Replies

Here is my considered opinion.

********

FROM THE REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE TO THE PRESIDENCY: Declaration Statesmanship in Action

...In 1846 I was once elected to the lower House of Congress. Was not a candidate for re-election. From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, practiced law more assiduously than ever before. Always a whig in politics, and generally on the whig electoral tickets, making active canvasses. I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.

-Abraham Lincoln, from a letter to Jesse W. Fell, with a biographical sketch, December 20, 1859

Now we need to do a bit more history. In particular, we have to know what the Missouri Compromise was, and why its repeal “aroused” Lincoln so. The tale of the growing division over slavery, in particular over the policy of the federal government with respect to slavery, is one of the most frequently written about episodes in American History, and you may have studied it elsewhere in your schooling. We must leave out much of historical interest in what follows. We will concentrate on the arguments between Lincoln and Senator Stephen Douglas, his great opponent from Illinois.

Again, original texts are best, and the most illuminating and enjoyable way to acquaint yourself with the key facts is to read from the men of the times themselves. We would recommend the speech of Lincoln given at Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854, especially the first half of it. Lincoln’s summary of the basic facts is hard to beat, though there is one error: Virginia did not, contrary to what Lincoln said there, make prohibition of slavery in what was to be the Northwest Territory a condition of its ceding the land to the Federal government. Congress did outlaw slavery in the Territory, in 1787, as we have mentioned before.

THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE: Facts, Causes and Principles

The Missouri Compromise is the name commonly used for a number of legislative and political acts taken in 1820, chief among which were the admission of two states to the Union, Missouri and Maine, and the prohibition of slavery in the portion of the Louisiana purchase north of the line of latitude 36' 30'’, approximately the southern boundary of the state of Missouri. The debate on the question of Missouri’s admission as a slave state had been bitter and sectional. In the House, where they had a numerical advantage of 105-81, the representatives of the North voted almost unanimously for a phased-in prohibition of slavery. The Senate, however, consistently blocked this prohibition. John Quincy Adams, Madison, and Jefferson were all aghast at the stark sectionalism of the vote, and Jefferson’s remark, quoted above, that it was “like a fire-bell in the night,” has become famous. Adams, who was then Secretary of State, wrote in his diary that, “If the Union must be dissolved, slavery is precisely the question upon which it ought to break.”

The struggle over Missouri did not appear to all the men of the day as altogether about the morality or justice of slavery. The new Western lands, and the natural increase of the slave population, augmented by legal importation before 1808, and by slave smuggling after then, had kept the South a region of agriculture, and with the invention of the cotton gin, an agriculture that included a significant portion of profitable, large scale slave labor operations. The ‘advanced’ farmers of the day, and certainly the wealthiest of them, saw in slaves the chief source of their labor force. They also constituted a commercial faction opposed to the tariffs that the infant Northern manufacturing interest sought to protect itself against European, and especially English, competition. A Missouri with slavery would presumably also be a state whose representatives would support Southern, agrarian, and anti-tariff policies in future Congresses.

When the Missouri question arose, the Senate had exactly the same number of free states and slave states, eleven. Maine’s desire for admission as a separate state ( it had hitherto been a portion of Massachusetts) gave both parties a way out of the standoff. The opponents of slavery obtained the prohibition north of the 36' 30'’ line, an extension of the policy of the founders in the Northwest Ordinance, which had contained a similar provision. Missouri was admitted in 1821, though it had to accept a second compromise, demanded by Henry Clay, to recognize the constitutional rights of Negro citizens of the United States.

Almost all of the remaining territory owned by the United States at that time (the sole exception was the portion of the Louisiana Purchase that was to become the state of Arkansas; Florida was not acquired until 1821) was thus under a federal ban against slavery. This put into the national law an obstacle to further growth of slavery, much as the Ordinance of 1787 had, and it reaffirmed the moral principle behind that ordinance. It is also reaffirmed the right of Congress to legislate about slavery and everything else in United States’ territories. The three chief goods of the compromise, as they appeared to Lincoln, were these: the fact of territory free of slavery north of the Line, the right of Congress so to act, and the moral disapprobation of slavery effected through its having so acted.

THE COMPROMISE HOLDS: 1821-1854

We now compress our story even further. In this period of Western expansion, the states formed out of the old Northwest Territory or above 36' 30'’ came in as free states, Michigan in 1837 through Minnesota in 1858. Arkansas, below the line, entered with slavery in 1836, and Florida in 1845. Texas, after a period of independence, came in with slavery in 1845. The boundary disputes between Texas, now an American state, and Mexico, culminating in the Mexican-American War, gave rise to new disputes over the prohibition of slavery in any territory to be acquired from Mexico. As in the Missouri controversy, Congress was split by section and between the two houses. Lincoln, who was in the House of Representatives, consistently voted with the majority for the prohibition, which was called the Wilmot Proviso, after its author, a Democrat from Pennsylvania. The Senate, in which the South had a larger share of the members, consistently rejected the Wilmot Proviso. The Missouri Compromise had not granted those favoring extension of slavery the right to have it in federal territory south of the 36' 30'’ line; it had only banned slavery north of it. Hence, Lincoln and the “Proviso men” resisted a motion by Senator Douglas to extend the line to the Pacific Ocean. It would have cut California, which was filling up with gold miners and other immigrants, and already seeking admission to the union in 1849, into two regions. They feared that one would produce a state with slavery and the other, one without it, and they wanted the whole of California free. California, like Texas, had been an independent republic. Its request for admission to the union was blocked in the Senate because the inhabitants wished to come in with a prohibition of slavery.

The California question headed a list of slavery related matters that were resolved in the Compromise of 1850. As with the Missouri Compromise, each side gave something. The North yielded on a fugitive slave law and certain payments to Texas. The South accepted California as a free state and let restrictions be placed on the slave market in the District of Columbia. Utah and New Mexico were allowed to choose to enter the Union, at some later date, as slave or free, but no concession was made limiting the federal power to govern them while they were territories. Most of the leading politicians declared themselves tolerably well satisfied with these arrangements, and both major parties, at that time the Whigs and the Democrats, endorsed it in their national conventions.

Throughout this thirty-year period, among the people, the deeper questions simmered and sometimes flared. Direct denunciations of the equality taught by the Declaration began to be heard, and abolitionists like the doomed Lovejoy made equally fierce attacks on the Constitution. Small but frightening slave rebellions, few in number, but big with terror, prompted Southern states to introduce road patrols and to prohibit the teaching of reading and writing to Negro slaves, lest they should catch a contagion of rebellion from Northern abolitionists. The great Protestant denominations, Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians, began to divide on sectional lines. Sentiment in the lower south, the “Cotton Kingdom” was clearly shifting from toleration of slavery as a perplexing and troublesome evil to defense of it as a positive good.

These underlying differences were not settled by the Compromise. In some respects they may have been worsened. Bitterness over the obligation to obey the hated fugitive slave law fueled defiance and sometimes non-compliance in the New England. Indeed, as prominent a man as Ralph Waldo Emerson advised his fellow citizens to break it “on the earliest possible occasion.” Confiding to his diary, he was yet more strident: “This filthy enactment was made in the nineteenth century, by people who could read and write. I will not obey it, by God!”

It was the fugitive slave law that set Harriet Beecher Stowe to writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the most incendiary novels of all time. It was a Northern and an international sensation, translated into twenty languages and selling over a million copies in the first couple of years after its publication. The crudely overstated depiction of the cruel slave master and the suffering slaves infuriated Southerners who knew how extreme it was from their own experience. Forgotten, perhaps, or overlooked, was how much of it was true. The passionate reaction of slavery apologists culminated in the defiant writings of Fitzhugh, whose polemics included statements like, “The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and in some sense, the freest people in the world,” and, “...the whole literature of free society is but a voice proclaiming its absolute and total failure. [Fitzhugh has in mind here the scandals of child labor, and the discarded and poor elderly, discussed and lamented in the liberal and Northern press.] Hence the works of the socialists contain the true defence of slavery.” (from Cannibals All, 1857)

It is hard to know what the leaders who had worked out the Compromise would have thought of these deep fault lines. They were among the great names of American history: Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and Seward. The first three were all dead within two years of the agreement, and the last two found themselves on opposite sides of the Civil War a dozen years later. Douglas would soon repudiate the 36' 30'’ line, a key element of the Compromise, taking an action that he knew, as he himself put it, would “raise a hell of a storm.” But this was in 1854. In 1850, the nation’s leaders had avoided open schism, and the lovers of the Union continued to live in hope.

Congressman Lincoln, whose popularity had declined in his house district because he had raised objections to the war of conquest in Mexico, did not run for re-election to the House. He returned to Illinois, and gave himself to the study of law.

POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY AND STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS

I regard the great principle of popular sovereignty, as having been vindicated and made triumphant in this land, as a permanent rule of public policy in the organization of Territories and the admission of new States...

I deny their [Congress’] right to force a good thing upon a people who are unwilling to receive it. The great principle is the right of every community to judge and decide of itself, whether a thing is right or wrong, whether it would be good or evil for them to adopt it; and the right of free action, the right of free thought, the right of free judgement upon the question is dearer to every true American than any other under a free government.

-Stephen A. Douglas, Speech, Chicago Illinois, July, 9, 1858

The North has only to will it [the saving of the Union] to accomplish it; to do justice by conceding to the South an equal right in the acquired territory, and to do her duty by causing the stipulations relative to the fugitive slaves to be faithfully fulfilled; to cease the agitation of the slavery question...

John C. Calhoun, Speech to the Senate, March 4, 1850

Lincoln wrote in his sketch for a campaign biography that, “the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again.” Draft language of that repeal was announced in a Washington newspaper in mid-January of 1854 as follows: “[an amendment will be added to the Nebraska bill stipulating that] the Constitution, and all laws of the United States which are not locally inapplicable, shall have the same force and effect within the said Territory of Nebraska as elsewhere within the United States, except the eighth section of the act preparatory to the Admission of Missouri into the Union, approved March 6, 1820, which was superseded by the principles of the legislation of 1850, commonly called the compromise measures, and is hereby declared inoperative.”

Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois was the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories; Douglas consented to the amendment, and the bill passed. This meant that the federal ban on slavery in the Territory, which was divided into a southern portion, the Kansas Territory, and a northern, the Nebraska Territory, was void.

What did Douglas intend? There can be no doubt that he wanted the Union to survive and prosper. Moreover, he was not, like Calhoun, of the “slavery as a positive good” school. Indeed, Douglas had supported the admission of California as a free state, and the organization of the Oregon Territory, in which Congress adopted an amendment authored by Douglas recognizing the existing ban on slavery, enacted by the settlers themselves. Douglas was an intelligent and bold politician, ambitious for the Presidency. He would be the candidate of the Northern Democrats in 1860, running against Lincoln. He saw the threat of disunion, and he had heard the resentment in his Southern Democratic colleagues like Calhoun. Calhoun had all but demanded that no one even talk about slavery as a political question. That is what he meant in saying that the North could bring an end to the threat of disunion by ceasing to “agitate” the issue of slavery. Douglas sought a bold answer to the Union’s troubles. It would require practical politics and principle. He called his answer “Popular Sovereignty.”

As a policy, popular sovereignty meant that Congress would no longer prohibit slavery in any United States’ territories. The question would be handed over to the people of the territories as they organized themselves. It would be addressed again in their conventions when they grew ripe for statehood. Since the fugitive slave law was now in effect, and since the overseas slave trade had been illegal for nearly 50 years, this meant that there should be no reason for any discussion or “agitation” on the issue to arise in Congress again. He further promised not to “care” about what the people of any territory seeking admission had decided on the issue in preparing for admission as a state, so long as they had done it fairly. This last point was meant to satisfy the demands of Calhoun’s heirs in the South. The national argument, as a political argument, was to cease, because the issue, as some say now about abortion, “didn’t belong in politics.” But on the question of the spread of slavery, Douglas’s solution had some appeal to the North, since many thought it unlikely that the northern climate would be hospitable to the plantation agriculture, chiefly cotton and rice, that had been home to slavery in the South. If this hunch about the economics of the spread of slavery was true, then the Union would become progressively more and more dominated by free states, without anyone having to raise the question of the morality of slavery, and thereby offending the slave interest in the South.

To make all this work, Douglas had to persuade his fellow Americans that popular sovereignty was the cornerstone of the republic. He had some reason to think that it was, and that he could make a majority think so. For one thing, the principle squared with the American fondness for local control. Douglas would point out in his 1858 debates with Lincoln that liquor laws, and agricultural laws, and a host of other ordinances differed from Maine to Louisiana, and that we liked it that way. Jefferson himself had been a strong proponent of states’ rights and of local self-government. At the same time, within these local communities, the will of the people had been held sovereign. Jefferson had called the rule of the will of the majority a “sacred principle” in his First Inaugural Address.

But there were problems with Douglas’s formulation. He might say, “I don’t care,” about slavery, but people did care. In Kansas, they would care enough to send armed bodies of settlers to inflate the votes of their side in the territorial disputes on the way to statehood. These men cared enough to shed blood over the question. It was not perfectly evident that slavery could only prove profitable growing cash crops in warm climates; we noticed above that in Richmond a successful factory enterprise employed slave labor exclusively. In our century, tyrants like the Communist Chinese have made effective, if inhumane, use of slaves, as has the old Soviet Union, in very cold climates. Moreover, it was not clear when Douglas was setting forth popular sovereignty in the 1850’s whether the slaveholding settlers who would share in deciding the question would bring their slaves with them, and, if they did, whether they would have the benefit of laws to protect their property. Most important of all, popular sovereignty was not a complete statement of the American Creed. Jefferson’s exact words, from his First Inaugural, in which he called the popular will “sacred,” deserve quotation in full:

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

-Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural, March 4, 1801

Douglas’s policy and that of the founders were alike in key points, but different in others. Both thought that the preservation of the Union was paramount. Both agreed in refusing to interfere with slavery where it existed. Both looked to a change to be produced by time and patience. But the founders had used the power of Congress to block the expansion of slavery and to strengthen the conviction that it was wrong. Douglas looked to popular sovereignty to produce the first effect while he took affirmative action to see that the second, the conviction that it was wrong, would not be expressed in the public arena. This meant that he differed from the founders in principle, and not only in policy. Douglas had made self-rule, and not self-evident truths, the deepest principle of free government. Lincoln thought the policy harmful; he was convinced that the principle, as Douglas’s statesmanship would have it, was false. That is what “aroused” him in 1854.

LINCOLN AROUSED: The Declaration Statesmanship of the Peoria Speech

The doctrine of self-government is right--absolutely and eternally right—but it has no just application as here attempted. Or perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such application depends on whether a negro is not or is a man. If he is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just as he pleases with him. But if the negro is a man, is it not to just that extent a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government--that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that “all men are created equal;” and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.

Judge Douglas frequently, with bitter irony and sarcasm, paraphrases our argument by saying: “the white people of Nebraska are good enough to govern themselves, but they are not good enough to govern a few miserable negros!!”

Well I doubt not that the people of Nebraska are, and will continue to be as good as the average of people elsewhere. I do not say the contrary. What I do say is, that no man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent. I say that this is the leading principle--the sheet anchor of American republicanism.

-Abraham Lincoln, Speech, Peoria Illinois, October 16, 1854

Lincoln’s Peoria speech merits our attention for several powerful reasons. It was an immediate success in its day. It is carefully researched. And it gives the heart of his disagreement with Douglas on facts, policy, and principles. Lincoln gave essentially the same speech at least four times, writing out the second, the one given in Peoria, for publication in the Illinois State Journal. Lincoln had asked Douglas to have the Peoria event be a debate; Douglas told a friend that he didn’t want to debate Lincoln, saying “[he is]...the most difficult and dangerous opponent that I have ever met.” Instead of holding a debate, they spoke one after another to the same crowd, Douglas going first. Lincoln’s shrewd political sense manifested itself in the timing; he told the tired crowd to go have dinner and come back before hearing him. Douglas had worn them out with a three hour address on a warm afternoon! To make sure they returned, he also offered Douglas an hour’s rebuttal to “skin me.”

The opening sentence gives the subject of the speech in plain, homespun simplicity: “The repeal of the Missouri compromise, and the propriety of its restoration, constitute the subject of what I am about to say.” The first quarter or so is a thorough review of the policy of Congress regarding slavery from the time of the Articles of Confederation down to the present day. We have summarized that history above. It establishes conclusively that Congresses from before the Constitution up to the 1850's held that they had the power to restrict slavery in national territories, and had often used that power.

STATESMANSHIP: Fidelity to Principles

The heart of the speech is Lincoln’s treatment of the contradiction between popular sovereignty as applied to slavery, and natural right as enshrined in the Declaration. If anyone, black, white, yellow, or brown, is a man, and if I arrogate to myself and only to men of my race the right to choose whether he and his kind shall be slaves or not, I cannot have grounded that decision in the universal proposition that “all men are created equal,” and hence “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.” Since I am no longer measured, that is, held to a moral measure, in my choice, how shall I make it?

Douglas’s position, popular sovereignty, comes to saying that the “sacred right of self-government” allows a moral right in one man’s enslaving another. Lincoln says that the deeper understanding of Douglas would lead men “into an open war with the very principles of civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”

Indeed, not only would the popular sovereignty basis of the Nebraska Bill lead men to disparage the Declaration, it had already done so, and not only the chieftains of the slave power, like Calhoun. The eloquence of the following passage from the Peoria speech demands that it be quoted at length:

...Little by little, but steadily as man’s march to the grave, we have been giving up the OLD for the NEW faith. Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for SOME men to enslave OTHERS is a “sacred right of self-government.” These principles cannot stand together. They are as opposite as God and mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other.

When Pettit [Senator from Indiana], in connection with his support of the Nebraska bill, called the Declaration of Independence “a self-evident lie,” he only did what consistency and candor require all other Nebraska men to do. Of the forty odd Nebraska Senators who sat present and heard him, no one rebuked him. Nor am I apprized that any Nebraska newspaper, or any Nebraska orator, in the whole nation, has ever yet rebuked him. If this had been said among [Francis] Marion’s men, Southerners though they were, what would have become of the man who said it? If this had been said to the men who captured [Major] Andre, the man who said it, would probably have been hung sooner than Andre was. If it had been said in old Independence Hall, seventy-eight years ago, the very door-keeper would have throttled the man, and thrust him into the street.

STATESMANSHIP: Our Place in History

Americans had, and have, a special duty because we have natural right spelled out in our founding “scripture.” Our British brethren, against whom we had written the Declaration, had already, in 1832, abolished slavery because they felt themselves measured by the standard of human equality and Christian morality. So had the newly liberated South American Republics. Brazil, a self-styled “Empire,” kept slavery until 1888. The next year it became a republic.

It may have been fairly easy for the British to end slavery, given that there was none of it in the home island, and Spanish Latin America did not have as extensive or as regional a slave establishment as did the United States. Still, they had cleansed themselves of the evil, and we had not. Our reputation, our prestige, was at issue. Lincoln was not alone in feeling ashamed at our loss of moral leadership, and he said so in the speech: “I hate it [Douglas’s declared ‘indifference’ to slavery] because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity...”

The thought that America has a special duty to mankind to vindicate republican government was, of course, not original with Lincoln. We have already seen that it was prominent in Federalist 1. If the young republic failed, it would be, according to Publius, “the general misfortune of mankind.” Washington told his fellow citizens, in his First Inaugural Address, “...the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment intrusted to the hands of the American people.” In the 20th century, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, among others, have spoken along the same lines regarding the scandal of race discrimination. Here is Eisenhower, addressing a national television audience in response to the defiance of Arkansas state authority to the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock: “At a time when we face grave situations abroad because of the hatred that Communism bears towards a system of government based on human rights, it would be difficult to exaggerate the harm that is being done to [our] prestige and influence...” Or Kennedy in 1963: “...[racial discrimination] hampers our world leadership by contradicting at home the message we preach abroad.” It is interesting that both of these recent presidents cited the Declaration in their inaugural addresses. In making the charge that Lincoln did, that popular sovereignty and ‘don’t care,’ “deprives our ...example of its just influence...” he showed the breadth of vision and the goodwill, as well as the attitude of a wise servant, that characterizes high statesmanship.

STATESMANSHIP: Opinion, the Matter of the Statesman, and Words, his Instrument

As we read the Peoria speech today, one element jars our sensibilities: Lincoln does not take a stand for full political and social equality of the races. Some of the abolitionists of his day, especially the Quakers and other religious abolitionists, did. The 1854 laws of Maine set up in almost all respects what we would recognize today as equal civil rights, including jury duty and voting rights. But Maine was almost alone. Illinois’ laws did not allow blacks to vote or serve on juries, and Illinois was typical of the free states.

In Peoria, Lincoln said this: “Let it not be said that I am contending for the establishment of political and social equality between the whites and blacks. I have already said the contrary.” Was this statesmanlike too, or was it either weak or unwise, or even unjust?

We think Lincoln’s position in the Peoria speech can be vindicated, and that it can be reconciled with his support for expanded civil rights towards the end of the Civil War, if two things are kept in mind. First, as Lincoln himself said in 1859, “In this country, public opinion is everything.” Second, that the knowledge of the statesman is prudence, or practical wisdom, which consists in knowing how to move towards moral goals by practicable steps, not in “the immoderate pursuit of moral perfection” which, in political life, “will more often lead to misery and terror than to justice and happiness,” as Thomas G. West puts it in his book on the founding.

To take the first point first, is it not self-evident that in a republic, where the citizens are governed by their consent, their opinion will be the court of last resort, the final arbiter of all disputes? That does not mean that those opinions will never change, or that it will not be the duty of a good man and especially of a statesman to mold them for the better. But a public man will ignore them at his peril. Lincoln turns this weapon back on Douglas in the Peoria speech, when he tells him that he will never be able to suppress the voice of the people crying out that slavery is unjust: “...the great mass of mankind...consider slavery a great moral wrong; and their feeling against it, is not evanescent, but eternal. It lies at the very foundation of their sense of justice; and it cannot be trifled with—It is a great and durable element of popular action, and I think, no statesman can safely disregard it.” Sir Francis Bacon wrote long ago that, “Nature, to be mastered, must be obeyed.” The saying is equally true of the nature of the physical body and of the body politic. Public opinion, the soul of the political body, was ailing in the days after the Nebraska Bill, and Douglas was prescribing as medicine what Lincoln thought poison. That the patient should also take up a regimen of vigorous exercise after his recovery was not and should not have been the first thing on the doctor’s list.

Lincoln never said that political equality between the races was wrong; the most complete expression of his early views on the matter came in the 1858 debates with Douglas, and he clothed them entirely in the language of feeling: “...[I said years ago1 that] my own feelings would not admit a social and political equality between the black and white races, and that even if my own feelings would admit of it, I still knew that the public sentiment of the country would not, and that such a thing was an utter impossibility, or substantially that.” And again, in the same debate, “I agree with Judge Douglas that he [the Negro] is not my equal in many respects, certainly not in color— perhaps not in intellectual and moral endowments; but in the right to eat the bread without the leave of any body else which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man.”

It must be remembered that the young Lincoln had said in 1838 that our passions, our feelings, were to be the enemy of our freedom in the future, and that reason, “cold sober reason,” would be the friend of the principles of the Declaration. Only one feeling, an almost religious reverence for the founding ideals, would buttress that reason. It should also be pointed out that Lincoln said that he knew only that the feelings of his fellow citizens would not admit of equality. He was certain that there was an inequality of “color.” He did not say that he was certain of the infinitely more important inequality of “intellectual and moral endowments.” These he said, might be unequal... “perhaps.”

Many causes, including prominently the religious conviction that all men are brothers, conspired to change public opinion in the United States towards the end of the Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation, by altering the legal status of slaves and by encouraging them to flee their masters and seek refuge in the Union armies, had some effect . But the greatest source of the change was probably the testimony given in blood by the black soldiers who had served the Union. The number enlisted was reported by the President to Congress in January of 1864 to be over 100,000, and Lincoln and many others thought that without their services, the war could not have been won. To a complaining Northern politician, James C. Conkling, who objected to fighting to “free negroes,” Lincoln penned these memorable words: “...[when peace comes] it will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost. And then, there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.”

When a man will not fight to preserve his people and his principles, we call him a slave; when a slave does fight, we see in him a man. In antiquity, slaves who risked their lives to save their masters were often manumitted. They had proved their manhood. Lincoln wrote Conkling in the same letter, “If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive--even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” It cannot, alas, be said that the promise was perfectly kept. It would take a century more after the abolition of slavery for a new exercise of Declaration statesmanship to establish political equality without regard to race in this country. But the start was made in the time of Lincoln’s stewardship.

Let us be blunt; if Lincoln had taken the full position of equal social and political rights, he would not have been electable to any statewide office in Illinois, neither in 1854, when he was drafted for U.S. Senate and nearly won, nor in 1858, when he and Douglas had their memorable debates. He would not have become president in 1860, nor would any member of his party who took such a stand. He accomplished the good that he could, always insisting on the fundamental principle that in the fullness of time would yield such results. To achieve this good, he had to rekindle a reverence for the Declaration. Let us look briefly at how he did that in the Peoria speech.

Word, words, words. “Mere words” men say, and yet it is by the power of words that we take common counsel and learn to govern ourselves. We are free because we are made in the image of the all-wise God, and we have a bit of His light in our minds, and by that bit we strive to live according to His laws, the “laws of nature, and of nature’s God.” Of Divine things, St. Paul writes, “But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear of him without a preacher?”

Lincoln preached in Peoria. He preached the political religion he had declared must be preached years ago in Springfield. Douglas and the doctrine of popular sovereignty were “giving up the OLD faith... ” Human equality and popular sovereignty were “as opposite as God and mammon...” Three times he calls the proposition that all men are created equal, the “ancient faith.” Of the Nebraska Bill he says, “It hath no relish of salvation in it.” He calls the Founders, “our revolutionary fathers,” and “the fathers of the republic,” stirring memories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He compares slavery to the fateful disobedience of Adam. He says: “Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us re-purify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution.”

Lincoln was like a great preacher in more than his scriptural language and his vision that America was founded on the Declaration as a kind of covenant or original creed, the “ancient faith.” He endeavored to emulate the charity of great preaching, too, as when he admitted that “the Southern people” were “just what we would be in their situation,” and when he said that “I surely will not blame them...” He stressed that Thomas Jefferson, the ‘father Abraham’ of the American covenant was “a Virginian by birth...a slaveholder...” He opened his speech by announcing that he did not “propose to question the patriotism, or to assail the motives of any man, or class of men...He. added that he wished “to be no less than national in all the positions” he would take. When he had suggested that “...a gradual emancipation might be adopted...” He immediately added, “but for their tardiness in this I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the south.” Thus, to political faith, he added political charity.

The climax of the speech actually occurs about three-fourths in; after that point Lincoln anticipates some of the points he expects Douglas to make in his final hour’s response. The paragraph begins with “Our republican robe is soiled...” It ends with these words of salvation and hope, which we quote in full:

Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south--let all Americans--let all lovers of liberty everywhere--join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make and keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.

In the Lyceum speech, Lincoln had concluded by urging the statesmen of his day to take the materials supplied by reason and mold them into intelligence, morality, and reverence for the law. “Upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest, as the rock of its basis; and as truly as has been said of the only greater institution, ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’” At Peoria, he took his own advice, and became such a statesman.

DRED SCOTT: The Supreme Court Betrays the Declaration

...Congress is neither “to legislate slavery into any Territory or State nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.”

A difference of opinion has arisen in regard to the point of time when the people of a Territory shall decide this question for themselves.

This is, happily, a matter of but little practical importance. Besides, it is a judicial question, which legitimately belongs to the Supreme Court of the United States, before whom it is now pending, and will, it is understood, be speedily and finally settled. To their decision, in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit, whatever this may be...

The whole Territorial question being thus settled upon the principle of popular sovereignty--a principle as ancient as free government itself--everything of a practical nature has been decided...Most happy will it be for the country when the public mind shall be diverted from this question to others of more pressing and practical importance.

-President James Buchanan, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1857

I know that Mr. Calhoun and all the politicians of his school denied the truth of the Declaration....But I say...that three years ago there had never lived a man who had ventured to assail it in the sneaking way of pretending to believe it, and then asserting it did not include the negro. I believe the first man who ever said it was Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case, and the next to him was our friend Stephen a. Douglas. And now it has become the catchword of the entire [Democratic] party.

-Abraham Lincoln, Seventh Debate with Douglas, Alton, Illinois, October 15, 1858

Dred Scott was a black slave, born in Virginia. His owner, an army officer, had taken him into the free state of Illinois and the then territory of Minnesota, also free soil under the Missouri Compromise of 1820. When Scott’s owner died, having willed Scott, his wife, whom he had married in the North, and their children to his wife, Scott sued for his freedom in the state court of Missouri, where the family had been taken and the owner had died. The case reached the United States Supreme Court, which decided against Scott on March 6, 1858, just two days after President Buchanan’s inauguration.

Chief Justice Taney’s opinion was long and convoluted in its reasoning. The key elements for anti-slavery men were these: it declared that Congress had never had the power to prohibit slavery in the territories, and hence that the Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise were never valid, and that blacks were not and could not be citizens of the United States. These were intended by the high court’s majority to be legally binding precedents. Buchanan, who had been in private correspondence with at least two members of the Court prior to their handing down the decision, desired this outcome. It meant that no legal power could prevent the introduction of slaves into federally controlled territory, not only before a territorial government had been set up, but also under the territorial government itself. Neither Congress nor its delegated substitute, the territorial legislature, could do anything whatever to block slavery.

Supreme Court decisions do more than settle the case before them (here, they reduced Scott and his family to the status of slaves again) and establish precedents for future cases. They also include the spirit and reasoning by which future decisions may be made on more or less closely connected matters. These additional elements of the justices’ opinions are called, “obiter dicta.” In Taney’s written opinion, the obiter dicta included the claim that the founders did not intend to include blacks in the Constitution or in the Declaration of Independence. Assuming that the humanity of the black man was not a constitutional principle, Taney went on to reason that the operative parts of the Constitution would be those governing him as a species of property. Accordingly, he wrote, “And no word can be found in the Constitution which gives Congress a greater power over slave property, or which entitles property of that kind to less protection than property of any other description. The only power conferred is the power coupled with the duty of guarding and protecting the owner in his rights. The Dred Scott decision provoked a storm of controversy in the North. The nationally known editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, wrote that the decision was about as respectable as an opinion reached by “a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.” It also caused both Lincoln and Douglas serious political problems, though for opposite reasons, as we shall see. Let’s start with Douglas.

Buchanan had said that the territorial question was being settled on the basis of Douglas’ principle of popular sovereignty. In 1854, popular sovereignty as taught by Douglas meant that the people of a territory would be free to keep slavery out by making a law . Congress had chosen not to make such a law by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in the Nebraska Bill, but the people of Kansas still could, before they applied to become a state. Now the Court had decided that not only Congress, but also the people of the territory, had no such power. How could Douglas now say that popular sovereignty meant anything? And if, as Lincoln was to hammer home in the great debates of 1858, slavery was hard to abolish once even a sizeable minority of the inhabitants held slaves, did Dred Scott mean anything other than the total victory of Calhoun and the more extreme pro-slavery men in the South? After the Court’s decision, the only part of the governmental structure in the country that could ban slavery was the state government. Lincoln was to show reason to doubt that sole remaining bulwark’s chances to stand. Lincoln’s statesmanship faced a problem of its own. After all, the highest court in the land had declared that the central reason for the existence of his party, the use of the national power to block the expansion of slavery in the territories, was unconstitutional. And Lincoln himself had said in the Lyceum speech that American statesmanship required an almost religious “reverence for the constitution and laws.” Was Dred Scott not, as a precedent, “the constitution and laws?” Had he not said, just a year ago, that “We [Republicans] will submit to its [the Court’s] decisions; and if you [Democrats] do also, there will be an end of the matter?”

Rarely has there been a Supreme Court decision as partisan in its effects as Dred Scott...perhaps never. To save his doctrine of popular sovereignty, Douglas would have to advocate local resistance to passage of local laws to protect legally held property, i.e., slaves. If the territorial legislature or its subordinate agencies simply refused to enact or enforce the laws needed to help the owner hold his slaves, they would run off when they pleased. It would be as if, in a state where popular resistance to drinking were strong, the local ordinances exempted saloons from protection by the police, while the Temperance society activists smashed windows and bottles. Douglas’ espousal of this policy, to which he was forced by the probing questions of Lincoln in the second of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, was to lose him every Southern state in the Presidential election of 1860. On the other hand, Lincoln had said while campaigning for Fremont, the Republican candidate in the 1856 election, that there was only one question, the answer to which defined his party: “Shall the government of the United States prohibit slavery in the [territory of] the United States?” Now his party was to be defined by advocating a position solemnly held to be unconstitutional! What was he to do?

For three months he thought, and held his peace. Then, in June of 1857, after Douglas had joined Taney in holding that the Declaration did not include blacks, who were, according to the Senator, “an inferior race,” and “incapable of self-government,” Lincoln struck. In a forceful speech given in Springfield on June 26, 1857, Lincoln withdrew his unqualified promise of acquiescence in the dictates of the Court. He granted that Scott and his family must stay in slavery, granted too that any future decisions made in accordance with that decision as a precedent would bind him as to action, but he emphatically denied that it had any moral force that would keep him or anyone else from direct, peaceful, and legal political measures aimed at its overthrow. Legal precedents have great force if they are unanimous, impartial, consistent with our legal expectations and traditions, including the policy of our statesmen, and if they are based on what is true. The Dred Scott decision, Lincoln held, met none of these standards. He said, “...we think the...decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it, has often overruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it overrule this. We offer no resistance to it.” Quoting President Andrew Jackson, Lincoln implied that the executive and legislative branches could act in ways contrary to the decision of the court, taken as precedent and authority. Jackson had said that ‘The Congress, the executive and the court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer, who takes an oath to support the Constitution, swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others.” Lincoln drops his argument here, but he has raised a difficult and powerful point. Was he saying that when an egregiously wrong decision has been reached by the Court, that the other branches may legislate and act contrary to it as authority and precedent, and must only go along with the Court’s understanding when particular cases are decided? Such a teaching would greatly impair the power of the Court to decide fundamental questions, where public opinion is divided or hostile. It would surely be prudent to resort to it only in matters of great import. But was not slavery such a matter? And without such an understanding of Constitutional Law, how could judicial tyranny be effectively resisted?

The rest of the speech, and the part where it soars, is devoted to showing that it is historically false to say that the black man had no part in the Declaration, and to expounding the Declaration as a standard of human action and a beacon for human hopes. We give two excerpts from the speech, which could, with profit, be read in its entirety:

...In those days [the period of the founding], our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all; but now , to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.

...They [the founders] defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal--equal in “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which could be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere. The assertion that “all men are created equal” was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be, thank God, it is now proving itself, a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack.

I have now briefly expressed by view of the meaning and objects of that part of the Declaration of Independence which declares that “all men are created equal.”

-Abraham Lincoln, Speech, Springfield Illinois, June 26, 1857

Lincoln perhaps went beyond what was in Jefferson’s mind in his account of the meaning of the Declaration. We argued in an earlier chapter that there was great immediate use of the idea of human equality towards effecting our separation from Great Britain. But where Jefferson used equality for separation and revolution, Lincoln saw in it a deeper meaning for perpetuation and justice. Equality in Jefferson’s thought led to “don’t tread on me,” since I am your equal, and I have my rights. And Jefferson was not wrong. But in Lincoln’s thought, this old, perhaps selfish, perhaps passionate sense of my rights, while retained, has added to it, what is right.

Let’s say that again in a slightly different way. In this speech, my rights are not only the basis of resistance and possibly revolution, but the standard to be aspired to, “looked to” approached, approximated, perhaps never perfectly attained. Slavery remains a violation of rights, but now it is also, and more importantly, not right. As Lincoln will say in the next to last debate, when confronted by Douglas’s presentation of the rights of the people to choose slavery, to have slaves, “...he is perfectly logical if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that any body has a right to do wrong.”

You might almost say that the attack of Taney and Douglas upon the Declaration gave Lincoln a golden opportunity to restore the fortunes both of his party and of the country. It moved Lincoln to take the argument about slavery, which had been mired in discussions of laws and technicalities when conducted by the men of the center in the political parties, and immoderate, uncharitable, and divisive when pressed by abolitionists and Southern “fire-eaters,” and restored it to fundamental principles that hold the Union together and give it purpose. It also taught us something about the fallibility of the Supreme Court, a lesson some would have us relearn in our day.

We leave our consideration of Lincoln’s Declaration statesmanship here, aware that his story and that of the nation’s final struggle with slavery was only to be consummated in the in the fiery trial of civil war. As we have said before, our subject is not American History, but American Principles. We have argued that the exercise of statesmanship we have studied was guided by a deep reflection on the principles of the Declaration, and brought about a new and deeper understanding of and love for those principles. A sign that this greater understanding was achieved is that every Congressional Act admitting a new state starting in 1864 with Nevada and continuing through Hawaii in 1959 has contained a provision specifying that the state government would be faithful to the principles contained in the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps a word of respect for the courage and honor of the men of the South would be in order here. Most of them fought for hearth and home, whatever the reasons of the political men, North and South, who brought on the war, may have been. Estimates vary, but probably no more than one in five owned any slaves. The spirit and valor of the Confederate armies has impressed everyone who has read the record of their lost cause. The capacity and personal dignity of many Southern generals, particularly Robert E. Lee, have been admired by Americans of all regions and parties from the days of their doomed but gallant campaigns to the present. Lee’s agonizing choice to join the Southern cause, which historian Samuel Eliot Morrison wrote, “[showed] the distress of a noble mind,” is best seen in his own words:

Secession is nothing but revolution¼In 1808, ¼and [when] the Hartford Convention assembled, secession was termed treason by Virginia statesmen; what can it be now? Still, a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets, and in which strife and civil war are to take the place of brotherly love and kindness, has no charm for me. If the Union is dissolved, the government disrupted, I shall return to my native state and share the miseries of my people. Save in her defense, I will draw my sword no more.

-Col. Robert E. Lee, USA, to his son , January, 1861 (quoted in Samuel Eliot Morrison’s History of the American People, page 613)

*********

I know that's long, but I hope it's relevant.

Regards,

Richard F.