Chapter Ten “Aroused As He Had Never Been Before”: Reentering Politics (1854-1855) For Lincoln, 1854 was an annus mirabilis. As he later said of himself, by that year the practice of law “had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind, when the repeal of the Missouri compromise aroused him as he had never been before.”1 He and thousands of other Northerners were outraged by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which threw open to slavery millions of acres that had long been set aside for freedom. That legislation, introduced in January 1854 by Stephen A. Douglas, allowed settlers in western territories to decide for themselves if slavery should exist there; Douglas called this “popular sovereignty.” The statute, as its author predicted, raised “a hell of a storm” because it repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which forbade slavery in the northern portion of the Louisiana Purchase (encompassing what became the states of Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana.)2 Indignation swept the Free States, where voters had been relatively indifferent to the slavery issue since the Compromise of 1850.3 “There is a North, thank God,” exclaimed a New England 1 Autobiography written for John Locke Scripps, [ca. June 1860, Roy P. Basler et al., eds., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (8 vols. plus index; New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953-55), 4:67. 2 Mrs. Archibald Dixon, History of Missouri Compromise and Slavery in American Politics: A True History of the Missouri Compromise and Its Repeal, and of African Slavery as a Factor in American Politics (2nd ed.; Cincinnati: Clarke, 1903), 445. 3 William E. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 73- 77. Helping to fan the flames of northern anger was the rendition of a fugitive slave, Anthony Burns, whose arrest in Boson touched off rioting so serious that hundreds of troops were dispatched to escort the unfortunate runaway to a ship returning him to bondage. Albert J. Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 1049 Michael Burlingame – Abraham Lincoln: A Life – Vol. 1, Chapter 10 antislavery leader in March 1854. “We have found out where even the people of N[ew] Hampshire had a heart and soul, stored away in a secret place under their waistcoats. We thought they had no such articles about them.”4 Antislavery Democrats in Congress denounced Douglas’s bill “as a gross violation of a sacred pledge, as a criminal betrayal of precious rights, as part and parcel of an atrocious plot” to transform free territory into “a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves,” and condemned Douglas for sacrificing the peace of the nation to gratify his insatiable ambition.5 “We are in the midst of a Revolution,” declared the New York Tribune. “The attempted passage of this measure is the first great effort of Slavery to take American freedom directly by the throat . . . . Should success attend the movement, it is tantamount to a civil Revolution, and an open Declaration of War between Freedom and Slavery on the North American Continent, to be ceaselessly waged till one or the other party finally and absolutely triumphs.”6 New York Senator William Henry Seward reported from Washington that protests against the Kansas-Nebraska bill from Northern legislatures, clergymen, and citizens’ assemblies were “coming down upon us as if a steady but strong North wind was rattling through the country.”7 In February 1854, Charles Henry Ray, editor of a paper in northern Illinois, told a friend: “I am up to my neck in Nebraska. Great God! how I hate and despise the movers of that 4 George G. Fogg to Elihu B. Washburne, Exeter, New Hampshire, 18 March 1854, Israel Washburn Papers, Library of Congress. On New Hampshire’s attitude toward slavery, see Lex Renda, Running on the Record: Civil War-Era Politics in New Hampshire (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 40-693; Donald B. Cole, Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire, 1800-1851 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970); Thomas R. Bright, “The Anti-Nebraska Coalition and the Emergence of the Republican Party in New Hampshire: 1853-1857,” Historical New Hampshire 27 (1972): 57-88. 5 David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 163. 6 New York Tribune, 10 May 1854. 7 William Henry Seward to Frances A. Seward, 19 February 1856, in Frederick W. Seward, William H. Seward; An Autobiography from 1801 to 1834, with a Memoir of His Life, and Selections from His Letters (3 vols.; New York, Derby and Miller, 1891), 2:222. See also Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 442-43; Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 73-77; Allan Nevins, The Ordeal of the Union (2 vols.; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947), 2:122-32. 1050 Michael Burlingame – Abraham Lincoln: A Life – Vol. 1, Chapter 10 infamous scheme, and I have but just begun to hate them, and to fight it.”8 Such hatred was widespread; that summer, when Douglas returned to Illinois, he said of his trip: “I could travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own [burning] effigy. All along the Western Reserve of Ohio I could find my effigy upon every tree we passed.”9 Whigs in Illinois, Lincoln observed, “were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion.” But quickly they arose in a fighting mood, each one “grasping whatever he could first reach – a scythe – a pitchfork – a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.”10 Lincoln’s weapon of choice was the pen, which he used to write editorials condemning the Kansas- Nebraska Act and urging voters to elect opponents of that law.11 He did not call for the establishment of a new party. In an editorial that he may well have written, the Illinois State Journal predicted in July 1854: “there will be, in our opinion, no large third party. There always 8 Charles Henry Ray to Elihu B. Washburne, Galena, 14 February 1854, Washburne Papers, Library of Congress. 9 George Fort Milton, The Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 175. 10 Speech at Peoria, 16 October 1854, Basler, ed., Collected Works of Lincoln, 2:282. 11 Albert J. Beveridge maintained that Lincoln in 1854 “had written several editorials for the Illinois Journal.” Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1858 (2 vols.; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), 2:238. He singled out as examples “The Fourteenth Section” (September 11) and “Negro Power” (October 7). Cf. ibid., 2:246n2. Certain that Lincoln had in 1840 contributed many articles to a Whig campaign newspaper called The Old Soldier, William E. Barton concluded that he must also have written for the Journal and, in 1928, Barton began combing through the files of that paper. He focused on the 1850s, explaining that it “would be unwise for the purposes of this experiment to begin at the commencement of Lincoln’s life in Springfield. I deem it better to choose a date after his style was formed and his political principles had matured. I am choosing 1854 as the time to begin.” Before his untimely death, Barton had concluded that Lincoln wrote dozens of editorials in 1854. William E. Barton, “Abraham Lincoln, Newspaper Man,” typescript, and “Lincoln Editorials,” handwritten memo, Springfield, 28 December 1928, and undated typescript of the same title, Barton Papers, box 13, University of Chicago. Simeon Francis was absent from Springfield in the early months of 1854. In his absence, a Wisconsin editor, the nephew of Erastus Wright, took over his editorial duties. Illinois State Register (Springfield), 2 September 1854. Isaac R. Diller told Stephen A. Douglas that Francis’s “sanctum was occupied by a one-horse lawyer & Yankee schoolmaster named Moore, who has so completely committed his paper, that Sim finds he is in for it, & hammers away at your ‘diabolical iniquity,’ in a style only equaled by his great prototype.” Isaac R. Diller to Douglas, Springfield, 31 May 1854, Douglas Papers, University of Chicago. After 1855, when Francis sold the paper to E. L. Baker and William H. Bailhache, Herndon stopped writing for it. According to Samuel C. Parks, while Congress was considering the Kansas-Nebraska bill, Simeon Francis said: “I will see Lincoln & get him to make a speech” against it. If this recollection is accurate, it seems plausible that Francis would have asked Lincoln to write editorials as well as deliver speeches in opposition to Douglas’s handiwork. Parks to Herndon, Lincoln, Illinois, 25 March 1866, Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 239. 1051 Michael Burlingame – Abraham Lincoln: A Life – Vol. 1, Chapter 10 have been but two large permanent parties in the country; and when the Nebraska matter is disposed of, the members of the free soil party will fall into the ranks of one of the parties.”12 Similarly, Lincoln’s political ally David Davis urged Massachusetts Senator Julius Rockwell to “save the Whig party. I don[’]t fancy its being abolitionized – although no one can be more opposed to [the] admission [of] Nebraska than I am.”13 Robert C. Winthrop of Massachusetts shared Davis’s feelings: “I deplore the passage of the Nebraska Act . . . . I am for resisting the aggressions of slavery, but I cannot unite in taking the first great step for rending the Union by the formation of a sectional party.”14 Throughout Illinois and other Free States, Whigs in 1854 hoped to reunite the party’s northern and southern wings for the presidential contest two years thereafter.15 Only in 1856 would Lincoln and other antislavery Whigs in the Prairie State help form a new party to combat the expansion of slavery and thus fulfill the prophesy of the New 12 Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 27 July 1854. 13 David Davis to Julius Rockwell, Bloomington, 15 July 1854, Davis Papers, Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield. Robert C. Winthrop of Massachusetts shared Davis’s feelings: “I deplore the passage of the Nebraska Act . . . . I am for resisting the aggressions of slavery, but I cannot unite in taking the first great step for rending the Union by the formation of a sectional party.” Winthrop to an unidentified correspondent, Nahant, 23 August 1855, in Robert C. Winthrop Jr., A Memoir of Robert C. Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown, 1897), 181. 14 Winthrop to an unidentified correspondent, Nahant, 23 August 1855, in Robert C. Winthrop Jr., A Memoir of Robert C. Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown, 1897), 181. 15 Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 27 July 1854; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 194; Michael Holt, The Rise and Fall of the Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 879; Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 82-87. The pattern of Whig behavior varied from state to state, as historian Tyler Anbinder noted: “in states where anti-slavery Whigs controlled the party and seemed determined to remain in it (such as New York), most conservatives concluded that they would never regain party dominance. They began seeking a new conservative organization in which to base their political operations. Conversely, in states where conservative Whigs held sway (such as Massachusetts), anti-slavery Whigs began to search for a new base of political operations as well.” Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850’s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 18-19. The Illinois Whig party divided into three factions. Some, like James W. Singleton of Quincy, joined the Democrats. Others, known as “Silver Grays” or National Whigs and led by Stephen T. Logan and John Todd Stuart, sought to keep the party alive by ignoring slavery and emphasizing economic issues. Unlike his two former law partners, Lincoln cast his lot with the far more numerous anti-Nebraska Whigs, who attacked slavery expansion boldly. Arthur Charles Cole, The Era of the Civil War, 1848-1870 (vol. 3 of The Centennial History of Illinois, ed. Clarence Walworth Alvord; Springfield: Illinois Centennial Commission, 1919), 127-28; Victor B. Howard, “The Illinois Republican Party: Part 1, A Party Organizer for the Republicans in 1854,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 64 (1971): 125-60; Stephen L. Hansen, The Making of the Third Party System: Voters and Parties in Illinois, 1850-1876 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980), 41, 54; Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 84. 1052 Michael Burlingame – Abraham Lincoln: A Life – Vol. 1, Chapter 10 York Tribune that the “passage of the Nebraska bill will arouse and consolidate the most gigantic, determined and overwhelming party for freedom that the world ever saw.”16 * As he once again dove into the political waters, Lincoln found himself swimming in a sea of Negrophobia.17 Illinois Democrats blatantly attacked him and other opponents of Douglas’s legislation as “nigger worshippers,” “nigger agitators,” and “nigger-stealers.”18 In September 1854, the Quincy Herald alleged that the “abolitionists of Chicago partake too largely of the instincts of the nigger himself to be ‘ashamed’ of anything they do. Who ever knew a nigger to blush, or to manifest any other evidence of shame? The nigger in Chicago occupies a reserved seat at the first tables of the best hotels – is escorted to the best cushioned pews in the first churches – and is permitted to address the people in a public speech when the privilege is denied to the white man. Last fall, Fred. Douglass, the nigger, was permitted to deliver a public address to the people of Chicago in favor of a dissolution of the Union.”19 The Herald claimed that there “are hundreds of abolitionists that wouldn’t hesitate a minute . . . to marry nigger women. . . . If the anti Nebraska abolitionists love the nigger half as much as they say they do, they wouldn’t hesitate an instant to marry all the nigger women in the free States.”20 Four months later the Herald declared: “It is doubtless within the recollection of everybody how indignantly the anti- Nebraska candidates for the legislature, . . . turned up their pious noses and uttered groans of 16 New York Tribune, 10 May 1854. 17 Paul Finkleman, “Slavery, the ‘More Perfect Union,’ and the Prairie State,” Illinois Historical Journal 80 (1987): 248-69; V. Jacque Voegeli, Free but Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro during the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Eugene H. Berwanger, The Frontier Against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension Controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967). 18 Hansen, Making of the Third Party System, 50. Democrats throughout the North stressed race as an issue. Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 118. 19 Quincy Herald, 12 September 1854. 20 Quincy Herald, 16 September 1854. 1053 Michael Burlingame – Abraham Lincoln: A Life – Vol. 1, Chapter 10 contempt which came up clear from the lowest extreme of their bowels, every time they were taunted with being abolitionists or with loving the nigger so hugely that they wanted to be perpetually in his company, to live with him, eat with him, &c. . . . The people of Illinois have niggers amongst them – and . . . would like exceedingly to get rid of said niggers.”21 The Herald was joined by other race-baiting Illinois Democratic journals. The Illinois State Register observed that the Illinois State Journal “opens its batteries upon Senator Douglas’ Nebraska bill, following in the wake of the New York Tribune, and renewing the ‘agitation’ of the ‘nigger’ question, by humorously ! charging Douglas with opening that question . . . . Niggerdom is preparing for a new onslaught.”22 Later in the campaign the Register observed of some candidates who seemed to be straddling the slavery issue: “The people of this district will want pledges” against “all alliances with niggerism.”23 A few days later it rejoiced to observe that there “is at least one Whig paper in the state which has not ‘withdrawn its objections’ to the fusion with niggerism.”24 (In addition to such racial demagoguery, Douglas’s allies resorted to other forms of name-calling. The Springfield Register termed Horace Greeley a “white-livered moral traitor,” Cassius M. Clay an “insane fanatic,” Ichabod Codding an “itinerant spouter of treason,” and abolitionists like Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Parker, and Joshua R. Giddings “traitors to their country.”)25 21 Quincy Herald, 10 January 1855. 22 Illinois State Register (Springfield), 14 January 1854. 23 Illinois State Register (Springfield), 2 September 1854. This editorial called on Richard Yates to disavow any connection with the abolitionists. 24 Illinois State Register (Springfield), 7 September 1854. 25 Illinois State Register (Springfield), 22 May, 12 July, 29 September 1854. 1054 Michael Burlingame – Abraham Lincoln: A Life – Vol. 1, Chapter 10 The Peoria Press called opponents of slavery expansion a “negro-loving abolition party.”26 In northeast Illinois, the Morris Gazette denounced a Republican candidate for Congress who, it alleged, “while a member of the constitutional convention [in 1847], whenever a vote was taken in regard to niggers that he did not dodge, was found always voting in favor of the niggers and against the white man.”27 The Chicago Times, Douglas’s organ, attacked Illinois Republican leaders for allegedly promoting miscegenation at the 1847 constitutional convention, where they had voted “to legalize in this State this identical intercourse between negroes and white women, and to place such intercourse, filthy and repulsive as it is, upon the same equal footing as marriages between our white citizens.”28 In western Illinois, the Pike County Union made the same allegation against a Whig congressional candidate: “He voted [in 1847] against a proposition preventing the intermarriage of whites with blacks; which was equivalent to voting that whites and niggers might intermarry.”29 Illinoisans were among the most bigoted of all Northerners. In 1858, the Chicago Times asserted that 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.” Proudly the Times boasted that the Prairie State “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. She denied to the negro an equal participation in the right to settlement upon and cultivation of the soil, and declared that Illinois should never be cursed with slavery, and that her people should not be crowded and 26 Springfield correspondence, 11 January, Peoria Press, 16 January 1855. 27 Morris Gazette, n.d., copied in the Joliet Signal, 17 October 1854. 28 Chicago Times, n.d., copied in the Joliet Signal, 17 October 1854. Jesse O. Norton and James Knox were the men in question. 29 Pittsfield Union, ca. 27 September 1854, quoted in The Free Press (Pittsfield, Illinois), 28 September 1854. 1055 Michael Burlingame – Abraham Lincoln: A Life – Vol. 1, Chapter 10 inconvenienced by an inferior and deteriorated race.”30 Republican papers lamented that the black man in Illinois was, “though born on the soil, an alien, nay worse – almost a beast. He has no rights, except the right of being taxed; he has no privileges, except the privilege of paying. His children are booted out of public schools, while no provision is made for their separate education; his testimony is not received in a Court of justice; his accounts, though he may be an honest hard-working mechanic, are worth nothing in evidence; his friends, if they remove hither from any other State, though perchance just redeemed from the thrall of chattel Slavery, are liable to be thrust into prison and thence sold into bondage.”31 The Illinois State Journal declared that the “truth is, the nigger is an unpopular institution in the free States. Even those who are unwilling to rob them of all the rights of humanity, and are willing to let them have a spot on earth on which to live and to labor and to enjoy the fruits of their toil, do not care to be brought into close contact with them.” The editor acknowledged that he shared “in common with nineteen-twentieths of our people, a prejudice against the nigger.”32 The militantly antislavery Chicago Tribune explained why so many Illinoisans resisted abolition: “The greatest ally of slaveholders in this country, is the apprehension in the Northern mind that if the slaves were liberated, they would become roaming, vicious vagrants; that they would overrun the North, and subsist by mendicancy and vagrancy; and that from the day they were made free, they would cease to work.”33 Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull told his legislative colleagues: “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.”34 Congressman William A. 30 Chicago Times, 2 August 1861, 2 October 1858. 31 Springfield correspondence, 4 January, New York Tribune, 13 January 1855. 32 “The Nigger in the New Constitution,” Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 22 March 1862. 33 Chicago Tribune, 12 August 1861. 34 Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 2nd session, 944 (25 February 1862). 1056 Michael Burlingame – Abraham Lincoln: A Life – Vol. 1, Chapter 10 Richardson of Illinois, Douglas’s chief ally in the House, declared that “God made the white man superior to the black, and no legislation will undo or change the decrees of Heaven . . . since creation dawned, the white race has improved and advanced in the scale of being, but as the negro was then so is he now.”35 The Chicago Herald referred to blacks as members of a “poor, ignorant and imbecile race” and applauded a Milwaukee theater proprietor who expelled a black audience member. “We utterly despise that spirit that would debase our own race to a social equality with the inferior races,” the Herald proclaimed. When a slave ship was captured, the Herald regretted that the authorities “were so precipitate as to neglect to give the nigger worshippers a peep at them [the slaves aboard]. It would do them some good. Nothing could be more impressive than to see a couple of thousand of those naked, musky, greasy cannibals at one of their usual feasts of raw beef and dead negroes.”36 Democrats in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio decorated wagons carrying young white women with banners reading: “Fathers protect us from Negro Equality.”37 In 1847, delegates to the Illinois constitutional convention endorsed a ban on black migration into the Prairie State, a provision which voters overwhelming approved the following year. In debates on that provision, anti-black sentiment was freely expressed by men like George Lemon of Marion, who doubted that blacks “were altogether human beings. If any gentleman thought they were, he would ask him to look at a negro’s foot! (Laughter) What was his leg 35 Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 2nd session, 2207 (19 May 1862). 36 “African Civilization,” Chicago Herald, 18 April 1860; “Niggers in the Boxes,” ibid., 31 May 1860; “The Raw Darkies,” ibid., 7 June 1860. 37 Lincoln, Illinois, correspondence, 16 August, Illinois State Register (Springfield), 17 August 1860; Dayton, Ohio, newspapers, mid-September 1863, quoted in Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (Lexington: University of Press of Kentucky, 1970), 247; The Illinoisan (Marshall), 26 June 1858; “Who are the ‘Nigger Worshippers,’” The Free Press (Pittsfield, Illinois), 17 July 1856; New York Herald, n.d., copied in the Illinois State Register (Springfield), 4 August 1858; J. Augustus Lemcke, Reminiscences of an Indianian: From the Sassafras Log behind the Barn in Posey County to Broader Fields (Indianapolis: Hollenback Press, 1905), 196. 1057 Michael Burlingame – Abraham Lincoln: A Life – Vol. 1, Chapter 10 doing in the middle of it? If that was not sufficient, let him go and examine their nose; (roars of laughter) then look at their lips. Why, their sculls were three inches thicker than white people’s.” William C. Kinney of Belleville said of the state’s free blacks: “Those members from the northern part of the State did not know how lazy, and good-for-nothing these people were. If they did and could witness their worthlessness their opinions would be changed.” Should blacks be permitted to immigrate into Illinois, Kinney argued, “we must admit them to the social hearth” and “permit them to mingle with us in all our social affairs, and, also, if they desired it, must not object to proposals to marry our daughters.” Edward M. West of Edwardsville agreed, saying that “negroes were, mostly, idle and worthless persons” and that his constituents were “very anxious to get rid of them.” Alexander M. Jenkins of Murphysboro declared that blacks “were a degraded race,” “trifling,” “worthless,” and “filthy.” James W. Singleton of Quincy charged that free blacks constituted “an intolerable nuisance” and warned that slave owners in neighboring states would make Illinois “a receptacle for all the worthless, superannuated negroes” they wanted to expel. Of those who wished to postpone consideration of a ban on black immigration, he asked: “What would you think of a man who would say to you, I have a negro and you have a pretty daughter, I should like a marriage contracted between them, I do not want you to decide now, postpone your decision until some other time?” Andrew McCallen of Shawneetown predicted that if the delegates did not prohibit “degraded, idle, thieving negroes” from settling in Illinois, white people in the southern part of the state would “take the matter into their own hands, and commence a war of extermination.” Hezekiah Wead of Lewistown shared McCallen’s fear that the southern counties would be inundated “with an idle, worthless and degraded population.” Benjamin Bond of Carlyle, who averred that he would not help slave owners capture runaways, wished to forbid blacks from settling in Illinois because he was