Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  At the beginning of Lincoln’s reply, he said he was embarrassed by the evident preponderance of Democrats in the audience. When his backers let out a cheer, however, he felt reassured and launched his remarks good-naturedly. Initially, his high-pitched voice and awkward gestures failed to impress his auditors. One journalist noted that “he got around about as gracefully as a woman climbs a rail fence.”142 But as usual, his earnestness made the crowd forget his ungainly appearance.

  Responding to the allegation that he and Trumbull had conspired to abolitionize the two parties, the exasperated Lincoln said: “I don’t want any harsh language indulged in, but I do not know how to deal with this persistent insisting on a story that I know to be utterly without truth. It used to be the fashion amongst men that when a charge was made, some sort of proof was brought forward to establish it, and if no proof was found to exist, the charge was dropped. I don’t know how to meet this kind of an argument. I don’t want to have a fight with Judge Douglas, and I have no way of working an argument up into the consistency of a corn-cob and stopping his mouth with it at all. [Laughter and applause.] All I can do is, good-humoredly to say to that story about a bargain between Judge Trumbull and myself, there is not a word of truth in it. [Applause.]” Douglas had cited a speech by James Matheny about that alleged conspiracy, to which Lincoln replied: “I hope the Judge will pardon me for doubting the genuineness of this document since his production of those Springfield Resolutions at Ottawa.” At this, the audience applauded loudly, disconcerting the cigar-puffing Douglas.

  Lincoln devoted much of his time at Jonesboro to reading Democratic antislavery platforms and resolutions adopted in 1850 throughout northern Illinois. These documents were provided by Herndon, who acted as his partner’s research assistant, plowing though old speeches, digging up statistics, and clipping articles from many newspapers.

  Lincoln argued that if Douglas were justified in holding him responsible for radical resolutions endorsed by Republicans in Aurora and other northern Illinois towns, the Little Giant should also be held responsible for the 1850 documents he read. He even introduced resolutions adopted by Democrats in Douglas’s home state of Vermont.

  Lincoln denied the central tenet of Douglas’s Freeport Doctrine, that slavery could not exist without “friendly legislation” to protect it. After all, he pointed out, Dred Scott had been held in slavery in Minnesota, which had no police regulations supporting slavery; in fact, Congress had explicitly forbidden slavery in that region. “It takes not only law but the enforcement of law to keep it out,” he sensibly observed. He then chided the Little Giant for inconsistency. Before 1857, Douglas had maintained that the Supreme Court should decide whether the people of a territory could exclude slavery; at Freeport (and on earlier occasions) he declared that the settlers in a territory could make an end-run around the court and were not obliged to abide by its explicit decision. Was not Douglas oath-bound to support laws protecting the right of slaveholders to take their slaves into the territories, just as opponents of slavery like Lincoln were honor-bound to support the Fugitive Slave Act, even though they found it “distasteful”? Pointedly Lincoln asked how Douglas could swear to uphold the Constitution and simultaneously “assist in legislation intended to defeat that right?”

  Lincoln then posed a fifth interrogatory to Douglas, supplementing the ones he had asked at Ottawa: “If the slaveholding citizens of a United States Territory should need and demand Congressional legislation for the protection of their slave property in such Territory, would you, as a member of Congress, vote for or against such legislation?” Lyman Trumbull had advised him to ask Douglas that question, anticipating that the Little Giant would “answer promptly that Congress possessed no such power, or that he was opposed to its exercise if it did.” Prophetically, Trumbull argued that such a response “would effectually use him up with the South & set the whole pro-slavery Democracy against him.”143

  Lincoln’s patience was tried beyond endurance by Douglas’s August 31 speech at Joliet, where the Little Giant alleged that at the close of the Ottawa debate his opponent was so frightened by the prospect of having to defend his views in Jonesboro that it “made him tremble in the knees, so that he had to be carried from the platform.”144 Indignantly, Lincoln expostulated: “I have really come to the conclusion that I can explain it in no other way than by believing the Judge is crazy. [Renewed laughter.]” When the senator asked, “Wasn’t you carried off at Ottawa?” Lincoln exclaimed: “There! That is Douglas—just like him!” and denied that he had to be carried.145 Again Lincoln asserted that when the Little Giant made that claim he “must have been crazy and wholly out of his sober senses.” (Perhaps Lincoln meant to imply that Douglas was drunk. The Chicago Press and Tribune observed that the senator presented “unaccountable falsehoods,” which “no sober man could ever have uttered.”146 Herndon commented that “Douglas is mad—is wild & sometimes I should judge ‘half seas over.’ [drunk]”)147 Lincoln denied that he feared speaking in Jonesboro. “Why, I know this people better than he does. I was raised just a little east of here. I am a part of this people.” (The audience warmed up to him when he claimed to have grown up nearby, even though Lincoln’s boyhood home in Indiana was 140 miles distant.) The Little Giant, Lincoln added, “has set about seriously trying to make the impression that when we meet at different places I am literally in his clutches—that I am a poor, helpless, decrepit mouse, and that I can do nothing at all. This is one of the ways he has taken to create that impression. I don’t know any other way to meet it, except this. I don’t want to quarrel with him—to call him a liar—but when I come square up to him I don’t know what else to call him. [Cheers and laughter.]”148

  Lincoln ended his remarks ten minutes early, prompting Henry Villard to comment: “if he were a man of intelligence, of talent and political wit he could have pressed a masterful speech into those ten minutes.”149 The Louisville Journal observed that Lincoln’s “searching, scathing, stunning” remarks “belong to what some one has graphically styled the tomahawking species.”150

  In his rejoinder, Douglas protested that at Joliet he “in a playful manner” asserted that Lincoln had to be carried off from the platform at Ottawa. (An account in the Peoria Transcript, whose “nigger-worshipping proclivities” were condemned by the Illinois State Register, noted that this explanation left “the inference that he was probably drunk.”)151 In commenting on Lincoln’s assertion that he had been raised nearby, Douglas accused him of dishonoring his parents: “I don’t know that a native of Kentucky who was raised among slaves, and whose father and mother were nursed by slaves, is any more excusable when he comes to Illinois and turns Abolitionist, to slander the grave of his father and the institutions under which he was born and where his father and mother lived.”

  Responding to Lincoln’s question about a federal slave code for the territories, the Little Giant declared that “there shall be non-interference, non-intervention by Congress in the States and Territories.” Although this was a platitude that failed to address the question, the audience applauded lustily. As Trumbull had predicted, this stance would cost Douglas dearly, for, especially after Freeport, Southerners would interpret it as an affront to their section.152

  An Illinois reporter thought Douglas’s “delivery was remarkably tame.”153 The Little Giant’s performance, according to Chester P. Dewey of the New York Evening Post, “was not marked by his usual ability, and the delivery was very bad—a sort of school boy monotone, with an especial aplomb on every emphatic syllable.” On the other hand, Dewey thought Lincoln’s speech “the best I have heard from him.”154 The following day Lincoln wrote that the meeting at Jonesboro “was not large; but, in other matters altogether respectable. I will venture to say that our friends were a little better satisfied with the result than our adversaries.”155 One such friend was Governor William H. Bissell, who told E. B. Washburne in late September that the Republican “cause is unquestionably gaining daily.… Lincoln is doing
well. He has made much, much in Egypt. There is no mistake about it.”156

  But in fact, Lincoln’s abbreviated Jonesboro speech was the lamest he made in the debates. His abuse of Douglas as a crazy liar was undignified, as was his remark about stuffing the Little Giant’s mouth with a corncob. Moreover, his reading of documents was tedious, and his claim that he grew up nearby disingenuous.

  At Centralia two days after the Jonesboro debate, the Little Giant, evidently drunk, delivered an ill-tempered “harangue” that “was particularly severe on the unfortunate odor of the black man.” Douglas “asked if his audience wished to eat with, ride with, go to church with, travel with, and in other ways bring Congo odor into their nostrils and to their senses.” He concluded that blacks were meant to be servants and averred that “if God Almighty intended them for anything else, he was a long time bringing it about.”157 This prompted a Republican editor to ask, indignantly: “And what is the ground upon which he asks the support of freemen? It is nothing more nor less than his ability to kick a nigger. It is the staple of all his speeches, it is the great one idea of his Statesmanship! When it is urged that our Fathers expected, and took such action as they thought would cause, the ultimate extinction of Slavery, Douglas valiantly ‘pitches into the nigger.’ If he is reminded that Freedom is on grounds of public policy, preferable to Slavery, that Free Territory will prove immensely more valuable to the Union than Slave Territory, and that our public domain should be kept free for the European emigrants, and the white inhabitants of this country, he summons all his courage to his aid, shakes his shaggy locks, and amid the roar of his cannon, again pitches into the negro. He threshes the nigger in the fence, and the nigger in the field, the free nigger and the nigger slave, declares that he ought to be a slave, and says if it is otherwise the Almighty has been a long time in demonstrating it!”158

  Lincoln also visited Centralia, attending the state fair with Henry C. Whitney and Jesse K. Dubois. The night before the next debate, to be held at Charleston, Whitney and Lincoln caught an Illinois Central train bound for that town. On board, local politicians pestered Lincoln so much that he could get no sleep. When Whitney asked a conductor if the candidate, in dire need of rest, could use the empty apartment car at the end of the train, he was refused. Whitney, who managed somehow to gain access to that car, was outraged that his friend should be treated so shabbily while Douglas traveled in a luxurious car on a special train. Bitterly Whitney recalled that “every interest of that Road and every employee was against Lincoln and for Douglas.”159 Republican newspapers made similar charges about other railroads.

  Fourth Debate: Charleston

  On September 18 the candidates clashed again, at Charleston, shire town of Coles County in east central Illinois, known as the “Buckle on the Corn Belt.” From surrounding villages like Greasy Creek, Muddy Point, Dog Town, Pinhook, Bloody Hutton, and Goosenest Prairie (where Lincoln’s stepmother resided and his father lay buried), some 12,000 people streamed in to hear the debate.

  Chester P. Dewey of the New York Evening Post remarked that “I have seen and watched these other demonstrations, but have failed to notice the hot and fevered flush which has marked this one.” Dewey painted a graphic picture of the debates in general: “It is astonishing how deep an interest in politics this people take. Over long, weary miles of hot and dusty prairie, the processions of eager partisans come—on foot, on horseback, in wagons drawn by horses or mules; men, women and children, old and young; the half sick, just out of the last ‘shake’; children in arms, infants at the maternal fount, pushing on in clouds of dust beneath a blazing sun; settling down at the town where the meeting is, with hardly a chance for sitting, and even less opportunity for eating, waiting in anxious groups for hours at the places of speaking, talking, discussing, litigious, vociferous, while the roar of artillery, the music of bands, the waving of banners, the huzzas of the crowds, as delegation after delegation appears; the cry of pedlars vending all sorts of wares, from an infallible cure for ‘augur’ to a monster watermelon in slices to suit purchasers—combine to render the occasion one scene of confusion and commotion.” At one o’clock, “a perfect rush is made for the grounds; a column of dust rising to the heavens and fairly deluging those who are hurrying on through it. Then the speakers come, with flags, and banners, and music, surrounded by cheering partizans. Their arrival at the ground and immediate approach to the stand is the signal for shouts that rend the heavens. They are introduced to the audience amid prolonged and enthusiastic cheers; they are interrupted by frequent applause, and they sit down finally amid the same uproarious demonstrations. The audience sit or stand patiently throughout, and as the last word is spoken, make a break for their homes, first hunting up lost members of their families, gathering their scattered wagon loads together, and as the daylight fades away, entering again upon the broad prairies and slowly picking their way back ‘to the place of beginning.’ ”160

  Charleston was alive with this excitement. The badges, flags, bunting, and other campaign trappings were far more elaborate and numerous than they had been at previous debate sites. Among those banners was one emblazoned with a quotation from the Little Giant: “This government was made for white men—Douglas for life.”161

  On the hot, clear day of this fourth debate, Lincoln approached Charleston from nearby Matoon, accompanied by many of its residents, mostly of Northern origin. In the procession was a float carrying thirty-two young women, each representing a state of the Union, with a banner reading “Westward the star of Empire takes its way, The girls link-on to Lincoln, as their mothers did to Clay.” In addition, a comely maiden on horseback carried a banner with the motto, “Kansas—I will be free.” (Horace White thought her so attractive that “she would not remain free always.”)162 Upon arriving, Lincoln was greeted by his friend H. P. H. Bromwell, who delivered a warm welcoming address. The challenger replied graciously, with special praise for the float bearing the young women, whom he likened to a “beautiful basket of flowers.”163

  Tension charged the air. As Lincoln and Douglas proceeded to the fairgrounds after lunch, the Little Giant erupted in anger at a banner showing Lincoln clubbing him to the ground. In a rage, he declared that he would not tolerate such an indignity. Petulantly, he added, “If I can’t be treated with some respect, I’ll get out of the procession.”164

  Lincoln had a better cause for complaint, for at 2:45 P.M., as he rose to speak, several Democrats pushed their way to the platform and unfurled a huge banner with a caricature of a white man, a black woman, and a black child, bearing the caption “Negro Equality.” When Republican demands that it be removed were ignored, two men leapt from the platform and tore it down.

  Lincoln had been warned that Negrophobia was intense in Coles County. His friend William M. Chambers, an influential American Party leader in Charleston, urged him to attack Douglas’s “political inconsistencies and tergiversations” and give his audiences “less of the favouring of negro equality.” Appeals for racial justice pleased neither Fillmore voters nor Republicans around Charleston.165 The town’s leading Republican, Thomas A. Marshall, with whom Lincoln stayed, recommended that he tell Dr. Chambers that “as for negro equality in the sense in which the expression is used you neither believe in it nor desire it. You desire to offer no temptations to negroes to come among us or remain with us, and therefore you do not propose to confer upon them any further social or political rights than they are now entitled to.”166 This counsel echoed what David Davis had told Lincoln about Tazewell County: “Among all the Kentuckians it is industriously circulated that, you favor negro equality. All the [Republican] Orators should distinctly & emphatically disavow negro suffrage—negro holding office, serving on juries, & the like.”167 In August, Jediah F. Alexander wrote from Greenville, 90 miles southwest of Charleston: “You must be full and explicit in explaining that.… the Republicans are not in favor of making the Blacks socially and politically equal with the Whites.”168 In July, the Republican dis
trict convention at Dixon in northern Illinois had adopted a resolution declaring that “the republican party has not held and does not hold to the political and social equality of the races or individually, and has re-affirmed and ever will re-affirm with the declaration of independence, the equality of all men of whatever race or color, in natural right, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”169 A Republican in Shawneetown declared that the only way his party could win was “to satisfy the people the republicans are not amalgamationists.”170

  In his opening remarks Lincoln showed that he had taken the advice of Chambers, Marshall, Davis, et al. to heart. “When I was at the hotel to-day,” he began, “an elderly gentleman called upon me to know whether I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people. [Great laughter.]” Lincoln had not planned to address that subject, but since he was asked, he thought he “would occupy perhaps five minutes in saying something in regard to it.” He declared bluntly: “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races [applause]; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say, in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”