Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [61]
Young Lincoln’s great ambition in the 1830s, he told Joshua Speed, was to be the “DeWitt Clinton of Illinois.” The pioneering New York governor had opened opportunities for all New Yorkers and left a permanent imprint on his state when he persuaded the legislature to support the Erie Canal project. In the Illinois legislature, Lincoln hoped to leave a similar imprint by way of an ambitious program of internal improvements.
During these same years, the young state legislator made his first public statement on slavery. The rise of abolitionism in the North and the actions of governors, such as Seward, who refused to fully respect fugitive slave provisions in the Constitution, led legislatures in both South and North to pass resolutions that censured abolitionism and confirmed the constitutional right to slavery. In conservative Illinois, populated by many citizens of Southern birth, the general assembly fell in line. By the lopsided vote of 77–6, the assembly resolved that “we highly disapprove of the formation of abolition societies,” hold “sacred” the “right of property in slaves,” and believe that “the General Government cannot abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, against the consent of the citizens.”
Lincoln was among the six dissenting voices. With one other colleague who had also voted against the resolution, he issued a formal protest. This protest did not endorse abolitionism, for Lincoln believed then, as later, that the Constitution did not give Congress the power to interfere with slavery in the states where it was already established. Instead, resisting the tide of public opinion in Illinois, Lincoln proclaimed that “the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy,” and affirmed the constitutional power of Congress to abolish slavery in areas under federal control, such as the District of Columbia, though he recommended “that that power ought not to be exercised unless at the request of the people of said District.”
Lincoln always believed, he later said, that “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” and he could not remember when he did not “so think, and feel.” Though he was born in the slave state of Kentucky, his parents had been antislavery. Their opposition had led them to change religious congregations, and eventually, they had moved to the free state of Indiana “partly on account of slavery.” Decades later, in his short autobiography written for the 1860 presidential campaign, Lincoln would describe his protest in the Illinois legislature as one that “briefly defined his position on the slavery question; and so far as it goes, it was then the same that it is now.”
In these early years, however, Lincoln paid the slavery issue less attention than Seward or Chase, believing that so long as slavery could be restricted to places where it already existed, it would gradually become extinct. He did not share Chase’s professional and personal aversion to slaveowners and did not hesitate to take whatever clients came his way. In the course of his practice, Lincoln defended both slaveowners and fugitive slaves. While he hated to see fugitive slaves hunted down, he publicly criticized the governor of Maine when he, like Seward, refused to give up two men who had aided a fugitive slave from Georgia. For Lincoln, the constitutional requirements