Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1
Page 89
One reporter believed Lincoln had made it clear that he was in earnest. Chester P. Dewey of the New York Evening Post, in describing the Ottawa debate, said the Republican champion might be ugly in repose, but “stir him up, and the fire of his genius plays on every feature. His eye glows and sparkles, every lineament, now so ill formed, grows brilliant and expressive, and you have before you a man of rare power and of strong magnetic influence. He takes the people every time, and there is no getting away from his sturdy good sense, his unaffected sincerity, and the unceasing play of his good humor, which accompanies his close logic and smoothes the way to conviction.”57
Dewey’s Republican sympathies may have colored his assessment, but German-born Henry Villard, a pro-Douglas reporter and stump speaker, rendered a similar judgment. Villard recalled that the Little Giant was more polished, for he “commanded a strong, sonorous voice, a rapid, vigorous utterance, a telling play of countenance, impressive gestures, and all the other arts of the practised speaker.” Lincoln, on the other hand, made a poor first impression, with his “lean, lank, indescribably gawky figure” and his “odd-featured, wrinkled, inexpressive, and altogether uncomely face.” He “used singularly awkward, almost absurd, up-and-down and sidewise movements of his body to give emphasis to his arguments.” Yet, Villard recollected, “the unprejudiced mind felt at once that, while there was on the one side a skilful dialectician and debater arguing a wrong and weak cause, there was on the other a thoroughly earnest and truthful man, inspired by sound convictions in consonance with the true spirit of American institutions. There was nothing in all Douglas’s powerful effort that appealed to the higher instincts of human nature, while Lincoln always touched sympathetic chords. Lincoln’s speech excited and sustained the enthusiasm of the audience to the end.”58
Gustave Koerner similarly recalled that the “impetuous, denunciatory” Douglas “frequently lost his temper” but nevertheless “magnetized the big crowd by his audacity and supreme self-confidence. Lincoln impressed his audiences by his almost too extreme fairness, his always pure and elevated language, and his appeals to their higher nature. Douglas, on the contrary, roused the existing strong prejudices against the negro race to the highest pitch, and not unfrequently resorted to demagogism unworthy of his own great reputation as a statesman.”59
Deliberate Garbling of Lincoln’s Speeches
Casting even more doubt on Douglas’s claim to statesmanship was the conduct of his organ, the Chicago Times, which ran a hopelessly garbled and ridiculous version of Lincoln’s remarks at Ottawa. Hundreds of discrepancies exist between its version of the challenger’s words and the version published in the Press and Tribune. The Times’s account is briefer; occasionally, it amounts to gibberish. The Press and Tribune declared that a “more cowardly and knavish trick was never undertaken by a desperate politician,” a trick which “betokens a meanness so despicable, a malignity so purely fiendish, and a nature so lost to honor that we know not where to look for a parallel.”60 Chester P. Dewey called it “altogether a shameful instance of the dishonorable warfare practiced by the Douglasites.”61
Throughout the debates the Chicago Times and other Democratic papers persistently misreported Lincoln’s remarks, eliciting fierce Republican protests. The Democrat of Galesburg, site of the fifth debate, complained that the Times’s account of Lincoln’s speech there contained “scarcely a correctly reported paragraph in the whole speech! Many sentences are dropped out which were absolutely necessary for the sense; many are transposed so as to read wrong end first; many are made to read exactly the opposite of the orator’s intention.” The paper counted over 180 errors in the Times’s version.62 The Press and Tribune concurred: “Not a paragraph has been fairly reported, from the commencement to the conclusion of his speech. Some of his finest passages are disemboweled, and chattering nonsense substituted in their stead. Wherever Lincoln made a ‘hit,’ the sentence containing it is blurred, and the point carefully eviscerated.” The same paper protested that the Times’s account of Lincoln’s speech at Quincy was so “shockingly mutilated” as to be unrecognizable, while the reporting of the Alton debate made Lincoln sound “like a half-witted booby.”63
The Times’s shorthand reporter who deliberately mangled Lincoln’s remarks was a disreputable character named Henry Binmore. Many years later Robert R. Hitt gave an interview stating that the “misrepresentation of Lincoln in the Times was in accordance with the purpose to make him appear ignorant and uncouth in language beside Douglas. Among the reporters it was well understood that the report of Lincoln for the Times was to be done in a slovenly manner, to carry out the Democratic estimate of Lincoln.” James B. Sheridan, a shorthand expert for the Philadelphia Press, temporarily on assignment to the Chicago Times, “was above lending himself to such a dishonorable practice” and took down only Douglas’s speeches. Sheridan “frequently talked privately about this treatment of Lincoln, but did not go further than to express his confidential opinion of it.”64 Because Sheridan refused to misrepresent Lincoln’s words, the Times turned to the more pliant Binmore, of whom the Press and Tribune said: “If mutilating public discourses were a criminal offense, the scamp whom Douglas hires to report Lincoln’s speeches would be a ripe subject for the Penitentiary.”65 Binmore had already been fired from the St. Louis Missouri Republican for lying. Hitt, who in July had teamed up with Binmore to report Lincoln and Douglas’s Chicago speeches, expressed great contempt for him, calling him “seedy,” “a complete little fop and fool” with “no common sense,” a man “hard to get along with” and “always needy.” On one occasion, Binmore “asked for the loan of a quarter,” explaining that “he had nothing but a hundred-dollar check with him.” Hitt confided to his diary, “I have … seldom known Binmore to tell the truth about his family.” In addition, Hitt complained about Binmore’s “fondness for telling stories about his connections, the amounts of money he has made and the familiarity of his acquaintance with every great man ever named in his presence.” Hitt complained with some irritation that “[n]o land can be mentioned in his presence but he has been there and is perfectly familiar with the greatest men in the country.” Understandably, Hitt had no faith in anything Binmore said.66
(Five years later, Binmore’s misbehavior and deceit led to his dismissal from the army. While in the service he had introduced an “abandoned woman” as his wife, had refused to pay his laundry bills in Memphis, and had behaved shamefully in Cairo. He was arrested for drunkenness and disorderly conduct. In an appeal for mercy, he explained that he had married at the age of 18 against his parents’ wishes, settled in New York, found no work, was evicted by a hard-hearted landlord, sired children, abandoned them and their mother, established a liaison with another woman, then led a vagabond existence, flitting from Utah to Nicaragua, “everywhere where excitement was to be found.” After his expulsion from the service, Binmore returned to the Chicago Times, where his colleagues held him in contempt.)67
Binmore, it seems clear, would deliberately garble Lincoln’s words if told to do so, and his colleague Sheridan confirmed that he did. Because Douglas frequently repeated himself, Hitt would cut and paste passages from the Little Giant’s earlier speeches rather than take down his words in shorthand. On observing this, Sheridan quipped: “Hitt mucilates Douglas for the Press and Tribune, while [Binmore] mutilates Lincoln for the Times.”68 The Times’s claims for the “the high characters of our reporters of these debates” fit Sheridan but not Binmore.69 Lincoln doubtless had Binmore in mind when referring to the Times’s “villainous reporters.”70
Just who instructed Binmore to perform that mutilation is unclear. The Press and Tribune alleged that Douglas himself, with the assistance of two lawyers and Chicago Times editor James W. Sheahan, had dictated “interlineations, [and] mutilations, destroying the sense and turning awry the grammar of his adversary!” Binmore had “undoubtedly defaced and garbled” Lincoln’s words at the “express orders” of Douglas. No hard evidence corroborates t
his charge, though the Press and Tribune alleged that Binmore had “offered to do for us, for pay, in behalf of Lincoln, what he is now doing for Douglas.”71 The Little Giant’s lies about Lincoln’s record, his claim that Lincoln had helped write the 1854 “Springfield” Republican platform, and his general unscrupulousness make it seem likely that either directly or indirectly Douglas commanded Binmore to misrepresent Lincoln.
Badly as the Times garbled Lincoln’s words, a pamphlet version of the fourth debate (at Charleston) mangled them even worse. Published anonymously, it presented Douglas’s speech in larger type than his opponent’s. Probably issued by the Douglas campaign, it further strengthens the suspicion that the Little Giant was behind the misrepresentation of Lincoln’s remarks. “Abraham Lincoln and His Doctrines,” a similar pamphlet of badly mutilated excerpts from Lincoln’s speeches, appeared without an imprint.
The Times denied all charges and alleged in return that “the Republicans have a candidate for the Senate of whose bad rhetoric and horrible jargon they are ashamed,” and that “they called a council of ‘literary’ men to discuss, re-construct and re-write” Lincoln’s words before allowing them to be published, for “they dare not allow Lincoln to go into print in his own dress.” Those who heard Lincoln’s speeches, said the Times, “must know that he cannot speak five grammatical sentences in succession.”72 The Press and Tribune retorted that everyone “who has ever heard Abraham Lincoln address the people … knows that he is forcible, agreeable and correct in his delivery, and that he never did and never can talk the nonsense which the Times attributes to him.”73
Some of Douglas’s supporters in Chicago acknowledged that the Times presented Lincoln’s words inaccurately but ascribed “the mutilation entirely to the incompetency of the reporter.” To the Chicago Press and Tribune, it seemed that “if this charge of incompetency were true, it is quite as dishonorable for Douglas to keep the man employed for the specific purpose of reporting his opponent, as it would be to compel a competent reporter to mutilate his speeches.”74
For their part, the Press and Tribune editors may have lightly retouched the text of Lincoln’s speeches, which an assistant named Larminie had transcribed from Hitt’s notes. The primitive conditions under which reporters had to cover the debates necessitated at least some repair to their field notes, which the wind could blow. In addition, the small, crowded, unsteady tables on which their notes were taken could be jarred.
Whatever cosmetic surgery the editors at the Press and Tribune may have performed on Lincoln’s text, however, they never inflicted nearly the damage to the record achieved by the carelessness, incapacity, and partisan malice of Henry Binmore and the Times.
Lincoln could be a difficult speaker to report because of his tendency to qualify his points. His sentences, according to Hitt, “were not finished and harmonious like those of Douglas but broken with endless explanation and qualifications and parentheses, which made it difficult to write or read it. Often he repeated what he had to say two or three times and each time qualified in some new way. His mind seems to be one of excessive caution and no statement that he makes will he suffer to go forth without a qualification that will prevent all misunderstanding, but which at the same time deprived the statement of its vigorous and independent tone.”75 Lincoln would, Hitt remembered, “dwell upon and emphasize several important words, perhaps in the middle of a sentence, and the rest of it would be spoken with great rapidity, and quickly followed by another sentence in the same manner, convincing to his hearers, but annoying and fatiguing to the reporters.”76 Horace White, who italicized the words Lincoln spoke with special emphasis, concurred, noting that Lincoln’s “words did not flow in a rushing, unbroken stream like Douglas’. He sometimes stopped for repairs before finishing a sentence, especially at the beginning of a speech. After getting fairly started, and lubricated, as it were, he went on without any noticeable hesitation, but he never had the ease and grace and finish of his adversary.”77 A Democratic observer of the Ottawa debate noted the same pattern. Lincoln’s speech there “was made up with such expressions as ‘I think it is so,’ ‘I may be mistaken,’ ‘I guess it was done,’ &c., &c. There were no straightforward assertions.”78
Reporters also struggled with Lincoln’s talking speed. Binmore’s only defense for his inaccurate accounts was his inability to keep pace with Lincoln. On July 10, both Hitt and Binmore recorded Lincoln’s speech at Chicago. Hitt noted in his journal that “so fast did his words follow each other that it was with the utmost difficulty that I could follow him and I was aware all the time that I was not writing my notes in such a neat and legible style.” The following day, as he helped Binmore transcribe his shorthand notes, Hitt discovered that “there was much matter that Binmore had omitted in his report. These passages were just where I remember Lincoln spoke the fastest.”79 In old age, Binmore told an interviewer, “I never became a record-breaker. Two hundred words a minute for a short time was the best I could do.”80
Lincoln may not have been surprised by the Times’s distortions. On August 12, he declared that he “would cheerfully allow any gentleman to report his speeches, but at the same time he would not be responsible for a perverted, distorted or patched up report which might appear in the Douglas prints.”81
Second Debate: Freeport
Two days after the Ottawa event, Lincoln asked Ebenezer Peck and Norman B. Judd to meet him for consultation. “Douglas is propounding questions to me,” he explained, “which perhaps it is not quite safe to wholly disregard. I have my view of the means to dispose of them.” But he wanted his friends’ advice.82 The night before the second debate, at Freeport, Judd and Peck met with Lincoln at Macomb, where they arrived at 2 A.M. They awakened the candidate, who received them in a brief night shirt that struck his visitors as comical. When he read to them his proposed replies to Douglas’s queries, Judd suggested modifications to suit the strong antislavery sentiment of northern Illinois. “But I couldn[’]t stir him,” Judd recalled. “He listened very patiently to both Peck and myself, but he wouldn’t budge an inch from his well studied formulas.”83
Earlier that day, Judd and Peck had conferred in Chicago with Joseph Medill, Martin Sweet, Stephen Hurlbut, and Herman Kreismann to discuss Lincoln’s tactics. They recommended answers to Douglas’s interrogatories and urged him to ask “a few ugly questions” of the Little Giant, including this fateful one: “What becomes of your vaunted popular Sovereignty in [the] Territories since the Dred Scott decision?”84 Lincoln had already anticipated Douglas’s reply to such a query. In late July, when Henry Asbury suggested that he pose that very question, Lincoln replied: “You shall have hard work to get him directly to the point whether a territorial Legislature has or has not the power to exclude slavery. But if you succeed in bringing him to it, though he will be compelled to say it possesses no such power; he will instantly take ground that slavery can not actually exist in the ter[r]itories, unless the people desire it, and so give it protective territorial legislation. If this offends the South he will let it offend them; as at all events he means to hold on to his chances in Illinois.”85
Medill and his colleagues recommended that Lincoln put two other questions to Douglas: “Will you stand by the adjustment of the Kansas question on the basis of the English bill compromise?” and “Having given your acquiescence and sanction to the Dred Scott decision that destroys popular sovereignty in the Territories will you acquiesce in the other half of that decision when it comes to be applied to the States, by the same court?” Echoing many others, they also counseled Lincoln to be aggressive: “Don[’]t act on the defensive at all.… [H]old Dug up as a traitor & conspirator a proslavery, bamboozling demagogue.… Above all things be bold, defiant and dogmatic.… Make short work of his nigger equality charges.… For once leave modesty aside. You are dealing with a bold, brazen, lying rascal & you must ‘fight the devil with fire.’ … Be saucy with the ‘Catiline’ & permit no browbeating—in other words give him h[el]l.”86
En route to Freeport, Douglas spoke in Galena, where a Republican journalist reported that he “dilated luxuriously for half an hour upon negro equality, amalgamation, marriages of black and white in Boston, and gave the African a general overhauling.” He “grew even blacker in the face than usual as he said he was no kin to, and never meant to be kin to, the negro.”88
On August 27, a crowd one-third larger than the one at Ottawa converged on Freeport, a Republican stronghold of 7,000 located 100 miles west of Chicago. Hoteliers and saloonkeepers blanched at the hordes demanding food and drink, and the streets were choked with visitors. Arriving by train the morning of the debate, Lincoln was greeted by cannons, bands, and cheering friends. He tried to find some privacy in his hotel, but his admirers demanded that he shake their hands. After lunch, he boarded a plain Conestoga wagon that conveyed him and a dozen salt-of-the-earth farmers to a nearby grove, where the speakers’ platform had been erected. Lincoln sat on the rear of the wagon’s box, his long legs sticking out, like “the skeleton of some greyhound.”89
Lincoln’s modest arrangements contrasted sharply with Douglas’s regal entrance the previous night. The next morning, fearful that his customary triumphalism might offend the egalitarian sensibilities of Freeporters, the Little Giant abandoned plans to ride in a grand carriage drawn by white horses and instead walked to the debate site.