Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (15 page)

In the first and best-remembered part of that speech, the briefest of its three sections, Lincoln addressed the growing agitation over slavery and declared that the conflict would cease only when “a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.” Taking a deeply familiar biblical text—“A house divided against itself cannot stand”—he set out the premise on which he constructed this and all subsequent speeches. Slavery and freedom were incompatible. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half
slave
and half
free.
” But the struggle had to be resolved
within
a continuing Union. “I do not expect the house to
fall—
but I
do
expect it will cease to be divided. It will become
all
one thing, or
all
the other.” There could be no permanent middle ground between the two conditions. Indefinitely continuing the status quo was not possible. Either the Republican policy of arresting the further spread of slavery, while avoiding the direct assault on the institution that the radical abolitionists advocated, would establish a public consensus “that it is in the course of ultimate extinction.” Or, alternatively, pro-slavery advocates would succeed in making it “alike lawful in
all
the States,
old
as well as
new—North
as well as
South.
”
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Lincoln devoted the main part of his speech to showing how events since 1854 provided powerful circumstantial evidence for just such a pro-slavery conspiracy, one designed to overturn the Founding Fathers’ intentions and make the institution national. Through the combined energies of Douglas, Pierce, Taney, and Buchanan (“Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James”), the Nebraska doctrine and the
Dred Scott
decision had forced open all the territories to slavery. All that remained for the completion of their common plan (the filling of a “nice little niche”) was “another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a
state
to exclude slavery from its limits.” Lincoln conceded that he did not
know
that there was a preconcerted plan or conspiracy, but he was ready to predict that “We shall
lie down
pleasantly dreaming that the people of
Missouri
are on the verge of making their State
free;
and we shall
awake
to the
reality,
instead, that the
Supreme Court
has made
Illinois
a
slave
State.”
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If Lincoln’s supposition of a conspiracy stretched the facts, his concern over the “nationalizing” of slavery was not far-fetched. The right of free states to obstruct the entry of slaveholders and their slaves was already being tested in the courts; it was only a matter of time before Taney and his colleagues could be expected to rule again.

Douglas, on Lincoln’s analysis, was a part of the problem, not the solution. Lincoln reportedly told a legal associate during the campaign, “Douglas will tell a lie to ten thousand people one day, even though he knows he may have to deny it to five thousand the next.”
⁴⁶
No doubt envy at the senator’s greater reputation also played its part, but Lincoln’s clear dislike of his rival derived primarily from his distrust of the Little Giant. His main purpose in 1858 was to show that Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty was not just practically unreliable as a bulwark of freedom (as Kansas had shown), but that it also embodied a dangerous moral neutrality over slavery. The senator’s dispute with Buchanan, and his uniting with Republicans in Washington, was only tactical and superficial: it was, Lincoln said, a mere “squabble,” representing no divergence on fundamentals. The truth really lay in Douglas’s “care not” policy, laid out during the Lecompton debates: this worked to create a corrosive climate of moral indifference, ultimately as threatening to freedom as the efforts of the most extreme slaveholder. Douglas, like Fillmore in 1856, inhabited the muddy middle ground of politics and offered a superficially attractive home for conservative free-soilers. Lincoln aimed to show them they were wrong.

Lincoln’s attempt to establish Douglas as the ally of pro-slavery radicalism made strategic sense and drew national attention, but the trenchancy of his language left him open to the charge of extremism himself. Advisers who heard a draft of the House Divided speech urged caution. Asserting the incompatibility of slavery and freedom made him sound like an abolitionist. A Chicago Republican editor feared that Lincoln seemed to pledge the party to a war on southern slavery. Lincoln denied this intention, but later conceded that he might have been engaged in a “foolish” prediction. By continuing to press the argument, he left himself open to Democrats’ counterattacks. Douglas himself naturally seized on the issue in his first campaign speech, at the Tremont House in Chicago, on July 9. With Lincoln sitting on the balcony behind him, he castigated his opponent’s bold advocacy of “a war of sections, a war of the North against the South.” Using language that he would repeat throughout the campaign, Douglas joined Lincoln to radical abolitionism, a belief in racial equality, the practice of “amalgamation with inferior races,” and “degeneration, demoralization, and degradation.”
⁴⁷
These were ideal topics for diverting attention from his own record as senator.

Some charges stuck better than others. Douglas’s efforts to associate Lincoln with Lovejoy and the radicals of 1854 backfired when Lincoln was able to show that the militant platform which he had allegedly supported was a “forgery.” Lincoln also had little difficulty in addressing the seven questions which Douglas put to him in the first joint debate, at Ottawa, trying to connect him with the abolitionists of northern Illinois: he firmly reiterated his support for the Fugitive Slave Law, the rights of slaveholders within the states and in the District of Columbia, and the continuation of the internal slave trade. Douglas might have made more of Lincoln’s imprecision about how restricting slavery would effect its extinction: to the limited extent that the senator did address this (by charging that the Republicans would inhumanely starve a growing slave population), Lincoln provided a riposte through his allusions to the colonizing of the black population and to the voluntary aspect of slavery’s demise. Far more problematic for Lincoln, however, were Douglas’s appeals to the prevailing racial attitudes of his audience.

The taunt of believing the black race the equal of the white dogged Lincoln throughout. It was exactly what his Springfield dialogue with Douglas in June 1857 would have led him to expect, and he tackled the issue head-on in the first joint debate, at Ottawa, in the north of the state. Facing a politically friendly audience, overwhelmingly Republican, Lincoln denied Douglas’s charge that he favored “perfect social and political equality with the negro,” and declared: “There is a physical difference between the . . . [white and black races], which in my judgment will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position.” Then, to loud cheers, he insisted that, even so, “there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” A month later, at Charleston, in east-central Illinois, in front of a more conservative and politically undecided crowd, Lincoln used some of the same language, but now dropped the cautious nod to open-mindedness implicit in the phrase “
probably
forever,” made no reference to equal rights or to the Declaration of Independence, and elicited considerable laughter by stroking his audience’s prejudices over the idea of interracial marriage.
⁴⁸

These were the remarks of a mainstream Illinois politician seemingly untroubled by the second-class civic status of the black population, so far as he had given it much thought; who was most probably free from many of the common prejudices against black people; who thought those who traded politically on fears of black equality indulged in “low demagoguism”; and who was acutely sensitive to the particular composition of his audience. His words at Ottawa, in front of Lovejoy and radical abolitionists, are more remarkable for what he claimed for blacks than for what he denied them. At Charleston, by contrast, cautious amongst old-line Whigs, he avoided the language that had so excited Chicago radicals two months earlier. Then he had declared: “Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position. . . . Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”
⁴⁹

Lincoln’s remarks on race are best understood in the context of his largely defensive strategy throughout the earlier debates. Douglas appeared to have the initial advantage. Though Lincoln held his own in the first meeting, at Ottawa, his advisers regretted a lost opportunity for lambasting the senator “as a traitor & conspirator [and] a proslavery bamboozelling demogogue.”
⁵⁰
On friendly ground, in Freeport, Lincoln in the second debate did take the offensive with a series of questions. Could the people of a territory, he asked, “in any lawful way . . . exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution?” Douglas’s reply—the so-called Freeport Doctrine—was not new, but in answering the question in the affirmative he both reasserted the integrity of popular sovereignty and demonstrated his distance from the national administration. Since Douglas’s split with Buchanan and the southern Democrats was already beyond repair, Lincoln’s main aim was probably to maximize electoral support for the “Danites,” the small band of Buchanan loyalists in Illinois. But the gain, if any, was modest, given that Lincoln’s larger purpose was to establish the shared ground between Douglas and the pro-slavery Democrats. The debate concluded rather lamely, and Lincoln’s advisers feared that Douglas had kept the advantage.

Over the next two debates, at Jonesboro in the deep south of Illinois, commonly known as “Egypt,” and at Charleston, Lincoln developed no great head of steam. He played safe when confronting the small, southern-born, Democratic, and strongly Negrophobic audience at Jonesboro, making play of Douglas’s Freeport Doctrine; at Charleston he sought mainly to nettle Douglas with the charge, first made by Trumbull, that the senator had secretly worked to deny Kansans a vote on slavery, but the evidence was complex, even tedious, and did little to excite the crowds. Charleston, however, was Lincoln’s watershed. In the final three debates, over a period of eight days during the first half of October, Lincoln focused far less on defending himself against Douglas’s charges, sidelined the racial issues, concentrated chiefly on the moral issues at stake, and reached new heights of eloquence.
⁵¹
At Galesburg, a hive of Yankee and Scandinavian abolitionists, a visibly tiring Douglas faced an opponent invigorated by the warmth of the huge crowd on the grounds of Knox College. The following week at Quincy, in the west-center of Illinois, Lincoln (“fresh, vigorous and elastic” according to the
Illinois State Journa
l
) confidently deployed the same moral case, undeterred by the good numbers of Democratic voters present. Traveling down the Mississippi to Alton for the final debate, Lincoln knew he had to win the river town. Though downstate, it had a sizable Republican population, including many antislavery Germans who had rallied to Trumbull and to other high-profile Democratic defectors. Lincoln, in what was the last widely broadcast speech of the campaign, here produced his most sustained eloquence, explaining why the advances of slavery had to be stopped and casting the whole conflict with Douglas as a battle between right and wrong.

The poison of slavery and the damage it did “as a moral, social and political evil” provided Lincoln with his most potent themes at Galesburg, Quincy, and Alton. Of all the political issues that had unsettled the republic in its short history, “this Slavery question has been the only one that has ever endangered our republican institutions—the only one that has ever threatened or menaced a dissolution of the Union—that has ever disturbed us in such a way as to make us fear for the perpetuity of our liberty.” And if political self-interest dictated that slavery be set on a course of ultimate extinction, then the needs of aspiring free white labor similarly demanded it be quarantined. Slavery was the antithesis of economic meritocracy. To the cheers of the Alton crowd, Lincoln explained that “irrespective of the moral aspect of this question as to whether there is a right or wrong in enslaving a negro, I am still in favor of our new Territories being in such a condition that white men may . . . settle upon new soil and better their condition in life.” This should be the privilege not just of native-born Americans, including emigrants fleeing the economic suffocation of the slave states, but also of “Hans and Baptiste and Patrick” and “
free white people everywhere,
the world over.” Yet where would they be able to go in the future, if slaveowners migrated into every territory as Douglas’s policy allowed?
⁵²

Lincoln, though,
did
respect “the moral aspect,” and profoundly so. The ethical elements had been there from the outset of the campaign, in Springfield and Chicago, as they had been since the Peoria speech of 1854, but Lincoln now gave them even greater salience, and it was the moral case, not the socioeconomic argument, that provided his rhetorical power. He reiterated his fundamental position, that all men, regardless of skin color, possessed the natural rights set down in the Declaration of Independence. “I hold that . . . [the Negro] is as much entitled to these as the white man. . . . [I]n the right to eat the bread without leave of anybody else which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man.” There was not, in other words, “a sort of inequality between the white and black races, which justifies us in making them slaves.” Jefferson’s document, he repeated, “meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all: constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere.” Lincoln lamented that Douglas and Taney had recently reinterpreted the Declaration’s “sacred principles,” in defiance of the intentions of the authors and their immediate successors, including Henry Clay. By asserting that the document did not include black Americans, they had concocted a new doctrine that operated “to dehumanize the negro—to take away from him the right of ever striving to be a man.”
⁵³