speech that government funding of improvements was a core issue for Lincoln, one that had long stirred his deepest emotions and that was a main reason for his loyalty to the Whig Party. In the speech Lincoln listed his main topics, numbered one to six, and then addressed each of them rationally. As usual, he returned to origins, going back to early investment in improvements by John Quincy Adams, and then moved forward through the presidents to Polk, who had twice vetoed river and harbor bills, and then dwelled on the constitutional and local-versus-national issues. Nowhere did he voice the common Whig complaint about Polk’s funneling money away from improvements toward a war that might extend slavery. And by saying the Constitution was fine the way it was, he rejected the radical abolitionist position that the Constitution was a proslavery document.
Indeed, he mentioned slavery only in passing in his congressional speeches, even when directly addressing the war. Here he contrasted sharply with other representatives of both parties, between which there was constant friction over slavery—so much so, as Joanne B. Freeman shows, that brawls, pummelings, stabbings, and duel threats were common in Congress.69 One all-night quarrel over the Wilmot Proviso on the House floor involved Southern Democrats and Northern Whigs. A Kentucky representative described the mayhem: “Imagine 230 tom cats fastened in a room, from which escape is impossible, with tin cans tied to their tails—raging and screaming, and fighting, and flying about from 6 P. M. to 6 A. M., twelve hours—and you will have some idea of the last jubilee in the House.”70 At three o’clock in the morning a fistfight erupted between Lincoln’s Illinois friend Orlando B. Ficklin and Jacob Thompson of Mississippi. Both were drunk. Another fight broke out between the Virginian Richard K. Meade and Lincoln’s messmate at Mrs. Sprigg’s, Joshua Giddings of Ohio.
Known as the Lion of Ashtabula, Giddings was six feet two, heavyset, and fearless. He took pride in his status as an antislavery martyr who had been forced to resign because of his views but was then triumphantly reelected by his Ohio constituents. “I allways [sic] make the fur fly,” he boasted. Once, when another congressman threatened him with a pistol and a sword cane, he declared, “Come on! The people of Ohio don’t send cowards here!”71 His denunciations of slavery and the Mexican War were brash. In a speech in support of the Wilmot Proviso he announced: “I would rather see this Union rent into a thousand fragments than have my country disgraced, and its moral purity sacrificed, by the prosecution of a war for the extension of human bondage.” Slavery, he continued, was an institution worthy of pirates and highwaymen—“It is founded in violence, and maintained by crime.”72 Giddings went so far as to suggest that there should be a separation between the “Puritans” of the North and the criminals of the South—he said that he did not want “the people of New England, the descendants of the Puritan fathers, [to] be transferred from the union formed in 1787, to a political fellowship with blacklegs and slave-mongers of Texas, in order to sustain African servitude in that government.” Giddings’s moral distinctions were absolute: “I rejoice that this is a question which admits of no compromise. Slavery and freedom are antagonists. There can be no compromise between right and wrong, between virtue and vice.”
Giddings was voicing opinions in the kind of language Lincoln would later use—slaveholders were like highwaymen, slavery was all about violence, there was a clear distinction between right and wrong. But it would take time for Lincoln to air such views openly, and never would he call for disunion. Indeed, he may have been thinking of Giddings’s vision of “this Union rent into a thousand fragments” when, in 1852, he attacked those who “would shiver into fragments the Union of these States” rather than see slavery continue.73
While Giddings raised the specter of the disintegration of the Union, Lincoln anchored his criticism of the war in an eternal constant: the soil, Mother Earth. His Spot Resolutions, widely derided in his day and seen as an impediment to his career, in fact show him returning to origins in a new way.
That his later speeches were grounded in nature is presaged in the Spot Resolutions. Lincoln expanded on the trope President Polk used when he attributed the war to Mexican soldiers “invading the ter[r]itory of the State of Texas, striking the first blow, and shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil.”74 Was this true? Lincoln asked. In his youth, he had witnessed how competing land claims had affected his father, who lost hundreds of acres due to shingled properties in Kentucky. He saw a similar problem with conflicting claims over territory at the start of the Mexican War, but this time the conflict had serious implications for the nation and its future. Lincoln agreed with Polk that “title—ownership—to soil” was the key to the Mexican War, but it was incumbent on the president “to present the facts, from which he concluded, the soil was ours, on which the first blood of the war was shed.” The land in question was the disputed territory between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande in Texas. Lincoln pointed out that Polk had begun the war under the assumption that this territory was part of Texas, when in fact Mexico plausibly laid claim to it. Lincoln summarized the history of the Texas revolution of 1835–36 and the subsequent annexation of Texas by the United States to argue that this land did not, in fact, belong to America, which had therefore engaged in the war of aggression against a foreign power.
Lincoln charged Polk with a confusion of aims. He said Polk hoodwinked the nation by “fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory, that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye that charms to destroy.”75 Lacking credible facts to support his explanation for the war, Polk was utterly lost. He “now finds himself, he knows not where,” giving speeches that are “like the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream.” And so, Lincoln declared, “his mind, tasked beyond it’s [sic] power, is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature, on a burning surface, finding no position, on which it can settle down, and be at ease.”
Lincoln here uses nonhuman images—a snake’s eye, showers of blood, an animal scurrying on a burning surface—to deflate the patriotic pretensions of Polk’s imperialist version of Manifest Destiny. Lincoln sees the centrifugal forces unleashed by the war, and he hurls them right back at Polk. He channels these forces into a centripetal center—a spot, an exact place—and he argues that Polk, who cannot describe that spot correctly, represents the lies behind irresponsible American expansionism, an uncontrolled animal rushing about in aimless confusion. Lincoln concludes that Polk is “a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man.”
Notably absent from Lincoln’s harangue is direct mention of slavery. Unlike Giddings, he did not dwell on slavery, because he did not want to alienate fellow Whigs who were Southerners or had Southern sympathies.
However, he learned in Congress how to use Whigs of different sections to advance his antislavery views palatably. He joined the Young Indians, a group of seven representatives, five of them Southerners, who supported the Whig Party’s 1848 candidate for the presidency, Zachary Taylor. A no-party general who had never cast a vote in a presidential election, Taylor was virtually a blank canvas onto which one could project one’s preferences. Even though he was a Mississippi slaveholder, Lincoln painted him as a Northern-leaning Whig. He did so in a way that proved irresistible to his fellow congressmen.
On July 27, 1848, he gave a pro-Taylor speech that made clever use of humorous techniques he had honed over the years: nonhuman images, little-big-man satire, and physical clownishness. Nonhuman images peppered the speech. In answer to a Democratic representative’s charge that “we have deserted all our principles, and taken shelter under Gen: Taylor’s military coat-tail,” he pointed out that “his own party have run the five last Presidential races” under “the ample military coat tail of Gen: Jackson.”76 Every recent Democratic campaign, trying to exploit Jackson’s record as a tough military leader, had used “never ending emblems” associated with Old Hickory: hickory poles and hickory brooms, James K. Polk as “Young Hickory,” Lewis Cass as “of the true ‘Hickory stripe,’” and so on. All such Jackson claptrap exposed the Democrats as “a horde of hungry ticks” who “have stuck to the tail of the Hermitage lion [that is, Jackson] to the end of his life; and . . . are still sticking to it, and drawing a loathsome sustenance from it, after he is dead.” This leechlike Jackson dependence reminded Lincoln of the story of someone who said he could make a new man out of an old one and still have enough left over to make a little yellow dog. The Democrats, likewise, had twice made presidents out of Jackson and “have had enough of the stuff left, to make Presidents of several comparatively small men since; and it is your chief reliance now to make still another.”
The current Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass of Michigan, was being hailed by biographers who, Lincoln said, were “tying him to a military tail, like so many mischievous boys tying a dog to a bladder of beans.”77 Lincoln mocked Cass’s performance in the War of 1812, in which he had served under an officer who invaded Canada and then retreated, with Cass reportedly breaking his sword and spending part of the time picking huckleberries. Combining the mock heroic and the nonhuman, Lincoln summoned up his own less-than-stellar performance in the Black Hawk War. He asked, “By the way, Mr. Speaker, did you know I am a military hero? Yes sir; in the days of the Black Hawk War, I fought, bled, and came away.” Lincoln could not say that he broke a sword, for he had none, but he had accidentally bent a musket. He boasted: “If Gen: Cass went in advance of me in picking huckleberries, I guess I surpassed him in charges upon the wild onions. If he saw any live, fighting indians, it was more than I did; but I had a good many bloody struggles with the musquetoes.” Lincoln turned from onions and mosquitoes to hogs. In response to Democrats who pointed to divisions among the Whigs, he asked, “Some such we certainly have; have you none, gentlemen democrats? Is it all union and harmony in your ranks?—no bickerings?—no divisions?” The competing groups of Democrats in a state like New York reminded him of a drunken man, indicted for stealing “ten boars, ten sows, ten shoats, and ten pigs,’’ who exclaimed, “Well, by golly, that is the most equally divided gang of hogs, I ever did hear of.’’ Lincoln’s punchline: “If there is any other gang of hogs more equally divided than the democrats of New York are about this time, I have not heard of it.”
In delivering the speech, Lincoln outdid himself in physical clownishness. He walked up and down the aisles of the House, gesticulating, varying his voice for comic emphasis, and jiggling his coattails at key moments. A reporter called him “a tremendous wag” and noted that “his style [was] so peculiar, that he kept the House in a continuous roar of merriment.”78 Another witness joked that he hoped Lincoln wouldn’t “charge mileage” for his peripatetic wanderings about the House floor.”79
But the clownish Lincoln had a strategy. If, in general, he aimed to add meaning to the nonsensical humor of his era, here he made an antislavery point. As he saw from Giddings and others, to speak out sharply in Congress against slavery was to risk alienating conservatives. And so, amid the jokes and comic gestures on that hot July day, he genially turned the slaveholding Zachary Taylor into a moderately antislavery Whig. Lincoln felt certain Taylor would follow the Whig policies on improvements, the tariff, the currency, and other matters. Would he also back the Wilmot Proviso? Lincoln couldn’t say for sure, but he was confident that Taylor was a man of the people who would respond to growing popular support for the proviso and would do the right thing by not vetoing it if it came to his desk. One thing was certain, Lincoln said. Taylor’s opponent, Cass, if elected, would definitely obstruct the proviso and follow “a course of policy, leading to new wars, new acquisitions of ter[r]itory and still further extensions of slavery.” And because “one of the two is to be President,” he asked, “which is preferable?”80
By packaging his antislavery message in other Whig policies and enlivening it with humor—and projecting it all onto the popular Taylor—Lincoln made his antislavery point without offending Southerners or doughfaces.
But the truce between the Northern and Southern congressmen would not last. Lincoln could lampoon the Democrats as a divided gang of hogs, but the Whigs were equally divided, despite their joining up over Taylor.
Driven by his instinct for unity, Lincoln throughout the 1840s reached out to supporters of slavery. But it was not long before the futility of his efforts became clear. Take his friendship with the Springfield lawyer Albert Taylor Bledsoe. Bledsoe, according to his biographer, “had more to do with molding Lincoln’s intellect than any man who ever touched it.”81 This is an overstatement, but doubtless the multifaceted Bledsoe—he was an Episcopal priest, an attorney, a Whig journalist, and, later, a professor of mathematics—was initially a positive example for Lincoln. At the time Lincoln was acquainted with him, Bledsoe shared Lincoln’s devotion to the unity of the Whig Party in Illinois. However, after he left in 1848 to teach in Southern universities, Bledsoe became increasingly attached to the South’s institutions. By the time of the Civil War, Bledsoe described the North as representing “brute force, blind passion, fanatical hate, . . . [of] constitutional law and human rights,” and Lincoln as “the talented but the low, ignorant and vulgar, rail-splitter of Illinois.”82 Bledsoe is best remembered today as one of the main architects of the Lost Cause, that nostalgic idealization of the Confederacy that became an underpinning of Jim Crow.
Fractures also arose among Lincoln’s pro-Taylor group, the Young Indians. The group originally consisted of two Northerners (Lincoln of Illinois and Truman Smith of Connecticut) and five Southerners (William Ballard Preston, John S. Pendleton, and Thomas S. Flournoy of Virginia, and Robert Toombs and Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia). The latter three were ardent Southern-rights men who later became linchpins of the Confederacy. Flournoy in 1861 participated in Virginia’s secession convention and served as a cavalry officer in the Confederate States Army. Toombs helped lead Georgia out of the Union and was the first secretary of state of the Confederacy. Alexander Stephens became the Confederacy’s vice president.
Stephens is an especially intriguing case, for he developed a genuine friendship with Lincoln in Congress, and the two later had important contacts during the Civil War. “I knew Mr. Lincoln well and intimately,” Stephens later recalled.83 He considered the Illinoisan as one of the best orators in the House. Lincoln, for his part, admired the brilliant Stephens. A friend of Lincoln reported that “of all the men in the South (of those who differed from him on the slavery question) Mr. Stephens of Georgia was his favorite . . . I have frequently heard him speak in very respectful terms of Stephens.
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