Douglas needed to squash the idea that he might be a Republican in disguise. Quickly he distanced himself from Lincoln’s notion of a house divided by shifting the discussion to war. For the phrase suggested a country divided permanently over slavery until that division brought on a civil war, “a war of sections, a war of the North against the South, of the free states against the slave states—a war of extermination to be continued relentlessly until the one or the other shall be subdued and all the states shall either become free or become slave.” Who wanted a divided country, a broken country, a country warring over such a benighted issue as slavery, especially when the matter could be so easily resolved by popular sovereignty? Massachusetts could vote itself a free state, which it had; South Carolina was a slave state; and the territories could decide for themselves: easy.
Douglas, in July 1858, had initially opened his campaign before thirty thousand people. Lincoln sat near him on the podium. “In my opinion,” Douglas shouted, “this government of ours is founded on the white basis. It was made by the white man, for the benefit of the white man, to be administered by the white man, in such a manner as they should determine. It is also true that a negro, an Indian, or any other man of inferior race to a white man, should be permitted to enjoy, and humanity requires that he should have all the rights, privileges and immunities which he is capable of exercising consistent with the safety of society. I would give him every right and every privilege which his capacity would enable him to enjoy, consistent with the good of the society in which he lived. But you may ask me, what are these rights and these privileges? My answer is, that each State must decide for itself the nature and extent of these rights.”
The moral apathy of Douglas is staggering—but from the point of view of his argument, he made sense: popular sovereignty, he contended, guaranteed democracy, and people could vote for or against slavery, and such freedom to vote safeguarded a republic of “diversity, dissimilarity, variety in all our local and domestic institutions.”
The rules of engagement were such that one man would speak for an hour, the other would reply for an hour and a half, and then the first man would rebut for another thirty minutes. It was a grueling schedule. Covering about ten thousand miles in a hundred days, Douglas and Lincoln stood for hours in riverboats or sat for hours on uncomfortable seats in hot steamy trains. They ate at odd times, they did not sleep, they were trailed by the press and greeted by cheering or hooting mobs. They shook hands and each man listened carefully, very carefully, to his opponent in the summer heat. Douglas often wore a ruffled shirt, dark blue coat, light trousers, and a white felt hat. His shoes were shined. Exhausting himself, he traveled relentlessly from fairground to blistering fairground, bringing an entourage that included private cannon. He occasionally lost his temper—some said he drank too much—and he sputtered the withering invective for which he was famous, accusing Lincoln, for instance, of an alliance with the abolitionists.
Lincoln, in turn, wore trousers too short for his long thin legs and a stovepipe hat that accentuated his height, giving him a physical advantage over Douglas. He also wore plain, rough boots, sturdy as a Conestoga wagon, but his sentences could incorporate biblical iteration, and he had schooled himself in politics and oratory, studying the law alongside the Bible, Milton, and Shakespeare. He peppered his speech with a laconic, self-deprecating humor that little disguised his tough, forensic reasoning. His task was formidable: he had to dissociate himself from the epithet of “ultra” or (radical) abolitionist that the Democrats hung around his neck like an advertising placard. At the same time he had to show how he differed from Douglas, who had recently joined forces with Lincoln’s fellow Republicans to help defeat Lecompton.
When the debates began in the dusty city of Ottawa, Illinois, about eighty miles southwest of Chicago, in the heat of a late August day, Lincoln reread part of the speech he had given in Peoria in order to swat away Douglas’s charge against him that he sought either immediate emancipation or equality for black men and women. “If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution,” Lincoln declared. “I think I would not hold one in slavery, at any rate,” he said. “Yet the point is not clear enough to me to denounce people upon. What next? Free them, and make them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings would not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that the mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the question, if indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot then make them equals.”
He then added that he had “no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. . . . But I hold that notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence,—the right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas that he is not my equal in many respects, certainly not in color, perhaps not in intellectual and moral endowments,” and here he again hammered his point, “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.”
As for clarifying the matter of the “house divided,” Lincoln said that the country was really a house united after all; “the great variety of the local institutions in the States, springing from differences in the soil, differences in the face of the country, and in the climate, are bonds of Union.” That is, “if they produce in one section of the country what is called for by the wants of another section, and this other section can supply the wants of the first, they are not matters of discord, but bonds of union, true bonds of union.” The bonds of union had to be built on common ground, not just economic interdependency but on the ground of compromise, though he did not say so.
These were cagey, sophistical answers, measured and direct and evasive at the same time. Lincoln was careful to separate the matter of racism from the institution of slavery; the one—the institution of slavery—he wanted to contain. Lincoln continued to believe vociferously that slavery violated the principle of human equality on which the Declaration had been founded, but he read the Constitution as an instrument whose necessary concession to slave owners had made the nation possible—no small thing. And though the Constitution compelled the protection of slavery where it existed, the document said nothing about restricting its expansion, which Lincoln assumed would (and should) hasten its eventual demise. Lincoln thus initially intended not to end slavery per se but to implement what he thought was a consensus about its fundamental wrongness so that, in its due time, slavery would disappear.
Lincoln did cling to the curious idea, bandied about for years, of colonizing free blacks in Liberia or Central America. Yet the moral heart of Lincoln’s political philosophy remained the “right to rise” in this world, which meant to achieve or make something from nothing, and, significantly, to keep and enjoy, as he had said, bread earned from one’s labor. Slavery denied basic human rights.
It was on the matter of race—race, not the institution of slavery—where, to certain later observers, Lincoln stumbled. “I am not nor ever have been,” he had said more than once, “in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races—that 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; and I will say in addition to this that 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. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”<
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But he emphatically added that while “I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I can just let her alone. I am now in my fiftieth year, and I certainly never have had a black woman for either a slave or a wife. So it seems to me quite possible for us to get along without making either slaves or wives of negroes.”
Again his reasoning was clear.
And he outwitted Douglas on the matter of popular sovereignty. At Freeport, in northwest Illinois and the site of the second debate, Lincoln argued that the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision countermanded Douglas’s beloved notion of popular sovereignty since the decision specifically allowed slaveholders to bring their slaves into whatever territory they saw fit to take them. He therefore asked Douglas whether he actually believed residents could exclude slavery from their territory before it entered the Union. The question was a trap. Douglas supported, as Lincoln did not, the Dred Scott decision. Yet he had to reply that, notwithstanding Dred Scott, people had the lawful means (the vote) to introduce or exclude slavery as they pleased. Though Douglas’s reply, which came to be known as the Freeport Doctrine, was nothing more than a reiteration of his popular sovereignty plank, it cost him his already dwindling Southern support. Southerners considered the Freeport Doctrine an abomination that implicitly challenged Dred Scott and potentially prohibited slavery in the territories.
Douglas’s reply also became good copy because a backwoodsy prairie lawyer had caught the seasoned politician in a contradiction. “Does he [Douglas] mean to say that he has been devoting his life to securing to the people of the Territories the right to exclude slavery from the Territories?” Lincoln asked. “If he means so to say, he means to deceive; because he and every one knows that the decision of the Supreme Court, which he approves and makes especial ground of attack upon me for disapproving, forbids the people of a Territory to exclude slavery. This covers the whole ground from the settlement of a Territory till it reaches the degree of maturity entitling it to form a State constitution. So far as all that ground is concerned, the Judge is not sustaining popular sovereignty, but absolutely opposing it.”
On September 15, at the fairgrounds in Jonesboro, Illinois, in the rural and Democratic area of Illinois known as Egypt (because of its proximity to Cairo), Douglas tried to restore his credibility. He brought up Cuba. “When we get Cuba we must take it as we find it,” Douglas declaimed, “and leave the people of Cuba to decide the question of slavery for themselves without the interference of the federal government or any other State in the Union.” Of course, he was assuming that Cuba would vote to uphold slavery and thus be a slave state. The ruse didn’t work.
Standing tall on a platform made out of rough planks, Lincoln again posed the Freeport question. “If the slaveholding citizens of a United States Territory should need and demand congressional legislation for the protection of their slave property in such territory, would you, as a member of Congress, vote for or against such legislation?” he wanted to know. Which was more important: the Dred Scott decision or popular sovereignty? Again Douglas was cornered.
John Hay and John George Nicolay, the two promising young men who had become Lincoln’s private secretaries, later said that when Douglas hesitated, he lost whatever chance he had of reunifying the Democrats. “Compared with this,” they noted, “his Lecompton revolt had been a venial offense.”
Gone too was his hope of unsplintering a country splintered among West, East, South, and North; there was no transcontinental railroad linking East and West, and communication between opposing parties had grown as muffled as those electric pulses in the failed transatlantic cable.
Though Lincoln won the popular vote, Douglas won the Illinois Senate seat. Senate seats were determined not by popular vote but by the state legislature, and the Democratic majority in the Illinois legislature voted for Douglas 54–46. Douglas was momentarily elated, and as he traveled from Chicago to Washington, he continued to stump for popular sovereignty and the need for cooperation between the free and slave states while America grew and grew and inevitably fulfilled its “glorious destiny.”
“We live in a rapid age,” he said, “and things will come along, naturally enough.” But Douglas had lost what trust the Democrats in the South had vested in him. Several Southern senators—along with President Buchanan—moved to strip Douglas of his chairmanship of the Committee on Territories. Judah Benjamin, a senator from Louisiana, noted that on the matter of Dred Scott, popular sovereignty, and the Freeport Doctrine, “the Senator from Illinois faltered.” To be sure, “he got the prize for which he faltered,” Benjamin said, but he forfeited “the grand prize of his ambition.”
Stephen Douglas would never be president of the United States. The South would see to that.
“I TAKE SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America,” the poet Charles Olson would say years later, in 1947. He was writing about Melville and the sea, but he was also referring to freedom and liberty and land, always land. It was to overcoming or to owning land that Americans were committed: western land, southern land, Caribbean land, Central American land.
William Walker is a case in point. This slender, small man had the tacit, if not explicit, support of men in government and was touted as an American hero, brave and restless and colorful enough to be the subject of theatrical reviews and song. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1824, Walker was a doctor, a lawyer, and the editor of the San Francisco Herald. Walker was also a man who fought four pistol duels and a swashbuckler who enjoyed the unspoken support of men in government. Called “King of the Filibusters,” he wanted to make Baja, California, and Mexico’s Sonora region his private empire, and when he and his tiny army of recruits failed in 1853, and he was arrested, he popped up again in 1855 and aimed for Nicaragua. Like the megalomaniacal Narciso López and with the same bullheadedness, Walker was consumed by his own imperial calling.
And he would settle for nothing less than a nation. Nicaragua, with its transit route to the West, beckoned. Fortunately for Walker, Nicaragua had been in the midst of a civil war for several years.
With the backing of several wealthy entrepreneurs and a group of armed Americans, Walker actually managed to seize control of the government by arriving at just the right time, having commandeered a steamboat on Lake Nicaragua, and having captured the city of Granada from the rear. After ordering that the Nicaraguan minister of war be shot, Walker set up a provisional government, named himself president, reinstituted slavery, pillaged the country, and in 1856 stupidly seized the property and revoked the railroad charter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose company conveyed Americans overland across Nicaragua and then on to California by steamship.
Officially, Washington had done nothing about Walker. Franklin Pierce, then still president, naively hoped to be nominated on the Democratic ticket for president in the spring, and he did not want to offend the South or Jefferson Davis, who supported Walker. To Davis, a Nicaragua under Walker held open the same promise as Cuba: territory for slavery. But Vanderbilt was not a man to be trifled with. He embarked on what his biographer called “an independent foreign policy,” closed the Nicaragua line, and, negotiating with countries such as Costa Rica that were hostile to Walker, he declared unofficial war on Walker. And Walker was no help to himself, especially when it was discovered he had no plans to let the United States annex Nicaragua.
So the American who had conquered Nicaragua had to leave the country in 1857, foiled by a coalition of forces from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala—and by Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had financed the military operation against him.
Walker again bounced back. Bankrolled by men in several Southern states, he launched another invasion of Nicaragua that fall. Again he was defeated, more quickly this time by the howitzers at the command of Commodore Hiram Paulding of the U.S. Navy operati
ng with the authority of the new president, James Buchanan. Walker was arrested and taken off to America, where Buchanan’s condemnation of him inflamed Southern fire-eaters. But Walker still wasn’t finished, or so he thought. He raised money in the South and mounted yet another—an astounding third—invasion of Nicaragua, this time traveling through Honduras to avoid U.S. patrols. The British navy captured him and turned him over to the Hondurans, who finally executed him by firing squad.
Citing neutrality laws, Buchanan had condemned Walker, yet in his annual address to Congress in late 1858, he tried to unite Democrats by whetting their appetite for land, which was to say expansion of its slave territory. Again, this meant Cuba.
The wealthy John Slidell of Louisiana introduced to the Senate a bill authorizing $30 million to purchase the island. But the call for appropriations ran smack into the Republican bid for homestead legislation that would open western territories to all settlers—and not coincidentally help those ravaged by the economic downturn in 1857, promising them a fresh start. Republicans insisted that the homestead bill be passed before they broached the subject of Cuba, and this set off another debate. “As soon as the Cuba question is disposed of,” promised Andrew Johnson, a Democrat from Tennessee, “we shall make one common and united effort to bring up the homestead bill and procure the action of the Senate upon it.” Cuba first, then homestead legislation, which Johnson supported. So did Stephen Douglas, though he expediently decided to put Cuba ahead of homestead legislation in order, he hoped, to unite his party and to boost his standing with Southerners, some of whom were now calling him Black Douglas. But Republicans such as Lyman Trumbull distrusted any Democratic promise to pass homestead legislation, and so did William Seward, who believed the Southern Democrats would postpone and postpone because they feared homestead legislation would do nothing more than lead to another Kansas, which was to say restrict the expansion of slavery.
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