The "rough man" from Illinois in 1860.
Walt
Arclight makes some very good points.
This is a lengthy passage, but I think you will find it interesting. Underscored empasis is mine.
"But the notion of independence as a fundamental part of liberty persisted, and became bound up with racism, especially in the South, to create an ideology of black slavery as the necessary basis of white liberty. The first part of this ideology was the mud-sill philosophy expressed by many southern thinkers in the 1850s, most bluntly by Senator James Hammond of South Carolina in his famous King Cotton speech of 1856. "In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life," said Hammond. "It constitutes the very mud-sill of society." Turning to senators from northern states, Hammond said that "your whole hireling class of manual laborors and 'operatives,' as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life . . . yours are hired by the day.'"
Hammond here reformulated the old Jeffersonian theme that liberty required independence—that is, ownership of property. Because most of the unskilled, propertyless workers in the South were black slaves, a larger proportion of southern whites than of northern whites owned real prop- erty. But more important, they all owned the most vital property of all, a white skin. This "Herrenvolk democracy"— the equality of all who belonged to the master race— became the perceived basis for white liberty in the South. It was a reading of the Declaration of Independence that said "all white men are created equal." As John C. Calhoun, the leading southern political leader, phrased it: "With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals." Alabama's fire-eating orator William Lowndes Yancey declared in 1860 that "your fathers and my fathers built this government on two ideas. The first is that the white race is the citizen, and the master race, and the white man is the equal of every other white man. The second idea is that the negro is the inferior race."* Therefore, echoed another Alabama political leader, "slavery secures the equality of the white race, and upon its permanent establishment rests the hope of democratic liberty." Or as one of the South's leading newspapers, the Richmond Enquirer, put it succinctly in 1856: "Freedom is not possible without slavery."
This idea was by no means confined to the South alone. Many northern workingmen shared it—especially Irish immigrants and other wage-earners at the bottom of the social scale, where they feared competition with blacks, particularly if the slaves were freed and came north looking for jobs. This fear sparked many of the anti-Negro riots in northern cities from the 1830s to 1660s, including the largest of all, the New York draft riots of 1863. This Herrenvolk theme of white supremacy was also a fundamental premise of the Democratic party. Stephen A. Douglas was one of its principal spokesmen, most notably in his famous debates with Lincoln in 1858.
For Lincoln rejected the notion that the rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness were confined to the white race. He was not the only American to challenge this dogma, of course. From the beginning of their movement, abolitionists had insisted that black people were equal to whites in the sight of God and equally entitled to liberty in this world. Indeed, the abolitionists and the radical wing of the Republican party went further than Lincoln in maintaining the principle of equal rights for ail people. But because of his prominence as a Republican party leader after 1858 and his power as president of the United States after 1860, Lincoln's were the opinions that mattered most and that are of most interest to us, Lincoln had always considered slavery an institution "founded on both injustice and bad policy," as he told the Illinois legislature in 1837. But he nevertheless indulged in the American habit of describing the United States as a "free country" that enjoyed more "civil and religious liberty' , more "human liberty, human right" than any other people in the history of the world. Even as late as 1861 Lincoln could refer to "the free institutions which we have unceasingly enjoyed for three-quarters of a century.'' But a decade earlier Lincoln had begun to question just how free those institutions were, so long as slavery existed in this otherwise free country. The "monstrous Injustice of slavery," he said in 1854, "deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites." In the 1850s Lincoln began to insist, contrary to the belief of perhaps two-thirds of white Americans, that the Declaration of Independence was not merely "the white-man's charter of freedom." "The negro is included in the word 'men' used in the Declaration," he maintained. This "is the great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest," and "negro slavery is violative of that principle" because the black man is "entitled to . , . the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. i agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects'—here Lincoln stopped short of the abolitionist affirmation of full equality-but, Lincoln continued, "in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man."
Lincoln did not consider this a new definition of liberty. He believed that Thomas Jefferson and the other founders had meant to include the Negro in the phrase "all men are created equal," even though many of the founders owned slaves, for they were stating a principle that they hoped would eventually become a reality. Douglas maintained that, on the contrary, Jefferson had not meant "all men" to in- clude blacks-nor for that matter any race except Caucasians.
"This government was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should never be administered by any except white meh," insisted Douglas over and over again. "The signers of the Declaration had no reference to the negro whatever when they declared all men to be created equal. They . . . [meant] white men, men of European birth and European descent and had no reference either to the negro, the savage Indians, the Fejee, the Malay, or any other inferior and degraded race." If a national referendum could have been held on these two definitions of liberty—Lincoln's inclusive one and Douglas's definition exclusive of all but white men—Douglas's position would have won.
But Lincoln persisted against the odds, denouncing Douglas's argument as representing a disastrous declension from the faith of the fathers, a declension that if it went much further would extinguish the light of liberty in America. The Know-Nothings, for example, were trying to deny to white immigrants the liberties of free-born Americans. Here was the danger, warned Lincoln in 1855.
Once a nation decided that its constitutional rights applied only to some and not to all men equally, the torch of liberty would go out. "Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid," lamented Lincoln with reference to the Know-Nothings. "As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal" We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know- Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.'
When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some other country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, without the base alloy of'hypocrisy."" To dehumanize the Negro—to insist that he was not a man—would boomerang on all of us, said Lincoln on many occasions in the 1850s. "Our reliance must be in the love of liberty...
. . . the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of al! men, in all lands, every where. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. . . . He who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve It not for themselves. . . . Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises."
The Democratic party of 1859, said Lincoln in that year, had departed so far from the ideas of its founder Thomas Jefferson that it "hold[s] the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict with another man's right of property." The only liberty that many whites seemed to believe in was "the liberty of making slaves of other people."
"That is the real issue," said Lincoln in the peroration of his last debate with Douglas. "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 . . . from the beginning of time. . . . The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. . . . No matter in what shape it comes, whether from a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an aplogy for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle." To prevent this principle from "eradicating the light of liberty in this American people," Lincoln pleaded, "let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it, . . . If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, for- ever worthy of the saving."
--"Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, pp.50-54 by James McPherson.
Note that Lincoln was taking in the 1850's a position at odds with 2/3 of the voters. That is why he is the greatest American.
Walt
The "rough man" from Illinois in 1860.
Walt