And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

The Whig Party was a major political party in the United States that originally arose in opposition to Andrew Jackson in the 1830s and dissolved in the mid-1850s as northern members joined the newly formed Republican party, Abraham Lincoln among them. The Whigs supported strong congressional power, as opposed to strong executive power. Among other things, Whigs were critical of the Mexican-American War and doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the view that Americans had the God-given right to colonize the entire western portions of the continent. Prominent members of the Whig Party included Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, Zachary Taylor, and William Henry Harrison. Several other former Whigs, including Lincoln, became American presidents as members of the Republican Party.

Abolitionism refers to the movement dedicated to the eradication of slavery. The abolitionist cause in the United States existed before the establishment of the republic and became a large, activist minority cause in the decades prior to the American Civil War. While Abraham Lincoln never called himself an abolitionist, in part due to the stigma attached to the label by mainstream racist America, his Republican Party was aligned with the abolitionist cause, especially in its dedication to limiting the westward expansion of institutional slavery.

The Compromise of 1850, another of Henry Clay’s compromises (which he composed with others, including Stephen Douglas and President Millard Fillmore), dealt with the division between free and slave states in the newly acquired territories purchased from Mexico after the Mexican-American War. Among other things, California would join the Union as a free state and Washington, DC, would outlaw the slave trade (but not slavery). At the same time, many other western territories were determined as free or slave states and the Fugitive Slave Act was strengthened. The compromise is remembered for delaying the outset of the war, but tensions would mount again soon in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.

This provision of the aforementioned compromise, states Jon Meacham, “explicitly deployed the power of the federal government in the service of slaveholders” (132). Fugitive slaves who had escaped to Northern free states (via the Underground Railroad in some cases) were not given due process and were forced to return to their slaveholders in the South. There were incentives for aiding authorities in executing this law and punishments for abetting enslaved people. Many Northerners were outraged by this aspect of the Compromise of 1850.

Created by the Illinois Senator who had recently defeated Lincoln in the senatorial election of 1854, this act formed the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, ostensibly to aid in the construction of a transcontinental railroad. In doing this, the act overturned the Compromise of 1850, thereby implicitly permitting the establishment of slavery in Kansas. It was signed into law by President Pierce on May 30, 1854. It is remembered as a major contributor to the conflicts of “Bleeding Kansas” throughout the 1850s, which made the territory an early indication of the full-scale war that was soon to engulf the nation.

According to Meacham, the Republican Party first took shape on “Tuesday, February 28, 1854, in Ripon Wisconsin” (143). At the time, the Republicans were a progressive party, broadly antislavery, and composed of disillusioned Democrats, Free Soilers and Whigs. In stark contrast to the present political landscape, the Republicans were a favored party in Northern, liberal states. Lincoln would be the first Republican president.

In 1856 a case was brought before the Supreme Court regarding whether or not Dred Scott, a slave residing in a free territory, should be forced to return to his slaveholder. In a 7-2 led by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the court determined that Black persons were not assured equal rights under law and could not be citizens. The decision was a lightning rod for the heightening political controversies of the late 1850s and part of the kindling that brought about the Civil War.

On September 22, 1862 Lincoln issued a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order stating that on January 1, 1863 all enslaved people in Confederate states would be freed. This order legally freed 3.5 million Black Americans. Notably, enslaved people in states under Union control were not included in this proclamation. Before the end of the war, all enslaved people would be freed, and the Constitution would be revised to reflect antislavery principles. Lincoln believed this was his most historically significant achievement.

Fort Sumter is an island military outpost off the coast of Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. When South Carolina seceded from the Union, Union soldiers still controlled the fort. Eventually, this led to a confrontation with Confederate soldiers who fired on the fort after Lincoln had issued it resupplied. This skirmish became the first open military conflict precipitating the Civil War. It seems to have functioned as a pretext, on both sides, for the inevitable war that would engulf the country.