Read Online Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power by Richard J. Carwardine - Free Book Online

kindred spirit, was the moral and philosophical clarity with which he identified the larger issues at stake in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. As well as engaging in a Union-threatening piece of political perfidy, Lincoln argued, Douglas and his allies had reversed the “settled policy” of the republic at a stroke. The new nation had followed Thomas Jefferson’s lead in excluding slavery from the territories of the Old Northwest, and in 1820 the terms of that exclusion had been applied again within the northern portion of the Louisiana Purchase. No other policy would have been consistent with the principles of natural rights, human equality, and political freedom laid out in the Virginian’s Declaration of Independence. Douglas’s novel principle of “popular sovereignty,” by contrast, assumed a moral neutrality toward slavery, leaving it to local communities to decide the issue for themselves—not with reference to the principles of civil liberty but in line only with material self-interest. His claim that the repeal of the Missouri Compromise had established “the sacred right of self-government” ran aground on the rocks of Negro manhood: “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
himsel
f
? 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. If the negro is a
man,
why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal’; and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.” Describing Jefferson’s Declaration as the “sheet anchor of American republicanism,” Lincoln insisted that no man was “good enough to govern another man,
without that other’s consent.
”
    Douglas might proclaim a moral indifference toward slavery, Lincoln explained, but this posture masked his and his allies’ “covert
real
zeal” for its spread; the fraudulent, “lullaby” argument, that climate and natural conditions made the new territories unsuitable for slavery, diverted attention from “the great Behemoth of danger” threatened by slavery’s extension; the “first few” having once fixed slavery in Nebraska, “the subsequent many” would find it hard to be rid of it. This was the closest Lincoln got to employing what was one of the most powerful themes of anti-Nebraska agitation, the maneuverings of a conspiratorial southern “slave power.” Instead, his emphasis lay on the stark ethical choices which now confronted the nation. The Nebraska Act, by putting slavery “on the high road to extension and perpetuity,” endangered the moral foundations of the republic. It gave the peculiar institution new status; it assumed “that there CAN be MORAL RIGHT in the enslaving of one man by another.” But, observed Lincoln, slavery in reality “is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature—opposition to it, [in] . . . his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism.” With a preacher’s scorn he scoffed at the folly of the Nebraska men: “Repeal the Missouri compromise[,] . . . repeal the declaration of independence . . . [but] you still can not repeal human nature. It still will be the abundance of man’s heart, that slavery extension is wrong.”
    In emphasizing the ethical polarities of slave and free societies, and by implication their incompatibility, Lincoln had set at least one foot on radical ground. He stood close to the position he would adopt explicitly in a private letter to the Kentucky lawyer George Robertson the following year: “Our political problem now is ‘Can we, as a nation, continue together
permanently—forever—
half slave, and half free?’ ” His most celebrated formulation of that question lay a few years off, to be posed in the celebrated “House Divided” speech, but the intellectual