The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [29]
Like his 1837 “protest,” Lincoln’s letter anticipated a position he would articulate in far greater detail and with far greater force in the 1850s. The ideal of liberty was central to American nationhood. Thus, the compromises of the Constitution, including recognition of slavery in existing states, must be respected by northerners lest the continued existence of the Union, the embodiment of liberty, be placed in danger. Non-extension, not abolition, was the only constitutionally available position for critics of slavery. Yet Lincoln did look forward to an American future, perhaps quite distant, without slavery.
Despite its tiny vote totals, the Liberty party played an important part in the evolution of political antislavery. Although the party was composed of committed abolitionists, its adherents accepted the pre–Civil War consensus that the Constitution gave Congress no authority whatever to interfere with slavery in the states. So widespread was this view, in the North as well as the South, that only a small minority of abolitionists challenged it. Lysander Spooner, a Massachusetts-born radical whose causes included postal reform, anarchism, and the rights of labor as well as abolitionism, claimed that by affirming mankind’s inalienable right to liberty, the Declaration of Independence had abolished slavery, which had not legally existed since. Alvan Stewart, a prolific writer and speaker against slavery from New York, developed the argument that the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which barred depriving any person of “life, liberty, or property” without due process of law, made slavery unconstitutional. Slaves, said Stewart, should go to court and obtain writs of habeas corpus ordering their release from bondage.22
Very few Americans found this reading of the law persuasive. “Absurd” was how the Republican Cincinnati Gazette described it in 1860. Far more influential was a political-constitutional strategy for opposing slavery developed in the 1840s by the antislavery Whig politicians Joshua R. Giddings and William H. Seward and, most notably, by the Liberty party leader Salmon P. Chase. It went by the name “freedom national” and concentrated on ways to make the federal government “freedom’s open, active, and perpetual ally” by attacking slavery in every jurisdiction outside the southern states—the District of Columbia, the territories, federal forts and arsenals, and the interstate trade in slaves. “The principle must be established,” Chase wrote in 1842, “that the government is a nonslaveholding government, that the nation is a nonslaveholding nation, that slavery is a creature of state law…to be confined within the states which admit and sanction it.” There, he believed, it would “perish.”
In Chase’s personality deep religious conviction intertwined with inordinate ambition and self-regard. Somehow the result was a lifelong commitment to promoting the rights of African-Americans, slave and free. As a lawyer in Cincinnati in the mid-1830s Chase had been drawn to abolitionism as an expression of outrage over a mob attack on the offices of James G. Birney, who was then editing an antislavery newspaper in the city. Chase’s program, developed in conjunction with Birney, offered an indirect means of limiting the power of slavery and promoting eventual abolition without violating the Constitution. It laid the groundwork for the juridical outlook of the Republican party in the 1850s and during the Civil War.23
Chase based his argument on a reading of the legal and political principles of the Age of Revolution. He harkened back to the case of James Somerset, a West Indian slave who sued for his liberty after being brought to England by his owner. In a landmark 1772 decision, Lord Mansfield, the chief justice of England, freed Somerset. Since the decision predated the printing of official versions of court decisions,