The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [101]
Despite this concession, it is easy to understand why many southerners did not view Lincoln’s inaugural address as conciliatory. When it came to what he considered the central issue of the controversy, Lincoln again refused to compromise. Repeating almost verbatim the language of his letters to Gilmer and Stephens the previous December, Lincoln declared, “One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.” He repeated his commitment to the South’s right to retrieve fugitive slaves, but suggested not only that the law be modified so as to prevent free blacks from being enslaved, but also that legislation should enforce the Constitution’s requirement that each state respect the rights of citizens of other states. Free blacks, Lincoln appeared to be saying, must be viewed as entitled to recognition as citizens under the comity clause. No president, the Liberator pointed out, had ever made such an assertion, which repudiated the Dred Scott decision. Indeed, Lincoln went on to insist that when it came to vital issues “affecting the whole people,” Americans could not “resign their government into the hands” of judges. All this was said in the presence of Chief Justice Taney, who had administered the oath of office moments earlier, looking, according to one reporter, like a “galvanized corpse.”56
The heart of Lincoln’s first inaugural consisted of a lengthy repudiation of the right of secession and an affirmation of national sovereignty and majority rule. In preparing the address he had consulted Henry Clay’s speech to the Senate on the Compromise of 1850 and President Buchanan’s December 1860 message to Congress, some of whose phraseology made its way into his speech. But the two key influences were classic documents of American nationalism dating from the early 1830s: Andrew Jackson’s Proclamation on Nullification and Daniel Webster’s reply to South Carolina Senator Robert Hayne. Drawing on the arguments of Jackson and Webster, which generations of northern children had learned in school and Republicans had reiterated throughout the 1850s, Lincoln insisted that the nation had been created by the American people rather than the states, and had been meant from the outset to be perpetual. No state, therefore, could unilaterally dissolve it. The audience, one newspaper reported, greeted Lincoln’s passages on the necessity of maintaining the Union with “vociferous applause.”57
Lincoln couched his argument as a defense of a basic principle of democracy—that the minority must acquiesce in the rule of the majority, so long as that rule accords with constitutional principles. The deep national division over the morality of slavery could be decided only by a democratic process, such as the one that had placed him in office. Secession, by contrast, not only was illegal but would lead to an endless splintering of authority as disgruntled minorities seceded from polities they deemed oppressive. No government could function in such circumstances. Over two decades earlier, as a young legislator, Lincoln had condemned “the increasing disregard for law” as the greatest threat to American institutions and the American experiment in democratic self-government. Then, the culprit was mob violence; now it was the claim that a state could decide to leave the Union. “Plainly,” he declared, “the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy.”
But Lincoln also appealed to the spirit of