Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

Already at this comparatively early period, Lincoln saw corporate 
capital and credit as a fructifying force, idealizing corporate owner-
ship and distrusting public initiatives in the realm of fi nance. 
When elected to the House of Representatives in Washington, 
Lincoln’s fi rst act (in January 1848) was to denounce the victorious 
and almost concluded war with Mexico as unnecessary, unconsti-
tutional, and the result of presidential mendacity and aggression.
21
 
While not pinning the blame for the war on slavery, as some did, 
and while accepting its result as a fait accompli, Lincoln backed 
David Wilmot’s motion, which stipulated that slavery should be 
entirely excluded from any newly acquired land. Slavery had been 
abolished in Mexico in 1829, during the administration of Vicente 
Guerrero, and there was a real prospect that the self-proclaimed 
champions of “Anglo-Saxon freedom” would reestablish slavery in 
lands where it had already been eliminated.
22
In the course of his speech attacking the way the Mexican war 
had been launched, Lincoln delivered the following judgment: 
Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power, have 
the right to rise up and shake off  the existing government, and 
form a new one that suits them better. Th
  is is a most valuable, a 
most sacred right—a right which, we hope and believe, is to lib-
erate the world. Nor is this right confi ned to cases in which the 
whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. 
Any portion of such a people that can, may revolutionize, and make 
their own so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a 
majority of any portion of such a people may revolutionize, putting 
down a minority, intermingled with or near about them, who may 
oppose their movements. Such a minority was precisely the case of 
21 “Th
  e War with Mexico,” in Basler, Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and 
Writings, pp. 202–16. 
22 Th
 eodore Vincent, Th e Legacy of Vicente Guerrero, Gainesville 2001, pp. 
195–9. For the signifi cance of the black and mulatto population of Mexico, see 
Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La población negra de México, 1519–1810, Mexico 
City 1946, pp. 223–45. For the racial rhetoric of “Anglo-Saxonism” at this 
time in the US see Roger Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: the Origins of 
American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Cambridge, MA, 1981, pp. 249–71. Even 
opponents of the war sometimes appealed to the supposed superiority of the 
Anglo-Saxons, but Lincoln did not. 
introduction  15

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the Tories in our own Revolution. It is a quality of revolutions not 
to go by old lines, or old laws.
23
Th
  is blunt and brusque version of the “self-determination” principle 
was off ered as the right way to look at Mexico’s “revolution” against 
Spain and Texas’s “revolution” against Mexico. Its terms might easily 
endorse “settler sovereignty,” but Lincoln was later to enter a crucial 
caveat on this point (to be considered below).
Lincoln set out his views on slavery in a series of major speeches 
that defi ned him as a politician. Th
  ese included one in Peoria in 
1854 that dwelled on the implications of the Kansas-Nebraska Act 
and off ered a sketch of the republic’s successive attempts to compro-
mise over slavery; the “House Divided” speech in 1858, delivered to 
a Republican convention; several speeches he gave as a Republican 
senatorial candidate in debate with Stephen Douglas (including 
one devoted to the Dred Scott ruling); and a speech at the Cooper 
Union in New York, in 1860. Put together, they make a weighty 
tome, and no other Republican leader devoted such sustained atten-
tion to the topic. Th
  e speeches often lasted two or three hours, were 
each heard by audiences of several thousand, and were reprinted 
verbatim in sympathetic newspapers. Southern leaders and opinion 
formers became familiar with their contents. Characteristically, they 
are quite unrelenting about the wrongs of slavery, but also moder-
ate in their conclusions. Once he became a presidential candidate, 
Lincoln reiterated his respect for the compromises embodied in the 
US Constitution and the compromise acts of 1820 and 1850, but 
he opposed any further concessions. He favored an end to slavery 
in the Federal district in Washington because such a move was not 
excluded by those agreements. Likewise he opposes the Dred Scott 
23 Basler, 
Abraham Lincoln:  His Speeches and Writings, p. 209. Lincoln was 
at this time involved in a group that called itself the Young Indians. He was 
hugely impressed by a speech against the Mexican War delivered by Alexander 
Stephens of Georgia, another member of the group, in which he attacked hos-
tilities that were “aggressive and degrading,” since they involved “waging a war 
against a neighboring people to compel them to sell their country.” Stephens 
insisted that facing such a prospect he would himself prefer to perish on “the 
funeral pyre of liberty” rather than sell “the land of my home.” Stephens, who 
remained friendly to Lincoln, was, of course, to become vice president of the 
Confederacy. Th
  e quoted excerpts are from Basler, p. 214. 
16  an unfinished revolution

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ruling allowing slaves to be brought into Federal territory. But he 
was prepared to recognize and implement established law, includ-
ing that relating to fugitives. For the long term Lincoln believed 
that means should be found gradually to emancipate the slaves, 
for example by freeing the children born to slave mothers once 
the children reached the age of 25, or some other alternative that 
gave compensation to their owners and allowed the former slaves 
to be settled in Africa. Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison 
had long attacked the latter idea. It was associated with Whig sla-
veholders, notably Henry Clay, a man much admired by Lincoln, 
who supported what was known as the colonization of African 
Americans, treating them as aliens in the land where most of them 
had been born and inviting them to “return” to the land of their 
ancestors. 
Lincoln’s support for colonization separated him from the main 
currents of abolitionism, but his concern for the integrity of the 
Federal state, his early disapproval of the lawlessness of the defend-
ers of slavery, and his distaste for the slaveholders’ demand for special 
treatment all signal themes that characterized the Republican Party 
of the 1850s. Unlike the Radicals, he did not fulminate against the 
“slave power,” but he did attack the exorbitant representation of 
Southern white men in the House of Representatives and electoral 
college, which came about because the slave population of each 
state was counted when apportioning delegates, with each slave 
deemed equivalent to three-fi fths of a free man. He sought a new 
and more demanding ideal of the nation and the republic. Whereas 
antebellum US national feeling characteristically deferred to the 
slaveholders, the Republicans sponsored a new vision of the nation 
that challenged the South’s claim to special consideration. In the 
Republican view, if slaves could be brought into Federal territories 
then the incoming slaveholders would be able to grab the best land 
and develop it more rapidly than free farmers. Th
 e Republicans also 
favored public improvements and free education. Th
 e Republican 
vision had great appeal in the regions characterized by cheap and 
rapid transportation, the growth of manufacturing, and the spread 
of the “market revolution.”
24
 Th
  is surge of growth spread wealth 
24  See Charles Sellers, Th e Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–
1846, Oxford 1991, pp. 125–30, 271–8, 396–427, and Melvyn Stokes and 
introduction  17

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