takes place, what do you mean to do? I often hear it intimated that you
mean to divide the Union whenever a Republican, or anything like it, is
elected President of the United States. [A voice: "That is so."] "That
is so," one of them says; I wonder if he is a Kentuckian? [A voice: "He
is a Douglas man."] Well, then, I want to know what you are going to do
with your half of it. Are you going to split the Ohio down through, and
push your half off a piece? Or are you going to keep it right alongside
of us outrageous fellows? Or are you going to build up a wall some way
between your country and ours, by which that movable property of yours
can't come over here any more, to the danger of your losing it? Do you
think you can better yourselves on that subject by leaving us here
under no obligation whatever to return those specimens of your movable
property that come hither?
You have divided the Union because we would not do right with you, as
you think, upon that subject; when we cease to be under obligation to do
anything for you, how much better off do you think you will be? Will you
make war upon us and kill us all? Why, gentlemen, I think you are as
gallant and as brave men as live; that you can fight as bravely in a
good cause, man for man, as any other people living; that you have shown
yourselves capable of this upon various occasions; but man for man, you
are not better than we are, and there are not so many of you as there
are of us. You will never make much of a hand at whipping us. If we were
fewer in numbers than you, I think that you could whip us; if we were
equal it would likely be a drawn battle; but being inferior in numbers,
you will make nothing by attempting to master us....
Labour is the great source from which nearly all, if not all, human
comforts and necessities are drawn. There is a difference in opinion
about the elements of labour in society. Some men assume that there is a
necessary connection between capital and labour, and that connection
draws within it the whole of the labour of the community. They assume
that nobody works unless capital excites them to work. They begin next
to consider what is the best way. They say there are but two ways,--one
is to hire men and to allure them to labour by their consent; the other
is to buy the men, and drive them to it, and that is slavery. Having
assumed that, they proceed to discuss the question of whether the
labourers themselves are better off in the condition of slaves or of
hired labourers, and they usually decide that they are better off in the
condition of slaves.
In the first place, I say the whole thing is a mistake. That there is a
certain relation between capital and labour, I admit. That it does
exist, and rightfully exist, I think is true. That men who are
industrious and sober and honest in the pursuit of their own interests
should after a while accumulate capital, and after that should be
allowed to enjoy it in peace, and also if they should choose, when they
have accumulated it, to use it to save themselves from actual labour,
and hire other people to labour for them,--is right. In doing so, they
do not wrong the man they employ, for they find men who have not their
own land to work upon, or shops to work in, and who are benefited by
working for others,--hired labourers, receiving their capital for it.
Thus a few men that own capital hire a few others, and these establish
the relation of capital and labour rightfully--a relation of which I
make no complaint. But I insist that that relation, after all, does not
embrace more than one-eighth of the labour of the country.
There are a plenty of men in the slave States that are altogether good
enough for me, to be either President or Vice-President, provided they
will profess their sympathy with our purpose, and will place themselves
on such ground that our men upon principle can vote for them. There are
scores of them--good men in their character for intelligence, for talent
and integrity. If such an one will place himself upon the right ground,
I am for his occupying one place upon the next Republican or opposition
ticket. I will go heartily for him. But unless he does so place himself,
I think it is perfect nonsense to attempt to bring about a union upon
any other basis; that if a union be made, the elements will so scatter
that there can be no success for such a ticket. The good old maxims of
the Bible are applicable, and truly applicable, to human affairs; and in
this, as in other things, we may say that he who is not for us is
against us; he who gathereth not with us, scattereth. I should be glad
to have some of the many good and able and noble men of the South place
themselves where we can confer upon them the high honour of an election
upon one or the other end of our ticket. It would do my soul good to do
that thing. It would enable us to teach them that inasmuch as we select
one of their own number to carry out our principles, we are free from
the charge that we mean more than we say....
_From a Letter to J.W. Fell. December 20, 1859_
I was born February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents
were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families--second
families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year,
was of a family of the name of Hanks, some of whom now reside in Adams,
and others in Macon County, Illinois. My paternal grandfather, Abraham
Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham County, Virginia, to Kentucky about
1781 or 1782, where a year or two later he was killed by the Indians,
not in battle, but by stealth, when he was labouring to open a farm in
the forest. His ancestors, who were Quakers, went to Virginia from Berks
County, Pennsylvania. An effort to identify them with the New England
family of the same name ended in nothing more definite than a similarity
of Christian names in both families, such as Enoch, Levi, Mordecai,
Solomon, Abraham, and the like.
My father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age, and he
grew up literally without education. He removed from Kentucky to what is
now Spencer County, Indiana, in my eighth year. We reached our new home
about the time the State came into the Union. It was a wild region, with
many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.
There were some schools, so called, but no qualification was ever
required of a teacher beyond "readin', writin', and cipherin'" to the
rule of three. If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to
sojourn in the neighbourhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was
absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education. Of course, when I
came of age I did not know much. Still, somehow, I could read, write,
and cipher to the rule of three, but that was all. I have not been to
school since. The little advance I now have upon this store of education
I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.
I was raised to farm work, which I continued till I was twenty-two. At
twenty-one I came to Illinois, Macon County. Then I got to New Salem, at
that time in Sangamon, now in Menard County, where I remained a year as
a sort of clerk in a store.
Then came the Black Hawk War; and I was elected a captain of volunteers,
a success which gave me more pleasure than any I have had since. I went
the campaign, was elated, ran for the legislature the same year (1832),
and was beaten--the only time I ever have been beaten by the people. The
next and three succeeding biennial elections I was elected to the
legislature. I was not a candidate afterward. During this legislative
period I had studied law, and removed to Springfield to practise it. In
1846 I was once elected to the lower House of Congress. Was not a
candidate for re-election. From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, practised
law more assiduously than ever before. Always a Whig in politics; and
generally on the Whig electoral tickets, making active canvasses. I was
losing interest in politics when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise
aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.
If any personal description of me is thought desirable, it may be said I
am, in height, six feet four inches, nearly; lean in flesh, weighing on
an average one hundred and eighty pounds; dark complexion, with coarse
black hair and gray eyes. No other marks or brands recollected.
_From an Address delivered at Cooper Institute, New York. February 27,
1860_
... Now, and hear, let me guard a little against being misunderstood. I
do not mean to say we are bound to follow implicitly in whatever our
fathers did. To do so, would be to discard all the lights of current
experience--to reject all progress, all improvement. What I do say is,
that if we would supplant the opinions and policy of our fathers in any
case, we should do so on evidence so conclusive, and argument so clear,
that even their great authority, fairly considered and weighed, cannot
stand; and most surely not in a case whereof we ourselves declare they
understood the question better than we.
If any man at this day sincerely believes that the proper division of
local from Federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbids
the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the Federal
Territories, he is right to say so, and to enforce his position by all
truthful evidence and fair argument he can. But he has no right to
mislead others who have less access to history, and less leisure to
study it, into the false belief that "our fathers who framed the
government under which we live" were of the same opinion--thus
substituting falsehood and deception for truthful evidence and fair
argument. If any man at this day sincerely believes "our fathers who
framed the government under which we live" used and applied principles,
in other cases, which ought to have led them to understand that a proper
division of local from Federal authority, or some part of the
Constitution, forbids the Federal Government to control as to slavery in
the Federal Territories, he is right to say so. But he should, at the
same time, have the responsibility of declaring that, in his opinion, he
understands their principles better than they did themselves; and
especially should he not shirk the responsibility by asserting that they
understood the question just as well and even better than we do now.
But enough! Let all who believe that "our fathers who framed the
government under which we live understood this question just as well,
and even better than we do now," speak as they spoke, and act as they
acted upon it. This is all Republicans ask, all Republicans desire, in
relation to slavery. As those fathers marked it, so let it again be
marked, as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected
only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that
toleration and protection a necessity. Let all the guaranties those
fathers gave it be not grudgingly, but fully and fairly maintained. For
this Republicans contend, and with this, so far as I know or believe,
they will be content.
And now, if they would listen,--as I suppose they will not,--I would
address a few words to the Southern people.
I would say to them: You consider yourselves a reasonable and a just
people; and I consider that in the general qualities of reason and
justice you are not inferior to any other people. Still, when you speak
of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us as reptiles, or, at the
best, as no better than outlaws. You will grant a hearing to pirates or
murderers, but nothing like it to "Black Republicans." In all your
contentions with one another, each of you deems an unconditional
condemnation of "Black Republicanism" as the first thing to be attended
to. Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable
prerequisite--license, so to speak--among you to be admitted or
permitted to speak at all. Now, can you or not be prevailed upon to
pause and to consider whether this is quite just to us, or even to
yourselves? Bring forward your charges and specifications, and then be
patient long enough to hear us deny or justify.
You say we are sectional. We deny it. That makes an issue; and the
burden of proof is upon you. You produce your proof; and what is it?
Why, that our party has no existence in your section--gets no votes in
your section. The fact is substantially true; but does it prove the
issue? If it does, then, in case we should, without change of principle,
begin to get votes in your section, we should thereby cease to be
sectional. You cannot escape this conclusion; and yet, are you willing
to abide by it? If you are, you will probably soon find that we have
ceased to be sectional, for we shall get votes in your section this very
year. You will then begin to discover, as the truth plainly is, that
your proof does not touch the issue. The fact that we get no votes in
your section is a fact of your making, and not of ours.
And if there be fault in that fact, that fault is primarily yours, and
remains so until you show that we repel you by some wrong principle or
practice. If we do repel you by any wrong principle or practice, the
fault is ours; but this brings you to where you ought to have
started--to a discussion of the right or wrong of our principle. If our
principle, put in practice, would wrong your section for the benefit of
ours, or for any other object, then our principle, and we with it, are
sectional, and are justly opposed and denounced as such. Meet us, then,
on the question of whether our principle, put in practice, would wrong
your section; and so meet us as if it were possible that something may
be said on our side. Do you accept the challenge? No! Then you really
believe that the principle which "our fathers who framed the government
under which we live" thought so clearly right as to adopt it, and
indorse it again and again, upon their official oaths, is in fact so
clearly wrong as to demand your condemnation without a moment's
consideration.
Some of you delight to flaunt in our faces the warning against sectional
parties given by Washington in his Farewell Address. Less than eight
years before Washington gave that warning he had, as President of the
United States, approved and signed an act of Congress enforcing the
prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern Territory, which act embodied
the policy of the government upon that subject up to and at the very
moment he penned that warning; and about one year after he penned it, he
wrote Lafayette that he considered that prohibition a wise measure,
expressing in the same connection his hope that we should at some time
have a confederacy of free States.
Bearing this in mind, and seeing that sectionalism has since arisen upon
this same subject, is that warning a weapon in your hands against us, or
in our hands against you? Could Washington himself speak, would he cast
the blame of that sectionalism upon us, who sustain his policy, or upon
you, who repudiate it? We respect that warning of Washington, and we
commend it to you, together with his example pointing to the right
application of it.
But you say you are conservative,--eminently conservative,--while we
are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort.
What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against
the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy
on the point in controversy which was adopted by "our fathers who framed
the government under which we live"; while you with one accord reject,
and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting
something new.
True, you disagree among yourselves as to what that substitute shall be.
You are divided on new propositions and plans, but you are unanimous in
rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers. Some of you are
for reviving the foreign slave-trade; some for a Congressional
slave-code for the Territories; some for Congress forbidding the
Territories to prohibit slavery within their limits; some for
maintaining slavery in the Territories through the judiciary; some for
the "gur-reat pur-rinciple" that "if one man would enslave another, no
third man should object," fantastically called "popular sovereignty";
but never a man among you is in favour of Federal prohibition of slavery
in Federal Territories, according to the practice of "our fathers who
framed the government under which we live." Not one of all your various
plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which
our government originated.
Consider, then, whether your claim for conservatism for yourselves, and
your charge of destructiveness against us, are based on the most clear
and stable foundations.
Again, you say we have made the slavery question more prominent than it
formerly was. We deny it. We admit that it is more prominent, but we
deny that we made it so. It was not we, but you, who discarded the old
policy of the fathers. We resisted, and still resist, your innovation;
and thence comes the greater prominence of the question. Would you have
that question reduced to its former proportions? Go back to that old
policy. What has been will be again, under the same conditions. If you
would have the peace of the old times, readopt the precepts and policy
of the old times.
You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it;
and what is your proof? Harper's Ferry! John Brown! John Brown was no
Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his
Harper's Ferry enterprise. If any member of our party is guilty in that
matter, you know it, or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are
inexcusable for not designating the man and proving the fact. If you do
not know it, you are inexcusable for asserting it, and especially for
persisting in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the
proof. You need not be told that persisting in a charge which one does
not know to be true is simply malicious slander.
Some of you admit that no Republican designedly aided or encouraged the
Harper's Ferry affair, but still insist that our doctrines and
declarations necessarily lead to such results. We do not believe it. We
know we hold no doctrine, and make no declaration, which were not held
to and made by "our fathers who framed the government under which we
live." You never dealt fairly by us in relation to this affair. When it
occurred, some important State elections were near at hand, and you were
in evident glee with the belief that, by charging the blame upon us, you
could get an advantage of us in those elections. The elections came, and
your expectations were not quite fulfilled. Every Republican man knew
that, as to himself at least, your charge was a slander, and he was not
much inclined by it to cast his vote in your favour. Republican
doctrines and declarations are accompanied with a continual protest
against any interference whatever with your slaves, or with you about
your slaves. Surely this does not encourage them to revolt. True, we do,
in common with "our fathers who framed the government under which we
live," declare our belief that slavery is wrong; but the slaves do not
hear us declare even this. For anything we say or do, the slaves would
scarcely know there is a Republican party. I believe they would not, in
fact, generally know it but for your misrepresentations of us in their
hearing. In your political contests among yourselves, each faction
charges the other with sympathy with Black Republicanism; and then, to
give point to the charge, defines Black Republicanism to simply be
insurrection, blood, and thunder among the slaves.
Slave insurrections are no more common now than they were before the
Republican party was organized. What induced the Southampton
insurrection, twenty-eight years ago, in which at least three times as
many lives were lost as at Harper's Ferry? You can scarcely stretch your
very elastic fancy to the conclusion that Southampton was "got up by
Black Republicanism." In the present state of things in the United
States, I do not think a general, or even a very extensive, slave
insurrection is possible. The indispensable concert of action cannot be
attained. The slaves have no means of rapid communication; nor can
incendiary freemen, black or white, supply it. The explosive materials
are everywhere in parcels; but there neither are, nor can be supplied,
the indispensable connecting trains.
Much is said by Southern people about the affection of slaves for their
masters and mistresses; and a part of it, at least, is true. A plot for
an uprising could scarcely be devised and communicated to twenty
individuals before some one of them, to save the life of a favourite
master or mistress, would divulge it. This is the rule; and the slave
revolution in Haiti was not an exception to it, but a case occurring
under peculiar circumstances. The Gunpowder Plot of British history,
though not connected with slaves, was more in point. In that case, only
about twenty were admitted to the secret; and yet one of them, in his
anxiety to save a friend, betrayed the plot to that friend, and, by
consequence, averted the calamity. Occasional poisonings from the
kitchen, and open or stealthy assassinations in the field, and local
revolts extending to a score or so, will continue to occur as the
natural results of slavery; but no general insurrection of slaves, as I
think, can happen in this country for a long time. Whoever much fears,
or much hopes, for such an event, will be alike disappointed.
In the language of Mr. Jefferson, uttered many years ago, "It is still
in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation
peaceably, and in such slow degrees as that the evil will wear off
insensibly, and their places be, _pari passu_, filled up by free white
labourers. If, on the contrary, it is left to force itself on, human
nature must shudder at the prospect held up."
Mr. Jefferson did not mean to say, nor do I, that the power of
emancipation is in the Federal Government. He spoke of Virginia; and, as
to the power of emancipation, I speak of the slaveholding States only.
The Federal Government, however, as we insist, has the power of
restraining the extension of the institution--the power to insure that a
slave insurrection shall never occur on any American soil which is now
free from slavery.
John Brown's effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It
was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which
the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the
slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not
succeed. That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many
attempts, related in history, at the assassination of kings and
emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he
fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the
attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution. Orsini's
attempt on Louis Napoleon, and John Brown's attempt at Harper's Ferry,
were, in their philosophy, precisely the same. The eagerness to cast
blame on Old England in the one case, and on New England in the other,
does not disprove the sameness of the two things.
And how much would it avail you if you could, by the use of John Brown,
Helper's book, and the like, break up the Republican organization? Human
action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be
changed. There is a judgment and a feeling against slavery in this
nation, which cast at least a million and a half of votes. You cannot
destroy that judgment and feeling--that sentiment--by breaking up the
political organization which rallies around it. You can scarcely scatter
and disperse an army which has been formed into order in the face of
your heaviest fire; but if you could, how much would you gain by forcing
the sentiment which created it out of the peaceful channel of the
ballot-box into some other channel? What would that other channel
probably be? Would the number of John Browns be lessened or enlarged by
the operation?
But you will break up the Union rather than submit to a denial of your
constitutional rights.
That has a somewhat reckless sound; but it would be palliated, if not
fully justified, were we proposing, by the mere force of numbers, to
deprive you of some right plainly written down in the Constitution. But
we are proposing no such thing.