In one sense, Lincoln nearly did “die” that evening, but because of his script, not his sentiments. When he rose to speak on June 16, he carried with him a freshly printed version of his speech, obligingly typeset from his own manuscript at the offices of the Illinois State Journal (the easier to rush it into print afterward). What Lincoln did not know—perhaps never realized until he began reading aloud from the actual sheets that publishers Baker and Bailhache provided him—was that their compositors had inadvertently transposed some of the initial paragraphs, garbling his opening thoughts.38 Such was the danger of relinquishing original, handwritten texts, even to the friendliest of newspapers.
A lesser orator might have lost his balance. Somehow, Lincoln made his way through his address without mishap, and to a roaring ovation. But tellingly, when later he assembled a definitive scrapbook of all his 1858 campaign speeches and debates, he chose a June 19 Chicago Tribune reprint of the “House Divided” address based in part on a transcript made on the scene, rather than the mangled version imperfectly typeset from his manuscript and printed in the June 18 State Journal. (Lincoln’s priceless, handwritten original has never been found.)
In whatever form it appeared, Lincoln’s speech aroused attention and, not surprisingly, some concern, from the country’s Republican editors. When John L. Scripps of the Chicago Daily Democratic Press (a pro-Lincoln paper despite its name) wrote to compliment the address—with reservations—Lincoln assured him that while “much flattered by the estimate you place on my late speech . . . yet I am much mortified that any part of it should be construed so differently from any thing intended by me.” He had never meant to imply that he favored interfering with slavery “in the States where it exists,” he told Scripps, only preventing its spread westward. In a letter he did “not intend for publication,” Lincoln tried to assure Scripps that the speech was less radical than the editor feared. Speaking in a way meant to convince all moderate journalists alarmed by the oration’s do-or-die catchphrase, Lincoln insisted: “I have declared a thousand times, and now repeat that, in my opinion, neither the General Government, nor any other power outside of the slave states, can constitutionally or rightfully interfere with slaves or slavery where it already exists. I believe that whenever the effort to spread slavery into the new teritories [sic], by whatever means, and into the free states themselves, by Supreme court decisions, shall be fairly headed off, the institution will then be in the course of ultimate extinction; and by the language used I meant only this.” (Three weeks later, Scripps merged his paper with Medill and Ray’s to form the new and stronger Chicago Press and Tribune.)39 Like Scripps, Horace Greeley, too, ultimately acknowledged the “House Divided” address as “memorable” and “in the right key.” But as late as July, Greeley still stubbornly believed Douglas should have been “conciliated.”40
One thing was certain: as far as candidate Lincoln was concerned, the Republican press represented one maddeningly divided “house” whose divisions he would no longer tolerate. He made this clear by firing off a barrage of both public and private post-nomination letters to Illinois editors. In rapid order, he defended a close ally against charges that he had undermined a fellow Republican over a House seat, corrected the record with regard to his old congressional votes on Mexico (against the war but for supplying the troops), and blasted another Republican for getting too cozy with a Democrat in neighboring Indiana—all in the space of two weeks, during which Lincoln strongly demonstrated that he now expected to harness the party press.
These latest volleys commenced on June 8, after the Chicago Tribune reprinted rumors of Judge David Davis’s opposition to Illinois congressional candidate Owen Lovejoy, brother of the martyred Alton editor Elijah. In response, Lincoln not only defended his longtime personal and professional ally Davis, but also demanded unity around “the vitalizing principle of Republicanism.”
Next, on the 25th, in the wake of new press charges that he had opposed House appropriations to support American troops in Mexico, Lincoln assured Medill, “you may safely deny that I ever gave any vote for withholding any supplies whatever, from officers or soldiers of the Mexican War.” The Chicago Times’s insistence otherwise, bristled the candidate, was based only on “its’ [sic] blind rage to assail me.” Just two days later, Lincoln flew into another rage at Medill’s partner, Charles Ray. The Press and Tribune had reprinted a recent article urging that Republicans support the reelection of Democratic congressman John G. Davis of Indiana because, like Stephen Douglas, he had bravely opposed the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution for Kansas.
A few weeks earlier, David Davis, increasingly angry at Medill and Ray over the earlier slight, had advised Lincoln that “The Editor of a newspaper, who knowingly permits such things to be done—is to say the least a bad leader—& ought to be rebuked.” Now Lincoln took that advice to heart. “How in God’s name do you let such paragraphs into the Tribune,” Lincoln exploded in his letter to Ray. “ . . . Does Sheahan write them? How can you have failed to perceive that in this short paragraph you have completely answered all; your own well put complaints of Greely [sic] . . . ? And what possible argument can be made why all Republicans shall stand out of Hon. John G. Davis’s way in his district in Indiana that can not be made why all Republicans in Illinois shall stand out of Hon. S. A. Douglas’s way? The part in larger type is plainly editorial, and your editorial at that, as you do not credit it to any other paper. I confess it astonishes me.”41 Through authoritative communications like these, Lincoln had by July strong-armed the Republican press into full conformity and allegiance, at least in Illinois. Independent-minded, out-of-state renegades like Greeley, primarily eager to injure the Buchanan administration by encouraging dissident Democrats like Douglas, proved harder to tame. Their unpredictable behavior convinced stalwart David Davis that the Republican Party remained merely “confederated,” not “consolidated,” and unless brought into line would be powerless to battle “the infernal South, that prolific monster of ruin, niggers, and disunion.”42 Bring the statewide party and press into line Lincoln did. Now it was time to take the Senate battle to the people.
The “hullabaloo,” public aspect of the Senate campaign got under way quickly. Better-known and far better-financed, Douglas returned to Illinois from Washington and commenced traveling the state in an ornately decorated private railroad car, drawing large crowds almost everywhere he went. The underfunded Lincoln had little option but to trail Douglas into town after town, asking audiences to reassemble to hear him rebut the senator’s latest orations. It did not take the Democratic press long to taunt that since there were already “two very good circuses and menageries traveling through the state,” it might be appropriate to “include a speech from Lincoln in their performances” as well. “In this way Lincoln could attract respectable audiences and his friends be relieved from the mortification they all feel at his present humiliating position.”43
On July 22, the Chicago Press and Tribune came up with a far better idea: “Let Mr. Douglas and Mr. Lincoln agree to canvass the State together, in the old western style.” By chance or design, a newspaper had proposed what would evolve into the most canonical political debates in American history. Days later, Lincoln formally challenged Douglas “to divide time, and address the same audiences.” When Douglas initially demurred, the Tribune accused him of cowardice, editorializing that he “would rather go about the country like a strolling mountebank, with his cannon, to[a]dies and puffers, to shout, cheer, and blow him, than to stand up to the world with a full grown man to confront.” Cornered, the incumbent had no choice but to accept.44
“Two men presenting wider contrasts could hardly be found as the representatives of the two great parties,” William Cullen Bryant’s antislavery New York Evening Post commented in August when the two combatants launched their joint meetings. Not surprisingly, the Post sneeringly described Democrat Douglas as a “short, thick-set, burly man, with a large, round head, heavy hair, dark complexion, and fierce
bull-dog bark”—a Vermont native who had clearly forgotten “the ancestral hatred of slavery to which he was the heir.” Lincoln, portrayed by contrast as “very tall, slender, and angular, awkward even, in gait and attitude,” was admittedly not very “comely” in repose. “But stir him up,” marveled the Post, and “the fire of his genius plays on every feature. . . . The Republicans of Illinois have chosen a champion worthy of their heartiest support, and fully equipped for the conflict.” Within a month, the Post took the temperature of the growing political excitement in Illinois and declared: “The prairies are on fire.”45
Contrary to their golden historical reputation, the Lincoln-Douglas debates did not actually bring out the best in either candidate. With progressive northern Illinois tilting to the Republicans, and the conservative southern part of the state firmly behind the Democrats, the candidates focused their fierce battle on the middle ground—both geographically and politically. This required Douglas to appear less retrograde, and Lincoln less liberal. In debate after debate, Lincoln repeated his warnings that Douglas intended to “plant slavery over all the states.” Douglas returned the salvos by accusing Lincoln of harboring secret plans to endow blacks with equal rights, a radical aspiration embraced at the time by only a tiny enlightened minority, few among them Illinois voters. Lincoln gave as good as he got. Even before the skirmishes commenced, however, a Tribune correspondent assigned to cover the campaign noted that Douglas had “an opponent who is fully his equal in nature, talent, and whose bold, candid and straightforward manners, when placed in contrast with the sophistry which is apparent in all of Judge Douglas’s campaign speeches, give the people more confidence in his living up to his professions, and a stronger faith in his honesty.”46
At the first debate at Ottawa, Illinois, on August 21, Lincoln felt compelled to defend himself against Douglas’s charges that he favored racial amalgamation by pointing out: “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which in my judgment will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position.” Lincoln may have still considered African Americans inferior, but there was “no reason in the world,” he insisted, “why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man.”47 Even that sentiment was sufficiently radical at the time to carry political risk.
The debates proved gigantically popular as spectacles. The public flocked to them, turning the encounters into day-long political festivals whose audiences toted handmade signs and banners, cheered themselves hoarse, shouted back at the speakers, and ate and drank with a delirious enthusiasm usually reserved for weddings and county fairs. The rhetoric the crowds heard was more often ugly than elevated, but it hardly dampened public enthusiasm. Ultimately, the Lincoln-Douglas debates achieved mythic status not because of what the debaters said, but because of what the press made of their words.
While the debaters toured the state, in Springfield tempers frayed. When onetime Shawneetown newspaperman John McClernand—an ardent Douglas supporter and former congressman now running for the House again—took exception to a charge published in the State Journal, he demanded that its editors retract it. They refused, and McClernand went looking for Edward Baker on the street to demand an apology in person. When Baker feistily insisted that he regretted nothing, McClernand attacked him with his cane—clearly the weapon of choice in the recent spate of duels. Neighbors had to pull the combatants apart.48
From the outset, dueling press “puffers” like Baker and his Democratic counterpart played active roles in the campaign that went far beyond mere coverage. They doubled as outright propagandists—what today we would call press secretaries or communication directors. Early on, for example, the Register’s Charles Lanphier provided Douglas with an 1856 clipping about Lincoln’s congressional voting record that the senator read aloud to great effect at the first debate at Ottawa. “I see that your quotation from our old file has made an uproar,” Lanphier proudly wrote Douglas five days later. With a sly wink at Lincoln’s old “Spot” resolutions, Lanphier gloated, “the point you made is not affected by their denial of the ‘spot.’ ”49 Joseph Medill and Charles Ray, who worried about the “mischief” such war talk might engender, tried to get Lincoln to provide them with an autobiographical sketch they could print in the Press and Tribune. “You are the only man who can furnish the facts,” Ray implored him on June 29. “ . . . We do not care for a narrative—only a record of dates, place of nativity, parentage, early occupations, trials, disadvantages, &c &c—all of which will make, if we are rightly informed, a telling story.”50
Ray was on to something; he was one of the first journalists to comprehend that emphasizing Lincoln’s inspiring rise from obscurity would attract far more support than debate points on divisive issues like slavery and race. For now, however, the editor would be compelled to tell Lincoln’s life story without the benefit of the candidate’s personal help; Lincoln was not yet prepared, or perhaps was simply too busy, to provide the details, even when Ray pointed out that he “need not shrink from the declaration of an origin ever so humble.”51 Ray’s overall fears were confirmed when he concluded that Lincoln had put in a lackluster performance at the initial debate. “For God’s sake,” he urged his friend, Illinois congressman Elihu Washburne, after the August 21 encounter at Ottawa, “ . . . tell him to ‘Charge, Chester! Charge!’ ”—a famous line from Walter Scott’s poem “Marmion.”52 Ray went so far as to draft a response Lincoln might use should Douglas again accuse him of “radical” notions on slavery.53
• • •
As close as Horace Greeley had earlier come to endorsing Douglas, the New York Tribune nonetheless commended Lincoln’s debate performances with enthusiasm. The Ottawa encounter was not just “a passage at arms between two eminent masters of the art of intellectual attack and defense,” the paper commented. Lincoln had accomplished nothing less than to transform an Illinois Senate race into “a contest for the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of Satan—a contest for advance or retrograde in civilization.”54 Greeley ordered the debate reprinted word for word in the New York Tribune, editorializing that “Mr. Lincoln has decidedly the advantage” in doctrine and demeanor, if only because Douglas “reminds us more of the wild and unscrupulous athlete of his earlier days than of the noble displays of last Winter, when he stood forth in the Senate Chamber as the champion of popular rights against Executive usurpation.”55 Old fixations died hard for Greeley, but the transcript of the Lincoln-Douglas debate at Ottawa clearly diminished his sympathy for Stephen Douglas.
The New York paper’s revolutionary “full report of the speeches on both sides” became possible because the Lincoln-Douglas debates inspired the first sustained, so-called phonographic reporting in politics—that is, complete, gavel-to-gavel transcriptions specifically designed for reprinting in newspapers. Over a two-month period, through all seven joint meetings and twenty-one hours of oratory, stenographers worked in both blazing sun and biting gales to record every word the protagonists uttered (or at least their own versions of these remarks). Within days of each encounter, leading party newspapers in Chicago and Springfield published what they promoted as faithful complete records. Out-of-town papers like the New York Tribune often followed up with reprints, summaries, and commentary. Tens of thousands of Illinoisans may have attended the debates in the towns of Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charleston, Galesburg, Quincy, and Alton. But hundreds of thousands more read the speeches when they appeared, soon after each encounter, on the pages of the press.
Providing exact transcriptions proved an elusive goal, however, and there is no real way to measure how fait
hful the results actually were. The debaters themselves used no written scripts; for the most part, they spoke extemporaneously, except when quoting themselves or each other. For occasional reference, Lincoln carried with him a small scrapbook in which he had glued newspaper clippings of his earlier speeches. The first time he took the book from his coat pocket at Ottawa. As he slowly leafed through its small print in search of a citation, a wag in the crowd shouted out: “Put on your specs.” Lincoln complied, looked out at the audience, and replied to much laughter: “Yes, sir, I am obliged to do so. I am no longer a young man.”56
The debaters delivered their speeches without benefit of amplification. Stenographers invariably sat behind, not in front of, them on the temporary wooden platforms erected for each encounter, and if the breeze was at the speakers’ backs, the candidates’ words proved difficult to hear, much less transcribe accurately. As a result, the texts that appeared in the newspapers suffered from unexplained gaps and occasional garbling. But they clearly differed in other ways, too, depending on which politically affiliated journal published them. Somewhere along the trail leading from stenography, transcription, and editing, to typesetting and publication, other variances inevitably crept into the texts. And many contemporaries attributed these inconsistencies to naked politics. Not even supposedly verbatim transcripts were immune from the unrelenting politicization of mid-nineteenth-century journalism.57
The flaws originated with the stenographers, who harbored undisguised political loyalties of their own. Initially, the Chicago Press and Tribune placed overall coverage of the meetings in the hands of a young newspaper veteran named Horace White. “I did not expect much of him,” White admitted of Lincoln before he first heard him speak four years earlier. Afterward, he exulted: “Lincoln is a mammoth. He has this day delivered a speech, the greatest ever listened to in the state of Illinois, unless himself had made a greater.”58 Now a true believer, White discovered to his distress that the Douglas camp had imported two shorthand experts to transcribe the debates word for word. Recognizing “the necessity of counteracting or matching that force,” White urged Medill and Ray to hire young Robert Roberts Hitt, “the pioneer” of this “new feature in journalism in Chicago,” to join him on the debate trail and produce transcripts of his own.59 Lincoln quickly came to regard the pro-Republican stenographer as indispensable. At the second debate, he tried delaying the start of his opening speech until the tardy transcriber reached the platform. To the amusement of those within earshot, Lincoln was overheard asking: “Ain’t Hitt here? Where is he?”60
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