In coming weeks, I hope to explore a claim made by Abraham Lincoln and other antislavery figures before the Civil War: that there was a powerful “Slave Power” which labored, covertly and overtly, to turn the United States into a slave republic, indeed, to make slavery a national institution.
Were these claims based on paranoia? Were Lincoln and others who promoted the “Slave Power” thesis making stuff up and using rhetoric for partisan purposes? Were they making up “noble lies” to scare Northern voters into opposing slavery? Or were they in denial about the U. S. always having been proslavery - from the very time of the country’s inception?
Let us explore the issue together.
I suppose the biggest competitor nowadays to the slave power conspiracy thesis is that America was always fundamentally proslavery and thus needed no conpiracy to make her so.
Earlier in the twentieth century, and even sometimes today, we hear criticism of Lincoln and other antislavery people for supposedly inflaming popular passions with made-up conspiracies, and leading the country into war.
There is even some “praise” of Lincoln for allegedly fooling some of the Northern white people (all of the time?) to think slavery threatened them personally, with the ulterior motive of getting a war to free the slaves.
In his famous “House Divided” speech in Springfield, Illinois, kicking off his unsuccessful 1858 campaign for the U. S. Senate, Lincoln reviewed in his homely way what he claimed was evidence of a vast conspiracy to extend slavery into free states and territories:
We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen – (Illinois Democratic Senator) Stephen (Douglas), (former Democratic President) Franklin (Pierce), (Chief Justice) Roger (Taney), and (President) James (Buchanan), for instance -- and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few -- not omitting even scaffolding -- or, if a single piece be lacking, we can see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared to yet bring such piece in -- in such a case, we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.
What preceded the “framed timbers” passage was a conspiracy theory about the Dred Scott decision, which declared that Congress could not exclude slavery from the federal territories. Lincoln had just reviewed the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise, allowed the people of the Kansas and Nebraska territories to decide the question of slavery “subject to the Constitution.” An amendment specifically recognizing the right of the people to ban slavery had been voted down. Lincoln commented:
Several things will now appear less dark and mysterious than they did when they were transpiring [in 1854]. The people were to be left "perfectly free" "subject only to the Constitution." What the Constitution had to do with it, outsides could not then see. Plainly enough now, it was an exactly fitted nitch for the Dred Scott decision to afterward come in, and declare that perfect freedom of the people, to be just no freedom at all.
Why was the amendment, expressly declaring the right of the people to exclude slavery, voted down? Plainly enough now, the adoption of it, would have spoiled the nitch for the Dred Scott decision.
Why was the court decision held up? Why, even a Senator's individual opinion withheld, till after the Presidential election [of 1856]? Plainly enough now, the speaking out then would have damaged the "perfectly free" argument upon which the election was to be carried.
Why the outgoing President's [Franklin Pierce’s] felicitation on the indorsement? Why the delay of a reargument? Why the incoming President's [James Buchanan] advance exhortation [in his inaugural address] in favor of the decision?
These things look like the cautious patting and petting of a spirited horse, preparatory to mounting him, when it is dreaded that he may give the rider a fall.
Any why the hasty after indorsements of the decision by the President and others?
As I hope to detail later, there may be some evidence for this conspiracy theory. For instance, we now know that there were some behind-the-scenes maneuvers on the Dred Scott case, which Lincoln guessed at though he didn’t know the details as we do (see, for instance, Don Fehrenbacher’s book on the case). President-elect Buchanan did, in fact, correspond with a member of the Court (Grier) about what the decision would say and found that the decision would be in favor of a constitutional right to territorial slavery. In his inaugural address of March 4, 1857, Buchanan said that “in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit [to the forthcoming Dred Scott decision], whatever this may be.” The Dred Scott decision came down two days later, and went just as Buchanan knew it would go.
So, score one for Lincoln. In future, I hope to be looking at his and others’ conspiracy allegations about the Slave Power, from a variety of viewpoints and on a variety of topics. Let’s see what we find…I’m not fully certain myself. For one thing, how does one define conspiracy? And did the particular conspiracies alleged by various opponents of slavery actually turn out to be true?