Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  Then Lincoln qualified this stark avowal: “I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. [Cheers and laughter.] My understanding is that I can just let her alone. I am now in my fiftieth year, and I certainly never had had a black woman for either a slave or a wife. So it seems to me quite possible for us to get along without making either slaves or wives of negroes. I will add to this that I have never seen, to my knowledge, a man, woman, or child who has been in favor of producing a perfect equality, social and political, between negroes and white men.” Alluding to the Democratic vice-president in the late 1830’s, a man who had sired children with a black mistress, Lincoln added: “I recollect of but one distinguished instance that I ever heard of so frequently as to be entirely satisfied of its correctness, and that is the case of Judge Douglas’s old friend Colonel Richard M. Johnson. [Laughter and cheers.]”

  Continuing in a satirical vein, Lincoln added that “I have never had the least apprehension that I or my friends would marry negroes if there was no law to keep them from it [laughter]; but as Judge Douglas and his friends seem to be in great apprehension that they might, if there were no law to keep them from it, [roars of laughter] I give him the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last stand by the law of this State, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes. [Continued laughter and applause.]” In concluding his remarks on the subject of black citizenship, Lincoln observed that only state legislatures could alter “the social and political relations of negro and the white man,” and “as I do not really apprehend the approach of any such thing myself, and as Judge Douglas seems to be in constant horror that some such danger is rapidly approaching, I propose as the best means to prevent it that the Judge be kept at home, and placed in the State Legislature to fight the measure. [Uproarious laughter and applause.]”

  Lincoln devoted most of his opening speech to a repetition of Lyman Trumbull’s accusation that Douglas had thwarted Georgia Senator Robert Toombs’s proposed 1856 bill that would have allowed Kansas settlers to vote on the proposed state constitution. Thus, he argued, the Little Giant was no true friend of popular sovereignty, and his opposition to the Lecompton Constitution was hypocritical. Toombs’s measure had been referred to Douglas’s Committee on Territories, which removed the provision calling for submission of the constitution to the voters of Kansas. The issue resonated in Coles County; a Charlestonian told Douglas “that Toombs matter is a great bugaboo with the nigger party here.”171 Lincoln’s friends advised him to attack Douglas for his evisceration of the Toombs bill. Mark Delahay reported to Lincoln that Trumbull’s charge “hit the right c[h]ord, from the uneasiness & fluttering which is discoverable among the Douglas bolters.” To criticize Douglas for altering the Toombs bill would compel the senator “to defend these charges and When ever he does you have got the ‘Word on him.’ ”172 “It is true,” J. H. Jordan said of the accusation, “therefore make him eat it.”173 Douglas’s supporters in the Jacksonville area were “staggered” and “reeling” in part because of “Trumbull’s charge in regard to popular sovereignty and the Toombs bill.”174 Newspapers devoted many columns to that issue.

  Earlier in the campaign, Lincoln had not directly addressed the matter of the Toombs bill; he had simply vouched for Trumbull’s honesty and integrity. This, in turn, prompted Douglas to hold Lincoln responsible for Trumbull’s charge. At Charleston, Lincoln counterattacked, repeating Democratic Senator William Bigler’s statement that a senatorial conference headed by Douglas had agreed to strike from Toombs’s bill the provision for submitting the constitution to a vote of the Kansas settlers. As for Douglas’s allegation that Trumbull “forges his evidence from beginning to end” Lincoln replied: “upon my own authority I say that it is not true. [Great cheers and laughter.]” The Toombs bill, Bigler’s speech, and Douglas’s own speech of December 9, 1857, were part of the public record, not forgeries. “I have always wanted to deal with every one I meet, candidly and honestly,” Lincoln said. “If I have made any assertion not warranted by facts, and it is pointed out to me, I will withdraw it cheerfully. But I do not choose to see Judge Trumbull calumniated, and the evidence he has brought forward branded in general terms ‘a forgery from beginning to end.’ ”175

  Lew Wallace, who admired Douglas, initially thought Lincoln’s opening remarks risible, but in time he changed his mind. “The pleasantry, the sincerity, the confidence, the amazingly original way of putting things, and the simple, unrestrained manner withal, were doing their perfect work; and then and there I dropped an old theory, that to be a speaker one must needs be graceful and handsome.” Wallace found Douglas’s reply disappointing. “His face was darkened by a deepening scowl, and he was angry,” a sure sign that his opponent had the upper hand. “He spoke so gutturally, also, that it was difficult to understand him.”176

  Douglas began with a disingenuous boast: “I am glad to have gotten an answer from him on that proposition, to wit: the right of suffrage and holding office by negroes, for I have been trying to get him to answer that point during the whole time that the canvass has been going on.” This was misleading; Lincoln had made his stand on that matter clear at Ottawa in their initial debate.

  As for the Toombs bill, Douglas asked why Trumbull and Lincoln had not objected in 1856, when that legislation was introduced and then modified. He chided Lincoln for devoting inordinate time to rehashing Trumbull’s “vile charge,” and asserted that Pennsylvania Senator William Bigler had retracted his allegation. The senator further protested that a requirement for a popular referendum on the Lecompton Constitution was implicit and that none of the statehood bills passed before 1856 stipulated that the constitution must be ratified by a vote of the people.

  The Little Giant expressed contempt for the “petty, malicious assaults” made against him. Without evident irony he declared, “I despair ever to be elected to office by slandering my opponent and traducing other men [cheers]. Mr. Lincoln asks you to-day for your support in electing him to the Senate solely because he and Trumbull can slander me.” While Lincoln had not mentioned his conspiracy theory, Douglas offered one of his own: “here is a conspiracy to carry an election by slander or not by fair means. Mr. Lincoln’s speech this day is conclusive evidence of the fact.” Scornfully he ridiculed his opponent for trying “to ride into office on Trumbull’s back and Trumbull is going to carry him by falsehood into office.” With disdain he added: “It won’t do for Mr. Lincoln, in parading his calumny against me, to put Trumbull between him and the odium and the responsibility that attaches to such calumny. I tell him that I am as ready to prosecute the endorser as the maker of a forged note. [Applause; cheers.]” With a characteristic air of injured innocence, he voiced regret that he had to spend time on “these petty personal matters. It is unbecoming the dignity of a canvass for an office of the character for which we are candidates.” He implied that he would now withdraw the compliments he had earlier paid Lincoln. “If there is anything personally disagreeable, unkind or disrespectful in these personalities, the sole responsibility is on Mr. Lincoln, Trumbull and their backers.” Averring that he had “no charges to make against Mr. Lincoln,” Douglas immediately thereafter said: “If Mr. Lincoln is a man of bad character, I leave it to you to find out. If his voting in the past was not satisfactory to you, I leave others to ascertain the fact, and if his course on the Mexican war was not in accordance with your opinions of patriotism and duty in defence of our country against a public enemy, I leave you to ascertain the fact. I have no assault to make against him.”

  The Little Giant again appealed to the Negrophobia of his audience by attacking Frederick Douglass. Four years earlier in northern Illinois, he recalled, “I passed Lincoln’s ally there, in the person of Fred. Douglass, the negro, preaching revolutionary principles, while Lincoln was discussing the same principles down here, an
d Trumbull a little further down attempting to elect members of the Legislature, and acting in harmony each with the other.” At Chicago he observed an effort by “Lincoln’s then associates and new supporters to put Fred. Douglass on the stand at a Democratic meeting, to reply to the illustrious Gen. Cass, when he was addressing the people there. [“Shame on them.”] They had that same negro hunting me down, the same as they have a negro canvassing the principal counties of the North in behalf of Lincoln. [“Hit him again.” “He’s a disgrace to the white people,” &c.]” Lincoln, said the Little Giant, knew that when they were debating at Freeport, “there was a distinguished colored gentleman there, [laughter] who made a speech that night and the night after, a short distance from Freeport, in favor of Lincoln, and showing how much interest his colored brethren felt in the success of their brother, Abraham Lincoln [Laughter].” Douglas then offered to read a speech by Frederick Douglass “in which he called upon all who were friends of negro equality and negro citizenship to rally as one man around Abraham Lincoln, as the chief embodiment of their principles, and by all means to defeat Stephen A. Douglas. [Laughter; “it can’t be done.”]”

  (In fact, on August 2 at Poughkeepsie, New York, Frederick Douglass assailed the senator, quoted from Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech, which he called “great,” and thanked Lincoln and his party colleagues “because they have nobly upheld and made prominent the principles of the Republican Party in Illinois, which seemed about to be compromised and sacrificed at the very heart of Government.” Democratic newspapers in Illinois found great significance in Douglass’s endorsement of the “House Divided” speech, which showed “that Mr. Lincoln has reached the very top round of ultra abolitionism, where he now stands, side by side with Fred Douglass.” They also asked ominous questions: “Can the white men of Illinois fail to see in this adoption of Mr. Lincoln’s position as a text for a negro agitator’s glorification speech, in favor of the equality of the races, the tendency of black republican policy to that end?” “Will you elect a man your Senator whose words fit so well the mouth of a negro?”)177

  To cheers from his supporters, Douglas thundered: “I say this Government was created on the white basis by white men for white men and their posterity forever, and should never be administered by any but white men. [Cheers.] I declare that a negro ought not to be a citizen whether imported into this country or born here, whether his parents were slave or not. It don’t depend upon the question where he was born, or where his parents were placed, but it depends on the fact that the negro belongs to a race incapable of self-government, and for that reason ought not to be on an equality with the white man. [Immense applause.]” (In December, Douglas would tell an audience in New Orleans: “It is a law of humanity, a law of civilization, that whenever a man, or a race of men, show themselves incapable of managing their own affairs, they must consent to be governed by those who are capable of performing the duty. It is on this principle that you establish those institutions of charity, for the support of the blind, or the deaf and dumb, or the insane. In accordance with this principle, I assert that the negro race, under all circumstances, at all times and in all countries, has shown itself incapable of self-government.”)178

  The senator charged Lincoln with being inconsistent in the previous debate: “There were many white sentiments contained in Lincoln’s speech down in Jonesboro, and I could not help contrasting them with the speeches of the same distinguished orator in the northern parts of the State.” Douglas erred; while it was true that Lincoln in Egypt said he would be willing to admit new Slave States, he had said nothing different at Ottawa or Freeport. Instead of statements by his rival, the Little Giant cited utterances by Republican congressional candidates Owen Lovejoy, John Farnsworth, and E. B. Washburne, all of whom opposed admitting new Slave States.179 (Farnsworth assured Lincoln that while he personally refused to support the admission of new Slave States, he was careful to “say that is not the position of the republican party.”)180 Obviously, Lincoln had not contradicted himself, and Douglas’s argument did him little credit. If either candidate was guilty of talking one way in the northern part of the state and another way in the southern part, it was Douglas. At Freeport he deemphasized the significance of the Dred Scott ruling, calling it an “abstraction.” In Egypt he spoke of it with much greater respect as “the supreme law of the land.”181 The Chicago Press and Tribune demanded that Douglas “be one thing or another, fish, flesh, or fowl, and not be dodging and skulking about, sometimes one thing, sometimes another, and sometimes both at once.”182

  Closing the debate, Lincoln denied that Douglas had ever asked him specifically about black citizenship rights and protested against the Little Giant’s misinterpretation of his criticism of the Dred Scott decision. As for the charge that he espoused radical views in the north and conservatives ones in the south, Lincoln said: “I dare him to point out any different between my speeches north and south. [Great cheering.]” Defending his House Divided doctrine, Lincoln estimated that slavery might not be abolished any time soon. “I do not suppose that in the most peaceful way ultimate extinction would occur in less than a hundred years at least; but that it will occur in the best way for both races, in God’s own good time, I have no doubt. [Applause.]”

  Addressing Douglas’s allusion to his record during the Mexican War, Lincoln grew angry, though he began moderately: “I don’t want to be unjustly accused of dealing illiberally or unfairly with an adversary, either in court, or in a political canvass, or anywhere else. I would despise myself if I supposed myself ready to deal less liberally with an adversary than I was willing to be treated myself.” He complained that Douglas “revives the old charge against me in reference to the Mexican war,” even though “the more respectable papers of his own party throughout the State [like the Illinois State Register and the Matoon Gazette] have been compelled to take it back and acknowledge that it was a lie. [Continued and vociferous applause.]” He then turned to Congressman Orlando B. Ficklin, sitting on the platform. Lincoln astonished him by grabbing his coat collar and hauling him forward “as if he had been a kitten.”183 The astonished crowd burst out laughing. Lincoln explained to them: “I do not mean to do anything with Mr. Ficklin except to present his face and tell you that he personally knows it to be a lie!” Ficklin had served in Congress with Lincoln and could testify that the Representative from Springfield had always voted to supply the army. A Democrat who was hosting Douglas, Ficklin artfully dodged the question, merely stating that Lincoln had voted for the Ashmun amendment, declaring that the war had been unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by President Polk.

  In reviewing Douglas’s charges, Lincoln compared his opponent to a cuttlefish, “a small species of fish that has no mode of defending itself when pursued except by throwing out a black fluid, which makes the water so dark the enemy cannot see it, and thus it escapes. [Roars of laughter.]” Insisting that Douglas had evaded the central question about his role in gutting the Toombs bill, Lincoln emphatically scolded the Little Giant: “I suggest to him it will not avail him at all that he swells himself up, takes on dignity, and calls people liars. [Great applause and laughter.]”184

  During Lincoln’s rejoinder, Douglas’s friends on the platform grew so agitated and the senator was “so boisterously profane” that reporters could scarcely make out what the challenger was saying. Three times Robert R. Hitt asked the Douglasites to quiet down, and the correspondent of the Paris Prairie Beacon News was unable to hear Lincoln. Finally, Douglas, who had been nervously glancing at his watch, interrupted Lincoln, excitedly insisting that he had “overspoken his time two minutes now.”185 Lincoln replied, “I will quit when the Moderator so says.”186 A gentleman on the platform wryly told Lincoln, “Yes, Douglas has had enough; it is time you let up on him.”187

  The Chicago Press and Tribune was unusually enthusiastic about Lincoln’s performance, particularly his reply to Douglas’s remarks: “We regard this debate as the GREAT TRIUMPH of the camp
aign for the friends of Mr. Lincoln.” As the newspaper observed, Douglas had demonstrated little more than an “uncommon fertility of quibbles, an opulence of sophistry, and a faculty of obscuring the issues.”188 The Charleston Courier remarked that Lincoln’s riposte “was the most effectual and perpetual and incessant pouring of hot shot upon the head of Douglas that ever poor mortal was the victim of.”189 Chester P. Dewey wrote that the challenger’s retort “was especially eloquent and convincing.”190

  Lincoln’s friends were delighted. David Davis told him: “Your concluding speech on Douglass at Charleston was admirable.”191 Three days after the debate, Richard J. Oglesby reported that the challenger had scored “the most full and complete triumph … in the speeches, the crowds, the turnout and the sympathy, I have ever seen.” Douglas “writhed and winced and at last left the stand in a bad humor.”192 Years later Oglesby still recalled the Charleston debate as “a day of triumph and glory. Douglas was manifestly tiring of that joint discussion. Lincoln, on the contrary, like a precious stone in the rough, was growing constantly brighter and more brilliant by the attrition of the contest. Douglas was petulant. Lincoln was calm, grave, and impressive.”193 Horace White remembered that “we all considered that our side had won a substantial victory. The Democrats seemed to be uneasy and dissatisfied, both during the debate and afterward.”194 To Hiram W. Beckwith, the final fifteen minutes of Lincoln’s rejoinder constituted the turning point of the campaign: “his remorseless logic toppled pillar after pillar from the Senator’s cunningly devised subterfuges. One could see the fabric tottering to its fall. Republicans saw it. The Democrats felt it. A panic among them began near the speakers stand and spread outward and onward over the great mass of upturned faces.… From this time on none doubted who was to be the winner in the fight.”195 One Democrat confessed that he had gone to Charleston expecting to see Douglas pulverize his opponent but came away from the debate “the most astonished squatter sovereign you ever saw. Who the—was Lincoln? What in thunder was the matter with Douglas? I was sick—very sick.”196