Lincoln's Mentors

by Michael J. Gerhardt

  These conditions were familiar to many people in the crowd who remembered Clay, who had pushed for them in 1850.

  Douglas answered that “Clay was dead, and although the sod was not yet green on his grave, this man [Lincoln] undertook to bring into disrepute those great Compromise measures of 1850, with which Clay and Webster were identified.”70 Indeed, Douglas pointed out,

  up to 1854 the old Whig party and the Democratic party had stood on a common platform so far as this slavery question was concerned. You Whigs and we Democrats differed about the bank, the tariff, distribution, the specie circular, and the sub-treasury, but we agreed on this slavery question and the true mode of preserving the peace and harmony of the Union. The Compromise measures of 1850 were introduced by Clay, were defended by Webster, and supported by Cass, and were approved by Fillmore, and sanctioned by the National men of both parties.71

  No one had to remind listeners that Lincoln was back in Springfield practicing law when this was happening. Everyone knew it was Douglas, not Lincoln, who had made the compromise a reality. “Thus,” Douglas said,

  they constituted a common plank upon which Whigs and Democrats stood. In 1852 the Whig party, in its last National Convention at Baltimore, indorsed and approved these measures of Clay, and so did the National Convention of the Democratic party, held that same year. Thus, the old line Whigs and the old line Democrats stood pledged to the great principle of self-government, which guarantees to the people of each Territory the right to decide the slavery question for themselves.

  Now Douglas twisted the knife:

  In 1854, after the death of Clay and Webster, Mr. Lincoln, on the part of the Whigs, undertook to Abolitionize the Whig party, by dissolving it, transferring the members into the Abolition camp and making their train under Giddings, Fred Douglass [who had escaped slavery to become one of the nation’s most eloquent and outspoken advocates for eradicating slavery], Lovejoy, Chase, [Hiram] Farnsworth [of Kansas], and other Abolition leaders.72

  This back-and-forth did not impede Lincoln’s strategy in the second debate. Following the advice of Chicago Tribune managing editor Joseph Medill, Lincoln pressed Douglas to answer four loaded questions: First, would Douglas favor the admission of Kansas before it had the requisite number of inhabitants as specified in the law controlling the admission of new states? Second, could the people of a territory, such as Kansas, “exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a state Constitution?”73 Third, would Douglas follow a Supreme Court decision declaring that the states could not exclude slavery from their limits? Fourth, did Douglas favor acquisition of new territory “in disregard of how such acquisition may affect the nation on the slavery question?”74

  Douglas dodged most of Lincoln’s questions, but it was the second one that Lincoln and his cohort thought was key, and Douglas took the bait. He answered that the passage of “unfriendly legislation” could keep slavery out of any federal territory because “slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere, unless it is supported by local police regulations.”75 He added that “the people of a Territory had the lawful power to exclude slavery, prior to the formation of a [State] Constitution.”76 This was a full embrace of his principle of popular sovereignty, and Lincoln and the Republicans would use it relentlessly as a wedge to divide Douglas from Buchanan and other proslavery Democrats.

  Lincoln also jumped on Douglas’s defense of Dred Scott. His first rejoinder came in response to Douglas’s assertion that he was prepared not to comply with the Dred Scott decision. Lincoln pressed Douglas to take a position on the issue that Dred Scott contradicted Douglas’s principle of popular sovereignty. After ruling in Dred Scott that the federal government could not bar slavery from the territories, the next likely step for the Court would be to forbid states from outlawing slavery, presenting Douglas with the dilemma of choosing either the decision or his principle of popular sovereignty. Something had to give. Forcing Douglas into a corner, Lincoln argued that “there is nothing that can divert or turn him away from this decision. It is nothing to him that Jefferson did not so believe. I have said that I have often heard him approve of Jackson’s course in disregarding the decision of the Supreme Court pronouncing a national bank constitutional. He says, I did not hear him say so . . . though it still seems to me that I heard him say it twenty times.”77

  Lincoln cast Douglas as lacking any principled fidelity to the Supreme Court or the law. He reminded those in attendance that Douglas had endorsed the Democratic Party’s 1856 platform that opposed Jackson’s stance on the national bank. Because the Supreme Court had upheld the constitutionality of the national bank, Jackson’s opposition placed him at odds with the Court. But then Lincoln called attention to the 1840s when Douglas took the lead in Illinois to overturn the “decision of the Supreme Court of Illinois, because [Democrats] had decided that a Governor could not remove a Secretary of State.”78 Lincoln pointedly added, “I know that Judge Douglas will not deny that he was then in favor of overslaughing that decision by adding five new Judges, so as to vote down the four old ones. Not only so, but it ended in the Judge’s sitting down on that very bench as one of the five new Judges to break down the four old ones.”79

  Lincoln returned to this theme in the fourth debate, at Charleston, Illinois. He pressed his audience not to forget “the fact that [Douglas] was one of the most active instruments at one time in breaking down the Supreme Court of the state of Illinois, because it had made a decision distasteful to him—a struggle ending in the remarkable circumstance of his sitting down as one of the new Judges who were to overslaugh that decision—getting his title of Judge in that very way.”80 Douglas ignored the taunt. Instead, he reiterated his position that Supreme Court decisions are final, and his duty was to follow them, regardless of whether he agreed with them or not.

  In the fifth debate, held in Galesburg, Lincoln reminded his audience of the ideals Clay had fought for all of his life, saying, “I can express all my views on the slavery question by quotations from Henry Clay.” He proceeded to do that, once again recalling

  that Mr. Clay, when he was once answering an objection to the Colonization Society, that it had a tendency to the ultimate emancipation of the slaves, said that “those who would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation must do more than put down the benevolent efforts of the Colonization Society—they must go back to the era of our liberty and independence and, so far as in him lies, muzzling the cannon that thunders its annual joyous return—they must blot out the moral lights around us—they must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate the light of reason and the love of liberty.81

  Lincoln was repeating portions of his eulogy but to good effect with the old Clay Whigs in his audience.

  In the sixth debate, held in Browning’s hometown of Quincy (though Browning’s law practice had taken him out of town), Lincoln again pressed the point that he, not Douglas, was the true heir of Clay. “I wished to show,” he said, “but I will pass it upon this occasion, that in the sentiment I have occasionally advanced upon the Declaration of Independence, I am entirely borne out by the sentiments of our old Whig leader, Henry Clay, and I have the book to show it from; but because I have already occupied more time than I needed to do on the topic, I pass over it.”82 Lincoln held the book of Clay speeches in his hand, his personal bible. In responding to Douglas’s opposition to thinking of the Declaration of Independence as setting forth the promises and ideals that the Constitution was designed to implement, Lincoln said,

  The Judge has taken great exception to my adopting the heretical statement in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal,” . . . [but] I have only uttered the sentiments that Henry Clay used to hold. Allow me to occupy your time a moment with what he said. Mr. Clay was at one time called upon in Indiana, and in a way that I suppose was very insulting, to liberate his slaves, and he made a written reply to that application, and one portion of it in these words,

  which Lincoln then
quoted,

  What is the foundation of this appeal to me in Indiana, to liberate the slaves under my care in Kentucky? It is a general declaration in the act announcing to the world the independence of the thirteen American colonies, that “men are created equal.” Now, as an abstract principle, there is no doubt of the truth of that declaration, and it is desirable in the original construction of society, and, in organized societies, to keep it in view as a great fundamental principle.83

  Douglas responded with a lengthy protest that he had been consistently attached to both Clay and his principle of popular sovereignty. In 1850, he “was supported by Clay, Webster, Cass, and the great men of that day” when he included within the Compromise of 1850 provisions that allowed for the entry of California into the Union as a free state but created the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska, which would decide for themselves whether to be slave or free. Thus, he said, he held on to the same principles “in 1854, and in 1856, when Mr. Buchanan was elected President.” His audience no doubt thinking of the eventual break between Buchanan and Douglas over the Lecompton Constitution, Douglas continued, “It goes on to prove and succeeds in proving, from my speeches in Congress on Clay’s Compromise measures, that I held the same doctrines at that time that I do now, and then proves that by the Kansas and Nebraska bill I advanced the same doctrine that I now advance.”84

  Held before a largely Republican audience, the final debate featured yet another struggle for each man to show he was more faithful to Clay’s legacy. Douglas, Lincoln said, now “brings forward part of a speech from Henry Clay—the part of the speech of Henry Clay which I used to bring forward to prove” that Clay’s Whigs were not radical abolitionists. The audience laughed. Lincoln paused, and then said, “I am somewhat acquainted with Old Line Whigs. I was with the old line Whigs from the origin to the end of that party; I became pretty well acquainted with them, and I know they always had some sense, whatever else you could ascribe to them.” Again, the audience howled in laughter. Lincoln then read an even broader excerpt from Clay’s speech on the Declaration and slavery than he had at previous debates. “‘That declaration, whatever may be the extent of its import, was made by the delegations of the thirteen states,’” Lincoln quoted, continuing,

  In most of them slavery existed, and had long existed, and was established by law. It was introduced and forced upon the colonies by the paramount law of England. Do you believe, that in making that declaration the States concurred in it intended that it should be tortured into a virtual emancipation of all the slaves within their respective limits? Would Virginia and other Southern states have ever united in a declaration which was to be interpreted into an abolition of slavery among them?85

  Lincoln’s objective was to cast Clay—and thereby himself—as no radical on abolition. Rebutting any claim that either he or Clay was radical, he quoted Clay further:

  I desire no concealment of my opinions in regard to the institution of slavery. I look upon it as a great evil, and deeply lament that we have derived it from the parental Government, and from our ancestors. I wish every slave in the United States was in the country of his ancestors. But here they are; the question is, how can they be best dealt with? If a state of nature existed, and we were about to lay the foundations of our society, no man would be more strongly opposed than I should be, to incorporating the institution of slavery among its elements.86

  It could be no surprise to Lincoln that later Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery to become a renowned abolitionist, proclaimed Lincoln completely complicit with the slave-owners. Friends like Giddings and Wilmot also looked away. But their extremism would not win Lincoln this election—or the next he had his eyes on. Only moderation could.

  Yet, as Lincoln saw it, moderation did not mean complicity. He reminded the audience of “the real issue in this controversy,” the conflict “on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and of another class that does not.”87 He concluded,

  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.88

  The unmistakable inference was that the framers’ legacy ran straight through Jefferson to Clay and to Lincoln himself. And in referencing the distinction between “the common right” of people and that of kings, Lincoln was returning to a notion that Clay had made so many times that it earned him another nickname, the Great Commoner. Lincoln began with Clay and ended with him.

  Douglas held nothing back. He attacked Lincoln’s assertion that he was an old-line Whig. “He was not,” Douglas flatly declared. “Bear in mind that there are a great many old Clay Whigs down in this region. It is more agreeable, therefore, for him to talk about the old Clay party than it is for him to talk Abolitionism.”89 Douglas pointed out that Lincoln said nothing about being an old-line Whig when he was campaigning in Democratic districts. Douglas gleefully asked listeners if they had read a speech from General James Singleton, who was widely known as a friend of Clay’s. The audience said, “Yes, yes,” and cheered. “You know,” Douglas said, “that General Singleton was for twenty-five years the confidential friend of Henry Clay in Illinois, and he testified that in 1847, when the Constitutional Convention of this State was in session, the Whig members were invited to a Whig caucus at the house of Mr. Lincoln’s brother-in-law, where Mr. Lincoln proposed to throw Henry Clay overboard and take up General Taylor in his place, giving as his reason, that if the Whigs did not take up General Taylor the Democrats would.” The crowd cheered more loudly, as Douglas warmed to his point:

  Singleton testifies that Lincoln, in that speech, urged, as another reason for throwing Henry Clay overboard, that the Whigs had fought long enough on principle and ought to begin to fight for success. Singleton also testifies that Lincoln’s speech did not have the effect of cutting Clay’s throat, and that he (Singleton) and others withdrew from the caucus in indignation. He further states that when they got to Philadelphia to attend the National Convention of the Whig Party, that Lincoln was there, the bitter and deadly enemy of Clay, and that he tried to keep him (Singleton) out of the Convention because he insisted on voting for Clay, and Lincoln was determined to have Taylor.

  The crowd again laughed and applauded. “Singleton says that Lincoln rejoiced with very great joy when he found the mangled remains of the murdered Whig statesman lying cold before him. Now, Mr. Lincoln tells you that he is an old line Clay Whig!” The cheers and laughter got louder. “General Singleton testifies to the facts I have narrated, in a public speech which has been printed and circulated broadcast over the State for weeks, yet not a lisp have we heard from Mr. Lincoln on the subject, except that he is an old line Whig.”90

  Douglas went in for the kill:

  What part of Henry Clay’s policy did Lincoln ever advocate? He was in Congress in 1848–9, and when the Wilmot Proviso warfare disturbed the peace and harmony of the country, until it shook the foundation of the Republic from its center to its circumference. It was that agitation that brought Clay forth from his retirement at Ashland again to occupy his seat in the Senate of the United States, to see if he could not, by his great wisdom and experience, and the renown of his name, do something to restore peace and quiet to a disturbed country. 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.

  The crowd laughed. “Lincoln is the man, in connection with Seward, Chase, Giddings, and other Abolitionists, who got up that strife that I helped Henry Clay put down.” The crowd erupted in tremendous applause. Douglas could have ended there, but he did not.

  Henry Clay ca
me back to the Senate in 1849, and saw that he must do something to restore peace to his country. The Union Whigs and the Union Democrats welcomed him the moment he arrived, as the man for the occasion. We believed that he, of all men on earth, had been preserved by Divine Providence to guide us out of our difficulties, and we Democrats rallied under Clay then, as you Whigs in nullification time rallied under the banner of old Jackson, forgetting party when the country was in danger, in order that we might have a country first, and parties afterwards.

  The record indicates the crowd proclaiming, “Three cheers for Douglas.”91

  The outcome of the election was never in doubt. The Republican newspapers all applauded Lincoln for having done more than hold his own with the Little Giant. Even so, on a cold election day in November 1858, Republicans won the popular vote, but because of the apportionment scheme they did not take control of the state senate. Because of that scheme, as David Donald explains, “Republicans, who received about 50 percent of the popular vote, won only 47 percent of the seats in the house, while the Democrats with 48 percent of the popular vote gained 53 percent of the seats.”92 In the election within the state legislature on the choice of Illinois’s next senator, held on January 5, 1859, Douglas was the clear winner. He had 54 votes to Lincoln’s 46. Douglas was headed back to the Senate, and in an ideal position to launch a serious presidential bid just two years away in 1860.

  After the debates, Lincoln reviewed transcripts to provide edited versions that sympathetic newspapers ran. He excised the three times he had used the N-word for the parts of the country that tended toward abolition and made other edits to ensure readers in more conservative regions got the versions that fit their politics.