Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [82]
As Seward understood better than Lincoln, Manifest Destiny was in the air. “Our population,” Seward predicted, “is destined to roll its resistless waves to the icy barriers of the north, and to encounter Oriental civilization on the shores of the Pacific.” Though he wasn’t in favor of the war, Seward’s political astuteness told him it was a mistake to argue against it. He warned that he did “not expect to see the Whig party successful in overthrowing an Administration carrying on a war in which the Whig party and its statesmen are found apologizing for our national adversaries.”
Back in Ohio, Salmon Chase told the abolitionist Gerrit Smith that he “would not have engaged in” the war, but in public he muted his opposition. For Chase was caught in a political dilemma. On the one hand, his antislavery allies in the Liberty Party were strongly against the war. If he wanted a seat in the U.S. Senate, however, he would need the support of Ohio Democrats, a task that would not be made easier by assaulting a Democratic president.
Of the four future presidential rivals, only Edward Bates matched the vehemence of Lincoln’s opposition. He charged Polk with “gross & palpable lying,” arguing that the true object of the war was “plunder & conquest.” Bates said he was ashamed of his Whig brethren who voted for the war, “actuated by a narrow & groveling policy, and a selfish fear of injuring their own popularity, & injuriously affecting the coming Presidential election.” To Bates, the war was part of a conspiracy to extend the reach of slavery—a belief he shared with many other Whigs, though not with Lincoln, who argued it was simply “a war of conquest brought into existence to catch votes.”
Whether or not it was begun to extend slavery, the war brought the issue of slavery expansion to the forefront. While the early battles were still raging, a little-known congressman from Pennsylvania, David Wilmot, had penned a historic amendment to a war appropriations bill providing that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory” acquired from Mexico—lands that would eventually comprise California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. This Wilmot Proviso was repeatedly passed in the House and repeatedly blocked in the Southern-dominated Senate. Its status became a battleground in the conflict between North and South. The issue of slavery in the territories would become the defining issue in the years that followed.
Seward, Chase, and Lincoln all favored the ban on slavery from entering the territories acquired from Mexico. Even before the Wilmot Proviso had been introduced, Lincoln positioned himself against the expansion of slavery, a position he would hold for the rest of his career, arguing that while the Constitution protected slavery in the states where it already existed, “we should never knowingly lend ourselves directly or indirectly, to prevent that slavery from dying a natural death—to find new places for it to live in, when it can no longer exist in the old.”
In Missouri, Bates also supported the Wilmot Proviso, though for different reasons. Bates considered the problem of extending slavery into these new lands a practical rather than a moral question. If Southerners brought their slaves into the West in large numbers, he feared that migration of free whites would come to a halt, thereby precluding growth and progress in the region. More important, he worried that the agitation over the slavery issue, which he blamed equally on Northern abolitionists and Southern extremists, would pull the country apart.
Bates had reason to fear so. South Carolina’s John Calhoun led the vocal opposition to the Proviso, denouncing it as an unconstitutional act that would deny Southerners the right to move freely “with their property” into commonly held American