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By Root 1626 0

could not pay a fine, Norman Judd, soon to become the state Republican chairman, told the Senate that the title should be amended to read “An Act to establish perpetual slavery in Illinois.” In 1857 and 1859, a majority of the Republican members of the legislature supported amending the Black Laws to allow blacks to testify in court and attend public schools, but unanimous Democratic opposition plus the votes of more conservative Republicans defeated the proposals. Richard Yates, like Lincoln a party leader in central Illinois, denounced the Black Laws as inhumane and called for their repeal; this did not prevent his election as governor in 1860. On the other hand, many Republicans, including Lyman Trumbull, who had fought to eradicate the state’s indenture system in the 1840s, freely employed antiblack rhetoric. Republicans, Trumbull declared in 1858, “want…nothing to do with” blacks. A year later he reiterated, “We are for the free white man, and for making white labor acceptable and honorable, which it can never be when negro slave labor is brought into competition with it.” Trumbull’s “noble stand” against “negro suffrage, personal negro rights, etc.,” one constituent reported, had had a “telling effect” among voters previously reluctant to support the Republican party.55

Efforts to assess Lincoln’s own racial outlook run the danger of exaggerating the importance of race in his thinking. Race is our obsession, not Lincoln’s. Other than in 1857–58, this was not a subject to which he devoted much attention before the Civil War. Many aspects of the slavery controversy—the rights of free labor, domination of the federal government by the Slave Power, the way slavery violated basic American values—were only marginally related to race. Although he carefully read proslavery books and newspapers, Lincoln evinced no interest in his era’s extensive literature of racial theorizing, with its predictions about racial destinies and debates over ethnography, separate genesis, and inborn racial difference. What was “political” or “strategic” in Lincoln’s statements during the 1858 campaign was not his disavowal of racial equality, but that he felt the need to outline his views on race at all.56

Nonetheless, it is clear that while Lincoln had disengaged from many aspects of frontier culture and was hardly unwilling to take unpopular political positions—as his long career as a Whig stalwart demonstrated—he shared many of the prejudices of the society in which he lived. Lincoln used the word “nigger” privately and, occasionally, in public. He enjoyed going to blackface minstrel shows, and his seemingly endless repertoire of stories and jokes included overtly racist humor.57 As we have seen, when pressed by Douglas in the campaign of 1858, Lincoln disavowed belief in black citizenship and civil and political equality. There is no reason to think that Lincoln, at this point in the development of his ideas, was not sincere in these statements. On the other hand, he consistently emphasized that blacks were entitled to enjoy the natural rights of mankind, especially the right to the fruits of their labor, a position that undoubtedly cost him votes in parts of Illinois. His definition of equality as an aspirational principle whose full accomplishment lay in the future could be taken to imply the possibility of improvement in the black condition.

In some respects, what Lincoln did not say is as important as what he did. He could turn racism into a political weapon, as he had done early in his career against Van Buren and again in 1852 in a speech quoting a sailor’s sea chanty about a “bright Mullater” to criticize Franklin Pierce, the Democratic presidential candidate, for seeking antislavery votes by criticizing the Fugitive Slave Act. In the 1858 debates, Lincoln charged that Douglas’s policies, by promoting the spread of slavery, would also encourage “amalgamation.” But generally speaking, in the 1850s Lincoln’s comments on race came in response to Democratic charges of “Negro equality.” Unlike many contemporaries, he was not given to orations