But the responsibility did not simply belong to Douglas. It was a power, the Slave Power, deeply entrenched, grasping for more power, overriding politicians and parties, dividing churches, a power they required another power to stop it, not the indifference of a Douglas.
But is it true that all the difficulty and agitation we have in regard to this institution of slavery springs from office seeking—from the mere ambition of politicians? Is that the truth? How many times have we had danger from this question? Go back to the day of the Missouri Compromise. Go back to the Nullification question, at the bottom of which lay this same slavery question. Go back to the time of the Annexation of Texas. Go back to the troubles that led to the Compromise of 1850. You will find that every time, with the single exception of the Nullification question, they sprung from an endeavor to spread this institution. There never was a party in the history of this country, and there probably never will be, of sufficient strength to disturb the general peace of the country. Parties themselves may be divided and quarrel on minor questions, yet it extends not beyond the parties themselves. But does not this question make a disturbance outside of political circles? Does it not enter into the churches and rend them asunder? What divided the great Methodist Church into two parts, North and South? What has raised this constant disturbance in every Presbyterian General Assembly that meets? What disturbed the Unitarian Church in this very city two years ago? What has jarred and shaken the great American Tract Society recently, not yet splitting it, but sure to divide it in the end? Is it not this same mighty, deep-seated power that somehow operates on the minds of men, exciting and stirring them up in every avenue of society—in politics, in religion, in literature, in morals, in all the manifold relations of life? [Applause.] Is this the work of politicians? Is that irresistible power which for fifty years has shaken the Government and agitated the people to be stilled and subdued by pretending that it is an exceedingly simple thing, and we ought not to talk about it? [Great cheers and laughter.] If you will get every body else to stop talking about it, I assure you I will quit before they have half done so. [Renewed laughter.] But where is the philosophy or statesmanship which assumes that you can quiet that disturbing element in our society which has disturbed us for more than half a century, which has been the only serious danger that has threatened our institutions—I say, where is the philosophy or the statesmanship based on the assumption that we are to quit talking about it, [applause] and that the public mind is all at once to cease being agitated by it? Yet this is the policy here in the north that Douglas is advocating—that we are to care nothing about it! I ask you if it is not a false philosophy? Is it not a false statesmanship that undertakes to build up a system of policy upon the basis of caring nothing about the very thing that everybody does care the most about? [‘Yes, yes,’ and applause]—a thing which all experience has shown we care a very great deal about? [Laughter and applause.]
For Lincoln the moral issue was entwined with the constitutional issue, which could only be resolved as a political issue. Here he came to the heart of the matter, beyond caviling over his various statements, at last reaching the culmination of his decades’ long contest for primacy with Douglas, which Douglas had always won, to demonstrate, as Lincoln adduced from Euclid, a geometry against tyranny and slavery.
“The Democratic policy in regard to that institution will not tolerate the merest breath, the slightest hint, of the least degree of wrong about it,” he said.
Try it by some of Judge Douglas’s arguments. He says he “don’t care whether it is voted up or voted down” in the Territories. I do not care myself in dealing with that expression, whether it is intended to be expressive of his individual sentiments on the subject, or only of the national policy he desires to have established. It is alike valuable for my purpose. Any man can say that who does not see anything wrong in slavery, but no man can logically say it who does see a wrong in it; because no man can logically say he don’t care whether a wrong is voted up or voted down. He may say he don’t care whether an indifferent thing is voted up or down, but he must logically have a choice between a right thing and a wrong thing. He contends that whatever community wants slaves has a right to have them. So they have if it is not a wrong. But if it is a wrong, he cannot say people have a right to do wrong. He says that upon the score of equality, slaves should be allowed to go in a new Territory, like other property. This is strictly logical if there is no difference between it and other property. If it and other property are equal, his argument is entirely logical. But if you insist that one is wrong and the other right, there is no use to institute a comparison between right and wrong. You may turn over everything in the Democratic policy from beginning to end, whether in the shape it takes on the statute book, in the shape it takes in the Dred Scott decision, in the shape it takes in conversation, or the shape it takes in short maxim-like arguments—it everywhere carefully excludes the idea that there is anything 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. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ 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. I was glad to express my gratitude at Quincy, and I re-express it here to Judge Douglas—that he looks to no end of the institution of slavery. That will help the people to see where the struggle really is. It will hereafter place with us all men who really do wish the wrong may have an end. And whenever we can get rid of the fog which obscures the real question—when we can get Judge Douglas and his friends to avow a policy looking to its perpetuation—we can get out from among that class of men and bring them to the side of those who treat it as a wrong. Then there will soon be an end of it, and that end will be its “ultimate extinction.”
Lincoln reached the crescendo of the seven debates, its dramatic climax, but he was informed he had ten more minutes, so he filled in mostly on Dred Scott.
Douglas’s response began by melding his principle of popular sovereignty with his theme against “negro equality.” “I care more for the great principle of self-government, the right of the people to rule, than I do for all the negroes in Christendom,” he said. (He did not use the word “negroes.”) Then he went to Lincoln’s traitorous position on the Mexican War, which he claimed was equivalent to his opposition to Douglas. “That a man who takes sides with the common enemy against his own country in time of war should rejoice in a war being made on me now, is very natural.” Lincoln also made war on Henry Clay. “Who got up that sectional strife that Clay had to be called upon to quell? I have heard Lincoln boast that he voted forty-two times for the Wilmot proviso, and that he would have voted as many times more if he could. (Laughter.) Lincoln is the man, in connection with Seward, Chase, Giddings, and other Abolitionists, who got up that strife that I helped Clay to put down. (Tremendous applause.)” He scorned Lincoln for talking about the extinction and evil of slavery. “His idea is that he will prohibit slavery in all the Territories and thus force them all to become free States, surrounding the slave States with a cordon of free States and hemming them in, keeping the slaves confined to their present limits whilst they go on multiplying until the soil on which they live will no longer feed them, and he will thus be able to put slavery in a course of ultimate extinction by starvation. (Cheers.) He will extinguish slavery in the Southern States as the French general exterminated the Algerines when he smoked them out. He is going to extinguis
h slavery by surrounding the slave States, hemming in the slaves and starving them out of existence, as you smoke a fox out of his hole. He intends to do that in the name of humanity and Christianity, in order that we may get rid of the terrible crime and sin entailed upon our fathers of holding slaves. (Laughter and cheers.)”
Douglas continued his mockery and ridicule. “He says that this slavery question is now the bone of contention. Why? Simply because agitators have combined in all the free States to make war upon it. Suppose the agitators in the States should combine in one-half of the Union to make war upon the railroad system of the other half? They would thus be driven to the same sectional strife. Suppose one section makes war upon any other peculiar institution of the opposite section, and the same strife is produced. The only remedy and safety is that we shall stand by the Constitution as our fathers made it, obey the laws as they are passed, while they stand the proper test and sustain the decisions of the Supreme Court and the constituted authorities.” And on that defense of Taney’s reputation in the Dred Scott decision the great debates ended, the last exchange on the same stage between Lincoln and Douglas.
Since Douglas was appointed to his first political office, state’s attorney of Morgan County, in 1834, he had systematically accumulated power in Illinois. He rose from office to office, from the state legislature to Springfield Land Office to secretary of state, from the Illinois Supreme Court to the House of Representatives, and to the Senate, his platform for his ultimate ascension to the presidency. He had come up as a loyal member of the party devoted to Jackson, the dominant party of the state. Swiftly, he took over the Democratic Party, imposing a convention system and placing his loyalists in strategic positions. His achievements in Washington as the central actor in the Compromise of 1850, the Illinois Central Railroad Act, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, whatever the criticism, made him into a titanic figure, especially compared to puny Illinois politicians. All this power was projected through his personal energy, his ferocity in political combat, his kinetic speeches punctuated by sweat, shouts, and ripping of shirts. He stood more than his own ground against the great men of the Senate and with presidents. Douglas produced around himself a magnetic field of awe. But facing Lincoln in seven debates, one after another, the Little Giant shrank in stature. He put Lincoln on the defensive at the start, but he could not intimidate, humiliate, or embarrass him. Lincoln’s use of logic, history, and moral appeal finally elevated him above Douglas. Failing to overawe Lincoln, the awe of Douglas dimmed. Douglas was still the senator and still the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president, but an essential and intangible part of his power was spoiled. The damage was apparent in his physical appearance.
“I was really shocked at the condition he was in,” recalled Gustave Koerner.
His face was bronzed, which was natural enough, but it was also bloated, and his looks were haggard, and his voice almost extinct. In conversation he merely whispered. In addressing his audience he made himself understood only by an immense strain, and then only to a very small circle immediately near him. He had the opening and conclusion. His speech, however, was as good as any he had delivered. Lincoln, although sun-burnt, was as fresh as if he had just entered the campaign, and as cool and collected as ever. Without any apparent effort he stated his propositions clearly and tersely, and his whole speech was weighted with noble and deep thoughts. There were no appeals to passion and prejudice. The Alton speech contained, by general admission, some of the finest passages of all the speeches he ever made. When Douglas’s opening speech had been made, he was vociferously cheered. When, after Lincoln’s speech, which made a powerful impression, Douglas made his reply, there was hardly any applause when he closed.
Douglas signaled to T. Lyle Dickey to launch his missile. Four days after the Alton debate, on October 19, at a rally in Decatur, Dickey took the platform to read the full letter from which he had previously quoted Crittenden’s endorsement of Douglas. It was promptly published in the Democratic newspapers. Douglas seized upon it as a club to batter Lincoln for having “betrayed Henry Clay.” “Isn’t he a pretty man to be claiming Old Line Whig support?”
A week after the last debate, in Rushville on October 20 Douglas supporters greeted Lincoln by raising a black flag atop the county courthouse and a black doll swinging from an upstairs window draped with a banner “Hurrah for Lincoln!” On October 23, he was met in Dallas City with a huge painted canvas hung across the main street of a black man above whose head was encircled the word “Equality.”
Douglas traveled in luxury by private train, but the rigors of the campaign exhausted him, his voice cracking and his words often inaudible. In Rock Island, on October 29, Douglas’s final campaign event, supporters paraded before him with banners reading: “This Country Was Made For White Men” and “Down With Negro Equality.”
“The planting and the culture are over; and there remains but the preparation, and the harvest,” said Lincoln in his last speech of the campaign, on October 30, in Springfield. “I have said that in some respects the contest has been painful to me,” he confessed. “Myself and those with whom I act have been constantly accused of a purpose to destroy the Union; and bespattered with every imaginable odious epithet; and some who were friends”—obliquely referring to Dickey—“as it were but yesterday have made themselves most active in this.”
On November 1, the Chicago Tribune published an exposé of Douglas’s Mississippi plantation, “Mississippi or Illinois—Which?” Douglas, in fact, was a slave owner, inheriting from his first wife a large Mississippi cotton plantation. For political purposes the paperwork put it in the names of his two young sons for whom he was guardian and executor of their estate. “If the slaves, the use and benefit of whom Mr. Douglas enjoys, were planted down on some prairie in Illinois, where they could be seen by the Senator’s constituents; if their backs seared by the lash, their bodies pinched by hunger, their limbs beat by excessive overwork, were exposed where they could be gazed upon by the free men of this State, his chances of representing free Illinois in the councils of the Nation would be hopelessly destroyed.” The information in the Tribune originated with Buchanan’s close adviser Senator John Slidell, himself the owner of a Louisiana plantation, who delivered it on a July trip to Chicago to an anti-Douglas Democrat, Dr. Daniel Brainard, who in turn passed it on to the newspaper. James Sheahan, editor of the Chicago Times, defended Douglas, calling the incident “the most violent . . . the last paroxysm of abolition regard for the moral and physical condition of ‘Douglas’ plantation of human chattels,” and a “total failure.” He denounced Slidell for having “sought the election of Lincoln, with his negro equality doctrines, by the defeat of Douglas.” Slidell claimed he had nothing to do with the story, but the Tribune produced documentation that the “authority given for these alleged facts . . . was the Hon. John Slidell, of Louisiana.” (In 1872, Douglas’s sons unsuccessfully sued the federal government for compensation for the Union army’s 1863 expropriation and burning of their plantation’s cotton.)
Election Day was November 2, the Republican legislative vote was greater than it had ever been for the Whigs in Illinois, polling 190,468, more than the 166,374 for the Douglas Democrats. But receiving the returns on election night, “dark, rainy, and gloomy,” said Lincoln, “I had been reading the returns and had ascertained that we had lost the legislature.” Knowledgeable about the districts around the state, he immediately determined that they were going Democratic. The legislature was still apportioned according to the 1850 census and gerrymandered on the basis of 1852, tilted toward the Democrats, giving the victory to Douglas. Lincoln’s party won 53 percent of the vote, Douglas’s 47, but awarded 53 percent of the electoral vote. If the election had been held on the popular vote, the Republicans would have won forty-four seats to the Democrats’ forty-one. Despite having lost the popular vote, the champion of popular sovereignty was returned to his seat in the Senate.
Had the Republicans carried three more of
the Old Whig districts in central Illinois, they would have prevailed. Douglas’s “negro equality” attack had succeeded in making Lincoln unacceptable to enough Old Whigs. Crittenden’s letter had been a fatal stab in the back. And the Buchanan Democrats that fielded their own slate only gained a pathetic 5,071 votes. The Illinois State Journal reported that the “Fillmore vote . . . which both the other parties struggled to secure . . . went for the Douglas candidates.” Of the twenty-two counties in which Fillmore had won 30 percent or more of the vote in 1856, the Democrats won all but two in 1858. Of the fourteen legislative districts in which the Know Nothings had a significant presence, the Democrats carried eleven. Of the legislative seats held by Know Nothings, the Democrats won all six. Across the state, Know Nothings flocked to the Democrats and were repelled by the Republicans. The Know Nothings and Southern-born Old Whigs held the balance of power. They voted for Douglas despite his open hostility to the Know Nothings. Racism trumped nativism. The farther south the district in the state, the greater Douglas’s gains. Thirteen counties, all in southern Illinois, registered particularly heavy increases from the 1856 vote for Democrats of over 15 percent for Douglas. The Democrats even picked up two legislative seats in Sangamon County. But the Republicans won the seats in Coles County.
Late on election night, wandering home through Springfield’s streets, Lincoln tripped on the dark, wet path, a final indignity. “A slip, not a fall,” he later recalled.
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