1858

__________ 

“Slavery is not a matter of little importance. It overshadows every other question in which we are interested.” 

Abraham Lincoln

__________

In 1858, drinking milk could kill you.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

June 16: In a speech in Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln offers stark warning. Passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act had not ended the bitter debates over slavery. That act and others had made the situation worse.

 

We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.

 

Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.

 

In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.

 

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

 

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

 

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

 

It will become all one thing or all the other.

 

Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new – North as well as South.

Carving of Stephen Douglas.

 

*

 

July 10: Lincoln gives a speech in Chicago, putting distance between himself and Stephen A. Douglas, between his party and the Democrats. His opponents believe the Declaration of Independence is meant only for men of Anglo-Saxon descent.

 

Lincoln believed that the Declaration represented a set of principles that transcended time, space, and ethnicity. His expansive reading of the Declaration held that the Founding Fathers intended for the proposition that “all men are created equal” to apply to all men, including those of African descent. As Lincoln stated in his July 10 speech at Chicago, this assertion of equality was “the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.” The Declaration had established a moral standard for the republic that should be color-blind, as Lincoln urged his audience in Chicago to “discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man – this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position – discarding our standard that we have left us. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring all men are created equal.”

 

*

 

Illinois to Become an “African Colony.”

July 16: Douglas speaks at Bloomington, Illinois, taking his cue from Lincoln’s comments regarding the Declaration of Independence.

 

Given Lincoln’s beliefs, Douglas claimed that the new senator’s first order of business would be to repeal the measure that prohibited African Americans from settling in Illinois. The state would thus be transformed into an “African colony,” and the “charming prairies” would “look black as night” during the middle of the day. Douglas speculated that once Lincoln had gathered “all his colored brethren around him,” he would proceed to remove all legal restrictions that had been placed upon them and it would only be a matter of time before they were voting, holding office, sitting on juries, and perhaps most troubling of all, “marry[ing] whom they please, provided they marry their equals.”

 

He went on to assure his audience that the Founding Fathers had never meant to include “Chinese or Coolies, the Indians, the Japanese, or any other inferior races,” under the umbrella of the Declaration. 

Instead, they “were speaking only of the white race, and never dreamed that their language would be construed to include the negro.”

 

* 

“Swallow every greasy nigger.”

Lincoln-Douglas Debates: As imperfect as Lincoln’s positions regarding race might sound to modern ears – he thought colonizing freed blacks in Africa might be a good idea – he was boxed in by Douglas’ attacks. 

He tried to clarify accordingly. 

Throughout the campaign Lincoln denied that he was in favor of elevating African Americans to a position of social and political equality. Instead, he drew a distinction between natural rights and civil rights. Though African Americans were entitled to natural rights, such as the rights to life and liberty enumerated in the Declaration, Lincoln reasoned that it did not necessarily follow that they should be allowed to vote, hold office, or intermarry with white persons. As he claimed on numerous occasions, “I protest, now and forever, against the counterfeit logic which presumes that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave, I do necessarily want her for a wife.”

 

The attacks on Lincoln only increased after Frederick Douglass praised the candidate in an address. Racism in that era was never hidden, but rather accepted and expected. The State Register ran one article under the title, “Another Ally of Lincoln – The Nigger Chief Out for Him.”

 

Really, much of what came out of Stephen Douglas’ mouth and out of newspapers that supported him during the debates is gag-worthy. The  Register warned that Lincoln and the Republicans were willing to “swallow every greasy nigger that comes along.” Lincoln had taken “a nigger to his bosom.” The Republicans had “a perfect right to employ darkey lecturers,” editors agreed, adding mockingly, that they  were “all right on the great question of wool.”

 

Senator Douglas reminded the crowd at the second debate in Freeport that when he last spoke there, Frederick Douglass had been in the audience, sitting in a carriage with a white woman.

 

He warned that Lincoln, if elected, would be “the champion of black men.”

 

A member of the audience then shouted: “What have you got to say against it?” Douglas replied: “All I have to say on that subject is that those of you who believe that the nigger is your equal and ought to be on an equality with you socially, politically, and legally, have a right to entertain those opinions, and of course will vote for Mr. Lincoln.”

 

To be honest, I couldn’t stand much more of the language and logic on display in that otherwise excellent article. 

Let’s just say that for his time and place, Abraham Lincoln was far ahead of most Americans in regard to matters of race. (See: March 4, 1861.) 

Lincoln once said that his “ancient faith” taught him “that ‘all men are created equal’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.” 

He also explained his thinking this way: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.” (Both quotes cited by John Meacham, Time, pp. 43-46, 10/31/22.)

 

*

 

History.com summarizes the views of Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, regarding race, like so:

 

Douglas repeatedly attacked Lincoln’s supposed radical views on race, claiming his opponent would not only grant citizenship rights to freed slaves but allow Black men to marry white women (an idea that horrified many white Americans) and that his views would put the nation on an inevitable path to war. Lincoln responded that he had “no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the Black races” and that “a physical difference between the two” would likely prevent them from ever living in “perfect equality.” Though he believed slavery was morally wrong, Lincoln made it clear that he shared the belief in white supremacy held by Douglas and nearly all white Americans at the time.

 

But while Douglas held that the nation’s founding document had been written by white men, who intended it to apply only to white men, Lincoln argued that “there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence.” Though he assured Southerners he did not plan to interfere with slavery where it already existed, he argued that the Founding Fathers – many of whom enslaved people – had regarded the institution of slavery as a moral evil that must eventually disappear.

 

WorldAtlas points out that for Lincoln, the question of slavery was a moral one, and he looked to the Declaration for guidance.

 

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Illinois itself denied the right of people of color to testify in court against whites. The state taxed everyone for support of the public schools – but then refused to allow African American children to attend. Some of the worst state laws had been passed only five years before, but among other limitations,

 

African Americans were also legally prevented from voting, holding office, serving in the militia, and intermarrying with whites. An 1845 statute required residents of color to file a certificate of freedom with the county court and post a bond for as much as $1,000 as a surety of good behavior. Persons who did not have a certificate of freedom were to be considered fugitives from slavery and treated as such. If the sheriff apprehended someone who did not possess the requisite papers, he was required to advertise the person in the newspaper and could hire him/her out for one year. If the alleged fugitive remained unclaimed at end of the year, he/she was issued a provisional certificate of freedom.

 

Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, had been so appalled by the passage of several of the newer laws that he asked,

 

What kind of people are the people of Illinois? Were they born and nursed of women as other people are? Or are they the offspring of wolves and tigers, and only taught to prey upon all flesh pleasing to their bloody taste? If they are members of the human family, by what spirit are they animated? Is it from heaven or is it from hell?

 

The Chicago Times endorsed Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, and found pride in knowing

 

that Illinois was “known all over the Union as a State where white people are absolute and supreme” and had enacted measures to insure “that the State shall for all time to come remain exclusively the home of the white race.” The Times fully endorsed Illinois’ policy of reserving “her broad prairies for her white citizens, her white farmers, laborers and mechanics.” By discouraging blacks from settling in the state, white residents would not be “crowded and inconvenienced by an inferior and deteriorated race.” All of this was in jeopardy, however, because Douglas’s Republican challenger was, in the opinion of the Times, an “advocate of negro equality and negro citizenship.” If Lincoln prevailed in the election, the Times warned that blacks would overrun the state, “crowd all our cities” and “stifl[e] free white labor.” A vote for the Republicans would therefore be an act of “self-destruction,” and Illinois would become known as “the negro State” of the Northwest.

 

* 

September 11: In another one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the future president poses a question: “What constitutes the bulwark of our liberty and independence?” 

It wasn’t guns or ships, he argued. 

Our defence is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors … Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.

Statewide, the Republican Party outpolls the Democrats in the Illinois elections. But Douglas is appointed to the U.S. Senate because the legislature is dominated by the Democratic Party.

*

 

More proof that our ancestors were as violent as we can be:

 

The Yale man’s habit of carrying a weapon contributes to a fatal clash. When a group of undergraduates passes the High Street firehouse, harsh words are exchanged with a firefighter and a student shoots him. The incident moves Yale to ban weapons – and to contribute $100 toward relocating the firehouse away from the campus. (See also 1806, 1841, 1854, 1919 and 1959.)

 

*

__________ 

“These philanthropists would be willing to see our nation exterminated, and our throats cut, because we are pursuing a system of mild domestic slavery.”

 

A.J. Pickett

__________ 

 

A. J. Pickett was a planter in Alabama. In  1851 he wrote a book called History of Alabama: and Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi, from the Earliest Period. The South’s steamy culture he wrote was “so destructive of the constitutions of the whites” the land “could [n]ever have been successfully brought into cultivation without African labor.” In his view, abolitionists were enemies of progress. “These philanthropists would be willing to see our nation exterminated, and our throats cut, because we are pursuing a system of mild domestic slavery,” he wrote.

 

He died in October at age 48, two weeks after purchasing the Figh-Pickett mansion. His wife Sarah lived in the house for 36 years (story in Smithsonian; September 2020). Two women, Ana Banks, a descendant of Pickett, the other the descendant of a slave, began a search together in family records.

 

Karen Orozco Gutierrez of Davenport, Iowa, is the great granddaughter of an enslaved man named Milton Howard. He told his children, and the story was passed down, that he and his family were born free in Muscatine, Iowa, but kidnapped by slavers and taken South. His first enslaver was a planter in Alabama named Pickett.

 

Their search led to records that showed in 1853, Milton, 2, three adults, five teenagers and seven other children were transferred from Pickett’s ownership into a trust for the benefit of his wife. Technically, the slaves no longer belonged to anyone named Pickett but rather to a trust overseen by a judge. When Milton died in 1928, he was a celebrity of sorts in Davenport. A front page obituary paid tribute to him as a Union Army veteran who’d escaped an Alabama plantation and later worked at Rock Island Arsenal, in Illinois.

 

The two women eventually located Pickett’s grave. Karen asked Ana if she would mind her saying a prayer. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” she began.

 

It is said that Pickett left the Baptist church because he liked dancing too much, and became an Episcopalian.

 

*

 

As late as mid-century, 60 percent of deaths reported in New York City were children under age 5.

 

One culprit was increasingly clear. In May 1858, a progressive journalist in New York named Frank Leslie published a 5,000-word exposé denouncing a brutal killer in the metropolis. Malevolent figures, Leslie wrote, were responsible for what he called “the wholesale slaughter of the innocents.” He went on, “For the midnight assassin, we have the rope and the gallows; for the robber the penitentiary; but for those who murder our children by the thousands we have neither reprobation nor punishment.” Leslie was railing not against mobsters or drug peddlers but rather a more surprising nemesis: milk.

 

Drinking animal milk — a practice as old as animal domestication itself — has always presented health risks, from spoilage or by way of infections passed down from the animal. But the density of industrial cities like New York had made cow’s milk far deadlier than it was in earlier times. In an age without refrigeration, milk would spoil in summer months if it was brought in from far-flung pastures in New Jersey or upstate New York. Increased participation from women in the industrial labor force meant that more infants and young children were drinking cow’s milk, even though a significant portion of dairy cows suffered from bovine tuberculosis, and unprocessed milk from these cows could transmit the bacterium that causes the disease to human beings. Other potentially fatal illnesses were also linked to milk, including diphtheria, typhoid and scarlet fever.

 

How did milk go from being a “liquid poison” — as Frank Leslie called it — to the icon of health and vitality that it became in the 20th century? The obvious answer begins in 1854, when a young Louis Pasteur took a job at the University of Lille in the northern corner of France, just west of the French-Belgian border. Sparked by conversations with winemakers and distillery managers in the region, Pasteur became interested in the question of why certain foods and liquids spoiled. Examining samples of a spoiled beetroot alcohol under a microscope, Pasteur was able to detect not only the yeast organisms responsible for fermentation but also a rod-shaped entity — a bacterium now called Acetobacter aceti — that converts ethanol into acetic acid, the ingredient that gives vinegar its sour taste. These initial observations convinced Pasteur that the mysterious changes of both fermentation and spoilage were not a result of spontaneous generation but rather were a byproduct of living microbes, and that insight, which would eventually help provide the foundation of the germ theory of disease, led Pasteur to experiment with different techniques for killing those microbes before they could cause any harm. By 1865, Pasteur, now a professor at the École Normal Supérieure in Paris, had hit upon the technique that would ultimately bear his name: By heating wine to around 130 degrees Fahrenheit and then quickly cooling it, he could kill many of the bacteria within, and in doing so prevent the wine from spoiling without substantially affecting its flavor. And it is that technique, applied to milk all around the world, that now saves countless people from dying of disease every single day. (See: 1892.)