Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

into slavery and others into freedom. That would make amoral nonsense of democracy. The right of the black slave to “eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns,” was so much a matter of natural law that no bare majority of white voters had the power to deny him. In that sense, the black slave was the natural equal of any other human being—“my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”40

Democracy must be not simply the vote of the majority but the choice by the majority of what is morally right, and the position of the Republicans was that slavery was so much a moral wrong that no amount of popular sovereignty could ever make slavery right for an American territory. In the last debate of the series, Lincoln insisted that “the real issue in this controversy—the one pressing upon every mind—is the sentiment on the one part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and on another class that does not look upon it as a wrong.”

It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. … It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” [Loud applause.] No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.41

Perhaps it is worth saying, in Douglas’s defense, that the Little Giant did not believe that slavery was actually right, nor did Lincoln in 1858 believe that it was wrong enough to justify direct intervention in the affairs of states where it was already domesticated, or that natural equality immediately translated into civil equality. Natural rights were permanent, common, and intuitive, and defined the person as a human being; civil rights were bestowed by communities and could be changed, altered, revoked, or bestowed as a community saw fit, without that in any way impairing the essential humanity of the individuals involved. “Society,” as even one New England abolitionist wrote, “in forming its institutions and organizations has a right to with-hold [voting rights] from any person or class of persons who it believes cannot exercise it understandingly.”42 Natural rights, however, were not the gift of “society.” They were possessed equally by all human beings simply by virtue of being human, and for Lincoln in 1858, black people were certainly the equals of whites in terms of their natural humanity. That made slavery a wrong that should be contained wherever there was opportunity to contain it.

For Douglas, black people were so far from being the equals of whites in any sense, natural or civil, that the misfortune of their enslavement was simply not worth antagonizing half the Union, especially when opening up half the continent was at stake. For Douglas, the question about slavery was not natural rights but workaday politics—shall we let this quarrel over inferior beings wreck the Union? For the time being, that was the basic outlook of most Illinoisans.

Douglas Democrats won the majority of the Illinois legislative seats on election day, November 2, and since the Illinois legislature was still the legal forum for electing the state’s U.S. senators, it was the legislature and not the popular vote of the people of Illinois that on January 5 sent Douglas back to Washington.

Lincoln tried to put as jolly a face on the situation as he could. On his way home on election night, “the path” he walked “had been worn hog-backed & was slippering. My foot slipped from under me, knocking the other one out of the way, but I recovered myself & lit square: and I said to myself, ‘It’s a slip and not a fall.’” And that would be how he would try to understand his defeat—a slip and not a fall. In his bleaker moments, though, he could not help seeing this defeat as being of a piece with all his other political disappointments. “I have no regrets for having… resolutely made the struggle,” he wrote to Salmon Chase of Ohio, the one Republican worthy who had come to Illinois to campaign for Lincoln in 1858—although “I would have preferred success.”43 Yet his loss really was a significant one. By forcing out into the open the inconsistencies of the popular sovereignty dogma, Lincoln had made it impossible both for anti-slavery Republicans to see Douglas as an ally and for pro-slavery Southerners to see him as a friend to slavery’s unlimited expansion. Incidentally, he had also made himself a national figure, with results that people were already beginning to speculate upon.

NEVER BE PURGED BUT WITH BLOOD

When James Buchanan became president in 1856 it was fervently hoped that he would have the political tools necessary to put the slavery agitation to rest. Buchanan had to his credit almost forty years of experience in Congress, the cabinet, and most recently in diplomatic service. Although he was a Pennsylvanian by birth and a Northern Democrat by conviction, he nevertheless sympathized with the South’s ever-mounting demands for reassurance, and the hope that he would be able to please everyone was the single most important factor in his victory over the fatally divided Whigs. “This question of domestic slavery is the weak point in our institutions,” Buchanan admitted as early as 1836. That meant it was all the more important for him to show it the loftiest respect: “Touch this question of slavery seriously—let it once be made manifest to the people of the South that they cannot live with us, except in a state of continual apprehension and alarm for their wives and their children, for all that is near and dear to them upon the earth,—and the Union