The Fiery Trial (15 page)

Frederick Douglass condemned the Republican platform for ignoring every critical question except Kansas: “Nothing said of the Fugitive Slave Bill—nothing said of slavery in the District of Columbia—nothing said of the slave trade between the states.” Yet the radical element within the party announced itself pleased with the language, evidently drafted by Joshua R. Giddings, that described slavery as unconstitutional outside of state jurisdiction. Salmon P. Chase wondered whether the delegates fully understood “what broad principles they were avowing.” They had endorsed, he noted, “the denationalization entire,” an idea “first promulgated by the Liberty party” in the early 1840s. George W. Julian, the leading Indiana Radical (and Giddings’s son-in-law), claimed that the logic of the Republican platform would lead inexorably to abolition in the District of Columbia and the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act.
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When it came to choosing the party’s first presidential candidate, the convention eschewed established political leaders of all kinds and settled on John C. Frémont, whose claim to fame lay in having explored the Far West and playing a role in the conquest of California during the Mexican War. (Lincoln preferred Supreme Court Justice John McLean of Ohio, whose reputation as a moderate Whig, he felt, would appeal to voters in Illinois and throughout the Lower North.) Since Frémont’s brief career in politics, a stint in the Senate from California in 1850–51, had been as a Democrat, the convention needed to choose a former Whig for vice president. The Illinois delegation asked John Allison of Pennsylvania to nominate Lincoln. Few at the convention had heard of him. All Allison could say about Lincoln’s qualifications was that “he knew him to be the prince of good fellows, and an Old-line Whig.” William B. Archer of Illinois seconded the nomination. He described Lincoln as fifty-five years old (in fact, he was forty-seven), “as pure a patriot as ever lived,” and a man whose presence on the ticket would enable the party to carry Illinois. John M. Palmer of Illinois added, “I know he is a good man and a hard worker in the field, although I never heard him.” Despite these less-than-ringing endorsements, Lincoln received 110 votes on the first ballot, far behind the eventual nominee, William Dayton of New Jersey, but well ahead of political luminaries such as Nathaniel P. Banks, David Wilmot, and Charles Sumner. Lincoln’s support from his own delegation reflected the standing he had achieved as a party leader in Illinois; his strong showing elsewhere underscored how crucial his state would be in the upcoming campaign.
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The three-way election of 1856 that pitted Frémont against Democrat James Buchanan and ex-president Millard Fillmore, running as the candidate of the American party, as the Know-Nothings were officially known, proved to be the most boisterous since the log-cabin campaign of 1840. Like the nation itself, Illinois emerged as a house divided, with Republicans certain to carry the northern counties and Democrats the southern. The “central counties…are to be the battle ground,” Richard Yates reported to Lincoln in August. And there Fillmore offered a refuge for conservative Whigs alarmed by the sectional nature of the Republican party but unwilling to vote for a Democrat. “I regret to say,” Yates wrote, “that the Fillmore division is large in this section of the State—splitting the Anti Nebraska vote
right
in the
middle
.”
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Lincoln threw himself into the campaign, all but abandoning his law practice in the fall to deliver over 100 speeches for Frémont. (“I lost nearly all the working part of last year,” he wrote in 1857, “giving my time to the canvass.”) He concentrated on his political base of central Illinois, but also gave a major address in Chicago. He even ventured into the southern part of the state, to places where, one newspaper remarked, “such a thing as a Fremont speech…[had] never been heard.” In general, Lincoln repeated the themes he had advanced in 1854, although the language now seemed more strident. Slavery, he claimed, was seeking not simply to expand into the West but to become the “ruling element” in the government. To counteract the Democrats’ description of the Republicans as a “sectional party” that endangered the Union, which he called “the most difficult objection we have to meet,” Lincoln drew attention to his own Kentucky birth and Whig background and to his party’s disavowal of any intention to interfere with slavery where it already existed. He begged Fillmore supporters to “unite” with the Republicans, even proposing the formation of a joint electoral ticket that would pledge to throw its support to whichever of the two candidates received more popular votes in the state.
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In the end, Frémont carried eleven northern states—all of New England, New York, Ohio, and the upper Northwest. But this was not enough, as Buchanan won every slave state except Maryland (Fillmore’s only victory), as well as California, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey—the moderate and conservative bastions of the Lower North. Within Illinois, the results reflected the national pattern. Frémont carried northern Illinois by an overwhelming margin—Elihu B. Washburne’s congressional district gave Frémont the largest majority of any in the country. But enough former Whig voters in the southern and central parts of the state voted for Fillmore or Buchanan to produce a Democratic victory. Even John Todd Stuart, Lincoln’s former political mentor and law partner and his wife’s cousin, could not bring himself to vote for the Republicans, a party he associated with abolitionism. Overall, Frémont received 74 percent of the vote in northern Illinois, 37 percent in the central counties, and 23 percent in the southern part of the state.
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The disappointing outcome nonetheless offered grounds for Republican optimism. It represented a remarkable showing for a party that had not existed two years earlier. In key northern states, Buchanan enjoyed only a narrow margin of victory. His plurality over Frémont in Illinois slightly exceeded 9,000 votes (around 3 percent of the total turnout), but William Bissell, the Republican candidate for governor, was elected along with the rest of the state ticket. Clearly, the key to the state’s future politics lay with the 37,000 voters, almost all of them in southern and central Illinois, who had chosen Fillmore. With the Know-Nothings disintegrating under the pressure of the same slavery issue that had destroyed the Whig party, it did not seem unrealistic to assume that a significant part of the Fillmore vote could be attracted to the Republicans the next time around.
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Moreover, rapid changes in the state’s economy and its population augured well for future Republican success. By the mid-1850s, great East-West trunk lines connected Chicago with Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York; the Illinois Central Railroad traversed the state from north to south; and feeder lines crisscrossed the prairies. The development of the rail network catalyzed a transformation of economic life in Illinois, bringing the final triumph of the market revolution. Milton Hay, the uncle of Lincoln’s secretary John Hay, later recalled the coming of the railroad as the “dividing line in point of time between the old and the new. Not only our homemade manufactures, but our homemade life and habits to a great measure disappeared…. We farmed not only with different implements but in a different mode. Then we began to inquire what the markets were and what product of the farm we could raise and sell to the best advantage.”

The railroad transformed Chicago’s agricultural hinterland, a vast area including northern and central Illinois and parts of Iowa and Wisconsin, into one of the world’s preeminent centers of commercial agriculture. By 1860, Illinois led the nation in corn and wheat production. Its economy reoriented itself from south to east. Railroads shipped farm goods previously sent to New Orleans to the burgeoning cities of the Atlantic seaboard, weakening the state’s ties to the slave South. Fewer and fewer men would take goods down the river for sale, as Lincoln had done in his youth. Indeed, in one of his most celebrated legal cases of the 1850s, Lincoln successfully defended a company that had built a railroad bridge across the Mississippi River against a suit by owners of a steamboat that had crashed into the bridge and burned. He had “no prejudice against steamboats or steamboatmen,” Lincoln told the jury, but “there is a travel from East to West,…growing larger and larger” and essential to the continuation of “the astonishing growth of Illinois.”
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Lincoln’s rise coincided with that of Illinois. The 1850 population of 851,000 doubled to 1.7 million ten years later, making Illinois the nation’s fourth largest state. Much of this increase occurred in the rapidly growing counties of northern Illinois, the heartland of the new Republican party. Farmers and laborers poured into Illinois from New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and overseas. By 1860, only 10 percent of the state’s population had, like Lincoln and most of the early settlers, been born in the South; a full 20 percent hailed from Ireland and Germany. Even southern Illinois attracted northern migrants, bringing “certain uncomfortable and antagonistical political maxims” to illuminate its “time-honored darkness,” as one Republican newspaper rather condescendingly put it. Of course, not every northerner gravitated to the Republican party (Stephen A. Douglas himself had been born in Vermont). But anyone examining the statistics of economic and population growth—which a politician as shrewd as Lincoln could hardly ignore—would conclude that like its economy, the state’s political geography had been fundamentally transformed. This was the context that made possible the rise of the Republican party and the emergence of Lincoln.
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III

D
URING THE
1850
S
, Lincoln established an approach to the slavery issue that situated him squarely in the middle of the spectrum of northern antislavery opinion. At one end of this spectrum stood abolitionists who sought to arouse public opinion by working outside the political system and insisted that free African-Americans must be recognized as equal citizens. Closely connected to abolitionists were the Radical Republicans, politicians who generally represented districts in New England or the belt of New England migration that stretched across upstate New York and the upper Northwest. Here, the abolitionist movement sank deep roots, and Republicans favored more drastic action against slavery than merely preventing its westward expansion. Radicals like Charles Sumner, George W. Julian, and Salmon P. Chase repeatedly avowed that the federal government had no right to interfere with slavery in the southern states. But, as we have seen, they insisted that constitutionally permissible actions beyond non-extension—the divorce of federal government from slavery, abolition in the District of Columbia and elsewhere within federal jurisdiction, repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act—could promote their avowed goal, “the emancipation of the bondsmen in America.”
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At the other end of the antislavery spectrum stood conservatives, most of them former Whigs, who joined the Republican party believing that so long as the federal government remained under the control of the “slave power,” measures important to the country’s economic growth such as a protective tariff and federal aid to internal improvements could never be enacted. They opposed the expansion of slavery but feared that any agitation beyond this would endanger the survival of the Union.
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Lincoln’s speeches of the mid-1850s, with their emphasis on the intentions of the founders, the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and the need to prevent slavery’s expansion so that free white laborers could inhabit the western territories, articulated ideas common among Republican politicians and newspapers. In some ways, however, he carved out an approach that was very much his own.

Abolitionists and Radical Republicans spoke movingly of the harsh cruelty of slavery. Their understanding of natural rights included the right to be free from physical abuse. Their speeches, newspapers, pamphlets, and lithographs overflowed with accounts of slave suffering: whippings, denial of access to literacy, and, especially in works produced by female abolitionists, the sexual abuse of black women and the separation of families. Radicals delivered long speeches in Congress about the “barbarism” of the “diabolical system” and dwelled luridly on “the flesh galled by manacle…the human form mutilated by knife,” and similar injustices. Lincoln privately, as in his 1855 letter to Joshua Speed, commented on how witnessing the sale of slaves and the hunting down of fugitives to be “carried back to their stripes” made him “miserable.” But he almost never spoke in public of the violations of slaves’ bodies and family ties. Occasionally, as in a March 1860 speech in Hartford, Lincoln warned against ignoring the reasons that inspired a slave to run away, including “the lashes he received.” But generally, Lincoln discussed slavery as an abstraction, a violation of basic principles of self-determination and equality, not as a living institution that rested on day-to-day violence.
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As a politician, Lincoln worked to harness the moral energies of the North’s evangelical churches for the Republican cause. But unlike most Radicals, religious doctrine played little role in his political outlook. The “little New Englands,” including northern Illinois, where Radical Republicanism flourished, had been swept in the decades before the Civil War by religious revivals that instilled a commitment to ridding the world of sins of all kinds, including slavery. Joshua R. Giddings believed in “the absolute oneness of religion and politics” and identified “religious truth” as “the only basis of free government.” Even moderate Republicans like Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts called slavery a sin, echoing what abolitionists had been saying for decades. Lincoln spoke of slaveholders not as reprobates and sinners but as men and women enmeshed in a system from which they could not disentangle themselves. “They are just what we would be in their situation,” he said at Peoria. In 1858 he reminded one audience that he had never “expressed any harsh sentiment towards our Southern brethren.” Lincoln knew the Bible well, but to condemn slavery he appealed not so much to Scripture or religious precepts as to American history and the Declaration of Independence.
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