America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  Alexander Stephens merely wanted to transcend his foul mood. Leaving Washington disgusted, he traveled to his home state of Georgia. Loath to sweat through the usual stifling southern summer, he convinced his half-brother Linton to accompany him on a meandering journey across the Ohio Valley to Illinois. Now, Illinois was not, in those days, a prime destination for a summer vacation. The state boasted few natural springs or cool mountain retreats to attract well-heeled vacationers. But Stephens missed politics, even if he did not miss Washington. He came to Illinois to look up two of his friends, one his new fellow Democrat, Stephen A. Douglas, and the other his old crony from Whig Party days, Abe Lincoln. Douglas and Lincoln were locked in a battle for the United States Senate. When a reporter asked Stephens to handicap the race, the Georgian said he hoped Douglas would win, adding that he thought President Buchanan’s animus against the Illinois senator for his opposition to the Lecompton Constitution was “wickedly foolish.” Stephens’s comments shocked his southern constituents, who had vigorously supported the Lecompton document. But now that he had set his mind on retirement, Stephens did not feel obliged to follow sectional orthodoxy; he could return to principle. Principle also prevented him from supporting his old friend Lincoln, for Stephens feared that the sectional nature of the Republican Party threatened the Union, a point that Douglas would echo repeatedly in the unfolding Senate campaign.50

  Lincoln and Douglas had been adversaries in Illinois since the late 1830s. When Douglas learned that Lincoln would be his opponent for the Senate seat, he remarked to a reporter, “I shall have my hands full.” Illinois, like many of the other states carved from the old Northwest Ordinance, reflected the politics of the areas from which its settlers came, with the southern part of the state staunchly pro-southern and Democratic, and the northern part increasingly anti-slavery and Republican. Abolitionist sentiment existed in and around Chicago, but it was a decidedly minor political factor. Most Illinoisans believed in a White Republic, and if they harbored any abolitionist sentiment, they expected that upon emancipation the freed blacks would go someplace far away. Illinois Republicans were a diverse group, mixing anti-slavery politics, Whig economics, evangelical religion, and Know Nothing nativism. The state party’s rallying cry in 1858—“The Two Despotisms—Catholicism and Slavery—Their Union and Identity”—reflected this amalgam. Setting out what they identified as the nation’s two great threats to democracy, and with the recent evangelical Protestant revival fresh in people’s minds, Illinois Republicans charged that their Democratic opponents were sinners twice over, a threat both to individual souls and the national polity.51

  Abraham Lincoln did not quite fit the mold of a typical Republican, if there was such a thing. The new party was still a work in progress, and Lincoln considered himself an heir to Whig icon Henry Clay, a man willing to compromise on the issue of slavery for the sake of the Union and hostile to nativism. But over the years, and especially since the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, Lincoln’s speeches had assumed more of a messianic tone and more awareness of the nation’s global destiny. He had good political sense, understanding what his fellow Americans were thinking and feeling, and then articulating those sentiments. When he gave his acceptance speech for the Illinois Republican senatorial nomination in June 1858, after Dred Scott and Lecompton, and just as the economic depression and the religious revival were winding down, he captured the reverent but troubled mood of his Illinois neighbors. The optimism of the 1840s and early 1850s had wavered in the political and economic crises. The utopian communities, the myriad reform movements, in fact all schemes, it seemed, to improve mankind had stalled by the late 1850s, including the once-promising democratic revolutions in Europe. These trends troubled Lincoln, normally an optimist when it came to his country and its institutions. Just as the religious revival represented a personal rebirth for its participants, perhaps the nation required a similar rededication for its salvation.

  Lincoln took his text from Matthew 12:25: “And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.” He had visited this verse several times in the past as his conviction grew that America could not fulfill its mission nor preserve its precious and fragile institutions if the nation persisted half slave and half free. It must be one or the other. This was not a Union-loving compromiser talking; the mounting political crisis had convinced him that the battle must be joined, probably sooner rather than later. The speech implied that Lincoln opposed not only the extension of slavery but the institution itself; that he would promote or favor policies designed to prevent its extension and erode its presence where it already existed.52

  Lincoln argued that support for the Republican Party (and therefore for himself) guaranteed a free nation; support for the Democrats and Douglas affirmed the nationalization of slavery, a process already begun with the Dred Scott decision and Douglas’s complicitous role in voiding the Missouri Compromise with the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Though the prospect that Stephen A. Douglas was part of a Slave Power conspiracy was far-fetched—Douglas, after all, had a very public and politically damaging split with the administration—the allegations played well in a state determined to remain white. Just ten years earlier, 70 percent of Illinois voters favored a constitutional amendment to exclude African Americans from the state. Douglas, seizing on this sentiment, would emphasize that Lincoln was a dangerous radical, a lover of black people (often put in more inelegant language), and an advocate of the unnatural mingling of the races.53

  Initially, Lincoln had difficulty getting his message across. Less well known than the popular Douglas, he followed the Little Giant around the state responding to his speeches. It was not an effective strategy, as it enabled Douglas to set the tone and agenda of the campaign. So Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of debates up and down the state. Douglas understood that such face-to-face contests would only give his opponent the recognition, publicity, and audience that he could not attract on his own. However, if Douglas declined, the electorate might take it as a sign of fear in the face of a manly challenge. Douglas agreed, though he set ground rules on venues and the order of speaking that favored him. In the seven debates that followed throughout Illinois in the late summer and early fall of 1858, some stark contrasts emerged. If each side had hoped to use the debates to clarify its views and distinguish itself from the other, the affairs were smashing successes. But they offered positions, not solutions, and in that, they highlighted the increasingly irreconcilable nature of the current political crisis and how much the spiritual had entered the public discourse.

  Citizens came in their wagons, families with picnic baskets and children in tow, by canal boats, on horseback, and on foot, townspeople, farmers, merchants, laborers, and housewives, a cross-section of mid-nineteenth-century America, to make a day or maybe two days of it, doing a little shopping in town, greeting old friends and family, and enjoying the communal culinary concoctions and the liquid refreshments that always accompanied such events. Not quite a circus, more than a political event, not as lengthy or as earnest as a religious revival, and more elevating than a county fair sideshow, the debates included all of these elements and then some. They were entertainment, education, and spiritual enlightenment.

  Not least, there were the visual and aural contrasts—the unlikely sonorous voice emanating from the small, impeccably attired Democrat, and the squeaky Kentucky drawl of the Republican, so tall that his breeches never seemed long enough, and so awkward that his arms flailed about as he spoke, as if he were trying to find the right swimming stroke instead of the correct phrase. Douglas traveled to the venues in a private train, while Lincoln arrived rumpled from squeezing into uncomfortable public conveyances. Carl Schurz, who witnessed some of the debates, and who was not a paragon of fashion himself, noted with some pain that Lincoln dressed in a “rusty black frock-coat with sleeves that should have been longer” and black trousers that “
permitted a very full view of his large feet.” If Lincoln wanted to appear as a man of the people, he succeeded. Douglas, on the other hand, projected the aura of a statesman.54

  The debates drew interest not only from the locals but also from well beyond the state. The New York Times, a Republican newspaper, noted that Illinois was “the most interesting political battle-ground in the Union.” Few in Illinois would disagree. The debates attracted huge throngs, aided by the coincidence of the contests with lay-by time on the farm. At the first debate in Ottawa, some eighty miles southwest of Chicago, ten thousand people turned up, though the town contained a population of less than nine thousand.55

  Douglas hammered on the Lincoln-as-radical theme. Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech provided fodder for Douglas’s charge that Republicans and Lincoln would sacrifice the Union to destroy slavery. Once emancipation occurred, Douglas asserted, freed slaves would flood Illinois to “cover your prairies with black settlements” and “turn this beautiful state into a free negro colony.” He was not above more primitive race baiting. Warming up the crowd at the debate in Freeport, Douglas related that he had spotted Frederick Douglass a while earlier on the edge of the gathering in a “carriage—and a magnificent one it was … a beautiful young lady was sitting on the box-seat, whilst Fred Douglass and her mother reclined inside, and the owner of the carriage acted as driver.” While laughter rippled through the crowd, a Lincoln backer yelled out, “What of it?” Douglas replied, “All I have to say is if you, Black Republicans, think that the negro ought to ride in a carriage with your wife, whilst you drive the team, you have a perfect right to do so.”56

  The charges threw Lincoln on the defensive. He initially tried to match Douglas’s racial views and reassure his audiences that there would be no black republic in Illinois or anywhere else on his watch. Lincoln also argued that Republicans, not Democrats, would keep the territories white, since, in the wake of the Dred Scott decision, popular sovereignty could no longer guarantee that protection. But Douglas replied that the people of a territory could exclude slavery prior to the formation of a state constitution simply by not enacting legislation to protect it. By doing nothing, the territory’s inhabitants complied with the letter of Dred Scott while at the same time effectively excluding slaveholders. Since slavery could not exist anywhere without specific protective legislation, that would discourage slaveholders from bringing their chattel into the territory.

  This so-called Freeport Doctrine undercut Lincoln’s attempt to connect Douglas to an alleged Slave Power conspiracy. But Douglas’s response did longer-term damage to his political future and that of the Democratic Party. It widened the breach between himself and President Buchanan, who believed that the Dred Scott decision killed popular sovereignty. It further isolated Douglas and like-minded northern Democrats from the Buchanan administration, and from southern Democrats.

  In the meantime, Douglas was having the best of the debates. At the fourth debate, in Charleston, Illinois, Lincoln encountered a mocking banner raised by Democrats, captioned “Negro Equality,” depicting a white man beside a black woman with a mulatto boy in the background. Though Lincoln’s supporters ripped down the banner before the debate began, he felt obliged to address his views on race again: “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.” He based his position on the belief that “there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”57

  Did Lincoln really believe what he said at Charleston, or was it merely a question of tailoring the message to suit the crowd? It was not unusual for politicians conducting statewide campaigns to say different things at different venues, even to the point of appearing to contradict themselves. Few voters in downstate Illinois knew what Lincoln or Douglas had said in Chicago, and vice versa. In Chicago, Lincoln had expressed a general belief in black equality. But he had always expressed ambivalence about the ability of blacks and whites to live together in peace and harmony. Abraham Lincoln held the sensibilities of a nineteenth-century white man. What distinguished him, however, was that he believed deeply in the humanity of African Americans and in their equality before God.

  Lincoln responding to Stephen A. Douglas (seated to his right) during their debate at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858. Douglas repeatedly used race- baiting as a tactic, especially in this debate. Lincoln responded here by denying he favored social and political equality for blacks. (Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum)

  It was not until the fifth debate, at Galesburg in the more friendly environs of northern Illinois, that Lincoln took to the offensive and presented his differences with Douglas in moral terms. “I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country that believes slavery to be a moral and political wrong.… I believe that slavery is wrong, and in a policy springing from that belief that looks to the prevention of the enlargement of that wrong, and that looks at some time to there being an end of that wrong. The other sentiment is that it is not wrong, and the policy springing from it that there is no wrong in its becoming bigger, and that there never will be any end of it. There is the difference between Judge Douglas and his friends and the Republican party.”58

  Unlike Douglas, Lincoln also believed that America’s sacred founding documents were inclusive of all races. Changing the tone of the debate from expressions of racial orthodoxy to the meaning and legacy of America’s democratic experiment, Lincoln elevated the dialogue and deepened the importance of the contest. He challenged Douglas directly on the origins of the republic, a subject under much discussion during these troubling years. Though most of these probings concluded predictably with one side or the other claiming that it best represented the nation’s birthright, the exercise involved an important definition, or redefinition of America for this second generation.

  Lincoln was unequivocal on that legacy. “The entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence.” He squared that view with his earlier statements endorsing social and political racial inequality by explaining that “the inferior races” were equal in their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.59

  Lincoln placed his differences with Douglas into this broader moral context so his listeners might understand the high stakes involved, that the slavery issue was not merely a political question like, say, the tariff or the transcontinental railroad but a test of America’s democratic and religious ideals: “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.” In these few sentences, Lincoln related how the slavery issue connected to principles that transcended both time and space. He linked the anti-slavery cause to the nation’s democratic legacy and its global mission.60

  Lincoln held a universal perspective on the American experiment. His immersion in the writings of the founding generation, the abortive revolutions of 1848, and the anguish of America’s friends over the nation’s struggle with slavery convinced him that more was at stake than the integrity of the Union. After the election of James Buchanan, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote to a friend wondering if the event signaled a campaign to extend slavery to the territories. If that were the case, Tocqueville worried, then Europeans would view it as “one of the greatest crimes that men can commit against the general cause of humanity.” Several months later, after Dred Scott and Lecompton, Tocqueville prayed for the integrity of the Union,
identifying America with the cause “of liberty across the world.”61

  Lincoln not only identified the cause of the Republican Party with the forces of liberty and freedom all over the world but also framed the debate as a contest between good and evil. Evangelical rhetoric had pervaded political discourse at least since the early 1840s. But coming on the heels of a national religious revival, Lincoln’s assertion reinforced the perception that the nation was approaching a battle that could determine the future of mankind for eternity: “As I view the contest, it is not less than a contest for the advancement of the kingdom of Heaven or the kingdom of Satan.” The difficulty with raising the stakes so high was that it threatened to polarize the electorate so that one side or the other could find the results of a democratic election totally unacceptable. For how do you compromise with evil?62

  The revival that began in the despair and disorder of New York City in the winter of 1857–58 now gave way to a broader revival. To save the Union and what it stood for in the world, Lincoln implied, it might be necessary to destroy it, to have it reborn in a form more consonant with its sacred founding documents and the sainted men who framed them.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE BOATMAN

  ISAAC SMITH BOUGHT A FARM in Maryland. It was good land in this country of gently rolling hills. Perhaps Smith would grow corn, oats, wheat, and carve out a small patch for tobacco. That is what his neighbors did in this part of Maryland, so different from the plantation agriculture of the Eastern Shore where Frederick Douglass spent his early days. Only Smith was not a farmer. He was not even Isaac Smith. His name was John Brown.