Then, finally’ taking the offensive, he posed to Douglas four questions of his own—four questions that were much like those that his Chicago advisers had recommended. First, would Douglas favor the admission of Kansas before it had the requisite number of inhabitants, as specified in the English bill? Second, could “the people of a United States Territory, in any lawful way,... exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution?” Third, would Douglas acquiesce in and follow a decision of the Supreme Court declaring that states could not exclude slavery from their limits? Finally, did he favor acquisition of additional territory “in disregard of how such acquisition may affect the nation on the slavery question?”
The second was the key question. Though advisers like Medill urged him to raise it, Lincoln had hesitated before asking it. He was in no doubt about how Douglas would answer; and, just as he expected, Douglas promptly replied that the passage of “unfriendly legislation” could keep slavery out of any territory because “slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere, unless it is supported by local police regulations.” Consequently—as “Mr. Lincoln has heard me answer a hundred times from every stump in Illinois”—“the people of a Territory can, by lawful means, exclude slavery from their limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution.” Though Lincoln predicted this reply, which became known as the Freeport Doctrine, he thought it important to have Douglas state it explicitly; otherwise, as he wrote a friend, it would be “hard work to get him directly to the point.” As long as Douglas could fudge the issue, he could pretend that he was loyal to the national party and even to the national administration. But when he was forced to make his position clear, he would further outrage President Buchanan and his advisers, who believed that the Dred Scott decision had killed popular sovereignty, and his stand would widen the division between Douglas Democrats and the Danites in Illinois. But by showing how greatly at odds Douglas was with the National Democracy, Lincoln risked undermining his basic argument that Douglas was part of a broad conspiracy to extend and perpetuate slavery. Nevertheless, pressed to take the offensive and realizing that this question might rattle his opponent, Lincoln decided to include the question.
Then, taking advantage of the research that Herndon and others had done for him in the Springfield newspapers, Lincoln dropped his bombshell. The abolition resolutions that Douglas had so elaborately read at Ottawa, which Lincoln allegedly endorsed, were not, as it turned out, ever adopted by any group in Springfield, much less at any meeting that Lincoln attended; they were passed by a convention or public meeting in Kane County. Indignantly Lincoln announced that it was “most extraordinary” that Douglas “should so far forget all the suggestions of justice to an adversary, or of prudence to himself, as to venture upon the assertion [concerning these resolutions]... which the slightest investigation would have shown him to be wholly false.”
The revelation momentarily disconcerted Douglas, but he was such a skilled debater that he quickly recovered. Using diversionary tactics, he charged that Lincoln was avoiding either endorsing or repudiating these abolitionist resolutions by claiming that the platform had not been adopted “on the right ‘spot,’” and that gave him an opportunity to attack Lincoln’s “spot” resolutions criticizing the Mexican War. Sensing that this tactic was failing, he provoked the audience by repeatedly calling them “Black Republicans.” When they began chanting “White, white” every time he used the phrase, he denounced them, announcing proudly, “I have seen your mobs before, and defy your wrath.”
Nearly everyone agreed that Lincoln made a stronger showing at Freeport than in the first debate, and his devoted supporters, like Herndon, were convinced that “so far Lincoln has the decided advantage” in the contest. One distant admirer, a writer in the Lowell (Massachusetts) Journal and Courier even announced that Lincoln’s speeches were so telling that people were “now calculating his fitness and chances for a more elevated position.” But Washburne, a more objective reporter, found after the Freeport debate that “neither party was fully satisfied with the speeches, and the meeting broke up without any display of enthusiasm.” In a confidential letter Medill confessed that Lincoln was not Douglas’s equal on the stump and predicted the senator would be reelected. Nearly all the Republicans felt relieved that Lyman Trumbull, who was considered a better speaker and had a wider reputation than Lincoln, had returned from Washington to assist the Republican cause.
X
Lincoln knew he was at a disadvantage in the third debate, at Jonesboro, an isolated town of 842 inhabitants in Union County, in the extreme southern part of the state. Settled by Southerners who had migrated chiefly from Kentucky and Tennessee, “Egypt” was solidly Democratic and overwhelmingly negrophobic. Rural, mostly poor, and relatively untouched by commercial ambition, voters in Union County had little use for the Republican party and its candidate. Fewer than 2,000 listeners attended the debate.
Lincoln and Douglas rehashed the issues they had raised in the previous debates, developing few ideas and adding little new information. Furious that Trumbull, that “excrescence from the rotten bowels of the Democracy,” was now taking such a prominent part in the campaign, Douglas renewed his charge that Lincoln and Trumbull had conspired to abolitionize both parties in Illinois, and he now added, in the hope of dividing his opponents, the accusation that Trumbull in the 1855 election had “played a Yankee trick” on Lincoln, in order to secure his own, rather than Lincoln’s, election to the Senate that year. Then, in an effort to goad Lincoln into responding, he elaborated on some of the racist charges he had made earlier in the campaign, announcing that “the signers of the Declaration [of Independence] had no reference to the negro whatever, when they declared all men to be created equal.”
Shrewdly Lincoln refused to be baited. He knew there was no possibility of persuading this audience (“very few of whom are my political friends,” he noted), and he avoided the issue of equal rights for Negroes. Much of his time he devoted to attacking Douglas’s Freeport Doctrine, which threatened the credibility of Lincoln’s charge that the senator was engaged in a conspiracy to expand slavery. Lincoln insisted that Douglas’s claim that slavery could not enter a new territory without police protection was “historically false,” for there was “vigor enough in slavery to plant itself in a new country even against unfriendly legislation.”
At Charleston, three days later, he was on more hospitable ground. Many in Coles County had known Thomas Lincoln and his family, and some enthusiasts spread a gigantic painting, eighty feet long, across the main street, showing OLD ABE THIRTY YEARS AGO, on a Kentucky wagon pulled by three yoke of oxen. Democrats countered with a banner, captioned “Negro Equality,” which depicted a white man standing with a Negro woman, and a mulatto boy in the background. Republicans found this so offensive that they tore it down before allowing the debate to begin.
Lincoln picked up on that theme in his opening remarks. He had, he said, recently been approached by an elderly man who wanted to know whether he was in favor of perfect equality between blacks and whites. This probably hypothetical inquiry gave him the opportunity to make his views explicit in a community where conservative old Whigs were strong. “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” he announced. “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.” “There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality,” he went on to add.
This was a politically expedient thing to say in a state where the majority of the inhabitants were of Southern origin; perhaps it was a necessary thing to say in a state where only ten years earlier 70 percent of the voters had favored a constitutional amendment to exclude all blacks from Illinois. It also represented Lincoln’s deeply held personal views, wh
ich he had repeatedly expressed before. Opposed to slavery throughout his life, he had given little thought to the status of free African-Americans. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was not personally hostile to blacks; indeed, Frederick Douglass remarked on “his entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race.” But he did not know whether they could ever fit into a free society, and, rather vaguely, he continued to think of colonization as the best solution to the American race problem.
Turning from this subject abruptly, Lincoln inexplicably devoted most of his Charleston opening speech to endorsing a charge, originally made by Trumbull, that Douglas, despite his protestations of opposition to the Lecompton Constitution, had really been part of a plot to impose slavery on Kansas. The story was intricate and confusing, involving secret proceedings in Senate committees and parliamentary maneuvering in the Senate itself, and Douglas had flatly announced that Trumbull’s evidence for the alleged plot “was forged from beginning to end.” Unwilling to see Trumbull calumniated, Lincoln now leapt to his defense with a tedious and unconvincing review of the charge.
Douglas expressed amazement that Lincoln had spent nearly his entire time on this discredited issue. Rather petulantly he asked: “Why, I ask, does not Mr. Lincoln make a speech of his own instead of taking up his time reading Trumbull’s speech?” Scornfully he declared, “I thought I was running against Abraham Lincoln, that he claimed to be my opponent.” It was, he concluded, “unbecoming the dignity of a canvass” to spend time on “these petty personal matters.”
XI
After Charleston, the lowest point in his campaign, Lincoln made a splendid recovery in the final three engagements with Douglas. The debate at Galesburg, which took place on the campus of Knox College, attracted one of the largest crowds, and in this antislavery area, heavily settled by Scandinavians, the audience was enthusiastic for the Republican candidate. Douglas, who was clearly tiring in the protracted campaign and was beginning to lose his voice, gave his standard speech, defending his unfailing fidelity in supporting the right of self-government and bitterly attacking the “unholy and unnatural combination” of Republicans and National Democrats against him. Lincoln, he claimed, was a political chameleon, advocating “bold and radical Abolitionism” in the extreme northern part of Illinois but professing in the central and southern counties to be “an old line Whig, a disciple of Henry Clay”; at Chicago, Lincoln announced his belief in Negro equality, but at Charleston, he declared that there must be a superior and an inferior race. By contrast, Douglas asserted, his own views were clear and fixed. He knew that the authors of the Declaration of Independence never intended to include the Negro and that “this Government was made by our fathers on the white basis... made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.”
In his reply Lincoln was in good voice and in high spirits; he seemed to thrive on campaigning rather than being exhausted from it. Sensing that his audience was on his side, he appeared almost joyful as he rebutted Douglas’s charges, most of which, he noted, had “previously been delivered and put in print.” Douglas had been guilty of slandering the Founding Fathers, for “the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence.” Similarly he had misrepresented Lincoln’s views on race, because there was no conflict whatever between his view that it was impossible to produce perfect social and political equality between black and white races and his insistence that “the inferior races” were equal in their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He taunted Douglas on his repeated failure to repudiate the alleged Republican resolutions of 1854, which he had tried ever since the Ottawa debate to attach to Lincoln. In constantly reusing this “stale fraud” he was like “the fisherman’s wife, whose drowned husband was brought home with his body full of eels.” Said she “when she was asked, ‘What was to be done with him?’ ‘Take the eels out and set him again.
Then, becoming serious, he again charged (“without questioning motives at all”) that Douglas was part of a plan to make slavery national. To do this Douglas was willing to distort history and to rewrite the story of the American Revolution; he was “going back to the era of our liberty and independence, and, so far as in him lies, muzzling the cannon that thunders its annual joyous return.” “He is blowing out the moral lights around us,” Lincoln continued, borrowing a phrase from Henry Clay; “he is ... eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty” in order to perpetuate slavery. Soon he would even extend it by making “a grab for the territory of poor Mexico, an invasion of the rich lands of South America, then the adjoining islands.”
At Quincy, a week later, each candidate went over the familiar arguments, and neither introduced many new ideas. Not until nearly the end of Lincoln’s opening speech did he again state what he believed was the fundamental issue of the campaign: “the difference between the men who think slavery a wrong and those who do not think it wrong.” Republicans believed that it was “a moral, a social and a political wrong,” and wanted to limit its spread. The Democratic party, on the other hand, did not think slavery was a wrong, and Douglas, its “leading man,” had “the high distinction, so far as I know, of never having said slavery is either right or wrong.”
Douglas, in reply, defended his record and once again charged that Lincoln held “one set of principles in the Abolition counties, and a different and contradictory set in the other counties.” He called the Dred Scott decision one from which “there is no appeal this side of Heaven,” and charged that Lincoln was stirring up opposition to the Supreme Court and “stimulating the passions of men to resort to violence and to mobs instead of to the law.” In the only new gambit in the debate, he suggested that Lincoln’s plan to contain slavery was really genocidal, because it meant confining slaves to land where they could not support themselves; thus by putting slavery on the course of ultimate extinction he really meant “extinguishing the negro race.” “This,” he gibed, “is the humane and Christian remedy that he proposes for the great crime of slavery.” Earnestly Douglas besought his listeners to return to the basic principle of self-government. If they recognized, as the fathers of the nation had always recognized, that “this Republic can exist forever divided into free and slave States,” Americans could get on with their “great mission” of “filling up our prairies, clearing our wildernesses and building cities, towns, railroads and other internal improvements, and thus make this the asylum of the oppressed of the whole earth.”
Lincoln in his rebuttal seized upon Douglas’s admission that his “system of policy in regard to the institution of slavery contemplates that it shall last forever.” That, he said, proved what he had been arguing all along about the Democratic candidate.
XII
On the day after the Quincy debate, both Lincoln and Douglas got aboard the City of Louisiana and sailed down the Mississippi River to Alton, for the final encounter of the campaign. Looking haggard with fatigue, Douglas opened the debate on October 15 in a voice so hoarse that in the early part of his speech he could scarcely be heard. After briefly reviewing the standard arguments over which he and Lincoln had differed since the beginning of the campaign, he made the peculiar decision to devote most of his speech to a detailed defense of his course on Lecompton. He concluded with a rabble-rousing attack on the racial views he attributed to Republicans and an announcement “that the signers of the Declaration of Independence ... did not mean negro, nor the savage Indians, nor the Fejee Islanders, nor any other barbarous race,” when they issued that document.
In his reply Lincoln said he was happy to ignore Douglas’s long account of his feud with the Buchanan administration; he felt like the put-upon wife in an old jestbook, who stood by as her husband struggled with a bear, saying, “Go it, husband!—Go it bear!” Once again he went through his standard answers to
Douglas’s charges against him and the Republican party. Recognizing that at Alton he was addressing “an audience, having strong sympathies southward by relationship, place of birth, and so on,” he tried to explain why it was so important to keep slavery out of Kansas and other national territories. This was land needed “for an outlet for our surplus population”; this was land where “white men may find a home”; this was “an outlet for free white people every where, the world over—in which Hans and Baptiste and Patrick, and all other men from all the world, may find new homes and better their conditions in life.”
And that brought him again to what he perceived as “the real issue in this controversy,” which once more he defined as a conflict “on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and of another class that does not look upon it as a wrong.” Rising to the oratorical high point in the entire series of debates, he told the Alton audience: “That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is 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.”
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