Citizenship Across the Curriculum

7 Enumeration, Evidence, and Emancipation

7 Enumeration, Evidence, and Emancipation Michael C. Burke Today’s students, tomorrow’s citizens, will have to make decisions, as citizens, about a collection of important issues that face us in the world today—issues such as global warming, energy policy, world population, as well as many social issues. Although the issues themselves are not inherently political, successful resolution of them will require political decisions. When our students think about political questions such as these, if indeed they think about them at all, how do they arrive at their conclusions? Most rely on the opinions of others— friends or parents. Some obtain information from radio or television, or search on the internet. They may even consult an expert or two. But what happens when these sources do not agree? How do our students process conflicting information to arrive at their own conclusions? It is our job to teach our students the skills they need to make sense of the world, and many of us work very hard at that. We focus, often, on skills of analysis, of argumentation and persuasion, and on what we have come to call critical thinking. What is often omitted in this e√ort, however, is an element that I think is central: the importance of looking at the data, and the skills needed to make sense of the data. Enumeration, Evidence, and Emancipation ⭈ 133 Lincoln at Cooper Union In February of 1860 Abraham Lincoln of Illinois traveled to New York to deliver an address at Cooper Union (Lincoln 1860). The address, delivered before a sophisticated New York audience, was Lincoln’s opportunity to convince those in the Eastern political establishment that he was worthy of the Republican nomination for the presidency. While in New York for the speech, Lincoln also visited the photography studio of Matthew Brady, who produced a dignified portrait that later appeared in newspapers across the country. The speech and the photograph were phenomenally successful, so much so that Lincoln later commented that ‘‘Brady and the Cooper Institute speech made me President’’ (Corry 2003, 93). The issue Lincoln chose to address at Cooper Union was slavery, or, more precisely, the extension of slavery to the territories of the United States. In Lincoln ’s words, the question was ‘‘Does the proper division of local from federal authority, or anything in the Constitution, forbid our Federal Government to control as to slavery in our Federal Territories?’’ Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s great rival, also from Illinois and the man who would be chosen as the Democratic presidential nominee later in the year 1860, took the position that Congress did not have the power to regulate slavery in the territories; Douglas argued that the question of slavery in the territories must be left to the residents of the territories themselves. Furthermore, Douglas had asserted in a speech at Columbus, Ohio, that ‘‘Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.’’ In his Cooper Union address, Lincoln accepted this last statement by Douglas as a starting point, and then used the statement to attack Douglas’s position. Lincoln did this by asking how our fathers (whom Lincoln took to be the thirty-nine signers of the Declaration of Independence) had acted on the question of the authority of the federal government to regulate slavery in the territories. The manner in which Lincoln examined how the thirty-nine signers had acted is quite extraordinary by today’s standards. Lincoln detailed, one by one, the instances, both before and after the Constitutional Convention, when members of the thirty-nine voted on the issue of slavery in the territories. He named those who voted both for federal regulation of slavery in the territories and those who voted against. Lincoln devoted considerable time to this analysis (thirty-two minutes of a sixty-seven-minute speech, in Sam Waterston’s C-SPAN reading (‘‘Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union . . .’’ 2005), and his case-by-case discussion made a very powerful argument. He concluded, after this careful analysis, that twenty-one of the thirty-nine (a clear majority) had voted to prohibit slavery in the territories, and therefore, implicitly, supported the position that Congress had the power to regulate slavery in the territories. Lincoln thus demolished Douglas’s position. He also noted that two of the thirty-nine voted against federal prohibition of slavery in the territories, and that sixteen had no recorded position on...