All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  Douglas was rattled. His surrogates attempted to obscure the cynical sleight of hand Trumbull had exposed, but they could not deny it. Trumbull cut to the heart of his pretense to principle. Without consistency on popular sovereignty, Douglas stood exposed as opportunistic, wavering, and untrustworthy. It also cast a harsh light on his conflict with Buchanan, making it appear less a brave struggle than a raw contest for political primacy. Douglas was determined to even the score in the first debate with Lincoln at the small north-central town of Ottawa on August 21.

  In preparation for the contest, Lincoln sat at his desk, undoubtedly in his law office, to compose a fragment of thought. He would not use the words in the debates. He spoke them neither in public nor in intimate conversation. Nobody later reported hearing him utter them. His fragment was unknown until it was discovered decades later. It revealed his deepest motives, the objects of his fierce ambition, his sense of himself engaged in a transatlantic movement, his description of the character of his opponents, and his premonition for an undefined future. “I have never professed an indifference to the honors of official station; and were I to do so now, I should only make myself ridiculous. Yet I have never failed—do not now fail—to remember that in the republican cause there is a higher aim than that of mere office.” He would not appear “ridiculous” even to himself about his striving; he had no need for false humility looking in the mirror. But he was dedicating himself to something higher.

  “I have not allowed myself to forget that the abolition of the Slave-trade by Great Brittain, was agitated a hundred years before it was a final success; that the measure had it’s open fire-eating opponents; it’s stealthy ‘dont care’ opponents; it’s dollar and cent opponents; it’s inferior race opponents; its negro equality opponents; and its religion and good order opponents; that all these opponents got offices, and their adversaries got none.” Lincoln had distinct people in mind in setting out these categories of opponents to emancipation—Southern fire-eaters, Douglas, Northern financial interests, Douglas, Douglas, and proslavery Southern theologians. They might prevail in the present, but were doomed in history. “But I have also remembered that though they blazed, like tallow-candles for a century, at last they flickered in the socket, died out, stank in the dark for a brief season, and were remembered no more, even by the smell.”

  William Wilberforce

  Lincoln invoked the names of the British emancipationists as his aspirational models. “School-boys know that Wilbe[r]force, and Granville Sharpe [sic], helped that cause forward; but who can now name a single man who labored to retard it?” William Wilberforce was the member of Parliament who joined with the small group of English abolitionists, among them Granville Sharp, to end the slave trade through the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and emancipate slaves in the British Empire through the Slave Abolition Act of 1833. The story of his extraordinary struggle may not have been common knowledge to schoolboys in the United States, but it was to Lincoln. He read far and wide, proslavery editorials and tracts, abolitionist literature, and English journals, and was well acquainted with the transatlantic connections of abolitionism. “Remembering these things I can not but regard it as possible that the higher object of this contest may not be completely attained within the term of my natural life. But I can not doubt either that it will come in due time. Even in this view, I am proud, in my passing speck of time, to contribute an humble mite to that glorious consummation, which my own poor eyes may not last to see.”

  It is possible that Lincoln was familiar with Wilberforce’s famous speech of April 18, 1791, commencing his long battle to break the chains of slavery. “Let us not despair; it is a blessed cause, and success, ere long, will crown our exertions. Already we have gained one victory; we have obtained, for these poor creatures, the recognition of their human nature, which, for a while was most shamefully denied. This is the first fruits of our efforts; let us persevere and our triumph will be complete.”

  Lincoln echoed Wilberforce’s approach that insisted on the humanity of slaves as the first and most important step toward reaching emancipation; that the struggle would demand the commitment of patience; that it would require many steps; and that it would prevail. But Lincoln had to win an election.

  At about the same time that Lincoln wrote this fragment he also filled a sheet with campaign strategy. The outcome of the Senate race, of course, would depend on the result of state legislative contests: the legislative was the senatorial. Based on the vote tallies from the 1856 election, Lincoln calculated where to concentrate, which candidates to help, and which were beyond help. District by district, he gamed the election. “By this, it is seen, we give up the districts numbered,” he wrote, figuring those amounted to “22 representatives.” “We take to ourselves, without question . . . 27 representatives.” “Put as doubtful, and to be struggled for . . . 26 representatives.” By different formulas, he adjusted for and against. “Taking the joint vote of Fremont & Fillmore against Buchanan as a test; and the 21.22.25.26.27.&33. with 9 representatives are brought over to our side—raising us to 48 & reducing our adversary to 27.” That was the best-case scenario.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE MORAL LIGHTS

  No one had more faith in the ability of Lincoln than Herndon. But facing the Little Giant in seven debates was a challenge unlike any other. Herndon wrote Theodore Parker on July 24 that “we Republicans have a clever villain to combat. Douglas is an ambitious and an unscrupulous man; he is the greatest liar in all America; he misrepresents Lincoln throughout, and our people generally are not logical enough to see the precise manner, point and issue of the deception.”

  Abraham Lincoln, 1859

  Lincoln had spent more than twenty years yearning for his chance to take on Douglas. His envy that Douglas soared above him made him feel diminished and left behind. He had debated Douglas beginning in 1840 on behalf of William Henry Harrison while Douglas took up the side of Martin Van Buren. Lincoln wrote hundreds of anonymous newspaper editorials over the years criticizing Douglas in the Journal. He futilely followed Douglas around trying to get him to “divide time” to debate the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. He almost joined Douglas in the Senate in 1855 but threw the election to Trumbull rather than let Douglas’s candidate win. His wife and friends thought Trumbull had the place that was meant for him. He was fixed on the Senate race against Douglas since then. Greeley and other Eastern Republicans considered Lincoln an insignificant speck to be brushed aside so the party could align with Douglas in his battle with Buchanan. Lincoln’s advisers except Herndon believed he had stumbled out of the gate with his “house divided” speech. They felt he needed to be handled.

  Douglas’s agreement to engage in a series of debates was unprecedented. Fighting for his political life against a host of enemies became the most riveting spectacle in the country and the national press covered the race as a sensational drama. Lincoln was overnight catapulted into prominence, but only because he was shadowing Douglas. Suddenly, his speeches were reprinted in the great Eastern newspapers. He was gaining the beginnings of a national reputation. But he had no sense that this was the first round of an even greater contest with Douglas. He was not playing on a future chessboard. He was attempting to end Douglas’s career in Illinois and dash all of Douglas’s hopes for higher office. Neither Lincoln nor the Illinois Republicans had a glimmer of his presidential nomination as they pursued the Senate campaign. If Douglas beat him for the Senate seat, Lincoln did not conceive of any future political match with him. At the state convention in June, the Daily Missouri Republican newspaper conducted an informal poll of the delegates and “passengers on the train,” producing a lopsided “preference for the Presidency” in 1860 for Seward with 139 votes, followed by Frémont at 32, McLean with 13, Trumbull 7, Chase 6, W.H. Bissell 2, and “Scattering” 26. Nobody mentioned Lincoln.

  Lincoln’s strategy for the election centered on winning the Fillmore voters of 1856, almost all Old Whigs. He targeted the central counties wi
thin eighty miles of Springfield, where the Fillmore voters were concentrated. He knew that the Democratic-controlled legislature had shaped the districts to give Douglas a likely majority. Instead of reapportioning the districts to account for the explosive growth in the northern part of the state, the legislature left the districts untouched, “by the gerrymandering of the State seven hundred Democratic votes were equal to one thousand Republican votes.” For Lincoln to wait on the sidelines until the elections were resolved and lobby the legislature would be a passive and self-defeating exercise. He had to make the legislative races turn on the Senate race. The legislative had to become the senatorial.

  His attention to political detail was like that of a master tailor. He did not miss a stitch. He contacted his old friend Joe Gillespie, running for the State Senate in Madison County, a crucial swing district located centrally along the Mississippi River. Alton, where Elijah Lovejoy was murdered, was its biggest town. Lincoln had served in the legislature with Gillespie, a Whig who had been a Know Nothing but was now a Republican. Lincoln wrote him on July 16 with political intelligence that “specimens of Douglas democracy” had been in Springfield, “making very confident calculation of beating both you, and your friends for the lower House in that county.” Lincoln advised, “If they do so, it can only be done by carrying the Fillmore men of 1856.” He listed columns of votes in the district from 1856. “By this you will see, if you go through the calculation, that if they get one quarter of the Fillmore votes and you three quarters, they will beat you 125 votes. If they get one fifth and you four fifths, you beat them 179. In Madison alone if our friends get 1000 of the Fillmore votes, and their opponents the remainder—658, we win by just two votes. This shows the whole field, on the basis of the election of 1856.” He added a note of deference and a caution, “Of course you, on the ground, can better determine your line of tactics, than any one off the ground; but it behooves you to be wide awake, and actively working. Don’t neglect it; and write me at your first leisure.”

  Suffering the defection of some of his closest allies, Lincoln felt the Old Whig problem intimately, not just as election numbers on a ledger. John Todd Stuart, from whom he had learned the law and logrolling in the legislature, was vociferously backing Douglas. Stuart had run against Douglas for the Congress in 1838, debated him often, and won by thirty-six votes. But he was outraged that Lincoln met with abolitionists to form the Republican Party. In 1856, he campaigned for Fillmore, railing at rallies against “Black Republicanism,” whose “movement” would “array the north against the South.” According to Herndon, “Between Lincoln and Stuart from 1843 to 1865 there was no good feeling of an honest friendship. Lincoln hated some of the ways of Stuart. Lincoln felt no jealousy toward Stuart, Stuart did toward Lincoln. Stuart in his heart hated Lincoln.”

  Stuart’s law partner, Benjamin Edwards, was a member of Lincoln’s extended family, the brother of Lincoln’s brother-in-law, Ninian Edwards, Jr., and Lincoln’s co-counsel on hundreds of cases. Edwards had required coaxing to go along with the Republicans in 1856, but he felt too uneasy about the abolitionist element to stay. Edwards introduced Douglas at a rally on July 17 at Edwards Grove, his land in Springfield, where “a vast crowd” assembled, bands played, and Douglas spoke for hours. “His friends pronounced it the best speech of his campaign,” recalled Gustave Koerner, the German American leader, a former Democrat turned Republican, who was there. Lincoln appeared, too, but left before Douglas’s remarks. The Journal claimed in its report that the band played over Edwards’s speech. Lincoln came on the train from Bloomington to Springfield with Douglas and his entourage. Leonard Volk, the sculptor, who was a member of Douglas’s party, recalled seeing him disembark. Lincoln “stalked forward alone, taking immense strides . . . carpetbag and an umbrella in his hands, and his coat-skirts flying in the breeze. I managed to keep pretty close in the rear of the tall, gaunt figure, with the head craned forward, apparently much over the balance, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, that was moving something like a hurricane across the rough stubble-field! He approached the rail-fence, sprang over it as nimbly as a boy of eighteen, and disappeared from my sight.”

  Rumor reached Lincoln that Douglas was preparing to announce the endorsement that would be most devastating to Lincoln’s prospects. Lincoln wrote a letter to Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, who represented in the public mind the model of the Old Whig. Not only was he Clay’s successor and had served as the last Whig attorney general but also had been the best man at the second marriage of Lincoln’s father-in-law, Robert S. Todd, Clay’s ally and business partner. Crittenden had abandoned the Whigs for the Know Nothings but still carried the Clay mantle. On July 7, Lincoln wrote him an imploring letter of quiet desperation:

  I beg you will pardon me for the liberty in addressing you upon only so limited an acquaintance, and that acquaintance so long past. I am prompted to do so by a story being whispered about here that you are anxious for the reelection of Mr. Douglas to the United States Senate . . . and that you are pledged to write letters to that effect to your friends here in Illinois, if requested. I do not believe the story, but still it gives me some uneasiness. . . . You have no warmer friends than here in Illinois, and I assure you nine tenths—I believe ninety-nine hundredths—of them would be mortified exceedingly by anything of the sort from you. When I tell you this, make such allowance as you think just for my position, which, I doubt not, you understand. Nor am I fishing for a letter on the other side. Even if such could be had, my judgment is that you would better be hands off! Please drop me a line; and if your purposes are as I hope they are not, please let me know. The confirmation would pain me much, but I should still continue your friend and admirer.

  Crittenden replied on July 29, assuring Lincoln that though it was “highly gratifying to me” that Douglas joined with him in opposing the Lecompton Constitution he had no plans to endorse him. “Since the adjournment of Congress I have not written a single letter to anyone in Illinois.” While Crittenden’s assurance may have been true, it was not the whole truth. Thomas L. Harris, the Democratic candidate for governor of Illinois, wrote Douglas that Crittenden had told him “that he would do anything we desired—he would write to anybody,” and that a letter from Crittenden would “control 20,000 American {Know-Nothing} and Old Whig votes in the center and south.”

  Two days after misleading Lincoln, on August 1, Crittenden wrote a letter to Judge T. Lyle Dickey, Lincoln’s Old Whig friend who previously had talked him out of using the “house divided” phrase and now was operating as a go-between for the Douglas campaign with Crittenden. Indeed, a week later, on August 9, Dickey openly endorsed Douglas. In Dickey’s letter, which he addressed to Benjamin Edwards, he quoted Crittenden praising Douglas for his “courage and patriotism,” for acting “gallantly,” and for “heroism.” He added that he did not want to be perceived as “intermeddling” in the election.

  Lincoln’s paper, the Illinois State Journal, wrote, “The letter is very appropriately addressed to B.S. Edwards, Esq., of this place, also a recent and miraculous convert to the principles of Democracy. Dickey, like Edwards, has been for a long time itching for political honors, and not finding the Whigs or Republicans willing to gratify him in his wishes, has been looking out for an excuse to lop over to the enemy.” The turncoats had stabbed Lincoln in the back, but Crittenden made the deeper thrust to draw blood.

  Since Lincoln’s Chicago speech of July 10, Douglas had traveled around the state flaying him for his remarks on racial equality: “. . . 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.” Douglas would not let Lincoln forget those words, which he repeatedly raised as Lincoln’s major gaffe. He pasted into a sma
ll notebook Lincoln’s “house divided” statement, which he read at every stop as the trigger for his attack lines.

  In Bloomington, Douglas sneered, “If the divine law declares that the white man is the equal of the negro woman, that they are on a perfect equality, I suppose he admits the right of the negro woman to marry the white man.” In Springfield, on July 17, at Edwards Grove, he ridiculed Lincoln’s citation of the Declaration of Independence’s credo that “all men are created equal,” “He thinks that the negro is his brother. I do not think that the negro is any kin of mine at all.” He derided “nigger equality.” And: “We must preserve the purity of the race not only in our politics but in our domestic relations.” In the town of Havana on August 13, Douglas lost his temper, calling Lincoln “a liar, a coward, a wretch and a sneak.” Horace White of the Chicago Tribune reported, “It would be difficult for me to give an adequate idea of the littleness, meanness and foulness of Douglas’ harangue here today. . . . He returned to his vomit half a dozen times with a new volley of bar-room phrases for Lincoln and Trumbull. . . . In the ‘attacking’ part of the speech I heard nothing but negro equality and amalgamation—amalgamation and negro equality—with a slight tincture of blackguardism against the Declaration of Independence.” When Lincoln appeared at Lewistown on August 17, the Democrats posted a large sign: “Lincoln declares the negro his equal.”