The Life of Lyman Trumbull

PREFACE

A few years since, the widow of Lyman Trumbull requested me to write a biography of her husband, who was United States Senator from Illinois during the three senatorial terms 1855-1873, or to recommend some suitable person for the task. It had been a cause of surprise and regret to me that the name of Trumbull had not yet found a place in the swelling flood of biographical literature that embraces the Civil War period. Everybody, North or South, who stood on the same elevation with him, everybody who exercised influence and filled the public eye in equal measure with him, had found his niche in the libraries of the nation, and such place in the hearts of the people as his merits warranted. Trumbull alone had been neglected. I reflected upon the matter and came to the conclusion that, although better writers than myself could be found for this kind of work, no one was likely to be found who had been more intimate with him during his whole senatorial career, or who had warmer sympathy for his aims or higher admiration for his abilities and character. I reflected also that very soon there would be no person living possessing these special qualifications. Accordingly I decided to undertake the work.

Mrs. Trumbull placed in my hands several thousand letters received by Trumbull, and a few written by him, during his public career. All these have been examined by me, and they are now in the Library of Congress. He was not in the habit of keeping copies of letters written by himself unless he deemed them important, and such copies were generally written out by his own hand, not taken in a copying-press. Other letters written by him have been sought with varying success in the hands of his correspondents, or their heirs, in various parts of the country, but nothing has been found in this way that can be considered of much importance.

During the Reconstruction era I had sustained the policy of Congress in opposition to that of Andrew Johnson, but had revolted at the carpetbaggery and misgovernment which had ensued, and had abhorred the "Ku-Klux" bills and "Force" bills which the Union party for a long time continued to enact or threaten. I was not quite prepared to find, however, upon going over the whole ground again, that I had been wrong from the beginning, and that Andrew Johnson's policy, which was Lincoln's policy, was the true one, and ought never to have been departed from. This is the conclusion to which I have come, after much study, in the evening of a long life. This does not mean that all of the doings and sayings of President Johnson were wise and good, but that I believe him to have been an honest man, a true patriot, and a worthy successor of Lincoln whose Reconstruction policy he followed. Lincoln himself could not have carried that policy into effect without a fight, and many persons familiar with the temper of the time think that even he would have failed. All that we can now affirm is that he was armed with the prestige of victory and the confidence of the North, and hence would have been better prepared than Johnson was for meeting the difficulties that sprang up at the end of the war. It must be admitted, however, that Johnson honestly aimed to carry out that policy, both because it was Lincoln's and because he himself, after careful consideration, esteemed it sound.

I acknowledge my indebtedness to the Diary of Gideon Welles, which I regard as the most important contribution to the history of the period of which it treats that has yet been given to the public. The history of Mr. James Ford Rhodes I have found to be an invaluable guide, as to both facts and judgments of men and things. I am indebted to Professor William A. Dunning, of Columbia University, for valuable suggestions, criticism, and encouragement, as well as for the assistance derived from his admired writings on Reconstruction. Miss Katherine Mayo has lightened my labors greatly by her intelligent and indefatigable search of old letters and newspaper files and by interviews with persons still living. My gratitude is due also to the late William H. Lambert, of Philadelphia, for giving me access to his collection of manuscript correspondence that passed between Lincoln and Trumbull prior to the inauguration of the former as President; also to Dr. William Jayne, of Springfield, Illinois, to Hon. J. H. Roberts, of Chicago, to the wife of Walter Trumbull (now Mrs. L. C. Pardee, of Chicago), and to Mrs. Mary Ingraham Trumbull, of Saybrook Point, Connecticut.

H. W.

INTRODUCTION

Events in the year 1854 brought into the field of national politics two members of the bar of southern Illinois who were destined to hold high places in the public councils—Abraham Lincoln and Lyman Trumbull. They were members of opposing parties, Lincoln a Whig, Trumbull a Democrat. Both were supporters of the compromise measures of 1850. These measures had been accepted by the great majority of the people, not as wholly satisfactory, but as preferable to never-ending turmoil on the slavery question. There had been a subsidence of anti-slavery propagandism in the North, following the Free Soil campaign of 1848. Hale and Julian received fewer votes in 1852 than Van Buren and Adams had received in the previous election. Franklin Pierce (Democrat) had been elected President of the United States by so large a majority that the Whig party was practically killed. President Pierce in his first message to Congress had alluded to the quieting of sectional agitation and had said: "That this repose is to suffer no shock during my official term, if I have the power to avert it, those who placed me here may be assured." Doubtless the Civil War would have come, even if Pierce had kept his promise instead of breaking it; for, as Lincoln said a little later: "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

It was not at variance with itself on the slavery question solely. In fact, the North did not take up arms against slavery when the crisis came. A few men foresaw that a war raging around that institution would somehow and sometime give it its death-blow, but at the beginning the Northern soldiers marched with no intention of that kind. They had an eye single to the preservation of the Union. The uprising which followed the firing upon Fort Sumter was a passionate protest against the insult to the national flag. It betokened a fixed purpose to defend what the flag symbolized, and it was only slowly and hesitatingly that the abolition of slavery was admitted as a factor and potent issue in the Northern mind.

It is true that the South seceded in order to preserve and extend slavery, but it was penetrated with the belief that it had a perfect right to secede—not merely the right of revolution which our ancestors exercised in separating from Great Britain, but a right under the Constitution.

The states under the Confederation, during the Revolutionary period and later, were actually sovereign. The Articles of Confederation declared them to be so. When the Constitution was formed, the habit of state sovereignty was so strong that it was only with the greatest difficulty that its ratification by the requisite number of states could be obtained. John Quincy Adams said that it was "extorted from the grinding necessity of a reluctant people." The instrument itself provided a common tribunal (the Supreme Court) as arbiter for the decision of all disputed questions arising under the Constitution and laws of the United States. But it was not generally supposed that the jurisdiction of the court included the power to extinguish state sovereignty.1

The first division of political parties under the new government was the outgrowth of emotions stirred by the French Revolution. The Republicans of the period, led by Jefferson, were ardent sympathizers with the uprising in France. The Federalists, who counted Washington, Hamilton, and John Adams as their representative men, were opposed to any connection with European strife, or to any fresh embroilment with England, growing out of it. The Alien and Sedition Laws were passed in order to suppress agitation tending to produce such embroilment. Jefferson met these laws with the "Resolutions of '98," which were adopted by the legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky. These resolutions affirmed the right of the separate states to judge of any infraction of the Constitution by the Federal Government and also of the mode and measure of redress—a claim which necessarily included the right to secede from the Union if milder measures failed. The Alien and Sedition Laws expired by their own limitation before any actual test of their validity took place.

The next assertion of the right of the states to nullify the acts of the Federal Government came from a more northern latitude as a consequence of the purchase of Louisiana. This act alarmed the New England States. The Federalists feared lest the acquisition of this vast domain should give the South a perpetual preponderance and control of the Government. Since there was no clause in the Constitution providing for the acquisition of new territory (as President Jefferson himself conceded), they affirmed that the Union was a partnership and that a new partner could not be taken in without the consent of all the old ones, and that the taking in of a new one without such consent would release the old ones.

Controversy on this theme was superseded a few years later by more acute sources of irritation—the Embargo and War of 1812. These events fell with great severity on the commerce of the Northern States, and led to the passage by the Massachusetts legislature of anti-Embargo resolutions, declaring that "when the national compact is violated and the citizens are oppressed by cruel and unauthorized law, this legislature is bound to interpose its power and wrest from the oppressor his victim." In this doctrine Daniel Webster concurred. In a speech in the House of Representatives, December 9, 1814, on the Conscription Bill, he said:

The operation of measures thus unconstitutional and illegal ought to be prevented by a resort to other measures which are both constitutional and legal. It will be the solemn duty of the State Governments to protect their own authority over their own militia and to interpose between their own citizens and arbitrary power.... With the same earnestness with which I now exhort you to forbear from these measures I shall exhort them to exercise their unquestionable right of providing for the security of their own liberties.2

The anti-Embargo resolutions were followed by the refusal of both Massachusetts and Connecticut to allow federal officers to take command of their militia and by the call for the Hartford Convention. The latter body recommended to the states represented in it the adoption of measures to protect their citizens against forcible drafts, conscriptions, or impressments not authorized by the Constitution—a phrase which certainly meant that the states were to judge of the constitutionality of the measures referred to. The conclusion of peace with Great Britain put an end to this crisis before it came to blows.

On February 26, 1833, Mr. Calhoun, following the Resolutions of '98, affirmed in the Senate the doctrine that the Government of the United States was a compact, by which the separate states delegated to it certain definite powers, reserving the rest; that whenever the general Government should assume the exercise of powers not so delegated, its acts would be void and of no effect; and that the said Government was not the sole judge of the powers delegated to it, but that, as in all other cases of compact among sovereign parties without any common judge, each had an equal right to judge for itself, as well of the infraction as of the mode and measures of redress. This was the stand which South Carolina took in opposition to the Force Bill of President Jackson's administration.3

A state convention of South Carolina was called which passed an ordinance nullifying the tariff law of the United States and declaring that, if any attempt were made to collect customs duties under it by force, that state would consider herself absolved from all allegiance to the Union and would proceed at once to organize a separate government. President Jackson was determined to exercise force, and would have done so had not Congress, under the lead of Henry Clay, passed a compromise tariff bill which enabled South Carolina to repeal her ordinance and say that she had gained the substantial part of her contention.

Despite the later speeches of Webster, the doctrine of nullification had a new birth in Massachusetts in 1845, the note of discord having been called forth by the proposed admission of Texas into the Union. In that year the legislature passed and the governor approved resolutions declaring that the powers of Congress did not embrace a case of the admission of a foreign state or a foreign territory into the Union by an act of legislation and "such an act would have no binding power whatever on the people of Massachusetts." This was a fresh outcropping of the bitterness which had prevailed in the New England States against the acquisition of Louisiana.

Thus it appears that, although the Constitution did create courts to decide all disputes arising under it, the particularism which previously prevailed continued to exist. Nationalism was an aftergrowth proceeding from the habit into which the people fell of finding their common centre of gravity at Washington City, and of viewing it as the place where the American name and fame were embodied and emblazoned to the world. During the first half-century the North and the South were changing coats from time to time on the subject of state sovereignty, but meanwhile the Constitution itself was working silently and imperceptibly in the North to undermine particularism and to strengthen nationalism. It had accomplished its educational work in the early thirties when it found its complete expression in Webster's reply to Hayne. But the South believed just as firmly that Hayne was the victor in that contest, as the North believed that Webster was. Hayne's speech was not generally read in the North either then or later. It was not inferior, in the essential qualities of dignity, courtesy, legal lore, and oratorical force, to that of his great antagonist. Webster here met a foeman worthy of his steel.

In the South the pecuniary interests bottomed on slavery offset and neutralized the unifying process that was ripening in the North. The slavery question entered into the debate between Webster and Calhoun in 1833 sufficiently to show that it lay underneath the other questions discussed. Calhoun, in the speech referred to, reproached Forsyth, of Georgia, for dullness in not seeing how state rights and slavery were dovetailed together and how the latter depended on the former.

That African slavery was the most direful curse that ever afflicted any civilized country may now be safely affirmed. It had its beginning in our country in the year 1619 at Jamestown, Virginia, where a Dutch warship short of provisions exchanged fourteen negroes for a supply thereof. Slavery of both Indians and negroes already existed in the West Indies and was regarded with favor by the colonists and their home governments. It began in Massachusetts in 1637 as a consequence of hostilities with the aborigines, the slaves being captives taken in war. They were looked upon by the whites as heathen and were treated according to precedents found in the Old Testament for dealing with the enemies of Jehovah. In order that they might not escape from servitude they were sent to the West Indies to be exchanged for negroes, and this slave trade was not restricted to captives taken in war, but was applied to any red men who could be safely seized and shipped away.

From these small beginnings slavery spread over all the colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia and lasted in all of them for a century and a half, i.e., until after the close of the Revolutionary War. Then it began to lose ground in the Northern States. Public sentiment turned against it in Massachusetts, but all attempts to abolish it there by act of the legislature failed. Its death-blow was given by a judicial decision in 1783 in a case where a master was prosecuted, convicted, and fined forty shillings for beating a slave.4

Public opinion sustained this judgment, although there had been no change in the law since the time when the Pequot Indians were sent by shiploads to the Bermudas to be exchanged for negroes. If masters could not punish their slaves in their discretion,—if slaves had any rights which white men were bound to respect,—slavery was virtually dead. No law could kill it more effectually.

In one way and another the emancipation movement extended southward to and including Pennsylvania in the later years of the eighteenth century. Nearly all the statesmen of the Revolution looked upon the institution with disfavor and desired its extinction. Thomas Jefferson favored gradual emancipation in Virginia, to be coupled with deportation of the emancipated blacks, because he feared trouble if the two races were placed upon an equality in the then slaveholding states. He labored to prevent the extension of slavery into the new territories, and he very nearly succeeded. In the year 1784 he reported an ordinance in the Congress of the Confederation to organize all the unoccupied territory, both north and south of the Ohio River, in ten subdivisions, in all of which slavery should be forever prohibited, and this ordinance failed of adoption by only one vote. Six states voted in the affirmative. Seven were necessary. Only one representative of New Jersey happened to be present, whereas two was the smallest number that could cast the vote of any state. If one other member from New Jersey had been there, the Jeffersonian ordinance of 1784 would have passed; slavery would have been restricted to the seaboard states which it then occupied, and would never have drawn the sword against the Union, and the Civil War would not have taken place.5

After the emancipation movement came to a pause, at the southern border of Pennsylvania, the fact became apparent that there was a dividing line between free states and slave states, and a feeling grew up in both sections that neither of them ought to acquire a preponderance of power and mastery over the other. The slavery question was not concerned with this dispute, but a habit grew up of admitting new states to the Union in pairs, in order to maintain a balance of power in the national Senate. Thus Kentucky and Vermont offset each other, then Tennessee and Ohio, then Louisiana and Indiana, then Mississippi and Illinois.

In 1819, Alabama, a new slave state, was admitted to the Union and there was no new free state to balance it. The Territory of Missouri, in which slavery existed, was applying for admission also. While Congress was considering the Missouri bill, Mr. Tallmadge, of New York, with a view of preserving the balance of power, offered an amendment providing for the gradual emancipation of slaves in the proposed state, and prohibiting the introduction of additional slaves. This amendment was adopted by the House by a sectional vote, nearly all the Northern members voting for it and the Southern ones against it, but it was rejected by the Senate.

In the following year the Missouri question came up afresh, and Senator Thomas, of Illinois, proposed, as a compromise, that Missouri should be admitted to the Union with slavery, but that in all the remaining territory north of 36 degrees and 30 minutes north latitude, slavery should be forever prohibited. This amendment was adopted in the Senate by 24 to 20, and in the House by 90 to 87. Of the affirmative votes in the House only fourteen were from the North, and nearly all of these fourteen members became so unpopular at home that they lost their seats in the next election. The Missouri Compromise was generally considered a victory for the South, but one great Southerner considered it the death-knell of the Union. Thomas Jefferson was still living, at the age of seventy-seven. He saw what this sectional rift portended, and he wrote to John Holmes, one of his correspondents, under date of April 22, 1820:

This momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened me and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated, and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.

Nearly all of the emancipationists, during the decade following the adoption of the Compromise, were in the slaveholding states, since the evil had its seat there. The Colonization Society's headquarters were in Washington City. Its president, Bushrod Washington, was a Virginian, and James Madison, Henry Clay, and John Randolph, leading Southerners, were its active supporters. The only newspaper devoted specially to the cause (the Genius of Universal Emancipation), edited by Benjamin Lundy and William Lloyd Garrison, was published in the city of Baltimore. This paper was started in 1829, but it was short-lived. Mr. Garrison soon perceived that colonization, depending upon voluntary emancipation alone, would never bring slavery to an end, since emancipation was doubtful and sporadic, while the natural increase of slaves was certain and vastly greater than their possible deportation. For this reason he began to advocate emancipation without regard to colonization. This policy was so unpopular in Maryland and Virginia that his subscription list fell nearly to zero, and this compelled the discontinuance of the paper and his removal to another sphere of activity. He returned to his native state, Massachusetts, and there started another newspaper, entitled the Liberator, in 1831. The first anti-slavery crusade in the North thus had its beginning. It did not take the form of a political party. It was an agitation, an awakening of the public conscience. Its tocsin was immediate emancipation, as opposed to emancipation conditioned upon deportation.

The slaveholders were alarmed by this new movement at the North. They thought that it aimed to incite slave insurrection. The governor of South Carolina made it the subject of a special message. The legislature of Georgia passed and the governor signed resolutions offering a reward of $5000 to anybody who would bring Mr. Garrison to that state to be tried for sedition. The mayor of Boston was urged by prominent men in the South to suppress the Liberator, although the paper was then so obscure at home that the mayor had never seen a copy of it, or even heard of its existence. The fact that there was any organized expression of anti-slavery thought anywhere was first made generally known at the North by the extreme irritation of the South; and when the temper of the latter became known, the vast majority of Northern people sided with their Southern brethren. They were opposed to anything which seemed likely to lead to slave insurrection or to a disruption of the Union. The abolitionist agitation seemed to be a provocation to both. Hence arose anger and mob violence against the abolitionists everywhere. This feeling took the shape of a common understanding not to countenance any discussion of the slavery question in any manner or anywhere. The execution of this tacit agreement fell for the most part into the hands of the disorderly element of society, but disapproval of the Garrisonian crusade was expressed by men of the highest character in the New England States, such as William Ellery Channing and Dr. Francis Wayland. The latter declined to receive the Liberator, when it was sent to him gratuitously.

What was going on in the South during the thirties and forties of the last century? There were varying shades of opinion and mixed motives and fluctuating political currents. In the first place cotton-growing had been made profitable by the invention of the cotton-gin. This machine for separating the seeds from the fibre of the cotton plant caused an industrial revolution in the world, and its moral consequences were no less sweeping. It changed the slaveholder's point of view of the whole slavery question. The previously prevailing idea that slavery was morally wrong, and an evil to both master and slave, gradually gave way to the belief that it was beneficial to both, that it was an agency of civilization and a means of bringing the blessings of Christianity to the benighted African. This change of sentiment in the South, which became very marked in the early thirties, has been ascribed to the bad language of the abolitionists of the North. People said that the prime cause of the trouble was that Garrison and his followers did not speak easy. They were too vociferous. They used language calculated to make Southerners angry and to stir up slave insurrection. But how could anybody draw the line between different tones of voice and different forms of expression? Thomas Jefferson was not a speak-easy. He said that one hour of slavery was fraught with more misery than ages of that which led us to take up arms against Great Britain. If Garrison ever said anything more calculated to incite slaves to insurrection than that, I cannot recall it. On the other hand, Elijah Lovejoy, at Alton, Illinois, was a speak-easy. He did not use any violent language, but he was put to death by a mob for making preparations to publish a newspaper in which slavery should be discussed in a reasonable manner, if there was such a manner.