The Fiery Trial (23 page)

Many Republicans accepted the Blairs’ argument that an embrace of colonization would enable the party to expand into the Border South. Like Lincoln, most Republicans envisioned a distant future without slavery. But, as the
New York Tribune
observed, even “our wisest statesmen” could not “tell us how slavery is to be abolished in the southern states.” Were the Blairs harbingers of a new generation of southern Republicans who would set in motion the abolition of slavery? Many northern Republicans believed a significant number of border residents were anxious to make common cause with their party. They celebrated, and exaggerated, the importance of the Blairs and other border-state critics of slavery, such as Cassius M. Clay of Kentucky, another advocate of colonization. William H. Seward, who thought the idea of sending a large part of the nation’s labor force out of the country absurd, nonetheless called Frank Blair “the man of the West, of the age.” Within eight years of a Republican national victory, declared the
Chicago Press and Tribune
, Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri would “rid their states” of slavery, and Kentucky and Virginia would soon follow. Some southerners feared the same outcome. One congressman from Mississippi declared in 1859 that in parts of the border, slavery was already “almost a nominal thing.”
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By 1858, Lincoln had emerged as a public spokesman for colonization. His first extended discussion, as we have seen, came in 1852, in his eulogy of Henry Clay. By the next year, Lincoln was closely enough identified with the idea that when Reverend James Mitchell, a prominent colonization organizer from Indiana, traveled to Springfield seeking allies to promote the cause, a local minister referred him to Lincoln. Lincoln addressed the annual meeting of the Illinois Colonization Society in 1853 and again in January 1855, even as his first bid for election to the Senate unfolded. No record has survived of the first speech and only a brief outline of the second. In 1858, when he ran for the Senate, Lincoln’s was the first name listed among the eleven members of the society’s Board of Managers. (The vice presidents included Chicago Republican editor John L. Scripps and William Brown, at whose behest Lincoln compiled his “book” on racial equality.) In his first debate with Douglas, Lincoln read aloud the passage from his Peoria speech of 1854 in which he said his “first impulse” in dealing with slavery would be to free the slaves and send them to Africa.
⁷²

There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Lincoln’s advocacy of colonization or to explain it solely as a way of deflecting Douglas’s accusation that Republicans favored racial equality. When Lincoln made his first extended remarks on the subject in 1852, he was not a candidate for office and his political career appeared to have reached a dead end. Unlike many other advocates of colonization, Lincoln never countenanced compulsory deportation and expressed little interest in creating an American empire in Central America or in the Christianization of Africa. Nonetheless, he believed that blacks would welcome the opportunity to depart for a place where they could fully enjoy their natural rights. Lincoln seemed to envision the bulk of the black population eventually emigrating. In his Springfield speech of 1857, he cited biblical precedent: “The children of Israel,” in numbers comparable to American slaves, “went out of Egyptian bondage in a body.”
⁷³
For many white Americans, including Lincoln, colonization was part of a plan for ending slavery that represented a middle ground between abolitionist radicalism and the prospect of the United States existing forever half-slave and half-free.

Lincoln’s thought seemed suspended between a civic conception of American nationality, based on the universal principle of equality (and thus open to immigrants with no historic roots in this country and, in principle, to blacks), and a racial nationalism that saw blacks as in some ways not truly American. He found it impossible to imagine the United States as a biracial society. When he spoke of returning blacks to Africa, their “own native land,” Lincoln revealed that he did not consider them an intrinsic part of American society. In fact, by the 1850s, the vast majority of black Americans—a far higher percentage, indeed, than of the white population—had been born in the United States.

The Blairs made a special effort to enlist Lincoln in their cause. In February 1857, Frank Blair, whose wife Appeline was a Kentuckian and relative of Mary Lincoln, traveled to Springfield, where he met with “the leading men of the party,” Lincoln doubtless among them. Blair advised them, he wrote his father, “to drop the negro and go the whole hog for the white man…the ground we have always taken here in St. Louis.” In April, Lincoln and William Herndon met in their law office with “one of the leading emancipationists of Missouri,” probably Blair, and developed a plan to promote the Republican party in the Upper South. Two months after this meeting, in his speech at Springfield on the
Dred Scott
decision, Lincoln called for “the separation of the races,” adding that while the Republican party had not officially endorsed the idea, “a very large proportion of its members” favored it. Blair and Lincoln met again in December 1857. They agreed that John Hay, then studying law in Lincoln’s office, would become a correspondent for the
Missouri Democrat
, St. Louis’s Republican newspaper. In 1858, Hay reported on the Lincoln-Douglas debates for the
Democrat
. Despite the urging of some Republicans, the Illinois party did not endorse colonization at the state convention of 1858, following Trumbull’s advice not to “get mixed up with the free negro question” at all. But Blair returned to the state to campaign for Lincoln, perhaps to the neglect of his own political fortunes, as he was defeated for reelection to Congress.
⁷⁴

These encounters seem to have affected both men. Visiting Illinois reinforced Blair’s conviction that Missouri must rid itself of slavery. “No resident of a slave state,” he wrote, “could pass through the splendid farms of Sangamon and Morgan, without permitting an enormous sigh to escape him at the evident superiority of free labor.” As for Lincoln, he clearly saw colonization as part of a broader antislavery strategy aimed, initially at least, at the Upper South. Perhaps the Blairs offered a way of placing slavery in the course of “ultimate extinction,” of which Lincoln had spoken but without any real explanation of how it would take place. Based on the surviving outline, his 1855 address to the Illinois Colonization Society surveyed the history of slavery beginning in the fifteenth century and went on to describe the spread of antislavery sentiment, culminating in the formation of the American Colonization Society in 1816. In the fifth debate with Douglas, Lincoln quoted Henry Clay to the effect that colonization would help prepare the way for emancipation. When Lincoln advanced his own program during the Civil War for gradual, compensated abolition in the border states, coupled with colonization, it was the culmination of many years of thinking.
⁷⁵

For decades, colonization had faced the seemingly insuperable difficulty that most free blacks repudiated the idea. In the 1850s, however, the resurgence of interest in colonization among whites coincided with a rising tide of nationalism among northern blacks as well as deep despair about their future in the United States. With the Fugitive Slave Act threatening their freedom, the
Dred Scott
decision denying that they could be citizens, and the prospect of abolition as remote as ever, a number of northern blacks now embraced emigration. “We must have a nationality,” one wrote. “I am for going anywhere, so we can be an independent people.” Martin R. Delany, an abolitionist editor and lecturer whose pessimism about the prospects for blacks in the United States was strengthened when, as a student at Harvard Medical School, he was dismissed because white classmates protested his presence, advocated the creation of a new homeland for black Americans in the Caribbean, Central America, or Africa. Henry H. Garnet founded the African Civilization Society to promote emigration. James T. Holly advocated emigration to Haiti. Like the Blairs, Delany envisioned mass emigration from the United States. Most black emigrationists of the 1850s, however, looked to a select group of migrants, a talented tenth, to bring to Africa, Haiti, or Central America the benefits of Christian civilization and American economic enterprise. Success abroad, they believed, would redound to the benefit of the descendants of Africa in “our own country,” as the constitution of the African Civilization Society put it.
⁷⁶

Like earlier colonizationists, the Blairs gathered endorsements from black leaders, among them Delany and Garnet. Their emigration efforts sparked a sharp debate within the black community. Black conventions engaged in heated discussions of the future of the race in the United States. Early in 1861, the
Weekly Anglo-African
, a black-run newspaper published in New York City, apologized to its readers for having devoted so much space to lengthy letters, pro and con, about emigration that “our usual editorial matter is crowded out.” The editor urged correspondents to remember that “brevity is the soul of wit.” The most prominent opponent of colonization, in lectures, editorials, and letters throughout the 1850s, was the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. “No one idea has given rise to more oppression and persecution to the colored people of this country,” he wrote, “than that which makes Africa, not America, their home.” Douglass argued that the idea of colonization allowed whites to devise plans for ending slavery while avoiding thinking about its aftermath in the United States. This certainly seems to have been the case for Lincoln.
⁷⁷

Despite its harsh Black Laws and the growth of the emigration movement elsewhere in the North, Illinois offered scant evidence for Lincoln’s belief that free blacks could be persuaded to leave the United States voluntarily. In 1848, the black Baptist Association of Illinois sent Reverend Samuel Ball of Springfield to visit Africa and report on prospects for emigration. On his return, Ball published a pamphlet praising Liberia as “the brightest spot on this earth to the colored man.” But at the time of Ball’s death in 1852, only thirty-four black persons had emigrated from Illinois to Liberia under the auspices of national or local colonization societies during the previous twenty years.
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Blacks in Illinois held their first statewide conventions in the 1850s, beginning with a gathering in Chicago in 1853. Primarily aimed at organizing to seek repeal of the Black Laws, the conventions also spoke out against colonization. The Chicago delegates denounced all such “schemes” as “directly calculated to increase pro-slavery prejudice.” A second convention in Alton in 1856 and a public meeting of Springfield blacks in February 1858 expressed similar views. “We believe,” the Springfield gathering declared, “that the operations of the Colonization Society are calculated to excite prejudices against us, and they impel ignorant or ill disposed persons to take measures for our expulsion from the land of our nativity…. We claim the right of citizenship in this, the country of our birth…. We are not African.” Another black convention in Chicago in August 1858 decisively defeated a resolution proposed by H. Ford Douglas favoring emigration to some locale “on this continent.” It is likely that Lincoln was aware of these gatherings, which were reported in the Republican press, but there is no record of a comment from him about them. They did not alter his public commitment to colonization.
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Shortly after Lincoln’s election as president in 1860, a New Orleans newspaper castigated him as a “thorough radical abolitionist.” As evidence, it cited a speech Lincoln had supposedly delivered in Cincinnati during the 1840s, when the local black community presented a silver pitcher to Salmon P. Chase to honor his legal work on behalf of fugitive slaves. The following month, William C. Smedes, a member of the Mississippi legislature, mentioned this report in a letter justifying secession to Henry J. Raymond, the editor of the
New York Times
. Raymond forwarded the letter to Lincoln, who replied by describing Smedes as a “mad-man.” “I was never in a meeting of negroes in my life,” Lincoln insisted. This was a revealing comment. Unlike Chase and other white abolitionists and Radical Republicans, Lincoln had no real contact with politically active free blacks before the Civil War.
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James McCune Smith, the black abolitionist, wrote in despair in 1860 of the pervasiveness of both prejudice and sheer ignorance among white Americans. “Our white countrymen do not know us,” he observed; “they are strangers to our characters, ignorant of our capacity, oblivious to our history.”
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Here is where Lincoln’s lack of involvement in the abolitionist movement affected his point of view. The experience of interracial cooperation was crucial both in persuading white opponents of slavery to abandon the idea of colonization and in enabling them to outgrow racism by being exposed to and working with talented black counterparts. Despite his deep hatred of slavery, Lincoln did not share this experience. Only during the Civil War would he come into contact with black Americans of political experience and wide-ranging accomplishment. Partly as a result, his outlook regarding the place of blacks in American society would finally begin to change.

B
Y
1859, as a result of his debates with Douglas, Lincoln had become a prominent figure in the national Republican party. Out-of-state Republicans eagerly sought his political advice as their thoughts turned to the upcoming presidential election. The “great problem,” Schuyler Colfax wrote from Indiana, was how to consolidate into a “victorious phalanx” a party that encompassed “all shades and gradations of opinion from the Conservative, who almost fears to defend his principles for fear of imperiling peace, to the bold radical, who strikes stalwart blows, regardless of policy or popularity.” Lincoln had a solution. The key to success lay in setting aside what he considered peripheral questions and concentrating on the lowest common denominator of Republican opinion—opposition to the “
spread
and
nationalization
of slavery.”
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In his letters and speeches of 1859 and early 1860 Lincoln succeeded in positioning himself as a viable candidate for his party’s nomination. So effectively did he do this that George White, a Massachusetts lawyer, described him as a “cunning, sly, crafty designing man,” whose public record “seems to have been made up for the express purpose of being a successful presidential candidate.”
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White felt that Lincoln had “no deep convictions”—certainly an unfair judgment. But Lincoln did shrewdly manage to make himself acceptable to all wings of his party. Occupying the Republican middle ground ideologically and geographically, he was moderate enough to carry the entire North and therefore the Electoral College, yet enough of a radical that his election triggered the crisis of the Union. In that crisis, besieged by conflicting advice from throughout the country, Lincoln once again located himself on the middle ground of Republican opinion. He proved willing to compromise on what he considered subordinate questions but refused, even at the risk of war, to sacrifice his and his party’s core commitment to halting slavery’s expansion.

I

I
N AN ERA
of intense partisan loyalties, Lincoln had always been a party man. He had remained a Whig, he said, “from the origin to the end of that party.” Now he committed himself to promoting Republican unity as the essential precondition to victory in 1860. “My main object,” he explained to Schuyler Colfax, “[is] to hedge against divisions in the Republican ranks generally, and particularly for the contest of 1860. The point of danger is the temptation in different localities to ‘
platform
’ for something which will be popular just there, but which, nevertheless, will be a firebrand elsewhere.” Lincoln urged Republicans throughout the North to steer clear of subsidiary and divisive issues and not to adopt positions in one state that would injure the party in others.
³

In the spring of 1859, Massachusetts held a referendum on an amendment to the state constitution establishing a two-year waiting period before naturalized citizens could vote. In a state with a powerful nativist movement, many Republican leaders supported the amendment. The measure was a considerably watered-down version of a twenty-one-year waiting period originally promoted by the Know-Nothings. Nonetheless, Lincoln joined numerous out-of-state Republicans in urging its rejection. Passage of the amendment, he feared, would identify his party throughout the North with anti-immigrant sentiment and alienate German-Americans, a pivotal voting bloc in the Northwest, especially Illinois. The amendment passed; shortly thereafter, Lincoln arranged the funding to establish a German-language newspaper in Springfield devoted to promoting the Republican cause.
⁴

The bruising Senate battle of 1858 had also convinced Lincoln that Republicans must not allow themselves to become identified with “Negro equality.” He told Elihu B. Washburne that he wished his brother Israel, a Republican congressman from Maine, had “omitted” a portion of a speech criticizing Oregon’s new constitution for limiting the suffrage to whites. Lincoln himself said virtually nothing about race or colonization in 1859, although on one occasion he did reiterate his opposition to black suffrage. He continued to characterize Democrats’ appeals to racism as “flimsy diatribes” intended to “divert the public mind from the real issue—the extension or the non-extension of slavery—its localization or its nationalization.”
⁵

Another divisive issue arose from the efforts of Radicals in a number of northern states to prevent enforcement of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Ironically, as the
New York Times
pointed out, by nationalizing the right to property in slaves the
Dred Scott
decision made “the doctrine of state rights, so long [slavery’s] friend,…its foe.” A number of northern states had already enacted personal liberty laws that prohibited public officials from cooperating in the rendition of fugitive slaves; some tried to ensure accused fugitives a trial by jury, which the federal law denied them. Now, Radicals in some states invoked the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798–99, in which Jefferson and Madison had claimed for the states the power to challenge or even override national legislation. The Maine Republican convention in 1858 passed a resolution terming the states “essentially independent sovereignties,” a position previously associated with defenders of slavery. Some Republicans spoke of nullification. “The fact is,” one Radical wrote in 1859, that to prevent enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, “we have got to come to Calhoun’s ground.”
⁶

The issue came to a head in Wisconsin and Ohio. In the former, the state supreme court declared the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional, and when the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the ruling in 1859, the Republican legislature denounced its decision, quoting the Kentucky Resolution to reaffirm the state’s sovereignty. In Ohio, the Republican state convention of 1859 demanded repeal of the federal law and denied renomination to a judge who had upheld its constitutionality.
⁷

Moderate and conservative Republicans were aghast. “Almost the whole country,” wrote Timothy O. Howe of Wisconsin, “has declared
nullification
to be an unconstitutional remedy,” and it would be suicidal for Republicans to allow themselves to become associated with the doctrine. Lincoln, always a strong nationalist and believer in the rule of law, fully agreed. He had no liking for the 1850 act, which was heavily weighted against the accused fugitive, but he had long affirmed the South’s right to “an efficient fugitive slave law.” To repudiate one clause of the Constitution, he said during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, would undermine the entire document. In 1859, Lincoln complained to Ohio Republican leaders that their demand for repeal seriously imperiled the party’s chances elsewhere by suggesting that it stood “in disregard of the constitution.” “I assure you,” he wrote, “the cause of Republicanism is hopeless in Illinois, if it can be in any way made responsible for that plank.”
⁸

But if Lincoln warned against Radicals’ efforts to add to the Republican platform positions of dubious legality, he also opposed efforts by conservatives to “lower the Republican standard” by deemphasizing the slavery question altogether. The economic downturn that began in 1857 revived demands for tariff protection among manufacturers, especially Pennsylvania iron-makers. Conservative Republicans, most of them former Whigs, promoted the tariff as an issue that could broaden the party’s base by attracting voters more interested in economic recovery than slavery. It might even win votes in border states like Maryland and Virginia, where industry was growing. “An attempt is making from the old Whig side,” Charles Francis Adams warned, “to stuff in the protective tariff as a substitute for the slave question.” Radicals like Adams strongly opposed such plans, as did the numerous former Democrats in the Republican party, long advocates of free trade. Despite his previous enthusiasm for the tariff, Lincoln sided with them. “I was an old Henry Clay tariff Whig,” he wrote, and “in olden times I made more speeches on that subject, than on any other.” But, he insisted, the revival of the tariff question “will not advance the cause.” As Lincoln explained to Thomas Corwin, the venerable Ohio Whig who had been elected to Congress as a Republican in 1858, slavery was “the living issue of the day” and it would be as disastrous to abandon it for the tariff or other “old issues” as to create a “
rumpus
” within the party over fugitive slaves.
⁹

Ever since the 1858 election, local newspapers in Illinois had promoted Lincoln as a potential president. In April 1859, Lincoln rebuffed one editor who wanted to endorse his candidacy, explaining, “I must, in candor, say I do not think myself fit for the Presidency.” Lincoln still harbored political ambitions. But another term as a freshman member of Congress lacked appeal, and he could not challenge Trumbull’s reelection in 1860 without wrecking the party, even though, he wrote, “I would rather have a full term in the Senate than in the Presidency.” Certainly, Lincoln’s speaking tour outside his home state in the fall of 1859 could hardly be explained by political requirements in Illinois. His purpose, he explained to a Pennsylvania correspondent, was to promote “the Republican cause.” He would “labor faithfully in the ranks” to this end, “unless, as I think not probably, the judgment of the party shall assign me a different position.” He did not say what other “position” he had in mind. Perhaps the vice presidency, for which he would be a plausible choice if an easterner became the Republican standard-bearer. But at some point in the fall of 1859, Lincoln began to think of himself as a contender for the presidential nomination.
¹⁰

Early in 1860, the opportunity to lecture in New York City offered the chance to enhance his national standing. The invitation had been arranged by a group of New York Republicans hostile to William H. Seward, the frontrunner for the party’s nomination. They first asked Lincoln to speak at the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, where Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, perhaps the nation’s most prominent clergyman, held forth every Sunday. But when Lincoln arrived in New York he discovered that the venue had been moved to Cooper Institute in Manhattan. The institute had been founded the previous year by Peter Cooper, whose life, like Lincoln’s, seemed to exemplify the opportunities for social advancement offered to men of ambition by northern society. The son of a New York City craftsman and a coach-maker’s apprentice as a youth, Cooper had acquired great wealth as a railroad entrepreneur and industrialist. His institute provided education, free of charge, to aspiring workingmen and women. In 1876, at the age of eighty-five, convinced that the free-labor ideal was receding in post–Civil War America, Cooper would run for president as the candidate of the Greenback party.

On February 27, 1860, Horace Greeley of the
Tribune
, long Seward’s critic, helped escort Lincoln to the platform, and William Cullen Bryant, editor of the
New York Evening Post
and another member of the anti Seward faction, introduced him. When Lincoln rose to speak, the institute’s 1,800-seat Great Hall was filled almost to capacity, “crowded with distinguished Republicans” as well as “a considerable number of ladies.” Lincoln used the occasion to strike blows against two rivals for the presidency, Seward and Stephen A. Douglas, as well as Chief Justice Taney, and to demonstrate to a demanding eastern audience his command of the slavery question, commitment to Republican principles, and availability as a candidate should Seward falter.
¹¹

Lincoln framed the Cooper Institute speech as a response to Douglas’s article in
Harper’s Magazine
the previous fall, and especially its claim that popular sovereignty represented a continuation of the founders’ policy with regard to slavery. Lincoln spent much of the time preceding his trip in the Illinois State Library in Springfield, where he exhaustively researched the public statements, votes in Congress, and writings of men who had framed the Constitution. The result was a surprisingly scholarly presentation, complete, when published, with numerous footnotes. Lincoln concluded that the vast majority of the founders who expressed an opinion on the subject viewed slavery as an evil whose existence had to be tolerated but whose expansion could and should be prevented by Congress. Moreover, contrary to Taney’s ruling in
Dred Scott
that the Constitution recognized property in slaves, Lincoln pointed out that the document referred to slaves not as property but as “other persons,” and intentionally avoided using the words “slave” and “slavery.” If a conflict existed between “the rights of property” and “the rights of men,” Lincoln had written in 1859, precedence must go to the latter. Now he insisted that the founders held the same view.

“What is conservatism?” Lincoln asked. “Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?” On this basis, he insisted, Republicans were the conservative party. This familiar reassurance he considered doubly necessary in the wake of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, the previous November, when this deeply religious abolitionist and a band of nineteen followers seized the federal arsenal, hoping to spark a slave insurrection. Democrats, North and South, had blamed Brown’s private war against slavery on the dissemination of Republican doctrines. Douglas had even introduced a bill in the Senate to outlaw agitation against slavery. But, Lincoln replied, Democrats had “failed to implicate a single Republican” in the failed enterprise. In any event, Brown’s effort to incite a slave insurrection was “so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed.”

But there was more to the Cooper Institute speech than an erudite, legalistic exposition of history. In remarkably forceful language, Lincoln accused the South of planning to “destroy the Government” unless it prevailed on “all points in dispute between you and us.” The implication was clear: the North would not let it do so. As he had done so often, Lincoln denied that Republicans planned to interfere with slavery where it existed. But, he continued, southerners remained unpersuaded. What would convince them? “This, and this only: cease to call slavery
wrong
, and join them in calling it
right
…. [A] sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong.” This Republicans would not do. The address concluded with a clarion call for the party not to abandon its bedrock beliefs in the face of threats of secession and charges of radicalism. Lincoln had been experimenting with dramatic perorations at least since March 1859, when he ended a speech in Chicago with the words “Stand by your principles; stand by your guns; and victory complete and permanent is sure at the last.” Now, he closed with far more resonant language: “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.”
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