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Abraham Lincoln: A History (Volume 1)

<h2 id="id00326" style="margin-top: 4em">CHAPTER VIII</h2> <h5 id="id00327">THE LINCOLN-STONE PROTEST</h5> [Sidenote: 1837.] On the 3rd of March, the day before the Legislature adjourned, Mr. Lincoln caused to be entered upon its records a paper which excited but little interest at the time, but which will probably be remembered long after the good and evil actions of the Vandalia Assembly have faded away from the minds of men. It was the authentic record of the beginning of a great and momentous career. The following protest was presented to the House, which was read and ordered to be spread on the journals, to wit: Resolutions upon the subject of domestic slavery having passed both branches of the General Assembly at its present session, the undersigned hereby protest against the passage of the same. They believe that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than abate its evils. They believe that the Congress of the United States has no power under the Constitution to interfere with the institution of slavery in the different States. They believe that the Congress of the United States has the power, under the Constitution, to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, but that the power ought not to be exercised, unless at the request of the people of the District. The difference between these opinions and those contained in the above resolutions is their reason for entering this protest. (Signed) DAN STONE, A. LINCOLN, Representatives from the county of Sangamon. It may seem strange to those who shall read these pages that a protest so mild and cautious as this should ever have been considered either necessary or remarkable. We have gone so far away from the habits of thought and feeling prevalent at that time that it is difficult to appreciate such acts at their true value. But if we look a little carefully into the state of politics and public opinion in Illinois in the first half of this century, we shall see how much of inflexible conscience and reason there was in this simple protest. [Sidenote: Edwards, "History of Illinois," p. 179.] [Sidenote: Edwards, p. 180.] The whole of the North-west territory had, it is true, been dedicated to freedom by the ordinance of 1787, but in spite of that famous prohibition, slavery existed in a modified form throughout that vast territory wherever there was any considerable population. An act legalizing a sort of slavery by indenture was passed by the Indiana territorial Legislature in 1807, and this remained in force in the Illinois country after its separation. Another act providing for the hiring of slaves from Southern States was passed in 1814, for the ostensible reason that "mills could not be successfully operated in the territory for want of laborers, and that the manufacture of salt could not be successfully carried on by white laborers." Yet, as an unconscious satire upon such pretenses, from time to time the most savage acts were passed to prohibit the immigration of free negroes into the territory which was represented as pining for black labor. Those who held slaves under the French domination, and their heirs, continued to hold them and their descendants in servitude, after Illinois had become nominally a free territory and a free State, on the ground that their vested rights of property could not have been abrogated by the ordinance, and that under the rule of the civil law partus sequitur ventrem. But this quasi-toleration of the institution was not enough for the advocates of slavery. Soon after the adoption of the State Constitution, which prohibited slavery "hereafter," it was evident that there was a strong under-current of desire for its introduction into the State. Some of the leading politicians, exaggerating the extent of this desire, imagined they saw in it a means of personal advancement, and began to agitate the question of a convention to amend the Constitution. At that time there was a considerable emigration setting through the State from Kentucky and Tennessee to Missouri. Day by day the teams of the movers passed through the Illinois settlements, and wherever they halted for rest and refreshment they would affect to deplore the short-sighted policy which, by prohibiting slavery, had prevented their settling in that beautiful country. When young bachelors came from Kentucky on trips of business or pleasure, they dazzled the eyes of the women and excited the envy of their male rivals with their black retainers. The early Illinoisans were perplexed with a secret and singular sense of inferiority to even so new and raw a community as Missouri, because of its possession of slavery. Governor Edwards, complaining so late as 1829 of the superior mail facilities afforded to Missouri, says: "I can conceive of no reason for this preference, unless it be supposed that because the people of Missouri have negroes to work for them they are to be considered as gentlefolks entitled to higher consideration than us plain 'free-State' folks who have to work for ourselves." The attempt was at last seriously made to open the State to slavery by the Legislature of 1822-3. The Governor, Edward Coles, of Virginia, a strong antislavery man, had been elected by a division of the pro- slavery party, but came in with a Legislature largely against him. The Senate had the requisite pro-slavery majority of two-thirds for a convention. In the House of Representatives there was a contest for a seat upon the result of which the two-thirds majority depended. The seat was claimed by John Shaw and Nicholas Hansen, of Pike County. The way in which the contest was decided affords a curious illustration of the moral sense of the advocates of slavery. They wanted at this session to elect a senator and provide for the convention. Hansen would vote for their senator and not for the convention. Shaw would vote for the convention, but not for Thomas, their candidate for senator. In such a dilemma they determined not to choose, but impartially to use both. They gave the seat to Hansen, and with his vote elected Thomas; they then turned him out, gave the place to Shaw, and with his vote carried the act for submitting the convention question to a popular vote. They were not more magnanimous in their victory than scrupulous in the means by which they had gained it. The night after the vote was taken they formed in a wild and drunken procession, and visited the residences of the Governor and the other free-State leaders, with loud and indecent demonstrations of triumph. They considered their success already assured; but they left out of view the value of the moral forces called into being by their insolent challenge. The better class of people in the State, those heretofore unknown in politics, the schoolmasters, the ministers, immediately prepared for the contest, which became one of the severest the State has ever known. They established three newspapers, and sustained them with money and contributions. The Governor gave his entire salary for four years to the expenses of this contest, in which he had no personal interest whatever. The antislavery members of the Legislature made up a purse of a thousand dollars. They spent their money mostly in printer's ink and in the payment of active and zealous colporteurs. The result was a decisive defeat for the slave party. The convention was beaten by 1800 majority, in a total vote of 11612, and the State saved forever from slavery. [Illustration: MARTIN VAN BUREN.] But these supreme efforts of the advocates of public morals, uninfluenced by considerations of personal advantage, are of rare occurrence, and necessarily do not survive the exigencies that call them forth. The apologists of slavery, beaten in the canvass, were more successful in the field of social opinion. In the reaction which succeeded the triumph of the antislavery party, it seemed as if there had never been any antislavery sentiment in the State. They had voted, it is true, against the importation of slaves from the South, but they were content to live under a code of Draconian ferocity, inspired by the very spirit of slavery, visiting the immigration of free negroes with penalties of the most savage description. Even Governor Coles, the public-spirited and popular politician, was indicted and severely fined for having brought his own freedmen into the State and having assisted them in establishing themselves around him upon farms of their own. The Legislature remitted the fine, but the Circuit Court declared it had no constitutional power to do so, though the Supreme Court afterwards overruled this decision. Any mention of the subject of slavery was thought in the worst possible taste, and no one could avow himself opposed to it without the risk of social ostracism. Every town had its one or two abolitionists, who were regarded as harmless or dangerous lunatics, according to the energy with which they made their views known. From this arose a singular prejudice against New England people. It was attributable partly to the natural feeling of distrust of strangers which is common to ignorance and provincialism, but still more to a general suspicion that all Eastern men were abolitionists. Mr. Cook, who so long represented the State in Congress, used to relate with much amusement how he once spent the night in a farmer's cabin, and listened to the honest man's denunciations of "that—— Yankee Cook." Cook was a Kentuckian, but his enemies could think of no more dreadful stigma to apply to him than that of calling him a Yankee. Senator James A. McDougall once told us that although he made no pretense of concealing his Eastern nativity, he never could keep his ardent friends in Pike County from denying the fact and fighting any one who asserted it. The great preacher, Peter Cartwright, used to denounce Eastern men roundly in his sermons, calling them "imps who lived on oysters" instead of honest corn-bread and bacon. The taint of slavery, the contagion of a plague they had not quite escaped, was on the people of Illinois. They were strong enough to rise once in their might and say they would not have slavery among them. But in the petty details of every day, in their ordinary talk, and in their routine legislation, their sympathies were still with the slave-holders. They would not enlist with them, but they would fight their battles in their own way. Their readiness to do what came to be called later, in a famous speech, the "dirty work" of the South was seen in the tragic death of Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, in this very year of 1837. He had for some years been publishing a religious newspaper in St. Louis, but finding the atmosphere of that city becoming dangerous to him on account of the freedom of his comments upon Southern institutions, he moved to Alton, in Illinois, twenty-five miles further up the river. His arrival excited an immediate tumult in that place; a mob gathered there on the day he came—it was Sunday, and the good people were at leisure—and threw his press into the Mississippi. Having thus expressed their determination to vindicate the law, they held a meeting, and cited him before it to declare his intentions. He said they were altogether peaceful and legal; that he intended to publish a religious newspaper and not to meddle with politics. This seemed satisfactory to the people, and he was allowed to fish out his press, buy new types, and set up his paper. But Mr. Lovejoy was a predestined martyr. He felt there was a "woe" upon him if he held his peace against the wickedness across the river. He wrote and published what was in his heart to say, and Alton was again vehemently moved. A committee appointed itself to wait upon him; for this sort of outrage is usually accomplished with a curious formality which makes it seem to the participants legal and orderly. The preacher met them with an undaunted front and told them he must do his duty as it appeared to him; that he was amenable to law, but nothing else; he even spoke in condemnation of mobs. Such language "from a minister of the gospel" shocked and infuriated the committee and those whom they represented. "The people assembled," says Governor Ford, "and quietly took the press and types and threw them into the river." We venture to say that the word "quietly" never before found itself in such company. It is not worth while to give the details of the bloody drama that now rapidly ran to its close. There was a fruitless effort at compromise, which to Lovejoy meant merely surrender, and which he firmly rejected. The threats of the mob were answered by defiance; from the little band that surrounded the abolitionist. A new press was ordered, and arrived, and was stored in a warehouse, where Lovejoy and his friends shut themselves up, determined to defend it with their lives. They were there besieged by the infuriated crowd, and after a short interchange of shots Lovejoy was killed, his friends dispersed, and the press once more—and this time finally—thrown into the turbid flood. These events took place in the autumn of 1837, but they indicate sufficiently the temper of the people of the State in the earlier part of the year. [Sidenote: Law approved Dec. 26, 1831.] The vehemence with which the early antislavery apostles were conducting their agitation in the East naturally roused a corresponding violence of expression in every other part of the country. William Lloyd Garrison, the boldest and most aggressive non- resistant that ever lived, had, since 1831, been pouring forth once a week in the "Liberator" his earnest and eloquent denunciations of slavery, taking no account of the expedient or the possible, but demanding with all the fervor of an ancient prophet the immediate removal of the cause of offense. Oliver Johnson attacked the national sin and wrong, in the "Standard," with zeal and energy equally hot and untiring. Their words stung the slave-holding States to something like frenzy. The Georgia Legislature offered a reward of five thousand dollars to any one who should kidnap Garrison, or who should bring to conviction any one circulating the "Liberator" in the State. Yet so little known in their own neighborhoods were these early workers in this great reform that when the Mayor of Boston received remonstrances from certain Southern States against such an incendiary publication as the "Liberator," he was able to say that no member of the city government and no person of his acquaintance had ever heard of the paper or its editor; that on search being made it was found that "his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all colors." But the leaven worked continually, and by the time of which we are writing the antislavery societies of the North-east had attained a considerable vitality, and the echoes of their work came back from the South in furious resolutions of legislatures and other bodies, which, in their exasperation, could not refrain from this injudicious advertising of their enemies. Petitions to Congress, which were met by gag-laws, constantly increasing in severity, brought the dreaded discussion more and more before the public. But there was as yet little or no antislavery agitation in Illinois. [Sidenote: Jan 25, 1837.] There was no sympathy with nor even toleration for any public expression of hostility to slavery. The zeal of the followers of Jackson, although he had ceased to be President, had been whetted by his public denunciations of the antislavery propaganda; little more than a year before he had called upon Congress to take measures to "prohibit under severe penalties" the further progress of such incendiary proceedings as were "calculated to stimulate the slaves to insurrection and to produce all the horrors of civil war." But in spite of all this, people with uneasy consciences continued to write and talk and petition Congress against slavery, and most of the State legislatures began to pass resolutions denouncing them. In the last days of 1836 Governor Duncan sent to the Illinois Legislature the reports and resolutions of several States in relation to this subject. They were referred to a committee, who in due time reported a set of resolves "highly disapproving abolition societies"; holding that "the right of property in slaves is secured to the slave-holding States by the Federal Constitution"; that the general Government cannot abolish slavery in the District of Columbia against the consent of the citizens of said District, without a manifest breach of good faith; and requesting the Governor to transmit to the States which had sent their resolutions to him a copy of those tranquilizing expressions. A long and dragging debate ensued of which no record has been preserved; the resolutions, after numberless amendments had been voted upon, were finally passed, in the Senate, unanimously, in the House with none but Lincoln and five others in the negative. [Footnote: We are under obligations to John M. Adair for transcripts of the State records bearing on this matter.] No report remains of the many speeches which prolonged the debate; they have gone the way of all buncombe; the sound and fury of them have passed away into silence; but they woke an echo in one sincere heart which history will be glad to perpetuate. There was no reason that Abraham Lincoln should take especial notice of these resolutions, more than another. He had done his work at this session in effecting the removal of the capital. He had only to shrug his shoulders at the violence and untruthfulness of the majority, vote against them, and go back to his admiring constituents, to his dinners and his toasts. But his conscience and his reason forbade him to be silent; he felt a word must be said on the other side to redress the distorted balance. He wrote his protest, saying not one word he was not ready to stand by then and thereafter, wasting not a syllable in rhetoric or feeling, keeping close to law and truth and justice. When he had finished it he showed it to some of his colleagues for their adhesion; but one and all refused, except Dan Stone, who was not a candidate for reelection, having retired from politics to a seat on the bench. The risk was too great for the rest to run. Lincoln was twenty-eight years old; after a youth, of singular privations and struggles he had arrived at an enviable position in the politics and the society of the State. His intimate friends, those whom he loved and honored, were Browning, Butler, Logan, and Stuart—Kentuckians all, and strongly averse to any discussion of the question of slavery. The public opinion of his county, which was then little less than the breath of his life, was all the same way. But all these considerations could not withhold him from performing a simple duty—a duty which no one could have blamed him for leaving undone. The crowning grace of the whole act is in the closing sentence: "The difference between these opinions and those contained in the said resolutions is their reason for entering this protest." Reason enough for the Lincolns and Luthers. He had many years of growth and development before him. There was a long distance to be traversed between the guarded utterances of this protest and the heroic audacity which launched the proclamation of emancipation. But the young man who dared declare, in the prosperous beginning of his political life, in the midst of a community imbued with slave-State superstitions, that "he believed the institution of slavery was founded both on injustice and bad policy,"—attacking thus its moral and material supports, while at the same time recognizing all the constitutional guarantees which protected it,—had in him the making of a statesman and, if need be, a martyr. His whole career was to run in the lines marked out by these words, written in the hurry of a closing session, and he was to accomplish few acts, in that great history which God reserved for him, wiser and nobler than this. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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