Lincoln, Slavery, and the Nation

Abstract

After returning to Illinois from a visit to Kentucky in 1841, Abraham Lincoln described a memorable experience on the otherwise tedious boat trip home: By the way, a fine example was presented on board the boat for contemplating the effect of condition upon human happiness. A gentleman had purchased twelve negroes in different parts of Kentucky and was taking them to a farm in the South. They were chained six and six together. A small iron clevis was around the left wrist of each, and this fastened to the main chain by a shorter one at a convenient distance from the others; so that the negroes were strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line. In this condition they were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them, from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where; and yet amid all these distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board. One, whose offence for which he had been sold was an over-fondness for his wife, played the fiddle almost continually; and the others danced, sung, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards from day to day. How true it is that “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” or in other words, that He renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while He permits the best, to be nothing better than tolerable. Readers of Ira Berlin’s Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves will recognize immediately that Lincoln had just witnessed the defining experience of slav ery in its “Migration Generations.” From 1812 to 1860 vast movements of slaves to the booming cotton and sugar plantations of the Southwest replicated the horrors of the original Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean. Lincoln had also seen, we might say, the makings of the plot of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brilliant book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which memorably indicted slavery for the horrors of this new migration—separation of families and removal to unfamiliar and harsher conditions. Yet Lincoln did not react as Stowe did. 1 In Matthew Pinsker’s able and comprehensive essay we do not always get a sense of the historiographical trends, such as the developments in the history of slavery, that generally