The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [41]
In retrospect, Lincoln’s speech appears as a eulogy not only for Clay but also for the kind of antislavery politics Clay represented. Surely, Lincoln recognized that Clay’s half century of advocacy of gradual emancipation had accomplished nothing. Between 1799, when Clay first proposed his plan to rid Kentucky of slavery, and 1849, when another constitutional convention met and Clay again urged it to take up his idea, the state’s slave population had grown from 40,000 to 210,000. Lincoln had been in Lexington, Kentucky, on legal business during the convention’s deliberations in 1849. Slavery had been much discussed in the press. The majority of the delegates, however, displayed more interest in strengthening the institution than eliminating it.
Lincoln drew a lesson from these events. Three years later he would write that he had despaired of the “peaceful extinction of slavery…. The signal failure of Henry Clay, and other good and great men [including his late father-in-law], in 1849, to effect any thing in favor of gradual emancipation in Kentucky, together with a thousand other signs, extinguishes that hope utterly.” “Not a single state,” Lincoln noted, had rid itself of slavery since the revolutionary era. “That spirit which desired the peaceful extinction of slavery, has itself become extinct…. The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.” Lincoln concluded on a note of desperation: “The problem is too mighty for me.” “Peaceful, voluntary emancipation” appeared to be impossible.59
Yet what was the alternative? In effect, in outlining Clay’s position on slavery Lincoln described his own. Until well into the Civil War, Lincoln would continue to adhere to the outlook he associated with Clay in this speech—blacks were entitled to the basic human rights outlined in the Declaration of Independence, slavery should be ended gradually and with the consent of slaveholders, and abolition should be accompanied by colonization.
As to the Whig party, to which Clay and Lincoln had devoted their political careers, it too needed a eulogy. Its presidential candidate, Winfield Scott, another Mexican War hero, suffered a disastrous defeat in the 1852 presidential election, carrying only four states. In that year, Lincoln’s brother-in-law Ninian Edwards defected to the Democrats. Lincoln served as a Whig elector but took a smaller part in this campaign than any presidential election since 1836. His few speeches dealt mostly with traditional economic issues that no longer seemed to matter to most voters.60 Yet in 1852, Whig congressional candidates did carry four districts in northern Illinois by running candidates who could attract abolitionist and Free Soil voters. The Western Citizen, the abolitionist newspaper published in Chicago, urged its readers to vote for Elihu B. Washburne, an antislavery Whig whose victory launched a career of eight consecutive terms in the House of Representatives.61
By 1852, Lincoln had developed antislavery ideas but not a coherent antislavery ideology; he had cast antislavery votes but had not yet devised a way to pursue antislavery goals within the political system. If Winfield Scott’s defeat threw into question the future of the Whig party, Elihu B. Washburne’s success offered a harbinger of a new alignment of northern parties that in the next few years would transform the politics of Illinois and the nation and sweep Lincoln back into public life as his state’s foremost opponent of