Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (18 page)

Douglas wanted to be president. His name had been placed in nomination at the Democratic convention of 1852, and he had actually led the field for two ballots. Franklin Pierce, the eventual winner, was a dark horse who had triumphed on the forty-ninth ballot. Douglas had been only thirty-nine at the time. If he were to win the nomination and the election in 1856, he would still be the youngest man to have reached the White House.

Douglas’s chances of winning both the railroad and the presidency seemed to be enhanced by his position as chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Territories. The Compromise of 1850 had divided the American Southwest into states and territories, but one great swath of land in the middle of the continent remained without formal government. Two more states had been fashioned out of the old Louisiana Territory after the admission of Missouri—Arkansas and Iowa—and the northeastern corner of it had been organized as the Minnesota Territory. But between the Missouri River and the Rockies there was nothing but plains, mountains, bison, and Indians, with a few forts. Most of this wilderness lay north of the Missouri line. A transcontinental railroad linked to Chicago would have to pass somewhere west of Missouri or Iowa. The region needed territorial government, followed by statehood.

Wrangling over new territories and states had almost torn the country apart in 1850, but Douglas had surmounted that crisis. He was sure he could handle any problems that might now arise.

He went to work in January 1854 and produced a bold bill. Douglas proposed two new territories—Kansas (the present state, plus a slice of Colorado) and Nebraska (everything else all the way to Canada). Whether these territories would admit slavery would be left to the decision of the inhabitants. Douglas said he was following the principles of the Compromise of 1850, under which the territories of New Mexico and Utah had been allowed to choose slavery or not as they wished. That option was simply being extended to Kansas and Nebraska.

By leaving slavery up to the people of the new territories, Douglas claimed to be taking it off the table of national politics. His bill was
a recipe for peace and quiet; it would, as he put it, “avoid the perils of . . . agitation by withdrawing the question of slavery from the halls of Congress and the political arena, and committing it to the arbitrament [judgment] of those who were immediately
interested in it.” The name for Douglas’s new principle was “popular sovereignty,” a phrase that had been first used a few years earlier by presidential candidate Lewis Cass. Now Douglas made it his own.

By embracing popular sovereignty, Douglas claimed to be beyond politics, but he had nevertheless offered a political deal along the way. Allowing slavery north of the Missouri line (if the residents wished it) meant repealing the Missouri Compromise. Many southerners had resented the compromise as a rebuke to slavery and to themselves as slave owners. (Why limit the spread of slavery unless it was a bad thing?) Douglas hoped his bill would win him southern support at the next Democratic convention.

For the rest of the winter and all through the spring, Douglas labored to pass his bill. He approached President Pierce in January, calling at the White House on a Sunday, which Pierce considered Sabbath-breaking. But Pierce’s secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, got the two men to sit down and talk; as a result, Pierce supported the bill. Douglas out-argued and arm-twisted his fellow senators, winning their approval by a comfortable margin. The House, with its northern majority, was harder, but he lobbied on the House floor (which senators are not supposed to do) for a narrow victory. The bill became law at the end of May 1854. “I passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act myself,” Douglas told his father-in-law, by “the marshalling and directing of men. . . . I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout
the whole controversy.”

Dictating to congressmen was one thing; persuading their constituents, another. The Kansas-Nebraska Act (often called the Nebraska bill or act, for short) was greeted in the North with rage. Every sectional dispute
for the past thirty-plus years had been resolved with some sort of deal: Missouri became a state, but so did Maine; South Carolina dropped nullification, but tariffs had been lowered; Texas had been annexed, but so had the Pacific Northwest; the Compromise of 1850 was a cat’s cradle of trade-offs. Now Douglas had given slavery and the South an opening for nothing in return, and he had obliterated one of the key provisions of an earlier deal—the Missouri line—to do it. Northern politicians, both Whigs and Democrats, denounced him.

Lincoln waited until later in the year to say anything in public about Douglas’s latest deed, but then he would not relent for the rest of the decade. The Lincoln-Douglas debates, which all the world now knows about, happened in 1858, but the six years from 1854 to 1860 were one long Lincoln-Douglas debate. Lincoln made it his business to shadow Douglas, speaking where he spoke and replying to what he said, as he tried, in succession, to join him in the Senate, to replace him in the Senate, and finally, to beat him to the White House. Their contest was a local matter, but it had national implications, for slavery was a national issue, Douglas was a national figure, and Illinois was becoming a more significant state (in the 1850s its population would double, boosting it from the ninth most populous state to the fourth). The contest began on unequal terms, as Lincoln was well aware, for Douglas in 1854 was a success and Lincoln was, if not quite a failure, certainly no success. But Lincoln hung on Douglas’s shoulder like a jockey trailing another down the backstretch and around the clubhouse turn, waiting for the chance to pull ahead.

All the elements of Lincoln’s mind and personality, which had lain about like engine parts in a workshop, finally came together into something coherent and ultimately powerful. He made use of humor, logic, and eloquence, each trait now purged of grossness, rigidity, or bombast.

Equally important—maybe most important—he had help, from the dead.

Lincoln addressed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise twice in October 1854, first in Springfield, then in Peoria. Both times he was paired with Douglas, in Springfield speaking a day later, in Peoria a few hours later. Both of Lincoln’s speeches were essentially the same, but the second was printed, with his corrections, so it has come to be known as the Peoria speech.

It was a major effort, three hours long, one of the longest speeches he would ever give.
When speaking on the stump, Lincoln would occasionally read out quotations or pause to glance at notes in his pocket, but mostly he spoke from memory (as did Douglas, and all other orators worth their salt). After years of campaigning and courtroom pleading no one needed prompters. Lincoln did not pace, or saw the air with his arms in the manner of Henry Clay. One hand might hold the opposite wrist, or a lapel. His voice was high and slightly whining—a useful timbre for addressing crowds in the open air—but as he warmed up it deepened a bit. Some listeners noted the remains of a Kentucky accent.

Although he went into many details in Peoria, Lincoln had one simple theme: he wanted to repeal the Kansas-Nebraska Act, restore the Missouri Compromise and the Missouri line, and block the extension of slavery. Following the pattern of the Henry Clay paragraph he loved, he argued that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was bad politics, false to history and false to human nature.

The bad politics of Douglas’s handiwork was the easiest point to establish. Douglas had said that leaving slavery in Kansas and Nebraska to local option was a way to avoid strife, yet his law had plunged the nation into it, as Americans argued whether or not slavery should be admitted into the new territories. “Every inch of territory we owned,” said Lincoln, “already had a definite settlement of the slavery question.” But as soon as the Missouri Compromise was repealed, “here we are in the midst of a
new slavery agitation.”

Lincoln ransacked history for instances in which the United States, contrary to the principle of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, had restricted slavery, either by limiting the spread of it or by interfering with the
slave trade. A Democratic newspaper noted that “he had been nosing for weeks
in the state library” in Springfield, looking up facts. He paid special attention to the slavery prohibition of the Northwest Ordinance, which he saw as a model for future restrictions. This was a powerful argument locally, for the Northwest Ordinance had helped determine the future of Illinois. It was also a powerful argument personally, for the Lincoln family had left Kentucky partly to escape the competition of slave labor.

When Lincoln condemned the Kansas-Nebraska Act as an offense to human nature, he echoed Clay directly. “Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature—opposition to it, in his love of justice. . . . Repeal the Missouri Compromise—repeal all compromises—repeal the Declaration of Independence—repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature.” For good measure Lincoln added an echo of Christ. “It still will be the abundance of man’s heart, that slavery extension is wrong, and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will
continue to speak.” (“A good man out of the good treasures of his heart bringeth forth that which is good . . . for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh” [Luke 6:45].) Whatever Lincoln thought about Rev. Smith and the divine authority of the Scriptures, he certainly read them.

In the Peoria speech Lincoln brought his rhetorical techniques to a new level. His audiences expected him to tell rube/boob jokes—Democratic journalists called them “
Lincolnisms”—and there was one such in the Peoria speech, a couple minutes in, when Lincoln described part of Ohio as “beat[ing] all creation at
making cheese.” By gum! He made some other jokes over the next two hours and fifty-eight minutes, but they were very different.

Three notable ones came in a cluster. Lincoln began the series by criticizing an opinion common among proslavery hardliners. “Equal justice to the south, it is said, requires us to consent to the extending of slavery to new [territories]. That is to say, inasmuch as you do not object to my taking my hog to Nebraska, therefore I must not object to you taking your slave. Now, I admit this is perfectly logical, if there is no difference
between
hogs and Negroes.” Lincoln’s starchiness—“it is said,” “that is to say,” “inasmuch”—set his listeners up; the sudden appearance of “my hog” knocked them down; the conjunction of “hogs and Negroes” made the joke, and the point—they were side by side in the sentence, but miles apart in their nature.

A few minutes later, Lincoln referred to the transatlantic slave trade, which Congress had defined as piracy in 1820. “The practice was no more than bringing wild Negroes from Africa, to sell to such as would buy them. But you never thought of hanging men for catching and selling wild horses, wild buffaloes or
wild bears.” Here Lincoln contrasted Negroes with a whole menagerie—to make the point that they did not belong in a menagerie.

Lincoln moved on to consider free blacks. “There are in the United States and territories, including the District of Columbia, 433,643 free blacks.” The solemn specificity of this—“including the District of Columbia”—was itself comic. “At $5.00 per head they are worth over two hundred millions of dollars.” More specifics. “How comes this vast amount of property to be running about without owners? We do not see free horses or free cattle
running at large.” Most American blacks were slaves, but not all of them; most white northerners did not like free Negroes, but they did not revolt at their freedom—perhaps, Lincoln suggested, because they acknowledged that blacks were entitled to it as men.

Each of these jokes used Paine’s favorite technique, the
reductio ad absurdum
, pushing an assumption until it broke down. Lincoln had finally learned to harness humor to serious purposes.

His jokes also all involved Negroes. There was a whiff of minstrelsy about this—using black folk to entertain white folk. But Lincoln was running a sly minstrel show, designed to show that his comic characters were men. He left his audience laughing—and thinking.