Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln Vol. II, 1849-1856 (2) - Softcover

Sidney Blumenthal is the acclaimed author of A Self-Made Man and Wrestling with His Angel, the first two volumes in his five-volume biography, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton. He has been a national staff reporter for The Washington Post and Washington editor and writer for The New Yorker. His books include the bestselling The Clinton Wars, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, and The Permanent Campaign. Born and raised in Illinois, he lives in Washington, DC.

Wrestling With His Angel CHAPTER ONE

WHITE NEGROES

The cholera bacteria that invades the intestines from feces-contaminated water racks the body with symptoms of severe diarrhea and vomiting, producing rapid dehydration, as well as circulatory failure, and usually swift and sudden death. A British medical researcher, John Snow, discovered the origin of the disease in 1854 and prescribed preventive hand washing, water boiling, and linen cleaning, but his work failed to receive notice. Only in 1884, when a German microbe hunter, Robert Koch, traced the bacillus to the Ganges River in India, was the cure finally realized. But its source and cure were unknown in 1849 when an epidemic swept the country and its shadow fell that summer on Lexington, Kentucky, before moving on to claim the life of President Zachary Taylor. After forty people in the town died in a single day, at the suggestion of scientists at nearby Transylvania University cannons were fired at regular intervals to rattle the atmosphere and somehow drive the disease away. Smoky oil lamps were lit on the streets night and day. The mayor issued a proclamation for a day of fasting “to fervently implore the Almighty for the arrest of the step of the Angel of Death.” Most of the affluent of the town fled to the countryside. But bacteria were indifferent to prestige. The most influential Kentuckian, Senator Henry Clay, and his wife, Lucretia, caught the disease, but survived. His lifelong political ally and business partner, Robert S. Todd, shuttling back and forth from his summer estate, Buena Vista, kept up campaign appearances in his race for the State Senate, but after one speech was overcome with exhaustion and chills, suffered the horrible telltale signs of cholera, and died on July 16.



Cassius Marcellus Clay

Todd managed to write his last will and testament, but it was signed by only one witness, therefore invalid, forcing his widow to sell and divide all his property. He also left unresolved a major lawsuit against Robert Wickliffe, his old antagonist and one of the most powerful men in Kentucky. The Todd heirs, who included Mary Todd Lincoln, designated Abraham Lincoln as an attorney to help sort out the tangled affair. Forty years old, he had just completed his one term in the House of Representatives. Despite his lobbying he had failed to secure a federal patronage post as commissioner of the Land Office and returned to Springfield to resume his law practice. He had run continuously for political office since his first campaign for the Illinois state legislature in 1832, but his political prospects now seemed dim. If he won the suit, however, he and Mary would receive a sizable share of the fortune and overnight become wealthy. Lincoln would handle hundreds of law cases over the next decade, but Todd Heirs v. Wickliffe was undoubtedly the most important in the development of his thought on the fundamental question of slavery and its political power. The suit, ostensibly about an inheritance, was the latest wrinkle in a power struggle over slavery in Kentucky that lasted more than two decades.

In 1833, after three years of debate, the Kentucky General Assembly enacted the Non-Importation Act, heavily fining those who brought slaves into the state for sale. The bill’s sponsors intended to create conditions that would lead to gradual emancipation. Kentucky’s limitation on slavery, effectively freezing the expansion of its black population and depriving slave owners of a significant profit through an unregulated slave trade, made it the most advanced of the slaveholding states. Henry Clay and Robert S. Todd supported the act. Robert Wickliffe, the largest slave owner and a state senator, was the vociferous leader of the pro-slavery movement, arguing in speeches and pamphlets that the act would destroy “the wealth and capital of the state.” Wickliffe came from a family of early settlers, studied law with George Nicholas, the state’s first attorney general, was appointed U.S. attorney in 1805, married a wealthy heiress who owned the largest plantation in central Kentucky, and after she died married another wealthy heiress, a Todd cousin. His brother Charles was a pro-slavery Whig, passionately hostile to Clay, and served as a congressman, governor, and postmaster general under President John Tyler. Perhaps because Robert Wickliffe’s origins were humble, accused of marrying into money, and had made his own fortune as a land speculator, giving him the patina of a parvenu, he cultivated a self-consciously courtly manner and did not discourage people from referring to him as the “Old Duke.”

One of the chief supporters of the Non-Importation Act was Robert Jefferson Breckinridge, member of the legislature and son of John Breckinridge, who as the U.S. senator from Kentucky had been President Thomas Jefferson’s floor leader and then his attorney general. John Breckinridge had shepherded passage through the state legislature of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 against the Alien and Sedition Acts. Written by Jefferson, along with the Virginia Resolutions, they became foundational documents of the Democratic Party. Despite John Breckinridge’s unease, the Kentucky Resolutions included an article that advocated a state’s right to nullify federal policy. John Breckinridge’s son was given the middle name of “Jefferson” at Jefferson’s suggestion. As heir to one of the Democratic Party’s founders, Robert Jefferson Breckinridge’s party politics developed into a family heresy, beginning with his election as a state legislator aligned with Clay and those who became Whigs. When Calhoun seized upon nullification, citing the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions as justification, Breckinridge rejected the doctrine root and branch.



Robert Wickliffe

Wickliffe had been his father’s lawyer. But when John Breckinridge died, young Breckinridge dismissed Wickliffe from handling the family estate, accusing him of fraud. Wickliffe hurled the charge back. In 1830, Breckinridge published a pamphlet, Hints on Slavery, a seminal document in the Kentucky antislavery movement, a point-by-point rebuttal of Wickliffe’s pro-slavery position. “Domestic slavery cannot exist forever,” he wrote, despite being a slaveholder. “It cannot exist long quiet and unbroken, in any condition of society, or under any form of government. It may terminate in various ways; but terminate it must.” At a meeting of the Female Colonization Society in Lexington, Wickliffe declared that he favored colonization to Africa only as a means to strengthen the relationship between master and slave by exporting “free persons of color.” Breckinridge heatedly replied that the true purpose of colonization was to further the cause of emancipation, benefiting the white race by freeing it of the sin and burden of slavery. Wickliffe retaliated by tarnishing Breckinridge’s reputation as an “abolitionist” and wrecking his political career. Breckinridge withdrew from running again for office, declaring he would not “submit” to those who had “excited prejudices.” He became one of the country’s leading Presbyterian ministers, waging a holy war against slavery and Wickliffe. They were just beginning their duel.

With the passage of the Non-Importation Act, it appeared that the antislavery movement was gaining traction, prompting James G. Birney before founding the Liberty Party to suggest that Kentucky was “the best site in our whole country for taking a stand against slavery.” Momentum grew for a new constitutional convention that would enact a plan for gradual emancipation. Wickliffe was relentless in his efforts to block the convention and overturn the Non-Importation Act, or “the Negro Law,” as he preferred to call it. It represented, he said, “the surrender of the country to the negroes.” After the emergence of the militant abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison in the mid-1830s, opinion sharply shifted against the antislavery movement. Henry Clay, once an advocate of a constitutional convention, carefully calculated the political winds as he charted his presidential ambition, opposing a constitutional convention, not because he loved slavery but because he loathed abolitionists. In 1838, in a referendum, Kentuckians voted overwhelmingly against a convention. “The effect,” said Clay, “has been to dissipate all prospects whatever, for the present, of any scheme of gradual or other emancipation.” And he cast the blame on abolitionists.

Breckinridge joined in denouncing abolitionists, as “the most despicable and odious men on the face of the earth” and “public enemies” who advocated the “heresy” of racial “amalgamation”—“a base, spurious, degraded mixture, hardly less revolting than revolution.” He consistently spoke of his hatred of slavery as a way to protect the white race. In 1836, he traveled to Glasgow to debate the English abolitionist George Thompson. Insisting on his antislavery credentials and agreeing that blacks possessed “natural rights,” Breckinridge professed that “God had kept several races of men distinct” and depicted Africans as “sitting in darkness and drinking blood.” The Manifest Destiny of American slaves, he revealed, was to be Westernized and colonized back to their native continent. But Thompson censured “a nation of slaveholders” ruled by “the aristocracy of skin.”

Into the vacuum on the antislavery side stepped the strapping Cassius Marcellus Clay, Henry Clay’s younger cousin, who had been converted to the cause as a student at Yale after hearing one of Garrison’s orations. “Cash” Clay, son of one of the richest men in Kentucky, glittering in his lineage, was as born to rule as any pro-slavery planter. Raised in a mansion on one of the largest plantations in the state, he felt no need to defer to anybody. After his own family, he was most closely attached to the Todds. He was Mary’s childhood playmate, lived in the Todd house when his dormitory at Transylvania University burned, and married one of the best friends of the Todd sisters, Mary Jane Warfield. In his closeness to the family, he was like a Todd brother.

Cash’s arguments were as imposing as his burly physical presence. He was as vehement in his opinions and turbulent in their defense as any of his fervent opponents. He believed that slavery shackled free labor by driving down wages, making mechanics and farmers virtual slaves, and crippling commerce and manufacturing. In 1840, he ran for the state legislature against “Old Duke” Wickliffe’s son, Robert Wickliffe, Jr., known as the “Young Duke.” “I declare, then, in the face of all men,” Cash announced, “that I believe slavery to be an evil—an evil morally, economically, physically, intellectually, socially, religiously, politically . . . an unmixed evil.” The Old Duke fired back that Cash was trying to “get up a war between the slaveholders and the non-slaveholders,” and was an “orator of inquisitors, the enemy of Lexington, a secret personal foe, an agitator without spirit, a liar systematically, and an abolitionist at heart.” But Cash won the election handily.

He ran again the next year, ignoring the friendly counsel of Henry Clay that he would lose and should stand down. Cash’s followers, “the boys” he called them, paraded through Lexington in a torchlight parade, “and the slave-party imitated our example.” On April 24, he debated the Young Duke. Cash assailed his opponent’s father while young Wickliffe called Cash an “abolitionist” for advocating a Northern style economy—and mentioned his wife, grounds for a challenge to a duel.

Sheer acts of violence and duels of honor were a tragic Wickliffe tradition. In 1829, when the liberal editor of the Kentucky Gazette, Thomas Benning, heaped abuse on the Old Duke for his pro-slavery conservatism, Wickliffe’s eldest son, Charles, went to the newspaper office and shot him in the back. Charles Wickliffe hired Henry Clay as his counsel and he was acquitted for acting in self-defense. When the Gazette published an editorial criticizing the judgment as the result of a “packed and perjured jury,” Charles challenged the new editor, James George Trotter, once a childhood friend, to a duel. After both men missed, Charles insisted on a second round, and was shot dead. Harassed for years by the Old Duke and his allies, paranoid that he would be murdered, Trotter wound up in the Lexington Lunatic Asylum.

When Cassius Clay and the Young Duke met across the Ohio River in Indiana for their duel, they stood ten paces apart and fired three times, each shot missing. (Wickliffe’s second was Albert Sidney Johnston, a relative by marriage and Transylvania classmate of Jefferson Davis, who would become a leading Confederate general, killed at Shiloh.) “No apology was made on either side, and no reconciliation was proposed,” wrote Cash, “and we left the ground enemies, as we came.” One observer remarked that no blood was shed, though bad blood remained. Cash lost the election and accused Wickliffe and his allies of stealing it. “The upshot was, that I was victor in the legal votes, but beaten by unfair judges and corrupt methods.” He proclaimed he had lost because he had “turned traitor to slavery!” Though he would never win another race, he had gained a devoted following that acted as his “compact body of personal friends,” “laboring men mostly,” men like Thomas Lincoln, Lincoln’s Kentuckian father who fled the slave state, and others who were roused by Cash Clay’s statements against their oppression: “Every slave imported drives out a free and independent Kentuckian,” and, “The day is come, or coming, when every white must work for the wages of the slave.” Despite his militant rhetoric he opposed immediate emancipation, denounced abolitionists like Garrison as “fanatics,” equating them with “fanatic” slave owners, believed the Constitution protected slavery in the states, thought blacks were naturally an inferior race that should not be granted equal rights, and favored gradual measures. Even so, he was perched on the far edge of opinion in Kentucky. Nobody, except perhaps Robert J. Breckinridge, was more hated by the Wickliffes and the pro-slavery forces than Cassius Clay. They hated him because he was a traitor to his class incapable of being intimidated, for his insurrectionary appeals to white non-slave-owners, his utterly Southern claim to honor and open contempt for their dishonor, and willingness to meet violence with violence.

In the next contest for the congressional seat in the district, in 1843, Robert Wickliffe, Jr., the Young Duke, stood against Garrett Davis, the Whig candidate, a thoroughgoing regular, not an antislavery man, who had been endorsed by Henry Clay and Robert Todd. Wickliffe’s campaign consisted of a stunt. He read a letter purporting to prove that his Whig opponent had gerrymandered the district in his favor, but carefully did not share the reply of the supposed letter writer emphatically protesting that the original document was “a damned lie.” Cassius Clay took it upon himself to stalk Wickliffe accompanied by his working-class entourage. On August 1, when the Young Duke spoke in a town square without Davis being present, Clay interrupted his reading of the letter. “Mr. Wickliffe,” he shouted, ...