The Fiery Trial (5 page)

In 1795, the Virginia critic of slavery St. George Tucker inquired of the Massachusetts clergyman and historian Jeremy Belknap how his state had abolished slavery. Belknap replied, “Slavery hath been abolished here by public opinion.” Understanding the importance of public sentiment, abolitionists pioneered the practice of radical agitation in a democracy. They did not put forward a detailed plan of emancipation. Rather, their aim, explained Wendell Phillips, perhaps the movement’s greatest orator, was “to alter public opinion,” to bring about a moral transformation whereby white Americans recognized the humanity and equal rights of blacks. By changing public discourse, by redefining the politically “possible,” the abolitionist movement affected far more Americans than actually joined its ranks.
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Abolitionists seized on the weapons available to them—petitions, lectures, and the newly invented steam press, which made possible the mass production of pamphlets, newspapers, and broadsides—to challenge the conspiracy of silence that increasingly barred discussion of slavery from the national public sphere.
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The movement appealed simultaneously to the hearts and minds of Americans, excoriating slaveowners and exposing the brutal reality of slavery—whippings, separation of families, and so on—while also condemning slavery for destroying “the influence which our otherwise free and republican institutions are justly entitled to in the world.” Abolitionists pioneered the argument that the founders were explicitly or implicitly antislavery and expected the institution’s demise. They tried to appropriate the Declaration of Independence for their cause, interpreting the Declaration (as Lincoln would later do) as a condemnation of slavery. The words of Jefferson’s preamble affirming the equality of man graced the front page of every issue of Zebina Eastman’s abolitionist newspaper, the
Western Citizen
, published in Chicago beginning in 1842. Abolitionists also argued for the superiority of free labor to slave, and insisted that slavery illegitimately denied slaves the fruits of their labor. Many critics of slavery, including Lincoln, who never thought of themselves as abolitionists, came to articulate ideas and themes that had first appeared in abolitionist writings.
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Where abolitionists diverged most profoundly from their contemporaries, including less radical critics of slavery, lay in their views concerning a post-slavery America. The crusade against slavery, wrote Angelina Grimké, the daughter of a South Carolina slaveholder who became an outspoken abolitionist and feminist, was the nation’s preeminent “school in which
human rights
are…investigated.” Abolitionists played a crucial role in giving new meaning to ideas such as personal liberty, political community, and the rights that attached to American citizenship. They insisted on the “Americanness” of slaves and free blacks, a position summarized in the title of Lydia Maria Child’s popular treatise of 1833,
An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans
. Child’s text insisted that blacks were compatriots, not foreigners; they should no more be considered Africans than white Englishmen. The abolitionist idea of egalitarian birthright citizenship, later enshrined in the Constitution by the Fourteenth Amendment, was a radical departure from the traditions and practices of American life.
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The first racially integrated social movement in American history, abolitionism was also the first to insist on the inextricable connection between the struggles against slavery and racism. “While the word ‘white’ is on the statute-book of Massachusetts,” declared the abolitionist editor Edmund Quincy, “Massachusetts is a slave state.” Abolitionists challenged both southern slavery and the racial proscription that confined free blacks to second-class status throughout the nation. In the ideas of a national citizenship and of equal rights for all Americans, abolitionists glimpsed the possibility, which came to fruition during the Civil War, that the national state might become the guarantor of freedom and equality rather than its enemy.
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Initially, the federal government and many private citizens responded to the crusade against slavery by attempting to suppress it. The House of Representatives in 1836 adopted the notorious gag rule, prohibiting the consideration of abolitionist petitions. Throughout the 1830s, northern mobs (well over a hundred by one count) broke up meetings of abolitionists and destroyed their printing presses. Nonetheless, between the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 and the end of the decade, somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 northerners joined local groups dedicated to the abolition of slavery and equal rights for black Americans.
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As abolitionism spread, a chasm opened between the movement and the American Colonization Society. Colonizationists often included the most prominent members of local communities. They not only found abolitionists’ ideas unacceptable, but resented their efforts to organize ordinary citizens outside existing channels of authority. Colonizationists instigated and participated in the anti-abolitionist riots that swept the North in the mid-1830s. Among numerous supporters of colonization who viewed the abolitionists as “exerting the most unhappy influence” was Henry Clay, who feared that the emergence of abolitionism had set back hopes for ending slavery by “half a century.” White southerners, he warned in 1839, would never accept the creation of a large class of free blacks who enjoyed equal rights. Therefore, if abolitionist views became widespread in the North, the inevitable result would be a bloody civil war.
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While no longer the main embodiment of white antislavery sentiment, colonization survived as part of the broad spectrum of ideas relating to slavery and abolition. This was particularly true in Illinois, where, until the mid-1830s, what antislavery sentiment existed took the form of colonizationism. The founding meeting of the Illinois Colonization Society, in 1830, attracted both genuine foes of slavery and those primarily concerned with ridding the state of free blacks. Among those present was former governor Edward Coles, who, as noted earlier, had emancipated his own slaves, brought them to Illinois, and fought for repeal of the state’s Black Laws. By 1830, Coles had concluded that blacks could never enjoy full freedom in the United States. Also present was Cyrus Edwards, the uncle by marriage of Mary Todd’s sister Elizabeth. Edwards dwelled on the “dangerous and baleful influence” of free blacks and insisted that freeing the South’s slaves and allowing them to remain in the country was impossible. In 1833, a local colonization society was organized in Springfield, with numerous leading citizens as officers, including John Todd Stuart, who would soon become Lincoln’s first law partner. Several other close associates of Lincoln, including the lawyers and Whig political leaders David Davis and Orville H. Browning, as well as Charles Dresser, the Episcopal minister who officiated at Lincoln’s wedding, were also longtime advocates of colonization. Whigs “antagonistical to abolitionism,” as one newspaper put it, dominated colonization ranks in Illinois.
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During the first two decades of Lincoln’s political career, abolitionism proved far weaker in Illinois than in other northern states. In 1837, the
Liberator
reported that of the 607 local antislavery societies in the United States, only 3 were located in Illinois. Nonetheless, during the mid-1830s abolitionist ideas did begin to circulate in the northern and central parts of the state, thanks to the
Observer
, a newspaper published by the Maine-born Presbyterian minister Elijah P. Lovejoy first in St. Louis and then, after a mob destroyed his press, just across the Mississippi River in Alton, Illinois. Lovejoy’s expulsion from St. Louis followed the killing of a constable by Francis McIntosh, a free black riverboat worker from Pittsburgh. Irate residents of the city subsequently lynched McIntosh. They blamed Lovejoy for spreading the ideas that allegedly caused McIntosh to commit the murder and for protesting the crime against him.
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In October 1837, Lovejoy and his brother Owen, a Congregationalist minister, called a meeting in Alton to organize the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society. On the appointed day, eighty-six delegates assembled. Only four hailed from Sangamon County, where Lincoln lived. The state attorney general, Usher F. Linder, organized a mob that packed the meeting and adopted resolutions condemning the idea of emancipation. The next day the town’s mayor brought constables to break up another mob led by Linder and allowed the gathering to proceed.
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The Declaration of Sentiments of the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society began with a discussion of “the foundation of human rights.” Since God had created every person with an “immortal soul,” it proclaimed, all were entitled to “equality of fundamental rights.” The document condemned slavery as a “subversion of the laws of God” and a violation of every human right, including education, family life, personal chastity, protection against injury, and individual self-determination. It called for immediate abolition by the southern states and the elevation of free blacks to “an equality with the whites.” Opposition to the Illinois Black Laws quickly emerged as a central tenet of abolitionism in the state. In 1840, one group of abolitionists published a pamphlet claiming that these laws violated the comity clause of the U.S. Constitution, which required each state to accord citizens of other states the same rights as their own.
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With abolitionists widely stigmatized as advocates of racial equality who threatened to disrupt the Union, identifying with the cause required considerable courage. This became starkly evident on November 7, 1837, less than two weeks after the organization of the Anti-Slavery Society, when Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered by a mob while defending his printing press in Alton. Owen Lovejoy vowed to dedicate himself to the cause now “sprinkled with my brother’s blood” he would go on to a long career as an abolitionist, member of Congress, and bridge between the Radical Republicans and Lincoln during the Civil War. Otherwise, so deep was the hostility to abolitionism in Illinois that Elijah P. Lovejoy’s death evoked little reaction. In Springfield, a public meeting denounced the abolitionists as “dangerous members of society.” In other northern states, however, dozens of newspapers, few of them sympathetic to the abolitionist movement, condemned the murder as a flagrant assault on freedom of the press. Lovejoy’s death persuaded many northerners that slavery posed a threat to the liberties of white Americans as well as blacks.
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For several years after the murder it remained difficult to hold abolitionist gatherings in many parts of Illinois. In 1843, a mob armed with clubs prevented fifteen abolitionists from convening a public meeting in Bloomington. In the same year, a large crowd disrupted an abolitionist assembly in Peoria. Two years later, the governor appointed one of the mob’s leaders, Norman H. Purple, to the state supreme court. Outside a few counties in northern Illinois settled by New Englanders, abolitionism remained weak well into the 1840s. This was certainly the case in Springfield, where Lincoln lived beginning in 1837. A correspondent of the
Liberator
reported in 1843 that of the city’s clergymen, only two, including the lone black minister, had “the moral courage” to speak against slavery. “This is a bitter pro-slavery…community,” he noted, adding that what was true of Springfield was equally true of “the entire middle and southern portions of this state.”
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III

N
OT SURPRISINGLY,
Lincoln repeatedly denied any association with abolitionism. Yet he did not remain indifferent to the clash between colonizationists and abolitionists, or to the mob violence swirling around him. Questions arising from these events rarely came before the Illinois legislature during Lincoln’s tenure there from 1834 to 1842. When they did, however, Lincoln proved willing, at some political risk, to set himself apart from his colleagues in both parties. The occasion arose in January 1837, after Joseph Duncan, the state’s Democratic governor, informed the legislature that a number of southern states had asked their northern fellow countrymen to condemn abolitionists and take action against them. The Illinois legislature appointed a committee to consider the governor’s message. Its chair, Orville H. Browning, a Whig state senator and close friend of Lincoln’s (they lived in the same boardinghouse in Vandalia, then the state capital), presented a report and three resolutions.
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As southerners had requested, the report condemned the abolitionists, although it hardly offered a ringing defense of slavery. Even though it defended the constitutional right to own slaves, Browning’s report was essentially a justification of colonization, which is presumably why the American Colonization Society published it in its monthly periodical, the
African Repository
. Browning’s main complaint against the abolitionists was that their agitation had undermined the colonizationists’ efforts to liberate “that unfortunate race of our fellow men” from “thraldom” and return them “to their own benighted land.” On the other hand, the three resolutions offered strong support for owners of slaves. The first condemned “the formation of abolition societies, and of the doctrines promulgated by them.” The second affirmed the legislators’ “deep regard and affection” for southern slaveholders, declared the right of property in slaves “sacred to the slave-holding states by the Federal Constitution,” and insisted that slavery could not be abolished there without state approval. The third condemned the idea of abolition in the District of Columbia—which abolitionists were demanding in petitions to Congress—without the consent of the District’s white citizens. When the resolutions came before the Illinois House of Representatives, Lincoln moved to amend the one opposing abolition in the nation’s capital by adding the words “unless the people of the said District petition for the same.” His attempt failed, and the House adopted the resolutions, 77 to 6. The Senate then concurred, 18 to 0. Thus, only six members of the legislature voted no. One was Lincoln.
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