By the time Lincoln’s turn came, it was past five in the evening. “I wish you to hear me thro,” he said. “It will take me as long as it has taken him. That will carry us beyond eight o’clock at night,” well past suppertime. So he suggested that everyone take a break, enjoy dinner, and reassemble in the cooler evening air at seven. He further told the crowd that he had agreed to let Douglas have an additional hour to reply after his own three-hour rejoinder. This gesture, he acknowledged, “was not wholly unselfish,” for it assured that the Douglas Democrats would return and stay to the end, “for the fun of hearing him skin me.” Then, turning to the audience, he asked: “What do you say?” And “immediately, a cheer went up,” one attendee recalled, “accompanied by the throwing of hats in the air, and other demonstrations of approval.”
Even in this brief, lighthearted negotiation for a supper delay, Lincoln had established an intimacy of tone as between friends who agree on a date later in the evening. That the members of the audience readily returned, and indeed, swelled in number, for a torch-lit evening session that would last until the hour before midnight, demonstrates the high level of citizen interest and participation in politics in the 1850s. With few public entertainments available in rural America, villagers and farmers regarded the spoken word and political debates as riveting spectator sports.
It was an age when the gift for oratory was essential to political success, when audiences listened with rapt attention to lengthy, well-researched speeches. Indeed, at Peoria, the audience was asked to give seven hours of concentrated thought broken only by a supper intermission. Following such debates, the dueling remarks were regularly printed in their entirety in newspapers and then reprinted in pamphlet form to reach distant villages and farms, where they provoked discourse over a wider space and prolonged time. Such circumstances were ideally suited for Abraham Lincoln—a natural storyteller with an exceptional range of oral and written skills of communication. He could simultaneously educate, entertain, and move his audiences with recognizable tales replete with such accessible, humorous, everyday images that they were remembered and repeated far and wide.
True to the storyteller’s art, Lincoln began his speech by explaining the situation that had brought the people together—the looming expansion of slavery begotten by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He then took his listeners back to their common beginnings, to the founding of the nation, unraveling a narrative to demonstrate that when the Constitution was adopted, “the plain, unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the principle, and toleration, only by necessity,” because slavery was unhappily knit into the origin of America’s social and economic life. Stressing the fact that the word “slavery” was deliberately omitted from the Constitution, Lincoln claimed that the framers concealed it, “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.”
In recent decades, Lincoln argued, with the line of the Missouri Compromise firmly in place, slavery had seemed to be on the wane; the time for excising the wen—returning to the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence—was in sight at last. “But now,” with the line of compromise rescinded by this disastrous law, slavery had been “transformed into a ‘sacred right,’ ” suddenly placed “on the high road to extension and perpetuity; and, with a pat on its back, [the law] says to it, ‘Go, and God speed you.’ ”
To demonstrate the thorny problem created by removing the imaginary line that had separated the country North and South and had prohibited expansion of slavery north of latitude 36°30', Lincoln had developed a string of metaphors drawn from the worlds of farming, pastures, fences, and livestock. Imagine, Lincoln suggested, two adjacent farms with a dividing fence between them. Suddenly, one farmer, whose prairie grass had dried up, removed the fence so his famished cattle could feed on his neighbor’s meadow. “You rascal,” protested the neighbor. “What have you done?” The farmer replied: “I have taken down your fence; but nothing more. It is my true intent and meaning not to drive my cattle into your meadow, nor to exclude them therefrom, but to leave them perfectly free to form their own notions of the feed, and to direct their movements in their own way.” No person in the audience failed to comprehend the analogy between this parable and Douglas’s deceitful claim that by removing the line there was no intent to bring slavery into northern territory.
The figurative language Lincoln used was designed to let the people see for themselves the profoundly threatening aspects of the Nebraska law, just as he had sought to make each jury believe that “they—and not he—were trying the case.” Having brought his listeners to understand the impasse created by the new law, he was then able to suggest a way forward. The Nebraska Act must be repealed; the Missouri Compromise must be restored. “The doctrine of self government,” as set forth in the Declaration of Independence, “is right—absolutely and eternally right,” declared Lincoln, but to apply it, as Douglas proposed, to extend slavery, perverted its very meaning. To allow slavery into new territory where it did not already exist by the original bargain of the Constitution would spark an open war with the “spirit of concession and compromise” that had marked the history of the Union. “Let us return [slavery] to the position our fathers gave it,” Lincoln implored.
This was no abolitionist credo; first, and last, the credo was containment. In arguing against the Nebraska Act, Lincoln made it clear that he had “no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up.” But if empathy allowed Lincoln to comprehend the difficulty of dealing with slavery where it already existed (and with all humility, he confessed that he had no easy solution to resolve that dilemma), he considered the annulment of the Missouri line a violent act that, if not reversed, might well lead to the destruction of the Union. The choice we face, he told them, is all of ours together. If we allow the Kansas-Nebraska Act to stand, if we allow slavery to spread, then the hope of America and all that it means to the whole world will be extinguished. But if we join together, “we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.”
“The whole house was still as death,” the Springfield Journal observed, “and when he finished, the audience approved the glorious triumph of truth by loud and continued huzzas.” Contemporary accounts considered Lincoln’s speech the most accessible, persuasive, and profound argument ever made against the extension of slavery. He penetrated his subject with deep insight and carried his listeners along to his way of thinking. What persuaded and changed minds was the sincerity, clarity, conviction, and passion of the story he told. “The inspiration that possessed him took possession of his hearers also,” a young reporter noted. “His speaking went to the heart because it came from the heart. I have heard celebrated orators who could start thunders of applause without changing any man’s opinion. Mr. Lincoln’s eloquence was of the higher type, which produced conviction in others because of the conviction of the speaker himself.”
Even those who had heard Lincoln speak over the years were taken aback. “When,” they asked one another, “had he mastered the history of the slavery questions so completely?” The answer lay in the long period of work, creative introspection, research, and grinding thought that emerged in the wake of his dispiriting time in Congress and his failure to secure the high-ranking position he thought he deserved after sustained party politicking. From that crucible of self-doubt had come an accelerated striving, a self-willed intellectual, metaphysical, and personal growth. Never again would he assume that his side of the aisle held a monopoly on righteousness; never again would he deploy satire as a means to vindictively humiliate another.
“Nothing so much marks a man as bold imaginative expressions,” Ralph Waldo E
merson wrote in his diary, speaking of Socrates and the golden sayings of Pythagoras: “A complete statement in the imaginative form of an important truth arrests attention and is respected and remembered.” Such oratory “will make the reputation of a man.” The way Lincoln had learned to use language, the collective story he told, and the depth of his conviction marked a turning point in his reputation as both a man and a leader.
“A great storyteller will always be rooted in the people,” essayist Walter Benjamin writes. “It is granted to him to reach back to a whole lifetime,” culling from “his own experience” as well as “the experience of others” to unfold narratives that provide counsel, advice, and direction. Such storytellers are “teachers and sages,” he remarked. “Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.” This was the leadership voice Abraham Lincoln had developed during his long waiting period.
Everyone who had known him in earlier years remarked upon changes that had begun to transform him from a local politician and country lawyer into the personage connoted today by the name of Abraham Lincoln. People observed that something large and lasting had happened during this introspective crucible period, something that could be gauged in his appearance and demeanor, his manner of delivery, and his profundity of thought.
In the antislavery struggle, he had found the great purpose that would thrust him back into public life, and that purpose, larger by far than his large personal ambition, would hold him fast until he died.
* * *
Two giant strides toward Lincoln’s ascension to the presidency were, ironically, his two failed efforts, in 1855 and 1858, to become the U.S. senator from Illinois.
In 1855, in a clear-cut surrender of personal ambition to moral principle, Lincoln orchestrated his own defeat to ensure victory for a fellow antislavery man over a pro-Nebraska candidate. In January, when the 100-member state legislature convened to choose a new senator, Lincoln was the clear “first choice” of 47 of the anti-Nebraska Whigs; the candidate of the Douglas Democrats had 41 votes; and a small band of five independent Democrats, who had broken from Douglas after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, held the balance of power. Led by Norman Judd of Chicago, this little band supported Democratic congressman Lyman Trumbull for senator. A deadlock went on into the night, until Lincoln instructed his Whig supporters to vote for Trumbull, fearing that the Douglas Democrat would win. Lincoln’s supporters were heartbroken, claiming the unfairness of “the 47 men being controlled by the 5,” but they followed Lincoln’s directive and Trumbull was elected senator. “The agony is over at last,” the chagrined Lincoln wrote a friend, but the defeat of the Douglas Democrat “gives me more pleasure than my own [defeat] gives me pain.”
When Lincoln ran in 1858 for the U.S. Senate he represented the new Republican Party, assembled from the disparate opponents of the Nebraska bill—antislavery Whigs, bolting Democrats, Free Soilers, abolitionists. As the leader who had fused this fragile coalition in the Prairie State, Abraham Lincoln was the overwhelming choice of Illinois Republicans to oppose the incumbent Democrat, Stephen Douglas. Recalling the generosity Lincoln had exercised three years earlier in his first run for the Senate, when he had maneuvered his own defeat to ensure victory for an antislavery Democrat, hundreds of party activists stood ready to commit their energies to ensure Lincoln’s victory.
Lincoln’s opening campaign statement offers a clear glimpse into his general blueprint for orienting his followers by gentle education and persuasion. “If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do and how to do it.” With this simple statement, he launched upon a communal storytelling voyage with his audience so they might collectively address a problem and together set about to forge a solution. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he began, echoing the gospels of Mark and Matthew, invoking an easily approachable image of the Union as a house in danger of collapse under the pressure of slavery advocates who, by repealing the Missouri Compromise, had jeopardized the integrity of the entire structure. Despite the ominous metaphor of a collapsing house, the tone of Lincoln’s speech was positive, exhorting Republicans to recapture control of the nation’s building blocks by restoring the laws that prevented the extension of slavery. If slavery were again on a course to eventual extinction, people in all sections could once more live peaceably in the revered house their forefathers had built.
All was now in readiness for the historic convergence of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, seven face-to-face encounters that attracted tens of thousands of people and fastened the attention of tens of millions more who read the full transcripts in leading papers across the country. If it was Douglas, the leading Democratic candidate for president in 1860, who drew the public and national journalists to the debates, it was Lincoln, then barely known outside his state, who made the lasting impression. “Who is this man that is replying to Douglas in your State?” an eastern political figure asked an Illinois journalist. “Do you realize that no greater speeches have been made on public questions in the history of our country; that his knowledge of the subject is profound, his logic unanswerable, his style inimitable?” When voters went to the polls that November, Republicans won a popular majority of the statewide vote, for which Lincoln received a great share of the credit. Nonetheless, by means of an unfair and outdated reapportionment scheme, the Democrats retained control of the state legislature, which promptly reelected Stephen Douglas to the U.S. Senate.
Once again, Lincoln’s personal aspirations were dashed, but he accepted loss with equanimity. Days later, while “the emotions of defeat” were still “fresh” upon him, he wrote dozens of consoling letters to his supporters. Characteristically, it was he who consoled them rather than the other way around. To his friend Dr. Anson Henry, he wrote: “I am glad I made the late race. It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way.” After hearing that another friend was despondent, Lincoln promised, “You will soon feel better. Another ‘blow-up’ is coming; and we shall have fun again.” The serenity and composure he exhibited were not simply to hearten his followers. Lincoln was in dead earnest. He trusted that this was a temporary loss. The antislavery fight not only would continue; it must continue until it was won.
* * *
“No man of this generation has grown more rapidly before the country than Lincoln in this canvass,” editorialized the Evening Post as the Senate race came to a close. The knowledge of Lincoln’s leadership capacities was rapidly spreading. When a friend suggested that he might well be considered a formidable presidential candidate, however, Lincoln protested, noting that William Henry Seward, Salmon Chase, and others “were so much better known.” They were the men who had “carried this movement forward to its present status.” Seward had been New York’s youngest governor before his election to the Senate, where his fiery speeches won a passionate following among northern liberals and marked him as the nation’s most celebrated antislavery politician. Chase, now the first Republican governor of Ohio, had been the Senate leader in the fight against the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and was one of the founders of the Republican Party. Judge Edward Bates, a widely respected native Virginian who had migrated to Missouri and joined the antislavery cause, had a natural constituency among conservatives throughout the North and within the southern tier of the mid-western states.
While recognizing that he had only an outside chance, Lincoln quietly pursued the nomination. From the start, he understood, with a raw political instinct as keen as his ambition, that the only path to his nomination against three celebrated opponents required a combination of relentless determination and self-effacing humility. By holding back, by not thrusting his own candidacy forward, he gained the goodwill of tens of thousands of fellow Republicans by speaking solely on behalf of the party and the Republican cause. In dozens of rousing speeches, delivered in cities and towns throughout the North, from Kansas, Missouri, and Ohio to New York, Co
nnecticut, and Rhode Island, he beseeched Republicans to put differences aside and unite behind the movement that was their new party. Aware that beyond his home state he was not the first choice of any, he sought to become the second choice of many. Refusing to disparage his rivals, he aimed to leave their supporters “in a mood to come to us if they shall be compelled to give up their first love.”
As his national renown began to build, so his estimation of his own chances improved. Even as he cast a humorous and skeptical eye on suggestions that he might successfully aspire to the nomination, he had begun to visualize himself as a legitimate contender. In all likelihood, he had been turning over the prospect of a presidential bid long before he made his candidacy known. “No man knows,” Lincoln said years later, “when the presidential grub gets to gnawing at him, just how deeply it will get until he has tried it.” As the possibility of success became more conceivable, Lincoln redoubled his efforts, working harder than all his opponents combined. While Seward, confident that the nomination was his, traveled through Europe for eight months prior to the convention, Lincoln labored daily, researching and deepening his speeches, keeping them fresh. As he crafted each speech, he would withdraw into a cocoon, finding a corner in the State Library or a back room or small chamber wherever he was speaking. There, he could be alone to focus his research, thought, and feeling. At times, he employed his closest friends as sounding boards, but the more he traveled the country, the more he relied upon his own perceptions of what he should say and exactly what it would take to win the nomination.
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