The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [90]
The most controversial plank opposed any change in national or state laws abridging the rights of immigrants, a repudiation of Massachusetts’s two-year amendment. Carl Schurz served on the platform committee and later claimed he had been given carte blanche to compose this resolution “so that the Republican party be washed clean of the taint of Know-Nothingism.” Lincoln received numerous reports of nativist displeasure. “I wish our German friends could have been satisfied without such a resolution,” Trumbull wrote to Lincoln after the convention adjourned. A Boston Republican newspaper sympathetic to the Know-Nothings commented that it would have been just as legitimate for easterners to demand a plank opposing the impairment of rights by any state on account of race. In fact, the platform entirely avoided mention of free blacks, although at the insistence of Joshua R. Giddings it included an affirmation of the Declaration’s language about human equality. Despite the hopes of the Blairs and their supporters, it did not endorse colonization. “It was too large a scheme and involved too many details to be introduced,” the elder Francis P. Blair explained. But the border states where colonization was so central a part of the Republican appeal played a major role in the convention. Ninety delegates—one-fifth of the total—hailed from below the Mason-Dixon Line. Republicans could be excused for believing that, as one Connecticut delegate put it, many southerners agreed with their party “if they dare express it.”18
When it came to the core issue—slavery—the platform avoided the inflammatory language of four years earlier about “relics of barbarism” and condemned John Brown’s raid. The platform, claimed the New York Times, was “eminently conservative in tone.” But the key plank embraced the “freedom national” position long associated with the Radicals. It went beyond non-extension by declaring freedom the “normal condition of all the territories” and denying the power of either Congress or a territorial legislature to give slavery “legal existence” there. “We have assumed the doctrine,” exulted the Radical Henry Wilson, a senator from Massachusetts, “that a slave cannot tread the soil of the Territories of the United States…a position in advance of the Wilmot Proviso.”19
George W. Julian, the Indiana Radical leader, later commented on “the amazing diversity of opinion” among those who campaigned for Lincoln. Most former Know-Nothings, despite feeling “humiliated” by the platform, “reluctantly swallowed the pill.” Rejoicing in the rejection of Seward and his “extreme opinions,” Old Line Whigs such as Richard W. Thompson and Thomas Ewing worked for a Republican victory, describing Lincoln as “a sound conservative man” who had no connection with the “abolitionists, higher-law and irrepressible-conflict men.” But Radical Republicans campaigned with equal enthusiasm. “I am inclined to think,” wrote the Boston correspondent of the New York Tribune, “that Mr. Lincoln is ahead of the anti-slavery sentiment of the Republican party, rather than behind it.” As noted in chapter 2, when Wendell Phillips called Lincoln the “Slave-Hound of Illinois” because his 1849 bill for gradual emancipation in the District of Columbia envisioned strict enforcement of the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause, Giddings rebuked him and affirmed the strength of Lincoln’s antislavery beliefs.20
Some abolitionists condemned Lincoln for his 1858 statements opposing suffrage and other rights for free blacks. No candidate, the black abolitionist H. Ford Douglas declared, “is entitled to the sympathy of anti-slavery men, unless that party is willing to extend to the black man all the rights of a citizen.” Yet even Douglas hoped for Lincoln’s success, because his election would strengthen the genuine “anti-slavery element” in the Republican party. Against Lincoln’s stated opposition