Making an Antislavery Nation

Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom

Graham A. Peck

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780252099960
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Winner of the Russell P. Strange Memorial Book Award This sweeping narrative presents an original and compelling explanation for the triumph of the antislavery movement in the United States prior to the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln's election as the first antislavery president was hardly preordained. From the country's inception, Americans had struggled to define slavery's relationship to freedom. Most Northerners supported abolition in the North but condoned slavery in the South, while most Southerners denounced abolition and asserted slavery's compatibility with whites' freedom. On this massive political fault line hinged the fate of the nation.

Graham A. Peck meticulously traces the conflict over slavery in Illinois from the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 to Lincoln's defeat of his archrival Stephen A. Douglas in the 1860 election. Douglas's attempt in 1854 to persuade Northerners that slavery and freedom had equal national standing stirred a political earthquake that brought Lincoln to the White House. Yet Lincoln's framing of the antislavery movement as a conservative return to the country's founding principles masked what was in fact a radical and unprecedented antislavery nationalism. It justified slavery's destruction but triggered the Civil War.

Presenting pathbreaking interpretations of Lincoln, Douglas, and the Civil War's origins, Making an Antislavery Nation shows how battles over slavery paved the way for freedom's triumph in America.

1.The Nation's Conflict over Slavery in Miniature

Illinois, 1818–1824

BETWEEN 1818, WHEN IT entered the Union as a free state, and 1824, when its residents defeated a proslavery movement, Illinois reproduced the nation's problem with slavery in miniature. The state was dedicated to freedom, but the state's constitution protected existing slavery and indentured servitude. Consequently, the meaning of freedom in Illinois was not yet clear. Many Illinoisans carried antislavery sentiment to their new home, migrating to the state with the hope of owning their own land and enjoying greater political liberty. Such migrants utterly opposed legalizing slavery. Yet proslavery arguments were beginning to take root in Illinois, as in the South, and the prospect of economic benefit enticed other Illinoisans to consider supporting slavery's legalization. Hence, when Illinois's economy faltered in the early 1820s, crippled by a nationwide depression, slaveholders pushed for a constitutional convention to legalize slavery. They contended that slavery was the key to unlocking the state's prosperity, and they hoped that Illinois's population, most of which hailed from the South, would endorse the idea. But the convention movement was soundly defeated at the polls. To a greater degree than previous historians have recognized, this result reflected a surge of antislavery migrants into the state during the eighteen months of political campaigning, but more generally it reflected Illinoisans’ conviction that slavery's legalization would undermine rather than enhance freedom. So, in 1824, after several decades of uncertainty, Illinoisans decided conclusively to oppose slavery in the state, considering it antithetical to freedom. Whether they would make the same judgment about slavery in the nation remained an open issue.

The lure of land and liberty brought settlers to Illinois. Whether traveling from Europe or the southern backcountry, immigrants often shared the same basic impulses. England's William Hall objected to social stratification, political oppression, and rampant poverty in his native land, where he struggled to support a “numerous family.” Once in Illinois, he celebrated “the feeling that we are at last on our own Estate Free, & Independent, secure in the enjoyment of the Fruits of our Industry.” Migrants from the upland South shared these sentiments. Descendants of peripatetic eighteenth-century small farmers who over the course of three generations had migrated from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas into Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana, upland Southerners typically had little money and less education, and each generation sought cheap, uninhabited land on which to raise a family. The vanguard of white settlement in the Upper South and Lower North, they drove out Indians and hewed farms from timber land. By the early nineteenth century, they began filing into southern Illinois, and by 1818 they constituted about 70 percent of the population in the newly created state. Englishman George Flower rendered a vivid depiction of these uprooted southern poor folk, describing a barefoot, emaciated family walking alongside a “little rickety wagon” pulled by “a horse as lean as a greyhound.” Such families hailed from “Alabama or Caroline,” he said, and “a more perfect picture of destitution can not be seen.”¹

Some of these Southerners sought a home free from slavery. Peter Cartwright had a small farm in Kentucky, but rising land prices precluded any chance that his children could acquire land near him. In 1823 he decided to move to Illinois, abandoning his “comfortable little home” in order to “get entirely clear of the evil of slavery,” improve his “temporal circumstances,” and raise children “where work was not thought a degradation.” Cartwright's reasons for emigrating were hardly unique. Slaveholders routinely pushed out subsistence farmers by bidding up the price of land on which commercial crops could best be grown. But in Illinois, Cartwright and others like him sought a promising home pledged to freedom.²

Some settlers’ love of liberty stimulated strong antislavery sentiments. Englishmen Morris Birkbeck and George Flower founded a settlement in Edwards County in 1817 and encouraged English immigration to it. In promotional letters published in England, Birkbeck wrote that America “is indeed a land of liberty and hope, and I rejoice unfeignedly that I am in it.” He extolled the religious liberty of Americans and their commitment to democratic government, although his admiration of freedom intensified his loathing of slavery, which he called “a foul blotch” of “leprosy” on the United States. Despite their considerable wealth and their roots in a society that privileged rank, respect for the egalitarian ideal ran deep in both men. Flower confessed to his mother that “the most perfect equality” of citizens in America unnerved him. He disliked being “accosted with familiarity by a parcel of ignorant upstart slovenly fellows.” But he forthrightly defended the political system resting on that equality. “[T]he Advantages of republicanism are too striking to be hidden,” he wrote, “and far outweigh any of its own Inconveniences.”³

Future governor Edward Coles exemplified the settler spurred by the ideal of liberty. Although a slaveholding Virginia aristocrat, Coles immigrated to Illinois on an antislavery mission. Deeply moved by the doctrines in the Declaration of Independence, and profoundly admiring its author, in 1814 he urged Thomas Jefferson to promote emancipation publicly. Jefferson refused, but Coles resolved to free his slaves because they “could not be property” according to his “understanding of the rights and duties of man.” En route to Illinois in 1819, he freed his slaves on the Ohio River, cherishing bold antislavery ambitions. He sought to prove that the “descendants of Africa were competent to take care of and govern themselves.” To that end, he gave three of his adult ex-slaves one hundred and sixty acres of unimproved land and urged them “to hire themselves out” until they earned enough money to farm independently. He presumed that their capacity for economic improvement would determine their readiness for political liberty, and he dreamed that their success would promote emancipation throughout the South.⁴

To be sure, most Illinoisans opposed the idea of permitting blacks to enjoy the benefits of liberty or economic opportunity. The 1820 federal census recorded only 457 free blacks in Illinois, and more than one hundred of those lived in white households, probably as dependents. They faced severe discrimination. The state's 1818 constitution prohibited them from voting and serving in the militia, and in 1819 the General Assembly prohibited them from living in Illinois without a properly registered certificate of freedom and from testifying against whites in court. Challenging popular sentiment sanctioning these laws, free blacks petitioned the Illinois House of Representatives for voting rights in 1822. They reported that white men “without the least color of claim” plundered their property and kidnapped their children, and they hoped that suffrage rights would enable them “to obtain that protection to our persons and property” enjoyed by whites. Having been “rocked in the cradle of liberty and equal rights, taking our ideas of liberty from you,” they “zealously” wished to “participate in that blessing.” Legislators referred the petition to a select committee already charged with considering measures to abolish slavery in Illinois and to prevent the kidnapping of free blacks. The majority and the minority reports of the committee, despite presenting radically different views on slavery's abolition, both skirted the subject of black suffrage, for which there was little public support.⁵

But Illinois's political leaders did laud the liberty and equality of whites. Their constituents gave them little choice. English traveler John Woods memorably described such backwoods settlers as “a most determined set of republicans, well versed in politics,” among whom a man “without shoes and stockings, is as independent as the first man in the States.” Yet the territorial governor of these barefoot republicans from 1809 until 1818 was slaveholding grandee Ninian Edwards, a wealthy, well-connected Kentuckian who dressed elegantly, lived lavishly, traveled stylishly, and owed his appointment to President Madison. Nevertheless, Edwards described himself as a representative of the people, whose “duty” was to protect “the equal rights of his fellow-citizens.” Furthermore, he expressed devotion to the principles of “liberty and equality, those fundamental rights of man,” and assured Illinoisans that “as a citizen” he felt “no superiority to any other honest, well-behaved man, however humble his station in life may be.” Indeed, Edwards promised to discharge his duties for “the public good,” and to “appeal” always “to the people,” trusting that he could “always confide” in “the candor, the good sense and justice of the people.” Whatever they may have said privately, Edwards and other Illinois politicians deferred to the common man in public. In keeping with this principle, they also supported policies the frontier electorate desired.⁶

The acquisition and exploitation of land made possible the personal independence and economic opportunity that Illinois's settlers associated with freedom. Hence, like their western counterparts, Illinois politicians sought above all to liberalize federal land laws. Prior to statehood, Illinois Territory's congressional delegate Nathaniel Pope strongly protested President Monroe's proposal to raise the price of public lands. After statehood, Senators Ninian Edwards and Jesse Thomas, along with congressman Daniel Cook, favored the sale of government land on credit, the reduction of the price of public land, and the passage of bills to enable squatters more easily to purchase land they had improved. In 1821, with the economy in a tailspin, Edwards, Thomas, and Cook supported a debtor relief measure that delayed the date of forfeiture for unpaid lands, permitted debtors to revert land back to the government without financial penalty, or reduced the price for debtors who paid their balance within eighteen months. A political opponent's charge that Cook had not supported a reduction in the price of public lands, an allegation the congressman sharply rebuked, demonstrated the importance of public land law to the prospects of frontiersmen, whether dirt poor or well capitalized. Access to land influenced where they lived, when they could buy, how much they could buy, and how long they had to wait before reselling the land to future settlers at a profit.⁷

Illinois's politicians also sought to foster settlement and trade by constructing the Illinois-Michigan Canal. In 1818 the state barely had enough settlers to build a canal, much less use it. Only the southern third of the state was settled, and Indian titles from the northern half of the state had yet to be extinguished. Nevertheless, Governor Shadrach Bond strongly recommended the construction of a canal in his first message to the legislature in 1818. At considerable cost the legislature funded an engineering study of the canal in 1821. Most politicians supported the canal, some opposition in southern Illinois notwithstanding. Its advocates argued that it would provide market access to the East and promote immigration to Illinois, thus increasing real estate values, tax yields, and local capital. In 1822, Governor Coles also urged canal construction, stating that it would spur “industry & enterprise, defusing wealth and happiness.” Subsequent governors and congressmen strongly supported the canal, and in 1827 the state secured a federal land grant to fund its construction. Yet the canal was not built until 1848, partly due to mismanagement, but largely due to the state's limited resources. The precociousness of canal politics in the early statehood period illustrates politicians’ desire to facilitate markets in order to promote the state's settlement, improve living conditions, and hasten economic development.⁸

The state's poor southern migrants stood to gain appreciably from the state's economic development. To be sure, their poverty prevented intensive participation in market agriculture. They had neither the tools nor the oxen to break up prairie land, so they settled in easily plowed but less fertile timber land. The accessibility of wood and water also encouraged them to settle on forested land, as did the limited market for grain. Such newly settled land was unlikely to have easy market access, but poor farmers had few other options. Speculators owning better land demanded compensation for tenancy, usually a set amount of the crop or specific improvements to the property, and those obligations required extensive labor that undermined the tenants’ ability to produce marketable surpluses. Therefore most poor settlers, who likely constituted at least two-thirds of the population, simply squatted on unused land. As one eastern migrant indignantly observed, squatters accumulated capital by clearing the land and selling their “improvements” to the “rale owner” when he appeared. Squatters who saved enough money to purchase a plot from the government could significantly better their economic fortunes. Gershom Flagg reported in 1819 that land “bought two or three years ago for two dollars an acre is now selling at 10 and 12.” Admittedly, this appreciation occurred during a land boom, and poor settlers rarely owned the land that was likely to appreciate the most. Nevertheless, land ownership enabled settlers to support themselves, promised a respectable return on capital if they chose to move farther west, and, if they had market access, enabled them to produce surpluses to the extent they desired. The opportunity to occupy or own such land had not existed to the same extent in the southern backcountry.⁹

By contrast, the capital that eastern migrants and European immigrants brought to Illinois made market production potentially lucrative. The purchase of land, animals, and farming implements upon arrival enabled them to produce surpluses. But they needed robust markets to absorb their agricultural production and multiply the value of their real estate. For this reason they pressed for internal improvements to facilitate commodity transport. The founding of the English Settlement in Edwards County by Birkbeck and Flower symbolized this commercial inclination, even though their wealth and ambitions made the settlement unique. Birkbeck argued that densely populated settlements nourished economic specialization, capital accumulation, transportation corridors, and trade networks. “I wish to see capital and population concentrated,” he wrote, “with no bond of cohesion, but common interest arising out of vicinity.” Consequently, he and Flower recruited laborers to the English Settlement by selling cheap land. They expected their estates to reap the benefit of rising land values and growing trade outlets. In this way a market society benefiting labor and capital would emerge from the wild frontier.¹⁰

However, markets for produce and livestock were insufficiently developed in early Illinois. Horatio Newhall learned this lesson in 1823. Needing a coat, he paid 120 bushels of corn for two yards of cloth. He indignantly wrote back to his family in the East that an Illinois farmer “can get enough to eat, and that is all.” Newhall's surplus production that year had almost no value. The same problem hindered the English Settlement. George Flower recalled that farmers in his colony produced surpluses of corn, pork, and beef by 1821. But to sell it, he wrote, they had “to quit their farms and open the channels of commerce, and convey their produce along until they found a market.” Farmers gladly abandoned this practice once merchants paid cash for produce, but that change was a long time in coming. In the meantime, farmers attempting to sell surpluses met repeated roadblocks.¹¹

By contrast, land speculation, or the market in land, seemingly offered the easiest and best return on capital, and thus most early settlers were in hock for land. As Gershom Flagg wrote in 1821, “Most of the People are in debt for Land and many otherwise more than they can posably pay.” The ubiquity of debt followed from the availability of credit. From 1804 until 1820, the government encouraged credit sales for land by requiring an $80 down payment for $320 of land. To make their initial payment, most settlers used paper money circulated by banks. The extent of speculation flowed from misguided optimism rather than from economic necessity. As future governor Thomas Ford remembered, albeit somewhat hyperbolically, settlers purchased “a quarter section of land” for “nearly every sum of eighty dollars” in Illinois. They assumed that immigrants to the state would continue to stimulate property values, which made a decision not to invest seem timid and foolhardy. But because the engorged land market rested ultimately on the market in trade, land speculating offered grave risks as well as great rewards.¹²

The risks became evident in the early 1820s, when a sharp decline in trade bankrupted innumerable Illinois farmers and eastern speculators. A nationwide economic contraction simultaneously diminished demand for farm products in major markets like New Orleans while curtailing the immigrant flow to Illinois. Farmers who had purchased land on credit could not fulfill their obligations without selling agricultural surpluses for cash. Meanwhile, neither farmers nor speculators had much hope of selling land to immigrants. Property taxes therefore loomed as a great threat because the state sold the land of delinquent taxpayers for the price of unpaid taxes and interest. As Gershom Flagg reported in 1825, “I purchased last June about 15 hundred acres of valuable land for the taxes which amounted to $103.” At 6.9¢ per acre, he benefited handsomely from the bursting of the speculative bubble. But the uncounted thousands of bankrupt speculators did not. They demanded relief.¹³

State legislators attempted to ride t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Maps
• Introduction
• Prelude: An Inheritance of Slavery
• 1. The Nation's Conflict over Slavery in Miniature: Illinois, 1818–1824
• 2. Democrats, Whigs, and Party Conflict, 1825–1842
• 3. Manifest Destiny, Slavery, and the Rupture of the Democratic Party, 1843–1847
• 4. Advocates for an Antislavery Nation, 1837–1848
• 5. Stephen A. Douglas and the Northern Democratic Origins of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1849–1854
• 6. The Collapse of the Douglas Democracy, 1854–1860
• 7. Abraham Lincoln and the Triumph of an Antislavery Nationalism, 1854–1860
• Conclusion: The Northern Democrats’ Dilemma over Slavery
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author