Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  As Lincoln was about to open the debate on that cool, windy, cloudy afternoon, he was interrupted by William “Deacon” Bross of the Chicago Press and Tribune, who said: “Hold on, Lincoln. You can’t speak yet. Hitt ain’t here, and there is no use of your speaking unless the Press and Tribune has a report.”90 After delaying until the shorthand reporter was found, Lincoln rose and handed his shawl to E. W. Brewster with the remark, “There, Father Brewster, hold my clothes while I stone Stephen.”91 During Lincoln’s opening speech, Douglas sat nearby puffing on a cigar, to the consternation of his immediate neighbors.

  Lincoln began by answering the seven interrogatories Douglas had posed at Ottawa. He did not, he said, “stand pledged” to the unconditional repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, nor to the admission of more Slave States into the Union, nor to admitting new states into the Union with a constitution approved by the people, nor to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, nor to the abolition of the domestic slave trade. He did believe that Congress had a right and duty to prohibit slavery in all the territories, and he would oppose the admission of a new territory if it would “aggravate the slavery question among ourselves.”

  These remarks evidently did not sit well with some antislavery auditors, who, according to Henry Villard’s report, “thought that by his seven answers Lincoln had repudiated the whole Republican creed.” They “began to be restive, to grumble and otherwise express their displeasure in undertones.” Villard observed that “these seven answers may still give Mr. Lincoln much trouble and we should not be surprised if the Republicans in Northern Illinois might label them ‘Lincoln’s seven deadly sins.’ ”92

  After succinctly responding to Douglas, Lincoln elaborated on his answers. The Fugitive Slave Act, he said, “should have been framed so as to be free from some of the objections that pertain to it, without lessening its efficiency,” but since that statute was not now a matter of controversy, he did not favor making it one. He “would be exceedingly sorry” to have to vote on the admission of a new Slave State, but he thought it highly unlikely that such an application from a territory would be made in the future if Congress prohibited slavery from entering the territory in the first place. He “would be exceedingly glad to see Congress abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and, in the language of Henry Clay, ‘sweep from our Capital that foul blot upon our nation.’ [Loud applause.]” But he would favor such a step only if it were carried out in accordance with the provisions he had incorporated into his 1849 emancipation bill (gradualism, compensation for owners, and approval by a majority of the voters of the District). If Congress were to abolish the domestic slave trade, it should be done in accordance with those same provisions.

  Having answered Douglas’s questions, Lincoln read slowly and distinctly four questions to the Little Giant:

  1. Would he favor the admission of Kansas if it had not the population called for in the English Bill compromise (i.e., 93,000)?

  2. In light of the Dred Scott decision, could the inhabitants of a territory lawfully “exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution” if a citizen wished to bring slaves into that territory?

  3. Would he support a second Dred Scott decision forbidding states to exclude slavery?

  4. Would he support the acquisition of new territory “in disregard of how such acquisition may affect the nation on the slavery question?”

  By far the most important question was the second, which placed Douglas in an awkward position. The senator would alienate Illinois voters if he stated that the Supreme Court’s ruling forbade settlers from excluding slavery in the territories; yet, to maintain that the court’s decision did not do so would antagonize the South. Lincoln told a friend, “If he sticks to the Dred Scott decision, he may lose the Senatorship; if he tries to get around it, he certainly loses the Presidency.”93 The question was not original with Lincoln. In July, a Quincy attorney had suggested it, and Republican newspapers had included it among several queries for the Little Giant. Two years earlier, Trumbull and other members of Congress had posed the same query to Douglas, who replied that it was up to the courts.

  Lincoln scolded Douglas for confusing the radical Aurora Republican platform of 1854 with the more moderate one of the Springfield Republicans. Caustically he observed that the discovery of the Little Giant’s error did not relieve Lincoln of anything, for he had participated in neither convention. “I am just as much responsible for the resolutions at [Aurora in] Kane county as those at Springfield, the amount of the responsibility being exactly nothing in either case; no more than there would be in regard to a set of resolutions passed in the moon. [Laughter and loud cheers.]” Douglas had not qualified his allegations but “stated them roundly as being true.” How could such an eminent man make such a mistake? When “we consider who Judge Douglas is—that he is a distinguished Senator of the United States—that he has served nearly twelve years as such—that his character is not at all limited as an ordinary Senator for the United States, but that his name has become of world-wide renown—it is most extraordinary that he should so far forget all the suggestions of justice to an adversary, or of prudence to himself, as to venture upon the assertion of that which the slightest investigation would have shown him to be wholly false. [Applause, cheers.]” Witheringly Lincoln speculated about the cause of such a blunder, emphasizing Douglas’s amorality: “I can only account of his having done so upon the supposition that that evil genius which has attended him through his life, giving to him an apparent astonishing prosperity, such as to lead very many good men to doubt there being any advantage in virtue over vice—I say I can only account for it on the supposition that the evil genius has at last made up its mind to forsake him. [Continued cheers and laughter.]” How hypocritical of Douglas to make such a mistake when “he is in the habit, in almost all the speeches he makes, of charging falsehood upon his adversaries.” In fact, he preferred to “stand upon his dignity and call people liars” rather than answer questions.

  Lincoln betrayed annoyance at Douglas’s condescending remarks about “an insignificant individual like Lincoln” daring to charge conspiracy against such eminent men as presidents, congressional leaders, and Supreme Court justices. Again Lincoln asked if it were not the case that Douglas had himself leveled a charge of conspiracy against Buchanan et al.94

  As Douglas rose to reply, a melon hurled from the predominantly Republican crowd glanced off his shoulder. Unfazed, he answered Lincoln’s interrogatories, which the challenger had written out and left on the podium. Douglas picked up the paper on which they appeared, read the questions aloud, and replied. In response to the first one, he asserted that he would support the admission of Kansas with a small population even if its voters rejected the Lecompton Constitution. (This angered the Buchanan administration, which regarded it as a betrayal of an earlier agreement. Promptly, more pro-Douglas officeholders in Illinois were fired.) After reciting the crucial second question, the Little Giant “threw down the slip of paper as if he was disposing of a most trifling matter” and offered what became known as the Freeport Doctrine, a proposition that he had made earlier (most notably in his June 1857 speech at Springfield and his addresses at Bloomington and Springfield in July 1858) but which now became much better known. The Dred Scott decision may have officially forbidden the people of a territory to exclude slavery, he said, but informally they could do so by refusing to pass “local police regulations” guaranteeing the rights of slaveholders. Slavery “cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere unless supported by local police regulations,” which “can only be furnished by the local legislature. If the people of the Territory are opposed to slavery they will elect members to the legislature who will adopt unfriendly legislation to it.”95

  Douglas also argued that the judgment of the court regarding the power of Congress to prohibit slavery in the territories was obiter dictum—lacking the force of law. Presumably he held a similar view of the passage in Taney’s majo
rity decision, which stated that “if Congress itself cannot do this [i.e., prohibit slavery in the territories]—if it is beyond the powers conferred on the Federal Government—it will be admitted, we presume, that it could not authorize a territorial government to exercise them. It could confer no power on any local government, established by its authority, to violate the provisions of the Constitution.”96

  Douglas’s answer, Lincoln knew, would sit well with Illinoisans but would startle and infuriate Southerners, who had been led to believe that the Little Giant’s seemingly neutral popular sovereignty doctrine really favored the interests of slaveholders. The correspondent of the New York Evening Post accurately predicted that when Douglas’s Freeport remarks “shall go forth to all the land, and be read by men of Georgia and South Carolina, their eyes will doubtless open.”97

  Indeed, as soon as they heard of it, Southern newspapers denounced the Freeport Doctrine, calling it “radically unsound,” a “snare and a swindle, full of mean cunning, rank injustice, and insolence … more dangerous and fatal to the interests of the South than any ever advocated by the rankest abolitionist.” It added “insult to injury, for it mocks and derides the just claim of the slaveholder” and constituted the “scurviest possible form of all possible heresies.… [William Lloyd] Garrison, with all his fanatical and demoniacal hatred of slavery, has never in his whole life uttered an opinion at once so insulting and injurious to the South.” The Little Giant had earned “the contempt and abhorrence of honest men in all sections.”98 The Cincinnati Gazette asked Southerners “to consider this fresh and faithless conduct of a man who reported the Kansas Nebraska Bill for the purpose of cheating the North into his support, and thought he had purchased the vote of the South.”99 Douglas’s presidential chances were doomed, the Missouri Democrat prophetically declared: “If his opposition to the Lecompton Constitution could be forgiven, his Freeport speech, equivocal as it is, would put him out of the ring.”100 The New York Herald exclaimed: “To this ‘lame and impotent conclusion’ has Judge Douglas’ championship of the rights of the South come at last!” Could this possibly be “the feast to which the author of the Kansas-Nebraska bill invited the South?”101 The Washington Union remarked that Douglas “boldly and unblushingly, repudiate[s] the Dred Scott decision.”102

  The Freeport Doctrine prompted the Democratic press to insist on a federal slave code for the territories. That cry was taken up by Southern senators, including James M. Mason of Virginia, a supporter of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, who angrily told Douglas: “You promised us bread, and you have given us a stone; you promised us a fish, and you have given us a serpent; we thought you had given us a substantial right; and you have given us the most evanescent shadow and delusion.”103 Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi called the Freeport Doctrine “worse than even the Wilmot Proviso.”104 Mississippi’s other senator, Albert Gallatin Brown, also denounced it: “I would rather see the Democratic party sunk, never to be resurrected, than to see it successful only that one portion of it might practice a fraud on another.”105 Senators Clement C. Clay of Alabama and William M. Gwin of California echoed Brown.

  Republicans pounced on the Freeport Doctrine. “Douglas’ answer to Mr. Lincoln’s question amounts to nothing more nor less than Mob Law to keep slavery out of the Territories, and the Dred Scottites cannot help seeing it,” said the Chicago Press and Tribune. “What sort of ‘police regulations’ enable old [Milton] McGee, of Ruffian notoriety, to hold slaves in Kansas? According to Douglas, he holds them simply because his neighbors don’t club him and his niggers out of the Territory!”106 The Missouri Democrat called the Freeport Doctrine “the most odious embodiment of higher law,” contemplating “an appeal from the Supreme Court, to ‘tumultuous town meetings’—to use Douglas’ own language,” and “an ascription of sovereignty and supremacy to mobocracy.”107

  Although Lincoln was not the first to expose this weakness in Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine, at Freeport he brought it fully into public consciousness. The debate with Lincoln “is drawing the attention of the whole country to that matter,” observed the Washington States.108 The Little Giant had not invented the notion that slavery could not exist in territories where settlers did not want it—Senators Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, Lewis Cass of Michigan, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, and Jacob Collamer of Vermont, as well as Congressmen William A. Montgomery of Pennsylvania, James L. Orr of South Carolina, and Samuel O. Peyton of Kentucky had all expressed similar sentiments. But Douglas’s clear statement of it at Freeport both ruined his reputation in the South and widened the breach within the Illinois Democracy.

  In his rejoinder, Douglas continued to patronize Lincoln, sneering at his “miserable impositions,” broadly implying that he was a “demagogue,” contemptuously likening him to “a school boy” for feigning ignorance of the senator’s stand on slavery in the territories, and suggesting that Lincoln was a hypocrite who would fear to espouse opinions in southern Illinois that he voiced at Freeport. He ridiculed Lincoln’s intellect, saying of his four interrogatories: “He racked his brain so much in devising these few questions that he exhausted himself, and has not strength enough to invent another. [Laughter.]” Inaccurately, he stated that Lincoln had “been driven into obscurity” because of his “political sins” (i.e., his denunciation of the way President Polk had led the United States into war with Mexico). Condescendingly, he said: “I don’t think there is much danger” of Lincoln’s being elected. Douglas claimed that his challenger had tried to deceive voters in 1854 by pretending to be a Whig while he was secretly an abolitionist Republican. Appealing to the deep-seated racial prejudice of white Illinoisans, the Little Giant predicted that as soon as Lincoln “can hold a council of his advisers, by getting [Congressman Owen] Lovejoy, and [Congressman John F.] Farnsworth [Cheers], and [Congressman Joshua R.] Giddings, and Fred. Douglass together, he will then frame and propound the other interrogator[ies] [“Good, good,” &c. Renewed laughter, in which Mr. Lincoln feebly joined, saying that he hoped with their aid to get seven questions, the number asked him by Judge Douglas, and so make conclusions again.] I have no doubt you think they are all good men—good Black Republicans. [“White, white.”] I have reason to recollect that some people in this country think that Fred. Douglass is a very good man. The last time I came here to make a speech, while I was talking … I saw a carriage, and a magnificent one too, drive up and take its position on the outside of the crowd, with a beautiful young lady on the front seat, with a man and Fred. Douglass, the negro, on the back seat, and the owner of the carriage in front driving the negro. [Laughter, cheers, cries of “Right, what have you to say against it,” &c.] I witnessed that here in your town.” When a member of the audience cried out, “What of it?” Douglas exclaimed: “What of it! All I have to say is this, if you Black Republicans think that the negro ought to be on a social equality with your wives and daughters, and ride in the carriage with the wife while the master of the carriage drives the team, you have a perfect right to so do. [Laughter; “Good, good,” and cheers, mingled with shouting and cries of “White, white.”] I am told also that one of Fred. Douglass’ kinsmen [evidently an allusion to H. Ford Douglas, who was not related to Frederick Douglass], another rich black negro, is now traveling this part of the State making speeches for his friend Mr. Lincoln, who is the champion of the black man’s party. [Laughter; “White men, white men,” “what have you got to say against it.” “That’s right,” &c.] All I have got to say on that subject is this, that those of you who believe that the nigger is your equal, and ought to be on an equality with you socially, politically and legally, have a right to entertain those opinions, and of course will vote for Mr. Lincoln. [“Down with the negro,” “no, no,” &c.]”

  Such crude race-baiting further diminished Douglas’s claim to statesmanship. When he referred to “you Black Republicans,” and audience members shouted “white, white,” he contemptuously observed: “there was not a Democrat here vulgar enough to
interrupt Mr. Lincoln when he was talking [Great applause and cries of “hurrah for Douglas”]. I know the shoe is pinching you when I am clinching Lincoln, and you are scared to death for the result. [Cheers.]” (A youngster in the crowd cried out in response, “Lincoln didn’t use any such talk.”)109 Melodramatically, the Little Giant declared, “I have seen your mobs before and I defy your wrath. [These remarks were followed by considerable disturbance in the crowd, ending in a cheer.]” (Douglas uttered the word black with angry contempt. At first the crowd did not respond, but as he repeated the taunt, they replied by shouting out “white, white.”)110

  Republican newspapers denounced Douglas’s racial demagoguery, asserting that he “deliberately insulted the audience, in order to provoke them to interrupt him, so that he might make capital for himself by the cry of persecution and unfairness.”111 The Illinois State Journal reported that Douglas’s “platitudes about amalgamation and nigger equality—his only political stock in trade—were too old, too stupid to be listened to with patience.”112 The Missouri Democrat asked rhetorically, “How can there be negro equality, when the negro is intrinsically inferior to the child of Circassian blood? When Nature has made him inferior, how can a political party, if it were so insane as to attempt it, make him equal?”113

  In dealing with the mistake he had made at Ottawa—confusing the Aurora platform of 1854 with the one adopted at Springfield—Douglas offered no apology but explained that he had obtained the document from the Springfield Illinois State Register. Refusing to acknowledge his error, he pledged to investigate the matter when he next visited the capital. He aggressively argued that it made little difference where the platform had been adopted. Alluding to Lincoln’s 1847 “spot resolutions,” he observed sarcastically, “Lincoln is great in the particular spots at which a thing is to be done.” Instead of citing the state Republican platforms of 1856 or 1858, Douglas then read the platform the Republicans of the Freeport district had adopted when they chose their congressional candidate in 1854 and quoted resolutions introduced into the legislature in 1855. These he misleadingly used to illustrate Republican doctrine in 1858. Chastising Lincoln for his alleged failure to state clearly whether he would vote for the admission of new Slave States, Douglas boasted: “I have stood by my principles in fair weather and foul—in the sunshine and in the rain. I have defended the great principle of self-government here among you, when Northern sentiment ran in a torrent against it. [That is so.] I have defended the same great principle of self-government, when Southern sentiment came down with its avalanche upon me. I was not afraid of the test they put to me.”