Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1
Page 91
Douglas again denounced Lincoln’s conspiracy charge as “an infamous lie.” As for the contention that he had accused the Washington Union, President Buchanan, and the framers of the Lecompton Constitution of a conspiracy to nationalize slavery, Douglas maintained that he had criticized only the newspaper’s editor, whom he called “that most corrupt of all corrupt men.”114 (How a conspiracy could be carried out by one man he did not explain.)
Elihu B. Washburne thought Douglas’s speech “was not up to his usual standard. He was evidently embarrassed by the questions, and floundered in his replies.”115 The Dixon Republican and Telegraph found the Little Giant’s language “coarse, blustering and insulting,” while the Rockford Republican condemned the senator for his “Maratlike rant and invective.”116 One observer reported that Douglas “had evidently been drinking very strongly, it is said, of brandy.”117
Henry Villard had only positive impressions of Douglas’s speech, asserting that it “was undeniably one of the best and most brilliant of his life.”118 The independent Cincinnati Commercial said that never before had he appealed “with more skill to the prejudices of the white people against the African race, to the political self-righteousness of American citizens, or to the love of Conquest and Dominion, the passion of the extension of Territory and National and self-aggrandizement.”119
Closing the debate, Lincoln expressed irritation at Douglas’s habit of insulting his opponents. Contrasting his own restraint with the senator’s intemperate oratory, Lincoln said, “in regard to Judge Douglas’s declaration about the ‘vulgarity and blackguardism’ in the audience—that no such thing, as he says, was shown by any Democrat while I was speaking. Now, I only wish … to say, that while I was speaking, I used no ‘vulgarity or blackguardism’ toward any Democrat.” He insisted that he had never attempted to conceal his opinions “nor tried to deceive any one in reference to them.” He pointed out that the radical platform statements of northern Illinois Republicans in 1854 were moderated at the Bloomington Convention in 1856 to accommodate the downstate opponents of slavery. He emphatically promised to honor every plank in that platform and indignantly declared, “I hope to deal in all things fairly with Judge Douglas, and with the people of the State, in this contest. And if I should never be elected to any office, I trust I may go down with no stain of falsehood upon my reputation—notwithstanding the hard opinions Judge Douglas chooses to entertain of me.”
In an evident allusion to the question of black citizenship rights, Lincoln urged the antislavery members of the audience to “waive minor differences on questions which either belong to the dead past or the distant future.” He observed that he turned almost “with disgust” from Douglas’s distortions of his “House Divided” speech and recommended that people read that address to “see whether it contains any of those ‘bugaboos’ which frighten Judge Douglas.” He denied ducking the question about the admission of new Slave States, reiterating that he would vote to admit one in the highly unlikely event that such a question were ever to arise. He objected to the Little Giant’s “working up these quibbles.” At some length he quoted from Douglas’s speech denouncing the editor of the Washington Union as well as President Buchanan and the framers of the Lecompton Constitution.120
A correspondent for the New York Tribune, who judged that Lincoln had made the “best impression,” called him “an earnest, fluent speaker, with a very good command of language, and he run the Judge so hard that the latter quite lost his temper.”121 The New York Times declared that Lincoln’s speech was “full of good hits,” while the Missouri Democrat praised his “[c]omprehensiveness, tact, temper, logic, and … most racy humor.”122
Not all Republicans were pleased. Lincoln’s continued defensiveness, according to Joseph Medill, might doom the party to defeat in November. Abolitionists expressed disappointment with his moderation. The Marengo Press, a Republican paper in McHenry County, disapproved of Lincoln’s answer to Douglas’s questions at Freeport. The Press asked: “Are such really his views? And are Douglas’ much worse? If this is bringing Lincoln to his milk, why the Judge of course has done it; and it proves to be of a quality that some, at least, cannot get down. We think he must have been browsing quite too long in Egypt. Let him be kept till November, in a good Northern pasture. We think it would improve him.”123
The Democratic press predictably ridiculed Lincoln. In the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, Henry Villard portrayed him as “the apostle of the abolitionists, negro-amalgamationists, nativists, and all other conceivable—ists” and “a would-be statesman who adorns his speeches with platitudes, with ordinary, shopworn puns, and with a kind of crude backwoods humor,” a man “who grounds his arguments in Bible quotations, and instead of appealing to the intelligence of his listeners merely tries to tickle their funny bones!”124
But by forcing Douglas to reiterate his “unfriendly legislation” doctrine and exposing his false accusation regarding the radical Aurora platform, Lincoln won the debate and regained the initiative he had lost at Ottawa.
In the three weeks before the third debate, both candidates stumped central Illinois, the Whig Belt where most of the 37,351 Fillmore voters of 1856 lived. With good reason, David Davis was especially worried about Tazewell County, which he visited at Lincoln’s request. There he found “a deadness … that I have seen no where.” Though he believed the county could be carried “by energy,” in mid-August there was little enthusiasm, and Republicans were “generally dispirited.” The main problem lay “with the charge of abolition at Lincoln. Lincoln is liked personally in the Co. better than any man in the state. It needs canvassing, active, thorough, old fashioned canvassing, to dissipate this charge.” Davis arranged for Lincoln to speak in Tremont on August 30.125
At Bloomington on September 4, young Joseph Fifer, a future governor of Illinois, stood close to the speaker’s stand and heard Leonard Swett introduce Lincoln, who began awkwardly. “His first sentence didn’t seem to suit him,” Fifer recalled, “and he came back to try it again.” Fifer’s brother whispered, “Swett is the better speaker; maybe he’d make a better Senator.” But as so often happened, once Lincoln warmed up, he mesmerized his audience. “Every one had faces up to Lincoln with their attention riveted on him,” Fifer recalled. “They looked as though they were hewn out of rock. They were sober and serious.”126
A week later, Lincoln was unusually eloquent at a rally in Edwardsville, where his good friend Joseph Gillespie lived. Gillespie, one of the leading Fillmore supporters in 1856, now backed the Republicans. Lincoln sought to win other Fillmore men by appealing to their moral sense. Succinctly he noted that Republicans “consider slavery a moral, social and political wrong,” whereas Democrats like Douglas “do not consider it either a moral, social or political wrong.” Expanding on the theme, he added: “The Republican party … hold[s] that this government was instituted to secure the blessings of freedom, and that slavery is an unqualified evil to the negro, to the white man, to the soil, and to the State.” Republicans “will use every constitutional method to prevent the evil from becoming larger and involving more negroes, more white men, more soil, and more States in its deplorable consequences.” Arguments in favor of Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine made sense only “if you admit that slavery is as good and as right as freedom,” but “not one of them is worth a rush if you deny it.”
Appealing to former Whigs, Lincoln quoted from Henry Clay’s antislavery writings, including an 1849 letter in which the Great Compromiser said: “I know there are those who draw an argument in favor of slavery from the alleged intellectual inferiority of the black race. Whether this argument is founded in fact or not, I will not now stop to inquire, but merely say that if it proves anything at all, it proves too much. It proves that among the white races of the world any one might properly be enslaved by any other which had made greater advances in civilization. And, if this rule applies to nations there is no reason why it should not apply to individuals; and it might easily be
proved that the wisest man in the world could rightfully reduce all other men and women to bondage.”127
(In a memorandum probably written in the 1850s, Lincoln paraphrased Clay’s argument, imagining a dialogue with a defender of slavery in which this question was addressed: “If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B.—why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?—You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly?—You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.”)128
Closing his Edwardsville address, Lincoln reflected on what the future might hold if Douglas’s moral neutrality prevailed and a second Dred Scott decision were handed down: “Now, when by all these means you have succeeded in dehumanizing the negro; when you have put him down, and made it forever impossible for him to be but as the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul, and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out in darkness like that which broods over the spirits of the damned; are you quite sure the demon which you have roused will not turn and rend you?” Rhetorically he asked, “What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence?” Not “our frowning battlements” or “bristling sea coasts,” or “the guns of our war steamers,” not even “the strength of our gallant and disciplined army.” These assets “are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land,” for they all “may be turned against our liberties, without making us stronger or weaker for the struggle.” Instead “[o]ur reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, every where. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises. And let me tell you, all these things are prepared for you with the logic of history, if the elections shall promise that the next Dred Scott decision and all future decisions will be quietly acquiesced in by the people.”129
After this memorable address, Gillespie drove Lincoln to Highland, a German community on the road to his next scheduled appointment. There Gillespie “got the first inkling of the amazing popularity of Mr Lincoln among the Germans.” The residents of Highland “were perfectly enraptured,” Gillespie recalled. “The bare sight of the man threw them into extacies.” The next day as the challenger and Gillespie continued on toward Greenville, Lincoln “said that he had but one serious charge to make against Douglass,” namely, “that Douglass arrogated to himself a superiority on account of having a national reputation.” He added: “I would not do that, if we occupied each others places.”130
On September 6, as Lincoln was approaching Monticello, a crowd came out to escort his carriage into town. When he saw Henry C. Whitney, he invited the young attorney to join him. “I’m mighty glad you are here,” said the candidate. “I hate to be stared at, all by myself; I’ve been a great man such a mighty little time that I’m not used to it yet.”131
That same day, Douglas, without evident irony, told a crowd at Jacksonville that his friends had chided him for being “too courteous by half to Lincoln” and that he “would show the lying, wooly-headed abolitionist how he would talk to him.” Rhetorically, he asked: “Have any of you an old father in Kentucky, or perhaps a mother in Virginia? Then don’t let those dear ties be broken by a demagogue like Lincoln throwing bomb-shells across the Ohio at ’em!”132 Two days later at Carlinville he characterized his opponents as “Yankees and intimates of niggers” and “miserable abolitionists” who were “unacquainted with the true courtesies of civilized life.” He also boasted that “I am much like Gen. Jackson. He didn’t understand Latin, neither do I; and when I was presented the Latin sheepskin making me L. L. D., I couldn’t read it.”133 Of the pro-Buchanan Washington Union and its supporters, the Little Giant said: “I intend to expose their treachery, their treason and their infamy, in their coalition with abolitionists everywhere.”134 The Democratic press echoed Douglas’s arguments, calling Lincoln “a red-hot abolitionist” who would, if chosen senator, “be the worst enemy of the Slave States to be found in that body.”135
Third Debate: Jonesboro
In contrast to Ottawa and Freeport, the 800 residents of Jonesboro seemed indifferent to the senatorial debate in their town. Located 350 miles south of Chicago in the poorest, most backward, and most heavily Democratic part of the state, Jonesboro did little to welcome either the candidates or the 1,400 people who came to hear them, many traveling in dilapidated wagons drawn by stunted oxen. When trains arrived bearing Lincoln and Douglas, no one cheered them. On the morning of the debate, only one procession paraded through the streets, a pitiful delegation from Johnson County, made up of two yoke of steers and an upside-down banner inscribed “Stephen A. Douglas.” A bystander remarked to Lincoln, “Do you see that? Here where Douglas holds sway is ignorance; up north where you are the champion we would find no such display of ignorance, we would see intelligence.” Lincoln chuckled mildly but offered no reply.136 The county was a hotbed of pro-Buchanan sentiment.
Conditions were far from ideal; the weather was hot, the railroads badly constructed, the country roads primitive, the taverns woeful, and food and lodging simply intolerable. Lincoln was fortunate enough to stay at the elegant home of David L. Phillips, the Republican candidate for Congress in that district. He arrived the night before the debate and sat on the porch observing Donati’s comet, which he much admired.
After lunch on September 15, a desultory crowd ambled to the fairgrounds to attend the debate. While Douglas delivered the opening speech, Lincoln cut a comic figure, sitting in a low chair with his feet drawn in and his knees projecting toward the sky.
At Jonesboro, where Douglas had threatened to bring Lincoln “to his milk,” the Little Giant once again stressed the race issue, for, as the challenger had been advised, “in Egypt there is little sympathy for the nigger.”137 Recounting the history of the birth of the Republican Party in 1854, the Little Giant alleged that in New York, antislavery forces had adopted a platform “every plank of which was as black as night, each one relating to the nigger, and not one referring to the interests of the white man.” Republicans throughout the North followed suit, Douglas asserted. The leaders of that new party were “restless mortals and discontented politicians.” In northern Illinois they “brought out men to canvass the State of the same complexion with their political creed, and hence you find Fred. Douglass, the negro, following Gen. Cass, the illustrious Senator from Michigan, and attempting to speak in behalf of Mr. Lincoln and Trumbull and abolitionism against that illustrious Senator. [Applause; renewed laughter.] Why they brought Fred. Douglass to meet me when I was addressing the people at Freeport as I am here, in a carriage with a white lady and her daughter in the carriage sitting by his side, and the owner of the carriage having the honor to drive the coach to convey the negro. [Applause. “Shame.”]”
In addition to his usual arguments about “the negro,” the “savage Indians,” the “Feejee,” the “Malay,” and “any other inferior or degraded race,” the senator introduced a new element into the debates: expansionism. Since 1843, Douglas had been calling for the annexation of Cuba. He told the Jonesboro audience that “our interests would be advanced by the acquisition of the
island of Cuba. [Terrific applause.] When we get Cuba we must take it as we find it, and leave the people of Cuba to decide the question of slavery for themselves without the interference of the federal government, or of any other State in the Union.” If other areas in the Western Hemisphere are to become part of the United States, “I will take them with slavery or without it, just as the people shall determine. [“That’s good.” “That’s right,” and cheers.]”138
(At Belleville on September 10, Douglas had expressed confidence about how voters in Cuba might act: “they will never turn loose a million free negroes to desolate that beautiful island.”139 Although he had not raised this point in previous debates, Douglas had asked at Joliet on August 31: “I want to know if when we take Cuba, Lincoln will oppose its becoming a part of the Territory of the United States ‘unless slavery is first prohibited therein?’ ”140 In December, Douglas would announce: “It is our destiny to have Cuba, and it is folly to debate the question. It naturally belongs to the American Continent.”)141