Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (14 page)

The decision confronted Republicans, too, with a problem. If Congress lacked the power to exclude slavery from the territories, where did that leave the unifying core of the party’s program, the use of national power to stop slavery from spreading? Lincoln’s response, like that of many of his colleagues, was tempered by his respect for the courts: he saw judicial process, in the historian David Donald’s words, as an essential defense against “the unreasoning populism of the Democrats, who believed that the majority was always right, and the equally unreasonable moral absolutism of reformers like the abolitionists, who appealed to a higher law than even the Constitution.”
³⁷
But, as he explained in his riposte to Douglas on June 26, he found it impossible to submit to what he considered the “erroneous” decision of “a divided court,” a decision based on historical misrepresentation and studied blindness to precedent, and one which could be honestly questioned because it had “not yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country.” He denied that Republican criticisms amounted to lawless resistance. It was Douglas, the Democrats, and their allies on the Court who were engaged in an assault on the constitutional rights of the black race, bound and free. Their exclusionist interpretation of the Declaration of Independence was a corrupting novelty, designed to tighten the grip of slavery: “if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.” Confronting Douglas’s amalgamationist smears, Lincoln protested “against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a
slave
I must necessarily want her for a
wife.
” The Founders had not meant “to declare all men equal
in all respects.
They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity.” They did, however, consider them “equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ”
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Lincoln used the
Dred Scott
decision, and Douglas’s defense of it, to contrast the ethical positions of the two parties. Republicans found in the Declaration “a standard maxim for free society,” for which all should labor and which “even though never perfectly attained” should be “constantly approximated,” so that its deepening influence would increase “the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.” But Douglas’s version, by limiting its meaning by time and place to the struggle of white colonists against the British crown, “frittered away” the document’s value as a universal statement of rights, leaving it a “mangled ruin.” Starkly put, “Republicans inculcate, with whatever of ability they can, that the negro is a man; that his bondage is cruelly wrong, and that the field of his oppression ought not to be enlarged.” Democrats, by contrast, “deny his manhood; deny, or dwarf to insignificance, the wrong of his bondage; so far as possible, crush all sympathy for him, and cultivate and excite hatred and disgust against him; . . . and call the indefinite outspreading of his bondage ‘a sacred right of self-government.’ ”
³⁹

Within a year of the Supreme Court’s ruling, political developments in troubled Kansas worked to complicate these simple polarities of party conflict. In the town of Lecompton a constitutional convention met to prepare the way for Kansas statehood. Free-state men, fearing trickery, had boycotted the election of delegates, who set about drawing up a constitution that sustained the slave status of the two hundred bondmen already in the territory. The convention also stipulated a referendum—not on the entire document, but only on a clause that would allow further slaves into the state. In view of the Lecompton Constitution’s pro-slavery character, ten thousand free-state men abstained, leaving the way clear for the endorsement of the constitution “with slavery” by a vote of 6,143 to a mere 569. Buchanan would have preferred the whole document to have been submitted to a popular vote, but he could see no illegality in what had been done by a properly constituted body, and was keen to remove a tense if no longer bleeding Kansas from the national political arena. Knowing that his party had the congressional votes to secure its passage, the president gave the Lecompton Constitution his approval.

A defiant Douglas stunned the political world during the early months of 1858 by leading the fight in Washington against its adoption. His energetic revolt against the administration, and unprecedented disloyalty to his party, was a measure of how personally threatening the senator found the president’s action. Having badly misjudged popular feeling in the Northwest in 1854 by surrendering on the Missouri Compromise, Douglas could not afford now to abandon his personal gold standard of popular sovereignty out of deference to a southern-dominated administration. Meekly accepting the Lecompton solution, considered even by many northern Democrats as a flouting of the popular will, would be an act of political suicide. Mustering all his considerable skills in debating and infighting, the Little Giant insisted that the slavery clause was not the issue; what concerned him was the paramountcy of local majority sentiment. Under his generalship the disparate forces of opposition, Republican and Democrat, free-soiler and abolitionist, succeeded in blocking the passage of the constitution through Congress. By virtue of a compromise it was resubmitted to the people of Kansas in August and drew the support of just one voter in seven.

The Lecompton battle won Douglas the everlasting enmity of Buchanan and the extravagant plaudits of long-standing foes. Most outspoken of the band of eastern Republican admirers was Horace Greeley, the editor of the influential
New York Tribune,
which circulated widely throughout the free states and had some ten thousand readers in Illinois. As the congressional struggle reached its climax in the spring, Greeley began to contemplate giving anti-Lecompton Democrats a clear run in the fall elections, perhaps even welcoming them into the party. Lincoln sounded a note of alarm as early as December 1857, complaining to Lyman Trumbull about the
Tribune
’s “eulogizing, and admiring, and magnifying” of Douglas. “Does it, in this, speak the sentiments of the republicans at Washington? Have they concluded that the republican cause generally, can be best promoted by sacraficing us here in Illinois?” Mixing exasperation and sarcasm, he added, “If so we would like to know it soon; it will save us a great deal of labor to surrender at once.” Illinois Republicans overwhelmingly shared Lincoln’s indignation at eastern meddling and could not conceive of burying the hatchet with Douglas, their abusive and bitter archenemy, in pursuit of “an unholy alliance.” Party leaders, encouraged by Lincoln, decided to call a state convention in Springfield on June 16. Its chief purpose would be to announce to the world that Lincoln was the “first and only choice” of Republicans for the Senate.
⁴⁰

In so acting, the Springfield meeting offered a rebuke to eastern brethren and shored up the party against slippage toward Douglas Democracy. Selecting Lincoln also denied regular Democrats the opportunity of fomenting voter confusion and even Republican disunity during the fall campaign: it removed the fear that a newly elected legislature would send to Washington some other Republican, perhaps the wayward and powerful “Long John” Wentworth of Chicago, a renegade Democrat. The resolution nominating Lincoln, as he himself intimated, “was passed more for the object of closing down upon this everlasting croaking about Wentworth” by hostile editors.
⁴¹
Pragmatism, then, underlay the action of the Springfield delegates. But what they did, imposing on the state legislature a subordinate role in selecting a U.S. senator by morally removing its freedom to choose, was practically unheard of. The implications for the campaign that followed could scarcely have been more profound. Voters would in effect directly choose their senator. In 1854 Lincoln’s campaign for the Senate had
followed
the November polls; the targeted voters were the newly elected general assemblymen. Now Lincoln and Douglas—confirmed as the preeminent Democrat at his party’s state convention in April—would take their candidacies straight to the people.

The Lincoln-Douglas contest of 1858 brilliantly revealed the extraordinary appetite of the Illinois public for democratic engagement. Later generations have added layers of romantic embellishment to the story, but even after these are peeled away we are still left with a remarkable example of sustained participatory politics. For four months, starting in the heat and dust of summer, the two men stumped their way across the state, covering between them some ten thousand miles by rail, river, and road, and delivering around sixty set speeches each, in addition to dozens of shorter, impromptu addresses. It was a punishing schedule demanding great physical endurance, but both candidates drew much psychological strength from contact with tens of thousands of enthusiastic voters, courteous and attentive more often than not. Neither canceled a speaking engagement, though by the end of the campaign Douglas’s voice had largely given out, while Lincoln seemed still to be growing in energy. Regiments of support troops—candidates, speakers, organizers, newspaper editors, musical bands—gave every locality the opportunity to share in what by common consent was a remarkable and unprecedented canvass. “The prairies are on fire,” reported the correspondent of an eastern paper. “It is astonishing how deep an interest in politics this people take.”
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What gave the campaign its particular piquancy were the seven joint debates between the two men. Though only a small part of the total canvass, they drew the largest crowds, attracted a caravan of reporters and stenographers, and stimulated interest nationwide. Lincoln proposed them, on the advice of Republican leaders, partly because of the early ridicule he attracted for trailing after Douglas and speaking at the same places a day later. Joint debates would let him profit from the bigger numbers that Douglas could draw as a national political figure, and prevent the Little Giant from largely ignoring him. His challenge put Douglas on the spot: Lincoln would be the beneficiary, but to refuse him would imply cowardice. Reluctantly, Douglas accepted the principle of joint discussions, but stipulated only seven debates, not the fifty or so the Republicans wanted. These were to be three-hour meetings, one in each of the state’s congressional districts where the men had not yet spoken. Douglas would open and close on four occasions, Lincoln on three.

The issue of slavery in the territories dominated the debates. This was not the imposition of politicians upon an unwilling public, but a measure of slavery’s perceived relevance amongst politically alert plain folk. Alluding to slavery’s power to stir up men’s minds “in every avenue of society—in politics, in religion, in literature, in morals, in all the manifold relations of life,” Lincoln drew a laugh at Alton when he promised his hearers, “If you will get everybody else to stop talking about it, I assure [you] I will quit before they have half done so.”
⁴³
In some county contests, campaigners addressed local economic concerns, pertinent following the financial panic of 1857, and harnessed popular disputes over the railroads, but neither of the Senate aspirants saw any advantage for himself in these issues. Douglas stuck to the same essential questions in his speeches throughout. Lincoln’s had more variety, but his fundamental purpose remained constant from the moment of his first campaign utterance, a thirty-minute address in the Hall of Representatives at Springfield on the evening of June 16, just a few hours after receiving his party’s nomination. This, his House Divided speech, provided the strategic anchor for his whole campaign. There was nothing spontaneous about it. He had probably been distilling its ideas for several months. Unusually, he wrote out the whole text, the work of a week or so. Then he committed it to memory, delivering it without notes.

ILLINOIS RIVALS

Lincoln is here captured by a Pittsfield, Illinois, photographer during the time of his debates with Stephen A. Douglas, whose own portrait dates from around 1860.