‘The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered’

Since Donald Trump’s Electoral College triumph, the enthusiasm and activities of Klu Klux Klansmen and neo-Nazis — and the political problems they lay bare — have been compared with the activities of the party unofficially called the Know Nothings during the decade before the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln could tell us something about that.

They were called Know Nothings because, although they successfully ran anti-immigrant candidates for governor and Congress, the party was also a secret society. When asked about the rites, members would reply, “I know nothing.”

In early 1856, Lincoln was feeling low. A long-time partisan of Henry Clay’s Whig Party favoring government support for development of commerce and industry, Lincoln was a prominent lawyer in Springfield, Ill. An adroit and cautious politician, he was a former state legislator and congressman and the best-known Whig in Illinois. But he had recently lost an election in the state legislature for the United States Senate.

His biographers, most recently Sidney Blumenthal, have described Lincoln’s agonized navigation of a chaotic political scene. The nation’s chronic race issue was fracturing the political parties as southern slave owners pushed for extension of slavery in to the western territories, starting with Kansas and Nebraska. If thwarted by growing anti-slavery and free labor sentiment in the North, southern leaders warned they would secede — break up the Union.

Lincoln hated slavery. But what to do? In several states, including Illinois, anti-slavery activists were forming what they called Republican parties. Lincoln was a committed Whig. But that party was falling apart, as northern and southern Whigs, and some Democrats, went separate ways over slavery. And some Whigs were joining with the Know Nothing Party.

A huge wave of immigration had given rise among white Protestants to hatred of what they saw as “illiterate hordes of Irish papists and German infidels.” Some Know Nothings had clubbed and killed Irish immigrants in the streets. Others were respectable citizens simply afraid of change in America. Some were old friends of Lincoln. And some of them were also anti-slavery.

To gain elective power, the nascent abolitionist Republican party in Illinois was gathering dissident Democrats, former Whigs and anybody anti-slavery. It wanted Lincoln in.

But in the North it was still considered risky in 1856 for an ambitious politician like Lincoln to be labeled an abolitionist. It was also risky to be labeled a Know Nothing. Because he was still willing to work with anti-slavery Know Nothings, Lincoln’s Democratic opponents tried to label him a Know Nothing, too. A troubled navigator finding his way, Lincoln wrote to an abolitionist friend:

“I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’

“When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty ....”

Luckily, Lincoln stayed.

Then came Donald Trump.

But Lincoln had more to tell us. After his loss in the 1858 United States Senate contest to the pro-slavery Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln wrote to another friend: “The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one, or even one hundred defeats.”

This story was originally published September 19, 2017 at 9:24 PM with the headline "‘The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered’."