The Fiery Trial (10 page)

Lincoln’s decision to represent Matson in seeking to return to slavery a family entitled to their freedom under Illinois law seems inexcusable. By 1847, Lincoln was no longer a fledgling lawyer but a respected member of the Illinois bar who was about to leave for Washington to take a seat in Congress. In the 1850s, Lincoln would repeatedly condemn Stephen A. Douglas and his famous statement that he did not care if slavery were “voted up or down.” But in the Matson case, in which Lincoln proved willing to represent either side, he came perilously close to precisely this moral and ideological neutrality regarding slavery.
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If the Matson case proves anything, it is, as Lincoln’s biographer David Donald argues, that up to this point Lincoln had not given consistent thought to the issue of slavery.
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He had, to be sure, established an antislavery reputation, in large measure because of his 1837 “protest.” But his antislavery sentiments had not yet developed to the point where they affected either his commitment to the Whig party or his law practice. But he was now entering, for the first time, an arena where he would be forced to clarify his views and make political decisions regarding slavery.

Lincoln argued the Matson case on October 16, 1847. The following day he returned to Springfield, and a week later he and his family departed for Washington to assume his seat as a member of Congress. On the way, they spent three weeks with Mary Lincoln’s family in Lexington, Kentucky. Lincoln was almost certainly in the audience when Henry Clay spoke in Lexington on November 13. Clay condemned as an act of American “aggression” the Mexican War initiated by President James K. Polk the previous year and affirmed that had he been in Congress when the declaration of war had been considered, “I never, never could have voted for that bill.” He went on to oppose the acquisition of territory for the expansion of slavery and to reiterate his “well-known” belief that slavery was “a great evil.” “I should rejoice,” he added, “if not a single slave breathed the air or was within the limits of our country.” But, he continued, abolitionist agitation only damaged the prospects for gradual emancipation. The American Colonization Society offered the “benevolent” solution to the slavery question and obviated the greatest obstacle to emancipation, “the continuance of the emancipated slaves to abide among us.” Clay reminded the audience that nearly fifty years earlier, he had proposed a plan of gradual emancipation for Kentucky.
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Twelve days later, the Lincoln family departed for Washington, where Lincoln would make his first appearance on the national stage and present his first concrete plan for addressing the issue of slavery.

III

I
T WAS A PECULIARITY
of nineteenth-century politics that more than a year elapsed between the election of a Congress and its initial meeting. The Thirtieth Congress, elected in 1846, assembled in December 1847 to confront the complex questions arising from the Mexican War. Although Democrats in the Senate outnumbered their opponents by almost two to one, the Whig party enjoyed a narrow margin in the House—the only time in his entire legislative career that Lincoln found himself in the majority. Both parties, however, were internally divided, especially on the question of the future expansion of slavery. In August 1846, just as the previous Congress drew to a close, Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania had proposed an amendment to an appropriation bill requiring that slavery be prohibited in any territory acquired from Mexico. The Wilmot Proviso, which passed the House but failed in the Senate, split both parties along sectional lines and ushered in a new era in which the slavery issue moved to the center stage of American politics.

In one form or another, the Proviso came before the House numerous times during Lincoln’s term in Congress. Every northern Whig supported it, while northern Democrats, evidently more wary of offending the southern wing of their party, split. For example, when a motion came before the House in February 1848 to kill the Proviso by tabling it, all seventy-one northern Whigs, including Lincoln, voted no while northern Democrats divided 26 to 21 in favor. For their part, representatives of slaveholding states from both parties united in defense of slavery. In this case, they cast seventy-eight votes for tabling the Proviso and one against (the lone dissenter being John Houston, a Whig from Delaware). Lincoln supported the Wilmot Proviso throughout his term in Congress. “I think I may venture to say,” he remarked in 1854, with some exaggeration, “I voted for it at least forty times.”
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Feverish debate on slavery dominated congressional proceedings. “It would really seem,” complained one member, “there is no other subject claiming the deliberations of this House but negro slavery…. From morning to night, day after day, and week after week, nothing is talked of here, nothing can get a hearing that will not afford an opportunity to lug in something about negro slavery.”
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Members from every state delivered long speeches, printed in the
Congressional Globe
and usually distributed in pamphlet form to their constituents. But one searches the
Globe
in vain for a significant contribution to the debate by Lincoln.

The first session of Congress, which lasted from December 1847 to August 1848, took place in the shadow of the upcoming presidential election. Lincoln quickly became associated with the Young Indians, a group of Whig congressmen (most of them southerners, including the future vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens) who pushed for the nomination of the victorious Mexican War general Zachary Taylor, owner of a Louisiana sugar plantation and over 100 slaves. Lincoln may have remained silent on slavery for fear of endangering the unity and electoral prospects of the Whig party. When he made his maiden speech, he chose not slavery but an issue on which northern and southern Whigs agreed—the Mexican War.
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By the time Congress assembled, fighting had ceased, American forces occupied the Mexican capital, and negotiations for a peace treaty were under way. Nonetheless, most Whigs continued to believe that President Polk had initiated the conflict by deceiving the American public. During his campaign for Congress in 1846, Lincoln had said little about the war, although he spoke at a rally to promote enlistment in the army. The war was popular in Illinois, where the spirit of Manifest Destiny ran high. But in Washington, the war had become, in the words of one congressman, “a party question.” If evidence were needed, it came on January 3, 1848, when the House voted on a resolution of thanks to General Taylor and his army. George Ashmun, a Massachusetts Whig, proposed to add to the preamble the words “in a war unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.” Ashmun’s amendment passed the House 82 to 81. Every Democrat, northern and southern, voted against it, and every Whig (Lincoln included) except one voted in favor.
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Nine days later, Lincoln delivered his first speech, a full-fledged attack on the president. Earlier Lincoln had introduced resolutions demanding that Polk inform Congress of the precise “spot” of American soil where, the president claimed, Mexican aggression had initiated the war. The speech dissected Polk’s claims about the boundary between Texas and Mexico and his failure to offer proof that “the soil was
ours
where war began.” Polk’s whole discussion of the issue, Lincoln charged, rested on “the sheerest deception.” In uncharacteristically emotional language, Lincoln continued: “He is deeply conscious of being in the wrong…he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.”
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Lincoln worked very hard on his speech. He hoped, he wrote his law partner William Herndon, to “distinguish myself.” His mode of delivery—described by a New York newspaper as marked by “rapidity of utterance [and] abundance of gesture”—reflected his excitement. But despite Lincoln’s overheated rhetoric, the speech repeated ideas that dozens of his Whig colleagues, from all parts of the country, were also saying. In the same month that Lincoln spoke, one Whig member of Congress described Polk as the second-worst president in history (Jackson presumably being the worst); another called the president’s claims about the war “monstrous” a third charged that Polk had committed “acts of injustice, cruelty, and wrong.” Many Whigs echoed Lincoln’s claim that the place where war began “was
not
American soil.” Indeed, Lincoln’s “spot resolutions,” calling for further information from the president, seemed mild compared with the demand of some Whig colleagues that the president order the immediate withdrawal of all American troops from Mexico.
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In Illinois, however, which sent more volunteers to Mexico than any state other than Missouri, Lincoln’s speech created a furor. One Democratic meeting described it as “treasonable.” Herndon informed him of the unhappiness of many Illinois Whigs, himself included. Earlier in the 1840s, Whigs in Lincoln’s district had agreed that the congressional seat would be occupied for a single term by a series of party leaders. Lincoln, therefore, could not be renominated. But his position on the Mexican War seems to have contributed to the defeat of Stephen T. Logan, his party’s nominee to succeed him, in 1848. For the rest of his career, Lincoln would be dogged by accusations about his course during the Mexican War. In their 1858 debates, Stephen A. Douglas charged him several times with siding with the enemy in wartime. As late as 1863, when Lincoln approved the arrest of Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio for an antiwar speech on the grounds that his words would discourage enlistments, Democrats responded that on the same principle, Lincoln ought to have been arrested during the Mexican War.
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Lincoln’s attack on Polk dealt with the origins of the war, not its consequences. Unlike many other northern Whigs, he did not charge Polk with acting in order to acquire territory from Mexico to promote the expansion of slavery. Indeed, he explicitly denied that the war had “originated for the purpose of extending slave territory.” Lincoln did not want the divisive slavery question to play a part in the 1848 campaign. Many northern Whigs disagreed. Calling the convention that nominated Zachary Taylor the “slaughter-house of Whig principles,” the so-called Conscience Whigs joined with Democrats opposed to the expansion of slavery to form the Free Soil party, with Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams as its nominees. The party aroused great enthusiasm, and to blunt its appeal, Democrats and Whigs throughout the North promised that they would prevent the westward expansion of slavery. Nonetheless, Van Buren won around 15 percent of the northern vote, a remarkable showing for a new party. The fact that a former president and the son and grandson of another had agreed to bolt their respective parties and run on a platform embracing not only non-extension but also the Liberty party’s call for the divorce of the federal government from slavery demonstrated, William H. Seward observed, that antislavery had at length become “a respectable element in politics.”
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In August 1848, as soon as the congressional session ended, Lincoln embarked on a tour of Massachusetts to give campaign speeches for Taylor. To counteract the Free Soil appeal, Lincoln called the Whigs the real antislavery party. Taylor may not have spoken in favor of the Wilmot Proviso, he argued, but as a Whig who believed in legislative supremacy, he would not veto it if passed by Congress. Democrats, on the other hand, would allow slavery to spread into the West. Thus, to avoid the mistake of 1844, when a split antislavery vote enabled Polk to win the election, Free Soilers should support Taylor.
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During this campaign tour, Lincoln shared the platform with William H. Seward, who also supported Taylor but whose speeches went much further on the slavery question. Seward had a far more extensive antislavery record than Lincoln; as governor of New York he had refused to extradite accused fugitive slaves and had supported the elimination of the property qualification for black voters. Now, he identified the Whigs as the party of emancipation and looked forward to the day when slavery would be abolished “by moral force, peacefully, and in full accordance with public opinion.” Seward seemed to envision the future of the Whig party as a coalition of antislavery northerners and forward-looking southerners united in a commitment to a gradual end to slavery. By contrast, Lincoln still viewed the slavery controversy as, in his own words, a “distracting question,” a threat both to the unity of his party and to the survival of the Union and Constitution he revered.
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The second session of the Thirtieth Congress convened in December 1848, shortly after Taylor’s election. The slavery issue immediately reasserted itself, this time in the form of demands for abolition in the nation’s capital. The first place where Lincoln had lived with a significant black population, the District of Columbia had a population of 52,000, including 3,700 slaves and 10,000 free blacks. Since the 1830s, slavery there had been a focal point of the abolitionist struggle. Many northern congressmen deemed the presence of slavery and of slave-trading establishments, some of which plied their business within sight of the Capitol, unseemly in the seat of government of a land of liberty.

The antislavery campaign in Washington was directed by Joshua R. Giddings, an abolitionist who represented the Western Reserve of Ohio, an area settled by New Englanders and one of the North’s most antislavery constituencies. In 1842, after being censured by the House for introducing resolutions affirming slaves’ right to rebel, Giddings had resigned his seat and been triumphantly reelected. Six years later, he attended the Buffalo convention that launched the Free Soil party, where he saw, he wrote his wife, “thousands of good and virtuous citizens, throwing aside party prejudices, declare for freedom and humanity.” Like Lincoln, Giddings campaigned in Massachusetts that fall, but for the Free Soilers, not the Whigs. But in an unusual coincidence, Lincoln had found lodgings in Washington in the same boardinghouse in which Giddings resided and where a group of his antislavery allies frequently gathered, among them Congressmen Amos Tuck of New Hampshire, John G. Palfrey of Massachusetts, Daniel Gott of New York, and David Wilmot of Proviso fame. Lincoln was far more moderate than they on the politics of slavery. But living in the house with Giddings led to an expansion of Lincoln’s views. Acting in cooperation with Giddings, he decided to promote his own plan for abolition in the nation’s capital.
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