After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Parker dedicated himself to the antislavery cause. A vigorous champion of the higher law, he declared, “It is my duty to resist a wicked law by all the expedients that are naturally just. . . . Who gave us the right to do wrong? I am bound to obey every natural law of God writ in the Universe.”86 In Boston he protected the fugitive William and Ellen Craft and served as the minister at their wedding before sending them to safety in England. He and other members of his Committee on Vigilance also aided other runaways, including George Latimer, Shadrach Minkins, Thomas Sims, and Anthony Burns. Parker lectured throughout the nation in the 1850s, reaching more than a hundred thousand Americans annually by averaging one hundred lectures a year, many of them directed against slavery.87 Believing that violence alone could liberate America’s enslaved millions, Parker joined the Secret Six of Northern radicals who helped fund and promote the militant abolitionist John Brown.
Inspired by this antislavery activism, William Herndon wrote Parker in 1854 that he had read all of Parker’s writings. Herndon confessed, “I am pulled to them. . . . You are my ideal—strong, direct, energetic & charitable.”88 In their correspondence, which lasted until Parker’s death in 1860, the two radicals shared news about the ongoing antislavery struggle, waxing passionate in their denunciations of the South’s peculiar institution. As the decade progressed, Herndon kept Parker abreast of the doings of Illinois’s rising antislavery star, his gangly, eloquent law partner. He sent Parker speeches by Lincoln and Douglas, lavishing praise on the former while anathematizing the latter. The freedom fighter Parker supported, John Brown, became one of Herndon’s heroes.
But neither Parker nor Herndon shared John Brown’s egalitarian views on race. Whereas Brown believed that blacks should be integrated into American society and treated equally with whites, Parker and Herndon espoused the more prevalent view that black people, while they deserved freedom, were inferior beings. “No doubt the African race is greatly inferior to the Caucasian in general intellectual power,” Parker wrote, “and also in an instinct for liberty which is so strong in the Teutonic family.”89 The reason he supported John Brown was that he thought that the enslaved were too passive to fight for freedom on their own. He stated, “The African is the most docile and pliant of all the races of men; none has so little ferocity: vengeance, instinctual with the Caucasian, is exceptional in his history.”90 Weak and passive, blacks were like children who need protection from the aggressively competitive Anglo-Saxon race, which took advantage of them and would eventually crush them. Parker accepted the ethnological view that blacks and other “inferior” races would disappear, a view espoused by many nineteenth-century figures.
William Herndon also appears to have considered the idea of racial extinction. Just as his alcoholism ran counter to his promotion of prohibition, so his antislavery activism was larded with racism. On the one hand, like Parker, Herndon selflessly assisted fugitives from slavery—in his case, as a lawyer who defended them in court. On the other hand, he was not above making repellent remarks about African Americans and the Irish. In a letter to Parker, he wrote, “The poor miserable Irish . . . will perish from the [stink?] of humanity, and men of grander type will take their place. Poor fools.” In the same letter he stated, “I am for cutting out the nigger, and as I now see it, it is self defense for the white man. . . . The cause [of conflict] must be eradicated before the white men are safe.”91
It is to Lincoln’s credit that he avoided such generalizations about race. While running for state office in the 1850s, he sometimes made conservative-sounding statements, but they were brief, perfunctory ones intended to appeal to certain groups of Illinoisans whose votes he needed. Actually, he loathed the race-baiting that his Democratic opponents utilized to whip up the public. Exasperated by Stephen Douglas’s racist diatribes, Lincoln wrote, “Negro equality! Fudge!! How long, in the government of a God, great enough to make and maintain this Universe, shall there continue knaves to vend, and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagougeism [sic] as this.”92 As Lincoln’s political speeches of the 1850s reveal, he was far from being the thoroughgoing racist that some claim he was.
“MY FIRST IMPULSE WOULD BE TO FREE ALL THE SLAVES”
By 1854, the year of Lincoln’s political reemergence, Illinois enforced harsh legalized discrimination. Like Indiana and Oregon, Illinois had passed laws that forbade free black people from entering the state. Its first black law was approved in 1819. In 1848, while Lincoln was in Washington serving in Congress, Illinois voters had approved an amendment to the state constitution banning black people from entering the state. The amendment took effect in 1853, when the legislature passed An Act to Prevent the Immigration of Free Negroes into This State, which stipulated that any black person entering Illinois must leave within ten days or face a misdemeanor charge and a stiff fine. This was one of the most severe black laws passed by any Northern state before the Civil War.
The prevalence of such race-based restrictions in his state impelled Lincoln at times to advocate colonization—the transporting of free blacks to foreign places such as Liberia. Like many prominent Americans, from Jefferson and Madison through Monroe, Jackson, Clay, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, he talked of the departure of free blacks because of racial prejudice that, he thought, made coexistence in America difficult for both blacks and whites.93 Lincoln joined the Illinois Colonization Society in the 1840s and by 1857 was one of its managers. He also joined the Springfield branch of the American Colonization Society.
But he perceived the extraordinary difficulty of colonization, and during the Civil War he abandoned the idea. On the matter of race, he seems to have profited from his contact in Washington with antislavery politicians who, as Richard H. Sewell points out, managed “to transcend the racism of the age” sufficiently to recognize the humanity of blacks and fight for their “most basic freedoms.”94
Lincoln never reveled in white supremacy, as did his opponent Stephen Douglas. Privately, Lincoln wrote that slavery on the basis of a difference in color or intelligence made no sense, because that would mean that people could enslave anyone who was darker or less smart than they.95 Moreover, he did not display prejudice in his private encounters with black people. When he made comments on race publicly, they were typically short, almost mechanical, as when, responding to Douglas during the 1858 debates, he gave a terse list of certain political and social rights for blacks he did not favor. Also, he carefully regulated his word choice to leave open the possibility that he would promote such rights in the future.
He cunningly surrounded his racist-sounding pronouncements with phrases that pointed in a radically abolitionist direction. He thus participated in what I call the “benign subversive” style that characterized the writings of Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and other writers of the American Renaissance—that is, packaging rebellious or progressive themes in conservative stylistic containers.96
Consider his October 1854 speech at Peoria, Illinois, on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which marked his reentry onto the political stage. The speech contains one of his longest, most measured public expressions on slavery and race.97
In a central passage in the speech, he admitted that he had no clue as to how slavery could be abolished constitutionally. “If all earthly power were given me,” he declared, “I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution.” He then considered several courses of action:
My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,—to their own native land. But a moment’s reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope, (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible. If they were all
landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days. What then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? I think I would not hold one in slavery, at any rate; yet the point is not clear enough for me to denounce people upon. What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded. We can not, then, make them equals. It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted; but for their tardiness in this, I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the south.98
The outward message here is a conservative one adapted to a general audience in Illinois, with its strong prejudice against blacks. After conceding that he has no solution to the slavery question, Lincoln weighs different possibilities: freeing the enslaved and returning them to Africa; freeing them and having them live as the underlings of whites; freeing them and making them the political and social equals of whites. None of the plans, Lincoln says, are feasible. Most of the blacks taken to Africa would die there; besides, America’s shipping resources could not come close to accommodating such massive numbers of passengers. Freeing blacks and making them a permanent underclass in America did not improve their condition, while trying to grant them equal rights would be prevented by the prevailing racism.
Couched in this conventional passage are radical themes. Lincoln begins with an abolitionist declaration—“My first impulse would be to free all the slaves”—and he doesn’t surrender the idea: he repeats, “free them all” and “free them,” and he also mentions gradual emancipation. He betrays real frustration over his inability to find a workable solution to the slavery problem. Although he says that “my own feelings will not admit of” making blacks “politically and socially, our equals,” he adds the conditional clauses “and if mine would,” “Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment,” and “whether well or ill-founded,” along with concessions to public opinion: “we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not” and “A universal feeling . . . can not be safely disregarded” (italics added). In these clauses, Lincoln hints that he leans strongly toward granting rights to enslaved workers. By saying that he defers to a “universal feeling” on race among “the great mass of white people,” he is subsuming his progressive leanings to majority opinion.
He was, therefore, muzzled by a locally biased public to whom his political fortunes were tied. Public opinion was vital to him. To win the votes, he could not be as progressive in public as he was in private. As for the Constitution, he wanted to show that it had an antislavery message, despite its obligatory concessions to slavery. How could he make this case without alienating conservative Illinois voters?
The Peoria speech, which initiated his dramatic political rise, showed the tools he would use to refashion antislavery language. His three basic tools—history, humanity, and the Declaration of Independence as the nation’s higher law—were standard antislavery ones. Lincoln used them with special skill at Peoria.
In history, he found evidence of antislavery sentiment among the Founders—sentiment grounded in a dedication to self-government that reached back to the seventeenth-century British civil wars. In humanity, he identified fundamental characteristics that bridged the racial gap and negated the proslavery views of blacks as mere chattel. The higher law posed a special problem, because it was a loose cannon. Eloquently expanding on the arguments of previous antislavery politicians and authors, Lincoln transformed the higher law, potentially anarchistic and omnidirectional, into a force for renewed patriotism. He did so by demonstrating that the nation itself originated in a higher law: the ideal of human equality announced in the Declaration of Independence and codified in the Constitution.
Although these ideas were not original, his mixing and calibration of them were. He cautiously avoided the extremes of sensationalism and sentimentality that marked other uses of them. He also avoided sectionalism. Trying “to convince and persuade,” in his words, rather than denounce or exaggerate, as he saw other reformers doing, he built his case rationally, with winning touches of emotion, poetry, and sarcasm.99
The lawyer Henry Whitney witnessed the tall, rawboned Lincoln, who looked like “a rough intelligent farmer,” deliver the speech on the portico of “a dingy, dirty courthouse” in Peoria on the evening of October 16, 1854. The speech, a reply to Stephen Douglas’s oration in defense of the Kansas-Nebraska Act given earlier that day, drew cheers, long applause, and handkerchief waving from the crowd, which filled the courthouse grounds. Whitney recalled, “I have never heard that speech equalled before or since except by Lincoln himself.”100
We can understand the speech’s appeal. For the first time in his career, Lincoln verbalized publicly the antislavery feelings he had long harbored, feelings shared by many in his Illinois audience who, whatever their feelings on race, were appalled by proslavery legislation and were hungry for a convincing attack on slavery by a politician.
Why did he delay until October 1854 before coming out full throttle against slavery? It’s well known that the Kansas-Nebraska Act roused him from political torpor and made him a dedicated champion of the antislavery cause. Less understood is his alarm over proslavery centrifugalism. In Lincoln’s mind, Kansas-Nebraska did far more than open up the western territories to slavery; it threatened to lead to the unchecked expansion of American slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere. Upon the passage of the bill, he declared, “We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion.”101 Seeing that slavery, “the genius of Discord himself,” was now free to spread, he realized that “shocks, and throes, and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.” His aim at Peoria, he announced, was to show that Douglas’s bill was not only “wrong in its direct effect, letting slavery into Kansas and Nebraska” but also “wrong in its prospective principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the wide world, where men can be found inclined to take it.102
The “wide world” meant, primarily, nations to the south eyed by proslavery expansionists. As he put it in one of his 1858 debates with Douglas: “If Judge Douglas’ policy upon this question succeeds, and gets fairly settled down, until all opposition is crushed out, the next thing will be a grab for the territory of poor Mexico, an invasion of the rich lands of South America, then the adjoining islands will follow, each one of which promises additional slave fields.”103 The spread of slavery, he wrote during the secession crisis in February 1861, would put America “on the high-road to a slave empire.” He said of the Southern states, “If we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum. A year will not pass, till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union.”
How justified was his fear of slavery’s hemispheric expansion? Very justified, if we consider the stated goals of slavery’s defenders.
Douglas proclaimed neutrality on slavery, which, he maintained, would take root only where it was established by a territory’s voters and enforced by local police regulations. But as Lincoln noted, Douglas’s “declared indifference” was, in fact, “covert real zeal for the spread of slavery
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