Lincoln Part 21

Lincoln could not stay in his office to manage the campaign because he was constantly in demand as a speaker. Day after day, both Democrats and Republicans held rallies all across the state. Republican foot soldiers were deployed to the smaller gatherings, in schoolhouses and village churches. At larger rallies Republicans often produced out-of-state dignitaries, like Governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, Representative Schuyler Colfax from nearby Indiana, and Francis P. (Frank) Blair, Jr., of the prominent border-state political family, who was editor of the influential St. Louis Democrat. Democrats felt less need to import speakers, though Representative Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio made several speeches for Douglas in Illinois.

But Illinois voters wanted to hear the princ.i.p.als, not their surrogates, and both Lincoln and Douglas were almost constantly on the stump. Douglas gave 130 speeches during the campaign, and Lincoln 63, not including short responses to serenaders, remarks to small groups that a.s.sembled along the highways, and compliments paid to the standard Republican floats, featuring thirty-two ladies (one for each state, plus Kansas), which almost every village seemed able to produce. In the hundred days before the election Douglas traveled 5,227 miles; and Lincoln, between July and November, covered 4,350 miles-350 by boat, 600 by carriage, and 3,400 by train.

The seven formal debates between Lincoln and Douglas were, therefore, only a small part of the 1858 campaign, though they naturally attracted the greatest interest. All of them followed the same format. The speakers alternated in opening the debate. The opening speaker was allowed an hour for his presentation; his opponent had an hour and a half for reply; and the initial speaker then had a final half hour for reb.u.t.tal. Lincoln grumbled that the arrangement allowed Douglas to make four of the opening and closing statements, while he was allowed only three.

As the Republican New York Times observed, Illinois in 1858 was "the most interesting political battle-ground in the Union," and newspapers throughout the country offered extensive coverage of the canva.s.s. Local papers, of course, gave it great attention. For the first time reporters were a.s.signed to cover candidates throughout the long campaign season. The Chicago Press and Tribune, the most influential Republican paper in the state, sent the skilled shorthand expert Robert R. Hitt to report every word of the debates, and James B. Sheridan and Henry Binmore performed the same service for Douglas's organ, the Chicago Times. Though each side accused the other of garbling, mutilating, or revising the speeches, the verbatim reports, which were widely copied and circulated in other newspapers as well, were largely accurate, both in substance and in expression.

Reporters noted how sharply the candidates contrasted in appearance. Douglas, so short that he came up only to Lincoln's shoulder, was a ruddy, stout man, with regular features marred only by a curious horizontal ridge that stretched across the top of his nose, while Lincoln was exceptionally tall and painfully thin, with a melancholy physiognomy and sallow skin. Douglas had a booming, authoritative voice, while Lincoln spoke in a piercing tenor, which at times became shrill and sharp. Douglas used graceful gestures and bowed charmingly when applauded, in contrast to Lincoln, who moved his arms and hands awkwardly and looked like a jackknife folding up when he tried to bow.

There was also a marked contrast in the way the candidates presented themselves to the public. Douglas wished to appear a commanding figure, a statesman of national reputation. Accompanied by his beautiful, regal second wife, Adele Cutts, he usually traveled by special train, splendidly fitted out for comfort and for entertaining. When he stood on the platform in his handsome new blue suit with silver b.u.t.tons and in his immaculate linen, he was unquestionably a great United States senator reporting to his loyal const.i.tuents. Lincoln deliberately cultivated a different image. When he went by train, he traveled in the regular pa.s.senger cars-a practice that afforded him endless opportunities for meeting the voters and talking about their concerns. Except at the final debate in Alton, Mary Lincoln did not accompany him; it was not part of the persona he was projecting to display his elegantly dressed wife with her aristocratic bearing. Lincoln took pains to wear his everyday clothes during the debates, appearing usually in what Carl Schurz, the German-American leader, who campaigned for the Republican ticket, described as "a rusty black frock-coat with sleeves that should have been longer" and black trousers that "permitted a very full view of his large feet."

From time to time, Lincoln tried to capitalize on the differences between Douglas's appearance and his own. The senator's followers, he said, antic.i.p.ated that their leader at no distant day would become President and saw in his "round, jolly, fruitful face" promises of "postoffices, landoffices, marshal-ships, and cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance," while in Lincoln's "poor, lean, lank, face" n.o.body ever saw "that any cabbages were sprouting out," because "n.o.body has ever expected me to be President." There was nothing false about all this; Lincoln was in fact a homely man with simple tastes, indifferent to personal comfort. It was important in this contest to present himself to the voters not as a man of considerable means and one of the most prominent lawyers in the state but as a countryman, shrewd and incorruptible.

VIII

The opening debate at Ottawa, a town of about 9,000 inhabitants some eighty miles southwest of Chicago, attracted 10,000 people, who came in on foot, by horseback or carriage, and even on Illinois River ca.n.a.l boats. A special train of seventeen cars brought visitors from Chicago, and another of eleven cars came from Peru and La Salle. Lincoln arrived about noon on the special train from Chicago and was greeted by Ottawa mayor Joseph O. Glover. Seated in a carriage that, according to the Chicago Press and Tribune, was "beautifully decorated with evergreens and mottoes by the young ladies of Ottawa," he was escorted by a procession of military companies and bra.s.s bands, which stretched out for half a mile, to the public square and then to Mayor Glover's house. At about the same time a rival crowd went out to meet Douglas, who rode in from Peru in a handsome carriage drawn by four spirited horses.

By one o'clock people began moving into Lafayette Square, where the speaking was to take place, and there was considerable jostling for the best positions. There were no seats, and the audience had to remain standing for the entire three hours. Some "clowns" climbed upon the roof of the hastily built speakers' stand, the newspapers reported, and their weight broke through the boards, which fell on the unsuspecting heads of members of the reception committee. Fortunately order was restored in time for Douglas to begin speaking at two-thirty.

The ferocity of Douglas's opening statement apparently startled Lincoln. The senator intended to demonstrate that he was, as Lincoln had said, a lion-and very much a living lion, with sharp teeth. Announcing his major theme, which he would pursue throughout the campaign, the senator bluntly charged that Lincoln and Trumbull had since 1854 been conspiring to subvert both the Democratic and the Whig parties in order to create "an Abolition party, under the name and disguise of a Republican party." As evidence of this intent, he adduced a radical antislavery platform, which he said had been adopted in 1854 at the first state convention of the Republican party in Springfield and which Lincoln had presumably endorsed. Like a prosecuting attorney pinning down a reluctant witness, he demanded to know whether Lincoln still stood on this platform. Did Lincoln now, as in 1854, favor the unconditional repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act? Did he oppose the admission of more slave states to the Union? Was he opposed to the admission of a new state "with such a Const.i.tution as the people of that State may see fit to make"? Did he support the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia? Was he pledged to end the interstate slave trade? Did he wish to prohibit slavery in all the national territories? Did he oppose the acquisition of additional territory unless slavery was prohibited in it? Lincoln, he charged, was in favor of suppressing self-government and imposing uniformity on the different states, a policy "never dreamed of by Washington, Madison, or the framers of this Government."

How to reply bewildered Lincoln. At his best when he had time carefully to think through his ideas and revise his phrasing, he was clearly uncomfortable in debate format, which required extemporaneous speaking and swift rearrangement of arguments to meet the opponent's charges. Rather stumblingly he declared that he had had nothing to do with the 1854 resolutions Douglas had read and that his name had been used in connection with them without his authority. To establish that his true position on slavery was a very moderate one, he read at great length from his 1854 Peoria speech, in which he had announced that, given all earthly power, he would not know what to do about ending slavery.

Lincoln rushed through his speech, failing to use much of the time allotted to him. He had difficulty striking exactly the right tone. At times he resorted to worn cliches of humor, calling Douglas's misrepresentations of his views on race an example of that "specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse." He lapsed into legal language that must have been all but incomprehensible to his audience. Because Douglas had not denied the charge that he was part of a proslavery conspiracy, Lincoln said, "in the language of the lawyers, ... I took a default on him." Then when Douglas did produce a belated denial, Lincoln continued: "I demur to that plea. I waive all objections that it was not filed till after default was taken, and demur to it upon the merits." He declined to give immediate answers to Douglas's questions, even though his position on all these issues had been firmly established for years; his native caution was so great that he delayed his response until the next debate, declaring: "I do not mean to allow him to catechise me unless he pays back for it in kind."

After Douglas's reb.u.t.tal most in the audience hunted up any missing members of the family and made a break for home, where the horses had to be watered and the cattle fed. More dedicated partisans gathered around to congratulate the rival candidates. As Douglas left the stand, according to the partisan Illinois State Register, "nearly the entire crowd pressed around him, and the living ma.s.s, with shouts and hurras bore him, in their midst, to the hotel, the cheering and shouting being kept up incessantly." Lincoln's partisans were equally enthusiastic, and, in what proved to be an unfortunate effort to show approval, a dozen or so st.u.r.dy Republicans put him on their shoulders and, preceded by a band, carried him to the mayor's house. He was clearly uncomfortable, and the hostile reporter Henry Villard thought it was a ludicrous sight to see Lincoln's "grotesque figure holding frantically on to the heads of his supporters," while his legs were "dangling from their shoulders, and his pantaloons pulled up so as to expose his underwear almost to his knees."

Some of Lincoln's friends feared that he had exposed more than that at the Ottawa debate. A few, like Richard Yates, reported that they were "well satisfied" with his performance, and Lincoln himself was reasonably content with the outcome, reporting the next day, "The fire flew some, and I am glad to know I am yet alive." But most of his advisers thought he had not been sufficiently forceful or aggressive. Ray, about to leave on a business trip to New York, enjoined Congressman Washburne: "When you see Abe at Freeport, for G.o.d's sake tell him to 'Charge Chester! Charge!' Do not let him keep on the defensive." Joseph Medill, of the same newspaper, also urged Lincoln to change his tactics. "Dont act on the defensive at all," he urged. "Dont refer to your past speeches or positions,... but hold Dug up as a traitor and conspirator a proslavery bamboozelling demogogue."

On reflection, Lincoln himself was sufficiently worried about his performance at Ottawa to call a kind of summit meeting of his advisers to discuss how he should respond to Douglas's interrogatories. Gathering in Chicago on August 26, they called for a reconsideration of Lincoln's campaign strategy, and Medill, reporting for his colleagues, told Lincoln that he should "put a few ugly questions" of his own to Douglas the next day, at Freeport.

IX

At Freeport, Lincoln was clearly more in charge than he had been at Ottawa, only a week earlier. Before this sympathetic "vast audience as strongly tending to Abolitionism as any audience in the State of Illinois," he turned first to answering the interrogatories Douglas had posed at Ottawa. His answers contained no surprises: He was not in favor of repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act. He did not "stand pledged" against the admission of additional slave states to the Union (though he would be "exceedingly sorry" to have to pa.s.s on that question) nor against the admission of a new state with whatever const.i.tution its inhabitants might see fit to make. He did not "stand to-day pledged" to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia (but he would be very glad to see it accomplished) or the prohibition of the interstate slave trade (though he admitted that he had not thought much about this subject). He was, on the other hand, "impliedly, if not expressly, pledged" to prohibit slavery in all federal territories. As to acquiring additional territory, he "would or would not oppose such acquisition," depending on whether it "would nor would not aggravate the slavery question among ourselves."

Then, finally' taking the offensive, he posed to Douglas four questions of his own-four questions that were much like those that his Chicago advisers had recommended. First, would Douglas favor the admission of Kansas before it had the requisite number of inhabitants, as specified in the English bill? Second, could "the people of a United States Territory, in any lawful way,... exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a State Const.i.tution?" Third, would Douglas acquiesce in and follow a decision of the Supreme Court declaring that states could not exclude slavery from their limits? Finally, did he favor acquisition of additional territory "in disregard of how such acquisition may affect the nation on the slavery question?"

The second was the key question. Though advisers like Medill urged him to raise it, Lincoln had hesitated before asking it. He was in no doubt about how Douglas would answer; and, just as he expected, Douglas promptly replied that the pa.s.sage of "unfriendly legislation" could keep slavery out of any territory because "slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere, unless it is supported by local police regulations." Consequently-as "Mr. Lincoln has heard me answer a hundred times from every stump in Illinois"-"the people of a Territory can, by lawful means, exclude slavery from their limits prior to the formation of a State Const.i.tution." Though Lincoln predicted this reply, which became known as the Freeport Doctrine, he thought it important to have Douglas state it explicitly; otherwise, as he wrote a friend, it would be "hard work to get him directly to the point." As long as Douglas could fudge the issue, he could pretend that he was loyal to the national party and even to the national administration. But when he was forced to make his position clear, he would further outrage President Buchanan and his advisers, who believed that the Dred Scott decision had killed popular sovereignty, and his stand would widen the division between Douglas Democrats and the Danites in Illinois. But by showing how greatly at odds Douglas was with the National Democracy, Lincoln risked undermining his basic argument that Douglas was part of a broad conspiracy to extend and perpetuate slavery. Nevertheless, pressed to take the offensive and realizing that this question might rattle his opponent, Lincoln decided to include the question.

Then, taking advantage of the research that Herndon and others had done for him in the Springfield newspapers, Lincoln dropped his bombsh.e.l.l. The abolition resolutions that Douglas had so elaborately read at Ottawa, which Lincoln allegedly endorsed, were not, as it turned out, ever adopted by any group in Springfield, much less at any meeting that Lincoln attended; they were pa.s.sed by a convention or public meeting in Kane County. Indignantly Lincoln announced that it was "most extraordinary" that Douglas "should so far forget all the suggestions of justice to an adversary, or of prudence to himself, as to venture upon the a.s.sertion [concerning these resolutions]... which the slightest investigation would have shown him to be wholly false."

The revelation momentarily disconcerted Douglas, but he was such a skilled debater that he quickly recovered. Using diversionary tactics, he charged that Lincoln was avoiding either endorsing or repudiating these abolitionist resolutions by claiming that the platform had not been adopted "on the right 'spot,'" and that gave him an opportunity to attack Lincoln's "spot" resolutions criticizing the Mexican War. Sensing that this tactic was failing, he provoked the audience by repeatedly calling them "Black Republicans." When they began chanting "White, white" every time he used the phrase, he denounced them, announcing proudly, "I have seen your mobs before, and defy your wrath."

Nearly everyone agreed that Lincoln made a stronger showing at Freeport than in the first debate, and his devoted supporters, like Herndon, were convinced that "so far Lincoln has the decided advantage" in the contest. One distant admirer, a writer in the Lowell (Ma.s.sachusetts) Journal and Courier even announced that Lincoln's speeches were so telling that people were "now calculating his fitness and chances for a more elevated position." But Washburne, a more objective reporter, found after the Freeport debate that "neither party was fully satisfied with the speeches, and the meeting broke up without any display of enthusiasm." In a confidential letter Medill confessed that Lincoln was not Douglas's equal on the stump and predicted the senator would be reelected. Nearly all the Republicans felt relieved that Lyman Trumbull, who was considered a better speaker and had a wider reputation than Lincoln, had returned from Washington to a.s.sist the Republican cause.

X

Lincoln knew he was at a disadvantage in the third debate, at Jonesboro, an isolated town of 842 inhabitants in Union County, in the extreme southern part of the state. Settled by Southerners who had migrated chiefly from Kentucky and Tennessee, "Egypt" was solidly Democratic and overwhelmingly negrophobic. Rural, mostly poor, and relatively untouched by commercial ambition, voters in Union County had little use for the Republican party and its candidate. Fewer than 2,000 listeners attended the debate.

Lincoln and Douglas rehashed the issues they had raised in the previous debates, developing few ideas and adding little new information. Furious that Trumbull, that "excrescence from the rotten bowels of the Democracy," was now taking such a prominent part in the campaign, Douglas renewed his charge that Lincoln and Trumbull had conspired to abolitionize both parties in Illinois, and he now added, in the hope of dividing his opponents, the accusation that Trumbull in the 1855 election had "played a Yankee trick" on Lincoln, in order to secure his own, rather than Lincoln's, election to the Senate that year. Then, in an effort to goad Lincoln into responding, he elaborated on some of the racist charges he had made earlier in the campaign, announcing that "the signers of the Declaration [of Independence] had no reference to the negro whatever, when they declared all men to be created equal."

Shrewdly Lincoln refused to be baited. He knew there was no possibility of persuading this audience ("very few of whom are my political friends," he noted), and he avoided the issue of equal rights for Negroes. Much of his time he devoted to attacking Douglas's Freeport Doctrine, which threatened the credibility of Lincoln's charge that the senator was engaged in a conspiracy to expand slavery. Lincoln insisted that Douglas's claim that slavery could not enter a new territory without police protection was "historically false," for there was "vigor enough in slavery to plant itself in a new country even against unfriendly legislation."

At Charleston, three days later, he was on more hospitable ground. Many in Coles County had known Thomas Lincoln and his family, and some enthusiasts spread a gigantic painting, eighty feet long, across the main street, showing OLD ABE THIRTY YEARS AGO, on a Kentucky wagon pulled by three yoke of oxen. Democrats countered with a banner, captioned "Negro Equality," which depicted a white man standing with a Negro woman, and a mulatto boy in the background. Republicans found this so offensive that they tore it down before allowing the debate to begin.

Lincoln picked up on that theme in his opening remarks. He had, he said, recently been approached by an elderly man who wanted to know whether he was in favor of perfect equality between blacks and whites. This probably hypothetical inquiry gave him the opportunity to make his views explicit in a community where conservative old Whigs were strong. "I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races," he announced. "I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people." "There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality," he went on to add.

This was a politically expedient thing to say in a state where the majority of the inhabitants were of Southern origin; perhaps it was a necessary thing to say in a state where only ten years earlier 70 percent of the voters had favored a const.i.tutional amendment to exclude all blacks from Illinois. It also represented Lincoln's deeply held personal views, which he had repeatedly expressed before. Opposed to slavery throughout his life, he had given little thought to the status of free African-Americans. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was not personally hostile to blacks; indeed, Frederick Dougla.s.s remarked on "his entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race." But he did not know whether they could ever fit into a free society, and, rather vaguely, he continued to think of colonization as the best solution to the American race problem.

Turning from this subject abruptly, Lincoln inexplicably devoted most of his Charleston opening speech to endorsing a charge, originally made by Trumbull, that Douglas, despite his protestations of opposition to the Lecompton Const.i.tution, had really been part of a plot to impose slavery on Kansas. The story was intricate and confusing, involving secret proceedings in Senate committees and parliamentary maneuvering in the Senate itself, and Douglas had flatly announced that Trumbull's evidence for the alleged plot "was forged from beginning to end." Unwilling to see Trumbull calumniated, Lincoln now leapt to his defense with a tedious and unconvincing review of the charge.

Douglas expressed amazement that Lincoln had spent nearly his entire time on this discredited issue. Rather petulantly he asked: "Why, I ask, does not Mr. Lincoln make a speech of his own instead of taking up his time reading Trumbull's speech?" Scornfully he declared, "I thought I was running against Abraham Lincoln, that he claimed to be my opponent." It was, he concluded, "unbecoming the dignity of a canva.s.s" to spend time on "these petty personal matters."

XI

After Charleston, the lowest point in his campaign, Lincoln made a splendid recovery in the final three engagements with Douglas. The debate at Galesburg, which took place on the campus of Knox College, attracted one of the largest crowds, and in this antislavery area, heavily settled by Scandinavians, the audience was enthusiastic for the Republican candidate. Douglas, who was clearly tiring in the protracted campaign and was beginning to lose his voice, gave his standard speech, defending his unfailing fidelity in supporting the right of self-government and bitterly attacking the "unholy and unnatural combination" of Republicans and National Democrats against him. Lincoln, he claimed, was a political chameleon, advocating "bold and radical Abolitionism" in the extreme northern part of Illinois but professing in the central and southern counties to be "an old line Whig, a disciple of Henry Clay"; at Chicago, Lincoln announced his belief in Negro equality, but at Charleston, he declared that there must be a superior and an inferior race. By contrast, Douglas a.s.serted, his own views were clear and fixed. He knew that the authors of the Declaration of Independence never intended to include the Negro and that "this Government was made by our fathers on the white basis... made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever."

In his reply Lincoln was in good voice and in high spirits; he seemed to thrive on campaigning rather than being exhausted from it. Sensing that his audience was on his side, he appeared almost joyful as he reb.u.t.ted Douglas's charges, most of which, he noted, had "previously been delivered and put in print." Douglas had been guilty of slandering the Founding Fathers, for "the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence." Similarly he had misrepresented Lincoln's views on race, because there was no conflict whatever between his view that it was impossible to produce perfect social and political equality between black and white races and his insistence that "the inferior races" were equal in their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He taunted Douglas on his repeated failure to repudiate the alleged Republican resolutions of 1854, which he had tried ever since the Ottawa debate to attach to Lincoln. In constantly reusing this "stale fraud" he was like "the fisherman's wife, whose drowned husband was brought home with his body full of eels." Said she "when she was asked, 'What was to be done with him?' 'Take the eels out and set him again.