The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [57]
Thus, in overall outlook, specific policies, and personal temperament, Lincoln differed considerably from the more radical members of the Republican party. Yet in persistently emphasizing both the moral dimensions of the sectional controversy and how the institution undermined the heritage of democratic self-government, and in seeking to exclude from political debate any issue that might divert attention from the centrality of slavery, he found himself allied with them. Lincoln’s language and his concentration on the slavery question made him appear more radical than his actual policy proposals. He may not have spoken of slavery as a sin, but during the 1850s he referred to it as a “monstrous injustice” (his words in the Peoria speech), “a vast moral evil,” an “odious institution,” a “cancer” capable of destroying the republic. He compared slavery to a “venomous snake” found in bed with a child—it could not be attacked directly but its activity must be constrained. By the mid-1850s, a gulf had opened between Lincoln and conservative Whigs such as Richard W. Thompson of Indiana. The two had voted almost identically on questions relating to slavery in the Thirtieth Congress. But Thompson now explicitly denied that “slavery, as it exists in this country, presents a moral question for our consideration.” Lincoln insisted this was precisely what it did.46
Lincoln was undoubtedly familiar with radical antislavery ideas. His law partner William Herndon, ten years Lincoln’s junior and somewhat in awe of his associate, later claimed to have been an abolitionist. This was perhaps an exaggeration, but he did correspond with Theodore Parker, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, and other eastern foes of slavery. In one letter of 1857, Herndon described how, in response to the events of the 1850s, he had evolved from one who “hated…the very name of Anti-Slavery,” to an advocate of “universal freedom.” Herndon subscribed to abolitionist periodicals such as the National Anti-Slavery Standard, National Era, and Chicago’s Western Citizen as well as more mainstream antislavery newspapers like the New York Tribune. He purchased copies of the speeches of Joshua R. Giddings, William H. Seward, Charles Sumner, and other Radicals, which accumulated in the law office he shared with Lincoln.47
After his emergence as a Republican leader early in 1856, Lincoln struggled to maintain unity in a party riven by internal discord. He found himself mediating disputes between former Democrats and former Whigs, nativists and immigrants, conservatives, moderates, and radicals. This was one reason why he stressed so single-mindedly the issue of slavery’s expansion, the lowest common denominator of Republican opinion and the one position on which these various elements could agree. Thus, he found himself making common cause with party Radicals, who had long desired, as one put it, “to make slavery the first question in our political affairs.”48
As he made the transition from a local to a statewide political leader, Lincoln recognized that the Republican party could not succeed without mobilizing the radical antislavery constituencies of northern Illinois. In July 1856, the Republican convention in the Third Congressional District, which included counties in both northern and central parts of the state, nominated the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy as its candidate for Congress, passing over Lincoln’s friend Leonard Swett, who was preferred by moderate former Whigs. Some of Swett’s supporters decided to nominate Judge T. Lyle Dickey, a Kentucky-born