Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  Evidently thinking that Lincoln’s antislavery statements and the senator’s reply would win friends for the Little Giant below the Mason Dixon line, one Douglas supporter issued a pamphlet version of the Alton debate and distributed it throughout the South by the thousands. Its introduction belittled Lincoln as an “artful dodger” and alleged that he sought to “palm himself off to the Whigs of Madison county as a friend of Henry Clay and no abolitionist, AND IS EXPOSED!”273

  This final debate elicited little applause. The subdued response was curious, for, as one reporter noted, “in many respects it was the greatest discussion yet held.”274 It was certainly Lincoln’s finest rhetorical hour. After the debate, while dining with several Republican leaders, he asked Lyman Trumbull, a resident of nearby Belleville, about the crowd’s reaction. The senator replied “that public meetings in Madison County were usually undemonstrative, but he thought a favorable impression had been made.” Then Mrs. Lincoln invited Horace White and Robert R. Hitt to spend a few days at her home in Springfield; Hitt tactfully declined, saying “that he would never call at her house until she lived in the White House. She laughed at the suggestion, and said there was not much prospect of such a residence very soon.”275

  Intervention by Outsiders

  As the campaign heated up, prominent figures of both parties joined the fray. Feeling beleaguered after the Ottawa debate, Douglas wired Usher F. Linder: “For God’s sake, Linder, come up into the Northern part of the State and help me. Every dog in the State is let loose after me—from the bull-dog Trumbull to the smallest canine quadruped that has a kennel in Illinois.”276 (When this telegram appeared in the newspapers, Linder acquired the sobriquet “For-God’s-Sake Linder.”) Rallying to Douglas were eminent Democrats like Vice-President John C. Breckinridge and Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise, who wrote public letters urging his reelection, and former Senator James C. Jones of Tennessee, who stumped Illinois for the Little Giant. (Whatever help these men provided against Lincoln, their efforts severely undermined the pro-Buchanan candidates.) For his part, Lincoln was assisted by Lyman Trumbull, Richard J. Oglesby, Owen Lovejoy, William H. Herndon, and John M. Palmer, all of whom campaigned actively. (“I am out all the time at the school-houses & village churches where good can be done and where the ‘big bugs’ do not go,” Herndon reported in October.)277

  In addition, the 27-year-old black abolitionist H. Ford Douglas of Chicago made speeches on behalf of Lincoln, prompting the Illinois State Register to observe: “he spoke in one of the Ottawa churches, much to the edification and delight of his abolition republican brethren, who seem in duty bound … to swallow every greasy nigger that comes along.”278 In Ottawa, Senator Douglas remarked that “[w]e heard a prominent Republican tell another the other day that Mr. Schlosser should have been kicked out of the court house for presuming that a Nigger was going to speak at the Free church, although the object of his address was to help Lincoln. Every fool knows that his speech would do Lincoln more harm than good.”279

  A small number of Republicans from outside Illinois assisted Lincoln. Among them were Governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio and Congressman Frank Blair of Missouri. (Douglas charged Blair “with laboring to abolish slavery in Missouri, and to ship off the free blacks to Illinois,” where they were “to be made citizens and our equals!”)280 In appealing to the German vote, Republicans also enjoyed the support of Carl Schurz of Wisconsin and others. “The black Republicans have a half dozen German hirelings traveling and spouting niggerism through this region,” sneered the Illinois State Register.281 Several nationally prominent Republicans, including Caleb B. Smith, Benjamin F. Wade, Cassius M. Clay, and Joseph Galloway, were invited to stump Illinois but declined. In 1859, Lincoln expressed gratitude to Chase for “being one of the very few distinguished men, whose sympathy we in Illinois did receive last year, of all those whose sympathy we thought we had reason to expect.”282 Although his letter to Chase seemed tinged with bitterness at the failure of more prominent Republicans to come to his aid, Lincoln had in June 1858 cautioned against “importing speakers from a distance and the like. They excite prejudice and close the avenues to sober reason.”283

  To offset the German Republican campaigners, Douglas hired Henry Villard, a native of Germany who delivered thirteen speeches and wrote dispatches for a New York newspaper belittling Lincoln. He told Douglas that he was “as enthusiastic & faithful a supporter of your political claims as any can be found anywhere in the State of Illinois.” He eventually quit when Douglas failed to pay the promised fee.284

  The eminent Whig, Kentucky Senator John J. Crittenden, widely regarded as Henry Clay’s heir, provided by far the most significant outside intervention. Four days after the Alton debate, Lincoln’s campaign suffered a grievous blow when T. Lyle Dickey publicly read a pro-Douglas letter he had received months earlier from Crittenden. Congressman Thomas L. Harris had informed the Little Giant that Crittenden “would write to any body—& give his views & wishes in your favor in any mode in which they would be most effective. If he will write a letter or come here & make a speech he will control 20,000 American or old line Whig votes in the center & south.”285 Hearing rumors that Crittenden favored Douglas’s reelection and had agreed to write friends in Illinois saying so, Lincoln asked the Kentucky senator in early July if that was in fact the case and predicted that Crittenden’s Illinois admirers would be “mortified exceedingly” by any such correspondence.286 On July 29, Crittenden replied that he admired the Little Giant’s opposition to the Lecompton Constitution and deplored his “persecution” by the Buchanan administration, and that he had so expressed himself to several men at Washington during the last session of Congress. Now he was besieged by Illinoisans, including Dickey, for confirmation of those discussions and would answer their requests honestly. He added that he had “no disposition for officious intermeddling” and that he “should be extremely sorry to give offence or cause mortification to you or any of my Illinois friends.”287 Three days later, Crittenden wrote Dickey recounting the praise he had bestowed upon Douglas in April and authorizing him to repeat what he had said.

  Dickey kept the letter private until October 19, when he incorporated it into a speech denouncing Lincoln as an apostate from Clay’s Whiggery. The Democrats cited that document as a conclusive reason why Old Line Whigs should not support Lincoln, though in fact it was hardly a ringing endorsement of Douglas’s bid for reelection. Crittenden, in company with many Republicans, applauded the Little Giant’s attack on the Lecompton Constitution, but that document had ceased being an issue when voters in Kansas decisively rejected it in August. (The Louisville Journal, edited by Crittenden’s friend George D. Prentice, declared: “We hailed him [Douglas] with applause when he mounted the solid ground of constitutional justice, but we feel under no obligation to extol him when he plunges back into the mire of Democracy.”)288

  The Illinois State Journal fanned the fires of controversy by mistakenly suggesting that Dickey’s Crittenden letter was a forgery and erroneously claiming that the Kentucky senator had written to a leading resident of Springfield expressing “himself heartily in favor of the triumph of the united opposition against Douglas, and bids them God speed in the good work.”289 The Springfield Register fired back that the “leading resident” was Lincoln himself, and denied that the letter supported the opposition to Douglas. “On the contrary,” it stated, “that letter expresses no such thing, but gives Mr. Abraham Lincoln a cold bath.… Will Mr. Lincoln, through the Journal, trot out that letter?” Democrats asked Crittenden if he had written in support of Lincoln, to which he telegraphed a reply: “I have written no such letter.”290 This telegram was published in the Missouri Republican at the behest of Owen G. Cates of St. Louis, who had seen a copy of the letter from Crittenden to Lincoln. Cates complained to the editor of the Missouri Republican that Lincoln knew Crittenden’s letter was being misrepresented, yet he remained silent. The Kentucky senator’s telegram and Dickey’s speech profoundly affected Ol
d Line Whigs in central Illinois. Crittenden apologized to Lincoln, disclaiming any responsibility for the release of his letter to the press.

  Compounding Lincoln’s problems were pro-Douglas public letters from two other Kentuckians, Vice-President John C. Breckinridge and Congressman James B. Clay, son of Henry Clay. Moreover, James W. Singleton of Quincy, a former Whig but now a Democrat, reported that Lincoln had abandoned Clay in 1847 and worked hard to defeat his nomination for the presidency. Douglas, T. Lyle Dickey, and others repeated Singleton’s accusation, and the Democratic press insisted that Lincoln had betrayed the principles of Clay. To counter this attack, Republican newspapers ran extracts of speeches by Clay and Lincoln, showing the similarity of their views on slavery, race, amalgamation, squatter sovereignty, and the Constitution.

  The race issue continued to dog Lincoln in the closing days of the campaign. The Chicago Times spelled out eleven principles for which the Democratic Party stood; heading the list was the assertion that Illinois Democrats “affirm the original and essential inferiority of the negro.” The Times declared that the election of Lincoln would disgrace Illinois. Rhetorically its editor asked voters, “Shall you by your want of zeal and inattention allow the Republicans to elect Abraham Lincoln, and send him, the advocate of negro equality and negro citizenship to the United States Senate, and thus forever put a blot upon the proud name of Illinois? Let Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, and Vermont, if they choose, send to the national councils men glorying in the profession of negro loving, negro equality, and negro citizenship doctrines, but must Illinois be brought to the shameful acknowledgment that her people, too, claim an equality for the negro with the white race, and claim for the negro all the political rights of the white man?” The Times denounced Lincoln for “shamelessly” promoting the “revolting” and “odious” principle of black equality.291

  In an undated manuscript, perhaps written at that time, Lincoln exclaimed: “Negro equality! Fudge!! How long, in the government of a God, great enough to make and maintain this Universe, shall there continue knaves to vend, and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagogueism as this.”292 On October 18, Lincoln gave to James N. Brown, a Republican candidate for the state legislature who expressed concern about the charges of black equality, a small notebook with clippings from his speeches dealing with black citizenship. In a cover letter, Lincoln reiterated that “I think the negro is included in the word ‘men’ used in the Declaration of Independence” but added that “it does not follow that social and political equality between the whites and blacks, must be incorporated, because slavery must not. The declaration does not so require.”293

  Lincoln often had to deal with hecklers, and he usually got the better of them. In Dallas City on October 23, one Tom Gates interrupted him with charges that he had lied. Lincoln asked him to rise and then blasted him severely. An observer remarked, “great God how Lincoln scored him. You could have heard the boys shout a mile.”294 In Clinton, when the crowd began to eject a heckler, Lincoln instructed them to stop: “No, don’t throw him out. Let him stay and maybe he’ll learn something.”295 When he spoke at Rushville, a Democratic town, he passed a group of socially prominent young women, some of whom had dark complexions. To taunt him for his antislavery views, one of them held up to Lincoln a black doll baby, prompting him to ask quietly: “Madam, are you the mother of that?”296

  In Springfield, as Lincoln delivered his final speech of the long contest to a wildly enthusiastic crowd of 10,000, he was interrupted by a haughty man who rode close to the speaker’s stand and shouted: “How would you like to sleep with a nigger?” Lincoln did not reply but simply stared at him in pity. Unnerved, the rider tried to leave, but the crowd restrained his horse and spat all over him. Some even removed tobacco chaws from their mouths and hurled them in his face.

  After this episode, Lincoln sadly remarked that the “the contest has been painful to me.” Alluding to Crittenden and Dickey, he told the Springfield audience that he and his allies “have been constantly accused of a purpose to destroy the union; and bespattered with every immaginable odious epithet; and some who were friends, as it were but yesterday[,] have made themselves most active in this. I have cultivated patience, and made no attempt at a retort.” In a similar vein, he said: “I have meant to assail the motives of no party, or individual; and if I have, in any instance (of which I am not conscious) departed from my purpose, I regret it.” As for the charges of disunionism, he protested that “I have labored for, and not against the Union. As I have not felt, so I have not expressed any harsh sentiment towards our Southern brethren. I have constantly declared, as I really believed, the only difference between them and us, is the difference of circumstances.” Frankly he acknowledged his ambition but emphasized that he cared more for the success of the antislavery cause than he did for merely attaining power. “God knows how sincerely I prayed from the first that this field of ambition might not be opened. I claim no insensibility to political honors; but today could the Missouri restriction be restored, and the whole slavery question replaced on the old ground of ‘toleration[’] by necessity where it exists, with unyielding hostility to the spread of it, on principle, I would, in consideration, gladly agree, that Judge Douglas should never be out, and I never in, an office, so long as we both or either, live.”297 The Illinois State Journal called this peroration “one of the most eloquent appeals ever addressed to the American people.”298

  As election day drew near, the Chicago Press and Tribune reviewed Lincoln’s conduct: “From first to last he has preserved his well-earned reputation for fairness, for honor and gentlemanly courtesy, and more than maintained his standing as a sagacious, far-seeing and profound statesman. Scorning the use of offensive personalities and the ordinary tricks of the stump, his efforts have been directed solely to the discussion of the legitimate issues of the campaign and the great fundamental principles on which our government is based.”299 Two years later the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican, which originally had urged Illinois Republicans not to run a candidate against Douglas, said that the “judgment of all men of mind upon the Illinois canvass is in favor of Lincoln as against Douglas.” Lincoln “handled Douglas as he would an eel—by main strength.”300

  Thanks to the rapid growth of the railroad network in Illinois, the campaign had been unusually extensive. Douglas traveled 5,227 miles in 100 days; in less than four months, Lincoln covered almost as much ground (350 miles by boat, 600 by carriage, and 3,400 by train). Excluding short responses, Lincoln by his own count gave sixty-three addresses; Douglas claimed that he delivered twice as many, though a journalist counted fifty-nine set speeches, seventeen brief responses to serenades, and thirty-seven replies to addresses of welcome. They both spoke in forty towns; Douglas addressed crowds at twenty-three sites where his opponent did not, and Lincoln did so in a dozen where the Little Giant did not.

  Election Results

  Prairie State voters trooped to the polls on November 2 to choose members of the General Assembly, a state treasurer, and a state superintendent of public instruction. “What a night next Tuesday will be all over the Union!” exclaimed the Burlington, Iowa, State Gazette, in excited anticipation. “The whole Nation is watching with the greatest possible anxiety for the result of that day. No State has ever fought so great a battle as that which Illinois is to fight on that day. Its result is big with the fate of our Government and the Union and the telegraph wires will be kept hot with it until the result is known all over the land.”301

  Like many of his party colleagues, Lincoln anticipated electoral fraud. To Norman B. Judd he expressed “a high degree of confidence that we shall succeed, if we are not over-run with fraudulent votes to a greater extent than usual.” In Naples he had noticed several Irishmen dressed as railroad workers carrying carpetbags; he reported that hundreds of others were rumored to be leaving districts where their votes were superfluous in order to settle briefly in hotly contested counties. To thwart this so-called colonization
of voters, Lincoln offered Judd “a bare suggestion”—namely, that where “there is a known body of these voters, could not a true man, of the ‘detective’ class, be introduced among them in disguise, who could, at the nick of time, control their votes? Think this over. It would be a great thing, when this trick is attempted upon us, to have the saddle come up on the other horse.”302 It is not entirely clear what Lincoln intended; the “true man of the ‘detective’ class” that he mentioned was perhaps a distributor of bribes.

  Many Republicans were willing to counter Democratic maneuvers with trickery of their own. In July 1857, O. M. Hatch, a close friend of Lincoln and the secretary of state in Illinois, wrote: “let us colonize—some four or five districts, and begin now—this fall—without fail—this must be done—and can be done, with money—and the end Justifies the means in this instance, certainly, in my Judgment—I have written this much after a talk with Mr Dubois & Herndon.”303 (Three years later, David Davis declared that “the Democracy are pipe laying for the Legislature” by “transferring Irish voters from the Northern part of the State into the doubtful districts. This can only be counteracted by like means on our behalf.”)304 Colonizing voters was a common electoral strategy in the 1850s, when registry laws were weak or nonexistent.

  Some Republicans even contemplated violence. On election eve, Herndon explained to a Massachusetts correspondent that Illinois Republicans “have this question before us—‘What shall we do? Shall we tamely submit to the Irish, or shall we rise and cut their throats?’ If blood is shed in Ill[inoi]s to maintain the purity of the ballot box, and the rights of the popular will, do not be at all surprised.”305