The Paris Prairie Beacon News thought that reasonable persons must be convinced that Lincoln did not favor political and social equality for blacks. If they were not, the only way the candidate could persuade them would be if he were to “arm himself with a huge cleaver, and at the next meeting between himself and his competitor, with appropriate formality and due solemnity, kill at least one nigger.” One listener, commenting on Lincoln’s denial of charges that he favored racial amalgamation, said: “If they can’t believe that, you might as well talk to stumps.”197
The Democrats rushed into print a garbled version of the Charleston debate. A Republican in Naperville told Lincoln that “your speech is so badly mutilated that it is well calculated to work a great injury to yourself & our party’s cause.… We look upon this here abouts as the most shameful and dishonest imposition & fraud, yet Committed by our unscrupable opponents.”198
In Massachusetts, the Springfield Republican also deplored Douglas’s tactics, though it had been sympathetic to him before the debate at Charleston. There, the Republican protested, the Little Giant had appealed to “the ignorance and prejudices of the people to sustain him in a coarse tirade against the blacks.”199 Similarly, the Missouri Democrat observed that Douglas “entertains but a poor opinion of the intellectual capacities of the people.”200
Some abolitionists were disappointed in Lincoln’s remarks about black citizenship. “Our standard bearer has faltered thus soon,” lamented the Chicago Congregational Herald. “Lincoln deliberately, and with repetition, declared himself to be opposed to placing colored men on a political equality with white men. He made color and race the ground of political proscription. He forsook principle, and planted himself on low prejudice.” The editors declared that “[w]it, sharp repartee, readiness of speech, good humor, [and] effective stump oratory, amount to something; but they cannot compensate for moral cowardice, or ignorance of the first truths of liberty.… when he proscribes an entire class of the population, irrespective of intelligence or character, merely because of color and race, … he has fallen from a position which we can respect.”201 Disenchanted Republicans in northern Illinois allegedly schemed to replace Lincoln with Norman B. Judd as their senatorial candidate.
Democrats complained that Lincoln was two-faced on the slavery issue. Belying his radical talk was the bill he had planned to introduce in Congress nine years earlier, which contained a clause calling for the rendition of slaves fleeing to Washington. (In 1860, the radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips would criticize Lincoln on the same grounds.) Moreover, they argued plausibly, his statement at Charleston about black citizenship stood in marked contrast to the idealism of his Chicago speech.
In response to such criticism, the National Anti-Slavery Standard sensibly remarked that “a certain degree of anxiety to escape the odium of abolitionism is pardonable on the part of our Republican friends, especially in election times.”202 Abolitionist Maria Chapman made a similar point to Lyman Trumbull, and Herndon told Theodore Parker: “Reformers must get so low—crawl along in the mud till a working majority sticks.”203
Lincoln’s rejoinder was in fact the turning point in the debate. Then he seemed to gain traction and to go on the offensive. In the next three debates he would best his opponent soundly.
Race
Other committed opponents of slavery, including congressmen, shared Lincoln’s views on citizenship rights for blacks and expressed skepticism about racial equality. In 1859, Lincoln’s old friend Joshua R. Giddings declared on the floor of the House: “We do not say the black man is, or shall be, the equal of the white man; or that he shall vote or hold office.”204 Eleven years earlier he had stated that slavery had been established because of “the physical and intellectual superiority of the whites over the colored race.”205 Although Congressman Owen Lovejoy hated slavery with a passion inspired by the murder of his abolitionist brother Elijah, he told a Chicago audience in 1860: “I know very well that the African race, as a race, is not equal to ours.” He added that he also knew “that, in regard to the great overwhelming majority, the Government may be considered, in a certain sense, a Government for white men.”206 Lovejoy further insisted that the white and black races were not equal “in gracefulness of motion, or loveliness of feature; not in mental endowment, moral susceptibility, and emotional power; not socially equal; not of necessity politically equal.”207 In 1852, Horace Mann told the annual Convention of Freemen of Ohio: “The blacks as a race, I believe to be less aggressive and predatory than the whites, more forgiving, and generally not capable of the white man’s tenacity and terribleness of revenge. In fine, I suppose the almost universal opinion to be, that in intellect the blacks are inferior to the whites.”208
Antislavery senators shared these views. In 1860, William Henry Seward, one of the foremost opponents of the peculiar institution in the upper chamber, stated: “The great fact is now fully realized that the African race here is a foreign and feeble element like the Indians, incapable of assimilation” and “is a pitiful exotic unwisely and unnecessarily transplanted into our fields, and which it is unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of the native vineyard.”209 Seward maintained that “the motive of those who have protested against the extension of slavery … always has … been, concern for the welfare of the white man,” not “an unnatural sympathy with the negro.”210
In 1859, another leading antislavery senator, Lyman Trumbull, voiced similar opinions: “When we say that all men are created equal, we do not mean that every man in organized society has the same rights. We do not tolerate that in Illinois. I know that there is a distinction between these two races because the Almighty himself has marked it upon their very faces; and, in my judgment, man cannot, by legislation or otherwise, produce a perfect equality between these two races, so that they will live happily together.”211 When asked if he would favor admitting Arizona as a state if it were “colonized and filled up with free colored people,” Trumbull replied that he “did not believe these two races could live happily and pleasantly together, each enjoying equal rights, without one domineering over the other; therefore he advocated the policy of separating these races by adopting a system to rid the country of the black race, as it becomes free. He would say that he should not be prepared under the existing state of state of affairs to admit as a sovereign member of the Union, a community of negroes or Indians either.”212 In recommending that free blacks leave the country, he told Chicagoans: “I want to have nothing to do either with the free negro or the slave negro. We, the Republican party, are the white man’s party. [Great applause.] … I would be glad to see this country relieved of them.”213
Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, another eminent opponent of slavery, told his colleagues during an 1860 debate on educating black children in the District of Columbia: “I do not believe in the equality of the African with the white race, mentally or physically, and I do not think morally.”214 “So far as mental or physical equality is concerned,” Wilson said, “I believe the African race inferior to the white race.”215 “I have studied the negro character,” declared one of Kentucky’s foremost abolitionists, Cassius M. Clay. “They lack self reliance—we can make nothing out of them. God has made them for the sun and the banana!” Clay thought the country “must spew out the negro.”216 The New York Tribune asserted that it did not believe in “the intellectual equality of the Colored with the White man.”217 Similarly, a Republican campaigner in 1860 declared that his party was “not the nigger party. We are the white man’s party. It’s the Democrats who are the nigger party.”218 In September, Frank P. Blair, a leader of the antislavery forces in Missouri, told audiences in New York and Pennsylvania that the “Republican party is the white man’s party, and will keep the Territories for white men.”219
Although neither Lincoln nor Douglas was a racial egalitarian, they differed sharply on race. Lincoln let slip the term nigger far less often than his opponent, and when he did use the word, it was usually
in a context suggesting that he was paraphrasing Democrats. Unlike Douglas, he never claimed that his party was the white man’s party; he seldom argued that slavery should be contained primarily to preserve the territories for whites; he did not raise the race issue except in response to Douglas’s race-baiting; and Lincoln’s statements regarding black inferiority were much more guarded, mild, and tentative than Douglas’s blatant assertions of white superiority.
The Mexican War Issue
Two days after the Charleston debate, Douglas virtually accused Lincoln of treason for his stand on the Mexican War:
“[D]uring the war, and after it was declared, and while the battles were being fought in Mexico, Lincoln took the side of the common enemy against his own country. He called Col. Ficklin forward on Saturday, as a witness about supplies, and drew him right up on the stand and said, ‘come now, just tell them it is a lie.’ ‘Well, said Ficklin, I will tell them all I know about it. All I recollect is that you voted for Ashmun’s resolutions declaring the war unconstitutional and unjust.’ Lincoln replied, ‘That is true, I did.’ [Cries of “that’s so.”] Thus he acknowledged that he voted for a resolution declaring the Mexican war unconstitutional and unjust. [A voice—“That’s enough; when did he do that?”] He did it after the war had begun, after the battles of Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, Monterey and Buena Vista had been fought. He did it when our army was in Mexico, ten thousand men combating an enemy 180,000 strong.—He did it at the time when the American army was in great peril of being destroyed. The enemy took that and other votes and Corwin’s speech and published it in pamphlet form in Mexico, and distributed it all over the army to show that there was a Mexican party in America, hence if the army could stand out a little longer, if the guerrillas would keep murdering our soldiers, or poisoning them a little longer, the Mexican party in America would get the control and decide all questions in favor of Mexico. [A voice, “My God! That is worse than his abolitionism.”] I say that his vote was sent to Mexico and circulated there at the head of the Mexican army as an evidence of the influence of the Mexicans in the American congress. [A voice—“I was there and saw it.”] You may appeal to every soldier that was there for the truth of what I say, and I add that vote.—This record made by Lincoln and others and sent to Mexico to be circulated there, did more harm than the withholding of thousands of loads of supplies.”220
At that point, Lincoln’s friends, en route to their meeting, came by with their band and distracted Douglas’s crowd. (Unaware that the senator had scheduled a speech for September 20 at Sullivan, Lincoln arranged to speak there that day. When he learned of the conflict, he told Douglas he would not attend his event and would postpone his own speech so as not to conflict with that of the Little Giant.) Indignant Democrats attacked the musicians, and blows were exchanged. Douglas charged that it “was a deliberate attempt on the part of his [Lincoln’s] friends to break up a democratic meeting. It was started at the very time when I was making a point upon Mr. Lincoln, from which all of his friends shrunk in despair, and it was begun suddenly, in order to break off the chain of my argument. It was evidently a preconcerted plan and therefore I say that I am warranted under this state of facts in charging that Mr. Lincoln, as well as his friends, have been a party this day to break up this meeting, in order to prevent me from exposing his alliance with the abolitionists, and repelling the false charges which he made against me at Charleston, and to which I had no opportunity to reply at that place.”221 Republicans countered that Douglas’s followers had been the aggressors, attacking their procession at the behest of the Little Giant.
At Springfield on October 20, Douglas repeated his charge about Lincoln’s opposition to the Mexican War, alleging that his vote on the Ashmun resolution, along with the text of that document and Thomas Corwin’s anti-war speech, “were all sent to Mexico and printed in the Mexican language, and read at the head of the Mexican army, to prove to them that there was Mexican party in the congress of the United States.… Lincoln’s vote and Corwin’s speech did more to encourage the Mexicans and the Mexican army than all of the soldiers that were brought into the field; they induced the Mexicans to hold out the longer, and the guerrillas to keep up their warfare on the roadside, and to poison our men, and to take the lives of our soldiers wherever and whenever they could.”222
In the three weeks between the Charleston debate and the next one at Galesburg in early October, Lincoln spoke at Danville, Urbana, Jacksonville, Winchester, Pittsfield, Metamora, Pekin and Sullivan. In Jacksonville he encountered the president of Illinois College, Julian Sturtevant, who solicitously observed: “you must be having a weary time.” Lincoln replied: “I am, and if it were not for one thing I would retire from the contest. I know that if Mr. Douglas’ doctrine prevails it will not be fifteen years before Illinois itself will be a slave state.”223
Lincoln, though tired, was not discouraged. In Danville, he attracted a huge, enthusiastic crowd under a banner proclaiming: “Free territory for white men.”224 A local newspaper described him unflatteringly as having “a sand-hill crane like body, surmounted by head which looks like a starved canvassed ham.” But it acknowledged that he “talked away at least fifty percent of his ugliness” with “clear articulation” in a voice “shrill, and not a little harsh.” The audience “seemed to be convinced, not charmed or captivated.”225 From that town Lincoln reported on September 23: “We had a fine and altogether satisfactory meeting here yesterday.… I believe we have got the gentleman [Douglas], unless they overcome us by fraudulent voting.”226
Texts of Lincoln’s speeches delivered between the Charleston and Galesburg debates have not survived, but notes evidently written at that time reveal what he may have said. In those jottings, he emphasized the danger that the moral indifference of Douglas and his allies posed to whites. Citing not only the Little Giant’s speeches during the campaign but also editorials in the Richmond Enquirer and the New York Day Book, both of which endorsed the idea of white slavery, and the assertion by Senator John Pettit of Indiana that the Declaration of Independence was “a self-evident lie,” Lincoln concluded that they were all “laboring at a common object,” namely, “to deny the equality of men, and to assert the natural, moral, and religious right of one class to enslave another.” Acknowledging that Douglas “does not draw the conclusion that the superiors ought to enslave the inferiors, he evidently wishes his hearers to draw that conclusion. He shirks the responsibility of pulling the house down, but he digs under it that it may fall of its own weight.”227
In October, Douglas repeatedly accused Lincoln of favoring the interests of the unpopular Illinois Central Railroad over those of the people. Three months earlier, Henry C. Whitney had urged Lincoln to “turn the hatred of the people to the I. C. R. Rd. against Douglas,” but Lincoln never did.228 The senator understood the advantage of making his opponent appear a tool of the Illinois Central, which the previous year had gone into receivership and then foreclosed on 4,000 mortgages; it was also asking to be relieved of its tax obligation to the state. After denying that he had ever worked as an attorney for the company or recommended that it be exempted from state taxation, Douglas suggested that his listeners pose questions to the challenger: “Ask him whether he did not hire out to the Company, to make a good bargain for the Company, against the State; and ask him how much money he got for having induced the Legislature to reduce the per centage from fifteen to seven per cent; and then ask him whether he is not to-day in the pay of that Company, and whether he is not now living and getting his bread from that Company.” He implied that Lincoln favored eliminating the 7 percent tax; and denounced anyone who favored such a step “as an enemy to the State of Illinois—as a traitor to her best interests.”
The Little Giant further declared that, in the late 1840s, he had persuaded the senate to grant land to the state of Illinois, not directly to the Illinois Central, for promoting the growth of the rail network. But the House of Representatives, in which Lincoln then sat, defeated t
he measure. “We tried it over and again got beaten,” he recalled, “and we never could pass that bill as long as Lincoln was there. Lincoln was then regarded as an abolitionist, making war upon the south, as a sectional man.” He further implied that Lincoln was one of the lobbyists for the Illinois Central who managed to get the tax rate set at 7 percent, below what Douglas thought fair, and attacked Lincoln for receiving a $5,000 fee as payment for representing the company in the suit brought by McLean County, money that would be used “toward defraying his campaign expenses.” Douglas added, “notwithstanding the enormous fee that Lincoln was paid, he is still the agent and attorney of that company.… I applied to the company not three weeks ago and ascertained that he is now in their employment.” Indignantly, he protested that “Lincoln and his friends might as well charge me with a conspiracy to murder my own children as to deprive the state of that [seven percent tax] fund.”229
Lincoln, who had never charged Douglas with any impropriety involving the Illinois Central, denied supporting the elimination of the tax on that company, explained how he and Herndon won their large fee in the McLean County tax case, protested against the implication that he had “received any of the people’s money” or was “on very cozy terms with the Railroad company,” and urged his audience to ask candidates for the state legislature how they stood on taxing the Illinois Central.230
Douglas also alleged that Lincoln was on cozy terms with the pro-Buchanan Democrats: “He has control of that body of men who are active as the agents of Presidential aspirants in other States, and through patronage are trying to destroy the Democracy in this State. Lincoln knows that these men are all his allies, all his supporters and his only hope, and the only hope of the Republican party is in that unholy and unnatural alliance with these Federal officeholders, to break me down.” Lincoln was thus part of “a combination for selfish and unworthy and malicious purposes to hunt me down.”231 This was an effective tactic, for, as a Philadelphia paper observed, the “negative strength of the Administration … is virtually with Lincoln, being bitterly directed against Douglas, and instructed to defeat him, no matter who else may be elected. This is the hardest load Lincoln has to carry, for the suspicion of even indirect and undesired aid from that quarter, is damaging.”232
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