Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

By striking down the Missouri Compromise, forbidding territories from deciding whether they were slave or free, and expanding slaveholder rights to pursue their slaves or willingly transport them into free areas, the Dred Scott decision seemed to resolve the furious debate over slavery that was central to US politics from the founding of the nation. It opened the door to the possibility that slavery could and would spread across the land and that Congress could do nothing to prohibit it, short of a constitutional amendment. Vilified as an abomination by all who held slavery to be a repugnant institution while seemingly resolving the slavery issue in the South’s favor, the Dred Scott decision also proved critical to Lincoln’s eventual election as president.

Without the Dred Scott decision, Abraham Lincoln would almost certainly be forgotten by history. Hence, to form a proper sense of Lincoln, we need to understand who he was before March 1857; that is, who he was before the Dred Scott decision came down and Democrat James Buchanan took the oath of office to become the fifteenth president of the United States. And we need to understand what the debate over slavery—and Lincoln’s part in it—looked like before and then after the Dred Scott case. We argue that pre–Dred Scott, Lincoln was little more than an aspiring but mostly inept failed politician, although a rather capable, smart, articulate, and successful lawyer. As we will see, after Dred Scott, Lincoln did not hesitate to use the subject of slavery to stoke the engine of civil war as a necessity to advance his political fortune and just maybe his sincerely held beliefs.

Lincoln Before Dred Scott

LINCOLN APPARENTLY HAD A LIFELONG DISLIKE OF SLAVERY. SOME OF his ancestors had been antislavery Quakers and his father, Thomas Lincoln, is reported by Abraham to have left Kentucky for two reasons: (1) because Kentucky had weak property rights laws and so his homestead was at constant risk of being lost; and (2) he disliked slavery, ultimately moving his family to Illinois, where it was prohibited. Although Abraham Lincoln personally found slavery objectionable on moral grounds, still abolition did not occupy a prominent place in his early political career. He addressed his earlier position on slavery in a speech he gave in Chicago in July 1858, a year after the Dred Scott decision, noting that “I have always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska Bill began.”15 The Nebraska Bill (which we know as the Kansas-Nebraska Act) was the basis of the idea of popular sovereignty, which was strongly supported, especially by northern Democrats like Stephen Douglas.

Although pre–Dred Scott, popular sovereignty was thought to solve the question of how territories would determine whether they were slave or free, as a practical matter it was pretty much a disaster. The idea of popular sovereignty led to a stampede of proslavery and antislavery settlers in Kansas and Nebraska, each trying to tip the popular-sovereignty electoral advantage their way, resulting in extensive violence between the two factions. In any event, however popular sovereignty might have worked given more time, the Dred Scott decision eliminated the legal foundation for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The people in a territory of the United States simply had no legal right to deprive lawful slaveholders of their property just because a slaveholder moved to the territory.

Prior to Dred Scott and the “Nebraska Bill,” as Lincoln said, he was mostly quiet on the subject. Robert Browne, for instance, claimed that Lincoln told him in 1854: “The slavery question often bothered me as far back as 1836–40. I was troubled and grieved over it; but after the annexation of Texas I gave it up, believing as I now do, that God will settle it, and settle it right, and that he will, in some inscrutable way, restrict the spread of so great an evil; but for the present it is our duty to wait.”16 This statement is quite revealing of Lincoln’s thinking. It is noteworthy that, as of 1854, he acknowledged that he attached no urgency to the slavery question. He understood his duty as being to wait rather than to agitate. Furthermore, the focus of his concern at that time was not the continuation of slavery per se, but its spread. Indeed, according to Browne, he did not even call upon God to end slavery but only to “restrict the spread of so great an evil.” It is exactly Lincoln’s disinclination toward activism, as distinct from his apparent personal sentiment, that engendered disdain for him among such abolitionists as H. Ford Douglas, quoted in the introductory chapter, or the more famous Frederick Douglass, who expressed a low opinion of Lincoln’s prospects of addressing slavery successfully prior to the firing on Fort Sumter. Lincoln had, after all, stated clearly that as president he would enforce the Constitution, including Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3, which states, “No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.”

That said, Lincoln was not utterly silent on the slavery question in his early political career. As we learned in the Introduction, during his one term in Congress he introduced a bill that would have ensured the rights of slaveholders to pursue fugitive slaves in the District of Columbia, thereby extending the Constitution’s reach to the pursuit of fugitive slaves outside the states. The actual piece of legislation was more complex, however, than the abolitionist’s account that simply condemned it for bringing to the district a fugitive slave statute from which it had thus far been immune. The actual bill attempted to find a balance between antislavery interests and the interests of slaveholders in not losing ownership of their slaves by bringing them to the district. This was, of course, of considerable importance to congressmen who traveled with slaves. A bill that protected elected officials’ ownership rights was bound to garner their support. But the bill also sought to prevent the spread of slavery to the district by setting a date after which slaves, other than fugitive slaves or those owned by members of Congress, would be freed. This double agenda characterized much of Lincoln’s attitude toward slavery before the Dred Scott decision made it irrelevant.

Even in his role as a practicing lawyer, Lincoln pursued a balanced approach between his personal dislike of slavery and his interest in sustaining adequate protection of slaveholder rights under the Constitution. Illinois barred slavery, and also tried to bar the entry of free blacks into the state. Free it was, but hardly a bastion of abolitionism and certainly not a place arguing for equal protection for free blacks under the law. Lincoln joined together in a legal action with Lyman Trumbull, later senator from Illinois, and Gustave Koerner to undermine the legal foundation of the indentured servitude system applied to African Americans in Illinois in what amounted to a reworking of the antislavery law. They succeeded in gaining a court ruling that stated that in Illinois there was a presumption that blacks were free. Despite this good turn, it was also the case that Abraham Lincoln “appeared in so few suits in behalf of negroes . . . because he didn’t want to be a party to a violation of the Fugitive Slave law.”17 Of the more than five thousand cases in which Lincoln was involved as a lawyer, only thirty-four concerned the free blacks in Springfield, where he practiced law.18 And then, too, he also represented slave owners. As with any rising lawyer, he seems not to have turned away business because of personal scruples regarding slavery.