A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  In a second note, written in this same period, Lincoln began, “But there is a larger issue than the mere question of whether the spread of negro slavery shall or shall not be prohibited by Congress.” Lincoln asserted that even the Buchanan papers, such as the Richmond Enquirer and the New York Day-Book, understood the issue. Both newspapers pointed to the assertion by Senator John Pettit of Indiana that the doctrine of equality in the Declaration of Independence was “a self-evident lie.” As for Senator Douglas, Lincoln said he “regularly argues against the doctrine of the equality of men.” Lincoln concluded that the “common object” of Douglas and his allies was to subvert the clear avowal in the Declaration of Independence and “to assert the natural, moral, and religious right of one class to enslave another.”

  THE LARGEST CROWD of the seven debates converged on Knox College in Galesburg in northern Illinois on Thursday, October 7, 1858. Gales-burg, a town of 5,500, was Republican, antislavery, and a stop on the Underground Railroad. Heavy rains had fallen the day before, and on debate day icy winds tore down signs and ripped up banners. But not even the elements could keep 15,000 to 20,000 spectators away. An eleven-car train came from Chicago. A twenty-two-car train from Peo-ria, crammed full with 2,200 passengers, was slowed by mechanical problems and did not arrive until near the end of the debate. Despite the winds, numerous banners vied with one another for creativity. A representation of a two-donkey act showed Douglas attempting to ride Popular Sovereignty and Dred Scott. Try as he might, he was unable to keep his balance and was sent sprawling. Another banner was inscribed “Small-fisted Farmers, Mud Sills of Society, Greasy Mechanics, for A. Lincoln,” a refutation of the recent Southern charge that laborers in the North were at least as exploited as slaves in the South.

  At 2:30, Lincoln and Douglas were driven to the college in identical carriages. Because of the bitter conditions, the platform had been moved from an open space on the college campus to abut the east side of Old Main, the central building on campus. According to a later reminiscence, both Lincoln and Douglas had to climb through a window in Old Main to get to the platform. Lincoln, never at a loss for words, was heard to say, “Well, at last I have gone through college.”

  Douglas began and quickly settled into his regular speech. By this fifth debate Douglas appeared exhausted, with a hoarse voice that did not carry his words beyond the first few rows of the audience. He defended popular sovereignty and attacked both Republicans and Buchanan Democrats. He accused Lincoln of shifting his message according to the geography of the debate. “In the extreme northern part of the state he can proclaim as bold and radical abolitionism as ever Gid-dings, Lovejoy, or Garrison enunciated.” In the southern part of the state, Douglas claimed Lincoln identified himself as “an old line Whig, a disciple of Henry Clay.” Douglas summed up his criticism by telling the crowd, “Mr. Lincoln’s creed cannot travel.”

  Lincoln, by contrast, seemed restored at Galesburg. His nineteen days of travel, spent speaking with thousands of people in Urbana, Jacksonville, Winchester, Pittsfield, Metamora, and Pekin, had not tired but rather renewed his spirits. Lincoln, who could be introspective and took pleasure from time alone to read and to write, was energized by contact with all sorts of people on the campaign trail.

  Taking heart from this strongly Republican community, Lincoln began with the Declaration of Independence. Douglas had insisted that the Declaration’s opening words were never intended to include Negroes. Lincoln countered with his strongest statement in the debates about the Declaration’s intent. “I believe that 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.” As for Douglas’s contention that Jefferson did not intend to include Negroes because he was the owner of slaves, Lincoln replied by recalling Jefferson’s words, offered late in his life, that “he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just.” Lincoln elicited “great applause” when he thundered, “I will offer the highest premium in my power to Judge Douglas if he will show that he, in all his life, ever uttered a sentiment at all akin to that of Jefferson.”

  Lincoln also charged head-on into Douglas’s criticism that Lincoln changed his message on Negro equality depending on where he was speaking. Lincoln pointed out that all his speeches were in print so everyone could read them. He denied that there was any conflict between what he said at the various debates. Lincoln then turned Doug las’s criticism to his advantage by addressing the moral dimension of the debate about slavery. In summarizing Douglas’s position, Lincoln reminded the audience that “every sentiment he utters discards the idea that there is any wrong in Slavery.”

  Lincoln’s supporters were exuberant about his performance at Gales-burg. The Quincy Whig reported, “When Douglas concluded, ‘Old Abe’ mounted to the stand, and was received with three such tremendous cheers.” The Republican paper believed “he met, and successfully refuted, every argument made by Judge Douglas.” Lincoln did so by seizing the moral high ground. He charged Douglas with “blowing out the moral lights around us.” Lincoln declared, “Judge Douglas, and whoever like him teaches that the negro has no share, humble though it may be, in the Declaration of Independence, and so far as in him lies, [muzzles] the cannon that thunders its annual joyous return” every Fourth of July.

  THE SIXTH DEBATE took place on October 13, 1858, at Quincy. Nestled on the banks of the Mississippi River, just across from Missouri, Quincy was settled by New Englanders who named the town in 1825 for then president John Quincy Adams. Quincy was like many cities in central Illinois—contested territory between Republicans and Democrats. Boats from Hannibal, Missouri, and Keokuk, Iowa, swelled the crowd to between ten thousand and fifteen thousand who gathered at Washington Park on a sunny but cool day.

  Lincoln arrived by train in the morning and was invited to ride in a decorated carriage, although he said he preferred to “foot it to Browning’s,” his friend Orville Browning’s home, where he would rest until the debate. Nevertheless, a large procession guided Lincoln. Central in the procession was a model ship on wheels drawn by four horses and labeled “Constitution.”

  Carl Schurz, an immigrant who had fled the failed revolution in Germany of 1848–49, traveled from Watertown, Wisconsin, to witness the debate. Later, Schurz recalled that Lincoln’s

  charm did not, in the ordinary way, appeal to the ear or to the eye. His voice was not melodious; rather shrill and piercing, especially when it rose to its high treble in moments of great animation. His figure was unhandsome, and the action of his unwieldy limbs awkward. He commanded none of the outwardly graces or oratory as they are commonly understood. His charm was of a different kind. It flowed from the rare depth and genuineness of his convictions and his sympathetic feelings.

  He said that Lincoln’s “voice was not musical, being rather high-keyed and apt to turn into a shrill treble in moments of excitement.” But it did possess “an exceedingly penetrating, far-reaching quality.” Lincoln’s movements especially struck Schurz. “His gestures were awkward. He swung his long arms sometimes in a very ungraceful manner. Now and then, to give particular emphasis to a point, he would bend his knees and body with a sudden downward jerk and then shoot up again with a vehemence that raised him to his tiptoes and made him look taller than he was.”

  Carl Schurz, a German immigrant from Wisconsin, traveled to Quincy to hear Lincoln in the sixth debate. Schurz would become instrumental in mobilizing the large German population in the Midwest behind Lincoln.

  Lincoln began the debate by denying that his remarks about Negro civil rights at Charleston were any different from what he had said at Ottawa or would affirm at Quincy. Whenever Lincoln bowed to the norms of his day as to the impossibility of social equality between the races, he always concluded with the greater possibility, not yet fully realized, inherent in the Declaration of Independence: “In the right
to eat the bread without leave of anybody else which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man.” To this the crowd cheered loudly.

  Lincoln concluded his opening hour with a compelling repetition of his charge that slavery is morally wrong. “When Judge Douglas says that whoever, or whatever community, wants slaves, they have a right to have them, he is perfectly logical if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.” Lincoln stated that the issue was not whether he or Douglas was right or wrong, but whether slavery was right or wrong. If, Lincoln declared in his final sentence, “we can get all these men who believe that slavery is in some of these respects wrong, to stand and act with us in treating it as a wrong—then, and not till then, I think we will in some way come to an end of this slavery agitation.”

  Douglas, on the defensive, was forced to respond to Lincoln’s charge that he would not say whether slavery was right or wrong. “I tell you why I will not do it. I hold that under the Constitution of the United States, each state of this Union has a right to do as it please on the subject of slavery.” He then spent much of his time disputing that he was conspiring with Pierce, Buchanan, and Taney to open the territories to slavery. Near the conclusion of his remarks Douglas stated, “This republic can exist forever divided into free and slave States.”

  Lincoln, in his rebuttal, immediately seized upon Douglas’s remark. “We are getting a little nearer the true issue of this controversy, and I am profoundly grateful for this one sentence.” Lincoln said that he had no desire to argue with slavery in Kentucky or Virginia, but that Douglas would be happy to see slavery extend not just into the Western territories but into the Northern states.

  AFTER THE QUINCY DEBATE, both Lincoln and Douglas boarded the City of Louisiana for the 115-mile passage down the Mississippi River to Alton, site of the final debate. Alton was snuggled among bluffs at the confluence of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. When the ship arrived the next morning, Mary and fifteen-year-old Robert were waiting to greet Lincoln. They had traveled from Springfield on the Sangamon-Alton Railroad, which ran a half-price excursion fare to the debate. Robert, a member of the Springfield Cadets, was smartly dressed in a blue coat with white pants. Gustave Koerner, who had served as president of the Republican convention that nominated Lincoln for the Senate, had also traveled to Alton. Koerner found Lincoln in the sitting room at the Franklin House. Lincoln encouraged Koerner to go upstairs and speak with Mary because “she is rather dispirited” about her husband’s political chances. Koerner expressed his confidence to her “of carrying the State and tolerably certain of our carrying the Legislature.”

  In 1837, Alton had been the scene of the murder of Presbyterian abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy, who was defending his press from a pro-slavery mob. In 1858, this town in southwestern Illinois remained sympathetic to slavery, Douglas, and Democrats. The White Cloud and Baltimore steamboats offered one-dollar round-trip fares from neighboring St. Louis, bringing in from Missouri more Douglas supporters. Some visitors even made the trip from Kentucky. On a beautiful fall day, organizers of the final debate were disappointed that the crowd would number only between five thousand and six thousand, some spectators saying that by now everyone knew what both Lincoln and Douglas would say.

  Douglas began the debate looking like a man the worse for wear from the debates and the campaign. His voice could barely be heard as he summarized his arguments of the previous six debates. On the offense in debate one, by debate seven he made the odd decision to focus his defense on his decisions relating to Lecompton. Obviously distressed by Lincoln’s renewed emphasis on the Declaration of Independence at Galesburg and Quincy, Douglas, in a barely audible voice, declared, “I hold that the signers of the Declaration of Independence had no reference to negroes at all when they declared all men to be created equal. They did not mean negro, nor the savage Indians, nor the Fejee Islanders, nor any other barbarous race.”

  Lincoln, in contrast, appeared tanned and eager for the final debate. Always conscious of his audience, Lincoln acknowledged that the citizens of Alton were linked with “strong sympathies by birth, education, and otherwise, with the South.” Not content to concede any audience, however, Lincoln recalled his father’s decision to move from a slave state to a free state, and then asked: “How many Democrats are there about here who have left slave states and come into the free state of Illinois to get rid of the institution of slavery?” One voice interrupted and said, “A thousand.” Another added, “One thousand and one,” to which Lincoln responded, “I reckon there are a thousand and one.”

  Douglas, at Quincy and again now at Alton in Madison County, had tried to put on the mantle of Henry Clay, arguing that the architect of the Compromise of 1850 would never have acceded to Lincoln’s radical views. But no one loved Clay and his speeches more than Lincoln. Perturbed that Douglas tried to pass himself off as a follower of Clay, Lincoln reached into his coat and pulled out his notebook filled with extracts from important speeches. He read a long section from one of Clay’s speeches to show that the Great Compromiser believed in the great “fundamental principle” from the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, even as Clay understood that principle had not yet become fully realized in American society.

  Toward the end of this final debate, when Lincoln must have been tired, he rose to the height of his eloquence. Focusing his final comments on Douglas’s constant refrain that he did not care whether slavery was voted up or down, Lincoln responded that the real issue was the morality of slavery. “That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent.” Lincoln declared the issue to be “the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world.” He continued,

  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.”

  THE TWENTY ONE HOURS of debate were over. The story of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 needs to be understood on its own terms and not from a backward glance from future events, when Douglas became at best a foil and at worst caricatured or marginalized. At the time of the debates, Douglas was a leading national actor while Lincoln was regarded solely as an Illinois politician.

  How was the voter to decide? Most attended only one debate. At the outset, Lincoln had to discredit the idea that he was a radical abolitionist, whereas Douglas had to deny that he was a pro-Southern defender of slavery. There were many other issues that Lincoln and Douglas might have included in their debates—currency policy, tariffs, immigration, railroads—but the focus was almost exclusively on slavery. The debaters and the audiences agreed that this was the most important issue facing the nation.

  There was a great deal of repetition in the debates, often with each debater reading long quotations from previous speeches. Douglas stuck to his theme of self-government. Lincoln invoked the Declaration of Independence again and again. Douglas began strong and put Lincoln on the defensive with his attacks and questions. Lincoln gathered momentum in the final three debates, beginning at Galesburg, both in his physical presence and his decision to focus on the moral dimension of slavery. Douglas, when under stress, resorted to anger and sarcasm. Lincoln, when pushed, reflexively responded with humor, a lighter touch that created a bond of trust with audiences. Lincoln, whether in his private notes to himself or in his public debates with Douglas, grew in his ability to communicate his ideas both clearly and forcefully.

  The debates were over, but the campaign continued. Lincoln, after spending several days in Springfield, was off again. In the final two and a half weeks he was alternately discouraged and encouraged
, as were his closest advisers. Stepping off the train in Naples on October 18, 1858, Lincoln saw fifteen “Celtic gentlemen” and wondered if these Irishmen were being brought into Illinois to vote. The next day, he heard that four hundred Irish laborers were arriving in Schuyler County to work on the railroad, arriving just before Election Day. On October 20, Lincoln wrote to Norman Judd, “I now have a high degree of confidence that we shall succeed, if we are not over-run with fraudulent votes to a greater extent than usual.”

  A few days later, Judge David Davis expressed his apprehension. “Outside Republicans from the East, Mr. Greeley—Truman Smith &c have thrown cold water on the election of Lincoln.” A difficult blow to Lincoln’s chances for election came at the end of the campaign. A letter written by Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky on August 1, 1858, announcing his support for Douglas, was held until the last week of the campaign when it could do the most damage. Lincoln and Crittenden had served together in the Thirtieth Congress. Crittenden viewed himself as Clay’s political heir. Astonished and hurt that a Kentucky Whig would enter the Senate campaign against an Illinois Whig, Lincoln had written Crittenden in July telling him that a story was being whispered “that you are anxious for the reelection of Mr. Douglas.” Lincoln told Crittenden, “I do not believe the story, but still it gives me some uneasiness. I do not believe you would so express yourself. It is not in character with you as I have always estimated you.” Unfortunately for Lincoln, the story proved to be true. Crittenden admired Douglas’s stand against the Lecompton Constitution and believed that a vote for Douglas was a vote against the Buchanan administration. Crittenden’s support for Douglas, trumpeted by the Illinois State Register in Springfield, certainly served to undercut Lincoln with some old-line Whigs, especially in the critical counties of central Illinois.