The Rise of Lincoln: The Story of America Series [Ep. 27]

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Up next, another installment of our series about Us: The Story of America series with Hillsdale College professor and author of the terrific book Land of Hope, Bill McLay. This episode: “The Rise of Lincoln.”

If there was one issue more than any other that led to the political rise of Abraham Lincoln, one issue more than any other that led to America’s seemingly inevitable march towards Civil War, it was the issue of slavery. Particularly was the Fugitive Slave Act. This law turned Northerners into co-conspirators with the South because it required Northerners to cooperate and actively engage in supporting the practice of slavery, requiring them to track, capture, and return escape slaves to their owners, rather than allowing them to live as free people with the rights of God gave Thom. And our own Declaration declared it was one thing to accept its existence down there, as long as they weren’t expected to abide by the same laws protecting the rights of slaveholders to hold slaves as property—human beings as property. There’s another thing to be complicit in that institution. The Fugitive Slave Law was a law that turned toleration of the peculiar institution into participation, and that was a bridge too far for Northern Nurse. One state Supreme Court, Wisconsin, seemed the law unconstitutional.

Vermont essentially nullified
the Fugitive Slave Act through legislation of its own. And just as importantly, very prominent critics, including writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, spoke out. And I should add here that Emerson was very slow to come to the anti-slavery cause. He was not congenitally political. He was interested in ideas, but this act galvanized him to speak out. “The last year has forced us all into politics and made it a paramount of duty to seek what it is offered and a duty to shun. We do not breathe well. There is infamy in the air. I have a new experience. I wake in the morning with a painful sensation to carry about all day; and which, when traced home, is the odious remembrance of that ignominy which has fallen on Massachusetts, which robs the landscape of beauty and takes the sunshine out of every hour. I have lived all my life in this state and never had any experience of personal inconvenience from the laws until now.”

“What kind of legislation is this? What kind of Constitution which covers it?”
“And yet the crime which the second law ordains is greater than the crime which the first law forbids. For it is a greater crime to re-enslave a man than to enslave him at first, when it might be pretended to be a mitigation of his lot as a captive in war. What shall we do? First, abrogate this law; then proceed to confine slavery to slave states and help them effectually to make an end of it. Or shall we, as we are all are advised on all hands, lie by and wait the progress of the census?”

“But will slavery libel? I fear not.”
“She’s very industrious, gives herself no holidays. No proclamation will”
“put her down.”
“She got Texas, and now will have Cuba, and means to keep her majority.”

“The experience of the past gives”
us no encouragement to lie by. “Shall we call a new convention, or will any expert statesman furnish us a plan for this summary or gradual winding up of slavery, so far as the Republic is its patron? Where”
“Is the sound itself?”
“Since it is agreed by all saying men of all parties, there was yesterday”
“The slave is mischievous?”
“Why does the sound itself never offer the smallest counsel of her own?”

“Let us hear any project with candor and respect.”
“Is it impossible to speak of it with reason and good nature? It is really the project fit for this country to entertain and accomplish. Everything invites emancipation. The grandeur of the design, the vast stake that we hold—the national domain, the manifest interest of the slave states, the religious effort of the free states, the public opinion of the world, all joined to demand it.” Very powerful words from Emerson. Abolitionists. Pastor Luther Lee of Syracuse had these simple words to describe the Fugitive Slave Act.

“It is a war upon”
God, upon His own law, and upon the rights of humanity. “To obey it or aid in its enforcement is treason against God and humanity. It involves the guilt of violating every one of the Ten Commandments.”

It was in this
context and at this time that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The novel, published in two volumes, had a profound impact on attitudes towards slavery in the United States, depicting in stark terms the cruelty of slavery and the perils that freedom-seeking slaves faced. At the same time, the effort was underway to connect our two coasts with a transcontinental railroad. There were two main proposals: one by Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, and another by Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. In short, a Southern and a Northern proposal. We get a deal done, Douglas fashion, and agreement that would bring the Southerners on board. He proposed that the land west of the Missouri be organized into two distinct territories: the Kansas Territory and the Nebraska Territory. And each would be allowed to settle by popular vote a slavery issue for themselves. It was a huge mistake.

When we come back, more of “The Rise of Lincoln” here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and all of our history stories are brought to us by our generous sponsors, including Hillsdale College, where students go to learn all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that matter in life. If you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu. That’s Hillsdale.edu. And we returned to Our American Stories and with our Story of America series with Hillsdale College professor and author of Land of Hope, Bill McLay. When we last left off, to get his way for constructing a transcontinental railroad up north, Stephen A. Douglas fashioned a deal in which territories in the West would vote on whether they would become free or slave states. His concept was called popular sovereignty. It was a decision that would haunt the nation. Let’s return to the story.

Now, this was a big deal because both new territories—both proposed territories—were north of the line established by the Missouri Compromise, thus opening up territory to slavery where it had already been forbidden. Douglas’s proposal led to furious debate for months, but to get the railroad built, both houses of Congress ended the debate with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and President Franklin Pierce signed it into law. It was a huge mistake; some might even call it recliffe. Soon violent conflicts erupted in competing communities, with pro-slavery mobs attacking the town of Lawrence. Those attacks were answered by anti-slavery attacks by the abolitionist John Brown and his sons. This is how Bleeding Kansas got its name, as this state, would be state state to be, found itself caught between competing ideas about slavery and two competing governments and two competing Constitutions. It also revealed the sheer folly that somehow popular sovereignty would settle these differences. The bitter differences in violence over the issue of slavery was not confined to Kansas. He’d managed to spill onto the floor of the U.S. Senate itself. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered a bitter speech against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and he needed to stop with the legislation. He personally attacked Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, accusing him of having embraced, quote, “the Pilot slavery as his mistress.” These insults were surely designed to prompt an equally outrageous rebuttal, and it came just days later when Congressman Preston Brooks, who was a cousin of Butler, confronted Sumner at his desk, denounced his speech as a libel on South Carolina and Mr. Butler, and then went on to hit Sumner over the head with a heavy cane, nearly killing him. Reaction to this fight between these men revealed just how profoundly polarized the nation was. Northerners supporting Sumner, while Brooks received adulation of all kinds from newspapers of the South and hundreds of new canes from fans of his. Want’t even inscribed a cane with these words: “Hit him again.” By the time Sumner gave his now-famous speech, he’d become a member of a new political party, the Republican Party, a product of and direct response to the Kansas-Nebraska. Its membership was constituted of anti-slavery advocates from the Democratic, Whig, and Free-Soil parties and unified around opposing the extension of slavery into the new territories. In short time, it became the second largest party in the nation. At the same time, the largest party, the Democratic Party, was struggling to maintain unity as its northern and southern factions became more and more divided. The Republican Party, from its inception, was a party of the North, almost exclusively. Because the Democratic Party was the only national party, it expected a victory in the 1856 election. Their candidate was James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, who had experience as a Congressman and a Secretary of State under James K. Polk. The Republican Party campaign on what were classic Whig issues, including what we today might call infrastructure and tariffs—protectionism—but it was also the first national party to declare fully its opposition to slavery. Buchanan was a familiar face, and he won with the hope he could maintain this delicate, fragile status quo in America. But just days after his inauguration, the Supreme Court handed down its momentous Dred Scott decision. That decision would only add to the already deep divide on slavery. Ironically, Justice Taney, who authored the decision, was hoping it would settle the issue. Far from that. Here’s some details of the case. Dred Scott was a man who had been born a slave.

He had been
sold to a surgeon who took him to Illinois, a free state, and then to the Wisconsin Territory, which was also free. Remember, the Northwest Ordinance proscribed slavery, and the Wisconsin Territory, as well as Illinois, were both part of that covered by the Northwest Ordinance. So in the Wisconsin Territory, Scott married and had two daughters. After his master’s death in 1846, Scott sued in the Missouri courts for his freedom on the simple grounds, or so it seemed at the time, that his residence in a free state and free territory as a freeman made him a freeman. The case made its way through the court system to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was presided over by the aforementioned Justice Taney, Roger B. Taney, a Democrat from Maryland. But the Court ruled against Scott, and Taney, who wrote the majority of the opinion, took his chance to stake his claim and resolve the issue of slavery the territories once and for all. There were three main components to the decision. First, the Court dismissed Scott’s claims, arguing that he lacked standing to sue because he he was not a citizen. Why was he not a citizen? He was not a citizen because the Constitution did not intend, the Court said, to extend the rights of citizenship to blacks. It said openly racial argument. Number two, he also argued—the Court argued—that Congress lacked the power to deprive any person of his property without due process, and because slaves were property.

“Slaves were property, slavery could not be excluded from any”
federal territory or state, so argued with the Court. Finally, number three, the Court ruled that the Missouri Compromise itself was not just moved due to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska hacked, but unconstitutional from the start. It had been all along because it invalidly excluded slavery from Wisconsin and other northern territories. So with the Missouri Compromise tossed the side and thrown on the ash heap of history. Everything was now up for grabs, and the radical Southerners wasted no time calling for a federal slave code to protect their property. As they thought of it. They were emboldened by the Dred Scott case and thought things were churning their way. At last, they even sensed, and with good reason, that President Buchanan was on their side. Northerners, too, believe Buchanan was a tool of the pro-slavery South at worst, and a man not willing to spend any political capital on the issue of slavery at best. Leadership on the issue of slavery would have to come from some other source. So at last we come to one of the great luminaries, one of the great figures of American political history, a rising star at the Republican Party, a very successful trial lawyer, a one-term Whig congressman. Who was this man? This man is Abraham Lincoln.

And you’ve been listening to Hillsdale College professor and author of Land of Vote, Bill McLay, telling one heck of a story, all of the elements political, cultural, leading straight to a collision, and that would be the Civil War. Up through this context rises a lawyer and a fairly unknown man up till now named Abraham Lincoln. When we continue, more of the remarkable story of “The Rise of Lincoln” here on Our American Stories. And we returned to Our American Stories and our final portion of our story on “The Rise of Abraham Lincoln” is a part of our “Story of America” series with Hillsdale College professor and author of Land of Hope, Bill McLay. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

“Who was this man, this Abraham Lincoln?” Well, his life story became the stuff of legend. He was the uncommon, common man born into a humble frontier life, who wrote us to prominence through sheer grit, determination, and talent and hard work. He was born in Kentucky, literally in a log cabin. We know almost nothing of his early life except that he was poor. He moved around from Kentucky to Indiana, from Indiana, Illinois, as his father moved around, which was not unusual in those days. We know he hated the chores of farm life: endless work, plowing, harvesting, chopping wood, hauling water. And although he had almost no formal schooling, he was a voracious reader and had a great love of words of rhetoric, of oratory, and he knew that books and his great capacity for the use of the English language would be a ticket to his rising in the world. He arrived as a very young man in New Salem, Illinois, unknown to anyone. He got a job as a clerk, and through his exertions became a very popular member of the community.

“He was appointed”
postmaster, and then ausis said and Try was elected to the Illinois General Assembly—the state legislature. For Lincoln, this success was the embodiment of the Declaration of Independence, a document he revered and would repeatedly return to because it so beautifully affirmed equal worth of all people, ordinary people, and their equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“That love of”
equality was not some passing affection; it was deep and profound.
for Lincoln.
The words equality meant the rights of all people to the fruits of their own labor—a principal grounded not in the will of government or any human source, but in nature itself, in God. And that’s why Lincoln so despised slavery from his earliest days, because he believed, deep in his core, that slavery was a form of theft aft and allowed one class of men to steal from another class of men. Well, some say that men make the times, and others say the times make the men. It was in the fervor of the 1850s, with slavery heavily weighing on the nation, that Lincoln emerged. Stephen Douglas, “the Little Giant” from Illinois. He was out for reelection to the Senate in 1858 in what was just going to be a warm-up for a presidential bid in 1860. Lincoln opposed Douglas from the very beginning of this campaign, that he was a natural choice to compete for the Illinois Senate seat.

“So he had his”
moment, and the Senate candidacy gave him a platform, a moral platform, to attack Douglas’s ideas, his political skills, expose his lack
of principle when it came to the weightiest
moral issue of the day. In 1850-80, he challenged Douglas to a series of debates, seven in all, and Douglas accepted. These debates were real classics of American oratory. Of all oratory, Lincoln tried at every turn to make Douglas appear to be a radical, pro-slavery, progens God sympathizer, which Douglas actually was not. Douglas, for his part, tried to make Lincoln look like a dangerous abolitionist radical, which Lincoln was not. Lincoln was anti-slavery, but he was not in favor of abolition. But the debates were substantive and worthy of the state of Illinois, the Senate, and the nation. Lincoln would go on to lose the election to Douglas, but it was a competitive race, and Lincoln emerged as a national figure, a possible and plausible Republican candidate for president in ei