“My Beau Ideal of a Statesman”: Abraham Lincoln’s Eulogy on Henry Clay

Abraham Lincoln’s admiration for, and discipleship under, Henry Clay is well documented.[1] Throughout his life Lincoln admired Clay as a “self-made” man who rose from relative obscurity to become one of the most dominant forces in American politics. Lincoln considered himself such a man, whose origins were even more obscure and more humble than Clay’s own.[2] Lincoln the Whig also identified readily with the policies of the Whig leader Clay, affirming his support for the three pillars of Clay’s political program: banking, protective tariffs, and internal improvements.[3] More than any other part of Clay’s program, however, the young Lincoln believed passionately in internal improvement.[4] Lincoln’s support for internal improvement, like that of Whigs generally, was connected to larger notions of improvement, which were connected to Lincoln’s understanding of himself as a self-made man. Beyond this, however, Daniel Walker Howe maintains that “Lincoln was ‘self-made’ not merely in the sense of being upwardly mobile, but in the more important senses of being self-educated and self-disciplined.”[5] Whig improvement and the ideal of the self-made men were intimately connected, and Lincoln saw their embodiment in Henry Clay.

Something more, however, drew Lincoln to Clay, which went beyond biography or Whig political values, and transcended the political battles of that period. Lincoln also admired Clay as a model for the practice of the art of politics; although the young Lincoln shared biographical and ideological similarities with Clay, he did not yet embody Clay’s political ability.[6] Later, in the first of his debates with Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln described Clay as “my beau ideal of a statesman, the man for whom I fought all my humble life,” but he did not make explicit why he held this opinion of Clay.[7] To find that explanation, one must look to Lincoln’s July 6, 1852, eulogy of Clay, which is his most systematic exposition of his understanding of Clay.

Unlike many other Lincoln speeches,[8] the Clay eulogy has not received a book-length treatment; moreover, it has also been relatively neglected in the literature generally. The two most substantial examples are John Channing Briggs’s chapter on the eulogy in Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered and an article by Mark E. Neely, Jr., comparing Lincoln’s eulogy with other prominent Clay eulogies.[9] Neely argues that Lincoln’s speech, mundane compared with his more famous efforts, was “striking” “in the context of other eulogies.”[10] While those eulogies focused on Clay’s nationalism or recent religious conversion, Neely asserts that Lincoln’s eulogy was a thinly disguised attack on slavery, noting that “Lincoln imparted to Clay’s life a consistent history of opposition ‘on principle and on feeling’ to slavery.”[11] Briggs’s book places special emphasis on Lincoln’s rhetorical abilities, while the chapter on Clay focuses specifically upon the accuracy of Lincoln’s portrayal of Clay as antislavery.

The debate over whether Lincoln’s interpretation of Clay is correct, however, is of limited importance. The question is not, “What is the veracity of Lincoln’s understanding of Clay’s statesmanship?” or even “How does Lincoln’s eulogy compare with other eulogies of Henry Clay?” The central question is rather, “What does Lincoln reveal of his own understanding of statesmanship through his presentation of Henry Clay’s statesmanship?” This question is inadequately treated in the extant scholarship.[12] Answering this question reveals that the eulogy, instead of being “largely perfunctory” as David Herbert Donald claimed, is in fact vital to understanding Lincoln’s political thought and statesmanship.[13] In eulogizing Clay, Lincoln provides an account of the man as the embodiment of Lincoln’s understanding of statesmanship in a free, self-governing society. Abraham Lincoln’s 1852 eulogy on Henry Clay is Lincoln’s most systematic, deliberate exposition of genuine statesmanship and its alternative, foreshadowing his struggle with Douglas in the 1850s and his rise to the presidency.

The Democratic Eulogy

As a leader in Illinois Whig politics and a devotee of Clay’s, Lincoln naturally eulogized the senior figure Clay, but doing so also presented unique challenges. First, as Lincoln himself concedes, Clay “never delivered an eulogy on an occasion like this”; rather, “all his efforts were made for practical effect. He never spoke merely to be heard.”[14] How was one to eulogize a man who himself disdained to eulogize? Second, as Briggs correctly notes, “the audience knew that Lincoln was a man with his own political ambitions,” despite his relative lack of active political involvement since his departure from the House of Representatives in 1849.[15] They would be evaluating Lincoln, but the occasion also demanded that Lincoln make a speech that was not narrowly political, especially given Clay’s reputation as a man dedicated to the survival and prosperity of the whole Union. This task was rendered more difficult by the fact that Clay was also a partisan in a partisan age.

Lincoln surmounted these obstacles with the help of his political opponents. The first part of Lincoln’s own oration is dominated by an extended quotation from a printed eulogy that had recently appeared in a local Democratic newspaper. He said he included the quotation “partly because such high and exclusive eulogy, originating with a political friend, might offend good taste, but chiefly, because I thought I could not, in any language of my own, so well express my own thoughts.”[16] Lincoln’s use of the Democratic eulogy allows Lincoln to praise Clay without sounding like a mere partisan.[17] In addition, it serves another, unstated purpose: it provides him with a foil against which he can make a larger argument. He claims that the Democratic eulogy is a better expression of his own thoughts than he himself could give, yet he continues at length after quoting from it. What did Lincoln believe needed to be added to the Democratic eulogy? Why?

One can begin to answer these questions by examining the Democratic eulogy itself, which praises Clay on several grounds. It recalls that Clay was the great orator of the age, whose “eloquence has not been surpassed. In the effective power to move the heart of man, Clay was without an equal.”[18] Michael F. Holt notes that although Clay was “[n]either as profound nor as learned as [Daniel] Webster, he exuded emotion and charisma when he addressed public audiences. The inspirational visions and the warmth of feeling that punctuated his speeches made them almost as effective” as Webster’s “weighty learning” and “cold, penetrating reason.”[19] Robert Remini, however, argues that “Senator Clay, undoubtedly, was a far superior debater. . . . When the Kentuckian spoke, listeners did not have the sense that they were hearing an oration, yet they found themselves utterly absorbed in his argument, and fully persuaded by his logic and commanding language.”[20] Regardless of how one ranks Clay relative to Webster, Clay’s rhetorical prowess was widely acknowledged.

The Democratic eulogy also waxes poetic upon Clay’s patriotism. He was a partisan, but he was an American first: “Henry Clay belonged to his country—to the world, mere party cannot claim men like him.” He was “Harry of the West,” but he was more than that: “As on a question of liberty, he knew no North, no South, no East, no West, but only the Union, which held them all in its sacred circle.”[21] He was a national figure who sought policies that would benefit and unite the whole Union. His American system constituted a serious attempt to create an integrated national economy that would bind the nation together and render it independent of British control.[22] Clay made unity his theme and, like Washington in his Farewell Address, warned that without the Union “we shall be torn into hostile fragments, and sooner or later become the victims of military despotism, or foreign domination.”[23] For Clay, the good of each section was inextricably bound to the good of the whole, which could only be served in the Union.

Clay’s eloquence and his patriotism were brought together in his efforts to save the country from a series of crises in the first half of the nineteenth century. His surpassing rhetorical ability, the Democratic eulogy continued, was “most conspicuously exhibited against intestine feud.”[24] Though the eulogist does not specify these crises, Lincoln correctly assumes that they are the Missouri crisis of 1819–1821, the nullification crisis of 1828–1832, and the deadlock that culminated in the Compromise of 1850. In all three instances, Clay was a central player in brokering an agreement between competing factions that threatened to destroy the Union. Finally, Clay was a dedicated and eloquent champion of self-rule for oppressed peoples in places like Greece and South America, which had revolted against imperial rule during his lifetime.

Buried within this torrent of opposition praise is a less than subtle suggestion about the man who will step forward as the successor to Henry Clay:

The Whig statesman’s natural successor can only be the great Democrat of the 1850s: Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, a man who “in political sentiment, [is] as far apart as party could make,” yet the only “one on whose shoulders the mighty mantle of the departed statesman may fall.” Michael Burlingame notes that “from 1852, when both Henry Clay and Daniel Webster died, until 1860, Douglas loomed larger than any other American politician, presidents included.”[26] With the passing of the great triumvirate of Clay, Webster, and John C. Calhoun, Douglas was indisputably the giant of the Senate.

Douglas embodied the characteristics of statesmanship highlighted in the Democratic eulogy. His talent, particularly in debate, was acknowledged by allies and opponents alike.[27] Moreover, Douglas’s love of country and commitment to the Union were not in dispute. In fact, Douglas would later ground much of his critique of Lincoln in the assertion that Lincoln’s position on slavery was “revolutionary and destructive of the existence of this government” and that Douglas himself was the true defender of the Union created by the Founding Fathers.[28]

Douglas would unite both Clay’s ability and his devotion to the Union in the crisis, wherein he would stake his claim to the title of Clay’s successor. The question of what to do with the lands acquired from Mexico began in 1846, even before the lands had been acquired, with the introduction of the Wilmot Proviso in the House of Representatives, and Congress had been unable to clear the impasse for more than three years. In January 1850 Clay introduced a series of eight compromise measures in one gigantic “omnibus” measure, “designed to provide a comprehensive settlement of all the various points of political contention involving slavery.”[29] However, Clay’s omnibus package was defeated, as there were simply too many who were opposed to enough of it to ensure that they would vote against, and too few willing to compromise on some issues to build a majority. A “shattered” Clay left Washington to recuperate.[30]

With Clay gone, Douglas grabbed the reins of compromise. Rather than attempt to shove one massive bill through Congress, Douglas split the compromise measures into their constituent parts, and then built majorities around each one individually. He realized that while everyone had found something to dislike in the omnibus, “there were strong sectional blocs . . . in favor of each of the measure separately. This compromise bloc . . . could form majorities for each of the measures, and all of them could thus be enacted.” Douglas secured passage of the whole compromise package in what David M. Potter called a demonstration of “rare parliamentary virtuosity.”[31] Although Douglas himself deflected the credit to Clay,[32] he had established himself as a national political figure and an architect of Union-saving compromise.[33]

Finally, like Clay, Douglas was a champion of democratic self-rule. He enthusiastically supported the European revolutionary movements of 1848. Closer to home, Douglas believed that the best way to secure democracy in the New World was to expand the borders of the United States. Douglas was an apostle of “manifest destiny,” which Frederick Merk defines as “expansion, prearranged by Heaven, over an area not clearly defined.”[34] During the 1840s and early 1850s, many Americans began to dream of a vast American empire wherein the people could enjoy the benefits of American democracy. Douglas was a prominent adherent of this movement, declaring in 1845 that “he would blot out the lines on the map which now marked our national boundaries on this continent, and make the area of liberty as broad as the continent itself.”[35] Eight years later, he was still devoted to the idea of expansion: “You may make as many treaties as you please to fetter the limbs of this giant republic, and she will burst them all from her, and her course will be onward to a limit which I will not venture to prescribe.”[36] Inevitable American expansion was, for Douglas, a victory for liberty and justice.

Lincoln’s Henry Clay

The Democratic eulogy creates an image of Clay that makes it easy for the casual observer to conclude that Douglas and Clay, despite their differences in party, are cast from the same mold. Lincoln never directly contradicts that notion, and he never attacks Douglas, but from the outset of the speech he provides an alternative interpretation of Clay, one which renders the Democratic eulogy’s interpretation untenable. In the first paragraph of his eulogy, Lincoln begins to establish a connection between the life of Clay and the life of the American nation. Clay, Lincoln notes, was born less than a year after the Declaration of Independence, which gave birth to the new nation, so that “the infant nation, and the infant child began the race of life together. For three quarters of a century they have travelled hand in hand. They have been companions ever.”[37] He makes a dedicated effort to link Henry Clay to the principle of liberty embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Eric Foner observes that this is Lincoln’s first extended reference to the Declaration, the beginning of the development of the argument of the Declaration that would dominate his thinking from 1854 to the end of his life.[38] This link is the basis for Lincoln’s presentation of Clay’s statesmanship.

According to Lincoln, it was Clay’s commitment to the principle of human liberty as embodied in the Declaration of Independence that tied together all the praises heaped upon him by his erstwhile opponents.[39] Lincoln holds that “Mr. Clay’s predominant sentiment, from first to last, was a deep devotion to the cause of human liberty—a strong sympathy with the oppressed everywhere, and an ardent wish for their elevation. With him, this was a primary and all controlling passion. Subsidiary to this was the conduct of his whole life.”[40] In the first instance, Lincoln concedes that Clay was a great orator but maintains that Clay’s eloquence was less a product of technical skill than of “that deeply earnest and impassioned tone, and manner, which can proceed only from great sincerity and firm conviction, in the speaker, in the justice and importance of his cause.”[41] Lincoln’s Clay was not simply a skilled politician; he was a man with a deep and abiding commitment to a moral principle. The substantive message of his oratory lent power to its form, a power that could not come from the form alone. He spoke in defense of the cause of human liberty, which was the animating principle of his political action, and his sincere commitment to that cause gave his oratory a power and conviction that mere technical ability could never equal.

Next, Lincoln concedes to the Democratic eulogy the obvious truth that Clay was patriotic and loved the Union, but he asserts that he did not love it in the manner of a jingoist or a traditionalist. His patriotism was grounded in the unique nature of the American experiment: “He loved his country, partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such, the advancement, prosperity and glory, of human liberty, human right and human nature.”[42] Although the love of one’s own cannot be discounted entirely, what was of primary importance for Clay was that America was fundamentally good. Clay loved America precisely because it embodied, to a greater extent than any other nation in human history, the cause of human liberty under “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The Democratic eulogy, by contrast, for all of its praise of Clay’s patriotism and unionism, can never quite bring itself to make explicit the connection between Clay’s patriotism and his principles.

It is true that Clay achieved a number of great compromises that saved the Union, but Lincoln enumerates these compromises immediately after his statements about Clay’s commitment to first principles. He sought to preserve the Union because it was the world’s greatest beacon of liberty and natural right. Lincoln is even more explicit with regard to the question of the struggle for liberty in other lands. He insists that “Mr. Clay’s efforts in behalf of the South Americans, and afterwards, in behalf of the Greeks, in the times of their respective struggles for civil liberty are among the finest on record, upon the noblest of all themes; and bear ample corroboration of what I have said was his ruling passion—a love of liberty and right.”[43] Clay’s support of Greek and South American independence must, according to Lincoln, be viewed in light of Clay’s “ruling passion.”

In the course of Lincoln’s eulogy it becomes increasingly apparent that it is impossible to talk about Clay without talking about slavery in America. Lincoln sees the connection as inescapable. He makes it abundantly clear that “the Missouri question . . . sprang from that unfortunate source of discord—negro slavery.”[44] This is where the inadequacy of the Democratic eulogy becomes most transparent: it makes no reference to slavery whatsoever. It does not comment upon Clay’s thoughts or actions on slavery, and it says nothing about slavery as an issue in the political controversies that Clay mediated.

When Lincoln finally confronts the slavery issue directly, he assumes the air of someone who is pained to raise unpleasant facts in a delicate situation. He claims that “having been led to allude to domestic slavery so frequently already, I am unwilling to close without referring to Mr. Clay’s views and conduct in regard to it.”[45] In fact, the discussion of slavery is the central feature of Lincoln’s project in the speech: “the whole speech is animated by antagonism to slavery.”[46] This is where his interpretation of Clay diverges from that of the Democratic eulogy. This is how he will demonstrate that Douglas cannot possibly be the heir to Henry Clay.

Lincoln begins by asserting Clay’s antislavery bona fides, claiming, “He ever was, on principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery.”[47] This is a curiously uncompromising description of a slaveowner whose political fame was, in large measure, built upon compromises on the slavery issue. Lincoln immediately recognizes his vulnerability in this regard and begins to explain the nature of Clay’s opposition to slavery. Context proves vital in understanding Clay’s approach to slavery: “Cast into a world where slavery was already widely spread and deeply seated, he did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could at once be eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself.”[48] Clay was antislavery, but he was not an advocate of immediate and unconditional emancipation.

Clay was perfectly in line with the general consensus of America’s Founding Fathers, as Lincoln had already taken care to establish by quoting Jefferson: “I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way.”[49] The abolition of slavery was, for both Jefferson and Clay, an undeniable good, but there were other goods, whose value could not be overlooked. In the letter quoted by Lincoln, Jefferson expresses concern for both “justice” and “self-preservation.” It would be just to free the slaves, but it would be perilous to undertake an action that risked one’s own annihilation. Jefferson was not simply referring to economic or social dislocation. There was a profound fear in America, particularly in the South, that mass emancipation would lead to a war of extermination between the races. This fear was heightened by news about the slave revolt on the island of Santo Domingo, and failed domestic slave revolts like those of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner.[50] Alexis de Tocqueville predicted in Democracy in America that race relations in America would end either in conflict or in separation.[51]

No less critical was concern that a move for immediate abolition would cause the dissolution of the Union. Given the importance ascribed to the Union by the Founding Fathers, the possibility of disunion over slavery weighed heavily on their minds. To them, the dissolution of the Union would fatally undermine the liberty of all Americans.[52] During the ratification debates, John Jay noted the connection between the slavery issue and the Union. He told an English antislavery society, “Several of the States conceived that restraints on slavery might be too rapid to consist with their particular circumstances; and the importance of union rendered it necessary that their wishes on that head should, in some degree, be gratified.”[53] Jay was referring to the threat posed by the states of the deep South, particularly South Carolina, whose delegate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney warned that “if the committee failed to find a way of preventing emancipation of slaves and the taxation of slaves, his state would withhold its support.”[54] The framers of the Constitution were thus faced with a dilemma: restrict slavery and risk the dissolution of the Union, or tolerate slavery in order to preserve the Union. Viewing union as central to their liberty and happiness, they chose the latter.

Abraham Lincoln’s Henry Clay followed the same course, and for the same reason. Two years later, Lincoln would profess this same inability to see his way clear to a solution to the slavery question. He told his audience at Peoria, “If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution.”[55] Clay was a statesman who had to deal with unpleasant realities and devise the best possible response. Radical positions, North and South, were unrealistic and dangerous, and Clay denounced them accordingly:

Clay rejected the radicalism of the abolitionists, who would destroy the Union, and even the Bible, in pursuit of their utopian goal. Clay’s bitter denunciation of abolitionists during the debate over the Compromise of 1850 would still have been fresh in the minds of antislavery northerners. They opposed the plan, he said, because “they see their doom” in a measure that would bring peace to the Union.[57]

Lincoln adopted Clay’s position on abolitionism. As a young state legislator in Illinois, Lincoln lodged a protest in the Illinois legislature with one colleague on slavery, stating “that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils.”[58] Five years later he indirectly castigated the tactics of abolitionists and other radical reformers as both “impolitic” and “unjust.”[59] Lincoln hated the disunionist tendencies of abolitionists, which he likened to “throwing fathers and brothers overboard, to lighten the boat for our security,” and called it “fiendishly selfish.”[60] He blamed their inflexible radicalism for harming their own cause: for example, in denying the presidency to Clay in 1844 and thus causing the election of James K. Polk, a southern expansionist. They rejected Clay as a slaveholder but, Lincoln asks, “if by your votes you could have prevented the extention &c. of slavery, would it not have been good and not evil so to have used your votes, even though it involved the casting of them for a slaveholder?”[61] Their unwillingness to recognize the complexity of the slavery problem led them to take positions that were counterproductive, unjust, and even destructive of the peace.

Lincoln, however, makes a point of also illustrating Clay’s disregard for southern fire-eaters, who would rend the Union for the sake of preserving slavery. This is somewhat more difficult to establish, and Lincoln accordingly devotes more energy in this effort. He begins by sounding a theme that will recur in his thought for the rest of the decade: that there is a growing consensus, emanating from the South, that the principles of the Declaration of Independence, particularly the principle of equality, are “false and dangerous.”[62] This is one of the few instances in which he directly cites John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, one of slavery’s foremost defenders, as being “the first American, of any note, to do or attempt this.”[63] Lincoln then quotes a Virginia clergyman who mocks the equality principle as originating not with Scripture but with “Saint Voltaire, and was baptized by Thomas Jefferson.”[64] Lincoln then quoted at length from Clay’s 1827 speech to the American Colonization Society, wherein Clay posited a link between all the liberty and prosperity that has accrued to the nation and the principles contained in the Declaration of Independence. It would take more than suppressing the Society to “repress all tendencies towards liberty, and ultimate independence.” To succeed, the defenders of slavery “must blow out the moral lights around us”: they must subvert America’s attachment to the principles of liberty and equality proclaimed by its Founding Fathers.[65] They must do nothing less than transform the moral character of the nation.

Once again, this is a position that Lincoln himself will adopt when he reenters national politics in the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In 1859 Lincoln would note, “The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied, and evaded, with no small show of success.” He sees in the success of their enterprise the destruction of free self-government. The next year, at the Cooper Institute, he would direct his audience’s attention to the unreasonable demands of the South: they “will rule or ruin at all events.”[66] Their ultimate demand as the price of remaining in the Union is the transformation of the Union: northerners must “cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.”[67] All dissent from the new orthodoxy must be swept away. This is the natural consequence of their adherence to a doctrine that holds that “slavery is morally right, and socially elevating,” and so they seek “national recognition of it, as a legal right, and social blessing.”[68] Lincoln asserts that the transformation Clay feared is coming to pass after Clay’s death.

Lincoln’s Henry Clay is a far different figure from the one presented in the Democratic eulogy. The latter maintained that Clay compromised because he wanted to preserve the Union. Lincoln accepted this assertion but went beyond it. His Clay wanted to preserve the Union because he believed it to be the greatest instrument for the security of human liberty that man had yet devised. The fact that the Union is such an instrument is because of its foundation in the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The connection between first principles and action is what the Democratic eulogy overlooks, and as a result it projects a distorted image of Clay, who was a man of principle: he compromised where necessary, but always in the service of his higher principle. As a result of his modification of the Democratic eulogy, Lincoln’s Henry Clay is a very different kind of statesman from the one his opponents eulogized.

The Transformation of the American Regime

Clay compromised, as Lincoln readily admits, but all of his compromises proceeded from the same basis: America was a light to the world, and every “advancement, prosperity, and glory” for America was a victory for “human liberty, human right, and human nature.”[69] All of Clay’s compromises were based on the presumption that the Union was founded upon these ideals, but that we should be willing to compromise where necessary, even to the point of tolerating the gross injustice of slavery, in order to prevent an even greater calamity: disunion. With this understanding, Lincoln admired Clay and accepted both his compromises with slavery and those of the Founding generation.

While both Lincoln and Clay recognized compromise as essential to the political art, they also recognized a danger inherent in compromise: that one in the service of a higher good may compromise the higher good itself. This is what Lincoln sees in the compromise with slavery embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which was conceived and championed by Stephen A. Douglas. The Act, which Lincoln describes as “the repeal of the Missouri Compromise,” opens to slavery a massive swath of territory that was supposedly closed to slavery forever by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.[70] Under the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the inhabitants of the territories covered by the Act could decide for themselves, as a matter of democratic self-government, whether or not to permit slavery.[71] This is the doctrine of popular sovereignty, and in the subsequent conflict between Lincoln and Douglas one sees the conflicting versions of Clay’s statesmanship made manifest.

Douglas portrayed his brand of popular sovereignty as a Union-saving measure that embodied the American ideal of self-government. He claimed in his First Debate with Lincoln that “up to 1853–’54, the Whig party and the Democratic party both stood on the same platform with regard to the slavery question. That platform was the right of the people of each State and each Territory to decide their local and domestic institutions for themselves, subject only to the Constitution.”[72] Every state and territory had the power to establish whatever policies it chose, so long as it remained within the guidelines set forth in the Constitution. This was what the Founding Fathers originally intended for the nation: “They knew when they framed the Constitution that in a country as wide and broad as this, with such a variety of climate, production, and interest, the people necessarily required different laws and institutions in different localities.”[73] Douglas’s popular sovereignty was a position that would preserve the Union as it was originally created because it provided room for the diversity of a republic as large as America.

Lincoln saw popular sovereignty and the Kansas-Nebraska Act differently. He affirmed the rightness of government by consent, but argued that Douglas’s popular sovereignty had twisted it beyond recognition:

Lincoln believed that self-government is grounded in the moral and political truths expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which he referred to as his “ancient faith.” Self-government, or government by consent, is an application of the principle of equality found in that document. Douglas confused the process of popular decision-making with the higher principle of self-government, elevating the process until it became the principle itself. The result, as Lincoln noted, was a novel conception of “the sacred right of self-government” which, “[t]hough expressive of the only rightful basis of any government, was so perverted in this attempted use of it as to amount to just this: That if any one man choose to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object.”[75] Douglas separated consent from equality, so that the majority could violate the principle upon which self-government was based. As long as the process of democratic self-government was observed, a people could introduce slavery into the body politic.

The means by which Douglas sought to effect this revolution were particularly alarming. The principles of the Declaration were being exchanged for a kind of majoritarian absolutism, posing as “the great principle of popular sovereignty.”[76] Democratic self-government, for Douglas, meant the unlimited right of any political community to adopt any policy it desired, including slavery. The morality or immorality of slavery or any other policy was not at issue; the only issue is whether or not the people were able to make the decision for themselves. Douglas rejected the notion that abstract moral principle could guide or limit popular sovereignty, claiming that

Popular sovereignty is the unlimited right of any local political community to enact whatever laws it pleases. Such a community may, at its unfettered discretion, enslave some portion of its population, or allow for the introduction of slavery into their community. Anything else would be a violation of the American ideal, the ideal of democratic self-government.

To the extent that Douglas’s popular sovereignty embodied an attempt to reform public opinion, it created an existential crisis for the cause of liberty in America. Lincoln remarked that regarding the slavery question, “the people of the South have an immediate palpable and immensely great pecuniary interest; while, with the people of the North, it is merely an abstract question of moral right, with only slight, and remote pecuniary interest added. . . . This immense, palpable pecuniary interest, unites the southern people, as one man.”[78] Interest gave the defense of slavery its impulse and its zeal; sentiment, based on moral principle, had to supply the want of immediate interest for the opposition. As a result, “The interest was concentrated, persistent, practical, and testily defensive. The sentiment tended to be diffuse, sporadic, moralistic, and tentative.”[79] Human nature thus created an uneven playing field in the slavery controversy that favored the defenders of slavery.

The danger of popular sovereignty, with its “care not” teaching on slavery, was that it would remove the principled element from the slavery debate altogether. As Harry Jaffa succinctly remarked, for the North “the moral and legal opposition to slavery in free territory, and free states as well, were inseparable”[80] in a way that simply was not true for the southern defense of slavery. By advocating this policy of moral indifference, Douglas was doing more than merely allowing each community to do as it pleased; he was stripping the antislavery cause of its motive impulse. In the absence of principle, all that remains is interest: the community must determine what is in their interest, and then enact policy appropriately. Under popular sovereignty, Lincoln laments, “there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”[81] If Douglas had succeeded, the contest would have been between southern interest and northern indifference, and the result for Lincoln would have been both obvious and catastrophic: the nationalization of slavery.

In explaining the danger posed by Douglas in the First Debate, Lincoln concludes by returning to Henry Clay. He references the same passage from the same 1827 speech to the American Colonization Society that he had quoted six years earlier in his eulogy. The relevant portion of the 1852 quotation bears inclusion here:

In 1852 Lincoln had used the quotation to establish Clay’s antislavery credentials. More importantly, it contains a description of what would have to happen for liberty to be destroyed in America. Clay, and Lincoln, believed that it would require nothing less than the subversion of the moral foundations of the regime, the transformation of the moral sentiments of the people, to turn them away from liberty and justice. These foundations and sentiments, embodied for Lincoln and Lincoln’s Clay in the Declaration of Independence, were a “stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism,” but if these were undermined then America would put itself on that path.[83]

Lincoln’s recycling of Clay’s speech on colonization in the First Debate indicates his belief that Douglas was attempting precisely the transformation against which Clay had warned. Douglas was, in Lincoln’s understanding, subverting the moral foundations and sentiments of the regime and its people:

The Democratic eulogy could not possibly have been correct in insinuating that Stephen A. Douglas was the rightful successor to the mantle of Henry Clay. Popular sovereignty was an outright rejection of Clay’s statesmanship because Clay’s statesmanship was grounded in the moral foundations of the republic, while Douglas is seeking to detach the nation from those foundations.

Statesmanship, True and False

One potential difficulty yet remains: how can Clay be Lincoln’s “beau ideal of a statesman,” given that Clay and Douglas were both compromisers, and both were regarded as moderates, while Lincoln was uncompromising on the slavery issue? Lincoln’s Clay was a moderate and a compromiser, but he never compromised on his principles, despite the fact that Clay inherited slaves as a child and acquired more slaves throughout his lifetime. He was only moderate in how he pursued his principles, and he only compromised in ways that did not compromise his principles. The youthful Clay had been, on at least one occasion, an outspoken advocate of abolition. While campaigning for the Kentucky state legislature in 1798 he told voters, “All America acknowledges the existence of slavery to be evil. . . . If it be this enormous evil, the sooner we attempt its destruction the better.”[85] A more mature Clay realized that slavery would not be so easily eradicated. Clay never lost his antislavery sentiment, but it was moderated by the need to preserve the Union. He was willing to compromise, and he did so on numerous occasions, but he was never willing to give more to slavery than was necessary. He never moderated his position that slavery was wrong in principle, and he never compromised in a way that conferred moral legitimacy upon slavery.

Douglas was also a moderate and a compromiser, but there the resemblance ends. Douglas compromised in exactly the way Clay had refused to compromise. Steven Kautz holds that “Douglas pretends to moderate neutrality between the extremist parties and thus to keep the peace between them; in fact, he is a witting or unwitting tool of the enemies of liberty.”[86] Douglas’s brand of compromise would have been hateful to the Henry Clay eulogized by Lincoln because Douglas not only compromised on policy but also compromised away the principle of liberty. Douglas espoused not merely an indifference to the outcomes of the democratic process but also an equivocation between right and wrong, just and unjust, good and evil. Popular sovereignty was predicated on the assumption that slavery was just as good as liberty, as long as democratic process was observed. In order to preserve the Union, Douglas had compromised away the very principle for which the Union itself was worth compromising.

Lincoln recognized that there are circumstances in which one cannot compromise. During the winter of 1860–1861, President-elect Lincoln privately told Senator Lyman Trumbull (R-Ill.), “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. If there be, all our labor is lost, and, ere long, must be done again. The dangerous ground—that into which some of our friends have a hankering to run—is Pop. Sov. Have none of it. Stand firm.”[87] Consistent with the principles of the American Revolution, and the principles of Henry Clay, there could be no compromise of the type embodied in popular sovereignty. The year after the debates, Lincoln told an Ohio audience, “Whoever desires the prevention of the spread of slavery and the nationalization of that institution, yields all, when he yields to any policy that either recognizes slavery as being right, or as being an indifferent thing.”[88] Compromise had its place for both Lincoln and Clay, but only the right kind of compromise, under the right conditions.

Henry Clay’s compromises were appropriate for America of Clay’s time, but different times required a different response. Lincoln concludes his eulogy by alluding to this possibility: “Such a man the times have demanded, and such, in the providence of God was given us. But he is gone. Let us strive to deserve, as far as mortals may, the continued care of Divine Providence, trusting that, in future national emergencies, He will not fail to provide us the instruments of safety and security.”[89] This is not to say that the principles of justice change; what may change is how to apply them in different circumstances. What made for successful statesmanship in one time and place may be inadequate in another context. This is a critical error in the Democratic eulogy: it assumes that because compromise was the order of the day in Clay’s age that compromise is appropriate to every situation, or that all compromises are the same.

Somewhat ironically, Lincoln believed that it was Douglas himself who created a situation in which the statesmanship of compromise was inadequate. Kimberly C. Shankman argues,

In making this argument, however, Shankman overlooks the crucial context of Clay’s and Lincoln’s statesmanship. Clay’s compromises, even his attacks on abolitionism, made sense in an America that was still officially committed to the original idea that slavery was an evil to be tolerated only out of necessity. It would have been unnecessary, and even irresponsible, to precipitate a divisive conflict. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was a new departure for Lincoln. The opening sequence of his Peoria speech is intended to show that slavery policy in America, from independence until 1854, had been predicated on the belief that slavery was a necessary evil.[91] Lincoln repeatedly asserted, “On the 4th day of January 1854, Judge Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska bill. He initiated a new policy,” which was a rejection of the old policy of “necessary evil” and based on a new principle utterly antagonistic to the principle of the Declaration of Independence, upon which the old policy was based.[92] “Let no one be deceived,” Lincoln warned. “The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms; and the former is being rapidly displaced by the latter.”[93] Douglas had created a situation in which compromise meant transforming the nation.

In the aftermath of Kansas-Nebraska, the nation needed a statesman who would restore the nation to its original principle. Lincoln was committed to saving the Union, but it was vital that it be a certain kind of Union that was saved. The Union had to be “worthy of the saving.” In order to accomplish this, we must “turn slavery from its claims of ‘moral right,’ back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of ‘necessity.’ Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it, and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it.”[94] The very concept of justice that America originally embodied was called into question by popular sovereignty, and there could be no compromise, except on the basis of the restoration of the principle.

In the Seventh Debate, Lincoln denounces Douglas by asking his audience to consider the nature of Douglas’s politics. He wonders “is it not a false statesmanship that undertakes to build a system of policy upon the basis of caring nothing about the very thing that everybody does care the most about?”[95] Popular sovereignty does not simply teach people to be indifferent as to the policy decisions of other communities regarding slavery; it teaches people to be indifferent to liberty and justice, and to act merely according to self-interest, with the interest of the strongest prevailing in the democratic process. Douglas plays to people’s basest passions, as is evident in his constant race-baiting of Lincoln. He tells them that they are morally right to do whatever they believe is in their interest. He is encouraging them to be governed by their passions and self-interest, rather than by their reason and sense of justice. This, for Lincoln, is the precise opposite of true statesmanship, the statesmanship embodied by Henry Clay.

Conclusion

The eulogy reveals that Lincoln understood himself not as a tyrant in the mold of Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon, but as a statesman in the mold of Henry Clay. Clay was firmly rooted in what Lincoln considered the true principles of justice, but Clay also had a keen sense of how to apply those principles in the context of his time. Clay recognized that to save the American Union, compromise was the order of the day. Lincoln ascribed to himself the same combination of principled foundation and situational awareness as Clay, but believed that the situation created by Douglas, popular sovereignty, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act necessitated not mere preservation but restoration of that understanding of justice. Lincoln denounced Douglas and his policies as “false statesmanship” precisely because they had the effect of transforming the moral foundations of the country, replacing justice with self-interest. This result, for Lincoln, was anathema to Clay’s statesmanship; as such, Douglas could never be the heir to Henry Clay. In Lincoln’s interpretation of Clay, one can discern Lincoln’s understanding of the nature of true statesmanship and its opposite.

1. Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 17. Kimberly C. Shankman describes Lincoln as “Clay’s most notable protégé.” Shankman, Compromise and the Constitution: The Political Thought of Henry Clay (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999), 1. David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 42; Stephen B. Oates, With Malice toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 21; Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1:30.

2. For a comparison of the backgrounds of Clay and Lincoln, see Edgar DeWitt Jones, The Influence of Henry Clay upon Abraham Lincoln (Lexington, KY: Henry Clay Memorial Foundation, 1952). Burlingame provides an excellent description of the young Lincoln’s conditions in Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 1:15–20. Howe speculates that this is the reason that Lincoln “dwelt on his humble origins less than Clay did—probably because they were in fact so much humbler.” Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 266–267. See also Lincoln, Communication to the People of Sangamo County, March 9, 1832, in Roy P. Basler et al., eds., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 1:8–9. See also Lincoln to Jesse W. Fell, Enclosing Autobiography, December 20, 1859, in Collected Works, 3:511; Lincoln, Autobiography Written for John L. Scripps, [ca. June 1860], in Collected Works, 4:60–61.

3. Lincoln, Speech on the Sub-Treasury, December 26, 1839, in Collected Works, 1:159–179; Lincoln to Edward Wallace, May 12, 1860, in Collected Works, 4:49.

4. Lincoln, Communication to the People of Sangamo County, March 9, 1832, in Collected Works, 1:5–9; G. S. Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1978), 6.

5. Howe, “Why Abraham Lincoln Was a Whig,” 38. See also Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 21.

6. This is not to say that the young Lincoln was not actively involved in politics. Joel H. Silbey employs Lincoln as an example of diligent political organization. The American Political Nation: 1838–1893 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 52–53. David Donald notes that in 1840, for example, “Lincoln also did his part in bringing issues before the people.” Donald, Lincoln, 78.

7. Lincoln, First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa Illinois, August 21, 1858, in Collected Works, 3:29.

8. Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959); Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). Recent examples include Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004); Lewis E. Lehrman, Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2008); Ronald C. White, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002); and Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).

9. Neely notes that Lincoln’s eulogy of Clay has been mostly ignored and treated disdainfully when considered at all. Neely, “American Nationalism in the Image of Henry Clay,” 538.

10. Ibid., 562.

11. Ibid., 565. This theme is noted by a number of other scholars who discuss Lincoln’s eulogy on Clay but do not treat it systematically. See, for example, Foner, Fiery Trial, 70–72; Burlingame, Lincoln: A Life, 1:357; Oates, With Malice toward None, 105–107; Donald, Lincoln, 165.

12. Neely attributes this neglect to “the historians’ customary disdain for eulogies.” Neely, “American Nationalism in the Image of Henry Clay,” 538.

13. Donald, Lincoln, 165.

14. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:126.

15. Briggs, Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered, 114.

16. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:122.

17. Briggs, Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered, 117.

18. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:123 (internal quotation marks omitted).

19. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 25.

20. Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 431.

21. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:123 (internal quotation marks omitted).

22. Remini, Henry Clay, 225; Clay, “Speech in Defense of the American System, in the Senate of the United States, Feb. 2d, 3d, and 6th, 1832,” in The Life and Speeches of Henry Clay, ed. Daniel Mallory (New York: Robert Bixby & Co., 1844), 2:5–55.

23. Clay, “A General Review of the Debate on the Compromise Bills”, July 22, 1850, in Calvin Colton, ed., Works of Henry Clay: Comprising His Life, Correspondence and Speeches (New York: Henry Clay Publishing Co., 1897), 6:563.

24. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:123 (internal quotation marks omitted).

25. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:122.

26. Burlingame, Lincoln: A Life, 1:370.

27. See Burlingame, Lincoln: A Life, 1:371–374; Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 498–499.

28. Lincoln, First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa Illinois, August 21, 1858, in Collected Works, 3:8.

29. David Morris Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 97. See also Fergus M. Bordewich, The Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 134–139.

30. Remini, Henry Clay, 756.

31. Potter, Impending Crisis, 109, 111. See more generally Potter, Impending Crisis, 108–114; Remini, Henry Clay, 758–761; Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 270–297, esp. 294–297; Gerald M. Capers, Stephen A. Douglas: Defender of the Union (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1959), 60–63.

32. Remini, Henry Clay, 759.

33. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 298–299.

34. Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (New York: Knopf, 1963), 24.

35. Stephen A. Douglas, Remarks in the United States House of Representatives, January 27, 1845, Congressional Globe, 28th Cong., 2nd Sess., 200, reprinted in Merk, Manifest Destiny, 28.

36. Speech in the Senate on Territorial Expansion and Foreign Aggression, March 10, 1853, in Clark E. Carr, Stephen A. Douglas (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1909), 180. For more on Douglas’s expansionism, see Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 344–345.

37. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:121–122. Lincoln would return to the concept of linking the life of a nation to the life of a man more famously in the Gettysburg Address, where he made the same comparison by alluding to the statement about the lifespan of a man in Psalm 90:10. See Lucas Morel, Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role in American Self-Government (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000), 45–47.

38. Foner, Fiery Trial, 70.

39. Briggs, Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered, 120.

40. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:126.

41. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:126.

42. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:127.

43. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:129–130.

44. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:127.

45. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:130.

46. Lord Charnwood (Godfrey Rathbone Benson), Abraham Lincoln: A Biography (1916; New York: Madison Books, 1996), 79.

47. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:130.

48. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:130.

49. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:128.

50. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 650–651; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought? The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 160–163, 323–327.

51. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (1832 in French; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 343.

52. See George Washington, Farewell Address, September 19, 1796, in Philip Kurland and Ralph Lerner, The Founders’ Constitution (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 1:681, 682; James Madison, Advice to My Country, October [1834?], in The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1973), 443; Federalist 2–8 in The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 8–50.

53. John Jay to the President of the [English] Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, June 1788, in Kurland and Lerner, The Founders’ Constitution, 1:550.

54. Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 663. See also Max Farrand, The Framing of the Constitution of the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1913), 149.

55. Lincoln, Speech at Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854, Collected Works, 2:255.

56. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:130.

57. Clay, “A General Review of the Debate on the Compromise Bills,” Speech in the U.S. Senate, July 22, 1850, in Colton, ed., The Works of Henry Clay, 9: 559.

58. Lincoln, Collected Works, 1:75.

59. Lincoln, Collected Works, 1:272, 274.

60. Lincoln, Collected Works, 1:275.

61. Lincoln, Collected Works, 1:347.

62. John C. Calhoun, Speech on the Oregon Bill, June 27, 1848, in Ross M. Lence, ed., Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992), 565.

63. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:130.

64. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:130.

65. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:131.

66. Lincoln, Collected Works, 3:543.

67. Lincoln, Collected Works, 3:547.

68. Lincoln, Collected Works, 3:548–549.

69. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:126.

70. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:254. For a description of the Missouri controversy and subsequent compromise, see Howe, What Hath God Wrought?, 147–160; George Dangerfield, The Awakening of American Nationalism, 1815–1828 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 97–140.

71. For background on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, see Potter, The Impending Crisis, 145–176; Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, 104–180.

72. Douglas, in Lincoln, Collected Works, 3:2.

73. Douglas, in Lincoln, Collected Works, 3:8.

74. Lincoln, Speech at Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854, Collected Works, 2:265–266.

75. Lincoln, House Divided Speech, June 16, 1858, Collected Works, 2:462.

76. Douglas, Speech at Chicago, Illinois, July 9, 1858, in Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 24.

77. Douglas, Speech at Chicago, Illinois, July 9, 1858, in The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, ed. Robert W. Johannsen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 28.

78. Lincoln, “On Sectionalism,” ca. July 23, 1856, Collected Works, 2: 351–352.

79. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 28.

80. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, 302.

81. Lincoln, Speech at Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854, Collected Works, 2:255.

82. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:131; Clay, Speech on African Colonization, January 20, 1827, in Colton, ed., The Works of Henry Clay, 6:339.

83. Lincoln, Speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857, Collected Works, 2:406. See also Lincoln to Joshua F. Speed, August 24, 1855, Collected Works 2:323.

84. Lincoln, Collected Works, 3:29

85. Clay, “To the Electors of Fayette County,” April 16, 1798, in James M. Hopkins, ed., The Papers of Henry Clay (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1959), 1:6.

86. Kautz, “Abraham Lincoln: The Moderation of a Democratic Statesman,” in Bryan-Paul Frost and Jeffrey Sikkenga, eds., History of American Political Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books: 2003), 407.

87. Lincoln, Collected Works, 4:149–150.

88. Lincoln, Speech at Cincinnati, Ohio, September 17, 1859, Collected Works, 3:460.

89. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:132.

90. Shankman, Compromise and the Constitution, 102.

91. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:248–254.

92. Lincoln, Speech at Clinton, Illinois, September 2, 1858, Collected Works, 3:82.

93. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:275.

94. Lincoln, Collected Works, 2:276.

95. Lincoln, Collected Works, 3:311.