Part 5 (1/2)
If Mr. Lincoln's presence in Was.h.i.+ngton during two sessions in Congress did not add materially to either his local or national fame, it was of incalculable benefit in other respects. It afforded him a close inspection of the complex machinery of the Federal government and its relation to that of the States, and enabled him to notice both the easy routine and the occasional friction of their movements. It brought him into contact and, to some degree, intimate companions.h.i.+p with political leaders from all parts of the Union, and gave him the opportunity of joining in the caucus and the national convention that nominated General Taylor for President. It broadened immensely the horizon of his observation, and the sharp personal rivalries he noted at the center of the nation opened to him new lessons in the study of human nature. His quick intelligence acquired knowledge quite as, or even more, rapidly by process of logical intuition than by mere dry, laborious study; and it was the inestimable experience of this single term in the Congress of the United States which prepared him for his coming, yet undreamed-of, responsibilities, as fully as it would have done the ordinary man in a dozen.
Mr. Lincoln had frankly acknowledged to his friend Speed, after his election in 1846, that ”being elected to Congress, though I am very grateful to our friends for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected.” It has already been said that an agreement had been reached among the several Springfield aspirants, that they would limit their ambition to a single term, and take turns in securing and enjoying the coveted distinction; and Mr. Lincoln remained faithful to this agreement. When the time to prepare for the election of 1848 approached, he wrote to his law partner:
”It is very pleasant to learn from you that there are some who desire that I should be reelected. I most heartily thank them for their kind partiality; and I can say, as Mr. Clay said of the annexation of Texas, that 'personally I would not object' to a reelection, although I thought at the time, and still think, it would be quite as well for me to return to the law at the end of a single term. I made the declaration that I would not be a candidate again, more from a wish to deal fairly with others, to keep peace among our friends, and to keep the district from going to the enemy, than for any cause personal to myself; so that, if it should so happen that n.o.body else wishes to be elected, I could not refuse the people the right of sending me again. But to enter myself as a compet.i.tor of others, or to authorize any one so to enter me, is what my word and honor forbid.”
Judge Stephen T. Logan, his late law partner, was nominated for the place, and heartily supported not only by Mr. Lincoln, but also by the Whigs of the district. By this time, however, the politics of the district had undergone a change by reason of the heavy emigration to Illinois at that period, and Judge Logan was defeated.
Mr. Lincoln's strict and sensitive adherence to his promises now brought him a disappointment which was one of those blessings in disguise so commonly deplored for the time being by the wisest and best. A number of the Western members of Congress had joined in a recommendation to President-elect Taylor to give Colonel E.D. Baker a place in his cabinet, a reward he richly deserved for his talents, his party service, and the military honor he had won in the Mexican War. When this application bore no fruit, the Whigs of Illinois, expecting at least some encouragement from the new administration, laid claim to a bureau appointment, that of Commissioner of the General Land Office, in the new Department of the Interior, recently established.
”I believe that, so far as the Whigs in Congress are concerned,” wrote Lincoln to Speed twelve days before Taylor's inauguration, ”I could have the General Land Office almost by common consent; but then Sweet and Don Morrison and Browning and Cyrus Edwards all want it, and what is worse, while I think I could easily take it myself, I fear I shall have trouble to get it for any other man in Illinois.”
Unselfishly yielding his own chances, he tried to induce the four Illinois candidates to come to a mutual agreement in favor of one of their own number. They were so tardy in settling their differences as to excite his impatience, and he wrote to a Was.h.i.+ngton friend:
”I learn from Was.h.i.+ngton that a man by the name of b.u.t.terfield will probably be appointed Commissioner of the General Land Office, This ought not to be.... Some kind friends think I ought to be an applicant, but I am for Mr. Edwards. Try to defeat b.u.t.terfield, and, in doing so, use Mr. Edwards, J.L.D. Morrison, or myself, whichever you can to best advantage.”
As the situation grew persistently worse, Mr. Lincoln at length, about the first of June, himself became a formal applicant. But the delay resulting from his devotion to his friends had dissipated his chances.
b.u.t.terfield received the appointment, and the defeat was aggravated when, a few months later, his unrelenting spirit of justice and fairness impelled him to write a letter defending b.u.t.terfield and the Secretary of the Interior from an attack by one of Lincoln's warm personal but indiscreet friends in the Illinois legislature. It was, however, a fortunate escape. In the four succeeding years Mr. Lincoln qualified himself for better things than the monotonous drudgery of an administrative bureau at Was.h.i.+ngton. It is probable that this defeat also enabled him more easily to pa.s.s by another temptation. The Taylor administration, realizing its ingrat.i.tude, at length, in September, offered him the governors.h.i.+p of the recently organized territory of Oregon; but he replied:
”On as much reflection as I have had time to give the subject, I cannot consent to accept it.”
VII
Repeal of the Missouri Compromise--State Fair Debate--Peoria Debate--Trumbull Elected--Letter to Robinson--The Know-Nothings--Decatur Meeting--Bloomington Convention--Philadelphia Convention--Lincoln's Vote for Vice-President--Fremont and Dayton--Lincoln's Campaign Speeches--Chicago Banquet Speech
After the expiration of his term in Congress Mr. Lincoln applied himself with unremitting a.s.siduity to the practice of law, which the growth of the State in population, and the widening of his acquaintances.h.i.+p no less than his own growth in experience and legal ac.u.men, rendered ever more important and absorbing.
”In 1854,” he writes, ”his profession 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.”
Not alone Mr. Lincoln, but, indeed, the whole nation, was so aroused--the Democratic party, and nearly the entire South, to force the pa.s.sage of that repeal through Congress, and an alarmed majority, including even a considerable minority of the Democratic party in the North, to resist its pa.s.sage.
Mr. Lincoln, of course, shared the general indignation of Northern sentiment that the whole of the remaining Louisiana Territory, out of which six States, and the greater part of two more, have since been organized and admitted to the Union, should be opened to the possible extension of slavery. But two points served specially to enlist his energy in the controversy. One was personal, in that Senator Douglas of Illinois, by whom the repeal was championed, and whose influence as a free-State senator and powerful Democratic leader alone made the repeal possible, had been his personal antagonist in Illinois politics for almost twenty years. The other was moral, in that the new question involved the elemental principles of the American government, the fundamental maxim of the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal. His intuitive logic needed no demonstration that bank, tariff, internal improvements, the Mexican War, and their related incidents, were questions of pa.s.sing expediency; but that this sudden reaction, needlessly grafted upon a routine statute to organize a new territory, was the unmistakable herald of a coming struggle which might transform republican inst.i.tutions.
It was in January, 1854, that the accidents of a Senate debate threw into Congress and upon the country the firebrand of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The repeal was not consummated till the month of May; and from May until the autumn elections the flame of acrimonious discussion ran over the whole country like a wild fire. There is no record that Mr. Lincoln took any public part in the discussion until the month of September, but it is very clear that he not only carefully watched its progress, but that he studied its phases of development, its historical origins, and its legal bearings with close industry, and gathered from party literature and legislative doc.u.ments a harvest of substantial facts and data, rather than the wordy campaign phrases and explosive epithets with which more impulsive students and speakers were content to produce their oratorical effects. Here we may again quote Mr. Lincoln's exact written statement of the manner in which he resumed his political activity:
”In the autumn of that year [1854] he took the stump, with no broader practical aim or object than to secure, if possible, the reelection of Hon. Richard Yates to Congress. His speeches at once attracted a more marked attention than they had ever before done. As the canva.s.s proceeded he was drawn to different parts of the State, outside of Mr.
Yates's district. He did not abandon the law, but gave his attention by turns to that and politics. The State Agricultural Fair was at Springfield that year, and Douglas was announced to speak there.”
The new question had created great excitement and uncertainty in Illinois politics, and there were abundant signs that it was beginning to break up the organization of both the Whig and the Democratic parties. This feeling brought together at the State fair an unusual number of local leaders from widely scattered counties, and almost spontaneously a sort of political tournament of speech-making broke out.
In this Senator Douglas, doubly conspicuous by his champions.h.i.+p of the Nebraska Bill in Congress, was expected to play the leading part, while the opposition, by a common impulse, called upon Lincoln to answer him.
Lincoln performed the task with such aptness and force, with such freshness of argument, ill.u.s.trations from history, and citations from authorities, as secured him a decided oratorical triumph, and lifted him at a single bound to the leaders.h.i.+p of the opposition to Douglas's propagandism. Two weeks later, Douglas and Lincoln met at Peoria in a similar debate, and on his return to Springfield Lincoln wrote out and printed his speech in full.
The reader who carefully examines this speech will at once be impressed with the genius which immediately made Mr. Lincoln a power in American politics. His grasp of the subject is so comprehensive, his statement so clear, his reasoning so convincing, his language so strong and eloquent by turns, that the wonderful power he manifested in the discussions and debates of the six succeeding years does not surpa.s.s, but only amplifies this, his first examination of the whole brood of questions relating to slavery precipitated upon the country by Douglas's repeal. After a searching history of the Missouri Compromise, he attacks the demoralizing effects and portentous consequences of its repeal.
”This declared indifference,” he says, ”but, as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world; enables the enemies of free inst.i.tutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites; causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity; and especially because it forces so many good men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty, criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.... Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature--opposition to it in his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism, and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow. Repeal the Missouri Compromise, repeal all compromises, repeal the Declaration of Independence, repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It still will be the abundance of man's heart that slavery extension is wrong, and out of the abundance of his heart his mouth will continue to speak.”
With argument as impetuous, and logic as inexorable, he disposes of Douglas's plea of popular sovereignty:
”Here, or at Was.h.i.+ngton, I would not trouble myself with the oyster laws of Virginia, or the cranberry laws of Indiana. The doctrine of self-government is right--absolutely and eternally right--but it has no just application as here attempted. Or perhaps I should rather say, that whether it has such application depends upon whether a negro is not or is a man. If he is not a man, in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just what he pleases with him. But if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent a total destruction of self-government to say that he too shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government--that is despotism.... I particularly object to the new position which the avowed principle of this Nebraska law gives to slavery in the body politic. I object to it because it a.s.sumes that there can be moral right in the enslaving of one man by another. I object to it as a dangerous dalliance for a free people--a sad evidence that, feeling prosperity, we forget right; that liberty, as a principle, we have ceased to revere.... Little by little, but steadily as man's march to the grave, we have been giving up the old for the new faith.