Lincoln: A Photobiography (6 page)

Lincoln at the age of forty-eight. "The picture ... is, I think, a very true one; though my wife, and many others, do not," Lincoln wrote. "My impression is that their objection arises from the disordered condition of the hair.
"

Mary had a strong sense of propriety, and her husband's homespun manners riled her. She was annoyed when he answered the front door in his shirtsleeves, greeted guests in shabby carpet slippers, or littered the parlor with papers and books. When Mary lost her temper, the neighbors would hear her furious explosions of anger. Lincoln would simply walk out of the house, giving her time to calm down.

She wasn't easy to live with, but neither was Lincoln. His untidiness followed him home from the office. He cared little for the social niceties that were so important to his wife. He was absent-minded, perpetually late for meals. He was away from home for weeks at a time, leaving Mary alone with a big house to run and children to care for. And he was moody, lapsing into long brooding silences. Like other couples, the Lincolns fought. But they always made up, and the love between them endured. If Mary scolded her husband for his failings, it was because she was so fiercely proud of his abilities.

They adored their boys, denied them nothing, and seldom disciplined them. Lincoln liked to take Willie and Tad to the office when he worked on Sundays. Their wild behavior infuriated his partner. "The boys were absolutely unrestrained in their amusement," Herndon complained. "If they pulled down all the books from the shelves, bent the points of all the pens, overturned the spittoon, it never disturbed the serenity of their father's good nature. I have felt many and many a time that I wanted to wring the necks of those little brats and pitch them out of the windows."

Mary Lincoln with her sons Willie (left) and Tad (right) in 1860.

But as far as Lincoln was concerned, his boys could do no wrong. "Mr. Lincoln ... was very exceedingly indulgent to his children," Mary remarked. "He always said: 'It is my pleasure that my children are free, happy, and unrestrained by parental tyranny. Love is the chain whereby to bind a child to its parents.'"

Wanted poster for a runaway slave.

"
If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel.
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When Lincoln took his seat in Congress in 1847, Washington was a sprawling town of 34,000 people, including several thousand slaves. From the windows of the Capitol, Lincoln could see crowded slave pens where manacled blacks waited to be shipped south.

Southern planters had built a cotton kingdom on the shoulders of enslaved blacks, and they meant to preserve their way of life. White Southerners claimed a "sacred" right to own Negroes as slaves. Slavery was a blessing for blacks and whites alike, they said, "a good—a positive good," according to Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.

Slave uprisings and rebellions had resulted in tough measures to control blacks and silence white critics of slavery. Throughout the South, antislavery writings and societies were suppressed or banned.

Slavery had never prospered in the North and had been outlawed there. Some Northerners wanted to abolish slavery everywhere in the land, but abolitionists were still a small and embattled minority. Most people in the North were willing to leave slavery alone, as long as it was confined to the South.

While the North was free soil, it was hardly a paradise for blacks. Racial prejudice was a fact of everyday life. Most Yankee states had enacted strict "black laws." In Illinois, Lincoln's home state, blacks paid taxes but could not vote, hold political office, serve on juries, testify in court, or attend schools. They had a hard time finding jobs. Often they sold themselves as "indentures" for a period of twenty years—a form of voluntary slavery—just to eat and have a place to live.

Even in northern Illinois, where antislavery feelings ran strong, whites feared that emancipation of the slaves would send thousands of jobless blacks swarming into the North. Abolitionists were considered dangerous fanatics in Illinois. Lincoln knew that to be branded an abolitionist in his home state would be political suicide.

Early in his career, Lincoln made few public statements about slavery. But he did take a stand. As a twenty-eight-year-old state legislator, he recorded his belief that slavery was "founded on both injustice and bad policy." Ten years later, as a congressman, he voted with his party to stop the spread of slavery, and he introduced his bill to outlaw slavery in the nation's capital. But he did not become an antislavery crusader. For the most part, he sat silently in the background as Congress rang with angry debates over slavery's future.

Lincoln always said that he hated slavery. He claimed he hated it as much as any abolitionist, but he feared that efforts to force abolition on the South would only lead to violence. He felt that
Congress had no power to interfere with slavery in states where it already existed.

Slave market in Atlanta. The slaves were held in pens until they were auctioned off.

He wanted to see slavery done away with altogether, but that would take time, he believed. He hoped it could be legislated out of existence, with some sort of compensation given to the slaveholders in exchange for their property As long as Congress kept slavery from spreading, Lincoln felt certain that it would gradually die a "natural death."

When his congressional term ended in 1849, Lincoln decided to withdraw from public life. For the next five years he concentrated on his law practice and stayed out of politics. As he traveled the Illinois circuit, arguing cases in country courthouses, slavery was becoming an explosive issue that threatened to tear the nation apart.

Vast new territories were opening up in the West, bringing the North and South into conflict. Each section wanted to control the western territories. The South needed new lands for the large-scale cultivation of cotton and other crops with slave labor. The North demanded that the western territories be reserved for the free labor of independent farmers and workers. Meanwhile, as the territories reached statehood and gained votes in Congress, they would hold the balance of political power in Washington. The admission of each new state raised a crucial question: Would it enter the Union as a free state or a slave state?

So far, Congress had managed to hold the country together through a series of uneasy compromises, such as the Missouri Compromise of 1820. These agreements permitted slavery in some western territories and barred it in others. But attitudes were hardening. Growing numbers of Northerners had come to regard slavery as a moral evil, an issue that could no longer be avoided. Southerners, meanwhile, were more determined than ever to protect their way of life.

Five generations of a slave family on a South Carolina plantation.

The issue came to a head in 1854, when Congress passed the bitterly debated Kansas-Nebraska Act. Under the Missouri Compromise, the region that included the territories of Kansas and Nebraska had been declared off-limits to slavery Under the new Act, however, the future of slavery in those territories would be determined by the people who settled there. They would decide for themselves whether to enter the Union as free states or slave states.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act had been introduced by Lincoln's old political rival, Stephen Douglas, now a U.S. Senator from Illinois. Douglas's policy of "popular sovereignty" caused a storm of protest in the North. By opening new territories to slavery, his measure overturned the Missouri Compromise, which had held slavery in check. With the passage of Douglas's Act, Lincoln ended his long political silence. "I was losing interest in politics," he said, "when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again."

He was "thunderstruck and stunned," aroused as he had "never been before." Douglas and his followers had opened the gates for slavery to expand and grow and establish itself permanently. Now it would never die the "natural death" Lincoln had expected. He felt compelled to speak out. For the first time in five years he neglected his law practice. He traveled across Illinois, campaigning for antislavery Whig candidates and speaking in reply to Senator Douglas, who had returned home to defend his policies.

Lincoln told his audiences that slavery was a "monstrous injustice." It was a "cancer" threatening to grow out of control "in a nation originally dedicated to the inalienable rights of man." And it was not only wrong, it threatened the rights of everyone. If slavery was permitted to spread, free white workers would be forced to compete for a living with enslaved blacks. In the end, slavery
would undermine the very foundations of democracy. "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master," Lincoln declared. "This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is not democracy."

Published as a book in 1852,
Uncle Tom's Cabin
became an international best seller that for hundreds of thousands of readers dramatized the horrors of slavery.