The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [42]
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“The Monstrous Injustice”: Becoming a Republican
ON THE EVENING OF OCTOBER 16, 1854, Lincoln stood before an audience in Peoria, Illinois, and delivered a powerful indictment of the nation’s new policy regarding the westward expansion of slavery. Nine months earlier, Stephen A. Douglas had introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate to organize the Nebraska Territory, a part of the old Louisiana Purchase from which slavery had been barred by the Missouri Compromise of 1821. By the time the bill became law in May, it had evolved into the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which explicitly repealed that compromise, substituting for the ban on slavery what Douglas called “popular sovereignty”—the right of settlers to decide for themselves whether to allow or prohibit the institution. Douglas had made a name for himself through bold, sometimes impetuous, actions. In 1850, after Henry Clay failed to get his plan for resolving sectional issues through Congress, Douglas had seized the political initiative and steered the Compromise measures to passage. This time, however, he seriously miscalculated. The Kansas-Nebraska Act aroused a storm of protest throughout the North. Suddenly, the prospect beckoned of slavery spreading not simply into the faraway lands recently acquired from Mexico, but into the heart of the trans-Mississippi West, an area long regarded as the domain of free labor.
Many northerners saw the Kansas-Nebraska Act as the first step in an “atrocious plot” to spread slavery throughout the western United States. These were the words of the Appeal of the Independent Democrats, issued in January 1854 by Salmon P. Chase, Joshua R. Giddings, and a handful of other antislavery members of Congress. It called on northerners to unite across party lines to oppose the bill.1 Over the course of the next two years, the furor aroused by Douglas’s measure redrew the nation’s political map. The Whig party disappeared and in its place arose the Republican, dedicated to halting once and for all the expansion of slavery.
The year 1854 marked the turning point in Lincoln’s pre–Civil War career. “At last,” a friend wrote to Chase in February 1854, “the great opportunity of your life has crossed your path.”2 The same could be said of Lincoln. He brilliantly seized the opportunity to revive his dormant life in politics. Before 1854 he had remained essentially a local politician. His name had rarely appeared in newspapers in Chicago, let alone outside Illinois. By 1860 he had become one of the North’s major political leaders, part of a generation that included Douglas and William H. Seward, men, like Lincoln, who built or rebuilt their careers on the basis not of the economic issues of the Jacksonian era but their positions regarding slavery.
During these years, Lincoln held no office; he rose to prominence on the basis of oratory, not a record of public service. Many factors contributed to his emergence, among them the good luck of inhabiting the same political space as Douglas, the most prominent politician of the 1850s. Virtually every major speech of Lincoln’s between 1854 and 1860 originated as a response to some action or statement by Douglas. In Springfield, where Lincoln delivered his critique of the Kansas-Nebraska Act a few days before presenting it in Peoria, he did so as a reply to Douglas’s long defense of the measure in the same city that very afternoon. Four years later, Lincoln acquired a national reputation by virtue of his debates with Douglas. As one newspaper put it in 1859, “Without Douglas, Lincoln would be nothing.”3 Yet Lincoln’s rise also reflected his success at fashioning a position on slavery that articulated the shared principles of those who were joining the new Republican party.
In the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln’s public statements underwent a profound transformation. He had long believed slavery to rest “on both injustice and bad policy” (as he put it in his 1837 “protest”) but had never considered opposition to its expansion the basis on which a political party could