And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

This chapter deals solely with the question of slavery, which became ever more dominant in American politics by the end of the 1840s. Lincoln was a supporter of the 1846 Wilmot Proviso, which sought to ban slavery in any territory obtained from Mexico.

Despite this, Meacham catalogs Lincoln’s inconsistent record on the issue of slavery. Though he sided with the abolitionists on many issues, he occasionally stood with the majority, proslavery view. On this interpretation, Lincoln is a left-leaning moderate. For instance, Lincoln voted against the expansion of slavery in the Pacific territories, like the Oregon Territory, but supported compensation for slave owners in Washington, DC, and did not yet lobby to end slavery in the capital. By 1849 he had changed his tune, and on January 10 of that year he proposed an act abolishing slavery in Washington, DC. According to Meacham, though this showed progress, “is was a gradualist plan, rife with caveats” (109). Meacham notes that Lincoln’s emphasis on gradual change and compromise would be a consistent theme in his career. “He’d always understood politics as a matter of compromise rather than of conquest,” Meacham writes (112). The bill, in any case, found little support and did not succeed.

In 1848 Lincoln campaigned for the Whig candidate for president, Zachary Taylor. There were two other major parties involved in this election, including the Democrats and the Free Soil Party, an antislavery party which backed Martin Van Buren. Mary Todd and the children returned to Lexington during the spring of that year. Lincoln and Mary exchange a series of endearing letters in which Lincoln expresses how much he misses his children.

The Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor, was elected president. Lincoln, as per tradition in his Illinois district, did not seek re-election. The Taylor administration offered Lincoln the governorship of the new organized Oregon Territory. Lincoln considered the position, but in the end, he decided against it. According to one of Lincoln’s colleagues, Mary Todd was against the move. Instead, the Lincolns returned to Illinois where Lincoln worked diligently as a lawyer.

This chapter traces Lincoln’s personal development, law practice, and griefs while residing in Illinois in his post-congressional era from the late-1840s through the mid-1850s.

During this time, Lincoln continued to study. He was a voracious reader who consumed Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and was very taken with the political ideology of Thomas Jefferson, especially as it is expressed in the Declaration of Independence. He also expressed his admiration for the waves of political revolution that swept Europe in 1848. This was a time during which Lincoln’s lifelong political sentiments became more deeply entrenched and indicative of the conscientious, moralizing defense of American institutions of government that would define his most mature years in the presidency. He expressed these views in a eulogy for Henry Clay, his idol, who died in 1852.

Meacham notes that Lincoln practiced law for nearly 25 years and that this practice included clients from all walks of life, including a slave owner. According to Meacham, “Lincoln felt an ethical obligation to argue his client’s case, reportedly remarking that ‘as a lawyer, he must represent and be faithful to those who counsel with and employ him’” (115). This does not mean that Lincoln wavered in his support of an antislavery agenda, as Meacham is keen to note, only that Lincoln believed in an equally important moral duty to protect the interests of a client.

Still, Lincoln was a far cry from the most revolutionary or powerful antislavery voice of the 1850s. Meacham takes the opportunity to detail the rise of Frederick Douglass, a free Black man (and former slave) who became a lifelong vocal critic of the hypocrisy at the core of a nation that upheld liberty and equality for all while simultaneously enslaving millions of innocent people. Douglass was the editor of the abolitionist newspaper, The North Star, and the author of an influential autobiography. His path will eventually cross with Lincoln’s, and Douglass consistently expresses cautious optimism about the future president.

In 1849 the Lincolns lost their three-year-old son, Eddy, likely to tuberculosis. Both parents are said to have experienced profound grief at this loss. Less than a year later, the Lincolns had another son, William, who was born in December of 1850. At the same time, though, Lincoln’s father, Thomas Lincoln, was in the final stages of his life. He died less than two months after the birth of William in January 1851. Lincoln did not attend his funeral, and it seems that the lifelong rift with his father never healed.

Meacham ends the chapter with some brief remarks on Lincoln’s personal metaphysical perplexities that were simultaneously “fatalist and activist” (123). In a providential world wherein everything was preordained, Lincoln struggled to understand the role of human agency, but nevertheless acted as though this agency was imperative. Lincoln apparently also studied Euclidean geometry during this era and was fascinated by the deduction of truths from the basis of fundamental axioms, as is also reflected in his love for the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence.

Among other things, this chapter surveys the changing political, moral, scientific, and religious situation that uprooted so much of society in the 1840s and 1850s. Lincoln read widely in moral philosophy and religion, including the works of John Stuart Mill. He is said to have been fascinated by the book, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which provides a natural, evolutionary account of the generation of the material world. Lincoln’s religious views were simultaneously complicated and simple. His friends claim that he was imminently rational. He was taken with Theodore Parker’s understanding of conscience as the “voice of God in the soul of man” (127). The call of conscience led Parker and others (including Lincoln) to voice strong opposition to slavery. Meacham quotes him: “‘If the Bible defends slavery,’ he said, ‘it is not so much the better for slavery, but so much the worse for the Bible’” (131). This heterodoxic religious view did not, by any means, necessitate a lack of racism.

1850 was a watershed year in American history. California was admitted to the Union as a free state, meaning that slavery would be outlawed in its confines. This was part of The Compromise of 1850, which did not resolve the issue of slavery in many other western American territories. 1850 also saw the passage of a new form of the Fugitive Slave Act, which required the federal government to use its power to return enslaved people who had escaped to slaveholders in the South.

Meacham also discusses the cultural landscape of the era which reinforced and shaped sentiments in both the North and South. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin became the most politically important novel in American history. It portrayed the horrors of slavery for a sympathetic Northern audience. Imaginary Southern confederacies were also propagated in southern writing and there was a rising sense in the South that their imperialist, slaveholding future should be a grand one.

In 1853, two years after the birth of William, the Lincolns had another baby boy, Thomas. In 1854, President Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law. The passage of this law made slavery legal in the Kansas and Nebraska territories. This overturned the Missouri Compromise that had been in effect since 1820. Lincoln was personally taken aback by this and claims to have been roused to greater action as a result.

This chapter opens with an account of the debates regarding the capacities of democracy and its ability to reduce or eliminate slavery. Important antislavery figures in this dispute include Sojourner Truth, Cassius Marcellus Clay, Henry David Thoreau, and William Lloyd Garrison.

Lincoln, for his part, after having been roused by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, would make a run for Senate in 1854. He ran against the Democrat Stephen Douglas and according to Meacham their rivalry was fierce. He writes, “Given Douglas’s and Lincoln’s diametrically opposed positions on slavery, their campaigns against each other had an elemental feel” (139). According to the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Stephen Douglas was uniquely abhorrent in his defense of slavery.

In his debates with Douglas, Lincoln invoked the history of the American abolitionist and antislavery movement and compares the institution to despotism. Lincoln expressed his hatred of slavery because of the hypocrisy America was expressing to the rest of the world, stating that “it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world” (141). During this time, he also expressed his distaste for nativism and expressed pro-immigrant views. In a private letter to his slaveholding friend, Joshua Speed, he discusses the pain he personally feels about the institution of slavery. He believed in a process of gradual emancipation in which slavery would be abolished in slow stages (142). Douglas denied all this. In the end, Lincoln lost the race to Douglas.

During this era the Republican Party was formed in Wisconsin out of a coalition of members from the Whig, Free Soil, and Democratic parties who were against the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lincoln would soon become a member of this party, stating in 1857 that “the [R]epublican Party ‘is to-day the best hope of the nation, and of the world’” (146).

This chapter outlines the deepening divisions of the United States across the 1850s and the ideological and political crises that would eventually lead to the Civil War.

Both Presidents Pierce and Buchanan attempted to purchase Cuba from Spain in a bid to extend American slaveholding society to the Caribbean Islands. Southern imperialists, sometimes called filibusters, eyed Mexico and Central America for the expansion slavery. According to Meacham, these filibusters “armed themselves and launched military operations to subdue and then control lands outside the United States” (148). This included one short-lived semi-successful campaign in Nicaragua.

The Kansas territory became a particularly disputed place for both proslavery Southerners and antislavery Northerners. Senator Charles Sumner was bludgeoned on the Senate floor by Representative Preston S. Brooks. Unconscious, he had to be escorted out. Sumner had spoken on the crimes in Kansas from an abolitionist position. “Vilified in the North, Brooks was celebrated in the South,” Meacham writes (152). “The facts of the case did not matter in the aftermath; ideology did. Antislavery members supported Sumner; proslavery members stood by Brooks” (152). Two days later (in 1856), John Brown, the “militant abolitionist,” and several of his compatriots murdered five people of proslavery families in Kansas.

In 1856 the Republican Party nominated John C. Frémont for president. Lincoln was one of the electors in this process. The Democrats, meanwhile, nominated James Buchanan, who defeated Frémont in a landslide victory in the general election. Lincoln expresses his view that public opinion is the guide for elected officials and that public opinion is on the side of equality amongst men. However, when President Buchanan was sworn in as president, he promoted the extension of slavery in Western territories. Shortly thereafter the Supreme Court made the infamous Dred Scott decision: “[I]n the decision announced in March 1857, by seven votes to two, a majority essentially ruled that the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of equality did not include Black people, that Black people were not citizens, and that the Missouri Compromise and any future restrictions on slavery—was unconstitutional” (155-56). In the case, Dred Scott, a slave, was forced to return to his slaveholder from a free territory. The decision reinforced the disturbing rise in political tension afoot in the years immediately preceding the Civil War and impacted Black suffrage in multiple states.

The Lincoln family travelled through the Northeast in the summer of 1857. Lincoln would soon challenge Stephen Douglas to a rematch for Senate in 1858.

In June 1858 a Republican convention in Illinois unanimously agrees to nominate Lincoln for Senate. Lincoln gives speeches that are strongly antislavery—perhaps his most fervent yet—and alludes to the possibility of war. In further debates with Stephen Douglas, the stark contrast between Lincoln and Douglas was again forcefully drawn on racial lines. Douglas explicitly argued as a white supremacist that the nation was for the benefit of the white race. Though certainly exhibiting racial prejudice, Lincoln strongly supported the rights of Black persons to keep the products of their own labor and that they had natural rights not to be enslaved. Meacham notes that both Douglas and Lincoln were using the 1858 senatorial race to see about the possibility of a presidential run on their respective party tickets in 1860.

Meacham does not want to gloss over the fact that Lincoln exhibiting racial views that contemporary persons would find abhorrent. Meacham writes:

That he did not seek political or social equality between whites and Blacks, and his occasional use of the N-word including in the debates with Douglas, raise difficult questions about Lincoln’s own views on race. However deep his antislavery commitment, he was a white man in a white-dominated nation shaped by anti-Black prejudice that he to some extent shared (164).

Meacham leaves open the question regarding the extent to which Lincoln was privately racist and the extent to which this was a politically-motivated concession. During the debates he advocated “racial separatism” and disabused people of the notion that he supported Black citizenship in Illinois (167, 169). (Meacham notes that during Lincoln’s time citizenship was a state-based issue, not a federal one.) At the same time, Lincoln railed against the “dehumanization” of the Black race and believed that racism entailed a terrible process of dehumanization. White people, he thought, could be next, and great tyranny could spread from the maintenance of slavery, like an infection.

In November 1858 Lincoln lost, yet again, to Douglas. In this case, Lincoln actually won the popular vote, but the state legislator—which was predominantly led by Democrats and which determined electoral matters in Illinois at the time—decided in favor of Douglas anyway.