The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [40]
Southern members found this alarming. “Every civilized nation on earth,” claimed Richard K. Meade of Virginia, agreed that governments had an obligation to indemnify owners for property lost through military operations. To refuse was to deny the legitimacy of property in slaves. In these discussions, Lincoln remained silent. But along with nearly all the northern Whigs and a majority of northern Democrats, he voted consistently against providing compensation. In one instance, where the closeness of the vote created confusion about the outcome, Lincoln spoke up to ensure that he had been recorded in the negative. Eventually, the House approved the claim of Pacheco’s heirs. But Lincoln had made clear that for him, as for many other northerners by 1849, property in slaves differed significantly from other forms of property.57
The adjournment of the Thirtieth Congress in 1849 appeared to mark the end, at the age of forty, of Lincoln’s political career. He failed to get the job he sought from the Taylor administration and failed again at the end of 1850, when his name was mentioned for an appointment by Millard Fillmore, who had become president after Taylor’s death. Lincoln’s political ambitions appeared hopelessly blocked, and he returned to Illinois to devote himself to his law career. For the next five years, Lincoln said little about slavery. But in July 1852 it became clear that he was clarifying his ideas on the subject. The occasion was his eulogy for Henry Clay, which Lincoln delivered in Springfield a week after the death of his political idol and which offered his most extended public discussion so far on slavery. His speech differed from most of the innumerable tributes to Clay that summer. Most eulogists hailed Clay as the Great Compromiser, the man who had almost single-handedly saved the Union in a series of sectional crises. Lincoln, by contrast, ignored both Clay’s work as a sectional conciliator and his economic program, to which Lincoln had devoted so much attention in the past. Instead, he devoted a significant portion of his speech to a (somewhat exaggerated) account of Clay’s devotion to the “cause of human liberty.”
Reflecting on Clay’s career, Lincoln identified “negro slavery” as the main source of “discord” in the republic. He took note of Clay’s efforts in 1799 and again in 1849 to persuade Kentucky constitutional conventions to adopt plans for gradual emancipation. Lincoln hailed Clay for occupying a position between two “extremes”—the abolitionists, whose assaults on slavery threatened the Union, and proslavery zealots who had begun to repudiate the very idea of human equality embedded in the Declaration of Independence, which Lincoln called the “white man’s charter of liberty.” He quoted extensively from Clay’s speech before the American Colonization Society in 1827 in which he charged that those who looked to no end to slavery must “blow out the moral lights around us”—an evocative phrase Lincoln would appropriate in his own speeches later in the 1850s. And for the first time in his career, he publicly embraced the idea of returning both free and emancipated blacks to their “long-lost fatherland” in Africa. Indeed, Lincoln implied that Americans, like the ancient Egyptians, might one day suffer divine punishment for “striving