The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [11]
The Todds were a proud, self-important family whose pretensions Lincoln frequently ridiculed. “One ‘d’ was good enough for God,” he quipped, “but not the Todds.” Nonetheless, Lincoln remained extremely close to his wife’s family. When the death of Robert S. Todd unleashed a bitter squabble over his estate, Lincoln became involved in the ensuing litigation. (His wife ended up losing money as a result of the eventual court decisions.) During the Civil War, as the New York World observed, referring to the Todds, Lincoln “appointed his whole family to government posts.”26
On several occasions, Lincoln came into contact with slavery on visits to his in-laws’ home in Lexington. With his wife and two young sons, he spent nearly a month there in 1847 on his way to taking up a seat in Congress. They enjoyed another extended stay in 1849, and Lincoln visited Lexington again while handling lawsuits in 1850, 1852, and 1853. The city’s newspapers were filled with advertisements seeking the recovery of runaways and offering slaves for sale. It is unknown whether Lincoln witnessed a slave auction during any of these visits. If so, he never mentioned it.27
Thus, before his emergence in the 1850s as an antislavery politician, Lincoln lived in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, all of which had histories of slavery and severe laws effectively denying black persons the rights of citizenship. All three, in fact, at one time or another prohibited free blacks from entering their territory.28 Lincoln had seen the small-scale slavery of Kentucky and the plantations and slave markets of the Mississippi Valley. He had married into a family of slaveholders.
From an early age, Lincoln demonstrated an independent cast of mind. He diverged in many ways from the boisterous and sometimes violent frontier culture in which he grew up. He did not drink, hunt, or chew tobacco, tried to avoid physical altercations, never joined a church, and early in life embarked on a program of self-improvement, bent on escaping the constraining circumstances of his youth.29 Despite his penchant for thinking for himself, however, for most of his life Lincoln shared many of the racial prejudices so deeply rooted in the border region in which he grew up.
Yet Lincoln, had he desired, could have easily moved back to Kentucky like his friend Joshua Speed and, with the support of his prominent father-in-law, established himself as a member of Lexington’s slaveowning high society. He chose not to do so. “Every American,” Tocqueville observed, “is eaten up with longing to rise.”30 Lincoln was even more ambitious than most of his contemporaries. But to him, success meant advancement in a society based on free labor, not slave.
II
AS LINCOLN grew to adulthood, the institution of slavery underwent a profound transformation. By the 1830s, when he entered Illinois politics, war, revolution, slave rebellion, and the spread of Enlightenment ideas concerning human freedom had combined to reduce significantly the geographical scope of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. In the United States, the combination of a revolutionary ideology centered on liberty and the disruptions caused by the War of Independence threw the future of slavery into doubt. Between 1777, when Vermont adopted a constitution prohibiting slavery, and 1804, when New Jersey acted, every northern state enacted measures to abolish the institution. These were the first legal steps toward emancipation