Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (22 page)

The state was riveted. “The prairies are
on fire,” wrote the
New York Evening Post
. The audiences sometimes exceeded the population of the towns in which the debates were held; the dust raised by incoming horses and buggies clouded the air. There was some heckling, and a lot of cheering, but to an impressive degree people paid attention to what was said.

What they heard included a lot of repetition and a lot of small-bore disputation. The two candidates wrangled over party platforms and past statements, and they gave minute accounts of political maneuvers, which they professed to find shocking (or, when they were the maneuverers, unexceptionable). Even so, a lot of noteworthy things got said.

Douglas led off the first debate by patronizing Lincoln: “I have known him for nearly twenty-five years. . . . He could beat any of the boys wrestling, or running a foot race, in pitching quoits or tossing a copper; [he] could ruin more liquor than all the boys of
the town together [uproarious laughter].” Since Lincoln was temperate and Douglas was a heavy drinker, that was a low blow. Douglas used Lincoln’s rube/boob persona against him, depicting him as a yokel who had never amounted to anything—and that part of the charge was still painfully close to the truth.

Throughout the debates, Douglas tarred Lincoln as pro-black. He claimed that Frederick Douglass—whom he called a “rich black negro”—and other black abolitionists were campaigning for him, charges that were greeted with cries of “white men, white men,” “down with the negro,” and “he’s a
disgrace to white people.” Frederick Douglass in fact scorned Lincoln as too conservative. Douglas accused the Republicans of tailoring their negrophilia to fit different parts of the state, the North being most antislavery, the South least. In Freeport and Chicago, said Douglas, Republicans were “jet black”; in central Illinois, “a decent mulatto”; in the southern part of the state, “
almost white [shouts of laughter].”

Lincoln for his part insisted that he had no intention of introducing “political and social equality” between whites and blacks: “There is a
physical difference between the two, which in my judgment will probably forever forbid their living together. . . . I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having
the superior position.” Lincoln made other demonstrations of his whiteness, using the words
nigger
and
niggers
several times, as if to say,
Don’t worry, I’m one of the (white) guys too
. Some of his uses, however, put the words in Douglas’s mouth: “My friend Judge Douglas [says I want to] set the niggers and white people to
marrying together [laughter].”
I talk about niggers; but Douglas worries about them
.

Lincoln told several versions of his joke about not having to marry a black woman if she was not his slave. He concluded one recital of it with a riff at Douglas’s expense, which incidentally shows how he worked a crowd. “I have never had the least apprehension that I or my friends would marry negroes if there was no law to keep them from it [laughter], but as Judge Douglas and his friends seem to be in great apprehension that they might, if there were no law to keep them from it [roars of laughter], I give him the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last stand by the law of this state, which forbids the marrying of
white people with negroes [continued laughter and applause].” Lincoln had mined his own sexual insecurity to tell the marriage joke in the first place; here he located an even greater insecurity in the racism of Douglas.

The debates are best known for two sets of questions the candidates posed to each other early on, Douglas to Lincoln in Ottawa and Lincoln to Douglas in Freeport. Douglas’s questions sought to entangle Lincoln with abolitionism—Did he favor repealing the federal fugitive slave law, for instance? Lincoln had drawn the line between abolitionists and himself so clearly that he had little trouble answering: he said he thought the fugitive slave law
was constitutional. One of Lincoln’s questions honed in on the
Dred Scott
decision: Could the people of a territory “in any lawful way . . . exclude slavery
from its limits”? Douglas answered that they could do it by “
local police regulations.” This was not news. Douglas had given that answer in his speech on
Dred Scott
in June 1857 in Springfield, and as he said at Freeport, he had given it “a hundred times from
every stump in Illinois.” But it was worthwhile to make him say yet again to what lengths he had been driven in order to square popular sovereignty with the Taney Court. Lincoln happily compelled him.

The issue overhanging all of the debates, however, was what the politicians on the podium thought of politicians who had never set foot in Illinois and who had, by 1858, all died years ago. Lincoln, Douglas, and their thousands of laughing, cheering, listening spectators wanted to know how the two candidates squared themselves with the founding fathers—and what that meant about the nature and future of the country. Chief Justice Taney had laid out his view of the founders, slavery, and race in a Supreme Court decision, and Lincoln had laid out his own in speeches since Peoria in 1854. Now Douglas and Lincoln expounded their conflicting views face to face on dusty Illinois podiums.

Douglas introduced his account of the founding fathers in his first speech in Ottawa. He began with a creation story of the federal government. The framers, he said, wrote a Constitution that recognized regional diversity and self-government. “Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Jay and the great men of that day, 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. [Right, right.]” “They knew,” Douglas went on, “ . . . that in a country as wide and broad as this, with such a variety of climate, production and interest, the people necessarily required different laws and institutions in different localities. . . . One of the reserved rights of the states was the right to regulate the relations between master and servant. . . . Why can [the government] not exist on the same principles on which
our fathers made it? [It can.]”

So Douglas squared himself and slavery with the Constitution. In the third debate at Jonesboro, Douglas turned to the Declaration of Independence, arguing that it cast no rebuke on slavery because it applied only to white people. “The signers of the Declaration [made] no
reference to the negro whatever when they declared all men to be created equal. They desired to express by that phrase white men, men of European birth and European descent, and had no reference either to the negro, the savage Indians, the Fejee, the Malay, or any other inferior and degraded race.” The proof was that no signer of the Declaration had emancipated his own slaves, “yet if they had intended to declare that the negro was the equal of the white man . . . they were bound, as honest men,
that day and hour,” to have done so. “[Cheers].”

Lincoln was a bit slower to present his account of the founders. In the flow of the debates, Lincoln got better over time, apparently losing some nervousness, while Douglas wore out, losing his voice. In the sixth debate, in Quincy, Lincoln attacked Douglas’s creation story: “When Judge Douglas undertakes to say that . . . the fathers of the government made this nation part slave and part free, he assumes what is historically a falsehood. [Long continued applause.]” The fathers bowed to what Lincoln had called, in his Peoria speech, necessity: “Our fathers did not make this nation half slave and half free, or part slave and part free. [Applause, and That’s so.] . . . They found the institution of slavery existing among us. They did not make it so, but they left it so because they knew of no way to get rid of it
at that time. [Good, Good, That’s true.]”

The founders, Lincoln argued, nevertheless left “many clear marks of [their]
disapprobation” of slavery. In the last debate, at Alton, he enumerated them. In the Declaration of Independence, the founders declared that all men are created equal, as “a standard maxim
for free society” (Lincoln quoted his own speech on
Dred Scott
from 1857). They banned slavery in the Northwest Ordinance, and in the Constitution they allowed the slave trade to be ended after twenty years. “Why stop its spread in one direction and cut off its source in another, if they did not look to its being placed in
the course of ultimate extinction?” The Constitution, it was true, gave guarantees to slavery (the three-fifths rule, the fugitive slave clause); yet its authors avoided the words
negro
and
slavery
, using “covert language” so that years later (a century later?), when slavery had finally disappeared, “there should be nothing on the
face of the great charter of liberty suggesting that such a thing as negro slavery had ever
existed among us. [Enthusiastic applause.]”

In the fifth debate, in Galesburg, Lincoln had quoted one more mark of the founders’ disapprobation. Although “Mr. Jefferson was the owner of slaves, . . . in speaking upon this very subject, he used the strong language that ‘he trembled for his country when he remembered that
God was just.’” The line came from
Notes on Virginia
, Jefferson’s long essay on his home state, which became the only book he ever published. Lincoln did not quote the rest of Jefferson’s sentence: God’s “justice,” he wrote, “cannot sleep forever: . . . a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is
among possible events.” Jefferson feared that slavery would end in a slave revolt and a race war; Lincoln hoped there would be no war. Time would show that both were mistaken.

Douglas’s view of the founders came with a glowing corollary: follow their policy, and the United States would have a glorious future. He sketched it most eloquently in the sixth debate, at Quincy. “Let each state mind its own business and let its neighbors alone, there will be no trouble on this question [of slavery]. If we will stand by that principle, then . . . this Republic can exist forever divided into free and slave states, as our fathers made it. . . . Stand by that great principle,” and the entire continent would become “one ocean-bound republic . . . the asylum of the
oppressed of the whole earth.”

Lincoln, holding a different view of the founders and their legacy, had a more anxious vision of the future, which he expressed at Alton: “The wisest and best men of the world,” as he called the founders, had placed slavery in the course of ultimate extinction. But Douglas was willing to let it last forever, and even let it spread, because he saw nothing wrong in it.

“That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world.” The principle of slavery “says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ [Loud applause.] No matter
in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the
same tyrannical principle.” Here Lincoln fused the 1850s with the 1770s. Douglas, and those who praised slavery forthrightly, took the place of George III.

November 2, election day, was rainy. Even so, more voters went to the polls than in 1856, a presidential year. Slightly more Republicans than Democrats voted. But the Republicans were concentrated in too few districts;
the newly elected legislature would be sending Steven Douglas back to the Senate, by a vote of 54 to 46.

After it was all over, Lincoln wrote an old Springfield friend who had moved to Oregon that “though I now sink from view . . . I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after
I am gone.” But the next day he wrote a friendly editor in Chicago asking for copies of the texts of all the debates. He planned to put them in a scrapbook, for the memories. A scrapbook would also assist typesetters if the debates were republished. He did not intend to sink from view just yet.

Nine

1859–1860: R
UNNING FOR
P
RESIDENT

L
INCOLN HAD PUT HIS LEGAL BUSINESS ON HOLD WHILE HE
ran for the Senate, and he needed to take it up again to earn some money. By the late 1850s his clients had come to include major corporations, not just the litigious locals of the circuit. He defended railroads in several important cases, arguing that the Illinois Central should be free from county-level taxes, and that a bridge across the Mississippi serving the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific did not obstruct navigation (steamboat companies, the competing form of transportation, naturally argued that bridges did just that). Despite his services, the railroads had given him no special treatment when he crisscrossed the state campaigning in 1858; Stephen Douglas, the powerful incumbent, was loaned a private car.