Lincoln (34 page)

In Illinois, as throughout the North, there was a firestorm of opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but Douglas’s enemies were badly divided. In Chicago much of the hostility to Douglas was personal, led by his rival, the erratic but popular John Wentworth, who controlled the influential
Chicago Democrat.
The
Chicago Tribune
and the
Chicago Democratic Press
also kept up a drumbeat of criticism. Elsewhere in northern Illinois, where the Liberty party had shown strength in 1840 and 1844 and the Free-Soil party had won a considerable following in 1848, opposition to Douglas was more ideological, and New England-bred abolitionists like Owen Lovejoy found in the Kansas-Nebraska Act the occasion to launch a new antislavery party, which they christened “Republican.” Southern Illinois, staunchly Democratic, was equally angered at the Kansas-Nebraska Act, because residents feared that opening Kansas to slaveholders would prevent the settlement of small farmers like themselves. Violently negrophobic, voters in this section wanted to have nothing to do with abolitionism; they fought under the banner of Anti-Nebraska Democrats. In central Illinois, hostility to Kansas-Nebraska was also strong, but the dominant conservatives had no desire to see that opposition translated into a general antislavery movement; they remained firm in their allegiance to the Whig party. Despite frequent calls for a fusion ticket, these disparate elements continued to march under different banners. In an October speech Lincoln graphically recaptured the “utter confusion” of Douglas’s opponents, who were united only in their hostility toward the Kansas-Nebraska Act: “We rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.” It was no wonder, he remarked, “that our drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform.”

These divisions were enough to cause a politician to hesitate, but there were other cross-cutting fractures that made it even more difficult to take a stand. A rising tide of immigration fed the endemic American nativist sentiment. In Illinois the large number of foreign-born who came to build the railroad network aroused fear of foreign tongues and behavior and of the Catholic Church, to which many immigrants belonged. Fear became resentment when the sharp recession of 1854–1855 put a temporary halt to railroad
construction and threw immigrant laborers into competition with local blue-collar workers. Native-born Protestants began to join secret societies, like the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, which advocated lengthening the term for naturalization and restricting the rights of the Catholic Church. Just how large the Order was, nobody could tell, because members were sworn to reply to questions from outsiders about the movement, “I know nothing.” When the Order, styling itself the Native American party, entered politics and secretly endorsed candidates, it seemed to pose more of a threat to normal political alignments than even the agitation over Kansas-Nebraska.

Lincoln had no sympathy for nativism, but he had to recognize that Know Nothings were a powerful political force when some of his strongest backers, including Simeon Francis, the editor of the
Illinois State Journal,
which had always been Lincoln’s newspaper voice in the state capital, joined the movement. Later charges that Lincoln himself was a Know Nothing and that he had been seen at a Native American lodge in Quincy were roorbacks, but he did not go out of his way to alienate his old political friends who had become nativists. When a local committee solicited his support, he tried to avoid a commitment by deliberately misunderstanding their meaning. “Do [the Native Americans] not wear breech-clout and carry tomahawk?” he asked. “We pushed them from their homes and now turn upon others not fortunate enough to come over as early as we or our forefathers.”

In public his position on nativism was circumspect. Initially he professed to know nothing—and perhaps the words themselves were significant—about the secret party. “If there was an order styled the Know-Nothings, and there was any thing bad in it, he was unqualifiedly against it,” he said; “and if there was anything good in it, why, he said God speed it!”

With the political situation so volatile, Lincoln held back all summer, even though it was becoming clear that Illinois would be a major battleground for Douglas and the popular-sovereignty issue. Prominent antislavery men like Salmon P. Chase and Joshua R. Giddings spoke, and Lincoln carefully studied reports of their addresses. In July, Cassius M. Clay, the fiery Kentucky abolitionist, appeared in Springfield to denounce the Kansas and Nebraska outrage and call for “an organization of men of whatever politics, of Free Soilers, Whigs and Democrats, who should bury past animosities, and... unite in hurling down the gigantic evil which threatened even their own liberty.” While Clay spoke, Lincoln lounged on the grass whittling and listening. It took him time to assimilate all these arguments and to make them his own.

He did not act until the end of August, when he spoke at the Scott County Whig convention in Winchester, attacking “the great wrong and injustice of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the extension of slavery into free territory.” His purpose in entering the campaign was a limited one; as he wrote later, “he took the stump with no broader practical aim or object than to secure, if possible, the reelection of Hon Richard Yates to congress.” That purpose defined the role that Lincoln was prepared to play in repudiating
Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act: he campaigned as a Whig—not as an abolitionist, or an anti-Nebraska man, or even a fusionist—who was seeking the reelection of a fellow Whig to the House of Representatives.

Once Lincoln decided to take part in the campaign, he showed no further hesitation. Feeling again the joy of political combat, he devoted all his time to the anti-Nebraska cause, except for his necessary commitments to court cases. He became, in effect, Yates’s campaign manager, spending hours conferring with the Whig candidate and advising him on tactics. Learning that English settlers in Morgan County were disturbed by reports that Yates was a Know Nothing, he drafted a letter denying the charge, which could be distributed “at each precinct where any considerable number of the foreign citizens, german as well as english—vote.” When he heard that Democrats were whispering that Yates, though professing to be a temperate man, was a secret drinker, he recognized that the rumor might cost the Whigs the large prohibitionist vote and sought to kill the allegation. “I have never seen him drink liquor, nor act, or speak, as if he had been drinking, nor smelled it on his breath,” he wrote. But then—almost as if he realized that the future would show that Yates did indulge in liquor, to the point of being intoxicated when he was inaugurated as governor of Illinois in 1861—Lincoln carefully explained his own position to a friend: “Other things being equal, I would much prefer a temperate man, to an intemperate one; still I do not make my vote depend absolutely upon the question of whether a candidate does or does not
taste
liquor.”

Though Lincoln wanted to bolster Yates’s candidacy, he resisted a plan to strengthen the Whig cause in Sangamon County by allowing himself to be nominated for the state legislature. This was not a position he wanted. Election to the state legislature, after a term in the United States House of Representatives, looked like a backward movement in his career. But several local antislavery leaders promised if he ran they would vote for him—and, implicitly, for Yates as well. At about the same time, a committee of Springfield Know Nothings informed Lincoln that their party was secretly nominating him for the legislature. Lincoln told his visitors frankly that “he was not in sentiment with this new party,” but in the end he agreed that “they might vote for him if they wanted to; so might the Democrats.” Even then he did not promise to run.

On September 3, while Lincoln was in Jacksonville campaigning for Yates, Dr. William Jayne, a prominent Springfield Whig who was also a Know Nothing, published an announcement of Lincoln’s candidacy for the state legislature in the
Illinois State Journal.
Mary Lincoln, who was obviously well informed of her husband’s wishes, rushed to the
Journal
office and demanded that Lincoln’s name be withdrawn. When Lincoln returned, Jayne called on him at his house and insisted that he must run. He found Lincoln
“the saddest man I ever saw—the gloomiest.” As Jayne remembered many years later, he walked up and down the room, almost crying, as he resisted the appeal. “No—I can’t,” he insisted. “You don’t know all. I say you don’t begin to know one-half and that’s enough.”

Neither then nor later did Lincoln explain his misgivings, but in all probability he had his own political future in mind. He knew, of course, that the legislature to be elected in the fall of 1854 would choose a United States senator to succeed James Shields, the incumbent Democrat. Aware of the growing strength of the opposition to Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he could foresee that the next senator would probably come from the anti-Nebraska coalition, and, not being a modest man, he realized that he would be a strong candidate for that office. But as a lawyer, he knew that the Illinois state constitution prohibited the election of a state legislator to the United States Congress. He did not know what to do. If he ran, he might be putting an end to his cherished hope for higher office; if he refused to run, he might well cause the defeat of the Whig ticket in Sangamon County (and also the defeat of Yates in the congressional district) and consequently would have no claim for support in the senatorial election. Unhappily he allowed Jayne to overcome his objections, and the
Journal
made his candidacy official.

Once he had committed himself, Lincoln wholeheartedly worked to build a coalition of all who were opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Feeling “anxious... that this Nebraska measure shall be rebuked and condemned every where,” he tried to enlist Democrats known to be critical of Douglas. Learning that John M. Palmer, a state senator from Macoupin County, had “determined
not
to swallow the
wrong,
” Lincoln begged him to make a few public speeches explaining his course. “Of course ... I do not expect you to do any thing which may be wrong in your own judgment,” Lincoln wrote, “nor would I have you do anything personally injurious to yourself.”

Lincoln himself vigorously campaigned for Yates and against the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In the month after his first appearance he spoke at Whig rallies at Carrollton, at Jacksonville, and twice at Bloomington, being very careful not to alienate either the Know Nothings or the temperance advocates, since support from these two groups was essential to Whig success in central Illinois. At his second appearance in Bloomington he had an opportunity to make a tacit appeal to the prohibitionists. Douglas had spoken there in the afternoon, in defense of his Kansas policy, and Lincoln replied in an evening speech. Calling on Douglas, Lincoln found him surrounded by fellow Democrats, with whom the senator offered to share a decanter of red liquor. When Lincoln got ready to leave, Douglas asked: “Mr. Lincoln, won’t you take something?”

“No, I think not,” Lincoln replied.

“What! are you a member of the Temperance Society?” Douglas quizzed him.

“No,” said Lincoln, “I am not a member of any temperance society; but I am temperate,
in this,
that I don’t drink anything.”

Lincoln’s friends widely circulated reports of the encounter among prohibitionists.

Alarmed when the elections in Iowa and Maine, both Democratic strongholds, went against his party, Douglas undertook a nonstop campaign to explain and defend the Kansas-Nebraska Act to Illinois voters. Everywhere his message was the same: he argued that it was his duty, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, to provide for a government in the Nebraska region, which was rapidly being settled. The Missouri Compromise, prohibiting the introduction of slavery into that region, had been “superseded” by the Compromise of 1850, which wrote into law the Democratic principle of popular sovereignty. That principle derived from the fundamental right of self-government. By extending popular sovereignty to the territories, the Congress was merely granting the citizens of those regions the same right enjoyed by free men throughout the nation, the right to choose their own social institutions, including slavery. Under popular sovereignty the inhabitants of the territories would speedily organize governments and these would readily be admitted to the Union, without the rancorous controversies that had hitherto held up national expansion. Since the climate and soil of Kansas and Nebraska made it highly unlikely that anyone would bring slaves into those territories, they were destined to become free states. Opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act came from abolitionists, who sought to stir up sectional hatreds, and from Know Nothings, who were fomenting ethnic and religious strife. It was a powerful case, and Douglas presented it with passion and sincerity.

Lincoln was eager for an opportunity to challenge it. Thoroughly familiar with all of the senator’s arguments, he carefully prepared to attack them, reading over the voluminous pamphlet literature, reviewing the laws and the speeches in Congress, and studying the census reports. The hostile
Illinois State Register
said that Lincoln “had been nosing for weeks in the State Library, pumping his brain and his imagination for points and arguments.” He looked for a chance to debate Douglas, but the senator, who was attacked by the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy when he spoke in the northern part of the state, by Lyman Trumbull, the anti-Nebraska Democrat, when he appeared in the south, and by Chase and Giddings wherever they could find him, was unwilling to share his audiences with yet another opponent.