The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [19]
that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils. They believe that the Congress of the United States has no power, under the constitution, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the different States. They believe that the Congress of the United States has the power, under the constitution, to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia; but that that power ought not to be exercised unless at the request of the people of said District. The difference between these opinions and those contained in the said resolutions, is their reason for entering this protest.57
Lincoln’s “protest” differed from the resolutions primarily in its strong language against slavery and in omitting the description of slaveholders’ property rights as “sacred.” It foreshadowed Lincoln’s public stance in the 1850s: slavery was unjust; northerners had an obligation to respect the constitutional compromises that protected the institution; the national government had the power to act against slavery in the District of Columbia; and Lincoln was not an abolitionist. In his 1860 autobiographical sketch, Lincoln wrote that the protest “briefly defined his position on the slavery question; and so far as it goes, it was then the same that it is now.” He instructed John L. Scripps to include the text in the campaign biography of Lincoln that Scripps was writing. During the secession crisis, a member of Congress from Missouri cited Lincoln’s words from 1837 as evidence that his intentions regarding slavery could not be trusted.58
Hardly a ringing condemnation of slavery, the protest did display genuine political courage. As Scripps pointed out in the Chicago Press and Tribune in 1860, the document’s “intrinsic ideas” were less important than “the time they were avowed,” well before “the conscience of the nation” had awakened to the evil of slavery. When Lincoln criticized slavery as unwise and unjust, abolitionism could not have been weaker or more unpopular in Illinois. The state Anti-Slavery Society had yet to be founded. Indeed, Browning explained that his committee did not recommend action against abolitionist activity because it was “not aware” of any in the state. Certainly, Lincoln could not have anticipated any political benefit from his course. Quite the contrary. The rules required that to be printed, any such protest had to be signed by two members. Lincoln canvassed the other five dissenters, but the four intending to run for reelection declined to join him. Only Stone, a Vermont-born lawyer who had recently been appointed to a judgeship and thus would not have to face the voters, agreed to sign.59
A year after his vote on the legislative resolutions, Lincoln again took the opportunity to speak about slavery, although in somewhat oblique fashion. The occasion was “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” a speech he delivered before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, one of thousands of local societies for political self-education and debate frequented by up-and-coming young men in Jacksonian America. Lincoln’s subject was citizenship in a democratic republic and threats to American institutions. In keeping with the exceptionalist vision of nationhood so common in postrevolutionary America, he proclaimed that the founders had put in place a political system more conducive to liberty than any in history. His generation’s duty was to preserve this “political edifice” and bequeath it to the future. The greatest danger to its continued existence lay within: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”
Where would this destruction originate? Lincoln pointed to “the increasing disregard for law” evident in a rising tide of mob violence. (He did not exaggerate: literally hundreds of riots of one kind or another took place in the United States in the 1830s, many of them reported in the Illinois press.) Americans, Lincoln warned, had fallen victim