One
THE COMPROMISE CONSTITUTION
Abraham Lincoln’s early biography epitomizes the most powerful energy pulsing through the new republic: the energy of expansion. His grandfather, the Revolutionary War captain Abraham Lincoln, for whom he was named, was born in Pennsylvania and as a young man moved to Virginia, then the population center and political powerhouse of the newly formed United States. In 1781, the War of Independence not yet over, the first Abraham Lincoln moved his family to Jefferson County, Kentucky.
Claimed by the state of Virginia, and not yet a state of its own, Kentucky was the Western frontier. It was contested territory, still peopled by American Indians protecting their own homes. And on that frontier, Captain Lincoln met a fate not unknown to settlers who propose to take land from its inhabitants: he was killed during a raid by a Native American who, according to family tradition, was himself shot on the spot by the captain’s eldest son, Mordecai. Eight-year-old Thomas Lincoln, the captain’s youngest son—Abraham’s father—saw it all.
Thomas grew up in Kentucky, married Nancy Hanks, and had three children, one of whom, also named Thomas, died shortly after birth. He repeatedly saved money and bought property to establish a farm. But each time, he was thwarted by the uncertain land titles that were common in Kentucky, where there had never been a single, agreed-upon land survey that could have definitively established boundaries and ownership. Thomas Lincoln lost three farms in legal disputes, a direct consequence of the piecemeal way that the Kentucky frontier had been occupied and settled. In December 1816, when Abraham Lincoln was nine, Thomas moved the family westward into southern Indiana, to a community called Little Pigeon Creek.
The Lincolns lived in Indiana for fourteen years. They did not prosper. Two years after their arrival, Lincoln’s mother, Nancy, died of milk sickness. This was a distinctly frontier settlement form of poisoning: domesticated cows would eat the white snakeroot plant that grew wild in the Ohio River Valley and then produce milk containing the fatal toxin tremetol. Thomas went back to Kentucky to court and marry Sarah Bush Johnston, bringing her and her three children to join the Lincolns in Indiana. Abraham Lincoln grew up in penury, working hard from an early age to help keep the family from financial ruin.
The solution to economic hardship in Indiana was another move west. On March 6, 1830, when Abraham Lincoln was twenty-one, his family crossed the Wabash River from Indiana into Illinois. Admitted as a state twelve years earlier, Illinois lay at the edge of the country. Only Missouri extended farther west. Working together, Lincoln, his father, and a dozen relatives cleared trees, built a log cabin, and split rails to fence in ten acres of ground.
DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI
The Lincoln family’s steady generational movement from Pennsylvania to Virginia to Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois mirrored the comparably gradual progress of white settlers westward. As a young man, Lincoln took two trips down the Mississippi by flatboat to New Orleans—in 1828 and 1831. These journeys showed a different direction of expansion: south, through the territory acquired in 1803 in the Louisiana Purchase.
Lincoln’s trips downriver are frequently discussed in modern biographies because they exposed Lincoln firsthand to the phenomenon of African slavery, which was common in Kentucky, where he was born, but not in Indiana or Illinois, where he grew up and lived as a young man. New Orleans, Lincoln’s destination on both trips, featured the largest slave markets anywhere in North America. Our first glimpses of Lincoln’s attitude toward slavery do indeed emerge in connection with the flatboat journeys.
But the boat trips also introduced Lincoln to the riverine geography that shaped the structure of the economy in states like Illinois and Missouri—and thus to the underlying logic of the compromise Constitution. The produce of those central states—and of Indiana and Kentucky—flowed down the Mississippi to New Orleans. From there it could be distributed to the South, to markets along the Eastern Seaboard all the way north, and abroad to the Caribbean and Europe. The north-to-south flow of the river gave shape to the direction of commerce, and hence to the flow of wealth. Andrew Jackson’s victory over the British in New Orleans at the tail end of the War of 1812 had guaranteed American control over the port and consolidated the growth of the United States on both sides of the Mississippi by ensuring free shipping. Expansion west would not have been economically viable had it not been for the outlet to the South where the agricultural products of the frontier could be sent and sold. The maintenance of the delicate balance of states for this project of expansion had come to be the real-world function of the Constitution.
The flatboats on which Lincoln made his two journeys were themselves artifacts of the geography of expansion—and of the way rivers defined reality in the early United States. Some eighty feet long and seventeen feet wide, according to the scholar who has spent the most time reconstructing the journey, the flatboat for Lincoln’s first trip was almost certainly built by hand by Lincoln and his friend Allen Gentry, whose father, James Gentry, paid for the materials and employed Lincoln at a rate of eight dollars a month. The timber would have been cut down near the spot where the boat was to be built—Rockport, Indiana, in the case of the 1828 trip. The second time, in 1831, Lincoln and his cousin John Hanks built the boat at Sangamo Town, Illinois.
A flatboat was an unusual type of vessel: purpose-built for one long trip out of materials available where the trip started. It required no specialized shipbuilding skills, because there were no specialized shipbuilders on the frontier. Instead, its construction could be accomplished by anyone who possessed the general carpentry skills of a frontier resident—like the young Lincoln.
Most notably, the flatboat had no sail or engine. It was steered by a single sixty-foot oar, or “streamer,” and two side oars known as “sweeps.” Strictly speaking, none of these oars propelled the boat, except over very short distances. The energy to take the eighty-foot craft a distance of 1,300 miles would come almost entirely from the current, itself a product of gravity, as the rivers flowed downhill. Of those miles, more than a thousand were traveled on the great Mississippi, the river whose course shaped the history of the United States more than any other single geographical feature.
The contents of the flatboats also told a story. On Lincoln’s first trip, the aim was to bring produce to market in New Orleans. James Gentry was a farmer with a thousand acres of land, but most of the produce was not his. Gentry also owned a store and controlled a river landing on the Ohio River. The produce came from other farmers nearby, who traded what they grew for goods from Gentry’s store. Cash was scarce on the frontier, and barter was the common solution. By bringing what was grown along the Ohio River to New Orleans and selling it for cash, Gentry would be injecting currency into the Indiana economy.
On Lincoln’s second trip downriver, the flatboat he built was outfitted to carry livestock—mostly hogs raised in Illinois, which had to be fed and tended during the long trip. Like the produce, the hogs represented the contribution that the frontier economy made to markets in the South and beyond. Of course, produce could be grown and livestock raised closer to New Orleans. But the climate there, as in the rest of the Gulf Coast and the Deep South, made it more profitable to grow cotton, which could not be profitably grown north of the Piedmont.
The way to make money in the old Northwest Territory—the area between the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and the Ohio River—was by clearing land, settling it, and farming it. The value of produce on the frontier depended on getting it downriver to the port of New Orleans. Before navigational improvements and canals allowed steamboats to travel from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi and then all the way to New Orleans, flatboats like Lincoln’s were the crucial link along the artery that defined the economy of the Northwest.
As a product of northern Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, Lincoln lacked direct experience of slavery before his two trips downriver. He also lacked, then and later, direct personal relationships with African Americans. What he saw and experienced on his flatboat trips south would shape his thinking in the future, but perhaps no more—and maybe less—than the fact that he had grown up in a milieu that was almost exclusively white.
The reason slavery did not flourish in the places Lincoln lived was partly economic and partly ideological. When the original thirteen states had been British colonies, slavery was legally permitted in all of them. It gradually became clear, however, that the economics of slavery would mean great profits for slaveholders primarily in states where labor-intensive cash crops—as opposed to produce for daily consumption—could be grown on a large scale and sold on the global market. Tobacco in Virginia is the most famous example from the early years of the republic; rice in South Carolina is another from the same period.
In states without cash-crop economies, moral opposition to slavery gradually drove legislatures to outlaw the practice. It is important to emphasize the gradual nature of abolition. Many states outlawed slavery by making the future-born children of existing slaves into indentured servants, keeping their parents in an enslaved status. In New York, for example, whites held slaves for household service through the revolutionary period, and in New York City slaves may have numbered high as 20 percent of the population. In 1799, New York State passed a law mandating gradual abolition, but complete abolition did not follow until 1827.
In the states where slavery on a large scale was economically valuable, the ideology of abolition never made major inroads. That is one reason to believe that economic logic was the determinative factor in the persistence of the practice. Moral beliefs and ideology mattered, to be sure—but they were given the scope to influence real-world legislation only when economic interest permitted it.
Several of the most influential framers of the Constitution, including Southerners, accepted the immorality of slavery. James Madison is an outstanding example. A Virginian slaveholder his entire life, he simultaneously acknowledged the human impulse to freedom. Writing to his father in 1783 about a slave called Billey, Madison explained that he could not “think of punishing” Billey by selling him to the Deep South or the Caribbean “merely for coveting that liberty for which we have paid the price of so much blood, and have proclaimed so often to be the right, and worthy pursuit, of every human being.”1 Madison, that is, recognized liberty as a fundamental human right. Yet his entire livelihood, and the entire structure of his daily existence, depended on the institution of slavery—and he was unable or unwilling to resolve the contradiction. Economic reality trumped moral intuitions.
Madison and other Virginians, including Thomas Jefferson, slaveholder and lead author of the Declaration of Independence, did have a story to tell themselves about how the contradiction at the heart of their worldview might someday be resolved: they expected that slavery would gradually be abolished as it gradually ceased to be economically beneficial anywhere, including the South. Implausible as it may sound now, that belief was not entirely groundless when the Constitution was drafted in 1787 and ratified two years later. The Virginia tobacco crop was already beginning to lose its profitability in the late eighteenth century, mostly as a result of soil exhaustion. Neither Madison nor Jefferson, both proprietors of large plantations, ever made much of a profit from the agriculture they practiced with the labor of enslaved persons. Indeed, both before and after their presidencies, the two men struggled to make ends meet at their plantations, despite the fact that both took a scientific interest in land management. Both understood that the rise of manufacturing would eventually transform the U.S. economy, and that it would not favor the employment of slave labor.
An epoch-making technological innovation thwarted the framers’ expectations: the invention of the cotton gin, or “engine,” patented by Eli Whitney in 1794. Although mechanical separation processes had previously been developed for long-staple cotton, Whitney’s machine sped up the process of separating usable fibers from useless seeds for short-staple cotton, which (unlike the long-staple variety) could be grown inland, far from the sea.2 In a single technological stroke, the cotton gin made cotton growing into a highly profitable enterprise throughout the huge swath of the North American continent that would come to be called the Cotton Belt—profitable, that is, if the intensive labor of picking the cotton could be performed by slaves who were not paid wages for their work.
Growing cotton exhausted the soil quickly. One solution was to let the land rest by planting beans or other legumes; another was to fertilize extensively. The easier and often cheaper solution was for growers to move to lands newly taken from Native Americans, bringing enslaved people to do the labor. From South Carolina and Georgia, where almost all American cotton was grown as late as 1811, cultivation expanded westward to Alabama and Louisiana, and then to Mississippi, Arkansas, and eventually Texas.3 By 1820, a third of U.S. cotton was grown west of Georgia; by 1860, the proportion had grown to three-quarters.4 The upshot was that national westward expansion became a necessary condition for continuing cotton-growing profits—a land rush driven by a “military-cotton complex” that, as the historian Sven Beckert has argued, “constantly pushed the boundaries” of the United States, “seeking fresh lands to grow cotton.”5 In the middle of the nineteenth century, fully two-thirds of U.S. cotton was growing on land that had not been part of the country when the century began.6
Once the cotton gin changed the economics of slavery, the ideology of abolition came to have a more limited scope for its operation. In places where large-scale slavery remained economically inefficient, abolitionism had opportunities to enact its objective into law. Where cotton grew, however—or where it might grow in the future—the odds of abolition gaining many white adherents were vanishingly small.
Kentucky, where Lincoln was born, was a state divided into very different cultural and economic zones. In the Bluegrass region, climate and culture resembled those of the Southern states, and slavery flourished. Where Lincoln was born, in a log cabin at Sinking Springs Farm, on what was then the Kentucky frontier, slavery existed only on a small scale. There were few African Americans, and we have no record that the young Lincoln met or knew anyone of color in the Knob Creek Valley where he lived until the age of seven. Abolitionists found a toehold, and in 1815 and 1833 the state passed laws barring the importation of slaves. Kentucky was too connected to the South for full-on abolition. But its distinctive mixed character meant that the economic realities of slavery and the moral possibilities of abolition were profoundly intertwined.
Indiana, across the Ohio River to the northwest, where Lincoln spent the formative years from age seven to twenty-one, was part of the original Northwest Territory. According to the Northwest Ordinance, adopted by Congress in 1787, “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” was permitted there. Despite the text of the ordinance, some settlers from the South brought slaves with them and continued to hold them in bondage. But slavery at scale was never economically viable in Indiana, where it was not profitable to grow tobacco or cotton. Abolitionists began to campaign even before Indiana’s statehood, and the territorial legislature made it difficult to hold slaves. Indiana became a state in 1816, the same year the Lincolns moved to Little Pigeon Creek. The state’s first constitution made slavery illegal. Lincoln does not seem to have known African Americans when he lived there, either. His neighbors were white settlers, some of whom no doubt retained proslavery sympathies associated with their Southern origins.
In the Illinois that Lincoln encountered when he crossed the Wabash, the situation was roughly similar. Illinois had also been part of the original Northwest Territory, and the Illinois Constitution of 1819 stated that slavery should not be “thereafter introduced.” That amounted to a gradual abolition but did not free slaves who were already being held in the state. Although there were abolitionists in Illinois, there were also many settlers from slave states. Missouri, where slavery was lawful, was right across the river. In 1824, Illinois voters rejected a proposed constitutional convention to formalize total abolition immediately. Only in 1848 did a new state constitution make slavery illegal there. So white were Indiana and Illinois that, in the early 1850s, both would enact legal regulations intended to keep Black people out of their states entirely.7
As Lincoln traveled downriver in 1828 and 1831, he witnessed a geography that changed gradually—and a population that changed with the topography. Just beneath the point where the Ohio River and the Wabash joined lay a mixed community of several hundred Shawnees and free Blacks. (Its name remains unknown.) As the Ohio approached its confluence with the Tennessee River, Lincoln would have seen his first Louisiana cypress.8
The most dramatic point in the journey was where the Ohio met the Mississippi, and the states of Illinois, Kentucky, and Missouri touched. The currents came together dangerously, requiring the boatmen to steer furiously and avoid flipping the flatboat and losing its cargo.9 Symbolically, the flatboat’s entrance into the Mississippi marked the end of the free states of the old Northwest Territory and the beginning of slave territory. As such, the boundary reflected the reality of the Constitution, which enabled states to legalize the enslavement of human beings and protected the property rights of those humans’ “owners.”
Much of the territory that Lincoln passed through in what is now Tennessee and Arkansas was still unsettled by Europeans. Forests dominated both sides of the river. Memphis was a tiny village.10 Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the first significant settlement that the flatboat would encounter. From there to New Orleans, every town had a river landing—and on every river landing were enslaved African Americans, many of them shackled and for sale. The slaves were one part of the economic entrepôt to which Lincoln was contributing the cargo carried on the flatboat. Prices for commodities rose gradually as the flatboat approached the great port city. On both trips, Lincoln and his partners held out and did not sell what they had brought until they got to where the prices would be highest.
Lincoln kept no diary of his trips, and we do not know what he thought about his first encounters with large-scale slavery. Many years later, he would say he had “always hated slavery” and that he was “naturally” against it. Friends would recall that the young Lincoln “was opposed to slavery and said he thought it a curse to the land.”11 Although there is little reason to doubt these claims, the first direct evidence of what Lincoln thought about the human consequences of the institution comes from 1841, a decade after his second trip to New Orleans, when he sent a letter to the half sister of his close friend Joshua Speed in which he described slaves he had seen then who were being transported south by steamboat on the Ohio River. “By the way,” Lincoln wrote almost offhandedly, “a fine example was presented on board the boat for contemplating the effect of condition upon human happiness.” This introduction was focused not on the nature of slavery, but on the psychology of happiness, a topic of perennial interest to the melancholic Lincoln.12 Lincoln went on to offer a remarkably precise description of enslaved people in transit:
A gentleman had purchased twelve negroes in different parts of Kentucky and was taking them to a farm in the South. They were chained six and six together. A small iron clevis was around the left wrist of each, and this was fastened to the main chain by a shorter one at a convenient distance from, the others; so that the negroes were strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line.
Lincoln understood the consequences for these enslaved humans who were being literally sold down the river:
In this condition they were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them, from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery, where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where.
Remarkably, however, Lincoln was fascinated by the slaves’ manner, which seemed to him not melancholy, but quite the opposite:
[A]nd yet amid all these distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparantly happy creatures on board. One, whose offence for which he had been sold was an over-fondness for his wife, played the fiddle almost continually; and the others danced, sung, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards from day to day.
From this Lincoln derived a lesson about character:
How true it is that “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” or in other words, that He renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while He permits the best, to be nothing better than tolerable.13
Some fifteen years after this experience, Lincoln would retell the incident with a different emphasis. “You may remember, as I well do,” he wrote to Joshua Speed, “that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were, on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave-border.”14
By then, as the historian Eric Foner has pointed out, political circumstances had changed drastically. Lincoln’s views on slavery had evolved to become more critical. Referring to the effect of the “fugitive slave clause” of the Constitution, he told Speed in the same letter, “I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, and unrewarded toils.” Yet at the same time, Lincoln in 1855 still accepted the constitutional structures that protected slavery as necessary to preserve the union. He objected morally to the recapture of fugitive slaves, he said, “but I bite my lip and keep quiet”15—because silence was the price of union. In any case, regardless of the emotions they conjured, the observations that Lincoln made whenever he was on the river or in a slave state were initiated on these first trips south.
Copyright © 2021 by Noah Feldman
