Stepping forward to respond, the weary Douglas managed to radiate supreme confidence. His haughty, contemptuous mien seemed to ask, “How dare anyone stand up against me?” Though his gestures were defiant, his hoarse voice was weak, carrying but a short distance. He spoke quite slowly, pausing after each word. Schurz recalled that his “sentences were well put together, his points strongly accentuated, his argumentation seemingly clear and plausible, his sophisms skillfully woven so as to throw the desired flood of darkness upon the subject and thus beguile the untutored mind, his appeals to prejudice unprincipled and reckless, but shrewdly aimed, and his invective vigorous and exceedingly trying to the temper of the assailed party.”255
The Chicago Times reported that Lincoln behaved in a “most improper and ungentlemanly” fashion during Douglas’s remarks. Sitting where his opponent could not see him, Lincoln would, “whenever a point was made against him,” rudely “shake his head at the crowd, intimating that it was not true, and that they should place no reliance on what was said. This course was in direct violation of the rules of the debate, and was a mean trick, beneath the dignity of a man of honor.”256
Curiously, Douglas devoted much of his rebuttal to a defense against charges leveled by the Buchanan administration’s organ, the Washington Union. He also continued to attack Lincoln personally. Repeating his lame explanation of the Ottawa forgery, he insisted that Lincoln was a “slanderer” and denied the conspiracy charge yet again. Boastfully and insultingly, he compared himself to Lincoln: “[W]hen I make a mistake I correct it without being asked, as an honest man is bound to. When he makes a false charge, he sticks to it and never corrects it.” Douglas again contrasted Lincoln’s opening statement at Charleston (“I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way, the social and political equality of the white and black races”) and the conclusion of his Chicago speech (“let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior”). Addressing Lincoln’s analysis of the Dred Scott decision, the Little Giant grew reminiscent: “When I used to practice law with Lincoln, I never knew him to get beat in a case in the world, that he did not get mad at the Judge and talk about appealing it (laughter). And when I got beat in the case, I generally thought the Court was wrong; but I never dreamed of going out of the court house and making a stump speech to the people against the Judges, merely because I found out that I didn’t know the law as well as they did. (Great laughter.)” Touting popular sovereignty, Douglas declared that “it don’t become Mr. Lincoln, or anybody else, to tell the people of Kentucky that they have no consciences—to tell them that they are living in a state of iniquity—to tell them that they are cherishing the institution to their bosom, in violation of the law of God. Better for him to adopt the doctrine of ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged.’ ” Rather than caring about blacks, Douglas counseled Lincoln and other antislavery proponents to focus on “our own poor, and our own suffering, … before we go abroad to intermeddle with other people’s business.” Besides, he argued, Northerners “know nothing” of the condition of slaves.
The Little Giant denounced as inhumane Lincoln’s plan to contain slavery. If the peculiar institution were bottled up in the states where it already existed, then “the natural increase will go on until the increase will be so plenty that they [the slaves] cannot live on the soil. He will hem them in until starvation awaits them. Thus he would “put slavery in the course of ultimate extinction.” Although this argument was specious, Douglas did raise a question here on which Lincoln was vulnerable: just how would the containment of slavery necessarily lead to its demise? To be sure, if more Free States were admitted to the Union, the Slave States’ power in Congress and the electoral college would wane, but the slave states would long be able to block a constitutional amendment abolishing the peculiar institution.257
With justice an auditor recalled that “Douglas was the demagogue all the way through. There was no trick of presentation that he did not use. He suppressed facts, twisted conclusions, and perverted history. He wriggled and turned and dodged; he appealed to prejudices.”258
In his rejoinder, Lincoln ridiculed popular sovereignty as “do nothing sovereignty” and asked apropos of the Freeport Doctrine: “Has it not got down as thin as the homoeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death? [Roars of laughter and cheering.]” It was one of his more telling metaphors.
As for Douglas’s complaint that Lincoln would not utter in downstate Illinois what he said in Chicago, the challenger cited his address on the Dred Scott case, delivered in Springfield the previous year, which contained “the substance of the Chicago speech.” He once again protested against Douglas’s contention that if people believed that blacks were incorporated in the statement that “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, they must therefore support racial intermarriage. “He can never be brought to understand that there is any middle ground on this subject. I have lived until my fiftieth year, and have never had a negro woman either for a slave or a wife, and I think I can live fifty centuries, for that matter, without having had one for either.”
Lincoln disputed Douglas’s boast that he had voluntarily come forward when he discovered the Ottawa forgery. In fact, Lincoln argued, it was only after the Republican press had exposed the fraud that Douglas acknowledged his error, an acknowledgment that he now sought to make a virtue, though the newspapers had made it a necessity.259
In Lincoln’s speech, Carl Schurz detected flashes of “lofty moral inspiration; and all he said came out with the sympathetic persuasiveness of a thoroughly honest nature, which made the listener feel as if the speaker looked him straight in the eye and took him by the hand, saying: ‘My friend, what I tell you is my earnest conviction, and, I have no doubt, at heart you think so yourself.’ ”260
The Illinois State Journal regarded the Quincy debate “as the most damaging to Douglas in the series. Lincoln carried the war into Africa, and came off with flying colors.”261 Many Iowans crossed the Mississippi River to hear the debate and returned favorably impressed with Lincoln. The Chicago Times, however, called Lincoln’s effort “the lamest and most impotent attempt he has yet made to bolster up the false position he took at the outset of the fight.”262
After the debate, Lincoln met at a hotel with the humorist David R. Locke, creator of the comic character Petroleum V. Nasby. Explaining that “I like to give my feet a chance to breathe,” the candidate removed his boots. He said of a recently deceased Illinois politician, “If General __________ had known how big a funeral he would have had, he would have died years ago.” Lincoln predicted that the Republicans would carry the state but that Douglas would retain his senate seat. “You can’t overturn a pyramid,” he said, “but you can undermine it; that’s what I have been trying to do.”263
Seventh Debate: Alton
Two days later the final debate took place at Alton, a sluggish town on the Mississippi River 25 miles north of St. Louis, where Lincoln and James Shields had once met for a duel and where a proslavery mob had killed Elijah Lovejoy. On the morning of the debate, Lincoln suggested to Gustave Koerner that they pay their respects to Mrs. Lincoln, who was attending a debate for the first time. As he introduced Koerner to his wife, Lincoln said: “Now, tell Mary what you think of our chances! She is rather dispirited.” Koerner gave an optimistic prognostication, which was not shared by Lincoln, who seemed “a little despondent.”264
Others also grew pessimistic as the election day approached. Salmon P. Chase reported from northern Illinois that it was not “certain that Lincoln will be elected: as it is possible that the Senate may be held by the Dems. & the House by the Republicans.” If that were the case, the Senate Democrats could block Lincoln’s election by refusing to go into joint session with the House Republicans.265
The Alton crowd of approximately 5,000 was smaller than usual because of the complacency of the population; be
cause both men had spoken in that county earlier in the campaign; and because few believed that anything new would be said. The event was subdued, generating so little excitement that there was no procession.
When Douglas began his address, his bloated face, haggard appearance, and hoarse, barely audible voice shocked some auditors. He seemed exhausted and in a sour temper. At the outset, he lost his composure when Dr. Thomas M. Hope, a Buchanan Democrat and the editor of the Alton Democratic Union, asked him if territorial legislatures should pass laws protecting slavery. In reply, the enraged senator said “in a most violent manner if he [Hope] wished to help Republicans beat Democrats he could do so.”266 After brushing off Dr. Hope, the Little Giant, in addition to rehearsing earlier arguments, roasted President Buchanan. Douglas proudly declared that even though the Chief Executive had dismissed many of the senator’s friends from their government posts, he “can never get me to abandon one iota of Democracy out of revenge or personal hostility to his course.”267
Lincoln replied to Douglas in a clear, steady voice which showed no signs of wear and tear. One observer recalled that he spoke slowly and seemed “awkward and diffident” at first, but that, as he so often did, he warmed up until “his voice rang out in clearness, rose in strength, his tall form towered to its full height, and there came an outburst of inspiring eloquence and argument.”268 He finally got around to declaring “untrue” the Little Giant’s repeated allegation that his primary objection to the Dred Scott decision was its denial of black citizenship rights. “I have done no such thing; and Judge Douglas’ so persistently insisting that I have done so, has strongly impressed me with the belief of a predetermination on his part to misrepresent me.” Emphatically he denounced Douglas’s assertion that in 1855 nobody thought that blacks were included in the Declaration of Independence’s statement that “all men were created equal.” Lincoln said, “I combat it as having an evil tendency, if not an evil design. I combat it as having a tendency to dehumanize the negro, to take away from him the right of ever striving to be a man. I combat it as being one of the thousand things constantly done in these days to prepare the public mind to make property, and nothing but property, of the negro in all the States of this Union.”
To support his position, Lincoln quoted to the traditionally Whig crowd a passage from Henry Clay’s reply to an abolitionist in 1842. The Great Compromiser had said of slavery: “I look upon it as a great evil, and deeply lament that we have derived it from the parental government, and from our ancestors. I wish every slave in the United States was in the country of his ancestors. But here they are, and the question is, how they can be best dealt with? If a state of nature existed, and we were about to lay the foundations of society, no man would be more strongly opposed than I should be, to incorporate the institution of slavery among its elements.”269
With passionate eloquence, Lincoln effectively challenged Douglas’s claims to statesmanship. The agitation over slavery expansion, he argued, could not be attributed to politicians’ selfish desire for power; it had, after all, divided the largest Protestant churches (Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian) into northern and southern wings, as well as the American Tract Society and, in Alton, the Unitarian church. Douglas urged people to stop talking about the slavery issue and to allow settlers in the territories decide the matter. “But where is the philosophy or statesmanship which assumes that you can quiet that disturbing element in our society which has disturbed us for more than half a century, which has been the only serious danger that has threatened our institutions …? Is it not a false statesmanship that undertakes to build up a system of policy upon the basis of caring nothing about the very thing that every body does care the most about?—a thing which all experience has shown we care a very great deal about?” They were good questions.
Setting aside the moral aspect of the slavery controversy, Lincoln asserted that “I am still in favor of our new Territories being in such a condition that white men may find a home—may find some spot where they can better their condition; where they can settle upon new soil and better their condition in life. I am in favor of this, not merely … for our own people who are born amongst us, but as an outlet for free white people everywhere, the world over—in which Hans, and Baptiste, and Patrick, and all other men from all the world, may find new homes and better their conditions in life.”
After this pragmatic point, Lincoln stressed the moral dimension of the antislavery cause in the most eloquent language of the campaign. He first dismissed accusations that he wanted “to make war between the free and slave States” or that he favored “introducing a perfect social and political equality between the white and black races.” Those he considered “false issues” that Douglas had invented. “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 sentiment that contemplates the institution of slavery in this country as a wrong is the sentiment of the Republican party. 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; 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.” Yet the Republicans “insist that it should, as far as may be, be treated as a wrong, and one of the methods of treating it as a wrong is to make provision that it shall grow no larger. [Loud applause.]” Lincoln repeated an earlier injunction: “if there be a man amongst us who does not think that the institution of slavery is wrong in any one of these aspects of which I have spoken, he is misplaced, and ought not to be with us. And if there be a man amongst us who is so impatient of it as a wrong as to disregard its actual presence among us and the difficulty of getting rid of it suddenly in a satisfactory way, and to disregard the constitutional obligations thrown about it, that man is misplaced if he is on our platform.”
The Democratic Party, by contrast, contains “all who positively assert that it [slavery] is right, and all who, like Judge Douglas, treat it as indifferent and do not say it is either right or wrong.” The morality of slavery was the crux of the matter. Passionately he continued: “That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the ‘divine right of kings.’ It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ [Loud applause.] No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.” (An auditor noted that the “melting pathos with which Mr. Lincoln said this and its effect on his audience cannot be described.”)270
Optimistically Lincoln predicted that once the public became fully aware of this fundamental difference between the parties, and the opponents of slavery united, then “there will soon be an end” of the controversy, and that end will be the “ultimate extinction” of slavery. “Whenever the issue can be distinctly made, and all extraneous matter thrown out so that men can fairly see the real difference between the parties, this controversy will soon be settled, and it will be done peaceably too. There will be no war, no violence.”
With unwonted heat, Lincoln denounced the Freeport Doctrine as “a monstrous sort of talk about the Constitution of the United States! [Great applause.] There has never been as outlandish or lawless a doctrine from the mouth of any r
espectable man on earth.” Logically, the notion that the people of a territory could in effect overrule the Supreme Court by “unfriendly legislation” was no different from the argument that the people of a state could effectively overrule the Fugitive Slave Act. Thus, Lincoln argued, “there is not such an Abolitionist in the nation as Douglas, after all. [Loud and enthusiastic applause.]”271
Douglas concluded the debates by once again attacking Lincoln’s stand on the Mexican War. Replying to Lincoln’s charge that the senator wanted slavery to continue indefinitely, Douglas declared: “I look forward to the time when each State shall be allowed to do as it pleases. If it chooses to keep slavery forever, it is its business, not ours. If it chooses to abolish [slavery,] very good, it is its business and not mine. I care more for the great principle of self-government—the right of the people to rule themselves—than I do for all the niggers in Christendom. [Cheers.] I would not dissolve this Union; I would not endanger its perpetuity; I would not blot out the great inalienable rights of the white man for all the niggers that ever existed.”272
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