Lincoln

by David Herbert Donald

  Lincoln was eager for an opportunity to challenge it. Thoroughly familiar with all of the senator’s arguments, he carefully prepared to attack them, reading over the voluminous pamphlet literature, reviewing the laws and the speeches in Congress, and studying the census reports. The hostile Illinois State Register said that Lincoln “had been nosing for weeks in the State Library, pumping his brain and his imagination for points and arguments.” He looked for a chance to debate Douglas, but the senator, who was attacked by the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy when he spoke in the northern part of the state, by Lyman Trumbull, the anti-Nebraska Democrat, when he appeared in the south, and by Chase and Giddings wherever they could find him, was unwilling to share his audiences with yet another opponent.

  On October 3, when Douglas appeared in Springfield for the opening of the Illinois State Fair, he again declined to permit Lincoln to appear on the same platform. After a rainstorm forced the cancellation of a huge open-air rally, Douglas spoke in the hall of the House of Representatives in the state capitol. To mounting applause he delivered his defense of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, ending with a powerful attack on the Know Nothings. While he spoke, Lincoln paced back and forth in the lobby, listening carefully to every word. As the crowd dispersed, he appeared on the stairway to announce, in a shout, that he or Trumbull would answer Douglas the next day. He invited Douglas to be present and offered him a chance to respond.

  The next afternoon when Lincoln appeared before a large crowd in the House of Representatives hall, he was fully prepared to meet all the arguments Douglas had advanced the previous day. The senator occupied a chair directly in front of the speaker and tried not to show any reaction until it came his chance to respond. But as Lincoln warmed the audience up with wry allusions to recent political events and compliments to “his distinguished friend, Judge Douglas,” the senator felt he could not remain silent and from time to time engaged in banter with the speaker. When Lincoln cited Douglas’s 1849 praise of the Missouri Compromise as “a sacred thing,” the senator interjected, “A first-rate speech!” As Lincoln proved that Douglas had once attempted to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, the senator snorted, “And you voted against it!” But Lincoln got in the last word: “Precisely so.... I was in favor of running the line a great deal further south.” The exchanges in themselves were of no consequence, but they helped establish the equality of the challenger and the challenged—something that Douglas hitherto had been unwilling to admit.

  Before an audience described as “very large, intelligent, and attentive,” Lincoln spoke for more than three hours. The afternoon was hot and sticky, and Lincoln, as though prepared for heavy physical labor, appeared in his shirtsleeves, without collar or tie. Unlike many other speakers, he did not pace back and forth on the platform or lean on the lectern; instead, as Herndon said, “he stood square on his feet, with both of his legs straight up and down, toe even with toe.” As always, he was a little awkward at the outset, and initially his voice was “sharp—shrill piping and squeaky.” Once he was under way, the pitch of his voice lowered and “became harmonious—melodious—musical.” He nearly always held his hands behind his back when he began a speech, the left hand grasped in the palm of the right, but as he proceeded, would bring his hands forward, often holding the left lapel of his coat with his left hand while leaving the right hand free to emphasize his points. He did not gesture much with his hands, however, and mostly emphasized his points with a jerk and snap of his head. But occasionally he would stretch out his long right arm and his bony forefinger to drive an idea home, and at moments of great inspiration he would “raise both hands toward heaven at an angle of about 50 degrees, generally the palms up.”

  Lincoln began this address with several demurrers. He now concealed the sharp envy he had long felt toward Douglas and announced that he did “not propose to question the patriotism or to assail the motives of any man, or class of men.” He sought to make the important distinction between slavery in the existing states, which was guaranteed under the Constitution, and the extension of slavery, for which there was no such authority. He made it clear that, unlike many in the anti-Nebraska coalition, he did not consider the repeal of the Missouri Compromise the result of a Southern plot, and he willingly recognized that the Southern people were “no more responsible for the origin of slavery, than we.” Finally, he acknowledged that he thought it was impossible to free the slaves and make them “politically and socially, our equals.” “My own feelings will not admit of this,” he declared; nor would those of the majority of whites. “Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question,” he added pragmatically. “A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded.”

  With these matters, which he considered irrelevant in the present contest, pushed aside, Lincoln could concentrate on the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the defenses that Douglas had made for it. He began with a long, careful review of the history of national legislation concerning the extension of slavery, from the Northwest Ordinance to the Missouri Compromise to the Compromise of 1850, ending with the bill Douglas had introduced in 1853 for the territorial organization of Nebraska, noting that they all had recognized the right of Congress to exclude slavery from the national territories. Then Douglas made his astonishing about-face in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.

  Lincoln next attacked Douglas’s arguments in favor of that measure. Claiming that repeal of the Missouri Compromise was not necessary in order to set up a territorial government in Nebraska, he showed that in recent years both Iowa and Minnesota had been organized with the Missouri restriction; indeed, Douglas’s 1853 bill, which “was within an ace of passing,” proved that Nebraska could be similarly organized. Vehemently Lincoln denied that pressure of public opinion had forced Douglas to introduce the Kansas-Nebraska bill. He dismissed as “a palliation—a lullaby” Douglas’s argument that slavery would not go into the new territories. The climate of Kansas would not exclude slavery; it was just like that in northwestern Missouri, where slavery was flourishing. Nor would the disposition of the early settlers, because Kansas was nearer slaveholding Missouri than it was to the free states of the North and West.

  Up to this point Lincoln’s appeal had been chiefly to reason and everyday experience, but his address took on a new tone when he turned to the next argument, that “the sacred right of self government” required restrictions on slavery be removed so the residents of the territories could decide for themselves whether to admit or exclude it. Of course the inhabitants of the territories should make their own laws, Lincoln conceded, and these should not be interfered with any more than “the oyster laws of Virginia, or the cranberry laws of Indiana.” But whether they could permit or exclude slavery depended upon “whether a negro is not or is a man.”

  Here Lincoln reached the crux of his disagreement with Douglas. He and the senator might both regret that slavery had ever been introduced to the American continent and they might both believe that African-Americans could never be the moral or intellectual equals of whites. But their views of African-Americans were fundamentally different. Douglas, Lincoln said, “has no very vivid impression that the negro is a human; and consequently has no idea that there can be any moral question in legislating about him.” But to Lincoln the African-American was very much a man. The Declaration of Independence taught him that all men—even men of limited abilities and prospects—are created equal. Because the Negro was a man, there could be no moral right to slavery, which was “founded in the selfishness of man’s nature.” “No man,” Lincoln announced, “is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent. I say this is the leading principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism.”

  Though Lincoln’s argument was terse and powerful, his audience found little in its substance that was new. After all, the Kansas-Nebraska issue had been before the American people for nine months, and the act had been repeatedly attacked from almost every con
ceivable direction. Indeed, a little later in the 1854 campaign Lincoln himself admitted that the flaws of Douglas’s “iniquity” had been so often exposed, that “he could not help feeling foolish in answering arguments which were no arguments at all.”

  What listeners did find different and significant in Lincoln’s speech was his tone of moral outrage when he discussed “the monstrous injustice of slavery.” “There can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another,” he thundered. It followed, then, that the extension of slavery into the territories and, prospectively, “to every other part of the wide world, where men can be found inclined to take it,” was equally wrong. So was Douglas’s “declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery.”

  With this Lincoln reached the bedrock of his political faith, with its assurance that all men are created equal. (Frequently in his 1854 addresses he made a significant misquotation of the Declaration, to the effect that all men are created “free and equal.”) “Our revolutionary fathers” understood that slavery was wrong. For practical reasons they could not eradicate it at the time they set up the new national government, but they “hedged and hemmed it in to the narrowest limits of necessity.” They did not allow the word “slavery” in the Constitution but permitted only indirect references to it, “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.”

  Sharply in contrast was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, with its open tolerance of this monstrous evil, and Lincoln reached a new oratorical height in denouncing Douglas’s claim that he was merely acting in the spirit of the Founding Fathers in permitting self-government in the territories. In denouncing this heresy, Lincoln, as Herndon wrote a few days later in the Illinois State Journal, “quivered with feeling and emotion” and “his feelings once or twice swelled within and came near stifling utterance.”

  Equally powerful was Lincoln’s insistence that the American struggle over slavery must be viewed in world perspective. He had always shown sympathy for liberal movements abroad, for instance, expressing sympathy with the efforts of the Hungarian revolutionary Louis Kossuth in his struggles against the Hapsburg monarchy, but only in recent years had he come to see the importance of America as an example to lovers of freedom everywhere. In his eulogy on Clay he echoed that statesman’s feeling “that the world’s best hope depended on the continued Union of these States.” Now he saw that by permitting the expansion of slavery the United States was undermining its influence on “the liberal party throughout the world.” “We were proclaiming ourselves political hypocrites before the world,” he warned, “by thus fostering Human Slavery and proclaiming ourselves, at the same time, the sole friends of Human Freedom.”

  It was a remarkable address, more elevated in sentiment and rhetoric than any speech Lincoln had previously made, and when he finished, the women in the audience waved their white handkerchiefs in support and the men gave loud and continuous hurrahs. Douglas took the floor immediately and offered a rebuttal that lasted nearly two hours. According to Democratic partisans, the senator demolished Lincoln, but in Herndon’s report, Douglas “was completely cut down by Lincoln, and... Douglas felt himself overthrown.”

  That was the way that party newspapers always reported such encounters, but in the next few days there was considerable evidence that Lincoln had made an immense impression. Immediately after Lincoln spoke, Ichabod Codding and Lovejoy, two of the most radical antislavery men, gave notice of a meeting that evening to organize a Republican party in the state, in order to oppose the further extension of the slave power. That the turnout was small—twenty-six men and a boy, according to the hostile Register—was hardly surprising; after three hours of oratory by Lincoln and two more by Douglas, nobody wanted to attend another political rally. But the next day there was a meeting of respectable size, and the delegates, mostly from the northern counties, adopted a party platform. The real excitement at the convention, however, was over Lincoln’s speech. “Ichabod [Codding] raved, and Lovejoy swelled,” the Register reported, and all pronounced it “a glorious abolition speech, worthy of Ichabod himself,... [which] ought to be reiterated all over the country.” Although disappointed that Lincoln failed to attend, the Republicans, without asking his consent, named him to their state central committee.

  The reaction of the Register suggested the impact of Lincoln’s speech. Ordinarily the editors of this Democratic newspaper refrained from abusing Lincoln, a fellow townsman whom they liked and admired. But as it became clear that his arguments had weakened Douglas’s position, the Register tried to counter with a mock eulogy on “the late Hon. Abe Lincoln.” “Left to himself,” it mourned with crocodile tears, “he might have been an honor to his kind,” with his “talent to hoodwink the blind, and with a facility of speech well calculated to deceive the ignorant,” but, “flattered and cajoled by his pretended friends,” he had allowed himself to believe that he was a great man, capable of challenging Douglas. “Annihilation—utter annihilation”—had inevitably been his fate, and there was no hope “to resuscitate his lifeless remains.”

  Whig reactions also attested to the effectiveness of Lincoln’s assault on Douglas. The day after the speech, B. F. Irwin and several other Springfield Whigs requested Lincoln to pursue Douglas for the remainder of the campaign, constantly challenging him and attacking his arguments “untill he runs him into his hole or makes him holler Enough.”

  Lincoln did just that. He asked to debate Douglas at Peoria on October 16, but the senator, exhausted from constant campaigning and so hoarse that he could hardly be heard, was reluctant. Privately he told a friend that he did not want to share the platform with “the most difficult and dangerous opponent that I have ever met”; but he recognized the political risk of refusing to meet his challenger. He resolved his dilemma by speaking for more than three hours in the afternoon, until well after five o’clock, so that Lincoln would have to face a tired and restive crowd, eager to go home. Recognizing the problem, Lincoln urged listeners to have their supper and reassemble at seven in the evening. Then, to keep the audience from scattering, he offered Douglas a final hour for rebuttal, saying candidly to the Democrats: “I felt confident you would stay for the fun of hearing him skin me.”

  At Peoria, Lincoln gave essentially the same speech that he had delivered in Springfield; this time he wrote it out for publication in full over a week’s issues of the Illinois State Journal, so that it would be widely read throughout the state. He went on from Peoria to Urbana, where he delivered his speech so effectively that years later Henry C. Whitney declared it had never been equaled before or since. After Lincoln spoke in Chicago, a journalist reported that he created the impression “on all men, of all parties,... first, that he was an honest man, and second, that he was a powerful speaker.”

  VII

  In the fall elections voters across the North repudiated Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Twenty-nine of the thirty-one New York congressmen elected were anti-Nebraska men, and so were twenty-one out of the twenty-five Pennsylvania representatives. Every congressman in Ohio was an opponent of Kansas-Nebraska, as were all but two in Indiana. Illinois joined the movement. Though the anti-Nebraska coalition failed to reelect Yates to Congress, choosing instead Douglas’s loyal lieutenant, Thomas L. Harris, the Democrats could boast of few other victories. Anti-Nebraska candidates won five of the state’s nine seats in the House of Representatives, and anti-Nebraska forces, by a small majority, would control the next General Assembly, whose principal duty would be to elect the next United States senator from Illinois.

  Even before the makeup of the new legislature was clear, Lincoln began to campaign for that office. He had been thinking about the prospect for some time. His address at Chicago, for instance, was probably intended to consolidate his following in the northern part of the state. Once the election turned out
so favorably for the anti-Nebraska coalition, he sprang into action. Three days after the election he wrote candidly to Charles Hoyt, a client whom he had represented in an important patent suit: “You used to express a good deal of partiality for me; and if you are still so, now is the time. Some friends here are really for me, for the U.S. Senate.” He asked Hoyt and his other correspondents to “make a mark for me” with members of the new legislature and solicited “the names, post-offices, and political position” of the incoming senators and representatives. His appeal went mainly to members of the Whig party. “It has come round that a whig may, by possibility, be elected to the U. S. Senate,” he wrote one new legislator; “and I want the chance of being the man. You are a member of the Legislature, and have a vote to give. Think it over, and see whether you can do better than to go for me.” So assiduous was he in soliciting votes that, as Herndon wrote, during the weeks after the November election “he slept, like Napoleon, with one eye open.”

  Lincoln recognized that his candidacy was problematical. The new legislature was certain to be fragmented and disorganized; only four of the seventy-five representatives in the previous legislature retained their seats. The anti-Nebraska majority was slim and far from united on any one man. There were, he discovered, “ten or a dozen, on our side, who are willing to be known as candidates,” plus “fifty secretly watching for a chance.” The Democrats could be counted on to offer “a terrible struggle,” and many vowed that, rather than elect an anti-Nebraska senator, they would prevent the state senate, where they were in the majority, from joining the house of representatives in a joint session and thus stave off any choice.