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By Root 1622 0

presidential candidate.”2 White felt that Lincoln had “no deep convictions”—certainly an unfair judgment. But Lincoln did shrewdly manage to make himself acceptable to all wings of his party. Occupying the Republican middle ground ideologically and geographically, he was moderate enough to carry the entire North and therefore the Electoral College, yet enough of a radical that his election triggered the crisis of the Union. In that crisis, besieged by conflicting advice from throughout the country, Lincoln once again located himself on the middle ground of Republican opinion. He proved willing to compromise on what he considered subordinate questions but refused, even at the risk of war, to sacrifice his and his party’s core commitment to halting slavery’s expansion.

I

IN AN ERA of intense partisan loyalties, Lincoln had always been a party man. He had remained a Whig, he said, “from the origin to the end of that party.” Now he committed himself to promoting Republican unity as the essential precondition to victory in 1860. “My main object,” he explained to Schuyler Colfax, “[is] to hedge against divisions in the Republican ranks generally, and particularly for the contest of 1860. The point of danger is the temptation in different localities to ‘platform’ for something which will be popular just there, but which, nevertheless, will be a firebrand elsewhere.” Lincoln urged Republicans throughout the North to steer clear of subsidiary and divisive issues and not to adopt positions in one state that would injure the party in others.3

In the spring of 1859, Massachusetts held a referendum on an amendment to the state constitution establishing a two-year waiting period before naturalized citizens could vote. In a state with a powerful nativist movement, many Republican leaders supported the amendment. The measure was a considerably watered-down version of a twenty-one-year waiting period originally promoted by the Know-Nothings. Nonetheless, Lincoln joined numerous out-of-state Republicans in urging its rejection. Passage of the amendment, he feared, would identify his party throughout the North with anti-immigrant sentiment and alienate German-Americans, a pivotal voting bloc in the Northwest, especially Illinois. The amendment passed; shortly thereafter, Lincoln arranged the funding to establish a German-language newspaper in Springfield devoted to promoting the Republican cause.4

The bruising Senate battle of 1858 had also convinced Lincoln that Republicans must not allow themselves to become identified with “Negro equality.” He told Elihu B. Washburne that he wished his brother Israel, a Republican congressman from Maine, had “omitted” a portion of a speech criticizing Oregon’s new constitution for limiting the suffrage to whites. Lincoln himself said virtually nothing about race or colonization in 1859, although on one occasion he did reiterate his opposition to black suffrage. He continued to characterize Democrats’ appeals to racism as “flimsy diatribes” intended to “divert the public mind from the real issue—the extension or the non-extension of slavery—its localization or its nationalization.”5

Another divisive issue arose from the efforts of Radicals in a number of northern states to prevent enforcement of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Ironically, as the New York Times pointed out, by nationalizing the right to property in slaves the Dred Scott decision made “the doctrine of state rights, so long [slavery’s] friend,…its foe.” A number of northern states had already enacted personal liberty laws that prohibited public officials from cooperating in the rendition of fugitive slaves; some tried to ensure accused fugitives a trial by jury, which the federal law denied them. Now, Radicals in some states invoked the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798–99, in which Jefferson and Madison had claimed for the states the power to challenge or even override national legislation. The Maine Republican convention in 1858 passed a resolution terming the states “essentially independent sovereignties,” a position