Rather than lamenting his luck, Lincoln prepared to make the best of the situation. He drew up a careful, detailed list of how the representative and senatorial districts had voted in the previous election and, assuming that the 1856 Fillmore voters would now support Republican candidates, tried to predict how each district would go in 1858. Some, mostly in southern Illinois, he wrote off as “desparate,” meaning that there was no use wasting Republican resources there; others, chiefly in the north, he marked, “we take to ourselves, without question,” so that no campaigning in these counties was needed. He allocated his public appearances accordingly, making only four speeches in the north and only four in the south. The rest of his time he devoted to districts “we must struggle for,” mainly in the central part of the state, where the Whig (and more recently the Know Nothing) party had been strongest.
Lincoln found his efforts to woo this old Whig vote frustrating. It was a warning of their disaffection that very few former Whigs participated in the Republican county conventions of 1858. Lincoln attempted to check this defection by stressing his long service to the Whig party and throughout the campaign claimed to wear the mantle of Henry Clay, but Douglas, too, campaigned as the great Kentuckian’s successor in advocating sectional compromise. Lincoln’s effort to win over the old-line Whigs was severely damaged when Judge T. Lyle Dickey, one of the most prominent Whigs and hitherto a close friend, announced that he would support Douglas; Lincoln, he said, was “too closely allied to the abolitionists.” Then Dickey let it leak out that he had a private letter from John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, Clay’s political heir in the United States Senate, favoring Douglas. Much troubled, Lincoln wrote Crittenden that though he did not believe this story it made him uneasy. To his dismay, Crittenden responded that he did indeed think that Douglas’s reelection was “necessary as a rebuke to the Administration, and a vindication of the great cause of popular rights and public justice.”
Along with efforts to keep his own fragile coalition together, Lincoln tried to capitalize on divisions among the Democrats. Despite several attempts at compromise, the break between Douglas and Buchanan persisted, and the President and his Southern advisers resolved to help defeat the Illinois senator, partly out of vindictiveness, partly to demonstrate that Democrats must not rebel against their party leadership. Buchanan began removing Illinois postmasters and other federal officials appointed because of Douglas’s recommendation, replacing them with men known to be inveterate enemies of the senator. He also fostered the creation of a separate National Democratic party in Illinois. Some of these “Danites,” as they were derisively called, after an alleged secret order of Mormons who acted as spies to suppress disaffection, openly endorsed Lincoln’s election to the Senate; others favored a separate ticket in order to divide the Democratic vote.
Douglas charged that there was a corrupt bargain between these National Democrats and the Republicans, who had nothing in common except a desire to bring about his defeat. In reply to an urgent inquiry from Trumbull, Lincoln replied that, at least as far as he was concerned, there was no alliance with the Buchanan men. To be sure, he was “rather pleased to see a division in the ranks of the democracy” and certainly did nothing to prevent it; but he had made no agreement with them “by which there is to be any concession of principle on either side, or furnishing of the sinews, or partition of offices, or swopping of votes, to any extent.” He chose his words carefully, as did Herndon, who also gave assurance that there was not “any contract ... either express or implied, directly or indirectly,” with the Danites.
Though that was literally the truth, it was not the whole truth. Only a few days after Lincoln wrote Trumbull, he met privately with Colonel John Dougherty, the National Democratic candidate for state treasurer, to discuss the election. When Dougherty promised that the National Democrats would field a candidate in every legislative district, Lincoln replied: “If you do this the thing is settled—the battle is fought.” In most of his dealing with the Danites, however, Lincoln preferred to keep his hands clean by working through an intermediary. Herndon was one of the best, because his brother, Elliott Herndon, was editor of the Illinois State Democrat, the National Democratic newspaper in Springfield, and his father was also a strong supporter of Buchanan. “They make ‘no bones’ in telling me what they are going to do,” Herndon boasted. He understood the importance of keeping Lincoln in the dark about these conversations. As he told Trumbull, “Lincoln ... does not know the details of how we get along. I do, but he does not.”
As the campaign progressed, ties between the Republicans and the National Democrats became even closer. In September so few Danites turned out for their party convention that Republicans had to pack the hall to keep it from becoming a joke. At this meeting, as Jesse Dubois reported to Lincoln, Republicans worked through “your man” to learn the National Democrats’ campaign strategy. The underfinanced publisher of the Illinois State Democrat told one of his unpaid employees that “he expected $500 of Mr. Lincoln in a day or two”—which may, or may not, have been true.
VII
Lincoln could not stay in his office to manage the campaign because he was constantly in demand as a speaker. Day after day, both Democrats and Republicans held rallies all across the state. Republican foot soldiers were deployed to the smaller gatherings, in schoolhouses and village churches. At larger rallies Republicans often produced out-of-state dignitaries, like Governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, Representative Schuyler Colfax from nearby Indiana, and Francis P. (Frank) Blair, Jr., of the prominent border-state political family, who was editor of the influential St. Louis Democrat. Democrats felt less need to import speakers, though Representative Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio made several speeches for Douglas in Illinois.
But Illinois voters wanted to hear the principals, not their surrogates, and both Lincoln and Douglas were almost constantly on the stump. Douglas gave 130 speeches during the campaign, and Lincoln 63, not including short responses to serenaders, remarks to small groups that assembled along the highways, and compliments paid to the standard Republican floats, featuring thirty-two ladies (one for each state, plus Kansas), which almost every village seemed able to produce. In the hundred days before the election Douglas traveled 5,227 miles; and Lincoln, between July and November, covered 4,350 miles—350 by boat, 600 by carriage, and 3,400 by train.
The seven formal debates between Lincoln and Douglas were, therefore, only a small part of the 1858 campaign, though they naturally attracted the greatest interest. All of them followed the same format. The speakers alternated in opening the debate. The opening speaker was allowed an hour for his presentation; his opponent had an hour and a half for reply; and the initial speaker then had a final half hour for rebuttal. Lincoln grumbled that the arrangement allowed Douglas to make four of the opening and closing statements, while he was allowed only three.
As the Republican New York Times observed, Illinois in 1858 was “the most interesting political battle-ground in the Union,” and newspapers throughout the country offered extensive coverage of the canvass. Local papers, of course, gave it great attention. For the first time reporters were assigned to cover candidates throughout the long campaign season. The Chicago Press and Tribune, the most influential Republican paper in the state, sent the skilled shorthand expert Robert R. Hitt to report every word of the debates, and James B. Sheridan and Henry Binmore performed the same service for Douglas’s organ, the Chicago Times. Though each side accused the other of garbling, mutilating, or revising the speeches, the verbatim reports, which were widely copied and circulated in other newspapers as well, were largely accurate, both in substance and in expression.
Reporters noted how sharply the candidates contrasted in appearance. Douglas, so short that he came up only to Lincoln’s shoulder, was a ruddy, stout man, with regular features marred only by a curious horizontal ridge that stretched across the top of his nose, while Lincoln was exceptionally tall and painfully thin, with a melancholy physiognomy and s
allow skin. Douglas had a booming, authoritative voice, while Lincoln spoke in a piercing tenor, which at times became shrill and sharp. Douglas used graceful gestures and bowed charmingly when applauded, in contrast to Lincoln, who moved his arms and hands awkwardly and looked like a jackknife folding up when he tried to bow.
There was also a marked contrast in the way the candidates presented themselves to the public. Douglas wished to appear a commanding figure, a statesman of national reputation. Accompanied by his beautiful, regal second wife, Adèle Cutts, he usually traveled by special train, splendidly fitted out for comfort and for entertaining. When he stood on the platform in his handsome new blue suit with silver buttons and in his immaculate linen, he was unquestionably a great United States senator reporting to his loyal constituents. Lincoln deliberately cultivated a different image. When he went by train, he traveled in the regular passenger cars—a practice that afforded him endless opportunities for meeting the voters and talking about their concerns. Except at the final debate in Alton, Mary Lincoln did not accompany him; it was not part of the persona he was projecting to display his elegantly dressed wife with her aristocratic bearing. Lincoln took pains to wear his everyday clothes during the debates, appearing usually in what Carl Schurz, the German-American leader, who campaigned for the Republican ticket, described as “a rusty black frock-coat with sleeves that should have been longer” and black trousers that “permitted a very full view of his large feet.”
From time to time, Lincoln tried to capitalize on the differences between Douglas’s appearance and his own. The senator’s followers, he said, anticipated that their leader at no distant day would become President and saw in his “round, jolly, fruitful face” promises of “postoffices, landoffices, marshal-ships, and cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance,” while in Lincoln’s “poor, lean, lank, face” nobody ever saw “that any cabbages were sprouting out,” because “nobody has ever expected me to be President.” There was nothing false about all this; Lincoln was in fact a homely man with simple tastes, indifferent to personal comfort. It was important in this contest to present himself to the voters not as a man of considerable means and one of the most prominent lawyers in the state but as a countryman, shrewd and incorruptible.
VIII
The opening debate at Ottawa, a town of about 9,000 inhabitants some eighty miles southwest of Chicago, attracted 10,000 people, who came in on foot, by horseback or carriage, and even on Illinois River canal boats. A special train of seventeen cars brought visitors from Chicago, and another of eleven cars came from Peru and La Salle. Lincoln arrived about noon on the special train from Chicago and was greeted by Ottawa mayor Joseph O. Glover. Seated in a carriage that, according to the Chicago Press and Tribune, was “beautifully decorated with evergreens and mottoes by the young ladies of Ottawa,” he was escorted by a procession of military companies and brass bands, which stretched out for half a mile, to the public square and then to Mayor Glover’s house. At about the same time a rival crowd went out to meet Douglas, who rode in from Peru in a handsome carriage drawn by four spirited horses.
By one o’clock people began moving into Lafayette Square, where the speaking was to take place, and there was considerable jostling for the best positions. There were no seats, and the audience had to remain standing for the entire three hours. Some “clowns” climbed upon the roof of the hastily built speakers’ stand, the newspapers reported, and their weight broke through the boards, which fell on the unsuspecting heads of members of the reception committee. Fortunately order was restored in time for Douglas to begin speaking at two-thirty.
The ferocity of Douglas’s opening statement apparently startled Lincoln. The senator intended to demonstrate that he was, as Lincoln had said, a lion—and very much a living lion, with sharp teeth. Announcing his major theme, which he would pursue throughout the campaign, the senator bluntly charged that Lincoln and Trumbull had since 1854 been conspiring to subvert both the Democratic and the Whig parties in order to create “an Abolition party, under the name and disguise of a Republican party.” As evidence of this intent, he adduced a radical antislavery platform, which he said had been adopted in 1854 at the first state convention of the Republican party in Springfield and which Lincoln had presumably endorsed. Like a prosecuting attorney pinning down a reluctant witness, he demanded to know whether Lincoln still stood on this platform. Did Lincoln now, as in 1854, favor the unconditional repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act? Did he oppose the admission of more slave states to the Union? Was he opposed to the admission of a new state “with such a Constitution as the people of that State may see fit to make”? Did he support the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia? Was he pledged to end the interstate slave trade? Did he wish to prohibit slavery in all the national territories? Did he oppose the acquisition of additional territory unless slavery was prohibited in it? Lincoln, he charged, was in favor of suppressing self-government and imposing uniformity on the different states, a policy “never dreamed of by Washington, Madison, or the framers of this Government.”
How to reply bewildered Lincoln. At his best when he had time carefully to think through his ideas and revise his phrasing, he was clearly uncomfortable in debate format, which required extemporaneous speaking and swift rearrangement of arguments to meet the opponent’s charges. Rather stumblingly he declared that he had had nothing to do with the 1854 resolutions Douglas had read and that his name had been used in connection with them without his authority. To establish that his true position on slavery was a very moderate one, he read at great length from his 1854 Peoria speech, in which he had announced that, given all earthly power, he would not know what to do about ending slavery.
Lincoln rushed through his speech, failing to use much of the time allotted to him. He had difficulty striking exactly the right tone. At times he resorted to worn clichés of humor, calling Douglas’s misrepresentations of his views on race an example of that “specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse.” He lapsed into legal language that must have been all but incomprehensible to his audience. Because Douglas had not denied the charge that he was part of a proslavery conspiracy, Lincoln said, “in the language of the lawyers, ... I took a default on him.” Then when Douglas did produce a belated denial, Lincoln continued: “I demur to that plea. I waive all objections that it was not filed till after default was taken, and demur to it upon the merits.” He declined to give immediate answers to Douglas’s questions, even though his position on all these issues had been firmly established for years; his native caution was so great that he delayed his response until the next debate, declaring: “I do not mean to allow him to catechise me unless he pays back for it in kind.”
After Douglas’s rebuttal most in the audience hunted up any missing members of the family and made a break for home, where the horses had to be watered and the cattle fed. More dedicated partisans gathered around to congratulate the rival candidates. As Douglas left the stand, according to the partisan Illinois State Register, “nearly the entire crowd pressed around him, and the living mass, with shouts and hurras bore him, in their midst, to the hotel, the cheering and shouting being kept up incessantly.” Lincoln’s partisans were equally enthusiastic, and, in what proved to be an unfortunate effort to show approval, a dozen or so sturdy Republicans put him on their shoulders and, preceded by a band, carried him to the mayor’s house. He was clearly uncomfortable, and the hostile reporter Henry Villard thought it was a ludicrous sight to see Lincoln’s “grotesque figure holding frantically on to the heads of his supporters,” while his legs were “dangling from their shoulders, and his pantaloons pulled up so as to expose his underwear almost to his knees.”
Some of Lincoln’s friends feared that he had exposed more than that at the Ottawa debate. A few, like Richard Yates, reported that they were “well satisfied” with his performance, and Lincoln himself was reaso
nably content with the outcome, reporting the next day, “The fire flew some, and I am glad to know I am yet alive.” But most of his advisers thought he had not been sufficiently forceful or aggressive. Ray, about to leave on a business trip to New York, enjoined Congressman Washburne: “When you see Abe at Freeport, for God’s sake tell him to ‘Charge Chester! Charge!’ Do not let him keep on the defensive.” Joseph Medill, of the same newspaper, also urged Lincoln to change his tactics. “Dont act on the defensive at all,” he urged. “Dont refer to your past speeches or positions,... but hold Dug up as a traitor and conspirator a proslavery bamboozelling demogogue.”
On reflection, Lincoln himself was sufficiently worried about his performance at Ottawa to call a kind of summit meeting of his advisers to discuss how he should respond to Douglas’s interrogatories. Gathering in Chicago on August 26, they called for a reconsideration of Lincoln’s campaign strategy, and Medill, reporting for his colleagues, told Lincoln that he should “put a few ugly questions” of his own to Douglas the next day, at Freeport.
IX
At Freeport, Lincoln was clearly more in charge than he had been at Ottawa, only a week earlier. Before this sympathetic “vast audience as strongly tending to Abolitionism as any audience in the State of Illinois,” he turned first to answering the interrogatories Douglas had posed at Ottawa. His answers contained no surprises: He was not in favor of repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act. He did not “stand pledged” against the admission of additional slave states to the Union (though he would be “exceedingly sorry” to have to pass on that question) nor against the admission of a new state with whatever constitution its inhabitants might see fit to make. He did not “stand to-day pledged” to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia (but he would be very glad to see it accomplished) or the prohibition of the interstate slave trade (though he admitted that he had not thought much about this subject). He was, on the other hand, “impliedly, if not expressly, pledged” to prohibit slavery in all federal territories. As to acquiring additional territory, he “would or would not oppose such acquisition,” depending on whether it “would nor would not aggravate the slavery question among ourselves.”
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