A Disease in the Public Mind (36 page)

CHAPTER 20

The Whole World Is Watching

In Illinois, Abraham Lincoln decided to challenge a weakened Stephen A. Douglas when he announced his candidacy for another term in the U.S. Senate. Like other midwestern states, Illinois had a split personality. Its southern counties had been settled by Kentuckians and Missourians, its northern tier by New Englanders. Douglas was popular in the southern counties and disliked in the northern ones. But Douglas had also had the courage to repudiate a southern attempt to seize control of Kansas, giving him statewide appeal.

Kansas proslavery settlers had gathered in the town of Lecompton and cooked up a constitution, which they proclaimed as the law of the land. President Buchanan, remembering that he was elected by mostly southern votes, recognized it. “Kansas,” he announced, “was as much a slave state as Georgia or South Carolina.” After investigating the rigged election that supposedly approved the constitution, Senator Douglas condemned it as an unethical grab for power and called for new elections to determine Kansas's status. The antislavery voters had won by a huge margin.

A furious Buchanan had declared war on Douglas inside the Democratic Party. Postmasters, marshals, and land agents appointed on the Senator's say-so were dismissed in wholesale lots. When Douglas began his run for reelection, Buchanan fielded a third candidate, and he ordered Democratic newspapers and politicians to oppose the Little Giant in every possible way.
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The president had already used his long years in Washington to bring the Supreme Court into the quarrel about slavery in what he hoped was a decisive way. The court had been inclined to let stand a case brought by Dred Scott, a Missouri slave who was suing for his freedom because he had resided in Illinois, a free state, for several years with his master, an army doctor, before returning to Missouri. The state supreme court had rejected his appeal, because he had supposedly returned to Missouri voluntarily. Buchanan persuaded one of the associate justices, an old friend, to pressure the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case.

Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney wrote the majority opinion, which declared that Scott must remain a slave. Congress had no power to interfere with slavery in the territories, Taney argued, because the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. A slave was property and was never intended to be anything else. The “enslaved African race” was not included in the Declaration of Independence's assertion that all men were created equal. Negroes were not regarded as citizens in the Constitution. The Maryland-born Taney sought to settle the dispute over slavery, once and for all.

Instead, the chief justice ignited another tremendous uproar. The decision made thousands of Northerners wonder if William Lloyd Garrison was right when he repeatedly burned the Constitution in public.
New York Tribune
editor Horace Greeley wondered why six million Southerners had more influence on the court than sixteen million Northerners. Since a majority of the court's justices were Southerners like Taney, the myth of The Slave Power got yet another boost.
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In this atmosphere, Lincoln's speech accepting the Republican nomination for Douglas's U.S. Senate seat was one of the boldest of his life. When he read it to the state party's leaders, they urged him not to deliver it. He went ahead, thrusting himself into the central issue confronting the nation. “We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated . . . with the confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation,” he said. Instead of ceasing, the agitation has “constantly augmented.” He was now convinced that “only a major crisis would end it.”

Then came words that reverberated around the nation. “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 that 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 the 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.”

Many people would seize on these words to claim that Lincoln foresaw—or even helped to start—the Civil War. Later generations would use it to justify the war's million dead. But Lincoln was not talking about a crisis he believed was imminent. He thought his solution, confining slavery to the southern states, might take a long time to eliminate the evil institution. In some notes he made during his contest with Senator Douglas, which he never used in his speeches, Lincoln wrote: “I have not allowed myself to forget that the abolition of the slave trade by Great Britain was agitated a hundred years before it was a final success.”

Another thing worth remembering: Lincoln was keenly aware that he had a rival for the leadership of the Republican Party, Senator William Seward of New York. In 1856 Seward had made a speech, describing the tension between North and South as an “irrepressible conflict” that would only be decided by a “higher law.” This brinksmanship thrilled the abolitionist wing of the new party. The House Divided speech showed Lincoln, too, could play the scare tactics game. Like Seward, who immediately began denying
that he favored a civil war, Lincoln rapidly backed away from his confrontational words.
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Even after the Dred Scott decision and President Buchanan's interference in Kansas, Lincoln remained convinced that the Founding Fathers' intention to eliminate slavery was still at work, in a slow but inexorable progress. Lincoln insisted in the debates about slavery at the Constitutional Convention and in the first sessions of Congress, “You will not find a single man saying that slavery is a good thing.” Why? “The framers believed that the Constitution would outlast slavery” if the peculiar institution were isolated in the states where it was legal.

Lincoln did not succumb to the paranoid version of The Slave Power that was gripping so many minds in New England and the Yankee Midwest. He only said that people were understandably wondering if there was a conspiracy, after Dred Scott and Buchanan's attempt to wangle a slave state label for Kansas. Lincoln felt Democratic Party explanations were in order to prevent the darkest, most worrisome conclusion. But he continued to hope that gradualism combined with compensated emancipation would take a steady toll on the evil institution. In 1859, he told another friend he was “quite sure it [slavery] would not outlast the century.” Lincoln did not—and could not—know that John Brown was looming on the horizon.
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Lincoln and Douglas met in seven debates during which Lincoln did not hide his antipathy to slavery. “If slavery is not wrong,” he said, “nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel.” But he was up against a tough opponent who had a rare ability to read the temper of the public mind of 1858. Douglas claimed he was indifferent to whether slavery was voted up or down in any territory or new state. He saw himself as an advocate of American freedom, even when there were times that free men made choices that disturbed other free men. This was a policy a lot of Americans preferred to unnerving ultimatums.
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In his speeches, Douglas repeatedly accused Lincoln of seeking equality between the two races, and even “amalgamation”—a word that scientists
like Harvard's Louis Agassiz had made frightening as well as reprehensible. Lincoln was aware that Illinois was a divided state, and his reply to this accusation should be understood in the context of his struggle to win the election. At one point he remarked that there was no need for him to campaign at all in northern Illinois, which backed him before he said a word, and no point in even visiting the southern counties, so firmly were they committed to the Democratic candidate. The election was decided in the mixed population of the central counties, where Douglas's approach had a potentially fatal impact on Lincoln's candidacy.

On the platform in these counties, Lincoln firmly and even vehemently denied he had anything like racial equality or amalgamation in mind. “I will say that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.” Nor did he favor making blacks voters or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office. “There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social or political equality,” he said, sounding like a reincarnation of John C. Calhoun.
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These words were not far from Thomas Jefferson's racist doubts about black and white equality and the improbability of peaceful proximity. Lincoln too favored colonization as the only practical solution, even though by 1858 it was evident that American blacks all but unanimously rejected it. With 500,000 free blacks and 4,000,000 enslaved, the American Colonization Society was sending only a few hundred blacks to Liberia each year. The
New York Herald
called the society “an old fogy affair.”

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The outcome of Lincoln's contest with Douglas showed that the Democrat's racist attacks had hit home. The Little Giant carried seventeen out of twenty-five legislative districts in central Illinois. Lincoln's attempt to make the Kansas-Nebraska Act a proslavery policy faltered when Douglas pointed to his opposition to the Lecompton Constitution. Those central districts gave Douglas the margin of victory in the Illinois legislature, which chose
U.S. senators in accordance with the Constitution. Not until the twentieth century were senators elected by popular vote.

Lincoln assumed his defeat ended his political career. He spoke of being ready to “serve in the ranks” to help Republicans win an eventual victory and keep the territories free of slavery. But many Republicans who had listened to his speeches or read excerpts from them in the newspapers had other ideas. Some of them began backing him for president in 1860.
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On October 21, 1857, Colonel Robert E. Lee, now commander of the Second Cavalry Regiment in Texas, received dismaying news. His father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, had died. Lee's two oldest sons, Custis and Rooney, were both on duty in the army. (As sons will, before and since, they had ignored their father's advice and chosen military careers.) His third son, Robert Jr., was away at boarding school and was too young (fourteen) to deal with the crisis. Mary Custis Lee was a semi-invalid, crippled by arthritis. Colonel Lee requested leave and rushed to Arlington.

There he found little to comfort him. The old house was a decaying wreck with a leaky roof and bushes and weeds growing on its once stately lawns. His father-in-law's will had freed the 196 slaves he owned on three plantations, in imitation of George Washington's example, and left Arlington to Mary Custis Lee during her lifetime. After her death, the colonel's son Custis Lee would inherit it. Grandfather Custis left the two other plantations to Rooney and Robert Jr. He also bequeathed $10,000 (the equivalent of perhaps $200,000 in twenty-first-century money) to each of the Lees' four daughters. He had borrowed against Arlington and he wished these debts—about $10,000—repaid as soon as possible.

The will directed that the slaves should be freed within the next five years, or sooner if the bequests were made and the debts were paid. If Lee wanted to sell some of the land to raise money, he was free to do so. But the colonel was reluctant to choose this solution. On his small army salary, he
was unlikely to have anything to leave his children. Their grandfather's legacies were their only hope of acquiring a decent inheritance. Lee decided, pending approval of the courts, to make Arlington profitable first, pay the debts and the legacies, and then begin freeing the slaves. His wife, Mary, agreed that this was the best course.
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Both Lees were revealing a psychological flaw of southern slave owners—a reluctance, amounting to an inability, to understand the deep desire for freedom that was in the soul of almost every slave. They thought that Arlington's sixty-three slaves, who had not been called upon for much labor in the years preceding their master's death, would agree to work—and work hard—to turn the plantation into a profitable enterprise.

The opposite rapidly proved to be the case. The slaves were sullen, uncooperative, and often defiant. Some told Colonel Lee they considered themselves free and accused him of bad faith in detaining them. Lee had no experience in dealing with slaves, and he fell back on the routines he had learned in his decades in the U.S. Army. Orders were to be obeyed. Disobedience merited punishment.

This policy led to several run-ins with recalcitrant slaves that came close to violence. Mrs. Lee told a friend, “The attitude and bad conduct of these slaves . . . has wounded me sorely.” She was probably talking about Arlington's house servants, who had seemed devoted to her. For many years, Mary Custis Lee had been a promoter of colonization. She set up a Sunday school at Arlington in which she and her daughters taught the slaves to read and write, and she urged them to consider Liberia as a possible homeland when they became free. In her diary she hoped that they could “carry the light of Christianity to that dark heathen country.” She saw this as an attempt to do something “for the benefit of those so entirely dependent upon one's will and pleasure.”