Lincoln argued that Douglas had “no claim to the support of the Old Line Whigs of Illinois” in light of being a “life-long enemy” of Henry Clay, who spoke of the “ultimate emancipation of the slave.” “Douglas’s position was as opposite to it as Beelzebub to an Angel of Light.” As he had in Chicago, Lincoln exposed the moral hollowness at Douglas’s core. “All others have said either that it is right and just, and should therefore be perpetuated, or that it is wrong and wicked, and should be immediately swept from civilized society, or that it is an evil to be tolerated because it cannot be removed. But to Judge Douglas belongs the distinction of having never said that he regarded it either as an evil or a good, morally right or morally wrong.” Unlike “all others,” Douglas “was the only statesman of any note or prominence in the country who had never said to friend or enemy whether he believed human slavery in the abstract to be right or wrong.”
In fact Douglas never had made a public statement against slavery. Nor had he defined it as a “positive good,” as John C. Calhoun had. He defended it as constitutionally mandated and protected. He praised the founders for establishing a charter that permitted slavery. He defined slavery as the freedom of property. He diminished the Declaration of Independence as applying only to white men. He commended the Dred Scott decision for denying rights to blacks, even though the ruling demolished his pretext of popular sovereignty. (Reverdy Johnson, an Old Whig and the attorney who in the Dred Scott case argued for his enslavement, eagerly endorsed him.) Douglas harped on sexual fear of interracial marriage. He warned against pollution of blood purity. He had used these ploys in one way or another over his career. Now he deployed all these gambits to appeal to the Old Whigs and Know Nothings. He usually began by claiming the founders as proslavery, but sexual panic was always his closing argument. These were his salient wedges. There was a method to his mendacity.
Before the debates, while Lincoln was stalking Douglas town to town, George Fitzhugh, Lincoln’s ideological nemesis and chief editorialist for the Richmond Enquirer, described the clash in Illinois as the most significant national political event. “The canvass between the Black Republicans and the Democracy is fairly opened. . . . Mr. Lincoln, the Black Republican candidate . . . took the broadest, and most radical abolition grounds which have ever been occupied by Giddings, Lloyd Garrison or Wendell Phillips. He proclaimed the doctrine, that ‘a house divided against itself, cannot stand.’ . . . On the question of negro citizenship, Mr. Douglas was particularly emphatic. He maintains that our Government was founded upon the white basis, that it was established by white men for the benefit of white men, to be administrated by white men and their posterity. . . . In short, the issue . . . is the most direct and radical that has ever been made in this country, involving the great question of State rights and State sovereignty on the one hand, and consolidation and despotism on the other.”
From his placid summer White House at a resort in Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania, Buchanan angrily observed the progress Douglas was making with Old Whigs by raising the specter of the “Black Republicans” and tarring Lincoln as the proponent of “nigger equality.” He ordered his attorney general, Jeremiah Black, to write new editorials in the Washington Union excoriating Douglas. “Judge Douglas ought to be stripped of his pretensions to be the champion of Popular Sovereignty,” wrote Buchanan on August 5. Black replied that Douglas should be “wiped as a man wipeth a plate, turning it over and wiping it.”
Douglas had choreographed his arrival at campaign events as an imperial entrance. “He came like some great deliverer, some mighty champion, who had covered himself with imperishable laurels, and saved a nation from ruin,” reported the Philadelphia Press, Forney’s newspaper. It was especially important for Douglas to stage a conspicuous display of his popularity and power coming into the site of the first debate, Ottawa, a heavily Republican northern town, on August 21, before he spoke a word. Dressed in an expensive suit, fancy shirt, and wearing a broad hat, he was escorted by a reception committee of local notables from the nearby town of Peru, from where he rode in a magnificent carriage drawn by four horses to be met by a waiting group of hundreds assembled with a blaring band to lead the way into the streets festooned with flags and banners, and pushing through a crowd of about ten thousand people, “a vast smoke house,” according to the Chicago Tribune, the sounds of more bands and peddlers hawking their wares from the corners, to the wooden platform constructed in the public square, his appearance triumphantly announced with the firing of two brass cannon. Lincoln came by the Rock Island Railroad to the depot without fanfare.
The debate format consisted of sequential speeches, an hour speech followed by a ninety-minute response followed by a thirty-minute rebuttal and conclusion. There was no moderator. Douglas and Lincoln alternated debate after debate in making the first statement. They appeared on an open-air wooden platform constructed for the occasion, standing when speaking and seated while their opponent took the stage. Behind them on the platform sat their chosen friends and supporters. Thousands clustered around to listen, cheer and hoot.
In his opening speech, Douglas cut straight to the chase; in one long breath he expressed all the points he would ever make against Lincoln in different forms and forums. He began with a history of the country and the political parties, a nation that by 1854 had secured peace over the question of slavery with both parties standing “on the same platform.” He had proposed his Kansas-Nebraska Act, not to extend slavery but to extend popular sovereignty, and “every Whig and every Democrat in the House voted in the affirmative,” with only abolitionists opposed.
But the Union had been disrupted by a conspiracy of two men willing to destroy their parties for the ulterior motive of abolition. Lincoln the Whig and Trumbull the Democrat made a bargain “to dissolve the old Whig party on the one hand, and to dissolve the old Democratic party on the other, and to connect the members of both into an Abolition party, under the name and disguise of a Republican party.” Their base motive was to help each other secure Senate seats. Lincoln, under false colors, “went to work to Abolitionize the old Whig party all over the State, pretending that he was then as good a Whig as ever.”
Lincoln and Trumbull’s true plan was supposedly contained in protocols of abolitionists at a meeting in Springfield in October 1854. Douglas brandished his exposé. “I have the resolutions of their State Convention then held, which was the first mass State Convention ever held in Illinois by the Black Republican party, and I now hold them in my hands and will read a part of them.”
Douglas read the entire document, its preamble borrowed from the Declaration of Independence and its resolutions calling for overturning the Fugitive Slave Act, stopping the extension of slavery, and ending slavery in the District of Columbia. He flung the challenge to Lincoln: Did he support these positions? Douglas promised to pose these questions even in the southernmost part of the state. “My principles are the same everywhere.” Douglas was the man of principles, Lincoln the opportunist.
He then offered a malignant account of Lincoln’s career. Douglas’s life of Lincoln began inaccurately with his subject as a grocery clerk whose “business enabled him to get into the legislature.” Lincoln was a joke-teller, who loved common sports and “could ruin more liquor than all of the boys of the town together,” though Lincoln was well known as a virtual teetotaler and temperance advocate. Douglas praised him for a reputation gained in lowlife pursuits—“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.” They had served together in the legislature, but Lincoln “subsided, or became submerged, and he was lost sight of as a public man for some years.” He emerged again as the “Abolition tornado swept over the country,” got elected to the House, where he opposed the Mexican War, “taking the side of the common enemy against his own country.” Then, Douglas said, “when he returned home he found that the indignation of the people followed h
im everywhere, and he was again submerged or obliged to retire into private life, forgotten by his former friends.” But the obscure loser, seeing his chance, “came up again in 1854, just in time to make this Abolition or Black Republican platform”—Douglas referred eight times in this speech to “Black Republicans.”
Douglas turned to Lincoln’s “house divided” speech, reading the whole paragraph containing that quotation, mocking him for being “destructive of the existence of this Government.” Lincoln was against the principles of the founders, who “made this Government divided into Free States and Slave States, and left each State perfectly free to do as it pleased on the subject of slavery.”
Douglas came to the heart of his appeal.
I ask you, are you in favor of conferring upon the negro the rights and privileges of citizenship? (“No, no.”) 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, (“never”) and cover your prairies with black settlements? Do you desire to turn this beautiful State into a free negro colony, (“no, no.”) 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? (“Never,” “no.”) 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, who are in favor of the citizenship of the negro. (“Never, never.”) For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any and every form. (Cheers.) I believe this Government was made on the white basis. (“Good.”) I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races. (“Good for you.” “Douglas forever.”)
Douglas ridiculed Lincoln as a fellow traveler of abolitionists,
following the example and lead of all the little Abolition orators, who go around and lecture in the basements of schools and churches, reads from the Declaration of Independence, that all men were created equal, and then asks, how can you deprive a negro of that equality which God and the Declaration of Independence awards to him? He and they maintain that negro equality is guaranteed by the laws of God, and that it is asserted in the Declaration of Independence. If they think so, of course they have a right to say so, and so vote. I do not question Mr. Lincoln’s conscientious belief that the negro was made his equal, and hence is his brother, (laughter,) 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. (“Never.” “Hit him again,” and cheers.) Lincoln has evidently learned by heart Parson Lovejoy’s catechism. (Laughter and applause.) . . . he is worthy of a medal from Father Giddings and Fred Douglass for his Abolitionism. (Laughter.) 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. Now, I do not believe that the Almighty ever intended the negro to be the equal of the white man. (“Never, never.”) If he did, he has been a long time demonstrating the fact.
Electing Lincoln would lead to nothing less than the end of the Republic and civil war. “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.” With that portentous warning, casting the contest between Lincoln and himself as between doom and salvation, Douglas sat down.
Lincoln’s reply was almost wholly defensive against the “very gross” misrepresentation of his record. He denied helping found the Republican Party in Illinois, pointing to Owen Lovejoy in the crowd, who could verify that he wasn’t even in town then. As for “abolitionizing the old Whig Party,” Lincoln put on his glasses to read paragraph after paragraph from his Peoria speech of 1854 against the Kansas-Nebraska Act in which he declared slavery “wrong . . . wrong . . . wrong,” the “covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate,” and “I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself.” But he quoted himself saying, “I have no prejudice against the Southern people,” and that he could not “admit” to make the slaves “politically and socially our equals,” that “the great mass of white people will not,” but that he was for some form of “gradual emancipation.”
Lincoln attempted to blunt Douglas’s sharpest point by neutralizing it, so he elaborated.
Now, gentlemen, I don’t want to read at any greater length; but this is the true complexion of all I have ever said in regard to the instruction of slavery and the black race. This is the whole of it; and 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. I will say here, while upon this subject, that 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.
And yet, Lincoln added, “I hold that, notwithstanding all this, 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. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man.”
He defended his “house divided” speech through a new metaphor, calling slavery “the apple of discord,” making it into the enticing apple of original sin in the Garden of Eden, and asserting, “I believe we shall not have peace upon the question until the opponents of slavery 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.” This, he claimed, was the true belief of the founders. The stages from stopping the expansion of slavery to “ultimate extinction,” he did not explain because he could not. He had no idea other than shipping the slaves, supposedly peacefully freed by their Southern taskmasters, perhaps compensated, to Liberia. Agreeing with Douglas’s conclusion that ending the “house divided” required civil war would have been politically suicidal. But it was a common thought. Lincoln begged the question in his “house divided” speech. Douglas used it as a weapon against Lincoln. Only abolitionists and secessionists were free to voice it.
Finally, near the end of his reply Lincoln rounded back to his own thrust against Douglas. “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.”
Douglas’s denial of the humanity of the slave also denied the basis of the American experiment. “When he invites any people, willing to have slavery, to establish it, he is blowing out the moral lights around us. When he says he ‘cares not whether slavery is voted down or voted up,’—that it is a sacred right of self-government—he is, in my judgment, penetrating the human soul and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in t
his American people.”
Partisans on each side hailed their champion’s performance. The most important judgment for Lincoln was from the impetuous Greeley, who had been avidly for Douglas and reluctantly for Lincoln. Now he wrote that Lincoln had made the race “a contest for the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of Satan—a contest for advance or retrograde in civilization.” By contrast, Greeley wrote about Douglas that “sympathy is diminished by the manner in which he has chosen to conduct the canvass, which reminds us more of the wild and unscrupulous athlete of his earlier days than of the noble displays of last Winter . . . we think Mr. Lincoln has decidedly the advantage. Not only are his doctrines better and truer than those of his antagonist, but he states them with more propriety and cogency, and with an infinitely better temper.” Greeley called the debates “a mode of discussing political questions which might well be more generally adopted.” The New York Tribune published full transcripts of the debates, like congressional debates. Just as the debates were novel, so was their publication in the national press. In the pages of the metropolitan broadsheets, Lincoln’s reputation was being built. On the Lincoln side the Chicago Tribune assigned its own stenographer and on the Douglas side the Chicago Times. Both cleaned up Douglas’s language, substituting “negro” when he had said “nigger.”
Lincoln in private worried how to parry Douglas’s torrent of falsehoods. He told his friend Clifton H. Moore, a lawyer on the circuit with him for decades, “Douglas will tell a lie to ten thousand people one day, even though he knows he may have to deny it to five thousand the next.” It turned out that the Springfield Republican platform of 1856 Douglas cited was not from the Springfield gathering at all, but from a district meeting at the time in Aurora about which Lincoln had nothing to do. But Horace White of the Chicago Tribune later told Jesse W. Weik, who assisted Herndon with his biography of Lincoln, that the dangerous lie was not about the platform but about Lincoln’s drinking.
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