The Fiery Trial (18 page)

The Springfield speech was Lincoln’s sole major address of 1857. He devoted the rest of the year to his law practice. He reentered the political arena in the Senate campaign of 1858. Then, he would elaborate what “equality” did and did not imply. He would make explicit that blacks were not entitled to the civil and political rights white Americans took for granted. But he would not retreat from his insistence that the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence applied to every human being.

II

A
S
L
INCOLN PREPARED
for his second run for the Senate, a political earthquake dramatically altered the landscape of party politics. In the wake of the
Dred Scott
decision, President Buchanan announced that slavery now existed in all the territories, “by virtue of the Constitution.” In the spring of 1858, when Buchanan attempted to bring Kansas into the Union as a slave state under the Lecompton Constitution, which patently flouted the wishes of the majority of the territory’s residents, Stephen A. Douglas denounced the move as a violation of popular sovereignty. Douglas and his supporters joined with Republicans in Congress to block approval of the constitution.

Douglas’s stance outraged the president and southern Democrats and made it almost inevitable that his party would fracture along sectional lines in 1860. But by reinventing himself with an antisouthern (if not antislavery) political persona, Douglas created a dilemma for the Republican party in Illinois and for Lincoln’s senatorial ambitions. Horace Greeley, perhaps the most influential Republican journalist, whose
New York Tribune
circulated widely throughout the North, urged Illinois Republicans to support Douglas’s reelection to the Senate. Lincoln was dismayed. “What does the New-York Tribune mean,” he wrote anxiously to Lyman Trumbull, “by its constant eulogizing, and admiring, and magnifying [of] Douglas? Does it, in this, speak the sentiments of the republicans at Washington? Have they concluded that the republican cause, generally, can be best promoted by sacrificing us here in Illinois?” Trumbull responded that, in his view, no “honest Republican” could embrace Douglas: “The idea is preposterous.”
¹¹

Most Illinois Republicans agreed. When the Republican state convention met in Springfield on June 16, 1858, party leaders decisively rebuffed eastern calls to embrace Douglas. The platform made no concessions to popular sovereignty: it called for barring slavery from all the territories and denounced the
Dred Scott
decision and the entire idea of the “extraterritorial operation” of slave law. In an unprecedented move, the delegates named Lincoln the party’s candidate for the U.S. Senate. (Normally, such a decision awaited the convening of the next legislative session.) Half a century before a constitutional amendment provided for the popular election of senators, the Illinois legislative campaign of 1858 in effect became a referendum on whether Lincoln or Douglas should represent the state in Washington.
¹²

The highlight of the convention was Lincoln’s speech launching his campaign. In May he had written to a fellow Republican, “There remains all the difference there ever was between Judge Douglas and the Republicans.” Now he set out to demolish the idea that Republicans could in good conscience support Douglas, by linking his opponent to the designs of the slave South and denying that any middle ground existed between the friends and foes of slavery. Underlining his words for vocal emphasis, Lincoln began by addressing the consequences of Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854:

That last seemingly anticlimactic sentence was crucial. In the remainder of the speech, Lincoln spelled out the “tendency” toward the nationalization of slavery. He accused Douglas of participating in a broad conspiracy involving Presidents Pierce and Buchanan and Chief Justice Taney, to make slavery legal throughout the United States. Already, the Supreme Court had deprived blacks of the protection of the Constitution’s comity clause requiring states to accord citizens of other states the same rights as their own. It had ruled that slavery could not be barred from any territory and that Scott’s temporary residence in the free state of Illinois had not made him free. The final step would be a ruling that a master could lawfully bring his slaves into any free state for any length of time he desired. Once the
Dred Scott
decision had been “apparently indorsed by the people” (presumably by Douglas’s reelection), such a ruling would be inevitable. “We shall
lie down
,” Lincoln warned, “pleasantly dreaming that the people of
Missouri
are on the verge of making their State
free
; and we shall
awake
to the
reality
, instead, that the
Supreme
Court has made
Illinois
a
slave
State.”

Lincoln’s point in the House Divided speech was not the imminence of civil war but that Illinois voters, and all Americans, must choose between supporting or opposing slavery. As he had since 1854, Lincoln identified not Congress or the courts but public sentiment as the key battleground where the fate of slavery would be decided. The entire conspiracy rested on Douglas’s effort to “
mould
public opinion” to accept the moral equivalence of freedom and slavery. Once that had been accomplished, northerners would join Douglas in not caring “whether slavery is voted
down
or voted
up
.” Here was the reason no Republican should consider supporting Douglas for reelection: “Our cause…must be intrusted to, and conducted by [those]…who do
care
for the result.”

Frederick Douglass later identified the House Divided speech as the moment when “the friends of freedom” recognized in Lincoln a “statesman” who could unite “all the moral and political forces [opposed to] the slave power.” Some of Lincoln’s friends feared the speech would injure his chances in central Illinois, enabling Democrats to portray him as a dangerous radical. But Lincoln, as always, chose his words with care. He wanted to draw a sharp distinction between himself and Douglas. To do so, as he had in the past, Lincoln invoked ideas common in antislavery circles while formulating the argument in his own distinctive way. Henry Clay, as Lincoln well knew, had used the words “ultimate extinction” as had such Republicans as David Wilmot, Salmon P. Chase, and Senator Solomon Foot of Vermont.
¹⁴
The image of a “house divided” was hardly unfamiliar. It appears three times in the Bible, most prominently in Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees in the Gospel of Matthew. (When Douglas objected to its use in 1858, Lincoln replied that if “a question of veracity” existed, it lay not between himself and Douglas but “between the Judge and an authority of a somewhat higher character.”) Lincoln had, in a sense, anticipated the idea in his Lyceum speech of 1838, when he spoke of a future tyrant choosing between “emancipating slaves or enslaving free men.” He had employed the phrase itself as early as 1843 (referring to the Whig party, not the nation), and it had been invoked before 1858 by the antislavery minister Theodore Parker and by the proslavery writer George Fitzhugh.
¹⁵

The idea that Pierce, Buchanan, Douglas, and Taney had entered into a proslavery conspiracy strained credibility, not least because of the bitter conflict between Buchanan and Douglas over Kansas. But by 1858, the notion of a vast plot to spread slavery throughout the nation had become standard fare in Republican circles. Lincoln considered the accusation so powerful a rhetorical weapon that he urged Republican editors not to refer to it during the campaign until he could directly confront Douglas with the charge. The Republican press, in Illinois and throughout the North, was already warning of a new
Dred Scott
decision that would make it illegal for states to prohibit the introduction of slaves. Newspapers identified as the likeliest candidate the Lemmon case, in which a New York court had freed eight slaves brought by their Virginia owners to New York City for shipment to Texas. In October 1857, an appellate court upheld the original decision, whereupon the state of Virginia appealed, pledging to take the case all the way to Taney’s Supreme Court. Many Republicans worried that the Court would use it to establish a nationwide right to slave “transit.” Lincoln did not mention the Lemmon case in his House Divided speech, but he referred to it in a footnote in the printed version of his 1860 Cooper Institute address. (The case had not yet come before the Court when the Civil War broke out and Virginia seceded, rendering it moot.)
¹⁶

By the time of the House Divided speech, the idea that slavery and freedom were locked in mortal combat and that one or the other would dominate the nation’s future was already familiar. Along with Lincoln’s, the most widely publicized statement of this idea also came in 1858, in a speech by William H. Seward in Rochester, New York. The very economic integration promoted by the market revolution, Seward maintained, was bringing the slave and free states—two “radically different” civilizations—into closer contact and placing a greater premium on national unity. “Shall I tell you,” he asked his audience, “what this collision means?…It is an irrepressible conflict between opposed and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.”
¹⁷

Unlike Lincoln, Seward was a self-conscious empire-builder who envisioned a future American nation, having rid itself of slavery, embracing the whole of the North American continent and the Caribbean, as well as “distant islands in either ocean.” He saw the slave South as a relic of a bygone era; aristocratic and economically retrograde, it was out of step with the progressive currents sweeping the nineteenth-century world. Lincoln also saw slavery as an impediment to American destiny, but his sense of the nation’s mission centered less on future imperial power than on demonstrating to the world the superiority of free political institutions. He had little interest in territorial expansion and indeed ridiculed the pretensions of Young America—a group of ebullient nationalists that included Douglas—and their vision of incessant territorial aggrandizement. Unlike Seward, Lincoln’s belief in future national homogeneity rested on political and moral premises, not economic and civilizational ones. But the two concurred that a clash between freedom and slavery was inevitable. As Lincoln wrote in 1860, while he did not accept Seward’s “higher law” doctrine, “I agree with Seward in his ‘Irrepressible Conflict.’”
¹⁸

In the House Divided speech, Lincoln did not address the rights of black Americans, except when he appeared to suggest that they ought to be covered by the Constitution’s comity clause. But four weeks later, in a speech in Chicago, he tried, once again, to outline his views on this question. Like so many of Lincoln’s other major addresses, this one came in response to a speech by Douglas, delivered in the city the previous day. Douglas had condemned the House Divided speech as a call for civil war by a man who had revealed himself to be a radical abolitionist. Douglas did not mince words in appealing to racism: “This government of ours is founded on the white basis,…for the benefit of the white man, to be administered by white men.” He accused Lincoln of opposing the
Dred Scott
decision because he favored racial equality. Lincoln’s talk of national uniformity, moreover, revealed a misunderstanding of the essential principle of self-government—“the right of every community to judge and decide for itself, whether a thing is right or wrong.” Douglas challenged Lincoln’s effort to appropriate the founders to the antislavery cause. Popular sovereignty, he insisted, descended from Jefferson’s vision of a decentralized empire of liberty. Why, he asked, could the nation not continue to exist half-slave and half-free, as it had for over half a century?
¹⁹

The day after Douglas spoke, Lincoln addressed his rival’s charges head-on, in one of his most eloquent speeches. First, he responded to Douglas’s argument about national diversity. The future of slavery, a “vast moral evil,” could not be equated with “the cranberry laws of Indiana, the oyster laws of Virginia, or the Liquor Laws of Maine.” On such issues, each locality could and should determine policy for itself. But slavery was a national question—later in the campaign he would call it a “wrong” to “the whole nation”—that demanded a national solution.

Chicago was a center of Radical Republicanism. Lincoln knew his audience would not object when he declared, “I have always hated slavery I think as much as any Abolitionist.” But when he turned to the rights of blacks he took a calculated risk. In opposition to Douglas’s racialized definition of American nationhood, Lincoln counterposed a civic nationalism grounded in the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Not race or ethnicity but principle bound Americans to one another. Douglas in 1857 had explained the Declaration’s preamble as a claim that American colonists should enjoy equality with Englishmen. Lincoln seized on this formulation to argue that Douglas’s repudiation of the universality of the Declaration’s principles endangered the liberties of all Americans, including immigrants not descended from the population of 1776: