Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (21 page)

“It is none of my business,” said Douglas, “which way the slavery clause [of the Lecompton Constitution] is decided. I care not whether it is voted down or voted up. . . . But if [the Lecompton] constitution is to be forced down our throats . . . under a mode of submission that is a mockery and an insult, I will resist it to the last. . . . I will stand on the great principle of popular sovereignty [and] I will follow that principle wherever its logical consequences may take me.”

Douglas was prompted by intraparty politics, for he was feuding with Buchanan at the time. Although the president would prove to be a hopeless executive in a crisis, he was determined, like many weaklings, to rule in little things, and he had shut Douglas out of patronage. Yet Douglas also wanted to defend his great principle. The proposed constitution of Kansas followed the forms of popular sovereignty. The delegates to the Lecompton convention had been elected, and the Lecompton Constitution would be submitted to the voters. But if the convention had been rigged, and if the president meddled in the vote on its handiwork, then the process was a sham. Douglas had to reject it, if only to justify the past three years of his public life.

But defending popular sovereignty by attacking the Lecompton Constitution might also open up his future—and here Douglas truly showed himself to be the Man of Audacity. He had appealed to the South with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, with disastrous consequences. If he now gave something to the Republicans of the North, perhaps his fortunes might rebound.

Republicans in the Northeast (which was the stronghold of the party) were intrigued. The support, even opportunistic, of such a prominent
Democrat looked like a coup. Perhaps an alliance with Douglas was the way for a united northern party to take Illinois and the White House. Horace Greeley, the Republican editor of the
New York Tribune
, the newspaper with the largest circulation in the country, urged Republicans to “promptly and heartily tender their
support to Mr. Douglas”—and Greeley was only printing what party leaders were thinking.

But if Republicans allied with Douglas, what would become of Lincoln? At the end of the year Lincoln wrote a tart letter to Trumbull in Washington asking what had possessed the easterners. “Have they concluded that the Republican cause generally can best be promoted by sacrificing us here in Illinois? If so we would like to know it soon; it will save us a great deal of labor to
surrender at once.”

Naturally, Lincoln was concerned for his political future. But he was also concerned with first principles, with digging to the roots of things. Douglas was for a fair vote in Kansas, which would almost certainly guarantee a free territory and state. (Kansas voters would reject the Lecompton Constitution, despite Buchanan’s endorsement, by huge margins in two different votes in 1858.) But who could believe that Kansas would be the last struggle over slavery? And Douglas had said that he did not care whether slavery was voted down or up.

Both Lincoln and Douglas were under pressure because Douglas’s current term as senator would end in March 1859. The future occupant of his seat would be chosen by the Illinois legislature that was to be elected in November 1858.

Douglas wanted a third term, and Lincoln wanted to replace him. Both men wanted a clean shot when the new legislature met, not a four-way struggle like the Shields-Lincoln-Trumbull-Matteson contest of 1855. Douglas asserted his dominance of the state’s Democratic Party at a convention in Springfield in April 1858, which voted to support his reelection. (Buchanan had been trying to woo Illinois Democrats away
from Douglas with federal patronage.) But Lincoln needed his own show of strength to impress out-of-state kibitzers like Greeley.

Illinois Republicans were happy to give it to him. Ex-Democrats in the party were still grateful for his selflessness in yielding to Trumbull in 1855. Ex-Whigs embraced him as one of their own. He was a fixture in state politics, and he had been acting as a scourge of Douglas since the Peoria speech. Illinoisans also resented the advice of easterners. The state’s Republicans held their own convention in Springfield on June 16, which declared that Lincoln was their “first and
only choice” for senator.

Lincoln addressed them that evening. He said nothing about the founders in this speech. The image that would give the speech its name came from the Bible (see Matthew 12:25 and Mark 3:25): “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Lincoln explained: “I believe the government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. . . . 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 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.”

Douglas and the Democrats would assail Lincoln for the binary sweep of this prediction, and it made even some of his staunchest Republican allies blanch when he gave them a preview of the speech; one called it a “
damned fool utterance.” Lincoln was setting an end term to his policy of stopping the spread of slavery; the logical result, he admitted, would be to make slavery extinct. (How might this work? If slaves could not be sold to new owners in new places, the prices of slaves would stabilize, then drop. In time it would become realistic for the government to offer buy-outs and send the freed slaves abroad.) He still put slavery’s consummation off to a distant, undefined day: the “course of ultimate extinction” could last for decades. In a note to himself about the time of the “House Divided” speech, Lincoln wrote that slavery might not end “within the term of
my natural life”; in public, he
would extend that to “
a hundred years.” Even such a long-range plan as this made a jolt in Illinois in 1858.

But Lincoln was also trying, with his prediction, to explain the dynamics of the 1850s. The advocates of slavery had indeed pushed slavery forward—into New Mexico and Utah (with trade-offs), above the Missouri line (with no trade-offs), deeper into the Constitution (via the
Dred Scott
decision), into the Lecompton Constitution (though that struggle was still ongoing).

They might push further still. In the “House Divided” speech Lincoln mentioned two possible ways in which slavery might expand. There might be a second
Dred Scott
–like decision, extending the right to take human property into free states. We may “awake to the reality,” Lincoln warned, “that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave state.”

Or there might be an effort to revive the slave trade. It had been considered piracy for thirty-eight years—indeed, a capital crime—but no one had ever been executed for slave-trading, and it had never been completely extirpated. If slaves could be carried into formerly free territories, why not allow them to be carried from Africa—especially since that was the cheapest place to buy them?

In a draft of the “House Divided” speech, Lincoln added a third arena for slavery’s expansion: new slave territories in Central America or the Caribbean might be acquired by the United States. And indeed Americans from the South had been sponsoring freelance uprisings and invasions in that part of the world throughout the 1850s.

Who were the advocates of slavery pushing it forward? Lincoln answered with a metaphor. He had opened his speech with a biblical house, but halfway through he described a second house that was under construction, along with the workmen who were building it. “When we see a lot of framed timbers” gathered “by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance”—Lincoln’s listeners would supply the surnames: Douglas, Pierce, Taney, and Buchanan—“and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house . . . all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting”—then,
Lincoln concluded, it was right to suspect that “a common plan or draft [had been] drawn up before the first lick was struck.” The second house was a trap, like something out of a story by Poe or Hawthorne, representing the policies that would imprison Republicans and liberty itself. The four workmen, with their matching timbers, were also the jailers.

This was a conspiracy theory involving two presidents, a would-be president, and the chief justice of the US Supreme Court. It showed the desperation of Republicans in 1858, and their fear that, even as their party and the free states grew, the advocates of slavery would keep a lock on the government.

Was it crazy, simply because it was a conspiracy theory? Buchanan had been seen talking intently with Chief Justice Taney at his own inauguration. Had they been talking about the
Dred Scott
decision, shortly to come? Decades after Buchanan’s death,
his published papers would show that as president-elect he had been corresponding with other justices as they discussed the case, pushing them to issue the most sweeping proslavery decision possible. James and Roger had conspired, if not Franklin or Stephen.

Sometimes a conspiracy theorist, shooting at noises in the dark, hits real conspirators.

Lincoln ended with a rousing appeal. “Two years ago,” the Republican Party had been formed to resist “a common danger. . . . Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds. . . . Did we brave all then, to falter now? . . . The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail—if we stand firm, we shall not fail.”

The nominations of Lincoln and Douglas earlier in 1858 allowed the two men to campaign across the state in the hope of affecting the elections to the legislature on November 2. After Lincoln twice found himself—first in Chicago, then in Springfield—speaking shortly after Douglas, the candidates agreed to appear together in seven other locations. Their schedule of debates was Ottawa (August 21), Freeport (August 27),
Jonesboro (September 15), Charleston (September 18), Galesburg (October 7), Quincy (October 13), and Alton (October 15). Their itinerary spanned the state: Freeport was near the Wisconsin border, Jonesboro in the tip of the wedge between Missouri and Kentucky. Republicans had wanted even more joint appearances, as many as fifty or one hundred. The actual schedule was numbing enough, as the candidates filled the days between debates with other speeches. Traveling by train, the two men logged almost 10,000 miles.

Such exertions for a Senate race were unheard of in American politics. (Presidential candidates did not campaign, either; when Winfield Scott made a few trips to army bases before the election of 1852, he was condemned for it.) In another innovation, the Chicago papers of both parties printed the
texts of the debates, with ample notes of crowd reactions (“hit him,” “that’s so,” “immense applause,” “laughter and cheers”).

The traditional arts of politics were also practiced. Buchanan still wanted to make trouble for Douglas in any way he could (these two workmen were not cooperating in the way Lincoln had charged), and his minions in Illinois ran a slate of independent candidates, who called themselves National Democrats (critics called them Buchaneers). Since the enemy of my enemy is my ally, the
Republicans kept tabs on this effort via Herndon, whose father and brother were staunch Buchanan supporters. Since my liaison to my ally is not me, this allowed Lincoln to deny that he himself had “in
any way promoted” the Buchaneers.

The format of the joint debates required one man to speak for an hour, the other to reply for ninety minutes, then the first to rejoin for thirty. Douglas opened and concluded the first debate, then the candidates successively switched positions. Douglas thus opened and closed in four debates, Lincoln in three—an advantage to Douglas, but as the incumbent and the man with the most to lose, he set the terms. Lincoln consistently called him “Judge Douglas”—a legitimate title, since Douglas had served on the state supreme court back in the 1840s; it also spared Lincoln calling him “Senator.” Douglas addressed his opponent as “Mr. Lincoln.”