Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1
Page 88
Because the debates drew national attention, newspapers from other states joined the chorus of criticism. The Louisville Journal declared: “Douglas has done a deed of shame”; the “minuteness of detail” in his charge “utterly precluded any idea that he was simply and innocently mistaken.”27 Chester P. Dewey of the New York Evening Post reported that “Douglas waded very deeply into the mire of mendacity” and concluded that his error “takes the very heart and core out of Douglas’s Ottawa speech. It strips it to the very bone, and leaves only a hollow and baseless frame behind.… The very audacity of this charge gave Douglas this seeming advantage; that it put Lincoln on the explanatory and defensive, in regard to a series of resolutions which, whether passed at a ‘one-horse meeting in Kane county’ or at Springfield, he could know nothing about it, as he had no hand in making them; and it is asking too much, to require a politician to have at his tongue’s end all the resolutions of four-year-old conventions.”28
Douglas untruthfully implied that Lincoln was a drinker. In praising his challenger, the senator remarked: “I have known him for nearly twenty-five years. We had many points of sympathy when I first got acquainted with him. We were both comparatively boys—both struggling with poverty in a strange land for our support. I was an humble school teacher in the town of Winchester, and he a flourishing grocery [i.e., saloon] keeper in the town of Salem. [Laughter.] … He could beat any of the boys wrestling—could outrun them at a foot race—beat them at pitching quoits or tossing a copper, and could win more liquor than all the boys put together.” (The Times’ account said “ruin more liquor.”)
Yet another misleading charge concerned Lincoln’s record in Congress, where, Douglas said, the challenger “distinguished himself by his opposition to the Mexican war, taking the side of the common enemy, in time of war, against his own country. [Cheers and groans. That’s true.]”
Lincoln fully expected the Little Giant’s mendacity. He had told a friend the previous month, “Douglas will tell a lie to ten thousand people one day, even though he knows he may have to deny it to five thousand the next.”29 In October he stated flatly, “Douglas is a liar.”30 Two years later, when asked about the Little Giant’s truthfulness, he replied: “Douglas don’t tell as many lies as some men I have known. But I think he keers as little for the truth for truth’s sake, as any man I ever saw.”31
When Lincoln’s turn to speak came, he responded to what he called “very gross and palpable” misrepresentations, which he treated as more amusing than provoking. As he spoke, he swept his arms so vigorously that he resembled a windmill. He thanked Douglas for calling him “a kind, amiable, and intelligent gentleman,” a compliment that truly gratified him. “I was a little ‘taken,’ for it came from a great man. I was not very much accustomed to flattery, and it came the sweeter to me. I was rather like the Hoosier, with the gingerbread, when he said he reckoned he loved it better than any other man, and got less of it. [Roars of laughter.]” With more good humor Lincoln denied the charge that he and Trumbull had conspired to seize the senate seats and to destroy the Whig and Democratic parties. Because he did not recognize Douglas’s mistake in attributing to the Springfield Republicans of 1854 the radicalism of the Aurora Republicans, he failed to call attention to it. Instead, he found himself on the defensive, protesting that he had not helped frame the “Springfield” platform.
As for his alleged saloon-keeping, Lincoln said Douglas “is awfully at fault about his early friend Lincoln being a ‘grocery-keeper.’ [Laughter.] I don’t know as it would be a great sin if I had been, but he is mistaken. Lincoln never kept a grocery anywhere in the world. [Laughter.] It is true that Lincoln did work the latter part of one winter in a small still house, up at the head of a hollow. [Roars of laughter.]” He also asserted that Douglas was “grossly and altogether mistaken” in conveying “the idea that I withheld supplies from the soldiers who were fighting in the Mexican war, or did anything else to hinder the soldiers.”
Shrewdly, Lincoln did not react to the charge that he “could win [or ruin] more liquor than all the boys put together.” If he had done so, Douglas would have harped on the issue repeatedly, diverting the debate from the central issue of slavery expansion.
In defending his conspiracy charge against Douglas, Lincoln pointed out that five months earlier the Little Giant had arraigned the Buchanan administration for plotting with pro-Lecompton forces in Congress, as well as with the Washington Union and the authors of the Lecompton Constitution to make slavery national. If Lincoln had a “corrupt heart” for daring to state that Douglas had conspired to promote that same end, did not the Little Giant have an equally “corrupt heart” for daring to say that Buchanan et al. had done the same thing?
Lincoln rejected the charge of abolitionism and racial egalitarianism, quoting from his 1854 Peoria address to illustrate the point. “This is the whole of it,” he said, “and anything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro, is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse. [Applause, laughter.]” He then elaborated: “I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which in my judgment will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. [Applause, loud cheers.] 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 moral or intellectual endowment. 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. [“Bully for you,” “all right,” great applause.]”
Eloquently, Lincoln gave his reasons for fearing that Douglas was paving the way for a second Dred Scott decision making it illegal for any state to exclude slavery. “In this and like communities,” Lincoln argued, “public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.” As an influential party leader, Douglas had the power to shape public opinion significantly, and he was doing so by stating repeatedly that Supreme Court decisions must be obeyed without cavil, even though he himself had undermined the independence of the Illinois Supreme Court in 1841 when he helped engineer the legislative coup by which the court was packed in order to get it to reverse its decision in the Alexander P. Field controversy.32 (Douglas had then been named a justice of the court.) So the Little Giant, a man traditionally contemptuous of the sacredness of court decisions, was helping persuade the public to abide docilely by any ruling handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, presumably even if that body decided that no state could outlaw slavery.
Lincoln invoked the authority of Henry Clay, “my beau ideal of a statesman, the man for whom I fought all my humble life.” That Kentuckian “once said of a class of men who would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, that they must, if they would do this, go back to the era of our Independence, and muzzle the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return; they must blow out the moral lights around us; they must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate there the love of liberty; and then and not till then cou
ld they perpetuate slavery in this country! [Loud cheers.]” Douglas, Lincoln charged, was blowing out those candles, muzzling those cannons, and eradicating that love of liberty by proclaiming his indifference to the morality of slavery, by asserting that the black man “has nothing in the Declaration of Independence,” and by stating he “cares not whether slavery is voted down or voted up.” Once he persuaded the public to adopt his amoral attitude, “then it needs only the formality of the second Dred Scott decision which he endorses in advance, to make Slavery alike lawful in all the States—old as well as new, North as well as South.”33
Enraged, Douglas sprang up to deliver his half-hour rejoinder. When he alleged that his challenger had met with the Republicans in Springfield in 1854 as they drafted their platform, Lincoln interrupted angrily to deny it. Republican committeemen silenced him, saying: “What are you making such a fuss for? Douglas didn’t interrupt you, and can’t you see that the people don’t like it?” Douglas went on at length, asking Lincoln if he agreed with the Springfield (actually Aurora) platform of 1854 and denouncing his “miserable quibbles.” He insisted that Lincoln was responsible for that platform, for he “was the leader of that party, and on the very day that he made his speech there in reply to me, preaching up the same doctrine of the Declaration of Independence that niggers were equal to white men—that very day this Republican Convention met there. [“Three cheers for Douglas.”]” Passionately, the Little Giant rejected the conspiracy charge, calling it “an infamous lie.” (Lincoln’s face registered indignation at this point.) The senator further protested that “Mr. Lincoln has not character enough for integrity and truth, merely on his own ipse dixit to arraign President Buchanan and President Pierce, and the Judges of the Supreme Court, any one of whom would not be complimented if put on a level with Mr. Lincoln. [“Hit him again,” three cheers, &c.]”34
At the close of the debate, half a dozen well-meaning supporters lifted Lincoln and carried him from the site. The Republican marshal had unwisely selected mostly short men for the job. The lanky challenger’s head towered above his honor guard, but his feet dragged. Lincoln protested in vain, saying “Don’t boys! Let me down!” but they did not do so until they reached Mayor Glover’s house.35 Recovering himself, he seemed pleased and, turning to one of the gang that had transported him, “said good naturedly ‘never mind, never mind! I’ve get even with you, you rascal!’ ”36
The following day Lincoln described the Ottawa debate to a friend: “the fur flew some, and I am glad to know I am yet alive. There was a vast concourse of people—more than could [get] near enough to hear.”37
Press reaction to the debate followed party lines. Democratic newspapers praised Douglas for exposing Lincoln’s “nigger-loving propensities” and for showing that he himself was no “nigger worshipper.”38 The Milwaukee News declared that the Little Giant had put his opponent “on the defensive and kept him there.”39 The Chicago Times reported that Douglas’s “excoriation of Lincoln was so severe, that the Republicans hung their heads in shame,” while the Democrats “were loud in their vociferations.”40
Douglas was delighted with the outcome, believing with some justice that he had Lincoln on the defensive, for the challenger had ducked the seven interrogatories and even if he were to answer them in the next debate, it would not undo the damage. An impartial judge would probably have awarded this first round to Douglas, whose aggressive style seemed to give him the whip hand.
An astute Douglas supporter thought Lincoln seemed to repudiate his “House Divided” and Chicago speeches and speculated on the reason why: “Lincoln has killed himself by his ultra Abolition-equality doctrine. His declaration that the negro is the equal of the white man, and that our laws should be uniform throughout the United States, has aroused the people,” who “now see that such monstrous doctrines are repugnant to the genius and spirit of our institutions.” So at Ottawa Lincoln was “endeavoring to shape a new course, by denying that the negro is the equal of the white man.”41 Though oversimplified, that conclusion is not far from the truth; Lincoln’s comments in Ottawa about black equality sounded far different from his comments in his Chicago speech, in which he called for an end to “all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and that race and the other race being inferior.” It is noteworthy that this disavowal of any intention to promote racial equality was delivered in northern Illinois, where abolitionist sentiment was far stronger than it was in the more Negrophobic central and southern parts of the state.
Not all Democrats were pleased, however. An enthusiastic Douglas supporter recalled that the Little Giant “had not made quite so convincing a speech as was expected” and that the challenger had bested him. “When Lincoln got up and said in his slow, frank style that when a fellow heard himself misrepresented a little, he felt ugly, but when he was misrepresented a good deal, it seemed funny, it was plain to see he had caught the crowd considerably better than did Douglass in his opening.” Although Lincoln’s “gestures were awfully awkward,” they appeared “weighty.” There was an obvious sincerity “that carried you with him. You could not help it, for he made you feel that he was so honest. When he got through, it was pretty clear that, in the mind of the crowd, he was ahead.”42 The Democratic Post in Providence Rhode Island, conceded that Douglas’s speech “contains a little more of gall and wormwood … than we can heartily endorse.”43
Illinois Republicans rejoiced over Lincoln’s performance. Those at the debate concluded that “Douglas is ‘a dead cock in the pit,’ ” and Republican leaders unable to attend expressed delight at the challenger’s triumph.44 L. D. Whiting in Bureau County told Lincoln that “in common with every Republican I have heard express himself, [I] think you in most respects proved yourself his [Douglas’s] superior.”45 According to the Ottawa Republican, “[c]andid, intelligent men of all parties are free to say that Lincoln won the field—Douglas lost friends and lost votes by the exhibition he made of himself.”46 Herndon judged that “Lincoln whipped Douglas badly—very badly” and opined that “Douglas’ forgery hurts him.… This fraud—this base forgery would kill ‘Hell.’ ”47
Republicans outside Illinois cheered the news. Schuyler Colfax of Indiana congratulated Lincoln for having “so signally triumphed.”48 From Ohio, Samuel Galloway wrote to John Locke Scripps, editor of the Chicago Press and Tribune, asking “who is this new man; he has completely worsted the little giant. You have a David greater than the Democratic Goliath or any other I ever saw.”49 The correspondent of the New York Evening Post informed his readers that Lincoln “is altogether a more fluent speaker than Douglas, and in all the arts of debate fully his equal. The Republicans of Illinois have chosen a champion worthy of their heartiest support, and fully equipped for the conflict with the great ‘squatter Sovereign.’ ”50 The New York Tribune said: “Of the two, Lincoln and Douglas, all partiality being left out of the question, we think Mr. Lincoln has decidedly the advantage. Not only are his doctrines truer and better than those of his antagonist, but he states them with more propriety, and with an infinitely better temper.”51
Abolitionists, however, were disappointed. Theodore Parker objected to Lincoln’s evasiveness, for he “did not meet the issue. He made a technical evasion; ‘he had nothing to do with the Resolutions [adopted at Aurora] in question.’ Suppose he had not, admit they were forged; still they were the vital questions, pertinent to the issue, & L[incoln] dodged them. That is not the way to fight the battle of Freedom.”52
Some Republicans thought Lincoln had been excessively defensive. Herndon explained that his partner “is too much of a Kentucky gentleman to debate with Douglas; i e, he will not condescend to lie: he will not bend to expediency: he will not hug shams, and so he labors under a disadvantage.”53 Charles H. Ray implored Elihu B. Washburne, “When you see Abe at Freeport, for God’s sake tell him to ‘Charge Chester! Charge!’ Do not let him keep on the defensive. Let him be fortified with his proofs and commence thus: ‘I charge so and so, and
prove it thus.’ ‘I charge so-and-so, and prove it thus!’ and so on until the end of his hour, charging in every paragraph. Let him close the hour with a charge, and in his half hour following, let him pay no attention to Douglas’ charges, but lump all his own together and fling them at his head, and end up by shrieking a loud note for Freedom! We must not be parrying all the while. We want the deadliest thrusts. Let us see blood flow every time he closes a sentence.”54
Lincoln received similar advice from many quarters, including a Republican in Jacksonville who insisted that “Mercy to Douglas is treachery to the cause of Right and Humanity.”55 Henry C. Whitney told Lincoln that his friends “think that you ought not to treat him [Douglas] tenderly:—he is going to try to intimidate you:—you have got to treat him severely.… I don’t of course mean that you ought to call him a liar or anything of that sort but that you ought to let him know that you are ‘terribly in earnest.’ ”56