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3. Lincoln and the Limits of Constitutional Authority
- Southern Illinois University Press
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37 Lincoln and the Limits of Constitutional Authority "braham Lincoln was a lawyer. He practiced law longer than he did anything else in his fifty-six years of life. Furthermore, the law was not just his profession. It was the means for his escape from rural poverty, his climb to social respectability, and the creation of his identity. In the legal profession, Lincoln found acceptance, friendship, and affirmation of his abilities. Certainly, politics was a career he enjoyed, but by the time of Lincoln’s maturity, politics and lawyering were intimately connected. Lawyers dominated the legislative halls of states and of the nation, and politics was consistently about constitutional and legal questions . Lincoln easily combined politics and law. It is also highly likely that Lincoln’s personal psychological needs were satisfied by practicing law. The profession provided a sense of order and discipline in his changing world. When Lincoln was a teenager, one of his friends, Matthew Gentry, went insane. Lincoln was so haunted by that experience that twenty-one years later he wrote a poem describing Gentry’s insanity and claiming that madness was worse than death.1 Lincoln also worked to bring order to his thinking by reading the books of Euclid on geometry. Lincoln’s first major speeches extolled the virtues of law and order and the Constitution in a rapidly changing society. His 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, told the story of the founding generation no longer able to guide the country. The nation needed guidance as the excesses of Jacksonian democracy, often equated with mob rule, showed themselves. With the Founders gone, Lincoln insisted, preserving the institutions that they had established, the Constitution and the rule of law, were imperative if the nation was to survive. “Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap. . . . Let it become the Phillip Shaw Paludan phillip shaw paludan 38 political religion of the nation and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay of all tongues and colors and conditions sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”2 Lincoln spoke in tune with the nation that he would one day lead. While the Whig Party spoke more often of order, Democrats, too, promised that they would bring stability by restoring the purer world of the Founders. Most of this discussion centered on interpreting the meaning of the Constitution. Constitutional discussion permeated the United States. Alexis de Tocqueville noted that every question facing the country ultimately became a constitutional question. The nation’s history demonstrated the fact. The American Revolution was in large part a struggle over the meaning of the English constitution. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson claimed that the Constitution blessed their diverse positions. New Englanders challenged Jefferson’s embargo in the name of the Constitution. Northern and Southern congressmen debated the meaning of union under the Constitution. And, of course, the slavery debate, which permeated the polity from 1820 to the Civil War, was about the meaning of national power and local rights in the territories, among other things. Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas debated that issue memorably. Almost all of this latter debate rested on the fundamental question of the extent to which the Constitution was a proslavery document. White Southerners almost unanimously insisted that it was. Most abolitionists agreed with them, echoing William Lloyd Garrison, who called the Constitution a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”3 Only a few of the abolitionist band argued that the Constitution opposed slavery; after all, the Fifth Amendment did hold that property could not be taken without compensation , and if slaves were property . . . Besides, the word slavery never appears anywhere in the document. Of course, at its root, slavery was more than a constitutional question. The white South remembered the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner (1830–31) and its fifty-five white casualties, most of them women and children. And throughout the region, the terror lingered that blacks might remember him, too. The Southern commitment to state sovereignty was not abstract; it dripped with blood. The more moderate majority of Americans recognized that the Constitution did provide protections for slavery: its three-fifths clause gave extra congressmen to slave states; its fugitive slave clause stopped free states from freeing runaways; and it forbade Congress from outlawing the international slave trade before 1808. Most fundamentally, the Constitution, in...