Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  In Springfield on the afternoon of July 17, Douglas repeated his Chicago speech, placing special emphasis on Lincoln’s belief that the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal” covered blacks. To the crowd’s amusement, Douglas sneered: “He thinks that the negro is his brother. I do not think that the negro is any kin of mine at all.” The signers of the Declaration “did not intend to include the Indian or the negro in that declaration.” Warming to his white supremacy theme, Douglas went on: “I am opposed to Indian equality. I am opposed to putting the coolies, now importing into this country, on an equality with us, or putting the Chinese or any other inferior race on an equality with us.” Douglas predicted that Lincoln would work to eliminate the Illinois black code forbidding African Americans to settle in the state. “When he lets down the bars and the floods shall have turned in upon us and covered our prairies thick with them till they shall be as dark and black as night in mid-day,” Lincoln would advocate giving them the same citizenship rights as whites. The Little Giant then went into graphic and extensive detail about the indignities of “nigger equality” and race-mixing—hordes of blacks invading the state, holding office, becoming judges, and—horror of horrors, marrying with whites. “We must preserve the purity of the race not only in our politics but in our domestic relations,” he thundered.177 (The word “nigger” appears in the account published by the Indianapolis Indiana State Sentinel, which supported Douglas, but not in the Chicago Times. This difference lends credence to the claim that Douglas regularly used the word “nigger” instead of “negro,” though the Congressional Globe and his organ, the Chicago Times, sanitized his language.) To this racist appeal, the Chicago Journal protested that “the subject of ethnology is not a question in the current politics … and has nothing whatever to do with the principles for which the Republican party are contending.”178

  In response, that evening at the statehouse Lincoln renewed his attack on the popular sovereignty doctrine as “the most errant humbug that has ever been attempted on an intelligent community.” He also responded to Douglas’s interpretation of the Declaration of Independence. Did the senator mean to amend that document to read that all “Europeans are created equal?” What about Russians in Asia? “I expect ere long he will introduce another amendment to his definition. He is not at all particular. He is satisfied with any thing which does not endanger the nationalizing of slavery. It may draw white men down, but it must not lift negroes up. Who shall say, ‘I am the superior, and you are the inferior?’”

  Lincoln acknowledged that the Declaration of Independence should not be construed literally. “I do not understand the Declaration to mean that all men were created equal in all respects,” he conceded, offering a bizarre example of one respect in which the races were unequal. Blacks, he said, “are not our equal in color.” His meaning is obscure; what is a superior color? Perhaps he was being satirical. In any event, when he repeated it, he did so with a strong qualifier: “Certainly the negro is not our equal in color—perhaps not in many other respects; still, in the right to put into his mouth the bread that his own hands have earned, he is the equal of every other man, white or black. In pointing out that more has been given you, you can not be justified in taking away the little which has been given him. All I ask for the negro is that if you do not like him, leave him alone. If God gave him but little, that little let him enjoy.” Noteworthy here is Lincoln’s agnosticism about black inferiority, above and beyond the dubious category of color; the black may be inferior to the white in other respects as well, but he did not identify them. Nor did Lincoln say that God gave black people little; he insisted only that if God gave them little, they should be allowed to enjoy that little undisturbed.179 This carefully hedged treatment of the racial inferiority argument differed sharply from Douglas’s unqualified racism. A Democrat objected that Lincoln’s speech—especially his query “Who shall say, ‘I am the superior, and you are the inferior?’ ” and his observation that blacks are “not our equal in color—perhaps not in many other respects”—belied his protestations about black inferiority: “Mr. Lincoln may not be in favor of ‘negro equality’ but he cannot follow up his declarations on this subject and land short of so odious a doctrine.”180 It was a telling point, for Lincoln’s remarks did imply that blacks might not be inferior to whites.

  Many believed that Lincoln’s speech effectively countered Douglas’s racial demagoguery. One auditor reported that Lincoln “was particularly clear and forcible,” delivering an address “full of solid argument, full of caustic criticism, full of pointed illustrations.”181 The Illinois State Journal declared that it was “a most masterly answer to all the quirks, quibbles, sophistries, misrepresentations and falsehoods of Mr. Douglas.”182 A correspondent for the Alton Courier called it “splendid … the best speech which has yet been made.”183 When urged to have one of his orations issued as a pamphlet, Lincoln chose this one, for, he said, it appeared “to be the most ‘taking’ speech I have made.”184 It even removed the scales from the eyes of the Louisville Journal, which remarked: “We had supposed him [Lincoln] to be an impracticable abolitionist or something near it from the representation of his views made by Douglas in his Chicago speech; but after reading the speeches of Lincoln at Chicago and Springfield, we find he has been most grossly misrepresented by Douglas.”185 Another Louisville paper, the Democrat, grudgingly observed that “Lincoln is able, and does full justice to the bad cause he advocates.”186

  Not all Republicans were pleased. One complained to Lincoln: “You are too easy on the Scamp! You should, you must be severer on him.… just throw aside a little, or sufficient, of your over-abundance of ‘the milk of human kindness.’ ”187 Horace Greeley complained that, although Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech “was in the right key,” his “Chicago speech was bad; and I fear the new Springfield speech is worse. If he dare not stand on broad Republican ground, he cannot stand at all.”188 Democrats, of course, disliked the speech and harped on Douglas’s themes. The Springfield Register objected that in Lincoln’s “peevish, fretful and feeble” Springfield address, “no allusion is made to the interests of the white man” and that all the “great questions” of the day “sink, in his mind, into insignificance compared with the interest of the negro.”189

  Attempting to sort out his thoughts about race, Lincoln wrote a memorandum, probably in 1858, appealing to religious sentiment in a discussion of the alleged inferiority of blacks. “Suppose it is true,” he mused, “that the negro is inferior to the white, in the gifts of nature; is it not the exact reverse [of] justice that the white should, for that reason, take from the negro, any part of the little which has been given him? ‘Give to him that is needy’ is the christian rule of charity; but ‘Take from him that is needy’ is the rule of slavery.”

  For religious defenders of slavery, like the Rev. Dr. Frederick A. Ross, Lincoln had withering contempt. The “sum of pro-slavery theology,” Lincoln wrote, “seems to be this: ‘Slavery is not universally right, nor yet universally wrong; it is better for some people to be slaves; and, in such cases, it is the Will of God that they be such.” Acknowledging that “there is no contending against the Will of God,” he insisted that “there is some difficulty in ascertaining, and applying it, to particular cases.” Suppose, for example, that Dr. Ross, a Presbyterian divine who had published a defense of slavery in 1857, “has a slave named Sambo, and the question is ‘Is it the Will of God that Sambo shall remain a slave, or be set free?’ ” God “gives no audable [sic] answer to the question, and his revelation—the Bible—gives none.… No one thinks of asking Sambo’s opinion on it.” Ultimately, then, Dr. Ross himself must decide the question. “And while he consider[s] it, he sits in the shade, with gloves on his hands, and subsists on the bread that Sambo is earning in the burning sun. If he decides that God Wills Sambo to continue a slave, he thereby retains his own comfortable position; but if he decides that God will’s Sambo to be free, he thereby has to wa
lk out of the shade, throw off his gloves, and delve for his own bread.” So Dr. Ross can hardly be expected to exercise “that perfect impartiality, which has ever been considered most favorable to correct decisions.” In commenting on this example, Lincoln displayed some passion. “But, slavery is good for some people!!! As a good thing, slavery is strikingly peculiar, in this, that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of, for himself. Nonsense! Wolves devouring lambs, not because it is good for their own greedy maws, but because it [is] good for the lambs!!!”190

  (In 1860, Lincoln would evince equal scorn for the proposition that slavery was “a necessity imposed upon us by the negro race.” In a letter he never sent, he contemptuously wrote: “That the going many thousand miles, seizing a set of savages, bringing them here, and making slaves of them, is a necessity imposed on us by them, involves a species of logic to which my mind will scarcely assent.”)191

  The two candidates focused on central Illinois, where legislative races would be the most hotly contested. In the thick of the struggle, Douglas sometimes lost his composure. At Beardstown on August 11, he assailed Lyman Trumbull for alleging that Douglas’s opposition to the Lecompton Constitution was hypocritical. The Little Giant reportedly “raved like a maniac,” “tore his hair,” and “shook his fists” while branding his senatorial colleague an “infamous liar” and a “miserable, craven-hearted wretch” who would “rather have both ears cut off than to use that language in my presence, where I could call him to account.”

  Douglas also said, without evident irony, that while he wished “to discuss principles alone, without any indulgence in personalities,” his rival had stooped to personal attacks. He had treated Lincoln “with marked respect and kindness,” and in return, he claimed, he had received abuse: his opponent had charged him with conspiring to nationalize slavery and then criticized him for not responding. Haughtily Douglas explained, “I did not suppose that there was a man in America so degraded in his own soul, as to believe that such a charge could be true against the Supreme Court and two Presidents.” He went on to call the allegation “an infamous lie” and an “assault upon my private and public character.” He charged that Lincoln made personal attacks in order to shift attention from his own radicalism. “Lincoln has been told by his abolition supporters that he made a great blunder in his speech at Springfield, that he should not have avowed the abolition doctrines as broadly, as rankly, as undisguisedly as he did, and that I was getting the advantage of him on the defense of his own issues,” Douglas said. “He is determined now to change the discussion, if possible, from the principle involved to a personal contest. I confess that I have no taste for personal contests before public audiences.” He then proceeded to ridicule Lincoln’s “exploits with broad-swords, on his trip to Missouri with Gen. Shields.”

  Douglas further alleged that in 1851 the Illinois Legislature had passed the following resolution: “The people of each State and each Territory should be left by Congress to legislate for themselves, subject to no limitation whatever.” Two days later a Republican charged Douglas “with deliberately falsifying the record. There is no such resolution as he read, in the proceedings of 1851, nor anything resembling it.”192

  On August 13 at Havana, where fistfights broke out among boisterous drunkards clogging the streets, Douglas delivered an intemperate speech in which he called Lincoln “a liar, a coward, a wretch and a sneak” and Trumbull “a liar and a wretch and a vagabond.”193 At Lewistown, Douglas denounced Lincoln and Trumbull as “liars, sneaks, wretches, cowards, villains and pickpockets.” Asked why he used such strong language, Douglas replied “that Lincoln’s course has been such as to leave him no other line of argument.”194 In Peoria on August 18, his abusive epithets for Lincoln and Trumbull—“infamous liar,” “low rascal,” “knave,” and “Billingsgate orator”—caused a pro-Douglas farmer to observe: “His temper is so rough, you could grate a nutmeg on it.”195 From afar, the New York Times noted that Douglas’s “envenomed” rhetoric demonstrated “how absurd was the hope indulged in some quarters of uniting the Republicans with the supporters of the Little Giant.”196 On August 31 at Joliet, Douglas abused Congressman and Congregational minister Owen Lovejoy for “wearing the clerical robe and uttering vulgarity and mendacity, slandering private character, [and] traducing honest men.” Projecting his own flaws onto his opponents, he characterized Lincoln as a “man who lets go of principle … of stern integrity, and undertakes, by the aid of schemes, tricks and dodging, to get popularity in each locality.”197

  In September, Douglas’s temper grew even worse. At Pontiac on September 2, he exploded in anger when asked a challenging question about a person’s right to recover a fugitive slave who runs away from a slave territory to a free state. The questioner reported that the senator “looked at us as though he would take perfect delight in eating us up, or would derive exquisite pleasure in knocking the daylights out of us. Approaching us, with upraised hand and flashing eye, shaking his shaggy locks, and fairly trembling with rage, he answered: ‘Yes, sir; he can be recaptured under the Fugitive Slave Law!’ He then commenced a volley of billingsgate which would make a fishmonger blush, calling us an Abolitionist; that we were in the habit of going round lecturing in church basements, making abolition harangues, after the fashion of Lovejoy and other pincushion lecturers.”198 During a speech at Gillespie on October 16, David L. Phillips raised a question about the Little Giant’s role in amending a bill that would have allowed the people of Kansas a fair chance to vote on any proposed constitution for that territory. Douglas “lost his dignity and self-respect, abused and blackguarded Mr. P.,” calling “him a liar half a dozen times.” An observer described the senator’s behavior as “scandalous and galling in the extreme.”199

  The Little Giant, whom one Republican called a “drunken demagogue,” may have been intoxicated during some of these speeches.200 He drank and smoked so much that throat and liver problems combined to kill him at the age of forty-eight. During the 1858 campaign he “was drinking himself to death,” according to Horace White.201 In a dispatch from Havana, White remarked that it would be difficult “to give an adequate idea of the littleness, meanness and foulness of Douglas’ harangue here,” and attributed it to inebriation.202 Another witness agreed, saying that Douglas “was very bitter; he shook his shaggy locks, rolled his eyes, stamped his feet, flourished his arms, pointed his fingers and gnashed his teeth.”203 The senator’s friends reportedly “claimed as an excuse for his language that he was intoxicated at the time.”204 A reporter suspected the “unshaven and unshorn” senator was drunk at Carlinville on September 8 and at Centralia nine days later.205 At Centralia, the reporter wrote: “I have never heard him commence a harangue so entirely out of temper as on this occasion.… In my hearing some one asked, ‘Is he drunk,’ to which a reply was made, ‘No, he has quit drinking,’ another voice adding irreverently, ‘Yes, that’s so, I’ve seen him quit more than a dozen times to-day.’ ”206 Another spectator noted that many in the crowd “thought that Douglas was under the influence of liquor, as a sober man would hardly talk and act as he did.”207

  The Little Giant’s private railcar was well stocked with liquor. An observer of the Quincy debate in October recalled that when Douglas arrived in that train, he “was well loaded with booze.”208 Carl Schurz observed Douglas there and later reported that “his face seemed a little puffy, and it was said that he had been drinking hard with some boon companions.”209 George B. McClellan, a pro-Douglas executive of the Illinois Central, traveled one day during the campaign with the Little Giant, to whom he had offered his private railcar. McClellan recalled seeing the senator “somewhat affected by the large amount of whiskey he had taken, & looking unkempt & sleepy.” Douglas had “brought with him a number of his political henchmen with whom he was up all night drinking whiskey etc.”210

  Douglas’s drinking had drawn notice long before the 1858 campaign. According to Herndon, in 1854 Douglas was “a little �
�cocked’ ” when he interrupted Lincoln repeatedly during his speech at Springfield.211 Two years thereafter, an attendee at a Douglas rally alleged that the Little Giant “was considerably drunk and made one of the most sophistical and deceitful speeches I ever listened to.”212

  In time, word of Douglas’s tippling spread. George D. Prentice of the Louisville Journal said that “Douglas fails to improve—perhaps from his keeping too near ‘the dipper.’ ”213 The Quincy Whig on several occasions alluded to Douglas’s alcohol consumption, remarking “there are stories of late inebrieties that might be told” and suggested that his confinement to his house in 1860 was related to health problems caused by excessive drinking.214 Douglas was evidently drunk at the Freeport debate in late August 1858. Herndon reported in October 1858 that “Douglas is [as] bloated as I ever saw him: he drinks very hard indeed: his look is awful to me, when I compare him as he now looks with what he was in Feb[ruar]y 1858.”215 In 1859, a brakeman aboard an Illinois Central train observed the Little Giant consume so much whiskey that “he got in a stupor and sort of slid down between the seats.” In Chicago he had to be carried off the cars.216 Campaigning for president in 1860, he stormed late one night into William Henry Seward’s railroad sleeping car and urged the New York senator to arise and address a crowd at Toledo. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., who along with his father was accompanying Seward, recorded in his diary that Douglas “had a bottle of whiskey with him, and, as he left the car, he stopped to take a drink; and, next morning, I was told he was plainly drunk.”217 (Henry Adams, perhaps based on what his father and brother told him, called the Little Giant “a drunkard.”)218 Others reported that Douglas was so intoxicated he required assistance to detrain. At that time an editor of the New York Herald wrote privately that Douglas “drinks hard.”219 In March 1861, only months before Douglas died, a Washington correspondent noted that the senator “drinks a good deal, and has been what the boys call ‘tight’ pretty often during the past winter.”220