Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  The Chicago Press and Tribune cited this speech as proof that Illinois Republicans had been justified in rejecting their Eastern counterparts’ advice to embrace Douglas. In his Chicago address, the senator had “avowed and re-affirmed his old and most odious doctrines—his adhesion to the dogma that a majority may enslave a minority, and that Slavery goes by virtue of the Constitution wherever that Constitution goes.” If the Little Giant had acknowledged “that Freedom was a little better than Slavery for the new Territories,” he would have been applauded vigorously; as it was, many auditors “went home disappointed—many of them grieved.” The Press and Tribune also denounced Douglas for badly misrepresenting the “House Divided” speech. Angrily, it observed that “Mr. Lincoln believes that there is now a struggle, and that it will continue till a certain result is reached; but Mr. Douglas says that Mr. Lincoln calls upon the participants in the struggle to throw down the slow weapon of the ballot box and precipitate the result by the sword!” Such garbling was “childish,” a “low prevarication.” The paper condemned Douglas’s espousal of the “monstrous” doctrine that the United States, in order to remain a free country, must have “diversity” (i.e., tolerate Slave States in its midst).150

  Lincoln, who sat through Douglas’s speech, reported that the Little Giant sought “to make it appear that he is having a triumphal entry into, and march through the country; but it is all as bombastic and hollow as Napoleon’s bulletins sent back from his campaign in Russia.” A majority of the crowd, he estimated, consisted of Republicans, some of whom called for him to respond to Douglas, but since the hour was late, it was arranged that he would speak the following night.151

  The Chicago Press and Tribune asserted that “the Douglas meeting was the product of three weeks hard drumming and coaxing, aided by cannon and clap-trap, fuss and feathers, and profusion of pyrotechnics and costly parade,” complete with “hired claquers” and fireworks.152 Alluding to Douglas’s cannon, Lincoln (who condemned such hoopla) said: “There is a passage, I think, in the Book of the Koran, which reads: ‘To him that bloweth not his own horn—to such a man it is forever decreed that … his horn shall not be blowe-ed!’ ”153 Republicans throughout Illinois shared Lincoln’s scorn for his opponent’s triumphal style, with its elaborate processions, brass bands, flag-bedecked trains, militia escorts, booming artillery, banner-festooned wagons, and gaudy pageantry.

  The next day, before an audience almost as large as Douglas’s (and, by Lincoln’s reckoning, five times as enthusiastic), the challenger responded to the Little Giant in a speech that seemed to a Democratic journalist “a talk” that made “no attempt at oratory.”154 With gentle mockery he dismissed the charge of Republican collusion with the Buchaneers. More bitingly, he maintained that “popular sovereignty” had become a meaningless concept, for thanks to the Dred Scott decision, inhabitants of a territory could only vote to exclude slavery at the very final stage of territorial settlement, when a constitution was to be adopted and application for statehood was to be submitted. According to the Supreme Court, Lincoln noted, “if any one man chooses to take slaves into a territory, all the rest of the people have no right to keep them out.” Thus, for all intents and purposes, popular sovereignty was a dead letter, and Douglas was hypocritical in proclaiming his devotion both to it and to the Dred Scott decision, which negated it. Lincoln asked: “how much is left of this vast matter of Squatter Sovereignty I should like to know?” A member of the audience answered: “it has all gone.” (Lincoln would return to this point in a debate the following month at Freeport.)

  Douglas’s willingness to support the right of people in a territory to frame a constitution in accord with their own wishes was nothing new, for, as Lincoln maintained, no one had ever denied it. Sarcastically he predicted that his opponent “will claim in a little while, that he is the inventor of the idea that the people should govern themselves; that nobody ever thought of such a thing until he brought it forward.”

  Should Douglas be credited with defeating the Lecompton Constitution? In the senate, twenty Republicans and only three Democrats voted against it; in the House, over ninety Republicans and only twenty-two Democrats voted against it. “Now who was it that did the work?” Lincoln asked rhetorically. (Douglas’s boast that he and his colleagues had won the victory reminded a Republican of three English tailors who sent a petition to Parliament beginning: “We, the men of England.”)155

  Lincoln protested against Douglas’s misinterpretation of his “House Divided” speech. “I am not [a] master of language,” he confessed. “I have not a fine education; I am not capable of entering into a disquisition upon dialectics,” but he insisted that the senator had distorted his meaning. (Two years later, Lincoln analyzed his strengths and weaknesses as an orator: “I am not much of a rouser as a public speaker. I do not and cannot put on frills and fancy touches. If there is anything that I can accomplish, it is that I can state the question and demonstrate the strength of our position by plain, logical argument.”)156 Obviously, the nation had existed half slave and half free for more than eight decades, but it had done so only because people expected that the peculiar institution would ultimately die out; the Kansas-Nebraska Act had demolished that expectation. Boldly Lincoln declared, “I have always hated slavery, I think as much as any Abolitionist.… I have always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska Bill began. I always believed that everybody was against it, and that it was in the course of ultimate extinction.” The Constitution, he argued plausibly, was framed and adopted by men who “intended and expected the ultimate extinction” of slavery.

  In refuting Douglas’s “uniformity charge,” Lincoln stated his belief that “each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man’s rights.” But he drew a distinction between laws like the Indiana statute regulating the cultivation of cranberries and laws establishing slavery; only a man who saw nothing morally wrong with human bondage could equate the two. Douglas, Lincoln charged, “looks upon all this matter of slavery as an exceedingly little thing—this matter of keeping one-sixth of the population of the whole nation in a state of oppression and tyranny unequalled in the world.” But slavery, Lincoln insisted, should not be regarded “as something on a par with the question of whether a man shall pasture his land with cattle, or plant it with tobacco.” Douglas might demur, but “there is a vast portion of the American people that do not look upon that matter [slavery] as being this very little thing.” Rather, they “look upon it as a vast moral evil.” As Lincoln scornfully argued, it was “nonsense” to assert that anyone who wished to keep slavery from expanding necessarily therefore wanted to force all states to have identical laws regarding cranberries.

  By insisting that the Dred Scott decision must, like all Supreme Court rulings, be supported unconditionally, Douglas was being hypocritical, for the Little Giant and his party had endorsed Andrew Jackson’s defiance of the court’s well-known contention, made in the 1819 case of McCulloch vs. Maryland, that Congress had the power to charter a national bank. Lincoln appealed to his audience to honor the Declaration of Independence and to recall what had been achieved under the blessings of liberty. He pointed out that Americans were not united by blood but rather by a devotion to the principles of the Declaration. Germans, Irish, French, and Scandinavians who had immigrated since 1783 could find no ancestors among those who had made the Revolution, but they felt deeply attached to the United States “when they look through that old Declaration of Independence [and] they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration and so t
hey are.”

  This Revolutionary-era idealism, Lincoln said, contrasted sharply with Douglas’s contention that inferior races should not be allowed to enjoy the rights accorded to the superior race. This reasoning he likened to “the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world.” Monarchs “always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn it whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.”

  To understand the purpose of the Declaration, Lincoln urged his audience to bear in mind a statement by Jesus: “As your Father in Heaven is perfect, be ye also perfect.” Christ, he said, “set that up as a standard,” and so the Declaration should be regarded. “So I say in relation to the principle that all men are created equal, let it be as nearly reached as we can. If we cannot give freedom to every creature, let us do nothing that will impose slavery upon any other creature.”

  Lincoln pleaded with Republicans not to forget Douglas’s racist demagoguery; they should remember, he insisted, “all the hard names that Judge Douglas has called them by—all his repeated charges of their inclination to marry with and hug negroes.” Emphatically, he declared: “I protest, now and forever, against that counterfeit logic which presumes that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave, I do necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I need not have her for either, but as God made us separate, we can leave one another alone and do one another much good thereby. There are white men enough to marry all the white women, and enough black men to marry all the black women, and in God’s name let them be so married. The Judge regales us with the terrible enormities that take place by the mixture of races; that the inferior race bears the superior down. Why, Judge, if we do not let them get together in the Territories they won’t mix there.” Eloquently he concluded, “let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position.… Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”157

  This remarkable address, with its soaring rhetoric and heartfelt idealism, was published in the New York Times, which deemed it “an able speech”; in the New York Tribune, which hailed it as “admirable and thoroughly Republican”; in the Bangor, Maine, Courier, which praised its “plain, candid, common sense exposition of Republican doctrine”; and in the New York Herald, which referred to Lincoln as Douglas’s “nigger worshipping competitor” espousing the “most repulsive disunion nigger equality principles and doctrines.”158 The abolitionist Chicago Congregational Herald detected in Lincoln “a champion” who was willing to “stand by the Declaration of Independence and fight for human rights, for man as man, irrespective of country, race, creed, or other accidental circumstances.”159 A leading abolitionist in eastern Illinois, Abraham Smith, congratulated Lincoln: “while some republicans—good men & true—but cautious will say thou hast taken too high ground … I am rejoiced that by thy speeches at Springfield & Chicago thou art fairly mounted on the eternal invulnerable bulwark of truth.”160

  “The war is begun,” remarked the Chicago Journal. “The first fire has been exchanged,” and “the Little Giant is wounded in several vital parts. In sound, manly argument, Lincoln is too much for him.”161 The Chicago Press and Tribune observed that even though Lincoln’s speech was “an unstudied and unpremeditated effort,” a product of “hurried and imperfect preparation,” it offered “a clear comprehensive and overwhelming refutation of the sophistries and charletanisms” of Douglas’s remarks the night before.162 An editor of that paper told Lincoln, “Your peroration to the spirit of Liberty was capital.”163

  Douglas and other Democrats repeatedly quoted that peroration (which the Chicago Times found “disgusting”), along with the opening paragraph of the “House Divided” speech, to illustrate Lincoln’s radicalism on the race issue. The Illinois State Register alleged that in his Chicago address, “Lincoln takes bold and unqualified ground with Lovejoy and ultra abolitionism.… Old Whigs can see in it the ‘contemptible abolitionism’ in which Mr. Lincoln desires to engulf his old whig friends.”164 The Chicago Times, which likened the challenger to the abolitionist Theodore Parker, regarded Lincoln’s Chicago speech as a “vain attempt to escape from awkward positions in which he had placed himself by his Springfield address.” In it the Times saw an appeal for slaves to rise up and kill their masters.165 The Boston Courier called it “inelegant, discursive, and laborious.”166 The Madison, Wisconsin, Argus detected in the speech only a “few sickly attempts at irony, a plentiful supply of cant, and one or two faint quibbles.”167

  Thanks to Douglas’s prominence, the attention of the nation focused on the Illinois senate race. Sharing the Little Giant’s spotlight, Lincoln began to emerge as a national figure. A Cincinnatian told Lincoln that the campaign “is assuming national importance in the eyes of the people of all sections of the Country.”168 From upstate New York, Charles Henry Ray informed him, “you are like Byron, who woke up one morning and found himself famous. In my journey here from Chicago, and even here—one of the most out-of-the-way, rural districts in the State, among a slow-going and conservative people, who are further from railroads than any man can be in Illinois—I have found hundreds of anxious enquirers burning to know all about the newly raised-up opponent of Douglas.”169

  Some Republicans chided Lincoln for not attacking Douglas more vigorously. One admirer of Lincoln’s address called it “a first rate defensive Speech” but urged its author “to assail & keep assailing.”170 Similarly, Norman B. Judd told Lyman Trumbull, “Lincoln has commenced it gallantly. The only trouble will be that (as I told him) he will allow Douglass to put him on the defensive.”171

  When the two candidates spoke in Springfield a week later, the contrast between them was highlighted by their mode of transportation to the capital and by their appearance. Fashionably attired in the so-called plantation style, with a ruffled shirt, dark blue coat with shiny buttons, light-colored trousers, well-polished shoes, and a wide brimmed hat, Douglas was the glass of fashion in his well-tailored broadcloth and linen garments. Traveling in imperial fashion, he and his wife, along with a large entourage, rode in the private rail coach maintained by the Illinois Central. Accompanying it was a platform car outfitted with a small cannon called “Popular Sovereignty,” which heralded the Little Giant’s approach.

  On that same train Lincoln traveled alone as a regular passenger, toting an ancient carpetbag and a bulging umbrella. He wore an ill-fitting coat, vest and trousers, all of black alpaca. On his head sat a too-large, battered, napless stovepipe hat. The outfit made him resemble a preacher. Later in the campaign, while garbed in a similar ensemble, he met Carl Schurz, a young German-American Republican leader from Wisconsin, who wrote that he had seen “several public men of rough appearance; but none whose looks seemed quite so uncouth, not to say grotesque, as Lincoln’s.”172

  Like all lawyers working for the railroad, Lincoln had a free pass, which he used to campaign simply, and usually alone. The Chicago Press and Tribune noted the sharp contrast in styles between Douglas and Lincoln. The Republican challenger “goes from one appointment to another without parade or ostentation. He charters no palatial cars with a bar-room and hotel aboard. He has no cannon and powder monkeys before him to announce his coming or departure.”173 Occasionally, Lincoln would even ride on freight trains. One day sitting in the caboose of such a train which was shunted onto a siding while Douglas’s special train, decorated with flags and banners, whizzed by, Lincoln jocularly remar
ked: “Boys, the gentleman in that car evidently smelt no royalty in our carriage.”174

  En route to the capital, Douglas stopped in Bloomington, where he once again praised Lincoln as “a kind-hearted, amiable gentleman, a right good fellow, a worthy citizen, of eminent ability as a lawyer, and, I have no doubt, sufficient ability to make a good Senator.” But he also attacked his rival as a miscegenationist. “Why, he would permit them [i.e., blacks] to marry, would he not? And if he gives them that right, I suppose he will let them marry whom they please, provided they marry their equals. If the divine law declares that the white man is the equal of the negro woman, that they are on a perfect equality, I suppose he admits the right of the negro woman to marry the white man.” He asserted that the “only hope that Mr. Lincoln has of defeating me for the Senate rests in the fact that I was faithful to my principles and that he may be able in consequence of that fact to form a coalition with Lecompton men who wish to defeat me for that fidelity.”175 When he finished, the crowd called for Lincoln, who refused to give a speech, saying: “This meeting was called by the friends of Judge Douglas, and it would be improper of me to address it.”176