Read Online Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln by Richard Brookhiser - Free Book Online

System, Lincoln wrote Stuart glumly, was “put downin a lump.”
    The collapse of the System hobbled Illinois for a time. But the state was growing so rapidly that it soon recovered; the canal to Lake Michigan and the most important railroads all got built eventually. Young, healthy communities can afford to roll the dice.
    The demise of the System would hobble Lincoln’s career, too—he stayed loyal to it to the bitter end, vainly urging the legislature “to save something . . . fromthe general wreck”—but he eventually found other issues. Good politicians know how to move on, sooner or later.
    In passing, Lincoln touched on what was then a marginal issue for him—slavery. The 1830s saw the emergence of an American movement to abolish it. Older critics of slavery, such as the Quakers, were joined by a more aggressive breed of polemicists. William Lloyd Garrison’s new Boston weekly, The Liberator , set the tone: “Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen—but urge me not to use moderation in a causelike the present.”
    For all their fervor, abolitionists remained a tiny minority. Democrats and Whigs were both national parties with slaveholders in their ranks; abolition threatened to upend the economy and society of half the country and annul the Constitution’s protections of slavery. (Each slave was counted as three-fifths of a freeman in apportioning seats in the Houseof Representatives—Article I, Section 2—and slaves escaping to free states had to be returned to owners who sought them—Article IV, Section 2.) Although Illinois was a free state, most Illinoisans had little love for Negroes, free or enslaved. In January 1837 the legislature voted overwhelmingly in support of a motion condemning “abolition societies.”
    At the tail end of the session in March, Lincoln and Dan Stone, another lawmaker from Sangamon County, entered a brief Protest on Slavery into the record. Although the two men agreed with their colleagues in disapproving of abolitionists, they declared “that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy.” And while they acknowledged that Congress could not “interfere” with slavery in the states where it existed, they pointed out that it could abolish it in the District of Columbia, which it governed directly. Even so, they went on, Congress should not act “unless at the request of the peopleof the District.”
    Why go to this trouble on an issue of minor importance—Lincoln was then far more concerned with the System—and for no practical effect? (No one else in the legislature joined Lincoln and Stone in their Protest.) The arguments of the Protest showed some characteristic features of Lincoln’s mind. He respected both legal punctilio—hence the parsing of Congress’s powers—and public opinion—Congress should be guided by the District’s voters. He also had a stubborn concern for first principles—hence the abstract statement about slavery’s injustice. The Protest resembled the course of his own education—it was careful, incremental, and self-directed. He worked up his own thoughts, and he would not forget anything once he had thought it.
    If there had been no Civil War from which to look back on it, Lincoln’s 1837 Protest would be legislative trivia, mere lint. But perhaps most principles are lint until they are challenged.

Four
    T HOMAS P AINE , L AUGHTER, AND R EASON
    L INCOLN’S TWENTIES PASSED AS THOSE OF MOST PEOPLE DO , in loving and working (he was less lucky than average in the first, luckier in the second). Meanwhile he continued to educate himself. In this decade he encountered Thomas Paine—an eccentric founding father who gave him provisional answers to some big questions, and who encouraged him in certain styles of thinking and writing. Paine