Abraham Lincoln, a History — Volume 02 · Chapter 12Table of Contents Vol. II (11)
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Ray to Lincoln, July 27, 1858. MS.
We must leave the career of Douglas for a while, to follow up the personal history of Lincoln. The peculiar attitude of national politics had in the previous year drawn the attention of the whole country to Illinois in a remarkable degree. The Senatorial campaign was hardly opened when a Chicago editor, whose daily examination of a large list of newspaper exchanges brought the fact vividly under his observation, wrote to Lincoln: "You are like Byron, who woke up one morning and found himself famous. People wish to know about you. You have sprung at once from the position of a capital fellow, and a leading lawyer in Illinois, to a national reputation."
David Davis to Lincoln, Nov. 7, 1858. MS.
The compliment was fully warranted; the personal interest in Lincoln increased daily from the beginning to the end of the great debates. The Freeport doctrine and its effect upon the Democratic party gave these discussions both present significance and a growing interest for the future. Another friend wrote him, a few days after election: "You have made a noble canvass, which, if unavailing in this State, has earned you a national reputation, and made you friends everywhere."
Delahay to Lincoln, March 15, 1859. MS. Dennison to Trumbull, July 21, 1859. MS. Dorsheimer to Chase, Sept. 12, 1859. MS.
Kasson to Lincoln, Sept. 13, 1859. MS. Kirkpatrick to Lincoln, Sept. 15, 1859. MS. Weed to Judd, Oct. 21, 1859. MS.
That this was not the mere flattery of partial friends became manifest to him by other indications; by an increased correspondence filled with general commendation, and particularly by numerous invitations to deliver speeches in other States. The Republican Central Committee of New Hampshire wrote him that if Douglas came, as was expected, to that State, they desired Lincoln to come and answer him. The Central Committee of Minnesota wished him to come there and assist in their canvass. There was an incessant commotion in politics throughout the whole North, and as the season advanced calls came from all quarters. Kansas wanted him; Buffalo, Des Moines, Pittsburgh wanted him; Thurlow Weed telegraphed: "Send Abraham Lincoln to Albany immediately." Not only his presence, but his arguments, and ideas, were in demand. Dennison, making the canvass for Governor of Ohio, asked for a report of his debates for campaign "material."
That men in all parts of the Union were thus turning to him for help and counsel was due, not alone to the publicity and credit he had gained in his debates with Douglas in the previous year; it grew quite as much out of the fact that by his sagacity and courage he had made himself the safest, as well as the most available, rallying-point of the Republican party and exponent of Republican doctrine. The Lecompton quarrel in the Democratic party had led many prominent Republicans on a false trail. In Douglas's new attitude, developed by his Southern speeches and his claim to readmission into regular Democratic fellowship, these leaders found themselves at fault, discredited by their own course. Lincoln, on the contrary, not only held aloft the most aggressive Republican banner, but stood nearest the common party enemy, and was able to offer advice to all the elements of the Republican party, free from any suspicion of intrigue with foe or faction. The causes of his Senatorial defeat thus gave him a certain party authority and leadership, which were felt if not openly acknowledged. On his part, while never officious or obtrusive, he was always ready with seasonable and judicious suggestions, generous in spirit and comprehensive in scope, and which looked beyond mere local success.
Thus he wrote from Springfield to Schuyler Colfax (afterwards Vice-President of the United States), July 6, 1859: "I much regret not seeing you while you were here among us. Before learning that you were to be at Jacksonville on the 4th, I had given my word to be at another place. Besides a strong desire to make your personal acquaintance, I was anxious to speak with you on politics a little more fully than I can well do in a letter. My main object in such conversation would be to hedge against divisions in the Republican ranks generally, and particularly for the contest of 1860. The point of danger is the temptation in different localities to 'platform' for something which will be popular just there, but which, nevertheless, will be a firebrand elsewhere, and especially in a national convention. As instances, the movement against foreigners in Massachusetts; in New Hampshire, to make obedience to the fugitive-slave law punishable as a crime; in Ohio, to repeal the fugitive-slave law; and, squatter sovereignty, in Kansas. In these things there is explosive matter enough to blow up half a dozen national conventions, if it gets into them; and what gets very rife outside of conventions is very likely to find its way into them. What is desirable, if possible, is that in every local convocation of Republicans a point should be made to avoid everything which will disturb Republicans elsewhere. Massachusetts Republicans should have looked beyond their noses, and then they could not have failed to see that tilting against foreigners would ruin us in the whole Northwest. New Hampshire and Ohio should forbear tilting against the fugitive-slave law in such way as to utterly overwhelm us in Illinois with the charge of enmity to the Constitution itself. Kansas, in her confidence that she can be saved to freedom on 'squatter sovereignty,' ought not to forget that to prevent the spread and nationalization of slavery is a national concern, and must be attended to by the nation. In a word, in every locality we should look beyond our noses; and at least say nothing on points where it is probable we shall disagree. I write this for your eye only; hoping, however, if you see danger as I think I do, you will do what you can to avert it. Could not suggestions be made to leading men in the State and Congressional conventions, and so avoid, to some extent at least, these apples of discord."[1]
Colfax to Lincoln, July 14, 1859. MS.
By this time Colfax was cured of his late coquetting with Douglas, and he replied: "The suggestions you make have occurred to me.... Nothing is more evident than that there is an ample number of voters in the Northern States, opposed to the extension and aggressions of slavery and to Democratic misrule, to triumphantly elect a President of the United States. But it is equally evident that making up this majority are men of all shades and gradations of opinion, from the conservative who will scarcely defend his principles for fear of imperiling peace, to the bold radical who strikes stalwart blows regardless of policy or popularity. How this mass of mind shall be consolidated into a victorious phalanx in 1860 is the great problem, I think, of our eventful times. And he who could accomplish it is worthier of fame than Napoleon or Victor Emmanuel.... In this work, to achieve success, and to achieve it without sacrifice of essential principle, you can do far more than one like myself, so much younger. Your counsel carries great weight with it; for, to be plain, there is no political letter that falls from your pen which is not copied throughout the Union."
Lincoln to Canisius, May 17, 1859.
This allusion was called out by two letters which Lincoln had written during the year; one declaring his opposition to the waning fallacy of know-nothingism, in which he also defined his position on "fusion." Referring to a provision lately adopted by Massachusetts to restrict naturalization, he wrote: "Massachusetts is a sovereign and independent State; and it is no privilege of mine to scold her for what she does. Still, if from what she has done, an inference is sought to be drawn as to what I would do, I may, without impropriety, speak out, I say then, that, as I understand the Massachusetts provision, I am against its adoption in Illinois, or in any other place where I have a right to oppose it. Understanding the spirit of our institutions to aim at the elevation of men, I am opposed to whatever tends to degrade them. I have some little notoriety for commiserating the oppressed condition of the negro; and I should be strangely inconsistent if I could favor any project for curtailing the existing rights of white men, even though born in different lands, and speaking different languages from myself. As to the matter of fusion, I am for it, if it can be had on Republican grounds; and I am not for it on any other terms. A fusion on any other terms would be as foolish and unprincipled. It would lose the whole North, while the common enemy would still carry the whole South. The question of men is a different one. There are good patriotic men and able statesmen in the South whom I would cheerfully support, if they would now place themselves on Republican ground, but I am against letting down the Republican standard a hair's breadth."
The other was a somewhat longer letter, to a Boston committee which had invited him to a festival in honor of Jefferson's birthday. "Bearing in mind that about seventy years ago two great political parties were first formed in this country; that Thomas Jefferson was the head of one of them, and Boston the headquarters of the other, it is both curious and interesting that those supposed to descend politically from the party opposed to Jefferson, should now be celebrating his birthday, in their own original seat of empire, while those claiming political descent from him have nearly ceased to breathe his name everywhere...."
Lincoln to Pierce and others, April 6, 1859.
"But, soberly, it is now no child's play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation. One would state with great confidence that he could convince any sane child that the simpler propositions of Euclid are true; but nevertheless he would fail, utterly, with one who should deny the definitions and axioms. The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them 'glittering generalities.' Another bluntly calls them 'self-evident lies.' And others insidiously argue that they apply only to 'superior races.' These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect—the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads plotting against the people. They are the van-guard—the miners and sappers of returning despotism. We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us. This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, cannot long retain it. All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that to-day and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression."
Lincoln's more important political work of the year 1859 was the part he took in the canvass in the State of Ohio, where a governor was to be chosen at the October election, and where the result would decide not merely the present and local strength of the rival candidates, but also to some extent indicate the prospects and probabilities of the Presidential campaign of 1860. The Ohio Democrats had called Douglas into their canvass, and the Republicans, as soon as they learned the fact, arranged that Lincoln should come and answer him. There was a fitness in this, not merely because Lincoln's joint debates with him in Illinois in the previous summer were so successful, but also because Douglas in nearly every speech made since then, both in his Southern tour and elsewhere, alluded to the Illinois campaign, and to Lincoln by name, especially to what he characterized as his political heresies. By thus everywhere making Lincoln and Lincoln's utterances a public target, Douglas himself, in effect, prolonged and extended the joint debates over the whole Union. Another circumstance added to the momentary interest of the general discussion. Douglas was by nature aggressive. Determined to hold his Northern followers in the new issues which had grown out of his Freeport doctrine, and the new antagonisms which the recent slave code debate in the Senate revealed, he wrote and published in "Harper's Magazine" for September, 1859, a political article beginning with the assertion that "Under our complex system of government it is the first duty of American statesmen to mark distinctly the dividing-line between Federal and Local authority." Quoting both the paragraph of Lincoln's Springfield speech declaring that "a house divided against itself cannot stand," and the paragraph from Seward's Rochester speech, announcing the "irrepressible conflict," Douglas made a long historical examination of his own theory of "non-intervention" and "popular sovereignty," and built up an elaborate argument to sustain his course. The novelty of this appeal to the public occasioned general interest and varied comment, and the expedient seemed so ingenious as to excite the envy of Administration Democrats. Accordingly, Attorney-General Black, of President Buchanan's Cabinet, at "the request of friends," wrote, printed, and circulated an anonymous pamphlet in answer, in which he admitted that Douglas was "not the man to be treated with a disdainful silence," but characterized the "Harper" essay as "an unsuccessful effort at legal precision; like the writing of a judge who is trying in vain to give good reasons for a wrong decision on a question of law which he has not quite mastered." Douglas, in a speech at Wooster, Ohio, criticized this performance of Black's. Reply and rejoinder on both sides followed in due time; and this war of pamphlets was one of the prominent political incidents of the year.
Thus Lincoln's advent in the Ohio campaign attracted much more than usual notice. He made but two speeches, one at Columbus, and one at Cincinnati, at each of which places Douglas had recently preceded him. Lincoln's addresses not only brought him large and appreciative audiences, but they obtained an unprecedented circulation in print. In the main, they reproduced and tersely re-applied the ideas and arguments developed in the Senatorial campaign in Illinois, adding, however, searching comments on the newer positions and points to which Douglas had since advanced. There is only space to insert a few disconnected quotations:
Now, what is Judge Douglas's popular sovereignty? It is as a principle no other than that, if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man nor anybody else has a right to object....
If you will read the copyright essay, you will discover that Judge Douglas himself says, a controversy between the American Colonies and the Government of Great Britain began on the slavery question in 1699, and continued from that time until the Revolution; and, while he did not say so, we all know that it has continued with more or less violence ever since the Revolution....
Take these two things and consider them together; present the question of planting a State with the institution of slavery by the side of a question of who shall be Governor of Kansas for a year or two, and is there a man here, is there a man on earth, who would not say the governor question is the little one, and the slavery question is the great one? I ask any honest Democrat if the small, the local, the trivial and temporary question is not, Who shall be governor? while the durable, the important, and the mischievous one is, Shall this soil be planted with slavery? This is an idea, I suppose, which has arisen in Judge Douglas's mind from his peculiar structure. I suppose the institution of slavery really looks small to him. He is so put up by nature that a lash upon his back would hurt him, but a lash upon anybody else's back does not hurt him....
The Dred Scott decision expressly gives every citizen of the United States a right to carry his slaves into the United States Territories. And now there was some inconsistency in saying that the decision was right, and saying, too, that the people of the Territory could lawfully drive slavery out again. When all the trash, the words, the collateral matter was cleared away from it, all the chaff was fanned out of it, it was a bare absurdity; no less than that a thing may be lawfully driven away from where it has a lawful right to be....
The Judge says the people of the Territories have the right, by his principle, to have slaves if they want them. Then I say that the people in Georgia have the right to buy slaves in Africa if they want them, and I defy any man on earth to show any distinction between the two things—to show that the one is either more wicked or more unlawful; to show on original principles, that one is better or worse than the other; or to show by the Constitution, that one differs a whit from the other. He will tell me, doubtless, that there is no constitutional provision against people taking slaves into the new Territories, and I tell him that there is equally no constitutional provision against buying slaves in Africa....
Then I say, if this principle is established, that there is no wrong in slavery, and whoever wants it has a right to have it; that it is a matter of dollars and cents; a sort of question how they shall deal with brutes; that between us and the negro here there is no sort of question, but that at the South the question is between the negro and the crocodile; that it is a mere matter of policy; that there is a perfect right according to interest to do just as you please—when this is done, where this doctrine prevails, the miners and sappers will have formed public opinion for the slave trade....
Lincoln, Columbus Speech, Sept. 16, 1859. Debates, pp. 253-54
Public opinion in this country is everything. In a nation like ours this popular sovereignty and squatter sovereignty have already wrought a change in the public mind to the extent I have stated. There is no man in this crowd who can contradict it. Now, if you are opposed to slavery honestly, as much as anybody, I ask you to note that fact, and the like of which is to follow, to be plastered on layer after layer, until very soon you are prepared to deal with the negro everywhere as with the brute. If public sentiment has not been debauched already to this point, a new turn of the screw in that direction is all that is wanting; and this is constantly being done by the teachers of this insidious popular sovereignty. You need but one or two turns further until your minds, now ripening under these teachings, will be ready for all these things; and you will receive and support, or submit to, the slave trade revived with all its horrors, a slave code enforced in our Territories, and a new Dred Scott decision to bring slavery up into the very heart of the free North.
This Government is expressly charged with the duty of providing for the general welfare. We believe that the spreading out and perpetuity of the institution of slavery impairs the general welfare. We believe—nay, we know, that this is the only thing that has ever threatened the perpetuity of the Union itself....
Lincoln Cincinnati Speech, Sept. 17, 1859. Debates, pp. 267-8.
I say we must not interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists, because the Constitution forbids it, and the general welfare does not require us to do so. We must not withhold an efficient fugitive-slave law, because the Constitution requires us, as I understand it, not to withhold such a law. But we must prevent the outspreading of the institution, because neither the Constitution nor the general welfare requires us to extend it. We must prevent the revival of the African slave trade, and the enacting by Congress of a Territorial slave code. We must prevent each of these things being done by either congresses or courts. The people of these United States are the rightful masters of both congresses and courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
Parsons and others to Lincoln, Dec. 7, 1859. Debates, preface.
The Ohio Republicans gained a decided success at the October election. Ascribing this result in a large measure to the influence of Lincoln's speeches, the State Executive Committee resolved to publish in cheap book form the full Illinois joint debates and the two Ohio addresses, to serve as campaign material for the ensuing year. "We regard them," wrote the committee to Lincoln, "as luminous and triumphant expositions of the doctrines of the Republican party, successfully vindicated from the aspersions of its foes, and calculated to make a document of great practical service to the Republican party in the approaching Presidential contest."
Lincoln to Parsons and others, Dec. 19, 1859. Ibid.
Lincoln, thanking them for the flattering terms of their request, explained in his reply: "The copies I send you, are as reported and printed by the respective friends of Senator Douglas and myself at the time—that is, his by his friends, and mine by mine. It would be an unwarrantable liberty for us to change a word or a letter in his, and the changes I have made in mine, you perceive, are verbal only, and very few in number. I wish the reprint to be precisely as the copies I send, without any comment whatever."
The enterprise proved a success beyond the most sanguine expectations. A Columbus firm undertook the publication, itself assuming all pecuniary risk. Three large editions were sold directly to the public, without any aid from or any purchase by the committee—the third edition containing the announcement that up to that date, June 16, 1860, thirty thousand copies had already been circulated.[2]
[1] Partly printed in Hollister, "Life of Colfax," p. 146. We are indebted to Mrs. Colfax for the full manuscript text of this and other valuable letters which we have used.
[2] The preface to this third edition contains a letter from Douglas, alleging that injustice had been done him because, "the original reports as published in the 'Chicago Times,' although intended to be fair and just, were necessarily imperfect, and in some respects erroneous"; charging at the same time that Lincoln's speeches had been revised, corrected, and improved.[A] To this the publishers replied: "The speeches of Mr. Lincoln were never 'revised, corrected, or improved' in the sense you use those words. Remarks by the crowd which were not responded to, and the reporters' insertions of 'cheers,' 'great applause,' and so forth, which received no answer or comment from the speaker, were by our direction omitted, as well from Mr. Lincoln's speeches as yours, as we thought their perpetuation in book form would be in bad taste, and were in no manner pertinent to, or a part of, the speech."[B] And the publishers add a list of their corrections.
[A] Douglas to Follet, Foster & Co., June 9, 1860. Debates, third edition, preface.
[B] Follet, Foster & Co. to Douglas, June 16, 1860. Ibid.
CHAPTER XI HARPER'S FERRY
There now occurred another strange event which, if it had been specially designed as a climax for the series of great political sensations since 1852, could scarcely have been more dramatic. This was John Brown's invasion of Harper's Ferry in order to create a slave insurrection. We can only understand the transaction as far as we can understand the man, and both remain somewhat enigmatical.
Of Puritan descent, John Brown was born in Connecticut in the year 1800. When he was five years old, the family moved to Ohio, at that time a comparative wilderness. Here he grew up a strong, vigorous boy of the woods. His father taught him the tanner's trade; but a restless disposition drove him to frequent changes of scene and effort when he grew to manhood. He attempted surveying. He became a divinity student. He tried farming and tanning in Pennsylvania, and tanning and speculating in real estate in Ohio. Cattle-dealing was his next venture; from this to sheep-raising; and by a natural transition to the business of a wool-factor in Massachusetts. This not succeeding, he made a trip to Europe. Returning, he accepted from Gerrit Smith a tract of mountain land in the Adirondacks, where he proposed to found and foster colonies of free negroes. This undertaking proved abortive, like all his others, and he once more went back to the wool business in Ohio.
Twice married, nineteen children had been born to him, of whom eleven were living when, in 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska bill plunged the country into the heat of political strife. Four of his sons moved away to the new Territory in the first rush of emigrants; several others went later. When the Border-Ruffian hostilities broke out, John Brown followed, with money and arms contributed in the North. With his sons as a nucleus, he gathered a little band of fifteen to twenty adventurers, and soon made his name a terror in the lawless guerrilla warfare of the day. His fighting was of the prevailing type, justifiable, if at all, only on the score of defensive retaliation, and some of his acts were as criminal and atrocious as the worst of those committed by the Border Ruffians.[1] His losses, one son murdered, another wounded to the death, and a third rendered insane from cruel treatment, are scarcely compensated by the transitory notoriety he gathered in a few fool-hardy skirmishes.
James Redpath, "Life of John Brown," p. 48.
Sanborn, in the "Atlantic," April, 1872.
These varied experiences give us something of a clue to his character: a strong will; great physical energy; sanguine, fanatical temperament; unbounded courage and little wisdom; crude, visionary ideality; the inspiration of biblical precepts and Old Testament hero-worship; and ambition curbed to irritation by the hard fetters of labor, privation, and enforced endurance. In association, habit, language, and conduct, he was clean, but coarse; honest, but rude. In disposition he mingled the sacrificing tenderness with the sacrificial sternness of his prototypes in Jewish history. He could lay his own child on the altar without a pang. The strongest element of his character was religious fanaticism. Taught from earliest childhood to "fear God and keep his commandments," he believed firmly in the divine authenticity of the Bible, and memorized much of its contents. His favorite texts became literal and imperative mandates; he came to feel that he bore the commission and enjoyed the protection of the Almighty. In his Kansas camps he prayed and saw visions; believed he wielded the sword of the Lord and of Gideon; had faith that the angels encompassed him. He desired no other safeguard than his own ideas of justice and his own convictions of duty. These ideas and convictions, however, refused obedience to accepted laws and morals, and were mere fantastic and pernicious outgrowths of his religious fanaticism. His courage partook of the recklessness of insanity. He did not count odds. "What are five to one?" he asked; and at another time he said, "One man in the right, ready to die, will chase a thousand." Perhaps he even believed he held a charmed life, for he boasted that he had been fired at thirty times and only his hair had been touched. In personal appearance he was tall and slender, with rather a military bearing. He had an impressive, half-persuasive, half-commanding manner. He was always very secretive, affected much mystery in movements, came and went abruptly, was direct and dogmatic to bluntness in his conversation. His education was scant, his reading limited; he wrote strong phrases in bad orthography. If we may believe the intimations from himself and those who knew him best, he had not only acquired a passionate hatred of the institution of slavery, but had for twenty years nursed the longing to become a liberator of slaves in the Southern States. To this end he read various stories of insurrections, and meditated on the vicissitudes, chances, and strategy of partisan warfare. A year's border fighting in Kansas not only suddenly put thought into action, but his personal and family sacrifices intensified his visionary ambition into a stern and inflexible purpose.
It is impossible to trace exactly how and when the Harper's Ferry invasion first took practical shape in John Brown's mind, but the indications are that it grew little by little out of his Kansas experience. His earliest collisions with the Border Ruffians occurred the spring and summer of 1856. In the autumn of that year the United States troops dispersed his band, and generally suppressed the civil war. In January, 1857, we find him in the Eastern States, appealing for arms and supplies to various committees and in various places, alleging that he desired to organize and equip a company of one hundred minute-men, who were "mixed up with the people of Kansas," but who should be ready on call to rush to the defense of freedom. This appeal only partly succeeded. From one committee he obtained authority as agent over certain arms stored in Iowa, the custody and control of which had been in dispute. From another committee he obtained a portion of the clothing he desired. From still other sources he received certain moneys, but not sufficient for his requirements. Two circumstances, however, indicate that he was practicing a deception upon the committees and public. He entered into a contract with a blacksmith, in Collinsville, Connecticut, to manufacture him 1000 pikes of a certain pattern,[2] to be completed in 90 days, and paid $550 on the contract. There is no record that he mentioned this matter to any committee. His proposed Kansas minute-men were only to be one hundred in number, and the pikes could not be for them; his explanation to the blacksmith, that they would be a good weapon of defense for Kansas settlers, was clearly a subterfuge. These pikes, ordered about March 23, 1857, were without doubt intended for his Virginia invasion; and in fact the identical lot, finished after long delay, under the same contract, were shipped to him in September, 1859, and were actually used in his Harper's Ferry attempt. The other circumstance is that, about the time of his contract for the pikes, he also, without the knowledge of committees or friends, engaged an adventurer, named Forbes, to go West and give military instruction to his company—a measure neither useful nor practicable for Kansas defense. These two acts may be taken as the first preparation for Harper's Ferry.