Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [107]
At midnight, Douglas began his concluding speech, which lasted nearly four hours. At one point, Seward interrupted to ask for an explanation of something Douglas had said. “Ah,” Douglas retorted, “you can’t crawl behind that free nigger dodge.” In reply, Seward said: “Douglas, no man will ever be President of the United States who spells ‘negro’ with two gs.”
“Midnight passed and the cock crew, and daylight broke before the vote was taken,” the New York Tribune reported. The all-night session was marked by “great confusion, hard words between various Senators and intense excitement in which the galleries participated.” Many of the senators were observed to be “beastly drunk,” their grandiloquence further inflated by “too frequent visits to one of the ante-chambers of the Senate room.”
When the Senate majority cast its votes in favor of the bill at 5 a.m. on the morning of March 4, the antislavery minority was crushed. “The Senate is emasculated,” Senator Benton exclaimed. As Chase and Sumner descended the sweeping steps of the Capitol, a distant cannonade signaled passage of the bill. “They celebrate a present victory,” Chase said, “but the echoes they awake will never rest until slavery itself shall die.”
“Be assured, be assured, gentlemen,” New York Tribune reporter James Pike warned the Southerners, that “you are sowing the wind and you will reap the whirlwind…. No man can stand in the North in that day of reckoning who plants himself on the ground of sustaining the repeal of the Missouri Compromise…. [Here is] the opening of a great drama that…inaugurates the era of a geographical division of political parties. It draws the line between North and South. It pits face to face the two opposing forces of slavery and freedom.”
In the weeks that followed, mass protest meetings spread like wildfire throughout the North, fueled by the enormous reach of the daily newspaper. “The tremendous storm sweeping the North seemed to gather new force every week,” writes the historian Allan Nevins. Resolutions against the law were signed by tens of thousands in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. In New York, the Tribune reported, two thousand protesters marched up Broadway, “led by a band of music, and brilliant with torches and banners.” On college campuses and village squares, in town halls and county fairgrounds, people gathered to make their voices heard.
LINCOLN WAS RIDING the circuit in the backcountry of Illinois when the news reached him of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. A fellow lawyer, T. Lyle Dickey, sharing a room with Lincoln, reported that “he sat on the edge of his bed and discussed the political situation far into the night.” At dawn, he was still “sitting up in bed, deeply absorbed in thought.” He told his companion—“I tell you, Dickey, this nation cannot exist half-slave and half-free.”
Lincoln later affirmed that the successful passage of the bill roused him “as he had never been before.” It permanently recast his views on slavery. He could no longer maintain that slavery was on course to ultimate extinction. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise persuaded him that unless the North mobilized into action against the proslavery forces, free society itself was in peril. The Nebraska Act “took us by surprise,” Lincoln later said. “We were thunderstruck and stunned.” The fight to stem the spread of slavery would become the great purpose Lincoln had been seeking.
Before speaking out against the Nebraska Act, Lincoln spent many hours in the State Library, studying present and past congressional debates so that he could reach back into the stream of American history and tell a clear, reasoned, and compelling tale. He would express no opinion on anything, Herndon observed, until he knew his subject “inside and outside, upside and downside.” Lincoln told Joshua Speed, “I am slow to learn and slow to forget that which