The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [72]
Lincoln seems to have assumed that the defeat marked the end of his aspiration for higher office. The battle “must go on,” he wrote, but he expected to “fight in the ranks.” But other Republicans already had a different idea. Three days after the election, George W. Rives, a party activist in Paris, Illinois, wrote, “My God, it is too bad. Now I am for Lincoln for the nomination for president in 1860.”36
III
BY 1859, Lincoln had a five-year record of public opposition to the expansion of slavery. That summer and fall, when he resumed public speaking, most of what he said was familiar. But in these speeches Lincoln placed new emphasis on what had previously been a subordinate theme in his political arsenal—the rights of northern “free labor.” He found that this resonated powerfully with his audiences.
Ever since the party’s creation, Republicans had contrasted the economic growth of the North with what they saw as the South’s stagnation, and explained the difference by the superiority of free to slave labor. “It is the energizing power of free labor,” Lincoln’s friend Richard Yates told Congress in 1854, “which has built our railroads, set the wheels of machinery in motion, added new wings to commerce, and laid the solid foundation for our permanent prosperity and renown.”37 As the decade progressed, discussions of free labor and the differences between free and slave society became more and more frequent. A key reason was the increasing stridency of southern defenders of slavery, who insisted that the freedom of the northern wage-earner amounted to little more than the opportunity either to be exploited or to starve.
Proslavery ideologues like George Fitzhugh insisted that the northern laborer was in fact “the slave of the community,” a situation far more oppressive than to be owned by a single paternalistic master who shielded his workers from the exploitation of the competitive marketplace. The very titles of Fitzhugh’s books constituted an assault on northern market capitalism: Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (1854) and Cannibals All!, or, Slaves Without Masters (1857). By the late 1850s, the critique of free labor as inherently exploitative had become increasingly common among the defenders of slavery. In one widely quoted speech before the Senate in March 1858, James Hammond of South Carolina accused the antislavery movement of hypocrisy for ignoring the plight of workers at home. He hurled an explosive accusation: “Your whole class of manual laborers and operatives, as you call them, are slaves.”38
In the 1830s, the description of northern workers as victims of “wage slavery” had been employed by the northern labor movement, Democratic politicians, and others uneasy with the consequences of the market revolution. Their critique had inspired defenders of market society to celebrate the harmony of interests that allegedly united all classes in the North. The free-labor ideology that emerged as a central tenet of the Republican party in the 1850s drew on this tradition. But unlike in the 1830s, the glorification of free labor and its opportunities for advancement in a free society was directed not against critics in the North, but the slave South. Republican newspapers and political leaders tried to refute southern charges by insisting that northern workers enjoyed an opportunity for social mobility unknown to slaves. “Our paupers of