All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  Embattled on all sides, at war with the administration, and challenged by a rival raised from the political dead, the campaign was a referendum on Douglas. The leading man of his party, fighting for his political life, basked in his controversy. Douglas loved drama, being the center of attention at dinner parties or in crowds, talking, backslapping, deal-making, eating, drinking, storytelling. Drawing a worthy opponent only magnified the Little Giant’s stature.

  Every faction on every side understood that the game was about the succession to the White House. All played with the intensity of a presidential contest. Local politics were waged for national stakes. Both candidates confronted a politics of contradictions. Douglas sought to hold his base within his fractious party and at the same time soften Republican ranks through his antagonism with Buchanan, while also winning over Old Whigs still upset at the rise of abolitionists among the Republicans. Lincoln sought to split off Buchanan Democrats who hated the enemy within more than the one at the gates at the same time he solidified the Republican coalition by unmasking Douglas as unprincipled on slavery. Even before Douglas began his campaign to defend his seat, he rose in the Senate to charge that he was the target of “an unscrupulous coalition” of Buchanan Democrats and Republicans. He had reason to fear such an alliance.

  In early July, Lincoln met with Colonel John Dougherty, the National Democratic candidate for state treasurer, and told him, “If you do this the thing is settled—the battle is fought.” Herndon served as intermediary to the “Buchaneers,” connected through his brother Elliott Herndon, who was editor of the Illinois State Democrat in Springfield, and his father, Archie Herndon, also an influential Buchanan Democrat. Everyone involved understood the value of compartmentalized knowledge. “Lincoln,” Herndon wrote Trumbull on June 24, “. . . does not know the details of how we get along. I do, but he does not.”

  Douglas’s paper, the Chicago Times, launched its first salvo at Lincoln, who had criticized the Mexican War when he was a congressman a decade earlier. The Times falsely stated he pledged to “refuse to vote one dollar to feed, clothe, or minister to the wants of the sick and dying volunteers from my own State, who are suffering in Mexico. Let them die like dogs!” Another Democratic newspaper called Lincoln “a friend of the ‘greasers’ ” and “apologist of Mexico” who “pandered to [the] greasers’ profit and advantage.” The Register picked up the smear that Lincoln gave “aid and comfort” to the enemy. Lincoln gave the Chicago Tribune information on his consistent votes for military appropriations in order to rebut the “intense meanness.” Henry C. Whitney told him the accusation was “the most potent and dangerous weapon that can be used against you in the rural districts.”

  The day after Douglas’s conquering entrance into Chicago, on July 10, Lincoln spoke from the same hotel balcony. Point by point he sought to answer Douglas, starting with the accusation that there was an alliance between Buchanan Democrats and Republicans. It “depends,” Lincoln said, “upon what may be a right definition of the term ‘alliance.’ ” After critiques of popular sovereignty and the Lecompton Constitution, Lincoln defended his use of the phrase “house divided,” reading the whole section. “I am quoting from my speech”—and referring back and forth to Douglas’s criticisms. “In this paragraph which I have quoted in your hearing, and to which I ask the attention of all . . .”

  Justifying his “house divided” speech, Lincoln self-deprecatingly presented himself as Douglas’s inferior. “I am not master of language,” he said. “I have not a fine education; I am not capable of entering into a disquisition upon dialectics, as I believe you call it; but I do not believe the language I employed bears any such construction as Judge Douglas put upon it. But I don’t care about a quibble in regard to words. I know what I meant, and I will not leave this crowd in doubt, if I can explain it to them, what I really meant in the use of that paragraph.”

  He argued defensively, repeating himself. “I am not, in the first place, unaware that this government has endured eighty-two years, half slave and half free. I know that. I am tolerably well acquainted with the history of the country, and I know that it has endured eighty-two years, half slave and half free.” And then in the next line his speech moved to another plane: “I believe—and that is what I meant to allude to there—I believe it has endured because, during all that time, until the introduction of the Nebraska Bill, the public mind did rest, all the time, in the belief that slavery was in course of ultimate extinction.”

  Lincoln explained himself clearly without hesitation. “I have always hated slavery, I think as much as any Abolitionist. I have been an Old Line Whig. I have always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska Bill began. I always believed that everybody was against it, and that it was in course of ultimate extinction.”

  He protested Douglas’s distortion of his position. “Judge Douglas has heard me say it—if not quite a hundred times, at least as good as a hundred times; and when it is said that I am in favor of interfering with slavery where it exists . . .” Lincoln’s position for not intervening against slavery in the South was the same as virtually every political antislavery advocate from Seward to Chase, from Sumner to Hale.

  Lincoln put Douglas in a special category of moral vacuity. He engaged Douglas on the ground where Douglas never ventured—slavery as a moral question.

  He looks upon it as being an exceedingly little thing—only equal to the question of the cranberry laws of Indiana—as something having no moral question in it—as something on a par with the question of whether a man shall pasture his land with cattle, or plant it with tobacco—so little and so small a thing, that he concludes, if I could desire that anything should be done to bring about the ultimate extinction of that little thing, I must be in favor of bringing about an amalgamation of all the other little things in the Union. Now, it so happens—and there, I presume, is the foundation of this mistake—that the Judge thinks thus; and it so happens that there is a vast portion of the American people that do not look upon that matter as being this very little thing. They look upon it as a vast moral evil; they can prove it is such by the writings of those who gave us the blessings of liberty which we enjoy, and that they so looked upon it, and not as an evil merely confining itself to the States where it is situated; and while we agree that, by the Constitution we assented to, in the States where it exists we have no right to interfere with it because it is in the Constitution and we are by both duty and inclination to stick by that Constitution in all its letter and spirit from beginning to end.

  Then he held Douglas up to ridicule for his sexual hysteria, “his passion for drawing inferences that are not warranted. I protest, now and forever against that counterfeit logic which presume that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave, I do necessarily want her for a wife.”

  In the midst of a description of the patriotic celebration of the Fourth of July, Lincoln made his most memorable public statement against nativism. He had always been opposed to the Know Nothing Party, but he had expressed his strong sentiments privately. In the founding of the Illinois Republican Party he had been instrumental in passing resolutions against nativism, but he had not shown himself acting in front of the curtain. After the election of 1856 in which the Republican Party cohered, the Know Nothings mostly fragmented and dissolved organizationally. Yet nativism remained a virulent strain coursing through politics. He remained fixed on bringing the Know Nothings into the Republican coalition. He also wanted to appeal to the immigrants, especially the Germans, who had become a significant and essential constituency for the Republicans. Lincoln had been subdued on the subject, but now he spoke. Commemorating the Fourth of July and the Declaration of Independence required, he said, including the immigrants.

  We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from EuropeGerman, Irish, French and Scandin
avian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

  But that was not his conclusion. He carried the logic of the Declaration of Independence through the immigrants to the slaves, from a refutation of nativism to a condemnation of slavery.

  Those arguments that are made, that the inferior race are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow. What are these arguments? They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent, and I hold if that course of argumentation that is made for the purpose of convincing the public mind that we should not care about this, should be granted, it does not stop with the negro.

  “My friend has said to me that I am a poor hand to quote Scripture.” But Douglas’s position would allow the creation of “one universal slave nation. He is one that runs in that direction, and as such I resist him.”

  Lincoln closed with an appeal to equality. “My friends, I have detained you about as long as I desired to do, and I have only to say, let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position—discarding our standard that we have left us. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”

  Lincoln looked to the crowd for a reaction but the crowd had turned completely quiet. There was no applause. Lincoln’s talk of race and equality, sounding like that of a radical abolitionist, had reduced his audience to silence. So, he declared, he had reached his end. “My friends, I could not, without launching off upon some new topic, which would detain you too long, continue tonight.”

  “Disgusting,” declared the Chicago Times. The New York Herald described Lincoln as Douglas’s “nigger worshipping competitor” speaking the “most repulsive disunion nigger equality principles and doctrines.” The Register stated, “Lincoln takes bold and unqualified ground with Lovejoy and ultra-abolitionism.” The abolitionist Chicago Congregational Herald, however, called him “a champion.” The New York Times and the New York Tribune reprinted the speech in full from the Chicago Tribune, Lincoln’s greatest national exposure. A number of Republicans worried he had gone too far. “The only trouble will be (as I told him),” Norman B. Judd wrote Trumbull, “he will allow Douglas to put him on the defensive.” Joseph Gillespie, an old Lincoln friend, who had belonged to the Know Nothings, running now as a Republican for the legislature, wrote Lincoln a “doleful letter” that he was “scared” the Know Nothings were going for Douglas. “Don’t fail to check the stampede at once,” Lincoln urged.

  Douglas began a triumphant procession from Chicago to Springfield in a private train car bedecked with banners and flags and accompanied by his wife, aides, Democratic officials, and members of the press. Douglas’s luxurious train car was provided courtesy of one his enthusiastic supporters, the Illinois Central’s superintendent, George B. McClellan. Douglas stopped in Joliet and then Bloomington, where he gibed at Lincoln for asserting that blacks were equal “under the law,” which he claimed proved his point about “amalgamation.” Lincoln was divisive, while Douglas stood for national unity. “I tell you, my friends, it is impossible under our institutions to force slavery on an unwilling people.”

  Lincoln took the same train from Chicago but sat in a common car. “Lincoln was perhaps the only Lincoln man on the train,” recalled the Chicago Times editor James Sheahan. He was following Douglas as a tactic to get him to “divide time,” to debate him from the same platform. At Bloomington, Lincoln stood in the crowd on the railroad platform, but visibly identifiable, and was given a spot up front by Douglas. He joined Douglas’s train the next day as a passenger, still stalking him. When the train pulled into Springfield, Douglas disembarked to address a large crowd, to deliver his developing stump speech deriding Lincoln and proclaiming his faith in popular sovereignty. Lincoln, carrying his suitcase and umbrella, went off to prepare his response in a speech that evening.

  On July 17, Lincoln delivered another stem-winder that began with yet another self-deprecating comparison of himself with Douglas—Douglas “of world wide renown; Douglas who looked upon “certainly, at no distant day, the President of the United States”; Douglas “in his round, jolly, fruitful face, post offices, land offices, marshalships and cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance ready to be laid hold of” by the “greedy hands” of his supporters; Douglas, who was given “marches, triumphal entries and receptions . . .” And then there was, alas, Lincoln. “On the contrary nobody has ever expected me to be President. In my poor, lean, lank, face, nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting out.” He drew a laugh from the crowd. “These are disadvantages all, taken together, that the Republicans labor under. We have to fight this battle upon principle, and upon principle alone.”

  The Chicago Times compared Lincoln’s “poor, lean, lank” self-pity to that of Dickens’s figure of unctuous hypocrisy Uriah Heep. The Illinois State Register was so delighted it published Lincoln’s speech in full next to Douglas’s and asked readers to compare the two to Douglas’s advantage.

  The Republican State Committee summoned Lincoln to an emergency meeting in Chicago on July 22. Lincoln’s campaign manager and party chairman, Norman B. Judd, was receiving reports from around the state that Lincoln’s support was faltering. His gambit of trailing after Douglas diminished him. Douglas was succeeding in tainting him as a proponent of “negro equality.” Lincoln’s recent speeches, taking Douglas’s bait, had made him vulnerable, as though he were an abolitionist. Judd was determined to put Lincoln under the State Committee’s “intellectual guardianship,” monitoring “every word, every thought, every argument he utters.” The members of the State Committee had not liked his “house divided” statement from the start.

  The day of the State Committee meeting, the Chicago Tribune, the committee’s sounding board, ran an editorial advocating a series of candidate debates. Before Lincoln had arrived to discuss the matter, it was settled for him. On July 24, Lincoln wrote Douglas proposing the idea. “Will it be agreeable to you to make an arrangement for you and myself to divide time, and address the same audiences during the present canvass?”

  Douglas was hesitant. “The whole country knows me and has me measured,” he wrote a friend. “Lincoln, as regards myself, is comparatively unknown, and
if he gets the best of this debate—and I want to say he is the ablest man the Republicans have got—I shall lose everything. Should I win, I shall gain but little. I do not want to go into a debate with Lincoln.” Despite his reservations, Douglas soon agreed, perhaps out of pride, self-confidence, and the need to appear fearless. But rather than accepting Lincoln’s proposal, which might have meant dozens of debates, perhaps fifty, he proposed only seven.

  Even then, still nervous about Lincoln operating alone, the Republican State Committee summoned Senator Trumbull from Washington to reverse the momentum they felt had been lost as a result of Lincoln’s speeches. Trumbull had authority as a senator that Lincoln lacked—and firsthand knowledge of Douglas’s record in the Senate. On August 7, Trumbull spoke in Chicago. He offered a corrective to any misimpressions that Lincoln might have created. “The charge that we want to have anything to do with negroes is utterly untrue. It is a false clamor, raised to mislead the public mind. Our policy is, to have nothing to do with them. . . . I want to have nothing to do either with the free negro or the slave negro. We, the Republican Party, are the white man’s party.”

  Not once did Trumbull bother to mention the Republican candidate’s name or refer even obliquely to him. Instead he accused Douglas of hypocrisy, that he had been central to a “plot” against “popular sovereignty.” Trumbull revealed that when a provision to a bill proposed by Senator Robert Toombs had been proposed to provide for a vote in Kansas on a constitution, free or slave, on June 25, 1856, Douglas as chairman of the Committee on Territories stripped the measure of the referendum. “It is preposterous,” said Trumbull, “it is the most damnable effrontery that man ever put on, to conceal a scheme to defraud and cheat a people out of their rights, and then claim credit for it.” Douglas was enraged, calling Trumbull “the miserable, craven-hearted wretch,” but the charge could not be refuted for the simple reason that it was true. “I will cram the truth down his throat, till he shall cry enough,” said Trumbull.