But some Republicans soon began to treat Douglas as a hero for opposing the president on Kansas. Lincoln wondered why eastern Republicans kept praising Douglas. “Have they concluded that the Republican cause, generally, can be best promoted by sacrificing us here in Illinois?” To Herndon, Lincoln complained that Horace Greeley was “talking up Douglas, an untrue and untried man, a dodger, a wriggler, a tool of the South once and now a snapper at it.”
Lincoln did his best to stir the fires of division between the Illinois Democrats. He quietly encouraged Buchanan’s Democrats to stand up against Douglas, and he asked some of his powerful supporters to direct Republican funds toward anti-Douglas Democratic newspapers. This, like much else in his early life, would indicate that he did not come to the presidency as the naive, frontier figure populist myth would depict him to be.
In Springfield in June, Lincoln sat in the audience for a Douglas speech in which the Little Giant argued that, after all, popular sovereignty would work, since the territories could exclude slavery by refusing to empower police to enforce slavery, and likewise by refusing to enact slave codes. As for the rest, he said, when the Founding Fathers had spoken of equality, they spoke of equality between whites. The Republicans were a bunch of fanatics who had led some Americans to believe that blacks were covered by the Declaration of Independence and were the equals of white men. If they had their way, whites could look forward to the intermarrying of whites and blacks.
At white heat Lincoln began to study the nine Supreme Court justices’ individual Dred Scott decisions to mount an argument against them and Douglas both. In a summer downpour that flooded all the rivers and made transportation difficult even on the Mississippi, the Republicans assembled in the state house in mid-June. In the afternoon a convention nominated Lincoln as “the first and only choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the United States Senate,” and in the evening he was to give the speech on which he had worked for the past two weeks, since hearing Douglas.
Among the spittoons of the Hall of Representatives, Lincoln uttered what was to become the formative speech of his generation, and one that served as the template for his future debates with Douglas. It drew on the language of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bible, and though it was full of technical points, its overall message was graspable by people who were not constitutional experts:
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half-slave and half-free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new—north as well as south.
He believed there was a concerted strategy to make the house a house of slavery, with Taney, President Buchanan, and Stephen Douglas its architects. Other less glittering passages of this speech addressed the illogicality of Douglas’s position: “That counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. . . . [I]n some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands she is my equal, and the equal of all others.”
According to Herndon the convention was ecstatic over Lincoln’s brilliant speech, but some Republicans and Republican newspapers condemned it, especially the reference to the “house divided.” “Damn that fool speech; it will be the cause of the death of Lincoln and the republican party,” said one commentator. For this speech, which would be an object of the admiration of later generations, was interpreted as threatening an inevitable civil war over slavery. It was out of the widespread public disapproval for what would become one of the famous speeches of the century, and for fear that Lincoln had destroyed his senatorial chances, that on the advice of various Illinois Republicans, he wrote to Douglas challenging him to a series of formal debates “to divide time, and address the same audiences during the present canvas.”
Douglas did not need to accept, because his campaign was flourishing, but perhaps he feared how a refusal would be depicted. He agreed to meet in each congressional district except the Second and Sixth, where they had both already spoken. Unlike even his supporters, Lincoln was confident going into the debates that Douglas was inherently dishonest. “Douglas will tell a lie to ten thousand people one day, even though he knows he may have to deny it to five thousand the next.” This perception of Douglas sharpened Lincoln’s sense of a crusade.
Thus the summer of 1858 turned into one of frenetic activity, in which Lincoln scooted around the state debating Douglas, supported by a far less adequate machine than Douglas had. Senator Douglas moved from debate to debate, speech to speech, in a private railroad car festooned with flags. He enjoyed the company of a secretary, a reporter, a traveling band, and his beautiful wife. Lincoln traveled to some of the debates by ox-cart, to others by railroad, to others by stagecoach. Thus the stations of the most famous political dialogue of the century were achieved—Ottawa, Freeport, Galesburg, Quincy, Alton, Jonesboro, and Charleston. Not that Lincoln lacked enthusiasts. For the first debate, at Ottawa on August 21, 1858, a special train seventeen cars long drew Lincoln, as a mere paying passenger, and his supporters into Ottawa, Illinois. A carriage bedecked with evergreens was available to carry him to the wooden platform on Washington Square, where the first Lincoln-Douglas confrontation was to take place.
Douglas proved to be an opportunistic debater. He asked why anyone would question that the Republic could last half slave and half free. Hadn’t the Founding Fathers themselves created it that way? Lincoln’s doctrines would “cover your prairies with black settlements . . . turn this beautiful state into a free negro colony.” Douglas was making a good play to the politics of fear.
Lincoln came back strongly, somehow scenting that the defensive mode was not the one to adopt. Lincoln aligned himself with Henry Clay, who had once said of those who would repress tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation “that they must, if they would do this, go back to the era of our Independence, and muzzle the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return; they must blow out the moral lights around us; they must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate there the love of liberty; and then, and not till then, could they perpetuate slavery in this country!”
Lincoln continued, “We will not have peace upon the question until the opponents of slavery arrest the further spread of it. . . . In the right to eat the bread of his labor without the leave of anyone else, the slave is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”
Lincoln’s handlers were pleased with the way he took the offensive in this first debate, and told him to continue in that mode. At Freeport, in northwest Illinois, Lincoln arrived holding up a wedge in his hand as a symbol of his hope that his words could drive a wedge into the Democrats. Here, with the threat of rain coming on and fifteen thousand people to address, Lincoln tried to cast attention on the divisions between Buchanan and Douglas: “Can the people of a United States Territory, in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a state constitution?” Buchanan would have said no, Douglas yes. Even with Lincoln’s shrill, penetrating voice, even with Douglas’s senatorial oratory, one wonders how many of them actually heard the ramified arguments, which would be reproduced in the next day’s newspapers.
In the intervening time between debates, Lincoln argued his case at picnics, at crossroad meetings, and even at political rallies marked by balloon ascents. Douglas always fell back on the idea that Lincoln was preaching “Negro citizenship.” On the defensive, Lincoln performed poorly at Jonesboro and Charleston, particularly given that Charleston was in southe
rn Illinois, where antiblack attitudes were the strongest. “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 inter-marry with white women.” Douglas was thus able to lambaste him with the contrast between what he said in the antislavery north of the state and what he said in the south.
In bad weather the Jonesboro meeting, down near the Kentucky border, attracted an audience of a mere twelve hundred. But in Charleston both sides went to a great deal of trouble. A cavalcade of thirty-two young women representing the states of the Union supported Lincoln. And at Galesburg, where he was on more sympathetic ground, he returned to a frontal attack on the immorality of slavery. “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.” There were twenty thousand in the crowd, buffeted by a freezing autumn wind, before which Lincoln and Douglas debated. But here as in every town in which they had occurred, the debates were social events, preceded by bands, pageants, marching militia—and those who treated them as a fair could always read the actual text in the next day’s paper.
The last of the debates was to be at Alton on the Mississippi in southern Illinois—country that seemed to favor Douglas by being antiabolitionist. Mary herself attended that debate; the Sangamon-Alton railroad ran a half-price excursion train from Springfield, and both the Lincolns and their son Robert, then a fifteen-year-old schoolboy wearing the uniform of the Springfield cadets, were aboard.
The weather was nearly as severe as that on the day of the Galesburg debate, and on arrival Mary was further depressed to see the streets decked out with Democratic Party slogans, and processions of Democrats carrying banners bearing such slogans as POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY. Abe was lucky to find a Republican, whom he sent over to where Mary stood to reassure her that though the Democrats were rowdy, there were loyal Republican souls among the crowd.
Lincoln blazed at Alton. In a memorable stanza of his speech, he equated slavery with the divine right of kings—the latter an odious principle in the United States. “No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”
Lincoln had become more optimistic as the debates went on. He went into the elections knowing he had made sixty speeches, traveled more than 4,300 miles around the state, and with other Republicans brought in 125,000 votes for Republican state candidates as against 121,000 cast for Douglas Democrats. But the Republican votes were not evenly spread, and on a seat-by-seat basis, Democrat candidates won 46 to the Republicans’ 41. When the legislature convened in Springfield in January, the vote was along party lines, even Buchanan Democrats voting for Douglas. Lincoln spoke of the “emotions of defeat” settling upon his household. In the pause after frenetic electioneering, the “hypo” was upon him and upon Mary Todd too. On top of everything they had sacrificed a great deal of income to the fight against Douglas.
Lincoln, however, had a sense of the notable nature of the debates, and wrote to a Chicago newspaper editor of his acquaintance, asking that a full set of the debates be sent by express. He saw his contests with Douglas as the high point of his life, and believed that the physical record of them might comfort him in the obscurity that lay ahead. He knew that the Douglas worldview, and even more so the Buchanan one, was doomed, but he saw his role in its future destruction as that of a mere political foot soldier.
As late as February 1859, a client saw that Lincoln was still depressed and commiserated with him. Lincoln explained that he felt like “the boy who stumped [sic] his toe. I am too big to cry and too badly hurt to laugh.”
Meanwhile, to console herself, Mary had taken to shopping. At her brother-in-law Clark Smith’s store, she bought six yards of plaid silk, ten and a half yards of cambric and cashmere, and various ruches, chenille, buttons, and stockings. She did not make her own clothing, however, but turned over her purchases to the Irish dressmaker Madame La Barth, whose French nom de couture saved her from the stigma Mary customarily placed upon the Irish. Fortunately Abe suddenly received a contested fee of $4,800 from the Illinois Central Railway.
To his surprise he was forced to go on combining his legal tasks with political appearances, for his debates with Douglas had, despite his failure to reach the Senate, brought him a measure of national renown. A few Illinois papers began mentioning Lincoln as a possible 1860 presidential nominee. A friend took him for a walk after court in Bloomingdale and told him that in the East, Republicans were asking about this Lincoln who had given Douglas such a run. Lincoln told an Illinois editor who wanted to announce his candidacy that “I do not think myself fit for the presidency.” One reason was that he did not consider that he had adequate administrative ability, and the idea of the patronage involved in the presidency, the numerous political favors that would need to be repaid to clamorous party interests, daunted him. Whether utterly sincere or not, he advised one Republican willing to promote his candidacy, “I really think it best for our cause that no concerted effort, such as you suggest, should be made.”
He took time to advise Salmon P. Chase, a Republican antislavery man eminent in Ohio, that he thought that “the introduction of a proposition for repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law, into the next Republican National Convention, will explode the Convention and the party.” That is, slaveholders’ right to retrieve their escaped property should be maintained, because the political consequences of any other option would be disastrous. His power to advise someone as eminent as the godly, ambitious Chase—one of the chief contenders to become the Republican candidate for the presidency—showed that his fear of being reduced to the role of humble party hack had been obliterated by his eloquence in the Douglas debates.
He embraced the chance to speak on other issues, such as the invention of steam plows, his enthusiasm for such inventions all the greater because they brought the subsistence farmer into the cash economy, into the milieu of self-improvement, into the possibility of literacy and numeracy. At the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in Milwaukee, he attacked the idea that “all laborers are necessarily either hired laborers or slaves,” a favorite Douglas proposition. “There is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer.” Again, his own success, and indeed his own self-effacement, conditioned him to see all men as ascendant in society, liberated by American Republican classlessness. Men were not stuck at the “mud-sill” level of society. “The speaker himself had been a hired man twenty-eight years ago,” Lincoln told an Indianapolis crowd. “He didn’t think he was worse off than a slave. He might not be doing as much good as he could, but he was now working for himself.”
In the autumn and winter of 1859-60, though Lincoln was increasingly cited as a potential presidential candidate, other far more eminent and accomplished Republicans were considered better presidential material. The most eminent was William Henry Seward, a former senator and governor of New York. Salmon P. Chase, the devoutly religious lawyer from Ohio, was also considered a favorite for the nomination. There were former Whigs, such as Justice John McLean and Edward Bates, who stood higher than Lincoln in the party nationally. And it was quite a prize in prospect, that nomination. Whoever received it had a good chance, purely because of the split between the Douglas Democrats and those who more radically supported the South.
Lincoln was back working on the circuit, unleashing the bolts of his oratory in country courthouses, when the story reached the press of John Brown’s attempt to capture Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with its Federal arsenal, and incite a slave rebellion. Lincoln was appalled by the fact that Democrats blamed the Brown uprising on Republican fervor, and on his own antislavery sentiments. But even while he went around the circuit, important men in Springfield and Chicago were forming a coalition in his support.
In January 1860 Lincoln�
��s “peculiar friends” met with him in Springfield and began to plan his nomination. They included Logan, Judge Davis, Lamon, Herndon, Swett, and a Chicago newspaperman named Norman Judd—all men who shared Lincoln’s Whiggish ideas about American improvements. Sickened by President Buchanan’s attempt to admit Kansas as a slave state, they knew also that Lincoln was a sensible fellow who thought abolitionism dangerous, and freed slaves likely to reduce the wages of white laborers. Moreover, they wanted for Illinois and its right-thinking men increased authority and the paid places, posts, and honors of which the presidency was a fount.
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LINCOLN WENT TO New York City that bitter and fraught winter, answering an invitation to speak at Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. Many leading New York Republicans were opposed to Seward’s candidacy, not least because he had at one time promoted an alliance between the Republicans and Stephen Douglas. To some extent Lincoln’s appearance was designed to test his palatability for New York and New England Republican tastes. Because of demand, his speech had been moved to Cooper Union, where it was to be part of a series by eminent western Republicans. When Lincoln arrived in New York by train and was met by leading Republicans of the anti-Seward variety, it must have become apparent to him that, should he perform well, Horace Greeley of the Tribune, perhaps the most important Republican organ in the country, was willing to throw support his way.
Abraham was accommodated at the Astor House, the city’s premier hotel, and on the day of his speech in February, he went to Mathew Brady’s studio and had a photograph taken for potential distribution throughout the Northeast. Like the few earlier photographs that survive, it shows a lean, clean-shaven, tall man, somewhere between august and rough hewn, possessing an appearance of tentative strength but already bearing an unreachable, unquenchable sorrow in his profound eyes. He seems a creature hewn from barely violated forests, and polished and grooved by the flow of primeval streams. People who would hate him for his success in the election of 1860 actually called him King Log, as if he were a shaft that had been floated down the Sangamon to the Illinois and to the Mississippi and out its mouth, washing ashore by implacable accident on the more sullied banks of the Potomac.
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