Hating the Zeal to Spread Slavery, 1854

"This ... real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world."

—Abraham Lincoln, Speech at Springfield, October 16, 1854

Springfield lawyer Abraham Lincoln and Princeton pastor Owen Lovejoy met for the first time on a muddy afternoon at the Springfield State Fair on October 4, 1854. The speeches of the day were moved inside to the stately Hall of Representatives in the newly constructed State Capitol. At that time, both Lincoln and Lovejoy were fuming over a new federal law that Illinois Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas had championed through Congress during the preceding May, the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In 1820, after protracted and contentious negotiations, Missouri had been allowed to enter the Union as a slave state on condition that all territories in the Louisiana Purchase north of the Missouri's southern border would be considered free. This compromise had been respected for thirty-four years but was repealed in conjunction with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, allowing slavery to spread into those territories.

Lincoln wanted the Whigs and Lovejoy wanted the emerging Republican Party to lead the "fusion" movement uniting all those opposed to Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act and advocating the restoration of the Missouri Compromise. Both men were working to unite various political elements into a new organization that would defeat the pro-slavery Democratic Party's domination of Illinois politics since 1818. Since July, they had been campaigning for seats in the Illinois House of Representatives.

In 1850, after the end of his only term in Congress, Lincoln had returned to Springfield to resume his law career, but the Kansas-Nebraska Act reenergized his political instincts. According to Eric Foner, "Virtually every major speech of Lincoln's between 1854 and 1860 originated as a response to some action or statement by Douglas." Lincoln's speech at the State Fair in Springfield on October 4, 1854, is a prime example.

When Douglas returned to Illinois after the act's passage, he was excoriated and harangued. Speaking at the State Fair on October 3, he defended himself against the charges that he had betrayed a long-standing agreement among the American people. The next day, the forty-five-year-old Lincoln strode into the Hall of Representatives, tall and lanky, and earnestly told the audience, "This ... real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate."

The forty-three-year-old Lovejoy was among those in attendance, with his thatch of black hair framing his forehead and his athletic body no doubt sitting upright as he identified with Lincoln's emotion and conviction. After the murder of his brother, Elijah, an abolitionist newspaperman, by a pro-slavery mob, Owen Lovejoy had not sought revenge on the four men who pulled the triggers but instead "swore by the everlasting God eternal hostility to African slavery."

Lincoln had opened his speech with an emphatic declaration about the conditions under which the opposition to the Douglas Democrats could unite. "I wish to MAKE and to KEEP the distinction between the existing institution [of slavery], and the EXTENSION of it, so broad, and so clear, that no honest man can misunderstand me, and no dishonest one, successfully misrepresent me." He was advocating not an end to slavery but an end to its spread. Lovejoy had held that political position since 1842, but Lincoln initially did not fully comprehend and accept the significance of Lovejoy's commitment to nonextension.

The primary purpose of Lincoln's speech was to reach out to northern and southern Whigs. He hoped to make the Whig Party the instrument for fusing various political factions against Douglas. He also made it clear that he had "no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it." Then, speaking from his experience as a southerner, he publicly admitted that he did not know what to do to end slavery: "When southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we; I acknowledge the fact.... I surely would not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution."

He explained both his and the Southern Whigs' position on slavery, declaring, "We can not, then make [African Americans] equals," and thereby distinguishing himself from the Garrisonian abolitionists who advocated full equality. But he continued, "It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted," demonstrating some agreement with the political abolitionists. Inviting the South to join him in restoring the Missouri Compromise, he declared his convictions of prudence while presenting a unifying vision: "We thereby restore the national faith, the national confidence, the national feeling of brotherhood, we therefore reinstate the spirit of concession and compromise—that spirit which has never failed us in the past perils, and may be safely trusted for all the future."

Lincoln appealed to the human compassion in all peoples. "The great majority, south as well as north, have human sympathies, of which they can no more divest themselves than they can of their sensibilities to physical pain. These sympathies in the bosoms of the southern people manifest in many ways their sense of the wrong of slavery, and their consciousness that, after all, there is humanity in the Negro." This assurance of the humanity of southern citizens was based in his radical belief in the "better angels of our nature," to which he appealed persistently. He also sought to stir the sympathies of northerners when he warned the South of the dangers ahead: "Let no one be deceived. The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska are utter antagonisms; and the former is being rapidly displaced by the latter." In so doing, he exhibited his understanding that self-deception is a root problem in all people. His most risky statement was to give lukewarm support to the "abolitionists." He "good humoredly" called his Whig friends rather silly for refusing to advocate restoring the Missouri Compromise line just...