I.
Abraham Lincoln was, for most of his political career,
a highly partisan Whig. As long as the Whig Party existed,
he never supported the candidate of another party. Until
the late 1850s, his chief political heroes were Whigs,
above all Henry Clay, whom he said he “loved and
revered as a teacher and leader.” Even after the
Whigs disintegrated, Lincoln bragged that he “had
stood by the party as long as it had a being.”
1
Yet we care about Lincoln not because he was a Whig
but because he became a Republican—which marks
him as a particular kind of Whig. Unlike the more conservative
of the Whigs, he was affected by democratic ideas and
practices that shaped the mainstream of both of the
major parties of the 1830s and 1840s. And with his conversion
to the Republicans, he declared himself an inveterate
foe of the Slave Power, at odds with the minority of
northern Whigs and the majority of southern Whigs who
chose a very different political course in the 1850s.
2
After 1854, Lincoln also mingled, as he had not previously,
with dissident, antislavery, former Jacksonian Democrats.
In this milieu, where fragments of old party ideologies
recombined to form a new Republican whole, Lincoln found
himself attracted, as never before, to Thomas Jefferson’s
egalitarian pronouncements -- but also, curiously, to
some of the words, ideas, and actions of Andrew Jackson.
II.
Having come of age in the 1820s, Lincoln, a paragon
of the self-made man, upheld certain democratic precepts
which distinguished his generation from that of the
Founders, and which Whigs of his more liberal persuasion
shared with the Jacksonians. One historian has described
these precepts as a cultural as well as political
fact—a “fraternal democracy,” rooted
in the male worlds of government and the law, which
emphasized comradeship, equality, and expressiveness,
including expressiveness on the political stump. “Lincoln
seemed to put himself at once on an equality with
everybody,” one of his law partners said.3
Lincoln linked his democratic sensibilities directly
to matters of political organization and policy. Mistrust
of professional political organization, which persisted
among the Whigs into the 1850s, made little sense
to Lincoln in the face of the changed democratic realities
of the 1830s and 1840s. Lincoln repudiated the nativism
and anti-Catholicism that gripped the Whig Party far
more than it did the Democrats. In 1855, he famously
denounced the Know-Nothings, telling Joshua Speed
that, should the nation as a whole ever descend to
their level, he “should prefer emigrating to
some country where they make no pretense of loving
liberty—to Russia, for example, where despotism
can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”4
Lincoln recognized the depth of his differences with
conservative pro-slavery Whigs. Lincoln acidulously
denounced one of these conservative ex-Whigs, Rufus
Choate, when Choate described of the Declaration of
Independence’s opening lines as mere “glittering
generalities” —remarks, Lincoln claimed,
aimed at replacing free government with the principles
of “classification, caste, and legitimacy,”
favored by “crowned heads, plotting against
the people.”5
Indeed, Lincoln sensed that a substantial number of
ex-Jacksonians were friendlier to his antislavery candidacy
for the US Senate against Stephen A. Douglas in 1858
than some of his former fellow Whigs were. “As
a general rule,” he wrote to his physician and
close friend Anson G. Henry, “much of the plain
old democracy is with us, while nearly all of the old
exclusive silk-stocking whiggery is against us.”
Lincoln did not mean that most of the old Whigs opposed
the Republicans – just “nearly all of the
nice exclusive sort.” The “exclusive”
Whig conservatives’ position, Lincoln observed,
made perfect sense: “There has been nothing in
politics since the Revolution so congenial to their
nature, as the present position of the [slaveholder-dominated]
great democratic party.”6
III.
After the enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and the
repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854, Whig principles
were no longer sufficient to address the burning issues
surrounding slavery and slavery’s expansion. Lincoln
and his fellow antislavery Whigs had to find fresh political
bearings. Although, for a time, he may have hoped, like
other liberal Whigs, that the northern remnants of the
Whig party could become the vehicle for national antislavery
politics, those hopes were dashed amid the political firestorm
of 1854. Only the newly emerging fusion of political abolitionists,
free soilers, antislavery Whigs, and defecting, so-called
Independent Democrats— “every true democrat,”
according to one of their number, “that was too
intelligent to be cheated by a name” —contained
the numbers as well as the principles required to beat
back the Southern-dominated Democratic Party and its Northern
doughface allies.
7
Once he joined the Republicans, Lincoln began speaking
and writing about politics and natural rights in new ways.
Before 1854, for example, he hardly ever referred, in
public or private, to the political wisdom of Thomas Jefferson,
widely regarded as a forerunner of the Jacksonian Democratic
Party. Thereafter, though, Lincoln, like many other Republicans,
continually cited Jefferson on equality and the territorial
questions, so much so that at one point, near decade’s
end, Jefferson seemed to have joined Clay as Lincoln’s
beau ideal of an American statesman. (“All honor
to Jefferson,” he wrote in 1859, the figure who
had pronounced “the definitions and axioms of free
society” and whose Declaration of Independence would
forever stand as “a rebuke and a stumbling block
to…re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”)
Lincoln, also like other Republicans, equated his new
party with Jefferson’s original Democratic Republicans,
and likened the slaveholder dominated “so-called
democracy of today” with the Federalist Party of
John Adams. And by the late 1850s, Lincoln was forthright
about how his belief in democracy underpinned his antislavery
views. “As I would not be a
slave, so I
would not be a
master,” he wrote, “This
expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from
this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”
8
IV.
Lincoln’s sudden turn to Jefferson and Jeffersonian
democratic rhetoric was striking, and marked off one phase
of his political career from another. More startling,
were Lincoln’s approving remarks about some of the
ideas and actions of Andrew Jackson. The crises over the
Kansas-Nebraska Act and Bleeding Kansas shifted Lincoln’s
perspective on Jackson’s presidency. Instead of
re-fighting the old issues about banking internal improvements,
and executive power, Lincoln focused on what he considered
Jackson’s commendable handling of sectional extremism.
Jackson’s record made him a more fitting symbol
of defiant nationalism, standing up to the southern slaveholders,
than Lincoln’s Whig hero, the Great Conciliator
Clay. Lincoln seemed to admire Jackson’s steeliness
as well as his patriotism. To a cheering rally of Illinois
Republicans on July 4, 1856, Lincoln noted how, for many
years after the Missouri Compromise, “the people
had lived in comparative peace and quiet,” with
one notable exception: “During Gen. Jackson's administration,
the Calhoun Nullifying doctrine sprang up, but Gen. Jackson,
with that decision of character that ever characterized
him, put an end to it.”
9
Lincoln found Jackson’s precedent particularly compelling
in the aftermath of the
Dred Scott decision of
1857 -- not over slavery or sectionalism
per se,
but over the Supreme Court’s supposed supremacy
in deciding constitutional interpretation. Pro-slavery
southerners hailed Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s
ruling in
Dred Scott as a sacrosanct vindication
of slavery and the Constitution, which repudiated the
entire basis of what they called “Black Republican”
organization. But Lincoln charged that Taney’s ruling
was exceptional, plainly founded on error, at variance
with all precedents, and not at all settled. “We
know that the court that made it,” he declared,
in his first public response to the ruling, “has
often over-ruled its own decisions, and we shall do what
we can to have it to over-rule this.” And in defense
of this peaceful resistance, Lincoln turned to the example
of Andrew Jackson and the Bank War. He quoted at length
from Jackson’s bank veto message of 1832, emphasizing
those passages where Jackson dismissed objections that
the Supreme Court has already proclaimed the Bank constitutional.
The judicial and legislative precedents concerning a national
bank, Jackson said, were divided. Even then, he charged,
“[m]ere precedent is a dangerous source of authority,
and should not be regarded as deciding questions of constitutional
power, except where the acquiescence of the people and
the States can be considered well settled.” In any
event, Lincoln noted, Jackson insisted in his bank veto
message “that each public functionary must support
the Constitution, ‘
as he understands it.’”
10
Lincoln returned to Jackson and the Bank veto during his
campaign debates with Douglas in the late summer and autumn
of 1858. “[A] decision of the court is to him a
‘
Thus saith the Lord,’” he
said of Douglas in Ottawa. “It is nothing that I
point out to him that his great prototype, Gen. Jackson,
did not believe in the binding force of decisions.”
Later, at Galesburg, Douglas replied to Lincoln’s
gibes by noting that Jackson had acceded to the court’s
rulings on the bank until a re-chartering of the bank
was proposed; by contrast, he charged, Lincoln was advocating
disobeying the Court. Lincoln’s retort, delivered
at Quincy, emphasized that, as an equal coordinate branch
of the government, the executive (like the legislature)
had to interpret the Constitution as it saw fit. “I
will tell you here that General Jackson once said each
man was bound to support the Constitution ‘as he
understood it.’ Now, Judge Douglas understands the
Constitution according to the Dred Scott decision, and
he is bound to support it as he understands it. [Cheers.]
I understand it another way, and therefore I am bound
to support it in the way in which I understand it. [Prolonged
applause.]”
11 Honest Abe, for once, sounded
like Old Hickory.
VI.
Less than three years later, as the secession crisis played
itself out in Charleston harbor, reviving memories of
the nullification crisis, Lincoln would have even more
reason to turn to Jackson’s example. “[P]ut
Andrew Jackson’s ‘union’ speech in your
inaugural address,” the Kentuckian Cassius Clay
advised him, even before the 1860 campaign had ended.
“But it may be necessary to put the foot down firmly,”
Lincoln told the New Jersey General Assembly on his way
to Washington for the inauguration, dramatically stamping
the stage to enthusiastic cheers. Although, in his efforts
to appear conciliatory, the new president omitted any
explicit mention of Jackson in his inaugural address,
Jackson’s proclamation on nullification was one
of the few sources he consulted (along with Webster’s
famous second reply to Hayne and Henry Clay’s speech
amid the sectional crisis of 1850); and thereafter, Jackson’s
precedent was very much on his mind. After the fall of
Sumter, when a committee in Baltimore bid him to cease
hostilities, Lincoln replied sternly that he would not
violate his oath and surrender the government without
a blow: “There is no Washington in that –
no Jackson in that – no manhood nor honor in that.”
12
The nationalist themes in Lincoln’s attacks on
secession were common to mainstream proto-Whigs as well
as to Jackson’s proclamation against the nullifiers.
In this respect, Lincoln seized on the piece of Jackson’s
legacy most in line with those of Jackson’s opponents
(and which many of Jackson’s supporters, including
Martin Van Buren, opposed.) But Jackson also based his
attack on the democratic, majoritarian grounds he had
expressed in his first message to Congress, ridiculing
the effort of a single state—indeed, “a
bare majority of the voters in any one state”
—to repudiate laws approved by the Congress and
the president, the people’s representatives. So
Lincoln based the Union effort, in 1861, on fundamentally
democratic grounds, proclaiming in his first inaugural
that the slavery issue, and with it the divination of
God’s will, had to be left to “the judgment
of this great tribunal, the American people,”
which had just elected him president.
13
VII.
The significance of Lincoln’s convergence with certain
antislavery elements of Jacksonian Democracy, and then
with certain of Jackson’s political precedents,
should not be exaggerated. Yet neither should the convergence
be ignored. As the politics of American democracy altered
in the 1840s and 1850s, to confront the long-suppressed
crisis over slavery, so the terms of democratic politics
broke apart and recombined in ways that defy any neat
ideological or political genealogy. Just as the Republican
Party of the 1850s absorbed certain elements of Jacksonianism,
so Lincoln, whose Whiggery had always been more egalitarian
than that of other Whigs, found himself absorbing some
of them as well. And some of the Jacksonian spirit resided
inside the Lincoln White House.
---
1Lincoln, “Speech on the Sub-Treasury,
December [26], 1839,”
Collected Works,
I, 162, 178.
2For a strong statement of some of these themes,
see Stephen B. Oates, “Abraham Lincoln:
Republican
in the White House,” in John L. Thomas, ed.,
Abraham
Lincoln and the American Political Tradition (Amherst,
MA, 1986), 98-110.
3Robert H. Wiebe, “Lincoln’s Fraternal
Democracy,” in Thomas, ed.,
Abraham Lincoln,
11-30, quotations on 16.
4Lincoln to Joshua Speed, August 24, 1855,
CW, II, 323.
5Rufus Choate, “Letter to the Whigs of
Maine, August 9, 1856,” in Samuel G Brown, ed.,
Works of Rufus Choate with a Memoir of His Life
(Boston. 1862); Lincoln to Henry L. Pierce and Others,
April 6, 1859, ibid., III, 375.
6Lincoln to A.G. Henry, November 19, 1858,
CW, III, 339.
7Frederick Robinson,
Address to the Voters
of the Fifth Congressional District (n.p., n.d. [1862]),
11.
8Lincoln to Henry L. Pierce and Others, April
6, 1859,
ibid., III, 374-376: Lincoln, “Definition
of Democracy {August 1, 1858?],”
ibid.,
II, 532.
9Lincoln, “Speech at Princeton, Illinois,
July 4, 1856,” ibid., 346.
10Lincoln, “Speech at Springfield, Illinois,
June 26, 1857,” CW, II, 401.
11“First Debate with Stephen A Douglas
at Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858,”
ibid.,
III, 28; “Fifth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at
Galesburg, Illinois, October 7, 1858,”
ibid.,
243; “Sixth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Quincy,
Illinois, October 13, 1858,”
ibid., 278.
12Lincoln to Cassius M. Clay,
ibid.,
IV, 92-93, n.1; Lincoln, “Address to the New Jersey
General Assembly at Trenton, New Jersey, February 21,
1861,”
ibid, 237; William H. Herndon and
Jesse W. Weik,
Herndon's Lincoln: The True Story of
a Great Life, 1889, 3:478; Lincoln, “Reply
to Baltimore Committee, April 22, 1861,”
ibid.,
341. The connections between Lincoln and Jackson were
not lost on ordinary supporters. “Withal, I am an
uncompromising Union Man. I despised
Nullification
in 1832, as I do the Rebellion now. I stand by the Administration
in their noble efforts to save the Union…,”
a native South Carolinian, relocated to New Jersey, wrote
the president in 1864, to show his pro-administration
bona fides. “I approved of Andrew Jackson's course
in 1832, and, I approve of Abraham Lincoln's course now.
I prepared the article ‘And. Jackson on States Rights’
to strengthen your administration in the judgement of
people in this section of the country.” Paul T.
Jones to Abraham Lincoln, April 11, 1864, Abraham Lincoln
Papers, Library of Congress.
13James D. Richardson, ed.,
A Compilation
of the Papers and Messages of the Presidents (1897;
Washington, 1910), II, 1209.
CW, IV.
Sean Wilentz is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor
in the American Revolutionary Era at Princeton University.
He is the author and editor of numerous books, including
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
(2005), which was awarded the Bancroft Prize.
