With Malice Toward None: A Biography of Abraham Lincoln

by Stephen B. Oates

“Nothing can hinder the execution of the designs of Providence,” the creed went. “What is to be will be and we can do nothing about it.”

peculiar institution

For it was “an old true maxim,” Lincoln contended, “that a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.”

When that happened, when “the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last.”

“I am now the most miserable man living,” he sighed. “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better.”

Lincoln's describes his depression.

nothing was new “except my marrying, which to me, is a matter of profound wonder.”

The poem was called “Mortality” and Lincoln came to love it more than any other.

Yet he did not participate in the fiery oratory that surrounded slavery in the Far West, because he was shocked and aggrieved at how slavery could arouse such passions, such menacing threats, among national leaders he’d assumed were fairly reasonable men.

For Lincoln, the session had been a disquieting lesson on how “the distracting question of slavery,” as he put it, could poison all reason and drive white Americans to the very brink of violence.

“He made simplicity and candor a mask of deep feelings carefully concealed.”

“the monstrous injustice of slavery itself,” which deprived “our republican example of its just influence in the world.”

And once blood was shed there, would this not “be the real knell of the Union?”

objective: to keep slavery out of the territories and end Southern domination of national life.

The objective of the newly founded Republican Party.

First (as the racial theorists claimed), that Negroes were inferior subhumans whose natural lot was servitude. Second, that “all men are created equal” was a “self-evident lie.” Third, that “master and slave is a relation in society as necessary as that of parent and child.” Fourth, that because “free society” in the form of Yankee capitalism was “unnatural, immoral, unchristian, it must fail and give way to a slave society—a system as old as the world.” For “two opposite and conflicting forms of society cannot, among civilized men, co-exist and endure.

The rationale for slavery.

“You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be a slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. “You do not mean color exactly?—You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. “But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.”

And then Lincoln distilled all his points down to one: slavery was wrong and opposition to it was right. And right must never submit to wrong…must never submit to the double wrong of extending slavery into the West. Would surrendering to wrong better our Constitution? our Union? our liberty? No, “there is no other way…. In the whole range of possibility, there is no other way.”

Let us resolve that free society is not and will never be a failure. Let us forget our own differences and animosities, unite, and go forward together in the cause of Republicanism—the hope of free men everywhere.

"-the hope of free men everywhere."

Each judge wrote a separate opinion in the controversial case, but Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney of Maryland, a gaunt Democrat and former slave owner, authored the one most often cited. The other six Democratic judges concurred with Taney, but the two Republicans vigorously dissented. First, Taney declared that free Negroes were not and never had been U.S. citizens, that the Constitution and the language of the Declaration of Independence did not embrace them as part of the American “people.” At the time these documents were framed, Taney argued, Negroes were regarded as “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” As a consequence, the Declaration itself was a white man’s document which had never applied to blacks.

The Deed Scott decision.

By contrast, the Republicans were a bunch of radical abolitionists who not only “resisted” the Court’s decision (and thus defied law and order), but would have Americans believe that Negroes were included in the Declaration and were equal with white men. Yes, that was the Republican doctrine, Douglas said, tossing his head in defiance. And if it should triumph in America, then whites could look forward to racial amalgamation here—to the intermarrying of whites and blacks in direct violation of the “great law of nature” which held them apart. And the consequence would be the destruction of the superior white race, as the Republican program of race mixing lowered whites to the subhuman level of the blacks….

This continues to this day.

“Fellow citizens, I

Lincoln's response. Continue to read.

they would work to have the court overrule itself, as it had often done in the past.

What they meant was that all men, black as well as white, were equal in their inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. “This they said,” Lincoln wrote, “and this they meant.” When they drafted the Declaration, of course, they realized that not all men then enjoyed such equality. No, they were simply declaring that the right existed, that it was to follow when circumstances permitted, serving as the standard maxim of free society in the future.

Equality.

Lincoln noted that of the 405,751 mulattoes now in the United States, 348,874 of them resided in the South. Thus slavery itself, which brought white masters and black slaves together, was the greatest source of race mixing in all the country.

The census.

“the mudsills of society”?

gallus straps,

Accordingly, after talking with the central committee in Chicago, he challenged Douglas to fifty official debates around the state. Though Douglas had nothing to gain, he accepted the challenge because he was too competitive to back away. But he stipulated that they meet only seven times—in the convention towns of each Congressional district—and that he have four openings and rebuttals to Lincoln’s three. While the terms favored Douglas, as the Republican press acidly observed, Lincoln agreed to the plan and the Great Debates were on.

The Great Debates.

“but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse.”

"...horse chestnut..."

“I feel like the boy who stumped his toe,” Lincoln said. “I am too big to cry and too badly hurt to laugh.”

“This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves.”

In Washington, Southern leaders kept up a steady roll of accusations against the Republicans. They cried out that Harpers Ferry was the inevitable results of Seward’s irrepressible-conflict doctrine, that Seward, Sumner, Chase, Thaddeus Stevens, and many other Republicans had all masterminded Brown’s invasion of Southern territory. In righteous indignation, Southern leaders launched a Senate investigation to root out Republican suspects. And Northern Democrats, hoping to capitalize on Harpers Ferry in forthcoming state elections, emphatically agreed with their Southern colleagues. Douglas announced that Harpers Ferry was indeed the “natural” and “logical” consequence of the teachings and doctrines of the Northern Republican party.

Harper's Ferry.

old idiot—the quicker they hang him and get him out of the way the better.”

“If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively…. Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.”

But as one liberal argued, only a Southern state could legally eradicate slavery within its borders.

Although most of them (liberal and conservative alike) were white supremacists, they all hoped that human bondage would one day terminate in America.

They were mostly "white supremacists".

probably the first use of the elephant as a Republican symbol.

“the South, the loyal South, the Constitution South, would never submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.”

Sounds like now!

the Montgomery Mail explained: “In this struggle for maintaining the ascendancy of our race in the South—our home—we see no chance for victory but in withdrawing from the Union. To remain in the Union is to lose all that white men hold dear in government. We vote to get out.”

From the Montgomery Mail:

Well, Washington always was a Southern city.

"Well, Washington always was a Southern city."

He would preserve the Union and the principle of self-government on which the Union was based: the right of a free people to choose their leaders and to expect the losers to acquiesce in that decision.

And so to his conclusion. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ it. “I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

As Seward found out, Lincoln could be tough when pushed too far. “Executive force and vigor are rare qualities,” Seward wrote his wife. “The President is the best of us.”

In Lincoln’s view, Lee was a strange and inexplicable man. Yet he was only one of many supposedly loyal Southern officers who violated their oaths of allegiance and went over to the rebels. Another Virginian, Captain John Bankhead Magruder of the artillery, came to see Lincoln, stood right here in his office and “repeated over and over again” his “protestations of loyalty,” only to resign his commission and head for the South. It gave Lincoln the hypo. He referred to Lee, Magruder, and all like them as traitors.

Lee and the rest lacked the courage to uphold their oaths.

It seemed that the White House was in a nest of rattlesnakes. Right here in Washington Southern sympathizers wore secession badges in the streets, and Seward claimed that the executive departments were crawling with disloyal men. “We were not only surrounded by the enemy,” Nicolay recorded, “but in the midst of traitors,” and the possibility was growing every hour that Washington might fall. If so, what would happen to Lincoln? To Mary and his boys?

Does history repeat?

On Sunday, April 21, in an atmosphere of intense foreboding, Lincoln called his Cabinet Secretaries to an emergency meeting. With Washington trapped between a secessionist Virginia and a hostile Maryland, they unanimously agreed that Lincoln must assume broad emergency powers or let the government fall. Accordingly he directed that Welles empower several private individuals—including Welles’s own brother-in-law—to forward troops and supplies to embattled Washington. He allowed Cameron to authorize one Alexander Cummings and the governor of New York to transport troops and acquire supplies for the public defense. Because he thought the government was alive with traitors, Lincoln himself selected private citizens known for “their ability, loyalty, and patriotism” to spend public money without security, but without compensation either. He told Chase to advance two million dollars to three New Yorkers for the purpose of buying arms and making military preparations. Lincoln

Read this history!

Zouave

Meanwhile, Lincoln dealt harshly with “the enemy in the rear”—with what he called “a most efficient corps of spies, informers, supplyers, and aiders and abettors” of the rebellion who took advantage of “Liberty of speech, Liberty of the press and Habeas corpus” to disrupt the Union war effort. Consequently he suspended the writ of habeas corpus and authorized army commanders to declare martial law in various areas behind the lines and to try civilians in military courts. Lincoln steadfastly defended such an invasion of civil liberties, contending that strict measures were imperative if the laws of the Union—and liberty itself—were to survive this “clear, flagrant, and gigantic case of Rebellion.”

Precursor to the Patriot Act?

So did Chief Justice Taney. While on circuit duty, he rebuked Lincoln for usurping power in suspending the writ of habeas corpus.

Habeas Corpus

“On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”

There was no patriot like Baker, So noble and so true: He fell as a soldier on the field, His face to the sky of blue…. No squeamish notions filled his breast, The Union was his theme, “No surrender and no compromise,” His day thought and night’s dream. His country has her part to play, To’rds those he left behind, His widow and his children all— She must always keep in mind.

By 10 year old Willie Lincoln.

Her closest confidante, though, was her Negro seamstress, Elizabeth Keckley. A poised, handsome woman in her thirties, “Lizzie” had suffered a great deal in her life, and yet she wasn’t bitter. On the contrary, she was one of the most dignified and compassionate women Mary had ever known. Born a slave in Virginia, Lizzie had spent more than twenty-five years in bondage and could speak with firsthand authority about life under the lash. She’d seen Negroes beaten and families broken up, had seen a boy sold away from his mother so that the master could pay for some hogs. By the time she was eighteen, she was living with her master and mistress in North Carolina. She was a pretty girl, with a spirit that aggravated many white people. To break her stubborn pride, the village schoolmaster, “a hard, cruel man,” approached her with a whip and ordered her to take her dress down. When she refused, he tore the dress off and flogged her—and then for good measure struck her with a chair. Later another white man raped her and made her his mistress. “I spare the world his name,” Lizzie said, but “he persecuted me for four years,” and she bore his son. In time, a new master took her out to Missouri, where she married a Negro named James Keckley, who turned out to be “dissipated, and a burden.” In 1855, with the help of several kindly whites, she bought her freedom and that of her son. In 1860 she left her husband and came to Washington to live and find employment. Ironically enough, she w...

Elizabeth Keckley…Mary Lincoln's confidante.