Describe the events that happened during the great economic war
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HAVING JUST LOST HIS HARD-FOUGHT 1858 BID FOR THE SENATE, LINCOLN CONSOLES HIS CAMPAIGN MANAGER
Published: November 16, 2018
Better days ahead, or behind, the tumultuous mid-term election of 2018 is now over, albeit in a hostile fashion. Losers, this time, are especially mournful. They might want then, to look back, as much as forward, to try and heal. At an even more fraught and divisive moment in our past, Abraham Lincoln, too, lost an epic contest - and so 160 years ago wrote this letter, whose final words, echoing King Solomon, are once more worth heeding.
Feeling bad about losing his 1858 senatorial race to Senator Stephen Douglas, Lincoln reputedly said, “like the boy that stumped his toe – ‘it hurt too bad to laugh, and he was too big to cry.’ ” Adding to his injury, was insult: he lost despite having won the most votes. He had polled 190,000 to Douglas's 176,000, but the number that ended up counting was eight. That was the difference between the seats held by the Democrats and Republicans in the Illinois legislature, 54-46, and it was state legislatures that - until 1913, anyway - "indirectly" elected senators. Thus Lincoln could claim, as he did in an autobiographical sketch written while running for President in 1860, that only once, in his almost 35 years in politics, was he "ever beaten on a direct vote of the people." (And even in that race, in 1832, in which four state legislators were chosen from a field of fifteen, Lincoln was away serving in the Black Hawk War and, when finally mustered out, barely had time to campaign.) But losing now to Douglas, having spent the late summer and early fall canvassing the state and, on seven times, famously debating him face-to-face, was a bitter disappointment. It was, he felt, the final nail in his political coffin - and a blow to a struggle, he said, "in which I felt more than a merely selfish interest."
About halfway through the middle of the 19th century, the fight over Southern slavery, which had begun in the Northeast, spread suddenly, to the West. The discovery of gold in California, silver in Nevada, and the acquisition of vast new territories in the victorious war against Mexico - a quarter of today's continental United States - threatened the always delicate North-South accord. A burgeoning population wanted to go West and bring their slaves with them; just as a growing abolitionist movement wanted slavery ended, period. By 1854 Congress repealed the Missouri Compromise and instead, by terms of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, left the issue of whether to allow slavery in the new territories to be decided by local self-determination.
In place of a unifying Federal law, states would now vote under the doctrine of "Popular Sovereignty,” one by one, on the issue, fundamentally, of whether melanin-producing cells located in the bottom layer of the skin's epidermis denoted their possessor a human being, or a piece of property. Whether it was legal to own another human being, however, was a question for more than just the western territories. The Supreme Court, too, had an opinion. In 1857 it ruled in the Dred Scott case - Scott, a slave taken to Missouri, had sued for his freedom - that no "negro of the African race,” whether slave or free, could be a citizen of the United States, with a right to sue again. In the words of Chief Justice Roger Taney, Blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The framers of the Constitution, Taney insisted, believed "the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it." And, as if that was not ignominious enough, the Court further declared that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional to begin with, and that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in the territories, ever. To lawyer Lincoln in Illinois, all of this - the "new-fangled" doctrine; the wrongly decided case; the brazen assumption of historical facts that were not true - were meant to do just one thing: cloak the national spread of slavery. This "nationalization of slavery," as Lincoln saw it, would as much as anything, cause the Civil War.