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

and a decent living that he knew to be the motors of his own life. Unlike a number of his fellow Whigs, members of a defensive social elite anxious in the face of democratic upheaval, Lincoln was moved less by questions of class than by a wish to widen opportunities for individual fulfillment through economic transformation. 29
    The institution of slavery, though negating the meritocratic society he prized, remained very much on the periphery of Lincoln’s field of vision during his years of state-level politics. Even so, the main elements of his opposition to the South’s peculiar institution were already in place before he stepped into the national arena. His first recorded statement on the subject was a response to a set of resolutions on abolitionism and slavery which the Illinois Assembly had endorsed in January 1837. Though a free state, Illinois felt powerfully the influence of its southern-born settlers, the largest element of the population in its early years: they very much shaped its stance on racial issues, failing narrowly to introduce slavery in the early 1820s, but ensuring that a system of indenture and restrictive “Black Laws” controlled the relatively small population of free blacks. While resisting the request of some slave states that abolitionism be suppressed by law, the Assembly readily affirmed its strong disapproval of abolitionist societies and doctrines, and declared that “the right of property in slaves is sacred to the slaveholding States by the Federal Constitution.” A few weeks later Lincoln and Dan Stone, a fellow Whig lawyer from Springfield, presented a protest to the House. Its significance derives not from their view of slaveholders’ rights, for the two Sangamon representatives occupied the same constitutional ground as their fellow assemblymen. Rather it lies in the nuanced difference between the Assembly’s direct assault on abolitionist teaching itself and Lincoln’s statement “that the
promulgation
of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its [slavery’s] evils.” It lies in the more positive emphasis Lincoln gives to the constitutional authority of Congress over the future of slavery in the District of Columbia. It lies most of all in his unequivocal insistence “that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy.” 30
    Lincoln in later years often reflected on his antislavery disposition. “I am naturally antislavery,” he wrote in 1864. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.” That moral abhorrence may have been absorbed from his parents and stepmother, whose aversion to slavery is well authenticated, and whose church fellowship with antislavery Baptists only underscored their revulsion. After Lincoln spent the first seven years of his life in a slaveholding county, his subsequent acquaintance with the institution of slavery would have been mostly random and intermittent. He would have seen large concentrations of slaves and stark examples of slave-trading on his two trips by flatboat to New Orleans in 1828 and 1831. On the second of these, according to his cousin John Hanks, the sight of “Negroes Chained—maltreated—whipt & scourged . . . ran its iron in him then & there.” On trips to Kentucky to visit friends or his wife’s family he probably saw the paraphernalia of slave-selling at Lexington. In 1841 he certainly made a steamboat journey down the Ohio from Louisville in the company of a dozen chained slaves, “strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line.” Some have contrasted the earnest intensity with which Lincoln later referred to this experience (“That sight was a continual torment to me,” he recalled in 1855) with the tolerant, even amused acceptance he is judged to have shown at the time, when writing to Mary Speed, the half sister of his close friend Joshua. But in fact that earlier letter also alludes to the