Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

by Richard Brookhiser

  In a draft of the “House Divided” speech, Lincoln added a third arena for slavery’s expansion: new slave territories in Central America or the Caribbean might be acquired by the United States. And indeed Americans from the South had been sponsoring freelance uprisings and invasions in that part of the world throughout the 1850s.

  Who were the advocates of slavery pushing it forward? Lincoln answered with a metaphor. He had opened his speech with a biblical house, but halfway through he described a second house that was under construction, along with the workmen who were building it. “When we see a lot of framed timbers” gathered “by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance”—Lincoln’s listeners would supply the surnames: Douglas, Pierce, Taney, and Buchanan—“and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house . . . all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting”—then, Lincoln concluded, it was right to suspect that “a common plan or draft [had been] drawn up before the first lick was struck.” The second house was a trap, like something out of a story by Poe or Hawthorne, representing the policies that would imprison Republicans and liberty itself. The four workmen, with their matching timbers, were also the jailers.

  This was a conspiracy theory involving two presidents, a would-be president, and the chief justice of the US Supreme Court. It showed the desperation of Republicans in 1858, and their fear that, even as their party and the free states grew, the advocates of slavery would keep a lock on the government.

  Was it crazy, simply because it was a conspiracy theory? Buchanan had been seen talking intently with Chief Justice Taney at his own inauguration. Had they been talking about the Dred Scott decision, shortly to come? Decades after Buchanan’s death, his published papers would show that as president-elect he had been corresponding with other justices as they discussed the case, pushing them to issue the most sweeping proslavery decision possible. James and Roger had conspired, if not Franklin or Stephen.

  Sometimes a conspiracy theorist, shooting at noises in the dark, hits real conspirators.

  Lincoln ended with a rousing appeal. “Two years ago,” the Republican Party had been formed to resist “a common danger. . . . Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds. . . . Did we brave all then, to falter now? . . . The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail—if we stand firm, we shall not fail.”

  The nominations of Lincoln and Douglas earlier in 1858 allowed the two men to campaign across the state in the hope of affecting the elections to the legislature on November 2. After Lincoln twice found himself—first in Chicago, then in Springfield—speaking shortly after Douglas, the candidates agreed to appear together in seven other locations. Their schedule of debates was Ottawa (August 21), Freeport (August 27), Jonesboro (September 15), Charleston (September 18), Galesburg (October 7), Quincy (October 13), and Alton (October 15). Their itinerary spanned the state: Freeport was near the Wisconsin border, Jonesboro in the tip of the wedge between Missouri and Kentucky. Republicans had wanted even more joint appearances, as many as fifty or one hundred. The actual schedule was numbing enough, as the candidates filled the days between debates with other speeches. Traveling by train, the two men logged almost 10,000 miles.

  Such exertions for a Senate race were unheard of in American politics. (Presidential candidates did not campaign, either; when Winfield Scott made a few trips to army bases before the election of 1852, he was condemned for it.) In another innovation, the Chicago papers of both parties printed the texts of the debates, with ample notes of crowd reactions (“hit him,” “that’s so,” “immense applause,” “laughter and cheers”).

  The traditional arts of politics were also practiced. Buchanan still wanted to make trouble for Douglas in any way he could (these two workmen were not cooperating in the way Lincoln had charged), and his minions in Illinois ran a slate of independent candidates, who called themselves National Democrats (critics called them Buchaneers). Since the enemy of my enemy is my ally, the Republicans kept tabs on this effort via Herndon, whose father and brother were staunch Buchanan supporters. Since my liaison to my ally is not me, this allowed Lincoln to deny that he himself had “in any way promoted” the Buchaneers.

  The format of the joint debates required one man to speak for an hour, the other to reply for ninety minutes, then the first to rejoin for thirty. Douglas opened and concluded the first debate, then the candidates successively switched positions. Douglas thus opened and closed in four debates, Lincoln in three—an advantage to Douglas, but as the incumbent and the man with the most to lose, he set the terms. Lincoln consistently called him “Judge Douglas”—a legitimate title, since Douglas had served on the state supreme court back in the 1840s; it also spared Lincoln calling him “Senator.” Douglas addressed his opponent as “Mr. Lincoln.”

  The state was riveted. “The prairies are on fire,” wrote the New York Evening Post. The audiences sometimes exceeded the population of the towns in which the debates were held; the dust raised by incoming horses and buggies clouded the air. There was some heckling, and a lot of cheering, but to an impressive degree people paid attention to what was said.

  What they heard included a lot of repetition and a lot of small-bore disputation. The two candidates wrangled over party platforms and past statements, and they gave minute accounts of political maneuvers, which they professed to find shocking (or, when they were the maneuverers, unexceptionable). Even so, a lot of noteworthy things got said.

  Douglas led off the first debate by patronizing Lincoln: “I have known him for nearly twenty-five years. . . . He could beat any of the boys wrestling, or running a foot race, in pitching quoits or tossing a copper; [he] could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town together [uproarious laughter].” Since Lincoln was temperate and Douglas was a heavy drinker, that was a low blow. Douglas used Lincoln’s rube/boob persona against him, depicting him as a yokel who had never amounted to anything—and that part of the charge was still painfully close to the truth.

  Throughout the debates, Douglas tarred Lincoln as pro-black. He claimed that Frederick Douglass—whom he called a “rich black negro”—and other black abolitionists were campaigning for him, charges that were greeted with cries of “white men, white men,” “down with the negro,” and “he’s a disgrace to white people.” Frederick Douglass in fact scorned Lincoln as too conservative. Douglas accused the Republicans of tailoring their negrophilia to fit different parts of the state, the North being most antislavery, the South least. In Freeport and Chicago, said Douglas, Republicans were “jet black”; in central Illinois, “a decent mulatto”; in the southern part of the state, “almost white [shouts of laughter].”

  Lincoln for his part insisted that he had no intention of introducing “political and social equality” between whites and blacks: “There is a physical difference between the two, which in my judgment will probably forever forbid their living together. . . . I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.” Lincoln made other demonstrations of his whiteness, using the words nigger and niggers several times, as if to say, Don’t worry, I’m one of the (white) guys too. Some of his uses, however, put the words in Douglas’s mouth: “My friend Judge Douglas [says I want to] set the niggers and white people to marrying together [laughter].” I talk about niggers; but Douglas worries about them.

  Lincoln told several versions of his joke about not having to marry a black woman if she was not his slave. He concluded one recital of it with a riff at Douglas’s expense, which incidentally shows how he worked a crowd. “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 w
ith negroes [continued laughter and applause].” Lincoln had mined his own sexual insecurity to tell the marriage joke in the first place; here he located an even greater insecurity in the racism of Douglas.

  The debates are best known for two sets of questions the candidates posed to each other early on, Douglas to Lincoln in Ottawa and Lincoln to Douglas in Freeport. Douglas’s questions sought to entangle Lincoln with abolitionism—Did he favor repealing the federal fugitive slave law, for instance? Lincoln had drawn the line between abolitionists and himself so clearly that he had little trouble answering: he said he thought the fugitive slave law was constitutional. One of Lincoln’s questions honed in on the Dred Scott decision: Could the people of a territory “in any lawful way . . . exclude slavery from its limits”? Douglas answered that they could do it by “local police regulations.” This was not news. Douglas had given that answer in his speech on Dred Scott in June 1857 in Springfield, and as he said at Freeport, he had given it “a hundred times from every stump in Illinois.” But it was worthwhile to make him say yet again to what lengths he had been driven in order to square popular sovereignty with the Taney Court. Lincoln happily compelled him.

  The issue overhanging all of the debates, however, was what the politicians on the podium thought of politicians who had never set foot in Illinois and who had, by 1858, all died years ago. Lincoln, Douglas, and their thousands of laughing, cheering, listening spectators wanted to know how the two candidates squared themselves with the founding fathers—and what that meant about the nature and future of the country. Chief Justice Taney had laid out his view of the founders, slavery, and race in a Supreme Court decision, and Lincoln had laid out his own in speeches since Peoria in 1854. Now Douglas and Lincoln expounded their conflicting views face to face on dusty Illinois podiums.

  Douglas introduced his account of the founding fathers in his first speech in Ottawa. He began with a creation story of the federal government. The framers, he said, wrote a Constitution that recognized regional diversity and self-government. “Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Jay and the great men of that day, made this government divided into free states and slave states, and left each state perfectly free to do as it pleased on the subject of slavery. [Right, right.]” “They knew,” Douglas went on, “ . . . that in a country as wide and broad as this, with such a variety of climate, production and interest, the people necessarily required different laws and institutions in different localities. . . . One of the reserved rights of the states was the right to regulate the relations between master and servant. . . . Why can [the government] not exist on the same principles on which our fathers made it? [It can.]”

  So Douglas squared himself and slavery with the Constitution. In the third debate at Jonesboro, Douglas turned to the Declaration of Independence, arguing that it cast no rebuke on slavery because it applied only to white people. “The signers of the Declaration [made] no reference to the negro whatever when they declared all men to be created equal. They desired to express by that phrase white men, men of European birth and European descent, and had no reference either to the negro, the savage Indians, the Fejee, the Malay, or any other inferior and degraded race.” The proof was that no signer of the Declaration had emancipated his own slaves, “yet if they had intended to declare that the negro was the equal of the white man . . . they were bound, as honest men, that day and hour,” to have done so. “[Cheers].”

  Lincoln was a bit slower to present his account of the founders. In the flow of the debates, Lincoln got better over time, apparently losing some nervousness, while Douglas wore out, losing his voice. In the sixth debate, in Quincy, Lincoln attacked Douglas’s creation story: “When Judge Douglas undertakes to say that . . . the fathers of the government made this nation part slave and part free, he assumes what is historically a falsehood. [Long continued applause.]” The fathers bowed to what Lincoln had called, in his Peoria speech, necessity: “Our fathers did not make this nation half slave and half free, or part slave and part free. [Applause, and That’s so.] . . . They found the institution of slavery existing among us. They did not make it so, but they left it so because they knew of no way to get rid of it at that time. [Good, Good, That’s true.]”

  The founders, Lincoln argued, nevertheless left “many clear marks of [their] disapprobation” of slavery. In the last debate, at Alton, he enumerated them. In the Declaration of Independence, the founders declared that all men are created equal, as “a standard maxim for free society” (Lincoln quoted his own speech on Dred Scott from 1857). They banned slavery in the Northwest Ordinance, and in the Constitution they allowed the slave trade to be ended after twenty years. “Why stop its spread in one direction and cut off its source in another, if they did not look to its being placed in the course of ultimate extinction?” The Constitution, it was true, gave guarantees to slavery (the three-fifths rule, the fugitive slave clause); yet its authors avoided the words negro and slavery, using “covert language” so that years later (a century later?), when slavery had finally disappeared, “there should be nothing on the face of the great charter of liberty suggesting that such a thing as negro slavery had ever existed among us. [Enthusiastic applause.]”

  In the fifth debate, in Galesburg, Lincoln had quoted one more mark of the founders’ disapprobation. Although “Mr. Jefferson was the owner of slaves, . . . in speaking upon this very subject, he used the strong language that ‘he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just.’” The line came from Notes on Virginia, Jefferson’s long essay on his home state, which became the only book he ever published. Lincoln did not quote the rest of Jefferson’s sentence: God’s “justice,” he wrote, “cannot sleep forever: . . . a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events.” Jefferson feared that slavery would end in a slave revolt and a race war; Lincoln hoped there would be no war. Time would show that both were mistaken.

  Douglas’s view of the founders came with a glowing corollary: follow their policy, and the United States would have a glorious future. He sketched it most eloquently in the sixth debate, at Quincy. “Let each state mind its own business and let its neighbors alone, there will be no trouble on this question [of slavery]. If we will stand by that principle, then . . . this Republic can exist forever divided into free and slave states, as our fathers made it. . . . Stand by that great principle,” and the entire continent would become “one ocean-bound republic . . . the asylum of the oppressed of the whole earth.”

  Lincoln, holding a different view of the founders and their legacy, had a more anxious vision of the future, which he expressed at Alton: “The wisest and best men of the world,” as he called the founders, had placed slavery in the course of ultimate extinction. But Douglas was willing to let it last forever, and even let it spread, because he saw nothing wrong in it.

  “That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world.” The principle of slavery “says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ [Loud applause.] No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.” Here Lincoln fused the 1850s with the 1770s. Douglas, and those who praised slavery forthrightly, took the place of George III.

  November 2, election day, was rainy. Even so, more voters went to the polls than in 1856, a presidential year. Slightly more Republicans than Democrats voted. But the Republicans were concentrated in too few districts; the newly elected legislature would be sending Steven Douglas back to the Senate, by a vote of 54 to 46.

  After it was all over, Lincoln wrote an old Springfield friend who had moved to Oregon that “though I now sink from view . . . I have made some marks which will te
ll for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.” But the next day he wrote a friendly editor in Chicago asking for copies of the texts of all the debates. He planned to put them in a scrapbook, for the memories. A scrapbook would also assist typesetters if the debates were republished. He did not intend to sink from view just yet.

  Nine

  1859–1860: RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT

  LINCOLN HAD PUT HIS LEGAL BUSINESS ON HOLD WHILE HE ran for the Senate, and he needed to take it up again to earn some money. By the late 1850s his clients had come to include major corporations, not just the litigious locals of the circuit. He defended railroads in several important cases, arguing that the Illinois Central should be free from county-level taxes, and that a bridge across the Mississippi serving the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific did not obstruct navigation (steamboat companies, the competing form of transportation, naturally argued that bridges did just that). Despite his services, the railroads had given him no special treatment when he crisscrossed the state campaigning in 1858; Stephen Douglas, the powerful incumbent, was loaned a private car.

  Lincoln’s most picturesque case had looked back to his past: early in 1858 he had saved the son of his old wrestling rival Jack Armstrong in a murder trial, by showing that the prosecution’s main witness could not have seen the deed on a night that was (according to a dramatically produced almanac) moonless. But the case that would be most important to his future had been a summons to Cincinnati in 1855 to advise the defense for Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the reaper, in a patent infringement suit. On second thought, McCormick’s lawyers did not like the looks of their Illinois adviser, one of them, Edwin Stanton, calling him a “damned long-armed ape”—not to the ape’s face, though Stanton’s attitude was all too clear. Lincoln, who was given nothing to do, felt insulted but pocketed the fee. He and Stanton would meet again.