THE AMERICA OF 1850 was a largely rural nation of about 23 million people in which politics and public issues—at every level of government—were of consuming interest. Citizen participation in public life far exceeded that of later years. Nearly three fourths of those eligible to vote participated in the two presidential elections of the decade.
The principal weapon of political combatants was the speech. A gift for oratory was the key to success in politics. Even as a child, Lincoln had honed his skills by addressing his companions from a tree stump. Speeches on important occasions were exhaustively researched and closely reasoned, often lasting three or four hours. There was demagoguery, of course, but there were also metaphors and references to literature and classical history and occasionally, as with some of Lincoln’s speeches, a lasting literary glory.
The issues and declamations of politics were carried to the people by newspapers—the media of the time. The great majority of papers were highly partisan. Editors and publishers, as the careers of Thurlow Weed and Horace Greeley illustrate, were often powerful political figures. Newspapers in the nineteenth century, author Charles Ingersoll observed, “were the daily fare of nearly every meal in almost every family; so cheap and common, that, like air and water, its uses are undervalued.”
“Look into the morning trains,” Ralph Waldo Emerson marveled, which “carry the business men into the city to their shops, counting-rooms, workyards and warehouses.” Into every car the newsboy “unfolds his magical sheets,—twopence a head his bread of knowledge costs—and instantly the entire rectangular assembly, fresh from their breakfast, are bending as one man to their second breakfast.” A European tourist was amazed at the central role newspapers played in the life of the new nation. “You meet newspaper readers everywhere; and in the evening the whole city knows what lay twenty-four hours ago on newswriters’ desks…. The few who cannot read can hear news discussed or read aloud in ale-and-oyster houses.”
Seventeen years before the decade had begun, President Andrew Jackson had prophesied: “The nullifiers in the south intend to blow up a storm on the slave question…be assured these men would do any act to destroy this union and form a southern confederacy bounded, north, by the Potomac river.”
And now the storm had come.
The slavery issue had been a source of division between North and South from the beginning of the nation. That difference was embodied in the Constitution itself, which provided that a slave would be counted as three fifths of a person for purposes of congressional representation and which imposed an obligation to surrender fugitive slaves to their lawful masters. Although slavery was not named in the Constitution, it was, as antislavery Congressman John Quincy Adams said, “written in the bond,” which meant that he, like everyone else, must “faithfully perform its obligations.”
The constitutional compromise that protected slavery in states where it already existed did not apply to newly acquired territories. Thus, every expansion of the nation reignited the divisive issue. The Missouri Compromise had provided a temporary solution for nearly three decades, but when Congress was called upon to decide the fate of the new territories acquired in the Mexican War, the stage was set for the renewal of the national debate. “If by your legislation you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico, purchased by the common blood and treasure of the whole people,” Robert Toombs of Georgia warned, “I am for disunion.” Mississippi called for a convention of Southern states to meet in Nashville for the defense of Southern rights.
The issue of slavery could no longer be put aside. It would dominate the debates in Congress. As Thomas Hart Benton once colorfully observed: “We read in Holy Writ, that a certain people were cursed by the plague of frogs, and that the plague was everywhere! You could not look upon the table but there were frogs, you could not sit down at the banquet but there were frogs, you could not go to the bridal couch and lift the sheets but there were frogs!” A similar affliction infested national discourse as every other topic was subsumed by slavery. “We can see nothing, touch nothing, have no measures proposed, without having this pestilence thrust before us. Here it is, this black question, forever on the table, on the nuptial couch, everywhere!”
Of course, slavery was not the only issue that divided the sections. The South opposed protective tariffs designed to foster Northern manufacturing and fought against using the national resources for internal improvements in Northern transportation. But issues like these, however hard fought, were subject to political accommodation. Slavery was not. “We must concern ourselves with what is, and slavery exists,” said John Randolph of Virginia early in the century. Slavery “is to us a question of life and death.” By the 1850s, Randolph’s observation had come to fruition. The “peculiar institution” now permeated every aspect of Southern society—economically, politically, and socially. For a minority in the North, on the other hand, slavery represented a profoundly disturbing moral issue. For many more Northerners, the expansion of slavery into the territories threatened the triumph of the free labor movement. Events of the 1850s would put these “antagonistical elements” on a collision course.
“It is a great mistake,” warned John Calhoun in 1850, “to suppose that disunion can be effected by a single blow. The cords which bind these States together in one common Union are far too numerous and powerful for that. Disunion must be the work of time. It is only through a long process…that the cords can be snapped until the whole fabric falls asunder. Already the agitation of the slavery question has snapped some of the most important.” If these common cords continue to rupture, he predicted, “nothing will be left to hold the States together except force.”
The spiritual cords of union—the great religious denominations—had already been fractured along sectional lines. The national political parties, the political cords of union, would be next, splintered in the struggle between those who wished to extend slavery and those who resisted its expansion. Early in the decade the national Whig Party, hopelessly divided on slavery, would begin to diminish and then disappear as a national force. The national Democratic Party, beset by defections from Free Soil Democrats, would steadily lose ground, fragmenting beyond repair by the end of the decade.
The ties that bound the Union were not simply institutions but a less tangible sense of nationhood—shared pride in the achievements of the reolutionary generation, a sense of mutual interests and common aspirations for the future. The chronicle of the 1850s is, at bottom, a narrative of the increasing strain placed upon these cords, their gradual fraying, and their final rupture. Abraham Lincoln would correctly prophesy that a house divided against itself could not stand. By the end of the decade, as Calhoun had warned, only force would be left to sustain the Union.
Was this outcome inevitable? It is not a question that can be answered in the abstract. We must begin with the historical realities and ask if the same actors with the same convictions, emotions, and passions could have behaved differently. Possibly, but all we can know for certain is that they felt what they felt, believed as they believed, and did as they would do. And so they moved the country inexorably toward Civil War.
AS THE 31ST CONGRESS OPENED, the rancorous discord boiled to the surface. All eyes turned to the seventy-three-year-old Henry Clay, who, Lincoln later said, was “regarded by all, as the man for a crisis.” Henry Clay had saved the Union once before. Now, thirty years after the Missouri Compromise, the Congress and nation looked to him once again. Already Clay suffered from the tuberculosis that would take his life two years later. He could not even manage the stairs leading up to the Senate chamber. Nonetheless, when he took the floor to introduce the cluster of resolutions that would become known as the Compromise of 1850, he mustered, the New York Tribune marveled, “the spirit and the fire of youth.”
He began by admitting he had never been “so anxious” facing his colleagues, for he believed the country stood “at the edge of the precipice.” He beseeched his colleagues to halt “before the fearful and disastrous leap is taken in the yawning abyss below, which will inevitably lead to certain and irretrievable destruction.” He prophesied that dissolution would bring a war “so furious, so bloody, so implacable and so exterminating” that it would be marked forever in the pages of history. To avoid catastrophe, a compromise must be reached.
His first resolution called for admitting the state of California immediately, leaving the decision regarding the status of slavery within its borders to California’s new state legislature. As it was widely known that a majority of Californians wished to prohibit slavery entirely, this resolution favored the North. He then proposed dividing the remainder of the Mexican accession into two territories, New Mexico and Utah, with no restrictions on slavery—a provision that favored the South. He called for an end to the slave trade within the boundaries of the national capital, but called on Congress to strengthen the old Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 to facilitate the recapture of runaway slaves. Fugitives would be denied a jury trial, commissioners would adjudicate claims, and federal marshals would be empowered to draft citizens to hunt down escapees.
Clay recognized that the compromise resolutions demanded far greater concessions from the North than he had asked from the slave states, but he appealed to the North to sustain the Union. Northern objections to slavery were based on ideology and sentiment, rather than on the Southern concerns with property, social intercourse, habit, safety, and life itself. The North had nothing tangible to lose. Finally, he implored God that “if the direful and sad event of the dissolution of the Union shall happen, I may not survive to behold the sad and heart-rending spectacle.” This prayer was answered. He died two years later, nearly a decade before the Civil War began.
Frances Seward was in the overcrowded gallery on February 5, 1850, when Henry Clay rose from his desk to speak. She had come to Washington to help her husband get settled in a spacious three-story brick house on the north side of F Street. “He is a charming orator,” Frances confessed to her sister. “I have never heard but one more impressive speaker—and that is our Henry (don’t say this to anybody).” But Clay was mistaken, she claimed, if he believed the wound between North and South could be sutured by his persuasive charm. Though he might make “doughfaces out of half the Congress,” his arguments had not convinced her. Most upsetting was Clay’s claim that “Northern men were only activated by policy and party spirits. Now if Henry Clay has lived to be 70 years old and still thinks slavery is opposed only from such motives I can only say he knows much less of human nature than I supposed.”
Four weeks later, the galleries were once again filled to hear South Carolina’s John Calhoun speak. Although unsteady in his walk and enveloped in flannels to ward off the chill of pneumonia that had plagued him all winter, the sixty-seven-year-old arch defender of states’ rights appeared in the Senate with the text of the speech he intended to deliver. He rose with great difficulty from his chair and then, recognizing that he was too weak to speak, handed his remarks to his friend Senator James Mason of Virginia to read.
The speech was an uncompromising diatribe against the North. Calhoun warned that secession was the sole option unless the North conceded the Southern right to bring slavery into every section of the new territories, stopped agitating the slave question, and consented to a constitutional provision restoring the balance of power between the two regions. Making much the same argument he had utilized in the early debates surrounding the Wilmot Proviso, he warned that additional free states would tilt the power in the Senate, as well as in the House of Representatives, and destroy “the equilibrium between the two sections in the Government, as it stood when the constitution was ratified.” This final address to the Senate concluded, Calhoun retired to his boardinghouse, where he would die before the month was out.
Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, the third of the “great triumvirate”(as Clay, Calhoun, and Webster were called), was scheduled to speak on the 7th of March. The Senate chamber was “crammed” with more men and women, a Washington newspaper reported, than on any previous occasion. Anticipation soared with the rumor that Webster had decided, against the fervent hopes of his overwhelmingly antislavery constituents, to support Clay’s Southern-leaning compromise. Frances Seward was watching when the senator rose.
“I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a northern man, but as an American,” Webster began. “I speak to-day for the preservation of the Union. ‘Hear me for my cause.’” He proceeded to stun many in the North by castigating abolitionists, vowing never to support the Wilmot Proviso, and coming out in favor of every one of Clay’s resolutions—including the provision to strengthen the hateful Fugitive Slave Law. Many in New England found Webster’s new stand particularly abhorrent. “Mr Webster has deliberately taken out his name from all the files of honour,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. “He has undone all that he spent his years in doing.”
Frances found the speech greatly disappointing. The word “compromise,” she told her sister, “is becoming hateful to me.” Acknowledging that Webster was “a forcible speaker,” particularly when he extolled the Union, she found him “much less eloquent than Henry Clay because his heart is decidedly colder—people must have feeling themselves to touch others.” Despite such criticisms, the speech won nationwide approval from moderates who desperately wanted a peaceful settlement of the situation. A few antislavery Whigs expressed a fear that Seward might hesitate when the time came to deliver his own speech, scheduled three days later. “How little they know his nature,” Frances wrote. “Every concession of Mr. Webster to Southern principles only makes Henry advocate more strongly the cause which he thinks just.”
Frances was right. Antislavery advocates had no need to worry about her husband. For weeks, Seward had been working hard on his maiden address to the Senate, delivered on March 11, 1850. He had talked at length with Weed and rehearsed various drafts before Frances. The Capitol of the 1850s offered no private office space, so Seward wrote at home, rising early in the morning and working long past the midnight hour.
As he began his Senate oration, Seward spoke somewhat hesitantly. Reading from his manuscript without dramatic gestures, he quoted Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and the ancient philosophers in a voice so low that it seemed he was talking to himself rather than addressing the chamber and the galleries. His words were so powerful, however, that Webster was riveted; while John Calhoun, attending one of his final sessions in the chamber, was “restless at first” but “soon sat still.”
Seward began by maintaining flatly that he was opposed to compromise, “in any and all the forms in which it has been proposed.” He refused to strengthen the Fugitive Slave Law. “We are not slaveholders. We cannot…be either true Christians or real freemen,” he continued, “if we impose on another a chain that we defy all human power to fasten on ourselves.” He declared that a ban on the slave trade in the District was insufficient: slavery itself must be abolished in the capital. Finally, staunchly affirming the Wilmot Proviso, he refused to accept the introduction of slavery anywhere in the new territories.
As he moved into the second hour of his speech, his conviction gave him ease and confidence. Step by step, he laid the foundation for the “higher law” doctrine that would be forever associated with his name. Not only did the Constitution bind the American people to goals incompatible with slavery, he asserted, “but there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes. The territory is a part…of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe. We are his stewards.”
With this single speech, his first national address, Seward became the principal antislavery voice in the Senate. Tens of thousands of copies of the speech were printed and distributed throughout the North. The New York Tribune predicted that it would awaken the nation, that his words would “live longer, be read with a more hearty admiration, and exert a more potential and pervading influence on the National mind and character than any other speech of the Session.”
ARRIVING ON THE NATIONAL SCENE at this same dramatic moment, Chase expected to take a leading role in the fight. He, too, labored over his speech for weeks, poring through old statute books and exchanging ideas with fellow crusader Charles Sumner. The bond between Chase and Sumner would continue to grow through the years, providing both men with emotional support in the face of the condemnation they suffered due to their strong antislavery views. “I find no man so congenial to me as yourself,” Chase confided in Sumner. For his part, Sumner considered Chase “a tower of strength” whose election to the Senate would “confirm the irresolute, quicken the indolent and confound the trimmers.”
“I cannot disguise the deep interest with which I watch your movements,” Sumner wrote Chase shortly before he was to give his speech. “I count confidently upon an exposition of our cause which will toll throughout the country.” When Chase took the floor on March 26, for the first part of his five-hour address, however, Seward had already delivered the celebrated address that outlined most of the positions Chase intended to take and had instantly made the fiery New Yorker the foremost national voice among the antislavery forces.
Nor did Chase possess Seward’s compelling speaking style. If, over the years, constant practice had improved his range and delivery, he was unable to eradicate the slight lisp that remained from his boyhood days. Although his arguments were thoughtful and well reasoned, the chamber emptied long before he finished speaking. Writing home, he admitted great disappointment with the result, which was “infinitely below my own standards…and fell below those of my friends who expected much.”
“You know I am not a rousing speaker at best,” he conceded in a letter to a friend. He wanted it understood, however, that the speech was delivered “under very great disadvantages”: the first chapter of the celebrated Benton-Foote confrontation, “which so engaged the attention of everybody,” occurred on the very same day, so that “I had hardly any chance of attention, and in fact, received not much.”
Chase was referring to a dramatic argument that broke out on the Senate floor between Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi. Benton had called Foote a coward, leading Foote to recall an earlier histrionic incident when Benton himself had behaved in cowardly fashion. In response to this personal attack, Benton rose from his chair and rushed forward menacingly. Foote retreated behind a desk and then drew and cocked a pistol. “I disdain to carry arms!” Benton shouted. “Let him fire!…Stand out of the way, and let the assassin fire!” The melodrama was finally brought to a peaceful close when Foote was persuaded to hand over his pistol to a fellow senator and Benton returned to his chair.
Chase’s disappointment over his failure was compounded by Sumner’s praise for Seward’s compelling maiden effort, which, Sumner told Chase, had filled him with gratitude. “Seward is with us,” Sumner exulted. “You mistake when you say ‘Seward is with us,’” Chase replied, with a heat not unmixed with resentment. While Seward “holds many of our Anti Slavery opinions,” he continued, his loyalty to the Whig Party made him untrustworthy. “I have never been able to establish much sympathy between us,” he explained in a follow-up letter. “He is too much of a politician for me.”
Over the course of the previous decade, Seward and Chase had maintained a dialogue on the most effective methods to promote the antislavery cause. Despite their divergent views on whether or not to join a third party, Chase had always held Seward in the highest esteem and looked forward to working with him on antislavery issues in the Senate.
The alteration in his attitude was likely spurred by jealousy, an emotion the introspective Chase begrudged in others yet could never subdue in himself. “I made this resolution today,” he had confided in his diary when he was twenty-three years old. “I will try to excel in all things yet if I am excelled, without fault of mine, I will not be mortified. I will not withhold from any one the praise which I think his due; nor will I allow myself to envy another’s praise or to feel jealousy when I hear him praised. May God help me to keep it.” His best intentions, however, could not assuage the invidious envy that possessed him at the realization that, given an identical opportunity, Seward had emerged the acclaimed leader of the antislavery forces. A rift developed between the two men that would last long into the Lincoln administration, with far-reaching consequences for the country.
Even as Seward basked in the applause of the antislavery community, however, he found himself excoriated in both Southern editorials and conservative papers throughout the North. “Senator Seward is against all compromise,” the New York Herald observed, “so are the negroes of New York…. [His] views are those of the extreme fanatics of the North, looking forward to the utter destruction of the institutions of the South.” Seward was initially untroubled by such criticism from expected sources and remained convinced he had “spoken words that will tell when I am dead.” Frances had never been prouder of her husband. When she looked at him, she told her sister, she felt almost overwhelmed by her love and respect for him.
Such elation was soon tempered by a disquieting letter from Weed, who feared that Seward had overreached when enunciating a “higher law” than the Constitution. Though Weed had seen earlier versions, he had not read the final draft. “Your speech…sent me to bed with a heavy heart,” Weed confessed to Seward. “A restless night and an anxious day have not relieved my apprehensions.” Weed’s criticism distressed Seward, who recognized that his mentor’s political instincts were usually better than his own. Indeed, the implications of Weed’s critical letter left Seward sunk in “despondency…covered with sorrow and shame,” apprehensive that he had jeopardized not only his own career but that of his mentor as well.
Seward’s status was further shaken when President Zachary Taylor, who had admitted both Weed and Seward to his inner circle, developed a fatal gastronomical illness after attending Fourth of July festivities on the grounds of the unfinished Washington Monument. Taylor’s sudden death brought Seward’s conservative rival, Millard Fillmore, into the presidency. With Fillmore in the White House, the antislavery contingent had no prospect of stopping the Compromise. Under the skillful leadership of Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, Clay’s omnibus bill was broken up into a series of separate pieces of legislation, which passed in both the House and Senate in September.
The Compromise of 1850 seemed to end the crisis. Stephen Douglas regarded the bill as a “final settlement,” urging his colleagues on both sides to “stop the debate, and drop the subject.” Upon its passage, the leading hotels in the capital were illuminated and a salute of one hundred guns was sounded. Serenaders, accompanied by a large crowd of spectators, honored Clay, Webster, and Douglas, singing “Hail Columbia” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” under the windows of their residences. “The joy of everyone seemed unbounded,” the New York Tribunenoted. The Southern-leaning Lewis Cass exulted: “The crisis is passed—the cloud is gone.” While the nation hailed the Compromise, however, a Georgia editor warned prophetically: “The elements of that contest are yet all alive and they are destined yet to outlive the Government. There is a fued between the North and the South which may be smothered, but never overcome.”
IN SPRINGFIELD, tracing the unfolding drama in the newspapers, Abraham Lincoln appeared to be satisfied that a peaceful solution had been reached. While he was unhappy about the provision bolstering the Fugitive Slave Law, he understood, he later said, that “devotion to the Union rightfully inclined men to yield somewhat, in points where nothing could have so inclined them.” Rejecting Seward’s concept of a “higher law,” he preferred to rest his own opposition to slavery in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
During the relative calm that followed the passage of the Compromise, Lincoln rode the legal circuit, a pursuit that proved congenial to his personality as well as his finances. He relished the convivial life he shared with the lawyers who battled one another fiercely during the day, only to gather as friends in the taverns at night. The arrival of the judge and lawyers generally created a stir in each town on their circuit. Villagers traveled from miles around, anticipating the courtroom drama as hundreds of small cases were tried, ranging from disputed wills, divorce, and bastardy proceedings to slander and libel suits, from patent challenges and collection of debts to murder and robbery.
“The local belles came in to see and be seen,” fellow circuit rider Henry Whitney recalled, “and the court house, from ‘early morn till dewy eve,’ and the tavern from dewy eve to early morn, were replete with bustle, business, energy, hilarity, novelty, irony, sarcasm, excitement and eloquence.” In some villages, the boardinghouses were clean and comfortable and the food was excellent; in others, there were “plenty of bedbugs” and the dirt was “half an inch thick.” The lawyers generally slept two to a bed, with three or four beds in a room. While most of the traveling bar regularly bemoaned the living conditions, Lincoln savored the rollicking life on the circuit.
He was singularly good at his work, earning the respect and admiration of his fellow lawyers. Several of these associates became great friends and supporters, among them Circuit Judge David Davis. In letters to his wife, Sarah, Davis spoke not only of Lincoln’s exceptional skill in addressing juries but of his “warm-hearted” nature and his “exceeding honesty & fairness.” Davis had come to Illinois from Maryland when he was twenty-one, after graduating from Kenyon College and New Haven Law School. In his late twenties he was elected to the state legislature and considered a career in politics, but his wife, whom he loved “too well to thwart her views,” was vehemently opposed. Instead, he ran for circuit judge, a position that offered the camaraderie of the circuit six months a year, yet enabled him to devote sufficient energy to business ventures that he eventually accumulated a substantial fortune.
The evolution of a warm and intimate friendship with Lincoln is evident in the judge’s letters home. The two men took lazy strolls along the river, shared accommodations in various villages, read books in common, and enjoyed long conversations on the rides from one county to the next. No lawyer on the circuit was better loved than Lincoln, a fellow lawyer recalled. “He arrogated to himself no superiority over anyone—not even the most obscure member of the bar…. He was remarkably gentle with young lawyers…. No young lawyer ever practised in the courts with Mr. Lincoln who did not in all his after life have a regard for him akin to personal affection.”
At mealtimes, all those with an interest in the various cases at hand would eat together at the same long table. Judge Davis would preside, surrounded by the lawyers, the members of the jury, the witnesses, the bailiffs, and the prisoners out on bail. Once the meal was done, everyone would gather before the blazing fire or in Judge Davis’s quarters to talk, drink, smoke, and share stories. Though Lincoln did not drink, smoke tobacco, use profane language, or engage in games of chance, he never condescended to those who did. On the contrary, when he had addressed the Springfield Temperance Society at the height of the temperance crusade, he had insisted that “such of us as have never fallen victims, have been spared more from the absence of appetite, than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have.”
No sooner had everyone settled in than the call would come for Lincoln to take center stage. Standing with his back to the fire, he juggled one tale after another, Herndon recalled, keeping his audience “in full laugh till near daylight.” His “eyes would sparkle with fun,” one old-timer remembered, “and when he had reached the point in his narrative which invariably evoked the laughter of the crowd, nobody’s enjoyment was greater than his.”
One of Lincoln’s favorite anecdotes sprang from the early days just after the Revolution. Shortly after the peace was signed, the story began, the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen “had occasion to visit England,” where he was subjected to considerable teasing banter. The British would make “fun of the Americans and General Washington in particular and one day they got a picture of General Washington” and displayed it prominently in the outhouse so Mr. Allen could not miss it. When he made no mention of it, they finally asked him if he had seen the Washington picture. Mr. Allen said, “he thought that it was a very appropriate [place] for an Englishman to Keep it. Why they asked, for said Mr. Allen there is Nothing that Will Make an Englishman Shit So quick as the Sight of Genl Washington.”
Another story, relayed years later by John Usher, centered on a man “who had a great veneration for Revolutionary relics.” Learning that an old woman still possessed a dress that “she had worn in the Revolutionary War,” he traveled to her house and asked to see it. She took the dress from a bureau and handed it to him. He was so excited that he brought the dress to his lips and kissed it. “The practical old lady rather resented such foolishness over an old piece of wearing apparel and she said: ‘Stranger if you want to kiss something old you had better kiss my ass. It is sixteen years older than that dress.’”
But Lincoln’s stories provided more than mere amusement. Drawn from his own experiences and the curiosities reported by others, they frequently provided maxims or proverbs that usefully connected to the lives of his listeners. Lincoln possessed an extraordinary ability to convey practical wisdom in the form of humorous tales his listeners could remember and repeat. This process of repetition is central to the oral tradition; indeed, Walter Benjamin in his essay on the storyteller’s art suggests that repetition “is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled.”
“Would we do nothing but listen to Lincoln’s stories?” Whitney was asked. “Oh! yes, we frequently talked philosophy, politics, political economy, metaphysics and men; in short, our subjects of conversation ranged through the universe of thought and experience.” Years later, Whitney recalled a lengthy discussion about George Washington. The question for debate was whether the first president was perfect, or whether, being human, he was fallible. According to Whitney, Lincoln thought there was merit in retaining the notion of a Washington without blemish that they had all been taught as children. “It makes human nature better to believe that one human being was perfect,” Lincoln argued, “that human perfection is possible.”
When the court closed on Saturday afternoons, most of the lawyers traveled home to rejoin their families, returning on Sunday night or Monday morning. Davis later recalled that Lincoln was the exception to the rule, often remaining on the circuit throughout the weekend. At first they all “wondered at it,” Davis said; but they “soon learned to account for his strange disinclination to go home”—while “most of us had pleasant, inviting homes” to return to, Lincoln did not. With the traveling bar, Lincoln was “as happy as he could be…and happy no other place.” Herndon agreed, arguing that Lincoln stayed on the circuit as long as he could because “his home was Hell.…Absence from home was his Heaven.”
Such withering commentary on Lincoln’s marriage and home life was made years afterward, when both Davis and Herndon had developed a deep hostility to Mary. The letters Davis wrote to Sarah at the time reveal quite a different story. “Lincoln speaks very affectionately of his wife & children,” Davis told Sarah in 1851. On other occasions, Davis described a letter Lincoln had received from Mary reporting nursing troubles with Willie, and a conversation in which Lincoln had confided that both he and Mary were hoping for a girl before Tad was born. Nothing in these letters hint that Davis detected marital discord in the Lincoln home.
The specter of some domestic hell is not necessary to justify Lincoln’s devotion to his law career. Life on the circuit provided Lincoln the time and space he needed to remedy the “want of education” he regretted all his life. During his nights and weekends on the circuit, in the absence of domestic interruptions, he taught himself geometry, carefully working out propositions and theorems until he could proudly claim that he had “nearly mastered the Six-books of Euclid.” His first law partner, John Stuart, recalled that “he read hard works—was philosophical—logical—mathematical—never read generally.”
Herndon describes finding him one day “so deeply absorbed in study he scarcely looked up when I entered.” Surrounded by “a quantity of blank paper, large heavy sheets, a compass, a rule, numerous pencils, several bottles of ink of various colors, and a profusion of stationery,” Lincoln was apparently “struggling with a calculation of some magnitude, for scattered about were sheet after sheet of paper covered with an unusual array of figures.” When Herndon inquired what he was doing, he announced “that he was trying to solve the difficult problem of squaring the circle.” To this insoluble task posed by the ancients over four thousand years earlier, he devoted “the better part of the succeeding two days…almost to the point of exhaustion.”
In addition to geometry, Lincoln’s solitary researches allowed him to study the astronomy, political economy, and philosophy that his fellow lawyers had learned in college. “Life was to him a school,” fellow circuit rider Leonard Swett observed, “and he was always studying and mastering every subject which came before him.”
Lincoln’s time on the circuit was certainly difficult for Mary; his long absences from home were “one of the greatest hardships” of their marriage. For Lincoln, circuit life was invaluable. Beyond the congeniality of boardinghouse life and the opportunity to continue his lifelong education, these travels provided the chance to walk the streets in dozens of small towns, eat at local taverns in remote corners of the state, and gain a firsthand knowledge of the desires, fears, and hopes of thousands of ordinary people in Illinois—the people who would become his loyal base of support in the years ahead when the time came to return to his first love: politics.`
WHILE LINCOLN was productively engaged on the circuit, Seward was dispirited by what he perceived as a reactionary turn in the country’s mood. “If I muzzle not my mouth on the subject of slavery,” he wrote Frances, “I shall be set down as a disturber, seeking to disturb the Whig Administration and derange the Whig party.” Responding to the public mood, he muted his strident voice on slavery and turned his attention to the less controversial issues of education, internal improvements, and foreign policy. Progress on emancipation, he endeavored to convince himself, could come only with the gradual enlightenment of the American public. When both Henry Clay and Daniel Webster died in 1852, he delivered such glowing eulogies on the Senate floor that his more radical friends took offense. “They cannot see,” Seward complained to Frances, “how much of the misery of human life is derived from the indulgence of wrath!”
The idealistic Frances accepted her husband’s rationale for the eulogies but could not countenance his reluctance to resist the reactionary zeal that enveloped the country after the Compromise. When it appeared that the 1852 Whig Convention was on the verge of endorsing the Compromise in an attempt to create a moderate platform for its presidential candidate, General Winfield Scott, Frances begged her husband to come home. “I do not wish you to be held responsible for the doings of that Convention if they are to endorse the Compromise in any manner or degree,” she wrote. “It will be a sad disappointment to men who are true to liberty.”
Nor did she spare him whenever she detected a blatantly conciliatory tone in his speeches or writings. While she conceded that “worldly wisdom certainly does impel a person to ‘swim with the tide’—and if they can judge unerringly which way the tide runs, may bring them to port,” she continued to argue for “a more elevated course” that would “reconcile one to struggling against the current if necessary.”
In Charles Sumner, Frances found a politician who consistently chose the elevated course she favored, even though he was often isolated as a result. Sumner, a bachelor, who, like Chase, was said to look like a statesman, with imperious, well-chiseled features, would often dine with the Sewards when Frances was in town. When she returned to Auburn, they kept up a rich correspondence. Sumner valued her unflagging confidence particularly during his early days in the Senate when his unyielding position on slavery provoked anger and ridicule. Though his attempt to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act in August 1852 garnered only 4 votes in the Senate, not including Seward’s—who, like other antislavery men, refused to support it on the grounds that it would torpedo Scott’s chances for the presidency—Frances stood loyally by her friend. “This fearless defense of Freedom must silence those cavilers who doubted your sincerity,” she wrote. “It is a noble plea for a righteous cause.”
That November, when the Southerners’ candidate, Franklin Pierce, crushed Scott in what Northern Whigs considered “a Waterloo defeat,” Frances fell into a state of despair. Her confidence in the mainstream political system gone, she was tempted, she told her husband, to join the abolitionists. Seward persuaded her to hold back, arguing that it would do “more harm than good” if the Seward name were attached to the abolitionist cause.
Try as he might, Seward could not persuade Frances to stay with him for more than a few months at a time in Washington. Her decision to remain in upstate New York, especially in the wretched summer months, was not unusual, but even when the weather began to cool as autumn set in, Frances remained in Auburn. “Would that I were nearer to you,” he lamented from Washington on his fifty-fourth birthday; but he accepted that his “widened spheres of obligation and duty” prevented him from realizing his wishes.
Had Frances Seward enjoyed good health, the course of their marriage might have been different; everywhere Seward went he rented sumptuous homes, hopeful that she and the children might join him. Burdened with a fragile constitution, Frances was increasingly debilitated by a wide range of nervous disorders: nausea, temporary blindness, insomnia, migraines, mysterious pains in her muscles and joints, crying spells, and sustained bouts of depression. A flashing light, a bumpy carriage ride, or a piercing sound was often sufficient to send her to bed. As her health deteriorated, she found it more and more difficult to leave her “sanctuary” in Auburn, where she was attended by her solicitous extended family.
Doctors could not pinpoint the physical origin of the various ailments that conspired to leave Frances a semi-invalid. A brilliant woman, Frances once speculated whether the “various nervous afflictions & morbid habits of thought” that plagued so many women she knew had their origin in the frustrations of an educated woman’s life in the mid-nineteenth century. Among her papers is a draft of an unpublished essay on the plight of women: “To share in any kind of household work is to demean herself, and she would be thought mad, to run, leap, or engage in active sports.” She was permitted to dance all night in ballrooms, but it “would be deemed unwomanly” and “imprudent” for her to race with her children “on the common, or to search the cliff for flowers.” Reflecting on “the number of invalids that exist among women exempted from Labour,” she suggested that the “want of fitting employment—real purpose in their life” was responsible.
Seward himself recognized that his marriage was built upon contradictions. “There you are at home all your life-long. It is too cold to travel in winter and home is too pleasant in summer to be foresaken. The children cannot go abroad and must not be left at home. Here I am, on the contrary, roving for instruction when at leisure, and driven abroad continually by my occupation. How strange a thing it is that we can never enjoy each others cares and pleasures, except at intervals.”
The Sewards’ relationship was sustained chiefly through the long, loving letters they wrote to each other day after day, year after year. In her letters, which number in the thousands, Frances described the progress of the garden and the antics of the children. She offered advice on political matters, critiqued his speeches, and expressed her passionate opinions about slavery. She encouraged his idealism, pressing him repeatedly to consider what should be done rather than what could be done. In his letters, he analyzed the personalities of his colleagues, confessed his fears, discussed his reactions to the books he was reading, and told her repeatedly how he loved her “above every other thing in the world.” He conjured images of the moon, whose “silver rays” they shared as they each sat in their separate homes “writing the lines” that would cross in the mail. He recollected pleasures of home, where the children played in the smoke from his cigar, and husband and wife were engaged in free and open conversation, so different from the talk of politicians.
Yet in the end, it was the talk of politicians he craved. As a result, the Sewards, to a far greater extent than the Lincolns, spent much of their married life apart.
CHASE, TOO, found himself in a dispirited state in the months that followed the Compromise. “Clouds and darkness are upon us at present,” he wrote Summer. “The Slaveholders have succeeded beyond their wildest hopes twelve months ago.” It seemed as if, temporarily at least, the wind had been taken out of the sails of the antislavery movement.
Moreover, Chase was isolated in the Senate, the regular Democratic Party having shut him out of committee work and political meetings. Nor could he rely on the camaraderie of the Free-Soilers, who believed he had sacrificed them to achieve his position. With time heavy on his hands, he spent hours writing to Kate at her boarding school in New York, where she had been sent when his third wife, Belle, contracted the tuberculosis that took her life.
The long years away from home must have been bleak and often difficult for the motherless child. Located at Madison Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, Miss Haines’s School held the girls to a strict routine. They rose at 6 a.m. to study for an hour and a half before breakfast and prayers. A brisk walk outside, with no skipping permitted, preceded classes in literature, French, Latin, English grammar, science, elocution, piano, and dancing. At midafternoon, they were taken out once again for an hour-long walk. In the evenings, they attended study hall, where, “without [the teacher’s] permission,” one student recalled, “we could hardly breathe.” Only on weekends, when they attended recitals or the theater, was the routine relaxed.
Living ten months a year under such regimented circumstances, Kate yearned to see the one person she loved: her father. Though he wrote hundreds of letters to her, his correspondence lacked the playful warmth of Seward’s notes to his own children. In cold, didactic fashion, Chase alternately praised and upbraided her, instructing her in the art of letter writing and admonishing her to cultivate good habits. If her letters were well written, he critiqued her penmanship. If the penmanship was good, he criticized her flat style of expression. If both met his standards, he complained that she had waited too long to write.
“Your last letter…was quite well written,” he told her when she was ten years old. “I should be glad, however, to have you describe more of what you see and do every day. Can’t you tell me all about your school-mates one by one…. Take pains, use your eyes, reflect.” “I wish you could put a little more life into your letters.” Four years later, he was still urging improvement. “Your nice letter, my darling child, came yesterday,” he wrote, “but I must say that it had rather a sleepy air. The words seemed occasionally chosen and arranged under the influence of the drowsy God.”
“It will be a great advantage to you to cultivate a noticing habit,” he advised. “Accustom yourself to talk of what you see and to write details, and in a conversational, & even narrative style. There is the greatest possible difference in charm between the same narrative told by one person and by another…. No doubt a large part of this difference is to be ascribed to constitutional differences of temperament, but any intelligent person can greatly increase facility of apprehension & expression by careful self culture.” The ascetic refrain of Chase’s instruction to Kate is that an effort of will can surmount most obstacles and self-denial can lead to its own gratifications: “I know you do not like writing…. You can overcome if you will…. I dislike for example to bathe myself all over with cold water in the morning especially when the thermometer is so low as at present: but I find I can when I determine to do so overcome my feeling of dislike and even substitute a certain pleasurable sensation.”
In his efforts to discipline and educate his daughter, Chase did not spare Kate his own morbid thoughts about death. “Remember, my dear child, that the eye of a Holy God is upon you all the time, and that not an act or word or thought is unnoticed by Him. Remember too, that you may die soon…. Already eleven years of your life are passed. You may not live another eleven years…. How short then is this life! And how earnest ought to be our preparation for another!” To illustrate his point, he described the death of a little girl just Kate’s age, the daughter of a fellow senator. The Monday before her death, he had seen her in the capital, “strong, robust, active, intelligent; the very impersonation of life and health. A week after and she had gone from earth. What a lesson was here. Lay it to heart, dear Katie, and may God give you grace.”
If Kate’s school reports were unfavorable, Chase refused to allow her to return home for vacation. “I am sorry that you feel so lonely,” he told her one summer. “I wish I could feel it safe to allow you to visit more freely, but your conversations with Miss Haines have made known to you the reasons why.” He urged her to understand: “you have it in your power greatly to promote my happiness by your good conduct, and greatly to destroy my comfort and peace by ill conduct.”
More often she excelled, relying on her nearly encyclopedic memory and hard work to please her exacting father. If unsparing in his criticism, he was extravagant in his praise. “To an affectionate father” nothing was more gratifying, he told her—not even the thought that he might someday “be made President”—than “a beloved child, improving in intelligence, in manners, in physical development, and giving promise of a rich and delightful future.”
He rewarded her with invitations to Washington, visits she vividly recalled years later. “I knew Clay, Webster and Calhoun,” she proudly told a reporter when she was in her fifties. As a small girl, she was particularly impressed by Clay, so tall that “he had to unwind himself to get up.” At ease with children, Clay “made much of me and I liked him.” Daniel Webster appeared to Kate an “ideal of how a statesman ought to look,” the very words later used to describe her father. “He seldom laughed, yet he was very kind and he used to send me his speeches. I don’t suppose he thought I would read them, but he wanted to compliment me and show that he remembered me and I know that I felt very proud when I saw Daniel Webster’s frank upon pieces of mail which came to me at the New York school.”
Of all her father’s Senate colleagues, Charles Sumner was her favorite, as he was of Frances Seward. “He was warm-hearted and sensitive,” Kate recalled. “He was full of anecdotes and was a brilliant talker.” When Sumner, in turn, spoke well of little Kate, Chase was overjoyed. “You cannot think, my precious child, how much pleasure it gives me to hear you praised.”
Buoyant at such moments with satisfied expectations, Chase shared with her intimate chronicles of his life in Washington, long descriptions of the protocol followed when a senator visited the president in his office, detailed accounts of dinners at the White House, amusing reports of late-night sessions in the Senate chamber, when all too many of his colleagues “have visited the refectory a little too often, and are not as sober as they should be.”
“The sun shines warm and clear,” he wrote one beautiful June day. “The wind stirs the trees and fans the earth. I sit in my room and hear the rustle of branches; the merry twitter and song of the birds; the chirp of insects.” “I should like to have you with me and we should take a ramble together.”
Not surprisingly, Kate cherished the prospect of living in the nation’s capital, accompanying her father wherever he went, assisting him in his daily tasks. Chase understood her desire and was careful to assuage her fear that he might remarry and deprive her of her rightful place by his side. Describing a visit to the Elliotts, a Quaker family with two remarkable daughters, he confessed that “Miss Lizzie is the best looking of them all, and is really a very superior woman, with a great deal of sense and a great deal of heart. You need not however be alarmed for me, for a gentleman in New York is said to be her accepted lover, and I look only for friends among ladies as I do among gentlemen.”
OF THE FOUR future presidential candidates, Edward Bates was the only one who supported the Compromise wholeheartedly. At last, with what he called the “African mania” finally subdued, he felt the American people might focus their energies once more on the vast economic opportunities provided by the ever-expanding frontier.
With equal ire, he denounced both “the lovers of free negroes in the North & the lovers of slave negroes in the South,” believing that the argument over slavery was simply “a struggle among politicians for sectional supremacy,” with radicals like Seward and Chase in the North, and Calhoun and Toombs in the South, exploiting the issue for personal ambition.
He specifically condemned Seward’s “higher law” supposition invoked to invalidate the Fugitive Slave Law, arguing that “in Civil government, such as we have, there can be no law higher than the Constitution and the Statutes. And he would set himself above these, claiming some transcendental authority for his disobedience, must be, as I deliberately think, either a Canting hypocrite, a presumptuous fool, or an arbitrary designing knave.”
He exhibited similar scorn for Calhoun, who would shatter “the world’s best hope of freedom for the white man, because he is not allowed to have his own wayward will about negro slaves!…Poor man, he is greatly to be pitied!…It is truly a melancholy spectacle to behold his sun going down behind a cloud so black.”
In the early fifties, Bates still believed that the West could refrain from taking sides, trusting that “if we stood aloof from the quarrel & pressed the even tenor of our way, for the public good, both of those factions would soon sink to the level of their intrinsic insignificance.” His hopes would quickly prove futile, for the settlement was destined to last only four years.
“A HUMAN BEING,” the novelist Thomas Mann observed, “lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and his contemporaries…if the times, themselves, despite all their hustle and bustle,” do not provide opportunity, he continued, “the situation will have a crippling effect.”
More than a decade earlier, speaking to the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum, Lincoln had expressed his concern that his generation had been left a meager yield after the “field of glory” was harvested by the founding fathers. They were a “forest of giant oaks,” he said, who faced the “task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land,” and to build “upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights.” Their destinies were “inseparably linked” with the experiment of providing the world, “a practical demonstration” of “the capability of a people to govern themselves. If they succeeded, they were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties and cities, and rivers and mountains; and to be revered and sung, and toasted through all time.”
Because their experiment succeeded, Lincoln observed, thousands “won their deathless names in making it so.” What was left for the men of his generation to accomplish? There was no shortage of good men “whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.” Such modest aspirations, he argued, would never satisfy men of “towering genius” who scorned “a beaten path.”
In 1854, the wheel of history turned. A train of events that mobilized the antislavery North resulted in the formation of the Republican Party and ultimately provided Lincoln’s generation with a challenge equal to or surpassing that of the founding fathers. The sequence began when settlers in Kansas and Nebraska called upon Congress to grant them territorial status, raising once again the contentious question of extending slavery into the territories. As chairman of the Committee on Territories, Illinois senator Stephen Douglas introduced a bill that appeared to provide an easy solution to the problem by allowing the settlers themselves the “popular sovereignty” to decide if they wished to become free or slave states. This solution proved anything but simple. Since both Kansas and Nebraska lay north of the old 36° 30' line, the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act would mean that the Missouri Compromise was null and void, opening the possibility of slavery to land long since guaranteed to freedom.
The debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened against increased antislavery sentiment in the North. Enforcement of the fugitive slave provisions contained in the Compromise of 1850 had aroused Northern ire. Near riots erupted when slaveholders tried to recapture runaway slaves who had settled in Boston and New York. Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed a common sentiment among Northerners: “I had never in my life up to this time suffered from the Slave Institution. Slavery in Virginia or Carolina was like Slavery in Africa or the Feejees, for me. There was an old fugitive law, but it had become, or was fast becoming a dead letter, and, by the genius and laws of Massachusetts, inoperative. The new Bill made it operative, required me to hunt slaves, and it found citizens in Massachusetts willing to act as judges and captors. Moreover, it discloses the secret of the new times, that Slavery was no longer mendicant, but was becoming aggressive and dangerous.”
Northern sentiment had been inflamed further by the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Less than a year after its publication in March 1852, more than three hundred thousand copies of the novel had sold in the United States, a sales rate rivaled only by the Bible. Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass later likened it to “a flash” that lit “a million camp fires in front of the embattled hosts of slavery,” awakening such powerful compassion for the slave and indignation against slavery that many previously unconcerned Americans were transformed into advocates for the antislavery cause.
Until the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, there was no signal point around which the antislavery advocates could rally. As the Senate debate opened, Northerners were stirred into action “in greater numbers than ever,” the historian Don Fehrenbacher has written, fighting “with all the fierceness of an army defending its homeland against invasion.”
Passions in the South were equally aroused. To Southerners, the issue of Kansas was not merely an issue of slavery, but whether they, who had helped create and enlarge the nation with their “blood and treasure,” would be entitled to share in the territories held in common by the entire country. “The day may come,” said Governor Thomas Bragg of North Carolina, “when our Northern brethren will discover that the Southern States intend to be equals in the Union, or independent out of it!”
This time Salmon Chase assumed the leadership of the antislavery forces. Seward understood that the bill was “a mighty subject” that “required research and meditation,” but he was distracted by a multitude of issues and the demands of Washington’s social life. With “the street door bell [ringing] every five minutes,” the popular New Yorker was unable to find the time to construct a great speech or to marshal the opposition. Consequently, while Seward’s speeches against the Nebraska bill were simply “essays against slavery,” Stephen Douglas later said, “Chase of Ohio was the leader.”
Chase, along with Sumner and Ohio congressman Joshua Giddings, conceived the idea of reaching beyond the Senate to the country at large with an open “Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States.” The “Appeal” was originally printed in The National Era, the abolitionist newspaper that had first serialized Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Deemed by historians “one of the most effective pieces of political propaganda ever produced,” the Appeal was reprinted in pamphlet form to organize opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
“We arraign this bill as a gross violation of a sacred pledge,” the Appeal began, charging that a rapacious proslavery conspiracy was determined to subvert the old Missouri compact, which forever had excluded slavery in all the territory acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase. Passage of the Nebraska Act would mean that “this immense region, occupying the very heart” of the continent, would, in “flagrant disregard” of a “sacred faith,” be transformed into “a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.” The manifesto urged citizens to protest by any means available. Its authors promised to call on their constituents “to come to the rescue of the country from the domination of slavery…for the cause of human freedom is the cause of God.”
“Chase’s greatest opportunity had at last come to him,” his biographer Albert Hart observes, “for in the Kansas-Nebraska debate he was able to concentrate all the previous experience of his life.” By the time he rose to speak on the Senate floor on February 3, 1854, the country was aroused and prepared for a great battle. “By far the most numerous audience of the season listened to Mr. Chase’s speech,” the New York Times reported. “The galleries and lobbies were densely crowded an hour before the debate began, and the ladies even crowded into and took possession of, one-half the lobby seats on the floor of the Senate.”
In the course of the heated debate, Chase accused Douglas of sponsoring the bill to aid his quest for the presidency, an allegation that brought the Illinois senator to such a “high pitch of wrath” that he countered, accusing Chase of entering the Senate by a corrupt bargain. “Do you say I came here by a corrupt bargain?” Chase demanded to know. “I said the man who charged me with having brought in this bill as a bid for the Presidency did come here by a corrupt bargain,” Douglas replied. “Did you mean me? If so, I mean you.”
Seated beside his friend, Sumner watched with rapturous attention as Chase refuted Douglas’s claim that the concept of “popular sovereignty” would provide a final settlement of all territorial questions. On the contrary, Chase predicted, “this discussion will hasten the inevitable reorganization of parties.” Moreover, he asked, “What kind of popular sovereignty is that which allows one portion of the people to enslave another portion? Is that the doctrine of equal rights?…No, sir, no! There can be no real democracy which does not fully maintain the rights of man, as man.”
At midnight, Douglas began his concluding speech, which lasted nearly four hours. At one point, Seward interrupted to ask for an explanation of something Douglas had said. “Ah,” Douglas retorted, “you can’t crawl behind that free nigger dodge.” In reply, Seward said: “Douglas, no man will ever be President of the United States who spells ‘negro’ with two gs.”
“Midnight passed and the cock crew, and daylight broke before the vote was taken,” the New York Tribune reported. The all-night session was marked by “great confusion, hard words between various Senators and intense excitement in which the galleries participated.” Many of the senators were observed to be “beastly drunk,” their grandiloquence further inflated by “too frequent visits to one of the ante-chambers of the Senate room.”
When the Senate majority cast its votes in favor of the bill at 5 a.m. on the morning of March 4, the antislavery minority was crushed. “The Senate is emasculated,” Senator Benton exclaimed. As Chase and Sumner descended the sweeping steps of the Capitol, a distant cannonade signaled passage of the bill. “They celebrate a present victory,” Chase said, “but the echoes they awake will never rest until slavery itself shall die.”
“Be assured, be assured, gentlemen,” New York Tribune reporter James Pike warned the Southerners, that “you are sowing the wind and you will reap the whirlwind…. No man can stand in the North in that day of reckoning who plants himself on the ground of sustaining the repeal of the Missouri Compromise…. [Here is] the opening of a great drama that…inaugurates the era of a geographical division of political parties. It draws the line between North and South. It pits face to face the two opposing forces of slavery and freedom.”
In the weeks that followed, mass protest meetings spread like wildfire throughout the North, fueled by the enormous reach of the daily newspaper. “The tremendous storm sweeping the North seemed to gather new force every week,” writes the historian Allan Nevins. Resolutions against the law were signed by tens of thousands in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. In New York, the Tribune reported, two thousand protesters marched up Broadway, “led by a band of music, and brilliant with torches and banners.” On college campuses and village squares, in town halls and county fairgrounds, people gathered to make their voices heard.
LINCOLN WAS RIDING the circuit in the backcountry of Illinois when the news reached him of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. A fellow lawyer, T. Lyle Dickey, sharing a room with Lincoln, reported that “he sat on the edge of his bed and discussed the political situation far into the night.” At dawn, he was still “sitting up in bed, deeply absorbed in thought.” He told his companion—“I tell you, Dickey, this nation cannot exist half-slave and half-free.”
Lincoln later affirmed that the successful passage of the bill roused him “as he had never been before.” It permanently recast his views on slavery. He could no longer maintain that slavery was on course to ultimate extinction. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise persuaded him that unless the North mobilized into action against the proslavery forces, free society itself was in peril. The Nebraska Act “took us by surprise,” Lincoln later said. “We were thunderstruck and stunned.” The fight to stem the spread of slavery would become the great purpose Lincoln had been seeking.
Before speaking out against the Nebraska Act, Lincoln spent many hours in the State Library, studying present and past congressional debates so that he could reach back into the stream of American history and tell a clear, reasoned, and compelling tale. He would express no opinion on anything, Herndon observed, until he knew his subject “inside and outside, upside and downside.” Lincoln told Joshua Speed, “I am slow to learn and slow to forget that which I have learned. My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch any thing on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out.”
Lincoln delivered his first great antislavery speech in Springfield at the annual State Fair before a crowd of thousands on October 4, 1854. Farmers and their families had journeyed to the capital from all over the state, filling every hotel room, tavern, and boardinghouse. Billed as the largest agricultural fair in the history of the state, the exhibition featured the most advanced farm implements and heavy machinery, including a “world-renowned” plow. Residents took pride in what was considered the finest display of livestock ever assembled in one place. Games and amusements, music and refreshments were provided from morning until night, ensuring, as one reporter wrote, that “a jolly good time ensued.”
The previous day, Lincoln had heard Stephen Douglas hold forth for three hours before the same audience. Douglas, stunned by the widespread hostility in northern Illinois to his seminal role in passing the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act, had chosen the State Fair as the best forum for a vigorous defense of the bill. Rain forced the event into the house of representatives chamber, but the change of venue didn’t diminish the impact of Douglas’s speech. Sharpening arguments he had made in the Senate, Douglas emphasized that his bill rested on the unassailable principle of self-government, allowing the people themselves to decide whether or not to allow slavery into their own territorial lands.
The expressive face of “the Little Giant,” as the short, stocky Douglas was called, was matched by his stentorian voice. “He had a large head, surmounted by an abundant mane,” one reporter observed, “which gave him the appearance of a lion prepared to roar or crush his prey.” In the midst of speaking, he would “cast away his cravat” and undo the buttons on his coat, captivating his audience with “the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist.” “He was frequently interrupted by cheers and hearty demonstrations of applause,” the Peoria Daily Press reported, “thus showing that a large majority of the meeting was with him.” When he finished, Lincoln jumped up and announced to the crowd that a rebuttal would be delivered the following day.
The next afternoon, with Douglas seated in the front row, Lincoln faced most likely the largest audience of his life. He appeared “awkward” at first, in his shirtsleeves with no collar. “He began in a slow and hesitating manner,” the reporter Horace White noted. Yet, minutes into his speech, “it was evident that he had mastered his subject, that he knew what he was going to say, and that he knew he was right.” White was only twenty at the time but was aware even then, he said, that he was hearing “one of the world’s masterpieces of argumentative power and moral grandeur.” Sixty years later, that conviction remained. The initial impression was “overwhelming,” White told an audience in 1914, “and it has lost nothing by the lapse of time.”
Although Lincoln’s voice was “thin, high-pitched,” White observed, it had “much carrying power” and “could be heard a long distance in spite of the bustle and tumult of the crowd.” As Lincoln hit his stride, “his words began to come faster.” Gesturing with his “body and head rather than with his arms,” he grew “very impassioned” and “seemed transfigured” by the strength of his words. “Then the inspiration that possessed him took possession of his hearers also. His speaking went to the heart because it came from the heart. I have heard celebrated orators who could start thunders of applause without changing any man’s opinion. Mr. Lincoln’s eloquence was of the higher type, which produced conviction in others because of the conviction of the speaker himself.”
While Douglas simply asserted his points as self-evident, Lincoln embedded his argument in a narrative history, transporting his listeners back to their roots as a people, to the founding of the nation—a story that still retained its power to arouse strong emotion and thoughtful attention. Many of his arguments were familiar to those who had followed the Senate debate and had read Chase’s masterly “Appeal”; but the structure of the speech was so “clear and logical,” the Illinois Daily Journal observed, the arrangement of facts so “methodical,” that the overall effect was strikingly original and “most effective.”
At the State Fair, and twelve nights later, by torchlight in Peoria, where the debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act was repeated, Lincoln presented his carefully “connected view” for better than three hours. In order to make his argument, Lincoln decided to begin with nothing less than an account of our common history, the powerful narrative of how slavery grew with our country, how its growth and expansion had been carefully contained by the founding fathers, and how on this fall night in 1854 the great story they were being told—the story of the Union—had come to such an impasse that the exemplary meaning, indeed, the continued existence of the story, hung in the balance.
For the first time in his public life, his remarkable array of gifts as historian, storyteller, and teacher combined with a lucid, relentless, yet always accessible logic. Instead of the ornate language so familiar to men like Webster, Lincoln used irony and humor, laced with workaday, homespun images to build an eloquent tower of logic. The proslavery argument that a vote for the Wilmot Proviso threatened the stability of the entire Union was reduced to absurdity by analogy—“because I may have refused to build an addition to my house, I thereby have decided to destroy the existing house!” Such flashes of figurative language were always available to Lincoln to drive home a point, gracefully educating while entertaining—in a word, communicating an enormously complicated issue with wit, simplicity, and a massive power of moral persuasion.
At the time the Constitution was adopted, Lincoln pointed out, “the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the principle, and toleration, only by necessity,” since slavery was already woven into the fabric of American society. Noting that neither the word “slave” nor “slavery” was ever mentioned in the Constitution, Lincoln claimed that the framers concealed it, “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.” As additional evidence of the framers’ intent, Lincoln brought his audience even further back, to the moment when Virginia ceded its vast northwestern territory to the United States with the understanding that slavery would be forever prohibited from the new territory, thus creating a “happy home” for “teeming millions” of free people, with “no slave amongst them.” In recent years, he said, slavery had seemed to be gradually on the wane until the fateful Nebraska law transformed it into “a sacred right,” putting it “on the high road to extension and perpetuity”; giving it “a pat on its back,” saying, “‘Go, and God speed you.’”
Douglas had argued that Northern politicians were simply manufacturing a crisis, that Kansas and Nebraska were destined, in any event, to become free states because the soil and climate in both regions were inhospitable to the cultivation of staple crops. Labeling this argument “a lullaby,” Lincoln exhibited a map demonstrating that five of the present slave states had similar climates to Kansas and Nebraska, and that the census returns for 1850 showed these states held one fourth of all the slaves in the nation.
Finally, as the greatest bulwark against the Nebraska Act and the concept of “popular sovereignty,” Lincoln invoked the Declaration of Independence. He considered the Nebraska Act simply a legal term for the perpetuation and expansion of slavery and, as such, nothing less than the possible death knell of the Union and the meaning of America. “The doctrine of self government is right—absolutely and eternally right,” he argued, but to use it, as Douglas proposed, to extend slavery perverted its very meaning. “No man is good enough to govern another man,without that other’s consent. I say this is the leading principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism.” If the Negro was a man, which Lincoln claimed he most assuredly was, then it was “a total destruction of self-government” to propose that he be governed by a master without his consent. Allowing slavery to spread forced the American people into an open war with the Declaration of Independence, depriving “our republican example of its just influence in the world.”
By appealing to the moral and philosophical foundation work of the nation, Lincoln hoped to provide common ground on which good men in both the North and the South could stand. “I am not now combating the argument of necessity, arising from the fact that the blacks are already amongst us; but I am combating what is set up as moral argument for allowing them to be taken where they have never yet been.” Unlike the majority of antislavery orators, who denounced the South and castigated slaveowners as corrupt and un-Christian, Lincoln pointedly denied fundamental differences between Northerners and Southerners. He argued that “they are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up…. When it is said that the institution exists; and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself.” And, finally, “when they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them…and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives.”
Rather than upbraid slaveowners, Lincoln sought to comprehend their position through empathy. More than a decade earlier, he had employed a similar approach when he advised temperance advocates to refrain from denouncing drinkers in “thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,” for denunciation would inevitably be met with denunciation, “crimination with crimination, and anathema with anathema.” In a passage directed at abolitionists as well as temperance reformers, he had observed that it was the nature of man, when told that he should be “shunned and despised,” and condemned as the author “of all the vice and misery and crime in the land,” to “retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart.”
Though the cause be “naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel,” the sanctimonious reformer could no more pierce the heart of the drinker or the slaveowner than “penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him.” In order to “win a man to your cause,” Lincoln explained, you must first reach his heart, “the great high road to his reason.” This, he concluded, was the only road to victory—to that glorious day “when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth.”
Building on his rhetorical advice, Lincoln tried to place himself in the shoes of the slaveowner to reason his way through the sectional impasse, by asking Southerners to let their own hearts and history reveal that they, too, recognized the basic humanity of the black man. Never appealing like Seward to a “higher law,” or resorting to Chase’s “natural right” derived from “the code of heaven,” Lincoln staked his argument in reality. He confronted Southerners with the contradictions surrounding the legal status of blacks that existed in their own laws and social practices.
In 1820, he reminded them, they had “joined the north, almost unanimously, in declaring the African slave trade piracy, and in annexing to it the punishment of death.” In so doing, they must have understood that selling slaves was wrong, for they never thought of hanging men for selling horses, buffaloes, or bears. Likewise, though forced to do business with the domestic slave dealer, they did not “recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man…. Now why is this?” he asked. “You do not so treat the man who deals in corn, cattle or tobacco.” Finally, he observed, over four hundred thousand free blacks in the United States had been liberated at “vast pecuniary sacrifices” by white owners who understood something about the human rights of Negroes. “In all these cases it is your sense of justice, and human sympathy, continually telling you” that the slave is a man who cannot be considered “mere merchandise.”
As he wound to a close, Lincoln implored his audience to re-adopt the Declaration of Independence and “return [slavery] to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace.” This accomplishment, he pledged, would save the Union, and “succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.” When he finished, the enthusiastic audience broke out in “deafening applause.” Even the editors of the Democratic paper felt “compelled” to say that they had “never read or heard a stronger anti-Nebraska speech.”
From that moment on, propelled by a renewed sense of purpose, Lincoln dedicated the major part of his energies to the antislavery movement. Conservative and contemplative by temperament, he embraced new positions warily. Once he committed himself, however, as he did in the mid-fifties to the antislavery cause, he demonstrated singular tenacity and authenticity of feeling. Ambition and conviction united, “as my two eyes make one in sight,” as Robert Frost wrote, to give Lincoln both a political future and a cause worthy of his era.