It was in 1856 that the conscience and courage of the North found a
voice in Abraham Lincoln. In his great soul the civilization of America
suddenly flowered.
In Congress Lincoln had vainly opposed the war with Mexico as
“unnecessary and unconstitutional,” and he had gone back to Springfield
to practice law with his new partner, William H. Herndon.
[Illustration: Abraham Lincoln. This photograph was made by Hesler, in
Chicago, about 1860]
The mighty sweep of events in the country had forced the Whigs and
Northern Democrats to form the Free Soil party, not to extinguish
slavery, but to prevent its spread from the slave States into the free
Territories, and Lincoln’s tongue had pleaded powerfully for freedom.
But Fremont, the Free Soil candidate for President, was defeated, and
the contending slaveowners and abolitionists continued to press the
cup of horror and hatred to the trembling lips of the nation. The South
threatened to withdraw from the Union.
Again and again Lincoln had expressed his opinion that slavery was
a crime against civilization. In the teeth of Senator Douglas, the
eloquent and all-powerful Democratic leader of Illinois, who was
arousing the West for slavery, he lashed and trampled upon the attempt
to make Kansas a slave State.
While trying to obtain the release of a free-born Illinois negro boy
held by the authorities of Louisiana, Lincoln appealed to the Governor
of Illinois, to whom he said, “By God, Governor, I’ll make the ground
in this country too hot for the foot of a slave, whether you have the
legal power to secure the release of this boy or not.”
Even then the man who felt in himself the stirrings of power great
enough to utter that threat was a grotesque figure among his
fellow-lawyers. Yet there was no shrewder advocate, no more effective
jury-pleader and no kindlier heart in Illinois. Mr. Herndon gives this
picture of him:
“His hat was brown, faded, and the nap usually worn or rubbed off.
He wore a short cloak and sometimes a shawl. His coat and vest hung
loosely on his gaunt frame, and his trousers were invariably too short.
On the circuit he carried in one hand a faded green umbrella, with ‘A
Lincoln’ in large white cotton or muslin letters sewed on the inside.
The knob was gone from the handle, and when closed a piece of cord was
usually tied around it in the middle to keep it from flying open. In
the other hand he carried a literal carpet bag, in which were stored
the few papers to be used in court, and underclothing enough to last
until his return to Springfield. He slept in a long, coarse yellow
flannel shirt, which reached half way between his knees and ankles.”
Lincoln was not a distinguished lawyer. Nor was he a financial success
in his profession. His partners complained that he neglected the
business side of things and was completely absorbed in the justice or
humanity involved in his cases. His heart would melt over the sorrows
of a client, and he would either accept a petty fee or altogether
neglect to collect anything. Mr. Lamon, his junior partner, has
testified that when he charged a fee of $250, Lincoln made him return
half the money to their client on the ground that “the service was not
worth the sum.” So extreme was his generosity and charity, so averse
was he to accepting anything but the most modest fees, that Judge David
Davis once rebuked him from the bench for impoverishing his brother
lawyers by such an example.
Not only that, but Lincoln many times in court showed his deep and
unfailing love of justice and fair play by refusing to take advantage
of the mere slips of his opponents. That generous honesty made him a
power with judges and juries.
It was when the Republican party was born in the convention at
Bloomington, Illinois, on May 29, 1856, that Lincoln displayed the
full grandeur of his character. His speech opposing the extension of
slavery to Kansas was so stirring, his presence so inspiring, that the
reporters forgot to take notes. His hearers were thrilled, swept out of
themselves. He seemed to grow taller as he spoke, his eyes flashed, his
face shone with passion, he seemed suddenly beautiful, for his soul was
in his eyes and on his lips as he declared that slavery was a violation
of eternal right.
“We have temporized with it from the necessities of our condition,” he
said, “but as sure as God reigns and school children read, that black,
foul lie can never be consecrated into God’s hallowed truth.”
_McClure’s Magazine_ in 1896 gave a report of this extraordinary
speech. Here is an extract:
“Do not mistake that the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Therefore,
let the legions of slavery use bullets; but let us wait patiently till
November and fire ballots at them in return.... We will be loyal to the
Constitution and to the ‘flag of our Union,’ and no matter what our
grievance--even though Kansas shall come in as a slave State; and no
matter what theirs--even if we shall restore the Compromise--we will
say to the Southern disunionists, ‘_We won’t go out of the Union and
you shan’t!_’”
We love Lincoln because on that day he spoke as one naked in the
presence of God. There was no lie in his mouth. Slavery must be kept
out of Kansas. Kansas must be free. Slavery was an unspeakable offence
in the nostrils of a free people. Yet, since the Constitution and the
Missouri Compromise permitted it in the slave States, a law-respecting
nation must permit it to remain there. But Kansas must be free. All
the soil as yet uncursed by slavery must be kept free.
And slave or free, the nation must be held together--that was the
central note of Lincoln’s great speech.
It is a common mistake to suppose that Lincoln was an advocate of
the abolition of slavery in the United States. Yet in 1854, while
denouncing slavery as a “monstrous injustice,” he said:
“When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the
origin of slavery than we, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that
the institution exists and that it is very difficult to get rid of it
in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I
surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to
do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what
to do as to the existing institution.”
There was a sincere man, brave enough and humble enough to make such
an admission in the teeth of the terrific abolitionist crusade. So,
too, he stood in 1856. The nation had given its word, right or wrong,
to the slaveholders, and the nation’s word must be kept. But Kansas
must be free.
No, tender and merciful as Lincoln was, he did not raise his voice for
negro emancipation. That thought came years afterwards, when, in the
agony of fratricidal strife, he proclaimed the freedom of the blacks as
a war measure.
However, when the Supreme Court of the United States in 1857 decided in
the Dred Scott case that a negro could not sue in the national courts,
and expressed the opinion that Congress could not prohibit slavery in
the territories, there was a fierce outcry in the free States, for five
of the Supreme Court justices were from slave States. It is impossible
to indicate the pitch of excitement in the country.
Senator Douglas, prompt, bold, masterful, faced his constituents in
Illinois and stigmatized opposition to the Supreme Court as simple
anarchy. Lincoln answered him at once. The people must not resist the
court, but it was well known that the court had often overruled its
own decisions and “it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not
even disrespectful, to treat it as not having yet quite established a
settled doctrine for the country.”
Another strain was placed upon the nerves of the overwrought country.
By trickery the pro-slavery men of Kansas had brought about the
“Lecompton Constitution,” permitting slavery in the State. President
Buchanan pressed for the admission of Kansas into the Union with this
constitution.
So, in 1858, when Lincoln was nominated by the Republicans to succeed
Douglas in the Senate, and when he challenged Douglas to a joint
debate, the nation was in the throes of an agitation that transcended
all other passions in its history.
When the long-legged country lawyer, in loose-hung cloak, faded
hat and ill-fitting trousers--sunken-eyed, lantern-jawed and
stoop-shouldered--went forth to meet the great Senator before the
people, the whole country watched the struggle with intense interest.
For, ever since Andrew Jackson overthrew the Virginia oligarchy, the
West had grown stronger in the national councils, and it was even now
suspected that the balance of political power was passing from the
South to the North. And Lincoln, risen from the soil itself, was a
singularly bitter challenge to the aristocratic and haughty temper of
the slaveowners.
Who can describe that unforgetable and decisive debate in Illinois?
On the very day of his nomination Lincoln uttered the thought that was
pressed on and on until slavery and secession were trampled into dust
under the heels of the Union armies:
“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this
government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not
expect the house to fall--but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing or all the other.”
Gaunt, gray-eyed, crooked-mouthed Lincoln! In all history no man ever
flayed an opponent as he did Douglas.
“I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just,” he
exclaimed in one of his loftiest moments.
He pelted Douglas with logic, exposed the sham of his “squatter
sovereignty” doctrine, and pitilessly analyzed the predatory policy
of the slavery forces. He forced Douglas to defend and explain his
Kansas-Nebraska law, trapped him into confusing admissions and showed
that his popular sovereignty principle meant simply “that if one man
chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man, nor
anybody else, has a right to object.”
Against the awkward country lawyer with shriveled, melancholy
countenance and shrill voice, the polished, handsome and resourceful
Douglas contended in vain in the seven monster outdoor meetings of the
debates. The humanity of Lincoln, the fairness of his statements, the
moral height from which he spoke, the homely, cutting anecdotes, the
originality and imagination, the obvious simplicity and sincerity of
his arguments beat down Douglas’ lawyer-like pleas.
Douglas charged Lincoln with favoring the political and social equality
of the white and black races. Lincoln denied that he considered the
negro the equal of the white man. “But in the right to eat the bread
which his own hands earns,” he added, “he is my equal, and the equal of
Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”
Nothing in the whole story of the American people approaches this
struggle between Lincoln and Douglas for dramatic setting and popular
enthusiasm; and nothing in Lincoln’s life proved more clearly that
with his feet set upon a moral issue he was matchless. He was filled
with the majesty of his cause.
“If slavery is right,” he said that winter in Cooper Institute,
New York, “all words, acts, laws and constitutions against it are
themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away. If it is
right, we cannot justly object to its nationality, its universality.
If it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension, its
enlargement. All they ask we could readily grant, if we thought slavery
right; all we ask they could as readily grant, if they thought it
wrong. Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong is the precise
facts upon which depends the whole controversy.”
In the race for the Senatorship Douglas defeated Lincoln; but in that
defeat Lincoln won a great victory in the awakened conscience and
courage of the North.
[Illustration: An unpublished photograph of Lincoln in 1860, framed in
walnut rails split by him in his woodchopper days. Owned by Charles W.
McClellan of New York]
We who love him now can hardly understand how deep was the love and
how great the confidence that, a year later, raised the cabin-born,
uncouth country lawyer and politician to be President of the United
States.
We remember his strength and faith in the great war; we remember his
gentle patience, his justice and mercy, and his martyrdom; but do we
fully realize the effort he made to save his people from the ghastly
sacrifice made on the battlefields where the nation was reborn?