The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [111]
Lincoln greeted the legislators with a long message detailing his actions since the outbreak of war and offering a philosophical and legal justification for the Union cause. Acknowledging that some of his actions might not have been “strictly legal,” he insisted that all had been demanded by “public necessity.” To critics, he posed a pointed challenge: “Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” He asked for retroactive approval of his conduct. This was soon forthcoming for all of Lincoln’s military measures, although Congress notably failed to endorse his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. This did not stop Lincoln from continuing to suspend the writ when he thought proper.13
Lincoln’s message reiterated arguments from his inaugural address about the permanence of the Union, the nation’s supremacy over the states, and the illegality of secession. He rejected the idea that any seceded state except previously independent Texas had ever been a sovereign entity, which he defined as “a political community without a political superior”—a description so “terse and complete,” the lawyer and political essayist Sidney George Fisher wrote in his diary, “that it deserves a place in the science of politics.” Northern newspapers, as well as many ordinary soldiers, had already insisted that the effort to maintain the Union embodied “the cause of self-government throughout the world.” Lincoln offered a powerful affirmation of this understanding of the war’s meaning:
This issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.
Lincoln went on to link the idea of democracy directly with the familiar free-labor ethos, which he had not mentioned in his inaugural. Democracy was not simply a structure of government but a promise of economic opportunity and social justice:
This is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.14
Lincoln’s celebration of free labor implicitly conveyed a critique of its opposite, slave labor. But apart from a reference to “slave states,” the message to Congress contained no reference to slavery as a cause of the war or to abolition as a potential result. Indeed, Lincoln promised that after the conflict ended, the states would enjoy all their traditional constitutional rights. “Any one reading that document, with no previous knowledge of the United States,” Frederick Douglass complained, “would never dream…that we have a slaveholding war waged upon the Government…. Thus do we refuse to see even what it is impossible to hide.” To be sure, many northern newspapers praised the message for precisely this reason. But Harper’s Weekly greeted the assembling lawmakers with an editorial entitled “The Slavery Question.” “This,” it declared, “without doubt, will be the most difficult problem with which Congress will have to grapple.” The disposition of runaway slaves, the editors continued, could not be left to individual military commanders—the government must adopt a “uniform policy.”15
A uniform policy, however, proved difficult to arrive at. Indeed, during the five-week session, Congress adopted measures that seemed patently contradictory. Five days into the session, Owen Lovejoy presented to the House a resolution declaring