A Self-Evident Lie
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A Self-Evident Lie

Southern Slavery and the Threat to American Freedom

Jeremy J. Tewell

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A Self-Evident Lie

Southern Slavery and the Threat to American Freedom

Jeremy J. Tewell

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A Self-Evident Lie explores and underscores the fear and complex meaning of "slavery" to northerners before the Civil War. Many northerners asked: If slavery was the beneficent and paternalistic institution that southerners claimed, could it not be applied with equal morality to whites as well as blacks? Republicans repeatedly expressed concern that proslavery arguments were not inherently racial. Irrespective of race, anyone could fall victim to the argument that they were "inferior, " that they would be better off enslaved, that their enslavement served the interests of society, or that their subjugation was justified by history and religion.

In trenchant and graceful prose, Jeremy Tewell argues that some Republicans, most notably Abraham Lincoln, held that the only effective safeguard of individual liberty was universal liberty, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. As long as Americans believed that "all men" were endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, everyone's liberty would be self-evident, regardless of circumstance.

Conversely, the justifications meant to exclude a segment of society from the rights of man worked to destroy the self-evidence of those very rights. Therefore, by failing to repudiate slavery—thus rejecting the universality of human liberty—northerners made themselves vulnerable to proslavery rationales, especially when they happened to occupy a position of political, social, or economic weakness. Black skin had been stigmatized as a badge of servitude, but there was nothing to guarantee that white skin would always serve as an unimpeachable badge of freedom.

This was a major theme in Lincoln's campaign against Stephen A. Douglas and was a key argument against the use of popular sovereignty as the method for determining slavery's status in the territories. According to Tewell, Lincoln's greatest challenge was to convince northern audiences that simple indifference to slavery was itself inimical to the liberty of whites.

A Self-Evident Lie will intrigue anyone interested in issues related to Lincoln, slavery and antislavery, the Civil War, and American intellectual history.

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The Myth of the Free-State Democrat

“I am not in the habit of looking upon this struggle as a local one, and confined to Kansas,” wrote the soon-to-be free-state governor, Charles Robinson, in 1855. “I regard it as one in which the whole nation is involved.” In the age of Manifest Destiny, the West represented the nation’s future, politically, economically, and symbolically. However, Manifest Destiny rarely served as a nationalizing force. Driven by separate sectional imperatives, westward expansion gave the conflict between North and South its “irrepressible” character. For more than forty years prior to the Civil War, Americans struggled to define slavery’s status in areas where it did not yet exist or was not yet firmly established.1
Due to their increasing populations and their desire for additional political representation, Northerners and Southerners vied for control over the nation’s territorial growth. Southerners felt the need to expand because of the depletion of the soil and the growing slave population. Many Americans, both Northerners and Southerners, agreed that if slavery could not expand it would eventually die. In the words of one proslavery editor in Kansas, limiting the institution to those states where it already existed would force Southerners “to choose between self-destruction and the agonies of a slow death.” Likewise, northern society needed to expand in order to prevent a high population density that would increase competition for jobs and lower wages, thus undermining the free-labor ideology. Jefferson’s hostility to urbanization had been predicated on this reasoning. According to the traditional republican view, land was the only source of personal independence, and personal independence was a prerequisite for those who expected to maintain their freedom in a participatory republic. Without an abundant supply of land, people would be forced to work for wages in an increasingly crowded market, which would make them dependent on their employers and, consequently, render them susceptible to blackmail and bribery. In this respect, Americans, with a sprawling continent at their doorstep, seemed particularly blessed. They envisioned the West as a safety valve through which people could make a fresh start when their fortunes declined.2
Yet many Northerners were convinced that their access to this land would be effectively blocked if they were forced to compete with slave labor. In the late 1850s, free laborers earned roughly a dollar a day, whereas the cost of a slave’s daily labor was less than twenty-five cents. Competition with slaves could therefore be expected to severely depress wages. Psychologically, the effects were similar. Northerners argued that slavery undermined the work ethic of free laborers by stigmatizing hard work as servile. What could be more enervating, they asked, than having to compete with another man’s slaves? Slavery therefore prevented upward social mobility, created a stagnant economy, and maintained a permanent class structure in which the bloated slaveholding aristocracy reigned supreme.3
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This conflict took a violent turn with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in the spring of 1854. Four years earlier, Congress had passed a series of measures that finally defused the crisis emanating from the Mexican War and the acquisition of California and New Mexico. Many Americans had hoped this would be a “final settlement” of the controversy over slavery’s expansion. Yet with the acquisition of this territory, facilitating travel and communication between East and West became a salient issue. In fact, the war had not yet begun when Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, then a thirty-two-year-old freshman congressman, began to advocate the construction of a railroad linking Chicago and San Francisco. In the fall of 1845, Douglas introduced a bill to organize the land west of Iowa as Nebraska Territory. The measure failed to pass, and while public support continued to grow, the possible location of a transcontinental road remained the subject of sectional and local rivalries almost a decade later.4
In February 1853, William A. Richardson, Douglas’s ally and chairman of the House Committee on Territories, reported a new measure to provide Nebraska with a territorial government. The need for such legislation seemed obvious. “In the name of God, how is the railroad to be made if you will never let people live on the lands through which the road passes?” demanded the bill’s author. Douglas, now chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, concurred and favorably reported the measure. Yet despite widespread support for a transcontinental railroad, many Southerners opposed a move to organize the Louisiana Purchase territory north of 36˚ 30´. Slavery had been prohibited there under the terms of the Missouri Compromise in 1820, and any states carved from Nebraska would assuredly enter the Union as free states. Missourians were particularly wary. With the free state of Illinois to the east and Iowa to the north, they now faced the unwelcome prospect of a free territory on their western border, where much of their slave population was concentrated. It was therefore with considerable misgivings that Senator David Rice Atchison of Missouri agreed to support the bill. Nevertheless, Douglas was still unable to garner the votes he needed. With the support of every slave-state senator south of Missouri, the Senate voted to table the measure shortly before Congress adjourned.5
Douglas remained committed to Nebraska’s organization, but as the new Congress assembled in December 1853, he found the terrain even more difficult than it had been during the previous session. Perhaps most notably, Atchison, who had spent the recess battling Thomas Hart Benton in the opening stage of the next senate campaign, now announced that he would see Nebraska “sink in hell” before voting to organize it as free territory. If Douglas could not pass the bill with Atchison’s support, it was highly unlikely he would be able to do so without it. With this in mind, Douglas began to make a series of increasingly direct concessions to his southern colleagues. The new bill, reported out of his committee on January 4, made no reference to the Missouri Compromise, but repeated the language that had been employed in the New Mexico and Utah legislation of 1850: “when admitted as a State or States, the said territory, or any portion of the same, shall be received into the Union, with or without slavery, as their constitution may prescribe at the time of their admission.” Southerners quickly made it clear to Douglas that this was insufficient, and within a week he added another section, which had supposedly been left out through “clerical error,” explicitly stating the right of territorial residents to determine slavery’s status within their borders. Southerners realized, however, that slavery would never have an opportunity to take root if the Missouri Compromise remained in effect. Two weeks after Douglas first introduced his bill, Senator Archibald Dixon of Kentucky pressed him to incorporate an outright repeal. Douglas agreed, fully aware that it would cause “a hell of a storm.” He also decided to provide for two new territories, Nebraska, to the west of Iowa, and Kansas, to the west of Missouri. While it was not unreasonable to allow these regions the opportunity to develop separately from each other, many construed this measure as a means of reserving Kansas for slavery and Nebraska for freedom.6
Although Douglas may have hoped to placate Southerners while leaving the Missouri Compromise intact, his basic reasoning remained constant. Beginning with the bill’s initial introduction, Douglas claimed that the principle of congressional exclusion had been superseded by “the leading feature of the compromise of 1850,” which in his view was the “great principle of self-government.” According to Douglas, Congress had repudiated the Missouri Compromise by refusing to extend it to the Pacific in 1848 (despite the support of the Polk administration) and in 1850 had determined “that the people of the territories, and of all the states, were to be allowed to do as they pleased upon the subject of slavery.” The supersession argument was, however, clearly disingenuous on Douglas’s part. He had publicly lauded the Missouri Compromise in 1849 as “a sacred thing, which no ruthless hand would ever be reckless enough to disturb.” And as for the Compromise of 1850, many Northerners pointed out, quite correctly, that no one at the time believed that the New Mexico and Utah legislation had any bearing whatsoever on the Louisiana Purchase. Lincoln aptly noted the absurdity of the argument that those who favored the Wilmot Proviso in order to prohibit slavery in the Mexican Cession were actually fighting to allow slavery north of 36˚ 30’ by refusing to extend the line to the Pacific. The Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850 were separate measures, he insisted, not general principles: “To argue that we thus repudiated the Missouri Compromise is no less absurd than it would be to argue that because we have so far forborne to acquire Cuba, we have thereby, in principle, repudiated our former acquisitions and determined to throw them out of the Union. No less absurd than it would be to say that because I may have refused to build an addition to my house, I thereby have decided to destroy the existing house! And if I catch you setting fire to my house, you will turn upon me and say I instructed you to do it!”7
To the extent to which it can be considered a principle, “congressional nonintervention” is perhaps a more accurate appellation than “popular sovereignty,” considering that the actual sovereignty of territorial residents over the issue of slavery had been left intentionally ambiguous ever since Lewis Cass first championed the measure in his run for the White House in 1848. The final version of the Kansas-Nebraska Act merely stated that territorial residents would be “perfectly free” to regulate their domestic institutions, “subject only to the Constitution.” Northern Democrats, including Douglas, assumed that a territorial legislature could exclude slavery during the territorial stage. Southerners, on the other hand, assumed no such authority. In their minds, slave property should be as sacrosanct as any other form of property. Regulation could only occur as the territory entered the Union as a state. This ambiguity, while attractive as a means of garnering support in both sections, would later serve to divide the Democratic Party.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act easily passed the Senate on March 3. Only two Southerners voted against it, Sam Houston and John Bell, while party discipline kept all but four northern Democrats in line. President Pierce had agreed to make the bill a test of Democratic orthodoxy, but the House, whose members soon had to face their constituents, was less amenable to administration demands. Douglas exerted his influence, which, along with the legislative legerdemain of Alexander Stephens, secured the bill’s passage on May 22 by a narrow vote of 113 to 100. More so than the Senate, the House vote revealed the sectional realignment of American politics. Half of the northern Democrats voted against the bill, as did every northern Whig, whereas two-thirds of southern Whigs joined the Democrats to support it.8
Douglas may have achieved an impressive legislative victory, but the Kansas-Nebraska Act was proved far from successful in its operation. Douglas had hoped that congressional nonintervention would define slavery as a state and territorial issue, thereby freeing Congress and the president to focus on greater issues. Instead, the dream of a transcontinental railroad was consumed by the sectional animosities engendered by the act, and the nation stood transfixed as Kansas descended into chaos and violence.9
Three years after the passage of Douglas’s bill, Northerners could look back on a long series of outrages in Kansas. Proslavery Missourians had stolen elections for Kansas’s delegate to Congress and for the territorial legislature. This legislature, fraudulent in spirit if not in fact, passed a draconian slave code, imposing a sentence of two years at hard labor for those who wrote or circulated antislavery material and threatening the imprisonment of anyone who simply denied the institution’s legality. Those who aided escaped slaves or incited rebellion risked the death penalty. Southerners also threatened the life and expedited the departure of every governor who dared to oppose them. Cowed by their demands, President Pierce blamed the hostilities on New England emigrants (who, despite the propaganda, were relatively few in numbers), condemned the free-state Topeka Constitution as “revolutionary,” and authorized the use of federal troops to disperse the free-state government. Then, in February 1857, the proslavery legislature attempted to solidify its gains by calling for the election of a constitutional convention.10
Not surprisingly, free-soil opponents often lamented their “enslavement” by a proslavery minority. Broadsides advertising mass meetings were emblazoned with the words “No White Slavery!” Sara Robinson, wife of the free-state governor, observed that Kansans “feel the iron heel of the oppressor, making us truly white slaves.” (The imprisonment of Gov. Robinson at Lecompton during the summer of 1856 illustrates her point.) Somewhat ironically, considering the northern reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, free-soil Kansans expressed acceptance of popular sovereignty as a democratic principle, but decried Southerners’ violation of that principle. In an anguished remonstrance, free-state leaders told Congress that the Kansas-Nebraska Act had granted popular sovereignty to proslavery Missourians, but had imposed “serfdom” on the territory’s actual residents.
The doctrine of self-government is to be trampled under foot here, of all other places in the world, on the very spot which had been hallowed and consecrated. . . . The compact is to be basely broken, and the ballot of the freeman torn from our hands, almost before the ink of the covenant is dry. . . . The question of negro slavery is to sink into insignificance, and the greater portentous issue is to rise up in its stead, whether or not we shall be slaves, and fanatics who disgrace the honorable and chivalric men of the south shall be our masters to rule us at their pleasure.11
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Republicans condemned the violence and fraud that resulted from the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Yet in Lincoln’s view, this was not the most troubling aspect of Douglas’s measure. The status of freedom and slavery in the public mind was his primary concern.
Lincoln believed slavery’s status in the West would determine the character of the entire nation. He therefore argued that Kansas-Nebraska was a dangerous watershed in American history. By relinquishing control over slavery’s expansion to territorial settlers, popular sovereignty both fostered and reflected national indifference to the future of human servitude. In other words, it presented freedom and slavery as equally acceptable options for local majorities in their dealings with vulnerable minorities. And this indifference implied national approval of slavery. The endorsement or toleration of slavery’s expansion (and indefinite continuation), under the terms of popular sovereignty, or any other policy, would signify that the American people approved of slavery in principle. Beginning with his Peoria speech in October 1854, Lincoln denounced “this declared indifference” to the spread of slavery because “it assumes that there can be moral right in the enslaving of one man by another.” It was “a dangerous dalliance for a free people”—evidence that “liberty, as a principle, we have ceased to revere.”12
This would develop into a major theme in his debates with Douglas four years later. Tolerating slavery’s expansion connoted an assumption that slavery was “not a wrong.” No man, Lincoln reasoned, could logically express indifference toward something he considered immoral. But it made perfect sense if the issue at hand was trivial or morally acceptable. The real difference between Douglas and his followers...

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