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By Root 1615 0

20 percent hailed from Ireland and Germany. Even southern Illinois attracted northern migrants, bringing “certain uncomfortable and antagonistical political maxims” to illuminate its “time-honored darkness,” as one Republican newspaper rather condescendingly put it. Of course, not every northerner gravitated to the Republican party (Stephen A. Douglas himself had been born in Vermont). But anyone examining the statistics of economic and population growth—which a politician as shrewd as Lincoln could hardly ignore—would conclude that like its economy, the state’s political geography had been fundamentally transformed. This was the context that made possible the rise of the Republican party and the emergence of Lincoln.39

III

DURING THE 1850S, Lincoln established an approach to the slavery issue that situated him squarely in the middle of the spectrum of northern antislavery opinion. At one end of this spectrum stood abolitionists who sought to arouse public opinion by working outside the political system and insisted that free African-Americans must be recognized as equal citizens. Closely connected to abolitionists were the Radical Republicans, politicians who generally represented districts in New England or the belt of New England migration that stretched across upstate New York and the upper Northwest. Here, the abolitionist movement sank deep roots, and Republicans favored more drastic action against slavery than merely preventing its westward expansion. Radicals like Charles Sumner, George W. Julian, and Salmon P. Chase repeatedly avowed that the federal government had no right to interfere with slavery in the southern states. But, as we have seen, they insisted that constitutionally permissible actions beyond non-extension—the divorce of federal government from slavery, abolition in the District of Columbia and elsewhere within federal jurisdiction, repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act—could promote their avowed goal, “the emancipation of the bondsmen in America.”40

At the other end of the antislavery spectrum stood conservatives, most of them former Whigs, who joined the Republican party believing that so long as the federal government remained under the control of the “slave power,” measures important to the country’s economic growth such as a protective tariff and federal aid to internal improvements could never be enacted. They opposed the expansion of slavery but feared that any agitation beyond this would endanger the survival of the Union.41 Lincoln’s speeches of the mid-1850s, with their emphasis on the intentions of the founders, the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and the need to prevent slavery’s expansion so that free white laborers could inhabit the western territories, articulated ideas common among Republican politicians and newspapers. In some ways, however, he carved out an approach that was very much his own.

Abolitionists and Radical Republicans spoke movingly of the harsh cruelty of slavery. Their understanding of natural rights included the right to be free from physical abuse. Their speeches, newspapers, pamphlets, and lithographs overflowed with accounts of slave suffering: whippings, denial of access to literacy, and, especially in works produced by female abolitionists, the sexual abuse of black women and the separation of families. Radicals delivered long speeches in Congress about the “barbarism” of the “diabolical system” and dwelled luridly on “the flesh galled by manacle…the human form mutilated by knife,” and similar injustices. Lincoln privately, as in his 1855 letter to Joshua Speed, commented on how witnessing the sale of slaves and the hunting down of fugitives to be “carried back to their stripes” made him “miserable.” But he almost never spoke in public of the violations of slaves’ bodies and family ties. Occasionally, as in a March 1860 speech in Hartford, Lincoln warned against ignoring the reasons that inspired a slave to run away, including “the lashes he received.” But generally, Lincoln discussed slavery as an abstraction, a violation of basic principles of