The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [10]
You may remember, as I well do, that…there were, on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border…. You ought…to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the constitution and the Union.22
Lincoln’s oft-quoted letter, addressed to a good friend who by 1855 differed substantially with him about slavery, has been described as a “cry from the heart.” Lincoln’s response in 1841, when he encountered the chained slaves, was quite different. Then, he sent a vivid description of what he had seen to Mary Speed, Joshua’s half sister:
A fine example was presented on board the boat for contemplating the effect of condition upon human happiness…. [The slaves] were chained six and six together. A small iron clevis was around the left wrist of each, and this was fastened to the main chain by a shorter one at a convenient distance from the others; so that the negroes were strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line. In this condition they were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them, from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where; and yet amid all these distressing circumstances, as we would think of them, they were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board…. How true it is that God…renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while He permits the best, to be nothing better than tolerable.23
Clearly, the chained slaves fascinated Lincoln, and he observed closely their method of confinement and their behavior. This letter is one of very few at any point in his life in which Lincoln muses on cruel punishments and the uprooting and separation of families—the concrete reality to which black men, women, and children were subjected. One cannot read the letter without a sense of revulsion at what the slaves experienced. Yet whether he did not wish to offend an owner of slaves, or his melancholy at the time affected his thinking, or his own views on slavery had not yet matured, Lincoln’s account was oddly dispassionate. He did not describe the scene, as he would in 1855, as a violation of rights, a way of illustrating a political outlook, or an affront to his feelings, but as an interesting illustration of how human beings have the capacity to remain cheerful even in the most dire circumstances.
Until they drifted apart in the 1850s over the slavery question, Lincoln’s relationship with the Speeds illustrated the close connection his circle of friends in Springfield had with slavery. His early political mentor and first law partner, John Todd Stuart, represented traders in indentured servants and slaves. Most important, when he married Stuart’s cousin Mary Todd in 1842, Lincoln became part of a significant slaveholding family. His wife grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, in the heart of bluegrass country, the focal point of slaveholding in the state and a major slave-trading center. One of Mary’s uncles bought and sold slaves. A prominent businessman, lawyer, and well-connected political figure, Mary’s father, Robert S. Todd, was a longtime member of the Kentucky legislature and an associate of Henry Clay.24
Robert S. Todd’s first wife died in 1825. He soon remarried and four of his daughters, including Mary, eventually moved to Springfield as young women, in part because of difficulties with their stepmother. Mary’s uncle, Dr. John Todd, also took up residence in Springfield and owned five slaves there in 1830. Mary’s eldest sister Elizabeth married Ninian Edwards, who served in the legislature