![]() But he also had to admit that the Fugitive Slave Law was technically and constitutionally correct. Lincoln hated slavery, and had said so long before 1852. ![]() It is that Abraham Lincoln was, first and foremost, a politician. The defamatory image of Lincoln as a conventional white racist, whose chief cause was self-aggrandizement, is even more absurd than the awestruck hagiographies that have become ubiquitous in this anniversary year. My point in re-telling this story is not to try, yet again, to debunk Lincoln’s reputation for probity and sagacity, and for perfect enlightenment on racial issues. Pierce’s contrived politics put Lincoln in mind of a sailor’s sea chantey that had appeared in a book by the British writer Frederick Marryat: “Sally is a bright Mullater,/Oh Sally Brown-/ Pretty gal, but can’t get at her,/O Sally Brown.” Were Pierce actually elected, Lincoln joked, “he will, politically speaking, not only be a mulatto but he will be a good deal darker one than Sally Brown.” According to Lincoln’s most optimistic projections, Scott might just peel off enough New York Barnburner votes to win the presidency. Lincoln said that Pierce could win only by positioning himself as a peculiar kind of political progeny, born of a mating of northern conservative Democrats and anti-slavery free-soilers, “the latter predominating in the offspring.” The positioning was particularly important in carrying the swing state of New York, where conservative Democrats, the so-called Hunker Democrats, had long been battling the anti-slavery Barnburners. Lincoln even claimed that the northerner Pierce’s “efficacy” at winning anti-slavery votes “was the very thing that secured his nomination.” He did so, Lincoln charged, in an effort to pick up votes outside the Democrats’ base in the deep South. Lincoln defended the law as perfectly constitutional, and charged that Pierce had taken a stance that was all too friendly to the real-life Elizas, and too dismissive of the rights of slaveholders and slave hunters. This was the very law that had provoked an outraged Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and portray the slave Eliza making her daring escape to freedom across the Ohio River. Lincoln specifically charged that Pierce had expressed a “loathing” for the Fugitive Slave Law, which Congress had passed two years earlier to help masters and their hirelings retrieve runaway slaves who had fled to the North. Douglas, Lincoln attacked Pierce not as a slaveholders’ tool, but as a Yankee who had flattered anti-slavery northerners. ![]() Defending the Whig candidate, General Winfield Scott, from slurs by Senator Stephen A.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |