now so likely to be partially acquiesced in by the different sections of the Union, as it would have been, could Gen. Taylor have been spared to us.” Lincoln missed the moderation of Taylor, who had denounced the “intemperate zeal” of “fanatics” on both sides—that is, Northern abolitionists and Southern fire-eaters.45
Moderation and centrism, the two virtues Lincoln highlighted in Taylor, also characterized Henry Clay, who died in 1852. In his eulogy of his political hero, Lincoln emphasized that Clay had put the Union above all else. Lincoln quoted approvingly from a journal that said of Clay, “He knew no North, no South, no East, no West, but only the Union, which held them all in its sacred circle.”46 As a stabilizing force, Clay had few parallels in American history. He had taken “the leading and most conspicuous part . . . in those great and fearful crises”—the Missouri question of 1819–20, the nullification controversy of 1832, and the debates over the Mexican Cession that led to the Compromise of 1850. Far more clearly than Taylor, Clay stood morally opposed to slavery and its extension. Though a slaveholder, he had said, in a speech Lincoln had attended, “I have ever regarded slavery as a great evil, a wrong Like Taylor, Clay denounced extremists. Clay was a “truly national man,” Lincoln declared, who had moderated between “extremes on the subject [of slavery].”48 On the one hand, he had opposed radical abolitionists who, in Lincoln’s words, “would shiver into fragments the Union of these States; tear to tatters its now venerated constitution; and even burn the last copy of the Bible, rather than slavery should continue a single hour.” On the other hand, Clay had lambasted Southerners who rejected the Declaration of Independence’s words about human equality. Lincoln quoted Clay’s remark that to deny the ideal of equality we “must blow out the moral lights around us, and extinguish that greatest torch of all which America presents to a benighted world. . . . [We] must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate the light of reason, and the love of liberty.” Noting that Clay had worked for the gradual abolition of slavery in Kentucky, Lincoln supported Clay’s vision of the gradual, peaceful extinction of slavery.
SENSATIONALISM AND THE HIGHER LAW
This hopeful prospect, however, seemed increasingly unlikely, as sectional tensions flared stronger than ever. The Compromise of 1850 did little to allay the tensions, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened the West to slavery, and the Dred Scott decision, which denied citizenship to blacks, fanned them further.
Antislavery writings intensified the polarization by portraying the enslaved as wronged, suffering human beings and by looking beyond proslavery laws and affirming the higher laws of justice and equality.
The prototype for the depiction of the suffering of enslaved people had been established in Theodore Dwight Weld’s landmark book, American Slavery as It Is (1837). Drawing from an array of Southern sources, Weld presented a dreary litany of horrors: the enslaved, he reported, are routinely flogged and, “have red pepper rubbed into their lacerated flesh, and hot brine, spirits of turpentine, &c., poured over the gashes to increase the torture”; “they are often stripped naked, their backs and limbs cut with knives, bruised and mangled by scores and hundreds of blows with the paddle, and terribly torn by the claws of cats, drawn over them by their tormentors”; they are hunted by bloodhounds, torn in piece by dogs, suspended and beaten mercilessly; they eyes are cut out, their ears cut off, they are branded with hot irons; “they are maimed, mutilated and burned to death over slow fires”; and so on.49
Few major antislavery works omitted scenes of whipping, ear cropping, or other forms of torture. To prove that the enslaved were human, the antislavery authors presented scene after scene demonstrating that slaves felt exactly the same pain that whites would under such circumstances. The sexual exploitation of enslaved women was also a common topic. Antislavery writings from George Bourne’s Slavery Illustrated in Its Effects Upon Woman and Domestic Society (1837) onward gave examples of sexual misconduct by masters that varied from the graphic to the nauseating. Bourne generalized that the whole South was “one vast brothel, in which multiform incests, polygamy, adultery, and other uncleanness are constantly perpetrated—and there is not a man, or woman, or boy, or girl, or any who has arrived at the age of puberty, that is not acquainted with nearly the whole mass of abominations.”50 Other abolitionists made similar points. Wendell Phillips declared, “The South is one great brothel.”51 William Lloyd Garrison branded slave owners as “monsters who have . . . given over to prostitution and ravishment, with all possible impunity, a million and half of helpless females.”52 The black abolitionist David Nelson declared, “Of the grown females belonging to more than two millions of our race, nearly every one is either a prostitute or an adulteress, and every grown male is either a fornicator or an adulterer.”53
Antislavery writers who harped on such themes were often charged with what Carol Lasser calls voyeuristic abolitionism and what I have termed immoral reform: that is, the practice of describing vice so graphically that sensationalism obscures social message.54 This opportunistic sensationalism extended to many other movements as well, including anti-Catholicism, anti-Mormonism, labor reform, and antiprostitution. There was no reform, in fact, that did not come under attack when some of its promoters went beyond exposing vice to wallowing in it and providing gratuitous details.
Although Lincoln had sometimes used such sensational reform rhetoric early on, he never allowed it to dominate his discourse, and he saw its shortcomings. In his 1842 Washingtonian speech he had decried temperance reformers’ “thundering tones of anathema and denunciation”—their obsession with the evils resulting from alcohol abuse. He advocated rational persuasion. By the 1850s, some of the radical abolitionists whose writings Herndon shared with him had alienated many Americans with their uncompromising language. William Lloyd Garrison conceded in 1854 that “a ‘Garrisonian’ abolitionist [is] the most unpopular appellation that any man can have applied to him.”55 The same year, Wendell Phillips noted that mainstream antislavery politicians distanced themselves from radical abolitionists because they wanted to avoid being “soiled by too close contact” with those “rough pioneers.”56
Politically, popular sentiment in the North was definitely moving in an antislavery direction, as indicated by the strong run for the presidency waged by the Republican candidate John Frémont in 1856. The widespread anger caused by the Fugitive Slave Act and the popularity of works like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Richard Hildreth’s The White Slave had contributed to the sea change in opinion. For Lincoln, the main impetus for taking up the antislavery cudgel in earnest was the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
He was, of course, one of many Northerners who argued against the extension of slavery. But he introduced a language that was uniquely forceful, for it projected all the passion and principle of the Garrisonian abolitionists while avoiding their sensationalism.
He also avoided their extreme interpretation of the higher law, which contributed to their view of the Constitution as a proslavery document. The phrase “higher law” had been around for some time and was ushered into the cultural mainstream by Senator William H. Seward in his 1850 speech “Freedom in the Territories.” In answer to the proslavery argument that the Constitution sanctioned slavery even in the western territories, Seward insisted that the western lands were protected by “a higher law than the Constitution”—the law of natural justice, supported by God and morality.57 Actually, Seward was not rejecting the Constitution; rather, he was making a rhetorical point. Unlike the Garrisonians, who dismissed the Constitution as “an agreement with hell” because of what they regarded as its proslavery message, Seward was part of a long line of antislavery politicians, reaching back to the founding era, who considered the Constitution an antislavery document because of its guarantees of due process and other rights. But his “higher law” statement, intended to quash proslavery readings of the Constitution, sparked widespread discussion and numerous attempts in the North to interfere with enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act.58 It also fed into Stowe’s portrayal in Uncle Tom’s Cabin of blacks and whites who heroically resisted proslavery laws. This virtuous lawbreaking, fused in Stowe’s novel with tributes to the heroes of 1776, led Frederick Douglass to write, “We doubt if abler arguments have ever been presented in favor of the ‘Higher Law’ than may be found here [in] Mrs. Stowe’s truly great work.”59 Another reviewer described “the tears which [Uncle Tom’s Cabin] has drawn from millions of eyes, the sense of a ‘higher law,’ which it has stamped upon a million hearts.”60 Southern reviewers, meanwhile, denounced the novel as a “portentous book of sin” that enforced “the doctrines and practices of the higher-law agitators at the North”—“all the enemies of the constitution.”61
But abolitionists, Lincoln insisted, were not enemies of the Constitution, which he and similar-minded Northern politicians regarded as an antislavery document—an argument he pursued during his political rise over the next decade. He greatly admired Seward but regretted that the senator’s higher-law speech had yielded misinterpretations that could prompt lawbreaking. In the margin of a newspaper article on slavery, he jotted, “I agree with Seward in his ‘Irrepressible Conflict,’ but I do not endorse his ‘Higher Law.’”62 He realized that the higher law could be appropriated by anyone to defend any position. He pointed to the irony of proslavery Democrats attacking Seward’s higher law while promoting their own versions of a higher law. Regarding the “proclamation of a ‘higher law,’” Lincoln declared that “in so far as it may attempt to foment a disobedience to the constitution, or to the constitutional laws of the country, it has my unqualified condemnation.” He added, “But this is not the true ground of democratic hatred to Seward; else they would not so fondly cherish so many ‘higher law’ men in their own ranks.”
His perception of the malleability of the higher law was shrewd. Southern fire-eaters and filibustering agents of slavery were just as prone to anchor their cause in God and morality as were abolitionists. Alexander Stephens, one of slavery’s most visible defenders, averred that the higher law supported the South’s peculiar institution. In a speech of 1856, he declared, “Let no man . . . say that African slavery as it exists in the South, . . . is in violation of either the laws of nations, the laws of nature, or the laws of God!”63 Five years later, in his famous Cornerstone Speech, Stephens boasted that the Confederacy was the first society in history based on the “great . . . moral truth” that “the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal position.”64 During the Civil War, Southerners boasted that God fully supported them. A Southern author typically hailed Confederate president Jefferson Davis as “a Christian of the Robert E. Lee type” and said that the South would be revered through the ages for having had “a Christian President! A Christian General! A Christian soldiery!”65
Lincoln saw that the higher law was, potentially, the most centrifugal force in the culture because it could be pointed in any direction. Indeed, it was pointed in all directions in the 1850s. For Stephens and other Southerners, slavery represented the ideal form of ethics: it accorded with the laws of nature and God, which mandated racial hierarchy, with whites in the superior position. The Northern sage Emerson, in contrast, denounced the proslavery Fugitive Slave Act by declaring that “no forms, neither constitutions, nor laws, nor covenants, nor churches, nor bibles, are of any use in themselves; the devil nestles comfortably into them all.”66 William Lloyd Garrison, enforcing his higher-law principle of immediate emancipation, burned the Constitution publicly because he thought it supported slavery. Stephen A. Douglas said that to reject the Fugitive Slave Act while pretending to be loyal to the Constitution was hypocritical. He declared, “I know not how a man reconciles it to his conscience to take that oath to support the Constitution, when he believes that Constitution is in violation of the law of God.”67 Douglas called those who disobeyed the Fugitive Slave Act “crazy fanatics” and traitorous “conspirators” who must be given harsh jail sentences.68 His dedication to it was as passionate as was his devotion to two other proslavery enactments: his own Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision.69
Lincoln, in contrast, rejected Dred Scott, vilified Kansas-Nebraska, and accepted the Fugitive Slave Act only with great reluctance. He denounced the latter law as “very obnoxious,” declaring it “ungodly! no doubt it is ungodly!”70 But he held that the law must be observed because of Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution, which mandated the return of fugitives from labor. “We are under legal obligations,” he lamented, “to catch and return their runaway slaves to them—a sort of dirty, disagreeable job.”71 As he wrote, “I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, and unrewarded toils; but I bite my lip and keep quiet.”72 He was in the position of Walt Whitman, who in his poetry democratically embraced fugitives but in a prose piece said that they must be returned to their owners out of respect to the Constitution.73
On the hated Fugitive Slave Act, Lincoln had to bite his lip and keep quiet many times. He also had to quell his impulse to express publicly his private sympathy for blacks. The issue of Lincoln’s racial attitudes is hotly contested. Because of his occasional use of the N-word and certain hidebound statements he made in speeches, some argue that he was actually a racist. One historian generalizes that “racism was the center and circumference of his being.”74 We realize the utter falsity of this statement when we place Lincoln’s attitudes toward race in their cultural contexts.
When he reentered politics in the 1850s, Lincoln found himself in a sea of racism. Laws aimed at restricting the settlement of black people in Illinois reflected popular racial attitudes, according to a Chicago journalist who wrote, “[There] is in the great masses of the people a natural and proper loathing of the negro, which forbids contact with him as with a leper.” The journalist bragged that Illinois “for many years has wisely kept her soil for white men alone; she has inhibited the negro from coming within her limits for settlement, and reserved her broad prairies for her white citizens, for her white farmers, laborers and mechanics.”75
Such attitudes were most frequently expressed by proslavery Democrats, but they were also aired by some antislavery figures, creating the ironic phenomenon that Frederick Douglass described as “opposing slavery but hating its victims.”76 Cassius M. Clay, the outspoken abolitionist whom Lincoln heard speak in Springfield, generalized that black people “lack self-reliance—we can make nothing out of them. God has made them for the sun and the banana!”77 Lincoln’s antislavery Illinois colleague Senator Lyman Trumbull, destined to be a major force behind progressive enactments, including the Thirteenth Amendment, the Freedmen’s Bureau Acts, and the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, declared, “There is a very great aversion in the West—I know it to be so in my State—against having free negroes coming among us. Our people want nothing to do with the negro.”78 The New York Times remarked that Republicans had always “aimed at the good of the white men of the country, and had nothing to do with negroes.”79 The famous antislavery editor Horace Greeley described blacks as “indolent,” “vicious,” “generally ignorant,” “dissipated,” and “groveling in their tastes and appetites.”80 Greeley wrote, “[W]e make no pretensions to special interest in or liking for the African Race. We love Liberty, Equality, Justice, Humanity, . . . but we do not like negroes, and heartily wish no individual of that race had ever been brought to America.”81
To be sure, there were notable exceptions to this record of racism among white antislavery spokespersons. One thinks especially of John Brown, Lydia Maria Child, Wendell Phillips, and numerous Quaker reformers, particularly Sarah and Angelina Grimké. William Lloyd Garrison, though accused of condescension in his treatment of blacks in the American Anti-Slavery Society, also showed racial openness, as did an increasing number of Republican politicians.
Then, too, abolitionism emerged among African Americans, from the seventeenth century onward. To mention the African American contribution, however, is to point again to racism, for in the 1850s some of the loudest calls for emigration from the United States came from blacks—James Theodore Holly, Martin Delany, Mary Ann Shadd, and Samuel Ringgold Ward, to name a few—who advocated fleeing racial prejudice in the United States by relocating abroad. Among the points of destination mentioned were Africa, Canada, Central and South America, and the West Indies, particularly Haiti.82 Even some former antiemigration blacks, including Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and William Watkins, briefly supported removal to Haiti. Martin Delany explained that free blacks in the North “occupy the very same position politically, religiously, civilly and socially (with but few exceptions,) as the bondman occupies in the slave States”; he added, “there is no species of degradation to which we are not subject.”83 His answer was emigration. He announced, “Africa for the African race, and black men to rule them,” and “Self Reliance and Self-Government on the Principle of African Nationality.” (Delany dropped the emigration idea during the Civil War, when he recruited black troops for the Union army and became one of the nation’s few black field officers; he had a warm relationship with Lincoln, whom Delany eulogized passionately after the president’s death.)
Theodore Parker, an abolitionist who has special relevance to Lincoln, manifested typical contradictions on slavery and race. A Boston Unitarian minister who championed progressive causes, Parker was known to Lincoln through William Herndon, who corresponded with the preacher throughout the 1850s and bought copies of his writings that he shared with Lincoln. The paean to “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” in the Gettysburg Address echoes a similar phrase—“Democracy is Direct Self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all the people”—in Parker’s 1858 talk “The Effect of Slavery on the American People,” which Lincoln marked with pencil in the copy he read.84 On religion, Lincoln said that he identified with Parker’s liberal, creedless views more strongly than with those of other preachers.
0 Comments