Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (19 page)

The
Dred Scott
decision was a deep embarrassment for Stephen A. Douglas. The doctrine of popular sovereignty, on which Douglas had pegged his hopes for achieving
sectional peace (and achieving his own nomination to the presidency), initially assumed that the inhabitants of any given territory could, if they wished, exclude slavery simply by passing the active legislation necessary to ban it from their midst. The
Dred Scott
decision, however, made it clear that no one—not Congress, not the inhabitants of a territory, not even a territorial legislature—had any power to keep any United States citizen from taking property (which had now become a euphemism for slaves) anywhere a citizen wanted and erecting the slave system in any territory of the Union. If the decision was pressed far enough, it might also open the way to claiming that no state could ban slavery, either.

Douglas was nothing if not resourceful. He “was a wonderful man with the people … When he came through the State, the whole Democratic party was alive and ready to rally to his support.” Once the initial shock of the
Dred Scott
decision wore off, Douglas announced that the Court’s decision would not contradict the operation of popular sovereignty after all. True, a territory could not pass legislation
actively
banning slavery; but the people of a territory could
passively
make it impossible for slavery to exist in their territory by refusing to enact the usual array of slave codes and police measures that slave states needed in order to keep slavery intact. The right to take slaves into the territories, claimed Douglas in a speech in Spring-field in the summer of 1857, was “practically a dead letter” without “appropriate police regulations and local legislation.” Withhold those, and slavery had no chance of surviving within a territory’s boundaries. By Douglas’s logic,
Dred Scott
not only left popular sovereignty intact but left it as the only weapon remaining by which slavery could be legally kept out of the territories.
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This line of reasoning did nothing to stanch the hemorrhaging of Douglas’s reputation within the Democratic ranks. Southern Democrats, who were overjoyed at the
Dred Scott
decision, were furious at Douglas’s refusal to submit tamely to the Supreme Court’s dictum. What was more, the new president, James Buchanan, had welcomed the
Dred Scott
decision as a convenient way of declaring the Kansas problem settled. Buchanan, surrounded by a mostly Southern cabinet, was irritated that Douglas was threatening to spoil that settlement by suggesting that anti-slavery Kansans might yet have the means to obstruct a pro-slavery settlement and prolong the Kansas turmoil. As Douglas approached senatorial reelection in Illinois in 1858, it became a real question as to whether Buchanan’s vengeful willingness to manipulate party patronage against Douglas might not prevent Douglas from returning to the Senate.
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The Republicans had been thrown into similar disarray by the
Dred Scott
decision. They had assumed that their task was the creation of a congressional coalition
large enough to block any attempt to admit Kansas or any other new territory as a slave state, and perhaps even restore the rule of the Missouri Compromise. Now the Court’s decision had pulled the rug out from under them by declaring that neither Congress nor anyone else had the authority to create such an obstacle. For that reason, desperate Republicans—especially in the East—began to hearken to the song of Stephen A. Douglas. Douglas’s argument that popular sovereignty (at least in its passive form) was now the only workable means of keeping slavery from the territories convinced many Illinois Republicans that, especially for the 1858 senatorial race, it was time to stymie Taney and Buchanan and throw their support behind Douglas.

There was, however, one Illinois Republican who dissented from this view of Douglas, and that was Abraham Lincoln. In 1858 Lincoln was forty-nine years old, one of the most outstanding lawyers in Illinois, and equally one of the most prominent state Republicans. Lincoln had come by his successes the hard way. Born in a crude log cabin in 1809 in Kentucky, Lincoln had known little before his twenty-fifth birthday but the poverty and hardships that formed the substance of backcountry life. “There was an unbroken wilderness there then,” he recalled in an autobiographical sketch he wrote in 1859, “and an axe was put in his hand; and with the trees and logs and grubs he fought until he reached his twentieth year.” Lincoln had also imbibed anti-slavery opinions almost with his mother’s milk, since his parents, Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, were both members of an ultra-Calvinistic Baptist sect that banned slaveholding members from their fellowship. In fact, the spread of slavery across Kentucky was one of the motivations for Thomas Lincoln to uproot his family and move first to Indiana and then finally to Illinois.
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Their views on slavery may have been almost the only things Thomas and Abraham Lincoln had in common. Thomas Lincoln was content to be a farmer, only marginally literate—Lincoln recalled that his father “never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name”—but at least moderately successful in his calling. Abraham, however, grew up with a passion for self-education and social betterment. He rejected his father’s raw Calvinistic religion; his reading turned instead to religious skeptics—Thomas Paine, Constantin Volney, Robert Burns—and the Enlightenment’s rule of reason. His stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, whom Thomas married after the death of Nancy Lincoln in 1818, recalled in 1865 that “Abe was a good boy,” but he “didn’t like physical labor—was diligent for knowledge.”

He read all the books he could lay his hands on. … Abe read histories, papers & other books. … He had a copy book—a kind of scrap book in which he put down all things and this preserved them. He ciphered on boards when he had no paper or no slate and when the board would get too black he would shave it off with a drawing knife and go on again. … Abe, when old folks were at our house, was a silent & attentive observer—never
speaking or asking questions till they were gone and then he must understand Every thing—even to the smallest thing—Minutely & Exactly—he would then repeat it over to himself again & again—sometimes in one form and then in another & when it was fixed in his mind to suit him he became Easy and he never lost that fact or his understanding of it. Sometimes he seemed pestered to give Expression to his ideas and got mad almost at one who couldn’t Explain plainly what he wanted to convey.
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In 1831 Abraham Lincoln struck out on his own, trying his hand at anything that offered him a way up the ladder. He tried clerking and postmastering in a store in the village of New Salem, Illinois, but succeeded at neither, and in 1832 he took his first turn at politics.

Politically, Lincoln found himself almost instinctively drawn to the Whigs rather than the Democrats. The Whigs celebrated the Union, deplored the loud demands of the states for first loyalties, and called for an enabling role for government in the economy, railroads, and internal improvements, with protective tariffs as incentives. The Whigs were the party of up-and-coming men, the businessmen, the self-improvers and self-transformers who did not want to be bound by the old loyalties of the past, and who saw at the core of American democracy the opportunity to transform themselves. Lincoln believed that what made the United States “at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world” was that, in America, “every man can make himself.” Whigs such as Lincoln embraced this self-making model as the guarantee of “hope to all, and energy, and progress and improvement of condition to all.” So Lincoln took Henry Clay (a fellow Kentuckian) as his political idol, as Lincoln’s “beau ideal of a statesman.” His first electoral platform—he ran for the state legislature but only came in eighth in a field of thirteen candidates—was dedicated to the need for tax-funded internal improvements. “He was,” said Stephen T. Logan, his second law partner, “as stiff as a man could be in his Whig doctrines.”
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In 1834 Lincoln won his first seat in the Illinois state legislature as a Whig, and served four successive terms there. In the process, he helped lead the Illinois legislature into the sponsorship of transportation projects and, in 1837, the passage of a $10 million appropriation for railroad construction. His first major speech in the Illinois legislature praised the operation of the Illinois State Bank for having “doubled the prices of the products” of Illinois farms and filled farmers’ pockets “with a sound circulating medium,” noting that the farmers were “all well-pleased with its operations.” Democratic attacks on banks and bank charters, Lincoln explained, would
never hurt “men of wealth,” who are “beyond the power of fortune,” but they would “depreciate the value of its paper [currency] in the hands of the honest and unsuspecting farmer and mechanic.”
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Having helped to put much of this program in place, Lincoln saw it promptly turned to ashes. A national economic depression, caused in large measure by the Democratic assault on the banks, crushed the American economy in 1837. Illinois had financed its railroad appropriation on bank borrowing, and the collapse of the banks saddled the state legislature (and the unforgiving taxpayers) with an indebtedness that took years to pay off.
¹³

This did nothing to discourage Lincoln’s urges for social betterment and education. While still a state legislator, Lincoln began teaching himself law out of an assortment of borrowed law books, and in 1836 he was licensed to practice in the state circuit courts. The choice of law as a profession was part and parcel of his Whiggish economic aspirations, since lawyers were (in the phrase of historian Charles G. Sellers) the “shock troops” of market capitalism, and from John Marshall’s Supreme Court on down, American lawyers were becoming the guardians of commercial contracts and property. It was in pursuit of the market—and of the financial and social respectability that came with it—that Lincoln moved to the Illinois state capital, Springfield, and entered a law firm there with another young lawyer, John Todd Stuart. Even then Lincoln was not content. “That man,” wrote his later law partner, William Henry Herndon, “who thinks Lincoln calmly gathered his robes about him, waiting for the people to call him, has a very erroneous knowledge of Lincoln. He was always calculating and planning ahead. His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.”
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Eventually, that “little engine” succeeded. In 1842 Lincoln married Mary Todd, the daughter of a prominent Lexington, Kentucky, family, who brought him a lifelong schooling in social graces. Even more important, Lincoln labored with ferocious intensity at becoming a successful lawyer and Whig politician. Herndon noticed that Lincoln seemed to think “that there were no limitations to the force and endurance of his mental and vital powers,” and he watched Lincoln wear himself to the point of breakdown in “a continuous, severe, persistent, and exhaustive thought” on a problem. Herndon described Lincoln as “persistent, fearless, and tireless in thinking.”
¹⁵

His thoroughness, his feel for the practical in legal issues, and his remarkably retentive memory made Lincoln an outstanding courtroom performer. He was not
“a learned lawyer,” recalled Herndon, but he was a first-rate case lawyer with an uncanny ability to bend juries to his point of view. “He was wise as a serpent in the trial of a cause,” one legal associate, Leonard Swett, recalled, “but I have got too many scars from his blows to certify that he was harmless as a dove.” He was not a schemer. “Discourage litigation,” was Lincoln’s own advice to aspiring lawyers. “Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser—in fees, expenses, and waste of time.” If anything, he was renowned for his scrupulous honesty. Among his fellow lawyers, “Mr. Lincoln’s character for professional honor stood very high.” The entire “frame-work of his mental and moral being was honesty,” Herndon remembered, “open, candid and square in his profession, never practicing on the sharp or low.” Herndon watched him warn clients with shaky cases, “You are in the wrong of the case and I would advise you to compromise, or if you cannot do that, do not bring a suit on the facts of your case because you are in the wrong and surely [be] defeated and have to pay a big bill of costs.”
¹⁶

Yet, as unbending as Lincoln could be about ends, he was surprisingly flexible about means. “Mr. Lincoln was a very patient man generally,” said Herndon, “but if you wished to be cut off at the knee, just go at Lincoln with abstractions.” This was a pattern that, in later years, would also characterize his political solutions. “Secret, silent, and a very reticent-minded man,” Lincoln was “a riddle and a puzzle to his friends and neighbors,” and in political combat he could be deceptively hard, evasive and dangerous to underestimate. “Any man,” warned Leonard Swett, “who took Lincoln for a simple minded man would very soon wake [up] with his back in a ditch.”
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The plainest example of this evasiveness was his awkward embarrassment over his crude backcountry origins. “Lincoln’s ambition,” remarked Herndon, was “to be distinctly understood by the common people.” Yet no man wanted less to be one of them. Once Lincoln moved to Springfield, he rarely cast a backward glance at his humble origins: neither Thomas nor Sarah Lincoln was invited to their son’s wedding, and Lincoln was too embarrassed and alienated by his father’s crudeness even to attend the old man’s funeral in 1851. His stepbrother’s pleas that Lincoln come down to the Coles County farmhouse where Thomas Lincoln lay dying were met with a frosty refusal: “Say to him that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.”
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When the same stepbrother tried to talk Lincoln into a loan to pay off his debts, Lincoln bluntly refused: “You are now in need of some ready money; and what
I propose is, that you shall go to work, ‘tooth and nails’ for some body who will give you money [for] it. Let father and your boys take charge of things at home—prepare for a crop, and make the crop; and you go to work for the best money wages, or in discharge of any debt you owe, that you can get”—in other words, join the cash economy. Lincoln had no love for Thomas Jefferson’s republic of yeoman farmers, nor would he have much use for utopian dreams of cooperative commonwealths in which all results were leveled. What he wanted for the Union was what he wanted for himself: an upwardly mobile society of successful small-scale producers and professionals, with equal liberty to pursue their own interests. “I hold the value of life is to improve one’s condition,” Lincoln said in 1861, and the star he navigated by was the “promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that
all
should have an equal chance.”
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