All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  The fact I had in mind when I spoke of Douglas’s unveracity in stump speaking was a statement he made at the Ottawa joint debate in which he said that Lincoln as a young man “could ruin more liquor than all of the boys in town together.” This was said in order to draw Lincoln into a personal controversy. Everybody who knew Lincoln knew that he never used liquor or tobacco at all. He said to me once that he had never taken a drink of any alcoholic beverage in the past twenty years. That he should have been a drunkard before 1838 is impossible. Not only was Douglas’s statement essentially false as to Lincoln, but it would have been a true description of himself (Douglas) at the time of the Ottawa debate. The fact was that Douglas at that time was drinking himself to death—an end which he reached three years later. The pen of the historian has not touched upon that fact as yet. I have no doubt whatever that Douglas made that false statement about Lincoln to get a denial from him that he was a drinking man, in which event he would have enlarged upon it and given particulars which he could easily have invented and would have assured Lincoln that he did not wish to injure him, etc., leading off the debate into a personal quagmire as was his habit when he was getting the worst of it. But Lincoln was too smart. He never noticed the charge at all. So Douglas never repeated it.

  Post-debate Republican newspapers hailed Lincoln as David slaying Goliath, but his defensive performance dispirited Republican leaders, who fell to fighting among each other over what to do next. “This campaign has not been managed right,” David Davis said on August 18 to the State Committee treasurer Ozias M. Hatch. He organized a rally in what ought to have been safe political territory and hardly anyone turned out. “No enthusiasm,” said Davis. The State Committee members thought Lincoln was making things worse. Norman Judd complained that by “repelling the charges . . . that he was an ‘Abolitionist,’ in favor of ‘negro equality,’ and ‘amalgamation’ ” Lincoln only succeeded in raising them again.

  The Douglas team believed that the first debate was all that counted. “The fate of Lincoln was sealed by the discussion at Ottawa,” wrote Sheahan, “and nothing but a special interposition of Providence could have elected a Legislature favorable to his election to the Senate.”

  On the night before the next debate, Judd and others on the state committee caught up with Lincoln, at two in the morning barging into his hotel room, waking him up and trying to shake him up to take the fight to Douglas. Lincoln stubbornly wanted to keep to answering Douglas’s questions to him at Ottawa. But the newspapermen had devised a series of questions for Lincoln to pose to Douglas. “Don’t be defensive at all,” Joseph Medill and Charles Ray, the coeditors of the Chicago Tribune, wrote him. “. . . be bold, defiant and dogmatic . . . in other words, give him hell . . . put a few ugly questions at Douglas.” Charles Wilson of the Chicago Journal wrote him questions, too. The point of these questions was to drive a wedge between Douglas’s and Buchanan’s followers. Judd said that Lincoln “listened very patiently . . . but he wouldn’t budge an inch from his well studied formulas.” Yet he absorbed the advice.

  The town of Freeport, near the Wisconsin border, was as solid a Republican district as could be found in Illinois, represented in the Congress by Elihu Washburne and in the State Senate by John Addams (whose daughter Jane would become one of the great Progressive Era reformers, founder of the settlement house movement). Fifteen thousand people crowded into the town on August 27 to witness the debate, “a vast audience as strongly tending to Abolitionism as any audience in the State of Illinois,” as Lincoln described it. While Douglas made a grand entrance in an elegant carriage, dressed in ruffled shirt, fine coat with shiny buttons, light colored pants, a plantation hat, and well-polished shoes, Lincoln’s handlers paid for him to be drawn in on a plain buckboard wagon accompanied by farmers.

  In rapid-fire succession Lincoln shot out answers to the questions put to him in the last debate. Then he issued four questions of his own to Douglas, the second of which was the most carefully calculated to catch him in controversy, trapping him between Douglas Democrats and Buchanan Democrats, between popular sovereignty and the Dred Scott decision. “Can the people of a United States Territory,” asked Lincoln, “in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution?” The “in any lawful way” part of the question was crafted to pit Douglas against the Dred Scott ruling to expose his contradictions if not hypocrisy.

  He dispatched Douglas’s claim in the Ottawa debate that he was party to a supposed Republican Party platform of 1854, when, in fact, Lincoln disclosed, the document Douglas had flourished was not the state Republican platform at all, but a proclamation of a Kane County organization. “I am just as responsible for the resolutions at Kane County as those at Springfield, the amount of the responsibility being exactly nothing in either case,” he said, “no more than there would be in regard to a set of resolutions passed in the moon.”

  Douglas replied with exasperation to Lincoln’s questions. “I answer emphatically, as Mr. Lincoln has heard me answer a hundred times from every stump in Illinois, that in my opinion the people of a Territory can, by lawful means, exclude slavery from their limits prior to the formation of a State constitution. Mr. Lincoln knew that I had answered that question over and over again.”

  Douglas quoted again from the “house divided” speech, read yet more resolutions passed by Republican organizations, and called Lincoln the tool of abolitionist advisers. Douglas picked out one man to personify Lincoln’s subversive political association, his subversive belief in racial equality, leading naturally to “racial amalgamation.” That man was Frederick Douglass, a former fugitive slave, famed as the author of his autobiography, a forceful speaker on the abolitionist circuit, and founder of the splinter Radical Abolition Party. Douglass admired Lincoln’s “house divided” speech, and said of it, “Well and wisely said.”

  Douglass was a foil for Douglas to stereotype as the black man ostentatiously surrounded with the accoutrements of wealth and white women serving his pleasure, the symbol of amalgamation and Lincoln’s intent. Douglas’s paper the Register had foreshadowed the attack line with an article on August 7: “Another Ally of Lincoln—The Nigger Chief Out for Him.” “The last time I came here to make a speech,” said Douglas, “while talking from the stand to you, people of Freeport, as I am doing today,” Douglas said about an appearance in 1854,

  I saw a carriage—and a magnificent one it was—drive up and take a position on the outside of the crowd; a beautiful young lady was sitting on the box-seat, whilst Fred Douglass and her mother reclined inside, and the owner of the carriage acted as driver. I saw this in your own town. All I have to say of it is this, that if you Black Republicans, think that the negro ought to be on a social equality with your wives and daughters, and ride in a carriage with your wife, whilst you drive the team, you have perfect right to do so. I am told that one of Fred Douglass’s kinsmen, another rich black negro, is now traveling in this part of the State making speeches for his friend Lincoln as the champion of black men. All I have to say on that subject is, that those of you who believe that the negro is your equal and ought to be on an equality with you socially, politically, and legally, have a right to entertain those opinions, and of course will vote for Mr. Lincoln.

  Douglas expressed contempt for Lincoln’s factual correction of his confusion of the 1854 Kane County platform for the Springfield one. “Mr. Lincoln makes a great parade of the fact that I quoted a platform as having been adopted by the Black Republican party at Springfield in 1854, which, it turns out, was adopted at another place. Mr. Lincoln loses sight of the thing itself in his ecstasies over the mistake I made in stating the place where it was done. He thinks that that platform was not adopted on the right ‘spot.’ ” Douglas used his error to demean Lincoln as unpatriotic on the Mexican War, referencing a speech at the time that led to Lincoln being derisively nicknamed “Spotty,” and conflate his position with a
bolitionism. “Lincoln and his political friends are great on ‘spots.’ ” (Renewed laughter.) “In Congress, as a representative of this State, he declared the Mexican war to be unjust and infamous, and would not support it, or acknowledge his own country to be right in the contest, because he said that American blood was not shed on American soil in the ‘right spot.’ (‘Lay on to him.’) And now he cannot answer the questions I put to him at Ottawa because the resolutions I read were not adopted at the ‘right spot.’ ” Even if Douglas was wrong on the particular, he claimed to be right in general. So he would not stop making exactly the same point. “When I get into the next district, I will show that the same platform was adopted there, and so on through the State, until I nail the responsibility of it upon the back of the Black Republican party throughout the State. (‘White, white, three cheers for Douglas.’ A voice—‘Couldn’t you modify and call it brown?’ Laughter.) Not a bit. I thought that you were becoming a little brown when your members in Congress voted for the Crittenden-Montgomery bill, but since you have backed out from that position and gone back to Abolitionism, you are black and not brown. (Shouts of laughter, and a voice, ‘Can’t you ask him another question.’)”

  Over and over again Douglas derisively baited the largely Republican crowd as “Black Republicans,” deliberately seeking to stir their anger so he could posture as the brave statesman taking his stand against mob rule. When he said, “Black Republicans,” he elicited from the crowd cries of “White, White!” Having provoked the audience, he answered it: “I wish to remind you that while Mr. Lincoln was speaking there was not a Democrat vulgar and blackguard enough to interrupt him. But I know that the shoe is pinching you. I am clinching Lincoln now, and you are scared to death for the result. I have seen this thing before. I have seen men make appointments for joint discussions, and the moment their man has been heard, try to interrupt and prevent a fair hearing of the other side. I have seen your mobs before, and defy your wrath.”

  Lincoln, in posing his question to Douglas, knew that he had answered it “a hundred times from every stump.” He wanted him to repeat it in the most prominent setting and in the most damaging way so that it would receive the widest possible circulation. His goal was get Douglas to further alienate the Buchanan Democrats. The immediate effect altered the debates’ dynamic. In pressing Douglas, Lincoln went off the defensive and onto the offensive, galvanizing his campaign. Some in retrospect believe that Lincoln’s question, what became known as the “Freeport Doctrine,” was advanced with the 1860 election in mind, but the evidence for that hypothesis consists of likely bogus quotes from Lincoln, who did not have the presidency in mind.

  The long-term effects on Douglas were lasting and devastating. Southerners could disagree with Douglas on Lecompton as a matter of policy, but not on doctrine. His assent that slavery could be excluded “in any lawful way” defied the Dred Scott decision, seemed to agree that Congress could legislate slavery’s prohibition and permanently thwart any expansion of slavery, tilting the majority of political power in the future toward “ultimate extinction.” That was the connotation of Lincoln’s question. Jefferson Davis, in a speech in Vicksburg, called Douglas’s Freeport admission “worse than even the Wilmot Proviso,” and Douglas’s view “as objectionable as those of his adversary, Mr. Lincoln. They were both equally destructive of the rights of the South, both at war with the Constitution . . . he would have been glad if they had made a Kilkenny fight of it, and neither had been left to proclaim a victory.”

  “It is impossible that confidence thus lost can be restored,” said Senator Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana on May 22, 1860, on Douglas’s Freeport position. Benjamin said of Douglas in the 1858 campaign that “he went home, and under the stress of a local election, his knees gave way; his whole person trembled.”

  The “Freeport Doctrine” was hardly the first or final factor that fractured the Democratic Party, but it contributed to its rupture to the extent that it made Douglas more toxic to Buchanan Democrats and to the South. “Judge Douglas Repudiates the Dred Scott Decision,” headlined the Washington Union, Buchanan’s voice. “Judge Douglas,” the paper wrote, “in the early part of his present canvass in Illinois, took great pains to tickle the ears of the South with encomiums upon the Dred Scott decision,” but at Freeport “backs out from the doctrine of the Nebraska-Kansas bill, abandons the Cincinnati platform, and repudiates the Dred Scott decision; and that he does so by reasserting the odious squatter-sovereignty doctrine in its most radical and obnoxious form.”

  Jonesboro, located deep in southern Illinois, in the most conservative part, in the region known as lower Egypt, populated by Southerners, hosted the third debate on September 15. It was the most sparsely attended debate, witnessed at most by 1,400 people. Jonesboro was more a test for Douglas than Lincoln. Lincoln was not going to win many votes there. Douglas feared that support for Buchanan would strip votes from him. He brought in former Tennessee governor and senator James C. Jones, a former Whig, to stump on his behalf, and by Election Day “no less than 41 slave holders” from out of state campaigned in southern Illinois for him, according to the Chicago Democrat.

  The tenor of the place gave Douglas a receptive audience for projecting Frederick Douglass as the star in Douglas’s very own minstrel show. “Why, they brought Fred Douglass to Freeport, when I was addressing a meeting there, in a carriage driven by the white owner, the negro sitting inside with the white lady and her daughter. (‘Shame.’) When I got through canvassing the northern counties that year, and progressed as far south as Springfield, I was met and opposed in discussion by Lincoln, Lovejoy, Trumbull . . . (Laughter.) Father Giddings, the high-priest of Abolitionism, had just been there, and Chase came about the time I left. (‘Why didn’t you shoot him?’) I did take a running shot at them, but as I was single-handed against the white, black and mixed drove, I had to use a shot gun and fire into the crowd instead of taking them off singly with a rifle. (Great laughter and cheers.)”

  Once again, Douglas ridiculed Lincoln’s “house divided” speech before pivoting to the core of his message.

  I hold that a negro is not and never ought to be a citizen of the United States. (“Good, good,” and tremendous cheers.) I hold that this Government was made on the white basis, by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should be administered by white men and none others. I do not believe that the Almighty made the negro capable of self-government. I am aware that all the Abolition lecturers that you find traveling about through the country, are in the habit of reading the Declaration of Independence to prove that all men were created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Mr. Lincoln is very much in the habit of following in the track of Lovejoy in this particular, by reading that part of the Declaration of Independence to prove that the negro was endowed by the Almighty with the inalienable right of equality with white men. Now, I say to you, my fellow-citizens, that in my opinion, the signers of the Declaration had no reference to the negro whatever, when they declared all men to be created equal.

  Lincoln spent his time trying to answer again Douglas’s original interrogatories and clarify the facts. Fending off Douglas’s charge that Lincoln and Trumbull had made a secret pact dividing offices between them, he said, “there is not a word of truth in it.” He talked about the founders as antislavery, how Douglas’s repeal of the Missouri Compromise was the source of the problem, and most of his already stated positions. Lincoln’s conclusion expressed his feeling of having lived too long in Douglas’s shadow and unwilling to be belittled by him any longer. “The Judge has set about seriously trying to make the impression that when we meet at different places I am literally in his clutches—that I am a poor, helpless, decrepit mouse, and that I can do nothing at all. This is one of the ways he has taken to create that impression. I don’t know any other way to meet it, except this. I don’t want to quarrel with him—to cal
l him a liar—but when I come square up to him I don’t know what else to call him, if I must tell the truth out.”

  Nothing new was said; nothing was resolved. The most unusual fireworks were provided by the appearance of Donati’s Comet streaking across the night sky. Lincoln gazed at it for an hour. But Lincoln’s remarks on his relation to Douglas and resistance to his demeaning methods were the most psychologically revealing statements of the debates.

  After the Jonesboro debate, Douglas ramped up his attack on Lincoln for supporting “negro equality.” His paper, the Register, mocked a free black from Chicago, H. Ford Douglas, who spoke in a church for Lincoln, “much to the edification and delight of his abolition Republican brethren, who seem in duty bound, according to the philanthropic ideas inculcated by Parson Lovejoy, to swallow every greasy nigger that comes along. . . . It is perfectly right that he should take a nigger to his bosom.”

  Under the headline “Negro Equality,” the Chicago Tribune explained on September 28 that Douglas exploited the issue “to obscure the magnitude of his own misconduct. . . . If by much drumming and repeating he can fasten the odium of ‘Negro Equality’ upon his enemies, he thinks he can escape the fate which overtook his assistants in the Nebraska job, and slide back into the Senate.” The Tribune pointed out that there were only six thousand “colored inhabitants of Illinois (of all hues) among a million and a half of Caucasians,” who “earn their own bread. . . . Yet will no argument, not even that of self-respect, deter Mr. Douglas from vociferating ‘nigger equality’ to the end of the chapter. His followers in the central and southern portions of the State make it the beginning, middle and end of all their harangues. Put the question to five of them taken at random anywhere south of Bloomington, why they are supporting Douglas, and four of them will tell you ‘Because he goes against nigger equality.’ Ask them what man, woman or child in the whole State is in favor of negro equality, and the reply will be ‘Oh, Lincoln and all the Black Republicans.’ ”