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By Root 1655 0

than Lincoln; as governor of New York he had refused to extradite accused fugitive slaves and had supported the elimination of the property qualification for black voters. Now, he identified the Whigs as the party of emancipation and looked forward to the day when slavery would be abolished “by moral force, peacefully, and in full accordance with public opinion.” Seward seemed to envision the future of the Whig party as a coalition of antislavery northerners and forward-looking southerners united in a commitment to a gradual end to slavery. By contrast, Lincoln still viewed the slavery controversy as, in his own words, a “distracting question,” a threat both to the unity of his party and to the survival of the Union and Constitution he revered.48

The second session of the Thirtieth Congress convened in December 1848, shortly after Taylor’s election. The slavery issue immediately reasserted itself, this time in the form of demands for abolition in the nation’s capital. The first place where Lincoln had lived with a significant black population, the District of Columbia had a population of 52,000, including 3,700 slaves and 10,000 free blacks. Since the 1830s, slavery there had been a focal point of the abolitionist struggle. Many northern congressmen deemed the presence of slavery and of slave-trading establishments, some of which plied their business within sight of the Capitol, unseemly in the seat of government of a land of liberty.

The antislavery campaign in Washington was directed by Joshua R. Giddings, an abolitionist who represented the Western Reserve of Ohio, an area settled by New Englanders and one of the North’s most antislavery constituencies. In 1842, after being censured by the House for introducing resolutions affirming slaves’ right to rebel, Giddings had resigned his seat and been triumphantly reelected. Six years later, he attended the Buffalo convention that launched the Free Soil party, where he saw, he wrote his wife, “thousands of good and virtuous citizens, throwing aside party prejudices, declare for freedom and humanity.” Like Lincoln, Giddings campaigned in Massachusetts that fall, but for the Free Soilers, not the Whigs. But in an unusual coincidence, Lincoln had found lodgings in Washington in the same boardinghouse in which Giddings resided and where a group of his antislavery allies frequently gathered, among them Congressmen Amos Tuck of New Hampshire, John G. Palfrey of Massachusetts, Daniel Gott of New York, and David Wilmot of Proviso fame. Lincoln was far more moderate than they on the politics of slavery. But living in the house with Giddings led to an expansion of Lincoln’s views. Acting in cooperation with Giddings, he decided to promote his own plan for abolition in the nation’s capital.49

Less than a week after Congress convened, Palfrey requested permission to introduce a bill to abolish slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia, but the House refused to grant it. A few days later, on December 18, 1848, Giddings presented his own bill, which called for a plebiscite on slavery’s future in Washington in which “all male inhabitants” would cast ballots marked either “Slavery” or “Liberty.” When Patrick Tompkins of Mississippi asked if he meant to allow slaves and free blacks to vote, Giddings replied that he did. If Tompkins, he continued, wished to exclude slaveholders as well as slaves from the referendum, he would agree, but he “never would submit to give one man the control of another man’s liberty.” The House quickly tabled Giddings’s bill. Even the National Era, Washington’s antislavery newspaper, called it too extreme. Then, on December 21, Daniel Gott introduced a resolution directing the Judiciary Committee to report a bill abolishing not slavery but the slave trade in the District. The resolution’s preamble denounced the trade as “contrary to natural justice,” Christianity, and “republican liberty.” A move to table the Gott resolution failed, and the House then approved it. But a few days later, the members agreed to vote in two weeks on whether to reconsider