Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (16 page)

The Republicans’ policy of restricting slavery within its existing boundaries was, as Lincoln represented it, “nothing more than a return to the policy of the fathers” and to the morality that underpinned it. The republic’s Founders had not known how to remove slaveholding, but none of them had expected it to survive for long. They had set their compass by abolishing the Atlantic slave trade and excluding slavery from new territories, placing slavery where “all sensible men understood, it was in the course of ultimate extinction.” Allusions to it in the Constitution were couched in “covert language,” to avoid marring the “face of the great charter of liberty.” Republicans, too, would “so deal with it that in the run of time there may be some promise of an end to it.” They would meet the obligations of the Constitution by leaving it undisturbed in the slaveholding states; they would respect the legitimacy of the Fugitive Slave Law; they would make no move against slavery in the District of Columbia, even though the federal government had the authority to do so. But they would “oppose it as an evil so far as it seeks to spread itself.”
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By contrast, Lincoln cast Douglas as a moral neuter. Painstakingly, he showed that indifference toward the struggle between freedom and slavery was consistent only with seeing no wrong in the peculiar institution: “No man can logically say he don’t care whether a wrong is voted up or voted down. He may say he don’t care whether an indifferent thing is voted up or down, but he must logically have a choice between a right thing and a wrong thing. He contends that whatever community wants slaves has a right to have them. So they have if it is not a wrong. But if it is a wrong, he cannot say people have a right to do wrong.”
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Douglas’s “don’t care” position held up only if property in slaves was as morally inoffensive as ownership of horses or other goods.
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Lincoln drew laughter when he accorded Douglas “the high distinction . . . of never having said slavery is either right or wrong. Almost everybody else says one or the other, but the Judge never does.”
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Douglas’s party, Lincoln declared, built its policy around this “central idea” that slavery was not a wrong. Since by no means all Democrats positively asserted that slavery was right, the party seemed to allow room for antislavery feeling. But this was self-delusion amongst slavery’s purported opponents. In practice their party silenced them by asserting the unfitness of time and place, whatever the circumstances. “You must not say anything about it in the free States,
because
it
is
not
here.
You must not say anything about it in the slave States,
because it is there.
You must not say anything about in the pulpit, because that is religion and has nothing to do with it. You must not say anything about it in politics,
because that
will disturb the security of
‘
my place.
’ ” Whenever schemes of gradual emancipation surfaced, as in Missouri, Democrats cheered their defeat. At Quincy, perhaps from weariness, Douglas made an uncharacteristic slip, saying the republic could “exist forever divided into free and slave States,” giving Lincoln more ammunition for arguing that the two parties inhabited different moral universes. Indeed, Lincoln insisted, Democrat logic and Douglas’s belief that “upon principles of equality it should be allowed to go everywhere” would make slavery national. He elicited laughter and applause when he remarked, “Judge Douglas could not let it stand upon the basis upon which our fathers placed it, but removed it and
put it upon the cotton gin basis.
”
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Lincoln, then, was determined to show Illinois voters that they faced a clear choice between “the men who think slavery a wrong and those who do not think it wrong.” Douglas had created an ethical fog, pretending that there existed some sort of middle ground between the forces of slavery and freedom, while simultaneously “blowing out the moral lights around us.” Douglas denied the moral sincerity of the Republican leadership, claiming that “the mere ambition of politicians” drove his opponents to attack slavery, but Lincoln scornfully pointed to slavery’s independent power to disturb society “in all the manifold relations of life” well beyond the arena of politics. What had divided the Methodists, and continued to shake the Presbyterians, the Unitarians, and the American Tract Society? “Is it not this same mighty, deep seated power that somehow operates on the minds of men, exciting and stirring them up in every avenue of society—in politics, in religion, in literature, in morals . . . ?” Douglas practiced “a false statesmanship that undertakes to build up a system of policy upon the basis of caring nothing about
the very thing that every body does care the most about.
” The true statesman confronted the issue, and presented the voters with the clearest of choices. Lincoln set out the options most eloquently at Alton, when he declared that “the real issue . . . is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.” The tyrannical principle had taken on different guises in different settings: sometimes the monarch “who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor,” sometimes “one race of men . . . enslaving another race.” In each case the moral choice was transparent.
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These October speeches thus assumed the character of political sermons. No admirer of revivalist preaching, Lincoln during the campaign nonetheless adopted the moral earnestness of an evangelical minister, shining a light into the ethical murk generated by Douglas’s political initiatives, avoiding anecdotes and jokes, and urging his audiences to decide between good and evil, right and wrong.
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If he shunned the extremes of evangelical self-righteousness, he still deployed scriptural language and allusion, sometimes for humorous effect (Douglas, he scoffed, warred on Republicans’ principles “as Satan does upon the Bible”), but more usually to offer Christian encouragement for sustaining the principles of his chief text, the Declaration of Independence. “The Savior, I suppose, did not expect that any human creature could be perfect as the Father in Heaven; but He said, ‘As your Father in Heaven is perfect, be ye also perfect.’ He set that up as a standard, and he who did the most towards reaching that standard, attained the highest degree of moral perfection. So I say in relation to the principle that all men are created equal, let it be as nearly reached as we can.” The Declaration’s principles were inspired by “truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues.”
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Lincoln’s earnest marking out of this moral fault line was driven by a conviction that Douglas genuinely represented an ethical threat to Republicanism.
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It derived, too, from a belief that the political campaigner should be more than a mere mirror reflecting back the attitudes of his hearers: believing that “an evil can’t stand discussion,” Lincoln judged that the campaign’s undimmed spotlight on slavery “taught a great many thousands of people to hate it who had never given it a thought before. What kills the skunk is the publicity it gives itself. What a skunk wants to do is to keep snug under the barn in daytime, when men are around with shotguns.”
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Lincoln’s consciousness-raising approach, however, was anchored in shrewd political pragmatism. He argued a progressive moral case, but did so in the confidence that his words would resonate amongst a huge and growing political constituency predisposed to ask hard questions about the peculiar institution: Protestant churchgoers.

Churches exerted a powerful influence over the lives of antebellum Illinoisans. They offered an opportunity for grassroots involvement which even political parties, whose local expressions were uneven and often impermanent, did not rival. They also provided crucial channels for the flow of local and national information, which was by no means restricted to narrowly defined church business. As the historian Linda Evans has noted, Illinois politicians and other opinion-formers regarded the churches as “a highly desirable prize,” since by the late 1850s their ministers, missionaries, and meeting houses covered the state.”
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Nearly 800,000 accommodations served the needs of an even larger number of members and “hearers”; the majority of the adults in the total population of 1,700,000 in 1860 were connected to one church or another.

They embraced all political views, even within the same communion, but antislavery opinions were scattered widely throughout the varieties of Protestantism. The most concentrated expressions of hard-edged abolitionism were found amongst the smaller denominations—the Reformed Presbyterians (or Covenanters), Freewill Baptists, Wesleyan Methodists, and, above all, the ten thousand or so Congregationalists. Strongly “Yankee” in origin and outlook, and mostly located in the northern counties, they articulated an optimistic, millennialist creed. The political gulf between these communions and the larger, centrist Protestant denominations, seemingly unbridgeable and widening in the 1840s, narrowed under the pressure of events in the following decade. Even moderates within the three biggest Church families—Methodist, Calvinistic Baptist, and Presbyterian—reacted uneasily to the South’s role in the growth of sectionalism; alarmed by the Nebraska Bill and the subsequent Kansas imbroglio, a variety of conferences, districts, presbyteries, and other local denominational gatherings expressed growing anxiety over southern aggression, and passed ever more militant antislavery resolutions. Along with Unitarians, Quakers, and “Christians” (Campbellites), these denominations remained explicitly anti-abolitionist but equally, in the northern and central counties in particular, made no secret of their dislike of slavery, advocating colonization schemes as a step toward emancipation. These sentiments found favor amongst even Episcopalian and old-school Presbyterian conservatives. The Sangamon Presbytery, which embraced the Lincolns’ own church, called for “wise and prudent means” to end slavery—scarcely a radical rallying cry, but an indication that opinion was edging slowly but discernibly toward antislavery politics amongst the tradesmen, merchants, lawyers, doctors, and other commercial and professional folk who made up the middle and upper echelons of Springfield’s Presbyterian society.
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By contrast, the conservatism of the rural and southern-oriented folk that comprised the Disciples, the “antimission” Baptists, and much of the membership of mainstream Methodist and Baptist denominations, made them deeply suspicious of Yankee reformers driven by millennialist zeal. The most “hard-shell” amongst them espoused a “do-nothing” theology which made them naturally receptive to Douglas’s “don’t care” approach to slavery.
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The state’s Catholics, mostly of Irish extraction, were equally alienated by activist Protestants. But the burgeoning immigration from the northeastern states and from Protestant Europe threw these communities onto the defensive. So, too, did the growing rapprochement between abolitionist and anti-abolitionist evangelicals. This process underlay the state’s reshaped party alignments of the 1850s, as the abolitionist stream, channeled by the former Liberty party men and free-soil advocates Zebina Eastman, Jonathan Blanchard, Owen Lovejoy, and other ex-Libertymen and Free-Soilers, coalesced with the anti-southern, antislavery floodtide of Republicanism; it was a process symbolized by the absorption into the
Chicago Tribune
of Eastman’s abolitionist
Free West.
Always politically oriented, Illinois abolitionists remained steadfastly resistant to the perfectionist and destabilizing doctrine of “Christian anarchism”—divorce from all human government—urged by William Lloyd Garrison and other radical eastern reformers.

From his extended dialogue with the Illinois public, Lincoln knew well enough the mainly Protestant sources of antislavery energy. Though cool toward the moral absolutism of the abolitionists, he still argued his case in terms which he knew would stir up the antislavery moderates of the mainstream churches. His fusion of Jeffersonian and scriptural precepts, set in the context of Whiggish self-improvement, was sweet music to the ears of those antislavery Christians whose church resolutions, circulating in the political as well as the religious press, likewise blended the Enlightenment idealism of the Founding Fathers with New Testament theology. Lincoln rubbed shoulders and talked with people of this kind throughout the campaign, men and women whose names and faces he often knew. Thus, for instance, John Alexander Windsor, a recent refugee from ministry amongst Maryland slaveholders, was introduced to Lincoln at Galesburg by fellow Methodist Henderson Ritchie, who knew them both. Windsor seized the chance to assure Lincoln of his support, shake his hand, and bid him Godspeed. Lincoln’s religious correspondents also contributed to the small change of the campaign, encouraging him to use “a little more
positive
language . . . so that everyone, no matter how humble or unintelligent he is, can and must see & feel that you are
right,
& that he [Douglas] is
wron
g
!,” and to hold on to “high ground . . . up to the standard of the Christianity of the day.” As one saw it, “the contest . . . is no less . . . than for the advancement of the kingdom of Heaven or the kingdom of Satan, . . . for an advance or a retrograde in civilization.” Lincoln developed his strategy of moral aggression out of a deep understanding of the audience for whom it was intended.
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At its inspired best, Lincoln’s rhetoric galvanized Republicans. A Vermilion County Quaker rejoiced that Lincoln was “fairly mounted on the eternal invulnerable bulwark of
truth
” against an opponent who had “the devil on his side.” Carl Schurz, who heard Lincoln for the first time at Quincy, was bewitched by the candidate’s “tone of earnest truthfulness, of elevated, noble sentiment, and of kindly sympathy,” and his flashes of “lofty moral inspiration,” which the young German contrasted grimly with Douglas’s “unprincipled and reckless” appeals to prejudice. According to the Methodist John Windsor, whereas the inebriate Douglas epitomized “the astute politician whose supreme concern is to win votes by all means,” Lincoln beamed “with downright honesty, sincerity and goodness,” irresistibly creating the impression of a “conscientious statesman . . . who felt that he had some message of mighty importance imperative upon him to deliver.” At Petersburg, in the final days of the canvass, James Miles, a Menard County farmer, shared in an electric thrill as Lincoln mixed words and action in his apostrophe to liberty: “God gave me these hands . . . to feed this mouth.” Horace White of the
Chicago
Press
and
Tribune,
who accompanied Lincoln for most of the campaign, thought his eloquence unsurpassed “when his great soul was inspired with the thought of human rights and Divine justice.” And White’s colleague, the young stenographer Robert Hitt, judged the Alton speech Lincoln’s greatest: its moral clarity captivated this son of a Protestant minister. He was not alone in pointing to the effect on Lincoln’s audiences at Alton and elsewhere of his “melting pathos.”
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