Review essay: The constitution according to Abraham Lincoln

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2000 by Waldrep, Christopher

Abraham Lincoln: A Constitutional Biography. By George Anastaplo. (Lanham, Maryland: Bowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999. Pp. x, 373. $35.00 cloth.)

It might be well to begin any constitutional biography of Abraham Lincoln in 1835, on the streets of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Located at the far southern tip of the great Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, Vicksburg was a place where courts and government had not yet monopolized power. More than the sheriff, a local militia company called the Vicksburg Volunteers maintained order, representing authority sanctioned by Mississippi's constitution. But Mississippi's constitution could not guarantee the militia legitimacy. That had to come from the ordinary people living in and around Vicksburg. When Vicksburgers gathered to celebrate the Fourth of July, the Volunteers paraded about the town, encouraging residents to affirm their ascendancy. Their authority was not uncontested. The Kangaroo, a neighborhood in Vicksburg's city limits, was known as a dangerously lawless haven for gamblers, prostitutes, and other criminals. As the militia paraded, one local gambler, a man named Cabler, insulted the militia's commanding officer and struck a citizen in front of the soldiers. What Cabler intended is probably not knowable now. He may well have wanted to expose the militia in a kind of street theater as weak and ineffective. If that was his purpose, he succeeded. Cabler's actions convinced his audience that legitimate authority could not handle the threat he posed. The crowd of onlookers transformed themselves into a mob, seized Cabler, and took him to the woods to lynch him, which meant a whipping followed by tar and feathers. Two days later, on Monday, July 6, Vicksburg's militia company attempted to reassert itself by marching into the Kangaroo and putting the gamblers in their place by seizing and destroying gambling apparatus. Had the soldiers carried this off, they would have reestablished themselves as not only lawful but dominant as well. Lawful authority would have been restored.'

A crowd of civilians trailed after the soldiers, watching to see what would happen when the militia confronted the gamblers. When the company kicked open the back door of a gambling house operated by a man named North, the gamblers inside fired four or five shots into the crowd, killing Dr. Hugh S. Bodley instantly. According to the Vicksburg Register, at this point indignation overcame all other feelings and the crowd stormed the house. Vicksburgers hanged five gamblers for killing Bodley. The Register thought this entirely justified, and offered as proof its assertion that every resident in Vicksburg and Warren County supported the killings. "We have never known the public so unanimous on any subject," the Register declared.2 Steamboats carried the news of these extraordinary events to newspapers across the nation, including the Sangamo Journal in Springfield, Illinois.' In his Lyceum speech, Lincoln used this drama to illustrate the state of lawlessness in antebellum America, declaring that constitutionalism hung in the balance.

Events in Vicksburg alarmed Lincoln because they did not happen in isolation. A few weeks before the Vicksburg violence, white citizens in nearby Madison County, Mississippi, thought they detected a slave uprising. By July, just as Vicksburgers hanged the gamblers, Madison County whites had organized extralegal tribunals. "It was agreed upon by the common consent of the citizens assembled," the whites' account of the affair explained, ". . . to make examples of [the conspirators] immediately by hanging, which would strike terror among the rest, and by that means crush all hopes of their freedom." The crowd went to work, extracting confessions from the accused and then hanging them.

Such extralegal violence was hardly confined to Mississippi. Mobs struck an abolition meeting in New York, "lynched" the mail in Charleston, South Carolina, and attacked newspapers in Cincinnati and Alton, Illinois.- On April 28, 1836, Francis McIntosh murdered a St. Louis deputy sheriff while seeking to avoid arrest after a waterside brawl. A mob forced open the jail, extracted McIntosh, and chained him to a tree to be burnt. Two thousand turned out, chanting, "Let the fire be slow." It was. According to one account, the flames first consumed McIntosh's legs and feet, leaving his upper body intact, writhing in conscious agony, until death came, finally. Subsequently Judge Luke E. Lawless instructed grand jurors that a killing carried out by such a large crowd could not be punished as it represented the will of the people.6

Lawless's comments outraged many, but Whigs charged that the judge merely articulated the principles of their political opponents. Whigs blamed the seeming wave of violence on Andrew Jackson's irresponsible populism. It was dangerous to promise too much power to the people. Such pandering aroused the lower orders! Lincoln belonged to a party that regularly presented itself as the true proponent of law and order while charging that Democrats championed a reckless species of political authority that based its legitimacy on public opinion. For the Whigs, law rested on timeless and universal absolute truths, not the unstable will of the majority. Jackson represented anarchy and popular despotism. For many Whigs, the Vicksburg violence, and the other riots and tumults common at the time, represented the worst excesses of Jacksonian democracy.8