Northerners detested the Fugitive Slave Act and also opposed the extension of slavery. His comment to Joshua Speed that “the great body of the northern people do crucify their feelings” about slavery pointed to his awareness of the widespread antislavery impulse. This impulse surfaced in various ways: in the personal liberty laws, granting varying degrees of rights to African Americans, that were passed in fourteen Northern states;54 in the near-victory of John Frémont in 1856; in the groundswell of support for John Brown, the warrior for freedom in Kansas; and in the surging popularity of antislavery literature—not just Uncle Tom’s Cabin but also slave narratives and antislavery plays, sermons, poems, and songs.
In Illinois, Lincoln’s conscience was stimulated by three radicals: the Chicago newspaper editor Zebina Eastman, the Springfield businessman and educator Erastus Wright, and the Princeton, Illinois, clergyman politician Owen Lovejoy. These three came out strongly against the Fugitive Slave Act and put their beliefs into practice by serving on the Underground Railroad. They launched attacks on slavery from a moral and religious standpoint. Lincoln was slow to admit having an alliance with these men, and for good reason. To have done so would have surely alienated the conservative Whigs who maintained a strong presence in central Illinois. But in keeping contact with the three men, whom he openly honored later on, he prepared the way for his own future as the Great Emancipator and the facilitator of the Thirteenth Amendment.
Zebina Eastman, born in 1815 in Amherst, Massachusetts, moved in 1838 to Illinois, where he worked with Benjamin Lundy on the antislavery newspaper the Genius of Universal Emancipation, which, after Lundy’s death in 1839, became Eastman’s the Genius of Liberty and then the Western Citizen, renamed the Free West before being integrated into the Chicago Tribune. Eastman was an unabashed champion of the Underground Railroad. In 1844, he published an announcement in his paper of the “LIBERTY LINE,” whose “improved and splendid Locomotives” ran “Night and Day” to “Libertyville, Upper Canada,” with “SEATS FREE, Irrespective of color” and overcoats for those “afflicted with the protracted chilly-phobia.”55 Chicago, the hub of Illinois abolitionism, was a key stop for runaways, whom Eastman was always eager to assist. Lincoln at first seemed too conservative to Eastman, who came out against Lincoln during his 1854 run for the Senate. But by the time of the Civil War, he had gained respect for Lincoln, who in turn praised Eastman as “one of the earliest, and most efficient of our free-soil laborers, . . . more than a common man, in his sphere.”56 Lincoln appointed him as consul to Bristol, England. Eastman worked hard to represent the North’s antislavery position in England, and in 1864 he sent a letter congratulating Lincoln for his reelection, declaring that his note came from “one of the humblest, who hopes to be one of the truest, of the fr[i]ends of the Author of the Proclamation of Emancipation.”57
A mutual friend of Eastman’s and Lincoln’s, Erastus Wright was another antislavery enthusiast. Another transplanted Massachusetts man, with a deep Puritan background, Wright was one of thirty Springfield residents who in 1837 left the town’s First Presbyterian Church and formed the radical Second Presbyterian Church, whose members were mainly antislavery New Englanders. A teacher, school commissioner, and businessman, Wright hired Lincoln to represent him in several debt cases. The two found themselves on opposite sides in a case in which an elderly widow hired Lincoln to represent her in a suit against Wright, who, she claimed, had overcharged her for his services in procuring for her a Revolutionary War widow’s pension. Lincoln’s passionate defense of the widow, punctuated by jingoistic Revolutionary War images, persuaded the jury to award her thirty-five dollars and costs.58 But Wright and Lincoln remained friends and political allies. Wright referred to Lincoln as “my near neighbor and fast friend,” and in 1860 Lincoln reported to Wright’s daughter, “your father calls on me every day.”59 It is telling that Lincoln was so close to the radical antislavery visionary Wright, a busy Underground Railroad agent and a strong advocate of the antislavery higher law.
Owen Lovejoy was cut from the same cloth as Wright. In May 1864, shortly after Lovejoy’s death, Lincoln wrote that “every step” in their relationship “has been one of increasing respect and esteem.”60 The key word here was “increasing.” At the start, when they first met at the Springfield state fair on the rainy afternoon of October 4, 1854, there was tension between them. Although both viewed slavery with equal loathing, Lovejoy, along with his radical friend Ichabod Codding, was
ager to establish the emerging Republican Party as the proper platform for gathering together the antislavery factions in the North. Lincoln resisted the rush to the new party. When Codding invited him to join the Illinois Republican Central Committee, Lincoln testily replied that, while he opposed slavery as much as any Republican, “the extent to which I feel authorized to carry that opposition, practically; was not at all satisfactory to that party.”61 For a time he remained cagey about a connection with Codding, Lovejoy, and other Republicans, but while visiting Lovejoy’s congressional district in 1856 and, as Lincoln wrote, “seeing the people there—their great enthusiasm for Lovejoy,” he sensed a swelling antislavery fervor among average Illinoisans.62 Owen Lovejoy served as the party’s sharp prow, bursting through the ice of moderation and the choppy sea of prevarication and evasions. He made no bones about his hostility to the Fugitive Slave Act and his activity as an operative in the Underground Railroad. In 1859 he declared on the floor of Congress, “Proclaim it then upon the house tops. . . . Owen Lovejoy lives at Princeton, Illinois, three quarters of a mile east of the village, and he aids every fugitive that comes to his door and asks it.”63 He became an unflagging supporter of Lincoln, who eventually called him “my most generous friend.”64
Lincoln’s friendship with several black and white leaders of the Underground Railroad brings into question his reputation among some historians as having been merely a moderate antislavery spokesman.65 As president, after all, he would oversee the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act in June 1864. Previously, he had made clear that he disliked the way the Fugitive Slave Act was being carried out—particularly the enforcement of provisions in the law that violated due process, such as not permitting a captured black to testify that he was in fact a free man, not a runaway. In the First Inaugural Address, he would concede that the Constitution demanded that fugitives must be returned, but would ask, “[I]n any law upon this subject, ought not all the safeguards of liberty known in civilized and humane jurisprudence to be introduced, so that a free man be not, in any case, surrendered as a slave? And might it not be well, at the same time, to provide by law for the enforcement of that clause in the Constitution which guarranties [sic] that ‘The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States?’”66
In carefully chosen language, Lincoln comes very close here to affirming citizenship rights for African Americans. He makes no mention, at this point, of voting rights—he would not publicly make that radical appeal until after Appomattox. But already, in March 1861, he is calling for blacks to enjoy one of the most fundamental rights in a democracy—that of habeas corpus and trial by jury. The fact that he would soon suspend habeas corpus for Northerners suspected of disloyalty, even as he was opening doors for black people, perhaps shows that his abhorrence of rebellion was so great that he could advocate due process for blacks while being willing to suspend it for Southern sympathizers.
IMPROVING SPRINGFIELD, IMPROVING POLITICS
Wherever Lincoln looked in Springfield he saw improvement. African Americans like Florville and Donnegan were getting ahead, as were many of the Germans, Irish, and Portuguese immigrants who had settled in the blocks around the Lincolns’ home. Springfield as a whole was prospering. Its population grew from 2,600 in 1840 to 9,400 by 1860, a gain of more than 350 percent.67 The economy was robust, led by the sale of farm products. It flagged during the downturn of 1853 and the recession of 1857, but it weathered even those rough times fairly well. The value of land in Springfield leaped from $1 million in 1847 to well over $4 million in 1858.
To a man who had progressed from the backwoods to middle-class respectability, Springfield’s economic advance could only be encouraging. It confirmed his core belief in the labor theory of value, American style: the idea that anyone could make it through hard work. When approached by a law student who asked about the key to success, his advice was simple: “Work, work, work, is the main thing,” said Lincoln.68 He wrote in notes toward a lecture, “The leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man, is diligence. Leave nothing for tomorrow, which can be done to-day.”69
This, of course, was the national formula, rooted in the Protestant work ethic and put to use by Americans from Benjamin Franklin through Horatio Alger to modern-day workers. For Lincoln, the formula had special meaning. It gave him an answer to the South’s so-called mudsill theory, which held that the North’s poor were stuck in their low position—they were “slaves without masters”—and as such, they lacked the care and protection that the South provided to its enslaved blacks.
The mudsill theory, Lincoln said, inaccurately depicted workers as “fatally fixed for life.” In fact, they could rise. “This,” he declared, “is free labor—the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.”70 Freedom gave all Americans, regardless of color, opportunity. “One of the reasons why I am opposed to Slavery is just here,” he said in an 1860 speech. “What is the true condition of the laborer? . . . I want every man to have the chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he can better his condition—when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him!” (Notably, he here envisages a black man as a business leader—remarkably progressive for that era.)
His vision of improvement included advances in technology. In an 1858 lecture he said, “Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship.”71 Around him in Springfield he saw the improving animal at work. Not that other animals were out of the picture. Hogs still crowded Springfield’s streets: odorous, grunting flea carriers, they were, at the same time, excellent consumers of street garbage and a ready source of meat for the needy.72 Mud and dust continued to be problems, but they were greatly alleviated by a drainage system and planking for the sidewalks and streets installed during the 1850s. By the middle of the decade, gas lamps illuminated the streets, fed by pipes from the Springfield Gas Light Company that also brought lamp fuel into the homes of the well-to-do. (The Lincolns, like most residents, continued to use candles and lard oil.)73 By 1853, two railroads ran into Springfield, facilitating travel and the distribution of goods.
City services expanded. Springfield’s single law officer was supplemented in 1854 by five policemen, who six years later received uniforms (though they groused about having to pay for them). In the absence of a fire department, citizens were virtually powerless to handle the fires that periodically broke out. The worst one, a conflagration in 1855 that wiped out half a block near the public square, led to the creation of Fire Company No. 1. Nicknamed the Pioneers, the company held festivals attended by notables, including, in July 1858, Abraham Lincoln, who delivered a toast to “‘The Pioneer Fire Company.’ May they extinguish all the bad flames, but keep the flame of patriotism ever burning brightly in the hearts of the ladies.”74 Soon came Sangamo Fire Company No. 2, Hook and Ladder Company No. 1, and Young America Hose Company No. 1. As in the cities of the Northeast, volunteer fire departments raced to fires in a fierce competition among groups of colorfully uniformed b’hoys, for whom running with “the masheen” (the hand-drawn fire engine) to a fire was as important as actually fighting the flames—a losing endeavor anyway in towns like Springfield that lacked a central water supply.
The town saw a cultural quickening. Visiting lecturers in the 1850s included such eminences from the East as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, Horace Mann, and (at William Herndon’s invitation) Theodore Parker. Controversy surrounded Parker’s lecture in October 1856, the month before the presidential election. Herndon had been prodding his favorite philosopher to lecture in Springfield, and he and his law partner must have been satisfied with Parker’s talk, “The Progressive Development of Man,” which argued that humans were distinguished from lower animals by their ability to improve their lot through inventions—the theme Lincoln would develop in his two lectures on discoveries and inventions. But Parker’s reputation as a radical abolitionist had preceded him. Springfield’s Democratic paper, the Register, reported that “Theodore Parker, the great disunion and abolition speaker of Massachusetts,” had in his talk “preached disunion and nigger supremacy after the most approved mode, and pointed to Fremont’s election as the great end to be achieved to secure these desired results.”75 Clearly, the reporter had not attended the talk; actually, Parker had given what the Illinois State Journal called a “purely literary lecture.” But Parker, notorious as a protector of fugitive blacks and a supporter of isms such as women’s rights, stood as an example of the danger of open radicalism in the highly charged political atmosphere of the 1850s. The Register’s response showed that any association with the isms could provoke the anathema of Democrats.
This helps explain why Lincoln was slow in joining the new Republican Party and why he associated himself intermittently with a plan for colonization. The position that blacks and whites could not live on equal terms in America reflected an environment hostile to integration. Take, for example, Illinois’s draconian law of 1853 that stipulated that a black person from another state who stayed in Illinois longer than ten days was subject to arrest, imprisonment, a fifty-dollar fine, and removal from the state. “In looking at the recent black law of Illinois,” Frederick Douglass declared, “one is struck dumb with its enormity.”76 The law stayed in effect for twelve years. Such attitudes were felt elsewhere in America. Racial discrimination led to a surge of emigration plans made by African Americans in the 1850s.77
Lincoln, however, was far from being an unqualified supporter of colonization. In subtle ways, he actually subverted the program from within. He spoke about the virtual impossibility of transporting millions of black people, and he held that emigration must be voluntary, not forced. He was developing a strategy he had introduced at Peoria in 1854 and that he would perfect in the late 1850s in his political battles against Stephen A. Douglas: that is, using a conservative cover to appeal to moderates while delivering a fundamentally radical message.
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