Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  “Those who know him best,” the Cincinnati Commercial noted of Douglas in 1860, “are impressed that he cannot live many years.” Early in his career he had “acquired habits of drinking spirituous liquors. He probably found it next to impossible to avoid those habits, and perhaps did not look upon it as dangerous.” In the newspaper’s view, the Little Giant was more to be pitied than censured for succumbing to “the temptations that beset public men.” The Commercial cited “illustrious examples before him, of the ruinous consequences of indulging in stimulants, to sustain overwrought brain and nerves, and flesh and blood, in the devouring excitements of contests involving the issues of political life and death.”221 Lincoln agreed with this analysis; he may have had the example of Douglas in mind when he told a student in his law office: “a large per cent of professional men abuse their stomachs by imprudence in drinking and eating, and in that way health is injured and ruined and life is shortened.”222

  At Havana on August 14, Lincoln subtly referred to Douglas’s drinking habits. The day before, Lincoln remarked, the Little Giant had “said something about fighting, as though referring to a pugilistic encounter between him and myself.” These remarks prompted one of Douglas’s more enthusiastic supporters to remove his coat and volunteer “to take the job off Judge Douglas’ hands, and fight Lincoln himself.” But, Lincoln said, he would not accept the pointless challenge. “If my fighting Judge Douglas would not prove anything,” he continued, “it would certainly prove nothing for me to fight his bottle-holder.”223 In mid-September, taking offense at Douglas’s conduct in the Charleston debate, Lincoln said he was tempted to protest publicly that he “did not have to have his wife along to keep him sober.”224

  In fact, the beautiful, cultivated, tactful, well-bred Mrs. Douglas (née Adele Cutts, his second wife), a grandniece of Dolley Madison, did accompany her husband, much to the consternation of Republicans, who regarded her as an effective weapon in the senator’s arsenal. Horace White said he had “never seen a more queenly face and figure” and did not doubt “that this attractive presence was very helpful to Judge Douglas.”225 Another journalist covering that campaign remembered her as “a most lovely and a queenly apparition. Indeed, it seemed to me that I had never seen a woman more beautiful in every way. Her tall figure was perfectly proportioned, and her every movement and gesture most graceful. She presented a marked contrast, in her youthful, blooming freshness and vivacity, to her small, dark, sombre husband. She appeared to be devoted to him, and certainly helped him no little in his political aspirations.”226 Wherever her husband spoke, she attended receptions. At such an event even a Republican editor, Charles L. Bernays, was so taken with her beauty that he became an admirer of her husband.

  In late September, Lincoln gallantly agreed to escort Mrs. Douglas on the train from Sullivan to Danville. The Little Giant’s schedule forced him to ride all night between those two towns; Lincoln was traveling the same route by day. To spare her the discomfort of a night journey, Lincoln offered to be her traveling companion. When the challenger arrived in Danville, he “firmly, yet kindly” told the Republican welcoming committee that he “had a lady in care whom he must first put in the hands of her waiting friends.” He then led her to a cab and wished her a good evening. She later remarked that “Mr. Lincoln was a very agreeable and considerate escort.”227 Unlike Mrs. Douglas, Mary Lincoln stayed home during most of the campaign.

  In late July and early August, Lincoln attended some of his opponent’s afternoon speeches and responded in the evening. On July 27 Lincoln listened at Clinton, when Douglas finally answered Lincoln’s conspiracy charge. “Unfounded and untrue,” Douglas said; “I never exchanged a word with Chief Justice Taney or any other member of the Supreme Court about the Dred Scott decision in my life, either before or after it was rendered. I never exchanged a word with President Pierce on the subject … nor did I exchange a word with President Buchanan upon it until long after it was made.” He menacingly warned that if Lincoln “resorts to this game after this explanation, he will get my answer in monosyllables.”228 When Douglas “said that no man could look him in the face and say that he ever denounced the U.S. Bank decision” of the Supreme Court, Lincoln stood and stared directly into Douglas’s eyes. The Little Giant averted his gaze.229 Tension mounted throughout Douglas’s denunciatory speech, after which Lincoln “arose pale and trembling evidently wrought up to the highest pitch” and announced that he would reply in the evening at the courthouse.

  There, by candlelight before a small crowd, Lincoln seemed “very much depressed, still smarting under the fierceness of the assault Douglas had made upon him.” When a large contingent eventually appeared and filled the room to overflowing, he “began to cheer up and finally warmed himself into a very successful oratorical effort,” during which he made “a withering allusion to the angelic temper, which Douglas had displayed in his speech,” denied charges that he had voted against supplying U.S. troops in Mexico, reiterated arguments he had made at Springfield and Chicago, and in response to the Little Giant’s assertion that he had never criticized the Supreme Court’s ruling in the U.S. Bank case, “said he had heard Douglas as many as twenty times himself, and a thousand men all over the State would back him in this, both Democrats and Republicans.”230

  As he proceeded up the Illinois River in Douglas’s wake, speaking at Beardstown, Havana, Bath, Lewistown, and Peoria, Lincoln seemed to be in high spirits. Many old Whig friends accompanied him, delighted to hear his stories and comments on the political scene. When Horace White asked why in his speeches “he did not oftener turn the laugh on Douglas,” Lincoln “replied that he was too much in earnest, and that it was doubtful whether turning the laugh on anybody really gained any votes.”231 On the eve of the August 21 debate at Ottawa, Lincoln was once more urged to abandon his solemn style of oratory and to imitate the Ohio wit Thomas Corwin. He again refused, observing that the “subject is too serious & important.”232 His aim as an orator was simple: “I do not seek applause, nor to amuse the people, I want to convince them.”233

  White was struck by Lincoln’s ability to say something new at each stop. “Many times,” White recollected, “did I marvel to see him get on a platform at some out-of-the-way place and begin an entirely new speech, equal, in all respects, to any of the joint debates, and continue for two hours in a high strain of argumentative power and eloquence, without saying anything that I had heard before.” In September he asked Lincoln about his ability to offer original remarks in almost every speech, whereas the Little Giant repeated himself over and over. Lincoln “replied that Douglas was not lacking in versatility, but that he had a theory that the popular sovereignty speech was the one to win on, and that the audiences whom he addressed would hear it only once and would never know whether he made the same speech elsewhere or not, and would never care.” Lincoln, in contrast, “said that he could not repeat to-day what he had said yesterday. The subject kept enlarging and widening in his mind as he went on, and it was much easier to make a new speech than to repeat an old one.”234

  Lincoln took umbrage at Douglas’s Beardstown speech in which the senator had deemed the conspiracy charge “an infamous lie.” On August 12, showing “much agitation,” Lincoln fired back: “it would be vastly more to the point for Judge Douglas to say he did not do some of these things, did not forge some of these links of overwhelming testimony, than to go vociferating about the country that possibly he may hint that somebody is a liar! [Deafening applause.] I repeat and renew, and shall continue to repeat and renew this ‘charge’ until he denies the evidence, and then I shall so fasten it upon him that it will cling to him as long as he lives.”235 A reporter noted that it “would be impossible for me to give your readers an idea of the energy and vehemence with which Lincoln uttered these words. It was the most terrible indictment I ever heard. Its effect was electrical. The vast audience gave three tremendous cheers when he pronounced the concluding sentence.”236 (A Democratic paper, on the other han
d, alleged that Lincoln’s auditors “received his niggerisms with disgust.”)237

  At Havana the following day, Lincoln arrived as Douglas was speaking. He did not proceed to the site where the Little Giant held forth, explaining to someone who suggested that he do so: “No, the Judge felt so ‘put out’ by my listening to him at Bloomington and Clinton, that I promised to let him alone for the rest of the canvass. I understand he is calling Trumbull and myself liars, and if he saw me in the crowd he might be so ashamed of himself as to omit the most vivid part of his argument.”238 He spoke later that day to a crowd much smaller than Douglas’s. The following day at Bath, a town he had laid out as a surveyor decades earlier, Lincoln turned for support to admirers of Henry Clay, who had resoundingly condemned slavery. Lincoln contrasted those views with Douglas’s indifference on the subject.

  On August 17 at Lewistown, facing a Democratic transparency proclaiming “Lincoln declares the negro his equal,” the challenger with unwonted “vehemence and force” denounced amoral neutrality on the slavery issue. The Little Giant, he said, “was the only statesman of any note or prominence in the country who had never said to friend or enemy whether he believed human slavery in the abstract to be right or wrong.”239

  Also at Lewistown, Lincoln delivered an even more ringing apostrophe to signers of the Declaration of Independence than the one he had made in Springfield a month earlier. “In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children, and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, or none but Anglo-Saxon white men, were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began—so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the human and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.” With “great earnestness,” he told his audience: “if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur, and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart[er] of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the Revolution. Think nothing of me—take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever—but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence. You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed these sacred principles. You may not only defeat me for the Senate, but you may take me and put me to death. While pretending no indifference to earthly honors, I do claim to be actuated in this contest by something higher than an anxiety for office. I charge you to drop every paltry and insignificant thought for any man’s success. It is nothing; I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of humanity—the Declaration of American Independence.”240

  Horace White reported that the “applause which followed these noble utterances rang far and wide through the pleasant village.” White called Lincoln’s effort “truly one of the finest efforts of public speaking I ever listened to.”241 A Massachusetts newspaper declared that Lincoln’s peroration “ranks him at once among the foremost orators of the land.”242

  Although Lincoln told a friend, “[m]y recent experience shows that speaking at the same place the next day after D[ouglas] is the very thing—it is, in fact, a concluding speech on him,” some Republicans frowned on such a strategy.243 Farmers were reluctant to neglect their chores for two consecutive days. One of his strong supporters said that Lincoln should not allow Douglas to take advantage of him; the Little Giant persuaded friends to give him elaborate receptions and draw big crowds for a daytime speech, after which most of the audience departed. Thus, “Douglas takes the crowd & Lincoln the leavings.”244 At Lewistown, Lincoln only drew about 2,000, whereas Douglas had an audience of 3,000 the day before. At Havana on August 13, according to the Democratic press, Lincoln attracted only 659 people, compared with Douglas’s 6,000 the preceding day. “Lincoln’s speech was not up to his usual efforts,” one Democratic correspondent alleged. “He is evidently discouraged. His ultra negroism being found to be disgustingly unpalatable to the masses.”245 The Illinois State Register ran similar accounts of his meeting at Clinton on July 27. After that speech, Lincoln reportedly said “that he would have to make his own appointments because Douglas, under present circumstances, has the crowd, and the people will not turn out in the evening to hear him reply. He is much disappointed at his reception in Clinton,” where he only drew an audience of 250.246

  Democrats were even more critical of Lincoln’s tactics than were Republicans. The Chicago Times called Lincoln a “cringing, crawling,.… poor, desperate creature,” who could not attract an audience on his own and therefore lurked “on the outskirts of Douglas’ meetings, begging the people to come and hear him.” Such conduct, the Times declared, was “mean, sneaking and disreputable!”247 Richard T. Merrick of Chicago threatened to follow Lincoln and reply to his charges wherever he spoke. George B. McClellan thought Merrick’s proposal “an excellent one.” (McClellan praised Douglas, saying apropos of one of his debates with Lincoln: “Douglas’ speech was compact, logical & powerful—Mr. Lincoln’s disjointed, & rather a mass of anecdotes than of arguments. I did not think that there was any approach to equality in the oratorical powers of the two men.”)248

  Unsatisfied by the results of his rebuttals of Douglas, Republicans in Illinois and elsewhere urged Lincoln to challenge his opponent to debate. The New York Tribune suggested that the two candidates “speak together at some fifteen or twenty of the most important and widely accessible points throughout the State, and that the controversy will be prosecuted … at every county seat and considerable town.”249 The Chicago Press and Tribune said: “Let Mr. Douglas and Mr. Lincoln agree to canvass the State together, in the usual western style.”250

  On July 24, when Lincoln saw the published announcement of Douglas’s appointments for August, he conferred with Norman B. Judd about debating his opponent. Judd, sensing that Lincoln had already determined to challenge the senator, said he thought it would be a good idea. Lincoln then wrote a letter for Judd to deliver to Douglas, formally proposing that they “divide time, and address the same audiences.” (According to one account, Lincoln stated: “I will give him the length of my knife.”)251

  With great difficulty, Judd tracked Douglas down. When, after three days, Judd finally did catch up with him and presented Lincoln’s note, the Little Giant angrily asked: “What do you come to me with such a thing as this for?”252 He berated Judd for abandoning the Democratic Party. Ignoring the insults, Judd handed over Lincoln’s challenge, which Douglas “angrily and emphatically declined to consider on the ground that it was a childish idea and that he would be belittling himself and dignifying Lincoln.”253 (Another reason for Douglas’s hesitation was his respect for Lincoln’s ability. As he told Joseph O. Glover, “I do not feel, between you and me, that I want to go into this debate. The whole country knows me and has me measured. Lincoln, as regards myself, is comparatively unknown, and if he gets the best of this debate, and I want to say he is the ablest man the Republicans have got, I shall lose everything and Lincoln will gain everything. Should I win, I shall gain but little.�
��)254 Judd warned Douglas that if he refused to debate, he would seem afraid of his rival.

  It was a telling point; the Chicago Press and Tribune noted that “it has been justly held that the candidate who refused to speak in that way [i.e., in debates] had no better reason than cowardice for declining the challenge.”255 The Chicago Times asked why Lincoln had not issued the challenge earlier. It was a reasonable question, for as Douglas noted, the underdog stands to benefit more than the favorite in political debates.

  Realizing that he could not afford to look cowardly, Douglas offered a counterproposal: noting that the Democratic State Central Committee had committed him to speak at party meetings throughout the state, he declined to share time with Lincoln at those occasions, but he would agree to debate in each of the state’s nine congressional districts, except for the two where they had already in effect debated (i.e., Chicago and Springfield). In picking up the gage thus flung down, Douglas peevishly, and falsely, suggested that Lincoln was plotting to include a National Democratic candidate for the senate in the debates. Forwarding Douglas’s response to Lincoln, Judd observed that it “is a clear dodge, but he has made the best case he could.”256 On July 29, protesting against the “unjust” insinuations of “attempted unfairness,” Lincoln accepted Douglas’s terms.257

  The following day Douglas submitted a schedule for the debates: Ottawa (August 21), Freeport (August 27), Jonesboro (September 15), Charleston (September 18), Galesburg (October 7), Quincy (October 13), and Alton (October 15). Each debate would last three hours, evenly divided between the two candidates, with one opening for an hour, the other replying for an hour and a half, and the first speaker concluding with a half-hour rejoinder. Douglas would have the opening and closing speeches at the first, third, fifth, and seventh debates. Mildly protesting that this arrangement gave the Little Giant four openings and closes to his three, Lincoln accepted these conditions. He also pledged, “I shall be at no more of your exclusive meetings.”258