The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [56]
As a politician, Lincoln worked to harness the moral energies of the North’s evangelical churches for the Republican cause. But unlike most Radicals, religious doctrine played little role in his political outlook. The “little New Englands,” including northern Illinois, where Radical Republicanism flourished, had been swept in the decades before the Civil War by religious revivals that instilled a commitment to ridding the world of sins of all kinds, including slavery. Joshua R. Giddings believed in “the absolute oneness of religion and politics” and identified “religious truth” as “the only basis of free government.” Even moderate Republicans like Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts called slavery a sin, echoing what abolitionists had been saying for decades. Lincoln spoke of slaveholders not as reprobates and sinners but as men and women enmeshed in a system from which they could not disentangle themselves. “They are just what we would be in their situation,” he said at Peoria. In 1858 he reminded one audience that he had never “expressed any harsh sentiment towards our Southern brethren.” Lincoln knew the Bible well, but to condemn slavery he appealed not so much to Scripture or religious precepts as to American history and the Declaration of Independence.43
Lincoln’s single-minded focus on the question of slavery’s expansion also differentiated him from the Radicals. Unlike them, he rarely complained about the Constitution’s three-fifths clause, nor did he embrace the “freedom national” doctrine that envisioned an assault on slavery wherever it existed under federal jurisdiction. Lincoln eschewed language, common among the Radicals and, indeed, more moderate Republicans, that portrayed slavery as an obstacle to human progress and southerners as economically and socially backward and lacking in morality. During the 1850s, Republicans mobilized census statistics—everything from economic output and railroad mileage to the number of educational institutions and the circulation of books and newspapers—to demonstrate that the South lagged far behind the North in every index of civilization. The typical Republican speech, quipped Robert Winthrop, a longtime Whig leader in Massachusetts, consisted of one-third repeal of the Missouri Compromise, one-third outrages in Kansas, “and one-third disjoined facts, and misapplied figures…to prove that the South is, upon the whole, the very poorest, meanest, least productive, and most miserable part of creation.”
On this score, the contrast is striking between Lincoln and William H. Seward. During the Civil War, Seward, as secretary of state, would become Lincoln’s closest confidant in the cabinet and would be regarded by congressional Radicals as a conservative influence on administration policy. During the 1850s, however, Seward was widely considered the most prominent Radical Republican, thanks to his long career of antislavery politics and his penchant for using provocative phrases such as “higher law” and “irrepressible conflict” and for forthrightly challenging the South to a contest for the future of the territories and the nation. Both Lincoln and Seward traveled in the South as young men. What impressed Seward was how slavery impaired the region’s economic development. Virginia’s soil had been exhausted by overreliance on tobacco, and as for New Orleans, which he visited a few years after Lincoln, Seward concluded that because of slavery “the city is secondary” compared to what it might have become. In his speeches of the 1850s, Seward termed slavery a “blight,” a “pestilence,” an “element of national debility and decline,” and repeatedly contrasted western economic development with what he called the stagnation of the South. Lincoln did not describe the South in this manner.44
In his Lyceum speech of 1838, Lincoln had proclaimed his commitment to the rule of law. He rejected talk of a “higher law” than the Constitution. Seward had used this phrase during the debates over the Compromise