The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (59 page)

The several points of the Dred Scott decision, in connection with Senator Douglas’s “care not” policy, constitute the piece of machinery in its present state of advancement. This was the third point gained. The working points of that machinery are:

(1) That no Negro slave, imported as such from Africa, and no descendant of such slave, can ever be a citizen of any State, in the sense of that term as used in the Constitution of the United States. This point is made in order to deprive the Negro in every possible event of the benefit of that provision of the United States Constitution which declares that “the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States.”

(2) That, “subject to the Constitution of the United States,” neither Congress nor a territorial legislature can exclude slavery from any United States Territory. This point is made in order that individual men may fill up the Territories with slaves, without danger of losing them as property and thus enhance the chances of permanency to the institution through all the future.

(3) That whether the holding a Negro in actual slavery in a free State makes him free as against the holder, the United States courts will not decide, but will leave to be decided by the courts of any slave State the Negro may be forced into by the master. This point is made not to be pressed immediately, but, if acquiesced in for a while, and apparently indorsed by the people at an election, then to sustain the logical conclusion that what Dred Scott’s master might lawfully do with Dred Scott in the free State of Illinois, every other master may lawfully do with any other one or one thousand slaves in Illinois or in any other free State.

Auxiliary to all this, and working hand in hand with it, the Nebraska doctrine, or what is left of it, is to educate and mold public opinion, at least Northern public opinion, not to care whether slavery is voted down or voted up. This shows exactly where we now are, and partially, also, whither we are tending.

It will throw additional light on the latter, to go back and run the mind over the string of historical facts already stated. Several things will now appear less dark and mysterious than they did when they were transpiring. The people were to be
left “perfectly free,” “subject only to the Constitution.” What the Constitution had to do with it outsiders could not then see. Plainly enough now, it was an exactly fitted niche for the Dred Scott decision to afterward come in, and declare the perfect freedom of the people to be just no freedom at all. Why was the amendment expressly declaring the right of the people voted down? Plainly enough now, the adoption of it would have spoiled the niche for the Dred Scott decision. Why was the court decision held up? Why even a senator’s individual opinion withheld till after the Presidential election? Plainly enough now, the speaking out then would have damaged the “perfectly free” argument upon which the election was to be carried. Why the outgoing President’s [Pierce] felicitation on the indorsement? Why the delay of a reargument? Why the incoming President’s [Buchanan] advance exhortation in favor of the decision? These things look like the cautious patting and petting of a spirited horse preparatory to mounting him, when it is dreaded that he may give the rider a fall. And why the hasty after-endorsement of the decision by the President and others?

We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James,
¹⁴
for instance—and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few, not omitting even scaffolding—or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring such piece in—in such a case we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another
from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first blow was struck.

It should not be overlooked that, by the Nebraska bill, the people of a State as well as Territory were to be left “perfectly free,” “subject only to the Constitution.” Why mention a State? They were legislating for Territories, and not for or about States. Certainly the people of a State are and ought to be subject to the Constitution of the United States; but why is mention of this lugged into this merely territorial law? Why are the people of a Territory and the people of a State therein lumped together, and their relation to the Constitution therein treated as being precisely the same? While the opinion of the court, by Chief Justice Taney, in the Dred Scott case, and the separate opinions of all the concurring judges, expressly declare that the Constitution of the United States neither permits Congress nor a territorial legislature to exclude slavery from any United States Territory, they all omit to declare whether or not the same Constitution permits a State, or the people of a State, to exclude it. Possibly, this is a mere omission; but who can be quite sure, if McLean or Curtis
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had sought to get into the opinion a declaration of unlimited power in the people of a State to exclude slavery from their limits, just as Chase and Mace sought to get such declaration, in behalf of the people of a Territory, into the Nebraska bill— I ask, who can be quite sure that it would not have been voted down in the one case as it had been in the other? The nearest approach to the point of declaring the power of a State over slavery is made by Judge Nelson. He approaches it more than once, using the precise idea, and almost the language too, of the Nebraska act. On one occasion his exact language is: “Except in case where the power is restrained by the Constitution of the United States, the law of the State is supreme over the subject of slavery within its jurisdiction.” In what cases the power of the States is so restrained by the United States Constitution
is left an open question, precisely as the same question as to the restraint on the power of the Territories was left open in the Nebraska act. Put this and that together, and we have another nice little niche, which we may, ere long, see filled with another Supreme Court decision declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a State to exclude slavery from its limits. And this may especially be expected if the doctrine of “care not whether slavery be voted down or voted up” shall gain upon the public mind sufficiently to give promise that such a decision can be maintained when made.

Such a decision is all that slavery now lacks of being alike lawful in all the States. Welcome, or unwelcome, such decision is probably coming, and will soon be upon us, unless the power of the present political dynasty shall be met and overthrown. We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free, and we shall awake to the reality instead that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State. To meet and overthrow the power of that dynasty is the work now before all those who would prevent that consummation. That is what we have to do. How can we best do it?

There are those who denounce us openly to their own friends, and yet whisper [to] us softly that Senator Douglas is the aptest instrument there is with which to effect that object. They wish us to infer all from the fact that he now has a little quarrel with the present head of the dynasty; and that he has regularly voted with us on a single point upon which he and we have never differed. They remind us that he is a great man, and that the largest of us are very small ones. Let this be granted. But “a living dog is better than a dead lion.” Judge Douglas, if not a dead lion for this work, is at least a caged and toothless one. How can he oppose the advances of slavery? He don’t care anything about it. His avowed mission is impressing the “public heart” to care nothing about it. A leading
Douglas Democratic newspaper thinks Douglas’s superior talent will be needed to resist the revival of the African slave trade. Does Douglas believe an effort to revive that trade is approaching? He has not said so. Does he really think so? But if it is, how can he resist it? For years he has labored to prove it a sacred right of white men to take Negro slaves into the new Territories. Can he possibly show that it is less a sacred right to buy them where they can be bought cheapest? And unquestionably they can be bought cheaper in Africa than in Virginia. He has done all in his power to reduce the whole question of slavery to one of a mere right of property; and as such, how can he oppose the foreign slave trade? How can he refuse that trade in that “property” shall be “perfectly free,” unless he does it as a protection to the home production? And as the home producers will probably not ask the protection, he will be wholly without a ground of opposition.

Senator Douglas holds, we know, that a man may rightfully be wiser today than he was yesterday—that he may rightfully change when he finds himself wrong. But can we, for that reason, run ahead, and infer that he will make any particular change of which he, himself, has given no intimation? Can we safely base our action upon any such vague inference? Now, as ever, I wish not to misrepresent Judge Douglas’s position, question his motives, or do aught that can be personally offensive to him. Whenever, if ever, he and we can come together on principle so that our great cause may have assistance from his great ability, I hope to have interposed no adventitious obstacle. But clearly, he is not now with us—he does not pretend to be—he does not promise ever to be.

Our cause, then, must be intrusted to, and conducted by, its own undoubted friends—those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the work, who do care for the result. Two years ago the Republicans of the nation mustered over thirteen-hundred thousand strong. We did this under the single impulse of resistance to a common danger, with every external
circumstance against us. Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds, and formed and fought the battle through, under the constant hot fire of a disciplined, proud, and pampered enemy. Did we brave all then to falter now?—now, when that same enemy is wavering, dissevered, and belligerent? The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail—if we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later, the victory is sure to come.

John L. Scripps was a Chicago newspaperman who was later to become Lincoln’s first biographer when he wrote a brief campaign biography which was used in 1860. Lincoln writes to Scripps to assure him that nothing in his speech of June 16 was to be interpreted as showing any desire on his part “to interfere with slavery in the states where it exists.”

Springfield, June 23, 1858

M
Y
D
EAR
S
IR
: Your kind note of yesterday is duly received. I am much flattered by the estimate you place on my late speech; and yet I am much mortified that any part of it should be construed so differently from any thing intended by me. The language, “place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction,” I used deliberately, not dreaming then, nor believing now, that it asserts or intimates any power or purpose, to interfere with slavery in the states where it exists. But to not cavil about language, I declare that whether the clause used by me will bear such construction or not, I never so intended it. I have declared a thousand times, and now repeat that, in my opinion, neither the General Government, nor any other power outside of the slave States, can constitutionally or rightfully interfere with slaves or
slavery where it already exists. I believe that whenever the effort to spread slavery into the new Territories, by whatever means, and into the free States themselves, by Supreme Court decisions, shall be fairly headed off, the institution will then be in course of ultimate extinction; and by the language used I meant only this.

I do not intend this for publication; but still you may show it to any one you think fit. I think I shall, as you suggest, take some early occasion to publicly repeat the declaration I have already so often made as before stated.

Douglas had not been allowed to speak when he had tried to address a Chicago crowd in 1854, just after he had engineered the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress. Now that he had broken with his own party on a matter of principle—the unacceptability of the Lecompton constitution which the pro-slavery men were attempting to ram down the throats of Kansas citizens—Chicago greeted him enthusiastically. He was a hero again. He spoke on the night of July 9 from the balcony of the Tremont House to a vast crowd gathered in the streets. Behind him, taking down notes, sat Abraham Lincoln, the Republican party’s official candidate for Douglas’s office, but a man who was still obscure and who had not yet been tried in any major political campaign. Douglas cheerfully admitted that he was attacking the Lecompton constitution, not because it was a thinly disguised measure to help the spread of slavery, but because it was being submitted in an unfair manner to the people so that they did not really have a free choice in the matter. He assailed the principle stated by Lincoln in his “House Divided” speech—the principle which maintained that the nation could not endure half slave and half free. Such a doctrine, Douglas said, would bring about “a war of sections, a war of the North against the South, of the free states against the slave states, a war of extermination to be continued relentlessly until the one
or the other shall be subdued and all the states shall either become free or become slave.” Uniformity of this kind had not been intended by the men who had founded the nation; they had allowed for sectional differences of climate and custom. To aim for uniformity was to achieve despotism. The Constitution must be maintained, the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case must not be resisted. Douglas then came out unequivocally for white supremacy, saying: “I am opposed to Negro equality.… No amalgamation, political or otherwise, with inferior races.” Lincoln was called upon to answer his opponent that night, but he refused to do so, and promised to speak the next night at the same place instead. Douglas had repeated many of the arguments used in his address at Springfield on June 12, 1857; Lincoln also repeats many of his own counter-arguments here. The chain of reasoning begins to become standardized, but Lincoln continues to improve upon the wording and the cogency of his arguments from this time on.