THE CULTURAL WORK OF REASON
The General Assembly approved the relocation bill on February 28, 1837. Two months later, the twenty-seven-year-old Lincoln moved from New Salem to Springfield. He had been studying law for three years, and he had often attended court sessions run by Bowling Green, the rotund, jovial judge in New Salem who became a kind of surrogate father for him. Just before moving to Springfield, Lincoln earned his law license. His political colleague John T. Stuart, opening an exciting door, had invited him to be a junior partner in his Springfield law firm. Lincoln anticipated a fresh start in the future capital and rode on a borrowed horse to Springfield.
On April 15, he arrived at a general store near the town’s main square. With his saddlebags on his arm, he went inside and asked about buying materials for a single bed. When the store’s proprietor, Joshua F. Speed, told him that the price of the items would be seventeen dollars, Abe said that he couldn’t pay now but hoped to do so by Christmas. He told Speed about his new law job and added glumly, “If I fail in this, I do not know that I can ever pay you.” Speed later recalled, “I never saw a sadder face.” But Speed told Abe that he need not worry, for he had a large room above the store where he slept in a double bed, and Abe could sleep there too. Abe went upstairs and, after checking the room, put his saddlebags on the floor and then returned to the store, his face beaming. “Well, Speed,” he said, “I am moved!”93
Lincoln lived nearly four years with Speed, who would become a lifetime friend—probably the closest one he ever had. Five years younger than Abe, the blue-eyed, dark-haired Speed had been born in 1814 Kentucky to a wealthy slaveholding family that lived on a plantation near Louisville. In 1835 he moved to Springfield and took up storekeeping. His friendship with Lincoln grew quickly. They had shared intellectual interests that led to the creation of an informal literary and debating club. They also had similar temperaments, swinging between cheerfulness and depression. In the late 1830s, they briefly shared a love interest, Matilda Edwards, and they served as mutual advisers at anxious moments during later relationships that, for each of them, led to marriage.
Springfield, with a population of about 1,600 when Abe arrived, was a formerly raw town that was becoming vibrant and respectable. Not that it completely shed its rawness. It had a serious problem with dirt and roaming hogs. In dry periods, its unpaved streets produced nostril-clogging dust; in wet weather, they became virtually impassable quagmires. The “dirt and discomfort” that William Cullen Bryant complained of when he visited the town in 1832 had, if anything, worsened when Emerson lectured there in January 1853. “Here I am in the deep mud,” he wrote home; “it rains, & thaws incessantly, &, if we step off the short street, we go up to the shoulders, perhaps, in mud.”94 Untended privies and manure piled near stables emitted noxious odors. Hogs roved about, foraging on the garbage tossed on the streets and digging holes to wallow in. According to the historian John J. Duff, “Hog holes, filled with filth and mud, met one at every turn. The smell, so positive and unequivocal, and the orchestration of the nonstop grunting, were a constant source of irritation.”95
In this regard, however, Springfield was no different from most grimy, animal-infested towns of the day. In 1837 there were more than twenty stores in Springfield that sold groceries or dry goods, four hotels, shops for clothing and shoes, coffeehouses, and drugstores. Log structures were steadily being replaced by ones built with brick or boards.96 In the town square, a large Greek Revival state house was constructed to host the operations of the state government, whose official transfer to Springfield came in 1839. Cultural offerings came from the Thespian Society, which put on plays, and the Young Men’s Lyceum, which offered public lectures and discussions. Two Bible societies and two temperance societies addressed moral and religious issues, and several Protestant denominations established churches there. A colonization society, devoted to sending free blacks to Africa, had been established in 1833, with John T. Stuart serving as one of its officers.
Promoting colonization was tolerated, but anything more radical than that met with stinging rebukes. Illinois as a whole had a notably mixed record on race and slavery. Before Illinois entered the Union as a free state in 1818 under the antislavery terms of the Northwest Ordinance, slaveholding had existed in the territory for a century. The territorial governor of Illinois, Ninian Edwards, the father of Mary Todd Lincoln’s brother-in-law, was a slave owner who in 1815 advertised for sale twenty-two enslaved persons along with two cattle, “a full-blooded stud horse, a very large English bull, and several young ones.”97 Although slavery was supposedly abolished when Illinois became a state, a version of it survived in the form of indentured servitude, by which blacks signed a contract to work for long periods—often twenty years, sometimes for life—for a white person in exchange for food and shelter. Even slavery itself did not fully disappear; it was, as one historian notes, “winked at” in the state.98 In the 1830 census, the Springfield resident Dr. John Todd, the uncle of Mary Todd, was listed as holding five black people as slaves. By 1840, in the town’s population of 2,579 there were 115 African Americans, six of whom were listed as “slaves.”99
As for free blacks, they had few rights under the state’s draconian black laws, which prohibited African Americans from serving on juries, testifying in court, or voting. An 1848 amendment to the state constitution forbade free blacks from settling in Illinois, a prohibition implemented by a law of 1853.100
Antislavery sentiment waxed and waned in Illinois. In the early years, proslavery forces pushed for a convention to amend the state constitution to legalize slavery. In 1822 the convention was prevented by a popular ballot, thanks to a challenge by antislavery spokespersons. Thereafter, antislavery sentiment languished until the early 1830s, when certain antislavery groups—Christian ministers, freethinkers, Quakers—began to speak out against slavery. Radical abolitionists, however, were rare. Even most of the antislavery figures who lived in Putnam County were racists who believed that free blacks should emigrate to Liberia. As an observer of Putnam County noted, “There is a most unparalleled prejudice here, among the people generally, against the Blacks.”101
Anything resembling extreme abolitionism received harsh criticism. After the Reverend Jeremiah Porter gave an abolitionist speech in Springfield in mid-October 1837, a citizens meeting passed resolutions stating that “Abolition . . . can be productive of no good result” and that “the leaders of those calling themselves Abolitionists are designing, ambitious men, and dangerous members of society” whose effect was “to breed contention, broils, and mobs.”102
Two weeks after the passage of these resolutions, the antislavery editor Elijah P. Lovejoy died at the hands of a racist mob in Alton, Illinois. Mobs had previously destroyed several of Lovejoy’s printing presses. On the evening of November 7, 1837, a screaming crowd surrounded his warehouse in Alton. When he came out to confront the people, he was shot. His murder was one of many antiabolitionist incidents that shook the nation during that decade. In October 1835, Boston’s mayor had to imprison William Lloyd Garrison to protect him from raucous opponents who threatened to lynch him. In Cincinnati, a mob destroyed the establishment of the antislavery editor James G. Birney, hauling away his printing press and heaving it into the Ohio River. In St. Louis, a black sailor, Francis McIntosh, was chained to a tree and burned to death by a mob after he had killed a policeman who had threatened his friends. In New York, mobs damaged stores and churches associated with antislavery leaders, and a race riot broke out in the Five Points. Similar outbreaks occurred in New Jersey and Connecticut. In the South, the dissemination of abolitionist literature fueled paranoid reactions among those who feared a massive slave insurrection. Amos Dresser, a New Englander who went south to distribute antislavery writings, barely avoided being lynched in Nashville, Tennessee; a group of prominent citizens publicly whipped him and expelled him from the state. In July 1835, rumors of an imminent slave rebellion in Mississippi led to the hanging, without trial, of many African Americans and several whites suspected of being involved in the plot.
The panicked response to the slavery issue appalled Lincoln. He had remained publicly silent on slavery until his second term in the Assembly, when he and a fellow congressman protested against proslavery resolutions passed by the Illinois legislature. The resolutions said that the US government had no right to interfere with slavery in the Southern states or in the District of Columbia; this would amount to “an interference with the rights of property in other States.” The legislators added “that we highly disapprove of the formation of abolition societies, and of the doctrines promulgated by them.”103
Seven weeks later, Lincoln and another Long Nine member, Dan Stone, issued a written protest against these resolutions. Lincoln and Stone argued that while Congress could not abolish slavery in the states, it had the right do so in the District of Columbia if it had the backing of voters there. Lincoln and Stone wrote that they believed “that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils.
Although this last statement seems conservative, it is understandable in context. Lincoln here reacts against the inflammatory moralizing of the Garrisonians, just as he would soon protest against similar rhetoric used by temperance reformers. In 1837, it was bold of him and Stone to declare in the conservative Illinois political arena that slavery was unjust. And they didn’t reject abolitionism; they just said that the way it was being promoted stirred up unnecessary acrimony.
Lincoln was alarmed by mobs provoked not only by the slavery dispute but also by other issues. In Charlestown, Massachusetts, an anti-Catholic mob burned a convent and threatened to kill nuns. The Charlestown affair showed that even staid New Englanders could give themselves over to mass frenzy. The same applied to transplanted New Englanders in northern Illinois, where disputes over land claims prompted recently arrived easterners to battle over land. As Thomas Ford wrote:
The old peacefu1, staid, puritan Yankee, walked into a fight in defence of his claim, or that of his neighbor, just as if he had received a regular backwoods education in the olden times. . . . The readiness with which our puritan population from the East adopted the mobocratic spirit, is evidence that men are the same everywhere under the same circumstances.105
Lincoln, too, saw that “the staid, puritan Yankee” was as likely as the Southerner to resort to mob action. Anarchic behavior by Americans of different sections led him to denounce it in a lecture he gave at the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum, where on January 27, 1838, he talked on “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.” He announced that the country was beset by “this mobocratic spirit, . . . now abroad in the land,” which, he feared, threatened to destroy American democracy.106 He declared, “Whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last.”
Revolutionary passion, he emphasized, had been necessary in the time of the Founders, who galvanized revolt through the stirring language of the Declaration of Independence. But those days had passed. The revolutionary energies fostered by the Declaration must now be tempered by strict observance of the law. “As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence,” he said, “so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor.” To be sure, some laws were bad. But the Constitution provided the means of replacing bad laws, and the justice system demanded due process in dealing with alleged malefactors. “Let reverence for the laws,” he insisted, “be breathed by every American,” from young to old; “let it become the political religion of the nation.” Revolutionary emotions must yield to reason. He concluded, “Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.”
This was Lincoln the rationalist trying to cap the political and social turmoil around him. It was also pure Lincoln (that is, the twenty-nine-year-old Lincoln, given to rhetorical flourishes) because the language was rooted deeply in the natural world. Throughout, Lincoln projected his major points in images of nature, which he tied directly to the national experience. Americans, he announced, occupy “the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.” The Founders’ task was to “possess this lovely land; and upon its hills and valleys” build the edifice of liberty. Americans faced no “transatlantic military giant” who could “step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow.” If we fail, we must “die by suicide,” which would happen if we let lawless passions control us. Mobs, he said, were “common to the whole country,” from New England to Louisiana. In Mississippi, whites and African Americans “were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side,” almost as profuse as “the native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.” In this bleak environment, self-aggrandizing individuals, with little regard for the American system, were frighteningly capable of taking control of the nation and tyrannizing over it; “but such belong not to the family of the lion, nor the tribe of the eagle.” As for the Founders, “They were a forest of giant oaks; but the all-resistless hurricane has swept over them, and left only, here and there, a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage.” Now was the time for “we, their descendants, to supply their places with pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.”
The natural world—ocean, trees, a quarry, birds, snow, sun, and so on—here solidifies Lincoln’s ideas. The earth yields a political message: rebuild the edifice of liberty on solid ground by obeying the law, or else the hurricane of revolutionary passions will tear it down.
The message of Lincoln’s address at the Young Men’s Lyceum reflected not only his experiences with nature but also his preparation for the law, especially his study of the eighteenth-century English jurist William Blackstone. For Lincoln, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England was the essential text for all lawyers.107 We find in Blackstone several principles that reappear in Lincoln’s lyceum address. Blackstone established civil law as a crucial defense against two extremes: anarchy and tyranny. Mob action posed so great a danger, Blackstone argued, that riotous groups numbering up to eleven people should be punished by fine and imprisonment, while the penalty for larger groups should be very harsh—even, in some cases, execution.108 Lincoln, of course, did not go that far, but he said that without due process, the basis of American society might snap apart; some will seek the “total annihilation” of the government, while others will become “disgusted with a government that offers them no protection.”109 What was needed, in the view of both Blackstone and Lincoln, was a strong government that produced clear laws that were faithfully observed by all citizens. Lincoln here followed Blackstone in placing highest value on civil law, rather than on natural law.110 Following natural law, or the dictates of one’s inborn moral sense, could lead in any direction. Natural law, then, must be harnessed—it must be debated in legislatures and courts; it must be held up to the tests of evidence and experience. Then, if it proved desirable, its dictates would be enacted in new civil laws.
Staking a middle ground between tyranny and mob action had political implications for Lincoln. When in the lyceum speech he warned about “men of ambition and talents” who “burn for distinction” and longed to be an American Caesar or Napoleon, he probably had in mind Stephen A. Douglas, the stentorian, self-aggrandizing Democratic legislator who had already emerged as his main political opponent. Also, while Lincoln saw mass violence among different groups, he associated it mainly with rabble-rousing Democrats. Whigs noted that Democrats—nicknamed Locofocos, after lighted matches—were the most frequent inciters of riots, driven by their hatred of abolitionists.
For the Whig Sangamo Journal, Lincoln stood out as the state’s leader in quelling such politically motivated violence. In an article that appeared in the wake of the lyceum speech, an essayist (probably the paper’s editor, Simeon Francis) charged that “wherever the Loco Focos have been predominate of late years, . . . they have had their seditious assemblies, their mobs, their destruction of property, their violations of the law, their attempts to intimidate and overawe its functionaries.” The essayist asked, to whom do we owe the salvation of “our present government”? The answer highlighted the Whigs and their leader: “To whom but to those with arms in their hands, with Lincoln at their head, repressed the first open treason of the progenitors of Loco Focoism.”111
In time, Lincoln would face the problem of suppressing truly nation-shaking treason and mass violence. For now, he was honing his mob-suppressing abilities in Illinois. He was also learning basic parameters—natural law versus civil law, democratic abstractions versus earth-based politics—that would guide his political thinking all the way up through the Civil War. He would eventually tip the balance toward natural law and centripetal power, but he would never surrender his faith in the Constitution, in a compassionate central government, and in the earth as a symbol of stability. He would also retain his respect for reason, which was especially strong in the lyceum speech.
Reason must subdue wild passion. That was his public position in the 1830s. Reason, however, proved hard to maintain when he was faced with severe personal loss and the vicissitudes of romantic relationships. Even resolutions of social problems that seemed staid and moderate, such as the temperance reform, could, he discovered, prove resistant to reason.
Rationalism was his ideal, but there were times in these years, both privately and publicly, when the irrational took over
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