Lincoln's Mentors

by Michael J. Gerhardt

  Lincoln responded to Wentworth’s threat as he had done to Hardin’s efforts years before to derail his candidacy for the House. There were eighty-seven seats up in the state legislature, and Lincoln had to find a way to secure at least a majority of the Republicans. With Lincoln’s approval, his supporters went to county conventions to secure support for his nomination to the U.S. Senate. With that in hand, they arranged, for only the second time in American history, to have a statewide convention held for the purpose of nominating a candidate for the Senate. Lincoln had not been moved to do so by any principle but rather, as he said, “more for the object of closing down upon this everlasting croaking about Wentworth, than anything else.”49

  When Republicans convened at the statehouse for their convention on June 16, 1858, the outcome was preordained. First, because Lincoln and other Republicans approved the platform Browning had drafted for the prior convention establishing the party, they asked him to draft an almost identical platform for this one. After nominating candidates for state treasurer and superintendent of education, they turned to the business of deciding on a nominee to challenge Douglas. The Lincoln forces quickly played their hand: state legislator Norman Judd and his Chicago delegation unfurled a banner declaring, COOK COUNTY IS FOR ABRAHAM LINCOLN. As the delegates applauded, a member from the Peoria delegation moved for the convention to adopt the motto, “Illinois Is for Abraham Lincoln.” The resulting momentum crushed Wentworth’s chances, and the convention moved unanimously to nominate Lincoln as “the first and only choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the United States Senate, as the successor of Stephen A. Douglas.”50

  Lincoln secured the nomination at five o’clock on June 16, 1858. The convention scheduled Lincoln’s acceptance speech for three hours later. He had been working on his draft for some time, and now he read the draft to Swett, Herndon, Palmer, and other campaign advisers. They all agreed on one thing—the speech would end Lincoln’s political career. Herndon thought it was powerful but was delivering the wrong message at the wrong time. Years later, Leonard Swett blamed the speech for Lincoln’s defeat: “Nothing could have been more unfortunate or inappropriate; it was saying first the wrong thing, yet he saw it as an abstract truth, but standing by the speech ultimately would find him in the right place.”51 Herndon agreed that the speech proved, in spite of what he thought, to be helpful to Lincoln in the long run: “Through logic inductively seen, Lincoln as a statesman, political philosopher, announced an eternal truth—not only as broad as America, but covers the world.”

  Lincoln rejected the advice to modify his message or give a more palatable one. He told them, “The proposition [set forth in it] is indisputably true . . . and I will deliver it as written. I want to use some universally known figure, expressed in simple language as universally known, that it may strike home to the minds of men in order to rouse them to the peril of the times.”52 Lincoln had found the self-assurance to speak in his voice. He could not merely compromise for the sake of compromise. Even Clay had understood that there had to be inviolable values—the Union was one, and opposing the extension of slavery was another. Clay did not write his speeches to be read but to be delivered. Lincoln was writing his speech to be both delivered and read later in newspapers. His message had to be simple and direct so anyone reading in a newspaper or reciting it aloud could experience the power of his words. So confident was Lincoln, he invited reporters to cover the speech and spread its message wherever their papers were sold. It soon became known as the House Divided Speech.

  Lincoln arrived at the Illinois State Capitol at eight o’clock on June 16, 1858. It was a familiar venue where he had spoken dozens of times. He began with an homage to Daniel Webster. No one delivered more powerful opening lines than Webster, and Lincoln knew every word of Webster’s famous reply to Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina, the defender of nullification. Rising from his desk in the old Senate chamber, Webster had opened his rebuttal with an elegant metaphor:

  When the mariner has been tossed for many days in thick weather, and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course. Let us imitate this prudence, and before we float farther, refer to the point from which we departed, that we may at least be able conjecture where we are now.53

  Lincoln adapted that same opening for his midwestern audience, in an early but significant sign of his mastery of simplifying flowery declarations and complex arguments. He wasn’t speaking to other senators but to the people of his state. He wasn’t aiming to reach the educated elite but the farmers and laborers he’d spoken to for more than two decades in countless campaign rallies. Fancy images were inauthentic. If his message reached them, it could move them to move their representatives and party leaders in Lincoln’s favor.

  Lincoln’s opening thus did not mince words: “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.”54 From there, he reminded his listeners that “we are now in the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.”55 However, under the Pierce and Buchanan policy of appeasing the slave power,

  that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has consistently augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.56

  It was common for Lincoln to try out his speeches and arguments on different audiences and keep tinkering with his message until the last moment. The metaphor of a house divided was not new, either for Lincoln or his audience. For those who had read Aesop’s fables, it was familiar. For those who read the Bible, it was even more so. As David Herbert Donald suggests in his biography of Lincoln, the phrase “was familiar to virtually everybody in a Bible-reading, churchgoing state like Illinois; it appeared in three of the Gospels.”57 Lincoln had used the image as early as 1843 in urging party solidarity among the Whigs, and abolitionist Wendell Phillips had used it in his speeches condemning slavery in the 1840s and later. The idea behind the metaphor as he now used it, that slavery and freedom were incompatible, had been a standard part of the abolitionists’ argument for decades. Webster, too, had used the phrase. As Donald determined, “As early as 1855, after his first defeat for the Senate, [Lincoln] raised the question with a Kentucky correspondent, ‘Can we, as a nation, continue together permanently—forever—half slave and half free?’” During the Frémont campaign the next year, he used the same phrase again, and in December 1857 Lincoln used it in another speech he was drafting. The persistent use was clever rhetorically, for it immediately made his audience feel smart and identify Lincoln as one of them.

  Having shared that powerful message at the outset, Lincoln then launched into a broadside against the Democrats. Just as he had done in his response to Douglas on Dred Scott, Lincoln returned to his theme that the Democrats likely were conspiring as their next step in protecting slavery to get a Supreme Court opinion that extended the logic of the decision to bar any state from keeping someone entering with his slaves. “But when we see,” he told his fellow Republicans, “a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance—and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or mill, all these tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and . . . not a piece too many or too few,” it was impossible not to think the four men had worked from the same plan.58 With that, Lincoln accused Douglas, Pierce, Taney, and Buchanan of working in concert to strengthen and extend the slave power. He
predicted, “Put that and that together, and we have another nice little niche, which we may, ere long, see filled with another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a state to exclude slavery from its limits. [Such] a decision is all that slavery now lacks of being alike lawful in all the States.”59

  VI

  * * *

  By 1858, Lincoln and Stephen Douglas had been debating each other for more than two decades. They had done it before large crowds, as in Peoria, and smaller ones, as when Lincoln substituted for Stuart in 1838. They had debated in taverns and at conventions. Lincoln had watched Douglas debate John Todd Stuart throughout the district in 1838, and he followed Orville Browning’s debates with Douglas in their 1843 contest for the House. In 1838, Stuart had bested Douglas, barely, while five years later Browning had lost, albeit by a respectable margin. In debates, Stuart matched Douglas’s combative style with his own brand of sarcasm and taunting, while Browning, with considerably thinner skin than either Stuart or Lincoln, had reached a different agreement beforehand with Douglas “not to violate with each other the courtesies and proprieties of life; and not to permit any ardor or excitement of debate to betray us into coarse and unmanly personalities; [and] the compact was well and faithfully kept on both sides . . . Not one unkind word or discourteous act passed between us.”60

  Lincoln and Douglas had met so often on the battlefield of politics that they had developed a long-standing respect for each other. When Lincoln received the Republican nomination for senator, Douglas told a newspaper man, “I shall have my hands full. He is as honest as he is shrewd.”61 Despite the stinging rebukes Lincoln directed at Douglas in the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Bleeding Kansas, he openly acknowledged Douglas outshone him:

  Senator Douglas is of world-wide renown. All of the anxious politicians of his party, or who have been of his party for years past, have been looking upon him as certainly, at no distant day, to be the President of the United States. They have seen, in his jolly, fruitful face, post offices, land offices, marshalships and Cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting forth in wonderful exuberance, ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands. On the contrary, nobody has ever expected me to be President. In my poor, lean, lank face nobody has ever seen that cabbages were sprouting out.62

  Elevating Douglas while exuding humility about himself was perhaps tongue-in-cheek, but it was a persistent note Lincoln sounded, inspired by Clay’s frequent use of the same device. Herndon agreed with Lincoln’s assessment of Douglas:

  I always found Douglas at the bar to be a broad, fair, and liberal-minded man. Although not a thorough student of the law his large fund of good commonsense kept him in the front rank. He was equally generous and courteous, and he never stooped to gain a case. I know that Lincoln entertained the same view of him. It was only in politics that Douglas demonstrated any want of inflexibility and rectitude, and then only did Lincoln manifest a lack of faith in his morals.63

  Lincoln considered Douglas “a very strong logician, that he had very little humor or imagination; but where he had right on his side very few could make a stronger argument; that he was an exceedingly good judge of human nature, knew the people of the state thoroughly and just how to appeal to their prejudices and was a very powerful opponent, both on and off the stump.”64 Joseph Gillespie recalled that Lincoln “always admitted that Douglass [sic] was a wonderfully great political leader and with a good cause to advocate he thought he would be invincible.”65

  Yet Lincoln hesitated to meet Douglas in debate because he feared that Douglas would stack the crowds with his supporters. With encouragement from Browning, Herndon, Judd, Swett, and others in his kitchen Cabinet, Lincoln warmed to the idea when he realized that standing on the stage with Douglas would improve his own stature and that reporters from Republican-friendly papers would report favorably on his performance. Lincoln saw his advantage. He extended an invitation in writing to Douglas, who initially resisted because Lincoln would tower over him and the debate might raise Lincoln’s profile, but the prospect of statewide and national coverage persuaded him to accept.

  Even after Douglas accepted the invitation and the two men scheduled debates in seven sites around the state, Lincoln knew he had little chance of winning. With Douglas’s help, Democrats in the state legislature had reapportioned seats to enable greater representation from the Southern, more Democratic districts. Douglas thus entered the contest in a strongly favorable position; he just had to keep the Democratic districts in line, while Lincoln had the nearly impossible task of not just carrying the legislators from his districts but somehow snatching a few from Democratic ones.

  Lincoln meticulously examined the results of the past election district by district, which indicated where he should focus his energies. He gave only four speeches in the northern portion of Illinois, four in the south, and otherwise spent his time rallying voters in the central part of the state, where he hoped to generate significant support. He thought his best chance to keep the old Whigs in his camp was to remind them that he was a Henry Clay Whig, as past election patterns made it clear Clay played well in many of the districts he would be traveling through.

  The problem was that Douglas was claiming the mantle of Henry Clay for himself. When Lincoln discovered that John Crittenden, the powerful Kentucky senator who had been Clay’s protégé, had followed Clay in joining the National Republican Party in 1828, and was openly encouraging people to support Douglas, Lincoln wrote him. Lincoln had worked closely in the 1848 presidential campaign with Crittenden, whom he thought was as devout a party man as himself and Clay. Crittenden responded that in fact the report was true and that he felt a Douglas reelection was “necessary as a rebuke to the Administration, and a vindication of the great cause of popular rights and public justice.”66 Crittenden was no friend to him or to Clay’s memory.

  Because of the reapportionment in the state, Douglas had everything to lose in the election. On the one hand, if defeated, Lincoln would be in no worse position than he was now—out of office trying to find his way back in, but likely to have enhanced his reputation and gained national stature by going toe-to-toe with such a daunting and powerful opponent. Douglas was fully aware he could not let his guard down; no one else had more experience debating Douglas than Lincoln.67 Lincoln never let his guard down, either. Whatever his respect for Douglas may have been, he distrusted his opponent, whom Lincoln regarded as dangerous, unprincipled, and underhanded.

  In the seven debates, the two men covered many familiar subjects, ranging from popular sovereignty to slavery to Douglas’s charge that Lincoln and his party were dangerous radicals. They were fighting for the middle, and that meant they were fighting over who had claim to Clay’s legacy. Douglas claimed that he was Clay’s true heir, since Clay and Douglas had both declared themselves devotees of Jefferson, and Douglas had worked with Clay to fashion the Compromise of 1850. Lincoln scoffed at the idea, and the outsize influence of Clay, particularly in Lincoln’s thinking, was central in every debate. At the first debate, in Ottawa, Illinois, Lincoln quoted Clay more than forty times, more than he cited any founder or prior president. Together, the two combatants quoted and mentioned Clay nearly a hundred times. These numbers do not include the many times Lincoln was talking about an idea or concept he learned from Clay. Six years after Lincoln delivered his eulogy of Clay, championing his legacy was crucial to the future of his campaign and the country. Proclaimed Lincoln,

  Henry Clay, my beau ideal of a statesman, the man for whom I fought all my humble life. [Clay] once said of a class of men who would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, that they must, if they would do this, go back to the era of our Independence, and muzzle the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return; they must blow out the moral lights around us; they must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate there the love of liberty; and then, and not till then, could they perpetuate slav
ery in this country!68

  Clay had been one of the first party standard bearers to insist that following the Constitution meant keeping faith with the Declaration of Independence, a position he regarded as the conservative one, derived from Thomas Jefferson, designed to keep the Union intact, and to preserve the ideals of both texts. (George Prentice rammed this point home in his 1830 campaign biography of Clay.) In repeatedly re-sounding that same theme, Lincoln hoped to cast Douglas and other Democratic leaders such as Taney and Buchanan as the radicals bent on destroying the promises and ideals of the nation’s founding documents. Rather than intend to protect slavery, the framers had drafted a Constitution that gave the federal government the power to regulate it, Lincoln argued. It was Lincoln and the Republican Party that took the conservative position to follow the original scheme of the Constitution and preserve its original ideals and promises; it was Douglas and his cohorts who were willing to destroy the country’s founding commitments for the sake of appeasing slave-owners.

  In the second debate, held in Freeport, Illinois, Lincoln said,

  Yet as a member of Congress, I should not with my present views, be in favor of endeavoring to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, unless it would be upon these conditions: First, that the abolition should be gradual. Washington, Jefferson, and Clay had all endorsed the principle of gradual emancipation. Second, that it should be on a vote of the majority of qualified voters in the District; and third, that compensation should be made to unwilling owners.69