Douglas’s proslavery colors came out when he said of Central America, “the time will come when our destiny, our institutions, our safety will compel us to have it,” and of Cuba, “I do not care if you want it or not . . . we are compelled to take it, and we can’t help it.”105 In his debates with Lincoln, Douglas declared, “The time may come, indeed has now come, when our interests would be advanced by the acquisition of the island of Cuba. (Terrific applause.) When we get Cuba we must take it as we find it, leaving the people to decide the question of slavery for themselves, without interference on the part of the federal government, or of any State of this Union. So, when it becomes necessary to acquire any portion of Mexico or Canada, or of this continent or the adjoining islands, we must take them as we find them, leaving the people free to do as they please, to have slavery or not, as they choose.”106
Douglas feigns fairness here, leaving the decision on slavery to the people in America’s future colonized nations, but he well knows that Cuba, Mexico, and the Caribbean islands would decide for slavery, while an American takeover of Canada, which was controlled by England, was highly unlikely. Areas to the south were common targets of proslavery expansionists such as Senator Jefferson Davis, who declared, “Cuba must be ours” to “increase the number of slaveholding constituencies”; he envisioned a slave empire that would also include the Yucatán, Panama, and other Latin American countries.107 The North Carolina congressman Thomas Clingman concurred. “I should like to see Cuba a part of this Union,” he said, adding that “the natural increase of slaves would, in less than a century, justify the extension of our territory, until we should occupy that portion of Mexico which bordered the Gulf, and ultimately Central America and the West Indies islands.”108 The desire to add Cuba as a Southern state led to the Ostend Manifesto, which stated that if Spain refused to sell the island, America had justification to take it by force. The manifesto, issued in October 1854—the month of Lincoln’s antislavery speech at Peoria—came to naught, as did most other Southern schemes for expansion. But an eagerness for new slave territory drove the South right up to the Civil War.
It is not surprising, given Lincoln’s apprehension over the South’s goals, that one of his most sweeping denunciations of slavery came at Peoria. About the “zeal for the spread of slavery,” he declared:
I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticising the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.
Lincoln’s loathing of slavery comes through as strongly here as it does in any work by the most radical abolitionist. And yet the terseness of the passage distinguished it sharply from much antislavery writing of the era. He emphasizes the “monstrous injustice” of slavery but omits the whips, gore, rapes, and other horrors that characterized sensational antislavery writing. He avoids the dark-reform rhetoric that permeated much political speech in the 1850s, as in Senator Charles Sumner’s blistering “The Crime Against Kansas,” which describes the slave power as “the great Terrestrial Serpent” with its “loathsome folds . . . coiled around the whole land” and mocks a proslavery politician as a “chivalrous knight” whose mistress was the ugly “harlot, Slavery”—or in Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” with its images of slavery as “a horrible reptile, . . . the venomous creature” that is “nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic,” while “YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD.”109
Lincoln points out the hypocrisy of America’s slaveholding democracy but doesn’t go to the subversive extreme of the dark-reform orators, or the the Constitution-burning Garrison, or the violence-condoning Parker.
In some ways, the Peoria speech is a prose version of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Both works criticize slavery without demonizing Southerners. In Stowe’s novel, two of the main Southern characters—Emily Shelby of Kentucky and Augustine St. Clare of Louisiana—are good people who want to free their slaves, while the savage, whip-wielding plantation owner Simon Legree is a transplanted New Englander. Lincoln notes a similar phenomenon: “We know that some southern men do free their slaves, go north, and become tip-top abolitionists; while some northern ones go south, and become most cruel slave-masters.”110 Announcing that he has “no prejudice against the Southern people,” Lincoln takes this attitude to a new level when he declares, “They are just what we would be in their situation.” If in his law practice he studied his opponent’s case just as closely as his own, so as an antislavery politician he opened himself up to the Southern point of view. His tolerance led to his outreach to the South in the First Inaugural (“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies”) and the Second Inaugural (“With malice toward none; with charity for all”).111
If both Stowe and Lincoln avoided attacking Southerners in general, they did pillory the slave dealer. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the coarse trader Haley, who views slavery as “just business” and blacks as “critters” who “ain’t like white folks . . . ; they gets over things,” buys Uncle Tom and sells him into the Deep South.112 Also, he and his slave-catching sidekicks Marks and Tom Loker pursue the fugitives Eliza and George Harris as they flee north with their child, whom Haley wants to buy. The Shelbys do not want to sell their chattels to Haley, but they must do so to pay off debts. Lincoln in his Peoria speech describes the Southerner’s predicament: “[Y]ou have amongst you, a sneaking individual, of the class of native tyrants, known as the ‘SLAVE-DEALER.’ He watches your necessities, and crawls up to buy your slave, at a speculating price. If you cannot help it, you sell to him; but if you can help it, you drive him from your door. You despise him utterly. You do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man.”113
It did not satisfy either Lincoln or Stowe merely to comment on Southerners and slavery; they must also consider the historical roots of the antislavery impulse. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the runaway slave George Harris invokes the founding fathers and the Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth when he takes up a gun against his pursuers—a controversial scene of slave rebellion that for many years thrilled Stowe’s readers and the audiences of the numerous plays and films based on the novel.
When revisiting history, Lincoln was interested not in drama but in accuracy. We tend not to think of him as a historian, but his knowledge of the history of slavery was remarkable. Fascinated by origins, he privately recorded key historical dates: 1434, when the enslavement of Africans began in Spain (he recognized race-based slavery as purely a social construction, referring wryly to “the invention [in 1434] of negroes, or, of the present mode of using them”); 1501–3, when Spain transported enslaved people to its American colonies; 1516–17, when Spain’s Charles V escalated the African slave trade; 1620, when a Dutch ship brought enslaved Africans to Virginia [it was not known in Lincoln’s time that a British ship had brought more than twenty Africans to Virginia a year earlier];114 1626, when slavery was introduced in New Amsterdam; 1776, when there were some six hundred thousand enslaved persons in America; and 1855, when the number had soared to 3.4 million.115
He knew that the history of the nation’s founders was largely a construct of the contemporary viewer. Looking at the founding generation, Southerners saw a group of leaders—Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Monroe, and others—who themselves held people in bondage and who produced a Constitution that condoned slavery.
Although Lincoln understood this proslavery view, he also saw a strong antislavery impulse among the Founders.116 It was clear to him that they anticipated the eventual extinction of slavery. In the Constitution, they established basic human rights that had been previously announced in the Declaration of Independence. In the Ordinance of 1787, as he told the Peoria audience, they registered their animus against slavery’s expansion by reserving vast expanses of land northwest of the Ohio River for freedom. In the three decades after 1790, they took increasingly harsh action against the slave trade, which was punished in 1808 by corporal and pecuniary penalties and, when those proved insufficient, by the death penalty, imposed in 1820, the year that saw the passage of the Missouri Compromise, intended to quell tensions over slavery. Slavery had always been something that America’s political leaders (mainly Northern ones, but also some Southerners) had wanted to retard and restrict.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act, which left the decision on slavery to voters in the territories, betrayed this antislavery impulse and defied the intentions of the Founders.
The Peoria speech was Lincoln’s first full presentation of this history of antislavery politics. His later speeches, especially the one at Cooper Union in 1860, enriched this narrative. Recounting history alone, however, would not draw many to the antislavery side. Essential to his argument was an emphasis on humanity. To demonstrate that blacks were humans was to take a major step toward affirming their rights. But he had to be extremely careful. Many white Americans, as seen, regarded blacks as inferior or subhuman—a view bolstered by ethnology and by reactionary interpretations of the Bible. To enter into the subjectivity of blacks and dwell at length on their suffering was to risk being dismissed as overly radical.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin again provides a point of comparison to the Peoria speech. Although many readers were so moved by Stowe’s portraits of African American emotional life that they embraced the antislavery cause, the novel struck conservative reviewers, including some Whigs in central Illinois, as an example of disruptive abolitionism. An essayist for the Quincy Whig (a paper that had published one of Lincoln’s poems) argued that while Stowe successfully portrayed “the evil, the wretchedness, the crime, the degradation, the sin of slavery,” she went too far in expressing empathy for blacks. The essayist explained, “Sympathy for suffering, and oppression, is a natural, and noble characteristic of the human heart, . . . but African slavery is a peculiar case,” and whites must “suffer their sympathies to be governed by their judgment, and guided by their discretion.” Stowe lacked such judgment. By suggesting that blacks had the same feelings as whites, she ignored “those insuperable feelings of aversion and disgust entertained by a great majority of the people of the Northern States towards the Africans.” She therefore exhibited the “insane fanaticism” of extreme abolitionists, who were responsible for “the years of trouble, discord, and dissension” that had made America “a scene of ceaseless strife and turmoil.”117
To avoid such censure, Lincoln had to perform a deft maneuver. Privately, he could say that the memory of chained blacks was a “continual torment” in his mind, with the power to make him “miserable,” but if in the political arena he dwelt at length on the suffering of the enslaved he risked being dismissed as a flaming radical. And so in the Peoria speech he swiftly and pungently highlighted the humanity of the enslaved people without depicting individual anguish. He pointedly used the kind of nonhuman imagery that produced humor in other contexts. If in his everyday jokes and stories he exploded pretension by comparing people to animals or things, at Peoria he made similar comparisons to expose slavery as utterly dehumanizing. He mentioned the slave pen near the Capitol, where, he said, “droves of negroes were collected, temporarily kept, and finally taken to Southern markets, precisely like droves of horses.”118 He said that Southerners’ desire to take their enslaved workers to Nebraska just as they took their hogs was “perfectly logical, if there is no difference between hogs and negroes,” but, he added, “you thus require me to deny the humanity of the negro.”
He used nonhuman comparisons to point out contradictions in the South’s racial attitudes. Why had many Southerners in 1820 supported the law passed that year which made the slave trade punishable by death? After all, they “never thought of hanging men for catching and selling wild horses, wild buffaloes or wild bears.” And how about the fact that more than four hundred thousand free blacks lived in the United States and the territories? If sold into slavery, they would be worth around $200 million. “How comes this vast amount of property to be running about without owners? We do not see free horses or free cattle running at large. How is this?”
His most controversial use of nonhuman images at Peoria—one cited by those who cast him as an incendiary—came in his devastating assault on Douglas’s views on race. Douglas, he declared, “had always considered this government was made for the white people and not for the negroes.” This was “the key to the great mistake” behind the Kansas-Nebraska Act. “It shows,” Lincoln declared, “that the Judge has no very vivid impression that the negro is a human; and consequently has no idea that there can be any moral question in legislating about him. In his view, the question of whether a new country shall be slave or free, is a matter of as utter indifference, as it is whether his neighbor shall plant his farm with tobacco, or stock it with horned cattle.”119 Horned cattle, tobacco, hogs, horses, wild buffaloes, and bears—Lincoln at Peoria implemented his antislavery political ecology.
If he accentuated the humanity of blacks, he also fused the higher law doctrine with patriotism—a tricky task because the higher law was appropriated for both anti- and proslavery uses. The problems surrounding the higher law become clear in the Quincy Whig review of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The reviewer, while impressed by the novel, complained that Stowe endorsed lawbreaking by making heroes of those who defied the Fugitive Slave Act. She thus placed herself among those who “raise their eyes to Heaven, and with an impious hypocrisy worthy of [the Puritan leader] Cromwell, talk of ‘a higher law!’” For the reviewer, this made her an anarchist who “would excite her countrymen to the disobedience of the laws!” And such law flouting could breed civil war. In the reviewer’s words, “[Stowe] would, for the accomplishment of her purpose, risk the creation of the most terrible of all conflicts, a civil war:—and, with a disregard of consequences worthy of an Abolitionist, would lead the poor objects of her compassion on to liberty, and happiness, through an ocean of blood and tears!”120
Lincoln, fully aware of conflicting interpretations of the higher law, followed the lead of previous antislavery politicians by channeling this potentially anarchistic cultural current into two documents treasured by most Americans: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Those documents, he knew, were not free of controversy. There was the ongoing quarrel over whether the Constitution was proslavery or antislavery. As for the Declaration of Independence, some, like the Indiana congressman John Pettit, branded it as “a self-evident lie,” a statement for which, Lincoln said at Peoria, Pettit would have been hung by the Founders.121 The phrase Pettit rejected, “all men are created equal,” was exactly the one that Lincoln seized upon as the resolution of clashing uses of the higher law. The Declaration overrode distinctions between people and granted life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all. Blacks, as humans, deserved these fundamental rights. The highest of higher laws—what Lincoln at Peoria called “my ancient faith”—was the doctrine of human equality announced in the Declaration of Independence and preserved by human rights passages in the Constitution.
Why, then, not free all the enslaved people immediately? Because the Constitution, as a concession to the South, protected slavery where it already existed, just as it mandated the recovery of fugitives from labor. To deny these facts was to retreat into sectionalism, which could lead to civil war. Lincoln, following the example of his cynosure Henry Clay, devoted himself to the nation as a whole. As he announced at Peoria, “I . . . wish to be no less than National in all the positions I may take,” avoiding any position that was “narrow, sectional and dangerous to the Union.”122
Preserving the Union while demonstrating its antislavery foundations, then, remained his highest goal. He had shown at Peoria that he possessed all the weapons necessary to combat centrifugal cultural forces that swirled around him. Over the next five years, these forces continued to assail him, more strongly than ever. His chief opponent, Stephen Douglas, made sure that he felt the full brunt of them. Lincoln battled back valiantly, using the weapons he had unsheathed at Peoria.
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