The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [5]
I
ABRAHAM LINCOLN was born in 1809 in a one-room Kentucky log cabin. When he was seven, his family moved across the Ohio River to southwestern Indiana, where Lincoln spent the remainder of his childhood. In 1830, when Lincoln was twenty-one years old and about to strike out on his own, his father moved the family to central Illinois. Here Lincoln lived until he assumed the presidency in 1861.
At the time of Lincoln’s birth and for most of the antebellum era, about one-fifth of Kentucky’s population consisted of slaves. Outside a few counties, however, Kentucky slaveholders were primarily small farmers and urban dwellers, not plantation owners. Substantial parts of the state lay outside the full grip of slave society, “tolerating slavery, but not dominated by it.” Kentucky formed part of the Border South, the northernmost belt of slave states that would play so crucial a role in the early years of the Civil War. Hardin County, where the Lincolns lived, lay south of the Ohio River in west-central Kentucky. In 1811 its population of around 7,500 included over 1,000 slaves, most of whom labored either on small farms or on the Ohio River. Kentucky at this time was an important crossroads of the domestic slave trade. The Lincolns’ farm on Knob Creek lay not far from the road connecting Louisville and Nashville, along which settlers, peddlers, and groups of shackled slaves regularly passed.2
As an offshoot of Virginia, Kentucky recognized slavery from the earliest days of white settlement. The state’s first constitution, written in 1792, prohibited the legislature from enacting laws for emancipation without the consent of the owners and full monetary compensation. In 1799, when a convention met to draft a new constitution (the first one being widely regarded as insufficiently democratic), a spirited debate over slavery took place. The young Henry Clay, just starting out on a career that would make him one of the nation’s most prominent statesmen (and Lincoln’s political idol), published a moving appeal asking white Kentuckians, “enthusiasts as they are for liberty,” to consider the fate of “fellow beings, deprived of all rights that make life desirable.” He urged the convention to adopt a plan of gradual emancipation. Clay’s plea failed, but antislavery delegates did succeed in putting into the constitution a clause barring the introduction of slaves into the state for sale, although this soon became a dead letter. On one point, however, white Kentuckians, including emancipationists, agreed: they did not desire a free black population. In 1808, the year before Lincoln’s birth, the legislature prohibited the migration of free blacks into Kentucky. When Lincoln was a boy, the state’s population of 410,000 included only 1,700 free persons of color, 28 of whom lived in Hardin County.3
By the early nineteenth century, emancipationist sentiment had waned, but in some parts of Kentucky, including Hardin, disputes about slavery continued. The first place to look for early influences on Lincoln is his own family. Some of Lincoln’s relatives owned slaves—his father’s uncle, Isaac, had forty-three when he died in 1834. But Lincoln’s parents exhibited an aversion to the institution. The South Fork Baptist Church to which they belonged divided over slavery around the time of Lincoln’s birth; the antislavery group formed its own congregation, which his parents joined. However, as strict Calvinist predestinarians who believed that one’s actions had no bearing on eventual salvation, which had already been determined by God, Lincoln’s parents were not prone to become involved in reform movements