Collaborators for Emancipation: Abraham Lincoln and Owen Lovejoy
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Collaborators for Emancipation: Abraham Lincoln and Owen Lovejoy
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Overview
In Collaborators for Emancipation: Abraham Lincoln and Owen Lovejoy, the authors examine the thorny issue of the pragmatism typically ascribed to Lincoln versus the radicalism of Lovejoy, and the role each played in ending slavery. Exploring the men's politics, personal traits, and religious convictions, the book traces their separate paths in life as well as their frequent interactions. Collaborators for Emancipation shows how Lincoln and Lovejoy influenced one another and analyzes the strategies and systems of belief each brought to the epic controversies of slavery versus abolition and union versus disunion.
Moore and Moore, editors of a previous volume of Lovejoy's writings, use their deep knowledge of his words and life to move beyond mere politics to a nuanced perspective on the fabric of religion and personal background that underlay the minister's worldview. Their multifaceted work of history and biography reveals how Lincoln embraced the radical idea of emancipation, and how Lovejoy shaped his own radicalism to wield the pragmatic political tools needed to reach that ultimate goal.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252096341 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 05/30/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 882 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Collaborators for Emancipation
Abraham Lincoln and Owen Lovejoy
By William F. Moore, Jane Ann Moore
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09634-1
CHAPTER 1
Hating the Zeal to Spread Slavery, 1854
"This ... real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world."
—Abraham Lincoln, Speech at Springfield, October 16, 1854
Springfield lawyer Abraham Lincoln and Princeton pastor Owen Lovejoy met for the first time on a muddy afternoon at the Springfield State Fair on October 4, 1854. The speeches of the day were moved inside to the stately Hall of Representatives in the newly constructed State Capitol. At that time, both Lincoln and Lovejoy were fuming over a new federal law that Illinois Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas had championed through Congress during the preceding May, the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In 1820, after protracted and contentious negotiations, Missouri had been allowed to enter the Union as a slave state on condition that all territories in the Louisiana Purchase north of the Missouri's southern border would be considered free. This compromise had been respected for thirty-four years but was repealed in conjunction with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, allowing slavery to spread into those territories.
Lincoln wanted the Whigs and Lovejoy wanted the emerging Republican Party to lead the "fusion" movement uniting all those opposed to Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act and advocating the restoration of the Missouri Compromise. Both men were working to unite various political elements into a new organization that would defeat the pro-slavery Democratic Party's domination of Illinois politics since 1818. Since July, they had been campaigning for seats in the Illinois House of Representatives.
In 1850, after the end of his only term in Congress, Lincoln had returned to Springfield to resume his law career, but the Kansas-Nebraska Act reenergized his political instincts. According to Eric Foner, "Virtually every major speech of Lincoln's between 1854 and 1860 originated as a response to some action or statement by Douglas." Lincoln's speech at the State Fair in Springfield on October 4, 1854, is a prime example.
When Douglas returned to Illinois after the act's passage, he was excoriated and harangued. Speaking at the State Fair on October 3, he defended himself against the charges that he had betrayed a long-standing agreement among the American people. The next day, the forty-five-year-old Lincoln strode into the Hall of Representatives, tall and lanky, and earnestly told the audience, "This ... real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate."
The forty-three-year-old Lovejoy was among those in attendance, with his thatch of black hair framing his forehead and his athletic body no doubt sitting upright as he identified with Lincoln's emotion and conviction. After the murder of his brother, Elijah, an abolitionist newspaperman, by a pro-slavery mob, Owen Lovejoy had not sought revenge on the four men who pulled the triggers but instead "swore by the everlasting God eternal hostility to African slavery."
Lincoln had opened his speech with an emphatic declaration about the conditions under which the opposition to the Douglas Democrats could unite. "I wish to MAKE and to KEEP the distinction between the existing institution [of slavery], and the EXTENSION of it, so broad, and so clear, that no honest man can misunderstand me, and no dishonest one, successfully misrepresent me." He was advocating not an end to slavery but an end to its spread. Lovejoy had held that political position since 1842, but Lincoln initially did not fully comprehend and accept the significance of Lovejoy's commitment to nonextension.
The primary purpose of Lincoln's speech was to reach out to northern and southern Whigs. He hoped to make the Whig Party the instrument for fusing various political factions against Douglas. He also made it clear that he had "no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it." Then, speaking from his experience as a southerner, he publicly admitted that he did not know what to do to end slavery: "When southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we; I acknowledge the fact.... I surely would not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution."
He explained both his and the Southern Whigs' position on slavery, declaring, "We can not, then make [African Americans] equals," and thereby distinguishing himself from the Garrisonian abolitionists who advocated full equality. But he continued, "It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted," demonstrating some agreement with the political abolitionists. Inviting the South to join him in restoring the Missouri Compromise, he declared his convictions of prudence while presenting a unifying vision: "We thereby restore the national faith, the national confidence, the national feeling of brotherhood, we therefore reinstate the spirit of concession and compromise—that spirit which has never failed us in the past perils, and may be safely trusted for all the future."
Lincoln appealed to the human compassion in all peoples. "The great majority, south as well as north, have human sympathies, of which they can no more divest themselves than they can of their sensibilities 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 assurance of the humanity of southern citizens was based in his radical belief in the "better angels of our nature," to which he appealed persistently. He also sought to stir the sympathies of northerners when he warned the South of the dangers ahead: "Let no one be deceived. The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska are utter antagonisms; and the former is being rapidly displaced by the latter." In so doing, he exhibited his understanding that self-deception is a root problem in all people. His most risky statement was to give lukewarm support to the "abolitionists." He "good humoredly" called his Whig friends rather silly for refusing to advocate restoring the Missouri Compromise line just because the abolitionists did the same.
After the speech, Lovejoy and antislavery political organizer Ichabod Codding invited Lincoln to attend a meeting the next day for citizens opposed to "the further extension and consolidation of the Slave Power." Lincoln politely declined, finding necessary business outside the county. Lincoln clearly was not interested in a permanent alliance led by abolitionists at this time, preferring to rejuvenate the Whig Party as the leader of the fusion process.
The Beginning of the Republican Party in Illinois
Lovejoy helped to organize the first meeting of the statewide Illinois Republican Party. Alvan Bovay had led a February 28, 1854, meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin, at which attendees discussed forming a political party based on the principle of nonextension of slavery. On May 28, 1854, a day after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Congressman Israel Washburn of Maine called a meeting of members of Congress to respond to the crisis and suggested the name Republican for the group. By the following October, parties had been organized in five midwestern and four eastern states.
On the evening of Lincoln's speech, ten antislavery leaders from different Illinois counties met in the dingy candlelit office of abolitionist Erastus Wright to draft resolutions to be presented the next day at the Republican Convention. Lincoln was not in attendance, possibly because he had had a significant legal misunderstanding with Wright that had caused some tension.
The next day, the men who had met in Wright's office presented a more moderate platform to the convention than the ones passed previously at Republican congressional district conventions in the northern Illinois cities of Rockford and Aurora and the central Illinois city of Bloomington. The resolutions reflected conciliatory language and emphasized the nonextension of slavery. They called not for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act but for a key modification. They bore the imprint of the representatives from Morgan and Adams Counties in the central part of the state. The convention was intended to attract moderate Whigs such as Lincoln as well as Democrats such as Congressman Lyman Trumbull from Alton, who had spoken out against Douglas's act.
The proposed platform for the new party resolved to "prohibit and preclude the extension, establishment and perpetuation of human slavery in any and every Territory of the United States." According to the organizers, "the Nebraska Bill was an attempt totally to reverse" that doctrine by allowing slavery to now expand into the Nebraska Territory. This platform of nonextension was the position taken by the Liberty Party, which had been organized in 1840 in Upper New York State by Myron Holly and Alvan Stewart to promote the end of slavery through political and constitutional means. Lovejoy had been active in that movement since its inception, helping to form the first Liberty Party organization in the Midwest at a July 4, 1840, meeting in Princeton. Whereas the Liberty Party called for a repeal of the fugitive slave laws, the Republican Springfield platform did not. However, it advocated the legal right for African Americans to testify on their own behalf on the grounds that "trial by jury and the writ of habeas corpus [are] safeguards of personal liberty so necessary ... that no citizens of other States can fairly ask us to consent to their abrogation."
The Republicans also reached out to southern citizens, saying, "We recognize no antagonism of national interests between us and the citizens of Southern States.... [W]e recognize them as kindred and brethren of the same national family." But, the platform concluded, "We heartily approve the course of freemen of Connecticut, Vermont, Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, New York, Michigan, and Maine, postponing or disregarding their minor differences of opinion or preferences, on acting together cordially and trustingly in the sacred cause of freedom, of free labor, and free soil."
Paul Selby, the editor of the Morgan Journal and an opponent of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, reported years later, "The conservative character of the plat- form adopted is a conclusive rebuttal to the charge of fanaticism. This went no farther than a distinct declaration of opposition to the extension of slavery in free territory, which became the essence of Republicanism two years later." Selby believed "that Lincoln could easily have agreed with these resolutions." They resembled Lincoln's core statements that he stood with the abolitionists in advocating the restoration of the Missouri Compromise but broke from them when they called for the repeal of fugitive slave laws. Lincoln, too, bore no antagonism toward the citizens of the South. However, Illinois Whig and Democratic newspapers were suspicious of the growing threat of the rise of a Republican Party, not only discouraging readers and supporters from participating but also refusing to allow their presses to be used to print flyers supporting the Republican effort.
Lincoln's failure to participate in the 1854 Republican Convention did not deter Lovejoy from reaching out again to include him. Selby had "a distinct recollection that Owen Lovejoy, in emphatic terms, vouched for [Lincoln's] fidelity to the principles enunciated in our platform." This statement implies that Lovejoy probably had information about Lincoln's background from others, including leading antislavery congressman Joshua Giddings, who had resided in the same Washington boardinghouse as Lincoln did in 1849.
After the convention, both progress for the fusion movement and Lincoln's participation were delayed by newspapers' distortions of the substance of the meeting. The Whig Illinois State Journal underestimated the number of participants and claimed that since Lincoln had refused to attend, other responsible Whigs had also stayed away, leaving the meeting to disgruntled and discredited abolitionists from northern Illinois. The Democratic Illinois State Register was even more caustic, declaring, "Ichabod [Codding] raved, and Lovejoy swelled." On October 8, the paper substituted the "radical" platform of the Kane County Convention held in Aurora on August 19, 1854, for the more moderate one adopted by the Republican Springfield Convention. The Register also sought to embarrass Lincoln by exaggerating his speech in the Hall of Representatives, which the paper described as "a glorious abolition speech, and worthy of Ichabod himself." Lincoln had been worried about precisely this sort of misrepresentation, which he feared would alienate him from his conservative Whig and Know-Nothing friends. As Lovejoy had already recognized, Lincoln's abilities and his political network were essential for the cause in the long run: "Only Lincoln could hold this rag-tag coalition together."
Victor B. Howard has noted that "early historians did not present an accurate account of the origin of the Republican party in Illinois." Writing in 1922, Arthur C. Cole, for example, claimed that after 1854, "party loyalty deterred all except discredited 'abolitionists' from participating in the movement," leading to "the prompt death of this 'republican' state organization." Similarly, according to Don E. Fehrenbacher, "In any case, this abortive 'Republican' movement of 1854 had no connection with the party organized two years later." Echoed William E. Gienapp, Lincoln's refusal to join the Republicans in 1854 "symbolized the failure of the fusion movement to enlist the support of downstate Whigs, a development that doomed it to ineffectiveness." Relying on both Fehrenbacher and Gienapp, David H. Donald contended that "the abolitionist Republican party of Codding and Lovejoy was too extreme to attract a wide following"; Lincoln, however, "was ready to take the lead." Allen C. Guelzo, too, followed suit, declaring that Lovejoy and Codding had an "anti-slavery passion" that "made them too hot for either Whigs or Democrats to handle." Foner grasped that by 1856, the new party "needed to harness the intense commitment that Lovejoy's supporters would bring to the campaign." Yet it is not clear that even Foner recognized the growing influence of the Illinois antislavery political parties led by Codding; Zebina Eastman, editor of the Free West; and Lovejoy. Foner and other historians also neglected to recognize that the well-organized Illinois Free Democratic Party formed the three northern congressional districts of the early Republican conventions in the spring and summer of 1854, leading antislavery Republicans to account for a quarter of the Illinois General Assembly in 1855.
All of these historians also failed to note the assets claimed by these Illinois radicals in 1855 and 1856—their ongoing ad hoc steering committee in Chicago; their strong religious basis; their ability to negotiate as a swing bloc of votes; their command of a daily statewide newspaper, the Chicago Tribune; and their full appreciation of Lincoln's strengths. The pragmatic in Lincoln knew well enough not to ignore them; the radical in Lincoln could tolerate and appreciate some of their radical tactics and slowly came to accept and embrace them by 1862.
Lincoln had taken a radical step toward Lovejoy by chiding his conservative Whig friends not to be afraid to stand with antislavery leaders when they were right. It was now Lovejoy's turn to demonstrate his pragmatism, shrewdness, and political effectiveness.
Lovejoy and Lincoln Elected
On November 7, 1854, both Lincoln and Lovejoy were elected to the Illinois House of Representatives. Whigs had suffered enough election losses nationally to be declared dead as an effective party. The Democratic Party in Illinois had lost the majority of its congressional seats as well as the majority in the state legislature for the first time since statehood in 1818. Opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act won majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives. And twenty-six of the one hundred members of the legislature officially listed themselves as Republicans, though not all of them were active in the emerging party.
Delighted, Lovejoy, a Republican, immediately wrote to his political mentor, Giddings, the leading antislavery member of Congress, who had campaigned in Illinois on behalf of the anti-Nebraska candidates. Lovejoy recognized that Giddings's skill and status had made a difference in the campaign, good-naturedly telling his friend, "By the way I heard of at least one vote you made for me at Henry in Marshall County." More seriously, Lovejoy found the victory satisfying in light of the fact that he had been "cursed & abused & vilified for a long series of years. I was drawn into politics on the antislavery principle apparently from the necessity of the case, & in consequence brought down upon me a great deal of wrath."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Collaborators for Emancipation by William F. Moore, Jane Ann Moore. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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