Abraham Lincoln: a History — Volume 01

by John G. Nicolay; John Hay

A FORTUNATE ESCAPE

When Congress came together again in December, there was such a change in the temper of its members that no one would have imagined, on seeing the House divided, that it was the same body which had assembled there a year before. The election was over; the Whigs were to control the Executive Department of the Government for four years to come; the members themselves were either reflected or defeated; and there was nothing to prevent the gratification of such private feelings as they might have been suppressing during the canvass in the interest of their party. It was not long before some of the Northern Democrats began to avail themselves of this new liberty. They had returned burdened with a sense of wrong. They had seen their party put in deadly peril by reason of its fidelity to the South, and they had seen how little their Southern brethren cared for their labors and sacrifices, in the enormous gains which Taylor had made in the South, carrying eight out of fifteen slave States. They were in the humor to avenge themselves by a display of independence on their own account, at the first opportunity. The occasion was not long in presenting itself. A few days after Congress opened, Mr. Root, of Ohio, introduced a resolution instructing the Committee on Territories to bring in a bill "with as little delay as practicable" to provide territorial governments for California and New Mexico, which should "exclude slavery there-from." This resolution would have thrown the same House into a panic twelve months before, but now it passed by a vote of 108 to 80—in the former number were all the "Whigs from the North and all the Democrats but eight," and in the latter the entire South and the eight referred to.

The Senate, however, was not so susceptible to popular impressions, and the bill, prepared in obedience to the mandate of the House, never got farther than the desk of the Senate Chamber. The pro-slavery majority in that body held firmly together till near the close of the session, when they attempted to bring in the new territories without any restriction as to slavery, by attaching what is called "a rider" to that effect to the Civil Appropriation Bill. The House resisted, and returned the bill to the Senate with the rider unhorsed. A committee of conference failed to agree. Mr. McClernand, a Democrat from Illinois, then moved that the House recede from its disagreement, which was carried by a few Whig votes, to the dismay of those who were not in the secret, when Richard W. Thompson (who was thirty years afterwards Secretary of the Navy) instantly moved that the House do concur with the Senate, with this amendment, that the existing laws of those territories be for the present and until Congress should amend them, retained. This would secure them to freedom, as slavery had long ago been abolished by Mexico. This amendment passed, and the Senate had to face the many-pronged dilemma, either to defeat the Appropriation Bill, or to consent that the territories should be organized as free communities, or to swallow their protestations that the territories were in sore need of government and adjourn, leaving them in the anarchy they had so feelingly depicted. They chose the last as the least dangerous course, and passed the Appropriation Bill in its original form.

Mr. Lincoln took little part in the discussions incident to these proceedings; he was constantly in his seat, however, and voted generally with his party, and always with those opposed to the extension of slavery. He used to say that he had voted for the Wilmot proviso, in its various phases, forty-two times. He left to others, however, the active work on the floor. His chief preoccupation during this second session was a scheme which links itself characteristically with his first protest against the proscriptive spirit of slavery ten years before in the Illinois Legislature and his immortal act fifteen years afterwards in consequence of which American slavery ceased to exist. He had long felt in common with many others that the traffic in human beings under the very shadow of the Capitol was a national scandal and reproach. He thought that Congress had the power under the Constitution to regulate or prohibit slavery in all regions under its exclusive jurisdiction, and he thought it proper to exercise that power with due regard to vested rights and the general welfare. He therefore resolved to test the question whether it were possible to remove from the seat of government this stain and offense.

[Sidenote: Gidding's diary, January 8, 9, and 11, 1849: published in the "Cleveland Post," March 31, 1878.]

He proceeded carefully and cautiously about it, after his habit. When he had drawn up his plan, he took counsel with some of the leading citizens of Washington and some of the more prominent members of Congress before bringing it forward. His bill obtained the cordial approval of Colonel Seaton, the Mayor of Washington, whom Mr. Lincoln had consulted as the representative of the intelligent slave-holding citizens of the District, and of Joshua R. Giddings, whom he regarded as the leading abolitionist in Congress, a fact which sufficiently proves the practical wisdom with which he had reconciled the demands of right and expediency. In the meantime, however, Mr. Gott, a member from New York, had introduced a resolution with a rhetorical preamble directing the proper committee to bring in a bill prohibiting the slave-trade in the District. This occasioned great excitement, much caucusing and threatening on the part of the Southern members, but nothing else. In the opinion of the leading antislavery men, Mr. Lincoln's bill, being at the same time more radical and more reasonable, was far better calculated to effect its purpose. Giddings says in his diary: "This evening (January 11), our whole mess remained in the dining-room after tea, and conversed upon the subject of Mr. Lincoln's bill to abolish slavery. It was approved by all; I believe it as good a bill as we could get at this time, and am willing to pay for slaves in order to save them from the Southern market, as I suppose every man in the District would sell his slaves if he saw that slavery was to be abolished." Mr. Lincoln therefore moved, on the 16th of January, as an amendment to Gott's proposition, that the committee report a bill for the total abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, the terms of which he gave in full. They were in substance the following:

The first two sections prohibit the bringing of slaves into the district or selling them out of it, provided, however, that officers of the Government, being citizens of slave-holding States, may bring their household servants with them for a reasonable time and take them away again. The third provides a temporary system of apprenticeship and eventual emancipation for children born of slavemothers after January 1, 1850. The fourth provides for the manumission of slaves by the Government on application of the owners, the latter to receive their full cash value. The fifth provides for the return of fugitive slaves from Washington and Georgetown. The sixth submits this bill itself to a popular vote in the District as a condition of its promulgation as law.

These are the essential points of the measure and the success of Mr. Lincoln in gaining the adhesion of the abolitionists in the House is more remarkable than that he should have induced the Washington Conservatives to approve it. But the usual result followed as soon as it was formally introduced to the notice of Congress, It was met by that violent and excited opposition which greeted any measure, however intrinsically moderate and reasonable, which was founded on the assumption that slavery was not in itself a good and desirable thing. The social influences of Washington were brought to bear against a proposition which the Southerners contended would vulgarize society, and the genial and liberal mayor was forced to withdraw his approval as gracefully or as awkwardly as he might. The prospects of the bill were seen to be hopeless, as the session was to end on the 4th of March, and no further effort was made to carry it through. Fifteen years afterwards, in the stress and tempest of a terrible war, it was Mr. Lincoln's strange fortune to sign a bill sent him by Congress for the abolition of slavery in Washington; and perhaps the most remarkable thing about the whole transaction, was that while we were looking politically upon a new heaven and a new earth,—for the vast change in our moral and economic condition might justify so audacious a phrase,—when there was scarcely a man on the continent who had not greatly shifted his point of view in a dozen years, there was so little change in Mr. Lincoln. The same hatred of slavery, the same sympathy with the slave, the same consideration for the slaveholder as the victim of a system he had inherited, the same sense of divided responsibility between the South and the North, the same desire to effect great reforms with as little individual damage and injury, as little disturbance of social conditions as possible, were equally evident when the raw pioneer signed the protest with Dan Stone at Vandalia, when the mature man moved the resolution of 1849 in the Capitol, and when the President gave the sanction of his bold signature to the act which swept away the slave-shambles from the city of Washington.

[Illustration: JOSHUA R. GIDDINGS.]

His term in Congress ended on the 4th of March, 1849, and he was not a candidate for reflection. A year before he had contemplated the possibility of entering the field again. He then wrote to his friend and partner Herndon: "It is very pleasant for me to learn from yon that there are some who desire that I should be reelected. I most heartily thank them for their kind partiality; and I can say, as Mr. Clay said of the annexation of Texas, that 'personally I would not object' to a reelection, although I thought at the time [of his nomination], and still think, it would be quite as well for me to return to the law at the end of a single term. I made the declaration that I would not be a candidate again, more from a wish to deal fairly with others, to keep peace among our friends, and keep the district from going to the enemy, than for any cause personal to myself, so that, if it should so happen that nobody else wishes to be elected, I could not refuse the people the right of sending me again. But to enter myself as a competitor of others, or to authorize any one so to enter me, is what my word and honor forbid."