American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Having centered his convention attack on Douglas and played down his own position, Lincoln kept on the offensive. To Douglas’ vast irritation, he continued to dog the senator’s footsteps, attend his speeches, and announce to Douglas’ throngs that a rebuttal would follow later in the day. Late in July, hoping to share a platform with Douglas rather than following him, Lincoln challenged Douglas to more than fifty debates in all the places—at least fifty—Douglas was scheduled to appear. Ready for combat but unwilling to share so many audiences with Lincoln, Douglas proposed they debate at a central point in each congressional district in the state, save for Springfield and Chicago, where each had already spoken. That would mean seven debates—in Ottawa, Freeport, Galesburg, Quincy, Jonesboro, Charleston, and Alton. Lincoln accepted.

  The debates that followed were grand theater. They were also a striking display of political craftsmanship on both sides; and they represented the intellectual climax of the grand debates over slavery that had been echoing throughout the land for decades.

  Douglas supplied most of the theater. Merely traveling from town to town, the senator was a sight to see. When he arrived back in Chicago from Washington, artillery roared a 150-gun salute; banners hung from windows and over the streets; flags fluttered on ships and buildings. When he journeyed down to Springfield, a flatcar on his special train carried a twelve-pound cannon that continually boomed out across the prairie. Rockets and fireworks climaxed his evening speeches. The intensive railroad building in Illinois was already affecting campaigning; Douglas could rest or receive delegations in his ornate private car between speeches, and regular and special trains brought listeners by the thousands.

  Still, the pastoral folk memory of the debates was valid too—the memory of farmers arriving in buckboards, buggies, carriages, and carts, of roads so enveloped in dust as to resemble great smokehouses, of farmers in overalls and their wives in hoop skirts and young mothers with babies at their breasts standing in the burning sun for two or three hours. With his homespun face, hollowed cheeks, and tangled hair, Lincoln looked more like the hired hand in Sunday garb than the wealthy attorney that he was; Douglas, with his shiny black hair, shiny top hat, shiny black vest, and shiny black footwear, appeared every inch the city man, traveled and worldly. Each respected the oratorical prowess of his adversary. Douglas was all force, pacing up and down the platform, tossing his huge head and locks, blasting out cannonades of questions and accusations. Lincoln was supple, sinewy, tenacious. Douglas himself took the best measure of his opponent, when informed of Lincoln’s nomination:

  “I shall have my hands full. He is the strong man of his party—full of wit, facts, dates—and the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West. He is as honest as he is shrewd, and if I beat him my victory will be hardly won.”

  Like master chess players, each man tried to put the other on the defensive. In the first debate, in Ottawa, Douglas posed seven questions for Lincoln, centering mainly on the question of race. Here Douglas felt on safe ground, given the anti-Negro attitudes so widespread in the state. “I do not question Mr. Lincoln’s conscientious belief that the negro was made his equal, and hence is his brother, but for my own part, I do not regard the negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother or any kin to me whatever.” Douglas’ belief in the innate inferiority of blacks was the key to his entire approach to slavery. It enabled him to consider the issue a matter of local preference, of popular sovereignty. To soothe the troubled consciences of Illinois free-soil sympathizers, who were expanding in numbers, the senator argued that popular sovereignty would keep slavery out of the territories, since slavery had already reached its natural limits and would not thrive where the soil and climate were inhospitable.

  “Diversity, dissimilarity, variety in all our local and domestic institutions,” Douglas said, “is the great safeguard of our liberties.” Lincoln’s statement that the nation could not endure half slave and half free, said Douglas, would lead to a war of sections. “Why should the slavery agitation be kept up?” It only gave Republican politicians a hobbyhorse on which to ride into office.

  Douglas’ exploitation of the race issue put Lincoln on the defensive. He made clear he was not talking about full Negro equality, but of the rights guaranteed all people by the Declaration of Independence. Blacks were equal in the “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” in rights that extended beyond mere liberation from slavery, but they did not extend to full social and political equality. Lincoln made clear his opposition to intermarriage of blacks and whites, to blacks serving on juries, to blacks holding office or becoming citizens or voting in elections. Lincoln sought to keep Douglas on the defensive by pressing his accusation of a conspiracy to legalize slavery in every state in the Union. He charged Douglas with holding a “care not” position on slavery and of seeking to lull Northerners into moral indifference. Douglas indignantly denied the conspiracy charge.

  And so the debates continued, lengthy, repetitious, with the audience chiming in with cheers, laughter, sharp comments, advice, cries of “good, good,” “we stand by that,” “you have him,” “that’s right,” all duly noted down by the reporters. “Put on your specs,” someone called out to Lincoln, who promptly obliged. The audience, indeed, was a vital part of the debates, responding, falling silent, audibly disapproving or doubting. A legend would grow that Lincoln vanquished his opponent, but each man really held his own. At one point Republican backers urged Lincoln to be more aggressive, and other orators were mobilized to assault Douglas. But as the debates proceeded, as charges were made and rebutted and specific questions raised and answered, the debates took on a broader moral and intellectual dimension, and here Lincoln emerged the superior leader, though a perplexed and flawed one.

  Lincoln moved to a philosophical level in the debates in part because he was frustrated on the political. Douglas’ doctrine of popular sovereignty was simply too tough to handle. That doctrine made it all too easy for the senator to label blacks inferior and at the same time express his dislike of slavery, but in the next breath to say, what did it matter?—the question should be left to the people in the states and territories, and it was none of his business how they decided. On this issue Douglas had been absolutely, indeed heroically, consistent, especially after Dred Scott, as his break with the Administration proved. His was a virtually unassailable position. Who could object to popular sovereignty? Even Republicans like Greeley—to Lincoln’s acute political discomfiture—had to admit the force of this old Jeffersonian, Republican, states’ rights doctrine.

  “Has Douglas the exclusive right, in this country, of being on all sides of all questions?” Lincoln demanded amid great laughter. Was he “to have an entire monopoly on that subject?”

  Frustrated, Lincoln found it politically necessary to “rise above politics” to the philosophical level of good and evil, to the moral level of right and wrong. “The real issue in this controversy—the one pressing upon every mind—is the sentiment on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and of another class that does not look upon it as a wrong.” The Republican party, he said, took the first position. “It is the sentiment around which all their actions—all their arguments circle—from which all their propositions radiate. They look upon it as being a moral, social and political wrong….”

  Strong words. But the more Lincoln took this high ethical plane, the more he became trapped in a political and moral dilemma. Political, because he was seeking to hold a centrist position in the Republican party, because he was a constitutionalist who did not want to move outside the document bequeathed by the founding fathers, because he was a “process” Republican as well as a “principle” Republican. That is why in the very next words after the moral bugle call he had just sounded about “political wrong”—indeed, separated in the official transcript only by a semicolon—he went on: “…and while they contemplate it as such, they nevertheless have due regard
for its actual existence among us, and the difficulties of getting rid of it in any satisfactory way and to all the constitutional obligations thrown about it.…” So what was the Republican party solution? “To make provision that it shall grow no larger. ”

  And here lay Lincoln’s moral dilemma. If slavery was so evil, what about the millions of enslaved who would be left alone in their degradation? If, as Lincoln implied, slavery might not be extirpated under his policy of gradualism for another hundred years, what about the tens of millions of bondmen who would be trapped on southern plantations while the rest of the civilized world emancipated serfs and slaves? Lincoln believed in individual effort and growth, in room for talent—what about the potential for growth and creativity crushed in the minds and bodies of millions of persons who would otherwise have made the musicians and actors, the lawyers and doctors, the businessmen and politicians of the future? And what about the blacks already free, or who might be free? In the debates he saw a “physical difference between the black and white races” that would “for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” They could not intermarry or, presumably, otherwise integrate. But since Lincoln would also deny them the right of citizenship, the right to hold office, the right to vote, and the right to serve on juries, he was also denying them the political means of achieving greater liberty and equality, short of a century or so.

  In effect, Lincoln would give black people economic rights, job rights, a property right in their own labor. Despite his reverence for the rights extended in the Declaration of Independence to all men—rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—he would narrow them in the case of blacks. “I agree with Judge Douglas,” he said in the Ottawa debate, that the Negro “is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But 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 living man. ” Great applause burst forth from this audience of farmers, just as they cheered and laughed, in a later debate, when Lincoln said, “I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife”—and proposed that, since only Illinois law could outlaw miscegenation, Judge Douglas’ fear of intermarriage could be allayed by placing him in the state legislature.

  It was all very demeaning to blacks and to Lincoln himself, who must have sensed it. His defenses were that he was admittedly an ambitious man who wanted to win an election, and politics was the art of the possible; that he must work within the Constitution and the political system, which allowed only for gradualism; and that his greatest love was for the Union, in the spirit of the Framers and Webster and Clay, and that forcing the issue would disrupt the Union. Lincoln, despite his supple and leathery argumentation, did not grapple with the question that had eluded so many other leaders: what was the Union for, if not for the ideals of the Declaration of Independence? And if in the spirit of national Union liberty and equality were national values, and if slavery was a national evil that flatly contradicted these values, then there should be national action to confront the evil. But Lincoln did not propose compensated emancipation or any other national program, however difficult to accomplish, that might serve as a response worthy of the Union.

  “The planting and the culture are over,” Lincoln said in a final speech, to friends back in Springfield; “and there remains but the preparation, and the harvest.” For Lincoln, the harvest was plentiful but inadequate. The Democrats won a majority of the contests for the state legislature, which could hence be expected to re-elect Douglas to the United States Senate. The Republicans, under Lincoln’s leadership, won elections for state treasurer and another statewide office, by popular vote. This did Lincoln no immediate good; once again he was a loser. But he had attracted wide attention; he had won praise as a fine debater of issues; and he had maintained his position in the dead center of the Republican party.

  And if Douglas had ended as the political victor in the debates, Lincoln, with his finespun logic and his grasp of the complex relationships of ideas, institutions, and individuals, had emerged as intellectually the superior of the two. Neither emerged as a moral leader, capable of reaching into the minds and hearts of human beings, appealing to their more generous instincts, recognizing their fundamental wants and needs, and mobilizing their hopes and aspirations. Still, the American people were the real victors in this contest, for the Lincoln-Douglas debates became a model for vigorous but rational political discussion, and a treasure of the nation’s intellectual heritage.

  THE POLITICS OF SLAVERY

  The economic boom roared through mid-decade, fueled by foreign capital, especially British, and by $300 million worth of gold from California. The nation’s commerce, industry, and foreign trade expanded as they stimulated one another. There were booms in land, railroads, securities and commodities speculation—and in prices. When prosperity faltered a bit in 1854, the Crimean War boosted overseas orders for grains, metals, and livestock. Also fueling the boom were more than 1,300 banks, with an authorized capital of over $300 million. Trading on the New York Stock Exchange rose to a new intensity, as brokers, their arms swinging over their heads, bought and sold in their staccato lingo—“Sell ’em”—“Take ’em”—“Fifty More”—“I’ll take your lot, buyer four months”—“Done!” The boom brought the usual worries over the excesses of materialism. Moralists chided the ladies who crowded into Tiffany’s to buy diamonds, Stewart’s to buy laces, Ferrerro’s to buy bonnets, or even worse, bought imported silks and laces and wines, or, worst of all, journeyed themselves to Paris and purchased

  Dresses for breakfasts, and dinners, and balls,

  Dresses to sit in, and stand in, and walk in;

  Dresses to dance in, and flirt in, and talk in;

  Dresses in which to do nothing at all;

  Dresses for Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall—

  All of them different in color and shape,

  Silk, muslin, and lace, velvet, satin, and crepe.

  The surge in big fortunes, Emerson feared, might “upset the balance of man, and establish a new, universal Monarchy more tyrannical than Babylon or Rome.”

  But not all was Babylon. While Kansas bled and business prospered, Thoreau published Walden, Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass, Longfellow Hiawatha, William H. Prescott the first volumes of his Philip II. At decade’s end, Hawthorne would bring out The Marble Faun and Emerson The Conduct of Life. The Atlantic Monthly, appearing in 1857 under the editorship of James Russell Lowell, promised to publish Emerson, Bryant, Prescott, Hawthorne, Melville, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wilkie Collins, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, and a score of other eminent authors. New York City was the book center of the country, with the big firm of Harper and Brothers issuing three million books a year; in New York State alone, books were distributed through four hundred or more booksellers or book outlets. Bibliophiles and litterateurs met at the Saturday Club in Boston, the Century Club in New York, Russell’s Bookshop in Charleston. The South no longer could boast an Edgar Allan Poe, though it was rich in storytelling. But there was little communication between southern and northern men and women of letters.

  Late in 1857 a panic suddenly swept through the whole edifice of American banking and commerce. First an old flour and grain house failed; then a prestigious life insurance company tottered; soon railroads—including the huge Illinois Central—went down; securities prices collapsed; depositors flocked to their banks to find closed doors; financial houses toppled; and within weeks fear was running throughout the American money system and to bankers, merchants, and investors abroad. Much human shock and misery followed. Businessmen could not borrow money to keep going; farmers found their commodity prices dropping almost overnight; workers were laid off; established Boston families were suddenly impoverished; western merchants waited in vain for their remittances from New York and Pennsylv
ania. Although southern banks held up more sturdily than northern or western, much to the satisfaction of “southron” leaders, hardly a segment of the nation’s economy was left untouched.

  So powerful were the forces sustaining the American economy, however—the resources, technology, enterprising workers and industrial leaders, the dependably high revenues from cotton, heavy demand from abroad, a continuing flow of gold from California—that the country had largely recovered by the summer of 1858. Still, the panic had left a residue of tension and ill feeling: farmers were angry at middlemen and eastern buyers, workers at coldhearted employers, depositors at faithless bankers. Farmers talked about laws restricting middlemen; workers in New York marched in militant processions demanding jobs; New England mill hands struck. There was little violence; the panic was too short-lived for that. Perhaps the deepest scar was left between North and South, as tobacco and cotton growers blamed the avaricious Yankee bankers, factors, and jobbers for robbing them of their profits.

  Still, as prosperity returned late in 1858 and the election oratory quieted, sectional hostility seemed to soften a bit. The Kansas crisis faded away into anticlimax as Kansans finally and categorically rejected the Lecompton constitution, thus leaving themselves in territorial status. A “Southern Commercial Convention” in May 1859 urged the repeal of all laws illegalizing the foreign slave trade, but even the Buchanan administration opposed such a retrograde and extremist measure.