All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  Bas relief, Lincoln-Douglas debate at Quincy, by Loredo Taft

  Quincy was a town on the Mississippi that had originally been Douglas’s home, had tilted Democratic against Whigs, gone for Buchanan in 1856, but had a sizable German population, in short, the sort of swing district Lincoln needed. On October 13, he opened by replying again to well-worn accusations. Talking about misrepresentations of what Lincoln said where and the different platforms of the Republican Party was becoming tired theater. Then he got to slavery itself. He called slavery “wrong” thirty-three times. “I suggest that the difference of opinion, reduced to its lowest terms, is no other than the difference between the men who think slavery a wrong and those who do not think it wrong. The Republican party think it wrong—we think it is a moral, a social and a political wrong. We think it as a wrong not confining itself merely to the persons or the States where it exists, but that it is a wrong in its tendency, to say the least, that extends itself to the existence of the whole nation. Because we think it wrong, we propose a course of policy that shall deal with it as a wrong. We deal with it as with any other wrong, in so far as we can prevent its growing any larger, and so deal with it that in the run of time there may be some promise of an end to it.”

  Douglas would not engage Lincoln on the moral wrong of slavery. He immediately accused him of slander. “I regret that Mr. Lincoln should have deemed it proper for him to again indulge in gross personalities and base insinuations in regard to the Springfield resolutions.” He went through his old arguments in elaborate detail, again accused Lincoln of hypocrisy and quoted the Chicago speech. “Did old Giddings, when he came down among you four years ago, preach more radical abolitionism than that? (‘No, never.’) Did Lovejoy, or Lloyd Garrison, or Wendell Phillips, or Fred Douglass, ever take higher Abolition grounds than that? . . . He knew that I alluded to his negro-equality doctrines when I spoke of the enormity of his principles, yet he did not find it convenient to answer on that point.” Then he cited the “house divided” speech, ridiculing Lincoln. “How then does Lincoln propose to save the Union, unless by compelling all the States to become free, so that the house shall not be divided against itself? He intends making them all free; he will preserve the Union in that way, and yet, he is not going to interfere with slavery anywhere it now exists. How is he going to bring it about? Why, he will agitate, he will induce the North to agitate until the South shall be worried out, and forced to abolish slavery. . . . and it does not become Mr. Lincoln, or anybody else, to tell the people of Kentucky that they have no consciences, that they are living in a state of iniquity, and that they are cherishing an institution to their bosoms in violation of the law of God. Better for him to adopt the doctrine of ‘judge not lest ye shall be judged.’ ”

  Lincoln replied that Douglas defied the founders on “the institution of slavery.” “Judge Douglas could not let it stand upon the basis which our fathers placed it, but removed it, and put it upon the cotton-gin basis.”

  Quickly, he moved on to the Dred Scott ruling as the refutation of Douglas’s popular sovereignty. “The truth about the matter is this: Judge Douglas has sung paeans to his ‘Popular Sovereignty’ doctrine until his Supreme Court, co-operating with him, has squatted his Squatter Sovereignty out. But he will keep up this species of humbuggery about Squatter Sovereignty. He has at last invented this sort of do-nothing Sovereignty—that the people may exclude slavery by a sort of ‘Sovereignty’ that is exercised by doing nothing at all. Is not that running his Popular Sovereignty down awfully? Has it not got down as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death?”

  Lincoln defended his belief in equality as he had stated it at Chicago. Douglas, he said, “thinks that is a terrible subject for me to handle. . . . The Judge has taken great exception to my adopting the heretical statement in the Declaration of Independence, that ‘all men are created equal,’ and he has a great deal to say about negro equality. I want to say that in sometimes alluding to the Declaration of Independence, I have only uttered the sentiments that Henry Clay used to hold.” And he quoted Clay approving of the sentiment. Lincoln finished by standing on his charge of conspiracy. “I won’t withdraw the charge in regard to a conspiracy to make slavery national,” he said. He went into the “certain matters of fact,” brushing aside whether Buchanan was “in the country at that time” and who owned Dred Scott and what their politics were in order simply to state it was “a made up case, for the purpose of getting that decision.” And then: “But my time is out and I can say no more.”

  Carl Schurz met Lincoln for the first time on the train to Quincy. Schurz, the exiled German liberal, had run unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in Wisconsin the year before and volunteered as a speaker for Lincoln’s campaign. He admitted to being “somewhat startled by his appearance.”

  On his head he wore a somewhat battered “stove-pipe” hat. His neck emerged, long and sinewy, from a white collar turned down over a thin black necktie. His lank, ungainly body was clad in a rusty black dress coat with sleeves that should have been longer; but his arms appeared so long that the sleeves of a “store” coat could hardly be expected to cover them all the way down to the wrists. His black trousers, too, permitted a very full view of his large feet. On his left arm he carried a gray woolen shawl, which evidently served him for an overcoat in chilly weather. His left hand held a cotton umbrella of the bulging kind, and also a black satchel that bore the marks of long and hard usage. His right he had kept free for handshaking, of which there was no end until everybody in the car seemed to be satisfied. I had seen, in Washington and in the West, several public men of rough appearance; but none whose looks seemed quite so uncouth, not to say grotesque, as Lincoln’s.

  Schurz was equally surprised at Lincoln’s platform performance. “His voice was not musical, rather high-keyed, and apt to turn into a shrill treble in moments of excitement; but it was not positively disagreeable. It had an exceedingly penetrating, far-reaching quality. The looks of the audience convinced me that every word he spoke was understood at the remotest edges of the vast assemblage. His gesture was awkward. He swung his long arms sometimes in a very ungraceful manner. Now and then he would, to give particular emphasis to a point, bend his knees and body with a sudden downward jerk, and then shoot up again with a vehemence that raised him to his tip-toes and made him look much taller than he really was—a manner of enlivening a speech which at that time was, and perhaps still is, not unusual in the West, but which he succeeded in avoiding at a later period.”

  Douglas appeared to Schurz as Lincoln’s opposite in looks, manner, and sympathy. “No more striking contrast could have been imagined than that between those two men as they appeared upon the platform. By the side of Lincoln’s tall, lank, and ungainly form, Douglas stood almost like a dwarf, very short of stature, but square-shouldered and broad-chested, a massive head upon a strong neck, the very embodiment of force, combativeness, and staying power. I have drawn his portrait when describing my first impressions of Washington City, and I apprehend it was not a flattering one. On that stage at Quincy he looked rather natty and well groomed in excellently fitting broadcloth and shining linen. But his face seemed a little puffy, and it was said that he had been drinking hard with some boon companions either on his journey or after his arrival. The deep, horizontal wrinkle between his keen eyes was unusually dark and scowling.”

  In Schurz’s telling, Lincoln’s last half hour “seemed completely to change the temper of the atmosphere. He replied to Douglas’s arguments and attacks with rapid thrusts so deft and piercing, with humorous retort so quaint and pat, and with witty illustrations so clinching, and he did it all so good-naturedly, that the meeting, again and again, broke out in bursts of delight by which even many of his opponents were carried away, while the scowl on Douglas’s face grew darker and darker. Those who by way of historical study now read the printed report of that speech and of its pointed allusions to persons then in
the public eye, and to the happenings of those days, will hardly appreciate the effect its delivery produced on the spot.”

  Two days later, on October 15, about 125 miles downriver from Quincy, the final debate was held at Alton, just across the Mississippi from St. Louis, where Elijah Lovejoy had been killed twenty-one years earlier by an antislavery mob. Five thousand people assembled to listen, cheer, and jeer. This was Douglas’s chance to hammer his nails. “The issue thus being made up between Mr. Lincoln and myself on three points, we went before the people of the State.” Those three points were: “First, that this Government could not endure permanently divided into free and slave States, as our fathers made it; that they must all become free or all become slave; all become one thing or all become the other, otherwise this Union could not continue to exist. I give you his opinions almost in the identical language he used. His second proposition was a crusade against the Supreme Court of the United States because of the Dred Scott decision; urging as an especial reason for his opposition to that decision that it deprived the negroes of the rights and benefits of that clause in the Constitution of the United States which guaranties to the citizens of each State all the rights, privileges, and immunities of the citizens of the several States.” And third, as Lincoln said in his Chicago speech: “that the Declaration of Independence having declared all men free and equal, by Divine law, also that negro equality was an inalienable right, of which they could not be deprived.”

  Douglas asked the audience to engage in a thought experiment about Lincoln as a founding father. “Imagine for a moment that Mr. Lincoln had been a member of the Convention that framed the Constitution,” he said. And imagine he had said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” With an adroit twist, Douglas explained that given the reaction Lincoln would have been the founding father of universal slavery. “You see that if this abolition doctrine of Mr. Lincoln had prevailed when the Government was made, it would have established slavery as a permanent institution, in all the States.”

  Douglas recounted the “warfare” conducted against him for opposing the Lecompton Constitution and how he had bravely defied Buchanan for his principle of popular sovereignty. “They now tell me that I am not a Democrat, because I assert that the people of a Territory, as well as those of a State, have the right to decide for themselves whether slavery can or cannot exist in such Territory.” He quoted Buchanan in favor of popular sovereignty, then Jefferson Davis, Congressman James Orr of South Carolina, and Alexander Stephens. Douglas dramatized himself as the man in the arena, alone against all the powers that be. “It is the principle on which James Buchanan was made President. Without that principle he never would have been made President of the United States. I will never violate or abandon that doctrine if I have to stand alone. (‘Hurrah for Douglas.’) I have resisted the blandishments and threats of power on the one side, and seduction on the other, and have stood immovably for that principle, fighting for it when assailed by Northern mobs, or threatened by Southern hostility.”

  Just as he stood against Buchanan and the others, he also took his stand against Lincoln for his abolitionist heresy. “But the Abolition party really think that under the Declaration of Independence the negro is equal to the white man, and that negro equality is an inalienable right conferred by the Almighty, and hence that all human laws in violation of it are null and void. With such men it is no use for me to argue. I hold that the signers of the Declaration of Independence had no reference to negroes at all when they declared all men to be created equal. They did not mean negro, nor the savage Indians, nor the Fejee Islanders, nor any other barbarous race. They were speaking of white men.” But the peace was disturbed by “these ambitious Northern men,” who “wished for a sectional organization”—the Republican Party—and “formed a scheme to excite the North against the South.”

  It was Lincoln’s turn, and within ten seconds he completely shifted the tone, opening with praise for Douglas “gradually improving in regard to his war with the Administration. [Laughter, ‘That’s so.’] At Quincy, day before yesterday, he was a little more severe upon the Administration than I had heard him upon any occasion, and I took pains to compliment him for it. I then told him to ‘Give it to them with all the power he had’; and as some of them were present, I told them I would be very much obliged if they would give it to him in about the same way. [Uproarious laughter and cheers.] I take it he has now vastly improved upon the attack he made then upon the Administration. I flatter myself he has really taken my advice on this subject. All I can say now is to re-commend to him and to them what I then commended—to prosecute the war against one another in the most vigorous manner. I say to them again—‘Go it, husband! Go it, bear!’ [Great laughter.]”

  Defending himself against the charges thrown at him, the statements in Chicago and elsewhere, Lincoln stepped through the bramble of accusations to a higher plane with the vantage point and clarity of history. Finally, he spoke in sharp concise sentences to express the thought he had been forging for years.

  At Galesburg the other day, I said in answer to Judge Douglas, that three years ago there never had been a man, so far as I knew or believed, in the whole world, who had said that the Declaration of Independence did not include negroes in the term “all men.” I reassert it to-day. I assert that Judge Douglas and all his friends may search the whole records of the country, and it will be a matter of great astonishment to me if they shall be able to find that one human being three years ago had ever uttered the astounding sentiment that the term “all men” in the Declaration did not include the negro. Do not let me be misunderstood. I know that more than three years ago there were men who, finding this assertion constantly in the way of their schemes to bring about the ascendancy and perpetuation of slavery, denied the truth of it. I know that Mr. Calhoun and all the politicians of his school denied the truth of the Declaration. I know that it ran along in the mouth of some Southern men for a period of years, ending at last in that shameful though rather forcible declaration of [Senator John] Pettit of Indiana, upon the floor of the United States Senate, that the Declaration of Independence was in that respect “a self-evident lie,” rather than a self-evident truth. But I say, with a perfect knowledge of all this hawking at the Declaration without directly attacking it, that three years ago there never had lived a man who had ventured to assail it in the sneaking way of pretending to believe it and then asserting it did not include the negro. I believe the first man who ever said it was Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case, and the next to him was our friend, Stephen A. Douglas. And now it has become the catch-word of the entire party.

  Lincoln quoted Clay at length on the Declaration, as he had at Quincy, but Lincoln went beyond his Clay quotations to state himself, “And when this new principle—this new proposition that no human being ever thought of three years ago—is brought forward, I combat it as having an evil tendency, if not an evil design. I combat it as having a tendency to dehumanize the negro—to take away from him the right of ever striving to be a man. I combat it as being one of the thousand things constantly done in these days to prepare the public mind to make property, and nothing but property, of the negro in all the States of this Union.”

  He quoted Clay again: “I desire no concealment of my opinions in regard to the institution of slavery. I look upon it as a great evil.” “But when Mr. Clay says that in laying the foundations of societies in our Territories where it does not exist, he would be opposed to the introduction of slavery as an element, I insist that we have his warrant—his license for insisting upon the exclusion of that element which he declared in such strong and emphatic language was most hateful to him. [Loud applause.]”

  Lincoln went to the root, to the language of the Constitution. “Again, the institution of slavery is only mentioned in the Constitution of the United States two or three times, and in neither of these cases does the word ‘slavery’ or ‘negro race’ occur; but covert language is used each time, and for a purpose fu
ll of significance. . . . And I understand the contemporaneous history of those times to be that covert language was used with a purpose, and that purpose was that in our Constitution, which it was hoped and is still hoped will endure forever—when it should be read by intelligent and patriotic men, after the institution of slavery had passed from among us—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.] This is part of the evidence that the fathers of the Government expected and intended the institution of slavery to come to an end.”

  Lincoln now turned the founders on Douglas. His betrayal was not just in his interpretation. By flouting their understanding, he violated their intention and introduced on his own an extension of slavery. He had not been neutral or passive. He had not stood back to appeal to the principle of popular sovereignty. He had acted himself as the agent of chaos.

  It is not true that our fathers, as Judge Douglas assumes, made this Government part slave and part free. Understand the sense in which he puts it. He assumes that slavery is a rightful thing within itself—was introduced by the framers of the Constitution. The exact truth is, that they found the institution existing among us, and they left it as they found it. But in making the Government they left this institution with many clear marks of disapprobation upon it. They found slavery among them, and they left it among them because of the difficulty—the absolute impossibility of its immediate removal. And when Judge Douglas asks me why we cannot let it remain part slave and part free, as the fathers of the Government made it, he asks a question based upon an assumption which is itself a falsehood; and I turn upon him and ask him the question, when the policy that the fathers of the Government had adopted in relation to this element among us was the best policy in the world—the only wise policy—the only policy that we can ever safely continue upon—that will ever give us peace unless this dangerous element masters us all and becomes a national institution—I turn upon him and ask him why he could not let it alone. [Great and prolonged cheering.] I turn and ask him why he was driven to the necessity of introducing a new policy in regard to it?