In January 1849 Lincoln drafted a bill that called for the gradual emancipation of the District’s enslaved people. He softened the bill by stipulating that emancipation must be approved by voters in the District and that slave owners must be compensated for giving up their chattel. Lincoln showed his proposal to some local officials, who supported it. But Southern congressmen subsequently expressed displeasure over the idea, and Lincoln dropped it.
It would not be until April 1862, under Lincoln, that slavery would be abolished in the District of Columbia. But the effort in 1849 by the forty-year-old Lincoln was a turning point for him. Not only was it the first time that he came up with antislavery legislation, but his bill signaled the progressive centrism that later became his trademark. Tellingly, his proposal won support from both Joshua Giddings and Duff Green; it was one of the few things that the abolitionist congressman and the Southern-rights champion agreed on. In his first major foray against slavery, then, Lincoln mediated effectively between Northern and some Southern interests. He proposed abolition without threatening the Union. On the slavery issue, he had inched toward effective political centrism.
He may have seen his bill as a means of testing the antislavery credentials of that quintessential centrist, Zachary Taylor. In the unlikely scenario that the bill passed Congress, would Taylor sign it and thus live up to his billing as the people’s president, averse to using the veto power? Lincoln did not get the chance to find out. But he did have other expectations of the president.
Among them was patronage, which for Lincoln was closely related to geographical centrism. Lincoln tried to persuade Taylor to award important government posts to Whigs from his central section of Illinois. In the spring and summer of 1849, a battle grew over the position of commissioner of the US General Land Office. This plum position, which paid $3,000 a year, held high importance for Lincoln because it involved supervising the surveying and sale of public lands. He had long put a priority on land use. He promoted the Whig agenda that the states should receive a portion of the moneys raised by the federal government from the sale of public land. Also, he doubtless saw an opportunity to help secure the Mexican Cession for freedom. A Whig from central Illinois, Lincoln believed, would be in an ideal position to regulate land use in a way that avoided the extremes of sectionalism. Lincoln reported to friends that, initially, he was considered for the Land Office position. Soon, however, he threw his weight behind Cyrus Edwards, the brother of his brother-in-law Ninian Edwards (and the father of his former love interest Matilda Edwards). However, the Chicago attorney Justin Butterfield soon emerged as Taylor’s favored candidate. Lincoln respected Butterfield but insisted that his appointment would be “an egregious political blunder” that would “give offence to the whole whig party here.”104
Why this hostility toward Butterfield? Lincoln later explained, “I opposed the appointment of Mr. B. because I believed it would be a matter of discouragement to our active, working friends here, and I opposed it for no other reason.”105 “Here” meant central Illinois. In appointing the Chicagoan, President Taylor had said, “I think the commissionership should go north.”106 Not only was Butterfield from the northern section of the state, but among his main backers were easterners, including the Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster.107
Once it was clear that Cyrus Edwards was not going to win the commissionership, Lincoln eagerly sought the job for himself. He solicited recommenders and, in June 1849, wrote President Taylor. He described his fitness for the position in geographical terms, declaring that “I am as strongly recommended by Ohio and Indiana, as well as Illinois”—indeed, by “the whole Northwest.” He complained that Illinois appointments had all gone to the southern or northern sections of the state. What was needed was someone from the center. “I am in the center,” Lincoln wrote. “Is the center nothing?—that center which alone has ever given you a Whig representative?”108
Butterfield got the appointment, and Lincoln supported him; at least the new land commissioner was an Illinoisan. But the patronage job Lincoln truly wanted had eluded him. He subsequently turned down offers of two positions in Oregon Territory: first, as secretary to the governor and then the governorship itself. The high salary that came with the latter job was tempting, but going to the Far West would sacrifice his geographical centrality and would confront him and his family with harsh living conditions.
If Lincoln felt shortchanged by the patronage system, others, it turned out, were frustrated with his own performance as a political patron. He expressed a willingness to run for reelection to the House, but Illinois Whigs had expected more governmental favors from him and instead nominated Stephen T. Logan, who lost a close election in August 1848 to a Mexican War hero, the Democrat major Thomas L. Harris, who would lose his seat two years later to the popular Whig, Richard Yates.
For now, Lincoln was satisfied to be back in central Illinois, which had more lessons to teach him. The Eighth Judicial Circuit now covered fourteen counties, and he was the only Illinois lawyer who consistently traversed its 440 round-trip miles each year. During the 1850s, he continued to learn much as a traveling lawyer. As tensions over slavery intensified during that decade, he also reentered politics. Extreme positions, antislavery and proslavery, hardened on both sides, widening political polarization and raising the possibility of civil war. When the threatened westward expansion of slavery drew Lincoln back into politics in 1854, he made a determined effort to avoid extremes.
“Is the center nothing?” he had asked President Taylor. As a political candidate and then as president, Lincoln would teach the world that in a deeply divided time, the center is everything—the center, that is, with an eye always trained on pushing the nation in a strongly progressive direction.
As Lincoln entered the 1850s, America responded to the growing slavery crisis by finding answers to political conundrums by looking beyond human laws to what was called the higher law, which caused wildly unpredictable actions on both the abolitionist and the proslavery sides. Lincoln reined in this higher-law trend by arguing convincingly that the founding fathers themselves had provided the most inspiring higher law of all.
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