The Lincoln-Douglas Debates Continue: The Supreme Court and Choice
The following is revised from an article first posted here on November 3, 2016.
Politics and the Supreme Court are much in the news today, as they were in 1858 when Abraham Lincoln debated Stephen Douglas for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. Issues have changed but more recent court decisions demonstrate that underlying themes have not. Perhaps we can, again, learn from Mr. Lincoln and his thoughts on the court.
Incumbent Senator Douglas had been contending in favor of “popular sovereignty,” the concept that inhabitants of a territory should choose for themselves whether to allow slavery or not during the process of becoming a state. The federal government could not and should not interfere with this will of the people while citizens of existing states had no say. Douglas promised that this approach would bring the nation together in an acceptable compromise, putting an end to “slavery agitation,” allowing the nation to grow and prosper in peace.
But, countered Lincoln, this question of choice had already been settled the previous year by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision. Scott sued for freedom on the basis that he had traveled with his master and resided temporarily in a northern state and later in a territory where slavery was illegal, thus nullifying his status as a slave. Similar suits had been successful in Missouri state courts where Scott and his owner then lived. The state court ruled in favor of Scott, but the politics were heating up. Scott’s owners contested vigorously; the case was elevated to the Supreme Court.
The court concluded (7-2) that Scott remained a slave because Negroes were not citizens and had no status to sue in federal court. If he had followed tradition that the court should settle cases on the narrowest possible basis, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney would have left it at that, but chose instead to write an expansive decision, which he intended to stand as the final declared solution to the broader political problem.
Taney specified that the Constitution permitted neither Congress nor territorial legislatures to exclude slaves—as property—from any territory. In so doing, he declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820—which banned slavery in the western territories above a line at 36°30? north—unconstitutional. All territories thus were opened to the possibility of slavery, including those previously closed. (The finding did not specify whether the Constitution permits an existing state or the people of a state to exclude slaves as property.)
Senator Douglas wholly supported the decision—necessarily to retain political support in the South. But to Lincoln, the court’s conclusion represented one-sided freedom and therefore not freedom at all, “The Judge is not sustaining popular sovereignty [by supporting Dred Scott], but absolutely opposing it,” be said, The decision, “does allow the people of a Territory to have slavery if they want to, but does not allow them not to have it if they do not want it.”[1]
The logical conclusion, continued Lincoln: “Any one man may take slaves into a Territory, and all the other men in the Territory may be opposed to it, and yet by reason of the Constitution [as interpreted by the court] they cannot prohibit it. When that is so, how much is left of this vast matter [of choice by popular sovereignty], I should like to know?”[2]
The other primary parties to the transaction, the slaves themselves, had no legal capacity to choose (not that their selection would be in any doubt could they express it). Douglas just ignored or argued around these inconsistencies.
In Dred Scott, therefore, the Supreme Court extrapolated a right from the Constitution, a right claimed by a vocal minority but not explicitly stated therein (a right of property in slaves), and explicitly expanded that right into areas where it had not universally applied (the territories). The declared right was allegedly justified by previous legislation and judicial precedent (certain references in the Constitution, fugitive slave laws), but the extended application was opposed by other existing laws and decades of precedent (Northwest Ordinance, Missouri Compromise), which the court declared null and void.
The right also was opposed by a large portion of the people as inimical to foundational moral principle, while the extended application was opposed as an incorrect interpretation of the Constitution. The right and its application limited the prerogatives of many citizens; it could (by advancing a competing form of labor) directly degrade other rights of citizens and might limit their ability to lawfully advance their own interests.
What alternatives remained for those adversely affected, and for those who believed the decision wrong and destructive to all concerned? These are common issues applying no less intensively and with no less moral weight to court decisions of our own times. How much is left of this vast matter of choice?
Douglas chastised his opponent for daring to oppose the Dred Scott decision, saying that he might advance a contrary opinion before the decision, but afterwards must abide by it, and to do otherwise was inciting dissention, radicalism, and violence.
But contrary or apparently contrary decisions had been made by the court before, Lincoln observed. This one is based upon falsehood in the main as to the facts, and no decision made on any question—particularly under such unfavorable circumstances—had been held as settled law without confirmation in legislative law. In other words, the court had been wrong before, and it should not legislate.
“The falsehood in fact is a fault of the premises. I believe that the right of property in a slave is not distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution, and Judge Douglas thinks it is.” However one derives a right of property from the Constitution, a human being cannot be property. He could not speak of Negroes in the same category as horses and cattle.[3]
The decision also was based on faulty analysis, as Lincoln would brilliantly expound in his Cooper Union address of 1860: the historical record showed that congress certainly could limit slavery, and had deliberately exercised that prerogative by banning it in the Northwest Territory.
Lincoln quoted a letter written by Thomas Jefferson in 1820: “To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions—a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps.”[4]
But, Lincoln said, “Judge Douglas will have it that all hands must take this extraordinary decision made under these extraordinary circumstances and give their vote in Congress in accordance with it, yield to it, and obey it in every possible sense…. He would make it a rule of political action for the people and all the departments of the government. I would not. By resisting it as a political rule, I disturb no right of property, create no disorder, excite no mobs.”[5]
Although he disagreed with the court’s finding—that Scott remained a slave—the future president would accept it, for now. He would not, however, universalize the proposition; he certainly would not extend it to justify the extension of slavery into the territories. The court also could not take upon itself the authority to nullify the Missouri Compromise, an act of Congress that most people held to be settled law.
Recent court decisions are subject to the same scrutiny. They might be considered gospel among adherents insisting that all opponents, public and private, abide by them uncritically under all circumstances despite what many consider questionable logic, doubtful premises, and arguable faults. Those presenting counter arguments or advocating alternatives must be “inciting dissention, radicalism, and violence.” Citizens can be subject to prosecution and punishment for any actions not in active, overt conformance regardless of adverse effects on persons, families, communities, and the collective conscience of the nation.
When Lincoln said that the nation could not endure half slave and half free, that it would become all one thing or all the other, he had in mind a mechanism that could decide the issue quickly: “We may, ere long, see…another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a State to exclude slavery from its limits…. Such a decision is all that slavery now lacks of being alike lawful in all the States. Welcome or unwelcome, such decision is probably coming, and will soon be upon us….”[6]
He saw nothing in the language or logic of the Dred Scott findings to preclude the extension of an abominable decision, and much to endorse it. In the case of Dred Scott and slavery, and because we know what happened, this outcome seems farfetched to us now. Douglas said the court would never do such a thing, without stating why. But given the administration then in power, the mixed feelings of the public, and the makeup of the court, Lincoln feared that it was not only possible but probable. From the perspective of 1858, that seems a perfectly logical conclusion.
Dred Scott is usually considered the worst decision in the history of the Supreme Court: It further legitimized a reprehensible concept; it mandated a highly controversial interpretation of traditional morality and civic definitions of duty; it disturbed a long history of common understandings among the people. It was overturned by bloody war and the Thirteenth Amendment.
Similar controversy continues to swirl around the court today and its role in interpreting—as opposed to legislating—law. What is there in the language or logic of recent decisions precluding subsequent decisions extending and expanding them despite the controversies they provoke, and in the absence of—or even in the face of—countervailing legislation passed by majority rule of elected representatives? What alternatives remain for those adversely affected, and for those who believe a decision wrong and destructive to all concerned? How much is left of this “vast matter of choice”?
Those of us who are not constitutional lawyers or scholars—and befuddled by the complexities thereof—are compelled to fall back on the simplicity of common sense. Abraham Lincoln epitomizes common sense. He found the premises, logic, historical analysis, and moral implications of the Dred Scott decision severely wanting; he believed that the court had acted far beyond its mandate in the Constitution. He would oppose Dred Scott and seek to overturn it by all legal means. As noted by Jefferson, members of the Supreme Court are fallible humans, always vulnerable to such errors.
The debates continue.
————
References:
Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008).
Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 50th Anniversary Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996).
[1] Lincoln, “Speech At Springfield, July 17, 1858,” in The Complete Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln: Constitutional Edition (Complete Seven Volumes), ed. Arthur Brooks Lapsley (Kindle edition) (Hereafter cited as Complete Papers.); Lincoln, “First Joint Debate At Ottawa, August 21, 1858,” Complete Papers.
[2] Lincoln, “Speech At Chicago, July 10, 1858,” Complete Papers.
[3] Lincoln, “Fifth Joint Debate At Galesburgh, October 7, 1858,” Complete Papers.
[4] Lincoln, “Speech At Springfield, July 17, 1858,” Complete Papers.
[5] Lincoln, “Speech At Chicago, July 10, 1858,” Complete Papers; Lincoln, “Speech At Springfield, July 17, 1858,” Complete Papers.
[6] Lincoln, “Speech At Springfield, June 17, 1858,” Complete Papers.
timely and thought provoking
There is a lot of pro-Lincoln bias in Mr Hughes article that cannot stand up to legal or historical scrutiny. Lincoln was simply wrong to question the constitutional right to own slaves. He argues for congressional legislative precedent in one breath (as if all congressional legislation could stand constitutional scrutiny if challenged) such as the Missouri Compromise, yet ignores some seventy years of precedent in which Congress and SCOTUS recognized the right to own slaves as a States Rights issue. Even a SCOTUS justice had expressed in a legal opinion that the right to own property in slaves was a “cornerstone” of the US Gov’t:
“You thus see that in protecting the rights of a master in the property of a slave, the constitution guarantees the highest rights of the respective states, of which each has a right to avail itself, and which each enjoys in proportion to the number of slaves within its boundaries.…Thus you see that the foundations of the government are laid, and rest on the rights of property in slaves—the whole structure must fall by disturbing the corner stones—if federal numbers cease to be respected or held sacred in questions of property or government, the rights of the states must disappear and the government and union dissolve by the prostration of its laws before the usurped authority of individuals.” — United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Henry Baldwin (a Northerner), ‘Johnson v. Tompkins,’ 1833
Lincoln’s attempt to call the ban on slavery in the Northwest Territories was historical ignorance on steroids! Those territories were determined before the Constitution was ever penned. And those territories creation was by the permission and cession of those lands by the State of Virginia as a States Rights decision, and the prohibition of slavery there was a decision of the State of Virginia itself as a part of the treaty ceding those lands. Lincoln simply ignores the fact that the creation of those territories as free of slavery was pre-constitutional Union and a State’s own decision.
While I’m with Jefferson in believing that no branch of the federal government should have final say over the States regarding interpretation of what is constitutional, Lincoln was certainly hypocritical in using Jefferson’s States Rights argument, when it was a nationalist like Lincoln himself who considered States no more important than counties!
Both Lincoln and Douglas were simply wrong to think that the federal government, or the people who happened to live in a territory had the right to interfere with slavery in the territories. The Constitution made slavery a reserved right of the States alone, and only States could therefore decide slavery related issues. Territories were not States, but were common properties of all the States, and therefore neither the people or the territorial governments held any right to rule for or against slavery. The territories as common property of all the States meant that any citizen in any State could go there with their legal property.
For Lincoln to claim some higher moral law above the Constitution as reason to ban slavery in the territories is the most dangerous and divisive claim that a human being can possibly make. That is an attempt to invoke god as the final say in human affairs, and nothing has been more disrupting given the question of who has the right to determine what god, and what moral law? That is why we have a Constitution instead of a doctrine. Lincoln’s position did indeed disturb “right of property,” create “disorder,” and “excite mobs.” Lincoln as a master politician was simply blurring the lines between the legal and religious; between church and State. Just as he sought to blur the meaning of the right of property in a human being. Slavery in the South had, since before the ratification of the Constitution, been legally recognized as ownership of the labor and not the person of the slave. This was one of the arguments Southerners used in arguing for full representation for slaves in congress, and ultimately led to the 3/5ths compromise.
Perhaps the most disingenuous argument Lincoln makes is stated by Hughes, “When Lincoln said that the nation could not endure half slave and half free, that it would become all one thing or all the other, he had in mind a mechanism that could decide the issue quickly: ‘We may, ere long, see…another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a State to exclude slavery from its limits…. Such a decision is all that slavery now lacks of being alike lawful in all the States. Welcome or unwelcome, such decision is probably coming, and will soon be upon us….’ This was the quintessential political scare tactic used by Northern politicians to coalesce a racist North into a political voting block for fear that Southerners would spread slavery all over the Union. This was the very purpose for claiming that the South wanted to spread slavery into the territories. It was a means of making racist Northerners believe the South would move blacks North and West. The claim was preposterous! Why would the South want to take the semi-tropical institution of slavery into the arid West or short seasoned North where slavery had already been ended because of climate? The “no slavery in the territories” was no moral line in the sand. It was nothing more than a racist and political strategy to keep blacks slave or free and Southern minded voters out of the territories where they might form Southern allied States, staffing the Senate with senators who would vote down Republican attempts at economic exploitation of the Union. Prominent spokesmen such as Daniel Webster (in his March 7, 1850 speech) and John C. Calhoun (in The Address of Southern Delegates in Congress to their Constituents) both said slavery was not going West. Calhoun denied emphatically that the South did not want to extend slavery into the territories, but it also wasn’t going to stand for its States to be relegated to a lesser status in the Union because some of its citizens were slave owners. Then Senator Jeff Davis saw through the attempt to ban slavery in the territories as a political strategy of the North against the South. He argued that all such a policy did as far as slavery was concerned was prevent the South from having a place to emancipate, calling the Norther political strategy of no slaves in the territory as:
“… the cold, calculating purpose of those who seek for sectional dominion, I see nothing short of conquest on the one side, or submission on the other… Why is its exercise sought? Why is this resolution to obstruct the extension of slavery into the Territories introduced? It must be for the purpose of political power; it can have no other rational object. Every one must understand that, whatever be the evil of slavery, it is not increased by its diffusion… What has been the progress of emancipation throughout the whole history of our country? It has been the pressure of free labor upon the less profitable slave labor, until the slaves were transferred to sparser regions, and their number, by such transfer, was reduced to a limit at which, without inconvenience or danger, or serious loss, emancipation of the few who remained might occur…. it is odious among us now, as it was with our ancestors. We only defend the domestic institution of slavery as it exists in the United States; the extension of which into any new Territory will not increase the number of the slaves by one single person, but which it is very probable may, in many instances, produce emancipation. It is not, then, for the purpose of emancipation or for the benefit of the slaves that it is sought to restrict it; no, sir, quite otherwise;”
Lincoln and his Party by playing upon racist fears, and seeking also political advantage prevented Southern emancipation! Pro-Lincoln bias covers a multitude of sins.
Lincoln didn’t question the right to own slaves. He questioned the right of the slaveowner to spread slavery into the western territories. That was the issue. And there was plenty of precedent, nonewithstanding
Of course, both sides believed that if slavery didn’t spread and spread it would probably decline and eventually end, which was Lincoln’s end game. The idea that spreading slavery would somehow weaken it, has not been supported by the historical record. James Oakes had an excellent account of this in “The Scorpion’s Sting.”
I always chuckle at the attempt to frame secession as anything but a grab for power and money by a slaveowning elite. It was the president that was defending the constitution, while the secessionists were motivated by their racist fears and pocketbooks.
Exactly right. Well-stated.