In 1844, John Quincy Adams described Douglas giving a vehement speech in the House of Representatives. Defending a committee report, the Illinoisan “raved out his hour in abusive invectives upon the members who had pointed out its slanders, and upon the Whig party.” Douglas’s “face was convulsed, his gesticulation frantic, and he lashed himself into such a heat that if his body had been made of combustible matter it would have burnt out. In the midst of his roaring, to save himself from choking, he stripped off and cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his waistcoat, and had the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist.” Adams, known as Old Man Eloquent, wrote in astonishment: “this man comes from a judicial bench, and passes for an eloquent orator!”79
Douglas’s combativeness led other observers to compare him to a boxer. In 1860, a Massachusetts journalist described him as “a chunky man” who “looks like a prize fighter.” Indeed, he possessed “excellent prize fighting qualities. Pluck, quickness and strength; adroitness in shifting his positions, avoiding his adversary’s blows, and hitting him in unexpected places in return.” Douglas’s “strong point is his will to have his own way.” Withal, he was “a plucky, hard, unscrupulous, conscienceless fellow.”80 The Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican maintained that Douglas’s “main power lies in his appeals to the passions and the lower instincts of the mob,” especially its racial prejudices.81
Douglas’s greatest asset was his prowess in debate. Congressman Isaac N. Arnold called him the U.S. senate’s “leading debater” in the 1850s: “He had been accustomed to meet for years in Congress the trained leaders of the nation, and never, either in single combat, or taking the fire of a whole party, had he been discomfited.” He “was bold, defiant, confident, aggressive; fertile in resources, terrible in denunciation, familiar with political history, practiced in all controversial discussion, of indomitable physical and moral courage, and unquestionably the most formidable man in the nation on the stump.”82 According to Arnold, the Little Giant “had a wonderful faculty of extracting from his associates, from experts, and others, by conversation, all they knew of a subject he was to discuss, and then making it so thoroughly his, that all seemed to have originated with himself.”83 A fellow senator, William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, credited Douglas with Houdini-like qualities: “You may drop him in the middle of a morass, from which escape seems impossible, and before your back is turned he will have built a corduroy road across it, and be out again and at you harder than ever.”84
Like Fessenden, Lincoln found it virtually “impossible to get the advantage” of Douglas, for “even if he is worsted, he so bears himself that the people are bewildered and uncertain as to who has the better of it.”85 In 1854, Lincoln said of Douglas’s debating style: “It was a great trick among some public speakers to hurl a naked absurdity at his audience, with such confidence that they should be puzzled to know if the speaker didn’t see some point of great magnitude in it which entirely escaped their observation. A neatly varnished sophism would be readily penetrated, but a great, rough non sequitur was sometimes twice as dangerous as a well polished fallacy.”86
After witnessing Douglas clash with senatorial opponents, Harriet Beecher Stowe made a similar observation: “His chief forte in debating is his power of mystifying the point. With the most off-hand assured airs in the world, and a certain appearance of honest superiority, like one who has a regard for you and wishes to set you right on one or two little matters, he proceeds to set up some point which is not that in question, but only a family connection of it, and this point he attacks with the very best of logic and language; he charges upon it horse and foot, runs it down, tramples it in the dust, and thus turns upon you with—‘Sir, there’s your argument! didn’t I tell you so? you see it’s all stuff;’ and if you have allowed yourself to be so dazzled by his quickness as to forget that the routed point is not after all the one in question, you suppose all is over with it.” In addition, Mrs. Stowe said, “he contrives to mingle up so many stinging allusions to so many piquant personalities, so many fillips upon sore and sensitive places, that by the time he has done his mystification a dozen others are ready and burning to spring on their feet to repel some direct or indirect attack, all equally wide of the point. His speeches, instead of being like an arrow sent at a mark, resemble rather a bomb which hits nothing in particular, but bursts and send[s] red-hot nails in every direction.” Mrs. Stowe thought it “a merciful providence that with all his alertness and adroitness, all his quick-sighted keenness, Douglas is not witty—that might have made him too irresistible a demagogue for the liberties of our laughter-loving people, to whose weaknesses he is altogether too well adapted now.” The Republicans, she concluded, “have pitted against them a leader infinite in resources, artful, adroit, and wholly unscrupulous.”87
Douglas treated the 1854 Illinois legislative and congressional campaigns as a referendum on the Kansas-Nebraska Act and on his leadership. In January he had accurately predicted that Northerners would assail him “without stint or moderation. Every opprobrious epithet will be applied to me. I shall be, probably, hung in effigy in many places.”88 To vindicate himself, he returned from Washington late in the summer to speak on behalf of Democratic candidates, especially Thomas L. Harris, challenger to Lincoln’s friend Congressman Richard Yates. When Yates announced his intention of retiring, Lincoln urged him to seek reelection. Yates recalled Lincoln’s statement that “though he could not promise me success in a district so largely against us, yet he hoped for the sake of the principle, I would run, and if I would, he would take the stump in my behalf. I remember his earnestness, and so deeply did he implore me that the question was one worthy of our noblest efforts whether in victory or defeat, that I consented.”89 When political leaders asked if he would like to run for Yates’s seat, Lincoln “seemed gratified by the compliment” but refused, saying: “No; Yates has been a true and faithful Representative, and should be returned.”90 Lincoln took to the hustings in August shortly after the announcement of Yates’s candidacy. The following month, a Chicago editor reported that “Lincoln tells me that Yates is on ‘praying ground’ in his District. Lincoln canvasses it with & for him.”91
Lincoln was no longer the fierce Whig partisan of old but rather a principled opponent of slavery expansion. As Yates’s campaign manager, he tried to marshal support for the incumbent congressman, reaching across party lines to seek the help of anti-Nebraska Democrat John M. Palmer. “You know how anxious I am that this Nebraska measure shall be rebuked and condemned every where,” Lincoln wrote Palmer on September 7. He added that if the Democrats had nominated Palmer instead of Thomas L. Harris, Lincoln would not have opposed him: “I should have been quiet, happy that Nebraska was to be rebuked at all events. I still should have voted for the whig candidate; but I should have made no speeches, written no letters; and you would have been elected by at least a thousand majority.”92
To counter rumors that Yates was a nativist bigot, Lincoln drafted a letter for him to circulate. Yates ignored the advice and later acknowledged that his failure to heed it probably cost him the election. Antiforeign, anti-Catholic sentiment was sweeping the North, in some states becoming the dominant theme in 1854. Supporters of this movement, called Native Americans or Know-Nothings, adopted the slogan, “Americans must rule America.” They believed that Catholicism was incompatible with America’s democratic, individualistic values; that Catholics wielded disproportionate power; that established political parties and professional politicians were corrupt and unresponsive to the popular will; that slavery and liquor were evil; and that immigrants were the source of crime, corruption, pauperism, wage reductions, voter fraud, and the defeat of antislavery candidates.
Know-Nothings in Springfield approached Lincoln, asking if they could run him for the state legislature. A party leader, Richard H. Ballinger, and two colleagues visited Lincoln’s law office, where he received them kindly but flatly turned them down, stating “that he had belonged to the old Whig party and must c
ontinue to do so until a better one arose to take its place. He could not become identified with the American party—they might vote for him if they wanted to; so might the Democrats; yet he was not in sentiment with this new party.” Lincoln asked “who the native Americans were. ‘Do they not,’ he said, ‘wear the breech-clout and carry the tomahawk? We pushed them from their homes and now turn upon others not fortunate enough to come over as early as we or our forefathers. Gentlemen of the committee, your party is wrong in principle.’ ” He added humorously: “When this Know-nothing party first came up, I had an Irishman, Patrick by name, hoeing in my garden. One morning I was there with him, and he said, ‘Mr. Lincoln, what about the Know-nothings?’ I explained that they would possibly carry a few elections and disappear, and I asked Pat why he was not born in this country. ‘Faith, Mr. Lincoln,’ he replied, ‘I wanted to be, but my mother wouldn’t let me.’ ”93
In September, Lincoln debated John Calhoun, who alleged that the Whigs and Know-Nothings were acting in concert. Lincoln disparaged Know-Nothingism and even “doubted its existence.”94 (The following year he condemned the Know-Nothings in an eloquent private letter to his old friend Joshua Speed, who had asked where Lincoln stood politically now that the Whigs were defunct. “I am not a Know Nothing,” he declared. “That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.”95 Lincoln “avowed that if the K[now] N[othing] movement was successful, that he could be no longer of any use to his fellow men in politics.”)96
One day when Lincoln was out of town, Springfield Whigs nominated him for the General Assembly, much to his surprise and his wife’s dismay. Upon reading a press account indicating that he was being put forward for the state House of Representatives, she rushed to the newspaper’s offices and ordered her husband’s name stricken from the list of candidates. Later, when William Jayne called seeking permission to reinstate Lincoln’s name, he found the potential candidate “the saddest man I Ever Saw—the gloomiest.” Lincoln, nearly in tears, paced the floor, resisting Jayne’s blandishments by saying, “No—I can’t—you don’t Know all. I Say you don’t begin to Know one half and that’s Enough.”97 Henry C. Whitney explained that it “was Mrs. Lincoln’s opposition which so much disturbed him. She insisted in her imperious way that he must now go to the United States Senate, and that it was a degradation to run him for the Legislature.”98 But despite his wife’s objections, Lincoln remained on the ballot, explaining to a friend: “I only allowed myself to be elected, because it was supposed my doing so would help Yates.”99
The First Great Speech
For the campaign Lincoln prepared a long, masterful speech arraigning Douglas, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and slavery with a passionate eloquence that heralded the emergence of a new Lincoln. Like a butterfly hatching from a caterpillar’s chrysalis, the partisan warrior of the 1830s and 1840s was transformed into a statesman. Abandoning his earlier “slasher-gaff” style, he began to speak with authority as a principled, articulate, high-minded champion of the antislavery cause. He dissected Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine with surgical precision, forceful logic, and deep moral conviction.
Lincoln had planned to debate Douglas, just as he had done on earlier occasions. In September, the Little Giant was to speak in Bloomington, where a leading Whig, Jesse W. Fell, proposed that he share time with Lincoln. “No, I won’t do it!” Douglas exclaimed. “I come to Chicago, and there I am met by an old line abolitionist; I come down to the center of the State, and I am met by an old line Whig; I go to the south end of the State, and I am met by an anti-administration Democrat. I can’t hold the abolitionist responsible for what the Whig says; I can’t hold the Whig responsible for what the abolitionist says; and I can’t hold either responsible for what the Democrat says. It looks like dogging a man over the State. This is my meeting; the people have come to hear me, and I want to talk to them.”100 Fear of Lincoln’s ability as a debater may have led Douglas to reject Fell’s suggestion. In October the Little Giant called Lincoln “the most difficult and dangerous opponent that I have ever met” in debate.101 Lincoln saw the logic of Douglas’s position. That evening he replied to the speech that the Little Giant gave in the afternoon. Lincoln’s remarks prefigured the memorable address he would deliver at Springfield and Peoria a few days later (discussed below).
While in Bloomington, Lincoln attended a reception at Douglas’s hotel suite, where the Little Giant offered liquor to his callers. When Lincoln declined, Douglas asked:
“What, do you belong to a temperance society?”
“No, I don’t belong to any temperance society, but I am temperate in this that I don’t drink anything.”102
Douglas may have been taunting Lincoln with a subtle allusion to the temperance movement, which had fielded candidates for public office. Although he had spoken on behalf of temperance in 1842, Lincoln did not participate in the Illinois anti-alcohol crusade of the mid-1850s.
In October, Lincoln responded to Douglas in Springfield, where thousands of Illinoisans had flocked to attend the State Fair. There the Little Giant defended his record and asserted that the defection of anti-Nebraska Democrats could not defeat his party: “I tell you the time has not yet come when a handful of traitors in our camp can turn the great State of Illinois, with all her glorious history and traditions, into a negro-worshipping, negro-equality community.”103 Sitting directly before Douglas, Lincoln listened with close attention, obviously planning to offer a rejoinder. At the close of the speech, Lincoln announced to the crowd that a leading Anti-Nebraska Democrat, Lyman Trumbull, might reply to it the following day, but in case Trumbull could not do so, he himself would.
When John W. Bunn opined that it would be hard to respond to the Little Giant’s speech, Lincoln replied: “No, it won’t. Douglas lied; he lied three times and I’ll prove it!”104 The next afternoon, in Trumbull’s absence, he did so before an unusually large crowd at the statehouse. He repeated this address twelve days later in Peoria and wrote it out for publication. It became known as the Peoria Speech, though he delivered virtually the same remarks earlier at Springfield.
Lincoln had prepared his remarks with special care, conducting research in the state library. Among the books that influenced his thinking was Leonard Bacon’s Slavery Discussed in Occasional Essays from 1833 to 1846, in which the author, a Congregational minister, declared that “if those laws of the southern states, by virtue of which slavery exists there, and is what it is, are not wrong—nothing is wrong.”105 (In 1864, Lincoln would famously write that “[i]f slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”)106
Lincoln gave a preliminary version of the speech in Winchester as well as Bloomington. A member of the Winchester audience recalled that “he made a few gestures, more with his head than he did with his hands or arms.” In discussing the way in which the three-fifths provision of the Constitution diminished the political rights of Free State voters, he said: “Talk about equal rights, I would like some man to take a pointer dog, and nose around, and snuff about, and see if he can find my rights in such a condition.” He illustrated this image by mimicking “with his head and face the acts of a dog doing that.” Richard Yates said of Lincoln’s effort in Winchester: “I have heard this winter all the big men in Congress talk on this question, but Lincoln’s is the strongest speech I ever heard on the subject.”107 Winchester and Bloomington were just a warm-up for Springfield and Peoria.
In this Springfield-Peoria speech, his first oratorical masterpiece, Lincoln presented a comprehensive analysis and denun
ciation of slavery and its apologists. Before getting to the substance of his address, he graciously “said that he should not assail the motives and not impeach the honesty of any man who voted for the Nebraska Bill, much less, his distinguished friend, Judge Douglas.” He gave Douglas “credit for honesty of intention and true patriotism—referring whatever of wrong he might happen to find among his actions, entirely to a mistaken sense of duty.” He invited the Little Giant to point out any mistakes he might make in recounting the history of the slavery controversy; Douglas consented to do so.
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