Good and Evil Mixed: Lincoln and His Party in the Civil War Era
- Good and Evil Mixed: Lincoln and His Party in the Civil War Era
David L. Lightner is Associate Professor of History at the University of Alberta. His most recent publications are “Simon Newton Dexter and the Panic of 1857,” to be published in Mid-America in 1988, and “The Door to the Slave Bastille: The Abolitionist Assault upon the Interstate Slave Trade, 1833–1839,” forthcoming in Civil War History.
Notes
1. Gamaliel Bailey in National Era, April 19, 1855, quoted in Harrold, Gamaliel Bailey, 171.
2. While Fehrenbacher’s critique of Silbey is mostly persuasive, one aspect of it is not. Fehrenbacher demonstrates that the stereotype of Republicans as pietists does not apply to the members of Lincoln’s cabinet and then asks, “Are we nevertheless to believe, simply on the basis of correlations between voting and church membership, that the nearly two million men who voted for Lincoln in 1860 fitted the stereotype far better than this handful of advisers?” (87). The answer to that question is that, yes, we should believe it if it is so. Lincoln’s cabinet was not a random sample drawn from the mass of Republican voters and therefore should not be expected to conform to any profile of such voters. But Gienapp’s data demonstrate that correlations between church membership and party support in various elections do not reveal anything so simple as a consistent dichotomy between pietists and non-pietists.
3. While preparing for his debates with Douglas, Lincoln was advised to avoid discussion of slavery and (especially) Negro equality, so as not to alienate Know Nothings. See George W. Woods to Lincoln, Carlinville, July 19, 1858, and W. Chambers to Lincoln, Charleston, July 22, 1858, both in Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress (microfilm copy, University of Alberta Libraries).
4. The best exploration of these matters is in Charles B. Strozier, Lincoln’s Quest for Union: Public and Private Meanings (New York: Basic Books, 1982).
5. “I go for all sharing the privileges of the government, who assist in bearing its burthens. Consequently I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms (by no means excluding females.)” A. Lincoln to editor, Sangamo Journal, June 18, 1836, reprinted in Roy P. Basler, ed., Marion Dolores Pratt and Lloyd A. Dunlap, assistant eds., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (9 vols., New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), vol. 1, 48. For a sensible discussion of Lincoln’s relations with women, see Roy P. Basler, “Lincoln, Blacks and Women,” chap. 3 of Cullom Davis, Charles B. Strozier, Rebecca Monroe Veach, and Geoffrey C. Ward, eds., The Public and the Private Lincoln (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Ill.: Southern Illinoıs University Press, 1979).
6. “Abraham Lincoln: Whig in the White House,” chap. 10 of David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (2nd ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1965).
7. Oates’s misquotation appears in Thomas, Abraham Lincoln and the American Political Tradition, 102. For the correct wording, see Address at Cooper Institute, New York City, Febuary 27, 1860, in Basler, Collected Works, vol. 3, 550.
8. Possibly in the course of his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln jotted down this fragment: “Negro equality! Fudge!! How long in the government of a God, great enough to make and maintain this Universe, shall there continue knaves to vend, and fools...
