The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [47]
Just as Lincoln had exaggerated Henry Clay’s antislavery record, so he made Jefferson’s far more consistent than it actually had been. Jefferson, to be sure, had written the egalitarian preamble of the Declaration of Independence and the proposal in the 1780s to ban slavery in the western territories. But a full reckoning with his career would have to take into account his persistent reluctance to endorse action against slavery in Virginia, the protection for slave property written into the Louisiana Purchase treaty of 1803, and his support, at the time of the Missouri debates, for slavery’s westward “diffusion” on the patently absurd grounds that this would improve the condition of the slaves and weaken the institution. (Jefferson, however, had opposed Edward Coles’s plan, mentioned in chapter 1, to free his slaves and settle them in Illinois.) The same federal government that barred slavery north of the Ohio River sanctioned, indeed encouraged, its expansion into the Gulf states during the terms of the Virginia presidents Jefferson, Madison, and James Monroe in the early nineteenth century.12
Lincoln later stated that slavery had been “a minor question with me” before 1854 because he “always believed that everybody was against it, and that it was in course of ultimate extinction.” This seemed an almost willful misreading of history when one reflected that between the ratification of the Constitution and 1854 nine new slave states had entered the Union and the slave population had grown from 700,000 to over 3 million. The black abolitionist H. Ford Douglas pointedly challenged Lincoln’s account of history. “The Republicans,” he remarked in 1860, “say they are bringing the government back to the policy of the fathers. I do not desire to do this; the policy of the fathers was not uncompromising opposition to oppression.”13
Nonetheless, during the 1850s Jefferson joined and eventually supplanted Henry Clay as Lincoln’s touchstone of political wisdom. And the argument that the founders had tried to place the institution on the road to extinction became the cornerstone of his case against Douglas and popular sovereignty. His selective reading of history allowed Lincoln to present his opposition to the expansion of slavery as “eminently conservative,” a return to the policy inaugurated by the revolutionary generation, rather than what in fact it was—a form of antislavery advocacy that marked a radical departure from national policies that for decades had fostered the spread of slavery. Despite his insistence on respecting white southerners and their constitutional rights, Lincoln’s account of history in effect erased proslavery Americans from the nation’s founding. “We,” he said in 1858, had created a nation based on principles enunciated in the Declaration, but “we” had to compromise with slavery to “get our constitution.” Lincoln’s “we”—his definition of the American nation—did not seem to include the proponents of slavery.14
II
SHORTLY BEFORE the 1860 election, Frederick Douglass offered a succinct summary of the dilemma confronting opponents of slavery, like Lincoln, committed to working within the existing political and constitutional system. Abstractly, Douglass wrote, most northerners would agree that slavery was wrong. The challenge was to find a way of “translating antislavery sentiment into antislavery action.” At Peoria in 1854, Lincoln for the first time embraced the idea that moral revulsion against slavery had become “a great and