Lincoln’s Grandiosity in Saving the Union (response article)

Chuck Strozier, in his dialogue with Jim Anderson speaks of the grandiosity in Lincoln’s reference to God—and by implication Lincoln’s seeing himself as God’s agent—in the Second Inaugural when comprehending the causes and costs of the Civil War. Chuck juxtaposes this not immodest Lincoln with the President’s clear struggle with guilt for his role in provoking and pressing a war that new estimates conclude was responsible for 750,000 deaths in a population of 30,000,000. Historians, like Lincoln’s contemporaries, continue to debate the relationship in Lincoln’s mind between ending slavery and saving the Union. In his persistently forceful rhetoric and framing of a narrative to foster a wider understanding of the war, Lincoln had given direction to this debate in his response to Horace Greeley on August 22, 1862 (Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 5, 1953, 388-389), asserting that what he, himself, did about slavery he did to save the Union. If he could save the Union without ending slavery, he would preserve slavery. If by ending slavery he could save the Union, he would emancipate the slaves. We now know what Greeley did not then know: that a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation was already on Lincoln’s desk when he gave this response to the publisher.

However, we also know that Lincoln, even as a young man, connected the fate of the new experiment in self-government created by the Founders with the fate of slavery, the greatest source of conflict for the new nation. Lincoln’s evolving (or shifting) attitudes toward slavery and what should be done about it have been the focus of an enormous amount of scholarly debate in the last half century. Linked to the slavery issue in these debates have been Lincoln’s shifting attitudes to race, specifically toward African Americans.

We know that whatever shifts and turns he made about slavery as a politician—and these shifts and turns were crucial to his successes and failures in Illinois politics—the institution of slavery made him miserable. It also provided him the opportunity to be the

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defining political leader during America’s greatest crisis. As Frederick Douglass said more than a decade after Lincoln’s death at the dedication of the Freedmen’s Memorial to Lincoln, he “was preeminently the white man’s president…. Black Americans,” on the other hand, were his “step children by adoption.” “We saw him, measured him, and estimated him…by a broad survey, in the stern logic of great events” and concluded that the “hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln” (Frederick Douglass, “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” April 14, 1876).

Lincoln’s “Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois” (Basler, Vol. 1, 108-115) on January 27, 1838, a few weeks before his 29^th birthday, reveals essential dimensions of this future-defining leader and, by consensus, our greatest president. The address is an encomium to the success of the Founders in creating and passing on to Lincoln’s generation “a political edifice of liberty and equal rights” (Basler, Vol. 1, 109). That edifice was at risk because of the increasing evidence of mob rule, demonstrated by the hanging of gamblers in Mississippi, the public murder in St. Louis (he does not use the word lynching) of a mulatto man convicted of murder, and the murder of the anti-slavery publisher, Elijah Lovejoy, whose printing press was thrown into the river in Alton, Illinois. To underscore his belief in the rule of law as the only way the Founders’ edifice could be sustained, Lincoln observed that there was no grievance that was a fit object of redress by mob law.

In any case that arises, as for instance, the promulgation of abolitionism, one of two positions is necessarily true; that is, the thing is right within itself, and therefore deserves the protection of all law and all good citizens; or, it is wrong, and therefore proper to be prohibited by legal enactments; and in neither case, is the interposition of mob law, either necessary, justifiable, or excusable (David Lowenthal, The Mind and Art of Abraham Lincoln, Philosopher Statesman: Texts and Interpretations of Twenty Great Speeches, 2012, 13).

Lincoln acknowledged that his generation did not face the “field of glory” enjoyed by the generation of the American Revolution, which succeeded against great odds in fulfilling a proposition, for all the world to see, “the capability of a people to govern them-

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selves” (Basler, Vol. 1, 114). They were successful beyond all expectations. For his generation, “This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated” (Basler, Vol. 1, 114). What glory will there be henceforth for those who merely work to maintain this new government?  A seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair—

…such belong not to the family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle. What! think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path…. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief…. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and if possible it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs (Lincoln’s Lyceum Address cited in Basler, Vol. 1, 115).

Lincoln then concludes with this warning: “Distinction will be his paramount object; and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down” (Basler, Vol. 1, 115). To this analysis of potential danger from unchecked passion, whether from a mob or from such a dictator, young Lincoln counsels “Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason [must] furnish all the materials for our future support and defen[c]e” (Basler, Vol. 1, 116).

For Lincoln, that support and defense would be as a lawyer and as an active, even impassioned, politician. After a period in the Illinois Legislature and a single term in Congress, Lincoln’s political efforts were invested in building the new Republican Party. In the wake of fellow Illinoisan Stephen Douglas successfully passing in the Senate the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, with its doctrine of popular sovereignty, allowing voters in territories moving toward statehood to determine whether they would be slave or free, Lin-

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coln re-entered the political fray. With lawyerly logic, he spoke out in public against the growing power of the slaveholding South and its increasingly impassioned defense of slavery, which threatened the self-governing creation of the Founders.

These political efforts came to a head in his Illinois senatorial campaign against Stephen Douglas in 1858, occasioning the most significant public political debates in our history. During their seven face-to-face debates around the state, these two men, who knew each other well—they had both dated Mary Todd—teased out the tortuous challenges facing the nation over slavery following the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which appeared to allow slaves to be kept in slavery even in free states, thus, as Lincoln would suggest, nationalizing slavery. Lincoln opened the campaign on June 16, 1858, with “‘A House Divided’: Speech in Springfield, Illinois” (Basler, Vol. 2, 461-469). After determining where the country was, and whither it was tending, Lincoln declared—in words that the newly established telegraph quickly carried throughout America:

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—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. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South (“‘A House Divided’: Speech in Springfield, Illinois,” 1953).

Senator Douglas was arguably the most powerful political figure in the country, more than the hapless President James Buchanan of Douglas’ Democratic Party. Douglas was assumed to be the next President. In taking on Douglas against the issue of slavery, Lincoln teased out the contradictions between Douglas’ support of popular sovereignty (the Kansas-Nebraska Act) and of the Dred Scott decision, which Douglas was forced to support as the likely Democratic Party candidate for president in 1860. The debates proved to be a full dress rehearsal for the nation’s impending

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crisis. Lincoln was beaten in the Senate race by a narrow margin, losing among his own Springfield and Sangamon County constituents. Douglas had successfully tied Lincoln to support of Negro equality, a charge Lincoln ruefully sought to deny, while also defending the Declaration of Independence and its affirmation that all men are created equal.

Springfield was the state capital and like most towns of any size had competing newspapers based on loyalty to specific political parties. Lincoln’s paper was the Illinois State Journal, Douglas’s paper The Illinois State Register. In capturing how Lincoln appeared to the Douglas Democrats of the State Register, the following analysis by his fellow townsman, Charles Lanphier, publisher of the Register, a month after Lincoln’s “House Divided” Speech, charged that Lincoln’s position threatened war between North and South.

“How did Lincoln expect slavery to be abolished in the states where it legally existed?” Lanphier may have suggested during this time that it was unfathomable how Lincoln could expect slavery to be abolished in states where the practice was legal. Lanphier may have also argued that a house divided is one that will not stand. That his wishes are that all should be free he cannot deny. Mr. Lincoln’s sincerity in the opinions he puts forth in relation to the “extinction” of slavery, and the rights of the “negro,” makes him all the more dangerous. How easy it is for a man of his ardent temperament, who starts with an “expectation” of a certain result and who zealously labors to obtain the victory for his own views, to desire and strive for the result, when he perceives his own failure. The “expectation” that this government cannot endure half slave and half free cannot exist in a mind like that of Mr. Lincoln, unless accompanied by the belief that it ought not to exist (Christopher Breiseth, eds. Cullom Davis, Charles B. Strozier, Rebecca Monroe Veach, and Geoffrey C. Ward, “Lincoln, Douglas, and Springfield in the 1858 Campaign,” The Public and Private Lincoln: Contemporary Perspectives, 1979, 118-119).

While Lincoln lost the election to Douglas, he became almost instantly a key contender for the Republican nomination for president in the forthcoming 1860 election. He sealed that position with his “Address at Cooper Institute, New York City” on February 27, 1860 (Basler, Vol. 3, 522-550). If his 1858 campaign had emphasized the Declaration of Independence, in the Cooper Institute speech he emphasized the Constitution and the actions of the 39

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signers in dealing with slavery. In unrelenting detail, he showed that overwhelmingly the original signers, not only in 1787, but in subsequent amendments and interpretations of the Constitution, did not abandon the Federal Government’s control of slavery in federal territories. Even where some of the original 13 states in the South ceded parts of their territory to newly created states (Mississippi) or with Louisiana, which joined the Union through the Louisiana Purchase, and slavery continued, the Federal Government maintained control over such matters as disallowing slaves to come into the new states from foreign parts except with owners moving there as settlers. He cited Washington and Jefferson in support of his position that slavery was restricted from being extended into the territories.

He challenged the assumption of the Southern States that the Constitution gave them a right to take slaves into the federal territories and hold them as property:

But no such right is specifically written in the Constitution. That instrument is literally silent about any such right. We, on the contrary, deny that such a right has any existence in the Constitution, even by implication. Your purpose then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events (Basler, Vol. 3, 543).

Lincoln ended his address after assuring the Southern states that slavery should be allowed to continue where it already existed, but insisted that Northern votes will prevent the spread of slavery into the territories to avoid free states being overrun by slave states.

The Southern States took Lincoln’s election in November as the cause to secede and create the Confederate States of America. Then in April of 1861, at Fort Sumter, the war came.

I would argue that Lincoln’s preparation for this moment of critical leadership included his crystal clarity about the Constitution and about the intentions of the Founders on the issue of slavery. He also was deeply committed to preservation of this last best hope of earth, the self-governing Republic of the United States of America. Breaking up what the Founders had put together was an unacceptable sacrilege. While Lincoln recognized that the existence of slav-

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ery was the profound cause of the Civil War, as his Second Inaugural makes clear, what he did in emancipating the slaves and securing support for the 13^th amendment outlawing slavery he did to preserve the Union. The pain he felt at the horrendous loss of life and limb was great, as the Gettysburg Address made clear. However, he was not conflicted in pursuing the war until he achieved total surrender by the Confederacy.

To that end he authorized the harsh, scorched-earth military policies, which General Grant conveyed to General Sherman, enabling his “March through Georgia.” Lincoln at the end ascribed God’s purpose in bringing the war as a means of ending the sin of slavery. Implicitly Lincoln saw himself as God’s instrument in that effort. The question remains how Lincoln had the toughness and the self confidence in managing this horrible carnage to be that towering genius he described in the Young Men’s Lyceum Speech in 1838. In preparing the nation for war and in its execution, Lincoln had disdained the beaten path and sought distinction in a brutal Civil War by not only saving the Union but doing so by emancipating the slaves.

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