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02 February 2009

Path to the White House: Abraham Lincoln From 1854

Lincoln at the Beginning of His Professional Career

This article is excerpted from Abraham Lincoln: A Legacy of Freedom, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 5.48 MB).

By Michael Jay Friedman

Michael Jay Friedman is division chief of Print Publications in the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. He holds a PhD in U.S. political and diplomatic history.

By 1854, Abraham Lincoln could be forgiven for believing his political career had reached an end. Lincoln had secured his party’s congressional nomination in part by pledging to serve only one term, thus allowing other members of the local Whig Party the chance to serve. Lincoln came to regret this pledge, advising his law partner, William Herndon, “If it should so happen that nobody else wishes to be elected, I could not refuse the people the right of sending me again.” Lincoln had enjoyed his two years in Washington and had begun to make a name for himself as an opponent of the Mexican War, but there was no great public clamor for his continued service. Disappointed, he returned to Springfield and began rebuilding his legal practice.

But 1854 also saw new fissures in the delicate sectional compromises over slavery. Increasingly the free North and slaveholding South each saw the other’s customs and practices as a lethal threat to its own way of life. Lincoln was drawn to this debate, and thus gradually back to public life. Whether Lincoln seized events or they instead propelled him forward, there can be little doubt over the nation’s good fortune: In its time of greatest need, America found its greatest leader.

Free Labor

Abraham Lincoln had always championed “free labor,” the principle that a man — and in Lincoln’s day this meant males only — could work how and where he wanted, could accumulate property in his own name, and, most importantly, could rise freely as far as his talents and abilities might take him. Lincoln himself was a model of this self-made man. As he wrote in 1854:

There is no permanent class of hired laborers amongst us. Twenty-five years ago, I was a hired laborer. The hired laborer of yesterday, labors on his own account today; and will hire others to labor for him tomorrow. Advancement — improvement in condition — is the order of things in a society of equals.

Along with many northerners, Lincoln believed that free labor was both economically and morally superior to the slave-based southern alternative. Free labor, he asserted,

has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope. The power of hope upon human exertion and happiness is wonderful. The slave-master himself has a conception of it. … The slave whom you cannot drive with the lash to break seventy-five pounds of hemp in a day, if you will task him to break a hundred, and promise him pay for all he does over, he will break you a hundred and fifty. You have substituted hope for the rod.

Lincoln believed that slavery would over time prove economically untenable, but he also understood that, in the short-term, individual wage-earners could not — indeed would not — compete with slave laborers. Along with many other Americans, Lincoln drew two political conclusions: Confined to its existing southern redoubt, slavery would wither away; but if slavery expanded into new territories, it could displace free laborers and gain a new lease on life.

Compromise Fails

As the young nation grew westward, the terms on which new states would be admitted to the Union, that is, as “slave” or “free” states, thus assumed decisive importance. It first arose during 1820 and 1821, with the application of Missouri for statehood. Thomas Jefferson likened the sectional tension to “a firebell in the night.” It eased only through a grand compromise in which Congress admitted Missouri as a slave state, Maine as a free state, and barred slavery from all Louisiana Purchase territories north of 36° 30´, Missouri’s southern border. With the acquisition of new, formerly Mexican territories, a carefully crafted “Compromise of 1850” mated the admission of a free California with a new Fugitive Slave Law, one that obliged northern courts to enforce the seizure and return of slaves who had escaped northward to freedom.

Meanwhile, Stephen A. Douglas, a Democrat and a United States Senator from Lincoln’s Illinois, offered a new formula to bridge the sectional gap. Under Douglas’s “popular sovereignty” doctrine, western territories would join the Union as free or slave states according to the wishes of their residents. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise 36° 30´ line and mandated the organization of the Nebraska and Kansas territories under popular sovereignty rules.

Many northerners met these developments with a combination of anger and fear. It was one thing to expect that slavery would be limited to the South, another entirely to watch as a pro-slavery mob killed an abolitionist publisher in Alton, Illinois — free territory — and destroyed his printing press; to witness pro- and antislavery forces battling openly in what soon became known as Bloody Kansas; to stand aside as slave owners enforced their Fugitive Slave Law rights in the very heart of the North. Not only were northerners forced to confront ever more squarely the immorality of slavery; the free labor beliefs that underlie much of northern life now seemed under direct attack.

Lincoln declared himself “thunderstruck” and “stunned” by the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s passage. With powerful October 1854 addresses at Springfield and Peoria, Illinois, he emerged as a leading opponent of that law and of Douglas: He understood that the “revolutionary fathers” had found it politically necessary to accept slavery in the southern states, but they “hedged and hemmed it in to the narrowest limits of necessity.” Indeed, the Constitution’s authors used every euphemism they could devise to avoid even the word ‘slavery’: “The thing is hid away, … just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.”

During the next two-and-a-half years, Lincoln helped establish the new Republican Party in Illinois. With sectional differences deepening, Lincoln’s Whig Party had collapsed, unable to paper over differences between its northern and southern wings. The Republicans, by contrast, were more forthrightly sectional and antislavery. Some northern Democrats, but not Stephen Douglas, joined up with the Republicans. Lincoln’s efforts for his new party earned him valuable political capital for the future, but for now he concentrated on his legal practice.

A House Divided

In March 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court’s much-criticized Dred Scott decision further enflamed sectional tensions. Scott, an African-American slave whose master had taken him to the free Wisconsin territory then back to Missouri, had sued for his freedom, arguing that residence in Wisconsin had made him a free man. The Court ruled otherwise, and its broad (unnecessarily broad, many felt) decision increased northern fears. Congress, a majority of justices held, lacked the constitutional authority to prohibit slavery in the territories. The 36° 30´ line (still in force when the case began) was thus unconstitutional, and slavery was permissible in all the territories, the Kansas-Nebraska Act notwithstanding. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney also held that African Americans were not U.S. citizens, were excluded from the protections of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and possessed “no rights which any white man was bound to respect.” Dred Scott, accordingly, could not even sue in federal court.

Much of the North reacted with fury. The Chicago Tribune flatly predicted that it would force the free states to accept slavery, and that Chicago, Illinois’ largest city, would against its will become a slave market. Lincoln feared that the Court next would bar state prohibitions of slavery. He decided to run against Senator Douglas, who had endorsed the Dred Scott decision, in the 1858 election. Lincoln accepted the Republican nomination with his famous “House Divided” address:

A house divided against itself cannot stand.

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and

half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery, will … place it where the public mind shall rust in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will put it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.

The New York Times swiftly pronounced the Lincoln-Douglas contest “the most interesting political battle-ground in the Union.”

Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of seven debates in different parts of Illinois. Together these Lincoln-Douglas debates emerged as an iconic moment in American democracy. Citizens converged in towns large and small, from Freeport to Jonesboro, Galesburg to Alton. They arrived on horseback, by canal boat, or simply walked for miles to witness the two champions address the greatest divide in their nation’s history. The contrast between the candidates was apparent. Douglas was smartly dressed and flowery of speech — the picture of sophistication. Lincoln was gangly, far less polished in appearance and mannerism. But the country lawyer scored real blows, holding Douglas to the contradiction between popular sovereignty and the Dred Scott decision, which forbade antislavery settlers from prohibiting slavery in their territories. In the very last debate, Lincoln memorably framed the dispute as a conflict

on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and of another class that does not look upon it as a wrong. … That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It 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.

In this era, United States senators were not directly elected but rather chosen by the state legislatures. When that vote was counted, it was Douglas who prevailed, by 54 votes to 46 for Lincoln. But Lincoln’s effort against one of the Senate’s leading figures had been noticed by many. Nor was Lincoln willing to abandon the field. As he told a friend: “The fight must go on. The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one or even one hundred defeats.”

To the White House

Throughout 1859, Lincoln toured a number of midwestern states, speaking against Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine and warning against slavery’s further spread. Probably he already was thinking about a long-shot run for the presidency: He authorized the compilation and publication of his debates with Douglas and, in December 1859, began to prepare his autobiography.

In February 1860, Lincoln traveled to New York, the nation’s leading city, not least to meet and address the civic and financial leaders who would have a large say in naming the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. Many who gathered at the Cooper Union expected to witness a rough, uncultivated midwesterner. At first, they were not disappointed. One recalled Lincoln’s long, ungainly figure, upon which hung clothes that, while new for the trip, were evidently the work of an unskilled tailor; the large feet; the clumsy hands … the long, gaunt head capped by a shock of hair that seemed not to have been thoroughly brushed out, made a picture which did not fit in with New York’s conception of a finished statesman.

But then Lincoln spoke. In measured words calibrated to assure the audience he was no radical, Lincoln demonstrated definitively that a majority of the signers of the U.S. Constitution had believed the federal government could indeed prohibit slavery in the territories. The true radicals were instead the southerners who threatened secession if their interpretation was not accepted: “Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.” Lincoln called for northerners to confine slavery to the states where it already existed, and to oppose fervently its extension to the national territories.

The Cooper Union address was extremely well received. Several New York newspapers published the entire text. One reporter proclaimed Lincoln “the greatest man since St. Paul.” Horace Greeley, editor of the influential New York Tribune, deemed Lincoln “one of Nature’s orators.” And Lincoln himself, discussing with a friend a possible presidential candidacy, admitted that “the taste is in my mouth a little.”

Many Republicans assumed that the powerful William Seward of New York would capture their party’s presidential nomination. But Seward was weak in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois, crucial states where a midwesterner might have more appeal. Were Seward unable to capture the nomination on the first ballot, Republicans might well seek a candidate from one of those states. “My name is new in the field, and I suppose I am not the first choice of a very great many,” Lincoln explained. “Our policy, then, is to give no offence to others — leave them in a mood to come to us, if they shall be compelled to give up their first love.” This proved a sound analysis. Seward fell short on the first ballot, then faded as midwestern states shifted their votes to Lincoln, securing him the nomination on the third ballot.

The Republican candidate possessed real advantages in the 1860 general election. Like the now dissolved Whigs, the Democratic Party was crippled by its own sectional divisions. Its northern and southern wings nominated rival candidates, allowing Lincoln, who won less than 40 percent of the popular vote in a four-way race, to capture a majority of the electoral votes and the presidency.

The South would not accept a Lincoln presidency. As Lincoln later would put it, “the war came.” Only then would the nation truly witness the wisdom, the strength, and, ultimately, the magnanimity of the man it had chosen during its greatest trial.