Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  When Douglas charged that the Republicans had formed an “unholy alliance” with the Danites (i.e., pro-Buchanan forces), Lincoln disavowed “any contact with either wing of the Democratic party.”233 He did readily own that he was not chagrined to see factions of the Democracy fighting each another. He jocularly alluded to a well-known story about a disenchanted wife observing her spouse wrestle with a bear; “Go it husband!—Go it, bear!” she exclaimed.234 According to Herndon, Lincoln paid little attention to the seamier side of the campaign. But he was kept informed of the anti-Douglas Democrats’ efforts. In early July, a Danite leader informed him that the National Democracy planned “to run in every County and District a National Democrat for each and every office,” prompting Lincoln to remark, “If you do this the thing is settled—the battle is fought.”235 He may also have subsidized a Danite newspaper, the Springfield State Democrat, edited by James A. Clarkson. In September, Clarkson said that he “expected $500 of Mr. Lincoln in a day or two.”236

  Fifth Debate: Galesburg

  On October 7, the fifth debate was held at Galesburg, a Republican town 175 miles southwest of Chicago. It drew the biggest crowd of the series, exceeding the turnout at Ottawa and Freeport by 2,000 or 3,000 and far outnumbering the 5,500 residents of the town. Abolitionism flourished at Knox College, where the debate took place on a platform adjacent to Old Main, the largest structure on campus. (To reach that platform, speakers and dignitaries had to enter the building, walk down a corridor, and then step through a window. After Lincoln did so, he quipped: “At last I have gone through … college.”)237 Although the sun was shining, cold temperatures and high winds made for a disagreeable day. Many banners were blown down, including one that proclaimed “Small-fisted Farmers, Mud Sills of Society, Greasy Mechanics, for A. Lincoln.”238 This banner alluded to a statement South Carolina Senator James H. Hammond had made about slaves the previous year: “In all social systems there must be a class to do the mean duties, to perform the drudgery of life.… It constitutes the very mud-sills of society.”239

  Because of a hoarse throat, Douglas had trouble projecting his rough voice and struggled to be heard in the wind. At Onarga on September 24 and at Kankakee the following day, he announced that he was suffering from a cold. A week later at Oquawka, he had trouble articulating words and sounded like a man with a swollen tongue. He referred to his opponent as “Misha Linka.”240

  Douglas opened the debate at Galesburg complaining about the Buchanan administration’s efforts to defeat him through an “unholy and unnatural” alliance with the Republicans. Contemptuously he remarked that Lincoln had “no hope on earth,” and “would never dream that he had a chance of success but for the aid that he is receiving from federal officers,” who were acting “against me in revenge for my having defeated the Lecompton Constitution.” In denouncing the Republican Party for its sectionalism, he asked: “What Republican from Massachusetts can visit the Old Dominion without leaving his principles behind him when he crosses Mason and Dixon’s line?” Instead of criticizing the South for its intolerance, he blamed Northerners for holding views that Southerners disliked. (Earlier he had asserted that the “whole stock in trade of our opponents is an appeal to northern prejudice, northern interest and northern ambition against the southern states, southern people and southern rights.”)241

  Douglas asserted with some justification that Lincoln’s speech in Chicago was far different from his opening statement at Charleston. He taunted the Republicans for using different names in different parts of the state; in southern and central Illinois they called themselves “Lincoln men” and the “Free Democracy” instead of using the more radical term, Republican. (An editor in Pekin had informed Lincoln, “You are stronger here than Republicanism and in all of our meetings instead of heading them ‘Republican’ I shall say ‘Meeting of the friends of Lincoln.’ ” Thus “we can gain some thing from the old whigs, who may be wavering, and soften down the prejudices of others.”)242 Pointing out that the author and many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves, Douglas asked how it could be inferred that they meant to include blacks in the proposition that “all men are created equal.”243

  Lincoln replied that Thomas Jefferson, though a slaveholder, had said that “he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just.” He challenged Douglas to “show that he, in all his life, ever uttered a sentiment at all akin to that of Jefferson.” He also noted that no signers of the Declaration of Independence ever alleged that blacks were excluded from that document’s statement that “all men are created equal.”

  In dealing with the charge that he spoke out of both sides of his mouth on the race issue, Lincoln ridiculed Douglas’s logic: “[T]he Judge will have it that if we do not confess that there is a sort of inequality between the white and black races, which justifies us in making them slaves, we must, then, insist that there is a degree of equality that requires us to make them our wives.” Lincoln reiterated that he would not interfere with slavery where it already existed, but “I have insisted that, in legislating for new countries, where it does not exist, there is no just rule other than that of moral and abstract right!” In the territories, he said, no one should be denied the right “to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

  If the Republicans’ inability to preach their doctrines in the South indicated that those doctrines were unsound, then would democracy itself be considered unsound because Douglas could not espouse it in Russia? “Is it the true test of the soundness of a doctrine, that in some places people won’t let you proclaim it?” Was popular sovereignty unsound because Douglas had been unable defend it before a hostile crowd at Chicago in 1854? He challenged the Little Giant to discuss the state platform adopted by Republicans in 1858 rather than the county platforms of 1854.

  The central issue dividing the parties, Lincoln maintained, was the morality of slavery. Douglas and his friends denied “that there is any wrong in slavery.” The Republicans disagreed. “I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country who contemplate slavery as a moral, social, and political evil” and who “desire a policy that looks to the prevention of it as a wrong, and looks hopefully to the time when as a wrong it may come to an end.”

  As for the purported alliance between the Republican and the pro-Buchanan Democrats, Lincoln acknowledged that he had “no objection to the division in the Judge’s party.” Republicans viewed the internecine warfare among the Democrats the same way that Democrats had regarded the split between Frémont and Fillmore supporters in 1856.

  Heatedly Lincoln attacked Douglas for the “fraud” and “absolute forgery” that he had introduced at the Ottawa debate. A month earlier the Little Giant had promised to look into the matter when next in the capital, but he had yet to issue any explanation of how the Aurora Republican platform was palmed off as the work of the Springfield anti-Nebraska conclave of 1854. In that year, both Douglas and Thomas L. Harris used the Aurora document to discredit their opponents and then blamed the mistake on the editor of the Springfield Register, Charles Lanphier, who would not explain how his paper made the error. (Lanphier’s paper had run a garbled version of Lincoln’s 1857 speech on the Dred Scott case.) Since the Register had reported accurately most of the proceedings of the anti-Nebraskaites at Springfield, it was “absurd” to say that the substitution of the Aurora platform for the Springfield platform “was done by mistake.” Clearly, Lanphier was responsible, but was he put up to it by Douglas or Harris, or both of them, who were in Springfield at the time of the anti-Nebraska meeting? The stratagem had worked in 1854, helping to defeat Congressman Richard Yates’s bid for reelection; Harris revived it in 1856 to attack Congressman Jesse O. Norton, and Douglas made use of it to assail Lyman Trumbull; at Ottawa it was trotted out yet again to discredit Lincoln. The recycling of the original fraud reminded Lincoln of “the fisherman’s wife, whose drowned husband was brought home with his body full of eels.” When asked what to do with the corp
se, she replied: “Take the eels out and set him again.” In the absence of an explanation from Douglas, Lincoln inferred that blame for the fraud could be equally divided among the Little Giant, Lanphier, and Harris.

  Lincoln repeated his interrogatory about a second Dred Scott case forbidding states to outlaw slavery. Douglas, Lincoln said, had not answered the question but merely sneered at him for asking it. Citing the language of the majority opinion in Dred Scott vs. Sandford—“The right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution”—Lincoln asked cogently why the court might not eventually rule that the supremacy clause of the Constitution would forbid Free States to continue making slavery illegal.

  Lincoln empathically disagreed with Douglas that the Constitution recognized the right of property in slaves. He offered as “the opinion of one very humble man” his belief that the Dred Scott decision would not have been handed down if the Democrats had not won the presidential election of 1856. He felt that if that party retained its hold on the White House, a second Dred Scott decision was likely to follow. Paving the way for the new Dred Scott decision was Douglas’s insistence that he “don’t care whether Slavery is voted up or voted down,” that “whoever wants Slavery has a right to have it,” that “upon principles of equality it should be allowed to go everywhere,” that “there is no inconsistency between free and slave institutions.” Abandoning the conspiracy theory that he had put forward in his “House Divided” speech, Lincoln did not allege that Douglas was deliberately “preparing the way for making the institution of Slavery national,” but insisted that the senator’s actions had that effect even if he did not intend it. This represented a sensible modification of his earlier charge. The Little Giant’s amoral neutrality on slavery “is penetrating the human soul, and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty.”

  Lincoln deplored Douglas’s indifference to the status of slavery in newly acquired territory. “If Judge Douglas’ policy upon this question succeeds, … the next thing will be a grab for the territory of poor Mexico, an invasion of the rich lands of South America, then the adjoining islands will follow, each one of which promises additional slave-fields.” Since the struggle over slavery alone presented a threat to the Union, Lincoln counseled that it would be unwise to acquire new territory that might intensify that struggle.244

  When Douglas rose to reply, he seemed agitated as he paced the platform, shaking his fist in anger. He huffily dismissed Lincoln’s charge of conspiracy against himself, Harris, and Lanphier. Approaching his rival, Douglas said: “I did not believe that there was an honest man in the State of Illinois who did not believe that it was an error I was led into innocently.… I do not believe that there is an honest man in the face of this State that don’t abhor with disgust his insinuations of my complicity with that forgery, as he calls it.” Brazenly, he maintained that the Aurora Republican platform of 1854 reflected the party’s ideology throughout the state in 1858 (an assertion which was demonstrably untrue). With great vehemence he denounced Lincoln’s stand on the Dred Scott decision and the finality of the Supreme Court’s rulings.245

  Even though the Chicago Times stated that “Lincoln limps, equivocates, and denies,” Republicans were jubilant.246 The Illinois State Journal noted that whereas Douglas at the beginning of the debate cycle had “entered upon the discussion with a grand flourish of trumpets from his followers, and from the name he has managed to acquire, they expected to see him literally ‘swallow his adversary whole’,” by the close of the Galesburg debate “what is their surprise and mortification to see him badly worsted at every encounter he undertakes with ‘Old Abe.’ ”247

  From afar, however, the debates began to appear excessively partisan. The New York Herald judged that the “controversy in Illinois between Douglas and Lincoln, on Kansas, the Kansas-Nebraska bill, Lecompton, popular sovereignty, Dred Scott, the Declaration of Independence, States rights and niggers in every style” had “degenerated into the merest twaddle upon quibbles, ‘forgeries,’ falsehoods, and mutual recriminations of the most vulgar sort.”248 The Missouri Democrat lamented that “the canvass has turned so much on personal issues” and blamed Douglas for that development. The Cincinnati Commercial leveled similar criticism, calling the antagonists “a pair of unscrupulous office-seekers” and “political pettifoggers” who “have insulted the people of Illinois and of the country, by the daily utterance … of the most transparent fallacies and the most vulgar personalities.” That newspaper found “very little … that merits much attention, or that can be esteemed as of interest to the public, or calculated to add to the reputation of the parties. Few debates less dignified in their external manifestations, or containing so little that was worthy to be remembered, have fallen under our observation.… Falsehood and personal vituperation are among the most common of the offenses committed, upon one side at least, if not upon both.”249

  The Commercial was doubtless alluding to Douglas’s tactics, for Lincoln had taken the moral high ground at Galesburg. Horace White thought Lincoln’s speech there “the best of the series.”250 Indeed, it represented a considerable advance over the earlier debates in which the challenger had tended to stress his opposition to black citizenship and to accuse Douglas of conspiring to nationalize slavery. As he had done earlier at Lewistown and Edwardsville, Lincoln de-emphasized legal and historical arguments, which often involved logic-chopping and hair-splitting, in favor of broad moral appeals, which he would make even more eloquently in the final two debates. Earlier he had often acted as if he were in court, scoring points before a jury and trying to win the specific trial of the moment; now he shed the role of lawyer for that of statesman and consistently spoke to the conscience and heart of his audience.

  All the while Lincoln eschewed personal attacks. In late September a correspondent of the Missouri Democrat accurately noted that Lincoln “treats his opponent with a deference which the latter is incapable of reciprocating.” More “than any other public man of the present time,” Lincoln “infuses the milk of human kindness, and the frankness and courtesy of a gentleman of the old school into his discussions.” Whereas he “says nothing calculated to wound the feelings of Douglas,” the Little Giant “deals in exaggerated statements, glaring sophistries, and coarse, fierce declamation. Douglas has cast his fortunes on a sentiment—the antipathy of the white to the black race.… Whatever incidental topics he may treat, it will be found that the substance of his speeches in this canvass is an invocation of prejudice.” Lincoln avoided “exaggeration or vindictiveness” and “acerbity of temper,” while his opponent “has fallen into an impotent passion several times.”251

  Sixth Debate: Quincy

  Less than a week after the Galesburg event, the candidates clashed again at Quincy, a Democratic stronghold where Douglas had lived for a time. On the train carrying him there, Lincoln shook hands with his fellow passengers, including Carl Schurz, a prominent German Republican orator. The challenger received Schurz “with an off-hand cordiality, like an old acquaintance.” Schurz recalled that Lincoln “talked in so simple and familiar a strain, and his manner and homely phrase were so absolutely free from any semblance of self-consciousness or pretension to superiority, that I soon felt as if I had known him all my life and we had long been close friends.”252

  The crowd at Quincy was smaller than the one at Galesburg, though still large. The event began inauspiciously when the railing of the speakers’ platform gave way, sending a dozen people crashing to the ground. Once order was restored, Lincoln delivered the opening speech. He showed no signs of fatigue but rather seemed energized by his extensive campaigning. Douglas, on the other hand, appeared tired. A reporter noted that “[b]ad whisky and the wear and tear of conscience have had their effect” on the Little Giant.253

  Before getting to the heart of the dispute between the parties, Lincoln addressed Douglas’s complaint about the use of “hard names” such as “forgery,” “fraud,” and “conspiracy.” He
insisted that the Little Giant had been the first to engage in personalities, starting at Bloomington in July, continuing at Ottawa in August, and at Galesburg in October. On those occasions Douglas had impeached his “veracity and candor.” Therefore, Lincoln said, he had been forced to respond in kind, but he would abandon that tactic if Douglas would do the same. In response to the Little Giant’s question as to whether he wished to “push this matter to the point of personal difficulty,” Lincoln said no. The senator, he asserted, “did not make a mistake, in one of his early speeches, when he called me an ‘amiable’ man, though perhaps he did when he called me an ‘intelligent’ man. It really hurts me very much to suppose that I have wronged anybody on earth. I again tell him, no! I very much prefer, when this canvass shall be over, however it may result, that we at least part without any bitter recollections of personal difficulties.”

  At Galesburg, Douglas had charged that Lincoln was trying “to divert the public attention from the enormity of his revolutionary principles by getting into personal quarrels, impeaching my sincerity and integrity.” In rebuttal, Lincoln repeated his understanding of the fundamental difference between the two parties, which, “reduced to its lowest terms, is no other than the difference between the men who think slavery a wrong and those who do not think it wrong. The Republican party think it wrong—we think it is a moral, a social and a political wrong.” Yet, “in all the arguments sustaining the Democratic policy, and in that policy itself, there is a careful, studied exclusion of the idea that there is anything wrong in slavery.” Douglas, said Lincoln, “has the high distinction, so far as I know, of never having said slavery is either right or wrong.” Addressing Democrats, he asked: “You say it [slavery] is wrong; but don’t you constantly object to anybody else saying so? Do you not constantly argue that this is not the right place to oppose it? You say it must not be opposed in the free States, because slavery is not there; it must not be opposed in the slave States, because it is there; it must not be opposed in politics, because that will make a fuss; it must not be opposed in the pulpit, because it is not religion. [Loud cheers.] Then where is the place to oppose it? There is no suitable place to oppose it. There is no place in the country to oppose this evil overspreading the continent, which you say yourself is coming.”254