VIII
Itwas in 1856 that the conscience and courage of the North found a voice in Abraham Lincoln. In his great soul the civilization of America suddenly flowered.
In Congress Lincoln had vainly opposed the war with Mexico as “unnecessary and unconstitutional,” and he had gone back to Springfield to practice law with his new partner, William H. Herndon.
Abraham Lincoln. This photograph was made by Hesler, in Chicago, about 1860
Abraham Lincoln. This photograph was made by Hesler, in Chicago, about 1860
The mighty sweep of events in the country had forced the Whigs and Northern Democrats to form the Free Soil party, not to extinguish slavery, but to prevent its spread from the slave States into the free Territories, and Lincoln’s tongue had pleaded powerfully for freedom. But Fremont, the Free Soil candidate for President, was defeated, and the contending slaveownersand abolitionists continued to press the cup of horror and hatred to the trembling lips of the nation. The South threatened to withdraw from the Union.
Again and again Lincoln had expressed his opinion that slavery was a crime against civilization. In the teeth of Senator Douglas, the eloquent and all-powerful Democratic leader of Illinois, who was arousing the West for slavery, he lashed and trampled upon the attempt to make Kansas a slave State.
While trying to obtain the release of a free-born Illinois negro boy held by the authorities of Louisiana, Lincoln appealed to the Governor of Illinois, to whom he said, “By God, Governor, I’ll make the ground in this country too hot for the foot of a slave, whether you have the legal power to secure the release of this boy or not.”
Even then the man who felt in himself the stirrings of power great enough to utter that threat was a grotesque figure amonghis fellow-lawyers. Yet there was no shrewder advocate, no more effective jury-pleader and no kindlier heart in Illinois. Mr. Herndon gives this picture of him:
“His hat was brown, faded, and the nap usually worn or rubbed off. He wore a short cloak and sometimes a shawl. His coat and vest hung loosely on his gaunt frame, and his trousers were invariably too short. On the circuit he carried in one hand a faded green umbrella, with ‘A Lincoln’ in large white cotton or muslin letters sewed on the inside. The knob was gone from the handle, and when closed a piece of cord was usually tied around it in the middle to keep it from flying open. In the other hand he carried a literal carpet bag, in which were stored the few papers to be used in court, and underclothing enough to last until his return to Springfield. He slept in a long, coarse yellow flannel shirt, which reached half way between his knees and ankles.”
Lincoln was not a distinguished lawyer. Nor was he a financial success in his profession. His partners complained that he neglected the business side of things and was completely absorbed in the justice or humanity involved in his cases. His heart would melt over the sorrows of a client, and he would either accept a petty fee or altogether neglect to collect anything. Mr. Lamon, his junior partner, has testified that when he charged a fee of $250, Lincoln made him return half the money to their client on the ground that “the service was not worth the sum.” So extreme was his generosity and charity, so averse was he to accepting anything but the most modest fees, that Judge David Davis once rebuked him from the bench for impoverishing his brother lawyers by such an example.
Not only that, but Lincoln many times in court showed his deep and unfailing love of justice and fair play by refusing to take advantage of the mere slips of his opponents.That generous honesty made him a power with judges and juries.
It was when the Republican party was born in the convention at Bloomington, Illinois, on May 29, 1856, that Lincoln displayed the full grandeur of his character. His speech opposing the extension of slavery to Kansas was so stirring, his presence so inspiring, that the reporters forgot to take notes. His hearers were thrilled, swept out of themselves. He seemed to grow taller as he spoke, his eyes flashed, his face shone with passion, he seemed suddenly beautiful, for his soul was in his eyes and on his lips as he declared that slavery was a violation of eternal right.
“We have temporized with it from the necessities of our condition,” he said, “but as sure as God reigns and school children read, that black, foul lie can never be consecrated into God’s hallowed truth.”
McClure’s Magazinein 1896 gave areport of this extraordinary speech. Here is an extract:
“Do not mistake that the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Therefore, let the legions of slavery use bullets; but let us wait patiently till November and fire ballots at them in return.... We will be loyal to the Constitution and to the ‘flag of our Union,’ and no matter what our grievance—even though Kansas shall come in as a slave State; and no matter what theirs—even if we shall restore the Compromise—we will say to the Southern disunionists, ‘We won’t go out of the Union and you shan’t!’”
We love Lincoln because on that day he spoke as one naked in the presence of God. There was no lie in his mouth. Slavery must be kept out of Kansas. Kansas must be free. Slavery was an unspeakable offence in the nostrils of a free people. Yet, since the Constitution and the Missouri Compromise permitted it in the slave States, a law-respecting nation must permit it toremain there. But Kansas must be free. All the soil as yet uncursed by slavery must be kept free.
And slave or free, the nation must be held together—that was the central note of Lincoln’s great speech.
It is a common mistake to suppose that Lincoln was an advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States. Yet in 1854, while denouncing slavery as a “monstrous injustice,” he said:
“When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we, I acknowledge the fact. 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. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the existing institution.”
There was a sincere man, brave enoughand humble enough to make such an admission in the teeth of the terrific abolitionist crusade. So, too, he stood in 1856. The nation had given its word, right or wrong, to the slaveholders, and the nation’s word must be kept. But Kansas must be free.
No, tender and merciful as Lincoln was, he did not raise his voice for negro emancipation. That thought came years afterwards, when, in the agony of fratricidal strife, he proclaimed the freedom of the blacks as a war measure.
However, when the Supreme Court of the United States in 1857 decided in the Dred Scott case that a negro could not sue in the national courts, and expressed the opinion that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories, there was a fierce outcry in the free States, for five of the Supreme Court justices were from slave States. It is impossible to indicate the pitch of excitement in the country.
Senator Douglas, prompt, bold, masterful,faced his constituents in Illinois and stigmatized opposition to the Supreme Court as simple anarchy. Lincoln answered him at once. The people must not resist the court, but it was well known that the court had often overruled its own decisions and “it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat it as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country.”
Another strain was placed upon the nerves of the overwrought country. By trickery the pro-slavery men of Kansas had brought about the “Lecompton Constitution,” permitting slavery in the State. President Buchanan pressed for the admission of Kansas into the Union with this constitution.
So, in 1858, when Lincoln was nominated by the Republicans to succeed Douglas in the Senate, and when he challenged Douglas to a joint debate, the nation was in the throes of an agitation that transcended all other passions in its history.
When the long-legged country lawyer, in loose-hung cloak, faded hat and ill-fitting trousers—sunken-eyed, lantern-jawed and stoop-shouldered—went forth to meet the great Senator before the people, the whole country watched the struggle with intense interest. For, ever since Andrew Jackson overthrew the Virginia oligarchy, the West had grown stronger in the national councils, and it was even now suspected that the balance of political power was passing from the South to the North. And Lincoln, risen from the soil itself, was a singularly bitter challenge to the aristocratic and haughty temper of the slaveowners.
Who can describe that unforgetable and decisive debate in Illinois?
On the very day of his nomination Lincoln uttered the thought that was pressed on and on until slavery and secession were trampled into dust under the heels of the Union armies:
“A house divided against itself cannotstand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”
Gaunt, gray-eyed, crooked-mouthed Lincoln! In all history no man ever flayed an opponent as he did Douglas.
“I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just,” he exclaimed in one of his loftiest moments.
He pelted Douglas with logic, exposed the sham of his “squatter sovereignty” doctrine, and pitilessly analyzed the predatory policy of the slavery forces. He forced Douglas to defend and explain his Kansas-Nebraska law, trapped him into confusing admissions and showed that his popular sovereignty principle meant simply “that if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man, nor anybody else, has a right to object.”
Against the awkward country lawyer withshriveled, melancholy countenance and shrill voice, the polished, handsome and resourceful Douglas contended in vain in the seven monster outdoor meetings of the debates. The humanity of Lincoln, the fairness of his statements, the moral height from which he spoke, the homely, cutting anecdotes, the originality and imagination, the obvious simplicity and sincerity of his arguments beat down Douglas’ lawyer-like pleas.
Douglas charged Lincoln with favoring the political and social equality of the white and black races. Lincoln denied that he considered the negro the equal of the white man. “But in the right to eat the bread which his own hands earns,” he added, “he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”
Nothing in the whole story of the American people approaches this struggle between Lincoln and Douglas for dramatic setting and popular enthusiasm; and nothing in Lincoln’s life proved more clearly that withhis feet set upon a moral issue he was matchless. He was filled with the majesty of his cause.
“If slavery is right,” he said that winter in Cooper Institute, New York, “all words, acts, laws and constitutions against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality, its universality. If it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension, its enlargement. All they ask we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong is the precise facts upon which depends the whole controversy.”
In the race for the Senatorship Douglas defeated Lincoln; but in that defeat Lincoln won a great victory in the awakened conscience and courage of the North.
An unpublished photograph of Lincoln in 1860, framed in walnut rails split by him in his woodchopper days. Owned by Charles W. McClellan of New York
An unpublished photograph of Lincoln in 1860, framed in walnut rails split by him in his woodchopper days. Owned by Charles W. McClellan of New York
An unpublished photograph of Lincoln in 1860, framed in walnut rails split by him in his woodchopper days. Owned by Charles W. McClellan of New York
We who love him now can hardly understand how deep was the love and how greatthe confidence that, a year later, raised the cabin-born, uncouth country lawyer and politician to be President of the United States.
We remember his strength and faith in the great war; we remember his gentle patience, his justice and mercy, and his martyrdom; but do we fully realize the effort he made to save his people from the ghastly sacrifice made on the battlefields where the nation was reborn?