The Fiery Trial (8 page)

Lincoln came of age as two great transformations unleashed by American independence—the market revolution and the democratic revolution—reached fruition, and he embraced them both. Many conservative Whigs retained a distaste for popular democracy inherited from the old Federalists. They preferred government by a “natural aristocracy” and disapproved of the elimination of property qualifications for voting, which occurred in nearly every state between 1800 and 1828. Lincoln was part of a younger generation of “New School Whigs” comfortable with the world of mass political democracy, and was convinced that the party could compete head-on with the Democrats for the votes of humble citizens. Another forward-looking young Whig, William H. Seward, later Lincoln’s secretary of state, alarmed conservative members of his party by actively seeking the support of the state’s poor immigrant voters when he served as governor of New York from 1839 to 1843.
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By the time of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, the axiom that the people ruled had become a cliché of American politics. When he ran for reelection to the legislature in 1836, Lincoln took this principle further than most of his contemporaries by issuing a public letter stating that he favored “admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms, (by no means excluding females).” Very few women, mainly property-owning widows, would qualify, since none served in the militia and married women did not pay taxes in their own name. Nonetheless, Lincoln’s statement represented a remarkable departure from the prevailing gendered definition of “the people.” Simultaneously, however, as his statement made clear, Lincoln accepted the legitimacy of the racial boundary that excluded blacks from participation in American democracy.
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As with so many contemporaries in Jacksonian America, including his great rival Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln found in politics an unparalleled opportunity for social advancement. He ran for the Illinois House of Representatives for the first time in 1832 at the age of twenty-three—the only time, he later wrote, that he suffered defeat in a popular vote—and two years later was elected to the first of his four terms in the legislature. His earliest campaign pronouncements identified him as a supporter of government-sponsored economic development and the creation of a public infrastructure. He dwelled at length on the value of internal improvements, specifically making the Sangamon River navigable by steamboat (a plan never implemented) so that New Salem could export farmers’ surplus agricultural goods and import “necessary articles from abroad.” Even “the poorest and most thinly populated counties,” he added, could thrive through participation in the market economy. He also promoted public education—something he had barely enjoyed—as “the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in.”
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Lincoln rose rapidly in his party. As early as 1836, he had emerged as “the acknowledged leader of the Whigs in the House.” He played a key role in the shift of the state capital from Vandalia to Springfield in 1837, and then moved his residence from New Salem to the new center of government. And he became a key advocate of a vast plan for state financing of canals, railroads, and river improvements, paid for by borrowing. Joshua Speed later recalled Lincoln saying he wanted to be the “DeWitt Clinton of Illinois,” referring to the New York governor who built the Erie Canal, completed in 1825. The internal improvements scheme, expanded so that every corner of the state would receive some benefit from it, initially won support from both parties. But the economic depression that began in 1837 made it impossible for the state to pay interest on its bonds. Democrats called for scrapping the program while Lincoln, as he put it, tried to “save something to the State, from the general wreck.” When the House, in 1840, voted 77 to 11 to abandon the system, Lincoln was among the minority. The following year, when interest due on the internal improvements bonds considerably exceeded the state’s entire revenue, Illinois defaulted, essentially declaring bankruptcy. It took the state forty-five years to pay off the debt.
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During the 1840 presidential campaign, when Whigs passed over their leader Henry Clay to nominate the Indian-fighter William Henry Harrison for president, Lincoln made numerous speeches and participated in debates with prominent local Democrats, including Stephen A. Douglas, then the secretary of state of Illinois. With President Martin Van Buren weakened because of the economic downturn, Whigs repackaged themselves as supporters of popular democracy, portraying the wealthy Harrison as a man of the people and Van Buren, the son of a tavern keeper, as an aristocrat. “No one will seriously pretend that this was a campaign of ideas,” the Indiana political leader George W. Julian later recalled. Yet Lincoln’s speeches in fact offered well-reasoned arguments for Whig economic policies. He defended the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States, blamed the economic crisis on its destruction, and analyzed the likely impact of the Independent Treasury, which Van Buren had installed to replace it.
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During his entire legislative career and for years thereafter, Lincoln’s primary concern remained economic policy. Sharing Henry Clay’s belief that the Whig economic program would benefit all Americans, as well as Clay’s powerful devotion to national unity, Lincoln also knew that as an intersectional institution, his party’s prospects at the national level (where questions concerning the Bank, tariff, and federal aid to internal improvements would be resolved) required cooperation between northerners and southerners, nonslaveholders and slaveholders. Even as the slavery issue made its way from the wings to the center stage of American politics during the 1840s, Lincoln would continue to view it essentially as a divisive influence, a danger to the success of his party and the stability and future of the Union.

II

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swept to victory in the 1840 election but, as usual, the Democrats carried Illinois. That year, Lincoln won election to his last term in the legislature. From 1842, when his career in the Illinois House ended, until he assumed the presidency in 1861, he held no public office with the exception of a single term in Congress. He remained, however, an active member of the Whig party, regularly campaigning for its candidates and continuing to emphasize its stance on economic issues. He made more speeches on the protective tariff than on any other subject, he later remarked. As late as 1846, when Lincoln ran for Congress and the issue of slavery was making its way into political debate in connection with the Mexican War, the tariff remained, as one newspaper reported, the “principal subject” of Lincoln’s speeches.
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Nonetheless, the slavery issue could not be entirely avoided. Antislavery sentiment was “gaining ground in the public mind,” the prominent Ohio Whig Thomas Corwin noted, a fact “that no one can overlook.” Some observers blamed the Liberty party—founded in 1840 by abolitionists who, unlike the followers of William Lloyd Garrison, believed in running candidates for public office—for Henry Clay’s defeat in 1844. The 15,000 votes cast in New York for James G. Birney, the Liberty party’s presidential candidate, enabled Democrat James K. Polk to carry the state and win the presidential election. Liberty supporters were far less numerous in Illinois—in 1840, the party received all of 160 votes. By 1844, its total had risen to 3,433 in a turnout that exceeded 100,000. Yet in a few northern counties, the Liberty party polled a substantial vote and became a factor in local politics. Given the Whigs’ minority status in Illinois, a shrewd observer of politics like Lincoln could not help thinking about how to attract Liberty voters to his party.
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In October 1845, Lincoln sent a long letter to the Liberty supporter Williamson Dudley in Putnam County, where Birney had received 23 percent of the vote the previous year. “I was glad to hear you say,” Lincoln wrote, “that you intend to attempt to bring about, at the next election in Putnam, a union of the whigs proper, and such of the liberty men, as are whigs in principle on all questions save only that of slavery.” Lincoln set out to delineate the differences between Whigs and “liberty men.” Both viewed slavery as an evil and both opposed the annexation of Texas, which had joined the Union as a slave state the previous March. Yet, Lincoln continued, “I was never much interested in the Texas question.” He failed to see how annexation would “augment the evil of slavery,” since slaves in Texas—whether in the American Union or outside it—would remain slaves. As to promoting emancipation in the South, Lincoln continued, “I hold it to be a paramount duty of us in the free states, due to the Union of the states, and perhaps to liberty itself (paradox though it may seem) to let the slavery of the other states alone”—the paradox being that to agitate against slavery endangered the preservation of the Union and Constitution that themselves embodied freedom. At the same time, Lincoln continued, northerners should never act so as to prevent “slavery from dying a natural death,” or finding “new places” in which to thrive.
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Like his 1837 “protest,” Lincoln’s letter anticipated a position he would articulate in far greater detail and with far greater force in the 1850s. The ideal of liberty was central to American nationhood. Thus, the compromises of the Constitution, including recognition of slavery in existing states, must be respected by northerners lest the continued existence of the Union, the embodiment of liberty, be placed in danger. Non-extension, not abolition, was the only constitutionally available position for critics of slavery. Yet Lincoln did look forward to an American future, perhaps quite distant, without slavery.

Despite its tiny vote totals, the Liberty party played an important part in the evolution of political antislavery. Although the party was composed of committed abolitionists, its adherents accepted the pre–Civil War consensus that the Constitution gave Congress no authority whatever to interfere with slavery in the states. So widespread was this view, in the North as well as the South, that only a small minority of abolitionists challenged it. Lysander Spooner, a Massachusetts-born radical whose causes included postal reform, anarchism, and the rights of labor as well as abolitionism, claimed that by affirming mankind’s inalienable right to liberty, the Declaration of Independence had abolished slavery, which had not legally existed since. Alvan Stewart, a prolific writer and speaker against slavery from New York, developed the argument that the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which barred depriving any person of “life, liberty, or property” without due process of law, made slavery unconstitutional. Slaves, said Stewart, should go to court and obtain writs of habeas corpus ordering their release from bondage.
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Very few Americans found this reading of the law persuasive. “Absurd” was how the Republican
Cincinnati Gazette
described it in 1860. Far more influential was a political-constitutional strategy for opposing slavery developed in the 1840s by the antislavery Whig politicians Joshua R. Giddings and William H. Seward and, most notably, by the Liberty party leader Salmon P. Chase. It went by the name “freedom national” and concentrated on ways to make the federal government “freedom’s open, active, and perpetual ally” by attacking slavery in every jurisdiction outside the southern states—the District of Columbia, the territories, federal forts and arsenals, and the interstate trade in slaves. “The principle must be established,” Chase wrote in 1842, “that the government is a nonslaveholding government, that the nation is a nonslaveholding nation, that slavery is a creature of state law…to be confined within the states which admit and sanction it.” There, he believed, it would “perish.”

In Chase’s personality deep religious conviction intertwined with inordinate ambition and self-regard. Somehow the result was a lifelong commitment to promoting the rights of African-Americans, slave and free. As a lawyer in Cincinnati in the mid-1830s Chase had been drawn to abolitionism as an expression of outrage over a mob attack on the offices of James G. Birney, who was then editing an antislavery newspaper in the city. Chase’s program, developed in conjunction with Birney, offered an indirect means of limiting the power of slavery and promoting eventual abolition without violating the Constitution. It laid the groundwork for the juridical outlook of the Republican party in the 1850s and during the Civil War.
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Chase based his argument on a reading of the legal and political principles of the Age of Revolution. He harkened back to the case of James Somerset, a West Indian slave who sued for his liberty after being brought to England by his owner. In a landmark 1772 decision, Lord Mansfield, the chief justice of England, freed Somerset. Since the decision predated the printing of official versions of court decisions, what Mansfield actually said remains a matter of dispute. His ruling appears to have been a relatively cautious one, stating that the laws of England did not allow a master to use force to capture and remove from the country a slave who had escaped. Mansfield tried to rule in Somerset’s favor without freeing the thousands of other West Indian slaves present in England or asserting the general principle that slavery could not exist outside the jurisdiction that created it. But the Somerset decision took on a life of its own. The antislavery movement on both sides of the Atlantic seized on it as establishing the legal doctrine that slavery was “so odious” that whenever a person left a jurisdiction where local law recognized the institution, he automatically became free. The case came to be best remembered for a phrase used by Somerset’s attorney: the air of England was “too pure for a slave to breathe.” This idea, known as the Somerset principle or “freedom principle,” quickly passed into English common law. It established a sharp distinction between the property right in slaves, which enjoyed only local legitimacy, and other forms of property, universally recognized as such.
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