Americans declare their independence, assert their right to govern themselves, by announcing their recognition of the natural equality of “all men.” By natural equality they mean equality of “unalienable rights” to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. men institute governments—which are not natural, which are alienable—in order to secure those rights. Governments derive their just powers from “the consent of the governed.” That is, the security of rights depends upon self-government. Tyranny, government without the consent of the governed, fails to secure the rights men institute government for.
In the first essay of The Federalist, Publius raises the question of the feasibility of government by consent. Can “societies of men” establish “good government”—government that really does secure unalienable rights–by “reflection and choice” rather than by “accident and force”? Self-government requires reflection or reason and choice or free will. Neither an accidental accumulation of customs and practices nor acquiescence to superior power can satisfy the nature of rational creatures equally endowed with unalienable rights. But can human beings actually exercise their reason effectively? Can they really govern themselves? Or will self-governing societies fragment into colliding atoms of self-interested ambition?
In the 1850s American self-government began to break down in a dispute over self-government, a dispute that would end in civil war. In the 1860 presidential election, a few months before the secession of the Southern states, each of the four candidates advanced his conception of self-government.
Two of those candidates, the Republican Abraham Lincoln and the Democrat Stephen Douglas, had themselves collided politically several times in their state of Illinois. Although Lincoln discusses the theme of self-government throughout his career, he actually uses the term only in the period 1854-59, i.e., during his Illinois years of rivalry with Douglas. He does this because Douglas had appropriated the term in ways Lincoln found to be contradictory to the moral and political principles of the American founding.
Background
In the years following the ratification of the 1787 constitution, Americans ended slavery in the northern states, where there were relatively few slaves, but failed to do so in the Southern states, where the ratio of free (mostly white) citizens to slaves was only two to one. Worse, while many slaveholders of the founding generation looked forward to the gradual abolition of slavery, subsequent generations began to attempt to justify slavery as the cornerstone of Southern political, social, and economic life. As the Northern states prospered economically and Northerners settled Western territories, slaveholders became increasingly apprehensive of abolitionist sentiment. The prospect of a constitutional amendment banning slavery yearly became more ominous to them. If enough new, free states were admitted to the Union, slavery might be voted out of existence by constitutional amendment.
Northern and Southern politicians assuaged these fears and averted disunion by enacting the Missouri Compromise of 1820. According to its terms, Missouri would be admitted into the Union as a slave state, but no slaves would be permitted north of latitude 36%-30′. Thirty years later, as new territories in the far West were settled, the controversy seemed to be settled by the Compromise of 1850. According to the terms of that act, California, the Oregon territory, and the territory now occupied by the states of Kansas, Nebraska, and Montana were kept slave-free; the New Mexico Territory would be allowed to vote slavery up or down. Finally, the Southern states would benefit from a new, stringent fugitive slave law.
This agreement unraveled in 1854, thanks to the Kansas-Nebraska bill proposed by Senator Stephen Douglas. Douglas envisioned Chicago as the eastern terminus of a railroad to the Pacific. Having invested in railway stock and Chicago real estate, he stood to profit financially as well as politically from this project. But Southern senators wanted a railway on a southerly route. Perhaps in order to overcome their opposition to his plan, Douglas proposed that Kansas and Nebraska settlers be permitted to vote on the question of whether slavery could exist in their territories: popular sovereignty would prevail over the terms of the Missouri Compromise. Some Southerners, attracted by the prospect of adding at least one new slave state to the Union (Kansans leaned toward slavery), allied with northern Democrats to pass the bill.
After opposing the Mexican War as a congressman in the late 1840s on the grounds that adding to American territory in the Southwest would extend slavery, Abraham Lincoln returned to Illinois neither with his shield nor on it. While not abandoning politics altogether, he saw little hope of success as a Whig in predominately Democratic Illinois. But the Kansas-Nebraska Act alarmed anti-slavery men throughout the North. Lincoln ran for the Illinois state legislature in 1854, attacking Douglas, the Democrats, and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. This election resulted in statewide gains by anti-slavery candidates. But the real collision didn’t come until 1858, when Lincoln opposed Douglas for the United State Senate and confronted him in a series of debates that won national attention. By them, the author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act had won back some support from anti-slavery men by opposing the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution of Kansas on the grounds that it had not been ratified by a genuine majority vote of Kansas citizens.
How Douglas Conceived of Self-Government
Douglas defined self-government as “the great principle that every people ought to possess the right to form and regulate their own domestic institutions in their own way” (Chicago, 7/7/58). Further, self-government means that “every community [may] judge and decide for itself, whether a thing is right or wrong, whether it would be good or evil for them to adopt it.” Self-government so defined is “the birthright of freemen,” and involves “the right of free action, the right of free thought, the right of free judgment”. Slavery is no exception. “You must allow the people to decide for themselves whether it is a good or an evil,” just as they vote yes or no on liquor laws, banking laws, and school budgets.”
The American Founders endorsed such popular sovereignty for the states in order to honor diversity. “The laws and domestic institutions which would suit the granite hills of New Hampshire would be totally unfit for the plantations of South Carolina” (ibid.). Separate and distinct interests and conditions require separate and distinct laws. “Uniformity is the parent of despotism the world over, not only in politics, but in religion.” Diversity is therefore “the greatest safeguard of all our liberties.”
When pressed by Lincoln, who cited the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of natural equality of all men, Douglas demurred. While men of “inferior race to the white man” should enjoy “rights, privileges, and immunities,” “each State must decide for itself the nature and extent of those rights” (ibid.). As for himself, Douglas favored “preserving not only the purity of the blood, but the purity of the government from any mixture or amalgamation with the inferior races.” Racial amalgamation exists in Latin America, and “its result has been degeneration, demoralization, and degradation below the capacity for self-government.” While I do not question Mr. Lincoln’s conscientious belief that the negro was made his equal, and hence his brother… for my part, I do not regard the negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother or any kin to me whatsoever” (Ottawa, 8/21/58). “I hold that this Government was made on a white basis, by white men, for the benefit of white men and none others. I do not believe that the Almighty made the negro capable of self-government” (Jonesboro, 9/15/58). This does not mean that blacks deserve enslavement; Douglas denies any intention to change the status of Illinois from a free to a slave State. But blacks deserve no civil rights in Illinois or anywhere else, and States should decide on blacks’ civil status, “consistent with the public good,” as the voters in each state conceive the public good (Ottawa, 8/21/58).
Further, the phrase “all men are created equal” has nothing to do with all men—only white men. The signers of the Declaration of Independence freed not a single slave (Jonesboro, 9/15/58). They all represented colonies in which slavery was legal. The author of the Declaration himself owned slaves. “Did he intend to say in that Declaration, that his negro slaves, which he held and treated as property, were created his equals by Divine law, and that he was violating the law of God every day of his life by holding them as slaves?” (Galesburg, 10/7/58)
In attempting to remove the issue of slavery from the halls of Congress, by attempting to de-nationalize the issue and make its fate depend upon local majorities, Douglas position himself as a man of moderation, occupying the sensible center between the abolitionists of the North and the slaveholders of the South. Conceived as popular sovereignty, self-government rests on that ostensible middle ground; it alone, Douglas claims, can preserve peaceful constitutional government in the United States. With popular sovereignty acknowledged as America’s fundamental principle, there can be no civil war. With popular sovereignty, the Founders’ legacy of government by choice instead of government by force can endure.
Lincoln’s Rejoinder
Lincoln replied to each of Douglas’s five arguments. In so doing, he deranged Douglas’s balancing act between antislavery Northerners and proslavery Southerners. He lost the Senate race but won the presidency two years later. The middle ground proved untenable. It may not even have been a true middle ground.
Against Douglas’s definition of self-government as community self-determination, Lincoln reminded Americans that no community can override the nature of humanity itself. “[T]he most dumb and stupid slave that ever toiled for a master, does constantly know that he is wronged” (Fragment on Slavery, 7/1/54). Conversely, slaveholders never volunteer to be slaves. Slaves may be treated as property in slave states, but slaves are in fact persons. To introduce slavery into federally-owned—that is to say, nationally-owned—territories must be morally wrong, an attempt to override the human nature of blacks (Speech at Bloomington, 9/26/58). “When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism” (Speech at Peoria, 10,16/54). Douglas defines self-government as the birthright of freemen, that is of citizens. Lincoln defines self-government as the birthright of man as such.
Lincoln refutes Douglas’s argument from diversity on the same grounds. Douglas’s analogy is wrong. Slavery is not the same as livestock management, because men are not cattle, to be herded by their owner from one place to another. Different laws and customs in response to differences in geography, climate, and soil are no excuse for injuring human nature and violating its rights. Slavery does exactly that (Ottawa, 8/21/58).
Centrally, Lincoln rejects the claim of radical racial inferiority of blacks asserted by Douglas. this is not to say that he proclaims racial equality in all respects. “I agree with Judge Douglas [that the black man] is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral and intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anyone else, which s own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.” (Ottawa, 8/21/58). The “physical difference” between blacks and whites precludes “the two races [from] living together on social and political equality”; Lincoln leaves open the possibility of living apart in equality, that is, as separate nations. While they do remain together, “I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race” (Charleston, 9/18/58). This does not bespeak ‘racism’; it rather bespeaks a lack of hypocrisy. Black and white men are surely ‘unequal’—that is, not the same—physically, in skin color. This difference will preclude what later generations called racial integration. But such a superficial difference simply gives no warrant for the extension of slavery into national territories, which was the issue before Americans in 1858.
In making slavery a matter of moral indifference on the ground of asserting the radical inferiority of the black man—to treat the black man as property, a being of some other, lesser, species—Douglas “penetrat[es] the human soul and eradicate[es] the light of reason and the love of liberty in this American people” (Ottawa, 8/21/58). Moral complacency with respect to slavery will have the effect of diluting antislavery sentiment where no slavery now exists, weakening resistance to slavery among the citizens of free states. Thus Douglas’s version of self-government will tend to undermine itself by diluting citizens’ fidelity to the principle of liberty as a natural right. If, however, you admit (as Douglas does) that slavery is wrong, you “cannot logically say that any body has a right to do wrong,” to vote for slavery. “You cannot institute any equality between right and wrong” (Galesburg, 10/7/58).
Regarding Douglas’s history lesson on Thomas Jefferson as a slaveholder, Lincoln. cites Jefferson himself against slavery (Galesburg, 10/7/58). On slaveholding, Jefferson wrote, “I tremble for my country, when I remember that God is just.” Jefferson had seen no practicable way to end slavery in the Southern states in his time. (One might add, although Lincoln does not, that as a lifelong debtor, Jefferson had indeed seen no practicable way to end slavery in his own household, although one might wish he had practiced more stringent economy.) Nonetheless, he was an abolitionist, if an ineffectual one. As for the Founders generally, they did not make the nation half-slave and half-free. Or rather they did: putting slavery on the road to extinction in those States where slaves did not comprise a substantial part of the population. And they attempted to place it “in the course of ultimate extinction” by permitting the federal government to prohibit the slave trade (Quincy, 10/13/58; Alton, 10/15/58).
Finally, Lincoln argues, Douglas’s hope that popular sovereignty can serve as an instrument to end America’s constitutional crisis over slavery will not work. The federal constitution refers to slaves not as property but as persons (Alton, 10/15/58). To reverse the constitutional formula is to innovate, not conserve. The Kansas-Nebraska Act represents an attempt to revolutionize the work of the Founders, not to continue it (Jonesboro, 9/15/58). The more recent decision by the Supreme Court is the Dred Scott case, holding that the slaveholder’s property right is absolute and that it extends to slaves. Douglass endorsed that decision, which flatly contradicts not only the language of the U. S. Constitution but also Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty. The incoherence of Douglasian constitutionalism points to the untenability of a Union part slave and part free.
This is the argument of Lincoln’s most famous speech of the 1850s, “A House Divided” (Springfield, 6/16/58). “Either the opponents of slavery will arrest further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction”—thereby returning to the intentions of the Founders—”or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the states….” (ibid.)—returning to the circumstances of 1776 and reversing a principal political effect of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the establishment and enhancement of self-government. Popular sovereignty will collapse right into self-interest (Peoria, 10/16/58). Douglas’s popular sovereignty reverses the Founders’ formula. For Douglas, popular sovereignty flows from constitutionalism and constitutionalism flows from radical racial superiority—the self-interest of whites. For the Founders, constitutionalism flows from popular sovereignty—the Constitution was ratified by the people—but popular sovereignty derives from equal natural rights, from the equal right of every person to the self-government that secures those rights. For Lincoln as for the Founders, the self that is governed must be governed by the better angels of our nature, or else it is not a fully human self at all.
The house did divide. On that, Douglas was right. Self-government as Lincoln conceived it could not vindicated without civil war. That war could only be justified, and was justified in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, as a new birth of freedom, an extension of self-government, of secure natural rights for all Americans. The fact that this security did require universal civil rights—again in accordance with the argument of the Declaration—was to be learned and relearned in the following hundred years.
Recent Comments