The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions, Part I: Context

     It would be difficult to deny that over the last handful of years a great many things have happened within the domestic political sphere of the United States of America which can fairly be said to fall well outside anything that the Founding Generation might have envisioned. Norms had been smashed, assumptions had been questioned, and many people have been given to wonder if the nation in which they find themselves living is really anything at all like the one they learned about in high school civics class. This has all given rise to a common enough lament. “It’s never been this bad,” people say. “We’ve never been this divided, this short of hope, this burdened by anxiety. We’ve never been this close to the brink of complete catastrophe.” People who say such things, in fairness, do not say them without cause. It may be the case that the United States of America has never experienced quite the succession of crises as beset it over the course of the years 2016 through 2020. But to imagine that the American republic has not faced anything even remotely similar to its most recent trials and tribulations? To claim that the union of states has never come as close as it is right now to complete and utter collapse? Utter shortsightedness. The United States has experienced recessions before, and epidemics, popular disturbances, crime waves, and partisan warfare. Indeed, for a memorable period in the 1860s it was even torn asunder by an outright civil war. None of this is to say that everything will be fine because it has always worked out in the past. Nor is it intended as a rap on the knuckles to those who would maintain that the early 21^st century represents a uniquely tenuous moment in the history of the American republic. Rather, it is simply meant as a reminder of the importance of perspective. The United States has been through a great deal in its history; perhaps a fair bit more than most people remember. And while not every lesson learned from the crises of the past can be effectively applied to the trials of the present moment, some of them may well reward an effort at reexamination.

    This naturally brings us to the subject at hand, and to something of an explanation of the nature of the thing. Up to this point, with few exceptions, the documents examined herein have had their origins in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. “The American Founding” has been the unifying theme, and the focus of study has accordingly strayed very little from the Founders themselves and the literature which they produced. But now and then, as topics too intriguing to lay aside have made themselves known, a deviation or two has been hazarded. We’ve discussed documents which predate the Revolution from both the American and British perspectives, works of theatre, and cases at law. And we’ve delved as far afield as the 1830s in pursuit of some manner of insight into the evolution of American republicanism from the Founding Era to the Age of Jackson. The excuse so often proffered on these occasions – perhaps unnecessarily – was that a fair bit more than just the Revolution and its immediate aftermath have served to define the United States of America. The Foundering Generation was influenced – often deeply – by those who came before. John Locke (1632-1704) and Joseph Addison (1672-1719) may not have been Founders, but their writings were nevertheless critical in shaping the assumptions upon which much of America’s political culture has since been based. Just so, while Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) and John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) might fall safely outside the traditional definition of America’s Founding Generation, they have nevertheless exerted as significant an influence on the theory and practice of American political society as any member of that selfsame cohort. The likes of Locke and Jackson might not be Founders in the strictest sense of the word, therefore, but they have nevertheless left an indelible impact upon the American experiment.

    It is on this note, at long last, that we come to the document to be herein examined. As the title of this entry indicates, it is known by the name, “The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions.” It was delivered originally as a speech, in fact, at a public educational forum known as a lyceum in Springfield, Illinois on January 27^th in the year 1838. The following month saw it published in local newspapers, greatly enhancing the reputation of the speaker, and arguably paving the way for what would at length become an fairly successful career in politics. The subject of the address was the nature of citizenship in a democratic republic. The speaker’s name was Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865).

    At this point in his life, Lincoln was not yet thirty years old. Born in central Kentucky to a struggling farmer named Thomas Lincoln (1778-1851), he had first accompanied this family when they relocated to Indiana in 1816, then struck out on his own in 1831 when they migrated into Illinois. The reasons for his ultimate departure are clear enough, on examination. Though possessed of scant little in the way of formal education, Lincoln took to the written word at an early age and with avidity, and his tendency to occupy himself with books and composition led his father to regard him as lazy and unmotivated. Abraham shared with Thomas, at the very least, his father’s dislike of the institution of slavery. The elder Lincoln found the practice to lend an unfair advantage to those who could afford to partake. But there was otherwise little love lost between father and son, and the younger Lincoln’s parting at the age of twenty-one marked more or less the final break in their relationship.

    Now freed of the obligation to turn over his wages to his family, Lincoln spent the next several years dabbling in ventures of varying success. At times this involved long-distance trading, moving goods into the slave states by way of the Mississippi River. At others, it amounted to the establishment of a general store in the town of New Salem, the success of which was notably lacking in spite of a booming local economy. In 1832, he first stood for office, putting forth his name for a seat in the Illinois General Assembly. And though he ultimately ended up losing this race, his popularity among the people of New Salem was meaningfully affirmed in the process. In the years that followed he served as their postmaster and county surveyor, became a captain in the local militia during its service in the Black Hawk War (1832), and by 1834 had built up enough personal popularity to win his second bid at elected office as Sangamon County’s representative in Springfield. Standing as a member of the protectionist, anti-Jacksonian Whig Party, Lincoln went on to serve four terms in the Illinois State Assembly, during which time he championed such infrastructure projects as the Illinois and Michigan Canal, helped to extend the state franchise to all white males living therein, and voiced his opposition to slavery in principle and his support for such measures – in keeping with the position of his mentor, fellow Kentucky-born Whig Henry Clay (1777-1852) – as the relocation of freed slaves to Africa by way of the Virginia-based American Colonization Society. In 1836, pursuant to years of self-directed study pouring over Blackstone’s Commentaries – the standard apprentice law text dating back to the colonial era – he was admitted to the state bar, and shortly thereafter opened a practice in Springfield under one John T. Stuart, cousin of his future wife.

    As of 1838, therefore, Abraham Lincoln was both a lawyer and a statesman. He was not a prominent figure on either count, to be sure, but at the very least he was already set on the path which would carry him forth to the end of his days. He was young, but well read. Inexperienced, but very astute. Not long in the practice of law, to be sure, but talented, and a man very much engaged with the prevailing political issues of the day. And what were those issue as of 1838? What else could they be in the age of Jacksonian Democracy but slavery, political violence, the franchise, and popular sovereignty? Of these, slavery was probably the single issue which could be said to have defined the entire period in 19^th century American history between the first years of the Jefferson Administration (1801-1809) and the end of the Civil War (1861-1865). It was not always at the crux of every major event of this era – The Nullification Crisis, for example, was ostensibly about the nature of American federalism – but at the very least slavery remained a matter of constant public concern on the part of those who sought to protect it and those who would have seen it abolished.

    At the outset of American independence in 1783, the latter group had seemed to be very much on the ascent. Having evidently grown introspective following their victory over the British, Americans living in many of the northern states where slavery was of limited economic value began actively questioning the compatibility of the ideals for which they had but recently risked their lives – i.e., liberty, justice, the sovereignty of the individual, etc. – and the notion that some people ought to be held in perpetual bondage. The people of Pennsylvania struck the first blow against the institution in question, abolishing slavery there in 1780 before America’s independence had even been won. This opening move was followed by New Hampshire and Massachusetts in 1783, Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784, New York (partially) in 1799, and New Jersey, at long last, in 1804. New York’s path towards abolition was by far the most difficult, slavery having become substantially integrated into certain sectors of the state’s agricultural economy, but a plan for gradual emancipation was eventually introduced which saw the final cohort of enslaved persons freed by the summer of 1827. This latter effort represented the apotheosis of the New York Manumission Society, founded in 1785 by none other than John Jay (1745-1829), and marked perhaps the high tide of anti-slavery political agitation in the pre-Civil War United States.

    This isn’t to say that Americans ceased to successfully organize for the abolition of slavery after the passage of the aforementioned legislation in New York. On the contrary, anti-slavery activities witnessed a marked increase particularly in the Northern states over the course of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. But by the time that the last slave in New York was set free in 1827, the principally Southern, slave-holding states had so completely coalesced around the idea that the institution of slavery was both economically essential and in need of protection that further domestic efforts to abolish it would end up meeting with increasingly rigid resistance. Consider, to that end, the relationship which eventually developed between the institution of slavery and American territorial expansion. Before the 1810s, new states joined the Union in a somewhat haphazard fashion. Free Vermont acceded in 1791, then slave-holding Kentucky in 1792, followed by free Ohio in 1803, and then slave-holding Louisiana in 1812. All throughout this era, it seemed, no one was particularly concerned with maintaining a strict balance of power in the Senate between the slave-holding interest and its anti-slavery opposition. But from the end of this early period right through to the time of Lincoln’s speech in 1838, slave states and free states were added in closely clustered pairs.

    Mississippi (1816), for example, joined along with Indiana (1817), Alabama (1818) was grouped together with Illinois (1819), the accession of Missouri (1821) famously necessitated the prior admission of Maine (1820), and the addition Arkansas (1836) was accompanied less than a year later by that of Michigan (1837). Neither the pro-slavery forces in Congress nor their anti-slavery counterparts were at all willing to let their opponents gain the upper hand, it seemed, in large part because of what they feared such an outcome would portend. The pro-slavery interest lived in terror of a federal ban on the institution, the Southern economy having become so deeply dependent on slave labor that its sudden disappearance would bring about the collapse of Southern society. The anti-slavery forces, on the other hand, absolutely dreaded the thought that slavery might once again become an unquestioned national norm. Control by the so-called “slave power” of the reigns of the federal government, they felt, would equate to federal protection of slavery in the existing states, the expansion of slavery into new states, and the gradual economic domination of the slave-holding business interests over those whose dependence on free labor rendered them unable to successfully compete. The ongoing territorial expansion of the American republic throughout this period accordingly became part of a larger game of socio-economic brinksmanship as opposing power blocs endeavored to preserve a tenuous stalemate that benefitted neither but at the least robbed their opponents of any particular advantage.

    Violence unsurprisingly played a huge part in how the tensions wrought by this ongoing competition effected the various American communities. Slave revolts, while not constant, were a far from unknow occurrence, with notable examples taking place at Chatham Manor, Virginia in 1805, the Orleans Territory in 1811, Spotsylvania, Virginia in 1815, and Southampton County, Virginia in 1831. The last of these, led by a local-born slave named Nat Turner (1800-1831) was particularly bloody, resulting in the deaths of over two hundred people in total. Meanwhile, in the ostensibly “free states” of the North, economic competition between working class white laborers – many of them immigrants from Ireland – and free blacks for jobs in burgeoning industries like construction and shipping led to recurrent outbreaks of violence in the form of deadly and destructive race riots in major urban centers. Such occurrences notably took place in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1829, New York City, New York in 1834, Washington, D.C. in 1835, and in Cincinnati again in 1836. The disturbance in New York is of particular significance to the topic at hand, fueled as it was by simmering local tensions between nativists and abolitionists. Over the course of nearly a week in early July of 1834, it seemed, businesses and newspapers owned by abolitionists, along with the homes and places of worship of the local black community, were targeted, ransacked, set ablaze, or else destroyed by roving mobs of white laborers and nativists who had been driven into frenzy by what they perceived as the conspiratorial activities of anti-slavery activists to raise the local black community to a more equal status in contemporary New York society. The state militia was ultimately called in to settle the disturbance, which more or less abated by the night of July 12^th.

    As the pace and intensity of these kinds of incidents increased over the course of the 1830s, and the national anti-slavery movement steadily gained in strength, pro-slavery forces in Congress responded by introducing a series of resolutions intended to stifle any debate that might have otherwise been the result. Evidently, as the abolition of slavery became an issue of increasing concern for larger and larger swaths of the contemporary American electorate, petitions began flowing into the House and the Senate from private citizens and advocacy groups alike requesting federal legal action in the face of steadfast resistance on the part of state governments. Seeking to stem the resulting tide of popular pressure – presumably because they feared the effects of an ongoing public conversation on the issue – members of the pro-slavery, pro-states’ rights Democratic Party in the House began introducing a series of formal declarations intended to limit the ability of certain measures to be taken. The first of these, introduced on May 26^th, 1836 by South Carolina Representative Henry L. Pinkney (1794-1863) – incidentily the son of Founder and Framer Charles Pinkney (1757-1824) – was presented in three parts. First, it stated that the United States Congress lacked the constitutional authority to in any way interfere with slavery as practiced in the states. Second, in response to calls for the abolition of slavery in the federally controlled capital district of Washington, D.C., it declared that Congress “ought not” to interfere with slavery in that selfsame city. And third, it introduced what swiftly came to be known as the “gag rule,” whereby, “All petitions, memorials, resolutions, propositions, or papers, relating in any way, or to any extent whatsoever, to the subject of slavery or the abolition of slavery, shall, without being either printed or referred, be laid on the table and [...] no further action whatever shall be had thereon.”

    Unsurprisingly, it was this third resolution that met with the most virulent response. Whether or not the United States Congress had the constitutional right to interfere with slavery in the states was something of an open question in 1836, and it wasn’t necessarily improper or inappropriate for a majority in Congress to express its opinion one way or the other. Just so, it wasn’t necessarily wrong of that selfsame majority to state its disinclination to interfere with slavery in the District of Columbia. But by declaring their intention to automatically table any, “Petitions, memorials, resolutions, propositions, or papers” having to do with slavery, after which, “No further action whatever shall be had thereon [,]” Pinkney and his fellow Democrats had proposed to commit a fundamental abrogation of the rights of the American people. As Massachusetts Representative and former President John Quincy Adams accordingly observed at the time, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution guaranteed to the people the right to, “Petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” If the House refused to hear certain kinds of petitions based on the subject in question, Adams thereby concluded, then the House was therefore guilty of violating the First Amendment rights of potentially millions of Americans. In may have been true, in point of fact, that the Democrats then in control of the House were never going to respond favorably to any calls to abolish or limit slavery in the states and were therefore only trying to save themselves the trouble of hearing petitions which they already knew they were going to reject out of hand. But even if convenience was the only motivating factor, Adams was still entirely correct to point out that the House had a constitutional obligation to consider every petition that was put to it in good faith.

    Seeking more to make a point about the sanctity of the First Amendment than out of any personal conviction on the subject of slavery – being, like his fellow Whig Lincoln, a believer in colonization – Representative Adams accordingly spent the next several years engaging in increasingly elaborate attempts to find loopholes in the rules and procedures of the House or else trying to fool his Democratic opponents into entertaining petitions whose substance they would otherwise have refused to consider. At times he very nearly succeeded in his efforts, his actions on February 7^th, 1837 being a prime example of the same. Knowing full well that the matter would be tabled immediately, Adams nevertheless made a point of introducing a petition on behalf of “nine ladies” from the city of Fredericksburg, Virginia whose desire, presumably, was that slavery be abolished. Normally, pursuant to the aforementioned gag rule, the matter would have gone no further. But, as it happened, the Democratic Representative whose district in Virginia included the city of Fredericksburg expressed his curiosity at the identity of the “nine ladies” in question and asked to review the relevant petition. He thereupon discovered, to his displeasure, that petitioners were not, in fact, “ladies” as he had been led to believe, but rather nine free black women. Apologizing for the apparent error, Adams amended the document so that it read “women” instead of “ladies” and then proceeded to request that the House consider it regardless.

    When his request was immediately and summarily denied, Adams next moved to ask of the House whether it was permissible for him to introduce another petition on behalf of a group of enslaved persons. The resulting pandemonium culminated in a proposal to censure Adams on the grounds that, “By his attempt to introduce into this House a petition of slaves for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, [he had] committed an outrage on the rights and feelings of a large portion of the people of the Union [.]” Given time to respond to these charges, Adams humbly offered a pair of subtle but significant corrections. First, he said, he had not attempted to introduce the petition in question into the House. Rather, he had only asked if the House would consider such a petition if it were to be introduced. And second, he explained, the petition in question was not actually concerned with the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. It would therefore have seemed to violate no rules or procedures of which he was aware. Naturally, these clarifications did little to assuage the anger of Adams’s Democratic opponents in the House. Nor did they really do very much at all to harm the integrity of the gag rule itself. A resolution reinforcing the same would in fact be introduced in December of that same year, with a third to follow in December of 1838. But what Adams did accomplish – indeed, what he most assuredly intended to accomplish all along – was that he made the supporters of the gag rule in Congress look foolish. Not only had they followed along with his circuitous requests and clarifications and then violently overreacted when they realized what he had done, but they had also essentially been made in engage in a debate on a subject which they had previously declared they would no longer debate. The gag rule would remain on the books in the meantime, of course, but Adams would ensure, by way of tactics like these, that the topic of slavery was never all that far from anyone’s mind.

    And then, at long last, we return to Abraham Lincoln. As aforementioned, Lincoln was elected to serve in the Illinois House of Representatives in 1834 as a member of the Whig Party. This did not necessarily mark him out as an ardent abolitionist, to be sure. Some Whigs absolutely did support the wholesale elimination of slavery, and accordingly allied themselves with advocacy organizations like the American Anti-Slavery Society. But others, like party founder Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, and Lincoln himself, were far more gradualist in outlook and favored the emancipation and removal of slaves from American society altogether over their eventual integration. Nevertheless – and though there were certainly Southern, pro-slavery Whigs – being a member of the Whig Party unequivocally meant being an opponent of the Democrats, the latter of which was so closely identified with slavery and its expansion that the Whigs became the de-facto mainstream political home for anti-slavery agitation. This association – between anti-slavery politics and Whig Party membership – was particularly relevant in a state like Illinois, where the Kentucky-born Lincoln eventually made his home. Slavery had been introduced into the region by French colonial authorities in the early 18^th century and had persisted through the early 19^th century in spite of the relevant passage banning the practice in the text of the Northwest Ordinance (1787). And while it was true that Illinois had been admitted to the Union as a free state in 1818, local attitudes towards slavery were decidedly mixed throughout the 1820s and 1830s.

    The southern half of the state, for example, had largely been settled by migrants from places like Virginia and Kentucky, and these residents and their descendants tended to favor the legalization of slavery and the introduction of plantation-style agriculture. At the same time, however, Illinois was also home to those who either opposed slavery on moral grounds or felt that the introduction of enslaved laborers would disrupt the state’s agricultural economy to the detriment of those who could not afford to purchase them. An early, prominent champion of this latter position was one Edward Coles (1786-1868), Governor of Illinois from 1822 to 1826 and former private secretary to President James Madison (1751-1836). Born in Virginia to one of the state’s many pseudo-aristocratic slaveholder families, Coles acquired a distaste for the institution during his time as a student at the College of William & Mary, determined to free his inherited slaves and leave his home state behind, and arrived in Illinois following his service under President Madison just around the time that the territory acquired statehood. Once settled, Coles proceeded over the next several years to purchase plots of land for each formerly-enslaved family that he had brought with him from Virginia, seek out employment for all those who required it, and tend to his responsibilities – pursuant to his appointment by President James Monroe (1758-1831) – as Register of Lands. And then, in 1822, he ran for governor and won.

    Though he reportedly never expected to succeed in his sole bid for elected office, Coles nevertheless seized the role of governor with a distinct lack of timidity. In his inaugural address, for example, Coles spoke unambiguously of his desire to both prevent the transformation of Illinois into a slave state and his intention to eliminate the last vestiges of the institution that yet stubbornly remained. To that end, he first led the opposition to a bill thereafter considered by the state assembly which would have set in motion a referendum on the possibility of holding a constitutional convention. Such a convention, he knew, was intended by its backers to allow for the legal recognition of slavery in the state of Illinois, and Coles accordingly endeavored to see the measure defeated at the outset. Then, when the referendum bill passed in spite of his efforts, he spent his entire salary as governor on a campaign to defeat the vote’s pro-slavery supporters by repeatedly dispelling economic arguments in favor of slavery and employing travelling preachers to emphasize the institution’s inherent immorality. When the results of the referendum were finally tallied on August 2^nd, 1824, Coles once more laid claim to an unexpected success. In what was essentially a plebiscite on the legalization of slavery, the people of Illinois had voted in the negative by some 60%. Granted, this did not mark the end of Coles’ troubles with Illinois’s pro-slavery partisans. In 1825, for example, his pro-slavery Lieutenant-Governor attempted to wrest power away from him while he was away in Virginia. And a nuisance lawsuit filed by certain of his opponents over unpaid taxes on his manumitted slaves was not dismissed until very near the end of his term in 1826. That said, Coles had in the very least succeeded in keeping slavery out of Illinois. Attitudes towards the institution remained distinctly mixed, but a blow had definitely been struck against its formal recognition.

    By 1838, therefore, at the beginning of which year Lincoln delivered his speech on “The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions,” Illinois was in some ways still undecided on the question of institutional slavery. Though the use of slaves had been permitted in certain specific industries by the state’s first constitution – with the caveat that such permissions would expire as of 1825 – and though the southern third of Illinois was still home to many Southern migrants and their descendants, it was nevertheless unlikely that slavery would become the law of the land any time soon. The aforementioned efforts of Governor Coles had seen to this. That said, free black people were not always particularly well treated regardless. The indentured servitude of black laborers was still quite common, and slavecatchers from neighboring states like Kentucky and Missouri were permitted to roam Illinois with legal impunity. The Illinois Supreme Court, it was true, steadily built up a body of case law over the course of the 1820s and 1830s that closed most of the loopholes which permitted the continued servitude of the state’s black inhabitants, but attitudes in large swaths of the southern backcountry remained decidedly hostile to any talk of abolition. It was into this socio-political environment that Abraham Lincoln willingly stepped when he won his second bid for a seat in the state assembly in 1834. He was not a native of the state, of course, and so had not witnessed the efforts of Governor Coles in the 1820s. Nevertheless, he was a member of the mainstream political party wherein most opponents of slavery had been forced to make their home, and by 1838 had doubtless grown well acquainted with the major cleavages of Illinois politics. When he addressed the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield in January of 1838, therefore, he did so fully aware of where he stood, where his audience stood, and the nature of the community to which they collectively belonged.