Lincoln Unbound

by Rich Lowry

  Defenders of free labor fiercely resisted the “mud sill” view of society and the imputation that the North reduced its workers to “wage slaves.” They believed in an essential identification between labor and capital. And however dire conditions might be in the industrializing cities of the North (overcrowded and unsanitary), they knew that the free laborer (obviously) had much more opportunity to exercise his autonomy and to better his condition than his alleged counterpart in bondage in the South.

  “I have noticed in Southern newspapers,” Lincoln said in Kalamazoo in 1856, “the Southern view of the Free States.” He noted how they “insist that their slaves are far better off than Northern freemen. What a mistaken view do these men have of Northern laborers! They think that men are always to remain laborers here—­but there is no such class. The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him.”

  This is a highly schematic portrayal, but it captures the essence of the matter. Free workers did tend to get better jobs over time, and to become better off than their fathers. If they felt stymied, they could always pick up and move elsewhere.

  As for the South, the free-soil image of it was of a sink of backwardness wrought by slavery. Its romantic ­image of itself was of a bastion of high-­minded paternalism above the money-­grubbing of the degraded North. Neither was quite right, as the economic historian Robert Fogel demonstrates. Whatever ­justifications were thrown on the top of the slave system, it was basically a business proposition, a racket. What made it distinctive was the coercion and theft of labor, not separation from the market or absence of the profit motive.

  Feeding overseas demand for cotton, plantations fully partook of the international economy, more so than any other sector of the nation’s economy. They were, in the context of the time, enormous economic enterprises whose owners were enormously wealthy, and in fact made up the lion’s share of the richest ­people in the country. The point of the gang labor of the cotton plantations was to regiment and maximize the efficiency of slave workers. Planters were very sensitive to the change in prices for crops, and so adjusted what they grew accordingly.

  The system worked—­up to a point. If the South were a country in 1860, according to Fogel, it would have been the fourth richest in the world. Per capita income grew at an impressive clip, and from 1840 to 1860, faster than that of the North. Driven by their slave gangs, the large plantations were more productive than free and slave small farms.

  Nonetheless, the South was a society dominated by a planter elite upholding a twisted aristocratic ideal, largely dependent on one crop and on human bondage to produce it, unable to keep pace with a North leaping into modernity.

  The population in the South was too dispersed to support Northern-­style urbanization and industrialization, and the planters had no interest in either. Commercial conventions met constantly in the 1840s and 1850s to promote the idea of a more diversified economy to compete with that of the North. The likes of James De Bow called for action, as he put it, “in the busy hum of mechanism, and in the thrifty operations of the hammer and anvil.” To no avail. The entire system leaned the other way. Planters wanted to protect their power from any competitors or disruptive forces; cotton was so productive that there was little incentive to invest in anything else; and slavery made labor-­saving technology less important.

  The Southern transportation network, compared to that of the North, was rudimentary. The planters just had to export their crop and so long as there was enough of a network to get it to market and exported, that was enough. Southern states built railroads, but they usually didn’t reach beyond the state line. The only railway connecting Memphis to Charleston, east to west, was built with a multitude of different gauges.

  The South couldn’t attract or hold on to ­people the way the North could. Fogel notes that the relatively new Southern states farther West—­places like Mississippi and Arkansas—lost more native-­born whites than they gained during the 1850s. And foreign immigrants overwhelmingly settled in the North, feeding factories with cheap labor. Education lagged. Planters didn’t have reason to invest in human capital outside the plantation system. According to economic historian Douglass North, with a little less than half of the white population of the North in 1850, the South had one-­third as many public schools, one-­fourth as many students, and one-­twentieth as many libraries.

  Above all, the South was committed to slavery. Slave-­owning was the avenue to wealth and to prestige. A way of life was built upon it, and the region’s self-­regard depended on it. The South considered the criticisms from the North ignorant and insulting. The South felt defensive, because it had so much to be defensive about. It had lashed itself to a system that was profoundly unjust and left it grossly underdeveloped compared to the North.

  This was the backdrop to Lincoln’s combat with Douglas. The legendary affair between the two raged much more widely than the immortal seven debates. The two traveled a collective ten thousand miles. Lincoln gave sixty-­three speeches, usually about two hours in length. Douglas gave 130, in a count that included shorter improvised remarks, and had almost lost his voice by the end. Lincoln wasn’t as well-­known, of course. ­Papers outside of Illinois were liable to spell his name Abram. But Douglas knew what he was up against. “I shall have my hands full,” he predicted.

  Lincoln’s friend Joseph Gillespie wrote Herndon about what he considered the respective appeals of the candidates: “Douglass was idolized by his followers. Lincoln was loved by his. Douglass was the representative of his partisans. Lincoln was the representative man of the unsophisticated ­People. Douglass was great in the estimation of his followers. Lincoln was good in the opinion of his supporters. Douglass headed a party. Lincoln stood upon a principle.”

  At the beginning of the campaign, Lincoln followed Douglas around and replied after his speeches in a strategy of calculated self-abasement. Lincoln considered it “the very thing” because it allowed him “to make a concluding speech on him.” Embarrassed that its candidate seemed an afterthought, the Republican state committee insisted that Lincoln request the joint debates. Lincoln’s initial proposal would have meant about 50; Douglas agreed to 7. They ranged up and down the state, with Lincoln’s most favorable territory in the northern part of the state (Ottawa, Freeport, Galesburg), Douglas’s in the south (Jonesboro), and the most contested areas in the middle (Charleston, Quincy, Alton).

  At the time of the debates, Senator Douglas looked every bit a man of his station. He dressed, Michael Burlingame writes, “in the so-­called plantation style, with a ruffled shirt, dark blue coat with shiny buttons, light-­colored trousers, well-­polished shoes, and a wide brimmed hat.” Lincoln looked as disheveled as ever, dressed in a black alpaca outfit and ill-­fitting stovepipe hat and toting an old carpetbag. Illinois lawyer Jonathan Birch recalled to Jesse Weik (Herndon’s fellow researcher) that he “carried with him a faded cotton umbrella which became almost as famous in the canvass as Lincoln himself.”

  Douglas crisscrossed Illinois in style, in the “palace car” of the directors of the Illinois Central Railroad. His traveling companions included his second wife, Adele, who was twenty-­two years old and a grand-­niece of Dolley Madison (Douglas had lost his first wife a few years earlier, in 1853); a sculptor working on his bust; and a collection of stenographers and loyal editors. He smoked ­cigars at his whistle-­stops, and as the campaign progressed, drank more and more. In one version of his lecture on discoveries and inventions, Lincoln went out of his way to slyly tweak Douglas, a champion of an expansionistic movement calling itself “Young America.” “If there be anything old which he can endure,” Lincoln said of the characteristic Young American, “it is only old whiskey and old tobacco.”

  Festooned with a banner declaring S.A. DOUGLAS, THE CHAMPION OF POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY, the Douglas train came outfitted with a cannon dubbed “Popular Sovereignty,”
or “Little Doug.” It boomed the arrival of the exalted statesman. Lincoln commented sardonically of the cannon, “There is a passage, I think, in the Book of Koran, which reads: ‘To him that bloweth not his own horn—­to such a man it is forever decreed that . . . his horn shall not be blowe-­ed!’ ”

  Lincoln flew coach. He traveled in ordinary passenger cars on trains with, the Chicago Press & Tribune observed, “no cannon and powder monkeys before him.” Once he rode on the caboose of a freight train that had to make way for the flag-­bedecked Douglas conveyance. “Boys,” Lincoln remarked, “the gentleman in that car evidently smelt no royalty in our carriage.” Compared to Douglas, he was practically a hobo. The Illinois lawyer Birch described to Jesse Weik seeing Lincoln board a train during the campaign in his usual outfit, including “the inevitable umbrella.” According to Birch, “On his arm was the cloak that he was said to have worn when he was in Congress nine years before.” Lincoln chatted with acquaintances until nighttime. Then he found a seat by himself. “Presently he arose,” Birch said, “spread the cloak over the seat, lay down, somehow folded himself up till his long legs and arms were no longer in view, then drew the cloak about him and went to sleep. Beyond what I have mentioned he had no baggage, no secretary, no companion even.”

  The two were impressive debaters in their own way. Lincoln was blessed with a verbal acuity that Douglas, whom Don Fehrenbacher calls “among the least quoted of major American statesmen,” couldn’t match. But Douglas was magnetic and lively. He had none of Lincoln’s lawyerly respect for the facts and careful argumentation. Lincoln complained of his “audacity in maintaining an untenable position.” Their styles, as Allen Guelzo points out, reflected the different sensibilities of their parties—­Douglas blustery and passionate, Lincoln logical and precise.

  The events made for rollicking, open pageants of democracy. They drew thousands, straining to hear the two men declaiming from the same platforms, with ­people jockeying for position near the candidates and some clambering up with them. Douglas’s voice was booming, Lincoln’s high-pitched—making it easy to hear. The partisans of the rivals faced off with competing parades, brass bands, banners, hecklers, and salutes by cannon. “The prairies,” wrote a New York journalist, “are on fire.”

  After the first debate at Ottawa, Illinois, Lincoln’s supporters carried him off on their shoulders as a band played, “Hail, Columbia!” At the next debate, in Freeport, a small boy got up on the platform and sat on Douglas’s lap, then on Lincoln’s. Someone in the crowd at that encounter threw a piece of melon that hit Douglas when he got up to speak—­perhaps less of an indignity than one visited upon him at a campaign stop in Danville, where his carriage was befouled with what was delicately referred to as “loathsome dirt.”

  At the town of Charleston, Illinois, the Douglas demonstration was graced by thirty-two young women on horseback. Each lady represented a state of the union. Half carried sticks of ash in homage to Henry Clay (his estate was Ashland); half sticks of hickory in honor of Andrew Jackson (“Old Hickory”). ­Lincoln countered with a wagon full of thirty-­two lasses of his own. The candidates’ supporters tussled over whether a pro-­Lincoln or pro-­Douglas banner would grace the platform. That of the Lincoln partisans declared, LINCOLN WORRYING DOUGLAS AT FREEPORT, illustrated by a depiction of Lincoln as a dog going for Douglas’s throat. Douglas supporters hauled up a derisive banner depicting a white man and black woman, NEGRO EQUALITY. (To mark one Lincoln campaign stop in Rushville, Douglas supporters simply hoisted a black flag on top of the courthouse.)

  Douglas sought to portray Lincoln as an extremist. Lincoln wanted to blunt the charge, but also—­somewhat at cross-­purposes with this goal—­get the debate on the higher plane of the House Divided speech to condemn Douglas for his moral indifference to slavery.

  Douglas certainly wasn’t where the South was. In fact, he had thrilled and impressed Republicans by breaking with the administration of his fellow Democrat James Buchanan over its embrace of the fraudulent proslavery Lecompton Constitution in Kansas. He was by no means a rabid supporter of slavery. But he held a dim view of the humanity of blacks and wanted to get on with what he considered the more important matter of settling the rest of the continent and perhaps taking territory farther south.

  He had a ferocious opening debate in Ottawa, but Lincoln picked up in the final clashes as he reached for the moral high ground and Douglas began to get worn down. Amid much that was petty, repetitive, and forgettable, the basic argument went like this:

  Douglas rejected Lincoln’s House Divided speech as a call for sectional conflict and for national uniformity. At Ottawa, he said the House Divided doctrine was “revolutionary and destructive of the existence of this Government.” The Founders knew, Douglas argued, “when they framed the Constitution that in a country as wide and broad as this, with such a variety of climate, production and interest, the ­people necessarily required different laws and institutions in different localities.” That included slavery.

  Douglas didn’t feel the slightest bit defensive about the Founders. “Washington and his compeers in the convention that framed the constitution,” he said at Jonesboro, “made this government divided into free and slave State.” The Declaration of Independence had nothing to do with it.

  He sneered at Lincoln’s use of the Declaration. At Galesburg, he called Lincoln’s belief “that the negro and the white man are made equal by the Declaration of Independence and by Divine Providence” nothing less than “a monstrous heresy.” How could Jefferson possibly have meant to say that “his negro slaves, which he held and treated as property, were created his equals by Divine law, and that he was violating the law of God every day of his life by holding them as slaves?”

  The Founders didn’t literally mean all men were created equal. “They desired to express by that phrase,” Douglas said at Jonesboro, “white men, men of European birth and European descent, and had no reference either to the negro, the savage Indians, the Fejee, the Malay, or any other inferior and degraded race, when they spoke of the equality of men.” No, as Douglas said at Charleston and elsewhere, “I say that this government was established on the white basis. It was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and never should be administered by any except white men.”

  Douglas thought it a travesty that the country’s march across the continent and perhaps farther south should be checked by agitation over slavery. Douglas said at Freeport, “I answer that whenever it becomes necessary, in our growth and progress to acquire more territory, that I am in favor of it, without reference to the question of slavery.” This process of acquisition might take us far afield. “The time may come, indeed has now come,” Douglas explained at Jonesboro, “when our interests would be advanced by the acquisition of the island of Cuba. When we get Cuba we must take it as we find it, leaving the ­people to decide the question of slavery for themselves, without interference on the part of the federal government, or of any State of this Union.” So, too, with “any portion of Mexico or Canada, or of this continent or the adjoining islands.”

  Lincoln countered that, like it or not, we were indeed a House Divided. The difference between slavery and freedom wasn’t a matter of a pleasing diversity among the states. “I shall very ­readily agree with him that it would be foolish for us to insist upon having a cranberry law here, in Illinois, where we have no cranberries, because they have a cranberry law in Indiana, where they have cranberries,” Lincoln said in Alton. “I should insist that it would be exceedingly wrong in us to deny to Virginia the right to enact oyster laws where they have oyster, because we want no such laws here.” But slavery was, obviously, a more consequential matter: “When have we had any difficulty or quarrel amongst ourselves about the cranberry laws of Indiana, or the oyster laws of Virginia, or the pine lumber laws of Maine, or the fact that Louisiana produces sugar, and Illinois flour?”

  Lincoln charged th
at Douglas wanted the peace of surrender on slavery. “To be sure if we will all stop and allow Judge Douglas and his friends to march on in their present career until they plant the institution all over the nation, here and wherever else our flag waves, and we acquiesce in it, there will be peace. But let me ask Judge Douglas how he is going to get the ­people to do that?” The senator’s position, Lincoln argued at Alton, was “that we are to care nothing about it! I ask you if it is not a false philosophy? 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?”

  He objected to Douglas’s contention that the Founders “made” the country half-­slave and half-­free. “The exact truth,” he said of slavery at Alton, “is that they found the institution existing among us, and they left it as they found it. But in making the government they left this institution with many clear marks of disapprobation upon it.”

  As for Jefferson, Lincoln said at Galesburg, “that while Mr. Jefferson was the owner of slaves, as undoubtedly he was, in speaking upon this very subject, he used the strong language that ‘he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just’; and I will offer the highest premium in my power to Judge Douglas if he will show that he, in all his life, ever uttered a sentiment at all akin to that of Jefferson.”

  Lincoln returned repeatedly to arguments about the Founders that were staples of his throughout the 1850s. They had set a date, 1808, for when the slave trade could be prohibited, and promptly prohibited it as soon as the day arrived. They excluded it from the Northwest territory—­the chunk of territory that would become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota (in part)—­in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. “Why stop its spread in one direction,” he asked at Alton, “and cut off its source in another, if they did not look to its being placed in the course of ultimate extinction?”