With a brief rejoinder by Douglas, the debates were ended. After that both candidates made a few more speeches to local rallies, but everybody realized that the campaign was over, and the decision now lay with the voters.
XIII
It was hard to predict what that decision would be. Even an extremely conscientious citizen who made a point of attending all seven debates—or, more probably, a voter who attended one of the debates and read the detailed accounts the newspaper carried of the other six—might find it hard to make up his mind. In terms of debating skills he would have to judge the two speakers as about equal, Douglas giving a much more impressive performance at the start but Lincoln gaining in fluency and flexibility as the campaign progressed. Neither speaker exhibited the purest debating technique, enunciating a position, logically developing its implications, and systematically refuting the arguments of his opponent.
The voter would have to give both Lincoln and Douglas passing marks for observing the amenities of debate, though there was a certain amount of horseplay. Douglas claimed that in his New Salem days Lincoln “could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town together”—a charge that was not merely inaccurate but singularly inappropriate from a senator known to have a fondness for drink—and Lincoln jeered that Douglas’s popular-sovereignty doctrine was “as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death.” But on the whole both men behaved with propriety. In the early debates Douglas made a point of complimenting Lincoln’s intelligence and ability, even while strongly disagreeing with his policies. Lincoln professed to be rather taken by the flattery, “especially coming from so great a man as Douglas,” and said he was not used to it. “I was rather like the Hoosier, with the gingerbread, when he said he reckoned he loved it better than any other man, and got less of it.” But he notably did not reciprocate by complimenting Douglas; he found it hard to tell even a white lie.
The informed Illinois voter would note, of course, that there was an enormous amount of repetition from one debate to another. Douglas used the same basic speech, with minor modifications, throughout the campaign; as Lincoln remarked, the senator’s “successive speeches are substantially one and the same.” Though more varied, Lincoln’s speeches frequently included long quoted passages from his previous addresses, and in several of the debates he employed almost identical paragraphs or passages.
There was no evidence that any considerable number of voters were concerned that the Lincoln-Douglas debates concentrated almost exclusively on questions relating to slavery. The speakers could have discussed other serious issues of great importance to a country just emerging from the panic of 1857: regulation of banks, revision of tariffs, control of immigration, provision of homesteads for farmers, improvement of the lot of factory workers, and so on and on. But the debaters focused on none of these because they, and the Illinois voters, felt that the major concern of the country was the present condition and future prospects of the institution of slavery.
By concentrating on slavery, Lincoln and Douglas naturally exaggerated their differences. In a less combative arena they would have found much on which they could agree. For instance, both men disliked slavery; Lincoln openly deplored it and Douglas privately regretted its existence. Both denounced the Lecompton Constitution as a fraud and wanted Kansas to become a free state; indeed, that question had effectively been settled just before the debates began when Kansas voters on August 2 by a vote of 11,300 to 1,788 rejected the Lecompton Constitution, even with the incentives of a large land grant and the promise of early admission offered by the English bill. Neither man favored a slave code to protect slavery in the national territories, and neither would contemplate the extension of slavery into the free states. So numerous were their points of agreement, Lincoln candidly admitted at Jonesboro, that there was “very much in the principles that Judge Douglas has here enunciated that I most cordially approve, and over which I shall have no controversy with him.”
But, of course, these were debates, not love feasts, and both men felt a need to stress the differences, real and imaginary, that divided them. Many of these were entirely immaterial to the 1858 senate race. For instance, Douglas’s repeated accusation that Lincoln had failed to support his country during the Mexican War had no conceivable bearing on the present contest, nor did his elaborate attempts to show that Trumbull had been guilty of “the most infamous treachery” in helping to defeat Lincoln’s election to the Senate in 1855. It was hard to understand why Lincoln’s tedious account of Trumbull’s charges against Douglas or Douglas’s wearisome report of his differences with Buchanan had any place in this canvass.
Even the larger issues, over which the candidates did profoundly disagree, often had little practical relevance to this election. For example, the controversy over whether the framers of the Declaration of Independence intended to include blacks in announcing that all men are created equal dealt with an interesting, if ultimately unresolvable, historiographical problem, but it was not easy to see just what it had to do with the choice of a senator for Illinois in 1858. And the heated arguments over the capacity and the future of the Negro race, with related controversies over social and political equality of the races, while showing fundamental philosophical differences between the two candidates, did not deal with any issue or legislation that was, or was likely to be, under consideration by the Congress of the United States. Many Illinois voters must have understood Douglas’s exasperated query at the Charleston debate: “What question of public policy, relating to the welfare of this State or the Union, has Mr. Lincoln discussed before you?” But many must also have understood that the same objection could be raised, with equal force, against Douglas himself.
Lincoln’s friends thought he took a clear lead in the final three debates when he stressed the moral issue of slavery, and it was hard to resist the force of his argument. Douglas could only counter by showing that Lincoln’s position was entirely negative: Lincoln was against slavery, but he offered no suggestion as to how it was to be placed “in a course of ultimate extinction.”
For Douglas the fundamental issue in the debates was self-government. In his mind, the right of Americans, whether in the individual states or in the territories, to determine their own form of government and their own social institutions—including slavery, if they so desired—was a moral question, more basic than even the one Lincoln raised. In his final rebuttal in the last debate he once more made his view explicit. “I care more for the great principle of self-government, the right of the people to rule,” he told listeners at Alton, “than I do for all the negroes in Christendom.”
With the basic differences so formulated, well-informed Illinois voters understood that what was at stake was not just the choice between two candidates or political parties; it was a choice between two fundamentally opposed views of the meaning of the American experience. One way to formulate that difference was to see Douglas as the advocate of majority rule and Lincoln as the defender of minority rights. In Douglas’s view there were virtually no limits on what the majority of the people of a state or a territory could do—including, if they so chose, holding black-skinned inhabitants in slavery. While Lincoln also valued self-government and would make no attempt to end diversity on, say, cranberry laws in Indiana and Illinois, he felt passionately that no majority should have the power to limit the most fundamental rights of a minority to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
XIV
How much the Lincoln-Douglas debates affected the voters remained problematical even after the ballots were tallied. Though November 2 was cold, wet, and raw, voters turned out in large numbers—more than in the 1856 presidential election. The Republican candidate for state treasurer received 125,430 votes, the Douglas Democratic candidate 121,609, and the National Democratic (Danite) candidate 5,071. Ballots for candidates for the state legislature were distributed in about the same proportion. As was expected, the Democrats carried all bu
t three of the counties in southern Illinois and also those along the Illinois River, while Republicans won all of the northern counties, many by heavy majorities. In general, counties that had substantial towns tended to vote Republican, while poorer, slower-growing counties voted Democratic. The forty-nine central counties, where both Lincoln and Douglas had done most of their campaigning, were closely divided.
Since the name of neither Lincoln nor Douglas appeared on any ballot, there was no accurate way of measuring the personal popularity of either man or the impact of their campaigning, and analysts could adduce evidence to support opposite conclusions. On the one hand, it could be noted that in the state as a whole Democratic votes significantly increased in 24 counties where both Douglas and Lincoln spoke, while Republicans gained votes in only five of the counties where both men appeared. On the other, the returns showed that the Republicans fared slightly better in the seven counties where Lincoln and Douglas debated face-to-face than in the state as a whole. These contradictory statistics were less significant than the remarkable pattern of continuity demonstrated in the 1858 voting; the returns were closely similar to those in 1854 and 1856. The most immediate and obvious lesson of the election was that voting patterns in Illinois had become very stable, with the northern counties firmly Republican and the southern half of the state stalwartly Democratic. It was Douglas’s split with the Buchanan administration and Lincoln’s courtship of the Danites that gave Republicans a plurality and kept Douglas and his party from winning a clear majority in the state.
Though Republicans won in the popular vote (and elected their candidates for state treasurer and superintendent of education), they did not gain control of the state legislature, which would choose the next senator. In the state senate, thirteen members were holdovers (the terms of senators were staggered), and eight of these were Democrats. That meant that, in order to have a majority in a joint session of the two houses, the Republicans needed to have more than half the members in the new house of representatives. But seats in the house were apportioned according to the population in the 1850 census. In the years since 1850 the northern section of the state, where the Republicans were strongest, had grown much more rapidly than the southern counties, which the Democrats controlled. Because of the apportionment law, Republicans, who received about 50 percent of the popular vote, won only 47 percent of the seats in the house, while the Democrats with 48 percent of the popular vote gained 53 percent of the seats. That seemed unfair, but even if representation had been apportioned exactly on the basis of population, the Republicans would still have won only 44 seats—not enough, even when their five holdover senators were added, to elect Lincoln. In the balloting on January 5, 1859, Douglas received 54 votes to Lincoln’s 46 and was thus reelected for another six years to the United States Senate.
After their defeat, many Republicans conducted postmortems on the election. The Rockford Register, along with many others, blamed “the unjust apportionment of the State, which deprives the people of a representation according to their numbers.” Others pointed to illegal voters allegedly brought in by the Illinois Central Railroad to help the Democrats carry key counties, and Herndon claimed that “thousands of roving—robbing—bloated pock-marked Catholic Irish were imported upon us from Phila[delphia]—St Louis and other cities.” Many condemned Horace Greeley and other Eastern Republicans for their lukewarm support of Lincoln. “D——n Greeley etc,” exclaimed a voter from Paris, Illinois; “they have done Lincoln more harm than all others.” Some thought that Crittenden’s endorsement of Douglas influenced thousands of former Whigs and Americans (Know Nothings), especially in the central part of the state, to go helter-skelter over to the Democrats.
Though Lincoln was not surprised by the outcome of the election, he was bitterly disappointed. Once again, he saw victory escape his grasp. With one more defeat added to his record, he had received yet another lesson in how little his fate was determined by his personal exertions. At times he felt very blue, and on the day the legislature elected Douglas, he was sure that his political career was ended. Confident only of the unquestioning loyalty of his partner, he remarked with some bitterness: “I expect everyone to desert me except Billy.”
But as a leader he recognized his duty to cheer up his associates, who were also suffering from his defeat. “I am glad I made the late race,” he wrote his old friend Dr. Henry. “It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way; and though I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.” “The fight must go on,” he assured another friend. “The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one, or even, one hundred defeats.”
CHAPTER NINE
The Taste Is in My Mouth
“This year I must devote to my private business,” Lincoln vowed in 1859, declining invitations to speak. “I have been on expences so long without earning any thing that I am absolutely without money now for even household purposes,” Lincoln explained to Norman Judd. Accordingly, four days after the 1858 elections, Lincoln & Herndon appeared before the Sangamon County Circuit Court in a case where their client had to pay a judgment of $23 and costs. Other more remunerative cases followed during the next twelve months, but, except for the celebrated Peachy Harrison murder trial, none was of any special importance. As always, Lincoln was careful in his preparation and dependable in his court presentation, but the law had lost some of its excitement for him. At times his letters to clients sounded almost testy. To one, who was dissatisfied with the way Lincoln was handling his suit, he wrote bluntly: “I would now very gladly surrender... the case to anyone you would designate, without charging anything for the much trouble I have already had.”
It was politics that really interested him now. As the leading Republican in Illinois, he felt a great responsibility in planning for his party’s victory in the upcoming presidential election of 1860. To win, it was necessary to keep the fragile Illinois Republican coalition together, to block extreme or diversionary moves by Republicans in other states, and to select a presidential nominee who could combine the votes received by Frémont and Fillmore in 1856.
I
After the defeat in the senatorial election, the Illinois Republican coalition threatened to disintegrate. The party was in debt. Judd, the chairman of the state central committee, had incurred obligations of about $2,500, in addition to some $1,300 he had paid out of his own pocket. Republicans who had pledged contributions were reluctant to pay up, and Judd unhappily asked Lincoln to help him collect. Protesting that he was “the poorest hand living to get others to pay,” Lincoln promised $250 himself, and then, along with O. M. Hatch and Jesse Dubois, asked Newton Bateman, the state superintendent of education, for assistance. Phrased as a request, their letter was in fact an assessment on the newly elected official who owed his position to the Republican party.
Republicans in central Illinois were slow to contribute because many felt that in the recent campaign the state central committee had slighted their section in favor of the Chicago area. Former Whigs like Judge David Davis resented the prominent role that former Democrats played in the campaign and correctly suspected that Judd was using his position as chairman of the central committee to promote his own gubernatorial prospects. Herndon was so vocal in charging Judd with misapplying party funds that the Chicago attorney had to ask Lincoln to curb his partner. Herndon gave a solemn promise to hold his tongue, but after this outburst Lincoln no longer shared political confidences with his partner.
A disruptive feud that continued to rage in Chicago between Judd and Wentworth was partly a personal vendetta and partly a bitter struggle for supremacy between Wentworth’s Chicago Democrat and the Chicago Press and Tribune, which consistently supported Judd. In addition to assailing Judd’s financial integrity, Wentworth accused him of conniving against Lincoln: Judd had helped defeat Lincoln’s Senate bid in 185
5; his mismanagement had brought about Republican defeat in 1858; and now he was plotting to promote Trumbull, rather than Lincoln, for the presidency. Judd, who desperately wanted to become governor, brought suit for libel, asking $100,000 in damages. Both men appealed to Lincoln for help. Wentworth tried to co-opt him by retaining him as his lawyer in the libel suit, while Judd insisted that he write a public letter vouching for his integrity. Lincoln attempted to remain neutral.
He also tried to keep Republicans in other states from shattering the party harmony. When Republicans in Massachusetts, where nativism was strong, endorsed a constitutional provision requiring naturalized citizens to wait two years before they could vote, Lincoln expressed forthright opposition. “I have some little notoriety for commiserating the oppressed condition of the negro,” he explained; “and I should be strangely inconsistent if I could favor any project for curtailing the existing rights of white men, even though born in different lands, and speaking different languages from myself.” Similarly, when Ohio Republicans adopted a platform calling for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave law, he bluntly warned Governor Salmon P. Chase that “the cause of Republicanism is hopeless in Illinois, if it be in any way made responsible for that plank.” “In every locality,” he urged, “we should look beyond our noses; and at least say nothing on points where it is probable we shall disagree.”
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