused Douglas of distorting the Founding Fathers’ declaration that “all men are created equal.” Lincoln’s arguments were moral, Douglas’s
more narrowly legal and pragmatic. The seven debates were followed breathlessly not only in Illinois but in the national press. Transcripts scribbled on the fly by reporters filled newspaper pages and were read widely and closely.
Lincoln’s defense against Douglas’ attack at the fourth debate on October
18th has become the most widely cited “proof” that he was a racist:
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 … I am not nor ever
have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying
them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in
addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and
black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living
together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot
so live, while they do remain together there must be a 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.
He did acknowledge that Blacks deserved
the “natural rights” of all men—the rights to be secure in their persons, to own property, to seek employment for fair wages, to marry and form families, and freedom of movement but explicitly denied support for equal participation in civil society based on an assumption of fundamental inferiority. That was a view of Blacks shared
by the overwhelming majority of Whites at the time. He hoped
that it would take the edge off allegations that he was a race traitor.
In the November elections Republicans earned a majority of votes for the
legislature but Democrats retained control of the Senate. It was no surprise that Douglas was
re-elected. But Lincoln was boosted to prominence and chatter about a
potential Presidential run in 1860 ramped up, which he did nothing to discourage despite saying modestly that he would be
“open” to
accepting a draft. Meanwhile he acquired a German language newspaper to boost his support for that large and politically
active ethnic minority with great influence around
St. Louis and Chicago. He also assembled a team of
political operatives and surrogates.
Lincoln began a round of public speeches—more than 50 in less than 2
years, to boost the Republicans and offer himself as the best alternative to more
abolitionist candidates. Particularly
strong among these rivals were William Seward of New York and Salmon Chase of Ohio both of whom were much more aggressive on the slavery issue than Lincoln. While he built considerable support in the Midwest and in the new Far Western states of California
and Oregon he was
still viewed as a yokel and a compromiser in the East. He was opposed by the Republican’s
most important voice in the press, Horace Greely of the New York Tribune.
It was then that he jumped at the opportunity to make his case in the
heart of the lion’s den at New York City’s Cooper’s Union on February 27, 1860. In it he directly
challenged Southerners who were already pledging disunity should Republican win the Presidency:
Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the
Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as
you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin
in all events...An inspection of the Constitution will show that the right of
property in a slave is not “distinctly and expressly affirmed” in it...But you
will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event,
you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of
having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol
to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill
you, and then you will be a murderer!” To be sure, what the robber demanded of
me—my money—was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more
my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my
money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can
scarcely be distinguished in principle.
And then pivoted with a warning to his own Party:
Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it
is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence
in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread
into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If
our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and
effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances
wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored—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 a
policy of “don’t care” on a question about which all true men do care — 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 —
such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said,
and undo what Washington did...Neither let us be slandered from our duty by
false accusations against us nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction
to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right
makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we
understand it.
The speech was a sensation and turned many heads in the East, including Greeley’s, even if it did
not dissuade the ambitions of Steward, Chase and others.
Lincoln’s campaign team in Illinois led by his friend Judge David Davis shrewdly
began meetings with delegates who were assembling for the Republican convention at the Wigwam in
Chicago. Lincoln charged him to “make no
deals that will bind me” but there was plenty of horse trading and assurances
of support for issues of local economic importance like the tariff was for the
crucial Pennsylvania delegation and its iron industry
interests. The
convention deadlocked through two ballots. Before the
third local managers packed the galleries and floor of the convention with yelling, sign wielding partisans recruited from the Chicago streets and saloons. Their loud and prolonged demonstration for Lincoln stampeded the vote for him.
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When Douglas was nominated at the Democratic convention, most Southern delegates
walked out and reconvened to name incumbent Vice
President John C. Breckinridge as their candidate. Separately, former Southern
Whigs, Know Nothings, and some border state Democrats formed the Constitutional Union Party and nominated Senator John Bell of Tennessee. It would be a four-way race.
During the campaign, Lincoln gave no speeches. He accepted visitors to an office he set up in
Chicago. The Republicans flooded the country—or at
least the North—with unlimited pamphlets, broadsides, and campaign
biographies touting the Rail
Splitter and Honest Abe. Young Wide Awake clubs held torchlight parades and noisy rallies with brass bands and plenty of stemwinding orators. They outspent
all their rivals combined.
With his opposition divided Lincoln won the election with just a plurality of 39.8% of the
popular vote losing 10 of the 15 Southern slave states carrying only two in the
entire region. Breckinridge swept the Deep South, Maryland, and Texas. Bell won the border states of Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The humiliated
and hapless Douglas only won the electoral votes of Missouri. Lincoln triumphed in the
Electoral College by a landslide—180 votes to 123 for his opponents.
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