American Political History, Topic 6: The Civil War Era and the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1858)

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1 Background: By 1858, the United States was a house divided against itself in at least two important ways. First, the nation was divided over issues related to sovereignty in the federal system. Should one say that the United States are or that the United States is? Had sovereign states created the nation, or had a sovereign nation created the states? Of course, state governments and national government had different roles, and each could exercise sovereignty in certain matters, but what happened when they disagreed? Who, ultimately, had the final say aside from the people? Did states have to do what the national government said? In the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of , Madison and Jefferson had argued that states could nullify laws of the national government that violated the 10 th Amendment. In the late-1820s and early 1830s, South Carolina s John C. Calhoun fleshed out the nullification argument by asserting that, if a state concluded that Congress had acted unconstitutionally, it could hold a special convention and declare the action null and void in that state. And if the national government tried to impose its will on the state by force, then the state had every right to secede from the Union. Nationalists opposed the states rights position by arguing that, when a state had ratified the Constitution, it had given up its ultimate and separate sovereignty and joined other ratifying states in a single sovereign nation, from which they had no right to leave. To nationalists, liberty and union, as Daniel Webster famously said in 1830, were now and forever, one and inseparable! The second issue that split national opinion was slavery. The Declaration of Independence set forth America s vision and values, and it stated that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If the people were truly sovereign, then legal equality and inalienable rights had to be incontrovertible. As Lincoln would argue, if blacks were not entitled to these fundamentals, then any other group could justifiably be denied them, too. Either all people were equal in natural rights or they were not and the nation could not continue to play by two sets of contradictory rules relating to the fundamental questions of human equality. The institution of slavery and its legal inequality and privileges for the few perpetuated the antithesis of the Declaration s message. If Americans were to remain committed to their inspired founding, they needed to comprehend what it had meant and then act accordingly. Its principles of human freedom were absolutes; they could not be altered by a vote. Lincoln knew that an America divided against itself in these two fundamental ways could not stand. In his acceptance of the 1858 Republican nomination for U. S. Senate, he uttered words that would prove to be prophetic: I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved I do not expect the house to fall but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Between 1820 and 1860, lawmakers had addressed the issues of a divided America with a series of unsatisfactory compromises, which would leave it up to the bloodiest war in American history the Civil War to decide which one thing the Union would become. In 1820, Speaker of the House Henry Clay engineered the Missouri Compromise : a compromise that

2 admitted Missouri to the Union as a slave state, admitted Maine as a free state, and prohibited slavery in the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase north of Missouri s southern border. In 1850, Clay presented another compromise to mitigate the nation s sectional differences. The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state, allowed citizens of New Mexico and Utah to exercise popular sovereignty to decide whether to be free or slave, ended the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and passed the Fugitive Slave Act to reinforce the provision of the U. S. Constitution (Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3) that required a slave who had escaped to a free state to be returned to his/her owner. In 1854, Illinois s Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas secured the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which created the Kansas and Nebraska Territories and repealed the Missouri Compromise by letting popular sovereignty decide the free/slave status of the territories. The Act led to the formation of the Republican Party by former Whigs, Northern Democrats, and Know-Nothings as well as to violent clashes in 1855 and 1856 between pro- and antislavery forces in Kansas: events that would be known as Bleeding Kansas. In the Dred Scott decision of 1857, the Supreme Court ruled that slaves were property not citizens (and thus could not bring a suit in the federal courts) and that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories (because it had no right to take property without due process of law ). The sectional crisis exacerbated by the decision made the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 (Lincoln and Douglas were running against each in the U. S. Senate election in Illinois) even more incendiary. Though Douglas won the Senate seat, antislavery Lincoln won the presidency in 1860, which ignited a firestorm of secession in the South, beginning, as Joseph Smith had prophesied in 1832, with South Carolina (see D&C 87:1-4 and 130:12-13). By April 1861, the Confederacy of seceding states captured Fort Sumter in South Carolina, and the American Civil War had begun. The war, which would rage until 1865 and claim over 620,000 American lives (a total almost equal to the number of American deaths in all of the nation s other wars combined) including Lincoln s, would decide the questions about sovereignty and slavery that had caused the nation to be divided against itself. As such, it would provide another founding era for the United States: a period in which the vision and values of the American Revolutionary Founders were reexamined, contested, and, ultimately, secured by a bloodletting that pitted brother against brother. In this war for the very meaning of America, Lincoln s vision of the Founders nation one conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal became America s vision. Lincoln s America would be one that would, under God, enjoy a new birth of [the] freedom envisioned by Thomas Jefferson when he penned the Declaration of Independence. It would be one in which a single, unified United States would work to ensure that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth. The national government would be sovereign, the Union would be preserved, and slavery would be abolished. The Emancipation Proclamation (1863) freed slaves in the Confederate states; the 13 th Amendment (1865) outlawed slavery in the United States; the 14 th Amendment (1868) declared that no state could violate a citizen s life, liberty,

3 property, or equal protection under the law; and the 15 th Amendment (1870) gave all adult American males regardless of race or previous condition of servitude the right to vote. And America has remained committed to the proposition that all men are created equal ever since. Questions to Consider as You Read: What does Douglas believe about (1) a Union comprised of both slave and free states and (2) states rights? What does Lincoln believe about (1) a Union comprised of both slave and free states and (2) equality between whites and blacks? What does Lincoln say about slavery and the eternal struggle between two principles? Research: Lincoln-Douglas Debate at Alton, Illinois (15 October 1858) As you read, don t forget to mark and annotate main ideas, key terms, confusing concepts, unknown vocabulary, cause/effect relationships, examples, etc. Stephen Douglas: The principal points in the speech of Mr. Lincoln s were: First, that this government could not endure permanently divided into free and slave states, as our fathers made it; that they must all become free or all become slave; all become one thing or all become another, otherwise this Union could not continue to exist. I give you his opinions almost in the identical language he used. His second proposition was a crusade against the Supreme Court of the United States because of the Dred Scott decision; urging as an especial reason for his opposition to that decision that it deprived the negroes of the rights and benefits of that clause in the Constitution of the United States which guarantees to the citizens of each state, all the rights, privileges, and immunities of the citizens of the several states.in [his] Chicago speech he even went further than he had before, and uttered sentiments in regard to the negro being on an equality with the white man. He adopted in support of this position the argument which Lovejoy and Codding, and other Abolition lecturers had made familiar in the northern and central portions of the State, to wit: that the Declaration of Independence having declared all men free and equal, by Divine law, also that negro equality was an inalienable right, of which they could not be deprived.. In regard to his doctrine that this government was in violation of the law of God which says, that a house divided against itself cannot stand, I repudiated it as a slander upon the immortal framers of our Constitution. I then said, have often repeated, and now again assert, that in my opinion this government can endure forever, divided into free and slave states as our fathers made it, each state having the right to prohibit, abolish, or sustain slavery just as it pleases. This government was made upon the great basis of the sovereignty of the states, the right of each to regulate its own domestic institution to suit itself, and that right was conferred with

4 understanding and expectation that inasmuch as each locality had separate interests, each locality must have different and distinct local and domestic institutions, corresponding to its wants and interests. I hold that there is no principle on earth more sacred to all the friends of freedom than that which says that no institution, no law, no constitution, should be forced on an unwilling people contrary to their wishes; and I assert that the Kansas and Nebraska Bill contains that principle. Abraham Lincoln: Has any thing ever threatened the existence of this Union save and except this very institution of slavery? What is it that we hold most dear amongst us? Our own liberty and prosperity. What has ever threatened our liberty and prosperity save and except this institution of slavery? If this is true, how do you propose to improve the condition of things by enlarging slavery?... It is the eternal struggle between those two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same spirit that says, You work and toil and earn bread, and I ll eat it. No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle. I will [say] something about this argument Judge Douglas uses, while he sustains the Dred Scott decision, that the people of the territories can still somehow exclude slavery. I do not believe it is a constitutional right to hold slaves in a territory of the United States. I believe the [Dred Scott] decision was improperly made and I go for reversing it. Stephen Douglas: [Lincoln] says that he looks forward to a time when slavery shall be abolished everywhere. I look forward to a time when each state shall be allowed to do as it pleases. Mr. Lincoln went on to tell you that he does not at all desire to interfere with slavery in the states where it exists, nor does his party. Let me ask him then how he is going to put slavery in the course of ultimate extinction everywhere? 1 Notebook Questions: Reason and Record What does Douglas believe about (1) a Union comprised of both slave and free states and (2) states rights? 1 SOURCE: Political Debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. Cleveland: O. S. Hubbell, 1895.

5 What does Lincoln believe about (1) a Union comprised of both slave and free states and (2) equality between whites and blacks? What does Lincoln say about slavery and the eternal struggle between two principles? Notebook Questions: Relate and Record How does the document relate to FACE Principle #7: The Christian Principle of American Political Union: Internal agreement or unity, which is invisible, produces an external union, which is visible in the spheres of government, economics, and home and community life. Before two or more individuals can act effectively together, they must first be united in spirit in their purposes and convictions? How does the document relate to Doctrine and Covenants 101:79? Record Activity: Multiple Choice Comprehension Check 1. Background: Prior to 1865, the United States was a house divided against itself over which two consuming issues: issues that would lead to the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision, and the American Civil War, among other things? a. foreign affairs and industrialization b. expansion and immigration c. reform and expanding the electorate

6 d. the market revolution and the welfare state e. sovereignty in the federal system and slavery f. the Union and admitting states to it 2. Background: All of the following are legacies of the Civil War except which one? a. By deciding the questions that had caused the nation to be divided against itself, it provided another founding era for the United States: a period in which the vision and values of the American Revolutionary Founders were reexamined, contested, and, ultimately, secured by a bloodletting that pitted brother against brother. b. Lincoln s vision of the Founders nation one conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal became America s vision, and Lincoln s America would be one that would, under God, enjoy a new birth of [the] freedom envisioned by Thomas Jefferson when he penned the Declaration of Independence. c. The national government became sovereign, the Union was preserved, and slavery was abolished. d. The Emancipation Proclamation (1863) freed slaves in the Confederate states; the 13th Amendment (1865) gave all adult American males regardless of race or previous condition of servitude the right to vote; the 14th Amendment (1868) outlawed slavery in the United States; and the 15th Amendment (1870) declared that no state could violate a citizen s life, liberty, property, or equal protection under the law. 3. Source: Which one of the following is the best summary of the main disagreement between Lincoln and Douglas? a. All men are created equal in natural rights, and the Union cannot last half slave and half free (Douglas). vs. States are sovereign to do as they please, and the Union can exist half slave and half free (Lincoln). b. The Dred Scott decision is flawed (Douglas). vs. The Dred Scott decision is correct (Lincoln). c. All men are created equal in natural rights, and the Union cannot last half slave and half free (Lincoln). vs. States are sovereign to do as they please, and the Union can exist half slave and half free (Douglas). d. The Dred Scott decision is flawed (Lincoln). vs. The Dred Scott decision is correct (Douglas).