The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [35]
Feverish debate on slavery dominated congressional proceedings. “It would really seem,” complained one member, “there is no other subject claiming the deliberations of this House but negro slavery…. From morning to night, day after day, and week after week, nothing is talked of here, nothing can get a hearing that will not afford an opportunity to lug in something about negro slavery.”40 Members from every state delivered long speeches, printed in the Congressional Globe and usually distributed in pamphlet form to their constituents. But one searches the Globe in vain for a significant contribution to the debate by Lincoln.
The first session of Congress, which lasted from December 1847 to August 1848, took place in the shadow of the upcoming presidential election. Lincoln quickly became associated with the Young Indians, a group of Whig congressmen (most of them southerners, including the future vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens) who pushed for the nomination of the victorious Mexican War general Zachary Taylor, owner of a Louisiana sugar plantation and over 100 slaves. Lincoln may have remained silent on slavery for fear of endangering the unity and electoral prospects of the Whig party. When he made his maiden speech, he chose not slavery but an issue on which northern and southern Whigs agreed—the Mexican War.41
By the time Congress assembled, fighting had ceased, American forces occupied the Mexican capital, and negotiations for a peace treaty were under way. Nonetheless, most Whigs continued to believe that President Polk had initiated the conflict by deceiving the American public. During his campaign for Congress in 1846, Lincoln had said little about the war, although he spoke at a rally to promote enlistment in the army. The war was popular in Illinois, where the spirit of Manifest Destiny ran high. But in Washington, the war had become, in the words of one congressman, “a party question.” If evidence were needed, it came on January 3, 1848, when the House voted on a resolution of thanks to General Taylor and his army. George Ashmun, a Massachusetts Whig, proposed to add to the preamble the words “in a war unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.” Ashmun’s amendment passed the House 82 to 81. Every Democrat, northern and southern, voted against it, and every Whig (Lincoln included) except one voted in favor.42
Nine days later, Lincoln delivered his first speech, a full-fledged attack on the president. Earlier Lincoln had introduced resolutions demanding that Polk inform Congress of the precise “spot” of American soil where, the president claimed, Mexican aggression had initiated the war. The speech dissected Polk’s claims about the boundary between Texas and Mexico and his failure to offer proof that “the soil was ours where war began.” Polk’s whole discussion of the issue, Lincoln charged, rested on “the sheerest deception.” In uncharacteristically emotional language, Lincoln continued: “He is deeply conscious of being in the wrong…he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.”43
Lincoln worked very hard on his speech. He hoped, he wrote his law partner William Herndon, to “distinguish myself.” His mode of delivery—described by a New York newspaper as marked by “rapidity of utterance [and] abundance of gesture”—reflected his excitement. But despite