The Life of Abraham Lincoln (Holland)/Chapter IX
The political biographers of Mr. Lincoln have stated that in 1846 he was "induced to accept" the nomination for Congress from the Sangamon district. It has already been seen that he had aspirations for this place; and it is quite as well to adopt Mr. Lincoln's own frankness and directness, and say that the representatives of his wishes secured the nomination for him. As a party man, he had well earned any honor in the power of his party to bestow. As a man and a politician, his character was so sound and so truly noble that his nomination and election to Congress would be quite as honorable to his district as to him.
Having received the nomination, Mr. Lincoln did after the manner of Western nominees and "stumped" his district. He had abundant material for discussion. During the winter of 1845, Texas was admitted to the Union, and the war with Mexico was commenced. The tariff of 1842, constructed in accordance with the policy of the whig party, had been repealed. The country had a foreign war on its hands--a war which the whigs believed to have been unnecessarily begun, and unjustifiably carried on. It had received into the Union a new member in the interest of slavery. It had been greatly disturbed in its industrial interests by the subversion of the protective policy. The issues between the two parties then in the political field were positive and well defined. Mr. Lincoln's position on all the principal points at issue was that of the whig party, and the party had no reason to be ashamed of its western champion.
The eminent popularity of Mr. Lincoln in his own district was shown by the majority he received over that which it had given to Mr. Clay. Although he had made Mr. Clay's cause his own, and had advocated his election with an enthusiasm which no personal object could have excited in him, he received in his district a majority of one thousand five hundred and eleven votes to the nine hundred and fourteen majority which the district had given Mr. Clay in 1844. He undoubtedly was supported by more than the strength of his party, for his majority was unprecedented in the district, and has since had no parallel. It was not reached, on a much larger vote, by General Taylor in 1848. There is no question that this remarkable majority was the result of the popular faith in Mr. Lincoln's earnestness, conscientiousness and integrity.
He took his seat in the thirtieth Congress, December 6th, 1847, and was from the first entirely at home. He was no novice in politics or legislation. To the latter he had served a thorough apprenticeship in the Illinois legislature. To the study and discussion of the former, he had devoted perhaps the severest efforts of his life. He understood every phase of the great questions which agitated Congress and divided the people. Unlike many politicians who engage in the harangues of a political canvass, he had made himself the master of the subjects he discussed. He had been a debater, and not a declaimer. He had entertained a deeper interest in questions of public concern than he had felt in his own election; and he was at once recognized as the peer of his associates in the House. He derived considerable prominence from the fact that he was the only whig member from Illinois, a fact almost entirely due to his own presence and influence in the district which elected him.
It is noticeable here that Stephen A. Douglas took his seat in the Senate of the United States during this same session. They met first as representatives in the Illinois legislature. Mr. Douglas was the younger, the more adroit, the swifter in a political race. He had had with him the large democratic majority of the state, and had moulded it to his purposes. He had taken a step--perhaps many steps--in advance of Mr. Lincoln; but it seemed destined that the tallest man in the House and the shortest man in the Senate should keep in sight of each other, until the time should come when they should stand out before their own state and the country as the champions respectively of the antagonistic principles and policies which divided the American people.
It is interesting, at the close of a great rebellion, undertaken on behalf of slavery, to look back to this Congress, and see how, in the interests and associations of the old whig party, those men worked in harmony who have since been, or who, if they had lived, would have been, so widely separated in feeling and action. John Quincy Adams voted on most questions with Robert Toombs; George Ashmun, afterwards president of the convention that nominated Mr. Lincoln for the presidency, with Alexander H. Stephens, afterwards vice-president of the Southern Confederacy; Jacob Collamer with Thomas Butler King, and Samuel F. Vinton with Henry W. Hilliard. History must record that the Mexican war was undertaken in the interest of human slavery; yet, touching the questions arising out of this war, and questions directly associated with or bearing upon it, these men of the old whig party acted together. The slaveholder then yielded to party what he has since denied to patriotism, and patriotism abandoned a party which held out to it a constant temptation to complicity with slavery.
Mr. Polk, at that time the President of the United States, was evidently anxious to justify the war which he had commenced against Mexico, and to vindicate his own action before the American people, if not before his own judgment and conscience. His messages to Congress were burdened with this effort; and Mr. Lincoln had hardly become wonted to his seat when he made an unsuccessful effort to bring the President to a statement of facts, upon which Congress and the country might either verify or falsify his broad and general asseverations. On the twenty-second of December, he introduced a series of resolutions[1] which, had they been adopted, would have given the President an opportunity to furnish the grounds of his allegations, and set himself right before the nation. These resolutions are remarkable for their definite statement of the points actually at issue between the administration and the whig party; but they found no advocates among Mr. Polk's friends. Laid over under the rule, they were not called up again by Mr. Lincoln himself, but they formed the thesis of a speech delivered by him on the following twelfth of January, in which he fully expressed his views on the whole subject.
The opposition in this Congress were placed in a very difficult and perplexing position. They hated the war; they believed it to have been unnecessarily begun by the act of the United States, and not by the act of Mexico; they were accused of being treacherous to the cause and honor of the country because they opposed the war in which the country was engaged; they felt obliged to vote supplies to the army because it would have been inhuman to do otherwise, yet this act was seized upon by the President to show that his position touching the war was sustained by them; they felt compelled to condemn the commander-in-chief of the armies, sitting in the White House, and to vote thanks to the generals who had successfully executed his orders in the field. Men picked their way through these difficulties according to the wisdom given to them. The opposition usually voted together, though there was more or less of division on minor points and matters of policy.
Mr. Hudson of Massachusetts introduced a resolution which covered essentially the question of abandoning the war--of restoring everything to the old status. Mr. Lincoln voted to lay this resolution on the table, and, when it came up for adoption, voted against it. The writer finds no record of the reasons for these votes. Whatever they may have been, they seemed good to him; and he took pains a few days afterward to show that they could not have grown out of any friendship to the war. Indeed, on the very day which saw these votes recorded, he had an opportunity to vote that the war "was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States," in company with nearly all the whig members of the House, southern no less than northern. The same men voted thanks to General Taylor for his brilliant achievements in the war.
The speech of Mr. Lincoln on the twelfth of January, in committee of the whole House, was thoroughly characteristic of the author. Simple, direct, exact in its comprehension of the points at issue, without a superfluous word or sentence, as closely logical as if it were the work of a professor of dialectics, it was the equal if not the superior of any speech delivered during the session.
Mr. Lincoln spoke as follows:
"Mr. Chairman: Some, if not all, of the gentlemen on the other side of the House, who have addressed the committee within the last two days, have spoken rather complainingly, if I have rightly understood them, of the vote given a week or ten days ago, declaring that the war with Mexico was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President. I admit that such a vote should not be given in mere party wantonness, and that the one given is justly censurable, if it have no other or better foundation. I am one of those who joined in that vote; and did so under my best impression of the truth of the case. How I got this impression, and how it may possibly be removed, I will now try to show. When the war began, it was my opinion that all those who, because of knowing too little, or because of knowing too much, could not conscientiously approve the conduct of the President (in the beginning of it), should, nevertheless, as good citizens and patriots, remain silent on that point, at least till the war should be ended. Some leading Democrats, including ex-President Van Buren, have taken this same view, as I understand them; and I adhered to it, and acted upon it, until since I took my seat here; and I think I should still adhere to it, were it not that the President and his friends will not allow it to be so. Besides the continual effort of the President to argue every silent vote given for supplies into an indorsement of the justice and wisdom of his conduct; besides that singularly candid paragraph in his late message, in which he tells us that Congress, with great unanimity (only two in the Senate and fourteen in the House dissenting) had declared that 'by the act of the Republic of Mexico a state of war exists between that Government and the United States,' when the same journals that informed him of this, also informed him that, when that declaration stood disconnected from the question of supplies, sixty-seven in the House, and not fourteen, merely, voted against it; besides this open attempt to prove by telling the truth, what he could not prove by telling the whole truth, demanding of all who will not submit to be misrepresented, in justice to themselves, to speak out; besides all this, one of my colleagues {Mr. Richardson], at a very early day in the session, brought in a set of resolutions, expressly indorsing the original justice of the war on the part of the President. Upon these resolutions, when they shall be put on their passage, I shall be compelled to vote; so that I can not be silent it I would. Seeing this, I went about preparing myself to give the vote understandingly, when it should come. I carefully examined the President's messages, to ascertain what he himself had said and proved upon the point. The result of this examination was to make the impression, that, taking for true all the President states as facts, he falls far short of proving his justification; and that the President would have gone further with his proof; if it had not been for the small matter that the truth would not permit him. Under the impression thus made I gave the vote before mentioned. I propose now to give, concisely, the process of the examination I made, and how I reached the conclusion I did.
"The President, in his first message of May, 1846, declares that the soil was ours on which hostilities were commenced by Mexico; and he repeats that declaration, almost in the same language, in each successive annual message--thus showing that he esteems that point a highly essential one. In the importance of that point I entirely agree with the President. To my judgment, it is the very point upon which he should be justified or condemned. In his message of December, 1848, it seems to have occurred to him, as is certainly true, that title, ownership to soil, or anything else, is not a simple fact, but is a conclusion following one or more simple facts; and that it was incumbent upon him to present the facts from which he concluded the soil was ours on which the first blood of the war was shed.
"Accordingly, a little below the middle of page twelve, in the message last referred to, he enters upon that task; forming an issue and introducing testimony, extending the whole to a little below the middle of page fourteen. Now, I propose to try to show that the whole of this--issue and evidence--is, from beginning to end, the sheerest deception. The issue, as he presents it, is in these words: 'But there are those who, conceding all this to be true, assume the ground that the true western boundary of Texas is the Nueces, instead of the Rio Grande; and that, therefore, in marching our army to the east bank of the later river, we passed the Texan line, and invaded the territory of Mexico.' Now, this issue is made up of two affirmatives and no negative. The main deception of it is, that it assumes as true that one river or the other is necessarily the boundary, and cheats the superficial thinker entirely out of the idea that possibly the boundary is somewhere between the two, and not actually at either. A further deception is, that it will let in evidence which a true issue would exclude. A true issue, made by the President, would be about as follows; 'I say the soil was ours on which the first blood was shed; there are those who say it was not.'
"I now proceed to examine the President's evidence, as applicable to such an issue. When that evidence is analyzed, it is all included in the following propositions:
"1. That the Rio Grande was the western boundary of Louisiana, as we purchased it of France in 1803.
"2. That the Republic of Texas always claimed the Rio Grande as her western boundary.
"3. That by various acts, she had claimed it on paper.
"4. That Santa Anna, in his treaty with Texas, recognized the Rio Grande as her boundary.
"5. That Texas before, and the United States after, annexation, had exercised jurisdiction beyond the Nueces, between the two rivers.
"6. That our Congress understood the boundary of Texas to extend beyond the Nueces.
"Now for each of these in its turn:
"His first item is, that the Rio Grande was the western boundary of Louisiana, as we purchased it of France in 1803; and, seeming to expect this to be disputed, he argues over the amount of near1y a page to prove it true; at the end of which, he lets us know that, by the treaty of 1819, we sold to Spain the whole country, from the Rio Grande eastward to the Sabine. Now, admitting for the present, that the Rio Grande was the boundary of Louisiana, what, under heaven, had that to do with the present boundary between us and Mexico? How, Mr. Chairman, the line that once divided your land from mine can still be the boundary between us after I have sold my land to you, is, to me, beyond all comprehension. And how any man, with an honest purpose only of proving the truth, could ever have thought of introducing such a fact to prove such an issue, is equally incomprehensible. The outrage upon common right, of seizing as our own what we have once sold, merely because it was ours before we sold it, is only equaled by the outrage on common sense of any attempt to justify it.
"The President's next piece of evidence is, that 'The Republic of Texas always claimed this river (Rio Grande) as her western boundary.' That is not true, in fact. Texas has claimed it, but she has not always claimed it. There is, at least, one distinguished exception. Her State Constitution--the public's most solemn and well-considered act--that which may, without impropriety, be called her last will and testament, revoking all others--makes no such claim. But suppose she had always claimed it. Has not Mexico always claimed the contrary? So that there is but claim against claim, leaving nothing proved until we get back of the claims, and find which has the better foundation.
"Though not in order in which the President presents his evidence, I now consider that class of his statements, which are, in substance, nothing more than that Texas has by various acts of her Convention and Congress, claimed the Rio Grande as her boundary--on paper. I mean here what he says about the fixing of the Rio Grande as her boundary, in her old Constitution (not her State Constitution,) about forming congressional districts, counties, etc. Now, all this is but naked claim; and what I have already said about claims is strictly applicable to this. If I should claim your land by word of mouth, that certainly would not make it mine; and if I were to claim it by a deed which I had made myself, and with which you had nothing to do, the claim would be quite the same in substance, or rather in utter nothingness.
"I next consider the President's statement that Santa Anna, in his treaty with Texas, recognized the Rio Grande as the western boundary of Texas. Besides the position so often taken that Santa Anna, while a prisoner of war--a captive--could not bind Mexico by a treaty, which I deem conclusive; besides this, I wish to say something in relation to this treaty, so called by the President, with Santa Anna. If any man would like to be amused by a sight at that little thing, which the President calls by that big name, he can have it by turning to Niles' Register, volume 50, page 336. And if any one should suppose that Niles' Register is a curious repository of so mighty a document as a solemn treaty between nations, I can only sat that I learned, to a tolerable degree of certainty, by inquiry at the State Department, that the President himself never saw it anywhere else. By the way, I believe I should not err if I were to declare, that during the first ten years of the existence of that document, it was never by anybody called a treaty; that it was never so called till the President, in his extremity, attempted, by so calling it, to wring something from it in justification of himself in connection with the Mexican war. It has none of the distinguishing features of a treaty. It does not call itself a treaty. Santa Anna does not therein assume to bind Mexico; he assumes only to act as President, Commander-in-Chief of the Mexican army and navy; stipulates that the then present hostilities should cease, and that he would not himself take up arms, nor influence the Mexican people to take up arms against Texas, during the existence of the war of independence. He did not recognize the independence of Texas; he did not assume to put an end to the war, but clearly indicated his expectation of its continuance; he did not say one word about boundary, and most probably never thought of it. It is stipulated therein that the Mexican forces should evacuate the territory of Texas, passing to the other side of the Rio Grande; and in another article it is stipulated, that to prevent collisions between the armies, the Texan army should not approach nearer than within five leagues--of what is not said--but clearly, from the object stated, it is of the Rio Grande. Now, if this is a treaty recognizing the Rio Grande as the boundary of Texas, it contains the singular feature of stipulating that Texas shall not go within five leagues of her own boundary.
"Next comes the evidence of Texas before annexation, and the United States afterward, exercising jurisdiction beyond the Nueces, and between the two rivers. This actual exercise of jurisdiction is the very class or quality of evidence we want. It is excellent so far as it goes; but does it go far enough? He tells us it went beyond the Nueces, but he does not tell us it went to the Rio Grande. He tells us jurisdiction was exercised between the two rivers, but he does not tell us it was exercised over all the territory between them. Some simple-minded people think it possible to cross one river and go beyond it, without going all the way to the next; that jurisdiction may be exercised between two rivers without covering all the country between them. I know a man, not very unlike myself who exercises jurisdiction over a piece of land between the Wabash and the Mississippi; and yet so far is this from being all there is between those rivers, that it is just one hundred and fifty-two feet long by fifty wide, and no part of it much within a hundred miles of either. He has a neighbor between him and the Mississippi--that is, just across the street, in that direction--whom, I am sure, he could neither persuade nor force to give up his habitation; but which, nevertheless, he could certainly annex, if it were to be done, by merely standing on his own side of the street and claiming it, or even sitting down and writing a deed for it.
"But next, the President tells us, the Congress of the United States understood the State of Texas they admitted into the Union to extend beyond the Nueces. Well, I suppose they did--I certainly so understand it--but how far beyond? That Congress did not understand it to extend clear to the Rio Grande, is quite certain by the fact of their joint resolution for admission expressly leaving all questions of boundary to future adjustment. And, it may be added, that Texas herself is proved to have had the same understanding of it that our Congress had, by the fact of the exact conformity of her new Constitution to those resolutions.
"I am now through the whole of the President's evidence; and it is a singular fact, that if any one should declare the President sent the army into the midst of a settlement of Mexican people, who had never submitted, by consent or by force to the authority or Texas or of the United States, and that there, and thereby, the first blood of the war was shed, there is not one word in all the President has said which would either admit or deny the declaration. In this strange omission chiefly consists the deception of the President's evidence--an omission which, it does seem to me, could scarcely have occurred but by design. My way of living leads me to be about the courts of justice; and there I have some times seen a good lawyer, struggling for his client's neck, in a desperate case, employing every artifice to work round, befog, and cover up with many words some position pressed upon him by the prosecution, which he dared not admit, and yet could not deny. Party bias may help to make it appear so; but, with all the allowance I can make for such bias, it still does appear to me that just such, and from just such necessity, are the President's struggles in this case.
"Some time after my colleague (Mr. Richardson) introduced the resolutions I have mentioned, I introduced a preamble, resolution, and interrogatories, intended to draw the President out, if possible, on this hitherto untrodden ground. To show their relevancy, I propose to state my understanding of the true rule for ascertaining the boundary between Texas and Mexico. It is, that wherever Texas was exercising jurisdiction was hers; and wherever Mexico was exercising jurisdiction was hers; and that whatever separated the actual exercise of jurisdiction of the one from that of the other, was the true boundary between them. If, as is probably true, Texas was exercising jurisdiction along the western bank of the Nueces, and Mexico was exercising it along the eastern bank of the Rio Grande, then neither river was the boundary, but the uninhabited country between the two was. The extent of our territory in that region depended not on any treaty-fixed boundary (for no treaty had attempted it), but on revolution. Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right--a right which, we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize, and make their own so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with, or near about them, who may oppose their movements. Such minority was precisely the case of the Tories of our own revolution. It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines, or old laws; but to break up both, and make new ones. As to the country now in question, we bought it of France in 1803, and sold it to Spain in 1819, according to the President's statement. After this, all Mexico, including Texas, revolutionized against Spain; and still later, Texas revolutionized against Mexico. In my view, just so far as she carried her revolution, by obtaining the actual, willing or unwilling submission of the people, so far the country was hers, and no further.
"Now, sir, for the purpose of obtaining the very best evidence as to whether Texas had actually carried her revolution to the place where the hostilities of the present war commenced, let the President answer the interrogatories I proposed, as before mentioned, or some other similar ones. Let him answer fully, fairly and candidly. Let him answer with facts, and not with arguments. Let him remember he sits where Washington sat; and, so remembering, let him answer as Washington would answer. As a nation should not, and the Almighty will not, be evaded, so let him attempt no evasion, no equivocation. And if, so answering, he can show that the soil was ours where the first blood of the War was shed--that it was not within an inhabited country, or, if within such, that the inhabitants had submitted themselves to the civil authority of Texas, or of the United States, and that the same is true of the site of Fort Brown--then I am with him for his justification. In that case, I shall be most happy to reverse the vote I gave the other day. I have a selfish motive for desiring that the President may do this; I expect to give some votes, in connection with the war, which, without his so doing, will be of doubtful propriety, in my own judgment, but which will be free from the doubt, if he does so. But if he can not or will not do this--if, on any pretense, or no pretense, he shall refuse or omit it--then I shall be fully convinced, of what I more than suspect already, that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong; that be feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to heaven against him; that he ordered General Taylor into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, purposely to bring on a war; that originally having some strong motive--what I will not stop now to give my opinion concerning--to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory--that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood--that serpent's eye that charms to destroy--he plunged into it, and has swept on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself he knows not where. How like the half insane mumbling of a fever dream is the whole war part of the late message! At one time telling us that Mexico has nothing whatever we can get but territory; at another, showing us how we can support the war by levying contributions on Mexico. At one time urging the national honor, the security of the future, the prevention of foreign interference, and even the good of Mexico herself, as among the objects of the war; at another, telling us that, 'to reject indemnity by refusing to accept a cession of territory, would be to abandon all out just demands, and to wage the war, bearing all its expenses, without a purpose or definite object.' So, then, the national honor, security of the future, and everything but territorial indemnity, may be considered the no purposes and indefinite objects of the war! But having it now settled that territorial indemnity is the only object, we are urged to seize, by legislation here, all that he was content to take a few months ago, and the whole province of Lower California to boot, and to still carry on the war--to take all we are fighting for, and still fight on. Again, the President is resolved, under all circumstances, to have full territorial indemnity for the expenses of the war; but he forgets to tell us how we are to get the excess after those expenses shall have surpassed the value of the whole of the Mexican territory. So, again, he insists that the separate national existence of Mexico shall be maintained; but he does not tell us how this can be done after we shall have taken all her territory. Lest the questions I here suggest be considered speculative merely, let me be indulged a moment in trying to show they are not.
"The war has gone on some twenty months, for the expenses of which, together with an inconsiderable old score, the President now claims about one half of the Mexican territory, and that by far the better half, so far as concerns our ability to make anything out of it. It is comparatively uninhabited; so that we could establish land offices in it, and raise some money in that way. But the other half is already inhabited, as I understand it, tolerably densely for the nature of the country; and all its lands, or all that are valuable, already appropriated as private property. How, then, are we to make anything out of these lands with this incumbrance on them, or how remove the incumbrance? I suppose no one will say we should kill the people, or drive them out, or make slaves of them, or even confiscate their property? How, then, can we make much out of this part of the territory? If the prosecution of the war has, in expenses, already equaled the better half of the country, how long its future prosecution will be in equaling the less valuable half is not a speculative but a practical question, pressing closely upon us; and yet is is a question which the President seems never to have thought of.
"As to the mode of terminating the war and securing peace, the President is equally wandering and indefinite. First, it is to be done by a more vigorous prosecution of the war in the vital parts of the enemy's country; and, after apparently talking himself tired on this point, the President drops down into a half despairing tone, and tells us, that 'with a people distracted and divided by contending factions, and a government subject to constant changes, by successive revolutions, the continued success of our arms may fail to obtain a satisfactory peace.' Then he suggests the propriety of wheedling the Mexican people to desert the counsels of their own leaders, and, trusting in our protection, to set up a government from which we can secure a satisfactory peace, telling us that ' this may become the only mode of obtaining such a peace.' But soon he falls into doubt of this too, and then drops back on to the already half-abandoned ground of 'more vigorous prosecution.' All this shows that the President is in no wise satisfied with his own positions. First, he takes up one, and, in attempting to argue us into it, he argues himself out of it; then seizes another, and goes through the same process; and then, confused at being able to think of nothing new, he snatches up the old one again, which he has some time before cast off. His mind, tasked beyond its power, is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature on a burning surface, finding no position on which it can settle down and be at ease.
"Again, it is a singular omission in this message, that it nowhere intimates when the President expects the war to terminate. At its beginning, General Scott was, by this same President, driven into disfavor, if not disgrace, for intimating that peace could not be conquered in less than three or four months. But now at the end of about twenty months, during which time our arms have given us the most splendid successes--every department, and every part, land and water, officers and privates, regulars and volunteers, doing all that men could do, and hundreds of things which it had ever before been thought that men could not do; after all this, this same President gives us a long message without showing us that, as to the end, he has himself even an imaginary conception. As I have before said, he knows not where he is. He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably-perplexed man. God grant he may be able to show that there is not something about his conscience more painful than all his mental perplexity."
With this speech on record, it is strange that the genuine literary abilities of the man were so long and so persistently ignored by literary people. There were men who voted for him for the presidency more than twelve years afterwards--twelve years of culture and development to him--who were surprised to find his messages grammatically constructed, and who suspected the intervention of a secretary whenever any touch of elegance appeared in his writings.
Mr. Lincoln had a position on the Committee on Post-offices and Post-roads, and, from the knowledge in his possession, felt called upon a few days previous to the speech on the war to expose a difficulty between the Postmaster-general and a transportation company, anxious to get the "Great Southern Mail" contract, and to get a better contract than the department had offered. The matter had excited some interest in Congress, and Mr. Lincoln showed a faithful study of the facts of the case in his speech and his freedom from any party feeling in the matter, by supporting the position of the Post-master-general.
On the 1st of June, 1848, the National Whig Convention met at Philadelphia to nominate a candidate for the presidency, and Mr. Lincoln was among its members. Mr. Polk, by his war with Mexico, had been engaged, much against his inclinations, in manufacturing available if not able candidates for his own place, two of whom afterwards achieved it. General Taylor had become a hero. The brilliancy of his victories and the modesty of his dispatches had awakened in his behalf the enthusiastic admiration of the American people, without distinction of party. He was claimed by the whigs as a member of that party, and regarded by them as the one man in the Union by whose popularity they might hope to win the power they coveted. The majority would doubtless have preferred Mr. Clay, but Mr. Clay had been their candidate, and had been beaten. Mr. Lincoln would have been glad to support Mr. Clay, it is not doubted, but he shared in the feeling of the majority concerning his "availability." It is possible that his visit to Mr. Clay, and its unsatisfactory results, already alluded to, had somewhat blunted his devotion and subdued his enthusiasm on behalf of the great chieftain. Certain it is that he was among those who believed that General Taylor and not Mr. Clay should be the nominee of his party.
Congress had continued its session into the summer, either for purposes of business, or with the design to control the nominating conventions, and do something to direct the campaign; and when the nominations were made it did according to its custom, and immediately commenced the campaign in a series of speeches. About two months after General Taylor was nominated, (July twenty-seventh,) Mr. Lincoln secured the floor, and made a speech concerning the points at issue between the two parties, and the merits of the respective candidates, General Cass having received the nomination of the democratic party. It was a telling, trenchant talk, rather than a speech--more like one of his stump orations in Illinois than like his previous efforts in the House. As a campaign harangue, touching the salient features of the principal questions in debate, and revealing the weak points of one candidate and the strong points of the other, it could not have been improved. Considered as a part of the business which he was sent to Washington to perform, it was execrable. He did what others did, and what his partisan supporters expected him to do; but his own sense of propriety must have suggested to him, or ought to have suggested to him if it did not, the indecency of the practice of president-making in Congress.
In the light of subsequent events, the speech contains some passages that are very curious and suggestive. In revealing the position and policy of General Taylor in 1848, he was unconsciously marking out his own in 1860 and 1864. General Taylor, in a letter to Mr. Allison, had said, "upon the subject of the tariff, the currency, the improvement of our great highways, rivers, lakes and harbors, the will of the people, as expressed through their representatives in Congress, ought to be respected and carried out by the executive." Mr. Lincoln, in remarking upon this, said: "The people say to General Taylor, 'if you are elected, shall we have a national bank?' He answers, 'Your will, gentlemen, not mine.' "What about the tariff?' 'Say yourselves.' 'Shall our rivers and harbors be improved?' 'Just as you please. If you desire a bank, an alteration of the tariff; internal improvements, any or all, I will not hinder you; if you do not desire them, I will not attempt to force them on you. Send up your members of Congress from the various districts, with opinions according to your own, and if they are for these measures, or any of them, I shall have nothing to oppose; if they are not for them, I shall not, by any appliances whatever, attempt to dragoon them into their adoption.'" From this point Mr. Lincoln went on to show in what respect a president is a representative of the people. He said: "In a certain sense, and to a certain extent, he is a representative of the people. He is elected by them as Congress is. But can he, in the nature of things, know the wants of the people as well as three hundred other men coming from all the various localities of the nation? If so, where is the propriety of having a Congress?"
There is much in this exposition of General Taylor's position to remind us of that upon which the speaker himself subsequently stood, when invested with the powers of the chief magistracy.
Mr. Lincoln's dissection of General Cass' position upon the questions of the canvass, was effected with characteristic neatness and thoroughness. Alluding to the subject of internal improvements Mr. Lincoln said, "My internal improvement colleague (Mr. Wentworth) stated on this floor the other day that he was satisfied Cass was for improvements because that he had voted for all the bills that he (Wentworth) had. So far, so good. But Mr. Polk vetoed some of these very bills; the Baltimore Convention passed a set of resolutions among other things approving these vetoes, and Cass declares in his letter accepting the nomination that he has carefully read these resolutions, and that he adheres to them as firmly as he approves them cordially. In other words, General Cass voted for the bills, and thinks the President did right to veto them; and his friends here are amiable enough to consider him as being one side or the other, just as one or the other may correspond with their own respective inclinations. My colleague admits that the platform declares against the constitutionality of a general system of improvements, and that General Cass indorses the platform, but he still thinks General Cass is in favor of some sort of improvements. Well, what are they? As he is against general objects, those he is for must be particular and local. Now this is taking the subject precisely by the wrong end. Particularity--expending the money of the whole people for an object which will benefit a portion of them--is the greatest real objection to improvements, and has been so held by General Jackson, Mr. Polk, and all others, I believe, till now." Certainly this was a very logical exposition of General Cass on internal improvements; and the charge of double dealing or gross inconsistency which it involved was unanswerable.
Mr. Lincoln tried his powers of ridicule on General Cass on this occasion. One of his palpable hits has already been quoted in connection with the history of Mr. Lincoln's participation in the Black Hawk war, in which he draws a parallel between his own bloodless experiences and those of the democratic candidate. Quoting extracts to show how General Cass had vacillated in his action on the Wilmot Proviso, he added, "These extracts show that in 1846 General Cass was for the Proviso at once, that in March, 1847, he was still for it, but not just then; and that in December he was against it altogether. This is a true index to the whole man. When the question was raised in 1846, he was in a blustering hurry to take ground for it, ...but soon he began to see glimpses of the great democratic ox-gad waving in his face, and to hear indistinctly, a voice saying, 'back! back, sir! back a little!' He shakes his head, and bats his eyes, and blunders back to his position of March, 1847; but still the gad waves, and the voice grows more distinct and sharper still--'back, sir! back, I say! further back!' and back he goes to the position of December, 1847; at which the gad is still, and the voice soothingly says--'so! stand still at that!'" The homely illustration, culled from his early experiences, was certainly forcible, if not elegant.
In this political canvass, the whigs found themselves nearly as much perplexed in the treatment of the Mexican war as they had been in Congress. They had selected as their candidate a man whose reputation had been made by the successful prosecution of a war which they had opposed. They were charged, of course, with inconsistency by their opponents, and were placed in the awkward position of being obliged to draw nice distinctions. It is possible that they deserved the embarrassment from which they suffered. General Taylor had, beyond dispute, been nominated because be was a military hero, and not because he had any natural or acquired fitness for the presidency. The war had made him; and the whigs had seized upon this product of the war as an instrument by which they might acquire power. Mr. Lincoln a1luded to this in his speech, but showed that while the whigs had believed the war to be unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun, they had voted supplies, and sent their men. "Through suffering and death," said he, "by disease and in battle, they have endured, and fought, and fallen with you. Clay and Webster each gave a son, never to be returned. From the state of my own residence, besides other worthy but less known whig names, we lent Marshall, Morrison, Baker and Hardin; they all fought, and one fell, and in the fall of that one we lost our best whig man. Nor were the whigs few in numbers, or laggard in the day of danger. In that fearful, bloody, breathless struggle at Buena Vista, when each man's hard task was to beat back five foes, or die himself, of the five high officers who perished, four were whigs." With an allusion to the distinction between the cause of the President in beginning the war, and the cause of the country after it was begun, Mr. Lincoln closed his speech.
During the time these presidential discussions were going on in Congress, Mr. Lincoln was in close communication with the whig leaders in Illinois, laying out the work of the canvass, and trying to convert the active men of the party to his own ideas of sound policy in the conduct of the campaign. Indeed, he began this work before General Taylor was nominated, under the evident conviction that he would be the candidate, and the strong desire that he should be. As early in the year as February twentieth, he wrote a letter to U.F. Linder, a prominent whig orator of Illinois, on this subject. It betrays the perplexity to which more than one allusion has been made, of the whigs at the time. Mr. Lincoln says, in this letter, "In law, it is good policy to never plead what you need not, lest you oblige yourself to prove what you cannot. Reflect on this well before you proceed. The application I mean to make of this rule is that you should simply go for General Taylor, because you can take some democrats and lose no whigs; but if you go also for Mr. Polk, on the origin and mode of prosecuting the war, you will still take some democrats, but you will lose more whigs, so that, in the sum of the operation, you will be loser. This is, at least, my opinion; and if you will look around, I doubt if you do not discover such to be the fact among your own neighbors. Further than this: by justifying Mr. Polk's mode of prosecuting the war, you put yourself in opposition to General Taylor himself, for we all know he has declared for, and, in fact, originated, the defensive line policy."
In this letter, Mr. Lincoln talks like a politician (and he was one of the most acute that the country ever produced,) to a politician. It looks as if he were handling grave questions of state with reference only to party ends; but the letter does not represent him wholly. In a subsequent note to the same friend, in answer to the question whether "it would not be just as easy to elect General Taylor without opposing the war, as by opposing it," he replies: "the locofocos here will not let the whigs be silent, ...so that they are compelled to speak, and their only option is whether they will, when they speak, tell the truth; or tell a foul, villainous and bloody falsehood." In this declaration, the politician sinks, and the man rises, and seems to be what he really is--honest and conscientious.
On the fourteenth day of August, the first session of the Thirtieth Congress came to a close, and the members went home to continue and complete the campaign which they had inaugurated at Washington. The session had been one of strong excitements, particular interest attaching to every important debate in consequence of its bearing upon the question of the presidency. Mr. Lincoln had discharged his duties well--ably and conscientiously, at least. He found to his regret that he had not entirely pleased his constituents in his course on the questions connected with the war. It is probable that he could have secured a renomination had he himself been Willing to risk the result. That a man with his desire for public life would willingly retire from Congress at the end of a single term of service is not probable; and while it has been said that he peremptorily refused to be again considered a candidate, on account of his desire to engage more exclusively in the duties of his profession, it is not credible that this was his only motive.[2] Indeed, there is evidence that he sought another office, in consequence of the fact that his professional business had suffered so severely by his absence that he would have been glad to quit it altogether. He was in no hurry to return to it, certainly, for at the close of the session, he visited New England, and made a number of very effective campaign speeches, and then went home, and devoted his time to the canvass for the election of General Taylor until he had the satisfaction of witnessing the triumph of his candidate, and the national success of the party to whose fortunes he had been so long and so warmly devoted.
In his own district, Mr. Lincoln helped to give General Taylor a majority nearly equal to that by which he had been elected to Congress. The general result of the election brought to him great satisfaction. It justified his own judgment touching the candidate's availability, and promised a return to the policy which he believed essential to the welfare of the country. But little time was left between the close of the canvass and the commencement of the second session, so that Mr. Lincoln had no more than sufficient space for the transaction of his personal business at home, before he was obliged to take his departure again for Washington.
The second session of this Congress was comparatively a quiet one. Several months had elapsed since the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had ratified peace between the United States and Mexico, the presidential campaign had transpired, and the national political caldron had ceased to boil. Mr. Lincoln carried into this session the anti-slavery record of an anti-slavery whig. He had voted forty-two times for the Wilmot Proviso, had stood firmly by John Quincy Adams and Joshua R. Giddings on the right of petition, and was recognized as a man who would do as much in opposition to slavery as his constitutional obligations would permit him to do. Early in the session, Mr. Gott of New York introduced a resolution instructing the Committee on the District of Columbia to report a bill prohibiting the slave trade in the District. The language of the preamble upon which the resolution was based was very strong, and doubtless seemed to Mr. Lincoln unnecessarily offensive; and we find him voting with the pro-slavery men of the House to lay it on the table, and subsequently voting against its adoption. He had probably been maturing a measure which he intended should cover the same ground, in another way, and on the sixteenth of January he introduced a substitute for this resolution, which had been carried along under a motion to reconsider. It provided that no person not within the District, and no person thereafter born within the District, should be held to slavery within the District; or held to slavery without its limits, while it provided that those holding slaves in the slave states might bring them in and take them out again, when visiting the District on public business. It also provided for the emancipation of all the slaves legally held within the District, at the will of their masters, who could claim their full value at the hands of the government, and that the act itself should be subject to the approval of the voters of the District. The bill had also a provision, "that the municipal authorities of Washington and Georgetown, within their respective jurisdictional limits," should be "empowered and required to provide active and efficient means to arrest and deliver up to their owners all fugitive slaves escaping into said District."
If any evidence were needed to establish the fact that Mr. Lincoln regarded slaves as property under the Constitution, this bill would seem to furnish all that is desired. If he did not so regard them, this bill convicts him of friendliness rather than enmity to slavery. If he did not so regard them, his whole record relating to slavery was a record of duplicity. Mr. Lincoln's character as an anti-slavery man can have no consistency on any basis except that of his firm belief that slaves were recognized as property under the Constitution of the United States; and those who impute to him the opposite opinion, or action based upon the opposite opinion, inflict a wrong upon his memory.[3] He recognized slaves as property not only in Congress, but on the stump and even in his business. He was once employed by General Matteson of Bourbon County, Kentucky, who had brought five or six negroes into Coles County, Illinois, and worked them on a farm for two or three years, to get them out or the hands of the civil authorities, which had interfered to keep him from taking them back to Kentucky. Judge Wilson and Judge Treat, both of the Supreme Court, sat on the case, and decided against the claim of the slaveholder, as presented by Mr. Lincoln. It is remembered that he made a very poor plea, and exercised a good deal of research in presenting the authorities for and against, and that all his sympathies were on the side of the slaves, but such a man as Mr. Lincoln would never have consented to act on this case if he had not believed that slaves were recognized as property by the Constitution. It is true that in a speech delivered afterwards, during the famous Douglas campaign, he denied the statement made by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision, that "the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution;" but there was to him, and there is in fact, a great difference between a distinct and express affirmation, and a real though it may be only a tacit recognition of property in a slave. Slavery was to him legally right and morally wrong. He was equally loyal to the Constitution and loving to his kind; and when the time came which gave him the privilege of striking off the fetters of the slave, in order to preserve the country and its Constitution, he did it, and counted the act the crowning one of his life.
Mr. Lincoln did not bring his bill forward without consultation. Mr. Seaton, of the National Intelligencer, is understood to have been most in his confidence; and Mr. Lincoln said, on presenting his bill to the House, that he was authorized to say that, of about fifteen of the leading citizens of the District to whom the proposition had been submitted, there Was not one who did not give it his approval. A substitute for the bill was moved, and finally the whole subject was given up, and left to take its place among the unfinished business of the Congress. The reason for this is reported to have been Mr. Seaton's withdrawal from the support of the plan; and Mr. Seaton's withdrawal from the support of the plan is said to have been owing to the visits and expostulations of members of Congress from the slave states. Mr. Lincoln could hope to do nothing without the approval of the voters of the District, and to secure this approval he must secure the support of the National Intelligencer. That taken from his scheme, he took no further interest in pursuing it.
Mr. Lincoln had other occasions, during the session, to record his votes against slavery, in his own moderate way--always moved by his humanity and his love of that which was morally right, and withheld and controlled by his obligations to the Constitution and the law, as he apprehended those obligations.
The fourth of March brought his Congressional career to a close. While he had maintained a most respectable position in the House, there is no reason to believe that he made any great impression upon legislation, or upon the mind of the country. His highest honors were to be won in another field, for which his two years in the House were in part a preparation. After his return to Springfield, he found his practice dissipated. He saw that he should be obliged to begin again. Business, for the time, had taken new channels, as it never fails to do in like cases. The charms of the old life in Washington came back to him, and he was ready to take an office. He had a fancy that he would like to be Commissioner of the General Land Office, and Mr. Defrees, now the superintendent of public printing at Washington, and then the editor of the Indiana State Journal, wrote an extended article, urging his appointment, and published it in that newspaper. The effort miscarried, very much to Mr. Lincoln's and the country's advantage; and Mr. Butterfield of Illinois secured the coveted place. The unsuccessful application for this appointment was subsequently a theme of much merriment between Mr. Lincoln and his friends.
Footnotes[edit]
- ↑ Whereas, The President of the United States, in his message of May 11, 1846, has declared that "the Mexican Government not only refused to receive him [the envoy of the United States,] or listen to his propositions, but, after a long continued series of menaces, has at last invaded our territory, and shed the blood of our fellow citizens on our own soil:"
And again, in his message of December 8, 1846, that "We had ample cause of war against Mexico long before the breaking out of hostilities; but even then we forebore to take redress into our own hands until Mexico herself became the aggressor, by invading our soil in hostile array, and shedding the blood of our citizens:"
And yet again, in his message of December 7, 1847, that "the Mexican Government refused even to hear the terms of adjustment which he [our minister of peace] was authorized to propose, and finally, under wholly unjustifiable pretexts, involved the two countries in war, by invading the territory of the State of Texas, striking the first blow, and shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil:" and,
Whereas, This House is desirous to obtain a full knowledge of all the facts which go to establish whether the particular spot on which trhe blood of our citizens was so shed was or was not at that time "our own soil:" therefore,
Resolved by the House of Representatives, That the President of the United Stated be respectfully requested to inform this house--
1st. Whether the spot on which the blood of our citizens was shed, as in his messages declared, was or was not within the territory of Spain, at least after the treaty of 1819, until the Mexican Revolution.
2d. Whether that spot is or is not within the territory which was wrested from Spain by the revolutionary Government of Mexico.
3d. Whether that spot is or is not within a settlement of people, which settlement has existed ever since long before the Texas revolution, and until its inhabitants fled before the approach of the United States army.
4th. Whether that settlement is or is not isolated from any and all other settlements by the Gulf and the Rio Grande on the south and west, and by wide uninhabited regions on the north and east.
5th. Whether the people of that settlement, or a majority of them, or any of them, have ever submitted themselves to the government or laws of Texas or of the United States, by consent or by compulsion, either by accepting office, or voting at elections, or paying tax, or serving on juries, or having process served upon them, or in any other way.
6th. Whether the people of that settlement did or did not flee from the approach of the United States army, leaving unprotected their homes and their growing crops, before the blood was shed, as in the messages stated; and whether the first blood, so shed, was or was not shed within the inclosure of one of the people who had thus fled from it.
7th. Whether our citizens, whose blood was shed, as in his messages declared, were or were not, at that time, armed officers and soldiers, sent into that settlement by the military order of the President, through the Secretary of War.
8th. Whether the military force of the United States was or was not so sent into that settlement after General Taylor had more than once intimated to the War Department that, in his opinion, no such movement was necessary to the defense or protection of Texas. - ↑ Mr. Scripps, in his campaign biography, says that his refusal to again be a candidate, was in accordance with an understanding with the leading whigs of his district before his election.
- ↑ "His vote is recorded against the pretence that slaves were property under the Constitution."--Charles Sumner's Eulogy at Boston, June 1, 1865.