by Len Levinson
Abe Lincoln arrived on Saturday, August 21, 1858, in a special seventeen-car train bedecked with patriotic slogans and filled with Republican supporters. His wife and children had remained in Springfield, because he would not subject them to the rigors of a no-holds-barred political campaign.
He waved to cheering throngs as he rode across town in a carriage covered with evergreen boughs. He had pored over Douglas's speeches and tried to guess what the Little Giant might say. Like any skilled courtroom lawyer, Abe Lincoln wouldn't ask a question unless he already knew the answer.
Then Senator Douglas and his fair Adele arrived on their special railway car and proceeded to the local hotel in an elegant carriage drawn by six white horses, followed by flag-waving supporters. In his suite of rooms, Douglas gathered with supporters to drink, smoke, and solicit contributions. Lovely Adele stood at his side, providing her special piquance, and the Little Giant anticipated demolishing the man who had the audacity to challenge him.
In the afternoon, the candidates made their way to the square, where a platform had been erected and decorated with bunting, but the sidewalks were mobbed, progress slow, and cannons fired fusillades, deafening everyone. Then the awning collapsed on the heads of the Douglas committee, producing great confusion.
It took a while for dignitaries and reporters to be seated. Then, at two-thirty in the afternoon, Senator Douglas mounted the podium. He had no notes to arrange, for he preferred to speak extemporaneously. He carried a copy of Abe Lincoln's Peoria speech in his jacket pocket, to remind him of his adversary's positions, while Abe Lincoln sat not far away on the platform, clean-shaven, with his large nose and ears.
Cheers reverberated across the square as the famous senator modestly received the crowd's adulation. Especially enthusiastic were Irishmen, the backbone of the Democratic party, and the Little Giant flipped them a salute. Next he waved to the large German contingent, whose swing votes were crucial to any political campaign, and finally he bowed to the great mass of Anglo-Saxon voters, citizens much like himself, old-time Americans, many of whom had fought the nation's wars, and believed themselves guardians of the nation. They comprised the majority, and Douglas's appeal would be to their common-sense conservatism.
The powerful senator was attired in tailored black broadcloth and spotless white linen, and stood on a box in order to appear taller. He took one last glance at Adele, for that final burst of energy, then faced his audience, gazed into the eyes of a nameless farmer in the middle row, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen—I appear before you today to discuss the leading political topics which now agitate the public mind. This vast concourse shows the deep feeling which pervades the masses in regard to this question. Today, Mr. Lincoln and I stand before you as representatives of the two great political parties in this state and the union, and we shall discuss the issues.”
Senator Douglas then launched into a history of the Whig party, his goal to demonstrate how the formerly national Whig banner had become captured by a narrow, sectional, radical party of abolitionists who called themselves Republicans.
Next he attacked Abe Lincoln personally, implying in subtle and not-so-subtle terms that his opponent was a schemer, hypocrite, and radical madman. Senator Douglas smiled and said, “In the remarks I have made upon this platform, and the positions of Mr. Lincoln upon it, I mean nothing personally disrespectful or unkind to that gentleman. Why—I have known him for nearly twenty-five years. Back in Winchester, I was a humble schoolteacher, and he a flourishing grocery store clerk in nearby Salem!”
Laughter erupted from the crowd, for everyone knew that “grocery store clerk” was code for bartender, and thus the clever former Judge Douglas cast doubt on Long Abe's morals.
Stephen Douglas continued. “I believe that Mr. Lincoln was more successful in his business than I, for it carried him to the legislature. He was then as good at telling an anecdote as now, and he could beat any of the boys at wrestling—could outrun them at a footrace—beat them at pitching quoits and tossing a copper, and could win more liquor than all the boys put together. The dignity and impartiality with which he presided at a horse race or a fistfight were the praise of everybody present.”
Abe Lincoln sat on his side of the platform, face stolid as one of the most eloquent senators in the land ripped him to shreds, and Douglas made so many exaggerations, distortions, and outright lies, Abe Lincoln felt himself becoming angry. But he took a deep breath and settled down, because he understood, as an old riverfront brawler, that one tactic was to make your opponent so mad he couldn't think straight. He listened calmly, taking notes as Judge Douglas accused Abe Lincoln of opposing the Mexican War, “taking the side of the enemy against his own country!”
Senator Douglas next attacked Lincoln's popular speech at the state Republican Convention, in which Lincoln had made the much-quoted remark, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
“This great nation,” roared Douglas, “has stood this way for eighty years, divided between slave and free states. Why can't it endure, as Washington, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Jay, and the patriots of the day intended, leaving each state free to do as it pleased on the subject of slavery. Why can't this nation continue upon the same principle upon which our fathers made it?”
“It can!” shouted his Democratic admirers. “It will!”
The time came for Douglas to confide in his audience, so he told them, “I believe this government was made on the white basis, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and I am in favor of confining the citizenship to white men—men of European birth and European descent, instead of conferring it upon Negroes and Indians, and other inferior races.”
“Good for you!” shouted someone in the crowd.
“Douglas forever!” screamed a contingent from Chicago.
Douglas smiled, then continued. “I do not question Mr. Lincoln's conscientious belief that the Negro is his equal and hence his brother. But, for my own part, I do not regard the Negro as my equal, and I positively deny that he is my brother, or any kin to me whatever. For six thousand years, the Negro has been a race upon the earth, and during that whole six thousand years—he has been inferior to whatever race adjoined him.”
Senator Douglas turned to Abe Lincoln and asked point-blank, “What would you do with Negroes if slavery were abolished?” But Abe Lincoln could not reply; it was not yet his turn.
Gripping the podium, Douglas delivered his closing argument. “I believe that the doctrine preached by Mr. Lincoln and his Abolition party would dissolve the Union! Because they want to array all the northern states against the South, inviting a sectional war of free states against slave states—to last until one or the other is driven to the wall!”
Senator Douglas wanted to describe the horrors of that coming cataclysm, but an aid signaled. “I am told my time is out,” said the Little Giant. “You will now hear Mr. Lincoln for an hour and a half, and finally myself for a half hour in reply.”
Stepping back from the podium, Senator Douglas was showered with wild applause. Cannons fired, his name was called, and he bowed to the mob, then returned to his seat beside Adele, who kissed his cheek. Again, the crowd bellowed its approval, and Senator Douglas knew he had spoken to their deepest concerns.
Abe Lincoln waited respectfully, then arose, and it was clear that his suit was not tailor-made, for his pants were too short, and his sleeves too long, the jacket billowing about him loosely because Abe Lincoln preferred freedom of movement in his fashions.
He strolled toward the podium, a gawky man with long arms, and many of his political enemies had referred to him as a “monkey.” He looked as if he'd just returned from the woods with an ax on his shoulder, a man of the people, startling for his very ordinariness, definitely not a polished Washington senator.
The Republican faithful cheered him, but it was clear that Senator Douglas had won the hearts of the majority, who booed and made other sounds of disapproval. The challenger would have an uphill
struggle, but it was nothing compared to the ordeal that had lifted Abe Lincoln from that leaky log cabin in Kentucky to the first rank of the Illinois bar.
Abe Lincoln waited patiently for the tumult to cease as he studied the crowd. He knew that the Irish were lost to him, but the Germans were largely abolitionist in sentiment, and the Anglo-Saxon-Americans were split down the middle. As he studied the latter, he saw many careworn faces, the ordinary folk who labored from sunup to sunset on the constant brink of ruin, and many had been bankrupted by the Depression of 1857, the effects of which lingered on. He knew they needed someone to talk straight to them, without grand flourishes and oratorical gestures, and if they could have a good laugh, so much the better.
Abe Lincoln did not grip the podium like a great senator, general, or tycoon, but rather grinned as if sitting by a wood stove in a general store, and said, “My fellow citizens—when a man hears himself misrepresented just a little, why, it rather provokes him, at least so I find it with me, but when he finds the misrepresentations very gross, why—sometimes it amuses him.”
He laughed, and a giggle went up from the crowd, for many never had seen Abe Lincoln's jocular campaign style. Patiently, like a friendly uncle, he perched his eyeglasses on his long nose and proceeded to repair his reputation by reading from documents and statistics that proved Senator Douglas a liar in the matter of his record. Then Abe Lincoln delivered his Peoria speech in its entirety, so the people could hear what he really had said in context, and it clearly wasn't as radical as Senator Douglas claimed.
“I have no doubt that Senator Douglas is conscientious man,” said Abe Lincoln, a cynical smile on his face. “Yet despite what he has told you, I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it presently exists, but I absolutely oppose its spread to new territories. I agree that the Negro may not be my equal and Senator Douglas's equal—certainly not in color or in intellectual development, but in the right to eat bread which his own hand earns, he is my equal and Senator Douglas's equal, and the equal of every living man!”
The Republicans and abolitionists applauded his bold statement, while the rest sneered. Abe waited for the demonstration to lessen, then said, “Now let me mention two or three other little matters, and then I shall pass on. I fear that our distinguished senator is woefully at fault about his early friend being a grocery keeper. Now I don't know that it would be a great sin if I had, but he is mistaken. Lincoln never kept a grocery in his life. But I confess it is true that Lincoln did work the latter part of one winter at a little still house up at the head of the hollow.”
The crowd exploded into laughter, because every town had “a little still house up at the head of the hollow,” where drinking and good times were enjoyed by weary farmers, and if Abe Lincoln had worked in one of them, it only made him a regular man, not a millionaire from Chicago.
Abe Lincoln next defended his position on the Mexican War, one of the most incendiary issues of the campaign. “I think the judge is at fault again when he charges me with having opposed the Mexican War. It is true that whenever the Democratic party tried to convince me the war had been properly begun, it could not do so, but when they asked for money or supplies, or land warrants to the soldiers, I gave the same votes as Senator Douglas. You may think as you please as to whether I was consistent, but when he insinuates that I withheld my vote, or did anything to hinder the soldiers, he is wrong altogether, as an investigation of the record will show.”
Now it was time for Abe Lincoln to go over to the attack, and he did so with the vehemence of an angry riverbank counterpuncher. He accused Senator Douglas of undermining the nation with his notorious Kansas-Nebraska Act, ridiculed the doctrine of popular sovereignty, and accused Senator Douglas of conspiring with Chief Justice Taney and President Buchanan to make slavery the law of the land.
When Long Abe answered Senator Douglas's question about what he would do with emancipated slaves, he could have invented any number of impractical but fine-sounding schemes, carefully engineered to win votes, but he had sworn to campaign on the truth, so he stood before supporters and hecklers alike, held out his arms, and told them, “If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do.”
An aid pointed to his watch, indicating it was time for Long Abe to end his speech. Once more he shifted his ground, for he knew that ultimately he was waging a moral campaign, and believed the common people maintained their fundamental decency no matter how they feared freed Negro mobs.
“When Senator Douglas says that if a people want slavery, they have a right to it, he is blowing out the moral lights around us,” Abe Lincoln lectured them. “When he says he doesn't care whether slavery is voted up or down, he is perverting the human soul and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty on this American continent. And when he shall have succeeded in bringing public sentiment in accordance with his own, then it needs only the formality of a second Dred Scott decision, which he is in favor of, to make slavery lawful in all the states, old as well as new. My friends, that ends my talk, and now the judge can take his last half hour.”
Long Abe stepped back from the podium, and the Republican party machine filled the square with cheers. It looked like a sporting contest, but fundamental issues had been raised, and Senator Douglas had to search for moral ground as he returned to the podium, the Democrats trying to drown out the Republicans, and the newspaper reporters resting their tired wrists. But Senator Douglas could find no moral ground, yet he had to say something, so instead decided to pick his opponent's argument apart in a lawyerly fashion, detail by innuendo followed by denunciation.
Dryly and devastatingly, Senator Douglas undercut candidate Lincoln's arguments, but succeeded only in outraging the crowd, who responded with jeers, embarrassing the distinguished senator from Chicago. The disturbance became so uncontrolled that Joseph O. Glover, chairman of the Illinois Republican Committee, was forced to take the podium, where he shouted, “I hope that no Republican will interrupt Mr. Douglas again. Let us remember that you listened to Mr. Lincoln attentively, and as respectable men, we ought now to hear Mr. Douglas without interruption.”
Senator Douglas politely thanked one of his most hated political enemies, then resumed his excoriation of Abe Lincoln. But Long Abe had visited the theaters of New Orleans, he knew an accomplished actor when he saw one, so he rose to make the performance more interesting, and he and the celebrated senator from Chicago shouted at each other toe to toe, the backwoods giant against the Washington manipulator, until a judge asked Abe to sit down.
Senator Douglas resumed his assault on Abe Lincoln, inventing no new arguments, but hitting the same themes, that he was a radical, a conniver, and he wanted to give the Negro equality with the white man. Senator Douglas could feel, with his highly sensitive politician's instincts, that he was winning the crowd back, so he beat away at Abe Lincoln with inferences, implications, and the cleverly veiled lies that provide the foundation for all political campaigns. “Ladies and gentleman,” he roared as his time drew to a close, “what does Mr. Lincoln propose, when you brush away the verbiage? He says the Union cannot exist divided into free and slave states. If it cannot endure thus divided, then he must strive to make them all free or all slave, or be for dissolution of the Union. What future can we have with such a pernicious doctrine? Where would such a senator take the nation? But I am told my time is up, and therefore I must stop.”
The crowd applauded as Senator Douglas bowed, but he had not delivered the critical knockout blow he'd intended. Abe Lincoln still was standing, receiving ovations from the masses, and Senator Douglas felt somehow diminished, as he stood in the shadow of the taller man. But he put on a brave smile, kissed his wife, and shook hands with Democrats, while out the corner of his eye he watched five thousand screaming Republicans escort Abe Lincoln off the platform. He didn't knock me out either, surmised the Little Giant, consoling himself. But I've got the votes, no matter how folks
y the son of a bitch might pretend to be.
As summer became autumn, Senator Douglas debated candidate Lincoln back and forth across Illinois as citizens from other states followed the contest in newspapers. It was duly noted that Americans tended to love the underdog, especially when he had a sense of humor, and some experts predicted that Lincoln might well defeat Douglas, in the biggest upset in the history of the U.S. Senate.
***
Meanwhile, Senator Jefferson Davis and his wife Varina vacationed in Maine, far from the clamor of national politics. They attended clambakes, strolled along rockbound coastlines, and climbed Mount Humpback, where they sat hand in hand on the summit, gazing at shimmering coves, bays, inlets, and promontories in the distance, seabirds flying overhead.
The senator's neuralgia disappeared, his mucous-covered eye cleared, and a healthy tan covered his cheeks. Often he and his family hiked through the countryside, showing up unexpectedly at backwoods taverns, where he chatted with lumberjacks, farmers, the common people from whom he himself had sprung.
But Jefferson Davis also was one of the nation's foremost senators, and politics could not be ignored. On October 11, he spoke in Boston's historic Faneuil Hall, before a rally sponsored by the Massachusetts Democratic Party. At the appointed hour, the hall was filled with politicians, policemen, journalists, and crowds cheering mightily as the hero of Buena Vista advanced to the platform.
Jeff and Varina knew that Boston was the heart of abolitionism, and southerners were hated in many circles, but the colonel of the Mississippi Rifles would not pretend to be a Yankee—he would speak the truth as he knew it, and if they tried to lynch him, he carried a Colt Navy revolver in his belt just in case.
Jeff and Varina took their seats on the dais, and after several speeches by lesser politicians, the visiting senator was introduced by Caleb Cushing, U.S. Attorney General during the Pierce administration, ex-Congressman, another veteran of the Mexican War. In the spirit of good party politics, Cushing failed to mention Jeff Davis's angry speeches in the Senate, and the time he'd challenged Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia to a duel. Instead he concentrated upon Jefferson Davis's many years of service to the nation, especially his support of numerous wonderful causes such as the Smithsonian Institution and the Washington Monument.
