He forcefully reminded his hundreds of listeners, and thousands more through the reprinting of his words—for no black man in America had ever reached so many Americans—that four things must happen in order that this daunting yet grand mission be accomplished: that this war "at untold cost of blood and treasure, shall be and of right ought to be, an Abolition War"; and that the peace to come must be "an Abolition peace." That every black man and woman be "entitled to all the rights, protections and opportunities for achieving distinction" as all other citizens; and lastly, that the black man must have the vote.10
Though he had sat and talked with Lincoln in the White House only five months earlier, and had been impressed with the president's personal qualities of honesty, earnestness, and above all, a refreshing and unusual mutuality, man to man, without any evident racial overtones, he now boldly addressed a president who was, he felt, incapable of seeing the mission of the war in this way. "Our chief danger lies in the absence of all moral feeling in the utterances of our rulers . . . the President told the country virtually that the abolition or non-abolition of Slavery was a matter of indifference to him. He would save the Union with Slavery or without Slavery."11
Not even the Emancipation Proclamation, issued under the banner of military necessity twelve months before, could possibly fulfill the pressing mission of destroying slavery once and for all. The president had made clear for three years that saving the Union was his goal, and from that first shot at Fort Sumter, Douglass had been equally clear that this goal was not enough. The hope of reunion with the South was doomed unless the higher mission of eradicating slavery was brought to the fore. "What business, then, have we to be pouring out our treasure and shedding our best blood like water for that worn-out, dead and buried Union, which had already become a calamity and a curse?"12This direct challenge to Lincoln was only part of a larger story of Lincoln and Douglass's dispute over the meaning of the war, and thus, the truth of America.
Their first face-to-face conversation remains one of the pivotal moments in American history—when a former slave could enter the office of the president for conversation and consultation upon significant issues and festering problems, and more remarkable still, when Lincoln could seem to enjoy Douglass's opinions and views, no matter how contrary to his own. And it is true that Douglass freely recalled, "Lincoln is the first white man I ever spent an hour with who did not remind me I was a Negro."13
Yet these admirable sentiments do not come close to encompassing the true nature of the contest between them, as when after the first inaugural address Douglass contemptuously noted of the new president, "What an excellent slave hound he is . . .,"14Or as he wrote in 1862, ". . . Mr. Lincoln assumes the language and arguments of an itinerant Colonization lecturer, showing all the inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy."15Douglass wrote in a letter to New York editor Theodore Tilton, just after his second meeting in 1864 with Lincoln in the White House, "When there was any shadow of a hope that a man of a more decided anti-slavery conviction and policy could be elected, I was not for Mr. Lincoln."16
Lincoln possessed an unusual ability to absorb criticism and rise above political abuse that beggars our imagination today. Douglass himself certainly came to understand that this cautious and measured politician had indeed been the essential man in this national crisis, perhaps the only national leader in his time who could have won union and emancipation both. Douglass saw Lincoln in all his imperfections and perceived "slowness" in response to the black cry for freedom, yet he stated in the dedication of the Freed-men's monument of Lincoln in 1876 that blacks were correct to revere him: "We came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln."17
Some readers will find Lincoln the reluctant liberator disturbing. No matter how many times the "real" Lincoln is presented, there seems to be a collective cultural reassertion of his mythic persona, a figure whose larger-than-life mystique places him almost beyond the reach of ordinary historical inquiry. Taking a fresh and direct look at the records of what Lincoln and Douglass said and did, and at how their relationship affected the "fiery trial" of the Civil War, is to respect the vast challenges they faced and mastered. The secret of Lincoln's instinctive bonding to one of his most severe critics is that the president sensed that he and Douglass shared common ground, as was evident in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, where for all time Lincoln calmly and simply evoked a vision of America's "new birth of freedom."
Americans have always moved instinctively to a self-understanding of themselves as being a people with a special, almost sacred, national mission, ever since John Winthrop's 1630 "Shining City on a Hill" sermon noting "the eyes of all people are upon us."18All across the American saga, poet, preacher, and politician alike have noted this powerful mission of being, as Whitman put it, "custodians of the future of humanity."19For Lincoln, the crisis of slavery had to be faced not solely for the Civil War generation but "for a vast future also." Jefferson, not Lincoln, had been the first to use the evocative phrase of America being "the last best hope of mankind."20This was a tall order in 1861, for a society in which four million men and women were slaves and in which the author of those very words had been a slave owner on the bucolic, peaceful crest of Monticello.
Both Lincoln and Douglass instinctively knew that the fate of America was irrevocably bound up in the "peculiar institution" of slavery, and that the war was nothing less than a violent rebirth that would either ratify or would forever nullify this destiny. Neither victory for the North nor the abolition of slavery was ever preordained. Any compromise before the guns of Fort Sumter would have left those four million slaves trapped. If Bull Run had gone the North's way, then the North's widely held vision of a quick resolution of the war would also have left slavery in place.
If General George B. McClellan had possessed the courage to drive home the Peninsula campaign in 1862, or had the Grant-like willingness to fully risk his men on the line in order to destroy Robert E. Lee at Antietam, the South might have collapsed—but well before emancipation. Victory would have been won by a powerful general who adamantly, and publicly, wished slavery to continue undisturbed.
If Lee had not possessed the headstrong will to send Longstreet's men on Pickett's Charge, but instead had maneuvered his army toward Harrisburg and Philadelphia, then Europe might well have decisively moved into the conflict and stymied any further prosecution of the war by the Lincoln administration. Had Atlanta not fallen when it did, Lincoln would likely have lost the 1864 election to McClellan, effectively leaving slavery alive.
During the war, Douglass warily assessed all of these dire possibilities and knew exactly how thin the line of success truly was. The cause of abolitionism was largely upheld by people for whom slavery was an abstraction. Bearing its scars across his back, Douglass knew slavery's realities in a way they never could, infusing him with a sense of desperation and danger at every twist and turn of the war. The price of saving the Union at several points looked to be nothing less than the sacrifice of his people. Above all, he understood that Lincoln was fighting a different war than he was.
Fearful that the Emancipation Proclamation, presented and released only as a desperate military necessity, would itself become null upon any early cessation of the war, whether in Union victory or in its defeat, Douglass viewed the conflict as far more than the progress of the Union army. For him, the war was a complicated and dangerous psychological maneuvering to produce an emerging sense that the Confederacy and the "peculiar institution" of slavery must be fully defeated at one and the same time. This realization among Northerners was achingly slow to grow and, even until the last year of the war, was never assured. The truth of the war was that there were many plausible scenarios of victory for Lincoln that could have spelled disaster for Douglass's mission. Moreover, there were no assurances that the North could subdue the South before its own political will exhausted itself.
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To 1860
CHAPTER 1
Black Republicans
The vast throng milled excitedly about the town square, almost twelve thousand people filling the normally quiet little town of Ottawa, Illinois, on a steamy late summer day in 1858. It seemed the whole populace of the state had turned out for this first of seven debates, with a fevered anticipation born of the expectation that this senatorial election would dramatically affect the nation's future and would be razor close. In the seventy years of the young republic, there had never been a political race quite like this one. Reporters were anxious to cover the novel debate format, with one eastern scribe proclaiming, "The Prairies are on fire."1
The two candidates had known each other for more than twenty-two years, rivals from the first. The wary antagonists had come to the burgeoning free state of Illinois as settlers from other states, Abraham Lincoln from Kentucky by way of Indiana, Stephen Douglas from Vermont by way of upstate New York. As poor and nearly itinerant young men, they had located in adjacent central counties, one to Sangamon, the other to Morgan. Lincoln, the Springfield Whig who idealized Henry Clay, soon found himself embroiled in constant battle with Douglas, the "Young America" Democrat who envisioned himself the next Andrew Jackson. Though each had mastered the law, both clearly thrived on the slashing pell-mell of politics, which drove their rivalry even more fiercely. Both worked hard to turn themselves into prosperous and self-styled western men—straight-talking, confident, humorous, effective speakers who felt no need to follow the strictures of classic oratory as practiced back east.
Senator Stephen A. Douglas, nicknamed "the Little Giant" by some, was a small rotund man, barely over five feet tall. Stephen Douglas (who dropped the second "s" from his name when he went west) was running for the Senate for the third time, a nationally prominent figure perennially mentioned as a Democratic candidate for president. If he could defeat his long-time but obscure challenger now, the presidential nomination for 1860 would be his. But the senator, unlike his supporters, did not underestimate his rival. Upon learning of his opponent's nomination, he said, "I shall have my hands full. He is the strong man of the party—full of wit, facts, dates—and the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West. He is as honest as he is shrewd, and if I beat him my victory will be hardly won."2
Abraham Lincoln, 1859. Photograph by Samuel M. Fassett.
Douglas's adversary was a well-respected leader in the rapidly developing Republican party in the state, but in truth, Lincoln had virtually dropped out of politics after a brief and not very successful two-year stint in Congress twelve years earlier, and he was now a successful railroad lawyer. Abraham Lincoln did not have as high an estimation of his opponent as Douglas had of him, despite Stephen Douglas's manifest success. He resented Douglas's agile ability to twist his opponent's words in debate, and, he confided to a friend, the senator's ability to tell a lie to ten thousand listeners one day and to deny it to five thousand the next.3Most of all, Lincoln bristled at the way their political fortunes had so dramatically diverged. Lincoln was never a man to reveal much about his inner state, feelings, hopes, resentments, but many years later, an undated fragment written before this period of frustrated self-analysis was discovered in Lincoln's writings, and the lawyer did not spare himself in a raw comparison: "We were both young men then, he a trifle younger than I. Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much as he. With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success."4
The election was likely to be Lincoln's last chance to reverse that course of fortune, and unexpectedly, his prospects were increasingly promising. The senator was now in severe trouble in his home state, and Lincoln's new Republican party was clearly on the rise. The two men had been shadow-boxing in speeches for four years over the one issue that compelled the nation's fierce interest, the spread of slavery into western territories soon to become states. Before the agreement for these debates, dueling speeches in Springfield and Chicago had already well prepared the ground of battle and future lines of attack, and the seven debates up and down the state were now attracting strong interest from all over a country convulsed over the fate of slavery.
Why was the whole nation riveted to this one senatorial race? Lincoln was not exaggerating the fame and importance of the Little Giant when he had said the previous month "that he is a very great man, and that the largest of us are very small ones."5After all, Stephen Douglas was the man who had helped pass the Compromise of 1850 that averted civil war, the man who also, almost inexplicably, four years later single-handedly smashed the 1820 Missouri Compromise with stunning legislation that allowed the vast territories of Kansas and Nebraska to enter the Union as either slave or free states. Instead of all the old painfully worked out compromises of decades past, Stephen Douglas trumpeted the doctrine of popular sovereignty, letting the people vote! What could be more reasonable, more democratic, than to put the whole issue of slavery to the test of the people in each territory as they formed these new states?
His northern supporters were, however, unnerved by the recent Dred Scott Supreme Court decision that clearly undermined Douglas's dream of letting the territories simply vote slavery up or down (Douglas famously claimed "not to care"). Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a Maryland slave owner, had shocked many northerners with this notorious decision proclaiming that blacks were "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race . . . and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."6Further, the decision effectively claimed no state, whether it claimed to be free or not, could legally exclude slavery. Still, Douglas was such a dominating national figure that he felt his notion of popular sovereignty could still put an end to the endless disputes and rising crises over slavery—that he could save the Union and claim the presidency.
Senator Stephen Douglas
As Lincoln was now anxious to remind the voters of the free state of Illinois, the problem was that Douglas's popular sovereignty dramatically increased these tensions and the mutual distrust between North and South. Each incoming state, particularly "Bloody Kansas," was now an open battle zone, and the prospects for peace among the states lessened with every fiery speech, every insult, every exchange of bullets, every election. The senator might still be a giant in national politics, but the voters of his state were angry and restive, and he was in danger of losing all.
If there is any cardinal rule in politics, particularly when an incumbent is in trouble, it is this: Move to the offensive, hard. On August 21 on the great platform in Ottawa, Douglas was slated to speak first. Outfitted in a white broad-brimmed plantation hat, a bright blue coat with great brass buttons that contrasted with his cream vest and pants, he was hard to miss. Engaging, compelling, he gesticulated in strong slashing motions, strode the stage with utter confidence. Barely ten minutes into his remarks, he struck: "Lincoln was to bring into the Abolition camp the old line Whigs, and transfer them over to Giddings, Chase, Fred Douglass, and Parson Lovejoy, who were ready to receive them and christen them to their new faith."7He claimed the faith was called the "Black Republicans." He hit hard again five minutes later, invoking Frederick Douglass's name a second and then a third time.
Lincoln might be in favor of equal rights for blacks, asserted the senator, but not he: "I believe this Government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by the white man, for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever . . . I do not question Mr. Lincoln's conscientious belief that the negro was made his equal, and hence is his brother; but for my own part, I do not regard the negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother or any kin to me whatsoever." Then a fourth time, he claimed his old friend deserved a medal from "Fred Douglass for his Abolitionism."8
When his turn at last came, Lincoln replied that the senator's claimed indifference to whether slavery was to be voted up or down was really a covert method of threate
ning even free states with the acceptance of slavery. And Lincoln truly despised slavery: "I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites . . ."9Yet Douglas's blows had found their mark, because Lincoln then tried to blunt the effectiveness of the senator's accusation.
If millions of slaves could not all be shipped to Liberia, then what? "Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this," Lincoln said, "and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people would not . . . We cannot, then, make them equals."10
Without a strong answer to Douglas now, Lincoln's victory would be an impossibility. After all, he was attempting to win the Senate seat of a state that, though free, had strong and effective Black Laws that refused any black resident the right to vote, join the state militia, testify against a white person in court, or serve on a jury. Interracial marriage was illegal. The Black Laws had long imposed steep fines and local injunctions against blacks living in Illinois but just five years earlier the state had passed a law making any further black settlement illegal. In his long political career, Lincoln had not spoken against these laws—nor did he do so now: "I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position."11
Douglass and Lincoln Page 2