Graham Peck is the Wepner Distinguished Professor of Lincoln Studies in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Springfield.  The following is a modified version of the Wepner Distinguished Professor Investiture Lecture, delivered Thursday, September 24, 2020.

In 2017, I published Making an Antislavery Nation: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom.  The book argued that Lincoln and the Republican Party in the 1850s promoted an antislavery interpretation of the nation’s founding in order to forge an antislavery majority in the northern states.  The Republicans insisted that the founding fathers had dedicated the nation to freedom rather than slavery. Yet, as the title Making an Antislavery Nation suggests, creating an antislavery majority in American politics was not foreordained.  Slavery existed in all of the colonies prior to the American Revolution.  Fashioning an antislavery nation thus proved a tremendous challenge.  Slavery’s abolition required decades of antislavery activism, the most radical mass political movement in American history, and a monumental war.  In the end, it took almost one hundred years to accomplish.

Today I would like to contemplate the implications of what I wrote in the book given the tremendous furor in contemporary America over our nation’s past.  Although public battles over American history have been waged for decades, I cannot recall a time when history served so distinctly as a leading subject of social commentary and political protest.  Statues are the most obvious example.  Throughout America, and to a significant degree throughout the world, many statues and other representations of notable figures have faced either physical or political attack.  Here in Springfield, Illinois, two statues and a painting of U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas are slated to be removed this fall from the grounds of the Illinois State capitol.  Unsurprisingly, the removal of statues has engendered opposition, and has encouraged President Trump to propose creating a National Garden of American Heroes filled with statues, presumably, heroic ones.  The New York Times’ 1619 Project has similarly elicited controversy.  The project, in its words, seeks to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”  It has received considerable praise, and some criticism.  One of its sharpest and most recent critics has been President Trump, who desires to inculcate patriotism through study of the past.  His line of thinking is clear.  He contends that the country’s founding “set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism, and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history…  We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”  What will come of these projects is an interesting question.  I have wondered how Americans will process these polarized portrayals of history, and what the consequences may be.  But as a historian who has studied slavery and freedom, I thought it incumbent upon me to express my considered judgment on the subject.

In this regard I am not alone.  Historians have been engaging with the public extensively during the past five turbulent months.  Many of them have written op-eds, posted on social media, or appeared on TV, radio, or podcast episodes.  In some cases, the turbulence has altered our own projects.  I spent most of the summer making a road film on the Lincoln-Douglas debates with Saint Xavier University’s Nathan Peck.  In the middle of the summer, the Douglas statue issue reared its head and forced us to change directions to address contemporary concerns.  After much discussion, we elected to try to promote dialogue between Americans on some of these difficult historical issues.  Our goal was to encourage conversation about our nation’s past by representing a variety of perspectives on how to think about Lincoln and Douglas.  Our hope is that viewers will learn about the debates, but we also hope that they will open their ears, and their minds, to people who think differently than they do.  Much can be learned by studying the past, but neither historical records nor interpretations of them can teach us tolerance and open-mindedness.  That work we must do ourselves.

In that spirit, I would like to explore how the making of an antislavery nation sheds light on slavery and freedom in American history.  Since Lincoln did as much as anyone to promote emancipation, I will take him as my guide, while trying to adhere to his advice that a “drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.”

Lincoln, of course, thought deeply about whether slavery or freedom predominated in the United States government.  Indeed, it could be argued that his central political concern from 1854 until his death was ensuring the predominance of freedom.  His concern in 1854 stemmed from congressional passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which permitted territorial settlers to authorize slavery in western lands that Congress had previously reserved for freedom.  This momentous change in policy reflected the principles of Stephen A. Douglas, the primary author of the act, who contended that it was a “sacred” principle of self-government for settlers to govern themselves.  Lincoln protested vehemently against Douglas’ logic, instead endorsing a definition of self-government rooted in universal individual freedom.  “I trust I understand, and truly estimate the right of self-government,” he declared in his great 1854 speech at Peoria.  “My faith in the proposition that each man should do precisely as he pleases with all which is exclusively his own, lies at the foundation of the sense of justice there is in me.”  Consequently, he observed, “if the Negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself?”  To Lincoln, blacks had a self-evident natural right to liberty, one articulated in the Declaration of Independence, but one that preexisted any formal acknowledgment of rights.  “[R]epeal the Declaration of Independence,” he said, “repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature.  It still will be the abundance of man’s heart, that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.”  Here, then, was Lincoln’s concise and powerful understanding of individual freedom rooted in natural law: the right of all men to do whatever they wanted, with whatever was theirs.

But Lincoln coupled this understanding with a broader political definition that flowed from American ideals.  His Peoria Address quoted the Declaration of Independence’s famous phrases on rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but also quoted the subsequent sentence: “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, DERIVING THEIR JUST POWERS FROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED.”  Slavery, he pointed out, was “a total violation of this principle.”  To Lincoln, therefore, slavery not only violated every slave’s individual freedom, but also contradicted the nation’s governing premise.  In his view, slavery as a system of social relations had no philosophical justification.  He therefore sharply distinguished between any argument that there was moral right in slavery and the revolutionary principle of self-government.  “These principles cannot stand together,” he declared. “They are as opposite as God and mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other.”  Correspondingly, he also sharply distinguished between the institution of slavery, which reflected man’s greed, and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which reflected their love of liberty.  Crucially, for Lincoln, slavery preexisted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Slavery clearly had been in the new nation, but was not of the new nation.

Lincoln’s distinction is of profound importance because he was substantially correct.  Slavery did in fact long predate the United States.  The long and terrible history of New World slavery and the slave trade, although awful in its character and its consequences, is not unique to the United States.  The Portuguese brought slaves to the New World in the 1520s, about one hundred years before slaves arrived in British North America.  By 1775, approximately 5,535,000 slaves had been taken from Africa and transported elsewhere in the world.  Mainland North America, which would become the United States, was the destination for approximately 280,000 of those slaves, or 5% of the total.   This relatively small percentage of the whole does not mean that slavery was not enormously significant for the history of the American colonies or the future United States.  On the contrary, it most certainly was, including for the peopling of the colonies.  But the small percentage does mean that the slave trade to the colonies was not exceptional to the English mainland colonies.  It also means that the American slave system had established itself in British and colonial law long before the American Revolution.  Consequently, slavery was large and durable by 1776.  The challenge was what to do with it.

Fortunately, a vibrant antislavery movement emerged in the wake of the American Revolution.  As historian Sean Wilentz has recently pointed out, Philadelphians established the world’s first antislavery society in 1775, and a flurry of additional societies burst forth in the 1780s.  Vermont prohibited slavery in 1777 and over the next three decades every northern state emancipated their slaves or enacted gradual emancipation laws.  Wilentz described this as “an essential break from the past and a momentous turn in the history of slavery and antislavery.”  Indeed, this burst of antislavery reform created the free states, whose politicians over the next seventy years generally opposed slavery and whose laws provided a safe haven for antislavery reformers.  The significance of this first antislavery movement, spurred by the Revolution, is hard to overstate.  It was a necessary precursor to Lincoln’s antislavery career, not to mention the 1850s Republican Party that opposed slavery’s extension and sought, in Lincoln’s words, slavery’s ultimate extinction.

Indeed, although slaveholders wielded much power in the young United States, the Union posed real dangers for slaveholders.  This was not immediately apparent because Northerners had little motive and no authority to attack slavery in the southern states.  But as the decades passed it was southerners who had to create alternatives to both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  The slow fashioning of a proslavery argument by southerners in the decades after 1830 eventually led them to Alexander Stephens’ famous cornerstone speech in 1861.  Stephens declared that the founders had been mistaken in their declaration of natural human equality.  He asserted that black enslavement was “natural and normal.”  Consequently, he observed that the new Confederate Constitution laid its foundation on the “great truth” of racial inequality.  Correspondingly, clauses in that document explicitly protected slavery to ensure its perpetuity.  In these ways the Confederate Constitution demonstrated the profound importance of the founders’ antislavery sentiments.  Had such sentiments not existed in 1787, the U.S. Constitution almost certainly would have provided strong provision for the protection of property in human beings.  If so, slavery would have been extraordinarily difficult to eradicate.

All of which brings us back to Lincoln.  The Confederate Constitution was certainly no surprise to the Union’s new president.  After all, he had said in response to Douglas in 1854 that the “spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms; and the former is being rapidly displaced by the latter.”  This was both observation and prophecy.  By 1857, Douglas had begun to deny the literal meaning of the Declaration of Independence.  He did not say that the Declaration of Independence was wrong, but he did say that the founders did not mean to include black people when they used the phrase “all men.”  Lincoln passionately replied that Douglas thus maligned the founders and mangled the Declaration of Independence.  Although the founders had no power to establish equality among all men, he said, they did mean “to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.  They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”  This was a critically important way to think about the founding in 1857; it remains so today.

Why it remains so is worthy of contemplation.  There are, I think, three compelling reasons.  The first is that our country’s legacy of freedom remains our resource for the present and future.  The abolitionists, and later Lincoln, and later many others, drew on that revolutionary legacy to advocate for equality and freedom, and in so doing strengthened our society.  We and future generations of Americans will need to do the same.  The second reason is that the meaning of freedom has always been contested, and always will be.  This idea can be gleaned from the subtitle of my book: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom.   Lincoln knew that his definition of freedom was not the only one.  Both southern slaveholders and Douglas were proposing very different ones, just like there are different definitions of freedom today.  I will take Lincoln’s definition until I find a better one, for “augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere” is a doctrine for the whole world, and not just for Americans.  This essential fact brings me to the third reason, which is that the idea of freedom reaches beyond our shores.  The Revolution helped spread the germ of freedom to other countries.  Other societies and countless people throughout the world are now our allies in freedom.  They remind us that the idea of freedom is not uniquely American.  But America has been a fount and a beacon of liberty for more than two centuries, and in a world where freedom is neither universal nor secure, Americans should seek to remain so.  We can of course choose otherwise, as Lincoln well knew.  He urged his fellow Americans at Peoria to return to what he called the “ancient faith.”  We too should return to the ancient faith, seeking to spread and deepen its influence, for all people, everywhere, even if we never perfectly attain it.