Liberator or Racist—Considering Lincoln Part II

 

                            The first authenticated photo of Abraham Lincoln as a Springfield Lawyer in 1847,

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.

Lincoln as a Circuit riding Illinois lawyer an experience that made him well known and cultivated wide circles of friends who would become the nucleus his successful political operation. 

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.

Kentucky belle Mary Todd ultimately chose Lincoln over his rival Stephen A. Douglas.  Her social ambitions helped mask his political ones.

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 Lincoln's comfortable Springfield home photographed in 1860 with Abe and his young sons Willie and Tad on the porch.

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.

Under Douglas's Popular Sovereignty both anti-slavery free spoilers and pro-slavery Southerners flooded the new Kansas Territory in hopes of securing majorities to form a government.  Violence quickly spread between the two sides.  In this picture pro-slavery Missouri Border Ruffians shoot 17 unarmed Free State settlers who they had captured at Marais des Cygnes gulch.

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.

Reynold's Political Map of the United Sates of the 1856 presidential election starkly depicted the political divide over slavery and its expansion.  Lincoln became a Republican and a surrogate speaker for John C. Frémont, the party's first nominee.

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.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates during their 1858 contest for the U.S. Senate attracted national attention and put Lincoln on the map as an opponent of the extension of slavery. 

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.

Although unannounced, Lincoln established himself as a leading candidate for the 1860 Republican nomination with his speech at Cooper's Union in New York City.  

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.

The Wigwam in Chicago was built especially for the 1860 Republican Convention.  Lincoln's managers flooded the building with rowdy and noisy demonstrators who stampeded the deadlocked delegates to nominate Lincoln. 

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.

The breakdown of the Electoral College majority vote that put Lincoln in the Executive Mansion despite winning less than 40% of the popular vote.

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.

Next—The Presidency.