The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [45]
Douglas’s policy, moreover, defined whether slavery expanded into Kansas and Nebraska as a matter of purely local concern. In fact, Lincoln insisted, it must be decided by a national majority (that is, by the North). “The whole nation,” he declared, “is interested that the best use shall be made of these territories. We want them for the homes of free white people…or poor people to go to and better their condition.” Were slavery permitted, this avenue of self-improvement would be closed off.
At various points in the Peoria speech, Lincoln insisted that despite the injustice of slavery, the issue must be approached within the existing constitutional framework. Even as he claimed that the framers of the Constitution had intentionally omitted the word “slave” because of their distaste for the institution, Lincoln also acknowledged that they had had no choice but to include protections for the institution where it had already been established. It followed that northerners must adhere, “not grudgingly, but fully, and fairly,” to the constitutional rights of the slave states. He described the recapture of men and women who had escaped from slavery as “a dirty, disagreeable job” but affirmed that because of the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause, he would support “any legislation, for the reclaiming of their fugitives, which should not, in its stringency, be…likely to carry a free man into slavery.” (This was a veiled rebuke of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which accorded no due process rights whatever to accused runaways.) Indeed, Lincoln went on, he would even consent to the extension of slavery if the alternative were “to see the Union dissolved, just as I would consent to any great evil, to avoid a greater one.” Yet what really endangered the Union, Lincoln insisted, was Douglas’s precipitous abrogation of a time-honored sectional compromise. The remedy was to reenact the Missouri Compromise and, by so doing, return to the nation’s original policy regarding slavery, thereby restoring “the national faith, the national confidence, the national feeling of brotherhood.”
The Peoria speech closed with a powerful peroration that summarized Lincoln’s argument against both Douglas and slavery:
Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it…. Let us turn slavery from its claims of “moral right,” back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of “necessity.” Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south—let all Americans—let all lovers of liberty everywhere—join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.
Juxtaposed with Lincoln’s sweeping condemnation of slavery, his actual policy aim—restoring the Missouri Compromise—seemed anticlimactic. But he recognized that to accomplish even this required a reordering of northern politics. Identifying himself as “an old Whig,” Lincoln urged members of his party not to be afraid to unite with others, including abolitionists. “Stand with anybody that stands right,” he advised his listeners, “and part with him when he goes wrong.”6
Lincoln’s expression of kind regard for southerners and his willingness to adhere fully and without reservations to the Constitution’s provisions regarding slavery distinguished him from more radical northerners. So did his repudiation of the idea of “political and social equality” for blacks and his embrace of colonization. Yet clearly, despite Lincoln’s insistence on maintaining the “distinction” between them, the Peoria speech was as much an attack on slavery as on its expansion. Its language, a Democratic newspaper