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

violent sundering of slave families, the perpetuity of their condition, and the “ruthless and unrelenting” cruelty to which they were exposed; its detachment, if such it is, lies in its near-anthropological reflection on the slaves’ apparent cheerfulness in the face of these horrors and in its endorsement of the theological truth that “ ‘God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,’ or in other words, that He renders the worst of human conditions tolerable.” 31
    We of course distort the words of the younger Lincoln if we try to read them simply as a prologue to emancipation, but neither should we set aside the recollections of several acquaintances confirming the tenacity with which, from his earliest years, he held that slavery was an offense against justice and sound policy. The horrors perpetrated by slave-traders and inhumane plantation overseers helped shape his repugnance. But so, too, did the understanding of economic morality that guided his thinking more generally. Slavery stifled individual enterprise, discouraged self-discipline, and sustained a fundamental inequality: depriving human beings of the just rewards of their labor. Lincoln the protectionist, alert to justice for the laborer, was the same Lincoln who, at about the same time, sarcastically told Ward Hill Lamon, “You Virginians shed barrels of perspiration while standing off at a distance and superintending the work your slaves do for you. It is different with us. Here it is every fellow for himself, or he doesn’t get there.” 32
    The elements of Lincoln’s antislavery posture were essentially in place before he left for Washington in 1847: moral repugnance at the institution, sympathy for the slave, respect for the protection the federal Constitution afforded slavery, commitment to preserving social order, belief in the essential goodwill of the southern slaveholder, and the need for common, gradual action by North and South on a problem for which they shared responsibility. His two sessions as congressman effected no fundamental change in his views, but a novel environment and the current of events brought his antislavery vision into sharper focus. In a city a quarter of whose population was black, and which included two thousand slaves, he could not avoid encountering some of the bleakest features of the peculiar institution: the auction block and the trading warehouse. Lincoln shared his lodgings with several other Whig representatives, including Joshua Giddings from Ohio’s Western Reserve, the most luminously antislavery of all congressmen. Here, in Mrs. Sprigg’s boardinghouse, the meatiest conversations addressed the main questions before the Thirtieth Congress: the resolution of the conflict with Mexico, the organization of the ceded territories, and a variety of other slavery-related issues.
    Within three weeks of arriving in Washington Lincoln introduced a series of resolutions bearing on the outbreak of the Mexican War, a conflict which he and most Whig representatives believed had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun” by President James K. Polk’s Democratic administration to secure more territory for slavery. 33 The resolutions required the president to prove his claim that the “spot” where Mexicans in 1846 had first shed the blood of United States citizens was in fact American soil and not, as antiwar Whigs believed, a Mexican settlement. Lincoln soon followed this up with a long speech in the House surmising that a disingenuous president was “deeply conscious of being in the wrong—that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.” No doubt part of Lincoln’s purpose here was to impress his congressional colleagues. No doubt it was also, with the presidential election of 1848 on the horizon, to secure an advantage for his party (with the bloodiest fighting now over, Whigs would be less vulnerable to accusations of disloyalty). But Lincoln’s earnestness,