Lincoln and Citizenship (Concise Lincoln Library) - Hardcover

Introduction
“My Fellow Citizens”
 
From Springfield to Washington
 
 Over the course of his political career, Lincoln used “fellow citizens” as a salutation in speeches over 100 times, from his 1832 “Communication to the People of Sangamo County” to a response to a serenade in the last week of his life. His use of the phrase may have been most pronounced during his eleven-day journey to Washington, DC., after he left Springfield as president-elect in February 1861. Lincoln gave over 100 speeches during the trip, addressing crowds gathered at train stations, state capitol buildings, and hotels. He would greet those crowds with different salutations, most often using “fellow citizens.” In one speech in Pittsburgh, he used the phrase seven times in his brief talk. It’s not clear what Lincoln meant when he addressed his “fellow citizens.” Who were they? 

In one speech at the steps of the capitol in Columbus, Ohio—the only occasion in his journey to Washington Lincoln used the word “citizenship”—he remarked, “Judging from what I see, I infer that that reception was one without party distinction, and one of entire kindness—one that had nothing in it beyond a feeling of the citizenship of the United States of America.” Lincoln was suggesting the members of the assembly were joined together by a sense of community, a sense of national identity.

The salutation Lincoln used almost as often on his 1861 journey to Washington was “ladies and gentlemen.” Did he see any difference between those two greetings? Were women also citizens? Lincoln was clear that women had no serious role to play in the ongoing drama over secession through his acceptance of traditional gender roles. When he took the train to Washington, his brief remarks to the gathered crowds at each stop invariably mentioned that many ladies were there to see him but he had “decidedly the best of the bargain.” He told the crowd at Painesville, Ohio there were few instances at such stops where he had seen “so many good-looking ladies.” Lincoln regretted not being able to give a speech in Newark, Ohio because it deprived him of “addressing the many fair ladies assembled.” 

In Cincinnati, Lincoln expressed pro-immigration views he had held as a Whig in the 1840s when he addressed a committee representing German workers. The chair of the committee first spoke of workingmen as the basis of all governments and Lincoln happily agreed with those sentiments, “not only of the native born citizens, but also of the Germans and foreigners from other countries,” of whom he said, “I esteem them no better than other people, nor any worse.” When he saw “a people borne down by the weight of their shackles,” Lincoln added, he didn’t want to make their life any worse. He wanted to do all he could “to raise the yoke.” Since the United States was “extensive and new and the countries of Europe were densely populated,” Lincoln welcomed “any abroad who desire to make this the land of their adoption.”

In Philadelphia, Lincoln was the most philosophical. Filled with “deep emotion” at Independence Hall, the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Lincoln declared all the political sentiments he held “originated, and were given to the world from the hall in which we stand.” Lincoln affirmed he never had “a feeling politically that did not spring from the Declaration. The Declaration of Independence was about more than separating from England, it gave “hope to the world for all future time.” While Lincoln never expressly mentioned slavery in any of these 100 speeches, in Philadelphia, he added an antislavery message when he noted the Declaration’s “promise in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” A reporter for the New York Daily Herald wondered what Lincoln meant: “Does the President elect speak of ‘men’ in the aggregate as a nation or a community aspiring to nationality, or does he refer to man in his individual capacity—white, red, yellow or black?” Based upon Lincoln’s 1858 senate campaign speeches, the reporter concluded Lincoln “means the individual man,” and Lincoln’s interpretation of the Declaration “puts the white and the black on the same footing of natural equality.” Lincoln’s notion that “the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men” meant “nothing more nor less than the progressive steps of African emancipation.”

While Lincoln called for all men to have an equal chance, he didn’t mean all men should have equal rights or all men should be citizens. The New York reporter astutely observed that Lincoln believed white and black people should be “on the same footing of natural equality.” Lincoln attacked slavery because it denied the natural rights of black people; however, he didn’t yet believe black people were entitled to equal rights of citizenship.  
 
The Meanings of Citizenship
            
Citizenship was a developing concept in antebellum America. In 1862, Edward Bates, Lincoln’s attorney general, lamented the lack of a “clear and satisfactory definition of the phrase Citizen of the United States.” During Lincoln’s lifetime, citizenship was sometimes seen as reciprocal duties of allegiance and protection. Military service would loom large as an obligation of citizenship. Citizenship was also tied to rights; this is how most Americans today view citizenship—as the “right to have rights.” But Lincoln and many of his contemporaries divided rights into distinct categories. The most basic rights were natural rights—the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Lincoln consistently said black people were entitled to their natural rights. Civil rights consisted of legal entitlements “essential to pursuing a livelihood and protecting one’s personal security”; they included such rights as owning property and going to court. Political rights included voting and holding office. Voting was becoming emblematic of citizenship but some states, including Illinois, allowed non-citizens to vote.

At its most basic level, though, citizenship is about membership in a political community. The crucial questions Lincoln and others asked were these: who belongs and who doesn’t belong in this political community? 

This book explores what citizenship meant to Lincoln at different times in his political career. For most of his career, it was clear to Lincoln that white males were members of this community. Women and racialized others were not.
 
In the first chapter, I examine Lincoln’s 1836 call for “admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms, (by no means excluding females).” This was a peculiar statement. For one thing, by limiting suffrage to taxpayers and militia members Lincoln was calling for a rollback from universal white male suffrage, which had existed in Illinois since it became a state in 1818. For another, allowing taxpayers to vote would have given some women voting rights, which Lincoln expressly recognized. When Lincoln entered politics, women were not members of any political community in the United States. Lincoln may have been carried away by an odd combination of Whig conservatism and a legalistic formalism he had imbued from the legal treatises he was reading as he prepared for the bar. Suffrage was an issue in 1836—and 1840—because Whigs wanted to capitalize on Martin Van Buren’s support for limited black suffrage at the 1821 New York constitutional convention. 

I examine Lincoln’s disdain for nativism in the second chapter. In the 1840s and 1850s, Lincoln addressed another aspect of citizenship—whether immigrants belonged to the political community. Nativists in the 1840s and 1850s questioned whether recent immigrants belonged in the American polity and suggested longer periods for naturalization and for suffrage. Lincoln believed all male European immigrants belonged to this community; he thought the Declaration of Independence provided basic values that defined what it meant to be an American and that unified all those who believed in its ideals. Since citizenship was essentially creedal, Lincoln rejected the anti-immigrant nativism common in the antebellum North.

In the 1840s, Lincoln joined with other Whigs in restricting voting rights to citizens. It was a move contrary to the 1818 Illinois Constitution, which didn’t link voting to citizenship—a non-citizen only had to reside in the state for six months in order to vote. Alien suffrage, for a time, somehow coexisted with the notion that voting was the most important attribute of citizenship. The Whig platform followed the idea put forth in the 1839 Law Dictionary, in which John Bouvier, a naturalized citizen, defined citizen as “one who, under the constitution and laws of the United States, has a right to vote for representatives in Congress, and other public officers, and who is qualified to fill offices in the gift of the people.”

In chapter three, I discuss Lincoln’s support for the Illinois Black Laws and colonization. Lincoln, for most of his adult life, could not imagine African Americans belonging to the political community of the United States. He supported the “Black Laws” of Illinois that prohibited blacks from voting, serving on juries, or testifying in court against a white man. Lincoln never wavered in this support. His understanding of the Declaration of Independence led Lincoln to antislavery convictions, but those antislavery convictions only went so far. In Illinois, Lincoln wasn’t an abolitionist. Rejecting both slavery and black citizenship, Lincoln chose what was then considered the “moderate” path of colonization. Black citizenship and colonization were antithetical. Black citizenship would mean black people belonged to the political community; colonization meant blacks didn’t even physically belong in the United States.

The most notorious antebellum discussion of black citizenship was Chief Justice Roger Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott. Taney wrote that black people couldn’t be citizens of the United States because they were “beings of an inferior order” with “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Lincoln’s responses to Dred Scott are the subject of chapter four. His initial reaction was an answer to Stephen Douglas’s speech on the case in which Douglas presented a nightmare scenario of racial equality that was averted by the Supreme Court. Lincoln, like Douglas, focused his attention on Taney’s holding on citizenship. Lincoln argued that Taney was wrong on the history of black citizenship during the founding era. Lincoln’s emphasis on the citizenship holding was unusual for a politician who didn’t support black citizenship. It’s likely that, as a lawyer, Lincoln couldn’t help himself as that part of Taney’s opinion was particularly weak.

In 1858 Lincoln ran against Douglas for a seat in the United States Senate. Douglas predictably attacked Lincoln and his fellow Republicans for their support of black citizenship. Lincoln didn’t continue his earlier attack on Taney’s holding on citizenship. Instead he reaffirmed his opposition to black citizenship. Douglas continued to press Lincoln on this point and Lincoln continued to disclaim any support for “making voters or jurors out of negroes.” Lincoln did consistently argue that blacks were entitled to natural rights. Lincoln’s stances on blacks having natural rights but not citizenship rights were the mainstream Republican views before the Civil War. 

In the last chapter, I argue that Lincoln supported large-scale colonization schemes for the first two years of his presidency. Lincoln publicly advocated for colonization in his annual messages to Congress in 1861 and 1862 and in his lecture to a “deputation of Negroes” in August 1862. But after a fruitless scheme intended for Chiriquí in Central America and an ill-fated project in Haiti, Lincoln gave up on large-scale colonization schemes. He never publicly mentioned colonization after his annual message in December 1862. I further argue that Lincoln slowly warmed to the idea of black citizenship. He changed his mind about black men’s capacity for citizenship because of the record of black troops. Lincoln initially had resisted the enlistment of black troops not only because of political considerations but because he thought black men lacked manly virtues like bravery. He was disabused of that notion. Lincoln also was encouraged by his meetings with Frederick Douglass and other black leaders at the White House. In his last public address, Lincoln discussed black suffrage in Louisiana and suggested the “elective franchise” be “conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.”
 
A Note on the N-Word
 
In this book, I quote Lincoln and others using the N-word. Sadly, that seems unavoidable in a book about Abraham Lincoln and citizenship. In the course of my research, the word showed up a lot, mostly in the issues of the Sangamo Journalduring the elections of 1836 and 1840 when Lincoln and other Whigs used race-baiting attacks against Martin Van Buren; during the senate campaign of 1858 when both Lincoln and Douglas used the word in campaign speeches and Democrats and Republicans freely used the term “nigger equality”; and during the Civil War when white Northerners debated the use of black troops and emancipation. I have tried to be careful about the word’s use. Its appearances aren’t gratuitous. 

The use of the N-word by white Americans during Lincoln’s time was racist. Scholars agree that the word “was a seminal anti-black term that gained virulence as a slur in the 1820s and 1830s.” David Walker observed in 1829 that “white Americans have applied this term to Africans, by way of reproach for our colour, to aggravate and heighten our miseries, because they have their feet on our throats.” Hosea Easton in 1837 explained that the word was an opprobrious term, “employed to impose contempt upon them as an inferior race, and also to express their deformity of person.” Historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor notes the white use of the epithet inscribed “black people as un-American”; whites used the epithet “to pose black citizenship as unimaginable.”