hat were Lincoln’s core convictions as he entered the slavery debate in earnest in the late 1850s? All humans are equal. Freedom—a respect for individual liberty—must merge with a belief in human equality, or justice for all. Slavery and other forms of oppression are wrong. Indifference toward them is de facto support for them.
For Lincoln, these were the real issues of the slavery controversy. But how could he present his radical ideas about them to an electorate that included a substantial number of conservatives and moderates? His answer, in effect, was that of Walt Whitman, who declared, “Be radical, be radical, be radical—be not too damned radical.”1 Observing the political and cultural conditions of the 1850s, Lincoln learned how to be radical without sounding too damned radical. He retreated from extremist isms that were said to be grounded in New England Puritanism. In his speeches and his debates against Stephen Douglas, he summoned liberty, associated by many with Puritanism, into the vision of human equality proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. The American Revolution, which had brought Northerners and Southerners together against a common oppressor, became for him the touchstone for the unified struggle for human rights.
PURITAN LESSONS
He was cautious not to get too close to a movement that attracted many antislavery advocates in the 1850s: the veneration of the nation’s Puritan forefathers. Despite his fascination with his own New England roots, he avoided publicly associating himself with Puritanism.
Other leading antislavery figures, in contrast, brandished such an association. The clergyman politician Owen Lovejoy, the brother of the antislavery martyr Elijah Lovejoy, as a fellow politician remarked, “hated slavery with the animosity of a regular Puritan,” and insisted that the nation’s founders derived their democratic principles “from the old puritan stock.”2 Other antislavery Illinoisans who were proud of their deep New England heritage included Zebina Eastman, Erastus Wright, Ichabod Codding, and Edward Beecher.3
In Illinois and throughout the nation, December 22—known as Forefathers’ Day, because, as was generally thought, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock on that day in 1620—was a major holiday, led by the New England Society, which had many branches in the North and even a few in the South Several politicians who became members of the Lincoln administration, including William Henry Seward, Gideon Welles, Salmon P. Chase, Francis P. Blair, and Hannibal Hamlin, spoke at Forefathers’ Day celebrations. Extolling the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock provided a platform for linking antislavery passion with America’s early history. Antislavery orators compared the Pilgrims’ rebellion against British aristocratic institutions to the struggle against the Southern slave power. Puritanism, the speakers argued, had fostered self-government, clear moral distinctions, and the antislavery higher law.
Self-government referred to the Puritans’ rejection of the age-old doctrine of the divine right of kings. In this view, the 1649 beheading of King Charles I by Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarians ushered in a spirit of self-rule. The argument for the natural rights of the individual, in opposition to the divine right of kings, was first made in detail by the seventeenth-century British politician Algernon Sidney, who has been called “Puritanism’s greatest political philosopher.”4
Sidney and other Puritan rebels, such as John Lilburne, paved the way for John Locke by arguing that the most valuable property was oneself and the highest goal was self-government. This Puritan spirit in turn contributed to the founding fathers and, later, American antislavery reformers.
To govern one’s self and one’s own labor subverted the rationale for slavery. As the antislavery clergyman Henry Ward Beecher announced at a Forefathers’ Day event, “Only give the whole of man to himself and he is made to be prudent, virtuous, orderly and self-governing. This is the molecule, the atomic cell of Puritanism.”5 Or, as Theodore Parker expressed it, “The dreadful axe of Puritanic Oliver Cromwell shore off the divine right of kings, making a clean cut between the vicarious government of middle ages and personal self-rule of modern times.”6
Another characteristic that antislavery reformers attributed to Puritanism was a tendency to make absolute moral distinctions and enforce them in the public arena. Americans generally considered the terms Yankee, Puritan, and Anglo-Saxon “virtually synonymous in their connotations” and that all were dedicated to morality in politics.7 The nation’s leading thinker, Emerson, noted that “our position, of the free states, [is] very like that of the [Calvinistic] covenanters against the cavaliers.”8 He wrote: “The moral peculiarity of the Saxon race,—its commanding sense of right and wrong, the love and devotion to that,—this is the imperial trait.”9 “Few bodies or parties have served the world so well as the Puritans,” Emerson wrote. Everything “of vigorous sense, or practical genius this country shews, are the issue of Puritan stock,” including moral movements such as abolition, which was “but the continuation of Puritanism.”10 For the Puritan-Yankee, slavery was wrong. To oppose its abolition was like trying to stop nature. In Emerson’s words, “As well complain of gravity, or the ebb of the tide. Who makes the Abolitionist? The Slaveholder.”11
Similarly, Lincoln’s friend Owen Lovejoy, who traced his antislavery principles to the Pilgrims, appealed to nature’s laws. Addressing Congress, he asked whether it is possible to send a river back to its source or calm the waves of a storm-tossed ocean. “Much less can you annul the eternal distinction between right and wrong,” Lovejoy said. “Before all law and above all law, human and divine, is the idea of right and wrong, eternal, indestructible.”12
The appeal to morality bred the antislavery higher law, which also was thought to come from Puritanism. The Puritan Algernon Sidney was commonly accepted as the principal ancestor of the higher law. He famously wrote, “That which is not just, is not Law; and that which is not Law, ought not to be obeyed.”13
This is how many antislavery Northerners saw proslavery laws. At a typical Forefathers’ Day ceremony held in Plymouth in 1855, William Henry Seward, Lincoln’s future secretary of state,
attributed his antislavery principles to Puritanism. While admitting that he had no Puritan ancestors, he declared, “I know no better rule of conduct than that of the Puritans,” who appealed to “a law, broader, older, and more stable” than human law, “a law universal in its application and in its obligation, established by the Creator and Judge of all men, and therefore paramount to all human constitutions.” “The Puritan principle,” he said, was “the absolute equality of all men” and “the spirit of Freedom, which is the soul of the Republic itself.”14
Another speaker that day, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips, said that Seward, the “great apostle of the higher law,” lied when he said “he is not descended from the Mayflower.” “There is such a thing as pedigree of mind, as well as of body,” Phillips explained, “and he knows as much about the Mayflower, that I am sure, as a Western man would say, ‘I was thar.’ [Cheers and laughter.]” Knowing about the Mayflower, for Phillips, meant standing for antislavery principle. In reference to the antislavery battles in the western territories, Phillips declared, “The Pilgrims, had they lived in 1855, would not be in Plymouth, but in Kansas.” Their creed would be “the Underground Railroad, and a thousand of Sharpe’s rifles, addressed ‘Kansas,’ labelled ‘Books’” (a reference to weapons, disguised as Bibles, that were boxed and sent west by the antislavery minister Henry Ward Beecher). As for Plymouth Rock, Phillips said, the antislavery warrior Elijah Lovejoy had “leveled his muzzle across it at Alton, Illinois.”
Moving words. But also, from Lincoln’s vantage point, sectional ones. The kind that could inflame hostilities between the North and the South, between Republicans and Democrats. Antislavery radicals claimed to have a corner on the Puritan spirit. Among those who addressed Forefathers’ Day events were the controversial reformers William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Charles Henry Remond, and Lucy Stone. At one Forefathers’ Day celebration, Garrison said: “Nothing is more clear than that the Abolitionists are the only people in this country who have a right to celebrate the Landing at Plymouth.”15 Frederick Douglass declared that America’s conflicting societies were seeded by the 1619 arrival of a slave ship in Virginia and the 1620 landing of the liberty-seeking Puritans in Massachusetts.16
Predictably, such praise of the New England Puritans aroused the ire of slavery’s supporters. One proslavery essayist bitterly proposed in 1858 that New England leave the United States, join England, and allow the South to take over Jamaica in order to reenslave and civilize its black population. In proposing “New England for Jamaica,” the writer expressed the aim of the Southern-controlled US government to extend slavery by taking over the West Indies.17 Insisting that “New England has been the source of all the evils” in America, the essayist explained that “there was a principle of evil in Puritanism from which, when it ripened into rottenness, was propagated all the isms that have since swarmed over the land. There is not a false religion, a false philosophy, a false literature, or a false system of politics in the country, of which the origin may not be traced to New England Federalism, Abolitionism, Know-Nothingism, Emersonianism—these, and a thousand other kindred impostures, have all the same prolific womb, in which a brood of unborn devils are now struggling for development and delivery.” From this perspective, Puritanism’s self-rule led to anarchistic individualism, its political morality to fanatical persecution, and its higher law to defiance of the Constitution. The only worthy product of New England, the writer added, was the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who criticized the Puritans, mocked Transcendentalism and other isms, and supported the Democratic president Franklin Pierce, his chum since college days.
Slavery’s defenders charged that Puritanism generated horrible isms. After the election of Lincoln, a political cartoon titled Worship of the North, by the Confederate caricaturist Adalbert Johann Volck, pictured Lincoln’s bust atop an antislavery Republican altar whose base is labeled PURITANISM. Above the base are stones labeled WITCHBURNING, SOCIALISM, FREE LOVE, SPIRIT RAPPING, ATHEISM, RATIONALISM, and NEGRO WORSHIP.18 Northern politicians and reformers swarm around the altar, on which lies a bleeding white man who has been stabbed by the knife-wielding abolitionist clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, who kills whites sacrificially in idolatrous reverence for black people. Above the devilish-looking bust of Lincoln and the words CHICAGO PLATFORM is seated the idolized black man, who holds a spear that has been given to him by John Brown, a statue of whom, labeled ST. OSAWATOMIE, is in the background to the right. Other figures include Senator Charles Sumner, who holds a torch to help Beecher take aim at his white victim; the antislavery editor Horace Greeley, who swings incense in the left corner; and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who kneels in prayer on the right-center side of the picture.
The cartoon’s main message was clear: New England Puritanism had bred the Republican Party and John Brown. How true was the message? In the case of John Brown, very true. He was a Calvinist who believed God had chosen him to eradicate slavery; he revered his Puritan lineage and was regularly compared to Oliver Cromwell, the seventeenth-century Puritan warrior. Brown also believed that African Americans should share equal rights with white people—what slavery’s proponents called “negro worship.” The cartoon pertained as well to a number of other antislavery figures who, to varying degrees, traced their views to the Puritan tradition of liberty and freedom fighting.
To include Lincoln in the picture, however, was deceptive. Despite his connections to Puritanism through his New England ancestry and his association with the Republican Party, he was careful to de-emphasize these connections.
He was well aware of the political implications of Puritanism. On December 22, 1856, he went with fellow attorney James H. Matheny to the annual meeting of the New England Society of Illinois held in Springfield, presided over by his friend Simeon Francis, editor of the Illinois State Journal. Toasts were raised to the landing “at the rock of Plymouth, 230 years ago this day,” to New England, “the birthplace of political and religious liberty,” and so on.19 A more suggestive toast went, “In the establishment of our national independence, the Puritan and Cavalier marched shoulder to shoulder. May their successors never forget that ‘all men are created free and equal.’”
This idea pointed to a route out of sectionalism for Lincoln. New Englanders and Southerners had fought together against a common enemy in the American Revolution. Lincoln concentrated on this idea. He fused ideas derived from the Puritans with those established by the Revolutionary War generation. As the toast said, “The Puritan and Cavalier marched shoulder to shoulder” in the Revolution—the key moment of national unity. During the Civil War, Lincoln would decline an invitation to attend a Forefathers’ Day celebration. He focused neither on the Puritans nor on the Cavaliers but rather on restoring the nonsectional spirit of the founding fathers.
THE NAKED QUESTION, THE CENTRAL IDEA
Lincoln’s improvement upon Revolutionary-era ideals shaped his response in the 1850s to Stephen A. Douglas, culminating in the famous debates during their competition for the US Senate in 1858.
In the landmark debates, Douglas accused Lincoln of having worked as early as 1854 “to abolitionize the Old Whig party all over the State” and to “bring old Democrats handcuffed and bound hand and foot into the Abolition camp.” Douglas said Lincoln followed a prearranged plan “to bring into the Abolition camp the old line Whigs, and transfer them over to [Joshua] Giddings, [Salmon] Chase, [Frederick] Douglass, and Parson [Owen] Lovejoy, who were ready to receive them and christen them in their new faith. (Laughter and cheers).”20
The record shows that, in a literal sense at least, Douglas was completely wrong. Actually, Lincoln was slow in joining the emerging antislavery fusion group that became the Republican Party. In October 1854, he kept away from an antislavery meeting in Springfield organized by the antislavery radicals Owen Lovejoy and Ichabod Codding. A month later, he bristled when he learned that Codding had added his name to the Illinois Republican Central Committee without consulting him. Lincoln wrote Codding saying that while he hated slavery, he was not yet ready to take political action to oppose it. He explained, “I suppose my opposition to the principle of slavery is as strong as that of any member of the Republican party; but I had also supposed that the extent to which I feel authorized to carry that opposition, practically, was not at all satisfactory to that party.”21
At this point, he didn’t want to ruffle the sensibilities of Old Line Whigs in central Illinois, who recoiled from any sign of abolitionism. He lost his 1854–55 run for the Senate mainly because key antislavery leaders like Zebina Eastman refused to back him. In February 1856, he did not go to the important Republican convention held in Pittsburgh, attended by Codding, Lovejoy, Giddings, Greeley, and others. Lincoln instead chose to attend the milder anti-Nebraska editors’ convention in Decatur, Illinois.22
The fact that in May he participated in the more militant antislavery convention in Bloomington, fifty miles north of Decatur, exemplifies his dictum that events shaped him. In the opening months of 1856 the slavery crisis intensified greatly. In January, President Franklin Pierce endorsed the bogus proslavery legislature in Kansas that had been elected by gun-toting, knife-wielding Border Ruffians from nearby Missouri who crossed into Kansas and cast ballots for proslavery candidates. The conflict over slavery in Kansas erupted into open warfare. In 1855, Lincoln had prophetically written of Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act, “I look upon that enactment not as a law, but as violence from the beginning. It was conceived in violence, passed in violence, is maintained in violence, and is being executed in violence.”23 By early 1856, Kansas had become the scene of proslavery atrocities committed against free state settlers, prompting John Brown’s violent reprisal in May at Pottawatomie Creek, where he supervised the slaughter of five proslavery settlers. The same month,
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