As for Canisius’s query about whether Republicans should ally with other opponents of the Democrats (like Know-Nothings), Lincoln said: “I am for it, if it can be had on republican grounds; and I am not for it on any other terms. A fusion on any other terms … would lose the whole North, while the common enemy would still carry the whole South. The question of men is a different one. There are good patriotic men, and able statesmen, in the South whom I would cheerfully support, if they would now place themselves on republican ground. But I am against letting down the republican standard a hair’s breadth.”31 Democrats complained of Lincoln’s inconsistency in saying that he had no right to advise Massachusetts about her policies while simultaneously criticizing slavery in the fifteen states where it existed. In the Bay State, the Springfield Republican praised Lincoln’s letter as “an apple of gold in a picture of silver.”32
Lincoln did more than merely write to Canisius; in May 1859, in order to help secure the German vote, he bought a printing press and gave it to Canisius with the understanding that he would publish a German-language, pro-Republican paper in Springfield through the election of 1860. Lincoln also encouraged friends to find subscribers for the Staats-Anzeiger. (Democrats alleged that Lincoln helped James Matheny establish a very different newspaper, the Springfield American, a “quasi American journal,” which was to serve as “a bridge for old whigs to cross to black republicanism.”)33
While counseling against the snare of nativism, Lincoln also combated the threat posed by radicalism. In Ohio, Republicans adopted a platform calling for the repeal of “the atrocious Fugitive Slave Law.” Alarmed, Lincoln told Salmon P. Chase that their stand was “already damaging us here. I have no doubt that if that Plank be even introduced into the next Republican National convention, it will explode it. Once introduced, its supporters and it’s opponents will quarrel irreconcilably.… I enter upon no argument one way or the other; but I assure you the cause of Republicanism is hopeless in Illinois, if it be in any way made responsible for that plank.”34 When Chase suggested that the Fugitive Slave Law was unconstitutional, Lincoln demurred, citing the Constitution’s provision that fugitive slaves “shall be delivered up” and that Congress had the power to pass all laws “necessary and proper” to carry out its responsibilities. But, he added, that was irrelevant; the main point was that a platform calling for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act would jeopardize Republican unity.35 (Lincoln also wished that Wisconsin Congressman C. C. Washburn had not denounced the proposed constitution of Oregon because of its clause excluding free blacks.)
Lincoln discouraged a flirtation with popular sovereignty by several Republicans, including Illinois Congressman William Kellogg, Ohio political leader Thomas Corwin, Massachusetts Congressman Eli Thayer, and the editors of the Chicago Press and Tribune. Lincoln warned that “no party can command respect which sustains this year, what it opposed last.” Dalliance with the Little Giant’s “humbug” enhanced its author’s reputation and provided him bargaining chips to use in wooing Southern support, Lincoln argued. He also maintained that widespread acceptance of popular sovereignty would pave the way not only for nationalizing slavery but also for reviving the African slave trade. “Taking slaves into new ter[r]itories, and buying slaves in Africa, are identical things—identical rights or identical wrongs—and the argument which establishes one will establish the other. Try a thousand years for a sound reason why congress shall not hinder the people of Kansas from having slaves, and when you have found it, it will be an equally good one why congress should not hinder the people of Georgia from importing slaves from Africa.”36
Turning to Indiana, Lincoln appealed to Congressmen Schuyler Colfax to avoid divisive issues that might split the party: “The point of danger is the temptation in different localities to ‘platform’ for something which will be popular just there, but which, nevertheless, will be a firebrand elsewhere, and especially in a National convention.” Everywhere, Lincoln counseled, “we should look beyond our noses; and at least say nothing on points where it is probable we shall disagree.” He suggested that Colfax urge Hoosier Republicans to avoid “these apples of discord.” Colfax agreed, though he acknowledged that uniting Conservatives and Radicals was a “great problem” and declared that whoever solved it was “worthier of fame than Napoleon.”37
Through the winter, spring, and summer of 1859, Lincoln, pleading poverty, declined invitations to speak. In September, however, he agreed to make a brief swing through Ohio, where voters were about to elect a governor and legislators, who would in turn choose a U.S. senator. Douglas was already stumping for the Democratic cause there.
The Little Giant had just published in Harper’s Magazine a lengthy, turgid, repetitious article, written with the help of historian George Bancroft, on “The Dividing Line between Federal and Local Authority: Popular Sovereignty in the Territories.” The article in effect continued his debate with Lincoln and with Southerners who denounced the Freeport Doctrine. Inexplicably ignoring the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820, Douglas argued that historically the people of the territories had been empowered to regulate “all things affecting their internal polity—slavery not excepted” without congressional interference. This was a basic principle endorsed in the Compromise of 1850, which the major parties had accepted in 1852 and which the Supreme Court had upheld in the Dred Scott decision, as well as in the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Unaware of the crucial Supreme Court decision in Barron vs. Baltimore (1833), Douglas mistakenly argued that the Bill of Rights in the Constitution limited the power of the states as well as the federal government. After reading Douglas’s article, Lincoln became aroused and burst into Milton Hay’s law office and “without a salutation, said: ‘This will never do. He puts the moral element out of this question. It won’t stay out.’ ”38
On September 7 at Columbus, Douglas delivered a speech repeating arguments from the previous year’s debates and summarizing his piece in Harper’s. This constituted “the opening manifesto of the Presidential canvass,” declared the New York Times, which carried it in full.39 When Lincoln announced that he would reply to Douglas, the Cincinnati Enquirer observed that “the Illinois fight is to be gone over again in Ohio.”40 As he had done the previous year, Joseph Medill urged Lincoln to be aggressive: “Go in boldly, strike straight from the shoulder—hit below the belt as well as above, and kick like thunder.”41
In a two-hour address at the Ohio capital on September 16, Lincoln took a gentler approach than the one Medill recommended. Calling Douglas’s magazine article “the most maturely considered” of his opponent’s “explanations explanatory of explanations explained,” he challenged it on historical and constitutional grounds, citing the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The contention that the Revolutionary generation adopted popular sovereignty in dealing with slavery, Lincoln said, “is as impudent and absurd as if a prosecuting attorney should stand up before a jury, and ask them to convict A as the murderer of B, while B was walking alive before them.” Popular sovereignty, when boiled down to its essence, meant that “if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man nor anybody else has a right to object.” Similarly, he reduced the Freeport Doctrine to a simple proposition: “a thing may be lawfully driven away from where it has a lawful right to be.” The fundamental question, Lincoln maintained, was whether Douglas was correct in regarding slavery as a minor matter. “I suppose the institution of slavery really looks small to him. He is so put up by nature that a lash upon his back would hurt him, but a lash upon anybody else’s back does not hurt him.” The Little Giant’s popular sovereignty doctrine would, he predicted, pave the way not only for a new Dred Scott decision but also for the reopening of the African slave trade and for a federal slave code in the territories.42
Lincoln also dealt with the charge, made by the Ohio Statesman, that he supported black voting rights. Quoting from his statements at Ottawa and Charleston in the debates of the previous year, he denied the
allegation. (After the speech, David R. Locke asked him about his support for a ban on interracial marriage, to which he responded: “The law means nothing. I shall never marry a negress, but I have no objection to any one else doing so. If a white man wants to marry a negro woman, let him do it—if the negro woman can stand it.”)43
The Chicago Press and Tribune praised Lincoln’s “new and fatal discovery among the maze of Douglasisms,” namely, that the Little Giant had “dropped the ‘unfriendly legislation’ dodge and commenced prating about the right to control slavery as other property.… It is patent as sunlight that Popular Sovereignty is abandoned by the great popular sovereign himself.”44 Frank Blair called Lincoln’s speech “the most complete overthrow Mr Douglass ever received.”45
That evening, Lincoln spoke briefly at the Columbus city hall, and the following day he delivered a version of his Columbus speech at Dayton, where the local Democratic paper complimented him as “a very seductive reasoner.”46 (The Democratic Ohio Statesman of Columbus was less generous, declaring that Lincoln “is not a great man—very, very far from it,” and calling his speech “very inferior.”)47 At Hamilton, Lincoln and his traveling companion, the diminutive Congressman John A. Gurley, stopped briefly to allow the Illinoisan to address a crowd, which was mightily amused by the appearance of such a tall man as Lincoln next to such a short man as Gurley. “ ‘My friends,’ said Lincoln, ‘this is the long of it,’ pointing to himself, then, laying his hand on Gurley’s head, ‘and this is the short of it.’ ”48
That night in a speech at Cincinnati, Lincoln aimed his remarks primarily at residents of his native Kentucky, just across the Ohio River. Some Republicans hoped that the visitor would “not give a too strictly partisan cast to his address,”49 but Lincoln candidly acknowledged at the outset that he was a “Black Republican.” Republicans, he assured the Kentuckians, had no plans to invade the South or tamper with slavery there. “We mean to leave you alone, and in no way to interfere with your institution, to abide by all and every compromise of the constitution, and, in a word, coming back to the original proposition, to treat you … according to the examples of those noble fathers—Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. We mean to remember that you are as good as we; that there is no difference between us other than the difference of circumstances. We mean to recognise and bear in mind always that you have as good hearts in your bosoms as other people, or as we claim to have, and treat you accordingly. We mean to marry your girls when we have a chance—the white ones I mean—and I have the honor to inform you that I once did have a chance in that way.” How would you Southerners react if the Republicans were to capture the White House, he asked. Would you secede? How would that help you? Will you go to war? You may well be at least as gallant and brave as Northerners, but you will nonetheless lose because they outnumber you.
Turning from Kentucky back to Ohio, Lincoln appealed to its Republicans to support only those candidates who embraced the party’s basic principle: unyielding opposition to the spread of slavery. In discussing the evils of slavery, Lincoln employed one of his favorite metahors in a new form. “I hold that if there is any one thing that can be proved to be the will of God by external nature around us, without reference to revelation, it is the proposition that whatever any one man earns with his hands and by the sweat of his brow, he shall enjoy in peace.… God Almighty has given every man one mouth to be fed, and one pair of hands adapted to furnish food for that mouth, if anything can be proved to be the will of Heaven, it is proved by this fact, that that mouth is to be fed by those hands, without being interfered with by any other man.… I hold that if the Almighty had ever made a set of men that should do all the eating and none of the work, he would have made them with mouths only and no hands, and if he had ever made another class that he had intended should do all the work and none of the eating, he would have made them without mouths and with all hands. But inasmuch as he has not chosen to make man in that way, if anything is proved, it is that those hands and mouths are to be co-operative through life.”
Lincoln defended the free labor system against critics who claimed that slaves were better off than hired laborers. Pointing to his own experience, he denied that a permanent laboring class existed in the North. Men like himself might start off with no capital and thus be forced to work for others, but in time they could, if they were industrious, accumulate capital and hire others to work for them. “In doing so they do not wrong the man they employ, for they find men who have not their own land to work upon, or shops to work in, and who are benefited by working for others, hired laborers, receiving their capital for it. Thus a few men that own capital, hire a few others, and these establish the relation of capital and labor rightfully. A relation of which I make no complaint.” No man, he said, was locked into the position of hired laborer forever unless he sank into vice, fell victim to misfortune, or simply chose such a life. The free institutions of the country were designed to promote social and economic mobility. “This progress by which the poor, honest, industrious, and resolute man raises himself, that he may work on his own account, and hire somebody else, is that progress that human nature is entitled to, is that improvement in condition that is intended to be secured by those institutions under which we live, is the great principle for which this government was really formed. Our government was not established that one man might do with himself as he pleases, and with another man too.”50
The Cincinnati Commercial reported that Lincoln’s “strong and peculiar speech” had “commanded the attention of a large body of citizens for more than two hours. He was clear headed and plain spoken, and made his points with decided effect.” The peculiar feature of his address was the speaker’s “odd wit that takes the crowds immensely.”51 Moncure D. Conway, a prominent Unitarian minister, remembered the event vividly. Lincoln, he said, called to mind Robert Browning’s “description of the German professor, ‘Three parts sublime to one grotesque.’ ” His “face had a battered and bronzed look, without being hard. His nose was prominent and buttressed a strong and high forehead; his eyes were high-vaulted and had an expression of sadness; his mouth and chin were too close together, the cheeks hollow.” All in all, “Lincoln’s appearance was not very attractive until one heard his voice, which possessed variety of expression, earnestness, and shrewdness in every tone. The charm of his manner was that he had no manner; he was simple, direct, humorous. He pleasantly repeated a mannerism of his opponent,—‘This is what Douglas calls his gur-reat perrinciple.’ ”52 Rutherford B. Hayes considered Lincoln an unusual speaker, “so calm, so undemonstrative, but nevertheless an orator of great merit.” Comparing him to Kentucky Senator John J. Crittenden, Hayes added: “It is easy to contrast him after the manner of Plutarch, but his like has not been heard in these parts. His manner is more like Crittenden’s, and his truth and candor are like what we admire in the Kentuckian, but his speech has greater logical force, greater warmth of feeling.”53 Hayes, who met with Lincoln and had a long chat, thought to himself: “Here is Henry Clay all over again.”54 Some newspapers ran excerpts of the speech and referred to its author as “Abe the Giant Killer.”55
The Democratic press was less complimentary. “He makes no pretension to oratory or the graces of diction,” observed the Cincinnati Enquirer, “but goes directly to his point, whatever it may be, bent upon uttering his thought, regardless of elegance or even system, as best he can.” His pronunciation “puzzles the ear sometimes to determine whether he is speaking his own or a foreign tongue.”56
Over 75,000 copies of Lincoln’s Ohio speeches were distributed throughout the state. The following year, Douglas’s friends sent reprints of the Cincinnati address to Southern Democrats to prove that the Little Giant was their friend because he was Lincoln’s opponent. A correspondent of the Washington Star protested that “a more villainously abolition incendiary document than this same was never essayed to be scattered broadcast throughout a slaveholding State.”57
The morning after his Cinci
nnati speech, Lincoln received a visitor at his hotel room who asked: “how would you feel if we nominated you for President?”58 Many Ohioans were taken with such a possibility. Hours after Lincoln had spoken in Dayton, former Congressman Robert C. Schenck told a crowd that “if an honest, sensible man was wanted” to head the 1860 Republican national ticket, “it would be well to nominate the distinguished gentleman from Illinois.” (Lincoln regarded Schenck’s remarks “as the first suggestion of his name for that office before any large assembly, or on any public occasion.”)59
During his visit, Ohioans reacted with surprised interest to their first look at the newly prominent “Old Abe” Lincoln from Illinois. A reporter covering the speech described him as “dark-visaged, angular, awkward, positive-looking,” with “character written in his face and energy expressed in his every movement.”60 Another observed that “Lincoln is a dark complexioned man, of a very tall figure, and so exceedingly ‘well preserved’ that he would not be taken for more than thirty eight, though he is rising of fifty years of age.”61
As Lincoln traveled nationally in the following year, the same reaction cropped up elsewhere. Simon P. Hanscom of the New York Herald remarked, “I do not see why people call him Old Abe. There is no appearance of age about the man, excepting the deeply indented wrinkles on his brow, and the furrow ploughed down his bare cheeks, hairless as an Indian’s; you can hardly detect the presence of frost in his black, glossy hair.” Another reporter concurred, saying that “he certainly has no appearance” of being fifty-one, for his black hair was “hardly touched with gray, and his eye is brighter than that of many of his juniors.” A friend of Lincoln’s protested that the sobriquet “Honest Old Abe” did not accurately describe the candidate: “The term ‘old’ is hardly as applicable as the epithet honest, for he is in the full vigor of life, with a powerful constitution, and no symptoms of decay, mental or physical.”62
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