A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  After answering Lincoln’s four questions, Douglas suggested Lincoln needed more help from his advisers if he was to craft more questions. He named among Lincoln’s advisers Frederick Douglass, the well-known African-American writer and editor, abolitionist, and Republican. He began his race-baiting by acknowledging that some people in Freeport “think that Fred. Douglas is a good man.” He then told a story that he said took place the last time he was in Freeport. “I saw a carriage and a magnificent one it was, drive up and take a position on the outside of the crowd; a beautiful young lady was sitting on the box seat, whilst Fred. Douglas and her mother reclined inside.” The story provoked a flurry of responses—“Right,” “What have you to say against it?” “What of it?”—to which he replied, “All I have to say of it is this, that if you, Black Republicans, think that the negro ought to be on social equality with your wives and daughters, and ride in a carriage with your wife, while you drive the team, you have a perfect right to do so.” He concluded, “Those of you who believe that the negro is your equal and ought to be on an equality with you socially, politically, and legally; have a right to entertain those opinions, and of course will vote for Mr. Lincoln.”

  Douglas was a master of negation. If momentarily caught off guard by Lincoln’s charges about the supposed Springfield resolutions of October 1854, he quickly recovered and tried to change the subject by going on the attack. He said that the real import of the resolutions was their radical abolitionist content, not whether they had been approved “on the right ‘spot.’ ” Douglas then launched into a diatribe about Lincoln’s unpatriotic behavior for criticizing the Mexican War during his term in Congress.

  Lincoln had the opportunity for a rebuttal for the first time at Freeport. He failed to follow up on his questions to Douglas and spent most of the time defending his own record.

  Most of Lincoln’s supporters believed he did a much better job at Freeport. He had seized the initiative with his four questions. He was less repetitive than Douglas. Yet, there was still concern in the Lincoln camp. Medill, who had encouraged Lincoln to ask the hard-hitting second question, was more discouraged than encouraged. The day after the debate, Medill wrote that Douglas was better on the stump than Lincoln and “the popular sympathy is more on his side than Lincolns.”

  FREDERICK DOUGLASS WAS NOT one of Lincoln’s advisers, but he cautiously admired Lincoln from a distance. Born in 1818, nine years after Lincoln, Douglass grew up as a slave near the Tuckahoe River and Baltimore, Maryland. He never knew his father, a white man, and was separated from his mother when he was very young. After what he described as “a religious awakening” at thirteen, his passion for reading found its focus in the Bible. In 1838, Douglass escaped from slavery by traveling in disguise on a train from Baltimore to Philadelphia. Settling as a laborer in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Douglass joined the abolitionist movement led by William Lloyd Garrison. In 1847, Douglass broke with Garrison, embracing the tactics of political action and rejecting Garrison’s reliance on moral suasion. Moving to Rochester, New York, Douglass began publishing his own abolitionist journal, the North Star. By the 1850s, Douglass had become the leading African-American spokesman in America, attacking slavery and advocating a greater role in society for free blacks in the North.

  Speaking in Poughkeepsie, New York, Douglass told an audience commemorating the twenty-fourth anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies that “the contest going on just now in the State of Illinois is worthy of attention.” He observed that “Slavery and Anti-Slavery are at the bottom of the contest” and characterized Stephen Douglas as “one of the most restless, ambitious, boldest and unscrupulous enemies with whom the cause of the colored man has had to contend.” He then turned, briefly, to “the great speech of Mr. Lincoln,” quoting the introduction to the “House Divided” speech, commending it as “well and wisely said.”

  THE DEBATES WERE ONLY a small part of the campaign in the summer and fall of 1858. Lincoln, by his own count, delivered sixty-three speeches; Stephen Douglas said he delivered more than one hundred. In the nearly three weeks between Freeport and the next debate at Jones-boro, Lincoln gave eight speeches, plus responses at several conventions and rallies. Although he focused his campaign on the middle of the state, he traveled the length of Illinois.

  The Lincoln-Douglas debates would have been physically impossible before the late 1850s. During his Senate campaign, Lincoln traveled 3,400 miles by train, 600 miles by carriage, and 350 miles by boat, for a total of 4,350 miles. Douglas traveled 5,277 miles, mostly by special train, with his own car, which allowed him to rest between towns and spend time with his wife, Adele. Lincoln traveled as a passenger on regular trains, without Mary, who stayed home with the boys. Exuberant supporters often accompanied him, giving Lincoln little time for rest.

  For the third debate, Lincoln went down into “Little Egypt,” a narrow neck of land at the convergence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, wedged between Kentucky and Missouri, with its best-known town named Cairo. The region was rural, poor, and strongly Democratic. It was also known for its hatred of blacks. Jonesboro, with its eight hundred residents, lay three hundred miles south of Chicago, and farther south than Richmond, Virginia.

  This was not Lincoln land. In his twenty-five years in politics, Lincoln had not spent much time in the state’s southernmost counties. John C. Frémont had received only forty-six votes in Union County, in which Jonesboro was located, in the 1856 presidential election.

  For Lincoln, a man who reveled in discoveries and inventions, a thrilling part of his stay in Jonesboro occurred in the sky the night before the debate. On September 14, 1858, he sat on the Union House’s porch to watch Donati’s Comet and its fiery tail race past the earth. Italian Giovanni Battista Donati, who discovered the comet on June 2, 1858, calculated that the comet, one of the brightest to be observed in the nineteenth century, would not be visible again for two thousand years.

  The next morning, on a hot and humid day, 1,200 to 1,500 people came to Jonesboro. Some spectators made the trek from Kentucky and Missouri. Douglas arrived with his private cannon.

  The setting for the debate was simple, the platform constructed of rough planks placed across logs. A table in the center of the platform gave newspaper reporters a place to write. The seats for Lincoln and Douglas and the various dignitaries were ordinary chairs brought from nearby homes.

  Douglas knew his challenge in this southern region of Illinois was not from the Republicans, but from that faction of the Democratic Party loyal to President Buchanan. He needed to reassure these conservative Democrats, given his rejection of the Lecompton Constitution, of his party orthodoxy. He did so by attacking Lincoln on his “House Divided” speech, trying to show that Lincoln was not a moderate but actually a collaborator with radical abolitionists.

  Lincoln, speaking second, added an additional question to the four he had asked at Freeport: “If the slaveholding citizens of a United States Territory should need and demand Congressional legislation for the protection of their slave property in such territory, would you, as a member of Congress, vote for or against such legislation?”

  Douglas responded with a general answer that “it is a fundamental article of the Democratic party creed that there should be noninterference by Congress in the States and territories.”

  Toward the end of his presentation at Jonesboro, knowing he could not win over a hostile audience by argument, Lincoln reached out to them with identification. “Did the Judge talk of trotting me down to Egypt to scare me to death? Why, I know this people better than he does. I was raised just a little east of here. I am a part of this people. But the Judge was raised further north, and perhaps has some horrid idea of what this people might be induced to do.”

  At Jonesboro, Lincoln tried not to become defensive. For the most part, he succeeded in parrying the thrusts of his Democratic antagonist.

  THREE DAYS LATER, Charleston welcomed Lincoln as a favorite son with an eighty-foot pictor
ial banner hung across the main street with the caption: “Abe’s Entrance Into Charleston Thirty Years Ago.” The painting depicted Lincoln, the pioneer boy, driving three yoke of oxen as his family entered Illinois from Indiana. The Douglas contingent answered with their own banner with the caption, “Negro Equality,” showing a white man, a Negro woman, and a mulatto boy.

  The fourth debate would take place in Coles County in east central Illinois, an old-line Whig district that Lincoln knew well. Some in the crowd had known his father and stepmother, who had settled in Coles County in 1831. Thomas Lincoln had died in 1851, but his beloved stepmother, Sally Bush Johnston Lincoln, still lived in an old log cabin south of Charleston. She did not attend the debate.

  Both Lincoln and Douglas entered Charleston on the morning of September 18, 1858, like heroes at the head of elaborate processions with bands and banners. In the Lincoln procession was Bowling Green College’s marching band, which had traveled fifty miles from Terre Haute, Indiana, to march for their Indiana son. Prominent in the procession was a large wagon filled with thirty-two young women wearing white dresses with long red and blue sashes, each holding a banner for one of the thirty-two states in the Union. A banner above the wagon read:

  Westward thy Star of Empire takes it way,

  Thy Girls Link-on to Lincoln,—

  Their Mothers were for Clay.

  Following the wagon was a young woman on horseback with a sign bearing the motto “Kansas will be free!”

  In this rural district of cornfields, when the time for early morning farm chores was over, between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand spectators thronged the dusty roads of Charleston. Men, women, and children from Bloody Hutton, Dogtown, Paradise, Muddy, and Goosenest Prairie converged on the agricultural society fairgrounds west of the town. A special eleven-car train brought in spectators from Indiana. By ten o’clock, the streets leading to the public square were nearly impassable.

  At 2:45, Lincoln opened the debate with an introduction that would become the subject of much interpretation and misinterpretation. At his hotel that morning, he said, an elderly gentleman had wanted to know whether “I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people.” After the laughter died down, Lincoln said he had not intended to say much on this subject in Charleston, but thought he would devote five minutes to the question.

  He then issued a series of statements defining where he stood on racial equality. “I will say that 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, [applause],—that 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.” After stating his own opinion, Lincoln went on to say that he had never met a person “in favor of producing a perfect equality, social, and political, between negroes and white men.”

  Lincoln, by the fourth debate, had grown tired of Douglas’s continual race-baiting. He decided to take on Douglas’s constant criticisms by clarifying his own position and appealing to the generally held norms of the community where he was speaking. Furthermore, Lincoln appealed to the laws of the state of Illinois, which expressly forbade marriage between whites and blacks.

  “Race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known.” So wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America in 1833. Few white Americans were without aversion to black Americans in the 1840s and 1850s. White attitudes were based on an assumption of the inferiority of African-Americans. This prejudiced mind-set permeated both the South and the North.

  Although the first Illinois constitution in 1818 outlawed slavery, by the time of a revised constitution, anti-black feeling was on the rise. A proposal at the 1847 Illinois constitutional convention to extend the right of suffrage to blacks was defeated by a vote of 137 to 7. Article 14 of the revised constitution of 1848 directed the general assembly to enact laws prohibiting black migration to Illinois. More than three-fourths of Illinois voters approved the new constitution.

  Ironically, antislavery and racist attitudes walked hand in hand. Only a few aggressive abolitionists contemplated social equality with African-Americans as a possibility. Republicans who campaigned in the 1850s understood that it was prudent to deny any interest in social equality as part of achieving some measure of political rights for African-Americans.

  Lincoln had one more method to try to silence Douglas’s “great apprehension.” It was his favorite tactic. Whereas Douglas resorted to anger, Lincoln employed humor. Lincoln said he understood that laws against social equality rightly belonged to the states and that Douglas seemed to be “in constant horror” about measures that might be brought forward in the state legislature to promote equality of the races. What was Lincoln’s solution? “I propose as the best means to prevent it that the Judge be kept at home and placed in the State Legislature to fight the measure.”

  Norman Judd had written to Lincoln before the debate at Charleston, “Allow me to suggest that in your next joint debate where you have the opening you make your entire opening a series of charges against Douglas leaving all statement of your own views for your reply.” Lincoln followed Judd’s advice. Taking leave of the remarks about popular sovereignty and Dred Scott that had been so prominent in the first three debates, Lincoln instead focused on the accusation that Douglas, despite his protest of the Lecompton Constitution, was part of a conspiracy to impress slavery on Kansas. Senator Lyman Trumbull, who had returned to Illinois in August to campaign against Douglas, had first made this charge, based on his knowledge of Douglas’s insider trading in the Senate. Douglas had denounced the charges before, but Lincoln renewed them at Charleston in an at-times wearying recitation of Trumbull’s version of the story.

  When Douglas stepped forward to speak, he expressed astonishment. “I am amazed that Mr. Lincoln should now come forward and endorse that charge, occupying his whole hour in reading Mr. Trumbull’s speech in support of it.” In Douglas’s conclusion, he referred to Lincoln’s opening remarks about Negro equality and left his audience questioning whether Lincoln was in favor of Negro citizenship.

  The fourth debate did little to boost Lincoln. His opening remarks about equality were read and heard in quite different ways among different audiences. Some thought he was simply acknowledging the attitudes of the overwhelming majority of those in south central Illinois. Others, reading about the debate in Chicago and northern Illinois, wondered if this was the same Lincoln of the “House Divided” speech. Many observers, then and now, reading only two sentences and not the full two paragraphs, failed to understand that Lincoln’s purpose in raising the issue of social equality was to get Douglas off his back. It was a short-term political tactic.

  —

  LINCOLN SPENT THE NEXT DAY with relatives in Coles County. He visited with his stepmother, giving her fifty dollars before he left the next morning at four o’clock to resume his campaigning. In the nineteen days before the next debate in Galesburg, Lincoln would crisscross the state in a hurly-burly schedule of speech making, sometimes two or three times in a day.

  Lincoln continued to refine his thinking on slavery by writing on his steady supply of small slips of paper. The catalyst for one of his notes was reading Slavery Ordained by God, an 1857 book by Frederick A. Ross, a Presbyterian minister from Huntsville, Alabama. The book, based on lectures and sermons, became an instant bestseller among pro-slavery advocates. Ross argued that slavery was a beneficent and ordering institution.

  Lincoln began his musing with a question: “Suppose it is true, that the negro is inferior to the white, in the gifts of nature?” He understood that most white Americans accepted the assumption of inferiority, but he did not stop there. Pondering that supposition, Lincoln wrote, “Is it not the exact reverse justice that the white should, for that reason, take from
the negro, any part of the little which has been given him?” Lincoln offered his answer. “Give to him that is needy” is the Christian rule of charity; but “Take from him that is needy” is the rule of slavery.

  Ross had argued that slavery was the will of God, to which Lincoln wrote, “Certainly there is no contending against the Will of God; but still there is some difficulty in ascertaining, and applying it, to particular cases.” He then proposed a case. Dr. Ross has a slave named Sambo. Lincoln asked, “Is it the Will of God that Sambo shall remain a slave, or be set free?” Lincoln pondered the options. “The Almighty gives no audible answer to the question, and his revelation—the Bible—gives none—or, at most, none but such as admits of a squabble, as to its meaning.” Lincoln quickly added, “No one thinks of asking Sambo’s opinion of it.” Lincoln wrote that the last option was for Dr. Ross to decide. If he decided that Sambo was to remain a slave, “he thereby retains his own comfortable position.” If “he decides that God wills Sambo to be free,” it will mean that he “has to walk out of the shade, throw off his gloves, and delve for his own bread.” Lincoln asked whether Ross will be guided by “that perfect impartiality” which was the best means of making decisions. Lincoln anticipated Ross’s answer: “But, slavery is good for some people!!!” and rebutted that slavery is “peculiar” in “that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of, for himself.”

  This complex reflection on slavery was something Lincoln was not yet prepared to say in public. After carefully considering all the options, Lincoln’s anger boiled over in the conclusion of his note. “Nonsense! Wolves devouring lambs, not because it is good for their own greedy maws, but because it [is] good for the lambs!!!” The triple exclamation points revealed Lincoln’s deep feeling as he struggled with the immorality of slavery, especially as it was defended by religious leaders. Lincoln was ever alert to the mishandling of religion.