The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [59]
In December 1856, a month after Frémont’s defeat, Lincoln addressed a Republican banquet in Chicago. He described the recent campaign as a battle not so much over specific public policies, but over bedrock political and moral principles. Republicans, he insisted, adhered to the idea, which, as always, he traced back to the revolutionary generation, of “the equality of men.” Democrats sought to “discard that central idea” and substitute “the opposite idea that slavery is right” and therefore ought to be perpetuated and extended. Which would triumph? “Our government,” Lincoln declared, “rests on public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion can change the government.” The task of Republicans was to counteract Democrats’ “gradual and steady debauching of public opinion” until it no longer valued the central ideal of equality.52
Like the abolitionists, Lincoln saw public sentiment as the terrain on which the crusade against slavery was to be waged. This was his most fundamental objection to Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty—its moral “indifference,” its assumption that it did not matter whether the people of a territory voted slavery “up or down.” “Moral principle,” Lincoln believed, was what “unites us in the North.” By the same token, the agitation of abolitionists and Radical Republicans helped to embed moral principle in the public mind, enabling—or compelling—politicians to take antislavery ground.
In the mass political system created during the Age of Jackson, leading politicians like Lincoln both reflected and helped to create public opinion. Speaking of William H. Seward, Wendell Phillips observed, “It is worth while to understand his course…. His position decides that of millions.” But by the same token, as Phillips knew well, the abolitionists helped to “create a public sentiment which will embolden men like Seward to speak their thoughts.” Never had the power of public opinion in a democracy been more evident than in the political earthquake of 1854–56, when leading politicians struggled to fathom and keep up with rapid shifts in popular sentiments.53
During the 1856 campaign, John Murray Forbes, a Boston railroad magnate and investor in southern plantations (and the man who handled the American investments of Alexis de Tocqueville), commented warily on the transformation he observed overtaking northern public opinion. Abolitionists, he wrote to a business associate, had little “direct influence” on party politicians. But the idea of “the wrong of slavery,” twenty years earlier confined to “a few fanatic men, and…enthusiastic women,” had now penetrated the northern consciousness. Forbes hoped for a Frémont victory so that the issue of expanding slavery could be settled once and for all before the future of the institution itself came into question. For were “northern feeling” against slavery to grow in the next four years “as fast as it has grown for four years past,” a “flood more dangerous and more sweeping than now” might well ensue, endangering slavery and the Union (and, of course, Forbes’s southern holdings).54
Between 1854 and 1856, unforeseen developments—the Kansas-Nebraska Act, bleeding Kansas, the rise and fall of Know-Nothingism—had shattered the old party system and impelled Lincoln to articulate far more fully and forcefully than in the past his views about slavery and its place in American life and politics. Beginning in 1857 another cascade of events, among them the Dred Scott decision, the Buchanan administration’s attempt to force slavery into Kansas, and his Senate race against Stephen A. Douglas, would propel Lincoln to address directly questions he had until then touched on only tangentially—the rights and future status of black Americans, and the underlying differences between two societies resting on antagonistic systems of slave