The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [18]
For several years after the murder it remained difficult to hold abolitionist gatherings in many parts of Illinois. In 1843, a mob armed with clubs prevented fifteen abolitionists from convening a public meeting in Bloomington. In the same year, a large crowd disrupted an abolitionist assembly in Peoria. Two years later, the governor appointed one of the mob’s leaders, Norman H. Purple, to the state supreme court. Outside a few counties in northern Illinois settled by New Englanders, abolitionism remained weak well into the 1840s. This was certainly the case in Springfield, where Lincoln lived beginning in 1837. A correspondent of the Liberator reported in 1843 that of the city’s clergymen, only two, including the lone black minister, had “the moral courage” to speak against slavery. “This is a bitter pro-slavery…community,” he noted, adding that what was true of Springfield was equally true of “the entire middle and southern portions of this state.”54
III
NOT SURPRISINGLY, Lincoln repeatedly denied any association with abolitionism. Yet he did not remain indifferent to the clash between colonizationists and abolitionists, or to the mob violence swirling around him. Questions arising from these events rarely came before the Illinois legislature during Lincoln’s tenure there from 1834 to 1842. When they did, however, Lincoln proved willing, at some political risk, to set himself apart from his colleagues in both parties. The occasion arose in January 1837, after Joseph Duncan, the state’s Democratic governor, informed the legislature that a number of southern states had asked their northern fellow countrymen to condemn abolitionists and take action against them. The Illinois legislature appointed a committee to consider the governor’s message. Its chair, Orville H. Browning, a Whig state senator and close friend of Lincoln’s (they lived in the same boardinghouse in Vandalia, then the state capital), presented a report and three resolutions.55
As southerners had requested, the report condemned the abolitionists, although it hardly offered a ringing defense of slavery. Even though it defended the constitutional right to own slaves, Browning’s report was essentially a justification of colonization, which is presumably why the American Colonization Society published it in its monthly periodical, the African Repository. Browning’s main complaint against the abolitionists was that their agitation had undermined the colonizationists’ efforts to liberate “that unfortunate race of our fellow men” from “thraldom” and return them “to their own benighted land.” On the other hand, the three resolutions offered strong support for owners of slaves. The first condemned “the formation of abolition societies, and of the doctrines promulgated by them.” The second affirmed the legislators’ “deep regard and affection” for southern slaveholders, declared the right of property in slaves “sacred to the slave-holding states by the Federal Constitution,” and insisted that slavery could not be abolished there without state approval. The third condemned the idea of abolition in the District of Columbia—which abolitionists were demanding in petitions to Congress—without the consent of the District’s white citizens. When the resolutions came before the Illinois House of Representatives, Lincoln moved to amend the one opposing abolition in the nation’s capital by adding the words “unless the people of the said District petition for the same.” His attempt failed, and the House adopted the resolutions, 77 to 6. The Senate then concurred, 18 to 0. Thus, only six members of the legislature voted no. One was Lincoln.56
Six weeks later, with the House about to adjourn, Lincoln and fellow Whig Dan Stone presented a “protest”—an explanation for their votes to be published in the legislative proceedings. “They