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Authors: Richard J. Carwardine
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framework that supported it had been fashioned in his election addresses of 1854.
It must be said that those speeches by no means marked a complete break with Lincoln’s political past. Their radicalism was qualified by persisting elements of conservative Whiggery. The lawyer who in 1847 had defended a Kentucky slaveowner—Robert Matson—in his attempt to secure the return from Illinois of his runaway slaves, and who had no doubt of the legitimacy of the harsh Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, continued to emphasize the constitutional rights of southern slaveholders. Dismantling slavery presented intractable problems: “If all earthly power were given to me,” he confessed, “I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution.” He reiterated his support for colonization and other gradual, voluntary means of the removal of slavery. He refused to entertain political and social equality for free blacks: “My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.” Earnestly, he stressed his own devoted Unionism and his lack of prejudice against the people of the South. Entrapped by circumstances not of their own making, they deserved sympathy for their virtual impotence in the face of an entrenched institution.
Lincoln founded his tolerant, encompassing nationalism, however, not on moral concessions to slaveholding but on a conviction that most southerners, in continuing to hold firm to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, shared his own view of slavery as a “monstrous injustice.” He was sure that “[t]he great majority, south as well as north, have human sympathies, of which they can no more divest themselves than they can of their sensibility to physical pain. These sympathies in the bosoms of the southern people, manifest in many ways, their sense of the wrong of slavery, and their consciousness that, after all, there is humanity in the negro.” This allowed him to build to a rhetorical and moral climax, in which he called on all Americans, “south, as well as north,” to resist the spirit of Nebraska and reenergize “the spirit of seventy-six.” In language that paralleled the spiritual warnings, cosmic meanings, and millennialist hopes of the salvationist preacher, Lincoln once more stressed the moral incompatibility of the principles at stake, and urged that Americans “repurify” their soiled “republican robe” by rededicating themselves to Jefferson’s principles and practice. “If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.”
Lincoln’s outrage and moral earnestness over the Nebraska issue surprised many in his audiences, who were expecting less seriousness and history, and more anecdotes. This newfound authority has prompted historians to dramatize the change from the Lincoln of 1849, the clever but essentially provincial and “self-centered” politician, to the powerful, broad-horizoned statesman of the anti-Nebraska struggle. Michael Burlingame, drawing on Jungian psychology, sees Lincoln’s new seriousness and enhanced stature as the product of a midlife crisis, a time when he spent hours brooding on his modest achievements in law and politics, and on the legacy he would leave. 44 Certainly, Lincoln in his early forties had good reason to take stock of his life, as the deaths of his father and, more poignantly, of his son Eddie prompted a heightened sense of his own mortality. These were years, too, when he successfully mastered Euclidean logic, a quintessential act of self-improvement that would leave its mark on all of his subsequent oratory. In the strains of the Peoria speech we hear the voice of a man who had without doubt matured during his
It must be said that those speeches by no means marked a complete break with Lincoln’s political past. Their radicalism was qualified by persisting elements of conservative Whiggery. The lawyer who in 1847 had defended a Kentucky slaveowner—Robert Matson—in his attempt to secure the return from Illinois of his runaway slaves, and who had no doubt of the legitimacy of the harsh Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, continued to emphasize the constitutional rights of southern slaveholders. Dismantling slavery presented intractable problems: “If all earthly power were given to me,” he confessed, “I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution.” He reiterated his support for colonization and other gradual, voluntary means of the removal of slavery. He refused to entertain political and social equality for free blacks: “My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.” Earnestly, he stressed his own devoted Unionism and his lack of prejudice against the people of the South. Entrapped by circumstances not of their own making, they deserved sympathy for their virtual impotence in the face of an entrenched institution.
Lincoln founded his tolerant, encompassing nationalism, however, not on moral concessions to slaveholding but on a conviction that most southerners, in continuing to hold firm to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, shared his own view of slavery as a “monstrous injustice.” He was sure that “[t]he great majority, south as well as north, have human sympathies, of which they can no more divest themselves than they can of their sensibility to physical pain. These sympathies in the bosoms of the southern people, manifest in many ways, their sense of the wrong of slavery, and their consciousness that, after all, there is humanity in the negro.” This allowed him to build to a rhetorical and moral climax, in which he called on all Americans, “south, as well as north,” to resist the spirit of Nebraska and reenergize “the spirit of seventy-six.” In language that paralleled the spiritual warnings, cosmic meanings, and millennialist hopes of the salvationist preacher, Lincoln once more stressed the moral incompatibility of the principles at stake, and urged that Americans “repurify” their soiled “republican robe” by rededicating themselves to Jefferson’s principles and practice. “If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.”
Lincoln’s outrage and moral earnestness over the Nebraska issue surprised many in his audiences, who were expecting less seriousness and history, and more anecdotes. This newfound authority has prompted historians to dramatize the change from the Lincoln of 1849, the clever but essentially provincial and “self-centered” politician, to the powerful, broad-horizoned statesman of the anti-Nebraska struggle. Michael Burlingame, drawing on Jungian psychology, sees Lincoln’s new seriousness and enhanced stature as the product of a midlife crisis, a time when he spent hours brooding on his modest achievements in law and politics, and on the legacy he would leave. 44 Certainly, Lincoln in his early forties had good reason to take stock of his life, as the deaths of his father and, more poignantly, of his son Eddie prompted a heightened sense of his own mortality. These were years, too, when he successfully mastered Euclidean logic, a quintessential act of self-improvement that would leave its mark on all of his subsequent oratory. In the strains of the Peoria speech we hear the voice of a man who had without doubt matured during his
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