by H. W. Brands
This time it was the Democrats who cheered, believing their champion had put the challenger in a difficult spot.
Douglas said he wanted to get Lincoln on the record. Ottawa, the site of this debate, was in northern Illinois, the more antislavery part of the state. “I ask Abraham Lincoln to answer these questions, in order that, when I trot him down to lower Egypt”—the southern, pro-slavery part—“I may put the same questions to him. My principles are the same everywhere. I can proclaim them alike in the North, the South, the East, and the West. My principles will apply wherever the Constitution prevails and the American flag waves. I desire to know whether Mr. Lincoln’s principles will bear transplanting from Ottawa to Jonesboro.”
Douglas said he put the questions to Lincoln out of no personal disrespect. On the contrary, he had nothing but good feelings for him. “I have known him for nearly twenty-five years,” Douglas said. “There were many points of sympathy between us when we first got acquainted. We were both comparatively boys, and both struggling with poverty in a strange land. I was a school-teacher in the town of Winchester, and he a flourishing grocery-keeper in the town of Salem.” Douglas emphasized Lincoln’s success, beyond what the evidence would bear. He explained how they had met in the state legislature. “He was then just as good at telling an anecdote as now. He could beat any of the boys wrestling, or running a foot-race, in pitching quoits or tossing a copper; could ruin more liquor than all of the boys of the town together; and the dignity and impartiality with which he presided at a horse-race or fist-fight excited the admiration and won the praise of everybody that was present and participated.”
But since those good old days, Lincoln had turned abolitionist, Douglas said. As evidence he quoted from Lincoln’s House Divided speech, laying stress on the passages that sounded the most extreme. “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free,” Douglas read. “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States,—old as well as new, North as well as South.”
Again Lincoln’s partisans cheered. “Good!” some shouted.
Again Douglas nodded knowingly. “I am delighted to hear you Black Republicans say ‘good.’ I have no doubt that doctrine expresses your sentiments, and I will prove to you now, if you will listen to me, that it is revolutionary and destructive of the existence of this government.”
Douglas pointed out that America’s founders had envisioned a nation half-free and half-slave. They had brought such a country into existence, and it had endured for seventy years. Was Lincoln wiser than they? The founders knew that the individual states understood their own interests best. “They knew that the laws and regulations which would suit the granite hills of New Hampshire would be unsuited to the rice plantations of South Carolina, and they therefore provided that each state should retain its own legislature and its own sovereignty, with the full and complete power to do as it pleased within its own limits, in all that was local and not national.” Yet Lincoln proposed to ignore their insight and overturn their accomplishment.
Douglas cited Lincoln’s criticism of the Dred Scott decision. “He says it deprives the negro of the rights and privileges of citizenship,” Douglas asserted. “That is the first and main reason which he assigns for his warfare on the Supreme Court of the United States and its decision.”
Douglas gazed around at his fellow Illinoisans. “I ask you, are you in favor of conferring upon the negro the rights and privileges of citizenship? Do you desire to strike out of our state constitution that clause which keeps slaves and free negroes out of the state, and allow the free negroes to flow in, and cover your prairies with black settlements? Do you desire to turn this beautiful state into a free negro colony, in order that when Missouri abolishes slavery she can send one hundred thousand emancipated slaves into Illinois, to become citizens and voters, on an equality with yourselves?” Douglas rephrased his question, and offered voting advice. “If you desire negro citizenship, if you desire to allow them to come into the state and settle with the white man, if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party.”
Douglas did not begrudge Lincoln’s right to idiosyncratic views on race. “I do not question Mr. Lincoln’s conscientious belief that the negro was made his equal, and hence is his brother,” Douglas said. “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 whatever.” Lincoln liked to cite the Declaration of Independence, Douglas said. “He holds that the negro was born his equal and yours, and that he was endowed with equality by the Almighty, and that no human law can deprive him of these rights, which were guaranteed to him by the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.” Douglas disputed Lincoln’s theology. “I do not believe that the Almighty ever intended the negro to be the equal of the white man,” he said. “If He did, He has been a long time demonstrating the fact. For thousands of years the negro has been a race upon the earth, and during all that time, in all latitudes and climates, wherever he has wandered or been taken, he has been inferior to the race which he has there met. He belongs to an inferior race, and must always occupy an inferior position.”
This did not mean that the Negro must always be a slave. “By no means can such a conclusion be drawn from what I have said. On the contrary, I hold that humanity and Christianity both require that the negro shall have and enjoy every right, every privilege, and every immunity consistent with the safety of the society in which he lives. On that point, I presume, there can be no diversity of opinion. You and I are bound to extend to our inferior and dependent beings every right, every privilege, every facility and immunity consistent with the public good.”
And what were the rights and privileges consistent with the public good? Douglas returned to the principle of popular sovereignty. “This is a question which each state and each territory must decide for itself,” he said. He cited the example of Illinois. “We have provided that the negro shall not be a slave, and we have also provided that he shall not be a citizen, but protect him in his civil rights, in his life, his person and his property, only depriving him of all political rights whatsoever, and refusing to put him on an equality with the white man.” Douglas added, “That policy of Illinois is satisfactory to the Democratic party and to me; and if it were to the Republicans, there would then be no question upon the subject. But the Republicans say that he ought to be made a citizen, and when he becomes a citizen he becomes your equal, with all your rights and privileges.”
Douglas did not profess to dictate to other states. Maine allowed free Negroes to vote. That was Maine’s prerogative. “I would never consent to confer the right of voting and of citizenship upon a negro; but still I am not going to quarrel with Maine for differing from me in opinion. Let Maine take care of her own negroes and fix the qualifications of her own voters to suit herself, without interfering with Illinois, and Illinois will not interfere with Maine.”
Lincoln and the Republicans showed no such tolerance. “This doctrine of Mr. Lincoln, of uniformity among the institutions of the different states, is a new doctrine, never dreamed of by Washington, Madison, or the framers of this government,” Douglas said. “Mr. Lincoln and the Republican party set themselves up as wiser than these men who made this government, which has flourished for seventy years under the principle of popular sovereignty, recognizing the right of each state to do as it pleased. Under that principle, we have grown from a nation of three or four millions to a nation of about thirty millions of
people; we have crossed the Allegheny mountains and filled up the whole Northwest, turning the prairie into a garden, and building up churches and schools, thus spreading civilization and Christianity where before there was nothing but savage barbarism. Under that principle we have become, from a feeble nation, the most powerful on the face of the earth.”
All this Lincoln would put at risk. Douglas refused to believe Illinois voters would let it happen. “If we only adhere to that principle, we can go forward increasing in territory, in power, in strength, and in glory until the Republic of America shall be the North Star that shall guide the friends of freedom throughout the civilized world. And why can we not adhere to the great principle of self-government, upon which our institutions were originally based? I believe that this new doctrine preached by Mr. Lincoln and his party will dissolve the Union if it succeeds. They are trying to array all the Northern states in one body against the South, to excite a sectional war between the free states and the slave states, in order that the one or the other may be driven to the wall.”
21
DOUGLAS WOULD HAVE continued, but the master of ceremonies signaled time. All faces turned toward Lincoln, who rose and looked about with what might have been a smile. “When a man hears himself somewhat misrepresented, it provokes him—at least, I find it so with myself,” Lincoln said. “But when misrepresentation becomes very gross and palpable, it is more apt to amuse him.”
Lincoln denied conspiring to break up the Whig party, and he disavowed the platform planks of the 1854 Republican convention to which Douglas had objected. “I never had anything to do with them,” Lincoln said. He explained that he had not attended the convention, although he had been named to the committee and had been requested to come. “I refused to do so, and I never had anything to do with that organization. This is the plain truth.”
As to Douglas’s charge that he was an abolitionist, Lincoln denied it. He produced a copy of the speech he had given at Peoria in the wake of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and prepared to read it.
“Put on your specs!” a voice shouted.
“Yes, sir, I am obliged to do so,” Lincoln responded. “I am no longer a young man.”
The length of Lincoln’s extract tried the patience of the audience that day. But the gist was his denial at Peoria of being an abolitionist. “If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution,” Lincoln quoted himself. “My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia—to their own native land. But a moment’s reflection would convince me that whatever of high hope (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible.”
Lincoln denied Douglas’s claim that he was a race leveler. “Anything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse,” Lincoln said. To make himself quite clear, he added, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. 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.”
Yet Lincoln didn’t wholly agree with Douglas in matters racial. In fact, they differed considerably. “There is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Lincoln said. “I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”
Lincoln realized that Douglas had scored points attacking his House Divided speech. He felt obliged to answer. He contended that America’s founders themselves had placed slavery on the path to ultimate extinction by their ban on the import of slaves and their cordoning it out of the Ohio Valley. The founders had considered slavery a necessary evil; they hoped time would render it ultimately unnecessary and, for that reason, dispensable. It was Douglas who had spoiled their vision. “Lately, I think—and in this I charge nothing on the Judge’s motives—lately, I think, that he, and those acting with him, have placed that institution on a new basis, which looks to the perpetuity and nationalization of slavery.” Douglas had asked whether Lincoln thought he was wiser than the founders; Lincoln threw the question back at Douglas. “I believe if we could arrest the spread”—of slavery—“and place it where Washington and Jefferson and Madison placed it, it would be in the course of ultimate extinction, and the public mind would, as for eighty years past, believe that it was in the course of ultimate extinction. The crisis would be past and the institution might be let alone for a hundred years, if it should live so long, in the states where it exists; yet it would be going out of existence in the way best for both the black and the white races.”
Someone in the audience shouted, “Then do you repudiate popular sovereignty?”
“Let us talk about popular sovereignty,” Lincoln responded. “What is popular sovereignty? Is it the right of the people to have slavery or not have it, as they see fit, in the territories?” This was not the reality, Lincoln said. “My understanding is that popular sovereignty, as now applied to the question of slavery, does allow the people of a territory to have slavery if they want to, but does not allow them not to have it if they do not want it.” The Dred Scott decision made a mockery of popular sovereignty. “As I understand the Dred Scott decision, if any one man wants slaves, all the rest have no way of keeping that one man from holding them,” Lincoln said.
Lincoln, likely as Douglas intended, wasted considerable breath refuting the exaggerations the senator had attributed to him. Eventually he returned to the charge that he was asserting a plot to impose slavery on all the states. Lincoln didn’t deny the assertion, but he believed it had been misunderstood. “What is necessary to make the institution national?” he asked. “Not war. There is no danger that the people of Kentucky will shoulder their muskets, and, with a young nigger stuck on every bayonet, march into Illinois and force them upon us. There is no danger of our going over there and making war upon them. Then what is necessary for the nationalization of slavery? It is simply the next Dred Scott decision. It is merely for the Supreme Court to decide that no state under the Constitution can exclude it, just as they have already decided that under the Constitution neither Congress nor the territorial legislature can do it. When that is decided and acquiesced in, the whole thing is done.”
Lincoln proceeded to elaborate on the Dred Scott reasoning, consuming several minutes of his allotted time. His logic was intricate and apparently hard for the audience to follow.
“Give us something besides Dred Scott!” a listener shouted.
“Yes; no doubt you want to hear something that don’t hurt,” Lincoln rejoined. He realized the moderator would be halting him soon; he hurried to the conclusion he had obviously written in advance. “Henry Clay, beau ideal of a statesman, the man for whom I fought all my humble life—Henry Clay once said of a class of men who would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, that they must, if they would do this, go back to the era of our independence, and muzzle the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return; they must blow out the moral lights around us; they must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate there the
love of liberty; and then, and not till then, could they perpetuate slavery in this country! To my thinking, Judge Douglas is, by his example and vast influence, doing that very thing in this community, when he says that the negro has nothing in the Declaration of Independence. Henry Clay plainly understood the contrary. Judge Douglas is going back to the era of our Revolution, and, to the extent of his ability, muzzling the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return. When he invites any people, willing to have slavery, to establish it, he is blowing out the moral lights around us.”
22
CARL SCHURZ KNEW Lincoln only by reputation before the debates with Douglas. Schurz had become a figure in Republican politics, speaking regularly among German immigrants. He had addressed a crowd in Chicago and was heading to Quincy to catch the next installment of the summer’s traveling political show. “All at once, after the train had left a way station, I observed a great commotion among my fellow-passengers, many of whom jumped from their seats and pressed eagerly around a tall man who had just entered the car,” he recalled. “They addressed him in the most familiar style: ‘Hello, Abe! How are you?’ and so on. And he responded in the same manner; ‘Good evening, Ben! How are you, Joe? Glad to see you, Dick!’ ” Schurz looked to his traveling companion, who pointed and said, “Why, there’s Lincoln himself!” The friend took Schurz forward and introduced him.
“I must confess that I was somewhat startled by his appearance,” Schurz said of Lincoln. “There he stood, overtopping by several inches all those surrounding him. Although measuring something over six feet myself, I had, standing quite near to him, to throw my head backward in order to look into his eyes. That swarthy face with its strong features, its deep furrows, and its benignant, melancholy eyes, is now familiar to every American by numberless pictures. It may be said that the whole civilized world knows and loves it. At that time it was clean-shaven, and looked even more haggard and careworn than later when it was framed in whiskers. On his head he wore a somewhat battered ‘stove-pipe’ hat. His neck emerged, long and sinewy, from a white collar turned down over a thin black necktie. His lank, ungainly body was clad in a rusty black dress coat with sleeves that should have been longer; but his arms appeared so long that the sleeves of a ‘store’ coat could hardly be expected to cover them all the way down to the wrists. His black trousers, too, permitted a very full view of his large feet. On his left arm he carried a gray woolen shawl, which evidently served him for an overcoat in chilly weather. His left hand held a cotton umbrella of the bulging kind, and also a black satchel that bore the marks of long and hard usage. His right he had kept free for handshaking, of which there was no end until everybody in the car seemed to be satisfied. I had seen, in Washington and in the West, several public men of rough appearance; but none whose looks seemed quite so uncouth, not to say grotesque, as Lincoln’s.”