Episode 14, The Commissioner’s Sale Document for Slaves: This month, we sit down with Dr. James Cornelius to discuss our Artifact of the Month: the broadside announcement for a slave auction in Mr. Lincoln’s home county in Kentucky.
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Most people have a favorite Lincoln Speech and many have a favorite Lincoln phrase. For over a century the hands-down winner among the speeches has been the Gettysburg Address, partly because so many schoolchildren started memorizing it in the late 1800s.
As for the phrases, the most beloved of them all may come from the end of the Second Inaugural Address: “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” For many people, “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” from the end of the Gettysburg Address, and “the better angels of our nature,” the last words of the First Inaugural, have proven equally memorable.
What about Lincoln’s greatest paragraphs? We don’t usually think of him as having written in paragraph-length units. We see him as the craftsman of elegant speeches, or historic one-liners. Yet his longer addresses depended upon powerfully built paragraphs to construct rock-solid arguments. These speeches amounted to legal briefs designed to meet and refute all possible objections. The First Inaugural contains a succession of such paragraphs, subjecting the idea of secession to logical and historical demolition.
To my mind, the most exquisite Lincoln paragraphs come from speeches delivered before he was president. Not yet knowing that he was speaking for the ages, he could address his audiences less formally, and at greater length. He could indulge in tangents, and join satirical dismissal to dispassionate reason.
In his great speeches from 1854 to 1860, he built a meticulous case against slavery, and for the necessity of tolerating it where it was constitutionally protected. Tolerating it did not diminish his hatred for it. If anything, his middle-of-the-road acceptance of slavery (it might last another hundred years, he announced) drove him to greater rhetorical heights in denouncing it.
Two of Lincoln’s most scintillating paragraphs come from the same speech, his 26 June 1857 address in Springfield on the Dred Scott decision of that year. Responding to Chief Justice Roger Taney’s majority opinion — which denied Dred Scott his freedom and ruled that no black person, free or slave, could ever become a citizen — Lincoln heaped scorn on slavery’s backers.
Lincoln attacked Douglas on all the issues of 1857, but focused on the Dred Scott ruling.
They “have him [the slave] in his prison house,” cried Lincoln, in the concluding lines of a longer paragraph. “They have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.”
Later in the speech, Lincoln went after Taney’s claim that the authors of the Declaration of Independence excluded black people when they spoke of “all men” being created equal. On the contrary, said Lincoln, the authors plainly meant to include them. Of course they did not mean that all men, at present, were equal in every respect. But they were most assuredly equal in their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
“This they said, and this they meant,” proclaimed Lincoln, toward the end of a paragraph on Taney and the Declaration. This section offers a discerning statement about how moral progress takes place over the long haul of history.
“They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere. The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be, thank God, [and] it is now proving itself, a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism.”
Many subsequent presidents have taken Abraham Lincoln as an exemplar of great leadership and character. The most historically minded among them, from Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama, have dwelt on his keen grasp of America’s role in the advance of democracy.
Lincoln, for his part, took the famously unsuccessful Whig presidential candidate Henry Clay as his main model of political virtue. Starting out with little education or material resources — just like Lincoln — Clay had become a galvanizing legislator, charismatic speaker, and zealous booster of America’s destiny as the beacon of liberty.
His failure to reach the presidency, said Lincoln, did nothing to lessen his impact on his times. He combined three character traits that in Lincoln’s estimation were common enough singly, but rarely found in one man: eloquence, judgment, and implacable will.
Henry Clay is scarcely more than a name today. He is perhaps less well-known by Americans than the other two members of the mid-19th century “great triumvirate,” Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun.
Sculpture of Henry Clay by C.Y. Haynes, 1850, celebrating the senator's support for technology and justice. Haynes's new gilt gesso technique, called a promoetheotype, did not catch on -- just as Clay's and Lincoln's mediating stances never had majority support.
Webster can still get plaudits for memorable speechifying: his rousing “liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” etched beneath his massive bronze statue in New York City’s Central Park, is familiar to many. Calhoun is often touted for original political theorizing, especially his concept of the “concurrent majority.”
Clay suffers by comparison. His major achievement — helping to rein in sectional divisiveness for a third of a century — gradually faded from view after the Civil War undid it. And his curious status as an anti-slavery slave-owner strikes many people nowadays as thinly masked hypocrisy. Men like Clay and Thomas Jefferson are often said to have salved their consciences with airy proclamations about equality, while luxuriating from the labor of their chattels.
Yet in his lengthy 1852 eulogy for the departed Clay — a speech delivered in the same Springfield Hall of Representatives where his own body would lie in state in 1865 — Lincoln declared that Clay’s viewpoint on slavery was one of the primary reasons to admire him. It qualified as paradoxical, Lincoln conceded, but it was emblematic of Clay’s good judgment.
Clay understood, said Lincoln, that the abomination of slavery must be tolerated indefinitely: abolishing it right away would wreak havoc, creating problems for blacks and whites alike. There was no way “it could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself.”
In Lincoln’s assessment, Clay’s entire career sprang from an intense commitment to liberty. “He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country… He desired the prosperity of his countrymen partly because they were his countrymen, but chiefly to show to the world that freemen could be prosperous.” Most people loved their country chiefly because it was their home; Clay loved it chiefly because it was edging the entire world toward freedom for all.
Ironically, Clay’s enthusiasm for the spread of liberty made it easy for him to embrace the “colonization” movement — the campaign to mobilize freed American slaves to resettle in Africa. All he had to do was perceive black Americans as a maliciously abused people who had still managed to pick up the ideal of liberty from their Euro-American environment. They could voyage to their “native soil” across the sea as ambassadors of freedom.
At the end of his 1852 eulogy, Lincoln enthusiastically embraced Clay’s colonization program. Liberty for slaves would not come anytime soon, he knew, but when it did come, true liberty would have to occur in two stages. Individual manumission had to be followed by the release of the entire group from their captivity in theUnited States.
Somehow, Lincoln imagined, the relocation of three million black Americans “to their long-lost fatherland” in Africa might be accomplished “so gradually, that neither races nor individuals shall have suffered by the change.” They could then embark on a new chapter in the history of liberty: “the possible ultimate redemption of the African race and African continent.”
Like his model Clay, Lincoln was so blinded by the bright glow of liberty, and the role former slaves could play in extending it, that he couldn’t perceive a very plain truth: by 1852 Africa was no longer their “fatherland” or “native soil.”
In the last years of his life, Lincoln came to his senses on colonization. He may still have believed in it in the abstract, but he knew that African-Americans, while sometimes supportive of the idea, had largely repudiated it. Most black Americans took theUnited States as their homeland, and loved their country — and its ideal of liberty — in spite of the severe restrictions still placed upon their freedom.
On the evening of April 11, 1865, Lincoln delivered the last speech of his life to a large outdoor crowd at the White House. He endorsed the idea of giving the vote to some black men, signaling his awareness that African-Americans as a group would make their future — and help to spread the principle of liberty — in the United States, not in a foreign land.
John Wilkes Booth was standing in the crowd that night, aghast to hear the president put black men on the path to republican citizenship. Booth decided then and there to stop Lincoln in his tracks.