The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [28]
During his entire legislative career and for years thereafter, Lincoln’s primary concern remained economic policy. Sharing Henry Clay’s belief that the Whig economic program would benefit all Americans, as well as Clay’s powerful devotion to national unity, Lincoln also knew that as an intersectional institution, his party’s prospects at the national level (where questions concerning the Bank, tariff, and federal aid to internal improvements would be resolved) required cooperation between northerners and southerners, nonslaveholders and slaveholders. Even as the slavery issue made its way from the wings to the center stage of American politics during the 1840s, Lincoln would continue to view it essentially as a divisive influence, a danger to the success of his party and the stability and future of the Union.
II
WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON swept to victory in the 1840 election but, as usual, the Democrats carried Illinois. That year, Lincoln won election to his last term in the legislature. From 1842, when his career in the Illinois House ended, until he assumed the presidency in 1861, he held no public office with the exception of a single term in Congress. He remained, however, an active member of the Whig party, regularly campaigning for its candidates and continuing to emphasize its stance on economic issues. He made more speeches on the protective tariff than on any other subject, he later remarked. As late as 1846, when Lincoln ran for Congress and the issue of slavery was making its way into political debate in connection with the Mexican War, the tariff remained, as one newspaper reported, the “principal subject” of Lincoln’s speeches.19
Nonetheless, the slavery issue could not be entirely avoided. Antislavery sentiment was “gaining ground in the public mind,” the prominent Ohio Whig Thomas Corwin noted, a fact “that no one can overlook.” Some observers blamed the Liberty party—founded in 1840 by abolitionists who, unlike the followers of William Lloyd Garrison, believed in running candidates for public office—for Henry Clay’s defeat in 1844. The 15,000 votes cast in New York for James G. Birney, the Liberty party’s presidential candidate, enabled Democrat James K. Polk to carry the state and win the presidential election. Liberty supporters were far less numerous in Illinois—in 1840, the party received all of 160 votes. By 1844, its total had risen to 3,433 in a turnout that exceeded 100,000. Yet in a few northern counties, the Liberty party polled a substantial vote and became a factor in local politics. Given the Whigs’ minority status in Illinois, a shrewd observer of politics like Lincoln could not help thinking about how to attract Liberty voters to his party.20
In October 1845, Lincoln sent a long letter to the Liberty supporter Williamson Dudley in Putnam County, where Birney had received 23 percent of the vote the previous year. “I was glad to hear you say,” Lincoln wrote, “that you intend to attempt to bring about, at the next election in Putnam, a union of the whigs proper, and such of the liberty men, as are whigs in principle on all questions save only that of slavery.” Lincoln set out to delineate the differences between Whigs and “liberty men.” Both viewed slavery as an evil and both opposed the annexation of Texas, which had joined the Union as a slave state the previous March. Yet, Lincoln continued, “I was never much interested in the Texas question.” He failed to see how annexation would “augment the evil of slavery,” since slaves in Texas—whether in the American Union or outside it—would remain slaves. As to promoting emancipation in the South, Lincoln continued, “I hold it to be a paramount duty of us in the free states, due to the Union of the states, and perhaps to liberty itself (paradox though it may seem) to let the slavery of the other states alone”—the paradox being that to agitate against slavery endangered the preservation of the Union and