Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (9 page)

In
this
fragment
of
text
Lincoln
addresses
the
“Pro-slavery
Theology”
of
Frederick
A.
Ross’s
book,
Slavery Ordained by God
(1857).
On
the
next
sheet
he
concludes
his
remarks:
“As
a
good
thing,
slavery
is
strikingly
perculiar,
in
this,
that
it
is
the
only
good
thing
which
no
man
ever
seeks
the
good
of,
for himself.
Nonsense!
Wolves
devouring
lambs,
not
because
it
is
good
for
their
own
greedy
maws,
but
because
it
[is]
good
for
the
lambs!!!”

This hybrid religious faith, with its rationalist, Universalist, Unitarian, fatalist, but only residually Calvinist elements, helped shape Lincoln’s approach to slavery as a morally charged political issue. The Declaration of Independence, in which he rooted his arguments during the 1850s, was for Lincoln more than a time-bound expression of political grievance. It was a near-sanctified statement of universal principles, and one that squared with essential elements of his personal faith: belief in a God who had created all men equal and whose relations with humankind were based on the principles of justice. Lincoln found the scriptural basis for the Declaration in the book of Genesis: if humankind was created in the image of God, then “the justice of the Creator” had to be extended equally “to
all
His creatures, to the whole great family of man.” As he told an audience at Lewistown, Illinois, the Founders had declared that “nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.” In setting down the Declaration’s self-evident truths, they had provided a basis for resistance “in the distant future” to a “faction” or “interest” determined to argue that “none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Sustain that document and you ensured that “truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues . . . [would] not be extinguished from the land.”
⁶⁶

Lincoln’s use of the Bible in the struggle over slavery was driven by conviction, not expediency. As Herndon recognized, whether or not Lincoln believed in the divine inspiration of Scripture, “he accepted the practical precepts of that great book as binding alike upon his head and his conscience”; late in life he described it as the means of distinguishing right from wrong. Not that Lincoln brandished the Bible as an all-purpose antislavery manual, but he was clear enough about where its principles led: “ ‘
Give
to him that is needy’ is the christian rule of charity; but ‘Take from him that is needy’ is the rule of slavery.” He was wryly scornful of those southern divines like the Presbyterian Frederick A. Ross, who had constructed a pro-slavery theology that concluded, as he put it, that “it is better for
some
people to be slaves; and, in such cases, it is the Will of God that they be such.” But how was God’s will to be established? Suppose Ross had a slave named Sambo. To the question “Is it the Will of God that Sambo shall remain a slave, or be set free?” God gives no audible answer, and the Bible, his revelation, “gives none—or, at most, none but such as admits of a squabble, as to its meaning.” But the fact that the question was to be resolved by Dr. Ross, who “sits in the shade, with gloves on his hands, and subsists on the bread that Sambo is earning in the burning sun,” gave little confidence that he would “be actuated by that perfect impartiality, which has ever been considered most favorable to correct decisions.”
⁶⁷

God’s words to Adam, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” provided Lincoln with a text for his theology of labor: that is, the burden of work, the individual’s duty to engage in it, and his moral right to enjoy the fruits of his labor.
⁶⁸
Equally, God’s arrangement of the human form was an expression of that theology and offered a physical argument for giving blacks the education and path to self-improvement which slavery denied them: “as the Author of man makes every individual with one head and one pair of hands, it was probably intended that heads and hands should cooperate as friends; . . . that that particular head, should direct and control that particular pair of hands[;] . . . that each head is the natural guardian, director, and protector of the hands and mouth inseparably connected with it; and that being so, every head should be cultivated, and improved, by whatever will add to its capacity for performing its charge.” Joseph Gillespie recorded the animation and almost Puritan earnestness with which Lincoln discussed the need to challenge slavery’s moral and social evils: ostentatious wealth, enervating leisure, and a view of labor as “vulgar and ungentlemanly.” Slavery “was a great & crying injustice [and] an enormous national crime”: the country, he told Gillespie, “could not expect to escape punishment for it.” Surfacing here in Lincoln’s thought was the Calvinist view of the political nation as a moral being. God punished wicked nations for their sins, just as he punished delinquent individuals.
⁶⁹

Punishment would bring reformation and progress: Lincoln, explained Leonard Swett, expected the “ultimate triumph of right, and the overthrow of wrong.” Here we see again Lincoln’s idea of destiny and his view that the universe followed a course fixed by divine laws. “He believed the results to which certain causes tended, would surely follow; he did not believe that those results could be materially hastened or impeded,” wrote Swett. “His whole political history, especially since the agitation of the Slavery question, has been based upon this theory.”
⁷⁰
It was a theory that threw up two areas of paradox in his thought and practice toward the peculiar institution.

First, his scorn for the argument that slavery was good for people (“As a
good
thing, slavery is strikingly perculiar, in this, that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of,
for himsel
f
”) stopped short of full-blown censure of slaveholders, or malice toward them. Believing that people are the product of their circumstances, that environments trap them into unbreakable habits and prompt actions according to the laws of motive, Lincoln was remarkably free from hate. Southerners did no more and no less than the people of the free states would have done had their positions been reversed. Moral opprobrium was inappropriate. “No man was to be eulogized for what he did or censured for what he did not do or did do,” Herndon explained. “I never heard him censure anyone but slightly, nor”—Jefferson and Clay excepted—“eulogize any.”
⁷¹

Further, if Lincoln really did believe “that what was to be would be inevitably,” and that slavery was a doomed institution, why did he so energetically engage in efforts to prevent its spread? Those who have alluded to the essential “passivity” of Lincoln’s nature have used a misleading term: he may have been fatalistic, but he was also ambitious, enterprising, and determined. He was scarcely inert politically. How, then, does one square the circle? First, we should note that even those who made much of this trait in Lincoln were quick to caution against a picture of blind belief in destiny. As Herndon himself explained, “his fatalism was not of the extreme order like the Mahometan idea of fate”; Lincoln conceded that “the will to a very limited extent, in some fields of operation, was somewhat free.” Humans had the capacity to “modify the environments” which shaped them. Second, as Joseph Gillespie shrewdly observed, Lincoln yoked a belief in foreordained
instrumentality
with his faith in predestined ends, “and therefore he was extremely diligent in the use of means.” As Lincoln told a newly married Joshua Speed, “I believe God made me one of the instruments of bringing your Fanny and you together, which union, I have no doubt He had fore-ordained.” This was how he stood in regard to the agitation over slavery, which from the first, according to Swett, he expected to succeed and so “acted upon the result as though it was present from the beginning.” Much later, as president, he not only trusted deeply in God’s purpose to save the Union but, in Gillespie’s judgment, concluded “that he himself was an instrument foreordained to aid in the accomplishment of this purpose as well as to emancipate the slaves.”
⁷²

The fatalist and activist were thus fused in Lincoln, who was in this respect by no means a unique historical figure. As Allen Guelzo has remarked, the doctrine of inevitability has often generated a psychological imperative to action, for instance, amongst Puritan revolutionaries or the disciples of Marx and Lenin. In Lincoln’s case we may have a sense of paradox, but his views were not absurdly self-contradictory. Driven by a clear understanding of the Union’s purpose, by a view of slavery as a doomed aberration in an enterprising, egalitarian society, and by a personal need to achieve, a politically reinvigorated Lincoln embarked in 1854 on a period of earnest public activity. As Herndon recalled, Lincoln the limited fatalist “made efforts at all times to modify and change public opinion and to climb to the Presidential heights; he toiled and struggled in this line as scarcely any man ever did.”
⁷³
Winning power in a mass political system required more than personal drive, an agenda, and a purpose. It demanded, as Herndon implied, an engagement with a potent public opinion. That essential element in Lincoln’s progress to the highest office forms the subject of what follows.

CHAPTER 2

The Power of Opinion: Lincoln, the Illinois Public, and the New Political Order, 1854–58

T
hrough the novel system of participatory democracy that evolved during the first half of the nineteenth century, ordinary Americans came to wield real political influence. By later standards, of course, it was a restrictive and discriminatory system, for it denied the formal vote to women and most nonwhites. Yet, measured against the practice of other political communities of the time, universal white manhood suffrage represented a radical new departure, one which seemed to herald the rule of the common man. When introduced, it demanded a revolution in thinking by the republic’s elite, many of them heirs of their eighteenth-century political world, where authority was synonymous with property and intellect. Some, lamenting the empowerment of the poor and unlettered, failed to adapt to the altered reality, but most politicians proved quick to develop new devices to deal with the challenge of the “sovereign crowd.”

Of these, the most significant was the mass-based political party. For Martin Van Buren, Thurlow Weed, and other astute professionals, party conventions, platforms, and networks provided a way of managing, channeling, mediating, and possibly even manipulating public opinion. By the 1830s and 1840s disciplined, organized, and recognizably modern parties had taken root in almost every part of the American Union and were intended to endure. Within what historians have termed the Jacksonian or second “party system,” most voters were either Whigs or Democrats.
¹
Even so, popular insurgency and the turbulence of democratic politics meant that the party managers’ control was often tenuous and never complete. In a system of almost constant electioneering, unresponsive candidates would be beached if they neglected shifts in popular tides and currents. Though shrewd managers acknowledged the need to respect public opinion, they contended with parties which, as coalitions of diverse interests, were often unstable. As well as articulating the material aspirations of ordinary people, politicians had to respond to prejudices and loyalties that frequently cut across the lines drawn by simple economic interest. In particular, they had to contend with the ethnic and religious hostilities of a heterogeneous, growing electorate, and the increasing intersectional animus that poisoned North-South relations in the quarter century before the Civil War.

The truth that in a mass democracy voters could be the ultimate arbiters of political power shone with dazzling clarity in the 1850s. The framework of the system within which politics had been conducted for twenty years buckled and then collapsed under the weight of popular revolt against the established parties. Native-born Americans, fearing the effects of mass immigration from Ireland and Germany, called for tough naturalization laws, stiff controls on the sale and consumption of alcohol, and the stout defense of Protestantism, especially in schools. When neither Democrats (the long-standing friends of the immigrant) nor Whigs (once sensitive to the anxieties of native-born voters but now fearful of offending a huge foreign-born constituency) moved energetically against rum and Romanism, hundreds of thousands of nativists jumped ship for a new vessel dedicated to the protection of the republic. Secretive and localized in its origins and structure, the new party—labeled the “Know-Nothings” in consequence of its members’ feigned ignorance when questioned—was initially a classic bottom-up political movement.

Insurgent nativism alone might have been enough to deliver the death blow to the mid-century party system. As it was, the established parties also had to contend with widespread popular distrust of their policies over slavery in the United States territories (those parts of the national domain that had yet to be admitted into full statehood). During the protracted political crisis from 1846 to 1850 a groundswell of “free-soil” opinion—opposed to the spread of slave labor into the federal territories—worked to erode support for the two main parties in the North, while a surge of pro-slavery radicalism upset the political balance in parts of the lower South. The political settlement, or compromise, of 1850 appeared to restore broad public faith in the major parties, but the suspicion that both had a rogue element capable of undermining their popular credibility proved only too well founded during the storm over Nebraska. A revolt of southern voters against a Whig party tainted by antislavery radicalism was paralleled by a hemorrhage of northern anti-Nebraska men from Stephen Douglas’s apparently pro-slavery Democrats. The party system of the Jacksonian era lay in ruins.

Lincoln entered the political arena in the early 1830s, when the distinctive elements of American participatory democracy had clearly, if not definitively, emerged, and the first two decades of his public career coincided more or less precisely with the maturing of a mass democratic system. He lived in a society in which his fellow citizens came to accept and encourage boisterous electioneering, theatrical campaigns, unrationed oratory, and the vivid polemics of local newspaper editors. It was a world in which men turned out to vote in proportions rarely matched by Americans before or since. Lincoln possessed a natural aptitude for the new politics: as a stump speaker he felt at ease with himself and, mostly, with the voters he addressed. He also had a clear view about the role and responsibilities of the republican citizen, as well as the duties of democratic leaders toward “the people”—that is, whether politicians should lead or follow, teach or take instruction, act as pedagogue or demagogue. These issues—together with an analysis of Lincoln’s personal power over his audience and his alertness to the cultural and sectional fault lines within the Illinois electorate—form the substance of the discussion that immediately follows.

This will act as a prelude to examining Lincoln’s political career from the Nebraska watershed of 1854 to his celebrated debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858. Lincoln never felt the politically destabilizing power of public opinion more intensely during his Illinois career than in the mid-1850s, when the state’s popular revolt over Kansas-Nebraska seriously wounded the Democrats, while the concerns of nativists made it improbable that the Whigs—as Whigs—would be able to seize the initiative. Lincoln himself would have an influential role in the interplay between public opinion and party agenda-setting, and in the stuttering emergence of a new anti-Nebraska, antislavery coalition. The experience left him well placed in 1858 to make a second bid for election to the United States Senate, now as a Republican. His first attempt, three years earlier, had been played out within the precincts of the state legislature, but now he was able, uniquely for the era, to take his candidacy directly to the people. He won the popular vote (though not, given the vagaries of outdated apportionment, the seat) after a campaign in which a speaker at the height of his rhetorical power succeeded in giving ordinary citizens a sense of their extraordinary moral duty to sustain his vision for the future of the American republic.

LINCOLN, DEMOCRATIC POLITICS, AND PUBLIC OPINION

Lincoln’s thoughts on democratic politics and on the role of opinion were shaped by his experience of living and working in small western villages and towns, most numbering only a few hundred inhabitants; even Springfield, the new state capital, had a population of no more than twenty-five hundred in the mid-1840s. These were face-to-face communities where people felt especially close to the institutions of government and to those who represented them. They prided themselves on their democratic faith and practice. Lincoln took the common view that the people were sovereign and that American government rested on public opinion. Even the most capable of public officers, he noted in 1850, “are wholly inefficient and worthless, unless they are sustained by the confidence and devotion of the people.” Public sentiment might sometimes be wrong but, as he insisted in his Peoria speech, “A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded.” He would later declare, “In this age, and this country, public sentiment is every thing.
With
it, nothing can fail;
against
it, nothing can succeed. Whoever moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.”
²

Early in his career Lincoln followed the fashion of promising obedience to the popular will. Standing for reelection to the state legislature in 1836 he told his Sangamon constituents that he would be “governed by their will, on all subjects upon which I have the means of knowing what their will is; and upon all others, I shall do what my own judgment teaches me will best advance their interests.” But before long he shed this doctrine of “instruction” and the idea that the politician was mainly a mouthpiece for the views of his constituents. Instead he came to work by the rule that public sentiment was to some degree plastic and that elected representatives had the power to shape it, as well as the moral responsibility to improve it. Opinion-forming was the most potent of all the politician’s activities, for it provided the means of changing the government. Just as moral individuals could construct their own character and transform themselves, so public opinion was susceptible to education and redirection, through the efforts of teachers, ministers of religion, and elected representatives. In his Lyceum speech of 1838, as elsewhere, he celebrated the power of lucidity, logic, and reason to speak to the intelligence, self-respect, and moral sense of the people. At the same time, pointing to the lessons of history and alarmed by the mobs that scarred the face of Jacksonian society, he warned against the arrival of some demagogic genius able to enchant a populace that had exchanged “sober judgement” for “wild and furious passions.”
³

Lincoln’s preference for swaying opinion by reasoned argument rather than by feeding prejudice remained a constant of his political career. It contributed to his protest over the resolutions of the Illinois General Assembly on slavery in 1837, when he refused to succumb to the visceral anti-abolitionism of most of his colleagues. It separated him from panicking nativists and fellow Whigs during the fever of anti-Catholic rioting and church-burning in Philadelphia in 1844, when his Springfield resolutions against the proscription of foreigners earned him the respect of leading Democrats. It informed his opposition to the Mexican War, which he argued had originated in Americans’ territorial avarice (reminding him of the western farmer who said, “I am not greedy about land; I only want what jines mine”), and had been sustained by false patriotism and a willful blindness to the fact of Polk’s aggression. It would become even more self-conscious in his speeches after 1854: while Stephen Douglas played on white Illinoisans’ deep racial fears to protect himself from the anti-Nebraska reaction, Lincoln appealed chiefly to their sense of justice and loyalty to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, and castigated Democrats for striving to “cultivate and excite hatred and disgust” against the black population. Lincoln was no saint, was careful not to move too far ahead of opinion, and did fall into demagoguery at times. But Trumbull was off-target in describing him as “a follower not a leader in public affairs.” The admiring Carl Schurz—contrasting Lincoln’s “candid truth-telling and grave appeals to conscience” with Douglas’s use of the “arts of the demagogue . . . to befog the popular understanding”—was nearer the mark when he judged that Lincoln “was not a mere follower of other men’s minds, not a mere advocate and agitator, but a real leader.”
⁴

That Lincoln held to this approach was a measure not only of his sense of duty toward the Founding Fathers but of a well-judged confidence in his ability to connect with the public. Only once in his political career did he lose an election when his name was on the ballot, and that was at his first attempt for office, in 1832. Even then he ran well, and in his own precinct of New Salem, where he was best known, he won by an encouraging 227 votes to 3. Thereafter he built an ever wider constituency of admirers and never lost his enormous popularity during his years in Illinois politics.

The power of Lincoln’s personal appeal can be variously explained, but it clearly owed much to his common touch. Despite his personal flight from the land, he never lost that rapport with country folk that his upbringing in Kentucky and Indiana had fashioned, and which the mix of social backgrounds and classes in New Salem did little to erode. He kept the pronunciation and accent of his native state. As an increasingly successful Springfield lawyer, his tours of the Eighth Judicial Circuit brought him regularly into contact with the ordinary farming folk, artisans, tradesmen, and merchants who made up the juries, thronged the courthouses, and clustered at the hotels. For some lawyers, professional success meant removal to the bustle of Chicago, but Lincoln turned down a partnership there at the end of his term in Congress, according to Judge David Davis, so that he might stay close to the people he knew and loved in the central counties. Of his years in New Salem it was said that his fondness for conversation and visiting had made him known to every man, woman, and child for miles around, and it is clear that his later work as a traveling lawyer, allied to his memory for names, gave many central Illinoisans a sense that he recognized them personally. Lincoln was entirely alert to the political benefits of projecting his humble origins, but this did not mean that there was anything contrived about his interest in the common folk. He empathized with those who were, as he had been, struggling self-improvers; he had, in Joseph Gillespie’s words, a deep faith “in the honesty & good sense of the masses.” Lincoln had dignity, considerable reserve, few real intimates, and a proper sense of the private: as John G. Nicolay and John Milton Hay, his White House secretaries, later remarked, in personal relations with him “there was a line beyond which no one ever thought of passing.” But he was hardly aloof. He cultivated no airs and graces. In the words of a fellow lawyer, “in the ordinary walks of life [he] did not appear the ‘great man,’ that he really was.”
⁵