Free Bloody Crimes by James L. Swanson

William Wirt, or the other great Supreme Court and constitutional advocates of his day, Lincoln practiced in the local, state, and federal courts and handled a diverse mix of criminal and civil cases, with collections work occupying a significant portion of his practice. He did not travel widely beyond Illinois, possessed little firsthand knowledge of the South, and did not cultivate friendships with influential Southerners.
    He was headed for a life of local celebrity, prosperity, and respectability—and national obscurity—until he was aroused in 1854 by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the possibility of admitting new slave states to the Union. Between his famous Peoria speech in1854 and the Lincoln-Douglas debates during the Illinois Senate campaign of 1858, he emerged as a major antislavery voice. Lincoln lost that election but the debates, published in book form for the presidential campaign of 1860, made him a national political figure and helped him capture the nomination and then the White House.
    When Lincoln took the presidential oath of office on March 4, 1861, he was, on paper, one of the least-qualified chief executives in the nation’s history. Of his fifteen predecessors, any comparison to the first five—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—would have been considered absurd. Of the following ten, not all enjoyed successful presidencies, but every one surpassed Lincoln in raw qualifications for the office. Perpetually disorganized, Lincoln had never administered anything bigger than a two-man law office, and he had done a poor job of that, often unable to keep track of essential paperwork. And the myth is true—he often stuffed important documents into his stovepipe hat.
    Davis, in addition to his other military and political merits, had held an important cabinet post and had overseen the administration of the U.S. Army. In November 1860, a majority of Americans would have said that Jefferson Davis was far more qualified than Abraham Lincoln to occupy the White House. If the Democratic Party had not split and produced two rival candidates, Stephen A. Douglas and John C. Breckinridge, and if Jefferson Davis had been nominated in 1860 as the sole Democrat to run against Lincoln, Davis might have been elected the sixteenth president of the United States. Indeed, Lincoln won the race with less than 40 percent of the popular vote. He may have secured an electoral majority, but 60 percent of the country voted for someone other than him.
    Lincoln, who was not an abolitionist, agreed with Jefferson Davis that the Constitution protected slavery. Thus, the federal government had no power to interfere with it wherever it existed. And like Davis, Lincoln—at least the Lincoln of the 1840s and 1850s—acceptedwhite racial superiority. But Lincoln parted ways with Davis and the South over the morality of slavery and the right to introduce it into new states and territories.
    Lincoln believed that slavery was a moral crime—“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” He argued that even if blacks were not “equal” to whites, they should enjoy the equal right to liberty and the fruit of their labor. Lincoln insisted that the founders had allowed slavery with the uncomfortable understanding that it was an unholy compromise necessary to create the new nation, and that the founders had envisioned, at some future time, slavery’s natural and ultimate extinction. Lincoln also opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories and states, fearing that its spread would give it a second wind, thus perverting the intentions of the founders and the true meaning of the Declaration of Independence.
    Davis and his fellow Southerners rejected that ideology, insisting that slavery was not a necessary evil but something good that benefited both masters and slaves. The “peculiar institution,” they argued, civilized, westernized, and Christianized a primitive, heathen African people. Southern