The Life of Stephen A. Douglas Part 9

"I agree to your suggestion that we shall alternately open and close the discussion. I will speak at Ottawa one hour, you can reply, occupying an hour and a half, and I will then follow for half an hour. At Freeport, you shall open the discussion and speak one hour; I will follow for an hour and a half, and you can then reply for half an hour. We will alternate in like manner in each successive place.

"Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

"S. A. Douglas."

To which Lincoln replied:

"Springfield, July 31, 1858.

"Hon. S. A. Douglas:

"Dear Sir:--Yours of yesterday, naming places, time and terms for joint discussions, between us, was received this morning. Although by the terms as you propose, you take four openings and closes to my three, I accede, and thus close the arrangement. * * *

"Your obedient servant,

"A. Lincoln."

Now that Lincoln has become idealized and is safely cla.s.sed with the great men of all ages, his modest challenge seems like a condescension of the immortal President to his rival. It then seemed an act of temerity bordering on madness. Lincoln's friends thought it rash. Douglas' friends had no hope that his adversary would be so easily delivered into his hands.

Yet Lincoln was not a despised antagonist. He was the most prominent Republican in Illinois. But Douglas was the recognized head of a great national party, the giant of the Senate, the most resourceful American statesman then living. Through years of desperate battling he had successfully repelled the a.s.saults of Seward, Sumner and Chase. He had more recently encountered with equal ease all the Southern Senators. It seemed a simple task to meet this humble Western lawyer and make his friends ashamed of their senatorial candidate. Douglas did not share the pleasant illusion of his friends. Before leaving Washington, when he heard that Lincoln was nominated, he said to Forney:

"I shall have my hands full. He is a strong man of his party,--full of wit, facts, dates,--and the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West. He is as honest as his is shrewd; and if I beat him my victory will be hardly won."

Lincoln was burning with jealousy. He believed himself to be Douglas' full equal in mental endowment. Fortune, he thought, with a tinge of bitterness, had dealt with them most unequally, clothing his rival with the glory of a world-renowned statesman, and leaving him to waste his powers on the obscure quarrels of litigious clients in a small town. He yearned for the opportunity to measure himself with the great Senator on a conspicuous stage.

This series of debates was a rare piece of strategy on Lincoln's part. Douglas had so long been wrapped in his senatorial toga that his greatness had become exaggerated to the popular mind of Illinois; while Lincoln had been a plain, modest lawyer, moving among the people in the daily round of routine life. The dogmatic statement of the great Senator carried more weight than the profoundest argument of the clearest demonstration of the country lawyer. But these debates brought them to a common level. They measured their intellectual strength in the presence of the people, with all official trappings laid aside; and while no one could well be disappointed in Douglas' strength, the whole country was amazed at the unexpected power of Lincoln.

There were disadvantages to Douglas in this mode of combat. He must sacrifice the glamour of senatorial dignity and enter the arena on equal footing with his antagonist. He was a brilliant debater.

"In the whole field of American politics no man has equaled him in the expedients and strategy of debate. * * * He was tireless, ubiquitous, unseizable. It would have been as easy to hold a globule of mercury under the finger's tip as to fasten him to a point he desired to evade. * * * In spirit he was alert, combative, aggressive; in manner patronizing and arrogant by turns." But he had to meet in argument a man of imperturbably temper, who had thought deeply on the great questions of the time, who by unerring instinct could lay his finger on every flaw in his chain of reasoning, could rise to heights of eloquence beyond the reach of his unimaginative mind and pour out streams of quaint humor that must have filled him with despair.

So great was the interest of the people in this extraordinary contest that it was found impossible to hold the meetings in halls. They were held during the warm autumn days in the open air, where the crowds, numbering from five to twenty thousand, struggled to get within range of the speakers' voices.

It would be difficult to conceive a more picturesque contest than that now waged by these politicians as they strove for the mastery, and the enormous crowds of friends and sympathizers listened with intense interest to the weighty arguments, or shouted applause when their favorite scored a point. The audiences, consisting largely of farmers, who had made long journeys in wagons and lived in tents or camped out in the open air while awaiting the great event, were in stern earnest, despite their holiday appearance, and listened with thoughtful faces and troubled hearts as the grave theme was discussed which had distracted the country for years.

And the orators, who were unconsciously playing a great role on the historic stage, were surely among the most interesting products of modern times. Lincoln's lank, ungainly figure, nearly six and a half feet tall, clad in loose fitting clothes, contrasted oddly with the short, stout figure of Douglas, barely five feet in height, trimly and rather sprucely dressed. The sad, calm face o Lincoln, his humble and unheroic bearing, were in marked contrast with the finely chiseled, powerful, defiant face and magnificent Napoleonic head surmounting the short, thick neck of Douglas, who strode with kingly air before he admiring throngs. The manner of Douglas was so masterful and strong that a wavering audience must have been swept away by it. His finely modulated voice reached with ease to the utmost limits of the crowds as he thundered out his decisive arguments or condescended to compliment his aspiring rival; while Lincoln manifestly labored to so pitch his unmusical voice that the distant listeners could hear, and was never betrayed into a single gracious compliment to the distinguished Senator whose seat he aspired to fill. And the contestants, however great their posthumous fame, were as yet merely ambitious politicians, supremely interested in winning the splendid prize. To Lincoln the possibility of a seat in the Senate was stimulus enough. Douglas was in mid career, a.s.sured of the Presidency in the near future, but compelled at all hazards to hold the ground already won. His commanding eminence attracted universal attention to the contest. He must not only win, but bear himself throughout with the air of an a.s.sured conqueror.

With all their disparity of rank and fame, they were not badly matched, and all the substantial advantages of the situation lay with Lincoln. The greatness of Douglas' fame excited sympathy for his rival. Success in the contest would give power and prestige to Lincoln, and even defeat would not be humiliating. Douglas could not expect much glory even from victory. Though he crushed his opponent in argument, he must still measure himself with the Douglas of the Senate and not fall below his own standard. In his contest for the Senate, he must remember the Presidency and shape his arguments for a larger audience than that addressed by Lincoln.

During the period of the debates both were actively engaged in the State campaign, addressing one or two audiences daily, so arranging their routes as to meet at the appointed times and places. On August 21st, in presence of a vast mult.i.tude, Douglas opened the first debate at Ottawa.

"Prior to 1854," he said, "this country was divided into two great political parties, known as the Whig and Democratic parties. Both were national and patriotic. * * * Whig principles had no boundary sectional line, * * * but applied and were proclaimed wherever the Const.i.tution ruled or the American flag waved over American soil.

So it was, and so it is, with the great Democratic party, which from the days of Jefferson to this period has proven itself to be the historic party of this Nation. * * * The Whig party and the Democratic party jointly adopted the Compromise measures of 1850 as the basis of a proper and just solution of this slavery question in all its forms. Clay was the great leader, with Webster on his right and Ca.s.s on his left, and sustained by the patriots in the Whig and Democratic ranks. * * * * In 1851 the Whig party and the Democratic party united in Illinois in approving the principles of the Compromise measures of 1850. * * * In 1852 the Whig party in Convention at Baltimore declared the Compromise measures of 1850 a suitable adjustment of that question. * * * * The Democratic Convention a.s.sembled in Baltimore the same year and adopted the Compromise measures of 1850 as the basis of Democratic action. *

* * They both stood on the same platform with regard to the slavery question. That platform was the right of the people of each State and Territory to decide their local and domestic inst.i.tutions for themselves, subject only to the Federal Const.i.tution.

"In 1854 I introduced into the Senate a bill to organize the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska on that principle which had been adopted in the Compromise measures of 1850, and indorsed by the Whig party and the Democratic party in National Convention in 1852. * * * Thus you see that up to 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska bill was brought into Congress for the purpose of carrying out the principles which both parties up to that time had indorsed and approved, there was no division of opinion in this country in regard to that principle, except the opposition of the Abolitionists. In the House of Representatives of Illinois upon a resolution a.s.serting that principle every Whig and every Democrat voted in the affirmative."

In 1854 Lincoln, the leader of the Whigs, and Trumbull, one of the Democratic chiefs, entered into an arrangement to dissolve the old Whig and Democratic parties and to unite the members of both into the Abolition party under the name and guise of a Republican party. The terms were that Lincoln should have Shield's place in the Senate, then about to become vacant, and that Trumbull should have Douglas' seat when his term expired. Lincoln went to work to Abolitionize the old Whig party, pretending that he was as good a Whig as ever, and Trumbull began preaching Abolitionism in milder and lighter form, hoping to Abolitionize the Democratic party.

The party met at Springfield in October, 1854, and proclaimed its platform. This doc.u.ment christened the coalition the Republican party. It pledged the party to bring the administration of the Government back to the control of first principles; to restore Kansas and Nebraska to the position of free Territories; to repeal the Fugitive Slave Law; to restrict slavery to those States in which it existed; to prohibit the admission of any more slave States into the Union; to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia; to exclude it from all the Territories and resist the acquirement of more unless it should be prohibited therein. He asked Lincoln to answer whether he stood pledged to each article in that creed and would carry it out.

"I ask Abraham Lincoln to answer these questions in order that when I trot him down to lower Egypt (Southern Illinois) I may put the same questions to him. My principles are the same everywhere.

I can proclaim them alike in the North and the South, the East and the West. My principles will apply wherever the Const.i.tution prevails and the American flag waves. I desire to know whether Mr. Lincoln's principles will bear transplanting from Ottawa to Jonesboro. I put these questions to him to-day distinctly and ask an answer. I have a right to an answer, for I quote from the platform of the Republican party, made by himself and others at the time that party was formed and bargain made by Lincoln to dissolve and kill the old Whig party and transfer its members, bound hand and foot to the Abolition party. * * * I mean nothing personally disrespectful or unkind to Lincoln. I have known him for nearly twenty-five years. There were many points of sympathy between us when we first got acquainted. We were both comparatively boys and both struggling with poverty in a strange land. I was a school teacher in the town of Winchester, and he a flourishing grocery keeper in the town of Salem. * * * I made as good a school teacher as I could and, when a cabinet maker, I made a good bedstead and tables, although my old boss said I succeeded better with bureaus and secretaries than anything else. * * * Lincoln was then just as good at telling an anecdote as now. He could beat any of the boys wrestling or running a foot race, in pitching quoits or tossing a copper, could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town together, and the dignity and impartiality with which he presided at a horse race or a fist fight excited the admiration and won the praise of everybody."

After Lincoln and Trumbull had formed their combination to Abolitionize the old parties and put themselves into the Senate, he said, Trumbull broke faith by demanding Shield's place for himself when it fell vacant and leaving Lincoln to fight for Douglas' seat two years later. Trumbull was stumping the State for Lincoln in order to quiet him. Lincoln was opposed to the Dred Scott decision and would not submit to it because it deprived the negro of the rights and privileges of citizenship.

"Do you desire," he asked, "to * * * allow the free negroes to flow in and cover your prairies with black settlements? Do you desire to turn this beautiful State into a free negro colony, in order that when Missouri abolishes slavery she can send one hundred thousand emanc.i.p.ated slaves into Illinois to become citizens and voters on an equality with yourselves? * * * Mr. Lincoln, following the example and lead of all the little Abolition orators who go around and lecture in the bas.e.m.e.nts of schools and churches, reads from the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal, and then asks, 'How can you deprive the negro of that equality which G.o.d and the Declaration of Independence awards him?'" * * *

"Now I do not believe that the Almighty ever intended the negro to be the equal of the white man. If he did he has been a long time demonstrating the fact. For thousands of years the negro has been a race upon the earth and during all that time, in all lat.i.tudes and climates, wherever he has wandered or been taken, he has been inferior to the race which he there met. He belongs to an inferior race and must always occupy an inferior position. The question, what rights and privileges shall be conferred on the negro, is one which each State and Territory must decide for itself. This doctrine of Mr. Lincoln, of uniformity among the inst.i.tutions of the different States, is a new doctrine, never dreamed of by Washington, Madison or the founders of this Government. Mr. Lincoln and the Republican party set themselves up as wiser than these men who made this Government which has flourished for seventy years under the principle of popular sovereignty, recognizing the right of each state to do as it pleased. Under that principle we have grown from a nation of three or four millions to a nation of about thirty millions of people; we have crossed the Allegheny Mountains and filled up the whole Northwest, turning the prairie into a garden and building up churches and schools, thus spreading civilization and Christianity where before there was nothing but savage barbarism.

"Under that principle we have become, from a feeble nation, the most powerful on the face of the earth; and if we only adhere to that principle, we can go forward increasing in territory, in power, in strength and in glory, until the Republic of America shall be the North Star that shall guide the friends of freedom throughout the civilized world. * * * I believe that this new doctrine preached by Mr. Lincoln and his party will dissolve the Union if it succeeds.

They are trying to array all the Northern States in one body against the South, to excite a sectional war between the free States and the slave States, in order that the one or the other may be driven to the wall."

When the applause subsided, Lincoln rose to reply. Addressing himself first to the personal matters contained in Douglas' speech, he denied the charge of a secret bargain between himself and Trumbull dividing the two seats in the Senate between them. "All I have to say upon that subject is, that I think no man--not even Judge Douglas--can prove it, because it is not true." He denied utterly that he had anything to do with the Republican platform drafted by the party leaders in 1854, having refused to meet with the committee or take any part in the organization.

"I have no means," he said, " of totally disproving such charges as this. I cannot prove a negative; but have a right to say that, when he makes an affirmative charge, he must offer some proof of its truth. Douglas' argument about 'perfect social and political equality with the negro' is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse. I will say here, while upon the subject, that I have no purpose directly or indirectly, to interfere with the inst.i.tution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which in my judgement will forever forbid their living together upon a footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I agree with Judge Douglas that the negro is not my equal in many respects--certainly not in color--perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas and the equal of every living man. * * *

"In the history of our Government this inst.i.tution of slavery has always been an apple of discord and an element of division in the house. I have a right to say that in regard to this question the Union is a house divided against itself. The public mind did formerly rest in the belief that slavery was in the course of ultimate extinction. But lately Douglas and those acting with him have placed it on a new basis which looks to the perpetuity and nationalization of slavery. * * * * I believe we shall not have peace upon the question until the opponents of slavery 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, on the other hand, that its advocates will push it forward until it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.

"Now, I believe if we could arrest the spread and place it where Washington and Jefferson and Madison paced it, it would be in the course of ultimate extinction and the public mind would, as for eighty years past, believe that it was in the course of ultimate extinction. The crisis would be pa.s.sed and the inst.i.tution might be let alone for a hundred years, if it should live so long, in the States where it exists; yet it would be going out of existence in the way best for both the black and the white races. * * * Popular sovereignty as now applied to the question of slavery, does allow the people of a Territory to have slavery if they want it, but does not allow them not to have it if they do not want it. * * *

As I understand the Dred Scott decision, if any one man wants slaves all the rest have no way of keeping that one man from holding them. * * *

"The Nebraska bill contains this clause: 'It being the true intent and meaning of this bill not to legislate slavery into any Territory or STATE.' I have always been puzzled to know what business the word State had in that connection. Judge Douglas knows. He put it there. * * * What was it placed there for? After seeing the Dred Scott decision, which holds that the people cannot exclude slavery from a Territory, if another Dred Scott decision shall come holding that they cannot exclude it from a State, we shall discover that when the word was originally put there it was in view of something that was to come in due time, we shall see that it was the other half of something.

"I ask the attention of the people here a.s.sembled to the course that Judge Douglas is pursuing every day as bearing upon this question of making slavery national. In the first place what is necessary to make slavery national? Not war. There is no danger that the people of Kentucky will shoulder their muskets, and, with a young n.i.g.g.e.r stuck on every bayonet, march into Illinois and force them upon us. There is no danger of our going over there and making war upon them. Then what is necessary for the nationalization of slavery? It is simply the next Dred Scott decision. It is merely for the Supreme Court to decide that no State under the Const.i.tution can exclude it, just as they have already decided that Congress nor the territorial legislature can do it. When that is decided and acquiesced in the whole thing is done. * * * Let us consider what Judge Douglas is doing every day to that end. What influence is he exerting on public sentiment? With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or p.r.o.nounces decisions. He makes statutes possible or impossible to be executed. * * *

"Judge Douglas is a man of vast influence. Consider the att.i.tude he occupies at the head of a large party. This man sticks to a decision which forbids the people of a Territory from excluding slavery, and he does so not because it is right in itself, but because it has been decided by the Court; and, being decided by the Court, he is, and you are, bound to take it in your political action as law. * * * You will bear in mind that thus committing himself unreservedly to this decision commits him to the next one just as firmly as to this. The next decision, as much as this, will be a 'Thus saith the Lord.' It is nothing that I point out to him that his great prototype, General Jackson, did not believe in the binding force of decisions. It is nothing to him that Jefferson did not so believe. He claims now to stand on the Cincinnati platform which affirms that Congress cannot charter a national bank, in the teeth of that old standing decision that Congress can charter a bank. And I remind him of another piece of history on the question of respect for judicial decisions belonging to a time when the large party to which Judge Douglas belongs were displeased with a decision of the Supreme Court of Illinois, because they had decided that a Governor could not remove a Secretary of State. I know that he will not deny that he was then in favor of overslaughing that decision by the mode of adding five new Judges, so as to vote down the four older ones. Not only so, but it ended in the Judge's sitting down on that very bench as one of the five new Judges to break down the four old ones.

"Now, when the Judge tells me that men appointed conditionally to sit as members of a Court will have to catechized beforehand upon some subject, I say, 'You know, Judge; you have tried it.' When he says a Court of this kind will lose the confidence of all men, will be prost.i.tuted and disgraced by such a proceeding, I say, 'You know best, Judge; you have been through the mill.' But I cannot shake Judge Douglas' teeth loose from the Dred Scott decision. Like some obstinate animal that will hang on, when he has once got his teeth fixed, you may cut off a leg, or you may tear away an arm, still he will not relax his hold. He hangs to the last to the Dred Scott decision. These things show there is a purpose strong as death and eternity for which he adheres to this decision and for which he will adhere to all other decisions of the same Court. *

* * When he invites any people willing to have slavery to establish it, he is blowing out the moral lights around us. When he says he cares not whether slavery is voted down or voted up--that is the sacred right of self-government--he is, in my judgement, penetrating the human soul and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty. * * *

"And now I will only say that when, by all these means and appliances, he shall succeed in bringing public sentiment to an exact accordance with his own; when these vast a.s.semblages shall echo back all these sentiments; when they shall come to repeat his views and to avow his principles and to say all that he says on these mighty questions, then it needs only the formality of a second Dred Scott decision, which he endorses in advance, to make slavery alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South."

Douglas, in his brief reply, reminded the audience that Lincoln had not frankly answered the question put in his opening speech; whether he approved of each article of the Republican resolutions adopted in Springfield in October, 1854. Lincoln's only answer had been that he was not present and had nothing to do with drafting the resolutions. "But this denial is a miserable quibble to avoid the main issue, which is that this Republican platform declares in favor of the unconditional repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. His reply to all these questions is 'I was not on the Committee at the time; I was up in Tazewell County trying a case.' I put to him the question whether, if the people of the Territory, when they had sufficient population to make a State, should form their Const.i.tution recognizing slavery, he would vote for or against its admission?

He is a candidate for the United States Senate and it is possible that, if he should be elected, he would have to vote directly on that question. He dodges it also under the cover that he was not on the Committee. * * * He knows I will trot him down to Egypt.

I intend to make him answer there. * * * The Convention to which I have been alluding pledges itself to exclude slavery from all the Territories. * * * I want to know whether he approves that provision.

* * * I want to know whether he will resist the acquirement of any more territory, unless slavery therein shall be prohibited. These are practical questions, based upon the fundamental principles of the black Republican party; and I want to know whether he is the first, last and only choice of a party with whom he does not agree in principle.

"He does not deny but that that principle was unanimously adopted by the Republican party; and now I want to know whether that party is unanimously in favor of a man who does not adopt that creed and agree with them in their principles; I want to know whether the man who does not agree with them and who is afraid to avow his differences is the first, last and only choice of the party. *

* * The party stands pledged that they will never support Lincoln until he has pledged himself to that platform; but he cannot devise his answer. He has not made up his mind whether he will or not.

* * * I have not brought a charge of moral turpitude against him. When he brings one against me, instead of disproving it I will say that it is a lie and let him prove it if he can. * * *

"Mr. Lincoln has not character enough for integrity and truth merely on his own ipse dixit to arraign President Buchanan, President Pierce and nine Judges of the Supreme Court, not one of whom would be complimented by being put on an equality with him. There is an unpardonable presumption in any man putting himself up before thousands of people and pretending that his ipse dixit, without proof, without fact and without truth, is enough to bring down and destroy the purest and best of living men. * * * The word 'State'

as well as 'Territory' was put into the Nebraska bill to knock in the head this Abolition doctrine that there will be no more slave States even if the people want them. * * * The people of Missouri formed a Const.i.tution as a slave State and asked admission into the Union; but the Free Soil party of the North, being in a majority, refused to admit her because she had slavery as one of her inst.i.tutions. Hence, the first slavery agitation arouse upon a State and not upon a Territory. * * * The whole Abolition agitation arose on that doctrine of prohibiting a State from coming in with slavery or not as it pleased, and that same doctrine is here in this Republican platform of 1854."

The peculiar difficult of meeting Douglas in argument before a popular audience is here exhibited in its most perfect form. The persuasive force of his last proposition lay in a most ingenious play on the words "State" and "Territory." Although the people of Missouri had formed a State Const.i.tution, they did not become a State until Congress approved it and formally admitted them.

During the entire period of dispute they continued a Territory.

Douglas' argument a.s.sumes that they became a State on forming a Const.i.tution.