The Fiery Trial (6 page)

Six weeks later, with the House about to adjourn, Lincoln and fellow Whig Dan Stone presented a “protest”—an explanation for their votes to be published in the legislative proceedings. “They believe,” Lincoln and Stone wrote,

Lincoln’s “protest” differed from the resolutions primarily in its strong language against slavery and in omitting the description of slaveholders’ property rights as “sacred.” It foreshadowed Lincoln’s public stance in the 1850s: slavery was unjust; northerners had an obligation to respect the constitutional compromises that protected the institution; the national government had the power to act against slavery in the District of Columbia; and Lincoln was not an abolitionist. In his 1860 autobiographical sketch, Lincoln wrote that the protest “briefly defined his position on the slavery question; and so far as it goes, it was then the same that it is now.” He instructed John L. Scripps to include the text in the campaign biography of Lincoln that Scripps was writing. During the secession crisis, a member of Congress from Missouri cited Lincoln’s words from 1837 as evidence that his intentions regarding slavery could not be trusted.
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Hardly a ringing condemnation of slavery, the protest did display genuine political courage. As Scripps pointed out in the
Chicago Press and Tribune
in 1860, the document’s “intrinsic ideas” were less important than “the time they were avowed,” well before “the conscience of the nation” had awakened to the evil of slavery. When Lincoln criticized slavery as unwise and unjust, abolitionism could not have been weaker or more unpopular in Illinois. The state Anti-Slavery Society had yet to be founded. Indeed, Browning explained that his committee did not recommend action against abolitionist activity because it was “not aware” of any in the state. Certainly, Lincoln could not have anticipated any political benefit from his course. Quite the contrary. The rules required that to be printed, any such protest had to be signed by two members. Lincoln canvassed the other five dissenters, but the four intending to run for reelection declined to join him. Only Stone, a Vermont-born lawyer who had recently been appointed to a judgeship and thus would not have to face the voters, agreed to sign.
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A year after his vote on the legislative resolutions, Lincoln again took the opportunity to speak about slavery, although in somewhat oblique fashion. The occasion was “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” a speech he delivered before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, one of thousands of local societies for political self-education and debate frequented by up-and-coming young men in Jacksonian America. Lincoln’s subject was citizenship in a democratic republic and threats to American institutions. In keeping with the exceptionalist vision of nationhood so common in postrevolutionary America, he proclaimed that the founders had put in place a political system more conducive to liberty than any in history. His generation’s duty was to preserve this “political edifice” and bequeath it to the future. The greatest danger to its continued existence lay within: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

Where would this destruction originate? Lincoln pointed to “the increasing disregard for law” evident in a rising tide of mob violence. (He did not exaggerate: literally hundreds of riots of one kind or another took place in the United States in the 1830s, many of them reported in the Illinois press.) Americans, Lincoln warned, had fallen victim to “wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of the courts.” If respect for the rule of law disintegrated, the stage would be set for the emergence of an ambitious tyrant, a “towering genius” who would seek to gain a place in history even greater than the founders by “emancipating slaves or enslaving free men.” The remedy was for Americans to rededicate themselves to the rule of “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” and make respect for the rule of law their “political religion.”
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The Lyceum speech has provided fodder for all sorts of psychological speculations. Was he (or, as has been suggested, Stephen A. Douglas, his rival even then) the future tyrant who would refashion the political system created by the founders and in so doing surpass them in historical importance? Was his description of a battle between reason and passion a reflection of his own mood swings?
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Certainly, in describing American democracy as a still-unfinished experiment in “liberty and equal rights” and identifying the core question facing the country as “the capability of a people to govern themselves” in the face of lawlessness, Lincoln anticipated themes of his later writings, including the first inaugural and Gettysburg Address. His presentation of the choice facing a future tyrant as “emancipating slaves or enslaving free men” suggested that even this early in his career, Lincoln recognized slavery as the crucial question the founders had failed to resolve and the greatest threat to the survival of the republic.

Condemnations of lawlessness were far from unusual in public orations of the 1830s.
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What distinguished the Lyceum speech was that Lincoln indirectly but clearly placed the blame on slavery. Lincoln emphasized that no part of the country could claim exemption from mobs: “They spring up among the pleasure hunting masters of southern slaves, and the order loving citizens” of the North (a revealing contrast in a speech arguing that unruly passions constituted the greatest danger to American liberty). Yet speaking only three months after Elijah P. Lovejoy died in Alton at the hands of a mob, Lincoln condemned the “vicious portion of the population” who, among other things, “throw printing presses into rivers [and] shoot editors.” No one in the audience could misunderstand the reference to the tragedy seventy miles west of Springfield; some, perhaps, realized that those Lincoln condemned as “vicious” included a number of Alton’s most prominent citizens.

Lincoln directly addressed two acts of mob violence in the Lyceum speech, both of which took place in slave states. One was the case of the “mulatto man…McIntosh” (identified, unlike Lovejoy, by name), whose lynching in St. Louis in 1836 had led the abolitionist editor to move his newspaper to Alton. Lincoln described McIntosh’s ordeal—he was “chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman”—with details he may have learned from the extensive coverage in Lovejoy’s newspaper. Lincoln also dwelled on the lynching in Mississippi of “negroes, suspected of conspiring to raise an insurrection” along with whites allegedly in league with them. “Dead men,” he concluded in a stark, evocative image, “were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees…in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss.” Given the pervasiveness of mob violence in the 1830s, Lincoln did not have to choose black victims to illustrate his point. His subtext was that slavery created a social environment that encouraged lawlessness.
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A few moments later, Lincoln explicitly turned to mob violence in relation to abolitionism:

Lincoln’s affirmation of the state’s right to prohibit the dissemination of “wrong” opinion may well surprise the modern reader. But it was hardly unusual at the time. Several southern states had enacted laws banning abolitionist agitation. A number of northern politicians, including New York’s governor, William L. Marcy, had proposed legislation to criminalize speech that might incite insurrection in other states (a measure clearly aimed at the abolitionists). To be sure, the very attempts to suppress abolitionism had made many northerners sensitive to the crucial importance of the right to dissent. Nonetheless, it would take many years before a jurisprudence defending this right superceded the venerable common law tradition that government enjoyed the power to punish speech and writing with a “bad tendency.” (Until the twentieth century, the First Amendment applied only to the federal government and had no bearing on state laws that limited free speech.) Lincoln’s comment certainly distinguished him from the abolitionists and their supporters. But his main point was not the legitimacy of laws suppressing opinion but the illegitimacy of mob actions against the abolitionists. At a time when most politicians condemned abolitionism as the greatest threat to the republic (an argument that President Martin Van Buren had made in his inaugural address less than a year before the Lyceum speech), Lincoln insisted that assaults on abolitionist meetings and presses endangered the liberty of all Americans.
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Four years passed after the Lyceum speech before Lincoln again addressed the issues of slavery and abolition. This came in his 1842 speech to the Springfield Washington Temperance Society, an organization of reformed drinkers dedicated to promoting temperance. As in other states, drink was a divisive issue in Illinois politics. Whigs, especially New England migrants in the northern part of the state, tended to support laws restricting the sale of alcohol or banning it altogether. Democrats, especially in southern Illinois, viewed drink as a personal matter, outside the purview of the government. Beyond temperance lay the broader issue of evangelical reform (including abolitionism) and its relationship to the state. Did one part of the public have the right to use the law to impose its moral standards on society at large?

In the frontier society of Lincoln’s youth, liquor was ubiquitous. As he noted in the speech, “To have a rolling or raising, a hunkering or hoedown, anywhere without it, was
positively insufferable
.” To middle-class professionals such as Lincoln had become, however, sobriety was a mark of self-control and excessive drinking an example of unrestrained passion. Lincoln, who personally abstained from imbibing liquor, made a number of temperance speeches during the 1840s. But as the Washingtonian speech revealed, his approach differed significantly from that of other advocates of the cause.
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Rather than a warning against the evil of alcohol, most of the Washingtonian address consisted of Lincoln’s critique of prior efforts to combat it. Speaking in a Presbyterian church, he proclaimed that the “old reformers”—the “preachers, lawyers, and hired agents” who had promoted temperance—had conveyed no “sympathy or feeling” for the very persons they hoped to persuade. They spoke the language of “anathema and denunciation,” indicting drinkers as “the authors of all the vice and misery and crime in the land.” They urged the “good and virtuous” to ostracize these sinners. So “repugnant to humanity, so uncharitable, so cold-blooded and feelingless” was their language that it alienated the very persons it sought to enlist. By contrast, Lincoln praised the Washingtonians, as former drinkers themselves, for understanding how to approach the objects of their campaign with sympathy and understanding.
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Lincoln’s strong language about the self-righteousness of previous temperance advocates has been taken, with plausibility, as a more general critique of the strategy and language of evangelical reform, including abolitionism. “A drop of honey,” he remarked in the speech, “catches more flies than a gallon of gall.” Lincoln favored voluntary abstinence, not coercive laws, and had voted against prohibition measures in the Illinois legislature. When Stephen A. Douglas, during their 1858 debates, charged that Lincoln had “kept a grocery” as a young man (that is, a place where liquor was sold by the drink), Lincoln denied it. But, he added, “I don’t know as it would be a great sin, if I had.”
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As the temperance speech suggests, Lincoln disliked the intemperate language of evangelical reformers. This is one reason why he never identified himself with the abolitionists. In his own later speeches, he would denounce slavery but not slaveholders. He made it perfectly clear in the Lyceum speech that he preferred to appeal to the reason of his listeners rather than to their emotions. Nevertheless, Lincoln’s critique came from a man who shared the goals of the temperance movement, and, implicitly, of abolitionism, if not their approach to achieving them. He embraced their understanding of genuine freedom as arising from self-discipline rather than self-indulgence—something violated by both drinkers and slaveholders, who allegedly lived according to their passions. Lincoln closed the temperance speech by looking forward to the “happy day” when reason would rule the world: “all appetites controlled, all passions subdued,” and “when there shall be neither a drunkard nor a slave on the earth.” Only then, he added, would the promise of the American Revolution, the triumph of mankind’s “political and moral freedom,” be fulfilled.
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But as with virtually every critic of slavery in the Upper South where Lincoln had been born and the Lower North where he lived, hope for an eventual end to slavery did not translate into a vision of a future American society where race no longer defined the rights of citizens. Lincoln may have differed from his legislative colleagues about slavery, but during his first term in the House, he voted in favor of a resolution, which passed 35 to 16, stating that all male citizens age twenty-one and over should enjoy the right to vote regardless of whether or not they owned real estate, but adding that “the elective franchise should be kept pure from contamination by the admission of colored voters.”
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