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By Root 1641 0

fair. In March 1860, Lincoln lectured in Connecticut at the height of a strike that paralyzed shoe manufacturing throughout New England (involving 20,000 workers, it was the largest strike in American history before the Civil War). Fitzhugh saw strikes as symptoms of the failure of free society. To Lincoln, they exemplified the superiority of free labor to slave: “I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers can strike.” But as the speech made clear, Lincoln understood striking essentially as leaving one’s job to find another. He never really confronted the implications for “free society” if wage labor was not simply a way station for a young “beginner” on the road to economic independence, but a large and permanent feature of economic life. Ironically, the Civil War would give a powerful impetus to the very economic forces that undermined the free-labor world of Lincoln’s America.47

Despite its palpable limitations, Lincoln’s invocation of the free-labor ideology added a powerful new dimension to his antislavery outlook. It took the slavery controversy out of the realm of moral judgments and made it, as the New York Times put it, a matter of “social and political economy,” emphasizing the threat the institution posed to the economic self-interest of white northerners and the prosperity of the entire nation. Whether or not one cared about the plight of the slave, the prospect of slavery expanding westward threatened the promise of social advancement, the key attribute of free society. As Lincoln explained,

In the exercise of this right you must have room…. Where shall we go to?…To those new territories which belong to us, which are God-given for that purpose…. Can they make that natural advance in their condition if they find the institution of slavery planted there?48

And without the safety valve of westward expansion, would not northern society eventually come to resemble the rigidly class-stratified economic order of the Old World, thus fatally undermining the promise of American exceptionalism?

Some Republicans invoked the idea of free labor in an explicitly racist manner. Their language suggested that the presence of blacks in the territories, not the presence of slavery, degraded white labor. A month after Lincoln spoke in Ohio, Salmon P. Chase expressed his concern over a tendency in the party “to lower our principles…to talk of white labor against negro labor rather than of free labor against slave labor.” Lincoln himself on occasion spoke of the importance of “free white men” having access to the territories. But he continued to insist that the Declaration of Independence, America’s “Charter of Freedom” with its bedrock principle of a universal right to the pursuit of happiness—now defined as enjoyment of the fruits of one’s labor—“applies to the slave as well as to ourselves.” “I want every man,” he said at New Haven in March 1860, “to have the chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he can better his condition.”49

IV

THE SENATE CAMPAIGN and his speeches of 1859 offered the first full airing of Lincoln’s views on the rights of black Americans and of how he situated himself on the spectrum of contemporary racial thought. In a society deeply imbued with racism, incessant Democratic charges that “Negro equality” was “the necessary, logical, and inevitable sequence of [Republican] policies,” as one congressman put it, posed a serious problem for the party. Lincoln was hardly the only Republican leader to struggle to find a consistent response. “If we suffer the Dems to present the issue which Douglas offers…to wit the equality of the black with the white race,” wrote an Indiana Republican, “we shall be beaten…from this time forward.”

Compounding the Republican dilemma was the fact that in antebellum America ideas about race and nationality were confused and contested. Contradictions abounded even in advanced antislavery circles. Benjamin F. Wade, the Radical senator from Ohio, for example, supported civil equality for blacks but freely used the word