The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [76]
As Benjamin Stanton, a Republican member of Congress from Ohio, put it in 1859, a “great variety of sentiment” existed within the party “as to the political and civil rights” to which blacks were entitled. Some Republicans tried to ignore the entire question, dismissing Democratic racism as an appeal to “low, vulgar prejudice.” Others insisted that their party’s goal was not so much to benefit blacks as to preserve the western territories for free white labor. A few Radicals, most notably Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, forthrightly condemned racism and insisted that free blacks ought to enjoy precisely the same rights as white Americans.51
Complicating the situation further, most Americans distinguished sharply between different kinds of rights. Nearly all Republicans, like Lincoln, agreed that blacks were entitled to the natural rights of mankind, as enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. Most, but by no means all, also felt that basic civil rights—protections of individual liberty and security of person and property—ought to be enjoyed by free blacks. Political rights were another question entirely. These were regulated by the individual states, and Republicans differed widely on whether they should be extended to free blacks. Social rights were even more contentious. “Social equality” was more a term of abuse than a legal or analytical category. It implied support for interracial sexual relations and marriage, which most white Americans viewed with disgust and which nearly every state, North and South, prohibited by law. Even the most radical Republicans believed that social rights stood outside the ken of legislation.52
Republicans’ racial outlooks were strongly affected by geographical and ideological differences and differences in political antecedents. Former Democrats seemed more prone to use overtly racist language than former Whigs. Radical Republicans were far more committed to civic and political equality for free blacks than other members of the party. Salmon P. Chase, Thaddeus Stevens, Joshua Giddings, George Julian, and Republican leaders in New England like Sumner had long fought to repeal laws discriminating against northern blacks and to guarantee their right to vote. Chase insisted on the repeal of Ohio’s Black Laws as part of the 1849 political bargain that elevated him to the U.S. Senate in exchange for Free Soilers, who held the balance of power in the state legislature, throwing their support to the Democrats. The repeal allowed free blacks to enter Ohio without posting a bond, send their children to public schools, and testify in court against whites. Overnight, Ohio went from being one of the most restrictive northern states with regard to black rights to one of the most tolerant.53
Even in New England, where five states allowed black men to vote, a Republican newspaper described the organization as “the white man’s party” and charged the Democrats with “fighting for more niggers and slavery.” Nonetheless, racism seemed far more prevalent among western Republicans than eastern. Benjamin Stanton of Ohio told Congress in 1860 that in the entire Northwest not one Republican in a thousand favored “extending equal social and political privileges to the negroes.” He went on to add, however, that blacks were entitled to “certain natural, inherent, and inalienable rights…. The right to live, the right to the enjoyment of a man’s own earnings, the right of locomotion, to go from place to place” (the rights, that is, of free labor).54
Similar crosscurrents characterized the Illinois Republican party. When the legislature enacted its “Negro exclusion” law in 1853, which included a provision for auctioning black persons who entered the state and