Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (icecream ebook reader txt) 📗

Lincoln had long harbored anti-slavery instincts. “I have always hated slavery,” he said years later, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel.” As early as 1837, during his days as an Illinois state legislator, he had put himself on record as opposing slavery as “both injustice and bad policy.” Lincoln’s dislike of slavery was generated less by a concern over racial injustice and more by the arbitrary and unnatural restraint it placed on the natural rights and abilities of an individual “to make himself.” Any artificial burden placed on the acquisition of property and the free exercise of one’s natural rights, whether it be aristocracy or slavery, was an offense to Lincoln. As was the case with most Northerners through the 1830s and 1840s, his rankling at slavery never actually took the route of abolitionism, nor did he need it to: “I rested in the hope and belief that it was in course of ultimate extinction.” The debate over Kansas-Nebraska and then Dred Scott, however, changed that: “I became convinced that either I had been resting in a delusion, or the institution was being placed on a new basis… for making it perpetual, national and universal.” Kansas-Nebraska “took us by surprise—astounded us,” and “raised such an excitement… throughout the country as never before was heard of in this Union,” Lincoln said.26

Kansas-Nebraska had managed to trample on not just one but several of Lincoln’s sensibilities. In the first place, it represented a reneging by the slave states on a contract they had agreed to in good faith in 1820. After “the South had got all they claimed, and all the territory south of the compromise line had been appropriated to slavery,” the South turned its eyes on the lands reserved for freedom and attempted to “snatch that away,” too. Instead of extinction, slavery had won access to the old Missouri Compromise territories, and with that, a new lease on life.27 That, in turn, meant the spread of a planter aristocracy who meant to use the slave system to fasten a permanent system of economic dependence onto the American republic, with no more opportunity for a “poor man’s son” to acquire a homestead of his own and begin the same ascent to bourgeois respectability which Lincoln had achieved.

What made this even more destructive was the way it soiled the reputation of liberal democracy before the world. “I hate [slavery] because of the monstrous injustice of slavery,” Lincoln said, but even more, “I hate it because it… enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.” How could Americans embrace the Declaration of Independence and Kansas-Nebraska with the same arms? The Declaration declared that all men are created equal; Kansas-Nebraska repudiated that and declared that some men might now be kept as unequals anywhere a majority decided to approve it. Lincoln could not have produced “one man that ever uttered the belief that the Declaration did not apply to negroes, before the repeal of the Missouri Compromise!” If slavery was good enough to be sanctioned, then blacks could not be good enough to be men; hence, Kansas-Nebraska has “deliberately taken negroes from the class of men and put them in the class of brutes.”28

So he threw himself into the anti-Nebraska fight, hoping to rebuild the shattered unity of the Whig Party on a platform that offered Northern Whigs a resurrection of the Missouri Compromise and Southern Whigs new reassurances for the safety of slavery in the Southern states. “We rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.”29 That platform came near to winning him one of Illinois’s U.S. Senate seats in 1855, when Lincoln outpolled a pro-Nebraska Democratic candidate, James Shields. The Whigs in Illinois no longer had the strength to push Lincoln over the finish line, however, and Lincoln was forced to throw his support to a free-soil Democrat, Lyman Trumbull, in order to keep another Douglasite out of the Senate.

Lincoln clung to the Whigs long after the party had, for all practical political purposes, asphyxiated. He had no sympathy with the Know-Nothings, and until he was convinced that another Whiggish alternative would survive as a platform for his ambitions, he was reluctant to abandon the party of Clay, which had got him elected to Congress. By the end of 1855, however, the slavery issue and Kansas-Nebraska had put the Whigs past any hope of resuscitation as far as Lincoln could see, and the mounting demands of the mysterious “Slave Power” for the extension of slavery everywhere in the territories tipped Lincoln over to the new Republican Party. In May 1856 Lincoln helped lead a coalition of anti-slavery Whigs (including his partner, William Herndon) and free-soil Democrats (such as Lyman Trumbull) into the Republican camp.

At length, in 1858, Lincoln got what he wanted most: the chance to bring down the chief perpetrator of the Kansas-Nebraska betrayal, Stephen A. Douglas, as Douglas ran for reelection in Illinois to the Senate. Not surprisingly, Lincoln was dumb-founded when he began to hear suggestions by eastern Republicans that Illinois Republicans stand aside and let Douglas be reelected without opposition. “What does the New-York Tribune mean by its constant eulogising, and admiring, and magnifying [of] Douglas?” Lincoln demanded of Lyman Trumbull during the last week of 1857. “Have they concluded that the republican cause, generally, can be best promoted by sacrificing us here in Illinois? If so we would like to know it soon; it will save us a great deal of labor to surrender at once.”30

Lincoln need not have feared: his standing among the Illinois Republicans was too high to be jeopardized by the editorials of the New York Tribune. On June 16, 1858, Lincoln was endorsed by the Republican state convention in Springfield as “the first and only choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the U.S. Senate, as the successor of Stephen A. Douglas.”31 That evening Lincoln addressed the