Abstract
In 1858, Lincoln was a political figure little known outside of Illinois. For 4 years, he had vigorously opposed the prospect of slavery’s extension into the territories, which was made politically feasible with Stephen A. Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty that was introduced in the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854). Lincoln believed strongly by 1858 that Stephen Douglas was the principal spokesman for a disastrous set of policies dealing with issues that the country faced. The country’s founders, in Lincoln’s view, had reluctantly accepted slavery as a Southern institution. They recognized its existence and even validated its perpetuation with the three-fifths compromise. Such constitutional protection had justified federal laws governing the return of fugitive slaves for over half a century. It was thus illegal and unconstitutional to talk of abolition and the mobilization of a national effort to end the South’s peculiar institution.
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Notes
- 1.
Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 volumes (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), II, 320.
- 2.
Ibid., 501.
- 3.
Ibid., 255.
- 4.
Ibid., 492.
- 5.
Ibid., 482.
- 6.
Ibid., 349–352.
- 7.
Ibid., 266.
- 8.
Ibid., 273.
- 9.
Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 35.
- 10.
Collected Works, II, 437–442.
- 11.
Gabor Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Memphis, TN: Memphis State University Press, 1978); Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 45; Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, 30–38.
- 12.
The issue of Lincoln and race has been hotly debated since Lerone Bennett, “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?” Ebony 23 (1968): 35–38, 40, 42. Herbert Mitgang replied to Bennett quickly and self-assuredly, “Was Lincoln Just a Honkie?” New York Times Magazine (February 11, 1968), 34–35, 100–107. In fact, quite a lot of scholarship preceded Bennett’s 1968 article. See, for example, Edward Magdol, “Owen Lovejoy’s Role in the Campaign of 1858,” Journal of the Illinois Historical Society 59 (1959): 403–416; Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (1962); and Arvarh E. Strickland, “The Illinois Background of Lincoln’s Attitude toward Slavery and the Negro,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 55 (1963): 474–494. See also Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); and Martin Duberman, ed., The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965). Since 1968 a number of important works have appeared on this issue. The best general study is Foner, Free Soil; a careful analysis is George W. Frederickson, “A Man but Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality,” The Journal of Southern History 41 (1975). Compare Stephen B. Oates, Lincoln’s Journey to Emancipation: Our Fiery Trial (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979). The historiographical story is nicely summarized in Arthur Zilversmit’s presentation of the topic of Lincoln and race, February 12, 1980, Abraham Lincoln Colloquium, State Historical Library, Springfield, IL, that will appear in the forthcoming Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association, vol. II.
- 13.
Collected Works, III, 145–146; see also II, 405–498.
- 14.
Kenneth Stampp, The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 128.
- 15.
Collected Works, II, 256.
- 16.
Ibid., 520.
- 17.
Ibid., 405–406.
- 18.
Frederick Douglass, “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, Delivered at the Unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln Park, Washington, DC, April 14, 1876,” in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Eric Foner, 8 volumes (New York: International Publishers, 1955), 4, 312. Compare Christopher Breiseth, “Lincoln and Frederick Douglass: Another Debate,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 68 (1975): 9–26.
- 19.
Collected Works, II, 255.
- 20.
Ibid., 255–256.
- 21.
Ibid., 132.
- 22.
Ibid., 298299; Earl Schenck Miers, ed., Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology, 1809–1865, 3 volumes (Washington, DC: Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission, 1960), II, 114.
- 23.
Frederickson, “A Man but Not a Brother,” 50, makes this point, repeating, without credit, Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1959), 61.
- 24.
Collected Works, II, 461–462.
- 25.
Illinois State Register, June 19, 1858, 2.
- 26.
Collected Works, II, 20–22.
- 27.
For example, ibid., III, 20.
- 28.
Ibid., 404.
- 29.
Ibid., IV, 263.
- 30.
Almost all commentators on Lincoln and on the 1850s agree with the observation. Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 80, noted that there is “no evidence of any organized movement in 1858 to push slavery into the free states, or of any disposition among members of the Supreme Court to attempt such folly.” For a complete discussion of the Dred Scott case, see Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). James G. Randall, Lincoln the President: Springfield to Gettysburg, 2 volumes (Gloucester, MA: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1945), 1, 108, termed Lincoln’s conspiracy theory “quite fanciful and nonexistent.” Allen Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln, 2 volumes (New York: Scribner’s, 1950), I, 362, called Lincoln’s theory a “partisan analysis” which “in the eyes of posterity, was pitched on a disappointingly low plane.” And in the view of David Donald, Liberty and Union (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1978), 71, “These utterances in the house divided speech reveal more about the state of Lincoln’s mind and the receptivity of the Northern audiences that cheered his speeches than they do about historical reality.” There has been one major dissenter to this interpretation, Harry Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1959), 81, 277–278. Jaffa, however, marshals evidence regarding only the Dred Scott decision. Lincoln’s theory went well beyond that. Jaffa’s interpretation has been echoed by George W. Frederickson, “A Man but Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality,” The Journal of Southern History 41 (1975): 45, “It is important to recognize that the years after 1854 not only saw an effort to extend and nationalize slavery but also provided the occasion for a torrent of racist propaganda.” In support of this assertion, Frederickson footnotes his own Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), 44–164; and Eugene H. Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 123–137. These sources, however, support only Frederickson’s notion that there was a “torrent of racist propaganda.” His idea that there was an effort to nationalize slavery remains unproven. Oddly enough, Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1966), passes over Lincoln and the 1850s.
- 31.
Frederick Douglass, Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln 4, 318.
- 32.
Collected Works, III, 9.
- 33.
Ibid., 16, 29, 145–146, 221–222, 248–249, 299–300.
- 34.
See Christopher Breiseth, “Lincoln, Douglas and Springfield,” The Public and Private Lincoln: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Cullom Davis et al. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), 101–120.
- 35.
David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 246. See also Kenneth M. Stampp, An Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 156–157.
- 36.
Lawrence J. Friedman, “Antebellum American Abolitionism and the Problem of Violent Means,” The Psychohistory Review 9 (1980): 26–32.
- 37.
Bruce Catton, This Hallowed Ground (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955), 23.
- 38.
Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1962), X, 153–230.
- 39.
Ibid., II, 21–47.
- 40.
Stampp, An Imperiled Union, 242–243.
- 41.
George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All!! or Slaves without Masters, ed. C. Vann Woodward (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1852), 252.
- 42.
Ibid., 11.
- 43.
Collected Works, II, 73.
- 44.
Ibid., 91.
- 45.
Lawrence J. Friedman, “Garrisonism, Abolitionism, and the Boston Clique: A Psychosocial Inquiry,” The Psychohistory Review 7 (1978): 6–19.
- 46.
Fitzhugh, Cannibals All!!; see also Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South or the Failure of Free Institutions (New York: Burt Franklin, 1854).
- 47.
Steven M. Stowe, “The ‘Touchiness’ of the Gentleman Planter: The Sense of Esteem and Continuity in the Antebellum South,” The Psychohistory Review 8 (1979): 6–15.
- 48.
Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness, 14.
- 49.
Admissions records of the Jacksonville State Hospital, 1852–1860, Illinois State Archives.
- 50.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: Collier Books, 1966 [1852]), 104.
- 51.
Even Mary Lincoln despised the Irish and leaned toward the Know-Nothings. See Justin C. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner, eds., Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New York, Knopf, 1972), 46. Compare Lincoln’s own views, Collected Works, II, 323.
- 52.
Potter, The Impending Crisis, 252
- 53.
Approximately 40% of the patients clearly indicated to the staff of the hospital when admitted that they had been born abroad. However, for those whose place of origin is listed as an eastern state—a sizable number—many could well have been born abroad but lived in the East long enough to establish residency before moving to Illinois. I suspect, for example, that many Irish immigrants named Massachusetts or New York as their place of origin.
- 54.
Potter, The Impending Crisis, 254. Note David Bryon Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969).
- 55.
Heinz Kohut, “Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage,” in The Search for the Self: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut 1950–2978, ed. Paul H. Orenstein, 2 volumes (New York: International Universities Press, 1978), 2, 615–658. See also Charles B. Strozier, “Heinz Kohut and the Historical Imagination,” Advances in Self Psychology, ed. Arnold Goldberg (New York: International Universities Press, 1980), 397–406.
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Strozier, C.B. (2011). Lincoln and the Crisis of the 1850s: Thoughts on the Group Self. In: Strozier, C., Offer, D., Abdyli, O. (eds) The Leader. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8387-9_4
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