by Joshua Zeitz
For a new political party not yet two years old, Illinois Republicans performed strongly in the 1856 elections, managing to hold four of the state’s nine seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and winning a string of important statewide offices, including the governorship. One of the victors that year was Ozias M. Hatch, a former legislator from Pike County who won election as the first Republican secretary of state. John Nicolay had stumped hard for Hatch. He threw the full weight of the Free Press behind his candidacy and took to the hustings to speak at Republican campaign rallies throughout the county. In recognition of his hard work and talent, Hatch offered Nicolay the post of chief clerk on his government staff. The young man jumped at the opportunity. Just shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, Nicolay could learn little more from editing a weekly newspaper. In Springfield—relative to Pittsfield, a city of refinement and culture—he would find himself at the nerve center of statewide Republican politics and enjoy an opportunity to study the law in his spare time. It proved a fateful choice. Years later, he remembered that Hatch’s office, “a large and well-appointed room in the old State House,” functioned “in effect [as] the State political headquarters . . . Mr. Lincoln was of course a frequent visitor, and when he came he was always the centre of an animated and interested group. It was there during these years . . . that I made his acquaintance.” Over the next four years, Nicolay became a trusted aide to the party’s leading men, chief among them Lincoln. An “assiduous student of election tables,” Lincoln spent long hours poring over local returns with Nicolay, plotting another race for the Senate. This time, he would be the consensus candidate of the Republican Party. As animated as the political climate was in 1854, it was red-hot by the time of his second campaign in 1858.
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Two days after President James Buchanan took the oath of office in March 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a shock to the nation’s political system with its historic decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. Scott was a sixty-two-year-old slave who in the 1830s had accompanied his owner on extended sojourns in Illinois and Minnesota—the latter still a territory and part of the original Louisiana Purchase. With support from white abolitionists, he sued for freedom on the premise that his enslavement effectively ended the moment he stepped on free soil—an argument with which many antislavery activists would readily have agreed. Local courts in Missouri ruled against Scott, but over the years he persisted in appealing his case up the judicial ladder until it reached the Supreme Court. There, his fate lay largely in the hands of Chief Justice Roger Taney, a Maryland slave owner whom Andrew Jackson had elevated to the high court over twenty years earlier. Unflinching in his support of states’ rights, Taney could very well have crafted a narrow decision rejecting either the court’s jurisdiction in the case or Scott’s standing to sue. Instead, he ruled expansively that U.S. citizens had a right to bring their property, including slaves, into federal territories. With one stroke of the pen, Taney declared both the Missouri Compromise and popular sovereignty null and void. According to the court, neither Congress nor a territorial government could prevent citizens from bringing slaves into federal territories. All federal land was now open to the peculiar institution.
Southern Democrats were elated. The Dred Scott decision, they believed, was the “funeral sermon of Black Republicanism . . . crushing and annihilating . . . the anti-slavery platform . . . at a single blow.” Northern Democrats, particularly Stephen Douglas, were boxed into a corner. They had promised their constituents that popular sovereignty represented a reasonable compromise with the South. Now a Southern chief justice, writing for a majority that principally comprised Southern jurists, had swept the rug out from under their feet by declaring it an unconstitutional principle. Republicans were enraged. Declaring that the Dred Scott decision held as much “moral weight [as] the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room,” the New-York Tribune viewed the court’s latest dictum as yet another in a long string of betrayals. William Cullen Bryant, a former Democrat turned Republican, lamented that “if this decision shall stand for law, slavery, instead of being what the people of the slave states have hitherto called it, their peculiar institution, is a Federal institution, the common patrimony and shame of all the States.” Above all, Republicans raised an inescapable question: If citizens were entitled to bring their “property” into federal territories, could they not also bring their slaves into free states? As Hay and Nicolay explained several decades later, although the Dred Scott decision technically applied only to territories, many Republicans genuinely wondered whether “if under the ‘property’ theory the Constitution carries slavery to the Territories, it would by the same inevitable logic carry it into free-States.”
Heading into his reelection year, Douglas would have found himself in a bind on account of the Dred Scott decision alone. But the Buchanan administration added to his pain when it endorsed the so-called Lecompton Constitution—the work of a territorial convention elected by outright fraud and violence that comprised, in the words of one critic, “broken-down political hacks, demagogues, fire-eaters, perjurers, ruffians, ballot-box stuffers and loafers.” Though the majority of Kansas settlers were antislavery, the Lecompton convention, acting as the territory’s legitimate governing body, drafted a proposed state constitution that recognized slavery and placed enormous obstacles to any future legislative action to abolish it. Adopted by a popular referendum that was equally fraudulent, the constitution formed the territorial government’s official application for statehood. Northerners were stunned when Buchanan gave the constitution his official endorsement and urged Congress to admit Kansas to the Union under its provisions. The administration’s decision to sanction a profoundly tainted political process caused a deep fissure in the Democratic Party. Many Northern Democrats agreed with Stephen Douglas, who saw only “treachery and juggling” in this latest betrayal of popular sovereignty. It was one thing to allow the South to run roughshod over long-standing territorial compromises. It was another matter entirely to allow the South so brazenly to rig and steal popular referenda. “We must stand on the popular sovereignty issue,” Douglas declared, “and go wherever the logical consequences may carry us, and defend it against all assaults from whatever quarter.” Privately, he promised friends, “I will show you that I will do what I promised. By God, sir, I made Mr. James Buchanan, and by God, I will unmake him!”
For Douglas, the stakes of the 1858 election were high. Illinois was trending Republican. The state’s population was in the process of doubling, from 850,000 in 1850 to 1.7 million by 1860, as hundreds of thousands of settlers from New York, Pennsylvania, and New England flooded the state’s northernmost counties and sharply reduced the electoral pull of the downstate, Southern-facing region, popularly known in those years as Egypt. With the regional divide so sharply pronounced, there was fierce competition for swing voters in central Illinois. “Talk of ‘sectionalism’ in the Republic!” quipped a newspaper correspondent. “There is not between South Carolina and Massachusetts . . . a more deadly hostility than between the ninth and first Congressional districts in this State.”
Widely regarded as presidential timber for 1860, Douglas was now fighting for survival against both his Republican opponents and his own party’s administration. For Lincoln, the race was an opportunity not only to win a much-coveted seat in the U.S. Senate but also to emerge as a giant killer. All eyes were on the race between these two long-standing rivals. For once, North and South agreed. The Richmond Enquirer noted that “the great battle of the next Presidential election is being fought in Illinois”; the New York Times called Illinois “the most interesting political battle-ground in the Union.” One of Lincoln’s correspondents told the candidate, “You are like Byron, who woke up one morning and found himself famous.”
By agreement, the two candidates squared off against each other in seven towns, one for each of the state’s nine congressional districts, minus tw
o, where they had already delivered well-attended speeches and rebuttals. Over the course of several autumn weeks, Lincoln and Douglas traveled more than ten thousand miles by boat, rail, and coach, drawing enormous crowds wherever they went. When not debating each other, they rallied the faithful. Lincoln estimated that he delivered 63 speeches—Douglas, 130. They were met by dramatic torchlight parades, men waving banners and women towing babies and toddlers. “The prairies are on fire,” marveled one of the many New York newspaper correspondents who were dispatched to Illinois that fall. “It is astonishing how deep an interest in politics this people take.”
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From his perch in the state capitol building, where state Republican leaders plotted strategy before the great hickory fire in Ozias Hatch’s office, Nicolay enjoyed an insider’s view of the Lincoln-Douglas Senate race. The line between partisan operative and journalist was blurry in the antebellum era. Though he served as the de facto director of the state Republican Party, George also wrote anonymously for the Pike County Free Press and the Chicago Tribune, under the pseudonym Sangamon. His articles and editorials promoted the standard Republican argument: slavery was an evil and cancerous institution that should be restricted to the states where it already existed; the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its popular sovereignty provision posed a stark betrayal of an agreement on which good men had long ago shaken hands; the Dred Scott decision had rendered popular sovereignty a dead letter and threatened to introduce slavery into the free states; and Stephen Douglas had either knowingly colluded in the “slave power conspiracy” or been duped by his friends in the “slaveocracy.” Nicolay carefully insisted that the Republican Party’s platform began and ended with preventing the extension of slavery into new territories—no more, no less. Reporting from Pittsfield, where Douglas spoke before a rowdy audience in late August, he noted that the Little Giant (as Douglas was popularly known) indulged in “his favorite misrepresentations—stating, for instance, that Lincoln was in favor of negro equality—of a war on the South—of abolishing slavery in the States &c.” The crowd was wise to Douglas, Nicolay boasted, and heckled the incumbent senator with cries of “That’s a lie!” and “We know better!”
To Nicolay, the “nub” of Douglas’s stump speech was “‘the nigger equality’ dodge.” Douglas was between a rock and a hard place. He had introduced the bill that overturned the Missouri Compromise and had appeased his Illinois constituents by promising that “popular sovereignty” would provide a democratic mechanism to keep slavery out of the new territories. Now his popular sovereignty proviso lay in tatters, flouted by border ruffians in Kansas and gutted by Southern Democrats in Washington. With nothing else to run on, he played the race card, charging repeatedly that Lincoln believed that “the negro was made his equal.” For his part, Lincoln had long been on record as insisting that “the negro is a man,” a position fully in accordance with the standard Republican argument that slavery was an aberration of natural law. While denying that African Americans were his “social equal,” he saw “no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness . . . [I]n the right to eat the bread, without leave of anyone else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.” In that specific time (1858) and place (Illinois), Lincoln’s position was sufficiently progressive to invite a backlash. Seeking to whip up racial animosities among conservative voters in the central and southern parts of the state, Douglas repeatedly warned that “black Republicans” would allow African Americans to “ride in a carriage with your wife, whilst you drive the team.” At the debate in Charleston, his supporters hoisted a banner that read “Negro Equality,” showing a white man, his black wife, and their mulatto child standing together. Many Republicans were no more accepting of racial equality than Douglas. When Douglas called Lincoln a “black Republican,” Lincoln supporters heckled him with cries of “White, white!” There was no mistaking their position: to oppose slavery’s extension—even to oppose the practice of holding other human beings in bondage—was not to favor black equality. If Lincoln’s and Douglas’s supporters agreed on nothing else, most held black Americans in contempt. Lincoln carefully walked a tightrope, assuring conservative voters that he believed in the separation and social inequality of the races while still earnestly defending the natural rights of black Americans and decrying the spread of slavery.
Nicolay was present at Lincoln’s campaign kickoff speech in Springfield, in which the nominee famously declared that “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” and was also in attendance at Douglas’s rebuttal, the following day. He was in the audience when Douglas visited Pittsfield later that summer, and he may also have witnessed some of their other debates and solo appearances. He also worked behind the scenes as a party lieutenant. Given his facility for research and writing, state leaders tasked George with preparing and publishing a campaign pamphlet, The Political Record of Stephen A. Douglas. He organized campaign rallies and lined up out-of-state surrogate speakers to stump on behalf of the candidate. Though it is possible that Nicolay took to the hustings to campaign for the Republican ticket in Pike County, as he had done in 1856, he left little public record of his sentiment during the fall canvass. What survive instead are several pages of notes that he scribbled out in a pocket journal. “In 1854, when the Dem. Party had repealed Mo. Compromise,” he noted in neat, angular script, “they started with the assumption: Slavery & Freedom equal. 50,000 Niggers equal 50,000 white settlers. Equal in Abstract Right.” Nicolay was turning Douglas’s “nigger equality dodge” on its head. Republicans would preserve the western frontier for white farmers; Democrats would place slaves in a position of equality with whites. They had, in fact, “blockaded” the “border of Kansas . . . against free emigration . . . Lincoln would never have made white men compete with niggers.” “Go it nigger, go it ‘mudsill,’” Democrats cried. “Every act of the Dem Party—legislative, executive or judicial has been against the White man and for the Nigger . . . Could say everything in favor of Niggers—but nothing for white men.” Playing on the familiar Republican charge that Buchanan, Douglas, and Taney had hatched a plot as early as 1854 to introduce slavery into the territories and possibly even the free states, Nicolay privately denounced the “Dred Scott decision—which says that niggers must go there [the territories] anyhow—that no power can keep it out. So that White men, after running their race according to Democratic terms, and winning it under all these difficulties, are cheated out of the prize by three Democratic judges, who give it to the niggers.”
It is unclear whether Nicolay’s notes reflected his personal sentiment or were intended as an outline for a stump speech. He was certainly in a position to offer talking points to Lincoln and, from the many hours he spent poring over election returns with the candidate, understood as well as anyone the urgent need to neutralize Douglas’s advantage with conservative voters in central and southern Illinois. In his personal correspondence, Nicolay made occasional use of the term “nigger,” but in his newspaper articles and official letters he usually referred to African Americans as “negroes.” Neither in private nor in public did he speak as venomously about black people as he did in the pages of his 1858 journal. Yet the line between personal belief and political rhetoric was thin. Two years earlier, as a newspaper editor, Nicolay proved willing to tap the reserve of popular racism to further the Republican cause, as when he denounced the “Pro-Slavery Black Democracy” or lambasted a Democratic rally as a “slavery-defending nigger-democratic Border-Ruffian pow-wow.” In his private notes, he echoed Lincoln in calling slavery a form of “despotism” and wrote disapprovingly of the Democratic Party’s insistence that “slaves are property.” “Free society,” he wrote, was “right & good. Slave society—wrong & evil.” But he also drew a sharp line between Douglas, who “wants Kansas for white men with n
iggers,” and Republicans, who “want it for white men without niggers.”
Whether Nicolay’s journal entries reflected his personal beliefs or were notes for a political speech or pamphlet, he gave expression to sentiments that his candidate, Abraham Lincoln, would never have indulged. While Lincoln told debate audiences that he wanted to preserve the West as “an outlet for free white people everywhere . . . in which [they] may find new homes and better their conditions in life,” he also affirmed that what was at stake was no less than “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.”
By contrast, Nicolay hung his argument on a stated belief that the “territories [were] for free white men. [Republicans] want it for free white labor—want it for the strong arm and the willing heart—want it for farms and cities—for railroads & telegraphs . . . and engines—for enterprise and prosperity—for free schools and free children.” As Henry Adams aptly summarized the Republican argument more than a half century later, bad roads meant bad morals, and slavery—the root of all immorality—was the antithesis of a prosperous and healthy society.
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The Lincoln-Douglas debates attracted enormous attention that fall. Both the Chicago Times, a Democratic publication, and the Chicago Tribune, a Republican paper, assigned stenographers to take down each and every word that the candidates uttered. Eastern papers also sent correspondents to Illinois to follow the events. Everywhere Lincoln and Douglas debated, enormous crowds assembled, traveling by rail, riverboat, and wagon, their horses kicking up dirt and mud so that “the streets and avenues leading from the country were so engulfed with dust that the town resembled a vast smoke house,” according to a contemporary account of the first debate, at Ottawa, where fifteen thousand spectators flooded a village that normally housed a population of just six thousand. Weeks later, in Charleston, a newspaper correspondent marveled that “over long, weary miles of hot, dusty prairie, the processions of eager partisans come on foot, on horseback, in wagons drawn by horses or mules; men, women, and children, old and young; the half-sick just out of the last shake, children in arms, infants . . . pushing on in clouds of dust under a blazing sun . . . talking, discussing, litigious, vociferous, while the roar of artillery, the music of bands, the waving of banners, the huzza of crowds . . . combine to render the scene one of commotion and confusion.” In Galesburg, a charming college town with a strong antislavery bent, the Macomb Lincoln Club let James Hammond know what they thought of him when they raised an enormous placard that read “Small-Fisted Farmers, Mud Sills of Society, Greasy Mechanics for A. Lincoln.”