Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (5 page)

But we misunderstand Lincoln’s Whiggery if we judge it to have been driven mainly by a concern to defend the rich and propertied. He may have fled rusticity himself, but he did not lose his feel for the concerns of ordinary country-dwellers. He knew their makeup well enough to take an early stand against a cattle-breeding and enclosure measure (the “Little Bull Law”) that made good economic sense but disadvantaged the poorer farmer. Most of his early legal cases related to land issues—including debt, disputes over titles, trespass, mortgage foreclosures, property seizure—and most of his clients were common folk, whom he charged only moderate fees. He could make fun of bucolic speech, as he did in his pseudonymous contribution to the local Whig paper, “Letter from the Lost Townships,” but this was more an exercise in affectionate humor than patronizing contempt. His capacity for empathic understanding of those beyond the charmed circle of bourgeois success was never more clearly set out than in his address to Springfield’s Washingtonian temperance reformers in 1842: he warned his respectable middle-class audience against censoriousness and affirmed his view that “if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class.” Lincoln’s concern, whether in the case of reformed town drunks or modest farmers, was to respect their aspirations toward self-improvement and a decent living that he knew to be the motors of his own life. Unlike a number of his fellow Whigs, members of a defensive social elite anxious in the face of democratic upheaval, Lincoln was moved less by questions of class than by a wish to widen opportunities for individual fulfillment through economic transformation.
²⁹

The institution of slavery, though negating the meritocratic society he prized, remained very much on the periphery of Lincoln’s field of vision during his years of state-level politics. Even so, the main elements of his opposition to the South’s peculiar institution were already in place before he stepped into the national arena. His first recorded statement on the subject was a response to a set of resolutions on abolitionism and slavery which the Illinois Assembly had endorsed in January 1837. Though a free state, Illinois felt powerfully the influence of its southern-born settlers, the largest element of the population in its early years: they very much shaped its stance on racial issues, failing narrowly to introduce slavery in the early 1820s, but ensuring that a system of indenture and restrictive “Black Laws” controlled the relatively small population of free blacks. While resisting the request of some slave states that abolitionism be suppressed by law, the Assembly readily affirmed its strong disapproval of abolitionist societies and doctrines, and declared that “the right of property in slaves is sacred to the slaveholding States by the Federal Constitution.” A few weeks later Lincoln and Dan Stone, a fellow Whig lawyer from Springfield, presented a protest to the House. Its significance derives not from their view of slaveholders’ rights, for the two Sangamon representatives occupied the same constitutional ground as their fellow assemblymen. Rather it lies in the nuanced difference between the Assembly’s direct assault on abolitionist teaching itself and Lincoln’s statement “that the
promulgation
of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its [slavery’s] evils.” It lies in the more positive emphasis Lincoln gives to the constitutional authority of Congress over the future of slavery in the District of Columbia. It lies most of all in his unequivocal insistence “that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy.”
³⁰

Lincoln in later years often reflected on his antislavery disposition. “I am naturally antislavery,” he wrote in 1864. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.” That moral abhorrence may have been absorbed from his parents and stepmother, whose aversion to slavery is well authenticated, and whose church fellowship with antislavery Baptists only underscored their revulsion. After Lincoln spent the first seven years of his life in a slaveholding county, his subsequent acquaintance with the institution of slavery would have been mostly random and intermittent. He would have seen large concentrations of slaves and stark examples of slave-trading on his two trips by flatboat to New Orleans in 1828 and 1831. On the second of these, according to his cousin John Hanks, the sight of “Negroes Chained—maltreated—whipt & scourged . . . ran its iron in him then & there.” On trips to Kentucky to visit friends or his wife’s family he probably saw the paraphernalia of slave-selling at Lexington. In 1841 he certainly made a steamboat journey down the Ohio from Louisville in the company of a dozen chained slaves, “strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line.” Some have contrasted the earnest intensity with which Lincoln later referred to this experience (“That sight was a continual torment to me,” he recalled in 1855) with the tolerant, even amused acceptance he is judged to have shown at the time, when writing to Mary Speed, the half sister of his close friend Joshua. But in fact that earlier letter also alludes to the violent sundering of slave families, the perpetuity of their condition, and the “ruthless and unrelenting” cruelty to which they were exposed; its detachment, if such it is, lies in its near-anthropological reflection on the slaves’ apparent cheerfulness in the face of these horrors and in its endorsement of the theological truth that “ ‘God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,’ or in other words, that He renders the worst of human conditions tolerable.”
³¹

We of course distort the words of the younger Lincoln if we try to read them simply as a prologue to emancipation, but neither should we set aside the recollections of several acquaintances confirming the tenacity with which, from his earliest years, he held that slavery was an offense against justice and sound policy. The horrors perpetrated by slave-traders and inhumane plantation overseers helped shape his repugnance. But so, too, did the understanding of economic morality that guided his thinking more generally. Slavery stifled individual enterprise, discouraged self-discipline, and sustained a fundamental inequality: depriving human beings of the just rewards of their labor. Lincoln the protectionist, alert to justice for the laborer, was the same Lincoln who, at about the same time, sarcastically told Ward Hill Lamon, “You Virginians shed barrels of perspiration while standing off at a distance and superintending the work your slaves do for you. It is different with us. Here it is every fellow for himself, or he doesn’t get there.”
³²

The elements of Lincoln’s antislavery posture were essentially in place before he left for Washington in 1847: moral repugnance at the institution, sympathy for the slave, respect for the protection the federal Constitution afforded slavery, commitment to preserving social order, belief in the essential goodwill of the southern slaveholder, and the need for common, gradual action by North and South on a problem for which they shared responsibility. His two sessions as congressman effected no fundamental change in his views, but a novel environment and the current of events brought his antislavery vision into sharper focus. In a city a quarter of whose population was black, and which included two thousand slaves, he could not avoid encountering some of the bleakest features of the peculiar institution: the auction block and the trading warehouse. Lincoln shared his lodgings with several other Whig representatives, including Joshua Giddings from Ohio’s Western Reserve, the most luminously antislavery of all congressmen. Here, in Mrs. Sprigg’s boardinghouse, the meatiest conversations addressed the main questions before the Thirtieth Congress: the resolution of the conflict with Mexico, the organization of the ceded territories, and a variety of other slavery-related issues.

Within three weeks of arriving in Washington Lincoln introduced a series of resolutions bearing on the outbreak of the Mexican War, a conflict which he and most Whig representatives believed had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun” by President James K. Polk’s Democratic administration to secure more territory for slavery.
³³
The resolutions required the president to prove his claim that the “spot” where Mexicans in 1846 had first shed the blood of United States citizens was in fact American soil and not, as antiwar Whigs believed, a Mexican settlement. Lincoln soon followed this up with a long speech in the House surmising that a disingenuous president was “deeply conscious of being in the wrong—that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.” No doubt part of Lincoln’s purpose here was to impress his congressional colleagues. No doubt it was also, with the presidential election of 1848 on the horizon, to secure an advantage for his party (with the bloodiest fighting now over, Whigs would be less vulnerable to accusations of disloyalty). But Lincoln’s earnestness, even biblical fervor, in pressing the charges sprang, too, from a determination to expose what he privately described as “a foul, villainous, and bloody falsehood.” It sprang from his conscientious objection to unprovoked aggression against a feeble neighbor for territorial gain. Though he pragmatically accepted the Mexican cession, he continued to stress that Whigs, the champions of intensive cultivation of the social order, “did not believe in enlarging our field, but in keeping our fences where they are and cultivating our present possession, making it a garden, improving the morals and education of the people, devoting the administration to this purpose.”
³⁴

The final strand in Lincoln’s concern was what the war might mean for the future of slavery. In 1845 he had written that while it was “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,” it was “equally clear, that we should never knowingly lend ourselves directly or indirectly, to prevent that slavery from dying a natural death—to find new places for it to live in, when it can no longer exist in the old.” Yet he did not then insist on treating new territory as the lifeblood of the slave system. He had no enthusiasm for the annexation of Texas by the United States that same year, but his opposition was low-key compared with the strident warnings of abolitionists who denounced it as the diabolical enterprise of an expansionary “slave power.” He did not then see “very clearly . . . how the annexation would augment the evil of slavery,” given that “slaves would be taken there in about equal numbers,” whether or not the territory was annexed. He did recognize, though, that as a new member of the Union Texas might become the home of American slaves who might otherwise have been freed: “To whatever extent this may be true, I think annexation an evil.” At the outbreak of the Mexican War, Lincoln remained unimpressed when the abolitionists who made up the tiny Liberty party renewed their warnings against a slave power conspiracy. As a congressman, however, he could not duck the question of slaveholders’ rights in whatever land might be acquired from Mexico. This had been repeatedly and acrimoniously addressed during the Twenty-ninth Congress (1845–47), ever since David Wilmot of Pennsylvania had, in August 1846, introduced his proposed ban on slavery in any acquisition. Lincoln was friendly with southern Whigs (and would indeed support a slaveholding presidential candidate in 1848), but he consistently lined up to vote with the advocates of the Wilmot Proviso—though his later claim to have done so “at least forty times” was surely an exaggeration. He had come to see that to stop slavery from “finding new places to live in” meant adopting a hard-line, “free-soil” stance.
³⁵

Though Lincoln kept quite a low profile in the debates over slavery’s expansion, he was not reticent on all slavery-related issues. His most salient contribution was his proposal for a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. Its features were entirely consistent with the stand he had taken in the Illinois Assembly in 1837 and aimed to achieve an accommodation between antislavery and southern members. All children born to slave mothers after New Year’s Day 1850 would be free, but would serve apprenticeships. Unlike the more radical proposals of Representative Daniel Gott, Lincoln’s bill would require federal cash compensation for owners who manumitted their existing slaves. To mollify slaveholders who feared that a free Washington would act as a magnet for runaways, Lincoln called for the local authorities “to provide active and efficient means to arrest, and deliver up to their owners, all fugitive slaves escaping into said District.” The whole plan depended on a referendum of the municipality’s white voters. Lincoln was initially hopeful: he had privately consulted prominent citizens of the District and possessed an ally in Giddings, who believed it was “as good a bill as we could get at this time.”
³⁶
But once the scheme’s particulars were made public, it lost the promised support of Washington’s mayor and brewed up a fatal mix of abolitionist contempt and pro-slavery fears. Lincoln decided not to introduce his bill.

While Lincoln’s congressional experience was working to crystallize his antislavery thought, developments in his native state worked to the same end. Lincoln warmly embraced the plan of gradual emancipation put before the Kentucky constitutional convention of 1849. The scheme’s advocates included his father-in-law, Robert S. Todd, as well as his great hero, Henry Clay. The state’s nonslaveholding whites were almost twenty times as numerous as slaveholders, but the plan proved thoroughly unpopular amongst all classes. Lincoln, recalled an Illinois colleague, was deeply disturbed by the enthusiasm for slavery amongst a new generation of Kentuckians, “the thoughtless and giddy headed young men who looked upon work as vulgar and ungentlemanly.” He highlighted these changing southern perceptions when he spoke to mark Clay’s death in 1852. The wise Kentucky statesman, he said, “ever was, on principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery,” but, like most white southerners, he had regretfully tolerated it, for he could not see “how it could be at
once
eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself.” Now, though, to Lincoln’s alarm, “an increasing number of men,” by no means restricted to the states’ rights eccentrics of South Carolina, “for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and to ridicule the white-man’s charter of freedom—the declaration that ‘all men are created free and equal.’ ”
³⁷