The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [58]
“When I heard that Swett was beaten and Lovejoy nominated, it turned me blind,” Lincoln wrote to David Davis, who “hated” abolitionists and initially favored a Dickey candidacy. But, Lincoln continued, “on reaching that region, and seeing the people there—their great enthusiasm for Lovejoy—considering the activity they will carry into the contest with him…I really think it best to let the matter stand.” After receiving Lincoln’s letter, Davis urged Dickey to withdraw. Events like “the outrages in Kansas,” he wrote, had “made abolitionists of those who never dreamed they were drifting into it.” Meanwhile, Lovejoy took matters into his own hands by appearing at a gathering called by the dissidents and disclaiming any right to interfere with slavery in the states. In the end, Dickey abandoned the contest. Lincoln appeared on the same platform with Lovejoy a number of times during the campaign, and the voters elected Lovejoy to Congress.49
A similar set of events transpired in 1858. Once again, conservative Republicans, led by Davis, plotted to run an independent candidate in alliance with local Democrats. Even though it placed him at odds with Davis, Ward Hill Lamon, and other “highly valued friends,” Lincoln privately warned Lovejoy that spring not to be complacent about his renomination. It would be better for all concerned, Lincoln wrote to Charles H. Ray of the Chicago Tribune, to renominate Lovejoy “without a contest.” When Lamon conveyed to Lincoln his fear that Lovejoy’s election would “put this Congressional District irredeemably in the hands of the Abolitionists,” Lincoln beseeched Lamon not to support an independent: “It will result in nothing but disaster all round.” Lovejoy might be “known as an abolitionist,” but, Lincoln pointed out, he “is now occupying none but common ground.” Partly as a result of these events, Lovejoy and Lincoln developed a close political relationship. Lovejoy closed one letter to Lincoln with a salutation expressing how, in his view, they agreed on the fundamental question: “Yours for the ‘ultimate extinction of slavery.’” During the Civil War, when other Radicals voiced harsh criticism of Lincoln’s policies, Lovejoy would always defend his antislavery credentials.50
More was involved here than Lincoln’s recognition of the paramount importance of party unity in the elections of 1856 and 1858 (when he was a candidate for the Senate). In July 1856, the Chicago Tribune observed that the “charge of abolitionism” constituted one of the greatest obstacles to Republican success. Fear of being “caught in cooperation with some abolitionist” had led “timid souls” to remain “aloof from the Republican movement.” Yet Lincoln was not afraid to work with abolitionists. He understood that without the public sentiment generated by abolitionist agitation outside the political system and by Radical Republicans within it, his new party could never succeed and that it needed to harness the intense commitment that Lovejoy’s supporters would bring to the campaign.
Lincoln was a moderate Republican, not a Radical. But during the 1850s, he came to see himself as part of a long struggle against slavery that stretched back to the eighteenth century and might, he said, continue for another hundred years. Every schoolboy, he wrote in 1858, recognized the names of William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp, leaders of the earlier struggle in Great Britain to outlaw the Atlantic slave trade. “But who,” he asked, “can now name a single man who labored to retard it?” (In the context of his Senate race with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, this remark implied that Douglas, by far the more famous of the two at that point, would be forgotten and Lincoln remembered by posterity.) Lincoln, who had always craved recognition, had found his life’s purpose. The “higher object of this contest,” he wrote, “may not be completely attained within the term of my natural life. But…I am proud