All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  On September 13, one of Douglas’s closest allies in the Senate, David C. Broderick of California, was shot dead in a duel. They had the same enemies and the bullet might as well have been for Douglas, who had avoided being provoked into duels earlier in the year. The rough-and-ready Broderick, an orphaned stone mason’s apprentice and New York fireman, joined the Gold Rush, and climbed his way to become lieutenant governor of California and political boss of San Francisco. He was an antislavery yet partisan Democrat. Elected to the Senate in 1856, displacing the proslavery John B. Weller, a friend of Buchanan, Broderick cut a deal to divide patronage with the other California senator, William M. Gwin. Under their terms Broderick would control the federal jobs and Gwin the state ones. But Gwin complained to the Southern Directorate of Buchanan’s cabinet and Broderick was completely shut out. His isolation served Buchanan’s pique for having defeated Weller. He favored Gwin in any case.

  Gwin was Broderick’s antagonist and antithesis. Fabulously wealthy from a gold mine and the owner of a Mississippi plantation, originally from Tennessee, and a private secretary to President Jackson, Gwin led what was proudly called the Chivalry faction of the California Democratic Party, aligned with Southern Ultras. In Mississippi, he had been instrumental as a power broker in the election of Robert J. Walker to the Senate and his business partner. He also befriended the young Jefferson Davis. Gwin moved on to Texas, where he grabbed half a million acres of land, and then as a speculator to California, where he literally hit gold. Gwin’s Southern manners extended to fighting one duel and threatening another against Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts. Broderick had tried to block Gwin’s reelection in 1857, which Gwin finessed by combining forces with the Know Nothings. Gwin derided Douglas for his removal as chairman of the Committee on Territories because of his Freeport Doctrine, publicly quoting Howell Cobb against Douglas. Douglas replied that Gwin’s “frank avowal” revealed Buchanan’s hand in his ouster.

  The antislavery Broderick bucked up Douglas to maintain his opposition against Lecompton. Unlike Douglas, he was not of the “don’t care” school on slavery. When Hammond delivered his “Cotton is King” speech, Broderick took to the Senate floor to condemn his “mudsill” theory of free labor, brandishing his common background, disdainful of slavery, and offending the Southern members. For months in 1859, David Terry, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of California, a violent proslavery Know Nothing close to Gwin, and who had stabbed a man and been defeated for reelection, tried to provoke Broderick to a duel with vicious taunts. Broderick eventually succumbed to the challenge. Terry provided the pistols, one of which was on a hair trigger and was deliberately handed to Broderick. It prematurely discharged into the ground and left him standing as a target. After Broderick’s murder, Edward D. Baker, Lincoln’s old friend, now the Republican senator from Oregon, eulogized him as a martyr before a crowd in San Francisco of tens of thousands. Broderick’s killing, he said, was “a political necessity, poorly veiled under the guise of a private quarrel” and “the consequence of intense political hatred.” He proclaimed what he said were Broderick’s last words: “They have killed me because I was opposed to the extension of slavery and a corrupt Administration.” Broderick’s death and Baker’s oration had a revolutionary effect on California politics, the beginning of the end of the pro-Southern Chivalry faction, that rippled through public opinion in the North, rolling the tide toward the Republicans. In Washington, a number of pro-Douglas congressman armed themselves coming and going around town, joining the already armed Republicans and Southerners. Senator Hammond remarked, “the only persons who do not have a revolver and a knife are those who have two revolvers.”

  When Broderick was struck down by a bullet to the lung, Douglas was campaigning in Ohio for the state Democratic ticket to prove his coattails. All the state offices were on the ballot. On the day Douglas’s schedule had been announced, William T. Bascom, secretary of the Ohio Republican State Central Committee, invited Lincoln to Ohio “to head off the little gentleman.” He followed up after Lincoln accepted. “Your despatch came duly to hand; and created a sensation in our City. I at once telegraphed to Cincinnati, and have since written to the leading men to prepare for you. We shall get up a large meeting here. Which day will you come? What time will you arrive? Do not fail us. We depend much upon you. There is no man who can do so much good in this State just at this time as yourself.”

  Before Lincoln went on the speaking tour in Ohio, he wrote notes for himself. He sketched out a political scenario in which the Southern Ultras trying to destroy Douglas instead played into his cynical hands to shatter the Republicans. His notes reflected his fears from the Senate campaign and his anxiety over betrayal by Eastern Republicans. In late December, Greeley had appeared in Bloomington while Lincoln was there and invited him to meet at his hotel, but Lincoln, still too angry over his touting of Douglas, refused. “What will Douglas do now?” Lincoln wrote to himself. “He does not quite know himself. Like a skillful gambler he will play for all the chances.” Lincoln gamed out Douglas’s possible moves to survive, which depended in the end on tricking the Republicans. “His first wish is to be the nominee of the Charleston convention, without any new test. The democratic party proper do not wish to let it go just that way. They are thinking of getting up a Slave code test for him. They better not. Their true policy is to let him into the convention, beat him then, and give him no plausible excuse to bolt the nomination. But if they press the Slave code test upon him, he will not take it; but, as in the case of Lecompton, will appeal to the North on his bravery in opposing it. True the logic of his position, as an endorser of the Dred Scott decision imperatively requires him to go the Slave code. Honestly believing in that decision, he cannot, without perjury, refuse to go the Slave code. But he will refuse.”

  After decades of close observation Lincoln defined the essence of Douglas’s political character that made him so dangerous. “He never lets the logic of principle, displace the logic of success.” Lincoln felt that Eastern Republicans never really grasped what he did about Douglas. “And then, when he thus turns again to the North, we shall have the Lecompton phase of politics reproduced on a larger scale. It will then be a question whether the Republican party of the Nation shall make him President, in magnanimous gratitude for having opposed a Slave code, just as it was, last year, a question whether the Illinois Republicans should re-elect him Senator, in magnanimous gratitude for having opposed Lecompton. Some larger gentlemen will then have a chance of swallowing the same pill which they somewhat persistently prescribed for us little fellows last year. I hope they will not swallow it. For the sake of the cause, rather than the men, I hope they will not swallow it.”

  Lincoln understood that flirting with Douglas would compromise and cripple the Republican cause. “The Republican cause cannot live by Douglas’ position. His position, whether for or against a slave code, for or against Lecompton, leads inevitably to the nationalizing and perpetuity of slavery, and the Republican cause cannot live by it. Dallying with Douglas is, at best, for Republicans, only loss of labor, and loss of time. Wander with him however long, at last they must turn back and strike for a policy, which shall deal with slavery as a wrong, restrain its enlargement, and look to its termination.”

  In his private jottings, Lincoln felt free to give vent to his frustration over the Eastern Republican embrace of Douglas, whose exploitation of the issue of “Negro equality” was sheer exploitation. “Fudge!! How long, in the government of a God, great enough to make and maintain this Universe, shall there continue knaves to vend, and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagougeism as this.” The New York Times, still promoting Douglas, published his speeches in Ohio at length.

  Lincoln again stalked Douglas, city after city in Ohio through September, appearing a day or two after Douglas had spoken, trailing after his presence and refuting his arguments. Lincoln’s shadowing of Douglas was the sequel to their Senate campaign. When the campaign had first begun Lincol
n was a little-known figure, but the debates had attracted national attention and elevated him into Douglas’s natural counterpart. Now they reprised their battle, testing their strength for their parties in another state and in another national spectacle. Drawing on his assembled “Scrap-Book” of the debates, Lincoln recapitulated all his points against Douglas, “only a continuation of the Illinois debates of the year before,” recalled David R. Locke, the Bucyrus Journal editor, who caught up with Lincoln in Columbus. Offstage, on the intermarriage of blacks and white, Lincoln told Locke, “I shall never marry a negress, but I have no objection to anyone else doing so. If a white man wants to marry a negro woman, let him do it—if the negro woman can stand it.”

  In Ohio Lincoln introduced several new elements into his criticism of Douglas. On his impenetrable Harper’s article, in Columbus, on September 16, Lincoln said, “He has a good deal of trouble with his popular sovereignty. His explanations explanatory of explanations explained are interminable.” The Chicago Press and Tribune, covering “Mr. Lincoln in Ohio,” reported, “The review is comprehensive, and complete, riddling the Douglas-Harper essay from stem to stern. . . . Mr. Lincoln’s remarks on the omissions and falsifications in the patented essay—particularly in the omission of the Jeffersonian ordinance of 1787—are exceedingly pointed and forcible.”

  Lincoln leveraged the icon of Jefferson for the Republicans. He held up Jefferson as not only the paradigm of democracy but also antislavery sentiment. Douglas, he said, “ought to remember that there was once in this country a man by the name of Thomas Jefferson, supposed to be a Democrat—a man whose principles and policy are not very prevalent amongst Democrats to-day, it is true; but that man did not take exactly this view of the insignificance of the element of slavery which our friend Judge Douglas does. In contemplation of this thing, we all know he was led to exclaim, ‘I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just!’ We know how he looked upon it when he thus expressed himself. There was danger to this country—danger of the avenging justice of God in that little unimportant popular sovereignty question of Judge Douglas. He supposed there was a question of God’s eternal justice wrapped up in the enslaving of any race of men, or any man, and that those who did so braved the arm of Jehovah—that when a nation thus dared the Almighty every friend of that nation had cause to dread His wrath.” Six years later, Lincoln would distill his thinking on divine wrath over slavery into his Second Inaugural Address. Now, he posed it as a contest between the founder of the Democratic Party and its would-be standard-bearer. “Choose ye between Jefferson and Douglas as to what is the true view of this element among us.”

  Taking off from his expropriation of Jefferson, he turned the argument against Douglas’s demagoguery over “negro equality,” retooling his rhetoric from their debates. “Did you ever five years ago, hear of anybody in the world saying that the negro had no share in the Declaration of National Independence; that it did not mean negroes at all; and when ‘all men’ were spoken of negroes were not included? I am satisfied that five years ago that proposition was not put upon paper by any living being anywhere. I have been unable at any time to find a man in an audience who would declare that he had ever known anybody saying so five years ago. But last year was not a Douglas popular sovereign in Illinois who did not say it. Is there one in Ohio but declares his firm belief that the Declaration of Independence did not mean negroes at all? I do not know how this is; I have not been here much; but I presume you are very much alike everywhere. Then I suppose that all now express the belief that the Declaration of Independence never did mean negroes. I call upon one of them to say that he said it five years ago.”

  Since Douglas had gone on his post-campaign Southern tour, he had adopted as regular trope the denigration of blacks as swamp creatures on the level of crocodiles. Few things Douglas said bothered Lincoln more than this reduction of men into reptiles. He saw it as a systematic corruption of public opinion aimed at degrading American ideals and democracy, the application of a big lie technique, in which the lie is repeated until it was believed, with this particular lie used insidiously to drive a larger agenda of inequality, beginning with the dehumanization of blacks. “They are taking him down, and placing him, when spoken of, among reptiles and crocodiles, as Judge Douglas himself expresses it.”

  Lincoln challenged his audience. “Is not this change wrought in your minds a very important change? Public opinion in this country is everything. In a nation like ours this popular sovereignty and squatter sovereignty have already wrought a change in the public mind to the extent I have stated. There is no man in this crowd who can contradict it. Now, if you are opposed to slavery honestly, as much as anybody I ask you to note that fact, and the like of which is to follow, to be plastered on, layer after layer, until very soon you are prepared to deal with the negro everywhere as with the brute. If public sentiment has not been debauched already to this point, a new turn of the screw in that direction is all that is wanting; and this is constantly being done by the teachers of this insidious popular sovereignty. You need but one or two turns further until your minds, now ripening under these teachings will be ready for all these things, and you will receive and support, or submit to, the slave trade; revived with all its horrors; a slave code enforced in our territories, and a new Dred Scott decision to bring slavery up into the very heart of the free North.”

  Lincoln reached back to the crescendo of his debates with Douglas, declaring that to achieve these ends “they must blow out the moral lights around us; they must penetrate the human soul and eradicate the love of liberty; but until they did these things, and others eloquently enumerated by him, they could not repress all tendencies to ultimate emancipation.”

  Again, he reprised himself. “I ask attention to the fact that in a pre-eminent degree these popular sovereigns are at this work; blowing out the moral lights around us; teaching that the negro is no longer a man but a brute; that the Declaration has nothing to do with him; that he ranks with the crocodile and the reptile; that man, with body and soul, is a matter of dollars and cents. I suggest to this portion of the Ohio Republicans, or Democrats if there be any present, the serious consideration of this fact, that there is now going on among you a steady process of debauching public opinion on this subject. With this my friends, I bid you adieu.”

  On his way to Cincinnati Lincoln stopped for a brief speech at the railroad depot at Hamilton, accompanied by Congressman John A. Gurley, “a very short man, and as these gentlemen emerged from the car, a great laughter went up from the multitude present.” “My friends,” said Lincoln, pointing to himself, “this is the long of it,” and putting his hand on Gurley’s head, “this is the short of it.” Then, according to a local historian, he “tore the argument of Hon. Stephen A. Douglas on popular sovereignty to shreds.” The Democratic newspaper in Hamilton described him, “Ugliness predominates,” but conceded “he is no slouch at wit.”

  That night in Cincinnati, September 17, he adopted the rhetorical device of addressing the Kentuckians in the audience and those across the Ohio River. First, he used this gambit to depict Douglas as proslavery.

  I say, then, in the first place, to the Kentuckians, that I am what they call, as I understand it, a “Black Republican.’’ (Applause and laughter.) I think Slavery is wrong, morally, and politically. I desire that it should be no further spread in these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually terminate in the whole Union. (Applause.) While I say this for myself, I say to you, Kentuckians, that I understand you differ radically with me upon this proposition; that you believe Slavery is a good thing; that Slavery is right; that it ought to be extended and perpetuated in this Union. Now, there being this broad difference between us, I do not pretend in addressing myself to you, Kentuckians, to attempt proselyting you; that would be a vain effort. I do not enter upon it. I only propose to try to show you that you ought to nominate for the next Presidency, at Charleston, my distinguished friend Judge Douglas. (Applause.)
In all that there is a difference between you and him, I understand he is as sincerely for you, and more wisely for you, than you are for yourselves. [Applause.] I will try to demonstrate that proposition. Understand now, I say that I believe he is as sincerely for you, and more wisely for you, than you are for yourselves.

  Then, Lincoln issued a portentous warning to the Kentuckians and Southerners generally. “I often hear it intimated that you mean to divide the Union whenever a Republican, or anything like it, is elected President of the United States,” he said. He baited them. “Are you going to split the Ohio [River] down through, and push your half off a piece? Or are you going to keep it right alongside of us outrageous fellows? Or are you going to build up a wall some way between your country and ours, by which that moveable property of yours can’t come over here anymore, to the danger of your losing it?”

  Lincoln told them that no matter how fiercely they fought for slavery they would lose to the overwhelming power of the North. “Will you make war upon us and kill us all? Why, gentlemen, I think you are as gallant and as brave men as live; that you can fight as bravely in a good cause, man for man, as any other people living; that you have shown yourselves capable of this upon various occasions; but, man for man, you are not better than we are, and there are not so many of you as there are of us. (Loud cheering.) You will never make much of a hand at whipping us. If we were fewer in numbers than you, I think that you could whip us; if we were equal it would likely be a drawn battle; but being inferior in numbers, you will make nothing by attempting to master us.”